The Star Eater Read online

  The Star Eater

  Part 1

  Marco Antônio Loureiro

  2019

  All rights reserved to Marco Antônio Loureiro, 2019.

  Published independentely by Marco Antônio Loureiro through Amazon.

  Author: Marco Antônio Loureiro

  Editing: Nina Bichara

  Tranlator: Thiago Rosa

  Proofreding: João Batista Salgado Loureiro

  Layout and Cover: Nina Bichara

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places and situations are born from the author's imagination or used as fiction. Any similarity with real facts is mere coincidence.

  Total or partial reproduction of the contents, by any means, is forbidden. The author's moral and authorial rights were contemplated.

  National library register number

  Nº 746497 in 05/10/2017

  Romance 2. Horror

  3. Cosmic Horror

  I thank all the Blues, especially my dearest grandpa, uncle and adoptive father. My wife and true love, Domy Peretti, without you none of this would have happened.

  To my wife father, João Batista, who taught me to love books.

  To my wise mother Sônia, who taught me to survive.

  To my dears Alexandre, André, Alex and Plablo, who taught me about Glamour. And to Nina Bichara, without a doubt the best book editor I've ever met.

  Summary

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  It's late, and the clock close to the window just rang three AM. Covered by water drops from morning dew, the glass window shows Brazilian mountains in their characterstic darkness; when eyes adjust to the pitch black, it is possible to see the peaks' rounded outline of norfolk island pine and quaresmeiras.

  In a small office, several computers are connected, working 24/7 to observe outer space, at the highest floor of Nix Institute's Observatory, at the top of Serra da Bruma, forty kilometers away from the city of São Paulo.

  Five high definition monitors, all connected to a multicore last gen computer, show tables, graphs, data and other everchanging numbers.

  The station's alarm sounds, danger and emergency icons jump to the monitor screens, the office's lights go red and the intermittent sound of threat detect assaults the dawn shift.

  Somethign terrible was found...

  Doctor Melissa Salgado, responsible for the dawn shift, is standind at the small pantry that serves as support for the observatory's last level, reading a book while she waits for the coffee machine to finish its job.

  The smell of fresh coffee being made takes her mind slightly away from the book, after all, no aroma is as inspiring as this one.

  In this cold month, the precocious twenty five year old doctor was chosen for the dawn shift, or as she likes to think as she drinks her coffee, the most boring shift ever.

  She remembers the day the timescale was posted to the meeting room's whiteboard, and how she complained to her boss, doctor Saul, and he only repeated, with all the calm and patince only he had. – Dawn shift is as important as any other shift, doctor. Science needs it too.

  When Melissa chose science, she has plans to change the world, to discover some star that would be named after her, to find a cure for cancer, anyway, some of these desires became distant whe she found out about the frustrating dawn shift.

  Diagnosed with autism and owner of a remarkably high intelligence, the young doctor has many relationship problems in her childhood and adolescence, her colleagues treated her cruelly and her teachers did not understand her and there were days in which her dream of being a scientist was the only reason for ther to move on with her life.

  However, time passed and today she is responsible for checkinc data collected by the space anomaly station, which has been monitoring the region called Oort cloud, in the edge of our solar system, and unfortunately there is no way to make this work pleasant.

  Everytime she is chosen for boring tasks, Melissa has the impression that that life has been moving past her as she grows old and this feeling follows her since childhood; repetitive and boring tasks only increase her anxiety and the noise that is in her head.

  Calmly she fills her cup with fresh coffee and takes a long invigorating sip, something routinely done by the young scientist that needs to get her energies back so as to to return to her work station.

  To withstand the hours of boredom she started engaging on digital activities, like electronic games and ineffective attempts at developing her hacking skills; despite being very good at cracking codes, her anxiety and headaches were frequently huge obstacles.

  Of couse she needed to be careful so that these activities would go unnoticed during her dawn shifts, after alll her two bosses, Doctor Saul, chief of Nix Observatory and Dosctor Seaman, programmer and creator of the Seshat program, software that controls the lenses system in the institution, are two renowed and demanding scientists.

  Meeting Doctor Eliezer Saul changed her life. Ever since their first contact, he treated her like a normal human being, understanting the specifics of her unusual behaviour. Autism was never an issue; to him, Melissa is a unique individual as any other, or like he always says:

  — United by race and unique as consciences, we hurry about in a little grain of sand called Earth!

  His concerns were specifically connected to the deep knowledge of the Universe we inhabit and with what he called "those that live inside the shadows of time and in other realities". Therefore, she respected him for seeing the world as part of a much bigger and still mysterious whole and has him as her true mentor. Teacher and student, intellectual partners, something she had for the first time in her life.

  Suddenly, all station alarms go off. Scared, she almost drops her coffee cup to the ground and on her legs.

  — Oh shit!

  Melissa hurries into the monitoring station and sits in. She still stunned from the noise and the lights blinking in front of her, nothing more terrible for her type of autismo than loud sounds.

  She concentrates and, after making sure it is not a false positive, turns off the alarm and reaches for the intecom.

  — Doctor Saul, “magic eye” has detected an anomaly atOort cloud! — Melissa says, excited, more because something happened during the boring shift than for the discovery itself.

  — What — A pause to clean his throat — Wake Seaman up and get him to help out daughter Seshat look at the phenomenon.

  — Sure, Doctor. — Thinkin once more about why Doctor Saul refers to a telescope system as if it was his daughter.

  Roberto Seaman is a fifty year old man, all of his hairs are grey, a mix of a Brazilian mother and a British father. He descends from a long and famous line of English corsairs, used to situations that demand flexibility.

  Today doctor Seaman is the onlyprogrammer and operator for the Seshat Telescope System in national territory, including more than one hundred and fifty last generation lenses, dedicated to detecting any outer space anomalies, each of them connected t
o and controlled by the Seaman Space Coordinates System.

  He wakes up scared and soon imagines what could have motivated this call, perhaps some problem with cables or servers.

  It has been a long time since the dawn shift has had any maintenance problems. Since the incident with safety lock at Nix Institute's door 32B, that leads to forbidden areas in the compound, the number os scientists at the observatory is kept at a minimum, that is, there are not enough people to break something.

  — Any problem with the servers, Melissa? Can't game with your friends? — The same sarcastic tone as ever. Seaman is never going to call her doctor, not because she is a woman, but because she is a child and the Nix Institute is no place for children. People die inside this institution, there is high risk secret research in course and he was against her being hired from the start, but doctor Saul kept saying — She iis a modern genius! She can help me develop the mysteries of hidden planes"

  “If she survives” Seaman thinks.

  Seaman listens carefully to the orders Doctor Saul gave the young doctor and about the anomoly inside of Oort cloud and begins getting dressed excitedly, because he is sure this is great news. They might make history today. Years of dedication cannot have been in vain.

  The three doctors gather at Command zero-one, A round room with a diameter of more than a hundred yards, located at the top of the observatory. The place, built on the highest point of the mountain, offers a clear view of the night sky, no obstacles.

  Dozens of monitors and work stations are spread around Command 01, looking like a sci-fi version of a Nasa launch room.

  Thanks to last gen technology, Command 01's roof can become transparent, showing the sky or becoming a planetarium, everything animated with 3D computer graphics that would drive a Star Trek fan mad. Furthermore, each scientist has a kind of touch-sensitive holographic display at their disposal. Melissa tochees her fingertips to the holoscreens, studying the numbers and graphs calmly. Doctor Saul looks attentively at his display.

  — Seaman, position Seshat to the indicated coordinates. Doctor Melissa, provide the calculations to compensate for Earth rotation. Activate the Planetarium.

  — Gentlemen, today this institute will make history! And with it our three names! – Doctor Saul cannot contain his anxiety, he screams as he orders his subordinates.

  — Activating tridimensional dome. Initiating transition sequence. — Melissa says, robotically, pushing screens in her holographic display from one side to the other.

  The roof becomes, in the blink of an eye, a tridimensional copy of what the Seaman telescopes are seeing. Until the mechanisms could find the right position, many beeps and electronic noises fill the environment.

  — Seshat is in position, Doctor Saul. Seaman says, hands on the system controls.

  The 3D model moves like a camera through the solar system, until it enter Oort cloud and the planetarium is taken by it.

  The three scientists get up at the same time, when they notice a big black shapeless mass drifting in high speed, like a huge amoeba, among the asteroids that form Oort.

  — Doctor Melissa... have you already received the data for this anomaly? — Doctor Saul stutters, visibly moved by the discovery.

  Melissa sits down, some moments pass and animated arrows surround the planetarium's projection of the anomaly measuring its size and other stats.

  — It's humongus, Doctor Saul! — Looking at her data display, amazed. — Seshat calculates its mass is thee times bigger than the Sun's.

  Everyone stands in silence.

  — Three times bigger than the sun?! — A stunned Melissa speaks, checking the data once again. — Doctor, if we extrapolate its route... — when she says this, the planetarium's camera pans out and shows a line linking the anomaly to Earth. — It's coming towards Earth.

  As he hears the last report, Doctor Saul stands up and points his finger at Seaman.

  — Warn the Blade, Seaman! Warn the Blade!

  Chapter 1

  First Day

  May the Blade be ever shard.Gladius! Gladius Acutus!

  The building at downtown New York is old. During the whole day, civil servants and citizens go up and down its stone stairways, like an infiite burocratic dance in the city that never sleeps.

  This old grey construction is adorned with gargoyles and other grim trappings, made with the sole purpose of scaring away curious onlookers. The atmosphere is heavy, and this strange aura has an anesthesic action on the people that enter its great wooden gates, carefully engraved with bizarre smbols in its leaves and stoppers; thanks to this narcotic effect, none of the thousands of people that wander through downtown notice the weirdsness of this old NY building.

  There is something hidden behind this building's stones, something so sinister that most common people could not even fathom its existence.

  In each of the twenty one floors, hidden from the unwary eye, old symbols, curvy runes representing enchantments long lost, engraved upon external intervals between floors.

  It is here, wearing the mask of an unimportant city building, that one of the Blade cells operate; a secret society that works from time immemorial to protect humanking from the dangerous infinite realities that surround us and its unmentionable inhabitants.

  It rains heavily in the city that never sleeps. It's that acid rain raising asphault smell; to some, this arome has a certain nostalgic purity, to others it is a negative miasma that does not bring any happiness, only loneliness. It is not without a reason that the number of suicides increases on rainy days.

  People in a rush fill the streets at afternoon's end. Building, built to shelter and protect, hide the totally clouded sky. It is a sea of umbrellas moving rhythmically, a contemporary postcard of life in a great urban center. Amidst this cluster of peiople, two hooded individuals walk as wolves among the sheep. Their movements are precise and coordinated. They walking looking sideways, wary of possible pursuers and threats.

  Both hooded figures go up the stone stairways of the city building. They go inside, past burocrats, toward the back. The inside is decorated with the same runes sculpted in each floor, statues of templar and teutonic knights positioned in each corner at the ground floor.

  Magnificence is all over the place. It was planned so that visitors felt inferior before its architecture, like the orthodox catholic cathedrals. The most striking feature of the entrance hall, a renaissance painting picturing a great battle of crusader knights against shapeless dark creatures, remains unnnoticed by most visitors. It's like the human beign preferred ignorance...

  In the back, the duo faces an iron door, with a pair of knockers that look like small silver masks. One of them knocks three times on the door...

  Someone walks behind the door. A small hatch, at eye-levle height, opens.

  — How many steps are there through the ethereal path? – A deep voice asks.

  — Twenty one steps. — The man answers removing the hood.

  — If the initiate is strong enough. Otherwise throw theminto the fire! — The woman laughs, ironically.

  Aaron Thernas is to first to take down his hood; he is a middle-aged man, military posture, gray stubble and long straight black hair. He has dressing a plain black t-shir, dark grey camo pants, combat boots and an overcoat the same color as his jacket, adorned with carefully sewn runes, curvy and delicate.

  Yura is wearing an outfit very similiar to her companion's. She is a beautiful blonde Ukrainian woman, a survivor of the horrors of war, from a very poor family that spent years hostage of a nation taken by armed conflict.

  Thanks to these sad events in her life, the girl could never spend a single night without terrible nightmares.

  The traumatic experience has scarred her irreversibly; her training in the Blade ranks is the only way to control her killer instinct and her terrors.

  Aaron and Yura are armed, her artifacts of war hidden under their overcoats. He preferes a more subtle style and carries an old pirate saber made of a human femur
at his waist. She prefers a more cruel weapon, capable of hacking bone apart, and carries worn tomahawk axe. Both weapons are ancient artifacts belong to criminals ofthe past, today under service of two Blade field agents.

  They walk through a long poorly-lit hallway and go down a spiral staircase that leads to the building's catacombs. The scenery changes and what used to be a mausoleum becomes a base of operations. Throughly prepared to preserve it's historical content. The smaller nooks were converted into storage space for weapons and other objects. The bigger one serve as conference or training rooms. Cables, including power and ethernet, can be seen on the ceiling and on the walls. Many greet Aaron with a respectful "May be Blade be ever sharp" while they avoid Yura's gaze.