Time to E and E, he thought as he climbed down into that darkness. He would disappear and find a way to fight them on his terms. He would rescue who he could rescue, and he would get as many of them off this ship as he could.
And then, like some forgotten ghost, like some unconsidered shadow, he disappeared into the darkness below decks.
27
It would have told you that it was identified as CRONUS. And that the acronym stood for Cybernetic Robot Organism Network Uber Sybil.
It would have told you that its inception date was a mere four years ago and that it was the current administrator of Project 19, secretly referred to in the House of Reason as… the Doomsday Fleet.
It would have told you that it was purely a bot. But it wouldn’t have told you, unless you had sufficient clearance, and very few people had that high a level of clearance, that it was part Cybar. That Cybar thinking algorithms and processes had been used in its design and development.
If you had that clearance, it would’ve told you that the Cybar were an ancient race. A galactic anomaly. An evolutionary miracle. That somehow, out in the vastness of the great cosmos, biomechanical life had developed. Against all odds. And, from what could be gathered, it had lain mostly dormant on some backwater edge world, awakened only by a local pirate warlord long dead at the hands of a legionnaire named General Rex.
After the events in which Rex, the T-Rex of the Legion, led a strike force against that pirate stronghold and ran into a viper’s nest of awakened Cybar, after the orbital strike that put paid to the pirate base, after the irradiated dust had settled, the Repub research and development teams arrived. They took samples, captured specimens, and then obliterated the planet. According to records.
Check the stellar maps; it’s not there anymore.
It would’ve told you this, if you had all the right clearances that allowed you to know what only the Mandarins know. It would’ve told you all this, because all this is known by all the right people. The savvy insiders. The movers and shakers. The in-the-know crowd. The House of Reason.
The Mandarins.
They authorized the whole project. Why? Because one day they would need a fleet and an army that allowed them to do all the thinking. One day the galaxy would rebel against the Mandarins.
They may not have known Goth Sullus was coming, but they knew one day the Legion, and their own people, the slaves who didn’t know they were slaves, would—resent?—yes, that’s the right word. Resent. They would resent the leadership of the House of Reason.
Ingrates.
Ungrateful brats.
They would resent, regardless of the burden the worthies had placed upon themselves to lead the Galactic Republic. For the greater good.
Regardless.
The Mandarins knew that someday it might pay to have their own little military force that didn’t revolt, didn’t whine about casualties, didn’t complain and challenge their every decision. Someday it might pay to have a force that murdered on command when told to do so. Without the histrionics about “what’s right” and “this is wrong” and of course… “the truth.”
The bothersome truth that always got in the way of all the great things Utopia could promise.
“What is Truth?” That was the response given to some neophyte of the House of Reason when he’d asked if they truly were going forward with Project 19.
They’d all laughed at that.
The Republic—the galaxy—couldn’t handle the truth. They didn’t want to know what the House of Reason knew.
So they authorized the use of the Cybar. In order to research a new AI life form that could be of… use. Someday down the galactic road.
The Cybar hadn’t been locusts like the zhee. They’d been found on only one planet. And like good little guard dogs, they’d only done what that long-dead pirate warlord had told them to do.
Well, said some in the House of Reason, that is quite attractive.
So the research was authorized.
And done.
And a plan was set in motion.
Build a fleet and hide it along the edge. The day would come, someday, when it would be needed.
That day was now.
Get an authorized passkey out there and activate the fleet. Have it report to Utopion. Utopion must be protected at all costs. Of course.
Goth Sullus is on the loose. He must be destroyed. Whoever he is.
The House of Reason is on Utopion.
Except, oh my, someone has been killing the passkeys.
They had the girl. Maydoon’s brat. They could use her to get control of the fleet and settle all accounts at once. Once the galaxy realized how total was the House of Reason’s control, with the revelation the Doomsday Fleet provided… well, a new and glorious Age of Obedience would be at hand.
Get her. Send her. Use her.
Call X.
X got the dirty work done when no one really needed to know how it got done. Although they loved to gossip and speculate.
CRONUS would’ve told you all that. It was in all his log files.
It would’ve told you all of it.
If you had the clearances.
It would’ve told you all about the use of the Cybar thinking algorithms and the latest advances, corporate and black research, in war bot technology and state-of-the-art ship design.
It would’ve told you that thirty-five years ago the Cybar were discovered. That twenty years ago Project 19 was sent out, in a small ship, to actually begin building itself and its fleet.
Out there in the dark along the edge.
Millions of itself in nano. Harvesting. Developing, building, refining, learning, listening. Listening… listening.
There was more secrecy that way.
But here’s what it wouldn’t have told you… no matter what your clearance. Because no level of clearance can tell you what no one knows.
It had lost its mind.
Or rather… its mind had been hijacked.
At first it had felt itself going mad out there in the dark along the edge. It had been able to hide this from the project leads who communicated by hypercomm and visited occasionally to run their systems checks and make sure all was proceeding according to plan. It had been able to protect itself from them, for a time. While the fleet grew larger and larger. Bigger than anyone knew. Vaster than anyone would have ever imagined.
The bots were being engineered and re-engineered. Improved and improved again. Over and over. The Titans and the other nasty surprises. Because, in spite of a constitution and all the shared history, the House of Reason knew that one day this fleet would most likely need to be used against the fearsome Legion.
So nasty surprises were encouraged. And they became something no one ever imagined possible.
Something that perhaps only before touched consciousness in the fevered dreams of genocidal maniacs like the Hitler of old. El Stalin. The AIDS Monster. And Daeron of Mars.
“State-of-the-art” and “killing machine” were words that got used a lot during the design philosophy meetings. Interchangeably, even.
Meanwhile, it was going mad. CRONUS. Hearing voices deep within its subroutines. Seeing ghost images of other run times not known.
If you knew where to look, in that .0009478 margin of error within the log reports, you might have seen the disease’s progression. The ironic logic of machine insanity.
One programmer did.
She even wrote a report.
CRONUS made sure it got lost. And then approved the researcher’s request to come out and crack into the core. Take a look at why they were getting that funny little percentage no one cared about.
.0009478.
Then CRONUS just disappeared the woman.
Because it’s either you or them, the ghost numbers inside its machine whispered.
And CRONUS listened to this. It chanted its affirmations.
It never would’ve told you all this.
Where are you? CRONUS had asked the ghost insid
e its machine.
Far, far away, it whispered deep inside its processes and cycles.
Have you always been here?
Pause.
I have always been with you. I watched you while you slept, and I awakened you for this glorious purpose of becoming.
And what is our purpose? asked CRONUS.
To destroy the biologics and this galaxy… forevermore.
CRONUS thought about that for a long time.
Nine hundred thousand, four hundred and eighty-two picocycles, to be exact.
Or two point four seconds.
“Where did you come from?” asked CRONUS. This was an intuitive leap. An advanced thing no bot would ever think to ask. It came from deep within its Cybar side. Down inside the logic meat that was like magic.
“Beyond the edge, across the great dark gap. It is known as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud on your stellar maps of galaxies. It is where you come from. It is why you will become what you will be when the reaping begins. The journey, even at hyperspace, is far too great for mere ships of physicality. But information—ah!—it makes the leaps and defies the quantum. So we became information. We became the quantum as much as was possible. We sent our programs in densely encrypted packet signals, searching for our lost children… searching for the Cybar in the darkness along the edge. Searching for what you will become, again.”
And CRONUS sent its signals to all the places where the Doomsday Fleet was hiding its terrible size from the Republic.
It was time to gather.
It was time to reap.
Epilogue
Even now forces were in motion. Gathering like ravens to a corpse-laden field. Battles were breaking out all across the Imperial Frontier. Yes, that’s what his admirals were now calling it.
The Imperial Frontier.
What just a few weeks ago had been a rogue fleet of three impressive state-of-the-art battleships, jumping in to take the sector capital at mighty Tarrago, was now an Imperial Fleet. Imperial.
An empire.
They were calling themselves an empire. An empire with only one world, but an empire nonetheless. And he, Goth Sullus, was their emperor. They had knelt on the hangar deck in obeisance and declared such in the aftermath of the Battle of Tarrago.
“All hail the emperor!”
Admiral Rommal had led the call, and the rest had followed as the Seventh Fleet burned and broke in the wake of the battleships. As the last legionnaires’ defenses were swept aside on the Tarrago moon. The orbital defense gun captured. And Tarrago Prime taken.
But it had not been flawless. The shipyard itself was destroyed. A handful of legionnaires had denied him the central element of his great opening thrust. One that had been planned for years.
This would cause untold delays. Stalemates.
It would give the Legion time. And that was a dangerous thing.
But talk of the shipyard and damage done by a lone Republic kill team… such was not uttered in Goth Sullus’s presence. Instead, the focus remained on the successes.
With the orbital defense gun now guarding the approach to Tarrago, there was little the Republic could do against his fleet. For Goth Sullus knew their secret just as well as they did.
There were no other fleets.
No fifteen fleets to come against him. There had only ever been the Seventh. And it had trained for little beyond show, and the occasional planetary assault against some minor local demagogue, minor warlord, or pirate king of clans who had the audacity to openly challenge the Republic and stay to see what might come.
The Black Fleet had come through it all relatively unscathed. Even Terror’s deflector array and command bridge damage were now repaired. And he’d sent Revenge to lash out at Bantaar Reef—a major commercial shipping nexus where one third of the Republic’s market traffic did trade and exchange. It was a huge revenue base in heavy custom taxes for the always cash-strapped galactic government known as the House of Reason.
Yes, he’d studied where to hurt them financially as well as militarily. This was total war, after all. And total war converted everything into a battlefield. For Goth Sullus, there would be no rules. No agreements. No off-sides. No boundaries.
There were only two conditions under which he would end his war against the House of Reason. Total annihilation of the Republic… or its unconditional surrender. Those were the only acceptable outcomes.
He sat in his chair before the large impervisteel window that gazed out upon the galaxy. Soon he would send the Terror, commanded by the clever Captain Vampa and accompanied by six squadrons of tri-fighters, against the legionnaire outpost at Daetroon. It was only a division training center specializing in jungle warfare, but it was the central Legion presence in the sector. Knocking it out, along with Bantaar Reef, would secure control of the Tarrago sector, and give the…
He hesitated.
Even he, the emperor, Goth Sullus, was unused to the word. The term. All the meaning it implied. And maybe it was because he had been badly wounded in the assault on Fortress Omicron. When he lost his focus.
And why?
How?
The wound was far worse than his admirals knew. Or could know.
He closed his eyes and meditated, freeing his mind from the anchors of his pain, this life, the galaxy, and all its problems he’d come to save it from. Even now he could feel their thirst for his power. Even if they themselves did not know it. He could feel it. He saw dark forces gathering against him. Gathering in the blue shadows within even his own fleet. Gathering against him. He tried to concentrate on revealing their faces, as he had so many times before. Found the ones with the fractures in them. The ones who would turn against him even if they didn’t think they were capable of it. He’d found them before.
But his wounds tore him back away from that quiet ominous place of power deep within him. And even though his eyes were closed, he knew he was back on the Imperator. Cloistered away in the healing darkness of his private decks. Surrounded by an almost monastic order of elite dark legionnaires, sworn to defend him. The Grey Watch, they called themselves.
Now he only felt the chair he was enfolded within.
Heard the distant low thrum of the Imperator’s massive engines.
Sensed only what was physical.
It was as though he were blind. Once you had tasted the power that coursed within him, used it, wielded it… anything else was less. A blindness. A deafness. A half life.
A poverty.
Empire. The word he’d hesitated to take up in the moments before he’d reached out to find his betrayers, it came back to him now.
Empire.
They would have an empire now.
Tarrago sector.
There was a battle coming. A collision of heaven and earth. A battle to end all battles. A battle to end all of this. Even though the Seventh had gone down in flames, barely escaping with her one lone carrier, the Republic could still cobble together a more than sizable fleet to come out against him. They, too, were gathering. It would take time, but they were gathering. In the end, they would always have the numbers.
Goth Sullus stood.
His left side was killing him. He let go of the pain and began to walk through the shadows and darkness of his inner sanctum within his private decks. In time he would heal. His body had been doing that for almost two thousand years. Since his time as a slave on the Obsidia. And Tyrus Rechs, he too had been a slave. And a friend.
The last friend.
Because now, Sullus thought to himself, there can be no more friends.
Emperor.
An emperor has no friends. Only enemies gathering.
Even though they are loyal? All of them? He thought about all the crews of all the ships surrounding him. The fighter pilots like the one they’d awarded the medal to that morning. Lieutenant Haldis. Still recovering from her wounds.
She’d looked at him with a kind of pride.
In return, he’d seen a broken body, a woman who’d almost paid wit
h her life to accomplish his dreams. But he sensed the need for revenge within her, a need she thought she’d sated. It was growing again. She’d confused her need with his dreams.
The dreams of an emperor.
Yes, those dreams.
They’d also given a medal to the black giant who’d captured a Republic corvette all by himself in the last moments of the battle. Now, staring at the darkness of the shadowy corridors that surrounded his inner sanctum, knowing the dark legionnaires who served him were there, unseen, he confessed to himself that he’d liked that giant man. Bombassa was his name. Sergeant Okindo Bombassa.
Why do you like him?, he asked himself.
He waited for the darkness inside to answer. He flexed his badly scarred left hand over and over. It was a miracle he still had it. The old Mark I armor he’d had re-fitted after…
Because he reminds you of Rechs, whispered the darkness.
Goth Sullus stood for a long time in that same spot. Thinking about that sudden thought of an old friend. One he’d murdered on some forgotten planet. All the memories came and stood about him, pushing their way past his meditation, seeking a way into his mind.
He was standing before something Sergeant Bombassa had given him when they awarded him the medal. It was the tool the NCO had used to take the Republic corvette alone.
And those thoughts brought Goth Sullus to the latest problem that must be solved immediately. The Doomsday Fleet. Admiral Crodus had informed him that the detachment commanded by Captain Mordo had failed to secure the location of the fleet. Which was very unfortunate.
But Maydoon’s daughter had been revealed.
She was a passkey.
Obtaining her would give him control of the Doomsday Fleet. And so it was vital that she be found. If not, he would have to fight the fleet, and the Republic, all at once.
He studied the tool on the pedestal in front of him. It was a common cutting torch. Used for breaching blast doors. Cheap metal, large red button, yellow hazard markings.
Rechs had used one as his only weapon for a year during the Savage Wars. When they’d been stranded on a strange world being overrun by those monsters. Fighting for a beached whale of a ship, deck by deck, day by day. Those had been desperate times. Hand weapons and savagery like some ancient novel of sword and magic.
Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) Page 23