My Friend the Emperor

by William Lee Gordon

  In fairness to the Empire I should point out that these hormone filled instances didn’t turn into orgies. Our instructors had explained to us that Citizens of the Empire were civilized and only barbarians practiced group sex. We were also taught that whether we were heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual, Citizens didn’t copulate like animals; that belly to belly was the only accepted form and one partner per day was the limit on civility.

  They hadn’t said anything about the proper etiquette of climax, but most of my dorm mates were relatively subdued about it – hence my question to Valys.

  From her initial response I had assumed we wouldn’t be discussing it further. I had no idea that not only would we talk about it, but that my world was getting ready to be turned upside down…

  Chapter three

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  My Eyes are Opened

  Second Semester

  We had just finished our lovemaking and were breathing deeply. I hadn’t yet moved myself off of her. One of her roommates had just started up with her boyfriend when Valys started whispering in my ear.

  “Look Jac, I like you and I don’t want to have to replace you but you’re going to have to grow up and learn some things really fast.”

  I was surprised. Lately, I’d found myself really wanting to please Valys and I was gratified that our lovemaking had seemed more energetic and her responses more animated than usual. I’d always been a fast learner, and I was glad that this particular skill was proving to be no exception.

  “What are you talking about?” I said in a normal voice.

  She pinched me in the ribs, hard.

  “Whisper, you idiot.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked in a whisper this time.

  “You really are a naïve little newb, aren’t you? Don’t you understand anything about the real world?”

  After I thought about it for a moment I whispered carefully, “Valys, I like being with you too. But I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

  She sighed. “Do you trust me?”

  I caught myself from giving an automatic answer and then said, “No.”

  “Okay, so maybe you do have the ability to learn. But I’m going to teach you some things and you’re not going to have a second chance to get it right. So listen up,” she whispered.

  “The media globes are everywhere, and they monitor everything.”

  “I know that.” I whispered back.

  If it was possible to whisper exasperatedly she did it, “Don’t you have any thoughts you want to keep private? Don’t you have any secrets? Do you really want them to know everything?”

  This brought me up short. I had just assumed that there was no other way; I had just assumed that my next few years were to be an open book. Her questioning of this in such a matter of fact manner made me realize how naïve I’d actually become. Of course I wanted some privacy.

  “Yes… I mean, no. I don’t want them to know everything, but I just figured that’s the way it worked.”

  She made a show of nibbling on my neck and running her hands across my back.

  She continued whispering, “Normally, it is. But in bed together like this is one of the very few times people can be close enough to share secrets. If we’re loud enough my other roommates can whisper without being overheard. They are doing the same thing for us right now. Can’t you tell?”

  Of course. Now it all made sense. It felt like I was entering a more grown-up world and I knew my next thought would mark me as still somewhat immature, but I couldn’t help but asking… “So, have you been faking everything?”

  She pulled away from me slightly and stared at me with narrowed eyes. Then she bit my neck.

  ΔΔΔ

  The next couple of months went by more smoothly than our first. Our semiprivate whispering sessions increased from twice a week to around four times a week. Apparently everything she had told me about limiting our times together for fear of raising concerns at The Academy had been bunk. She just hadn’t been sure she wouldn’t have to quickly replace me.

  I started learning more things about her, too.

  An overt sign of affection would be seen by The Academy as a weakness, and Valys wouldn’t have stood for it. Here and there, though, I could slip in a small thing. One morning while she still slept I polished the buckle and buttons on her ceremonial uniform. Another time I bribed a staffer to give her a medical excuse so she could skip a day of classes and study for an exam she was worried about. I figured if someone questioned her about these things she could claim I’d lost a bet or owed her a favor.

  She never said anything but I knew she was ok with it because she didn’t say anything. Of course, I never mentioned them either. I was finally starting to learn to let my actions speak louder than my words.

  One day I surreptitiously left a single small flower where I knew only she would find it. She didn’t know I could see her or she never would have smiled like that.

  I’d also come up with a secret pet name for her and she hadn’t gouged my eyes out. I had started noticing that when she was in the throes of a particularly satisfying climax she would curl her toes.

  So in rare private moments I would call her Curlytoes. She always acted angry and left some type of mark on me but since the damage was never permanent I figured that was okay too.

  I also discovered her secret. I found a picture of what I at first thought to be a younger Valys, but I soon figured out that it had to be her younger sister. She would never tell me exactly why, but it became obvious she was very worried about her. I think it must have been the reason behind why she drove herself so hard.

  Everything else at The Academy seemed to be going better as well. My marks were high and most of my classes were interesting.

  Part of living in a Galactic Empire was learning to accept the inconsistencies and incomplete explanation of everyday life. For example, we called ourselves the Galactic Empire when in reality we only occupied a little over 1000 star systems in one tiny part of one of the many spiral arms of our galaxy. But everybody knows that this is just the language of the Empire, it’s just the way things are and to suggest otherwise would be disloyal.

  The classes I found most interesting were typically the ones that explained some of these inconsistencies.

  Everyone knew that normal intersystem spaceflight, let alone interstellar spaceflight, was a very high-level science. But I used to get frustrated by the lack of specific information available to a kid like me growing up with a curious mind. Our school’s science program never discussed it. Oh, we had the entertainment vids but they were full of inconsistencies that I knew couldn’t be true.

  One of my favorite series as a child centered around the crew of a small ship that went careening from one planet to another, one star system to another, righting wrongs and teaching the Imperial way. It was a great series and almost every episode included ship to ship combat. The two things that always bugged me, however, was that when they changed their direction or accelerated in space they would always lean to one side of the other or be pushed back into their seats until the onboard inertial compensators could catch up and cancel out the effect.

  By the time I was six years old I had realized how bogus this was. First of all, you can’t change direction in space. You can’t dogfight and use air resistance to maneuver in large sweeping curves to get behind your enemy and blast them out of the sky (or vacuum). In space if you wanted to reverse course, for example, you had to reverse the direction of your thrust and come to a complete stop relative to your target before beginning movement in the opposite direction. You could be simultaneously applying lateral thrust to give the appearance of a rounded turn, but under most circumstances it would be a time and fuel wasting maneuver.

  That one was rather obvious but the one that really bugged me had to do with acceleration.

  Everyone knew that inertial dampening was an essential part of spaceflight. The distances between planets and moons, let alone st
ars, was so vast that to traverse them in any reasonable amount of time required tremendous accelerations. We’re talking hundreds of gravities of acceleration over a sustained period of time. I had always wanted to ask the producers of the vids, how many microseconds of 200 gravities do you think the human body can endure while waiting for the inertial compensators to kick in? No, inertial dampening needed to be perfect to make spaceflight possible at all, but almost all of the popular vid’s ignored this.

  At The Academy we learned how it actually worked. There were four known types of spacecraft propulsion.

  Thrust propulsion is the easiest to accomplish and had been around the longest. This method included chemical reaction, nuclear, ion, and antimatter. This was the most inefficient form of propulsion used in space. Your spacecraft had to actually throw something out the back of the ship, be it energy or matter, and the opposite and equal reaction is what propelled you forward.

  A LightSail was analogous to a sailboat. Instead of wind, it used its gossamer sails to capture light and other radiation and utilize it as thrust. This was highly efficient but with acceleration curves so slow as to be almost totally impractical.

  Magnetic propulsion was a week force, near distance, low energy form of propulsion that required the nearness of a magnet and a magnetic field. It was best suited for conveyances on a planetary surface.

  Gravitational propulsion was what made real spaceflight possible. The official version states that the Empire invented it but no one believed it. Many of the star systems we absorb or pirates we encounter already have the technology and even most of my professors had implied that its true discovery lay much further in the past. Regardless, the ability to pinpoint distant sources of gravity and then magnify their local effects is how the Gravity Lens Drive worked. The word propulsion was probably a misnomer when it came to both the magnetic and gravitational forces. Either of these could be tuned to attraction or repulsion.

  The focusing of a gravitational lens not only gave us tremendous accelerations but its local effect could also be used to perfectly cancel inertia or create a ship’s artificial gravity. It’s why our bodies aren’t crushed during an instant 300 gravity acceleration.

  My history classes had been vague on telling us exactly when these discoveries had been made but one point they were clear on; gravitational propulsion and space-time bubbling were two totally separate breakthroughs.

  It was one thing to accelerate throughout your own star system at tremendous speeds, it was quite another to try and traverse interstellar distances. There were these pesky laws of physics that kept getting in the way, things like time dilation among others.

  It was only once mankind had discovered how to create an artificial bubble of space-time that interstellar travel became practical and safe.

  Without bubbling, travel speeds are limited – not because the Gravity Lens couldn’t accelerate us faster but because the technologies to shield a ship travelling faster than .3c hadn’t been invented yet.

  Artificial space-time bubbles literally don’t exist within our own reality. Therefore, they are not subject to our laws of physics. Couple a Gravimetric Lens to a bubbled ship and now you have no limits on your top speed… but you still had to pinpoint a distant source of gravity to lens onto.

  Unfortunately, everything outside of a space-time bubble doesn’t exist – well, almost everything.

  This is where Dark Matter comes in.

  No one understands what Dark Matter really is. The only thing we know for sure is that when we measure the universe and compare the rotation and expansion of the galaxies against the gravitational effects of known matter… suffice it to say that about 87% of the matter in our universe is missing.

  It’s missing in every way except for its gravity. You can’t see it, hear it, taste it, or touch it but it does exert a gravitational influence.

  Dark Matter is the only thing known to exist outside of a space-time bubble.

  It takes some modification but once mankind learned to focus a Gravitational Lens on Dark Matter, interstellar travel became possible.

  It became known as skipping. Now you could literally skip your way across the spiral arm at thousands of times the speed of light.

  As I mentioned, our Empire certainly wasn’t the only group of humanity to have these technologies. Other civilizations that we ran into, bartered with, and went to war with all used surprisingly similar adaptations of this technology. Even the Pirates and rogue civilizations that that were rumored to exist just beyond our frontiers used them.

  Our professors made it clear, however, that if the Empire could somehow restrict or recapture this technology just to itself the galaxy would be a safer place. This is why, they confidently asserted, that this detailed information wasn’t casually handed out to the masses. Now that I had the explanation it made somewhat more sense.

  Life at The Academy also included a number of group activities that I was required to attend or participate in, usually involving my dorm mates or other classmates. I can’t really say that I got along with most of them – I can’t really say that I even knew most of them. Everything was a competition, and the competition was stiff.

  Looking back, I don’t know how I would’ve survived without our post coital whispering sessions. I hadn’t realized how important it was to have somebody I could talk to, somebody that more or less followed my daily narrative and could even occasionally offer advice or, more often, tell me where I’d screwed up.

  The only present she ever gave me was a small clear acrylic teardrop. When I looked at it closely I realized that it had a single strand of hair coiled inside it. She casually mentioned that she thought I might need a good luck charm. She told me I could keep it or throw it away, but knowing my luck she thought I’d better hold onto it.

  By the end of my first year I was riding high. I had bested some of the top people in my class when it came to strategic thinking and command decision logic matrixes. My opponents in these contests were unfailingly polite but you could just tell it really ate some of them up.

  It didn’t really bother me all that much, though, because I was excelling and I had somebody that cared about me. I still had my dreams for the future… and maybe even someone to share that future with. The plan I’d laid out for myself was working perfectly – until it didn’t.

  ΔΔΔ

  I hadn’t seen Valys for several days. She was graduating and her last final exam was of a totally different type. They called it a Deep Core Psychoanalysis.

  From what she had told me they would be shooting her full of drugs, strapping electrodes to her head chest and arms, and delving into every recess of her mind to confirm her loyalty and dedication to the Empire.

  She’d made it clear that she’d be sick as a dog for a few days afterwards so I’d been giving her some space.

  So I was excited when a few days later I pushed the buzzer on Valys’ door and waited for her to answer. I’d just aced my last first-year final and I was in a great mood. I was coming to collect her so we could go celebrate.

  One of her roommates opened the door and gave me a sad smile. Instead of letting me in she stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek… and whispered into my ear, “Erase it after you listen to it.” She then slipped a small data chip into my hand.

  I had a confused expression on my face and started to step forward into the room but she didn’t give ground. As she closed the door she mouthed to me, just listen to it.

  I found a tree with a grassy area underneath and sat down. I plugged my earpiece in and listened to Valys’ voice over the familiar background noise of one of her roommates.

  “Jac, sorry to have to do it like this but you’re not going to take it well and I think we both know this is the best way. I’ve been given an assignment and by the time you get this I’ll have already shipped out. I’m really glad I chose you to spend my senior year with, but now it’s time to move on. Good luck. And remember, you’re stronger than you think.”

&
nbsp; She hadn’t bothered to give me an in-person goodbye… and I didn’t even know her last name.

  Chapter four

  CADET JACOBY NICOLAY

  Moving On from Valys

  Sophomore Year

  There was little downtime between semesters at The Academy.

  It was probably just as well; it left me very little time to dwell on Valys.

  I had messed up, I told myself. She had warned me from the beginning that I was just a convenience, that this was a way to endure the pressures of competition. I should’ve known better than to let my feelings get out of control. I finally pulled out of my funk because I was too ashamed to grieve any longer. Valys had taught me how to earn money and pay my debts, how to smoodge or bribe instructors when I needed a favor, and most importantly, how to play the game and still keep my sanity. It had been her that had told me to stop sprinting from class to class so I would be on time; there was no attendance taken and the curriculum was exactly the same no matter which professor was teaching a specific course. In other words, as long as I attended classes from my same course load I could create my own schedule – I just had to attend my assigned classes on test days.