by Nick Cole
Many were never heard from again. And all throughout the nearly two-thousand-year history of hyperdrive travel, scouts, explorers, and colonists would occasionally find the ending of some of those lost to history during the Pilgrimage or the Exodus. Some survey ship would find a tribal group gone almost full savage, like lost children who’d never known where they came from other than badly related myths. But more often than not, they would uncover the remains of old ships and bad landings on worlds that were unforgiving and harsh. Not everyone was lucky enough to survive reentry aboard an ancient freighter that would never fly again. Not everyone could handle the challenge of surviving a jungle where every plant and predator might be deadly.
And who knew how many just plowed into stars and were consumed. Lost forever.
Lost… forever.
As he sat there listening to the rain and watching the night, he wasn’t ready to deal with that.
He pushed those thoughts away and opened his mouth to the rain. Eventually he’d have to find out if it was poisonous, so why not now? Why prolong the agony?
He drank. It tasted like water. Sharp. Iron. Wet.
All those elites… the celebrities, the politicians, the one percent, the mega-capitalists and the demagogues of the people… they’d all gone sailing on glittering private cities out into the stellar dark. Some asleep, some wallowing in all the pleasures their advanced longevity techniques could buy them. As the Exodus unfolded, they were just forgotten by hyperspace travelers who could reach other worlds in hours.
At twenty I joined the Terran Navy.
He had been trained by NASA to work in space aboard the first capital ships. He was assigned to the Challenger.
Right then he remembered.
Casper.
His name had been Casper.
Ensign Sullivan. That had been the whole of it. Ensign Casper Sullivan.
In the era in which he’d been born, before the hyperdrive, in the shadowy, nuclear ash of the New American Dark Age, the old names had been in fashion. As though, he thought, our mothers giving birth in the ruins of some mall had looked around and known we’d need something better than what we’d arrived at.
That life would be hard.
That the galaxy would be cruel.
So here’s a bit of nobility, child. Sorry we almost nuked ourselves into a second Stone Age. Here’s a name I found in a book before we burned it for heat… something from way back when humanity was really something. Sorry we blew ourselves up and the best of us were so disgusted they just up and left the losers behind. Like some ditching prank nine tenths of the planet wasn’t in on.
Sorry.
Casper. It was a name from way back. Back when the world was new. When there were heroes who fought monsters and did brave things.
He stared out into the darkness, out there beyond the wreckage of the ship. By the light of one of the planet’s two moons, he could see something out there, a shape moving around in the dark. Crossing the jungle night back and forth.
It turned suddenly toward him. The thing had red, glowing eyes. Inhuman eyes, both familiar and terrible.
But it did not come closer.
Casper continued his watch.
In time the bot appeared in the darkness just below him. He could barely make it out, but its shape was unmistakable.
It was a THK model. Tactical Hunter-Killer. Reaper Variant. And it was his.
“Ah… master!” it exclaimed. The bot was holding one of the heavy automatic blasters from the ship’s well-stocked arsenal. He’d spent a month on Ankalor, in the Night Market, collecting all the specialized gear he’d need for this expedition. But THK-133 had been with him long before that. They didn’t even make THKs anymore. The machines were banned, categorized as weapons capable of war crimes. Too good at what they did. The Sayed Massacre and all. And they’d never been entirely trustworthy, even according to those who designed them.
“You are alive,” it said with a droll little fanfare in its malevolent English butler voice. “I had assumed you were dead, or dying slowly. And since I possess no lifesaving programming, nor desire to perform such menial tasks, as they would be inconsistent with my main purpose of taking life, I opted for a wait and see outcome.”
Casper said nothing.
I am Casper, he thought. And I’ve been other people. And maybe those other people have even been different than me. Maybe each one was a role I had to play to get a little farther down the trail that led all the way to here. A chance to do things differently and make the galaxy into what it needed to be. But I am Casper. That’s who I started out as. That’s who I was at the first. And who I’ve come here as.
But who will I be when I leave?
Who says you’re leaving? whispered some other voice.
Casper. I am Casper.
“How long have I been out?” he asked the bot.
THK-133 stood amid the debris of the ruined ship, a ship torn apart by its furious descent into the dense jungle, and scanned the darkness slowly. The wind and the rain were dying down, and one of the moons, a fat bone-white orb, rode high above the tall skeletal limbs of the silhouetted treetops.
“Three days, master. I planned to bury you tomorrow. I am glad that I will not have to add that to my task list for the day.”
There was a long pause.
Then the bot’s deep burning red optical assemblies pivoted and landed on him. Casper wondered if it would activate its laser-assist targeting system. Landing a red dot right in the center of his skull.
“We are not alone here, master,” stated the bot matter-of-factly. “There is something out there.”
Chapter Four
Dim, almost wan light filtered down through the dense alien foliage. As the skies lightened in the east, Casper pulled himself out of the wreckage and climbed down to the ground.
The ruin of his ship, a ship he’d never bothered to name, a ship he’d bought in a salvage bazaar on Tongath, lay before him, at the end of a blackened wake of debris. Burnt bushes and torn trees trailed off into the distant pink morning haze. It had once been a medium-sized light freighter. Now it was almost cracked in half, both wing sections had broken away from the central keel, and the engines were sinking into a moss-laden waterway that wandered off into the depths of the jungle. How much worse might it have been if the repulsors and deflectors hadn’t absorbed some of the damage?
It would never fly again. It would never leave this planet.
Casper thought of just how far out he was in the chasm between galaxies. The thought threatened to replace his strategies with hopelessness.
No one would come here looking for him.
No one would find him.
How could they? No one back in the galaxy even knew he was still alive. He’d “died” at the Battle of Telos. Gone down on the battleship Unity inside the atmosphere of Telos IV, surrounded by Savage cruisers blasting the Republic’s latest behemoth to pieces.
Officially, that was what had happened.
“But obviously it didn’t,” he chuckled to himself.
During the night, he’d popped his shoulder back into place and made a sling to give his arm a rest. Maybe the wrist wasn’t fractured. Maybe, maybe not. It hurt, but not nearly as bad as it had.
He walked along the hull, thinking how best to salvage what could be salvaged. How to fortify himself, for however long it took for him to get ready for what came next. And what came next was to search for a place he’d only found rumors of. A place called the Temple of Morghul.
When he’d asked THK-133 what he meant by “We are not alone,” all he’d gotten was an enigmatic, “That’s all I can reliably report at this time… master.”
Casper had thought the bot referred to the predator with the unsettling eyes. But THK-133 had seemed even more sinister than usual. Like he was withholding information of some sort. Lik
e he knew exactly what was out there, but he didn’t want to say.
More fun that way.
To be honest, the bot had been weird for a long time. Most people would have had its memory wiped by now. That, or cashed it in for scrap bounty. Casper had done neither. He’d kept it hidden after the Massacre at Sayed, in the caves below his estate on Bahaca.
THKs had strange programming to begin with. They were used for terminations in missions where no one on a kill team was expected to survive. So unlike most bots, they had little sympathy or emotive pathing.
But in theory, Casper reminded himself, as he often had, its programming was set to protect me.
And now, it was the only thing he had to talk to—and he knew how important that was, to have someone, or something, to talk to in survival situations. Once he’d gone two years, he remembered, a very long time ago, without talking to anyone. He’d felt himself going mad during those long and lonely months. And it was a horrible thing to lose your mind. So, for however long he was here—and with the longevity he’d had forced upon him, he might be out here a very long time—he would talk to the strange bot. If only to keep himself sane.
“Let’s clear away some debris for a campsite,” he told the bot as though he were once again a Terran Navy junior officer organizing a naval work detail. “Just outside this cargo hold. We’ll use that for stores.”
The bot scanned the debris field. “I require very little in the way of stores, master. My current battery shall last another one hundred and twenty-six years. Besides, I doubt we shall survive that long on such a hostile world as this.”
Casper stopped. “What do you mean, ‘hostile’?”
But the bot merely went off to place its weapon down against the hull. It picked up a piece of the ship’s armor that had sheared away and tossed it into the jungle. It was clear the bot wasn’t interested in saying anything more.
Let it go, Casper, he told himself.
My name is Casper. That’s right.
He was still having trouble remembering everything. It was coming back, but it all had a sense of not-quite.
For the rest of the day they worked on setting up a campsite. By evening they’d collected some firewood that burned well—bright and hot—and salvaged what they could of the food stores. Casper had armed himself with a small but powerful holdout blaster from the ship’s armory. He strapped on the weapon’s belt and holster, and practiced a few draws.
The night would be spent in his quarters, the same as every other night for the past five years, save the last one. THK-133 would provide close perimeter patrol.
The day had been almost insect-free, which was an unusual thing for a jungle swamp. But now, as thick darkness came quickly, tearing the light away from world, and as the swamp grew eerily quiet in the gloaming, large insects appeared and dove at the fire. Fortunately, none seemed interested in him.
For hours he sat, staring at the fire, thinking about why he’d come here. It came back to him in waves.
THK-133 stared at him across the fire. “You’re remembering, master.”
The vocalization from the bot had caught him by surprise. Bots, at least to him, had seldom seemed interested in the inner lives of living beings, unless they were asked to be.
He wanted to ignore the observation. When he was a fleet admiral, people had accepted his long, brooding silences. They had never required him to respond when he’d been teasing out some difficult tactical decision. But out here, beyond the edge of the galaxy, he could not afford to be moody or internalized. That way lay madness. He needed to force himself to respond, if only for his own sanity.
And yet, how had the bot known he was remembering?
“I was,” Casper replied, as though the bot were a living being, a long-time acquaintance. It was better to humanize the bot than to totally disconnect and treat it as a tool or a servant. He could deal with the anthropomorphizing issues once he made it out of here.
If he made it out of here.
“About the Quantum Palace,” said the bot.
It wasn’t a question.
It was a statement.
Casper looked up from the fire and stared at THK-133. The bot was staring dispassionately back at him. Returning his gaze. He could feel the red lights in its optical assemblies on him. They weren’t just taking him in and cataloging all the observable data they could capture, so that the bot’s processors could crunch it and make their thousands of millions per minute decisions. No, those cameras were searching him for something beyond data. Something intangible.
You’ve reached a ridiculous level of anthropomorphizing in an insanely fast amount of time, Casper told himself.
Casper realized his mouth was hanging slightly open. He wondered if maybe his bell was still rung from the crash. If maybe the long work throughout the day had exhausted him more than it should have. If maybe he was finally getting old.
Almost two thousand years old, but you don’t look a day over forty-two.
“I was remembering,” Casper said.
He waited to see what would happen next. Watching the automated killing machine that wanted to talk. As if it would somehow non-verbally react to any stimuli he gave it. A thing it had never been programmed to do.
Except… it shrugged. Right in front of him. Just barely. For a brief moment, its shoulder chassis rose up toward its insectile MicroFrame processor head.
Or maybe that was just a trick of the light?
Maybe.
“How do you know about the Quantum Palace?” Casper asked. Because only three people knew about it, and they’d made a pact.
The machine pivoted its head slowly, turning to scan some noise off in the jungle deeps. When night fell, strange unseen birds—at least Casper suspected they were birds—had begun to cry forlornly to the consuming darkness. The noise periodically drove away the rising insect chorus of sub-aural clicking. The plaintive wails of the unseen birds would erupt out across the night, and the sounds of the crickets, as Casper had taken to thinking of them, would cease at once.
And sometimes, the cry of another bird would come. Some answer, off in the night, from another creature like the first. Which seemed almost… wonderful, amazing, even beautiful in a haunting way.
Unless one knew about xenozoological predator theory. Then the strange cries took on a whole different meaning.
They could be predators. Communicating. Hunting.
The bot slowly panned its head back toward Casper across the fire. Its unblinking red optical assemblies watched him in the flickering light.
“Because you told me everything,” it said.
“Why?” asked Casper without pause. “Why would I tell you everything?”
Because he wouldn’t have.
“Because the fate of the Republic depends on what we do here, master. That was the ‘Importance of Orders’ setting you engaged in my mission protocol database. Secondary reason provided for information-sharing was that you have been having memory problems. A side effect of your advanced age—although you have been tested for dementia and a host of other genetic diseases, and none have appeared in the results. You are in excellent health, other than your current injuries. Perhaps your memory problems are because you are human, and therefore fragile in ways I am not.”
Casper listened to the low snap and pop of the fire between them. The smoke smelled floral and weird. In time he would get used to it.
“Perhaps humans are not meant to live as long as you have,” stated THK-133 in the long silence that followed. “I speculate that you are losing your capacity to remember. Reasoning should become impaired next, according to my analysis of the neurological data files on human cognition I was given in order to effect more efficient terminations.”
“Why am I here?” Casper asked the bot.
The bot didn’t immediately answer. A few uncomfortable seconds
passed.
“You believe this planet contains the key to a power that will allow you to bring order to the disintegrating Republic. What you have not been able to accomplish with subterfuge, assassination, war, diplomacy, economic theory, and a host of other options, you believe will be possible once you unlock the secrets of this place. To be specific: you seek the Temple of Low Men. The Morghul Gate.”
And it all came back to him.
The Lexington.
The Quantum Palace.
And of course the Dark Wanderer.
All the clues that had led from the battle inside the palace, inside that other nether reality, that blank space in the universe… to here.
He had come here to save a galaxy that didn’t want to be saved. A galaxy that wouldn’t save itself. He’d come to find a power source unlike anything ever known, a power source encountered only once—by him, in a place that didn’t exist as far as existence seemed concerned.
Casper stood. “I’m tired. I’ll turn in now. Stay close to the ship tonight, 133.”
He left the bot there, watching the firelight and sensing the night all around it.
Later, he lay in his bunk within the wreckage, thinking about the lighthugger Moirai and the Martian light infantry. About all the dead they’d left in that lifeless place. About his friend Tyrus Rex. And about how all of this had begun. Soon he was asleep and dreaming, though he didn’t know it. The dreams were like watching a memory.
Chapter Five
Casper wanders in his dream past all the dead left behind after the Lexington landed, under heavy fire, to secure the hangar of the massive ark ship known as the Moirai. This was early in the Savage Wars. So early it wasn’t even really a part of the major conflicts that would follow as the Savages came in from the dark voids in their sublight ships and started raiding planets, connecting with other lost lighthuggers, and then spreading like some out-of-control virus of closed loop insanity. Before everyone understood just how savage those wars would become.
This is one hundred years after the Obsidia. Casper, commander of the assault frigate Lexington, has been sent by the Confederation of Worlds to board the lighthugger Moirai and rescue a scientist the savages captured in a recent raid. Fate has brought Tyrus Rex into this because he leads the boarding party, which consists of a force of Martian light infantry, formerly enemies of Earth, now members of the loose Confederation of Worlds that will one day form the Galactic Republic.