Imperator (Galaxy's Edge Book 5)

by Nick Cole

  He turned back to the others. “I see a light up ahead. Got to be the next stop. I’m going forward to scout. Get Major Rex up and out of the car, then wait here. Back in five minutes.”

  He pulled his sidearm and began to walk. He had one charge pack left.

  Within a few minutes he neared the broad blanket of light. It was, as he’d expected, another platform. He took a knee and waited, listening.

  He checked his six. From here he could see no sight of the ruined car. Or the spiders. Maybe they, too, had died in the wreck. Or maybe they’d taken too many losses to continue on and had gone off to…

  Caves?

  Warrens?

  Labs?

  His mind didn’t want to think about what those things might call home, so he left the thought alone.

  But whatever had happened… they hadn’t continued their attack. They’d disappeared with the victims they’d managed to snatch. And maybe for them… that was enough of a victory.

  When nothing changed in the local soundscape, he proceeded forward cautiously. Unlike the other platforms they’d passed in their helter-skelter journey along the rail line, this one was pristine, almost new. It waited as though at any moment some sleek monorail train might appear in a rush and disgorge chattering and harried scientists, crew, and colonists from that long-ago era that was Earth outward bound and hopeful. Casper imagined that the big ship, when it pulled away from low Earth orbit all those years ago, must have looked a lot like this platform did now: a cross between a state-of-the-art gadget store of slate-gray chrome and glass, and a medical facility with all the latest longevity techniques promised to those who could afford them.

  For Casper it was like stepping back in time. Or stepping back into a time before time as he knew it. For him there were those kinds of memories too. The memory of wandering other people’s memories. Of uncovering what once was. It was part of his nature, that constant archeologist he’d always been. The wondering wanderer who’d asked all those questions across all those worlds.

  Who were these people?

  Why is this here?

  What do these pictures mean?

  He remembered, as a child, maybe seven or eight years old, wandering the ruins of a wrecked Los Angeles as a kind of playtime after the daily chores. That year his father was raising a herd of pigs in the ruins of their farm on La Brea Boulevard, and Casper would often go out to the big old silent street and look down it, morning and evening, and wondered what had become of all the cars that had once raced up and down the broad avenue. All the movie stars who had died before, and during, the war. And maybe even after, in the ruins and long winter.

  In the afternoons, when his father went copper mining, Casper often went with him. They’d head for the wreckage of some old building where his father would extract all the copper wire he could wrap and bundle and sell at the swap meet in Santa Fe Springs.

  Casper never went inside the shotgunned and barely standing buildings. It’s too dangerous. The buildings his father worked in were on the verge of constant collapse. Old rotten floors could give way, and often did. Weakened walls would collapse inward. And raiders might be hiding in there in the darkness. Waiting for the night and their wildings.

  And so Casper as a child wandered La Brea, allowed only to look from a distance at all the “once was” that once was. He spent many a long hour watching those stores, trying to see what life had looked like before the world had gone ruined. Trying to imagine it all. Sometimes he could form an image, an understanding. Other times things were so tumbledown that they were beyond the knowing. But sometimes there were pictures that made the work of imagining what everything once looked like much easier.

  His father had been a cop in the times of those pictures. LAPD. All through the food riots and during the Vegas War, as he called it. Even then, on La Brea, the other farmers had made his father a kind of sheriff and judge, and sometimes an executioner too, when it needed to be done.

  “We do what we have to,” his father remarked sadly one evening after returning from Beverly Hills where he’d had to hang a rapist. And then he’d said no more as they thanked God for their lima beans and cornbread. There was bacon that night too.

  Casper recalled all those memories as he stood there looking at the platform on the ship from the past that had hurtled off into the future. Memories of a pristine golden age when the world was a better place of abundance and technology, and the celebrities and politicians and thinkers had seemed like gods among men.

  A particular memory came back to him, distinct. He was staring into the grit and debris of a store on La Brea. A high-end gadget store named after a fruit. Which seemed dumb to Casper. The picture had been thrown to the floor by some looter in the time of looting, left to lie abandoned among the smashed glass and shattered furniture.

  It was a picture of a family. Obviously they were getting a smartphone. A gadget. A toy to them in that lost age of abundance. They’d used that fantastic device to amuse themselves from moment to moment. With games. Or pictures. Or commercials of endlessly available goods and services. Or meaningless conversations that paled in importance to what was on the horizon and headed straight at them like a bullet.

  In the age after that, everything was precious, and nothing, not even smartphones when they came back, was used to play. Instead, when technology returned, it was used to work, make, and grow. All the noble things. Everything the Galactic Republic used to be before the House of Reason took it upon itself to steer the ship of culture right back to what had ruined everything in the last days of Earth.

  When no one had hired it to murder another civilization, the House of Reason had taken it upon itself and returned to its old tricks, expecting a different outcome this time rather than all the failures they’d ended up with before. And they were always surprised when the same results of failure, starvation, and revolt came up again and again.

  Insanity.

  But on the eight-year-old child’s day, when he looked at the family in that picture he’d found among the grit and rubble, getting that wonderful device and all the pleasures it promised, things were different. Better than what they had become.

  In the picture they were all clean. Some weeks Casper’s family did not bathe at the farm.

  In the picture, they all looked healthy. Casper’s little sister had died of the plague at two.

  And they had new clothes in the picture. The eight-year-old Casper had never owned new clothes. The first set of new clothes he would ever own that weren’t salvaged or found, or put together from the scraps of lost things, was the plebe uniform that NASA issued him at the academy in his first year. Blue coveralls. Boots. A nylon jacket. And the next new clothing he would own was his issued uniform the week before graduation four years later.

  On that day, his mother and father, the sheriff of La Brea, drove six hundred miles in an old truck that was his dad’s pride and joy. His father was wordless that whole windy sun-swept day in Houston. And then, finally, he said to Casper in a low voice made hoarse by wind, dirt, and fallout: “Make the galaxy better than what we gave you, son. Make it better out there.”

  Yes. That’s how it should’ve been.

  Casper hauled himself up onto the platform.

  The slate-gray floor was polished to a high sheen, and the back wall was polished chrome. Space Age lettering on frosted white glass, backlit with a soft green glow, announced this platform as “Platform Nine.”

  Casper studied everything. A high-tech security hatch was set in the wall, and next to it was a glass plaque with embossed black lettering that read:

  Welcome to the Moirai Center for

  Advanced Cognition.

  Within all will be known.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  There was the man, the bot, and the little beast.

  Casper came to himself as the three of them struggled up through the sha
ttered granite scree of the jagged ridge that separated the jungle and all its narcotic madness from the desert that lay ahead with all its unknowns.

  The effects of the psychotropic mushrooms were fading, and in those moments he slowly awoke from the nightmares. They seemed now more like dreams than the stark raving terrors they had been. Even now all the horrors of his memories, mixing with the dark rivers, strange stones, and wild clutches of that spreading jungle, were like something that had happened to someone else. Someone not him. Someone he’d only been half-watching.

  The first thing Casper heard as he came out of that day’s long waking dream was the sound of his own boots crunching against tiny broken rock. The Moirai and its horrors lurked within that sound. The screams. The staccato bursts of automatic weapons. The half-remembered conversations. The running. Running through the darkness in fear and terror. The Savages always at your back. And all the unknown tunnels surrounding you as you made your way through that ghost ship.

  The next thing he heard was the little beast huffing and puffing up the ridge behind him, muttering.

  “Urmo. Urmo. Urmo.”

  Casper looked up and saw the tactical hunter killer bot, a dark shadow against the rays of red light that cast themselves out beyond the ridge. And beyond the lethal killing machine rose the ancient edifice.

  The statue of a lizard king.

  In his mind, during the terrors, he remembered it hovering ever above him, watching with those soulless saurian eyes and that hungry wide smile. It had been there too, on the Moirai, watching him like the piles of skulls.

  But now it faced away from them, out over the desert. Looking toward some unknown place that couldn’t be found on any maps back in the galaxy. Casper had a feeling that this place, this planet, was far more ancient than anyone could have suspected. Ancient by orders of magnitude.

  He began to shiver.

  Or maybe he had been shivering. His teeth rattling in his skull. Every muscle ached. Especially his eyeballs. And his jaw. As though his eyes had been pinned wide open and his jaw set in some grim yet furious decision to see the end of the drug trip through to its fatal end. As though he hadn’t been able to take his mind or eyes off the hallucinations that had ravaged him in the long and lost trek through the jungle.

  He turned, just below the ridge, to stare back at the jungle one last time. He would probably never see it again. It covered everything, swallowed everything. The ship. The rivers. The memories. His arrival. He scanned the hazy alien treetops that rose up like statues in their own right. Clustered among those great trees he saw finally the unseen birds that had howled and moaned and always stayed just out of sight. From this distance they seemed to swim through the red-and-yellow-hued haze as though it were a sea, and the trees were great coral reefs, shimmering and waving.

  And then Casper turned his back on it all and climbed the pass between two summits.

  Beyond the statue that seemed to stare down at them once they crossed from jungle to high desert waste, its expression one of anticipation and contempt, a vast desert fell away from the sharp iron ridges turned blood red by the fading red dwarf sinking into the horizon. Casper saw jagged canyons, a sea of dunes, and nothing… endless nothing. If the desert had once had a name, it was long lost now. It was the quintessence of nothingness.

  A desert of nothingness.

  For there was nothing in it.

  Part Two

  The Desert in Which

  You Must Come to the

  End of Yourself

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  That night they made camp beneath the statue. THK-133 had gathered dead wood to make a fire while Casper sat beneath a survival blanket. His body felt drained, his mind cottony and distant, as though it had been through a great sickness and had only just survived. In other words… he felt thin.

  There was little food left in his ruck, and THK-133’s pack carried only charge packs for the heavy blaster. This was odd, because Casper remembered loading that pack with survival rations.

  The state of Casper’s gear was a question unto itself. Many things were simply missing. Some were not. There was no rhyme nor reason as to why one piece of equipment had survived the trek through the jungle and another had disappeared. Try as he might to remember what had happened in the jungle, Casper could find nothing in his mind to give him a coherent picture of the journey. His boots had been ravaged. His pants were muddy and torn. His shirt had been so badly ruined through sweat and damage that he’d used it as kindling to start the fire that night. He had only the jacket now. That had remained strangely pristine, folded and strapped to the top of his ruck. For all the damage everything else had taken, the heavy-duty survival jacket looked like it hadn’t even gone on the terrible journey that had brought them beneath the glare of the desert statue.

  The hunting blaster rifle was gone too. And he had no memory of losing it.

  He looked at THK-133. The bot merely stared into the fire. Urmo had caught some desert rat and was busy skinning it in the darkness away from the fire.

  “How long?” Casper croaked. From the sound of his voice, he guessed he hadn’t used it much in the time he’d been under the influence of the strange mushrooms. Or perhaps he’d screamed and screamed it into uselessness.

  The bot swiveled its head mechanically, landing its gaze on Casper.

  “Ah, you can speak coherently again, master. Excellent. This is quite a change from your constant nonsensical raving and general lunacy. I look forward to a return to your more lucid conversations, which I have occasionally enjoyed.”

  Raving.

  Casper drank some water. He still had the canteen. It didn’t cool things now—somehow it had malfunctioned with regard to only that one feature—but even the tepid water felt good on his raw throat.

  Little Urmo returned with the spitted rat. It had two heads. The tiny creature thrust it into the fire with evil delight and watched the flames leap up around it, muttering its one, oft-repeated word over and over to itself.

  “Raving?” Casper asked. His voice was still hoarse.

  “Yes, raving,” answered the bot drolly.

  Pause.

  “What I was I raving about?”

  “Oh… everything. You gave a running commentary of everything we saw. Often objectifying trees or rocks and turning them into persons. You had cute names for them. It was like going on a long walk with a primeval tribesman who explained everything with the catchall word ‘magic.’ It was quite ridiculous.”

  Casper thought about this. Again, there were no memories of any of these events inside his brain. Instead he felt that the ancient memories of his time aboard the Moirai had been the subject of his waking hallucinations. In the past, in the years since those events, he’d often returned in nightmares to that haunted ship, awakening and feeling as though he were suffocating, or screaming out with night terrors as the Moirai exploded around him once more.

  “What did I say?” he asked the bot nonchalantly.

  Urmo’s coal-dark eyes glistened greedily as the two-headed rat began to roast and sizzle. The little beast hopped gently back and forth from one tiny furry leg to the other as flames licked at the desert rat’s flesh.

  “Oh…” began the bot, staring upward as if in deep thought.

  There were no stars above; this planet was too far from the galaxy. Casper found that deeply unnerving, both with regard to navigation and basic humanity. But his system was too shot to even consider how lost beyond the known he was, so he focused on the flames consuming the dead wood.

  Dead for how long, he wondered absently. This wood had once been some kind of tree. Now it had arrived here in a treeless desert.

  “Well… you talked about your parents,” said THK-133. “How very proud they were of you. Graduating from something you called ‘NASA’ seemed to have been a big moment for them. For your male biological progenitor
especially. You were very proud of that. So proud that you talked about it endlessly for days—when you weren’t tearing through the rations every time I turned back to make sure you hadn’t fallen into another pit.”

  That doesn’t seem right, thought Casper. His parents had been murdered by raiders. A biker gang called the… Goths. And that was well before he’d ever been accepted into NASA. No one had come to his graduation because there had been no one. He didn’t think about his parents much; their deaths formed one of the most painful memories of his life.

  And yet he’d been luridly fascinated by Goths. As though they were the source of all his fears. He’d been driven to learn about them, to make them less… powerful. Less of a nightmare figure, always on the edge of his vision. Always waiting in the shadows. And instead… the very word Goth inspired a sense of dread darkness inside his mind despite all his efforts to haul it into the light.

  So he had researched them, the Goths. The original ones, found in the history books, from which the bikers must’ve taken their gang’s name. The Goths of history had destroyed the known world, such as it was back then. Just like the later Goths who killed his parents… and destroyed his own known world.

  When he suffocated… at night, in his nightmares of the Moirai… the painful sound he made as the air refused to come sounded like… Gothhhhh. It felt like a hand gripping his throat.

  Painful… like Reina? asked that observer who watched all the dreams and nightmares in his mind.

  “Yes,” he whispered aloud, answering the question as though it were his own thought, when it had so clearly been a voice inside his head. “And that was somehow worse in its way. Which, even after two thousand years, is a terrible thing to think about your parents. That losing the love of your life is somehow worse than losing the people who gave you life and unconditional love. But I’m too strung out from the mushrooms to be anything but honest with myself. It’s too late for comfortable lies.”