by Chad Huskins
: Asteroid Monarch
Kalder the Dreaded moved with rare grace for a man of his advanced age. Even more impressive because he walked with bare, callused feet everywhere he went. Now, as he strode to the middle of the Senate Hall, he cast around at his fellow senators. His black robes whispered across the floor. He moved upright and with great poise, without the crackling knees or nearsighted eyes that most his age suffered. Each step he took, he took slowly, deliberately.
The rest of the assembly watched him with a mixture of worry and expectation. The man was known for his longwinded speeches, often reserved for ungodly filibusters that consumed hours and sometimes days of Senate time. Indeed, it was for this reason he had earned his sobriquet: the Dreaded. The assembly often despaired to see the man become involved with any issue, for Kalder only got involved with matters he felt passionately about—the man was heard to say he suffered not petty pedestrian arguments, such as overly complex taxation laws or the amortizing of the government’s many debts; he understood the topics fine, he just left those squabbles to others.
So, if ever he raised his voice to speak, one could be certain of two things: one, that he would be discussing sweeping change, and two, that he would not be silent for a long while.
Kalder came to a halt just in front of the Two Consuls, drew up a portion of his robes in one hand and folded them over the opposite arm. His robes were the dingiest of all the senators’. Kalder’s hair, gray and thin, wasn’t completely unkempt, but neither was it styled nor even adequately combed. His face, purportedly etched in stone at the beginning of time, contained no humor, and its deep creases bracketed a thin-lipped frown.
His outward appearance was of no great shame to him. Indeed, his appearance may well have been arranged to look slightly disheveled. Kalder was one of the last adherents to a philosophical movement that came and went seven decades before, when he was not yet past his Course of Honors. The Zeroist movement had been a powerful one, but like most things that burned too bright, too fast, its light had gone out. Few acolytes of the pseudo-religious Zeroistic Order remained after the Brood had become so prevalent in the universe.
Though they scoffed at the strange cult’s doctrine, no one scoffed at their discipline. Nor did they mock Kalder. He had trained to live off of a poor man’s diet, to endure sickness in silence and without showing discomfort, to go barefooted on hot or jagged ground, to speak bluntly, to remain silent when he had nothing worthwhile to say, to endure the laughter and mockery of others, and to imagine the loss of everything he held dear and be at peace with the notion.
Kalder the Dreaded was a bitter political rival to any that found themselves on the other side of an issue than he, for he had proven that he could endure, he could last, and he had nowhere else to go. An immortal, they said, who would surely be the last human standing, still living in shadows when all mankind was dead, still arguing with no one. The joke was, the last human words spoken would be by Kalder, and they would be, “I object!”
Kalder was a militant conservative of the Restoration Arm, once dangerous in his first days in the Senate, responsible for toppling many political enemies and rallying support from even the most anti-Restoration corners of the Republic. But now he had become like a large, mostly dormant volcano, one that rumbled from time to time, threatening to erupt. And like a volcano, his eruptions seemed to come with the force of decades of pent-up pressure, his speech having a blast radius that reached most of the Republic.
Old, stubborn, immortal, he counted among his friends his many enemies. A fey man at times, he could still wield power through the senators, lobbyists, and corporations—all the connections he’d made early in his career. He was from an age when war had not been so rife, when it seemed there might be hope against the Brood, that the Fall of Man might be reversible, and he had done well as a leader of legions and a tactical advisor to the Senate, making important relationships that served him throughout his Course of Honors.
Kalder was, then, a strange hybrid of the powerful and the obsolete, a species of man whose philosophical views garnered little sympathies, but whose connections still allowed him to hold considerable sway. The others in the Senate would’ve ignored him…if only they could.
Presently, the Second Consul cracked the Iron Rod against the floor again, and said, “The Senate will hear Holace Adamik Fuller Kalder!”
An interminable silence filled the room.
When finally the old man spoke, his voice was loud, reverberating off the asteroid’s walls and carrying through the great hall. It was likely that even the Vigiles and signators waiting outside could hear him.
“My venerable Senators,” Kalder said, raising one open hand. This, at least, was a mercy—while a closed fist usually signaled a filibuster, an open hand typically indicated a senator meant only to speak for a short time. He put his hand to his ear. “Listen.”
The entire senate listened to the slow drip-drip-dripping from the walls, to the distant rattle of decaying pipes behind the walls, to the echoes of their own forlorn thoughts.
“Do you hear it?” said Kalder. He looked at each of their faces in turn, slowly, his eyes drifting from one to the other, like an insect tasting the nectar of each flower. “This is where humanity ends. After millennia of advancement, this is where we are. A bunch of tired old men huddled inside a rock, floating in space, each of us plugging holes like plumbers.”
A hundred taciturn faces stared at him.
“You know that I am no alarmist,” he said. “I am not given to wild, unbridled speculation.” The room remained silent. No, no one could argue those points. “You know that I do not come out of my dark corner to merely frighten or rouse a rabble, nor do I leave my corner to tell you what you already know. I quite like my dark corner, and if it were up to me, my dark corner is where I would stay, forever receiving my stipend, while I use my spare time to sculpt and study the ancients. But something compels me to service and I return each year, at the behest of my constituents, to find myself occupying a darker corner, one colder and more drear with each passing day.
“I am called immortal, though I am not. I am old, though. This is known. And I am the bitter enemy of almost every man and woman here. This is also known. As a Zeroist, I am impelled to confront the reality, and not to hide behind words of obfuscation, prevarication, or false flattery. I am hated above all others present and I know it. I feel neither joy nor contempt in this knowledge. I find it only satisfying to know the truth. To face it. To confront it. As a Zeroist, I relish the truth, brutal though it may be. So now, I ask you all to confront the truth with me.”
Kalder started to move. Slowly at first, not for any decrepitude in his bones, but for the sake of his usual measured gravitas. A Zeroist he might be, but he still understood the need for a bit of theatrics. His saturnine ways had always helped him to hold an audience’s attention. Like children they were, and like children was how he would treat them.
“Senator Notombis has already recited many things that you already know,” Kalder went on, gesturing at the young senator. “He has told you about the Great Decay. He has told you about the many billions of citizens we have scattered across the cosmos, perhaps trillions, in faraway systems, and, if legends are true, in faraway galaxies. We answered the call of our natures, we sought to sate our wanderlust, and even as we thirst, the lanes by which we travel are being cut off. All this he told you, yes. But what Senator Notombis neglected to tell you—what his logic probably wrestles with his heart to admit—is that it is impossible to recover them all. It will never happen. We will never find all our lost colonies. Give up hope on that now, it is best for us all.
“Earth. Mars. Jupiter. Ceres. Venus. Europa. These are the core worlds we descend from. As Notombis said, the Sol System is our home, and it is the only foundation we have left. We have entered a state of regression, of stark decline, and there can be no mistake. Part of it is our own fault, as Notombis suggested. But there can be no doubt about it—the Brood hav
e proven themselves undefeatable, and have become so omnipresent we might as well consider them walls. Walls we shall never cross again. Those worlds behind such walls will never know the touch of home again, they will never know the beauty of Sol, nor the white shores of Earth Cradle. They are lost to us. Let your thoughts and prayers go with them, and hope that they might somehow scratch a living off of asteroids and moons.”
Someone made a noise. A senator was weeping to himself, trying to hide it. It was not uncommon to hear senators sob openly when discussing all they had lost.
A woman near the front row stood up, a hand raised. It was Senator Hash, from the Kuiper Belt, a member of the Corporate Arm and a representative of both the people and the mining guilds. “This is coward’s talk!” she hissed. “To lie down and let what we’ve built crumble and fall.”
“You don’t have to let something crumble that already has, my dear.”
“You would have Decay win, Senator Kalder? You would concede defeat to the Brood, and have us leave thousands of colonies adrift?”
“I would,” Kalder said without hesitation. It was said with such absoluteness that Hash appeared to have been struck. She was utterly cut off from any follow-up. She slowly sat down as Kalder continued to pace and speak. The rigidity with which he spoke was his strength, her only hope now, she knew, was to let him keep talking, and perhaps his own words would reveal to others present his madness.
“It’s true some of the stragglers may find their way through,” he said, answering questions he imagined were already brewing in the others’ minds. “Some of them may find a way through the Galaxy Keys, and if that should happen then I will be among the first to welcome our brothers and our sisters from those galaxies. But we cannot waste energy on the search for these lost colonies—”
“Even if those colonies could provide us with precious resources?” hollered a man brave enough to speak, but not so brave as to stand and be seen.
“Yes,” Kalder said bluntly.
“Resources that we need if we are to feed more than eighty billion mouths?” shouted another such bold senator. His voice descended from the Liberty Arm’s side of the chamber.
“Even if we need the resources to feed more than eighty billion mouths, yes,” the old man confirmed, walking on, unabated. “Humanity made its push, and it was a valiant effort, but our reach exceeded our grasp, and we’ve paid the price for our naked ambition. Hundreds of years now separate us from that enterprising—some might say foolish—spirit. We endeavored to see more, to taste more. We did so, and at great expense. Lives spent, even sacrificed, all in the name of exploration and expansion. But, as it is, we do not have that luxury anymore. It is time to point our military’s full might towards a worthier goal—”
“But people will starve!”
“Yes, they will,” Kalder said, as if confused as to why anyone would need to voice this thing that went without saying.
“You want us to go to the people,” another senator laughed, “and tell them that we’re not going to look for their families, and that we’re not going to try to reconnect with our mining operations in Andreana or Vigo? What about Sombrero, and Antioch?”
“We have the single greatest military ever conceived!” shouted another senator. “And you would have us waste it on some of your schemes?”
At this, Notombis laughed. “Yes, your mad schemes! We’ve all heard them!”
“My scheme is not mad,” Kalder said plainly. “It is an alternative with an unknown outcome, whereas any return to previously visited systems has a known outcome: utter annihilation. Wherever the Brood lie, we are forever barred from passing. Every naval force that falls on them is obliterated, guaranteed to be lost. They present to us a barricade, one which we should never attempt to approach again. At least, not until our technology sufficiently advances to rival their own someday.”
“You try selling that to the proles!” shouted Hash, back on her feet and emboldened by the shouts of the other senators.
“Fuck the proles,” Kalder said with a shrug.
It was said in his usual, stoic manner. So calmly, so matter-of-factly, that it hit the whole of the Senate like a slap in the face. Also like a slap in the face, it had the effect of shutting them up in red-faced indignation for a moment before there came a volley of insults, demands, and even challenges—challenges that would never have been issued at the old man, were it not for the support of a crowd.
Above the strident accusations of “anti-patriotism” and “madman” and “zealot,” Kalder the Dreaded raised a single hand and pointed at the whole of the Senate, and spoke in a booming, accusatory tone. “Your only salvation,” he told them, “resides within the Moon Scrolls, and the prophecies that the Strangers left amid the dust!”
This brought the Senate to some semblance of order. The assembly lowered their voices, if only out of curiosity.
“Perhaps you should clarify that statement, Senator Kalder,” inquired the First Consul from behind him, forcing a diplomatic tone through grinding teeth. Both Consuls’ patience wore thin whenever the old man strode across their floor.
“As you all know,” said Kalder, lowering his hand and beginning to pace again, “I have some considerable interest in archaeology. Indeed, it is a lifelong pursuit, one that runs deep in my family. The Ancient Kalderus have their roots in venture capital survey, as well as space exploration. Though none of them shared my philosophical pursuits, I am told that there is one thing all Kalderus share, and that is their need to know. We require an answer to certain mysteries. One such mystery is: Who were the Strangers, and where did they go?”
“And what have you found?” asked Hash in a challenging tone.
“Maps,” Kalder said. “There are maps among the Scrolls. Waypoints. Markings that represent star clusters, probably constellations.” He paused, his eyes raking across them. “And a promise. The maps themselves represent the promise of a greater knowledge.”
“Greater knowledge,” snorted Notombis, unconvinced.
“The maps on the Moon Scrolls are old, and incomplete. There have been sightings of others, though. Maps made by stellar cartographers, left in the wake of the Strangers’ retreat from our universe.”
“And let me guess,” Hash said. “You want to go in search of them all. You want us to fund this mad quest, don’t you, Kalder?”
“You may call it a crusade, Senator Hash. Humanity has always enjoyed a good crusade.”
Kalder looked at the assembly, this fragile group of withering old space miners and corporate reps, many of whom became public officials in a time before the Great Decay, back when elections still had meaning. “My friends…this is the end.”
He allowed those words to hang in the air a moment. The words did their work. There was a quality to simplicity, his Zeroist tutor had taught him. It had a tendency to bore into a person’s mind deeper than delicate gifts and large promises.
And here, that simplicity worked its magic. They all knew it was the end. They knew it. Just no one had ever said it out loud in a public forum for the Senate scribes to officially record. “It is the end for the human race. It’s been a long journey, one filled with heroism and villainy, with geniuses and monsters, with strife and victory. But it has come to an end.
“This is the end. Unless,” he added, raising a finger. “Unless we change our perspective on what progress means. It’s more than just searching for answers elsewhere.” He now turned that finger on all of them. “This is the end of our great Republic, but there may be a new beginning, an egg laid by our fallen Republic, which may yet hatch into something else. Something grander.”
Again, Kalder held them in silence, and slowly turned his gaze on one senator after another. Many of them had served under him in the military, and almost all of them owed him a major debt from back in the days when Kalder had been more amenable, more…bendable. Presently, some of them met his gaze, though at least half averted their eyes or pretended to be looking at something else more int
eresting. Kalder does not bend. They all knew it, and they all worried.
It was Hash who voiced their fears.
“And can we expect you to assault this Senate for the next several years with filibusters?” she asked. “Can we all look forward to your robust speeches, pontificating on the virtues of Zeroism, on shedding the past, and on abandoning our lost colonies and—”
“You can,” Kalder said.
That stopped her.
“Senator Hash,” he said, moving towards her. “I respect your vim and vigor, though I ill like your abject cynicism—”
“Cynicism! You’re the one purporting ‘this is the end’ before a formal meeting of the Senate, as if the sky were falling—”
“—and I also ill like your penchant for interruption.” Kalder held up two fingers, and touched them to his temple. “Clarity of thought. Clarity of vision. This is what’s needed. No more plans for rescue. No more emotionally-charged debates on the best way to get around the Brood and to our loved ones. You want to risk more lives by trying to rescue people from the Brood? That is a statement of such arrogance and conceit it is not to be fathomed.
“My tutor once told me there comes a time to give up all hope and call a spade a spade.” He pointed at Notombis. “No more suggestions of falling back to the Sol System to ‘regroup’ before attacking the Brood again after ‘a measure of years.’ Stop fooling yourselves, you mangy dogs! This is the collapse into a state of nothingness, a ‘zeroing’ if you will, and it has been long in coming.”
“And you think the only thing that may save us is a handful of dusty scrolls?” said Hash, with supreme derision.
Again, Kalder did not hesitate. “I do, Senator.”
“And you believe you can convince the Imperator of this?”
And there it was. The real question. Not whether any of his plans made actual sense, but could he get the Imperator’s support? It was always the question to stop any senator from going rogue.
“The Imperator is not here,” Kalder pointed out, gesturing to the Resolute Throne that sat collecting dust behind the two Consuls. “His seat remains vacant, as it has for three long years now, ever since his throneworld fell, and we’ve been forced to move his Resolute Throne with us, like an old piece of furniture no one can come to part with. I think it’s time now to admit something to ourselves: The Imperator is not coming back. He is lost. As lost as the colonies.”