Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Within the darkness of his private decks, he found himself standing before something Sergeant Bombassa had given him when they’d awarded the shock trooper his medal.

  A cutting torch.

  A simple tool the NCO had used to take the Republic corvette alone.

  He studied the tool on the pedestal in front of him. It was utterly ordinary, formed of flimsy metal. A cheap tool.

  For an entire year during the Savage Wars, Rex had used one of these as his only weapon. When they were stranded on a violent world being overrun by those monsters, fighting for a beached whale of a ship, deck by deck, day by day. Those were the most desperate of times. Modern warfare had devolved down into hand weapons wielded with savagery like some ancient fantasy novel of never was. Swords and magic.

  The torch was utilitarian. It was fashioned like an oversized ancient flashlight. Heavy duty. A piece of equipment some sanitation worker might carry on his belt when going down into the dirty dark for the most practical of reasons. There was nothing elegant, or even beautiful, about it. It was not some weapon from a lost age of nobility and honor.

  But its flame had always mesmerized him.

  Reminded him of a past forgotten by most, when men fought and won empires with swords forged of steel.

  Empires.

  The black giant had won Goth Sullus an empire with this torch. And he had then given the torch to his emperor, as a gift.

  “It is the way of my people,” he’d told Goth Sullus in his deep basso rumble. “Every gift must be answered with a gift.”

  Sullus had accepted, and he had placed it here, most likely to be forgotten, on this pedestal in his inner sanctum. But now he could sense the violent destructive power within the tool. It was like a kind of salve to him at this moment—as though that pure potential for destruction was a sort of peace. A symbol. Perhaps even a symbol of himself. Within the chaos forming all about him.

  Because he’d come to destroy the Republic. He would destroy it so that it could be made ready for what was coming.

  If it must be an empire that rises from the ashes, then let it be one taken with a sword. Like it always and ever has been.

  He closed his eyes and understood the entire meditation his mind had been caressing now. Understood what must be done next. He’d considered the past, the present, the future, and the possibilities that might be.

  They were coming for him. Right now, at this very moment. Three teams formed from the best of the best of the shock troopers. Former members of the Legion. Men who obeyed orders. Men who would not have signed on for an emperor or an empire.

  But it was still a group of desperate men. A group like the raiders who had killed his old life, the one he’d first started out with, long ago when he was a child. He’d been afraid of such men back then. Afraid until one day… he wasn’t anymore.

  Those coming for him now were half of his personal guard. Two full companies of heavily armed shock troopers massing in the shadows of his private hangar deck, supported by two HK-SW mechs beyond the massive impervisteel portal that sent silver starlight down into his shadowy blue chambers. It was possible they might even use tri-fighter interceptors to make an attack run, venting the entire deck to open vacuum. A sure death for all. Even him. The vacuum of space cared little for arcane and ancient powers. Space was, as it had ever been, mercilessly unforgiving.

  Goth Sullus pushed the cowl of his hooded robe back, revealing a large bald head, coal-dark eyes, and a lantern jaw. The years had changed him. In more ways than his fear-driven subjects could ever imagine.

  The times were dangerous indeed.

  A storm was gathering.

  A storm that would ruin the galaxy.

  He had become what the galaxy needed, long ago, in many places, bringing him now to this critical moment. But of course, none of his would-be assassins had any idea what they were truly dealing with. How could they? Even he did not understand it when he first began his long quest for power. When he looked upon a ruined Earth, two thousand years ago, with his child’s eyes. When he crashed on a planet, no more than fifty years ago.

  When he was someone else.

  Part One

  Jungles of Madness

  Chapter One

  The Past

  He pushed away all thoughts of death as he fought to get the speeding light freighter under control. If he didn’t concentrate, he was going to crash into the massive mountain before him—the mountain carved into the likeness of some alien warlord from a long-gone age. The gravity of the lost world had embraced the falling starship, pulling it into a deadly caress. Below him, past the metal-latticed cockpit windows, burning red wastes gave way to a high desert plateau of wind-carved rock and forbidding cliffs swallowed by a sea of shifting sand dunes.

  At first, as he’d dropped through an upper atmosphere shrouded in smoky haze and sulfur-colored clouds, he hadn’t even seen the edifice. And then, below ten thousand feet, with every warning light indicator flashing across the controls, he’d been too busy getting a glide slope set up. But now the massive carved rock rose out of the alien landscape like an inevitability, as though his long leap out through the darkness between galaxies was fated to end there. A monument that been waiting eons to receive his violent impact.

  The engine power loss horn chanted its automated litany of doom—an impending stall warning. He would be dead in the next few seconds if he didn’t do something fast.

  “I believe we are about to be disintegrated should we strike the obstacle in our flight path, master,” warned the bot sitting in the co-pilot’s chair.

  This sounded like less of a warning and more of a judgment, as though the bot somehow relished their impending demise. The bot had a superior tone that made it come across as sinister and condescending regardless of its words.

  “Lock in the ventral repulsors,” the pilot shouted back, raising his voice to be heard over the screaming wind beyond the hull and the turbulence-driven rattling of almost everything inside the ship. Their speed was well beyond standard re-entry guidelines. “We’re gonna try a dead stick approach.”

  The VN-708 series freighters were equipped with two ancient Tratt and Kleider ionic engine thrusters for maneuvering—and currently, the engine panels inside the cockpit were indicating bad starts in both engines. They’d lain cold and dormant during the five-year jump through hyperspace it had taken to reach this forgotten planet, and now, when they were desperately needed, they failed to come online.

  The pilot frowned at his own neglect. He should have done a maintenance check.

  “Seven thousand and falling,” chanted the bot.

  Yes, it definitely sounded enthusiastic. As though a wager had been placed, and the bot would collect only in the case of an epic fail with terminal results.

  The pilot was well aware of the altitude. They were running out of it quickly. He needed those thrusters to kick in and shift the falling starship away from the massive mountain that raced toward them.

  For a brief second, staring out through the cockpit window, he caught a glimpse of some giant lizard-like creature down below on a high desert plateau. It had a bull neck and walked on two legs. It must’ve been ten stories tall.

  There was no time for a second look.

  “Take the controls,” he ordered the bot. “I’m gonna try to windmill the turbines.”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, I suggest you do it quickly, master, if you wish to continue,” the bot answered. It paused and inclined its head, as if considering. “Though I am not severely attached to runtime, I had always envisioned an end much more worthy of my service capacity. Perhaps a company of dead legionnaires at my feet, vanquished by my considerable termination skills.”

  The pilot lunged for the engine panels at the rear of the cockpit. He found the master bus for the ion thrusters and switched them both to the off position. Then he threw the claw-
switch master into the start position and waited.

  Nothing.

  As he turned to re-check the altimeter, he saw through the window the rising carved rock on the horizon. It was an epic statue the likes of which he’d never seen on any world back in the Galactic Republic. A massive alien warrior every bit the size of the mountain, shaped like a humanoid crocodile, was carved right into the natural stone. The warrior had one clawed hand raised toward the red dwarf giant high in the burning sky. As though it had been clutching at that dying star all through its eons-long existence.

  It reminded the pilot vaguely of something from Egypt, before the Uplift. He tried to remember Egypt. A place of dead pharaohs and lost tombs was all he could bring to mind—and barely, at that. Some days, he had to concentrate to remember Earth at all.

  Don’t waste your time thinking about that now, he yelled at himself as the ship refused to come to life.

  It’s not a waste of time, because this is the end, he replied. The end of your foolish quest.

  He set both turbines in the ion thrusters to windmill, hoping that would bump the startup sequence and cause the engines to fire the next time he threw the master start.

  “Sir…” intoned the bot. The condescension was gone this time, replaced by caution, warning, and maybe the realization that runtime was a more coveted thing than previously calculated.

  The bot wants to go on living, the pilot thought in some distant part of his mind that was always speaking. Always watching. Always weighing.

  He flicked the master off, closed his eyes, and set the sequence to cold start. The entire ship felt like it was on the verge of rattling itself apart at any moment, and even if the engines started, they were rapidly running out of time to evade the mountain-sized lizard man.

  He brought the master bus back online.

  A loud baaang echoed from the portside thruster, and a damage indicator began to whoop repeatedly. The portside engine instruments all went red.

  The pilot looked out the side cockpit window, craning his neck to check for the massive rectangle of the thruster that protruded from the wing. It had exploded, and now they were trailing thick black smoke across the sulfur-laden sky behind them.

  But the number two engine, on the starboard side, had caught. They had power. Some.

  Barely.

  The bot was already yanking the control yoke over to starboard, narrowly dodging the massive statue that had once been a mountain. They came within a hundred meters, close enough to see the chipped and missing chunks in the weathered ochre stone, beaten by untold millennia beneath a burning sun on a world untagged by any Republic stellar chart the pilot had ever seen. Through the upper cockpit glass the ancient stone monster seemed to glare down at them, grinning malevolently.

  On the far side of the monument the freighter leaped the jagged ridgeline and soared above a vast valley of dark jungle and steaming yellow swamp. The pilot searched frantically for any place to land. This was the end of the flight, no matter what. They were going down.

  “Strap in!” he cried as he threw himself back into the pilot’s seat and grabbed the control yoke. “Flaps to full. Bringing in the reversers now!” He could hear himself hyperventilating as he gave the commands that would determine the ship’s final seconds. Very few people ever survived a starship crash.

  “I will remind you, sir, that I can maintain my position regardless of the fragile safety devices you biologics require to maintain your delicate existence.”

  The pilot ignored the bot. He made sure the ventral repulsors beneath the ship were set to full, then snapped on the deflectors—for all the good they would do once they hit the jungle canopy.

  He took it all in during the brief, but somehow incredibly long seconds before impact. Bizarre flocks of bats swooped and circled above the jungle’s haze. In the distance, vine-covered ruins rose from the treetops.

  And then the ship plunged into the dark twilight depths of the tangle.

  There was a loud and terrific CRRAAACK, as though some giant stick had been snapped. An explosion followed as the starboard engine, under the strain of the repulsors set to full, went off like a firecracker. Rending metal cried from the disintegrating hull.

  And then all was silent.

  ***

  In the instants after the crash, above the dense jungle foliage, it looked as though there had never been some starship speeding in from the outer dark. It was as if the steaming yellow jungle had swallowed it and forgotten it in the same instant.

  And then the ancient forest of that lost world resumed its normal pace. Unseen monsters cried out forlornly across the sweltering distances. Some strange bird gave a haunting, ululating wail.

  The pilot was vaguely aware of these sounds. Barely aware of the need to get up. To make sure he was all right. He wanted his bot to talk to him, to wake him from the hovering feeling of living between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  In time, the lost world surrendered daylight to its night. Swollen and corpulent moons rose above its jagged mountains, dark jungles, and the gray ruins of a civilization lost before the Galactic Republic ever rose.

  A Republic that now ruled everything with an unseen iron fist. Back in the rest of the galaxy. Back home.

  But not here, beyond the edge, out in the long dark distance between the Milky Way and the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Out here beyond the edges of galaxies is a place where distances are almost inconceivable to the rational mind.

  Out here there is no such thing as a Galactic Republic. Out here there are only monsters.

  Out here… we are perfectly lost.

  Chapter Two

  It was raining.

  He felt the thick drops hit his face. With his eyes closed he became aware of the sound of wet slaps. Heavy rain on leaves. Sudden sharp thwaps. He could hear it against the hull, too, like a constant, hollow hailstorm.

  The hull of my ship, he thought.

  He was still in the ship. And there had been a crash. He was still strapped in. Every muscle ached. His head felt like it… like… it was dull. Like it had been split open. His ears were ringing, but distantly. A background noise to the driving rain.

  He screamed. Or at least, he thought he did. In the dreamlike state between wakefulness and unconsciousness, he was screaming—but as he began to come to, he realized the noise was more of a groan. He was groaning. Or croaking, because his throat was so dry.

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing. Was he blind? Were his eyes still closed? He fluttered them, could sense his eyes being open, searching, but he saw only darkness all around him.

  Then he saw crystals.

  No, not crystals. Rain. On the smashed cockpit windshield. Running down along the fractured and spider-webbed glass. He could see nothing beyond its watery starbursts.

  Where am I?

  That was more important than almost anything else.

  And the next thought… the next thought scared him a little bit. It would have scared him more had he not been suffering from some kind of… concussion. Yes. He was definitely suffering a concussion.

  And how do you know that?

  Which brought him to…

  Who are you?

  That was the question that had scared him. Because he wasn’t sure he could answer it. He wasn’t sure who he really was. He’d been many people, over many years. But… who was he right now?

  One shoulder was dislocated. Perhaps a wrist was broken. He felt around in the darkness, with his good hand, for the harness release. He pulled, heard a thick metallic click, and felt himself slump free of the heavy straps that had held him tight. He took a deep breath. It hurt to breathe deeply. He coughed.

  Rain streamed in from above, through a rent in the cockpit. He wiped the water from his face. His hand came away bloody.

  He’d taken a good hard crack to the head.

  Th
at was all. He hoped.

  Because there probably wasn’t a doctor in… well, there wasn’t a doctor in a very long way from here. And he’d come all the way out here to save the galaxy. And that wasn’t going to happen if he died before he made it back.

  Except you seem to have some medical training.

  But… Who am I?

  He stumbled through the darkness of the ruined flight deck, crawling hand over hand back through the fallen-in panels and smashed flight computers. The ship was full dark. No power. Not even emergency power.

  He checked for smoke, sniffing at the cool air. Every astronaut knew, was trained thoroughly, to check for smoke first. Always. Constantly, in fact.

  Astronaut?

  Now there was an ancient word.

  Are you an astronaut? he asked himself. Were you an astronaut? Once… long ago?

  He couldn’t answer.

  He continued crawling toward the rear of the ship, feeling his way through something that was familiar to him. Known to him. And yet now everything was different because of its ruined state. Ruined.

  You spent five straight years in this ship.

  That seemed impossible. With hyperspace, who would ever need to spend that long in a ship?

  He made it to the upper hatch along the portside, the one that let out just before the wing. The wing. It truly was an ancient freighter. Built back when freighters needed aerodynamic capabilities to work hand-in-hand with the new repulsor technology.

  That was a long time ago…

  He tapped at the lock controls. Dead.

  Lowering himself to the deck with a groan, he opened a panel and took out a lock bar. He fitted it into the manual cycle mechanism that opened the hatch and began to crank it.

  That was even before we met…

  The sudden memory was gone, now meaningless. Or at least incomplete. All he could see in his mind, when he thought of that memory, was shadows above him. Things that had once been men and fancied themselves gods. The Pantheon, they called themselves. Back when he was a slave on a ship called the Obsidia. Even now that memory caused him to shudder.