Imperator

by Nick Cole

  He continued to crank the cycling mechanism, ignoring the screaming sharp jolts in his dislocated shoulder. He should set it. Fix it. But first, he wanted out.

  The rain continued to strike the hull of the ship. Steady, but softer and slower now. As if the storm in the unknown skies above had lost its furious rage and was content to merely drift off into an oblivion of comforting white noise.

  The hatch popped open, and the smells of the night rushed in. The sharp iron scent of rainwater falling from the sky. The sweet decay of a self-consuming jungle. Grow or die. Move or die.

  He could see nothing beyond the ship. No distant fires, no hints of help. Nothing but blackness. He had told himself he was alone, and now he’d proven it to himself. But he could hear. He could hear the soft rain hitting the puddles and the leaves. They sounded like big, fat leaves. Palm leaves of some type.

  There was no sense in leaving the ship until daylight came, whenever that would be. Wandering out there in the dark was a good way to hurt himself. There would be debris from the crash. Dangerous terrain. Predators.

  The crash.

  He knew there had been a crash. That much was obvious.

  He had crashed on a planet. A planet he had searched for… searched for for a very long time. And that was an amazing thing to recall, because he still didn’t know who he was, exactly, at this moment. It was as if his identity wasn’t as important as remembering how long he’d searched for this lost planet. As though his brain had long ago made some filing decision that placed one bit of information above the other in order of importance. And now, in the kingdom of fractured skulls, that hierarchy reigned.

  Or maybe you made that decision? The choice to make one more important than the other.

  Maybe.

  This planet was called Morghul. An ancient world found recorded in a place of madness, by madmen who’d been worshipped as gods and lived like devils.

  And perhaps Morghul wasn’t even the planet’s name. Maybe that had merely been a direction in some symbology—or a warning in some forgotten tongue. Because who would ever trust the ravings of the insane? Who would put themselves in the confidences of devils?

  He remembered more…

  Morghul lay a quarter of the way out into the yawning emptiness that existed between the great galaxies. In the gulfs of nothingness, out in the darkness. Between the massive super-clusters of stars where the living and the dead worlds gathered and circled, between those gathering points lay the lost places, cast off into the interstellar nothingness like unwanted children flung into chasms of the forgotten void. That was where Morgul traveled endlessly around its ancient star.

  It was theorized—by a mumbling blind scout from the old survey service, who’d wildly claimed to have visited this place during an infrequent moment of lucidity—that the planet’s star, a dying red dwarf giant, had once been part of the Milky Way.

  Which is your galaxy, thought the man who couldn’t remember who he was.

  And like many such worlds beholden to their stars, this lost planet was long ago cast off into the outer dark. Cast off to wander unclaimed, unrecognized, and unknown by the frightened races who claimed the hot swirls as their own and turned the unknown in-between into ghost stories and superstition. That very old scout—the seemingly crazy scout—claimed as much. He said the planet had been cast out of the galaxy.

  And when the man who couldn’t remember who he was thought about those words—cast out—it felt like some kind of punishment. Some kind of judgment reserved for fallen angels become demons. Cast out of paradise.

  But really, it was most likely due to the cosmic game of marbles played by physics inside every galaxy. This lost world and her dying star had simply been knocked from the galactic circle, a stellar loser in a cosmic game. Some unvalued tiger’s eye with a fracture in its surface that could be traded for a better marble.

  Stellar marbles. That’s all it probably was.

  But if the rumors and legends were true… then it was something much, much more. If the legends were true, it was worth investigating. Because, despite all the things he could not remember, he remembered that the galaxy was in trouble. The Galactic Republic especially. From within and without. And he’d come here to find a power that might make the difference to its survival. Not to mention the uncounted populations of many, many worlds. Every other option had already been tried, like some desperate family member trying to stop an addict from using. Nothing had worked. And in the end… there was only this last desperate effort. Even though it had been forbidden by the most serious of oaths.

  The castaway pilot leaned back against the bulkhead and sank down in front of the open hatch and the rainy night beyond. At least some of it was coming back to him.

  At least the how.

  But not the who.

  And not the why.

  He could remember being a slave on the Obsidia. Yes. And remembering just that, that horrible time, caused him to find other pieces to the puzzle of himself. The Obsidia had come after the Martian War. That seemed right. And the Martian War had come after the Big Leap brought on by the discovery of the hyperdrive. That also seemed right. And that had come just a few years before you were born in the ruins of Los Angeles, he told himself. And before that…

  His mind wandered off, and he forced it to come back to the problem of his personal history.

  And before that had been the Exodus, when ships like the Obsidia, and the Moirai, had fled Earth, taking the rich and powerful away from a ruined world.

  And what makes the Obsidia and the Pantheon so important? Right now at this can’t-remember-because-I-have-a-concussion moment? Why is that ship the starting point?

  He thought about that for a long moment.

  It isn’t. It came before. But it’s important that it did.

  The Obsidia had been a lighthugger. A generational lighthugger plowing away through the dark at sublight speeds—even while the Terran Navy, and all the other hyperspace-connected worlds the Obisidia was headed toward, already possessed the ability to leap between planets in days, sometimes hours. Almost forty years of hyperspace travel passed before some functionary thought it might be nice to track down the old generational ships and fold them into the slowly growing galactic community. And so the Terran Navy dispatched the Challenger to make contact with the slow-crawling Obsidia.

  He thought about that. He remembered being an officer aboard the UNS Challenger. He and the rest of the crew had boarded a ship full of maniacal megalomaniacs who’d spent their forty years and more of monastic isolation perfecting some wild technological advances, in addition to building a civilization that was half madhouse.

  And they, the crew of the Challenger, had become slaves on board that ship. Slaves who served the twisted pleasures of the Pantheon. Rex. Reina. And you. Crewmembers of the Challenger. Others, too. But you were the only ones who made it off that ship… fifteen years later. Fifteen years after the Terran Navy had officially declared you lost in the stellar dark. Fifteen years of being experimented on, altered by scientific advances the Galactic Republic wouldn’t match over the next nearly two thousand years.

  How do you know that? he asked himself. And then he remembered why the Obsidia was important. It wasn’t the reason he was here, on this lost planet beyond galaxy’s edge, searching for something that might save the Republic from itself. But it was the answer to why he could be here. How he could live long enough to find all the clues that led here.

  Because the experiments, the ones performed on Rex, Reina, and… himself… had given them longevity beyond imagining. The Pantheon had wanted to keep them alive and serving their dark desires for decades unending.

  You are nearly two thousand years old, and you were just in your fifties when the Challenger docked with that nightmare.

  There were some longevity techniques in use back then. But nothing matched the discoveries of
the Obsidia.

  You were in your fifties and looked twenty-eight when the Challenger docked. Fifteen years later you looked even younger than twenty-eight. And nearly two millennia after that, lying in the ruins of a wrecked freighter, you could pass for barely forty-two.

  The only reason the Obsidia is important is because it allowed him to live far longer than other people.

  A little over a hundred years after the escape from the Obsidia, when he was the captain of his own ship, the Lexington, he docked with another lighthugger. The Moirai. He’d been sent there. And it, too, was a nightmare.

  And that ship was the beginning of the trail that led here to this planet lost beyond the known of the galaxy.

  Chapter Three

  When there is nothing to do in the night but listen to the rain falling on a strange and alien world, one has time to think. The night is long. Its hours pass slowly. Sleep… or think. And in the thinking, one remembers the things that have been forgotten.

  Like why. Why did he come here?

  Why had he come so far out into the big empty spaces within the universe? Past the edges. Beyond the knowing of what was known. Out into the unknown.

  Slavery.

  It had started with slavery, of all things. A slavery he’d endured aboard the lighthugger Obsidia for years. A slavery that had given him the ability to live a very long life. It was a parting gift of sorts, its givers grinning at its presentation, knowing it to be a curse.

  The event that brought him out here came later, when he found the Quantum Palace… and the lighthugger Moirai… and an insane crew’s quest to discover what they’d called the Quantum—a thing far bigger than they understood at the time. It was in those years that he found the trailhead that provided an answer to all the questions that had ever plagued him.

  That was a hundred years after the time of slavery aboard the Obsidia. The Galactic Republic wasn’t even a thing back then. Fewer than thirty inhabitable worlds had been reached by the hyperdrive, and those thirty growing worlds were just a loose alliance, trying to work together to solve the problems that confronted them. And occasionally, they started shooting at each other.

  But before all that, back in that long-ago time, when the man who could not remember was on his way to Houston to attend the academy at NASA, he read an article in some surviving magazine. It was a museum piece about the Exodus, when the elites fled the dying Earth. Away they went in massive sublight ships—lighthuggers, some wag named them, bitterly—to other stars, other planets theorized to be amenable to life. These ships were arks. Mayflowers and explorers’ vessels. Colonization ships. But they were also massive pleasure palaces, with state-of-the-art technology, advanced research and design. Technological wonders. Just like the Obsidia had been. Just like the Moirai was.

  These weren’t the first sublight ships. Those left Earth during what came to be called the Pilgrimage. These early versions, the experimental versions, were utilitarian, stripped clean of comfort or luxury. They’d set off into the deep dark nearly a century earlier, carrying the pilgrims and religious zealots. All of whom were probably dead.

  But the elites—the celebrity betters and the oligarchs from all the bankrupted nations of Earth’s past—they traveled in style. They left together, humanity’s “best hope,” when the poisoned seas finally did rise after centuries of warnings. By that time the environment had been ruined by their perpetual wars for some elusive peace they were always promising. Just one more campaign.

  When the ancient power grids couldn’t handle the strain and finally went down, and the plagues came like whirlwinds out of the ever-spreading slums of the have-nots, “humanity’s best hope” just up and left on their big ships, taking their coveted gene pool and accumulated wealth and knowledge base with them.

  Earth was done. And they were done with it.

  Those not in the circle could have what was left of it now.

  For those left behind, it was the best thing that ever happened. Because fifteen years later, the people found their own way off planet—and their way was far better than crawling along at unimaginably slow sublight speeds.

  Hyperdrive.

  A wonderful technology that let man leap between stars in the blink of an eye.

  The new ships put the lighthuggers to shame.

  And now here you are. Five years of hyperspeed, and here you finally are. Two thousand years later and beyond the edge of the galaxy.

  For just a moment, sitting there in the smashed hatch of the ruined freighter, marooned and watching the jungle dark, the soft rain beginning to let up some, the wind causing broad palm leaves to toss and bustle like dancing shadows… for just a moment he almost remembered his real name.

  His lost name.

  The name he’d stopped using so long ago.

  He’d had to use a lot of names. Most people couldn’t deal with someone who lived so much longer than they did. And so, every fifty years or so, he and Rex and, yes, Reina, started anew with different names. Not aliases. Because in a way they all began to become that new name. Letting the old name die. Like some star cast off into the dark between galaxies.

  Cas—?

  It was Cas…

  The name escaped him. Not all the others he’d gone by—those crowded into his mind, along with all their memories. But that first name… it had been his nearly two thousand years ago.

  That was a long time.

  No one was as old as him and the two others.

  One of the others was his best friend. A great gift in a life where you tended to make fewer and fewer friends. In a life where any friend you made would die long before you ever would. The burden of that…

  The other was the love of his life. She had been since the day she first awakened him aboard the Obsidia. And that love had only grown stronger, despite the years and truths that came along with so much time.

  They were the only three to survive the journey into the Quantum Palace a hundred years after the Obsidia… to survive and return. Rex and Reina were there when he found the trail of secrets that led to this lost planet. It was just a secret back then, really. A thing to discover, a way to pass the time, for a man with centuries to pass. But the secret that had brought him to this lonely little planet, lost out in the grand darkness beyond the edge of the galaxy, was more than just a secret. Like some secrets, the best secrets… it guarded something great.

  The secret of true power. A power that could fix a galaxy feeding on itself to the point of death. A galaxy where the weak ruled the brave and the bold. A galaxy that wouldn’t stand up to the troubles coming its way if someone didn’t take the reins with a firm hand.

  Inside the Quantum Palace, he’d found the trail. That trail had led him here. And though he’d never known it, it had been leading him here all along. Calling him. Summoning him. As if to find out if he was worthy.

  Those were the musings that waited out the rainy night with him. He turned the mysteries over and over, watching, waiting for them to slip into their places and form a pattern that could be recognized.

  The secret he’d come looking for waited in the darkness out there, in the rainy jungle night. He’d come here to find it. To make it his. To take it back… and save the Republic from itself. From everything.

  He would make things right, if they ever could be made right. His reasons had always been noble. Those who questioned his methods could go to hell.

  An image came to mind then, unbidden. An image of a proud young man. Eager. Hopeful. Naive. Ready to leave Earth and set forth into the unknown.

  I was twenty then, he remembered. Just twenty years old.

  Born the year of the Exodus. Turned fifteen the year of our freedom. The year of the hyperdrive.

  Fifteen years after the Exodus, after the elitist betters had fled the ruined Earth, the geeks unlocked the secrets of the hyperdrive, and the people who’d been left
behind—the ones deemed unworthy of the salvation the lighthuggers promised—were no longer prisoners of a ruined world. They were now, in fact, inheritors of the galaxy, ready to pioneer it as fast as they could reach it. It was manifest destiny.

  The incredible hyperdrive.

  The first test ship was cobbled together in the junkyard at Houston. The geeks did it all on their own. No funding. No government. No bureaucracy.

  Just the impossible made suddenly real. Right now.

  He laughed at that now, sitting in the hatch of the ruined freighter he’d picked up on some world turned into a salvage bazaar. But the sound that came from him was only slight. Dry. A soft once-chuckle. They were geeks, and they saved us all.

  Geeks. An ancient word. He was an ancient man who knew all the ancient words. And in time, he and these old words would become like the ruins of the enigmatic Ancients. Ruins they’d found on almost every planet the hyperdrive had taken them to.

  He laughed because the Galactic Republic, the most monstrously bloated government ever known, had been made possible by the geeks, on their own, without the slightest bit of help from any politician. Because you couldn’t have a galaxy-spanning Republic without the hyperdrive. It just wasn’t possible.

  The geeks made one orbit around a habitable planet over in Alpha Centauri, recorded it all, and then jumped back to Earth. In less than a day they’d gone farther than anyone had ever been. Later that night they uploaded the plans for the fantastic new hyperdrive onto the New World Wide Web’s open source servers. Now everyone could have freedom.

  They just had to build it for themselves.

  Everyone—everyone—could go wherever they wanted. Wherever light speed took them. And of course, there would be consequences, but that too, was also their responsibility.

  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.