by Nick Cole
They have come to rescue Reina. That too is fate. She is the captured scientist the Savages hold somewhere deep within their lighthugger ship.
Casper finds himself watching some of the deceased, thinking they are not truly dead, but merely playing a part. As though this is some entertainment, or exercise, in which the “dead” must pretend to be such for the purpose of the show. Or the lesson. But in his memory it was not so. In his memory they were really dead.
Asleep in the wrecked ship two thousand years in the future, Casper somehow knows this is just a dream.
He steps over the corpses of the Martian light infantrymen who formed part of the combined arms task force. He leaves the Terran Navy assault frigate Lexington, the Lex, its boarding ramps extended and gears down, and makes his way across the ancient hangar deck of the Moirai.
Most of the dead are the men of Delta Company, Third Battalion, Forty-Seventh Martian Light Infantry. They were assigned as the first wave to secure the landing zone within the Moirai hangar. They went down hard under the defenses of the Savages. Cut to pieces by the strange half humans that came rushing out from across all decks. Half-man, half-machine lunatics ululating electronic eight-bit war cries and brandishing ancient slug throwers. These are sometimes the descendants of those long-ago best and brightest of ancient Earth who fled during the Exodus, and sometimes those best and brightest themselves. But they are strange and post-human now. Made almost animal and backwards by their cloistered sublight societies that have gone philosophically strange in their long crawl out through the darkness between worlds.
Casper passes by their energy bolt–riddled corpses, their eyes fluttering behind closed lids in his memories, as though the dead are dreaming too. Occasionally, one of them opens their eyes and smiles as if to say, “It’s all right, I didn’t really die here in what the old calendar used to call 2122. We’re just acting.”
But then, thinks Casper, who hears the low thump of automatic gunfire ahead, you would have lived and made it to see the Republic. And even if you’d lived a very long time, you’d still be long dead by the time I’m having this dream. You were never a slave on the Obsidia. You were never experimented on like I was. Like Rex was. Like Reina was.
The staccato rattle of gunfire echoes in rapid hollow booms across the hangar deck of the Moirai, a forty-kilometer-wide spinning cylinder that’s over fifty thousand meters long. The tiny Lex looks like a mere shuttle in comparison.
I’m very old, thinks Casper as he surveys the cyclopean innards of the great lighthugger, but never older than what came before me.
The Martian Light Infantry uses Krieg Systems forty-watt magnetically accelerated ultrahigh directed energy rifles. KS-99s. Blasters won’t come into use for another hundred years. The KS-99s fire small bolts of disrupted energy that can do brutal damage to flesh and unarmored systems. They were manufactured in the armaments districts of Saffron City back on Mars. Most likely before the last Terran War, when Mars was still a planet and not a crescent-shaped chunk of debris trailing red dust in its degrading wake around the sun.
Casper wears a Terran Navy tactical environment uniform. He stayed in the navy after the escape from the Obsidia, while Rex went off to Mars to join their new army. And when there was war, they fought on opposite sides, even though they were friends—and survivors of the same horrible nightmare. Eventually peace followed war, if only because by that time there wasn’t much left of Mars to fight for. By then the Martian Infantry was serving as a sort of foreign legion for the Terran forces. And now they are part of the combined arms task force that has come to assault the Moirai along with the crew of the Lexington.
Casper goes forward over the eviscerated soldiers of Delta Company. He is alone, seeking to link up with Rex—but the Lexington’s comms aren’t working inside the lighthugger for some strange reason. Yet there is another, more pressing reason for the captain of the Lexington to leave his assault frigate and go forward to link up with the boarding party fighting its way into the interior of the Moirai. The lighthugger is rapidly approaching an area of no-go space known as the Dead Zone.
Casper reaches the infantrymen. They’re pinned down by enemy fire. Major Rex leads the attack. They are attempting to penetrate the Savage defenses that prevent access to the interior of the ship.
“I see three entrances into the main hab systems,” Rex shouts to his soldiers. “Team One, with me. We’ll assault forward. Teams Two and Three, flank those Savages while they try and stop us.”
Rex leads Team One forward under heavy fire.
The flanking teams draw the attention of the Savages while Rex’s squad tries to breach the maze of tunnels down to the hab. Casper remembers that he has gone forward to re-establish comm. To tell Rex that their window to safely disengage with the lighthugger is closing.
The Moirai is approaching the Dead Zone. Ships don’t return from there.
He joins Rex as the Martian commandos endure furious fusillades of automatic return gunfire coming from the passages beyond. Subsonic rounds zip past their buckets and ricochet off the bulkheads all around them. The Savages still use combustion-based firearms. Ancient automatic weaponry.
“Rex, we’re almost out of time,” Casper warns. “Push through now, or pull out and let the ship enter the Dead Zone.”
A giant hatch, two stories high, like some ancient and gleaming bank vault door, is blown from its hinges. More bullets rip from the maw left behind.
One of the Martian soldiers pulls away from the wall and lets loose with a furious blast from his KS-249—the heavier version of the KS-99. A burst of ethereal electrical snaps signifies the charge chamber being converted into pulsed rounds of energy. They are sent at the enemy in blistering sprays of flashing light.
But the awe-inspiring display doesn’t drive the Savages into cover; they merely concentrate their automatic weapons fire on the Martian soldier, who dies knowing his cover fire helped Rex and the team move into a dark passage farther down the way.
Casper feels a chill as the corridor is illuminated by flashes of eerie green light from the Martian light infantry’s forty-watt weapons. The infantry wear graphene space suits with hardened ceramic alloy chest plates, shoulder and arm guards, shin and knee protectors, and heavy combat boots. Their helmets are Kevlar that can seal with the graphene armor for limited operations in poisonous environments and environments with no oxygen.
A soldier takes a shot right in the faceplate. He falls to the deck. The Terran Navy corpsmen, attached in support, are too busy with those who can be saved.
“Ten minutes and we’ll pass into the Dead Zone, Rex.”
What Casper means is clear. No scout ships have ever returned from that navigational dead space within the universe. It’s an almost completely starless zone where instruments and readings turn weird when even close proximity is attempted. Most astrogation charts list the area as off-limits.
And yet the Moirai was headed straight into it after its raid on Al-Baquar Seven. And now together, both Moirai and Lex are flying straight into a zone of space no captain in their right mind would ever venture into.
“Clear!” says one of the soldiers pinned to the wall beyond the massive hatch.
Rex pumps his first twice and makes a quick knife-edge gesture with his hand. The infantrymen move into the darkness ahead.
Casper’s oldest friend turns back to him and says across the static-filled comm provided by a line-of-sight connection, “We’re not leaving her here.”
The “her” is Dr. Reina Benedetti.
Casper is glad, in the dream, that they will not leave her this time. He has had other dreams where they did leave her. And those dreams aren’t dreams… they’re nightmares.
At this moment, he cannot remember what really happened in the record of the past. As though, in this dream, all things are possible. The future doesn’t have to be what it will become.
To Casper, there are two horrors to fear. There is the horror of being left on the Moirai. And then there is the horror of leaving someone else there. Especially Reina. In the Dead Zone. In the Quantum Palace. Forever with the Dark Wanderer.
The horror.
The horror of… being abandoned in Hell forever.
***
Casper bolted upright, awake and breathing heavily. Sucking in humid jungle air as though he had been drowning in the dream.
He was awake, but he remembered where his dream left off. He remembered the truth of what happened next. They’d hacked and cycled an airlock to get to the outer hab decks where the air smelled and tasted of death, and Casper followed Rex and his teams deeper into the Moirai’s shadowy interior.
He remembered much more than that.
He remembered the Dark Wanderer in the Quantum Palace on the other side of the Dead Zone.
He remembered the nightmares that flayed his mind.
What had they called them?
Casper took a pull from a canteen he’d left by his bunk inside the ruined freighter. He struggled to remember what they’d called them…
Prophetesses.
And in the jungle night of this lost and lonely planet beyond the galaxy’s edge, he heard footsteps crunching slowly through the undergrowth. THK-133 was walking past the hull, trampling the foliage that had already begun to clutch at the ruined vessel. The bot was like some devil in the night, passing by the place where Casper slept.
Chapter Six
The strange dream stayed with him the next day. In the milky light that filtered down through the strange and alien jungle, fragmented bits of it returned over and over again. Casper tried to work out what had been real, and what had been false.
He spent the day fortifying the wreck of the freighter and organizing salvageable supplies. He wasn’t staying. Getting to the planet had been only the beginning. Now would come the real journey—a search across the length and breadth of an unknown world. A search for the Temple of Morghul. It might take years to find.
It might be the last hope of the galaxy.
The armory was organized first. He checked the condition of each blaster, oiled it, and sealed it in a clamshell case, hoping the jungle’s oppressive humidity didn’t find a way inside. He selected a hunting blaster rifle with a powerful scope and set that to one side. The holdout blaster pistol was still strapped to his thigh. After all the organizing, his wrist felt swollen and tight, but it would work. It wasn’t broken.
When he got outside, THK-133 informed him there was a spring with drinkable water two clicks to the south. “I have left a marked trail for you, master,” it intoned dispassionately. “Once I discovered the spring, I thought of you. I know water is important to your feeble species if you are to sustain operations. And therefore I decided to let you know of its existence. No doubt you would have discovered it on your own… given time.”
Casper’s mind moved slowly, working out the next step. Now that they’d found water, he would need food. The ship was stocked, given the length of the journey, but not all the supplies in the hold could come with him. Besides, Casper would prefer to eat those rations as a last resort. Those supplies had a long shelf life, and would be needed in the event of a famine or drought.
Some other part of the bot’s statement niggled at his mind. The bot’s choice of words…
“Therefore I decided to let you know of its existence.”
As though it had considered other options. Thought of something else besides helping him survive.
Did you want to watch me die of thirst? Casper wondered to himself. Watch me die while knowing the water I needed was just within reach?
In the end, it didn’t matter. The bot was his only companion on this forsaken planet.
And maybe it was just a quirk of the machine’s programming. The THK series had been used in some of the Republic’s nastier conflicts. Wars that hadn’t made the news feeds. Wars with no heroes. Wars where brutality had been an essential part of the tactics, alongside chemical warfare and orbital bombardments.
Wars with no winners.
Or… maybe there was nothing odd about the bot’s programming at all. Maybe this was all in his head. His mind was sound enough—it wasn’t shattered from the long flight—but it still felt… strange. He’d been alone for five years in cryosleep, hurtling through hyperspace. What did that do to a man’s mind?
There was a surprising lack of research on the effects of long-term cryosleep—probably because there was no need for it. You could go from one edge of the galaxy to the other in a few standard months. Cryosleep was tech from a pre-hyperspace age, and it was no longer necessary, unless you were making jumps that took years. And no one did that.
Except you, Casper thought to himself. Because where this planet is, lies years beyond the known of the galaxy.
There was a theory that it was decades of cryosleep that had made some of those Savages so outright insane. Not all of the lighthuggers had chosen to begin forming their personal utopias while in flight; some had opted for cryosleep, postponing their elaborately designed Edens until they arrived at their own Promised Land, or whatever distant rock they had targeted as their destination. For them, those extended flights through the void were like floating along like some lost soap bubble in a dark bath, until finally the bubble popped to reveal howling beasts of death and terror. Beasts that had once been the best of humanity, but which were now savage post-humans, their minds almost alien.
Like the prophetesses, said some whispering shade inside his head. Said that constant observer brought on by the concussion—or awakened by the five years hurtling through hyperspace.
Or had it been THK-133, who was back to organizing the wreckage into neat piles? Had the bot said something, and he’d mistaken it as a voice in his head?
That voice, whatever its source, whispered again. What would happen if you died out here? What would the bot do? What would he build left all alone out here and by himself?
Nothing good, thought Casper. And he knew this to be truer than he actually understood. As though he’d received some terrible dark vision of possible futures. The thought sent a cold shiver up his spine. He decided to think of something else.
Like the prophetesses?
They, the prophetesses, had been the first clue to the hidden power that waited beneath the universe. They had found the first secrets. Their steps had marked the trail into the mists of the unknown. And even though—he told himself now as he sat down on a log they’d hauled over to their campsite—even though you’d never known what you were looking for, he told himself… you’d been searching for it all along. A way to do all the things when mankind and the galaxy itself couldn’t accomplish what needed to be done.
It was that rescue mission aboard the Moirai that began the…
The…
The…
This search?
Yes.
That mission was like some ancient scroll being unrolled, revealing a fable of mythic heroes and magic powers. The beginning and a journey, both things at once. A quest that led from the past to here. This planet. This unfound planet, forgotten and cast beyond the embrace of the galactic spiral like some unwanted child.
And it was the prophetesses who had shown Casper the way. That was how it all had begun, though he hadn’t known it at first.
His first glimpse of a prophetess was of a strange, almost poverty-stricken figure behind a cohort of uplifted half-human Savages. “Uplifted” was what they, like many Savage societies, had called the interface of tech and man. As though they had evolved themselves on their own, rejecting evolution’s poor performance record and humanity’s lack of commitment to survival of the fittest.
Casper absently chewed his rations, and his mind went back to the dream.
***
Intense energy fire erupted from Re
x’s light infantry. But the Uplifted Savages’ cybernetic parts formed an armor system that protected them. And around each Savage, a swarm of tiny drones flitted about like vampire butterflies, deflecting damage and doing who knew what else. It was rare to get a Savage with a single shot in those early days. They absorbed large doses of firepower.
But they were slaves too, just as you and Rex had been, on a different ship, Casper remembered. They just didn’t know it.
The Martian Light Infantry was the toughest fighting force operating in the pre-Republic stellar frontier back then. They fired and advanced into the face of the Savages, spending their lives to gain precious corridors in order to complete the mission. To find a hackable terminal and get a location on the scientist they’d come for.
No, not just a scientist.
Reina.
The girl Casper loved though he’d never told her so, apart from that one time… a time best left forgotten.
He remembered kissing her. Just once. And thinking that if the shape of the galaxy were such as it was at that moment, he could take things as they were. He could put aside his continual quest to right some wrong he’d forgotten the origin of so long ago. As long as he had her, the galaxy could have the rest. It could crumble all around them if that was what it wanted to do.
She had offered him that road. To be the opposite of himself.
In the corridors, a soldier went down, and Rex covered Casper with a blistering barrage of electric fire in short suppressive bursts. Casper ran for all he was worth and dragged the wounded man out of harm’s way. The squad medic was busy with another downed soldier.
By the luminescent green electrical flashes of the infantrymen’s assault rifles, Casper surveyed the scene. The Savages were faceless, almost blurry. Their strange tech swarmed about them, looking now more like miniature crows than butterflies—dark and swirling, an extension of themselves. And on the walls all around the advancing force, madness was written. The graffiti of minds that had snapped out there in the interstellar darkness.