Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Impossibly, its dead-sprint run stops in an instant atop the student’s body. It reaches down with one of its four long arms, and its claws rip the student to pieces while its weight pins the student to the nothingness.

  The student feels all of this. Every breaking bone. Every ripping muscle. Every pulped organ. Every nerve ending shrieking madness.

  And then the student is back in the nothingness—but within sight of that other self who has been torn to pieces. Brutally.

  Forward comes the Taurax again, a terrible thing to behold.

  This time, the student assumes a fighting stance. Though his frame and ability to defend himself will do little good against such an impressive weapon as the Taurax… it is a different choice.

  A new choice.

  The Taurax draws four ancient swords. Each is shaped like a butcher’s gleaming cleaver. Each whirls as the clawed hands at the ends of four bulging arms handle the blades with a sublime deftness.

  The student’s right hand is removed at the wrist. The left arm comes away at the elbow. The third cleaver plants itself in the student’s breast, breaking bone and cartilage. Crunching through, by sheer force, to the life-giving organs quivering beneath.

  The student has time to register each swift attack. Each terrible cut.

  The fourth cleaver sweeps in and removes the student’s head.

  He feels all of this, and he senses the impossibility of standing before such an opponent.

  And then the student finds himself just a short distance from the other sites of slaughter within the gray nothingness. Seeing where each decision has met its end.

  Forward comes the Taurax, a terrible thing to behold.

  See all the possibilities one might take, whispers the Master across the ether of the nothingness. Choose… and powerful you will become.

  Again the Taurax wins, tearing the student in two. The student had begun to reach out with his mind, to direct a wave of energy that has knocked lesser foes back—but he sees the hopelessness of this before it happens. And so he runs.

  Because he does not want to die horribly again.

  Which he does.

  Forward comes the Taurax, a terrible thing to behold.

  The student draws a long, single-bladed weapon of ancient origin. In those onrushing moments he considers each cut he might try. The forward slash. The overhand cleave. The final thrust. The whirlwind of blows. The death of a thousand cuts.

  All of these appear about him as choices. All fail.

  And the student feels all the failures in the terrible tableau that appears about him.

  Feels all the deaths.

  All the pain.

  All the failure.

  A hundred different deaths turn to two hundred. It is not until he has passed beyond a thousand gruesome and violent deaths that the student begins to let them all go. His mind instead plays a game of possibilities. If this won’t work, will that? And if that won’t, what about the five permutations that evolve?

  And what if there are other forces?

  He tries the most powerful weapons he knows.

  The N-50.

  The Taurax, bloody and shredded, still rips his head from his shoulders.

  The student sees this and feels it, and it doesn’t matter. Because just a few feet away in the nothingness, he has hurled a fragger.

  The Taurax bats that away and closes with extreme brutality.

  But that’s not important, because that other student who he is now unloads with a full charge pack from a heavy assault blaster, giving ground and burning through charges, until the beast is shot through and through. Then the student leaps forward, letting go of the weapon and calling the power within himself to strike at the beast’s throat.

  Except the Taurax sweeps one blade up and cuts the student in half.

  And so a few feet away he does not leap but instead uses the fragger, and the Taurax grabs it and runs close enough to blow them both to shreds.

  And on and on.

  He even uses the fabled hand cannon of his friend Rex, blazing away as he chokes the creature with the power his mind can forge, feeling himself drained of all his reserves down to the last iota. The Taurax responds by surging forward and punching straight through the student’s heart and out his back.

  And finally the student is not the student. He is the uncountable field of deaths represented in a thousand bloody tableaus of a single combat. A combat that repeats itself exponentially, expanding, branching, evolving with each nuance generated by each new encounter.

  He sees them all.

  He is them all.

  He reaches out to find the one that will work. His mind lets go of all the savagery and pain that surrounds him, the pain he feels each time the Taurax wins. He lets go, and he sees one possible reality…

  … where the Taurax does not win.

  Forward comes the Taurax, a terrible thing to behold.

  The student shifts to the right, causing the beast to check its rush. To reorient. To sweep with one claw instead of the other. Because all of this has happened before. Several times.

  The student thrusts with the ancient sword at the place where the claw will be, driving the scalene, razor-sharp tip straight through the meat of the claw.

  The beast howls and brings its three other weapons to bear on where the student should be… but the student is not there. Because this move, the beast’s move, has been witnessed so many other times, and the student has stepped away.

  The beast howls in rage, expelling all of its breath in an inhuman roar. And with the shaping of power, a shaping born of a thousand thousand deaths, the student cuts off the monster’s air supply.

  Nothing is as important to the beast as its next breath.

  It manages only two steps before it topples in its unconsciousness, surrendering to the black hole that has consumed its vision.

  It is powerless, unable to resist, as the student snaps its neck. This final note punctuates who, exactly, is the victor.

  The master weaves through the carnage of a million dead students and one dead Taurax. The student falls to his knees. Drained. Empty. And yet he feels new power surge through him. As though his weakness has only made him stronger.

  In the temple, such are the lessons of the Master.

  “Obvious is the way to failure. Beyond these you choose. Then powerful you will become.”

  Thus ends this lesson.

  Chapter Nine

  Casper drifted off to the sound of rain. It thrummed lightly on the hull of the smashed cockpit. He’d crawled up onto the remains of the flight deck and spread out a jacket to sleep on. At least he was up off the ground. There were always snakes on every planet he’d ever been to.

  He dreamt of those lost times of the Moirai and its journey into the Quantum Palace, or what the stellar maps had erroneously called the Dead Zone. Those long-gone hours, maybe days, where time had no meaning. That place where he’d first found the clues that had led him here, across all the years ever since.

  “I embrace the Quantum… and the Quantum embraces me.”

  That’s what she murmured as she died. The prophetess. A seemingly normal human with almost magical powers.

  By that time, what remained of Rex’s Martian light infantry combat team had come from the other passages along the outer hull in order to link up for the final assault into the Moirai’s main hab. As the soldiers planned their next move, they formed a perimeter, a patrol circle, or at least as much of one as they could in the tight corridors.

  “What did she say?” Rex asked Casper as the platoon sergeant redistributed charge packs, and gear was either shed or adjusted.

  That was when you first lied to him, thought Casper. You didn’t even know why at the time… but you did.

  Why? asked the questioning voice inside his head. At that moment�
� “Quantum” meant nothing to you. So why did you lie to your best friend?

  Quantum. The smallest divisible unit of energy. A metric for counting.

  Even then—he reminded himself now, on the other side of all the years—he had known she’d told him a secret. A powerful secret. After all, he’d just witnessed a power unlike anything in the known galaxy. And from that first moment, that secret had become like an electric fire all over his skin and buzzing deep inside his skull. Like Gollum of old, he hadn’t wanted to share it. He’d known it was something… precious. Something special. Something important.

  Something just for him.

  Was that it? he asked himself, feeling that familiar discomfort with this old line of questioning.

  Casper lay on the floor of a twice-wrecked ship deep in a dark jungle where terrible giant monsters roamed the night. Here, he could hear that other more honest part of his mind asking him, questioning him, and yes… indicting him for all the wrongs he’d committed along the way.

  In his defense, he did have a security directive. From UNS Command. Even in the dream, that name—United Nations Space Command—felt ancient. It had nothing to do with the stellar governing body called the Galactic Republic, which stretched across all the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

  United Nations Space Command was as old as that forgotten place called Rome. Or the Hittites. Or Nimrod the Mighty Hunter of Ur.

  But back then, back when the hyperdrive was just a hundred years old, back then the UNS Command was law. And they’d told him to find out what secrets the lighthuggers they’d been tracking contained. Because they knew those old ships contained new secrets. Incredible secrets. And Earth wanted them. Needed them. Or so they thought.

  Why?

  Two reasons.

  Reason One was the hyperdrive. Or rather, what the hyperdrive had done. See, once everyone had the formulas, schematics, and everything one needed to know about faster-than-light travel, well, all over the planet people built themselves ships and just headed out off-world. Because at this point, Earth was a constantly unfolding disaster, day by day. Humanity had spread wide and thin, separated by vast interstellar distances—and the species as a whole wasn’t getting much R and D done.

  And that led to Reason Two. The lighthuggers had become grand science experiments in social engineering, among other things. That had been their intent from the very beginning. The elites had been crazy about utopianism, and aboard the lighthuggers, they saw their opportunity. They controlled an environment in totality, with a nearly unlimited amount of time to tinker as they wandered out into the dark at sublight speeds. With no outside influence, they could hyper-focus on social engineering. On genetics.

  They could experiment.

  And experiment they did.

  What the vast spreading mass of humanity didn’t have the time or commitment to do—because they were too busy rushing about with their fantastic new hyperdrive—the slow-crawling elites invested in. Their bubble civilizations, wandering at sublight speeds, devoted themselves entirely to R and D.

  One lighthugger had tried to develop the powers of the mind by living in total darkness and going long periods without sleep. When the UNS found the ship and cracked the hull, the people they found within referred to themselves as demons. They said the humans who had once occupied their bodies were all gone now. They said they, the demons, had come in from the outer dark. Their minds were shattered. They were stark raving mad.

  Or is that just what we wanted to believe? Casper asked himself.

  Another ship had tried to implement a completely communal society—which had quickly devolved into tribal warfare. They fought a civil war and destroyed their life support systems. One of their leaders formed a death cult and was “uploading” the survivors into a cloud he’d called Valhalla. Even in the Republic’s most advanced state, no one had ever figured out how to digitize a human personality. So really he’d just been murdering them and butchering their corpses for food. The UNS found the ship about five years after they’d run out of “food.”

  But although many of the lighthuggers revealed living nightmares full of crazies—often armed to the teeth with terrible new weapons based on formerly state-of-the-art weapon systems—they also contained valuable research into longevity, energy, communication, and tech. That was the real reason the UN wanted those old lighthuggers cracked and looted. For the tech that seemed, at times, like miracles.

  That was the problem with hyperspace. Everybody was too busy heading for the frontier to carve out their little slice of the galaxy. No one was sitting around and actually developing stuff like the lighthugger micro-civilizations had the time to do. After so much of Earth’s population just fled the planet, scattered, society fragmented overnight, and it took a long time to get everybody back in relative coordination with one another. Not only was not a lot of research getting done, but a lot of people were getting killed out there in a very dangerous universe.

  Also, just because you could jump into hyperspace didn’t mean you knew where you were going. To be honest, by modern astrogation standards, it was a miracle everybody who engaged a hyperdrive wasn’t killed. At one point, at the rate the population kept fragmenting, and its members dying, as they raced outward and away from Earth, it was statistically possible for humanity to reach zero viability within five years.

  And thus the UNS had two prime directives. One was public, the other very secret. The public one was to keep humanity united in some form or fashion by providing a governing body. To keep the hundred new political experiments that had sprouted up across a dozen worlds somehow tethered to a single cohesive sense of humanity. Even as new alien species and their governments were starting to become players, folding themselves into the gossamer hyperdrive-connected worlds.

  Hence the UNS Navy.

  Hence the Lexington.

  Directive Number Two, the secret directive, was to recover the tech and research from those lighthuggers the elites had run off in. The primary reason for secrecy was, of course, that if the UN could maintain a proprietary and controlling interest in anything new—anything discovered, developed, or stolen—then they’d have something with which to draw all the separate entities back to the table of galactic coherence. Away from the edge of zero viability.

  And so it was that the dying prophetess whispered… that secret.

  You knew it from the start, Casper accused himself. You recognized something valuable. But the question is… did you know how valuable?

  “I embrace the Quantum… and the Quantum embraces me.”

  And so you look up at a man you’ve known as a friend since the time you were enslaved on the Obsidia… and you just lie to him. Is that about right?

  “Nothing. Just babble. She’s insane,” Casper said to Rex as the soldiers all about them readied themselves to move deeper into the Moirai.

  I had some idea, Casper admits to himself in the dream. In his observation of the dream. To be honest, yes, I knew it was something big even then. I could… sense it.

  He was guilty of that. As he was of many far worse crimes.

  “Was,” said Rex. “She was insane. Now she’s dead.” He slapped in a new charge pack for his rifle. “We’re going forward. Inner hab should be a few more decks in. You don’t have to go with us, Cas. You can head back to the Lex. If we’re not back in two hours, or you don’t hear from us, lift off and get clear. Then hit the ship with a full spread of SSMs.”

  “I think we’re in this for the long haul. We’ll rescue her,” Casper replied, and he didn’t need to explain who “her” was. They both knew.

  So you left the mangled body, the voice told Casper as he continued to watch that dream of events long done. The prophetess, though at that moment no one in his little company, no one who had boarded this lost ship, this tragic wandering nightmare of a ghost ship, no one yet knew that those who could do the magic tricks w
ere called prophetesses. Emissaries of something greater. Something powerful. Something found out there in the long dark.

  Casper went forward with Rex and what remained of the company. The light infantry, moving in teams, checking corners and clearing abandoned rooms, headed deeper into the ship.

  The clock was now meaningless. The soldiers’ chronometers weren’t working here inside the Dead Zone.

  You know, Casper tells himself in the dream, because for all the things you are, you were first an astronaut. A sailor of the stars. And you know that the Moirai, and thus the docked Lexington, has already entered the Dead Zone. A kind of Stellar Horse Latitudes no other ship has emerged from.

  A place of nightmares.

  A place of lost ships.

  And lost souls.

  ***

  When Casper awoke, he remembered everything that had happened in the night before. A shadow passed across the wan morning light coming in through the cracked cockpit glass, filtered by the dense jungle that surrounded the beach and the river. And in that shadow was the desire to lie back down and give up.

  Because…

  Let’s just add this up, Casper thought to himself in the silence.

  The crash.

  The monster that had destroyed what he’d tried to gather in order to survive the crash.

  And the quest itself.

  The quest of finding the Temple of Morghul. The temple the prophetesses had pointed the way toward.

  Were they really called prophetesses? Or were they just that to you and you alone?

  Why? Why come all this way to die alone on a planet beyond the love of the galaxies’ embrace?

  To save the Republic from itself.

  To save the galaxy from itself.

  He’d slept with his blaster rifle next to him. At this point in the expedition he was down to this one piece of working equipment. Nothing else could be counted on. Nothing else was known for sure. This and the jacket he was lying on were all that he truly had.

  Why aren’t you counting the bot? that other voice asked him.