Imperator

by Nick Cole

  His name, according to the unit roster in the HUD, was Private Gordon.

  And that was when the ground began to shake. Once. Twice. Again. And again. And in the dream, it’s almost familiar to Casper. And he remembers that, in the distant future, his ship will be destroyed by a monster who makes those same sounds. The ponderous artillery strike footsteps of something giant coming this way, one after the other.

  So I am dreaming, he thinks in the dream. This is all just a dream.

  And that’s when the infantry saw the huge mech coming for them above the dead fields of a dead world traveling through the Dead Zone of outer space.

  The mechanized armor was huge. Frankensteinian. A monstrosity of machine and nightmare. And it was coming from the opposite direction, as though all the gunfire was merely a trap intended to distract the Martian light infantry, and now came the coup de grâce. It hit them in their flank, and Casper barely scrambled away before it tore the heavy weapons team to shreds with claws and spinning saws.

  Rex was screaming orders over the comm to be heard and obeyed. He knew the mech made the infantrymen feel helpless, and that without orders the mindless fear would take hold and send them all in a hundred useless directions. In seconds he had the infantry falling back, with teams providing covering fire. Running. A full retreat through the dry dead fields.

  The towering mech nightmare chased them through the twilight world of the ship. A nightmare at their heels.

  ***

  Casper awoke with a start.

  In the dream he was screaming. Because the hulking mech had caught him and pulled him apart by the limbs. He saw everyone racing away from him. Leaving him. Even Rex. The looks in their eyes, behind their faceplates, had told him how hopeless his situation was.

  Now awake, he saw the campfire on the beach. Saw Urmo sitting before it, the smoke rising up to meet his dreaming monster face. The little goblin looked peaceful, as if his dreams were good to him.

  As if dreams ever could be, thought Casper.

  And he fell back to watch the rest of the night pass through the shattered glass of the canopy of the ruined ship.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They left the river the next day. Casper carried the bag with the medical supplies, which now also held a few tools he’d managed to scavenge from the wreckage, a small tarp, and a hatchet. He wore his holdout blaster and carried his hunting rifle. He’d strapped a survival knife to his hip. THK-133 carried the heavy blaster and a rucksack overloaded with survival rations. Rations that would last for up to five years, unless they were relied upon as the sole food source, in which case they’d last for about thirty days.

  Before they left the beach, Casper oriented himself. He established north and was pleased to find that great hairy ropes of black moss tended to gather along the north sides of the massive swamp trees. They would follow the ship’s trail of ruin backward, away from the crash, toward the enigmatic statue on the high desert plateau.

  He considered climbing up into the trees to get the lay of the land and possibly see some features to navigate by, but the thought of falling and ending up with a broken leg or arm dissuaded him. And this planet was so far beyond the galactic lens that navigating by the stars was all but impossible.

  With a final sigh that expressed both resignation and frustration, he hefted the hunting rifle blaster and announced, “Time to move out, 133.”

  The bot turned and headed off. “You’ve probably forgotten that my internal navigation system can establish a reliable course to take us back to the statue you wish to look at, master. I could sense you feebly attempting to plan your way across this planet… and while it was fun to watch, your very pathetic odds of survival were made abundantly clear. Allow me to lead you to your destiny, master.”

  He’d forgotten the bot had that capability, and for a moment it comforted him. But the comfort soon passed, and he found himself unable to totally trust the bot. He’d follow it, but he vowed to keep his own dead reckoning running. Cross-checking everything for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on. It just felt like the safe thing to do.

  Casper scanned his temporary campsite once more, and his gaze fell on the little creature. Urmo. Casper had almost completely forgotten about the thing. While Casper and the bot had made their preparations, the strange red-haired beast had simply sat before the cold fire, his tiny little walking stick across his knobby knees. As always, he seemed interested, in an incomprehensible way, in anything they were doing.

  Casper wondered what Urmo would do once they began to leave.

  And then, without prompting, Urmo hopped off the log, grunted, and began to follow the bot, muttering, “Urmo.”

  Casper shook his head and not for the first time asked himself what he was doing here. He’d planned this expedition to the last detail. He’d had to. And now, at the very doorstep of his prize, he feared his plans were for naught. The idea of finding the Temple of Morghul on foot, of exploring an entire planet of whose geography he had not the slightest clue, never mind the giant lizards and whatever else was out there… it all seemed just a little too impossible. He might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.

  Ahead, the tactical hunter-killer bot disappeared into the dense jungle foliage like it was stalking something, or on patrol in some terrible conflict where mercilessness was ever the order of the day. It was followed by a creature that looked more like a child’s puppet than an actual living being, walking stick in hand, just out for a morning stroll.

  Casper took the first step.

  The first step is always the hardest, he reminded himself. Especially if you were someone like him. Someone who had to finish what was started. Had to know what was out there on the other side of all the unknowns. Once you’d taken that first step, committed, then the ten thousand that followed were easy. Because you knew you’d never stop. Never. Ever.

  That just wasn’t you.

  The Lesson of Focus

  The Master has brought the student into a howling wilderness. A place of cold ice, cutting snow, and howling wind.

  Whether this lesson has happened before, or after, or at any time is irrelevant. Again, time has no meaning in the temple, and reality is best thought of as a candy store, in that there are many selections to choose from.

  The student stands before the Master, shivering on the frozen ice. They are on some kind of glacier. The air bites cruelly into the skin and stings at the eyes with its frost. It hurts to breathe. The lungs ache because the oxygen is so very cold.

  Within moments the student knows that to stay here is to die. He doubts he can last much longer than the few minutes he foresees.

  “Live…” says the Master in his swallowed and gravelly voice. “Moment to moment… live one must. Other things… things that cloud and haunt our minds… those things must be pushed away in order to focus. And to live… is to focus. When you have blocked out all the distractions… live you will then.”

  The storm surges on a banshee’s cry, casting snow and ice in whirlwinds all about, only to die down and reveal that the student is alone on the icy glacier. Alone in all its vast cruel emptiness.

  The student turns. Turns looking for the Master, and does not find him. It is so cold that though the panic of being suddenly abandoned has caused his adrenaline to spike, the feeling dies off in seconds, and the student thinks of just lying down on the ice and going to sleep. It is that intensely cold. It is the cold of despairing for your life.

  And of course the wind is a constant howl that sets his nerves of edge. A shrill whistle from far off within this featureless frozen waste that says warmer places of friendship and love are just lies told to wicked children abandoned in the dark.

  Move, thinks the student to himself. Move and stay warm.

  And so he does. If just to stay warm.

  He has only his clothes and the old jacket from that other life,
and they are poor defenses against the howling icy wind that is both constant and relentless here on the glacier.

  He goes upslope, into the blinding white snowstorm, at times unable to distinguish between the land and the sky. He climbs because he feels that down must lead to some icy canyon or unseen crevasse that he might slide into helplessly.

  And if that were to happen?

  This is a serious question.

  There are things in the temple that have been revealed to be a simulation. He felt himself being stomped to death, and cut, and burned, only to find it wasn’t true. But not everything is a simulation. He has seen things within the temple that indicate there have been other students—many of whom failed.

  And if the Master’s ambivalence toward him can be used as an indicator, then his own failure is definitely a possibility. The Master seems to care little for his student’s survival. And maybe, possibly, there is even more to this. Maybe the Master thinks the student is arrogant in the extreme for trying to learn. And so the Master is daring him to try, while knowing the inevitable failure that is to come.

  The student is thinking these things as he crawls on numb hands and frozen knees up the icy glacier. And now the wind is howling so high up in the upper registers of sound that he can no longer think the thoughts he was trying to distract himself with.

  At the top of the glacier he reaches an icy bowl. The wind is howling over the lip, and flying debris nicks the student’s face. All about the bowl are strange stones, and as the wind whips through these stones, it wails—a high, tortured soprano.

  The sticks.

  It is his mind that focuses on the debris. Broken pieces of wood, sticks, carried here from some forest beyond the other side of the glacier. Their presence conveys so much. But the element that means the most in this freezing moment of imminent death is… heat.

  He begins to race about, gathering up the sticks, ignoring the shrill cry of the wind while he tries to remember how to start a fire with snow.

  He has done this before. Once. A long time ago, in a life that doesn’t matter anymore. Not when one has become lost within the temple.

  One must come to the end of one’s self in the temple. That was the first lesson.

  When he has a pile of sticks, he throws himself to the snow in the lee of the bowl, where the wind is the least brutal. Ignoring the painful burning of the ice on his frozen hands, he begins to burrow into the side of the drift. Pulling, pushing, packing, the work progresses steadily. In no time he has an ice cave, and he wonders if it will fall in and crush him…

  But he is freezing.

  And the wind is howling.

  He has forgotten why he is here. That is how desperate this moment is. There is no larger picture of all the things that brought him to this moment. That brought him into the temple.

  There is only survival.

  He gets the fire started by tearing off a piece of his jacket and using his body to shield it from the wind. He cups some ice, forms it, molds it into a lens of compacted snow.

  A sun floats high above. Somewhere above the howling winds and the wan, overcast sky, a star burns down on this nameless world. Lying here, feeling himself go numb and drifting into a sleep that promises so much more than just rest, he despairs. He will never get the kindling to ignite. It seems like some miracle that has never happened, could never happen. Or only happens for other people.

  He has closed one eye and the other is just a slit when it ignites. Smoking gently.

  As carefully and as quickly as he can, the student moves to the woodpile just inside the cave. And yes… he gets a fire going. And very carefully he gets deeper inside the cave, into a grotto of ice where he can stay warm.

  For the next few days the student’s life is nothing but gathering sticks that were once wind-driven debris, melting water to drink, and trying to drown out the shifting, howling wind that never lets up and never dies down.

  But soon the hunger screams deep inside him. It is the hunger, much more than the wind, that is on the verge of driving him insane. He hears the voice of the Master… but he has forgotten the meaning of words.

  He makes a spear and goes out to hunt.

  To kill and find food. Any food.

  And he finds the three-headed snow leopard. He is so hungry and tired he cares not whether he lives or dies, only that he eats. So when the three-headed cat comes at him, all jaws and saber teeth, he attacks with the fire-hardened spear, thrusting it straight for the body of the charging leopard.

  The leopard raises one snow-white paw and bats the sharpened stick aside, snapping it in two.

  Then the three-headed cat comes after the student. One head rears back to yowl in victory, while the other two, open-jawed, lunge for his throat in killer fury.

  Because the student has learned the Lesson of Flying at some other point of never-time within the temple, he leaps away to a fantastic height. It’s a short trick—and a trick is all it is.

  The leopard scrambles in a flurry of claw-thrown snow and comes for him in a tremendous burst of speed and screeching. As the leopard leaps, the student dives. His fatigue is gone, replaced by a sudden awareness that death is indeed imminent. He doubts it will be a tableau this time. An endless tableau he will be allowed to repeat.

  There are no do-overs.

  The leopard drags a claw through his jacket, and the student reaches the broken spear, half-buried in the drifting snow. Because it is broken, it is now more knife than spear, and a knife it must be. He pivots, sees the leopard leaping, and falls back.

  The cat embraces him with its paws and fetid breath.

  But by then he has jammed the knife up and into the wild animal’s belly. The student twists it and drags the stake as much as he can. All three of the cat’s heads yowl pitifully.

  It dies there on the ice.

  He drags the beast back to his cave, his ears beaten almost to deafness by the howling wind. He skins the cat, then eats the meat.

  His days after that become the gathering of sticks, the melting of ice, the hunting of three-headed snow leopards, and the scraping and curing of the hides. In time the cave is close and cozy. Warm and safe.

  But he can never block out the howling wind.

  And he despairs that he will ever leave this place.

  Three years pass.

  For the most part he has forgotten the Master, though there are some nights he remembers the temple. Its bells and smoke and silences. And that voice. He has dreams and sometimes nightmares of his other life. That life forgotten before.

  But now…

  Now it is wind.

  Ice.

  And death.

  He walks the glacier dressed in skins. A great moving bear of a man. He walks the glacier looking for a way off of it. As though that is somehow important. And he knows there must be a forest somewhere. A forest that brings the dead wood to his cave in his bowl with the stones that make the wind howl and keen. The wind is passing over the graves of ghosts, drawing out their hysteria and misery. Reminding them that their torment is never-ending. That there is no peace for the wicked.

  But he finds no way off the high glacier. Every pass and path is too dangerous.

  He searches along a jagged crevasse that looks so deep in its iridescent blue bottoms that he wonders if it is depthless. He wonders, if he should decide to step off into its nothingness… he wonders how long he’ll fall.

  He never finds the edge of the glacier at the bottom of the descent. It just seems to go on and on, and he is reluctant to tread any farther from his cave. But the cats come from somewhere. He thinks they live in long-ranging tunnel systems beneath the ice. He will not go down into these. He would not be able to fight well down there. And there might be many of the nightmare cats with three heads and long saber-tooth fangs.

  One cat badly mauls him across his back.


  It’s a vicious battle, and he barely survives. He won’t be able to hunt for a week after.

  But he wins.

  And he never doesn’t hear the wind. Never doesn’t hear its howl. If he gets used to one pitch, it changes to another that bothers him even worse than the last.

  One day, when he has meat for the week, and water for the day, when the sound of the wind bothers him so much he can’t stand it anymore, he goes out from his cave.

  If he buries the stones, the wind won’t be able to pass over, and the disconcerting notes and tones won’t sound. He hopes this. Sweet perfect silence seems like a kind of salvation to him. To even imagine it reminds him that there are other worlds than this.

  He tries to bury the stones, but the wind fights him. It sweeps the sleet and ice from them before he can bury more than a few.

  But he does notice something.

  He notices that, for a moment, the pitch changed.

  He bends to one crescent-shaped stone and wonders if he can’t pick it up and move it inside the cave where the wind can’t pass over it.

  But it has a weight beyond its size. Like it’s some trick weight at a carnival run by cheaters and hucksters who not only take your money but also like to make you feel weak and stupid. The rock cannot be lifted.

  But it can be easily turned. He pivots the stone—and notices the barest change in the howl of the wind.

  For a while he plays with the stones. Randomly shifting them. In brief moments there seems almost to be a harmony emerging. But inevitably the music turns discordant and drives a fresh spike into his brain.

  In time the student returns to his ice cave. Throughout that long wind-howling night he listens and thinks. Remembering that certain stones made certain notes, pitches, tones, even timbres.

  He lies awake, thinking.

  In the morning he returns to the field of stones and begins to adjust them once more. There are hundreds of stones. He tries random configurations and never lucks out. Never gets it just right. But the wind teases him, hinting that there’s a key to be unlocked if he can just find it. Each new combination reminds him that he never will.