Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Trask’s fear was evident in his voice as he responded. “Roger that, sir, will have a perimeter set up in the next five. Trask out.”

  Casper listened to all this and was struck by a thought.

  Who was their Prometheus?

  Who would bring the gift of godhood to the savages seeking it?

  Who gave them the prophetesses?

  Because… didn’t there have to be someone to give the gift? It couldn’t just be taken. Could it? They hadn’t just made that. Made a human who could do real live magic? Someone had come. Someone had shown them the trick of space magic.

  Private LeRoy threw himself down next to Casper.

  “Dig in, sir. ’Bout to get real hairy and all.”

  A moment later a wall of screaming Savages came charging through the stands of corn like demons howling for living flesh. A second after that a hot jet of flaming liquid fuel lanced out across their axis of advance.

  LeRoy screamed and whooped.

  Casper recoiled in horror. Fire aboard a ship, as every astronaut knew since time immemorial, was the devil’s friend. It was the worst thing that could happen in an oxygen-rich environment. It could consume all your breathable air in moments. And though the Moirai was like a world unto itself, it was still, at its basest definition, just a ship in the void. Its oxygen was a finite thing in a bottle.

  “When you got to kill everyone in the most gruesome way possible… always pick the flamethrower!” LeRoy whooped and shouted. Then he opened up with his KS, shooting into the flaming corpses that wandered about, writhing in pain and eternal agony, their flesh and machinery melting.

  The energy blasts punched gaping holes in them, carrying away flaming debris to ignite the fields beyond. Out there, other Savages could be seen in the firelight, their advance checked. Some ran off back into the darkness. And off to Casper’s left stood Rex, pumping out short spurts of flaming fuel from a small but heavy rifle, creating a barrier of leaping flames between them and the Savages. The Savages’ keening wail rose into a howl of torment.

  The mech loomed above the firefight, its guns pivoting to some other section of the field, spooling up and hosing everything over there with bright bursts of gunfire in excess. Giant brass ejecting shells gleamed in the hellish light of Rex’s flamethrower as they showered down into the corn.

  Rex sprayed the mech with a hot liquid jet of burning napalm. Flames raced across the thing as they connected with some badly maintained oil-laden section. The pilot tried to back away from the fight, but within seconds the entire piece of equipment was crawling with racing fire. A hatch popped open and a figure crawled from the mech, but it was consumed by the greedy flames and collapsed half in and half out of the burning armored walker.

  From Casper’s view among the igniting cornstalks, it was like watching some mythical giant being burned in effigy at Fall’s End.

  And then, above all this, he came.

  The Dark Wanderer.

  They’d find out later that’s what he—not it, but definitely he—was called.

  He came through the press of Savages beyond the leaping Halloween fire that turned everything on the dark shadowy plain into a hellish orange. He passed through the drifting smoke and strode past creatures that screamed while being roasted alive, once-men beasts that howled in a torment that seemed eternal. The Dark Wanderer came through all this battle mayhem turned autumnal festival. He came in seemingly above them.

  Not as though he was merely taller than them, which he was, but above them, as though he were floating. A dark angel that ruled over these wicked half-human, half-machine goblins in a fantasy not written by a sane or rational mind. He ignored their mad press to get away from the flame-spitting devil Rex had become.

  The Dark Wanderer came through the flames.

  Rex cut the bursts of pumping fuel igniting into flame and issued a command over the squad comm. As though he, Tyrus Rex, a murder machine if the galaxy had ever created one, knew in that second that what came for them was beyond his power to resist.

  As though this was the fabled Balrog to their Gandalf.

  “Run! Now!” Rex shouted.

  Not Fall back. But… Run! Run for your lives.

  Casper heard someone fire. Full auto. A whole charge pack on those old trusty KSs they’d used for so long. They were ancient compared to the weapons the Legion used now, but back then they’d been state-of-the-art. It was Rex who laid down the cover fire, long enough for all of them, what remained of First Squad, to get up and run for their lives.

  LeRoy literally pulled Casper to his feet as he started running. Firelight danced across his Martian armor.

  “Come on, sir!” he shouted. “We gotta didi!”

  Casper had never heard that word before. Didi. But the meaning was clear. They were running, full out, full tilt, for their lives. Why?

  Because they’d been ordered to?

  Because it was their only chance to go on living one minute more?

  No.

  Because they could feel the fear, the palpable fear at their backs, chasing them through the flaming darkness of the field of corn. They could feel the Dark Wanderer coming for them.

  That strange corn born in the dark between the stars, modified to grow and live in the shadows of a permanent twilight, tore at his gear as though trying to prevent him from escaping the Dark Wanderer who must surely be at his heels.

  Casper remembered thinking that Rex was dead now. Gone. And that he’d been only barely able to care about that over his overriding desire to save his own life.

  Who could stand against something so… weird?

  They reached the streets of the abandoned city.

  Shadowy towers with windows like gaping eye sockets rose up in the twilight darkness all about them. Gazed down in horror at them. The streets were bare, and yet there was a feeling of dust and disuse about everything. The buildings revealed inner darknesses beyond their facades that seemed to scream out at them in a permanent silent horror.

  They had run from a burning hell, chased by an unknown demon they’d been too afraid to even remember from childhood, to a lonely and forgotten place that was somehow far worse than the horror at their heels.

  Trask sidestepped out from an anonymous building and signaled them over. Casper heard LeRoy’s boots behind him as he pounded across the empty street, racing for the darkness inside the building.

  They numbered only nine.

  They were the only ones from First Squad to have reached the city. The only ones to have survived the horror in the dead cornfield.

  They could hear the Savages out there in the darkness, coming for the city. The half-human, half-machine beasts’ passage through the mutant corn was a symphony of rasping white noise that was both discordant and darkly hypnotic in the same moment.

  Like it was a promise.

  As though they too would soon be running through the corn.

  “Take a position,” Trask ordered. He was afraid, but there was a resolve in his voice, like steel that wouldn’t easily break. “We’re holding here. Last stand, gentlemen.”

  ***

  It was dark when Casper found the altar beneath the vines.

  Long had it lain, covered in snake-like growths that had not easily relented beneath the onslaught of Casper’s hatchet. He’d cleared them away with ragged heaving breaths and a fury that belied his weary muscles. He’d cleared pillars, pedestals, even some sort of chair. And beneath all of that he’d found the ancient paving. Every stone denoting that this was a special place. It was a small place—not what he’d expected the Temple of Morghul to be. Perhaps it was a shrine. Some waypoint that led to where he must go.

  But it was the altar that showed him what this place was.

  The lizards were shown in bas-relief, carved like pictoglyphs on some ancient wall, dragging prisoners forward. Harvesting th
em with terrible dark scythes. Offering them up to the thing they worshipped.

  Casper pulled the remaining dead vines from atop the altar. Revealing the last carvings. Revealing the outline and image of that nightmare in the corn.

  And here too was the Dark Wanderer.

  Except this time the Dark Wanderer was reaching out, opening his arms to embrace and receive the sacrifices that had been laid atop this table long ago. And in return, he offered… power.

  So, thought Casper. We meet again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning, standing atop the vine-covered jungle hill in the soft light of daybreak, Casper looked west and saw other hills rising above the trees. In the distance—and who could tell how far the horizon was in the steaming jungle—were the jagged mountains where that monolithic statue should be.

  An hour later, after a thin breakfast—nutrition bars for Casper, some strange jungle fruit for Urmo—they started off again, following their course, leaving behind the vine-covered temple of the Dark Wanderer.

  As they descended the leafy hill they were swallowed once again by the dense dark jungle. Surrounded by a chiaroscuro of red light from the dying star filtering through the high leaves, they traveled among the bogs. Alien branches grew and twisted like many-tentacled squids reaching out to clutch and take as much of the jungle as they possibly could, never mind the time it might take.

  THK-133 wove around these spider-like trees and always returned once more to its true course. Its heavy blaster at port arms, it scanned the darkness between the shafts of bloody light that fell down in great pylons.

  As the day progressed, Casper began to feel better. Much better. Not that he’d felt bad—he’d just been hot and tired. And again he wondered how much of this planet he would need to search in order to find the Temple of Morghul. The excitement of finding the pictoglyphs of the Dark Wanderer had faded.

  They passed deep dark pools that might have offered a cooling dip, or perhaps the sunken remains of lost civilizations, but even Urmo avoided these, muttering his only word nervously, casting large wary eyes about as though expecting danger from all quarters at any second.

  Casper used the little beast as a kind of planetary guide. He vowed to try some of the orange-like jungle fruit Urmo had consumed for breakfast. It hadn’t killed the creature, and thus the chances that it wouldn’t kill him were… possibly even acceptable.

  And so, as he watched Urmo give those deep dark jungle pools a wide berth, he decided it was probably best for him to do the same.

  At times, THK-133 would deploy his carbon-forged machete to hack through the denser areas. “In lieu of killing your enemies, master,” the bot always began in its droll English butler voice, “I shall murder the local flora and fauna, so that your passage may be made easier. Rest easy, and I shall commence the slaughter, my liege.”

  Casper would sit, sweat dripping from his hair, which had turned prematurely iron gray the year he made captain, and listen to the monotonous chop of the bot’s war against the jungle. His shirt was drenched. He drank some of the water, telling the canteen to chill it.

  He’d been in a lot of jungles, and he’d never heard one as quiet as this. And that was strange. Jungles were alive with the sounds of birds, insects, and predators. Here? There was nothing. Just a dull, brooding silence that hung over everything.

  It was then that he began to notice the mushrooms. They were a deep purple, and though they were beautiful in a dark and sinister way, they were clearly, or most likely, poisonous. Their very look seemed to promise death. Some things, Casper thought to himself as he took another swig from the canteen and felt better, cooler, more refreshed… some things just looked deadly—because they were deadly.

  He swirled the water as he eyed the mushrooms clustered on the dark loamy ground. They gathered primarily near the rough trees that arched and spread out over the jungle deep He could hear THK-133 up ahead, hacking his way through the dense overgrowth. Rhythmically, methodically. Hacking and slicing at the dense vegetation that seemed to grow and expand as Casper watched.

  He began to notice that there were mushrooms everywhere. They seemed to reveal themselves, as though appearing from one moment to the next.

  Everywhere…

  ***

  There was Trask.

  LeRoy.

  Dunbartty.

  Nogle.

  Barr.

  Esmail.

  Duhrawski.

  And a medic. A young girl the team called Bones.

  Eight of them and Casper.

  For the next hour the Savages would probe the abandoned city on the dark curving plain, trying to locate their position. But the Martian infantry were not so easily dislodged. Based on the old Rangers of the ancient and long-forgotten American military, of which Rex had been one of the last, the Martian infantrymen were far more highly trained and had seen much more actual combat than the Savages.

  Probably.

  The Savage marines, as they would come to be known over the millennia of warfare to come, were at that point used to being mere enforcers of the lighthugger’s oligarchical ruling elite. Perhaps they occasionally served as raiders against a frontier outpost. But the Martian Light Infantry had fought the collective forces of the UN to a standstill in the War for Martian Independence. They had even counter-invaded and taken the entire West Coast of North America, all while being heavily outnumbered.

  The next hour was as bloody as it ever gets, remembered Casper as he watched the memories unfold.

  And as close.

  The first ten minutes were quiet. Trask leaned against one of the walls of the abandoned building and peered out through the shattered glass at the empty twilight street. Every other soldier had a point and a field of fire. There was only one exit, in the back. They’d put Esmail on that. The rest watched the two streets that intersected beside the building, just a little ways into the city.

  “It’s creepy how it’s all dark in here,” whispered LeRoy over the comm. “Think it’s like that all the time, Sergeant?”

  Except, Casper noticed, they never pronounced sergeant as “sergeant.” It always came out sounding more like “sarn’t.” Some distant part of Casper’s mind that had always been interested in history and etymology wondered how that had come about. Was it particular to the Martian military forces, or had it come from some old American military NCO who’d fled Earth during the Exodus to be part of the Grand Martian Experiment? New America, as some had called it for its short-lived existence.

  “Contact,” whispered Private First Class Nogle. Then, “Three hundred meters down the main street. Team of four moving close to the buildings. Light ’em up, Sarn’t?”

  “Wait…” whispered Trask. His gravelly voice was almost trance-like as he craned his head around the dark spaces inside the building, staying out of the window’s frame. “Might be tryin’ to get us to show ’em where we’re at. Don’t do nothin’. They’re tryin’ to find us.”

  Silence.

  Casper heard one of the soldiers in the darkness spit, snuffle his nose, then spit again.

  “Two fifty,” whispered Nogle, calling out the distance.

  Casper pulled his sidearm and checked it. Full charge. He clicked the safety off. They would need him too if it turned into a full-blown firefight.

  “Two hunert, Sarn’t.”

  “Don’t do anything!” hissed Trask.

  Silence.

  Then, “Crossin’ the street, Sarn’t. Our side now. Got ’em lined up. One burst and they all go down.”

  Trask didn’t reply.

  Again, it was a testament to the training of the Martian light infantry that they held their fire despite a palpable nervous undercurrent of tension. The desire to unload and blast their way out of there… it was something even Casper could feel.

  “Hunnert.”

 
“Anybody see anything else?” Trask asked nervously.

  Negatives all around.

  “Sarn’t… they’re comin’ straight at us. Like they know we’re here. Thirty seconds and they’ll reach the intersection.”

  “Be cool,” whispered Trask.

  A second later PFC Nogle announced the Savage scout team had stopped. Then, “They’re doin’ somethin’, Sarn’t.”

  “Can you tell what?” asked Trask. “Switch to low-light imaging.”

  “Already there, Sarn’t,” replied Nogle testily. “Comm, maybe. I don’t know—maybe they got some close-range tracking juju… like a radar that triangulates heartbeats… and they had to be close enough to get a read on us…”

  “That’s crazy,” replied one of the other soldiers in the shadowy darkness. “Ain’t no such thing.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone says, Dunbartty. Till there is. Whatever they’re doin’, I’m bettin’ next month’s pay they know we’re here exactly, and they’re callin’ in a strike. I say light ’em up and shift positions. Sarn’t?”

  “Nah,” said the other soldier, “tha’s crazy. We just hunker and they—”

  In an instant, incoming rounds came at them from everywhere. Mainly from the buildings and alley located diagonally across the intersection. Dunbarrty got hit in the chest by a round that zipped straight through the door that guarded the street entrance.

  “Bones!” someone shouted out over comm. “DB’s hit!”

  What remained of the Martian infantry opened up and returned fire. The once-shadowy room was filled with the staccato pulse of the KS rifles’ green-hued energy bursts.

  Trask shouted out orders. “Suppress that alley on the right!” He duck-walked beneath a window, held his rifle above his head, and unloaded on the street where the scout team had been.

  “Anti-armor!” someone shrieked.

  Casper was crawling across the floor to reach Dunbartty and assist the medic when he passed the space where the door had been. Now he had a perfect view of a smoke trail sidewinding from down the street. Leading the curling snake of smoke was a micro-missile of some sort. It bounced off the street mid-intersection, skipped, then curled off in a whole new direction, smashing into another building across the way.