Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Chapter Eighteen

  They moved out a few hours later, following the old dirt-carved service road that cut through the cornfields. An hour into the march, Nogle held up one fist. They were using hand signals in the event comms had been somehow compromised by the Savages’ predilection for developing next-gen tech. Also, they’d left a lot of their own dead behind, and it wasn’t impossible for the tech-hungry Savages to have hacked the captured comm devices. They could be listening in. Or even tracking them.

  So Rex had ordered them to disable their telemetry and transponders.

  Nogle’s hand signal came down the column. In the distance, a small structure lay between the rows of corn. Rex ordered a wedge, and the Martian infantry slid through the cornfield and came out in a quiet clearing before an ancient and leaning wooden barn.

  Casper had fallen in behind the wedge.

  Rex raised a fist, and they waited. Listening. Then he signaled Nogle and Barr to move forward and search the building. The two moved forward, stacked at the open entrances on either side, and moved in as one, sweeping the darkness with their weapons. No doubt they were imaging on low light.

  Before the march had started, the command team—Rex, Trask, and Casper—had discussed finding another structure. Rex and Casper, having been prisoners on just such a ship as this, knew that four rail systems ran the length of the long cylinder, from bow to engines, on these Rama-class vessels. Below the “earth” of the cylinder, or the main hab, lay a network of supply and maintenance tunnels, storage warehouses and lifts that allowed cargo to be moved about. Finding an entrance into this subterranean network, and ultimately the rail system, was the priority. Out here on the open plain of the cylinder, they were needlessly exposed and quite possibly under some kind of drone surveillance, though they’d detected none thus far.

  Nogle gave the move-forward hand signal, and the rest of the soldiers, including Casper, moved in.

  The barn was open and empty. The floor was covered with old straw, and the faint scent of animals hung in the air, but that was all. Rex was immediately down on his hands and knees, sweeping aside the straw, and within moments he’d located the gates to an old service lift that accessed the maintenance levels. Finding the control mechanism to open the gates and call the lift took a bit more time, so while the others worked at getting it operational, Casper walked the rest of the barn.

  He felt uneasy. There was something here that was bothering him. Except… it wasn’t obvious to the eye. It was something that needed to be discovered.

  Rex and his men managed to raise the lift gates that barred access to the lift. The platform itself was somewhere far below. Someone found the controls and called it up from the lower levels. Unsure how far away it was—or how long it would take to arrive.

  Casper was only dimly aware of this activity. With his light, he was scanning the wooden walls. At first there was nothing. But then, low in a corner, he discovered writing.

  This writing wasn’t in the same hand that had written the madness on the walls of the outer hull corridors. This seemed almost sane. Rational, at the start.

  It was different. It was like a log, a diary.

  And it would prove to be a warning they should have listened to.

  Beware the Dark Wanderer. He ain’t human. Ain’t from Earth like he claims. He’s a demon. A demon who walks like a man. Whole command team is dead. Whip ain’t himself anymore. This ship is a hell ship. And beware of his spooky women. Get off this ship while you still can. But if you’re reading this you’re probably already dead. —Dobbs

  There was more. Much more. But none of it made sense. Some of it was a supplies list. Another section was a kind of roster, with names that had been crossed off. If they’d had the time, they might have learned more. They might have heeded the warnings. They might have… done what? What could they have done differently?

  It didn’t matter what they might have done. Because they didn’t do it.

  Because the prophetesses came at them.

  They surrounded the barn as if they had known all along that the little soldiers would hide within like frightened animals. A strange, almost hypnotic music—like some composer’s take on a siren’s call—announced their arrival. It floated out there in the darkness, haunting them. Taunting them. Come and see.

  Rex’s soldiers took up their rifles. They were not going down without a fight.

  In the end, each and every one of them would deliver that much.

  “Come out,” whispered three voices together but not in unison.

  Casper heard the voices inside his head… and as clear as day. As though the women were in the same room and spoke as gently as possible. Coaxing and commanding all at once. The meaning was clear. And the audible sound, it too had been clear. Like a bell. A perfect pitched bell ringing inside his head, communicating the command, the request, the threat.

  Casper turned and saw that the others had heard the same thing. The same three discordant voices. The women. Everyone scanned the dark barn, but there was no one there. Just that haunting music that probably wasn’t even real.

  They were still waiting for the lift platform to arrive. If it ever would.

  Casper glanced over at Trask. The man’s face was pale, and the look in his eyes made his feelings clear: it was time to run. Or perhaps Casper was just projecting. Because he felt it too, deep in his gut, a feeling that had to be true whether it was or it wasn’t.

  Nogle, who’d been watching the wide barn door entrance, was suddenly yanked from their presence and out into the darkness. Out into the twilight of the corn. His weapon went off with a short, high-pitched staccato burst. And then it fell dead silent.

  By the time Casper had taken the mere strides it took to cross the empty building to the other side, Barr, Trask, Duhrawski, and Rex had already opened up with their weapons on what was out there.

  The prophetesses were out there.

  And what Casper saw in that moment changed him forever.

  It was not the three women, ethereal, wan, and pale, wisps of shrouds covering their emaciated frames. It was not that.

  It was not the fact that Nogle was suspended in midair, feet dangling helplessly. Humans don’t hang in midair unless some type of anti-gravity system is in place, and at that moment in galactic technological history, anti-grav was mostly theoretical. Repulsors were still a long way off. But that was not what changed Casper.

  It was the look in Nogle’s eyes. The desperation to be set free of what had him, the conviction that he never would be free, the desire to have never been born… it was all there in one horribly twisted mask-of-pain moment. His head was canted back in a silent horrible scream as though he was in an eternal torment that might never end. And maybe, thought Casper at that moment, it wouldn’t.

  And the prophetesses were somehow controlling all this with their minds.

  The next thing that every soldier, including Casper, was about to find deeply disturbing, was the fact that their gunfire wasn’t getting anywhere near the three women, the three girls, the three… prophetesses.

  There were three of them, whatever they were. One was holding a long and spidery-fingered hand to her head, just like that first prophetess had done. Right before she popped a soldier’s head like a swollen pimple. The other two had their arms spread wide, as if they were holding Nogle up.

  With a quick motion, one of the two flicked her wrist, and Nogle’s neck emitted a sickening crack. His head flopped to the side, and his tongue hung thickly from his mouth. His hands and legs began to twitch.

  And then his body hit the dead comet dust–collecting earth of the main hab cylinder.

  None of the soldiers were firing now. Perhaps they’d fired dry on their magazines. Perhaps they’d recognized the futility of their attack. Perhaps they, like Casper, were almost too stunned by the raw power they’d just witnessed.

 
Then Sergeant Trask was yanked off his feet just like Nogle had been, forward and into the prophetesses’ midst. He screamed.

  “Move! Fall back to the shaft!” Rex shouted. He stepped forward to fire another burst at the three girls, as if that might achieve something it had so far shown no signs of achieving.

  Casper did not retreat to the shaft as ordered. His eyes refused to look away from Trask as the NCO was spun and rotated in sudden torment. The chorus of witches chanted some unknown word inside Casper’s mind like a bare harmony of whispers in the background. He felt, more than knew, that they were telling Trask in their chant that he, and they, were all about to die. Telling the sergeant he would be the first, but not the last of the men he’d been given sacred charge over.

  He might have been frightened. He might not have been the most high-speed, low-drag, hardcore soldier who’d ever served. But Trask was brave. That was for sure. And he proved it in his last action.

  He fought their iron will and somehow reached his good hand across the load-bearing harness that covered his Martian armor. He pulled the pins on two matte-gray grenades, leaving them attached to his body.

  Rex might not have even seen this.

  Casper was distantly aware that his friend had gone to that old place inside himself. That place he’d needed in order to survive the gladiatorial pits of the Obsidia. That place of the ancient warrior. A place of mindless rage, where there was nothing left but to do as much damage to your enemy as you could. To keep fighting until they couldn’t fight back.

  It was entirely possible that Rex, in that mindless place, had not seen Trask pulling the pins in this last action of his life.

  Casper hurled himself at his friend, yanking him behind the barn doors just before the explosives went off and sent thousands of jagged shards in every direction. The barn’s wall on that side was torn to splinters, but Rex’s armor absorbed most of the damage, protecting both men as they crashed down on the stale-smelling straw.

  When they recovered their feet, weapons out, they saw that the prophetesses, all three of them, were dead. Their bodies had been savaged by the mercilessness of physics and explosively released energy.

  Rex raced forward, picked one girl up, and hurled her bloody body into the side of the barn. Then he shot it several times. When he was finished, he stood over it, a savage sneer across his face, his chest armor heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows.

  Casper realized then, in some sad and distantly ironic commentary on his life, that only they, of all the galaxy’s fools, had been so foolish as to come to this terrible relic of a ship. They came willingly, like rubes unsure what horrors and mirrors the funhouse might offer. Now their dead were strung out behind them, discarded tickets between the booths the carnies hectored them from, in a forgotten amusement park on some lost back alley street that was always too hard to find. This ship was that amusement park. A museum floating off into the dark of the cosmos.

  Casper had all these hopeless thoughts of melancholy as his feet carried him forward and his light shined on the faces of the two prophetesses who remained.

  One had been horribly marred, her face torn to shreds. But the other didn’t even look that badly hurt. Instead there was a look on her face of… found peace. Finally. And that was somehow much more terrible than the girl who’d been blown half away.

  Casper wondered if there was still some part of the dead girl’s mind that was whispering.

  Still whispering that phrase.

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

  Some part of him knew that she was. That there were other worlds than these. Other worlds of powers like they ones he’d just seen displayed. And that those worlds had been there all along, and he’d just had a first glimpse of them through the funhouse mirror of this nightmare ship wandering the cosmic dark.

  He thought about the prophetesses’ powers. There was nothing like them in the entire universe. Nothing at all.

  And yet, there was.

  The Lesson of Listening

  “Listen to it,” says the Master to the student. “Hear it first… then… yours it is to command.”

  The silence within the temple is so deafening that it has become like a physical thing to the student. A thing that seems a wall, or a wave, or a blanket that covers and smothers everything.

  The student holds the stone.

  The stone is his focus.

  The stone is the invitation.

  The student waits, listening for the music the Master has instructed him to hear.

  But it does not come that day.

  And the student opens his eyes to see the Master floating, floating above the debris-littered floor of this ancient place. Shafts of bloody light stab down into the darkness around him. But there is more…

  All about the Master, rocks that have long lain forgotten among the ruins of the temple now hang like planets, circling the Master in concentric rings. Orbiting their sun. One explodes, and like some moon hit by a planet killer from an Ohio-class battleship, its debris field expands outward. Except in slow motion.

  The student watches… fascinated. Always fascinated.

  Beyond the Master, the ancient idol that was toppled long ago in this room, an idol that reflects the image of something that never should have been, grinds and rises up from its eons-long resting place on the floor.

  The Master’s face is neither beatific nor straining… it just is. As though this too is the way of all things.

  The student watches this raw display of power. He has seen the Master perform many such wonders, and always they have struck him to the point of dumbfounded amazement.

  “Do… you cannot,” hisses the Master as the multi-ton idol begins its circle, joining the tiny inner worlds that were once rocks. “Deafened by your blindness you always will be.”

  Later…

  Later…

  Another lesson.

  The student follows the Master across a deep, possibly bottomless chasm far beneath the temple. A central stair leads down to an incredible depth, and the waters from the sea fall down into it.

  The Endless Well never fills.

  And the waters fall into it endlessly.

  What has become a typical daily exercise of balance and combat becomes something else. Down here, far down the depth of the shadowy well, the student follows the Master across a thin strand of ancient stone that crosses over the void. Water cascades all around them, down the sides of the immense cistern, onto the stairs, across the narrow rock on which they stand. Its bombastic thunder is deafening.

  “Deafened by your blindness always you will be,” says the Master, though the student only hears this in his mind.

  And then… he is actually blind.

  He has practiced this before. Moving while blinded by a tied strip of cloth. Moving in the dark. But never here, above a bottomless well where death waits to pull him down into its unknown. And never actually blind.

  “Master!”

  He hears himself. Hears himself desperately asking for the voice of the teacher to come back to him. To reassure him. He repeats the word, over and over, his voice rising. Rising to the point of hysteria.

  He knows that if he reaches that point, he will surely fall. Balance will flee him.

  He will fall.

  So he stops.

  Stops his mind.

  Slows his breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

  He can feel the rock in his pocket. Or rather, he knows it’s there. And that is a comfort to him. A wild and reckless thought surges to the front of his panicked mind…

  Take the rock out. Hold it in your hand. Comfort you will have.

  But of course here, on a slender beam deep down in the Endless Well, the act of fishing around in his rags for the rock will cause him to lose focus and fall. And so he does not.

 
“Master?” he tries again.

  His voice is forlorn and lost. Like some child abandoned by the wayside. That small and helpless voice is carried away by the weight of all the waters falling down and down the steps of the deep well.

  That way lies madness.

  In that moment the student knows that this too is a lesson. Knows that this is the next harsh lesson. He must hear the music. That is the power. He must find it. And once he hears it… then he will control it.

  Except the noise of the well is deafening. In fact it is so deafening that even hearing his own thoughts requires a supreme act of focus and concentration.

  It so deafening that its constant thunder is all he can hear.

  His legs are getting tired. The beam he stands on is so slender that he cannot even crouch down to his hands and knees so that he might begin to crawl back to safety.

  Hear it! his mind roars. Because he knows that if he doesn’t… he will soon fall. And the student is convinced that the fall will be endless. And so he must learn. Now or never.

  But all he hears is the noise of the falls. Cascading and rumbling. Falling from the ocean that presses against the temple above. Washing in across the lower levels where he has trained with the stick and the sword to perfect his body. Cascading across carved stones that might have been shaped before the ancient pyramids that litter the galaxy he has passed beyond.

  Then those waters pass into the four channels that serve the well. There, the water turns smooth. It forms a powerful flow that makes a different sound. Not the rush of the tidal wash that flows beneath the temple.

  Each physical object makes a music all its…