Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Rechs hit the deck, ventilated a nearby Savage with a spray of hip-fire from the Savage weapon, and disengaged from the ropes. He took two steps, grabbed the doctor, and threw her over his shoulder. Then he disappeared underneath the balcony, firing at Savages as he went.

  “Give him time to get clear!” yelled Barr as he ejected a mag and fished around in his ruck for another. Then Barr was pulled off the balcony and thrown to the floor below. The medic tried to grab him as he went over, but he was hauled as though dragged by some line pulled by a great engine.

  LeRoy popped a grenade off his belt, shouted, “Heads up, chumps!” and threw it into the melee below. The medic regained her feet and fired down into the madness. Her face was one of fatalistic determination. As though she and Barr had been more than just squaddies.

  Time slowed in Casper’s memory.

  Slowed to a crawl as he watched bright flying brass trailing from their weapons. As he watched his own sidearm cycle energy and charge between each shot. As he saw some Savage from below rocketing toward the ceiling, arms and legs flailing as though he were at the zenith of a trampoline’s bounce.

  The grenade flared explosively, sending a wave of sudden debris in all directions.

  At the same moment, the medic was lifted off her feet. Casper lunged, reached for her, and in that moment he felt… he felt that immeasurable unseen ghost clutching at her, roiling about her.

  And he knew it would pull her over.

  Would pull them all over if it was allowed the time to do so. If given eternity, it would consume everything. It would pull everything over and down if it could. Someone had once said, Some people just want to watch the galaxy burn. This force, whatever it was, wanted to crush the galaxy all by itself. In that rescuing-the-medic moment of nearness…. Casper felt its wild and unrestricted power.

  “No!” he shouted at it.

  Except in the dream, later in the desert, asleep in the canyon, his voice sounded slowed down, as if time dripped like molasses. He reached for the young girl going over the rail, wanting to save her and knowing that it was all but impossible. And also… and also wanting to touch that force that was pulling at her. Wanting to know it.

  Wanting… it.

  And knowing that he had found the thing that could have made the difference in so many of the other stories that had added up to the sum total of his life.

  His parents.

  The Obsidia.

  Martian infantry who had boarded the destroyer he’d been assigned to during the War for Martian Independence. A destroyer that been scuttled to avoid capture. Seven hundred and forty-five lost in the nuclear flare.

  So many stories would have ended differently if the power he was now witnessing had been his to use as he saw fit. Had been used for good, and not evil. Had been used to do the right thing that needed to be done, never mind questions of good and evil.

  He caught the girl’s web-belt as time began to return to normal. As she was going over and down. To die and be lost as so many had.

  He caught her harness.

  Maybe LeRoy’s grenade had sent some needle-sharp fragment into the brain of that severed head. Maybe the focused energy, kinetic and explosive, had been too much for… it.

  Whatever it was.

  Maybe there was, even within fantastic powers, only so much one could do with such incredible power. Only so much the mind could handle and process.

  Maybe.

  But he caught the girl medic, and he held on to her.

  And she did not go over.

  A Savage marine, held aloft near the amphitheater’s ceiling, suddenly fell, a puppet whose strings had been cut. But had he hit the ceiling?

  Casper would never know, because so little time remained to the Moirai. She was not long for this reality. This plane of existence. All her stories were about to be lost forever.

  She had always been doomed. Now her doom was upon her.

  “Major’s got her, let’s boogie!” cried LeRoy, pulling Casper and the medic away from the balcony. They ran for the dark passages and away from this theater of horrors.

  The Lesson of Fear

  He did not turn back after he entered the open tomb, because he knew he could not. He walked into the tomb of an ancient Spiral King and was enveloped by the darkness.

  There are “other” places, his mind whispered. Places where you can become lost forever. Dangerous places.

  And yet this was the lesson. One of the last lessons the Master would teach.

  “Confront your greatest fear you must,” the Master had whispered in the moment before the student had stood up from their little fire within the gloomy Hall of Kings. “Then you will become what you will be.”

  Ten steps into the darkness of the tombs and the blackness felt like a physical thing. Like a smothering cloak. Like a hand about his neck. Gripping and threatening to cut off his air all at once. He coughed and moved forward into the darkness.

  In time he came to blocks of stone. Or rather, the blocks of stone formed the walls of the passage. Except they weren’t blocks of stone. They were alive, with a strange glowing alien circuitry within them. Like the runes he’d learned to read, except math too, and also some kind of powerful operating system language. Alive within the stone after ten thousand years.

  This was the tomb of Xu Zyglax, Eater of Children.

  The tomb was still dark, but the glowing red circuitry threw a soft bloody light across the tomb’s inner chamber. The walls were alive, in bio-electronic detail, with an obscene recounting of the reign of Xu Zyglax. So many worlds ruined. So many souls consumed. So many lives enslaved.

  And directly ahead, sitting in a throne that was more starship command chair, rested the space-suited corpse of the ancient Spiral King. The face plate was dark, tinted against the suns of a thousand worlds. But the suit itself was made like an armor of dead emeralds and obsidian flakes. One gauntleted hand rested on the pommel of a great single-bladed sword, gleaming in its razor-sharp keenness. The gentle curve of its blade reminded the student of other lost weapons from Earth’s past. Like the katana. Or the wakizashi. Like that, only somehow large and less delicate.

  These are the ceremonial weapons of the Spiral Kings. And not for the first time did the student wonder if these same Sprial Kings were the Ancients who’d left their enigmatic pyramids across the galaxy.

  The other hand of the resting corpse gripped the barrel of what had to be an alien’s version of a blaster rifle. Except there was what looked like a chainsaw attached to the front. The weapon was made of a black metal, and it looked like the most deadly weapon he’d ever seen. Far more deadly than anything the Legion carried.

  Beyond the resting king lay a dark passage.

  The Way of the Void, some voice inside his mind whispered.

  And the student knew that was the way he must go to complete the lesson. To confront his fear.

  He considered taking the blaster. It seemed far too large for human hands, but he wrested it from the dead king’s grip and felt along its surfaces for how it might work. After a moment he slung it over his shoulder and back and then reached for the sword. He might not understand how the blaster worked, but the sword… The sword worked like all swords.

  As he took it, it came alive with a gleaming red glow that soon turned the burning white of a firy sun. He held it out in front of him, gave the dead king one last look, and set his shoulders as he proceeded past the ancient monarch and into the darkness of the Way of the Void.

  Fear stalked him.

  Came for him.

  But it never made its presence known.

  Not even when he came to a place he called the Palace of Dead Worlds, even though that might not be its name. Beyond the Way of the Void it lay, an open expanse, like something one might find on some large and featureless world no one had ever bothered to explore. The silence here wa
s a thing that could be felt and even heard. And in time it became deafening.

  And upon that gray and shadowy plain rested great globes that towered above him. They were like dead moons, or dead worlds. This was their resting place.

  He held the sword at the ready, sensing the fear circling out beyond the worlds that stretched off in every direction now. It was a twisting thing he could only barely see out of the corner of his eye. Like a serpent. Or a dragon. A Black Dragon. Running and twisting among a thousand dead worlds. Whispering nothing that could be heard in the deafening silence through which the student passed.

  “What are you afraid of?” it hissed a thousand times before he finally answered. Before he was finally honest.

  He’d given it every answer. And not just answers, but the truth. Or at least, the truth as far as he was concerned.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  Nothing.

  “Nothing?” he shouted.

  And the dragon may have laughed, but it never come forward, or close enough to be seen by the light of the bloody sword.

  Death.

  “Death!”

  And still the dragon laughed like the lost echo of a roar and refused to be seen.

  Failure.

  “Failure!” he tried.

  And there was nothing.

  He wandered for days and began to be afraid that he had truly found the “other” places of the temple.

  “I can go back,” he thought to himself, and turned in the charcoal-gray darkness among the frozen worlds.

  “Can you?” hissed the dragon, and seemed to laugh when the student realized there was no back to go to. He wasn’t even sure if he was walking a straight line.

  He stared all about him, feeling the fear begin to close in. Close in more than it ever had.

  The dragon would attack now… and knowing that… knowing that was like waiting in a pitch-black room with someone who was swinging a sledgehammer at your head.

  “What are you afraid of?” the dragon whispered in his ear.

  The student whirled. Blade out. Only to find nothing.

  He could sense the dragon and its immense coils looping about him. Soon they would constrict and squeeze the life out of him. Soon…

  He began to run. He ran for his life. He lost the blaster. Felt it go clattering off in the darkness behind him. Nothing in the temple, no skill or feat he’d learned, could resist the Black Dragon. It was like trying to punch the galaxy. How? Where did one start?

  Even the glowing blade was gone.

  And still he ran.

  Hearing the dragon coming for him. It roared, and the sound was like the sound of motorcycles echoing off canyons of ruined buildings and rubble.

  “The Goths are coming…” he heard his mother say. Long ago. Before they’d murdered her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The desert faded away behind them as they climbed into a tropical forest that grew near the mountains’ upper reaches. One moment they’d been threading a high desert plateau, looking for ways up along the rising canyons and draws, and then within the space of a hundred yards they’d crossed a ridgeline and entered a beautiful mist-shrouded valley full of palms, waving grasses, and dense clusters of alien trees. The smell of salt came on sudden breezes rushing through the valleys and between the passes. It reminded Casper of an ocean, and it felt good on his sunburnt skin.

  He realized, in a brief moment of clarity, that he was starving to death. The nutrition bars had run out in the desert, and he had learned to eat the two-headed rats Urmo caught. Sometimes they shared one, and other times the creature caught one for each of them. Now he pulled a thick, rind-laden fruit hanging low from a strange palm, and he cut it open. It was bright yellow like a mango and filled with ruby-red seeds. He was too hungry not to eat it, never mind the hallucinogenic qualities of some of the plants on this planet. Starving to death was a whole other trip.

  But the strange fruit didn’t kill him—not right away, anyway—and in fact, not only was it satisfying, it was deeply refreshing. He ate so many of the low hanging fruits that his mouth started to develop small sores from the high citric content. After this he lay back and waited for either a drug trip, or death. He listened as THK-133 wandered back and forth across the hill, moving through the tall grass that blew from side to side.

  Casper drifted once more back into that other waking dream of things from long ago. As though there might be some other ending than the one that had inevitably found them. That had been headed for them all along.

  ***

  They ran from the carnage and horror unfolding behind them. They ran like the devil was at their heels. Several times they hit dead end passages and had to backtrack, all the while expecting to be suddenly attacked by the unseen pursuers their minds had conjured.

  And the more they ran, the more it felt like they were running for their lives. Like something was behind them, chasing them down the corridors, an angry presence at their heels. In memories of that moment Casper could almost hear its low moan just behind them. But he distinctly remembered turning to see what it was that was chasing them… and finding nothing but darkness.

  As they raced back toward the rail system, the pristine lab complex that was the Center for Advanced Cognition aboard the ghost ship Moirai entered some sort of emergency mode. The brilliant antiseptic lighting became a bloody wash of strobes casting their undulating lighting across now-shadowy rooms. The soft-hued office and administrative sections were bathed in blues, with rapidly pulsing white strobes indicating emergency egress routes.

  It was against this backdrop that they met two of the Savage marines, armored just like the marines in the surgery amphitheater. The Savages were guarding an intersection that Casper, LeRoy, and the medic needed to pass through. Glass-walled cubes, behind which research had once been conducted, formed the intersection, and the whole area screamed science and innovation. The two dark figures in heavy armor, helmeted and scanning, vicious automatic weapons at the ready, were at odds with their surroundings.

  What became of these people? Casper wondered, not for the first time aboard the Moirai. Whoever they’d been, they’d left Earth full of optimism that they would uplift humanity in what they saw as the right way. Yet here, hundreds of years later, they’d clearly gone the opposite direction, devolving into something ancient. Something animal. Something warlike and vicious.

  He wondered how much humanity was left in them. Or had they removed it? Cast it off.

  Letting go of the vestigial tail for something better, as it were.

  LeRoy opened up on them at first sight, intent on blasting his way through to the hangar deck and the Lex. A hurricane of rounds smashed into the frosted glass cubes that shaped the office complex intersection, shattering them instantly, or cracking straight through them to race off into the other partitions. Some of the bullets found their mark, but they simply ricocheted off the advanced armor of the Savages, sending misdirected slugs in all directions.

  In other words, LeRoy’s first sustained burst turned the combat area into an explosion of flying glass.

  One trooper pointed while the other fell to one knee, his wicked matte-black automatic weapon opening up in a lethal burst that tore LeRoy to shreds.

  Casper pulled the medic behind cover as a hail of gunfire filled the area where they both would’ve been in the next second. She in turn took off running off down a new passage, towing Casper after her. They could hear the armored Savages’ boots against the polished deck, giving chase, and then an insane and almost insectile high-pitched electronic comm transmission echoing over ambient.

  They’re calling in our location, thought Casper desperately as he ran for his life. But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe they were receiving their orders. Except whatever it was wasn’t orders in the way we think of them. Giving and receiving. Maybe it was more input. Like turning on
an appliance.

  He and the medic were too busy running for their lives to care. And from the sound of it, the Savages were closing fast.

  At the end of a long, frosted-glass hall, each window reinforced by gleaming chrome bolts, Casper turned, planted both feet, aimed, and fired at their pursuers.

  He’d been here before. Dangerously close and firing point blank in the face of certain death.

  The shots hit the lead Savage in the chest armor. Dead center. And then bounced off into the ceiling. The man, or once-man, checked his rush, but the other continued past his comrade, raising his battle rifle to engage on the fly.

  Registering the ineffectiveness of his own attack, Casper danced away from the spray of gunfire.

  The medic had popped two grenades.

  “Run!” she screamed, rolling them straight at Casper.

  He felt his legs wanting to slow and just give up. He told them to push harder. There were mere seconds to get out of the most lethal radius of the blasts. But explosively accelerated needle sharp fragments traveled; everyone knew that.

  Pulling hard, legs and arms pumping, they made it most of the way down the corridor before they heard the explosion behind them. It was like a cross between a bullfrog’s croak and audio-electronic feedback gone haywire.

  The two explosions tore the deck to shreds.

  Casper felt grit and blast pepper his uniform as he skidded to a halt. Instantly there was blood running down his fingers. Something had caught him, but there was no time to see how bad the injury was.

  He turned. Both Savages were still coming at them, racing down the hall as though the explosion had been a mere distraction.

  They’ve got some kind of personal defense shield, thought Casper. That’s what the high-pitched electronic haywire sound had been. It had activated just before the blasts, protecting the Savages.

  He remembers, while climbing into the tropical forest, he remembers how hopeless that feeling was. His energy sidearm hadn’t stopped them, nor had LeRoy’s automatic gunfire. Even the grenades had done nothing. They were coming for them, and there was nothing that could be done.