Imperator

by Nick Cole

  What they found instead was the Dark Wanderer.

  They encountered a derelict alien starship, unlike anything known, drifting in the dark wastes between the stars. Later, much later, they would find that it wasn’t so much a lost starship as a prison, and its sole prisoner’s sentence had been imposed by a civilization far older than any of humanity’s outreaching explorers had previously discovered.

  Who the Dark Wanderer really was, they would never know. But they marveled at the wonders he provided them. Portions of the derelict ship were cannibalized and remanufactured to give the Moirai faster-than-light travel. Hyperspace engines were constructed along the aft portions of the main cylinder, and the Moirai leapt away toward its fate. Other marvels were acquired as well, including a superior form of advanced longevity, and innovations in stellar navigation, food production, and cognitive powers.

  Yes… cognitive powers.

  What had started long ago, back on Earth, in seminars at hotels out by the airports, promising happiness, wealth, prosperity, and success, had become a religion that boasted of the ability to grant not just life after death, but life eternal as a sort of god. The Dark Wanderer ensorceled the feverish minds of the Moirai, taking their cockamamie belief system and riffing it into an ancient power that accessed what some might have once called superpowers.

  There was, of course, a price to be paid.

  There always is.

  There came a night when the Dark Wanderer held his ebony blade aloft and sacrificed a screaming and stunned Whip Hubley. The Dark Wanderer offered godhood, and he demanded the worship that was his due. I Power became what the faithful tribes of the Moirai now misguidedly called the Quantum, and it promised them an eternity of their own making if they would help the Dark Wanderer on his own personal quest.

  That quest was to leave physicality, to shed the real, and to become a superintelligent being who ruled the universe in a place beyond time, space, and reality. This was the true power. Once he obtained it, he would his bless his faithful servants with the gifts they deserved.

  According to the Dark Wanderer, the Quantum—a place distinct from reality, a place driven by pure intelligence and information—provided access to powers of the mind, or rather information-driven cognition, that could be used to manipulate physical reality. The Dark Wanderer trained those who were able to use this power, and they became his prophets and prophetesses. He enslaved the rest with chains biomechanical, turning them into chimeras that served as slaves and warriors in a state somewhere between eternal torment and drug-induced euphoria.

  Long before the advent of the Galactic Republic, after the Exodus, and decades after those who had been left behind on a dying Earth had made their own Great Leap, the Moirai was capturing stray explorers and lost colony ships, or arriving at lost planets, wiping out lesser civilizations, and scouring the ancient records and sacred places for clues the Dark Wanderer sought. Clues to a place called the Quantum Palace. Progress was slow, but it was progress that drove them on to other genocides.

  In time they picked up whispers and rumors of work being done on quantum consciousness. And that to led to the raid on Al-Baquar Seven—and the capture of Dr. Reina Benedetti. Her work on intelligence preceding physicality contained the path into next-level evolution the Dark Wanderer had long sought.

  Based on Dr. Benedetti’s work, the Dark Wanderer made his final plans to ascend into a post-physical existence beyond the present reality. To do that, the Moirai would have to navigate deep into the Dead Zone, to an area where data became real and information manipulated reality. This had been the focus, a working hypothesis really, of Dr. Benedetti’s research, and it was that research which led the Moirai to begin navigating the unnavigable.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “If he succeeds,” said Reina in the most sober of terms, “this Dark Wanderer will effectively become something like—and believe me, I know this sounds crazy—he’ll become what we might have once called… a god.”

  Rechs, Casper, and the medic stared at the doctor. The look in her eyes said, Yes. That’s crazy. But after everything I’ve experienced on this ghost ship… sure. I believe it. Why not? The galaxy is a weirder place than we ever thought.

  Or some variation of that.

  The four of them parted ways, breaking up into two teams. One “team” consisted solely of Rechs, in the commandeered high-tech battle armor forged by the Savages with the help of the Quantum Palace. He would prevent the Dark Wanderer from escaping the ship via the pyramids, which apparently enabled some kind of transportation between worlds. The Dark Wanderer had to be stopped; Reina had made that abundantly clear to Rechs during their journey through the labs of the complex. She’d shown him things. Shown him experiments that never should’ve been undertaken. Nightmares that never should’ve existed.

  And if there was one man who could stop the Dark Wanderer—if the Dark Wanderer even could be stopped—then it was probably Rechs, Casper thought. Or at least his oldest friend would die trying.

  The second team, consisting of Casper, Reina, and the medic—the lone survivor, besides Rechs, of the Martian llght infantry task force—was to return to the Lex… and destroy the Moirai with ship-to-ship missiles.

  “He has to be stopped,” Reina said as they made their way through the sub-levels of the main hab. “If, as I and others have theorized, the universe is a data construct… information at its most basic level, like here in the Dead Zone… then him using that pyramid would be like giving him the ability to rewrite everything on an informational level. I don’t know what the Dark Wanderer is exactly—some sort of exile or criminal from a dead race we haven’t discovered, or maybe he’s even one of the Ancients. But whatever he is, he’s evil. He is pure evil. That’s why Rechs is going to stop him. If he doesn’t… or if we don’t nuke the Moirai… then he has the potential to take control of everything we know as reality. And I mean everything. Seriously, Casper. He would make the Pantheon back on the Obsidia look like volunteer charity workers feeding the homeless. With the ability to manipulate reality via cognition alone, he could theoretically reshape the entire universe based on a thought.”

  They were heading for the cross-cylinder transit that would take them back down the spine of the ship to the aft hangar deck and the Lex. If it still existed. If the crew had waited. If they hadn’t been overrun by Savages. More of the gibberish graffiti decorated the tube that led toward the other rail lines.

  “Whoever’s alive aboard this ship is little more than an animal now,” Reina sighed in disgust. “This… Dark Wanderer… has bent and twisted their minds until there’s very little left of whoever they once were back on Earth.”

  “What about… what they can do…” Casper said, and it was clear he meant the powers of the prophetesses he’d witnessed. Because… looking back, years later, he would see that Reina, too, in that moment, had been just as intoxicated by their powers as he had been all along.

  “Real,” said Reina, quickly and earnestly. “They’re all real. And there’s a part of me that knows….” She hesitated. Only the sound of their footsteps could be heard in the irregularly lit darkness of the corridor they were following. “A part of me knows we should just walk away from this. That it’s something humanity was never meant to mess with. That it isn’t even an option with regard to the evolutionary process. We’re not looking at ourselves ten million years from now. We’re looking at monsters coming in from some void in the universe that was sealed off for a reason. Some dark place. Part of me knows that’s the truth. But…”

  And then she added, as though having won some argument within herself, “I know that now. I should’ve known it before… I should have. And I didn’t.”

  They reached the cross-rail transit.

  The transportation hub was now some kind of ghoulish tribal temple. Candles, actual candles, guttered in the barest of breezes beneath shrines to gods that were chime
ras of man’s bones and machine’s parts. Dim dreams of what could be. Sweet jasmine burned on joss sticks beneath altars dedicated to these hoped-for monsters. And every so often they heard the clock and chock of bone chimes.

  Casper cleared the car with his sidearm out, and the medic, Bones, set to figuring out the controls to get the rail line going. By the ghostly blue light of their devices, Reina seemed older. Tired. Weary.

  “How could you have known it would lead to this?” Casper said. He was trying, still trying, to give her some kind of absolution for what she’d unleashed. What he’d seen her do. But was it for her, or for him? He’d never answer that question.

  “After the Obsidia…” she began, then hesitated.

  And in this pause, a terrible history passed over them both once more. Both were suddenly unwilling tourists forced to remember some horrible vacation every time they came across the photos they’d so carefully hidden away. Hoping never to find them ever again. Because, of course, they’d both lived through that terrible vacation in hell. Lived through a long nightmare in which every moment was a never-ending hell in and of itself.

  Whenever some religious nut had tried to put the fear in Casper with their talk of eternal damnation, his reply had always been, “Don’t talk to me about hell. I’ve already been there.”

  Except often, later, in the quiet of his solitary life, he would admit that he was still afraid of going back to hell. Just a taste of it had been enough for him. And the taste itself hinted that yes, true hell might be real enough to consider.

  He shuddered in those moments and felt like he was drowning.

  “After the Obsidia,” Reina started again, “I let go of my old research. I floundered for a time. I’ll admit that, Cas… I was lost. I was really lost.”

  Casper swallowed as the car came to life around them. For no reason, he checked his watch, staring at the old Omega Seamaster. As though he were somehow synching with Rechs out there in the darkness of the tunnels of the ghost ship. Rechs, who had most likely gone off to his death. Or maybe he was just trying to find something to hold on to in a galaxy that seemed to be slipping off into dark waters no one had ever bothered to map.

  But really, he told himself all those years later in that high mountain valley as the giant monster charged at them, really you knew it was because she saw the look on your face in the half-light of that rail car.

  The look that said, Is that why we lost contact after…

  And…

  You knew I loved you.

  “Can you believe I worked as a bartender on Oberon?” laughed Reina in disgust at herself. “In a club where children come to play day and night and all year long. Boozing and drugging themselves to trick themselves into thinking they’re feeling something. I became one of them… if you can believe that. I drank, and danced, and… loved, because…” Her mouth moved, struggling to find the words.

  “Because you wanted to live again,” whispered Casper. Finding them for her.

  She nodded. Her eyes desperate. Desperate for him, and even herself, to understand.

  Casper thought about the people she’d… known then. People who hadn’t known her back on the Challenger and during the rebellion aboard the Obsidia. They’d thought of her as just another lost soul like them, seeking temporary company in the warm tropical nights of paradise Oberon. They’d tasted her lips, probably tasted the salt and lime and tequila the pleasure world was famous for.

  Casper wished he wasn’t Casper. Wished he’d been any once of those strangers who’d had the chance to…

  On any one of those tropical nights. Just the once would have kept him.

  But they never loved her as you did, the voice whispered. Like you always did.

  And do, he added in his head, because that seemed right. True still.

  The transit car started, and they shot off into the darkness along an upward-curving tube. They were fully aware that a ghost ship run by madmen might have obstacles along the rail, and that any such obstacle could kill them with unforgiving physics. But they had no choice. Staying was not an option any longer.

  Reina spoke as though in a trance now, and Casper wondered how long it had been since any of them had slept.

  “Eventually I went sane again and picked up my research once more. But this time I wanted to understand the very nature of the universe. I wanted to know if it was random, or…”

  She stared at him for a moment. Daring him to ask her to explain herself after what she was about to say. Seeing the disbelief forming in his eyes.

  Then she tilted her chin defiantly and told him anyway.

  “I wanted to know if intelligence precedes physicality.”

  Casper eyed her in wonderment. Not totally sure he believed her. Not totally sure he even knew her.

  “Do you mean… Intelligent Design?”

  She nodded. “There are many reasons why it makes sense. But if I’m honest…. none of those mattered to me, Cas. So trust me, it took a long time for me to be completely honest with myself about why I was looking for what I was looking for.”

  “And… why were you looking for… that?”

  Intelligent Design.

  “I wanted justice,” she whispered after a long moment.

  Casper shook his head. Of all the answers he’d expected to hear, that wasn’t one.

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked away. Looked forward and watched the young female medic driving the rail car into the curving tube and the unknown darkness beyond. Only occasionally did they pass through bare fits of ghostly illumination. And somehow that made the darknesses beyond and in between much worse.

  “Those things,” said Reina, staring ahead into that uncertain dark. “That were done to us by… them… by the Pantheon… they couldn’t just be wiped. Couldn’t just be zeroed out on some balance sheet. They couldn’t just get away with it. Because when you think about it… they did. They got away with it. Like… like…” She struggled to find an example. Then she looked at Casper as if only then remembering who he really was. Because the truth was… she had known him. Had watched him when he was a sleeping slave. Had awakened him.

  She had seen inside that tortured mind of his like no other.

  A moment passed between the two of them where he knew, knew she had been able to love him once. Maybe a long time ago. They might have…

  If there hadn’t been Rechs.

  A man who seemed not to care. Immovable in a constantly shifting galaxy of objects and lives. A prominent rock along a dangerous coastline that sailors used to find safe harbors.

  We are all sailors, thought Casper. Except Rechs. He is the lighthouse we steer our courses by.

  Casper knew that she too had held that other possibility of them in her mind, just as he had. But there was something about that giant, immovable rock. It was a safe place to the frightened children of the galaxy.

  “Like the Nazis,” she said finally. “Of ancient Germany. You, with all your history, you know about them, right? All your ‘before’ history acquired in all those books you were always spending your money on. The Nazis who almost burned up the world long before our mothers and fathers succeeded.”

  Casper nodded. “I know of them,” he whispered.

  “And if you know, then you know that right up until the moment they died, they were busy stuffing the innocent into ovens as fast as they possibly could. Like it was some game for them. Like they were trying to break some record, never mind the consequences. And do you know why?” She practically growled at him through gritted teeth in the humming darkness of the speeding rail car. “Do you?”

  Casper said nothing. Because she wasn’t looking for a reply, or an answer, or an insight. Or a lesson by some perpetual amateur historian who’d read all the books that purported to have all the answers.

  She continued. “Because the Nazis knew there
were no consequences for what they were doing. They weren’t religious, contrary to misinformation. They believed in nothing but blood and soil. They were the ultimate Darwinian evolutionists’ murder machine. They knew it was survival of the fittest and that there were no consequences for the ‘winners’ except winning the genetic survival lottery.”

  She looked at him with hard eyes that searched his soul.

  “So I went looking for that to be wrong,” she said bluntly.

  They were coming into a station. To a platform where hopefully they could find a rail car going back down the spine. Back to the Lex.

  What about Rechs, that other voice asked Casper. Your oldest friend. He’s still out there, and he probably isn’t coming back from this one. What about him?

  And yet Casper had seen the look in her eyes. The look that spoke of other worlds than these. Of worlds where it was just him and her, and not Rechs.

  “I wanted justice for the Pantheon on the Obsidia,” Reina said. “I wanted justice for the Nazis and all the mass murderers who ever thought they were going to get away with burning, shooting, and stabbing their way to the top. I wanted them to pay, not just escape into death. And one night, underneath the stars and cruising on narco-tequila, I realized that the only way I was ever getting that was if there was something bigger than all of us. Something… someone… let’s call it God. Call it power. Call it the Grand Weaver. Whoever it was, I wanted someone who made sure the bad people paid in the end on the other side of this joke we call reality. Because if it’s all nothing, then where exactly is the justice for Nazis who get to go on doing what they’re doing right up until death? Where are their ovens? Their torture chambers? Where is their court and who is their judge?”

  She stared at him in the shifting light of the passing tunnel. “If there is someone in charge of all this… then that’s who’ll give us our justice. That’s what hell is for, Casper. And I needed to find out if that was possible.”