Imperator

by Nick Cole

  Then… as the Master had often said, Know you will.

  So move, he told himself. Knowing now what the lesson was. He would confront his fear. His deepest fear. He hadn’t been brought back to save them. He’d been brought back to be set free. To know.

  Except his feet did not move. He remained rooted before the tragedy of his parents. He’d never come back to visit their graves. Never ever. Not in all that time in the orphanage. Not on leave from NASA. Or in the UN Navy. He would never come back here to the place where they were buried.

  He stared around at the silent intersection of ancient buildings. Buildings his father had mined and farmed for salvage. He tried to see them. Tired to see his parents and himself as they’d once been. Tried to see the ghosts of who they once were moving about, as though all the bad things that had happened never did. And never would.

  But he couldn’t.

  So move.

  He waited one moment longer. Just hoping. Hoping to feel some echo of all that he once was before the day, three days prior, that had set him on his course like some starship that cannot be dissuaded from light speed and its final destination.

  Finally he turned, and set out to murder the ones who’d made him.

  The Last Lesson Is the Lesson of Becoming the Thing You Fear

  Part Two

  In the night he made a bar called Spider Mike’s. West of the downtown rubble sites being cleared by the teams working out of the zone, east of the falling moon. He entered looking like any other scavenger/salvager that was so common in those days. He’d smelled the chargrilled meat of the place in the barest of night breezes in the junkyards he’d crossed to get here.

  A gang of desperate dirty children had come with pipes and studded nail boards to take what little he had. He had sensed their menace and hidden himself from their starving minds.

  He’d known of this place, of Spider Mike’s, as a child. But he’d never been here. Other farmer men who worked with his father on the big salvage jobs said it was a good place to go for a drink. They brewed their own liquor and beer, though there were rumors that they used mutie meat for their burgers. Stuff that might not even be cattle, and couldn’t be graded for sale inside the reclamation zone.

  But he was hungry, and he couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten.

  In the temple, eating wasn’t always guaranteed. One got used to not eating more than eating.

  He approached the claptrap honky-tonk, its oldies blaring out across the still night of the surrounding junkyards. Distant gunshots punctuated the night. Bikes and rides were out in the yard in no orderly fashion. Some singer was singing over the static-filled PA system about guitars and Cadillacs, but the student paid it no mind as he pushed the mesh screen door open and made for the neon-adorned bar where crazy-shaped bottles of liquor glowed from the candles set behind them. The bartender was covered in dirty tattoos, and half her face had been horribly burned years ago. She showed a lot of skin and her nicely shaped body to distract from the injury that had never healed. In the moment Casper stood before her, he read her entire life story in her face, and sensed her mind with his.

  A thing he’d learned to do in the temple.

  She was just another girl on the day it all went down.

  A hard life. Years lost in drugs and skin trade just to survive. Finally she’d learned to fight and trade, and she’d clawed her way into this position. Spider Mike’s main lady. Within her mind he could sense a predatory animal that would just as soon knife him as she would pleasure him, depending on which seemed to yield the most profit to her.

  Behind her lay the backlit bottles, and behind those was a dirty cracked mirror that ran the length of the bar. In its reflections he could see all the other people who hadn’t died long ago, drinking to forget all those who had. People left behind by the Savages who were only then starting to become the horror show they would turn into. People who had just barely survived the end of civilization. And people who would inherit the galaxy in just a few short years, once the schematics for the hyperdrive were put on open-source servers. Except they didn’t know that just yet.

  The scarred beauty who was the bartender appraised him, leaned forward, and asked, “Whatcha want?” with a hunger in her eyes that verged on the sociopathic. She’d once been a bank teller. Back on that last day before the end of all things.

  In the dirty dark mirror that was cracked, Casper saw who he had become.

  He’d always been slight. Now he was rippling with bulky muscles from the rigors of the temple. His iron-gray hair was all gone. His skin was tight and drawn over his gleaming skull. Skin that was tanned and lined by the brutal red sun of that lost planet. Drawn tight by the salt-laden wind of the sea. He looked like a brute and a bruiser. Not the dashing naval officer he’d once been.

  But his blue eyes remained the same. If even more so. They stared back at him like gems. Gems burning with fire.

  “Two burgers. Two beers,” he said. His voice was rich and sonorous. Though he’d seldom used it for conversation in all the years at the temple. It was the chanting during the focused meditation that had strengthened it, grown it, grounded it to a deep baritone. Even when he whispered, his voice struck the listener with a heavy presence that could not be ignored. Or denied.

  She made a face that might have been a smirk, then turned away to head for the kitchen.

  He remained still, not moving, as he stared back at himself in the mirror. Smelling the meat begin to grill. Letting the rowdy boasts and machine-gun chatter of the broken and ruined lives all around him fade into the background noise of the galaxy.

  He’d never abided by their pact. The pact made by Rechs, Reina, and himself. He’d thought he had. But really he’d been looking for it all along, though even he hadn’t known it.

  At first he’d justified his quiet inquiries in a thousand different libraries on a hundred old worlds as doing intel. Finding out who, or what, this Dark Wanderer actually was. Surely there were ancient myths and legends that had made their stamp on the story of the galaxy. That’s all. Just seeing who we’re up against, he would’ve told Rechs or Reina if they’d confronted him. But he’d never shared any of his findings with Rechs or Reina.

  His findings were for him.

  He remembered the old scout who had found the Temple of Morghul out beyond the galaxy’s edge, but couldn’t remember exactly where, or how he’d found it. Or how he’d gotten away. Could the Master have allowed that old man to escape? Sent him back, to draw forth someone who was worthy, someone who would seek and one day find the lost planet?

  Then there were the accounts of ancient heroes with fantastic powers from before the age of hyperdrive. He investigated these unexplained phenomena that were so often easily explained… unless they weren’t. And therein lay the few and far between jackpots he waited patiently for. He tracked down anything that smacked of the “supernatural” or “miracles.” Tricks, like those the Dark Wanderer had used to bend the twisted minds of the Savages to his will. To his purposes.

  He, too, could do a “miracle”—right here, right now, in this bar. With what he’d learned in the temple, he could move things with his mind. Break a neck. Send the old rotten furniture flying into the boom box on the shelf, where someone with a heavy voice was singing about a ring of fire, and falling down, down, down into it. He could turn out the lights and knock the building down. He could make them think they were in a storm.

  He could do all that and they’d probably worship him in the end.

  Because to him, to whom he had become, they were just savages now with their mewling little existence, shooting each other down for a few meager scraps of all that once was.

  Or was it he who was the Savage now? Just like the elites who’d left and become post-human. Doing “miracles” with their strange tech. Seeming like gods to the hyperspeed travelers who finally went looking for them after half the
galaxy had been staked and claimed.

  Was he the Savage now?

  He’d been looking in all the cracks and crannies of the universe. Finding things that never should have been found. Watching the Republic turn into a beast that would destroy everything, through the sheer self-indulgent folly of the privileged few he’d never been able to defeat. They were like cockroaches. Every time he stamped out one, ten more scurried for the darkness.

  He’d tried to save the Republic from itself. With war, assassination, intrigue. But in the end he’d realized what so many in the past had also come to know. If the cockroaches could weaken the system for their own gain, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

  It was a broken system. Because the people were broken.

  The Legion had seemed like an answer to everything. It had defeated the Savages in what was the most brutal war of all times; surely it could handle whatever the “other” side of the galaxy decided to throw at civilization. But the monster of government… that was a different problem. It was intent on all the power with none of the sharing. And the Legion couldn’t stop it. Even during the Savage Wars, even during those glory days of brave and capable legionnaires, the cracks had begun to show. The Legion was crumbling, ever so slightly, beneath the oppressive weight of the perpetual do-gooders who didn’t actually do any good for anyone beyond themselves. And once the Savage Wars ended, the balance of power shifted—fast. The Republic no longer felt it needed the Legion, and it wasted no time taking steps to reduce its power. To control it.

  Casper could see what would happen next as clearly as if it lay before him. The cracks were beginning to appear. So thin you could barely detect them, but in time, the Legion would be, at best, a useless praetorian guard protecting the House of Reason from the greedy masses. They could even become as bad as the House of Reason itself, if they chose to.

  The war would end, but the rot had set in. That was all too clear.

  And you created the Republic. And Rechs created the Legion. All in an attempt to save the galaxy from whatever the Dark Wanderer was. And in the end, neither of you could save the Republic from itself, much less the unknown threats waiting on the other side of the curtain of reality.

  And Reina….

  Missing. Gone dark. Maybe even dead. One last transmission telling Casper she’d been up to everything he’d been up to. She’d seen the writing on the wall, had known the stakes, had taken the same chances.

  And she’d never returned.

  The scarred bartender set down a chipped plate with two burgers. She added a lascivious wink, giving the student a generous view of her goods while pulling two mismatched brown beer bottles from a cooler beneath the bar.

  Casper regarded her for a long moment before taking up the first burger and biting into it like some hungry monster surfacing from the deeps of time. Its juice ran down onto his scarred and calloused hand. He chewed once, twice, tasting garlic and even… mayonnaise. Then he swallowed.

  He closed his eyes.

  He felt whatever he’d become fade away for a moment. He felt some lost connection of what he’d once been signaling to him from out across the distance of a dark and storm-tossed ocean on a rainy night. Like some passing ship in the stellar dark reminding him he had once been these people around him.

  He finished that burger. Popped one of the beers and drank it down in one cold gulp. He emitted a gusty “ahhhhh” and belched. Then he finished the second burger and downed the last beer. He left the bar, selected a ride in the parking lot, and slid behind the wheel of the ancient armored muscle car adorned with impact damage and bullet holes. It was black.

  He sensed the trap that had been laid upon it, and within his mind he reached out and disabled the gel-ignite canisters beneath the fuel tanks. He forced the vehicle to rumble to life without a key, and a moment later he was headed north with the night, leaving the dead city behind.

  In time he picked up their trail. At an armored gas station beyond the Sepulveda Pass. Out in the valley, which he remembered as a child to be a wild place akin to an old frontier filled with wild stories of survival, as told by travelers who stopped by to visit with his father. A grizzled oldster gave him the information he sought. He didn’t have to be coaxed, persuaded, or dominated. Merely asked.

  “Them boys ain’t what they seem,” said the oldster, speaking of the bikers knows as the Goths. “I know wild when I see it. I know’d crazy too. Was friends with it on occasion. They’d act the part, shore ’nuff. But they somethin’ more.”

  Casper felt the cold sweat on his back. One hand shook ever so slightly, and he stared at it until it stopped. None of them possessed what he wielded. None of them knew what he knew. So… why so afraid?

  Yes, whispered that other voice. Why so afraid, boy?

  For Casper, who had just given the man all the cash he could find in the old armored muscle car to top off the tanks, the fear started under the hot white blaze of the station outpost’s neon lights. Out beyond the ramshackle salvage walls as the gentle gloaming of the night was coming on. Flights of dark crows, grown bold and numerous off the scavenging of bodies left by the war, crossed the deep blue sky turning to purple hush, like tiny flapping shadows in the night. Cawing and crowing to one another.

  Right then the student’s fear began.

  He felt it take hold of him like a cold iron hand whose grip would never relent. There was no after, no release in that fear-struck moment of forever. After all, these were the Goths he’d fled from, knowingly and unknowingly, for all these years. He controlled his breath, because it was all he could do, and in time he got hold of his mind. Taking the reins of rationality in hand once more. He screwed in the cap on the gas tank and thanked the oldster. Moments later he blew out of there in a screech of tired grit that sent the dust of destruction blooming into the night once more.

  The Goths made their camps up along the “one-oh-one,” the oldster had said, east of the ruins of a place the old man called “San Barbara.” If he would find them, he would find them there.

  Before dawn he came upon one of their patrols. He spotted them on the highway ahead, wound up and making for the coast. Out to sea the sun was throwing its light over the tops of the mountains and turning the ocean all gold and blue at once. He mashed the accelerator hard and came up on them faster than they suspected. He tried to run the rearmost bikers down, and he got two of them, but the rest scattered, one dropping his bike and kissing the pavement in a long slide. He was doing well over a hundred.

  He dropped through the gears, hit the brakes, and heard the tires squeal as he threw the car around at the top of the rise.

  They were on him in an instant.

  With a wave of his hand he swept one biker skyward, bike and all. But three passed, one firing and another hitting him in the throat with a small hard chain. It knocked the air from him, and he was down on his knees, struggling to breathe. It felt like he’d been hit in the throat with a baseball bat.

  Two bikers circled him now, hitting him with their chains. The third, off his bike at the side of the road, was trying to reload a pistol.

  He was blacking out, and the fear had hold of him. He tired to use what he’d learned within the temple, but none of it would come, and all he heard was the sound of himself choking. It sounded like Gothhhh in his ears.

  If he was going to die… he thought to himself… then he didn’t have time to be afraid. Not anymore. Not now. Not of these monsters.

  He got hold of their chains with his mind and sent them flailing around the bikers’ own necks. Both bikes dropped as each man struggled with the hard iron coil about his own neck.

  The student clenched his fist. Those chains would never budge. Now he stood, straightened, and made for the man reloading the pistol. The man chambered a round, raised the weapon—and felt it fly from his fingers. A moment later the student had his own iron grip around the man’s dirty throat. He rai
sed him off the ground with one arm. The man gagged.

  “Where are the rest of you?”

  The man shook his head, fear in his bulging eyes.

  “Tell me now!”

  The man gagged and sputtered. “Road… north of Santa Barbara. East… Totems lead the way.”

  The student broke the biker’s neck and tossed the man aside.

  He drove through the rest of what remained of the night.

  Just after dawn he pulled off into the cracked parking lot of an old hotel that looked out over the sea. He lay back, drained and tired, feeling his body shake softly. In time he would grow strong. The more he used what he’d learned, the more… powerful, but that was the wrong word, the Master had used another… something more similar, but not quite, to “knowing”… he would become. He slept through the day, and when night came on he continued on up the highway toward the ruins of the old seaside village.

  Toward the road that led to the lair of the Goths.

  The Last Lesson Is the Lesson of Becoming the Thing You Fear

  Part Three

  Beyond the silent and fire-gutted ruins of Santa Barbara he found an ancient road headed east into the coastal mountains. The road wound and climbed the heights, and he passed strange totems, illuminated by the muscle car’s one working headlight. The totems, clearly meant to warn him away, were made up of the remains of men and birds, crows, crucified and made into almost artistic chimeras. Like those he’d found long ago on the Moirai. Except… that hadn’t happened yet.

  He sensed them before he came upon them. Sensed their menace for everything. Their rage to survive. Their fear of nothing.

  Just as he’d learned to within the temple.

  “Height nor depth has not the power,” the Master had taught. “Neither on a side it is. You determine how great it can be used. Which side it will serve.”