Imperator

by Nick Cole

  “We have to,” she’d pleaded.

  “Why? Why do we have to destroy ourselves? Do we think we’ll be the ones to beat a thing no one else has beaten? Isn’t that what every junkie gambler thinks on their way to losing yet another paycheck? Or a drunk on their way to the drink? Or a drug addict handling the injector? This time… things will be different?”

  “We made contact, Cas,” she whispered softly across the ether that connected them for the very last time ever. “There’s a galaxy full of them out there. And they’re trying to get in. We have to be ready when they come. We have to fight them with their own weapons. We have to…”

  “Who?” he asked.

  But he knew.

  The Dark Wanderer.

  Somewhere out there, beyond the dark between the galaxies, across the incalculable gulfs that made even hyperspace seem slow… were more of them.

  “No,” he said, and didn’t really mean it. Because hadn’t he been looking for it all along? Hadn’t he needed a reason to find the lost planet and the Temple of Morghul? Here was the reason. She was practically giving it to him on a silver platter. She was practically giving herself to him… finally.

  “There is another way…” she said.

  And it was everything he could do to close the contact. Finger shaking. Thinking at the time that he would be able to convince her to reason at some other time.

  Except she disappeared after that. And not even the entirety of the Repub Navy, or all the intelligence services, or even Rechs himself, would ever find her. It was as if she simply vanished from the galaxy.

  Except you found her, he remembered as the Dark Wanderer fought with all its screeching power to toss the vehicle down on top of him.

  Yes, he remembered. I blocked that out in the temple. But I found her there.

  Once, she too had been a student. Long before he’d arrived. After she’d disappeared. The temple was littered with the skeletons of those who had failed some lesson. He’d never found her bones… but he knew she lay among them. Done to death by some lesson that couldn’t be passed. Failed where he had succeeded. He’d known that, found it while meditating on failure in a dark and forgotten place lost in the temple deeps.

  Or maybe, that fading child’s voice of his from long ago whispered, maybe that other way, the one Reina had found, was on another planet, lost like this one.

  No, he grunted, and he fought to wrest control of the hovering multi-ton vehicle from the creature looming above.

  No, he told himself again. Maybe somewhere in that graveyard of ships beyond the temple, out in the waters of the ocean, shimmering beneath the waves, you’ll find a small light freighter and the skeleton of a girl you once knew long ago.

  A girl you once loved.

  The student felt the Crux at the center of the massive vehicle being lifted overhead. With his mind he reached out and took hold of it, wrenched it away from the being that opposed him. Ice water flooded his soul as he made mental contact with the thing’s mind. And in that instant he was suddenly aware of just how hungry the thing was. And… how weak the Dark Wanderer really was also. Yes, it had near limitless power. But there was no knowing in it. Regarding the Crux… it was little more than an animal.

  It was like a simple dumb battery. All power. No intelligence.

  The Dark Wanderer, for all its searching, had no idea what the Crux really was. That was what the student found inside the ancient thing’s mind. Beyond the millennia of torment and pain and images of some fantastic civilization that had spanned the galaxy long ago, ruling from star towers, the thing had no idea what the Crux was.

  It just had power.

  The student, fighting the power of the creature, shifted the massive weight of the hovering wheeled vehicle over the Dark Wanderer’s head. He pulled the gleaming sword from the creature’s claws.

  Its shroud seemed to reach out for the weapon as it strode toward the student, crosssing the distance between them.

  Holding the sword now, the student forced himself to dig deep and overpower the Dark Wanderer, overcome its hold on the vehicle. But it would not relent. It would never relent. This battle would only go so far before the sheer, unknowing power of the creature wore him out.

  So he let go.

  He let go and raced forward before the creature known as the Dark Wanderer realized what was happening. Instead it remained intent on not letting the vehicle crush it. And in that instant the student drove the gleaming sword straight through the being, cutting it in half as he raced past and out from under the hovering vehicle. A moment after that the vehicle surrendered to gravity and smashed down on the Dark Wanderer.

  He was back inside the temple. Inside the central tower that was like a wide oven open to the dark night sky above.

  The Master was there. Just as he had been from the start. Legs and arms folded in meditation.

  “Finished you are now.”

  The student who was no longer a student fell to the ground. He was breathing heavily. Spent beyond anything he’d ever known.

  He heard the tiny creature approach him. The creature he’d followed for so long. Once, long ago, it had followed him through the jungles and across the desert.

  “What is your name now?” asked the Master.

  “What were you afraid of?” asked Urmo.

  The man who had once been Casper Sullivan got to one knee. He saw the galaxy aflame. Saw the inevitable ruin of the Republic. Saw the vain death of the Legion he’d helped form. Saw none of it able to stand against the things Reina had warned him, and him alone, of. Saw the images from the probe they’d sent into another galaxy. The Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

  Saw things that were demons. Their madness. Their enigmatic structures that dwarfed Dyson spheres and spoke of torture and imprisonment.

  “I was afraid of the Goths, Master,” he whispered. “But they are dead now.”

  “What will your name be?” asked the Master.

  What was it? What had it been when he’d been a child? A captain? A legionnaire?

  He tried to remember. But it didn’t matter now. He wasn’t that person anymore. Those persons.

  He heard the sound of himself whispering long ago, and just a few minutes ago. Standing over the graves of… whoever he’d once been.

  “Sullus,” he whispered.

  The little Master chuckled as the flames began to rise at the center of the temple. His voice was a low papery rasp now. And it was old. As old as the galaxy since it first began to spin. Inside the temple those flames leapt to life inside the large bowl that was probably last alight eons ago with sacrifice and carnage in bloody delight. Above, over the rim of the tower, the stars of his galaxy formed.

  “Then arise, Goth Sullus. The time of your destiny… is now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Present

  All of that was a long time ago.

  Since then he had returned to the galaxy. Forged a rebellion. Then a fleet. A Legion of his own. And finally… an empire.

  And yes, he and Rechs had finally met out there on the edge of the galaxy. But Rechs’s memory had faded. For centuries his mind had stayed sharp, sharper even than Casper’s, but something had happened to him after the Savage Wars. Perhaps he’d needed those wars, that cause. Needed it to remember who he was. Why he was. Needed a cause, a purpose. Like Casper had. And Reina.

  Casper had searched his friend’s mind when again they met. He was still as tough and determined as ever. Living steel. But he had no idea why he was still just waiting out there. His best friend was like a watchdog that had forgotten what it was watching for. He saw himself as a bounty hunter now, hunted by the Legion he’d built.

  But that was another story.

  And the defeat of Tyrus Rechs had been no story at all.

  Goth Sullus had merely broken the man’s neck with a flick of his w
rist, bending the powers of the Crux to do his bidding. To do what needed doing. He’d felt no strange tinge of friendship or melancholy as he stripped the iconic Mark I armor of the Moirai off the body of his dead friend. He’d even searched for the feeling, daring it to hide somewhere within him.

  And hadn’t killing Rechs been a kind of mercy after all? What the galaxy had failed time and time again to give his friend was an honorable death in combat. Goth Sullus had provided that final of all gifts. Later, as the night winds came up on the backwater desert world, he’d burned what remained of his oldest of friends with a pyre Goth Sullus had made himself.

  And from that moment forward, there was no one to stop him from destroying the Republic and installing an empire to do what the feeble-minded demagogues of the House of Reason had never had the guts to do. Rule by benevolent dictatorship. Do what was the best thing to be done and ignore the mewling of the kittens and whining sheep of the galaxy.

  Except now, at this crucial moment after the great victory of Tarrago, when the empire he’d forged was just beginning to rise, his own generals, a cabal of power-hungry men just like any he’d find within the House of Reason, sensed their moment of taking. Of looting. Of destroying what was his. He was wounded. Badly wounded from the Battle on the Tarrago moon. The armor was being re-forged several decks away. They knew he was powerful. And they knew he was weak at this moment. So they’d sent their assassins, in the form of his own troops.

  If one is to have power, then one must gamble. It was almost a thing he could feel as he reached out to touch their shadowy images… the image of them letting the dice fly. Like bikers on the road. And howling Savages in the outer dark. They were takers who took.

  So it would be now.

  Two companies of shock troopers comprising ex-legionnaires, two HK-SK mechs in case he dared try to escape via his personal shuttle on his private hangar deck, and beyond the ship… he could sense fighter support. Willing to attack the ship just to get him.

  “Pathetic,” he heard himself murmur as he hobbled to seal the blast door to this deck. His personal guard was gone. So they’d thrown in too, he realized with disgust and contempt.

  Well, he thought to himself, they really have no idea what they’re dealing with.

  He’d just reached the upper platform that guarded the entrance to his inner sanctum aboard the battleship Imperator when behind him, the blast door irised open from all four corners. Instantly the dark legionnaires he called his shock troopers were shooting en masse at him from the corridor beyond. Red-hot blaster fire filled the wide passage. The shock troopers were positioned behind cover all down the corridor, their dark armor gleaming like greased lightning as they fired and shifted positions to get closer to him.

  He absorbed the first shot that would have hit him. Channeled the Crux into a temporary deflector field that lasted but the instant it took the bolt to almost hit him. Then he swept his hand across his body, throwing a field that redirected any nearby blaster bolts away from him as he scrambled, as best as his wounded body would allow, back into his private sanctum.

  If he’d had Rechs’s Mark I armor, he wouldn’t have needed to use his powers to defend himself. That ancient armor still defied the best engineers in the galaxy in its ability to protect the wearer. But then again, none of those engineers had access to the Quantum Library.

  Never mind that, he told himself as the darkness of his private deck swallowed him into its gray and blue shadows.

  Already the shock troopers were swarming forward into his chambers. “Idiots,” he swore under his breath as he sent a wave of energy at one of the troopers who’d come too far forward too fast. The man was thrown back against a bulkhead in an instant and knocked unconscious. Never mind the broken back.

  I’m using too much of the too little I have, thought Sullus as he sensed how much access to the Crux was at his disposal. How much of it he could reach out and touch. Control. Shift. Bend to his will beyond the screaming pain of his wounded frame.

  He didn’t chastise the assassins for coming for him. He’d known all along that such a moment must come in the march toward total domination of the galaxy. That the wolves he’d formed would have to try the pack leader to know that he was indeed… their leader. And if he was to remain the pack leader, then he had to face this test. Now.

  With his body working as best it could despite his wounds, he pulled himself deeper into the lower columns of power control bulkheads that supported his meditation chamber above. He could sense them coming into the shadowy darkness, sweeping the gloom and scanning for him.

  Sullus stopped and pinned himself behind a power column. Out of sight he could feel the warm hum of the powerful processors at his back. Display lights and readouts spoke softly in the quiet of this hidden place. He closed his eyes and focused as he tried to build up more of the Crux for his next engagement. He could only think to give ground and make them pay with each step.

  But there was only so much ground to give.

  There was at least one company coming for him here. Now. Where was the other company of shock trooper assassins? He could try to reach out and sense their location, but even that little trick would cost him the precious energy he needed to defend himself in the right now of this desperate moment.

  The line of highly disciplined combat veterans that were his shock troopers coming for him were just a few power columns away. He stilled the beat of his own heart. Their sensors could detect that if they’d switched over to that imaging mode. For a moment, a long moment, his heart stopped. His blood ceased to move. He was as still as a corpse.

  In his mind he floated in an immense pool of darkness. Around him, ancient leviathans as old as time swam in the shadows deeps.

  A shock trooper appeared next to him on the other side of a nearby power column. But he was looking in the wrong direction as he swept past the column, searching for the target.

  Sullus opened slitted eyes.

  “There he is,” he whispered to the feeble-minded soldier.

  The man shot his nearest squad mate with a blaster bolt. Suddenly blaster fire was everywhere.

  Sullus threw his heart into overdrive and moved fast, very fast, watching as blaster fire came at him from all directions, but to him it was as though all of it, each individual shot, was moving through some incredibly dense liquid. He could hear the chatter of their voices inside their comm. The frantic calls about where they thought he was. The last groans and yelps of those upon whom he dealt sudden deadly blows of energy as he evaded their targeting. Getting as close as he could, he hammered the troopers with intense bursts of the Crux at close range. The cost to him was less this way. The damage to his attackers was great.

  When he’d cleared the nearest troopers, he grabbed one with the invisible hand that was the Crux and smashed the man into the low ceiling. Then he sent a broad wave of power against an entire squad that had targeted him for concentrated fire as the man he’d smashed into the ceiling fell back to the deck. The shock troopers went sprawling, and Goth Sullus hobbled away into the forest of power columns, now sending surges of wild and unrestricted power into the conduits all around. Within moments the entire deck was alive with the blue fire of released electrical explosions that fried the surviving shock troopers of that company in snapping explosions that cooked them inside their high-tech armor.

  One down, he thought, and he hobbled up the dais to his personal meditation chamber within the innermost sanctum. Before him, the wide impervisteel-laced window that looked out on the galaxy waited. Stars like tiny bits of shattered crystal shimmered out there in the deep distances. And it was his, even if they didn’t know it yet. It was his.

  He could sense more now. In the heights above his meditation chamber. His once loyal personal guard had flipped, and now they were merely waiting for the order to shoot him down, should he appear.

  Who was giving the orders? wondered Sullus.r />
  And…

  I’m weak. Better to admit that than not.

  And then his personal guard was firing at him from the dark heights three stories above the central deck. Their aim was perfect. Because of course they’d been the best of the Legion. Handpicked to defend him. It took almost all the Crux he had left to deflect their fire as he stumbled into his sleeping quarters and away from the central meditation dais.

  I need a weapon, he thought, and for the first time wondered if they might not get away with this today. Didn’t they realize he’d come all this way to save them from…?

  Didn’t he realize that perhaps this might be his last day?

  A hot blaster shot hit him in the thigh, and he leapt forward through a blast door that he closed with his mind behind him.

  This bought him only a moment.

  A last moment that felt like all the last moments he’d ever faced.

  Already the other squad of Dark Legionnaires who’d turned assassin were flooding the central chamber. They’d either cut through the blast doors or used a bridge override to force them open in order to get to him. He had but a moment now.

  Focus, he yelled at himself inside his mind.

  It’s not about power. It never was. It’s about knowing.

  Except that his mind was having a hard time focusing with the intense and searing pain from the blaster shot that had nailed him in the thigh. And with the awareness that all his plans, all his efforts, were about to be wasted by yet another group of power-hungry tyrants trying to take for themselves what he had built.

  He screamed and got to his feet. He was sweating in rivulets. His breath came in short gasps as he tried to control the pain and focus his mind in order to access the powers of the Crux.

  They’d taken the House of Reason from him and turned it into their personal clubhouse to line their own pockets with wealth and power. It had never been intended for that. Just like the once-powerful legion of Tyrus Rechs had been intended to protect the weak from the strong. To save the galaxy from tyrants. Instead it had become a tyrant in its own way.