by Jay Allan
“I do not call the empire home.” Blackhawk’s tone was cold, almost like space itself, and in its icy strands, the others could almost feel the hatred.
“That’s okay, but you’re among friends, and this place is far away from your empire,” Amanda replied, her tone soothing.
“That much is clear.” Blackhawk looked around at the bar. He knew he spoke only the obvious, but he’d seen a chance to try to direct the line of questioning away from himself and he’d taken it.
But Floribeth’s next words washed away any hope of success.
“Arkarin, it sort of feels as if you’ve had a rough go of it to get to where you are now,” she said. She reached over and pushed his glass forward. “Why don’t you take a drink and tell us about it?”
Blackhawk hadn’t intended to drink. All he wanted was to find out how he had gotten there and how to get back home…and he was willing to employ considerable coercion to secure the cooperation he needed. His pistol, its aged grip well-worn, hung from his right hip, and his short sword from the left, both ready for action as always. But BOB was strangely compelling, and something about the difference in the bar, and in the space that housed it, seemed to disarm Blackhawk’s defenses. Before he even realized it, he was speaking candidly about himself.
About how he came to the Far Stars. About how he went from brutal imperial general to smuggler and pirate, and finally, to rebel leader, and the scourge of the empire.
“I served the emperor in my early years.” The statement was matter-of-fact, and yet, there were subtleties in it, and hints of secrets deeper even than those Blackhawk was prepared to reveal. “I was an imperial general…” He paused, even the cold and resolute core that usually drove him failing to prevent the delay, as images of all he’d done rose to the surface of his thoughts. “I was an imperial general…” he repeated. Another pause, although whether the hesitation was driven by resistance or humility, even Blackhawk didn’t know. “The best. Perhaps the deadliest who had ever served an emperor.”
The others sat quietly while they listened to Blackhawk.
“I worshipped the emperor and led his fleets and armies. I killed for him. The forces I commanded slaughtered uncounted millions, and none who rebelled against imperial rule, or even thought of it in the most passing way, escaped the fear of Frigus Umbra.”
“’Frigus Umbra?’” Floribeth asked.
“Yes, that was my name. Is my true name. Arkarin Blackhawk is a designation I took—stole—from a man I killed.”
Ark, you are not behaving in accordance with your own cautious norms regarding information.
Blackhawk hesitated, as he often did when the AI implanted in his head and connected to his thoughts spoke to him. He thought of it as speech, at least, although he knew it all took place in the neurons of his brain, without any sound detectable to those around him. It had driven him mad for a long time after that day years earlier when he’d awakened with the strange presence in his mind and a nasty scar on his partially-shaved head. Even after he’d made his peace with the AI who was now, in some ways, at least, part of him, the distrust remained. HANDAIS—the clumsy acronym the mysterious device used as a name—had saved Blackhawk’s life more than once even, depending on one’s specific analysis of various misadventures. Despite the fact that the machine, if “machine” was even the right term for the unfathomable entity, had only ever aided him, his cold cynicism would never let him truly accept the AI as a friend.
This is not a normal situation, is it? Blackhawk flashed the thought to the AI with more than a bit of caustic edge. There was no response, which was typical when he scored a point.
“You say you ‘served’ this emperor, past tense. “Did you resign from his service?” Kelsey asked, unaware of the conversation Blackhawk was having in his head.
Blackhawk snorted, an abortive laugh he stopped just a bit too late to completely hide. He shook his head and looked right at the two sensors the robot used as eyes. “One does not resign from the emperor’s service. There are far faster and easier ways to die than that.”
“Yet you no longer serve him?” Kelsey inquired.
“No, I do not serve him now. I would die before I would serve him again.” Ark chided himself silently for the looseness of his words, but he continued to speak, nevertheless. “I deserted. Left my command post one day and never returned.”
Bethany Anne’s lip quirked. “You decided he was unjust? That you could no longer remain in his service?”
A derisive laugh briefly escaped Blackhawk’s lips. “Just? Justice was not a concept that concerned me then. I was born into imperial service…if ‘born’ is the correct term for the way I came into being.”
“Whatever your life became, surely you were born somewhere. You had parents,” Charline said.
“I had none. Or a hundred. It depends on your viewpoint. Yet, whoever they were, I never knew any of them.”
“I can sympathize with that. I didn’t know mine until much later in life,” Amanda commented.
“A hundred parents? How’s that possible?” Charline asked, leaning toward him.
Blackhawk hesitated once more, his natural caution seeking once again to assert itself, and failing under the strange effects the bar and the space that housed it. “I was…manufactured. I am a creature born into an imperial breeding program, the greatest creation of an effort twenty generations long, one conceived by the greatest scientists of the empire.”
“Your DNA was manipulated? To make you stronger? More capable?” Kelsey asked.
“To make me a remorseless killer and nearly invincible.”
Bethany Anne nodded. “That I understand. Seems like no matter what the universe, there are some bastards always fucking with the DNA.”
BOB approached the table and took Blackhawk’s glass, the one the grim adventurer had just emptied. He refilled it from an ancient-looking decanter and set it down again.
“And, you served that purpose? You killed for the emperor? Destroyed his enemies?” Bethany Anne inquired.
“I destroyed any he sent me against. For years, I led my forces against rebellious worlds, killing enemy soldiers and civilians alike without the slightest thought of whether my victims were despicable villains or virtuous heroes. I was above such considerations. Or below.”
“Why did you follow such orders and serve such a ruthless ruler? For coin? The rewards of glory, or simply because you feared to resist?” Rika asked.
Blackhawk felt a surge of anger at the pointed questions, especially the last. “I fear nothing. Death would be only a relief, and the imperial torturers in their subterranean cells are but a minor concern to me.” It was pride behind the words, he knew, as well as anger. Arkarin Blackhawk was many things. He had been a hero of sorts, and a villain. He had traveled across the empire and to the Far Stars as well, visited hundreds of worlds, and fought countless battles. There was one thing he had never been, though...a coward.
“You don’t fear death? You seek it?” Floribeth asked, clearly surprised.
“I long sought the relief of death. I laughed at it and challenged it to take me in a hundred places, yet it is my fate to endure and carry my burdens forward. I have purpose ahead of me yet; tasks I must complete before rest can come.”
“Death isn’t hard to find if you truly want it. Maybe you’ve chosen life but you just don’t realize it,” Amanda suggested. “Even for a mighty warrior, maybe you’re less anxious to die than you think. Clearly, you’ve chosen to live.”
“I have chosen nothing.” Blackhawk’s mind reeled with memories of the past, shadowy images of imperial conditioning. Of endless sessions extending through childhood and beyond, of the ways the imperial psychologists had shaped him, formed him…created the monster the emperor required.
“You look like a hard-ass warrior, and you said you’ve got some butt-kicking capabilities,” Floribeth said. “You must have made decisions to avoid death and survive.”
Blackhawk didn’t respond at
once. He had indeed tried to court death for many years, to no avail. Instead of yielding, of allowing an enemy to strike a final blow, he had fought like a demon to survive. He’d resisted the doom that had so often tried to take him, yet choice had played little role in any of that.
“I made no decisions. None of my own, at least.” He hesitated again. He was delving into deeply uncomfortable thoughts and memories…flashes of his past—of himself—that threatened to shatter the self-image he’d so painstakingly rebuilt over the years. “The imperial conditioning—I broke some of it, enough to regain control over most of my actions, but the self-preservation instincts were implanted deeply, and they remain strong.”
“All people have instincts to survive. You’re no different than anyone else in that,” Floribeth told him, sitting back as if convinced she’d made a point.
“I am different. Men and women consumed by despair can and do take their own lives. Those stricken with painful and fatal illnesses can choose to end their suffering. I cannot. I have tried.” His mind reeled with memories of guilt, misery, and hopelessness—and a grim resolution to end it all, always with the same result. He could not do it.
Images of battles flashed before him as well, desperate struggles when he’d come close to defeat and the strange strength that had come to him from desperation, the inability to simply allow defeat—death—to come. Deadly struggles, opponents coming at him from all around, and yet, always the same ending. Standing in place, covered in blood and surrounded by the bodies of enemies. Still alive, as always.
“Your conditioning does not allow you to give up? That’s a great strength, right?” Cain asked.
Blackhawk’s first impulse was to send back a caustic response. His conditioning, the inability to surrender, to give up… It had caused him much pain, yet there was no doubt it had made him strong as well and contributed to his victories. The black ones won in the service of the emperor and those that had come since, ones from which he sometimes allowed himself to draw tenuous shreds of personal pride.
“That is a complex question. It has aided me in battle, no doubt, but such strength comes at a cost.”
“All things carry a cost, Blackhawk,” Amanda replied. “I think most people around this table have paid a heavy price for at least some of their actions, so you’re not alone in that regard. I know we’re laughing and joking tonight, but don’t mistake that for something it isn’t. Sometimes you just need to cut loose. So anyway, if you’re not in this empire now, how did you get out?”
Blackhawk remained silent, feeling the same urges he always did when someone pushed him for details or tried to probe into his past. But despite the anger and the defensive impulse to move to hostility, he found himself replying, his voice calm, the defensive storm constrained within his thoughts.
“Deltara.” A pause. “It was a rebel world, a planet some distance from the imperial capital but still within the heavily-populated central zone. A leader had emerged there, one who possessed considerable charisma. He’d begun as most such do—as a rabble-rouser speaking on street corners and drawing some crowds…until the imperial secret police intervened. But his support had risen quickly, and soon he was too powerful to remove by simple means. The mobs rallied to his side and protected him, and the imperial authorities were quickly overrun. Many of the emperor’s servants were killed, and the newly elected Deltaran Congress declared the planet’s independence.
“From the way you speak of your emperor, I—” Charline started before Blackhawk interrupted.
“He is not my emperor.” Blackhawk spoke coldly, and his words gave them insight into the rage and hatred he carried within him.
“I apologize. From the way you have described the emperor, I imagine such things happened frequently.”
“You underestimate the power of fear.” Blackhawk paused, looking down for a moment as a wave of silent regret came over him. “I was an instrument of that greatest weapon of the emperor. The imperial battleships are great displays of might and power, as are his seemingly endless legions, and yet to use those implements, to send his war machine into action, was costly. Thriving worlds full of factories produced great wealth and a continued flow of taxes and tribute to the imperial court. Blasted and wrecked worlds, their industry reduced to radioactive slag, produced little. Fear was a weapon that cost the emperor nothing, and one he sought to maintain at all costs.”
“And yet it failed on Deltara? Fear failed there?” Amanda asked.
“Yes. On those few occasions when fear did not manage to control the imperial masses, it was left to me to…restoke…its effectiveness. To remind the people of the cost of defiance.”
“You led your forces to Deltara? Your battleships and legions?” Rika asked.
Blackhawk nodded, then added, “The emperor’s battleships and his legions.”
“Of course,” Rika agreed, nodding for Blackhawk to continue.
“Yes, I led forces to Deltara. My orders were clear, the same as they always were: to crush the rebellion. The emperor was protective of his industry and the assets that fed the imperial machine, but when a world crossed the line, brutality became the only focus. His command was simple, the benchmark unchanged from any campaign I had undertaken. The rebels were to know the cost of their defiance, and the scars were to endure in the sinews of life on that world through the living memory of all who survived, and for generations of their descendants. The treatment of a rebel world was the fuel that powered the machinery of imperial terror.”
“So you attacked Deltara? Killed its people?” Kelsey asked slowly.
“We killed many. The battleships bombarded the surface, destroyed anything likely to aid whatever minimal defense the rebels were able to mount. Then the legions landed.”
Kelsey blanched, obviously horrified.
“You could have killed everyone from orbit, right?” Bethany Anne asked.
“Easily, but dead bodies and lifeless, uninhabited worlds are quickly forgotten. Broken, subservient planets and their scarred and traumatized inhabitants sustain recollection. They remain examples of the cost of rebellion.”
“That’s a tactical truth,” Bethany Anne agreed. “No matter how heinous, it’s the truth.”
“I understand why you carry so much guilt for what you’ve done, Blackhawk,” Floribeth said quietly without judgment, one warrior to another. It was just a statement of bare fact.
Blackhawk was silent for a moment. The Navy pilot and Bethany Anne had said nothing except what he’d always believed, and yet there was no way for him to express the self-hatred he had felt for so long. His story still wasn’t complete.
“I landed ten legions…a million soldiers. The rebels, at least those who remained under arms after the bombardments, were poorly armed and organized. The fighting, at least when we caught up with any but the most organized bands of defenders, was more like some kind of hunt. My soldiers slaughtered all who faced them, and imposed the emperor’s punishment on millions of others—civilians, helpless and cowering, begging in vain for mercy.”
Blackhawk took a deep breath. His mind had traveled back—decades now—and he looked out from the eyes not of Arkarin Blackhawk, Far Stars adventurer, but of Frigus Umbra, the emperor’s most terrible and capable minion, a man who had left a legacy of fear across dozens of worlds.
“We rounded up huge groups, and in punishment for the rebels who remained active, the executioners worked night and day. Every imperial soldier killed was avenged by a hundred Deltari. Every day of continued resistance began with a thousand executions.”
“Did such measures work? Did those still in opposition to imperial rule yield?” Charline asked.
“Many surrendered, although they had to have known that only death awaited them. Perhaps they sacrificed themselves in the hope that their families and loved ones would be spared. Such hopes were baseless, of course, showing only desperation or ignorance of the emperor’s ruthlessness.” Blackhawk paused for a few seconds. “Some remained in the
fight, though, and the campaign endured far longer than I’d expected. The Deltari showed more spirit and endurance to resist than any I had faced before.”
“And, you hated them for it,” Floribeth stated, looking at Blackhawk. “But you respected them too, didn’t you?”
Blackhawk didn’t respond, but his silence was answer enough.
“So what did you do next?” Ridge asked.
“We continued the campaign, and gradually, we hunted down each group of fugitives. We...killed them all.”
Blackhawk stopped again, sitting silently for a moment. Then he continued, this time unbidden.
“It was close to the end of the struggle. We’d hunted down most of the rebels, and the planet, despite our efforts to preserve as much industry as possible, was in ruins. I was in my headquarters, aides all around as well as the sounds of various comm units, of orders being issued and received—a din that suddenly seemed too much for me. I needed a moment to myself.”
Blackhawk grabbed the drink the bartender had poured for him, slugging it down in one gulp.
“We were in the capital of a regional province, the last true hotbed of resistance. We’d moved into the closing stages of the pacification, but the situation in the immediate area was still pretty hot. The rebellion had mostly been broken, but we were still fighting the diehards.”
He paused again. “I was standing in the HQ listening to reports, and suddenly something came over me. I felt the need to get out, at least for a few minutes. I gestured for the officer making the reports to stop, and I just walked out the door. It took two more waves to stop my guards from following me, and a third to hold them still in place once they realized I was heading for the checkpoint leading out of the secured area, but they knew better than to defy me.” The coldness in that last sentence carried more meaning than the words.