Empire's End

by Chris Bunch

  Sten lunged… and the Emperor threw himself back, across the tabletop, whirling, and was on his feet.

  Feint… bob…

  The Emperor doublefist-smashed the table and the plas shattered. Sten's knife flicked out… and first blood ran down the Emperor's forearm.

  The Emperor backed away, hand scooping up a razor fragment of the tabletop, nearly forty centimeters long. He held it low, close to his right side. Sten chanced a look away from the Emperor's eyes. Noted the Emperor held the shard in the relaxed thumb-forefinger fencing grip of a trained knifefighter.

  Shiphum. Feetshuffle as each of them moved, circling toward his opponent's offside.

  Sten realized he was being maneuvered… and caught the Emperor's goal. The pistol. The Emperor sliced at Sten, and Sten back-leaned… away from the cut… chanced a riposte of his own, missed, recovered.

  The Emperor's eyes flickered, giving away his next strike, and Sten's arm wasn't where it'd been a moment earlier. Too long, Sten thought. You haven't been in a real brawl in too long.

  But neither have you, Sten.

  Sten chanced a bravo's flip, tossing his blade from right to left hand—and the Emperor attacked. Sten damned near lost the knife, reeled back, cursing himself for even thinking of a grandstand play. Again he slashed at the Emperor's wrist, recovered, slashed, blade slicing off a long curl of die plas, and Sten's hand flashed to the deck, came up with the pistol, and the Emperor underhand-cast the plas, and it cut into Sten's shoulder, muscle spasm on the trigger, round going somewhere, missing, pistol flipping out of his hand from recoil and…

  Darkness.

  The voice was calm. "I have determined that the intruding organism is more dangerous to my assigned duties than the aberrant one that was created. His termination will be given priority."

  Jesus. It hurt. Sten put his knife between his teeth, clenched on the machined crystal, and pulled the long shard from his shoulder. Waver of pain. Put the plas down. Wipe blood from your fingers. Feel the wound. Bleeding? Some. Badly? Not to worry about. For a while. Pain?

  Sten mumbled the mantra he had been conditioned with years before, back when he had been a Guards trainee, and his body forgot the pain. He went prone on the deck. Slowly let his fingers move across the deck, looking for that pistol. It could not be far.

  Across the chamber, a clatter.

  Laser aircrackle blast as the round hit somewhere. High, and left.

  Sten's fingers touched something.

  The pistol butt.

  Clot. So the Emperor had a backup gun.

  "Stand by," the voice announced. "I have the intruding organism located. Prepare to fire."

  Twin lights flashed on, glareblind, and Sten shot twice, explosion, dying into darkness, the Emperor shooting a little late, the bullet smashing down where Sten had been a few seconds earlier.

  All right, you bastard, Sten thought, and, concentrating on where those lights had been, sent five rounds rapid into the general area, rolling and spinning as he fired.

  If the Emperor shot back, Sten didn't know it, as thunder rocked the room and alarms screamed. Sten thought he heard a shout. That strange voice that had to be the ship itself? The Emperor? He didn't know. Smoke boiled, fire flashed, lights strobed. A panel was sliding closed; Sten snapped a shot through it, buckling the door.

  Sten started after the Emperor, trying to stop him before he got to whatever nasty surprise he was heading for in this, his ship. Stopped, damned himself for a fool, and headed for his spacesuit. He tugged it on, but left helmet and gauntlets clipped to the belt. Before he sealed the suit's chest opening he touched his medkit to his arm, and the box clicked, clicked, feeding painkillers and disinfectants into the wound. He sprayed a dressing across it, then buttoned up.

  Take your time, he thought. Better to let him get a bit of a lead rather than stumble into something.

  "Ship," he panted, feeling very much a damned fool.

  The voice did not respond.

  Sten blew two more rounds into the biggest wallcrater. More alarms, and the flicker of flames, and the hiss of extinguishers.

  "Ship! I will not harm you," Sten lied. "You can continue your mission."

  Toneless: "Does not compute. Organisms other than the created organism are hostile and to be destroyed. Basic program applies."

  Okay, try to kill me then, Sten thought. If you can.

  He went to the buckled doorpanel and started to kick it open. Stopped, cursing himself for still not having his head oil correct, picked up a chair and hurled it through the plas. Gunslam, and an AM2 round blew the panel away. Remember, that could of been you.

  He sent a doubletap down the corridor for confusion's sake and went through. He was about to go after the Emperor when a thought struck him.

  He aimed back into the ruined compartment and blew five carefully aimed shells into the deepening hole in the wall. He flashsaw metal peel/girder strips/smoke boiling into another chamber and then the smoke and fire closed in as a new alarm DEEdawDEEdawDEEdawed…

  This one he knew. This one was standard—Ship holed/Atmosphere being lost.

  His ears popped as the ship lost air. Sten scrabbled for his helmet. He had it on and was ready to slam the faceplate when pressure returned to normal. The ship was self-repairing. Having given the ship something to busy itself with, Sten ran down the corridor after the Emperor.

  He understood none of the rooms he searched, any more than he had the first time through. Some were tiny, yet packed with consoles and equipment. Others were huge and completely bare.

  It was in the first of those that the ship tried to kill him, as the McLean generator went off, and Sten floated up toward the ceiling, and then gravity slammed back on, but you didn't wait enough to let the fall kill me, as Sten dropped back, landing cat-quick on his feet. He put two rounds, out of spite, straight down, into the deck. One worry he did not have was ammo—the ammo tube contained five hundred of the 1mm-diameter AM2 rounds in their Imperium X shield.

  The blast tincanned the decking, and Sten looked down, into another level. He quickly ran a three-D prog in his head. The Emperor would probably be farther along this deck I'm on, so if I can get down there and circle up behind…

  Sten dropped through the hole.

  "The intruding organism is now on Golf Deck," the voice narked. "Proceeding toward medical station."

  Clot. He looked around, to see if he could spot a telltale eye to shoot out. Nothing.

  Okay. Bad idea. He would just as soon be back where he had come from. Idea. He stepped into the middle of the passage, the rent in the decking just above him, and the ship took its lead and spun the gravity yet again, sending Sten falling "up" toward the hole he had come down through. But as he fell he thumbed a bester grenade out. Heard it tink against the passageway's upper deck. He fell through the hole toward the overhead deck now twenty meters above/below him, locking a bootheel under a curl of debris, and gravity went back to normal as the grenade went off.

  Sten waited—but the voice said nothing about his return. Did the time-loss grenades operate against it? Improbable.

  Now what? The Emperor could be anywhere in this great polygon of a ship/station. He would have a spacecraft decked somewhere—probably in the same place that ships would be parked the Emperor would use to begin his return journey.

  This is his turf, not yours. Exactly. And it is his to defend.

  Therefore:

  Return to your first plan. Except you don't just want to turn off the AM2 now.

  The control room is… Sten reoriented himself… one deck up. And back a short distance. We'll do it the easy way. Don't worry about the ship—just don't let it get you into wide open spaces, and it can play up with down all day long. If that's the worst it can manage, it wasn't that great a danger. Sten wondered why it hadn't been built with some sort of robot guncars or something—and then he realized the ship would have to be suicidal to allow shooting in its own "body." But he still worried—this last bastion wasn't well
defended at all.

  A few seconds later, the ship made its first real attack.

  The corridor was long. Closed hatches led off to unknown compartments at periodic intervals. Somewhere down near its end, Sten thought he would find a stairwell leading up to the control deck. He heard a sound, like a hundred locks banging closed. Then he saw the far wall of the corridor was coming toward him. As was the near one, he saw, glancing behind him. We'll just divert through this hatch… which is bolted. As were the next two he tried. Sten knelt, held a two-handed firing stance, and sent four rounds slamming into the four corners of the oncoming wall.

  Blast, smoke, fire… but nothing else. The "piston" kept closing in the cylinder.

  Imperium X. Used as armor-plating. Why not? If you had enough of it…

  The moving walls, he guessed, weren't a livie nightmare impossibility—they were most likely intended to help the ship repair itself. Close off an injured section, and send in repair robots.

  So the ship was improvising and learning how to modify its resources into weapons.

  Sten shot a door panel apart, as the moving walls were only a few meters away, and darted into the compartment. It was bare. Outside, in the corridor, the two walls stopped on either side of the doorway.

  Stalemate. The ship would likely let Sten sit here for the rest of his life. The air was thick, he noticed. The ship must've shut off the corridor's air circulation. He could close his suit's faceplate, which would give him another, what, six E-hours before he ran out of air?

  Fine. So get out as you got in. He went to the doorway, made himself into a smallish target for ricochets, and fired once at the far wall.

  A smashing explosion, and shards of metalloid sang around me room. A crater. Not a hole. And the blast had eaten even more of the oxygen. Sten coughed in the smoke. How long would it take him to shoot through the wall, even if he buttoned up the suit? Unknown, but certainly longer than it would take pieces of shrapnel to finish him.

  Could he use his knife to cut his way through? Possibly, given enough time, and enough leverage. Not probable.

  Up there. A vent duct.

  Too small.

  But as he thought it, his knife was in his hand, slicing the grille away.

  The duct was tiny. Sten would never fit. He looked into it—his forehead touching the top, his chin the bottom. Not only was it not much more than a forearm wide, but it turned through 90 degrees about an equal distance in.

  Sten's palms were sweat-drenched.

  He told his mind to shut up, and stripped naked. He kept the pistol ready. Hell, you can always shoot yourself.

  Head turned to the side, he forced himself into the vent. One shoulder cocked forward, palms finding a hold on the smooth metal, pulling, pulling, legs flailing in the room behind him. He pulled himself three centimeters forward. Then another three. And another.

  Then he stuck.

  His chest and mind swelled in panic. Stop that, he told himself. You can't be stuck. You can always go back in the room and start over. You can always crawl out of anything you can crawl into.

  That was a physiological lie.

  Don't flail. Don't hyperventilate. Exhale. Wriggle. Exhale again. The lungs are empty. Goddamn it, no they aren't! Lose here and the Emperor wins… clot the Emperor, and with a great squirm he was in the vent, around the bend, and writhing, writhing down the tight passage not thinking, just moving, pushing his clothes and suit ahead of him, and then it opened down into a wider duct, and he could bring up a knee, and lift his head, and then it widened again, and again, and he was up, feet and hands sending him forward, bearwalking, and hell, now he could move upright, standing, this was just like the ducts you used as a private throughway back on Vulcan, when you were a Delinq and it wasn't so bad back there, was it? You've been through tighter squeezes, you lying clot, and isn't this about right? You do want the control room, don't you?

  Sten unconfused his mental map. And agreed. He found a grille with an empty room on the other side, cut the grille away, and dropped inside.

  A messroom. Tables. Cooking gear over there.

  Then he heard it.

  It sounded like a voice.

  Sten quickly dressed, and moved silently toward the voice.

  It was the Eternal Emperor.

  He stood in the center of a large, bare compartment. Just in front of him was a shallow pool, now dry. There was a bare stand beside it.

  The far wall was a monster screen, sense-smashing with the colors/not colors of N-space.

  His back was to Sten. His arms hung empty.

  Who had he been talking to? Himself? The ship?

  Sten lifted his pistol, then hesitated. It was not any misguided sense of fair play—he'd shot many an enemy from behind without warning in his life.

  But…

  "In my end," the Emperor said, "is my beginning."

  Sten jolted. The Emperor laughed, but did not turn.

  "Of course, would there even be another beginning is the question?" the Emperor said, in a near monotone. "Or would the next refute beelzy, and return to that long line of milksops it took to breed me?"

  "And even if the ship bred true again, what would the path be? Would he… would my… perhaps you might call him my son… find his way, alone, back? Would he be able to cut out the telltale inside as I did, without it detonating?"

  "But," and the Emperor's voice slowed, "it's a question that'll never be answered, will it?"

  "Either way"—and as he spoke, he whirled, dropping into a gunfighter's crouch, Sten realizing here was the trap, the Emperor's right hand flashing for his belt, gun coming up, reflexpoint aim…

  Sten fired, and the projection flickered, holograph flashing off, and then the real Emperor came around the corner, close, too close, real pistol about to fire, Sten's foot up leg blocking, the Emperor's arm thudding against the bulkhead, painshout and somehow his own pistol was gone, knife coming out of armsheath, into hand, and it was very slow:

  Sten's right foot slid forward, just clear of the ground. It found a firm stance, half a meter in front of his left, as that foot precisely turned toe outward, and slid backward on its instep.

  His knife-hand came up and forward, just as Sten's left hand caught his right, just at the wrist, clamped for a brace, as his hips swiveled, shock-impact and he full-stretch lunged, needlepoint attack lancing out, going home.

  His knife buried itself in the Eternal Emperor's throat. Mouthgape. Bloodgush.

  Sten recovered as the Emperor stumbled backward, backward, then fell, fell through all time and space, and his body struck the deck with the limp thud of a corpse.

  Sten took two steps forward.

  The Emperor's face held a look of vast bewilderment.

  It softened, toward blankness.

  And then the mouth that had ordered too many deaths twisted. Death rictus—but Sten thought it to be a smile. The eyes that had seen too many years and too much evil saw nothing, looking straight up at the chamber's overhead.

  Or perhaps they saw everything.

  Time ran free again, and Sten was moving, diving for his pistol, and in a crouch. He was firing, firing like a madman. Into that empty pool, into that wallscreen, and, in now-realized carefully spaced shots, around the room.

  An end…

  … there would never be another beginning for the Emperor.

  Fire gouted from the walls, and multicolored smokes whirled.

  The ship screamed.

  Emergency alarms… distorted metal… self-destructing cybernetics and electronics…

  Perhaps.

  But the ship screamed.

  And Sten ran for the control room.

  Sten swung the targeting indicators across the bulk of the ship. One here… two here… three here… four here… five here… six here… seven targeted here.

  One reserve.

  Fire when…

  … the first charge blew, the screen told him, the demo pack in the control room that Sten had set for a fifteen-
E-minute delay as he fled toward the meteor hole and his ship.

  One blast, and the robot mining ships brainlessly processing AM2 somewhere in the distance would be stopping. But they could be reprogrammed and recontrolled, if anyone wished. Later.

  Sten slammed fingers down onto firing keys, a dissonant chord of hellfire.

  Seven nuclear-headed Goblin XII missiles spat from the tacship's launch tubes, and, ignoring the jumble of N-space input their sensors shouted to them, homed as ordered on the Emperor's birth/death ship.

  Sten's ship was too close when they impacted.

  All his screens blanked, went to secondary, blanked again, and then, probably because they were jury-rigged to give computer enhancements of N-space, stayed dead for long seconds.

  Finally, one imaging radar came to life, and adjusted its input to the enhancement program.

  Colors/not colors.

  Nothing else.

  It was as if the great decahedron had never existed.

  The Eternal Emperor was gone.

  Sten stared for a long, long time at that emptiness, perhaps wishing many things had never been, perhaps making sure the void would not take form.

  Finally, he turned to his controls.

  He fed in his return course, and went at full drive, for the discontinuity.

  And home.

  It was over.

  Chapter Forty-One

  FOUR SCREENS YAMMERED HIGHEST PRIORITY—IMMEDIATE ATTENTION. Three others flashed with CRITICAL—PERSONAL messages for Sten, using his private access code that supposedly only Cind, Alex, and Sr. Ecu had ever been given.

  All of them—and other coms outside Sten's suite in Otho's castle—wanted one thing, in various categories: Sten. Sten's appearance, Sten's advice, Sten's prognostications, Sten's orders, Sten's suggestions, Sten's emissaries.

  "Doesn't anybody want to do anything for themselves?" Sten wondered. "I mean, the Emperor is dead. Go for it, people."