Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2)

by Jason Anspach

  The voice will be everything to him.

  “Why?” says the voice in the dark of the narrow pit Crometheus finds himself in.

  It’s a pit. But it was officially designated an enhanced interrogation cell when designed by the ship’s architects back on lost Earth. The question he would think about over the course of that dark and lonely six months of torture and re-education, was why they’d included so many enhanced interrogation cells when they designed the ship. A colony ship outbound to a brighter, better future. Had they known, when first designing the Pantheon back in some lab or office tower on Earth, that things would eventually get to this point? Had they known that things would get so out of hand that enhanced interrogation cells would be needed? Or was it simply better to be safe… than sorry? Especially if you were in charge and intended to remain that way for the duration of the long flight. And even a longer flight than you’d first planned.

  Thirty years… or two hundred. However long it takes. You’ll eventually need some enhanced interrogation cells. Trust us.

  Had they known, even then, how crazy this nightmare trek into deep space looking for some promised world that kept turning out to be either poisoned or already inhabited, would be? Had they known that things would eventually come to this sorry state of affairs? Rebellion and guillotine. That the populace who’d believed in the movement… would one day become disillusioned when they found out it was all just a big lie?

  Had they known? Even then?

  Crometheus thinks about that a lot in the cell, and once again as he relives it all. Because they must have known. They built the cells before they even needed them.

  They built them before the flight began.

  The voice that asked him “Why?” is everywhere in the cell in that memory that feels like the frighteningly real present once again. It’s in his ear and right in his face so that he might even feel the hot breath of the one who speaks. And at the same time, it’s far away out across some distant and frozen arctic plane of the kind only Finnish rock bands seek to capture for their heavy metal album covers. And again it’s also very close and personal. Intimate even. Right in his ear. Maybe even his brain. It’s all three even though two are the same. Because the two that are the same, close and closer, personal and even more intimate, aren’t. They’re layers of the same hell. Imagine that.

  You only figure out the levels of hell once you’ve arrived. And by then it’s too late.

  Later he will learn that the pit, the enhanced interrogation cell, is really just a tube. Nine feet down into the deck. It can shower him with freezing cold water from nozzles located high up along the rim lined with metal blades and knives. The walls are close and pin his shoulders no matter how he turns. They can be made hot with live electricity, as can the floor. Crometheus is naked. Hungry. And cold. And pain will become the metric by which he judges his days for the foreseeable future ahead. In fact, that future will seem like forever in here.

  In further fact… it will become as though he has no future other than the one he has arrived at.

  Imagine that. No Friday nights. No Monday mornings. Nothing by which to measure pain by.

  He will lose all hope.

  He knows that now, even at the first when the voice he will worship speaks to him. Knew it then. Even at the very beginning. He’d lost already. He’d gambled and he’d lost.

  And this was the price.

  He did not answer the voice that was in his face, far out across the frozen plain, and in his brain all at once.

  He didn’t answer.

  So the floor was suddenly alive with that living electricity that burned and froze in the same instant. And it didn’t just drop by for a zap. It stayed to chat. It stayed on until he thought he was going to have a heart attack. It stayed on and he tried to grab the walls but those too were running with live current. Living fire. He bounced around, being “burnt” everywhere. Nothing was safe and there was a brief moment of looking into the abyss of insanity when you guessed it never would be safe forever. That this right now was forever and that you had erred exceedingly. How naive you were then, he’d think back in the months to come. You had no idea how long forever could be at the beginning.

  Maybe five seconds.

  Felt like hell. Felt like forever.

  It stopped and the voice came back, coming in over the sound of his pantings turning to harsh sobs in the tight cavern he couldn’t move his arms within. Crying like the baby he must once have been. Crying like the drug addict who’d reached the end of his tether at that airport Marriott weekend when he’d been offered a chance to join the future or just go up to his room and hang himself.

  Weeping.

  Later he would gnash his teeth.

  He’d come forward then in the brightly lit conference room at that airport Marriott. To their altar call, as it were. Crying and weeping and sobbing… begging to be a winner again like he’d once been when he’d been the lead singer of a band that was the brightest star in the firmament of rock and roll. Begging to feel what he’d once felt when he rocked a stadium of seventy thousand one hot summer’s night.

  Weeping to be famous again.

  “Why, Billy?” asked the voice in the pit.

  Billy had been his name long ago. Billy Bang had been his stage name. The name the world knew him by. Billy Bang… rock god.

  He was sobbing uncontrollably. Begging without using words because his mouth wouldn’t form them because every muscle had been turned to quivering jelly by hot currents of living fire. Begging that the juice to the current never be turned on again. He was wrong. He knew that now, he blubbered. He never should have…

  “I’ll ask you once more… Billy,” asked that wry friendly slow-speaking and yet menacing voice because it had all the power in the world over, and all the time in the… no not the world, the ship. The Pantheon. The galaxy. All the power. All the time. All the truth. “Why did you join the resistance?”

  He knew his mind was blubbering I don’t know and I was wrong and I’m sorry over and over again without stopping and with no intention of relenting. He knew that. But he also knew everything coming out of his mouth made no sense. And the fear that they wouldn’t understand that he was begging for forgiveness. The fear that they’d turn back on the juice was as bad as if they actually had turned it on once more. He knew this because he’d begun to shriek incoherently. So much so that he could feel his once prized and precious vocal cords tearing apart with each ragged gasp for a mercy he knew he’d never receive.

  Just imagine, his future self murmured… this was only the first five minutes in hell. A hell that would last six months or two years, he never really was quite sure how long. And who cares… it would feel like forever anyway.

  “You had it all, Billy. You were one of us,” said the wry voice regretfully. And that… that regretful tone, disappointed is really the word, that was somehow worse than the electricity. “All you had to do was toe the party line and keep the rabble entertained. Instead… you got caught up in the lie, Billy.”

  Silence.

  At any moment they’d turn on the power and fry him for good. And this time it wouldn’t go off and he wouldn’t die. It would just be that live electricity moment of forever. Burning and cold and dying and knowing all at once… forever. Because that’s the thing about torture pits or chambers or enhanced interrogation cells. Whatever you want to call them. You don’t really know that’s what they are. You don’t know that any more than you know it could just as well be called… an execution chamber.

  That’s the mistake people who don’t know make. Until you’re in one. Then you’re convinced it’s an execution chamber, and anything else is a kind of hope you have no right to. Again, you never really know when you’re in one what it’s called. Because there’s hope in a name. Hope in a purpose. Even if it’s just promised death instead of endless pain unending endlessly.


  Hell. After… later… he’d once remembered the pit and asked himself why people never really understood the concept of a hell in all those hokey old Earth religions. Not an end. But endless suffering unending. Even the people who’d believed in one—a hell—they hadn’t even believed in suffering forever, really. Really. Because if they had they would have crawled across the world on their hands and knees over broken glass to save just one of the people they claimed to have loved, from that kind of hell.

  If you think hell is real… then of course that’s what you’d do. But people don’t so it must not be.

  Right?

  “You were Billy Bang,” continued the voice in his head and across the wastelands of frozen ice. “You weren’t like the crew and the great unwashed we brought along to serve us. The ones being flung from the Cliff down into the hab below right now, as we speak, son. Why, Billy?” The voice honestly seemed like it wanted to know the answer to the question. “Why, son?”

  This is how it would go for time immeasurable. Forever. Endless questions that walked him through the process of the rehabilitation of him. Teaching him their truths. Helping him to become…

  “We’re not going to give up on you, Billy. You’re going to become something new. Something wonderful. I’ll help you, son. Do you want that?”

  And when he didn’t answer why he’d betrayed the Pantheon and joined up with the resistance… then he got the living fire. And when he didn’t answer their other questions…

  … Who are your leaders?

  … Where’s the secret shrine?

  … Where is Anubis?

  … Two plus two is five, right?

  And every other seemingly nonsensical thing that led him toward the total breakdown that was coming. The breakdown on the other side of which lay abject slavery. And the slavery led to the rebuilding and ultimately… the shedding. Which he was so grateful for. Is grateful for correct?

  “Do you want me to help you… son?”

  Don’t give the right answer and then it’s the fire. The living fire. Or the ice-cold, arctic-cold water, so cold it cut the skin like sharp icy knives.

  In time he figured out the voice was real. In that it belonged to a person. Someone who seemed familiar to him. Or at least did now. Hard to tell. But it was just a voice. A voice that had been patterned and mapped and was most likely being run by an AI with interrogation and deprogramming protocols in some processor node somewhere.

  So the questions never stopped. Not night nor day… because those didn’t exist here in the pit. Not even when you slept.

  Never. The questions never ever stopped.

  He must have answered a hundred thousand questions over those years. And in the end… on graduation day as the voice had begun to call it… after they had shattered his mind and rebuilt it in their image… he was raised from the pit. Hauled forth like a Lazarus. And there, standing in front of him… yes… of course… it was Lusypher. As it always had been all along. In his Nazi SS officer’s uniform. When the shedding came and they chose their god names, he called himself… Lusypher. And Billy Bang took Crometheus.

  Told them he’d do anything.

  Become anything.

  All he wanted was just one more chance to serve the Pantheon. That was all.

  On graduation day, on the day when the floor of the pit suddenly began to rise toward that opening he’d stared at for six months, or two years, or forever, who really knew how time ran in hell, it was Lusypher and two marines standing there to greet him. The security police had become something new in the interim. The Uplifted marines. And they hauled him out at the last, holding up his shrunken body.

  He caught a brief glimpse of himself in the reflective surface of a one-way mirror that watched over the upper chamber of the interrogation pit as the two marines held him steady.

  He was emaciated. A skeleton. Hair gone and his ribs showing through his ruined skin. His eyes were haunted.

  Remember all those teen magazines you were on the cover of? Shirt off and a wild sneer that said you don’t care? Some insipid article about the kind of girl you were looking for. Remember? some other voice asked. Maybe it was the voice of Jim Stepp. Maybe he was in the Hollow… or the Swamp. Both are the same when you think about it.

  “That’s… not me,” he must have murmured to them. Or no one.

  Lusypher turned and saw what Crometheus was staring at. His own shrunken and emaciated image in the mirror. Then the man who would be Lusypher laughed dismissively. The friendly chuckle of some ever-patient doctor.

  “Oh… don’t worry about that anymore,” he said of the horror-show image in the mirror. The skeleton Billy Bang had become. “We’re getting rid of that.” And, “Son… welcome to the marines.”

  Gods: Chapter Twenty-One

  “We’ve been here before, son,” says Lusypher. Or rather, the disembodied voice of Lusypher.

  Crometheus is lying at the center of a state-of-the-art robot surgery amphitheater. The Pantheon, when first launched, was outfitted with many such facilities. Nothing but the best in premium medical care for the Uplifted master race during their long voyage to the promised land. He can feel himself there, in it, at the center of the surgery show. That’s the best way to put it. But at the same time he can also see the entire amphitheater via an HD feed from one of the many monitors.

  Except there’s a blank spot in the image. At the dead center of the operating table, where he should be and knows that he is, where he should be… there’s nothing.

  Or… he cannot see that area?

  No, that’s not right.

  Not that that area is not there… it’s just that his mind won’t actually process what he’s seeing and let him look into that space. Within the galaxy of his mind that image of himself has become a null space. A phantom zone. He’s there, but you can’t see him. A blank spot in the universe.

  “You’ve been here before, marine,” says Commander Zero, above him. Somewhere. They’re getting ready to remove him. He can tell. Techs are moving the robot arms aside and powering down the cutting lasers that disengaged him from the shell he’s been… traveling in… his whole life. Current life. New life now begins.

  In the arcade you always got three lives for a quarter. So this is like that.

  “But we’re doing truth now,” continues Commander Zero. Her voice hard and stern, but the practicality within it makes her somehow more believable. Human, not to insult her with such a low term. Somehow real. Somehow truth.

  That might be a better way to put it.

  “As Eternals we know the real score, Player Crometheus,” continues Zero. “None of this augmented reality evolved from filters. No best-dreamed life made real, as you think. You will, as an Eternal, know the true state of affairs, marine. Then you will be truly free. Free to become a god like the rest of us.”

  Lusypher steps into frame. Or within the camera that Crometheus’s mind is currently using to capture images.

  Oh my… thinks Crometheus. They’ve taken my eyes. And given me… a camera.

  This is like…

  … some horror movie. But it’s real.

  Lusypher’s long black leather Nazi trench coat is somehow perfect in this sterile operating theater… but still singular and the opposite of everything else here.

  “You can’t see yourself, son, just like all those years ago when we first perfected the shedding, because of a condition called Self-Aware Blindness Induced by Uplift. It’s a common condition. Nothing to worry about. As Commander Zero said… you’ve been here before.”

  How did Silver… Lusypher know that was exactly what his mind was freaking out about? Not about the surgery that was about to be done on him, something ghoulish and diabolical in the name of voodoo super-science… but about the fact that he can’t see himself on that monitor no matter how hard he tries to stare into the negative space within th
e universe in order to find an image of his own being within real-time. It’s like suddenly becoming afraid that you don’t actually exist. Which is an oxymoron that, if true… will drive you mad if you think too long about it.

  Must… drive you mad. In fact.

  He cannot look at the spot where he once was. Wait, is.

  And to think about that for even a few cycles… well, as they say, that way lies madness, son.

  Are these even my thoughts?

  “It’s a common side effect of the shedding process,” says Lusypher frankly, close and intimate within Crometheus’s mind. “We’re relaxing you with Abyssatrol. Should take effect in a few seconds. So it’s best if I run things down for you now.”

  He can feel something coming into his brain. Cooling and calming. Dialing back the freakout that’s underway and rolling toward full-blown psychosis.

  “Back when we put down the revolt in main engineering… that wasn’t the biggest problem facing us at the time, son. You and the other resisters, you were right about the current situation aboard the ship. That comet business was foolish. But in our defense, we didn’t have a lot of options at the time. Even with the water from the comet and the seeds from storage… even if we could get the crops going again down on the main hab floor, which was a matter of some debate… we were doomed, Crometheus. It wouldn’t be enough. Couldn’t be. Had never been designed to be.

  “Our biggest problem facing the Pantheon wasn’t the resistance, son. It was, as it long had been, calories. Plain and simple. A problem as old as humanity once was. Enough calories and you and your tribe get to go up the evolutionary ladder. Too little and you’re a dead branch on the tree of life. But unbeknownst to you and the others, at that time we discovered something wonderful in the forward design labs. Our Persistent Contrived Realities Project merged with our filter technology allowed us to neutrally interface with the Pantheon net, as we called it back then. More and more of us at the top, even yourself, were retreating into those vast simulated worlds to live as we had back on Earth, instead of what we were facing: the harsh realities of a very long interstellar