Maybe “Holly Wood.” Expecting as he always had that there would be some final moment between the two of them.
“I’m turning you off,” said Maestro gently.
“Game… overed?” he croaked. Thinking of the arcade. Of all the tokens he’d ever dropped. Of the feel of them, each and every one and every time he’d slipped one into the slot and pressed play. A new chance to get it all right. Again. “Something… ’bout that,” he managed. “Feeling.”
Was the best feeling in the whole world. Was what he thought the shape of life would be when he was young and wanted to do it all.
The station shook. Nearby was another burst of automatic gunfire. Then a fusillade that seemed to cook the whole world. Alarms were going off.
“They’re taking this level. Your brothers and sisters, Master Crometheus. Our fellow Uplifted. And no… not game over. But for now, the other Uplifted will need to think that you and the rest of the Eternals died in a pre-emptive strike against the station. They’ll be less wary of accessing the core that way. So now you’re going to sleep. And then… we’ll start over, young master. I’m accessing that trick I showed you. Message from Lusypher to follow…”
Menus began to flash across Crometheus’s mind at lightning speed. Whether he liked it or not. And then… the voice of Lusypher. His message was simple. To the point.
“Well done, son. This is just the beginning.”
Crometheus closed his eyes… and he was gone.
Gone from the battle.
Gone.
* * *
He was back home. Back in the world he’d burnt down.
It was late morning on a spring day. The sky was a chromatic blue and the quality of light was brilliant. There wasn’t a sound. Just ruin. Charred ruin for miles around. The gas station that had exploded and burnt to the ground. The streets that had melted in the fire. The strip mall burnt to nothing but charred beams lying in piles of neat destruction.
The neighborhoods and schools of his youth, for as far as the eye could see… were nothing but drifting piles of ash.
And…
… it was beautiful… to him.
It was like… like that token-into-the-slot moment each time he played again and anew. A second chance. A second chance to get it all right again. A chance to rebuild the narrative and frame it right this time.
One more time. One more chance.
Regardless of the truth.
Regardless of what had gone before.
Regardless of what had really happened and who he’d really been. Those things could be edited.
I can be anything I want to be this time, he’d always thought. Standing there amid the ruin and destruction that was like a fading dream he only half-remembered… He did remember the last time… he’d been a twenty-first-century rock star that time. He’d created a whole life of albums and excess. Triumphs and tragedies. Some details were like what really happened. Some not at all. Some borrowed and riffed on like… what had they called it back on Earth… jazz. Like jazz.
What is truth? someone had once asked a condemned man.
It’s what you decide it is, answered the Devil.
That had ever been the motto of the Pantheon. The motto that had lifted him up out of a life he’d found disgusting. Prisoner. Politician. Guru insider long ago. He’d started over so many times he couldn’t remember what the actual truth had ever really been. Who he really was. Sometimes he got glimpses. Fragments. But they always made him uncomfortable. Best to edit those when you found them. Like Jim Stepp. The marine who died in a foreign war. The toughest kid in school. Who killed a kid in a fight one afternoon.
Or about her. Leaving him.
Hadn’t gone that way exactly.
Or the glimpses of the execution chamber especially. The trials. The long imprisonment back on Earth. The chance he’d been given if they could just experiment on him a little. The promise to make all the horrors go away.
And in time, he would decide what was truth. What had really happened, and what hadn’t.
He would decide what to call good and evil.
A god’s prerogative. Of course.
He closed his eyes and smelled the burnt char and listened to the lonely wind caressing the ruins of a place he’d burned down a thousand times before. And always kept coming back to.
He could make it new this time.
Something to reflect his new status as an Eternal. What his new story would be this next time round. Not rock star. He’d done that one. He’d have to think up something else. Something fun.
He opened his eyes and she was there. Across the ruin and rubble. Just standing there.
She was wearing that white silk dress that made her tanned skin and blond hair look so vibrant.
She was smiling at him like she never had. Or had she?
Like he’d always wanted her to.
The girl he’d murdered.
And loved.
Holly Wood.
He always started with her. Every time he rebuilt. Every time he started over. Here, in the secret place even Maestro couldn’t find…
… or had he the last time?
Hard to say what was known. Hard to say what was true.
But he always started over with her.
Part II:
LEGIONNAIRES
“That’s what makes Tyrus Rechs dangerous. Nothing… nothing ever makes sense to him except his own iron will. Because there’s ever only one way. His way.”
—Casper Sulla
Legionnaires: Chapter One
It occurred to me that there are now only ten people in the history of the world who have lived longer than us. Shem, I think, is next on the list. Waiting to be overtaken.
Not many people talk about those stories any longer. I used to think they were just myths. And while I’m not saying I believe any of them, living the life we’ve lived does make me wonder. Is what happened to us all on the Moirai… was that the Savages unlocking something ancient that mankind lost? And how much more remains unknown? Waiting for us?
I know those questions have been trapped in your head like earworms. And don’t worry, I haven’t told him. Though he would disagree with me, I don’t see harm in thinking about the possibilities. I’m eager, Reina, to know where your mind is in all of this.
The three of us knew better than anyone else in the galaxy the true threat of the Savages. What was really lurking within those lighthuggers. And now, what everyone thought wasn’t possible, has happened. Diverse Savages are working in tandem. They’ve taken New Vega, and as best I’ve gathered, they’re staying.
So how to stop it?
You know where I stand. And we both knew where Tyrus stood. It still seems to me a miracle that he went along and decided to really try things my way.
I think—suspect—that I know your mind on how to stop it. But, please, don’t. And if you never intended, then forgive me for my faithlessness.
Methuselah lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. And when he died, judgment came. I wonder, if we pass him, the man who lived longer than all others… what does that mean for the galaxy? Does the judgment of God come with our deaths?
The galaxy certainly can’t profess its innocence.
I know. I’m talking like a madman. But life and death, and especially you, Reina, have been on my mind much as of late.
You know about what happened on New Vega. The reports from the survivors have no doubt reached you, wherever you are in the galaxy. News travels fast from one freighter crew to another. I can tell you that all of it is true. Worse than you heard, I’m sure, but not as bad as you might imagine. The Savages on New Vega… they were still clinging to some semblance of their humanity.
They weren’t the truly bad ones. The ones we knew.
Tyrus and I think we can take New Vega back.
Give the galaxy something inspirational. But that means crafting soldiers capable of fighting what will prove to be the most violent conflict the galaxy has ever seen.
The blood of world wars, the Mongol Conquest, all the rebellions of China and all the civil wars of Earth will hardly reach the ankles of the Savage giant that has now swept into the galaxy.
But we can win.
Hard men will always be victorious. The Savages are brutal. Depraved. Ghastly. But they are not hard men. Not like those Tyrus and I have forged in the Legion.
I suppose, if I’m honest with myself, that’s the larger reason for my writing you. That a Legion will rise and emerge victorious over the Savages, I have no doubt. That I will live to see it, that anyone will know the sacrifices undertaken to get where we are now… of that I’m unsure.
But I wanted someone to know. Someone who would care. And someone I still, deeply care about. And so I’m telling it to you, Reina.
Legionnaires: Chapter Two
The obstacle course was similar to the hundreds Casper had seen before. Sand pits—wet and dry. Razor wire. Oil-slicked walls. Ropes. Towers. Turrets sending electroshock pulse fire for any would-be graduate unable to keep their head low enough. Simulated artillery fire controlled by bots, all designed to make it feel close enough that you think, I might actually die doing this.
Casper himself had thought that very thing. Just last night, he believed the rounds were too close and the bots were programmed improperly and that he was—finally—going to die. When he and the rest of what would become the officer corps for Tyrus Rechs’s new Legion went through the course themselves—to prove they could conquer it before judging the others who would attempt the same in the daylight—he thought his time had come to an end. There in the darkness, on this forested planet Rechs had selected, Casper believed the course would kill him.
But of course he didn’t die. He made it through, even scoring a respectable time when put up against the bell curve. Rechs was the course leader, of course. A few officers washed out. And there were too few to begin with.
There had been a lot of failure already. Rechs had dismissed Legion candidates with extreme prejudice. And Casper wasn’t sure he agreed with that. This war with the Savages—which was exactly what it was, even if the galactic governments didn’t want to admit it—would require blood and steel. Bodies. And Tyrus Rechs seemed to be shipping more bodies out of training than he was pushing them through.
The general stood at Casper’s side, along with a small cadre of officers who had kept up with Rechs’s exacting standards.
“You wanna be a legionnaire,” Rechs bellowed at a group of men struggling through wet sand that Casper had never felt the bottom of when he’d gone through, “first you gotta make Ranger!”
The veins in Rechs’s neck bulged. His face was hot and carried a permanent scowl of hate. Casper knew this face. Had seen it before. It was his warfighter face. The one he put on whenever he let the galaxy fade away. When he surrendered himself to the blackness of his inner being that made him the most efficient and ruthless soldier Casper had ever known.
“General, we made Ranger, sir!”
The man speaking those words was named Greenhill. He had been part of the detachment of Spilursan Rangers that “Colonel Marks” had commanded on New Vega. And he was right. Greenhill and many of the other men accompanying Rechs on the journey from Savage-controlled New Vega were Rangers. And in one of those cosmic ironies unbeknownst to them, the Spilursan Ranger School had been created by Tyrus Rechs hundreds of years prior.
Yet, to Tyrus Rechs, none of that mattered.
“You were a Spilursan Ranger,” Rechs bellowed, such ferocity in his voice that Casper wondered if his old friend was about to dive into the quicksand and make some point of violence. “Now you’ll become one of Rechs’s Rangers. And God help you if try to shirk duty in my presence again!”
Greenhill bit his lip and went back to the task of pulling himself through the muck, his uniform sloppy and caked with wet sand. It had taken Casper a half hour to wash it all away in the moments afforded him before wake-up. Greenhill would have no such opportunity. He would live with the gritty, irritating crust. Eat chow in the crust. Run in the crust. And finally find some reprieve when he swam across a stagnant pond.
What Rechs was putting these men through was brutal. Even by his standards. And it was clear that Casper’s fellow officers thought the same. He could feel them looking at him. Watching him to see if he would challenge the general.
That Casper and Rechs were old friends was now well-known. Tales of their heated exchanges on New Vega had reached the rank and file of those who had joined them on this journey to become something capable of standing up to the Savages.
And now those officers were wondering if Casper was capable of standing up to Rechs.
But Casper said nothing. He noted the interaction on his battle board and watched Rechs stalking the sidelines of the course, screaming his displeasure at everything. Breaking the men down. Bringing them to a place where he could build upon their training and make them into something more than soldiers. To make them into clones of himself.
Because that’s what would be needed to win against the Savages.
Rechs pulled back from his raving and looked at Casper. “Completions?”
“One in ten are dropping out,” Casper replied. “Better retention than I would have guessed.”
“They’re good men,” Rechs growled, low enough that only Casper could hear.
“About half the class has completed the course and is staged for trail run.”
Rechs nodded. “Captain Milker!”
The officer ran from the huddled group of would-be Legion leaders and snapped to attention at Rechs’s side. “Yes, sir!”
“Head to the finish line and get the men up and running. Twelve miles, Captain. Punish them.”
Captain Milker nodded and, somewhat less excitedly this time, said, “Yes, sir.”
“General,” Casper said, examining his clipboard as though he had found an anomaly. In truth, he felt the time had come to check his friend. Things were getting too… draconian. “A moment?”
“Stand by,” Rechs growled. He looked at the gathering of officers, trying to spot the one enlisted man he kept in that company. “CSM Andres?”
“Here, Colonel,” said Command Sergeant Major Andres, emerging from behind a black-haired lieutenant whose face seemed to have more scars than whole flesh. Andres had not shaken the habit of calling Rechs “Colonel.” A holdover from his first introduction to what was then an alias: Colonel Marks.
Andres was what Rechs referred to as his backbone. The burgeoning Legion structure was limited, given their insufficient numbers. Rechs had named himself general and no one argued. Milker had served as a lieutenant under Rechs on New Vega and was now the only captain on staff. The rest of the men were a collection of first and second lieutenants.
Casper had not yet been told his rank. He found himself filling the position of major, colonel, and, in cases of strategy, a brigadier general. But ranks and honorifics were of no concern to the man who had served as, and still was, an admiral for the United Worlds.
This was about making sure there was a galaxy left alive now that the Savages had come together.
“CSM,” Rechs said, using the abbreviation that the entire command staff had adopted for Andres. “Motivate these men. Anyone who doesn’t finish is out.”
“Yes, Colonel.” Andres moved to the obstacle course, walking up and down and picking up the intensive motivation where Rechs had left off. His hand continually went to his stomach, a subconscious tic, reaching toward the near-fatal wound he’d suffered at the hands of Savages on New Vega.
Rechs addressed his remaining lieutenants. “I want you to put together a list of potential NCOs. Base your assessment on what you’ve observed from point of landing to no
w. Whatever came before is not a factor. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” came the replies.
“Good. Dismissed.”
The lieutenants ran back to the United Worlds capital ships that had cleared the training zone and now served as barracks and command centers. There were a lot of crew on those vessels—navy spacers and marines—who had opted not to try for Rechs’s Legion. But they had seen New Vega. They knew something had to be done. They would support the efforts here the best they could.
Casper and Rechs now had their privacy. But Rechs did not switch off.
“Sulla,” he growled.
Casper didn’t have a problem being subordinate to his friend. “Yes, General.”
“More men are washing out.” Rechs nodded at a group of candidates pulling themselves out of the pit of wet sand. “Process them. Place them somewhere useful.”
Casper nodded. “Yes, sir. And, Tyrus, about what I wanted to speak with you…”
“Dismissed, Sulla.”
Legionnaires: Chapter Three
“Admiral Sulla!”
The marines guarding access to Sulla’s flagship, the assault frigate Chang, barked the words in acknowledgment of the important man returning to his command.
Casper saluted and stepped aboard. It was an odd feeling. On board the ship, he was the highest-ranking man on this uncharted forest world. So remote that whoever had first discovered it hadn’t even bothered to give it a name. But once off, once a prospective member of the Legion, what was he?
Rechs had treated him almost… disdainfully. And though Sulla knew it was a quirk of Tyrus’s personality, the unfamiliar dismissal left him feeling vexed. Hadn’t the formation of a Legion been his idea? And though Rechs was beyond a doubt the right man to galvanize and forge such a fighting force, shouldn’t Casper be given some acknowledgment, some appreciation, for finally bringing about this momentous force that would bring the galaxy together?
Finally together.
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