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  In that moment his feet were rooted to the deck. And he knew deep down inside himself that he was probably going to die in the next few seconds. Because… what could one do against that kind of tech?

  Back in those days, Casper thinks almost two thousand years later, that tech seemed like sorcery. It may as well have been sorcery. It was as unfathomable then. And unstoppable even now.

  His mind thinks about this sorcery as that terrible titanic roar sounds again, except much nearer. Very near. And in this heart-stopping, fear-struck moment, Casper feels a kinship with that long-ago Casper who stood frozen as the two Savages closed, guns ready for the final burst. Beyond the valley’s edge something is coming this way. Something huge. Something that roars like a prehistoric monster from a lost age.

  And it is as clear now as it was then, back on the Moirai, that there will be no escape. No savior. No Rechs. This time.

  Because he is here out beyond the galaxy’s edge. Beyond the perimeter of the known. Lost in the land of the insane and the unknown.

  The monster roars and comes forth onto the valley floor, making Casper feel as small as Urmo must feel beside him. Even THK-133, the lethal killing machine, seems stunned at the sheer size of what has come out of the forest ahead of them in this final reckoning. It’s as though they have all known what was coming all along, but never really expected it to actually show up.

  Just as those Savage marines came for him in what would one day be the prototype for the Legion’s iconic armor. The galaxy, the Republic, would never know that this armor had come from the minds of the mad on the Moirai, in a place that didn’t really exist, aboard a ghost ship of damned souls still doing R&D out in the dark like sorcerers translating ancient tomes and formulas.

  Imagine that, Casper tells himself as a giant monster charges across the valley, the ground shaking beneath his feet.

  I don’t have to, he reminds himself. I lived it. I was there.

  ***

  Another armored Savage came flying through the smashed glass cubicles and slammed into both marines. Suddenly all was chaos as the three figures were carried off in another direction.

  In seconds, the one—and this was hard to tell because of their similar armors—but the one who had attacked was up and delivering kicks and throwing punches, even though there was clearly some kind of massive pistol strapped to his thigh.

  A hand cannon.

  Rechs never called it that, but when he drew and fired, everyone else did, thought Casper. But at that moment his oldest friend didn’t know how to actually use much of the armor he’d just requisitioned from an R&D lab, which, he would later tell Casper, had had many far stranger wonders than just this prototype.

  Of course, at the time, neither Casper nor the medic knew it was Rechs inside that armor. That it was Rechs who appeared at the very second before they would’ve both been murdered.

  One of the Savages hit Rechs hard enough to send him flying back across the corridor and through what remained of a glass cube partition. That marine then charged at the prone Rechs like a raging bull with nothing but the red cape in sight.

  That was when Rechs first drew and fired his legendary weapon. On his back, as a sociopathic post-human rushed him. The hand cannon boomed rapidly on auto-fire, like some battleship of old unloading a full salvo from its main eighteen-inch guns.

  Casper watched as the subsonic dumb slugs smashed into the charging marine’s chest armor and tore out the back. Three shots echoed bombastically across the science complex, their sonic explosions causing tenuous glass shards to give up their hold and finally fall. The first round took the man dead center, spinning him to the left. The next round struck the man’s upper chest, and the third smashed into his helmet. Each concussive explosion demolished the man a little more, pushing him back, and finally onto the floor.

  Rechs pushed off the floor with one mailed gauntlet and continued firing, drawing a line of blossoming damage across to the other marine, who’d recovered his own weapon and begun to fire back. Rechs was hit, but the rounds bounced off the armor and into the destruction all around.

  Rechs’s shots didn’t bounce. They blew large, gaping holes in the Savage’s head.

  How is that possible? Casper wondered in horrified astonishment.

  Casper, like all Terran naval officers, had studied to the graduate level in naval gunnery. He knew more about physics than most. There was no way the weapon Rechs was using could explode, recoil, re-aim, and then fire again as rapidly as it was, and with such deadly accuracy. Casper estimated that the weapon was easily firing fifty-caliber ammunition. The explosions were deafening, yet Rechs was firing as though he were aiming some child’s first low-power target blaster.

  Later they would learn that the armor did all kinds of wonderful things. Its cybernetic targeting assist system was among the least of its features. It was with this armor, even though it was only a pale imitation, that the Legion would become formidable and would one day conquer the galaxy.

  Only for the House of Reason to misrule it badly. And that was an understatement, given the dumpster fire it had become by now.

  Both marines were down, and Rechs got to his feet.

  Reina Benedetti emerged from the ruin where Rechs had begun his charge.

  Rechs popped the helmet off the armor with a hiss of escaping oxygen and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I can’t figure out how to communicate externally,” he rumbled.

  That was when Casper learned who his savior was. His oldest friend. His warrior in shining armor. Not some other other Savage who wanted the kill all for himself.

  The medic ran over to check Rechs for injuries.

  Rechs waved her away. “I’m fine. Nothing’s broken.”

  She checked him anyway, then stood back and swore. “Full-auto CQB. Broken glass firing everywhere. And a blow that sent you flying like you’d just been hit by a truck. And you’re completely unscathed.” She gave a low and long whistle of admiration and disbelief.

  Rechs smiled grimly. “Not saying I didn’t feel it, Corporal.”

  Reina threw herself at Casper, grabbing him and pulling herself into him.

  Casper was at a loss. She had been… something special to him. And then he’d seen her participate in the vivisection of a sentient entity. And now…

  And now, she was still something special to him. He loved her. Always had. Always would. She was his blind spot in the galaxy, and she knew it. But they never spoke about it.

  He could feel her tears. Her heaving sobs.

  “She was under… some kind of mind control,” Rechs explained. “I don’t fully understand it, but she came out of it pretty quickly. She’s back. She’s all good, Cas. It’s time to go now.”

  Casper felt himself embrace Reina in that moment. Fully. Like he’d always wanted to. And in that closeness was all that might have ever been. All that the galaxy could never be.

  Even now, all these years later, Casper still feels that moment as some kind of fulcrum on which the fate of the universe might have changed. Might have gone a whole different direction.

  “What was all… that?” he asked. And the meaning to everyone was clear.

  Except now, as he waits to face the monster coming for him in that high valley, the intent and the meaning are all for him.

  Even then, he has asked himself throughout all the years of the long questing to find the power, even then you wanted it, didn’t you? Even then you knew you’d seek it out?

  Even then.

  He answered that question once. Long ago. When he first realized the only way to change the way things were was to find a power that bypassed all the petty power systems of the galaxy, all the machinations of her denizens always seeking their own advantage over others for the greater good of all.

  Power was only ever the way.

  What he had seen had been but a small tast
e of something outside their ken. Beyond their ability to control and manipulate. A hint that whispered in his mind, even then—even then—that there was so much more for the taking. If its source could be found. And once it was, good could be done with it. In the right hands, of course. All the wrongs could be made right. Casper was sure of that.

  “Here’s the plan,” Rechs began. “I need you to get yourself back to the Lex. I need you to lift off and get into a firing position. Use the SSMs to nuke the ship. Then get out of the Dead Zone.”

  There was a long silence in which only the roar of Rechs’s hand cannon seemed to still echo in Casper’s ears. A memory of white noise that didn’t easily fade into the background hum.

  Then Rechs added, “If you can.”

  Because there was still the Dead Zone to deal with. Even if they got off this ship… could they escape whatever the Dead Zone actually was?

  No, thought Casper. Probably not. Because no one ever had. And there was still the theoretical nightmare possibility, even now, on this lost planet cast out from the galaxy, that they had never actually survived their incursion into its unknown extent in the first place—that all of this was just some two-thousand-year probability simulation the Quantum generated like a byproduct.

  But long ago Casper had needed to put that scenario aside… just to remain sane. Because that way lay madness unending.

  “What about you?” asked Casper.

  “I’m going for the pyramid inside the main hab. Apparently it’s some sort of gate.”

  “It’s a door for a creature the Moirai made contact with,” Reina said breathlessly. “They call him the Dark Wanderer. He’ll use it to escape. And that can’t happen.”

  “Why?” asked Casper.

  “Because,” said Rechs, a man Casper would’ve told you was the most serious, non-hyperbolic, and blunt-to-the-point-of-deadly person he’d ever met, “it would be the end of everything as we know it.”

  The Sad Tale of the Moirai

  The ship is a ghost ship. A thing of legend fading into the darkness. And because her time is short, it is time for you to know what very few ever would. The ship’s story will never enter the galactic record. All the horrors and madness of her long journey are shortly to be lost. But this is her tale. Or at least, some of it. This is what her ghosts whisper and mumble in their torment. As though crying out all the wrongs done to them. As though seeking some absolution never obtained. This is the story of the ghost ship Moirai that was lost in the Dead Zone during the days of pre-Republic exploration.

  A grand experiment.

  That’s what they called it in those last heady days as the world came apart at the seams. Food shortages. Global disaster. War.

  The Earth was ruined, and the elites were convinced, as Sartre once wrote, that hell was, indeed, other people. Namely the great unwashed. The masses. The takers. The hordes. The common people, as they were referred to in thought and secret memos. Their fellow men and women who never could quite get around to evolving. Like they had.

  Those people had elevated the elites, the Brights, to the lofty heights of industry, media, and government. The result was an unlikely coalition, as the Brights needed the Hordes’ cheap and easy votes. Needed their cheap and easy labor. Their backs. Their sweat.

  The elites resented that dependence. Those poor sad people who led common ordinary lives of desperation, they ruined everything with their mere hungry-mouth handout presence. And in order to maintain their grip on power, the Brights were forced to pander to the Hordes, to support their basic human rights campaigns, to mouth their salt-of-the-earth platitudes. They were forced to live with them.

  Well, not with them. Ideally, and by long and careful design, a Bright would never encounter an actual living Hordesman in any other than the most purely transactional capacity. But they were forced to live on the same planet. Which was a kind of horror to them, in the end. A horror that could not be borne for one moment longer.

  Finally, that would change. It was time to go.

  Originally the Rama-class ark ships, designed and built by Krupps-Mitsubishi under a UN grant charter, were financed as survival arks when it looked like World War III was about to break out. Each ship could carry more than one hundred thousand refugees in the event of a global catastrophe. A slick massive media campaign was spat out across the internet, to which most people were constantly glued when they could get the bandwidth to log on, assuring those in dense population centers that in the event of a nuclear exchange there was a plan in place to rescue everyone who could get to the ark ships in low Earth orbit. Which was not an impossible feat given that most airliners were then using scram-jet technology to make the trip from New York to Tokyo in under two hours.

  Awaiting the survivors who reached the ships were vast living worlds looking in on themselves. There the survivors would wait out the nuclear holocaust in relative comfort, or so they were assured in hip-hop soundbite twenty-second display ads on powerful social media sites.

  But of course, this was all a big lie.

  As almost everything had ever been.

  Originally, the plan, organized by the Brights, had been to release a series of plagues that would rid the planet of its “excess population.” Where mass abortion as a way to a better life had failed, SARS, weaponized Ebola, and Superflu-42 should have done the job in lowering the population density to a level that would allow the elites to live out their best lives. And for a while there these terrible-horrible wonders did brisk business in the wholesale death trade—until things got a little out of hand and AIDS 2.0 made the leap from contact to airborne.

  But by that time China and India had gone nuclear on each other, ruining much of the East and Middle East. Europe and North America were fighting over what remained, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Unless you consider a no-holds barred conventional naval conflict that had poisoned much of the Atlantic with a bonus round expenditure of tactical nuclear ordnance and sunken reactors gone meltdown, pretty.

  And both sides still hadn’t pulled out the strategic nuclear weapons—the big ones, the ones with yields in the megatons, designed to destroy wide swaths of infrastructure, military or not. Although, as the ark ships lumbered out of orbit, this seemed a done deal within days, if not hours.

  But there were hundreds of thousands of survivors in those ships, heading out into the relatively shallow dark of the local solar system lagoon, soon to be traveling into the empty seas between the giant suns.

  There could have been many more survivors. If that had ever been the plan, there would have been. But instead, each ship carried far fewer people than it could hold. Rather than the promised one hundred thousand per ship, there were only about ten thousand: perhaps one thousand elites in oversight positions, and nine thousand of their inner circle. The latter were slaves, really, though they might have defined themselves as entourage, personal assistants, crew, and playthings. They didn’t know they were slaves. Yet.

  Departing a burning, ruined, poisoned home world for the promise of something at least forty and perhaps well over a hundred years away on the other side of the interstellar hauls between the habitable systems, the massive ships approached just this side of light speed. Or, that is, they would. Acceleration to maximum speed took about ten years of constant acceleration. But what did all that matter inside a living, breathing world that was devoted, almost unanimously so, to a worldview that was so wise and prosperous, surely it could never descend into such madness as the world they’d left behind?

  In Greek mythology, the Moirai were known also as the Fates. It was they who decided the lengths of lives of both men and gods. It was they who were the final judges, never mind who you thought you were.

  The head of the oligarchy of elites who ruled the lighthugger Moirai was a former weather newscaster who’d founded his own personal empowerment religion called “I Power” back on Earth. After a career
-ending technical mishap during a news report, the huckster had reinvented himself as a man who had sought the counsel of the wise and come away as some sort of mystical savior guru who specialized in pseudoscience TED talks and who felt compelled to uplift humanity from its constant struggle with baseness to a fabled land awash in aromas of hope… one personal empowerment course at a time.

  He came to give them a better life, and in turn they signed up for his classes, seminars, websites, health products, and eventually private floating cities, by the millions.

  While not initially a member of the power-elite cabal that had long planned to rule Earth alone at a much lower population density, he was eventually accepted into their secret global planning sessions when his wealth and sway became so great that the hidden cabal had no choice but to recognize his place in the world. Plus, they’d been working on a long-term plan to use his popular health products to spread a form of time-release gene-editing cancer that had a mortality rate of 74.8% in the first month.

  So as dozens of ark ships, each with its own core group of elites and special utopian philosophy, climbed away from Earth and into the stellar dark, Whip Hubley, former weatherman and now the First Councilor of I Power, ruled the Moirai with a genial smile and absolute authoritarianism.

  Yes, aboard the lighthugger Moirai there were all the usual abuses common to the powerful once they’ve acquired absolute power.

  Sex. Drugs. Murder. Humiliation. Insanity.

  But that goes hand in hand with being the victor.

  The Moirai society went from quasi-religious to full-blown cult within twenty years. Factor in the longevity research the elites had been holding back for themselves on Earth, and the revolutions provided by the constant research aboard the paradise-pleasure ship, and the situation was soon ripe for the insanity of self-proclaimed godhood.

  Sixty-five years into the flight, the Moirai slowed from light speed and hove into orbit around a small star. But the only world there was an almost dead one that promised a harsh existence. So the Moirai, as Whip and his fellow elites now called themselves, chose to leap starward once more, promising the masses a world beyond their fading memories of Earth. Promising what they had no idea how to actually deliver.