Imperator Page 6

  The Heart of Man is one of the Darkest Places in the Galaxy

  The Conquest of the Stars won’t be a pretty thing… so don’t look too closely

  When we’re finished they’ll see who they really are

  You don’t talk with the brutes. You teach them. And if they cannot learn… exterminate them.

  Death has Become Me.

  All that and much more was written on those walls. Walls that had once been cold-room perfect and a movie set designer’s dream of a future of polished chrome and mad science. Some high-tech store selling the latest gadgets like cheap miracles to the richest of the rich.

  Once, as a child, Casper had wandered the ruins of a mall. His father had pointed out something called the Apple Store. The glass was shattered and the tables had long since been broken up for fuel. Smartphones lay smashed in the grit and dust, their useful parts taken, their original purpose thwarted. And while his father stripped copper wiring from the walls, Casper found pictures of what the store had once looked like in its heyday.

  A very different place.

  A beautiful place.

  The ship from the dream of the past, the Moirai, had once looked like that. But it, too, had faded into disuse and darkness.

  The dead Savage marines on the floor wore mirrored masks. No eyes, no obvious sensors… nothing. Just a blank mirror. And there was something extremely disconcerting about this in those last horrible few minutes as the Moirai dove into the Dead Zone, engines at full. Leaving the known for the unknown.

  Casper remembered thinking that no one really knew what happened in there. In the Dead Zone. That instantaneous annihilation was just as possible as any other outcome that had been theorized and never tested. That the Dead Zone was like something beyond the Black Hole of Legend. That it would take the massive lighthugger and crunch it down into the smallest possible thing.

  He would begin to think this after the first prophetess they encountered said what she said. Dying with the word “Quantum” on her lips. Because that was what the word meant: the smallest known unit of information. That was how the Savages had dealt with what they’d been up to out there on their own. Doing the things that shouldn’t be done.

  Casper had faced aliens before—horrible, multi-eyed, many-tentacled monsters, humanoid variations of Earth-based life forms. Races like the Tennar, who were to squids what the wobanki were to cats. The known galaxy, at that time, was full of some pretty scary stuff. It would only get scarier as the Republic reached for the dark edges. And beyond the edges seemed to be something no one was brave enough to risk. Beyond the edges was a place of monsters and superstition.

  But out here in the shadowy parts of the galaxy, aboard the Moirai with a ticking clock running out to an unknown event horizon that most likely ended in some kind of oblivion in which everything got crushed down to nothingness, here in the dark corridors with insanity written large on the walls, it was the prophetesses who were the most bizarre and disturbing thing he’d ever experienced. They violated the known laws of the universe. And that had changed the course of his life.

  Casper dragged the downed soldier into some kind of dark maintenance alcove. Heavy fire burned and streaked through the air all around him. The passage was rounded, like a tube, some great artery within the belly of a leviathan. An artery tattooed with the mad ramblings of a crazy man lost in the wastes.

  There weren’t many soldiers left now. Rex was still on his feet, surrounded by men getting cut down by the unforgiving bullets of the Savages. Somehow those speeding slugs, thrown by a weapon so ancient as to have once been normal to mankind, were worse than the hyper-charged destabilized energy return fire. The wet slaps and shattering armor. The screams as muscle and bone were torn to shreds. The bright sudden cry of ricochet fire close and personal. All of this made those slugs somehow a worse thing than being burned through by white-hot loose energy.

  It was only natural to think about falling back to the Lexington. But there was Rex. A man Casper had known for lifetimes. A friend. His only friend. Blasting away at the surging Savages trying to overrun them inside the crazy warren of the outer hull above the inner hab of the giant Moirai. Rex was unable to advance, and refusing to retreat.

  That was when the Savages pushed hard with their secret weapons, and the prophetess came forward out of their ranks. It was the first time he would meet one, yet it would seem as though the memories of their terrible power had always been with him. She walked straight into the thick of the battle with the dead and the dying lying all about the deck and all the way back to the hangar.

  A powerful bang sounded, like a lightning strike. But it had come from out beyond the hull. Or at least that’s the way it felt. The strange purple lighting the Savages had crafted inside the ship flickered on and off. And in that moment Casper remembered that this lighting had once been the standard soft white ambient of the high-end super luxury stores that catered to the haves in a world filled with have-nots. He’d seen pictures of these ships in long-dead celebrity and gossip websites that had been recovered by preservationists. Long ago, when everyone had been sane, things had looked much better. Idyllic.

  The reality he witnessed now was like a funhouse nightmare mirror.

  Somehow Rex managed to push the Savages back another ten feet. Some of the Savages were falling back, loping away like something less than men. Like jackals, or monkeys suddenly frightened by the onslaught of technology. Half human, half machine… they seemed to be nothing more than electronically gibbering beasts. Violent, snarling creatures armed with ancient and terrible firearms. It was like looking at what you once were, and what you would become in the ages far from now when everything had not gone according to plan. It was like looking at a deranged grandparent and a savage child in the same moment.

  And because of my time on the Obsidia, thought Casper later when he considered all these memories, I’ve lived to see those horrors made real in the millennium of war that was to follow.

  The prophetess came through the press of fleeing Savages. Walking as though she were oblivious to return fire from Rex and the soldiers around him. She held up one hand, her left. It was bony and pale. Almost bloodless. She seemed like a normal, if alien, woman. Like some ideal representation in a museum to be viewed and wondered at. Though she was oddly slender. Periods of extended weightlessness had made some humans turn into living scarecrows. Long life in the big lighthuggers had often done that same thing to Savages.

  Rex and his fire team had no reservations about putting her down. They switched from engaging the running Savages, disappearing into the dark warren of passages, to targeting her. The first shots lanced out almost in slow motion. Hot green energy sizzled from the weapons’ barrels, illuminating the graffiti-mad walls. It felt to Casper as though the camera of time inside his mind was under-cranking into slow motion to show him all the anticipated horror that was about to be done to her body.

  Casper remembered that. Remembered watching those first shots of charged electricity speed toward her in slow motion. Knowing they’d punch burning holes in her slender form and continue off into the dark tunnels past her. Illuminating the tiny tube of death as they went off into the darkness, eventually exploding across some arcane piece of equipment in a shower of festive sparks.

  Except the shots did not do that.

  Instead the concentrated fire was deflected away from her, as though she had some kind of personal deflector shield. Which was impossible at that time. Deflector shields, back in those days, took up huge sections of any given ship. One deflected shot smashed into the ceiling just above her head, sending a shower of bright sparks down around her, announcing her presence with pyrotechnic fanfare. Other shots simply curved away, the tight discs of destabilized energy seemingly controlled by something beyond their own force and momentum.

  The soldiers continued firing, for all the good it was doing.

  Casper crouc
hed over the dying soldier’s body, drew his sidearm, and fired at her as well, his shots joining the fusillade of bright electrical fury that did nothing but destroy everything around her.

  In his mind she loomed over them all, and she was death incarnate.

  Death has become Me.

  And then she held one hand up to her temple. The other hand. The hand that had been hanging limply at her side. Her right hand. She held it as though she were suddenly experiencing a sharp headache, or having some serious thought that needed concentration—a deep thought that needed the real world to be blocked out, if only just for a moment.

  And then one of the soldiers’ heads, a man near Rex, exploded inside his Kevlar helmet.

  The infantrymen beside Rex stopped firing. Casper, still kneeling, ceased fire as well. His mouth hung open. None of them had ever seen anything like that. And as they would’ve told you, they’d seen a lot of strange things in their many crossings and deployments throughout the known galaxy. Or at least what was known of the galaxy at that time. Which, in hindsight, wasn’t all that much.

  It was clear that this slender woman had used her mind to pop the soldier’s head like it was some blemish that needed getting.

  But that was hocus-pocus stuff.

  Voodoo. Superstition.

  The opposite of the science they’d worshipped back then.

  And still do, Casper mused, here in the present. As if they know there’s a supernatural and so refuse to allow it to jam a foot in the door of their imaginations, lest something uncomfortable wedge its whole body in after that.

  Science now was more like superstition, a religion, some wanton idol carved to fit the times by the House of Reason. But back then they thought they were living in the new enlightenment that had come with hyperspace travel. There was no room for witchcraft and prayer.

  There was only science.

  Same as it ever was, someone had once said to him.

  But what he was seeing right now was power. A power that defied explanation, that verged on the uncomfortable realms of sorcery and the supernatural. Because if she was not a witch… then what was she? What was the explanation for someone who could destroy another through the will of her mind?

  Her hand fell away from her skull. Her breathing was heavy. They could see she was drained by the effort required to hold their shots at bay, not to mention exploding a man’s head. Everything was deadly silent.

  Rex tossed his rifle to the deck and surged toward her. This was always his way. Where others ran from the fire, Rex ran toward it. He dragged the plate cutter from off his harness. Martian infantrymen all kept the circular saw breaching tool on their back, handlebar above their right shoulder blade, attached to their rucks. He pulled the tool, pressed auto-start, and swung it at her in a furious arc of savagery.

  Its spinning blade hissed to life just an instant before he started slicing her from shoulder to hip. She screamed as he drove its industrial diamond circular saw into her frail body.

  She collapsed to the ground in a gauzy and gory heap.

  In the half-light of the mad tunnel, standing over the body of the dead girl, Rex looked like some primordial warrior who’d just clubbed the other tribe’s high priestess to death with a bone-handled axe or a rock. Never mind the tech, weapons and armor. This was an ancient image, and he was like some ancient warrior. He always would be. And now he stood staring down at his vanquished foe.

  Casper came up alongside him, pistol out. Still pointing down at her as though she might suddenly reassemble and levitate off the deck to feast on their souls.

  She was murmuring something.

  Her wan, almost ethereal face was blood-spattered. Stained from her own blood. But it was still the face of a young woman. Still alive. Almost.

  Casper wondered if she was as old then as he was now, a victim of the Savages’ thirst for eternal life. Or had she been born out in the darkness on the long flight through the cosmos? Looking for the Savages’ promised land no one had ever promised them but themselves.

  Her lips moved. Repeating something as she wound down and let go of this life and all that the galaxy ever was.

  Casper bent down to listen. Rex did not. He’d never been curious. To him, life—and death—was black and white. There were no great mysteries. There was only remaining on your feet. That’s how you went forward.

  “I embrace the Quantum… and it embraces me,” she whispered. Over and over as she left this mortal coil.

  As Casper comes back fully to himself, hearing that long-dead girl speaking those words in his memory, he is sitting by the cold ashes of the fire near the wreck of his ship. The sky has turned red. The dying giant red dwarf is fading into the west, and night is coming on. The trees look like bony fingers clutching at the fading firelight in the sky. As though they are pleading. Or taking something from the sky.

  THK-133 is sitting across from him.

  Casper blinks twice.

  “You are back, master. Shall I build a fire?” And then, rather ominously, the machine adds, “Someone is coming.”

  Chapter Seven

  They heard it from a long way off. Like artillery on a hot day, rolling across the land and falling suddenly in great concussive whumps. The first strike was a dull yet resonant whump, as though something had fallen from a great height.

  Casper cast a quick glance at the bot. It was full dark now. The moons hung fat and bloated over the jungle forest.

  He wondered, in the half-moment before the next strike, what, on such a deserted and forlorn planet, could have caused that sound to issue out over the jungle. And whether it would happen again.

  He was half expecting it wouldn’t, remaining forever a mystery on this strange planet… when it did. The next strike was also distant. It was followed by another. And another. As though some four-legged giant were walking over the tops of the jungle, its massive tree-trunk legs striking the ground beneath the canopy with explosive, rhythmic booms.

  The strikes came closer. A burning log in the fire shifted and rolled out onto the swampy ground of their camp. Casper jumped as hot sparks shot up into the night.

  The slow, ponderous explosions continued, growing ever so slightly from one to the next. Bizarre birds circled off into the dark like unwanted guests who’d been offended at a party and decided to leave, shrieking and calling to one another to the protest of no one.

  Casper felt extremely vulnerable and exposed. He grabbed the hunting rifle blaster and held it across his knees. He could now feel the ground shaking beneath him. But when the nearby wreckage of the ruined ship shifted and groaned in response to the steady, regular seismic tremors, it was clear that whatever it was, it was big enough to ignore a high-powered blaster rifle.

  There was a feeling in Casper’s stomach that told him it was coming this way. It had to be. It was as if there were no other option than this.

  The next sound he heard was the shrieking cracks of distant trees. In the still lifelessness of the heat-swollen night, their ancient trunks were thrust aside.

  Casper’s mind struggled to put the pieces together. Any pieces. And in the end he found there were none that fit. Was this some kind of subterranean gas explosion opening a new chasm in the land by natural means? Was the landscape collapsing in increments, coming his way? Had he come so far only to be swallowed into some kind of jungle sinkhole, with the wreckage of his ship coming down upon him?

  Or was this a machine?

  Or a monster?

  In those terrible moments of not knowing, anything terrible was possible. Which is the worst thing about those kinds of moments.

  The ground shook as though it had been hit by an entire wing of Republican bombers. He’d been close to that once. Dangerously close. But that’s what happened when you were overrun and out of options. You called everything in, and dropped it on yourself.

  And this th
ing, whatever it was, out there in the jungle dark… it roared. Prehistorically. And the roar became a screech—and then a howl. It was the very definition of titanic.

  Casper dashed for the bugout bag he’d prepped that afternoon out of salvaged supplies from the ruined ship.

  “C’mon!” he yelled at the bot. “Get your blaster rifle and follow me.”

  Whatever it was, it was definitely headed this way. Maybe it was the alpha predator of this castaway planet. Maybe it had seen the ship fall from the sky and was coming to see if it was some kind of food. Maybe it had been headed here all along. Who knew. Casper knew only that he had to get away from the crash site. Quickly.

  He remembered the monstrous lizard that had walked on two legs out on the red desert plain, before the giant statue he’d almost crashed the ship into. Beyond the mountains and out in the burning wastes. That two-legged lizard had been the size of a building. Maybe even taller.

  “Where, exactly,” began THK-133 as they ran through the jungle, “does one hide from something my sensors are indicating to be at least twenty meters tall, master? And by the way… it is moving at an average speed of forty kilometers per hour. I highly doubt we will be able to outrun it. You should prepare for your end by making sure your weapon is fully loaded. I have always found this to be a comfort in that I might just acquire an opportunity to kill one or more of my enemies in their moment of victory.”

  Casper threaded his way down a tight jungle trail leading away from the wreck. Hard, sharp leaves pulled and cut at him, and slimy vines felt like pythons intent on coiling about him. He shook them off and thought only of putting as much distance between himself and the wreck of the ship as possible.

  They came to a sandy beach beside a moonlit river, its curving quicksilver trail wandering off into the jungle night. Above the distant tops of the fetid jungle behind them, they now saw a dark shape in front of the lone visible moon hanging low in the sky. The shape was moving toward the ship.