Eternal Enemy

by James David Victor

  The Eternal Empress hadn’t been walking the city when it happened, but now, in her digital dreams, she had been. She had been walking arm in arm with a young commander of a Marine Corps—the very Marine Corps unit that had first met and countered the Ru’at menace.

  “Helena, I…” The rakish, handsome blond commander had turned to the younger empress, his eyes bright. Helena knew what he was going to tell her… That he was going to stay. Here on Earth. With her. They were going to rebuild Earth together, after the Ru’at menace.

  Wait. That didn’t happen in that order… the stray, warning thought bubbled up from her subconscious. Helena pushed it down immediately to enjoy this delicious fantasy.

  “I’m going to rebuild the Ganymede base,” Helena heard what the commander really had said as the sky behind him suddenly started to lighten and flare with plasma.

  “They need me out there. And humanity needs the Outcast Marines, out there,” he spoke those awful, true words that he really had spoken—but not here, and not now—to her.

  “What!?” Helena heard the younger version of herself say. This was not part of the plan. This was not part of her plan.

  “I’m sorry, Helena, but I owe it to my men…” the young and handsome commander said, just as the New York City skyline eclipsed with a blinding white as the neutron bomb hit.

  “No!” Helena burst out, and, in reality, her dried, almost desiccated eyes snapped open. That hadn’t been how it had happened of course. The neutron bomb that had taken New York had been fired by the renegade commander-in-chief of Earth, the one that her Commander of the Outcast Marines had been trying to topple. Neither the commander nor Helena had that conversation there, but months later, after the Ru’at.

  But the devastation and sense of hopelessness had been the same. For a moment, the ancient crone of humanity lay awake, truly awake, for perhaps the first time in a long time, and she looked at the velvet curtains and the warning blip of lights from her bedside medical consoles. If her body could have produced tears anymore, she would have cried.

  “So. Very. Human…” a voice said from somewhere between the realm of dream and data.

  With the voice came a rising flow of nausea and sickness—more than what Helena could put down to finally, actually, being awake for the first time in a few decades.

  “You,” Helena whispered, her dry lips moving against the mouthpiece that encapsulated her lower face.

  “Empress,” said the strange voice, one that was curiously echoed and sounded at once like a young human girl and something, well, other.

  The voice belonged to the flickering form of a hologram that stood by the side of the bed, wavering and glitching in and out of existence. The small form was that of the LOHIU, with her short bob of blonde hair and pale skin, and her large red service coat that Helena had ordered the hologram to wear whenever she made an appearance.

  The LOHIU herself was the most remarkable psychic that Helena had ever discovered. Powerful enough to reach into people’s thoughts and pluck out any fact—or to stop any heartbeat—even if the person was a continent away. That was why the Eternal Empress had given her over to the Architrex of the Gene Seers and demanded that she be sedated, then augmented with the latest drone and machine technology. Now, the girl was a living battery of psychic power, the unknown key at the heart of the Golden Throne’s power, totally at the mercy of the Eternal Empress.

  But the thing that talked through her was not a servant to anyone.

  “I believed you close to transcendence, Empress,” said the alien words of the Black Sun through the hologram of the LOHIU. “When you reached out this vessel to me, through her mind I saw how you had come close to enlightening your entire half of the galaxy.”

  By ‘enlighten,’ Helena knew that it meant control. That was what the Eternal Empress was good at—playing a long, slow game of control that turned the derelict and almost extinct species of humanity into the known galaxy’s most advanced and powerful spacefaring civilization.

  And the LOHIU was supposed to bring it all together. To allow the Eternal Empress to make contact with—and to use—this ancient source of psychic power and finally become the god she knew she had to be…

  If nothing was ever going to hurt her again.

  “But here, I see you falling prey to weak, biological emotion. Again. Regret. Yearning. Loneliness.” The Archon spoke through the hologram-girl, herself residing many, many lightyears away in the Gene Seer Temple.

  “I wonder if I have been wrong about you all along,” the Archon continued. The hologram of the little girl raised one shimmering hand and slowly placed it on the thin coverlets—through the coverlets—that veiled the empress’s mummified body.

  Helena hissed. In that instant, something transferred from the creature to the girl’s mind, through her projected hologram and through that even, to the mind of the Eternal Empress where she lay in Imperial 1.

  “No!” It was a sense of vast, ancient…purpose. The sort of purpose that the Archon had honed and solidified like a mineral substance through millennia of hate. With it came images of the body of the strange, pure-black sphere of the Archon as it hurtled through the depths of space inside its own corona of plasma, moving faster than any ship and any warp-jump as it headed toward the human territories.

  It was coming to her, it was supposed to be coming for her, just as the human commander was supposed to have returned to the younger empress, too.

  “Don’t leave…” Helena heard herself whisper, before instantly cursing herself for her weakness.

  “Frailty! Weakness!” the Archon castigated her. It was a being that was older than any other sentient life. It claimed to be a shard of the first form of sentient life, and that it and its brethren had played their god-games with entire species and civilizations for eons.

  And now, the Black Sun was the last of its kind, and it had noticed the mind of the LOHIU and the determination of the Eternal Empress behind it.

  “I promised you godhood!” the Archon stated. “Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there is another champion…”

  The images transmitted by the LOHIU were thrust, unwelcome, into Helena’s mind with such force that she cried out. She saw the images of a gaunt youth rising in the air and throwing aside the missiles that were fired at him with such ease as though the youth was already a god himself.

  “The J-14 project…” Helena recognized. It was the second-most powerful psychic that Helena had ever uncovered, thanks to her rigorous testing and sensing protocols, enacted at every birth clinic and laboratory across the Reach of the Golden Throne.

  “But he is so young. So unskilled… He has no purpose!” Helena tried.

  “But he has so much anger, Empress!” the Black Sun considered, drawing back the hologram’s hand. There were a hundred things that Helena knew that she could have said—that she had an entire empire, that she had almost destroyed two more civilizations just this very cycle, the Ilythians and the Mondrauks…

  But what good would arguing with an alien god do her?

  “There is only one way, Empress, and you know it. It is the way of survival, of the fittest. The strongest. When I arrive, I will choose my companion and successor as inheritor of this galaxy entire. And it will be the strongest one I see before me!” the Black Sun promised. Suddenly, its presence left the room, and the hologram of the LOHIU coughed and flickered in and out of existence before wearily raising head.

  The LOHIU blinked, and the full black had left her eyes, leaving a pale sort of clear blue behind.

  “It’s gone,” the voice of the hologram-girl said with a touch of recrimination.

  The Eternal Empress considered ignoring the child for a moment. She was, after all, only a tool. But Helena also never quite knew how much the thing remembered of its Black Sun transmissions.

  “It has,” she conceded, feeling suddenly weary and exhausted. She hadn’t been awake for a long time. “You are to locate J-14 immediately and to transmit his coordinates to
Commander-General Cread, do you understand?”

  “I do,” the LOHIU said. She sounded tired. And resigned. “But J-14 is a very gifted psychic. It is hard for me to isolate him, with his powers…”

  “Is it more powerful than you!?” Helena snapped at the hologram. “Are you telling me that you are unable to do the job? That I should perhaps capture J-14 and install it instead of you there!?” The snarl of threat was unmistakable in the empress’s voice. There was no confusion over what would happen to a subject—even the LOHIU—that failed to be useful to Helena.

  “I am ready to serve.” The LOHIU hung her head.

  “Then find J-14!” Helena snarled, dismissing the hologram girl with one wave of a bony finger.

  When the LOHIU was gone, and the inner sanctum of the Eternal Empress had returned to its pristine stillness and quiet, the desiccated woman tried once again to give herself over to her digital sleep.

  And this time, she tried not to dream of things she had failed to have.

  6

  New Eden

  Sector 0, Sol

  “Watch out!” Anders called to the trio of humans ahead of them, completely surprised by what was coming for them. At the same time, the commander slung his heavy Outcast Marine rifle from his shoulder in one smooth movement and took aim—

  Thwap! A bolt of purple-and-crimson meson fire spat forward from Anders’s rifle, past Jake’s shoulder, to catch the last capture drone and turn it into a ball of flame.

  But there were still the other two drones hurtling toward the civilians.

  Thwap! Another bolt of meson fire, this time from Dalia’s quick reactions as she used one of her side pistols to take out another drone. But the final one was moving too fast. This was, after all, what they had been designed to do.

  Anders was frozen in horror. The smallest, dirty-faced child screamed.

  “Hm.”

  And then Anders was looking at the last capture drone, hanging just a hand’s breadth away from the smallest child’s face, as Jake casually walked to the other side of it.

  The PK youth made a small gesture and the drone slowly swiveled in mid-air, turning toward him and rising to eye level.

  “So much hate in something so small…” Anders heard Jake mutter as the drone slowly petalled apart in the air, carefully taken apart with machine precision by Jake’s psychic powers. First came the outer shell casing, and then the internal components, each part leaving its previous nest and revolving around the others in a slow, balletic dance.

  And then, with a shrug of nonchalance, the drone parts fell to the floor as the youth lost interest.

  The child with the grubby face stared up at the psychic in the Outcast power armor with her eyes still wide in incomprehension at what had just happened.

  “S’alright,” Jake muttered, a little sullenly and awkwardly to the kid.

  “We— We aren’t doing anyone any harm!” said the adult that accompanied the children. Their mother, Anders guessed. She must think we’re Throne Marines…

  “Neither are we,” Jake murmured, which Anders might have questioned, given what he had seen the youth do, but he shook away the instinctive reaction.

  “We know you’re not,” Anders said quickly, moving to Jake’s side as Dalia and Patch joined them. “We’re not Throne Marines. We’re Outcasts,” he said firmly, looking for a flicker of recognition in the mother’s eyes.

  He got it, but it was a guarded expression, a slight turning of the head as she looked sidelong before her eyes immediately went downcast again.

  She doesn’t trust us. Or the Outcasts.

  “Thank you,” the woman in the patched and re-patched service suit said, “for saving our lives.”

  “It’s…” Anders wondered just what he could admit to. Was this woman one of the same group that had tried to capture them earlier in the city-forest? Were they runaways from the colony? What could he say about their mission?

  But Anders had always known what his mission was, really, hadn’t he? That was the reason why he had chosen to leave the fanatical Throne Marines and retrain to be colony police, after all.

  “We’re here to help,” he said simply, this time earning a steady, questioning stare from the woman.

  “Then you’d better come with us,” she said. “I’ll take you to New Eden.”

  The woman’s name was Arya, and her two children were Sven and Apple, Anders learned as they led the way through long brick tunnels, filled with the drip of moisture and the crunch of gravel underfoot.

  “This used to be a subway system for the old cities,” Arya said matter-of-factly, as if Anders would know what they were. He struggled to remember some of the names that he had heard from out of the history logs.

  “Berlin... Paris... New York…” he muttered out loud, earning a dry cough of laughter from Arya.

  “They’re on the other side of the world!” she scoffed, gesturing to a black iron door set in the wall to which she lifted a set of actual heavy metal keys.

  “Who uses keys anymore!?” he heard Patch say in apparent amazement.

  “You would too—” His disbelief had been overheard by the woman. “—when the occupiers have pretty much every bit of tech at their hands, and we survive on scraps!”

  The occupiers. Anders nodded. She meant the Reach of the Golden Throne and the armies of the Eternal Empress’s Marines, didn’t she? To her, they were the alien force, Anders suddenly realized.

  There was a creak and the squeal of protesting metal as the door slowly slid inward and spilled with it an accompanying cacophony.

  “Holy stars!” Patch whispered again, as he too heard it. There was the murmur of raised voices, the clank and thump of industry, and even singing as Arya, Sven, and Apple led the way through the short passage to the subterranean colony of the surviving humans of Earth.

  New Eden looked cramped—that was Anders’s first impression as the passage opened onto a metal terrace with concrete block steps that led down to the first square or marketplace.

  Which was already busy and teeming with people.

  It was hard for Anders not to stop and stare, because he hadn’t expected to see so much community, and so many people down here, hidden from the eyes of the empress.

  The first space was a wide, irregular semicircle, edging onto buildings that were made out of old corrugated metal shipping containers, painted bright pinks, blues, yellows, and greens. Strings of lights hung from every available corner and container edge, with much larger lamps standing proud on their own and forming avenues for the humans to walk past.

  “We’ve got several lines tapped into the Port Helena grid,” Arya said proudly. “Although we’re trying to get a geothermal system started…”

  Anders nodded at their resilience—and their ingenuity. This first space seemed to be some sort of work area, as larger, open-sided containers were filled with the whirr and bustle of manufacture, and Corsigon could see the spray of sparks and hear the hiss of quenching steams as people worked.

  The square itself was filled with humanity, people of every possible color or creed, and each wearing a ragtag of items that he tried to discern where they had come from. A lot of old service suits, boiler-suits, or factory-worker jackets and heavy trousers, but Anders also saw sarongs and wraps made out of old hexa-weave solar cloth, as well as what was obviously home-spun and home-dyed woolen leggings, sweaters, and mitts.

  “How long have you been down here?” Anders murmured to Arya as she led them through the press of people, eliciting stares and sudden hisses of alarm from some as they clanked past in their power suits.

  “They’re silver!” Arya signaled to one of the workers, rushing out of her foundry space with an arc welder still fizzing in her hands as she slid her goggles up onto her brow. “Malady’s lot,” she explained with a shrug, and Anders saw the woman make some finger gesture with a hand, which the policeman guessed was derogatory.

  But Arya didn’t stop, leading them down the main thoroughfare a
s news of their arrival sped out ahead of them in the forms of Sven and Apple, passing on their tale to the other derelict children and youths of New Eden.

  “How long?” Arya turned to answer him, and Anders could see the wrinkles and smattering of white-lined scars across her cheekbones that indicated a hard life. “Well, New Eden’s been here ever since I was young, but I remember when we moved here from Sanctuary,”

  “Sanctuary?” Anders shook his head.

  “That was our previous place. Down near the edge of the plains, but the golds found us.” The woman’s face darkened. “We didn’t stand a chance. They fire-stormed the place, and we lost everything. A lot of people.” Another, difficult pause. “Sven and Apple were too young to realize it, of course. But luckily, we already had this secondary setup, and we ran for days through the tunnels to get here.”

  “And we got Granite Bluffs just in case, too!” piped up Apple, the girl who had apparently forgotten her brush with paralysis or death at the hands of the capture drone. As they walked, Anders noticed that the girl would stay close to the still-sullen Jake and steal glances up at him, clearly curious of the person who had saved her.

  “Shush! Don’t tell them anything!” snapped a new voice in their midst, as the crowds around them suddenly peeled away to reveal a collection of human men, each with their hunting rifles lowered straight at Anders, Jake, and the others.

  You don’t want to do that. Anders’s eyes flickered to an already-blustering Jake as the policeman slowly raised his arms up in front of him.

  “We’re not with the throne,” Anders said slowly and calmly.

  “They’re silver, Hazan,” Arya said, and Anders guessed that was the local term for Malady’s Marines rather than the ‘golds’ of the throne.

  “I don’t care what part of the sky they come from.” The man fixed Anders with a foul look, and Anders realized that he was one of the men who had attacked them earlier in the forest. “Our man Kestrel is still laid up in the hospital with laser shot right through his calf thanks to this man.” The leader—a man in his prime, but with wiry gray shooting through his beard and with dark, serious eyes—pointed the rifle at Anders.