“You see what power I have!? And now… I shall kill the Eternal Empress herself! All of her power, every Marine and installation and ship and colony, will be mine!”
Many, many millions of lightyears away, in a distant arm of the galaxy, in the giant metal sphere of Imperial 1, the eyes of the Eternal Empress snapped open.
Something had woken her from her state of constant dreaming.
The parts of her consciousness that were connected with the most powerful data-fields were blaring alarms, which all downloaded into her memories in a heartbeat.
The Archon has arrived… It tore through Commander-General Darius’s fleet on its way here to me. And the Architrex has combined the LOHIU to J-14, too.
It was all almost too much to put together. To understand. It was too chaotic… But the Eternal Empress could see that her final goal was almost here. At any moment, the Architrex would open the living ansible link that was the LOHIU straight to her, Helena Tri’Vi’Pathian herself, and with all that power, she would turn to the approaching Archon as an equal.
It would welcome her with open arms—if the thing had open arms, that was…
I will finally be a goddess. No one and nothing can hurt me, ever again, the Eternal Empress thought. She tried to compose herself and make herself ready for her ascension. The truth be told, she didn’t much care for what happened to her carefully-built empire after she became a god. That was all just the means to get to where she needed to be.
Helena, the Eternal Empress, felt a little excited. It was an emotion that she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She closed her eyes once more.
Helena Tri’Vi’Pathian was so enraptured with her own feelings that she didn’t even heed the personal alarms that started to blare so distantly in her mind. A shadow detached itself from the veils of her inner sanctum, and Rose stepped forward, silent as a cat.
She drove a nano-filament dagger deep into the mummified, partially-living body of the Eternal Empress…
There, Rose thought. It was done. She had her revenge at last. All she had to do now was escape Imperial 1 and blow the Sul’Daar missile behind her, so that no Gene Seer could ever clone the empress’s body. Ever again…
“What?” Commander-General Cread was hitting the console in apparent fury as something refused to obey him. He was getting more furious by the moment.
And then a deeply, strangely echoed voice filled the chamber, and Anders realized it was coming from the LOHIU-J14 itself.
‘CANNOT COMPLY.’ The voice made Anders’s heart and eyes ache, and it sounded like a mixture of both human and machine voices, all in one.
“What do you mean, you cannot comply?” Cread snarled, throwing a desperate look at the two containment units ahead of them. “I said, kill the Eternal Empress!”
But the answer was the same. ‘CANNOT COMPLY.’
“Rargh!” Cread pounded on the desk in his fury, just as the joint machine voice of the two psychics changed. It became deeper, and richly echoed.
“What is this? Who here is worthy...or should I just kill you all?”
It was the voice of the Archon. It had arrived, and it was channeling itself through the LOHIU and Jake.
No!
Anders seized his chance as the waves of nausea and pain washed through him and everyone else. The Throne Marines guarding them were falling back, and Cread was snarling in pain as he slid to his knees. The Architrex had apparently fallen unconscious, and Patch was huddled in a ball by the window.
But Anders still moved. He still knew who he was, despite the waves of pain that threatened to destroy his soul.
He was Anders Corsigon. A detective. A Marine. An Outcast. He was here because there were innocent people who were dying, and who had already been killed by the actions of evil people.
This certainty of purpose crystalized in the man, forcing him to roll into the legs of the stumbling Throne Marines and seize the nearest rifle as he kicked one of them aside.
People screamed as the Archon bent its will into the room, but Anders alone moved with singular purpose. First, he shot Commander-General Cread, then he fired a blister of bolts at the control desk. He didn’t stop until the heavy rifle went click as its plasma batteries emptied.
Instantly, the multiple fields shielding the two psychics dropped, and the wave of psychic power that flooded into the room was enough to take Anders off his feet and fling him to the wall…
Anders blinked. Saw stars. He didn’t know if the pain he felt was from the arrival of the Archon or just from the explosion.
“Please, Jake...remember…” he whispered as the waves of battering power grew and grew.
Anders gasped, once again turning toward the center of the evil to see that both the LOHIU and Jake’s eyes were open, and both were a deep, solid black. The Archon was here, acting through them. It would kill them all. It would kill all of humanity with barely a thought.
And now that their shields were gone, all Anders had to do was to shoot one of them to drop the connection between the psychics and the Archon. He had two such targets already right there in front of him. Either the LOHIU, the girl, or Jake, his friend.
Anders raised his rifle.
And didn’t pull the trigger.
“I believe in you, Jake…” he whispered, staring hard at the floating, twitching form of the boy. “You’re stronger than this. You’re stronger than anything. We believe in you…”
The waves of unholy anger increased their pressure against the room, causing gurgles from everyone. The Black Sun was trying all that it could to make the psychics kill the man with the rifle that threatened its victory.
But they didn’t. The two young psychics wouldn’t kill the one man that had shown them kindness. There were some things that were even more powerful than the Archon, and the LOHIU and Jake now turned that more-ancient force around at the alien god-thing.
And suddenly, all the pain and torment inside the room stopped.
The LOHIU and Jake, inspired by the actions of Commander Anders Corsigon, wrapped their minds around the Archon of their galaxy and crushed it. Together, these two were stronger than any singular thing. Many millions of miles away, the Black Sun appeared to crack and shiver, the glossy black skin of its world turning a charred gray before it started to fray and wisp away into nothing but stellar dust.
There was no god-thing ruler of their galaxy anymore.
But there was the LOHIU-J14.
“Anders,” said a voice that was both the girl and Jake together, and so much more.
The ex-detective raised his head in exhaustion to see that both the girl and Jake’s eyes were still open, but now a solid white.
“Anders. Thank you. Thank you for your faith in us,” the new, strange being said, but every breath of its voice did not bring so much hurt and nausea as the Archon’s had. “We have been born. We are like the Archon, but not. I do not quite yet know what it is we are.”
“Jake?” Anders stammered, and there was a gasp as Dalia stumbled and collapsed to Anders’s side, clutching his shoulder.
“I am Jake and I am LOHIU and I am neither and I am both. I am something...together,” the new being spoke into their minds. “You will not have to fear, Commander Anders of Earth. I am not a god, and neither do I have any desire to be. I think that this galaxy has no need for another tyrant,” the twin being said. “There are so many places I wish to go. To see…” Both bodies inside the tubes started to glow, turning brighter and brighter white like they might be about to jump.
“You will have to help rebuild humanity now, Commander Anders of Earth. And you, Dalia of the Ilythians, and Patch McGuire, of the Void Worlds. All of humanity and the other races need each other more than ever. You have a chance to start again. The Eternal Empress is dead, but not by my hands. The fleets of the Throne Marines are in disarray. No one holds all the power anymore.”
Anders blinked away tears in his eyes, because he knew what the strange new being was saying was true.
They had done it. They had saved humanity and Earth…but there was still so much more to do. They had lost so much, but they also had so much to gain now that the Eternal Empress was gone.
And Anders knew that with the help of his friends here, he was the man to do it. He was an officer, after all, sworn to serve and protect.
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading Eternal Enemy, the ninth and final story in the Memories of Earth series. I hope you enjoyed reading the series as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you’d like to know more about what happened all those centuries ago on Earth that gave rise to the Eternal Empress and everything that happened in this series, check out the Outcast Marines series. The first book in that series is called Outcasts of Earth.
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amazon.com/dp/B07N2KVVLK
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Eternal Enemy Page 13
