“You are just impossible to kill, you know that?” Cassius the Elder said, shaking his head. “I suppose I should be proud but mostly I’m just annoyed.”
“You’re not going to destroy Albion,” I said, taking a deep breath. “As deeply ambivalent as I am about that.”
Cassius the Elder snorted. “Really? That’s your statement? At least put a little flair into it.”
“You killed an entire race inside the temple,” I said, looking around for some sort of weapon to use against him. There were rifles in the hand of the ship’s security as well as hand pistols on some of the officers standing eerily still. “Two even. The Kolahn and all of your followers had their essences preserved inside them.”
“I exorcised a derelict ship full of ghosts,” Cassius the Elder said, his voice cold but resolved. “When Albion is decimated by the battle moon and my fleet, there won’t be a need for any peace treaty or for the Community to step in. I’ll bring the whole of humanity together in as an equal partnership in the Community.”
“You’re letting your ego get the better of you,” I said, realizing my father was literally trembling with rage. “Whomever you made friends with in the Community would not be happy with you betraying them like that.”
“You speak to me of arrogance?” Cassius the Elder asked. “You who got your brother and sister killed then came here to kill me? Kill him!”
My father’s command was directed to the mindless slaves he’d created around him. I stared at them and mentally begged them not move.
They didn’t.
“Oh bother,” Cassius the Elder said. “It seems that mad old electric alien gave you some protection from our machines.”
I ran up to the nearest of the guards, grabbed his fusion pistol and fired repeatedly at my father. The blasts splashed harmlessly against his personal barrier, seemingly doing nothing more than irritate him.
“Shoot him, Vera,” my father said.
The floating eyebot moved out in front of him, being little more than a metal sphere with a single strange ocular sensor moved in front of my father. I didn’t wait for it to do anything but immediately sought cover behind the same guard I’d stolen a weapon from. The eyebot proceeded to release a blast of glowing white energy that blasted the top half of the man off. If I had been just a couple of inches higher, I would have been killed instantly.
I ducked into one of the pits and ran past some of the nanovirus-afflicted soldiers below, seeking a place to hide as the eyebot adjusted its position in order to find me. This entire plan was starting to look like a really stupid idea. But what else was new?
“We all want immortality, Cassius,” my father said, his voice low. “The human race as a whole is a railing against the nature of reality that does not care whether we exist or not. It was all right for us when we were the only species in the universe and could take some perverse pride in our status as the only God who could define reality, but jumpspace has removed that from us. The Strong Anthropic Principle means the universe will continue providing new minds and new races to define itself long after humanity goes extinct. Do you know what that means, my boy? We are not the Children of God, we are his CELLS. As easily replaced and as ultimately immaterial. I am not going to let that happen to me. I choose to rail against the reality.”
The eyebot blasted a power console after I threw my coat out in front of it to distract it. That gave me a chance to blast it with my fusion pistol but it, too, had a barrier. Apparently, the guard’s gun I possessed just wasn’t powerful enough to pierce the side of either of my opponents.
“So you decided to become a cancer instead,” I said, taking a deep breath.
Cassius the Elder walked over to the eyebot as I maneuvered near the catwalk. “The jumpspace gate is already opening. It’s finished. Your friends are dead; I teleported them into deep space. I blew up the Melampus. The only reason I kept you alive as long as I did was to destroy the Kathax Prime. Submit to the inevitable.”
The machines around us were programmed to obey my father, but the Kathax Prime had apparently taken advantage of the fact we were identical to somehow make it so they had to obey me as well. He couldn’t get them to attack me and I’d tried to get them to get attack him to no avail, willing them to assault him several times but that didn’t seem to register with them. So, instead, I imagined one of the Void Marines on the bridge to hurl a thermite grenade at the eyebot. It was an action the Marine immediately undertook despite the fact that my father was present beside it.
“Son of a bit—” My father didn’t get to finish his sentence before there was a detonation of fire and flame above my head. I used that opportunity to climb up a short ladder from the pit and immediately look around for another weapon. Getting behind the very Void Marine which had thrown the grenade, I saw he had a collapsible light-pike which I picked from his belt before knocking him into the pit beside me.
The little metal tube in my hand had a pair of buttons, the first of which I tapped to extend it to a meter-long, barrier-covered weapon before tapping the end to create a glowing plume of white-hot energy on the end. I spun the weapon in my hands to get a feel for it before assuming a defensive posture. The barrier the weapon provided would be a weak one compared to the one generated by the Void Marines’ armor, but I didn’t exactly have time to put it on.
Cassius the Elder was, still, alive, and apparently unharmed from the blast. I had no idea how expensive his personal-barrier generator was, but it was worth the money. Standing up, he took a deep breath. “Such a stupid weapon.”
“It was always going to end like this,” I said, holding my pike toward him. “Imagine the stories they’ll tell when you defeat me here in a duel for the fate of the world.”
My father snorted and drew his proton sword before holding it in front of him. “There will be no stories. As far as the world will be concerned, you will be the greatest murderer since the Cognition A.I.”
I smiled. “Some legacy.”
Cassius the Elder stepped forward to attack, only for me to drop the light pike on the ground, causing his sword to swing wildly where he expected it to hit. I proceeded to grab him by the throat, my hands passing through his barrier, then crushed his larnyx with one swift squeeze. It was the action of a street brawler and wholly immune to the knowledge of the rigid forms in which I’d been educated by my father.
Cassius the Elder’s eyes widened and he choked before falling to his knees. I grabbed his proton sword off the ground and jabbed it straight through the old man’s heart. The expression on his face was one of shock, agony, and…amusement? It was not a dignified way to die—in real life you emptied your bowels when impaled on a proton sword—but it was a warrior’s death. Giving my father it felt wrong, somehow, and I agreed with the damned soul of Prince Germanicus he should have perished as an obese politician mourned by none.
I pulled the proton sword from his chest and tossed it to one side, staring at the bridge around me. “Now what?”
No answers accompanied me even though I tested my control over the nanovirus-infected troopers around me. I ordered a Void Marine to step forward before asking all of the bridge officers to stop their tasks.
They did so.
“I see,” I said, speaking only to myself.
I didn’t know whether to believe my father’s statement that he’d murdered all of my friends and loved ones, but it didn’t matter since I was going to be dead soon. Walking over to the controls, I proceeded to look over my shoulder and half expected more eyebots to arrive. Instead, there was only the fractured pieces of the one my father had sent after me, lying on the ground next to his corpse.
I conjured up a hologram in front of me of the surrounding system. I saw the massive fleet of the Free Systems Alliance standing before the jumpgate. It was sitting still, their engines running, but none of them making a move. The comm traffic between them was nonexistent, giving the impression of a fleet of tomb ships.
Which is what they were.
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That was when I saw the Temple of the Kathax Prime and was briefly moved to awe. It was every bit as large as described, a massive pyramid the size of a country. I’d seen similarly sized space stations but none of them capable of movement. Though it was only a speck of dust in the great void of the universe, it held more than enough power to lay waste to humanity’s forces. I tried contacting the Kathax Prime onboard it but received no sign of any response.
“I must destroy every bit of Elder Race technology,” I said, dictating orders to the crew of the C.S.S Revengeance. “That was what he said and that is what I need to do.”
I didn’t actually believe the fleets forces would obey when I sent out a command to all of them: Destroy all of your allies except for the Revengeance. What followed was a fireworks display of energy blasts which crisscrossed the void, causing vessel after vessel to explode. It would go on for hours as the machines were programmed as warriors.
With that, I dictated command after command to the C.S.S Revengeance and began turning the vessel slowly around before setting it for a collision course with the Temple of the Kathax Prime. It would take several minutes as I had to coordinate every single action. Whatever programs or A.I. which my father had designed to assist him in battle were not assisting me. They weren’t resisting me either.
So this was how I was going to die.
It was irritating in a way because I was now being given the very heroic death I’d always longed for. I’d not wanted to become a fat, idolent, pathetic waste of space like my father. I’d wanted to go out in the blaze of glory, a heroic figure to inspire future generations. Now I was going to die saving billions of lives and single-handedly winning a war, yet the experience was still ashes in my mouth.
I wanted to live. It was a shocking realization for me because I’d tried to kill myself slowly with whiskey, drugs, and risks up until this point. I’d been willing to die a thousand times before and there were times it would have been nothing more than a blessed relief. Yet, here and now, I wanted nothing so much than to live. The ghosts of my dead squadmates, crew, and even family did not call me to the afterlife but looked down upon me as if to say, “We have no hold upon you, Cassius. Not anymore.”
Yet, I didn’t have a choice, did I? If what the Kathax Prime said was true, then every bit of technology he had given or Zoe reverse engineered was an existential threat to humanity. A reason to give the Elder Races an excuse to destroy mankind—not that they seemed to need much of one. Hell, I’d been party to the death of not one but two of their kind and I suspected they’d killed races for far less than murdering what was supposed to be immortal. I had to die.
Right? In the end, I would have been able to give my life up. I was willing to die.
But I couldn’t resist the voice which spoke next.
“Cassius?” Isla’s voice spoke on the bridge’s comm system. “Are you there?”
I rushed to the side of it and tapped the response key. “Isla? Are you there? Are you alive?”
“How the hell did you get on the Revengeance?” Isla asked. “We’re on the Melampus and everyone is…well not everyone, but most of the crew is alive and the ship is still functional. It looks like the whole FSA fleet is on fire.”
“It is,” I said, trying to figure out what was going on. It seemed my father hadn’t killed them. Possibly the only time in his life he’d ever honored one of his problems. “As for how I got here, it’s a long story. My father is dead and I’ve got the dreadnought aimed like a dagger to the heart of the temple.”
“We’re sending over a shuttle to pick you up,” Isla said. “I don’t know how you did it, but I’m glad you did.”
I opened my mouth to object. To say that I had to die here and now, but found myself not doing so. I didn’t want to believe the Kathax Prime. Even more so, I didn’t give a shit about fulfilling his race’s demands. It wasn’t like he’d negotiated with them for humanity to be spared. If we’d discovered a way to fight the Kathax then that needed to be spread across the galaxy. Those were all lies, though.
Instead, I remained silent.
“Please come back to us,” Isla said.
I broke in that moment. “I’ll be at the bridge’s starboard airlock. Come pick me up. Please.”
There wasn’t much else to say after that moment. The engines of the Reveangence picked up about five or ten minutes later, well after I’d departed the ship, then plunged the ship at relativistic speeds into the side of the temple. There wasn’t an explosion, or at least much of one, but more the Revengeance smashing itself through the center of the pyramid. The Revengeance tore the asteroid-sized vessel into two humungous chunks that floated slowly through the air before coming part of Kolahn IV’s atmosphere. As I understood it, it would three years before the last of the debris landed on the decimated uninhabitable ruin of the world.
The last of my father’s legacy.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It took us two days to get out of Lucifer’s Nebula using our existing drive mechanisms. We had enough spare parts aboard the ship to make it jumpspace once we did. I spent most of that time cleaning up my office and redecorating it until it was impossible to say there had ever been a fight.
Instead, I sat down at my desk with the lights turned low while drinking the bottle of Crius scotch which Clarice had given me for my birthday. It couldn’t get me drunk thanks to my new liver installed by Isla, but I was finishing it just for the experience. I hoped it would also be the last bit of alcohol I ever considered in my life.
The crew was celebrating down below in the lounge, believing they were all going to be rich soon. I hadn’t the heart to tell them they were all going to get paid diddly-squat given the Commonwealth had never intended to follow through on its deal thanks to their plans for betraying me.
I turned on my computer interface and cycled down to a message which had been left on the ship by my brother. I’d watched it a dozen times since I’d first found it but found myself compelled to watch it one more time.
A life-size image of my brother wearing a workman’s jumpsuit, absent all the frills of his station as a Free Systems Alliance marshal, appeared in front of my desk. He had an expression on his face which was halfway between determined and resigned. He was clearly filming the message inside the office of the Kolahn Palace’s motorpool with dirty equipment as well as vehicles visible behind him.
“Hello, Cass,” Thomas said, blinking. “I don’t know if we’re going to get a chance to speak again after this, but I know you used to update your messages to Judith before every mission during the last days of the war. Since we haven’t had a chance to speak in the past decade and I can’t say anything incriminating in front of my father, I thought I’d take time to give you an explanation as well as some parting thoughts just in case I don’t make it.”
I took a deep breath. “With any luck, I’ll never see this…”
“With any luck, you’ll never see this,” Thomas said, saying the words from the message I memorized. “We’ll successfully hijack some kinetibikes, blow up the base, and get to the Temple of the Kathax Prime and blow it to kingdom come. Once that’s taken care of, Zoe and Father’s plans will be ruined. You wouldn’t believe the horrible things they’ve done. The horrible things we’ve done.”
“I would have,” I said, taking another drink of scotch.
Thomas looked down. “When we first gathered all the various resistance groups together, it was an impossible and exciting time. We were freedom fighters, terrorists, guerillas, and activists who never would have gotten together. I believed, though, we would be able to find common ground and defeat the Commonwealth. This was despite the fact I was the kind of person who would have killed these people for resisting against the Crius Archduchy just a few years before. We had friends in the Chel, Union of Faith, transtellars, and even Commonwealth.”
I closed my eyes.
“In the end, our father didn’t want to take the risk of compromise. If he couldn’t be th
e man absolutely in charge, even using you or Vi as his public persona, he didn’t want the FSA to survive at all. Zoe’s Elder Race-derived technology gave him the option to do it. I’m sure it won’t take you much longer to figure out the majority of our soldiers here in the nebula are little more than mechs. Really, it’s a miracle it’s been kept secret as long as it has been, but I suppose people don’t want to believe,” Thomas said. “There are plenty of real-life agents for the FSA, people who report to me, and brainwashed bioroids who might actually be the closest thing to real soldiers we have now. Whatever the case, though, father and Zoe murdered many of my friends and loved ones.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Thomas,” I said, talking to his digital echo.
“It my fault,” Thomas said, not speaking to me save in the loosest sense. “I should have stopped them but I was blinded until it was too late. I could have killed them but I could never bring myself to hurt Zoe or even father. I believe you can.”
“Yeah, thanks for that,” I muttered.
“That’s not a flaw,” Thomas said, pausing for a moment. “Rather, it’s a statement that you’ve done something I haven’t been able to do. You’ve built a family outside of the one we both grew up in. You have friends, lovers, and people who you can trust. Who aren’t monsters trying to rebuild a government which wasn’t worth protecting from the beginning. I envy you that and if we survive, well, maybe I’ll be able to do the same. If not, and by some miracle that you do, treasure them. I don’t believe in an afterlife despite the fact I am definitely in a foxhole right now. However, I know you do so say a prayer for me and I’ll do the same. Goodbye, and honor be with you.”
“Honor be with you,” I said, watching the hologram disappear.
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