Arun gasped.
And bowed his head before his master.
—— PART V ——
THE CULL
HUMAN LEGION
— INFOPEDIA —
HISTORY OF THE LEGION
– Introduction to the Cull
To understand the White Knights, you must first understand the poisonous rusty-brown clouds that choke their homeworld: the Flek.
Originally a natural phenomenon that has long been re-engineered and updated to better serve the will of the White Knights, the key to the Flek's significance lies in its mutagenic properties. The ancestors of the White Knights evolved into a world where the only constant was change. Natural selection rules unchallenged across every world that gave birth to living creatures, but nowhere has it cracked the whip so furiously as on the White Knight homeworld.
To the outside world, the White Knights appear obsessed with change. With the super-accelerated forces of creative destruction hardwired into every cell of their biology it could be no other way.
The White Knights celebrate change. And they fear it. Change created them, and change will destroy them. The rest of the galaxy accepts this as an intellectual fact, but not an emotionally relevant one, because the evolutionary timescale for the rest of us is measured in mega-years, not decades as with the White Knights.
New branches of the White Knight family are constantly generated, some deliberately. Many are harnessed by more dominant members of the species, others are exterminated, and a tiny proportion will overcome ferocious odds to become dominant themselves.
Constant renewal.
Incessant conflict.
Their supercharged evolution is the key to the White Knights' strength, but it does not lend itself to stability.
Insurrection, coups, and civil wars are commonplace, but the White Knights are not fools, and they have remained the dominant force in this region of the galaxy since long before Homo sapiens emerged to become the principal hominid of Earth until the modern period.
Whatever faction prevails in the Imperial citadel on the White Knight homeworld, they enforce the rituals of submission upon their vassal races with a ruthless consistency. Chief among these rituals is the most hated aspect of submission across hundreds of worlds.
The Cull.
Every single being across every world that swears fealty to the White Knights is subject to the Cull.
On their homeworld, the Flek accelerates the randomness of White Knight mutation, and provokes the extermination of the branches of the family who outlive their usefulness or choose the wrong side in the endless power struggles. In honor of their masters' nature, each world and each race devises their own form of Cull, combining randomness and competition in a manner acceptable to their overlords.
On worlds that please the White Knights, the numbers Culled are far too small to impact their economies, but there is a profound psychological impact from having each and every person on that world knowing they are, or were, eligible for the Cull.
Worlds that displease the White Knights suffer accordingly, often with additional forms of Cull being imposed. The Littoranes of Shepherd-Nurture-4 suffered such a punishment Cull in what they call the Year of Sorrows. An entire generation was exterminated as a lesson, though what it was that had so displeased them was a detail the White Knights never passed on.
The form of Cull employed in the Human Marine Corps was far more severe than civilian populations would all subjected to, but typical in the way it combined randomness with competition. Cadet battalions competed with one another, attempting to outscore each other in their martial competence to escape the Cull Zone of the inter-battalion rankings. If your battalion was caught in the Cull Zone at the end of each season, then a tenth of your number of final year cadets would be selected at random, and executed by members of your own unit.
To the leaders of the White Knights, whatever their faction, the Cull was the keystone of their empire: the ritual that must be enforced at any cost.
Those who had experienced the Cull, executing their own comrades in honor of their overlords’ nature, also saw the Cull as a keystone of the White Knight empire. If they could destroy the Cull, they reasoned, the entire edifice of White Knight supremacy would crumble into the dust of history.
After the Liberation of Athena, as the victorious Human Legion prepared to meet with the White Knight Emperor in the wasteland beyond the Imperial citadel, there were those who dared hope that the Cull would soon be ended.
— CHAPTER 45 —
Although Arun was glad of the opportunity to be involved once more – he would have given anything to feel useful again after being forced to sit out so much of recent events – he could have wished for better circumstances. The techs were designing him legs that could be grafted onto the stumps of his thighs and would feel ‘better than the originals’, or so they claimed. He wasn’t convinced: soothing rhetoric if ever he’d heard it, but they were sticking to their guns. He would have been happy to adopt the sort of prosthetics that Springer – Arun still found it painful to think of her as ‘Tremayne’ – and so many others relied on, but the techs were having none of it.
Apparently the wounds relating to the amputations were not yet healed enough, the risk of damaging the still-delicate stubs of his truncated limbs too great to expose them to the crude friction of standard prosthetics. No, they had to be cosseted and allowed to fully heal so that there would be no possibility of a reaction to his new lower limbs once they were ready.
So it was to be a mobile chair for him; a contraption that encased his lower body from the waist down, its stylish curved-lozenge front resembling the nose of a Valiant to Arun’s mind. As well as taking care of bodily waste in much the same way a battlesuit did, the chair was armored, motorized, and capable of limited flight and hovering – not enough to send him soaring off into the clouds but enough to handle tricky terrain when necessary. It also made Arun feel self-consciously… short.
He had recovered from his immediate sense of awe at sight of the Emperor, but only to a degree.
Physically, the White Knights were unlike any other race of Arun’s experience. He was accustomed to conjuring a mental image of a Jotun, a Littorane, even a Hardit, when he thought about each race, but there was no chance of doing so with the White Knights. They possessed so many varied forms – some of them radically divergent – that it was impossible to contemplate a single generic image. On first arriving at the capital, he had been impressed by the number of races in evidence, all of them new to him. He assumed that what he was seeing were various subject races, those high in the White Knight’s estimation and deemed worthy to attend the homeworld. He found the truth astounding, that these were all forms of the White Knights.
Arun saw crusted chitinous forms that made the worst mutated skins of the Wolves seem mild in comparison, and rotund, almost spherical beings that initially seemed to roll across the ground, until he realized that short stout legs sat beneath their corpulent bodies and the impression that they rotated was just that: illusion. There were frail-seeming skeletal beings who stalked across the ground on tripedal legs, towering over the majority of their contemporaries; reptilian vermillion-scaled individuals with compound eyes, and amorphous blobs whose faces seemed to be their only immutable features. The latter flowed across surfaces in a disconcerting manner, evidently untroubled by how steep or narrow the path before them might be.
Size, color, form, even the number of limbs seemed ever variable, and Arun struggled to comprehend how such extreme divergence could constitute a single species.
“I knew there were variations in White Knight form,” he muttered to Del-Marie, “but this–”
“Don’t bring the subject up with the Emperor,” Del-Marie said quickly. “Let the Emperor explain the differences in his own time. We’ve no idea what cultural mores or taboos we might stomp over by asking without being prompted.”
Arun had little trouble in acceding to Del’s advice. As he ha
d first approached the citadel, flanked by his most trusted officers – well… most of them – and with Valiants thundering past overhead, it had been easy to adopt an attitude of strength, of authority, to imagine that the Emperor should worry about offending him rather than the other way around. But at the first sight of the Emperor’s golden form all that had crumbled to dust. It wasn’t just him, either: the whole party had reacted in similar fashion, their defiant resolve swept away in the face of this – the supreme ruler of the White Knight Empire – radiant and glorious among the dust and rubble. Here was a being born to rule, while they were born to serve.
That was then. Arun was determined not to succumb to the Emperor’s sheer physical presence again. Thankfully he had been given the opportunity to recover. They had all been shown to private quarters within the citadel ahead of a formal audience, and Del had helped him to regroup, to reassess the situation and stitch the tattered threads of his resolve back into a semblance of order. Arun still found it impossible to trust his senior diplomat as fully as he once had, but, as Del himself had pointed out, “If that was me you saw, if that really is me from the future, it’s precisely that: the future. The me that’s here and now is the same as I’ve always been – your friend, your advisor, committed to the cause just as you are. Don’t let the specter that our relationship might change at some indefinable point in the years or decades to come prevent me from contributing now, when you most need me. After all, who’s to say what lies ahead for any of us?”
Arun could have said something then, about Night Hummers and even Tremayne, but he bit back the words, unwilling to risk compromising this new beginning with Del, such as it was.
Among all the bewildering variety of White Knights they encountered en route to the Emperor’s chamber, there were a few – a very few – tall, slender beings, humanoid in essence but elongated as if stretched, and lacking any hair. Their skin was of a burnished gold that almost seemed to glow, and they carried themselves with a poise, a grace, that set them apart even in such a kaleidoscope of physical forms. These were the Royals, Arun knew, considered to be the epitome of the White Knight form. Perfection. Yet none were a match for the Emperor, the most perfect of them all; these others were like echoes or reflections, appearing flawless until you saw the original and realized that in fact all the others had been fractionally distorted, marginally compromised…
Again that sense of overwhelming awe struck him as soon as he entered the Emperor’s presence. At least Arun managed not to abase himself this time, but only just.
“Ah, General McEwan, welcome.”
“Your Elevance,” Arun replied, his voice slightly muffled by his mask, which protected against the Flek. By contrast, the translation Barney was providing of the Imperial voice had none of the monotone flatness Arun had known all his life. The intonation and idiom was more than natural. It was preternatural: the voice of an angel. Or a demon.
The Emperor had risen to his feet – which might have been a mark of respect but Arun suspected a different motive, as this enabled the White Knight to tower over his visitor, making Arun’s own situation all the more frustrating. However much he kept telling himself that this was a meeting of equals – the Legion had, after all, just saved the Emperor’s ass – Arun had been raised to think of the White Knights as beings so far above him that they might as well be gods. Yes, he had dedicated his entire life to casting off that yoke of servitude, but indoctrination like that was deeply ingrained, no matter how much he might want to deny the fact. Despite his resolve and all the coaching from Del, it was all Arun could do to meet the Emperor’s gaze. And when he did, he could only do so by craning his neck and staring upward towards the heavens.
Arun was determined to overcome this sense of inferiority. Yes, here was a being used to feeling superior to everyone, even to other White Knights, who doubtless felt all the more superior when dealing with a member of a ‘lesser race’ whose head didn’t reach much further than his waist, but at the end of the day it was the Emperor who had come to him for help, and not the other way around.
He gazed up unflinchingly into the White Knight’s eyes, smiled and said, “Shall we begin?”
——
The Flek dissipated quickly once they left the citadel behind.
“It’s ever present,” the Emperor said when Arun commented on the fact, “but in such low volumes in this area that it’s harmless, even to off-worlders. So, yes, you may remove your breathing apparatus.”
Reasoning that there were a thousand easier ways for the Emperor to kill him than lie at this point, Arun removed his mask and breathed the Flek-tainted air. Even in this low concentration, his lungs tingled, and the taste of almonds and burnt biscuits that filled his mouth was surprisingly familiar. He felt his face pinch when he realized why. On that day in 2565 when Arun had participated in the Cull, the replica-Flek released by Sergeant Bissinger had the same bitter taste of biscuits and almond.
“Flek can accumulate, though,” continued the Emperor, “gathering into dense clouds, as you’ve seen. The accumulation is predictable at certain times and places but not always – Flek can manifest almost anywhere.”
“And that process can be manipulated, I take it,” Arun said, “to bring additional protection to a defensive position, for example.”
The Emperor smiled. Or so Arun believed.
Arun was learning to recognize the expression now; at least he hoped so. At first the Emperor and his courtiers had seemed inscrutable to him. This golden variety of the Whites Knights presented a uniformly blank expression to the world for all their outwardly humanoid appearance, their features apparently frozen, immobile, but Arun was coming to realize that this was not entirely true. It was the eyes. They widened and narrowed, bringing fleeting changes to cheeks and the ghost of laughter lines that disappeared almost before Arun could be certain of their meaning. The subtlest of clues, but he was working to master them.
He still found it hard not to be deferential, still struggled with the concept that he was in casual conversation with the Emperor. Drugs might help and had been suggested by Del-Marie, but Arun had rejected the idea, determined to keep a clear head. This was too important to risk missing the slightest nuance. He still wasn’t entirely clear why the Emperor had insisted on this ‘extended audience’ – that was the term he used – personally escorting Arun around Athena to show him the White Knight world. “It will help you appreciate who we are,” the Emperor had said. “Once we have established that, we can begin negotiating properly.”
Perhaps, but Arun and his Legion advisors were not about to accept the explanation at face value. “It’s intended to soften you up,” Indiya had opined. “Either to win your sympathies or impress the hell out of you.”
“If it’s the latter, they needn’t bother,” Arun had replied. “Simply being in the Emperor’s presence does that, even if the Tree hadn’t.”
To distract himself, Arun glanced out and upwards. From here, aboard the fragile-seeming aircraft with walls that could be made opaque or transparent at will, Arun could see the Tree, the great metal shell that arose from myriad trunks across this world; a bewilderingly vast habitat that supported… how many White Knights? Arun realized he had no idea.
“Many of my people go their entire lives without ever setting foot on our homeworld’s surface,” the Emperor said, presumably noting the direction of Arun’s gaze. “The Tree, as you like to call it, provides all we need, all we desire.”
“And yet you have situated your own home on the surface,” Arun noted, thinking of the citadel.
“One of my homes,” the Emperor replied.
Arun returned to studying the Tree, trying to imagine how this was all built: the massive supporting structures, the tubes and blisters and gantries that appeared slender and delicate from this distance but which were undoubtedly vast in reality. The enormity of the undertaking was astonishing. A statement that brought home the power of the White Knights more emphatically than anything he h
ad yet encountered, brazenly declaring, “We are beyond you all!”
This underbelly, this planet-side view of the world-encircling structure, was invisible from the ground. The White Knights had done a credible job of creating the illusion of open-skies, of a natural climate, which continued to deceive the eye from the ground despite all the damage suffered by the Tree during decades of war. But, from up here, the Tree was visible.
Beside him, Indiya too gazed upwards toward Athena’s great metal shell. Today it was her turn to accompany Arun, though not with any enthusiasm – he knew that she was itching to be back aboard her precious ships. There was no way she or any of the Legion officers were going to let him travel unaccompanied, however. They all had better things to be doing, so it was decided that the command team would take it in turns to escort Arun during this ‘grand tour’ that the Emperor had insisted upon. It was the Emperor himself who suggested Indiya should be the first to do so. He seemed fascinated by her purple hair, saying, “And this is natural, not a cosmetic effect?” The question was addressed to Arun, as all of the Emperor’s conversation had been; deliberate provocation, no doubt, suggesting that all other Legion commanders were beneath his notice.
It was Indiya who answered, though. “No, I was born with it.” Arun had to admire her restraint.
“Interesting…” The Emperor still managed to avoid looking at her, even when replying.
——
Their first port of call proved to be an area of comparative wilderness. They had flown over cultivated fields and gazed down upon crops growing in regimented rows; on herds of great lumbering six-legged beasts, their heads crowned with bony formations that looked capable of battering through walls when powered by their thick neck and shoulder muscles. A simple command magnified the scene, enabling those aboard the royal craft to study individual specimens that would otherwise have been mere motes among the herd. The plane had then dropped lower and sent groups of white skittish creatures scuttling from one side of a vast paddock to the other in order to escape its passage, while it had produced the opposite reaction from a forest of giant purple-green fronded trees, which reached towards them with serpentine tendrils that swayed in unison, following their course in an eerie semblance of sentience.
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