The Imperialists: The Complete Trilogy

by H. T. Kofruk

  Fann went down to his knees. “As the son of the radiant Han Ching-diu, I accept this honour with the heaviest heart. Our divine bloodline will continue in me while endowing fatherly love to the citizens of the New Han Empire. I bask in the light of humility and duty.” He said ceremoniously.

  Even after having known for months of his destiny, saying the words and accepting the status of Crown Prince with such ease disgusted him. He had never truly loved his brother, not even liked him, but he was his brother and he could only guess of the heart-wrenching pain he and his father had inflicted on him. He told himself that he was doing it for the good of the Empire, but was it really just that? Was there no part in him that wanted the position for purely selfish reasons? Did his soul not want to drink in the love and glory that went with being Emperor?

  He looked up at his brother who was standing with his face down. Tears were hanging on the bottom of his eyes. One of them fell to the marble floor.

  “Do I disappoint you, my son?” asked the Emperor unnecessarily with a surprising affectionate edge to his voice. “I am not punishing you by stripping you of your title. You will remain my first-born and retain all the privileges that go with it.”

  Xiao said nothing. A single tear rolled down his eye along the crevice of his nose and then around his lip. As it fell from his chin, it left a tell-tale lifeline of moisture on the young prince’s face. All of a sudden, the prince knelt on the floor in front of him, crumpling like a defeated mountain. He planted his fists on the ground and cocked his head down as if he were worshipping some idol of sadness. A searing sob filled the room. The other two members of the Imperial Family couldn’t see Xiao’s face but the flood of moisture impacting the black marble was proof of his broken pride.

  Fann approached the former Crown Prince and knelt down beside him. He was annoyed at his father’s method, timing and his current indifferent attitude. Slowly, he put his hand on the heaving black-clad shoulder of his brother. With a sudden movement of his shoulder, Xiao shoved away his hand and turned his head towards the new scion of the Empire.

  “You!” he screamed with murder in his blood-shot eyes. “You conspired against me! You treacherous filth! I thought you my brother but you’re no better than all the rats infested around me!” With that he resumed his hunched position and continued to bleed tears.

  Fann stood back up with resignation. He knew at that moment that his brother would never forgive him and that the wound in his pride would never be healed.

  “My son” called the Emperor in a fatherly voice. He walked towards his first-born until he was almost stepping on the tears on the floor. “I know that your heart harbours pain. But you must set it aside for your family and the common people who will always love and look up to you. You must have a big heart that can absorb your pain and look towards the future of the universe.”

  Xiao looked up at his father, face full of tears and snot. “Father” he said with a trembling voice charged with emotion. “I am sorry for failing you as a son.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. I still love you and…”

  “I am sorry” repeated Xiao again.

  What happened in the following second didn’t register immediately in Fann’s mind. Indeed, it took several seconds for him to come out of his disbelief as he stood motionless. It was Xiao’s voice that brought him back to reality.

  “Guards!” screamed Xiao. “Uncle Qin!”

  A side door opened and Colonel Qin materialised with three of his Shadows. Xiao ran to him and knelt in front of the old assassin while clinging at his clothes. A collective gasp rose from the Imperial bodyguards as they saw their Walking God lying on his back on the marble floor with blood gushing from a deep gash on his throat. A small grey knife, still vibrating, protruded from the gash, digging ever deeper into the Emperor’s thin neck. As the most powerful man in the universe grappled to stay alive, red bubbles emerged from his mouth and he looked at Fann with desperate eyes.

  “Fann wanted to be the Crown Prince, and when Father refused, he killed him” cried Xiao amidst his sobs. “Fann killed father!” he cried again.

  Fann didn’t know what to say. His mind was frozen from the shock but now he could see what Xiao was doing. “I…I didn’t do it” he mumbled. “I didn’t do it.”

  A sudden loathing of his brother gripped Fann. He wanted to pull back his head and make him tell him why he did it before slitting his throat. He approached his father who was now still and silent and pulled out the knife, letting out another torrent of blood. His father’s face was now forever imprinted with the shock and fear of death.

  “You piece of shit!” he shouted as he ran towards his brother. “I will cut out your lying throat, you murderous animal!”

  Two of the Shadows suddenly disappeared and then reappeared in front of him, each one grabbing shoulder. “We are sorry, Your Highness. We must arrest you for your crime.”

  “Yes, he must be tried and hung for killing Father” said Xiao in a pleading voice.

  Fann knocked away the hands that were grabbing him. “Can’t you see what he’s doing? What he’s done? He is a snake that needs to be skinned.” He made another run at his brother. But when he was just a few feet away, a strong shock struck him in his chest and he found himself on the floor near his father’s corpse.

  He was nauseous from the pain in his chest and had difficulty breathing. Still struggling for breath, he got up, only to be confronted by Colonel Qin who had somehow materialised in front of him. “How dare you strike me” he said in a strained voice.

  “Please be still, my prince. I do not want to hurt you anymore. Forgive me for hitting you.”

  “But can’t you see? I would never kill Father. You know that.”

  “Yet you hold the blade that killed him as if it was yours.”

  His own stupidity suddenly angered him. “You know I wouldn’t do such a thing, uncle. You know me.”

  Fann could see the stern eyes of Colonel Qin, his father’s childhood friend, softening. For a split second, an understanding passed between them, two men who had loved the Emperor.

  “Should we take Prince Fann under custody, sir?” asked one of the masked Shadows.

  “No” was the short reply from Qin.

  Xiao stood up. “What? Why are you not arresting him as I command?”

  “Because I do not believe that he was the killer.”

  “It is not your place to question my order. I am now the Emperor. I order you to arrest my treacherous brother and hold him until trial” he sneered.

  “He will be investigated for possible murder, but so will you, Your Highness.”

  “How dare you…If not, I will find someone who can follow orders to do it for me.” He pointed at one of the other three Shadows. “You, relieve Colonel Qin of his duties and arrest the traitor, Fann.”

  “How could you do this?” shouted Fann, his voice trembling from emotion. “I will cut the truth from you!” He tried to make another run but was prevented by Qin who raised an arm to block his way.

  “I am the rightful emperor! And I command all of you to arrest Fann!” screamed Xiao whose voice and face contrasted vividly from a few moments ago. “If you do not do as I command, I will have all of you relieved of duty and arrested!”

  “No one will touch Prince Fann unless Prince Xiao also agrees to be investigated” said Colonel Qin in a dangerous voice void of emotion.

  “You are relieved of duty! Arrest them both!” cried Xiao.

  One of the Shadows took off his mask to reveal the face of an officer in his early forties. “Please, sir. Let us do our job” he pleaded.

  Qin didn’t budge. “It has been a pleasure serving with you.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. Kill them all. That is an Imperial order” said Xiao.

  The younger Shadow replaced his mask and moved forward. He tried to move past his commanding officer but was blocked by a raised arm. “Please, Colonel Qin. Please.”

  The ensuing fight was too fast f
or even Fann to follow. Black blurs filled the room as the three younger Shadows attacked their former leader. The sound of pulse fire shots reverberated as holes suddenly appeared in the floor. Silk chairs burst into piles of bio-foam.

  Colonel Qin was in his sixties and knew he had to subdue the other three quickly; they were younger and more durable than he. Despite his stoic appearance, he suffered from several ailments that he kept secret. If the now-dead Emperor had found out about any of them he would have made him retire and live a simple and cosy life. But then he would have felt useless and lonely; Emperor Han Ching-diu had been his only friend.

  He was more experienced, however, than the others. He knew his men well and was aware that two of them were relatively junior and he had a few tricks to bring them down. It was Major Bo, the one who had pleaded to him, who was dangerous. He had been one of the most successful assassins before being recalled to Imperial bodyguard duty.

  With a fist to the right armpit, he impacted the pressure point of one of the younger Shadows before he knocked him out for sure with an elbow blow to the neck. He heard the squeezing of a trigger and arched his back just in time to see a pulse shatter the glass chess table. He rolled forward to pick up a shard of glass which he threw with deadly precision at the other young Shadow, only to see it blocked by his forearm.

  He just managed to block a kick to the throat but it left his hand numb. Major Bo threw a fist at his unguarded face and he managed to block that, too. But not the kick to his stomach that sent him flying backwards into the glass wall. Another pulse set to maximum power shattered the glass after he lunged to the floor. He rolled again and saw a pair of feet stamping on the ground on which had lain. Using his core strength, he spun around on the floor, catching the toes with his own as Major Bo tried to jump again. The slight contact sent the major spinning and crashing into a marble and jade cabinet.

  The other one holding a pulse pistol shot again. He responded with his own pulse pistol, purposely hitting the wall just next to the other one’s head. The younger bodyguard predictably ducked. But when he lifted his head again, it was met by Qin’s knee.

  After downing the last one, he went to Prince Fann who was crouching near the glass wall. He helped him up and looked him in the eye. “My prince, I have committed treason and I will pay for it. You, however, must go. You are a good man and you must survive for our Empire, and for humanity.”

  “I will go. But not before I kill him!” yelled Fann.

  Colonel Qin made a rumbling sound and his eyes opened wide. Blood drooled down his lower lip.

  “I am sorry, sir. You gave me no choice” said Major Bo. With that he withdrew the blade that had impaled his former superior.

  Qin slumped but Fann caught him before he fell to the floor. “Uncle” he sobbed. “I can’t lose you and Father in one day.”

  “It has been an honour, Fann” said Qin before he took out his pistol and shot at the glass wall. With his final strength, he pushed Fann through the cracked glass. The last image of Colonel Qin that Fann ever saw was the expressionless face of a dying old man, dribbling blood as he was slung over the glass wall at the summit of the Heavenly Tower.

  Chapter 2: Lebanon

  ‘A peculiar phenomenon can be observed in the number of organized religions after the twenty-third century; it started declining rapidly, reversing a centuries-old trend. But rather than attribute this to the rise of scientific rational thinking, I believe the opposite to be true. Religions were being destroyed and consolidated. Fewer religions were indoctrinating more people. After all, what is religion but a collection of thought on where we come from and where we’re going, two fundamentally scientific subjects.’ – Desmond Ba, futurist and political scientist, , year 2603

  It was a cold winter morning in the mountains of Lebanon. The low clouds spilled out of the shallow valleys onto the gentle peaks. The morning dew was frozen and created tiny crystals on the needles of the cedar trees. Major Nabil Abdul-Hadi had been born in these same mountains fifty miles east of the northern city of Tripoli. His home was on the other side of the mountains, near the Beqaa Valley, where life was simple.

  In the fifteen years he spent in the army, six were spent in Turkey; three years in the northern borders with the Orthodox Empire and the last three in Ankara as a logistics planning officer. His mundane cycle of computing supply requirements and sending orders through the Web-Com were changed by the outbreak of war.

  No one had suspected the northern defences would fall so easily and swiftly but it turned out the Orthodox troops had entered from two points: the north western border with the Atlantic Alliance of which the eastern part was now under Orthodox control and the north eastern border with the Orthodox Empire. Enemy armoured infantry units descended south with shocking speed, reaching the outskirts of the Turkish capital in merely four days.

  There, he had seen the enemy for the first time. The invading forces from both frontiers didn’t even wear camouflage; they came as grey hoards like thunderous clouds on a sunny day. The Peace Alliance’s lack of combat experience was painfully obvious in the initial days of the attack. The grey masses cut through ill-prepared defences like a knife through butter.

  Intelligence suggested that the soldiers wearing peculiar grey armour were the mythical Catholics. Nabil hadn’t believed it at first. When war broke out between the Oceanic Alliance and the Continental Empires, the Peace Alliance had held back in joining in due to its disdain of Atlantic Alliance doctrines. When it became clear that Catholics, a people not seen on earth for at least three centuries, were aiding the Orthodox Empire, the Peace Alliance couldn’t stand back and just watch the Charter Convention of Earth being violated. The Catholics, due to their long absence from Earth, were to be considered intelligent aliens rather than fellow Rendens and their use in a war on the Home Planet by any of the Six Empires was a severe violation of the Charter.

  But decades of no military muscle-flexing had left the Peace Alliance soft. Unlike the other empires, the Peace Alliance had very limited outer-space presence and hence, hadn’t fought any colonial wars. The Catholics, on the other hand, had been hardening themselves for centuries for the reinvasion of their home. Turkey was completely lost in four weeks.

  The Arab members of the Peace Alliance became even more agitated; they were on the front line in the new war and the fact that Catholics were the enemy brought back collective memories of an event that was still deeply engrained in the Muslim psyche: the Crusades. Radical imams, for centuries condemned to the fringes of society in a largely secular super-state, suddenly started gaining influence and popularity. This made the other major half of the Peace Alliance, the Hindus, very nervous. Internal cracks in the supposedly rock-solid alliance that considered peace and secularism as its binding values started to appear.

  ‘Cowardly bureaucrats’ thought Nabil. The Hindu Congress decided that it couldn’t divert vital troops to the western front when an attack from the Chinese Empire could begin at any moment. The Peace Alliance troops managed to slow the enemy down in Syria but they couldn’t stop the grey onslaught. Another eight weeks and the Peace Alliance forces made yet another retreat into tiny Lebanon, a routine that was becoming depressingly familiar. He remembered the flames that engulfed Damascus as his troops retreated, leaving a million civilians to find their own way out.

  And one month ago, after what seemed to be the hundredth retreat, he had come back to the mountains as familiar to him as his rifle. He saw the ridges he had maglev-glided along as a teenager, the same cedar trees he had climbed as a child, the same snow-capped mountains where he had trained as a soldier. When he was fighting in Turkey and Syria, he had fought for an idea, for an invisible entity. Now the fight was coming to his home, to the mountains he loved, and the struggle became personal.

  ***

  Paul Camileri was rejoicing at the arrival of the transport pod. It held what he held dearest to him apart from his faith. A hiss notified
the release of pressure from inside the pod. He waited impatiently like a child waiting for a present as the door to the pod opened painfully slowly. Twelve crates, each at least twenty feet long and seven feet high, were stacked side by side. A Web-Com controlled mobile crane stopped in front of the stack. The biological metal alloy at the head of the crane morphed and took the shape of a giant pair of fully functioning claws. The claws gripped one of the crates and slid it gently out.

  Magdalena was starting to move around as she caught a whiff of her master. Once the crate was settled down in front of Paul, the metal sheet blocking one end was slid out. Magdalena inquisitively put her head out and sniffed. Paul approached her and gently touched her great pair of mandibles. The dranipede’s four eyes all focused on him and the great slit that served as a mouth and a nose opened wide to drink in his scent. His great mount let out a high-pitched whining noise to express her happiness at being reunited with him.

  Paul walked back slowly, drawing her out onto this new world. The twelve segments, each supported by two pairs of legs, emerged from the crate. Magdalena was no longer her natural green but had been fitted with grey scale armour. Her full combat gear would include a pair of geratinium blades for her mandibles, a mounted pulse canon, two missiles launchers at the rear and an array of blades that could be folded in and out from her sides. The fact she could already run as fast as a pulse-glider and her natural armour was tough enough to deflect medium-strength pulses made her a formidable weapon in the hands of the right master.

  The soldiers, all clad in grey amplifier suits with inflated armour, stood wisely away from the beast. Only one of them, Sir Adam Balo, dared step closer.

  “She is a fine beast, Paul” he remarked, admiring her well maintained mandibles. Another crate was being unloaded, and the deeper squealing indicated it was a male. “One day, she could be a good mate for Abraham.”