Graveyard of Empires

by Lincoln Cole

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  Collision of Worlds

  Prologue

  Sector 4 – Tellus

  Alaina Naylor

  1

  “When I went to the market today they didn’t even have bread.”

  “No bread?” Carl echoed. “How could they run out of bread?”

  They were both in the kitchen of their home, preparing dinner. Carl stood at the sink trimming half-rotten vegetables, eyeing each carefully for glaring imperfections before dropping them into a bowl along with the others.

  As Darius’s rebellion went on through the years, the tolerable level for rot and decay had loosened. Now, he was at the point that anything was ‘acceptable’ if he didn’t feel it would make his family sick.

  “I don’t know. But they had none, and no one knew when they would be able to make more.”

  “Damn,” he said, dropping another spear of asparagus into the bowl. “Things just keep getting worse. First they ran out of most dairy products, and now bread.”

  “That isn’t even the half of it,” Kate replied. “By all accounts the rationing has only just begun.”

  “What are they planning to limit next?”

  “Meat,” Kate answered. “Water. If it’s something we need, they’ll ration it or hike up the prices until we can’t afford it.”

  “I’ll get a second job if I have to,” Carl said. “If we need the money.”

  “The money won’t matter,” Kate said, leaning heavily against the counter. “There won’t be anything left to buy.”

  Alaina knelt in the living room next to the kitchen door. She was pretending to watch television but really listening in on her parents’ conversation. She knew her parents didn’t like her eavesdropping, but she couldn’t help herself.

  They always assumed she didn’t know what was going on, and that she didn’t understand grown up things, but she did. She hated being treated like the seven-year-old girl she was.

  In a short while they would call her in for dinner to eat the meal they had prepared, but judging by the meager supplies her mother had returned home with Alaina knew it would be a small meal.

  They were all small meals nowadays.

  “The food lines are the worst of it,” Kate said. “Having to wait for hours and then only being allowed to purchase a small amount of anything. They only let you buy enough to take care of half of your family.”

  “I waited three hours for a cod filet yesterday,” Carl agreed. “Three hours for one filet, and by the time I got there they were all sold out. The woman three spots ahead of me got the last one. I thought I was going to cry.”

  “How are we supposed to feed our children?” Kate asked. She was speaking lower now and there was a thickness in her voice. Alaina had to strain to hear. “Or keep them clothed. I’ve had to mend Jessie’s shirt three times in the last week.”

  A long moment passed, the only sound them working side by side. Alaina didn’t like when her parents got sentimental like this, but it was a lot better than them being mad at each other. That happened a lot nowadays, too.

  “We’ll get by,” Carl said finally. “It can’t stay like this forever. The economy will make a turnaround.”

  “How?” Kate asked, a twinge of anger in her voice.

  This was more what Alaina was used to.

  “How can it possibly turn around? It’s been two years since Tellus ratified the Union. Two years since our planet joined Darius and this stupid rebellion. The aid funding we used to receive from the Core is gone. Trade dried up. How are things going to get better?”

  “Things like this take time,” Carl argued.

  “How much time? Do you know? Does Darius know? This war is costing us far more than it is costing the Republic.”

  “I know,” Carl replied. “Progress has been slow, but you saw the news. Big things are happening. More planets have sworn for the Union. Trade is starting back up in Sector Six. Darius is calculating, waiting for things to fall into place before launching an all-out military campaign against Axis and the First Citizen.”

  “How long can we wait? We are starving and can’t take care of our families. By the time Darius decides we’re ready to start fighting we’ll all be too weak to do anything. We should just end this: surrender and let us go back to the way things were.”

  “There is no turning back,” Carl said quietly. “The only way for us now is forward.”

  “How are we supposed to keep fighting? If Darius can’t even keep his own people fed, how is he going to bring down the Republic?”

  This time, her father was slower in responding.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Kate, I just don’t know.”

  Kate sighed, breathing out the tension. “Neither do I. I know it isn’t your fault…I just…”

  “I understand,” Carl said. “I supported Darius, but I’m not so sure anything will change now. But I promise I won’t let you or the kids go hungry.”

  “How will you do that?”

  The silence hung in the air. “The families of soldiers never go hungry.”

  “No, Carl,” Kate said. “I won’t let you. You promised you would never join and risk your life and I will not let you.”

  “I know but—”

  “No,” Alain’s mother interrupted sharply. “End of discussion.”

  Alaina heard her father blow out a breath of air, but he didn’t say anything. She strained to hear, but it sounded like they were finished talking.

  A few moments passed, and then footsteps alerted her that they were heading toward the living room where she was supposed to be watching cartoons.

  She scurried back over to her spot on the floor. On the television two children were wandering through a make-believe forest, searching for stupid teddy bears or something. She pretended like it was funny as her parents pushed through the door and came inside.

  “How’s my big girl?” Carl asked, lifting Alaina up and giving her a hug. He was disheveled and smelled of stale sweat. He spent long hours at work each day, coming home in the middle of the night sometimes after she was asleep. She rarely saw him anymore, with how often he was working or waiting in the food lines.

  She missed him.

  “Hey daddy,” Alaina said, squeezing him.

  “What are you watching?”

  “Cartoons,” she answered.

  He set her back on the floor and sat down on the couch. Her mother sat next to him, and it looked to Alaina like she’d been crying.

  “How are your dance lessons going?” her father asked.

  Alaina looked at the floor.

  “We had to take her out of dance,” her mother said. “They closed shop because there were too few students. Everyone was behind on their payments.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “It’s okay daddy, I didn’t like dance lessons anyway.”

  “You didn’t? I thought you loved to dance?”

  “Nope,” she said, kind of annoyed. She hadn’t liked dance for almost a month. “I want to learn how to fight.”

  Carl glanced at her mother, raising an eyebrow quizzically.

  “Don’t look at me. I don’t know where she gets these ideas. Probably from vids.”

  Carl shrugged. “Maybe,” he agreed. He turned back to Alaina. “So you want to learn how to fight, huh? Why? So you can be a superhero?”

  She nodded emphatically. “I want to fight monsters.”

  “Don’t worry honey,” her father said. “There aren’t any monsters.”

  “Oh yes there are,” Alaina said. “And I’m going to beat them up!”

  He laughed. “Well, then I guess we had better eat dinner. We need to make sure you grow up big and strong to defeat the monsters.”

  Alaina
was a little upset that he wasn’t taking her seriously, but it didn’t surprise her. Adults never really took her seriously, but she knew that one day she would prove them all wrong and do everything she promised she would do.

  There was suddenly a loud crashing sound in the distance, followed by a heavy rumbling noise that shook the whole house. The ground bounced under her feet, plates fell to the floor in the kitchen and shattered, and the windows started rattling.

  Alaina screamed, covering her ears. Her father knelt on the floor next to her, wrapping her up in a tight hug and using his body to shield her. It lasted a full fifteen seconds, reverberating through the entire house before calming back down.

  Once it was over, silence enveloped the living room, punctuated by the barking of dogs and screaming of sirens in the distance. She could feel her father holding her and panting in fear. Gradually, she pulled herself loose.

  “What was that?” Kate asked breathlessly. She was clutching the couch, rising slowly on wobbling knees.

  “I have no clue,” Carl said. His face was ashen and Alaina had never seen him so afraid. “Maybe an explosion.”

  “An explosion? You don’t think the Republic…?”

  “No. No way,” he replied. “We aren’t under attack.”

  “How can you be—?”

  “We would have heard something before today. They would have said something on the news if the Republic was on its way.”

  As he spoke he moved over to the couch and flicked the remote to change the television station. Reports were rapidly being displayed as all of the news outlets posted breaking news about what had just happened.

  He selected a station, and the broadcast was showing the wreckage of an old building. It looked like an industrial warehouse, but there were no external markers denoting what it was for.

  Fire licked the interior and half the building looked to have been destroyed in an explosion. It was surrounded by containment crews and barricades. Firefighters were struggling to get it under control and put the flames out.

  “A gas line malfunction,” Carl read incredulously as the news captions scrolled past.

  “Gas line?” Kate said. “Are you kidding?”

  “That’s the official story.”

  “There is no way a gas line did that,” Kate said, gesturing her hand angrily at the images on display. The camera began to pan left and they saw a pile of long shapes under blankets. Alaina squinted, wondering what might be under the sheets.

  Her father quickly turned the news back off.

  “I know,” he said. “Do they think we are stupid? That used to be an old chemical processing plant.”

  “They are probably testing a new weapon.”

  “Maybe,” Carl said. “Or they might have been cutting costs in the storage of chemicals and had a malfunction. They’ve been sacrificing safety in there for years. This could just be a terrible accident.”

  Kate let out a huge sigh. “We keep seeing ‘accidents’ like this and we’re just supposed to look the other way. We can’t keep living like this.”

  “I know,” Carl agreed.

  “Constantly afraid,” Kate continued. “Hungry. Despondent. We can’t raise our family like this. We need to leave.”

  “Where can we go?” Carl asked. His voice was low, full of defeat. “Where will we go, Kate? Where could we go that is better?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Off world?”

  “Who would take us in? We are outcasts now, part of Darius’s rebellion. Every other planet in Sector Six is as bad off as we are, and no one else would let us come. At best we are fools. At worst, traitors.”

  “Maybe this was all just wrong,” she said. “Joining Darius and his rebellion; joining the Union: maybe it was all just a terrible mistake that we’re paying for.”

  “It was,” Carl agreed softly. “Supporting Darius was the worst decision we’ve ever made. I wanted freedom for our children, but I didn’t really understand how bad things would get. Now we’re all going to pay.”

  Alaina could barely believe her ears. Normally, when her parents argued about Darius and the rebellion, her father wasn’t willing to give an inch. He thought joining the Union was the right and only choice. It was the idealist choice, the one best for the future.

  How bad must things be, then, for him to take mother’s side?

  “Maybe it was all a mistake,” her father reiterated. “And we will lose everything. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that there is nothing we can do now except to move forward. We can only do the best we can with what we were given.”

  “I know,” Kate said. She pulled Carl close and pressed her face into his chest. “But at what cost?”

  Want to Keep Going?

  Things are heating up as the Union tries to find an edge in its conflict with the Republic. The war is becoming more of a reality every day and terrorism is cropping up as the disenfranchised take matters into their own hands. Jayson finds himself in a struggle to align his morals with his duty and is on the verge of making irreversible decisions. Billions of lives are at stake in the coming conflict, but right now it’s anyone’s game to win.

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  Raven’s Peak

  Prologue – The Reverend

  “Reverend, you have a visitor.”

  He couldn’t remember when he fell in love with the pain. When agony first turned to pleasure, and then to joy. Of course, it hadn’t always been like this. He remembered screaming all those years ago when first they put him in this cell; those memories were vague, though, like reflections in a dusty mirror.

  “Open D4.”

  A buzz as the door slid open, inconsequential. The aching need was what drove him in this moment, and nothing else mattered. It was a primal desire: a longing for the tingly rush of adrenaline each time the lash licked his flesh. The blood dripping down his parched skin fulfilled him like biting into a juicy strawberry on a warm summer’s day.

  “Some woman. Says she needs to speak with you immediately. She says her name is Frieda.”

  A pause, the lash hovering in the air like a poised snake. The Reverend remembered that name, found it dancing in the recesses of his mind. He tried to pull himself back from the ritual, back to reality, but it was an uphill slog through knee-deep mud to reclaim those memories.

  It was always difficult to focus when he was in the midst of his cleansing. All he managed to cling to was the name. Frieda. It was the name of an angel, he knew… or perhaps a devil.

  One and the same when all was said and done.

  She belonged to a past life, only the whispers of which he could recall. The ritual reclaimed him, embraced him with its fiery need. His memories were nothing compared to the whip in his hand, its nine tails gracing his flesh.

  The lash struck down on his left shoulder blade, scattering droplets of blood against the wall behind him. Those droplets would stain the granite for months, he knew, before finally fading away. He clenched his teeth in a feral grin as the whip landed with a sickening, wet slapping sound.

  “Jesus,” a new voice whispered from the doorway. “Does he always do that?”

  “Every morning.”

  “You’ll cuff him?”

  “Why? Are you scared?”

  The Reverend raised the lash into the air, poised for another strike.

  “Just…man, you said he was crazy…but this…”

  The lash came down, lapping at his back and the tender muscles hidden there. He let out a groan of mixed agony and pleasure.

  These men were meaningless, their voices only echoes amid the rest, an endless drone. He wanted them to leave him alone with his ritual. They weren’t worth his time.

  “I think we can spare the handcuffs this time; the last guy who tried spent a month in the hospital.”

  “Regulation says we have to.”

  “Then you do it.”

  The guards fell silent. The cat-o’-nine-tails, his friend, his love, became the only s
ound in the roughhewn cell, echoing off the granite walls. He took a rasping breath, blew it out, and cracked the lash again. More blood. More agony. More pleasure.

  “I don’t think we need to cuff him,” the second guard decided.

  “Good idea. Besides, the Reverend isn’t going to cause us any trouble. He only hurts himself. Right, Reverend?”

  The air tasted of copper, sickly sweet. He wished he could see his back and the scars, but there were no mirrors in his cell. They removed the only one he had when he broke shards off to slice into his arms and legs. They were afraid he would kill himself.

  How ironic was that?

  “Right, Reverend?”

  Mirrors were dangerous things, he remembered from that past life. They called the other side, the darker side. An imperfect reflection stared back, threatening to steal pieces of the soul away forever.

  “Reverend? Can you hear me?”

  The guard reached out to tap the Reverend on the shoulder. Just a tap, no danger at all, but his hand never even came close. Honed reflexes reacted before anyone could possibly understand what was happening.

  Suddenly the Reverend was standing. He hovered above the guard who was down on his knees. The man let out a sharp cry, his left shoulder twisted up at an uncomfortable angle by the Reverend’s iron grip.

  The lash hung in the air, ready to strike at its new prey.

  The Reverend looked curiously at the man, seeing him for the first time. He recognized him as one of the first guardsmen he’d ever spoken with when placed in this cell. A nice European chap with a wife and two young children. A little overweight and balding, but well-intentioned.

  Most of him didn’t want to hurt this man, but there was a part—a hungry, needful part—that did. That part wanted to hurt this man in ways neither of them could even imagine. One twist would snap his arm. Two would shatter the bone; the sound as it snapped would be …

  A symphony rivaling Tchaikovsky.

  The second guard—the younger one that smelled of fear—stumbled back, struggling to draw his gun.

  “No! No, don’t!”

  That from the first, on his knees as if praying. The Reverend wondered if he prayed at night with his family before heading to bed. Doubtless, he prayed that he would make it home safely from work and that one of the inmates wouldn’t rip his throat out or gouge out his eyes. Right now, he was waving his free hand at his partner to get his attention, to stop him.