“Lady Veber seemed agreeable to our proposal,” the prince said.
“Was she now?” the emperor asked.
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
“Her family is more powerful than you realize.”
Prince Richard shrugged dismissively. “No more than any other...”
“House Veber has always acted as an arbiter among the other families,” Augustus went on. “They’ve remained above the usual squabbling between the other houses.”
“Even so,” the prince said, “the Vebers have the same sense of duty as we all do.”
The emperor chuckled.
“Duty has nothing to do with it!” he said. “None of the families give a damn about anyone except themselves. If it wasn’t for a status quo that’s made us all fabulously wealthy, any of the houses would’ve burned the others to the ground long ago!”
“To my point,” the prince replied steadily, “it’s that balance that keeps the Imperium from collapsing. It’s an equilibrium that benefits us all.”
The two men passed a fountain featuring a stone cherub bending to smell a flower. A narrow stream of water squirted from the angel’s rear into the basin.
“My agents tell me Lady Nasri was seen at the Tagus estate,” the emperor remarked matter-of-factly.
“That can’t be good,” the prince remarked. “Old man Tagus is dangerous; always has been.”
“The head of each of the Five Families is dangerous,” the emperor replied, “but the question has always been, dangerous against whom?”
“If Tagus is up to something, there’s no question about whom.”
“He’s clearly attempting to turn Lady Nasri to his way of thinking—”
“Against you, you mean?”
“Precisely,” the emperor replied.
“All the more reason to get Lord Santos to change his mind,” Prince Richard said. “If Nasri is against us, we’ll need Santos more than ever.”
“Perhaps, but I get the impression Captain Santos is not impressed by our little palace intrigues.”
“Then he must be made to see reason!”
Emperor Augustus raised an eyebrow.
“Indeed,” he said.
Lady Veber never wanted to have children. As a young girl the thought of babies, and especially the thought of one growing inside of her, made her squirm. Then, after meeting her future husband, things changed.
He was handsome and charming, even if he came from one of the lesser families. He made her laugh and he seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say, unlike the gentlemen she was accustomed to. They spent much of their time on the beaches of Lokeren, soaking up the rays and feeling the warm waters wash over their legs in the surf.
When they married, Lady Veber became aware how much her new husband wanted children. She knew he would never ask her directly or make demands of her, but she knew it was always in the back of his mind. With time, they started trying and then things became more difficult. Even with advanced natal medicine, her first attempts ended in stillbirths. She cried, late at night, feeling a sense of failure for something she never dreamed she would ever want, but now she wished for more than anything.
Eventually, Lady Veber became pregnant and it went to term. They named the baby Philip, a healthy boy with dark brown eyes like his father.
They were happy together, the three of them, and played in the sands below the cliffs surrounding the southern palace. Lady Veber saw the joy in her husband’s eyes every time their boy ran up and down the beach, growing older and stronger with each passing day.
When the boy was twelve, his father died when his gravcar crashed into the ocean. The investigation found a mechanical part had failed, causing the vehicle to lose control, spiraling into the sea.
Lady Veber wore black for a year after her husband was buried. When she began wearing regular clothes again, white and blue with the ubiquitous shell motif, she noticed something in her son. Philip looked more and more like his father. The way he walked and carried himself was the spitting image of Lady Veber’s late husband. It was uncanny, but it gave her a sense of continuity, as if her husband somehow lived on in the child they shared.
When Philip turned eighteen, he fell in the courtyard of the palace. He laughed it off and told his mother he must have tripped. A month later, when he fainted at dinner, Lady Veber called for the doctor. Philip was a strong boy and there wasn’t any reason why he would be feeling so weak. The family physician was mystified so Lady Veber sent to the capital for a specialist. A parade of specialists, in fact, visited Lokeren, each with their own tests and machines. None of them could find the reason for Philip’s illness and, all the while, he grew worse.
Lady Veber withdrew from public life and her responsibilities. The other families began speaking of her in the imperial court as if she was the one who had fallen ill.
And then Philip died.
She sent away the doctors and the nursebot and her staff. Alone in her son’s bedroom, Lady Veber sat beside Philip’s lifeless body. She thought about the funeral arrangements and remembered the funeral of her husband when he had died. She never wanted a child, but now that was all she ever wanted. Most of all, she wanted Philip alive again.
A storm had brewed over the ocean, the waves crashing against the cliffs below the palace where Lady Veber, her husband, and her son had played. The lightning burned the sky, bright shadows cast for mere moments among the corridors of the estate.
When the door to Philip’s quarters opened, Lady Veber and Ghazul of the Necronea emerged. Behind them, a little unsteady at first, someone followed. His eyes were no longer brown, more of a steel gray like the ocean when the clouds are covering the sky. His hair had fallen out and his skin was tight against his skull.
Lady Veber knew he was no longer human, but in her mind, Philip was still her son.
Chapter Four
As a younger man, Magnus Black served in the Imperial military as part of their counter-insurgency forces on Marakata, the Draconian home world. At the time, he was known as Pitt, but the Draconians knew him by a different name: The Butcher of Bhadra.
The township of Bhadra was founded at the confluence of two rivers, deep in the territory controlled by the separatists. Its location was strategic, both for the river traffic that brought raw materials out of the thick jungle and because it contained a religious site, a tiered pyramid where the native Draconians went to pray for their fallen brethren.
The head of the local cell of revolutionaries was named Ekavir, but his followers also called him the Jade General. Under his command, the separatists had repelled every attempt by Imperial forces to take the town. To the people of Bhadra, and even some in the Imperial ranks, the Jade General seemed unbeatable.
Colonel Grausman, the military governor, considered leveling the town from orbit, but the outrage it would cause, especially the inevitable destruction of the temple, would inflame opinions both on and off the planet. The Draconian cause, despite Imperial attempts to portray them as mindless savages, was popular among many in the rest of the empire.
The colonel decided that a team, led by Pitt, would infiltrate Bhadra and take out any hostile enemies they encountered. Pitt had distinguished himself by completing jobs that no one else could. What Colonel Grausman didn’t consider was that everyone in Bhadra was hostile and Pitt was very literal about following his orders.
Wearing power armor, a carapace that covered his entire body, Pitt walked into the village along with a squad of Imperial soldiers. As groups of rebels began charging with their Draconian warstaffs, the troops opened fire with blaster rifles, cutting the separatists down in droves. Soon regular townspeople joined the fight, defending their homes and businesses against the invaders. As the civilian death toll rose, the Imperial soldiers started dying as well. Still, Pitt led his men deeper into the village. After their blaster power packs had reached zero, drained of energy, the soldiers switched to their own edged weapons. For his part, Pitt wielded a vibro-bla
de, a five-foot long sword with handholds along its length. Resonating at high speed, the cutting edge could slice through nearly anything and certainly the scales and bones of the Draconians.
Carving through the crowds against him, Pitt searched in vain for General Ekavir. After hours of fighting, Pitt found himself alone atop the temple pyramid. His armor, dented and scarred, dripped with the blood of those he had killed as if he had swum through a river of their bodies. Below Pitt, down the stone steps draped with corpses, the population of Bhadra lay where they had died. Like a terrible god of death, Pitt bore witness to what he had done. He felt sick, but knew each one he had killed had wanted him dead. They gave no quarter and he gave none in return.
Still, where was Ekavir? Where was the one who sent these villagers to die? Pitt continued to search but found nothing. The Jade General had vanished into the jungle.
His repairs complete, KB-8E led Magnus Black through the dense jungle. Minute amounts of organic matter, left by Draconians passing by, clung to the leaves and hung in the air, all recorded and analyzed by the sensors in the killbot’s head. Following this invisible trail, the robot and the human found themselves in the remains of a town just as the sun was rising over the forest canopy.
“It appears General Ekavir came through here,” KB-8E said.
“If you say so,” Magnus replied, eyeing the stone buildings, the doorways and windows blackened with soot. “Do you see this damage?”
“The town appears to have burned.”
“With a little help from above,” Magnus remarked, pointing at the gap in the canopy. “An orbital strike...”
“It seems the inhabitants had little chance of survival.”
“That’s the idea.”
Magnus leaned against a broken wall, taking a drink from his canteen. His feet were nearly submerged in ashes. The robot waited patiently.
“Do you have much experience on this planet?” KB-8E asked.
Capping the canteen, Magnus hooked it back onto his belt. “Yeah.”
“May I ask when?”
“It’s been a while,” the human said. “I wasn’t much older than twenty. I kinda fell into service with the Imperium and was good at it.”
“Good at what exactly?”
“Killing.”
“Would you say you were made for it?” the robot asked.
Magnus gave the machine a side glance. “Like you?”
“Indeed,” KB-8E replied. “I was built for my function. I have no other.”
“Well, you didn’t have much of a choice, did you? I suppose I did.”
“I sometimes wonder...”
“Yeah?”
“If perhaps I could do other things besides killing.”
Magnus chuckled. “Like a hobby?”
The killbot lacked a mouth so he wasn’t able to smile, although he sometimes wished he could.
“I mean whether I could perform other functions,” he said, “that did not require ending someone’s life.”
“Hell if I know,” Magnus admitted. “You’re a slave to your programming, I guess.”
“Indeed.”
After a long pause, Magnus asked, “Why did Colonel Grausman assign you this mission?”
“Actually,” the robot replied, “he sent several units like myself. However, I remain the only one still in operation.”
“Serves the colonel right,” Magnus said. “Don’t send a robot to do a man’s job.”
“Do you resent him sending robots?”
“Like I said before, I don’t like them.”
“Why is that?”
“You kill a man, he stays down,” Magnus went on. “Destroy a robot and they just build more.”
“True,” KB-8E said. “We can always build more killbots...”
When Ekavir, the Jade General, was still a young Draconian, his father told him about the virtues that made them a proud, honorable race. His father spoke of courage, wisdom, and loyalty, and how the human invaders lacked these things. The Imperium, with all its wealth and technology, was a dim spark compared to the fire of the Draconian spirit.
“They’re barbarians,” his father said. “Never forget that.”
Ekavir was no more than a teenager, in relative terms, when he saw his first battle. A patrol of Imperial soldiers made the mistake of taking the same trail once too often, allowing the resistance fighters to set up an ambush. In the murky light of the jungle, the green scales of the Draconians blended with the leaves and branches, giving the rebels the perfect element of surprise. Armed with a warstaff, Ekavir dropped from a tree onto one of the unsuspecting soldiers. Years later, he still remembered the eyes of the human, blue like the sky, wide with the fear of his impending death. Ekavir hacked the man’s head from his shoulders, the body going limp like a sack of loose vegetables. What Ekavir found most shocking was not the blood or the screaming, but the ease with which these humans died. Their skin was soft and their bones weak. They crumbled with such little prodding that he couldn’t understand how they could rule an empire such as the Imperium.
It was unbelievable.
Over time, as Ekavir grew older, he developed contempt for the humans. They were not just barbarians, they were cowards. They used their weapons to strike from a distance, even from high above in orbit. He understood why. They were too fragile to face the Draconians in hand-to-hand combat, unless they wore suits of armor like robotic warriors.
It sickened him.
What really bothered Ekavir, however, was that these weaklings kept winning. The humans could be killed — that much was not debatable — but there were always more. For every soldier the Dracs killed, ten more arrived from off-planet. It was unending. No matter how many humans died, freedom for Ekavir’s people remained always in the distance, never closer than the horizon.
Now grown and an experienced insurgent, Ekavir began leading attacks against the invaders. He developed new tactics, too. Instead of waiting in the jungle, he and his agents planted bombs in the places were the humans lived and worked. There were sometimes casualties among his own people, but they were the price that had to be paid for freedom. Their deaths were blood spilled for the revolution. Ekavir was confident they would have laid down their lives willingly if he had merely asked.
As the years dragged on, he never wavered or lost hope. The words of his father remained in his ears long after his father had died in an Imperial reprisal. The humans could not break Ekavir’s spirit, no matter how many Draconians they lined up to be shot.
However, not everyone was as strong. Some of his people questioned his methods. They suggested negotiations, even as they lived in chains. This bothered Ekavir even more than the humans. This weakness in the face of the enemy could not be forgotten or forgiven. Those who were not for him were against him and, naturally, his enemy. They, too, must suffer the consequence of their barbarism.
Squads of his men fanned out into the jungle and the cities alike, looking for collaborators. These traitors were pulled from their homes, sometimes with their families watching. It was only right that they died within view of those they had betrayed. Ekavir took no pleasure in these killings, but he knew in his heart that only the strength of honor could lead to salvation and banishing the human invaders.
Even so, the bombing of the Green Zone, where the humans kept their spouses and children, was a miscalculation. The videos of the dead, played hourly by the Imperial propaganda machine, weakened Ekavir in the eyes of his people. The friends he knew he could trust suddenly were no longer reliable. The safe places became dangerous and the strikes from the sky became more frequent. All the while, he retreated deeper into the jungle.
With a machete, Magnus Black hacked at a particularly stubborn vine blocking their path. The jungle had grown ever thicker, slowing their progress. KB-8E considered using his particle beam but doing so, with the associated smoke and possible flames, would ruin any chance of surprising the Jade General. The killbot waited impassively as Magnus made a final swing, s
evering the vine in two.
“Have you worked with robots a great deal?” KB-8E asked suddenly.
Magnus wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “What?”
“You said you don’t like robots,” the robot went on. “I wondered how much time you’ve actually spent working with them.”
Magnus turned his eyes toward the machete in his hands as if contemplating something.
“Machines are everywhere,” he said. “You can’t kick a sweeperbot without hitting another sweeperbot.”
“No, I meant working together with a robot, as we are.”
“You mean, like a partner?”
“Indeed,” KB-8E replied.
Exasperated, the human shook his head. “We’re not partners!”
Without a face, KB-8E could not express emotions, provided he had any. However, the robot’s blinking light stared at Magnus without the machine saying anything.
“Don’t tell me I hurt your feelings?” Magnus said finally.
“I’m not programmed to have feelings,” KB-8E replied.
“Good.”
“In fact,” the killbot added, “I believe humans created killbots to avoid feeling the guilt associated with ending another person’s life.”
“Is that so?”
“How do you deal with your emotions after killing?”
Magnus shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”
“That seems wise,” KB-8E said. “Most of your kind seem to ruminate endlessly about their actions.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Magnus reared back to strike the next vine with his machete.
“Perhaps you are what they call a psychopath,” the robot said.
Magnus missed the vine, narrowly missing his own leg.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say!” he growled.
“Or are you a sadist of some kind?”
Shaking the long blade in his hand, Magnus held it threateningly. “I’m none of those things!”
The light on KB-8E’s head blinked several times. “If you say so.”
“I’m a killer, that’s true,” Magnus replied, “but it’s my job and I’m damn good at it.”
Imperium Chronicles Box Set Page 32
