by Barry Lyga
“Your Majesty and your courtiers, I bid you good morrow from my ship in orbit above your planet. Forgive me if I elide the niceties of our first meeting—there are urgent issues to discuss.”
“Go on,” the king told him, gesturing.
“Years ago, I proposed a solution to Titan’s inevitable demise, one that was rejected by the people, to their eventual dismay and destruction. I hope and believe that you will not do the same.”
“I would hear of your solution, Lord Thanos.”
It was the first time someone had called him Lord Thanos. He was inordinately pleased, and paused for a moment to absorb the pleasure before continuing.
“The solution is simple, ruthless, and incontrovertible,” Thanos said. “You must eliminate fifty percent of your population, and you must do so immediately.”
Aboard Sanctuary, Thanos stared into the hologram projector. The throne room had gone silent. Was there a problem with the audio transmitters? He wished they’d had time to outfit the Other with visual sensors as well as aural. They could see him, but Thanos could only hear them.
After a protracted silence, the king spoke. “Forgive me, Lord Thanos. I am unfamiliar with Titan humor. Was I supposed to laugh?”
Thanos seethed but fought to keep his ire from showing on his face, projected so much larger down on the surface. “This is no joke. I proposed the same solution to Titan, and they rejected it. You know the results of that rejection. Where half could have been spared, now all are dead. You can avoid this fate. My euthanasia technology is painless and can be altered quite easily to conform to your species’ biology.”
More silence.
“Every moment you delay, Your Majesty,” Thanos said with heat, “is one moment closer to an extinction-level event for your planet.”
“And how am I to convince my people that this is the correct course of action? I am their monarch, but I will not put people to death who have no wish to die.”
An easy question. Good. “You submit yourself as the first volunteer,” Thanos said. “Lead by example.”
The next sound Thanos heard from below was a dry chuckle. “His Majesty has left the room, Thanos of Titan,” said a new voice. “I am Viceroy Londro. While some may appreciate your humor, I’m afraid His Majesty does not. If you have a serious proposal for us, I am willing to listen.”
“You’ve heard my proposal!” Thanos’s rage sneaked up on him, pounced, and sank its claws into his shoulders. He could not see the throne room, but he could see devastated Titan, orange with dust, wrecked and ramshackle. He could smell the bodies. “I warn you—if you do not take drastic action, your streets will clot with bodies. Your monuments will fall. You will be less than dust, a dead world with no savior, no memento, no story to tell. You will—”
“My lord.” It was the Other, speaking calmly. “I’ve been escorted out of the palace. They’re not listening.”
Cha entered the bridge of the ship with the Other, who had just returned safely to Sanctuary. Thanos sat alone, slumped in the captain’s chair, staring out at the curve of Fenilop XI through the window before him. The planet was a banded beauty, rainbows of soil and water making it a chromatic wonder turning slowly before them.
“They will all die,” Thanos said quietly.
Cha put a hand on Thanos’s shoulder. “There are other worlds in danger, Thanos. We’ll find them. We’ll refine our message. We’ll save them.”
“Yes. We will. But first, we must conclude our business here on Fenilop XI.” He rose from his chair and pointed to the Other. “Have your troops mustered and ready for combat within the hour. We will target the capital city and its defense forces first, then the outlying military bases.”
The Other bobbed his head and left the bridge. Cha stared slack-jawed at Thanos.
“Close your mouth, Cha. The sight of your gaping maw is unappealing.”
“What are you doing? Why are you attacking them?”
“They’re all going to die anyway, Cha. We saw the results on Titan, did we not?” Thanos settled back down into his seat. “Hastening their demise may save some of the planet’s resources, making it available for settlement by a wiser species at some point in the future. Besides, this way I am sparing them all the slow death of disease and geologic upheaval, granting them instead a swift, merciful death.” He arched an eyebrow. “Do you not approve?”
“I… They…” Cha cast about for words. “They are innocent! What was it you said back at Titan? ‘I see no balance in children dead in the streets!’”
“Exactly. That is their fate, if we do not act. Speak not of innocence, Cha. This is the path. It is not about innocence or guilt—it is about life and death. One begets the other. As I said—these people are already doomed. The science of it is irrefutable.” He paused a moment. “If a weed chokes a flower, you kill the weed so that the flower may live. Do you not?”
Cha stammered. “I—I suppose so….”
“In the garden of the universe, we have much weeding to do. If you’d rather not, then”—he strummed his fingers on the arm of the chair—“there are shuttlecraft at your disposal.”
Cha’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. At last, he offered a small shrug. “I believe in our path, Thanos.”
“Good. According to my scans, the Fenilops don’t have long-range super-atmospheric weaponry, so we should be safe here. But just in case, lay in an emergency retreat course.”
Cha went to the navigation pod and did just that. Meanwhile, the Other was preparing his troops.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE CONQUEST OF FENILOP XI CAME SWIFTLY. THE KING AND his advisers thought Thanos to be a madman with no resources and no recourse to their rejection. They were shocked when the Chitauri ships rained lightning and fire from the sky.
They’d never seen anything like a Chitauri army. No one had. Moving in perfect lockstep, with hive-mind coordinated precision, the Chitauri soldiers captured the capital city in no time. The nearby military bases were crushed by a brace of Leviathans.
Thanos’s orders were simple, so simple that even the lack-brained Chitauri could follow them: Kill every living thing you see. There was no need for the grand strategies of war, for the thrust and counterthrust, the capture of key territories and the holding of hostages for negotiations. No one would be suing for peace.
This was slaughter, plain and simple. Kinder, Thanos knew, than leaving these people to the capricious mercies of their own planet’s chaotic revenge.
The war was one-sided. With the element of surprise and the willingness to discard the usual stratagems and rules of war in favor of utter ruthlessness, Thanos had an early advantage that he pressed and pressed and pressed. The Chitauri’s teleportation technology made them impossible to counter.
Still, as combat dragged into its third week, he watched from the sky above and told Cha, “We need more Chitauri. More Leviathans. More weapons.”
Cha, who had not slept much since the beginning of the war, looked up from his monitoring station, where he was in communication with the Other to direct troops where they were needed. “More? My projections indicate that we’ll have their entire military either destroyed or under our control within another day. Then it’s just a mop-up operation to kill the survivors. By the time any reinforcements would arrive, we’d be done.”
Thanos permitted himself a smile at Cha’s expense. “Oh, your naïveté amuses me, Cha. I speak not of our current conflict but of our next one.”
It took a moment for the remark to penetrate the layers of sleepiness that had accreted around Cha’s brain. He said, “Next one?” in the tone of a complete dullard.
But Cha wasn’t a complete dullard. Thanos took pity on him. “You’ve done good work, Cha. Get some sleep. The Chitauri know what to do, and I can relay my own commands to the Other, if need be.”
“Next one?” Cha said again, rising and heading to the door. “Next one?”
Yes, Thanos thought. The next one.
Chit
auri scavenger teams pillaged Fenilop XI for usable resources and matériel. It was just pragmatic. There was no one left alive on the planet to use any of it, so Thanos might as well take it.
He was grateful that he had a cargo ship at his disposal. Most of the Chitauri soldiers remained in the Leviathans, which now floated side by side with Sanctuary, leaving the cargo space free for the raw ore, food stocks, and technology ferried up from the planet.
They made a stop at the Chitauri homeworld to replace dead soldiers and ramp up their numbers. Then, without hesitation, they set out for the next planet Thanos had identified as being in danger of Titan’s fate.
CHAPTER XXXII
THIS TIME HE CHOSE NOT TO SPEAK TO THE RULERS OF THE planet. Denegar was a balkanized world, made up of more than thirty different territories, ruled by sixteen different forms of government. There was no global ruling body to appeal to, and going to each territory would take too much time and amount to nothing, in any event. Even if he could convince the leaders of most of the territories, any holdouts would mean no consensus. A waste of his time.
Instead, he gambled on the tactic that had backfired on Titan but could work here: He projected a hologram of himself worldwide, explaining the situation and his solution. On Titan, his people’s predisposition to distrust him had made this gambit a failure, but here, on Denegar, no one knew him, and no one had any reason to distrust him.
He projected the hologram live, speaking in calm, measured tones. Cha encouraged him to smile frequently. “People trust those who smile.”
He was both pleased and surprised that Cha was still with him. He’d expected that the killing of Fenilop would have chased away the Sirian for good. But days after they broke orbit over the planet, Cha had emerged from his chambers and a lengthy meditation.
“We have the same end goal, you and I, Thanos. We both seek peace, equilibrium, balance. I am willing to explore your means to this end.”
Thanos could not and would not let it show, but he was glad to have Cha with him, even as he badgered Thanos to smile.
“Is that more received wisdom from the universe?”
“No, Thanos. It’s just part of life.”
Thanos had reluctantly agreed. He punctuated his entreaty with smiles, with gentle gestures.
He implored them. He importuned them. He had charts and graphs that bolstered his argument, proving that…
“… within three generations, Denegar’s natural resources will have been exploited beyond a tipping point. Your water will be so contaminated that it will be unfilterable by current technology. A rare influenza variant currently percolating on your easternmost equatorial continent will evolve to spread via airborne vectors. And your atmosphere will be so polluted that global climate change will cause radical swings in local weather patterns. You will suffer tremendous hurricanes for which you are unprepared, as well as rising ocean levels that will swamp your coastal habitats.
“You may think: Who is this man, and why should we heed him? I am Thanos of Titan, and I have issued this warning twice before, on two different planets. They are both now dead worlds, with not a single breathing soul on either. One of them is my own home, Titan, a planet of surpassing beauty, technology, and generosity. Yet my people did not heed my warning, and now that world is as dead as the vacuum of space.
“And so, people of Denegar, I implore you: Mind my words. My solution seems radical and heartless, I know, but trust me: It. Will. Work. You will sacrifice greatly, yes, but you will also benefit greatly.
“I have spoken directly to the people rather than to your ruling class so that you might all know the truth and, in your numbers, find the wisdom that is often lacking in leaders.
“This comms channel will remain open. I await your reply.”
He switched off the outgoing audio and looked at Cha.
“Well?” he said.
Cha slid his hand over the control surface, generating a hologram of the surface of Denegar. Sanctuary was a smallish dot in orbit. As they watched, lines rose up from Denegar, heading for the ship.
“Super-atmospheric fusion warheads launched,” Cha said with a sigh.
“Evasive maneuvers!” Thanos barked. “And unleash the Chitauri!”
The Battle of Denegar was both shorter and far bloodier than the Battle of Fenilop XI. The Denegarese had multiple militaries and did not hesitate to use them. In retrospect, Thanos thought the length of his oratory gave them time to prepare and launch an attack. He had assumed a level of rationality and intelligence on the part of the Denegarese.
He would not suffer such presumptions in the future.
Fortunately, his Chitauri were more than up to the task. Bolstered by reinforcements from the homeworld and now seasoned by one battle (the experience of which was instantly inculcated in the entire warrior clan, thanks to the hive mind), the Chitauri ranged over Denegar like a swarm of maggots on a corpse. The planet wasn’t dead, but it soon would be.
Thanos watched from the safety of Sanctuary, which Cha had moved to a higher parking orbit, beyond the range of the super-atmospheric missiles. He stood at the fore of the bridge, hands clasped behind his back, watching the planet grind its slow turn beneath him, imagining that he could see individual explosions below.
“They could have lived, Cha,” he said through clenched teeth. “Half of them could have lived! Thrived! Gone on to gestate new generations! Damn it, Cha, why don’t they want to live!” He thumped his fist against the panel of hardened crystal that formed the window. “Why?”
“We cannot know the path of the universe,” Cha told him. “We can only walk it.”
“I will continue on this path,” Thanos seethed, his breath fogging the window, “until the path is no longer necessary. Send scavenger units to the surface with our shuttlecraft to strip the planet of everything we need.”
Cha nodded and turned on his heel.
“Oh, and Cha…?”
“Yes?”
“I’m tired of flitting around space in this glorified cargo pallet. See if there are any intact warships we can appropriate.”
By the time they attempted to persuade a third planet, Vishalaya, word had spread. The Mad Titan Thanos, Warlord Thanos, had come. They were met at the edge of the solar system by jump-ships and dreadnoughts. Thanos had hoped that the slaughters on Fenilop and Denegar would have served as warnings to future worlds, omens that they should heed his advice.
If the military vessels gathering on his long-range sensors were any indication… apparently not.
The new Sanctuary was a military jump-ship that had never gotten off the ground during the Battle of Denegar. Sitting in its command chair, Thanos finally felt as though he had the means to execute his will.
“Attention, Sanctuary,” a voice crackled over an open hailing frequency. “This is the RSS Executrix, of Her Majesty Cath’Ar’s navy. Turn back or be fired upon.”
Thanos sighed. The Other sat to his left, Cha to his right. Thanos waved at the air as though something stank.
“Kill them,” he said, “and then we’ll see if Her Majesty Cath’Ar is willing to discuss the horrors her people will soon face.”
Thanos watched on a holo as his Leviathans swung around from the sides of Sanctuary and plowed into the RSS Executrix. Since they were primarily living tissue, the Leviathans didn’t show up on most conventional sensors. They were perhaps the most perfect stealth weapon in space warfare.
In short order, they disabled the Executrix and ripped open its hull. Bodies spilled out into space. Other ships had begun a rescue run, but Sanctuary’s photon guns held them off until the Leviathans could engage.
“It’s too easy,” Thanos murmured.
“Perhaps the ease of your victory here will compel this queen Cath’Ar to parlay with you,” Cha said. “Take you seriously.”
“Your optimism is welcome in this instance, but unwarranted, I fear. Anyone who greets us with a show of force is not going to listen to our proposal with an open mind. Prep
are our forces for a planet-wide death sweep.” Thanos heaved himself out of his chair. “I will be in my quarters. Alert me if this queen calls, begging for mercy.”
The queen did indeed call, and she did indeed beg for mercy. Thanos explained what mercy was: Fifty percent of her people dead. Including her.
“You must be mad,” she said via hologram to Thanos, who studied her with the bored listlessness of a snake at noon. Her species was bipedal, with a distinctive whorl pattern of raised flesh just beneath the hairline, descending to just above the eyes. It was hypnotic to watch.
“I hope your arithmetic skills are superior to your military acumen, Your Majesty. Half your population is better than none.”
“We are not weaklings, as on Fenilop. Or disorganized, like the Denegarese. You will not slaughter us all, Warlord Thanos.”
He leaned forward. That whorl… It seemed almost to move on its own. “I have no wish to slaughter you all, Your Majesty. But I cannot bear the thought of your world continuing to suffer under such benighted idiocy. Surrender now and offer up half your people. It’s simple math.”
“Try us,” she said, and disconnected the comms.
Thanos left his quarters and strode down the corridor to the bridge. Within were the Other and Cha.
“You were listening in?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Cha.
“Launch the assault.”
“As you command,” said the Other.
In a parking orbit around the planet Vishalaya, Thanos stared at the endless stream of shuttlecraft soaring from the planet’s surface to his cargo ship, now rechristened Mercy. Restocking the Chitauri army was taking longer than the conquest and depopulating of the planet itself had.
In the reflection from the window, he caught a glimpse of Cha approaching him.
“Three planets, Cha. Three. In how long? How long since we left Titan?”
