Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Read online

  And other darker things…

  Years later when reviewing the words of the poet Jim Morrison, he would come upon a phrase that had struck him deep in some corner he’d never known was within himself. And that phrase was something too, but there was a word within the phrase that had spoken everything to him and described the romance and freedom’s adventure of the train tracks and the swamp beyond the neighborhood of his youth… in one word.

  Perimeter.

  There was the world. The known. The neighborhood. The Pantheon. But when you were past the train tracks, and if you even dared the swamp, then you were out beyond the known. Out beyond the perimeter. Where everything was possible between the worlds of the known and unknown.

  Out here… we is stoned immaculate, Jim Morrison had once crooned. Sometimes he wondered if Morrison had made it into the ranks of the Uplifted. He would have been perfect. If he had faked his own death and needed to be thawed out and revived when the right level of tech had been achieved. Such things were possible in the last days of Earth.

  Jim Stepp had invited him to come and see things. But not just down there, down in the swamp. Out there… beyond the perimeter. That was the real invitation. The only question was why was it coming from inside his own personal reality. A thing that was inviolable, and even considered “sacred” within the Pantheon. The swamp was the same as it always was in all of their minds, from the old movies about space wizards and bounty hunters. The swamp was where the wizard of all wizards lived. Where one truly became a god when they took up their destiny. Perhaps Freudian algorithms within the reality were trying to tell him something? Signal some desperate message about himself to himself. Or perhaps it was an outside source coming for him through back channels he’d never even considered. Or, when those possibilities had been eliminated…

  …perhaps it was a miracle.

  Gods and miracles were often to be found in close proximity to one another.

  It would seem that the next step of the path to godhood had been revealed. And it led there. Beyond the perimeter. Out to the swamps beyond the tracks.

  There are things down there.

  Perhaps he, Crometheus, had created his very own first miracle.

  He couldn’t remember the name of that movie. It was lost, or it had been purged due to some found wrongthink someone within the Pantheon had considered “problematic.” Problematic was always the first clue something was about to get banned. But the lesson was there all the same. That place, the swamp, was a becoming place, just as it had been in the movie they’d all watched with mouths agape in the old palaces of film before they became thirty-screen megaplexes all somehow seemingly showing the same thing year after year ad nauseum. Getting dumber so that the masses, the Animals they were leaving behind, could be made even dumber by the viewing of such monstrosities as modern movie-making had become.

  And therefore more pliable in their ignorance.

  At the last of Earth, before the Uplift, entertainment had fallen so low as to be something made for… they once called them some unfortunate name… but something for those half-people idiots they, the elites, had tried to lead. All entertainment, in the end, was made for the stupid so that they could get the lessons the Uplifted were desperately trying to teach at the last of everything. As the planet began to come apart at the seams, metaphorically speaking.

  Simple lessons. Trust. Obey. Surrender.

  Not like the swamp and the things that needed to be seen. Not at all like that. This thing from Stepp was a new thing. A new unlock. A new country. Jim Stepp had never asked him, no, invited him down to the tracks to enter the swamp and see the things that needed to be seen down there in the cool dark cluster of mystery beneath the willows and vines alongside hidden streams that lay within. Algorithms and psychology were interacting and miracles were happening.

  New things were becoming.

  As crazy as all that sounded.

  And then he had fully transferred… on to Sin City’s reality.

  He was astride not a motorcycle, but a full barrel hog. His old hog. Big, dirty, and loud. Barreling hard down the highway for an appointment in Sin City. Crossing miles and miles of burning road and endless waste. Heading for another ultimate experience in which one might find all the happiness there was to have. Or lose themselves in nothing but pleasure.

  Game on, he said with his trademark whiplash smile. And then throttled up and gunned the hog down the highway toward the rising monoliths in the distance.

  Gods: Chapter Ten

  What can you say about Sin City?

  Say it’s everything you ever thought you wanted. And more you didn’t even know you needed. Say it’s all the pleasures you never thought you knew of. Say it’s the freedom to do whatever you imagined.

  Say happiness. Maybe.

  He, the one called Crometheus, who must have had some other name in the long-ago of Earth, was trying to articulate those feelings at the Dante. Dante’s Inferno Room, as it was known. The end-all-be-all club that was going off that season inside Sin City.

  Say whatever you want, but say that Dante’s is indeed a very good time where happiness might not be found… but debauchery abounds. And as some say inside the Pantheon… close enough.

  Say all those things.

  Right now, on the main floor of Dante’s, two very beautiful and half-naked women were fighting a live tiger. There had been three beautiful women, but the third had been the tiger’s first victim for this hour’s Inferno Match. Above and around the Rolling Stones, and I mean the actual Rolling Stones, rip through a set that’s currently in the throes of an undervalued album they once did called Undercover.

  The tiger, a sabertooth striped in vivid orange and demonic black, with arctic blue cat’s eyes, paced the two beauties, considering its next move. Deciding on its next desperate victim.

  The buxom brunette with eyes as blue as the tiger’s held out a spear between her and the big cat. Her tattered loincloth left little to the imagination. The blonde, tall and Nordic, an ice queen if ever there was one, wielded a sword with expertise. Daring the killer to come for her. Taunting the big cat.

  It was all quite thrilling. This was Sin City at its best, the background apps of Crometheus’s mind screamed. Beyond the concert and down in the labyrinthine underground called the Vault, the soundtrack of the club was some dance beat that kept ominously proclaiming everything was on fire and that the room was about to turn into something called a disco inferno. The rhythm and bass throbbed about the senses like the music was a living thing and somehow supported the gyrations and thunder of the Stones above and the soundtrack below, all of it together promising sweet damnation.

  In the future perfect of Sin City… everything syncs. Because everything is spectacle. And everyone must be distracted. If even just for an eternal moment.

  All at once, everyone in the club chanted “Burn, baby, burn!” as the tiger lunged at the blonde and Jagger, up on a high balcony where the band played, twisted and turned, his body forcing out his belts.

  This moment, thought Crometheus, this moment was everything he’d ever wanted it to be. And time seemed to slow down so that he could take it all in. Every nuance. Every sensation. Every observation of the crowd of surging partygoers expanded into a microcosm he could consider and study for eons, if he so chose. Or discard. Just like that. A bit of gossamer brushed away from the shoulders of the mind. Another forgotten civilization consumed by the Savages.

  Another lost angel.

  Bad Thought.

  Uplifted. Use Uplifted. Not Savages. Savages is a bad word.

  That, also, was his choice to make. Maestro was a little more forgiving here in Sin City. A little less schoolmaster. A little more tour guide warning you to mind the natives. They do tend to bite.

  The feel of the coke, and it was really good stuff, he’d blown a few precious achievement points on it, wa
s perfect. The look on Miss Cyber Saigon’s face when she first walked into his suite at the Olympus, dressed exactly like the picture he’d been promised in-game, and noticed the coke, that too had been perfect. And unexpected. Which was also perfect. Remember that part about the immortal mind finding joy in such unexpected moments? The cocaine was a mere party favor just for the occasion of their weekend tryst. A treat for him, and her. But the look of unexpected surprise on her face had somehow moved him to something he hadn’t felt in years… a thing he had not expected.

  It was pure adoration. A thing only gods must experience when lesser mortals are allowed into their presence.

  Don’t tell me I’m not a god, some distant part of his mind crooned. He was the god of rock and roll from a long time ago, and cocaine and space marines boarding ships to kill kill kill and win big prizes now.

  He was.

  He is.

  I will be.

  That sudden shift in her eyes when she entered the luxury suite at the Olympus, playing her part of unhappy gamer girl who’d let you do anything to her and seem uninterested all the while—it was a quirk in his makeup that he liked such a thing—to then see her suddenly shift over to gratitude because he’d been thoughtful enough to share such a very expensive drug with her.

  Adoration without guile.

  Surely the stuff of gods? The stuff they receive and which is their due.

  Suddenly she wasn’t who she was supposed to be. An actress playing the part for a few days of his pleasure. Lines and a role inside his fleshy fantasy if she knew what was good for her inside the Pantheon.

  And… then suddenly she’d adored him and he wasn’t who he was supposed to be, either. The possibility that he could be something different to her… that had deeply affected him. All of a sudden and without warning.

  Surprised, he was.

  And that was just this early evening when the weekend after the Battle of New Britannia had finally begun for him. After he had driven into Sin City astride his bellow-belching bike, checked in, and then waited for her to present herself in his suite. After the action to stop the Animal counter-invasion force against their allies, the Id. After hanging from the sensor mast and discussing truths with Maestro while a fleet of starships burned in the ruined panorama of a magnificent galaxy that was becoming theirs.

  It was time to cash in all his winnings. His rewards were imminent.

  He’d selfied in the PITT of the Animal ship. And that had been broadcast all over the Pantheon. Held up for glorification. And when he entered Sin City on his hog, skinned like who he really was, who he’d once been in the long-ago myths of Earth, tooling down the main thoroughfare of Sin City Boulevard, he basked in the gaze of the masses. Casino palaces towered over a street throbbing with revelers reveling. When they got sight of him the flash of their cameras went off. He as him, and also the hero of New Britannia. Both were a pleasure for the observers who swarmed him at every intersection.

  He pulled to a stop at a red light as the colors from casino light shows swirled and danced in a thousand different hues across the vehicles, streets, buildings, and faces in the crowd. Suddenly a bevy of young girls surged off the sidewalk toward him. They were young and dressed like tramps for fun. Giggling and cooing all over him. Some were even chewing bubble gum as they asked for his autograph and slipped him their identifiers. He knew the code strings well enough to realize they were all lower orders. Those captured and re-educated after raids on various Animal worlds long before the sack of New Vega. Saved from reclamation for the present. Of use for pleasure until then. Devoid of the will to fight the reality that had been forced on them. They had no idea how long they’d truly been in here. Hundred years, two hundred… The Uplifted were like celebrities to them. The poor little things experienced joy in their presence. Felt better about themselves. Desired only to please their masters.

  They’d been broken and retrained.

  Twenty years ago, or all those hundreds maybe, they’d been running for their lives through the ruins of their colony world most likely. And if they could see what they’d become now all these years later, which wasn’t exactly how they saw themselves inside the realities… they’d have died of shock. Imagine thinking you were a buxom teen tramp, when really you were a corpse rotting in a soupy vat, hooked up to Maestro and playing your part. Regardless of whether you wanted to or not. There was something about having a live conscious mind that was unwilling and being made to perform anyway that made it all… more. And when they were finally disconnected someday, they’d get a brief glimpse of what the years had done to them. What they’d lost. What they’d been forced to do would suddenly be uploaded onto their last dying seconds of consciousness. And then they’d be reclaimed.

  He felt sorry for them in that instant.

  They thought sleeping with him, right now, offering him their willing young bodies, would do something for themselves inside the Pantheon they’d been made to love so dearly. That if they could have a moment, or an hour with him, they’d somehow be transmogrified into something like the Uplifted instead of the slaves they really were. As if lying under him would somehow free them from the shackles of mortality.

  But they had no idea.

  No idea that it was all for the Uplifted to understand the concept of what a god must feel like, among the Animals. That too was part of the Path.

  He smiled and gave them his trademark whiplash sneer, his leather jacket barely covering his tanned, muscled chest. He signed the things they asked him to sign. Made small talk as they gaped in amazement at him. That was really all you could do with their kind.

  He made their year. Of course.

  Like he was creating artifacts they could trade in for whatever passed for the bazaar of the lower decks where they existed to please the Uplifted. They were given some kind of weird half-life to live, according to Maestro. Their servitude somehow incentivized.

  The light turned green at the party-intersection-rave and he drove on, dazzled by the spectacle and pomp of Sin City in all its trashy glory. The greatest place in the galaxy. Porn stars pouted from fifty-story-tall billboards while magicians performed fantastic illusions that seemed almost incomprehensible. Fearsome beasts of all the worlds they’d ever conquered did tricks in promised shows by some of the greatest Uplifted.

  It was part circus, part promise.

  Codex-1, one of the original Uplifted who’d first disappeared into the Xanadu Tower at the top of the Pantheon, was performing his Feast of the Tyrannasquid sometime this weekend. A show the wildly gyrating electronic signage assured must not be missed.

  And he would not miss it. Absolutely without a doubt. Crometheus had to see that show.

  It would be like watching some ancient pagan god conducting an underwater copulating ballet of the most beautiful people of all the worlds they’d ever visited. While those same beauties were slowly devoured by the most fearsome predator in the galaxy.

  The mighty tyrannasquid.

  The intersection of revulsion, and the desire to watch, was luridly sublime, and he was sure tickets were already sold out. Or even invite-only. Codex-1 was a pharaoh among gods. He was a god’s god and always would be. There was no denying that.

  But of course, if you had ambition, then the heavens were the limit. All one had to do was dare to dream of being better, bigger, and even bolder than even Codex-1, first adherent of the Path, and anything was possible. That had been the first lesson learned along the Path.

  Dream it. Do it.

  He pulled his hog off the main boulevard and into the best hotel palace on the strip, the Grand Olympus. Slaves dressed like the ancient generals of some forgotten age of gentlemanly warfare when the uniforms were like those of bands marching in parades, surged forward to take care of his bike, handle his ruck, and lead him to the concierge who came halfway down the steps to greet with a flourish and a “Welcome, Player Crometheus!�
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  Flashes were going off all across the opulent front entrance of the hotel as the multi-storied lava fountains began to erupt in violent beauty. A once-in-a-lifetime must-see bucket-list item for most of the non-Uplifted and slaves to see in their most-likely once-in-a-lifetime trip to Sin City. But the focus on the lava fountains paled in comparison to their focus on him. He had the numbers. Everyone was trying to get a photo of him as he entered the pleasure palace.

  A record.

  A souvenir to dream by.

  But really… a relic. A holy relic. That’s what they were capturing. Because surely it was known he was the closest of them all to becoming. To entering the Xanadu Tower.

  They would need such remembrances when they returned to wherever it was they were going. The lower decks. The Grunt Corps. The Flesh Pits. A billion other less glittery places to run out their existence in service to the Pantheon. Hoping beyond evidence that they too might become.

  He smiled and waved, but honestly, he was looking forward to being free of them and their expectant desperation. He needed to be among his own. He was beat from the battle and looking at their anxious faces, all of them willing to do anything for, or with, him for the chance at an opportunity to uplift, even just a little. It was all so tiring.

  Inside his room, which took up half the floor of the seventy-fourth, he stretched out on the bed and felt for the coke he’d traded in achievement points to obtain.

  He closed his eyes and just lay there in the utter silence of the room. A silence that was overpowering due to the thick carpet and the well-appointed furniture that was a blend of cubist fantasy and Swedish industrial modern. Thick curtains, voluptuous towels, and soft bedding made him feel like a child within a womb somewhere inside the galaxy.