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

  Thermal and radiation readings were growing along the gaping sections of the torn-to-shreds hull. Alarms inside Crometheus’s HUD in the form of beeping sensors and chiming warnings were indicating extreme danger. Surging levels of runaway energy would cook him within his armor in minutes if he didn’t exfil the wreckage of the Animal cruiser. Crometheus left the maintenance gantry, climbed onto the long arm of the sensor mast, and began to pull himself farther and farther out along its slender length, trying to get as far away from the collapsing hull as possible without actually leaving it altogether. He had to get away, but was not yet ready to trust his fate to the stellar void. Space was too big a place to go hunting for one drifting marine. Uplifted resources were not infinite. They never had been.

  “There is a truth,” said Maestro within the dull hum of Crometheus’s comm as the marine pulled himself along the arm of the damaged sensor mast. Destroyed Animal ships floated in space nearby, or at least burning sections of them did, debris spilling away from twisted hulls like ice from a comet tumbling through the void. Or lice from a dog.

  It was not… not beautiful to Crometheus. All the panoramic destruction. Destruction had always been post-apocalyptically beautiful to him. It even inspired him within his deepest meditations on what his godhood would be like. What form his next life would take. Or to put it another way… how he would shape the heaven he alone would rule over. His visions of becoming a god often involved a ruined world of crumbling monuments to all those who had failed before him. And only he himself wandering its vast abandoned surfaces. Alone among the ruins of past greatness with the poetry of his mind expressing truth via electric guitar power chords.

  When he meditated in the long sleeps between the worlds, he dreamed these visions of emptiness. And of himself. That was how he knew he would be a god one day. On that dead world he dreamed of… his would be the only voice heard. And it would be the voice of creation.

  “So we must say,” he chanted deep within himself.

  Just as he’d learned long ago.

  Had not The Real Anubis—that was the old prophet’s tag, the kind of tag they’d all taken, eschewing their birth and stage names during some previous shedding—said the same when he, Crometheus, had gone on a pilgrimage into the Forbidden Decks and found the wizard? Serving him, sitting at his knee for what felt like long years to learn the truth of how one became a god when everything they’d believed in had collapsed out there in the long sublight crossing from Sirius Two.

  Now the old wizard was just called Anubis. Wherever he was. Whatever had become of him in the forgotten parts of those off-limits decks.

  Those were the dark years of the colony ship Pantheon. The dark years that followed the madness of their first world. And all its heartbreak. The lessons that had needed to be learned if they were to become. The big colony ship limping back up to just shy of light speed after that world. After that heartbreak and defeat.

  “There is a truth… Crometheus,” whispered Maestro almost to himself as though the Uplifted and he weren’t even on the same comm. As though they were just two old friends talking in a quiet room where no one could listen to what was said but them.

  He was as far out as he could go on the sensor mast. Any farther and he would be drifting off in the void. Still with a chance of being rescued. But power for the armor was running low. So was time. It was looking more and more unlikely that he would be found.

  Far down the length of the ruined Fury, a munitions magazine, probably where they kept more of their racked SSMs, exploded in the silence of space. Debris and ignited gases sprayed out into the void. A pyrotechnic show that was just for him and all his ruminations on ruin and godhood. And becoming.

  All that beautiful destruction just for him, and him alone.

  As though…

  “And that truth is,” continued Maestro, mindless of the vast spectacle of final destruction expanding across the debris field that was the United Worlds attack fleet, “that not all things are true, Cro.”

  And…

  “Do you understand this?”

  Crometheus did.

  “But we tell them, tell ourselves… that we have truths. All of us,” said Maestro as though teaching some important point. “And we tell ourselves that all of our truths, even if they are in contradiction with one another, are still true. Still valid. Just because we say them, and claim them, as ours. We tell them that despite the law of non-contradiction. Our enemies and our allies are the same. We tell them the “truths” that serve us because at the end of the day when it comes down to it, on the other side of the extermination of all the Animals and only the remaining of the Uplifted, friends and enemies are all the same… to us. Why is that, Crometheus?”

  There was a ship coming. Scanning lasers caressing the ruined hull of the Fury. An allied Uplifted rescue vessel searching for… him.

  The body of a dead Animal, frozen by the unforgiving cold of space, drifted past. The Fury was coming apart at the seams. Wreckage was beginning to trail away from the hull. It wouldn’t be much longer now until it broke apart, or more likely was blown apart in a thousand different directions by some tremendous internal rupture.

  “Why?” prompted Maestro once more. “Why are our friends and our enemies the same, in the end, Cro? Why is that?”

  Crometheus pulsed his transponder, and the rescue vehicle altered its course for intercept almost immediately. He would be rescued. He would make it. He would enjoy the pleasures of the flesh of Miss Cyber Saigon. A new experience in which to find the elusive… happiness. The endless quest continues once again, he thought.

  Happiness could be attained, as Anubis had once said. If one was willing to continually seek the next new experience in hopes of finding happiness, then pleasure could be had. If one didn’t think about it too much along the way and just kept some kind of faith in the law of averages.

  “Let go and do,” the old Uplifted wizard had made clear down there in the darkness. Hidden deep within the Forbidden Decks where such blasphemies had been uttered freely. “And maybe one day you will find the thing that will make you eternally happy deep inside yourself, Crometheus.”

  Anubis had said that deep in the midnight caverns of the Forbidden Decks during the long dark ages after the failure of the first world the Pantheon visited. After the revolt and the war in the central hab that followed.

  Bad Memory.

  Bad Memory.

  Bad Memory.

  The rescue ship was close to the hull now… coming in for extraction.

  “Why, Cro?” prompted Maestro. “Why can there, in the end, be just one truth? Why is diversity a lie we tell our friends, and our enemies?”

  Silence. The vast stillness of space and the galaxy with all its dying stars, swirling nebulae, and turning planets seemed to wait for an answer. Awesome if you didn’t remind yourself that it all paled in the light of what you were becoming. This was all mere mortality. Runaway supergiants, stars, black holes… they were finite things.

  He was becoming immortal.

  Becoming a god.

  Becoming infinite.

  He was…

  “Because there is only one truth…” he whispered to the void.

  And to Maestro.

  “And it is the Pantheon’s, and the Pantheon’s alone, to decide what the truth is.”

  Gods: Chapter Nine

  Back in the arcade Crometheus stepped away from the video game machine called Britannia Attack! Its eight-bit parade-of-horrors screen requested he enter his initials. Three blank dashes blinked up at him as ships in cartoon miniature exploded and frozen tiny human dolls drifted past in the livery of the Coalition Animals.

  Every muscle in his body ached. His eyes were tired. His mind fried. But the triumph was there.

  The high-score high.

  He stepped forward and moved the joystick in quick, practiced, al
most unthought movements as he tapped the fire buttons to commit his tag to the permanent record inside the Pantheon. An achievement that would be noted by the society that would rule the galaxy one day. His mark. The symbols by which the galaxy would know him.

  You shall know us, and us alone, some poet might have phrased it. Some rock singer might have belted. Just old programming mixing with the new in the background apps of his mind.

  “Good game, kid?” asked Jim Stepp, who’d come up behind him. Not tall, but taller. The older boy was that. And powerful too. Everyone in school knew about the winter’s day last year when Jim Stepp had fought three older kids from another school in the culvert of the park across from their school. It had been a full-on knock-down-drag-out brawl that ended when Stepp—he was always called “Stepp” as though he were a confidant of the teller of that tale of glory and battle, or mayhem and mischief at other times—when Stepp kicked the last and largest of the boys he’d knocked to the ground with the toe of his Doc Marten. Right in the face.

  Some said the other boy’s jaw was broken right at that moment.

  Others said the kid died in his sleep that night, his parents finding his corpse in bed the next morning, and that the police were putting together the clues. It was only a matter of days before Stepp was arrested and sent away to “juvie,” or even the army.

  Years later Crometheus would remember finding out that one Jim Stepp, late of Viejo Verde, had indeed joined the marines and ended up dying in some foreign conflict about the time he, as Billy Bang, his stage persona, was on tour in Japan with Rebel Child.

  Stadium tour.

  “Nice,” said the older boy known to all as Stepp. Jim Stepp. “First high score on a new game.” He didn’t give Crometheus a high-five, only a mere toss of the head and neck-length swept-to-one-side hair that indicated the recognition of an achievement.

  “Pretty good. Wanna play doubles on Battlefront?”

  Crometheus felt around in his pocket for tokens. The clock on the wall said six and it was getting dark out. Which was impossible to confirm from inside the arcade. But it was indeed likely dark and the streets would be windswept and turning cold as evening came on. And lonely. His parents would be expecting him home soon.

  Which was a nice thought.

  There were rules you had to abide by to keep your own personal reality organized. Everyone had at one time turned theirs into a carnivalesque bacchanal littered with corpses in which even gravity or physics was suspect. That way lay madness and a bending of the mind in ways it wasn’t supposed to bend. Best to stick with your own rules knowing you could break them whenever you wished.

  “Sure thing,” said the boy Crometheus, disregarding the hour and the imminent coming on of the street lights with the night.

  Home. Home had always been a nice thought. An anchor in a world he’d gotten very lost in once long ago. A point on the compass he’d misplaced at times back in his old life on Earth.

  Later, after hours upon hours of Battlefront, avoiding other tanks, the smaller and the bigger ones, weaving around the barriers while clearing levels and being rewarded with an eight-bit diddy-bop of martial triumph, he left Jim Stepp, saying he had to be home soon.

  “Cool,” said Stepp. And then… almost as an afterthought… “You should come down to the tracks sometime. There’s things down there in the swamp. Things you need to see, Crometheus.”

  Cold water splashed over his scalp and down his spine as his own thoughts did a little dance between what was real and what was simulation. How had a mere string of code that represented memories of Jim Stepp, set up to the parameters of his wishes, decided to use his player tag? Here, in the arcade, they called him by the old name he’d forgotten.

  His mind blinked and almost fritzed as some powerful processor inside him tried to recognize the fault.

  Then… he just went with what was easiest. Better that than getting stuck in a loop you could never get out of.

  Those were called mind traps. And they’d fried more than a few Uplifted once the Pantheon had shed itself and gone online.

  Besides… the truth was what you decided it was.

  So…

  Just being invited had been the part that struck Crometheus as his mind said, Be cool about this. That was all his mind could think of now. And even later when he lay in bed thinking it over. It was so odd. Something that had never happened in real life as far as he could remember. Something he hadn’t ever figured on—his own personal reality presenting him with an option he hadn’t considered. That the Jim Stepp character was offering him an unconsidered rabbit hole down which he might go. Odd, and an unexpected treat. A strange, and even pleasant, surprise. Such things, he’d come to say to himself at times, were the moments an eternal and immortal mind treasured.

  The unplanned and the unexpected.

  And yes, later, lying in bed that night as he drifted off toward Sin City, ready to redeem his prizes and transition into that reality, he would think about what Stepp had offered without taking his eyes off of him.

  Those same eyes that stared into the forbidden game. Jim Stepp’s game.

  Devil’s Hollow.

  They’d moved off of Battlefront after clearing several levels and working as a team. Drawing out the tanks and killing them in a crossfire only doable in doubles.

  That’s what they’d called it then when a game had a two-player option.

  Doubles.

  Drifting toward the pleasure capital of the Pantheon in his bed in the house he never should have left, images came together. Seeing the soft blue glow of the television up in his best friend’s window in the dark, he thought about that.

  Doubles.

  And… last thought before going… going… off.

  The greatest doubles game of all time was Joust. Remember that, he asked someone standing near him in the dream he was about to have. Some stranger in the darkness between the digital realities of the Pantheon. He had an idea it was Maestro. But it could have been her. She always turned up. Often at the end of things. Before the next beginning. The next shedding. But he couldn’t tell. It was too dark and shadowy here where he was.

  Holly Wood.

  Then he was fading down into his child’s mattress. Like sinking into a cloud of unexplored worlds. He watched the stars rising above him like shooting comets and thought about the time he hung from the sensor mast of a burning starship rotating in the blue and crystal void near an alien world lost somewhere in the stars.

  What was real… and what was just a dream?

  All those memories they’d made along the way. What had become of them? He knew many were missing now. Deleted and gone forever. Edited.

  Gone, baby, gone. The love is gone.

  He drifted along the Blue Highway—that’s what he called his post-apocalyptic future world where he would be god. The way, the Path, for him, was called the Blue Highway.

  The film he’d never finished back on… what was the name of the place where it all began?

  “Yes… all those things,” he heard himself murmuring in the shadowy void between the simulated realities of the Pantheon, aboard the beached colony ship also named the Pantheon.

  He drifted along and remembered Jim Stepp staring into the arcade machine called Devil’s Hollow. The realities were sinking now. The clouds were shaking hands. He was transitioning to the next reality. His mother had seen that video game once when they’d been out as a family and she’d told him not to play it. Devil’s Hollow. Seen it in the corner of a movie theater they’d gone to that night. It seemed evil then when she said it. He remembered vaguely getting the creeps around it ever after. And also… being strangely attracted to it at the same time.

  Though he’d never admitted that to anyone. Maybe mumbling it to some passed-out underage groupie once in some hotel room between concerts.

  But tonight, as the stars becam
e the ceiling of his room, lighting the way along the Blue Highway toward Sin City and Miss Cyber Saigon a-waiting, he could hear Jim Stepp asking him again to come down to the tracks sometime. To the swamp.

  “There’s things in there you should see.”

  Edit. Something had been edited. But it wasn’t important now. It wasn’t needed for becoming.

  What? he wondered as he heard the echoing roar of a motorcycle speeding across the apocalyptic desert wastes, passing all the Ozymandias statues of ruin and pride littering his lonely world. Connecting with Sin City now along a straight, blue, highway.

  What should he see down there? What had Jim Stepp wanted him to see down there beyond the train tracks? And why had his reality thrown that at him?

  Why now of all moments?

  Change was coming. He’d been here before. He knew how to sense it. Knew that it was inevitable. Had learned not to fight it. But to just embrace it. That was the Path. And his instincts along it had not failed him yet.

  As far as he knew…

  Still his mind parsed the koan that had been set before him. The train tracks were a no man’s land between the perfectly planned neighborhood of the Pantheon when she left Earth… no, that wasn’t right. He was confusing truths. But in a sense… it was. When you really thought about it and the symbolism that could be implied. It really was. The train tracks was an area where children from his neighborhood weren’t supposed to be, playing at being who they would one day become. Beyond the sight and knowledge of the adults. Choosing their roles. The old swamp had been a forgotten place of becoming. Adventures were down there along its twisting ever-changing streams often filled with strange flotsam that could be treasures… or just trash, or even something dangerous. Older kids did drugs in hidden copses. Sometimes they found porno mags. Sometimes a mattress.

  It was, at times, as though his past had been a prophecy of his becoming all along and he’d never known it. Only understood it to be so with each upward step along the Path. Amazing to think of it that way, he thought before he transferred on… to Sin City’s reality. Drifting in that half world between their constructed realities. Between the clouds of information and data. Between the powerful servers. Where shadows and memories lurked and waited.