Chapter 1-2
1574 Words
And owner of a cube that had ludicrously chosen him to become Emperor.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded and caught his breath, sure he looked a wreck, his face red and tear-strewn. “Too ironic, is all,” he said, glancing down at the cube. “Well, if this was truly the source of the Circian"s power, it"s clear why their Empire fell.” And he laughed some more.
* * *
“I think they"re gone now,” Misty said, peering from the culvert.
He could barely see her outline, night having long since fallen.
They"d likely set up infrared monitors in a perimeter, but they weren"t interested in the native peoples. The Imperial Patrol would be looking for him and his Salvager.
He followed her out, trusting that she knew the area and where they could flee if the patrol returned.
They made their way to the gravesite and stood beside the unmarked mound of freshly-turned soil.
Her face swung up to his, a pale shadow amidst darker shadows.
What am I supposed to say? he wondered; I didn"t know the man.
The moon of her face beamed at him brightly.
He took her hand and sighed. “We gather here at the final resting place of—”
“Augustus Circi, Emperor,” she supplied in the pause.
“—to honor his passing from a life of devotion. Those of us who remain behind will never forget him.”
The girl beside him wept softly in the darkness.
* * *
He climbed into a clean set of formalls, fresh from a shower, wondering the whole time how they were going to get off planet without the Imperial Patrol"s intercepting them.
At least I"ll be clean when they arrest me, he thought.
He"d parked Misty in the galley in front of a protein mush, his synth having sized up a meal for her.
Although famished, he had more of an appetite to get out of his soiled clothing and get cleaned up.
She licked the last off the spoon and glanced at him, her eyes taking in the fresh formalls.
“Your turn,” he said, hiking his thumb toward the stall.
She half-frowned in that direction. “I"ve never been in one before. Does it hurt?”
He chuckled, shaking his head. “It"s voice-operated, so if you scream, it"ll shut itself off.” He glanced around. Everything looked all right. “Did you touch anything?”
“Not a thing, just like you told me.” She beamed at him. “The mush was terrible.”
“You get used to it. In,” he said, hiking the thumb.
He took her seat, the cube where he"d set it, after admonishing her not to touch it.
“It"s not mine anymore, so I can"t,” she"d told him.
The galley was small, with barely room for two at the table. The seamless walls hid all the kitchen gadgets, but Jack needed just two: the synth and a spoon.
“Synth on,” he said, and a whirring noise trundled out a bowl of mush. “My favorite.”
He devoured it mindlessly, his gaze on the cube.
Two inches to a side, its edges slightly beveled, its sides completely reflective, the cube gazed back at him.
Belching, he pushed aside the empty bowl and put his hands on the cube.
* * *
The opulence stunned him, and the feel of the silk against his body felt like a mother"s womb.
The two bulges at his breast bewildered him, as did the cavity between his legs. Mammaries and a v****a! he thought, looking around.
In his hand was a hairbrush. The marble columns framed a view of manicured palace grounds, topiary-tangled gardens, sprawling out-buildings.
He knew where he was, but not how he"d got here.
Or who he"d become.
Dismayed, he looked up from his ample breasts to see a servant approach.
“My Lady looks distressed, pardon my noticing,” the handmaid said.
* * *
“What am I supposed to wear?” Her voice came from the shower, bringing him back to the ship.
He hadn"t noticed she was finished. Ordering up a pair of small formalls, he took them from the sizer and thrust it into the showercube, his eyes on the kitchen, averted.
“Thank you.”
He stepped back to the table.
She emerged, clad in formalls, looking down at herself in evident distaste. “I"ll need better clothes than this before I can be presented at the Palace.”
He roared with laughter and the bewildered look on her face caused him to laugh all the harder.
“You shouldn"t have laughed like that,” she said a long time later.
“I"m sorry,” Jack replied, kissing the top of her head. She was curled against him in the Pilot"s chair, one of three places to sit aboard the Scavenger.
He"d laughed so hard he"d begun to cry, and her face had crumpled as she"d slid to the floor and gathered herself into a fetal position to weep.
He"d picked her up and sat her on his lap and wept with her until they"d both wept themselves dry.
The girl quiescent in his arms, he wondered how he"d known what to do. An orphan, reared in a brothel on Alpha Tuscana, he"d run away to work on a garbage scow at age twelve. Jack had never known a mother"s embrace. The brash buxom breasts of courtesans had been a paltry substitute, the boy cast away the moment a paying customer walked in the door.
“I"ll get you finer clothes than Princess Andromeda, and she"ll be so envious that she"ll ask who your designer is.”
Misty giggled. “Liar.”
He giggled too, enjoying the moment and the smell of freshly-washed child and being close to another human being.
Far too little of the latter throughout my life, he thought.
* * *
Emperor Phaeton Torgas stared at Princess Andromeda. “There"s been a change in the alignments, I tell you!”
She sat on an ottoman slightly to the right of his throne, the heiress in attendance upon the troubled Emperor. “Someone dares oppose the Empire?” she asked lightly, looking as dainty as a daisy. They were alone in the throne room, or as alone as they"d ever get, servants omnipresent and perpetually underfoot. Like rats, she thought.
He scowled at her over his scepter, a gold-plated staff two-and-a-half feet long, capped with a platinum-filigreed halo, which served to house a somewhat-plain looking two-inch silver cube. “No, it"s not open defiance, as if we didn"t have enough of that already.” His gaze was on his own satin-clad foot.
Her satin slippers, embroidered with gold and silver thread in the shapes of roses, glinted in the evening light.
“It"s more an undercurrent, but a strong one, a shift in the pillars that hold the Empire aloft.”
“Sounds grave, Father. No doubt a concern easily addressed.” She smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from the sleeve of her silk blouse.
“If only I knew where to look! I"d place the Armada on alert, but I haven"t an inkling of what to tell Admiral Camelus to look for.” A shudder shook him. “When I look around the room, I see the legacy of my forebears, and I"m invigorated to build upon their achievements,” Emperor Phaeton intoned. “And when I look upon you, my dear daughter, I desire to extirpate any hint of resistance, that you may rule unhindered when I"m gone.”
She glanced around the room, busts of her forebears lining the walls. For twelve hundred years, the Torgas lineage had held sway over half the galaxy, occasional rebellions flaring at the edges but nearly all put asunder quickly.
“I hear you had something akin to a fit this morning?”
She drew a sharp breath. Of course he knew about that, she reminded herself. The cube tells him everything.
“The cube tells me everything.”
It was an open secret that this alien cube was the source of Torgassan power.
“I don"t know what happened, Father. I was brushing my hair out in my dressing room and …” She looked at him bewildered. “Remember that time you ghosted me? That"s almost what this felt like. I was in a ship galley, small and cramped, a bowl with the leavings of some mush beside me, and a girl"s voice called from around the corner …” She shook her head, unable to recall what the girl had said.
They both looked at the cube mounted on the scepter.
The alien artifact functioned by reading the minute variations in electrical fields introduced by human thought. At its wielder"s behest, it also injected electrical field perturbations in resonance with the brain"s neuro-electrical activity, able to do so irrespective of distance.
Which was how her father had known.
These electrical fields were known as Gaussian fields, and the device was called a Gaussian Holistic Oscillating Subliminal Tesseract, but it was usually referred to by the acronym, GHOST. Thus the origin of the term. Whenever the Emperor wanted to know something or to influence someone, he simply ghosted them.
Their gazes met over the top of the scepter.
“Is there another cube, Father?”
- Writer
