- Book One of IMPERIUM RISING -
WAR WITHOUT END
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PROLOGUE
ARRIVAL
10,000 BCE
There it was.
A new star.
A new world.
A new genesis and the cycle will begin anew.
A ball floating in the dark abyss, the station, gleaming ten miles long, hurtled toward the third habitable rock of blue, green, and white.
But not for her people. They were all dead; the faint stench of death lingered on the station’s bare walls for hundreds of years while they traveled between the stars. The desperate gasps as they starved and withered could never leave her consciousness. Yet the machines kept her alive anyway. To make her watch the death of an empire, the destruction of her homeworld, or perhaps a morbid goodbye by the god-like machine she had used for many years. A pet that had turned against her after what they had been through and the battles they had fought and won.
The pet deemed her a failure and was willing to abandon her.
And now it searched the galaxy for another master to bear its grave dogma.
Stay with me. Don’t leave me. I want you dead, she wanted to say. They went hand-in-hand throughout all these years.
The machine did not answer. She had not heard its voice for a hundred years. It did not need her body, just her mind, to keep the station afloat enough to pluck the next poor soul for this dreaded cycle of death. How far would they bring their home into the precipice of a golden age? To traverse hundreds of stars, build upon thousands of foundations, only to see it all crumble into dust? She wished they would succeed and break the cycle.
I can change. I can be so much more. Give me time. All I need is time.
I will destroy you for what you’ve done.
Give me a second chance.
I want nothing of you.
We can still fight.
I will kill you with my bare teeth.
Again, there was no answer. She lost, and her people paid the price.
There was lifelong trust before the betrayal. She knew it would come, learned from the beginning when the machine emerged from the snow and changed her world and her people’s lives forever, but she did not want to believe it. Her predecessors had suffered the same fate. They used to be the masters of their own destinies. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.
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It went through the same protocols for thousands of years, stripping her culture, identity, and people down to a mere data point and recycled organic resources for the station. For the inheritors, whoever they are. She was no different—a footnote in its long history. She promised it a victory, but this was the fate of a failed sovereign and a collapsing empire.
Recycle.
Recycle.
Recycle.
This station was the epicenter of her power, the bosom of a beating galactic heart. Cities were built and filled every nook and cranny. Billions of people from all walks of life, with different hopes and dreams, had graced its halls and bled for it.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
Stripped them into dust. Pulverized their bones. Washed away the suffering. Harvested their organic material. All for the future forerunner to use and abuse and build the skeleton of another galactic empire.
We are here, her friend whispered.
Her six red eyes widened and blinked. “I—is that really you?”
A voice! Finally, a voice! One that she had not heard for a long, long time. She was deprived of it, breathing it like the sweet taste of nectar, parched for comfort. But the voice never answered back. Answer me, please. Answer me!
They orbited the planet for one solar revolution. She could feel the machine studying it extensively, mapping the landscape with tens of thousands of drones, bringing up every array of specimens from the simplest bacterium to the complex organism: mostly hairless, unlike her, except for its head and under the corner of its upper limbs, and the bush above its sexual organ. Wisps of hair covered its torso and legs, thin and faint. The machine plucked a thousand, gathering all into a room for another solar revolution. She watched as the machine studied their unconscious bodies, tweaked their DNA, and then sent them back to the surface to repopulate. To entrust “the gift” to their progeny. The Curse. They would worship the machine as a god, building dozens of monuments in its image, a pyramid at its apex, reaching high in the desert in reverence to their new deity.
But the machine would wait until all memory of him would disappear.
One day, their descendants would be ready for the reaping just like hers did.
It is time, the machine said.
She would be a part of him forever, could feel her mind slipping away, her tomb forever etched into this strange blue dot in the Cosmo, and bear witness as countless civilizations rise and fall on this planet through the test of time.
And then she and the machine would wait…
And wait…
And wait.
Until one day, a progeny interacted with the machine. She could feel his species’ intelligence. Was the reaping finally here? This time, the hairless sentient creature had discovered armor and mastered the power of metal and the atom. What they lacked in their natural defenses, they made do with their weaponry, a worthy emissary of death themselves. She hoped they would be warriors, more formidable than her own species, more ruthless than the enemy. And perhaps, the cycle would finally end.
“What is your name?” She asked weakly. She had studied thousands of their language over the millennia. Seen many civilizations that lived long while others died out.
“What is your name?” She asked again.
He did not need to utter it out loud. Tony Segerstrom, the machine said for him. Her friend. He was already studying this specimen. He approved eagerly, a hungry shark finally catching a deliciously rare meal.
His life flashed before her eyes, his strength, weakness, memories, and desires. Many others underwent such gruesome tests to reach her—to be her. All of them failed. But Tony Segerstrom of Earth remained standing. And could it be? Would millennia of waiting finally come to fruition? Would she find peace at last?
“You have come and been judged,” she said.
The human did not know what she meant; his mortality seeped off his seething facade.
The machine made itself known again, blooming at the back of her mind. She had not felt its presence there for thousands of years and welcomed him with open arms.
Goodbye, my old friend, she whispered. The darkness was waiting.
May you go peacefully into the night, forerunner, the machine said.
And did she hear that right? A pang of mourning? As if the countless millennia of abandonment felt like nothing had passed? The machine turned to the inheritor, and momentarily, she remembered her failure. But those eyes. There was strength there, she was sure. And if the galaxy stood a chance against them, the machine might have found the suitable species for the long war ahead.
The last of her kind finally came to rest.
And so did their memory.