---King---
---Gordon’s perspective---
My magnum opus reveals himself…
At 275cm, I could count on one hand the number of gigantism afflicted Humans who’ve ever been taller… and all of them died before they hit 35… after living short lives of pain and frailty.
At 338kg of muscle, bone and sinew… ‘frail’ couldn’t be a less fitting descriptor for this man!
His sclerae and pupils both glow with an unearthly bioluminescence that very much conveys the idea of ‘Godking’ to any who see him.
A thick, black beard and long, sleek, straight black hair both spill out from his skull which, while at the more ‘heroic’ proportion of 1:8.5 rather than the more normal 1:7, is still significantly larger than anyone else’s, meaning I was able to expand his brain and, consequently, his intellect, much more than I was for the rest of us… still giving him a cranium dense and thick enough to protect against a direct hit with a low calibre bullet!
Atop his luxuriant beard sits a proud, aquiline hooked nose, which he insisted would make him look kingly and wouldn’t look at all silly.
His internals (mainly heart and lungs) all had to be significantly increased in both size and efficiency to account for the extra strain that servicing such an enormous body places on them.
If I could have figured out a way to further fortify the extremities of his circulatory system without impeding their permeability, I probably could have got him another half a metre or so taller!
My old professor could definitely have done it but… something tells me the smug little French hermaphrodite wouldn’t have gone for such a project… even absent the wider context of everything Bastion stands for(!)
From his neck down, he wears a thick, regal looking set of enamelled, durasteel plate armour, trimmed with golden accents.
From his shoulders flows a cape, in the same stark white and gold.
Atop his head perches a crown with tall, angular palisades, embossed with geometric lines of gold and with a 6cm wide, table cut diamond of flawless clarity, sitting over his bushy black eyebrows.
In his right hand he holds the handle of a 20kg plasmasword with a 2m long, durasteel blade (the only part of his ensemble where the durasteel isn’t covered with a glossy white layer of enamel.)
The *boom*s of (probably getting on for) 400kg of man and durasteel meeting the floor, with each of his footfalls, utterly fill the room with reverberation.
Looking at my greatest achievement, it’s difficult to picture the man he was when I first met him; the 175cm tall, 70kg lean little New Coloradoan Colonel, Cyrus ‘Hannibal’ Postlethwaite, who’d been put in charge of organising the Terran Werewolf Programme. Stay-behind divisions, meant to cause chaos behind enemy lines after they’d been passed over.
That programme ended up sidelined long before the end of the War, after it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a significant expansion in our occupation.
When he realised the flaccid half-victory the Terran governments were going to settle for, this man used the authority he still had to take the Werewolf Programme and turn it into the Revanchists.
After the Betrayal, it took years for me to transform that scrawny Colonel into a Godking… but it was so worth it!
The clear awe he inspires in any lazarites seeing him up close for the first time is priceless!
He looks like a man to whom the title ‘Emperor of the Terrans’ belongs!
When we found our way here, we negotiated with the local clan leaders to permit us to stay, with the promise that they can ride our coattails to a position of galactic domination alongside us… A promise we have little intention of actually honouring, not that we can let them know that(!)
Most of the planet’s native populace don’t even know we’re here, the crater our city is in having a rather generous no-fly zone extending into the deserts around it, for those odd flights that would otherwise take locals from one side of the habitable zone to the other, over us.
At this point, my King sits on his outsized throne, slinging his cape to fall over the right arm, his right hand resting on the guard of his enormous leafblade sword (that’s tip adds another little gouge to the collection in the floor, on my side of that seat.)
His left hand reaches to between Artazostre’s ears to stroke through her snow white fur.
The giant gives a ferocious grin around the table, exposing the thumbnail sized teeth I gave him, and speaks “Dearest friends! Nobles!… Terrans!… I’m certain you must be wondering why you were summoned here on such short notice!” in an affected midAtlantic accent.
No one answers.
We all know better than to interrupt Cyrus when he’s speaking…
“Well…” he booms “…I shan’t keep you waiting! I’m told by Barron Parr, over there, that a very… distressing video has been released onto the galnet recently… which he learned of after one of his subordinates was sent it by a lazarite… It, somehow, managed to slip our censorship and make it onto. Bastion’s. intranet!”
He lets his words sit… outwardly smiling but clearly not happy!
“Now…” he continues “…I’m sure everyone bar the good Barron is wondering what in Terra’s name could have been in this video… so I shall hand you over to him to explain.”
The tall, well built, blond, Nova Britannian Guardcaptain, Barron Harold ‘Saxon’ Parr, stands and clears his throat “*ehem*…Thank you, Your Majesty…” before turning to address the rest of us “…As King Cyrus says; earlier today, one of my guardsmen was sent this video by a lazarite acquaintance from the lower city. He had the wherewithal to immediately bring it to my attention. We deleted the video and tracked down the owners of any device that had accessed it… Fortunately, that wasn’t many… We quickly managed to arrest the 27 individuals who’s devices had been used to view it and are questioning them, now, with regards to who else they might have shown it or told about it… We’re fairly confident we’ll have them all in hand soon… The content of the video is one Kara Stellan, positively identified as one of the operatives assigned to the crew of the Vulture, the ship belonging to our assassin Jackson ‘Scout’ Stetter (also known as Death) at the time he was apprehended… It appears that Ms Stellan has been made… aware of her nature as a lazarite… This video is performing exactly as it was intended to… The traitors are using this girl as a propaganda piece, attempting to foment a lazarite rebellion against our rule…”
Many of the other Councillors mutter to eachother at that, clearly disturbed.
I’m quite disturbed myself!
The lazarites becoming aware of the Lazarus Programme?… It’s a potential worst case scenario!
We could lose everything…
Avoiding this exact eventuality was one of the strongest arguments against keeping the lazarites’ nature from them in the first place!
We could have openly and honestly told them what they were and how they came to be here!
We just decided that the propagandic value of the ‘you were orphaned and we took you in and raised you’ angle was just too great to ignore (when compared to the, far less compelling, ‘you were a casualty we brought back to life to serve as a labourer and footsoldier to us’!)
Not even mentioning the way them not being born naturally undermines our position on the primitives!
“I’ll play you the video now…” states Parr, raising a screen from the centre of the table.
A woman appears.
Her voluminously curly hair is a vivid red and her eyes are a bright emerald green.
She wears comfortable looking clothing and sits in a room that’s daubed in therapeutic blues.
“Hi… my name is Kara Stellan and I’m speaking to you from a medium security women’s prison… at a location I won’t divulge… I was raised on a planet called ‘Bastion’, ruled by a terrorist organisation who call themselves the ‘Revanchists’…” she starts, speaking in a lazarite accent, quite similar to the way the Starborn tend to speak.
“…I say ‘raised’ because I don’t know if I was actually born there… Actually, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t, if for no other reason than I probably wasn’t born full stop!… I probably came out of a tube… I’m not a naturalborn Human… I’m a clone of this woman who you should be seeing on screen beside me right now…” the same face (with a clearly very different personality behind it) appears beside the speaker in a Wartime photo “…Her name was Esme Taylor… She was born ‘Esme Reid’, on Earth, on the 31st of October, 2664, and died on New Australia, on the 1st of January, 2686, at the age of 21… At 27… I’ve already lived longer than she ever did…”
If her sample was collected on my homeworld, there’s a not insignificant chance I did it myself!
I was back there in the last year of the War, one of about 200 or so Revanchists, laying the groundwork for the Lazarus programme.
“…She died heroically, at the Battle of the Murnma Gorge, crushed by collapsing rubble when her battalion refused to yield to the army of War King Vlixrothju… and were shelled…”
Ah… odds of me having been the one to put the swab in this woman’s mouth just jumped from less than 1:200… to a little more than 1:6… I was there with five others and, as I recall, none of them worked as fast as I did.
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I may be confabulating it but I feel like I might even remember that vivid red hair on one of the mottled corpses…?
“Now… you might be wondering how I know this! Well, that would be because, when I was arrested, it was by her son… Victor ‘Cuddles’ Taylor…”
Scowls and scoffs emanate from every councillor at the mention of that posterboy for everything wrong with postWar Terrans!
Heedless of our reaction, the prerecorded girl continues “…he recognised me… convinced me to get a DNA test… a test which proved I’m not her… Someone took her genes, edited out all the bits they didn’t like and grew me in a tube before handing me off to an orphanage on Bastion… to live the next 26 years thinking I was a War orphan and that subH… that gardenworlders had killed my parents!… Now, if you’re watching this on Bastion (and I really hope you are) I just want you to know that, unless you actually remember the War… there’s a good chance you’re like me! A clone! Made as nothing more than livestock! Meant to be moulded into the ones who made you’s idea of a perfect little Terran(!) They don’t care about you! They never did!… I know you probably want to call me a liar right now! Hell! If someone had told me all of this last year, I’d’ve called them a liar, for sure!… But I’m not lying!… They lied!… They lied to you about everything! The galaxy isn’t like they said… That’s something it didn’t take me learning I was a clone to notice(!)… They said the Terran government was subverted by traitors but, if anyone, they’re the traitors!… They’re the ones who went against the majority of Terrans’ will for Peace and started plotting to take over the galaxy to revenge themselves for the past! They’re the ones who wasted time and resources skulking around battlefields, stealing DNA to make us, instead of helping out while the War was still happening! They’re the ones lying! Not me!… I am begging you: Stop listening to their lies! Stop doing as they say! Rise up and demand to know the truth!… Escape, if you can! Though, I know that’s easier said than done… If you can surrender yourself to Terran forces somewhere, they’ll protect you!… I know Bastion and the Revanchists don’t have anything like the resources to take them head on!” she sits back and folds her arms “Now, to anyone not from Bastion who wants to do their part to take down an organisation of slaving terrorists, this is all the information I can give you; Bastion is a planet, somewhere in the middle rim of the galaxy… the part of it I’m from is a desert where it averages around 50°C and it’s always daytime. I don’t know what the dark side of the planet looks like. The city of Bastion is situated in a large meteor impact crater, about 10km in diameter, with a prominent rebound peak at it’s centre. The city houses around 16 million Humans and about half as many enslaved gardenworlders (though, I’m guessing that number varies up or down depending on how recently fresh shipments of them have arrived… There’s a fairly high rate of attrition!)… The planet’s gravity is naturally a little lower than Earth Standard, I’d say about 0.75G? 1.6 Galactic Standard? 1.65 maybe?… That’s more or less everything I can tell you about it… I wish I could give you more to go on but, for obvious reasons, they don’t trust most people who live there to know exactly where in the galaxy it is, much less give us access to ships that could take us on and off world!… All I can say is, it took me about 4 months to get from there to Citadel but I wasn’t driving or allowed to look at any navigation for the first 3 of those months, so I have no idea how circuitous the route they took was… I know it’s a big galaxy but, hopefully, a lot of people see this and, hopefully, someone gets an idea about where Bastion is! If you think that someone is you, please… call the holocom hotline that should be linked on screen now! Let the Terran authorities know… even if it’s just a hunch… Though, I have also been asked to say; if you think you know where Bastion is, please don’t go looking for it yourself!… If you’re right, you may not come back!”
Parr stops the video there.
“As you can see, this video represents a grave threat to our security; external and internal… In terms of small mercies; we have the fact that our information control worked… She wasn’t able to give a full accounting of this planet, crucially leaving out the fact that it’s also home to a species of subHumans… Their renowned isolationism should protect us from too much scrutiny. On the other hand, she’s managed to give our proximity to the galactic core, our climate and the fact that we’re on the sunward side of a tidally locked planet!… That’s a lot of breadcrumbs, considering how close our nearest Terran neighbours are! And then, of course, there’s the revelation of the Lazarus Programme… if 3 out of every 4 people in this city learn that they’re not naturalborn and most of the remainder learn that all those ‘War orphans’ weren’t, it stands to be massively destabilising to our ability to govern!”
“A thorny issue indeed, Barron Parr… I commend you and the guards for catching it so quickly… even if that praise must be tempered by the fact that something like this made it onto our intranet in the first place(!)” observes Cyrus with an unreadable smile “Now… on to the question of what to do with all those who’ve already seen that video… Duke Chandler…?” his head lolls to me, lazily “…the Lazarus Program is your baby… What do you suggest?”
Acting unperturbed I turn to Parr and ask “How many of the ones you’ve arrested so far were lazarites?”
He checks his notes on his holo before answering “22 of the 27.”
“Anyone irreplaceable?” I follow up.
“Not particularly.” he shrugs.
“Hmmm… if it were one or two people who’d seen it, I’d say send them to me and I’d just wipe their memories… a city this size, a handful of people turning up a bit addled around the same time would likely go under the radar… but, with so many, I don’t think it would be possible to release them slowly enough not to get people asking questions, one way or another… I think… if anyone irreplaceable turns up, just swear them to secrecy and put them on the surveillance list for the next few years… For the rest of them, I don’t see anything to do but dispose of them and tell those that ask that they were executed for subversion.”
“Agreed.” smiles Cyrus.
“I’ll see that it’s done, Your Majesty.” acknowledges Parr.
“WHAT!?” cries the horrified voice of one not sat at the table.
Every eye in the room turns to look at the guardsman who just spoke, stood over by the wall.
“You’re just going to kill them!?” he asks, dismayed “They’ve done nothing wrong! Why not just wipe their memories and say it was a chemical leak at the jail or something!?”
I look from the idiot guard to Cyrus and see him fixing the poor boy with a long, hard stare…
I wince at what I know is about to happen.
Cyrus lifts his enormous bulk from his throne and lays his gargantuan sword across its arms.
“Stay, Arta…” he calmly orders the sabretooth making to follow him, without looking at her.
Smiling sweetly, he walks behind my chair and over to where the guardsman who just questioned him is.
Looking down on the boy (who I hadn’t noticed until he spoke out of turn) like a father about to impart a serious life lesson, Cyrus smiles “Take off your helmet, son… let me see your face.”
The boy hesitates a moment before transferring his plasmaspear to his shield hand to pull off the fine Kingsguard helm before placing it down on the floor by his feet.
“What’s your name, son?” smiles the King with all the outward, genial sweetness of a kindly uncle.
“K-Kingsguard Shaun Ossino, Your Majesty.” he stammers, visibly unnerved by the mountain of man looking down at him.
“And… how long have you been a Kingsguard, Shaun?” he smiles, leaning down conspiratorially, like he and the boy are sharing secrets.
“About s-six months now, Your Majesty.”
“Is that right?” Cyrus patronises “And… I know you’ve not spoken up at me like you just did before… So, please… tell me why you are now?”
A little desperately, the boy says “I-it… it’s not right, Your Majesty!… They may be clones but they’re still Humans!… They didn’t know what they were doing when they opened that video! Why not just wipe them an come up with an explanation plausible enough that anyone who questions it gets brushed off as a conspiracy theorist?… It’s no less likely to get people talking than that many people all being executed for subversion at once!”
Cyrus’s luminous eyes were closed and his beard wagged up and down in a sagely nod as he listened to the boy’s yammering.
He opens them to once more look into his guardsman’s eyes and ask “Tell me, Shaun… do you know what a ‘sacrifice’ is?”
Dolefully, the boy answers “Yes… Your Majesty… I know…”
“Good…!” Cyrus beams “…because our path to claim Humanity’s birthright will require many!”
The guardsman’s brow twists in dismay.
“Oh… *tsk**tsk**tsk**tsk*!” Cyrus tuts, feigning consolation “…so full of mercy, Shaun!… Unfortunately, unlike you, I’ve got no mercy left to give… Now… I want you to repeat after me; ‘ruthlessness is mercy on ourselves’… Can you do that for me?”
“R-ruthlessness is mercy on ourselves… Your Majesty.”
Beaming the last sunny smile this boy is ever going to see, Cyrus says “Good boy!” before slamming the unhelmeted head into the white stone wall behind him with a sickening *crack*, hard enough to kill him instantly.
The guardsman’s body crumples limply to the ground, revealing a bloodsplattered chunk of masonry missing from the wall, as his spear clatters down beside him.
“*tsk*…Such a waste!…” laments Cyrus before rounding on Parr and jabbing a thick finger to the body, saying “…I want that armor cleaned up and put on someone with a spine in their back and a brain in their skull by the end of the week, Parr!”
“It will be done, Your Majesty…” answers Parr, averting his wide eyes down to the table, clearly realising how his subordinate’s idiocy just burned through any good will he might have earned by taking care of the censorship lapse.
Cyrus strides back to the throne at my left, picking up his sword and sitting back down, placing his left hand back between Artazostre’s ears.
“So… Stoker…” he barks at Circe’s hologram opposite me, all pretence of joviality evaporated “…do you think you can track down the prison this Stellan woman is being held at?”
“Yes, Your Majesty, quite easily, but I would strongly advise against dispatching her.” smiles the uncanny face of the woman, seeming perfectly at ease.
“Oh?… Not for mercy’s sake, surely?!” he growls, gesturing over to the body on the floor to demonstrate what his likely reaction would be to such talk.
She closes her eyes and shakes her head, still wearing that creepy smile, and softly says “Not at all. My reasoning is very much pragmatic, Your Majesty.”
“Then explain it.” orders Cyrus, simply.
“Well, right now, the majority of those outside Bastion who see that video have little reason to take her seriously and little reason to care. If we break into that prison to kill her, all that we’ll achieve is making her story ×100 higher profile and ×100 as credible. The traitors also won’t have released that video until after they were confident they had everything useful out of her. There’s no point in spending energy to lock a stable door when the horse bolted so long ago…” she explains with effortless grace.
Cyrus studies her for a moment before cracking a smile and saying “And that’s why you’re my Mistress of Whispers, Stoker!” apparently satisfied “Let her languish into obscurity then!”
Circe smirks and, in her sensuous half whisper, says “You’re too kind to me, Your Majesty… While we are all gathered here, I myself have some intelligence to relay from Citadel?”
He extends his hand to her and says “Please, Duchess… Good news I hope!”
The dollish features of the face I gave her perform a complicated dance before she answers “Some bad news first, I’m afraid… While I was playing with one of my little toys from the UTCIS earlier today, he told me that Jackson ‘Scout’ Stetter is dead…”
Cyrus sighs “*hhhhhhh*…Well… that’s disappointing… he was a reliable agent until he went chasing after that white whale of his!… But I had sort of already written him off when he failed to make contact after his break out.”
“But, Your Majesty… those weren’t the only sweet nothings my little plaything whispered to me… I think I may have a potential solution for our durasteel problem!”
Cyrus sits bolt upright, as do I, as does half the room!
Our inability to make durasteel with the limited resources on this planet (restricting us only to what we originally brought here and the small amount we can smuggle in) is one of Bastion’s longest running bugbears!
“You have my full attention, Circe!” says Cyrus “Tell me what you need!”
She smiles and bats her (too large) eyes before answering “Actually, Your Majesty, while I appreciate it… the one who needs to be saying that right now isn’t you…” she extends her hand across the table and pouts “…It’s the unrequited love of my life just there(!)”
I frown and splay my fingertips against my chest, cocking my eyebrow quizzically before asking “Me, Circe?… What could I have to do with solving the durasteel problem?”