2995 December 28, 09:53.

The boy held the picture cube in his palm, a sad sigh escaping from him. Gently, he switched it on, and watched the holographic scene play out in miniature above the cube. It was a picnic with the Cormorov family, taken last summer near Southport Lake.

The vivid scene finished, but the hologram stayed frozen on the final frame, an image of Kaylee jumping in midair, to catch a ball being tossed overhead.

’I wish I could take you with me,’ he felt himself thinking, with a touch of remorse. ’My time at the Academy will be lonely enough, but selecting and packing the bare necessities will be tight as it is….’

His own common brown hair, always immaculately clean and straight, seemed a physical antithesis of her shoulder-length raven hair, forever tangled in the hot, windy atmosphere of the rocky world of Danzinay. Their blue eyes were perfect matches, though he was half a head higher than she was. Both of them were lean, as an inhabitant of planet Danzinay needed to be. Although she had always been the physically athletic one, he preferred to be more technically-minded.

Jeffery Theodore Thornton gazed longingly at her likeness hovering over the cube for several seconds, then switched off the miniature scene and set it back on the dresser.

The Academy had a rule about how much luggage ― weight- or volume-wise ― a cadet was supposed to bring with them. Not that some hadn’t tried to fudge the rules a bit ― or so he’d heard. Still, he had never been one to intentionally break or even bend rules, and he wasn’t about to start; so although the cube would add only another two pounds net weight, it was left to the next round-trip. He continued sorting through clothing and personal items, while his mind raced with his previous thoughts.

’Oh, Kaylee. If only you were still alive….’

The accident had happened almost nine months ago, when Jeff, Kaylee, her family, and his adoptive mother had gone to Easton Zoo. They had divided, spent three hours that morning wandering through the almost-palatial park grounds, quite possibly the most absurd thing on a rocky, semi-volcanic world. All were about to meet back together for lunch, when an angry bull dynozar escaped from its pen, and chaos followed….

An hour later, the chief warden had the entire story straightened out: a rookie animal feeder had absentmindedly left a critical gate latch open, planning to return in a couple of minutes but never making it back. Jeff saw Kaylee waiting, sitting on a park bench reading some of the zoo’s promotional literature she had picked up, the first to arrive at the preplanned meeting place, and started walking toward her.

An obnoxious little kid near the fence, with no sign of adult supervision, had been making loud noises, upsetting the nearby caged animal; the dynozar lunged forward against the gate, which flung open and tossed the scared child, now unconscious, away from the fence. Everyone’s attention, Jeff’s included, was drawn immediately toward the nearsighted old beast, six meters tall, while it slowly began treading forward into the Commons, looking for its source of irritation.

Zoo Security was quick to arrive, their guard tower being only a hundred yards away. It took eight shots of tranquilizers to sedate the beast, but unfortunately not before the beast had locked its sights on Kaylee, who was frozen in fear, and had broken her into….

Others of the zoo staff had later verified that the rookie had been making far too many mistakes for the experience he claimed he had. Then, the man broke down, admitting that it was all a lie, that he had to find some job to feed his four kids. Captain Cormorov turned red-faced and was about to grab the man and thrash him like a limp doll, when the security crew ― all eight men ― stepped in to hold him back, and were barely able to do so. Jeff, himself, was too weak, still in shock at the loss of his best friend, and he knew not whether the crying he heard was his own, or the Cormorov’s.

The next day, the planetary news feed reported that President Zinay himself had visited the zoo and began ordering drastic changes. First, he shut it down for six months, while crews analyzed what had happened, and attempted to fix the flawed gates. Second, the president personally oversaw the zoo’s command-restructuring details; from what Jeff could only assume, Drew Zinay must have given them some tight-lipped lectures. Yet nobody was talking about it….

"Jeff!" His adoptive mother called from down the hallway, interrupting the solitude of his thoughts.

He peered out from his bedroom and down the hall, where Catherine Thornton waited patiently. "Yes, ma?"

A once-energetic middle-aged woman, now a permanent paraplegic, sat in a used hover-chair. Her condition had been the result of an industrial accident seven years ago, at the electronics plant just outside this city’s immediate jurisdiction where she worked. Surgeries did exist to correct this, with a fractional success rate of barely 70 percent or more, but Alliance Fleet’s Medical Corps was borrowing the most qualified medical personnel from everywhere that could spare them, to heal wounded from battles with Emperor Beaumort and Lord Byron’s Imperials.

If he had the power, the ability, Jeff would’ve cured her himself. She had always been there for him, had treated him like the adult she had believed he was capable of being ― firmly, when he needed discipline, certainly, but never unfairly; she made him want to always be better than the petty bickering and foolish politicking going on in the families around them. He respected her for the effort ―

Jeff felt an acidic comment rise from within, and struggled to control it from becoming an expletive.

Nevertheless, the aging lady fumbled with her hover-chair controls, and floated down the hall toward Jeff. "I was wondering. Would you mind doing an errand for me, before you leave for that Academy of yours, tonight?"

His brows furrowed at that attribution, as it had been doing lately. ’My Academy? No, I don’t own it; I am just going there….’

"Okay, okay! It’s not your Academy," she answered his unspoken retort. "Nyet. Will you still do it?"

"Yeah; sure, if I still have plenty of time to finish packing. What do you need me to do?"

"Go downstairs to the storage closet, and on the top shelf you will find a locked metal safety box. Bring it to the kitchen, please."

Jeff did a silent double-take; he’d always wondered about that box. It was the only container in the entire apartment about whose contents he did not yet know.

Oh, he had always had a feeling what it contained: remnants of his mysterious childhood. Mementos from his parents, perhaps, who had died in an accident while Jeff was only a few weeks old. His earliest memories were of Catherine Thornton as his mother, and so would not include anything of his birth-parents. She had not told him much about them, not even who they were; yet, while not hiding the fact that Jeff was an orphan, she had always said she would tell him ― someday … when he was a bit older.

But one night when he was fourteen years old, he had found out on his own, doing private research in the city’s public library.

Jeff thought back to that night, and remembered with crystal clarity the whole night of searching. He had stayed out all night, and had returned home very late the next morning, after his adoptive mother had gone to work. Allowing him any chance to satiate his inquisitiveness was one freedom she had not taken from him in this cramped, shielded city.

Jeff did not have much success finding any information, at first. Not until the librarian recommended checking and including public records for accidents from a year before to the year following his assumed date of birth, where at least one or more people had died. That netted three hundred records.

Searching and cross-referencing with the birth certificates of various worlds eliminated those people who didn’t have any children, plus those who were either too young or too old; eighty-four records remained. So, getting to the essential work, he had tracked down the five most likely records, sneakily comparing their DNA with his own.

Only one match resulted: Admiral James Tyrone and Lady Lanae Christina Hillory. When he looked at their picture, his father and mother’s faces were as his own; they were his parents.

The rest of the story was already known. The evil pair, Emperor Timothy Edward Beaumort and Lord Harold Wayne Byron, had killed them both.

*

’I should have taken the other route…. Damn you Imperials!’

"Evasive maneuver Delta-Tango, Mister Jurgen."

"Aye, Captain," came the timid answer.

The ship lurched as another missile salvo impacted against the ablative energy shields, and this time more than one broke through that line of defense. The floor of the bridge tilted up at her as the whole ship bucked in agony. The dedicated core beneath her chair sparked anew, and her chair tore loose from the swivel socket. In the space of a second or two, she seemed to be flying through the air ― and then, she came down hard.

Had she been wearing the seat’s restraining straps like she should have, she might have been spared serious injury; the chair landed more or less on its back, then bounced a bit before coming to a full stop. In this case, however, landing on the floor and with this velocity, she felt more-than-one-somethings pop, and the sudden rush of sensory stimuli was more than she could take.

While she struggled desperately to retain consciousness, her tactical officer called out the damage list as she tried but failed to pull herself up. Through a haze, she could barely even hear that voice, but she heard enough.

’Engine Two’s core going critical … Decks Three and Four Rearward exposed to space …Damage Control not responding … what are your orders, captain? Captain Schellby … ?’ The TO’s voice became more insistent, as he turned to face her, and then mortified, as the officer saw what she could not. ’Oh Captain … Medic!’

For an indeterminate moment, the darkness seemed to take her, then the blurry specter seemed to leap out of his seat toward her; she felt his hands reach out to her, one to put steady pressure against her side, the other to gently hold onto her hand.

Half-stunned, she tried to look around; blood was splattered on her uniform and her nose felt crushed. She tried to sit, against her friend’s imploring plea, but cried in pain upon finding one leg broken, a bone fragment sticking out, and the other shattered almost beyond recognition and laying at an odd angle.

The darkness of shock and unconsciousness threatened to overtake her yet again, but she fought to maintain her alertness. A cold ampule was pressed against her neck; within seconds, her body felt cooler and lighter.

Already, too much of the ship was gone, either open to the vacuum of space or damaged far beyond belief. The ship was dead in space, with little left to salvage. Only two of her ship’s main chase armament ― mid-range masers ― were functioning in the rear, and one forward missile tube. She had one secret weapon, new and untested but hopefully still unaffected.

The design was so secret that, in all likelihood, perhaps even the Alliance Bureau of Docks and Yards did not know about this vessel. If they had, they might have spared two or three cruisers to hunt it down ― depending on their mood, either to capture or destroy. Technically a new ship, only a year out of the hidden shipyard, this battle-cruiser ― designed and built completely in secret, with better than eighty percent of the maximum acceleration of a cruiser but almost as fully armed as a battleship, and all the tricks and treats that only a pirate would have need of ― should have been able to kick the you-know-what out of the Imperial ship. Why it had not, Captain Leu Pauline Schellby had been fiercely fretting over for the last one of the three-hour-long battle. How the Imperials had found her hideout and tracked this battle-cruiser was yet a second piece of the expanding puzzle.

Thoughts of a traitor within their midst ― or back at the yard ― suddenly became a not-so-impossible consideration.

"Signal surrender, Bryn, and bring the bow to face them. Stand down also, Tactical."

The helmsman responded a ragged affirmative, as did Tactical’s deputy, and she saw why their affirmative was so terrifying: they were wounded almost as seriously as she. Bryn clutched one hand tightly to his chest, and she heard as well as felt his rasping breathe. He might not last the following hour, without medical attention. For that matter, glancing further around the bridge, neither would half of the eight others still alive.

The view outside the forward window seemed to slide around to face their threat. Schellby reached into a pocket and withdrew a palm-sized keypad; it only took three seconds to tap in a secure code and press ’Send’. Her thumb stood poised over one small button.

Pressing that button would unleash the secret weapon, the one that was sneakily crafted into her ship’s dorsal center-line. Called a Sliver Gun by those in the know, it shot out fléchette-style slivers of metal, which made it only seem like an upgraded mass-driver. In reality, where it had normally come standard with tungsten-steel fléchette rounds, she had upgraded to the more secretive deridanide-titanium alloy slivers. While it still fired at a maximum rate of 4,000 rounds a minute, it now had the effect of propelling them through several decks and compartments, instead of ’just’ the normal armor-piercing effect.

But the fixed-mount weapon was something to be used as a weapon of last resort: it was one mean power-hungry son-of-a-gun; the coded signal she was about to send would initialize the experimental weapon to begin sucking up power, and would simultaneously tell the engineering computer to re-route all energy to that weapon. It would take a half minute to attain full power, though it could only fire line-of-sight forward from the bow. Luckily, the compartment was also stealth-shielded; from the Imperial perspective … they wouldn’t even know what had hit them, until it was too late.

An audio tone squelched singly, then cut off, as the view-screen switched to display their opponents. The face on the other end, marred only by mere smudges of dust, looked around at what he could see of her beaten bridge and crew, and the old man on the screen looked a little too much chagrined for her tastes.

’Oh, great; I’m left as a cripple, and all he gets is a few scratches?’

"A wise decision, Captain Schellby. Had you made it a couple hours sooner, you would now be in a nice, comfortable holding cell ― instead of writhing in pain on the deck. Oh well, can’t win ’em all now can we." He snorted arrogantly, then finished in a more serious tone: "You are to remain where you are; I am readying the occupation team now. This is Commodore Kallamander, over and out." He drew his forefinger across his throat, again with a large grin, and the connection closed instantly.

’Just that one weapon left. Come a little closer, you Imperial bastard. Just a little closer….’

She pressed the button at just the right second, as her bridge’s life-support console caught on fire.

*

’I have doomed my empire,’ bemoaned the emperor. ’We are the villains in this war, and a hero is coming to destroy us….’

Apparently not noticing the look of not-well-subdued pain on His Imperial Majesty’s face, the intelligence officer continued with his systems report. "Agents near Chantalle and Drevax are noticing increases in espionage from Alliance agents, while Xunara still finds no current evidence of their involvement. Though our own deep-cover moles in Alliance Fleet Command still insist that Alliance Intelligence don’t know where this world is, they also warn us that they are working on triangulating our position ― since they have just discovered Drevax is now under our control…."

While the young officer continued to report, Emperor Beaumort let his mind wander, taking stock of his own life. Timothy Edward Beaumort, born to the teenage daughter of an Earth politician and abandoned to an orphanage, had lived a rough life, almost six standard decades now. At first learning to accept what little he had but later feeling jealous and cheated out of his true destiny, the young man had climbed his way to owning his own business ―

’Well okay, I was a mortician, and business then had been, um, good.’

But he had taken on a morbid philosophy about life, and saw death as a commonality. He had seen too many ways that people could die, and often in horribly grotesque ways.

But medical forensics and the handling of the dead had been a cover-story: he had served in the Alliance Fleet under the Intelligence Services division, and had been rather proficient at "intelligence-ing" his targets. And, his cover career fit; who would question when  the owner and operator of a mortuary wished to go away for a few days? Or, who could question when a few more bodies were disposed of than business records specified?

When in his second decade of service, Beaumort went through a crisis of conscience and destiny: having found the woman who had birthed him, herself now a politician in her own right, he intended to only to ask her why he was abandoned ― but instead found himself choking her until she died. Hands shaking and eyes glancing everywhere the whole year after, Beaumort had managed to escape far into space. Eventually landing on a planet in the Kooshat Stellar Imperium, he found sanctuary among the Kooshat noble family, among the household of one Count Razz Milagros Byron.

The count had a young son, Lord Harold Wayne Byron, only half his own age at that time, whose interests also lay in the morbid side of things, though for more sadistic personal reasons. Beaumort, as an under-steward of Razz’ household, began ’tinkering’ with Lord Byron’s mental bent in things. Between them both, they had eliminated the head steward (who had begun to suspect trouble) without it being traced back to either of them, giving Beaumort a raise in position and stature within Count Byron’s household. But the blood was on Lord Byron’s hands as well, Master Beaumort had seen to that ― as a later bargaining chip, if needed….

Besides that, Beaumort had taken liberties with the Countess while her husband was away or busy, a crime that demanded swift execution in Kooshat’s law books ― even though the women themselves were still little better than property. Both of their crimes later discovered, both the young lord and Beaumort on the run, they were captured in a circumstance which was not entirely legal in the Kooshat Imperial justice system. He’d used a few of his bargaining chips to finger Harold as a worse criminal than himself. Surprisingly, the Countess had pleaded expulsion for the both of them, instead of the more immediate death.

From what Beaumort could see now, circumstances had not improved all that much; they had just gained a different setting and new milieu.

’For a certainty, we are doomed. We have just signed our own death warrants and locked ourselves into our own coffins.’

The young officer standing before him now would probably disagree, and vow profusely that it would never happen like that. Not that his opinion mattered; the intelligence specialist had not heard the eerie prophecy that Timothy Edward Beaumort, self-proclaimed Emperor of the Great Republic Imperium, had heard. The boy had not even been born when the frantic turn of events had occurred. Lieutenant Fillmore had been the result of more than two harsh decades of Imperial propaganda on his captive home-world, as finally the newly-imperialized worlds began to accept and even embrace their Emperor. However, the words spoken on that bitter day were the only ones that had ever truly frightened him; even today, twenty-three years after, Emperor Beaumort still had the wild nightmares.

Just less than twenty-five years ago, Beaumort and his protege, Lord Harold Wayne Byron, had devastated the Alliance by destroying their space-based Command Station and laying siege to a major shipbuilding facility with atomic weapons. Next, he and Lord Byron had gained control of a remote agrarian planet, and Beaumort had bestowed upon himself the title of emperor.

Lord Byron operated as his unofficial imperial heir, his understudy into imperial politics, and as his commander of the Imperial Fleet …though Harold had done quite well on his own. Soon, Byron had directed the capture of a second planet, and both men had rejoiced in arrogance for many days.

Then, they had managed to conquer their third planet, Burvanne, and added it to his empire.

Of the small number of religious cults in his newly born three-planet empire, none had so drastically given him a scare as the Burvanne Warrior Monks. He had shuttled down on the third day, after his marine troops had assured his nominal control of the planet. Then, a quiet group of warrior-monks broke out in outrage, and they had mastered a kill-ratio of three to one, to the Imperials’ surprise. Only one monk had survived, but the irate Beaumort had adamantly insisted on being present for the interrogation, as his Security men drugged the captive with truth-serum.

It was a widely-accepted fact that truth-serum metabolizes in the body to produce a calming, euphoric result, for most individuals the serum was ; only in an average zero-point-eight percent of its recipients did it not work as planned. Yet what had happened had shocked all those attending: the monk went mad, his heartbeat racing wildly and his demeanor changing to maniacal laughter. Counter-serum failed to calm him ― it only sped the monk’s heart into overdrive.

The monk had been speaking gibberish, reciting some warrior-monk’s code, but suddenly switched to speaking the crystal-clear words of a prophecy that he would never forget. As the young monk finished his ice-cold words, his heart imploded in his chest, and Beaumort had fallen into vomiting on the floor, as its meaning became clear to him.

Two of the operatives present that day had since mutinied away to the Alliance; after, Beaumort had secured the silence of most others, or else had Harold creatively ’dispose’ of those who didn’t … and those they talked to.

Even now, he could recall the words crisply, as he struggled to withhold the fear and to keep projecting the calm exterior in front of the young officer. The words foretold a hero that was coming to {restore balance/ bring about an equalizing} in the galaxy, through the destruction of an evil empire. Of course, he had hoped that it would be another empire that this hero would destroy, preferably the Kooshat Stellar Empire. Yet Kooshat had not been expansionist in the last half-century, as Beaumort himself had been.

However, his protege, Lord Byron, had become obsessed with the immediate pursuit of power … moreso than he himself ever had been. It had been Harold who yearned for expansion, and decimation of whomever he saw as an enemy.

Especially since one of his Imperial Fleet commodores had just taken captive a small local mercenary fleet and captured two more nearby planets for the empire ― claiming success that irked Lord Byron. Emperor Beaumort hadn’t really wanted to play those two against each other so strongly, but he figured that, even with his power, he wouldn’t be able to stop either one of them alone. Instead, he simply informed Lord Byron, ’Put up or shut up.’ Harold begged to let him expand the empire even more, without this ’impudent commodore’.

Beaumort’s plans had always been for the beginning of something that would outlast himself, albeit however his morbidity had tempered that view; though the aging emperor had no successes in creating a biological heir, he’d always thought of Harold as an errant son, and so he’d chosen him to be his as-yet-unnamed heir to the Imperial throne. Only, it bothered him that, while Beaumort was intent on building an empire, Byron seemed obsessed with using those resources to destroy and conquer all whom he saw as a potential enemy.

’I have even caught rumors of Lord Byron planning my assassination. Might this evil empire be my own Great Republic Imperium under the auspicious, dictatorial control of my unstable heir? Great Stars and Space, even I do not want his evil tightfisted control of the galaxy, if it will cause the ultimate destruction of my beautiful empire….’

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