The Emperor's Fist Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise for the Far Stars

  Also by Jay Allan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  The screams rose up into the sky, sharp and shrill, audible manifestations of the terror of a dying people. Thousands ran, fleeing from the advancing soldiers, frantically searching for someplace, anyplace, to hide, knowing even as they fled, there was no escape. The doom that had come to Valask was an unstoppable force, utterly relentless and without mercy. It was death unleashed, and in its path remained only fire, corpses, and the charred remains of a place where people had lived and worked and raised families.

  Valask had been a prosperous world, at least reasonably so. Its local government had been moderate in its severity, at least by imperial standards, and the emperor had mostly ignored it, content with the annual tribute that flowed from the Valaski factories into the imperial coffers.

  Until the Valaski made a fatal mistake.

  They rebelled.

  The planet’s population, mostly factory workers, heard the news from the Far Stars. It had come in scattered bits at first, whispers and rumors that slipped through the imperial censors and spread like wildfire among the people. It seemed almost an impossibility. Imperial planets had thrown off the imperial yoke! And not just the mass of worlds in the Far Stars, long claimed by the emperor, but never truly under imperial rule. No, the news had spread of the six worlds in that distant sector that had once been the imperial demesne for centuries. The emperor’s standards had been pulled down and stomped into the streets of those half-dozen worlds, soaked in the blood of the imperial soldiers. For the first time in a millennium, planets had broken free of the deadening hand of empire.

  The Far Stars was impossibly distant, of course, far across the Void, beyond the reach of the emperor’s dread battleships. But the defiance that consumed those people was not stopped by such distance. And if the people of the Far Stars could throw off the chains of empire, so, too, could the Valaski.

  The people poured out into the streets, wielding tools, clubs—any implements of war and destruction they could fashion—and they overwhelmed the local forces and seized the centers of government worldwide. Their victory carried great cost, of course, as with any battle pitting hordes of poorly armed revolutionaries against modern troops equipped with guns. But even though the Valaski died in the hundreds of thousands, the emperor’s garrisons were small and scattered. In the end, the triumph was the people’s. And with all the blood they lost, they demanded it be repaid in kind.

  The local officials all carried the taint of empire and endured the wrath of the victorious mob, first as captives, and then when they were killed, torn to pieces in the streets, their murders used as props by those among the rebels already jockeying for power in the new order to come. But that order, so desperately craved by the would-be political operatives among the mobs, was short-lived, too transient even for the revolutionaries, who were already turning on one another. Nature abhors a vacuum, and too many tried to fill the roles of leadership with the bodies of their rivals.

  While the people of Valask fought one another, the empire prepared.

  No more than two months after the flags were first pulled down from the imperial headquarters, the emperor’s forces entered the system, massive battleships, each twenty kilometers long, bristling with weapons and packed with armored soldiers.

  The emperor’s fist had arrived.

  The fleet did not hesitate to move on the planet. Nor did any of its ships respond to the increasingly frantic communications from the surface, attempts to negotiate at first, quickly morphing into terrified pleas to surrender. Yielding was no longer an option. The people of Valask had committed the greatest offense imaginable: they had defied their master, and imperial doctrine demanded punishment, a wound to the planet that would never heal, a nightmare that would be spoken of by the survivors’ descendants long after living memory had faded to dust . . . if such survivors should even exist.

  The sky was thick and dark with smoke, great pillars of gray black rising from the burning cities, blasted from the guns of the orbiting battleships. Abandoned vehicles lined the broken and pockmarked roads, and bodies lay strewn about everywhere the eye could see.

  The fields surrounding the planetary capital, once lush and green with rich crops that fed a world, were scorched and blackened, and pitted with craters. Thousands of landing craft lay there now, over what had once been farmlands and pastures, and the soldiers of the empire streamed forth from them, bringing ruin, despite the fact that all active resistance had long since ceased.

  In the center of the great fleet of landers sat a larger ship, ostentatious, almost, looming over the others, the great red standard of empire emblazoned on its gray metal hull. A man stood in front of the ship, tall and grim, surrounded by guards and aides. He was clad in black-and-red robes partially covering the body armor he wore below, and a pistol and a sword hung down at his sides. His hands were extended, gesturing roughly in one direction and then another, and he snapped out orders quickly, in a voice so harsh, so cold, his own soldiers winced when it was directed at them.

  Ignes Inferni was an imperial lord, a general of the empire, and a notorious butcher whose exploits were sewn deep into the scars of a dozen tormented worlds. Inferni had killed millions in the service of his ruthless master, and he had never failed to carry out his orders, to do as the emperor bade him do. Men, women, children—rebels or simply innocents the emperor wanted to use as examples—it didn’t matter to the brutal general. He was seemingly without emotion, a cold-blooded killing machine, and in the decades of his murderous career, he had never been moved to the slightest mercy.

  Now, this dark imperial minion had come to Valask to crush rebellion, and to remind the people of the doomed world—and the broader galaxy—that they were the emperor’s subjects, then and forever.

  “Go, Colonel Trax. There are reports of refugees fleeing the city to the south, moving toward the forests. See that they do not escape.”

  “As you command, General.” Tragon Trax was a stone-cold killer in his own right, a thirty-year veteran of imperial service, but in the presence of Ignes Inferni, he seemed almost timid. “Do you want us to take prisoners?”

  Inferni turned back and stared at his subordinate. “No, Colonel. No prisoners.” He stood two meters tall, his armor adding to his already massive, hulking form, and a metal mask covered the lower half of his face. Above the sheath of steel, peering through the hood of his black cloak, were two steel-gray
eyes, cold, focused on the imperial officer. “Kill them all, Colonel. Every one of them.”

  The room was vast, almost unimaginably so. To any eye unaccustomed to the wonders of the imperial capital, it defied even the most grandiose imaginings of what men could build. The ceiling vaulted two hundred meters above the floor, two columns of great buttresses running along its awesome length, reaching out, held up, seemingly, by the very air itself. And all along the walls were mosaics, great images of the emperors who had ruled humanity for a thousand years.

  The floor was an expanse of polished black marble stretching almost out of sight to either side, and in the center of the far wall, seated on an immense throne covered in gems and precious metals, the emperor of mankind, the supreme ruler of all humanity—ruler, in fact, of a thousand worlds coreward of the Void, but by name and claim only in the Far Stars—sat and stared out at a small group of military officers.

  The emperor’s face was harsh, the jagged lines of age carved into a cold grimace, almost as if he was a statue of menace and darkness. Arrogance seemed to float in the air around him, and it was perhaps warranted—in every particular, he was the product of a lifetime of privilege and power almost unchecked . . . one preserved and protected by a murderous paranoia.

  His hands protruded from billowy silken sleeves, clenched tightly into fists, and his posture was tight, the tension consuming him clear to any who looked. The emperor was angry, as few had ever seen him, and nothing instilled fear in those who served the throne like the fires of imperial rage.

  “General Inferni has returned, Your Supremacy,” an imperial officer reported. “His shuttle approaches the capital even now, and his reports have begun to come in. He has won a great victory, Your Supremacy. The rebellion on Valask has been crushed, utterly and completely. All leaders of the revolution have been killed, and total civilian casualties are estimated to exceed one billion. It will be generations before the survivors forget the consequences of their folly, if, indeed, such a cataclysm can ever be truly forgotten.”

  “It is good, General Idilus, that Valask has been restored to the imperial fold . . . yet it will be many years before that rich world again fills our coffers at the rate it once did. Rebellion cannot be tolerated, of course, yet our purposes are served far better by preventing such uprisings, no?”

  Anyone who heard the emperor’s tone knew it was not a question.

  Idilus shuffled nervously, his feet sliding back and forth on the hard marble. He was about to speak when the emperor continued.

  “Fear . . . that is our chosen tool. It is far cheaper than war, and less damaging to the productivity of the worlds in question. For many years, it did most of our work for us, and rebellions were rare. Yet we have seen no fewer than nine in only the last two years . . . and every one of you is aware of the cause behind this.” The emperor’s volume grew, and with it, the severity of his tone.

  “Not only did all of you fail to prevent the worlds of the demesne from breaking from our grasp—a defeat from which we still sting with rank humiliation—but you were not even able to enforce our quarantine on information of this ignominious defeat. Instead, every lowly factory worker on Valask, and, seemingly, on every other world of the empire, has heard of our shame . . . almost as if the damned fools in this room shouted the news out to any who would listen.”

  Idilus knew the emperor was being unfair, but he didn’t dare say that. He just stood at attention, struggling to maintain the respectful look that masked his fear. The emperor didn’t usually take out his rage on the highest nobles and officers, at least not beyond screaming and perhaps the confiscation of estates . . . but humanity’s ruler was very angry just then, and Idilus optimistically put his odds of leaving the room right a touch below 80 percent.

  Maybe even seventy.

  “I abase myself, Your Supremacy.” Idilus dropped to one knee. He’d almost thrown himself to the floor, facedown in the full prostration, but there was an art to such things as appeasing an angry monarch, and overdoing it could be almost as bad as doing nothing. “I did all I could to maintain the news blackout . . . and yet, I failed. I beseech you for your pardon, my master.” There was a fine line to be followed with excuses, as well. Some deflection of responsibility was useful, but too much was almost guaranteed to inflame the imperial rage.

  “Your apologies are meaningless, General, as are your excuses. Your idiocy has cost my treasury billions in military expenditures and lost revenues. I would take it out of your estates, if your miserable holdings were more than a trickle of what was lost. If you would have my forgiveness, General, you must earn it. I would have my worlds back, and no less. First the six planets I so long possessed beyond the Void, and then the hundred others that have for so long defied imperial rule. If you would return to my good graces, General, you must find a way to invade the Far Stars in force. A way to reclaim what is mine.”

  Idilus could feel his legs weaken. What he was being asked was impossible. The empire had never been able to conquer the Far Stars. For centuries, only the smallest of imperial warships had attempted the journey across the Void, and even those endured staggering loss rates. No emperor had dared risk any of the great battleships in that deadly nothingness. They were too massive to make the crossing, and too costly to risk. But without the great ships of war no imperial fleet could defeat the forces of the Far Stars, especially not since the long-divided cluster was now well on its way to being united.

  “Am I understood, General?”

  “Yes, Your Supremacy. I understand completely. And I will obey.”

  Though what the hell I’m going to do, I have no idea . . .

  Chapter 2

  “Boss, come on . . . we’re going way too fast. I trust your hands, and your feel on the controls—you know we all do. But that crazy thing . . .” Letis Grendel pointed toward the black metal box sitting next to the captain’s chair. The old mate was worn and rugged, his gray-white beard a wiry mess, plastered with grime from hours spent crawling around the creaking old ship’s bowels, along with scattered bits of his last two or three meals. He was, in every particular, the image of the grizzled old spacer, run down from a hard life spent in the dark deeps.

  Which was exactly what he was.

  Rachus Denali reached down and put his hand on the ship’s main control housing, an affectation and not any effort to change course or speed. He knew just what he was doing, and he wasn’t going to let a few flops in his crew’s guts change that. Things were going exactly as expected . . . notwithstanding the usual hauntings from the depths of the Void that could terrify even the coldest veteran of the frigid dark.

  Granger was an old ship, but she was his ship, and though everything on her wobbled a little or made noises of varying levels of inexplicability, Denali trusted the worn and tired vessel. She was the only thing that had been there for him in his life, always and without question. She’d gotten him out of more than one scrape that looked to be his last, and, such that it was, she’d put food on his table for thirty years.

  He trusted the new nav system, too—the black box Letis was now questioning. Maybe not 100 percent, truth be told, but then navigating the Void had never been a sure thing under any circumstances. He’d built the damned thing, and he was as sure as he was about anything: that it would get Granger where she was going, and the two other ships following tight behind his rogue trader, as well.

  It better work . . .

  He’d put just about everything he had, as little as that was—plus a thousand he’d gotten from the Kilian brotherhood—into its construction. That made the voyage a make-or-break proposition, in more ways than one. He’d borrowed from the brotherhood before, but never more than a hundred or so to pay off a gambling debt or make an emergency repair. He’d been late once in paying back what he’d borrowed, and he still winced thinking about the way that hammer had shattered his knee.

  “Relax, Letis,” he said, trying hard to take his own advice, “the demons out here want better than
a grizzly old piece of meat like you.” A pause. “Or me, old friend.” Denali knew his crew was edgy . . . far more than normal for a pack of moth-eaten spacers who had crossed the Void more than once. And he understood their fear—because you never quite got over the fact that this journey took lives as if they were simply a toll for a bridge.

  Denali and his crew, however, had made dozens of crossings, which placed them in a small group of those who had repeatedly defied death, and an even more minuscule collection of those who’d managed to ship the rarest of commodities back and forth repeatedly while somehow managing to avoid getting wealthy from the effort.

  Granger’s captain was among the rarest of breeds, a rogue trader who had a nose not just for interstellar travel in general, but that undefined sense that somehow seemed to guide him through the depths of the Void, carrying small shipments of valuable ores to the empire, and imperial luxuries back to the lonely worlds of the Far Stars. The trade between the empire and the Far Stars was a lucrative one, illegal as well, though moderately tolerated on the imperial side, as long as the right payoffs were made.

  The few spacers who shared Denali’s gifts typically reaped the benefits of such a restricted trade, and most of them retired early, after becoming far too rich to feel the need to risk life and ship on yet another journey. But Denali’s life—the drinking, the drugs, the gambling . . . not to mention three wives and eight children, plus more women in random ports than he could even begin to count—had left him old, worn, and if not poor, exactly, at least short of cash and barely hanging on to his ship, mortgaged heavily to the Far Stars Bank (and, worse, the hammer-wielding gangsters).

  A few more well-executed runs, though . . . that would be enough. Enough to pay off his ship, or at least work the debt down to the point where he could sell it for more than he owed, and to fund a comfortable, if not opulent, retirement. That had been his plan, at least.

  Unfortunately, his bad habits and self-destructive tendencies remained his worst enemies. Things had gotten progressively worse in recent years, and he’d struggled to come up with the funds to fill the hold with ore, and to gather the payoffs he would need on the imperial side.