A Question of Relativity

So tragedy.

Most deep.

Mmm...

Oh, also, he was holding a gigantic golden flaming sword. That was kind of important too.

The daemon roared at him.

The ancient human swept his blade left, then right, and then let the flat of it rest against one bronzed, muscular shoulder.

The daemon collapsed into several chunks and then faded into nothingness.

"Humph," he said, sounding a bit disdainful. "I see they've lost their edge."

I kipped up, using some counter-gravitics to get myself on my feet as quick as I could. I wrung out my wrists, knowing it'd take some time for my energy generation systems to recharge the batteries -- I may have been able to waste a small scale planet without breaking a sweat, but it took a lot of energy to tear open holes in space time via spontaneously generated rapidly rotating Eisenstein hyper-cylinders. Every tiny ones. And I had made, like, five during that fight. Don't judge me.

"Are you okay?" the man asked, looking down at me. I resisted the urge to extend my legs up to match his height -- for one thing, it would be petty, and I am never petty, even when some asshole steals my kill, and that was what he had done, no matter how cute or muscular he was -- and for another thing, I looked really stupid when I was anything more than five feet high. My legs got all disproportional and I kept bumping my head into ceilings.

Which meant I had to crane my head back to glare at him.

"Okay? I had him on the ropes!"

"It seemed like he was about to split you in half," the man said, dryly.

"That would be a neat trick, considering he couldn't even hit me," I said, scowling.

"I wasn't awake for most of the fight, but I assure you. He could have hit you and he would have killed you and I don't particularly care how many centuries have passed, I expected to be somewhat more respected." He shook his head. "Or has your education been so sorely lacking to not recognize me?"

I scratched my chin. "Are you...a...celebrity or something?"

The man -- who had swung his blade down to rest the tip on the ground, palm spread against the hilt, his head lifted up in a stance that puffed up his chest and made him look quite regal and impressive even in a hospital scrub -- started. He looked at me.

"A celebrity?" He scowled. "I am The Emperor!"

"Which Emperor?" I asked. "There's been, like...two."

He scowled. "The Emperor. Of Terra."

"You mean Earth?" I asked.

"Terra, Earth, yes. Emperor of the Terran Hegemony," he said.

I looked at him blankly.

"Genetically engineered legions?" he asked. "The Glitter Boys?"

I spread my hands in a shrug.

"The Siege of Mars? The Atraxian Rebellion?" He sounded increasingly put out. "The Bug War? The Great Crusade?"

I shrugged even harder. "I dunno, dude, never heard of any of it. Uh, where's Mars? Maybe that'll, like, help?"

"It's Earth's neighboring planet," he said, scowling at me. "The research labs, the Legio Titanus? City sized war machines, nothing? You haven't read about any of this?"

I blew air out between my lips. "To be totes honest? It all seems kinda, you know. Dumb."

The Emperor -- or, as I had already started thinking of him as, Emps -- goggled at me.

"Like, who names their big badass soldiers Glitter Boys?" I asked, snickering. "Or were they fabuuuuuuuuulous?"

Emps scowled. "Only Trebonius, but we're a progressive Empire."

I giggled. "Hey, I'm queer as shit but that's still pretty gay, bro."

Emps lifted his sword and pointed it at my nose. The flickering flames that surrounded it seemed to be a holographic effect, as I didn't feel any actual heat. It still made me want to reach up and rub the tip of my nose.

"What year is it, wench?"

I scowled. "I dunno, wench," I said, putting my hands on my hips.

"I cannot be a wench, I'm not a woman."

"I thought you were a progressive Empire, Big E." I said, sticking my tongue out at him. His face reddened and he growled quietly. "As for the year, it depends. It's been two thousand years since we defeated the upper baneworld and discovered FTL. Uh, ten thousand years of the Concord. Maybe fifty thousand since we started using chipped stone to kill wild beastcritters?"

"It was twenty three thousand years when I went into storage," he said, frowning. "That can't be right -- this ship wasn't designed to survive more than three thousand years at the outer limits."

"Well, maybe it has something to do with the weird reality botch demon thingys?" I asked, stepping over to where the daemon had been. "Though, they're not daemons. Not really."

"Oh?" Emps asked, stepping over -- not to where I was, though. He was heading for the wall -- and as he came close to it, the artwork started to whirr and click out of the way, revealing a storage compartment. He with drew the world's biggest gun and some ancient military uniform that actually looked pretty swanky. As he discarded his scrubs, I cocked my head and tried to get a better look -- but the wall folded outwards and covered him up before I could get more than a slight glimpse of muscular back.

Dang it!

Not that I liked him -- he was a pompous, probably racist jerk. I didn't know if he was actually racist or not, but...well...he was a few thousand years older than the Concord, so he probably still thought people with different melanin counts were different races. Yeah, that seemed likely.

"Well?" he asked, imperiously.

I shook my head, scowling. "Well, I touched him -- and I did some scan samples. He has human genetics. But they're weird. Like, you know how human genetic codes have introns?" I asked, standing up -- memories from some of my members trickling through my brain.

"I am aware," Emps said as he emerged from around the wall. He had the gun slung over his back -- it had compacted and folded into the shape of a merely large box, rather than being a super duper big gun shape -- and he had the sword sheathed in a large scabbard at his side. He looked quite martial and damn if that uniform didn't work for him. Like, rawr. Down girl.

"Okay, so, imagine if all the introns are replaced with, um, like...banestuff," I said, nodding.

"Now, I fear, you have lost me with your oh so elegant future-speak," he said, acidly. "Remember, I have been cryogenically stored long enough for all my accomplishments to be forgotten and replaced with whatever it is you kids are into these days."

"Going off my friends? Capturing tiny monsters in balls," I said, crossing my arms over my chest.

"How horrid." Emps made a face. "Can't they conquer a few planets? That's how I spent my youth."

I scowled at him. "That's not an improvement, Emps!"

He growled. "Emps? Ugh. I am the Emperor of the Terran Hegemony, not one of your schoolyard mates."

"Well, it's either Emps or it's wench," I said, sneering. "Or it's I wormhole home and let you deal with the weird mutant demon human hybrid monsters by yourself."

"I once defeated the False-God of Karnak with nothing but an ancient MRI machine!" He snapped, stepping forward and glaring down at me.

"Well, I once altered the orbit of a planet so my BOYFRIEND and I could have a better sunset for our picnic!" I snarled at him.

"I'm so very impressed," he said, shaking his head. "But I doubt that even such a task could keep him attached to one such as you. Now would you be so kind as to illuminate me as to what a brane is."

I trembled with fury, glaring at him. "For your information," I said, placing each word with the careful elocution of someone who was well and deeply pissed. "He didn't dump me. He just modified his neurochemical makeup to no longer desire sexual relationships and we became just regular friends. And a brane is a nearby universe." I rolled my eyes. "Duh."

Emps' brow furrowed.

I sighed. "Basically, there are a bunch of different universes. They accelerate at different rates, or something, based off the power of their big bang. The higher the brane's acceleration, the smarter the creatures inside can get cause the local speed of light going faster allows for faster something or others in the thinky bits." I tapped my temple. "Each brane is nested in another. Ever heard of dark matter?"

He nodded. Well, at least he was listening to me. That was kind of nice.

"Okay," I said. "That dark matter is the brane that's going slower than us. It can't interact with us normally, cause we're different universes. There is a brane going faster than us -- and we're their dark matter."

He nodded again -- his hand rubbing his chin. "Well, that doesn't explain how this daemon came to be here -- not quite. But I believe that the engines of this ship may manage to provide us with more clues."

"Why'szat?" I asked.

"Why?" he chuckled. "This is the Imperitor Dominus Maximus. It's my flagship. And the Technocore of Mars had installed a faster than light drive on it -- this was to be its maiden flight."

My mouth opened in a wide O of shock.

###

"...and then I revealed myself to him," he said, casually. "Since he had forgone the trial of fire to try and save my life, I figured that he was truly a son worthy of the name and so took him under my wing. He would be one of my finest generals, old Belisarius." He shook his head. "Not that that was his first name -- he was originally called V-"

"Wait, let me get this straight." I said, turning to face Emps as we strode down the corridor that wound its way along the IDM's main spine -- we were supposed to be underneath the turbo-gamma lasers turrets that had provided my main body with such a fine energy bath earlier in this adventure. "You found a long lost son and your first idea was not 'hey, hi, lets go and say hello to my son' but rather 'hey, lets fuck with him first while in disguise!' Do I have this right?"

Emps scowled at me. This was rapidly becoming his standard state of being.

"That is a gross simplification of my feelings towards my sons," he said, gravely.

I shook my head. "What I don't get is how you ended up in cryo storage on a flagship that was supposed to go faster than the speed of light? Reefersleep was how peeps got from place in the bad old days where traveling to a new system was a one way ticket."

I turned back to the corridor and started walking. I had gone past five gargoyles -- which, to be fair, was still not very far considering how grotesquely overdecorated the IDM was -- before I realized Emps wasn't following me.

I looked over my shoulder.

Emps was standing in shadows, his head ducked forward. I bit my lip. "Uh, Big E?"

He shook his head. "I was betrayed," he said, his voice filled with regret. "This voyage was not to be my gloriously making the history books once more. It was to be a death voyage. That casket was to be my tomb."

I blinked a few times, feeling deeply awkward. Like I had walked into a family argument that while just coming over to spend the night watching movies. I shrugged, slowly, then said: "W-Well, uh, that sucks?"

He frowned at me. "That's all you can offer? That sucks?"

"Well, what do you want me to do? It's history so ancient for me that even the spiders living in the textbooks have grandkids!" I said, scowling. "I'm sorry!"

He shook his head. "Come on, lets get to the engineering bay -- if we examine the engines, it may provide more l-" He stopped. "Did you hear that?"

"Oh, the demonic chanting?" I asked. "Yeah, that's been going on since we hit this part of the ship."

Emps slowly turned his gaze on me. His eyes narrowed and he hissed: "And you did not think to inform me of this...why?"

"Well, it's not getting any cl-" I stopped. "Oh, Emps. Uh, it's getting closer."

He put his hand over his face and sighed. "Wench, use your sensors for something worthwhile for once in your life and tell me -- how many enemies are getting closer to us"

I muttered under my breath -- but being a jerkass aside, he did make good sense. I knelt down and put my palms on the ground, letting sonic sensors feel out. Downside to using this on weird reality daemons was that it ended up picking jack and shit. "And jack left town," I said, picking up my palm. "They're not really coming through the sonic sensors. Which is weird, cause we can hear the voices, right?"

Emps sighed quietly. "Lets retreat to somewhere more defensible then."

"Oh!" I slapped the side of my head. "Better idea."

I stood and snapped my fingers. By now, my body had refreshed the energies that let me wormhole -- and the glowing portal cracked apart the corridor, revealing the immense, cyclopean shape of the warp drive that had brought the IDM this far. Emps gaped at it -- but I grabbed his arm and dragged him forward. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw that dark shapes were flowing into the corridor we had been standing in -- and then the wormhole shut with a crack.

"Well," Emps said. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, Big E," I said, my palm spreading against his muscular forearm. My palm pressed to his uniform -- feeling the fabric crinkle slightly. It was all smooth flesh underneath -- and there were tiny imperfections that I could feel. This wasn't the product of a genesculptor and some bodymodders. He had worked his ass off to turn basic genetic quality into something real. I bit my lip slightly -- then jerked my hand away as he looked at me.

"So, do you recognize this technology? Anything like what you use?"

"No," I said, not looking away from his eyes.

"You haven't looked at it," he said, dryly.

"Oh! Right!" I looked around myself.

The warp engine looked like your dirt basic antimatter bottler -- two magnetic tubes that could hold huge amounts of antimatter, then feed it into a central chamber to produce more energy than anything else ever. There were backup fusion reactors and backup nuclear reactors built around it -- those, in fact, took up the bulk of the space. Redundancies on top of redundancies that had kept the ship from being immolated in a single, fiery instant.

I frowned. "Sloppy," I said. "Like, why fuck around with antimatter when you can just tap into the zero point energy field?"

"Almost as if the ship were a few thousand years old or something," Emps said. He still had that dry delivery down pat. I flushed and scowled at him. It was weird how quickly my feelings could yo-yo backwards and forward with him.

"Lets find a computer."

It ended up taking a few minutes of rooting around in the surrounding computerized surfaces to find something that wasn't just a readout about the devices that the engineering bay used to keep the ship intact and flying. When I did find said computer, Emps started to imput codes into it. When the words flashed across the screen and green lights lit up -- signifying that he had reached the actual operating system -- I frowned.

"So, if this was a death voyage, why not change your codes?"

"I doubt Hercy wanted me to die if he could help it," he said, voice distracted.

"Hercy?" I mouthed -- barely loud enough to be heard.

Emps started, then looked at me -- his fingers frozen over the alphanumeric keyboard. "Hercules, my most foremost son. He lead the legions as they landed on Charon and retook the dark matter research site from the Technocore rebels." He shook his head. "He conquered five worlds for me across two centuries. He was a good boy." He frowned. "And he betrayed me. He lead the faction that said that my goals for the Empire were too lofty -- that I would tear all we had built apart."

"Oh." I rubbed the back of my neck.

Emps sighed. "He may have been right." He frowned. "This warp drive..." he looked at her. "Look at the data that the ship recorded while in transit."

I leaned forward.

"No way," I whispered. "You're still using Windows?"

He scowled at me. "The data, wench!"

"Yeah, I see it -- you dropped into a universe where the speed of light was...slower..." My eyes widened. "Oh holy crap! You almost did it! Your freaking Technocore almost freaking did it! They built an engine that could slip into another universes!" I spun to grab onto Emp's forearms, squeezing them as I started to bounce excitedly. "You just went the-"

"Wrong direction!" Emps nodded, looking as excited as I was. Then, suddenly, he sobered, looking back at the controls. "And because my sons placed me in that damn casket, they never learned. They thought I was merely lost to the Technocore's folly..." he shook his head. "And the Empire and the Core fell mere decades later, didn't they?"

"Hey," I said, quietly. "Still better than any of my space empires."

"You didn't have any space empires," Emps said, scowling at me.

"No, but I was trying to cheer you up," I said, grinning at him. "Still don't get why the engines turned the loyalist crew into daemons."

"I believe," a new voice spoke from the darkness at the far end of the engineering bay. "That I can answer that."

We spun around -- and I lifted up my palm, shining out a stream of light. The light fell on a choir of monsters. A huge array of hideous, horrifyingly mutated beasts made of darkness and flickering unreality. At their center was a large, humanoid figure with a face stretched and distended and turned into an almost Y shape by the way its ears were dragged outwards. And yet the front of the face and those hideous lips were solid enough to stay in place -- and to form words.

"Trebonius," Emps said.

"In the flesh," Trebonius said, gesturing to his chest. "So to speak."

"What happened?" Emps asked -- his voice calm and even, but I could practically feel his tension, the tightness of his body. I put my hand on his back -- and I could almost trace the hardness of his muscles.

"I fought to keep you alive," Trebonius said -- slowly pacing to the side. "I was loyal, I and my fellow Legionaries. And for our reward, we were trapped when your favorite son -- the son I was always better than, I hasten to add -- blasted away at five Gs. The whole ship was taken...elsewhere..."

Emps hand twitched towards the hilt of his sword. I caressed his shoulder gently, trying to will him to remain calm. We just needed a few seconds.

"We were taken. We were changed. And when the ship came back, we knew what we had to do," Trebonius said, sneering. "They want this place. They hunger for it. But they never understood how. But we do. And we waited, oh how we waited, waited for someone to find us. We would take them and make them see and-"

"And blah blah blah!" I said, cutting into the conversation. "God! You're not even original. Extradimensional invasions from another braneworld? Boring. Been there. Done that!" I spread my hands. "You don't even have the decency to be actual supernatural demons from, like, Hell or something." I rolled my eyes.

Trebonius hissed -- his tongue darting from his mouth. "Silence, wench!"

I scowled. "I am not a fucking wench, you halfbaked genetic reject. I am the Peanut-butter and Jam Collective. I am sixteen people. One of them, by the way, was named Tanner. And while he was pretty dumb, he was also a very good shot."

At that moment, my primary body smacked into the asteroid that it had been dragging into position. Force fields snapped through the asteroid and imparted enough kinetic energy to turn most of the rock into powder save for a few chunks that had been made of sturdier stuff than the rest of the 'roid. That meant that they remained intact, and the kinetic energy sent them whistling through this overdecorated hunk of scrap at several notches below C. They were basically particle weapons at that point and they flew, shotgun like, through Trebonius' body.