“29. For that which the Universe provides, thus can the Universe take away. Yet know this; the Universal constant is such that any planet, deemed worthy and fit in the eyes of the Universe, thence shall evolve Man.

It is Man who is pleasing to the Universe, for how else should Man come to live on countless worlds? I tell you now, no species is so loved by the Universe as is Man, and Man is repaid threefold above all others by the bounty of the Universe. But those who tamper with Man, know that you tamper with the mold made of the stars themselves. The Universe shall suffer no change to perfection, and has no sufferance for those who dare trespass on its will. I say to you, to change the mold of Man is to revile the Universe in all its many glories, and you shall be denied the gracious bounties of the Universe for your sins.”

Bible of the Pure Universe, Hamilton 6:29-35

Dominus Valerius Artifex, Eternal Emperor

Somewhere deep in Unknown Space

With an exhausted grunt, Artifex sank down into the plush acceleration couch he had installed in the cockpit. It was configured as a chaise lounge form right now, allowing him to stretch his sore muscles. He looked over to see a similarly worn out Titus in the co-pilot’s seat.

Six days. They had been working nonstop for six days to get the Crown’s Vigor online. By and large, their initial assessment had been correct. The warship was largely intact and in relatively good condition. But the difference between ‘good condition’ and ‘safe to fly’ was significant.

“I’m worried about the environmentals,” said Titus. “The food stasis fields are in great shape, and we’ve enough food to feed a full crew for a long flight. But the damn recyclers are in terrible condition, and one of them is downright dangerous. Don’t even get me started on the primary filtration unit.”

“Dammit,” said Artifex with a laugh. “I’m tired. I’ve been elbows deep in the PNP for days. Are you sure we need it? We could run manual like the Coalition does.”

“I’m not too keen on figuring out how to navigate manually. My navigation days are, sad to say, way too many years ago. Not to mention, I don’t quite recall how to properly triangulate the pulsars and tie that in to the star maps we have.”

“Stellar cartography was never a strong suit of mine, either,” acknowledged Artifex. “The Collies sure do have us beat there. I guess I’ll have to finish getting the nav online.”

Titus snorted. The Coalition ships’ manpower requirements was four to five times as many as the Imperium. That was hardly a strength in his opinion.

“Getting the neural network functional will help with more than just navigation,” said Titus. “Without it, we cannot even fire the guns, and the memetic armor is completely offline.”

“Don’t forget cloaking, manifold mapping, and the graviphotonic grapnels,” added in Artifex cheerfully. He was so tired that he was almost giddy. “Hey, I don’t think I’ve been this tired… hmm.. since Oldumes. Remember?”

“Oldumes… I don’t re…. Wait, was this before the Grand Concord? In the Goldar System?” Titus frowned in concentration, trying to remember.

“Yeah, when we found Sicarius,” confirmed Artifex.

“That was before Emilia joined us. Where was Auria then?” asked Titus.

“Still a recruit, I think. Just took the first round of gene mods. I don’t think we were fully evolved from baseline human yet. Shit, was that before or after the Concord?”

“Don’t ask me, I can barely remember what I looked like back then. I remember you fixed my bald spot. So what about Oldumes?” Titus gave a yawn as he stretched out to full length, before settling back into the couch.

“What? Oh, right, Oldumes. So we were outside the planetary capital. Sieging it, you know. Artillery going, orbital drops, the whole works. I’m dead tired, we’ve been running a blitz invasion for three weeks.”

“Yeah, we plowed right over them. The proto-dems, I think? Relying on fixed defenses, thinking heavily armed forts would protect their little democratic quagmire.” Titus sneered, more out of habit than with any actual malice. In truth, Titus had left malice behind decades before going into stasis. Some men mellowed with age, and Titus’ temperament had mellowed so much over the centuries that he truly embodied the zen of a saint. In fact, Artifex suspected that it was the only thing that was holding him together in the face of so much loss. Titus had mastered acceptance, while Artifex lived in denial.

“No, the proto-dems were… that system post Concord. The one with the nebula. I can’t remember the name. Doesn’t matter, they fell fast. No, Oldumes was the kritarchy. We looked at their system when we were tinkering with our own judiciary, but it didn’t mesh. You were right about the idiotic fixed defenses strategy though. Anyway, three weeks of non-stop victories. We blow through their outer forts, seize some strategic positions, mop up some half-assed army they cobbled together, and haven’t hit a single roadblock. Then suddenly we hit the capital, and full stop. Fortifications are top of the line, staffed with large numbers of well trained soldiers. Endless amounts of ammunition stockpiled, and a brilliant general running the whole show,” reminisced Artifex.

“I remember him! He was the lynchpin of the whole thing, wasn’t he?” Titus pulled a small bag of baby carrots out of somewhere, and offered a few to Artifex.

“You do remember! So I offered a bounty for the general. It was just throwing something out to see what would work. I offered the bounty and forgot about it - I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. I mean, a general in the middle of a war, guarded on his home turf by incredible defenses and a loyal army? Forget about it. I was resolved to just wear them down. Sieges always work, if you can keep them penned in long enough.” Artifex crunched on a carrot before continuing. “So two days later, some kid gets escorted in to see me. His uniform is torn up, his face is grimy and bloody, and he was wearing a shit-eating grin. Even the escorts seemed amused.”

“Sicarius?” guessed Titus.

“Sicarius,” came the confirmation. “He dropped a duffel bag in front of me, and opened it up. The general’s head was in the bag, along with his dog tags. Without the general, the kritarchs started bickering and commandeering soldiers and parts of the wall. It took less than a week for them to screw up and leave a section understaffed. Two weeks later we executed the kritarchs and had full control of the planet.”

“Sicarius was always an able hound,” said Titus. “So what brought that particular fight to mind? The Goldar System was the first of thousands of such conquests. It was hardly unique.”

Artifex sat up, all giddiness and exhaustion-fueled good humor drained away in a moment of absolute seriousness. “Sicarius taught me a valuable lesson. He taught me the virtue of the ruthless, and without it, I would have never been able to build the Imperium.”

“The virtue of the ruthless?”

Artifex gave a solemn nod. “Think about it. If the general had lived, he would have held his forces together. How many more weeks or months would we have held that city in siege? I’ve no doubt of our eventual victory. We held the orbitals, we controlled all the approaches, had superior weaponry and bigger armies. They had no allies to call, and no way to call them. We would have suffered more losses from attrition, they would have lost countless to bombardment and starvation. I have one man killed, and the war ended in a few weeks.”

“How is that ruthless?” asked Titus.

“You’ve seen me do that countless times since, my friend,” said Artifex. “I think your memories are skewed. Do you not remember the old Conventions, that decried assassinations as a so-called ‘war crime’ or ‘violation of international laws’? Some ancient holdover of honor, where the people in charge were somehow supposed to be magically immune to the wars they were responsible for? I ended our invasion of the planet with far less loss of life, by taking out the leader. I ignored the convention of the time, and slew my enemies. No protracted negotiations as the siege dragged on, no long propaganda campaigns to demoralize the civilians. Bam. Done. Just like that.”

“Just like that?” asked Titus. “So by your logic, what your enemies did was the right move. They cut off the head and let the wyrm die.”

Artifex glowered, but couldn’t refute his statement. “Except for one thing. They failed to kill me. They destroyed that which I loved most in all this galaxy. The Coalition bastards liked to call me the Destroyer. They will soon learn what destruction truly is.”

It took two more days before Titus was happy with the environmentals, even after sealing off two-thirds of the living spaces and the small shuttle bay on the aft wing. It was another three before Artifex was able to bring the polaritonic neural processor, or PNP, fully online. This was the central logic unit of the ship’s neural network, and relied completely on manifold pathways and fold circuitry. There was not a single piece of electronics inside, making the neural network completely immune to the problems faced with manifold translation. While ships that relied on electricity could only use manifold translation by way of huge, bulking capacitors and heavy-duty busses, Imperium ships could do the same with small, powerful manifold translators that had considerably deeper (and faster) translations. Non-Imperium craft couldn’t rely on computers, for they would invariably be fried once in manifold space. The Imperium avoided the problem by adapting the warships to use the manifold, rather than forcing the application of standard physics on a different ruleset. Of course, none of this was new to Artifex, for he had helped develop the technology at the onset of the Imperium. Now he was simply repairing it sufficient to get to a real space station.

“Good news,” said Titus as he barged into the neural data closet on the Crown’s Vigor. “The onboard shuttle still works.”

“I should hope so,” said Artifex, not looking up from his work. To the uninformed, the room looked to be filled with long, thin crystals and sheets of glass that fit into glowing racks that tended towards reds and purples. What wasn’t readily visible were the thousands of glass fiber cables that attached each interface and that each crystal contained millions of microscopic pathways organized into logic gates, and those gates forming circuits and microprocessors. He slid the last rack back into place, and locked down the cabinet doors. The system was far more robust than it looked, but better safe than sorry. “Those shuttles were designed to fly in conditions that would kill its pilot.”

“That wasn’t really the good news, Valerius,” said Titus wryly. “No, I found some warehouses containing base materials. Several crates of ventricite crystals, a few pallets of osmium and iridium, cases of adamium shards, and even a single box of aurum ore. Dozens of pallets of sealed transuranics. No platinum-group metals, and far too many base metals. We have more than enough to get started.”

“Excellent,” said Artifex. “Load up the ventricite crystals, but not for sale. I need them. Take the osmium, iridium, and adamium. Hide the aurum ore under the floor of the washroom, and make sure it’s secured. That will be our insurance policy, but it’s too dangerous to sell except in an emergency. If we have room left, fill up on titanium and steel ingots. I can use them, if nothing else.”

“Sire,” said Titus with a formal nod. He hesitated, then asked, “What is our next step?”

“Two things, at least to start,” said Artifex. “We need supplies and repair time, which we should be able to find if we can locate a space station. You know as well as I how much we need to fix. We’re going to be sleeping in the cockpit for Universe-knows how long, and if we don’t get the plumbing in the washroom sorted before we leave, we’re going to smell like rotted skark meat by the time we get to civilization.

“Secondly, we are flying so completely blind that school children are better informed than we are. I don’t know about you, but I have a host of questions. First and foremost is, what happened? Obviously, the star in Swiftes was destroyed which broke up the Sphere. But what happened with the transcom? How much of the Imperium has survived? Are the supran survivors still around? What happened to the Coalition? And that’s just the big picture, not even taking into account the personal part of the whole thing.”

“Are Emilia and Auria still alive? What happened to Sicarius?” offered Titus.

“Where is Marcus?” said Artifex darkly. “And the biggest question - why?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why did my own son betray me to my worst enemies?” Artifex growled.

“Can we find answers with the Great Host?” asked Titus. “They’ve always had top-notch spies.”

“Perhaps, but I’d rather not owe them. Their help comes at a price that is always far too personal a cost. I think I’d rather try the Mother of Thousands.”

“You think she might still live?”

Artifex laughed. “She was at least three thousand years old when I was fresh out of the colonist vats. I would be more surprised if she wasn’t.”

“Well, if that’s your first ally, then we’ve got a long road ahead of us. She will eat us alive if we show up as weak as we are.”

“I’ll need to deal with the Nyx as well, but that’s even further down the road. First, we get the Crown’s Vigor fully operational,” said Artifex decisively.

“And then?”

“It will take time to find all the answers. I will not work from a position of weakness for long. We will marshall our strength while we hunt. And we will remember the lessons of Sicarius. There is a virtue in ruthlessness, and all who stand against me shall feel it.”