Author: David Barber

Over the centuries it had become a tradition for the Immortal Emperor to wash away His guilt in ceremonies at the Schwarzschild radius.

Since nothing escaped the event horizon of a black hole, awful secrets could be whispered there, cruelties, mistakes and bad karma consigned to the singularity, and history begun afresh. But the Emperor had not always answered threats and heresies with weapons so terrible they snuffed out suns, and heretics whispered that immortality had driven Him mad.

Orbiting a distant black hole, the Station of Eternal Renewal prepared for the Emperor’s arrival in full pomp and circumstance, and amongst those waiting was Anders Aquila, the Imperial Navigator, and secretly a heretic.

Turning to leave after the Welcoming, his path was blocked by an Officer of the Emperor’s Blood Guard.

“You didn’t sing the Anthem, and you mumbled your responses to the Oath.”

It was said the Blood Guard always knew when you were lying, but for Anders the lie was his entire life. Still, he had been careless.

“It was the presence of the Emperor,” he said carefully. “I was struck dumb.”

Head bowed, Anders watched the Officer’s hand settle on his pain stick, then lift off again, like a wasp shooed away from something sweet.

Anders raised his gaze to the man’s face.

The Emperor could order a clumsy servant punished or worlds set ablaze with the same wave of His hand. The Officer had carried out both acts, and found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference.

“The Imperial Navigator should set an example,” he said finally.

The Emperor had already boarded the Imperial Grace, secluded from all but his Guards and the Priesthood. Anders waited at a lesser airlock while his identity was confirmed.

Generation after generation of conspirators within the Imperial Bureaucracy had come and gone since the Emperor’s conscience was last cleansed, each faithfully doing His bidding while always ensuring one of their own was in a position to act.

Anders Aquila was the latest of these.

He was escorted to the Bridge where the Pilot and Engineer already sat. The faultless autonomics of the Imperial Grace flew an orbit that would safely skim the event horizon, the three of them being just another fail-safe redundancy.

They had never met before, the paranoia of the Guard having plucked them from far-flung planets of the Empire. Anders had no idea if either was a heretic. It made no difference.

One of the Blood Guards stationed around the Bridge stepped forward.

“What are you doing?”

Anders realised he had instinctively hunched forward to conceal his actions.

“Running a simulation of our trajectory one last time.”

Imperial Navigator was an honorary title, but by tradition his role was to oversee their course.

“Your heartbeat is raised.”

“Gravitational frame dragging around spinning black holes means our approach must be prograde and precisely equatorial, so—”

Detailed explanations tumbled out of him, but the Guard had already stepped back.

Half a millennium ago, a nameless heretic had inserted code that waited like a seed in the earth for this simulation to waken it. The subtlest of course changes which the autonomics should now blindly follow.

If this ancient plot succeeded, the Immortal Emperor, the Imperial Grace, and everyone aboard, guilty and innocent alike, would vanish across the event horizon forever and a thousand worlds would be free.

Anders had accomplished his life’s work, though strangely he felt no triumph.

But then, heretics claim that evil is neither created nor destroyed, we merely call it by another name.