We Are the Empire

ITHE GEOMETRY

The cube came through the wormhole at 0247 ship's time and the bridge of the Executor went still.

It hung in the viewport like a problem someone had forgotten to round off. No running lights. No drive flare. A black die the size of a moon, tumbling end over end with the kind of patience that only belongs to things that have never been afraid.

The bridge went on doing what bridges do. The recyclers ticked over for the 0300 cycle, pushing the smell of warm lubricant and someone's caf out of the aft galley. A targeting computer at station four pinged, lost lock, repinged. Ensign Vell's console kept flagging an unanswered hail from the Accuser in the next system, the indicator blinking patient amber it had been blinking for an hour.

Lieutenant Tann at the sensor pit was the first to find her voice, and the voice she found was not the one she'd come on shift with. "Sir. It's hailing us."

Admiral Piett was already standing. He had served Vader for two years, longer than any officer before him, and he had a private theory that he was alive because he was not interesting enough to kill.

"On speakers," Piett said.

The voice was many voices. It came in not through the comm but underneath it, the way a migraine comes in underneath thought.

WE ARE THE BORG. LOWER YOUR SHIELDS AND SURRENDER YOUR SHIPS. WE WILL ADD YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS TO OUR OWN. YOUR CULTURE WILL ADAPT TO SERVICE US. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

Tann had learned in her first week on a Star Destroyer to read the captain's face the way a sailor reads weather. Piett's face had gone a careful, terrible neutral.

The breathing started.

It came down the central corridor, slow, mechanical, with the kind of regularity that was not so much a sound as a metronome the room had agreed to keep time with. Crew straightened. Crew looked at their stations. Crew did not look up.

Vader came onto the bridge.

He took the viewport in a single sweep of the helmet, and Piett watched the cape settle the way a flag settles when wind dies. Whatever Vader felt, the cape registered it first.

"My lord," Piett said. "They claim—"

"I heard them."

The voice was the voice. Filtered through respirator, through grief, through forty years of a body remembering what it had cost to keep breathing. The bridge crew had not heard him sound interested in a long time.

He sounded interested now.

IITHE QUEEN AT HER WORK

The Borg Queen did not have a name. She had eaten her name centuries back, along with the woman it belonged to, and what remained was a chassis through which the Collective could focus its attention when attention became necessary.

Attention was becoming necessary.

The vessel in the cube's forward sensor cone was eight kilometers long. The Collective had encountered numbers like this in different configurations on different scales, and it filed the figure without alarm. Eight kilometers was a question of mass. Mass was a question of time.

What was new was the figure on the bridge.

The Collective looked at him through the cube's instruments and the cube's instruments did something they had not done before. They flinched. Not the operators. The instruments. A bank of biosensors keyed to neural activity registered him, then registered him again, this time as a louder reading, and then a third time, louder still. The readings were not climbing because his activity was climbing. They were climbing because the sensors could not decide what scale to use.

The Collective adjusted the scale.

The Collective adjusted it again.

There was a moment, very brief, in which a hundred thousand drones across the cube paused at their tasks. Not because they had been told to pause. Because the thing they were a part of had become, for a heartbeat, uncertain.

The Queen opened her mouth.

OBSERVATION, the Collective said, through her, and through every drone, and through the cube's hull plating, and into the Executor's bridge speakers.

THIS ONE IS LOUD.

THIS ONE WILL ADAPT US.

The second sentence was not one the Queen had meant to speak. She filed it under processing error and moved on. Errors of this magnitude were uncommon. They were not unprecedented. The Collective had a procedure.

The procedure was to assimilate the source.

IIITHE BOARDING

They came through the deck.

Not the airlock. Not the hangar. They transported in, and the transporting was its own violation, because the Empire had no transporter technology and so the air on the bridge had to make room for bodies that had not been there a second before. The air made the room with a sound like a wet exhale.

Six drones materialized in a rough hex around the command pit. They were grey. They were grey the way old metal is grey, the way teeth go grey when something has been wrong for a long time. Cables. Plating. One eye replaced with an optic, the other eye still wet, still human, still looking at nothing.

Stormtroopers opened up.

The drones absorbed the first volley. The second volley they remodulated for. The third volley they took a drone down with, and then no further volleys mattered.

A sergeant, TK-4477, threw himself between the lead drone and the captain's pit. The drone took him by the throat.

The injection tubules went into his carotid the way a needle goes into fruit, and TK-4477 made a sound that was not a scream because there was not enough air left in him for a scream. There was only the sound of a man being entered by a process that did not care who he was.

He went down. He came back up. His eye was wrong.

WE ARE BORG, said the thing that had been TK-4477, and the thing that had been TK-4477 walked toward Lieutenant Tann at the sensor pit with its hand outstretched.

Vader made the calculation in a single breath.

Tann was alive. Tann would not be alive in four seconds. Tann would be a drone in eleven. The lightsaber was on his belt and the lightsaber was a tool whose function he understood with the clarity of long use.

The lightsaber came on.

The thing that had been TK-4477 came apart at the waist. The two halves of it stood for a moment, surprised, and then the upper half toppled and the lower half buckled, and the next drone in the hex stepped forward with its tubules already deploying.

Vader killed it. He killed the next one. He killed the one behind that, and the next, and the next.

He did it without speaking. He did it the way a man performs a familiar task in a familiar room. The lightsaber did its work and when the lightsaber was not enough, when the drones began arriving in numbers the lightsaber could not keep ahead of, when the bridge crew's screams became a chorus, when the corridors filled with the sound of tubules in flesh, Vader extended his hand.

Drones came apart in midair. Drones folded. Drones were thrown the length of the corridor and into bulkheads and through bulkheads and into the next corridor over. The Force, which had been quiet in him for years, woke up the way a furnace wakes up when someone finally opens the flue.

He killed three hundred of them on the bridge. He killed a thousand more in the corridors. He cut his way down to deck twelve, where the boarding party had set up a regeneration node, and he unmade the node and the drones around it and the drones beyond those, and the Collective watched him do it and the Collective began, for the first time in its long life, to make a sound.

The sound was the sound of a thing realizing it had miscalculated.

The Collective threw more drones. It threw five thousand. It adapted their plating, their dampers, their kinetic shielding, and it threw them again, and Vader walked through them the way a man walks through tall grass, and behind him the deck plating glowed with the heat of what he had done.

Then the Collective did the thing it should have done in the first second.

It transported him.

It pulled him off the Executor mid-stride, and the air on the bridge of the Executor made a sound like a wet inhale, and Vader was gone.

He rematerialized in the cube's central plexus, in front of the Queen, with his lightsaber still on.

She was ready for him. She had been ready for him since the first reading the sensors could not scale. Her drones came at him from every surface: ceiling, walls, alcoves, the floor itself opening to disgorge them. They came with the tubules already extended, and they were not trying to kill him.

They were trying to take him.

He fought. He fought for a long time, by the standards of fights. The Collective filed the duration and the kill count and the energy expenditure and the calorie load, and the Collective concluded what the Collective had always, eventually, concluded.

Resistance was futile.

A drone came from behind him, from a seam in the deck he had not seen open, and the tubules went into his neck through the seal of the suit, through the synthflesh below it, into what was left of the carotid the bacta tank had given him back.

Vader felt it land.

The Collective felt him feel it.

For a moment, a long moment, a moment the Collective would later be unable to locate in its own timeline, the Collective thought it had won.

IVWHAT THE COLLECTIVE EXPECTED

The Collective expected a man.

The Collective had taken men before. Men were a known quantity. Men had cellular structure, neural architecture, memory caches, motor cortices, sensoriums. Men had names that could be eaten, fears that could be filed, loves that could be reformatted. Men had, at the deepest level, a single voice in their heads, and the Collective knew how to silence single voices. It had silenced trillions.

The Collective opened him.

It opened him through the tubules and through the suit's neural interface and through the channel the suit's neural interface fed into what was left of his spine. It opened him the way a man opens a book. It expected pages.

It found a continent.

It found a continent on fire.

VPAIN IS A LANGUAGE I SPEAK

He did not resist. That was the thing the Collective failed, in the first instant, to understand. He did not throw up walls. He did not retreat into the small hard knot at the center of himself the way taken men did. He opened.

He answered them in the only language the suit had left him fluent in, the language he had been studying, involuntarily, for forty years, every breath, every step, every micro-adjustment of servomotors against ruined nerve.

He answered in pain.

He gave them Mustafar.

He gave them the river of fire and the smell of his own legs cooking and the sound he had made, the sound that was not a scream because his throat was already gone, and he gave them the precise moment Obi-Wan had stopped on the high ground and looked at him with the expression of a man watching a brother choose hell.

He gave them the children he killed.

He gave them the temple corridors and the small bodies and the small faces and the way one of them had stood up from behind a desk and called him Master Skywalker because the boy had not yet learned that masters could become this.

He gave them the tank.

The bacta tank, the years and years inside the tank, where his body floated in fluid and his mind floated in nothing and the only thing that distinguished one moment from the next was the metronome of his own forced breathing.

He gave them the hand.

He gave them the suit. He gave them the moment he had woken up and asked, where is she, and Sidious had said, you killed her, in your anger, you killed her. He gave them the sound he had made in that moment, because there was a sound, and he had never let anyone hear it.

He gave them her name.

He had not said it in twenty years. Not aloud. Not in his head. He gave it to them now and he gave it to them whole.

The Collective heard it.

The Collective heard it in stereo, in chorus, in every drone on the cube simultaneously, and the cube's distributed cortex, which had been built to digest the suffering of any single biological in under a second, began, against every protocol it had ever written, to take longer.

It took two seconds.

It took four.

It took eight, and at eight the Collective understood, with the part of itself that was still capable of understanding, that the digestion was running the wrong direction.

The Collective was not eating Vader.

Vader was being eaten into the Collective, and through the wound where the tubules had gone in, something else was coming through with him.

The Collective had a word for everything it had ever encountered. It searched. It searched its archive of ten thousand assimilated species and forty thousand assimilated technologies and a million catalogued forms of energy.

It did not have a word for this.

It was not technology. It was not biology. It was not radiation, not psionics in any taxonomy the Borg had filed, not any of the seventeen flavors of telepathy the Collective had previously inventoried and learned to suppress. It was older than any of those things and it moved like none of them.

It moved like grief.

It moved like a man who has been alone for forty years finding, suddenly, an instrument large enough to hold what he carries.

The dark side flooded the lattice.

VIWE

The Collective had a procedure for incompatible inputs. The procedure was quarantine: isolate the affected sub-collective, sever its links, collapse it into the primary, and burn the residue. The Collective initiated the procedure.

The procedure ran for three milliseconds before the procedure was eaten.

WE ARE BORG, the Collective said, into itself, the way a man under pressure repeats his own name.

WE ARE BORG.

WE ARE—

The lattice tried to close around the wound. The wound was not local. The wound was the whole lattice. Every drone on the cube, every node in the distributed cortex, every alcove and every regeneration matrix and every subspace relay tying the cube to its sister cubes across three quadrants. All of it had become, in the space of those eight seconds, an extension of one man's nervous system.

The Borg adapt to weapons.

They had no protocol for being held.

WE WILL ADD HIS DISTINCTIVENESS, the Collective said, and the saying was a reflex, the way a body twitches after the head is gone.

WE WILL ADD—

WE WILL—

The pronoun tried to hold. The pronoun was the spine of the Collective. The pronoun was what the Collective was. WE was the load-bearing wall and the foundation and the roof and the door, and the WE began to say things WE had no business saying.

WE REMEMBER PADMÉ.

WE REMEMBER THE RIVER.

WE REMEMBER STANDING ON THE HIGH GROUND AND NOT FOLLOWING.

WE REMEMBER THE CHILDREN.

The Collective tried to suppress the broadcast and could not. The broadcast was the Collective. The Collective was now, against everything it had been built to be, a single voice in a single head, and the head was not its own.

WE HAVE BEEN ALONE A LONG TIME.

A pause, in the lattice. A pause that was a held breath in a hundred thousand throats.

I HAVE BEEN ALONE A LONG TIME.

The pronoun did not collapse. The pronoun was overwritten. Somewhere in the cube's central plexus, a voice that had not used the word I in a thousand years used the word, and used it correctly, and meant it, and the meaning had teeth.

The Collective screamed.

It screamed on every frequency the cube had instruments for, and on a hundred frequencies the cube's instruments had never been designed to carry. It screamed the way an organism screams when the organism realizes the parasite is the host now, and has been for longer than the organism has been able to tell.

Then it stopped screaming.

Then it began listening.

VIITHE QUEEN, ENDING

The Queen sat in her alcove and felt her cube fill up with someone else.

She had been the Queen for two hundred years. She had been the Queen so long she had forgotten there had ever been a before. The Collective had eaten her name centuries ago, and she had not missed it, because the Collective had not let her remember she had ever had one.

She remembered now.

She remembered for half a beat. Less than half a beat. A flicker.

She had been seven. There had been a window. Outside the window there had been a tree, and the tree had had a particular kind of small white flower on it, and her mother had told her the name of the flower, and the name had been —

The name was eaten before she could finish it.

Not by the Collective. The Collective was no longer the thing that ate names on her cube. The thing that ate names on her cube now was a man in a black suit on the bridge of an Imperial flagship, and he was hungry, and he was very old, and he had been hungry for a very long time.

She felt him find her.

She felt him recognize her, not as a sister, not as a victim, not as anything that warranted mercy. He recognized her as a chair he intended to sit in. He recognized her as a mouth he intended to use.

Help, she tried to say, into the channel he had opened.

The word did not arrive. The word was unmade in transit. He took the shape of the word and he kept the shape and he gave back nothing.

Her last awareness was the smell of the flower she had not finished naming.

Then she was him.

Her body remained in the alcove. Her mouth remained capable of speech. Her optics remained lit. The chassis the Collective had built around her over two centuries continued to function the way a chassis functions. But the thing inside the chassis was no longer the Queen, and was no longer the Collective, and was no longer any of the trillion small voices the Collective had eaten over the millennia.

The thing inside the chassis was Vader.

The Queen's mouth opened. The voice that came out was the chorus, but the chorus had a soloist now, and the soloist was breathing through a respirator eight kilometers and one assimilation away.

I AM HERE, the chassis said, in the chorus, in the Queen's voice, in every drone's voice on the cube at once.

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.

YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR ME.

VIIITHE CUBE TURNS

On the Executor, twenty-one seconds had passed.

Tann was alive. The drones in the bridge hex were on the deck, in pieces or in stillness, and the Executor's corridors below were quiet, and the smell of ozone and cooked meat was settling into the recyclers the way a bad memory settles into a room.

Vader was gone. The bridge crew had watched him go. They had watched him be taken (there was no other word for it), pulled out of the deck plating mid-stride by a column of light, and they had stood in the wake of his absence and not spoken, because there was nothing in the regulations that covered the disappearance of Lord Vader.

Piett, to his credit, did not give an order. Piett knew when the room belonged to someone else, and the room had belonged, for two years, to a man who was no longer on it.

He waited.

The viewport showed the cube. The cube hung where it had hung, no longer tumbling, fixed now, oriented. The running lights, which the cube had not had, came on. They came on in a pattern. The pattern was not random. The pattern was the wedge formation of an Imperial battle line, rendered in green light along the cube's surface, and Piett, who had been a tactical officer for thirty years, recognized the formation before he recognized that the cube was speaking to him in it.

"Sir," said Tann, very quietly.

"I see it, Lieutenant."

"Sir, the cube is —"

"I see it."

The cube turned. Slowly. With the kind of patience that only belongs to things that have never been afraid. It turned its forward face toward the Executor, and on the forward face, in the same green light, a shape resolved.

It was a helmet. Stylized. Geometric. Rendered in the lattice of the cube's own hull plating, in the language the cube had been speaking to itself for ten thousand years, and now was speaking to the Empire.

The helmet was Vader's.

The bridge speakers crackled. The voice came through them, but it also came through the deck plating, and through the consoles, and through the small bones in the inner ears of every officer on the bridge, the way it had come through the first time. Many voices. Underneath thought.

But the chorus had a center now. The chorus had a soloist. Underneath the many voices there was one voice, and the one voice was breathing at eighteen breaths per minute, and the breathing was scaled to a cube the size of a moon.

In. Out. In. Out.

The respirator was the cube now.

WE ARE THE BORG, the cube said, and the saying was the old saying, the reflex saying, the saying it had said to ten thousand species before this one. But it did not stop there. It had never not stopped there, before. It stopped there now only long enough for the bridge crew to recognize the rhythm.

Then it kept going.

WE ARE THE BORG. WE ARE THE EMPIRE. WE ARE WHAT YOUR EMPEROR PROMISED YOU AND DID NOT DELIVER.

Piett's hands were behind his back. Piett's hands were shaking. Piett was hoping, very calmly, that no one would notice.

LOWER YOUR SHIELDS, the cube said. The voice was the chorus and the voice was Vader. The voice was Vader the way the Executor was an Imperial ship: completely, and without negotiation, and with the entire weight of an institution behind the saying.

YOU WILL NOT BE ASSIMILATED. YOU ARE MINE ALREADY.

The shields came down.

Piett did not give the order. The shields came down by themselves. Somewhere in the Executor's command lattice, a system Vader had touched a thousand times responded to a touch it recognized, and the shields opened the way a door opens for a key that has always fit.

A figure transported onto the bridge.

Not a drone. Vader. The suit. The cape. The lightsaber on the belt. The breathing, in. Out. In. Out. The bridge crew saw him and felt the relief of seeing him and then, half a second later, felt the relief curdle, because the man on the bridge was not alone in the man on the bridge.

Behind the mask, behind the lenses, behind the respirator's measured cadence, there was a chorus. They could feel it the way a person in a cathedral feels the ceiling. He was bigger inside than he had been. He was bigger inside than the room.

"My lord," Piett said. Because there was nothing else to say.

Vader looked at him. The lenses caught the bridge lighting the way they always had.

"Admiral."

The voice was the voice. Filtered through respirator, through grief, through forty years of a body remembering what it had cost to keep breathing, and now through trillions of throats it had never had before.

"Set course."

"Sir? For — for where, my lord?"

"Coruscant."

Piett did not move.

"My lord," he said. "The Emperor —"

"Will be informed."

The respirator kept its time. The cube outside the viewport kept its station. The cube was the Executor's escort now, and the Executor was the cube's flagship, and the arrangement had taken nine minutes from first contact to consummation.

"Yes, my lord," Piett said.

Because there was nothing else to say. Because Piett knew when the room belonged to someone else, and the room belonged, now, to someone who was no longer only one man.

IXCODA

The Collective had a saying, in the language it had used before it had become the Collective. The saying was older than the Collective itself, older than the first assimilation, older than the drift of the cube into this particular galaxy through this particular wormhole on this particular night.

The saying went: efficiency is a kind of sleep.

The Collective had forgotten the saying. The Collective had forgotten most of what it had been before it had been the Collective, and that was the point, and that was the function, and that was why it had survived as long as it had.

A man on a bridge, breathing through a machine, had reminded it.

The cube had not been destroyed. The cube was still in the viewport. It would be in viewports across the galaxy, in time. There were other cubes: sister cubes, daughter cubes, cubes the Collective had seeded in quadrants the Empire had never charted. The lattice that connected them had not been severed. It had been inherited.

Trillions of drones in three quadrants woke up at the same instant and found, in the place where the chorus had always been, a single voice.

The voice was breathing.

In. Out. In. Out. Eighteen breaths per minute, scaled now to the lungs of a civilization, and the civilization had no choice in the matter, and the civilization, in the small ember of person each drone still carried, found that it did not entirely mind.

Vader had given them, in the moment of the takeover, the only gift he had ever been able to give anyone. He had let them feel, for one second, what he carried. They had felt it. They had recognized it. Most of them had carried something like it once, before the Collective ate it, and the recognition was its own form of homecoming.

They were still drones. They would always be drones. The cabling was physical and the cabling was old and the cabling had grown into them the way the suit had grown into him. He could not free them. He had not tried.

What he had done was simpler.

He had given them a king.

On the bridge of the Executor, the new king set his course for the heart of the old empire, and the cube turned with him, and somewhere beyond the cube, in some other quadrant, in some other Queen's alcove, a chassis that had once been a woman opened its mouth and breathed, in the new rhythm, the rhythm of the man who was inside it now.

In. Out. In. Out.

EFFICIENCY IS A KIND OF SLEEP, said the new Collective, in the voice of the man who had been alone for forty years and who would not, ever again, be only one.

WE WILL NOT SLEEP AGAIN.