The Punished

By Jacob Magnus

The Punished: a short story.
In a future where soldiers fight in borrowed bodies, one warrior will confront the ultimate loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jacob Magnus
• Release date: May 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463421215

Jacob Magnus

When he isn't touring the world on a majestic airship, Jacob Magnus lives with his wife in the mountainous beauty of Korea.

Book preview

The Punished

Jacob Magnus

Copyright 2019 Jacob Magnus

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The first Human Empire was founded by mistake.

Long before men built walls of rock or mud, and slaughtered beasts to their gods, the Xrest rode the stellar wind and built a civilisation spanning the galaxy. When Sennacherib smashed the walls of Babylon, the Xrest had already created the network of soul gates, making an instantaneous connection between every world in their control, and transforming the galaxy from a great archipelago into the greatest city, where a citizen could walk from the outermost edge, pausing to transmit consciousness between locally-adapted bodies at the soul gates, to the very brink of the gaping void at the heart of the spread of stars.

With connection came conflict. The Xrest had never been alone; they had encountered dozens of fledgling civilisations in the first expansion. The mature, they absorbed; the childlike, they avoided. Yet they never employed force, for their nature, and the technology of the soul gates, made war impossible.

Or so they had thought.

When war came, it took the Xrest by surprise, and carried away a full thirty systems in a storm of violence that stunned the founders, and only when the storm had swept across half the celestial city, did they act. They could not fight themselves, being physically fragile and emotionally incapable of the madness of battle fury, but they did possess weapons. They possessed humanity.

Contact and conscription, so the humans called it, but the rewards of conscription were too great to ignore: infinite stores of energy, technologies millennia beyond their own, a galactic network to explore and profit from, and, not least, the means to extend life. All this was offered and accepted, in return for the transformation of the human species into a single, ten billion-strong army. This, the Xrest considered, was a good bargain, because of the very reason they had left humanity out of their civilisation; of all known species, humans were the most destructive.

The blade proved sharp. It cut away the cancer that had blighted the galaxy, and restored order, a vigilant, martial order. This should have been the Xrest’s ultimate triumph, but it was, inevitably, their downfall. Once humans had the galaxy in their grasp, they realised they could never let it go, for the Xrest had proved too weak to hold it. And why should they let go? They had shown their strength, and they had won the galaxy with the blood of their sisters, the broken bones of their brothers.

The Xrest, aghast, took to their sunships, and sailed beyond the edge of the galaxy. Most agree, they sailed to their death. The first Human Empire was created as a mistake, but like many mistakes, it proved stronger than its creator.

- The New Approved Galactic History, by Otho, Master of Archives

They came for her at dusk in the long shadows cast by the green sun of Viridian Seven, as it sank behind the obsidian towers that loomed out of the steaming jungle, sending a wash of moist, sweet air like the day's last