Imperator

Authors: Nick Cole, Jason Anspach
Narrator: R.C. Bray
Duration: 10h 7m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: sci-fi - action - adventure

---

This is how Dart Wader Dark Goth got his name and became who he is. Of course bad guy was good guy at some point.

Pros:

• I really liked that they spend more time explaining the plot behind galaxy, savage wars, hyperspace drives.
• Awesome idea with the hyper-drives and colony ships.
• Also finally super powers are explained here.
• Finally we get to know about Rechs, Goth Soles, and other guys.

Cons:

• I really hate space combats sections in this books - they are really boring and exhausting.
• You really wish to stop reading book few times, so much I was exhausting and tired from the deus-ex machinas moments.

Quotes:

Combat is nothing but chances. Especially if you want to seize the momentum and maintain it. So that one was always ridiculous. It was a picture of a family. Obviously they were getting a smartphone. A gadget. A toy to them in that lost age of abundance. They’d used that fantastic device to amuse themselves from moment to moment. With games. Or pictures. Or commercials of endlessly available goods and services. Or meaningless conversations that paled in importance to what was on the horizon and headed straight at them like a bullet. And yet he’d been luridly fascinated by Goths. As though they were the source of all his fears. He’d been driven to learn about them, to make them less… powerful. Less of a nightmare figure, always on the edge of his vision. Always waiting in the shadows. And instead… the very word Goth inspired a sense of dread darkness inside his mind despite all his efforts to haul it into the light. And they were wearing some type of advanced armor system like nothing Casper had ever seen before. Because, thought Casper as he watched himself watching all this once more from the future in the desert, because this is the version of armor that came before the Mark I legionnaire armor. The legendary armor Rechs would take for his own. The armor the Legion techs and scientists would try to reproduce, but would never really be able to. That quest was to leave physicality, to shed the real, and to become a superintelligent being who ruled the universe in a place beyond time, space, and reality. This was the true power. Once he obtained it, he would his bless his faithful servants with the gifts they deserved. And in this pause, a terrible history passed over them both once more. Both were suddenly unwilling tourists forced to remember some horrible vacation every time they came across the photos they’d so carefully hidden away. Hoping never to find them ever again. Because, of course, they’d both lived through that terrible vacation in hell. Lived through a long nightmare in which every moment was a never-ending hell in and of itself. Whenever some religious nut had tried to put the fear in Casper with their talk of eternal damnation, his reply had always been, “Don’t talk to me about hell. I’ve already been there.” Except often, later, in the quiet of his solitary life, he would admit that he was still afraid of going back to hell. Just a taste of it had been enough for him. And the taste itself hinted that yes, true hell might be real enough to consider. Because the Nazis knew there were no consequences for what they were doing. They weren’t religious, contrary to misinformation. They believed in nothing but blood and soil. They were the ultimate Darwinian evolutionists’ murder machine. They knew it was survival of the fittest and that there were no consequences for the ‘winners’ except winning the genetic survival lottery. His whole life had been that of a viewer watching a disaster unfolding. Yes, he’d tried to save what could be saved. But what had he really saved, in the final tally? The galaxy was on the edge of ruin. Some force from the Outer Dark beyond the galaxy was headed this way, if Reina’s last transmission was to be believed. All of it, all of everything they’d fought for and built, was spinning apart.

He had no idea. And long ago he’d stopped thinking of himself as Casper Sullivan or any of the many other aliases he’d once used to try and save the Republic from itself. By any means save one.

Though it surely seemed a non sequitur to the medic named Maydoon.

That had been the agreement. Between Rechs, Reina, and Casper. They would never seek the power they’d seen inside the Quantum Palace. They, the only three survivors of the horrors on the ghost ship Moirai.

The girl, the lone surviving medic from among the Martian light infantry who had set out to rescue Reina from inside the Moirai. She had survived, too. Take my hand, Corporal Maydoon! I’ll save you.

They would watch the entire galaxy. Reina would watch the sciences; she would stop any development in a direction that might lead toward the paths the Savages had been wandering down. Rechs would watch the power struggles; he would see who might be putting themselves in front of the others a little too effortlessly. And then they would be smitten. Hence the Legion. And Casper… Casper would beat, cajole, and manipulate from behind the scenes. In a galaxy full of aliens, connected by the gossamer of hyperspace, he would form a government that might work together to keep an eye out for the Dark Wanderer. That might respond when the time came.

But the Savages, who even then were beginning to come into communication with one another, were taking worlds of their own in which to grow their nightmare societies. The galaxy-wide conflict that would be known as the Savage Wars was coming. And that too was the reason for the Legion. And the Republic and its mighty navy.