EMPEROR’S WATCH

  CONNOR WHITELEY

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  Copyright © 2023 CONNOR WHITELEY

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  EMPEROR’S WATCH

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  EMPEROR’S WATCH

  He woke up to find a hand reaching down covering his face, mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe but a normal person might have overreacted and lashed out in tiring uncontrolled moves. But he knew better from his training, he didn’t know what training he had had but he knew that he had some.

  John Doe focused on his attacker as the skinny stupid idiot tried to kill him faster and faster. But it was useless.

  Most people would probably try to attack the idiot’s eyes and face. It was foolish. John noticed how the attacker’s elbows were exposed and they were perfect weak points.

  John hit them. Hard.

  The attacker screamed and John knew at least one of the elbows were broken. Good. John threw the attacker off him and got up.

  His body was already weak from staying at the hospital that was perfectly based on the hospitals from London from Old Earth. John hopped over to the little metal door and opened it.

  He went out into a long cold corridor that seemed to stretch on forever and he quickly locked the door behind him.

  “John?” a woman asked in a very posh elegant voice that John just loved.

  John was beginning to get used to that name. Of course John wasn’t his real name, it was the name that the hospital workers had given him. Including the Lady Matron here, the wonderful woman who had made it her mission to look after every one on this floor like they were her own family.

  John loved the Lady Matron’s sterile white lab coat, small black bag of instruments and the square glasses that only seemed to amplify the natural beauty of her bright blue eyes. John had little doubt he could use those eyes as a nightlight if he was scared of the dark. Which he wasn’t.

  “What’s wrong John? You should be in bed,” the Lady Matron asked.

  John just rolled his eyes. He was so done with lying in bed. Sure he might have been beaten within a millimetre of his life a few months ago in the planet’s desert region, but he had done nothing but healing just right.

  He needed something to do and he needed to stop that attacker.

  “There’s an attacker in my room. He tried to kill me,” John said.

  He had no idea that it was a man until now. He had been far too focused on surviving and attacking to notice something so silly as who the attacker was, could that be more training?

  The lady Matron just laughed. “Come on John. I’m sure it was just a bad dream-”

  Someone smashed their fists into the metal door.

  The Lady Matron recoiled but John didn’t. There was nothing to fear here, these hospitals were made from some of the toughest steel in the entire system. Nothing was getting through that door.

  The smashing stopped.

  “Call the Arbiters. We need detectives here now,” John said calmly.

  The Lady Matron nodded and quickly walked off. John was rather impressed with himself actually, he would have imagined himself to be an emotional wreck at being attacked. But this was all just... training?

  He really wished he could remember what he actually was before the attack a few months ago.

  The sound of a building collapsing ripped through the corridor.

  John instantly knew what it was. These doors might have been made from steel, but the thin white walls that separated these hospital rooms were made from prehistoric material known as plaster.

  It was useless.

  John dashed over to the two hospital room doors next to his room. He locked them both.

  He heard the attacker shout in frustration and pound his fists into the door.

  John knew that all he needed to do now was wait for the Arbiters to arrive and they could investigate. The attacker was clearly some crazy criminal but why did he want to attack John?

  “The Arbiters will be arriving within minutes John,” the Lady Matron said.

  “Excellent,” John said.

  An intense wave of apple, cloves and coffee-scented cleaning products filled the corridor, and then John realised that this was the first time in ages he actually focused on the environment.

  Then what was even stranger was how he already felt like he knew a lot about the hospital. It had been built over a decade ago by a wealthy mysterious investor born on Earth and wanted everyone to have access to great medical care, even in the harsher systems of The Great Human Empire that wanted people to pay for their medical care.

  “Will the room contain him?” the Lady Matron asked.

  John shrugged. “The other side of these walls is a three kilometre drop to the ground so I doubt he’ll be climbing out any windows. Isn’t it?”

  The Lady Matron nodded.

  Something smashed.

  John unlocked the hospital door to the room where the noise came from and John laughed as he saw that the window had been smashed.

  He didn’t know why the attacker had decided to risk falling to his death but John was interested now. It was just a shame he was going to have to wait for the Arbiters to investigate.

  ***

  Arbiter Elena O’Leary absolutely hated strange calls like this. As she stood on the awfully large circular landing platform over the immense Capital City with all its flying ships, spires and bright lights, Elena hated waiting for a so-called Lady Matron to allow her access into the hospital.

  Elena had never liked Hospitals too much for that matter, or at least these stupid pretend hospitals based on the barbaric practices of Old Earth technology. There was a reason the Emperor united humanity and threw them into the future. So stupid places like these just pissed Elena off big time.

  Elena would have much preferred to be joining her Arbiter friends down in the Capital City below hunting down a newly discovered traitor cult, The Emperor’s Watch, and killing them.

  Elena had spent ages learning about the cult, their deluded ideals about how the traitor superhumans and their allies were there to liberate the Empire from the corruption of the Emperor (complete bullshit) and how the cult was working to overthrow the planetary governor.

  The Emperor’s Watch needed to die.

  She would have expected some kind of purified pine-scented air to help give the hospital landing platform a nice relaxing atmosphere, but nope. All Elena could smell was the horrible smell of burnt ozone from all the flying vehicles below.

  Elena had wanted to bring a full investigative team, another Arbiter and more support to investigate this stupid attack, but as her Lord Arbiter kept banging on about. It was the job of an Arbiter to be a law unto themselves with them only ever answering to their Lord, the Inquisition and the Emperor.

  Elena just laughed at him, which certainly didn’t help improve the chances of her request going through, she would have no problem answering to her Lord Arbiter or even the glorious Emperor himself.

  But by fuck was she going to answer to some Inquisitor prick who was a part of a secret organisation policing the Empire from the backgrounds like spies and puppet masters do.

  The sound of massive metal doors opening made Elena gently smile at the three people walking towards her. The tall elegant woman in the middle dressed in all white like some kind of Matron from ancient Earth just looked awful and terribly ugly. And the two shorter men dressed in white armour hardly looked any better.

  Elena definitely preferred her thick black Arbiter armour with her two sidearms at her side and her communicator in her backside. She looked like the Emperor’s law and Will incarnate and that was what she wanted to look like. Yet the Lady Matron oddly enough barely looked scared.

  “Arbiter. I am the Lady Matron of this facility. Follow me,”

  The Lady Matron woman didn’t even wait for a response. If it was anyone else then Elena would have happily shot her but this was outrageous. She was an Arbiter of the Emperor, everyone showed her respect, fear and admiration.

  This Lady Matron woman was clearly going to be a problem.

  Elena followed the Lady Matron and her two idiot men for over an hour through a network of tight corridors, purification chambers to get rid of the bacteria she bought in from the Capital City below and the Lady Matron seemed to be obsessed with taking wrong turns.

  Elena knew that she was doing it on purpose and asking ever so pointed questions about who she was, why was Elena here and Elena just wanted to throw her against a wall and force her to reveal why she was asking so much.

  But she behaved.

  A few moments later, the Lady Matron led Elena into an endlessly cold metal corridor and Elena saw a man in the distance sitting on a chair with a cup of something on his lap.

  “That is your witness, my lord,” the Lady Matron said.

  Elena didn’t care for the change in tune at all, but she thanked her and went over to the man.

  Elena was rather impressed that the man looked so... amazingly hot considering he had just been violently attacked. But he looked amazing with his strong muscular jawline, fit but muscular body that made him look like a Greek god and his longish brown hair looked like sheer perfection.

  He was gorgeous.

  Elena wanted nothing more than to just run her fingers through his amazing hair, kiss his big soft lips and really, really get to know him. He was amazing.

  “Arbiter,” the man said without getting up.

  Elena was a little irked at him not standing up. For so many humans even if they didn’t learn it at school, it was basic instinct to stand up and at least salute an Agent of the Emperor, something that the Arbiters were definitely classed as.

  “Thank you for calling it in,” Elena said.

  “I trust you have your units and Junior Arbiters tracing the aerial traffic around the hospital at the moment he jumped out the window,” the man said.

  Elena was just flat out shocked that the man knew that was what they did. It was actually Elena’s Lord Arbiter that had given that duty away but it still stunned her how this wonderfully sexy man just knew something no one should.

  “Former Arbiter?” Elena asked.

  The man laughed like that was the funniest joke ever.

  “Emperor no my dear. I would never be an Arbiter,” the man said.

  Then Elena noticed that he was equally confused by his answer. It was almost like he was giving answers that he had no clue he knew.

  Clearly there was so much more to this amazingly hot man than meets the eye, and Elena so badly wanted to talk to him more but Elena felt her pocket vibrate.

  Elena took out her small square communicator and answered it. She was getting a call from a Junior Arbiter.

  “Me Lord Elena, I traced the traffic report as requested. I am standing outside an old petroleum station in the Deserts. My teleporter homer is activated if you care to join me,”

  “Confirmed,” Elena said.

  “The Emperor Protects,” the man said.

  Elena just loved that little saying of the Empire that could mean anything from goodbye to hello to good luck. Elena just loved this sexy man.

  As Elena activated her teleporter, she locked onto the Junior Arbiter’s location and she just looked at that amazingly hot sexy man one last time.

  “The Emperor Protects,” she said as she teleported away.

  ***

  John was so confused at himself. That insanely hot woman had been asking him questions and he just knew the answers. It was so strange and it made no sense whatsoever.

  John just knew that he had never been an Arbiter. He actually didn’t like that because on planets they pretended to be judge, jurors and executioners. But when it came down to it they were honestly so pathetic compared to other people in the Empire that actually made it a safer place.

  Again John had no clue how he knew that or what made that opinion, but he just knew it is was true.

  Another intense wave of apple, coffee and cloves hit him and finally having ask the Lady Matron about it all. He had found out that every thirty minutes an energy wave washed over the hospital. It killed all the viruses, bacteria and fungi in the hospital, without hurting any humans and it had the side effect of creating the smell of apples, coffee and cloves.

  John just loved technology.

  John kept sitting on the cold chair staring down the large endlessly cold metal corridor that had been his home for so long, but it never actually was his home. He knew he lived somewhere he just didn’t know where or who with.

  “Mug of tea John?” the Lady Matron asked.

  John shook his head. He couldn’t have cared less about drinking.

  “Did you send my medical records to the Arbiters?” John asked.

  It was a very sad fact that because the Arbiters were all-powerful and in the age of traitors, superhumans and civil war, privacy laws were a joke. John just wanted her to confirm that little detail for him.

  “Of course John it is the law,” the Lady Matron said.

  John shivered as she said that. The Law. John was shocked at how disgusted he felt about it like the law was about to be broken and it was a hindrance to his work. But what work?

  John was starting to get so annoyed at not being able to remember who he was, what he did and anything else. He just needed to know why he didn’t like the Law and was shocked to be following it for a change.

  “Lady Matron?” John asked.

  “Yes dear,”

  John carefully looked around to make sure no one else on this floor was awake or up.

  “I need you to get me all my medical records please. It seems some kind of training is returning to me and I want to see if this training could help me understand what I was before all this. Could you help me?” John asked.

  The Lady Matron smiled. “Of course John. It would be my pleasure,”

  John knew it was a long shot but he couldn’t help but feel like there was something so important to him, his job and his past that was so critical to the future of the Empire.

  He just didn’t know what that was or why.

  ***

  Fucking hell that was a bumpy teleportation if there ever was one, Arbiter Elena flat out hated Junior Arbiters and their teleporter homers. They were always given the cheap versions that made it a pain in the ass (literally) to teleport to them.

  Elena was hardly impressed as she stood in a massive open desert field that stretched on for miles beyond miles. There was meant to be an old station here but Elena couldn’t see it, smell it or even hear it. All she could see was an endless stretch of desert that looked horrific.

  “Arbiter!”

  Elena rolled her eyes and firmly placed her hands on her sidearms as a Junior Arbiter walked over in much thinner black armour.

  Elena nodded her respect to her junior who was nothing more than a short little man barely out of the academy.

  “My sorrys for the constant movement my Lord Elena. The suspected cultist was moving away from the station and I had to track him,”

  Elena nodded. That was okay in this single instant and it was good that the young man had at least some good instincts.

  The low sound of humming got louder and louder as a small hover bike drove towards them.

  “Is this the cultist?” Elena said as the hover bike got closer and closer.

  The Junior nodded. Elena wondered if he was actually going to do something but that clearly wasn’t going to appear.

  So Elena whipped out her sidearm. Shot the hover bike’s engines. Throwing the cultist forward.

  The Cultist was hardly an attractive example of the human gene pool that was a certainty that no jury (not that he was ever going to get a jury or trial for that matter) would disagree with. The Cultist was a young man with awful cuts, bruises and slices in his face and body.

  Elena wanted to shoot him right there and then for being such a disgusting human (some Arbiters had actually killed for a lot less) but this idiot had threatened the sexy human she was seriously missing so she had some questions for him.

  The Junior Arbiter kicked the cultist in the head and forced him to stand in a headlock.

  “I am Arbiter Elena, Agent of The Emperor and you will answer me,” Elena said firmly.

  The cultist cackled. “I do not recognise your or His Authority,”

  Elena was so going to enjoy snapping his neck. He was definitely a member of the Emperor’s Watch, which was actually a stupid name considering how badly this cult hated the Emperor. But that was the thing about cults, the traitors and their allies. They were all beyond stupid.

  “You attacked an innocent man tonight. A man from the Old Earth Hospital, why?” Elena asked.

  “He isn’t an innocent. He is an enemy of the Traitors and the Watch brotherhood. He is a servant of Dark Powers and had to die,”

  It took a moment for Elena to understand what the cultist meant by the whole Dark Powers thing, and from what she had read about the cult. They believed anyone siding with the Emperor to be corrupted by the Emperor’s dark magical powers (even though the Emperor had none).

  “He’s a servant of the Emperor?” Elena asked.

 

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