With the entire Baraken fleet gathered around the planet, the Tartarusios was completely surrounded, and the Emperor's message had been as stiff as an executioner's order.
At that moment, Kaiser the First was making his way toward the control room. He walked slowly through the corridors of the ship with one hand pressed against his chest. When the doors opened, there he was — the old Emperor himself, with Mahin and Tarko at his sides. Everyone on the bridge turned to look at him.
Youri, who had no idea who the two old men were, raised an eyebrow. "Hey, are you sure these two didn't sneak in from that place you were in?"
"No, they didn't sneak in," Oscar said. "In fact, the old man in the middle is the previous Emperor. Kaiser the First."
Youri frowned in confusion, and before he could ask anything else, Mahin stepped forward. "Captain, His Majesty wishes to speak with his son, if he may."
The situation was already complicated, and it had just become far more so. Oscar shrugged. "What do we have to lose? Go on, old man. Give it a try."
A little later, a call came through to the Baraken flagship, and Kaiser the Second smiled as he received the news, believing it was the Tartarusios' surrender. What was about to unfold, not even he could have predicted. When the call opened on the main screen, there was his father's face in front of him — the man he had once banished to the deepest pit in the Empire, now looking back at him. He could barely recognize him; all those years in the Labyrinth had done their work. Every officer on the flagship's bridge was frozen with shock at the sight of their former sovereign.
Long before he took the throne, Kaiser the Second had lived in his father's shadow. Kaiser the First had been the Great Kaiser, the Emperor who brought peace between the United Empire and the Planetary Alliance and ended the long war his great-grandfather had started. That peace had taken more than it gave, as peace always does, and to hold onto it, the Emperor had almost never been home. He was always away on diplomatic missions or buried in work, and that left a great hollow in his young son's heart. The boy lost his mother, Tatiana, when he was only seven, in a crash that killed her and every one of her attendants. Perhaps after that the Emperor buried himself even deeper in his work so that he would not have to face what had happened. If so, it was not the right choice.
At ten, the young Kaiser was sent to live with his grandfather, Ludwig Baraka — a renowned man and a great emperor in his own right. Ludwig had himself been raised by his own grandfather, Frederic Roches, the leader of the revolution who had seized the Empire by killing the rightful Emperor of his day, Molio Trifonov, and who had taken the name Frederic Baraka — the name that lived on ever since. Frederic had lived by the sword, and he died by it. His own son, Florian, the father of Ludwig, ran him through the heart one day as they walked together in the royal garden, over ideals and a hunger for power that no one ever fully understood. That act cost Florian his claim to the throne and sent him into exile. So young Ludwig became Emperor at fifteen. He ruled mostly in peace, though he could be something of a war junkie at times — perhaps a reflection of the years he had spent under his grandfather's wing. When he grew old, he gave up the throne to his son Kaiser and retired to the countryside to watch over his grandson, just as his own grandfather had once watched over him.
Ludwig taught the boy many things: fencing, battle strategy, and even how to talk to women, for Ludwig had been a notorious charmer in his youth. But there was one lesson above all that he drilled into the young Kaiser, a saying he had learned from his own grandfather: A great ruler is one who is feared by his enemies, for to be truly feared takes a different kind of heart. Those words dug deep into the boy's soul. When he was fifteen, Ludwig died at the age of seventy-eight, and something inside the young Kaiser changed that would later decide his whole destiny.
On his twentieth birthday, the young Kaiser asked his father to take a trip with him, on the pretext of finally spending some time together. The date was set for the eighteenth of February, 4813, and it would be remembered as the day Kaiser the First died — or so everyone believed. That day, as they traveled toward the family's countryside villa, the son's plan was already in motion. Every servant and every guard on that ship had made a deal with him, some for money and others for power or position; every one of them had something to gain. When the ship turned off course toward the Labyrinth, the old Emperor understood what was happening. He looked into his son's eyes and wondered whether that was the same look his ancestor had worn when he drove a sword through his own father's heart. It would have been better, he thought, for his son to kill him outright than to send him down there to rot. But he was powerless by then, and fate had other plans.
Now Kaiser the Second rose from his throne and stared at the screen, and his father — old, bruised, battered — looked back at him and spoke.
"Greetings, my son. It has been a long time. You probably thought I was dead, but somehow I survived these past nineteen years. I see my absence hasn't stopped the Empire from growing, and that, at least, is good news. I have two things to say to you." His voice was steady, though his hand still pressed against his chest. "The first is that I forgive you for everything. To be honest, I forgave you on the very day you sent me to the Labyrinth. I know I was not a good father, and you had every right to do what you did. The second is this. Please abdicate the throne and step down as Emperor. Our time has come to an end, and I think it is time for both of us to let go."
Kaiser the Second slammed his fist against the arm of his throne and glared at the screen. "How dare you say that to me, after everything you did! You ask me to step down? My father is dead. He has been dead for nineteen years. You're nothing but a ghost talking nonsense." His voice dropped, cold and terrible. "So look at me now, and I'll show you what I can do."