Excerpt
Marvel: Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda
Chapter 1Goree“Come back to me,” the white-haired woman crooned.
The galaxy was inky black, all streaks and stars and nothingness. It was a cocoon that soothed and suffocated, that coddled and crushed. It was dread personified, a darkness that plagued and gave no assurances, save for the assurance of despair.
Anxiety brewed in the soul of the man, the dreamer, and panic bloomed in his sleep. He twisted and turned, sweat beading his forehead and dripping down his neck, face scrunched up in agony.
Yet, amid this consternation, the face of the white-haired woman was there, a balm. She lay next to him, shoulders bare, head in her hand, propped up by a crooked elbow. Concern was written all over her face, but that did not stop her from being beautiful. Her skin, smooth and dark and unblemished, reminded him of home, her shining eyes a guiding light, a way out of this hellhole and into the comforting arms of a warm place he struggled to remember.
“Come back home,” the woman whispered, and he was filled with the desire to do exactly that. He reached out to touch her, gain hold of something real amid this etherealness. But he never got there because an eerie sound, loud and sharp, pierced the moment, and the woman was gone.
Rrrrooooo!
The man opened his eyes and sat up.
He was among people, like him and unlike him in many ways, all sitting on the floor of a cold, sterile room. Triangular windows brought little light in and opened up into nothingness: desolate land and planetary bodies round and large and far and near in the sky above the horizon. The vastness of space seeped from his sleep and stretched out before him, a dream he could not blink away. The stars offered no comfort, the constellations no familiarity; he could not shake the wrongness of his being among them.
Rrrrooooorrr!
Everyone in the room, though all different species, was dressed the same: a gray jumpsuit with snatches of blue, a label printed on their chests. He looked down and saw he was dressed no differently. They all wore the same tired, despondent expression, and no one spoke to anyone else. He mentally counted them in fives and realized they were about thirty, jam-packed into a room meant for half that number, which explained why he’d awoken to the sole of a boot resting an inch from his face.
Rrrrooooorrroooo!
The man turned to the windows and peered closer.
Outside was a vortex. It was the only way to describe what he was seeing: a massive hole, surrounded by aircraft, groundcraft, and floating freighters, all hauling significant amounts of rock.
A mine, he realized.
Below, in the lower trenches of the hole—the mine—were beings all dressed like him. Some hacked at rocks with mechanized diggers, while others hauled large rock collections on their backs. There was something familiar about the rock itself, or about the mining, but the memory was too far to reach, buried somewhere too far back in time for him to place.
Rrrrooooorrrooooo!
It took him a moment, but he began to piece it all together. The locked doors, the piercing sound that he now realized was an alarm, the room that increasingly looked like a cell, and beings that increasingly looked like fellow inmates.
But it wasn’t just that this looked like a prison. It was the specific brand of imprisonment that dawned on him, that his bones recognized even though his mind’s eye didn’t. The complete absence of agency, a void where he ought to feel self-investment—a familiar song vibrating in his marrow. The walls here spoke a language his skin could understand: demanding, extracting, hard, hard labor.
Slave, he realized. I’m enslaved.
The hiss of a pressurized door caught his attention. He turned to see four guards dressed in combat suits, complete with helmets and red visors, fill the doorway. Their jaws, the only parts of their faces visible besides their eyes, were hard and set, teeth bared in disdain. They whipped out their stun batons, and the whirs of their windups echoed around the room. Electricity crackled at the baton tips.
“You heard the alarm!” the lead guard said. “Move, you dumb mules!”
The guard reached forward and stunned the first person before him. The prisoner, green of skin and eyes so large they occupied half their face, yelled in a language the dreamer couldn’t understand and fell to the ground. The bzzt! of the shock did the job of jolting everyone else to their feet, some stopping to help their semi-stunned comrade up. The prisoner, on jelly legs, leaned against another.
“Let’s go!” the lead guard screamed.
They began to file out of the room. The man, the dreamer, still not fully comprehending what was happening, remained seated on the floor. Consternation brewed within him. He wanted to remember more, to piece together this puzzle, but gaping holes opened whenever he tried, no glue to hold together increasingly disparate parts. Consternation turned into frustration, then anger, as he realized that these precious memories weren’t simply missing.
They had been taken from him, from everyone in this room.
He was going to get them back.
“Hey!” The lead guard stepped up to him. “You.”
The dreamer didn’t look up. He felt his body tense, readying itself for the situation about to unfold. The memories of his mind might be far off, but the memories of his body had yet to forsake him. And how they bristled, stood at the ready, dared to be given a chance to demonstrate their prowess.
“You find my instruction confusing?” The guard was standing above the dreamer now. “Perhaps a clarification, then.”
The guard swung his weapon, bringing electricity down on the dreamer. His arm and baton whooshed in a large arc, promising nothing but pain.
The dreamer’s hand shot up and caught the guard’s wrist mid-flight.
It was as if he were being controlled by a being from elsewhere—from elsewhen—that understood him more than he understood himself. The memories of his body were swift, deadly, unparalleled. They responded without hesitation, his other arm swinging across and whacking the guard’s jaw in an uppercut, sending him to the floor.
As the lead guard hit the ground, his comrades drew new weapons—firearms—and shot at the dreamer.
The dreamer’s body moved, angled out of the way. The bullets whizzed past him, on one side and the other.
“Don’t damage the emperor’s property!” shouted the afflicted lead guard, still coming to his feet. “Stun! Stun!”
The guards’ batons crackled. They advanced.
Property, thought the dreamer. I am the emperor’s property.
This inflamed a new rage in his heart, rising up to his ears, filling his head. Now, he didn’t even wait to be attacked. He moved first, tackling a nearby guard, grabbing his arm, and swinging the man over his shoulder. The man crashed into two others standing nearby. Another guard advanced too close, and the dreamer crouched low and swung his leg out, taking the man’s feet out from under him. As the guard landed, the dreamer brought his knee down on his head, knocking him out.
Slowly, the dreamer picked out the fallen guard’s baton. Electricity crackled.
“Don’t you—” another guard started.
The dreamer didn’t let him finish. Baton met chest, and the guard yelled. He squeezed his weapon, but the dreamer redirected his aim. The blast shattered the visor of another guard.
The dreamer picked up the firearm and looked at it. The weapon, so comfortable in his grip. It felt like power, a feeling he realized, now, was not at all alien to him. Sitting on that floor, clouded by doom, he realized how much had gone into ensuring that he and the others around him experienced nothing but paralysis. What he felt now was the opposite of that. As if he was made for this.
The face of the white-haired woman appeared to him again, her eyes unblinking, her gaze concerned, her unvoiced words pleading.
Come back home.
Indignation burned in his chest. His fellow inmates stared at him, confused, fascinated, enamored, their gazes asking the question their mouths dared not.
Surely, you would not?
Surely, I would, thought the dreamer. And so should you.
His grip tightened on the firearm. He turned, swiped one of the guards’ keys, and jammed it against the sensor. The door hissed open. Then he was running in the hallway.
Voices followed him wherever he turned. ATTENTION, ATTENTION! ASSET LOOSE IN THE SOUTHWEST QUADRANT! ASSETS ARE THE EXCLUSIVE PROPERTY OF EMPEROR N’JADAKA.
That word again: property. It triggered something feral and violent in him, a desire for revenge of the most brutal sort. Whoever this N’Jadaka person was, just they wait until he found them. He would make sure they paid for what they had done to him, for what they were doing to everyone here.
