Free The Imperium by PM Barnes Page B

take
care of them all.
    My great uncle had a prosthetic leg,
something I understand to be a primitive version, of what we have
available now, and an old gun that had been handed down for
generations.
    As my father told it, he (my uncle) had no
idea if any of the 6 firing cartridges (which were referred to as
bullets) would even work. Lucky for him (and us all) they did.
    As it goes, toward the evening one night, as
my great grandmother was putting my father down, they heard the
roar of motorcycles approaching and the loud hoots and hollers of
men. My great uncle had told my great grandmother to get into the
basement with my grandfather and not make a sound.
    At this point, my father would switch the
narration to my grandmother's point of view and say that as she
huddled there in the dark, clutching her son in one hand and a
knife she had grabbed from the kitchen in the other, she was
mentally preparing to fight until the end, should the men make it
to where they were hiding.
From the basement, she could not hear much of what was going on
above. But, after some muffled conversation and some stomping, she
heard two loud bangs. The bangs had startled her as well as my
grandfather, who began to cry. She cooed him as best she could, but
he would not be silenced. She knew that their position would be
given up.
As she heard footsteps approaching the door, she laid my still
crying grandfather down behind her and got into a fighting stance
with the knife.
When the door to the basement opened and what little light they
used in the house, spilled down, all she could see was the
silhouette of a man.
    Then my great uncle had called down to
her.
    She had dropped the knife, grabbed my
grandfather and gone upstairs to hug my great uncle. After the
emotions had died down, she asked what had happened and ran to the
door to see a man lying half in and half out of the house, with a
small pool of blood spreading around him.
    Six men had come to the house that night. My
great uncle killed one and wounded another. He became somewhat of a
legend in our small community after that. Many people would come
by, bringing offerings of food and drink, just to hear the famous
tale and see the spot on the wood were the blood had stained
it.
    My great uncle and father, along with other
men from the community, had formed a watch group of sorts after
that. Standing guard with their primitive weapons of knives
attached to long sticks, prepared to fight to the end if the need
so arose.
With the word out that we also possessed an ancient weapon and were
not to be tampered with, the fear of being raided became almost
extinct in our little corner of the world.
    Through my great uncles act of bravery and my
family's subsequent assistance in keeping the peace, we began to
drop the cloak of destitution and shame and rose into the warriors
who we were always destined to be.
    When word that the great General Tollis had
begun to amass an army arrived, my family was one of the first ones
to sign on. General Tollis spoke of gaining back our planets once
fine glory. He was greatly respected by everyone the world over and
was highly revered in my family.
He had already started the process of unifying all of us left on
earth, into one nation. This unification allowed us to begin to
organize and create an infrastructure again. Manufacturing popped
back up, along with farming and education. In addition to that, as
we begun to heal and come together, we put a stop to the pillaging
and crime that had plagued us as a planet for almost a century.
    He brought back the light and gave us
something to be proud of again. He saved us all from the edge.

    The stories of how he helped to restore our
glory became part of the fabric of my early years growing up.
Everyone in my family before me, who could serve, did, including my
mother who had lost her left eye in the war.
As a young boy, all I ever dreamed of, was the day that I too could
join the fight and continue the tradition of excellence