The first thing you must understand about the Black Knight is that I am evil, irredeemably evil, absolutely evil, and because of that, I have no pity, no mercy, no disregard for human life; I will stop at absolutely nothing, and no action, no thought, no plan is too foul, too murderous, too treacherous, or too destructive for me to embrace and enact.
All of these things are, to one degree or another, lies. But this appears to be the only thing they understand, so I’m going to roll with it.
To be a bit more precise, I am certainly “evil” by quite a lot of definitions, and in the eyes of many, and I’d consider that if there are such things as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ lying around, what I’ve seen of ‘good’ doesn’t particularly inspire in me a sense of fellow-feeling. Saying that I ‘reject conventional conceptions of morality’ would be philosophically more appealing, but there’s a certain generalized contempt in simply assigning ‘conventional morality’ to others. Internalized intellectual laziness is a deathwatch beetle in the neocortex. It’s why “antiheroes” don’t do the ‘opposite’ of what heroes do; imagine someone whose daily routine included “Don’t brush your teeth, don’t take supplements, and don’t eat, because heroes do those things”; that would be a very short-lived (and overly literal) interpretation of the role.
In practice, there are neutral sides in a Galactic war, but they are (if you’ll stretch your historical searches back a bit) best-suited to take on the role of a 19th-century Switzerland: a firmly-stated neutrality, reinforced by, in practice, taking on an essential role as middleman in international banking affairs, and, not coincidentally, surrounded by mountains.
As a single, large-but-not-massive colony ship, my crew and I have none of those options. Oh, we could hide in some faraway system, surrounded by, say, asteroids or solar flares. But space is not the same as the Earthscape; the Swiss mountains were not likely to pulse unexpectedly and wipe out your life-support; and there’s no metaphor for hovering near an asteroid field. There doesn’t have to be one; if you don’t understand the likely risks of keeping your ship close to asteroids, you ought not be Captain.
And maybe I ought not be Captain; but there was no-one onboard who hated the idea of my Captaincy more than I did, and I was the one holding the plasma blaster on the duly-elected representatives of my people. And I’d do it again; hypothetically, I rule by force, and my people are helpless in the grip of an interstellar madman. In practice, we knew that every option we debated, back when the war broke out, was likely to get us killed. I’ve kept us alive so far, and they’ve all got plausible deniability. If we’re ever captured, they can say that they had no choice but to obey the dictator whose forces held all the weapons.
In reality, if every single one of my guards accidentally fell asleep on duty, their weapons on the floor beside them, they’d be awakened by a sharp, quiet poke in the ribs, and a whispered hiss, “Get up, you idiot.” But the rest of the Galaxy doesn’t need to know that.
The Black Knight duels other spaceships. Yes, duels. I find (through my sources, my unexpected and manifold sources) military ships which are floating somewhere in space, and I challenge them to duels.
My goal is the humiliation of all those in the Galaxy whose pilots are not as sharp as I, whose weapons are not as well-tuned, whose crews are not so bloodthirsty and ravening for blood. I do not seek to obliterate my targets. I damage their ships and then demand a ransom of transferred credits immediately. I don’t finish them off, for they must live to know that The Black Knight is their superior, and they have been bested, defeated, wrecked, left to limp home in disgrace.
An observer with a sympathetic perspective might note that this is a reasonable method of committing as humanitarian a form of space-piracy as possible. Certain journalists have done this, and I—well, my chief propagandist—has found time to search out these articles and rebut them in the strongest of terms. The Black Knight does not want your pity or your sympathy; I want your fear, your respect, and, should we cross spaceways, your credits. My attacks have crippled ships, ruined missions, certainly killed at least some of their recipients, even (rarely) destroyed ships, particularly if those ships came close to destroying me. The Black Knight is like a rabid creature—but not some small creature, or a domesticated animal like a former pet. The Black Knight is some great beast, dangerous in its own right, and dangerously ill in ways which make me ferocious, make my bite lethal, make me unpredictable.
And let me emphasize this to you: sure, this is showmanship. But it’s also quite real.
If any of my guards did fall asleep on duty, they’d be disciplined. If the former heads of my people asked for their jobs back, the kindest thing I’d do is laugh at them. We’ve gone from a democracy to a dictatorship; and if the governed find that comforting, that doesn’t necessarily make it a kindness.
We are a small people, in a relatively small ship. For weeks, as the War drew ever-closer to us, we debated what side we should join; or if we could possibly flee as far as possible; or if there was any neutral role we might take on. By the time my crew and I marched into the conference rooms with cocked weapons and some serious anger issues, they’d been long deadlocked; and had I waited much more, they, and we, and I, would simply be dead.
I said I was evil; I might be. The truth is, both sides of the Galactic conflict have proclaimed themselves holy, and the other side heretics; and that’s why there are no neutral parties. “How can you be undecided between that which is Right and that which is Monstrous?” Quite a number of ships, early on, declared the neutrality. Those ships still exist, in a technical sense, in the form of bits of floating wreckage. Most of the time, they very quickly found either an immediate understanding of the correctness of those with the bigger guns, or they discovered whether or not there’s an Afterlife.
I’d rather not learn either thing. I’m prepared to do quite a number of things which I might, in my heart, consider unforgivable in order to avoid either of the fates above, and I might even forgive myself. I don’t know my own sense of morality anymore. You can’t necessarily proclaim a role, and live by it, without eventually becoming it, and deep down, I have no regrets whatsoever. Perhaps that means I’m damned; I don’t care. All I care is that when they see most ships, they attack. When they see The Black Knight, they flee.
Survival isn’t always justification. But I’ll worry about survival now, ethics later.
I’d like to think that, deep down, people are scared right now. They’re easily led by those who suggest that there’s clearly a “just path” and a “wrong way”, and that’s understandable. Someday, the Black Knight might be able to come out of the shadows and take its rightful place along with all the colonies and nation-states of the Galaxy.
For today, though, we’ll take your credits, and we’ll leave you what remains of your ship. Go ahead and tell your story to anyone you’d like; this room’s scrambler device will garble any attempts at recording you might have made, and if you ever tell anyone that The Black Knight is anything less that a demon of the spacelanes, they’ll just think you’re lying, because it’s not what they want to hear.
But if we ever cross paths, I think you’ll surrender without a fight, yes?
…what’s that?
Oh, no, the name “Black Knight” is hardly trademarked. What nation would give it that level of legal standing?
No, I wouldn’t mind if you took on that name. There’s at least a half-dozen of us now, each claiming we came up with the idea. That’s why The Black Knight is everywhere, and why, even if one ship is sure it has blown up The Black Knight, it always returns. There’s no formal agreement between any of us, but we do tend to leave each other alone; why attack each other when the skyways are full of pigeons, waiting to be plucked?
It’s historically inaccurate, but given that both phenomena are in our distant past, nobody really cares, so I’ll let you in on a secret: a bottle of rum really is a lovely thing, and for reasons I cannot explain, letting out a hearty “Yo ho ho!” always improves my disposition.
Here, have a slug of grog, and try it out for yourself. Draw out the “y” in “Yo”, and sort of bite off the syllable at the end; that shows ’em you mean business.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
I put on a convention for Villains every February.
I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!
