Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)

by Lee Bond

  He needed to know if she’d spontaneously evolved the ability to turn him into a drooling mushroom clone.

  Ugh. Not even five minutes in and he was already eager to be back home, dealing the usual gamut of shit. Things like ultra-powerful five thousand year old lunatics and end-of-the-world scenarios. Y’know, fun stuff.

  The Mark III gravny-gen harness would theoretically help with that, especially after tweaking it out like a goddamn mad scientist for the last few hours before launching himself into space on this goddamn mission.

  Huey shook his head. He was getting seriously worked up over this. Half his minds suggested he was worrying for nothing, the other half hinted that maybe they should just find the engine core overrides and blow the fucking thing up from a safe distance and one or two minds quite calmly suggested they’d really rather prefer having a pizza party and none of them were finding anything interesting coming from Vorpal Cannon.

  The AI grunted and goosed the gravny-shields’ engines. Maybe being closer to the assembled mental might of the flagship would assist in learning something important.

  Hamilton Barnes’ body –Huey wished he could think of it as his own - reacted to the sensation of sudden, smooth and extremely fast acceleration exactly the same as if he was sitting on a roller coaster; the old stomach did a strange flip flop, his center of gravity went haywire for a skittish second, and he even inadvertently let loose with a little anxious scream.

  Organic life was so fucking weird.

  Then, because he was en route to doing a potentially terrible thing and because he was supposed to be a hero, Huey looked around nervously before seguing into a wicked air guitar solo. As far as the AI was concerned, there was nothing more rock and roll than zipping along through space towards a gigantic war machine against the backdrop of a solar system enshrouded in a giant energy bubble.

  Huey laughed. Minus the occasional seriously life-threatening encounter with implausible beings, his life was exactly the sort of thing Garth yakked about long into the night when he was desperately trying to hold on to the wonder of the Universe instead of succumbing to the bleakness that reached to him from every corner of Existence.

  The AI shook his head and focused on the data streams roiling out from Politoyov’s ship.

  Sill nothing!

  Technically, the absence didn’t mean much. Not yet, though hope for brave survivors grew ever slimmer.

  Huey did some quick math. At the rate he was traveling, he’d be at the hull in less than ten minutes. There was always the option of taking a huge risk by tunneling directly through the constant chatter emanating from the ship and straight into the encrypted feeds. It’d be quicker than trying to swim ‘naturally’ through the ocean of data, for sure, but was it worth it?

  The AI decided to consider the rest of the communication sphere around him before making any further decisions by taking a gander at what the other ships in the neighborhood were up to; so long as he kept the directed focus of his mind away from his intended target, he should be able to mask his probes as incidental connectivity from Vorpal Cannon.

  Cautiously, tentatively, Huey unfurled more of his mind, reaching out through the void of space until subminds collided, ever so gently, with the deeper quantum emissions belonging to the dominant AI aboard the only other ship ‘nearest’ him. The Salacious Harpy was a mid-range fully armed battleship, designed more for battle around planets than conquering them; it was a lumbering beast ringed with hundreds and hundreds of beam engines capable of flash-frying enemies on all sides, not to mention top and bottom as well.

  If any alarms were triggered, not even a Mark III harness would keep him alive.

  The first thing Huey saw was that someone aboard the command vessel he was hurtling towards quite quickly had done their diligence in terms of keeping prying eyes and minds from questioning why the command vessel had broken ranks; Tendreel or one of her Myco-drones had warned every craft to be extra vigilant against 'The Floating Enemy'.

  "Sounds like an 80's episode of Doctor Who." Huey announced mirthfully, though thinking about those Harmony idiots and their willful attempts in giving Trinity's Army the willies still managed to piss him off no end.

  The actual memo popped up and the AI read through it quite cautiously.

  The communiqué was pretty straightforward: issued by Tech Expert Division and auto-approved by Politoyov's personal AI, it encouraged every ship currently assembled on the commander’s ‘side’ of the shield to maintain the barest minimum of contact with one another. Further, they were ordered to increase the distance between themselves and each other by a minimum of one thousand miles.

  A submind announced quietly that in all his years of service in both Special Services and the Army, Politoyov had never once used auto-approval for anything. The Offworlder was the quintessential micromanager when it came to his domain, personally signing off on everything from extra toilet paper to planetary bombardment requests.

  This sudden lapse in procedure piqued Huey’s interest, so he risked prying deeper into the strata of AI minds governing the vessel in search of the last truly official document bearing the commander's digital seal of approval and... came up wanting: Commander Aleksander Politoyov’s digital footprint stopped cold three days ago.

  Either… either Tendreel had murdered the Captain or he’d been the first to be infected with the Myco zombification plague.

  Huey shook his head in denial. The Old Man was too cagey to let himself get caught like that. Given the Offworld IndoRussian’s previous life before service to Trinity, there was every chance the guy was out there, trying to muster a new army to deal with Tendreel’s infection.

  “See?” Huey bitched at his minds. “This is totally why I didn’t want to do this! This is totally, one hundred percent fucked in every way!”

  As the ship grew closer, Huey toyed with the idea of redirecting his inquiry into Vorpal’s AI rig with the intention of ripping out video feeds just to see how messed up it was aboard until one of his subminds very dickishly reminded him of all the horror movies Garth had related, pointing out that this was a terrible combination of many, many ball-shrinking celluloid nightmares wrapped into one giant metal sardine can.

  “Fuck you guys.” Huey snapped.

  But he didn’t dig. Because that mind was right.

  The hull rushed at him and Huey deftly manipulated the controls of his harness rig until he came to a gentle rest against a massive armored slab. Then because fortune favors the bold and the suicidal with request beneficence, Huey have himself a high five and a Bronx cheer; he'd aimed for and landed at one of several external hatches with no need for extra maneuvering.

  "I'm just that good, bitches." A quick yet subtle submind assault on the hatch's autonomous security systems -a few trillion different combinations, nothing too difficult- and the heavy metal door popped open. Air trapped inside floated out, transforming instantly into ice flakes.

  As cocky as he was feeling, Huey was no fool. A Mycogene assault on unprotected sentient life was swift, savage and nigh on impossible to detect or deflect without having foreknowledge of the event; the inside of the ship could be anything from a graveyard to a truly Lovecraftian nightmare, with, like, frond-tentacles housing eyeballs that dripped weird shit all over the place hanging from everything and gigantic vulva-monsters shambling in the warm, wet darkness.

  Those kind of images were a far cry from the generally bumbling-seeming bipedal bodies the Mycogenes had been forced to wear thanks to Trinity’s intercession, making it too bloody easy to mistake them for the intergalactic mushroom-equivalent of Peewee Herman when they were, in fact, a vicious and virulent disease only playing at sentience.

  The AI clambered in, shut the door and spoofed the inner controls into thinking it was running a test on pressurization protocols when it was in fact, pressurizing the chamber. A counter began ticking down from sixty seconds.

  When a cluster of subminds demanded permission to begin running through the video
feeds, Huey almost buckled. Walking into a situation as potentially bad as the one he was getting ready for blind... wasn't really the best course of action.

  Watching the counter tick down, Huey licked his lips and shook his head.

  Too risky.

  The Tech Experts aboard this ship were the best. The Old Man only picked Specters at the top of their game. Mushroom-virused up or not, their relative absence thus far could be nothing more than a complicated gambit to lull invaders into false security.

  Besides which, he had the gravny-gen shield.

  Microscopic mushroom zombie viruses probably wouldn’t get in through the shield.

  The subminds flipped him off and did what the hell ever they did when they weren't bugging him, an attitude that never ceased to amuse Huey; the tiny instances of himself that he thought of as subminds were all that remained of the full-blown intellects that’d once done their very best to kill him, and now they toiled ceaselessly in trying to protect him.

  “How far we’ve come since then, eh?” Huey asked softly as the inner airlock hatch popped open with a clangor that –to his quietened ears- sounded like Sauron asking for a cup of tea. Prudence suggested he wait inside the airlock for another minute or so, preparing himself mentally and physically for the battle that might be coming at any second.

  The meatsuit’s impressive cybernetic array of offensive and defensive capabilities came on one by one, flickering green lights flashing then disappearing in the HUD of the mind’s eye. This, the last body to roll off the twisted monkey Hollyoak’s production floor, was one of a kind, utterly unique.

  “Thank God for that.” Huey admired the surge of power and preparedness flowing through the body he perpetually inhabited. The man who’d given up his soul so that some small measure of good may be done with his flesh had been –at the end- a noble, if terribly broken, man. The AI liked to think that somewhere deep down in the DNA, past where even the most sensitive and probing scanners could detect, some tiny fraction of Hamilton Barnes remained, driving the flesh’s ‘autonomous’ reactions, finding peace in the knowledge that his sacrifice hadn’t been in vain.

  It would certainly explain his terrible addiction to Charbo’s foods.

  When no slavering hordes of ravening monsters started hammering at the door, Huey smiled. He was absolutely dreading that first encounter with one of Tendreel’s Myco-drones; proper carbon-based life forms didn’t react super well to the Mycogene strain, oftentimes sporting truly hideous, Fright-o-Rama fungal protrusions from pretty much wherever, transforming them into dripping, wheezing, shambling slaves.

  “All I need is for fucking Sid Haig to show up and then I’ll be living a rock solid nightmare movie!”

  The AI shook his head.

  He was entirely too freaked out by what was waiting for him on the ship, and as he climbed free of the airlock hatch, battled-ready cybernetic systems running a gamut of programs and unleashing avatars that fell on ‘deaf’ AI ‘LINKs, Huey once again cursed Fenris. This time, in Klingon, because seriously, fuck that guy.

  You want someone dead, you do things the right way. You hire mercenaries or soldiers or assassins, or, like, launch missiles at them when they’re trying to have a bath. You don’t frighten a herald of the fucking Mycogene-Alzant Empire so badly she fungal-pees herself before deciding to zombify an entire spaceship.

  That kind of shit wasn’t gentlemanly.

  “When I get back to Latelyspace,” Huey whispered promisingly, “I am straight up going to shiv that motherfucker. I’m not a god yet.”

  Once the door to the airlock was properly closed –he made certain to spoof the brute-force security locks into thinking everything was nice and secure when in fact, it was merely shut- Huey took stock of his surroundings. Cybernetic eyes clicked through a series of filters until they adjusted to the low-light conditions of the hallway.

  Naturally: Mycogene worlds were perpetually musty, dusky and shrouded from the full brilliance of their sun thanks to the tremendous, towering mushroom trees and the never-ending stream of spores flowing through the sky.

  Tendreel would want to make her unwilling assistants feel as comfortable as possible. Several thousand subminds suggested sneaking the ship through the Latelian shield somehow, then dropping said stolen ship on top of Fenris, insisting that the Harmony soldier would be far too busy cackling and rubbing his hands maniacally to notice a several million ton spacecraft hurtling towards him. One even drew Huey a picture of what the scene would look like, drawing heavily from Heavy Metal magazine’s particular style.

  Huey spent a long picosecond contemplating that. As far as revenge scenarios went, it was certainly the most encompassing and Fenris had done more than enough in the last few years to warrant death-by-falling-super-destroyer.

  Alas, Fenris and the other Horsemen had a date with destiny, one Huey was reluctant to fuck with; he, more than anyone else save Garth, knew precisely what was coming for them, and while Fenris was personally a colossal douchebag, his presence was all but mandatory at that moment when the Darkness Fell and the Light rose.

  “I’ve never been on a spaceship this big,” Huey commented softly as he made his way down the first hallway, “but … they ain’t supposed to sound this quiet. This … this is … spooky.”

  And, to a large extent, it really and truly was spooky. There were certain things you expected aboard a large vessel like Vorpal Cannon, and while Huey knew all too well just what the men, women and Offworlders on the thing were up to, it was wildly disconcerting to be standing, alone, in a dark hallway, listening to the strange noises a ship this size got up to all the time; ordinarily unheard and unnoticed sounds –save by those who were paid to listen to the lifesigns of a spacecraft-, the pings, tings and other low rumbles passing through the corridors sounded all too much like disembodied spirits.

  Huey shut his eyes and commanded himself to stop being a pussy. There were no such things as ghosts. Not of any kind. He knew all there was to know about the formation of the Unreal Universe and how it worked and ghosts weren’t a thing. There were all kinds of things that were … things … in the Unreal Universe, but ghosts weren’t one of them.

  A particularly loud ka-chunk­ rumbled through the hull of the ship just then. Huey realized a split second later that he’d bolted from his casual position in the middle of the hall and was now pressed against a wall, trying to make as little of a target as humanly … cybernetically … trying to make himself as small a target as possible.

  The subminds chuckled, then informed him that what he’d likely heard was nothing more ghostly or spiritual than the ship’s automated services switching over to a fresh bank of air scrubbers.

  “You can all suck a dick. A big bag of spirit dicks. You’re not the ones out here, wandering through the corridors of a spaceship better investigated by goddamn Scooby Doo and the gang, not a mildly creeped out and paranoid level 11 artificial intelligence.” Huey disengaged himself from the wall and stared down the corridor to the far end. “Though no Scrappy Doo-ing. Fuck that mutt.”

  Huey, would-be God for Reality 2.0 and AI worried about ghosts, plotted his course and started walking, engaging the meatsuit’s espionage protocols as he did so; from now until he deactivated that particular set of avatars, the cybernetic machinery of Barnes’ body would automatically adjust his gait to reduce footstep sounds, regulate his heart rate and breathing patterns to counter most programs designed to detect those signs of life, decreased blood flow to the extremities so his heat signature faded into the background … all that a few dozen more tricks that had, in their time, made Hamilton Barnes a nightmare figure for bad boys and girls all over Latelyspace.

  Steadfastly ignoring contemplative thoughts such as ‘what’s down this dark corridor’ and ‘that noise was not an oxygen regulator, it was a banshee’ and ‘is there someone behind me’, Huey chose to consider the best method of dealing with Tendreel and her brood. A submind reminded him to consider Politoyov as a variable until or unless
his absence, death or transmutation became clearer. Huey added those possibilities into any retaliatory efforts by the monsters aboard and finalized the best possible option.

  Obviously, the end result was total destruction, but Huey was angling for something with a little more finesse than the boss, thus:

  By manipulating the very impressively constructed and coded black hole engines in ways Huey sincerely hoped no one in Special Forces had ever actively considered before, the AI intended on weaving artfully controlled sheets of gravity –no more than a micron or so distant from every ‘important’ surface in Vorpal Cannon- throughout the vessel. From there, it’d be more or less ushering everything trapped inside the gravity field out through a convenient exit and then behind the Cannon’s titanic engines.

  From there?

  Flame on. Everything not a part of the actual ship –desks, pens, pencils, underwear, Mycogene mutants- would be utterly incinerated.

  Myco threat? Handled.

  It’d take a masterclass programmer and someone infinitely knowledgeable in fine-tuning powerful natural forces, but Huey was totally confident he could pull it off so long as he had the time.

  As always, there was the N’Chalez Option. It was much quicker.

  “Destroying the ship’d take … three seconds? Three seconds. Also, not a priority option.” Huey took a left, mind’s eye blazing with a big red quest marker style arrow leading him towards the engineering section. “But I need more … finesse. Not that, you know, I’m trying to outdo the boss, or anything. That’d be silly.”

  Silly to a point, certainly, because Huey knew that if he did try to one-up the old boss man, they’d be at all damn day long because the boss was the boss and he hadn’t met a challenge he didn’t take.

  And to be honest, while Garth could handle the resultant presence of Trinity and It’s endgame soldiers in a hurry, Huey wasn’t certain he could pull it off, or if he’d even want to make the effort because while they were running around looking for answers, he’d be hanging out somewhere in the local cluster trying to figure a fucking way to get home that didn’t involve inviting the unruly neighbors in for an intergalactic kegger.