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

by Lee Bond

  The Engineer plugged a fifteen second countdown into the machine’s firing mechanism and the Sheets disappeared in puffs of light. He shut his eyes. He wished he could hear something in the dead city of Arcadia beyond the beating of his own heart, the hissing of blood through veins, but it was dead silent. Agnethea and PK were too far away for the sounds of their battle to reach his straining ears, and while the Menagerie could probably be heard if they felt like shouting at him, they were probably too busy trying to figure out a way to get past the impenetrable shield. The Armory was just above him, a little off to the left, but it, too, was too high up for anything that might be going on to be heard.

  Garth N’Chalez sighed happily, though he deeply wished he wasn’t. This was how he wanted the End of All Things to be. Him, astride a machine, surrounded by silence, the moment of devastation a tick-tock away.

  Every man, woman and talking insect puttering along doing their thing, blissfully unaware that their lives were destined to end and then … nothing. Maybe a flash of light, but one done with so quickly and so painlessly that their eventual reemergence into Reality 2.0 would be one free of the burden of their Unreal lives.

  Only that was a fairy tale.

  The Birth of Reality 2.0 was going to be the opposite. Rivers of blood and galaxies of torment were destined to fall on him before the penultimate moment, a never-ending battlefield full of noise enough to drown everything out.

  3…

  2…

  Garth opened his eyes.

  The disintegration field burst outward, invisible, untraceable, a mighty fist of unstoppable power that turned everything as far as the eye could see into denatured nanoparticulate that gently shivered into nothingness. There wasn’t even anything destructive or chaotic about the erasure of the city. Just … buildings and trees and towers puffing into nothingness, atomic-sized poofs, transforming Arcadia in seconds into a wavering, nevermore hallucination. Everything was gone save the smooth cobblestones that’d been Arcadia’s foundation. Nothing else remained, save the Armory, still floating high overhead, a glittering diamond, a beacon of possible hope.

  The disintegration disc gave a stuttering gasp of iron discontent, then shut down, it’s various and innumerable parts fused or consumed by the mega-blast.

  Garth looked up at the Armory, then back to where he could just barely discern Agnethea and PK duking it out. It was unsurprising that the two hadn’t let the sudden and abrupt dissolution of their surroundings keep them from the dual goal of survive at all costs and kill the other guy. Each one of them was fighting for something more important than mere ‘survival’.

  With a flat, smooth surface and nothing but straight lines separating him from his goal, the distance between them would be closed in less than two minutes.

  The Platinum King would be pulling out all the stops now, that was a given. Caught completely off guard by a Specter’s desperation, the nanotech hivemind would be in a great rush to do Agnethea in, to retain some of it’s own mighty scheme.

  “Hold on for a couple minutes, Agnethea. I’m coming.” Garth jumped from the defunct world-destroyer and sped off towards the two combatants, trying to come up with some method of doing for what was –essentially- the physical manifestation of a true God in such a way that when he was inevitably victorious, there was enough mojo left over to deal with Barnie.

  So far he had ‘hey, so, yeah, I totally killed your Menagerie guys and just destroyed a city and fucked your plans up, so … yeah. How’s about you just, y’know, admit defeat like a super-intelligent thinking machine should?’

  Awesome.

  ***

  Furious indignation burned through them. How could They have missed something so obvious as transforming Arcadia’s disintegration disc into an actual weapon that could be fired? The concept wasn’t even a new one! Davram the Last Brigadier had literally only just done the same thing, though obviously with a fair bit more destruction and fallout than N’Chalez’ infinitely cleaner undertaking; where Davram’s finale would need proper dealing with to clear the proverbial atmosphere of Will-defeating fallout, Garth’s efforts in clearing the playing field had whisked Arcadia away into memory, leaving not even a single undisturbed atom, let alone any destructive quantum fluctuations.

  “Your Specter is a marvel.” They admitted as They pushed Their advantage; the deadly Queen of Dark Golems –while mentally prepared for the sudden destruction, she’d nevertheless been … spiritually … unprepared for the utter absolution of everything surrounding them- had made a huge misstep when everything around them had shivered into sparkling motes of nothingness, and now they were once again at the advantage.

  Agnethea smiled through the pain. The Platinum King’s cruelly sharp buzzswords were proving very effective against her flesh. Those first few cuts had healed themselves within a few seconds, a minute at the most, but the wicked blades were now leaving long grooves on her arms and legs, vicious gashes that weren’t knitting themselves together.

  “Yes, yes he is.” Now that Arcadia was officially gone, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, somewhere deep inside her, the girl she’d been before taking that first, chaotic sip of extruded Dark Iron was trying to claw her way back to the light by reminding her of the many things she’d once loved more than life itself. “And soon, no less than a minute or so, now, he shall be here and we both shall do for you, as is only fitting.”

  ”Then,” They snarled ferociously, lashing out with their chuckling buzzblades, “we shall have to call this little drama to a close. We confess; We are disappointed in Ourselves for having underestimated the man. We need to prepare for his return.”

  Agnethea tried dodging her opponent’s slashing attack and failed: she was too weakened by her wounds. To make matters worse, the fire in her mind grew suddenly effervescent as the nasty blades grew closer. Unable to dance out of the way, she gasped in breathless agony at the searing hot, frightfully wet tears being gouged into her stomach.

  Quick on the heels of the vicious attack, the maths inside her mind suddenly began trickling outwards, filling the air on all sides of the mocking King –he … it … had a most amused lilt to their disconcertingly mobile mouth and an all too sardonic cast to it’s limitlessly deep silver eyes- with fire-edged numbers too profound to believe!

  Agnethea threw her hands up in the air, clutching the singlesticks clumsily still, and backed away from both King and the thunderous, burning numbers. For all her efforts, one of the sapphire-wreathed weapons clattered free and rolled away, spitting bursts of lightning that danced like snakes across the ground.

  The bloody pain in her gut reached up and took hold of all conscious control for a heart-pounding second, and in that second, the remaining singlestick dropped from her slack hand, sending yet another round of power through earth and air.

  Standing there, wondering why the King had not pressed the attack, Agnethea stared on in incredulous disbelief as the lightning flickering fitfully from her discarded weapons collided with the numbers floating through the air, literally hammering them into the invisible skin of the world.

  There! The King did come suddenly, passing through the unseen torment of numbers and lightning, and … Agnethea couldn’t be certain, but it looked to her as though faint tendrils of the powerful stuff attached themselves unawares to the mad metal monstrosity.

  Soon. Soon now it would be over, the task given unto her by The Engineer dispatched with all proper haste.

  Agnethea could not wait for the silence. It’d been too long in coming, the blood on her hands too dark to be cleansed any other way.

  They moved in for the kill, heightened senses calculating with near one hundred percent certainty that this moment would be the moment they were successful. Chuckling buzzswords held high for a purely theatrical double-evisceration that served no real purpose other than their own perverse amusement, They …

  … Stepped on a singlestick and lurched forward like a pregnant water buffalo, traitorous body dropping Their s
words as arms and hands flailed madly to regain balance.

  A childlike peal of laughter erupted from Agnethea at the sight of the ruthless King careened forward like a drunken stumblebum. She clapped her hands, truly and blissfully amused at the sight of her foe coming to a lurching, ungainly standstill.

  Seeing the machine monarch’s face flash with rage and anger and sensing that it was about to launch some kind of attack –it was, after all, skilled enough to turn even the most ungainly stumble to it’s advantage- Agnethea went to skip away out of grasping reach, only to slip on the other singlestick.

  “Oh now, surely…” Agnethea lamented as she, too, fell, though where her adversary had fallen forward and was even now turning that stumbling gait into something a little more combat-ready, she went backwards onto her derriere without so much as a by your leave, floundering hands tearing the veil covering her eyes off in the process.

  They lurched forward at lightning speed, a deadly monochromatic viper, seizing this unbelievable moment with both hands. They would choke the life out of the Queen of Dark Golems before Master Nickels arrived –senses not what they were, not now, not with the detritus from a destroyed city filling the quantum airwaves, they nevertheless knew N’Chalez was closer than was good for them- so that when the ‘Engineer’ arrived, they could simply look at him, motion to the Armory, and wait for the rest of the story to fall out properly. All moments concerning awkward battles and being evenly matched against one of their own creations would be forgotten.

  The Platinum King descended on her, all rage and fury, all sense of machine-driven logic out the window, knees settling down on the sweet spots of her arms; the antagonist ground the points of Their knees deep into the flesh and muscle there, sending brilliant stabs of pain through her, swift agony to match the slow, meticulous throbbing of the sword-wounds shining wetly across her shredded stomach.

  Agnethea struggled, kicked her legs as high and as frantically as she could, but the King was too heavy. She was done for.

  “Stop now, my child.” The Platinum King whispered gently. “It is over with. The millennia of your agony has come to a close. You failed. There is nothing wrong with that. We have come to realize that there are only two options in life, and they are not even true options at that. One is failure. The other is success. Everything else is just variations on a theme. Open your eyes. Greet your end valiantly.”

  Agnethea did as she was bade. The secret side of the man, peeking his head out every now and then to see what was going on, hadn’t been smart enough or wise enough or prepared enough for this moment, hadn’t been aware of what the Platinum King’s existence implied.

  The Queen of Dark Golems stared into the reflective surface of her ‘true’ father’s form. She was beaten, torn and bloody and damn the King, but his blades had done a thorough hatchet job of her hair and her last set of good clothes. She’d like to believe she’d given as good as she’d got, but … had she? Those numbers –or whatever they were- still danced around the King, were still all wrapped up in lightning-fire, were still tenuously connected … were they … they were!

  The blazing numbers were growing closer and closer to her conqueror! Passing through them to come at her had sprung the trap!

  Agnethea pouted prettily. “And I was so looking forward to coming to the afterlife dressed for a party.”

  But something was wrong with the King; her enemy, proven not so much victorious as the luckier of the two on the field of combat, was twisting it’s head this way and that, stretching it’s neck all out of proportion as it tried to comprehend what it saw. Eyes widening to two then three times the size, gigantic, glistening pools of quicksilver that Agnethea felt she would fall into, the King was the very reflection of pure concern.

  “What’s this?” They whispered, Their voice hashing at the edges of sibilance. “What’s this what’s this?” They licked Their lips. “Your eyes, Queen Agnethea, your weak spot, they pool with something never seen before.”

  To Their enhanced senses, the twinkling pools of metal in the Dark Golem’s eyes not only shone with iridescent fervor, but data; relentless streams of ones and zeros folded in on themselves, buckled and twisted this way and that, forming tesseracts and other impossible shapes, each repetition growing closer to some goal … they widened their own already huge eyes further.

  Something in Queen Agnethea was trying to solve Their cyphers. The numbers shifting this way and that in the Golem’s eyes were code breaking engines, swift and fleet and altogether too-well programmed to be something of the Arcadian’s own devising. As she lay there, still ready for her own death, it was obvious to them they had no clue that somehow, Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez had transformed her into a walking, talking decryption machine.

  Agnethea made to respond to the King’s query, but something snagged her attention. She laughed. “Too late, Le Roi de Platine, for mine savior doth approach.”

  They rotated one of Their eyes around to spy upon the approaching aggressor. Sure enough, in Their distraction, Garth had managed to get within two hundred feet of Their position without being heard. No matter. Counting down the precious seconds until he arrived, They waited until They were certain he was moving too fast to stop or change direction.

  Then they caused a wall to rise up out of the earth.

  The collision was … powerful.

  They rotated their eye back to where it belonged. “Now then,” They said clinically, “let Us see if your savior thought to prepare you for death, hey?”

  Agnethea, believing her eyes couldn’t widen any further, did just that when the Platinum King’s thumbs turned into long, slender, curved hooks with shivering jagged edges.

  This was it, this was the end. There was nothing anyone could do. Her friend, the one she … the one she thought she could’ve properly loved was either dead or unconscious. No one was going to save her.

  The cruel, dazzlingly bright hooks descended, gently breaking the surface of her repurposed corneas.

  The numbers danced.

  ***

  “Platinum King used Wall.” Garth picked himself up woozily. “It was super effective. Fucking Christ that hurt.” Not as much as that time in Jimmy’s basement when he’d come barreling out of ex-dee faster than Speedy Gonzalez en route to the bathroom after Taco Bell, but still, he’d been hustling his ass at a respectable clip. “Wellp. Time to save Agnethea.”

  Garth strolled around the corner, a nasty quip or two on tap about the relative inefficiency of certain Platinum Kings, prudence also pushing him to add three layers of carbon fiber armor to an already impenetrable body suit. There was no point in fucking around.

  “Hey so, Leroy…” Garth –expecting to see King and Queen fighting like mad- found himself instead looking around the vast empty space in search of a fleeing or otherwise moved enemy; Agnethea was right where she’d been before the Wall had popped up like a Looney Tune deus ex machina plot device, though she was shaking and trembling as though she were having some kind of fit.

  Garth was at her side in a flash. He grabbed one of her hands and held it close, carbon-fiber armor dissipating so the woman could feel the warmth of his skin. The Queen’s hand was cool and clammy to the touch, with tiny spasms twitching every single inch. “Hey. Hey! Agnethea! I’d murder for a medicomp right now, something … anything. What did he do to you? Agnethea! Open your eyes!”

  She didn’t though. The spasms were growing deeper, stronger. Garth dropped her hand in favor of holding open an eyelid. The placid oceans of deep quicksilver that’d been a result of other-him’s abusive attack were gone, replaced by a swirling torment of polychromatic hash.

  “Goddamn.” Garth … he … he couldn’t think. The Platinum King had done something nanotech-based to her and had fled. Hot tears filled his one eye. Obviously. But just as obviously, figuring out what that was so he could work up some kind of …

  “Tertiary problem set solved.”

  Garth blinked away the tears, watched them fall on Agne
thea’s chest. “What?” he whispered thickly. He was imagining things. The Specter turned his attention to his dear friend’s face; it was slack, save for the mouth, and those madly whirling eyes.

  This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. It was too cruel a joke, even for him.

  “Primary and secondary problem sets too broad. Require additional computational units. Tertiary problem set solved. Nanoparticulate Cloud structure designated ‘King’s Will’ autonomous subset unit ‘Platinum King 001’ decrypted. Additional computational units required for Dome Unit Secondary Set Cloud Generator decryption. Solid State Systems required for Primary Unit designated…”

  “No!” Garth shouted, hammering his bare fists into Agnethea’s chest. He did so again and again, howling ‘no’ every time, the thing that’d once been the Queen of Dark Golems tried to report it’s successes and failures a few more times before acquiescing to it’s programmer’s intended request.

  “No.” Garth shut his eyes. All this time. From the moment he’d walked through the Geared Doors, he’d imagined himself bereft of Eye support. “It can’t be.”

  And well, maybe he had been, in a way; the concentration of entropy between the two layers of Dome separating Arcade City from the Universe was powerful enough to render direct contact with the quadronium-powered systems, but perhaps not encompassing enough to prevent the systems from functioning on a subconscious level. Realizing –as he had- early on that King’s Will was actually a form of Cloud particulate, his restless need to solve that particular problem -first by monkeying around with the broken Kingspawn circuit board then later, by practicing his skills as a Dark Iron blacksmith- must’ve carried on inwards, reaching through to some bare whisper of a spark.