Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  But where they were in it for themselves, she were on this quest for none other than King N'Chalez Himself.

  With such providence on her side, Mirabelle, Lady of the Weeping Eye, knew she'd succeed where all else failed.

  The Beast in Sheep’s Clothing

  Fire crews working around the clock to contain the destructive force of the deadly blaze spiraling upwards from where the center of the spaceport used to be had barely managed to do so; a deadly combination of there being simply too much space and too many buildings saw much of Tenerek’s primary means of connecting with the other planets in their solar system destroyed before too long.

  Investigators on the scene were at a complete loss as to how or why the ‘port had gone up in such a cataclysmic eruption. Investigators suspected it might have something to do with the unscheduled, unpermitted landing of one ‘Joseph Hewitt’, but they were days –if not months- away from having any kind of clarity into the matter.

  Detective Inspector Grace Markham awaited data direct from Trinity on who, precisely, this Joseph Hewitt had been before landing on Tenerek.

  With everything happening on Tenerek and to her people these days, the slender EuroJapanese truth seeker simply wasn’t willing to discount gut instinct.

  In this case, her guts said that whatever else Trinity claimed Hewitt had once been, 'terrorist' would also figure prominently in his curriculum vitae.

  “It makes a lot of sense.” Markham said to her compatriot, Inspector Chase, who was plunking his way through the fifteenth model of the spaceport’s destruction; it was his job –aided by an AI, of course, one of the few on the planet- to unearth other causes for this grisly loss, things that didn't involve terrorism.

  Chase didn’t look up from his models. As much as he didn’t like Markham’s point of view on this particular case, even the AI was beginning to think it might’ve been intentional. The blast pattern –calculated by scanning debris at the furthest edges of the cataclysm and determining it’s original location through a mixture of AI assumption and advanced math- could’ve only come from one point, and that point was right smack dab in the center of the ‘port’s main building.

  Now, yes, the primary generators were very stupidly close by, but … Chase wasn't sold on intentional destruction.

  What point in destroying a space port that was hardly used anymore? Why cause all that damage?

  There had to be other reasons... Something was missing.

  “From what I’ve seen,” Chase fed more data uploaded to him by one of their lackeys in the field, brave idiots clad in radiation-proof suits clambering around the devastating scene in search of something -anything- that might shed a brighter light on the situation. “There’s no reason for this man to be here, let alone blowing up our spaceport.”

  Markham didn’t mind working with Chase, even though he wasn’t a Churchgoer. He had a first-rate, rational mind and a willingness to look beyond what was immediately in front of his face. It was one of the reasons why he made such a good investigator, and, Seinfeld willing, one day he, too, would become a Detective Inspector.

  That being said, he was missing the biggest thing of all, and it was right in front of his face, and it was precisely because of that analytical mind that it was going unnoticed: not only was the destruction of the port an act of terrorism, it was an act of unbridled anti-religious mayhem.

  Pure and simple...

  “I’m certain,” Markham said confidently, “that when my request for a deeper dig into the dead man’s history is approved, we’ll find out it was either a fabrication or he was a dissident specifically chosen by our enemies to bring rack and ruin to our cause. His puppet masters will be sorely disappointed, though! We’ve been trying for months to get this ‘port closed down fully.”

  “Isn’t that conve…” Chase slammed his mouth shut so hard he bit down on his tongue and drew blood.

  Feeling the smoldering, white hot glare beaming from Markham’s mottled, angry face, he retained enough presence of mind to point at the screens before him.

  Around a mouthful of blood and an already swelling tongue, he managed to gabble out, “That there were only the two guards in this entire place, and that the other two who were on duty before them basically let Hewitt onto the planet and then went home without any warning to their coworkers.”

  “Oh.” Markham glowered at Chase, willing him to slip up like that again anytime soon. He’d find it very difficult to purchase anything at any store or business owned and operated by Churchgoers in a heartbeat. “I think those two men, Phil and Roberts, are in the middle of a very … serious … inquest right now. They’re probably directly involved with Hewitt…”

  “Holy shit!” Chase hollered the words so loudly and so suddenly that Markham jumped a full foot in air, causing her to knock over one of their more expensive pieces of scanning equipment. It clattered noisily to the ground and promptly cracked in half.

  This time finding ‘proper’ reason to glower quite vehemently, Markham adjusted her business suit and strode over to him, radiating hostility. “What’s with the profanity, Chase? If there's no good reason...”

  She trailed off meaningfully.

  “I…” Chase gestured to the screens displaying the far end of the spaceport, where fire crews were still trying to deal with the blaze. They were finally getting a handle on the deadly situation, which was nice; Arturii’s port hadn’t been in the best of locations to begin with, and with the ever-growing population, the edge of the city proper was less than fifteen miles away.

  A fire like this one, with the kinds of flammable and/or explosive materials likely to be found on a spaceport, that was just asking for the blaze to spread to the city.

  Markham smacked Chase on the back of the head. “Out with it.”

  “They … there’s someone alive!” Chase read through the report as quickly as he could. “About … fifteen minutes ago they found the first of the guards, a … Guardsman Darren. Well, what was left of him. He must’ve been standing by a power conduit when it went up. About the only thing left of him is his bones, and those are thoroughly cooked. DNA confirmed.”

  “Is he the only one?” Markham asked breathily. Oh, she hoped it was Joseph Hewitt. The Church could use the actual, physical presence of a man so completely against their ideologies to their extreme advantage. The rest of Arturii would be converted overnight. “Gah.” The one thing Chase would never get accustomed was the extreme damage that fire did to a human body, or the amount of punishment something so frail-seeming could endure. From the video feeds spooling directly from first responders, the survivor was also very nearly cooked all the way through, one eye magically untouched, whirling in a socket surrounded by blistered, oozing skin. “Guardsman Darren Freoli. Confirmed, sole survivor.”

  Heart racing in her chest, Markham smiled haltingly. Not the best of outcomes for the Church, in her opinion, but still … good for Freoli. “Fantastic. This is just … fantastic.”

  Chase agreed with the facts behind his partner’s pleasure in the guard’s survival, if not the reasons. He was just glad the man was still alive, in whatever form.

  To his partner's discredit, she was already on her personal phone, no doubt calling whoever she was buddy-buddy with inside the Church, just to inform them before anyone else that there was a survivor.

  Chase wondered what kind of media circus they were going to throw that poor, burnt bastard into, and found a morose wish that he'd died in the conflagration.

  Some things were worse than death.

  That was assuming Freoli would even survive these wounds...

  Chase read the reports anyways. Medical AI confirmed Guardsman Darren Freoli would indeed live.

  The Inspector wondered how pleased Darren Freoli would be in the new life that he'd be thrust into, and didn't envy the poor bastard one bit.

  Tin Man

  Kaptan Innit absorbed the sights and sounds filtering in from the multitude of video screens surrounding him, not r
eally paying attention to any one thing.

  Wasn’t worth his time, not any longer; since that epic arrival on the Sparrowhawk combined with conscientious broadcast warnings from Specters to Army, almost everyone was playing nice these days. As unruly and wild as Tarterus could get, you could still see the fine line between permitted and unpermitted, and it was the terminally stupid or suicidal who trod over it.

  The ex-Heavy Elite could easily imagine the kinds of things ship-bound Specters had whispered over encrypted comm channels to their brighter, holier-than-thou Army counterparts.

  Threats of pulling someone’s head from their shoulders or tossing them deep into the heart of the Crystal Sands Deserts just outside Nova Base or roughly ten million other things the sergeant had done in the pursuit of ensuring that his men and women would become the toughest goddamn Specters anyone had ever seen, anywhere, had put him squarely in the minds, hearts and nightmares of every single one of them.

  Most Specters were still terrified of him to this day, even after they'd seen shit that'd turn normal folks into quivering masses of jellied blood.

  Kaptan smiled at that. Still a nightmare to some of those idiots, even after they’d bounced through The Cordon to see what madness really was.

  It took special effort, it did.

  “Worth it, though.” Kaptan said to himself, still idly watching the shenanigans and tomfoolery on the monitors. “My Specter are legends now. All of them. Even here, with these idiots.”

  ‘Here’ meant Space Station Tarterus; after hotdog space races and the by-the-seat-of-your-pants aerial combat technique tryouts had ended, the very next thing he’d done –after threatening the morons aboard Sparrowhawk with a lifetime of death if they messed with anything- was wing out to the cobbled-together space station with the full intent on shutting it down.

  Except, upon arriving, he hadn’t.

  He wanted the station shut down. It needed to be shut down, because even though he knew and understood and even expected that his Specters were usually only one drink away from firebombing their best friend or a gnat’s whisker away from ripping up the floor plates before trying to sell them straight back to Engineering, having them all in the same place at the same time like this was usually the worst idea ever.

  It’d happened once before, in recent memory. Just after Nickels had shown up, in fact. More than half their local roster –something like four thousand Specters- had been at Nova Base, and the combined rage and hostility interspersed with towering egos and crushing suicidal tendencies wrapped up in a nice, neat ‘Specter Training Package’ had very nearly seen the end of the base.

  Kaptan shook his head at the destruction that’d rattled the rafters so badly that a representative from the natives had come around to enquire politely if they were going to destroy the planet around their ears. The sergeant didn’t know what Commander Politoyov had said to smooth things over that time.

  If he had been present for that conversation… maybe, just maybe, things would be different now.

  If he'd only had a chance to see the Novinians in action before … before.

  Kaptan rubbed a finger over a spot on his chest, wishing the … power source … wasn’t in there, but knowing that it was in there, feeling raw power flowing through ancient systems once dry as desiccated riverbeds, there wasn’t anything he could do. And late at night, when he lay in his modified cot, feeling that rush of power flowing through him like purest light, he wasn’t entirely certain he would’ve made a different choice had he known the dangers. His new Lord and Masters had undoubtedly known that, and thus, their trap had been sprung on an old, old man desperate to feel as he’d been.

  Thinking of his … captors reminded Innit why he was so sour; he wanted the station shut down and his men and women dispersed back to their proper positions along the shield.

  Unfortunately …

  They wanted it right where it was.

  Kaptan shut his eyes and thought back to the moments right after Trinity had contacted him personally with the news that in Commander Politoyov’s unfortunate absence that he, a mere sergeant, was going to be the Man…

  ***

  The heavily modified cyborg soldier clattered and clomped around the machine bay with nervous energy, entirely uncertain if he was going mad or if Trinity had finally decided to get rid of him. He'd been waiting quite a long time for it.

  Had, in fact, come to believe for the last long while that Trinity didn't know anything about where he'd come from, which made this sudden turn of events the sort of thing the machine mind did all the time.

  The cavern –a true cavern, in every sense of the word, for it, like most of Nova Camp, had been carved right into one of the only mountains on the entire, desert-blasted world of 9-Nova-12- echoed each and every one of Kaptan Innit’s heavy metal steps, bounced the high velocity one-sided conversation right back into his ears.

  “Commander Politoyov, gone!” Kaptan bellowed. Somewhere behind him, Private Foolish Class Simms was cowering behind a track-plated ATV, unfortunate witness to Innit's screeching diatribe. “Ship empty! Gutted! Everyone dead! AI knowing nothing! AI dead! This is madness!”

  PFC Simms didn’t say anything. He’d followed Kaptan Innit out of the Comm room, terrified that the enraged cyborg was going to do something reckless; it was a long known fact that, while the majority of his Heavy Elite capabilities had been deactivated so he might better train Specters without accidentally killing them, the burly sergeant was still a literal unholy terror and might just take it upon himself to start laying about with a Sticky Gun or a Big Bouncing Betty Shredder.

  Kaptan whirled and stared right into PFC Simms’s stupid eyes where they hovered above one gigantic, dirty, heavily knobbed wheel. “Madness! What in the goddamn fucking hell are you following me around for, Private Foolish Class Simms! I am your sergeant. You do not follow me. I follow you, because you have the look of a man about to do something stupid!”

  Simms looked around nervously. What possible reason could he be in here for? “I … I came to …”

  “You came to do laps around the Machine Bay?” Kaptan Innit demanded, voice dripping with sarcasm so poisonous entire planets would curl up and die should his words be heard. “What a wonderful thing to hear. Sadly for you, I am in the middle of considering my future options within the wonderful realm that is Special Services, so it would behoove you to move your evening calisthenics to the outside, Simms! Just because you’re a Tech Expert does not mean you should neglect your physical fitness! Now! Go! If you hurry, you can get in fifteen laps before the nighttime razorstorms! Be a good lad! Run! And don't come back until you're covered in sweat and can recite to me the fifth page of the SpecSer manual! From memory!”

  To add a bit of punch to his order, Kaptan slammed a foot down on the thick metal flooring covering much of the natural unevenness of the cavern's rocky, unstable ground. The sound ricocheting through the vast bay was explosively loud, sending Private Foolish Class Simms scurrying towards the huge metal gate to the north of where they were stood.

  The sergeant watched the Tech Expert run for all he was worth, partially metallic mind whirling. He couldn’t believe it.

  The Old Man.

  Dead or presumed missing.

  “The Old Man.” Kaptan shook his head miserably. It’d been Politoyov who’d given him a second chance, so long ago. So very long ago. Who’d somehow known him for what he truly was, even though he himself had all but forgotten his true past in favor of the one that’d been grafted onto him.

  “We do not think he is dead, Kaptan Innit.” The bold statement, hardly more than a whisper, still washed through the vast expanse as easily as an ice cold breeze through a sauna, cutting right through to the heart of him.

  Innit didn't turn around. Not yet, anyways. There were things on his mind, after all.

  To say Innit had been through a lot in his life was to underscore the truth of things by a considerable margin, but even if you only considered his ‘life’
as a sergeant in Special Services, you could quite easily say that his soldiers had tried killing him at least once a day for as long as he’d been a Specter himself.

  The practice was encouraged, opportunities always intentionally presented, casualties always falling on the side of Specters hoping to free themselves from the howling, screaming, ten foot tall galvanized maniac who they believed had no idea of what ‘training’ was actually comprised of.

  Naturally, only a single Specter had ever managed to get within striking without Kaptan Innit being aware of the skulking culprit the whole time.

  Not once, not twice, but enough times that it’d become something of a game for them both. Kaptan Innit would admit only to himself that when Nickels was on-base, turning in his hunter’s cloak in favor of the hunted’s noose had been a special, secret pleasure.

  Since Innit knew Nickels was either dead or trying to kill something or someone far more important than himself, the person –or persons, given her choice in words- standing behind him was one of the locals; other than PFC Simms -who had better fucking goddamn well be hiking his lardass sumbitch butt around the exterior of the facility- there were absolutely no other Specters on Nova-12, so, by process of elimination, his guest or guests had to be natives.

  Because the locals just weren’t that stupid. Close, mind, but they weren’t all the way there.

  Dusties -Innit wrinkled his massive forehead and corrected himself- Novinians didn't just swing by anywhere unannounced. Not unless they were looking to cause trouble.

  Innit steeled himself for the worst and turned around as calmly and politely as possible.

  The first thing he took in was the heavy, midnight black hooded robes on the three people standing arrayed ever so slightly in a combat formation and couldn’t help but smile.

  Just as he knew about them, they knew about him.

  Robes didn’t necessarily make them Novinians. Many locals dressed in thick black robes to protect themselves from the worst of the razorstorms, especially if they were stupid enough to be past the towering stone walls circling their ‘city’ once the winds started howling. If these same hypothetically and clandestinely suicidal colonists were stupid enough to dress like Dusties, walk around in razorstorms like Dusties and come knocking on a Specter outpost like Dusties, they were going to learn a very valuable, very … life-altering lesson.