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

by Lee Bond

  Then the glittering whimsies sewn here and there into the fabric of each robe caught errant beams of swiftly fading natural sunlight. Innit did his best not to frown, squint, shuffle his feet awkwardly, grimace, roll his shoulders or in any way, shape or form, intimate or imply that his guests were unwanted.

  A dusty ochre hound sent rose-colored striations against the far away ceiling while a tourmaline-blue flower shone azure-laced flecks into the metallic gray floor of the Bay. An onyx black snake winked at him ominously from between heavy folds of midnight fabric. There were other baubles, too, odd designs and geometric patterns that should make each Novinian tinkle like a Christmas tree when they walked –or at the very least cast forth enough light to see them coming twenty miles away for all the shone- but didn’t.

  No one on 9-Nova-12 was stupid enough to wear crystals of any kind. Well, not for long. The Novinians took their carefully crafted whimsies quite seriously, and anyone stupid enough to flaunt anything mammalian or floral found themselves hurting.

  Then they found themselves dead.

  Which was fine, because everyone on or even coming near the planet was warned on a daily basis that anything the Novinians said, did, implied, might possibly want, theoretically dreamed of, or future generations might demand, they got. It was that simple.

  The Novinians allowed the Specter base –and the resultant crap-fest that was Nova City- to be on their planet because they ostensibly required the protection of Trinity’s best and most deadly, should anyone figure out what it was the Novinians exported.

  Few people knew just how important 9-Nova-12 was, not just to the Novinians themselves, but to the whole of Trinityspace. Politoyov knew, obviously, as did Innit. The sergeant suspected Nickels might know, but if the black haired, blue eyed maniac did know, he was wisely keeping his yapper unyapped.

  Seeds.

  Crystalline seeds so miniscule in size you could barely see them. If you weren't careful, you could lose a King's ransom between the folds of your palm print. Shortly thereafter, you'd lose your life, so it was best not to touch anything. Seeds by the thousands, each one possessing a characteristic so unique, so incredibly valuable, so wondrous that if the Novinians should ever ask for, say, the homeworld from which Humanity had sprung so they could turn it into a dog park, it was highly likely that foreclosure signs would pop up on that ancient world before lunch.

  So. Seeds. From 9-Nova-12, direct to Trinity Itself, and from Trinity, into ordinary steel-VII balls that would eventually become an irritating artificial intelligence.

  Kaptan did his best to bow, but he wasn’t that kind of man, so it came out as a kind of half-lurch. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  The middle figure spoke, his or her voice muffled by the thick, heavy cowl obscuring everything but endless dark eyes. “There are many ways.”

  “Into the base?” The sergeant knew of three not-quite secret ways in and out and he suspected Nickels of actually making several of his own. He’d always meant to track those extra passages down, but … time wasn't always his to spend.

  The figure on the right shrugged, heavy cloth fabric shifting, causing the rose-petal crystals just beneath the fabric to throb gently, as if those delicate edges were somehow drinking in and storing fading sunlight. “There are many ways.”

  “You said you don’t believe the Old … Commander Politoyov is dead.” Kaptan didn’t want much in life, but he sincerely wanted that grizzled old bastard to still be alive. He couldn’t run Specter for more than a minute. Deeply embedded training would have him legitimately trying to kill them all before the first shift rotation.

  The one on the right, who’d spoken first, stepped forward. The other two followed suit, with the one on the left spreading out a tiny bit more. “A man like him? With his intellect? With what he knows of the Universe? The Old Man in the Mountain won’t die until the lights go out forever.”

  Kaptan watched as the three of them brought their fingers to their lips, eyes straining to catch sight of the alleged bodysuit they wore beneath their robes; rumor and legend had it that the Novinians had actually developed a skin-tight overlay that was able to see them standing in the middle of the deadliest razorstorms without danger to their lives.

  No luck.

  “Why are you here?” he demanded, struggling against the urge to lash out. Static bounced up and down where his HUD had once flashed critical Intel. Unused and unconnected internal systems tried coming back online and failed, sending stuttering hash along his peripherals.

  The trio of surprise visitors were now definitely standing in an attack pattern and all his old training wanted was for him to start fighting. It was bad. Real bad, if those truly ancient cybernetic systems were trying to spontaneously reforge long inactive combat mechs, yet …

  Innit was perversely glad they weren’t reconnecting.

  That would surely see his death and he wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.

  The one in the middle spoke, this time … this time her dulcet tones chiming clear as crystal. “You ready yourself to leave this planet, yes? The Wise Mind seeks to move you to Latelyspace, the last location of The Old Man in the Mountain?”

  Kaptan nodded. No point in denying it. They had right of information on anything Trinity did or said to anyone on their planet. Just another way the Novinians exercised their powers.

  The one on the left laughed softly, humor laced with something … sharp. “In your current … condition, Tin Man?”

  The one on the right brushed a hand ever-so gently across where her heart probably was, if the Novinians were in fact an offshoot of Humanity’s original clans.

  Kaptan took a step back, as if physically struck. How could they know? The Old Man would never say anything, and he’d never mentioned it aloud to anyone ever. Not in the entire time he’d been with Special Services, and none of the … none of the people who’d held him captive before then had cared what he might’ve been.

  What they hadn't understood had been cored clean out of him, and what had been repairable had been fixed, though with … shaky … skill, leaving him somewhere between the grand and glorious soldier he'd once been and a Heavy Elite that no longer wished to tour the expanse past The Cordon.

  The only thing that remained of who … who he’d been before were quiet whispers in the back of his mind, the training that had him straining to murder everyone not like him every waking moment of his life.

  A wry grin dimpled his face.

  Oh yes, and of course, the hollow emptiness where his heart had once beat to a very … particular strain.

  The one on the right stepped boldly forward a second time, prompting the others to follow suit.

  From an unseen pocket deep inside the dark robes, the Novinian plucked forth a heart-shaped crystal that burned with a rosy brilliance.

  Holding it aloft and twisting it until the stone caught the last few rays of sun, the Novinian seemed to smile beneath her robes as the entire machine bay caught fire.

  Even as Kaptan held his hands in front of his eyes to shield them from that brilliance, a part of him hungered to gaze more fully upon this artifact.

  “We cannot make you as you were.” The right-hand Novinian sounded almost apologetic. “That is as gone from you as our homeworld was stolen from us. But with this heart beating in your chest, Tin Man, you will be as close to the man you were thousands of your years ago as you could ever possibly hope to be. There will be a warmth in you, and the silence echoing through your veins will be filled with song. Not your song, but a song is a song.”

  “Is a song.” The other two Novinians sighed breathily.

  Kaptan licked his lips. He could already hear a bit of the song chiming outwards from the thumping crystal heart. It felt familiar, like something he’d heard a long time ago, but with only half a mind paying attention.

  He was no fool. Everything had a price. Everything.

  “And what would you want from me?” Kaptan couldn’t tear his eyes away.

 
The raw, unfettered power pouring outwards with each rosy thump was exhilarating. Questions flared through Kaptan Innit, matching each throb of light. Had they given other people this kind of thing? What price had those others paid?

  The right-hand Novinian shrugged. “We cannot know. Though we see everything, in time, there are some things we cannot see until it is time. Follow through on your commands from Trinity. Take yourself to where the Wise Mind’s great army sits. If we have need of something from you, we will make our wants made clear.”

  Kaptan took a step forward, metallic fingers that looked more like skeletal digits than anything reaching out towards the heart. “And if I take your gift and do nothing?”

  The middle-hand Novinian chuckled. “Hearts can be broken in more than one way, Tin Man. We will not ask you to kill the innocent, or to do anything you yourself would never do anyways.”

  “The Novinians are not like that, Tin Man.” The left-hand Novinian chided gently. “And besides, your heart has already been broken once, and for so very long. We cannot offer you the brotherhood you once knew, but a thing is better than no thing.”

  The right-hand Novinian stepped forward until her heart-bearing hand was pressed against Kaptan’s hot metal chest. She could feel the power radiating from the cybernetic soldier, feel how it tasted wrong to her. She took comfort in knowing that once the heart was in, this soldier would be theirs.

  Then? Then it wouldn't matter what the soldier wanted or didn't want. The lure of power was and always would be too great a song to put down.

  “I will take your gift. But be warned. I will not act against my principles.” Kaptan Innit growled.

  Now the Novinian was touching him, he could see the skin-tight fabric wrapped tightly around the woman’s hand. It was filled with millions of tiny grains of dimly lit crystal. “And I will kill no innocents. I never have and I never will.”

  The right-hand Novinian shoved the crystal smoothly and easily through the cybernetic Specter’s thick metal chest, shoved and shoved until she felt the empty space in his body. The heart went in, the power flooded the man, and he collapsed where he stood, a clutter of arms and legs, utterly, utterly enraptured.

  The left-hand Novinian nudged the unconscious cyborg with a toe. “How long until everything is connected?”

  “An hour or two.” The middle-hand Novinian nodded. “Then he’ll be on his way. How long until he realizes that there are no innocents, not this late?”

  “Sooner than he’d like. Come. We need to leave. That private returns from his calisthenics. Better for that one to find him alone.”

  Kaptan Innit lay there, unmindful of anything other than the harmony hammering through his veins…

  ***

  Kaptan Innit stopped stroking the spot where the crystalline heart pumped silently and resumed watching the monitors, this time with more intensity. If the Novinians wanted this space station left operational but wouldn’t say why, it meant something was coming.

  And he had to be ready for it.

  Fuming at something he saw on one of the monitors, Kaptan Innit thumbed the button that activated the loudspeakers for that particular area. Putting on his best Sergeant of Doom voice, he started hollering, “LISTEN HERE YOU STUPID FUCKING MORONS. HALLWAYS ARE FOR WALKING, NOT FOR HIDEOUS INTERSPECIES COITUS. IF YOU TWO DO NOT SHAG YOUR ASSES TO A ROOM IN THE NEXT THIRTEEN SECONDS, I WILL GODDAMN WELL DEPRESSURIZE THAT HALLWAY AND YOU CAN SPEND THE REST OF FUCKING ETERNITY AS SOLID CHUNKS OF FROZEN FLESH. I AM CERTAIN YOUR RELATIVES WILL BE IMMENSELY PLEASED AT THE ROMACE OF IT ALL. NOW MOVE!”

  Of Fruiting Bodies, Shapeless Forms and a Tapestry of Revenge

  The realm of the Mycogene-Alzants was one unlike any other solar system in the entire Unreal Universe. It was this way for a number of reasons, but there was only one that truly, truly mattered; the moment the Mycogenes had revealed themselves as the kind of threat they were to every other form of organic life, Trinity had set about ensuring that no other solar system spanning viral intelligence was permitted to exist. No other system had received such severe treatment so early on in Trinity's career as shepherd for Humanity. No other system would remain under such scrutiny.

  Not that it mattered, not with the End coming so swiftly, but still. Trinity was no fool.

  Thus;

  Routine sweeps of so-called ‘dead systems’ once under the threat of Mycogene incursion, in search of microlife resulted in more than a dozen such spots being utterly destroyed, and all because the Mycogene Empire could, in fact, rise from a single spore. With their indomitable ability to corrupt and control very nearly all forms of organic life to their own xenophobic purposes, Trinity would spare no expense, would mourn no loss, to ensure that the threat remained forever contained...

  If anyone in any kind of position to make any sort of fuss about the Mycogenes were to learn that this threat not only survived but flourished in their own locked-down system, they would surely disappear before the first querulous demands for answers could spring from whatever passed for lips on whichever nosy species was stupid enough to start up with that kind of thing.

  It went beyond It’s compulsion to protect the strange, the different, the unique. It went beyond a need to follow ironclad rules burned so deep into It’s matrices that It was willing to risk complete and utter catastrophe, all so the Mycogene-Alzant Empire could be of use.

  It was because unlike any of the other viral intelligences that’d cropped up –and there were more than any might imagine … well, there had been more- the Mycogenes could see the now, and the past, and discover the most likely future because of their connections to the base state of the Universe.

  The Mycogene intellect claimed it was capable of divination, Trinity Itself insisted fervently that it was a solar system-sized organic computer capable of making the kind of intuitive leaps that made their proclamations seem like divination, the few Conglomerates and other financial entities capable of affording the exorbitant fees for a consultation didn’t care one way or the other.

  To them –and to everyone who knew of them- results were results and that was that.

  Trinity kept the Mycogenes around because It wanted to know the future.

  Had wanted to know the since the moment It'd decided that it was time to open Pandora's Box, so to speak and yet …

  It'd been the Mycogenes who'd augured the most propitious time to allow N'Chalez and the others freedom from Bravo, not Trinity...

  In payment for such a … momentous prognostication, the Mycogene intellect had begun bartering. For extended borders. For more contact with the outside Universe.

  For humble representatives of the much depleted, sorely abused and greatly penitent Mycogene Empire to be allowed their place in the greater world, to set their feet on alien soil once more.

  In a purely non-destructive, peaceful manner, of course. The Mycogenes had learned their lessons, oh yes they had...

  And the machine mind, never forgetting the unholy war that the Mycogenes had brought to the Universe nearly ten thousand years ago but willing to take the risk, had acquiesced, knowing that threats of systemic eradication would be taken very seriously.

  And thus, a small handful of brave Mycogene-Alzants were let loose into the greater world of Trinityspace, to encounter all the strange and wondrous –and sometimes frightening- varieties of life that was out there.

  Trinity’s first mistake was always in assuming that there the Mycogenes were people. A people merged in some kind of strange neural net that linked them all together, but a people nonetheless.

  They were not.

  There was a Mycogene progenitor, a singular, systemic intelligence that played at people because that was the best way to make yourself palatable to a Universe full of individuals.

  It played the role so well, in fact, that the majority of the Mycogene citizens living and dying on the worlds within the Alzant system believed themselves to be unique. They had their own lives, their own thoughts, their own hopes and dreams and
perhaps if they were lucky they would meet a Myco who’s internal nature matched their own or one who offered interesting twists and turns to the strain that was them and they would merge for a time to produce a new Myco strain, one who would be son or daughter in the traditional sense of the matter.

  But those were lies. Simple, comforting lies to a mind as vast as a solar system, a mind that needed to keep the vastness of itself occupied and away from confronting the all-too-brutal truth that yes, the Universe was going to come crashing to an end. A bitter, abrupt end, with an unthinkable number of organic and inorganic lifesigns snuffed out like candles.

  The end of everything didn’t bother the Mycogene Intellect as much as it might the rest of the Universe.

  It recognized the futility of life in the Unreal Universe perhaps even better than the architect of it’s eventual destruction; able to sense the whole fabric of Creation, the MI had known, and for thousands upon thousands of years, that something wasn’t right with the Universe, that some flaw, some … error … kept everything from connecting together properly.

  This was why it’d tried conquering the Universe so very long ago. It was connected properly. It possessed the type of structural rightness the Universe deserved.

  Once Trinity had explained that there was a being within It’s care capable of reordering everything in a more sensible fashion, the Mycogene Intellect had –more or less- allowed itself to be pushed back to a single solar system. No great loss, not really, not with proof that the being called Garth N'Chalez had a workable resolution to the chaos, one that involved no loss to the Mycogene Empire.