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

by Lee Bond

  “Simple.” Huey agreed blandly. “You get all that, Aleksander?”

  When the Offworlder nodded grimly, expression so neutral it wasn’t funny, Huey gestured weakly at the world they were to use as pawns in a war that likely had no idea what was going on. “So. Arlass World.”

  Orion rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Allow me to introduce you to the Fleckers and the Quarrymen.”

  “Sounds like a prog rock band from the Eighties.” Huey sniped. He ran a check, with most of his subminds helping, and yes, he was quite sure that he’d never run into anything or anyone more arrogant than Orion the Tunnel.

  “When I am victorious, you will have to give me access to all your memories, Huey.” Orion’s voice was full of reasonability. “Garth N’Chalez’ vision deserves to be wrought in it’s fullness. Now, in all seriousness, if you interrupt me once more time, I will lose my temper. The Fleckers and the Quarrymen of Arlas World.”

  There was no way of knowing if Orion moved them close enough to the world or if he was using some form of Tunneltech to achieve the goal of basically dropping them right onto the planet, but at the end of the day, both Huey and Aleksander supposed it didn’t matter: they now had a close-up view of this world.

  It wasn’t anything impressive.

  The damage done by whatever had started slowing the planet’s rotation down had started an irrevocable chain of destruction making the surface essentially uninhabitable. Both AI and commander saw –here and there as their host swooped and swarmed them around- faint signs of civilization; tiny hints of buildings, small areas that might’ve once been farmland, left untouched for however many thousands of years Trinity had been stabilizing Arlas World’s terrible condition.

  “What caused this to happen?” Aleksander asked into the silence.

  “At first, terrible earthquakes.” Orion answered readily, trying to pick his way into Huey’s quantum substrate; the AI in a meatsuit was avidly consuming terabytes of data about the planet below, attempting to divine the entire history of the world in that mysterious way he did all things, but there was no luck. Whatever it was that’d been done to him by N’Chalez and Kamagana, it was a non-replicable feat.

  Fascinating!

  Aggravating!

  “Those must’ve been some earthquakes.” Politoyov admitted, pulling at his wiry beard. “Manmade?”

  “No. Well, yes. Maybe.” Huey interjected, still looking for signs of present life and coming up short. Either both the vaunted Fleckers and the Quarrymen were long dead and buried or he wasn’t looking in the right directions. “The internal composition of Arlas World is … weird. There really shouldn’t have been life on this planet. The gravity … variable here. The molten core of Arlas wasn’t pure, like Earth’s. The usual stuff like nickel and iron and a whackload of precious minerals like platinum and gold and all that, but … the internal temperatures rarely had everything molten at the same time. There were soft spots. From the looks of things, the inhabitants of this world tried to smooth out their gravity problems by literally injecting some form of high volume explosive, like nuclear weapons, into the core.”

  “That's ridiculous.” Aleksander hated nuclear weaponry more than anything else he’d ever come across.

  Wildly unstable, prone to leaving the places and things you wanted to have covered in deadly radiation –which took forever to clean up- and just about the easiest kind of mass destruction weapon you could ever try to make, nuclear weapons were the bane of Deep Strike teams everywhere. He’d rather Cordonites possessed Hand of Glory missiles than nukes: most of his guys forgot to even scan for the antiquated tech, and the paperwork for accidental nuclear death was a bitch to complete.

  “On the contrary.” Orion cursed inwardly as the quantum substrate was filled with Huey’s subminds doing a variety of things ranging from blowing him raspberries to mooning him with holographic behinds. “The method was quite effective for a number of years. Over a thousand, really. But as with all humanity, they believed their efforts would be everlasting and moved on with their lives. Over time, this world and it’s peoples forgot they’d ever needed to inject nuclear material into the core of the planet, forgot even the reasons why they should be interested in their own world. And then the earthquakes came.”

  “I’m not seeing any signs of life here, Orion. This is a waste of time.” Huey hated to even admit the small defeat his inability to see anything represented, especially when he caught sight of the victorious smirk on the other AI’s holographic face. The AI turned his attention to Aleksander, who still looked mystified. “The kinds of earthquakes that Arlas eventually began to experience were the kinds that literally slow the planet down, Aleksander. Not only immensely destructive as we’ve both already seen, but … the change must’ve been miniscule, to start. A quarter-second added to the clock, then another, then another, that sort of thing.”

  “Their days and nights became longer.” The words fell from Aleksander’s mouth with utter disbelief dripping on all sides. “That’s…”

  Orion snapped his fingers in delight. “You see that, Huey? That light in our judge’s eyes, the way his head is tilted to one side? He’s trying to find the tactical merit in something like that. What kind of damage could be done to an enemy, if we were to slow their world down, make their days and nights longer than ours? And thus we come to the resolution the original people of Arlas chose.”

  “You keep implying there’s life here, Orion, but I just don’t see it.” Huey was getting bored. There were tracks here and there across the endless plains, but they could mean anything; Arlas had been locked into place like this for many thousands of years, the rotation of the planet itself glacially slow. The grooves crisscrossing the globe were most likely fifteen to twenty thousand years old, the remnants of the Arlasians as they tried desperately to outrace their dying world. “And, just so we’re clear, I’m accusing you of wasting time now. If there is life on this planet, you know just where it is, and have forced me into the position of demanding to see it.”

  “Bah.” Orion gave a half-bow. “As you wish.”

  The view blurred, and suddenly, they were gazing on an open stretch of land roughly four thousand miles from where they’d once been. Here and there across the field –which Aleksander estimated to be near about eight million square miles- vast stone towers stood, some of them four hundred feet tall and nearly one hundred feet wide, loomed over the emptiness. Off to the east and west of their current position –they were sat directly above one of these strange stone fortifications, and Huey was drilling his subminds into the strata of rocky surface as adroitly as he could, knowing Orion might use the distraction for another attempted break-in- a huge mountain range ran in a jagged-edged line right near four of the gigantic stony pylons.

  “Now, closer still.” Orion snapped his fingers, and the view blurred again.

  This time, they were arranged right in the middle of one of the enormous stone towers and one of the sharp-edged corners of the mountain range.

  “Do your subminds have anything to tell you, oh mighty Huey who would be God?” Orion smiled pleasantly enough, though he did make certain there was the tiniest bit of threat to his tone. He fluttered a hand to his neck at Huey’s bland smile. “I assure you, during this moment of intelligence gathering, I would not and will not do anything to, ah, shall we say, perform any … breaches?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Aleksander asked, eyeing the mountain range thoughtfully.

  “Our ‘friend’ here has been trying to hack me from second one.” Huey dispatched a few subminds to investigate the edge of the range closest to their position; there were some curious looking bore holes scattered too evenly across the surface to be natural, and he figured there might be more answers as to who or whatever these so-called Fleckers and Quarrymen …

  “No.” Huey shook his head adamantly.

  Aleksander tilted his head to one side, bristling with curiosity; Huey’s denial of whatever had just crossed his
mind was ironclad, making the notion of immense interest to the commander. “What is it?”

  Orion indicated the giant stone monolith at their feet. “Our friend has just come to a conclusion about the first type of life on this strange world known as Arlas.”

  “That is just not possible.” Huey shook his head once more, refusing to accept the idea. “You claim that the people of this world were Human-based, and everything I’ve seen so far validates your statement one hundred percent. Whether they were one of the original Tunnel colonists willingly flinging themselves to a habitable world or one of the poor Generation Ships sailing endlessly through space, the beings who came here were human. They were here twenty thousand years ago, making them one of the less … hm … manipulated branches out there. What … no. It can’t be possible. Silicate-based life does exist. I’ve seen it. Hell, there’s a fucking stone man in your own goddamn organization! But Crag’s people are not and never have been an organic offshoot. It’s simply not possible.”

  Witnessing understanding cresting on Aleksander’s face was like seeing the sun slowly rise. The Offworlder pointed to the gigantic stone edifice at their feet. “Are you telling me that this thing is alive?”

  “Oh yes.” Orion practically jumped for joy. “Oh my yes. The Quarrymen. You see, when the world began to slow, the peoples of this planet went into overdrive on how best to deal with the slowing of their own personal time. Some … quirk … in their technological growth prevented them from discovering the more obvious and mechanical solutions, so they went … biological.”

  Huey threw his hands in the air and walked around for a bit, muttering angrily to himself. One by one, the subminds he’d tasked to dig into the stone tower came back with grudgingly positive results.

  However it’d happened, in whatever sick, twisted manner the original Arlasians had accomplished the grim task of surviving the slowing of their world, the stone tower –and therefore all the stone monoliths across the world- were in fact human.

  Orion sidled up to Aleksander and pointed a finger at Huey, whose visible distress was a wonderful thing to see. “You see? He fights against the realization. His own subminds have proven to him the truth. We sit above an ancient Arlasian, a being many thousands of years old, whose thoughts run like treacle through sand. By the time he becomes aware of us, we will have already determined their battle-worthiness.”

  “So,” Huey bellowed belligerently, “they what? Used drugs or something to slow their perception of time down to the point where their internal clocks meshed with the world around them? That in no way fucking explains why their bodies grew so big, or so goddamn stony. They should be, like, regular looking people, only … moving totally slowly or something.”

  Orion whispered into Aleksander’s ear. “Wait for it. Wait for iiiiit.”

  The subminds ordered to investigate the bore holes into the mountain’s surface came back with their preliminary results, and the news they had to bring their overmind was horrific in every sense of the word.

  Huey’s mouth was full of ash as his vast intellect began playing out the evolutionary steps required to wreak these kinds of changes into the ever-mutable flesh and DNA of that glorious thing called Humanity, shaking his head every step of the way. It didn’t take long, not with his mental abilities, and when he was done, the AI wished for beer and a cigarette.

  “What’s going on, Huey?” Aleksander had never seen the AI so distressed, and while he had to admit that he and Huey hadn’t known each other for terribly long, the Specter commander felt he knew the … man … thing … whatever well enough to be worried.

  Huey cast a bitter hand at the Quarryman and then towards the holes in the mountain. “Not every being on Arlas wanted to slow their time down. Some went the opposite direction. Some opted to speed their personal frame of reference up, so they might have more time to enjoy everything. Where the Quarrymen grew slower and slower, their days and nights stretching out further and further until a single day lasted years or more, the Fleckers … their days and nights would’ve lasted maybe a lifespan.”

  “I … don’t follow.”

  “This Quarryman is at least fifteen thousand years old, Commander.” Huey explained patiently. This kind of evolutionary path was nearly impossible to comprehend in one sitting. “One of the original people of Arlas. Chances are he’s older than that. Hell, if I could figure out a way to unlock or even locate his thoughts, he might even remember this world as it’d once been. But … slowing your biology down has … side effects. Less and less energy is required to keep you alive. You … or at least the Quarrymen did … become, well, monolithic. They draw their energy directly from their personally calibrated sun. The radiation bathing them is low and slow and keeps them perfectly satiated. Their sun ‘revolves’ at just under ten solar years, though I bet they could last a helluva lot longer than that. Once you get far enough through their stony skin, each of these Quarrymen is a fusion generator of heat and power. There must’ve been a period of at least three thousand years after their world nearly ended and before Trinity arrived to ‘save’ them. They certainly manage to store enough power to survive during the Dark Ages, though I doubt we’d call it ‘survival’. But that’s not the worst of it.”

  Aleksander licked his lips slowly, incredibly uncomfortable that Orion was still basically hanging off his arm, emitting an excitement that vibrated off his false skin. “No?”

  Personally, the thought of being trapped inside a living mountain, thinking thoughts that ran so slow they almost hardly even counted as thoughts was the stuff of nightmares for Aleksander.

  “No.” Orion pointed at the bore holes. “Not at all. Do you want to tell him, Huey, or shall I?”

  Huey flicked a hand, disgusted at Trinity for allowing this kind of … crime to continue. “Be my guest.”

  “You see, Aleks, where the Quarrymen slowed their lives down until their hearts beat once a year and thus became the megaliths you see before you, the Fleckers … grew small. And smaller still. Their energetic lives began to require positively enormous volumes of power to keep on living, and so the perverse biology of Humanity, combined with the reckless cruelty of the Unreal Universe forced them to shrink. Conservation of energy, you see. The Fleckers, Aleks, are barely pinprick-size now, and they live and die by the trillions, day in and day out. Their lives may seem like those of mayflies to us, but to them … well, I confess, I don’t know how long they think they live, but I’m certain it’s enough for them. Their sun revolves around the world quicker than the Quarrymen’s, but not so quickly that their population explodes into the quadrillions. Unlike the Quarrymen, who live in both the light and dark and, as Huey so expertly pointed out, don’t necessarily need feeding as regularly as they get, the Fleckers are diurnal. When their sun is ‘hidden’ from them, they retreat to stony enclaves like this one, with their population slowly but surely dwindling until they begin to think this is it, their days are done for. And then, the sun comes back, the population grows again, and all is well. Truly remarkable, don’t you think?”

  Aleksander didn’t know what to say.

  As commander for Special Services, he was more aware than anyone save Trinity Itself just how queer and weird biology and evolution was when it came to the Unreal Universe. The bizarre twists and turns life took across The Cordon was enough to make any being wonder just what in the hell was going on, and there were more than a few lifeforms out there that had the Specter Commander shaking his head in either confusion or disgust, but these Fleckers and Quarrymen … it was brutal.

  “You think these … terrible permutations of life are battle worthy?” Aleksander pointed to the Quarryman. “Now I know what I’m looking for here, the journey this particular being took to get to this point must’ve taken a hundred years or more. There’s just no …”

  “I’m not finished. I’m not finished.” Orion raised a finger high in the air. “Now as I’ve previously said, each of the ‘suns’ above this world are very precisely cali
brated to each specific offshoot of Arlasian, yes?” The Quantum Tunnel continued when both of his guests nodded, Huey more confidently than Aleksander, which meant that the meatsuit-wearing AI already knew of the true horror that rest with the Fleckers and the Quarrymen. “As with all celestial mechanics, there are moments of … congruence, and Arlas World is no exemption. Every few sidereal years, there’s a convergence of both suns, at the same time. We sit moments away from one of those, right now. Watch the holes, if you would, Aleksander Politoyov, and behold the miracle of life, and what,” Orion whispered darkly, “what it will do to survive.”

  Aleksander did as he was bade, though more out of morbid personal curiosity than Orion’s demands. Huey stood off to one side, refusing to watch the Fleckers receive their enclave-restoring burst of pure energy, which troubled Aleksander greatly.

  At first, there was nothing, no glorious burst of light or anything like that and it took a slow second for Aleksander to sheepishly realize that he could wait all day to see the Fleckers’ sun rise and come up wanting.

  Then, just as he went to shake his head, one of the bore holes –dim and dark and not at all inviting- suddenly erupted with a golden-hued burst of scintillating radiance. It grew brighter and brighter and brighter still until suddenly, almost like a volcano erupting, millions of microscopically bright pinpricks burst into the dimly lit sky, a glorious eruption of life that was breathtaking to behold.

  Aleksander found himself smiling at the sight, his heart ennobled that he was witness to the permanence and wonder that was human life; in some indescribable manner, he was well aware of the superlative joy these Fleckers felt at being rescued from extermination at the last second.

  Whole clouds of Fleckers rushed to and fro across the mountainside, restless, chaotic, fervent life casting harsh shadows wherever they went, brilliant, neon flecks of golden life tearing around enthusiastically, doing nothing more than living.