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

by Lee Bond

  “Beautiful, yes?” Orion whispered into the silence.

  “I calculate they’ve already gone through three generations since sunrise.” Huey felt sick to his stomach and wished Hollyoak had dispensed with them altogether when building Hamilton Barnes MK II. “Mayflies. Nothing more than mayflies.”

  Aleksander looked at both Orion and Huey. They were waging a silent war over these two types of Man. “I still fail …”

  And then he saw it; one of the Flecker-swarms, lucky or unlucky enough to’ve risen out of a bore-hole further away from their kin and closer to the Quarryman suddenly seemed to flex towards the shadow-casting stone man.

  “Do they … do they sense it? Him? Her?” Aleksander held his breath. The cloud of microscopic life –glinting brightly like golden darts in the night sky- grew ragged, tattered, disharmonious as they tried reaching the impassive Quarryman. They stretched themselves thin as paper, a living golden bridge to hope.

  “Sundown in just a few minutes.” Orion watched on, face beaming with excitement. Oh, he couldn’t wait until they got down to the nitty-gritty of these people and of their superlative battle-born talents. “Will they make it? Won’t they? If they fail, their enclave is lost forever. Next sunrise, one of the remaining Flecker-spawns might find the empty warrens, might have enough energy to start a new clan, they might not. There’s no telling. Ah, so close … so close … yes!”

  Orion pumped his fist in the air enthusiastically, false face shining with excitement. The Tunnel Intellect gestured graciously at Huey, who turned up his nose in disgust.

  That being done, Huey narrated this next bit with a heavy stone tugging at his heart. Orion “Less than three thousand ‘souls’ left right there. From somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty million from sunrise. Barely sustainable."

  “Sundown!" Orion rubbed his hands together and flashed the Old Man a wild grin. "Watch on, Aleksander Politoyov. Watch on, and behold the magnificence.”

  Once again, Aleksander was forced to seemingly follow Orion’s commands, a trend the grizzled Specter commander was going to have to put a stop before too much longer. As it was with the Fleckers’ birth from the bore hole, nothing exciting seemed to be happening across the Quarryman’s skin, unless you found mote-like lightning bugs flickering and flaring here and there against a dark, stony landscape 'exciting'.

  “They’re … not dying.” The realization escaped Aleks’ lips with utter astonishment. The invisible sun had definitely set, for the Flecker Range was empty of life, with nothing more than a few guttering wisps of yellow light disappearing down into the bowels of their underground homes.

  “The radiation emitted by the Quarrymen is nectar for the Fleckers. The finest ambrosia. A reminder of ancient days long past. They cannot know it, will never remember the feeling of the original sun upon their flesh, but the organic batteries that keep the Quarrymen alive are infinitely more satiating to the Fleckers than Trinity’s sun.” Orion’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah! Yes, you see? A crack in the wall!”

  Both Huey and Aleksander watched on in mortified awe as the remaining Fleckers swarmed the ‘crack in the wall’ Orion indicated with one long, black finger.

  Located midway down the length of the giant stone Arlasian, it was most likely some form of breathing hole for the being inside or a vent to release the heat that must build up over the centuries. Before their eyes, the few thousand Fleckers abruptly exploded with life once more, their numbers almost instantly doubling, then tripling. The small sea of golden-hued mites revealed themselves to be leeches, and as the two men watched aghast at the vampiric efforts of the Fleckers, the small crack in the Quarryman’s skin began widening.

  “Forced evolution.” Huey spat the words. He caught Aleks’ quirked eyebrow and explained. “The Fleckers, with their sped-up time, underwent their biological and physiological changes much, much quicker than the resilient and stoic Quarrymen. They probably hit rodent-size or even insect-size hundreds, perhaps even a thousand years or more, before the Quarrymen started seeing any real changes to their physiognomy. When the Quarrymen began transforming themselves into beings capable of storing tremendous amounts of energy to sustain them through their long dark nights, the Fleckers began … swarming. There must’ve been millions of Quarrymen in the beginning. They … turned themselves into stone to keep the Fleckers out, only … only they still need to breathe, still need to vent the air. And that gives the Fleckers a way to feast.”

  “So this man is dead.” A surge of sorrow rattled his heart. How awful. An ancient man, slaughtered for energy by children living lives so fast they may have only a thought or two in their heads before their lives were snuffed out like candles. The SpecSer Commander felt sick to his stomach. To think, only a few minutes ago, he'd been proud to be a part of the Flecker's rebirth, only to now stand witness to savage cannibalism.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so.” Orion shook his head. “A kind of queer synergy erupts when Fleckers attack Quarrymen. The treacle and molasses thoughts of the latter somehow become incredibly aware of the former, and … ah, such a light show.”

  Orion gestured grandly to the Quarrymen, and as Huey and Aleksander watched all the cracks across his body began glowing, a soft, sultry orange that quickly ramped up to an eye-searing thermite-white.

  And then …

  BAM!

  An energetic explosion radiating outwards across every inch of the Quarryman’s visible, stony skin, a riot of power that tore through the Fleckers, a vengeful wildfire of untold energy. The colony didn't miss a beat. They drank deeply of this boon, quintupling in size as they battened down on the unexpected gift.

  In no time at all, their Quarryman was sheathed in a nimbus of golden light, almost as if the ancient stone man had suddenly grown shy about his nudity.

  Aleks couldn't stand to participate. His guts ran rampant, but he quashed the urge to hide his eyes in shame.

  They’d been brought here to witness this.

  He would watch.

  “I don’t…” Aleks hated being clueless like this. He closed his mouth and watched on. The freshly invigorated Flecker-horde intensified their feeding frenzy, digging deeper and wider holes into the Quarryman’s flesh.

  It wasn’t too long before another explosion of intense energy burned across the stone man’s skin. The Flecker population grew again, feeding once again off the power. The life-giving emanations boiling from holes scattered throughout the Quarryman’s ordinarily impenetrable granite flesh dwindled down to a dark, dark orange, leaving the Fleckers … suddenly bereft of their delicious smorgasbord.

  The riotous profusion of golden-speckled life swarming across the now nearly lifeless Quarryman was perhaps as many as a trillion Fleckers. Desperately, fiendishly, they crawled across the massive Arlasian, eagerly hunting for a vent containing some dribs and drabs of life-restoring sustenance.

  From their aggravated movements, it looked as though they'd take table scraps, where before, they'd supped on the finest meats.

  Aleksander rubbed his beard, troubled. The Fleckers’ movements grew ever more erratic, full of panic and desperation. Soon enough …

  There! Glinting sparks, bright as diamonds, bursting through the relatively calm golden rivers cresting across the Quarryman’s body.

  “Civil war.” Huey couldn’t even look at Orion; the Tunnel Intellect's shone with the reflected images of the carnivorous savagery unfolding before their very eyes. “Only the strong will survive. They’ve turned on each other, formed camps. I’ve seen this before.”

  Orion’s smug eyes shone with understanding as to Huey’s personal experiences with the many battling the few. He whispered into the silence stemming from his guests as they watched on with ever-growing disgusted horror. “Watch on, friends.”

  The Flecker camps fought and raged a whirlwind war on their remote island, each side growing or shrinking as tactical advantages were gained and lost until … until one of the many separate groups proved to be the victor. The savage joy
of their triumph was evident simply in the way this brilliant horde of vampiric mites surged this way and that for a few moments before directing their attention towards the return to an ancient home, long since transformed from experience to nothing more than whispered words of dying elders.

  “A thousand years for them, give or take.” Orion pointed out. “And now they’ll try to make the long journey to the bore hole of their ancestors. Oh, the stories they must whisper to each other as they journey, lost and alone, afraid. Daunted, terrified, casting themselves outwards into the unknown. This is the stuff of legend, friends. The stuff of legend."

  “But?” Aleks and Huey demanded in unison.

  Orion merely pointed a slender, black finger at the Quarryman with dread elegance.

  A fresh vent hole suddenly opened nearest the tail end of where the Fleckers were extending themselves, precariously attempting to retain some physical connection to the Quarryman whilst simultaneously stretching themselves to the mountain range no more than five feet from where they were. The few remaining Fleckers struggled like ants trying to build a bridge across a river

  What happened next happened quickly, and decisively; the fleeing Fleckers were inhaled by the slow-thinking Quarryman, sucked down into the vent hole as though they were being sucked through a straw. A few seconds later, the many and various holes torn into the Quarryman’s granite-like skin returned to their barely visible status. The Quarryman shivered for a moment, then slowly, imperceptibly, it began moving away from the mountain range.

  Orion’ brave clan of Fleckers, those triumphant bastards, those heroic travelers …

  “Breathtaking, no?” Orion demanded, quite literally breathlessly. “The smaller Quarrymen do this on purpose, somehow instinctively drawn to Flecker enclaves close to the edges of their mountain domains, all in the hopes of bursting out of their shell, to grow and grow and grow. And all so they might gain enough strength to battle each other further out in the blasted sand dunes to the north. The Fleckers who house themselves in structures like this also do it on purpose, gambling they’ll gain enough power to move further inward to do battle with the older, more stable Flecker territories.”

  “Why would they want to do that?” Huey could think of a few different reasons, but wanted to hear the story from Orion. Aleksander nodded his approval at the question.

  Orion fluttered a hand in the air. “Dynamic control. There’s a positively ancient Quarryman out there, probably the first of them all, and he’s … well, big enough to house his own Fleckers. Like … like a beehive, riddled with honeycombs. He moves across the world, Demolishing smaller Quarrymen wherever they hide. He sends out flocks of ruby-colored Fleckers, and they wear his victims down until he calls them home. It’s all very homicidal. I can’t explain how or why a Quarryman evolved to hunt other Quarrymen, or even why the in-house Fleckers don’t just murder him and blanket Arlas in a swarm of endless bits of light, but they don’t. All the other Quarrymen know of him, and every few hundred years, one or two get it into their heads to retaliate.

  As to why the Fleckers do what they do, they seek stability. The deeper caves and boreholes offer a kind of protection that they simply can’t find anywhere else, not to mention that some of the stony strata have begun to absorb low levels of their precious life-giving energy, allowing them to continue on for slightly longer than normal. Combine that with more spacious living quarters and freedom to grow –every now and again- larger without the threat of a hungry Quarryman coming knocking, and, well, the Fleckers will risk nearly anything for that kind of safety.”

  Aleksander Politoyov turned his eyes on the ‘fleeing’ Quarryman. He’d moved about a foot and a half, and had already stopped to conserve energy. “So how would you use these entities on the battlefield, Orion? To what purpose would you turn the Quarrymen and the Fleckers?”

  Orion showed his palms, face wide with over-exaggerated simplicity. “A few tweaks here and there to the Fleckers and we can have them thirsty for Harmonic energy, Commander Politoyov. Introduce the changes through viral replication, ramp up their personal sun for a minute or two and we’d breed Harmony warrior-killing savages in less than a day. Let each loose on the battlefield and they’ll swarm like you can’t even imagine. I’ve done some preliminary investigations into this area, and even though the Harmony warriors are nigh-on unkillable, they’d have a very difficult time dealing with a foe that can quite literally burrow in through the skin. Should they begin laying about with some kind of energy weapon, well, we saw what happens when the Quarryman protected himself, no? Assuming for the moment that Kith Antal’s foot soldiers are all about Harmony, then, yes, we would lose significant Flecker lives with each resultant blast, but we’d also see a significant surge in each remaining swarm’s population. Our lovely golden warriors would blanket the field.”

  “They might also get hungry for God soldier flesh, Orion.” Huey countered hotly, turning on the AI, fists clenched. “May I remind you that there’s approximately thirty million God soldiers in Latelyspace that’ve been recently introduced to Harmony? That they now share the same kind of communal connections that Antal’s army possesses?”

  “Different flavor.” Orion returned flippantly. “It might take some doing, we might need to grab a few thousand of Antal’s stooges to get the programming just right, but we’ve got the time and the energy to do it right. The war isn’t going to be happening for at least three years. I … I never said that thought aloud before. Think of it, gentlemen! In less than five years, all of this,” Orion spun in a wide circle, arms held out as far as they could go, “will be gone, replaced by something newer, better, and stranger!”

  “Let’s not put the cart before the donkey.” Politoyov cast a sideways glance, troubled by the warring thoughts in his mind. Thus far –and as much as he positively loathed to admit it- Orion’s plan to use the dual nature of the Arlasians in the War to End It All seemed … viable. Manipulating their genetic coding smacked of the shady and unethical, but Trinity had been doing things like that for tens of thousands of years. No, the way he looked at it, the only true risk lay in getting the ‘flavor of Harmony’ for the Fleckers right; experimentation like that fell just this side of an actual war crime, and while there was little to no doubt in his mind that Antal would undoubtedly do that and infinitely worse, it was all about being the … best of the worst instead of the worst of the worst.

  Was it better to rise above and lose, or to sink to the same level and win?

  “What would you do with the Quarrymen?”

  Orion tore his gaze away from the infinite splendor of all that would soon be destroyed. “Hm? Oh, right. The Quarrymen. I’d give them their own suns, let them loose on the battlefield. You saw how quickly our boy healed when he had enough power flowing through whatever they call veins. We could use them as control points, death towers, that sort of thing. Park them in areas of the ‘battlefield’ we’d like to control without deploying too many troops and let them just vomit their particular brand of lethal radiation all over the place. Enemy troops get too close, their sensors go off, they rattle out a bloom of frankly terrifying radioactivity in a nice big radius, untold numbers of Harmony soldier get melted into contaminated slurry. Any damage our behemoths suffer could be healed within minutes from a commander’s computer station. Just ramp up the artificial sun’s output and blammo! Round two, ready to go!"

  “How many Quarrymen are there on Arlas?” Aleksander asked, all brisk and commander-like. “There can’t be more than a few thousand.”

  Orion grinned with embarrassment. “Actually,” he drawled the word out, “there’s … quite a few more than that. There’s about a million in underground storage. Trinity … Trinity shifted loads of them down there after It noticed that there was an honest to goodness serial killer Quarryman running hell-bent on being the only one standing. If he becomes too successful, the Flecker variant could fail, so … when the populace drops more than ten percent, as has already happened more than once,
some are Tunneled up to the surface, usually near weak and stupid Flecker caves. And thus the Arlasian Dyad continues."

  Huey shouted inarticulately and wandered off to have a quiet word with himself about the insanity of all things in the Unreal Universe, making several promises that when –not if- he was successful in becoming the Godhead for Reality 2.0, this kind of stark raving mad bonkers bullshit would never be allowed to exist, not ever, not in a million years and certainly not across an infinitude of multiple realities and dimensions.

  All of the subminds personally promised that they’d do their diligence in keeping an eye out for this particular brand of awful. When he came back to the ‘discussion area’, he shot daggers at Orion, who feigned a deeply wounded chest.

  “I take it,” Orion said when he recovered from his fake injuries, “that you have no desire to use the Fleckers and the Quarrymen for anything at all.”

  Huey wanted to throw up, but controlled his disgusted rage as best he could, reminding himself that if he wanted to defeat Orion, it'd be at ‘A’ game levels or not at all. It was obvious to the AI that he’d lost this round, and quite badly; you just couldn't ignore the thoughtful, crafty look on Politoyov’s face. Had the Arlasian evolutionary path been a little less manipulated, a little less cruel, Huey supposed he might’ve seen a clear reason to use them in the forthcoming war. They were certainly going to need all the help they could get.

  But not like this.

  The Arlasians –both the diminutive Fleckers and the gargantuan Quarrymen- were too savage. There’d be no controlling them on the battlefield. Their inherent ability to subsist on energy alone meant they could gain the thirst for any energy at all, including friendlies. Add to that mix the Fleckers’ warp speed lifecycle and you’d definitely have an innumerable amount of different Flecker species swarming everywhere. They might develop a taste for radio waves, or the lifesigns of ordinary mortals, or the never-ending flow of quantum energy surging under the skin of the Universe.