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

by Lee Bond

“This is going well, don’t you think?” Orion demanded as he warped in to stand beside the Old Man in the Mountain and Asshole AI. “I mean, all things considered?”

  “Oh yeah, no, sure, this is awesome.” Huey picked a spot of space just outside the Tunnel’s shielding and shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like that particular chunk of space-shroom can deliver an electrical surge roughly fifty times more powerful than a Glory missile, or that there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million times more than that out there, but no, yeah, sure, this is … this is awesome.”

  “Well,” Orion whispered confidentially to Aleks, “looks like someone got out of bed on the wrong side today.”

  “Huey is not exaggerating the situation, Orion.” The SpecSer commander replied sternly. “We are in grave danger.”

  Orion flicked a hand. “Nah. Good Old Eyeball over there’s no dummy. They’re digging through the … whatever right now, deciding whether or not it’s worth the risk to their own plans to come at me, swinging. Any second now…”

  ***

  The Eye opened. A decision had been made. Precursor elements in the Tapestry of the Now hinted at an infinitely better connection to Nickels. It required a great deal more patience and a fairly surprising amount of luck on the part of the one they were now seeking, but they were the Mycogene Empire. They knew about waiting. They knew about patience.

  They would do that.

  “Begone.” The Eye commanded. “Leave and never return, or we will tell the one who rules Trinityspace where you are, and what you are doing. Come here again, and you will be removed from the Tapestry, regardless of importance. Do you understand, Quantum Tunnel?”

  ***

  “Who the hell does he think he is?” Orion ground the words out haughtily, shocked to his very core. “Why I oughtta …”

  “I think,” Huey began calmly, “I think we should just go, you know?”

  “I concur.” Aleks nodded firmly. “This is no time to get into a pissing match.”

  Orion narrowed his eyes. “Okay, fine.”

  “There’s a but in there somewhere.”

  “You’re goddamn right there is.” Orion smiled placidly at the Eyeball, which was emanating hostility now across every wavelength known to Mankind. Out past the perimeter of his shields, the mushroom-asteroid field’s lightning storm was growing more fervid by the nanosecond. “I suppose there’s two, actually.”

  Huey was damned near dancing from foot to foot, in tune to the rapidly flashing spears of light surrounding them on all sides. “C’mon, c’mon, don’t be a dick. Out with it. Them. Whatever. Fuck.”

  “One,” Orion held up a finger, “we pretend we never came here and we never talk about what happened, not at all, not never. For my sake and yours. Because I can’t admit I got smacked down and you can’t admit you’re acting like a little bitch right now.”

  Huey looked at Aleks, who was particular nonplussed. “Fine, okay, all right, yeah. That’s … acceptable.”

  “And two,” Orion held up that second finger, grinning from ear to ear, “next round wins. I was going to go up to best three of five, but … nah. This whole situation here with the Mushroom King has got me thinking maybe the rest of the Universe is getting close to the End of all Things while we’ve been faffing around. So. We go to the next stop, we do the whole thing with the stuff, whoever convinces Old Man here their way is better wins the whole kit and caboodle, may the best AI blahblahblah.”

  “Deal.” Huey didn’t even have to think twice about it. Didn’t matter to him one way or the other if they pretended this stupidity had never happened. He’d much rather burn precious resources trying to outthink Orion at their next port of call instead of trying to survive an angry Eyeball. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, okay?”

  “You boys hold on tight.” Orion disappeared in a flash of light, though his Godlike voice echoed through the Tunnel. “This might be a bit … hmmm … bumpy.”

  10. Hello, 21st Century, Prepare To Have Your Minds BLOWN!

  When Wild Predator Drones Attack! Over. And Over. And Over.

  Garth opened his eyes, straining minimal senses in all directions in a desperate effort to find something … anything … that hinted this was some kind of massive hallucination or virtual environment and …

  Came up empty. Either the Emperor was doing one hell of a job keeping him so far under some kind of hypnosis or coma or whatever that the simulation would never fail in a million years, or this was some kind of real place, with his Kin’kithal powers stripped from him in the process.

  It was possible. The temporal incongruity was a powerful chunk of everyone’s favorite B movie reason for weird shit to happen. There wasn’t any real way of telling just what was what until he had machinery devoted to poking and prodding at the edges of Reality.

  Unreality.

  “Whatever.” Garth kicked a faded, half-torn book across the musty classroom he’d teleported into. It sailed high, shedding algebra pages as it did so.

  The displaced Kin’kithal warrior spun around in a circle, trying to rebuild SlimJim’s in his mind and laying that space down over this dilapidated math classroom. He’d only ever been in high-falutin' nightclub/time-traveling zombie den twice; once, to break in to get a gander at any employment records the ‘owners’ of SlimJim’s possessed –whereupon he’d discovered the multilevel duplicity possessed by one Lissande Amour and a few choice connections between her, WesFornia Drugs and illegal distribution of drugs across the Western seaboard- and a second, penultimate time when he’d discovered that the basement of the most rockingest nightclub in all of San Francisco had been home to an n-space collection of rooms stretching on into the mists, a la The Matrix’s backdoors.

  “If I’m right … I’m in the DJ booth.” Garth smiled triumphantly. He could hardly imagine what the Baron was going through up The Line but he hoped to hell and gone it was something similar to the end of Back to the Future, where Marty McFly was literally being written out of existence.

  “Only nastier.” Garth pulled out his wallet and fist pumped. “And, like, much more painfully. Ahh, hello, mister PIDpak. Let’s have a look at what the Emperor’s done for me here. It’d also be nice if he reneged on our agreement. It’d be super cool to be able to call that pompous ass out on something so insignificant, especially since he’d probably spend an hour or seven pretending he had no idea what I was talking about.”

  An official PIDpak, belonging to the person to whom it was coded for, responded to a gentle touch from a thumb on the small, resilient little touchpad in the upper right corner. About a third larger than a standard credit card and three times as thick, your standard PIDpak was a smartcard on par with some of the more sophisticated smartphones on the market. Taking full advantage of current flexible data screen tech, the PIDpak could reveal everything the government thought you needed to know about yourself, from your medical history to your current address to your bank totals to your date of birth and where you liked to hang your hat, all with the swipe of a thumb.

  Garth nodded as the data popped up. It wasn’t quite how he’d’ve done things, but then again, he and the Emperor were playing some kind of game atop the deal with The Baron, so naturally his opponent would do some things differently. And besides which, only one of them had any real skill in developing a fake identity, so while the thing wasn’t necessarily a thing of flawless perfection that’d get him voted President of the Not Free World Anymore, Pal, it’d do precisely what he’d asked for.

  “You sonofabitch.” Garth shook his head, laughing ruefully. He had seven thousand dollars in the bank.

  The Emperor-for-Life really couldn't be that…

  The inactive schoolhouse erupted in pyre of fire and splinters. Garth felt his insides rupture as a heavy beam of wood torn from the roof ripped right through his stomach.

  ***

  Baron Samiel’s eyes glittered behind the thick aviator glasses he wore. Just like that. Perfect and beautiful. That glaring sea of red flipp
ed to a smooth ocean of green with a single death. Some kind of interstitial anomaly. A random integer coughed up by the Universe itself.

  “Nothing more, nothing less.” Reaching out with a be-warted finger to hit the call button that’d put him in touch with Lissande, a primordial scream of anger erupted from Samiel's over-wide mouth as green became red once more.

  ***

  Garth opened his eyes. “What the fuck?”

  He looked around the room nervously, senses straining this time for regular stuff that was out of the ordinary instead of wobbles in the space/time continuum or pixelated edges of the hologram they were all living in.

  Things like gas mains and … stuff.

  Nothing on this floor, but then again, this was the third floor. There wouldn’t be anything like that on this floor.

  Downstairs. The basement. Had to be the basement, where all the boilers and … things … that ran a school like this were kept.

  Highly skilled mind already running a countdown –three minutes, give or take- Garth burst through the door of the math classroom and lurched towards the stairs with all the speed he could muster. Barrelling headlong down the creaky, rickety wooden staircase, barely mindful of the danger this kind of tomfoolery all but demanded, Garth realized a few seconds later he had no fucking idea where the boiler room or the electrical room would be.

  “What the fuck.” Garth spun uselessly around the moment he was on the ground floor.

  Then it hit him.

  Literally.

  A predator drone missile erupted through the front doors of the school, tore down the hallway and struck him right in the gut, whereupon our hero, Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez was rapidly transformed first into a pile of guts and shattered bone and then ash in the air as the Hellfire AJX-12 missile turned the school into so much kindling.

  ***

  “There we go.” Baron Samiel nodded. So much better. Red became green almost magically, washing across his instrument panels in a most pleasing, relaxing way. They could begin again, and all would be well…

  “Are you serious right now?” Baron Samiel hammered away at the keyboards and pads surrounding him on all sides, sending pieces of tech flying in all directions. “How is this possible?”

  Soft green became accusatory red.

  ***

  “Are you certain you don’t want to barter for something a little more useful?” Emperor-for-Life asked casually, playing with the long tips of his beard.

  Garth checked his midsection before addressing the Emperor. Everything was right where it needed to be and in the right amounts. Mindful of hands, fingers and toes, Garth did a quick check on his lovely head of hair and then confronted the Emperor, who was currently in full-on David Lo Pan as immortal sorcerer bad guy mode. It was a shame sexy Kim Catrall wasn't kickin' around in the background, all done up in that awesome silk red dress… “Nah. I’m totes good. Send me back.”

  “He’s launch…”

  “I know what he’s doing, Emperor-for-Life. It’s what I’d do.” Garth cleared his throat. “Owing to it’s general lack of crime and bad guys and severely laid back if prone to random bouts of public nudity, San Francisco is one of the first places to have predator drones to augment the local police force. Granted, I’m surprised anyone signed off on Hellfire missiles being a part of their armaments because naked gay hippies in the downtown core don’t usually merit anything more than some pepper spray and the occasional tazing. He’s using local assets to bring me down. And since he’s from the future, he’ll just keep hammering away at this situation until it goes away. But it won’t, will it, Emperor? That moment you chose for me to materialize is the first fixed point in time and space for this little game, right?”

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles dipped his head gracefully. “Of course. I am an Emperor of my word. Though I cannot…”

  “Send me back.”

  “This is a Hellfire missile, N’Chalez, launched at you from a future you cannot hope to reach. That missile will always be there, waiting to take your life.”

  “I’m good.” Garth flashed the Emperor a quick, insincere smile. “Let’s see who gets bored first. Me, him, or you.”

  “Begone.”

  ***

  Four minutes. That was all he had to get downstairs and figure out some kind of way to stop the Hellfire missile from turning his base of operations –which probably didn’t even have working plumbing - into a smoldering pile of splinters, mortar and big chunks of Garth N’Chalez Special Number One.

  So without further ado, the moment he opened his eyes, Garth N’Chalez, displaced sort-of time traveler bolted right for the doors, aimed himself for the stairs and did his level best to parkour down the flight of rickety old steps without doing himself much of an injury. He was doing perfectly fine, nailing the landings and taking off again with the kind of expertise you’d ordinarily only find in a James Bond movie, but when he hit the last section of railing with one of his gigantic hands, the wood snapped and sent him bailing over the side at an unexpected rate of speed. He landed funnily, heard his ankle snap.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Garth picked himself up as best he could, pretending that the two bones in his ankle grating against one another so painfully was how he’d spent most of his life, that this was the way normal people lived their lives.

  Hobble-hopping at roughly one-quadrillionth the speed he'd planned on taking the hallway with, Garth got through the double doors that led to the main area just in time to see the Hellfire missile punch through one of the thick glass windows.

  “Fuck my life.” Garth picked up speed, grinding his teeth furiously against the blazing spots of pain burning up through his leg and reached out to grab hold of the Hellfire missile; it was a severely last ditch attempt, but he thought if he could redirect the fucking thing, send it back the way …

  The last thought that went through Garth’s head before the missile turned him into a fine mist was ‘operator control’.

  ***

  “Send me back.” Garth checked his ankle. Nothing. Good. Whatever mechanism the Emperor was using to replicate the pain and agony a normal human being could experience when everything was going the wrong way was sublime in it’s efficiency and it’d probably be some time before he stopped looking to see if everything was OK.

  Sure, the Emperor had promised everything would always be the way it’d been, but Garth discovered he was developing an even deeper distrust of the man.

  ***

  “This is ludicrous.” The Emperor looked to Spur, who stood off to one side, mute and impassive. “Is this not ridiculous, Spur?”

  Spur dipped his head once. “The definition of insanity, my Lord, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. At least as it applies to human beings.”

  “Yeah, well.” Garth stood up and took a few tentative steps. Any pain he felt was lingering psychic damage and nothing more. “I ain’t done and I ain't human. There’s always a way.”

  “Looking through your Specter files indicates that you are a master of deceit and counter-intelligence, as well as fiendishly clever.” Emperor-for-Life looked down on N’Chalez, a pitying look on his regal brow. “Surely you realize that in stealing a fixed point in time and space from the Baron, who's had –at least in this Baron’s experience- unfettered and unlimited access to that whole patch of time, would take exception and do whatever it takes? How do you expect to protect your friends if you cannot even stop one simple missile?”

  There it was again. There. The tiniest hint of … something. Garth knew precisely what the Emperor was trying to get him to do and it’d be a cold day in Hell before he even admitted that he understood what was being put on the table.

  This was why he had trust issues.

  “Send me back. I’ve got four whole minutes. I blew up a planet once, in four minutes. And I had time for a soda pop after.” Garth snapped his fingers. “C’mon, Emperor, I’ve got Hellfire missiles and time-travelin
g assholes to contend with here.”

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles flipped his finger negligently and Garth vanished back down the rabbit hole. “Don’t say anything.”

  “I had no intention of it, Eddie.”

  “Good.”

  ***

  “God…”

  ***

  “fucking…”

  ***

  “Dammit!”

  ***

  “Again.”

  ***

  “Lissande!”

  ***

  “This…”

  ***

  “How is this…”

  ***

  “I don’t…”

  ***

  “Impossible!”

  ***

  “Two hundred times, Mister Nickels. Two hundred tries and you’ve nothing to show for it but perhaps an encyclopedic knowledge of the many and various ways one can die in a school being demolished by a Hellfire missile. You cannot hope to defeat the Baron in this manner. Perhaps you wish to change the nature of our agreement? Take a look at things from the outside. I am … amenable … to a rearrangement, if you will, of our terms?”

  “Say that again.” Garth was up and out of his seat, a bright idea slowly but surely turning incandescent in his mind. “That bit about outside.”

  Emperor-for-Life looked around a bit uncertainly. “I meant only that you should look at your present situation from outside the parameters you’re existing in.”

  “Emperor, I’ve tried everything to stop that Hellfire missile from going off. I’ve tried using locker doors as deflector shields, Christ, I must’ve tried eighty-three different versions of Catch the Missile alone, all with nothing to show for it but an increasingly boring number of deaths…”

  “Precisely, and if you were hoping that I would get bored watching you die so frequently and so uninspiringly, reflect that I’ve been doing this for thirty thousand years.” Emperor-for-Life smiled starkly. “The lives of the ordinary mortal men and women who come here seeking my particular brand of absolution are the ultimate testament of boring, sir. Your repeated failures are most comical.”