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

by Lee Bond

  This was more important.

  Eddie needed to see.

  Needed to witness. The mere fact that the room had to pull more power from the temporal incongruity to physically resolve the data into something meaningful simply proved his point: this thing wasn’t some odd microscopic creature that’d somehow attached itself to Garth during the return trip to the Unreal Universe, some … blobby microbe mutated by the journey but something much greater than that.

  This was one of the Ushbet.

  Somehow.

  The image swam and swam until Eddie felt as though he were floating through space, surrounded by diaphanous black tendrils of dark matter. Here and there in it's nebulous body, tiny flashes of lightning sheared, representing either random, barely-there thoughts of the black smudge of life or random impulses from it’s equally non-existent nervous system.

  The system sensed Eddie's interest and shifted focus, following the input of it's lord and master.

  There.

  Inside one of those flashes! The room zoomed in once more, and an excitement so profound he worried for a moment he might die filled him to the very depths of his being.

  The lightning was neither embryonic thoughts nor surges of bioelectric energy!

  Not at all!

  Before his very eyes, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles watched as the thing that'd been become the thing it was through some kind of majestic and never-even-dreamed-of existential decompression.

  The tiny chains of lighting zipping through the sketchy creature’s body crackled and twisted and hissed with furious power as some inner mechanism began decrypting itself, unwinding tightly bound molecules buried deep inside …

  “Internal n-space storage?” Eddie mused, stepping back to get a broader view. “Technically possible, I suppose. Well, I mean, I know it’s possible because N’Chalez has done the same thing, but he used the shattered remains of the proto-Reality to accomplish that. The risks you took.”

  Eddie waggled an accusatory finger at his prized possession. “But these compression ratios are beyond the realm of possibility, aren’t they?”

  After spending time dealing with the temporal incongruity, working to unlock the deeper secrets of the strange chunk of protomatter, both Eddie and Drake understood a great deal about compression and encryption; the worlds they –well, he more than Drake- created for penitent EuroJapanese citizens were real and true worlds in every sense of the word, but they were compressed down in size until they occupied very little space at all. Then this pocket world was placed inside an n-space storage unit inside the incongruity, and none was the wiser.

  It was kind of like a nesting doll, though Eddie had never dreamed in his wildest flights of fancy that you could compress yourself down into digestible bits, and then to store them away inside yourself?

  It was baffling.

  To a being who’d lived for thirty thousand years, who had complete control over the temporal incongruity, this miraculous feat was …

  “Something I want.” Eddie ran a hand across the box again, and the proto-Ushbet shivered a little at the sensed contact.

  The Emperor-for-Life contemplated hammering on the walls again to spark another round of frenzy, but decided against it at the last minute; if this beastie was capable of expanding further, of possibly outstripping it's containment protocols, then Eddie wanted to be on it's good side.

  Better safe than sorrow, as his dad had always said.

  “You and I are going to be great friends.” Eddie told the snakelike thing in the box. “Watch this thing closely. Monitor it from all angles. I don’t want to miss a thing.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Make sure you watch for ex-dee access or anything remotely similar. This thing was a God in the proto-Reality. It had access to who knows what for a power source. I don’t want it getting anywhere near anything like that over here.”

  Eddie was about to depart to deal with the second of his most pressing chores when he realized what he’d said. An astonished look crossed his face, a hand stole up to his mouth, and he turned back to his precious, living artifact. “You were a God. In the proto-Reality. You possessed powers beyond comprehension. Anything and everything you wanted done, happened. I came from there. You were one of my Gods.”

  The realization was mind-blowing!

  A God!

  Eddie laughed joyously, tilting his head back to let it all out. It was amazing. There were such things as Gods in the Unreal Universe after all. He had the proof of one in a box. And as long as he managed to keep God in the Box, Eddie knew he’d learn all of God's secrets.

  And then, when the time came, when Antal and anyone else who thought they knew how best to treat their flagging, beleaguered Unreal Universe, well, God Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles would teach them all their most valuable lesson.

  Then, if they'd failed to learn the lessons, they'd be obliterated. Simple as that…

  What a time to be alive!

  Until then, though, Eddie knew he was going to have to check up on Tomas Kamagana. Prior to Drake’s stupid mouth running unfiltered, he hadn’t given the wizened old clone a single thought. But now his friend had pointed out how fervent he was on saving Naoko, the Emperor couldn’t shake the worry loose from his mind.

  ***

  Eddie settled into the comfortable chair and started the systems running, frankly pissed at Drake for bringing Tomas up; there were a million other things he could be doing that moment, most of them involving keeping a firm eye on N’Chalez. No matter what Drake really thought, Eddie was no fool and wasn’t about to let the Kin’kithal get the better of him.

  “Instead, here I am, fucking around with this bullshit. I’m not even going to get anything good. Huey’s shield blocks even my efforts at infiltration, and that’s saying something.” Eddie grumbled as the powerful computers seemed to take forever to boot up.

  It was true, about the shield surrounding Latelyspace blocking his efforts. It had been -still was- upsetting as hell; as the creator of the solar system, Eddie had enjoyed keeping intimate tabs on the comings and goings of the important players in Latelyspace, treating the whole thing kind of like a television show to keep him preoccupied during the boring times.

  It’d been difficult, keeping his hands off during those moments when his people had teetered on the brink of destruction, especially in the past, when he’d been doggedly loyal to N’Chalez, but alone he’d left them.

  After, when N’Chalez had arrived on the scene, he’d kept a very close eye indeed on what was happening on Hospitalis, continually on the edge of his seat the whole time, utterly and completely blown away by the man’s implausible survival skills. He remembered quite clearly feeling extremely vindicated in his decisions in creating Latelyspace for Garth, and pretty damned ecstatic over the budding relationship between him and Naoko.

  A perfect realm for a man he’d completely and utterly wronged in the proto-Reality; Drake had said more than once that there was no ill will between the two of them.

  Yet, Eddie still felt the long term guilt of those indecisive, almost jealously possessive moments as clearly as if they’d happened yesterday and it was only now, with the full measure of who and what Garth truly was that the Emperor-for-Life felt vindicated at not trusting Garth N’Chalez so many thousands of years ago. No kind man, no truly good man, would've allowed the things that’d happened to a woman like Naoko come to pass.

  The funny thing about the whole situation –Naoko’s horrid transformation and Garth’s ultimate plan for the entire Universe- was that Eddie was still on board with the destruction of the Unreal Universe. It needed to happen, and in a hurry. With the tampering by the M’Zahdi Hesh and Garth’s own thirty thousand year-long manipulation of the shape of the Universe being what it was, everything, everywhere, was entirely too broken to be of use to anyone.

  Everyone, everywhere, was going to die. And that was the funny part. Eddie knew that fact, embraced it wholly.

  He just couldn’t get
over what’d been done …

  “Finally!” Eddie smacked the side of the monitor with a heavy thump and settled in to see if there was anything worth learning out there in Latelyspace. “Politoyov gone … already knew it … Specter and Army turning their ships into a Mad Max clusterfuck … hilarious, but already knew it … Jesus, well, that’s a terrible idea. Kaptan Innit as the new Commander of the war effort against the … ah. I see. Well. That’s an even worse idea, but they’ll get about as far as the rest of us. Didn’t think the Novinians would ever throw their hat in the ring, but it sure looks like they did. Wonder if that refurbished Goddie knows what he’s gotten himself into. Hm. Beyond that bit of messed up news, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot going on over there.”

  Eddie noodled around for a bit longer, wondering why he wasn't closing the systems down. It was just another normal day in the war, with Trinity’s … ADAM’s forces twiddling their respective thumbs and waiting for someone to come up with any kind of method of burrowing through the impenetrable shield.

  “Which won’t happen.” Eddie grumbled. “Advanced hy-tech created by an AI fully hacked by Garth at the height of his powers, even if he didn’t know it himself. There’s literally no way of knowing just went into that thing.”

  The shield was a pure expression of unmitigated scientific wonder. The Emperor-for-Life could admit that quite easily, and had a perfect comparison; Garth’s technology, which was being used to shield all the ‘important’ planets in Trinity’s endless treasure trove of worlds, wasn’t quite perfect. There were still a few weapons out there in the vastness of the Unreal Universe that could possibly puncture the gravnetic shields. Trinity hadn’t included testing those particular weapons of mass destruction because they were, quite literally, an eternity away and therefore –to It’s rational mind- not worth worrying about.

  A sure sign of the dementia that’d led It into allowing ADAM to row the boat for a while. Just because a Sorrelian Burrow Cannon was on the far side of The Cordon and roughly eighty billion Galaxies away beyond all that didn’t mean it couldn’t show up one day. If there was one thing Eddie was learning about this Universe that Garth had crafted, it was that weirder shit than a deadly weapon capable of countering gravnetic shielding showing up could happen at any minute.

  But Huey’s shield … in their desperation –and anger, and irritability- everyone from Specter, the Army, Historical Adjutants and wildly insane Enforcers had used everything at their disposal in a mad bid to rip the shield down for even a second. Tried, and failed, using weapons and explosives capable of annihilating planets, of creating quantum-level interactions that might ultimately unspool solar systems.

  All to no avail.

  “It’d take something unprecedented.” Eddie said aloud, trying to wiggle the niggling thought in the back of his head loose. His subconscious had to know something he didn’t, else he’d be back upstairs, watching Garth muddle through the impossible task of defeating Baron Samiel. “It’d take using two disparate technologies together to form something never imagined… Bring up a list of tech available to the Latelians.”

  That list popped up almost immediately. Eddie knew most of it by heart; in one way or another he’d been instrumental in providing the Latelians with the basic underpinnings of most of the technology they took for granted every day, but Garth had spent considerable time and money on improvements and developing new ideas that were almost-but-not-quite hy-tech in nature. With UMDT still in full swing, they might’ve squeezed out a few new earth-shattering concepts that could trump Huey’s understanding of science.

  “Incomplete.” Eddie sighed. Of course it was incomplete. They’d been behind that shield for years. Though Garth –and presumably Huey as well, as the Emperor-for-Life couldn’t imagine that the AI mind would let his creator and benefactor gear the rest of the Universe up for destruction on his own- was no longer in the system, the people of Latelyspace were amongst the most inquisitive of all. They might lack the ability to create hy-tech devices, but now that N’Chalez had sparked their lives, there was no telling what was happening.

  Eddie tapped his lips. Tomas Kamagana most certainly could not escape the Latelian shield wall. “And yet, here I still am.” The Emperor mused.

  It was irrit…

  The Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles smacked himself in the head hard enough and with enough gracelessness for any penitent to doubt their Godking's sanity.

  “The fucking Army. Specters. Heavy Elites.” It’d been a long time since Eddie’d felt anything close to concern over what someone else might accomplish.

  A long, long time.

  He felt more worry now –over what his clone might do with proper access to Trinity tech- than over anything Garth might do; in here, surrounded by the temporal incongruity and stripped of his incredible powers, Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez was mortal, barely able to fight his way past normal people.

  But Tomas Kamagana, kissed with the tiniest fraction of power by the temporal incongruity, just enough to give him a great intellect and the kind of willful tenacity a non-Latelian would need to survive Latelyspace … he might just cause considerable problems. For everyone, everywhere.

  “Give me a list of what the assembled Armies has on deck. Nothing is off limits.” About the only thing Eddie knew for certain wasn’t on the other side of the shield wall were Enforcers.

  A gnawing suspicion in his gut suggested that that was the only gift he'd be getting during this foray.

  The Trinity list took a lot longer to compile than the Latelian one, a fact that didn’t sit easy in Eddie’s stomach. Now, he wasn’t overly worried about what Trinity’s actual Army had brought along with them; they were a bunch of preening idiots in shining spaceships, relying on the steadfast shock and awe approach they'd been using since the War Against the Hesh. It was true that they quite often played dirty pool by dropping Hand of Glory missiles or Havoc Bombs on planets just to end things quickly, but other than those deadly weapons, they rarely strayed…

  Eddie read through the Army’s list with a derisive snort. As expected.

  Each ship's loadout was about as boring and as standard as you'd expect to find, to the point where it was obvious the Army commanders had flat out ignored AI suggestions that they bring beefier weapons along.

  Army hubris was a real sonofabitch.

  “This is pathetic.” Eddie groused, unreasonably aggravated by the Army’s short-sightedness.

  Oh, he was damn pleased they’d been so idiotic about the whole affair, but at the same time, Trinity's soldiers were descendants of the original Armies of Man!

  These were the descendants of men and women who'd warred against the Kith and Kin! Nothing should be out of bounds for them!

  This Army was a showpiece.

  Another list popped up and this one –longer and as intricately detailed as one might expect from the legendary Aleksander Politoyov- was the kind of thing that'd fill the leaders of militant Galaxies with a deep, instinctual woe.

  Hand of Glory missiles in the hundreds. Shrike and Fury Aggregate Weather Compilers. Gamma Plateaus …

  “I cannot believe this.” Eddie smacked the side of the monitor. “He brought Gamma Plateaus? This man could conquer a Universe.”

  The list went on. Illicitly obtained semiBams. Inoperative Superstring Cannons scavenged from the sites of Enforcer devastation. Kouranni Slickguns. Vengeful Mites. Skypiercer Satellite Arrays.

  “Cordontech.” Eddie wanted to throw up. Cordontech was the literal stuff of nightmares, for no matter where it came from, no matter what it did, there was almost a definite chance that at some point or other, Kith Antal or one of his minions had had their grubby, Harmonized mitts on the stuff, making it wildly dangerous and impractical to use at the best of times.

  The Emperor-for-Life had seen footage of Cordontech weapons in use, and … there was no wonder why both Politoyov and Trinity Itself allowed the abominations that were Heavy Elites to exist.

  There was n
o other way to counter the deadly power of such weapons.

  As powerful and hair-raising everything was, though, they still wouldn't be effective against that shield.

  The room went on to display the few squads of Heavy Elites that’d definitely made it through when the shield had dropped to allow Garth passage out into the Universe, but Eddie waved the data away.

  He was missing something, wasn’t thinking the right way. He was thinking like himself, the Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles, a man who hadn’t had to think around corners or outside the box in thousands and thousands of years. He needed to think like a man who thought he was mortal, who’d be willing to risk anything and everything to dig a hole through the shield …

  “Dig. A. Hole.” Eddie exhaled noisily through his nostrils. He had been thinking about this the wrong way, imagining that the best and only way through the shield was through force of arms.

  By blasting or shattering. Going at the shield wall with all guns and barrels blazing would not only attract the attention of either the invading forces or the Latelian God Army themselves, it’d force the machinery driving the shield to go into overdrive.

  But … digging? Burrowing? Something small, innocuous?

  “What does he have at his disposal?” Eddie wondered aloud, looking over the lists of tech he’d ignored in favor of the more destructive stuff at the man’s fingertips. “If I were going to try and burrow through the shield, what would I need? How would I do it? I’m desperate to get through, desperate enough to risk my own life. Enough to wind up caught by Trinity, or by my own people. What would I do under those circumstances?”

  Captured AI minds might help Tomas, but Eddie couldn't see a single mind aiding and abetting a Latelian for any reason at all.

  And that was assuming the old man could even lay his hands on one, let alone getting enough alone time with it to generate some kind of plan.

  Data crawled by and Eddie grew more concerned by the second. He wasn't at the point where he was seeing items that'd help Tomas and his bid for freedom, but Eddie couldn't shake the feeling that bad news lurked around the corner.