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

by Lee Bond

  Gwy nodded. Learning the truth about Garth Nickels, being forced to understand the absolute truth of their very Unreal existences and of the … things lurking in the darkness … it’d taken about an hour for Huey to flesh out the broad strokes, and at the end, he’d been bone tired,

  But it’d been worth it.

  Gwyleh’d been an Enforcer for a long, long time and had come across things out past The Cordon, strange things hinting at powers and monsters hiding even deeper in the wilds of the Universe than was safe to contemplate. He’d been a believer before Huey’d finished, and as they made their weary way back to proper civilization so Huey and Chad might rescue Garth from his temporal prison and a tired insect could turn his hands at farming, even stranger truths had been revealed.

  “See, wot I is thinkin’, yeah, is that all that fun back there’s got you missin’ the gang, right? And you is feelin’ guilty that you had fun doin’ it.” Suit leaned back in it’s chair, putting it’s hands at the back of it’s head. “Now, that’s all well and good, right, but … I is finkin’ our man Chad is goin’ to be in some kind of serious trouble, right, and we is need to be in full fighting form if we is goin’ to be of assistance. Bein’ a farmer for all them years made us kinda soft. All that devastation got your blood or ichor or wotever as is flowin’ through them vein-like fings ‘neath your chitin all sorts of pumpin’, I warrant.”

  Gwyleh said nothing. Suit was more or less right. Being a farmer had made him a bit soft. It was … distressing, how easily he’d cast off the mantle of Enforcer and how quickly he’d fallen into the routine of civilian life. Waking up before the sun rose, working the fields, tilling the soil, smelling hot sun over fresh earth … it’d crept in overnight, transforming him from one of the most feared Enforcers in the Universe to Gwyleh Ronn, farmer extraordinaire.

  “I’m not that person anymore.” Gwyleh said boldly.

  “And well perfect you ain’t, squire.” Suit replied earnestly. “You were an angry lad, all the way ‘round the bend. Like as not bite someone’s face clean off before givin’ ‘em half a chance to explain. Nah, we in’t talk about that bloke, we is talk about the one who ‘as friends. Yes, sure, we did cause quite a few problems, but we is also ‘ave some fun.”

  Gwy bristled at how cavalierly Suit brought up the ‘old’ him all the while neatly dismissing the reasons for the rage that’d burned through him for so long and considered rallying to defend his actions for a long, hot moment before eventually changing his mind; he was the last of his kind, his species had been destroyed by Jordan Bishop and he had been one of the most terrible Enforcers in all of Trinityspace’s history. But that was the past.

  Traveling with Huey and Chadsik had been difficult, in the beginning.

  On the one hand, there’d been Huey, cautious and careful to a fault, always mindful of everyone and everything around him. The AI in a meatsuit had been a nearly perfect creature in all respects, possessing a first-rate intellect –thanks in no small part to the reprogramming he’d undergone in Latelyspace and the crazier-than-hell rewiring performed by Garth- but his body was also unique, built from the ground up using cutting edge technologies that'd see the entire solar system turned into charred cinder if the shield ever went down.

  Gwyleh liked Huey. If they were successful in helping Garth with his dreams, the AI had a considerable destiny ahead of him. It was because of this heavy burden that Huey treated the entire Universe around him with literal kid gloves, resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary. Gwyleh recalled quite clearly bristling at the man’s insistence for a low profile, wanting nothing more than to open up with gun’s blazing and BAM’s bamming whenever they ran into difficulty, which is where Chadsik’s influence on his growth came into play.

  Always ready for a scrap, the … whatever Chadsik was had generally wound up causing them all a lot more grief than should've been possible. It was almost as if the FrancoBritish assassin generated an invisible field that drew the worst possible elements of any single encounter and then ramped things up to about eleven on the danger dial.

  Gwy’d never seen anything like it in his entire life. And of course Chadsik was never one to back down from a fight, not in a million years, and it was then, right then, that Gwy caught wind of Garth Nickels’ true essence: when shit hit the fan, Huey rolled up both sleeves and started wading around just like his mentor, wreaking havoc with a devil-may-care grin on his face, oftentimes singing lyrics from ancient rock ballads.

  A burst of laughter escaped Gwy.

  The first time things had gotten truly serious –they’d been sneaking onto a homegrown military base in an effort to steal a midrange vessel capable of getting them to a Quantum Tunnel without too much fuss, only they’d mistakenly set off an antiquated alarm system none of their scanners had detected- Huey and Chadsik had set about ‘defending’ their position with about as much violence as one might expect. Aircraft blown out of the sky, ground machines launched right off their wheels, soldiers shot in the hands, legs and arms –both the AI and the assassin had done their level best to keep the casualties as low as possible- and there, right there in the middle of it all, Gwyleh Ronn had stood, head tilted to one side, unable to believe the lunacy he was witness to.

  Only when he'd stepped in, dropping EMPs all over the place, had they finally gotten around to stealing a ship. Off they’d flown into the night sky. Just like that. The switch between friendly enemies to friends had been thrown.

  “So which is it, mate?” Suit wondered idly, fiddling with tech on it’s chest. “Is you angry you ‘ad fun, or is you angry we is wreck all that shite?"

  Gwy exhaled noisily. “Okay, yes, fine. That was fun. We put on a great show, but it can’t happen again! That’s the kind of thing that’ll catch the attention of Trinity Itself, and the last thing we want is for someone to come hunting after us.”

  Suit nodded knowingly. “Right, right, true, true. But, I is wonderin’, right, if an Enforcer’s main method of travel is down for the count and likely not to come back on line, wot is the worry, hey? These ‘ere ships,” Suit thumped an inactive console with a metal gauntlet, “are the bee’s knees and the camel’s tits sure enough, but they in’t exactly pinpoint, hey? We’d be long gone before any of our old friends came wanderin’ around, right?”

  Gwy held a hand up impatiently. “Look, if we’re going to rescue Chad, we’ve got to be smarter than this. A little more Huey, a little less Chad, if you please. Especially since we have yet to figure out a way to get through The Cordon that doesn’t involve Orion. If it’s even possible, I’m willing to bet the old farmstead that any attempt we make will pull more attention than anything that’s happened in this Universe to date, including any of Garth’s shenanigans.”

  Suit reflected on that for a moment, then spent a few more minutes pondering how it were able to do any sort of thinking at all. It were the weirdest of things. It remembered quite plainly being nothing more than a Suit following the telepathic commands of it’s operator, Gwyleh Ronn, without question. That’s how it’d been designed, after all. That’s how all the Suits had been built.

  And then Chadsik’s plea had come screaming up out of the darkness, a harrowing cry for help that’d been like lightning blasting storm clouds loose, revealing a landscape of intellect and thought that had no rational explanation for being in the first place.

  Suit knew it sounded and acted and maybe even felt like Chadsik al-Taryin, but that din’t make any sense. How were something like that possible?

  Suit decided to dismiss concerns over it’s sudden sentience with a flick of the hand. There’d be better times ahead to figure out why it’s mind were full of … thoughts. “Orl right, mate, you’ve got it. We’ll do fings your way, hey? A little more Huey it shall be. Now, ‘ave you figured out these controls yet or wot?”

  Even though he’d been using Trinitytech for as long as he could remember, Gwy really wasn’t much of a fan of Trinity's particular flavor of tech; coming from a telepathi
c agrarian race of insects as he did, the insect preferred a more … rustic … approach to high-tech machines. Slogging through technical manuals on the safest and most productive method of using the black hole engines was sheer torture for someone like himself, which was why he hadn't told Suit to go away.

  As aggravating as the conversation was, it was infinitely more preferable to more reading.

  “Mostly. Maybe?” Gwy shrugged, a faint grin on his face. “It’s ironic that I can read a human’s mind and know everything they’re thinking, but I have no idea how something like a human is capable of coming up with anything like this. I do know it's going to take more than five … jumps to get to our destination. Possibly closer to ten or a bit higher, even.”

  “Wot?” Suit tensed up.

  In the back of it’s mind, Chad’s rallying cry for assistance was on a permanent playback. The man’s terror at falling into that massive ship was still as real now as it’d been when it’d first been sent. The sooner they got properly on the road, the better. Suit wasn’t certain how much longer it could handle the fear that percolated through it’s senses every few minutes. “We is got to get a proper move on, my son, and you is sayin’ we is take like, wot, weeks to get there?”

  “Well, now, hold on.” Gwy held up a reassuring hand. “I’m not saying that at all. Traveling through black hole acceleration is nothing like going through a Quantum Tunnel, Suit. That’s bypassing the normal frame of the Universe altogether. There’s nothing to run into. These…”

  “’s not true.” Suit said smugly, shifting in it’s seat. “There’s all kinds of stories about ships crashin’ into other ships as wot got jimmied out the way.”

  “I’m certain those are just stories.” Gwy wouldn’t admit it, not to anyone, under any circumstances, but the stories to which Suit referred ranked quite highly amongst the things that bothered him the most about Trinitytech. “And as I was saying, these engines and shields provide a tremendous amount of acceleration. More than the Universe has ever seen, as far as I understand it. But that doesn’t mean we can steer while we’re underway. Which means the AI minds aboard this vessel need to plot a trajectory to our final destination that avoids all stationary or orbiting objects –like planets- that we could theoretically run into. Do you want to run into a planet or a space station?”

  Suit crossed it’s arms. “Wiv these shields, we’d probably survive impact with a space station. They’s the tits.”

  “Quit being contrary.” Gwy snapped irritably. “You understand my point.”

  “Oh, I is understandin’ it well perfect.” Suit cleared it’s imaginary throat. “I is just not pleased wiv this whole fing. Bollocking arsehole Orion being a bollocky cunt an’ disappearin’ on us like that.”

  Gwy didn’t bite down on that particular offering; ever since learning that their primary method of traveling had been thanks to a massively massive Quantum Tunnel instead of one of the Suit’s more impressive features, the Enforcer was … pleased the method was no longer available.

  “Yes, well,” the Enforcer replied soothingly, “this is the only way available, so we’re stuck with it. Now, whereabouts is Chad? You need to input the coordinates for me.”

  Suit shut it’s metaphorical eyes and focused on the location from which Chad’s plea for assistance had originated. Never one to have experienced this kind of sensation before, Suit had to remind itself that it wasn’t really real and that the queer, riotous feeling of falling backwards into an ocean that threatened to steal it’s very being was also not real.

  Even if it felt real.

  Following the memory of Chad’s broadcast message was difficult; now that the original moment was long gone, the psychic supplication was thin and thready. The Cordon itself was powerful enough to block something that was purely in the realm of the mind! A part of Suit marveled at that, and then found itself in momentary awe of the kind of man it took to envision a method of keeping not just the physical horrors that existed beyond The Cordon at bay, but the mental ones as well.

  Garth Nickels were a force to be reckoned with, that were for certain. Suit genuinely hoped it didn’t fall on the wrong side of the Engineer’s mighty temper.

  “Waiting.” Gwy said snarkily, glad to find a reason to tease Suit for being slow.

  “Mate,” Suit snapped testily as it’s patience over the difficulty dwindled further, “you is the psychic one, yeah? I is well certain you is used to this sort of fing, but I is a talking Enforcer Suit who ‘as suddenly gone conscious, right? Locatin’ a mental cry across the whole fucking parking lot of the Universe through the fucking Cordon ain’t summink as I was ever trained for. ‘s like swimmin’ in a particularly and Enforcer Suit unfriendly ocean. Not to mention the fucking call is damn near … ah. ‘ere we are then. Close as, hey?”

  The monitors filled with the address Suit had plucked from thin air. “What do you mean, close as?”

  “Worl,” If Suit had lips, it would’ve pursed them speculatively, “like. The ship or wotever ‘e’s in is quite large, you understand. Like, roughly the size of a Galaxy.”

  “I understand that.” Gwy didn’t like where this was headed. Not at all.

  “Okay, good.” Suit bobbled it’s head up and down. “So … them coords I is loadin’ in there, they is … roughly where part of the ship is sort of like, erm, pushin' against The Cordon.”

  Gwy knew better than to demand that Suit do better. As he well knew, psychic location was difficult under the best of circumstances, and that was over marginal distances, so Gwy simply couldn't find it in himself to be angry at Suit. It’d performed well enough under adverse circumstances. “Good enough. Once we make a few jumps in this direction, I'm confident we'll nail it down to less than a million miles.”

  “Yeah, ‘course, mate, no worries on that end.” Suit gave Gwy an awkward thumb’s up to disguise his awkwardness over the little white fib he'd just told, then powered down into surveillance mode so Gwy could have enough quiet to work the engines.

  Inwardly, though, it were fretting something fierce. The only reason it’d been able to locate Kith Antal’s Galaxy-ship at all was because of the distance between them and where Chad had somehow fallen through The Cordon.

  The moment they were up close and personal to The Cordon separating the wild lands of the Universe from Trinityspace, they'd be well and truly fucked: The Cordon, combined with the immense power of Kith Antal's Galaxyship, meant that it'd be fucking impossible to get any sense of where Chad might be.

  Meaning …

  Meaning that once they got through –however the fucking hell they managed something no one else had ever done in the entire history of the Cordon- it was a verifiable fact that they'd be playing cat and mouse with Antal's forces while simultaneously trying to find the fucking guy.

  Suit felt a wave of an unfamiliar emotion blow through it's cybernetic nerves, and it thought perhaps it was beginning to understand just why Gwy was on edge.

  The Beast Prepares

  Before meeting Garth Nickels on that fateful day, Jerszak Senfell would’ve been the first one to tell you that life on Tenerek, especially in Arturii, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; a citizen in the main city of one of the most corrupt cities in what felt like the entire world wasn’t precisely an easy life, even for someone as lowly as a bus driver.

  Daily bribes just to keep his bus on the road and to keep the peacocks at bay had been rising steadily for the last ten years. So much so, in fact, that Jerry'd been on the cusp of moving to the hills.

  But … then he’d come.

  A dark-haired, blue-eyed maniac, gallivanting into his life with reckless abandon and fiendish skill, laughing like a damned soul and whispering awful, awful secrets about how the world really was.

  And thus Jerszak Senfell had become Jerry Seinfeld in truth, and when the dust had settled and the inquiries had finally slowed to a halt and one poor, lowly bus driver had been found innocent of all wrongdoing, The Church of Nothing had been born.


  His poor church had been so tiny in the beginning, existing mostly in the shadows, because if there was one thing everyone hated more than the ever-revolving governmental models that drove most employees homicidal at one point or another in their lives, it was new religion. No one wanted it. Most of the time, no one wanted the religion they had.

  Before the Church of Nothing, the only reason the primary faith of Tenerek had even lasted this long was because it was pretty simple stuff.

  Then the Church of Nothing had shown up, and it'd been like a light cast on all their lives.

  Jerry remembered meeting Richie and Steve like it was yesterday; he’d been sitting in the front studio of his apartment –his wife, Rita, had been out buying food for dinner- wondering if anyone would be brave or foolish enough to follow the directions on the pamphlets he'd left all over the neighborhood. Just as he'd been gearing up to call it a day, Steve had knocked gently on the open door frame.

  Jerry smothered the grin that wanted to creep across his face. With all the attention poor Darren was getting not more than five feet from where he stood, the expression could easily be misconstrued.

  While he had more than enough clout to pull any footage of himself –or any Church member, if it came down to it- from any media outlet in the world, Jerry couldn't help but feel that today, of all days, needed to be left clean and pure.

  This was a most triumphant day, the day the Church of Nothing finally got a face that'd launch their religion across the stars. Jerry could feel it in his bones.

  You just didn't throw your weight around on a day like today.

  Steve’d been the first to come into that 'old' Church set inside a shabby apartment living room, with outdated furniture, an old television set, and faded floral wallpaper - but only by a few seconds; Richie, the disgraced cop who’d risked everything to hear the same sorts of secrets, had arrived seconds later, looking sheepish and awkward.