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

by Lee Bond

  Until now.

  Massive tentacles hanging from beneath the bloated, airborne larval form that would -very soon now, very soon indeed- become the first Unreal Universal-based Bruushian warcraft born beneath truly alien skies dragged themselves across the landscape, indiscriminately vacuuming organic and inorganic matter into suckered mouths as wide across as a hundred men laying end to end. Up, up, up the matter went, being ground into finer and finer paste or dust, smashed into a thick gruel that would find a home in one of the massive vats.

  Once that crude but essential task was complete, the intelligent-yet-unlearned organic computers running the complex system of veins and arteries would send the fluidic foodstuff to wherever it needed to be, and after that, even more complicated and complex organic machines would reformat the matter into what was needed.

  Energy convertors for weapons. Blast shields for external armor plating. Sensor probes to detect enemies. Everything and anything, all from the glorious stuff that was organic matter.

  This was the true power of the Bruush. All matter, converted from one thing to another, be it human skin for metallic compounds strong enough to survive the most arduous of weapons attacks or earth and dirt for projectile weapons.

  Andros Medellos knew he was no gene witch, knew that those wizened, hoary old lizards could have accomplished all that he was doing now in a third the time and perhaps with even more grandeur, but they'd been born to their lot in life, trained from the egg to understand the complexity of life.

  But he, Andros Medellos, the great and grand Tr'ss T'aa Nihaaq S'strss, he had taught himself! Had learned to crack the deepest mysteries of DNA all on his own, with no one to help, no one to confide in.

  "I am miraculous." Andros howled his glee into the tortured sky, receiving in kind for his self-born adulation a thundering, garrulous shriek from his enormous child flying high above them all. "And you are even greater than I."

  One of the massive tentacular feeding tubes crashed into one of the few remaining structures in … whatever city he was in and Andros -no longer encumbered by the skin he wore so often- became a black streak of muscle and claw, bone and fang; what had to be the sole remaining men and women on this particular continent were streaming from the shattered, tumbling remains, and it was time for him to feed.

  So long had he gone without being who he truly was underneath the pale, almost slick pink skin belonging to a man calling himself Andros Medellos. Too long as a wolf in sheep's clothing when in truth, he was more than even that.

  He was a dragon, a thing of gory wonder. The people of the world he strode across while his child blotted out the sun and cast dark shadows everywhere were nothing to him, nothing to anyone, but when they were dead, when their blood and bones and organs were turned to a new purpose, they would be greater in death than they ever had been in life.

  "You are so lucky." Andros growled from deep inside his capacious lungs at the man he clutched in one massive, scaly claw. "So lucky to be given this opportunity to mean more to the Universe as food or fuel for my child."

  "Why... why are you ... how ... this ..."

  It was the same every time. Well, with variations on a theme, but no matter where the Bruush landed, no matter what kind of world -Shattered Dominion or plateau- fell victim to the rapacious hunger of the mighty, mighty Bruush, they all of them asked the same questions, over and over again, without pause.

  As if they could ever hope to understand. Their minds were too tiny to comprehend even a single second of what it meant to be Bruush, of the eternal, endless life the most powerful of them led, and what that life demanded in return. Fresh conquests. New land, more power, more matter for the vats.

  It was never-ending.

  "I miss my family." Andros told the struggling larva in his right hand. "Is that so wrong a thing? Were you to stand here, in my stead, would you not do the same?"

  "I ... you're ... you kill our entire world to return to your family?" The Terrexian wailed, heart aching and somehow numb at the same time. "I ... would never do such a thing. What kind of monster are you?"

  "I am no monster." Andros growled, increasing the pressure of his grip. He could feel the fine bones in the human's neck grate beneath his mighty fingers. "I am Bruush. And were you capable of feeling the same kind of sorrow, the same loneliness as I, you would not stop at a single world. You would burn entire systems to fuel your desperation. You know so little about the stock from which you come, Terrexian. If ever there was a species to match the Bruush for viciousness, it would be your kind. Such willingness to cause pain for no reason other than to meet your own needs. When I first came here, I thought all of you weak, puny, pointless. But not all of you."

  The Terrexian tried to speak, but couldn't; the grip around his neck was stealing the life from him, so rather than try to defend himself against the mad monster killing his world, he simply chose to allow the pain to overwhelm him.

  Andros watched the Terrexian willingly die rather than be subject to ideas and concepts beyond his capacity to understand, shaking the limp corpse like a rag doll. He sighed, even as the world around him was a raging torrent of screams, explosions and death.

  "Every time I believe I understand these humans, they do something that defies all explanation."

  Surly hunger surged through the Bruush's capacious gut, so he bit the Terrexian's head off and chewed it thoughtfully, contemplating the dead man's words. Had he killed the entire planet?

  Surely not. He'd decided to go ahead and plunder the entire world in order to create a child that would definitely protect against all comers, yes, but ... everyone, everywhere?

  It wasn't likely. The larval ship was even now too heavy and moribund with food and fuel and building blocks to make the effort of hunting down any remaining survivors pointless; why deplete vital stock for a few thousand stragglers when -if there were people still living, somewhere, on the world- they could whisper stories of the night dragons flew through the sky, devouring everything in sight.

  It was how myths were born, was it not? A sliver of truth, told down through the long centuries until it became legend and warning both?

  "I like it." Andros said around a mouthful of brains and bone. "My own story. My own. Nothing of the Bruush, but of dragons terrorizing a world. Hah."

  High above him, the wriggling ship made a noise he'd been waiting for and Andros Medellos smiled a toothy, blood-stained grin that'd drive mortal men mad.

  Feeding was over, the vats were full, the incipient transformation from larva into something strange and wonderful ready to be completed.

  How great it was to be alive, a Bruush, and free to do as he pleased for a change!

  Andros cast about for one of the enormous tentacles that would be his way back and smiled once more; a bit of a run, then, before the time-consuming work kept him occupied.

  Letting loose a howl of laughter that echoed weirdly through the empty world in which he moved, Andros -black and red reptilian skin coated in blood and dust and everything else that came from destroying most of planet - ran as fast as he could, clawed feet tearing holes in the stone beneath him with each swift stamp. Just as the gigantic feeding tube was about to swing on towards it’s next target, Andros reached out with one vicious, clawed hand and grabbed hold, hauling himself upwards onto the massive tube of flesh with one smoothly executed gesture.

  Whether in response to the small wound –which was really unlikely given the absolute amount of muscle and bone each of the tubes were comprised of- or in urgency of the impending rebirth, the dragon in the sky wailed, filling the dying world of Terrex-33 with glorious music.

  If there were any living souls left on the surface of the nearly destroyed world, they would –if they were smart- stay hidden and listen to the beautiful sounds until they were gone. If they rose up from their hiding places and tried once more to free themselves from the dragon, his most wondrous child, his most devilish creation, Andros knew the fools could count on him to be somewhat less
than considerate.

  Andros howled again, this time in his native tongue, a brutish, guttural language that almost –but not entirely- felt strange coming from a throat that’d spoken almost nothing but various form of Human since donning his fleshy disguise so long ago.

  “I come, my son.”

  ***

  Inside the larval ship, everything was … warm. Over-saturated. What wasn’t warm was boiling hot to the touch; ingredient transformation from, say, ten thousand pounds of flesh into iron-hard metallic plates took a great deal of power –power they had in ridiculous amounts, now the ship was growing close to completion- to achieve, and so … heat. Everywhere.

  Heat and dampness that pressed down on Andros with every step he took, a firm reminder of what it’d been like on the Shattered Dominion of the Bruush so many hundreds of years ago. And the smell. Andros snorted as a dim memory swam up to him from the depths of his nearly eternal life; a friend of his, name no longer there, proclaiming that he and he alone had grown accustomed to the fiendish, acidic stench that boiled incessantly from the gene witch conversion chambers, only to be proven wrong no more than five minutes later when one of those very same chambers had erupted near to where they’d stood, vomiting afterbirth, grainy genetic soup and a truly unthinkable amount of grotesque appendages into the sky to land with wet, meaty slaps on all sides.

  It took a lot to cause a male Bruushian to vomit. His friend had thrown up for days at the stink of it and had –right until his death some eighty thousand years later- never been able to spend time near the vats, even when his task was to oversee the witches and what they produced.

  Andros didn’t mind the smell, but neither did he find it comforting or relaxing, as the witches claimed. To him, it was the errant reek of success, of the culmination of hopes and dreams burning inside him for too, too long.

  “I suppose,” the exposed Bruushian Warlord ran a taloned hand across a bulging section of dock ‘plate’, “I should thank you, Emile Voss. You and the others, for your impassioned betrayal of the one man you would’ve followed.”

  Andros paused in his congratulations to listen to the heavy flow of materials being shuttled through the veins behind the walls where he stood. Firm, strong, unrelenting. He was walking through the capillary system of a monstrous-sized beast, and the first sign that something might be wrong would be found in the flow of blood and guts from one end to the other.

  But of course he had nothing to worry about. His son, the dragon, was fine.

  Beyond fine. He was unique in all the Universe.

  Oh, certainly, when the Bruushian expedition dispatched to find their missing Tr’ss so many years ago had found themselves on that stupid little backwater planet, there’d been true sights to see. But they’d had more than one gene witch, and proper access to the higher-level Bruushian technologies to oversee the domination and alteration of the entire world. They hadn’t needed to oversee the gestation of a ship like the one he was building for himself, they’d’ve been able to turn the entire world into their vessel. It was the best way to farm the Shattered Dominions, after all.

  Whole planets were a rarity across the gulf and the void, but when the rapacious Bruush came across one, they abandoned their glittering black insect ships –which were great and wonderful and struck fear into the hearts of everyone who saw them, but which succumbed too easily to the destructive nature of the stuff between Dominions- for planets. Hearty, worlds were, and with something of what had allowed them to pass from possibility into improbability still remaining, each of those earthly spheres gained durability.

  But that first deployment hadn’t been able to move their world. Hadn’t been ready for the arrival of Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez, or equipped for what he could do. What he would do.

  “That man is Bruushian. I swear it. Somewhere in the weird curls and flanges that makes a human a human, somewhere where no one has ever looked, there’s some of us looking back.” Andros resumed his trek to the command center, musing on the man he now hunted to the exclusion of everything else. “I wonder … if I find him, if I convince him to return me to my people or run the risk of a full-blooded Bruushian Warlord finally waging proper war on the Unreal Universe … would he let me test his blood?”

  Many species had tried emulating their reptilian conquerors down through the millions and millions of years. Some had grown close, learning the hard way precisely what it took to achieve the kind of domination the Bruush had over the entirety of the Shattered Dominions, but never quite close enough to achieve unstable harmony with the dominant species. Many cowardly Dominionites had found other ways to win their freedom from Bruushian depredation –and while allowed, it was … disheartening- yet none had ever gained respect.

  Garth, though. Garth understood. The man had his qualms, of that, there was no doubt. He was human. Human-ish, and hadn’t been alive for the necessary length of time to see all vestiges of things like compassion and sorrow and regret turned to ash beneath his feet, ash to mingle with the dying worlds burned to crisps with his passage, but he was so close. He made those decisions, who lived, who died, what manner, how violent, how quick, all of them he made with the rapidfire consideration of a being for whom individual lives meant terribly little, and for whom the continuation of species mattered only a little more.

  But Andros was certain the man still felt guilt. That was what needed to go.

  That was what it meant to be Bruush. When you floated through the void, either in a stolen world or in your black ships, you sometimes had only seconds to consider a new conquest before Entropy swallowed it whole. Would you risk the resources to siphon off the power that spiralled up from the disc comprising the Shattered Dominion? Would you hold off, trusting an instinct that said no, the domain before you was about to be snapped into trillions of unusable pieces? Could you wait? Were your ships strong enough to survive the journey to another fresh Dominion, did you have enough power to return home?

  Would you risk returning home without bounty?

  A heavy moan echoed through the ship’s capillary system, a burdensome groan that pulled at Andros’ reptilian heart strings. He patted another section of wall.

  “I know, my son, I know it hurts. I am coming. We will talk properly, then.” Andros put on some speed, knowing that if he wasn’t there to explain to his child what was happening, and more importantly, why it was happening the way it was, this whole thing would come crashing to an apocalyptic halt the likes of which the Universe had probably never seen.

  ***

  The ‘command center’ for the Bruushian vessel was, naturally, the first thing to’ve been properly completed because without a brain, there finishing the rest of the kilometer long vessel would’ve been impossible.

  Andros had no idea how the gene witches had grown such things, and he rather suspected he might’ve gotten it at least a little bit wrong, but there was no sense in debating that with himself. His child was growing apace, as quick or quicker as anything he’d grown in his laboratories, and thus, everything was fine.

  His child groaned again. This time, the unhappiness was evident in the wordless expression.

  Well, perhaps fine was stretching things just a tiny little bit.

  Andros reached out and tapped one of the duraplass shields covering sensitive and complex electronic machinery with a thoughtful claw, then stepped back to consider the entire command room with a dispassionate eye.

  The Bruushian Warlord easily understood his child’s immaculate displeasure with how he was being formed. “There is nothing I can do, my son. Nothing at all. Trinity knows to watch for that which you wish to be. And so, we must go another way, must we not?”

  In place of comforting black stone bearing holographic glyphs, there were consoles with duraplass covers full to overflowing with the stupidly complex and overblown NorthAMC language structure most of Trinityspace used in their day to day dealings.

  Where there should be thick, durable skin with wide folds to allow Bruushi
an soldiers methods of grasping the floor with powerful, clawed feet during a battle, tiles. Bright white tiles that spilled the reflective light piercing down from above his head with seemingly intentional brutality.

  The lights, too. All wrong for a Bruushian vessel. Andros should be standing in near darkness, the gentle flickering from those coolly lit holographic consoles being the majority of the illumination. Intended to keep hot blooded soldiers from spilling over into violence for no good reason, the dim lights also kept your average warrior feeling … comfortable. Safe. Happy. Add to that the never-ending thumpthumpthump of a Bruushian ship’s immense heart pounding out from the halls and walls and you felt like you were on the verge of being born all over again.

  Safe and warm. Cozy and comfy, waiting to spill out of the ship like a living tidal wave of tooth and claw, blood and bone, to rip and tear into your enemies until you were coated in the remains of their pathetic lives.

  It was going to be like this everywhere. Every corridor, every room. Every blast shield and every gangplank. From engines to weapons and from sensor arrays to atmospheric controls, every single inch of his child would be nearly indistinguishable from a standard Trinity vessel.

  “There is nothing else I can do.” Andros repeated miserably. “As mighty as you will become, my enemy is greater still.”

  “Build an army of us, then.”

  “Would that I could.” The thought had crossed Andros’ mind, more than once. Ponobley system was almost entirely Industrial in nature, hardly of worth to Trinity. He could launch gestational larva at the three remaining worlds in the solar system and spend the next four or five months touring the asteroid belts and other formations, gathering rare and exotic elements while those worlds were transformed from planets into warships greater even than this, his first.

  From there, it would be no difficult task to begin raiding the entire Galaxy. He could spend a literal lifetime harvesting. He could even begin efforts at building proper conversions chambers, and, using cloned cells from his own body, resurrect the Bruushian race. Or he could simply use what he knew already, and raise an army of monsters like Jordan.