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

by Lee Bond

  Yeva started plugging in the new seed protocols for the next round of gravnetic limpet mines, a worm of dread crawling in her guts.

  ***

  Four hours, thirty six minutes later, every Heavy Tech Elite on every Heavy Specter vessel near The Storm sat bolt upright and filled their respective comms with a veritable tsunami of cursing. It wasn’t soon after that the regular Army vessels got themselves up to a lot of head-scratching when they began receiving their updates through the usual channels.

  Most of the forty or so vessels lurking on the far edge of The Storm had encountered Latelian forces in one manner or another since that unfortunate, high speed lurch into Latelyspace; either –as was the case for most of the Regulars- through those supply and munition raids where they’d fallen upon fat, lumbering cargo vessels or from actual, legitimate space conflict, it was a good solid bed that every man, woman, Offworlder and Cordon-doomed thing had cut their teeth on the Latelian God soldiers at least once.

  And for those scant few who might not have had the chance –or who’d been actively avoiding their duty, as wonky Homolka seemed to believe quite fervently- there were still thousands and thousands of hours of footage ripped from alien hard drives or stolen from museum curators or received in lieu of proper payment to pore over. The ancient solar systems and Galaxies that’d fallen afoul of the God soldiers millennia ago had a tendency to remember just what’d happened to them with crystal clarity. And rightly so; it was goddamn hard to forget a legion of titanic soldiers flattening a civilization that'd taken thousands of years to flourish.

  So, irrespective of Homolka's delusional beliefs, everyone was, in one way or another, fully up to speed on how the Goddies rolled.

  Were they scared? Of course. God soldiers were and always would be something to worry about. Rumors and whispers about what happened when you came face to face with one of the fifteen foot tall cybernetically enhanced super soldiers had a tendency to burn through a vessel in less time than it took for two AI spheres to communicate through the quantum substrate.

  Fear was a great motivator. It encouraged soldiers to engage the enemy as quickly as possible, and with as much violence and intent to end things as they could find in their bodies. If you needed to take chems or stims or to activate a hidden implant or two to get the job done, no one, anywhere, would ever judge you, because war this far in the future was one of two things.

  Fast and brutal, with carnage leaking into the streets. With you, scooping your insides back into the place they belonged all while screaming and firing your weapons and hoping to hell and back the other guy died first so you could make certain your guts stayed kind of where they belonged until medics found your ass.

  Or ...

  Slow and monotonous, with each side bored off their asses, waiting and wondering if anyone was having any kind of fun until suddenly ... the tide shifted and it turned into a goddamn shitshow of nearly neon proportions, with the battlefield emptying out so quickly that it took both sides a second or two to figure out who -if anyone- had done the winning.

  So when Regular Army and the Specter had begun preparing themselves for battle against these stranger, more powerful God soldiers, they’d done so with the awareness that they'd be fighting foes with a very different concept of 'tactics'.

  Sure, they hadn’t been active in over a hundred years, but it’d be a fool –and not even Military Services was that stupid- who forgot that prior to being decommissioned, nearly every single soldier in the system had fought across The Cordon, honing their skills against the worst the Universe had to offer, most of them for more than two thousand years at a stretch.

  There were rumors that some of the Goddies had fought for twice that length, and that -implausibly- they were still alive!

  TMS wasn’t stupid enough to forget that, the Heavy Elites were never that cocky.

  Sure, they'd done the reading, they'd watched the feeds, they'd worked up their battle plans, they'd held their meetings and sitreps and done all of that, just like good soldiers did...

  But this … this was something you just couldn’t prepare for.

  Not fully. Not without wondering if you’d lost your mind in the process.

  ***

  “I’m sorry,” Marker said, squinting at the screens and refusing to pull out a pair of glasses to make his life just that much easier, “but how fucking big are those things?”

  Toon smacked the side of her monitor with enough force to crack the corners of the viewing glass just the tiniest little bit. She didn’t care. Corroborating updates from Zipper and Flits –two Heavy Techs from other ships she could actually talk to without losing her fucking mind- were streaming on … independent channels, but it was still so fucking hard to digest; they were aboard Midsummer, but were fully in contact with their own vessels, and they, like her, were ... concerned. “Reports from all sides capable of reaching past the interference suggest ten miles or larger, sir.”

  “Are you sure?” Marker didn’t like feeling like an idiot.

  He felt like he was missing something, and the last time he'd missed something, he'd been laid up in quarantine with a body full of Cordontech.

  “Third and final update from the usual sources, boss.” Toon could not believe her eyes, or the reports flitting across the inside of her eyelids. This was … unbelievable. “Ten miles exactly.”

  “And there are…” Marker counted under his breath, while Iago, entombed within his Wraithgear, whistled low. Tortured by the multi-phasic fabric he was shrouded in, the sound came out as a quiet, mangled shriek. “Ten of them. There are ten, ten mile long ships out there. Who’s good at math? Toon?”

  “In theory, given average size and shape of basic God soldier stature …” Toon licked her lips and watched the data spill from her eyes and onto the screens. The magic number appeared. “Well. That can’t be right. There’s got to be some room for assault craft, right?”

  Marker didn’t like this. Not at all. He had honestly stopped liking this when one of those motherfucking huge asteroid ships had fucked off inside The Storm. At least he’d been smart enough to realize that not only could he not do anything about it, there was every chance that whoever had been inside that monolithic space craft was probably already dead.

  So … win/win.

  “What do the others think?” Marker ignored the small look of hurt on Toon’s outlandish features. This wasn’t about feelings, this was about missing something.

  Toon rattled loose an exasperated steam kettle sigh and reached out to her colleagues. Flits and crew were one of the ones who’d gotten themselves up to more than a dozen space raids on those fat supply ships before they’d gotten better protected, and so it was Flits' personal knowledge of Latelian personal fighter craft size that filled in the missing pieces.

  Toon made a noise.

  Iago whispered, and the nightmarish keening moaned gently through the command center. “I do not like that sound, Toon.”

  “Goddamnit, Iago.” Marker dug a finger into an ear and wiggled it around for a few seconds. “If you’re gonna wear your Wraith in here, could you fucking not talk? You sound like a midget nightmare when you whisper like that.”

  Iago bowed deeply, his shifty, smoky body twisting in an invisible wind.

  “You. Toon. What’s the story?” Marker looked at his personal screens and saw –unsurprisingly- that the other captains and Specter leaders were heating up the area with their speculations and concerns.

  And it was well deserved, the protocol breach, ignorable. A single one of those ships equalled their entire accumulation of soldiers and was impressive as fuck.

  Ten of them?

  Marker didn’t want to think they’d overplayed their hand, didn’t want to wish they’d had more time to find more Trinityfolk in the system to come and play in the sandbox, but somewhere down by his ugly left toe, those thoughts were peeking out.

  “That’s … a negative.” Toon frowned heavily, the corners of her brightly rouged mouth dippin
g down, down, down. “There might be a few support craft aboard those mothers, but assessment indicates that there won't be more than one or two assault craft. Most of the space will be occupied by Goddies. A hundred thousand per, as … as you saw.”

  Marker put a thoughtful hand up to his lips, tried to imagine what his counterparts were thinking and refusing to acknowledge that his own comm-centers were lighting up like old-fashioned Christmas trees.

  “They aren’t stupid enough to bring those fucking things anywhere near us. As armed as they are, as potentially shielded by either gravny-gens or black hole gens, they’re just too fucking big. We’d hammer into them and pop those shields loose in a matter of seconds. Boom. Gone. So what the hell? Are they waiting for additional troops? Combat equipment deliveries? What?"

  And it was then that Toon noticed –perhaps a little too late, though possibly understandable, given her overwrought condition- thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny little lights populating her deep space scanners.

  Lights moving at roughly a hundred thousand miles per hour. Almost invisible lights.

  “Um. Boss?” Toon pointed a manicured finger at the dots.

  “No.” Marker shook his head defiantly. “No. No fucking way.”

  “Well,” Iago howled with laughter, “there’s a thing you don’t see every day.”

  The End of a Friendship…

  Drake was at his wit's end. He'd been hunting for Eddie's hidden workshop for what felt like decades. No matter where he looked, it seemed it was the wrong place. Making matters worse, too many of the pre-existing Guilt Trips had fallen by the wayside.

  In the grand scheme of things, losing a handful of penitent EuroJapanese didn't equate, but it was the principle of the matter; they hadn't lost hopefuls in well over fifteen thousand years, but Drake still remembered quite clearly how it'd been to lose those lives. They'd come to the Emperor seeking absolution and forgiveness for their many and varied crimes, only to discover ... dissolution.

  It'd taken forever for them to recover from the deaths of those penitents, and there'd been less than a dozen souls lost all told.

  This time?

  Hundreds lost, with him, Drake, narrowly losing his own life as he'd desperately tried freeing the Guilty from their cages. Whole entire pocket dimensions, sundered and shattered, violently ripped loose from the incongruity, struck down by the tandem needs of Garth's own, ultra-defined reality and Eddie's personal -and quite voracious- demands for more power.

  Losing potential adherents to the Emperor-for-Life's Shriven Program should be of great concern to Eddie, who used the strangely soulless servitors to great effect throughout Trinityspace yet...

  Yet, where was he?

  Off in the darkness of the temporal incongruity, doing something with something. Even in his darkest times, Sparks had never been this closed off, this … resolute with secrets. Hell, half the time the idiot couldn’t keep his yapper shut for more than five seconds, so this newfound level of circumspection was … bothersome.

  "Where the fuck could you be, Eddie?" Drake roamed the vast 'halls' of the inner portions of the incongruity, running his hands across deep purple striations that lurked beneath the thick walls that formed their home. There was power there, power enough –he suspected even still, even after having been absent for five thousand years- to do whatever you wanted, but neither he nor Eddie had ever been made enough to hunt for the key that’d unlock deeper levels of access…

  They’d both seen –in live and in color, direct from the incongruity’s odd memory banks- precisely what could happen to a mortal being reaching too deep and fast into the purple stone’s powers. Madness. Bizarre, corrupted insanity, the worst kind.

  In the end, they'd decided that it didn’t matter what else the incongruity could do, not when they'd have eternity to figure out the absolute limits of the power they already possessed.

  Eddie –always the more technical - had jumped headfirst into the incongruity's available secrets, hungrily devouring everything in sight.

  The first thing he’d discovered was that it’s internal size and shape wasn’t … a thing. It was or was not as big as they needed, and in those earliest of days, with the two of them still figuring out how to wield the re-creationist skills blossoming inside them, there’d been more than one precarious moment as the incongruity itself had ‘decided’ to change shape all on it’s own, right in the middle of experimentation.

  Drake cracked a smile at those memories.

  The two of them, running around an ever-decreasing landscape, working frantically to undo their test subjects, while all around them, their handmade Universe had continued unspooling beneath panicky feet.

  Ultimately -obviously- they'd managed to corral the unruly incongruity, though only at the last possible moment. From that moment onwards, Eddie Marshall had and always would spend considerable time controlling the incongruity's fluidic internal state with an iron fist.

  "Compression and decryption." Drake muttered the words over and over again, changing the tone and focus once in a while. "That's what you said. Better actualization, too. What could you be doing? Where are you doing it?"

  Of the two of them, Eddie'd been the most affected by their near-death by unspooled simulation, so naturally, a chance to augment his control would be of paramount concern.

  But now? With Garth down in the dungeons?

  It seemed too ... timely.

  Drake resumed his slow stroll through the halls, tuned-in mind plumbing the invisible depths behind the walls in search of something -anything- that might lead to Eddie's whereabouts.

  Now that whole worlds had collapsed into purplish energy and with most of the sims now shut down, Drake knew he should’ve found Eddie’s work space some time ago.

  There was no getting around it; the operating domain of their efforts shrank in correlation to how many simulations were being run. The smaller the draw on the incongruity, the better it was to keep things nice and compact. Leaving blank space inside the incongruity was not only a waste of power that was better served being used elsewhere, it was an invitation for energetic collapse.

  So, again, with Nickels' power-hungry simulation running at ten times normal frame rate, with the incongruity itself shrunk down to it's smallest in thousands of years ... Eddie should be just around the corner.

  Purple striations pulsed and throbbed as Drake passed by, a slow motion lightshow that he’d always imagined to be the heartbeat of the strange matter that’d transformed them from mere men into …

  “I don’t even know what the fuck I am anymore.” Drake confided to the empty halls. “Five thousand fucking years, trapped in perdition. Hidden behind a mask of metal. Pretending to be something I wasn’t. Until I became that thing, watching on in despair, time and time again as my children proved themselves to be ... assholes. I participated in the attempted assassination of one of my only true friends.”

  That’d been the worst. Standing there, just behind maddened Jordan Bishop’s right shoulder, nodding and agreeing about the blackness in all men everywhere, agreeing to find someone capable of killing the 'caveman' so the absolute worst instance of the Bishop line could continue earning assets he didn’t need.

  "Goddamn, that kid had been an asshole from Day One." Hobbled in many ways -mostly because of Trinity's influence- Drake's mission to save the declining Bishop Line had nevertheless afforded him the luxury of working diligently towards that goal, so long as he remained inside Bishop Towers. "Should've popped one of the others loose centuries ago, let you ... just die. Coulda spared Nickels so much bullshit if I'd manned up and done the right thing."

  Drake remembered very clearly screaming himself hoarse behind that placid mask of android neutrality. Screaming and screaming and screaming until he’d grown worried that he was as mad as his ultimate descendant.

  Of course, he hadn’t gone mad, and no one had heard him scream, because hiring someone to kill Garth N’Chalez had been the most logical course of acti
on under the circumstances.

  And that was what worried Drake.

  The logicality inside him now.

  As an eternal member of the Order of the ‘Purple Moon’, he’d known infinitely more about Chadsik al-Taryin than he could’ve –or would’ve- articulated to Jordan.

  Had known, and hired Chadsik anyways, hemmed in on all sides, frantically and desperately concerned that while it'd seemed that the assassin would ultimately fail, the exact opposite had been closer to the mark than anyone could've guessed.

  "Should've hidden the file." Drake muttered to himself, frustration over failing to find Eddie a knife in his guts. "Should've said Chad was too fucking crazy to risk in Latelyspace. If I'd done that ... maybe ... maybe Garth wouldn't've been pushed to do as he’d done."

  That penultimate battle on that storm-lit rooftop had almost done the Engineer in. Should've, actually, and had it not been for the nanobox in the basement, Garth 'Nickels' N'Chalez would have died, throwing the Unreal Universe into a chaotic death spiral of epic proportions.

  Alas, it'd been more logical to follow Jordan's orders than to reveal the truth of his nature.

  “At least now we know why our Universe had started collapsing inwards, especially after we ‘defeated’ the Invaders.” Drake pulled his hands away from the walls and continued to … just wander, wherever his subconscious felt like taking his feet.

  So terrifying, that'd been, standing there, endless legions of the dead and defeated at their feet, gasping and panting, with this almost tumultuous sense of overriding joy turning their blood to triumphant fire, looking to the sky and seeing … inversion. Vast swathes of space above their heads folding into itself, leaving behind a deadly void of nothing.

  A chunk here, a chunk there, the whole of the sky above their heads as far as they could see –and there, at the end, with their enemies vanquished, they’d been able to see so very far- their whole Universe, the matter that made up their lives, gone. Turning the night sky into a broken palette of collapsing stars.