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

by Lee Bond

  “Nah, mate, we is never really fuck wiv anyone.” There. They finally found what it were they were trackin’. Chad made an unhappy face. “And yeah, you dad is almost certainly either ‘eaded to see the Emperor-for-Life or is already inside, doin’ … wotever. We is never find out wot ‘appens, but we is know wot appens to them as come out again. We were ‘ired to kill one of …”

  “The Shriven.” Griffin spat.

  Trinity rarely did anything to soften the lives of an Enforcer about It’s work, but the one thing that the machine mind had tried to do more often than not was limit exposure to The Shriven.

  Nothing It tried and no one It asked could find anything technically wrong with the … smoothed out Emperor-for-Life emissaries, yet no matter how hard It –and therefore every other entity in the Universe not a Shriven- tried, there was no escaping the fact that there was still something very, very wrong with the men and women who served their monarch. “And Etienne Marseilles. This is a goldang huge motherfuckin’ problem, then, son. Trinity never did find out how that EuroJapanese asshole got alla ‘is powers an’ whatnot, which means Daddy’s in all kinds o’ trouble. If Garth comes outta that thang actin’ like a Shriven…”

  “Sonny Jim, we is all agree that that sounds like a terrible idea, but we is got summat way more worrisome than your da walkin’ around like some kind of personality-less drone.” Chad pointed a second time to the sky, this time much closer. “Your Granda is a fuckin’ cunt, mate, of the highest order. Like, if ‘e were tryin’ out for the title in a fuckin’ contest of cuntery, everyone else would just leave the queue. E’en the Heshii would prolly be like ‘fuck this, mate, you is off you fuckin’ rocker’.”

  At first –and troublingly- Griffin didn’t see anything. Then he relaxed his eyes a bit and stopped working so hard to make out individual features –like ships or things of equal size- and he suddenly became aware of … “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me raght now? A fuckin’ meteor storm?”

  “To be more precise, we is fink the term is meteorite.” Chad looked around, but they were drawin’ a blank on wot they could do. The last time they’d been in this kind of situation, they’d more or less had the destruction of an entire planet to sort of disguise their getaway. Naturally, that’d all drained down the shitter once they’d found somewhere else to temporarily set up shop, but … meteorites. “An’ if I were you Granda, I would make cert they was come in on all sides. We is not goin’ to get off this ‘ere planet via conventional means.”

  “How confident are ya’ll on whut you been sayin’?” Griffin asked, reaching for the nuclear fire that burned through his cells, flaring eternally between each beat of his heart and the next. The blazing heat answered his call and hastened to the surface, to the outside, to where it could do what it was meant for. Scouring the world clean. “On ‘im bein’ mostly powerless an’ most likely bein’ with th’ Emperor-for-Life?”

  Chad filtered out the brightest spots of Griffin’s internal fire and was quietly nonplussed when he failed to shield his peepers from the worst of the light gently burning at the Kin’kith’s fingertips. Hotter than the Universe itself. “We is near one hundred percent on the latter, and as to the former? We is cert. If ‘e is survive the Emperor an’ ‘e is remain normal when ‘e gets outside, ‘e is back to square one, tryin’ to find out a way to power an atomically-fused suit of quadronium power armor. ‘ere. Mate. Wot is you do?”

  Griffin twisted and flexed his hands in a wide circle, leaving behind thin streamers of fearsome heat that wavered in midair, a shivery, lopsided eye that just hung there, beckoning. “I weren’t never no good at ex-dee travel, raght? An’ frankly, Ah wouldn’t try it here even if Ah were in total desperation, but Ah do thank Ah got an idea.”

  Chad opened their mouth to ask what that idea might be when the Kin’kithal suddenly let loose with a blast of power equal to anything he might’ve used when moving Antal’s tremendous ship through the stars, burying that eruption right into the center of the hovering fire-circle. The whispery loop, tenuous as a firefly’s dreams, drank that furious deposit down, quickly imploding into a yawning, roaring hole. The edges of the new portal folded in on themselves, and as Chad watched on, this time considerably more than nonplussed, the center of the damn thing disappeared in an eye-wrenching display of broken physical laws.

  “Wot in the bleedin’ fookin’ bollocksy ‘ell is this fookin’ fing?”

  Griffin shot his partner a grin that would not have been amiss on a certain craggy, blue eyed, black hair-framed face, the burning aperture from here to there a portrait frame perfectly capturing ‘Ire, in Space, Wreathed in Flames’. “Well, hell, son. Doin’ mah Granddaddy’s work for ‘im gimme th’opportunity t’develop heat hotter’n th’Universe, raght? Somethin’ been on the back o’ mah mind since ya’ll freed me. This here? Call it a goldang fire portal. Now Ah ain’t got th’power to bounce through The Cordon, but this here lil’ thang’ll git us off this planet and somewhere inside the ship where it might make it difficult for Granddaddy to find us. Maybe long enough t’figure out a way to git loose.”

  Chad peered inside, face prickling from the intensity. “Cor blimey, we is see it all.”

  “Go on wi’ya. Git.” Griffin clapped a friendly hand on Chad’s shoulders. “Oh yeah, don’t touch th’edges when y’go through. You might, uh, burn somethin’ clean off.”

  And then, because that’s the kind of person he was, Griffin Jones shoved Chad Sikkmund of Taryin through the fire portal and followed suit very quickly afterwards, pulling the aperture’s end shut as he disappeared past the edge.

  Neither one of them heard Antal’s shriek of rage as the meteorite shower slammed into the planet’s surface on all sides, transforming a valuable world into nothing but chunks of broken rock and wasted effort.

  They were on their way.

  Pinocchio Syndrome

  He was real. hewasreal. heWASreal. hewasREAL. hewasreal.

  Herrig squinted and reread the flash report bounced from the First Prote to the more-convenient-to-wear proteus around his wrist and frowned. They'd engaged the enemy...

  hewasreal. hewasreal. hewasarealboy. yes. a real boy ...

  ...at the Storm and things were looking both up and down on the battlefront. God soldiers had breached the first layer of the conflict with min...

  ...hewasreal. hewasreal. there was no doubt about it. he was as real as they came. other people might not be real, but hewasreal. hewasarealboy. he knew it because when he looked in the mirror, he looked like himself, and if you weren't real, you would obviously look like someone esle. That was how it worked...

  ...imum casualties, though a solid hundred thousand of their toughest soldiers had been vaporized by some fairly insidious deep space limpet mines. Herrig didn't know the classifications of what those weapons might've truly been, but he knew enough about God soldier physiognomy at this point to understand that for Goddies to be wounded to the point of death, they'd have to be ...

  ... how could he not be real? he woke up every morning and looked in the mirror and there was his homely old face staring back at him with those hangdog puppy eyes. his face was skinnier than ever, you could see the sharp blades of his cheekbones jutting through the remnants of his jowly cheeks, but hewasreal...

  ... some of the worst weapons deployed.

  Herrig flicked the flash report away and into one of the ever-increasing databases of information streaming live and in full color from that dangerous conflict. He didn't need to see everything. There was no point, because he wasn't a soldier and knew very little about combat outside of a board room or councillor's chambers and besides all that, there was only one thing he really and truly needed to know at any one ...

  ... other people might not be real. hewasreal. they might wake up thinking they were real, but they weren't, because The Engineer said they weren't, but Herrig knew better than that. hewasreal. hewasarealboy. there was no doubt about it...

  ...time and that was what the Horsemen we
re up to.

  Herrig disliked the fact that one of their kind had voluntarily steered his asteroid ship into the maelstrom, and for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, they were all supposed to remain inside Latelyspace until Huey deemed it wise for them to begin the second phase of their journey towards Reality 2.0, and 'spelunking, nothing more' struck Herrig as an attempt to uncover how Ute and Tomas had pulled it off.

  Secondly -and as far as Herrig was concerned, it was a terrible state of affairs that it was true no matter how much he didn't want it to be- whichever one of the Horsemen who'd proven to be lunatic enough to risk that Storm was needed.

  They all were. Garth had been ...

  ...realrealrealrealreal...

  ... most insistent that everyone make it to the final conflict against Kith Antal. From a practical point, everyone was kind of a stretch, but at the very least, the people who'd stuck their noses into the Engineer's business could be polite enough to hang around so they could -in the man's own words- 'fucking die properly'.

  Herrig went to move his glasses from his nose so he could press the points there in some kind of pathetic effort to remove the ever-growing stress crowding in on him from all sides and smirked at his own foolishness when he found they weren’t even on his head at the moment, but on the table, next to a half-finished cup of coffee and the remnants of some Charbo’s.

  The Chairman’s stomach growled, but he couldn’t be bothered. That was Sidra’s self-elected position in the world. Next to being the best of confidants and –let’s be realistic, considering who he was- the finest lover a man could ever ask for, Sidra was without doubt the greatest nag in the Universe.

  “She doesn’t even make it seem like nagging, that’s the whole point.” Herrig loved Sidra. Had done from the moment she’d risked her life to save his. The words issuing forth from those gorgeous lips as the whole of the not-so-secretive government base had fallen atop her were burned into Herrig’s very soul.

  No one had ever said anything like that to him before. He’d never even really considered the likelihood of finding love, not with his lowly status as a Trinityfolk immigrant.

  One of his many secretaries shuffled quickly into the room, legs moving like they were steampowered. Clutched in her arms was a massive double armful of hardcopy reports fresh from MoE; the director over there wanted none of their analyses shot out through any ‘LINKs unless it was absolutely necessary. Claimed she didn’t trust the Horsemen and there, Herrig had no qualms about involving the nearly one hundred people it took to get the documents from the MoE facility and into his offices because doubting the motivations of someone five thousand years old was the only natural…

  …realrealreal. heWASREAL. heWASreal. HE.was.REALLLLLL…

  … response.

  “Si Sally.” Herrig said brightly enough. Just because he was miserable didn’t mean he had to treat the people below him with anything other than courtesy and politeness. “How are you today?”

  Sally flinched as if someone had fired a handgun in the room, and some of the documents –ridiculously sensitive documents bearing the names of people who would most certainly attempt to move from Hospitalis to one of the moon colonies, even during a war, if they were to learn of the interest they’d brought on themselves- went spilling across the desktop, into the Chairman’s lap, and onto the floor.

  Herrig laughed as more and more of the paperwork fled Si Sally’s hands and wound up on the floor, hastening to push his chair out of the way as he did so. Poor Sally’s face was bright as an apple at harvest and as she took in the colossal mess she’d made in front of the Chairman, she went brighter still, her eyes teared up, and out she went, faster than she’d come in.

  The Chairman hopped out of his chair, made a small joke at his expense about the Noble Opposition wishing it were that easy, and considered the mess, his lower lip pushed all the way out.

  “I’m real.” He said conversationally to the spilled reports.

  They, of course, said nothing back, but some of the high-def glossy photos of persons of interest looked as though they might be interested in hearing what else he had to say on the subject of real versus unreal.

  Herrig was happy there was someone willing to listen to what he had to say, so as he began picking up Si Sally’s file tsunami, he spoke, “A long time ago, so long I can’t even remember how long, really, one of my very best friends … I suppose my best friend at the time, because this was before I met Sidra, he confessed to me a secret.”

  Senator Rowliss Arcanlasi, in the crosshairs of MoE’s particular lens, looked up at him. His eyes were dark and hooded, yet held the slightest hint of interest in learning the secret; in the background, barely visible, was half the face of a fifteen year old girl, gearing up to do another line of … the report suggested Wobble, which was horrific. Rowliss was a bad man doing bad things all on his own, he didn’t need to involve girls so young they didn’t even know what feelings were yet.

  “I don’t really think you should be hearing the secret, you awful bastard.” Herrig picked Rowliss’ file up and shuttled it directly into the ‘out’ box, then snickered. Just a little bit.

  It was the lowest tech method they’d come up with as far as it came to weeding out men and women that the Chairman felt were no longer of use to society; they had one or more –Herrig didn’t want to know how many- MoE employees on payroll, and every night after he left, someone would come into the office and empty the ‘Out’ box.

  Sometime in the next few days –the longest stretch of time between ‘Out’ and ‘calamity’ was about a week - the people in that box would … stop breathing. Accident or otherwise, the Commonwealth lost a person who’d dedicated their lives to taking advantage of the war over helping their brothers and sisters.

  “Can’t have that.” Herrig shook his head firmly ‘no’ on the matter. “Too much of that going on for the last … what … two thousand years? I’ll clean the Commonwealth up with my own bare hands if I have to. Because I am as real as they come. No one else might be, except, obviously, for Garth. Because he’s the realest thing in the room. But, me too.”

  The Chairman’s eyes fell on another dossier. Si Ritta Qilo. Under pressure from local businesses to sell her property to a third party so that the land could then be sold back to the original businessmen so that they might suddenly find themselves in possession of rather a large plot of land, within city limits, that might eventually wind up on government radar.

  Especially if the conflict at The Storm was successful. They were going to need significant acreage to house prisoners of war. All so they could be spent later on, during the actual War. The important War.

  Profiteering of any kind was a terrible racket, triply so when you got up to it right smack dab in the middle of a war. There were better things to do with your time and your money, like building houses, feeding the homeless.

  Anything at all, really.

  “When Darkness Falls and the Light Rises.” Herrig intoned mystically. You heard that about ten thousand times a day. Whenever you were near more than two Goddies. They usually used that to end a conversation, other than the more sensible ‘see you later’. And when they didn’t say that, it was usually the even weirder ‘Candall Guide You’ or ‘Candall Watches’. “You look trustworthy, Si Ritta. You look like you have no intention of caving to pressure or to anything … illicit. So. My friend, Garth Nickels, told me a secret. He told me that the Universe isn’t real. Isn’t that a kicker?”

  Herrig picked the dossier up and settled into his chair, just for a few moments, just so he could chat. He flicked through Ritta’s file while he told the unlikely tale. “I didn’t believe him, of course, because as he would say, ‘that’s some fucked up bullshit right there’. Then he did his best to prove it to me, doing stuff that I’d always imagined impossible. Then he did some other things that were really impossible later on, including flying Bravo out of a mountain while basically blindfolded and killing the physical representatio
n of all things evil in the world, but I’m talking about Unreality here.”

  Herrig slapped himself hard enough in the face to not only leave a mark but so that it was loud enough the sound bounced off the dour paintings of all the previous Chairmen and –women that’d served Latelyspace that hung on the walls.

  “See?” he demanded of Si Ritta’s telephoto picture. “That hurt. If I wasn’t real, that wouldn’t hurt. You get that, right?”

  Si Ritta didn’t say anything. She just continued looking harassed.

  “Of course, I got angry.” Herrig accepted responsibility for losing his temper on The Engineer wholeheartedly.

  When your friend was the greatest man in the Universe, you really should learn to choose your battles a little more carefully, only Herrig hadn’t been able to get over the deeper implications that came from those kinds of revelations.

  “He basically told me to my face that I wasn’t real, that I didn’t matter. Huh! Who says that kind of thing to their friends? But he looked so sad, so unhappy, that I wound up not blaming him. He’s wrong, of course, because I am real, but he’s more real than I am, and he’s got all these crazy powers, so what if … what if because he’s more real than I am, he’s making everything not real?”

  Herrig DuPont, once upon a time, nothing more than a fairly successful bank manager working to help fresh immigrants with their finances but also how to deal with increasing racism and pressure from overtly polite but otherwise miserly asshole Latelians, wasn’t really accustomed to thinking big thoughts like this. Not even when he’d become CFO –and later sole owner/operator- for UltraMegaDynamaTron, had he plumbed the depths of his intellectual soul so regularly.

  As Chairman, though, introspection like this happened every few minutes. Every decision he made. Well, not the personal ones, obviously. Not like where he chose to eat or what color tie to wear or anything. That’d be insane. But the big ones, like which pile to but Si Ritta’s file folder in, or whether or not he should have Fenris assassinated, or if he should incarcerate all the men and women having secret meetings about …