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

by Lee Bond

  Eddie poked one of the many shattered pieces of bone popping through his mangled hand and instantly regretted it; the shock of pain was literal electricity jouncing right through his nervous system and straight into his skull.

  Glowering furiously at Drake –who was smiling smugly around the blood-stained straw in his mouth- the Emperor chose to create a bright red drinking helmet atop his glorious skull. He fiddled with the plastic flexi-straw until it was in his mouth. He drank deep and gratefully of Cherry Crush mixed with Orange Soda.

  “No.” Eddie belched loudly. “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about, asshole.”

  “Liar.” Dammit, he was hurt. The analytical side of his brain, permanently on Spur-detail, highlighted the gravity of the situation. It would be quite some time before he was completely healed. The same held true for Eddie and the regrettable condition of his left arm; the hand that'd turned his insides to goop was already on the mend, but the rest of the wounds would take forever. “That was quite the punch.”

  “No Kamehaha or anything, though.” Eddie sipped more soda and looked at his arm. “This thing is completely fucked.”

  “My gut is ruined.” Drake chuckled, then regretted it as a few ounces of blood –grotesquely carrying several chunks of intentionally unidentified organic matter- trickled out of his mouth and down his chin. He wiped the offensive stuff clean with a sleeve. “You…”

  “We aren’t done here, Drake.” Eddie shook his head firmly. “I want what I want, and you’re set against me. This bullshit excuse of a Universe needs someone better than N’Chalez or any of the other contenders to usher in the new Reality he’s got planned.”

  “And that’s you.”

  “Man, take a fucking look around. We’ve got Kith Antal, who is completely off the rails. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of insane he is, and I’ve got the fucking temporal incongruity to help with the heavy lifting. The same goes for Trinity. That thing isn’t even really intelligent, and can we both just admit right here and now that ADAM, who is running the show for the time being, is quite literally the worst option ever imagined. I would sooner let an enhanced naked mole rat become God of Reality 2.0 than that fucking guy.” Eddie felt a small surge of relief as some of the bones in his arm knit themselves back together. “When we’re done healing, we’re right back at it.”

  Faint strains of Queen filled the devastated lab, lifted directly from the movie ‘Highlander’.

  “Yes. That’s it exactly.” Eddie nodded somberly. “There can be only one.”

  “I really liked that movie.” Drake finished his XXX-Tra large soda and disappeared the empty container. “Shame about the …”

  One of Emperor-for-Life Etienne’s many simulacra bamfed into the room, took one slow, thoughtful look at the damage and the wounded beings identified as ‘Drake/Spur’ and ‘Eddie/Emperor’ and parsed the announcement into a collection of words designed to be easily –and more importantly swiftly- understood.

  “There is a dire situation, my Lord Emperor.”

  “In the middle of something, Emperor-bot.” Eddie flipped his healthy hand at the slowly recovering idiot beside him. “In the middle of a cage match. This is the half-time show.”

  “Yeah.” Drake belched a quarter of the alphabet. “Stick around. Once we can stand, it’s going to be a pants-off dance-off.”

  “You fail to apprehend the seriousness of the situation, my Lord. I …”

  “We are fucking trying to kill one another, asshole. One of us is for the exploitation of the God in the Box, the other is against.” Eddie shouted at the mirror image of his Emperor-self. “When we’re done killing each other, come back. Whoever is left standing can deal with your imaginary situation.”

  “My Lord, I …”

  And then an explosion ripped three quarters of the already pretty thoroughly ruined lab apart, revealing the endless, lilac star field that existed beyond the borders of every room inside the place where Drake and Eddie did most of their living. The Emperor-bot, nothing more than a free-roaming exemplar of the true Emperor’s will made manifest, burst apart with a staticky buzz.

  Eddie exchanged a look with Drake, who quirked an eyebrow.

  “Pin?” The former asked the latter.

  Drake assessed his situation. He was healed enough to stand. Healed enough to find out what in the fuck was going on. He nodded. The beef between him and Eddie had been percolating for a long goddamn time.

  It could wait a while longer.

  “Pin.”

  The two Lords of the Incongruity puffed away into smoke.

  And on the Ushbet watched.

  ***

  The first thing they noticed when they appeared in the main viewing chamber, a room designed not only to impress and otherwise awe those penitents who were having a difficult time dealing with their particular guilt but to also house –very far away and free from prying eyes and bored hands- the vast machines required to actually run the simulations, was the smoke: where there was some, there should be none.

  And that was worrisome.

  The incongruity was many things, but one thing it was not was easy to use.

  They’d learned from examining Samiel’s life as Overlord of The Line just how difficult it was to properly manipulate the incongruity into doing what needed to be done, and they’d ran with it, devising a whole other level of complexity to their equipment.

  The thing it was not, was prone to random acts of smoke.

  “What in the actual fuck?” Eddie howled despairingly as he flung himself towards one of the nearest command repeaters; these were simple devices, capable of detecting and understanding any whim demanded by the Lords of the Incongruity, relaying them to the main array, which would in turn transfer the demand to the orb of power itself. “This can’t be happening.”

  “This is why I’ve been trying to get hold of you for like, the last umpty-billion years.” Drake snapped, producing a screwdriver from a pocket and quickly removing the simple plate front of his repeater. He and Eddie were on the same page; it took no genius to realize that –for whatever reason- the incongruity’s primary controls were offline or compromised, so they were going to try and hotwire a connection from the grand viewing room to one of the other areas.

  A festooned rat’s nest of wires and connections bloomed out at him. “Something’s wrong down there. I don’t know what. But there’s … something. The simulation’s been pulling increasingly high levels of processing power, ramping up and up and up. I told you manifesting a complete Samiel was chancy.”

  Eddie popped the face of his relay loose with an expert twist of his screwdriver. He promptly began assessing the squiggle of wires and almost as quickly shook his head in confusion. He’d been Emperor for too long and he didn’t really have the desire to sit down and get back into the memories of Eddie Marshall. He looked over at Drake, who was peering at his repeater’s guts, obviously disheartened. “How old are these fucking things?”

  “Uh, eighteen thousand years?” Drake poked a wire. It moved, but other than that, nothing. “I got nothin’, dude. I’ve been Spur for the last five thousand years. If you need me to, like, corporate raid a solar system into ashes, move a trillion dollars of illegally gained assets or acquire an expensive piece of Exodus art from an Offworlder who’s got no idea what he’s sitting on, I’m your guy. But this tech shit? Completely beyond me at the moment.”

  “Same.” Eddie made some random noises with his mouth. “That explosion, though. We gotta figure out what the fuck happened. Without access to the main systems, that’s gonna be tough. Pretty sure I …”

  Coughing noises reached their ears just then, huge, overblown, gasping coughing noises that sounded for all the world like someone was going to lose both their lungs on the next round.

  Both Lords peeked over the top of the console disguised as a fancy looking piece of furniture and glared down at whoever was making the noise, suspiciously concerned suddenly that they might’ve lost their m
inds.

  There, down below, was Garth N’Chalez. Sitting –more or less- complacently in his chair, smoke rising from his hair, blood pouring freely from pretty much every orifice they could see. Every now and again he flapped his hands towards a smoldering part of clothes, which only succeeded in pushing smoke all over everywhere.

  Drake and Eddie exchanged a glance.

  “This motherfucker right here.” Eddie growled. “He did it! He fucking figured out a way to destroy the simulation.”

  “I warned you.” Drake shot back with a violent whisper. “I warned you. We missed … you missed something on entry. I was busy reintegrating as Drake Bishop and fucking keeping your goddamn penitents from bloody well dying. So this …”

  Eddie raised a finger, all but jamming it into Drake’s eyeball. “If you put this on me, if you even try putting this on me, we’ll pick right back up with Incongruity Face Smash, Unlimited Edition, right here and right goddamn now.”

  Drake opened his mouth to interject, but Garth started up with another round of Let’s Lose Our Lungs, Okay? “If he’s here, and there’s all this damage everywhere, I think you might be right. I think he did figure out a way to destroy the simulation.”

  Eddie peered at Garth. The ex-Specter was sitting in the chair, fiddling with all the fresh blood pouring freely from his eyes, ears … from everywhere. And he was humming to himself. Shepherd of Fire, if he wasn’t mistaken, from one of Avenged Sevenfold’s last albums before the Invasion.

  “Does he seem right to you?”

  “Garth N’Chalez has never been ‘right’, Eddie. You know that.” Still, the man didn’t seem to be all there. “You shouldn’t have made that phone available. It put him in contact with tech he …”

  “I was bored, Drake.” Eddie hissed, eyes still on Nickels. Still humming, still tracing bloodstained fingers in the air. “Impatient. So sue me.”

  “You just wanted Garth to die so you could …”

  “Hey!” Garth’s voice rang through the area. “You guys gonna continue arguing like little bitches or are you gonna stand up and have a proper adult conversation? I’m down here, prolly dying, definitely, uh, you know, bleeding all over the place. Aren’t you curious about what’s really going on here?”

  Eddie and Drake shared a weird look.

  That didn’t sound good.

  They may have –either intentionally or because they just hadn’t known what to look for- missed a few things here and there when gearing up to deal with N’Chalez, but there was one thing they knew for certain.

  A confident Engineer was a dangerous Engineer.

  Eddie whispered, “Let’s keep him occupied. Chatty. He loves that whole monologue thing where he explains how awesome he is and how stupid everyone else is. Makes him feel important. While he’s doing that, let’s dial up some refresher courses on how to be old us. Repair the conduits.”

  “We could shift him elsewhere.” Drake suggested. Not to say that he was worried about what Garth was going to get up to. Not at all. “One of the other worlds? Somewhere we’ve … you’ve still got influence?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Too risky.”

  Drake watched on as Eddie Marshall shimmered and became Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles and cursed. He really didn’t want to put his Spur skin back on, but there was no other choice.

  ***

  “Cheater.” Emperor Marseilles’ scathing accusation bounced off the walls, slammed into the smoke and disappeared, swallowed by the billowing black and gray clouds. “Cheater.”

  Garth opened his mouth to respond, took a big shot of smoke down the throat, and spent a long, terrifying second spluttering for dear life; it wasn’t easy breathing regularly when you were leaking from every orifice in your body. Adding smoke born from electronics into the mix and you really were risking your life.

  When he was able to speak, he was the picture of innocence. “Me? A cheater?”

  Garth added a fresh dab of blood to a finger and resumed sketching in the air while he waited for the most august and powerful Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles to find his words. Off to one side, Spur watched on with undisguised interest.

  Oh, if only they could see what he saw. They’d run. Run and hide. Run, hide and pretend they’d never done anything of the sort, never tried.

  There were Lines all over the antechamber now, rude and crude and roughly, but they were in. They were there. All it’d take was a burst of energy, and the circuits would catch fire.

  Then everything would come tumbling down.

  This time?

  For real. In the really real world.

  “Yes.” The word was heavy as Thor’s Hammer. “Cheater. You destroyed your world. And everyone in it.”

  “Saved Drake from the Baron.” Garth proffered casually, still sketching out the last bit. “You didn’t specify he needed to be alive. Saved the world from the awful thing that happens later on, as well, didn’t I? Y’see, Emperor old friend, when you’re dealing with a Specter, ex or otherwise, it is always best to be certain you got every angle covered.”

  Drake leaned over and whispered into Eddie’s ear. “He’s doing something down there. His hands keep moving. In familiar patterns. If I could only …”

  From the corner of his mouth, Eddie responded. “He’s fucking with you. It’s what he does. He’s got nothing and he knows it. There’s no way out of here, no matter he destroyed the world he was in. We’ll keep on as we are, find out what he did, then send him back once everything is reset. We’re still on track.”

  “While I agree we need to get Garth under wraps,” Drake said softly as he moved back into position, “I do not agree with what you plan on doing afterwards.”

  “Hey, pal, no law says you gotta stay.” Eddie nodded his head. “Once we’re done, once I get what I want, you can fuck off. I even promise to leave you alone, so long as you leave me and mine alone. In the new Reality.”

  “Gee thanks, Eddie, you’re so swell.” Drake withdrew a bit further. Standing so close to a man he’d believed in for so long, only to learn that he was, in fact, more of a colossal asshole than imaginable … actual, physical pain flooded his senses. He went back to the task of remembering who he’d been during the construction of the relay repeaters and command conduits.

  He was almost there. Once repairs were made, they’d be able to reconnect with other portions of the incongruity, channel power from there to the room they were in.

  Snatch Garth back up and put him somewhere safe, where he couldn’t do any harm.

  Then they could figure out what he’d done and how best to protect themselves from having it happen again. The reality of how dangerous Garth was pulled at Drake’s heart, made it heavy, but there was nothing he could do. At least, not yet. After five thousand years solo, Eddie was closer to the incongruity, held more influence over it.

  Down below, Garth let out a piercing whistle. “Fellas, let’s stay on track, okay? I’ve just destroyed your powerful simulation, a result of which is a surprising amount of damage to this here place. Which I personally find incredibly interesting. I mean,” the Kin’kithal took a long, purposeful look around, winked at the billowing smoke down the far end of the grand meeting hall and continued, “if I were to build a place like this and do the kinds of things you guys are getting up to, I’d definitely prepare for some asshole, uh, you know, blowing shit up. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the majority of the people who come here aren’t exactly the best and brightest of the EuroJapanese peoples, are they? You get a lot of criminals and other assorted very bad men up in this joint. Guys like that, they might get frustrated. Might look to do things the old-fashioned way.”

  “Even the worst of them were never as bad as you, Garth N’Chalez.” Etienne’s voice was a tight whip of fury. “The very act of coming here, the decision to seek absolution for their crimes all but guarantees their good behavior. Their … eagerness to be free from their guilt forces them to play by my rules. Even if they know, deep in their heart
s, that they’ll never succeed, still, they try. But always according to the rules of the game.”

  “Yeah well.” Garth twiddled bloody fingers at Spur, who was definitely off to the side, doing something he shouldn’t. “Never been one for rules, have I.”

  “I’ll just send you back, N’Chalez. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it.” Eddie looked over at Drake, who signalled he was close to uncovering the memories of how to rebuild the conduits, head ringing with Garth’s words.

  The truth of the matter was, he should have considered the possibility that Garth would do something like this. Drake had pointed it out, right there at the very beginning, in easy to understand words, yet he’d chosen to ignore the warning.

  Eddie saw that he’d been stupid. Stupid and arrogant and far too cocksure for his own good, especially when he recalled his all-too precise summation of Garth Nickels. He’d called Nickels destroyer, labeled him nothing more than a savage with a brain devoted solely to the ruination of everything he put his hands on, and it was his fault for failing to consider the very real possibility that a man like that would find some way to do the unthinkable, manage the impossible.

  It was, after all, what the man did.

  “You can try.” Garth replied bluntly as he put the finishing touches on the circuit connecting himself to the room. Now all that was left was a very shocking arrival. “I ain’t going nowhere. Now, if you’ll excuse me. Ahem. I’m about done here!”

  Eddie looked at Drake, who motioned that he was just a few seconds away from getting it all in. The Emperor licked his lips, unable to contain himself any longer. “How’d you do it, then? How did you destroy your trial? So effectively, so efficiently?”

  Garth smiled, and the effect was hideous. “n-space device. The biggest of it’s kind.”

  Eddie did some preliminary math in his head. He was intimate with the specs of the world he’d dropped Garth into, and of the various technologies he’d put an effective ban on, so it wasn’t difficult to come up with the necessary requirements for a bomb powerful enough to obliterate the simulation and to cause structural damage to the outside world.