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

by Lee Bond

  “What?” he demanded defensively. “It’ll help them get it. You see, it was super totes easy for Nickels here to fall into the proto-Reality, but climbing back out? Uh-uh. His way in was a one way journey. No, for him to get home again, it was a lot less ‘click your heels three times because the power was inside you the whole time’ and ‘kill this fuckin’ time traveling asshole because if we do it, everyone will notice us and that’s kind of not our thing, or we will make sure you just sort of linger here for all of eternity, which is something we know you don’t want on account of how your Universe is falling to pieces’ kind of thing.”

  “I … see.” Drake was finally getting a handle on things. “So … you arrived, all superpowered Kin’kithal guy and what? These local deities suddenly realize they’re not the only thing in the Universe? And they see that, no matter how powerful you are, you can’t go home because … the local rules are different? So they corral you into dealing with Samiel in exchange for a ride home?”

  “That about sums it up.” Garth looked at Chaos, who nodded, so he nodded at Eddie and Drake; the former was sitting there, a very thoughtful squint in his eyes and the latter looked like he just wanted to crawl into bed for a million years.

  “That’s not a stalemate.” Eddie said into the quiet. “That’s a fair exchange of efforts. What happened after you killed Samiel? After you killed Samiel, they were supposed to send you home.”

  “I still want to know why you didn’t come back to the 21st century.” Drake barged over Eddie’s attempts to unfurl the knot.

  “You guys didn’t need me around. You guys were happy enough on your own. I wanted the two of you to live a long and fruitful life. Without the presence of a Kin’kithal. Besides, like I been sayin’, I had more important things to do than pal around with two knuckleheads.”

  “Yeah, well, we got invaded, so … it’s not like we got to hang around double-fisting rum and cokes into our twilight years or anything.” Eddie snapped. “When the first of the black, chitinous ships appeared in our skies and the first of the ground troops appeared, slaughtering farm animals all over the globe, we knew we were in trouble. When the first of them arrived on Earth, talking about how they weren’t going to kill us all, that we’d be used as slaves, when the T’aa whispered seductive word…”

  “The motherfucking Bruush were your fucking Invaders?” Garth had to lean all the way back in his chair over that news. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

  “Yes. The Bruush. They were the Invaders. Apparently, they possess the ability to track cracks in Reality, and someone, not naming names or pointing fingers, left a great big furrow in the skin of Whatever. So they came to see what was what, found us, thought we were easy targets, rolled right on in. Eddie and I found the incongruity, used it to not only push them back, but to track them to their home base and hand them a beating the likes of which they’d never encountered.” Drake had his eyes shut, recalling some personal terror endured during the effort to defeat the dinosaur-like monsters.

  “After that, after we’d done what we could, the world left behind wasn’t … wasn’t ours anymore. We’d already used the incongruity too much to fit in. We’d seen so much in the Shattered Dominions. We barely felt human. Which is why we thought we’d see how you were doing. By then, after our exploits, we … we figured it out. We’d accessed some of Samiel’s memories … memories trapped in the incongruity, so … so we knew what you really were. Besides which, around this time, our scientists were discovering that great swathes of space were being … harvested somehow, so we wanted to …”

  “Holy fucking shitballs, none of you say another fucking word!” When Garth tried to say something, Chaos hopped up and started running around in circles. “No. Don’t say anything …none of you … all of you just … shut up. This has been bugging me forever. The smell. The smell. So damn familiar. The only reason I didn’t figure it out on my own was coz I’d never actually smelled it myself. Holy shit, Garth. Holy all the way fucking shitballs! The smell, Garth. That rank, spicy stink coming from the Ziggs! It was …”

  “Well now, that is just goddamn peachy.” Garth picked up a napkin and threw it on the table. “Bruushian DNA? Really? Baron Samiel was splicing Bruushian DNA into a fucking drug? To transform people into soldiers capable of defeating the Invasion his own way? Your way wasn’t good enough? Why in the hell would he do that?”

  Eddie and Drake exchanged glances. “We … don’t really know the answer to that, Garth. There were just too many memories. Samiel really did live for more than a million years. Even with, you know, proper ‘aid’, even with incongruously-powered machines … too much data. Too many cross-transfixed timelines. Personally, we think it’s a miracle Samiel wasn’t a vegetable.”

  “So … your efforts at defending the Earth from the Invasion of the Space Dinosaurs ended things in a manner that Samiel didn’t like, the direct result of which was his decision to start monkey-fucking with time.” Garth pinched the bridge of his nose. “Goddamn I hate time travel. My personal assumption is that your deal happened … no. You know what? Fuck all that noise. I ain’t trying to be Doc Brown figuring out time revision. But you know what I do know? I know that your shenanigans had to’ve had some kind of an effect on the Ushbet M’Tai, because yeah, everything was super-dope and awesome and they were all ‘Hey, wow, you totally killed that fat weirdo with the welding goggles bolted to his face, he went splat all over the place’ and the next they were like ‘uh, bro, so, yeah … we need to renegotiate our deal’.”

  “How do you mean?” Eddie demanded, leaning forward.

  “The old deal was off the table. One minute, on, next, off. Said they wouldn’t send me home unless…”

  Eddie gave a shriek and disappeared in a flash of inverted purple light. Drake, startled, leaped backwards from the table only to crash into the one directly behind him. Then he, too, screamed and disappeared.

  Garth looked at Chaos. “Well, fuck. I suppose it was too much to hope that that fuckin’ guy’d just, like, stay away, right?”

  Chaos didn’t have time to say anything: he was pulled apart like a ball of yarn right before Garth’s eyes.

  Garth grabbed a cookie. “All right, Aäl, let’s get this over with, you asshole.”

  And then Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez, Engineer of Reality 2.0, uncrowned King of New Arcadia and Kin’kithal warrior, disappeared in an inverted flash of purple light, only he didn’t scream because it was all about sending the right message.

  Wasn’t it just?

  Stragglers? We’ve Got Stragglers?

  An Old Man and a Giant Walk onto a Space Station…

  “I tell you, this isn’t going to work.” Tomas’ old man-quavery voice sounded thin and cranky in the mostly destroyed escape pod.

  “It’ll work just fine, old man.” Ute announced with a confidence that may or may not look better on paper than in real life. He shifted a bit more, struggling to get comfortable.

  “They’ll detect you.” Tomas said again.

  “Well, if they do, that’d be very interesting, because that would mean they’ve got Latelian technology out here, which is something that should be impossible.” There. He’d found the perfect and proper position to curl around the much smaller and infinitely more cranky Tomas Kamagana. “Also, if they were going to detect me, it would’ve been before now, that’s for certain. And if they had, they wouldn’t be this close. They would’ve most definitely blown this chunk of space debris into a million tiny pieces.”

  “You, sa, are a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and dreary place.” Tomas felt more than a little uncomfortable being surrounded on all sides by the gigantic God soldier, but there was nothing they could do about it now; no more than fifteen minutes after popping through the Shield wall and taking stock of their situation, long range sensors had detected the impending arrival of a space vessel.

  Lacking the necessary language protocols to contact them because of the difference in vessels, the clea
rly marked Trinity Military Services ship had made a course correction to come in closer, at which time their own ship had detected the first of the scanner probes.

  They'd decided to stay hidden for obvious reasons, with Ute's Harmonic power keeping the interior of their escape pod as lifeless and as boring as anything, leaving Tomas with the profound worry that their ... 'rescuers' were going to waste no time in digging in.

  And yet, that hadn't happened. What had happened was a round of exuberant clanging and banging against the durable exterior of their pod, followed by a few hours of salty language and then ...

  Mishap. Of some kind. Lots of crashing and banging and jostling followed swiftly by...

  Nothing. The obvious -and for Tomas, unenjoyable- sensation of freefall through outer space. They'd done that for awhile, Ute going on at length about some kind of battle or other where this exact same thing had happened to him.

  Tomas felt somewhat guilty for being relieved that, in the middle of that longwinded story, someone else had snatched them up.

  At which point, Ute had come up with the brilliant idea they were currently engaging in.

  “I do my best.” Ute replied dryly, taking one last look at the monitor showing the vessel’s approach. “These new guys will be here very soon. Now listen, when I, erm, go down, I will seem … very dead. There’s just no way they have the tech aboard to detect me then. I’ll be nothing more than a huge chunk of strange, inert matter. Their probes won’t be able to pass through the density of duronium implants I’ve got inside, either, so they won’t find you until we’re … aboard. Wherever we’re headed.”

  As far as lunatic plans went, it was the best thing they had on deck.

  “And when I want you to wake up, I just say …”

  “Ute, wake up.” The Fivesie smiled. “Easy, right?”

  Tomas couldn’t wipe the dubious look from his wrinkled old face, but nodded. The risks they were taking! For all either of them knew, they were pointless risks, at that; Naoko could be long dead by now, or on the far side of Trinityspace. She could be happy, with a child, with a new life. She could be … she could.

  Tomas plastered a bogus smile on his lips, one he knew Ute saw right through, then nodded. “Yes, sa. Easiest thing in the world.”

  Ute closed his eyes and located the source of Harmonic power within him. As always –especially since that fateful moment in the meeting room with Herrig- the flow was different somehow, the tune … modulated. It sounded almost the same as the old Harmony he’d owned, but … crisper, somehow. The Goddie closed mental hands around Harmony and snuffed the flame that burned inside every atom of his being, held it close, until it were nothing more than a dim flicker, the merest hint of consciousness.

  The oldest Goddie in Latelyspace slipped into a darkness suffused by pops of color.

  Outside, breathing shallowly out of some perverse worry he’d breathe up all the air, Tomas Kamagana watched on as his friend and traveling companion seemed to do nothing more than fall asleep.

  That was it. Nothing else. No signs of power being turned off, no crackles of electricity, nothing to indicate that one of the most powerful men in the system –probably even in the Universe- had gone to ground.

  Tomas poked his friend in the nose with the tip of his broken pipe. “You better not be dead. When we’re dug out of this mess, I’m going to need someone to beat everyone up, and as much as Nickels believes old men with canes are masters of martial arts, I most definitely am not one…”

  ***

  “Commander Innit, this is the TMS Osprey Sixteen, requesting comm.”

  Innit looked over at the comm unit, eyes bleary, face drawn taught, veins in his face and neck clearly visible beneath paper-thin skin; at his chest, the powerful blue crystal delivered to him by Novinians on New Nova moments before the call to arms had been made pulsed as always, but slower now, exactly as a heart would, a heart that was failing.

  They’d never said anything about the power being finite.

  Innit didn’t want the power to leave, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it, not unless he decided to risk returning to 9-Nova-12.

  He wasn’t dying. No, there were no worries there; the Offworlders who’d discovered him by detecting the waning power within had done all they could to keep him alive and functioning up to nearly ninety percent efficiency. They’d lacked the technical know-how to reproduce the strange spark of power transforming a man from just a man into the unstoppable force that was a God soldier, but they had ensured his ... durability. He wouldn’t die unless the Novinians insisted.

  “I repeat, “Commander Innit, this is the TMS Osprey Sixteen, requesting comm.”

  “Not dying.” Innit commented as he reached out to activate the comms. “Just going back to normal, which is worse.”

  The commander for Trinity’s Assembled Army stabbed the button with a grimy finger. “Go ahead, Osprey Sixteen.”

  “We’ve located some space debris, sir.”

  “Well, aren’t you lucky.” Innit snapped. “Arnas will love the hell out of you for at least fifteen minutes, and I’m sure the rest of the station will help deprive you of your earnings.”

  “It’s … it’s not that, sir. It’s … the location, Commander Innit. We’re about … seventy-eight thousand miles out from the Shield Wall, Commander, and … the … well. We’re recording the disturbance playing against the energy wall for later examination, sir, because …”

  “AM I THE ONLY HERE WHO CAN SPEAK IN COMPLETE SENTENCES?” Kaptan Innit bellowed so loudly the loose objects on his desk vibrated and danced to his tune. “I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU ARMY PEOPLE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST IN THE ENTIRE BLOODY UNIVERSE AND HERE YOU ARE, HEMMING AND HAWING LIKE A ROOKIE SPECTER. GET TO THE POINT, YOU MISERABLE MAGGOT, OR I’LL SNAP YOUR NECK AND USE YOUR SPINE TO SKIP TO M’LOU.”

  “Sir, yessir.” There was a noticeable presence of fear and terror in Osprey Sixteen’s comm jockey, now. “Preliminary scans indicate there’s no one alive inside, but … there’s an awful lot of disturbance in the area, makes it difficult to be certain. One thing we do know is that the ident frequency coming from the escape pod identifies it as belonging to the … TMS Sureshot, sir. As you are no doubt aware …”

  “Bring the pod aboard. Park it in decontam bay 7. Rally your nearest friends. I’ll deploy some Heavies and some of our Specter Techs, to go over the data pulled from the Shield Wall. Chances are good the escape pod just farted out the ass end of Sureshot when they lurched past The Line and it’s been bouncing around against the Shield Wall since then.” Innit ran a hand against the hard blue surface of the crystal in his chest. Faint stirrings of power flowed from the crystal into his fingers, like a weirdly pleasant shock to the system. “But there’s always a chance I’m wrong. And if I am wrong, I’d like to be the kind of wrong that has us with nothing more than an empty pod.”

  “Sir?” Osprey Sixteen was puzzled.

  Innit touched the Novinian power crystal again. Was it his imagination, or was there a little spike of power there? “I know the enemy of old, Osprey Sixteen. If anyone could con Trinity scanners into thinking it’s empty, it’d be a Latelian God soldier. Keep in constant contact. When you get to Bay 7, make good and goddamn sure you’re ready for anything. If there is a Goddie inside that thing, it’s going to come out like a fucking armor-plated space rhino that knows how to pull damn near everything to pieces. Do you copy?”

  “Roger, Commander. Armor-plated space rhino, complete with combat skills. Osprey Sixteen, out.”

  “Innit out.” Kaptan Innit ended the comm, and stared at the preliminary data beamed to his systems by Sixteen. From the exterior shots and scans, the spherical escape pod had been through all kinds of shit in the last little while. Well-trained eyes built the most likely scenario from the damage incurred, and at first blush, it really did seem as though the damned thing had popped through the Shield, making the literal shitstorm of godawful 'weather' beating on
the inside of that same barricade directly responsible for this little nugget of weirdness. Innit tried making heads or tails of the technical data pouring through the encrypted channels, but he’d never been much for that kind of thing. It was just a load of ones and zeroes, far as he was concerned, so he went back to looking at the escape pod.

  Big enough for a Goddie. Yes it was.

  He licked his lips.

  Would it be someone he knew?

  Only time would tell.

  Innit reached out and thumbed the intercom button. "Someone find out what the fuck is going on in that section of space. This is too hinky to've been missed before now. Get on it."

  ***

  Once upon a time, Decontamination Bay 7 had been known more colloquially as the TMS Supergreen, but in light of the fact that the rapidly growing Space Station Tarterus had greater need of places large enough to store things and that Supergreen was more bay than ship, well. Kaptan Innit had only done five minutes of top-acceleration shouting to convince the Captain of Supergreen -a surly Specter going by the unlikely name of Bob- that it'd be in everyone's best interests if compliance had the appearance of total agreement, if only because a certain Commander wasn't really interested in beating on Specter Captains unless it became strictly necessary.

  Captain Bob really didn't mind the appointment as a bay. Locked into the overall superstructure of Tarterus as Supergreen now was, he and his would be one of the very last ships to disembark should the need for full conflict and combat status arise.

  Not that it was likely. The Shield Wall wasn't coming down, and frankly speaking, anyone deciding to come out this way to take a look at what was going on was just goddamn stupid. Tarterus was seething with Specters, Specter ships, and a whole messful of irritation. It'd be like poking a beehive full of drugged-out, hyper-accelerated space wasps with nothing but time on their hands.