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

by Lee Bond

  The noise above them swiftly became noise below them.

  Aline stepped forward, pointed her rifle right at the Offworlder's left eye. The old bastard didn't even flinch. "What the fuck have you done?"

  "I'm getting there, young woman. For all the noise we're hearing, we've still got at least half an hour. More than enough time for me to finish my story and for us to all hurry away like scared mice. If I may?" Aleks looked past the angry female soldier and directly at Rillin. When the lieutenant nodded, he resumed. "Here, in Latelyspace, Huey was able to use the 'LINKed systems to remotely operate the clone body. More than enough power to go around. Again, I can't quite figure out the specifics without looking things up, but that's about it. To function beyond this solar system, though, Huey needed to make certain that the Barnes' body had a reliable source of power. The internal batteries of an AI sphere would in no way allow this to happen, but the two miniaturized solid state ultra-protonic batteries implanted along the spinal column most definitely did. Enough power in those two things to keep the Barnes body up and running for about thirty years at max output. You see where this is headed yet, Lieutenant, or would you like me to continue explaining?"

  Aline looked over her shoulder at Rillin. She was a soldier, pure and simple, waiting eagerly for the time when she passed the Onesie exam and took that final step towards true glory. "What's he mean, sa?"

  Rillin opened his mouth to answer, but the Offworlder trod on his lines, as it were. "Simple dead man circuit, soldier. From the power sources inside Huey's dead body to those all around us. As long as I held the circuit in place," Politoyov held up his hand, which was laced with shiny wires, "everything kept on working smoothly and without trouble. The moment it broke, though? Feedback loop. The engines for this rig do so very much more than generate Tunnels, sis and sas. They power everything from the oxygenerators that are still running to the offensive weapons. Right now, thanks to a lot of creative wiring, they're trying to complete the broken circuit. In the process, they're also overheating. We've got about twenty minutes now."

  "Before what?" Rillin's throat cracked under the pressure. He didn't even need the answer. There was no doubting just what it was that Politoyov had done.

  The nightmare of the whole situation was that this was his first big mission. And it was such an important one. An entire Quantum Tunnel. One capable of moving from one place to the other without effort, one that could ferry soldiers from one place to the other in the blink of an eye. Sure, they had the Quantum Cannons that could rip intelligences out of spheres with impunity, but that was barely even half the equation in terms of warfare. Strip Trinityfolk of their AI minds, they still had bodies.

  A particularly loud shuddering clank groaned hideously out of the depths, prompting a few nervous Latelians to sweep their muzzles towards the ground, subconsciously expecting some kind of monster to rear up at them, their faces turning bright red when they realized that their actions had left their prisoner free to do whatever he wanted.

  "Before this Tunnel goes up, and in a very big manner." Politoyov stomped his feet noisily. "And, as with most things, my timetable seems to be a bit off. I'd say we've got about fifteen minutes. Now, from my estimations, your version of the black hole ships should be charged to full capacity at this point, which is why you waited so long before boarding this Tunnel. Congratulations, by the way, on securing and reverse engineering the tech. You Latelians. So crafty. Well. Shall we go?"

  Rillin could barely believe what he was hearing, let alone what he was seeing; Aleksander Politoyov, the Old Man of Specter, rubbing his hands and strolling off towards their small landing craft, acting for all the world as if he'd planned the steps of their encounter long before they'd even arrived.

  As Lieutenant Rillin and the others hustled to catch up with the grizzled commander, he wondered perhaps if that wasn't far from the truth; there were reports and records attached to Politoyov's Intelligence Dossier, handwritten assessments of the man's accomplishments and capabilities added by none other than OverCommander Vasily himself.

  To read the reports was to read about a man who seemed able to think around corners, to peer through the mists of time. How could you defeat a man like that?

  A powerfully loud tremor shuddered what felt like the entire Orion Tunnel array, from stem to stern and back again.

  Everyone on the platform picked up speed, Politoyov included. As Rillin got to his side, swearing furiously, the sour look on his face suggesting he'd love nothing more than to leave any freshly acquired prisoners behind to suffer the results of all his crafty planning, Aleksander cleared his throat.

  "While you no doubt believe you know what you're going to need to do in this particular situation, Lieutenant, I urge you to consider this: wherever you intended on jumping to is almost certainly not far enough."

  "How bad could it be?" Rillin -no Quantum Tunnel expert- loathed the worried curiosity in his voice.

  "Prior to your people destroying both Orion and Huey, we were all discussing the nature of the Gravnetic Storm on the edge of this solar system, Lieutenant, and the depth of the conflict about to spawn there." Politoyov angled towards the small landing craft once it hove into sight, pulling the Latelian soldiers in his wake, an undeniable force; at least they'd all recovered from the shock of imminent destruction and were finally pointing their guns back where they belonged. "While there are no … will be none, if we make haste, at any rate, black hole ships in the area to contribute their deadly payloads to the mix, the resultant damage caused from this Orion Tunnel going hypercritical will transform this entire region … oh, perhaps fifty thousand light years."

  It was Bortöen's turn to be shocked. "Fifty thousand light years?"

  Politoyov nodded agreeably, enjoying himself far more than was fair. "Oh my yes. At the least. That number is extrapolated from my certain knowledge of standard sized Tunnels going boom. It could easily be a very much larger number. The entire solar system, for all I know."

  That was enough for Rillin and all the soldiers present. One of them flipped their rifle around and slammed the butt into the back of the man's head hard enough to drive him to the floor, bleeding from fresh wounds. A few more rifle butts to the back and kidneys just to let the man know who was in charge, then they quickly shuffled him aboard, cracked, bleeding.

  And smiling.

  The small landing craft took off furiously, the pilot ever mindful of what awaited them if they failed to be out of the region in the next ten minutes. It’d be close, but some beatings just needed to be delivered no matter the consequences.

  Politoyov, propped up against a tiny viewing window, watched Orion Tunnel recede into the distance. Well, sort of; he knew it was a trick of perspective, given that Orion was massive, but it felt as if the Tunnel was diminishing. Either way.

  Without Huey in Latelyspace, Aleksander Politoyov couldn’t help but feel that things were going to go all the way downhill, and in a hurry.

  A short time later, a brief but bright star lit the heavens.

  Tunc Potest Cadere Tenebras

  Toon groaned unhappily as she felt pieces of mass return to her essence, indicating that yet another of her self-generated clones had bit the dust; these Goddies were killing them –a fact that she was still having a hard time coming to grips with- as fast as she could generate them, and with everything else she was doing, taking the time out to do so seemed like it was becoming pretty goddamn pointless pretty goddamn quick.

  On-screen, the Honor Your Offer, a ship that was supposed to’ve been the vanguard and ‘easy beater’ of the enemy forces, was in the middle of valiant death throes; from her position in the very well-defended and armored control room of the Galyssian Titan-class warship –officially known as Creed’s Gamble but most often referred to as ‘that big fucking ship’- the BAM-cannon bearing cruiser split in half, spilling debris and soldiers into the cold embrace of deep space. Huge gouts of quickly smothered fire burst here and there across the lower half of the dyi
ng ship, while across the top, vibrant flares of ruby light split the darkness, revealing tiny little motes that moved with purpose.

  Behind them all, the terrible Storm on the Edge raged, planet-sized whorls of gravity-spawned chaos spitting lightning cracks light-years in length, silently paying destructive homage to the deaths of every man, woman and thing being slaughtered out there. So much death, so much destruction, all of it caused by the Goddies, precious little of it caused by the righteous and noble combined forces of Regular Army and Special Services.

  The red light had to be unleashed BAM-cannon munitions and the little motes of light casting long shadows through the carnal-seeming illumination, God soldiers. Flying through space, without EVA suits. Or anything.

  It was amazing.

  It was awful.

  Toon had never seen anything like it in her entire life, and she’d spent most of her career as a Heavy across The Cordon, doing things and witnessing spectacles that might very well drive ordinary people insane.

  All of that paled in comparison to the awesome sight of God soldiers, carving through the depths of space, launched from missile tubes at enemy vessels, crashing into ships, using powerful light-lances to hammer through shielding that’d been prorated to handle damn near anything the Universe could throw at them.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Just like that. They’d lost more than half the fleet already, and the conflict had barely even started; with the kind of tactical insight that they all should’ve expected from enemies that were allegedly immortal, the God soldiers had targeted Honor Your Offer first, taking precious time to make good and goddamn fucking certain that the BAM-cannon-equipped TMS craft went down and stayed down, with hordes of Goddies –looking like miniscule ticks skipping from one animal to the next- swarming to all the other Regular Army boats before even bothering with Specterships.

  They all been targeted, pure and simple, and were being dismantled like a children's playground.

  Toon couldn’t tell what was happening on those other ships because none of the Captains had even been approachable when it came to letting versions of herself aboard, but the one thing the Heavy Elite Tech Expert knew for certain was that whatever it was, it didn’t look good; unlike Honor Your Offer, none of the other infested ships were adding their fireworks to the nighttime sky, which … wasn’t good.

  Goddies taking prisoners wasn’t something that was in the field book. Goddies crushed, killed and destroyed and if there was anything left over after they’d had their fun, they swung back for Round Two and that was that.

  Toon didn’t know much, but she suspected that if a God soldier decided to put his or her mind to the task, torture from one of those giants would be uncomfortably successful.

  As she watched, the brightly colored Heavy detected a gigantic, singular pause in the vicious combat flowing through the eternal battlefield. It lasted for about five seconds, with nothing but the continuing –and spectacular- death throes of Honor Your Offer adding brilliant color to the nearly monochromatic Storm behind everything.

  The motes crawling over hulls of ships resumed, though this time … with definitive motion. In one direction.

  Towards them.

  “Fuck my life.” Toon hollered into the comm system, caring little if she broke the eardrums of every Heavy aboard Creed’s Gamble; the Goddies had ripped through Honor Your Offer and Seriiooously, not to mention taking a swing at Quonset Over Qwater and Salacious Sally’s Home for Wayward Criminals. From the vectors … and there were thousands and thousands of them … it was fucking apparent they’d saved Gamble for last. “We got incoming, people, incoming from all quarters, Goddies en route, all channels, all access points, though as we’ve seen already, they got weapons that can puncture gravny-shields like balloons. All hands on deck. All hands on deck. Breach imminent. I repeat, breach imminent.”

  Creed’s Gamble was the biggest ship in the Specter’s armada. Clocking it at just over four miles long, two wide and just under a mile and a half tall, the ship belonging to Marker and his band of maniacs was –to the untrained eye- an easy target. The Goddies had had an admittedly easy time of things en route to the Gamble because let’s be honest, regular Army hadn’t had been in a decent fight or even had a fair showing of things in the last ten years, let alone this god-awful skirmish they were in now.

  But things were going to go a little differently once they got inside Gamble. There were only seven Heavies aboard the ship, but that didn’t mean a goddamn thing when they had someone like Toon aboard, or when you had someone like Marker as captain. Between corridors that dropped acid on you and walls that slammed you into fine paste and hidden alcoves in which hid monsters and worse secretly transported cross-Cordon –monsters that had a kind of ‘loyalty’ to Marker, a loyalty built on a base of terror and a desire to live- and all manner of other deathtraps strewn throughout, there was Toon herself.

  Toon. Impossible to kill. Brightly colored hair, oddly colored skin, weirdly rubbery flesh. Able to create versions of herself, smaller than her, but just as deadly, just as strange, all in synch, all working towards the same goals. It was a side effect of her existence, one she didn’t particularly care for, but one that was going to have to be deployed more now that the barbarians were at the gate.

  Cartoonish ears flicked backwards over her skull as she heard and felt the first faint tremors of Goddies slamming against the no-longer-impregnable gravnetically-generated shields and she smiled, wondering if they were feeling the first faint stirrings of dismay as their colossal light-lances failed to breach Gamble’s shields; the one of her that’d died so very recently had been dispatched to the black hole engine bays to hastily augment the output.

  They’d been dangerous modifications, but one her incredibly elastic mind had been working on for a very long time. Ever since they’d lurched their way past the equally-impossible shield surrounding the entire fucking solar system, in fact, and mods that only a Galyssian ship of immense size could possibly hope to contain; Gamble had eight times the volume of AI spheres driving the engines and four times the number of engines and emitters than every other vessel in Trinityspace, including bullshit Regular Army crap-ships.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Nothing. Nothing yet. The shields were holding.

  Toon felt a pinprick presence asking to show her something. One of the few recon-Toons she’d spread out across the ship. Marker thought she was an idiot for wasting precious resources aboard their own vessel, but Toon was Toon. She felt more comfortable viewing things from the confines of her own mind. Difficult to hack an intelligence like hers.

  It was so very elastic.

  Heavy Expert Toon let the sights and sounds flow into her, and suddenly …

  She was there.

  ***

  “I fucking love the feeling of space on my skin.” Foursie Ergot’s words echoed through the comms of all the Goddies within range. There was an added frisson of enjoyment that pushed through Harmony. “Wish we could build showers like this in the barracks. Have a nice vacuum-shower after a hard day at the office, eh, boys?”

  Guttural laughter clipped in and out across the comms; the Heavies inside that fucking gigantic beehive of a ship were trying out different forms of electronic intrusion-ware, but they just weren’t smart enough to fully dig into the encrypted ‘LINKs they were using, so it only lasted a few seconds here and there.

  Ergot hoisted the lance in his hands over a shoulder and pondered the glassy surface beneath his feet with heavy curiosity. He knew his lance was in proper working order because he –and a few of his closest friends- had only been spending the entire morning puncturing gravnetic shields like they were papier mache pinatas, but this fucking ship…

  “What d‘you think?” Ergot looked around at his comrades. They needed in. There was just no getting around that, no sa, no there wasn’t. Whoever or whatever was inside this gigantic Offworld space craft had to be representative of the Specter forces remaining inside Latelyspace�
�s borders, and if they could convince the Captain or commander or whatever flavorful title had been chosen by whoever was in charge that it was in their best interests to not only lay down their arms but to listen to reason, then there was a fairly decent chance that they might be able to do the same for all the other remaining ships out there in the system.

  For the most part, the sis and sas on the other ships, while not necessarily agreeing with what they were being told were actively listening to a greater truth. Some of them, like bedraggled Homolka and attractive Yeva, showed signs of being on board, though it was equally obvious they were waiting for more people to start nodding.

  No, if they were going to end the conflict, or at least forge on down that path, it started here.

  “I say it’s time to practice that Harmony punch you were bragging about, oh mighty Foursie.”

  Ergot grinned, felt a few void-spawned ice crystals crack from around the sides of his mouth. “You think you can handle being in the presence of something so magnificent, Spira? Might send you back to Hospitalis, to the streets, singing my praises. It’s that amazing…”

  Spira’s harsh laughter split and cracked as the Heavy intrusion spun through another series of frequencies. “Go on, sa, amaze me. Amaze us all.”

  Ergot laughed and handed his lance to the Twoesie standing next to him. “Hold my spear while I do this.”

  All the Goddies standing on the skin of the gravnetic shield stepped back a bit, not entirely certain how much damage Ergot's fancy punch was going to do. The last thing any of them wanted was to be blasted off into space. It'd be so bloody embarrassing.

  Ergot looked over his shoulder at his brothers and sisters, flashed them one of the gaudiest winks he'd ever revealed, then held his fist up high. When he was sure they were all paying attention, he wiggled his massive paw back and forth until it caught a gleam that shone bright as any star. Harmony now flooding through him as it never had, Ergot felt connected to his brothers and sisters in every way.