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

by Lee Bond

  If that ha… no. There was no way it'd come to that. They'd planned too long, worked too hard, for anything to get in the way of their deepest goal.

  "Well, Daisy?" Stride tried to keep his tone lighthearted. He failed, of course, because this fucking Storm was putting him right into the moodiest mood he'd endured in something like four thousand years.

  "Fascinating." Daisy's simulated feminine tones echoed with literal interest. "We seem to have gained a companion."

  Stride moved to a control panel, fingers a blur. He quickly directed cameras to swivel outwards, and squatted down on his haunches, nonplussed. Daisy's assessment of the situation was entirely correct. They had adopted themselves a companion, and it was fascinating; the AI had yet to explain precisely how it'd happened, but a globe of gravnetically-infused quantum ball lightning had taken up orbit around the Peloponnese and was right that moment whirling around the Asteroidship.

  "Well." Stride was at a loss for words. "Any ideas how this is happening?"

  "The most obvious explanation would be that the weight of this vessel is great enough to attract stellar objects." Daisy thoughtfully tossed a few quick facts on one of the side Screens to illuminate the basic principles of planetary bodies and moons, and how the physics of such theoretically fit the scenario they were currently in. "We've never explored something like this before, and without deeper understanding of changes wrought in the localized quantum substrate, the only model we can currently accept is one based on standardized stellar mechanics."

  Stride pulled on his chin, ideas churning quite a bit slower than the strange wanderer orbiting his lovely ship. Could they flip the Storm over by introducing inconceivably large and dense objects -like the Peloponnese- into the mix? Lodestones to draw out the more unstable and chaotic essences flooding the afflicted quadrant.

  "Are we at risk?" That was of obvious and paramount concern. He was a Horseman, and very difficult to kill, but there was risk and there was risk. At the moment, they weren't so far in that if the vessel experienced crippling damage, returning home was still viable. But this chaotic ball of intense gravity, powerful quantum lightning and who knew what else?

  One false move and it could rip right through the ship.

  "Uncertain."

  Stride plucked at a lip. "Can we get rid of it?"

  "Negative."

  The answer came too quickly for Stride's liking, but of course, Daisy was an artificial intelligence and had put her primary focus directly where it needed to be, making her seemingly instant assessment the product of intense consideration rather than quickly made guesswork.

  Stride nodded reluctantly, then rose. If there was nothing they could do to rid themselves of their electric moon, then there was nothing they could do. There was absolutely no point in wasting more time worrying about it than they already had.

  "Fine then. Monitor the situation, keep me appraised. If the orbit begins to decay towards the hull, let me know immediately. Before, if you can manage. If it … fucking hell!" Stride reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest railing and held on for dear life as the entire command center shuddered as if they'd ran aground; on Screen, their fizzing moon slammed into a rivulet of free-flowing gravity.

  It was like a circuit had completed. The 'moonlet' flexed and warped under the assault but maintained form and orbit, but the gravitic swell it'd collided with broke loose from it's reasonably stable course and flowed towards, then around, their guest and directly at the Peloponnese.

  The second jarring attack shattered a handful of Screens, broke any number of important machines into snapping, fizzing, sparking piles of junk and rattled Stride's brains so thoroughly that it took him a solid five minutes to regain full control of himself. During that time, he instinctively wrapped himself in an impenetrable blanket of Harmonic power that kept him safe and secure.

  Pinpricks of cautious concern trickled through the blanket, his brothers probing quietly to see how he was doing; they'd long ago synced all their ships together so that no matter where they were in the solar system -the time they'd spent together since Garth's arrival in Latelyspace was the longest ever, and quite rare- they'd be informed immediately of anything serious.

  And the kind of damage the Peloponnese was experiencing right that moment certainly qualified as disconcerting; safely entombed in Harmony as he was, Stride now had the presence of mind to pay more attention to what, specifically, was happening to his wonderful ship. Training his eyes on the nearest damage control center, the Horseman was instantly disheartened to see that not only was the vessel moderately damaged, it was continuing to be damaged; the onscreen 'rock' display was spiraling quickly downward, identifying several major areas where the asteroid shell was being relentlessly being ground into dust.

  Stride hesitantly signaled to his brethren that he was doing just fine, though he was cautious enough to non-verbally imply that the situation could change at any moment. He urged his brothers to resume doing what they were doing, fobbing off their re-exerted bursts of concern by reminding them that they'd just managed to acquire quite possibly the most high-profile war prisoner the Universe had ever seen.

  There were more important things to deal with than an Asteroidship losing it's rocky exterior. When Stride felt their consciousnesses dissipate, he heaved a sigh of relief.

  "This is no good, no good at all." Fingers scrabbling across the keyboard, Stride augmented his connectivity to the ship's primary systems through several hytech devices that interpreted his purely Harmonic essence into something comprehensible by the 'LINKed avatars.

  It was time to discover just how bad things were, and how much worse they could possibly get.

  Stride's mind filled with statistics and data on what was going on throughout the Peloponnese. The situation wasn't great, but neither was it as dire as the initial assessment indicated; yes, portions of the metallic vessel nestled within the giant asteroid were now exposed to the vacuum of space and the stresses of the chaotic ocean, but the pure duronium casings were infinitely more durable than mere rock. It'd take an assault three to five times larger than the one he'd just experienced for concern to rise.

  The interior of the ship, though, was a different matter. Entire slews of systems and equipment were offline, the ordinarily green lights replaced with dark, austere red; all of his backup atmospheric generators were burnt to a crisp, ruined when some girders set into the ceiling had suddenly found themselves free of their burden, flexing so hard upwards that they'd snapped in half to tumble downwards, directly into the generators. That wasn't good. If the primary atmospheric generators went down, he'd be looking at expending tremendous amounts of Harmonic power to keep functional.

  A half-dozen weapons' systems -primarily missile bays, though there were a few long-range laser turrets that were gone now- had been lost straightaway, the very moment the turmoil had struck. Not surprising there, to be honest, but an unlucky turn of events either way.

  Beyond that, the damage was typical of a heavy assault from missiles. Some standardized computer systems here and there, the food processors, the 'green room' -where he grew all his own food- and one of the waste handling plants were all gone.

  All told, not insurmountable. Repairs would take forever because there was no way in hell he was going to let anyone other than a Horseman through the doors, and he was damned certain that none of the others would offer help.

  Daisy asked for permission to effect repairs immediately, which Stride denied out of hand; they weren’t in the position to waste anything, including spare equipment and/or supplies. He wanted to hold on to everything he had for the moment when the engines or life support or something equally critical suffered from this fool’s errand he was on. The AI accepted his decision and moved on to the next thing, which was an assessment of the Storm.

  “What have you got for me, Daisy?” Stride read through the data, a mounting sense of unease flowing through him.

  According to the breakdown of the Storm’s compositi
on, it wasn’t going to go anywhere any time soon, spelling disaster for dreams of making the journey to where Tomas and Ute had made their jailbreak; being an AI mind developed with Latelian science –with a bit of help from hytech jiggery-pokery- Daisy wasn’t sophisticated enough to begin modeling the processes by which the Storm had been created, but she was more than smart enough to see how things were going to be.

  As expected, there was a powerful undercurrent of extra-dimensional energies cycling through the gravnetic-quantum maelstrom, a huge beast of supplemental power that kept everything flowing, kept the Storm as vicious and brutal now as it’d been within moments of being born. There was no getting around that fact and without proper safeguards, anyone wandering into the Storm could conceivably find themselves tainted by that endless source of power; the Horsemen had long been able to sense ex-dee –thanks to Lisa’s tutelage- but only out of concerns that Garth might prove to be less than receptive to their reasons for wanting to assist with the War to End All Wars.

  God soldiers falling too close to this bitch would very likely find themselves puppets of the Heshii, or even worse, become automatically elevated to the kind of demigod that Sa Gurant had come all too close to becoming.

  “Can’t have that.” Stride swiped the information away with a thick forefinger. “This isn’t shaping up to be any kind of good at all, Daisy. You have anything on what might’ve occurred to cause all this?”

  While Daisy started churning through the data she’d already accumulated, Stride took a breath, assessed the damage to the control center, and shrugged. He’d known right from the very beginning that risking the Storm would bring damage to the Peloponnese, and from where he stood, he considered himself relatively lucky that this was all that’d happened. Still, though, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe he was out of hot water just yet; they were only about three thousand miles into the bloody thing! There was at least three times that left to go before he was officially at the section of Shield where the two Latelians had escaped.

  Stride wandered around the control room, booting larger chunks of debris –broken monitors, shattered ‘LINK stations- into the corners. No sense in leaving large, promising-looking projectiles where they could fly up and bang into him, especially since the Horseman was by no means convinced that his gravnetic moonlet was done interacting poorly with the Storm.

  “Well, Daisy?” Stride was close to the huge Screen now, and standing there, staring upwards at the video feed, he felt just the tiniest bit … tiny.

  It was an unwelcome feeling. He was a Horseman. He’d been reprogrammed from the tiniest atom up to be loyal to the opposite of the M’Zahdi Hesh, which in this case meant that he was for the preservation of the Unreal Universe. Since that’d proven to be entirely impossible –not to mention stupid-, that loyalty had transferred itself to Garth N’Chalez.

  Or … his plans. The rebirth of the Unreal Universe into something more palatable, more … ordered –with an acceptable degree of chaos and uncertainty thrown into the mix for good measure- and when Lisa Laughlin had finished explaining –in far more detail than Garth would’ve liked- the hows and whys of the Kin’kithal’s efforts to do just that, they’d all of them felt … refreshed. Reborn. Given new purpose.

  And with that resurgence of hope, they’d seen the birth of their great plan. The plan that they never spoke of, never thought about, never considered. Not when Garth was near, nor Huey, nor Herrig. The Plan was why they got out of bed in the morning, why they did what they did. It filled them with unshakeable purpose, was why they were the way they were.

  Being made to feel inconsequential when they were anything but made Stride’s skin itch.

  “We are the closest things to Gods in this realm.” Stride told the impartial Storm. “We have power that skirts the divine. We are unkillable, unstoppable, and damned near all-knowing and all-seeing. When the Darkness Falls and the Light Rises, we’ll be right there, casting out long shadows across Reality 2.0 and all will know that we were there first, before the first new species opens it’s eyes to gaze out into the night sky. You are nothing more than a collision of stellar events fueled by a chaotic wellspring of ill power that shouldn’t even be. I am a master of Harmony.”

  “Sa.” Daisy’s voice chimed politely, pulling Stride right out of his thoughts and into the present moment.

  The Horseman looked around, feeling slightly ashamed at his overreaction, ready to defend himself and his words should any of the others feel the need to bring him to task. But they were silent; digging into Harmony to see what was going on revealed to Stride that all of their focus bent on either dealing with the recently ‘captured’ Heavies or on working out how best to deal with Aleksander Politoyov or –and this was most distressing- the apparent destruction of the single biggest Quantum Tunnel they’d ever seen.

  “Good grief.” Stride didn’t know how to react to that last bit of news. He’d automatically subsumed the brief update concerning the presence of –and imminent capturing of- Aleksander Politoyov atop the Quantum Tunnel that’d most mysteriously appeared in their solar system during one of the communiques prior to entering the Storm, but this news that he’d destroyed it was a crushing blow.

  “Sa, there is a situation you need to be aware of.” Daisy’s voice was flooded with as much concern as an artificial intelligence built without Trinity-tech could be, which immediately raised flags.

  “What is it?” Stride yanked himself loose from Harmony. “What’s the mat… fuck. F- … fuck.”

  For the first time in a very long time, Stride the Horseman was at a complete and utter loss for words; there, on-Screen, was the gravnetic moonlet the Peloponnese had pulled into orbit some time ago. Nothing new there. It spun on a stately axis, an atom whirling endless through the night.

  The other three that were right that moment attaching themselves to the partially-ravaged stony skin of his Asteroidship, though … those were new.

  Stride rushed back to the controls and immediately started working on adjusting the vector he was on in the desperate hope that the simple act of changing course would prevent him from acquiring any more unwanted travelers.

  The Peloponnese groaned under the abuse, and as the massive ship violently changed course, all the debris he’d kicked out of his way went slamming upwards into the ceiling. Long banks of brilliant lights erupted into shards of broken glass and twisted metal, but Stride wasn’t done trying to out-maneuver the new gravnetic moonlets; they’d ‘sensed’ the localized gravity of the Asteroidship and followed as unerringly as dogs chasing after bones, so it was with a deadly curse, a fixed look of grim determination and the smallest bit of prayer to the Starlight Lady that Stride continued changing course.

  All the Asteroidships looked as clumsy as morbidly obese shubin. It was part of their charm. But while they appeared to be no more capable of high speed maneuvers than those glandular-challenged hoofed monstrosities, they were in fact surprisingly speedy and insanely maneuverable.

  The Asteroidship Peloponnese, swooping ‘down’ through the Storm, changed course on a dime, lurching left at speed. The debris, once stuck against the ceiling of the control room, followed course, digging long furrows in that very same ceiling, pulling loose more lighting and ripping out generous sections of bulkhead. The racket was tremendous, and through it all, Stride bellowed wordlessly, literally intent on using nothing more than his skills as a pilot and his howled defiance as shields against what hunted him.

  And still the three fizzing, dangerous-looking ‘moonlets’ hunted.

  “Sa,” Daisy’s voice chimed, “gravity well imminent.”

  “I know.” Stride had seen the indent some time ago, back before everything had gone sideways, and had intentionally begun aiming himself directly at it. “That’s part of the plan, Daisy.”

  “There is an astonishing lack of data to support this plan’s efficacy, sa.”

  “Thanks for that, Daisy.” Stride grit his teeth. If the sudden sluggishness of the controls
and the noticeable dip in speed were any indication, his spatial antics were causing the ship considerable unseen damage, yet with the gravity well looming ever closer, there wasn’t a whole helluva lot left he could do except hope he was still moving fast enough to skirt the deadly patch.

  “You won’t make it.”

  Icy dread sent shivery chills through Stride. Yet another uncomfortable sensation.

  “You can’t be here.” Stride refused to look to his left, towards where a light that shouldn’t be flickered. “And I can so. The Peloponnese has been through a lot.”

  “It has, yes. But this Storm ripples through more than just the mundane layers of this broken Universe, Sa Stride. Or would you prefer it if I called you by your original name, the one you were born with? Sa Greg…”

  “Shut your mouth right now, ghost, or we’ll see how unassailable you are.” Stride had hoped to sound more angry than afraid, but the disembodied echo that was possibly the spiritual essence of one Sa Candall was unfortunately right about his chances in using the gravity well to yank the sizzling orbs loose from orbit; two of three had already joined the first moonlet in spinning crazily around the Asteroidship, thankfully falling into a pattern of revolutions that were complimentary to one another.

  That third one, though … once it fell into the mix, all bets were off. There simply wasn’t enough real estate for four gravnetically-charged quantum moon-things to orbit, not without colliding into one another sooner or later. And whether he wanted to admit it or not, the ship was slowing down further still, and the projected intensity of the gravity well was equal to or nearly greater than a black hole.

  If everything was working properly, a feat like avoiding a black hole would be a matter of course.

  “But everything isn’t working properly, is it, Stride.” Candall demanded, bemused.