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

by Lee Bond

“Fuck off.” Stride fought the controls now. He’d abandoned the gravity well altogether now, and was trying to valiantly strong arm the ship into a different direction. “Go harass my brother Fenris.”

  “He’s busy with his part of the puzzle, Sa Stride.” Candall moved closer to the volatile Horseman, marveling at the sheer rage that roiled off his skin like a heat mirage rising from a parched desert. Tremors of Harmony blistered outwards, tearing at the wispy stuff he'd generated so that he might manifest himself fully in the Asteroidship. "And besides, with the mood he's been carrying these days, appearing before him might be more than a little detrimental, don't you think?"

  Stride snorted wryly at the apparition's spot-on assessment of the God Army leader, but remained more focused on trying to save his life. The gravity well -more of an elongated pipe than an actual well- loomed ever closer. The outermost layer of rock still remaining on the Peloponnese rotated outwards towards the destructive source to provide him with a few more minutes of life, began undulating until large chunks broke off.

  "Tell me why…" Stride's demand was lost a second later as a phenomenal collision rattled the Asteroidship so hard that the Horseman was picked up off his feet and slammed firstly into the ceiling -adding a significant number of dents to the surrounding area- and then back onto the deck with enough force to collapse the plate beneath him. A faint rain of shattered glass and some odds and ends littered Stride, who lay there, breathing shallowly, wondering if he hadn't made a mistake somewhere early on in his life.

  "We don't have much time, Stride." Candall pointed a luminous hand towards the now almost completely shattered Screen at the far end of the command center; the last round of cataclysmic rattling had broken nearly all the struts holding it into place, leaving a single one barely able to keep it in place. As it was, the thing hung drunkenly, banging backwards against the wall every few seconds. "The gravity swell looms closer. In less than three minutes, you and your ship will collapse into something very close to a quasar."

  Stride saw no percentage in picking himself up off the floor. As much as he loathed Candall's presence, there was no getting over the fact that the ghostly presence was right. The deadly swell had the Peloponnese fully gripped and that was that.

  Regardless of impending doom, Stride still wanted to know why the elevated entity calling itself Candall had risked coming into the presence of one of the men who dedicated a significant portion of each day towards killing him. "Why are you here?"

  "Tell me the secret reason why you and the others are so interested in breaking free from this system ahead of schedule and I will do everything I can to ensure your survival." Candall shifted slightly, made uncomfortable by the pensive light shining in Stride's eyes. There was no real reason to worry about what the Horseman might attempt here, in this place, yet the worry was there all the same; Stride had no way of knowing that the Storm was affecting his connection to Harmony, but that lack of awareness in no way lessened the fury in those eyes.

  "There is no reason." Stride replied adamantly. "And how can you possibly hope to save me? Not that I want you to."

  "Ahhh." Candall grinned. "The dark and dour love affair you lot have with death and all things coming to an end. You'd rather stare into the abyss and greet the reaper with eyes wide open than admit there's another reason to your mission here. You know Huey's Shield will come down sooner or later, yet you risk your end. Tell me why, and I will save you. Two minutes left, noble Stride."

  "Which version are you right now? Righteous or Vengeful?" Stride demanded bitterly, still refusing to set eyes on the apparition.

  "Those are constructs fabricated by the Goddies in accordance with their own internal leanings, Stride, no more and no less. An automatic and spontaneous reaction to my rebirth inside Harmony. I am a single person, though depending on the soldier who calls for me, I do wear a different skin. For you, I'm just Sa Candall. A man capable of saving your life. Do you not think your brothers would be saddened at your absence? The five Horsemen, become four? Have you not prepared to reach the end, all together? With one of you gone, any victory for those who remain will be less. Tell me why, and I will reclaim you."

  An unfamiliar feeling rose up inside Stride then, a spiraling whorl of raw desperation that seized him by the throat, a reaction to the sudden and unexpected possibility that here, right here and now, his life could end. He hadn't felt this unsure, this weak, this small since well before the moment he'd climbed into the conversation chamber with his four best friends. It left him ragged and breathless.

  There was only one thing in the Universe that mattered. The destruction of the Universe, all in favor of something new and better rising up in it's place. How they got there, how it was engineered, none of that mattered. If he died in this foolhardy quest, Fenris and his brothers would find it difficult -if not impossible- to arrange everything so that they came out on top.

  "Ute!" Stride gasped the name. "Ute Tizhen! We need to find him. Find him. F-find him. And kill him."

  Candall flicked his eyes to the Screen. Time left for a full confession, though Stride probably wouldn't realize until too late that some of what he was experiencing was pure manipulation. "Why would you want that? Noble Ute, struggling through nearly five thousand years of loneliness, forced to watch on as his brethren grew dumber and more moronic with each successive iteration of the supplements, all to keep them pliable and controllable in a system that didn't really need or understand them. Ute, who became the benchmark to see if God soldiers could survive induction into Harmony, the one single God soldier who endured dozens of lifetimes worth of suffering? He deserves your love, not your wrath."

  "He isn't a God soldier anymore, phantom, you have to know that." Stride struggled to a seated position. Being rattled around like a bean in a tin can had done a number on him, that was for sure. He hadn't felt this sore since the last time he'd gotten into a fistfight with Nalanata, and that'd been so long ago it wasn't worth figuring out who'd thrown the first punch.

  "More than anyone, I bet." The Horseman added darkly, eyes on the Screen. The deadly swell loomed closer still. "He's not a creature of Harmony anymore. Not after what Herrig did to him. He was dead, miserable spirit. Dead and gone the way we all hope to be one day. And then he was back. We need to find him before whatever happened to him spreads."

  Candall nodded. He understood all too readily why it was so important for Fenris and the others to find their brother, Ute Tizhen. Where before he'd been a part of the communal Harmony the Horsemen had sought so hard to bring about, he was now … changed. The once-living Candall had done a great deal of thinking about what the five thousand year old God soldier represented, and if his summation was correct, Ute was something wondrous. "Very well. I can accept that."

  "It isn't for you to accept or deny, Candall. It merely is. Like us. We just are." Stride knew he sounded arrogant beyond comprehension, but it was deserved. He was five thousand years old. He was a Horseman. He and his brothers had worked out a plan to trump the End of Everything, a way to con the greatest conman in Existence. "Now, do you plan on assisting me?"

  Candall smiled, let a twinkle of good humor flare in his eldritch eyes. "Of course, Strider, of course. We all have our parts to play in the coming future, don't we? You need to be side by side with your friends when the End comes, and I would love nothing more than to be, at least in part, responsible for that. There's just one thing."

  Stride at last turned his eyes to Candall, a disgusted curl wrinkling his lips. No matter what Candall was to the Goddies, to the Horsemen, he was a creature that violated everything Harmony stood for. That wondrous place that connected all of them together, so they could share their experiences, their hope … it wasn't a place for whatever it was that Candall represented. There was no room in their hearts or minds for a mortal man lurking around in the back of them.

  "What is it?" Stride grated the words out, worry pushing his pulse to frantic limits.

  "This will probably hurt." Candal
l confessed readily, reaching out with one translucent hand to touch Stride on the forehead. "I've never moved something organic, something living, through Harmonyspace before. I'm fairly confident you won't die from it, but the experience may be … traumatic."

  Stride had the chance to get a single word out of his mouth before a warmth that quickly morphed into a blazing heat that burned through every atom. "Fucking…"

  Then he and Candall, Saint Victorious and Saint Vengeful, popped out of the normal frame of reference and into some other place entirely, a single tick of the clock ahead of the Asteroidship Peloponnese being torn to pieces…

  ***

  Fenris, Solgun, Nalanata and Lokken, each of them aboard their own Asteroidships, each of them focusing on their own drama –there was more going on than merely the conflict by the Storm, after all, many different irons in the fire, some that would work, some that wouldn’t, but all needed tending to just the same- all stopped what they were doing at the same time and stared fixedly off into the middle distance, all four of them with the same curse on their tongues.

  Shit.

  As a matter of course –and in recognition of how dangerous the mission might be- they’d all voluntarily portioned some of their consciousness to the task of tracking Stride through Harmony, matching his progress through the Storm in that otherworldly domain. They’d all sensed the diminishing returns of their seeker-sense and hadn’t worried over much; there were all kinds of things in the Universe that could cause aberrations to a Goddie’s connection with Harmony, and in this respect, there were no differences between a Onesie and a Horseman.

  Harmony was Harmony, your connection to it was as strong or as weak as it was, with the whole of it being influenced by unseen tidal forces greater than any of them could possibly understand.

  Well, perhaps with the exception of the Starlight Lady and her damnable father, the Engineer, but neither one of them were present to assist, and while the former might deign to explain how the quantum storm chewing at the fabric of space was affecting Harmony so thoroughly, the latter would tell anyone asking to go screw. Then, because Nickels was Nickels, he’d go around behind everyone’s back to dig into the problem all on his own, from which anything at all could happen.

  The disappearance of Stride had all four remaining Horsemen frantically plumbing the depths of Harmony, none of them caring one way or the other how rude or rough they treated the Goddies in the neighborhood. They knew the ship was destroyed because how could you miss something like that, even if it’s destruction had taken place in the middle of the biggest Storm the Unreal Universe had ever seen?

  Just as they knew the Peloponnese was gone, ripped into pieces so small that it’d be impossible to imagine there’d been an Asteroidship there, they also knew their brother wasn’t dead.

  The death of a Horseman, at anytime, anywhere in the Universe, would send a carillon call through Harmony so loud and so powerful that surely every sentient being capable of holding a thought between their ears would stop, stare up at the sky, and scream their defiance that such a thing had even been allowed to happen.

  “Where is he?” Fenris demanded through an open comm channel with the other three brothers; they were all so busy screaming through Harmony that there was no other way to talk. Yes, it left them open to prying, and yes, it was a breach in security, and yes, there were perhaps more important things to deal with right at that moment, but one does not simply turn their backs on a fallen brother.

  Not now, not ever.

  “The Storm is not contained merely to the oceans between the stars.” Solgun offered from his own ship, the Radiant Jade Snake between Blades of Grass. “Whips lash the skin of the world, flaying it open to reveal muscle, flexing. Maybe he fell through.”

  Fenris, bitter, virulent curse on his lips over the extreme inappropriateness of brother Solgun’s adherence to his mystic ways, swallowed it at the last second; the suggestion, mired down in over-colorful metaphors and rendered almost idiotic because of it, did make a great deal of sense.

  Their own ship’s computers, driven by AI, were still working through the reams of data streamed out of the storm, though it’d take an age to get anywhere; the profundity of the chaos in that region was so great that even though their comm systems were encrypted and signal-boosted to such an extent that there was no need for data buoys to communicate from one end of Latelyspace to the other, there were great swathes of information that were simply missing. Their own AIs would need to compare the entire data set to make comprehensive assumptions about the missing facts before reassembling the whole thing.

  “Lokken,” Fenris plunged through another section of Harmony, disturbing an entire section of Goddies who were getting up to the kinds of things that the mindspace they all shared was most definitely not for, “what do you think? You’ve got some of the more sensitive sensors aboard Gradient Curve. Could he have fallen through?”

  Lokken, who’d seized on Solgun’s loquaciously delivered high-minded concept from the second he’d started up, answered immediately, though with reservations. “It’s entirely possible. There’s an awful lot going on inside that Storm, Fenris. We know for a fact now that there are gravnetic swells mixing with quantum disturbances the size of which should be ripping that entire quadrant into confetti. Shiva is of the opinion that the gravnetic turbulence is somehow keeping the quantum bursts from doing just that, which is very lucky for all of us, but that opens the door for another possibility altogether.”

  Nalanata uncovered where Lokken was headed and burst into the conversation. “Unstable Quantum Tunnels?”

  “Rabbit holes to other worlds.” Solgun, arguably the most open-minded of all the brothers, had latched on to the idea of spontaneously generated Quantum Tunnels within seconds of seeing the preliminary data. Didn’t matter that the whole picture was cloudy. When you were dealing with stellar phenomena like this, it was best to dispose of preconceived notions and to destroy your working understanding of the Universe. “Down and down and down. He might’ve fallen all the way to the new Reality.”

  Lokken snorted. “I do think I prefer it when you don’t make sense, brother mine.”

  “I make sense all the time, Lokken. You know that. Why…”

  Fenris pulled his consciousness out of Harmony instantly and fully. There was something … someone … inside his ship with him. As he exited, his eyes focused on something that shouldn’t be possible. “You three need to be here immediately. Not later, not on your own time, but within minutes.”

  “That’s…”

  Fenris snarled. “Now, damn your eyes and blacken your hearts. If you’re not knocking on my door within ten minutes, we will find out once and for all which of us has the most power and authority. Do you understand?”

  When the comms all went dead at the same time and Harmonyspace began prickling with interested curiosity, an interest that was swiftly shoved away by his unwanted guest, Fenris looked at faintly glowing Candall –who looked no different than his Latelian Intelligence photos, though perhaps there was a hint of serenity around crow-footed eyes- with undisguised contempt.

  “I’ll be long gone before they get here, Fenris.” Candall marveled at the hostility blooming from Fenris’ shoulders. Black gossamer wings of purest hatred shifted through Harmony. Never had there been a cleaner expression of loathing. Oh, if others could see Fenris as he did! “You know that.”

  Fenris nodded once, then shifted away from the command consoles. If they got into a scrap, it’d be purely Harmony-based, and the last thing he wanted was for the controls of his ship destroyed. There were many experiments occurring on all levels, all of which needed power and containment at all times. “I do. But your being here will leave a physical impression, Candall, however miniscule. Once we have that, some … indication of what you’re comprised of, we can follow that back into Harmony. Once there, it won’t be too difficult to hunt you down wherever you hide. You’ve overplayed your hand, here. We’ve lost a brother this day a
nd so making you the target of a fox hunt will be just the thing to soothe our burdened hearts.”

  Candall clapped his hands slowly, a contrite smirk on his face. “Seeking to use matters like that against me? I remember when I stood before you, aching for revenge, willing to do whatever it took to destroy those Heavies. I remember the look on your face, the scathing, barely concealed contempt. How you decided to ‘let’ me do what I needed to do, not from a place of understanding, but from a place of reserved interest. Would Glory missiles do for those Elites? Would I survive the journey in Hungryfish? And now here we are, though this time, the tables are turned. Now you mourn for the loss of someone, now you hope to find some kind of surcease from the emotions burning through you. And I …”

  "And you what?" Fenris snarled angrily, spittle flecking his lips. "You what?"

  Heedless of the danger, concern only for his missing brother spurring reckless actions, Fenris lashed out with a pure bolt of power very similar to the one he'd tried killing Herrig with not too long ago.

  And with precisely the same reaction as last time. Perhaps a bit less climactic than with Herrig, but the end result was the same; the bolt of energy, capable of frying the brain stem of nearly any creature crawling through the Universe, fizzled away to nothingness, leaving Candall to stand there, smug.

  "I am of Harmony now, Fenris." Candall shrugged as if to say 'there's nothing I can do about it, sorry'. "It's like trying to destroy water with water. You simply can't."

  "You are an abomination above all other abominations, Candall," Fenris spat the name, methodically trying to come up with some other method of dealing with the apparition, "and we will stop at nothing to remove you from Harmony. The God soldiers don't need you. No one needs you."

  "Well now." Candall countered smoothly. "That's not entirely true now, is it?" The Harmonic entity felt the encroaching Horsemen' signature essences blister the skin of Harmony. They were moving hot and traveling fast, using their innate powers to speed their progress. It didn't matter. One or all of them, combined or separate, could bring him no harm.