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

by Lee Bond

  "Get on with it." Fenris was sorely tired now, and he did nothing to disguise this.

  "His life," Candall said as he started to fade, "is not for you to take. Not you, nor any of your brothers, nor any of the many men and women under you. His death, much to your pleasure, will come sooner than he wants, but it must happen in a way that is beyond you to affect. Do you understand? If you kill him before his time, it is entirely likely that the Universe itself or the Engines will strike you down. And if not by those things, then those hunt him will come …"

  "We fear nothing at all in this Universe. Inside or Outside." Fenris stalked boldly to where Candall's wavering image was washing into the background. "And we will do as we will and there's nothing you can do about it. Take your thirty day's grace, Saint Candall, and practice the fine art of staying the fuck out of our business. Do that, and we'll leave you be. Interfere in our affairs again, and you will regret it. Understand?"

  But Saint Candall was already gone, dissipated back into the ethereal domain they all called Harmony.

  The Shriven and The Clone

  Tomas crept cautiously and nervously out of his hidey hole inside the escape pod, old heart hammering so powerfully in his chest that he was more than a little concerned it was going to burst through the paper-thin skin covering his bosom, killing him stone cold dead.

  What’d he been thinking? Risking the theft of the Quantum Tunnel, spending all that time working on the entire rig so that they could burst through Huey’s Shield … that’d been simple.

  And, to a point, fun; it’d been heartwarming to see an entire family of God soldiers, all of them at different points in their almost-immortal life, being … family. The Elder Kamagana knew that it was a side of life that most Latelians never got to see, which was a shame. If they spent more time being normal in the eyes of the Commonwealth, it’d go so much further towards humanizing them, dispelling the mental imagery that so many citizens still carried of their God soldiers being either lumbering clods or distant, impartial warriors.

  Even the harrowing, frightful journey through the Shield, with all that noise and clamor, death waiting for them inside every second, had been easy enough. He’d had Ute with him, shielding him not only with the power of Harmony, but with his nearly indestructible body. Doing the impossible under those circumstances had made the impossible seem … ridiculously easy.

  But this?

  Laying silently inside the escape pod, listening to his new friend stand just outside the ship, talking plainly with the handful of Heavies who’d showed up to decant their prize?

  Madness. Sheer and simple madness, and as the first punch had been thrown, the Elder Kamagana had, for the first time in a long time, questioned his own sanity to the point where a sudden, swift and intense craving to be home, in his comfortable chair, puffing on his pipe, watching the delectable Tricia Takanawa and dodging the amorous intent of his next door neighbor had filled him from top to bottom and all the way through.

  He was Outside.

  Outside, in what was technically still Latelian ‘space’ if you were to go by the book but reality suggested that everything not inside the solar system belonged to Trinity Itself.

  Tomas cringed just at the lip of the escape pod’s hatch, peering like a frightened mouse over the top. He watched on in awe as Ute began fighting for their right to survival, masterfully handling all the combatants in the room as if they weren’t even there.

  “What am I doing?” Tomas hissed to himself as he crawled over that lip and scurried around the backside of the pod, making himself as small as he possibly could. In present company, it wasn’t all that difficult to disappear into the background; even if the men and stranger things weren’t trying to murder each other in progressively more violent ways, he was –as he had been for the last fifty-plus years- the smallest thing in the room. “I’m Outside.”

  Tomas twitched nervously as a particularly loud sound racketed through the loading bay. Something banged into the escape pod hard enough to shove the heavy metal vessel free from where it’d been parked, grinding grooves into the corrugated deck plates, forcing Tomas, already winded from the exertions of a few moments ago and already quite worn down simply from fear, to run. He scooted and scampered as best as his old man legs and muscles would allow, quite literally one misstep away from being ground into a fine paste, a thin gruel of a man that’d simply drop through the slats in the plates at his feet, gone forever.

  Tomas laughed breathlessly at the moribund thoughts that’d replaced the calm, cool rationale he’d been carrying for the last fifty years, shaking his head at his foolishness. He’d come this far without injury or death, and he’d spent most of his life inside Latelyspace, during Chairwoman Doans’ regime.

  Daily threats against his life had been a common theme in those earliest of days, with moronic but dire God soldiers standing guard wherever he was, always ready –and quite vocal about their desires- to stomp him flat, just so they could see if he’d scrape off in one long, thin piece of Offworld trash, or if they’d have to work at it like they’d stepped in dog doings.

  He’d been present for more than one Goddie undergoing the physically painful, mind-searing transformation from Onesie to Twoesie and so on, literally right there the moment the alchemical process –which everyone now understood to be energy saturation generated by their duronium implants and an interaction with some never before observed or detectable plane- began burning through them, forcing every other God soldier within range to run.

  Through walls. Through buildings. Over cars and over people. However far and however destructive their journey was towards the awakening God soldier, it didn’t matter, as nothing was more dangerous than allowing a Goddie to elevate untended.

  Especially in light of the fact that not every transformation went smoothly, that not every Goddie came out the other end unscathed.

  He’d had rotten food thrown at him by unkind, unthinking Latelians who’d grown up with a bigotry they didn’t understand. He’d been looked down upon by colleagues who dreamed they were the smartest thing in the Universe, only to call him ‘freak’ and ‘misfit’ when the brilliance of his intellect turned their own intelligence transparent.

  Why, once one of those very same colleagues had tried poisoning him! Out of the blue, no less, just a randomly savage attack stopped only at the last moment when one of his God soldier ‘escorts’ had –briefly- awakened from supplemental stupor just in time to snatch the poisoned cup of tea from his hands.

  The colleague, Si Arya Trejo, had been stood by, eagerness to see the filthy dirty Offworld Trinity immigrant choke to death on his own vomit prompting her to be perhaps the stupidest poisoner on Hospitalis, hadn’t … hadn’t fared well.

  It’d taken Tomas quite a few years to purge the memory of those God soldiers finally getting to see just how easily someone could be scraped off their gigantic boots, and even then, when his mind wandered –as it did now, which was terminally stupid- down dusty corridors, Si Arya’s colorful, vibrant death was one of the very first things that waited for him.

  Shouts of frustration mingled with the clash of weapons grew frantic, and Tomas, cowering against the back of the escape pod, felt poorly. He wished there was something he could do to help his friend, but knew that not only was there nothing he could do, he’d almost definitely die within seconds of making an appearance on that particular battlefield.

  He wasn’t Latelian. He lacked their hardiness, their bravery, their tenacity. He was a Kamagana, true, and had a lineage tracing back to very nearly the beginning of Time Itself, and he did come from one of the most powerful Yellow Dog Clans that’d ever terrorized the Universe, but …

  “I am also so very old.” Tomas whispered the words to himself, yet he meant the softly spoken announcement to play as apology for Ute. “Too old to do anything but sneak away, to cower and hide elsewhere on this ship. You’re a smart man, Ute Tizhen. I have no doubt in my mind that when you learn of my disappearance, you’
ll say nothing. You will survive your gauntlet. Mine is yet to come.”

  That said, Tomas Kamagana scanned the far walls for signs of access panels leading into the bowels of the ship –or whatever it was- they were inside. It was the only safe means of escape, at least until he managed to find his way to some other vessel in the fleet; the degree of certainty that everyone on this ship knew each other, if not by name then by sight alone, was extremely high.

  A miniature, elderly EuroJapanese man strolling through the corridors of a military vessel without papers or identification cards would bring the kind of attention he was already attempting to …

  There! Tomas’ eyes, trained over many decades to hunt for microscopic flaws in proteus design, picked out faint indications of a doorway set into a wall not more than fifteen feet from where he cowered. A few more seconds spent staring at that particular section also revealed the mostly obscured panel that’d open said door.

  Path set, plan mostly set, Tomas did a quick check on his heart rate.

  It was beating as fast as the very first time he’d laid eyes on his future wife-to-be, Maurna. She’d been bent over a terminal, fussily correcting a colleague’s work, her sharp wit eviscerating the poor fool even as she’d identified his coding errors with cool professionalism. He’d known, right there, that she’d be his. She, of course, hadn’t exactly laughed at the first of his many advances –the woman had been far too kind for that kind of cruelty- but she’d made her distaste for foreigners obvious.

  Well. He hadn’t let her disinterest sway him, and thus had begun a journey filled with both laughter and tears, heartache and joy.

  Something –or someone- banged into the escape pod a second time. Not hard enough to send the spherical vessel grinding against the deck plates again, but definitely with enough force to remind Tomas precisely where he was and what he should be doing.

  “A journey leading right here, to this place.” Tomas took several deep breaths in a vain attempt to calm his hammering heart. All he got for his efforts were several lungfuls of various type of weapons’ discharge, and for a very brief moment, he was reminded of the first time he’d met his long-time friend and brother-in-law, Vasily Auric Tizhen.

  The fleeing Latelian was smart enough to push those memories away. Decades of exposure to the God soldier lifestyle, not to mention his avid –some would say overly so, given his non-Latelian heritage- fandom to all things Game-related, had given him an incredibly acute awareness as to the ebb and flow of combat.

  Whether he wanted it or not, Ute’s time with the Specters was coming to an end.

  Something impossibly heavy banged into the outside of where they were all doing their best to survive, instantly replacing Tomas’ worry with a powerful urge to get himself gone; whatever it was that’d just crashed into the outside of the loading bay most definitely spelled bad news for anyone not a Specter, and so it was that the old man –heart hammering violently in his chest, cold sweat covering him nearly head to toe- scurried directly towards the obscured keypad.

  Tomas snorted disdainfully when his eyes fell properly on the machine that’d allow access into the service hallways. “Pathetic. They haven’t changed these things since the last time I was out here.”

  The Latelian escapee put his hands on the keypad and started working, humming one of the last Sahari songs he’d heard before setting forth on what would surely be an adventure to rival his flight from the angry Yellow Dog Clans baying for his head.

  Just as he figured out the proper password, something ripped it’s way into the loading bay. Tomas spared a quick look over a shoulder, an action he immediately regretted; a man, very similar to a God soldier in shape and size but completely different in demeanor and attitude –not to mention visible signs of cybernetic enhancement- was literally ripping his way into the bay, tearing thick metal plates in half as if they were paper.

  “Ute may have met his match after all.” Tomas wished his friend luck, then disappeared into the dimly lit service corridor…

  ***

  In order to remain hidden from view, Tomas was forced to keep the service corridors he skulked through in almost total darkness, leaving him with nothing more than the flashlight function on his prote as guide, and even then, only sparingly.

  He didn’t know enough about the current state of space vessel construction in Trinityspace to be one hundred percent certain, but if he were to guess, the ship he was on had recently undergone upgrades; thick, God-soldier wrist-sized bundles of cable were haphazardly lashed to the ceiling of the corridor that looped and looped around one another the further he went.

  If he were to make that guess, Tomas –who couldn’t resist- would say that whatever upgrades the ship had undergone were of the impressive kind, for Trinity didn’t use these data cables for anything short of a full overhaul; the old man did recognize the brand of cable used, and they supported and augmented high-functioning AI minds in the processing of absolute reams of information.

  With that kind of fresh work done under the hood, Tomas was reluctant to use his prote in any fashion until he could prove to himself that the upgrades –real or imagined- weren’t capable of detecting random surges in power.

  So it was that Tomas Kamagana strolled softly and quietly through dark corridors, the occasional bead of illumination springing from randomly fluttering operational lights on control panels or sporadic lights left on by service techs keen to get back out into the main areas; for a diminutive EJ turned Latelian, the walls and ceiling were insufferably close.

  For someone ‘proper’ sized –as anyone serving in the Army should be- the voyage to check on subpanel 35-aX-1 would be a nightmare of endless proportions.

  “This isn’t bad at all.” Tomas said lightheartedly, his soft voice nothing but two pieces of paper rubbed together.

  He chuckled at the thought of that, remembering with a smile in his heart the time that Maurna, frustrated not only with his teaching style but with the ease with which he’d grasped the Latelian netLINK coding language, had delivered the stereotypically polite insult; looking to embarrass the foreigner but not wanting to actually be rude for fear of getting in trouble, Maurna Tizhen had instead delivered the clumsiest and most awkward slur imaginable.

  He’d laughed. Right there in front of the entire class, he’d broken down laughing his damn fool head off, driven right over the edge of sensibility by one haughty woman’s intent to hurt his feelings.

  “And you, you old girl you, you stood right up and called me mean before flouncing out of the room.” Tomas flicked his prote-light on; after having moved through the hidden corridors for what felt an eternity now, his night vision had more or less adapted to the dim illumination enough to sense branching choices ahead.

  Playing the weak beam of light –really, had he known he was going to encounter this kind of thing, he would’ve prepared a little better- back and forth in front of him as he moved slower, Tomas nodded when he did in fact come to a choice: right, left, or forge on ahead.

  The old man winked the prote-beam off and settled back on his haunches for a moment, ignoring the twinging complaints of his knees, ankles and hips. The price of wisdom always seemed to need payment from physical sources.

  “Still.” Tomas caught himself patting his jacket in search of his pipe, then forced his hands away. The alleged sensors and what-have-you that might or might not exist might not catch emanations from the weak beam off his prote, but the master hacker was damned certain that the very second he started puffing on the last of his Hospitalian Blend #403, alarms and warnings would split the dusty silence before he’d gotten his first proper taste.

  “Not to mention fire suppression.” Tomas didn’t know what they used on Trinity ships, but back home in Latelyspace, fire retardation methods were almost always instantly fatal to any non-God soldier type person.

  Amidst horrible daydreams of being smothered in one of a million different wildly effective fire dampening chemicals that were also insanely toxic
–to the tune of a single drop or whiff touching a person killing them stone cold dead toxic- Tomas reached a personal decision about this leg of his odyssey; for better or worse, he was now so far away from the site of departure –all without sign of being hunted or tracked- that it was high time he made an actual effort at starting said odyssey.

  Properly.

  Which, regrettably, meant not skulking through endless, almost completely black, corridors.

  Tomas plucked at the virtual keys of his prote; once he’d gotten far enough away from the entrance and he’d caught most of his breath back, the elderly Latelian had commanded his prote to start charting his movements through the unseen halls. The map his avatars had generated wasn’t terribly good, given that he hadn’t spent nearly enough time scripting them, but for his purposes, they’d do.

  Using the inbuilt camera to record one second slices every fifteen seconds and building an avatar to analyze, asses and order those split-second images into a visual diary from which another avatar assembled a standardized map for easy reading, Tomas now had a direct route from where he was standing back to the escape pod.

  Not necessarily useful in and of itself unless he felt an insane need to return to the scene of the crime, but the data itself was very valuable; in addition to simply charting his movements through the bowel of the ship, those avatars spent time comparing other visual markers –thick trunks of data cables, the occasional computer access port, things he’d missed during an old man’s reverie of times long gone- to the load of data he carried inside his prote.

  Tomas loved avatars. Working with an actual artificial mind was all well and good and there were times he missed the sweet interface that you got when using AI intellects, but at the end of the day, those shiny spheres struck Tomas as somehow inferior.

  Why spend time trying to tell an AI what you needed, all in the hopes that it properly and fully understood the parameters of your request when you could simply use the inconceivably robust Latelian coding language to script yourself a damned near sentient avatar to do the same thing, all without the frustration of explaining things to an AI?