Dark Iron King Volume I: Thy King's Will Be Done (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  Granted, she’d asked for the information using dodgy data. Instead of using herself in the request, Alyssa had been crafty enough to ask the system which of her citizens would rise to the challenge of helping Central should natural disaster strike, and since it was a request for pure information that held no real world value, the avatars had spat the data out almost immediately.

  Alyssa recalled knocking on the ornate door leading into The Coolom family residence. She remembered the vaguely disgusted look on the butler’s face as he processed who’d had the temerity to invade the privacy of his family.

  She even remembered –and this sometimes still found her laughing hysterically- she even remembered the God soldier picking her up by the scruff of the neck and carrying her twenty miles outside of Central proper. She didn’t quite remember trying to kill the Goddie for the duration of their long trek, but when she’d come to … it’s hard to deny the evidence of your misdeeds when your fingernails are cracked and bloody and when your teeth are wobbly in the gums from trying to bite through the impervious skin of your ‘transport’.

  Daunted but not beaten, she’d started walking back the moment the Goddie’s back had disappeared over the horizon.

  A new family, a new attempt to badger a harmless family for food and drink and money had generated another God soldier. This one had taken her thirty miles outside Central.

  Alyssa aimed herself towards her Bench, from where she reigned over her new and loyal subjects, smiling. Oh, it’d taken her seven such interceptions before she’d given up hope. She was now all the way in one of the quiet suburbs in Easson and … she liked it, more or less. Certainly this little area was much quieter than the eternal and restless nature of Central, certainly the people were less inclined –when they came across her- to point and laugh or to throw sticks than the last town she’d been in and, yes, there were occasions where they brought her food or clothes to wear, which was … nice.

  Ex-Chairwoman Alyssa Doans had zero intention of warning them that being nice to her would kill their little town. The Pariah System was unforgiving. The Pariah System had been put in place to punish her and those who sought to provide aid. It made no distinction between the gift of a hot meal and a promise of military support should she seek to overtake Central. A new, clean shirt was exactly the same as a gun. An apple? Air support. Shoes? A shiny new tank.

  The population of the last town she’d been in hadn’t figured it out. One day, things had just stopped working properly. LINK-feeds had grown spotty, Screens and Sheets had stopped working, machines had gone idle. In time, everything requiring power –and there were oh so many things that needed either electricity or the LINK to run- had shut down.

  The town had died. The people had moved away. She’d swooped in and salvaged everything worth anything and had moved on herself.

  This new town … it was called Ecklin … Ecklin was positively stuffed with kind, polite Latelians who just couldn’t abide the thought of a woman living in a park, even if that woman had once upon a time been the worst thing to happen to Latelyspace in five thousand years. And so they brought her good food, fresh clothes, Sheets so she could keep up to date on what that Trinity bastard was doing to her system … they brought her whatever they could spare.

  By now, by now they were noticing tiny little things. Maybe the light on their netLINK took longer to turn on. Perhaps their refrigerator stopped working for a while. Maybe, here and there, a bank account was mysteriously empty. Whatever it was, however the Pariah System operated, sooner or later, Ecklin was going to die just like the other three towns before it.

  Alyssa Doans. She might have lost the power to conquer the Universe, but she was damn well going to destroy Hospitalis, one suburb, one town, one village at a time. Ultimately, Northon, Easson, Wesson, Central and Port City were going to find that they were stuffed to capacity, full to overflowing with millions of unwanted people and then they would learn something new and terrible.

  The Pariah System was a plague. It followed those who’d been caught up in it. It followed the men and women who’d helped her. It followed them and spread to those who were nice to them.

  It would take a long, long time. The System, the avatars running it, they might figure out what was happening. But whatever damage had been done would stay done and would make things that much harder for that fat balding bastard.

  How dare he? How dare he think that he could do a better job than the greatest Chairwoman in History?

  Alyssa Doans leaned back on her bench, lit a cigarette, and dreamed of Hospitalis in ruins.

  ***

  Aleksander Politoyov, ‘commander’ of Special Forces and one of the only Offworlders to have ever risen to such rank inside Trinity’s military structure, hated his life.

  He shook his head. Perhaps that was a bit rough. He didn’t necessarily hate his life. There were many good things he could say about living and breathing, and the joy of eating, but beyond that and for the last year, there was little else that’d been good about it.

  Contacted by Trinity just over a year ago to wage war on the intensely militaristic and over-technologically developed solar system Latelyspace, Politoyov had leaped at the chance. Every commander in every branch of armed forces run by the machine mind would’ve done the same; in all the systems spread throughout the Universe, only Latelyspace offered any challenge, any interest, any … fun.

  Their God soldiers were a most tantalizing test, their weapons the most devastating, their tactics, the most advanced. Prior to the moment Trinity had come to him inside his personal offices, Politoyov had never heard of any other agency being given the chance to go toe to toe with the Latelians. In point of fact, if his voluminous memory –when it came to conflict- was correct, Trinity had actually destroyed Its own troops the very moment a captain or commander or admiral got it into his or her head that they were going to slug it out with the Goddies.

  And as commander for Special Services, the agency replacing the God Soldier Army as the number one deterrent against Cordon-based threats over a hundred years ago, Politoyov was even more interested to see how they’d fare. The Cordon was a weird and wondrous place, just as it was dark and twisted. His men -those who’d fought on the other side, at least- were barely men anymore. Would they be a match for the ungodly God soldiers?

  Although Latelians had been crushing and dominating Offworlder and human alike at Trinity’s command for thousands of years, Commander Politoyov believed they’d stand a really good chance at coming out on top. The Latelians might’ve done it for longer, but they’d done it better.

  So yes, naturally and without reservation, the Offworlder commander had leaped. The last of the Sovereign systems would fall and Trinity’s Domain would be whole.

  There was only one wrinkle. Well, two.

  The first was the goddamn shield. No one had seen anything like it. It defied analysis. It was similar to the gravnetic shielding currently deployed on a nearly Universal level, but only in effect. Design-wise, SpecSer techs and engineers could only shake their heads and shrug.

  Trinity had nothing to say on the subject and one day, a bored Enforcer had shown up to take a whack at it ­–literally, the armor-clad warrior had taken a swing at the invisible shield with the biggest hammer probably ever to’ve been forged, all without any effect whatsoever- before leaving. Special Services own tech troops, the geniuses behind the black hole engines that’d gotten them the gig in the first place, couldn’t even technically prove that there was a shield there.

  But there was. Oh, by all that was holy and just in the world, there was definitely a shield there.

  The moment the black hole engines had proven not only workable, but impressively efficient, Trinity’d held to Its promises; every ship in Special Services had been outfitted with the new rigging no matter where in Trinityspace it’d been parked. More than half the Army’s vessels had undergone the same treatment. They’d all launched themselves at the unsuspecting solar system, confident that t
he battle –minus a few hitches- would end quickly.

  Using a fiendish –and some would argue impossible- design involving Trinity’s new planetary shield techniques and actual gravity bombs, SpecSer tech teams had discovered a way to launch ships at a remote target at speeds faster than light. Since the technique didn’t involve any of the sciences or branches of science outlawed by Trinity for being too dangerous and/or illegal, the machine mind had gracefully decided not to kill everyone involved, so long as they get their hindquarters to Latelyspace as soon as possible.

  The Army, the ‘golden child’ of Trinity Itself and the ‘face of modern warfare’, had insisted on taking the lead for that initial sortie into Latelyspace. Their reasoning, at the time, had been simple –if embarrassingly egomaniacal-; all their ships looked the same, were easily identifiable as belonging to Trinity, and were really quite intimidating, whereas SpecSer forces were the equivalent of spacefaring hobos in dirty shirts, what with their mishmash of ships from a thousand different solar systems and their steadfast refusal to even recognize that the word ‘uniform’ existed.

  Understanding that wars were hardly ever won based on who made the grandest entrance, Politoyov had capitulated to Admiral Bennenson’s demands without batting an orange eyeball. Winning wars wasn’t about who made the best entrance, but who stuck around the longest.

  Ships moving faster than light need a lot of AI processing power to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Even level 8 and 9 AI spheres had a difficult time analyzing and assessing data coming at them at those speeds. They’d lost a dozen or more of the costly minds in the beginning, realizing in a burst of insight that, while the new engines had no real upper limit to velocity, you could hit the ceiling on AI processing power pretty damn quickly. The delicate synthetic diamond fiber optic brains were able to handle the flow once things were up and running at eighty percent of max speed, but when you cannot see a goddamn solar system-sized shield, there was … there was nothing you could do but watch space cruisers the size of cities burst into pretty fireworks.

  That was the first wrinkle. Latelyspace had destroyed roughly half of their invasion force without even firing a shot.

  Trinity was pissed; It’d brought those Army ships in from dozens of different hotspots throughout It’s Domain, hotspots that couldn’t really afford to be without military presence for any goodly length of time. Getting the Army back up to strength wasn’t just a matter of pointing to a bunch of different worlds and shouting ‘sign up for the Army now!’ There was training to do, experience to gain, wisdom to acquire. It wasn’t the deaths that had Trinity irate, oh no, not at all; It’d been expecting massive casualties. It was more that It would’ve preferred there to be casualties on both sides.

  The second wrinkle, one that Aleksander was glad they weren’t actually having to deal with right now, was the whole reason why they’d come to Latelyspace in the first place.

  Garth Nickels. Commander Politoyov knew more than most about the man. Truthfully, though, he spent most of his waking hours wishing he didn’t know anything at all. The rest of the time he worried what was happening behind that shield.

  Garth Nickels was a destroyer. A wild-eyed, dark-haired, died-in-the-wool eater of worlds. He was a technical savant, too, but on a level that made the Offworlder’s feet sweat and brain itch. You could –and it’d happened- drop Nickels on a planet with no technology whatsoever, he’d have the local equivalent of Hand of Glory missiles built and ready to launch in a matter of days. Armed with these deadly world-breakers, he’d threaten to launch them at the sun if the natives didn’t bring him things like ‘Jujubes’ or ‘hamburgers’.

  Plop Garth on a planet with computers and actual science and fissionable material, and suddenly buildings were being launched into space and space stations were stolen from under the noses of systemic crime lords.

  But in a system like Latelyspace, where there were no laws governing what areas the mad scientists delved into, where there were no safeguards against insanity… there was no telling what was actually on the other side of the shield.

  Not for the first time, Politoyov wondered if the shield wasn’t there to keep them all alive. At his worst, Nickels hadn’t exactly been a ‘spare the wounded’ kind of man.

  Politoyov wrinkled his nose. He couldn’t make up his mind. Was he happy that he wasn’t currently going toe-to-toe with Garth Nickels or not? He wished he had a piece of paper he could ball up and throw against the wall.

  “Sir?”

  The commander looked up from his navel gazing. It was one of his aides. “Yes?”

  “They’re … they’re doing it again.” The aide, a young woman with a pageboy haircut, rubbed a hand through her immaculately short hair nervously.

  “Don’t they have anything better to do?” Politoyov demanded angrily as he rose from his chair. He followed the woman –Patrice, if he wasn’t mistaken- out into the corridor. Highly trained commander-ears heard whispers and grumbles as Patrice ‘led’ him to the command station in the middle of the battleship.

  His escort grew from Patrice to dozens and by the time Commander Aleksander Politoyov made it to the bridge, he had to nudge his way through a crowd of nervously excited soldiers and SpecSer servicemen alike. Politoyov shooed a ranked officer out of his chair with a smack to the back of the head and watched the antics of the five unknown men with the gaze of a predator.

  AI analysis didn’t know what to make of their … visitors. The shield prevented or hindered all but the crudest of their sensors from operating properly, so they didn’t have definitive proof that the five weren’t God soldiers, but if they were, they were unlike any others anyone had ever seen. They lacked all the physical hallmarks of soldiers so heavily augmented that they made departed Zurich seem like a newborn.

  One of the spectators gasped as one of the five, a dark-haired, black-eyed … devilish looking man, blurred then added six feet two inches to his frame. The others chuckled in the depth of space and did the same.

  Politoyov barked to the AIs. “How are they doing that?”

  The response came back almost immediately. “Unknown. Their physical forms adhere to no standard model of rationality. Assessment of the change is that it is not …”

  Politoyov threw up a hand. “I remember from yesterday, Gamma. ‘It is not illusion or manipulation’. They are actually growing that big.”

  “How … how are they breathing?” Someone new asked.

  The commander for Trinity’s assembled might shook his head in disgust as the quintet began tossing a ball around, their stark features alight with humor. “That,” he turned, trying to spy who’d asked the question, “That is what bothers you? Not the whole ‘growing bigger in the blink of an eye’ thing.”

  As his eyes roved over the crowd trying to locate the man or woman who’d asked such a stupid question so he could kick them off the bridge and ban them for the duration of the operation from ever asking something so stupid again, Politoyov grew aware that every single one of them was standing stock still, their faces pale, their mouths wide open, their eyes … their eyes positively ablaze with terror.

  “I swear by all that is holy,” Politoyov muttered as he slowly swiveled his head back, “if they’re inside this ship, I will blast this bridge into sp … well, no. That wouldn’t work. Fuck me.”

  About the only thing that was lucky was that the five mysterious, space-breathing, size-changing men weren’t in the ship. Politoyov reflected that would be better than what they were doing; they were somehow managing to stare directly at them, and were rapping ever-so-gently on where AI systems said the shield was.

  “Let us in.”

  The voice whispered through the bridge comm systems, awash with a hissing noise.

  Three of the viewers passed out and a clean dozen threw up on themselves. Klaxon alarms and the assorted noises of machines and AI minds abruptly doing the electronic version of passing out and throwing up on themselves filled the bridge.

  “
Let us innnnn….”

  “It’s so cold out here….”

  Politoyov turned the monitors off, skin tingling with cold sweat. “Every … every non-essential person on this bridge … get your asses off it.”

  The monitors flicked back on of their own accord. One of the five tick-tocked a finger at them. The speakers filled back up with soulless moaning and whispers. The lights began flickering.

  Politoyov hung his head in his hands. This stank of a Garth Nickels ploy. When their most successful Specter hadn’t been busy figuring out ways to blow up planets with a quarter-stick of dynamite he’d been busy coming up with new and ingenious methods of driving his targets batshit insane.

  “All right.” Politoyov thumbed a button and waited for the comm system to acknowledge that his voice would be heard across every single speaker in his armada. He didn’t do speeches, he hated talking to this many men, women and other all at the same time, preferred, actually, to do as little as possible and to trust those in his command to do what they knew how to do with as little interference as seemed realistic.

  But this … shape-shifting, space-breathing men who whispered through speakers that were allegedly hardened against interference … this was, in Garth Nickels’ own words, total bullshit.

  “Everyone, listen up. I know this is going to sound redundant, but ignore those crazy bastards out there. They’re messing with our minds. This is psychological operations at its finest. We’ve all seen some nasty shit in our long careers and when this is all over and done with, we can sit around a table drinking beers and scaring the ever-loving shit out of one another with this particularly nightmarish story. And when we get drunk enough and it’s late enough in the evening, we can confess to one another how close we came to pissing our pants but for now, right now, I want every single man, woman and Offworlder in these ships to focus on coming up with a way to get through that shield. I want you to do that, and I want you to do it quick because so help me, I would really like to jam a HoG down each one of those motherfucker’s throats and set them off like human-shaped Roman candles. Are we clear?”