by Lee Bond
Garth ignored the blows on his back. The two old military commanders were just that. Old. Tired. Unarmed. He could hear the splintergun-packing soldiers bellowing for everyone to move out of the way, but of course Snotty and Shorty wouldn’t; in close quarters like this, splintergun discharge would almost certainly eviscerate the very people they wanted to protect. The stupid OS was offering up trajectory patterns of likely fired round dispersal and body count estimates.
The would-be Engineer of Reality sighed. He’d done some awful, horrible things to get into the room with Leftbridge Stewart, things the OS had ‘allowed’ him to do because the need to get into Arcade City was on par with ensuring that the Unreality got destroyed in just the right way. Things like blowing up space stations, and firebombing hospitals. The toll for this one meeting was in the thousands, and … it sickened him.
“I hope,” Garth stared into Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart’s watery green eyes, “that you are the last man I ever have to kill, Lefty. Know this, though; your death is the most important sacrifice a man can make. If I’d had the time, I would’ve found you at home, sat you down and shown you the way. It took too long, the Enemy grows closer and I’ve got more to do than just this.”
The crunch as Garth head-butted Lefty hard enough to crack the man’s skull froze the room into a morbid tableaux of sickened horror. Garth went down on one knee, watching the life leak out of a man who’d done nothing wrong in his entire life, a man who had, in fact, been one of the good guys, a man who’d risked his own life once upon a time to save a bunch of kids. A man who, because of that one selfless act, had marked himself for death because of the journey his death would enable.
The guards had had enough. They waded in, pushing and shoving their commanders out of the way with stern words and rough hands. They cracked The Scourge in the back of the head with their rifle butts.
They kept on until The Scourge stood, whereupon they scattered backwards far enough so they could aim their weapons at him.
“I’m ready to go to Arcade City, gentlemen. Upon my honor, I won’t hurt anyone else. On the planet-moon of Trieste in the Goddard Triangle, there’s a mansion. In the mansion are the children of every single person who has died because of me. They are being very well taken care of. In a room in the mansion, there is a chest. It’s full of money. It is for the children, and for a funeral for Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart. He is to be given a Hero’s Wake. This whole fucking system will honor and cherish his passing or I swear to Christ I’ll come back here and …”
“Er, yes.” Snotty stepped forward. “Quite right. Quite … right. It … it shall be as you say, sirrah.” The old man’s eyes tilted towards Lefty’s corpse. Amazing, how quickly someone could die. “You … it is on your honor, yes? No more deaths?”
“God willing,” Garth stepped forward when he was commanded by a panicky guard, “the next time someone dies by my hand, it’ll be at the beginning of a new dawn.”
There was no point in mentioning that that ‘death’ would be the destruction of an entire Galaxy, followed by the rest of Unreality. There was some math that no mind, organic or otherwise, could comprehend.
A final, morose sigh escaped Garth’s lips. Information on Arcade City was nonexistent. None of the soldiers freed from the domed island could remember what happened inside. Push too hard and they cracked. Usually to napalm-levels of fiery distemper. Still, it was where he needed to go; thirty thousand years of assembled data inside Bravo indicated that there was a major player hidden inside the weird dome, a player capable of rising up against the Heshii, of breaking into the game and stealing the Engines of Creation. It was probably the ‘Mad Goth King Blake’, but there was no telling.
Next stop, Arcade City.
Galaxy’s Edge
“Do you still love your power?”
Nothing but screams. Screams, and fire. Burning and burning and burning.
“Is it still all you thought it would be?”
Motion, too, a hideously slow, crawling movement, a billion billion trillion pounds of weight tied to every single cell. It threatened to pull him apart.
“Was it worth the wait? Was it worth the loss, the betrayal?”
More screams.
The weight suddenly vanished for a moment. The burning ended.
Kith Antal loomed forward, his craggy, crystalline face seeming to materialize in front of Griffin. “I asked you a question, Kin’kithal Jones. Do you still love your power?”
Griffin spat and smiled. His skin, cracked and blistered and oozing raw, venomous fire from prolonged access to ex-dee, healed. “’course Ah do. It was whut Ah was born fer, ya dang stupid idjit.”
Antal patted Griffin affectionately on the head. “Good boy. Keep fighting. That way, when you break, it will be all the way.”
“Hah.” Griffin struggled a bit against the machine that held him in place. There was little hope of escape; the thing that sucked the fire from him and channeled it elsewhere was forged from some unholy combination of quadronium and crystalized extra-dimensionality. Utterly indestructible. “Didn’t break afore, didn’t break fer Trinity, won’t break fer ya’ll.”
“One more question, before we start again, Kin’kithal.” Antal traced a finger against the controls for the machine. “Did you think your power was great enough to move an entire galaxy?”
Griffin snorted. “Mah fuckin’ power is enough to burn this whole fuckin’ Unreality to ashes, you fuckin’ inbred dinosaur. You only play at bein’ civilized, but Ah know when you was born! Ya’ll ain’t really got the fuckin’ brain capacity to outthink me! You…”
Antal flipped the switch.
And Kith Antal’s armada, an entire galaxy full of resources capable of waging war on Trinity and anyone else who stood in his way, began moving once more.
Nothing but screams. Screams, and fire. Burning and burning and burning.
Just So We’re All on the Same Page, Captain…
Edio Tekmara, Captain of the currently –and still- shipless No Assembly Required*But We’ll Take You Apart crew, sat pensively in front of his commanding officer. The diminutive EuroJapanese pilot turned captain could tell they were nearing the final series of interviews, if for no other reason than Old Man Politoyov was finally paying more attention to AI feeds than the documents spread out across the table.
Which was tremendous relief; the enquiry into what’d happened had taken damn near two years to come to this point, wasting valuable time and resources better spent on pretty much anything else. At all.
The only problem was, Eddie couldn’t tell which way Politoyov was leaning. None of them could. Not Tel, Ci, Babel or Dagon. And not to put too fine a point on it, if there was anyone in the solar system outside Garth Nickels who could tell what was on their commanding officer’s mind, it should be them.
Eddie was pleased things were coming to an end, and for more reasons than the obvious; while he and his crew were potentially in a lot of hot water for … for what’d happened, the war of attrition against the Latelian Commonwealth wasn’t going well, not for Politoyov, not for Trinity, not for any of them. Scuttlebutt had it that shortly before No Assembly Required had had their sorry asses hauled out to the front line for personal interviews concerning possible misconduct and other bullshit charges, the shield spanning the entire solar system had shut down for about five seconds.
More than long enough for troops to get in, but more worryingly, for things to get out. Without doubt, it was the out part that had Politoyov all worked up. Eddie knew the commander had nothing to worry about when it came to the soldiers who’d shot through the shield before it’d come back online; soldiers outside his holding cell had let slip ages ago that roughly half the soldiers to make it through the impressive systemic shield were either Deep Strikers or Specter Engineers, some of whom had the distinction of traveling with Nickels himself. So while it sounded like things weren’t going so well at the moment, it was a given that things were going to start hopping
sooner or later.
That wasn’t the problem.
No. The problem? It was what might’ve come out. In a solar system with troops like those so-called God soldiers, there was literally no way of knowing what else the Latelians had at their disposal, or if those presumed nightmares-made-flesh were now on the loose somewhere in Trinityspace.
Just because they hadn’t found anything yet didn’t mean a goddamn thing. To be sure, the time wasted on them could’ve been spent in a far better manner.
Eddie shivered.
“Cold?” Politoyov asked curiously, snapping the feeds off as he did so. There was little point in going over the data anymore. The tech crews’ current efforts –figuring a way to communicate with his troops inside Latelyspace- were progressing well enough. No need to mother them. They’d only get their collective backs up and start complaining about fake equipment malfunctions, as they always did when they felt their efforts were being under-appreciated.
“Nosir.” Eddie straightened up in his chair. “Just one of those random body twitches, sir. You know how it is.”
“Indeed,” Politoyov scooped up a handful of papers and straightened them, “I do.”
After two years of waiting, of watching, of witnessing countless attempts to breach that damnable barrier fail, Aleksander Politoyov did indeed know how it was.
Eddie kept his yapper shut. One thing he’d learned was that when you were in the chair, you waited. You didn’t offer advice. You didn’t try to explain yourself. You never tried to get the first word because most of the time you’d be damned lucky to get the last word. Especially in situations like this. He’d been taught by a man who’d mastered being in the hot seat, especially the hot seat directly opposite a very imposing Commander Aleksander Politoyov.
Almost as if their thoughts were running parallel, Politoyov grinned, incisors dimpling his lips. The commander scratched at the bristly orange and purple goatee he’d started growing to alleviate the boredom of ship life. The growth had caused a bit of a scandal and now everyone and their Aunt Mary were growing beards, making the ever-escalating attempts to outdo one another vis-à-vis ridiculous styles perpetrated by his Specters a welcome distraction. “I’m going to recap the incident, Captain Edio Tekmara. Feel free to hop in with comments or corrections as you see fit.”
Eddie nodded.
Aleks picked up the first of the pages. “As per Special Services rotational duty roster, your team, the …” he looked up from the paper, “as you certain you don’t want to change the name of your crew? It’s … ridiculous.”
“Sir.” Eddie shook his head. “The only other name we could think of was Armageddon Troop Too and we were concerned prospective clients might expect the same sort of … the same …”
Aleks held up a hand. “I understand.” Another Armageddon Troop in their midst was a thing that could be of equal benefit and extreme detriment to their reputation. “As I was saying before attempting to get the unwieldy name of your troop out of my mouth…”
“We usually refer to ourselves as No Assembly.”
Aleks squinted, running through possible inside jokes. There were many. He nodded. “No Assembly found themselves on surveillance duty around the planet.”
It was a Trinity Law that you couldn’t say the name. The … quicksilver bubble… surrounding the world prevented standard exclusion shielding from operating properly, bringing into existence a rotating roster of SpecSers who did nothing more than watch the queasy-looking ball of light fester in the bleakness of space.
Just in case.
Since there was no way to shut the world away, anyone with a particularly insane idea of fun learning of its presence could quite easily –in theory anyway- enter the bubble.
And then encounter the enemy within.
“Yessir. The planet.” Eddie steeled himself and failed. It was the same with any crew that’d monitored the planet for any length of time. The silver, shimmering blob of light in the night sky was wrong. It made you sick to your stomach. Made you wish you were dead. Made you want to fall into it. To see what was inside.
“And you were coming up on the end of that duty, yes?” Aleks quirked an eyebrow when Edio didn’t chime in. “When, suddenly, in your own, unaltered words ‘something really fucking crazy happened and the bubble exploded, kind of.”
Eddie nodded, feeling foolish. Since he couldn’t trust himself at this late stage not to blow the whole thing, he literally tucked his hands under his legs. He groaned inwardly when Old Man Politoyov’s eyebrows practically shot off the top of his head. They were busted for sure.
“And then, insanely enough, a bunch of somethings forced you and the rest of your crew into an escape pod, politely taking time out of their busy schedule of presumed destruction and mayhem to launch you at the Quantum Tunnel and then, ah, stealing Frau Farbissina from you.”
“Yessir.”
“Captain, are you familiar with the nature of the planet you were assigned to watch?” Aleks knew that no one was supposed to know, but he also knew that the sole survivor of Shoemacher’s Grave couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut.
“Sir?” A fist of dread seized Eddie’s heart. Busted for sure. “N-nosir.”
“The world behind the silver bubble was –according to one man- populated by a race of sentient … reptiles, particularly bloodthirsty and violent reptiles with access to a technology bordering on the magical. In their own language, they are called Bruush. According to files that don’t exist, the Bruush aren’t … aren’t from these parts. In fact, if the survivor is to be believed, they are either from an alternate dimension or from a previous iteration of this particular existence. Both concepts are outside my pay grade.” Aleks put the papers down. “Shoemacher’s Grave, Captain Eddie, is called such because the survivor of that world was frightened out of his wits. So frightened that when he made his way free, the first thing he did was sacrifice the lives of every man, woman and Offworlder aboard the Shoemacher to ensure that nothing followed him out. He rigged the ship to turn into a giant cannon, Captain, and fired the assembled might of an Army war vessel at the quicksilver bubble. Then the ship blew up, filling a volume of space with horrific radiation poison. The survivor, as he often does, survived in a fairly improbable yet –according to my Tech Experts- ‘totally doable, given, y’know, the guy’ manner.”
Eddie licked his lips. He prayed that none of his crew was receiving this line of inquiry. It was new, and merciless
Aleks continued. “Since that time, there has been no sign of activity, either from the silver bubble, or from the planet’s surface.” Since Aleksander knew quite a bit more about the Bruush than he should, he continued, mercilessly. “Now, Captain Eddie, given the nature of these reptiles, their evident technological mastery and the resources of an entire planet within their scaly grasp, I find it nearly impossible to believe that they’d have the need of any vessel, let alone a single SpecSer craft. While the description of these monsters has most of them at about standard human height, many of them are, as pointed out by the survivor ‘built like fucking brick shithouses’. And then, of course, there’s your survival.”
“S…s…s…”
Aleksander ignored the tremendously pale Eddie and continued. He was relishing this. “The Bruush decimated the population of the world inside the bubble, Captain Eddie. Every Offworlder –er, technically, an offshoot of Humanity, but altered enough and over long enough a time to fall into the Offworlder category, like myself- on that planet was either killed as a food source or genetically manipulated into things. To them, all life is a pot of clay. That’s another quote from the survivor.”
Eddie gripped the arms of his chair. They’d been assured that no one outside Trinity knew anything real about the world inside the bubble, or what’d happened.
Aleksander nodded, approving of Eddie’s palpable concern. He rubbed his hands together. “Now then. Just to be clear we’re on the same page, as it were. We have an inter-dimensional or pre-Existence pack of w
izardly space reptiles lurking around on a planet. They suddenly break free and rather than eating your faces off before turning your carcasses into giant spacefaring corpseships, they politely escort you to an escape pod, ensuring that you have enough supplies to last the journey. Then they steal your ship only to leave it at the third planet from the Tunnel, neatly parked, with all the AI on-board dead or drained or otherwise depleted. Interestingly enough, that planet shows no signs of being attacked by said rampaging pack of space lizards, nor do any planets in the last two years. Does that about sum it up?”
Eddie could only nod. By now … honestly by now, Babel had probably talked himself off the ship and was undoubtedly somewhere else in Trinityspace, complete with a new name, a new face, and a bank account full of ill-gotten gains. That man could –had- talked himself out of worse.
Telgar and Cianni … well, Telgar was habitually incapable of lying and almost certainly had already confessed to everything, while his wife was cagier. She might’ve copped to a few inconsistencies in their story but otherwise, nothing.
Dagon, as an Offworlder, could and probably was pretending to be so otherworldly foreign it wasn’t even funny. They’d used that gambit more than once in their dealings. Additionally, he was a protected Offworld species; even if he was found seriously guilty of wrongdoing, Trinity Itself would see the stony Specter back on home ground and that’d be that.
“Excellent.” Aleksander continued. “Now, in what I am certain is are entirely unrelated events, I have reports here on my desk of two different solar systems that seem to be under severe and extreme attack by forces absurdly impossible to stop. One is a EuroJapanese System by the name of Jade Whisper. You may be unaware, but Whisper is one of the few Emperor-for-Life systems that still maintains connections to the Emperor Himself. This isn’t terribly important, save for the fact that those of us in the position to worry are worrying. The Emperor doesn’t react well to his personal belongings being played with, Captain Eddie, and that is most certainly what this … pirate is doing. One world in particular, Jade Song, seems to be suffering from quite a bit of … quite a bit. The tactics used in this system are bewildering, Captain. Things are happening that have local authorities confused and frightened and, it seems, many of them are becoming ludicrously superstitious. Back channel chatter even has Yellow Dog with their tails tucked and their heads down, all of which is … troublesome. Your old commanding officer has used intrigues like this before, yes?”
