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

by Lee Bond

  “Holdovers.” Babel jumped in, feeling brutally ridiculous in his bathrobe and flip-flops. In terms of Specterism, he’d never been and never would be like Telgar, or even Cianni. He was strictly a front man, the face, the guy who snuck in and did shit when no one was looking. Being more than three-quarters naked and completely unprepared for marauding Specters had him thinking maybe he might like to look into some formal training when it came to fighting.

  All eyes were on him. Comically, the Enforcer’s gigantic, dome-like head turned to confront as well.

  “Holdovers.” Tiv replied flatly.

  From the moment he’d entered Armageddon Troop Too’s bungalow, Suit had registered an odd, low-level transmission bouncing between the four Specters and had offered up a few of the usual explanations. The most likely source of this divergent signal was Cross-Cordon exploits; at some time in their career, it was probably ATT had dabbled in Deep Striking, though not so much so that they’d been as terribly transformed as long-time voyagers in that wild frontier.

  As Tiv Solom well knew, fighting across The Cordon wasn’t for everyone, but even a single trip could change people in ways other than was immediately obvious, even to Trinity’s careful scans.

  From there, the most logical thing was to assume the frequency bouncing through the room was some form of telepathic mindlink, allowing them to network their organic brains together, which would, in turn, enable them to do things that they shouldn’t out to be able to do.

  Tiv nodded, albeit only to himself. Stupid Specters. Getting themselves infected with telepathy. When the machine mind found out, It was going to be angry. Luckily for them he wasn’t in the mood to discharge any of Trinity’s commands other than the one where he’d been ordered to shag ass to Old Earth to investigate some very odd doings at the Mad Goth King’s indestructible TikTok Dome.

  Finally! A challenge worthy of the great Tiv Solom!

  If these idiots with their illegal Cordon modifications let him have their black hole ship without any further delay or foolish confrontations, Tiv decided he was more than willing to let the whole thing slide. Still, his reaction depended on them. The choice was theirs. Life, or death.

  Babel nodded, moving to put more of the drink counter between him and the angry Enforcer. “Holdovers. From back in the day. When Specters were the whipped dogs of Trinity’s secrety military complex. We were part of an initiative to learn as much as we could about Enforcers and Adjutants and stuff like that.”

  “Fantastic.” Tiv Solom said scathingly. “That sounds like something that Trinity would be willing to ignore.”

  Eddie bulged his eyes at Babel, who gave a glimmer of a shrug. Hopefully the Enforcer took the exchange as it was intended; a Captain chastising a subordinate for divulging potentially damning information about their less-than-legal activities. Captain Eddie turned his attention back to the Enforcer, wondering very briefly if Garth had ever stood so close to one of the most powerful beings in Trinityspace.

  If he had, Eddie wondered next how things had gone. He blinked the thought away. “What, ah, what can we do for you, Enforcer Solom?”

  Tiv held out a hand. “I need the keys to your spaceship.”

  Babel, admittedly more than a little sozzled on fine EuroJapanese green-colored gin drinks, burst into laughter. He couldn’t believe his ears, and judging from the bemused expressions on the faces of his comrades –not to mention the mildly amused sensation of rock-laughter from Dagon-, neither could anyone else.

  Eddie held the laughter welling out of him at bay with staunch practice, making a mental note to talk to Babel about controlling himself better in situations like these, wishing as he did so that he had more of Telgar’s inbred stoicism. The golden-eyed warrior was a damn stone. “I thought … ah … don’t, don’t you guys have a …”

  Babel interrupted, raising his drink up in a mocking salute, “What skip is trying to ask is, don’t you guys have your own teleporter? Sorry. Sorry. A personal Quantum Tunnel built into your awesomely badass space armor?”

  Tiv looked at his outstretched hand, wondering if there was something wrong with him. He’d been across The Cordon for a long time. He’d spent most of the last two hundred years watching variants of Humanity so profoundly different from the four in the room that perhaps his experiences had altered his perceptions in some hitherto undetected way. Certainly there was something going on here that was making little to no sense.

  “I require the decryption keys for your spaceship.” Tiv shook his hand. “Now.”

  “Our mission here is paramount.” Cianni said into the brittle, cold silence, offering logic to balance out Babel’s irrepressible –and oftentimes inappropriate- joviality. “We can’t just give you our ship.”

  “We are in hostile territory.” Telgar shifted, preparing himself. “The Yellow Dogs are under assault from an unknown force. They do not want us here, fearing that we are going to attempt some sort of coup against them as well as their enemy. If we are left without a vessel …”

  Enforcer Solom dropped his hand. What was wrong in the Universe that four stupid Specters thought they could deny an Enforcer what he wanted? He was following the direct orders from the most powerful entity in all of time and space! He pulsed a request to his Suit AI, and it agreed. They had tried intimidation, they had tried polite demands. Both had failed.

  In the grand scheme of things, Solom was certain that whatever had Trinity insisting fourteen Enforcers get themselves to Arcade City was of infinitely greater importance than a handful of Specters. Weapons powered up. Out of respect for the Yellow Dogs, Solom opted for the least destructive of his armaments; if things ended quickly enough, the Enforcer was confident he could keep the devastation to less than five square miles.

  Tiv cleared his throat absentmindedly. “I am an Enforcer. You do as I say.”

  “Sure, sure.” Babel nodded like his neck was on a spring. “You, ah, you got the, y’know … official documents? This is a serious Specter deployment, here. Trinity needs to be aware of the repercussions in cutting…”

  Ci cut through Babel’s chatter. “He’s armed.”

  Tiv didn’t bother being surprised. “Give me the keys and this ends, here and now, Captain Tekmara. Trinity Itself’s commands override all other concerns.”

  This time it was Eddie who nodded like a marionette. “I understand that, Enforcer Solom, I really do. But this is a specifically difficult mission. Jade Whisper is a system cherished by the Emperor-for-Life. No matter Trinity is the ultimate shepherd of Humanity. It has long held to tradition when it comes to the Emperor. We’ve been dispatched. We can’t…”

  Tiv Solom shouted incoherently. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing! “You have to minutes to get your collective heads out of your collective asses and give me what I want or this situation will rapidly devolve.”

  Telgar smiled. Babel snuck in closer, though it wasn’t necessary; the warrior couldn’t think of the number of times he’d tried to prove to the small man that his shield could extend more than ten feet outwards if necessary, and in close quarters such as these, he was more than capable of providing each member of the team with their own individual shields.

  Eddie sighed miserably.

  Suit was patiently trying to identify the sudden spike in … something that was filling the air. The disturbance was similar to the low-level telepathic field it’d already identified, but … stronger now, multi-waved. This was no mere telepathy field. The AI’s diagnostic filters began wrestling with this new version of the Specters’ Cordon augmentations. Tiv Solom watched for a moment, lips pursed beneath his helmet. Before his eyes, the field, visually displayed as a bouncing sine wave, flexed and buckled underneath the AI’s scrutiny.

  Whatever it was, it worked at hiding itself, sliding this way and that, reflexively evading proper classification. Definitely not telepathy. Some kind of self-aware consciousness, then. Multi-body telepresence, perhaps, or embedded hive intelligence or …

  “Screw
this.” Solom opened fire on the Captain. It was the quickest and easiest way to dismantle any enemy force.

  The Suit shrieked ‘misfire’.

  Then something punched Tiv Solom in the side of the head and he found himself crashing through a wall. Captain Edio Tekmara chased after him holding, of all things, a gleaming obsidian katana.

  The Suit tried to scream for help, tried to contact Trinity Itself, but It, too, was neutralized, all processes capable of reaching the outside world locked down from an outside source. Relegated to the confines of the Suit, the AI began storing as much data on the shockingly powerful Specters on the off chance that, in five or a hundred or five hundred years, what it learned today might be pried out of it, for it –and Solom- knew that they weren’t going to walk away from this one unharmed. As the dancing sine wave continued growing in complexity, both AI and Enforcer realized with a grim start that they might not make it out of this one alive.

  But they were going to make these upstart Specters pay, and pay dearly, for their insolence.

  ***

  So many things about how Humans and human-derivatives chose to live their lives bewildered Dagon, oftentimes to the point where it was simpler to stop thinking about those things and focus instead on habits that made sense. Except when it came to his squadmates. When it came to Captain Edio and the others, Dagon understood everything.

  A large part of that understanding came from having spent nearly every day together for the last five years. That level of cohabitation led to a deeper understanding of those around you, and then of course, there was the … link.

  They’d felt the first stirrings of the link shortly after dumping ex-Captain Nickels on the planet Tenerek, but it’d taken their first truly sideways SpecSer mission for them recognize the undercurrent of the additional ‘familiarity’ as something more than long-term cohabitation. That mission, a simple snatch and grab that’d somehow metamorphosed into a confrontation hovering on the eclipse of a systemic war… it’d been something of a major turning point in their lives, their corpses tossed into the sun.

  Without that spiritual chrysalis –and here, they all agreed, however silently, that Garth was somehow responsible for the … awakening-, the Encounter at Enoch would’ve been marked with their gravestones instead of sixty deep miles of Trinity Black Mission codes.

  Without each one them rising up from a kind of waking dream into one another’s minds, without seeing inside each other that one thing that made them truly who they were, fanning those individual traits until they burned bright and hard, that solar system would’ve been torn apart and they along with it. There was no explaining it, no identifying what they’d become, so like the Specters they were, they’d accepted it and moved on, scrupulously keeping it a secret until they’d inadvertently revealed themselves to their old Captain.

  Who’d blinked, shrugged and without missing a beat, handed their asses to them before stealing their ship from underneath their unconscious bodies.

  The Xenocryst understood his squadmates better than anything, used them for the template upon which he built his understanding for organic life, but this posting… the Offworlder found the Yellow Dog Elder and his living habits to be extremely confusing.

  Dagon curled his toes deeper into the fine white sand that was a part of Alistair Katainn’s ‘Zen Garden’, marveling at the perfection of the pristine white substance, his stony body enjoying the gentle frisson that rumbled across his ‘skin’. Katainn had good taste in rocks, for which Dagon quietly thanked the high-strung, overly-pampered Elder.

  The Elder Katainn was somewhere in his palatial home, complaining about something in his native tongue that the Offworlder’s imprecise knowledge of Old Japanese failed to decipher. Dagon’s ears perked up when he heard a querulous older woman’s voice split the night air and he grinned, flashing heavy granite teeth at the peaceful columns of rock carefully balanced into a kind of statue; the Yellow Dog Elder was having a screaming match with his mother yet again, and for this, you didn’t need to speak an ancient tongue.

  As Dagon often pointed out to Babel, many things about Humans were hellaciously confusing, but there was one thing that was a constant -be you a pale, fleshy man-shaped thing or a living rock entity that had ultra-hot magma flowing through you- and that was: mothers drove you batshit insane.

  Katainn’s mother had taken the hauteur and poise so artfully and carefully maintained by the Elder gangster and tossed it out the window with a single, archly inflected word, turning one of the most powerful men in the solar system into a caterwauling child.

  Dagon shifted a bit, dug himself in deeper. He simply could not get over how comfortable the sand was. The Xenocryst grabbed a handful and pressed it into his flesh, absorbing the fine white granules into himself. When he had time, Dagon resolved to recreate enough of the stuff to make his own ‘Zen Garden’.

  Satisfied that Elder Katainn was going to be preoccupied for quite some time, Dagon returned his attention to his squadmates, who were still in the middle of discussing things with the Enforcer. Things had grown considerably strained in the last few minutes. Armageddon Troop Too wasn’t dealing overly well with the sudden appearance of an Enforcer or his demands for their space craft without proper authority, a reaction that was also affecting their unwanted visitor’s brittle mood. Captain Eddie seemed to be smoothing the rough patches, but the rest of the crew was prudently remaining on high alert.

  Dagon prepared himself to move quickly. The situation prior to the Enforcer’s arrival –Tendreel Salingh and her unwise poking and prodding- had already filled them all with fraught tension. Things, the stony Specter knew, were going to…

  The situation blossomed from tense to hostile with abrupt explosiveness, Armageddon Troop Too brazenly wielding talents they’d sworn to keep secret and hidden from Trinity’s many prying eyes.

  Violence grew more and more frequently the effect of all causes. Dagon, an aberration because his chosen profession of warrior was diametrically opposite to that of his own people -as a species, while they were capable of leveling cities with their mighty fists, were terrifically diplomatic- often wondered aloud at the underlying reasons for this. Both Babel and Telgar had tried explaining the overriding fear curling under the surface of nearly every man and woman in Trinityspace, this thing they called ‘Dark Ages’, giving up when he had explained that Xenocryst had never experienced the Dark Age phenomenon to the same extent as Humanity, and that his species honestly took those long stretches of silence as something of a relief; Humans, Dagon had said, were a bothersome species, too young and too noisy for the older civilizations in the Universe for too long without needing a nice, quiet break.

  Babel had flipped his shit and Telgar had laughed.

  Dagon shook his head and refocused on the far more important ‘his friends fighting an Enforcer’ situation.

  The fight was interesting. The Enforcer, Tiv Solom, had just deployed some form of electronic counter-measures that was having unexpected –not to mention previously assumed to be impossible- effects on Tel’s psychically manifested fields. The normally invisible and nearly impossible to breach force field had undergone worrisome changes: the manifested shield surrounding Eddie –who was boldly bracing the Enforcer on his own- flickered amber and gold. As Dagon ‘watched’, he noted that less than thirty-five percent of the Enforcer’s brutal melee attacks were being stopped by the shield, forcing the skilled Captain to ‘step up his game’.

  Dagon pressed stony lips together. Sooner or later, no matter how good Eddie was, Tiv Solom would score a telling blow and they’d be down a man. The undercover Specter sent appreciative thoughts towards Cianni; her pre-emptive decision to strip Solom of ninety percent of his weaponry before things had even started had proven to be a wise one. Had she not…

  The Xenocryst shifted in the soft sand, working his way resolutely through all available options. Solom was a vicious in-fighter, and Eddie, while the fastest man he’d ever seen -especially when wearing h
is Aspect- was having a difficult time keeping up. The moment were their ‘enemy’ scored that direct hit grew ever closer. Two hundred years across The Cordon, dealing with the strange things that grew out there, all of that had done much to prepare the Enforcer for this moment; though he’d almost certainly never encountered anything like what Armageddon Troop Too was, he was proving to be deadly efficient all the same.

  Babel was fiddling with a broadcast microphone he’d found in one of the rooms, some sort of attachment for a pastime called Karaoke, which was apparently quite popular in the EuroJapanese solar system. His intention was clear. If their conman could find the right harmonic frequency, the right pitch and hum, commands could theoretically be bounced right through the Suit’s filters, using those internal security measures to spin the sounds into the correct pattern … they might be able to end the fight without casualties by locking the mad Enforcer out of his own corporeal body.

  Enforcer Solom’s howl of rage at being continually thwarted by a team of Specters echoed through the Soul-HUD. His deep space Suit rippled, suddenly divesting itself of thousands of war machines no larger than a fingernail. The mass hovered around the now much-slenderer Solom before splitting into three equal sized swarms. One each for the main combatants; Tel, Cianni, and Babel.

  Cianni’s embarrassed apology rippled through the connection. It was immediately ignored by everyone; it was too late for apologies or recriminations because each of them had screwed up in their own way.

  The half-naked Specter dropped his microphone and sadly, did what he did best, which was run away. Cianni stopped hacking into the Suit to save herself and Telgar’s short-circuited shield abruptly vanished.

  Telgar grunted like he was wrestling a mountain and the shield reappeared a few seconds later. The psionic manifestation was still under Solom’s counter-effects, but now –rather than shielding people- each bubble he’d manifested surrounded a mass each stinger-swarm. Dagon counted more than two hundred still loose and active in the room, attacking the husband and wife team with vicious energy blasts that welted the skin. Enough of them attacking in concert would eventually incapacitate even the mighty Telgar. Captain Eddie was still in the other room, fighting for all he was worth, ebony soulsword flicking in the light.