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

  Dark Iron King

  By Lee Bond

  ©copyright Lee Bond 2014

  Kindle Edition

  CAST

  Trinityspace

  Commander Aleksander Politoyov: leader of Special Services and Trinity’s Army

  Tendreel Salingh: Technical Expert in SpecSer

  Jordan Bishop: deposed head of BishopCo

  Ariel Bishop: new head of BishopCo

  Andros Medellos: Conglomerate head of Medellos Medical

  Trinity Itself: leader and protector of Mankind

  Gwyleh Ronn: telepathic Enforcer

  Naoko Kamagana: Savior 2.0

  Alistair Katainn: Yellow Dog Elder for the Katainn Clan

  ADAM: Absolute Dynamic Associative Matrix

  Enforcers

  Tiv Solom

  Grave Kallan

  Varan Seems

  TwinForcer Ketchum Killem

  Shirram

  Gar Til

  Clipper

  Lexy Daisicon

  Boron Tillamok

  Marie

  Slate

  Armageddon Troop Too

  Babel: Conman and Subterfuge

  Telgar Wren: Master of Arms

  Cianni Wren: Technical Expert and Co-Pilot

  Dagon: Demolitionist

  Eddie Tekmara: Captain and Pilot

  Tenerek

  Jerry Seinfeld: bus driver

  Steve Smith: career criminal

  Richie Rock: police officer

  Gary Poorfowl: Evil Chicken

  CyberPriests

  Erg

  Anode (George Stevens)

  Faraday

  Sine364

  Coulomb6

  Latelyspace

  Harmony Soldiers

  Fenris

  Solgun

  Stride

  Nalanata

  Lokken

  Others

  Herrig DuPont: Chairman of the Latelian Commonwealth

  Sidra: Foursie

  Ute Tizhen: The Oldest Man in the System

  Vasily Tizhen: OverCommander

  Tomas Kamagana: avatar codemaster

  Candall: reclamation specialist

  Captain Shane Markson: Trinity invader

  Petros Vasco: Father to Morgan the Dead

  Arcade City/Arcadia

  Wardens

  Warden Peemes

  Warden Gaston

  Warden Bastille

  Lady Hanover

  Mondulac

  Prestier

  Holcmobe

  Messers

  Falcomb

  Shrutii

  Mistresses

  Mistress Taint

  Mistress Primrose

  Mistress Greenspire

  Others

  King Blake: obviously, King

  Chadsik al-Taryin: Master assassin

  Garth Nickels: Engineer and Specter

  Dominic Breton: Gearman in service to the King

  Chevril Pointillier: Gearman in service to the King

  Dave the Bartender

  Tinkers, Artificers, and Smiths and other Citizens of Ickford

  Havilland Harvard

  Danny-Boy Boom

  Saucy Miss Smith

  Twisted Mickel

  Doctor Sharp

  Lady Bullet

  Shackled Al

  Boisterous Bill

  Downtrodden Lucy

  Lugubrious Hammet

  Idle Eric

  Tricky Slamford

  Crews/Lookers

  Nicked Jimmy

  Mistar Chang

  Sally Ahoy

  All-Points Eric

  Mental Marc

  Quick Wit

  Shooty Jane

  Rabid Elton

  Dank Eddard

  Fresh Emmy

  Thumper

  Deezy Cue

  Moxy Molly

  Obese Patterson

  Riddled Smitty

  Coralline Criss

  Large Ronald

  Obsidian Golems

  Agnethea: Queen of Ickford and First Obsidian Golem

  Melissa

  Trevor

  Henrietta

  Young Luther

  Juliet

  Hiram

  Morton

  Shelby

  Table of Contents

  CAST

  Trinityspace

  Enforcers

  Armageddon Troop Too

  CyberPriests

  Latelyspace

  Harmony Soldiers

  Others

  Arcade City/Arcadia

  Wardens

  Mistresses

  Others

  Tinkers, Artificers, and Smiths

  Crews/Lookers

  Obsidian Golems

  Odds and Ends before the Beginning

  Here

  There

  Back Again

  In Between

  Somewhere Else Entirely

  Galaxy’s Edge

  Just So We’re All on the Same Page, Captain…

  1. Now Do Yourself a Favor

  2. Strange Bedfellows

  3. Tick Tock

  4. Tendrils

  5. What’s All This, Then?

  6. Nicked Jimmy’s Perpetual Revenge

  7. All The King’s Horses and all The King’s Men

  8. Saturday in the Park

  9. Kingspawn Pub

  10. Black Clinic

  11. Bad Moon Rising

  12. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

  13. Hair of the Dog

  14. Knock Knock

  15. Following the Threads

  16. Hell’s Bells

  17. Harmony wants YOU!

  18. Trouble on the Rise

  19. I Spy With My Little Eye

  20. Workin’ for the Man

  21. Of Strange Growing Things, Spreading Tendrils and Hitchhikers across the Universe

  22. All Hail the King, Baby

  23. Of ‘Requisitioned’ Ships and Unwanted Visitors, an Officer and A Chairman, and Barbarians at the Gates

  24. The Great Wall of Arcade City and Other Surprises

  25. A Father’s Love, A Friend’s Revenge, A Horse’s Ass

  26. Dammit, I should’ve gone with the Barter Town Quote!

  Author’s Foreward 14/07/2014

  When I sat down to write Dark Iron King more than a year ago, I had absolutely no idea it was going to take so long. I had an idea of where the story was going to go, and the general format of how I wanted to handle the telling of this particular tale, but … I learned something about the very fundamental nature of writing in the process of getting this massive book off the ground.

  Indulge me for a minute, if you will, kind reader;

  As a young man, I grew up reading some of the best science fiction in the world (and fantasy, too, and this little anecdote holds true just as well in the realm of swords and sorcery as it does in the universe of laser beams and AI); from Herbert to Chalker, Asimov to Banks, I thrilled to these other worlds and other places, marveling all the while at what they’d called up out of their minds and onto the pages. But, as I read these stories, as I tore through a series and waited oh so impatiently for the next book, I began to notice something:

  The time between books grew longer. And longer. And then longer fucking still. And the books got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Gone were novels I could read in a week, replaced by something so huge and ponderous that it would take a month or more.

  Why? What in the hell? What … oh.

  Right. There were people in the story being told. People who had their
own plots, and their own threads, and all of that needs proper handling, because if you don’t, if you miss something or screw something up (I am so guilty of this it’s not even funny), your fans will notice. Someone you think is insignificant to the plot is someone that a reader loves. Some little throwaway line can have tremendous implications later on, and so on and so forth. Truly immense stories with more than three characters grow and swell of their own accord, and as the one putting brain to keyboard, it’s my job to say ‘hey, back the hell down over there’ but …

  It’s hard to do that when you’re writing what I’m writing. The End of the Unreal Universe looms over all their heads. So many people are involved, so many different needs and wants and desires and fears and all of that needs to be told. Even peripherally, and I believe it’s the hallmark of someone truly vested in telling the story properly that they take the time. Yes, it leads to a gigantic book. Yes, it can sometimes be a little … cumbersome.

  Would you rather read a chapter or two on, say, what happened to ex-Chairwoman Doans or always and forever wonder? Would you rather miss out on what’s happening to Herrig, or the weird dynamic between so-and-so and whosit?

  I don’t and I’m the dude who’s spent three hundred and eighty hours of my life getting Dark Iron King Volumes I and II done. And that ain’t including covers. Or edits. That’s just the writing bit.

  And that’s why this book is so big, and why it got split into two. Because the story isn’t just about Garth anymore. It’s about Herrig and Vasily, Huey and Ute, Chadsik al-Taryin and Jordan Bishop. It’s about characters I hardly mentioned, and ones I fell in love with after the first sentence and others I couldn’t wait to kill because I hated them. It’s about a Universal war hanging over everyone’s heads and it’s about a million other things I can’t mention because spoilers suck.

  I didn’t appreciate the effort my favorite authors put in to writing their big, grand, epic stories because for me, the Latelian Cycle was very nearly Garth-centric from page one. Not to mention, nearly complete; the only novel in that trilogy that wasn’t ‘finished’ was Citizen Pariah, and even then, it was almost done. Those of you who are into that sort of thing will have noticed that Subversive Elements and Citizen Pariah came out in the same damn year!

  Dark Iron King I: Thy King’s Will Be Done and II: Arcadia Falls were purely invented in the last year. Everything between the electronic pages are fresh and new and damn me if I didn’t nearly kill myself every now and then trying to get it right.

  Hell, I’m still not certain it’s perfect, but if there’s one other thing I’ve learned, it’s that there comes a time when you’ve gotta put the fucking thing to bed.

  There are other reasons why the book(s) took so long to get done, and if you follow me on Facebook (if you don’t, for shame! Please, like me. I already like you. I’m working on coming up with some fun stuff to involve everyone a little more, and if you don’t like me, you’ll always wonder) you know what happened about six months ago:

  Catastrophe happened. I can’t quite explain how it happened, not precisely. Basically, though, as my fingers were flying like mad across the keyboard, several things happened in precisely the proper order to screw me over in the worst way since my computer died in the late 90’s:

  I hit ctrl-a (those of you who use word are already cringing, I’m sure).

  I hit a random letter.

  Office began it’s autosave (here is where I am certain I experienced an out of body moment).

  Googlecloud (where I store my stuff) began autosyncing.

  I panicked and x’d out.

  I died.

  Now, since this moment, I am infinitely more careful about backups but back then, all I ever really did was drag and drop a new file whenever I remembered.

  My ‘newest’ backup file?

  Three months old.

  Three months of work. Gone.

  I’ll … I’ll let that sink in for a moment. Consider that. I am not ashamed to say I spiraled into depression, pretty much right there on the spot. Factually, I wasn’t terribly worried; I rarely forget what I’ve written in the broadstrokes, so I assumed it would just be a matter of plugging it all down again.

  Except … except it was harder than I’d imagined. Nothing felt right. Nothing clicked the way it had the first time off my fingers. I went through the motions, of course, because the story had to be told. It would be told. I consoled myself by reminding myself that everything could and would be fixed in edits, that I knew precisely where I’d lost my stuff (thanks be to the concept of copy and pasting ‘dailies’ into a separate file), so really, all I had to do was get back to that moment and everything would fall back into place.

  Then, one day at work, while I was … ah … ‘working’, I … well, I can’t remember what prompted me to check my google drive, but I did. And there, in the online trash receptacle, was a file. With DIKnew.docx.

  Could it be? I remember sitting there, dumbounded.

  Not possible. The good stuff was gone.

  I undeleted it and before I opened it, I checked the file size. It seemed big.

  Still not possible. No way.

  I did the only thing I could do at this point. I held my breath, hit ctrl-end and …

  My life was returned to me. Mostly; 85% of the story as I’d told it before the doc crash was there. Instead of three months of lost effort, it was three weeks, and that stuff was fresh in my mind.

  From that mistake, and from that miraculous gift (presumably from a certain Engineer we all know and love) I took precautions. I set an alarm on my phone, ingloriously labeled ‘Backup your fucking work, you stupid ass’. I wrote a macro that automatically copied what I was writing both to my desktop and to the cloud. I routinely backed up my online copies. I do that for everything I touch, now. I’ve learned my lessons good and proper.

  Other things that kept the book from coming out sooner? Well, work. The job that pays my bills so I can sit and write went all kinds of mental from about November until January. It was painful; I dropped down to about four hours of sleep a night and quit going to the gym. I ate like crap because by about week two of November, I was an automaton.

  But …

  That’s over and done with. Volume I is done. Hell, you’ve got it in your hands right this minute!

  If you’re a sneaky person and have already looked at the Table of Contents, you may notice the addition of the chapters that were in ‘Road to Trinityspace’. I wasn’t going to put it in, but after a quick check on what Chad got himself up to in that little novella, I realized that everything in that booklet (touted as ‘not important but interesting anyways’) had somehow seeped all the goddamn way into the Dark Iron King and that I had somehow also forgotten some pretty damned important stuff in the meantime.

  In all honesty, Thy King’s Will could’ve been out last week, had it not been for the last minute addition, but I’m glad I took the time out. It makes the story better, refreshes the mind and … oh.

  Before I forget. If you have read Road to Trinityspace, I urge you to read the chapters again. There’ve been a few minor changes, one relatively significant one that, if you remain unaware, will have you fairly confused.

  Those of you who’ve read the other books (who am I kidding? No one who’s not already familiar with the Unreal Universe would start with book 4) will notice the price is a bit … high.

  It has to be. I consider myself a real and true author. I put genuine and sincere effort into what I create. Further, I believe the work is worth it. If you’ve thrilled to anything I’ve written (even if you’ve been a bit lenient on some dodgy grammar here and there) I know you won’t be disappointed. If you are, whisper to me quietly of your discontent, else Messers Nickels and al-Taryin hear.

  Dark Iron King was the most fun (and the worst time) I’ve had writing anything. Between these electronic covers, I hope you find the same sense of awe and wonder, hope and fear, doubt and laughter that I had in writing them. And, on the off cha
nce that anyone out there knows game developers, kindly and gently (and if that don’t work, roughly and forcefully) beat them in the head until they read The Latelian Chronicles so they can get up to speed on Arcade City.

  You’ll see why.

  Always and forever yours,

  Lee Bond

  Odds and Ends before the Beginning

  “I’m not comfortable with you leaving, Huey.” Herrig DuPont looked up from terminal he’d been staring gloomily at since … since everything had happened the way it’d happened.

  Currently, the screen was displaying a table of contents labeled ‘Secrets of the Chair’, and it was about as depressing and infuriating a thing as anyone had ever been asked –or even expected- to read. The long list of rulers ‘guiding’ Latelyspace ‘to a better, bright tomorrow through force of arms’ revealed that nearly every one of them had, in truth, been a pack of maniacs. There wasn’t a single Chair –with the possible exception of the first one- who hadn’t, at one point or another, done things so horrible, so grim, so … unforgiveable as to make them demonic.

  It was depressing as hell. And Huey, the one who’d shown him how to work the Chair’s proteus, was leaving. Yes, it was to find some way to free Garth from the Box, but still.

  Herrig knew he wasn’t up to the task of running a solar system of one man, let alone a solar system crammed to the rafters full of … full of Latelians. They looked well-behaved, they minded their P’s and Q’s and dotted all their I’s, but the second, the very second you looked the other way, they turned into curiosity-fueled maniacs. And that was the ones who pretended they were nice.

  The ones who didn’t bother acting, the ones who’d accepted who they were, well, they just ran around doing whatever they wanted anyways. Nature and mishap took care of those fools easily enough.

  Luckily matters involving the Army and everything those men and women got up to was being handled by men better than himself; Fenris and his breed, Ute and Vasily had their jobs cut out for them. Herrig knew he wouldn’t have lasted a minute in office had he been expected to corral all those Goddies.