Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6) Page 13

  Therefore, any subsequent targeting of stolen space craft and launching of seriously irresponsibly dangerous missiles and the resultant blizzard of machine parts raining down on the heads of patient EuroJapanese citizens waiting to chill with their Emperor was, in the strictest sense, not Garth's fault.

  The kernel of guilt disagreed, so the Kin'kithal buried it beneath a few choice Zakk Morris guitar riffs and chose to survey the rest of where he and Spur were at.

  Just like freshly reborn Arcadia, the Land of the Emperor was beautiful and pristine and all kinds of natural. Very pretty, if … somewhat on … fire. Unlike Arcadia, though –according to Spur- the lands the Emperor called home had always and forever been like this, through the worst of the Dark Ages’ calamities and even with the weather on the rest of the planet being something right out of an environmentalist’s worst nightmares. Tellingly, the state of the Emperor's land appeared to’ve been managed without obvious displays of technology or otherworldly power.

  “Feel no regret for the pagoda, or for the land.” Spur pushed his way through a small throng of people. Five thousand years since he’d been home, and still it was the same; tier after tier of faithful EuroJapanese souls waiting to get close enough to the Dome so they might sit and pray in reflection, all on the off chance that one day, one morning, one hour, the mighty Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles would allow them entrance within, whereupon they would be tried.

  There were thousands of men and women and the occasional child, milling around their section like tireless ants. Forming endless-seeming rings around the Dome, the sides of the mountain passes running through this section of the island had been worn smooth as glass from the countless numbers of people finally being ushered forth to the next phase of what was -for some- a lifelong journey.

  Spur couldn’t believe it. Still, after five thousand years, they came and squandered their lives for the Emperor, when they all of them knew that their actual chances of kneeling before the great man were slimmer than slim.

  “Why’s that?” Garth demanded loudly, striving to be heard over the muttering prayers of the aspirants; some looked at the pair of them furtively, with quickly darting eyes, but they looked away just as quickly when Garth made eye contact.

  One of the hopefuls decided he’d had enough of the gwailo and the pale robotman pushing their way through the respectful passengers. Since the robotman was probably the more dangerous one, he was let past, but the dark-haired stranger with the queer eyes wasn’t going anywhere. Sam Mizida occupied the mountain path fully, standing with his legs fully square, arms akimbo, using his girth as a natural barricade.

  “I got an appointment with the Emperor.” Garth stared into the EuroJap’s eyes and sighed. So miserably.

  “Back of the line.” Sam growled the words out. Who did this man think he was? First, he wasn’t even of the Blood and he was on the island, which meant he was crazy. Second, he brought something that looked like a figure out legend along with him, which meant he was asking for death the moment he got close enough to the Dome for the Emperor to see him, which actually meant that he, Sam Mizida, was doing this insane clown a favor.

  Which meant that the Emperor might hear of his actions sooner rather than later. Sam puffed himself up. He might even get invited inside right now. He frowned just a bit. Not right now. In a few minutes, when he’d finished with the gwailo.

  Third, he'd practically blown up the admissions pagoda and set fire to an entire copse of delicate willow trees. If nothing else, he'd be doing someone, somewhere a solid favor.

  And that had to be worth something.

  Garth plastered an empty smile on his face. The OS pointed out that in this little section of the Emperor’s Pathway there were seventeen hundred and thirty-four men and women –along with sixteen children, all born on the Path- who were pretty seriously pissed off. The OS suggested he could take them all if it became necessary, because not one of them seemed to have any augments, and were either old or tired or starving or some combination of all three.

  Garth told his OS to fuck itself sideways. There’d be no killing today, and sure as hell not in the numbers the OS was suggesting. Everyone in eyesight was just someone hoping to get something from their Emperor. They weren't the bad guys, though the fat asshat in front of him was gonna get an education real quick if he didn't cool his jets.

  Over the angry man’s shoulders, Garth noticed Spur paying very close attention to the exchange, eyes hooded shrewdly.

  “Look, friend, I have an appointment.” There was a tone that wasn’t quite pleading, but it was pretty fucking close. The muttering grew louder and Spur’s feigned disinterest grew even more disinterested. “Just let me pass. I don’t wanna fight you, not in this little fucking mountain hallway. You ever fight in a crevice before? I have. There’s a lot of getting bounced off mountainsides, and while it’s smooth as glass all over this place, it’s still stone. Besides, from what I understand, the Emperor does whatever he does to like, a whole pile of you guys at the same time, right? So it’s not like you’re going to be stuck out here for another fifty years or whatever.”

  “Besides,” Garth pressed when the man didn’t say or do anything aggressive, “I’m gonna be in and out, real quick. Ten, fifteen minutes, tops.”

  That it was pretty inevitable that the Emperor-for-Life was going to be a smoking, steaming pile of Imperial guts and burning attitude was left out of the story.

  Sam took the man in, this NorthAMC bastard who thought he could stroll through the Emperor’s Pathway as if it was nothing, as if the people he’d spent the last three years with meant nothing, as if their efforts didn’t count. Tall, stocky, looked very strong. Probably full of implants, if the weird eye was any indication.

  “You’re not even EuroJapanese.” Sam Mizida said plaintively, losing some fire. The weariness in the man’s voice … it was more fatiguing than standing in this line, waiting desperately for a chance that would almost certainly never come.

  “You’re right, I’m not. I’m not even human.” Garth pointed over the man’s shoulders at Spur. “But that belongs to the Emperor, and I’m returning it. You may have heard rumors or stories about the legendary Spur? Right hand man … err, android to the Emperor himself? Sent out to do some kind of shit with, to or for or against BishopCo, only he got caught by a Dark Age and a certain cranky machine mind? Yeah. Thought so. I’m bringing him home. For a reward.”

  Up until now, everyone within earshot of Sam Mizida and his foolish sense of pride and honor had been steadfastly looking the other way because no one really wanted to get involved with the fallout from two people standing in the Emperor’s presence getting into a fight, not this ‘close’ to him.

  Mentioning the missing and legendary Spur, on the other hand, brought everyone around very quickly, including Sam himself, who stared incredulously at the tall, slender albino machine.

  “You.” Sam shouted somewhat rudely. “What is your name?”

  Spur turned, keeping a mindful eye on those around him. Though they appeared intelligent enough to keep their hands to themselves, some few of the stragglier looking penitents looked as though they wanted to touch the hem of his stolen IndoRussian pilot garb.

  “My name, Samwell Mizida of MizidaCorp Ingenitex Limited,” Spur’s austere voice seemed to roar through the manmade canyon walls, and all those who’d been whispering or talking excitedly to themselves fell silent, “is Spur.”

  Samwell wasn’t impressed by the robot using his name. Though he wasn’t as well-known as some of the more powerful Conglomerate leaders out there, it was no difficult trick to program a machine with the names and faces of those who truly mattered. He shot a warning eye to the gwailo –who feigned total indifference by snorting and muttering to himself in a foreign language- and turned to confront the machine, who stood about ten feet off.

  “You say that.” Sam jerked a finger at the NorthAMC dog, who flinched and held a hand to his hurt heart. “And he says that, but I could
say that I am the Emperor. None of this makes it true.”

  The eavesdropping crowd suddenly found better things to do. Anyone foolish enough to bring a machine that was the mimic of Spur onto the Emperor’s land was a fool indeed, but since the two of them had gotten this far in the journey without being accosted, odds were that the Emperor was either curious about the pale robot or that He was eager to receive reception of a long-lost creation.

  Those points were moot. That, and the fact that it seemed they’d been pushing through the crowds to do so without punishment further pushed home the point that the Emperor was well aware of the situation.

  But to imply –even as an example, even as a joke- that you were the Emperor? Greater men than Samwell Mizida had fallen prey to that kind of hubris. Fallen prey to it and then disappeared into the night air, no sign that they'd ever been on the Path in the first place.

  Garth clapped his hands hollowly. The noise went scattering up and down the grave-silent pathway. “Congrats, Sammy, you freaked the royal fuck out of everyone! Let me see if I can find a Q-Comm so you can dial Trinity up! Then you can tell It you think It’s a fucking moron, maybe arrange to have a Gamma Plateau dropped on your skull.”

  Spur could tell by the tightening of Sam’s fists –not to mention the veritable avalanche of data funneling into him now he was back in the Emperor’s presence- that the EuroJapanese man was very close to pushing the limits of their Most Glorious Emperor’s patience. He moved swiftly and silently to the enraged Conglomerate owner, until he was standing no more than three inches away.

  Well within striking range.

  “Strike me.” The android ordered simply.

  Garth watched the crowd –already not paying attention with every fiber of their being- scamper further away still, doing their level best to keep the queue they’d formed intact the whole time. He chuckled.

  “I…” Sam looked around. He was all alone now. “I…”

  Spur continued, “Raise your hand. Strike me. Here, in the Emperor’s presence. I will be the only thing to react to the blow. Of that, I can assure you. If I am wrong, and I am programmed to say these things, then we know what will happen next, do we not, Samwell Mizida of MizidaCorp Ingenitex Limited?”

  Garth stepped forward, raising a hand. “Hey! I don’t know what’ll happen if you’re not Spur. Hey! Holy shit, I didn’t even think of that. What if you’re not Spur?” Garth whapped himself upside the head. “I mean, like, the fucking Platinum King sent me to find you, right? And both it and the goddamn Dark Iron King were cahooting all over the fucking place with Trinity! Jesus! What if you’re some kind of fucking, I dunno, nanotech Trojan Horse and when you get close enough you’re gonna explode all over the goddamn place. If you’re not Spur, what happens when he karate chops you?”

  Sam looked at the weirdly frantic gwailo through the corner of one eye. “I’m not going to attack him either way, you stupid NorthAMC idiot. If he isn’t the Emperor’s machine and I attack him, the Emperor’s Terracotta Soldiers will rise up out of the earth and pull me down to Yomi-no-kuni for my temerity to strike someone in his presence. If he is Spur, then I will be dead before I finish.”

  Overactive imagination preoccupied with the idea of their little canyon crevasse filling with Terracotta Soldiers and working out the best way of dealing with that kind of overwhelming threat without burning through the last shreds of AI-gifted extra-dimensional energy he’d absorbed during the whole ‘Teleporting Ninja Robot/Let’s Blow Up an Innocent Island’ Fiasco, Garth shook his head suddenly.

  “Wait. What?” He maneuvered until he was standing beside Spur, staring into Sam’s eyes. “What the actual fuck? Bro, like, five minutes ago I thought we were gonna be doing this whole fucking clip from a Kung Fu movie and now you’re all ‘hey, no, not really’? Like, I was looking for tree branches to run along and stuff. You know. Legit wire-fu action.”

  Samwell Mizida licked his lips nervously while the weird man with the odd eye made strange martial art passes with his hands and made even stranger 'haiyaaa' noises then looked around to see if there was any support from his neighbors and friends.

  Unsurprisingly, he'd become a ghost to them all.

  Embarrassed, he stammered out an answer. “I … I … I never thought it would go this far.”

  Eyes bugging so far out of his head that he wondered for a second if he’d damaged the sockets, Garth looked for an answer from Spur, who obliged. “It is the honor system.”

  Garth looked –tried to look- down the path towards where the Emperor’s castle or palace or whatever it was he lived in was supposed to be and couldn’t because there were –according to OS- another eighty thousand people in front of them and they’d already hustled their ass past about ten thousand.

  “The honor system.” He said this so flatly you could build a house on it. “The honor system. All you fucking people are lined up like this because of the honor system? And what? If some dudes like us come strolling along being like ‘lines are for suckers, bitches, see you at the Emperor’s table’ guys like you jump in front of them pretending like you’re gonna fight, only you know you won’t because mythical soldiers will rise up out of the earth –which is something I would like to see, honestly- and kill the both of you. What happens then?”

  “Either the two people come to an agreement, or the brazen one continues until they encounter someone who can convince them to stop being so rude.” Spur explained. “And if no one challenges them they may find themselves before the Emperor.”

  The android chancellor spread his hands as if to say 'it is that simple'.

  Garth glowered at Sam and Spur. “If I had glasses, here is the part where I would take them off and rub my goddamn eyes in frustration, because that is fucking stupid. How long have you been in this line?”

  “Three years.” Sam answered quickly, ducking his head down as he'd seen servants of his do many a time when being questioned by him. He wanted the gwailo named Garth and Spur to move along.

  Garth shook his head irritably. Three years. In a lineup. “Like I said. Stupid. Come on, Spur, let’s get moving.” He shook his head one last time at Sam and forged on ahead.

  Spur nodded. “The wise traveler knows who to argue with, and who not to. Though the man I travel with does not seem to be an old man with a walking stick, that is precisely who he is.”

  The android hastened to hurry after Garth.

  Sam blinked, then slumped down against the wall, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

  Unsurprisingly, people started walking past him.

  Even more unsurprisingly, he let them pass.

  ***

  “Look, pal.” Garth didn’t budge from where he stood, distrusting eyes trained on the shivering Dome that lurked more than a mile away; from their elevation, their destination appeared much further away, but … now he was here, all urgency had leaked out his left foot.

  “Cool your booster jets, Commander Cody. I get you been away from home for five thousand years and you need to, like, get caught up on back episodes of Doogie Howser, MD, The Later Years When He Changed His Name to House MD, but I ain’t budging from this spot until I am satisfied everything’s hunky dory.”

  Spur stood apart from the man who would be Creator –of a sort- contemplating the Emperor's home, just as the man who’d survived the Dark Iron King was, and for nearly the same reasons; the returning android considered the Dome, the people who spiraled downwards and inwards from one of the seven great paths etched into the stony walls, everything.

  Once upon a time, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles’ home had been atop biggest mountain in Tokyo, but that –as they said- had been a lifetime ago. Towards the end of the Harmony occupation, some … occurrence lost to the annals of history had caused a solid mile of stone and snow to simply … erupt, devastating the land all around the newly cratered mountain.

  Though that ancient world had been in the middle of the plague called the Harmony Soldiers, the devastation and loss of lif
e to Japan had bordered on the apocalyptic. Millions, dead, so many, and so quickly that emergency services had broken down almost instantly, forcing the crumbling government to … pile the lost souls in huge mountains of flesh and bone.

  The pyres had burned for weeks, filling the skies with charnel smoke and the empty streets with unwanted scents. Still, the Japanese of the day had been … pragmatic. With the eruption, with the death, with the horrific loss had come … providence.

  The Harmony Soldiers, evacuated, the Kith Warrior in charge of corralling the industrious and hardworking Japanese people –even then slowly but surely becoming EuroJapanese in nature thanks to the demoralization of the EU and the irradiation of their land- dispersed to other hotspots around the globe.

  The once-glorious island of Japan, labeled off limits, toxic, a waste of manpower, the few remaining citizens, spared the cruelty stemming from ex-dee madness.

  From out of nowhere, a self-titled Emperor-for-Life had claimed the destroyed mountain for his home, setting down the roots of a domain that would ultimately grow to cover first an entire island and second, whole Galaxies, but it was here and here alone that the effulgence of the god-king’s brilliant blue dome was seen.

  The effects spread across the entire island, which was of course why Trinity held no proper foothold on the land and why it appeared as it had so long ago. It was said that no one truly set foot on the Emperor's Land without His permission, and this was no story spoon-fed to infants. Not even the mighty Trinity or It's servants could cross the threshold without first paying homage to the great and powerful Emperor-for-Life.

  As it was, thus had it ever been.

  “By all means, Garth Nickels, take as much time as you like.” Spur replied after a long, reflective silence.