Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6) Read online

  Here, this close to the Emperor, the lines of the penitents were thin, sparse, indicators of true resilience and need. No more than a double circle of loyal EuroJapanese surrounded the Emperor’s glittering azure home, less than a thousand men and women. “If you wait long enough, you may see the Emperor choose someone.”

  Garth wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t interested in seeing the Emperor do anything. He wanted Intel, and dammit, Spur was gonna cough the answers up or they'd all be learning about mythical Terracotta Soldiers and the shit they could do. And in short fucking order. “So the Emperor’s been here thirty thousand years.”

  Spur flickered a smile across his strict face. Always after information, this one, always hungry. It was the one reason Spur hadn't yet put all his faith in the man. For truly, Garth N'Chalez would need no inside track, so to speak. “So it is said. Though, being from the same time as the Emperor, you do understand it is easier to round up or down for the purpose of making a legend.”

  Garth snorted so loudly some penitents –fifteen of them, now standing off to one side and pretending they were on a sightseeing tour instead of wasting the best parts of their lives to talk to a guy who was probably some antiquated Harmony nutbag, or even worse, a Kith or Kin- made noises like startled birds and flocked en masse further away, which got the other penitents all kinds of upset.

  The Kin’kithal warrior tapped the side of his head, a semi-conscious gesture he’d been getting up to ever since the OS had come back online. It was a terrible tell, he knew, but it was no better or worse than talking out loud to yourself -which was a thing he was well aware of, thank you very much-, but it did have the added bonus of being slightly less crazy seeming than having a full on conversation with yourself.

  The Universe of the future accepted many things on many levels, but some rando dude having a chinwag with himself set people on edge for some reason. Personally, Garth blamed Chad the Wingnut for poisoning the entire Universe against him.

  “I know all about adjusting the narrative.” Garth replied enigmatically, distracted by icons and data flowing across the HUD. The inner panorama of his mind filled with data culled from the environment.

  Atmospheric pressure. Oxygen content. All normal. OS tried giving him data on the half-sphere that was the Emperor’s domain-within-a-domain, but Garth shifted his attention elsewhere; he wasn’t interested in the place where the Emp hung his crown. Not yet.

  Systems designed for cracking into enemy hardware and to identify weaknesses in structures or to just plain old wreck some shit were tasked elsewhere, targeting local vegetation for cellular inconsistencies and the soil beneath their feet for nitrogen decay.

  The data wasn’t perfect because never once in his life had Garth imagined he’d need to figure out precisely how old something was, but the OS did it’s best either way; according to a fresh round of data flowing through the real-time monitors, vegetation and soil had enjoyed a nice, long steady cycle of nearly eighteen thousand years of uninterrupted growth and decay.

  “Not good enough.” Garth turned his focus back to the way they’d come, through one of the seven mountain passes and cranked up the processing speed by dialing down on errant information that wasn’t doing him any good; he didn’t need to know they were breathing air because he was breathing it.

  What he wanted now was data on the mountain itself.

  Spur gazed on as Garth continued digging into the history of the Emperor’s lands, more than impressed and with a mounting sense of unease. The android was impressed because the data was very nearly visible as it flowed from the surrounding area and into whatever passed for the operating system of the man’s awe-inspiring suite of augments; whatever Garth's true need was, it'd driven him to the heights of maddened genius during the pursuit.

  In all the millennia of the Emperor’s life, never once had a thinking engine quite like this one been brought to bear on these most fabled lands. It truly was a wondrous thing to behold.

  That being said, concern overrode the android's fascination with Garth's augmentations because no matter how powerful the Emperor-for-Life was, or how indomitable the source of his powers were, the man turning his steely gaze at the bedrock of their home had been out there in the Universe, doing things.

  Things that might make him a legitimate threat to the very stability of the Emperor.

  If the man trying to pierce the veil of truth wasn’t Garth' N'Chalez, you still needed to appreciate his accomplishments.

  Even just his most recent escapades were … beyond noteworthy.

  This man had defeated the Dark Iron King in his own home, had brought down The Dome. Had piloted a stolen Tynedale/Fujihara heavy excavation craft on his own. Had called up the Trinity AI intending on receiving answers to all his questions like it was something he’d done before and like it was no difficult thing. He’d reprogrammed an entire island satellite to do it, had caused the land to shudder with his passage.

  Garth smacked a fist into an open hand. The sound split the silence in half. “Gotcha.”

  “You found the answer you were looking for.” Spur itched to be back beneath the Dome. He’d been gone for too long. There was no guessing the Emperor's state of mind after being alone for five thousand years.

  “I did.” Garth turned to Spur. “This is Mount Fuji, which I'd buy at the dollar store without blinking, but these days, I don’t believe anything I hear at first blush, and that includes the shit coming out my own damn mouth hole… See, after the balls-out weird shit I seen, the good old Emperor could’ve, like, summoned this goddamn thing right out of the earth itself.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Fucked if I know, man.” Garth rolled his shoulders. OS wanted another gander at the shimmering dome surrounded by praying EuroJapanese penitents, but he genuinely wasn't ready to confront the unassailable truth of what waited for him down in the basin's center. “Guys with this kind of power usually do what-the-fuck-ever they want because they can. Christ, Barnabas Blake used his nanotech powers to plague his gearheads with hundred foot tall steampunk robot versions of himself, so. You know. There’s that.”

  Spur opted for silence… though to be honest, he did hope Garth divulged as much as he could about the Dark Iron King and His doings 'neath The Dome.

  “If you are satisfied that this area is the same from the ancient past, and that there are no … untoward methods being used to preserve the sanctity of this holy ground, what are your concerns?"

  “Everything I saw or read about this Emperor of yours is basically what you been telling me this whole time.” Garth moved back to where Spur stood, much to the pleasure of the cowering penitents. “Thirty thousand years, blah blah blah. Emperor-for-Life is eternal, and so on. But this whole … not ruined by the shitty weather and all that crap is bugging the hell out of me. I mean …”

  “The power of the Emperor spills outward for a great distance." Spur rolled a languid, pristine hand towards the lushness surrounding the Emperor's home. "And as I've said, the methods of preservation are non-invasive."

  Garth rolled his eyes. “I figured that out all on my own, sparky. You claim it’s not nanotech that keeps everything super-wonderful here, which kinda is something I can get on board with because let’s be honest, by now everyone knows the Universe hates nanotech.” He wanted to add except when it doesn’t, but he didn’t want to waste his breath pointing out the obvious. “I was looking for proof of this place’s actual age. ‘neath The Dome, it was obvious. Signs of it were everywhere. But this place is practically idyllic. Minus, you know, the huge fucking crater where the top of this mountain used to be, and, uh, all the … weird beards just … chilling. If this Emperor of yours is a fucking wingnut running a cult of personality from his basement, I'ma have issues."

  Sensing Garth was irritable and that he was trying to get him to react unfavorably to the term 'this Emperor of yours', Spur did what he did best under these circumstances: he ignored the not-so-subtle barb by staying on point.
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  “And what did you find?”

  Garth grinned, pleased as hell. “Microscopic traces of the initial explosives used to detonate roughly one hundred kerbillion tons of solid mountain on top of the people down below. An experimental explosive used by the Armies of Man roughly fifty years before the end of war, which I still kind of wished I’d seen." The Kin'kithal waved a hand. "Anyways. Detronex-9. Nasty stuff. We stopped making that shit before I hopped into Alpha on account of holy fuck was it unstable. Now, the chemical structure is complex, but yeah. Detronex. Boom. A really big one. Thing that's got my ass hairs all rustled up, though, is why in the fuck would the Armies of Man blow up half a goddamn mountain? I mean, obvy, whichever Kith or Kin was over here prolly bounced right the fuck out the moment the dust settled, but … AoM tried to avoid collateral damage wherever possible. The death toll must've been … exorbitant."

  “The true age of this place is that important to you?” Spur asked, very nearly quizzically. “And the Emperor's preservation of such an idyllic locale? These are the things that bother you the most. Whatever for?”

  “’s like this, Spur-o-rino." Garth finally looked properly and fully at the Dome, making a fake gun with his thumb and two fingers. It sat there. An obvious, intentional harkening to a time and place that simply should not be in the Unreal Universe. “There are way too many fucking things left lying around from the War. Don’t like it. Don’t trust it, I had nothin’ to do with it, and that, my ghost-like robo-pal, gets right on my tits. Makes me suspicious that someone else has been banging around behind my fucking back this whole time, doin’ shit under the radar, shit I didn’t account for. I know it’s not Super Dad the Insane, ‘cuz he’s across The Cordon and won't be gettin' past the front gate until I let him, so, yeah. Ain’t him. And if it ain't him or, well, yeah, Trinity too, now I think on it, that means I don't know who it might be. And to be blunt, I don’t fucking like that at all.”

  “What is your problem with Emperor-for-Life’s Dome?" Spur hoped he didn't sound overly keen to learn Garth's reasons for disliking the situation.

  “Well,” Garth drawled the word slowly while making a big show of gauging the Emperor's abode very intently, “’s like this. I did manage to acquire some Intel on this place, and on your Emp, but as it was for Barnie the Asshole, so to was it for your so-called God King and this place. Super sparse. Like, there was more information on back issues of Ultra Spider Man, and that stuff doesn’t even exist over here. Everything I saw, everything I read, everyone I met spoke about the wondrous, shiny, shimmery, blue dome. Called it sapphire, or azure, or what the hell ever." Garth clasped his hands in front of his waist as if to say 'point made'.

  One of Spur’s eyebrows quirked. “You imply it is not blue.”

  Garth fired his imaginary gun a second time, right smack dab at the middle of the paradoxical structure and all the bullshit hidden inside. "This bitch is purple."

  Spur dipped his head in satisfaction. “The Emperor will see you now.”

  ***

  If you strained hard enough, you could almost make your reflection out in the glossy, shiny purple surface of the Emperor-for-Life’s Dome as a faint smudge of ‘not Dome’ colors. The effect was unsettling, like being turned into a real-life, people-version of a melting clock.

  Garth did this, making faces at himself, trying to see past the ugly reflection and into what lay beyond. His own senses and those of OS –intently trying to prove that there was even anything in front of him at all- screamed quite loudly that something other than his own warped reflection should be visible inside.

  OS didn’t like the purple half-shell. It hated it more than the Dome of Gears, because at least that gargantuan edification had impinged against the structure of Reality. It’d had a definable mass, a distinct impression on the earth, a measurable and quantifiable existence. It was there because you could see it.

  The Emperor’s home made no such impression, held no such existence.

  In it's own way, OS suggested Garth change his mind and go somewhere else.

  Spur watched Garth stick his tongue so far out of his mouth he worried the man might tear it loose. “Second thoughts?”

  Garth looked at Spur, sheepishly tucking his tongue back into his mouth. “No. Trying to find out what the Dome is made of. It doesn’t seem to exist.”

  “Yet here it is.” Spur replied tonelessly. Garth wasn’t alone in his efforts to prove or disprove the existence of the dome, or to even uncover how it’d been built, but he was alone in actually possessing the machinery to do so; the Emperor actively prevented anyone with implants, augments and equipment from getting this close to the shimmering purple construct, but Garth's quadronium-enhanced biomechanics were of an order never before seen or even contemplated.

  If anyone could bypass the Emperor's security, it was N'Chalez.

  Alas," Spur spread his hands, mirroring his words, "your own eyes will have to suffice. The Emperor's power is all."

  Garth wrinkled his nose. He was all the way in the dark, here. More than he’d ever been, and certainly more than when he’d decided to foolishly brace the Dark Iron King in his lair without full and total knowledge of what he was going to go up against.

  Those events had irrevocably changed him. Some might argue for the better, that by coming to grips with the predatory nature of the Kin’kithal –that thing he’d referred to as Specter - he was a full and proper being now, but there'd been no time to consider the ultimate ramifications of what that meant. It seemed to suggest that he was now more capable of controlling the bleak, vicious need for domination and control, to destroy everything around him, but you just couldn't know for certain until … well, until the shit hit the catastrophic fan.

  “Guilt, hey? Regret?” Garth ached to slump against the curved purple structure that screamed it was no thicker than an egg shell, but there was no fucking way. He wasn’t touching anything until he was goddamn good and ready. “So how does the Emperor do that, then?”

  “What powers the Dome possesses also gives him the ability to see into the deepest part of man, Garth.” Spur kept the aggravation from his voice as best he could; his traveling companion had been going over this particular nugget of information over and over again, almost as if he didn’t believe it were possible.

  A sorrowful smile slipped across Garth’s face before vanishing quick as it’d come. “There are so many regrets, though, Spur. So, so many. More than I can count, and more than you can possibly even imagine… Does the Emperor just pick one at random or what?”

  “The process is automatic, pulled from your subconscious. Somewhere inside of you, Garth Nickels, there is a guilt that overshadows all others. You may not be consciously aware, but … you know. Everyone always knows." Spur explained, wondering for a moment what the penitents this close to finishing their own journeys thought of the events unfolding before them.

  Some of them had been waiting to see the Emperor for nearly ten years, meaning all hostility, impatience and eagerness had been ground out. They were perfect vessels, completely suited to the Emperor’s ministrations.

  When –if- they were given leave to enter, they would receive their lessons without difficulty.

  If they were told to leave … some small percentage might find it within them to make the journey back through those endless lines to where family or board members or associates might be waiting to take them home, but most, upon learning the Emperor held no use for them, generally took their own lives right there on the spot, spilling their blood on the soil beneath their feet.

  The cherry blossoms growing around the Emperor's true domain were significantly darker than their sister trees further up the way, intentionally made so by the Emperor, all for the drama.

  Garth had been through no such conditioning. He was hot-tempered and fiery and far too inquisitive and intelligent for his own good. He was –in his own words- suffused with machinery an actual step above King Barnabas Blake's nanotech.

  Not only that, h
e claimed he still carried the seeds of Dark Iron in his veins.

  Were Spur capable of the feat, he'd go paler still every time he tried to fathom the implications of Dark Iron being loose on the Outside.

  Spur believed most fervently that letting N'Chalez inside as he was right now was perhaps the most dangerous course of action. Certainly no good would come of it, and while they'd been preparing for this moment for a considerable amount of time, it was all playing out backwards.

  When Garth said or did nothing to imply readiness, Spur resumed. “Somewhere in that mind of yours, where the hypothetical soul resides, there is a glimmer of some deed or misdeed that haunts you. The Emperor brings that moment to life. You go through it over and over again until…”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Garth shook his head in frustration. “Groundhog Day. Except … is this a virtual thing or what?”

  Spur gestured to their surroundings. “Does this appear virtual to you, Garth? Though we are not inside the Dome, the Dome has measurable effects on this outside world. The Emperor himself keeps this land and the air and everything else you see in perfect condition. Elsewhere on this world, machines the size of Stacks provide breathable air for It’s people, and complicated, genetically modified and machine-assisted farms provide enough food for them to eat without dying. Machines stretching thousands of miles float in the air, carefully controlling the weather, pushing eternal lightning storms and poisonous rains across and around the globe, always dancing on the edge of failure. Without those machines, more than three-quarters of this world would be dead within days. The only area that would remain untouched is here, Garth, and nowhere else. The Emperor’s power is undefinable, but quantifiable.”

  “So where's the power come from, then?” Garth demanded bluntly.

  A pleasant smile crossed Spur’s ordinarily somber face. “If you see purple, you know the answer already."

  Garth kicked at the earth, accidentally booting a rock unerringly towards one of the penitents. Terrified that it might strike the poor woman, causing the Terracotta Warriors to rise up out of the earth, Garth sped to catch it.