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

  The stone smacked noisily into his open palm. He dropped it to the earth, then returned to Spur, leaving the terrified woman to sob quietly into her hands at the close call, “Is the Emperor Baron Samiel?”

  “No.” Spur shook his head. “And neither is Samiel the Emperor.”

  Garth grabbed a fresh stone -this one worn so smooth he instinctively knew men and women had held it in their hands tirelessly through the centuries- and hucked it at the Dome. Striking the impossibly purple half-dome shield at speed, it cracked noisily in half before falling listlessly to blossom-covered earth. “The last man to wield the incongruity tried using it to destroy the world, but not before creating a plague of violence and misery far into the future of that same world. For his own benefit, for his own power, to satiate his own unending greed and hunger. Is that what your Emperor is doing?”

  Implicate in Garth's tone was a very clear picture of just what he'd do to a man with intentions such as those.

  “That is why you came, yes?” Spur asked curiously. “To determine if the Emperor is a threat to some great plan of yours? You’ve not spoken of it, but since you visited –and ultimately destroyed- King Barnabas Blake the One and Only because of his eventual plans for this Universe, it is easy to see you are here, now, for the same purpose.”

  “Is he a threat?” Garth wasn’t afraid, not necessarily, but … if the thing giving the Emperor his immense power was in fact the temporal incongruity, then … all bets were off, because that almost certainly meant that whatever else he was, the Emperor was also someone who’d once lived in that place that'd once been a pleasant Dream had by the Engines of Creation.

  He, Garth N’Chalez, had been transformed into a hypothetically unstoppable paradox of significant strength and ability, simply from a visit to the Engines’ idle day dream of a perfect Universe.

  Someone born there? Someone bathed in the radiance of the Engines' warm and fuzzy thoughts about how nice it would be to have nice things? A someone who'd subsequently jacked the incongruity from Samiel's hands and then traveled into the Unreality?

  Garth pursed his lips bitterly. With a provenance like that, this so-called Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles might very well possess the power to click his fingers and end the Universe right there on the spot.

  “You need to enter, to face your deepest sorrow, to have your chance at learning the Emperor's motives, Garth Nickels. There is no other way, and your time is up. Either do, or do not enter.” Spur stepped back to give the man some room.

  Garth shut his eyes. An exasperated sigh rattled through thinly pressed lips.

  He was so sick and fucking tired of all this lateral bullshit. He just wanted everything to end.

  End, so he could finally relax.

  There was nothing else to do.

  Pressing his hands against the purple surface, Garth was surprised at how cool and slick the incongruous shield was beneath his sweaty palms. “It’ll be nice to see the guys again, even with everything that eventually went down…”

  Spur watched Garth disappear in a puff of wavering lilac smoke and hung his head in relief.

  Good. It was done. Secrets and lies, lies and secrets. He was done with it all, now.

  The android knocked politely on the bright purple section of dome nearest him. Within seconds, three seams of light were incising their way across the skin of the impenetrable barrier, eventually forming a perfect, android-sized door.

  Spur smiled. It was good to be home.

  ***

  "I … I don't…”

  Something had grabbed hold of him, swift and tight, an all-over vise that gripped and squeezed harder than you could ever imagine, except maybe in your dreams.

  He could feel something inside that grip, some slender, sly, slithery thing, squirming through his pores, crawling inside him, looking. Poking and prying. Calling up old ghosts, forgotten demons, dismissed phantasms.

  Gorensworld loomed. Matter-hungry zombies, shambling echoes of the men and women they'd once been, edges fuzzy with uncontrollable Cloud Particulate. Well, the edges looked fuzzy, but in truth, those edges were sharp as sin, trillions of tiny buzzteeth capable of grinding even the most resilient matter into specks.

  Not good enough. Not … tasty enough.

  Gorensworld disappeared.

  "This is …

  Tannhauser's Gate loomed up, then disappeared just as quick as it'd reared it's nightmarish head; for all that'd happened there, for the unfathomable loss of life, the severance of an entire Galaxy from the whole … it'd been necessary. Grief? Yes. Assuredly.

  Guilt? No. The Bruush were contained. Trapped forever behind a Node.

  No more demons from that quarter.

  The images flashed quicker, and crueler, each one an acid-tipped scythe gouging chunks from his soul. Faces swarmed him, friends and family, loved ones all, abused by his presence, targeted by the darkness, swept up and driven mad or crushed flat or chewed to bits and vomited onto the pavement.

  …fucking …

  Not good enough.

  Yes. There was guilt. There was remorse and regret and all those other dirty, nasty feelings that hit you smack dab in the middle of the forehead while you were trying to sleep, but the hungry, digging thing rooting through his soul wasn't satisfied.

  Wouldn’t be satisfied until something proper had been found. A fitting stage for someone like the Kin'kithal, so he could strut about as he always did, cracking wise when being wise was the better course.

  More memories, faster and faster they came, now a spinning blizzard of frozen moments, each one lacerating and tearing, cutting away at the mighty Engineer's armor until …

  Until the right moment was found.

  Hallelujah.

  ***

  "I can't do this."

  "You have no choice. None."

  "This is bullshi…”

  "You keep saying that. It is, but it doesn't make it any less important."

  "What’re you going to be doing?"

  "Keeping them busy, of course. Keeping them distracted, and away from you. You’re the important one, here. I certainly can’t do this. Not…"

  "I’d rather you were here."

  "Why? This is what you've been dreaming about forever. A return. To a better place. To the Dream.

  "Call me old-fashioned."

  "Hah. That’s rich.”

  “What about the …"

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “That’s all under control. Nothing to worry about.”

  “I-if you say so.” A pause, only discernible here, in this place between places, in this moment between moments. "It’s coming."

  "It’s going to hurt."

  Hint of a shrug. "Probably. You’re used...”

  Something reached in and tore him completely, utterly, irrevocably in half. For a chromatic stutter of a second, he was in two places at once, then he was...

  ***

  Garth opened his eyes, momentarily distracted by the memory of just … blankness before remembering where he was.

  Which was right where he was supposed to be.

  If that were true, the Portuguese cabbie was about to flip his shit in three … two …

  As if on cue, the other man in the vehicle started swearing quite nastily in his milk tongue, going so far as to gesture quite rudely with both hands at the driver of a beat-up Honda Civic trying to race it’s way through the intersection. He was home. Unbelievable... Even though the whole experience was likely nothing more than a hallucination or cunningly crafted virtual reality, he was home, where Drake and everyone lived.

  It didn’t get any better than this. Now he was here, he felt a little foolish about his concerns. Garth figured he was probably going to be okay after all.

  Not only that, if the Emperor was playing fair, then he'd arrived quite a few months before Samiel had moved properly against Drake Bishop.

  And that meant …

  Shenanigans w
ould be had.

  There'd be time enough for what happened after, but first … Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez readied himself for the inevitable; with a head full of ancient memories, he knew what was coming, just as he knew it had to happen. Just like before.

  With blood and pain.

  The cabbie screamed angrily, vehemently in his native language, and slammed on the brakes while spinning the wheel to avoid sideswiping a BMW trying to edge them out of the lane.

  Garth only had enough time to steel himself for …

  A dull thump, a sharp crack, and soothing warmth, trickling down the side of his head...

  Another round of angry swearing, gestures and horn-leaning, an abrupt swerve to the right when the cabbie lost his temper, a swift crack in the side of the head, and nothing but unconsciousness until he woke up in a certain dorm room…

  1. Out There in the Wilds of the Universe

  Before We Leave

  Once upon a time a long time ago now, UltraMegaDynamaTron had been both a paean to one man’s enormous creativity and an outlet for that creativity, though during his time in Latelyspace and on Hospitalis, Garth Nickels had never really been afforded the opportunity to do much with the vast expanse of land, machinery, equipment and ideas he’d spent so much time developing.

  The events of the Game, his conflict with both Chadsik al-Taryin and Sa Gurant, even the terrorist undertaking in the Natural Museum of History … these conflicts had eaten his time, stolen him away from things he’d really rather have been doing than battling, say, the horrific quasi-deification of a literal God soldier or having the actual shit beaten out of him by someone who’d later turned out to be an actual, living nanotech warrior.

  Whatever else Garth had planned on doing with UMDT and it’s offshoots – Acme, Weyland, Mesa, OCP, UmbrellaCorp, and others-, a certain pudgy now-Chairman for the entire solar system had done his diligence in ensuring that the adopted Offworlder’s money and ideas had been put to proper use.

  So where before Garth Nickels –mad Engineer that he was- had worked from one small portion of his holdings, UMDT now had a staff of thousands, the aforementioned strange-sounding companies spreading, not only to all corners of the land acquired by the visionary Nickels in a mad rush to prove his intentions to a greedy Chairwoman, but to the entire industrial park, almost ten square miles, every square inch working day and night to bring a single man's dreams into the light.

  The presence of a homicidal and unfortunately plainly self-aware spaceship had at first proven something of a dire concern for the employees of the Nickels Industrial Park, what with the continual threat of assault from an unassailable vessel, but that worry had sorted itself out rather nicely; while the Latelian government had been smart enough to recognize an inherently unstable and unstoppable threat fairly quickly, every mercenary organization, crime family, bored-but-curious wealthy elite the world over had poured nearly all their resources into laying claim to the ship.

  With disastrous results, obviously, for them, but to great benefit of the UMDT staff; after all, how could you turn down free raw materials?

  On the downside, there were legal motions in the works by disgruntled companies who’d been forced to move because continual repair fees had threatened to bankrupt them. They weren’t getting too far because –it could be said in all fairness- the CEO of UMDT and the Chairman of the system were on very good speaking terms, and besides all that legal skullduggery, no one had asked for Hungryfish to be parked in their neighborhood, just as no one had suggested to the criminals in the region that the Offworld ship was an easy target.

  Now UMDT owned the whole shebang, as it were, and they were free to run as rampant as their curious minds could carry them.

  From baby rattles to cutting edge black hole engine design and everything in between, the first true Conglomerate to ever grace Latelyspace was a juggernaut of innovation and design, slowly but surely crawling –one way or another- into the homes and hearts of every man, woman and child in the solar system.

  With nearly unfettered access to the best building materials and next-next-gen equipment –some of which was actually designed in-house- the geeks and the nerds hired by Herrig DuPont to make Garth’s dreams a reality produced top quality … everything.

  And they were all profiting from it. Obscenely so.

  A dour, frightening man calling himself Huey but who was –or so the rumors went- an artificial mind merged with illegal biogenetic experiments performed by the homunculus Hollyoak spent as much time as he could limiting research into areas better left under cover of dark, and with good reason; their absentee CEO had never put a limit on what came out of his brain, so someone had to do it for him.

  In his downtime –or even when he was too busy to think straight- Garth Nickels had spent time doodling on his prote, on any nearby Sheet, sometimes on napkins, overly dusty tables, in the mud, with charcoal-tipped sticks … it was almost ridiculous.

  While digging through a desk full of paper, an intern had discovered a handful of simple sketches on how to design and implement cannons capable of turning a man’s veins to glass.

  Under a chunk of duronium?

  Implausible-seeming mathematical scribblings that shattered your preconceptions of space/time.

  Carefully designed directions on how to build what appeared to be a pizza oven that … well, actually that one appeared to be nothing more dangerous than a functional pizza oven, so...

  Huey caught a lot of flak from the nerds and geeks in the pen, but he was of a very singular mind when it came down to Garth Nickels and his doodles. What looked like a pizza oven could very well transform into a Pizzor, Destroyer of Worlds, so …

  Better safe than sorry.

  Ute pointed at the pizza oven, and Tomas raised an elderly eyebrow at the thin layer of dust. “There it is.”

  Tomas whacked it with his walking stick. A small drift of dust settled to the floor. “Why isn’t it being used?”

  “After I built it, I used it a few times, following his recipes.” Ute shrugged. “It works fine, but there are too many blinking lights and it makes the occasional odd noise. Once Huey put the fear of Imminent Murder by Pizza Maker into their hearts and minds, none of the others were willing to go near it. Herrig flat out told me that if I tried to market it he’d find a way to take all the money Garth left me away.”

  “Does it do anything else?” Tomas whacked it again with his stick. The method of escaping the system burned bright and clear in his mind, and they were wasting time skulking through a nearly abandoned workshop.

  “No clue.” Ute started walking again, though at a much slower pace; the elder Kamagana was spry for his age, but also roughly 1/8th the size of a normal Latelian, making his gait equal to that of a child. "That odd noise is very odd. No point in risking the early death of the Universe just because I want some melted cheese and meats on a thin piece of toasted bread."

  “Why are we here?” Tomas demanded suddenly, squinting to see through the dim lights and into the shadows surrounding them. “This whole building is abandoned. This is a waste of time. We have no time. Besides all that, your … what would you call them?”

  “No Goddie has come up for a proper way to describe our relationships with relations yet.” Ute flicked a switch on the panel he’d been angling for and massive overhead lights started popping to life, one after the other, with a loud clonk followed by a gentle buzz until each hit full intensity. “Calling someone great-great and so forth is a waste of time. With Harmony, we know the precise relationship. We leave it at that."

  This time, Tomas whacked Ute in the shin with his stick. It was like striking a mountain. “Children, then. Your children are waiting for us, and the longer they’re unavailable, the more likely it is that your … hrm … commanding officers will become suspicious.”

  “I have no commanding officers.” Ute keyed in a few commands on his prote. Somewhere else in the warehouse, large automated machines were now sifting through coded storage
boxes in search of the items he’d requested. “I am free.”

  The weird sensation such an admission brought about in Ute was one Tomas found very interesting. The most ancient God soldier would say nothing of what he meant by that –and similar- statements, just as he refused to explain in any way why he was suddenly so desperate to leave Latelyspace. Tomas readily felt the emotion pouring from the large man, but it was inexplicable.

  Ute shook the sorrow that threatened to roost in his brain free; ever since … ever since Herrig’s shocking display of power, he was different. He was a part of Harmony still, but he was also apart from Harmony. There was simply no other way to put it, and that fine division was … unnerving.

  There existed within Harmony a kind of communal well from which all soldiers drank, be they lumbering and mostly stupid Onesies all the way up to Foursies on the cusp of Five. A great and wondrous meeting of the minds, if you will, with old teaching the young, the young surprising the old.

  Naturally, there were levels within that well, and you needed to ask permission to speak to someone above your rank, but that permission was almost always given, for how can a young person learn if their elders refuse to teach?

  Beyond that, genetic filiation was always given permission, no matter what, because that’s how it was done.

  The original Harmony soldiers could burrow their way into your thoughts without permission, but it was a thing they rarely did, because no matter how scintillating their arrogance or how brazen their professed need, they recognized there was a way of doing things, and a way of not doing them.

  That being said, there was always a kind of … hum, or buzz. Not unpleasant, mind you, but a persistent thing, always there in the back of your mind. Many Goddies found it soothing, a reminder that your brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers were no further away than a sideways thought, that aid and support was no more than a whisper away.

  Ute no longer felt or heard that familiar buzz. Not unless he wanted to. The crackle of thirty million thoughts could be turned off, just as had been done by Herrig to make a true point of power. Not even mighty Fenris could locate him through the well of thoughts.