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

  And now they were going to meet up with their best friend in the entire world and it were gonna be well wicked.

  Why, they reckoned that now he was free and were Huey to suggest it, they might very well swing back to Trinity Prime and see how Lord N’Chalez were doin’, hey?

  “So,” they said as they stepped through the door as had sprung from their own imagination, “this priest walks into this bar, right, wiv this whore, okay? And he … what in the great bollocking fuck is this?”

  ‘This’ were empty space. Loads and loads of great flaming empty space as far as their cybernetically –nanotechnically- eyes could see. Which, in their case, were quite far indeed.

  It were not what they’d been expecting.

  “Orl right, lads, one of you is explain this, yeah? I in’t got the patience.” Chad pulled a cigarette out of thin air and lit it. The end smoldered brightly against the bleak backdrop of inky space because when you were Chad Sikkmund, sole master of proper nanotech, you could damn well do as you pleased.

  And if that meant smoking a fag in the utter void of space while other parts o’ you farted about tryin’ to make sense o’ some truly weird shite, then that were wot were goin’ to happen!

  He took a deep drag, exhaled, and gestured at empty space with his ciggy, orange firelight embers trailing away into nothingness.

  “As I is recall, when we is lookin’ for our best friend, we is, erm, basically able to hop out wherever the fuck we is ‘opin’ to be, right? Just like that an’ nice an’ easy to boot. Huey is all sorts of amazing, but he in’t us. He is need a spaceship or summink to move around. As there is no spaceship, well, the only uvver fing as makes possible sense is we got the fucking coordinates wrong. Which in’t s’posed to be possible, if you is follow. Coz we is uz.”

  One of the hims suggested they could properly fuck himself in the ear now that they were properly in charge, and though a few hims followed suit with a blazing row of equally grim and intriguing sexual escapades he were welcome to try out, eventually they all got around to suggesting that the ship had tellyported away.

  “Nah.” Chad shook their head and finished his ciggy off, then flicked the filter off into space, where it tumbled end over end, and prolly would do forever an’ ever, until Nickels destroyed the Universe in his own image.

  They lit another one, took a deep, introspective inhale and let the smoke settle right into their lungs. “Nope. They is not ‘ave that tech. Not even my mate could do that. ‘is brain don’t work in ‘Priestspace and even then, I reckon ‘e wouldn’t do that even if his cloned ballsack were on fire.”

  One of him revealed data reconstruction based on readings they’d done while he’d been smoking their face off.

  “Cor blimey. Is that a fing I can do?” Chad considered it.

  Now the locks were off and the chains’d been tossed down the rubbish bin, they supposed there were quite a lot of things they could do, as they’d been doing some of those things the whole time they’d been busy bein’ bonkers; they’d just been too damned insane or hollowed out with that fucking CyberPriest’s manipulations to notice. “’s bloody brilliant. Orl right, then, lads, let’s ‘ave a look at all this, then.”

  Chad Sikkmund read over the reports generated by one of him with interest. It were loads more technical than he personally thought he were capable of, which suggested that, sadly, more than one of them were closeted nerds.

  “You is lucky,” Chad swiped through a few more pages of holographic data impatiently, “that my mate’s mate is a nerd as well, as I find it quite disturbin’ that other you’s of me are smarter than the actual me, which is who I am. So, if I understand this correctly, which reminds us, if you do this again, make it easier for us to understand wivvout makin’ uz feel like a right twat, there was a giant fing ‘ere, and then there weren’t, and this fing is wot Huey were on.”

  Chad pursed their lips thoughtfully. “Worllll, the only fing as I is knowin’ of as can tellyport is them Quantum Tunnels. Is that a possible fing?” The rest of the Chad’s finished reading through Nerd Chad’s information and collectively shrugged their shoulders.

  In a Universe where one man could be the psychic repository for every form of Chad that could’ve been, might’ve been and –in more than one instance- Chads that never should’ve been, they all suggested it were reasonable to accept the possibility of a tellyporting Quantum Tunnel.

  Further, if there were anyone in the Universe other than King Nickels hisself who'd lay their hands on summink like a tellyporting Quantum Tunnel, it'd be the lad wiv an AI for a brain.

  Chad wrinkled their nose. Tracking Huey down if he were capable of blipping ‘ere and there ‘cross the Universe didn’t strike them as an easy task. Shame there weren’t some sort of Universal Bulletin Board friends and allies of Garth N’Chalez could use to leave each other messages, stuff like ‘Oi, I were poppin’ ‘round to see you, only you and your giant tellyporter fucked off seconds before we got there, where is you goin’ to be, you stupid twat?’.

  “What do we do, then, hey? I ain’t got no idea.” With an irritated frown, they saw they’d wasted an entire ciggy wiv their deliberations, so Chad created another cigarette and lit up. “Floor is open, lads, round robin this shit all day as you like.”

  And that were when The Mouth of Ages popped up in their early warning systems, only it were well too fucking late for them to do anything but sort of take a look at what they were about to encounter; the Chads, always and forever devout believers in running away as fast as they could whenever the situation proved to be more than they could handle, quickly discovered that their little patch of local time/space was completely and utterly fucked by the tremendous thing suddenly lurking directly behind them.

  They blamed Chad for the distraction with a chorus of spiteful words. Chad Himself, in no particular terms, explained in brightly colored images that left zero room for misinterpretation that if there were any one of thems that should be paying attention to this kind of shit, it were them and not him, as he were the main them and that's how it were goin' to be, movin' forward, sideways, backwards, through space and prolly e'en through time.

  Feelin' quite comfy in his verbal smackdown, Chad spun around. And stared at the vast ship coming their way. The edges of it were faint, diaphanous, slender golden threads washing away into the emptiness of space, but as you followed those tendrils towards the center, the golden hue turned brighter and brighter until it were almost impossible -e'en for them- to pierce the heart of the ship.

  Chad tried calculatin’ the size of the fuckin' fing wiv 'is own brains only to come up short. At the very least, what they were lookin' at were the kind of ship as should only exist in nightmares.

  Their cigarette fell out of their mouth.

  “Bollocks.” Chad whispered.

  Nerd Chad started piping up with all sorts of technical reasons why their tellyportation gag weren’t working, rounding the whole thing off with the terrible –and obvious- announcement that the gravitational field of a ship big as a Galaxy were considerably stronger than a black hole, so there weren’t going to be any fancy running away this time.

  They were going to get sucked into that thing. And there was no knowing what were in there, though if Chad were asked to have a guess, he reckoned that it weren't goin' to be stuffed to the tits full o' lads as were friendly and lookin' to 'and out space-apple pies and asteroid-cotton candy.

  Anyone buildin' summat this big definitely fell into the unfriendly side o' the spectrum, hey? So it were best to be on best behavior, so to speak.

  Chad centered themselves. “All right, fellas, we is in the shit now. I is too pretty to be killed, so I is goin’ to do summat well tricky. This here Universe is full of Suits. Well, not full, yeah, but there’s a few thousand. Time to put out a distress call. If that old fucktwat Trinity hears and comes running, well, that’s a risk we is take, yeah? If our man Nickels in’t free of Arcadia yet, we is need this threat dealt with for ‘im, orl right?
All right. ‘ere we go. Orl right, you muvverfuckers…”

  Endless Waves of Grain

  The farmer sat on the chair, staring out over the endless flowing golden and amber rows of grain that greeted him every morning, a pleasant smile on his face; since coming to this quiet, out of the way planet, the farmer had discovered a passion for making things grow that’d make his friends and relatives –had any of them survived the depredations of BishopCo’s most unkind business practices- nod their chitinous heads in full understanding.

  For how could any member of an insect race be anything but aptly suited to the purpose of bringing life to dead, pointless soil?

  Gwyleh Ronn, though, he'd always been different, even before the cruelties perpetrated upon his innocent, loving –and far too trusting- people had crushed them into the dust. Amidst a sea of warm thoughts and kind-hearted brothers and sisters by the billions, he, alone amongst all that, had loathed those thoughts, had distanced himself from their kind hearts, had sought only quiet, and the dark. And there he'd sat, festering like a mushroom, alienating himself from love and comfort.

  The joke was on him, he supposed.

  Gwyleh laughed. There was nothing else he could do. Last of his kind, living alone on an alien world, tilling the soil as the farmer his father had always wanted him to be when he'd done everything in his power to push his family to the furthest corners of his mind.

  There was nothing else to do but laugh.

  But those waves of grain, reaching as far as his eyes could see and quite a bit further than that, they filled him with a pleasance he could honestly say he’d never felt, not in the embrace of his people and certainly not under Trinity’s ‘employ’; anything endured under Trinity’s expert tutelage in destruction and mayhem was best described as ‘hollow and meaningless, with quite a bit of flame and disintegrated people’. There was no room in an Enforcer’s heart for anything else.

  The grain shifted and whispered beneath the hot sun, soft susurrations that shivered through Gwy's chitin and took root.

  The closest thing to how he felt now was when he’d been alongside Huey and the madman Chadsik al-Taryin.

  But it hadn't started off that way.

  Not at all.

  If anything, the kindled passion of hate and fire had burned all the brighter, elevated to new heights by both Chadsik al-Taryin and the atrocity calling itself Huey. Gwyleh was morbidly embarrassed at the destruction he’d wrought on that world in pursuit of Huey and Chad, but only in hindsight.

  In the beginning, seconds after falling through that spontaneously generated wormhole, he’d still been a full-fledged Enforcer, intent and hell-bent on finally eradicating two monstrosities that should never have been permitted to exist.

  On the one hand, a psychotic mass-murderer guilty of enormous and incalculable crimes against who knew how many innocent civilians, within reach.

  On the other, a rogue AI sphere entombed inside a perfectly formed, far-too enhanced clone body spawned from the blackest of black Latelian science, close enough to smell.

  Their deaths would've brought enormous gratitude -or whatever you wanted to term it- from Trinity Itself. So off he'd popped -so to speak-, beginning a phase of destruction rarely seen inside Trinityspace.

  It hadn’t been until later, when everything and everyone had calmed down enough to actually talk, that certain … elements hitherto left unknown by the Offworld Enforcer had come to light. Important elements, things the machine mind would destroy entire galaxies to keep quiet.

  Things about Garth N'Chalez. The things he wanted to do.

  Why they needed doing, and why he was the only one capable.

  And with his powerful telepathy -not to mention Chad and Huey's willingness to allow him the step- digging into his compatriot's minds, Gwy had at last come to understand, respect and support those things.

  And thus they’d begun the adventure of making their way back to Latelyspace, so they might save the wildly improbable Garth Nickels from the eternal prison he’d been tricked into.

  Only …

  Only Gwyleh had grown tired of the adventure, and far too soon for his boon companions’ happiness, but they’d understood.

  Well, Huey had understood.

  Chad had gone on at great length in that barely discernible mother tongue of his, a language populated almost entirely of curse words. It'd taken some time and a lot of explaining, but he, too, had eventually come to grips with the loss of the 'Third Musketeer'…

  No one to blame there, friends.” Gwyleh said softly into the evening breeze. “Freeing my Suit from Trinity’s prying eyes … changed the dynamic. You couldn't have known."”

  Unbeknownst to everyone save Trinity Itself, therefore, Suits held within their powerful frames … temperamental adjustors. That’s what Huey’d called them. Chad had called them ‘absofuckinglutely the worst kind of fucking shite in the entire fucking Universe, hey, a man’s mind is his own effing castle, right? Muckin’ about wiv that ain’t the right fucking fing, now is it?’

  Whatever the embedded mental commands were –temperamental adjustors or total fucking bullshit- his Suit had kept him pliant to the machine mind’s eternal quest to crush, kill or destroy those things –people, planets, solar systems, kings, queens, demigods, ancient species both grand and deplorable- that were unwanted.

  And in the Unreal Universe, there was so very much that was unwanted, this close to the end of all things.

  When Huey and Chad had assailed the Suit -and therefore its internal environs- they couldn't have possibly known the extent of Trinity's influence over their agreeable chum, nor could they have possibly foreseen that one day -far too soon- the faint vestiges of intent to be anything more than a farmer would blossom into a soul-demanding need.

  But Gwyleh Ronn, sensing the subtle shift in his reason for being, had kept those small whispers of grain rushing through him silent, for there were bigger and more important things that needed doing.

  Freed from worrying about Gwy going off the deep end or Trinity Itself seizing control of the hostless Suit, the trio had started their grand escapade, fighting pirates, freeing a princess from a dragon –technically not an actual princess, but some kind of important woman in some kind of Human hierarchy and also, not truly a dragon, but a rather tiresome criminal- and so on and so forth until they’d come to light on Fesseren-17, a bucolic, pasture-filled world.

  And that, as they said, had been that.

  Fesseren had hit poor old Gwyleh Ronn right between his fifth and six eyes, filling him with an unmistakable and unbeatable longing to be one with the land, as his parents had done, as had theirs.

  Whispers of home had become shouts, and Gwy … well, he hadn't been precisely powerless, but neither had he been unwilling.

  The abrupt change in the wind had caught his new friends off guard, and rightly so; while both Huey and Chad could easily be considered fresh Powers in the Universe, they were still nevertheless rogues and assassins.

  Traveling with an Enforcer -no matter their route was made via mundane transport- bestowed a legitimacy you just couldn't buy. Entire worlds bowed down to the demands made by an official Enforcer. Quantum Tunnels opened without question.

  With him departing, Gwy had transformed the journey back to Latelyspace from 'mildly irritating, but with some nice jaunts here and there' to 'Christ on a fuckin' sidecar, Gwy, we is now gon' 'ave to figger out a way to get through Trinity's Army wiv nuffink but our good looks an' all, now, hey, and we is reckon that might not be as simple as, hey?'.

  In the end, however, recalcitrant Chad had seen and understood the desperation in Gwy's multi-faceted eyes, and had relented.

  Their farewell hadn't been teary-eyed, but there had been some gleaming moments, here and there…

  Gwyleh watched his immense grain fields shift in the wind, caught the telltale sign of the worker about his job in the way one row shifted against the ever present, always calm, always soothing winds of Fesseren.

  At the
beginning of his new life, Gwyleh had checked the newsfeeds every few days for signs or hints that Huey and Chad had been successful in their endeavors, but only sparingly, like a fish popping to the surface for a breath of fresh air; they’d managed to manufacture a simulated death convincing enough to throw off Adjutants or Enforcers should anyone come looking for their departed brother. They’d already managed to sever those ties connecting the Suit's AI to anything left behind by Trinity, leaving the Offworlder with a mostly functional and highly technical piece of equipment, but…

  Digging too deep or too often into the communication network that existed between Trinity and It’s Enforcers would be to risk discovery.

  So infrequent searches had become sporadic peeks had become 'perhaps next week'…

  Which made him something of a coward.

  Him. Gwyleh Ronn, a coward.

  The telepathic insect Enforcer turned farmer’s thorax clicked with laughter. The terror of Humanity, the only uncaring, unthinking, unfeeling Enforcer in the whole of Trinityspace, destroyer of thousands of worlds, a coward.

  But there it was. He loved being a farmer more than he’d ever loved being an Enforcer, more even than he loved the only two people in the Universe who’d shown him proper friendship.

  That love was in no small part thanks to the mental freedom he'd been given by those two friends of his.

  “It is a strange old world, isn’t it?” Gwyleh asked the slowly whispering fields of grain.

  :alert:

  Gwyleh hung his head.

  He'd smelt the change in the wind early this morning, and wished he hadn't. Things were coming to a boil.

  :townsfolk approaching. They are armed with substandard equipment. Four hundred axes. Three hundred knives. Several guns. Allow me:

  Rising from his comfortable chair, Gwyleh commanded his … companion. “Return to me.”

  He cast a wistful look at the rickety old contraption. He’d built that chair even before he’d built the small home behind it. Had, in fact, built the house around the chair, because the first thing he’d imagined doing on his new land was sitting on a chair, looking out over fields, as he’d been doing since the morning, when the first of many traitorous, villainous thoughts had careened unwanted and unmistakable into his head.