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

  It appeared that the fine men and women of bucolic, pastoral Fesseren found they could no longer tolerate a quiet Offworlder who did nothing more and nothing less than provide them with more grain than they could ever hope to use, and at prices so fair and compromising that they themselves had more time to spend at home with their friends and families than tilling the earth.

  :they mean to do you harm!:

  “Of course they do.” Gwyleh agreed.

  Of course they did. His predatory eyes caught sight of the dust plumes rising up from the ground over by the east fields. Even though their route added something like ten minutes and all kinds of telltale signs about their approach, they were taking the roads, as he’d known they would.

  They didn’t want to ruin the fields. Because of course they didn’t.

  :then…:

  “Return to me.” Gwyleh commanded. There was a sense of great speed and a wink of quicksilver catching brilliant red sunrays, and Suit stood beside him, tall, gleaming, indestructible. It was breathtaking, even to the being who’d worn it for decades, a thrilling, exciting display of technology and power so wondrous, so … terrifying that there was no real need to guess why most folk simply bowed their heads and let Enforcers do as they wanted.

  The impartiality, the enduring stoicism. The implicate nature of the Enforcer demanded obeisance.

  :this is a terrible idea:

  “What would you have me do? What would you do?” Gwyleh demanded, wishing he’d had the foresight to bring his pipe out from the kitchen. It was a horrible habit, one that actually made him violently ill no matter he’d been doing it for more than a year. But now, standing on his porch with his only companion, ready to brace a pack of enraged village idiots, Gwyleh Ronn couldn’t help but feel it’d help set the mood.

  Enforcers and dangerous Offworlders didn't smoke pipes. They gloomed. They bristled. They … they ate babies.

  Gwy rolled his many eyes at the thought inadvertently pulled from one of the idiots that were swiftly approaching.

  Babies would hold no nutritional value for someone such as Gwyleh Ronn…

  :analysis of the situation suggests we would only need to kill three people. Mayor Vincelz Comserratti, Sherriff Calhoun Sinchetes and the Barmaid Missy:

  “The barmaid.” Gwyleh knew why he’d kill the barmaid, if that were the sort of thing he was going to do today, but he was legitimately curious how his Suit had come to the same conclusion.

  :reconstruction of pattern analysis indicates that Barmaid Missy is a rabble-rouser. Tracking movements and replicating repeated behavior through pattern analysis shows she's been visiting no less than fifteen of the men involved in today’s events, and, in the words of Marm Sontacgue, ‘getting her skirts up’. There is a 90% probability that a single, tightbeam maser shot through her forehead will forestall the inevitable for quite some time. Killing the Mayor and the Sherriff will…:

  “I … we … won’t be killing anyone anytime soon, Suit.” Gwyleh grimaced as the first of the old trucks driven by the people of Fesseren made it round the corner. Men and women and a startling number of teenaged children were piled into every single vehicle.

  In about three minutes, choices would need to be made. In Chad's particular vernacular, oh yes, those choices would need makin', hey, wouldn't they just?

  Madness. Sheer madness. Their thoughts were a rampaging cauldron of half-formed ideas, deep, swirling fears of the alien, the unknown. Here and there were diamond-hard pinpoints of cruel intent, outright xenophobia, murderous lust. It combined into a morass of sick brutality that only highlighted the reasons why Trinity had found it so easy to manipulate the lone survivor of a lost world.

  Human minds were messy, illogical, disordered. Gwy wondered -not for the last time- how it was that any single one of them managed to make it past childhood without jamming a soldering gun into their ears…

  The worst –as Suit had pointed out- was Barmaid Missy. The girl was mad as a hatter, cracked all the way through her brain pan. She wasn’t even particularly against him, which was the amusing part; dear old Missy had been spending time on the local ‘nets, reading everything she could find on the Dark Ages, sparing no concern over whether the matter she so avidly consumed was fact or fiction.

  And this close to … this close to the Dark Age? There was so very much fiction, none of it hopeful, all of it morbid, all of it lurid.

  Gwy dug a little deeper, just enough, easily skirting towering pillars of diseased lunacy stuffed pregnant with grim flashes of Offworlder rapists mingled with intangible horrors lurking in the background until … until…

  The ex-enforcer blinked.

  Of course.

  Dark Age Madness.

  No wonder. There was one coming, sure enough, especially and doubly so if Garth Nickels and his friends were successful.

  Suit shifted it’s arms, sprouting a number of weapons. :I know what you said. Not killing anyone is one thing, but inviting them to kill you is another. A display of intent will level the playing field.:

  The lead truck came to a screeching halt, kicking up dust and dirt and ripping through the first row of grain closest to the house. Gwyleh shook his head at that. Suit shifted it’s stance and aimed it’s guns directly at Barmaid Missy as she hopped free from the back of the truck with fifteen of her friends. Gwy could easily imagine the flood of data streaming into the riderless Suit's HUD, and wondered idly if Suit would listen to his demands.

  The Mayor, the Sherriff and a few deputies disgorged themselves from the cab of the truck, the latter drawing their pitiable service revolvers when they saw Suit was armed for bear.

  By his count, there were just over three hundred unhappy townsfolk glaring him down. Gwyleh shifted his thorax muscles around so he could speak in tones bearable by the humans; while he did so, the other trucks arrived, slightly less destructively than the first, disgorging even more men and women.

  The fine folk of calm, agrarian Fesseren had whipped themselves up a good old posse. The insect farmer hoped they didn't feel the need to start a few bonfires to set the mood.

  They were too close to the grain fields, you see, and they didn't seem particularly on the ball enough to have concerns about setting the whole place alight.

  “Afternoon, Sherriff, Mayor. Friends. How are you on this fine day?” His human voice -reedy and thin-sounding- washed over the horde of jumped-up hicks.

  Sherriff Calhoun could scarcely take his eyes off … well, he reckoned he didn’t rightly know which … which … which thing to keep his eyes on, truth be told; he’d seen the bug fella on and off through the years, mostly when the fella come in to town to sell his grain, but there was just something off about the way the Offworlder tilted his big insect head this way and that when he was talking to you.

  Made a man feel as though Gwyleh was getting ready to eat you up, like one a’ them praying mantis’ you found every now and then when you were out in the fields.

  Then there was the … suit of armor. It talked, if you got up too close, as some of the boys had learned real quick. It talked, and if you pushed –as those boys had, because some folk didn't have a lick of sense, no matter how hard you tried to hep them- it pushed back hard enough to break bones.

  Now, it was pointing weapons at all of them, which –Cal could tell- had some of the more excitable in the crowd fit to bust out their own weapons proper-like.

  Mayor Comserratti stepped forward, hands clutching the suspenders on either side of his considerable bulk, a fine, sly smile on his face as he took in the situation. This had to come to an end, oh yes indeed it did, this … this … consorting with aliens. “Mighty fine day, Gwy. Roundabout the best sunset we’ve seen this whole year, wouldn’t you agree?”

  The crowd muttered sullenly. This wasn’t why they’d come out to the Offworlder’s farm. They’d come out to roust an alien off their planet and take what was his for their own. It wasn’t even against the law, because technically, the thing they were looking at right t
hen wasn’t from their world, so how could an alien own things on another planet they weren’t from in the first place?

  Suit did it’s best to whisper. :this crowd doesn’t look pleased. Let me…:

  Gwyleh winced as Suit’s words washed over the crowd. Guns and knives were brandished even more prominently and Missy the Barmaid adopted this sickly, pleased look on her otherwise lovely face.

  The ex-Enforcer wondered if any amongst her people could feel how bruised she was inside, rotten like a peach left out in the sun too long, and if they did, whether they knew what it was. Her thoughts glittered like an abscess tooth, leaking poisonous gasses directly into her soul.

  The miserable female opened her mouth to say something awful, and Gwyleh struck. A quick, furtive lance of pure thought across the 528hz range. The wordless, thoughtless spike of psychic energy rattled around in Missy’s venomous head and clamped her mouth shut tight as a sealed oil drum before the silly cow could start anything the entire planet might eventually regret.

  It was the first time in a long time he'd used his natural talents this way, and Gwy genuinely hoped it'd be the last.

  Aloud, Gwyleh responded, “Why, yes, Mayor, I do believe it is one of the best sunsets I’ve seen. I’d invite you in for some freshly made lemonade, only I don’t drink the stuff and I don’t have three hundred and twelve glasses.”

  While the crowd laughed nervously at the Offworlder’s casual joke and recognition of how poorly the situation was for it, Calhoun looked over his shoulder at Missy and bit back a curse. She looked like she’d forgotten her own name.

  Suit took a step forward, driven by autonomous programming to protect it’s Wearer. Didn’t matter that it was mostly free to do as it would. So long as the Wearer was alive, the Wearer received protection, and there were more variables occurring out there in the crowd than it believed Gwyleh was capable of processing. :why are you here?:

  The Mayor opened his mouth to speak, but the Sherriff bulled ahead, literally stepping forward to cut the leader of their small town off. “You need to leave. Now. Tonight.”

  Golden yellow links flared in the mental space where Gwyleh’s profound telepathy existed, forging a solid connection between the Sherriff and Missy the Barmaid, who was still working diligently to find her voice. Of course. He’d missed it, mostly because he loathed spending time inside any being’s mind –least of all Humans, with their cluttered, incoherent flow of poorly mixed and even poorer understood selves- but also because he’d been interested in being normal.

  Best to tread lightly, then; connections like the ones bonding Calhoun and Missy were the sorts of things that could start wars. She was blissfully mute -with a face ugly as storm clouds now, but still silent- but if she or any of the others were pushed too far…

  Brushfire…

  “I am a simple farmer, Sherriff. I till the fields. I grow grain, and corn, and other things.” Gwyleh gestured to his lovely waves of grain. Now the sun was almost completely set, the illusion that they stood before a great, endless sea was complete. The gentle winds contrived to send a thrilling shush shush shush from one end of his farm to the other, sealing the image.

  The Offworlder smiled a bitter smile as his simple indication of the fields behind them all prompted a few of the surlier –no more than fifty or so- to rather blatantly aim their weapons. Suit responded by doubling in size and sprouting a hundred micro-laser ports across the entire front of it’s body.

  Gwyleh continued. “I confess, Sherriff, Mayor, townspeople of fair Humbria on Fesseren, I don’t know what I’ve done to generate such hostility. I am a farmer. As all my kind are.”

  No need for these people to know that he was the last of his kind. Knowledge like that could quite easily prompt them to open fire right there on the spot.

  “You aren’t human.” Calhoun hissed, skin turning cherry red at the awful admission. The crowd rabble roused at his bold words, with Missy’s shrill voice –still wordless- echoing queerly.

  Mayor Comserratti cleared his throat, giving Cal a good long look that cowed the excitable idiot so much that the lawmaker stepped back a few feet. They were going to have a good long chat when they returned home. It was one thing to have those feelings and discuss them in secret, it was another thing entirely to announce them out loud. “What my hasty Sherriff means to say, Gwy, is that …”

  :you hate bugs. You’re racist against bugs:

  “Now see here, er, uh, er…” The Mayor stammered, realizing he’d turned his temper on a gleaming metal statue. He turned his attention back to the insect man. “You’re not from these parts, is all. You make people uncomfortable, when you come in to town. You got this metal suit that does most of the heavy work in the fields, doing the work of nearly a hundred men. Now,” the Mayor held a hand up in confession, “when we sold you the land for … what was it?”

  “Fifty pounds of metal ore dug from the mountain range far to the East.” Gwyleh responded dryly. "And I daresay that 'yella, lumpy rock' was worth more than the entirety of Humbria."

  The Mayor nodded nervously, flushing so bright that he reckoned he could be seen from space. They'd benefited from their crookedness, oh yes, the whole town had indeed been resting on laurels made of gold for some time now, but … that was one thing. This was another.

  “Just so, just so. Now, see, when we sold you this land, we didn’t expect anything to grow here, you see? Dead land, it was. We did it as a joke.”

  :a joke:

  As the little drama continued unfolding, Gwyleh found himself wishing that –of all the minds he could read- he wished he could read the mind of his Suit; always a little different after Huey and Chad had freed the AI within from Trinity’s embrace, it’s attitude and behavior at the moment was very … uncharacteristic. Technically, everything was still on point as far as handling the situation went, yet you'd be hard-pressed to admit that things were going 'smoothly'.

  Nevertheless, the ex-Enforcer was willing to see where things went, as both of Suit’s most recent comments –the former shockingly insightful, given the sullen muttering and awkward glances between the townsfolk and the latter having the Mayor mopping his sweaty face with a handkerchief- seemed to’ve scored as direct a hit as any of the onboard weapons.

  Besides which, Gwyleh Ronn wasn’t the butt of anyone’s jokes.

  “You heard the suit.” Gwyleh announced loudly, drawing sudden stares. Under the imperious, sightless gaze of the armored suit, they’d all but forgotten about the Offworlder. “A joke?”

  Comserratti looked at Cal, who shrugged helplessly. Back in town, when they’d all stood around the great bonfire they’d built, talking about how this was going to work, what they were going to say, they hadn’t for one second imagined that the Offworlder would … would say anything back! Or that the machine it used to till the soil and grow the crops really was an old Enforcer’s Suit.

  It’d seemed so simple, back in town.

  Cal looked over his shoulder at Missy a second time, regretting it immediately; her ordinarily lovely face was swollen with furious anger, and while she’d magically lost the ability to speak, she was wordlessly trying to secure a weapon from Bo Hank the Second. To his credit, the lumbering farm hand had enough brains in that thick melon of his to see that wasn’t such a great idea and was using his considerably muscled frame to keep her at bay...

  :well?:

  Mayor Comserratti coughed to cover his nervousness before answering. “This land, it wasn’t … wasn’t … fertile. Hadn’t been for decades. B-bad fertilizer. We figured you’d fiddle around for a while then … then leave.”

  “Where would I have gone?” Gwyleh mused aloud, multiple eyes still on the crowd. Things probably weren’t going to flourish into violence, not with Missy proving surprisingly ineffective in acquiring a weapon without her dulcet tones to assist her; her comrades in arms were –almost to a one- shocked and dismayed at the surprising amount of ugliness flaring brightly across her comely young face.

  Mob
mentality always worked that way.

  :more than that: Suit replied smugly, :it helps when they have weapons capable of shattering planets pointed at them. They aren’t all hayseeds out there:

  “There is that, yes.” Gwyleh murmured. “Now, please, if you could all just go…”

  With a shriek fitting for an ancient banshee, Missy the Barmaid, secret mastermind behind the day’s decision to commit murder and addlepated Dark Age lunatic, cranged poor old Bo Hank right in the gonads with a knee. The lummox bellowed in agony –a scream rising several octaves split the air- and fell to the ground, clutching his broken babymaker with both hands.

  Missy picked up the farmhand’s fallen weapon –an old, bulky laser rifle from a civil war more than a hundred years gone- and fired recklessly towards the house, at the gleaming suit that mocked her for it’s beautiful precision, and at the giant, talking praying mantis that was too foul, too alien to live.

  Several things happened in rapid progression.

  A few of Missy’s shots ventilated friends of hers; Borgrund –Borrie- Silverma wound up with a neatly cauterized hole through her brain, meaning someone else was going to have to open the bar the next day, Sherriff Calhoun Sinchetes –who’d sussed what was going to happen a scant second after it’s started unfolding- took a blast through a shoulder, dropped on the spot, bellowing like a wounded warthog while simultaneously trying to shout orders, and Gwyleh’s hand-made house took a hit. Half a dozen people swarmed the shrieking barmaid and wrestled her to the ground. Unpleasant sounds of struggling and various methods of submission reached everyone's ears. Old Missy wasn't going down so easily.

  Mayor Comserratti –face ashen where it wasn’t sweating buckets- turned back to assure their Offworld visitor that all was well…

  :Fuck this: Suit muttered angrily. :Deploying Discouragement: