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

  That was a harrowing thought. An unparalleled and unstoppable growth of Fleckers, spreading throughout the Universe.

  Give the Quarrymen too much power, they could turn themselves into organic quasars powerful enough to begin ripping the substrate apart, probably by accident.

  Arlasians weren't the stuff of legend.

  They were the devil's own tools. The stuff of brimstone and damnation.

  No dice.

  “You’re goddamn right I’m taking a pass on these guys.” Huey admitted belligerently. “This is some fucked up bullshit, Orion. Trinity should’ve left these people to dwindle into the past, nothing more than a curious nightmare on how things can go terribly wrong in the Unreal Universe. Instead, it fostered them, transformed them into living weapons.”

  “Trinity was only following The Engineer’s orders.” Orion replied simply, without emotion. “All the oddities and weirdnesses and awful things that exist under Trinity’s roof do so at the express desires of Garth N’Chalez himself. Now, whether or not the man chooses to utilize the tools that Trinity will provide is up to him and no one else. He does get final say, after all. This is just an exercise. I will by no means begin altering the Arlasians’ disparate genetic codes until I get the say so from him. Politoyov, what say you? Do the Fleckers and the Quarrymen have a legitimate battlefield presence in a manner similar to what I proposed, or–like Huey- do you think they’re simply too dangerous to use? I will of course abide by your decision.”

  Aleksander looked from Huey to Orion and back again, loathing the situation he was in. He was trapped, with no way out. On the one hand, he genuinely wanted to see Huey win out over their captor, but on the other, Orion wasn't going to play fair, no matter what his claims.

  The only thing they could do was wait and see if there was another way.

  The Offworlder found himself praying quite sincerely that the next two options in Orion’s game were infinitely less viable than the Arlasians, because as much as he hated the thought of using the poor bastards, they were amply suited to combat Kith Antal and his forces.

  “I’m sorry, Huey. I … they have a clean advantage. We could launch Flecker-bombs into the heart of occupied territory, well and far away from any troops we might deploy, and watch them tear through the enemy ranks like microscopic Hands of Glory. We could lob Quarrymen at Omega-class warships, watch them turn into super-radiated slag in seconds. They’re … they’re too useful.” Aleksander watched a handful of emotions rage across Huey’s borrowed face, most of them tinged with one form of anger or another, but in the end, the AI simply nodded.

  Orion fist-pumped the sky once more then went in to Aleksander for a fist-bump.

  “I never once fist-bumped The Specter when he was at his worst,” Aleksander replied frostily, “so what in the goddam hell makes you think I’ll do it for my captor?”

  Orion looked at his outstretched fist. “Awkwaaard.” Then he dropped his fist and looked at Huey, shining with smug superiority. “Well, old chum, sorry about that, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and all. It’s why I chose The Old Man in the first place. He understands on an intrinsic level what’s at stake here.”

  “Garth would never allow something like the Arlasians to be used.” Huey hoped his words sounded as convincing as he wanted them to be; when the End came, when he confronted his father, there was simply no telling how desperate Garth might be.

  Hell, there was no telling how Garth was right now.

  His time dealing with the Dark Iron King had to’ve changed him and now he was dealing with the Emperor-for-Life and the awful truth that lurked underneath all of that might just be the sort of thing to break him further.

  It sucked having knowledge the people in your life would find of inestimable value, and in this particular instance, if Garth could only know the true identity of the Emperor-for-Life!

  Things would go much smoother for him.

  “We’ll see.” Orion’s eyes shone strangely. He rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Now! On to Option Two! I know you guys are going to love what's coming next! This is fun. Isn’t this fun?”

  Huey and Aleksander shut their eyes against the weirdness of being inside a Quantum Tunnel’s space-warping power.

  It did nothing to quell their heavy hearts.

  4. It’s The Emperor’s Game Now

  Don’t You Think You Could Ease Up Just a Little Bit?

  Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles watched Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez try for the eighteenth time to survive the deadly trap that seemed to’ve been set for him at the bridge with disinterest; so far, the Kin’kithal’s attempts at survival were all brute force, lacking the finesse you'd expect to see in the man responsible for engineering a con stretching to the ends of the Universe.

  To think of it!

  Etienne knew now if he'd been asked to come up with something suitable enough to con the great and mighty Kith Antal in his previous iteration as a mostly normal human being, he would’ve failed.

  Not because he lacked the wit or intelligence, but because he’d lacked the knowledge Garth possessed. To believe that the Garth N'Chalez of thirty thousand years ago had had the kind of mental wherewithal to look this far into the future and plan for everything … Etienne's youngest self would've been flabbergasted.

  Now, though?

  With everything he understood, with the depth of power contained within the queer rock that short-sighted fool ‘Baron Samiel’ had once called the temporal incongruity … he and his friend could easily ride out to destroy the Unreality.

  If they so chose. In the grand scheme of things, however, it was far better to ride out the devastation, and arrive in the new wonderland as Gods. Far more befitting of their stature, that elevation to a Primal power.

  “Don’t you think you could ease up just a little bit?”

  Etienne broke free from contemplating the shape of this the new Universe and smiled at his friend. If N’Chalez failed to make it free from this, his most challenging gauntlet ever, that honor would fall to Trinity or to Kith Antal and his leech-like masters, the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  Having peered deep into the heart and mind of N’Chalez, Etienne was forced to admit that he –and his friend- would much prefer the rich and colorful tapestry that waited to burst forth from the Kin'kithal's powerful vision.

  And therein lay the conundrum.

  “Glad to see you home.” Etienne meant it, too. It’d been five thousand years. Five thousand long years, with only sparse communication between the two of them.

  Spur narrowed his eyes at Etienne, seeing –impossibly enough- that the Emperor truly carried that sentiment in his heart.

  Of course, it didn’t mean much, not when you were talking about Etienne Marseilles.

  Still, it wasn't the right moment to bring up old wounds, not when the one man who had the best dreams and hopes for the Unreal Universe in mind was being rung through the literal wringer.

  If there was one thing Spur knew about Etienne and what the man had planned for Garth, it'd be … unwise.

  So rather than accuse the Emperor of willfully arranging for him to be caught on the wrong side of the planet in the middle of the shortest Dark Age ever recorded or the mysterious manner in which Trinity had finally managed to track him down he reiterated his sentiment.

  Etienne flapped a hand. “Bah. The man is a savage. Look at his past attempts at getting out of the cab. Kicking the door open. Breaking the cabbie’s neck. Knocking the cab driver unconscious. Screaming into the radio at the dispatcher. My personal favorite thus far is the one where he climbs through the window and tries to surf through the disaster. That was the absolute worst car wreck I’ve ever seen, and I played GTA: V until my fingers bled."

  Spur replayed the footage.

  Bereft of his impressive powers and quadronium-enhanced body, Garth Nickels was just a man. A man in peak physical condition with the kind of reflexes soldiers the world over would kill for, but still just a man.

 
The hair-trigger response times and nearly prescient ability to sense danger was still there, that wasn’t something that Etienne could –or should- take away from Garth, not unless he wanted the entire proceedings to be illuminated for the farce it might very well be, yet it still wasn't enough.

  Spur feared it'd never be enough, not with the vendetta roiling through Etienne's spirit.

  “He is desperate.” Spur zoomed in on the man’s facial expression. Anyone unaware of what he’d been through so far in this little experiment would beg to differ, but there was a tightness around the eyes, a brutal, calculating efficiency to Garth as he sought to uncover some link he’d missed, some bit of random chaos swirling around the edges of the cab ride that could help. “And he is no savage.”

  “He is, though, don’t you see?” Etienne rolled his hands like a stage magician, and Garth’s attempts at freeing himself from the cab ride of doom were suddenly dwarfed by hundreds of thousands of scenes of brutal, terrible violence. Savagery incarnate flashed and spat at the watching Emperor and his friend.

  “Here, he drops a moon onto a planet because they refused to follow the terms of their agreement. Here. Look. Some nameless marauder on some nameless planet across The Cordon. Garth dismantles him for no reason. Just … destroys him. Utterly.”

  “It is an object lesson.” Spur gestured to the remainder of the marauders who’d watched on in petrified silence as their greatest warrior had been so ruthlessly dispatched. “As you well know. This Universe is incredibly different from ours, Etienne. Nothing compares. Our world was a dream this world had, a kind of place it wanted to bring about because it saw how rough and brutal this place is.”

  “You still like him.” Etienne snapped coldly. “After all this time. After what happened? To our Universe? To us? When we arrived here? Bright and shiny and ready to help him against the enemy he was too afraid to mention?”

  “Like or dislike doesn’t factor into it, Etienne.” Spur refused to take the bait.

  He could see Etienne wanted to bring up poor Naoko and what was happening to her, wanted to find some basis to justify the madness he was perpetrating on Garth N’Chalez, but he was too tired to begin that verbal joust.

  “As you are –were- fond of pointing out so many thousands of years ago, before this all went sideways, is that the salient facts are the only things that matter. It is a fact that he was trained by the most terrible being this Universe had ever seen, a man he called father. It is a fact that he was being trained to take on an existential scourge capable of destroying entire Universes to feed on the energy arising from that destruction. It is a fact that he had no idea about our pocket Universe, and as you were so pleased to hint before tossing him into the fray without any hope of survival, his entire life over there was manipulated. You cannot hold him accountable for the viciousness in his soul. He is the child of his times. He was chosen by the Engines of Creation for this task. If the Engines wanted him to be other than he is, he would be. He is the paradoxical Kin'kithal. He is the very personification of excess. We are all lucky he keeps himself under as tight a control as he does."

  Etienne clapped slowly, mockingly. “Five thousand years in the guise of an unfeeling android and you shed that skin like it’d never been. And you reveal a belief in the Engines. What else has your time amongst family taught you? And while you’re at it, why not remove the suit? The splinter of energy keeping you alive is best returned to the source.”

  Spur bit back an angry retort. The incongruity belonged to the both of them, had bonded to the both of them, but … in his five thousand year absence, Etienne had inveigled himself deeper into the incongruency's embrace.

  Was, in fact, more Etienne than anyone else.

  Even if he wanted to recalibrate the division of power and control, it'd be nigh on impossible to wrest more from his best friend, not without causing deeper problems.

  Without looking at Etienne -who was positively voyeuristic- Spur grabbed hold of his chest and pulled as hard as he could at the invisible seams that held his 'robot suit' together so perfectly that not one single person in five thousand years had ever guessed the truth.

  Bright purple light flared between his fingertips, casting a shadow across Etienne Marseilles, one that transformed him very briefly into the man he truly was rather than the ‘wise old EuroJapanese Emperor’ he’d been playing for so very long; a stitch of violent red hair, a hint of surfer, a patch of beard, and it was gone, and Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles was back in full effect.

  Spur kept pulling and pulling. He’d wanted to do this for so long, had practically been begging for another Dark Age to take Trinity’s restless eyes from him but … none had come. He’d been Spur this time for a solid two thousand year stretch, without a single break from the monotony, and his time with Jordan Bishop had been the absolute worst imaginable.

  This literal defrocking was the most luxurious thing he'd experienced in nearly his entire life. The second skin pulled off like a reptile’s, begrudgingly at first and with all the sensation that implies, then swiftly, as if it, too, was eager to be freed.

  Etienne clapped his hands, this time in pure joy. He smiled and gave an earnest nod at the man who was and always would be his best friend, even if there were those times when they hated each other with a vibrant passion that burned bright and hot as any sun.

  That was the cost of being true immortals.

  Still, they always came around in the end, always returned to fast, firm friends once the dust had settled.

  “There he is, there he is.” Etienne rose from his chair and gave his old friend a good long hug. “How you feelin’, bro?”

  Drake Bishop, immigrant from a failing, nearly destroyed proto-Reality rolled his shoulders with a nearly ecstatic smile on his face. He did a few stretches, a handful of dips and exhaled. Oh, it was good to be free of the suit. “Spur got a little tight there at the end, you know?”

  “It’s because you couldn’t get out to surf.” Etienne replied. “And you didn’t get to eat, so your naturally fat ass just got fatter.”

  “Shut your hole.” Drake chuckled. “Asshat. You could divest yourself of your raiment as well, you know. There’s nobody here but us chickens.”

  Etienne Marseilles looked around. There was never anyone here but the two of them. Well, for a long time, it’d been just him, but … lessons needed to be taught, didn’t they?

  He nodded, then gestured. Lavender streamers unspooled the skin of Etienne Marseilles, the self-proclaimed Emperor-for-Life of the entire EuroJapanese expanse of Humanity, revealing … Sparks Dangerously, a short, well-muscled half-Japanese guy with ludicrously bright red hair.

  Drake sniffed. “Looks like someone got to surf whenever the fuck he wanted.”

  Sparks didn’t say anything, choosing instead to simply shrug enigmatically.

  “Here, this is for you.” Drake pulled a sparking bit of amethyst from thin air and handed it over to Sparks, who took it with a grave solemnity. “Oh, uh, and … our guy just got out of the cab. No damages. That’s good.”

  Sparks looked over his shoulder, eyes roving to find the one screen that still held Garth N’Chalez and his stupid attempts to not die. A cagey motherfucker, was their 'friend' Garth.

  "So, what was the deal with our man's rough entry?" Drake asked, summoning a Mister Pibb out of thin air. Yeah, he wanted a beer in the worst goddamn way, but it wasn't Miller Time just yet.

  "Hm?" Eddie looked up from the monitor replaying Garth's escape. "Oh, right. You simply wouldn't believe what he's done to himself."

  Drake's thoughts flew back to their time on Kitezeh. "Oh, I think I have some idea."

  Eddie would beg to differ, but whatever. "Anyways, yeah. His entire insides are stuffed to the tits with quadronium … somethings. Plus, one rather inefficient, overblown, overpowered AI operating system. Looks like it's meant to mimic or replicate his Kin'kithal abilities, since that whole thing is … anyways." Eddie waved his hands around. "Took a motherfucki
ng lot of effort to yank the bloody thing loose. Couldn’t have him having access to anything on this end. Too risky. I’ve got it safely … sequestered."

  Drake nodded, only half-listening; he'd absorbed the necessity of Eddie's doings in the first few seconds and was more interested in the not-quite simulation they'd dropped Garth into. "You … you're using an awful lot of power for this Guilt Trip. More than ten times the usual amount."

  "N'Chalez isn't some fat, guilty banker from Tet-ur-Saurie, Drake." Eddie replied smoothly, itching to get to the containment area he'd built for what'd really come out of Garth. "His domain needs to be fully rendered. Fully."

  "This doesn't seem like the best of ideas." Drake felt a bit stupid falling right back into his role as advisor, especially with the bad blood boiling between them, but these words needed saying. "This could lead to all kinds of errors. I …”

  Drake realized he was alone in the room. Eddie had left.

  ***

  Eddie Marshall ran a loving hand across the smooth not-glass case containing the ... smudge. That was all it was, a microscopic smudge of ... something. He'd never seen anything like it in his entire life, wondered just what thoughts had been running through Huey's vastly augmented intellect when he'd hurriedly coded the quadronium OS.

  It surely couldn't have been something like this.

  "I thought you'd be much larger." Eddie whispered as he hunkered down to get a closer look. He could use all the powers of the incongruity to burrow into it, rip it open, splay it's secrets on the inside of that case for the whole world to see, but ... he didn't want to. He wanted to figure this one out for himself. “Something as complicated as running those implants …. But you’re not. How … interesting.”

  It was wonderful. So pretty. So … interesting …

  Why Didn’t I Think of This Sooner?