Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)

by Lee Bond

  That couldn’t occur.

  The Q-gun’s settings were as they’d always been. Candall sighed, then answered Nalanata’s question. “I did.”

  “And did this … revelation,” Nalanata rolled a hand at the word, “come to you in a flash, so to speak?”

  “What?” Candall thought furiously. What was going on here? The original Harmony soldiers never traveled in groups anymore, hadn’t since after Nickels had entered the Box. The war effort demanded all their time. “Why? What does it matter? What matters is that he,” Candall pointed at Fenris, who put a hand on his chest, adopting the most incongruously innocent face, “promised me that I would be allowed to use this on that ship, and that I would then be permitted to avenge the pointless death of my … my friend.”

  Nalanata really did want to bash his brother in the head. The ‘younger’ Harmony soldier couldn’t believe that this … this … mortal could hear the faintest whispers of the connection that bound them all together.

  Imagining the whole of Latelyspace afflicted by Harmony set Nalanata’s teeth so far on edge that Lokken, half a solar system away, stopped what he was doing to tell his brother to reign it in. Solgun and Stride, only a planet away, chortled, suggesting he and Fenris actually wind Candall up further to see if Harmony would burst through him right then and there.

  The premise behind their suggestion was simple: virtually every major player in Latelyspace had –at one point or another- come in contact with Garth N’Chalez, making it highly probable that the ‘readings’ they were picking up from Candall were nothing more than symptoms stemming from an ex-dee phase change.

  Fenris looked to his younger brother. “Well?”

  Candall stamped a foot. “Well what?”

  Nalanata raised a hand in apology. “Forgive me, Sa Candall. I spend most of my days solely in the presence of my brothers, or others of Harmony. I am not used to being in the presence of …”

  “Regular people. That’s fucking obvious.” Candall no longer cared how he spoke to anyone. When all was said and done … well. It would be said and done, wouldn’t it just?

  A faint smile of apology crossed Nalanata’s lips and he stepped aside. Inwardly, he raged, first at Fenris, then at Solgun and Stride for their ludicrous suggestions. There would be no double-checking on anything, and here -thankfully- Fenris was in total agreement; Candall was going to do as he was going to do and there was clearly no other thought in his mind. They would all be spared the ignominy of a human-based Harmony.

  The last thing they needed was regular folk thinking they were better.

  Candall twiddled his fingers across the top of the Q-gun. Now that he was armed against the deadly vessel, his plan seemed … silly. This craft had been piloted –now that the documents had been released, Candall knew quite a bit more about Chadsik than he had before- by the greatest assassin in the Universe, a cyborg so weirdly powerful and, when you got down to it, more insane than any sixteen other people you could meet.

  Not to mention that the man … cyborg … had gone toe to toe with Garth Nickels and nearly come out on top. Chadsik was missing, presumed dead, but dead apparently didn’t mean very much in Latelyspace anymore, not when you were standing sandwiched between two men that’d lived in the darkness of the solar system for nearly its entire history.

  As the owner, so too was the ship; Hungryfish had a huge death tally attached to it, and standing there, with a weapon capable of dealing it tremendous damage, Candall suddenly wondered with a frightened start why they were all still alive!

  “Problem?” Fenris asked.

  “How …” Candall straightened his shoulders. These godlike men must’ve done something to it. Blanketed its sensors or something. “How do we know there’s more than one AI mind in there?”

  Fenris gestured and someone in the control room hit a switch to deactivate the AI dampening system. The result was immediate.

  An unrelenting cacophony filled the air, howling shrieks, woeful laments, endless sobbing. There was more than one argument going on, raging, full-on, hands-down murderous arguments between men, women, things. Children’s songs traipsed through the volcanic tide of sound and fury, bright and high voices that only served to make the whole thing harrowing and unsettling instead of just … disturbing.

  “What’s… what … the …” Candall’s brow furrowed. “Is that…”

  “Yes.” Fenris nodded. “One of the voices is singing about collecting dead things.”

  Candall shuddered. That particular voice sounded like a five year old girl, and was perhaps the happiest sounding child’s voice the reclamation specialist had ever heard in his long and miserable life.

  “If you give it a moment,” Fenris shouted to be heard over the argument being held by two of the strongest personalities inside the ship, “they will start asking after their master.”

  Nalanata watched Candall like a predator bird, eyes shrewdly hooded. Master of hy-tech he might be, gifted that way by the Engines of Creation itself, he was also the most prescient when it came to Harmony’s subtle influences; it’d been he who’d followed Ute’s life inside Latelyspace, he who’d charted the possible progression or regression of the God soldiers when they were ultimately introduced to the part of their lives they’d been missing.

  It was still just a kernel of connection, a weak, slender thread, but it was there!

  Candall waved the Q-gun in the air. “I’m good, thank you.” When Fenris gestured for the sound to be killed, he sighed, relieved to be quit of the noise. “Didn’t I read somewhere that AI minds are more complex than our own? Could that not all be the product of one fractured mind?”

  “Just fire the gun.” Nalanata supplied firmly. “Climb in the ship, find a place to plug in the control mechs we worked up, fly off, dispatch your revenge.”

  Candall nodded slowly. “Sure, sure, I could do that. Maybe I don’t have the gun calibrated right, maybe I only get three of four or five of nine of the minds in there. Maybe those minds lose their shit at suddenly losing a handful of their companions. Maybe they start firing everything they’ve got. You did say that you had to convince Hungryfish to allow itself to be moved, no? You … appealed to its … their … need for privacy? So it could what? Wait for Chadsik to return?”

  “Huey confirms that there are eight AI minds aboard the ship.” Fenris interjected, pulsing a warning to Nalanata; for all his efforts to deny Candall the opportunity to rise fully into Harmony, his brother seemed to be doing his level best to insure that that is exactly what happened. “Beyond that, the AI had little to say on this ship.”

  Candall plugged that information into the Q-gun’s diagnostic panels and watched as the avatars within programmed the ‘best guess’ option. Not exactly the greatest way to fire a weapon, but between the test firings he’d done a little while ago and the data accumulated by the control room off to one side, everyone involved was as confident as they could be that everything was going to work out.

  “Oh?” Candall had met Huey a few times down through the years. He still found it hard to believe that the man was actually an AI sphere remote-controlling one of the most sophisticated artificial bodies ever made. “And why is that?”

  “Oddly enough,” Fenris prudently stepped behind Candall. Just because all signs said no physical harm could come to them by being caught in the crossfire from such a gun, there was no point in testing the theory, “he declined to comment further.”

  “The ship made him nervous.” Nalanata said as he moved to stand next to his brother.

  “This ship should make everyone nervous.” Candall replied, instinct urging him to dial the power rating up three more notches. Likely, the Q-Gun would burn out, but it didn’t matter. Instinct said the two Harmony soldiers behind him wouldn’t miss the portable weapon at all. They did have the resources of an entire solar system to work with. “If you could have the control room turn the voices back on, please?”

  Fenris gestured, and the laments of purgatory filled the
air once more.

  Candall walked forward three more feet, took aim –though, strictly speaking, he didn’t need to- at the cockpit, and depressed the trigger; he held it down for a solid five count, watching the readout on the Sheet with interest. The weapon shivered a bit with each heavy quantum burst, but it was nothing like firing a real weapon. About the only thing of interest that happened was that the power meter shrank down to nothing as quickly as puncturing the bottom of a full water can.

  As the power in the Q-gun dissipated, so too did the mad AI voices shrieking, hollering, weeping and singing enough to wake the dead. The first to go were those who argued, followed by those who wept, until the only voice remaining was the singing child, who disappeared a heartbeat later, mid-sentence.

  “Well.” Fenris said dryly. “That was far more anticlimactic than the test firing.”

  Nalanata, nodded, lips pursed tightly. “Somewhat disappointing. Could’ve done with some type of explosion or sparks. For dramatic effect.”

  Candall dropped the gun, muttering, “Assholes.”

  He gestured over his shoulder at Nalanata, who tossed him the control mechs; there was one to bypass non-AI security systems built directly into the hull of the ship and second unit for the actual panels inside. That one –in theory- would bypass the physical connections the AI spheres had with the ship, allowing Candall the luxury of controlling them.

  The reclamation specialist ran quick as he could to Hungryfish’s side, located the appropriate panel as outlined in the briefing he’d been given prior to being ushered into the landing bay, popped it open with casual ease, and slotted the first piece of tech into place, just as he’d been shown.

  He looked over his shoulder and grinned at the two Harmony soldiers. This … this was the sort of thing he’d been born for. He could reclaim a vessel like this –now it was properly defenseless- in his sleep.

  A door popped open with a loud hiss, releasing a truly redolent puff of air into the bay. Candall retched and slapped a hand over his mouth and nose. It wouldn’t take long for the interior to air out properly, but right that moment, there was no time; each of the artificial minds he’d shot with the Q-gun –save for the first one, which had exploded- had come back online, sometimes within a few seconds, sometimes within three minutes.

  There was just no way of knowing when Hungryfish would came back to life, or her mood when that happened.

  Candall plunged into the guts of the ship, letting blind instinct take over. As insane as Chadsik had so obviously been, there were few ways the interior of a ship could be designed, and as leader of Landmark, Candall had been party to more than his fair share of ship-boarding. He could navigate in the dark when pressed.

  And he was so pressed for time.

  There was no way of knowing if Hungryfish’s AI spheres were interconnected or if they were simply housed in the same area. If they were merged, he was already too late. With a man such as Chad, it was safe to assume that the ship was booby-trapped inside and out. The moment a single AI came online and saw a stranger aboard, that was it.

  Perhaps the only two people to survive such an explosion of violence would be Fenris and Nalanata, but Candall had hopes that not even men like them could withstand a quadruple Hand of Glory apocalypse.

  The interior of the Hungryfish was a rat’s warren of mazelike corridors twisting this way and that, and although the ship was –at present moment- only thirty feet stem to stern, Candall felt certain he was absolutely lost. Regardless, the ex-reclamation specialist turned vengeance incarnate pushed forward, rushing madly through reeking corridors, trusting faith and instinct to guide him to where he needed to be, the relentless nature of his own mind counting down seconds to theoretical AI reactivation.

  Breathing shallowly, strange sounds of a ship he’d never been on before echoing in his ears, starkly convinced the minds were coming online any second, Candall at last burst into Chadsik’s tiny cockpit.

  A bark of laughter escape his lips before Candall cast hurriedly about for any one of a dozen different access ports that’d been described to him; Chadsik’s home-away-from-home was a virtual shoebox, forcing the cyborg to cram his gaunt, lanky form around and in between machines of –as yet- inexplicable purpose.

  Only a true madman could work in such cramped conditions, all day, every day.

  The hy-tech device in his hands grew slick with sweat; Hungryfish had been an enclosed environment for two long years, and the rank stink of something that had died in a corner had Candall sweating up a storm.

  There! There.

  Candall slammed the hy-tech control panel atop a similarly-sized board off to one side as quickly as he could, beaning himself good and proper on a low-hanging switchboard as he lunged forward. Warm blood trickling freely down his forehead, Candall wasted no time in worrying over the injury: he’d been more than lucky already. Wasting precious seconds fretting over a shallow cut on his forehead?

  Beyond pointless.

  The hurried, sweating, bleeding and mildly nauseous Latelian slapped the button labeled –Candall didn’t even take the time out to be insulted- ‘GO’ and waited for the machine to do its thing, wondering as he did so precisely what ‘hy-tech’ meant. Fenris had taken the time out to explain there was a distinct difference between the notions of ‘high tech’ and ‘hybridized technologies’, but had failed to highlight any of the ways in which they actually differed.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  The machine, designed and developed by Nalanata, seemed to somehow unfurl itself before clamping more forcefully onto the ship’s control panel with hitherto unseen pincers. The interface panel, a large screen one foot by two feet, flickered to life with hazy static and weird fractal shapes. The nonsensical display was quickly replaced by long streams of numbers that flitted across the screen too fast for the naked eye to follow.

  Candall pursed his lips, unsure of what he should be doing with himself. This was the first reclamation where he hadn’t been directly immersed with every stage of the plan. He had no clue what –exactly- Nalanata’s machine was doing and as he stood there, delicately wiping blood away from the stinging cut in his forehead, he wondered if perhaps a mistake had been made in not being more involved.

  The stoic, normally silent Harmony soldier’s curious interest/disgust in one mortal man’s hunger for revenge had not gone unnoticed. Frankly, Candall believed Nalanata –as with all the Harmony soldiers- more than capable of petty sabotage, and he had earned more than his fair share of misdirected ire by being the one to invent the Q-Gun.

  There was every chance that the hy-tech device was carefully calibrating his death.

  One of Hungryfish’s main viewscreens popped on so abruptly that Candall barked in fear, hands clambering for weapons. Fenris’ enigmatically bemused face appeared. The Harmony soldier raised an eyebrow at the sight of the blood streaming down Candall’s face. “The vessel appears to be yours, Sa Candall. Is everything all right in there?”

  Candall took one last swipe with a thumb at the bleeding gash on his forehead before sliding into the cockpit, glad that at least that the damned cyborg had opted to go around being as tall as a normal Latelian. He wouldn’t have known what to do should the physical arrangement of the ship been for a much smaller man; presumably reconfiguring Hungryfish required the assistance of the artificial minds, something that was best avoided.

  “I’m fine. This vessel reeks like the inside of a dead dog’s asshole, though.” Candall’s eyes roved over the instrument panels, more or less familiar with the basic layout from his long years ‘reclaiming’ things. Beyond that, there were a few dissimilar things between Latelian and Trinityspace ships, but he was a smart man. He’d figure things out in due time.

  “Fascinating.” Fenris mused. “And how would you know that?”

  Candall looked up from poking around the panels. “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “Of course it is, Sa …”

  The screen went dead. No foreplay, no p
reamble, no sign of what’d happened or why.

  Just … dead.

  Candall pursed his lips and leaned over the side of the cockpit chair to get a better look at Nalanata’s hy-tech Screen. The simplistic diagnostic buttons –and here, again, he should be aggravated but chose the higher ground once more- were all green. Unsure of what else he could do, Candall gave the thing a hearty thump. The numbers streaming across the glass display flickered, but nothing else happened.

  Had Nalanata or Fenris actually planned his death this whole time, merely giving him the delusion that he’d have his revenge, only to get rid of both an unwanted lunatic and a deadly dangerous sentient murder-ship?

  Silent seconds stretched outwards into eternity, the painful gash in his forehead dripping blood down his cheek.

  A girl’s voice rose up out of the speakers, so young and innocent sounding that the fine hairs on Candall’s arms and the back of his neck almost quite literally rose right up off his body.

  “You’re not my brother.” The innocent-sounding voice declared accusingly.

  Memories of the horrific song this girl-voiced AI had been singing whilst all the other minds had been arguing about this and that swelled in Candall’s ears. A song of collecting dead things to play with.

  How could it even be accessing the ship’s comm systems? Candall reached out and flicked the communication control switches off.

  The girl’s voice grew louder, more strident. “You’re not my brother! Who are you?”

  To drive home the point, a weapon of some kind disengaged itself from a cunningly hidden false backing behind one of the multitudinous monitors and screens that surrounded Candall’s monumentally uncomfortable chair. Guided by robot arms, it rather pointedly … pointed itself at his forehead.