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

by Lee Bond

  “As I said in the beginning, Andros, we of the Cabal are rudderless. We are desperate to find a way to replace Trinity Itself, but cannot agree on any particular direction. Some suggest we focus on finding a way through The Cordon, where we would be free to work on transforming ourselves into the very Gods we want, while others insist that we continue trying to work on methods of defeating the machine mind. Others still have recently uttered sentiments similar to yours, that no matter how hard we try, no matter what we think we can do, the undeniable truth is that Trinity has been marshal for Humanity for an unthinkable amount of time. It has brought us back from the brink of every recorded Dark Age, It has put us to every corner of It’s Domain and yet, we still think we can do better.

  But not without our own guiding force, a mind either wise enough or implacable enough or arrogant enough to force a roomful of Conglomerate owners and other powerful men and women into staying the course. Without that, Andros, without someone willing to oversee the grand design of ousting Trinity Itself, without someone eager to see Man ruling Man as He should be, there is no reason for the Cabal. We cannot maintain ourselves, and if there is to be no Cabal, what then? Go back to our normal lives?”

  Emile paused, then smiled as Andros chose not to interrupt. He could see in the man’s eyes that he was trying to foresee the very near future. Voss thought it was highly unlikely the genetic master could ever see what was coming. None of them had, not until the subject had seemed to materialize around them.

  He continued. “The answer is ‘we hope so’. So long have we been Cabal members, so long have we plotted and planned and hoped for a time in our lives when we could be free of the stranglehold Trinity has on us that some few of us imagine that life without these meetings would be no life at all. But we agreed, though, to make one last attempt to save the group by asking you to be lead us. Then someone asked in the silence following that problematic decision ‘Can we trust him? Of all of us, he is actually under Trinity’s watchful eye. Those Clinics of his provide services that Trinity has decreed illegal, and It hunts for him everywhere. What happens if he is finally caught? What would he do in that instance, knowing as he does all our names, all that we’ve discussed, all that we’ve planned? Would he barter for his own freedom at the cost of our imprisonment?’”

  Emile fixed Andros with his own forceful gaze. He knew it wasn’t as effective as Andros’, but it’d served him well through the years. The other man signaled that he wasn’t going to interrupt, though body language and a darkening of the man’s ridiculously handsome face suggested he didn’t like what he was hearing, not at all. “Good questions, those. Salient. Practical. Wise, even, something that was quite … fun … to discover about ourselves, in all honestly. That we could, after all, ask questions like that. More fun, though, was coming up with a plan for what to do should you in fact turn on us.”

  Andros curled a lip. “You are beneath me, Emile Voss. You and all your kind. Pale, squirming insects, useful only in the way that base animals can be. I would sooner ‘turn’ on a pair of shoes. Wasting the time and effort to bring a pack of fools like yourselves down? Hardly. I would spend more time deciding what to eat for lunch. Trinity will never find me, and if It did, however impossible that is, I would have honestly have other matters to attend to.”

  “That is what I said!” Emile clapped his hands. “I said that very sa… well, not precisely, but I encouraged the other members of the Cabal to consider that very same thing. You would not go out of your way to cause us misery, even if you were hunted. We all agree that Trinity, when It is hunting, devotes considerable effort to that fact. It gets what It wants, in the end, and someone being hunted must spend their energy on survival, not revenge. And that is why we did what we did. It took us time to get to the point where we started worrying about our own survival. United, we formed a protective barrier around ourselves. Divided, well, it is said that Trinity knows everything, isn’t it? It could hardly bring us all down at once, for that would cause It’s people enormous strife, and a Dark Age looms so close we can see the curtain being drawn as we speak. But one or two here, another there, mysteriously dead or vanished or disgraced? Easy to manage a broken group. We, of course, trust each other implicitly. We colluded and planned and plotted and discussed High Treason amongst ourselves for decades. Never would we turn on each other.”

  Andros sucked a tooth. Either he’d missed it because he was, in fact, getting old and senile and playing at human was making him weak, or he’d seriously miscalculated the predator-instinct in these fleshy, squirming worms. He thought he understood what had Emile grinning like a fool. “You are threatening me, yes? The usual ‘keep quiet or we will spew what we know to the machine mind’? Something along those lines? That threat goes both ways, Emile.”

  Emile laughed. He’d wanted to prolong the moment as long as he could, but he couldn’t contain his jubilance. It was time to hit the smug bastard where it hurt. “On the contrary, you moron. We sold you out for our own freedom. About ten minutes ago, just after you said those awful, hurtful things. You see, Trinity does know everything. It knew all our names, all our plans, everything we’d ever said or done in an attempt to further our own machinations against It and has just now transmitted documents waiving all grievances against us in exchange for being permitted to monitor the remainder of this call. We are free. You are not.”

  Emile’s face was replaced by a solid, shimmering wall of silver, one of Trinity’s most favorite ways of representing Itself when contacting regular people. “Greetings, Andros Medellos. It has been a long time since we spoke last.”

  “Decades.” Outwardly, Andros was calm and cool as ever. Inwardly rage and anger seethed through him like barbed snakes. He’d made a dreadful mistake,

  The same mistake, it seemed, that all Bruush made when dealing with humans.

  “Such a long time.” Trinity’s voice –as gender neutral as ever- sounded … pleased. “A long time. To prepare.”

  “As last time,” Andros rose from the couch and headed for the labs downstairs, “you will find me long gone, Trinity. By the time you decrypt my location, I will be hundreds of Galaxies away. My security systems are unparalleled.”

  Trinity’s voice followed Andros as he moved through the now mostly empty labs and offices where he’d done most of his research. “Such a long time.”

  Andros chuckled and shook his head. “You said that already, machine mind.”

  “Such a long time.” Trinity repeated itself one last time, intentionally riling the lizard. “Long enough to crack the secret of your genetic prowess, Andros Medellos. Time enough to painstakingly regrow tissue samples found in other Black Clinics, to learn how your neural interfaces connect with my designs, to understand the language being spoken, to decrypt everything, to see the ingenious method of redirecting Quantum chatter from Tunnels to … see you for what you are. Bruush. So far from home. Lost and alone for so long.”

  Andros Medellos froze solid. Not long, no more than a second, but in that second, his heart stopped. He was found out. Of course he was. He’d only just so smugly enjoyed the fact that he’d evaded all Trinity machinations.

  He was caught.

  And Trinity so liked to collect the strange and the unique.

  “Run.” Trinity’s voice was no longer neutral. It was basso profundo male, and it sounded eager. “Run. Make the challenge worth the wait. Run, lizard, run.”

  Andros Medellos started running.

  ***

  My Other Ship lurched out of what SpecSer crews the Universe over were calling ‘the slippery black’ with something less than grace but a little bit more than flat-out awkwardness; their last entry vector had been hurried, harried and quite possibly not entirely as well thought out as anyone had actually hoped, but Specters were nothing if not sensible. Anything you could walk away from –even if you were carrying one of your own legs between your teeth and were actually doing more of a shimmy-crawl than anything else- was totally acceptable. F
or bonus points, if people were around, it was best to make it seem as though whatever weird shit you’d just pulled off was something you did all the time, not a fluke.

  Babel, from his position beneath a crash couch, shouted. “That was my least favorite one yet, Cianni. Least favorite.”

  Ci, wreathed and sweat and looking pale and wan, didn’t even bother responding. She was pretty certain she’d actually done something impossible and wasn’t about to let the diminutive man bring her down. Telgar’s warm hand on her shoulder was quickly replaced by an even warmer kiss on the cheek. Somewhere in the distance, Babel made a noise and Dagon asked –yet again- what such a gesture meant.

  “It means,” Telgar announced proudly, “that my wife made a mid-course correction in the slippery black. No one else, anywhere, has ever done such a thing.”

  “Wouldn’t have needed to,” Babel picked himself gingerly out of the crash couch and checked his handsome limbs for signs of bruising, “if you hadn’t pointed your weapons at that Yellow Dog barge.”

  “I had a feeling.” Telgar replied simply enough. And he had. And his instinct had been right. That barge hadn’t been just a barge, no matter what all their sophisticated scanning equipment had said. “And I was right.”

  “So you kissed your wife because she did her job?” Dagon asked, working his way through the conversation as quickly as he could. He started moving towards Cianni. “Do we all kiss her for doing this? I have never…”

  Telgar whirled on Dagon. “What! No. No. No. The only one who gets to kiss my wife is me.”

  “There was that time that Garth kissed her.” Babel said, sighing happily when his wonderful arms and legs and hands and toes showed no signs of damage. They were a bit stressed out, of course, but that was what happened when you were in a solar system where everyone hated you.

  Cianni, glad Tel was busy trying to explain to Dagon why he was the only one who got to kiss her, blushed. Yes, the captain certainly had kissed her. Quite thoroughly. “Barely a peck on the cheek. As chaste as a priest.”

  “Lemme introduce you to some of the priests on my homeworld, sister.” Babel muttered darkly. “A look from some of those robe-wearing lunatics will have you in the shower for a month and in therapy for longer.”

  “So it is because you and she are married that you use the kiss to say thank you.” Dagon nodded. “If you were not married, then you would not kiss her.”

  Telgar smiled wide, nodding encouragingly. “You have the right of it.”

  Dagon mimicked Telgar’s nod and followed the taller man towards the center of the room saying, “Then what about that time that Captain Nickels kissed Cianni?”

  “For the love of everything that is holy and divine in the Universe!” Ci pulled herself loose of the rig –an incredibly illegal rig, handmade tech that would have Trinity in fits and the rest of the scientific community flabbergasted- and dropped the patches onto the command console. “It was barely even a kiss! It was … was like …”

  Telgar couldn’t help himself. He grinned. “It was an impressive kiss, ladylove. You did that thing where your fingers curl. And you rolled your eyes back into your head. And Captain Nickels, well, he … appeared … content.”

  Cianni –working her way up to a different method of denial- turned her head so sharply to stare at Telgar that she was positive she’d done herself an injury. “You said you never looked! That you understood why it’d happened! That it didn’t matter.”

  Telgar put an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I do understand why it happened. Were it not for the kiss, you and Captain Nickels would’ve been apprehended and killed. It does not matter, because it was only the one time, and it was for a very specific reason. And …”

  “And,” Babel mock-saluted Captain Eddie as he came into the control room, “any husband in the Universe is going to tell his wife those things because if he wants to …” and from there, the con-man turned Specter proceeded to simply gesture, throwing more and more innovative and deeply perverse arrangements of fingers, hands, elbows and, once, his tongue, “he will continue saying them.”

  Eddie rubbed his bruised elbow, wincing when he got to the sore spot. “Are we talking about The Kiss that Saved a Planet?”

  “It hardly saved the planet.” Cianni threw her hands up in frustration and went hunting for something to drink. She wasn’t entirely certain they had anything left, not with the way Babel drank, but she was hopeful.

  “I am uncertain you are correct.” Dagon interjected. “As part of my training, I have read those pertinent files several dozen times. As Captain Eddie and the others often refer to that mission as The Kiss that Saved a Planet, I worked up several models of that mission with and without that kiss. I can send them …”

  “Straight to hell, Dagon, you can send those files straight to hell.” Cianni stalked out of the control room, intending to first hit the common room in search of booze that probably didn’t exist, then the showers, where one golden-hewed, tawny-haired giant was going to find himself barred from entry.

  Eddie held up a hand to quell Dagon’s next query. “What Cianni did was nothing short of a miracle, Dagon. She is … not at her best at the moment. Course correction while moving at high speed is tricky to begin with. I bet getting a ship this big to change direction while moving faster than the speed of light is something none of us in this room will understand. As it is, we lost three of the AI spheres driving the black hole engines.”

  “That’s where you were.” Babel ran a hand through his hair. Greasy. If he was called upon to soothe the soul of some savage Yellow Dogs –assassins and ninjas and marksmen and what have you- with greasy hair … it couldn’t be done. He’d rather try and talk angry Dogs into not biting them in his robe.

  “Yup.” Eddie plopped himself into his command chair and wriggled around until he got comfortable, whacking his bruised elbow pretty good on a corner. Biting back a curse, he threw the diagnostics he’d built up onto the main monitors. “It looks worse than it is, but it still ain’t pretty. Ci had to shuffle the shields around like mad, sometimes, and I’m speculating, sometimes violating the laws of physics to do so. The three that are down for the count are ones she … uh, co-opted. No matter how great those spheres are, the human mind is still better.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Babel slid into his chair and started working through the information that the AI had pulled up about their current location. “Okey-dokey. If we want to get a jump on rebuilding our black hole engines, best bet is ... Furiamoi Space Station. About four hundred thousand klicks away. Class 3 … ooh! Class 3 communication network station. Those are fun. All sorts of expensive gear laying all over the place, basically unguarded. Plus, if we’re lucky, all those people will be bored off their asses and looking for a little entertain… dammit, I think I left my dice at home. Oh! I’ve got my cards, though. Think these Yellow Dogs know what poker is, cap?”

  Working his way through the data being provided by the AI concerning the space station that had Babel all hot and bothered, Captain Eddie hadn’t truly been paying attention. Reading over specific armaments for the comm station –slim to none, as it was more a relay hub than anything- his subconscious mind lingered on ‘dice’, ‘cards’, and ‘poker’.

  “If,” Captain Eddie said sternly, grabbing a random sampling from the freely transmitted broadcasts being routed through Furiamoi then dumped them onto Dagon’s workstation, “if we go there to steal a bunch of stuff, it’s going to be in and out, Babel. I’m willing to bet the ship that everyone knows who we are by now. What we look like, all that sort of thing. Poker or dice will only cause problems.”

  Telgar, looking over stony Dagon’s shoulder at the sample packets, darkened. “Oh yes, Captain Eddie, they do indeed know who we are, what we look like, and what we’re doing here.”

  “Though they have labeled us as part of ‘Trinity’s dogmatic engine’, ‘a machine mind’s power-hungry destructive force’. The … the list here goes on and on, Captain.
” If Dagon had a brow, he’d furrow it. He recognized all the words as standard English spoken throughout Trinityspace and suspected he understood what they meant when put together in this fashion, but if there was one other thing that Dagon had learned about the most spoken language in the Universe, it was that it was clumsiest by far. “What does all this mean?”

  Eddie shook his head in dismay. The Yellow Dog Elders were panicking, if they’d resorted to these old, ancient methods. They were ignoring the greater problem –whoever or whatever was causing them so many problems out there in space- in favor of focusing on the one that might get them ‘airtime’. He grumbled. “Check those particular transmissions. Are they being routed through the Q-Tunnel?”

  Babel followed the packets through the web of data buoys filling Jade Whisper. The primary method of hopscotching data from one end of the solar system to the other when you didn’t want to pay for or didn’t have access to a portable Q-comm, the buoys were the third or fourth most notoriously difficult things to hack into. He idly thought of asking Ci to come back and give them a hand with the work, but changed his mind. The woman had burned incandescent bright there for a second, when she’d taken control of the black hole engines. Everyone else had been too busy convincing themselves they were going to die, but … he’d seen. She’d done something miraculous, and …

  It terrified him. Not a lot, but enough to worry. About them all. They’d all been ‘blessed’ by Nickels, more or less, to a degree. They each of them could do things that none other could do, and then there was the Soul-HUD, that freakish ‘psychic’ command center that existed between the five of them, allowing them to do things that were greater still.

  Images of Cianni Wren, wreathed in spectral, eldritch fire, flitted across his eyelids. The Soul-HUD wasn’t operational during transition. Something about being dislocated from the constant framework of the Universe.