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

by Lee Bond

  Cianni wandered back into the control room, shot daggers at Babel, mimed drinking a bottle until it was empty with a look of disgust on her face then slumped down against the wall. Telgar moved to join his wife, but her body language suggested this might be a tactical error.

  He stayed where he was.

  “Babel!” Eddie shouted, snapping his fingers as well. “Babel!”

  Babel blinked, shook his head. “Hold your horses.” He muttered as respectfully as he could. “I had a fucking crash couch fall on me, you know. I mean, I didn’t psychically grab hold of three artificial intelligences or anything, but dammit! A couch fell on me!”

  Technically true in the sense that the couch had wound up in a position different than the one it’d started from, but truthfully, he’d flipped it over to hide from Cianni.

  “Uhhh.” Babel whacked the side of his station for no apparent reason and the AI spit out the information he’d received a few minutes ago. “Uh. Yes. All of the ones filled with those not-very-elderly Elders spewing political propaganda all over the place are definitely aimed at the Q-Tunnel.”

  “Why are they doing that?” Telgar asked Eddie, who looked as though he’d just eaten the worst tasting thing in the world.

  “They’ve gone political.” Eddie shook his head. He couldn’t believe it. As hidebound and static as ever. Though he’d only been in the Yellow Dogs for a terribly short time, the lessons he’d learned from the Elder of his family remained with him always. They idolized the past, the forms, the … the ‘nobility’ of it all; the yakuza, the model on which Yellow Dog was based, really was one of the oldest concepts in the Universe. Right up there with prostitution these days in terms of the world’s oldest profession.

  The weird thing was, it worked. Gentlemanly businessmen providing illegal services and everything else associated with Yellow Dog seemed to be a thing the entire population of Humanity was willing to accept, be it from the Dogs themselves, or any one of the million different flavors of organized crime out there. There was no appreciable government in any of the systems where Yellow Dog ran, unless you counted their absentee Emperor-for-Life, and even then, the Elders were on record as saying they would step back from their positions of ultimate power the moment Emperor Etienne Marseilles made an appearance and demanded such.

  But along with the nobility of it, and the acceptance or even idolatry of such an ancient organization came the concept of ‘face’. The problem plaguing their system –and it was a plague, no matter what that fool Elder insisted- was their problem and they’d deal with it in their own way, on their own terms, never once realizing that while they were mighty and powerful, they absolutely lacked the ability to deal with someone using even half-understood Specter tactics.

  Elder Katainn had made his displeasure at their presence known from the beginning, but had played along because it was the thing to do; Nickels’ torturous treatment of several completely disbanded Yellow Dog Families had forced the bastard into playing role, but all that’d gone out the window the moment that fucking Enforcer had shown up to steal their ride.

  When the explosion had ended and the dust had cleared, Katainn had obviously seen his chance to blacken Trinity’s name by throwing their actions onto the Universal stage. Under normal circumstances, Eddie wouldn’t care one way or the other, but the Old Man had wanted them out here, dealing with the problem. Them. Not one of the other teams out there. Which meant that Politoyov felt the problem in Jade Song was one that needed their specific abilities.

  By informing the Universe that of the unwanted Specter team in Jade Song, acting against their best wishes, chances were high that other Elder Clans would come rushing to their aid. Once the problem was dealt with and the Universe was looking somewhere else, all those ‘helpful’ Clans would grind Katainn into dust and spread his assets around until there was nothing left.

  “This should’ve been a Black Op from the beginning.” Eddie sighed. “The Old Man should’ve thrown concerns about aggravating the Yellow Dogs right out the damn window.”

  Cianni, slumped against the wall just on the other side of the command room, couldn’t have agreed more. Far better to come in guns blazing as their old Captain would’ve.

  Just fly in, track the weirdo with the badly decrypted Specter playbook down and blow them out of the sky. Then they’d fly the fuck home and leave the Yellow Dog Elder to figure shit out. At lot more publicity, sure. A lot more flak, sure.

  But if that was all they were capable of, Politoyov wouldn’t have given them the assignment in the first place. Their skills and abilities were supposed to’ve been a last ditch effort in surviving whoever or whatever was harassing Yellow Dog with such contemptible disdain.

  Cianni banged her head lightly against the thick metal wall while her companions kept at whatever they were doing. If only that Enforcer hadn’t shown up. If only they hadn’t been ramped into the redline by dealing with Katainn and his incessant bullshit.

  If only they hadn’t fucked up so badly. None of them were willing to talk about it, but the blame was on them. They’d fucked up.

  They’d killed an Enforcer. An Enforcer!

  One of the first things she’d done when they’d gotten back to the ship was rather quietly plumb the depths of AI information concerning that particular feat. Using her rather … specific … skillset had revealed considerably more information than a regular AI user, but at the end of the search, the statistics were pretty cut and dried.

  No one anywhere had ever killed an Enforcer. It was considered one of the most impossible things in the known Universe. That was the official report. Cianni was just jaded enough thanks to her service in Specter to know Trinity was undoubtedly whitewashing those particular statistics, because no matter how powerful the Enforcers were in their Suits, there were things –whispered of by Garth- out there in the dark that were just as powerful, just as nasty, and even less bound by ephemeral things like morals and constraint.

  Cianni had therefore concluded that Enforcers simply were not killed by normal people, whereupon she’d laughed her ass off for a solid minute. After their … whatever it was they’d gone through … they were most definitely not normal.

  The Tech Expert ran a trembling hand through her hair. Not normal by a longshot. She wanted to find Garth, find him and ask how he dealt with being the strangest thing in the Universe, how he could put on that wry grin of his and tell those strange stories and still go on, day after day. Carrying that burden without screaming until the lights went out.

  She laughed, mind turning back to when they’d been rocketing through the slippery dark, blindly fleeing in any direction from the truly impressive Yellow Dog armada that had –in some way still unbeknownst to anyone in Armageddon Troop Too- managed to sneak up on them.

  Their BattleSystem had lost its shit right at the same time Telgar had trained his weapons on that barge, filling every available screen and flat surface capable of carrying data with a breakdown of weapons and defenses and offensive capabilities of the Yellow Dog Armada. After absorbing the daunting information, she and her friends had gone into full Soul-HUD, working silently and efficiently, doing everything in their power to assess the best course of action.

  Undoubtedly assembled to deal with the ‘problem that wasn’t a problem’. The armada had pointed everything from Hot and Heavy KinetiCannons to WhisperQuiet Masers, not to mention a vicious hodgepodge of missiles, torpedoes, mines and … well, everything but the damned kitchen sink.

  Cianni shook her head bitterly. The problem that wasn’t a problem had generated so much fear in Katainn and the other local Elders that they’d formed a space navy large enough to conquer a medium-sized solar system, and damn her if My Other Ship had been outclassed in every way, shape and form.

  One on one, with Eddie’s piloting skills and Telgar’s unbeatable weapons’ control -hell, even Dagon’s willingness to be launched from one of their own torpedo tubes approaching vessels and Babel’s ever-growing prowess at convincing
people to do things against their nature over comm systems- they might’ve been able to walk away without too many issues.

  But they’d all panicked. After the Enforcer … after that, they hadn’t found it in themselves to settle down. They’d each of them done a terrible thing and the threat of Trinity hunting them the rest of their days over the affair was a thing you just didn’t dismiss out of hand.

  So naturally, with a navy that size breathing down on them, they’d panicked, she most of all! assessing the situation instantly, fear grabbing hold of her fight or flight responses and throttling them both for all they were worth, she’d chosen flight.

  By reaching instinctively outwards towards the AI minds governing their ship’s black hole engines.

  And they’d responded. In that moment, the gossamer thin threads of the Soul-HUD had snapped like a brittle spider web.

  The moment the host of Yellow Dog ships had appeared on their telemetry systems like magic –right behind the decoy vessel- those damned AI minds had responded to her raw terror by flinging them into the slippery dark.

  Right at the nearest world. Crooning Orchid, if she wasn’t mistaken, though Cianni had to admit to herself that her brain wasn’t at its best right then; parts of her precious organic computer bank felt like overheated food, while other parts were icy cold.

  It’d taken about a quarter of a second for the black hole engine AI minds to ‘realize’ their mistake, and less than an eighth of a second for their diagnosis to come back; they couldn’t perform a course correction with less than the three seconds of lead time they possessed. Traveling faster than the speed of light towards a celestial body guaranteed imminent collision and there was no realistic way to warn anyone down below that they’d soon find themselves transformed into sparkling white motes of light that would fall through space for an endless eternity.

  It’d taken Cianni a femtosecond to realize all this, and what had to happen next.

  It was undeniable that the sensation of being merged into the Soul-HUD with her bosom companions was a feeling that was wonderful and exhilarating, she would never be able to forget the scintillating, diamond-edged satisfaction coursing through her with the neon-bright lines knitting them together had fractured at her command, freeing her up to save them all.

  Ci turned her attention to her friends and husband. They were bickering amiably over their next course of action.

  Babel –as always- was trying to wheedle Eddie into letting them slip aboard the space station to plunder everything in sight, with Eddie firmly denying –though never as strenuous as he could be, for Eddie did have a soft spot for the con- they would do anything of the sort. Telgar and Dagon were discussing tactical solutions should they run across another Yellow Dog war fleet, apparently trying to outdo one another in terms of epic madness; Telgar’s best idea was to launch the actual sun at their enemies, while Dagon was attempting to sketch out practical alterations to their engines, turning them into black hole cannons.

  The Tech Expert sighed, pleased her friends and comrades were wrapped up in solving the problem. She doubted she was capable of anything at all beyond leaning against the cold metal wall behind her back right then.

  More than that, though, Cianni was guiltily pleased that out of all of them, Babel was the only one to’ve seen what’d happened to her when she’d seized control of those AI minds, combining them into one of the most powerful neural networks seen anywhere in the Universe.

  Pleased because out of all of them, Babel was the only one who could actually keep a secret. The man was nothing but secrets. With his talent, the man learned more and more about the human condition with every passing moment. His innate power was forcing him to turn a blind eye to some of the more savage excesses he eked out of someone he was ‘convincing’. This sudden education into the darker side of life was no doubt the sole reason the short man spent much of his time off-duty drunk.

  This dark secret between the two of them was also why she, ordinarily a non-drinker, was desperate to find some hooch: transforming into a living AI mind kind of took the wind right out of you.

  Merged with the three AI minds responsible for guiding My Other Ship through the stretch of space that their hyper-velocity engines entered, Cianni … she’d felt like a goddess. Every single aspect of their ship had been within her grasp. A twitch here controlled oxygen flow from the replicators. A tap there, lights went on and off. A blink there, and part of her consciousness was in control of the internal camera network.

  And that was when she’d seen what she’d become. Wreathed in spectral, eldritch electricity, she’d been beautiful. Evanescent.

  She literally could not explain the wash of emotion flooding through her that none of the others had seen that transformation.

  If something like that had happened to her, what could happen to the others when and if they were pushed to their absolute limits? The Tech Specter truly didn’t want that to happen to any one of them. The urge to demand flight once again, that they turn tail for the Quantum Tunnel so these stupid Yellow Dog Elders and their need to maintain ‘face’ was hot, hungry. There were a million other things they could be doing. They could …

  “What in the bloody fuck?” Eddie’s bellow was so loud that it startled Cianni to her feet instantly.

  Cianni brushed Babel’s sour face away. He nodded sadly at her own quick raise of an eyebrow, signaling that all was well.

  “What’s the matter?” Cianni demanded as she hit her seat.

  “Random intrusion scan detected, well, an intrusion.” Eddie flashed the data over to Cianni’s workstation. “Telgar, weapon systems detect anything out there? Dagon? Anything on your systems? Babel, any chatter?”

  Ci worked through the figures on her screens. There. Right there.

  Code, shifting sinuously alongside the noise of the Universe. Bits and pieces of kernels struck a chord but the memory wasn’t ready to break loose yet.

  “Whoever this is, they’re good, Captain. I haven’t seen coding like this in a long time. There’s something … almost … fam …”

  A voice, distorted, wavering, popping and snapping full of electronic hash, filled the command center. “Imagine my surprise,” the heavily altered voice whispered seductively, “when I felt someone coding through the substrates of the Universe.”

  Telgar was at Cianni’s side instantly; he’d sensed something amiss with his ladylove from the moment she’d left the command room, but had known enough to leave her with her troubles. As petite and ladylike as she appeared to be, Cianni was as tough as they came and needed to work through her issues on her own terms before bringing them to anyone else’s attention.

  This strange augmented voice was something different.

  “Who is this?” Eddie shouted. He looked at Babel. “Where is this transmission coming from?”

  Babel’s hands flew across the controls. “I … I … the systems say everywhere.”

  “Not possible.” Dagon countered.

  “Be that as it may, rock man,” Babel started hammering commands into the AI minds, forcing them to submit to his demands whether they could actually do what he wanted or not, “these fucking computers are telling me that the air molecules inside this ship are acting as transceivers.”

  “That is not possible.” Dagon was up, out of his seat and at Babel’s side, crystalline eyes reading the same reports his friend was going over for the fifth time. The ‘rock man’ blinked, once. “It … it seems it is.”

  “Imagine my surprise again,” the voice continued, almost gleefully, “when all the data on your vessel connects you to someone I know intimately.”

  Eddie, desperate to regain control of a situation that was somehow already well out of his grasp, leaned back in his captain’s chair, crossed his legs, and spoke as calmly as he could.

  When you found yourself without a paddle, you only had two choices. Drown, or ride it out.

  Eddie’s voice was calm and rock steady. “We’ve been to many places, stranger.
We’ve come into contact with, well, hundreds of thousands of people. Why won’t you identify yourself?”

  “We’ll come to that, Edio san-Tekmara. Cianni and Telgar Wren. Babel Sinfell. Such a naughty person you are. ‘Dagon’. If only your cohorts understood the true nature of a Xenocryst-Caltan. I know all about you, about how you tried so desperately to show my love how to be a better man, how you tried to help him claw his way back from the darkness that was Specter.”

  “Holy fucking shit!” The shout escaped Babel’s lips before he could control himself. “This person knows the Captain!”

  “Ex-Captain.” The voice chided. “He has gone on to other things, now, greater, more wondrous things than you can imagine, Babel Sinfell.”

  “Can you or can you not locate where this transmission is coming from?” Eddie demanded hotly, looking around the room at each of his people.

  Cianni raised a pale, trembling hand. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes. She could feel that eldritch witch-fire, right down in the center of her being. It wasn’t as hot as before, though that probably had to do more with the fact that right that second, the fear coiling its way through her was infinitely greater than anything she might’ve felt before. Telgar stuck his handsome face in front of hers, eyes questing to find some reason for the sudden, deep sorrow he felt from his ladylove.

  The strange voice made a sound, a sound full of curious and excited interest.

  Eddie sensed Ci’s trepidation, but there was nothing he could do about that. He was the captain. They were on a mission to put a stop to the threat –he’d realized almost instantly that the person ‘talking’ to them was the one they’d been sent to deal with- and if Cianni had a … a special way … of locating this person, then he was duty-bound to use all available means.

  “Do it, Ci.” Babel’s voice sounded thin and far away. “Show them what you got.”

  Cianni blinked away her tears, mouthed an apology to the only man she’d ever loved, and grabbed hold of the fire in her belly. To his credit –and, if possible, earning a stronger place within her soul than even imagined- Telgar Wren did not move from his wife when diaphanous fire welled up from her pores to sheathe her in flickering electric heat. He simply countered her flame with an impenetrable shield.