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

by Lee Bond

  Alice flushed. She was being silly, of course. Pre-show jitters had her all sorts of flummoxed. Not to mention all the God soldiers standing around like statues, being … weird. Not ten minutes gone, each and every Goddie in the building had suddenly snapped ramrod straight, their eyes seeming to fill with some kind of electronic static! That’d gone on forever until suddenly, half of them had saluted, their thunderous voices shattering the eerie calm.

  The words echoed in Alice’s ears: “Long live Saint Candall the Vengeful! May the sword of Vengeance strike down all enemies!”

  The other half? They’d dropped to a knee, head bowed, their voice a soft, gentle whisper. “All hail Saint Candall the Glorious. He shall live ever onward as guardian to the lost and lonely.”

  Making matters weirder still, one of her friends who had friends on Sarelsa said that it’d happened there, too! Reports were coming in that it’d happened in every city on every planet. Every Goddie. No one could find anything on who this Candall was, and the Goddies were being even quieter than usual. In fact, they were pretending that nothing had happened.

  Alice didn’t know anything about why the Goddies were being weird except that they were the reason everyone was behind, and really, there wasn’t anything they could do about it now except cut corners.

  “Okay, Sa Tizhen,” Alice extracted her hand from his, “I …”

  “Please,” Marcus eyed a brace of God soldiers standing at the far end of the hastily erected meeting hall –not as big as the coliseum in the now-destroyed Museum, but capable of holding more than five thousand si’s and sa’s- circumspectly, “Marcus. Sa Tizhen is my father.”

  “Oh! Haha. Yes. Of course.” Alice nodded. “Marcus. Now, Marcus, I’m going to have to park you in this greenroom here for a while. Your …” She flipped through pages on her Sheet, shaking her head at the revised timeframe –Takanawa, of all people, was running even later than Marcus-, “Father is tied up.”

  This God soldier business was going to ruin the whole show!

  Marcus estimated the distance between him and the Goddies. No more than four hundred feet. They could cover that stretch before he could even sneeze. “Naturally!” he said understandingly. “This is the biggest day in televised history. The first non-Governmental simulcast ever. I wonder … did the Chairman give News4You access to military channels?”

  Alice made to shut Marcus down for asking such a question, then changed her mind. Looking around, she leaned in to whisper, though with everything that was going on, it wasn’t strictly necessary. “The strangest thing, Marcus. We ‘found’ an entire communication relay network just floating out there in space a few years ago, right around the time The Box launched itself into space. No one could figure out how it got there, and no one stepped forward to say it was theirs. Chairman DuPont took possession of it through … um … ah … Ultrasomething? The company that he used to work at alongside Sa Nickels.”

  “UltraMegaDynamaTron.” Marcus supplied helpfully.

  Alice nodded sharply. “That’s the one. He’s letting us use it to get the broadcast out.” She gestured to the door leading into the greenroom, frowning angrily at her Sheet, which was beginning to chime with three different alerts and shriek an alarm. “If there’s anything you need, just ask through the Sheet. Your father will be with you … for the Love of Pete, I am sorry, sa, but I must go.”

  Marcus watched Alice the PA disappear into a throng of electricians, a bemused smile on his face. When he was certain she was gone, the smile dropped. Being the son of an ex-OverCommander who was now the current spiritual advisor to thirty million eternal soldiers had its benefits. The failed actor warranted that he was the only properly unaccounted person in the entire structure: no one, at any time, had logged him into the pervasive security net.

  Oh, he’d gone through fourteen different security checks to get this far into the building, but at no point had anyone bothered to go beyond that. They knew him, or so they thought. He was ‘that man who’d played that scientist that time’ or ‘Vasily’s son’.

  So naturally, he was no threat at all.

  They hadn’t even bothered to secureLINK his prote to the building’s automatic security systems!

  Rubbing his hands together like he was washing them –an old, calming trick he did before going on stage- Marcus entered the green room, preparing himself for the off chance that there were other people inside.

  No one. So far. The door to the facilities and a private changing room were shut, so Marcus –still playing a role- started humming quite loudly as he strolled through the lavishly appointed greenroom, eyes falling on the various accoutrements awaiting someone other –he presumed- than himself; there were several trays of this new fancy ‘fast food’ stuff that people the world over were going frankly insane for, but Marcus turned up his nose. One of his many agents had –very recently- tried to get him out of bed to audition for commercials. For ‘Chef Charbo’s’ brand line of delicious food.

  He was an actor. He didn’t do commercials. Not even if he wasn’t about to do what … he didn’t do commercials. It was beneath him. Marcus would rather flip back to Screens and do a live drama than a single thirty second advert, especially for something as … as … as meat-laden as the fare produced by Charbo. The reeking scent of well-cooked flesh wafted into his nostrils.

  Marcus froze where he was and willed his body’s automatic responses to fall in line. He was on stage. He was live. He was in front of thousands of people. If he threw up now, if he let the ghastly redolence of all that cooked animal get the better of him, he’d flub his lines and be bounced out the door.

  The reflexive urge to vomit dissipated, though with a white-knuckled, hair-raising departure that very nearly had Marcus to his knees. He grinned, shakily rubbing the back of a hand across his mouth. Picking up the song he’d been humming –something new and mindless from that tart Indra Sahari, who was even more popular now she was singing songs about Nickels and his exploits- Marcus hurried first to the change room, then the bathroom, knocking on each door.

  No answer at either. Risking embarrassment, the son of Father Vasily popped the bathroom door open and stuck his head through the gap. No one. He nodded. Good. Next was the change room, and the result was the same.

  “Phew.” Marcus took another deep breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling loudly through his mouth. “Alone at last.”

  Alone meant he could check on … check on the thing he’d brought with him. Alone meant he could decide whether or not he was going to do what he planned on doing with the thing wrapped against his chest.

  One last deep, calming breath and he began unzipping his heavy jacket, slender, handsome fingers betraying only a slight tremor as the zipper was worked. He’d worn one of the biggest, heaviest jackets he could find. Not one person had questioned the choice, not once during interminable process of working his way through to the inner areas of the studio, but he’d had an answer prepared, all the same.

  Actors had answers for everything. If they were good at what they did, those answers were always believable.

  As Marcus shrugged out of the thick, all-weather jacket, he ran through the dialogue he’d worked out last night before trying to get a few hours sleep. “The jacket? Oh yes, sa, it’s for later tonight. Friends and I … no … no, people don’t talk like that. Me and some friends are going to check out the new Charbo’s up there in Northon. Got a different style than the others. Weather avatars say it’s going to be wet. Better safe than sorrow, I always say. Thank you, I like the colors as well. No. No. Awful. Thanks! I was worried it’d be too garish but … bah! I’ll have to wing it.”

  Marcus put the expensive coat –the last he’d ever buy- on the couch next to him, running his hands across the slick surface of the other coat he wore. More properly considered overalls, the bright, bright orange Rescue and Recovery suit clashed terribly with the pallid hue of his skin; flashes of the overly bright fabric bounced from his nearly chalk-white face, making him l
ook … sick.

  Marcus walked over to a full length mirror to check the effect out properly. He turned his head this way and that. It was eerie. Designed to be worn in dangerous places like Port City’s Space Port and the Museum, the coveralls’ color turned him cadaverous.

  He frowned at the mirror. It was a miracle Alice the PA had even recognized him; his beautiful eyes were surrounded by crows’ feet, there were bags under his eyes and his skin, oh his lovely skin, well, he was practically white as snow. He thought back to their brief conversation.

  Had she merely been playacting? Being polite for the sake of keeping an obviously distraught man from causing problems on the set of the most important broadcast since … since ever?

  Had he … had he been dumped here? Were there Goddies on the other side of the door right then? Ready to pull his head off like they did to so many others?

  “No.” Marcus shook his head. Her eyes had shone with excitement at discovering his identity, her hand in his –so warm, so vibrant, albeit a little damp with sweat- had betrayed no tremors, no flinch of disgust or dislike.

  Marcus squared his shoulders, thrust out a jaw that should’ve launched a solar system-wide acting career, and shook his head once more, slowly, so the cameras could catch it properly. “No. She was happy to see me. But…”

  Here, Marcus couldn’t help himself. He paused for a long beat, slender fingers holding the zipper of the RaRsuit up high so the audience could see what he was doing. With a dramatic flourish worthy of any stage actor worth his salt, Marcus Aurelius Tizhen pulled on the zipper, revealing what he wore beneath the furiously orange jumpsuit in one perfect, suave maneuver.

  “But she won’t be happy to see this!” At the last second, Marcus resisted the urge to cackle as a maniac would. It’d be too much.

  ‘This’ was the reason he was wearing the RaRsuit in the first place. He still couldn’t believe his ‘luck’ when he’d found it so long ago, just as he couldn’t believe he hadn’t done the proper thing the very moment he’d clapped eyes on it; prior to being allowed entry onto the ravaged site that’d once been the Latelian Natural History Museum, every volunteer had gone through an extensive training process, taught by a variety of expertly skilled men and women. That training had –at base- been all about proper bomb disposal.

  Prior to introducing the world to his particular brand of political madness, the madman Vilmos Gualf had seeded the old transport tunnels running from the Museum to the still –and often- used newer channels beneath nearly all of Central City with a truly maniacal amount of explosive devices.

  Owing to the tremendous amount of weaponry used –not to mention the inexplicable destruction of the sorrowful Gunboys- traditional techniques used to hunt down such weapons had failed. Therefore, the old-fashioned way, with people walking through dimly lit tunnels, literally poking at rocks and rubble with sticks, hoping to find something, hoping that it didn’t go boom straight away.

  RaRsuits were supposed to protect against the worst ravages of being blown up, and Marcus knew from personal experience –one of his tunnelmates had poked ‘not a rock’ and was thankfully alive and awaiting two shiny new robot legs and half an arm- that the suit worked well enough.

  Marcus couldn’t take his eyes of the bomb on his chest. It was simple, yet elegant. Cautious exploration on the ‘LINK over the last few years had revealed a world that he hadn’t even imagined existed; there were, it seemed, a million different ways to make things blow up, and if you were so inclined, you could turn your home or apartment into a smoking crater, all thanks to a few common household items.

  Sis and sas the system over prided themselves on being able to toss together any number of random things that could then be used to express their dislike of government policy. It’d been that way since the foundation of the system.

  Naturally, with Chairman DuPont at the helm nowadays, the expression of that hostility had decreased to the point where the only people who seemed to be complaining were the few ancient politicians who’d grown fat from Doans’ policy of deceit and theft. At long last, civilian protestors had put down the bombs to pick up signs.

  But Gualf … Gualf had had access to next-level components. Marcus knew all about it, about how he and his brother –Guillfoyle- had essentially colluded to take control of the solar system, literally planned on ripping the reins of power from Alyssa Doans’ hands. Knew about how the wealthier, younger, smarter brother had provided the politically disenfranchised older brother with weapons and components well beyond what any other terrorists could lay their hands on.

  It was a thing of beauty, in it’s own, lethal, way. According to the friendly bomb expert who’d trained him and a roomful of eager-to-help Latelians, each one of the fist-sized bombs had enough high-tech explosives inside to level an entire building or –as intended by the nastily murdered Gualf- to pull down half of Central to hide a coward’s escape.

  It hardly even looked like a bomb. Marcus remembered the moment when his eyes had fallen on the first one, half-buried under a huge pile of rubble. Why, he’d thought it a discarded proteus, or a broken Sheet. Luckily for him, he’d been partnered with an older si with the sharp eyes of a predator bird. Si Ramsey had shouted a stern warning, and he, fool that he’d been, had stopped with his fingers not more than half an inch from the buttons.

  “More than enough.” Marcus wondered if that friendly bomb expert had ever once paused in the middle of a lecture to worry about what he was showing the unusually interested once-famous actor, or had he, like the others, simply accepted that, as OverCommander Vasily’s son, his reasons were beyond reproach, his honor and integrity as sterling as that of the greater man’s.

  His cover story had been simple. Actually, more than simple; the premise for his need to learn how to defuse the high-tech devices on his own had been ripped right from a made-for-Screen movie released nearly three hundred years prior, and the expert had swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

  “It’d be better,” Marcus said, sinking into the acting style of three centuries ago, where every man had spoken in a fast staccato, like they were too damn busy to be fooling around with something as slowly and unwieldy as speech, “if I knew how to dismantle these bloody things on my own. Cover more ground that way. Makes sense, doesn’t it? You say there’s hundreds of miles of these tunnels all looping in and around and over and under, don’t you? We could be here for months, years, even. Show me how, so I can help. Sure, poking them with marker sticks and hoping to bloody Pete we don’t go up in a flash of light and a splash of red’ll work, but still. Show me the ropes. I’m a quick study, you’ll see. Hah. Perfectly delivered!”

  The actor couldn’t rightly say when he’d decided to take one of the bombs home with him. It was one of those things that just seemed to’ve happened, all by itself. He remembered finding it and turning the deadly machine off one, two, three, just as he’d been shown. He even remembered tucking it inside the highly protective Rescue and Recovery jumpsuit –the very one he was wearing right then, in fact- and walking out through the security checkpoint.

  Marcus flashed his pallid self a quick smirk. The incredibly resilient fabric of the jumpsuit, theoretically designed to protect the wearer from all but the closest of eruptions, had shielded the bomb from sensors situated literally every three feet.

  Marcus couldn’t say why he’d taken the thing home. Certainly, nothing like today had been on his mind, not back then. His father had still been OverCommander, Alyssa had still been out there in the wilds, Nickels still trapped in The Box. The war with Trinity, months away. Their solar system hadn’t been shrouded in a shield that was –more than anyone could admit- more a prison door than protection shield, Harmony had only been a sleek whisper in the night …

  “I suppose I took it home because …”

  The door opened. Marcus whirled quickly, fingers yanking the zipper on the RaRsuit all the way up to the neck as he did so. He bit back a yelp as the metal fastener cut a shallow groove int
o the flesh beneath his Adam’s apple.

  Alice the PA tilted her head to one side, giving Marcus an odd smile. “That’s certainly … orange.”

  Marcus tilted his head back and laughed. “Isn’t it just? It’s for an audition later today. It’s a flight suit, don’t you know. For … an audition.” He’d flubbed it. He knew it, and he could tell by the look on Alice’s face that she knew it as well. Didn’t matter. All he needed to do was get through the next few minutes and then … and then he could perform.

  Alice pursed her lips thoughtfully for a moment before nodding. “Isn’t that exciting? You get to be here, to meet with your Father, then off you go to an audition, which I just know you’ll get. I loved you when I was a little si! Watching you act on the Screens was the highlight of my Sunday mornings, Sa Tizhen.”

  Marcus bit back the vehement retort trying to rip through his teeth. When I was a little si. That, right there, that was the kiss of death for an actor. People not in the business had no goddamn clue what that sounded like to someone who’d been famous. And bringing up Sunday movies? He was only sixty. Barely into his middle years!

  “What can I do for you?” Marcus asked as casually as he could, reaching out for his overcoat. “Is it time to meet my Father?” He’d need to put the bloody warm thing back on. Though his old man wasn’t OverCommander any longer, he’d recognize a Rescue and Recovery suit instantly, not like this little girl.

  “Just … just a few minutes more.” A quick smile flicked across her face; truth was, she’d snuck back to get an autograph, but … “Your father is a very fussy man.”

  This time, when he laughed, it was all honesty. “Fussy, Alice the PA, doesn’t begin to explain my father.” He was blown, and that was a fact. Shrugging into the thick coat quickly, Marcus plopped down onto a couch. “I shall await my Father’s leisure, then.”