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

by Lee Bond

  Agnethea puffed herself and mimicked the King’s gait. Grinning impishly, she filled the stairwell with those ‘demotivational’ words, a litany of doubt that –to her certain knowledge- had never actually worked; again, them who were mad enough to risk the inside of a King were mad. Trying to make them any madder would take an awful lot more than awful music that had some mean words mixed in.

  Nothing!

  This was infuriating. Already on the second ‘level’ of this weird funhouse monster and The King wasn’t even monkeying about with the temperature, which was something Big’Uns did when they got desperate. To her bare skin, the innards of this metallic monstrosity Old Mackie had christened Irondrinker was a fair and courteous summer afternoon.

  Under normal circumstances, it would be quite pleasant.

  “Only t’isn’t a normal day, now is it, Mad Goth King?” Agnethea stopped where she was, suddenly full of trepidation and concern.

  This was the day the King had decided to bring an end to Ickford using the most blatantly destructive methods she’d ever personally seen in her life, and, sad to say, she’d witnessed more than her fair share of their monarch’s black moods.

  He’d even gone so far as to violate the self-imposed restriction of keeping direct manifestation of King’s Will from the general population, as most regular people generally lost their minds right and proper when they saw the things their King could get up to when he had reason.

  Even gearheads got wobbly when Blake started flinging Will around, and with good excuse: being directly confronted with a being with the powers of a God was the sort of experience that had you on your knees begging for forgiveness or dead where you stood.

  Agnethea dropped her butt down on the stairs, “I am impressed this time. But these stairs and halls don’t make no sense, and I am a dab hand at figuring things out, if I do say so myself.”

  Everything Agnethea knew about the King suggested Irondrinker and his brood were the greatest physical manifestation of Will since the King had caused The Dome to rise. Which were the problem, she reckoned.

  Where were the protective measures? If Golems could gain entrance, then Master Nickels most assuredly could, and there was no room for doubt in a quizzical Queen’s mind that that burly man would cause nothing but mayhem and disaster.

  There had to be some kind of protection! There simply had to be.

  “But you aren’t normal, now, are you?” Agnethea thought back to what she’d seen outside.

  Irondrinker and his giant brothers lumbering around to an area and then spending more time flattening buildings in a huge circle than trying to do for any of the gearheads and wardogs as were hammering on their thick metal flesh. And there were so many of them, all armed with truly inspired weapons from Harvard and Mickel’s special forges.

  Agnethea tapped a lip thoughtfully. The monsters weren’t defending themselves against the onslaught of weapons, nor were they –honestly- actively killing those who tried to climb upwards and inwards. No, them gearheads were being felled by the only defensive measure the beasts seemed to possess, and many of them were being killed so quickly that they had little chance to cause more than miniscule damage before dropping like mayflies.

  The original Obsidian Golem squinted. At first glance, the widening circles of trampled buildings and rubble seemed to fit in with her theory that the King wanted to destroy Ickford.

  “You go on about it every bloody time you come to town.” Agnethea craned her head upwards, wondering if –against all bloody reason- there was a bloody door leading directly to Irondrinker’s brain. “And you act like you don’t want to be here when you do show up. And you don’t pay your bloody bar tab when you leave.”

  Every chance he got to warn her that one day he’d destroy her precious blight, Blake took, and thus, the demolition Irondrinker and his siblings undertook seemed to fit those warnings.

  Oh, there was more to this. There just had to be. If there weren’t, them Giant Green Men’d be laying about with the old-school weapons them ancient Kingly cousins had once brandished many thousands of years ago. Missile launchers and Rocket Crowns and all manner of wartime weapons.

  But they weren’t. Which meant…

  Insight sparked. All the various bits and bobs floating around in her brain suddenly collided together, giving her a clear picture of what it was the King up to.

  Agnethea shook her head. “He isn’t that clever.”

  The Queen of Ickford hopped to her feet and took the stairs three at a time, hurrying to spite caution, knowing now there was nothing to stop her.

  “I wager there shall be a door, as well, to fit this cunning charade.” Agnethea took the last dozen steps in a single bound.

  She bit back a particularly vile curse.

  There was a door. A big, stupid door with a bloody glass window set in so anyone at the door could peek in and take a long, cautious look inside.

  “You aren’t this clever.” Agnethea ground out furiously. She booted the door off the hinges. The unbarred door flew across the room, bouncing off a giant console set directly in the center of Irondrinker’s cavernous skull and fell off to one side.

  “Am I not?”

  Agnethea ignored King Blake’s taunting voice in favor of examining Irondrinker’s mind. There were several dozen monitors bolted into the walls of the beast’s brain pan with huge screws. On each, a different view of Ickford, the surrounding environment, and the gearheads who battled to protect the city they’d come to love and loathe. Agnethea caught on quickly that most of what she was looking at were live feeds coming from the other destroyers.

  Blake’s voice thundered through the control room. “I said, ‘I’m not’?”

  Agnethea turned her attention to the console set into the middle of the brain, fingers tracing the cracks her unceremoniously booted door had set into the casing. “Quite a lot of buttons and switches and dials and readouts. And panels and whatnot, too.”

  Agnethea tsked unhappily. “And none of this falls in line with your most cherished style, Barnabas.” At last, she looked to the single monitor holding the King’s gloating face.

  “That’s King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, you scabrous whore.” Blake smiled as he delivered the insult. “But clearly I am this clever, else …” He opened his palms wide. “Here we are.”

  “This is a trap, isn’t it?” Agnethea checked over her shoulder, though it was too late. The entrance was gone as if it’d never been. Oh yes, the most intense deposit of King’s Will ever seen.

  No matter. She was an ancient Obsidian Golem. There wasn’t a trap anywhere that could hold her for long. Not even in the middle of the greatest concentration of Will anyone had ever seen.

  Blake laughed. Oh, how he laughed. He laughed so hard that, for a time, he let down his Kingly guard and degenerated into a giggling, snorting regular person. When he was able –wiping tears from his eyes and blowing his nose on his robe- Blake answered properly. “Oh aye, Queenie, ‘tis a trap indeed.”

  “You can’t hold me for long, Barnabas.” Agnethea strode over to a wall and pried a section of it away as easily as a child unwraps a present from Mum and Dad. “Your Will is weak around me.”

  Barnabas smiled. He even let a twinkle appear in his eyes. “Trap hain’t for you, sweetheart. Not at all. Still,” the King added charitably, nodding appreciatively at Agnethea’s deconstruction efforts, “you keep right at that, there, will you, love? Reckon by the time you’re loose, I’ll have enough data to prime the other Gunboys for ah, well…”

  Just then, Irondrinker shuddered and the entire control room erupted, tossing Agnethea about like a ragdoll. The Obsidian Golem banged her head on the control room and lost consciousness, leaving the King on his monitors to scream and shout.

  ***

  Now that the armor was up and running and everything was hunky-dory, it was spilling loads of information all over the HUD, more than Garth could keep up with.

  Or –if he was being perfectly truthful w
ith himself- more than he really needed. He didn’t need to know the relative construction date of the wall he was currently bracing himself against, nor did he need to know the names, ages and Dark Iron consumption rates of the gearheads that were all the way on the opposite side of the Gunboy’s wide circle of mayhem. News flashes he did want to know about included but were not limited to: anything Gunboy related –for preference, he wanted DB to find a single critical kill point that’d turn his target into an hilarious explosion of springs, pistons and bouncing tires- and the locations of the two Gearmen and Agnethea.

  DarkBook –or DB for short, because even Garth hated the name he’d come up with for the result of two merged technologies- was working hard on scanning the Gunboy to find precisely that kind of explosive off-switch, but it was taking time; in addition to the monstrously thick armor plating that was eating up all but the most heavy duty weapons’ barrages, good old King Barnabas Blake the Asshat had finally gotten around to thinking like a normal person, opting to surround his foul creation in some nasty-as-hell electronic countermeasures.

  In short, DB was having a difficult time getting proper readings.

  “You weren’t having trouble when I was at the fucking bank.” Garth exhaled noisily through is nose.

  : close proximity appears to be influencing the scan:

  “Well.” That … that made sense.

  Garth didn’t like it, so he spent a solid thirty seconds cursing himself left, right and center for being so stupid to miss the fucking blatantly obvious fact that there wasn’t an earnestly nice, sincere individual in all of Arcade City. Even Agnethea –who was the nicest woman he’d met by far and away- had one of the most impressive track records for being ‘Most Awfulest Person Since Time Began’.

  It was going to irk him until the end of time, the whole ‘missing out on the fact that Barnabas the grouchy blacksmith is in truth the evil King Blake’.

  “I mean seriously.” Garth watched three gearheads –Silent Sam, Awful ‘Arry and Slick Stevie- scoot across a trampled so they could leap lithely onto the Gunboy’s foot. They weren’t going to make it. None of them did. “I traveled with him for a month and, sure, okay, I didn’t trust the guy, but he was such an asshole. That’s, like, auto-distrust sequence alpha right there. And I still can’t figure out why he didn’t just whammy me with his magic Cloud powers and be done with it.”

  As expected, the gearheads fell off the Gunboy, sadly making it no further than the Godzilla-sized soldier’s ankle. DB indicated their Dark Iron levels at 4. Whatever ‘4’ meant.

  Garth looked back the way he’d come, wondering if it would even be worth his while to go back to the entrance of the city so DB could get an unaffected scan of the Gunboy.

  “Hey.” Garth snapped his fingers. “Hey. DB.”

  : acknowledge:

  “What’s the power output for this sniper cannon?” He was driving a super-powered suit of nanotech augmented armor, for crying out loud. If it couldn’t adjust shit on the fly, then what was the bloody point?

  DB popped the update onto the HUD. For a sniper rifle driven by a rebuilt Iron heart, it was impressive. From the stats, Garth figured he could shoot someone in the brain pain from a minimum of five klicks. After that, the efficacy of the rounds saw a serious dip in diminishing returns. Five klicks, half a meter, the person unto whom he was theoretically trying to give a third eye to would be able to bend over and pick up a pretty nifty souvenir of the time he almost died.

  Against Gunboy armor, even stuff that wasn’t augmented by nanotech?

  The handguns and mortars the locals were using were more effective.

  “Do better.” Garth snapped. Beyond being completely disappointed in his awesome mega-armor so far, the Gunboy’s antics were bugging the living daylights out of him. Most of them still weren’t moving beyond their little patch of flat land, no matter how thoroughly they were being pummeled by Ickford’s militia.

  DB started working on the problem. Still nowhere near artificially intelligent, it could only work on issues that were brought to its direct attention. Charged with the task of deriving a method of powering the sniper rifle up, the only thing –Garth prayed- DB required was time to crunch the numbers.

  If it suddenly announced it needed more power, he would literally beat the shit out of his own armor.

  While DarkBook the Singularly Unimpressive chewed through the math, Garth decided that a quick up-top check on the locations and situations of the other three Ultraman knockoffs was in order. It was hard to tell how the crews across Ickford were doing, but if its stentorian shrieks of outrage were any indication, the Gunboy closest to his position seemed to be getting its robo-tits in a big twist.

  Crouching low to the rooftop to keep his profile as small as possible –no sense in letting his quarry see him too soon- Garth crept quietly over to the far lip.

  The Gunboy who’d set up shop closest to the wall seemed to be having an internal disagreement with itself over what it should be doing, caught up in his own kind of ‘should I, shouldn’t I’ twitching dance step maneuver that was utterly hilarious. It desperately wanted to move on the gearheads whanging away at it with wanton madness, but the King’s ‘Don’t Fucking Move’ protocols were keeping it locked into place.

  To their credit, the crews hammering away at the ‘Wall’ Gunboy had caused really significant damage, more than any of the others combined; while ‘his’ target had some pretty nasty gashes in the leg from some expert demolitions work, the Wall Gunboy … had seen better days. As it bellowed and screamed and acted just like a fucking B-movie villain, DB tracked and analyzed critical damage to its face.

  “Wow.” Garth pursed his lips and ordered DB to give him a better look at who and what was fucking with that Gunboy so competently.

  : processing power from current task will need to be diverted:

  “Seriously? Are you sure you’re a nanotech suit?” Garth punched the roof. “You can’t do anything. I swear. This is bullshit. By now I should be fucking jetpacking across this goddamn city calling down Cloud airstrikes and, like, just … stuff.”

  : current deployment activities prevents full and total assessment of capabilities. Removal from warfront will effect considerable …:

  “Suck it. I’m not going anywhere.” Across the city, the Gunboy’s ants-in-the-pants dance grew more frenzied. “And don’t bring it up again.”

  Pressure from the gearhead squads doing for their Gunboy lessened, suggesting to Garth’s long history of violence that they were out of ammunition, so he made his way back to the other side of the wall and dropped back down into his little alleyway before his Gunboy noticed him.

  “So what’s the dealio, you incredibly unintelligent hunk of scrap metal?” Garth opened his mouth to deliver a few more interesting and polite insults to a machine mind that probably would never understand what he was saying when the HUD filled with … with a … plan was probably the way to go.

  The wireframe video was astonishingly easy to understand, and a little … awesome. On the heads-up-display, a simply rendered version of the Geared Armor –complete with badass Heartsniper already revealed and ready to fire- pressed itself up against the wall. After a few seconds, five objects that Garth automatically labeled ‘matter scoops’ assembled themselves along his back, and from there, they began doing what they’d been created to do: they ate the wall for fuel and ‘better bullets’.

  There was a longer pause in the proceedings –a chronometer pulsed into view, telling Garth that he was looking at a 3:1 conversion for time spent by the armor’s conversion efforts- then Wireframe N’Chalez took aim and …

  The rendering went all sorts of choppy as the FPS dropped to an unbearably low count. Garth wiped the rest of the display from the display, saying, “It’s about goddamn time you showed me something amazing. That was like a fucking wave motion cannon.”

  The theme song for Starblazers rolled through his mind and Garth grinned At the memories of Space Battleship Yamato t
urning into a giant fucking cannon and then, just, like, blasting the utter fuck out of about a billion enemy ships.

  So awesome.

  He pressed himself against the wall and commanded DB to begin the process of eating the wall for dessert. Faint whirring sounds reached his ears. A few seconds later, the whirring switched to that of glass beads being dropped to the floor in their millions.

  : do you really want to ‘jetpack’ across Ickford:

  Garth held his left arm up to watch the clockwork mech shift and turn, an incomprehensibly complex Rube Goldbergian puzzle of moving parts. The Heartsniper began growing from his arm like a living thing.

  A living, deadly thing of phenomenal power.

  An idiotic grin spread across his face.

  “Well, yeah, duh, but only if it’s cool. If you can’t make it look cool, no.” The unique sound of matter being repurposed ceased, the chronometer started ticking down three minutes, and the wireframe Geared Armor in his display began gleaming…

  “I think a little Highway to the Danger Zone is in order.” Garth cued the old mental jukebox and Kenny Loggin’s number one hit started up.

  ***

  Hunting through the streets of a war-torn city was unlike anything Dom had ever experienced, and as he skulked through an alleyway -desperately wishing Master Nickels would just show his head so the whole thing could be over and done with-, the Book Club Regular decided he didn’t much care for them.

  Cities, he meant. Cities like this one, or it’s fairer counterpart in the center of Arcade City –if he were being proper honest with himself- were unnatural. So many people, so close together, doing all the things people … did whether or not other people were nearby … it was disconcerting. While Arcadia was more mannered and orderly and distinctly lacking in gearheads, the King’s once-cherished metropolis had it’s own fair share of darker secrets, and that wasn’t even including the century-old Platinum Monarch who –from time to time- was let loose to wander about the place, murdering everything as was stupid to walk out of doors when the Nannies gave the warning.