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

by Lee Bond

  Freoli laughed. “Oh, that would be Phil and Roberts, Mister Hewitt. They were coming up to the end of their shift, you see. They hacked the systems to watch a sporting event down in Vereton City. Snuck out for a quick smoke break or whatever, saw you’d slipped in when they were goofing off, then decided to leave you out there until we showed up. Bit of a nasty trick. Don’t you worry, though, they’ll get theirs. And so here we are. It’s just an awful mess.”

  Alsinz nodded apologetically once more. It was really quite unfair, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. He said as much to the nearly apoplectic Hewitt, adding, “Besides all that, Mister Hewitt, there really isn’t anything on Tenerek for an outsider.”

  “Please.” The unfettered strength and speed and glorious power given to him by the genius Medellos was coursing through his veins now, altering his perception, reducing the two unnamed security guards from living, breathing people into obstacles to be crushed. The glass wall keeping him from his goal shimmered and shone and Jordan could see precisely how hard it was, precisely where it needed to be struck for it to shatter into a million pieces. It would be so easy.

  The moment could be recovered. Jordan knew it would be best, one hundred percent optimal, were he to slide in under the radar, but these men and their ways …

  “Please.” He whispered. “Don’t make me angry. Let me in.”

  Freoli laughed, shared a humorous look with his partner. “Look, Mister Hewitt, we’re awfully sorry, but rules are rules. We can’t let you in, even if we wanted. It’s not worth our jobs.”

  “You …” Jordan struggled to find the words. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

  Alsinz sniffed imperially. “We don’t like you now, Mister Hewitt, and we suggest you make your way back to your ship, Systemic Quantum Tunnel Pass or not.”

  “But I came all this way.” A frenzied tide of chemical, hormonal and Offworld changes rushed through Jordan just as the last word came out of his mouth, putting a sort of whiney spin to it.

  And that was the last straw.

  Alsinz and Freoli had no time to react with anything other than utter, gobsmacked surprise as Joseph Hewitt’s fist smashed through the indestructo-glass as though it were made from tissue paper; shards of the stuff –sharper than glass by a long ways away- turned both mens’ faces into so much shredded flesh and visible bone.

  The last conscious thought Alsinz had before a nicked artery sent all his blood gushing out in a crimson fountain was piqued interest; their killer, Joseph Hewitt, suffered no damage at all from the i-glass.

  Freoli lasted a bit longer, long enough to see … a … roughness curling and uncurling deep inside Joseph Hewitt’s diamond-hard eyes. Then their unwanted visitor grabbed him hard by the neck and pulled and pulled and pulled. The last thing passing through Freoli’s mind was nothing but savage agony as jagged edges of the i-glass gouged bone-deep grooves through his flesh.

  Then, mercifully, darkness.

  Jordan gazed at the dead lump of flesh in his right hand. It was amazing, how incredibly quickly someone could pass from being a living, breathing entity capable of dreams and hopes and all that made them alive into something … into nothing.

  So quick, so savage had the attack been that neither guard had had time to hit the alarm, giving Jordan plenty of time to do what needed to be done.

  “You used to be a man, guardsman,” Jordan tilted the lifeless head back until he could read the blood-smeared nametag, “Guardsman Freoli. I used to be a man as well, you know.’

  Freoli’s head lolled this way and that.

  “Now you’re just lunch.” Jordan turned himself to the task of restoring energy to those most vital organic systems. As he chewed and chewed and chewed, surges of exhilarating refreshment rushed through him, filling his mind with a kind of reverential awe.

  He’d never felt this good in his entire life! Being the leader of the most powerful Conglomerate in the Universe –in all time- was nothing in comparison to the strength and majesty coursing through his veins!

  Greed got the better of him. He finished the one corpse off in a savage frenzy of feeding before breaking his way through the remainder of the glass so he could get at his second meal in comfort.

  More blood. More bone. More precious, life-giving sustenance. It flowed through him, a deep red river of satiation.

  There was nothing like it anywhere in the Universe, and he’d hunted for years to feel this good.

  Jordan tilted his head back and howled, thrilling to the animal sounds echoing through empty, barren hallways. He was a god. Andros had transformed him beyond his wildest dreams.

  Belly full and swollen with ill-gotten food, Jordan looked at his surroundings, absentmindedly wiping gore from his face with a casual backhand. He succeeded only in smearing the red stuff around, though, and a second later, concerns about his appearance were gone.

  The totality of his error came crashing in on him as the blood on his face went sticky. His ship had been logged, his identity had been checked, his files read. The computers operated by the guardsmen had been during his transformation, recording everything.

  What would happen when the remains of these guards were found and the footage examined? What if what the bored guard had said was true? If Jerry Seinfeld didn’t even like citizens from the same solar system coming to ‘his’ planet, then he’d certainly take a very dim view of a cannibalistic outsider!

  “What do I do?” Jordan trailed blood-smeared fingertips across the keyboard. Sigils popped up, but he was at a loss after a few words. Arturii was a Voss_Uderhell system, Tenerek painfully IndoRussian and his own skills with the complex, tongue-mangling language were best considered ‘useless’. Spur’d done all that for him.

  “What to…”

  An idea struck him, a tricky bolt from the blue.

  Tenerekians loved Garth Nickels. They called him Change. They idolized him, mouthed pretentious dogma about him, about what his existence implied. Were he to return here, he would find himself elevated to planetary ruler before his other foot hit the ground.

  Garth had fallen on another world after this one, and he’d brought about similar change, though much more … explosive. It was time to take that page from the caveman’s playbook and see how the idolaters of Tenerek dealt with this new change.

  Jordan smiled as he pried an errant blob of flesh from beneath a fingernail. “I think I can arrange something … suitable, given that this place is empty.”

  The monster wearing the skin of a man went in search of the Port’s main generators.

  And thus Jordan Bishop, would-be Destroyer of Worlds, came to Tenerek.

  ***

  “Listen to reason.” Politoyov snapped bitterly, sick and tired of being treated as though he were an intellectual invalid.

  He’d already come to terms with the fact that he’d been kidnapped by –of all things- a sentient Quantum Tunnel posing as an AfroEgyptian representative.

  He was coming to terms with the fact that the man he was currently talking to was an AI sphere somehow in control of a Latelian meatsuit, though that one was taking a bit more time to warm up to, considering … considering he was a died-in-the-wool Trinity supporter and a commander of It’s Armies; if there was one thing that’d been burned into his mind –indeed, the minds of all commanders since AI had become part and parcel of any military undertaking- was that human/AI hybrids were awful ideas.

  But he was warming up to the idea. Garth Nickels liked to surround himself with the strange and the surreal as Politoyov well knew, and if there was any one man out there in the Universe capable of creating something as … blasphemous as this … entity … calling itself Huey, it was the Specter.

  Besides which, the thing calling itself Huey hardly seemed insane. In comparison to their ‘host’ –and most other people Politoyov knew on a personal basis- Huey was positively normal.

  “Hah. That’s rich.” Huey shook his head and pushed away from the table. “’Listen to rea
son’.” He hooted mockingly. “This, coming from the man in command of the entire assembled might of Trinity.”

  Huey tilted his head back and shouted loudly. “You hear this, Orion? He wants me to listen to reason.”

  Since the sentient Q-Tunnel mind had whisked him away from Politoyov’s flagship several days ago, the thing calling itself Orion had been absent, leaving Huey and Politoyov to ‘sort their shit out’ so they could ‘get on to the way more important shit’, an enigmatic statement so fucking vague Huey was certain Schrödinger was turning over in his grave.

  Huey rolled his eyes at The Old Man. The commander just stood there, simmering with perfect IndoRussian rage. The AI commiserated with his unexpected companion; they both had enormously important problems weighing on their minds and rather than sorting that shit out, they were stuck dealing with an insane uber-Tunnel’s delusions of godhood.

  Yep, as expected, no answer.

  Just an endless wheel of stars.

  Their ‘host’ had picked one of the more awesome spots in the Unreal Universe for The Incredibly Vague Game of Who Gets to be God, though; whenever he or the unusually pensive Offworld Overlord got bored of going around in circles, all they had to do was look up through the spinning rings of Orion’s protective barrier, past the formidable immense Q-Comm telemetry riggings, ignore several thousand miles of ultra-boring support struts and into the Mouth of Ages: their horizon was a vast, almost endless cavalcade of blazing solar systems of all sizes and shapes, falling ever inwards towards the hungry maw of the what was most certainly the largest black hole in existence. As the systems grew closer to the event horizon, tattered shreds of their inexhaustible furnaces were pulled apart to flutter towards the end, blazing bright dandelion puffs in space.

  The Mouth of Ages defied propriety.

  Officially, the extremely unlike astral phenomenon had no name because Trinity didn’t let scientists see weird shit because It knew damn well that people got the weirdest fucking ideas from looking at inspiring sights like vibrant, endless solar systems being sucked down the ever-hungry gullet of a gluttonous, wandering black hole.

  Off the top of his head, Huey could rattle off fourteen different bizarre and wildly dangerous ideas regular old people might come up with after a three second peep at the celestial lightshow.

  He looked at that and was uncomfortably reminded of the M’Zahdi Hesh and their eternal, voracious hunger.

  “You. Politoyov.” Huey snapped his fingers at the Offworlder until he got the man’s attention, then pointed to the Mouth. “What do you see when you look at that?”

  Politoyov quirked an eyebrow. The man claiming to be an all-knowing AI, not knowing something? “A black hole eating solar systems. The one that just got sucked down appears to’ve been System Gliex-32-X-Alpha-12.”

  “Now how,” Huey turned to Commander Politoyov, “in the ungodly hell do you know that? I don’t even know that. I could know that, but I’d have to think about it for a second or two. You shouldn’t know that.”

  Politoyov tapped the side of his forehead. “Gliex 32 is … was one of the solar systems The Specter visited. One of his more, ah, exuberant displays of …”

  “Stark raving assholishness.” Huey watched The Mouth consume more of the solar system, glorious golden streamers of matter being pulled from the central mass towards the invisible predator. Minus the horrific destructive nature, it was really quite pretty. He called to mind that particular exploit.

  Gliex-32 hadn’t been one of Garth’s crowning achievements. In fact, he’d left it –and almost the entire Galaxy in which it’d been situated- pretty much permanently stuck in a ‘pounded hamburger’ state before buggering off to be a dick somewhere else.

  “But Garth didn’t turn that solar system into gas, nor did he drop a black hole on them.”

  Huey hoped he sounded confident than he felt.

  Too much of what N’Chalez had always done past The Cordon had served more than one purpose, though sometimes it was hard to look past the brutality of the effort; many of the shredded planetary systems and severely weakened Galactic powers had –regardless of Trinity’s hand in Specter’s birth- served to terrify the remaining Cordon-systems into preparing for something much, much worse.

  Kith Antal and his Harmony Army. Those galaxies that were likely to be right in the Kith’s way were primed. They would fight, and if the rest of the Universe was lucky, they’d slow the invasion force down.

  But Gliex … Gliex was too close to The Cordon for those kinds of tactics. If Garth-as-Specter had been raging white hot, Gliex-32 –and Supratex VI, the cluster in which it resided- would’ve been transformed into some kind of MOAB, lurking in plain sight, ready to gut whatever kind of ships Antal was bringing to Trinityspace.

  Politoyov blanched at the unwelcome memories of Specter. Nickels had been many things during his stint as Specter. Murderer. Killer. Thief. Bastard. Destroyer. At the time, and because he’d been under orders to turn a blind eye most of the time, Politoyov had rather unhappily accepted Nickels’ off-handed explanations; he and the other Heavy Elites were striking deep, deep, deep into Cordoned Territory, he’d said, and the things they were running into that deep were a thousand times worse than anything they’d expected. Madness abounded. Horrors prevailed. Unfettered scientific exploration without proper governance had yielded entire systems of blackest night. Without the smothering embrace of the machine mind’s relentless control, the human mind went black as pitch.

  But an actual destroyer of solar systems? At his worst, Nickels had killed an entire planet. Politoyov had seen the now-erased footage of that moment, of that decision, and was reluctant to admit that the man had done the right thing. Tannhauser’s Gate and Goreene didn’t count. The former had been unbridled chaos through and through. The latter, not his fault, not really.

  “No.” Politoyov shook his head. “Nickels didn’t do this. I am led to believe by Trinity that the gaseous thing happened after Specter’s departure. The … citizens of Gliex 32 were so shaken by Garth’s arrival and even more spectacular leave-taking that they began work on Omega-level weaponry. They triggered some kind of quantum level cascade effect and,” the Commander for Trinity’s Military Engine gestured dramatically, “you have a glorious golden solar system being consumed by a wandering black hole.”

  Huey kicked a passing servant-bot hard enough to slam it into a wall. The thing righted itself after making a bunch of woeful noises and continued on it’s way. “Do you know how many black holes ‘wander’? Less than a hundred. Most of them eventually run into something that causes them to collapse. None of them get this big. Endless streams of solar matter like this thing is eating? This thing looks like it could eat a fucking galaxy! It’s too big, Commander! That fucking event horizon should’ve collapses ages ago.”

  The angry AI booted the robot that arrived to check on the first ‘bot. The two machines clattered noisily over the lip of where they’d been deposited, never to be seen again.

  “Feel better?” Politoyov asked wryly. He’d done the same thing after being deposited here by Orion. That, and worse. He’d tried engineering an escape and had succeeded only in wrecking his one good suit. By way of recompense, Orion had given him a sweat suit that Kaptan Innit forced first year Specters to wear.

  Aleksander assumed he should glean some sort of terribly unsubtle lesson from the ill-fitting clothing. Not going to happen. Turning back to the conversation that’d prompted both of them to lose their tempers, Aleksander asked, “Why won’t you tell me what Garth is up to?”

  Huey didn’t look away from the destruction of the solar system. It was … weird. Weird how something so catastrophically destructive could be so beautiful. The AI found himself wondering if –if anyone could see it from the outside- their intentional and willful dismantling of the Unreal Universe would hold the same kind of joyous beauty.

  He hoped so.

  The last thing he wanted was for the birth of Reality 2.0 to be ushered in on the sho
ulders of ugly.

  Behind him, Politoyov repeated his demands.

  There were so many things he could tell the commander. So many, all of them awful and terrible. And unfortunately, Huey reflected sourly, they were things Commander Aleksander Politoyov needed to know. Eventually. The AI knew everything there was to know about the dour Offworlder, from the moment of his birth to this very moment in his life; using the power of the HIM and his own intimate connection with the strata of the Unreal Universe, he’d made discovering who and what Politoyov was one of his primary concerns the moment Trinity had sent the man to make war with the Latelians.

  One glaring thing stood out above all others.

  Aleksander Politoyov wouldn’t deal well with the deaths of his crew. Just as he would carry that burden with him for the rest of his life, the tough-as-nails commander would almost certainly take extreme issue with the underlying reasons that the Universe was destined for destruction. He would be even less thrilled to know that they were all maneuvering things to make damned sure Garth N’Chalez got there first.

  Of all the mortals who’d discovered –or been told by Nickels, who really should learn to keep his yapper shut when it came to that particular ‘hey, did you know…’ nugget- that they weren’t even ‘real’ yet, roughly none of them were handling it all that well.

  Except possibly Herrig, whose sole defense against the harsh truth was to believe so firmly in the exact opposite –and with such sterling resilience- that he was likely to remain upright and diligently trying to pass effective crop rotation laws even as the Universe fell down around his ears.

  A grin to stole to Huey’s lips. Good old Herrig. He hoped the dude was doing okay on his own.

  Aleksander opened his mouth to start shouting again. He didn’t like being ignored. “I said…”

  “I heard you the three thousand one hundred and eighty-sixth time, Commander Aleksander Politoyov.” Deep in space, another long golden streamer was handily devoured by the Mouth of Ages. Huey turned, voice laden with defeat, “I heard you.”