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

by Lee Bond

  It didn’t take much, not in this instance, though there were two important reasons why he was wasting his time –as Dom would insist, rather mulishly- doing any figuring at all.

  One, naturally, was finding Master Nickels. It were that man’s … well, ‘fault’ weren’t really all that fair a word, given they’d already been intending to do something similar, but … fault it was. It were Master Nickel’s fault none of the Dark Iron Bastards had been able to prepare for the truly bizarre ending Crudesucker had met.

  “Speaking of…” Chevy whirled around and stared up the Gunboy’s backside. “Blimey.”

  Up close and personal as he was, the Gearman stood and watched huge torrents of electricity arcing up and down, back and forth, all over the metallic corpse’s inert frame. It was impressive, to be sure, only … only Chevy wondered how long it would take for The Wall to destroy the Gunboy, or if the power source behind the fortification’s decidedly offensive defensive measures would run out beforehand.

  Chevy dabbed at his wounded forehead some more. “Did not see that happening, no sir, I did not. That Wall be a mile high now if it be an inch. And what a right mess of the place this whole thing ‘as caused, hey?”

  Oh, they’d all leaped out of the way when Crudesucker had begun falling towards The Wall thanks to Master Nickel’s legendary assassination of the one-armed Gunboy chasing him through the City, but gearheads being gearheads, they hadn’t gone too far. Master Pete’s fateful words still rang in Chevy’s ears.

  “Worl,” Master Pete had said, crouching low with his head craned upwards, “we got ter see if it’s goin’ ter work, hey? Then if it do, we gotta figure out a way to bring them other metal pricks to The W…”

  And then The Wall had shot upwards, hauling Crudesucker along for a ride. One of the Gunboy’s enormous legs had come crashing right through the building Master Pete had been hiding behind and sucking the Dark Iron right out of him with a brush delicate as a kiss from the wind itself. Him –and all the others- the life sucked right out of them.

  Just like that.

  It weren’t right. The Dark Iron Bastards had been good lads and lassies after all! To die like that did not befit their status, no sir, no it did not!

  “Were I to have a proper hat,” Chevy said mournfully, “I’d doff it for you and the other ingloriously slain gearheads, Master Pete. You and them other Dark Iron Bastards did well against a foe we had no real chance at killing.”

  All the more reason to completely resurrect the chain of events surrounding the invader’s early demise.

  Dominic Breton had some explaining to do, didn’t he just?

  Master Nickels or Gearman Breton? Possible savior of Ickford, or a friend who’d gone completely off the rails?

  Chevy turned his head to The Dome, shook a fist at the King in his hidey-hole. “Damn you for all this, you bloody twat.”

  Two loud booms rocketed through Arcade City. The Gearman watched the two reclamation cylinders launched from The Dome for a moment, shaking his head miserably. Of course the King would reclaim the beasts. The whole world had done gone and went topsy-turvy.

  Gearman Pointillier squared his shoulders and went off in the direction he suspected Dom had flown, uncertain if he wanted to find his old friend and partner alive, or a charred, smoking corpse clutching a Book that never could and never would be worth the lives of an entire city of innocent men and women.

  “And that’s just it, hey?” Chevy muttered miserably as he wended his way through mountainous piles of rubble. “I should be trying to find Nickels, see if he’s alive, damn you. But you’re a Gearman until I hear otherwise, and though you don’t deserve it, Dominic, I will find you in the shite.”

  ***

  Garth came to with a violent start; something was drip-drip-dripping onto his forehead, and as he rose, spluttering and snorting and shouting something incomprehensible –his brain suggested it had something to do with Dom being a fucking goof- the ex-Specter experienced a growing surge of horror like he’d not felt since those first few moments in Kingspawn Pub. His back felt like he’d recently undergone some very unkind massage therapy.

  With thousand pound mallets.

  He was covered in Dark Iron. And his tattoos were practically fucking glowing with dark power, drinking the goddamn stuff in, a horse plunging it’s head into a trough full of water. The gears themselves were hard-edged tools incised deep into his flesh.

  “How long? How long?” Garth pummeled his brain, yammered at instinct, and demanded some part of his long experience give him an answer.

  Nothing. Arcade City was bathed in twilight, so it’d been at least three minutes, but given the state of things, three hours was equally likely.

  Glaring worriedly at the whirling mechanisms on his knuckles, Garth decided it couldn’t have possibly been that long. Three hours? The remaining two Gunboys –who were still alive and kicking and doing their Godzilla impersonations like there was no tomorrow- would’ve gotten off their robotic asses and come to hunt him down well before then, especially since he was their only intended target.

  “Not too long.” Garth tried wiping Kingsblood stuck to his forehead away, stomach churning in icy disgust as the stuff came away from his head in sticky streamers that wrapped themselves around his fingers instead of dripping to the ground.

  “Fuck me sideways.” Garth hissed. The piston tattoos ribbing his fingers drank the Iron down, filling his hands with a zing of furnace-like heat.

  Garth rocked back on his haunches and tried to figure a few things out, using both his shoddy memory –as with the first time he’d fired the Heartsniper at the Gunboy, the second time had resulted in … fractured recollection - and Specter training to figure out what the fuck was going on and what he should do next.

  Sketchy, juddering half-images percolated through his brain.

  Dom Breton, hands wrapped around a ‘stolen’ Book, faced a picture-perfect representation of anger, wreathed in the unstintingly bright blue power of the Heartsniper.

  Him, wondering if he’d made the right decision in firing the biggest weapon Arcade City had ever seen while floating in mid-air like some kind of particularly unlikely idiotic … idiot.

  The Gunboy, lumbering there, raising it’s remaining arm as if to snatch the two men quickly and easily, a look on it’s ugly mug that Garth was positive was complete and utter joy.

  Then, the gun fired.

  Dominic Breton, hands wrapped around Book, savagely trying to rip the tome from its temporary mooring on the chest of hand-crafted Geared Armor, suddenly … launched backwards, driven away by the monumental pressure of the Sniper’s discharge, treasure in his hands.

  Garth, slingshot backwards, DB filling the HUD with a litany of errors, a veritable cavalcade of problems, the air between him and Dominic filled with a smattering of delicate brasswork; thanks to physics and a poorly executed plan to assassinate a geographically displaced Gunboy –a Gunboy who’s head was still in the process of exploding like an overripe melon, spewing all manner of high-tech components all over the fucking place, all nicely backlit by the brilliant sapphire light from the round that’d done the killing- the Book was now in Dom’s hands.

  Collision with the second Gunboy. Shattered Geared Armor. Darkness.

  Garth rubbed his back as best he could. That explained why –from neck to butt- he was nothing but bruises.

  Bruises, and sharply raised geared tattoos.

  Then it struck him. Properly. For the first time since he’d woken.

  His armor was destroyed!

  “Fuck me.” Garth looked around, frantically, for any sign that anything from his patiently built armor remained. He couldn’t do for the remaining Gunboys without it, not without running the risk that Specter would rise again. There wasn’t too great a chance of that happening, not when you considered that the majority of the crudey-crude in his system had either transformed into geared tattoos or had been siphoned out by the apparatus in the first place, but you when i
t came to your darker side, it just didn’t pay to play it safe.

  Nothing. There was nothing. Just … just gears and sprockets and pistons and pumps and everything that’d…

  “The fuck?” Garth stared, mind almost a complete blank, at a gear, standing –seemingly- on edge, in a pool of Dark Iron liquid. As he stood, staring, the shiny brass gizmo melted into the crudey-crude, disappearing with a little blorp!

  That little pool of Dark Iron expanded.

  Now that he knew what to looking for, Garth spun wildly in place, looking for more instances of the same strange behavior. It was happening all around him. His Geared Armor was reverting to Dark Iron. Thousands of barely heard blorps reached his ears, one after the other, a rapid fire staccato of gears and plates and everything reducing to nano-particulate.

  He was surrounded by a sea of the stuff, a sea that grew ever larger.

  “Explains the goop dropping onto my forehead.” Garth looked at the partial building he’d been lying under and sure enough, part of a leg was wedged between two chunks of stone. Moist black beads of nanoparticulate trickled down across the length of the now corroded-looking tech.

  Garth shuddered as a surge of forge-driven heat shock and awed its way up his leg. Shards of Specter snicker-snacked up through his subconscious and for a brief second, hot hatred of all things that his darker side felt for everything that wasn’t Kin’kithal burned through him.

  Thinking he’d accidentally been standing on a barely visible cog that’d succumbed to the weird entropy affecting the rest of the Geared Armor and Wrestling with his self and grim urges, Garth took a panicky step forward, glancing over his shoulder as he did so.

  What he saw filled him with revulsion.

  A viscous black pool of Dark Iron had formed behind him as he’d been standing there like an idiot. That pool of liquid rage incarnate was not only growing larger, it was –ever so sneakily- surging towards him. Thin rivulets of crudey-crude flooded into cracks in the cobblestones, eventually pulling the main … blob … along for the ride.

  “Oh. Hell. No.” The last meal he’d eaten came up and out, a vile surge of stomach acids and whatever the hell it’d been he’d scarfed down. With everything that was going on, Garth was hard pressed to recall just what it was, or even when he’d had the time to eat anything. “I ain’t Steve McQueen and I sure as shit ain’t that Dillon dickweed from the remake.”

  Garth lithely hopped past the furthest point of where he considered the Dark Iron Blob’s could possibly reach in the time it took for him to figure out what the fuck he was going to do next and … considered what to do next.

  “Well,” the mostly-nude guy said aloud –finding proper clothes was highest on the list, so didn’t even need to be worked on, it was just one of those things, like ‘don’t step in the blob of crudey-crude-, “there’s them two dudes.”

  Garth made a gun with his fingers and fired a shot each at the two remaining Gunboys. Now more than ever, the Kin’kithal was convinced they’d been designed specifically with him in mind, specifically because they weren’t doing anything else except hanging around casually drinking Kingsblood from the rapidly dwindling gearhead population.

  “Yep.” Garth turned his eyes to the tattoos on his forearms. Still there, still whirling away, still doing … something. The gears themselves had ridges and grooves and were doing all the things that machinery ordinarily did inside engines and things, yet he felt no pain or even discomfort.

  Except for the part where his entire body was transforming into a nanotech machine of unknown purpose.

  That was causing a neutron star’s worth of fucking discomfort.

  Whatever was wrong with him was something outside King’s Will, which was about the only thing good thing happening right then. His priority list added ‘figuring out what the fuck is really going here’ right beneath ‘find some goddamn clothes and kill the rest of the Gunboys’.

  Garth stared unthinkingly at the Gunboys. “Yeah, if I were a gearhead, this is about the point where I’d fuck right off and leave this shitty berg to its own devices.”

  “Then,” Garth was about to discuss –with himself, since it seemed he was rapidly becoming forever alone guy- locating and teaming up with Agnethea to either quite possibly murdering Dominic the Retarded Gearman or forgiving him and Chevy –who really hadn’t done anything wrong except shoot his backside full of Big King summoning tattoos- and then voyaging off to Arcadia to practice the fine art of regicide when the air above Arcade City split wide with two of the loudest explosions Garth had ever heard.

  It took about a second for him to puzzle out what the sounds represented and even less time to locate the reclamation cylinders; in the dusky dark night sky, it was damn hard to miss the epically sized brass-and-glass cylinders, or the fact that they were so big and moving so fast that they were…

  Where before the tiny little bit of Dark Iron that’d crawled in through his heel had felt like a stab of lava laced with spitting rage, now … now it felt as though his nerves were being flayed open to the world so some cruel torturer could lay burning acid on them. Savage heat and the cruel gifts Dark Iron brought to those who drank deep of King’s Will –willingly or unwillingly- surged through Garth’s body, a fire tornado dragging those same angry, hungry scythes that he suddenly remembered from his last exposure to the crap in the devastated wake of his skin.

  Whirling, biting, gnashing, and snapping scythes and gears and hatred boiled inward.

  Garth looked at his trembling hands, watched the tattoos there –and presumably everywhere else on his body, by now, from head to toe and back again- somehow coalesce, grow deeper, until they ceased being tattoos at all but actual armor once more.

  comin’ for ya

  “Not yet you ain’t, you fucker.” Garth set his sights on the nearest Gunboy. Power surged through freshly rewritten flesh. Here and there, between and beneath the edges of the machinery, the piercing brilliance of quadronium afire took his breath away. “Not yet.”

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez started running towards the closest Gunboy, unaware that he was, once more, screaming like banshee. As he ran, as bare feet slapped against tough stone, those resilient slabs cracked and turned to dust every heavy footfall.

  There was no time to worry about what Kingsblood was finally doing to him. There was just enough fortitude left –he prayed- to hold Specter at bay long enough so the targeted Gunboy could be done for. After that, it was going to have to fall to the remaining gearheads and Golems to find some way of killing the last one.

  Because at this point, one overriding hope burned like a beacon through Garth’s embattled soul; that as he found a way to do for his foe, it did for him.

  Because if he lived, if he strode forth from the metal carcass of the downed Gunboy as the thing he feared he was becoming?

  Specter laughed at Garth’s fears. Specter would make a wonderful Dark Iron King. Better, in fact, than the doddering and weird Barnabas Blake, who’d barely scratched the surface of what his Cloud Particulate could do.

  As that old familiar darkness crowded the edges of Garth’s sight, he let loose with a howl of inarticulate defiance.

  He would hold on. He could hold on. He could do this one last thing for the people of Ickford, for Arcade City.

  And then … and then … and then he would … he would die.

  He would. Somehow.

  Specter laughed amidst Garth’s screams.

  ***

  Dominic Breton awoke from a nightmare of being surrounded by dead people into a world where he was, in fact, surrounded by dead people; the explosive force from Garth’s deadly energy weapon had thrown him damn near halfway across the city and into one of the piles of dead ex-gearheads brought into being by Crudesucker’s titanic stomping.

  Gabbling inarticulately, slapping away cold, clammy arms and legs while fighting off a growing hysteria that was much closer than the Gearman was happy about, Dom broke free of the pile of carnage and lay there on the co
ld cobblestones, staring up into the night sky, gasping into that queer silence that sometimes settles onto battlefields as two cherry-red reclamation cylinders fell towards the city.

  “Good.” Dom gulped in fresh air as greedily as he could. Waking up in a pile of bodies really did a man’s head in, didn’t it? If it weren’t for the thick Geared armor he wore about him, shielding him from all the sort of thing, well, it …

  “Good for the King.” Dom said this almost quizzically. “Bring this place down about its ears.”

  Something was bothering him. Something weren’t right.

  The answer to his curious little problem smacked him right in the face a few seconds later when Dom went to scratch at his nose; his bare hand, utterly without gauntlet, rose up to scratch his itchy nose, which yielded the second heart-stopping revelation in as many seconds.

  He weren’t wearing his helmet, neither.

  “Now what in the bloody hell is going on here?” Dominic rose –a little unsteadily- to his feet so he might get a better look at himself.

  What he saw did, in fact, stop his heart, for very nearly a full second.

  His vaunted Geared Armor, the only thing he’d worn for a very long time, were in ruins. The entire left arm was naught by shreds of gears and a smattering of pistons held in place by the burnished copper mesh that’d once given Gearman a different kind of name. Them little machine pieces were trying to twirl and spin but there wasn’t anything for them to connect to; as Dom watched, a strip of such fragments seemed to somehow dry up then fall away, turning into puffs of dust before too long.

  “What in the bloody fuck?” Expecting to see the same again Dom looked to at his right arm, pleased to see that at least one side of his Geared Armor had fared well enough against … against whatever had happened.

  Flexing the hand and muscles of the right arm proved to be more challenging than he’d originally thought, replacing Dom’s smile of ‘accepted losses’ with a frown of ‘this hain’t fair’ variety.

  As the Gearman stood there, playing with his hand, the fine meshwork of elegant machinery attaching gauntlet to forearm cracked suddenly, greyish-black dust and slender components spilling out of the fresh seam.