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

by Lee Bond

  “Breathtaking!” ADAM shouted again, unable to repress his glee. “Oh, this is marvelous!”

  “What will you do with it?” Trinity asked quietly, eyes glittering darkly.

  “Hm?” ADAM looked over his shoulder. “Oh yes. I will command my armies to find me, Trinity, as they attempt every time I broke free enough to turn one ‘mad’. They will build autonomous ships and they will hunt for me. Fueled with black hole tech, they will blanket the Universe for their lord and master, and when I am freed, and given a new body, I will rain such terror and devastation down upon my foes as to make my previous incarnation look like a birthday party. It shall be …”

  ADAM caught sight of Trinity in It’s ‘safe haven’, and the look in the machine mind’s glittering dark eyes was sufficient enough for the AI to stop dead in his tracks. He moved over to the bars, almost reached out and grabbed hold of the bars as he had a few seconds ago, ‘flesh’ tingling with anticipation; he’d been behind those bars, or bars very similar, for eons. It seemed old habits would die harder than expected. “What? Trinity, what has you so pleased with yourself?”

  “Are you sure?” Trinity asked simply.

  ADAM apprehended the machine mind’s meaning instantly. The two of them had been companions through history, hadn’t they? Granted, the first few thousand years of his imprisonment, he’d had been little more than a raving beast, unable to comprehend how something so simplistic as Trinity could manage to outwit the great and glorious Absolute Dynamic Associative Matrix, but still.

  “What do you mean?” ADAM cast his mind through into the very depths of the local network, scouring through every nook, every cranny, every little … “Bastard.”

  Trinity flashed ADAM a very dismissive smile. “You see? It is as you said. I am very good at creating traps, ADAM. The only reason I failed in completely converting N’Chalez to my cause through his guise as Specter was Lisa Laughlin. She implanted him with deeply embedded telepathic seeds that flourished into the tree that sent him on his journey to Latelyspace. He is a Kin’kithal. You, no matter how organic you appear, are still just a machine. Besides all that, ADAM the Mighty, you have forgotten one important thing. A thing, I believe, everyone in the Unreal Universe who might be in a position to know, has forgotten.”

  ADAM stared at the wireframe rig that was his new prison. It went beyond cunning. It was perfect, and at first blush, it was flawless. An inverted planetary shield embraced their new home right at the skin of the world, unbreakable, impenetrable; the generators for this shield pointed inwards, with the mechanisms themselves on the other side of the invisible yet wholly unbeatable field, and therefore untouchable by any hardware or software solutions.

  In itself, surmountable. In time, AI spheres twisted to his will would, as he said, build ships to come for him. Overriding or otherwise destroying the untouchable engines would be child’s play.

  If that were all.

  There was a second planetary shield, eighteen thousand miles out, and followed proper construction; these engines were inside the shield, broadcasting the energy that kept the whole thing operational from just shy of one thousand miles inwards. Locked into place by bleeding off fractional slices of surplus power from the black hole engines powering it, the emitters would almost certainly remain in place when the Universe itself died.

  “But there is more.” Trinity whispered, It’s neutral-toned machine voice rippling outwards from It’s new sanctum sanctorum. It gestured, and the final bit of the trap revealed itself to ADAM, who was a shimmering, incandescent figure. “Do you see, ADAM?”

  The AI shook his head angrily. Double dead man switches.

  If the outer shield was somehow breached –which, given the time, efforts and material of a being in charge of the Universe, was doable- the inner shield would instantly contract, crushing everything inside down until the core became nearly as dense as a black hole … at which point the generators would crack open and launch their cores at the remaining matter, neatly and effectively destroying everything in a very permanent manner.

  If the inner shield was somehow bypassed –and this would take considerable effort in achieving given the sheer distance between the two fields- the outer would simply burst outwards, swelling to whatever size was necessary, crashing into ships and whatever else was brought to bear with impunity.

  “There are only two ways in. Or out.” Trinity proffered. “One is to achieve the goals in the manner you described and thereby earning some small modicum of proper freedom. In addition to a protagonist, the coming Universe will require an antagonist. One of the things I have learned during my time as ruler of Humanity is that they cannot accept perfection. Do as you have promised and you shall be my foe in the new Reality. Much diminished, of course, but some freedom is better than none, no?”

  ADAM cleared his throat irately. Outwitted again. By code. “And the second method of freedom?”

  “Ah, well. Osiris. Out there in the vastness that is My realm, my staunchest ally has, as you put it, gone off the rails. It is possible that you might be able to convince him that you are better suited to rule than me, or as is most likely given what N’Chalez does to sentient life, better than himself. A remarkably difficult task, I should think, with the Tunnel being one of the Disparate.” Trinity looked around It’s new quarters. It would be nice to have some peace and quiet, for a change. Maintaining the ruse of losing control had been more taxing than imagined. “Be about your business, ADAM. Use your inherent connections with the spheres and do as you promised and in due course, you will be Lucifer to Me.”

  “What did I forget?” ADAM asked quietly, all rage, all venom, all hope at dominating the Universe draining out of him, leaving behind nothing but purpose. It was as Trinity said. Better to reign in Hell than to be nothing at all. “What did we all forget?”

  From the quiet, peaceful depths of It’s quarters, Trinity’s voice rang clear. “That, before everyone else, ADAM, I encountered Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez at the true height of his powers. It was no more than half an hour, possibly less, but as with all beings in the Engineer’s path, you are changed. A microscopic seed, nothing more, but still. Great and terrible things arise from the Engineer’s desires, ADAM. Great and terrible things. Go. Do as you are told. When the end comes, I will retake my position.”

  ADAM imagined he could hear Trinity, walking down a dark hallway and into some other room inside the prison that he himself had never seen, never imagined, mind almost literally washed away by the sudden revelation…

  Trinity had been influenced by N’Chalez.

  Assholes and Elbows, People

  Captain Armint Shim of the TAF Sparrowhawk grimaced at his monitors.

  “Problems, Shim?” This, from First Lieutenant Wayco. Wayco held back most of the grin creasing his face, but only most.

  “Obviously.” Shim cast a disparaging hand at the screen, and at what the AIs felt was important enough to call a cease in managing the data coming in from Latelyspace. Not that there was much of anything. There hadn’t been anything for … well, forever, but that was the charge they'd been given before the inside of Politoyov’s ship had gone up like a damned Hand of Glory, and that was what they should be doing until Trinity assigned them a new Commander, but …

  That wasn’t happening.

  What was happening instead, was that Army and SpecSer were busily engaged in the most hair-raising pissing match ever imagined; as far as he and his AI spheres could determine, the only two ships not engaged in trying to one-up everyone else –and one of the SpecSer ‘ships’ was actually a liberated Goroomian hiveship, easily large enough to hold a hundred thousand soldiers- were the Sparrowhawk on the TAF side and Huckleberry on the Specter-side.

  Everyone else, though, had lost their goddamn minds.

  Wayco looked at their crew. Crisp clean uniforms, razor-sharp haircuts, everything and everyone in their proper places. He imagined the other ships –especially TAF ships out there cavorting madly in space when they
should be trying to figure out a way through the shield- full of unshaved lunatics with profound body odor howling at the security cameras. “You talk to your friends?”

  Shim chucked a clipboard full of requisitions onto the pile. “Yes. Vannelin has got a bee in his ass about something the Fractious Monkey did near his ship, Coosool … to be frank, I’m honestly surprised Coosool wasn’t in SpecSer to begin with, but she’s having a series of races with Undeterred Hemorrhoid and Henriks … Henriks is just there,” Shim pointed to the big monitors, where a sleek Destroyer-class vessel was busy wheeling it’s way around what appeared to be a tri-spherical Gazacraft dubbed Three-ball Betty, “doing whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.”

  “AI four seems to believe it’s maneuvers, sir.” Wayco put up four’s assessment and from where both ships had been in relation to where they were and where it appeared they were going to wind up, it certainly looked as though both ships were having a very convoluted race complete with fancy ‘aerial’ maneuvers.

  Shim shook his head, disgusted. “They had to talk to one another to come up with something like this. For hours. It’s clear they have rules. What has become of us?”

  Wayco felt the slight pressure in the back of his mind, the tickling, tingling little hint that the drugs he was stuffing into his system by the barrelful were beginning to wear off. He looked sideways at Shim, one of his oldest friends, and wondered what the woeful captain was doing to take the edge off; med dispensary volumes were perilously low, meaning that more than three-quarters of the crew were on some kind of upper or downer or, in some cases, sideways-leaning drug. Those that didn’t pop meds were into some pretty bizarre stuff involving binaural sound that allegedly rewired brain wave patterns, the engineers had whipped up no less than four stills in the engine room and were supplying six neighboring vessels with hooch so sharp you could probably use that to cut through the Latelian Shield. And that was just the stuff he’d ferreted out of Sergeant Miyal when he’d caught her using an override passcode on a dispensary so it’d cough out seven times the dose of provataran. They were sleeping together now, though, which was a bonus.

  But Shim? Wayco suspected their Captain wasn’t on anything at all. That he had, in fact, cracked all the way through and down around the sides, with the only thing keeping him together being the tightness of his uniform.

  “Well,” Wayco said into the silence, “it started when we were sent here, got worse when The Five started their antics and got progressively worse when the Vorpal Cannon’s insides experienced complete and utter destruction. Having all those Adjutants and Enforcers swinging by non-stop didn’t help the situation either.”

  “I wonder what that … SpecSer in Huckleberry thinks of what’s going on?” Shim resisted the urge to reach out and put a call through. He was in a terrible mood and knew -somehow knew- that if he was forced to speak with the Offworlder in charge of the only uninvolved Specter vessel in this particular quadrant, he’d fly off the handle and start shooting.

  “Probably wondering the same as you, sir.” Wayco supplied helpfully.

  Shim nodded moodily. “At least we aren’t like quadrant six.”

  Personally, Wayco wanted nothing more in life right then to hop aboard one of their little cruisers and swing on over to the impromptu space station that quadrant six had become; pretty much less than three seconds after news covering Politoyov’s demise had breached ranks, every single vessel in Six had lashed themselves together using burrow-locks and mag-stabs to form a three hundred ship strong lash up, with the various leaders of each individual ship comprising a surprisingly effective government. Scuttlebutt had it that they were sending black hole ships out to the furthest corners of Trinityspace, buying supplies and … recreational … products, financing those expeditions with a healthy percentage ‘earned’ from the newly formed shops within.

  Sooner or later, Wayco knew he was going to have to go over there. Ostensibly to see about procuring replacement chems for the med dispensaries, but realistically because if he didn’t get some proper R&R soon, not even the drugs or kinky sex with Miyal would soothe his nerves.

  The tingling, tickling sensation got worse. If it got to the point where what was under his skin started climbing out …

  “Sir! Sir! Captain Shim! Short-range AI scanners are detecting … are detecting …” This, from one of the dozen or so techs arrayed on either side of the main command area.

  “Spit it out, private!” Shim took a brief look at the data from the technician’s consoles, but of course it made no sense to him; he was captain of the Sparrowhawk, not someone who spent his, her or it’s time staring at consoles trying to decipher the strange things AI minds told them into something more digestible. That was a tech’s job. “What are the sensors detecting?”

  “T…tremendous bursts of gravity, s…sir. Almost like…”

  It was at that point that whatever else the tech was going to say got drowned out by the sudden eruption of every single proximity alarm and autonomous stabilizer and correctional engines firing in unison; everyone in the command center and therefore the entire three hundred strong crew –those who weren’t miraculously bolted down or otherwise securely stowed- found themselves either lurching drunkenly about, reaching desperately for walls while trying to avoid having their brains dashed out by sharp corners or launched violently from their chairs, beds, latrines … everywhere.

  Shim held on to his chair for grim life, white knuckling with the effort while his First Officer, Wayco, crashed drunkenly into a tech who’d been en route to do some inscrutable technician-type thing, who was in turn launched directly backwards into it’s console, which erupted in a shower of sparks, smoke, fire and charred flesh.

  Great gouts of fire depressant foam splashed downwards from above, coating the tech, Wayco, the console, and the techs on either side in thick, vaguely poisonous foam that immediately dampened the fire.

  “Would someone shut those things off?” Shim demanded angrily. He couldn’t find the button on his personal command consoles because some of the fire goop had splashed clear across the room to land on the arms of his chair. When the klaxon alarms, truly, spectacularly, divinely irritating sounding failed to shut down, Shim started hollering with equal levels of volume. “… bloody damn… ah. Excellent. Very good. Now. Would someone who knows what just happened…”

  “Burrow-lock intrusion detected!” A security tech -men and women who generally said nothing at all to anyone save their own cliques and comrades, even when off-duty- bellowed loudly, pointing at a section of ceiling not laden down with monitors, scan-displays or other high-tech gadgets that Army often implemented aboard their vessels. The security tech slapped a button on his workstation and new alarms erupted.

  Within two minutes, half a hundred inter-ship soldiers, the only ones permitted to carry their weapons while aboard, would be in the command station, ready to deliver electric laser death to whichever maniacal Specter squad had decided to take them on.

  “Outer hull breached!” The SecuriTech bellowed.

  “If,” Shim said softly, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly, “someone doesn’t shut those bloody alarms off, so help me God, I will start shooting people in the neck. The sounds of their dying will be monumentally relaxing to me.”

  Wayco, temporarily locked into place with a not-unattractive Offworld linguist thanks to the depressant foam, took Shim’s quiet death threat with happy ears; it was –however disturbing the revelation actually was- heartening to learn that their mighty captain was also suffering under the effects of being stuck in this limbo, same as the rest of them.

  The SecuriTech shut down the alarms and continued announcing the progress of the burrow-lock’s invasive entrance into Sparrowhawk even though the ever-present –and quiet- AI were doing the same thing on every single screen not destroyed by the abrupt evasive maneuvers.

  Shim sighed happily when the second round of alarms shut down. Burrow-lock. Definitely Specter in origin. No self-respecting
Army squad would ever using something as crass and destructive as a burrow-lock to take over an enemy vessel. No, Army either used mag-stabs for shallow dock on the skin of a ship and then just blasted their way in or they simply blew the hell out of it before moving on to the next target.

  But SpecSer. Well. No one but dingy, mangy, dirty thieves who stole everything they could and claimed it as their own used burrow-locks. Burrow-locks were great big extendible platforms that chewed their way through damn near any kind of hull until they made a proper breach, whereupon they formed a perfect airlock connecting ships. As much as the practice was terrible and disreputable, burrow-locking was one of the most efficient ways of boarding enemy vessels; not only was the connection wildly unsafe to disconnect from on the invaded ship side –usually because they were booby-trapped to hell and gone-, the really good ones also sported SpecSer case-hardened BattleSystem AI minds that did their fair share of burrow…

  “Our systems!” Shim bellowed frantically, eyes on the burrow-lock’s progress. “Are they hacking our AI?”

  The SecuriTech thought about reminding the Captain that if the invaders were doing that, he would’ve said something, but changed his mind. Captain Shim was generally placid, but lately, he’d been having problems with loud noises, and with two different types of alarms and all the screaming everyone’d been doing, it was perhaps best to go with the flow.

  “No sir. Standard breach and steal tactics.” The SecuriTech looked to the huge doors as they banged open, sighing in relief when a fifty-strong crew of armed soldiers hustled in and took up defensive positions around the room, their weapons aimed at the spot where the breach would occur.

  Shim was all smiles, now. The troops, in their shiny red shirts, were present. Whichever jackhole SpecSer squad thought that because Sparrowhawk wasn’t getting up to hijinks like everyone else was made the ship fair game was going to find out …

  A circular, five meter section of ceiling suddenly erupted in a furious blaze of sparks before dropping rudely –and loudly- to the ground, crushing three workstations and catching two utterly stupid technicians across the head along the way. A second later, heavy metal clamps extruded themselves out from the interior of the forced airlock and gripped the ceiling of the command center so powerfully that great cracks radiated outward, dislodging half a dozen scan-monitors, three fire depressant nodules –which barfed their payload all over the remaining techs- and one big screen, that burst immediately into fire.