Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  On the other, he needed to do his job, which was protect Nickels from outside forces, and from himself.

  The violence from the other night still loomed so bright and predominant in Rommen's thoughts, and now Garth had crafted a video game around that bloody moment, it genuinely seemed as if his employer carried no guilt or remorse about how the trio of lunatics had been treated.

  Rommen knew people in Securicorps who’d been party to similar levels of mayhem and they’d needed years –if not decades- of therapy to get over what they’d seen and done.

  The security officer was pleased to note that his question had finally spurred some level of actual interest in his employer; Garth’s facial expression had immediately transformed from one of idle amusement to intense concern.

  "We got weirdoes?" Garth asked after staring oddly off into the distance. "My kind of weirdoes?"

  Rommen nodded, ears itching at the sound of the printers working on their projects. "Yup."

  Garth mentally shook his head. There was simply no way he could meet Samiel head-on any time soon. Given the opportunity, the Kin'kithal would sincerely prefer to not encounter Samiel at all, limiting all incidents with the man's foot soldiers wherever possible. It was all too likely that sooner or later an actual, real ODDity was gonna land on his doorstep. If everything went according to plan, though, the quadronic systems he was laying down would provide more than enough protection.

  But that was all down the road. Too far down the road, it seemed, if Samiel was already rolling out the next wave of Zigg-head harassment; everything he knew about Ziggurat addiction and ODDity transformation would serve him very well, but it was all about time. The save-point feature so graciously offered by Emperor-for-Life Marseilles and the live-die-repeat functionality of it all wasn't -would never- be enough to protect him or allow him to advance should Samiel run at him full bore.

  This was all about being a shadow. About not engaging the enemy until all your forces and plans were already fully in play. About trapping the enemy in an invisible web that you could close firmly.

  So while, yeah, he did want to rush right the fuck out there and karate chop the shit out of the Zigg-heads, doing so right then would cause legitimate, serious problems of a temporal nature.

  Garth wanted none of that. Gauging Rommen's mood through the reflection in one of the monitors, the Specter saw the officer was displeased with the unexplained restrictions to their connectivity but that he was willing to deal with it. "Lemme ask you a few questions about these 'weirdoes'"

  Rommen exhaled noisily. Always testing limits. "By all means, sir."

  "Have any of these people crossed the street? Approached my property or engaged any of my employees?"

  "Not as yet, sir, no. They stay on the other side." Garth's intent was clear. "But..."

  "No buts, Rommen. If this was 'ghani, I'd get it. I'd let you guys snipe from the tall cranes, but we aren't. We're in San Francisco. If they are bad guys, they're bad guys who aren't technically doing anything wrong." Garth realized he was rubbing his eyeballs as vigorously as anything and stopped, feeling a bit stupid. "Now, you could kick their presence to local PD, but that'd alert them ... and their boss ... that we're aware. That is a thing I do not want. Understand?"

  "We could make an anonymous tip." Rommen trailed off when he saw the look of amused tolerance on Garth's face and took it to mean that he doubted anything would remain anonymous when it came down to things dealing with his as-yet-unnamed enemy. "What do you suggest, then?"

  "Nothing." Garth ignored Rommen's stiff body language, feeling bad even as he did so; the man was only trying to do what had become an extremely complicated job in a very short period of time.

  The problem with dealing with someone like Baron Samiel was that -in this instance, anyways- it was safer and wiser to trickle information to the people around him in small bites.

  Today, they saw Zigg-heads taking severe wounds on the chin and walking them off. Tomorrow or the next day, they'd run into an actual ODDity performing what seemed to be magic. The day after that, they might see legit time travel at play.

  But today was not that day.

  "Look." Garth tried putting on a friendly face and stopped when Rommen rolled his eyes. "Here's the thing. You and any of the other guys can back out anytime. I won't hold it against you and I won't be a dickbag about it. I really would like your team here because all of you have topnotch training in a wide variety of areas. The situation I am in is more volatile than you can imagine. For the time being, my guy is … testing the waters. He's uncertain about who I am and what I represent, so he's being very careful. The moment we tip our hand, he's gonna come full bore at us and I am not ready for that. Might not ever be ready, tee bee haitch, but slowly and softly is the best approach. He's got nearly unlimited resources and an army of soldiers willing to do whatever he asks of them. I've got fifteen of you guys annnnnd that's about it for the time being. We cannot hope to compete against him in an arms race, Rommen."

  Dismissing Garth’s own abilities in protecting himself, Rommen’s urge to do his job was still there, a howling, pressing urge to storm out of the building and across the street to confront the four potential threats. With Birchcreek and Gambelson covering his backside from the high cranes, they’d be done and done before dawn.

  It wouldn’t even have to be physical. It could be something as simple as the old ‘hey, we see you here and we don’t like you, move it along down the road somewhere else or we can make this more official’. That worked all the time. Though –and this was something he wouldn’t admit to anyone- he was more inclined to just open with an elbow strike to the woman’s exposed throat and then suggest sunnier climates.

  “So what do we do then?” Rommen demanded, almost plaintively. He clutched his phone again, wanting to show Nickels the footage. If he could only see what they looked like. These four were cut from the same cloth as the others, no doubt about it. “Nothing?”

  “Whoa, there Captain Do Nothing, I didn’t say that. Not at all.” Rommen’s mounting frustration was a palpable thing and this time, Garth did commiserate. He was finding it difficult to repress the urge to hack and slash his way through all comers, but that was precisely what Etienne Marseilles wanted and precisely what wouldn’t work, not with Baron Samiel.

  Garth saw that now. It was plain as day.

  He really was the cause of the absolute shitstorm that Old Earth had become during the major points of the War against the Heshii. Their inability to locate him, to determine precisely where the threat was coming from … well, that’d been a fucking Godsend, hadn’t it? Being invisible to their eyes and their agents had afforded him the luxury of doing whatever he deemed necessary to end the War before it got too out of control, yet in so doing, he’d prompted –no … he’d shoved- those extra-dimensional, atemporal- M’Zahdi Hesh into ever-escalating levels of response, merely to keep their control.

  And oh, had Earth and her people suffered. Hadn’t they just?

  Every time he’d done something, they’d brought the hammer down, harder and faster and with vicious anger, a blacksmith trying to forge living red hot iron that squirmed out of the way every time a blow was brought to it. All he had to do to consider the truth of that was reflect on the thirty thousand years following his departure in Alpha.

  Had those millennia been great? No, not really. Tons of hardship and war and the kinds of fucked up weird shit that only an Unreal Universe could possibly hope to experience on the regular, but … no Heshii. No Harmony Soldiers. No Kith and no Kin.

  Granted, the absence of the Heshii and their foot soldiers had an awful lot to do with the Cordon keeping everyone and everything ex-dee outside the considerable property that was Trinityspace, but would they have really done anything else once the War subsided?

  The M’Zahdi Hesh were cruel farmers, tending their crop, weeding out sections of vegetable that weren’t going to make it to term, leaving everything else to flourish as it would, under the c
areful and cautious and yes, as sick as it sounded, loving care.

  His presence –and the presence of his genetically modified kin- were directly responsible for the state of the War and everything that’d happened to the Unreal Universe since then. The CyberPriests, King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, whatever the fuck The Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseilles was. The fucking original Latelian Harmony Soldiers. And a million other things, as well.

  Did the Heshii deserve their punishment?

  Deservedly so. That went without saying. At the end of the day, their Universal feasts weren’t the sort of thing that should’ve ever been allowed to happen, and while there was no way to learn or even understand should learning become possible why they’d been permitted to do so, Garth knew in his quadronium-laced bones that there was never going to be another time. He’d accomplish his mission or he’d die trying.

  And that meant –right here and now- treating Baron Samiel’s time-traveling ability with the kind of kid’s gloves the situation demanded; if there was one good thing Garth could say about the asshole’s operations here and in any century was that –minus the occasional brain fart- he was and would continue to be incredibly circumspect. No out-of-sync tech. No overt displays of power. No mass revisions of history.

  That could change. And Rommen, hot and heavy and ready to do what he’d been trained to do, could wind up being the focal point for that change if he was let off his leash. The others –Birchcreek, Gambelson, Varely- they were equally ready for blood, but they’d follow their commander’s orders.

  Personally, Garth was loving the quiet approach. It was a nice refresher, and without Dark Iron or neural sheathes or the dark appetites of the Kin’kithal blood in him baying at the moon and filling him with unbridled passion for the hunt, it was pretty fucking easy.

  Plus, and this was super fucking key, there was a Starblazers marathon coming up in the next few days and he really didn’t want to have to coordinate defensive and offensive measures around each episode. It'd make things super awkward.

  “Well, then, sir, what are we going to do?” Rommen refused to admit or even recognize the fact that Garth was acting like he didn’t believe the threat was real. As far as he was concerned, they both of them had agreed that the four weird birds were envoys from the enemy and they’d been discussing tactics this whole time.

  Garth gave his eyeballs one more vigorous rub in their sockets before clapping his hands together decisively. “First things first, mi amigo. Is every single one of the worker-type dudes gone from this establishment?”

  “Yes. They all clocked out an hour ago. Took some doing to get a few of their supervisors off property. They’re really torqued up over those bonuses and were insisting they be allowed to stay as long as it took to double-check all the work. We got them gone, though.” Rommen tapped his earbud. “Confirmation of the last one happened just before I came here.”

  “Cool, cool.” Garth loved the power of money. It was one of the first things they taught you in Specter. After they taught you how to stop dying, of course. Money was the Universal Lever. With it, you could accomplish miracles. Power alone was never enough. You could be the most powerful being in all time and space and you could force your minions to do your bidding all the live long day under the fear of pain and suffering, but eventually they’d rebel.

  Offer them money or something of equal value and they’d fucking toe The Line until the Universe itself froze solid.

  “And the GEEPS?” Garth hid the smirk as the corners of Rommen’s lips tugged down –however briefly- at the bastardized pronunciation of GPS. He couldn’t help himself. “They all turned in?”

  “Yessir, at the front gate.” Rommen nodded. “The new login and logout procedures at the main gates are performing very well. Thank you for allowing us to install them.”

  Garth waved a hand, eyes on the last of the aerogel cubes falling free of the robotic assembly line, red hot quadronix circuit filling the room with bristling energy. So beautiful, so complex. It was amazing, the things he was beginning to learn about this new form of technology.

  Thank God he’d come up with a way to casually hide what he was doing under the guise of ‘calibration and control’ steps. Now, that wasn’t to say that good ole Emp Etienne would eventually find him out, but until then?

  Full speed ahead.

  “Super dope.” Time to bring Rommen a little further into the fold. Bit by bit, step by step, it was necessary; so far every single one of the other Securicorps officers would follow his lead regardless of how weird or fucked up it might seem, but Rommen … Rommen had the power to not only pull the plug, but expose everything he was doing to the outside world.

  That couldn’t happen.

  “Okay, man, two things. One, I need one of your lackeys to hustle all them tags up here to me. And then around midnight or so I want you and your most trusted to meet me on 3.”

  Rommen squinted, trying to see the angles. He couldn’t. Garth had so many angles he was basically the most complicated angled sphere in existence. “What do you want with the trackers?”

  “Gonna revise ‘em. Part of a security measure. One I was working on before you got it into your tits to force boring old regular tech onto my super-cool amazingly radical ultra-tech evil lair. Hah. Just kidding about the evil part. I’m totes a Jedi Knight. Anyways, I’m adding a biometric dealie-bop to the tags. Our guy’s resident team of hopped-up killer drug addicts usually have either an extremely high heart rate or a stupidly low one. Like, lower than the healthiest, most cardio-addicted … addict. In conjunction with those,” Garth pointed at the cubes stuffed full of solid-state technology and overflowing with quadronix, “I … we’ll be able to monitor every person onsite. And for bonus shits and giggles, we’ll be able to locate anyone on property who doesn’t belong here.”

  “And just how is that going to work?” Rommen picked up one of the cubes and –when Garth didn’t flip his shit- took a closer look. The aerogel cube was surprisingly light, even with what looked like some kind of circuitry inside; terribly fragile looking whispers of bright silver metal branched everywhere inside the cube, looking all the world like a tree spreading it's branches into the air. “How is this a part of a new security system. Looks almost exactly the same as the other cube thing.”

  “For one,” Garth’s voice cracked a bit, “the other cube thing is a product of immensely and intensely powerful event-horizon technology, dude. That thing is, like, a berjillion times cooler. For another, I couldn’t make these like that and have them capable of being airborne. Now. Get one your muscled flunkies to hustle me them GEEPS tags and, like, eat your bodyweight in protein or something. Meet me on 3 with your most trusted. Until then. Scoot. Uh. Oh. Wait. Uh. Yeah. One secco."

  The Securicorps supervisor tilted his head to one side. "Yes?"

  "You, uh, you … hear that?" Garth felt awkward asking. It was barely there, might be nothing more than a residual charge from some unstructured moment that'd never really happened, but it was there. A tiny little wuhwuhwuhvuhvuh, just there, just inside the audible range.

  Rommen made a show of listening as intently as possible, swearing to high heaven that if Nickels screamed in his ear … "No. N-nothing. What’s up? You … I … is this related to the smell from earlier, somehow? Some kind of …"

  Garth waved a hand, dismissing his question. "Nah, nah, nothing like that. I prolly just need to lie down. Been workin’ real hard over here. Y’know how it is. Now scoot."

  Rommen dropped the cube back into the bin, and, without another word, departed the office.

  On one of the monitors, Garth watched the Securicorps officer sweep slowly but purposefully through the assembly areas as he made his way to the elevator, carefully scrutinizing where the man laid his eyes; the tall Kansas City boy lingered near the heavy and heavily secured door labeled ‘Metallic 3D printers, Do Not Enter Upon Pain of Death', just as he always did. Rommen didn't stop, didn't check the type of security, but … his eyes linge
red, oh yes they did.

  Curiosity?

  Or something else?

  Garth couldn't dismiss the time-warble that was suddenly present whenever Rommen was around, but neither could he put too much stock in the sound, either; it was faint, thin, barely worth noticing, precisely as if Samiel had tried something once before changing his mind.

  Didn’t matter, though, if Samiel'd taken interest and then changed his mind.

  Garth flat out didn't like snoops and the things being crafted in that room weren’t to be seen by normal people eyes. They were for testing the waters of this carefully crafted simulation and for breaking the world, should it come right down to it. Garth had yet to decide if the things in that room would ever see the light of day, but that was beside the point.

  Once Rommen checked himself through the three layers of security required to get get into the elevator and back up to the world of normality, Garth returned to the main monitors. With a deft hand, he logged into the Securicorps secured servers and resumed investigating the footage they had of the four Zigg-heads.

  “Rommen, I know you would shit a brick if you saw me entering your ultra-secure systems so easily, but pal, it’s for the best you don’t know the full level of what I can do. Not yet.” Garth tapped the still image of the weird girl who looked like she’d taken her final, ‘fatal’ dose of Ziggurat while at a DC Cosplay Party; ran through Securicorps servers and compared against millions of photos they’d acquired somehow, it hadn't taken long to find matches for all the lurking culprits. “Something wrong, here. We got would-be Harley Quinn, Fucking Asshat in the Rubber Mask, Muttering Curseypants McGee and … Guy with Hair. Four Ziggs. Where there should be five. ODDities in the 25th were always odd. Never evens. Evens are too tactically easy to handle. There was always the odd one in the background, waiting to bite into an Achilles. Waiting to slit your throat from behind.”

  Garth took a deep breath.

  They were missing one.