Dark Iron King Volume I: Thy King's Will Be Done (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  Herrig pasted as real a smile as he could muster on his face and waved Huey out saying, “I know that it is, Huey. We need Garth more than ever. We need him soon. Good luck, sa. Good luck.”

  Chairman DuPont watched Huey leave.

  What, he wondered, would happen to the lustily curious population of Latelyspace when they thought as the Harmony soldiers did? In what way would their newfound rush to the end manifest itself?

  The First Engine was spitting out some truly abysmal possibilities and Herrig prayed Huey was successful before even the smallest of those chances rose to the light of day.

  Herrig pushed a comm button. “Si Demaynesfeld, if you could send my two o’clock in now?”

  Here

  "Look, all I is askin' is why is she so damn important, is wot." Chad was leaning against a wall across from one of his favorite nudie bars, smoking a cigarette and eyeing the crowd. He was none too pleased at being yanked out of the bar by the weird fella-me-lad in front of him, but as it was all too likely that same odd duck would've killed everyone in the bar so they could chat in private, Chad allowed as how he was okay with the temporary change of venue. "I mean, really, mate. You is askin' me to take a wander up to the very heights, yeah? Hisself in't all the pleased wiv 'ow events shook out, yeah? Like, if I is seen on camera whilst I am up there doin' this 'little job' for you, it's all too likely he'll start trying to blow me up. An’ I is certain I is bein’ seen. This ain’t no simple snatch and grab you is askin’ for, now, is it?”"

  Ohm239 twitched as someone thirty feet away started moving; he could feel the man's future destination curling through the eddies of the now, and his skin itched at the realization that there would be less than five feet between them in a few minutes. He loathed being out in public. Every man, woman and child in this accursed Unreality was a bane, a scourge. They were literally living lies, a testament to how truly broken everything was, and worse, a constant, continual reminder of how awful everything was.

  And the phenomenally scarred mess of psychoses and nearly limitless power leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette and still talking to himself was their only hope.

  Ohm239 shook his head. None of them could believe how tragically their plans had turned.

  It'd taken torturous effort to free the CyberPriest that'd merged with Chadsik's psyche, and there was no telling if the poor soul would recover. They'd only just managed get the cyborg assassin to stop referring to himself as 'themself', and there was still so much work to get done.

  Regardless of the promise Chadsik al-Taryin had made in exchange for surviving his final encounter with Garth N'Chalez and a return to Ground Zero, the damnable assassin was showing –and would likely never show- any interest in helping them with their goals. Without Chad and his impossible collection of never-were intellects and might've-been memories, there was simply no way they could defeat the M'Zahdi Hesh harbinger. Unless things changed drastically, they were never going to be able to coerce Chadsik into doing what was necessary of his own free will.

  To that end, they were going to undertake a perilous risk.

  Naoko Kamagana was the greatest hacker in the universe. She was on her way to Jordan Bishop, where, if she wasn't kidnapped, she would begin the process of creating an artificial intelligence equal to, if not greater than, Trinity Itself. If that happened, the Dark Age Cabal could very well wrest the seat of power for themselves. Humans. Broken. Insufferable. Egomaniacal and power mad humans in charge of Reality. A revolting concept in every possible way, the notion made all CyberPriests sick to their electronic guts.

  Ohm239 shuddered. He ignored Chad's sullen muttering. Naturally, the assassin hadn't considered why the CyberPriests would need a hacker with Naoko's skills.

  "Oy, twatface, I is talkin'." Chad slapped the 'Priest upside the head, then grinned as ripples and echoes of the most ancient cyborg's ire rippled outwards to smack the wandering Ground Zero denizen right in the forehead. The man blinked and abruptly decided to take a different path to whichever slum he called ‘home’.

  Ohm239 closed his eyes and thought for a long moment. “We require Naoko Kamagana. Her skills are needed.”

  Chad twitches th… his lips back and forth. It were obvious that the cyborg priest was lying. But about what? The assassin figured it had something to do with the state of their being, and found it hilarious that over the thirty thousand years or so that the CyberPriests had been knockin’ around the universe, they’d never managed to ‘figure themselves out’, as it were.

  Chad only knew about Naoko Kamagana in the most peripheral of ways, having been focused solely on killing the damnable Garth Nickels. He knew she was a talented hacker, had a solid grasp on mechanical engineering and was a genuine whizz-bang genius when it came to the weird tech that existed in Latelyspace and nowhere else, but that was it. She’d been a pretty backdrop, if you like tall, gangly women.

  It bothered th… him that he couldn’t figure out what the ‘Priests needed the woman so badly they were willing to risk outright and open confrontation with the high and mighty Lord Jordan Bishop Hisself. It was extremely unlikely that any of them would suffer death or even embarrassment in kidnapping the chit from under Spur’s nose; they’d survived thirty thousand years of strife and were, as far as Chad could tell, actually properly immortal.

  No, if Chad were honest with them… himself, yes, himself, he was more worried about what the Trinity AI would do when it got wind of the ‘Priests being openly active. From what he understood from the totally fucked and bizarre son of a bitching bastard Kant –a CyberPriest kidnapped and brainwashed by Trinity, for the love of God-, Trinity imagined there were no more ‘Priests out there at all.

  The truth was far and away from that. Every ‘Priest created by the Armies of Man so long ago still existed. They were few in numbers, and their powers and abilities were fueled by an incomplete understanding of the Music of the Spheres. Incomplete or not, they were powerful all the same.

  Chad thought the concept of the Spheres was well and truly hogwash, but wotever he thought didn’t matter; the hoary old electronic bastards had been doing as they had been for a ridiculously long time. Getting them to rethink their life choices now was well and truly impossible and Chad had better things to do besides.

  Once Trinity saw the Baker’s dozen running around like goons, all of Zanzibar was going to be absolutely rotten with Enforcers. Poncing around in their space armor, looking handsome and ridiculously poised, laying about with some of the most advanced and dangerous weaponry this side of the Unreality. Chad had a particular loathing for Enforcers. Always had, always would. Them with their Suits. Poncy twats.

  Ohm239 twitched again. Whenever Chadsik al-Taryin started thinking deep thoughts around one of the brotherhood, the environment around them, unseen and unfelt by all but the most sensitive flesh-and-blood beings in the Unreality, went utterly still. The silence was deafening when that happened, and those ‘Priests who’d experienced it felt uncomfortable for days after.

  “We need her. You need her.” Ohm239 reiterated. “Therefore, you will acquire her.”

  “Orl right, my son.” Chad rolled his head languidly about his neck. “We … I was only askin’. You and yours is goin’ ter find yourselves under a lot of scrutiny, is all. Whether Jordan gets ‘is ‘ead outta wotever sack of cats ‘e’s tucked it inside or not, there is still Spur you is ‘avin’ ter deal wiv, yeah? I is ‘avin it on solid authority that ‘e won’t let this wee kidnapping slide, no matter wot ‘is boss finks.”

  The ‘Priests had considered Spur long and hard. What Chadsik said was true. Spur wouldn’t let the kidnapping go. Trapped as he was inside BishopCo’s massive holdings, the unique android wasn’t as limited as many thought. The EuroJapanese android would hound them just as fervently as Trinity. Still. The risk had to be taken, regardless of any trials that arose later. “Nevertheless. She is needed. You will…”

  “Yeah yeah yeah, I get is. I will acquire ‘er. Jesus, mate, you is a fuc
kin’ broken record today, yeah?”

  Ohm239 turned to confront Chadsik one last time, to remind the assassin specifically why he’d been transformed into a singular and unique entity with memories spanning hundreds of thousands of iterations of Unreality and the power to summon forth things from those shattered realms, only to see the FrancoBrit mooning him from a hundred feet in the air, dangling precariously from the side of his hoverbike merely so the angle would be perfect.

  Ohm239, CyberPriest and thirty thousand years old, danced out of the way to avoid being hit in the head with offal. “I hate that man.”

  Warm thoughts from his brethren echoed the sentiment.

  Once Naoko Kamagana was kidnapped and forced to hack Chadsik’s psyche, they would at long last have themselves the ultimate weapon they’d always dreamed of.

  And then, oh and then their Savior would ride forth and destroy the Enemy and from there, they would raze the whole of the glittering Reality that lay on the other side of their shattered and bleak Unreality until finally, at long last, there was nothing but the blissful and pure Nothing.

  ***

  Naoko looked thoughtfully at the viewscreens, then compared the data streaming through her proteus. It was mind-boggling to think that the whole of Humanity, the scope and stretch that was her race, had come from a single planet, in a single solar system. It was unthinkable. The rationalist inside her denied the very real proof that were Latelian history files; though much of her own planet's history had been lost across five thousand years of war and dissemination by the 'great and wise Chair', documentation chronicling the expansion of Mankind across the stars was more cohesive in Latelyspace than in any other system in the Universe.

  The only being to know more was the Trinity AI, and as Garth would say, "It ain't sayin' shit."

  A single world. Countless trillions of men, women and children, spread across a literal fathomless depth of planets, asteroids, space stations and other forms of habitat too bizarre to even contemplate. A single species, transformed and manipulated and regressed and ascended into a billion different echoes of that one pure strain, each more dizzyingly wonderful than the last.

  It was a miracle too profound to consider.

  "Looks like a dead apple, don't it?" Greuz asked from the co-pilot's chair. He'd gotten used to surrendering most of his authority to the young Miss fairly quickly on, and, truth be told, the old captain would admit that the girl had gotten his unruly crew onto a track that he'd been wishing to follow for some time.

  "Or a dead dog's arse." Seta muttered sullenly, rubbing the nub where the tip of a finger used to be. They'd had to chop the end off. She could still feel the whole finger, and it was driving her mad.

  "One world." Naoko shook her head. The majesty of it all. The horror of what 'Earth' had become. “One people.”

  According to Greuz, who'd somehow managed to stay in the employ of Jordan Bishop longer than was mathematically possible, the Trinity AI insisted that all the big players in Human Commerce remain on the planet until the stars themselves died. That had massive Conglomerates like BishopCo, Tynedale/Fujihara, Voss_Uderhell and others chained to the dying rock like prisoners.

  And, like prisoners, fat, rich, obscenely wealthy and unconscionably powerful prisoners, they rebelled. They wanted freedom that the poorest and most basic of commoners owned, the freedom to set foot on new ground in strange solar systems, they wanted the right to shift their power bases away from murderous friends and devious enemies.

  Since they could not have that, they continued to poison their world, to destroy their land, to suffocate everyone and everything around them in the hopes that, like Greuz's dead apple, one day, the world would slough off its skin and Trinity would be forced to allow the powerful their freedoms.

  Alligorni scratched his jaw. He'd never been this close to Trinity Prime. Frankly, it made his balls sweat. He'd tried convincing the others to shift Naoko to another cruiser in Bishop's employ. Well, okay, he'd spent roughly three seconds trying, failing after a claustrophobic and panicky silence had literally erupted from the other crewmembers.

  Trinity Prime.

  Alli'd grown up with horror stories of the madness that roiled under the skin. The Mad Goth King Blake lived in his even madder Arcade City, running his citizens through an endless gauntlet of endurance, pain and madness, forcing them to look up into the heavens, not at a sky, but a bizarre clockwork dome of brutal mechanics whenever they sought freedom. Alli could trace his lineage back six hundred years, and there was FrancoBritish blood pumping in his veins.

  What if that Mad King called to him? What if there was something in the blood you couldn’t get rid of, even if you’d never even come from Arcade City? What then?

  Worse still was the EuroJapanese Dome. Like the King's only forged from energy, the Emperor's Dome kept everything and everyone out. No one knew what happened on the other side of the impenetrable glistening field. Men and women, penitents and parishioners to the word of the Eternal Emperor came and went all the time, but never said anything about what they'd seen, what they'd heard, what they'd learned.

  In his time as a pirate and kidnapper, actually, in all their times, every man and woman aboard the Zhivago had run into both FrancoBrits and EJ's direct from their motherlands, and of the two, Alli'd rather talk to one of the stone cold killers from Arcade City than the blank-eyed gossamer servants of the Emperor.

  You could feel the terror and madness survivors of the King's predations lived with, day in, day out. You could look into their eyes and understand that they'd been through something few beings could handle.

  When you talked to someone who'd held audience with Emperor for Life, they had no idea what they'd seen. And they didn't care. They'd seen their leader, a being divine and wondrous. Or so they said.

  Alli usually wound up killing anyone who'd met the Emperor. Talking to them made it feel like his brain was sliding out his ear.

  A panel at Greuz's shoulder beeped. He read the information over. "We have docking permission. BishopCo Tower Alpha." He sent the data over to Naoko.

  Naoko nodded. "Take us in if you would, Captain Greuz?"

  The passengers aboard the Zhivago watched in awe as a … a … a skin around the world seemed to ripple for a second. Then, a brilliant square blossomed to light and a large number of automated security drones arrived, sprouting weapons by the dozen.

  Alli bit back a surge of hot bile while the others, damn their eyes, just whistled or nodded appreciatively. Worst of all was Naoko herself; the Latelian positively beamed with pleasure, which meant that somehow, that damnable maniac who'd destroyed some kind of living god back in Latelyspace was involved in what they were witnessing.

  "Gravnetic field generators." Naoko supplied, choosing to take Alligorni's expression as one of interest and not blackened fear. "The technology generates the most powerful energy protection in the known universe. My boyfriend developed it."

  After having seen some of what Garth Nickels was capable of, no one on the bridge would've blinked an eye had Naoko said 'my boyfriend eats planets and travels through time by blinking'.

  The crewmembers of the Zhivago exchanged a look. Greuz, happy at long last to see the return of his ship, their safety and, most importantly, his sanity loom on the horizon, shrugged and set about piloting their ship through the shield corridor.

  ***

  Spur did his best to ignore the words whispering directly into his mind; Jordan Bishop had grown increasingly possessive of Naoko Kamagana, literally attempting to will into existence a universe where she was capable of doing exactly as he demanded, a world in which she fell in love with him and forgave him the predatory excesses he’d indulged in, a world where she accepted that he’d intentionally affected the growth and stability of an entire solar system for his own, personal needs. With Naoko so close to being in his possession, the four hundred year old Conglomerate head was acting like a foolish schoolboy.

  The android reflected that it was very like
ly possible that the young Latelian woman was indeed capable of creating an artificial intelligence powerful enough to rival the Trinity AI. There was certainly every indication that the pressure-cooker that was Latelyspace could churn out the most amazing men and women; data files were at long last coming in surrounding those last few days before everything had gone so catastrophically wrong, and Spur was … impressed. Appalled. Amazed.

  Doctor Hollyoak was a genius that should’ve been aborted in the womb and his mother and father thrown into the sun. Where Bishop had skewed the intellectual and political growth of the system to meet his needs, Hollyoak had never met an abomination he didn’t like. The things he’d done to further the militaristic goals of the martial arm of Latelyspace were a thousand times worse than anything done by Medellos Medical, a million times worse than anything perpetrated by the Emperor-for-Life. There were few beings in the universe that made an unfeeling android feel revulsion, but Hollyoak topped the list.

  The short-named ex-God soldier, Ute, turned liaison for a freshly rechristened government run by a surpassingly talented ex-banker was another miracle made flesh. The ‘man’ was perhaps the oldest living mortal being not named Nickels and not affiliated with the Emperor-for-Life. Behind him stood five shadowy figures, dark legends that Spur wished he could ignore, but couldn’t; it was obvious to Spur that these men, one of whom was named Fenris, were somehow the precursor for the God soldiers that had, once upon a time, filled the Universe with fear.

  There were others. The list was nearly endless. Ex-Chairwoman Doans. Excluding her stellar descent in lunacy, the finest organic political mind in Existence, possibly beside Herrig DuPont himself. The deceased Bolobo, an impressive hacker and first true man/machine melded entity. Hamilton Barnes. Allegedly deceased but apparently not content to let that death get in the way of doing … something.