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

by Lee Bond

  Anyone who’d intentionally done things he’d done to wind up in Arcade City was a man –regardless of how sane and polite he seemed- to concern yourself with all the time.

  Garth pulled his arm back as far as it could go. The Eye opened the trickle feed of power from ex-dee to give the blow a bit of a boost, conveying a peculiar embarrassment at its inability to do more; the quadronium implants had been designed to mimic the powers of ex-dee access by drawing energy from the Unreal Universe, yes, and Huey’s Hail Mary alterations to the schematics to keep him from dying in the nanobox had effectively stripped him of any genetic connections to the extra-dimensionality, sure, but the place was still there. The quadronium fibers spread through his body flickered and flitted through the strata of the Unreality all the time, infinitely small threads brushing against the body of the universe. And, whether the Heshii liked it or not, their home above and below was a part of that loathsome cosmos all the same, so there was almost always a tiny, nearly imperceptible whisper of purest energy available. It was a miniscule amount and took an abominably long time to get anything usable, but every little bit helped.

  “Actually,” Garth told The Eye as it offered up strike patterns and collision points to achieve maximum effect for its experiment, “I’m glad you can’t get a better connection. This close to the end, the Heshii are probably eyeing the edges of their domain very closely. Don’t want them popping Harmony soldiers out, now do we?”

  “Say what now?” Peemes stepped forward involuntarily. “The who? And what are Harm…”

  Garth drove his fist into The Dome with raw, titanic fury, willing the power raging through his hand into a shaft that would –hopefully- drill straight into the thing that hovered just on the edge of The Eye’s perception. His other hand, still stretched flat against the slick surface, felt all those gears and cogs and clockwork mechanisms shake and fall apart. The Eye’s will followed the disturbance hungrily, pushing itself to the limit. Outside, across the surface, plates great and small started buckling, crunching and cracking, with Garth’s fist at the epicenter of the disturbance. Guards and prisoners alike shuffled back until those with guns realized what was happening and barked orders for everyone to stop; Warden Peemes decided to forego such antiquated notions as common courtesy and bravery and took up residence with the guards as fast as his white, shiny boots would allow him to move.

  Inside, inside … Garth and The Eye could feel gears and cogs shattering under the force of the blow, a large scale destruction setting up a widening chain of events that began throwing the smooth operation of the truly vast machine into disarray. The Eye pursued that chaos even as it continued tracking the forefront of the blow; if it could get a large enough ‘map’ of how the gears, cogs and other contrivances meshed together, it thought it might be able to discover the hidden –if there was one- purpose of The Dome of Gears.

  Garth’s fingers and wrist began tingling. He’d punched The Dome hard enough to crack a moon in half and if he wiggled his eyes around a bit, he could tell that –in this instance- the sheer force of the punch had buckled maybe ten feet of plates in any direction.

  The Eye signalled that the kinetic energy was nearing the middle point of The Dome’s inner workings and eagerly prepared itself for a tons of data. The curious skittering it’d first detected with subtlety would be revealed with brute strength, would be outed as a either a Cloud-variant -as Garth feared- or some new form of viable nanotech.

  Either way, it was exciting.

  The fantastically destructive energy from the world-killer punch struck the curious something deep inside the walls and was stopped. The Eye signalled absolute confusion and Garth raised an eyebrow. He went to pull his fist out of the impression he’d created, but wasn’t fast enough.

  The Dome of Gears, the TikTok Dome … whatever it was called, however it was called, had survived thousands upon thousands of years of persistent damage and attacks from all sources. It’d withstood furious attempts from Enforcers, had stood resolute against the depredations of maniacs armed with forbidden Dark Age weaponry and had walked away the victor every time.

  It was a miracle of another Age.

  Garth felt all the impressive power he’d slammed into The Dome of Gears strike back. It hammered its way up through his closed fist, rattled his teeth and brought about memories of the first Monster Truck Rally he’d ever seen back in the proto-Reality. His head filled with a riotous noise that he realized a nanosecond later was him, shrieking and screaming at the top of his lungs. He was flying backwards through the air, every bone in his hand broken.

  Warden Peemes watched Mister Scourge fly overhead, hollering incoherently, utterly nonplussed as to what they’d all just witnessed. It was beyond comprehension that Scourge had gone along with everything so complacently! More to the point, it boggled his suddenly beleaguered brain to imagine –even for a second- that the man had been so polite and gentlemanly this whole time!

  Still and all, The Dome had met the best Scourge had brought to bear with perfect aplomb. From the sounds of things, the man himself was far worse for wear now he’d had his moment in the sun.

  As happened with all who thought they could beat The Dome into submission. As if that could ever happen. The Dome and the city it protected was a thing not even Trinity could command.

  The criminal landed in a crumpled heap very nearly at water’s edge. Lucky that. Falling into the water was to invite all manner of disease and ailments of the body. Peemes snapped his fingers and several men hurried to drag the prisoner to his feet.

  Then the Warden turned his eyes to The Dome, a smirk of smug satisfaction on his face. The plates that’d shattered under Mister Scourge’s absolutely impressive display of strength and martial prowess were already knitting themselves back together. The thunderous ticking rumbling through the earth beneath all their feet –momentarily disrupted by the blow- resumed with vigor. All was well with the world, oh yes.

  Their King was glorious. Their King was great.

  Warden Peemes pulled a small communicator from his pocket and waited impatiently for the guards dragging Mister Scourge between them to get close enough. Then he spoke into it, his voice echoing across the assembled prisoners.

  “Do you see, gentlemen?” Pride and overweening confidence filled Peemes. This was a red letter day for proof positive that The Dome was indestructible. He didn’t know who Mister Scourge really was, nor why the man would truly want inside to Arcade City. Perhaps Trinity had come to the conclusion that the only way to get rid of The Dome was to assassinate the King. It didn’t truly matter. As he’d warned Scourge a little while ago, the only things that worked under the Gears were those things that their mad monarch allowed. Shockingly powerful cyborg or not, Mister Scourge would find himself in a whole other world. “Do you see? The Dome of Gears years is eternal. It is indestructible. And our King, our glorious and mad king, he is … he is. Now, chaps, if you would be so kind as to escort our prisoners to the doors?”

  Peemes stood aside and smiled kindly as his men ‘escorted’ their charges to the ‘doors’. With Scourge’s display ringing freshly in their minds, with the unshakeable knowledge that they were entering a world far and away from anything that they could’ve ever possibly imagined, many of them were shaking in their boots. Many required a little extra … encouragement. The Warden winced sympathetically as several men asked for –by their mulish recalcitrance- and received a rifle butt to the back of the head. Other prisoners were inspired to carry their now unconscious comrades with gentle nudges from rifles.

  Warden Peemes turned his attention to Mister Scourge, who was muttering under his breath. He leaned in, curious as to what a man who’d –at least in his own mind- come to close to punching a hole right through The Dome. What fun that’d been, though Peemes had to admit that –for a vanishingly brief moment, too brief to even really be considered real- he’d found himself with a tiny nugget of worry that Mister Scourge’s impressive punch would succeed.

&n
bsp; Luckily, FrancoBritish engineering was amongst the best in the world.

  “What is that you’re saying?” Peemes asked kindly, rolling his eyes comically for the guards’ benefit.

  “My hand.” Garth tried to flex the hand he was referring to and failed. He reached inward for The Eye and found nothing. “My fucking hand is fucking broken. And my Eye is gone.”

  “Ah,” Peemes flashed an unsympathetic grin to Mister Scourge, which set the guards to chuckling, “yes, well, when one punches an immovable object with such tremendous ferocity, Mister Scourge, one is lucky that that is all that happened.”

  “You don’t understand.” Garth struggled to his feet and jerked his shoulders loose from the guards’ grip. He eyed his broken right hand critically and concentrated on moving something. His little finger wiggled a tiny little bit. He grimaced. “My hand is broken. My hand –my whole fucking body- is made of stuff from another fucking universe. That makes it unbreakable.”

  “I understand.” Peemes put a consoling hand on Mister Scourge’s back and gently pushed him towards the doors. There were only a few prisoners remaining. “I understand completely.”

  Peemes understood at last. Mister Scourge was a complete and utter loon. That was why he’d perpetrated such terrible crimes, why he’d nutted that poor King’s Son’s brains into jelly. Insane people, Warden Peemes reflected as they got closer to the doors, did the strangest things, for the poorest of reasons. Intentionally entering Arcade City was above and beyond poor and into some new realm altogether, you asked Peemes.

  Garth stared dubiously up at The Dome of Gears, cradling his broken hand apprehensively. The Eye was nowhere to be found. Either the data it’d gained in that split second when the last layer of gearwork had crumbled to dust had blown all the fucking fuses or redistribution of the energy poured into the level 9000 punch had done the same thing. Even the standard HUD display graphs were gone.

  The doors loomed. Garth flexed his hand again. Tried to. The pinky wiggled and a lance of pain spiked all the way up his arm.

  Old Meechy had been right.

  He was going to be just like any other guy inside Arcade City. No tricks, no powers, nothing. Garth groaned. He was well and truly fucked.

  4. Tendrils

  Commander Politoyov scratched himself in a place that commanders aren’t supposed to scratch when underlings are present, but under the circumstances, he was sure he could’ve detonated a shiverbomb in the room and his … guest … wouldn’t have batted an eye. Eyes. Eyelids.

  His guest, according to the roster, was a private in the Army, and had been a lowly private in that most august organization for nearly thirty years. Politoyov knew his Army counterparts terribly well, and unless something were to change, Private First Class Tendreel Salingh would remain a private until she either died, got bored of doing PK duty and everything else that the brass threw her way and she just sort of … left under her own steam or –worst case scenario- this damnable engagement somehow got her killed.

  PFC Salingh was an Offworlder. Obviously an Offworlder, not one of the multitudes of Human-offshoots; the Commander had never heard of the world where PFC Salingh came from before now, but that meant very little when you looked at the scope and breadth of Trinityspace from a speculative eye.

  From half a dozen eyes arrayed around a mottled blue mushroom cap of a head to wide-splayed feet that were almost entirely toe –toes which were currently wrapped around the legs of her chair- Salingh was a talking mushroom.

  How she’d found her way aboard an Army vessel was an interesting story all its own; Salingh was from Alzant-Mycogene, a solar system of worlds populated, well, by talking mushroom people. According to AI, Alzant-Mycogene worlds were enormous, home to a staggering number of citizens who all did the same thing. They grew … mushrooms and other funguses, but where Politoyov’s dear old mom had tended to a tiny little garden that yielded odd-tasting little orange and purple mushrooms that she put into soups, Salingh’s people grew mushrooms that could dwarf troop carriers.

  As Politoyov had learned during the AI search resulting in Tendreel Salingh, the solar system next to the Alzant-Mycogene worlds were insatiable for those mushrooms, and tired of preventing wars between two people, Trinity had ushered in an agreement. The fact that the other system provided something of value to another solar system that Trinity had ongoing dealings with probably had a lot to do with stopping the raids and fighting; while they were terribly peaceful and almost entirely agrarian in nature, Tendreel and her people could do awful things with mushroom spears the size of skyscrapers…

  They all of them also possessed a singularly unique … talent. One that a commander also singularly desperate to find specific answers might find … worth the risk of exploiting, should the rewards be great enough.

  “This is most interesting, commander.” Tendreel tapped a button on the screen and resumed reading. “No one anywhere has heard of this conflict.”

  “And no one ever will, yes?” Commander Politoyov knew it was wrong, knew that if the spicy-smelling Offworlder absorbing the voluminous data concerning Tannhauser’s Gate mentioned anything to anyone at all, well, it wouldn’t even be Enforcers by dawn. Every AI on every ship would simply take control. Of everything. From life support to engines to internal and external defenses. And thus, the secrets would kept.

  Aleksander knew all this, yet he was compelled by the virtue of the quiet panic convincing him everything was slipping through his fingertips. Thus, the Offworlder, Tendreel Salingh. For beyond the Mycogene ability to grow the most amazing things–if you knew where to look, what to listen to- their hidden talent was for plucking at the tiniest of threads, unraveling, over time, the most amazing secrets. So profound was this talent that others of Salingh’s kind given leave to travel Trinityspace were apparently being burned alive.

  For being witches.

  The universe was weird and getting weirder every damn day.

  The Commander shrugged. With a Dark Age looming ahead, this kind of thing was inevitable. Mushroom witches. Some of the worlds where the Mycogenes were meeting their ends were full-on technologically dependent, yet allegedly rational beings were burning the flammable mushroom folk alive in the streets. Now, the reigning body of the Mycogene system had yet to rouse themselves over the torturous murders, but if they did, Politoyov resolved that if the governments of those particularly savage worlds reached out to SpecSer, begging for help to deal with the mountain-sized fungi raining down on them, he’d hang up, make note that such-and-such a system was off limits to Specters and go on with his life.

  Hopefully, though, the rulers of those mighty mushroom worlds never found out what was happening.

  Or, if they did, they saw the wisdom in just letting … letting it lie.

  If Tendreel was any indication, the Mycogenes were weird, so there was no real way to tell which direction her forbearers would twist if they caught wind. Beyond being the kind of weird that would normally have him keeping her at arms’ length, the Myco’s natural, spicy body odor was quite pleasant and a very nice change from the stringent cleansers that regular Army bathed themselves in with religious zealotry.

  Politoyov was lucky if he could get his own men to admit that water was a thing most weeks, which was honestly fine by him: he’d rather put up with his men reeking like something you found in a sewer than the pristine, antiseptic stench of Army.

  “Oh no. Oh no no.” Tendreel shook her head and her eyes batted alarmingly. “I would never tell. This is a secret, yes?” She smiled shyly.

  “Absolutely.” Politoyov turned his attention to the feeds streaming along the screens on his side of the desk. A Specter ship on the far side of Latelyspace had detected a strange series of what the onboard AI were assuming were coded messages. As with everything coming from Latelyspace –which wasn’t much- the ‘brilliant’ AI minds and their Tech Expert wranglers had thus far failed in decoding them into anything meaningful.

  He asked for the original data f
iles, reasoning that since some of the Specters inside Latelyspace had spent time with Nickels, there was every chance they were deploying something from that twisted genius’ ever-surprising repertoire of tactics. Given he knew –mostly- what to look for, there was every chance he would see something the Tech Experts weren’t cleared to know.

  At this point in the game, any shot was a shot worth taking.

  It didn’t matter. He was desperate. Desperate to get in, desperate to get his men out, desperate to learn what Garth fucking Nickels was up to and why. Desperate enough to check out a talking mushroom witch to see if there was anything to the rumors of her species’ talents. Alexander chuckled to himself. He’d gone full circle inside his own head a la Garth Nickels and his circuitous lines of bullshit.

  The thing he’d done, the thing that would get them all dead if Trinity found out, the thing that gentle Tendreel Salingh was doing without realizing the severity of the crime … involved two of the greatest secrets in history.

  Tannhauser’s Gate. Shoemacher’s Grave.

  Technically that was two things, but they were related, and in more ways than one, and the commander felt most strongly that Nickels’ involvement was more than coincidence, which was why it was a thing instead of many things.

  Because of Nickels.

  The world that was supposed to be inside the shimmering quicksilver shield that Garth Nickels had somehow and for some ungodly reason destroyed was missing, and that had been bothering the crap out of Politoyov since the interviews with Armageddon Troop Too had ended; unbeknownst to that Specter team, shortly after Nickels had launched them off to safety, the shield surrounding the planet had collapsed, presumably from whatever the ‘ex’-Specter had crashed into it.

  Revealing… nothing.

  So yes, a grizzled old commander had lied to his men just as they’d lied to him. Undoubtedly both sides had had very good reasons for their prevarications, which was why Armageddon Troop too had been dispatched to deal with irate Yellow Dog Elders instead of languishing in a Deep Striker lockup…