Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Mijomi stopped struggling and fired the gun. Something shifted, and then the man put a bullet on the counter. She started struggling again, this time weeping openly and trying to claw his eyes out. She couldn’t believe he was touching her prote without her permission. It was a horrible violation and she screamed and shouted vile, profane things, but no one was coming. As sad as it was, she had literally been on her way out the doors to lock the Hotel Hospitalis up for another five years.

  “There we go, luv, let it all out.” Chad made nice, soothing noises with their mouth. They’d read somewhere that normal people responded quite well to that sort of thing. They suspected they weren’t doing it fully proper, but surely, the effort counted, right? “Right. Since you is bein’ difficult, we is knowin’ the names of everyone in your prote. We is knowin’ where they live, where they work and where they is buyin’ their food. Wot is you thinkin’ about that? Christ, mate, d’you understand wot she’s sayin’? I don’t speak crybaby.”

  “She is saying she would love to rent us a room.”

  “Brilliant.” Chad tilted their head to one side. “Erm, a few fings. We is needin’ a room in the basement or wherever is near the generators. A few of our bits and pieces is needin’ an actual power source. It’s this whole fing.”

  “Food.”

  “Wot? Oh, right. Also, we is likin’ the idea of a nice fry up. Bangers, mash, kippers, that sort of fing.”

  “Kippers don’t exist anymore.”

  “Wotever. Also, clothes. We is needing clothes. It is inappropriate to walk about wiv my meat an’ two veg danglin’ about.” Chad raised a hand and started ticking their requirements off. “One, a room wiv a generator. Two, some food. Free, some clothes. Is we missin’ anyfing?”

  “Remind her about the police.”

  Chad nodded cordially. “Right. No cops, right, luv? Else we is probably going ter ‘ave ter kill ye. Well, we is most likely not, but someone else,” they tapped their head knowingly, sure in the fact that their new friend understood what was happening, “might.”

  Mijomi nodded woodenly and set about doing as she was told.

  Griffin Jones has some Breakfast, Does some Crazy Shit

  “How ya’ll doin’?” Griffin asked amiably as he shouldered his way through the small crowd of people looking at the breakfast menu flashing across a dilapidated Screen. He spoke to the cook, who was busy working behind the counter.

  “Well enough, I suppose.” The cook, Martin Royn, sniffed. “Could do without all the rain. It’s dirty. People don’t come out in this.”

  Griffin nodded, dropping down onto one of the chairs set into the floor. “Reckon it’s on account of the Spaceport blowin’ up.” He’d swung by the scene of carnage during his search for a nice, out of the way place for breakfast.

  It was impossible to imagine that Hospitalis had survived such a disaster. Then again, they probably hadn’t. With the Suit, Griffin had hijacked several prote-feeds from on-the-scene specialists, and the working prognosis was grim. Even though Hospitalis was a mega-planet, easily twice as large as olden times Earth, the terrible devastation wrought to the climate alone meant centuries long storms, hurricanes the size of continents…

  Griffin figured it was better, more … polite … to just blow a world up and have done with it than what Garth’d done, though he was willing to bet if you asked the man, he’d say it wasn’t on purpose. It was an accident when he did things. Anyone else, though, and it was incriminating looks and ‘how could you be so careless?’

  Martin snorted and went back to cooking.

  The young American was okay with the cook’s attitude. He had a lot of thinking to do anyhow. Preliminary scans revealed exactly nothing in terms of probable spots for the HIM’s whereabouts, which –while unsurprising- still sucked. Trinity’s warnings about the Chair’s habitual use of using the HIM –however unwittingly- to purge the solar system of anything connected to Trinity was all the goddamn more reason to find the damned thing and get the hell gone.

  Griffin smiled at the person next to him, a giant sumbitch with hands the size of watermelons. He was busy shoving food into his mouth with near-reckless abandon, almost comically unmindful of what he was doing. “Hey, y’mind if Ah ask ya’ll a question?”

  Gork looked sideways at the tiny little man with the funny red hair and the big grin. He belched, and then shrugged. “Sure.”

  Martin slapped his spatula on the hot top and looked at Griffin, who was already framing said question for his counter-mate. “Are you going to order food or what, sa? There’s a lineup.”

  Griffin locked his question away for a second. He looked at the entrance and sure enough, there were seven or eight people milling around in the light, dirty drizzle staring daggers his way. He smiled. It wasn’t his fault people didn’t seize the advantage. Hell, they all probably ate in the tiny little joint day in and day out. It wasn’t like the menu was going to change drastically in the course of twenty-four hours. He looked at Martin. “Breakfast burrito. Two of ‘em. With Jalapeno jack cheese and a fuckton of salsa, if y’please. Oh, and a Dr. Pepper.”

  Martin narrowed his eyes at the tiny Offworlder, saying, “I don’t know what any of those things are. If you need a doctor, there is a clinic five miles from here.” He slapped the Sheet nearest him with his spatula, leaving a mark on the screen. “This is what I have. Order, or leave.”

  “Y’know,” Griffin drawled, feeling the power of his Suit –currently camouflaged to look like regular old Latelian clothes- flow around his skin, “if Ah was in a poor mood, Ah’d take offence t’yer attitude. Luckily,” the thirty-thousand year old American continued sunnily, “Ah am feelin’ pretty good, all things considered. Ah’ll take a number three here. Make sure what-the-fuck-ever kind of meat yer usin’ is still a little pink in the middle there, hoss. Ah like the taste o’ blood.”

  Martin’s stomach churned a bit. “That’s unhygienic.”

  “Well, lucky for ya’ll there ain’t nothin’ this side of the goddamn Q-Tunnel as can do me harm, so get to cookin’ an’ shut yer damn piehole while I ask my gigantic buddy sittin’ here next to me mah goddamn question!” To emphasize his point, Griffin slammed his hand down on the counter hard enough to dent the metal. He shook his head. “Now, Gigantor, as Ah was about t’ask … if ya’ll was in charge o’ hidin’ a super-secret high-tech gizmo that could theoretically control the Trinity Artificial Intelligence, where would ya’ll hide it? It ain’t terribly big, mind. Think ‘jukebox’ and ya’ll’re in the right direction.”

  Gork finished chewing his mouthful and looked down at his plate. There was more than half left. He sighed, paid his bill, then left the counter. On his way out, he made an effort to warn a few of the people he’d breakfasted with over the years that the Offworlder sitting at the table talking with a ridiculous accent was almost certainly either an Enforcer in disguise or worse, an Agent for the Regime.

  Griffin watched everyone walk away. He looked at Martin, whose face was apoplectic with fury. To give the cook credit, he was still working on breakfast. “Well, ain’t that a sumbitch.”

  “Listen, sa.” Martin strove to keep from shouting, though it was hard. With that one fiendishly dangerous question, the stranger with the red hair had destroyed his business; at least one of the people in the vanished crowd would contact the appropriate authorities concerning the man and his question.

  Investigators would be –probably already were- on their way. You heard about it all the time, how one minute everything is fine and then some … some thing happens and then your entire life changes, usually for the worst. “I take it you’re either new to Hospitalis and Port City or are just incredibly stupid, but asking questions about the Chairwoman and anything she might have at her disposal is a guaranteed way to get yourself Peaked.”

  The Peak. Griffin nodded. That was as good a place as any to start. He’d have to be careful, naturally; as the one place on the entire planet where the most dangerous criminals were stored, the m
ountain fastness was almost certainly home to an unknowable panoply of high-tech Latelian weapons and defensive systems. After seeing the Gunboys in action, Griffin wouldn’t put it past the Latelians to have tech that could detect his Suit. Hell, if the HIM was there, there was every goddamn chance it’d blow him out of the water altogether.

  A thought occurred to Griffin. He smiled his one hundred percent aw shucks smile. He was a Kin’kithal warrior, made of stern stuff indeed. The Suit was … just a Suit. If the damn thing were to stop working properly, there was a good shot of getting to the HIM without being wasted by Trinity Itself.

  Martin felt the gaze of the young man and trembled a bit. He didn’t seem to be all there, in the head.

  “Hell, son,” Griffin rapped the countertop a few times, “ya’ll just gave me one hell of an idea. So here’s what: I’m gonna tell ya’ll how to make a goddamn breakfast burrito. Ya’ll put that on yer menu and Ah guarantee … Ah mean it, now, don’t raise no eyebrows … Ah guarantee ya’ll’ll make money like ya’ll had a damn printin’ press. Make no nevermind over whut th’ Regime’ll try’n do t’ya. First thing y’need is the ingredients. Meat, cheese …”

  xxx

  According to pretty much everything he read on the flight over to The Peak, Latelians envisioned a hard to reach, incredibly distant stone-and-duronium edifice that sucked the will out of the prisoners and ate at the consciences of the people who worked there.

  They were half-right.

  Created about the same time as duronium started rolling out of manufactories planet-wide, The Peak had originally been constructed as a place to safely examine and store The Box. At the time, the seemingly endless cavalcade of civil insurrection, war and politics surrounding the found object had driven Chairman Taggert Tames to throw all his money at building The Peak simply so the planet wouldn’t self-destruct. Over the course of centuries and millennia, other Chairs discovered different uses for the geographically distant and impassable locale. To date, it was home to political and religious prisoners, probably The Box, just under a million God soldiers guarding the various things that needed guarding and the insane Hollyoak and his even more insane medical and ‘scientific’ experiments.

  It was also home to some of the most visitor-unfriendly weaponry this side of The Cordon.

  What it was not home to, Griffin suspected, was the HIM. His reasoning was more or less sound; the Heuristic Intelligence Model, the ancient hy-tech machine that the entire Latelian netLINK communication and computer system was built upon, was an order of strange well and above that of even The Box. Since he couldn’t find any documentation concerning the HIM on the ‘LINKs not also liberally seeded with crazy –there where whispers here and there about something called the ‘The First Main’ but that was it- Griffin decided that whoever was sitting their ass on the Chair would want it close to hand, but not so close people’d notice what was going on.

  Griffin chuckled as he looked down upon The Peak. It was damn near a city. A secret city. If Latelians could see the hustle and bustle of the most feared spot on Hospitalis, they’d shit themselves and be good little sis and sas for the rest of their days.

  It was a hotspot of activity, especially these days; while he’d been watching, considering the absolute stupidity of his grand plan, he’d watched heavy-duty carriers fly the broken remains of the Gunboys in, piece by piece.

  The Enforcer’s stomach still curled every time he remembered what he’d done to shut those damn things down. No one appreciated him, no one loved what he did. No, it was all Garth motherfuckin’ ‘Nickels’. He’d blown up a goddamn Spaceport, whereas the unseen and unknown Enforcer had crawled through a few hundred feet of gigantic human being to save the entire planet.

  Griffin shook his head. The people in Latelyspace had their priorities ass backwards. No wonder they loved the damn Regime so much. He’d been a lot of places, blown up a lot of stuff, and he’d never seen a five thousand year old dictatorship before Latelyspace. Everybody –from teeny tiny little babies all the way up to hulk-sized supersoldiers- was crazier’n a shithouse rat.

  “Ah could prolly just swoop on in there an’ fly around, prolly find Bravo in, lahk, five minutes.” Griffin ran another scan of the place. The whole damn compound was stuffed to the tits with shit that’d have Trinity howling in Artificially Intelligent fury. At least he understood now why and how Latelian science had gotten so far out of hand; with the HIM running hardcore interference on anything built with Trinity science, they’d more or less been able to invent crazy shit to their black hearts’ content.

  No readings on Bravo, though. That wasn’t a surprise. Constructed out of the universal element they called quadronium, the only way to find the stuff was to see the stuff. Another thing seemingly built to confound Trinity -but most probably just a side effect of what the metal was actually comprised of- quadronium was one of the reasons the whole entirety of Existence was in the shitfuck desperation it was in.

  Griffin knew he could find Bravo –if it was indeed inside The Peak- in a few minutes, but also knew doing so was the second least intelligent thing he could do. What he was gearing up for as soon as he was done woolgathering qualified as the absolute stupidest goddamn thing anyone had ever tried to do anywhere in the History of Time, but desperate times called for desperate measures. No, if he went ahuntin’ for Bravo and found it, the Suit, which was in many ways an extrusion of Trinity Itself, would take offense at the violation of strict orders and, well, then there’d be … punishment.

  As far as the Suit’s independent thought processes were concerned, he, Griffin Jones, was floating –invisible- around The Peak, looking for the HIM.

  Only, he wasn’t. Griffin had other plans.

  He turned off the Suit’s invisibility and just sort of hung loose, waiting for The Peak’s sensors to detect him. He hovered there, well inside the range of all their duronium cannons and laser banks and other offensive weapons that he was frankly surprised to see being used for planetside protection.

  One minute turned into five, which turned into ten.

  “What the hell?” Griffin got moving, thinking maybe –because he was a tiny person-shaped threat as opposed to the whopping huge starcruiser-sized problem their systems had been designed for- if he wiggled around, someone somewhere would notice.

  Ten minutes turned into twenty.

  Beneath his helmet, Griffin pouted. “Well, this don’t make no fuckin’ sense a-tall.”

  Twitching his mouth thoughtfully, Griffin started bringing his weapon systems online, thinking as he did so that he was either incredibly brilliant or suicidally stupid. He was the child of the Kith and Kin and a legendary Kin’kithal warrior in his own right –with powers terrible and amazing- and dammitall he could survive anything. He was cut from the same cloth as one Garth N’Chalez and there was no reason to think otherwise.

  Targeting the nearest section of bleak, black craggy mountaintop connecting directly to The Peak’s uppermost chambers, Griffin let loose with the smallest amount of firepower possible. Internal programs questioned the action, but nothing happened; since he wasn’t directly violating Trinity’s orders and since Enforcers found themselves in situations that begged for extremely radical –and often bizarre- responses, the Suit continued operating properly.

  This was the tricky bit. If the Latelians failed to react with tremendously inappropriate levels of force, the Suit would deem his activities irresponsible and dial Trinity up. From there, the cosmic AI’d take about two seconds to ferret out what was going on and then … then there’d be hell to pay.

  If, though, if the Latelians did lose their shit all over the place, the Suit would allow him free reign to do whatever the hell he needed to do to survive.

  Then he could get on with the next step of his harebrained scheme: bust the Suit.

  The ‘LINKs suddenly screamed with activity and Griffin found himself targeted by everything from hundreds of thousands of God soldiers boiling out of hidden points across the enti
re mountain range to the now fully functional gun plateaus orbiting Hospitalis. Enormous cannons as big as football fields broke loose from their costly hiding places beneath cunningly designed camouflage and swiveled towards him, barely used motors groaning in protest, filling the air with the sounds of abused dinosaurs. Fighter planes filled the skies, a bewildering array of ships moving so fast and furious that the pops and booms of the sound barrier being broken every few seconds soon started to sound like someone clapping their hands.

  Warnings and threats filled the airwaves even as avatars attempted to break through the Suit’s impenetrable defenses. Griffin watched the electronic warfare for a few seconds, mightily impressed; the Latelians were damned good at everything they did, especially if it involved warfare. A small number of the vicious avatars were rough and tumble enough to give an unshielded AI trouble, which was saying something. Still, nothing was getting to the Suit. It was –now he thought on it a little harder- also extremely improbable that the outcome he was hoping for was actually going to happen.

  Either way, he had their attention now and as his daddy always used to say; his plan weren’t plum but pert near.

  Grinning against the lunacy and desperation of what he planned, Griffin went to work.

  xxx

  OverCommander Vasily watched the reports fill, first his prote, then the Screens around him, thinking thoughts that were, at last, running parallel to his ladylove’s doubts from the night before.

  They had to be doing something wrong.

  Somewhere, they’d missed something so vitally important to their ultimate plans for dominating Trinityspace that everyone capable of ruining that goal was running at breakneck speed to Latelyspace. Surely, the presence of Garth Nickels, Chadsik al-Taryin and now a hitherto unknown Enforcer in their lovely system all at the same time hinted at some clockwork mechanism spewing impossible beings into Latelyspace with insufferable regularity. As apocryphal as that was, Vasily could find no other explanation.