Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Garth was acting like … Ute didn’t know what to compare Nickels’ behavior to.

  Every few seconds the camera feeds tracing Garth’s route flickered spasmodically. Ute made a note to have the systems looked at.

  Ute ran an avatar to see if they could divine Nickels’ destination and continued eating breakfast. He was happy to see the man up and moving around, even if his behavior was a little odd. The shock of finding Garth unconscious and sporting several wounds –wounds unrelated to the kidnapping- had been enough to fill him with enough worry for six men because Ute, who knew a little more than everyone else in the Hotel, knew anything Garth got up to was likely to be dangerous. The type of dangerous that might just cause a kidnapping.

  Guests murmured unhappily for a moment, then resumed gossiping.

  Ute grabbed a waiter by the wrist as he passed. “What’s going on?”

  The waiter shrugged. “The lights, Sa Ute. They keep flickering. We’ve got maintenance on the problem.” As if to underscore the statement, the lights flickered again before coming back to full brilliance.

  Ute let the waiter go and bent back to his prote. Garth was still moving through the halls. The avatar tasked to determining his goal had decided on two likely courses. One, Garth Nickels was headed for the lockup where his weapons were stored. Ute nodded. With a kidnapped girlfriend, you’d want to gun up, as it were, and Garth had enough weaponry to outfit a small army.

  Two, since Nickels was no dummy, he could be heading to Security to steal an autolock disabler, because unless he had a machine shop hidden under that thin paper gown, there was no way the man was going to be able to move those guns off property without shocking himself unconscious.

  Garth stopped in front of the doors very clearly labeled ‘Security’. He rather obviously tested the latch and shrugged when he learned it was locked.

  As Ute watched, the cameras flickered with static again; primed now for the fluctuation in the lights, Ute put his fork down and pressed his lips thoughtfully together.

  The problem with the lights was a problem with the cameras.

  Before jumping to conclusions, Ute picked a random, non-Garth related camera feed and watched it for a solid minute. Nothing.

  The massive head of security sighed deeply. He tabbed through his prote until he found the standard apology form labeled ‘sudden and frightening activities of Security’ and sent it off to the Managers; the guests in the restaurant were, in a few seconds, going to have their wits … abused.

  Ute stood. The lights bowed, the darkness stretched, they came back on, brighter than ever. Then the restaurant dipped into black.

  “Well.” Ute said gloomily as he tore from his spot in the far back of the fine dining establishment, tables, chairs, people, waiters and the occasional Minister shoved up against the walls or blown off their feet by his speedy departure. “That was considerate.”

  xxx

  Garth worked feverishly, hurriedly, but with the practiced ease of someone used to working under the most extreme of pressures.

  There was no time to waste, but there was also no sense in making mistakes; mistakes at this point meant the difference between extra time and, well, the destruction of the entire planet. The dismantled guts of Security mains lay wasted around him and as he worked, pieces he required fell into his hands as if by magic.

  The two bulky security guards tasked with monitoring the multitude of feeds and the shenanigans of the rich and powerful lay peacefully against the wall furthest from the Sheet embankment, well away from the … maelstrom growing around the man in the thin paper gown.

  As he worked, Garth’s mind spun and whirled with math so arcane that the numbers seemed to glow in the air around him. Ignoring the pain rising up from inside his bones, the ex-Specter redoubled his efforts; he needed to finish building the machine so he could get what was in his brain onto a Screen. Only then would he learn if the world was savable.

  Wires tied themselves together, power cords fused themselves at the ends, connections never dreamed of by the design teams responsible for kitting Security and Surveillance were made. The machine began to take shape. A computer. A computer capable of working out a problem worse than anything anyone had imagined in the entire History of Everything.

  “I need more.” Garth stepped away from the mass of wires, chips and motherboards and moved to the sleeping security guards. He took their protes off their arms with a sad shrug and went back to work.

  All around him, the blazing blue light of ex-dee glimmered and fluttered, an impossible light that suffused him, let him work, let him create the solution to his most pressing problem. The pain in his bones grew, became pain in his blood.

  The door crashed open.

  Garth, in the process of tearing the protes apart, looked over his shoulder. “This isn’t what it looks like, dude.” Then he stepped back mentally and considered the scene from Ute’s point of view. “Okay, well, it probably looks even more insane from over there, but totally don’t shoot.”

  Ute, gun drawn, tried to figure out what to do. Two of his men –Ferreget and Smith- were against the wall, unconscious and prote-less. Garth was standing in the middle of what appeared to be a typhoon of computer parts, his hands a blistering blur of speed as he continued assembling … something that seemed to need components from every system and Main in the large room. A brilliantly soft blue light seemed to be leaking into the air from … from somewhere.

  Ute shielded his eyes against the luminescence. The blue glow didn’t hurt his eyes but … but it made him uncomfortable. “Garth Nickels, stop what you are doing.”

  Garth saw the bullet coming before Ute pulled the trigger, felt the delicate duronium round tearing through the network of ex-dee lines spilling out of him and into the room. “Don’t pull that trigger, Ute.”

  “Stop what you are doing and I won’t pull this trigger.”

  There was no time!

  There was something wrong with him, some … imbalance turning his use of the extra-dimensionality against him, riddling his body with pain, stretching him out of shape. Part of this new problem was thanks to Bravo; their panicky counter-bloom of ex-dee energy had shredded local space/time into so much confetti. Trying to dig through that noise was harder than ever.

  Even as he tried to figure out a way to convince Ute not to fire, he pummeled his brains for answers to this new situation. It came to him in a flash: it was him. His own body was working against him now!

  More specifically, it was the sheathes! Designed to inhibit the weird powers of a Kin’kithal, the neural sheathes seeded throughout his body were working overtime to prevent access to ex-dee.

  Yet Garth was no ordinary Kin’kithal. He remembered that much, now. He had … he was different and that … difference gave him the power to reach through the sheathes to the wellspring that was the extra-dimensionality.

  The sheathes and … and what made him who he was warred against one another and would continue to fight until one side or the other won. Or until he died.

  Either way, what he was doing right then, right that moment, was more important than his own life. He was going to need help.

  “Ever saved the world, Ute?” Garth asked as he directed pieces of machinery into the guts of what he was building, marveling as he did so the wondrous nature of his need.

  It was the first time since waking up where he was in full control of the savantism that’d given birth to such wonders as gravnetic shield generators. It was amazing. Odin’s construction had been nothing like this.

  “What is going on here?” Ute demanded loudly, mind refusing to see what his eyes insisted was real. Garth Nickels’ ordinarily piercing blue eyes glinted with an impossible brilliance, diamond-hard where the light spilling forth from the air was soft, blue velvet. “Save the world?”

  His fingertips were throbbing wetly with pain. He was pushing himself too far, too fast, too obviously, too blatantly. The final connections inside the new computer were made just as dro
plets of blood began beading around his fingernails, though, and he looked over his shoulder at Ute. “Uh, yeah, you … like, might want to hold on to something, Ute. Or, like, stand really still.”

  Ex-dee was dangerous. Every Kith and Kin knew that, every child conscripted to them knew it, every man, woman and child born into the War against the M’Zahdi Hesh had known it.

  Ex-dee –the extra-dimensionality- was a raging plane of limitless power. It was home to the Heshii, a race of beings dedicated to the eradication of all life everywhere, a race with a special hate-boner for Humanity. The Heshii had given rise to the Kith and Kin in an effort to stop Humanity from doing something, from achieving some –to the Heshii- awful thing, and they’d used a mere glimmer, a tiny fraction of solidified ex-dee energy to create their soldiers.

  Garth’s father, the legendary and reviled Kith Antal had been the first man to withstand that power, that infinitesimal connection to the ex-dee. Kith Antal had grown to the strength, the speed, the wisdom, the longevity over time, and as years turned to centuries, he’d discovered the ability to use and augment those ‘inborn’ gifts, accessing the hidden crystalline kernel buried in his brain. All Kith, all Kin, over the course of servitude to the Heshii Paradigm, learned this. Accidentally or through design, the Heshii had given their most trusted foot soldiers the powers of Titans, but at a price.

  They learned that the human body, no matter how powerful, no matter how ancient, no matter how durable, suffered from direct exposure to ex-dee energy. Great or small, long or short, the tidal ripples wreaked havoc across their titanic flesh. It was a price those Kith and Kin had born with stoic acceptance; their war needed to be won at any cost.

  Where the Kith and Kin had but a single granule, a microscopic seed, their scions, the Kin’kithal and the Kith’kineen had … more. Far more, infinitely so. The bodies of the children were genetically linked to that plane, to the home of the M’Zahdi Hesh, and thus the power and strengths they could call upon were to the Kith and Kin as their parents were to ants.

  Ex-dee was dangerous. Every child of the Kith and Kin knew it, and learned over time, just as their parents had. It took patience, caution, and, most importantly, control. The minds of the children fought and struggled for that control, finding the center of themselves and using their will to corral the very wild thing growing inside of them to a specific thing, some particular trait. The torrent was too great otherwise.

  Thus, Lisa Laughlin was a telepath, Griffin Jones burned like the stars in the night sky, so on and so forth, endless variations on a theme, the very fabric of ex-dee contorting to the necessity of control.

  All children except Garth N’Chalez, the first of them all, and by a … by a fair span of time. He’d never needed to fix his mind in a particular pattern, had never understood why it had to be a particular way. Kith Antal had seen that, and began training his son from a very early age in the fiendishly difficult skill of mastering the source of the Heshii power, seeing in his son a chance to end the War that he himself had marshaled for thousands of years.

  These thoughts and more raged through Garth as he prepared to shed the energy building up around him.

  Many philosophers back in the day, upon learning of ex-dee, called it the Cauldron of Creation and other, more ridiculous, metaphors, struggling to control the reality of that other place so it might be more palatable.

  Ex-dee was worse, much worse. With the sheathed barrier and the extra quirk battling for dominance of his flesh, it was going to be worse than anything he’d endured so far.

  “What are you talking about?” Ute shouted as loud as he could, though for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why; the room, minus the sound of power running through the inexplicable and ramshackle-looking computer in front of Garth, was quiet as a tomb.

  “Hold on!” Garth bellowed back merrily.

  The very first time he’d pulled this much through ex-dee in a training exercise intended to educate him on the process of stepping across three hundred feet, he’d accidentally destroyed fifteen klicks of forest, flattening trees in a very wide circle. He and his dad had hustled their asses out of that place as quickly as possible.

  Of course, he’d gotten better at translating, as his dad had called it. So good, in fact, that he’d gone and done something … miraculous, a thing that’d led, well, to everything. Hell, he was quite possibly responsible for the War, which was why -when Kith Antal had decided to announce to the peoples of Earth that they were in a war- they’d decided they were going to keep Garth’s particular skillset a secret, even from the others.

  Especially from the others.

  Garth shoved that particular memory out of his mind as forcibly as he could. It wouldn’t do to dwell on the grim truth. Not at all. Never, at all. He smiled ruefully. Lisa Laughlin had known he’d remember sooner or later, and her sorrow and rage finally made sense. Rage that he couldn’t remember. Sorrow that he would.

  All the secrets he’d been toting around for the last decade weren’t known to him. Just enough to know that he needed to get into Bravo more than ever. He needed to get in, find the answers, and then … and then he needed to figure out a way to get back.

  “Hold on, buddy!” Garth shouted again. He flexed his hands, watched the droplets of blood leaking around his fingernails rise up through the air to flash into incandescent beads of blue.

  It was going to hurt. Maybe even worse than the last few times.

  Garth really fucking hoped that didn’t happen. The tiny pinhole access point that was all that remained after Bravo’s magnificent plan to render him powerless wouldn’t accept the flood easily or prettily. About the only thing that was working for him was awareness. Almost whole, he figured he might be able to guide the return flow back into ex-dee. Or at least control everything better this time around.

  He hoped.

  Garth took a deep breath and prepared himself.

  Control was of paramount concern. Heshii presence was conspicuously non-existent in Trinityspace and even beyond The Cordon, but neither was there any sign the aliens had been defeated. Expelling these levels of ex-dee energy was a cosmic flare that shouted ‘hey, assholes, here I am, come and get me!’. There was no way of knowing how many more ‘times’ he had left before the Heshii or their servants took notice and came at him. Until he got inside Bravo, until the final door in his mind was unlocked and the whole plan spilled into him, he was not, would not, be ready to fight the M’Zahdi Hesh. Oh, he had the power, all right; it was what was letting him monkey around with ex-dee while sheathed up.

  But they’d had so much more time to prepare and this … this place was not at all close to what he’d planned.

  Garth prayed the release went smoothly. He’d accept ‘not blowing up the building’ as ‘smooth’. It was about what you were willing to deal with after you did something.

  Ute watched Garth flicker fitfully blue.

  The lights went out.

  Something went bang.

  xxx

  Garth leaned against the desk, breathing through his nose, his ass just hanging in the wind. Ute was beside him, sitting in the only remaining chair; everything else –excluding the main constructed out of parts- had been crushed against the far wall.

  “How did you do all this?” Ute demanded, indicating the crude-looking machine. Unlike other mains, the one wrought by Garth’s … wrought by Garth was at best described as ‘half-finished’ and ‘dangerous-looking’. It wasn’t what any Latelian in the world would call ‘functional’. “And what is it doing, and why doesn’t it have a keyboard? And why is it working when it’s not even finished?”

  Garth eyed Ute critically. The big lug was taking being hammered against the wall by unseen forces of unending power fairly well. Better than well, really. Staring critically at the giant, Garth twitched his nose suspiciously. Actually, Ute had withstood the battering far better than the only other guy in the room, a guy who’d done it before.

  “First off,” Garth repli
ed defensively, “some of the greatest inventions in the world were, like, barely even finished. Case in point, the second Death Star. That thing looked like it’d been built out of Meccano pieces and it could’ve blown up planets.”

  “Did you build that, too?” Ute looked sidelong at Garth. He couldn’t quite figure out why he wasn’t arresting the man, or at the very least kicking him out of the Hotel. Certainly, Management was going to want to sue the extremely wealthy man for everything they could. They were looking at about a half a million dollars’ worth of damage, and the two guards would undoubtedly press for ten times that much.

  Garth sniffed. “Nah. Some guy with poor taste in helmets.” He pointed a finger at the … ‘computer’. It wasn’t even that, really, just a fiendishly complicated calculator built to crunch the numbers that he’d woken up remembering. His natural instinct upon waking up had been to run immediately to the storage site to fix things there, but that wouldn’t work anymore. Too much time had passed.

  For all he knew, wherever the mistuned duronium had been dumped was a great big area of mostly evaporated everything. Running into that kind of mess without a solution on hand would only make things a great deal worse.

  He shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t have a keyboard because it doesn’t need one. It’s a machine built to solve a very specific problem that just requires a lot of … processing power.”

  “It doesn’t have a Screen.” Ute pointed out thoughtfully.

  “That’s why I left the Screens on the walls, Ute.” Garth gestured with a broad sweep at the bank of Screens bolted to the walls. Arcane and impossible math scrawled across them with ever-increasing ferocity. The ex-Specter had been going out of his way to avoid looking at the hy-tech sigils since coming to underneath the desk they were now using as a leaning post. He was terrified the answer was going to be ‘run for your fucking life’.