Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  He dialed the precision up a notch to get a closer look at the emanations pouring through the walls. If he was lucky, all they’d see was a bunch of ultra-bright but ‘soft’ beams of light, almost like flashlight rays. If they were unlucky, they might catch sight of a hard point accelerating through those same walls.

  Garth’s stomach quivered at the thought of that. A single hard point of light whipping out of the building … would be bad. “Yeah.” He said again. “But it’s totally cool. Soft light isn’t … you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

  Someone had just walked out of the building. Garth was only vaguely aware that he was screaming, yelling, and shouting his head off.

  Ute grabbed Herrig’s Screen port and switched it to his side of the van. He looked beside him and smiled weakly. “Hello, Sa Herrig. It seems as though Garth is ... preoccupied with heavy concerns at the moment.”

  “I … agree.” Herrig eyed Garth nervously. His employer/friend was pale as a ghost and cursing with astonishing volume. “What is the problem?”

  Ute touched his nose gingerly; one of the security guards at the Palazzo had gotten in a lucky poke during their flight down the stairs with Garth’s main in tow and it was still a bit tender. “It seems as though the … location … where, well, sa, where the end of the world awaits, is … is full of people.”

  Herrig took his glasses off and slumped forward, head in his hands. “It’s the dump site, isn’t it? For the metal from the Museum. The reclamation team mentioned in a flash that the metal was behaving oddly this morning, said it was ‘singing’.”

  “Oh, it’s fucking singing all right.” Garth shouted, veins in his neck, forehead and above one eye popping out so far they could set up residence on Ute’s body. “Jesus fucking Christ people are stupid on this planet. Hey! Let’s all sit around the weird, singing, glowy metal all fucking day and see what happens! Jesus!”

  “What Garth means to say, Sa Herrig, is that he feels it would be in the best interests of mortal life if everyone there hurried away as quickly as they can.” Ute nodded firmly. He’d had a commanding officer like Garth. The man had been incapable of coherent discourse when angry as well. Once you weeded out the curse words, you found yourself with orders that made perfect sense.

  “And if they take even a single goddamn scrap of that metal with them, I will hunt them down and eat them!” Garth was so terrified he was shaking. Latelians and their curiosity. Good Lord, it was almost as if the entire race was willing to die just so they could see something before anyone else. He could imagine those workers, sitting there in the same room as a mistuned pile of duronium, being bombarded by soft light from a different dimension, eating their breakfast, just … hanging out.

  “I think…” Ute closed his mouth when Herrig held up a hand.

  “That one I understood well enough on my own, sa.” Herrig began flashing orders.

  Garth wanted to weep. It was too late. They’d been too late. He pointed. “Too late.”

  The flashlight rays leaking out through the walls and the roof of the building stuttered and flickered as if the power was going out. Then, in an immediate … bump … of light, the entire building burst into sparkling beads that fell to the ground like sparks from a welding torch, revealing the throbbing pile of duronium at the center. The concentrated point of light that’d destroyed the building and consumed all the men sitting innocently inside arced upwards, shredding the air and leaving behind a vacuum that they could see quite easily on their satellite feed. Garth dexterously manipulated the satellite controls to follow the seed. He heaved a morose sigh when it died a few scant seconds later.

  Ute was aghast at what he’d just witnessed. If he was honest with himself, he’d followed Garth out of The Palazzo, not because of the alleged imminent threat of global destruction, but because he’d gotten bored pampering to the rich and powerful and disgusted with the hideous things they demanded they be allowed to get away with. He’d been ‘normal’ for too long, had lived a life of complacency and ease for more than a hundred years, and he’d seen in Garth a chance for adventure.

  Never in his wildest dreams could he have envisioned something like that building just … puffing away into skittery flakes of light.

  “Oh … oh my.” Herrig whispered into the awful silence.

  Garth jiggled the controls, centering on the pile. He’d fucked up. He’d forgotten to include an integer into his equations this morning. He couldn’t believe it, didn’t want it to be true, but he had fucked up again and this time, this time things were the worst they’d ever been.

  In his joy at being gifted with almost all of his memories, in his sorrow at losing Naoko, in his soul-darkening fear at the thought of the pile going critical, he had somehow managed to forget Bravo’s interference at the Museum and what that meant.

  With Bravo’s cunning reversal of the torrential flow of ex-dee energy flowing through him and out into the Universe had come an attenuation of the quantum state surrounding Hospitalis. The implosion had –quite simply- made the walls of the Universe thinner than ever.

  Thin enough that mistuned duronium would decay that much faster, for the Universe from which quadronium was forged was that much closer.

  “We don’t have ten hours, Ute.” Garth tracked another seed shearing off from a metal strut pointing –thankfully- straight at the sky. Unlike the last, this one gleamed sickly green and lasted nearly fifteen seconds as it tore its way through the sky. Green. If that one had gotten anywhere near a human being … he pushed the thought away. It hadn’t and that was all that mattered. “At most we have four. Way lots less, probably.”

  Garth turned his attention to Herrig. His throat ached from shouting. Why? Why were Latelians like this? “Are there any more people in the area?”

  “No, sa.” Herrig had started a search immediately after watching the building disappear. “None. You … you own the surrounding six miles of buildings and machinery, sa. I … thought it would be simpler and more efficient for you if all of your businesses operated in a hub around a central core, sa. Rather like the way Hospitalis is structured. The … compound is clear.”

  “That, Herrig,” Garth smiled one of the first true smiles of the day. Probably the last one, too. “Has earned you a place in my heart like none other. Except, uh, for Naoko. Because she’s a chick. Woman. She’s my girlfriend.” He finished lamely.

  Ute checked his prote discreetly. No information yet. Where had she gotten to and why had anyone bothered to kidnap her when the other person in the room was worth more than every man, woman, child and financial institution on the system combined and multiplied by ten?

  Herrig looked up from his prote. “There are fifteen hundred construction robots matching the criteria you suggested, sa, and they are available for purchase. Where shall I send them?”

  Garth called up a graphic representation of UltraMegaDynamaTron’s property holdings and laid the schematic across the satellite feed. The van’s output screens dropped to the bare minimum; skirting shutdown, the displays stuttered and danced wildly before finding an acceptable output. “Put them in the building earmarked for OCP. That spot has the machinery I’m going to need.” On-screen, a grotesque chartreuse shard of light lanced upward from the duronium spire. In its wake, clods of soil plummeted to the earth only to be puffed away into atoms upon hitting the main pile.

  Ute frowned. Variable exotic elements, indeed.

  Herrig nodded. “Done, sa.”

  “Synch them to the primary netLINK there.” Garth pursed his lips. There wasn’t a lot of time. Four hours was nothing. Even if they hurried there was a better than average chance that he was going to have to do something moronic. They still had to try, though. He continued. “This next bit will get us into hot water.”

  “Moreso than having a … something that melts buildings into light, eats people and turns air into dirt?” Herrig asked woodenly.

  “Um, yeah. So far, no one knows what’s going on over there, right? Anyways, y
es. Lots more trouble.” Garth tapped in a Trinityspace data address, knowing full well that Herrig would at the very least recognize the prefix. Surprisingly enough, he felt a tense from Ute, the second one since they’d been in the van together. They were going to have to have a long talk about stuff.

  Garth screwed his eyes shut for a second and was rewarded for his efforts; modifications to the old gravnetic generator design pulsed against his eyelids. It’d take just a few minutes to adjust the template. Garth nodded, opened his eyes, and flicked his hand across the display as fast as he could go. It was time to show people what real technology was. He finished the mods, saying, “Get the robots working on this. I’m going to need … many. If the fabrication avatars can’t cut it, get a nerd. You hired nerds, right?”

  “Er … I … yes, sa, I did.” Nerds? Herrig wished he were someone else, but only briefly. “If … if by nerds you mean technical staff.”

  “Awesome. The design is pretty standard. Okay, well, no, it’s really not. It’s complicated as fuck, but from what I’ve seen, there shouldn’t be any problems getting this done.” Garth looked outside. The ground started shaking and old reflexes threatened to kick in as a herd of God soldiers tromped by en route to their posts throughout the city.

  “Don’t worry, sa.” Ute said gently. “We are still well within our rights to be free. There are several more hours before curfew.”

  “Is that all you need, sa?” Herrig saw no need to wait until it developed whether the avatars at OCP could handle Garth’s technical requirements. He assigned one of his staff to look through their specialist files in search of someone smart enough to aid in the fabrication right away, mentioning in the assignation that the person needed to work from a remote location, completely unsupervised and that they be … orphaned.

  “Well.” Garth bit his lip.

  Ute had been waiting for this part since their odyssey had begun.

  “Um.” Garth ran a hand through his hair. “See. Here … here’s the … the thing. The pile is spitting out retarded amounts of dangerous elemental energy. We can’t just, like, make it go away. We need to cap it and bleed the power out safely.”

  “Duronium.” Ute and Herrig spoke in unison, laughably managing to match each other’s desperately vexed tones.

  Herrig had been doubting he could feel more deflated than he already was and yet every time Garth opened his mouth, it happened. “How much?”

  “A hundred tons? Is that a lot?”

  Ute laughed at the maniacally insane situation they were in. "Little has changed since this morning, sa.”

  “Yeah, but we really need it.” It was a lot, but using gravnetic shield generators to warp the metal into shapes capable of capping the deadly pile would result in a fuckton of wasted materials; realistically, the job was doable with a tenth of what he was looking for. But, he’d gone and gotten himself knocked right the fuck out for hours on end, and so now the luxury of half-assing around for most of the day being proper and meticulous was gone. Quick and dirty it would be, with a lot of left over dross. “Really, really lots.”

  Herrig happened to have information concerning duronium on hand; ever since Garth had first started talking about needing a lot of it, he’d kept himself appraised on the market standings. “Sa, there isn’t that much ‘free metal’ lying around on this entire planet. The maximum amount of unassigned duronium in bulk lots currently available on the open market is just under a ton. Before you ask, SA, no, there isn’t a hundred entries of similar size. The average weight available is about fifty pounds.”

  “Fuck me sideways.” Garth put his hands in his head and did his best not to weep. Where in the fucking hell were they going to get the metal they needed?

  “Sa,” Ute interrupted the silent frustration, “if I may? There are two different solutions. One will certainly require … flexibility of morals. Both may in fact need … creativity.”

  Garth’s ears perked up.

  Herrig sighed woefully. He didn’t know Ute at all, but he understood on a genetic level that anything that made Garth’s ears perk up was destined to be … grey area maneuverings at best. With Martial Law impending, they could very well wind up being shot to death even as they tried to save the planet from blowing up. God soldiers weren’t well known for their ability to process their need to eat and sleep. Expecting them to be convinced that stealing something was important for everyone was an impossibility.

  “Oh?” Garth asked. It’d been three whole minutes since the pile had shot strange matter into the sky. “Do tell.”

  “You may be unaware of this, sa, since you were unconscious at the time, but earlier this morning, the God Army fired the Old Gun.” Ute tapped his way through his prote until he found the news feed he’d saved and tossed it up on the Screen.

  “Is that what that was?” Herrig remembered thinking the world had been about to end when the horrific noise had racketed through his entire house all the way up in Northon. He grinned, then, at memories of his first night in his dream home. The turmoil of being caught in Garth’s wake was well worth it, so long as you kept your head down and realized it could all come crashing down at any moment.

  “Yes, Sa Herrig.” Ute pointed to the poorly shot video of the duronium slug hustling through the sky. “That looks to be about the weight you are looking for, yes?”

  Garth did some rough calculations in his head. “Yeah, pretty much. Egads, look at the size of that thing. Tell me you guys didn’t build a big gun to shoot spaceships out of the sky.”

  “We did, sa.” Ute admitted this with a mix of pride and embarrassment. “This was shortly after we invented duronium, sa, and at the height of our paranoia over being annexed by Trinity. At the time, duronium was well in advance of anything in use in Trinityspace, so we took measures.”

  “Okay, I like the duronium bullet that is as big as a house.” Garth looked at Herrig. He rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Task someone to find out where that bitch crashed. It’s going to be far. Probably too far to be of use to us right now because that fucking thing is going fast and it’s trajectory is all wrong for a local landing. But hey … duronium, am I right? With all this other shit going on, dollars to donuts says no one’s gonna be reclaiming that huge mother any time soon, so pitter patter, git atter. What’s the second solution, Ute?”

  Ute called up footage from News4You’s coverage of the Museum and sped through until he found what he was looking for. “Did you see these things?”

  Garth stared, nonplussed, at the Gunboys in action. Latelians. Batshit insane. Part of him wished he had seen them ripping the shit out of The Museum, but the sane part of his brain –usually very small and very drunk- insisted being unconscious at the time was being better than dead because the heroic part of his brain would’ve demanded immediate involvement. “Those really are giant robots. I mean, I saw the bits and pieces the other night … but still. Fuck me.”

  The footage showed the two giant robot men blasting the utter shit out of the assassin that he’d seen just this morning, looking hale and hearty and violently insane.

  “What in the fuck is that guy made out of?” Garth demanded, tapping the van’s Screen angrily. He’d never seen anything like that cyborg, not anywhere in Trinityspace and not even across The Cordon.

  “Irrelevant, sa.” Ute interrupted. He, too, wanted to know what Chadsik al-Taryin was constructed out of, and –more importantly- the identity of the man he’d fought in the Palazzo’s foyer. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the time to fuss around. He froze the replay and pointed to the massive plate being torn off one Gunboy by the other.

  “Holy cats!” Garth nodded slowly, then quicker as his enthusiasm grew. “Jesus. That’s Conquistador-class armor plating! Omega level Trinity warship metals. And…”

  “And it is detached from the Gunboy, sa.” Ute returned Garth’s grin with one of his own. “And while it is undoubtedly heavier than a hundred tons …”

  “It’s a helluva lot closer than the d-slu
g.” Garth whooped. “Probably under a lot of security, though.”

  “Not as much as you might think, sa.” Ute gestured to the world beyond their van. “Martial Law, sa. A Goddie on every corner, on every street …”

  “In every city.” Garth fist-pumped. He was finally getting to steal something after all. “Dudes looking after that slab are gonna be normal guys. Oh, hoho, this is gonna be easy.”

  “Are you two gentlemen going to be finishing each other’s’ sentences frequently?” Herrig demanded with mock-anger.

  Garth looked at Ute, who shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe? Okay, okay okay. We are rocking and rolling. Herrig. Robots, fabrication, nerd. Find the slug. If it landed on someone’s property, offer to buy it, don’t care if it’s not a legit purchase, odds are it fucked someone’s house up or whatever. They’ll be happy for the cash and will want that damn thing off their land. If it didn’t, yeah, um. Find someone who will … ‘claim it’.”

  “You mean steal.” Herrig interrupted. “Steal. From the Army. You intend on stealing from the Army. Twice. Two different irreplaceable things. On the same day.”

  “They’re busy.” Garth beat the drum solo out on the console. “Make it happen.” He killed the connection to Herrig and Ute ended the replay of the Gunboys battle with the cyborg.

  “You know where they’re keeping this chest plate?” He asked Ute.

  “I have a good idea, sa.” Ute put the van in motion. “A very good idea.”

  “Awesome. I love stealing stuff. I know I shouldn’t, but … Special Services, right?” Garth leaned back. In his mind, the countdown continued. Four hours, give or take, until the end of the world.

  “Indeed, sa.”

  “You ever hear of Knight Rider?”

  “No, sa, I have not.” Ute made a turn.

  “Not an it, but a who. Well, sort of two who’s. You drive, I’ll talk. There’s this dude named Michael Knight, only that’s not his real name, and he has a talking car…”

  “A talking car?” Ute frowned as he imagined that. “Cars don’t … did this happen in Trinityspace?”