Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Eddington looked up from his prote. He’d sneakily tried to use his military credentials to override the civilian laws only to be rebuffed again. “Big ones. The terrorist lunatic Guelf …”

  “Gualf.” Ute corrected.

  “Gualf. He put them in the transport tunnels.” Eddington chuckled. “Looks like he wasn’t planning on dying with the rest of everyone after all. Looks like he was going to run and pull down half the city with him. Crazy stuff.”

  Memories of that night were going to be with Garth for a long, long time. One of his personal failures was that he hadn’t had an opportunity to do Vilmos Gualf in himself. The terror and the nightmares that he’d planted into the hearts and souls of the survivors deserved unlimited punishment. Garth hoped with every fiber of his Kin’kithal being that the man had suffered for his crimes.

  “How many men you got down there with you, Corporal?” Garth tried to ask as casually as he could, but really, when you’re grilling a soldier about troop emplacement in a gaping crater in the middle of the city hours before a curfew kicks in, there’s only so much casual to go around.

  Eddington went to answer. Instead, he tilted his head to one side, then the other. He’d just remembered where they were, and what they were doing. “Why are you two sas in this hole?”

  “It’s hardly a hole, sa.” Ute countered. “Closer to a crevice.”

  “Crevasse, I say.” Garth supplied, trying to crane his head past Eddington. The guy moved his head.

  “You know what I mean, sa.” Eddington reached for his gun.

  “Shit.” Garth poked the man in the chest and Ute reacted with blinding speed, catching the corporal before he fell and bashed his skull open on a rock.

  “How do you do that?” Ute couldn’t believe how fast Garth could move. If he hadn’t been prepared to catch Corporal Eddington ….

  Garth wiped away a bloody tear. “Ninja.” God, doing that hurt. “Now let’s take a quick poke through the guy’s prote.”

  xxx

  “That’s a bit of good news.” Garth pointed to the overlay map on Eddington’s prote. He was referring to the troops in the underground access tunnels once used by Museum Curators, naturally, but also to the fact that the corporal had left his secure proteus incredibly unsecured.

  “How so, sa?” Ute was doing his best to ignore things, but he couldn’t; he needed definitive proof that what they were doing was the best thing possible for saving the planet. He’d seen a few wonders leading him to hope that Garth Nickels knew what he was doing, that together they’d be able to cap that pile, but he was essentially a stranger to Hospitalis. There was a government in place, with emergency services that could possibly be of greater support than two men looking to steal Trinity armor plating from that same government.

  Ute shook his head, gritting his teeth. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t keep quiet. “Why are we doing this, sa?”

  “Told you.” Garth pecked through the corporal’s prote. What he wanted to do was steal it, but he was perversely afraid that the OverCommander would somehow magically know he was breaking his promise. “Savin’ the world today.”

  “No, sa,” Ute sat back on his haunches. It was amazing that no other citizens were coming to stick their heads into what little remained of the Museum. “I mean, why are we doing this?” He explained his thoughts, watching Garth, willing –hoping- that the man had a reasonable explanation.

  Garth checked the time. He didn’t like it, but, at the same time, he was surprised they’d managed to go this long. Frankly, it would’ve been better had Ute broached this topic while they’d just been driving around Central like two dudes out for a cruise instead of minutes away from a heist. He made a noise with his mouth. “Okay. How much do you know about duronium? Really and truly and not, like, from what you can read on a Wiki page when I’m not looking.”

  Ute shook his head. He thought about what Garth had already told him, of the semi-impossible nature of duronium. “It’s a composite metal, sa. Comprised of several dozen different elements, it is very durable and extremely resistant to both heat and radiation. For many thousands of years, we’ve been using it almost exclusively. For just as long, it made us a true power in the Universe.”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah.” Garth bit nervously at his lip. He had an answer ready for Ute. There was just no telling how the big lug was gonna take it.

  “None of this explains why we aren’t simply asking the Chairwoman or the OverCommander for assistance, sa.” Ute crossed his arms.

  Garth cleared his throat. “Like I said, quadronium isn’t a metal, Ute. It isn’t a metal at all. It’s solidified matter from a Universe existing on the other side. Traveling across a bridge and through a place we called the ‘extra-dimensionality’, every instance of quadronium is matter ripped from one place, essentially funneled through ex-dee and out through the crude matter bridge inside duronium. Ex-dee in itself is a place of limitless power. The process destroys more than ninety percent of what is used, but what remains is indestructible, sa. Not figuratively. Not metaphorically. When you try to destroy something made from quadronium, you are trying to destroy another fucking existence. It is indestructible and invisible to anything save the naked eye. Now,” Garth took a deep breath. He realized he’d been shouting and thanked his lucky stars Joe and Jane Latelian were too busy preparing for Martial Law to be wandering around like idiots. “Now. Can you imagine your government in possession of something like that? The reign of terror they would force upon the people and systems? Is that something you really want to be a party to? Your scientists are geniuses at looking at things and figuring out how to reproduce them. We are doing this because of that. I will not be a party to that.”

  Ute’s mind spun. He could barely think, let alone process all that Garth had shouted at him. He latched onto the one thing that made any sense. “You can access ex-dee, can’t you?”

  “I told you. I’m special.” Garth gave his patented Devil May Care Grin #232, the one that made people doubt his sanity.

  “There’s more to this story, isn’t there? More to this ‘ex-dee’, more to this ‘other Universe’.”

  Garth pursed his lips. As he’d feared, Ute had sniffed out the deeper secret. Who had this man been, once upon a time? There was indeed more. Much more, and each step of the way towards ultimate truth was worse. “We gonna steal this thing or what?”

  Ute spent another precious moment imagining what would happen if the Chairwoman and OverCommander Vasily got ahold of true quadronium. Armed with weapons and machines of war cast from a truly indestructible metal, it wasn’t possible that the Latelian Army would crush everything and everyone under foot, it was certain. He was by no means disloyal. Not at all. He believed in the Latelian Regime. Had believed in it for a very long time.

  Yet, he couldn’t condone warfare on the scale that quadronium would bring. Forty million God soldiers could spread to all corners of existence. Even without quadronium that would be a hard thing to repel.

  “I am going to want to hear more of this story, sa.” Ute checked on Eddington. The man’s pulse was steady, if slow.

  Garth looked up at the sky, wishing he were anywhere else. Wishing he were anyone else. “No, sa, you don’t. But hear it you will.” He rubbed his hands together; they’d reached a temporary armistice. “Game plan. We rush this place and we steal some shit.”

  Ute took Eddington’s gun. He raised an eyebrow at Garth’s disdain. “Sa?”

  “We’re not going to kill anyone, pal. Jeepers.”

  Ute –more than emotionally able to deal with the impact of killing people to save people- looked at his stolen gun lamely. “We could shoot the cameras out.”

  “We … we … we could do that, sure.” Garth groaned against the pain burning beneath his skin as he reached for the source of power nestled deep inside his atomic structure. He understood now why it hurt so much, and why he bled every time he pushed his will onto the ex-dee.

  While the neural sheathes
were, in fact, reset to zero, their base function was to inhibit the esoteric powers of a Kin’kithal warrior. That was something that couldn’t be overridden, no matter what. Every time he grabbed hold of the microscopically thin tendril of ex-dee that was loose inside him, the nearly infinite number of sheathes attached to every atom pushed against that desire.

  Fortunately, the sheathes hadn’t been built with him in mind. They hadn’t been constructed to contain a paradox. The two warred inside him on a continual basis. With space/time around Hospitalis as damaged as it was, he was only barely capable of beating the nullification effects from the machines inside. The titanic, tidal force of ex-dee, of his will, of the paradox that made him who he was, was literally ripping the sheathes out.

  “Or,” Garth continued, grinning against the pain, ignoring the blood flowing freely from his eyes, nose, ears, mouth and fingertips, “or we could … could … go dark. Ouch.”

  The blossom of released power flowed outward from the epicenter. Ute shielded his eyes against the invisible deluge of energy and watched –awestruck- as the lights flickered, dimmed, then went out. His prote made a funny noise then shut down. Ute reached out with lightning-quick reflexes, catching Garth Nickels before he knocked himself silly.

  The ex-God soldier worried at a tooth as he stared down at the unconscious man. There was blood everywhere. Cautiously, Ute opened an eyelid and gazed at a bloodshot eye. For a brief second, a flicker of electricity sparked deep in the cornea.

  xxx

  High above the worried and soon-to-be frantic population of Hospitalis, Hamilton Barnes replayed the footage he’d downloaded from a satellite for the eighth time. For a man who’d lived as long as he had, for a man who’d done the things he’d done in the name of Chair and Regime, he was having a goddamned hard time coming to terms with what he’d just witnessed.

  Si Jane Paulson had indeed done as she’d been –fairly enough- coerced into doing; he had premier access to camera footage of Garth Nickels and the command codes worked into the avatars authorized him to decide whether the Chairwoman got to see what the man was up to. So far, the fixer was glad he’d decided to keep his ‘employer’ out of the loop.

  In the theater of his mind, Garth Nickels and Ute, freedom man he’d run into before through the years, were having some type of heartfelt discussion in the open wound that was The Museum. At their feet lay an unconscious corporal by the name of Eddington. Though there was no audio –all the cameras within range of the two men weren’t the right type- it was obvious that the soldier was having second thoughts about their blatant goal. Either way, it was unsurprising the two men had fallen in together.

  Hamilton wished for audio. It was impossible to read their lips. What they were there to do was obvious. They were there to steal the armored chest plate lately belonging to a very dead Gunboy. A faint smile flickered across the assassin’s lips as he tried and failed to understand why. There wasn't a conceivable use for Conquistador-class armor that’d already been repurposed. While the center of UltraMegaDynamaTron was in the midst of what seemed to be a massive gearing up for something, thus far all their purchases were innocuous. Even the fifteen hundred construction robots being delivered to one of many addresses on file for Garth’s Conglomerate would be useless when it came to the plate.

  There was nothing they could do with the armor. To anyone except the engineers who’d reformed the fantastically complex and resilient metal, it was a two hundred ton encumbrance. Even if they managed to abscond with their prize –and it was definitely doable given the skillsets of both men- they were only going to get so far. Even the most dimwitted God soldier would find it inside him or herself to wonder about the massive truck hauling an even more massive weight through streets.

  It’d be a simple thing to contact the Chairwoman. It was what he should do. Hamilton knew this. Loyalty, blind and unswerving loyalty to the Chair had been a part of his life for just shy of a thousand years.

  But he didn’t. Hamilton couldn’t shake the feeling, the absolute, one hundred percent certified feeling deep in his gut that Garth Nickels was doing something that needed doing.

  The three hundredth request for access to video files concerning Garth Nickels filtered onto Hamilton’s mental Screen. Chairwoman Doans was repetitively demanding access. The ruler for the entire solar system was doing nothing else but sitting in her offices, hammering away on the Prometheus Device, trying to –he guessed- force data into existence.

  Another faint smile crossed Hamilton’s lips. Alyssa had made such a terrible mistake in giving Hollyoak the funding necessary to figure out a way –any way- to modify his resurrection chamber. The freakish, twisted doctor had done more than he could’ve possibly imagined.

  Posing as an avatar, Hamilton pulsed a ‘quarry not engaged’ response back to the Chairwoman’s Screens. If she were even a tenth less concerned about finding and watching Garth, she’d pause to track the source of the avatar and find that it wasn’t even based on Hospitalis. From there, Alyssa Doans would realize that her pet attack dog was the one keeping her from the source of her affliction.

  He resumed watching the two men. This next part, just following the heated moment where Garth had somehow managed to convince Ute to continue on, was the absolute most interesting thing Hamilton Barnes had ever seen in his long life, and he was including the rapturous, drug-induced angelic hallucinations given to him by Chadsik al-Taryin in that list.

  On Screen, Garth Nickels, flickering. Fitfully, like he had somehow transformed into an image. Static, a stuttering of his entire frame, as if he wasn’t really there at all and then …

  Nothing. All cameras, all power, everything in Central, cast once more into darkness. Even the satellites locked into geosynchronous orbit around their most important city were dark. Again.

  Hamilton checked the multitude of feeds streaming through the Trinity Representative’s living quarters. Northon, Easson, Wesson, Southon … they were all live and dealing with the concept of Martial Law. Local law enforcement officers were beginning to suggest over open frequencies that the sis and sas of each city purchase enough food and water to last for several weeks. And so on and so forth.

  But not Central. Central was –and here, Hamilton grinned wolfishly- Central was in the middle of its very own Dark Age. Nickels and his companion could well be on their way to Port City by the time Central’s systems were running properly.

  “Now how do you keep doing that, Sa Nickels?” Hamilton looked at the corpses of the three very dead Representatives. “How does he do that, sis and sas? You come from Trinity. Is there anything in It’s vast collection of galaxies that can explain this to me? What is Garth Nickels, really and truly?”

  Hamilton considered the brutal silence in the room. The Reps had been astonishingly easy to kill. Far easier than he would’ve deemed likely, given that they were, according to their own press, the will and voice of Trinity in all matters pertaining to Latelyspace’s ongoing negotiations with the machine mind.

  If he was ruler of as great a land as Trinity, if he had sent two men and one woman to treat with the openly hostile and xenophobic nation that was Latelyspace, Hamilton would’ve chosen to send people able to defend themselves. More than that, he would’ve made certain they could conquer the solar system if push came to shove.

  Trinity had not. Trinity protected everything It considered an asset. Sometimes to the point of being over-the-top about it.

  Hamilton chewed indecisively on the inside of his lip.

  What was Trinity up to?

  xxx

  Chairwoman Alyssa Doans sat in the darkness of her office, slamming the indestructible Prometheus Device against her desk until the wood started to splinter.

  xxx

  Vasily stared at … nothing. He was drawing a blank. For the second time in less than two days, Central City was shut down. Nothing was working this time, not even the cars.

  What was happening to his world?

  Machinations of a Machin
e Mind

  “Shit.”

  Trinity didn’t know what else to say. It’d been perilously difficult to engineer organic bodies capable of emitting a Quantum frequency powerful enough to broadcast any information to the Tunnel without detection by Latelians. Now It was without eyes and ears in the most important solar system in the entire Universe.

  The deaths obviously meant that the Chairwoman was moving forward with her plans. It was abrupt, but Trinity understood.

  It all rest with Garth N’Chalez. Trinity Itself didn’t understand how it happened and had never seen the effects on such a grand scale before, but Garth’s mere presence was a destabilizing event. The machine mind understood Griffin’s bleak references to his old commanding officer and friend being a ‘black hole’.

  Some … thing about Garth was different from the other Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen. Some … essence warped causality, pushing and pulling events far out of their original pattern. Simply standing next to the man was a barrage of madness. Normal beings had no choice but to be pulled along in the Kin’kithal’s wake, mortal flotsam. It was either that or be destroyed.

  If Trinity had a face, It would smile. Latelyspace was disintegrating before It. An unexpected but wholly welcome side effect to Garth Nickel’s inexplicable influence, one It reveled in. All the Chairwoman’s plans, so carefully plotted, so deviously designed … none of it would happen. It’s preparations were unnecessary, now. Garth Nickels was a raging inferno, a mobile event horizon, a shattered singularity. Garth would unlock Bravo and then Bravo would kill Garth. That was destiny. That was an inescapable event thirty thousand years in the planning.