Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  The wall thrown up by the gravnetic generators would prevent either group from getting onto the property, from stealing the armor plating back, would even save them from being executed out of hand, but only so long as they stayed inside. What were they going to do then?

  “Yes,” Herrig reiterated slowly, “yes, Sa Oscar, they will help. Was there another reason you called?”

  “Oh! Yes! Hah! Do you hear that music, sa? It’s getting louder.” Oscar shook his head and sneezed again, completely oblivious to the small trail of sparks launching from his nose. “Anyway, yes. Sa N’Chalez asked me to contact you to find out the exact center of UltraMegaDynamaTron property. I’m supposed to launch one of the shield generators above there. For maximum dispersal.”

  “I’m sorry what did you say?” Herrig tried to swallow the terrified tremor in his voice, but couldn’t. Sparks had shot out of the man’s nose. He was being transformed into light from the inside out! “How … h-h-how did you pronounce Sa Nickels’ last name?”

  Oscar laughed, tilting his head to one side then the other. “That’s an odd way of saying his name, sa. Here. Try it slowly. N’Cha-lez. It’s pretty simple.”

  “I … I shall work on that, sa.” Herrig shivered. What was happening to Oscar Sabellik defied reason. He found the information the young man wanted and flashed it over. “There you go, sa. Good luck!”

  “I don’t need luck, Sa DuPont. Oscar Sabellik is on the case!” Oscar smiled, sneezed more light, and then ended the ‘LINK.

  Herrig put his face into his hands.

  Boom Goes the Dynamite

  Chairwoman Alyssa Doans gazed at the Screens. The forces chasing both the thieves of the armor plating and the gangsters attempting to steal it from the original group were having a difficult time fighting a war on two fronts. A mobile war stretching –against all possible comprehension- from one entire city to another. A war literally tearing up hundred mile stretches of roadway and it –they­- showed no signs of stopping.

  “Why can’t we get a proper feed from equipment inside our own vehicles?” The Chairwoman demanded of the Army Colonel, a young man by the name of Salms. He wasn’t faring well under her constant scrutiny, as if he was somehow aware that he was dangling over a pit of ravenous animals.

  “I … that is … we … I …” Salms swallowed. Tried to swallow. His mouth wasn’t working properly. His tongue was as dry as paper. Where was the OverCommander? He was the one who spoke with the Chairwoman. Underlings had a disturbing tendency to never come out of a meeting with the woman and from the way she kept twitching and shouting, Salms was certain he was on borrowed time. In a situation like this, it was all too likely that the OverCommander would duck his head, say Sorrysi, and run the other way.

  “Out with it, Colonel.”

  Salms tried to run a nervous hand through his hair, but instead succeeded only in knocking his forgotten hat off his head. It lay there on the floor between the Chairwoman and him, and the chilly –subarctic- temperatures coming off the woman suggested his hat was going to stay there until the end of time. “C-colonels Harredad and U-Ito believe that the man on the heavy carrier is Harry Bosch. Th-the tech blocking our scans is similar to what we saw in … in The Museum.”

  Alyssa arched an eyebrow, enjoying the way the man cringed. “Similar but not the same? Why do you think it’s Bosch, then, sa?”

  Salms summoned up footage from various God soldier vehicles chasing the massive ‘truck’ hauling the gargantuan metal plate through city streets at speeds only definable as ‘insanely reckless’. He cross-referenced it with satellite footage and from the hundreds of cameras already in place.

  Each display revealed the same thing. Which was nothing. The only reason they knew that the Conquistador chest plate had been stolen was because a loyal citizen on the edge of Central had called to complain about the noise. Oh, you could watch God soldier attack vehicles and cars full of gangsters and opportunistic mercenary groups fly past at equally insane speeds. You could even watch them attack something, but the moment that attack got to a certain point, be it a missile or a laser or whatever the various elements were bringing to bear against the original thieves, there was a frantic burst of stuttering chaos and then nothing.

  Salms explained all this, though surely the Chairwoman was receiving Intel from her own teams, who were also surely involved in this mess. If Bosch had engineered the theft, then he was also responsible for the blackout swallowing Central City whole for a solid fifteen minutes.

  What they could do with a maniac like that on their side.

  “Indeed, Colonel Salms.”

  Salms felt all the blood leave his brain. He’d said that last part aloud, and the arch, wry agreement coming from the Chairwoman left him ready to cry. It didn’t even matter that he was a Colonel in the Army, the highest rank one could achieve before becoming UnderCommander. Alyssa Doans was Chairwoman.

  “You have not yet explained why you believe this is Bosch.” Alyssa said calmly. Her worlds were falling apart. First Nickels, now Bosch. Was there another maniac waiting in the wings?

  “I … it’s the tech, Chairwoman.” Salms wanted to call up more data, but didn’t bother; the Chairwoman kept routinely swiping her Screens clear to an empty feed that seemed to bother her even more than the theft of Trinity materiel. “We …we’ve been examining the News4You footage and our own scans with both avatar and humans, trawling for data. While this is different tech in that … in that he is effectively invisible to scanning equipment, we theorize it is a step up from the tech used inside The Museum. It … it’s a matter of power, Chairwoman.”

  That had the Chairwoman’s attention. She was looking at him with a slightly less raptor-like gaze, so he continued onwards, feeling himself on moderately stable ground. “Our wEye scans of Harry Bosch revealed that he was lugging around an incredibly powerful source of energy, one strong enough to make him look … look like a ghost while we were scanning him. All that News4You footage … it is clear to us that this Bosch fellow was also shielded from physical harm. All you have to do is watch a few seconds of him being attacked to see it.

  Until Sa Gurant wakes up from his … coma? Coma, we have no definitive proof of what happened in those last few minutes, but the new, going theory is that the power source Bosch was carrying was overloaded by Gurant’s merciless strength.” Salms summoned specs of the heavy truck back, only to watch them fling off the Screen as soon as they were done loading. “This, ah, truck, is capable of carrying the two hundred forty-two ton armor plate with relative ease. Therefore, it would be a simple matter for Bosch and his accomplices –he has at least one man aboard firing at everything and everyone- to bring a much larger example of the tech aboard.”

  Alyssa repressed the urge to shout and scream. Instead, she spoke calmly through her proteus. “Find out what Garth Nickels is doing. Learn for me if his stupidly named Conglomerate is building anything. Especially find for me if he is working on anything he developed in Trinityspace.”

  She didn’t know how Garth had done it, what with him being involved with Terrance and that hideously planned coup, but he had somehow fallen in with a God soldier. They’d all of them discounted the possibility of Nickels working with Bosch simply because between the Portside Boys, the Spaceport, Ashok Guillfoyle and that two week stay in hospital, Garth Nickels ‘hadn’t had the time to do anything like that’.

  Oh, it all made sense now! Did it ever. Nickels hadn’t been at The Museum with his girlfriend. Perhaps he had been there on a date –Naoko Kamagana’s presence and their mutual attraction was impossible to miss-, but he’d also been there to test run modifications to his gravnetic shield generator technology. This madness had to stop. Hospitalis was being destroyed by a single man’s presence. She needed to save her people.

  Alyssa grinned wickedly. A solution to all her problems floated above her head. “Do, continue. I should like to learn all I can about this … magical technology.”

  Against all reason, Salms
was more terrified of a calm and presumably happy Chairwoman. Regardless of his personal feelings, he had no choice. “We … we believe that this new technology can … can be stepped up or down in terms of … of what it can do. Since … since the heavy truck is essentially armored with one of the hardest substances available in Trinityspace, both our God soldiers and the other random forces arrayed against the driver are having a difficult time dealing any significant damage. The … the plate is … is curved, you see, slightly, to fit over the chest of the Gunboy. On the truck, the edges overlap on all sides. No need to shield it from damage. That thing is a very small battlecruiser right now. So … so, they adjust the frequency somehow to affect visual scanning. They probably learned the trick from looking at their own recordings from the Museum.” Salms tried not to beam his pleasure at their solution and failed.

  “Fascinating.” It was. Truly fascinating. Garth Nickels was truly amazing. There seemed to be nothing he could not accomplish. Her prote signaled the arrival of data. Alyssa read it carefully, ignoring Salms’ presence with ease.

  Nickels was nowhere to be found, which was natural; he apparently hadn’t been wearing a proteus for some time now and if he was engaged in anything illegal, he was almost certainly avoiding cameras with a will. It would be some time before he popped up, but when he did, MoE would find him and beam his demonic visage right to wherever she was. Alyssa couldn’t wait for that moment.

  His Conglomerate leader, Herrig DuPont was spending money in Port City with reckless abandon, buying food, drink, and all manner of sundry items. It took the Chairwoman a moment to figure out why that would be and –for a split second- she cursed herself. Her last minute addendum to the rules of Martial Law had effectively rendered it impossible for her people to go out and buy food once the curfew kicked in.

  No matter. She could fix that tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Any si or sa that didn’t have enough food in their fridges to last several days was a si or sa that didn’t deserve to live. Besides, they all had tap water. A person could survive days without food so long as they had drink.

  More data filled her proteus. Nickels –through Herrig- had acquired fifteen hundred construction robots, a cunning workaround to laws prohibiting gatherings in more than two and those covering businesses being operational during lockdown. Alyssa tapped her lips thoughtfully. She didn’t have enough manpower available to investigate this properly. Martial Law had drained her resources down to the last drop; the only free agent she could really and truly spare without weakening the efficacy of the lockdown was Barnes, and when she was done with Salms, she had orders for him.

  No matter. Alyssa knew in her bones Nickels was violating the agreements he’d made. Somewhere in the expanse of land he’d purchased … somewhere in there he was using his robots to build gravnetic shield generators. It was as plain as the nose on her face.

  “Is there any way to determine where they are headed? The thieves. Bosch and his crew.”

  Salms cleared his throat. “Well, more or less, Si Chairwoman. I realize that is vague. Since they are on the high-speed roads, there are very few destinations other than Port that they can make. Avatars can’t make any definitive guess as to their ultimate port of call, but instinct says it has to be the industrial sections of Port City. There really isn’t anywhere else in the entire City capable of hiding something that large for any amount of time. If, if Bosch or his employer possess tech capable of doing anything with that armored hull plate, the machinery will be massive. Our own equipment filled a cavern in The Peak.”

  “Is it possible they do?” Alyssa asked, bored with the meeting. She’d already decided what she was going to do.

  “Before yesterday and today, I would have said no with absolute assuredness, Si Chairwoman. Now?” Salms shrugged, showing his palms. “There is no telling.”

  Alyssa nodded, more pleased than she’d been in some time. “Wonderful. One last thing before you leave, Colonel Salms.”

  “Yes, Si Chairwoman?”

  “This Conquistador-class armored plate. Would it survive impact from our Orbital Cannons?”

  Salms swallowed nervously. “Y…yes, Si Chairwoman. Well, almost certainly. N…nothing else would, though. Minimal dispersion missiles will destroy everything within … three to five kilometers. Maximal dispersion could carpet … carpetbomb the entire city.”

  “The chance of the plate being destroyed?”

  Salms consulted his prote, glad his avatars were listening. The data was there and ready. He needed to get out of the offices as soon as possible; the Chairwoman’s eyes had started glittering like sick diamonds. “There …. There is a fifteen percent chance the plate could be damaged or destroyed, Si Chairwoman. The method used to free it from the Gunboy may have caused internal stress fractures. There’s no way of knowing until we get it back.”

  Alyssa smiled again. So long as Bosch was decimated, losing the plate was acceptable. “Wonderful. The Chair thanks you for your efforts today, Colonel Salms.”

  The Chairwoman watched the colonel leave hurriedly, enjoying the man’s palpable fear. Knowing him, he would be on the prote to her missing or otherwise engaged OverCommander in seconds, spilling his guts.

  Alyssa called Hamilton Barnes. Hopefully, the man hadn’t left the moon yet. It’d be much simpler for him to fly from there to the Orbital Cannons than to turn his ship around.

  xxx

  Hamilton Barnes ended the call with the only woman who could give him orders. He contemplated the data she’d flashed him.

  Logically, her decision to use the Orbiter to rain death and destruction down upon the thieves made terrific sense. The God soldiers chasing valiantly after the truck were having zero success, partly because the truck was perhaps the most secure thing on the planet, partly because of the mysterious shield making their scanners and targeting equipment less than worthless and partly because when they weren’t trying to shoot the thieves dead, they were trying to protect themselves from a considerable armada of other thieves and mercenaries.

  Barnes logged onto freeway cameras so he could get a better sense of what was going on down there. When he saw the hundreds of miles long scene of destruction, he found himself laughing. What a mess! Whoever had the stones to steal from the Latelian Regime was also a maniac who had either not considered the likelihood of other parties –parties with the possible wherewithal to affect their own theft- coming after them or just hadn’t cared.

  The trail of destruction kept getting worse the closer they got to Port City; while The Portside Boys and Devil’s Nuts gangs had been effectively and decisively ripped to shreds at the Spaceport, there were other criminal organizations out there. Throw the hundred or so different mercenary groups operating on the planet into the mix and you had yourself a never-ending cycle of forces throwing themselves against that truck and the operators.

  Hamilton logged onto air traffic control avatars. As he’d suspected. The volume of flight paths being automatically filled had tripled in the last hour, flying directly in the face of the impending curfew. Mercs and criminals were rushing to secure this most amazing and unexpected prize.

  Yes, the Chairwoman’s decision to launch missiles at what was –when you got down to it- a theft made perfect sense. The three-to-five kilometer radius of destruction would obliterate a sizable portion of –not only the surrounding city- but irritants as well.

  Perfectly logical.

  If you were a lunatic.

  Alyssa had confided her theories with him before ending the call and –like her insane plot to attack one of her own cities with missiles from on high to get rid of a few problems- they made sense. If the original thief was Bosch, he assuredly deserved to die for being a walking, talking example of a hundred ways to flout Regimist policies. Hamilton agreed with that part of the Chairwoman’s decision-making process. Bosch was a nightmare for the Regime.

  If –as Alyssa believed, and again, it made sense- Bosch worked for Nickels, well, then, her Great Enemy deserved t
o lose everything. Specifically by fire; the Chairwoman was asking that Hamilton keep an eye on the progress of the ‘caravan’ and, should it evolve that they were making their way towards UltraMegaDynamaTron’s holdings, the Orbiter should not fire until everyone was close enough so the blast radius would destroy everything in sight.

  That was where the Chairwoman’s plan fell apart, at least for Hamilton. If Bosch worked for Nickels then there was every chance that what the man was doing was –ultimately, probably- beneficial for Hospitalis.

  Hamilton aimed his ship for the Orbiter. It wouldn’t take him long to get there. As he piloted the small craft, he decided to make a call.

  xxx

  “Hey, Herrig, buddy. What’s shaking?” Garth looked over his shoulder at Ute, who was grinning like a madman. The massive Latelian was plainly enjoying himself, though he was denying it. He bit back laughter.

  He really, really should’ve considered that every criminal and grey-area organization on the fucking planet would have their eyes on the hull plating. It was why he needed an AI on his side. Not even Ute had considered that bit, or how fucking crazily determined they’d all be once everything got rolling. Every time he believed they were free of raiders, more arrived like there was a hidden spawn point just over the horizon.

  About the only thing they’d taken into consideration was the God Army’s reprisal, but the plan there had been ‘we are too far away for you to do anything, so nanana’.

  They’d –he’d- forgotten about everyone else on the fucking planet. Now they had everyone and their goddamn gun-toting gramma chasing their asses, forcing him to use his choked up powers to turn their enormous carryall invisible.

  As a super awesome bonus to his stupidity, the effort was definitely going to kill him before too much longer.

  Herrig blanched the moment he took a good look at Garth’s face. There was dried blood covering every visible inch and –if he wasn’t mistaken- a very thick trail of fresh blood pouring consistently from his nose. “Are … are you injured, sa?”