Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Garth absentmindedly backhanded the blood from his nose and shook his head. “I’m totally, totally fine. This? It’s a thing. I do it now. I spent all this time keeping my blood inside of me but I’ve decided it’s liberating, bleeding to death.”

  In his mind’s eye, the … gauge … of power shrank. The unique essence of who he was was slowly, inevitably being used up and that was something he knew he should avoid. The strong sense that the … paradoxical nature … that’d been grafted onto him thirty thousand years ago needed to be preserved wouldn’t leave him. Garth closed his eyes for a moment, thinking on the Heshii and the absurdity of his plan.

  He needed the secret within him to last until the very end of days. There was no other way to win. Getting into the Box, having Bravo remove the sheathes so he could fully access both the extra-dimensionality and the paradox-core within … there was nothing else as important as that. There was no other way to decimate the Heshii with any efficiency.

  He grinned, baring blood-soaked teeth. “But hey, you didn’t call me up to see if I was bleeding to death, didja?”

  Herrig flinched spasmodically at the sight of the death mask. One day, possibly soon, Garth was going to kill himself. The feeling hooked into his soul and wouldn’t leave. “N… no, sa, I did not. I … there is a call, you see. From someone … someone who…”

  Herrig’s face disappeared to be replaced by a very generic-looking, gray-eyed man. “Someone who wishes very much to speak with you. It is an honor, sa, to meet you face to face.”

  “What is going on?” Ute shouted from his perch. The God soldiers were temporarily engaged in aerial combat with what appeared to be a chapter of the Hawks Mercenary Agency. Ute was surprised they’d come out of the woodworks, even with prize being so grand; the Hawks had gotten up to some bad business a while back and weren’t … liked in their ‘community’.

  Ute lumbered over, sniper cannon dangling loosely from one hand. The moment he saw the sa on the Screen, Ute shouted incoherently and tried to end the call.

  Garth slapped Ute’s hand away. “Calm down, dude. This is just a phone call.”

  “That is Hamilton Barnes, sa.” Ute felt his testicles –already shriveled to peas from the day’s events- shrivel further. “He belongs to the Chairwoman. He’s her … ‘fixer’. Nothing he doesn’t is ‘just’ anything.”

  “And you,” Hamilton smiled mirthlessly, “are Ute. You should be long dead. And yet here we are.”

  “What d’you mean, belongs to the Chairwoman?” Garth took a deep breath. Maintaining a physical connection to ex-dee like this, willfully manipulating the raging torrent of power burning across his skin while driving a motherfucking heavy truck across insanely hostile terrain was –and he was really sure of this- killing him.

  Hamilton redirected his gaze to Nickels. The man was seriously hurt, yet neither he nor Ute were overly concerned. He dismissed his own fears based on that. “He means, Sa Nickels, that I … solve problems for the Chairwoman. I have ultimate authority and ultimate discretion. Earlier this morning, she demanded I find and kill you. Some short time ago, she asked that I deal with the thieves of the armored plate. She believes Harry Bosch is the thief, and that he is in your employ. She would be quite interested to know that you yourself are the thief.”

  “Oh.” Garth looked quizzically at Ute. “Does he normally call guys he’s going to kill? That seems like a weird thing to do, right? I wouldn’t call anyone I was gonna kill and be all ‘hey, guys, what’s up’. I’d be all ‘blammo’ and then I’d buy a Slurpee. Ignore me. I’m … bleeding a lot.”

  Ute shook his head. “No. He does what he does from the shadows, sa. He is a legend in certain circles. I cannot think of a single instance where he has spoken with his victims.”

  “You, also, are a legend, Sa Ute.” Hamilton continued, satisfied that Ute would keep his mouth closed for the time being; the factors adding up to Ute being with Nickels made instant sense, but Hamilton seriously doubted Garth knew even a fraction of what there was to know about the man. Barnes continued. “I have been reviewing your life since coming to Hospitalis, Sa Nickels.”

  “Busy, me.” Garth gritted his teeth and held on for dear life as a missile bounced off the top of their awesome armor. He watched Ute fall and bash his head on a chair, then whistled as the man picked himself up and hurry back to his perch. Expertly targeted gunfire filled his ears. Satisfied that Ute was taking care of business, Garth turned his attention back to the fixer. “That guy … he’s got some secrets.”

  “Indeed he does, Sa Nickels.”

  “Please, call me Garth.” His unerring sense of direction told him they were about fifteen, twenty minutes away from their base. When he was done chin-wagging with Mysterious Phone Caller Hamilton Barnes, it would be time to call poor Oscar up. Garth prayed the dude hadn’t disintegrated into puffballs of expended Reality. “So, you’re s’posed to be killing me and you’re calling me up for what? An exchange of recipes?”

  “Nothing like that, Garth. As you say,” Hamilton dipped his head, “As you say, I am supposed to be killing you and as I say, I have made myself very familiar with your activities since coming here. I know considerably more than the Chairwoman would undoubtedly be pleased with, most specifically your claims of ownership to a certain item in our possession.”

  “Hey, man, that ain’t …”

  Hamilton waved a hand as he watched a bubble of blood pop out of Garth’s nose. Most interestingly, this particular bubble chose to violate the laws of physics by rising up and away from the man’s left nostril. What was going on there that was inevitably killing the man? Hamilton checked his own video files. No. Ute was unharmed. What could it be? “What I have learned, or deduced, if you prefer, is that however reckless and insane your activities appear, ultimately, somewhere in the wreckage and carnage left in your path, there is a tiny kernel of good intention. Everything you do has a motive. So why, then, are you stealing this armored plate?”

  “Can’t tell you.” Garth ground his teeth against a tidal wave of pain. He felt beads of blood well up on his forehead. The pressure was pushing sheathes out through any available spot. “But it’s … it’s important. Are … are you loyal to the Chair, the Chairwoman, or Latelyspace?”

  An abyss nearly destroyed Hamilton then, a shock so profound that he physically reeled back. Who was Garth Nickels? It took a long, precarious moment to recover, during which time Garth Nickels eyes flared incandescent, sapphire blue. It was only a second, a brief flash, but it was recorded in his mind. When he was able to speak, it was fitfully. “I … am … I am loyal to … the people, sa.”

  “Groovy. What I am doing, Sa Barnes, stealing this plate, risking death and destruction by my own fucking hand as well as the forces currently trying to blow the shit out of me an’ Ute, is your average, basic, saving the world kind of thing.”

  “Then, Sa Nickels, Garth … it is with all honesty and sincerity that I must warn you that in approximately ten minutes, I will be firing the Orbital Cannons at you.”

  “Did he say he was going to fire the fucking Cannons at us?” Ute hollered from his position at the rear of the gigantic truck. “Did I hear that?” He rubbed his forehead. He’d hit his head very hard. There was a small chance he was hallucinating. “He cannot be serious. The Chairwoman must be insane.”

  Garth was busy building a timeframe in his head, but he took time to nod. “That’s fucking bananas.” If everything went awesomely and Oscar wasn’t a blob of light on the pavement, they’d be inside the shielded compound by then.

  “The Chairwoman is indeed, enraged.” Hamilton nodded in total agreement. “Army avatars assign a fifteen percent chance that the plate will be destroyed in the blast, Sa Garth. That is if I follow the requested plan of attack. The chances of destruction rise considerably the more missiles I use.”

  “Are you …” Garth reefed on the steering column, willing the truck to stay flat and stable. “Are you telling me you’re going to blow us up? Like f
or real?”

  “No, sa, what I am saying is that I am going to ensure that you are not at the center of the blast radius while programming these Cannons to believe you are.” Hamilton smiled serenely. “The Chairwoman will accept the lie I tell her, especially considering the … methods … you are currently using to obfuscate your presence to electronic scanning. She will believe the plate lost, Bosch dead, you weakened.”

  “Awesome. That’s pretty cool of you.” Garth shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what else to say and I kinda need to make another call, so…”

  Hamilton nodded. “By your leave, Sa Nickels.” The man’s face disappeared.

  xxx

  “Hello, sa!” Oscar shouted happily. He was very excited to talk to his employer.

  “Hey, pal. What’s shaking?”

  “Oh, the entire building, sa. The entire building is shaking with music and light. But that’s okay.”

  “Riiiight.” Garth couldn’t believe Oscar was still mobile. The guy was bursting at the seams with hard light poisoning. In a realm of impossibilities, what was happening to Oscar was … was the most impossible of all things. “Anyway, did you get the shield generator up?”

  “No, sa.” Oscar opened his mouth to speak, but Garth cut him off.

  “Holy fucking shit are you kidding me?” He slammed the steering column feebly. “Jesus wept. We’re totally dead, man. Some guy in space is going to be launching fucking missiles at us in, like, six minutes! Missiles! Man, I can’t possibly make a shield that big. It’d pull me apart! Ute! Ute! We’re gonna have to, like, flip this bitch around! Hold on!”

  “Sa!” Oscar shouted loudly. “Sa! Sa N’Chalez!”

  Garth stopped what he was doing and stared directly into the Screen, bloody eyes gleaming with blue lenses. Quietly, with deadly concern, he spoke. “What did you say?”

  “Sa N’Chalez, I’m … I’m sorry, but I couldn’t use just one generator, sa! The … the space/time around this planet is … it’s all wrong, sa! I mean, well, one could do the job, but with how … how wrong everything is right now … I mean, if you think of the space/time continuum around our planet as a piece of tissue paper, right, and the generator as a ball bearing, and, and and we drop the bearing right in the middle of the tissue paper, well, uh, it would tear. You see. It’s really eroded, sa. I don’t know how anyone’s missed that! If … if I used just one … well, I’m sure the planet would’ve stopped right in its tracks. Whirlwinds! Cataclysmically fast winds! Ripping and tearing everything off the planet right down to the bedrock! The whole world, smooth as a ball! Whoosh!”

  “Forgetting for the moment that the only thing able to say my last name properly is Trinity Itself, would you care to explain what you meant by ‘just one generator’?” There was something dreadfully wrong with the emanations coming off the pile. A whole new slew of worries rumbled into his brain to fuck with already frayed nerves.

  “Oh! Hah! Yes! Well!” Oscar shouted. “One wouldn’t do the job, sa! Like I said. Splat. But I figured out a way to get a bunch of them working together in harmony, sa! You see, one would create a tremendous dimple in the gravity field of the planet, and since everything here is all … all …”

  “Wonky.”

  “Yes, exactly! Wonky. I realized that if I created a … a … chain … no, a … crown of generators, they could distribute the pressure caused by their activation evenly. The … the thinness of the continuum can handle that.”

  “And you figured that out on your own.” Garth said flatly. No one could figure that out in the time allotted. He could do it, but only if he went full savant.

  “The idea just flew into my head!” Oscar beamed. He was very proud of himself. “You can just drive right in! Through the shield! The generators are mobile across the skin of the gravity shielding, sa, and have been programmed with the transponder signals from the truck you are driving. When you get close enough, they’ll just turn off a bit of the shield.”

  “Smart man.” Ute commented. He’d moved from his perch because they were close enough now that Hamilton’s missile strike would take care of everything. The glowing beads of light coming out of the young scientist’s face were just as disconcerting as the blood pouring freely from virtually every exposed bit of Garth’s skin.

  “That’s the problem, sa.” Garth shook his head. “No one is that smart. He’s working with modified hybridized technology thirty thousand years old. The theories he invented on the fly should only be inside my brain.”

  What was happening to Oscar wasn’t only impossible; it was officially the worst thing ever, falling right beside the Heshii in terms of overall worst-ness.

  “I don’t follow you, sa.”

  “That pile is going to go critical in less time than we have available to save it, Ute. The energy from the other Universe isn’t coming from any random chunk of inert matter or empty space. It’s coming from a person.”

  “Sa?”

  Garth shook his head again as he aimed himself for the edge of his property. On-Screen, as promised by Oscar, four gravnetic shield generators swam across the invisible skin of energy and locked themselves into place, forming an aperture big enough for them to drive through. If things hadn’t immediately gone to shit in the last few seconds, the scene would’ve impressed the hell out of him.

  As they did so, fire and explosions and death erupted, a solid, expanding circle of devastation tearing through the section of Port City, gutting ten square miles of property, destroying hundreds of smaller businesses and flattening other buildings up to five miles away.

  “It’s me, Ute.” Garth toggled the heavy truck’s cameras until they displayed the raging firestorm caused by Hamilton’s Chair-commanded vengeance. Once again, his mere presence had brought damnation to Port City. “The mistuned duronium isn’t mistuned at all. The transformation isn’t complete, but it’s tuned all right. To me. To … to the me I … fuck me. To the life I’m supposed to go back to when this is all over and done with. When … when Gurant… Fuck me.”

  He couldn’t believe the Chairwoman hated him enough to destroy an entire part of a city to rid him of assets she assumed were his. What would she do if she was certain he was involved? He continued speaking, even though he knew he shouldn’t; not only did Ute deserve to know what’d happened at The Museum, he deserved to know the truth about everything. “When Gurant and I were fighting, I panicked and reached for something I shouldn’t have, and in quantities that affected everything around me. The explosion that killed the planet’s power … that was energy from the other side of ex-dee, Ute. The same stuff that quadronium is made from. If that hadn’t happened, well, we’d still be in the shit, but now … now is worse. Way, lots worse.”

  Ute didn’t have it in him to be surprised by anything come out of Garth’s mouth. Not any longer. Learning he was –somehow- Harry Bosch was just something he accepted automatically. “How so?”

  Port City authorities were already rushing to deal with the conflagration, heedless of the violations; left untended, the destruction would gut all of Port City. “Briefly, sa, very briefly. We’ve gotta contain the pile and quickly.” Garth started climbing out of the truck, Ute on his heels.

  “Briefly then, sa.” Ute nodded, surveying the damage. Hamilton had done wonders with the dispersal pattern of the missiles; they’d fallen close enough to UltraMegaDynamaTron property to make it look real, but far enough away so that –even without the shielding- none of the buildings would’ve sustained any appreciable damage. The ex-soldier wondered how the Chairwoman was responding to the news.

  “I am fighting a war, Ute.” Garth looked up and caught sight of Oscar running full tilt towards them. “A war thousands and thousands of years in the making against beings living inside the extra-dimensionality. They call themselves the M’Zahdi Hesh. The … the power coming out of that goddamn pile is … paradoxical, sa, making it an unbeatable weapon. My connection to the life I led … over there … dwindles every second. The tuned duronium is pulling m
y life essence out of that other Universe and … leaking it everywhere. By the time I’m finished capping that pile, damned near all of it will be there instead of in here, where I need it.” Garth tapped his forehead angrily. “Where it will be inaccessible in the ways I need to use it. And no more hope for me. Without that power, I’m useless.”

  “Fwoom!” Oscar shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. “Did you see that, Sa N’Chalez? That was amazing! Boom!”

  “Goes the dynamite.” Garth added sadly.

  Of the Heshii and Their Plans, of Capping a Life, and Briefly, Alyssa Doans

  “What happened?” Alyssa Doans demanded angrily. The devastation was considerable. She’d heard from one of the Ministers lucky enough to have an office facing the right way that the fire from the strike looked like it was blanketing all of Port City. But … had Nickels been affected? That was the only thing that mattered.

  A small explosion was easy enough to hide, but one in a heavy production area full of equipment hastily shut down so her Martial Law would be followed?

  An inferno swallowing approximately ten kilometers of that same industrial area? Equal to if not greater than what’d happened at the Spaceport. Less environmentally destructive overall, perhaps, but in many ways, yes. The damage was comparable. If Nickels was unaffected, it was all for naught.

  MoE wanted to do as they’d done last time and unleash flEyes to get in-depth coverage, but Alyssa wanted nothing of the sort. She did, however, command the Ministry to find out where in the blazes all the mercenaries and gangsters had come from. Like everyone else in office, she’d assumed that the bulk of their gang-related problems had ended with The Portside Boys burning to death.

  Alyssa reiterated her question. Hamilton Barnes’ calm, neutral gray eyes stared back at her. She very definitely did not like this incarnation of her most loyal citizen. He was too confident by half.