Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “I think I see where you are headed, sa.”

  “Do you, Ute?” Garth hated sounding so bitter, but when it came to that other place, he had no other control over his emotions. He missed it in ways that beggared the imagination. The other Universe, the plane of existence he’d ex-dee’d himself into at eighteen … that was the real Universe. Everything around him right now … none of it was really real. That much he knew for certain. It was an agonizing, soul-aching acid burn of sorrow and misery that everything and everyone –Naoko included- wasn’t really real, that the Universe in which they lived some sort of weird echo, a … a poor man’s carnival sideshow set up beside Barnum and Bailey’s.

  That was the truth. There was no understanding why or how their Universe of galaxies existed, or what purpose it fulfilled in the grand scheme of things. Maybe their Universe was a release valve, an existential ripple flowing outward from Reality, a vast collection of maybes and might-have-beens bled out from Reality to keep things over there stable. There was … there was no way to know for certain.

  Except, Garth realized as he stood there, picking at the dried blood on his face, there was a way to know. Rambling around inside his brain, working on answers, he found that he was still keeping secrets from himself.

  He shook his head angrily. Nothing was real. Nothing except him, and only by accident.

  Garth continued. “If you think I passed through ex-dee into the other dimension, then you’re right. Earlier, when I explained how quadronium was made, quite possibly I didn’t stress how supremely impossible that is. Being there, being in that other place, it changed me even more. I absorbed massive amounts of paradoxical energy, sa, and I became a man of two Universes, two dimensions. And then I was sent home.”

  “How?” It wasn’t hard to empathize with Garth and how he was struggling. Ute understood keeping deep secrets, the need for it, but … sad to say, now was not the time. The obvious pain and sorrow Nickels was experiencing was regrettable, but if they were to move forward, answers needed to be given. Ute could tell that they were getting close to the end.

  “By a representative of a species calling themselves the Ushbet M’Tai.” Garth thought of A’äl, the alabaster alien and shook his head. That whole thing had been awkward and difficult from the beginning. “Anyways. I was sent home, and the act of that passage back here is pretty much why and how I was able to be born in the first place. I can’t go into specifics because I don’t fucking understand it either, but I uh, wound up kind of sort of back here before I was born. And that, uh, created the potential for me to be born. Paradox.”

  “This is completely over my head.” Ute pursed his lips. He was beginning to wish he’d just nodded and accepted Garth’s glib answer.

  “You asked for it. We’re almost at the end of what I remember. And it ain’t pretty.” Garth took a deep breath. “Fully grown, retardedly powerful, invisible to the Heshii, I started fighting back. It was during this time that I learned about the Heshii’s plan to destroy not only all Humanity, but also every galaxy, all life. I –don’t ask for clarification on this next bit right now, man, ‘cuz we really don’t have a lot of fucking time left and I’m sick and fucking tired of talking about this now- we helped the Armies of Man fight the war. It got desperate. We were destined to lose. I told the Armies of Man that we could ride out the end of the war, that eventually the enemy forces would fray and fall upon themselves and that we could return after a few hundred years and kick all of their asses.

  But that wasn’t the plan. The plan was to go far into the future, far, far away. So far that the Heshii would imagine us truly defeated and then we’d strike. Far enough away from the point of my return that using the power I’d gained by becoming a living, breathing existential paradox wouldn’t rip everything to shreds when I did strike. That is the goal, Ute. To use the hard light burning inside of me to blast the Heshii where they stand and thus free all of us to live safely. Here, now, on the far end of Existence, I was going to rip those motherfuckers out of the extra-dimensionality and end them.”

  “That … that won’t happen?”

  Garth pointed at the pile. “No. Not … ahhh, fuck me. Not ever. What is happening to that pile of fucking death over there happened once before, to one of my … one of my brethren. He got too close to an imbalanced pile and it … leeched him. He … ‘died’. I guess. It’s the only way to describe it. It swallowed his essence and went stable enough for us to cap. Showed us a way to create some really fucking powerful machinery in the process. Me, though, I’m different. Our pile tuned itself to the paradox inside me and somehow … somehow burned through the fissure I represent backwards through time and through to the other side. Every second the pile decomposes, the more of … of my time there becomes unraveled, making me … not a paradox. Young Oscar there is as goddamn weird as he is right now because he’s been hit in the head with my memories, my experiences. Maybe there’s something wonky with his genes, but whatever it is, the true light shining out of him is my life. He’s sweating beads of light that belong to me.”

  “These … Heshii … how are you going to beat them now? Can you undo the leeching effect?” Ute’s head hurt. He was a soldier. He understood war and death and fighting, but this kind of war, these kinds of death, this level of fighting … it humbled him. He had no doubt Garth was telling the truth about everything, even if it was profoundly confusing; there was a bleakness inside Nickels that hadn’t been there before. The man was desperately sad.

  “Maybe.” All it’d take was tossing Oscar at the pile. Doing so could cause an ouroboros effect where the two ends of the fissure slammed into one another to seal the rift. Only at the cost of a single life, too. Garth could barely understand the ramifications of how it’d all happened. Oscar Sabellik was just a man. How was he absorbing even a glimmer of that other Universe without bursting into light where he stood? “At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. Even if we are successful, too much has already been transformed. I needed every scrap of power, every fucking ounce of oomph, to beat the Heshii. My … my ‘normal’ powers, are great and as mighty as they seem to you … it’d be like tossing a lit match into the sun.”

  “Do you know where these Heshii are?”

  “Nope. It’s why I need to open The Box.” Garth saw the confusion and interest in Ute’s eyes and he held up a blood-stained hand. “Not now. We got shit to do. We have to cap the life I led in that other existence, transform it into an energy source, and really quickly. Or …”

  “Or what?”

  “Well, see.” Garth finished the calculations on his Sheet. “See, that’s the, uh, thing. Regular old ex-dee explosion, sure, burn the planet. See you later, Hospitalis. Paradox-infused Garth N’Chalez energy flyin’ all over everywhere?”

  “Bad?”

  “Kind of.” Garth flashed the information to Oscar then picked up the pace. “Do you know how big the Universe is?”

  “Big.” That much Ute knew. “Infinite, they say.”

  “Yeah. That’d be about the size of the explosion, I guess.” Garth laughed at Ute’s nauseous expression. “Shit, man. Think about it. The power to beat the enemy is the same level as the power to help the enemy win.”

  Looking at the glowing pile, Ute cursed. “You could have led with that part, sa, about this being a Universally destructive threat.”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t’ve believed me. ‘sides, I didn’t know until I got a look.” Garth shrugged, trying his damnedest to play off the loss. The Heshii. How in the hell was he going to beat them without Reality burning inside him? He fucking hoped there were answers in Bravo. He’d gone ten long years without knowing anything at all about why he’d slept thirty thousand years. He’d been awake for near about twelve hours, and during that time, he’d wrestled with the truths he’d more or less revealed to Ute and now, in about fifteen –maybe twenty- minutes at the outside, he was going to sacrifice the only sure method of winning that war.

  Everything he’d planned, everyt
hing he’d prepared for … gone in an instant.

  Everyone, everywhere … doomed.

  Vasily’s Progress

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. Certainly it’d been a long, long time ago. A mad, mad grin on his ordinarily stoic face, Vasily pulled a hand back and slammed his gauntleted fist forward. “Now.” The OverCommander asked calmly. “Who could’ve taken her off-planet?”

  Dingo Sherret licked his lips nervously and tasted the electric thrill of hot blood on his tongue. The world was going insane. The Chairwoman had locked the planet down, the OverCommander was ransacking ‘offices’, God soldiers were … were eating his men, The Game had just announced another change to how things were done. Nothing made sense anymore. He groaned when the OverCommander whacked him again, this time in the stomach.

  “Don’t make me ask again, sa.” Vasily looked around the room. The two God soldiers were doing what they all did when off the leash. Full of curiosity and childlike wonder, armed with the strength of titans, the room in which Dingo Sherret did the majority of his business was a shambles. The soldiers, Var and Sel, were currently bickering over an arm. He smiled indulgently at the massive children before turning back to Dingo.

  “I … I …” Dingo worked furiously, fingers flying through the lists he kept on his prote. “You’re talking about the brain drain, right? Smart people disappearing in the night, y-y-yes?”

  Vasily folded his hands at his waist and nodded. At his wrist, his prote went off again. The Chairwoman. She’d been hounding him for hours now, and he was –technically speaking- in dereliction of duty by refusing to answer her calls. He wasn’t in any great trouble yet because Alyssa hadn’t used her Prometheus Device to push the call through, but that would undoubtedly happen. “Yes, Sa Sherret. That is what I am talking about.”

  Oh, he knew who was responsible. That’d only taken a few seconds to learn, and had come after reading Naoko Kamagana’s school records. It wouldn’t be apparent to anyone not fully aware of who’d raised the girl, it might’ve gone missed by school administrators and all of her friends, but Naoko had hidden an intellect that shone like the sun.

  An intelligence like that would be most coveted by Jordan Bishop.

  They’d never bothered to familiarize themselves with the methods used by that man to spirit their best and brightest off-planet, displaying a level of sheer short-sightedness that urged Vasily to pound Dingo’s head off his shoulders.

  “He … he … the man you’re talking about used … used Morgan the Dead’s shipping lanes, Sa OverCommandersa. B-b-b-but he’s really dead or gone or something. Has been for days.” Dingo licked his lips again then threw up on his chest; one of the God soldiers, apparently having won a game where they’d each shaken their fingers at the other, was chewing on the arm of his most trusted lieutenant.

  “Was that so difficult, sa?” Vasily asked politely. He patted Dingo on the shoulder, nose wrinkling at the stench. “What have you been eating?”

  Conversation over, Vasily drove a fist into Dingo’s forehead, knocking the man unconscious. The gangster fell noisily to the ground. Var and Sel wandered over. The former nudged the unconscious kidnapper hopefully with a toe while the latter picked up a broken Sheet and bit the edge thoughtfully.

  The world had been too busy to deal with Morgan’s disappearance and/or death; the shipping lanes had yet to be redistributed to companies involved in interplanetary trade. Gazing idly at the antics of the two men he’d brought –wait, Sel was a female Onesie-, Vasily considered leaving the planet to continue the hunt for a long minute before shaking his head.

  Alyssa would have his head if he left Hospitalis. His lady love was off the rails in a significant way and wouldn’t approve or appreciate his disappearance. It was bad enough he’d been ignoring her calls.

  There were few options. He could find someone smart enough to track Naoko’s kidnappers to their ultimate destination, thereby depriving someone on the planet of an asset put to ‘better use’ or he could just call The Gargan to keep an eye out for any unauthorized vessels. It’d be difficult, especially since Bishop’s money went a long way in Latelyspace, but it’d be better than nothing. If it came down to it, he could remote access the massive troop ship and park it right in front of the Quantum Tunnel and just start shooting at anything that came near the blasted thing. All of those things would take time to set up properly, time which he might not even have.

  His prote rang again. It was Alyssa. Again. He commanded Var and Sel to stand outside. They might have the intellectual capacity of monumentally slow five year olds, but they understood tone well enough. Having two God soldiers snicker under their breath because their commanding officer was being yelled at was something no OverCommander could bear.

  “Where have you been?” Alyssa demanded frostily, the edge to her voice cutting through the prote with vicious intensity.

  “Occupied with internal manners.” Vasily returned just as frostily. If this was the game they were going to play, so be it. “The position of OverCommander isn’t beholden to the Chair, Chairwoman. Our ancient leaders saw fit to maintain a division between law and order many thousands of years ago.”

  Alyssa narrowed dagger-like eyes at Vasily. Any other man would be dead where he stood. “I needed you.”

  Vasily thought about Naoko, about the incredible gulf that’d separated the Kamaganas and the Tizhen family for all those years. What a waste. Caught up in the intrigues of plotting the first true systemic war ever waged –a war against Trinity, no less- he’d literally abandoned family. Even the dimmest God soldier would frown at that. Unable to articulate why it was wrong, that dim soldier would just know it was wrong. Family was stronger than love, but Alyssa could never understand that. Her own family treated one another like maddened animals. “I was needed elsewhere.”

  Alyssa didn’t care for this new turn Vasily was taking. He was acting just as strangely as Barnes. Everyone was acting different. Why couldn’t they see that she was doing the right thing for everyone? “Your people are idiots. They aren’t you.”

  Vasily wanted to groan; he was reading through the voluminous reports filling his prote-screen, data coming from all of his colonels and from nearly sixty-five different military commanders worldwide. In his brief absence –he’d only been off-book for three hours- someone had stolen the Gunboy’s chest plate, engaged in a cross-City run, provoked the Army, unsettled a dozen or more mercenary and criminal organizations and blacked out Central.

  His eyebrows leaped off his head at Salm’s last report. The Chairwoman was going to or already had launched missiles from the Orbital Cannons at the thieves of the plate. He switched back to the comm-screen, furious. “Did you really fire the Cannons, Alyssa? Without approval?”

  “I am Chairwoman.” Alyssa replied frostily. “I require no approval. My word is Law.”

  “Things are different now, Alyssa.” Vasily dropped into a chair. “Before, when we were … abroad, it did fall to the Chair to oversee police and military matters. It was proven that the stresses behind such requirements drove men mad. Launching missiles, even at thieves, that’s … madness, my love.”

  He began accessing military satellites to get an overview of the destruction. This time he did groan. She’d launched those missiles very nearly into the heart of a heavy industrial zone. Fires were raging everywhere, even more toxic gas was spilling into the atmosphere. Vasily shook his head in disgust. Hospitalis was going to wind up a barren, oxygen-starved world by the time they were done.

  “I am the Chair. The Chair is me.” Alyssa intoned. “Nothing I do is mad. Now, OverCommander, if you would kindly get yourself back to what I told you to do? If I have to speak to another one of your colonels, I will just have him or her executed. Being that stupid is surely a violation of Regime Law. If it isn’t, I may just make it so.”

  Vasily authorized one of his intelligence agents to begin hunting through Morgan’s shipping lanes for signs of Naoko’s kidnappe
rs. If the woman he loved was comfortable attacking her own planet merely to rid herself of one irritant, then he was most relaxed in pursuing his own goals. He cleared his throat. “What would you like for me to do, Chairwoman?”

  “Take yourself to Port City, Sa OverCommander. Examine the wreckage. Find proof that Harry Bosch was involved in the theft. Your Colonel Salms indicated that the technology involved in keeping the identities of the thieves from our scanners is similar to that used by Bosch during his Museum rampage. Failing that…”

  “Yes, Chairwoman?”

  Alyssa’s eyes sparkled. “Failing that, return to me here. This world is not hewing to Martial Law as well as expected. I … I may have made some errors in formulating the particulars. I require fresh eyes. This is the best thing for Hospitalis, Vasily, it truly is but I worry.”

  Vasily put a hand to the back of his neck and hung his head for a long, silent moment. He’d been certain there at the end that Alyssa was going to ask him to personally assassinate Garth Nickels. Engineering the missile strike to fall so perilously close to UltraMegaDynamaTron property was –in and of itself- a very clear attempt to end his life, and in direct violation of Trinity’s ‘request’. For all any of them knew, Nickels was dead already; since Alyssa didn’t know that Bosch was Nickels, the explosion may have vaporized the ex-Specter.

  The OverCommander straightened his long coat. He wasn’t going to go anywhere but home to Alyssa and see if he couldn’t keep the bloody woman from blowing up the planet before Gametime.