Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Let us,” Chad said softly, trying to regain their calm composure, “let us explain summat to you, luv. We is artists, like the Voice was just sayin’, yeah? You is not askin’ Michelangelo to rush on, hey? You is not comin’ up to van Gogh and sayin’ ‘oy, let’s ‘ave this paintin’ done now, never mind doin’ that wiv your ear’.”

  “I don’t know who those people are.” Alyssa answered readily.

  “They was just regular artists, Chairwoman.” Chad replied, hitting a switch when their ship found the originator point for the Chairwoman. The monitor directly in front of them stopped relaying coordinates and started displaying the side of the Chairwoman’s head; the images, pulled from data acquired by the targeting laser passing across thousands and thousands of miles and through buildings, were of very low quality, but you didn’t need high quality pictures to shoot someone’s head off. Thoughtfully, and so the Chairwoman could appreciate their efforts, they put the image up for the silly cunt to see. “We is a notch above.”

  They continued speaking. “Now, please, don’t be movin’ about too much, luv. We is quite sincere about this. Right now, it is nuffink but a targetin’ laser, yeah? A low-yield beam of light traversin’ a lot o’ miles and goin’ frough a whack of buildings. It’s quite impressive, yeah? Followed your signal right back to the source. Built the machine doin’ all this to assassinate a person wot was in the middle of a battleship. At the time, it was quite artistic as no one ‘ad done it before. We ain’t seen a need for it since. If you move, sweetheart, more than inch or two, the laser will turn volatile. It’ll punch frough everyfing from ‘ere to there and quicker than you can fink, well, all you’re finkin’ will basically be done wiv. You can’t move fast enough. Trust us.”

  Oh, Alyssa had definitely made a mistake allowing al-Taryin into their system. Trinity had to be involved in this madness somewhere. It was the only thing to make sense. Garth Nickels, Chadsik al-Taryin, Harry Bosch. They were all –had all, now that Bosch was dead- been working for the Trinity AI, had been thrown into her system to drive her mad and make her weak. They had no real proof on how Special Services worked to bring down entire solar systems for the multi-systemic AI, but it just felt … right.

  “What do you want?” Alyssa asked softly, too terrified to even think about moving. What could she do anyways? She’d made this call against the explicit suggestions of both OverCommander Vasily and her own staff. What had she been thinking? A few minutes ago, it’d all made perfect sense, but now that she remembered that she was talking to the … the ‘man’ who’d fought hundreds of God soldiers to a standstill, she felt absurd. Foolish.

  “Wot we want, luv, is to be all the fuckin’ way out of this arsehole of a system. You lot is all fuckin’ mad as fuckin’ ‘atters, in’t ya?” Chad shook their head. “Giant soldiers wiv rockets poppin’ out o’ their bodies and all that. It’s fuckin’ crazy. An’ you lot is all protected or wotever from Dark Ages? If this is wot ‘appens when you is not smashed back into the darkness like clockwork every few thousand years, we is finkin’ the Dark Ages is a bloody goddamn good idea.”

  Chad realized they’d started shouting again and so they smiled apologetically at the Chairwoman, who was starting to feel the strain from not moving her head. “Now, since we is takin’ a Job, we can’t just leave. It’s not proper like, is it? We is certain someone in your employ told you that we is preferrin’ to take our time wiv fings, sort of come up wiv some sort of epic way to do for someone, right?” They continued when the Chairwoman mouthed ‘yes’. “Brilliant. Now, ‘as it ‘appens, we is goin’ frough a sort of … existential crisis, right? We is been told nuffink is real except for us, and then there’s some sort of bit where we is s’posed to be leadin’ a bunch of fuckin’ maniacs in some sort of ‘oly crusade.”

  “Yea, it has been written in the Unwritten Scriptures that Chadsik al-Taryin, the Many-in-One, shall rise up from himself and lead the CyberPriests to the End of … ouch.”

  Alyssa watched Chad head-butt a nearby bulkhead for a solid thirty seconds before resuming, blood trickling wetly down his forehead. Cast against the nearly alabaster flesh, it was gruesome. Chad, smiling sunnily, either didn’t know or didn’t care that he was bleeding quite profusely. “As we was sayin’ before we was rudely interrupted by The Voice of Madness –which, we is ‘opin’ you noticed, is really barmy-, we isn’t quite sure of our purpose in this world. So, we ‘as decided we ain’t going ter fuck about wiv art. Just this once.”

  “Excellent.” Alyssa smiled as best she could; her tendons were rock hard and she was having difficulty breathing. “When can we … I count on your dispatching Nickels?”

  “Oy, we is just sayin’ … nope, wait, sorry. We thought we ‘ad.” Chad consulted his scanners then scratched his nose. “We is finkin’ we is gonna do the lad in, oh, probably tomorrow night, yeah? A bit of a rooftop scuffle, we fink. Looks like it’s gonna be a full moon. Should look a fair bit o’ epic, two lads fightin’ it out on a roof wiv the full moon? Wot you fink?”

  “I think,” Alyssa closed her eyes, “I think that sounds quite … lovely.”

  “Brilliant.” Chad smiled sunnily again. “An’ just so we is clear, if anyone is finkin’ about launchin’ ships at us or missiles or lasers or giant lizards as wot shoot fire out of their mouths or anyfing, we will, in point of fact, blow this whole fuckin’ planet up. An’ we mean that quite literally. Then, because we is mad arseholes ourselves, we will fly to the uvver planets and do the same. Leave us the fuck alone and no one is get ‘urt. Orl right?”

  “Yes.” Alyssa nodded, nearly wetting herself before noticing that Chad had turned the tracking laser off. “Yes, sa. We … we will leave you alone.”

  “Fan-effing-tastic, sweetheart. Toodle-oo.” Chad wiggled their fingers at the Chairwoman before turning the ship back to normal.

  They resumed watching Garth Nickels. The man was interesting, all right. They could well understand why the CyberPriests were terrified of him. If there was anyone in the known universe of Unreality who could turn their plans of conquest aside, it was Garth.

  It was a bit of a shame that they’d been contracted to terminate the ex-Specter. If it weren’t for that bit of unpleasantness, Chad would’ve loved to ask the blue-eyed maniac for a bit of a hand in dealing with the ‘Priests.

  Just A Good Ole Boy…

  As he drove, Griffin sang. Poorly, but he didn’t care. He was alone in the truck and had been driving non-stop since the moment he’d left Old Man Orin’s property. It was a long haul to Central City, and with the Chairwoman losing her mind and instituting Martial Law, Griffin reckoned he was going to have to make as much good time as possible before hitting any of the cities.

  Griffin missed Old Earth. Missed every little thing about it. Trinity had done a bang-up job of making sure that every world out there held some little stitch of the past in its history, be it the way people spoke, their governmental models, how they named things, but it wasn’t the same. The richness of his homeworld had been spread across millions of worlds and degraded over thirty thousand years of evolution.

  Not counting what’d been destroyed, hidden, or buried by the damned Dark Ages, what remained was a paltry shadow, more insult than homage.

  Humming the theme song to the Dukes of Hazzard –one of Garth’s patiently reconstructed television shows-, tapping out the bass line on the steering wheel, Griffin filled himself with memories of so long ago, of back when they’d all been young and hungry and flinging themselves against the endless hordes of Harmony Soldiers. All fifteen of them, every Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen, fighting a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand different fights across the world. Hell, one time, they’d even had a scrap up on the moon, of all places. What a blast.

  He remembered running away from the occasional Kith or Kin they came across with mixed emotions; it had been a long-held fact that not one of them -no matter that they held powers far greater than anything possessed by either Kith or Kin- could beat the Heshii
’s original shock troops. The youngest of them had been just under six hundred years old and nearly invincible to everything any one of them could muster, even his own furious fire.

  Griffin remembered Shikosi fondly. God, she’d been hot. Skin so black it was blue, eyes so green that when she lost her shit and started opening up the ex-dee gate inside her brain they seemed to burn. He’d had a huge crush on her, but Garth had always warned him off, pointing out the tremendous dangers in having any contact with the deadly Kith assassin.

  Dammit. He hated thinking about Garth. Hated that Garth had lied and cheated them all out of their rightful place in the cosmos.

  Griffin tried to shove his old commander out of his mind and failed. Everything was central to N’Chalez. Everything that was happening now had been laid out thirty thousand years ago. The man had been a consummate planner and a genius when it came to thinking like the Heshii.

  Being entombed for thirty thousand years wasn’t an accident. It couldn’t have been. Nothing N’Chalez did had ever been an accident, so if they were this far into the future, there was a reason for it.

  “Whut in th’ fuck could it be, though?” Griffin would give anything to know what the plan was, for while he wanted to kill Garth so badly he tasted blood every time he closed his eyes, of more importance –of supreme importance- was what happened after Garth’s death.

  Trinity’s plans relied on Garth dying, but not before opening Bravo. There was no telling what was inside Bravo. Griffin couldn’t even begin to speculate, and for one simple reason: there was no way to know how long he'd stayed out of Alpha. Long enough to build Bravo, certainly. There could be anything at all inside Bravo, up to and including an Omega Level Heshii Killing weapon.

  They were all just going to have to wait and hope to Jesus N’Chalez got his ass inside Bravo before something weird and powerful enough to take him out showed up on Hospitalis. The damn fool had come too close too often since hitting dirt and damned if Griffin intended to keep him alive.

  Trinity’s new plans focused on gaining control the HIM, and that was a goal Griffin understood; the ancient Heuristic Intelligence Models had been designed to hobble the collection of powerful protocols that Trinity had evolved from. Powered by the extra-dimensionality and thus both immune and invisible to the ancient programs –and the thing they’d mutated into- any HIM could be used to rewrite hardwired protocols buried deep inside Trinity’s ancient operating system.

  “Just the good ol' boys, Never meanin' no harm…” Griffin wanted that HIM for himself, and with the Suit barely functional, the sooner he got to Central, the quicker he took Alyssa Doans hostage, the better.

  The Kin’kithal warrior laughed, then laughed again when he thought about how stupid the Latelians were. Now, he didn’t know how they’d gotten ahold of a HIM, but he did know that they’d sell their non-existent souls to know about all the extra little things the blasted thing could do, especially in light of the Chairwoman’s thinly veiled announcement that she had plans on going to war with Trinity as soon as was humanly possible. With the HIM under ‘human’ control, Trinity would roll over like an eager puppy.

  If it were up to him, well, he’d wait until a Dark Age crashed on top of every damnfool system under Trinity’s belt. As the only verifiable solar system in the entire Universe capable of withstanding the smothering blanket of darkness –and that included other systems in the same galaxy as Latelyspace- that would be the best time to strike. The only time to strike.

  It was all about the tech. With everything the Latelians used being connected to the ubiquitous ‘LINK running piggyback on the quantum signals emitted by the HIM, everything was therefore, however peripherally, powered by the extra-dimensionality itself. Over the course of five thousand years, the Latelians had, slowly but surely and thanks entirely to their Dark Age immunity, begun the process of developing hy-tech equipment.

  Once solely Garth N’Chalez’ domain it was entirely –and frighteningly possible- that the Latelians would figure out how to design and implement their very own hybridized machines.

  That was a thought to give a fella nightmares. Latelians were the most amoral, destructive and batshit crazy people this side of Everything. They were worse than the monsters and ghouls-made-flesh on the other side of The Cordon because –unlike everyone else- they were terrified of everything. It didn’t show, the Latelians themselves probably had no goddamn idea, but some catastrophic terror had pushed them to want everything but them gone.

  “Just good ol' boys, wouldn’t change if they could…” Griffin riffed another bass line on the steering wheel. It didn’t matter what’d happened to those old Latelians. It didn’t matter what Trinity really planned. It didn’t matter why Garth had lied about his ultimate method of dealing with the Heshii, or why he’d hidden his power, or what he was doing now.

  Because he, Griffin Jones, was going to get the HIM. Then he was going to wait until N’Chalez opened Bravo. Then he was going to use the HIM to override Bravo’s systems –surely that was part of Trinity’s plans- using the nearly infinite flexibility of the programs nestled inside the Model. Then he was going to use what-the-fuck-ever N’Chalez had crammed inside Bravo to find the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  Then he was going to do what he’d wanted –tried- to do thirty thousand years ago.

  He was going to hand Humanity to the Heshii on a silver platter.

  And then all those fuckers would learn.

  The OverCommander and the Chairwoman

  “Where did you get off to, my OverCommander?” Alyssa asked, head against the chest of the man she loved. “I needed you.”

  Vasily held a hand at the back of Alyssa’s neck, doing his best to ignore the signs that she’d been chain-smoking her way through every crisis. Beneath the odor of cigarette smoke lingered a faint hint of the perfume she’d worn for the press conference. “I am sorry, my love. There were things that needed tending to.”

  Alyssa pushed herself away from Vasily, her skin aching to be against his. “What is more important than our well-being?”

  Vasily didn’t say anything, but it was apparent that when Alyssa said ‘our’ she was, in fact, referring to herself. It always happened. Every time. There wasn’t a Chair who could stay sane. Sometimes, –as with Scottsdale- they were driven mad by a hungry OverSec. Sometimes, –as with his love- they just went mad. Granted, he reflected dryly, no previous Chair had ever been forced to endure the types of … insanity … as Alyssa.

  “Naoko Kamagana has been kidnapped.” It would take a few seconds for her to figure out the implications of the announcement, so Vasily perused a data update on his prote. When he learned that not five minutes before coming to see her she’d actually gone through with a conversation with Chadsik al-Taryin, he nearly started hollering. The man was a cybernetic viper that needed to be left alone, and she’d damn well called him up!

  Alyssa opened her mouth to ask what was so important about some woman being kidnapped, then clicked it shut. Kamagana. “Have you found her?”

  “Yes and no.” Vasily admitted hesitantly. Since his rough departure from just outside The Peak –Vasily and his command staff had effectively buried the destruction of three fighter squadrons and another fifty God soldiers under a ton of paperwork- Chadsik had become an ornament hovering high above the Industrial Sector Garth Nickels had recently purchased. The cyborg seemed well and truly content to float, hopefully doing nothing but preparing to kill Nickels and then leave. He’d commanded everyone to ignore the cyborg, warning anyone who even dreamed that the road to promotion and success lay in destroying the maniac that they’d find themselves launched into the nearest available Onesie’s mouth at light speed.

  “Does … does Tomas know?” Alyssa walked around her desk to sit in her chair. Vasily moved to sit on the edge of the desk.

  “Almost certainly.” Vasily opened his palms at Alyssa’s glance. “There is no way of knowing, ‘lyssa. As you well know, the man never stopped writing avatar code, if only insi
de his own head. The x-and-c-DEC repair avatars designed by him en route to The Museum are working infinitely better than even he expected. That level of intellect … I hate to say it, but all of our systems could be infected by Tomas’ avatars and we wouldn’t be able to find them. Could Tomas know his daughter, my niece, has been kidnapped? Impossible to say with any certainty, but the man doted on her. Moreso after … after…”

  Alyssa took Vasily’s hands in her own. Softly, gently, she said, “It is all right, my love. Things happen for a reason.”

  “That they do, ‘lyssa, that they do.” Vasily huffed out a sigh. “So. When I say ‘yes’ I have found her, I mean ‘yes, I know the name of the ship she is on’.”

  “And no?”

  “There is no telling where the Zhivago is, Alyssa. The vessel was built for stealing people and for staying undetected.” Vasily continued when his ladylove quirked an eyebrow. “Bishop. Both the men and the ship itself are from Trinityspace. Vastly modified to use Latelian technology, but quite, quite capable of using Trinity tech as well. And as you well know, their more sophisticated equipment trumps ours hands down.”

  “Jordan Bishop stole Naoko Kamagana?” Alyssa was at a loss for words. In the beginning, when the young girl had first opted to go into avatar coding like her father, they’d all turned an eye to her progress. Her school records, her programming skills, nothing indicated a skillset equal to Tomas Kamagana. Why, she even remembered thinking it a shame that the daughter wasn’t as the father. “For what purpose?”

  Alyssa hated that she’d been more or less coerced into allowing Bishop to continue harvesting her people; sadly, the money offered by the Conglomerate head had been a thousand times greater than the purses given to the Latelian Regime by more honest Trinityspace-based businesses. Without Bishop’s blood money, they would be far worse off than they already were.

  Thinking about Bishop’s money tripped thoughts of Nickels and his endless coffers and how bloody willing the insufferably handsome man was to spread the wealth, so Alyssa focused on Vasily. She couldn’t afford to lose her temper in front of the OverCommander. He would –however imperceptibly- judge her.