Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

Trinity reached a decision. It called Commander Aleksander Politoyov.

  As Expected

  It was a quiet time for Special Services, and Aleks, for one, was pleased for the respite; there were only three Deep Strike missions on the table and less than a dozen standard smash and grabs being run right that moment, a state of affairs that the aged commander could handle with his eyes closed.

  Now that Nickels was out of SpecSer, everything seemed to’ve stabilized. It was amazing, now that the old Offworlder considered the amount of chaos that man had pulled in. In his heyday, when he’d been the prolific monster known as ‘Specter’, Special Services had been running at four hundred smash and grabs and nearly a hundred Deep Strikes. With Nickels running rampant across the Universe, it seemed that the Universe had responded in kind, rising up with ever-escalating chaos.

  Aleks smiled toothily, incisors denting his lips. All that war, all that death, all that material acquisition … it’d done wonders for their, well, for their reputation. Yes, at heart, Special Services was –and always would be- an underfunded quasi-military organization that did all the dirty work Trinity wanted done and then some, but even the Army was afraid of them now. Conglomerates had stopped complaining about loss of equipment, which was as close to a miracle as one old soldier was ever going to hear about.

  At first, losing Nickels hadn’t sat well with Aleks, but as days had turned to weeks and weeks to months, well, he had to admit to himself –and only to himself- that it was better this way. SpecSer had raged too bright, too hot with Nickels and –more times than anyone save Trinity- they’d come close to starting actual wars with other Galaxies past the Cordon. No one talked about it and thankfully, everyone missed that several galaxies across The Cordon had begun talking to one another about the bloody, legendary Specter, a miraculous feat in and of itself if for no other reason than they’d had to invent an entirely new form of comm-tech to get the job done.

  Everything had fallen quiet once every ship in SpecSer’s armada had begun broadcasting in several million different languages that Garth Nickels was no longer a Specter, that they could now rest easy in the knowledge that if Special Services showed up, it would be –more or less- a very polite asskicking instead of the all-out feeding frenzy he was best known for.

  “Commander Aleksander Politoyov.”

  A thrill of fear squirreled through Aleks, one he rudely crushed. He talked to Trinity at least once a month. It was part of his job to ensure the vast AI that everything was going according to It’s plan. Whatever that was.

  This time, though, there was something different in the AI’s tone, some tiny, barely audible, change.

  “Trinity.” Aleks rose and saluted, one of the few carry-overs from his previous life as a leader in the Army. He sat smoothly, slapped a hand on a big red button on his desk and his office was transformed into the most impregnable room on 9-Nova-12. “We are secure.”

  “I would not contact you if it weren’t so.”

  Aleks consulted his paperwork. “We aren’t due for a confab for another two weeks.” He had yet to add any sort of honorific or obsequious bullcrap to how he spoke to the machine mind and the mind Itself had yet to ask. Trinity knew he was –relatively speaking- as busy as an organic being could be and that he couldn’t be bothered in wasting time.

  “This is so.” Trinity paused. “I am not contacting you concerning our efforts beyond The Cordon, Commander Politoyov.”

  “I … see.” The Offworlder’s stomach sank. There was only one other thing the machine mind could want to talk to him about.

  “If you were to wage war with the Latelians, Commander, how would you go about it?”

  Garth Nickels. Aleks slammed a hand down on his desk, then cursed as he both damaged the release button to get out of his now-sealed office and got a splinter the size of a finger jammed into the palm of his hand. Cursing fluently in his native tongue, Aleks pulled the splinter out and cast around for a bandage. Finding none, he made a fist and answered Trinity’s question. “From a distance. With Enforcers. And every single Hand of Glory Missile You have. Then I’d blow up the Q-Tunnel and use one of those shields You have. Then, I’d shrink the shield until everything inside the shield was compressed, hopefully, into a black hole. And then I’d get serious.”

  Trinity chuckled. It appreciated Aleks’ ferocity. It always had, and had thoroughly enjoyed the Offworlder’s exploits while in It’s Army, but It’d needed Politoyov here, in place, to control Nickels. “Assume that My Enforcers are engaged elsewhere.”

  “All of them?” Aleks asked, brow furrowing.

  “How many do you presume I have?”

  “At last count, two hundred and eleven different Enforcers.” Aleks rattled the number off easily; it was rare –rarer now that Nickels was gone- but SpecSer operatives and Enforcers did run into one another, and sometimes, at cross purposes. Knowing which Enforcer you were dealing with oftentimes helped in ensuring that one or more of his Specters made it home with most of their limbs. Sometimes those limbs were in duffel bags, but every little bit helped.

  “That number is amazingly accurate.” Trinity admitted. “It would do you no good at all for that to be revealed to anyone.”

  Aleks nodded. “Trinity, I assure you that this number is written down nowhere.”

  “Indeed. Now. Speculate.”

  Politoyov had already spent considerable time thinking about Latelyspace, pre-and-post Garth Nickels. Prior to Garth’s immigration to that solar system, Aleks had grappled with the idea of how best to protect Trinityspace from the Latelians and their ultimate soldiers and had failed every time, even with AI assistance. God soldiers had done the work of Special Services for somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand years and had none of the cybernetic restrictions Trinity imposed upon It’s subjects. Get enough of the giant bastards going in the same direction at the same time and even Enforcers would start sweating.

  Further, they didn’t suffer from Dark Ages, which made any ‘conquering’ a time-limited offer only. The only thing keeping them from being an absolute nightmare was their insistence that AI was evil.

  Aleks shuddered. If they ever got over their irrational paranoia over Artificial Intelligence, they would be unstoppable.

  With Garth Nickels in the system and inevitably doing the things that Garth Nickels did when he got bored, there was quite simply –and frighteningly- no way of knowing what they had now. The man had developed gravnetic generators while under fire from a Gamma Plateau, and he’d done it in less than fifteen minutes. He’d been on Hospitalis for months, and with access to unrestricted technologies …

  Commander Aleksander Politoyov shuddered again, this time with feeling. Nickels had made his dislike of Trinity common knowledge. Armed with the intellect, the passion, the … the rage that had turned him into the Specter, Garth Nickels could easily come up with methods and means to wage war against Trinity Itself.

  “We … we’d have to cancel all the Deep Strikes we have going.” That was a given. Nickels was more than a match for any single team, but if they concentrated four or five of the heavily augmented cyborg troops –some possessing Offworld tech- against the man, it was possible they could slow him down. Long enough for some long-range exotic weapon bombardments. Politoyov knew of at least three illegal luminal arc cannons he could lay his hands on that would be a sweet start to the engagement. Hospitalis wouldn’t survive in any useable manner, but then again, neither would Garth. Hopefully. “We’d need to shift all our regular SpecSer teams there as well.”

  “Agreed.”

  Aleks continued. “Is he or will he be in control of or a part of the God Army?”

  “Unknown.”

  The deep yellow-skinned Offworlder didn’t like the thought of Trinity Itself not knowing something, but continued. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Even if we announced our desires to deal with only one man, Chairwoman Doans and OverCommander Vasily most definitely wouldn’t believe us. The moment we entered the syste
m, we’d be under fire.”

  “Agreed.”

  Aleks raised his hands. “But the point is moot, Trinity. We cannot enter the system safely. They have those space stations situated far enough away from the radius of the Q-Tunnel’s effects but close enough so their weapons can get us. We’re not Army, not every ship we have has Conquistador armor. They’ll blast us as we roll through. Plus, latest Intel still puts one of their massive troopships in the area. Something like three million of their beastly soldiers. Easily the match for my Deep Strikers, they’ll just fire God soldiers through the walls of each ship. I’ve seen footage of them in action, Trinity. We cannot enter their system and if, as you claim, your Enforcers are otherwise engaged, we can’t dismantle or disable those ships and stations.”

  “You can enter the system from any point.”

  “Construction of a new Quantum Tunnel requires six months.” Aleks answered dutifully if evasively. “Do we have six months?”

  “I am aware, Commander Aleksander Politoyov, of the modifications made to the gravnetic shield generators destined for planets 8-Quar-10, Sellit-15, Homas-10-32 and others. Just as I am aware of how you acquired them in the first place.”

  “Spoils of war, Trinity.” Now that he was found out, there was nothing else to do but admit it then ignore it. “The mandate of Special Services has always been that we acquire what we can, when we can, for our purposes. Which, at the end of the day, are Your purposes.”

  “Those devices were originally designed to protect planets in My Domain.” Trinity said reproachfully. “Yet the modifications made to their purposes astonish even me. Have you field tested the black hole engines yet?”

  “No.” Aleks admitted. If he went further, if he admitted everything, he was terrified of the design his crews had come up with; Trinity’s alterations to Garth’s original device allowed the generators to be fueled by stable ‘portable’ black holes no more than a few microns across. The gravity sink powered the generators to the point where a single machine could blanket an entire planet.

  His teams had gone a step further. They’d figured out a way to mount the generators fore and aft of a ship and how to fire black holes at the aft generator, resulting in a tumultuous explosion of guided propulsive The fore generator, naturally, kept the ship –theoretically moving faster than any vehicle had ever moved before- from blowing up due to collisions with particulate matter.

  The design was complex. Infinitely so. They’d needed to steal three level 9 AI minds to assist with the final calculations, something that Trinity was gratefully ignoring.

  The design was also top of the list of Things You Didn’t Build, right below nanotechnology and right above sunkillers. The design, at least in theory, made FTL a possibility. With it, they could lurch into Latelyspace on any vector, with any target in mind, long before anyone could stop them.

  “How long will it take for a test to be done?” Trinity demanded.

  “A week.” Longer, if he couldn’t break out of his own offices to pass the commands along.

  “Make it so, Commander Politoyov. If the test works, I will make equipment available to outfit all of your vessels, great and small. Any shipyard in any of My systems will perform these upgrades. Every ship will be expected to be in Latelyspace inside two weeks.”

  Dead silence filled the tiny office.

  Politoyov stared at the blood dripping out of the wound in his hand, then at the smashed button.

  Trinity wanted to go to war with Garth Nickels.

  God help them all.

  Why Weren’t They Attacked Like We Were?

  Garth clapped his hands and made many Bronx cheering noises. He whooped and he hollered, and then, just in case Herrig didn’t understand what was going on, he announced loudly and cheerily that he was the happiest he’d been since he’d ridden his first bicycle.

  Then he wrinkled his nose as the realization that there wasn’t one single suicidal God soldier in one of their tiny little planes, or mercenaries hell-bent on ramrodding a souped-up tank through the heavy lifters, or indeed, any signs of anything like that.

  “Well, that isn’t fair.” Garth wrinkled his nose again. “It hardly counts as theft this way.”

  “We didn’t steal it.” Herrig commented dryly, eyes boggling at the immensity of the duronium slug. It towered above them. He’d done a bit of research about this ‘Old Gun’ and wasn’t too terribly surprised at the mentality going into the production of a gun that big, or of the bullets it needed to fire. Latelians were nothing if not comfortable with going big.

  “Well,” Garth whistled at the sound of the heavy lifters unlatching the clamps; he was super-pleased their delivery was coming under cover of nightfall, “we did. Sort of. From the God Army.”

  The heavy lifters’ engines made weird noises as the pilots shifted from lifting mode to flight mode and peeled away towards a spot designated a little while ago for such purposes.

  “Again, sa,” Herrig followed Garth as he walked up to the truly massive block of duronium, “hardly. The God Army was disinterested in removing this rather large chunk of metal from Sa Orin’s property. They essentially told him to deal with it himself. I suspect they didn’t imagine anyone anywhere would have the wherewithal to do so, or that Orin would have the contacts. I’m assuming it is because, for whatever reason, everyone has forgotten you are alive.”

  Garth rest his hand on the cool metal and felt a positive thrill of excitement burn through him. He was going to be up all night nerding out, that was for sure. It was going to be sparks and electricity and some dude on a rooftop belting out jazz solos while he built the weapons he was going to need if he had any chance of surviving against eight friggin’ Goddies at once.

  Then he frowned. Well, it wouldn’t be so much sparks as a quiet humming. Also, there wouldn’t really be any electricity either, because he planned on building a couple of gravny-gens that ran off purified duronium batteries.

  “Do you know anyone who plays the saxophone?” Garth asked wistfully. It wasn’t pre-apocalyptic planning if a guy wasn’t playing the sax.

  “What’s a sax … saxomaphone? Saxphone? What?” Herrig smiled cordially at Sa Candall and the rest of his team as they walked up. “Well done, sa.”

  “Except for the part where we got caught by a bunch of cattle herders and trussed up like goats.” Candall spat, then grinned.

  “They have goats?” Garth narrowed his eyes at Candall. “And why are you talking that way?”

  “What way?” Candall looked the burly blue-eyed man up and down. Supposedly, this was the man that’d hired them to take the duronium away. He didn’t look like a businessman of any kind. He looked like what the news channels were saying he was, which was a foreign devil and a genuinely dangerous person.

  “All twangy an’ shit.” Garth jerked his chain. “Say ‘come and get it’. Like you were calling everyone for dinner.”

  Herrig raised a hand to Candall’s entirely understandable discomfort. “Humor him, if you please, sa. He … he won’t stop.”

  Candall shook his head irately and ignored the quiet laughter from his men. “Come ‘n git it!”

  “You see any redheaded bastards up there at Orin’s?” It figured. The causal effects he had on places were, once they got rolling, large and difficult to manage. It had a lot to do with the fact that he was a whopping great huge paradox that insisted people remember things like how to make cheeseburgers and general shit like that.

  “Nope.”

  Candall’s response was blunt, to the point and said ‘don’t bother me anymore, I would like to be paid’, so Garth let Herrig and the mercenary chat.

  He had some thinking to do.

  Garth knew Lisa wouldn’t be wandering around Hospitalis messing with cattle herders. She was far too busy waiting for the End of Days to care anything about any of that and besides, the poor girl was probably gearing up for another burst of insanity.

  Therefore, the only other person –unless he’d completely l
ost his shit and was teleporting around without knowing about it- who could’ve been up there at the farm was Griffin Jones.

  The ex-Specter absentmindedly fingered the back of his neck while Herrig and Candall ironed out the final bits of the payment, going back to those last few moments of consciousness before Griffin had nearly chopped his fucking head off in that hangar bay on Pluto.

  At the time, he hadn’t known anything. The sheathe-spawned amnesia keeping him from remembering anything about anyone, and the vicious, violent, unprovoked attack had –and not just because of the wound- left him reeling. The confusion of that moment was still fresh in his mind. Garth would never forget the look of raw hatred on Griffin’s face and wondered if, thirty thousand years later, the poor guy had remembered why he hated his commanding officer so much.

  Garth supposed it was fair. He hadn’t intended for Griffin –his best friend, his confidante, his partner in crime- to see him defeat that Kith warrior so easily, so … effortlessly. That close to his exit from Reality, the power bristling inside had been there, ready and waiting for him to use at a moment’s notice, and with no fear of depletion, and he’d used it to eviscerate Kith Moral in just a few seconds.

  Lisa had been there because she’d needed to see, to understand what he was capable of, of why they weren’t going to sleep for a little while, but for a longer time than man had even been capable of conscious thought. Back then, so very far back then, she’d been a ‘garden variety’ telepath, able to do little more than surf conscious thought. By displaying a range of abilities that she would only have access to after thousands of years of patience, he’d proven to her that, in the fullness of time, they could defeat the Heshii and their ‘children’.

  But Griffin … Griffin hadn’t been meant to see any of that. They’d argued, all three of them, amidst the blood, guts and bone of Kith Moral, shouting recriminations and howling epithets back and forth. They –and by they, it was everyone from the commanders of the Armies to the other Kin’kith and Kith’kin- had always known Griffin’s stance on the War, of his ill-kept desires to be King of the Hill, and gratefully, he’d always kept his darker side under control.