Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

Entering Bravo would result in removal or reactivation of the sheathes. Reactivation meant a return of the strength and power that he’d grown accustomed to over the last ten years. Then ... then he could tromp and stomp his way through the Heshii one bloody body at a time.

  If the sheathes were removed, full access to his Kin’kith abilities would be restored and then he could walk around in ex-dee like nobody’s business. Oh, the minions of the Heshii were undoubtedly keeping a hot eye peeled for those kinds of shenanigans, but he’d be himself. He’d be able to fight a pretty good fight while he tried to come up with a way to beat the lot of them permanently.

  It was funny, because even with all these preparations, odds were he wouldn’t survive long enough to get inside Bravo, not now that he was irrevocably locked into The Game, without either of those ‘talents’.

  It was funny because he was going to attempt a transformation that would change him into something that wouldn’t need access to Bravo.

  The depth to which the q-circuits would be layered into his body would most certainly kill him, leave him a vegetable, or break him completely; the pain alone could be enough to wipe his mind clean. Beyond the joy of all that, there were ‘issues’ about the impracticality of having extruded Real matter coursing through his body.

  If he survived… The q-circuits would be powered by his genetic link to ex-dee, a connection that nothing short of permanent death would affect. It existed, it would always exist. The only thing that could suffer was his ability to grab hold of that power, such as the curse he was currently stuck with.

  The q-circuits would give him strength and speed comparable to a fully powered up Kin’kithal. They’d make him unbreakable, too. The quadronium infusion would transform him into The Immovable Man. He would be a walking, talking extrusion of Reality.

  It wasn’t ideal, but there was no other choice. The sheathes prevented him from accessing ex-dee even when inoperative. The only reason he’d been able to do so before had been because of the paradox. Now that was gone. Done for. It was sitting a few miles away as a refined energy source.

  He had no other choice. It was burn quadronium circuitry –complete with augments and designs making him equal to or greater than a Foursie- into himself at the genetic level in the hopes that it would give him enough oomph to win over against Gurant or die in the ring.

  It was become the ultimate warrior or lose all chance at saving the universe from destruction by Heshii hands.

  It was sacrifice for the greater good or death.

  “Ain’t a choice a-tall.” Garth muttered, mimicking Griffin’s cornpone accent.

  Weapon Testing

  Ute couldn’t sleep. His blood and bones, muscle and metal, kept screaming they were on the verge of something big, something disastrous. Over the years he’d learned to trust those instincts. He finally crawled out of bed, absurdly nostalgic over the bunk beds filling the room; the big beds, the snoring, the restless noises of people all sleeping together, all of that reminded him of the Army.

  Ute wanted to say they’d done good, but they hadn’t, not really. They’d fought for Trinity to maintain their independence and that was it. There’d been nothing else to do; the Trinity AI had offered those long dead ‘colonists’ –renegades was a closer truth- a choice. Crush and kill enemies of It’s choosing for as long as It wanted or be crushed, be killed.

  They’d said yes, of course, beginning a long and established cover story of loathing faith, reviling religion, a story metamorphosing into the truth in a shockingly small amount of time. Those who knew better –who remembered­ better- chose to say nothing.

  Ute stepped outside and took a deep breath of fresh air into his lungs. By craning his head up, he could see the ship still floating there. A colleague of his had verified that the name of the Trinity ship was Hungryfish and that in addition to carrying the Universe’s most deadly and insane assassin, it had enough firepower to destroy a world.

  More of Trinity’s mysteries. Ute sometimes thought that the AI Itself didn’t know why It did some things.

  There was little doubt about why the assassin was here. Not just here, on Hospitalis, but here, above UltraMegaDynamaTron, glittering in the night like a deadly ornament. That same colleague had confided that Chadsik al-Taryin was in the system to kill none other than Garth Nickels himself.

  “Of course he is.” Ute grumped, orienting on where the man who’d brought so much death and destruction to his world simply by landing. The giant took another deep breath and started walking.

  xxx

  “Hey, bro, what’s up?” Garth asked, wiping sweat from his forehead with an arm. He was really glad that Ute hadn’t walked in on him about an hour ago, when the whole room –and the three mile stretch of road from Acme to the cap- had been full of super-brilliant energy. While incredibly awesome to see, the reality of the situation -that the only thing keeping all that powerful energy from erupting and ripping first the planet, then the solar system, into shreds had been a micron-thin shield of heavily manipulated quantum fields- was the stuff of nightmare.

  Cool, yes. A technical triumph rivaling anything done before or since he’d gone for a thirty thousand year dirt nap, you bet. Ball-shriveling, oh yes. Twice, oh yes.

  “Where is the bullet?” Ute asked, watching the robots clatter and clank around them, doing things that presumably made sense to their operator.

  “Hm?” Garth looked up from peering inside the nanobox. “Oh. Gone. Almost all of it.”

  “What?” Ute demanded, astonished. He wanted to say they’d gone through hell and back to get the blasted thing, but truth be told, it’d been infinitely less difficult to ferry the bullet back from Orin’s Farms than shifting the armored plate. In all honesty, he’d –like Garth- been somewhat dismayed that the God Army and everyone else had been too busy to stop the theft, or to even investigate after the fact. “Gone?”

  “Uhuh. Yep. Here Hey. Stick your eyes on this.” Garth stepped out of the way so that Ute could look in through the window built into the side of the nanobox.

  Ute hunkered down, formed a cup over his eyes and found himself staring into a miracle.

  Hundreds of thousands of brilliant beams of light, hard lines so bright that they were surely sharp enough to slice through the fabric of space glistened in the darkness of the chamber. The lines formed something … a … a sword. A sword made of light, so finely detailed that Ute felt his hand instinctively reach out to take hold. A weapon like that … he redoubled his attention when his finely augmented eyes told him there was movement.

  Ute looked over his shoulder at Garth, who was leaning against a very large box, doing his best to look nonchalant. He was humming and singing under his breath. The ex-soldier stuck his face back to the window.

  Infinitesimally small particles of … well, it couldn’t be dust because that would make no sense … were crawling along the slashes of light. Every time a piece of particulate matter reached its destination, there was a tiny, nova-like flare.

  “This isn’t dust. What is it? What is this? Are you making a sword in there?” Ute stood and rubbed his eyes. Afterimages of a burning blue sword hovered on the periphery.

  “It is dust. Duronium dust. Finer than grains of sand. That is a nanobox. And yes,” Garth grinned like a proud father, “I am making a fucking sword in there. Ain’t it cool?”

  “Im-impossible.” Ute hated the word ‘impossible’. First of all, he himself was –or had been- impossible once upon a time. Second, Garth Nickels took ‘impossible’ as a dare.

  “Nah.” Garth shook his head. “Not impossible. Just … unreal.” He saw a flicker of irritation on Ute’s normally very placid face and wanted to punch himself. He was going to have to watch it. Normal people, even men like Ute, men who counted as ‘normal’, didn’t much care for metaphysical discussions on the nature of Reality. It made them twitchy. Was it a side effect of the Universe wanting to protect itself? He nodded to himself. It made a weird sort of sense.

  Ute
stuck his head against the glass for a second just to make sure that he wasn’t imagining things. No, he was not. If Garth wasn’t lying or otherwise stretching the truth to make things ‘cooler’ than they already were, duronium dust was being used to make a sword.

  “What an extravagant way to make something.” Ute said once he was standing upright. “There are more traditional ways, sa, of making a simple sword.”

  “Ah!” Garth pointed a finger. “Ahah! Nothing I make is simple, Ute. That sword will be able to do more than any other sword ever made. Just like the other things I already made.”

  Ute eyed the huge box Garth was leaning so nonchalantly against dubiously. The man was doing his best to pretend it wasn’t there and was exuding ‘please don’t look at this, I don’t want to talk about it’ vibrations so powerfully that Ute was astonished the robots themselves weren’t trying to walk through the huge thing.

  The lure of weaponry drew him in as surely as a fish hooked on an unbreakable line, no doubt as intended. His new employer was talented at that, all right. “Other weapons, you say?”

  A smile of purest child-like glee split Garth’s face. “Oh yeah. Totally. Come on. I will show you some shit you have never seen before.”

  Ute followed Garth, rubbing his scalp with a hand. He’d already seen things he’d never seen before. Regular people could go their entire lives and not ever see one single solitary thing that beggared the imagination. While he wasn’t a regular person, Ute had gone something like ninety years without being overly shocked. He’d been in Garth’s company for just over two days and had already lost count.

  Besides, what could be more awe-inspiring than watching a man move objects with the power of his mind, or using that power to black out an entire city?

  xxx

  “Do that again.” Ute commanded, unaware he’d put on his old authoritative voice.

  Garth held the fat dart between two fingers like a shiny cigarette and flicked it away. The air filled with a high-pitched buzzing whine that was not at all pleasant. The dart –seemingly of its own volition- whizzed and zipped through the air, its trajectory describing a perfect arc before slamming with murderous intensity into the wall right beside his beautiful head.

  Ute cradled one of the darts in the palm of his hand. Forged from duronium, it was heavier than it looked, but that was sort of the point; Garth was designing –had designed- weapons that would allow him to fight in the ring against eight God soldiers of varying skill levels.

  The ex-God soldier thought it cowardly and foolish to force the Game Promoters into readjusting the way the Game was fought.

  Ute believed this was the last Game. So many changes over such a short period of time combined with the effects of Martial Law … the citizens of Latelyspace would be left with a foul taste in their mouths.

  Besides the Chairwoman’s shenanigans running roughshod over four thousand years of history, there was Garth’s utter conviction that The Box would open at his command, in front of the entire system.

  If the Chairwoman’s antics didn’t ruin The Game, Nickels’ opening the sole focus of their truly ancient tradition would. From there, system-wide riots and a complete meltdown of the social structure were frighteningly real possibilities.

  Ute threw the dart, precisely mimicking the Garth’s throw. The fat dart flew thirty feet across the area laid out by Garth before plopping into the dirt. He retrieved the dart, trying to grasp the corners of the puzzle presented by his employer. Was Garth twisting his hand somehow? Was he cheating, using powers he claimed came from being ‘realer than the rest’?

  On his way back, Ute shook his head; Garth’s eyes hadn’t shone blue once and he wasn’t bleeding from his hands or eyes as he did when he used those mysterious powers.

  No, Garth was throwing the dart like a normal person and yet the dart was doing things that no normal weapon, no simple weapon could do. Ute handed the dart back to Garth, asking, “How does it work?”

  “Quantum state mechanics.” Garth answered simply, holding a dart in each hand. “It’s the real reason … well, okay, yeah, nanotech works properly here and totally doesn’t eat planets, but … Quantum state mechanics is the real nanotech. This is what comes after nano. QSM, though … totally, totally safe. With Quantum state mechanics, you can turn darts,” He flourished the two fat hummingbird-sized weapons, “into deadly pieces of art.”

  Garth flicked his hands gently and the two darts shot off in opposite directions, arcing unerringly towards a pillar of duronium about fifty feet away; it was a scandalous waste, but there were ways to reclaim almost all of it. Besides which, short of attacking live God soldiers, using a pillar of metal was the next best thing.

  The darts struck either side of the post with a clang, the air filling with a shrieking squeal that put Garth and Ute’s teeth on edge. Ute shouted a bellow of utter disbelief as the darts fell through the other side. Both men hurried to the post, Garth high-fiving himself and Ute staring incredulously through one of the two holes that’d been burrowed through the purest duronium he’d seen in over four hundred years.

  “Who are you?” The ex-soldier turned whatever-he-was-now demanded softly. He reached out and touched the rim of a hole, wincing when the heat singed his fingertips. He looked down at the dart by his feet, then back at Garth, who was peering through a hole now as well. “What else do you have?”

  Garth grinned eagerly. “Lemme show you this whip I made.”

  Ute snorted so derisively the Chairwoman practically turned over restlessly in her sleep thousands of miles away. “Whip.”

  Regardless of his doubts, Ute followed Garth back to the ‘beginning’ of the hastily devised weapon testing facility set up in the basement of Acme’s factory, curious to see what a ‘whip’ could do that was more impressive than darts that flew around corners and could burrow through duronium.

  Garth put the darts back in the case with the other eight he’d made and smiled at them. They worked better than he could’ve ever hoped. He probably wouldn’t get a chance to use more than one or two in the ring before things went critical and he was forced to use the whip, but there was little point in making only two of anything. Besides, the glistening darts looked so much cooler bundled up like deadly eggs when in the box. He picked up the whip, which Ute had no doubt dismissed as just some ‘thing’.

  “This.” Garth uncoiled the whip with a twitch of the hand, beaming like a proud papa at the metallic hiss of metal on metal. “This is my whip. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

  Ute stuck his hand out, heart trip-hammering in his chest as his giant paw closed around the cool, chill handle. Metal! Again! Garth Nickels was a … was a wizard. ‘Quantum state mechanics’ made no real sense to him, was a phrase that would undoubtedly mean something only to a metallurgist or a scientist.

  Garth had explained before displaying the power of the darts what that meant, that, with something he was calling ‘quantum field emitters’ –presumably an upgrade to the gravnetic generators- he was now able to make subatomic-sized machines and put them to devastating use. The darts had gyroscopic motors in them that took the friction of being thrown, the motion of moving and used that energy to fly like birds, not to mention blades and burrs that rippled out of solid skin.

  What could the whip do? Ute handed the whip wordlessly back to Garth.

  “Okay, so. The darts can fly around corners and have teeny-tiny little buzz saws along their bodies that spin when thrown, right? The whip sort of does the same thing.” Garth moved closer to the pillar; his Indiana Jones-influenced weapon was only fifteen feet long. As far as things to use against God soldiers went, he might as well really just walk up to them and bonk them on the nose with a banana because fifteen feet wasn’t just ‘short range’ it was ‘within easy reach’. He’d been forced to go short because, frankly, he doubted his ability to use anything longer without lopping own fucking head off.

  How awesome would that be? Fight and struggle and plan and all that s
hit only to stand in the Ring, scrutinized by trillions of Latelians across a handful of worlds, only to pull his own head clean off his shoulders? He could hear the Chairwoman’s laughter now. She’d probably call for a systemic holiday.

  Garth took a deep breath.

  “Nervous?” Ute asked dryly, but not without sympathy. This wasn’t his first round of weapons testing. In his time as a soldier, he’d been volunteered on more than one occasion to stand somewhere and fire a gun or a missile launcher or rifle or what have you at something. He was honestly pleased –and stunned- that so far, weapon testing with Garth Nickels was pleasurably void of explosions, fire, and vaporization of comrades.

  Garth wiggled his hand and the whip clicked and clacked at his feet. “Fuck yeah, man. This thing is metal. I could, like, cut my ass in half.”

  “I would say you’d cut more than your ass in half, sa.” Ute conspicuously moved six feet away, his face a careful mask of concentration.

  “Asshole.” Garth chuckled. Then, before panic made him screw up, he cracked the whip. As soon as the tip bit into the pillar he twisted his hand just as he’d done in his mind a thousand times while designing the damned thing. From where he stood, it was hard to tell if the motion had been successful. Either way, there was no choice now but to continue with the test. He flicked his wrist a second time, scurrying forward three feet as the whip bucked and looped itself around the top of the pillar until it rested on part of itself.

  Then he yanked and twisted.

  Ute’s bellow was a barely heard sound of fright; Garth was busy trying to dodge the two-foot long chunk of duronium hurtling towards him much, much faster than expected. Underprepared, the hunk slammed into him like a damned freight train.

  “Well.” Garth wheezed cheerily, wincing. He examined the ceiling for a time, waiting patiently for Ute to get over the shock. It was a decent ceiling.

  Ute’s homely mug swam into view and he nodded gratefully as the God soldier manhandled the heavy chunk of duronium off his chest.