Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Vasily couldn’t stop grinning. Sa Samwell was a funny drunk. He had to be nearly blackout drunk, else he would’ve come to his senses midway through that torrential, expletive-laced diatribe and begged for his life. There was no other explanation for it. The OverCommander toyed with the idea of hiring Samwell to follow him around, drunk, all day long to say ridiculous things to all the people he wanted to shout at but, for various political and politesse reasons, never did.

  “There.” Samwell slurred the word, belched and grimaced at the toxic fumes rising from his mouth. He shouldn’t’ve slammed those last three drinks at the office party before coming to sit in his workspace. He was drunker now than when the Vasily had first called. “A … one … thousand. The … did I really say fuck to you? Fuck me. The seats are being sent to you now.”

  “Yes, sa,” Vasily answered, his voice full of dark glee, “you really did say fuck to me. Several times and in highly imaginative ways. You curse like a soldier.”

  “Lifetime of servitude to The Game, Sa OverCommand-OverCommander.” Samwell muttered blurrily. “Spend all my time listening to … to those damned Onesies and Twoesies. You … you know I can speak that Batlang? That is a stupid thing to know. Not well, but I can tell a Onesie to fuck off in it. And other things. And … and they … they do it. ‘s weird. Threesies and Foursies … they tell us to shut the hell up, but it’s funny as hell.”

  Vasily’s amusement turned to brittle, deadly interest. “Truly?”

  Samwell, head on his desk, moments away from passing out, nodded. “Truly. There’s … there’s … almost all of us can, you know. Takes ab-about five years.”

  “Thank you for your assistance in this matter, Sa Samwell. The God Army appreciates you and your endeavors.” Vasily ended the call.

  “Take it easy, OverCommander.” Samwell passed out.

  Bessie’s Final Flight

  Museums were a funny old thing, when you got right down to it; they were celebrations of the past, a big storeroom of stuff that allowed people to walk around and think ‘isn’t it funny that we used to think this was awesome’ and ‘this is a truly magnificent piece of art’ and ‘damn I am glad that it was free to get in today because it is too hot outside’.

  Outside of an absurdly wealthy Conglomerate’s private collection of Exodus materials –Jordan Bishop being the prime example of such a collector- Griffin knew you’d be hard pressed to find any museum open to the public in Trinityspace. About the only thing closer to a museum than that would be the occasional –and safe- knickknacks brought to the office by Historical Adjutants.

  People of the future just didn’t care. They couldn’t care, not when there was every chance that the next time they woke up, ninety percent of everything they owned wasn’t going to work properly, or at all, or for long.

  Griffin understood the mentality, even if he thought it was kind of stupid. People today –and for the last twenty thousand years or so- found little reason to celebrate the past in any kind of meaningful manner because the past didn’t exist in any meaningful manner; when there was a stretch of five hundred or a thousand or two thousand years of relatively unchained chaos that had been known to rip lesser solar systems apart, the past for all but the most positively enlightened civilizations was one of bloodshed, war, and grief. Even if a random solar system didn’t start whomping on their neighbors with whatever came to hand, well, there was that misery thing to contend with, as well as ghost ships, space stations stuffed full of the dead … Dark Ages were a real sumbitch.

  But Latelians … they loved them some museums. They were everywhere. Even in the small suburban towns that filled out the compass points of the original five cities to make for a gigantic wheel of a megacity, they had them. All anyone not believing that Latelyspace, and hence Latelians, were free from the ravages of a Dark Age needed to do nothing more than take a tour of, say, six out of over five thousand worldwide museums and they’d get the picture.

  Griffin wasn’t one for museums. The things Latelians celebrated weren’t the things he remembered, the things he wanted celebrated. Oh, Hospitalis was homey enough, and though he didn’t know a goddamn thing about it, he suspected in his bones that somehow Bravo had influenced that growth. It was about the only thing that made sense; Earth –Trinity Prime- didn’t feel as homey as Hospitalis, therefore, as the global babysitter for an artifact from thirty thousand years ago, Bravo was the only realistic source of that feeling.

  It bugged him. Bugged him a lot. Being bugged by that was like listening to a real sad song played on the violin; it got under your skin and though you might not understand all of what you were listening to, those sweet, haunting notes burrowed under your skin. You liked what you were hearing, but it made your heart hurt.

  And Griffin didn’t like it when his heart hurt. It reminded him that Garth N’Chalez had lied, had tricked them all into what’d basically amounted to suicide.

  “Can I help you, sa?”

  Griffin whirled, ashamed and angry that he’d let his mind wander, especially since he’d broken into a museum in what amounted to a damn hick town in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. Not that anyone getting the drop on him could do anything beyond talk politely to him. When it dawned on him that the guy talking to him was probably the oldest Latelian in the whole damn Universe, he bit back on his reflexively angry response and pointed to what’d captivated his interest so thoroughly before his stupid brain had gone down memory lane. “This thing still fly?”

  “Bessie?” Sa Bert frowned, stupendous, snowy white eyebrows wiggling like captured moths. “I assume so.”

  Griffin jerked a thumb at the small Sheet-plaque. “Says here th’ thing is over a thousand years old.”

  “Oh,” Bert ran a hand along the plaque, smiling, “we build things to last here in Latelyspace. I guess you might not know that, seeing as you’re a … visitor.”

  Griffin went to ask how the man would know that when he remembered he was easily a foot shorter than the geezer and dressed in the finest Trinity Enforcer armor available. It was easy to forget. “Right, right. Bessie?”

  Bert laughed, then shrugged. “Named after my old si, sa. Bessilina. Dear old woman took a beating her whole life –she had one of the few cancers our people get- and looked just as beautiful as they day I met her right up until she died. Same with the ‘Concordia Seventeen Interplanetary Service Vessel xj-76’. Single pilot craft for a very smart Twoesie or up.”

  “Ya’ll’re tellin’ me a God soldier could fly this thing from one planet t’nother?” Griffin whistled. That took balls, and while it was certifiably true that the giant sumbitches had themselves some big balls, there was big and then there was big. “Why in th’ hell’d they do that?”

  Bert took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow. He was frightfully old and had been about to call the local police when out of the dimness of his poor old brain a propaganda story from his youth had risen; the piece had been called ‘Enforcers of Utter Destruction’. It’d essentially drilled into the minds of every young Latelian born over a hundred years ago that while the God Army was an unstoppable juggernaut, Enforcers were Evil Incarnate and utterly indestructible.

  The young man with the odd accent was clearly not Latelian. Just as clearly, he wasn’t that Garth Nickels sa who was on the news all the time. Dreadfully clear was the armor the man wore: some things were iconic. Even if no one in Latelyspace had ever seen one or had only had the equipment described to them, anyone would know Enforcer armor when they saw it.

  And yet, the red-headed Enforcer seemed genuinely interested in Bessie, and, unless Bert was mistaken, terribly sad about something. Not at all a rampaging beast levelling cities with weapons too evil to consider.

  “Oh,” Bert said with a misty smile, “upon a time our soldiers used to conquer whole solar systems. Got so people recognized our giant warships, so the Army came up with the idea of smaller vessels capable of flying under the radar, so to speak. When we first started using these to f
erry single soldiers from planet to planet, there were no Foursies, so typically, it would be an invasion force of three or four Threesies.”

  Every time Griffin considered the awesome destructive power of God soldiers, he found himself wondering how any of them had managed to stem the tide of the Heshii invasion … not just once, but hundreds, thousands of times. It was undeniable that Goddies were Titans, but the Kith, Kin and the eventual Harmony soldiers that’d risen up when the M’Zahdi Hesh had started pissing in their boots … that had been a colossal army. He shook his head. The last five or six years in the War to End All Wars had been frantic beyond comprehension.

  “Ya’ll’re nuts.” Griffin shifted his helmet from one hand to the other. “Now, ya’ll’re tellin’ me this thing is radar invisible?”

  “Designed to fly beneath a wide array of scanning equipment. I’m sure that if we were to use this ship in an assault today, sa, that the invaded planet would have upgraded their security.” Bert paused. Something dawned on him. He was talking to an Enforcer. The implication behind the man’s polite questions was that he was looking for a way to travel very quickly, when by all rights, his armor could fly him anywhere in the entire known Universe, and undoubtedly far more efficiently than Bessie.

  Griffin nodded. He’d seen footage of the old Goddies tearing shit up across the universe back in the day, and that’d been pretty damned impressive. Once their antics had become the sort of thing entire solar systems went out of their way to talk about with other solar systems, everyone started doing their best to get one or two or even twelve steps ahead of the marauding maniacs. Not every civilization had managed that back then, but now … now it was almost a certainty that much of everything –minus the Gunboys, which you could definitely just drop on a planet and step back- had been upgraded to defend against the Latelians.

  “What about here? Ah mean, would Ah be detected if Ah was t’ say, fly t’ Central?”

  Bert cracked a joke in his old, wheezy voice. “You planning on assassinating the Chairwoman?”

  Griffin shot the man a look. “Kill her? Naw. Ah don’t mean to kill her.”

  The moment grew strained, the silence of the empty, closed museum filling their ears. Bert looked around nervously, just that second remembering the rest of the things that they’d heard about Enforcers as children; they were insane, they were evil, they were inhuman. For a second there, when he’d answered his rhetorical joke, the redhead standing there gazing thoughtfully up at Bessie had seemed all those things and more.

  “Well, son? Ah’m awaitin’ over here. This ain’t no woolgatherin’ contest, Ah’m askin’ for a reason.”

  “No, no, you wouldn’t be, ah, detected.” Bert felt like an old fool. So pleased to talk about Bessie. Always had been, always would be, he supposed. The damage –such as it was- was done. And for the most part the unnamed stranger didn’t seem too bad and had said he didn’t plan on killing the Chairwoman –not that that would be too terrible a thing, not with the way she was acting these days- so Bert guessed it was all right. Besides … “The netLINK systems we use are backwards compatible for multiple generations, but like I said, Bessie is a thousand years old. The avatars don’t speak the same language anymore and the onboard systems can’t be upgraded. More or less invisible.”

  “More or less?”

  “You won’t be able to go terribly fast, I’m afraid.” Bert said apologetically. “Bessie is rated for interplanetary travel. Could do the run from here to the Quantum Tunnel in about a month.”

  “Decent time for a thousand years ago.” Griffin commented. “’course, Ah reckon some o’ that was on account o’ the pilots bein’ God soldiers and therefore ya’ll could push the shit out o’ th’ engines. So why can’t Ah fly so fast here?”

  Bert nodded. It was so easy to forget that the man was an Enforcer. He kept forgetting. He was so old. Every time he opened his mouth, it was like he was talking to a group of children, even with the strange way the man spoke. “You’d only be invisible so long as you make the effort to stay invisible, sa. Go too fast and avatars will detect something. Someone, somewhere will just keep sending out avatars of older and older coding until they happen on a series that the ship will identify with. Then that’ll be that.”

  Griffin didn’t like the sound of that. He had an overriding need to be in Central before the end of tomorrow night. During the long, long drive from Orin’s Farms to whatever the hell the name of the small, damn-near parochial town he was in, the one thing every channel broadcast over the radio kept talking about was the Final Game and how amazing it was going to be.

  At first, he’d been mightily pissed at Garth having to get inside the ring with eight God soldiers, all of whom were Foursies. He was the great and mighty N’Chalez, sure enough, but the man didn’t have access or wouldn’t access the powers he’d used to rip the shit outta that Kith all those years ago. Even with his hand-to-hand prowess and any weapons he might bring to bear, those Goddies were ultimately going to shred him to pieces. Beyond that, if they somehow managed to fail, there was always Gurant. That Foursie was a goddamn bona fide nightmare of epic proportions.

  Nosir, there was no way N’Chalez was getting out of the arena alive, and yeah, he’d been mightily upset for a long, long way. Nearly a thousand miles of rage had blackened his mood, distracting him from the feeling that he wasn’t driving through bucolic farmland and whatnot thirty thousand years and hundreds of trillions of lightyears away from home. Then he’d realized something.

  Revenge was awesome, sure. Killing a guy you’d wanted to kill for a long, long time was a good way to get closure, but … even better? Even better was not having to do it yourself. Consequently, Griffin had come to grips with Garth’s demise in the ring, relishing in the thought that the death would be caught in the highest definition possible and that everyone, everywhere, would be doing nothing but watching that slaughterfest day in and day out for the next million years. Then? Well … Griffin reckoned he’d just download the file and watch it whenever he felt in the mood for a light-hearted comedy.

  He wanted to be in Central by tomorrow night so dealing with Chairwoman Doans would be that much easier. Immediately following ‘her’ triumphant victory over N’Chalez, that silly bitch would undoubtedly be at her most vulnerable. There was no dismissing the fact that she was as cracked as Humpty Dumpty, and when you got like that, you started thinking you were invulnerable and invincible. Riding that high, Doans would make critical mistakes, make capture hassle-free.

  The new plan to find the HIM wasn’t so much about hunting for the fucking thing himself, but to get the one damned person in the entire solar system who knew where it was to bring him to it. Griffin honestly couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it, first thing.

  The Enforcer blamed Trinity. With all the tiny little nano-slivers jammed into his body everywhere, there was just no telling how much actual control the fucking AI had over his thought processes.

  Realizing he’d been standing there in total silence, staring up at the ship, Griffin cleared his throat, asking, “So, how long would ya’ll figger it’d take to git there from here, travelin’ at ‘safe’ speeds?”

  Bert –anticipating the question and using the Enforcer’s silence to his advantage- had the answer ready. “Twelve hours, give or take.”

  Griffin nodded, pursing his lips, “Twelve hours, hey? Goddamn old-fashioned airplane speeds, sure enough. Still, Ah reckon it’ll have to do. Ah’m wonderin’, though, sa, why ya’ll’re tellin’ me alla this.”

  Bert grinned foolishly. “Bessie here is a thousand years old, Sa Enforcer, and it took a great deal of effort sixty years ago for us to get her here. This museum is pathetically small. She’d fit inside the foyer of … well, would’ve fit … inside the foyer of The Museum of Natural History. Most everything I’ve got in this museum isn’t interesting enough to get parents and their children here, but Bessie … she’s a hit. The kids love crawling all over her, they pretend they can fly her. It do
es an old man good to see that.” He fixed Griffin with a look. “Now, the way I see it, if this ship is stolen, is flown in some kind of escapade, now that is a story. If Bessie here is parked safely and is easily recovered and returned here, well, not only will that bring the kids in, but … it’ll be news, sa. Big news. Might even get News4You out here. Then I’ll get to tell the whole world why I’ve named an old military ship after my wife. And that would do an old man even better.”

  A billion watt smile split Griffin’s face. Goddamn but it was like home on this planet. “Well, sa, you just got yourself a deal. Ah’ll fly this plane from here t’ Central. An’ Ah’ll do ya one more. Ah’ll make sure she gits in the news, all right. Maybe Ah’ll buzz the arena where they’re havin’ their fights tomorrow or something equally dangerous … but not so dangerous she gets blown up or anything. How’s that sound?”

  Bert shared Griffin’s smile. The man’s moods were as infectious as a disease. “That sounds fantastic, Sa Enforcer.”

  “Awesome.” Griffin turned his head up to the ship again, already imagining the pranks he’d get up to in the old thing. “Now, uh, how in the hell we gonna get her outta here?”

  “The roof moves, sa.” Bert hit a button on his prote and motors unused for sixty years groaned and creaked and whined their way into motion. “And Bessie can go straight up.”

  Griffin licked his lips. He hadn’t flown a jet plane –technically a space plane- in a long time. “This is gonna be rad.”

  Shoot the Moon