Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Garth put the finishing touches on his Last Will and Testament with a heavy heart; poor old Herrig and his newest friend, Ute, were going to be in for a tough time if Chadsik managed to kill him. Clearly and as already ratified by Latelian Regime Legal Avatars, the two would wake up in charge of UltraMegaDynamaTron.

  Naturally, Herrig got the lion’s share. Upon his death, Herrig DuPont would become The Man. All his personal assets, along with everything he owned as Conglomerate head, would be transferred over to the short, bald man.

  It made Garth smile to think of the ‘oh dear’ look on the ex-banker’s face. It almost made his impending death totally worthwhile.

  Had to be done, though. His wealth was abstract to the point of being perverse. If he died, if Chadsik al-Taryin killed him, the Chairwoman would sweep in and attempt to claim as much money and property as possible, treating his demise like Christmas morning. That kind of cash in Doans’ hand would see Latelyspace become a true terror; capable of purchasing Trinity weapons and materials in bulk and from real smugglers … it didn’t bear thinking about. Chairwoman Doans’ present frame of mind indicated the woman would drop all of their systemic fears and dislikes over non-Latelian equipment in favor of doing whatever it took to rape the shit out of everyone the very moment that happened.

  Herrig, for all his unassuming behaviors and quiet stature and perpetual hangdog look, had a first-rate mind. The man was far more intelligent than he gave himself credit for and had utterly dismissed the glaring evidence; Latelyspace didn’t let anyone ‘normal’ in through the front door. Every single immigrant –minus any ridiculous personality flaws or whatever- was brilliant. Sure, they were forced to live in Port City because hostility towards the strange and different had gotten nowhere near close enough to being forgotten, but … brilliance was brilliance. As the new face of UltraMegaDynamaTron, Herrig DuPont would excel.

  Then there was Ute. Garth loved Ute. The man was … amazing. His story –being a four thousand plus year old super soldier, the only one to successfully fake his death and hide in plain sight for two thousand of those years- was amazing. Revelations concerning the true nature of God soldierhood were less so, and if he managed to kick Chad’s ass, Garth was going to work hand in hand with Ute to figure out a way to prevent more soldiers from being made and maybe properly undo what’d been done. Guillfoyle’s documentation of God soldiers was useless now that it was apparent everything the dead bastard had based his theories on was pure grade, high quality Army dissemination.

  Should he die, Ute would find himself in possession of a fuckton of money and a permanent position at UltraMegaDynamaTron, a position which would be what he chose to make of it. Not as great as Herrig’s golden ring, but Ute wasn’t the sort of guy to get hung up on power or prestige. He’d taken his ‘gift’ and work with it.

  Garth checked the time and winced. There was less than fifteen minutes left before his scheduled ass-kicking. Pushing himself away from the Screens, Garth hit the ‘send’ button and a burden fell from his shoulders. His people were provided for. That was all that mattered.

  Making his way down to the weapon’s basement, Garth laughed ruefully at that. ‘His people’. ‘His people’ had a tendency to die bloody. The only ones who’d managed to get away scot-free were the last batch of Armageddon Troopers. Eddie and the rest had dropped him off on Tenerek, magically avoiding the N’Chalez curse.

  Everyone else, though, everyone else died. Zurich and his heavily meched and augmented super-freak Heavy Elite Specters … dead and buried on an alien world across The Cordon so supremely fucked up that it wasn’t even a joke; Trinity expansion plans no longer considered that area of space a viable option. Ever.

  Ninety percent of the fools involved with the shit-storm that was Tannhauser’s Gate … dead. Very dead. Fighting beings that were inter-dimensional or alter-dimensional or at the very least completely fucking bizarre had turned out to be a terribly awful idea.

  The same with Shoemaker’s Grave and Gorensworld. Triply so for the fucking awful insanity on –in- Pluto, the horrible killbox of a hollowed-out planet that’d started the whole thing rolling. All those moments, full of ‘his people’ in one way or another, all of them dying in terrific ways. It was stupendously egotistical to take responsibility for all those lives lost, but … he couldn’t help himself. He knew, now, at long last and thirty thousand years later, that his presence alone caused chaos and strife, no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing. The Heshii weren’t even involved in the turmoil that bubbled to the surface; it was an automatic response by the Unreal ‘body’ of the Universe trying to rid itself of something that was, in a very real, very undeniable sense, alien.

  Garth laughed, the hollow joy bouncing off the stairwell. Now that he was ‘better’, now that there was just a single, tiny kernel of bright blue light within him –barely enough to influence the toss of the dice, let alone force an argument over a sandwich into full-scale war- he was marching to his death. Now that he could properly and safely protect Humanity and all it’s weird offshoots –not to mention all the inhuman and alien life in the Universe- without worrying his presence alone would fuck shit up, he was going to die.

  Oh, he hadn’t forgotten that he hadn’t really come up with any kind of non-Real Paradox method of permanently dealing with the M’Zahdi Hesh, but honestly, that kind of thing really was nothing more than sitting down and thinking. There was a lot of weird shit in the Universe after thirty thousand years of messing around. There had to be something somewhere that that could be twisted to the task.

  Garth grabbed the fire ax and gave it a few experimental swings. The head burst into flames almost immediately, filling the air with fiery trailers that were definitely magical to watch.

  “Quantum state supertech, fuck yeah.” Garth grinned fiercely. He’d made himself a +10 Magic Fire Ax. The wicked, wicked teeth of the blade-head gleamed brilliantly white-hot bright, a grinning maw waiting to be fed. He shrugged into the harness he’d built, and then sheathed the ax on his back. “Next up, the Salamander Sword.”

  In creating the wicked blade, Garth had been unable to stop from making a weapon that belonged more in a Final Fantasy video game than in the real world. It was certainly impractical. No hand-held weapon matching the size of the wielder was, and there were so many things wrong with that kind of design that video games and anime cartoons glossed over, it wasn’t even funny. Primarily, and the thing that’d always bugged Garth, even as a kid, was unsheathing the damn thing. If you’re carting a six and a half foot sword strapped to your back and you go to pull it out, your arms had better have springs in the elbows that can stretch way the fuck out. Otherwise, that sword isn’t going to do anything but hang you up until the guy/monster/robot/demon gets in your face and carves you right the fuck up.

  The only solution was to walk around with in your hand, which he had zero problems in doing. It wasn’t like Chad was going to be all ‘Oy, mate, what is this wiv all the weapons, we is going to be bestest of friends, yeah?’.

  There was a really good chance that Chad was going to shoot him in the head the moment he walked out onto the roof.

  Garth slashed the air a few times, cementing the feel of the thing. He’d spent a couple hours after dinner –a joyous, riotous dinner with a thousand or so rambunctious Latelians just happy to be out of the house- practicing with the sword and the axe, mostly so he wouldn’t burn his own fucking eyebrows off. It was one thing to have your ass handed to you by a freaky ultra-augmented cyborg; it was a-fucking-nother thing entirely to have that happen when you were missing your eyebrows.

  Garth couldn’t bear the thought of his nearest and dearest friends –all two of them- standing over his corpse, trying to be sad but secretly wondering instead why he’d chosen to pluck all his eyebrows out before fighting an insane Trinity cyborg with more accents in his mouth than there were stars in the sky.

  It was shit like that that could ruin an afterlife. Garth clipped the stupidly long sw
ord to the temporary holder at his waist –when the time came he was just going to rip it out- and slotted the hornet darts to the front of the ax harness a la a bandolier of bullets.

  A loud thump echoed through the entire facility.

  “You ain’t subtle at all, pal.” Garth looked up, imagining Chad standing on the roof, striking a magisterial pose. It was, after all, a full moon and it was, lest he forget, raining cats and fucking dogs outside.

  Apropos of what could be his last night alive, there was also the prerequisite lightning storm.

  “All the best fights have Ma Nature doing the background music.” Garth gripped his sword and tried to go up the stairs. The sword whacked into wall.

  “Fuck me.” He unclipped the sword and angled his way up to meet destiny.

  xxx

  Garth ignored the pressure of Chadsik’s curious gaze as best he could; the cyborg’s interest was a pressure, a sudden knot of scrutiny and intensity pushing right through his back. He leaned the ridiculous sword against the door leading back into safety and sighed. What the fuck had he been thinking? Leaning up against the wooden door, it looked about as badass as anything in the known universe, but again, he had people-sized arms.

  “Is that a cigarette?” Garth asked, looking at the smoldering stick in the assassin’s mouth.

  Chad, lounging casually on the lip of the building, took a languorous puff and watched circles of smoke whisk away on the breeze. They tried not to let their disappointment show, and they thought they were doing a pretty good job. The man in front of them with that truly inspired sword was not the man they’d fought with in the Museum. Granted, that man had been encased in a solid hologram and fighting with a super-powered mace, but even before then, when they’d just been watching Garth with that girlfriend of his … there was a fire missing from the man.

  “This,” they heard their voice say with scathing contempt, “is fucking bullshit.” Chad thought about apologizing, but whichever one of them had spoken those words wasn’t lying. It was bullshit.

  Garth took a deep breath. It was bullshit. It really was. He’d done everything he could do to get into Bravo with only your standard avalanche of insanity and nightmarish retardation, and had, he supposed, in the grand scheme of things, failed miserably at it; Gorensworld, Tannhauser’s Gate, Shoemaker’s Grave, all the goddamn things he’d done as a Deep Striker, he really hadn’t planned on any of that happening, but at least he’d had the neural sheathes to fall back on.

  Tomorrow, he’d be laced up with all manner of q-circuits, an impressively ingenious expression of technology that would hopefully make neural sheathes look like Tonka toys. He’d spent time after weapon practice looking circuitry designs over to see if they could be improved –he knew it could be done- and hadn’t even been able to move a single circuit around. It was maddening, and the damned problem had him distracted as fuck. He could see a solution that would transform his quadronium circuits and implants from merely ‘holy shit this is awesome’ to ‘Jesus Harry Christ, I’m an actual superhero now’.

  Try as he might, though, that solution evaded him like quicksilver fish in a stream. Even his ‘savant-o-scope’ wasn’t working. Oh, there was a dim flicker of light in his eyes, the last bit of a failing connection to ex-dee that was doomed to close before too long as the sheathes, completely unaffected by anything, finally and completely sealed him off from the extra-dimensionality, but it wasn’t enough to spur his creativity.

  Garth was praying like mad that it’d be enough to help him with this fight. He couldn’t use it to augment his speed or strength, because the titanic forces involved would probably rip him to shreds.

  Garth took another deep breath. “Are you sure you want to kill me? I’ve kind of got something important to do that doesn’t involve my actual death.”

  “Oh,” Chad said around a mouthful of smoke, “we is knowin’ more about what you is wantin’ to do than you is likely to know, my son.”

  It was probably just happenstance, since there was a storm brewing, but an errant crack of thunder and lightning split the sky in half and filled their immediate world with a bruised howl of sound.

  Garth shook his head, disgusted. “Why don’t you tell me what you think you know about what I plan on doing?”

  Chad cocked their head to one side, listening to the thin, moaning wail of The Voice in their head. The Voice most definitely didn’t want them to say anything to Garth about anything, which, naturally, made them want to say everything. “Silly twat.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Chad knocked the side of their head with a fist. “Not you, my son. Us. Him. It. Wotever. Fuckin’ ‘ell. If we was to spend all our time tellin’ ya wot it is you is plannin’, we would be ‘ere all night long and would wind up wiv an audience, which is summink we is finkin’ you is not wantin’, yeah? You is the hero and if all your little ‘ero minions is seein’ you get your ass handed to you on a plate, well, wotever plans you ‘as left behind is likely to fail cos they will be so disappointed.”

  “Are you genuinely insane or just sorta?” Garth demanded, well aware that he was poking a mad, cybernetic super-assassin bear with a sharp, pointy stick.

  “Oh,” The Chad’s said all in one wonderful voice, “we is completely stark raving bonkers. We was born that way, and then we was made that way.”

  “You are one creepy fucking dude, dude.”

  “You get used to it.” Chad replied, then blushed. “Er, sorry, there, chum. You can get used to it, but you in’t, is ya? Anyways, we is knowin’ you is … was, on account of shortly we is murderin’ ya … plannin’ to kill some fellas as wot is tryin’ ter destroy the whole of everyfing. Right? Some sort of intergalactic punch-up?”

  Ignoring the entire length of the general confusion plaguing him since up until about three days ago, only a very few moments in Garth’s life had left him completely balls-out stunned nonsensical. Here and there throughout his career in Special Services there’d been a few genuine ‘what the fucking fuck’ moments that’d thrown him off his game, but nothing but nothing beat the absolute bizarro-world moment he’d just been flung into.

  “The fuck?” Throwing his hands up in the air, Garth walked around in a tight semi-circle. “How in the fucking hell could you know that?”

  “Oh, we is bein’ told by the Voice inside our ‘ead.” Chad ground the cigarette butt under their heel and lit up another one. They hadn’t quite decided what they were going to do about the fight; it was obvious The Job was a complete and utter fucking wreck and was actually about as dangerous as a wet towel and they were having a very difficult time coming to a consensus.

  Most distressing, it seemed more than half of him didn’t want them to kill The Job anymore at all; many of them liked him. “The Voice is part of a group who don’t seem to like you very much. They was abductin’ me and turnin’ me into a them wiv the express purpose of endin’ your life. There’s this whole fing about Spheres and Engines and all that whatnot. It’s really quite fuckin’ insane, yer ask us.”

  “So … so … you were made to kill me by some agency?” Garth stared furiously at Chad. Nothing about the man’s body said Heshii-tech, and he definitely hadn’t been made out of hy-tech parts. If only he’d thought to build a scanner or something. But no, that only worked in hindsight; up until the revelation of a few seconds ago, everyone –including him- had been under the misguided belief that Chadsik al-Taryin was a cyborg similar in nature to Zurich.

  If he had, in fact, been crafted by any being or group of beings in the position to know anything about the Spheres of Existence and the Engines of Creation … that made him more dangerous than anything.

  “Well, ya, but that is not wot we is doin’ ‘ere.” Chad could tell The Job was distressed. It wasn’t every day you learned that the man who was going to kill you had been made for that very express purpose and that there actually was an incredibly powerful group of fellas out there that really hated you that much.

  “You were ju
st flat out hired by someone to kill me.” The coincidence was too much to bear out as simple randomness. Chad’s entire existence simply had to be some kind of early game preparation on the Unreal Universe’s behalf. It sounded impossible, but then again, it was how the Unreal Universe operated.

  “We know, right?” Chad climbed off the wall and stretched out the kinks in their back. “It’s a funny old world, yeah? Anyways, we is done talkin’. The storm ‘as picked up and the moon is about as full as it’s gonna get, and we ‘as finally decided ‘ow we is going to kill you.”

  Garth wished he’d asked for a cigarette. It was the sort of thing that happened in the movies and now he was going to die wishing he’d asked a mortal enemy he hadn’t even known about for one and it was going to piss him off to no end. If he was unlucky, he’d be reincarnated as a chain-smoking baby. He stepped backwards, hand outstretched until his palm closed around the improbably long sword’s hilt. “What?”

  Chad chuckled. “Oh, right, you is not knowin’. We is actually an artist. Ordinarily we is craftin’ a very special death for each Job. Sort of like, we elevate the Job into legend by, like, bein’ very creative. It’s a whole process. Truthfully, we is hatin’ this bloody fuckin’ planet as it makes The Voice really quite chatty. We want to be done wiv ya as soon as possible so we can fuck off for somewhere quiet. To that end, my son, my dear old depleted wonder, we is going to beat you silly, but only just. We figure you is just a plain old ‘uman being now, and so, displayin’ a level of skill and control that will surely count as unbelievably artistic, we is goin’ to kill you by bein’ just a bit better than you. Sounds fantastic, don’t it?”

  “Sure, okay.” Garth replied sarcastically, letting the last final bit of the ex-dee connection filter into him. His eyes immediately began burning with the effort of overlaying the ripple effect each and every motion from that other plane into something his brain could work with, and it took a precariously long moment to refine the data down further so –instead of tracking clouds and lightning and birds and … random weird bullshit- he was watching just Chad.