Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Mari watched her arm -an arm that had been attached to her for four thousand years- fall to the ground, a fountain of jet-black blood pouring from the massive wound. She howled and reached out with her remaining hand to grab hold of the whip once again, but the damnable Offworlder flew overhead, this time … this time …

  Garth flew over Mari, landing behind her, his back facing her back. Before she or the other Foursies could react, he grabbed hold of the handle with both hands and yanked once more.

  Si Mari the Foursie’s head came clean with a terrible buzzing sound, an appalling noise driving the arena into utter, aghast silence.

  Garth dropped the whip. The surprise was over; the remaining Foursies had already adapted to the deadly weapon and would change their tactics accordingly.

  He unshackled his fire ax and turned to face the remaining Six. He grinned darkly. They’d brought this on themselves. If they’d just let him into the Box, none of this would be happening.

  xxx

  “What in the ungodly fuck is happening?” Granger bellowed into the microphones, completely heedless. “What is going on?”

  Uncle Sa sat there, stunned. “Ladies and gentlemen, sis and sas, Sa Holmes has been vanquished in a record-breaking two seconds! Never before has anyone ever been so ruthlessly, so thoroughly dispatched. Following that shocking death is the gruesome delimbification and beheading of Si Mari, who, I believe, is –was- the only female Foursie in the entire system.”

  Granger pressed a palm to his forehead, literally trying to will the last minute of the fight to have gone some other way. One God soldier dead in two seconds! The other decapitated, her head sawed clean off by that deceptively simple-looking whip. He clambered to stop the Game avatars from replaying the footage.

  xxx

  Alyssa Doans nearly shouted for her snipers to take the man’s life right there on the spot, stopping barely in time. It wouldn’t do. It was a close call, though. Instead, she ordered one of her agents to track down the Game employees who’d allowed Nickels into the ring with those weapons, ordered them to find them and kill them.

  Someone had to pay for the foolishness.

  xxx

  “Remarkable, is it not?”

  Vasily closed his eyes. Si Mari had been … a treasure. Holmes was no great loss; in the last dozen years, he’d become increasingly less … adherent to the principles of the God Army and had –unknowingly- been inching towards a training accident. Vasily nodded. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Nor I.” The calm-toned Five applauded as Garth somehow managed to roll out of the way of a thundering kick. Around him, the entire audience jumped to their feet as a brilliant trace of fire sliced the leg of the God soldier nearest Garth open from knee to hip. “Nor I.”

  “What kind of weapons are those?” Vasily asked, demanding answers from his proteus. The response was instantaneous; the weapons had been thoroughly examined and had passed every test. According to the comprehensive scans, they were solid metal. Ridiculously complex and over-designed, but solid nonetheless.

  “Your scanners are insufficient, sa.” Fenris turned to Vasily, his soft eyes full of danger. “You risk your life by coming to sit here, as I am sure you know. Why, then?”

  Vasily stared at the contestants, shaking his head. “He is so slow, but he is getting faster? What is going on?”

  “He is becoming.” Fenris repeated the question. “Why did you come to me, here, in the middle of this event?”

  Vasily wanted to ask what the unnamed man meant by ‘becoming’, but understood there was very little time. The Sigma Five wasn’t radiating hostility, but was very clearly upset at the disturbance. Under normal circumstances … but these weren’t. “I’ve come to ask what you mean, precisely, by your statement that you are here to ‘attend to’ Garth Nickels.”

  Fenris let a small smile cross his lips. “We are here to attend. That is all. Do not ask again. I encourage you to enjoy the Final Game and all that will happen here, but elsewhere. Perhaps from a safe distance.”

  xxx

  A reflexive blow from a God soldier struck Garth in the back and suddenly he was airborne, ax trailing a superheated streamer of white hot fire. The pain from the blow was agonizing. Were he not suffused with quadronium he would’ve been punched in half. Warrior instincts told him the six Goddies were hot on his heels, taking to the air themselves with massive leaps.

  Garth tucked into a mid-air roll, ax held out to one side so that when he landed, he wouldn’t gut himself. Moving a fair bit quicker than he had only a few minutes ago, he let the roll carry him across five full feet before he sprang back up, spinning with the ax.

  Jagged, fiercely hot duronium teeth dragged nastily across the chest of a Goddie, ripping through layers of skin and metallic mesh, and snapping several ribs before ramming into the head of another Goddie.

  A booted foot struck him in the chest. The ax was ripped from his hands and he fell, hard. The ex-Specter jumped to his feet just in time to see his fire ax yanked unceremoniously from a skull. Cradling his chest with an arm, Garth took a deep breath, warily eyeing the remaining five God soldiers. His ears perked up; they were talking again.

  xxx

  “We need to work together.”

  “Fuck that. You go ahead.”

  “What? If we work together, we can kill him then we can fight each other. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

  “What, so one of us can fight Gurant? Look, this guy was supposed to be dead already. I don’t like these weapons he has. They’re … not fair.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I think you know. Gurant came to all of us, right, suggested we not fight? He’s got something personal against this Nickels.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, sa, is if we work together and kill this Offworlder, Gurant, who just recently ate a dozen Onesies like it was easy, will be upset.”

  “Good … good point.”

  “So … we yield? To an Offworlder?”

  “He’s … he’s not an Offworlder. He’s Latelian. And, also, someone dropped a Spaceport on him and he didn’t die. He’s over there probably faking his injuries. Don’t forget, people from Trinityspace are great liars. I remember this one pips… never mind.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s an Offworlder. Don’t give me that look. I know what I said and I say I would like to live. It’s a farce anyway. Technically speaking none of us earned our way here anyway. We were picked by avatars. There’s no honor in that.”

  “Ugh. He’s right. All right. Let’s go and bend our knee.”

  xxx

  “What is going on down there?” Uncle Sa and Granger demanded in unison. They watched in awed silence with the rest of the solar system as five God soldiers walked up to the tiny non-Latelian citizen –who looked like his chest had probably been caved in- to have a discussion.

  xxx

  Tomas Kamagana watched from the comfort of his own couch, though he could’ve easily been present for this most historical showdown. It’d been difficult, surrendering his tickets –one for him, one for Naoko- to the people across the hallway, but he’d made the right choice. What was happening was something that was likely to erupt out of the massive auditorium, onto the streets and through the cities.

  Puffing contentedly on his pipe, Tomas wondered if Port City was so far away rioters wouldn’t even consider the journey.

  xxx

  Seta looked across her shoulder at Naoko, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the common room, eating food and drinking some water. “You’re dating him?”

  Greuz, pale and getting paler, moved another few inches away. “Why didn’t he kill us all?”

  “He was sleepy.” Naoko replied primly, though inwardly, she was panicking. There was something very definitely wrong with Garth. She’d watched him fight for an eternity, and while his style of attack was as varied as a person’s moods, there wa
s one thing she’d noticed immediately; his speed and his strength were gone.

  He’d used those deadly weapons to kill three of the Eight –though Garth would deny he was responsible for the third God soldier, that he’d simply left the ax buried in his skull- and that was all right, but it should’ve been unnecessary. He should’ve been able to destroy the Eight with his bare hands.

  Sandlak had busied himself rewatching footage of the weapons in action, shaking his head in amazement every time Sa Holmes had his brain and heart perforated in under three seconds. “What kind of weapons are those?”

  “That’s a good point.” Seta pointed out. “I thought you couldn’t use energy weapons.”

  Naoko turned the volume up. That was worrisome as well. Obviously the ax and the whip had passed rigorous scanning; not even the greediest Game Promoter would accept a bribe to sneak deadly dangerous and illegal hand weapons into a fight. Their career would be over, and being a Promoter was the second most lucrative position in the entire system.

  Knowing Garth, having seen firsthand what he was capable of, it wasn’t too great a leap of the imagination to assume he’d turned his phenomenal creativity towards designing … magical weapons.

  Alli jerked his chin at the monitors. “They do a lot of this, this standing in the middle of a hundred thousand screaming fans, chit-chatting? There was a lot of blood at first, but now it’s like a council meeting. I thought there’d be more blood.”

  xxx

  Garth pretended he was twelve feet tall. No. Better. Thirteen feet tall and ten feet wide. It was the only way to keep from feeling like a goddamn toddler.

  He was also working very hard on not being sarcastic. Foursies either didn’t get sarcasm or they hated it. Whichever it was, the results were the same; they clenched their fists and tried to punch the sarcasm away.

  “So, how are you guys?” Garth eyed the gaping chest wound of the Goddie nearest him. Half of one of the guy’s lungs was exposed and he could see all kinds of metal circuits running up and down the dude’s insides.

  Sevlar wrinkled his massive nose and poked at his lung. He hadn’t been hurt like this since … nearly three thousand years ago. “You fight very well, for an Offworlder.”

  “You fight exactly like a dude who’s been going at it for a real long time.” Garth took a deep breath and made a weird noise as his chest told him deep breathing was off the table.

  “How did you get these weapons past security?” Boron asked, fiddling with the ax. He’d swung it in every possible way, had been since they’d stopped fighting and started talking, but the ends hadn’t caught on fire. “They’re illegal.”

  “They’re not illegal. They’re … regular.” Garth wrested the ax from Boron and, after giving them all a look that said ‘I am not suicidal, please don’t stomp me flat’, spun the ax around. The air between him and the Goddies shone with fire. “Miniature gyroscopes inside the shaft. You’ve got to be a certain strength. A very specific, certain strength that no one else anywhere can match. Better than genetic locks.” It was a lie, but under a plausible one.

  All six of them stood there in silence for a moment, listening to the shouts, hisses and boos from the crowd, which was growing louder and surlier by the moment. Over the announcer system, Uncle Sa and Granger were having an incredibly vociferous argument about –of all things- the former’s sex life and how that was having a terrible effect on the Game down below.

  “So….” Garth dragged the word out. “What’s, uh, what’s up.”

  Boron rumbled deep in his chest. “We … we yield.”

  “Say what now?” About the stupidest grin he’d ever grinned in his entire life filled his face full of teeth and happiness. He shoved the shitty fact that he still had to fight Gurant away into a corner and jammed a mental fire ax into its figurative forehead. He got to live a little while longer, which meant his stupid, uncooperative q-circuits would maybe get up and do something.

  Sevlar bent down on one knee and the others followed Suit. The auditorium erupted into madness. Uncle Sa and Granger filled the air with a long string of curses. God soldiers rose from their seated positions and turned to face the crowd, bellowing commands.

  xxx

  Vasily looked up at Gurant. The God soldier had grown another five feet in height and had added somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred pounds of something to his frame.

  Gurant smiled. “It is about time.”

  xxx

  Alyssa howled and gnashed her teeth. No one could do anything right. No one. She called the lead assassin and told him to prepare.

  xxx

  Tomas bit his pipe in half, dribbling half-hot embers of tobacco across his wizened chest. Moving spryly for a man his age, he leaped from the couch, cursing in EuroJapanese.

  xxx

  “Has anyone ever yielded before?” Seta asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

  Naoko couldn’t take her eyes off the screens. Garth looked terribly, sickeningly relieved that the fight was over. “No, not over three thousand years. Not since God soldiers started fighting in the Game. They never yield. They die.”

  Greuz pointed at the enormous soldiers. Even on one knee, heads bent in supplication, they towered above Garth Nickels by an easy five feet. The man looked so tiny, so pathetic, so … frail. “These ones did.”

  Naoko opted to keep silent. Something was happening on her homeworld, something that wasn’t easily relayed through the ‘LINKs.

  xxx

  Fenris nodded once. The dark-haired savage down there could be N’Chalez after all. He rose from his chair. It was time for a confrontation.

  xxx

  Uncle Sa read the prompt from the Game Promoters. They were going to run out some more Onesies and the remaining shubin bulls for a quick round of ‘no one pay attention to the fact that this is all going swiftly downhill’. “This is a disaster.” He moaned, looking to Granger for support.

  Granger read his prote. “And we’re giving away a free drink to everybody down there.”

  Uncle Sa cleared his throat, ran through a couple seconds of voice exercises and then started making announcements. “Ladies and gentlemen, sis and sas, we are lucky to witness history in the making! While we set the arena up for one on one combat between Sa Garth Nickels and Sa Gurant, we are offering…”

  xxx

  Ute and Huey moved swiftly through the milling crowd of support staff, pushing slow-moving fools out of the way if they lingered even a second too long; they had to get to Garth in his sequestered changing room for a variety of equally important reasons. First, they had to see if the man wasn’t a few seconds away from death. Second, they had to figure out a way to spirit the whip and ax out of the arena before either the Chairwoman or the OverCommander’s staff realized they’d seen the impossible out there.

  Third, they needed to protect his life until he could risk it again in about an hour; the crowd, held at bay for the time being by the presence of God soldiers specifically tasked with the chore of beating rioting spectators unconscious, might choose to not care. There were a hundred thousand of them and perhaps ten thousand God soldiers. In the chaos that ensued because of an actual in-arena riot, anything could happen.

  Ute’s eyes fell on a man talking to the two Onesies standing outside Garth’s secluded quarters. The ex-Foursie reached out and grabbed hold of Huey’s arm.

  Huey stopped and turned. “What?”

  Ute pointed a trembling finger at the tall, average-looking Latelian. “Don’t … do not go in there right now.”

  When Huey stared at something, he stared with the full might of a level 11 AI riding pillion on the ubiquitous presence of the HIM’s quantum field. Every scanner, camera, Screen, sheet, ‘LINK and the actual, physical representation of the local space/time field bent to his will when he wanted to get a really good look at something and he stared at the man.

  “Huh?” Huey’s mouth dropped open. The man was … there and not there. “What …”

 
Ute swallowed. Tried to swallow. His mouth was as dry as it’d ever been. As dry as the day he’d first seen Fenris and the other four. The day that he and nearly ten thousand God soldiers had all seen something they shouldn’t have, the day that’d cost them their lives. “That … that is a Five. One of the Five.”

  Whispers in historical documents hinted at knowledge Ute clearly possessed from firsthand experience. None of it boded well for Garth. “We’ve got to do something.”

  Ute shook his head again and put his hand on Huey’s shoulder once more. He gripped as tightly as he could as the … the man wanted to race to Garth’s side. Ute wanted to do the same, as badly as anything he’d ever wanted. But he couldn’t. He owed Fenris for two thousand years of freedom.

  “We must wait, Huey.” Ute took a deep breath. “We … must wait. And hope that Fenris doesn’t kill Garth.”

  Huey dismissed Ute’s warnings and doubled his efforts, drawing on more of the HIM’s power. The Five confronting Garth glistened in the quantum field for a moment and then … and then …

  Huey lost his mind. He scrambled for purchase inside Barnes’ body and was summarily booted out, forced into leaving Garth to fend for himself.

  Music of the Spheres, Part I

  “So you claim to be N’Chalez.”

  Garth, lying down on a massage table, arm crooked over his eyes, didn’t even bother looking at who’d walked in unannounced when there was supposed to be two particularly stupid Onesies preventing that from happening. “Why are there all these people who can suddenly say my name now? It’s like some kind of weird verbal plague. I don’t even like the name. And for the record, I don’t claim anything. I am him. I mean, me. I’m me.”

  “And yet that fight was a near thing.” Fenris commented wryly, grabbing a hot towel from the dispenser and sliding it into Garth’s hand.

  Garth accepted the towel and slid it onto his head, managing to work things so that he didn’t catch any glimpse of the man he was talking to. “So you know my name and how to say it properly. Who in the hell are you?”