Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Why …” Ute dropped into his seat. “Why don’t you do something, then?”

  “Because.” Huey showed his palms, defeated. “When Garth reordered my consciousness to become what I am, he left hardwired commands. Of utmost priority is that I not interfere with his efforts of entering Bravo. I assume he knew, even then, that getting into the Box would require a great deal of patience and more than a few trials, but my man down there has always been one to do things the hard way. He could not, however, have known about this. Or Fenris, or a bunch of other shit.”

  “Surely you can override those restrictions.” Ute glowered at Gurant. How could Garth not feel that presence looming down upon him?

  “If I had a hundred years and his girlfriend, sure, absolutely.” Huey shrugged sheepishly. “The man developed the science behind what I am thirty thousand years ago, sa. He’s forgotten more about artificial intelligence than anyone else has discovered since then. Oh. Look. He’s turning around. This should be … awful.”

  xxx

  “Should he look like that?” Alligorni had spent most of his professional life in Latelyspace avoiding God soldiers at all costs; men in his line of work who ran afoul of the giant soldiers had a life expectancy of minus three and so he didn’t know if what he was seeing was normal or not. If it was normal, Alli decided, he was quitting the business of stealing people.

  Naoko didn’t say anything. She was petrified. The … the … it was some kind of abomination, something equal to or worse than the Gunboys, designed in the Chairwoman’s mad laboratories to rid herself of Garth.

  “I hate to be the one to say this out loud,” Greuz said warily, “but I am pretty sure your boyfriend is going to die. Maybe we could get caught up on The God Squad? That’s a funny show.”

  xxx

  Even before Uncle Sa and Granger had announced Gurant’s arrival on the scene with simultaneous disgust and horror, Garth had seen shock, awe and … nearly ecstatic fear ripple across the crowd.

  Only a fool would mistake that for anything else other than emotion over Gurant. It was why he’d persisted in dancing with his back towards Gurant’s entrance; there wasn’t much left to him and seeing Gurant without first mentally preparing himself …

  Garth danced for a few seconds more, busting out a rousing take on The Running Man before turning to confront Gurant. How bad it could it be, anyway? The guy had already been a Foursie. A little additional Reality juice couldn’t do that much harm, right?

  Garth spun on his heels, popping and locking one final time.

  “Are you fucking serious? What the fuck is this?”

  Someone, somewhere, really was messing with him. He knew it for certain.

  Garth VS Gurant

  Garth craned his head up. And up. And up some more. He had an uncomfortable view right up the massive cyborg’s nostrils. Sadly, it wasn’t the first time but it was –unless his q-form decided to ramp itself up all on its own- going to be the last.

  Gurant had grown into a true behemoth. Driven by whatever twisted psychopathy you found in a megalomaniacal Foursie like Gurant, the events at the Museum had started transforming the Goddie into … a battle-plated golem. There was nothing else to describe what had happened –was happening- to Gurant.

  The metallic overskin process wasn’t yet complete. Garth saw that in a split-second, not that it really mattered one way or the other; if he was going to magically win this fight, it wasn’t going to be through something as prosaic as the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The duronium undermesh that all God soldiers had would’ve prevented that anyway because as a Foursie, that internal shielding was that much more comprehensive. In addition to a really awesome, shiny skin that would look spectacular in the sunshine and was a hazard for blindness, Gurant was now sporting kickass spikes and horns and things growing all over the place.

  “So,” Garth said introspectively, his voice rolling through the mega-stadium, “you, uh, you got bigger.”

  Gurant chuckled, a vast, wet, bass that licked at the far walls. “You got smaller. And weaker.” Looking at Sa Garth Nickels made his eyes twitch. It was as though his scanners were trying to locate some … some thing that his subconscious knew should be there. Onboard systems said there was nothing. “What happened to you, little man?”

  “That’s a funny story, you see…”

  Gurant was bored. The fight was pointless. He did not care that Nickels was no longer what he’d been. He’d come as a man and not as Bosch, and that’d been a mistake. Gurant drove a fist the size of a locomotive engine into Garth, feeling the top knuckle collide with his enemy’s head and the bottom one scrape the ground.

  A surprised Garth flew backward, a stupid expression of surprise on his already dead face. Not done, not by a longshot, Gurant swarmed after the flying corpse, angling an uppercut that sent Nickels straight up for nearly sixty feet. Moving smoothly, Gurant’s highly complex cybernetic muscles shifted him from a forward gallop into an upward leap. At the apex of his flight, Gurant pulled back a mighty arm and hammered it into Garth’s limp body with every ounce of power he had.

  It was considerable. The crack of his fist passing the speed of sound ricocheted throughout the Arena, stunning some of the more sensitive spectators. Garth’s body arced downwards, striking the hard-packed earth of the arena floor, a human asteroid.

  Gurant landed with a thunderous three-point touchdown. The crowd –those who could even process what had happened- went wild. The GigantiSheets began replaying the entire fight –a fight that’d taken less than three seconds- at ten thousand times slow motion and even still, the processors were having a difficult time. About the only thing they were getting perfect was the stupid look on that stupid Offworlder’s ugly face as he’d been killed.

  Uncle Sa and Granger were shouting obscenities into their microphones almost non-stop. Mixed between incredulous and mostly incoherent curse words –some of which would assuredly get them dead come morning- they praised Gurant and his magnificence.

  Gurant threw his hands up in the air and roared, a hearty bellow heard worldwide. Cameras flared, spEyes recorded, ‘LINKs beamed his image across the stars.

  He was a God.

  xxx

  Seta put a hand on Naoko’s shoulder. The poor girl was weeping uncontrollably and little wonder; her boyfriend had just been … murdered on systemic television. Some pricking of the skin told her to look over her shoulder and so Seta followed the notion just in time to catch a wicked gleam in Greuz’ eyes. She shot him a poisonous glance.

  Alligorni couldn’t take his eyes off the Screen. He’d never seen anything so … so … anything in his entire life. The God soldier … Gurant … had demolished Naoko’s boyfriend, moving so fast that the cameras in the arena –specifically designed to handle the speed of the fastest cyborgs in the system- were leaving huge gaps in the actual fight’s progression. Something flickered at the far end of the viewpoint.

  “Hey! What!” Alli squinted, fumbling with the controls for the ‘LINK feed. He wrestled with the commands for a few seconds before managing to find a series of unused cameras and directed them to look at Garth’s impact crater. He wasn’t the only eagle-eyed spectator out there; as he directed the ‘poor people’ cameras to peek, several thousand hi-res ‘rich man’ spEyes swarmed closer.

  The dirt pile was moving.

  “Oh. My. God.” Alligorni shouted. He didn’t know what to do, so he pumped his fist. He’d never done it before in his life, never seen the motion, but it was the right thing to do. He hollered again, voice cracking with excitement. “Holy. Shit. Hey! Hey! He’s … guys … Greuz, put down that wrench! Hey! He’s not dead!”

  Naoko looked up from her misery. The dirt continued twitching.

  xxx

  The audience was quieting down, something Gurant didn’t like. His massive face screwed up into an ugly, mottled vision of anger and disappointment. They would all need teaching, of course. They needed to understand what he was now.

  And the best w
ay to teach was with the fist.

  xxx

  OverCommander Vasily stared at the two dead BCUs littering his personal skybox, nose wrinkling. He’d always feared it would come to this. In the history of Latelyspace, a partnership between OverCommander and Chair never lasted, never maintained trust and honesty, always ended in violent bloodshed. The latter loathed the former’s ability to control the God soldiers, the former almost always wanted the Prometheus Device for himself.

  His collusion with Alyssa, their grand scheme to control everything that Trinity held ... that’d helped. It’d been a definitive goal, a reason to work through the petty –and sometimes not- arguments dividing the two posts of ultimate authority.

  Now … if Vasily was completely honest, no sane person would’ve come up with the idea of conquering Trinity’s Domain under the black umbrella of a Dark Age.

  The audience’s silence drew Vasily from his grim contemplation. He peered through the windows.

  xxx

  “Are you ready?” Alyssa all but howled into her prote. She imagined she could see her snipers, seeded throughout the auditorium, wincing and trembling in fear at her wrath. She had been the first to see the dirt of Garth’s shallow grave shift. She –out of an entire solar system of fools and idiots- had been the only one to know he wasn’t dead. “Are you ready to kill him? If he defeats that freakish God soldier, you kill him dead. Then you kill the God soldier. Then you kill anyone who does anything that makes you nervous.”

  The snipers, armed with smaller, ‘less deadly’ versions of the FARS-gun, designed for tactical use on battlefields choked with infantry, would have no problems in carrying out the Chairwoman’s mad orders.

  They’d been bred for the purpose.

  xxx

  “… on … on account of, during our last … fuck me, man … fight, I kinda sorta lost … lost all my powers.” Garth pulled himself up out of the dirt. He fish-flopped out of the hole and lay there on the ground for an entire second, a whole second, during which time he reflected on how completely fucked up his life had become.

  The moment passed and it was time to greet Fate head-on.

  He really should’ve built an orbital death ray supercannon. Way more sensible than quadronium circuitry.

  Garth climbed wearily to his feet, aware of Gurant’s incredulous stare from three hundred feet away. The crowd roared the utterly incomprehensible approval of this sudden and very impossible turn of events, thousands and thousands of spectators leaping to their feet and stomping, shouting, screaming and crying.

  Garth patted the dust from his clothes. They were ruined.

  Gurant didn’t waste time wondering what was going on. His automatic response systems responded to the threat by throwing his body into motion.

  Prepared for the moment, Garth took a deep breath and tried not to pee his pants. The q-form was working, sort of; the hundreds of millions of subatomic quadronium particles in his body had ‘risen’ to the occasion of Gurant punching the utter Hulk-sized shit out of him by forming an indestructible barrier between the point of impact and his delicious, gooey insides. He knew without looking that several layers of skin beneath his clothes and part of his face were destroyed. There was a thin layer of skin held taught above the q-fibers, but that was it; even then, the ultra-thin spread of flesh wasn’t perfect. Garth could feel portions of his face where there was nothing but the Universal element.

  Thank god no one would be scanning him with anything more sophisticated than Screen-tech. Hopefully anyone looking at him through a Sheet or Screen would assume the empty blotches where parts of his face were supposed to be was due to transmission error.

  He … he didn’t want to go flying again. That was a terrible feeling, hurtling through the air with a dude like Gurant chasing after you, moving at the speed of light and chanting weird shit that he probably wasn’t even aware of.

  Garth set his feet. The q-form ballooned again, only … only in weird directions that actually made him want to barf. He could feel tendrils of quadronium circuitry snake into his brain and tickle his eyeballs.

  Time slowed down just enough to show Garth how frighteningly close Gurant’s fist was, how big it was and most importantly –and in an entirely unnecessary and vaguely taunting move- how hard it was going to hit.

  Garth brought his hand –which was something like one-one hundredths the size of Gurant’s stupidly big mega-fist- up to block the punch. It was the only thing to do.

  The thunderclap shut down all recording devices, threw more than ninety percent of everyone in the viewing audience into transitory, hysterical blindness.

  -kinetic transference in 3 … 2 … 1 … -

  xxx

  Gurant’s fist hit something that did not move. The jarring impact sent shockwaves tearing faster than the speed of sound back through his arm, wrenching and shuddering duronium bones in their sockets. Several unimportant systems went offline and half a dozen duronium spikes, grown cruelly through his skin, literally shot off his shoulder.

  The Fivesie blinked the red warning lights away and looked blurrily around, muzzily wondering what had happened. Damage control systems informed him that his arm was at eighty percent efficiency and would require nearly three full hours to recuperate.

  xxx

  Griffin whistled. His old commander was full of surprises, yes he was. Too bad. Once the HIM was under proper control none of that would matter.

  xxx

  “Ouch.” Garth said. Then he looked down at himself. Awesome. He was naked in front of trillions. “Ouch? Ou… ouch. Huh.”

  Then, because it seemed that the glass shards of pain shredding through him apparently felt that what had just happened to him deserved more of a response than ‘ouch’, “Jesus that hurts.”

  The skin on his arms, and his entire body, had stretched, the q-form absorbing what had to’ve been a ten-kiloton deliverance of kinetic energy and driving it through the hundred million or so quadronium tubes stretching into the extra-dimensionality. A transferal pushing his body upwards and outwards to match the size, speed and strength of one Sa Gurant, mutated Fivesie with Harmonic tendencies.

  “Well, this is weird.” Garth flexed his giant muscles and made Schwarzenegger noises at a stupefied audience.

  He continued after he realized he was balls-ass naked. He had a fight to win. Modesty came in second.

  xxx

  Ute and Huey, one of the only few people in the audience to resist the temporary blinding effect of the gargantuan impact, looked at one another, mouths open.

  The ex-Goddie spoke first. “Is that supposed to happen?”

  Huey, who’d been running theoretical models on Garth’s freshly implanted q-form since the moment he’d hastily slammed trillions of quadronium fibers through the sheathes, shrugged. “I … it’s … it’s a learning system. In theory, given enough time and power, it can … it could … engineer a proper response. And … and the quantum field emitters can do damn near anything when powered by the ex-dee. Supposed to happen? Probably not. Did happen … uh, giant naked Garth. But…”

  Around them, the crowd was awakening from their panicky blindness. In fits and spurts they refocused on the fight down below, their inarticulate shouts of confusion once again spiraling out of control.

  Ute looked down at Gurant and Garth. The massive and hideously malformed God soldier was cocking his other fist back, gearing up for another explosion of force. “But?”

  Huey shook his head dismally. “The one thing I am sure of is that whatever the fuck just happened is temporary. Kinetic energy … even a payload as big as the one he just absorbed … isn’t the right kind of energy to power up the field emitters. Whatever Garth did to turn himself … um, big, won’t last. After this … bigness, there ain’t no more tricks in his bag.”

  Ute watched the fist start to move, marveling in the return of his God soldier powers even as he lamented his inability to assist. “How long does Sa Nickels have before he … reverts? And, more importantl
y, can he beat Gurant like this?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe?” Huey ran the figures through his subminds and got an awful lot of nil responses. The answers he did get came from fringe minds so far out of touch with reality that he was honestly surprised one of them didn’t just say ‘daisies’. “And no. He’s as fast as Gurant, probably was from the start because that’s easy. The easiest. Next is response time. Also easy. But strength? There are a fuckton of things that gotta be enhanced to equal Gurant. I … oh, here we go.”

  xxx

  “Not so weak after all.” Gurant drove a fist at Garth and was already moving into a lumbering spin kick before the attack was countered.

  “Oh,” Garth slapped the punch away, ducked under the kick and delivered a paltry jab at the God soldier’s doubtless armor-plated wang, “I don’t like to brag.”

  Gurant flexed his jaw at the punch, turning the uncomfortable attack into a spin. As he whirled, he threw his arms out, catching Garth in a blur of open-handed slaps that sent the Offworlder backwards. “Tell me your secret.”

  Garth rubbed the back of a hand against his mouth, taking away blood. Several of his teeth were loose and he was positive he didn’t want to be hit in the head like that again. As expected, the q-form wasn’t perfect; he was big enough to fight Gurant on equal footing, but was no longer invulnerable.

  It wouldn’t be perfect until all the quantum field emitters had been spun up, and that wasn’t going to happen during this little tête-à-tête.

  Garth tilted his head to one side. “You tell me yours. Tell me why you’re humming.”

  Gurant launched himself at the Offworlder, urging his online systems to move faster. The God soldier hadn’t had time to push himself prior to the fight, had been … unconcerned … about the confrontation, had never imagined that the Offworlder would be able to do anything like this. He had no idea what would happen by drawing more on the torrential power raging through him and even less of a clue as to the price he’d pay for being so demanding.