Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “I,” Gurant shouted to be heard above the sudden singing in his blood, “am not humming.” He jumped, delivering a crushing elbow to Garth’s unexposed right shoulder.

  Garth grunted as he dropped to a knee. A spear of agony drilled through the shoulder, past the lungs and into his hip and –as he delivered a hearty punch to Gurant’s exposed gut- the ex-Specter wondered if his bones could break in his current … ‘condition’. If his teeth were wiggly, then he grimly figured the answer would be yes.

  Gurant tried to step out of the way of the punch to his abdomen, and as he stepped, Garth stood, jammed a hand into the attacking elbow’s armpit and grabbed that wrist. The Goddie struggled violently to get loose of the surprising move. Warning signals flooded through him but it was too late; his own frantic motion dislocated the shoulder. Bellowing furiously, falling backwards to get away, Gurant lashed out with a forward kick, catching Garth high in the chest as he himself hit the ground.

  The crowd, dazed, confused, and emotionally obliterated, issued a soft ooooh. They’d already been through so much in the day that they were having difficulty time breathing.

  Garth grunted as he landed hard on his back. Too big and not at all used to the big-ass body he’d accidentally grown for himself to do the back-flip-onto-your-feet thing that his opponent did just as casually as breathing, Garth found himself suddenly rolling across the floor in a desperate bid to avoid being stomped flat.

  Gurant chased Garth across thirty feet of floor, each of his thunderous, barefoot slaps against the hard dirt of the floor sounding like rumbling earthquakes. The power was there, deep inside. It wasn’t easy to get to, there were … obstructions … blocking the way, but the more he concentrated, the easier it was becoming. While his feet slammed and rained down at Garth, the God soldier realized that his adversary was right.

  He was humming. Almost inaudible, virtually unnoticed, some … part of him had been humming the whole time. A lightning quick check of his systems revealed that he’d been repeating the same sequence of sounds over and over again –sounds well out of normal hearing range- since his last ‘training’ session when he’d accused someone of playing bells during the fighting.

  Gurant laughed as one of Garth’s cowardly, frightened rolls went awry, and for more reasons than just the fact that he’d stopped with his stomach completely exposed. No, what was of infinitely greater humor was the realization that he wasn’t making the humming noise with his mouth.

  No, his body was singing. His body was singing and all he had to do was reach out, grab hold, and let the song in. If he let the song in, he could truly defeat Garth N’Chalez and then he could subjugate the weak and destroy his enemies.

  Of which there was an entire Galaxy’s worth.

  Garth watched the foot come down at him like God’s own fury. Then he heard a sound he’d hoped never to hear, ever again.

  The Song of the Heshii Paradigm, the tainted Harmony of the Spheres, a poisonous melody that drove normal men mad and gifted them with horrific powers and an insatiable lust for destruction. It was a song that, at the end, had put fear into the hearts of the Kith and Kin themselves.

  Nightmarishly, it was coming from Gurant.

  A song that was virulent. A plague. One man surviving the infection spread it to others and there, in the Final Game Arena, were thousands of soldiers who were already prime vectors.

  “Ah, shit.” Garth brought his hands up to catch Gurant’s foot as it slammed down. His wrists, elbows and shoulders groaned with the effort of absorbing the blow. He felt one shoulder break and the other wrote him a hasty note of apology before becoming so sprained it would likely take longer to heal than its broken counterpart. Garth did his best to shimmy out of the way of the truly gigantic foot as it continued down, barely managing to keep it from crushing his stomach. As it was, the heel caught him on the right side, breaking three ribs and … yep … puncturing a lung.

  Gurant’s foot collided with the arena floor and the arena trembled.

  xxx

  Fenris watched the battle impassively. He felt the emotions of his four brothers keenly. They, unlike him, were nervous, concerned. They wanted the man calling himself Garth N’Chalez to be Garth N’Chalez, but Fenris counted upon nothing but truth.

  Trinity was vast, it was old, it was endlessly and cruelly manipulative. Reports and sources validated every claim Garth made, and although one of those sources had assisted them a hundred times over, at the end of the day, there was only the truth.

  The man calling himself N’Chalez either was, or was not. If he was, the solution would come. If he was not, then he would die and every God soldier not already tied to the Five would become Heshii Harmony Soldiers and all would be lost; as terrible and powerful as they were now, forty million Harmonized God soldiers would be an unstoppable plague of locusts.

  The Five and the Hundred Thousand would be crushed underfoot.

  Fenris settled back into his chair, calm as a sunrise.

  xxx

  Garth rolled a few more times, but it wasn’t necessary; Gurant was stock still, eyes ripped wide open, arms flung out to his sides as his cerebral cortex and whatever crazy cybernetic systems he had inside got stuffed chock full of even crazier Heshii subroutines. He struggled to his feet, spat up an awful lot of blood and listened to his lungs wheeze and bubble.

  Then, because the Universe had a shitty sense of humor, he started shrinking.

  xxx

  High in their observation booth, Sa and Granger started panicking when the cameras came back online of their own volition. The two men started slapping at buttons to kill the feed; they needed to get it done before the Chairwoman demanded they do it, because if the crazy old Chair beat them to the punch, they wouldn’t get out of the room alive.

  A grey-eyed man looked up from their monitors. “Really, guys?” the unnamed … hacker … demanded scornfully. “One of the most awesome events in all of Latelian history and you want to keep the people from witnessing it?”

  Uncle Sa continued hitting buttons. Granger looked around for something big and heavy to smash the consoles into a million pieces.

  “No.” Huey ticked a finger back and forth. Uncle Sa and Granger stopped briefly. “This needs to happen, this needs to be seen. You’ll be safe. Report what you see. Do a good job. We stand on the verge.”

  The two sports reporters watched the grey-eyed man’s face disappear from the Screens. They looked at one another. Uncle Sa grinned sheepishly. “Before I picked this gig up I worked for News4You.”

  “Funny.” Granger replied, redirecting the cameras to give the home audience less of the glitzy, glamorous high and low shots that the Game Promoters preferred and more of the straight-up, in your face shots favored by real news stations. “I worked for Hospitalis Tonight, about a million years ago.”

  “Well then.” Uncle Sa took a deep breath. “Let’s do some final reporting, shall we, you crusty, bitter old man.”

  “After you, you queer-as-hell sybaritic pervert.”

  Uncle Sa laughed at the joke. “Ladies and gentlemen, sis and sas, Uncle Sa and Granger live and direct from … from what might be the beginning of the end here …”

  xxx

  Griffin grabbed hold of a panicky Latelian in a bright red jumpsuit. “Hey, hey, uh, miss, ya’ll mind tellin’ me where I can find th’ Chairwoman? Ah, uh, Ah got a package for her. Yeah, it’s real important-like.”

  The Enforcer prepared himself to beat the answer out of the woman in the red Suit but she answered without hesitation, demanding even as she fled the way he’d just come, “Don’t you hear that? That … that … sound?”

  Griffin nodded. “Sure Ah do, sweetheart, an’ it sounds like home t’me.”

  The Harmony had come to Latelyspace. That’d make things a might bit easier.

  xxx

  “You okay, man?” Huey asked Ute the question gently, even though he already knew the answer. Ute was not, strictly speaking, all right. Not any longer. None of th
e God soldiers were.

  Down below, in front of everyone, Gurant was becoming a chimera, a terrible mixture of Harmony and God soldier with an unfortunate underscoring of paradoxical energy thrown in for good measure. As with the ancient Harmony soldiers, so too had Gurant become a ‘seedling’ for anyone with a specific type of DNA or thought patterns: the Armies of Man had never been able to exactly determine the specific process that a Harmony seedling used to convert those around him or her, but in this case, it was easy to tell.

  The God soldiers shared a communal, nearly telepathic link to one another through the weak duronium bridge to the extra-dimensionality. Gurant was forming a bigger, badder, wider bridge, and through it came the Song.

  God soldiers in the auditorium started gabbling in their guttural, throat-ripping pidgin language, laughingly called ‘Batlang’.

  Huey knew what it really was and if Garth wanted to survive, he’d better figure it out fucking quickly.

  Ute opened his mouth to offer support to Gurant.

  Huey smacked him in the head. “Hey, knock it off, asshole, you’re on the good guy side.” Then, for good measure, he hacked into Ute’s subconscious avatar ‘LINK and embedded a permanent block.

  And then, because he could feel the Five’s beady eyes on him, Huey gave Fenris the finger.

  xxx

  God soldiers the arena over filled the air with their bellowing, gruff shouts.

  To Latelians, it was awful, a discordant, maddened baying at the moon kind of insanity. Those onlookers seated next to God soldiers shifted uncomfortably in their seats and more than eighty percent rose quickly, reluctant to miss whatever was going to happen once the crowd favorite –Gurant- stopped glowing like a star but profoundly disinterested in sitting next to a vacant-eyed, grunting, screaming God soldier. Parents hauled children away by the ears, husbands left wives, wives left husbands, and people began fleeing en masse.

  To Garth, head ringing, chest stinging, bones aching, the Song sounded … broken. For four thousand years, the God soldiers had been speaking broken Harmony. Probably from the very beginning.

  All that was changing. Or would change, in just a few seconds, once Gurant was finished getting his cranium shoved full of Heshii genetic propaganda. Once that happened…

  Garth sighed, full of relief. He didn’t relax as much as he wanted to because there was every chance the plan that’d leaped into his head wouldn’t work, but at least he had some kind of chance that didn’t involve having to be punched too many times more.

  Because if he failed, Gurant wouldn’t even need to move from where he stood; some kind of laser cannon or sonic shooting beam or some kind of distance weapon would spontaneously manifest itself. That sort of thing tended to happen over time, and the creep was four thousand plus years old. His body was ripe for transformation.

  xxx

  The Song ended. The Harmony bristled in him. Head spinning with alien concepts that would take more time than he was willing to spend right then to understand, Gurant spun in a slow circle, eyes glittering with a sickening light. He smiled wide when he saw, up in the stands, five black shadows.

  “I see you.” Gurant whispered, but the words rattled against the walls. “I see you and when I am done with this … mortal … we will rise up against you.”

  The God soldiers hollered and stamped their feet and brandished their weapons. Driven by Gurant, they turned and faced the crowd.

  Gurant turned his attention to N’Chalez, who’d shrunk down to normal size. He was beyond notice now, but as in all things, it paid to take notice anyways. Once upon a time, N’Chalez had posed a dire threat to the natural order of things, and while that had obviously changed, the man possessed a deadly instinct and even deadlier way with weapons.

  “You are going to die, now.” Gurant took a step forward. He didn’t even bother to use his infinitely more enhanced systems to carry him right up to the cowering Offworlder. Content that this was being broadcast to the entire solar system, Gurant wanted everyone to see the utter destruction of the man they’d so foolishly adored.

  When it was all over and done with, they would have themselves someone new to adore. “Look at you, N’Chalez … broken, battered, weak. My mind tells me this isn’t how you used to be. You used to flare so brightly against … someone … so brightly they actually couldn’t see you until it was too late. Oh, how they feared you.”

  Garth spat another mouthful of blood onto the dirt. “They had every right to fear me, Gurant. I was born to kill them all. Say goodbye to your friends and family, Sa Gurant. I give you leave to wish them well.”

  Gurant’s laughter blasted the audience. He stretched his arms out, reveling in the power coursing through them. In the corners of his mind, his brothers and sisters in the Army were tiny, twinkling little lights that followed his commands, but only barely. When this debacle was over with, when he’d pulled N’Chalez’ head from his body and consumed it, he would teach the others how to become like him. It would be glorious.

  “And what,” Gurant demanded fervently, “and what makes you think you can give a god any leave?”

  The audience, not so far gone in terror and madness at what they were present for, gasped. Trillions of Latelians throughout the solar system hissed, booed, and stamped their feet. High in their skyboxes, Chairwoman Alyssa Doans and OverCommander Vasily Tizhen shared similar reactions to the unspeakable utterance that had just tripped so madly from one of their own; they began plans to destroy the entire auditorium and all of the people in it in the hopes that they managed to kill Gurant.

  Light years away, Naoko Kamagana and the crew of the Zhivago blinked, nonplussed.

  Enforcer Griffin Jones just laughed, shook his head and continued on his way towards the skybox where his target was undoubtedly frothing at the mouth.

  “Poor choice of words.” Garth commented dryly. He cleared his throat. He’d never actually been able to speak Harmony beyond a few words, and very poorly at that; some … quirk … in the Harmonizing process made it nearly impossible for normal people -or even the Kith’kin and Kin’kith, for that matter- from making the sounds right. Forming just a few words, a few sounds, even, of Harmony made the speaker feel like their throat was going to be ripped out.

  Back in the day, he’d managed to get a single sentence out; he’d begged some random Harmony asshole to spare a child, and it’d worked, but left him mute for an entire month. Oh, how the Armies of Man had loved that silence.

  If Lady Luck was really with him … now with the q-form rampant in his body, there was a really good chance his larynx and all that fun stuff would be able to handle the stresses.

  Gurant threw a hand at the crowd, who still booed, still hissed. “Bah. When me and mine rise up, we will destroy those who fail to hear. Those that do hear will worship me.”

  If at all possible, the disgust and rage grew, and those Latelians who’d brought their homemade weapons of civil anarchy with them suddenly decided that –creepy God soldiers staring straight ahead and muttering gobbledygook or not- they were going to jump down there and murder themselves a jumped-up God soldier with serious delusions of grandeur. Assuming, of course, that Garth failed to do the job.

  “Testing. One. Two. Three.” Garth waited for his throat to tear itself out, and when nothing happened beyond a mild tickling sensation and a weird euphoria that he knew instinctively not to trust, he went to high five himself. The broken arm grated bone on bone and the dislocated one just sort of hung there. Grimacing against his stupidity, Garth tried a few more words. “What’s new pussycat, Whoah-oh-oh.”

  xxx

  Fenris’ heart quivered in his chest. He felt the other four fill with nearly luminous joy. He pushed down on the tentative feeling. A few words in Harmony –and nonsense words, at that- meant nothing. Nothing at all.

  xxx

  Gurant felt his ears swivel and some internal part not yet categorized fluttered in recognition at the strange words coming out of Garth’s mouth. They sounded
like nothing he’d ever heard, and yet, in much the same way that he had very curious, half-formed recollections about the Offworlder, the sounds were familiar.

  “I do not know what is new.” Gurant answered. After he realized he had responded with absolute and utter subservience, he heard himself ask, “What is a pussycat?”

  What was happening? He was a newborn God! Sublimated with the power of a Harmony that knew no bounds, a Harmony offering endless swathes of destruction and the eventual –glorious- eradication of all life, everywhere, for all time, he was unstoppable. No mere man could speak with such authority!

  Thirty thousand years of pent-up fear and worry fled Garth. He was, for the time being, safe. He smiled, one of the few non-Naoko related smiles of happiness he’d enjoyed since landing on Hospitalis. “Kneel.”

  His mind began spinning with the poisonous advances of the Heshii Paradigm. The q-form, apparently redesigned for just this sort of thing, hungered eagerly towards the power, demanding connection, thin quadronium fibers fanning out, a hundred million invisible fibers shivering on the edge of improbability. Garth struggled against the q-form’s insentient need, winning after a few moments, even though success meant tossing away a huge advantage: the Heshii Harmony was electrified acid, neon maggots, a bad LSD trip, but it was power all the same. Garth shook his head. He’d rather die that drink from that fountain. He refocused. The Poisoned Harmony swirled and swam like glittering wasps at the edge of the True Harmony he was uttering.

  Gasps rocketed through the audience as every single God soldier dropped to one knee in mute supplication. Uncle Sa and Granger uttered one confused shriek each and then flat-out refused to comment any longer.

  Gurant legs buckled, so he turned the motion into an ungainly, awkward, lumbering step forward. Through teeth gritted so tightly molars shattered, he grated, “No.”