Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  He’d planned for this. Thirty thousand years ago, he’d sat down and devised a reason to come this far forward, a purpose and while he remembered very nearly everything, one final thing escaped him. That one thing would only become clear after he’d stepped inside. Fenris had pushed an answer out of him, had literally choked the truth as to what his goal was, and … it didn’t make any sense.

  Destroy the universe? What possible reason was there for that? It was madness. Destroy the Heshii, perhaps. Remove the extra-dimensionality or, at the very least, eliminate all chances for anyone to enter to that place. That made sense.

  But destroy everything? The Unreality? As much as was possible, he liked the Unreality. There were all kinds of people and things in it that would probably look unhappily on him if they found out that he was apparently planning to kill all of them.

  The Box –long-lost Bravo- shuddered up from the bowels of the Arena in all its glory and Garth’s smile faltered. He put the smile back on. It’d been a long time. He didn’t even remember building Bravo. Maybe … maybe his recollections were … were wrong. Maybe the q-form was affecting his perception after all.

  The Chairwoman wouldn’t fuck with him like this, would she? She had to know how majorly intent he was on getting inside, and how absolutely pissed off he’d be if she fucked with him now, this late in the day.

  It looked like Bravo; nothing like a box, the massive quadronium-forged vessel was, if you wanted to stick with your basic geometric shapes, a rectangle.

  Fifty feet long, fifteen feet high, thirty-five feet wide, Bravo satisfied the requirements for ‘rectangle’ almost perfectly. Dependent on hy-tech engines for propulsion and constructed from quadronium, Bravo had no real need to follow even the most basic design parameters of an actual vessel. Dim memories suggested that the chapped asses in the Armies of Man had insisted on making Bravo –once they’d found out about it’s imminent construction- look like a ship because ‘something something Army’.

  Garth pursed his lips as more of Bravo was revealed. His blood pressure was rising. No. This was not happening. His memory was to blame.

  Every available inch of Bravo’s exterior hull was engraved with a ‘language’, a specific ideographic form of writing carved into the impossible element and put there to frighten the ever-loving bejesus out of any Heshii agent who might have the misfortune of falling upon the vessel as it burned its way through space.

  A ‘Real’ Language, the engravings belonged to the Ushbet M’Tai, a … a race of beings from the real Universe that were –at best- described as mirror images to the M’Zahdi Hesh.

  At worst, the M’Tai were the same as the Heshii, just … different. They certainly weren’t much better than their Unreal counterparts in terms of how they viewed ‘mortal’ beings, but the mandate for the Real species had nothing to do with ‘destroy every-fucking-thing everywhere’ and more ’we will protect Reality at all costs’.

  One of them, a being apparently carved out of pure alabaster and named Aäl, was responsible for helping a lost Kin’kithal warrior get back to where he’d come from. What a trip that had been.

  The carvings were simple enough to decode, for someone who could read and write Heshii. A hundred thousand warnings, each more or less saying ‘open this and everyone will die’. Not even the Kith and Kin were that suicidal. Oh, they hewed to their overlords’ commands with every fiber of their being, but the destruction of everything had to happen on schedule. Any minion coming across a ship invisible to everything but the naked eye, a ship covered in markings warning of unlimited devastation, would think twice.

  Garth’s face darkened. Bravo was fully up and out of the earth now, and the crowd around him, all the people of Latelyspace, were cheering, albeit quietly. He reckoned his homely-ass face looked like thunderclouds ready to start spitting lightning bolts.

  They’d gone all out, that was for sure. Unlike the one in the Museum, this replica was perfect. They’d even taken extra-special care to get the M’Tai carvings done properly, a time-consuming and irritating task that had probably driven the poor bastards nuts.

  It was still fake. It was just a duronium ship. Just a box.

  “Motherfuckers.” Garth hissed the word out. He strode up to the replica and punched it as hard as he could. The Box trembled. “Motherfuckers!” He howled, punching the Box again.

  Fists raining down on The Box, Garth shouted, he ranted, he raved. “I came here,” he howled, slamming his fists into the nearly unbreakable metal with all the strength he possessed, heedless of the damage, “I came here and I said ‘hey, this is mine, please let me in and I’ll be very quiet about what happens. I won’t. Tell. Anyone.”

  The q-form began responding to his rage. The lowest level QFEs began siphoning residual energy remaining from Gurant’s death, drawing on Garth’s unspoken desires.

  “Terrance told me I couldn’t get in. Told me I needed to be a good little boy.” Garth punched harder, faster. He didn’t even notice. He was reliving the nightmare of his time on Hospitalis, there, fresh in each moment as if for the first time. “Told me I needed to follow orders, that he was going to ‘let me live’ so long as I did him a little favor. A favor that was supposed to put the fucking Chairwoman out of office.”

  Wham! The Box shifted against the earth, moved an inch.

  “We all know how that ended.” His body was really getting into the groove. “Even the Chairwoman knew. The Chairwoman knew this was mine. Knows it’s mine. Thirty thousand years I slept. I came here, full of anger and rage and, okay, yeah, I was totally being mind-controlled by Bravo to try to destroy the whole fucking planet, but I didn’t do that. I begged to be let in. The Chairwoman agreed it was mine.”

  The Box shifted again, the weight and motion pushing the dirt beneath it away until metal ground against metal, a shivering, wailing sound that screeched through the arena.

  Garth continued pummeling the Box, knuckles and fists bleeding. “I didn’t know who I was, didn’t know why I was. All I knew was that getting in here meant answers. That’s all. Answers. Reasons. Explanations. For who I am, why I’m here, what I’m doing.”

  The QFE spun, fully powered, fully operational. Strength and speed filled him, and the q-form circuitry, anticipating what was coming next, spilled into his hands, arms and shoulders to keep everything from fingertips to clavicle from shattering.

  Garth took a deep breath. The power stolen from Gurant’s death was almost as poisonous as the Song of the Heshii. A toxic spiral was trying to burn its way into the quadronium fibers, insidious black worms wriggling in his skin. As much as he thought he could handle Gurant’s spectacular madness and keep what the q-form had ripped from the air, there was a … better … ‘solution’.

  He was sick to fucking death of Latelyspace. He was sick to fucking death of the Chairwoman. It looked like he was going to have to teach them a lesson anyway. Big bad it is, he thought wearily.

  “Well,” Garth said conversationally, craning an arm back, marveling at the fluid ease of his quadronium-enhanced body, “here’s an answer for you all.”

  xxx

  Huey and Ute –and a trillion other people- watched Garth pull his arm back. They watched Fenris and the others step back out of the way at the last second.

  They watched the blow hammer into ‘door’ of The Box hard enough to buckle the solid duronium plating as if it was made out of a softer metal.

  They watched Garth draw his arm back again.

  Another blow fell. The door buckled further. The audience gasped.

  The arm pulled, the fist slammed. A noise, a howling, rumbling noise filled the Arena, forced home viewers to turn the volume down.

  The solar system watched as Garth pulled both arms back. They watched as he hammered the door of The Box with two powerfully driven open-handed punches.

  They watched in absolute awe as the door to their most cherished icon, a beacon of hopes and dreams, a historical object as old as the system, shattered into bent, broken
, smoking pieces littering the arena floor.

  The anguished sound rolling back and forth through the Arena cycled back on itself, ripped through the noise and turned into a high-pitched shriek rattling everyone’s prote and forcing every God soldier clench their teeth.

  xxx

  “Behold,” Fenris shouted loud enough for everyone in the vast Arena to hear as if he was whispering into the cowering ears, “behold the anger and might of a true warrior. Behold the Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez. Is he not marvelous? Is he not what you were promised in book, song, and story? Is he not a true leader?”

  Fenris and his brothers kneeled once again, heads bowed deeply. The End was Nigh. The Final Battle was coming.

  All would be at peace, when Darkness Fell and the Light Rose.

  xxx

  “Ouch.” Garth wiggled his open hands, did some stretching exercises. He’d punched the shit out of The Box and the audience was stunned senseless. He was going to be wonky as hell for at least a few more minutes. Garth really hoped that everyone in the viewing audience had figured out he was pissed because The Box was a fake. If not, they’d be pretty choked when they were done being all confused and horrified and whatnot.

  Garth looked over his shoulder at Fenris and his Apocalypse Pals. They were a particularly gloomy bunch, and sullenly mute to boot. Except Fenris. He liked to open his mouth like a pornstar doing auditions, except he uttered some of the most depressingly grim proclamations in recorded history at the drop of a hat.

  “Couldn’t you have said, like,” Garth rubbed his shoulders methodically; the q-form had absorbed a great deal of the punishment he’d put himself through, but he still ached. “’holy shit he punched that box so hard it exploded?’ Not ‘blah blah blah I sound like a crazyperson’? Only because that’s … what … the fuck?”

  xxx

  Sitting in the middle of the shattered remains of the Box, a smallish upright rectangle began gleaming unwholesomely. Arrayed on the sides and across the top were a series of light-lozenges, each one set to glow a darker shade of green the longer the device was active. The central part of the device, also a light-lozenge, would, when all the other lights burned their horrible colors, open.

  When it opened, it would release a flare of energy powerful enough to scour ten miles of Hospitalis clean to the bedrock.

  Given the device a few days ago, scientists assigned to the task of configuring its payload had only discovered the right combination to activate the Offworld weapon.

  They’d slapped a Screen on top and handed it over to their leader.

  As per instructions, the Screen turned on and Chairwoman Alyssa Doans’ face appeared. Her well-known voice filled the air.

  xxx

  “Garth Nickels.” Alyssa hissed the last name, made it sound like poison. “How I loathe you. You have brought ruination to my world. You and your damnable passions. You and your crooked grin and your nonsensical words that stick to a person’s insides like glue. Every step you take leaves death and destruction in your wake.”

  “Not my fault.” Garth answered sullenly, jaw setting itself mulishly. He looked at Fenris and the others. “Get everyone out of here.”

  Fenris made to argue the point.

  “I don’t know what kind of fucking bomb this is and it’s going to blow right the fuck up. I can’t defuse it and I know this crazy bitch. It’s going to be a big explosion. Do as I say.” Garth turned his attention back to Alyssa’s recording.

  Reluctant to follow the order but honor bound nevertheless, Fenris and the others started hollering, their Harmony-enhanced voices blotting out the virulence spilling from the Chairwoman’s recorded mouth.

  xxx

  Ute pointed at the device that had Garth’s attention. “Is that a …”

  “Bomb?” Huey nodded. As close to omnipresent as a being could be without actually … omnipresenting himself into that state … it was hard to actually know everything. He’d known The Box would be a fake. That was a gimme. But this … “Yeah. Shit, man, am I stupid.”

  All around them, people heard the word ‘bomb’ and started screaming. Before they even knew what they were doing, spectators were up and out of their seats, running up stairs, running for doors. God soldiers appeared –seemingly out of nowhere- and began bellowing orders. As quickly as chaos had erupted, it transformed into terrified order. The Latelians followed the orders as they were commanded to by the eerily calm and … serene … Foursies.

  “What kind of bomb?” Ute asked.

  “Checking.” Huey’s mind burned through classified Peak files and found the one associated with the murder-rectangle that was now glowing a bright, venomous green. “We … we gotta run. Garth’s gotta run. That bomb is going to devour all matter within a ten mile radius. Fuck me, seriously?”

  Ute looked on as Huey beat his head against the chair in front of him. “What is it now, sa?”

  “I …” Huey shook his head in bewilderment. “I have to go. I have to go right now. This is … fucked. Shit.”

  Down below, Garth was poking delicately at the strange-looking bomb with a cautiously extended fingertip and not looking at all pleased by whatever it was he was seeing.

  Ute frowned. “Where do you have to go right now?”

  “To a place to see a guy about a thing. Good luck. Don’t die.” Huey was up and running over the heads of the people blocking his way. He paused on top of a nonplussed God soldier. “Also, get that idiot out of there.”

  Huey disappeared just as Ute was about to mention that Garth was, in fact, not running anywhere, but rather, getting ready to jump on the bomb.

  xxx

  “How resilient am I?” Garth asked Fenris, who’d come to stand beside him. The countdown fan was nearing the end of its run. The Chairwoman’s recording had stopped a few seconds ago, revealing the fact that she was as crazy as the craziest thing ever. “Like, for real.”

  Fenris discerned Garth’s plan instantly. “You will probably survive.”

  “Probably?” Garth hunkered down and poked at the bomb again. “In the movies,” he said casually, “there’s always a bunch of wires. All it takes is clipping the right one and the bomb turns off. Usually at the last second. The hero saves the world and gets laid so hard that women born thirty years after he dies wind up pregnant.”

  “That isn’t a very effectively designed bomb.” Fenris pointed at the alien device. “This one has no wires. It is going to blow up. Do you mean to tell me you are going to … jump on the grenade?”

  “Uh.” Garth swallowed queasily. “Uh, yeah, I’m thinking about it. Not very hard, mind you.” The last light-lozenge was filling rapidly with whatever energy the bomb required to operate. “Because if you can think of anything else to do…”

  Fenris could indeed think of other things to do but it was readily apparent N’Chalez was still wearing his white knight hat; if he were less concerned about Latelian survival, they could all walk out of the building together and mourn the loss of the hundred thousand or so civilians properly. Or, they could throw the bomb into the atmosphere, where it would explode, gouging a divot out of the already fragile biosphere of Hospitalis. They could even toss it into the access tunnels through which The Box had traveled.

  Irrespective of options, Garth was interested in being the hero still, and could only see jumping on the bomb in the hopes that his q-form body would rise to the challenge.

  Heroism. Fenris understood the need for it, understood that Garth valued it above all else. He sincerely hoped that when he exited Bravo, that mindset would be gone.

  “All other avenues,” Fenris announced, jerking Garth out of whatever momentary reverie he’d been enjoying, “are even less palatable.”

  “Lame.” Garth jumped on the bomb, curled himself over it, pulled it in close until he was certain every single inch was surrounded by his body. He shut his eyes, queued 80’s hairband rock and roll for his possible journey to the stars and waited.

  Fenris shook his head in disgust.
He motioned for the others to surround their commander and they stood around N’Chalez, locking their arms and growing until they formed a barrier around the stupid man and the bomb. Any energy Garth didn’t manage to absorb would be handled.

  “Heroes.” Solgun said scathingly. The others laughed. They got the joke.

  xxx

  The bomb went boom. Garth lost himself for a time in the agonizing onslaught. He shouted a bunch of stuff. He might have even quoted lyrics to some very not-rock-and-roll songs. The q-form stretched, roiled, buckled and generally complained at the abuses it was being put to so soon in the game. The QFE, only recently powered, spun faster and faster, flaring so brightly through Garth’s skin that –for a moment- the gleaming light phosphoresced more powerfully than the matter-eating brilliance of the bomb.

  Then … there was a pop like an old-fashioned flash bulb.

  The bomb stopped exploding.

  xxx

  Fenris nudged Garth with a toe. “He is not dead.”

  “I am still naked, though.” Garth said with a mighty groan. “Why aren’t your guy’s’ clothes all burned off.”

  Lokken plucked at his shirt. “It would be undignified. Besides, we are Harmony.”

  “How do you feel?” Fenris asked, though he already knew the answer. The foolish hero had almost destroyed the first –and most important- QFE in his q-form to protect ten miles of utterly unimportant men, women, children and real estate. If that had happened, no attempt at fixing the ruined machinery would have worked and Garth N’Chalez would have wound up forever more nothing but a man.

  A man had no chance of winning. No chance of seeing Darkness Fall, or of ushering in the Rising Light.

  It was only by the slenderest of threads that the QFE remained operational. It would take ages for the thing to repair itself. Fenris resisted the urge to club Garth in the side of the head, for playing so fast and loose with the only thing that could bring about the proper End.