Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  The elevator bumped gently on the ground floor. Alyssa smiled cheerily. “Here we go, sa. Your machine awaits.”

  “Awesome.” The elevator door opened and Griffin shoved the Chairwoman through. He knew the woman was planning something and didn’t mind; anyone as crazy and paranoid as a Chairperson would’ve prepared for a hostage scenario thousands of years ago. There was nothing, nothing, in the Universe other than Trinity, that could mess with his Suit. Still, warnings were in order. “An’ don’t ya’ll try an’ do any funny stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Sa Enforcer.” It was the truth. For most of the ride down in the elevator, Alyssa had to admit she had been entertaining notions of tripping one of the thousand different traps lacing the hallways leading to the First Main, but the Enforcer’s ultimate revelations had changed her mind in a most profound way.

  It was clear to her now that –while the Enforcer was amazed at the survival of whatever genetic connection she shared with the hoary old Armies of Man commanders or their representatives- her DNA wasn’t ‘good enough’ for the First Main. Since the discovery of the antique –oh, so antique- computer, intermarriage had undoubtedly watered the purity of the different bloodlines down to the point where the machine considered her a seventh cousin twice removed. Just enough to operate its most basic functions, but no more.

  Not him. He was from the era in which the machine had been made. He had a direct line to the full array of controls. Whoever the Enforcer was, his goal was the same as hers.

  It was risky, her plan. She would let the Enforcer activate the controls, and then she was going to do whatever it took to crash him into it. Even if it meant flinging herself bodily at his back.

  The First Main would react decisively, and Enforcer armor or not, the man in the Suit would be dead and the computer would be wide open. Then she could begin the business of controlling Trinity.

  xxx

  Griffin stared at the readout scrolling across the crappy old monitor, seething in ways he couldn’t rightly explain. He turned to confront Alyssa just in time to catch the lanky bitch leaping sideways at him like she was going to try to wrestle him to the ground. The Enforcer caught her smoothly by one ankle. The leader for the Latelian people banged her head quite seriously on the floor.

  “What,” he drawled, his voice so pained with anger he was having hard time keeping his thickest of southern accents out, “in the ungodly googly-moogly superfuck did ya’ll fuckin’ do?”

  Alyssa cackled at the blood pouring down the side of her face. Drip drip drip. “I tried deleting Garth Nickels from the ‘LINKs. I tried to Sigma him. If he’s Sigma’d, none of the machines will see him, nothing. Eventually, he would die of starvation, or he’d be trapped in a building. It’s what the system does, you see. If you’re Sigma’d and the First Main has a chance to kill you, it will. Everyone thinks a Sigma makes everything just ignore you, but it’s so much more than that. Only the Chair knows how murderous a Sigma really is. The Sigma is a silent killer.”

  Griffin kicked the Chairwoman in the ribs. “Ya’ll. Are. Fuckin’. Jokin’. Me. Raght. Naow.” Each word brought another kick.

  Alyssa laughed, blood spraying through clenched teeth. “Oh, I wish I was, Enforcer. I wish I was. You mean to say you don’t have superuser access?”

  Griffin dropped the stupid bitch. She landed in a contorted heap and started crawling away. “Am Ah actin’ lahk Ah got fuckin’ superuser access? Christ on a motherfuckin’ bahcycle. Tried t’delete Garth N’Chalez. Jesus. Whofuck thanks lahk ‘at? Shitbird. Shit.”

  There was one option left available to him. The diskette supplied by Trinity. With the Suit hopefully offline for a little while longer, there might be a chance to sneak in a couple commands before the damn thing fixed itself all the way. It’d be tight; readouts were going green quickly now. Well ahead of schedule, probably thanks to Trinity bein’ one helluva liar.

  Griffin grunted. He’d come all this way. He was not going to lose. Not now. He yanked the disk from storage and held it up the light. “Here goes nothin’.” He turned his attention to the HIM.

  Alyssa struggled to her feet, head spinning, mind whirling. There was one thought on her mind. Kill the Enforcer. That was all that mattered. Once he was dead and gone, murdered by the Main, the situation would be fixable.

  She leaped, colliding bodily into the Enforcer with all her weight.

  Griffin dropped the disk. It clattered across the keyboard. He shouted something incoherent, matching the Chairwoman’s insane rally cry.

  Alerted to the presence of Trinity tech at last, The HIM woke up. “Lockdown procedures commencing.” It bellowed. “Shieldfield, active. Please do not attempt to move. Help is on the way.”

  Griffin dropped to his knees. A little bit from where he slumped, Alyssa pounded furiously against the invisible and indestructible force field that’d sprung up around the HIM. He watched her boggle at the sight of her blood dripping down from what appeared to be empty space. “Don’t bother, you psychotic bitch. We are trapped. Help ain’t on the way. There ain’t no goddamn person anywhere with access to a fuckin’ HIM. Th’ field keepin it safe is keepin’ us locked in here. We’re gonna starve an’ turn into goddam dust afore anyone invents the tech to bust through it.”

  xxx

  Thousands of Galaxies away, a machine flickered to life. “Alert. Alert. HIM #4 safety compromised.”

  A voice like thunder rattled the skies. “I see you.” It sang joyously. “There you are. At last.”

  Swan Song

  Fenris nodded his understanding. “I comprehend what you are saying, sa, but no one discovered that this … Batman … was Bruce Wayne? At all. Ever.”

  Garth shook his head and leaned further back in the chair. It was enormous. The entire ship they were using to shoot themselves at The Peak as fast as possible was, in fact, entirely bigger than it actually needed to be, especially since the Five had the ability to be as big or as little as they felt.

  He really wanted to stick his head into the guts of the gigantic ship. At the very least, he wanted to know why and how no one anywhere had seen the fucking thing hovering over the Arena like a goddamn parade float. He suspected Fenris or one of the other Apocalypse Dudes knew how to build hy-tech devices, a definite ‘shouldn’t be possible ever’ kind of thing.

  Fenris looked to his brothers, who all shrugged. “Anyone with half a brain would realize that –at the very least- the billionaire Bruce Wayne was funding this masked vigilante. Humans are incredibly detail oriented when it comes to money, sa. Eventually someone would demand to look at Wayne’s financial records. Furthermore, you say the mask isn’t a full mask, either. Leaving his mouth free like that … as a wealthy man, he is undoubtedly well known and recorded. Someone would recognize his jaw, especially people who idolize him.”

  “Hey, look,” Garth spied a panel not fifteen feet away that looked very promising, “I never lived in Gotham. I never even … visited …”

  The world spun away in a shower of sparks.

  xxx

  Garth’s heart broke the moment Lisa stepped through the self-generated portal. The last time he’d seen the blue whirling gate had been on the eve of the final sortie at Tannhauser’s Gate. The effort it took to generate left Lisa terribly vulnerable to … everything. Expending the vast amounts of power required to travel from wherever she spent time hiding to move physically to another location left her as human and as frail as the next person.

  Gazing at her cornflower silk hair filled him with the reason she’d come and he wanted to weep. The nebulous promise to Lisa Laughlin had bothered him since waking up in the Hotel Palazzo. Even without knowing what it was she’d demanded, the ex-Specter had spent as much time as possible praying she’d never come to collect on that promise.

  Promises made were promises kept, most of all between Kith’kin and Kin’kith.

  Lisa smiled sadly and reached to give Garth a hug. It was the first time they’d had physical contact since the
last few minutes before they’d all climbed into Alpha. It felt so good to hold on to him. He was so … warm. So … alive. “You smell.”

  “Hey,” Garth stepped back, mock offended, “I just went a couple rounds against Superhulk the Smash-nifigent and got bombarded by some kind of funky alien megabomb. I dare anyone to smell good after that.”

  Lisa laughed. He was, for the most part, his old self. Being knocked unconscious had triggered some kind of response mechanism, allowing him to draw on virtually all of his memories. Lisa fretted, unable to keep from wondering where they’d be right now if that hadn’t happened. Had Garth prepared some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion or was it just … happenstance? The omniscient woman wondered if that had been part of his plan all along, or if the extreme dangers on Hospitalis had merely … forced the issue.

  Of course, now that he was no longer ‘Real’, she could learn the truth in a second, but she didn’t.

  Garth pointed to the Sigma Fives and the handful of Foursies that were frozen around them. “Professor X much?”

  Lisa laughed again, a tinkling sound that rang off the walls. “Oh, commander, it is a bit more than that.”

  “You stopped time.” Lisa’s power was unthinkable. Unless she was blowing smoke. With what she’d become, with what she’d endured to come to this point, it was entirely possible.

  “Only locally.” Lisa bowed. There were a hundred million things she’d been able to do since … since … since fully evolving, things that she’d never done out of the fear that the Heshii and their sole surviving minion would find her, hunt her down, trap her.

  Those fears were gone.

  “How locally?” Garth demanded, walking up to Fenris and poking him in the nose. Nothing.

  “Latelyspace.” Lisa flexed an arm that was purely fictional. “I could do more, but it might get noticed.”

  Garth nodded, adding, “Ah.”

  The moment hung in the air, stretching to the point of desperate discomfort. Garth knew why she’d come and it made him sick to his stomach.

  “No.” Lisa kept the denial just this side of an angry bark. She didn’t need to read his mind to see what he was about to suggest. “No. Please.”

  “But…” Garth trailed off. There was no getting around it. Without access to the Reality paradox that he’d once housed, the eventual war with the Heshii was going to go very poorly. His recently added q-form might be able to help, but Fenris’ skepticism about powering it up rang so true. Griffin was out there somewhere doing Lord knew what, but unless he, too, had been secretly awake during the thirty thousand year sleep, there was only one person in the entire stretch of Unreality that was already a walking powerhouse.

  If Lisa could stop time, there was nothing she couldn’t do. Sure, it was ‘local’, but Latelyspace was just a little bit smaller than Trinity Prime’s home system. She could read the minds of every sentient being in existence, all at once. Hell, she probably already knew who the enemy was, where they were, what they were planning.

  Only a fool let such an asset go.

  No matter how powerful the Heshii had grown in the last thirty thousand years, they couldn’t have grown as much as a full-blooded Kith’kineen sorceress; during the war on Earth, they’d already proven that the Heshii, the Kith, Kin and the Harmony soldiers had all had a difficult time tracking their activities. With what Lisa had become, she had to be invisible.

  “But…” Garth trailed off again. He’d done Lisa so wrong. If he could travel back in time and stop the beautiful young woman who’d promised to keep an eye on the Universe for him from doing so, he would. Not only that, but he’d punch his past self so hard in the face that he’d still be bruised.

  She stood there, glimmering in frozen time. Hidden behind the cool austerity that she’d picked up from her even colder foster parents was animalistic terror, a quivering … creature trembling on the edge of panicky rage. Sapphire blue nodes swam up and down her immaculately pale skin, flaring and shining with more and deeper intensity as she prepared … for denial. Tears as blue and hot as stars quaked in her eyes.

  “But …” Garth trailed off one last time. “But I’ll miss you. We … we never had a real conversation in this now. You … you were just … here. For me. You never got to be you. I’ll miss you.”

  Lisa reached out and pulled Garth into a hug once more. “You promised me, Commander Garth N’Chalez, you promised me that, in return for enabling your mad, grand, Universal scheme to be a possibility, that you would erase me. No chances for me, my brave, brave man. No chance at all. It is important. If any chance of me remains…”

  Lisa froze, swallowed her words. Thankfully, Garth was too wrapped up in his sorrow to pay attention.

  “Yeah, but, this sucks.” Garth looked over Lisa’s shoulder, staring at the frozen God soldiers. Thank God no one was able to see him bawling like a baby.

  “It does.” Lisa pushed Garth back far enough so that she could look into his eyes. Cupping his rugged, ragged chin in both hands, she smiled. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way. What you dreamed of … is worth this sacrifice.”

  “I still don’t know all the answers.” Garth wanted so badly to talk to Lisa about why it was necessary to destroy the whole Unreal Universe, and to take her life. She knew. There would be no other way to convince anyone to endure that kind of madness. It must’ve been one hell of a compelling truth. Garth knew for an absolute fact he’d’ve told himself to fuck right the hell off.

  Lisa burst out laughing. “You probably would’ve.”

  The walls around them shuddered. Lisa smiled sadly. “It is time, Garth. I’ve depleted enough of myself for this to work. Don’t waste time. If you aren’t quick enough, my Kith’kineen survival instinct will kick in and I will vanish. I assure you that if that happens, all hell will break loose.”

  Garth nodded miserably. He reached inside, seeking out the final bit of Real paradox that he’d been nurturing like a favored song. He held up a hand, palm blazing with the Last Piece of Hard Light, the final proof that he’d ever been. The gigantic room they were in filled with light to the point where, if time was running, the whole of Hospitalis would think a star had fallen to the earth.

  Once intended to help him fight the Heshii back, to destroy them wholly, the paradox that’d transformed him into something more than any other thing in all of Unreality drew Lisa Laughlin forward, a glittering blue moth to a sterling blue flame.

  “Oh, I am going to miss you, Lisa, so very much.” Garth put his hand against Lisa’s forehead. A smile spread across the young woman’s face, a look of pure, radiant happiness.

  “And I, you.”

  The hard light pulsed. Lisa Laughlin, a Kith’kineen woman transformed into nothing but sentient light by thirty thousand years of unstoppable evolution, burst like a soap bubble, flaring into a hundred million sapphire pinpricks.

  She was gone.

  Time resumed, with cruel, inevitable precision.

  xxx

  Fenris shared a look with his brothers. The Latelian soldiers in the room had missed the skip, but they were older, wiser, and … tuned in. They saw that Garth had moved from the path he’d intended, and that he was staring at the palm of his hand with inconsolable sorrow.

  She was gone, as promised. The End grew closer still to perfection.

  “A light has gone out in the Universe.” Fenris said quietly, so softly that only his brothers could hear. They grunted in agreement. “Soon, then, all the lights will go out.”

  Their ship sped towards The Peak. A few more minutes and they would be inside the mountain stronghold. A few minutes after that and Garth N’Chalez would be inside Bravo.

  Then … ah, then, preparations for war would begin in earnest.

  Fenris and his brothers smiled as Garth continued to stare sorrowfully at the hand that had killed a goddess, flexing his fingers, stretching the palm, aghast at the power that he’d squandered so foolishly.

  Some lessons, some truths, had to be born the
hard way.

  The War against the Hesh –and what came after- wouldn't be won with power.

  It would be won with sacrifice.

  Griffin Gets a Pass

  Alyssa stared uncomprehendingly as the elevator door opened, revealing an irritated Hamilton Barnes. They’d heard the elevator moving, but the Chairwoman hadn’t given it much thought. As the Enforcer said, they were trapped by the … the HIM itself. Even if one of her own people figured out how to find the elevator shaft and what it represented, there wasn’t a single person on Hospitalis capable of getting through the traps because –and this was so deliciously ironic- no new Chair had been logged into the HIM.

  Therefore, anyone in the elevator was supposed to have wasted the last few moments of their life wishing the bloody thing would hurry up. Instead, impossibly –from the sounds, at least- it’d moved ten times faster than was remotely safe.

  “You!” Alyssa Doans was up and hammering against the invisible wall sealing them in. “You!”

  “Aw, hell.” Griffin rose as well, shucking his helmet in the process. “Ah mean, come on.” His Suit had spent the last thirty seconds shitting itself. “What the hell is he thinkin’?”

  Huey stared at the odd couple. “I can tell you he doesn’t know, not yet. But he will.”

  “You’re talking about Nickels, aren’t you?” Alyssa hammered at the wall hard enough to bruise skin. “You’re working for him? How could you! I … we gave you the opportunity to serve Latelyspace, the Regime, for all eternity and this is how you repay me? Me?”

  Griffin looked apologetically at the AI-driven meatsuit. “Ya’ll’re gonna haveta forgive the ole Chairwoman, here. She done plumb lost her mind. So he done gone and made hisself a super-AI, eh?”

  “What is going on here?” Alyssa demanded, shoving –trying to shove- the Enforcer physically out of the conversation. “This is Hamilton Barnes, a traitor. Oh, if I had access to the machine, I’d Sigma you right out of existence.”