Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Herrig made a popping sound with his lips. The blasted thing was too big for his arm. He ran his hand across the touch-sensitive screen, logged in, set himself up as Chairman, and then shoved the thing into a drawer.

  “First order of business,” Herrig said to no one in particular, “is to see about changing the name of this company. The Latelian Regime… too … mercenary.”

  xxx

  Naoko Kamagana ran her hands across the control consoles. Beside her, Captain Greuz negotiated with the comm jockey aboard Smash All Infidels for an accelerated entry position. From the sounds of things, it wasn’t going well. Behind her, the other members of the Zhivago were attempting to gather information about what’d happened on Hospitalis; attempts there were failing as well.

  Whatever had happened, whatever was happening … wasn’t good.

  The young woman wanted to turn around. It was a desire that raged through her. She wanted to turn around, to fly into Garth’s arms, to help him be the man he needed to be.

  But she couldn’t. They were at the Tunnel and the time for turning around had passed long ago. Naoko’s hands continued flying across the keys. “Don’t bother, Greuz.”

  “I’m sorry, miss?” Greuz looked up from his monitor, confused. He was getting close to wearing the man down.

  Naoko pointed to the main Screens. “Look.”

  On those Screens, the Quantum Tunnel was firing. Shouts of confusion erupted across every communication channel.

  Greuz’s ugly face split into a wide grin. “All right, boys and girls, the Lady Ha has secured us passage. Batten down them hatches and hold on tight! Off we go.”

  Naoko accepted the shouts of congratulation from the crew before hurrying to her cabin. She couldn’t let them see her weep. Weep for the loss of her man, weep for the loss of things that might’ve been.

  xxx

  Fenris and the Four turned to OverCommander Vasily. The Latelian was healing. The Harmony soldier pointed to the legions of God soldiers arrayed before them. These were the Sigmas, the ones who had slept, the ones who had matured in that slumber. “From these, OverCommander Vasily, we shall raise an army to do battle with gods. We will undo the damages done by the drugs you fed your men, and we will train them in the Way of Harmony. When we are done, there will be nothing to stop us.”

  Vasily looked over his shoulder, turning his eyes to where The Peak would be if he could but see that far away. “What about Garth?”

  “N’Chalez? He will either win his way out of the trap left behind by the greedy and foolhardy Armies of Man, or he is not N’Chalez.” Fenris shrugged, moving to draw Vasily’s attention back to the assembled soldiers. “Either way, Vasily, war is coming. The Great War. The End of Days. Whether Reality is born out of the ashes of our conflict or not is not our concern. We will destroy the Great Enemy. And that is all that we have been bred to do.”

  “And who is this Great Enemy you keep talking about?” Vasily demanded angrily, distracted by his prote. He grimaced. Alyssa was trying, once again, to requisition a starship. She tried every day. Every day, usually after lunch, the demand for a vessel to take her away from all of this came through the Pariah System. Every day. Happily, no one wanted to deal with the repercussions of letting that madwoman gain control of a ship. Vasily hit ‘no’ and turned his gaze on Fenris, who grinned. All the Fives and their Sigma soldiers were vastly amused at the ex-Chairwoman’s punishment.

  “Well?” Vasily demanded again, more stridently.

  “Ahhh.” Fenris’ grin turned to laughter. The other Fives followed. “The Great Enemy. Such … viciousness. Such … punishment. He will be the perfect opponent by now. Ready to destroy everything.”

  xxx

  Griffin rose unsteadily to his feet, shielding his eyes with a hand against the harsh glare of three suns burning down at him from on high. His body ached with complaints similar to those from those few times Trinity had channeled him from one place to another without blocking the pain, but it wasn’t nearly as bad. Whatever weird mechanism Garth had built into the HIMs to allow teleportation was a much better system than the one Trinity used.

  “Probl’y thinks It discovered it all by It’s lonesome.” Griffin continued scanning the skies, trying to find some sign of technology beyond the HIM at his side. Nothing. There wasn’t a single damn hint that the world that goddamn AI-meatsuit-stealing bastard had sent him to had any kind of life on it at all.

  A thundering sound reached his ears. The earth shuddered. Griffin hung his head. Of course, nothing was ever simple.

  “Kneel.”

  The voice came from behind Griffin. It was filled with harmonic sounds that almost –almost- had him on his knees before he knew what was happening. But he didn’t kneel, nosir. He was a Kin’kithal. A Kin’kithal without an Enforcer Suit. No one would make him do anything he didn’t want to do.

  Griffin ignited the bridges throughout his body, and he was filled with the ecstasy of fire. The landscape continued to shake and shudder, earthquake-style, but filled with the power of his heritage, Griffin Jones remained stable, unaffected. Fireballs gleamed in his hands.

  “Kneel.” The stentorian imperative boomed through the heavens. “Kneel.”

  “Ah don’t kneel to no one no more, motherfucker.” Griffin turned and unleashed as much power as he dared after so long without practice. Based on the volume of the voice, the reaction of the landscape, he knew he was –however improbably- dealing with something on the order of a Gunboy. “Ah’m a fuckin’ Kin’kithal, an’ I do not kneel.”

  Furious, glorious power, the heat of suns and more, burned out from him. It was wondrous. Griffin couldn’t remember the last time he’d been allowed to cut loose with the full authority of what it meant to be a Kin’kithal. The swathe of destruction radiating out from him would obliterate whatever giant had been foolish enough to come to him. Enough power to destroy damn near anything burned out of him, and after a solid ten seconds, Griffin eased up, throttled the beast back into it’s cage and stood there, breathless, exhausted. Exhilarated.

  “Kneel, Griffin Jones.” The voice no longer boomed but whispered seductively. “Kneel. Kneel before Kith Antal. God of the Heshii. Kneel, and worship what I have become.”

  xxx

  As minutes turned to hours and hours to days and days to weeks, those that had been involved with Garth N’Chalez and his attempts to destroy everything –whether they knew the truth or not- so that life, real, true, and poignant life could be born turned to the tasks thrust upon them by fate and by design.

  But Wait! There’s More!

  Garth pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  He was mad. Had to be, to come up with this … well, technically, it fell into the concept of ‘plan’ but really, it was fucking insane. No one sane would ever come up with a plan so bonkers.

  “Hannibal Smith would.” Garth said aloud, trying to comfort himself. “Hannibal Smith would come up with this plan, then throw in a helicopter and some dynamite just to make it more interesting.”

  The ex-Specter wrinkled his nose and hit a button. He couldn’t feel anything, but Bravo, a spaceship, either was or was not ripping the shit out of The Peak right that second, flying straight up through the mountain fastness like anybody’s business.

  Hopefully it was.

  Hopefully it wasn’t, because his destination was Shoemaker’s Grave.

  If there was anything in the Unreal Universe capable of destroying the physical extrusion of the Engine’s now-ruined version of Reality, it was the Bruush’s very first landing pad. The bizarre energy field surrounding the planet wasn’t of this Universe, was –as far as Garth could guess- a physical manifestation of the Bruush’s shattered domain.

  Theoretically, the collision of Bravo against the quicksilver-colored field should eat away at the quadronium shielding in a matter of seconds.

  It was just a matter of getting it right. While flying blind.

  The bastard lightbodies had tied external cameras into their
own thought processes millennia ago. Garth would rather be fucked by a Bruush than wake one of those motherfuckers up.

  Then, because there was nothing else he could do for a little bit, Garth headed back to the chair to get caught up on some television.

  Odds and Ends before the Beginning

  “I’m not comfortable with you leaving, Huey.” Herrig DuPont looked up from terminal he’d been staring gloomily at since … since everything had happened the way it’d happened.

  Currently, the screen was displaying a table of contents labeled ‘Secrets of the Chair’, and it was about as depressing and infuriating a thing as anyone had ever been asked –or even expected- to read. The long list of rulers ‘guiding’ Latelyspace ‘to a better, bright tomorrow through force of arms’ revealed that nearly every one of them had, in truth, been a pack of maniacs. There wasn’t a single Chair –with the possible exception of the first one- who hadn’t, at one point or another, done things so horrible, so grim, so … unforgiveable as to make them demonic.

  It was depressing as hell. And Huey, the one who’d shown him how to work the Chair’s proteus, was leaving. Yes, it was to find some way to free Garth from the Box, but still.

  Herrig knew he wasn’t up to the task of running a solar system of one man, let alone a solar system crammed to the rafters full of … full of Latelians. They looked well-behaved, they minded their P’s and Q’s and dotted all their I’s, but the second, the very second you looked the other way, they turned into curiosity-fueled maniacs. And that was the ones who pretended they were nice.

  The ones who didn’t bother acting, the ones who’d accepted who they were, well, they just ran around doing whatever they wanted anyways. Nature and mishap took care of those fools easily enough.

  Luckily matters involving the Army and everything those men and women got up to was being handled by men better than himself; Fenris and his breed, Ute and Vasily had their jobs cut out for them. Herrig knew he wouldn’t have lasted a minute in office had he been expected to corral all those Goddies.

  Huey looked up from the diagrams he was working on. In truth, there was no need to use any ‘LINK or terminal, but … he was doing his best to be as human as possible. The sacrifice Hamilton Barnes had made for the Unreal Universe demanded nothing less. “Gotta save the boss man.”

  Herrig pushed his glasses back up on his nose and ignored ex-Chairwoman Doans’ status update. The programs set to watchdog the batshit insane one-time ruler of Latelyspace were doing their job very well indeed. She’d only been on the streets for a few days and already she’d set about trying to secure everything from starships to billions of dollars to the assassination of everyone in office.

  Thankfully, Huey’s programs continued to do their diligence in explaining what would happen to any citizen should they continually assist the Chairwoman in procuring the basic staples of continued life and exactly what would happen if they signed off on some of her more ludicrous demands. The aforementioned Latelians, though curious to the point of self-destruction, were displaying remarkable amounts of common sense for a change; the woman had left a foul taste in everyone’s mouth so they were ignoring nearly every request the ex-ruler made. A small miracle, that. All it would take was three morbid-minded thrill-seeking lunatics to sign off on a spaceship laden down with explosives for everything to go horribly awry.

  “Yes, well, er, I understand all of that, Huey, but…” Herrig trailed off. The notion of Garth Nickels stuck in that Box filled him with dread. The non-descript man which the Chairman considered friend –a man who was no man but an AI housed in a very sophisticated clone- had explained as clearly as possible that time was flowing differently inside ’Bravo’, that only a few minutes had passed for Garth, but the explanation had barely made a dent.

  The ‘but’ was there because the few Latelian spies and/or contacts in Trinityspace he’d managed to contact before everything had shut down had all said the same thing; Trinity was unhappy and some kind of major attack was en route.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Huey was pleased with how … not a lie the lie coming out of his mouth sounded. Truth was, everyone inside Latelyspace had a great big pile of crap to worry about, starting with the impending and very early arrival of Special Services warships and ending with the eventual arrival of Trinity’s large Army vessels. From the response, Trinity was treating the small solar system of Latelyspace in much the same way It would a Bruush incursion.

  Probably the only reason It wasn’t unleashing more dark secrets and twisted science experiments was because they were all dead or trapped inside what little remained of the galaxy that was now forever known as Tannhauser’s Gate.

  Huey grimaced and kept plucking away at the program. A beast like Kelvin the Sick or The Spectacled Myriad would roll over the God soldiers like they weren’t even there. Darkened Zion and others would find Fenris, Solgun, Stride, Nalanata and Lokken a bit more challenging, but … yeah. Latelyspace would become a footnote, Bravo would get dumped into a sun or a black hole somewhere and Trinity would simply progress to the next stage of Its attempts to bootstrap itself into true Godmind. Huey’s frown turned into the bleakest of scowls at that thought. The Trinity AI, a collection of self-aware programs dozens of millennia old that would honestly fail an old-fashioned Turing Test in three seconds flat … in charge of Reality. What a nightmare.

  “You sound so confident.” Herrig pecked his way through another series of documents highlighting things that Chairwoman Doans had been up to during her reign. Sighing, he set about undoing some of her worst policies. Somewhere in Hospitalis, OverCommander Vasily was doing much the same, though with considerable reluctance; in his heart of hearts, Vasily still rebelled at the new notions he was being asked to believe in, still dreamed of conquest, still thirsted for absolute dominance. To that end, shutting down of some of the Army’s blackest secrets were being overseen by none other than Tomas Kamagana.

  The twisted homunculus Hollyoak was locked away nice and tight so they wouldn’t have to deal with him at all; upon finding out that the new Regime was actually shifting towards a more rational approach to governance and wouldn’t be funding things like eyeball laser cannons the size of small moons and tentacles monstrosities that leaked poison, Hollyoak had gone into panicked frenzy.

  Surprisingly –frighteningly- it’d taken the combined efforts of a small platoon of God soldiers and the eventual intervention of … Lokken, if Herrig was correct, to subdue the freak. A single computerized shriek from the Shrinky survivor had turned three-quarters of the base defenses against the inhabitants. More than half the regular Latelian support staff had been vaporized, shot, poisoned by gas chambers, strangled by slipknot robots, disintegrated by acid vats hidden beneath floors, mind-controlled by modified DNA drugs …

  It was appalling. Before falling into the event horizon that was Garth Nickels, Herrig would’ve sworn nothing like Hollyoak or the methods he’d employed could exist anywhere inside Latelyspace. Horrors like that belonged either to Trinity Itself or to the monsters living on the other side of The Cordon. But Latelyspace? Nearly impossible to believe!

  The harsh light of truth, however, illuminated things Herrig was already beginning to wish had stayed in the dark.

  “That,” Huey announced triumphantly, “is because I did this.” He clapped his hands and holographic emitters in Herrig’s office blossomed to life. A wireframe schematic of Latelyspace gleamed in the suddenly darkened room.

  A big red cartoon arrow popped up and pointed to Hospitalis. “As you can tell, this is home. The center of Latelyspace.”

  Another arrow, this one bright green, pointed to the edge of their solar system. “This,” Huey continued, “is where the Quantum Tunnel is.”

  “I am with you so far.”

  Huey’s grin faltered, but only for a second. “I haven’t even got to the good bit yet, man, and that totally sounded like you were preparing to be confused.”

  Herrig shrugged his shoulders an
d chuckled. “There is a lot on my plate, Huey, and the one man I can trust implicitly is getting ready to leave. How should I react?”

  “Okay, listen. You can trust Vasily with your life. The same for Tomas. Fenris … Fenris is … well, no. At the end of the day, he totally has his own agenda, but I promise you this. As long as Garth is trapped in Bravo and we are all not getting ready to fight whatever is coming this way, he and the others will go along with basically whatever you need. Can … can I continue? Because this is pretty fucking awesome, what I did here. Not even Garth has done this.” Huey fairly danced from foot to foot.

  He needed to leave. His target, Chadsik al-Taryin wasn’t dead. Everyone with the authority needed to access footage of the day’s events were operating under the assumption that the ripple-like explosion that’d centered on the assassin’s body as it flew through the sky was detonation of the cyborg’s power source.

  But it wasn’t. Energy signatures –too sophisticated, too subtle, too … otherworldly for Latelian science to plumb properly- matched those made by, well, by Kant Ingrams, and that whacko’s disappearance had been voluntary. No, whatever else had gone on that day, Chad wasn’t dead, and if there was anyone in the Universe capable of digging through impenetrable layers of quadronium, it was the Unreality’s most unreal citizen.

  The longer he dallied, the longer he was delayed in hunting the freaky assassin down, the harder it would become. Huey couldn’t imagine that Chad would remain … obvious … not after everything that’d happened in Latelyspace. Add to that the pressure that would come from failing to assassinate Garth and you had yourself a guy that was going to go as underground as you could. As a little extra sauce to the big old dish of disgrace, there was good old Jordan Bishop to deal with. That guy had the deepest pockets in the Universe. Chad would be hiding for a long, long time.