Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  In a fight like this, between two Titans wielding powers greater than anything anyone should possess, the first strike really was the most important. That first blow, lucky or unlucky, destructive or dismissive, counted.

  They circled each other warily.

  As they made one circuit, Hell grew larger and louder. Ships began arriving to either rescue lives or to raid Jordan’s cracked domain. Momentarily distracted by the carnage surrounding them, it took both Gwyleh and Chad a few seconds to realize that that they weren’t alone.

  “Hey. Um. Hi.” Huey waved a hand feebly. “Is this, uh, gonna … gonna take long? I got a thing.”

  Gwyleh stormed into action, shifting the cannons from Chadsik to the curiously eyebrowless Latelian who’d somehow managed to sneak onto the set of his most impressive battle to come. His AI was having no luck identifying their unwanted guest.

  “Actually,” Huey gestured and the Suit suddenly froze where it was, servomotors whining piteously with the effort of trying to move, “um, yeah, I’m not here for you, Enforcer type guy.”

  Chad shook his head irately, un-fucking-able to figure out where his life had truly gone to shit. He wanted to blame Arcade City for being a really awful place to come kicking and screaming into the world, but he knew several FrancoBrits that were actually quite well adjusted. He could blame his dad, but blaming a psychotic raving nutter for things he did was like trying to blame sunlight for being bright and shiny. He even really desperately wanted to blame Jordan Bishop for hiring him to take a wander over into Latelyspace to kill a guy that’d turned out to be the fucking physical incarnation of War and Murderous Technology, but none of those seemed appropriate. Were it possible his life had been shit from before he’d been born? A few Chads accepted this might be the case, then suggested the main Chad pay more attention to what was going on in front of them. Him.

  “Wot ‘appened to yer eyebrows?” Chad was surprised at the question, but decided to roll with it. Gwyleh Ronn was busy shouting his damnfool head off inside his presently frozen solid suit of armor.

  “Don’t ask.” Huey walked up and rapped the Enforcer suit. It was really well constructed. A bit old, though. In his efforts to locate the one man who could possibly get Garth N’Chalez out of Bravo, Huey’d run into a lot of data concerning the armor-clad Enforcers, data Trinity would most definitely prefer not be available to anyone. Though this was his first live Suit encounter, none of that data suggested any new Suits had been forged for quite some time. Gwyleh’s … Gwyleh’s had reportedly been worn by three Enforcers down through the years. Why, even Griffin’s suit was a hundred years old. He squinted at Chad, then groaned. “Look, having a body is still kind of new for me. I couldn’t figure out the purpose of eyebrows. I shaved them off to see how they affected … expression. And they won’t grow back.”

  Chad cackled. “A fucking lot is the answer. Christ, you look like a burly drag Queen wivvout ‘is lady-costume.”

  “I said I didn’t want to talk about it.” Huey grumbled.

  Chad put his guns away and rummaged in one of his pockets until he found a marker. He brandished it with a salacious wink. “Oi, ‘ow about you is lettin’ me drawr in some eyebrows for you? I can make you look pretty decent. One of me was a cross-dresser. I can make you look real serious or very, very confused.”

  Gwyleh Ronn continued howling inside his Suit. Nothing was working. The AI was shut off, the base mechanics of the blasted armor weren’t working, nothing was happening.

  When Chad saw that Huey wasn’t having any of it, he turned serious. “Why is you ‘ere?” He gestured around himself. “In case you is not noticin’, I is in the middle of this whole fing.”

  “Yeah, no, I totally get that.” Huey strolled over to the side and looked down on the destruction that Chadsik had wrought. “Why’d you do this?”

  Chad walked up beside Huey, running a hand through his pale white hair. “Honest answer, I was sort of ‘opin’ that the ‘Priests would be all freaked out an’ leave me alone. Sorta … sorta forgot about them bein’ nihilistic idiots, ter be ‘onest. A bit awkward, really. Fellas din’t even blink.”

  “You killed somewhere in the neighborhood of a five hundred thousand people and destroyed Jordan Bishop’s empire so they’d leave you alone?” Huey wanted to judge, wanted to condemn Chad… hell, he even wanted to walk away and leave the mad cyborg to whatever Fate provided, but he couldn’t; his creator and friend had perpetrated a scam stretching thirty thousand years that would ultimately –if successful- cause the destruction of every single atom in the Unreality. A huge death count before that moment was inevitable, and as much as it made him sick to his stomach, Huey needed Chad. There was no one else in the entire Unreality with even a chance at getting into Bravo. It was galling, what he was being asked to ignore. “Couldn’t you have just asked them politely?”

  “Well, Huey or ‘amilton or whoever the fuck you is, you isn’t that stupid.” Chad lit a cigarette and offered one to Huey, who declined. Shrugging, the assassin took a deep toke. “You know wot they is wantin’. Wot I is not knowin’ is wot you is wantin’. You is a long way from ‘ome and the last time I checked, Latelyspace is sealed behind the biggest shield anyone ‘as ever seen. As cake on top of delicious pudding, on the uvver side of that shield is the amassed military might of the Army and, more excitin’, all of Special Services. They is ‘avin’ the Deep Strike teams and everyfing. As wotever it is the fuck you is, I would fink you would be there, ‘elpin’ that chubby new Chairman out wiv fings. An’ it’s only been, like, a few weeks, yeah? Wot’s it gonna be like out there in a month or two, I is wonderin’.”

  “Chair Herrig is fine.” Huey responded. For the first time in his life, Herrig DuPont was doing precisely what he’d been born to do. Never in its five thousand years of existence had Latelyspace been run so smoothly, so efficiently, so well. And all thanks to Herrig DuPont. If things grew too terrible, he could always call on Fenris and the others, but with the hytech shield surrounding Latelyspace, there was absolutely no way SpecSer or the Army could get anywhere.

  Chad nodded knowingly. “Oh, aye, aye, that he is, that he is. On the telly all the time, your new leader, askin’ Trinity all polite-like to fuck off. Funny thing is, ‘e’s getting’ a bit more pissed off each time ‘e asks for the military aggression to cease. ‘ow long, I wonder, before your polite, ever-so-polite bureaucrat flips ‘is shit and ‘as them all blown to fuckin’ bits?”

  If he was honest with himself, Huey’d been worried about the same thing for a few days now. While not nearly as aggressive as Chairwoman Doans’ speeches shortly before her downfall, Herrig’s most recent message to Trinity had indeed been more forceful than the others. ‘Direct action’ and ‘cease all attempts to breach the Wall’ had featured more than once in the fifteen minute broadcast. Making matters worse was the fact that Trinity was airing the footage in a way that made Herrig and all of Latelyspace the ire of every man, woman and child in Its Domain. If enough time passed, the AI would succeed in making any eventual confrontation –Huey wasn’t stupid enough to imagine it’d never happen- between Latelyspace and Its armies popular.

  Phrases like ‘we’re going to blow you out of space’ and ‘hold on to your fucking hats because it’s going to be raining gigantic goddamn God soldiers all over everywhere’ weren’t too far down the road.

  “That,” Huey took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly, “is actually why I’m here. I need your help.”

  Chad blinked. He replayed the last few seconds of conversation back. Nope. No hallucinations. No drugs in his system, either. He turned incredulously to confront the Latelian. “I is checkin’ to see if I ‘as done some drugs I is forgettin’ about, and I is sadly as clean as a whistle. Now I is askin’ if you is high. I remember some of the drugs I was jammin’ down your throat. One or six of ‘em was quite addictive. If you is ‘avin’ a problem, mate, I can ‘elp. It is nuffink to be ashamed of. Drug addiction is a serious fing.”r />
  “Haha what?” Huey held up a hand. “No, I’m not high, you idiot. I need your help. To rescue Garth.”

  Chad stood there in silence, watching a large ship garishly marked with the lurid colors of Voss_Uderhell’s Acquisition Branch lumber around BishopCo remaining buildings like a drunken wildebeest, a half-dozen BishopCo attack jets laying in with an impressive amount of firepower. The cargo transport caught fire, then burst into flames as rounds struck the fuel chambers. A thunderclap heartbeat later and the armored vessel cracked in half and started falling towards the grumbling inferno below.

  “Now I know you is mad.” Chad sniffed. “Wot makes you fink I would do such a fing? It’s bonkers. I was ‘ired to kill the man. ‘e ain’t likely to forget that, mate.”

  “No. It isn’t.” Huey grabbed Chad by the shoulder and turned him around. When he was certain that the assassin wasn’t going to mistake the gesture for an attack, the Latelian/AI hybrid continued, though hurriedly; sooner or later Trinity Itself was going to realize that the data packets being uploaded through Gwyleh Ronn’s Suit were fake. Once that happened, It would release more Enforcers, and while it was easy to hack into the protocols of one, perhaps two more Enforcer Suits at the same time, there were limits he needed to impose lest the systemic AI discover who was doing the hacking. Old Earth wouldn’t survive that, oh no, not at all. “Look, there are three options left to those of us who know what’s really going on.”

  Chad spent considerable time every day not thinking about that very topic, but he didn’t think he was going to be able to get Huey to shut his gob. “I is listenin’.” He hoped his tone suggested that, while he was in fact, listening, he wasn’t enjoying the conversation.

  Huey spoke. “It is an undeniable truth that the Unreality is going to end, yes?”

  Chad nodded, albeit huffily. He still wasn’t entirely certain about the whole ‘End of Everyfing’ bit and had only just sort of gotten to the point where he could contemplate the ‘reality’ that everything he’d known for the his entire life wasn’t even technically real. “Go on.”

  “There are three ways this is going to happen.” Huey raised a finger. Technically, he wasn’t about to lie to Chad; as far as he was concerned, Garth was going to take care of the other problems represented by Mad Goth King Blake, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseille and Trinity Itself. Those three things weren’t on the table. Hell, he was only lumping the ‘Priests in the list to play on Chad’s intense dislike of the weird holy men.

  “One. Your pals the CyberPriests come out on top and they use you to destroy this entire Unreality. For added shits and giggles, they swarm the other remaining actual Spheres and destroy them as well, transforming ‘Existence’, which is vaster and broader and way more interesting than you can possibly comprehend, into … nothing. Actual nothing. No,” Huey waggled his finger, “no. No metaphysical discussions on the nature of nothing being something. Actual, legitimate nothing.”

  Somewhere deep in the recesses of his bizarre new AI mind, Huey could see the representation of that possibility. It sickened him, filled his flesh and blood body with ice and dread more profound than when he thought about Garth trapped for all eternity inside Bravo. If the ‘Priests were successful… Huey shut his eyes. It wasn’t going to happen. The ‘Priests were low on the list, yes, but only because they seemed to be having difficulty getting off the ground. Garth was going to take care of them before that happened. He had to.

  “Yep.” Chad sucked at a tooth. “Me and the Electric Friars are currently on the outs about that. I reckon you is knowin’ they built me to assist in that, yeah?”

  “Yes.” Huey’s heart thrilled at confirmation that Chadsik wasn’t on board with the ‘Priests and their nihilistic goals. Ever since leaving Latelyspace to hunt the FrancoBrit down, he’d had suspicions, if for no other reason than nothing was happening; of all the players in the endgame, the dysfunctional holy men with their warped Harmony were the closest of all to realizing their goals. With Chadsik at long last in their grasp, well, Huey wasn’t ashamed to admit –only to himself, and only in the bathroom- that he’d basically been shitting bricks the whole time.

  He held up a finger. “Two. And this is the Big Bad Wolf, the worst of them all, the whole reason why we’re here, the whole reason why everything sucks, why everything has been happening the way it’s been happening, the Numero Uno Reason to fight for your life, the Great Grandaddy …”

  “Oi, mate, get on wiv it.” Chad rolled a hand. “For a fella wot says everyfing is in danger, you chat like a girl.”

  “… The Monsters in the Dark, Chadsik al-Taryin, I give to you the M’Zahdi Hesh. Extra-dimensional beings with the powers of actual, literal Gods, monsters hiding in the shadows, born out of the mists of the very first iteration of this Unreality, beasts capable of consuming and using the powers of creation for themselves. They squat above and below, guiding and shaping the birth of an entire Universe, coaxing things along until some Golden Mean is met and then wham. Lights out. They consume the energies from the Unreality and they grow in power. There is nothing they cannot do, Chadsik al-Taryin, nothing. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of trillions of years. They have seen and done it all in ways you can’t imagine. Except…”

  Chad knew somewhat about the M’Zahdi Hesh from the brothers, but they were notoriously close-lipped about their … counterparts. It seemed they were terrified of these Heshii even more than they were of Garth Nickels. He suspected that these extra-dimensional leeches were the whole reason he was the way he was; the only way to counteract monsters who’ve had trillions of years of experience was to provide a being who’d had similar amounts of lifetimes. “Except?”

  “Except for Garth, they would’ve succeeded thirty thousand years ago. Their goal is to destroy this Unreality as they’ve always done, destroy it and let the Engines of Creation spit out another one so they can do it all over again. No one knows what they actually intend. If I was them, I’d be doing this so I could get enough power to do as the ‘Priests intend, and for exactly the same reasons but I just don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  “Orl right, so we’ve got two different groups as wot are just really fuckin’ batshit bonkers an’ they all wanna blow everyfing up.” Chad took a bit of a stroll around, pausing to knock on the Enforcer’s Suit. A barely audible shriek of rage welled up. The cyborg chuckled. He cozied up and took a bunch of selfies with a camera dug out of a pocket before continuing. “I is liking being alive, me. I is enjoyin’ the absolute fucked-upedness of this whole fing. It’s summat that the brothers ain’t understandin’. Now, wot makes your fella-me-lad worth rescuin’? Is he gonna stop all this from ‘appenin’?”

  Huey’d thought long and hard about how he was going to answer this particular question. It’d be easy, and believable, given Garth’s track record, to lie and say that all the ex-Specter planned on doing was defeating both the Heshii and the CyberPriests, but … it was a lie and … there was every possibility that they were all going to need Chadsik later on. Lie now, get the man on board for a quick and dirty rescue, but lose the man’s admittedly terrifying powers later on. Tell the truth and possibly lose him right off the bat.

  It was a tough call.

  “No.” Huey said bluntly. “No. He plans on destroying everything as well.” He threw up a hand and shouted incoherently when Chadsik turned to leap off the edge of the building. Huey couldn’t let Chad go. He’d traveled too far, had left too many of his friends in the lurch in pursuit of whispers and lies to meet with Chad. He couldn’t let the assassin leave. “No. Listen. Please.”

  Chad stopped at the edge. Most of the fires were out now, and whatever remained of BishopCo’s automated defense systems had managed to stop all but the most ardent of ransackers. There were a few Voss_Uderhell scows milling around, but the majority presence right now was Tynedale/Fujihara. Bishop was getting what he deserved.

  The … man behind him was filled with desperation. And fear. The wavering tone in his v
oice spoke volumes. For all his bravado, for all his power –stopping that Enforcer in his tracks had been a neat trick, all right- Huey was terrified. That and no other reason was keeping Chad on the roof. He turned, crossed his arms high on his chest and said. “Two minutes, mate, two minutes.”

  “I don’t need two.” Huey replied stridently. He took a deep breath and started talking quickly. “As you well know, Garth N’Chalez is an unparalleled engineer. A designer and builder of things. Most of those things involve machinery capable of destroying everything across a very large landscape, but he’s a genius. He loves to build. The nature of this Unreality has forced him into a very specific form of creation, but even that has been turned to his benefit. I won’t go into details right now, but … experiences in his early life showed him what Existence is supposed to be like.”

  “Runnin’ out of time, mate.” Chad warned.

  “Fuck you. Fifteen seconds added for interrupting.” Huey resumed when Chad nodded, a wry smile on his face. “He is here, now, in this time, because he devised a plan of creation that needed thirty thousand years to prepare. He plans on defeating the M’Zahdi Hesh, and he’ll probably kill anyone who gets in his way and yes, part of those plans involve the absolute and utter destruction of everything everywhere. But what you don’t know is that he also plans on giving everyone and everything that ever lived up to the moment of destruction another chance. He plans on using the energies of the defeated Heshii and anything else he can find to push Reality 2.0 through the extra-dimensionality and into truth.”

  “Not possible.” Chad countered. He knew that much from the brothers. They were most cogent on that. “The brothers…”

  “You’re going to listen to broken down cybernetic religious men who want everything to be erased?” Huey couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re going to listen to the beings who made you mad, stuffed one of their own inside your brain, and set you loose with the mistaken belief that you were not only a sociopath but a hackneyed serial killer?”