Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  “Screens say otherwise.” Verton insisted, pointing with a narrow finger at a bar graph that was slowly inching its way upwards. “This says it’s getting ready to do something.”

  Herrig licked his lips. “Awesome.” It was about goddamn time. He expected that any second now the invisible door was going to explode off its hinges and Garth Nickels was going to come wandering out jibber-jabbering about Swan Halen or whoever and then they could all go about the business of getting Aleksander Politoyov and his damned Army off their borders.

  ***

  Fenris looked up from the prone figure of Hollyoak. The mite had passed out from the ‘gentle’ questioning again. “Is the body in place?” he asked through the Harmony.

  Nalanata, the one who everyone ignored because had yet to say anything to anyone not of the Harmony, responded. “This bloody body is heavy as a black star, Fen.”

  The others, situated throughout the citadel, chuckled.

  “Harmony rewritten God soldiers such as Sa Gurant do tend to the heavier side.” Fenris poked the should’ve-been-aborted madman with a pinky. Disgusting, yet so … curious. He had no basis for comparison as to how or why Hollyoak had come into being. The man was divinely inspired, to be sure. But was the divination Harmony-wrought or just … madness? “But you didn’t answer my question, brother.”

  A grunt escaped and echoed through the Harmony. “As close as it’s going to get, Fen. Be easier if I could get a bit bigger.” Nalanata grunted again.

  Lokken broke in. “Is this necessary?”

  “Not … not entirely.” Fenris admitted. “But surely you, too, are curious about this disgusting thing.”

  Shrugs from his brothers whispered through the Harmony. Fenris accepted their ambivalence with grace. They could take or leave any knowledge gleaned from his proposed experiment. The leader of the Harmony soldiers continued. “And besides, this will be a wonderful test for the one who would be sixth.”

  “Now that,” Stride said impishly, “is something I am far more interested in.”

  Nalanata interjected. “Can I leave now? This corpse is perhaps the foulest thing in Existence. It rubs me raw in every way possible.”

  Fenris twitched his mouth. “I disagree. What is to come will surely violate all of your dainty senses a thousandfold, dear brother Nalanata. I ask again: is Gurant’s corpse close enough?”

  “We’ve been simulating fracture and collapse patterns for months, Fenris. The moment we detected a pulse to the engines, the Planck-second we determined his plan. Our models are as close to what will truly come to be without actually being.” Nalanata booted Gurant in the head and walked away. “Unless the Unreal Harmony decides it doesn’t want this to happen, this miscegenation will quite literally land beside that toad.”

  “Good.” Fenris nodded. “Now, everyone, I advise we make ourselves absent and let these people deal with what is going to happen on their own.”

  Solgun sighed. “Can we go frighten the Army for a bit? Everything’s so boring right now.”

  Lokken, Stride and Nalanata’s desire for that option flooded the Harmony. Fenris nodded. It was important to get the Army as riled up as possible, because sooner rather than later, Huey was going to come home and the split-second that his shield went down was important.

  Because the Harmonized Goddies needed testing, too.

  The Peak started shaking.

  ***

  Sidra stepped forward and addressed the Chairman, mentally adding the honorifics she’d been forbidden from saying. “Sa Herrig.” Leader of the New People, Most Trusted. “We must leave.”

  Herrig held his glasses on with one hand; the sympathetic vibrations in the room had nearly everything loose jumping and skittering like living things and he’d be –heh- damned if he was going to miss whatever was going to happen next. He shook his head. “No.”

  “The scientists are leaving, Sa Herrig.” Revitalizer of Latelyspace, Healer of Broken Soldiers. “You cannot remain.”

  Herrig straightened his back and stared defiantly at Sidra. “Foursie Sidra, if you cannot remain at your post, if you cannot follow your orders as I have given them, I suggest you remove yourself to the other room. If you are frightened of what might happen, then by all means, leave. I am staying.”

  “But … The Bo… Bravo … it might blow up. It looks like it is going to blow up.”

  Herrig smiled. “Have you learned your new lessons well, Sidra?” The Chairman knew what Fenris and his gloomy brothers were teaching the soldiers, knew that they claimed understanding what was to come was integral to understanding how to work their wondrous bodies and minds without the interference of the chemicals the Regime had been feeding them for thousands of years.

  Sidra stuck out her considerable chest and nodded firmly. “I have, sa. We must End so something new, something wondrous, can Begin. It is the way of things.”

  Herrig pointed at Bravo, which was shifting in place so violently cracks in the surrounding walls were beginning to appear. “And the man inside?”

  “He is the Engineer, Sa Herrig. The Creator. Without him, there can be no proper End. Without him, we will fall on the stars like a plague. We will destroy before we are destroyed. We will deny the M’Zahdi Hesh their bountiful meal in the hopes they will learn to be more careful. If we are lucky, our destruction will end them as well, and the Engines of Creation will be … free.” Sidra smiled. The first time she’d heard those words, felt them issuing forth through her feeble grasp of the Harmony, she’d wept.

  After four thousand years of death and war and watching friends and family disappear and die, she’d never have imagined there could be beauty in death, majesty in the end, but, with Fenris’ aid, they all knew the truth. This war, this end, this death … would mean more than any other in recorded History. If she died on the front lines battling whatever horrors the Heshii cooked up or right now, right here in this room protecting the most foolish human being she’d ever met, a man who loved her people more than he had any reason to and thus deserved to be loved in turn, so be it. All deaths this close to the End were good.

  “My friend is in there, Sidra.” Herrig sat down. “My friend is in there and if his ship blows up, there is little point to me going on without him. You Goddies have your Ending. I have none. I will offer my hopes to Garth Nickels by sitting by his side. If he dies here, he will not be alone.”

  Sidra Deschayn, four thousand one hundred forty-two years old if she was a day, had seen awful things. Had done awful, terrible things in the name of progress, in the name of protecting the Regime, in dark servitude to Trinity Itself. The Harmony was helping her –all of them- deal with the madness that’d curled into their souls.

  Never in her life had she seen a normal man be so brave. She moved to stand behind him, knowing the she could never move from his side. She would live for Herrig DuPont. She would die for Herrig DuPont.

  Herrig stiffened when the weight of Sidra’s hand rested ever so gently on his shoulder, then relaxed.

  Bravo continued to rumble in place.

  ***

  Ex-Chairwoman Alyssa Doans looked up at the sky, squinting angrily as she always did; spEyes were an ever-present facet of her life, and had been since the moment she’d walked out of her old offices in Central more than a year ago. They followed her day and night, tracked her every movement, recorded and reported everything she did to the renamed Ministry of Information.

  As Hamilton Barnes, who she still didn’t believe was not The Last Loyal Man turned … turncoat, had promised so long ago, everyone knew where she was and what she was doing all the time. Last she’d heard, some enterprising Latelian had figured out how to hack into the spEye-feed and was making a fortune on the black market by selling her most private moments to the highest bidder.

  No matter. Alyssa cackled and spat at the invisible spEyes. Oh, she knew they were there. You couldn’t see them because spEyes were tiny, but they were there. It didn’t even matter if they were there or not, because wi
th the proteus on her wrist relaying her position through the ‘LINKs to the avatars set to control her desires through the awful voting system, her … freedom was limited at best, a joke in truth.

  Alyssa Doans, once the most powerful woman in the solar system, lover of the most powerful man in the solar system, finished washing her face in the park drinking fountain as best she could.

  For the first few months, it’d been hard. Oh, it was still hard. Impossibly so. Relying on the goodwill of others for basic sustenance was a thing normal people who’d fallen on hard times would struggle with. For the woman who’d once dreamed of conquering the entire Universe, of wrestling the powers of control from Trinity Itself … well, now, some lessons come steep, come hard, and cost more than anyone could’ve possibly imagined.

  In the beginning, she’d rarely chosen to use the Pariah System to get the things she’d needed to live through the day. No, she’d chosen instead to belittle, badger and outright force people to give her the food off their plates, the credits in their pockets, their beds at night; the Pariah System, at the start, had been a toy. She’d demanded starships and billions of credits and mercenaries and the deaths of people who’d looked at her funny.

  It’d been a game because back then, she’d still thought of herself as Chairwoman. She’d imagined that, at any second, she’d figure out some way to steal the Chair back from that fat, balding man who wasn’t even Latelian, for the Love of Pete!

  So rather than use the System for food and drink and shelter, she’d squandered precious requests on things designed to resurrect the power she’d once held, going from house to house and knocking politely on the door and then, essentially, invading a private residence.

  Alyssa didn’t know if the Pariah System had just allowed her to treat polite Latelians that way or if it’d taken so long for things to change because Hami… Huey hadn’t considered the possibility of her audacious behavior, but, the ex-Chairwoman reflected, it probably didn’t matter because the System had ultimately smacked her down, and hard.

  She remembered the day most clearly. Freshly showered and fed by The Rennats, a lovely family positively aflutter with excitement and pride at having provided for a wrongfully deposed Chairwoman, she’d headed towards the next home on her list of People Who Would Provide; ironically, the Pariah System was responsible for providing her with a geographical breakdown of wealthy Latelians most likely to be predisposed towards providing aid.

  Granted, she’d asked for the information using dodgy data. Instead of using herself in the request, Alyssa had been crafty enough to ask the system which of her citizens would rise to the challenge of helping Central should natural disaster strike, and since it was a request for pure information that held no real world value, the avatars had spat the data out almost immediately.

  Alyssa recalled knocking on the ornate door leading into The Coolom family residence. She remembered the vaguely disgusted look on the butler’s face as he processed who’d had the temerity to invade the privacy of his family.

  She even remembered –and this sometimes still found her laughing hysterically- she even remembered the God soldier picking her up by the scruff of the neck and carrying her twenty miles outside of Central proper. She didn’t quite remember trying to kill the Goddie for the duration of their long trek, but when she’d come to … it’s hard to deny the evidence of your misdeeds when your fingernails are cracked and bloody and when your teeth are wobbly in the gums from trying to bite through the impervious skin of your ‘transport’.

  Daunted but not beaten, she’d started walking back the moment the Goddie’s back had disappeared over the horizon.

  A new family, a new attempt to badger a harmless family for food and drink and money had generated another God soldier. This one had taken her thirty miles outside Central.

  Alyssa aimed herself towards her Bench, from where she reigned over her new and loyal subjects, smiling. Oh, it’d taken her seven such interceptions before she’d given up hope. She was now all the way in one of the quiet suburbs in Easson and … she liked it, more or less. Certainly this little area was much quieter than the eternal and restless nature of Central, certainly the people were less inclined –when they came across her- to point and laugh or to throw sticks than the last town she’d been in and, yes, there were occasions where they brought her food or clothes to wear, which was … nice.

  Ex-Chairwoman Alyssa Doans had zero intention of warning them that being nice to her would kill their little town. The Pariah System was unforgiving. The Pariah System had been put in place to punish her and those who sought to provide aid. It made no distinction between the gift of a hot meal and a promise of military support should she seek to overtake Central. A new, clean shirt was exactly the same as a gun. An apple? Air support. Shoes? A shiny new tank.

  The population of the last town she’d been in hadn’t figured it out. One day, things had just stopped working properly. LINK-feeds had grown spotty, Screens and Sheets had stopped working, machines had gone idle. In time, everything requiring power –and there were oh so many things that needed either electricity or the LINK to run- had shut down.

  The town had died. The people had moved away. She’d swooped in and salvaged everything worth anything and had moved on herself.

  This new town … it was called Ecklin … Ecklin was positively stuffed with kind, polite Latelians who just couldn’t abide the thought of a woman living in a park, even if that woman had once upon a time been the worst thing to happen to Latelyspace in five thousand years. And so they brought her good food, fresh clothes, Sheets so she could keep up to date on what that Trinity bastard was doing to her system … they brought her whatever they could spare.

  By now, by now they were noticing tiny little things. Maybe the light on their netLINK took longer to turn on. Perhaps their refrigerator stopped working for a while. Maybe, here and there, a bank account was mysteriously empty. Whatever it was, however the Pariah System operated, sooner or later, Ecklin was going to die just like the other three towns before it.

  Alyssa Doans. She might have lost the power to conquer the Universe, but she was damn well going to destroy Hospitalis, one suburb, one town, one village at a time. Ultimately, Northon, Easson, Wesson, Central and Port City were going to find that they were stuffed to capacity, full to overflowing with millions of unwanted people and then they would learn something new and terrible.

  The Pariah System was a plague. It followed those who’d been caught up in it. It followed the men and women who’d helped her. It followed them and spread to those who were nice to them.

  It would take a long, long time. The System, the avatars running it, they might figure out what was happening. But whatever damage had been done would stay done and would make things that much harder for that fat balding bastard.

  How dare he? How dare he think that he could do a better job than the greatest Chairwoman in History?

  Alyssa Doans leaned back on her bench, lit a cigarette, and dreamed of Hospitalis in ruins.

  ***

  Aleksander Politoyov, ‘commander’ of Special Forces and one of the only Offworlders to have ever risen to such rank inside Trinity’s military structure, hated his life.

  He shook his head. Perhaps that was a bit rough. He didn’t necessarily hate his life. There were many good things he could say about living and breathing, and the joy of eating, but beyond that and for the last year, there was little else that’d been good about it.

  Contacted by Trinity just over a year ago to wage war on the intensely militaristic and over-technologically developed solar system Latelyspace, Politoyov had leaped at the chance. Every commander in every branch of armed forces run by the machine mind would’ve done the same; in all the systems spread throughout the Universe, only Latelyspace offered any challenge, any interest, any … fun.

  Their God soldiers were a most tantalizing test, their weapons the most devastating, their tactics, the most advanced. Prior to the moment Trinity had come to him i
nside his personal offices, Politoyov had never heard of any other agency being given the chance to go toe to toe with the Latelians. In point of fact, if his voluminous memory –when it came to conflict- was correct, Trinity had actually destroyed Its own troops the very moment a captain or commander or admiral got it into his or her head that they were going to slug it out with the Goddies.

  And as commander for Special Services, the agency replacing the God Soldier Army as the number one deterrent against Cordon-based threats over a hundred years ago, Politoyov was even more interested to see how they’d fare. The Cordon was a weird and wondrous place, just as it was dark and twisted. His men -those who’d fought on the other side, at least- were barely men anymore. Would they be a match for the ungodly God soldiers?

  Although Latelians had been crushing and dominating Offworlder and human alike at Trinity’s command for thousands of years, Commander Politoyov believed they’d stand a really good chance at coming out on top. The Latelians might’ve done it for longer, but they’d done it better.

  So yes, naturally and without reservation, the Offworlder commander had leaped. The last of the Sovereign systems would fall and Trinity’s Domain would be whole.

  There was only one wrinkle. Well, two.

  The first was the goddamn shield. No one had seen anything like it. It defied analysis. It was similar to the gravnetic shielding currently deployed on a nearly Universal level, but only in effect. Design-wise, SpecSer techs and engineers could only shake their heads and shrug.

  Trinity had nothing to say on the subject and one day, a bored Enforcer had shown up to take a whack at it ­–literally, the armor-clad warrior had taken a swing at the invisible shield with the biggest hammer probably ever to’ve been forged, all without any effect whatsoever- before leaving. Special Services own tech troops, the geniuses behind the black hole engines that’d gotten them the gig in the first place, couldn’t even technically prove that there was a shield there.

  But there was. Oh, by all that was holy and just in the world, there was definitely a shield there.