Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Ute grinned again and let the Harmony lead him to where he needed to be.

  ***

  It wasn’t his fault, no no no, it wasn’t his fault. It was was … was their fault, yes, that was the truth. He hadn’t wanted to scream the machines awake, that was a silly thing to do, he hadn’t meant to do that because all those people had died and then the soldiers had come and then he’d had to do whatever he could do to keep from dying and then … and then one of the first God soldiers had come, only only they were calling themselves Harmony soldiers.

  Hollyoak tried to shift to get more comfortable under his restraints and succeeded only in pulling one of the straps tighter.

  They didn’t trust him, no no, they definitely didn’t trust him. The straps were one of his inventions. They pulled tighter. That was all they did. They pulled tighter and tighter and tighter until they squeezed an arm or a leg off. Because he was so small, and the straps were for normal-sized people, he was only held down by two and they covered his whole, pathetic body except for his head, the pressure was like being squeezed.

  Hollyoak watched the lights very high on the ceiling far away shake and sway. The Peak was trembling like a leaf caught in a windstorm. He wondered what was causing it. Locked away as he was inside the very chamber they’d once imprisoned Gurant in and subject to incessant interrogation by Fenris, for the first time in his life, Hollyoak didn’t know anything.

  Fenris thought he was mad, mad as a hatter, mad as the maddest thing in all creation, mad. Hollyoak wondered, for real and for true, if you were mad, could you even admit it? Could you know you were insane? He didn’t feel insane. The thoughts he had in his head had always been there. His constant companions.

  He’d killed a lot of people. No one was happy with him. He’d screamed and the machines of the base had responded with shocking lethality. Hollyoak giggled at the joke. Shocking. More than a few people had died by electrocution. And poison gas. And lasers and bullets and even a few vats of acid.

  It wasn’t his fault.

  It was OverCommander Vasily’s. And Chairwoman Doans, although Fenris had let slip that she wasn’t anymore, that some fat Offworlder turned Latelian was running things now. That didn’t matter. What mattered was no one believed him when he tried to say how it wasn’t his fault.

  If if if … if they’d let him hang himself before being arrested so long ago, none of this would’ve happened. He wouldn’t have panicked and killed all those people.

  If … if if if they hadn’t come to him and said ‘we would like to see what you can do for the glory and might of the Latelian Regime’ … he wouldn’t have made the things he’d made, done the things he’d done.

  They should’ve known. They should’ve seen the light of madness in his eyes and backed away, should’ve backed away to let that light grow dim.

  Hollyoak stopped humming for a moment. Where had that thought come from?

  No matter. Why couldn’t Fenris and this new Chairman and even old OverCommander Vasily accept their own responsibilities? You let a mad dog off it’s leash, isn’t isn’t the owner responsible for when it starts chewing the faces off babies?

  Except, only, he wasn’t a mad dog and as far as he could remember he’d never chewed any faces off any babies, but he had turned the God soldiers into a pack of raving fools and lunatics and addicts hooked on a terrible, terrible cocktail of drugs and neural inhibitors. He had created the Gunboys and other things, some which were actually technically far, far worse than his poor giant soldiers.

  Those worse things were on other worlds, though, and maybe, maybe if he could figure out a way to get free from bondage … maybe he could get to one of them and then exact revenge.

  They shouldn’t have come to him and said that the Project was over, that the Chairwoman’s plans to conquer Trinityspace weren’t ever going to work. They shouldn’t have done that, and they shouldn’t have said they were closing up shop.

  Just like you don’t take a face out of a face-chewing mad dog’s mouth, you don’t take away Hollyoak’s job, no, no, that was a terrible idea.

  Suddenly, and in the middle of designing the genetic template for a dog bred to chew faces off small children, everything went sideways. Walls and ceilings fell in, the world turned chaotic and filled with a furious sound that threatened to shatter the mad midget’s eardrums. Everything went dusty and for a long time, Hollyoak’s only companion was the sound of tumbling rocks.

  During it all, Hollyoak was calm. The funny thing was, even though he’d panicked so long ago and killed all those people, well, that’d been because he’d been afraid of losing his job, of having nothing to do, of being separated from all his machines. It was funny because he wasn’t afraid to die. That was the mistake Fenris and all the others who came to poke and prod and ask their stupid questions somehow managed to forget. They looked at him and saw a tiny little madman full of genetic modifications and weird cybernetic enhancements. They forgot. They all forgot.

  They forgot he’d survived EOPD, though how how how anyone who was anyone could forget that was beyond Hollyoak. He was the solar system’s most notorious survivor of Shrinky. He’d even developed a kind of cure modeled on the one he’d used for himself, though the Chairwoman hadn’t wanted to release it to the public because because sometimes it worked and sometimes it turned poor little sufferers of Shrinky all the way inside out, and in a hurry.

  They’d forgotten, and it was their fault. There wasn’t a survivor in the world who could accurately or even adequately describe the exquisite pain of Shrinky. It drove everyone who had it mad. It was just a matter of whether you came back from that madness.

  Lying on his restraining bed while the world continued to go topsy-turvy, Hollyoak reflected that quite possibly he hadn’t come back from the madness of that painful disease at all. Maybe maybe he’d gone through the madness into some darker place.

  Either way, they’d forgotten about EOPD and the pain and the suffering and the desperate wish to die that everyone who had it dreamed of, sometimes for days on end. Days on end of feeling your inside scratching and twisting and poking into new and weird genetic patterns, feeling your bones creak and crack and break and heal into tiny versions of itself …

  You survived Shrinky, you didn’t fear dying. It was as simple as that. At most, you went through the rest of your life wishing other people could feel that kind of pain, experience that kind of madness, withstand that level of pressure. Hollyoak had been compressed and compacted into a new form, one harder than duronium. Simply by surviving. They’d all forgotten that. He hadn’t. Never never never. No. Never.

  The world finally stopped shaking. Whatever had happened was done happening. It didn’t matter to Hollyoak. He was still strapped in and amazingly enough, the straps hadn’t popped his head off like a pimple.

  Coughing dry dust out of his mouth, the diminutive dwarf tried to take a look around. Oh my, the damage was most extensive. The whole room was in a shambles. Vasily and the new Chairman were probably going to have to find a new place to hide him and all the other secrets; if the destruction to this room, one of the most fortified in the entire Peak was any kind of sample, well, the rest of the place was ruined.

  “Oh my.” Hollyoak licked his lips and stared at the … at the gift. He couldn’t believe it wasn’t decayed at all, though he supposed a few heartbeats later that what Gurant had become could very well have ensured that he body wouldn’t decompose. The magical science that’d transformed Sa Gurant into into into some kind of God would surely want to preserve itself.

  Except, except oh except the crashing and crushing and colliding rocks from the falling roof had done something awful, so so awful to the poor dead God’s head. A jagged, splintered spear of solid sharp rock laced with sharper still duronium had severed that massive head clean from the neck, like a surgeon.

  Hollyoak licked his lips and giggled a high-pitched giggle. Oh my. A quick check of his paltry cybernetic systems verified that the old mechanisms buri
ed inside his neck and tiny little chest were still operative, if nearly forgotten; once upon a time fifteen years ago he’d been close to building a brand new body for himself. A bigger one, a better one, a stronger one.

  The Chairwoman had learned of it and naturally, naturally, she’d put a stop to it. He’d been so angry for so long about that, but then he’d decided to stick with what he had because because he’d survived for so long in such a tiny body but this…

  This was a gift. A great big gift.

  Hollyoak began to struggle against the seemingly sentient bonds.

  They started to grow tighter. So tight. He found it hard to breathe almost immediately. He kept struggling, wiggling and twisting and shimmying. When his bones began breaking and the room started growing dark, he told his cybernetic systems to come online.

  A few seconds later, Hollyoak’s head crawled off his neck, slender robotic legs built from bones and metal teetering and tottering out of the crushed body like a grotesque spider. Mouth frozen in a rictus of concentration, Hollyoak commanded his head to move.

  Destiny awaited, it seemed.

  ***

  Vasily’s head snapped around and his eyes automatically sought the source of the sound; long years of practice had him staring at a pinprick blur of motion leaving a thick white contrail of debris in its wake. A few seconds later there was a second massive boom, this one three times as loud. A concentric burst of light and cloud filled the sky.

  The OverCommander didn’t reach for his proteus for a number of reasons. One, he knew instinctively that it was Garth; the thing he’d been entombed in, had, at one point, been a space-faring vessel. He didn’t know the whys and wherefores of how the smartest and most destructive man he’d ever met had managed to let himself get trapped inside, or why it’d taken him more than a year to engineer his escape, but watching the blur of light had elicited nothing more than a ‘yes, that makes sense’.

  And secondly, Vasily couldn’t reach for his prote. He didn’t have it. It was nowhere near him. In point of fact, it was currently sitting on a desk in his nicely expensive condo in Central City, no doubt to the distraction of the half-million or so people who seemed rely on his counsel day in and day out, even in this, a post-Regime life.

  Vasily turned back to what he was doing, mind turning over how much his life had changed. With Fenris and his ‘brothers’ freeing the God soldiers from their chemical dependency and arming them with the tools to deal with their longevity, you’d think they’d have the adoration of the general population, but … that wasn’t the case. In the few informal polls Vasily’d seen before going … going dark, the dark-eyed and scathingly dismissive ancient Latelians were almost universally loathed, even though it was obvious they were the ones responsible for bringing the Goddies ‘back’.

  Vasily shrugged at that; Fenris didn’t care and to be honest, every time the man spoke to those ‘in the know’, he spoke with such morbid gravitas that even Goddies shivered. The Harmony soldiers had some kind of bizarre love affair with death and the eventual end of the Universe and they blatantly didn’t care who heard what. So the less the Horsemen of the Apocalypse –as Garth had once called them- stayed in the background, training broken God soldiers in how to reassemble themselves into who they’d once been, the better.

  Besides, they had Ute now. Ute Tizhen.

  Jesus wept bloody damn tears, what a goddamn nightmare that was. The progenitor of the Tizhen family line, the reason behind every Tizhen since his ‘death’ joining the Army in whatever capacity possible … alive. Alive and –if you ignored the first Harmony soldiers- the second most powerful being in the solar system. The first, now that it was obvious Nickels was on his way somewhere else.

  Vasily remembered that first fateful encounter like it’d just happened. When he was old and drooling into a cup, wishing he was still capable of fighting instead of wetting the bed, that moment would be the only thing he’d remember with absolute clarity. He remembered Fenris feigning surprise at Ute’s sudden appearance in the conference room and the look of ashamed disgruntlement on Ute’s broad features; of course the leader of the five demigods had arranged the encounter.

  Beyond the shock of seeing the man alive after more than four thousand years, beyond the stunning similarities between the two, there was the feat the man had performed. No one stayed hidden from the Regime for long, even by accident. Sooner or later, someone noticed something and said so to someone else, who either wanted to make a fast buck by selling secrets or was loyal to the Regime and … and you couldn’t look at Ute without thinking ‘this man is a God soldier, why isn’t he out somewhere stomping heathens flat’?

  They hadn’t spoken beyond that initial encounter. There was too much to say. Besides, umpty-great grandfather Ute Tizhen was too damn busy helping train the soldiers because, as it turned out, everything Fenris and his freakishly quiet brothers were showing the poor Goddies had been ripped from the man’s experiences.

  “It is about time.” Tomas said once he’d done puffing on his pipe.

  “Hm?” Vasily didn’t take his eye off his target.

  Tomas pointed the end of his pipe towards the now-fading circle in the sky. “Sa Nickels.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you suppose is going to happen when his very fancy ship meets the very unbreakable shield?” Tomas wondered aloud.

  “I am finding, Tomas, that it is better not to worry.” Vasily shifted his arms a bit. His shoulders were getting sore. “Fenris, Lokken and the other three somehow seem to have everything under control.”

  Tomas took another puff. “Mm. This is true. They definitely seem to be prepared for everything.”

  “Except this.”

  “It is possible,” Tomas murmured gently, “it is possible they left this for you because, for all their talk of Dark Endings and Bright Beginnings, they are truly about helping people come to grips with things.”

  “I thought of that.” Vasily admitted. “And…”

  “And?” Tomas scrawled on his prote while his dearest and oldest friend stared down the scope of a liberated personal FARS-gun. Not as powerful as the one used by Gurant, it was still excessively deadly.

  The avatar ping came back null. No news about Naoko. Tomas’ old man bones warned him that something had gone terribly, tragically wrong. He could feel his daughter was in trouble and try as he might, he could think of no way to get out.

  Tomas Kamagana’s eyes turned to the skies once more. Garth Nickels had broken free of Hospitalis and was on his way somewhere else, and thankfully, he knew that Naoko was out there somewhere too. It was a hard thing, letting go, trusting someone else to take care of the problem and he was afraid he wasn’t quite there, not yet.

  Garth Nickels was a fairly capable young man with wild ideas who’d done a lot to and for Latelyspace. If anyone could track Naoko down and rescue her from Alastair –oh, Tomas was no fool, he well knew that the dear old Yellow Dog Elder would, if he hadn’t already, renege- it would be him. But there was the niggling worry about the time; could Nickels get to his daughter quickly enough? Would anything he did, even if was there fast, matter? The lure of true power the Kamagana name could wield within Yellow Dogs was might and nearly impossible to resist. Tomas closed his eyes briefly. He’d never thought to instill in Naoko a loathing of that kind of power because … because who in their right minds could conceive of events like these?

  “And,” Vasily said grimly, “if that were true, they wouldn’t have hidden the deaths of four towns from me. Two or even three would’ve fallen into the ‘acceptable’ range, as data points in a graph to verify their concerns, but four? The effort to track down all the people afflicted with Pariah, to provide them with a homestead not attached to the ‘LINK in any way … there had to’ve been a better way. I am not so important, my inner wounds are not so terrible, that so many others should’ve been made to suffer.”

  Tomas wanted to differ. He spoke often with the freshly wide-eyed Goddies every chance
he got. They were uncharacteristically eager to share their newfound knowledge with a short EuroJapanese elder than one of their own kind, and so he knew a fair bit more about the proposed end of the Universe than anyone not a God soldier. To a one, they alluded to some kind of impending greatness for Vasily Aurick Tizhen, something of profound impact, something only he could do.

  Then they’d said ‘it all depends on what happens next’.

  ‘Next’, in this context, was why he was sitting on a wet hill with his best friend, while said best friend stared down a scope at his ex-girlfriend.

  If Vasily could do what needed to be done here, now, with the stakes so personal, so intense, then later, when his next great challenge arose, then something wondrous would happen. Or so the Goddies claimed.

  Vasily took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly. He took another. He held it.

  A gentle squeeze, a puff of sound, a flash of red.

  ***

  Alyssa couldn’t wait until the whole world was swallowed in Pariah, when there was no one left except those who’d thrown her down this dark technological hole. She’d walk into Central, the countless masses of those who followed her because they had no choice at her back. She’d walk up to Vasily and Nickels and Hamilton-who-wasn’t and she’d be ruler again, except this time a ruler of savages who didn’t rely on science any more.

  She’d make them all suf…

  ***

  “Thank you for finding her for me, Tomas.” Vasily began packing away his FARS-gun.

  “No trouble at all, sa, no trouble at all.” Tomas moved to help his oldest friend with the heavy case, but the OverCommander snorted derisively, so he bowed gracefully and clambered into the truck. When Vasily got in, the EuroJapanese man yawned loudly. “I do believe I am in the mood for some of Si Stonigvale’s pancakes, Vasily.”

  “You aren’t in the least bit interested in what happened in the sky?” Vasily threw the truck into gear.

  “Oh,” Tomas drawled around a freshly lit pipe, “I am certain everything is going to be ok.”