Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Lefty bit back an undignified chortle and motioned for the prisoner to be brought in. The meeting was a formality; sentencing had already been decided. In truth, sentencing had been decided the moment the Scourge had gotten his own nickname.

  Four Square Guards, resplendent in their King’s Armor, dragged the prisoner into the room. Beyond being naked as a babe, their prisoner had been treated to the manacles and the shackles, and then some; metallic tubes called ‘Prisoner’s Choice’ stretched from fingertip to elbow. Lefty quirked an eyebrow at that. Even here, in the capital, surrounded by guards and watched every which way, still the man had attempted escape at least once.

  It took all kinds, Lefty supposed. And really, the sort of person who attacks a harmless woman with flying undergarments would have to be the sort of man who’d risk his life when it was all over with.

  The Square Guards, all red and marigold yellow, dropped the prisoner into a chair and arrayed themselves behind, splinterguns at the ready. The Scourge slumped down, resting his chin on his chest.

  Lefty raised a hand, both at the discontented muttering of his comrades and at the martial display. “Now, now, gentlemen, surely we’re free from the rapscallion’s ministrations now? He’s clad in Prisoner’s Choice. He’ll blow his own arms off should he even think about causing us harm, yes?”

  The Square Guard commander shook his head. “Orders may be orders, sah, and you may be making all the orders you wish, but you is Lieutenant General. We can’t be risking your life, sah. The Scourge is dangerous beyond comprehension.”

  Snotty waved a hand in the air. It was creeping on four. He had –they all had- places they’d rather be. “Oh, do let the Guards have their moment, Lefty. I’ve got tee time at six and if I’m not mistaken, tonight is steak and kidney night at the Stewart household?”

  Lefty puffed, and his majestic moustache ends wiggled. Snotty was bang on the money, as always. Cold steak and kidney was terrible. He nodded. “Right then, let’s get on with this. You, sir, are known as the Scourge, Terror of Elysia, destroyer of …”

  “Your name,” The Scourge interrupted, head still slumped across his chest, “is Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart?”

  “Of cou … see here, this is a formal reading of your charges and announcement of your punishment.” Lefty cleared his throat, ready to resume. “Destroyer of Homestead and Hampton Quinting and …”

  The Scourge interjected again. “Of the Swinting Stewarts, formally of Whinny-on-the-Rocks System?”

  Shorty stepped forward. “You will be silent, you blighter, else the Guards will slap you silly.”

  Lefty tilted his head to one side, suddenly, and against caution, very interested. The Scourge was incredibly well educated, at least on familial matters. There were, outside of the artificial intelligences, perhaps three people in the entire solar system who knew that his family had come, once upon a time, from Whinny-on-the-Rocks. “How did you come by that information, sirrah? That’s not publicly available anywhere.”

  “Just learned it.” The Scourge tilted his head up and everyone within eyesight gasped; as a matter of course, they all knew that there current, ‘greatest’ enemy was missing an eye, but they hadn’t been expected the man’s socket to be glowing blue.

  Lefty surreptitiously signaled for more guards. As keen as he was on maintaining civility and decorum, he was also not entirely a fool. He had an itch in his spleen that said The Scourge was not likely to play fair, even now, even shackled with The Choice and surrounded by guards. “And how, pray tell,” he leaned forward until his elbows rest on the table, steepling his fingers together, “did you do that.”

  “My replicated eye does … things. Things I wasn’t really expecting. I sacrificed the original for a bit of knowledge, and when it grew back, well, it took a fucking long time, first off, but … yeah. It can see the quantum emissions of AI spheres and if my body’s in the mood to be nice instead of a dick, I can hack in. It’s pretty neat.” Garth smiled. “Anyways, you are Leftbridge Stewart, yes? You received the honor called ‘King’s Favored Son’ for valor in the face of danger?”

  Lefty ran his fingers thoughtfully against the chassis of his robotic left hand. He had indeed won that particular award, and it had indeed been for valor. In his youth, he’d lost his hand saving a school full of children from burning to death. Some foolish child had lit a candle after lights out so he could read under the covers. The damn bed sheet had gone up like it’d been soaked in kerosene. “I did.”

  “And, under King’s Law, that makes you a relative of the King, right?” Garth leaned forward, an action which scared the Square Guards behind him so fiercely that they shuffled forward until the muzzles of their splinterguns were pressed against his skull. “The Law makes no distinction between blood relatives and those recognized under the Favored Law, right? As far as anyone is concerned, anyone like, sayyyy, King Blake, an attack against you is an attack against the Crown?”

  “Indeed, sah.” Lefty didn’t rely as much on his status as King’s Son as much as he once had. In his youth, he was ashamed to admit he’d rather used it for nearly anything he could think of. The King or his representatives had never once contacted him or warned him away from the excesses he’d gotten up to, but over time, Lefty had matured and mellowed out. Those in the room unaware of his impressive nobility were doing a fine job of keeping calm. “Raise a finger to me and the punishment will go from bad to worse. Tell me though, sah, why does any of this matter? You are caught. You are bound in Prisoner’s Choice, which, if you are unaware, will blow your arms up to the elbow clean off. If the shock doesn’t kill you outright, blood loss a few moments later will. And should miracles occur and neither of those things happen, there are seventy more Square Guards outside the door.”

  Garth nodded, hefting the Prisoner’s Choice modules approvingly. “Great design. Keyed into about fifteen different physical and neurological measurements. Really hard to fool. The explosion’ll pulp everything inside the modules, but the ‘shackles’ won’t blow up at all. They’ll fall off, all full of goop and bone and stuff, which is gross. I approve. A bit barbaric, but whatever. Anyways. I found another King’s Son, a Jonathon Kingston, but as it turns out, that guy really was a son, or, well, a kid. Like, all of seven years old. I won’t kill a kid, even if he did steal my wallet to buy himself some hookers and guns.”

  The room went awkwardly quiet. Violence began to fill the air as the Square Guards began to panic.

  Garth continued, merrily. “And just for my own benefit, an attack on you results in specifically which punishment?”

  “If,” Lefty checked the readout from his AI, and frowned behind his moustache; if the Scourge had somehow hacked into their artificial intelligences with a glowing eyeball, the damnable machines couldn’t find any proof of it. “If,” he resumed with all the frosty hauteur he could muster, “if that even happened, you would find yourself on the next ship to Trinity Prime, sirrah Scourge, to be set before the King Himself, beneath the Dome, in his wondrous and legendary Arcade City. There, cowering before the majesty of Our King, you would be given but a single command; survive. Survive against the madness. Survive against the FrancoBritish wardogs that howl like crazed beasts in the night. Survive against the best soldiers with the worst appetites. Perhaps a dozen men a year are sent to Arcade City for slights against King’s Sons, from a foul word to an accidental touch on the wrist. Some last minutes, others days. I have been given to believe that a gentleman’s gentleman once lived an entire year. But I, sir, am a gentleman. Desist this line, receive the reading of your crimes, take your punishment and if you are lucky enough to be reborn, hopefully you shall remember your P’s and Q’s and be a good fellow the next time around.”

  Garth took a deep breath and sighed miserably. “I am sorry.”

  “It is a bit late for that, sirrah. You cannot receive forgiveness for your crimes. Mayhap if you’d apologized last year, or even six months ago, perhaps we could’ve seen clear to imprisonin
g you for life somewhere. But I’m afraid it’s the gibbet for you.” Lefty picked up the papers bearing the Scourge’s list of crimes and began reading.

  “No.” Garth said woefully and with such heartbreaking sorrow that some few of the men arrayed on Lefty’s side of the room twitched. “No. I’m sorry for this.”

  Everyone in the room gasped theatrically when The Scourge raised his arms most dramatically, as if he expected the Prisoner’s Choice to fall from his arms.

  Nothing of the sort happened. Everyone in the room, including the normally stoic and rigid guards, chuckled and tittered.

  Lefty motioned for silence. “You did indeed have us going, sirrah. Well played, yes? A bit of a last minute uproar before the end.”

  “Goddamnit.” Garth muttered angrily. “Are you fucking kidding me? That would’ve been awesome. Very dramatic. I raise my arms, the doohickeys clatter off, everyone gets spooked, I karate chop Lefty McGee and His Moustache into paste.” Garth shook his head and looked up at his audience, which was staring at him as if, in addition to being a world-class villain, he was a loon. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s the fucking operating system for … it’s this operating system. It has concerns over collateral damage. The Prisoner’s Choice modules might explode and hurt some of you guys, but I’m like ‘eff that, that was a cherry moment’ but … yeah. So. Um.”

  No one had a chance to move. The Scourge, a living bane on their solar system for two long and dreadful years, presumed trapped, secure –and mildly insane- moved. Later, the guards responsible for keeping him at bay with their splinterguns would assure their gibbet-masters that no being could’ve moved that fast, with the gibbet-masters replying with something pithy about the condition of the immortal soul before pulling the rope.

  Shorty and Snotty bellowed in FrancoBritish confusion, flinging themselves forwards to assail the suddenly rampaging Scourge while the other members of the junta did the opposite; it was all well and good to protect their leader –who was also a King’s Son- but when a madman suddenly flings himself forward faster than the eye can properly follow, one must also ensure that there are leaders left behind.

  Garth ignored the blows on his back. The two old military commanders were just that. Old. Tired. Unarmed. He could hear the splintergun-packing soldiers bellowing for everyone to move out of the way, but of course Snotty and Shorty wouldn’t; in close quarters like this, splintergun discharge would almost certainly eviscerate the very people they wanted to protect. The stupid OS was offering up trajectory patterns of likely fired round dispersal and body count estimates.

  The would-be Engineer of Reality sighed. He’d done some awful, horrible things to get into the room with Leftbridge Stewart, things the OS had ‘allowed’ him to do because the need to get into Arcade City was on par with ensuring that the Unreality got destroyed in just the right way. Things like blowing up space stations, and firebombing hospitals. The toll for this one meeting was in the thousands, and … it sickened him.

  “I hope,” Garth stared into Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart’s watery green eyes, “that you are the last man I ever have to kill, Lefty. Know this, though; your death is the most important sacrifice a man can make. If I’d had the time, I would’ve found you at home, sat you down and shown you the way. It took too long, the Enemy grows closer and I’ve got more to do than just this.”

  The crunch as Garth head-butted Lefty hard enough to crack the man’s skull froze the room into a morbid tableaux of sickened horror. Garth went down on one knee, watching the life leak out of a man who’d done nothing wrong in his entire life, a man who had, in fact, been one of the good guys, a man who’d risked his own life once upon a time to save a bunch of kids. A man who, because of that one selfless act, had marked himself for death because of the journey his death would enable.

  The guards had had enough. They waded in, pushing and shoving their commanders out of the way with stern words and rough hands. They cracked The Scourge in the back of the head with their rifle butts.

  They kept on until The Scourge stood, whereupon they scattered backwards far enough so they could aim their weapons at him.

  “I’m ready to go to Arcade City, gentlemen. Upon my honor, I won’t hurt anyone else. On the planet-moon of Trieste in the Goddard Triangle, there’s a mansion. In the mansion are the children of every single person who has died because of me. They are being very well taken care of. In a room in the mansion, there is a chest. It’s full of money. It is for the children, and for a funeral for Lieutenant General Leftbridge Stewart. He is to be given a Hero’s Wake. This whole fucking system will honor and cherish his passing or I swear to Christ I’ll come back here and …”

  “Er, yes.” Snotty stepped forward. “Quite right. Quite … right. It … it shall be as you say, sirrah.” The old man’s eyes tilted towards Lefty’s corpse. Amazing, how quickly someone could die. “You … it is on your honor, yes? No more deaths?”

  “God willing,” Garth stepped forward when he was commanded by a panicky guard, “the next time someone dies by my hand, it’ll be at the beginning of a new dawn.”

  There was no point in mentioning that that ‘death’ would be the destruction of an entire Galaxy, followed by the rest of Unreality. There was some math that no mind, organic or otherwise, could comprehend.

  A final, morose sigh escaped Garth’s lips. Information on Arcade City was nonexistent. None of the soldiers freed from the domed island could remember what happened inside. Push too hard and they cracked. Usually to napalm-levels of fiery distemper. Still, it was where he needed to go; thirty thousand years of assembled data inside Bravo indicated that there was a major player hidden inside the weird dome, a player capable of rising up against the Heshii, of breaking into the game and stealing the Engines of Creation. It was probably the ‘Mad Goth King Blake’, but there was no telling.

  Next stop, Arcade City.

  Galaxy’s Edge

  “Do you still love your power?”

  Nothing but screams. Screams, and fire. Burning and burning and burning.

  “Is it still all you thought it would be?”

  Motion, too, a hideously slow, crawling movement, a billion billion trillion pounds of weight tied to every single cell. It threatened to pull him apart.

  “Was it worth the wait? Was it worth the loss, the betrayal?”

  More screams.

  The weight suddenly vanished for a moment. The burning ended.

  Kith Antal loomed forward, his craggy, crystalline face seeming to materialize in front of Griffin. “I asked you a question, Kin’kithal Jones. Do you still love your power?”

  Griffin spat and smiled. His skin, cracked and blistered and oozing raw, venomous fire from prolonged access to ex-dee, healed. “’course Ah do. It was whut Ah was born fer, ya dang stupid idjit.”

  Antal patted Griffin affectionately on the head. “Good boy. Keep fighting. That way, when you break, it will be all the way.”

  “Hah.” Griffin struggled a bit against the machine that held him in place. There was little hope of escape; the thing that sucked the fire from him and channeled it elsewhere was forged from some unholy combination of quadronium and crystalized extra-dimensionality. Utterly indestructible. “Didn’t break afore, didn’t break fer Trinity, won’t break fer ya’ll.”

  “One more question, before we start again, Kin’kithal.” Antal traced a finger against the controls for the machine. “Did you think your power was great enough to move an entire galaxy?”

  Griffin snorted. “Mah fuckin’ power is enough to burn this whole fuckin’ Unreality to ashes, you fuckin’ inbred dinosaur. You only play at bein’ civilized, but Ah know when you was born! Ya’ll ain’t really got the fuckin’ brain capacity to outthink me! You…”

  Antal flipped the switch.

  And Kith Antal’s armada, an entire galaxy full of resources capable of waging war on Trinity and anyone else who stood in his way, began moving once more.

  Nothing but screams. Screams, and fir
e. Burning and burning and burning.

  Thus Ends The Latelian Cycle!

  Stay Tuned for The Beginning of the Conclusion of The Reality Saga in 2014

  When Garth N’Chalez returns in…*

  ‘Dark Iron King 1’

  ~Thy King’s Will Be Done~

  RENEGADE WRITMAN

  A NOVEL BY

  LEE BOND

  Introduction

  “Well, ya see, I'm not saying that I've been everywhere AND I’VE done everything, but I do know it's a pretty amazing planet we live on here, and a man would have to be some kind of FOOL to think we're alone in THIS universe.” –Jack Burton

  Hi. The name’s James Mallory Murphy.

  I’m gonna tell you the story of my life. In order to do that, I gotta tell you a couple secrets that not too many people know. I know, I know, ordinarily it’s the other way around; I tell you my life story, you get the secrets along the way.

  But my life, all your lives … they ain’t ordinary and the secrets are important enough to, ah, the bigger picture that they come first. I’m gonna do my best not to get too science-y, but hey, I can only do so much.

  The secrets? They’re doozies. Guaranteed to melt your brain with awesomeness. So, without further ado, here’s one to get you all started:

  What you’re reading now, right now, was written after the events of this book, and the books to follow. Think of ‘em as … chronicles. Yeah, I like that. Anyways, the ‘me’ who’s talking to you has been through an extraordinary amount of shit and has seen things you wouldn’t believe, leading me to go back over … over everything to see if I can’t make some kind of sense out of it all.