by Lee Bond
“Well, well, well.” Garth said quietly. His new buddies were a step above common street thug; their guns were old-fashioned slug throwers outfitted with silencers, a fact suggesting they weren’t out for mere shits and giggles. They wanted him gone. Because of the weapons, Garth figured them for gang members or possibly one of the more radical anti-Offworld groups getting a lot of news coverage. Neither was good for him.
“Fuck this.” There wasn’t enough time for him to figure out which portion of Hospitalis’ disenfranchised youth was out to get him, and if the cops busted him for getting into a scrap … well, he’d blow that bridge up when he came to it. Sliding silently down the ladder, Garth dropped directly behind the man closest to him.
Before the thug could react, Garth drove a fist into his kidneys. Letting loose with an involuntary gasp of pain, the Latelian stooge collapsed, a shuddering heap. The sound drew the attention of his partner, who immediately opened fire. The air filled quickly with the barely audible buzz and whine of bullets. Garth dove out of the way of the first volley of shots, scooping the unconscious man’s gun up with his left hand in the process. Ducking behind a reeking bright yellow garbage container, Garth heard the second man shout for help. Risking a quick look showed the man moving carefully down the middle of the alley, gun at the ready, his proteus arm crossed over the gun.
Garth didn’t like guns that used bullets. Bullets went through him like they went through everyone not wearing bulletproof armor. By contrast, nothing but the highest-powered laser guns did any of the things they’d been built to do to: nowhere in the manuals did it say the Eckenbrick-1200 Infantry Rifle should produce a mild tickling sensation on exposed skin. Upon learning of this mysterious immunity, medical attendants on Nova had insisted on learning why lasers didn’t produce the desired effect –him screaming in agony with a hole the size of his head burnt all the way through his torso. Suggesting they test the upper limits of this mysterious condition was all they’d been able to talk about, but glue artfully applied to skin and skin applied to a roof three thousand feet above the ground dispelled even the most ardent answer-seeker. They left the relative immunity alone after that, choosing to ignore Garth and his bizarre adaptability altogether.
Taking a two count, Garth popped his head over the top of the garbage can, squeezed off three shots from the over-sized gun, and ducked back down. The second man collapsed where he stood. All three bullets had taken the top of his head off.
“Goddammit.” Garth muttered as he looked around the bin. “Seriously?”
His goal had been a nicely grouped cluster of shots in the middle of the fucktard’s chest, but the unwilling bastard had sensed the motion and ducked, sticking his big fat head right in the way. Now there was blood and brains everywhere, and the unconscious guy was starting to groan.
When someone caught sight of Headless Counterpart, all thoughts of teaching a foreign devil a lesson about Latelian Purity would fly right out the window: it’d be 9-1-1, SWAT teams, ground tanks, and another fucking interrogation cell. To make matters even more exciting, any second now the other two hombres would show up, compounding the problem. It wouldn’t take much to turn one messy headless body into four. It was the kind of addition Garth was very good at. Or was that subtraction?
“Crap.” Garth shot the Kidney Punch in the chest a couple times and slid the big gun into his waistband before stepping out into the alley to take stock. “Just … crap.” It was too goddamn early in the day to start killing people. Hell, he hadn’t even had enough carbs to be so active.
So far, his antics hadn’t caught the attention of any passers-by. Every second wasted standing in an alley with two dead bodies was a second closer to someone taking a casual side glance as they went about their business, so he grabbed a foot of each body and started dragging; it was his intention to use the partially full, immensely smelly, bright yellow dumpster to hide the bodies.
A strangled shout of alarm stopped Garth in his tracks: a new salvo of bullets, this time from two guns, spurred him into action.
Garth dropped to his stomach, cursing fluently in IndoRussian as his shirt sponged up dead Kidney Punch’s blood. Now he was going to have to find a way to get into a fucking clothes shop without attracting attention. Great. People noticed blood. It was a thing that got noticed.
Bullets hissed and whined in the air above him, the occasional bad shot sinking into the body he was using as a shield. Garth was perversely pleased that the average Latelian was at least a foot taller than him and more than a hundred pounds heavier; if not, he’d have been shot more at least once by now and he liked his blood on the inside.
He dug the gun from his waistband and waited for the distinctive sounds of weapons being reloaded. When he heard an empty clip hit the ground, followed by another, he slid to a seated position and squeezed of a quick series of shots. Two more bodies fell.
Professionals they were not. Good enough to put fear into the locals, maybe, but highly trained experts? Not so much.
Moving quickly now there were more dead bodies in the alleyway, Garth brought all four corpses together in a row. Stripping his own shirt off, he replaced it with one from the smallest of the four Latelian thugs, grimacing at the thought of wearing a gangster’s clothes even as he adjusted it so the tent-sized article hung ‘properly’; who knew where it’d been, and what’d been dropped on it. His bloody shirt got shoved into one of the bright yellow garbage containers, deep enough into the refuse that no one was likely to notice it. At least he hoped so.
Working with rapid, precise motions, he removed the proteii and put them off to the side. He removed their jewelry, weapons and other trinkets and put them into another pile. The top of the garbage can went up with a loud clatter that startled a few curious birds but nothing else. The first body went in with a grunt; the headless corpse went in easier but much slower as he struggled to keep the gore from dribbling gore down his back. He heaved the remaining two bodies and looked around nervously.
He idled for a moment to make sure no one had seen him dispose of the bodies. When no one came running, he went over to the first pile of dead man crap. To his inexpert eye, the four proteii were cheap, mass-produced. The property of thugs and gangsters, they’d seen a lot of wear and tear; each was scratched, scuffed and missing buttons. One had a cracked screen while another looked like it’d stopped a bullet. Looking up, Garth waited a few precious seconds.
When no one walked by the entrance still, Garth set to snapping the proteii into pieces as hurriedly as he could, wondering as he did so how the manufacturers would feel about seeing their duronium-coated merchandise broken up by an Offworlder, even if it was just a thin layer. As he scattered the bits and pieces throughout the alley, he shook his head in bitter despair. All the Latelians had done with their chance at the big league was to squander it.
Garth turned his attention to the guns, ejecting clips from the remaining three, tossing the empty weapons into the dumpster along with the bodies. He didn’t have time to scour the alley for the shells, so was just going to have to hope that street sweepers or bums or whoever didn’t twig to the fact that there’d been some murdering going on. Beyond all the blood, of course, and that was something else he couldn’t do anything about.
The jewelry was typical gangster bling –all shine and no worth- so those rejoined their owners. The four credit chips had no names on them, but were etched with a dagger/heart/eye logo.
Committing the image to memory, Garth took the remaining gun, the credit chips and the spare clips and wrapped his bounty in the second, voluminous t-shirt. Wasting another few precious seconds to see if anyone was preparing to bust him, Garth eventually climbed back up to the roof, ducking low and scouting out a good hiding spot. After a minute of futile searching, he just tucked the bundle into a corner, tossing gravel over top the innocuous-looking pile to add some at-first-glance ‘nothing here’ authenticity. When he was done the rest of his chores, hopefully he’d be able to spare the time to get ba
ck here and reclaim his booty.
Garth made his way unhurriedly down the fire escape this time, trying to exude a vibe that said he absolutely did belong on the ladder, and that any bodies found in the vicinity weren’t his fault. No one approached him, no one said anything. People still looked at him funnily and he repressed the urge to shout.
Still thinking unhappily about hamburgers, shakes, and French fries, Garth resumed his trek to the bank.
xxx
“Listen, sa. I’ve actually already had kind of a long day and I’m tired, so if you could just see your way through to seeing me now, that’d be super.” Killing four idiotic gangsters after a shoddy breakfast was not conducive to a bright and shiny attitude. Being forced to wait in a bank after having been first threatened by a security guard was also not a good way to win friends and influence others, either, but both had happened in remarkably short order.
Garth frowned direly at the avatar on his Screen. It was a ‘representative’ of the bank manager, and was only able to answer questions with the vaguest of responses. Garth’s current impression was that the ‘intelligent’ program had been hastily thrown together moments before being loaded onto his Screen; things had gone from bizarrely hostile to oddly obsequious moments after walking into the bank.
The first teller had tried to kick him out without even really looking up, reacting poorly to his goddamn obvious status as an Offworlder. The lone security guard lounging around the main doors had come to within scant moments from having his lower lip pulled over his head before a second teller had intervened, directing him to a seat in front of the manager’s office. Bewildered and doing his best to keep calm because the bank had his money and he didn’t know the area well enough to dispose of more bodies, he’d acquiesced; by the time he’d sat down, his Screen had been co-opted by the manager’s software avatar, as great an expression of uselessness as anything he’d ever encountered.
“I am sorry, sa, but I am busy.”
“Then send me to someone else in this freakin’ bank.” Garth pointed directly at an extremely tall woman filing her nails carefully, then at another who was flipping her way disconsolately through a print magazine. Everyone was definitely getting on his nerves. It was too soon to burn stuff down to make a point.
“I am sorry, sa, but you are a Gold Account Member.” The avatar tried to pull off a smile and failed.
“What in the hell does that mean?” Garth shouted angrily, shocking the guard into an attack position. He glowered at the idiot with serious anger, just daring the guy to try something. The guard backed down, though his hand kept straying towards his service pistol. “I don’t remember asking to be a Gold anything.” He muttered.
“You are a client of note.”
Garth had already given up pondering that nugget. They had his money, he needed it. That fact alone meant he was going to stay parked, time-line or not. “Then hurry the fuck along. I got places to be. I just wanna put some money on my card and get the hell out of here.”
“I am s … ah, I will see you now.”
The boring but chatty happy face was replaced by a luminous green check mark as the door in front of him swung silently open. Garth rose, straightened his pants then strode breezily into the office.
“Thank you for waiting, sa.” Sa Herrig gestured absentmindedly to the only other chair in the room. He tucked some sensitive documents into a drawer, and then looked at his client. “Goodness, you are a long way from home, aren’t you?”
At first, Garth thought the overweight, balding banker was making a side-reference to his ‘chronological’ age. He shut his mouth upon realizing he was also several million light years away from Trinityspace. “Yep.”
“I can’t place the accent, though. IndoRussian or EuroJapanese?”
“Ohhhh,” Garth thought rapidly, doubting anyone would know what ‘American’ would mean, “sort of a mix, I guess. I spent the last few years on 9-Nova-12. Worked with a lot of people with, um, really strange accents.” One crewmember of Armageddon Troop One had been a representative from a world of felines grown up from colonists with too much time on their hands and a fully stocked genetics lab. Listening to her talk had been a hoot.
“Yes, yes.” Sa Herrig read his screens. “The data is coming in now. Ex-mercenary captain for Special Services, ten years duty. Lots of blanks here, eh? Not fit for my eyes! Not to worry about, though, sa, that’s obviously not why you’re here.”
“I know that. It’s about time someone else did.” Garth tossed his credit chip onto the desk, where it glittered in the bright light. “I’d like some money on that, please, and then I’d like to get the fuck out of here.”
“I wonder,” Herrig started, pale brown eyes twinkling, “if you even know what’s happened.”
Before Garth could answer, Herrig swiveled his monitor around so his client could understand, pointing to a number at the bottom. “This is your total balance, sa.”
“Yeah?” Garth shrugged nonchalantly, not bothering to look. He was fidgety, restless. Hospitalis was making him as uncomfortable as any crap-planet rife with lunatic hostiles on the other side of the Cordon ever had. “So? The exchange rate is amazing.”
Herrig shook his head slowly. “That number, sa, is not in Latelian currency. That is in Trinity currency and I suspect there are rather a lot more numbers than you would think. Please, look.”
“Say what now?” Garth looked at the digits carefully. He did so now, counting slowly in his head. Rising smoothly, he put his hands flat on the table, ready to run at the slightest hint of trouble. “I didn’t do it. Whatever you think I did, it wasn’t me. I was somewhere else doing some other thing.”
“Sa, sa, please sit down. You’re making Willis nervous.” Herrig put on the best smile he could muster. “Would you like some refreshment?”
“Water. Water would be good.” Garth couldn’t take his eyes off the balance. It was massive. It was almost too much money for him to wrap his head around. Which made no sense; tunneling across the Universe to get to Latelyspace should’ve all but drained his accounts, unless by some fantastic mistake Trinity’d put money in instead of taking it out. When water arrived via robotic assistant, he accepted the glass and drank it down.
“It comes from a spring near a mountain several hundred kilometers from here. Tasty, no?”
“Sure.” Garth counted the number again. “There’s a hundred thirty-eight billion two hundred thousand eighteen credits and some fiddly bits more in there than there should be.”
Herrig scratched thoughtfully at an earlobe. It was rare, but there were occasions when people of a … certain … type took off in their ships and disappeared for a time. Upon returning, they discovered vast fortunes where none belonged. Or so the stories went. “Ahem. I, ah, took the liberty of accessing the deposits, sa, to understand your … situation in greater detail. A majority of monies came from Special Services. Smaller at first, and then, ah, quite substantial. Memos indicate payment rendered on behalf of research and development. Then, of course, the funds took another leap upwards when you started dabbling in the stock market, then a massive payment out. Sound familiar?”
“Uhuh.” Garth put the glass he’d been fiddling with down on the desk so he wouldn’t drop it. “The R&D payment set-up was an idea Politoyov had to keep the monies from being sent directly to Tynedale/Fujihara. They missed it, the idiots.”
“Sa!” Herrig shook a finger warningly. “That is not information I need unless you need for me to represent you. Which,” he indicated a plaque behind him declaring him a member of the Latelian Charter of Attorneys, “I can do for you.”
“Wait a minute… you said came from Special Services.” Garth looked at the number again. It was too big as an idea, let alone reality. “Someone else put money in?”
To make a clean break from his old unit and the money-hungry accountants at Tynedale/Fujihara, Garth had sold off his entire stock portfolio as well as waiving any further R&D payouts he might be eligible for; the
shield generators kept grunts like him alive and that was that. Now he was solvent, there was no point. That cash was better suited for people still stuck in SpecSer. “Who the fuck would do that and why?”
Herrig smiled as he located the data. “According to this, sa, Trinity put the money there. More specifically, the Trinity Branch of Terraforming, Planetary Reclamation, and Safety. That’s … well, that’s quite impressive, sa.”
“What do they do?” The first thing Garth had learned after getting out of basic training was that Trinity loved Bureaus. And Branches, and Groups, and whatever words you could slap together to make something sound official. They were all over the place, like weeds, getting in people’s faces and shit like that.
“Well,” Herrig shrugged, “a bit of everything, as I understand it. They build new planets or fix old ones. Among other things, as is often the case with our betters.”
Garth snorted. “Everyone’s the same, all over everywhere.”
“Yes, sa, that is the truth. Now,” Herrig smiled apologetically, “as to when you came in … I … must apologize. There’s a certain percentage of Latelians who aren’t all that tolerant of Offworlders –which is odd considering that Port City is home to more than thirty thousand of them, myself included- and I am afraid Si Melissa responded very poorly to your presence. She will be reprimanded by the end of the day. When Si Bekkah accessed your account information, a memo arrived directly from the Trinity government itself. I can assure you, this is no small matter; I’ve been a banker for most of my life, and I have seen only two. Most rare.
For one to come here is rarer still. According to the document, someone from the Trinity government has been trying to contact you at your last address for some time. As is often the case with young men who are inclined to gallivant, you left no forwarding address, and why should you? Why would anyone imagine they would be hearing directly from the Trinity AI? Anyway, along with the first payment was a contractual agreement that was signed in absentia.”
