by Lee Bond
“You got to tell the government!”
“Yeah, I should.” Garth sat back down, pretending to mull the idea over. He rolled his head on the headrest, obviously very unhappy. “Only thing is, they’d prolly make me leave before I even get to start in The Game.”
A wave of depression swept Jimmy felt over him when he realized Garth was right; he was a stand-up guy, but Offworlders were Offworlders. Jimmy really didn’t care one way or the other if Garth came from Trinity or if he was an alien in disguise. What mattered was that he’d already confided in his horrible wife that he had the inside track on the man to win the Offworld portion of the Game. He’d managed to convince her to promise she’d put some of her own personal money on the wagers. By now, the word had probably spread to the rest of her extended family, and some of those guys weren’t the sorts of people you wanted mad. If Garth went to anyone in the government, they’d throw him out of the system fast. “What were you thinking?”
“If only I could get to it without being caught, I could fix it. I’d of done it today, but they’re suspicious bastards over there. If they saw me messing around with the engine, I’d get kicked off Hospitalis at warp speed.” Garth hazarded a look through the rearview mirror into Jimmy’s eyes. The story seemed to be going over well, so he pushed onwards. "I’d need a ton of metal, some cutting and welding tools, and enough time to make the adjustments, but it’d work.”
Jimmy sighed. “I might know some people who could help you out with that, sa. They’re pretty rough people, though.” His wife’s brothers. Jimmy shuddered. They were more than rough, but he was also very certain that Vernita had talked to them about Garth Nickels. He’d rather run the risk of being involved with an illegal activity and get away with it than have to explain to them why their sure thing was being deported.
Garth leaned towards Jimmy. “All I know is, Jimmy, is I want to fight in the Game, and if that ship blows up or starts causing problems, it won’t happen. How long do you think this’ll take to set up?”
“These guys are going to want to meet you before they decide to do anything, Garth. A couple of days after that, probably. You’ll … you’ll probably have to pay them.”
“I’d be suspicious if I didn’t.” Garth clapped the cabbie on the back. “You’re a good man, Jimmish. When this is all over, you’re going to be so rich you’ll never have to drive a cab again.” Satisfied that he’d managed to pull the wool over Jimmy’s eyes without too much trouble, Garth leaned back in the cab and set about enjoying the ride.
Jimmy, who was at heart a very unimaginative man, frowned at Garth’s prediction. “What would I do without my hack?”
The weigh-in site hove into view.
xxx
Garth was tired and irritable but couldn’t rest. The weigh-in had been an utter catastrophe. For reasons he’d never personally understood, the event had been an outside affair. For the first twenty minutes, things had gone smoothly, with the suave and well-toned announcer whipping the resulting crowd of reporters and gawkers into a frenzy of interest. It was, after all, a show, and if they didn’t get enough viewers from the beginning then there was little or no hope that the Offworld collectibles would move.
And then …
Riot.
The crowd, a thousand strong at its weakest, had started pushing their way through sloppily built barricades. Since no one could have possibly predicted that normally ‘peaceful’ Latelians –their love of mayhem notwithstanding- would go off the wall like that, the detail issued for the event lacked the numbers and the equipment to deal with the rapidly escalating situation. The idiots from Trinityspace being, well, idiots… they’d started breaking heads just for the hell of it and the crowd hadn’t enjoyed that so much, transforming into a mob in a heartbeat.
Reacting decisively, Chairwoman Doans released the hounds.
Or in her case, God soldiers.
Garth had never seen anything like a God soldier in his entire tour of duty and he’d seen things in the field that still made his hair stand on end and his skin crawl when he stopped to daydream. They made Heavy Elites look like fat kids with asthma.
From his vantage point behind a shatterproof wall, Garth had witnessed firsthand just how the Latelians had once been the scourge of religion in their corner of the Universe. The infantry mowed through the crowd with absolute disregard for life. The God soldiers, ogres with more teeth and less brains, hadn’t even bothered with petty things like tactics and coordination; their massive size and frightening appearance subdued the easy ones in seconds, freeing the small army of fifty to deal more decisively with the hard-core instigators.
The average God soldier stands ten feet tall and was easily half as wide. If statistics held based on what he saw, there were soldiers reaching fifteen feet or more in height.
Having spent more than enough time in the company of cyborgs and other similarly enhanced beings, Garth recognized the telltale fluidic grace of a group so completely remodeled underneath the skin that they were more machine than Man.
God soldiers moved slowly, almost with great effort and strain, until they responded to a crisis, in which case they moved so quickly that only someone trained to follow at such speeds would ever know what was truly going on. The bigger the soldier, the faster the run speed.
The agitators who’d whipped the fragile crowd into a riot had brought the Timeless Classic Riot Weapons; Molotov cocktails, shotguns, bricks, and other homemade implements. Terrorist weapons designed to make media points and not fight human tanks, the only thing to have any effect was a single cocktail thrown with uncanny luck; the huge freak -blanketed in a smothering blaze of fire- pulled his antagonist’s head off before putting himself out by rolling around on other rioters.
By the time the main targets had been subdued into fine red paste on the sidewalk, some of the other, non-involved rioters discovered the stones to get into the fray. Rather than deal with these men and women on a hand-to-hand basis, the God soldiers switched to noxious gas grenades that dropped everyone other than them to the ground, vomiting and shitting themselves uncontrollably. Fun stuff.
After the smoke had cleared, arrests made and bodies carted off, formal statements had been issued to the press. Garth thought Chairwoman Doans, who’d shown up almost before the God soldiers, was a good-looking older woman who was also an incredibly talented spin-doctor. Thirty seconds into her televised address, she had the public eating out of the palm of her hand by commandeering previously shot footage of the crowd moments before the riot had broken out. The evidence was abnormally clear; the Offworlders hadn’t engaged the crowd in any way, shape or form unless it was on the scale, or during an interview behind closed doors. Anything happening after was rioters’ fault.
Two things bothered Garth greatly. No, make that three.
One, the Chairwoman seemed peculiarly willing to use her God soldiers against regular, hopelessly inadequate citizens. Actions like that hinted at tyranny or despotism, neither of which Garth enjoyed.
Two, the rioters -those men and women who’d actually started the demonstration- had to’ve known how the Chairwoman would respond; the appearance of God soldiers had been so bloody quick that all fifty of the giant tank-people must’ve been around the corner waiting for the shit to hit the fan. That spoke of one or two possibilities; the first was that the mastermind behind the riot didn’t care one way or another that innocent people were hurt if their point was made. The other was that the riot was the work of Chairwoman Doans, which was … upsetting.
The third and most important thing worrying Garth so much he doubted he’d sleep again was the insight that if he failed to acquire the Box silently, he’d find himself face-to-face with a God soldier. Fantastic and mysterious strength notwithstanding, the average God soldier was fifteen times as big as Hercules and easily mean enough to eat babies. They may not be sporting alien hardware grafted onto their heads or anything like that, but Garth had spent a lot of time with serious, hardcore Heavy Elites. No
matter what anyone said, God soldiers were worse.
Would his adaptive enhancements be up to the challenge? And if they weren’t, what hope did one poor Garth Nickels have against monsters like that?
DAY FOUR:
Latelians Love Do Their Espionage
It started over a glass of orange juice. It ended with fifty dead, forty-seven injured, and ninety-two deported.
The armistice generated by the previous days’ introduction to the awesomely destructive abilities of the God soldier lasted throughout the night and into the morning hours, but couldn’t survive breakfast. The assortment of men and women from a hundred different Trinity worlds were just too cocksure, arrogant, and interested in making a fast buck to let petty grudges and stupid misconceptions stay quiet. Toss in detoxing –no one wanted to get shit-hammered and have those soldiers roll in while they were too drunk to fight back- and you had a greasy, queasy, surly assortment of loons and goons.
Garth -whose night had been one prolonged session of incessant warnings of extreme danger and half-formed memories trying to take root in his subconscious- was sitting at the back of the banquet room when the argument turned from bad to catastrophic.
Two formerly friendly contestants, one a swarthy IndoRussian mercenary-type with long scars down both his arms and the other a lithe, sinewy AfroEgyptian with teeth filed into sharp points, started bickering over some point of interest between the two of them. Already keenly primed for just this sort of thing, Garth picked up his breakfast and cup of coffee and made his way even further back into the hall. He hopped lithely onto a raised dais where he assumed gregarious Latelian product managers could discourse at great length about the wonders of the newest and greatest while a small group of soldier-salesmen wolfed down enough food for a thousand people. As he made himself comfortable, a few of the other guys who’d been sitting at his table hastened to join him. A few looked dubious but trusted Garth had a damned good reason for shifting.
Three seconds after the last ruffian sat down, cradling a plate of eggs in one hand and a bottle of water in the other, IndoRussian Man launched his glass of orange juice at AfroEgyptian Guy’s head, driving the rim of the container into his forehead. Bellowing in his native language, the dark-skinned mercenary jumped backwards, slamming clumsily into the table behind him.
From there, the chaos that ensued was very similar to watching a pile of carefully laid Dominos skitter and collide; fragile alliances splintered and reformed as everyone suddenly found a reason to stab the nearest person with a fork or knife, to sink teeth into exposed necks or to break arms and legs. Drawn by the shouts and screams, a group of contestants from the other banquet hall across the way showed up at the door, immediately drawn into the fracas.
Garth rolled his eyes. If there were hidden cameras in the room, the footage rolling out live to any number of gamehead-dedicated channels was prime stuff; when it came to violence, Latelians were mad as hatters. He groaned in sympathetic pain when he saw a woman scoop out a guy’s eye with her spoon. “Son of a bitch, that had to hurt.”
“I would agree.”
Garth turned to look. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the few people who seemed to be serious about competing. His new friend was a whipcord-lean EuroJay male in his late fifties who, ironically enough, was missing an eye. Garth remembered seeing the thin Offworlder on the periphery the day of his arrival, contemplating as he was contemplated. He stuck out a hand. “Garth.”
“Injiri.” The EuroJay clasped Garth’s hand and shook it once. He jerked his chin at the melee. “How did you know?”
“Most of these guys are idiots. Someone farts in the wrong direction and it’s liable to set off a fight.” Garth ducked as an errant serving plate came his way. “Why’d you follow?”
Injiri shrugged. “Like you, I’m here to fight in The Game, to make money, to add to my resume. Those fools down there aren’t getting paid to do anything. All they’re doing is letting those of us who are serious see their fighting styles. Best case, they take themselves out of the running.”
The two sat in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Garth wasn’t overly impressed, even when the likelihood that the cramped area of the banquet hall wasn’t really spacious enough for everyone to let loose and have at one another like they meant it was taken into consideration. Closed quarter combat didn’t leave a lot of room for flair. It was kill or be killed. The savage fools in front of him were supposed to be the best of the best from over a hundred systems and he wasn’t seeing anything interesting. “What you do before this?” he asked after someone bit someone else’s ear off.
“Yellow Dog.” Injiri answered without hesitation. He’d spoken to a number of contestants during transport, and knew over half the people so far belonged to one criminal organization or another. “You?”
Injiri’s candor was impressive, if … befuddling. Yellow Dog was a major criminal organization exclusively populated by EuroJapanese families of noble birth who could allegedly trace their ties back to Mother Earth. They shared a great deal of their philosophies with ancient yakuza and mafia tribes. They were notably chilly to anyone not in their cultural echelon, and were well-known for their extreme politeness even as they doled out equally notorious bloody-handed justice. Operating from a number of Emperor-for-Life dominated planets –Garth had yet to discern just what that meant, because as far as he knew, the legendary ruler of the EuroJapanese people did not have sovereignty in Trinityspace- Yellow Dog had amassed a fortune that was impressive even by today’s standards. Many law enforcement agencies saw zero percentage in actively pursuing charges against anyone –even the low man- in Yellow Dog, because not only was the EuroJapanese mafia unbearably powerful, they were patient and, again, incredibly thorough. Entire generations of glory-hungry or honest cops and families vanished overnight, twenty years or longer after the perceived insult to honor. For Injiri to so blithely mention his affiliation with Yellow Dog … it wasn’t unheard of, but it was practically begging for trouble, because practically everyone knew someone who’d been done over by one of their people.
“Glass Hammer.” Garth answered after a respectable pause. In the grand scheme of things, Glass Hammer –a small organization limited to a handful of systems and more mercenary than mercantile- was barely a blip on the Dog’s radar. Respectable enough in their own right, but beneath notice.
Injiri jerked his chin again, this time at a burly IndoRussian big enough to qualify as a Latelian teenager. “That’s Marko Devresh. He was friends with one of the men you fought the other day.”
Garth watched Marko clobber two smaller men with a haymaker each. “Oh yeah? Which one?”
“The one you killed.” Injiri snatched a croissant out of the air as it flew by his head. “He is very unhappy with you.” He started eating the croissant, letting Garth know through his posture that he wouldn’t answer any questions. That he hadn’t said anything, in fact.
It was around this time that law enforcement responded to the raging conflict by literally blowing the doors of the hinges and rushing into the room en masse. Large see-through shields shoved into the first row of unruly contestants protected the front line guardsmen while also slamming a number of idiots into the ground; the officers behind the shield-bearers smacked each of the fallen warriors solidly in the head with stun batons. Another sally of cops followed fifteen seconds behind the first, tossing unconscious contestants into the arms of brothers in blue/grey, who dragged them into waiting paddy wagons.
Things continued on in that vein for ten more minutes, the shield-bearers doubling their numbers as the crowd began thinning out. When the contestants stopped trying to kill each other and turned their attention on the officers, policemen hovering on the edge of freshly destroyed wall produced shoulder-mounted cannons and began deploying non-lethal rounds at the remaining thirty or forty rioters.
The first basketball-sized beanbag nearly tore the head off one man, and the second one aimed his way struck him in the chest with
enough impact to break every rib. The cannons continued firing dozens of large pacifiers until everyone stopped moving.
“Fuck me.” Garth closed off his sense of smell as the odor of death, mingled with harsh accelerants, threatened to crowd his senses. Against his better judgment, he was impressed. “Sideways.”
Injiri nodded in agreement. “That was … disturbingly efficient. They might have at least deployed rounds used against children.”
Scores of emergency response teams flooded into the destroyed banquet hall as the cops, looking pleased, filed out. Med teams moved quickly and efficiently through the room, separating the living from the dead, the seriously wounded from those needing a few bandages and a pat on the head. Garth recognized the woman who’d spoken with him over Firnkle’s corpse. She stalked through the rows of the dead, clearly taking pictures with her proteus, stopping only when some inner sense warned her. Reywin straightened up and looked straight at Garth, who waved back.
Injiri nudged Garth and nodded towards the doors. “Government.”
Sure enough, five impeccably dressed, perfectly manicured men strode into the room, their eyes covered with sunglasses and the cut of their dark blue suits so sharp they sliced the air into shreds. They stood just inside the room, swiveling their heads back and forth until they found their target. When it became clear they were walking towards the dais, the other contestants, Injiri included, found better things to do, dematerializing so quickly Garth swore he heard air rush in to fill the vacuum.
Garth drank his coffee, waiting patiently. It wasn’t worth his time to worry because he’d been expecting them. They weren’t there to bust him for breaking any laws. The dead guys he’d killed the day before couldn’t warrant high-level attention: that was a local matter for local cops, if at all.
Dollars to donuts said his titular claim for The Box had reached the ears of someone powerful and paranoid; this alleged someone undoubtedly wanted the foreign devil making such ridiculous pronouncements shut down, quickly, quietly, and without any undue fuss. The only other option was someone higher up had caught wind of his military history and had decided that he should get gone, and the way Latelians ran information through the wringer, that was a distant possibility.
