Foreign Devil (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  “Excellent. And you believe that, with whatever was done to him, Injiri will be able to deal with the caveman?”

  Spur bowed. “I do.”

  “Have you begun negotiations?” Jordan doubted a high-ranking noble in Yellow Dog would go through torturous physical remodeling simply to win a Game in a backwater system like Latelyspace. So long as the assassin wasn’t on Hospitalis to destroy his precious business agreements with the OverSecretary, Jordan didn’t care what Injiri’s reasons were; hopefully, the EuroJapanese Mafioso would be of a mind to make some extra money for a few minutes of service.

  “They were completed ten minutes ago, sire. Injiri Katainn’s services have been acquired, with the proviso that he discharge his duty as soon as humanly possible.” Spur allowed himself a smile. “As luck would have it, the Offworld contingent is being housed in the same location, and tensions are running … high. There have been several prolonged fights involving large groups. Injiri should find little or no difficulties in bracing Nickels.”

  Jordan dismissed Spur with a negligent flick of the hand. He set the display back to the conflict on the streets. Once Nickels was out of the picture, he was confident that he would be able to convince planetary leaders using the shields to switch back to his Conglomerate’s method.

  When Dogs Attack

  Garth made room for Injiri as the EuroJay Contestant moved to the table. Like Garth, his tray was filled with food, and when he sat down, he nodded briefly. “There has been no sign of your friend.”

  “He and I exchanged some words hours ago.” Garth indulged himself by drinking more coffee. The Latelians were many things –psychotic, manipulative espionage-freaks, for starters- but they made damn fine coffee. Since he wasn’t able to sleep, Garth figured there’d be no harm in having another cup; with the way things were going, the likelihood of him catching any z’s before leaving Latelyspace were nil. He’d been awake once before for seven months with no appreciable problems other than serious jetlag, but his life hadn’t been in the same kind of jeopardy then as now. The God soldiers were a threat unlike anything he’d ever encountered. If The Box in the museum was a duplicate, it was safe to assume the real one was elsewhere, and under heavy guard. His subconscious was wiring him up for that eventuality whether he wanted to or no.

  Injiri’s lips quirked up as he tried to imagine Marko trying to string a sentence together. “And how is he?”

  Garth cracked his knuckles. “At the end, he saw things my way.”

  Injiri, who’d already made a pass through Garth’s area of the Hotel, knew Marko’s fate. Marko’s blood had been so deep in spots that the carpet needed replacement. Damages done to the wall went beyond the superficial; reconstructing the fight led Injiri to believe that Marko’s back had been broken prior to being dumped into the laundry chute. The Iron Hammer soldier was as vicious as he was laid-back. A disturbing collection of qualities. “Good. I am glad.”

  “Me too. Last thing I need is some bozo trying to get to me before the Game.” Garth cut into a slab of meat that looked and tasted like steak, which only got his mouth watering for an old-fashioned barbecue. He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the subtle flavors of mesquite-grilled steak, the smell of the beachfront where he’d done most of his cooking, the feel of the sand between his toes…

  “You are going native on us?” Injiri asked abruptly, the intrusion jerking Garth out of his reminiscence so hard that for a moment the assassin thought he was going to have to fight for his life right there.

  Garth shook his head, then pinched the bridge of his nose. Rather than easing his conscience, these ‘new’ memories -which were incomplete and increasingly at odds with the world-view of a past he’d constructed for himself over the last five years- were making him uncomfortable; Garth was beginning to suspect he wasn’t the man he’d been in SpecSer. “Ah, I’m sorry, what?”

  Injiri thrust his chin at Garth’s proteus. “Native?”

  “Oh, heh, yeah.” Garth ran a hand over the military proteus. “It’s a neat gadget, is all. Spent a lot of time with machines like this when I was … working, couldn’t resist.”

  Injiri’s mouth worked for a few seconds as he tried to find the best way to say what was on his mind. “How is it that you are back with us?”

  Feigning confusion for a second, Garth handed off the response that the agent had written up. “From before? Those guys in suits? They questioned me about what was his name, Firnkle.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Fucked if I know, man. Wanna know what I think?” Garth leaned in, drawing Injiri closer. As the Contestant leaned forward, Garth caught sight of the body-tattoo Injiri wore underneath his tunic. Familiar with Yellow Dog’s lifestyle through his one-time pilot, Edio Tekmara, Garth understood the modified kanji he saw. Injiri wasn’t just a member of Yellow Dog, he was an Elder.

  An Elder Clansman wouldn’t come to Hospitalis for a Game. The only ones within Yellow Dog with enough spiritual purity to withstand the taint of the outside world, Elders performed tasks for the greater good of their collective families. The big ticket jobs, the things that put Yellow Dog on the map and kept them there. Whole family murders, that sort of deal. Injiri was here for some other reason, something pretending to be a Contestant could accomplish. “I bet someone high up around here had serious money on Firnkle and got pissed I killed him. They took me, asked me a lot of questions, then let me loose. Guess they saw hotel footage or something.”

  Injiri leaned back, a thoughtful look on his face. Inwardly, he was troubled. There was no telling if Garth was lying. With the amount of money he’d paid Medellos for top-quality augments, there should be no gray areas. Latelians -especially those in government office- were heavy betters when it came to the Game, so it made perfect sense that an official had taken exception to losing money before The Game started. The only flaw with the tale was in its execution. The only thing that could have saved Garth from being killed by this alleged politician was someone higher still offering protection, which begged the question why. “You are very lucky, my friend.”

  “Tell me about it.” Garth ate in silence for a while, half-heartedly trying to dredge up the memories Injiri’d inadvertently torpedoed; he couldn’t throw all his attention into the task because something about Injiri was bugging him.

  Earlier, the Yellow Dog had been unwilling to talk beyond a terse warning about Marko, and that had been nothing more than one serious competitor looking out for another. A person like Injiri - a Yellow Dog Elder- spent their entire lives in a very tight-knit community when they weren’t killing boatloads of infidels and turncoats. They had little room in their hearts for people who weren’t at the very least EuroJapanese.

  But now? The stoic Contestant was almost too chatty, if the brief bursts of chit-chat could be considered too much anything. Coming from anyone but Injiri, a sudden spate of friendliness could be construed as homesickness or even camaraderie. Words like friendliness and camaraderie weren’t in the Yellow Dog Dictionary.

  Garth wondered if he was being overly paranoid. Thanks to the God soldiers and OverSec Terrance, it was all too likely that his common sense was being screwed with, having him jump at shadows.

  On the other hand, he had spent part of the day going through the formalities of being keelhauled into performing an as yet unspecified but certainly bloody task on a date to be named later. He’d spent the other part of his day being extorted by yet another governmental agent promising everything under the rainbow, reminding Garth of a saying:

  You’re only paranoid if you’re wrong.

  At best, Injiri’s friendliness was sincere, and his death would be a momentary shame.

  At worst, the EuroJay’s intentions were anything but sincere and his death would eliminate future difficulties.

  The decision was made. Garth nodded politely to Injiri, who returned the gesture, and then left the banquet hall, meal hardly touched.

  Up in his room, Garth got comfy. He stare
d at the proteus, trying to imagine what would happen if he started mucking around before Lady Ha defused the bombs and the sentinel programs. Wearing a bomb as an accessory was naturally inhibiting, but being cooped up in a big Hotel with a EuroJapanese assassin was a threat he couldn’t ignore.

  He was screwed if he did, and screwed if he didn’t.

  With a grunt of resolution, Garth booted up a hacking program he’d found in the proteus’ file list before going down for dinner. With it, he’d be able to access the hotel’s main server and from there, locate blueprints.

  His initial encounter with hostile Mijomi had netted him a top floor room at the far end of the Hotel. All the other ‘guests’ were located at the other end, and only halfway up. The intervening space between the last occupied room and his would soon be filled when the remainder of the contestants; a press announcement in the afternoon had confirmed that the Latelian transporter sent off to pick the other Offworlders had run into delays, giving him a little more time to himself.

  With all that extra space between him and the rest of his comrades, Garth had taken to wandering through the hallways late at night when his insomnia got particularly unbearable. During those midnight strolls, he’d started noticing minor inconsistencies in the size and shape of various hallways. If he was right, hotel Hospitalis gone through major renovations before opening its doors to the Offworld public.

  If they could be used to get someone into his room unnoticed, those inconsistencies would put Injiri at a great disadvantage.

  The machine’s interface was surprisingly intuitive, and in less than fifteen minutes, Garth was zipping through the different functions like an old pro. He barreled through the laughable encryption on the server with a governmental override program then built a fake managerial profile to gain access into the main without playing hacker; even the stupidest systems could catch you if you weren’t smart. He backed out and logged in under the new password.

  Rather than dive right into work, Garth perused some of the hotel’s files, hoping to find strong enough blackmail material to keep that horrible bitch Mijomi off his back. Beyond virulent anti-Offworld digital flyers, Mijomi was clean as sunshine. As were the finances, maintenance files, and employee records. Unwilling to imagine someone as awful as Mijomi wasn’t dirty, it was the work of a few minutes to set an avatar to hunt down Management files; if there was any dirt on the manager, the owners of the building would have it.

  Inspiration struck as soon as he found the blueprints, forcing him to save his progress before getting down to business. He backtracked to the root filing system and started hunting for access to the security cameras. The proteus’ operating system, driven by avatars written by people who did illegal things for a living, figured out what he wanted done and located the necessary files for him. Live video feeds went directly to the big Screen.

  Garth was amazed at the coverage and the sneakiness. All the main areas of the hotel were being recorded from a multitude of vantage points! The sort of guy to count cameras automatically, Garth knew some of those hotel points didn’t have cameras. Muttering to himself, he delved further into the prote’s storage banks, astonished yet again by Latelian ingenuity.

  The Hotel and its environs were laced with microscopic machines called ‘spEyes’. To put a fine point on things, spEyes were cameras so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye. Very flexible, the cameras could be ‘told’ to monitor a specific area with detailed sets of events to watch out for; the spEye prowled its programmed area, relaying everything its 360 degree camera lens detected to an independently run netLINK.

  A spEye netLINK required one primary system to control the equipment and another to process the huge quantities of digital footage for easy perusal by the human element. Someone in the Hotel had hacked into these other mains and was beaming that raw footage along heavily encrypted lines. He tagged the file location, built another avatar from the proteus’ template to look for any spEyes around Injiri’s room, and went back to his own work.

  Hotel Hospitalis had indeed gone through major renovations six years ago in preparation for the first Offworld contingent, and again shortly after the end of that Game to bolster up or improve upon areas that the original design team had missed.

  Most interestingly, rather than tear down the interior and rebuild it from scratch, The Game promoters had opted to go cheap by reducing much of the Hotel’s Latelian-sized features by adding false walls and ceilings; the only areas in the hotel to remain ‘normal’ were the banquet halls on the ground floor and some of the meeting halls. Armed with this knowledge, Garth saved his progress again before heading out into the hallway to visually inspect the Marko-shaped hole in the wall.

  Repair droids had been through to clean up the bloody mess, but hadn’t gotten around to fixing the huge tear in the drywall. Gingerly, he stuck his head into the hole and waited for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw exactly what he’d been hoping to find: there was a four-foot gap between the first and second walls. Big enough for a dude like him to skulk around in, if a guy was so minded. Hugely pleased, Garth went back into his room and continued poking around the data netLINK.

  The Screen showed a number of spEye vantage points down Injiri’s hallway, and the protean avatar he’d set was already monitoring them with Latelian surveillance protocols. Using the onboard facial recognition program and the Hotel’s own registration logs, Garth tweaked the semi-intelligent avatar to keep it’s ‘eyes’ peeled for Injiri Katainn. Working with the original Hotel blueprints in combination with the new ones, Garth then designed an incursion avatar to generate different entry/exit points into Injiri’s room.

  The flexibility and superlative programming of the proteus was obscene. Even after such small exposure to his new toy, Garth could no longer imagine working without one, and if his plans to marry Huey to a protean netLINK bore fruit, he’d be unstoppable!

  xxx

  As always, Injiri made a cautious sweep through his room before retiring; ostensibly he was here for the Game, but his true purpose in Latelyspace was such that Injiri could not, would not, close his eyes until he was absolutely certain he was in no danger.

  Satisfied that the room was empty of anything life threatening, the assassin changed into his sleep clothes and crawled into bed. As he lay there, Injiri went over the text message he’d received shortly after the riot in the banquet hall.

  The other Clan leaders of Yellow Dog had been contacted by a very powerful NorthAMC Conglomerate head. Ordinarily, Yellow Dog front line secretaries would’ve ignored the comm altogether as NorthAMC scum were, well, scum, but the man making the call was too valuable a potential asset to lose. Thus, it came to be that he, Injiri Katainn, became a solution to this businessman’s difficulties. Other than some very vague wording, the only other thing worth mentioning was the expectation he complete this new duty first.

  Injiri could have easily used his standing as Eldest male in the Katainn Clan to request more information, but saw no reason; he knew, or thought he knew, Garth Nickels’ upper limits in physical combat. Knowing the name of the man who’d approached Yellow Dog for this service would personally do him no good, other than to possibly put his family at risk. It was enough to know that the Eldest Clan knew the man, trusted him to play by the rules of the game. By performing this favor –money notwithstanding- Injiri knew he would gain his family much honor, enough possibly to move further in.

  Injiri found the prospect of losing unlikely. Truthfully, he rather looked forward to the fight. Not only would it rid him of a potential threat, it would be a nice way to test his new augments. Casting a final, sweeping glance around the room, his reworked eye picking out the minutest of details, Injiri settled into a restful sleep.

  Injiri woke quickly, but did nothing to betray this; one of the first things he’d learned as a child was the art of breathing steadily awake or asleep. You could learn much in a Clan household by seeming to sleep. Just as easily, you could lose even more by failing. As he had
learned at ten.

  “You sleep pretty deeply for a guy in hostile territory.” Garth remarked from his chair.

  “How is it that are you in my room, friend? I did not hear the door or the windows open.” Injiri remained recumbent. Moving now would only incense Garth. Until or unless he could get into a less exposed position, he would risk his life only if necessary.

  Garth rapped the walls. “This whole hotel is built inside another one. Climbed in through the bathroom mirror. Almost dropped the fucking thing. Surprised you didn’t wake up.”

  “Ah.” Injiri accepted Garth’s story immediately. Before coming to Hospitalis, Injiri had memorized the blueprints of the hotel, planning to use this unique feature as an escape route if his meeting went poorly. Of course, during that phase of planning it hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be called upon to assassinate an Offworld contestant, or that this same person would have similar access to difficult-to-come by information. “Why are you here? Surely, you knew nothing of my intentions. I was only approached in the early afternoon, while you were … away.”

  Garth rubbed his face with his hands. “’s the funny thing, Injiri-san. I didn’t really know until just this second. Now,” he held up a hand, “that doesn’t mean I didn’t suspect you, ‘cuz I did. I’d of killed you either way. I don’t climb through a hotel’s guts without planning to do the deed, irrespective of truth.”

  “What if I were to delay the attempt until well after the Game?” Injiri asked calmly. The purchaser’s request, though definite, was nevertheless only a guideline; it wasn’t unheard of for an assassination attempt to be put off as a result of extenuating circumstances. Injiri didn’t ask out of fear, but for other reasons; his primary goal was to meet with his government contact to ensure a Yellow Dog presence in Latelyspace was guaranteed once Trinity found Its way inside. His family had leveraged much of their personal holdings to get this far, but those costs would be incidental to the loss of honor by failing to set up a local franchise. The predominant EuroJapanese population of Latelyspace –no matter how diluted by millennia of intermarriage- would find themselves drawn to Yellow Dog by silent, genetic bonds. If he could waylay the fight with Garth until he was secure in the knowledge that his family honor would remain intact, his death –if, indeed, such a thing were possible- would incur no debt.