by Lee Bond
The two gangs hated each other so vehemently that a nudge here and there would have the two gangs at Defcon One in short order.
With a plan taking shape, Garth added a few Devil Nut prote-sigs he had on file to an easy access folder before turning back to the work he’d started a few hours ago: while Antonio had been trying to cave his head in, the scanner add-on for the prote had arrived at the front desk. Excited like a fat kid in a room full of donuts, the first thing he’d done upon getting into the room was scan his ugly phizz into the software. Running in the background during his bath and subsequent brainstorming session, the Facial Reconfiguration program had come up with a series of Latelian look-alikes built off the entered data.
The avatar had done its job well. He was now armed with six new local faces that were indistinguishable from the real thing over prote lines; if he wanted, he could be anyone he wanted, including a disturbingly attractive female God soldier. The only remaining task to kick his idea into motion was to choose a specific face out of the handful generated and run a configuration program that would save his personal characteristics into a database.
Garth selected the crudest face of the lot; Latelian General Face #3 was a broad-faced, wide-nosed IndoRussian descendent with a thick brow-line, fleshy lips, watery brown eyes and a ruddy complexion. Based on a large demographic, #3’s features happily fell into the ‘typical lower class worker type’.
It was also a dead ringer for ‘gangster with personal issues’.
Garth booted up the program and ran through the tests. He spent a long time reading sentences out loud and mimicking what felt like hundreds of expressions running the gamut from easy ones like angry to hard ones described as ‘joy mixed with sorrow’.
When the process was over, the prote asked if he wanted to run the loaded face through a filter-avatar that would remove specific ‘tells’ from the overall architecture of the face’s ‘moves’. In theory, it’d keep suspects from being able to pick the sneaky spy out in a crowded room during their arraignment, thereby assuring total privacy. Garth wanted his new online persona to seem as real as possible so he decided to leave all the tics and whatnot right where they were. After all, it wasn’t as if any of these yahoos were going to live long enough to get to a courtroom.
It was eerie to see a face based on his own and yet so very different make faces and talk with his own voice. Garth ran the face through its paces for a bit, amazed at the real-time rendering abilities of the prote. There were computer systems in Trinityspace that lacked this kind of processing power.
Garth climbed out of the massive tub, dried himself off, and headed into the other room. He pulled on some clothes, this time making sure he didn’t put on one of his slogan shirts –even the stupidest gangster would remember a shirt proclaiming him a ‘Foreign Devil- and began calling Devil Nuts, one by one.
His story was simple. By this time, everyone in the underground had heard about the atrocities perpetrated on the Portsiders, so Garth presented himself as Harry Bosch, the only poor bastard to’ve survived the encounter. He’d survived by running away, making him a man marked for death. Elaborating wherever possible, Garth told the various Nuts he spoke to that his bosses were willing to ‘let’ him live if he agreed to come along on the manhunt. He further explained that the man they were so intent on killing wasn’t a man who would die easily, so it was very probable that some, if not all, the guys sent out weren’t going to make back. The tale ended with him as Harry Bosch feeling very seriously that no matter how the hunt went, he’d be dead by the end, either by his old friends or by the maniac they were hunting, something he wanted to avoid.
It took more than an hour of patient calling and steady perfection of the story before he found a Nut willing to ask questions beyond ‘are you fucking insane’ and ‘where do you live motherfucker, I’ma cut your balls off’.
“Why you calling us up like this?” the Nut demanded irritably.
“I ain’t wanna have no more to do with no more Portsiders. They gone crazy over this Nickels guy and they gonna get they asses killed dead. He a fuckin’ maniac.”
“Whafuck makes you think we give a shit, stoolie bitch?”
“I gotta tell ya, I ain’t been with ‘em since that day, but I heard somethin’ major’s goin’ down tonight. Allz I want is to be left the fuck alone.”
“What’s this ‘thing’?”
Garth/Harry played it cagey for a moment, answering hastily when the Nut looked like he was going to hang up. “This guy, this … this fuckin’ nutcase, he’s an Offworlder or some shit. Got his own spaceship, brother. He’s got somethin’ on it my old crew wants really bad. Lots of ‘em are gonna die tryin’ to do this bastard in, but the bosses, they think whatever it is, it’s worth them dyin’. When this Offworld gink’s outta the way, off they go to the Port to steal it.”
The Nut snorted hard enough to pop a vessel in his eye. “You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me, man. This is some kind of trick and shit. Go fuckin’ peddle your wares somewhere else, you ‘sider stoolie bitch.”
But he didn’t hang up. The hook was in.
“Lissen.” Harry/Garth flashed the Nut Jimmy’s address. “If you guys are sick o’ playin’ fourth string to us ‘siders, send some young’uns out to here. Guarantee there’ll be bluecoats crawling over that place like ants. I’d take you, but I ain’t goin’ nowhere near that place. Gives me the creeps just thinking about what that crazy ass-bastard did to my buddies. Hey, if this works out, you think I could join you guys? I ain’t got nowhere else to go.”
“Hold on to your prote, there, fucktard.” The Nut read the address aloud. “Think I saw something about this. All right, Harry, we check this out.”
The call ended. Devildong would hear about the rumor and would dispatch runners to find out what the hell was going on. In a couple of hours, he’d learn something horrible had indeed gone down in the suburbs and that the Portsiders were hot for revenge. If the runners were especially good at their jobs, they’d learn that a hit had been put out on an Offworlder. If they were the MI:6 of the criminal underground, they might even discover that this nutcase from beyond the stars really did have his own spaceship and that there was something of extreme value onboard.
While the Devil Nuts were running around trying to find out as much as they could about the Portsiders’ activities over the last several days, Garth planned on having a personal heart-to-heart with Ashok Guillfoyle …
The Fortress of Temporary Doom
Since it was still on the early side of the afternoon, Garth hopped an intercity cab to Guillfoyle’s headquarters. The way of the world being as it was, it’d be nice if Guillfoyle wasn’t there; it struck Garth that there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot for the rich and powerful to do except spend money and lie to people. That, and take themselves off to the Arena and watch God soldiers eat each other alive whenever the opportunity presented itself.
If Ashok was there, the short-term goals would become a little more complicated, but long-term, everything would go smoother; the plan called for the business tycoon to be forced into showing his traitorous head down at the building anyways. There wasn’t a lot of leeway to compensate for a person who believed in things like ‘work ethic’ and … ‘work ethic’.
With Central City being the seat of power for Chairwoman Doans, the level of God soldier protection was higher than anywhere else on the planet. They had nothing better to do. This sent already very high real estate prices skyrocketing, but with very good reason; from the news reports Garth watched late at night, it was evident that Doans did in fact rely on the greencoats for protection and law enforcement more often than the ‘bluecoat’ police force. Since it was likely that Doans would whistle up a dozen Goddies in the case of a local emergency, situating the center for his ‘powerful’ Research and Development Empire as near as possible to Doans’ offices made perfect sense. Any rabble-rousing anti-Capitalists who got it into their heads to vent against the money-hungry Guillfoyle Firm would
find themselves amidst very rough company in less time than it took to organize the handing out of angry and grammatically correct placards.
What was great for Guillfoyle sucked eggs for Garth. It didn’t help that, as a direct result of The Game and the last round of terrorist threats just prior to the Game, there was a markedly increased presence of greencoats on every goddamn corner. Pundits put the Chairwoman’s relationship with the OverCommander as the cause for the new deployment standards, while others claimed Doans didn’t trust the civilian police force as far as she could throw them. Whichever side had the story right, Garth’s skin crawled every time he saw one of the lumbering behemoths in green swaggering down the street. They were huge.
Doans’ growing unpopularity, military cutbacks, the growing tension in the under–classes, spasticated terrorists, all of it had given Guillfoyle a perfect, relatively cost-free solution for protecting his half-acre. Being exorbitantly well-protected from the outside didn’t mean that Ashok –a budding supervillain if there ever was one- hadn’t gone ahead and spent all that money on cookies and ice cream. No, the chances were much higher that he’d funneled his yearly defense budget on internal protocols. Lots of them.
Garth glared at the squat, ten storey building with loathing. Even if it weren’t elbow to elbow with a courthouse and a Ministry building, the damned thing would be impossible to slip into unseen; the squat structure had thick duronium plating wrapped around all exposed surfaces. There were about a jillion cameras all over everywhere and there were probably three times as many spEyes you couldn’t see. No doubt the windows were also bomb-proofed, the floors drill-proof and the rooftops electrified.
Not that he planned on blowing his way through the front door. That was very last week and he was aiming for Ethan-Hunt-sneaks-in-through-the-back-door-while-everyone-is-looking-the-other-way kind of sneakiness anyway.
Having the option of blowing shit up taken away, though, that was just plain uncool. It was mind-boggling no one else on Hospitalis looked askance at Guillfoyle’s absurd levels of protection. You build a place like that anywhere in Trinity and you’d find yourself visited by an Enforcer right away. Not that Garth condoned Enforcers or anything, but really … supervillains weren’t supposed to be this crafty.
Garth moved to a park bench thirty feet from the main entrance and plopped down. A few bystanders looked curiously at him but said nothing. Smiling cordially to an elderly couple who zoomed through the small park like speed walking freaks, Garth began the tricky process of scanning the fortress without getting caught.
His prote wasn’t able identify everything it detected, but it didn’t matter. As expected, the joint was solidly packed with security devices and other contingencies. Some stupidly tall stooge was probably counting his nose hairs right that minute. It was entirely plausible that right then a tiny red light was going off and huge lasers were being pointed at his head. Well, he could hope for lasers but it was more likely they were aiming Gauss cannons at him.
Garth shrugged those concerns off and pulled the ambient circuitry of his prote in as far as possible without losing all of his slender monitoring threads. Within seconds, the prote tagged more than fifteen thousand spEyes, many of which were covering the access roads and walkways leading into the small plaza from the main streets.
Sorely tempted, he couldn’t risk logging into those feeds; running on super-paranoia mode, the espionage specialist didn’t like how quickly all those miniature cameras had popped up on the system. Instead of taking the bait, he dialed his prote’s relay node control down to the bare minimal. That done, he started scanning the closest node’s transmission volume.
Patience was a virtue. Fifteen dull minutes later, Garth detected a very quick ultra-frequency transmission disappear from the local node and into the ether. A nano later, a ‘confirm’ transmission generated from the same frequency emitter was sent back through the node and into the cluster of spEyes.
Guillfoyle was a tricky bastard. Dozens of would-be thieves must’ve been conned by that nasty spot of deception. Hell, he’d almost been caught with his pants down, and he was running a MilInt prote with some of the best software out there! Garth scolded the unseen security teams with a finger for making him work so hard. Taking control of or even monitoring a single spEye-feed would affect that hidden transmission, instantly alerting the off-site security team of shenanigans.
Now that there was a target, all that needed doing was finding the bloody thing. Once again the boys at Military Intelligence knew their jobs well; an avatar meeting Garth’s requirements waited patiently in the virtual wings of his prote.
According to the files attached, it was sufficiently ‘intelligent’ enough to hide inside the relay station’s operating system until a spEye transmission came zipping through; the tiny program would detach itself from its hiding spot and follow along until the hidden center was located. Then it would navigate its way to a ‘safe’ relay station, sending Garth an anonymous, encrypted email.
While the avatar sat silently in the node, Garth polished up his Big Plan. He was pretty damned proud of it, especially since he was flying by the seat of his pants. Getting the Portsiders and the Devil Nuts together in the Space Port was going to be a big blast, in more ways than one. The enmity between the two gangs was so intense that there was no way they’d give up a chance for some good old-fashioned curb stomping, even if they realized they’d been conned. It was important -but not absolutely necessary- for the rival gangs to kick up as much of a fuss as they could. It’d be nice if they went at each other with guns and grenades and whatever else they had on hand with resplendent foolishness; Garth’s hope was that they managed wing Meadowlark Lemon in the process. It’d make writing the ship’s destruction off as collateral damage that much easier.
Getting the gangs together on the spaceport meant forcing Ashok Guillfoyle to extend protection to the Devil Nuts. Once the businessman got a look at the sort of lengths his number one enemy was willing to go to in order to get what he wanted, the decision to make the Nuts invisible to the cameras shouldn’t be a tough one. While the ‘Nuts and the ‘siders were busy –hopefully- whanging away at one another, he planned on being inside ripping Huey’s brains out of the ship.
Once –if- that happened, there was every chance the remaining soldiers on either side would recognize him, but by that time, it was Garth’s sincerest and most desirous hope that God soldiers by the metric ton were crashing all over the place. A three-way free-for-all conflict full of murderous psychopaths added heightened drama to the impending spaceship explosion. Now all he needed was a way to get Huey fre…
Garth facepalmed hard enough to leave a mark. What an idiot.
“If I was any stupider I’d be in the army.” Ever since learning how hot a commodity Huey was in Ashok’s eyes, he’d wasted valuable –and diminishing- brain cells trying to come up with a way to get the AI of the friggerty ship without setting off any alarms when the answer had been right in front of him the whole fucking time!
You didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to steal an artificial intelligence, not if you lived in Latelyspace, not if you were any one important enough to actually have a shot at getting it done. Ashok Guillfoyle was both of those things and he just so happened to have a berjillion dollar facility at his disposal. Taking that into consideration and the Portsiders’ fairly rabid attempts at killing him of late, Garth would bet his legendary left nut that there was already a method in place for getting Huey safely off the ship and into Hospitalis.
The only thing he need to was provide an extra pound per square inch of convincing.
It was nice when things solved themselves. It happened so rarely.
The only part lacking in ‘finesse’ was the part where he willingly blew himself up. It was necessary, though, which sucked.
Spaceport security was tight. Very tight. They logged his every move through as many cameras and recording devices as they could because they –correctly, as it turned out- imagi
ned that a Trinity Offworlder couldn’t handle being without artificial intelligence for more than three minutes.
Since this was the case –though not for the reasons they assumed-, Garth needed to be able to physically document the fact that he, an untrustworthy foreign devil, had got his ass blown to Kingdom Come by an exploding spaceship and attacked by weird gangsters. With the level of paranoia that the average ‘security’ Latelian operated on, he was looking at substantial burns, scrapes and bruises. Minimum.
Not good.
It was therefore imperative, that when Goddies started stepping on everyone, he was already sufficiently squashed enough to allay suspicion. It was all part of the plan. It was a risky plan, and one that could go pear shaped within seconds, but he didn’t have anything else cooking and he knew he couldn’t operate on Hospitalis for another day without serious, serious help.
The prote chimed its success. The source of the spEye’s directives was a secret relay station hidden inside a building just two blocks away. Garth located the structure on a Central map, then dialed in an information site. According to a realtor avatar, the establishment was undergoing major renovations and would be for several more weeks; when repairs were completed, the current owners would be looking to sell.
“I’m cookin’ with gasohol now.” Garth leaped lightly to his feet and made his way through the lovely park area that gave the occupants of the four buildings a place to eat and relax. Though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Garth still undertook the basic caution of keeping his speed normal and refrained from looking over his shoulder.
xxx
As Garth trucked on through small crowds of mildly disinterested locals, a fairly obvious facet of Latelian lifestyle popped into his head.
