Foreign Devil (Unreal Universe Book 1)

by Lee Bond

  Paulson, who knew in her gut that whatever was happening at the spaceport would never be identified in time by the responsible authorities, was willing to bet that Chairwoman Doans would forgive and forget.

  Julius followed orders, a thrill of excitement rushing through him as he heard twin explosions demolish the relative silence of their listening post. Julius retained some conscientiousness and began programming a number of audio avatars to filter the weak signals coming into his station on the off chance that he could generate a kind of map based on what was picked up.

  xxx

  Garth stuck his gun in the thug’s ear the moment Huey’s sphere was sealed inside the baffle-sphere. “Thanks for not being an idiot. Now put your hands behind your head and interlock your fingers.”

  Stickler did as he was told, cold sweat beading on his forehead. As he turned slowly around, the sounds of fighting outside the ship grew louder. He felt a huge surge of relief that he wasn’t out there, being killed or worse, being expected to fight. Stickler looked down at the Offworlder, amazed at the lethality filling the oppressively small cabin. Seeing Garth Nickels up close, Stickler saw no reason to doubt the stories that’d been circulating; he definitely looked capable of everything attributed to him, and more, and worse. “W-w-what’s going on outside?”

  Garth picked up the clunky device dreamed up by Ashok and his greed, hefting its weight thoughtfully. It was heavy enough to bean someone pretty damned hard. “I reckon the Devil Nuts and your boys are going at it pretty hard right now.”

  As if to prove Garth’s point, a scattering of bullets danced across the cabin windows, shattering one and fracturing the other. The smell of smoke and fire filled Meadowlark Lemon, as did the sounds of shouting and dying gangsters. It didn’t bother Garth, since he was the one who’d coordinated the event, but the realities of war sat heavily on Stickler’s shoulders.

  “You should go outside and join your pals.” Garth waved his gun at Stickler, who refused to move.

  “Isn’t … isn’t it safer in here?” Stickler asked, astounded that he even considered being in a small room with a homicidal maniac ‘safe’.

  Garth angled his head a bit so he could see around Stickler and out into the port. The Portsiders were actually showing some common sense by using features of the port to their benefit while the Devil Nuts were milking the element of surprise to the fullest. The conflict showed signs of slowing down into a casual exchange of gunfire, but that would change when his ship did a Hindenburg.

  “No, it ain’t. By removing the AI from its housing, you triggered a self-destruction sequence. I’m gonna try and defuse it, but there isn’t a real good chance of that happening. So unless you wanna get vaporized, I suggest you get the fuck outta here.”

  Stickler dropped his hands and started to move quickly past Garth.

  Garth holstered his gun and grabbed hold of Stickler in one smooth movement. “Oh yeah, I got one question for you. Answer quickly and truthfully.”

  “O-okay.” Stickler licked dry lips with an even drier tongue.

  “This device looks pretty suspicious. How did Guillfoyle plan on keeping it a secret?”

  “I… his … o-o-once we stole it, we were supposed to give it t-to him. H-he said that his car was built to h-h-hide it. That’s all … all I know.” Stickler looked pleadingly at Garth. If the ship really was going to blow up, he really would rather try and survive outside with the rest of his so-called friends.

  Garth let go of Stickler and watched the tall, thin Latelian leg it out of the ship and across the tarmac to his buddies. During the course of their conversation, the Devil Nuts had adopted a defensive position similar to the Portsiders, and both gangs were now sharing moderate gunfire. Garth wondered when, if at all, either side would realize the situation they were in reeked of a setup. From the way they kept trying to shred each other with bullets, Garth had the feeling it wasn’t going to be until well after his ship went sky-high and the God soldiers showed up with their size ninety shitkickers on.

  Two loud explosions drew a momentary cease-fire. Garth craned his head upwards just in time to see two missile-like objects streak off into the distance. He didn’t know what they were, but he was willing to bet there was very little time left before God soldiers showed. He moved to an engineering control panel, hastily read through Huey’s thoughtful instructions, and began typing in the access codes needed to bypass all the safety protocols for the engines. Then, because there was no other way, Garth made his way back to the ‘bedroom’; there were a few panels in there that needed fiddling with as well.

  If Lady Luck had only bothered to show her head a little sooner in the week, he could’ve avoided all these trials and tribulations. As it stood, there would only be a few seconds to spare after the final sequence hit the computers. Huey’s adjustments to the fuel cells, monitoring equipment and fail-safes would allow for a bigger, more consumptive explosion but that also made it very quick and really dirty.

  Garth hoped whatever mojo he was using to get through the day didn’t to peter out in the next few minutes; although his plan really did involve getting caught by the blast, it did not include him being turned into Blackened Cajun Garth. Not only would it hurt a whole helluva lot, it’d prevent him from carrying off the second and third vital stages of his master plan.

  Once Meadowlark Lemon was a smoldering carcass, he’d still need to get the baffle to Ashok’s car and get himself back into the area of the firefight and the explosion before the God soldiers made their appearance. At best, Garth guessed he could add a few minutes leeway on the other end of things by making allowances for the Goddies’ zeal in thrashing crazy gangsters, but little more than that. If he wasted time before he could set the scene for his ‘discovery’ by examiners, his efforts would be for naught; someone with too many smarts would realize he’d intentionally come back on the scene, and then there’d be all sorts of difficult questions to answer, ones like ‘why didn’t you just run away when you had the chance?’.

  That was not a question he was willing to answer.

  Not a religious man –he’d seen and done too much in his relatively short life to believe in something so nebulous, especially with beings like Lisa Laughlin roaming throughout Reality-, Garth still found himself tossing up a prayer to whatever much-ignored deities still had the stones to hang around in the Black Hole of Faith known as Latelyspace. Everything needed to happen at precisely the right time, and in precisely the right order. If one thing went wrong, the fragile house of deceit, manipulation and coercion he’d built over the day would collapse. All over him.

  Garth hit the ‘enter’ button and started hauling ass. He had a gut feeling the boom was going to be big.

  xxx

  Actually, it wasn’t so much a ‘boom’ as it was apocalyptic.

  In his haste, and because he’d been juggling a million different oddly shaped balls, Garth Nickels had missed one … vital … thing.

  Ashok Guillfoyle had planned his operation with precision. Not only had he and his crews devised a baffle-sphere capable of hiding an artificial intelligence’s quantum emissions, he’d employed some unsavory types not associated with the Portsiders to plant enough explosives beneath the Meadowlark Lemon to vaporize it, and for exactly the same reasons as the owner.

  xxx

  The heavily anticipated ‘boom’ transformed into a holocaust. Seconds after the ship’s antiquated fusion cells and the engines went super-critical, the explosion triggered charges planted in service ducts beneath Meadowlark Lemon. The ship vaporized, reduced to an incandescent ball of superheated gasses, radioactive fallout and lethal plasma clouds. A blizzard of destructive fury tossed by secondary and tertiary explosions, the remnants of Meadowlark Lemon landed amongst the gangsters, wreaking terrific carnage up to two miles away.

  The blast consumed more than three quarters of the Portsiders and the Devil Nuts, either burning them to a crisp or simply disintegrating them with a furious plasma storm. Those that remaine
d realized that there was something far more important than killing each other and that was ironing out their differences long enough to run the fuck away.

  Backpedaling from the immediate source of danger, both small groups managed to avoid the ‘second’ explosion. The first two happened so quickly on top of one another that it would take examination by professionals to tell the difference. A third explosion roaring up out of the ground in a rough, ragged two hundred foot circle ultimately pinned down the fleeing thugs.

  Driven by the immense cataclysm of two very disparate explosions occurring on top of the other, duronium barricades designed to lock the Offworlder ship in place were the next thing to go critical. Normally ultra-resistant to such ravages, the alloy plating was stripped clean in the first few seconds of the explosion, the rare elements and metals left behind converting into yet another ball of blazing hot lethality. Rather than following previous paths, this snarling mass of gases and unexpended energy slammed downwards through the jagged mouth created by Ashok’s charges, enveloping three dozen system-critical junction points, and destroying much of the netLINK control systems for the immediate area.

  Some of these destroyed systems were directly responsible for energy control to various automated machinery depots and the automatic defense platforms that were a strict requirement for Offworld visits; the former began redlining their own safety parameters, causing generators and machinery alike to begin exploding or otherwise malfunctioning as an excess of energy began building up. The latter, no longer bound by the avatars running the show, began firing intermittently, at first wildly but with more precision as the programs, corrupted by data loss and the passage of the flEyes, began identifying everyone as targets. The first minute after the dual explosions saw two heavy passenger transports carrying late spectators for The Game shot down and one of the main generators for the entire port severely damaged.

  In the midst of all this, four Orbital Insertion Pods slammed down from the heavens and into the spaceport, hammering into the thick dock plates with a vengeance. The titanic shock waves from the pods’ collision/landing picked up and distributed wreckage from the destroyed vehicles miles away on either side of the conflagration.

  Gangsters who managed to spare a moment’s thought on the arrival of the God soldiers actually found themselves grateful; caught between hell on earth, malfunctioning cannons, and God soldiers, almost everyone at the port would prefer the surety of death at the hands of a rampaging militia.

  The first thing the God soldiers did as they exited their pods was destroy the faulty defensive machines with a quick, decisive sortie. Assured that they wouldn’t be hurt or hindered by stray fire, the bulky warriors divided into two groups and made off towards the gangsters.

  xxx

  Rey shielded her eyes with a cupped hand as an inferno bright enough to be a false sunrise lit up the skyline. A scant second later, her prote burst to life with thousands of warnings automatically issued from the Bureau of Examination detailing what was happening. Reywin read the first few through, then programmed her prote to disregard any other messages except those issued directly from the Chairwoman. Beside her, Bolobo and Trumann did the same thing.

  “Well?” Trumann asked, breaking the silence.

  “Well.” Reywin commented dryly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible. She was, unfortunately, at a complete loss as to why Garth Nickels would find it necessary to destroy the spaceport. “If he doesn’t die, we’ll continue surveillance. If he does, we call Jordan up and let him know the good news. In the meantime, looks like we’ve got a few days of R&R coming up.”

  Bolobo chuckled, and all three headed back to their flier.

  xxx

  Garth doubted anyone in the entire Universe had ever been so hurt in their lives. He personally thought that he was using the agony allotment for at least half a dozen people, and he gloomily forecast that the bastards wouldn’t even drop by his grave to say thanks.

  The only part of the explosion he really and completely remembered was a sudden swarm of hot air –probably from the exploding fuel cells- picking him and throwing him through the air mere moments before the Meadowlark Lemon went up like God’s Own Roman candle.

  After that, it was a vague mosaic of many, many more explosions, another unpredictable flight through the air, and, finally, a Mach 3 collision with a very impolite support column.

  He supposed that since he hurt like a motherfucker it was all good. Ears roaring with explosions, screams and automated warning sirens, Garth slogged his way agonizingly towards the stolen car. In his wake, he left an unfortunate stream of blood, leaking copiously through a number of deep grooves in his back. By the amount of red stuff pouring out his ears, eyes, nose and mouth, Garth felt confident that between the two, someone would be able to figure out what was going on. His only hope now was that the devastation going on behind him was so insanely destructive that no one at this point would even pay him any mind, even if they found him on top of his stolen car.

  Each step was pain, each breath an effort, each moment of conscious thought failing. Sometimes, he forgot who he was and why he was even trying to walk, others, it was the only thing he could remember; somehow, the noise filling the air around him had gotten worse, had taken on a life of its own as more and more of the spaceport found itself consumed. A tiny but insistent voice of logic informed him very gently that he had perhaps only a few seconds before the God soldiers showed up on the scene. The implication that he needed to hurry, while physically incapable of anything quicker than the old zombie shuffle, was pretty clear.

  Garth hawked up a mouthful of blood in response, and kept on a’shufflin’.

  Miraculously, the baffle-sphere was almost completely undamaged; Garth had thoughtfully shielded the piece of tech from explosions and heavy collisions with his body, both on the way up into the air and on the way down again.

  In point of fact, a tremendously insistent ache in his chest told Garth that he probably had a baffle-shaped indent from sternum to groin.

  Of equally benign fortune was the direction he’d been thrown during Hell’s reintroduction to Hospitalis; if that goddamned support column hadn’t leaped out at him like a hockey goalie hiding behind the net, odds are he would have landed way past the car. Grinning bloodily at his fortune, Garth reminded the voice in his head that he was going to have to make sure that -on the way back into Hell- he kept his eyes open for anything important left behind.

  Like his kidneys.

  xxx

  Naoko Kamagana woke up to sounds of her proteus going mad. She’d only ever heard the Emergency Status alarms during practice runs under controlled circumstances; before the young woman was even aware, she was fully dressed and halfway to the door. Her father Tomas appeared magically in the kitchen, cup of tea in one hand, pipe in the other. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Something is wrong at the port, papa.” Naoko pecked her father on the cheek. “I must go.”

  Tomas grunted unhappily. When he was certain his daughter was in the elevator, he made his way back into his study and began scrolling through the news channels for signs of what was going on.

  It didn’t take very long, and he started reading with interest. He bit through his best pipe and cursed.

  xxx

  Chairwoman Doans looked at interruptions during her personal time –those rare moments when she was actually able to schedule a few seconds of quietude where she could enjoy a few glasses of wine, a nice meal, and perhaps some handholding with her chosen paramour- as an affront to all things good and noble. As Chairwoman, Alyssa Doans was a phenomenally busy woman, required to know what was going on, not just on her homeworld, but also on all planets, everywhere, all the time. Her proteus was absolutely unique in that it could contain more data, both live video recording and the colossal amount of textual information, than any other device in the system. Without her proteus and its endless capacity for assistance, Chairwoman Doans would be lost.

  The
refore, even though she could occasionally manage some spare time with her lover, Doans could never leave her proteus behind. It was the albatross around her neck, or rather, her forearm, but Doans was a woman with a healthy appreciation for power, so she considered it a fair trade.

  Clad in a thin dress of precious silk, Doans read through the report with growing alarm. The spaceport, more than half destroyed? Unbelievable.

  “’lyssa, come to the balcony.”

  Alyssa Doans, the most powerful woman in the system, shivered slightly at the man’s voice. She loved him dearly, but couldn’t figure out a way to let the worlds know; for the time being, theirs was a romance that needed to stay as nothing more than unverified truth. She hurried to the balcony to join the OverCommander of all her Armies, slipped her arms around his, and stared at the pulsing red glow visible on the skyline. The direct path from her home to Port City, and to the spaceport, was several thousand kilometers long, yet the inferno raging there was bright enough to bring a second day to Hospitalis. She looked at her lover.

  Vasily tapped his proteus. “Confirmation of God soldier deployment less than ten seconds ago.”

  “How many?” Doans asked, settling down onto a chair. She needed to make everyone in her cabinet aware, if they already weren’t, of the situation.

  “Four units.” Vasily took up a spot at the table and began working. “They weren’t deployed because of the explosions, though.”

  “No?” Doans accessed the governmental netLINKs and began mass contacting everyone in the bureaucracy.

  “One of the listening posts detected gunfire, illegally launched some flEyes and demanded soldier support.” Vasily started work on downloading the available data.

  Chairwoman Doans groaned miserably. It was going to be a long night and an even longer day.

  xxx

  Garth leaned up against a chunk of duronium column that had broken free from a support strut, taking a calm breather before he started up again. As he sat there, worrying over the aching whistle in his chest, Garth felt he owed Ashok Guillfoyle another nod of congratulation for genius ingenuity; the car really had been designed to hide the illegal AI, and with total, cunning sneakiness. As he’d approached, shambling slowly and bleeding from everywhere except his left earlobe, he’d damned near died of fright when said car had actually deployed a grappling arm to receive the baffle-sphere. Stunned almost senseless, Garth had maintained enough consciousness to download the contents of his proteus into the car’s netLINK system and reformat it before heading back. The car, programmed with directions to park itself safely at the rented storage unit, lifted away smoothly.