Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2)

by Lee Bond

  At the same time, a smaller, lither Threesie leaped swiftly into the air, powerful hands grasping the spiked ball of the mace. Yanking with massive cybernetic strength and aided by the sheer velocity of the jump, the Threesie managed to wrench the mace painfully free from Garth’s weary grasp.

  The exultation that washed through Garth’s opponents was a nearly physical force that pounded through the entire Museum. Even those Goddies assigned to the suicidal task of trying to contain Chadsik al-Taryin seemed rejuvenated by the efforts of their brothers, redoubling their own pointless charge at the albino assassin.

  No longer concerned about the mace, a second group of four began to advance. These were hastily assembled Threesies not entirely enthused about their task; midway between the upgrades of the command-oriented Twoesie and the fully battle dominating aspects of a Foursie, they weren’t nearly as solidly constructed as either cybernetic designation. They were closer in strength and speed to a Foursie, though, and were able to deliver unparalleled levels of short-burst damage. Precisely the sort of thing their field commander needed for the plan to work. The assembled Onesies and Twoesies -still driven by the cybernetic commands of the Foursie- moved swiftly out of the way to allow the Threesies access to their Great Enemy.

  Garth, unable to think straight after the vicious pummeling he’d just taken, knew that once the second group swarmed him, he was done for. The continual ex-dee drain that’d given him unbelievable strength, endurance and power beyond even what the neural sheaths was capable of was almost totally gone. Given the extreme physical discomfort he’d experienced the previous two times he’d gone ex-dee –and only for a few seconds each time-, it was, in point of fact, entirely likely that he was close to being dead.

  Grimly, he imagined the Harry Bosch hologram was holding his original flesh and blood self together by the slenderest of threads. When the power failed, it was all too possible he’d simply splash to the ground, a loose accumulation of innards and bones. If he didn’t die the moment Harry died, the Goddies would kill him.

  It was as simple as that. Stark logic suggested there was no real way out.

  Garth swallowed, part out of fear, part out of nerves; this was all going so wrong. In his last years of service, he’d been designated a Heavy Elite. He’d gone on Deep Strike missions so far into the Cordon that it’d take Trinity’s colony missions hundreds, if not thousands of years, to come across the smoking rubble he and his teams had left behind. While he’d never encountered anyone or anything as remorselessly brutal or efficient at killing as a God soldier before, in that time he’d fought –and survived- hordes of Offworld killing machines and drastically altered humans with abilities that made Enforcers look like children with plastic ray guns.

  There was a single option. He could run.

  Panting, Garth crouched. Bunching his leg muscles as tightly as he could, the weary warrior stole a play out of the Goddie handbook; as soon as the Goddies lurched closer, their eyes gleaming in anticipation of the ass-kicking of their careers, he leaped upwards with all the strength he could muster. His target was a crumbling section of upper balcony that looked like it could hold his weight.

  The Foursie, waiting for that moment, followed Garth into the air, tackling him around the waist.

  “Come on!” Garth shouted involuntarily as a grip beyond steel closed around his waist. “You guys are cheating!”

  “Whoever the fuck you are, sa, you’re going down.” Gurant howled murderously. “All the way down.”

  The two of them tussled in the air as they sailed directly above Chadsik and his knot of assailants; the cyborg and the greenskins paused in their actions, drawn to the spectacle of two several-ton heavy soldiers flying gracefully through the air. They tracked the flying knot of muscle, eyebrows raised, lips pursed.

  Since Garth had staged his defensive measures close to the entrance level of the Viewing Room, they flew ‘upwards’ for another few dozen feet before they lost their momentum.

  Then it was all about falling.

  Garth tried to breathe deeply. When that didn’t work, he tried to breathe, period. He tried to calm himself with prana meditation, to slow time down enough or to speed his mind up so he could figure out what to do.

  He couldn’t. His mind was a whirling blur of ragged emotions, half-formed thoughts and overriding panic. The one great dominating fear was the apprehension that, as soon as they hit the ground some thirty feet below, the Harry Bosch solidigram would short out. Then everyone in the world would know that their favorite ex-Goddie hero was in actuality Garth Nickels, their current –unwilling- ‘hero’. Oh, and he’d be dead.

  Typically, he liked to avoid that state at all costs, but by then, it’d be too damn late. If, by some miracle of impossibly unlikely miracles, he survived not just the impact with the ground but the fucking Foursie trying to cave the side of his head in, then … then …

  There’d be no stopping the press then. Not even his crazy-as-fuck publicist extraordinaire had the mojo to stop the storm of interest that would rip through Latelyspace. His rise in popularity would be beyond meteoric.

  Garth didn’t even think there was a word for what would happen to him, then.

  So as they fell, their clash became a high-speed struggle for control. Garth prayed that if he was on top of his attacker when they hit dirt, the collision would knock the gigantic motherfucker unconscious long enough for him to run away and quietly bleed to death in a corner. Then he’d just be a dead guy in the corner and no one would say anything like ‘Gee, wasn’t this dude wearing a Harry Bosch outfit a little while ago?’.

  It was a nice thought.

  A lunatic scenario leaped to the forefront of Garth’s consciousness even as he drove an inelegant elbow into Gurant’s eyeball; the moment they hit, the planet Hospitalis -unable to shed the extreme momentum of two such redoubtable powerhouses- got whacked out of orbit, the survivors of the initial hostile conditions finding themselves on a journey between the stars…

  Gurant saw stars but continued fighting for supremacy, grabbing hold of one of the man’s hands. Reports from those few Goddies capable of coherent speech after their own encounter with Bosch claimed that the man’s skin was … wrong.

  Grasping Bosch’s bulky wrist with all the strength he could muster, Gurant confirmed those initial suppositions, even though the point was moot; once the x-DEC avatars completed their tasks, no data on any device within two miles of The Museum would be retrievable. Further, the sheer bulk of analytical information recorded by Gurant’s own vastly enhanced systems was too great for him to store in his own internal servers, making the Foursie’s assessment –that Bosch was some kind of impossible shield and not a fleshy being at all- nothing more than an observation, a memory.

  No one in command, not even the OverCommander, would believe that inside Harry Bosch was another being altogether. No matter how strenuously Gurant proclaimed what he knew to be truth, he would sound crazy. That couldn’t be allowed. He was a Four. One of the only ... stable ... Fours in the system. He was Gurant. He would not be the subject of idle gossip.

  He needed to provide the Army with a corpse. Gurant knew he was supposed to subdue Harry Bosch, but that wasn’t a win. That was a compromise, and of infinitely more importance were the soldiers, and their impression of the day. Gurant, subduing ‘Harry Bosch’? Unacceptable. They needed to see at least one of the men who’d killed so many suffer in ways previously unimagined.

  Through his ‘LINK, Gurant commanded the Onesies, Twoesies and Threesies not already redeployed towards the unnamed Trinity cyborg to converge on the point where he and his captive would impact; once on the ground, the squad would pummel whoever existed beneath the shifting, rippling and pixelated skin of Harry Bosch into a thin, bloody smear. The Foursie grinned murderously at Bosch, whose ugly face was a picture of fear.

  Garth couldn’t stop the panic. There was nothing he could do. He was going to die. He was going to die and Bosch would be revealed as a solid hologra
m. Everything he’d done since landing would be reinvestigated and eventually those investigators were going to come across the rebuilt protean creation machines in the old Guillfoyle building. They’d discover he’d hopefully purchased every waste management facility in Central and that he’d contracted them to hide the mistuned duronium for later perusal/disposal. They’d find Huey.

  They’d find everything and Garth instinctively knew that with all these separate pieces, whatever secret agenda Chairwoman Doans and OverCommander Vasily held in their heart of hearts would be transformed into something wholly and irrevocably unstoppable.

  Worst of all, they’d find Naoko.

  That couldn’t happen. Even if Doans wasn’t planning some sort of table turning on Trinity, all the loose ends his death would reveal would most likely cause the absolute destruction of Latelyspace. Of Naoko, who would in turn, because of his utter, utter assholery, be revealed as Lady Ha.

  The entire system could burn for all he cared, so long as Naoko stayed safe.

  Madness, terror and fear seized him.

  Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez reached for ex-dee with everything he was worth. Power filled him immediately, and if he’d thought wrestling with ex-dee before had been a tumultuous ride, this was a galaxy-sized tsunami. Sizzling agony seized him.

  So long as Naoko remained safe, the sacrifice was worth the pain.

  xxx

  Outside, in the pouring rain and still invisible, Griffin Jones felt an impact deep in his bones, a tremulous eruption pulling and pushing and yanking through him. He turned his gaze from the second Gunboy and gazed with growing anger at The Museum. Beneath his helmet, his jaw locked into a grim scowl.

  The Enforcer Suit tried to calculate and examine the sudden, raw and furious presence of limitless power that began to pour into The Museum’s Viewing Room and failed. To compensate, it read the solid state of the physical surroundings and noted that a steady trickle of this unidentifiable power had been growing more refined for nearly an hour.

  How the fuck could he have missed that? The energy burning through his Kin’kithal senses was supposed to be immediately identified; that ability was a part of his heritage! It was the goddamn suit. Trinity and It's damned tricks and miserly hoarding of secrets.

  Griffin didn’t need the suit to tell him what was happening, though he really fucking wished it could explain how it was happening. He could see it with his own eyes, a motherfucking vortex of pure extra-dimensional energy being forcibly contracted into a single point, a single moment, a single man.

  A man who'd proved time and again that he wasn’t able to do anything of the sort.

  A man who’d lived and laughed and trained with all of them, a man who ‘hadn’t’ been blessed with any of the unique abilities of his Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen brethren, not unless you counted his extraordinary intellect and martial skills as ‘abilities’.

  Griffin Jones howled then, a blackened rage filling the lightning and rain-soaked sky. The Kin’kithal warrior had known, had always known, that Garth N’Chalez was a liar of the worst sort, a traitor to the blood, and there, before him, flowering like an incandescent blossom, was proof.

  He’d said the war would be hard-fought, that there was no way they could possibly defeat their enemies head-on, that they needed to give them their victory so the usual hubris could sink in. He’d said they didn’t have the power to fight them one on one, toe to toe. They’d all stepped into Alpha at his command, believing a journey of ten, fifteen, twenty years would be just the ticket, and those ancient Armies of Man had believed him. They, the Kith’kineen and Kin’kithal, they’d followed him into suspension, a suspension that’d lasted hundreds of times longer than they’d been promised. ’Let them reap what they’ve sown’ he’d said. ‘Corruption will weaken them and then we can drive them away. I, we, can’t beat them as they are now’.

  He'd been lying to them the whole time. The extra-dimensional power unfolding before Griffin’s glittering dark eyes was greater than any single Kith, Kin or their progeny had been capable of sustaining for even a second. It was greater than the comingled efforts of them all. And it was continuing to grow.

  All of this. All of this bullshit and bleak futures with Trinity and The Cordon and all the fucking twisted echoes of Humanity … all of it shouldn’t have ever been.

  Something clicked. A memory flooded into him, one blocked by a ‘friend’ thousands of years and trillions of light years away. Griffin Jones turned fluorescent eyes menacingly to the heavens. “You were there, you bitch! You saw! You knew! You let him lie! You let all this happen when we ... when he could’ve ended this thirty thousand years ago!”

  The Enforcer flicked his eyes back to The Museum. The ex-dee energy was growing into a maelstrom destined to rival the storm overhead.

  Trinity be damned. Great plans be damned. Great Enemies didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that someone punish Garth N’Chalez for his crimes.

  When Garth N'Chalez was a memory, it would be Lisa Laughlin's turn to suffer. How dare she fiddle with his memories after she’d promised she wouldn’t?

  After that? Well, Trinity was the current arbiter of his unhappy fate…

  xxx

  Gurant’s determined expression turned to one of complete bewilderment as Harry Bosch’s face and body went luminous. Adding more confusion to the mix, by dint of his wide array of cyborg systems, the Foursie was aware that -even as his opponent’s ‘skin’ began glowing with an inexplicable light- every other source of illumination in the Viewing Room extinguished itself. This was no coincidence.

  The God soldier opened his mouth … to do what, he wasn’t sure, but the half-formed question or demand, or whatever he’d been planning to shout into his enemy’s ear transformed suddenly into howl of soul-piercing agony; his prote-arm flared from the mildly irritating discomfort he’d been ignoring into a white-hot, flesh searing, bone-burning assault of torture.

  The one-hour mark for Tomas Kamagana’s miraculous avatars had passed. Adamant he be the victor, Sa Gurant held on for all he was worth, screaming incoherent torment into Sa Bosch’s shining, radiant face.

  Bravo Intervenes and Secrets Revealed

  The Curator watched and assessed.

  There seemed to be no limit to the physical endurance of the alleged Kin’kithal warrior. The neural sheathing driving the so-called ‘adaptive morphology’ the being had come to rely on would apparently find no plateau, allowing him to become endlessly stronger and faster and more immune to damage even as it rendered the man’s own, ‘theoretical’ natural abilities neuter.

  This was distressing, as was the man’s repeated –dangerously repeated- direct access of the extra-dimensionality, feats that were supposed to be impossible.

  Impossible not only because the sheathing attached to every single molecule of the Kin’kithal’s organic being should prevent anyone of Garth N’Chalez’ lineage from reaching out to that power-filled other plane.

  Yes, the sheaths had been designed as a booster for human troops fighting against the Kith and Kin and their Harmony Army, but also as a hobble for the Armies of Man’s very own alien fighting force. Afflicted with sheathing, no progeny of the Kith and Kin should be able to even sense the extra-dimensionality, let alone use it. The Kith’kineen and Kin’kithal were only to have had access to their greater powers at the whim of Man. No one could have known these ... soldiers ... relied on a genetic level reaction to ex-dee for their very lives.

  What the Curator was witnessing was also impossible because Garth N’Chalez, out of all the scions of the Kith and Kin, had never once shown any talents whatsoever. And the Armies of Man had checked, oh yes, they had checked and rechecked the great 'man's' lack of power. They pried, tricked, trapped, and bullied Garth N’Chalez incessantly for days, months, years before finally admitting that the first of the human/Kin hybrids was bereft of whatever mechanism gave the rest their stunning talents.

  Another impossibility: the man’s legen
dary resistance to the pain he should be feeling. The other warriors under his command had experienced extreme physical pain and other deleterious effects under the influence of the neural sheathing almost instantly, whereas Garth N'Chalez, incredibly, was capable of withstanding whatever ravages the neural sheaths did to him. What manner of being was Garth N’Chalez, that he could survive thusly when there was nothing –had been nothing- to set him apart from the others under his command?

  Why would he demand the neural sheaths scant hours before interment into Alpha, citing pressing need for the benefits they’d offer him?

  Benefits, it seemed, he didn’t need.

  And still, with all the telemetry and readings they’d accumulated during the man’s illustrious exploits throughout Trinity’s ‘Cordon’ and here on Hospitalis, they were no closer to understanding the true nature of the First Kin’kithal as they’d been when he’d come to them with an implausible story of a war being fought beneath their noses. A war thousands of years old, a war started by entities calling themselves M’Zahdi Hesh, a war where they took ordinary men and woman and transformed them into remarkable machines of destruction and devastation.

  A war they were going to lose. A war they might have lost.

  The Curator stood and assessed, trying to plumb Garth N’Chalez’ true being and failing, thanks in no small part to the profound volume of extra-dimensional energy flooding the entire area, swamping through local space-time like a tsunami.

  If those other warriors had possessed talents like telepathy, pyrokinesis, teleportation, what, then, could the so-called ‘First Kin’kithal’ do if sufficiently motivated?

  What and -given their absolute determination to do whatever it took to get him to reveal those abilities- more importantly how had he hidden these possible gifts from them all?