Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  All they needed now were entities from beyond The Cordon and they’d have a perfect set of nightmares running roughshod over their worlds even as the system collapsed around their ears.

  Vasily knew about Enforcers. He’d even had occasion to speak with one, a long time ago and very far away. Shyla Sin, she’d been calling herself. Fairly attractive but poisonous in every way, shape and form, Shyla had taken it upon herself to learn as much as she could about Latelians by attempting to seduce the only one she could find. Vasily remembered Shyla’s shock of being turned down and his own profound terror at realizing what he’d done. She’d decided not to kill him for being an idiot, instead going on to display the absolute unfettered power an Enforcer had at his or her command.

  Enforcers, clad in their impossible Suits, were … awesome. There was no other way to describe them. Fabricated using techniques and sciences outlawed for any other species in all the galaxies, the Suits were the ultimate expression of warfare. There was nothing a Suit couldn’t do, and aided by Artificial Intelligence, a wearer could accomplish unimaginable things. Their own attempts at producing Suits –the Gunboys- had seemed, until last night, just as awe-inspiring, but Vasily knew better now. Whatever science went into the Suits was still thousands of years away.

  Ruminatively, Vasily watched the unnamed Enforcer flit around destroying as little as possible, wondering if the Suits were affected by Dark Ages as well. Alyssa’s plans –backed up by the most comprehensive and detailed understanding of those terrible Ages seen by anyone, anywhere- depended on entire solar systems under Trinity’s command being unable to defend themselves when their troops arrived. If even a single Enforcer survived, their plans would be for naught. It was too late in their schemes to hunt for that particular truth. If an Age fell and they attacked and were in turn rebuffed by Enforcers, they’d find a way to win or they’d fail. It was a simple truth, a soldier’s truth.

  “What is he doing?” Vasily asked aloud at last. Shyla Sin had demonstrated a Suit’s ability to destroy a black hole, laughing about how easy it was the whole time. The Enforcer on his Screens was, quite literally, in the middle of a firestorm greater than entire fleets had endured. By contrast, their unnamed Enforcer seemed … disinterested in doing much more than shooting down the occasional enemy flier. It was a most confusing turn of events.

  Harredad, the only one of Vasily’s top-level advisors in The Peak at the moment, looked up from the tech analysis. It was so frustrating. None of their avatars could pierce the Suit’s shielding and all the communication wavelengths spilling out from the armor were encoded with AI protocols that no amount of processing power could decrypt. “It’s strange.”

  Vasily didn’t like strange. Never had, and for too long now he’d been dealing with nothing but strange. It had to stop. Come the end of the month, he thought bleakly, he’d start disliking the ordinary. If none of their advanced weaponry was having an effect, perhaps they could offer their Enforcer a … suggestion that he go elsewhere. “Is the Old Gun still operational?”

  “Sa?” Harredad started hunting for the necessary data.

  Harredad understood Vasily’s plan well enough, and, all things being relative, it was worth the shot; the Old Gun was a precursor to the cannons they used to protect their cities from orbital attack. At over three times the size of the biggest of those city-savers, the Old Gun fired duronium ingots weighing a hundred thousand pounds. Big enough to punch mile wide holes through any invading spaceship, slugs from Old Gun might convince the Enforcer to go away.

  Then again, it could just as easily upset the man. And that was if they managed to score a perfect hit with a cannon not used in, well, in forever. All the Enforcer would need to do was sashay to the left or right and about the only thing they’d accomplish was a hundred thousand pound airstrike against the entire city of Easson.

  Harredad wondered if Easson would consider that an act of war.

  “The Old Gun.” Vasily repeated slowly. “Can we fire it at this Enforcer?” The OverCommander stared at his Screens, mesmerized.

  They were going to try to steal from a machine mind that could create something like that? It struck Vasily as madness of the worst sort.

  Harredad used his access codes to break open the Old Gun command protocols and sent activation avatars ripping through the ancient cannon’s systems. The megalithic machine was well and truly one of the oldest things in the system, designed and built shortly after duronium smelting became simple enough to do quickly. At the time of its creation, the Old Gun had used up every scrap of duronium on Hospitalis.

  Fitfully, slowly, the cannon systems can online, surprising Harredad quite a bit; maintenance logs for the ancient planetary defense system showed that the last time anyone had even peeked at its guts had been close to two thousand years ago. He would’ve wagered a month’s salary to the opposite.

  He flashed Vasily the confirmation reports. While his commanding officer read them over, Harredad decided to ask something that’d been on his mind since last night. “Sa, is the Chairwoman really asking Trinity for more systems?”

  “Hm?” Vasily asked absentmindedly, absorbing the data. He looked up when Harredad repeated the question. “Oh, yes, Trinity. Yes, Colonel Harredad, Chairwoman Doans is, in fact, attempting to gain more systems from Trinity.” He wanted to add ‘by any means necessary, most certainly involving the first truly multi-systemic war known to Mankind’, but obviously didn’t; Harredad gossiped like a teenage girl. It was one of few faults in the young colonel, but it did keep the man from learning important news until the last minute. Sadly, he hadn’t even realized they kept secrets from him.

  Harredad thought about that for a moment while Vasily bent himself to the task of figuring out the best way to shoot a man-sized target with a weapon designed to eviscerate starships. Beyond giving the Army something to do, expansion seemed like a good idea. He’d seen papers on various types of urban planning that loomed at them in the very near future. Most of them proved one unalterable fact: they’d be living in beehives of smothering Humanity or living underground before the century was out.

  “Good.” Harredad said finally. His prote chimed and he looked at what the OverCommander had sent. The plan was to essentially force the bizarrely ‘low retaliation level’ Enforcer thirty miles to the west, where the Old Gun was even now being ‘unlimbered’, whereupon they would fire its massive payload. If they could keep their antagonist preoccupied with ever-increasing ferocity, they might be able to bean him good and proper when he was looking the other way.

  “I am certain,” Vasily replied dryly, “that Chairwoman Doans will be inordinately ecstatic that one of my Colonels approves of her difficult decision.”

  “What?” Harredad looked up from his prote, face burning. “I mean … no! I wasn’t …”

  Vasily curled the corners of his lips. “Relax, Colonel Harredad. I was teasing you. If anything, the Chairwoman will appreciate the vote of confidence. As you know, treating with the Trinity Representatives has been met with considerable opposition.”

  “Not after last night’s speech.” Harredad’s mind swam with the martial images of the Chairwoman, the OverSecretary and his OverCommander standing there, delivering the Speech of the Millennium. To call it awe-inspiring was to diminish its impact.

  Vasily motioned at the Screens. “Now, sa, how about we kill ourselves an Enforcer before the Chairwoman calls us up, screaming about the small war we’re having in her back yard?”

  Colonel Harredad saluted and began issuing orders.

  xxx

  “Dang it all.” Griffin wasn’t having any fun. Everything the Latelians were using against hardly even registered on the Suit’s defenses. Near about the only thing causing him any discomfort were the biggest guns poking out the sides of the craggy mountaintops, and even then, barely.

  Having either grown bored of or no longer interested in reflecting the endless barrage of energy fire blasting at it from every conceivable direction, the Suit
was now absorbing all that power and using it to recharge the small fraction of power it’d already burned up in defending its foolish user. The effect was akin to transforming Griffin into a blazing ball of brilliant, pure light, a new sun rising on Hospitalis.

  A tracking icon burst into view, dragging Griffin’s attention away from a cluster of seven VapoRaptors. He cackled gleefully when the Suit identified what he was looking at. “Well golly, lookit that. C’mon, let’s go have a closer gander.”

  xxx

  “Is he … is he flying closer? On his own?” Harredad demanded.

  Vasily pulled at a lower lip. Was it possible that the Enforcer was insane? Admittedly, he knew very little about the mechanisms employed by the Chair –mechanisms that’d kept their system Enforcer-free for five thousand years- and so had very little to go on, but the monstrously powerful being seemed crazy. Maybe that was what the First Main did every time, and this was the first time an Enforcer had actually made it to a planet, where the craziness could be witnessed firsthand. “I think so, sa. It definitely looks like it.”

  “Should we fire on him anyways?” Harredad asked doubtfully. He couldn’t think of a single reason why an Enforcer would willingly subject themselves to the tremendous amount of punishment awaiting. There were no data –military or otherwise- suggesting reasons why anyone would do anything like what the Enforcer had been doing for the last quarter of an hour. “What if we blow him up and he blows us up?”

  “Not possible.” Vasily said with a reassurance he didn’t feel. “Trinity wouldn’t design anything like that. It has to have had accepted the possibility that an Enforcer’s Suit could encounter something destructive enough to destroy it. Knowing that, I cannot imagine It would design those Suits so poorly that they’d explode or erupt or what have you upon critical damage.”

  “So … fire.” Harredad gazed at his TactiSheet. The Enforcer was hovering in front of the Old Gun, literally peeking inside.

  “At your leisure, Colonel Harredad.” Vasily looked down at his prote, which had just announced a call. Hollyoak. That couldn’t be good.

  xxx

  The Old Gun –once designated as Planetary Defense System Alpha- was a precursor to the ten kilometer guns floating above every Latelian’s head. Indeed, over the centuries, not much had changed; it was a very large cannon that would shoot stupendously large bullets at Trinity invaders. Four thousand years ago, when the prevailing Chairman had effectively thrust Trinity’s advances away, it’d seemed like a damn good idea to ensure that It wouldn’t just roll in behind their backs and steal their planets from them.

  PDSA –or Alf, as engineers had endearingly called it- had never really been fired against an enemy; whatever the Chairman of the time had said, however he’d managed to convince Trinity it was in It’s best interests if Latelians were left alone for all of time, had stuck. No Trinity warships had arrived; no conscripted Offworld vessels had entered their volume of space, nothing.

  For a time, they’d fired one of the massive rounds at the beginning of each Game. They’d held big parties and counted down the seconds to The Firing and it had been a grand old time. Eventually the cost -in broken windows, ruptured eardrums and reclamation of the spent round tumbling through space- had necessitated an abrupt cancellation of The Firing. There were perhaps thirty non-military people on Hospitalis that knew about that old celebration and even fewer who knew that the Old Gun was even still assembled.

  Following the events of the last month or so, even the twitchiest Latelian resident did nothing more than look up at the sky as the heavens erupted in sonic fury before shrugging and going back to whatever it was they were doing.

  Every single one of them missed Griffin Jones flying past their cities at just under the speed of light, splatted on the nose of the very large bullet that the Latelian God Army had fired at him.

  xxx

  Half an hour after being forcibly hit by probably the largest bullet ever fired at anyone ever, Griffin Jones crawled agonizingly to his feet, a wonky grin on his face. It’d taken Griffin a surprisingly long while to tunnel to freedom; the concussion from the round had knocked him unconscious immediately. The Suit, deprived of motivation to save him from himself, had done nothing, even as he’d fallen from the sky, a big ole bullet on top of him like a frisky hooker.

  The first impact had fractured much of the Suit’s external damage-dampening shell, rendering it more susceptible to injury than any other Suit.

  Falling at terminal velocity –pinned beneath a hundred thousand pound weight- and hitting the earth had ruptured most of the Suit’s power supplies in addition to burying him nearly fifteen feet underground.

  Griffin took his helmet off so he could get some fresh air. He whooped and he hollered for a joyous couple of minutes, glad he’d survived the foolhardy attempt.

  He couldn’t believe it’d worked.

  Even as he’d stared down the long, cold barrel of the PDSA, last-minute concerns about his sanity, his survival, and the possibility that he’d somehow gone completely retarded had floated up through the Great Plan. It happened. Sometimes, people wearing a Suit went bugnuts crazy and did all sorts of weird shit that generally resulted in Trinity actually having to do something Itself instead of just issuing a command to another Enforcer.

  Attempting to damage a Suit enough so that it’d leave you alone definitely fell into the bugnuts insane category, if only by a few degrees.

  Either way, more than ninety percent of the command protocols running the Enforcer’s Suit were down for the count, and for the first time in ten years, Griffin was in command of his own life. Of course, Trinity would know something had happened to It’s favorite Enforcer, but lucky days … It wouldn’t be able to do a goddamn thing about it until everything was over and done with.

  “All raght, let’s take a look here.” Putting the helmet down by his feet, Griffin flexed his hands and willed a holographic grid to spring to life. It took a few seconds, and when the module was up and running, it was in black and white. Griffin snickered, flicking through menus, nodding with pleasure every time he entered a new area of the Suit’s routines.

  The damn thing was pert near ruint. Every major system was offline, as was everything except the repair mechs, which were barely even functional; a subroutine informed him it would take nearly five solid days of effort to complete repairs. That Suited Griffin just fine. If he couldn’t find the HIM before then, using the brains he’d been born with, well, maybe he didn’t deserve to find it at all.

  “Up yours, Trinity.” Griffin hollered, satisfied. Free of the Suit’s inflexible insistence that he hew to the machine mind’s ulterior motives for the next five days, Griffin felt more alive than he had since before he’d ‘volunteered’ to enter Alpha with the rest of the idiots.

  The Suit –now functionally as sophisticated as a calculator watch- beeped. A full diagnostic was done.

  Griffin read the reports thoughtfully, accepting what he saw with only a few qualms; instead of the closest thing to a deity this side of Existence, Griffin Jones speculated that the Suit made him about as close to a Twoesie as a fella could get without being stuffed full of cybernetics.

  Griffin nodded.

  It was acceptable. Besides which, he had his inborn powers. Powers he could use now the Suit was almost entirely busted. With the power of fire running hot through his veins, every door on Hospitalis would open. If not voluntarily, then by dint of being vaporized right out of the fucking doorframe.

  The redheaded maniac rubbed his hands together excitedly before reaching for that inner spark, that secret core of energy and power that every child of the Kith and Kin had been able to touch, that glimmer that’d given them abilities beyond the scope of mortal man.

  Griffin remembered the fear and loathing on the faces of the commanders for the Armies of Man, recalled their disgust at being forced to rely on ‘people who were barely even human’ to help save Humanity. On a few of those faces, hunger had settled in behind careful
ly neutral expressions, though. A hunger good ole Garthie-boy had chosen to ignore.

  Most of all, though, Griffin remembered the fire. His fire. The incandescent, raging torrent of fire in all it’s wonderful forms, boiling and twisting and turning just beneath his skin, how he could make the air burn simply by willing it to be so. That was what he remembered, and that was why he hated Trinity so; the first thing the machine mind had done was take it away. That was like cutting the arms off an octopus.

  “Somethin’ simple, somethin’ small.” Griffin muttered to himself. “Nothin’ showy. Don’t want no one comin’ ‘round.”

  He reached for the power and … nothing. A warning voice burst out of the command hologram he’d generated.

  “Griffin Jones, my dear Enforcer, if you are hearing this, then you have attempted –and succeeded at- something so foolhardy that the mind staggers; you have successfully damaged the Suit you wear to the point where I am no longer capable of monitoring you. Further, you perhaps foolishly presume that temporarily freeing yourself from My gaze will enable you to utilize that which you dream about every second of every day. By now, you will realize that this is not the case.”

  “Motherfucker.” Griffin shouted.

  The Trinity recording continued. “The Suit is the barrier, Griffin Jones. The Suit itself. There is no ‘command protocol’ within the armor that keeps you from accessing the powers that your genetic connection to the extra-dimensionality allows. If you will recall My words, ‘as long as you wear this Suit, you will never be able to use your inborn powers’?”

  “Motherfucker.” Griffin started flicking through the various functions still left at his disposal. Suit removal wasn’t merely ‘in the red’, it was blacked out. Not that it fucking mattered much. The only time that protocol worked was ‘at home’. “Cocksucker.”