by Lee Bond
“Worried?”
Injiri rose slowly to a seated position, curling his legs underneath his buttocks. If Garth was worried, he betrayed nothing. “I must admit to a certain amount of concern, yes. I am not without methods of detection, Garth, yet you managed to invade my room without my knowledge. I saw your ‘fight’ the other day with Firnkle, as well as the results of your conflict with Marko, but nothing I saw gave indication of your stealth.”
Garth stood. He’d been battle-ready for over three hours. Sitting in the walls of the bathroom listening to Injiri go through the various phases of sleep had been interminably frustrating. It was only by reminding himself that Injiri was a Yellow Dog Elder and therefore in peak condition mentally and physically as well as most definitely wired for sound that he managed to wait. “Your tattoos.”
“Eh?” Injiri moved smoothly off the bed. He squinted, trying to discern Garth’s meaning, then nodded. “You know someone in Yellow Dog?”
“He was there only for a short while.” Garth said, moving the chair out of the way. “He taught me the kanji over a week or so while we were killing time. He chose to join an organization that guaranteed he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. When you and I were talking downstairs, I saw some.”
Injiri shoved the bed as far out of the way as he could, ever mindful that Garth could use the distraction to his advantage. “That did not give you enough information to bring you here, though.”
Garth nodded, agreeing. “No, but it did tell me that you’re a Yellow Dog Elder. The chance of someone of your stature coming here just to fight in this bloody stupid contest is impossible. Plus you were a lot chattier during dinner than at breakfast. Since I already don’t trust anyone further than they can throw themselves, I got really, really paranoid.”
Not knowing Garth’s frame of mind before he’d gone to talk to him at dinnertime had been a calculated risk. Unfortunately, it hadn’t panned out. “So why,” Injiri asked, adopting a fighting stance, hands held loosely at his sides, legs slightly akimbo, “do you believe that I am here?”
“Didn’t really give it that much thought.” Garth admitted. He didn’t take any special stands or anything other than stand there. Injiri knew they were going to fight to the death, and so he wanted Injiri to make the first move. “I expect you’re here to meet with some guy or other to talk over some deal or other. Same shit as anything else you guys do.”
Injiri stood there, his ability to process the visual world speeding up as the deeper modifications he’d paid Medellos for started coming online. His body and mind flooded with powerful chemicals secreted by organs Nature never intended, and miniature machines implanted along his neural pathways and muscles came to life by the handful. His thoughts accelerated while his time-sense decelerated. Responding to the deluge of chemicals assaulting his system, Injiri’s skin began thickening. The changes took perhaps five seconds to complete, and when they were done, Injiri knew he’d have no problems defeating Garth Nickels; other than a God soldier, he was now the fastest human being on this or any planet in the system.
The NorthAMC dog would have no idea what hit him.
Injiri moved so quickly that he covered the distance –around six feet- between him and Garth in the blink of an eye. He chopped a knife hand down towards Garth’s unprotected neck; his vastly accelerated consciousness had discarded any options of a long, drawn out fight. He wanted to kill Garth and dispose of the body as quickly as possible.
Garth stepped lithely out of the way of the rigid knife hand, grabbed Injiri’s wrist as it passed by his chest, and pulled Injiri bodily to the right. Intending to slip a sleeper or domination hold on the assassin, Garth found himself automatically blocking a powerfully delivered heel strike to his unprotected groin. Doing so meant letting go of Injiri’s wrist, and as he did, Injiri wheeled to strike an open palm against Garth’s forehead.
Leaping back just in time to avoid a flurry of blows, Garth recovered quickly by planting both his feet solidly on the ground. He held both hands up, showed Injiri the edges of his fingers, and did not move. His forehead stung, his head was ringing, but other than that, he was unharmed.
Injiri sent a thought just so through his body and waited for the almost immediate sensation of more chemicals flowing through his body. He was appalled that Nickels was still breathing, let alone able to ask for more; benchmark tests performed back in the clinic had proven he was unstoppable. His initial attack, a maneuver delivered along with the first powerful rush of drugs and chemicals, had a speed rating of fifteen miles an hour. And the bastard NorthAMC mercenary had danced around him! Spitting fretfully, Injiri moved in again, this time with a great deal more caution.
The two men stood in the middle of their impromptu battle ring and exchanged a furious delivery of blows. Every time a blow failed to strike, they pushed their bodies harder, demanding more speed, more strength, more everything. Both Garth and Injiri were masters of Chi Sao, though, so regardless of how quickly they delivered their strikes, the other was already in position to neatly deflect or avoid the attack. They moved back and forth across the room, neither one giving up anything but the smallest of advantages before regaining what they’d lost.
Garth found himself smiling like an idiot as sweat and blows rained at him. Injiri was the best combatant he’d gone up against and the joy he felt in losing all conscious thought in favor of the sublimate pleasure of an empty mind was profound. Ears full of exhaled snorts of air, the flicker and stamp of feint/counter feint, the slap of open or closed fists against the skin, Garth found his eyes closing. He allowed them to seal shut, trusting himself as never before.
Injiri forced himself to push forward, though the drugs in his body were depleting too quickly to be replenished without a large intake of food and an even longer period of recuperation. Even if he managed to survive Garth’s seemingly endless reserves of energy, Injiri found himself doubting his body would recover from the abuses he was putting it through: the spectrum of implants and drug-secreting glands he’d purchased had only been intended for momentary spurts, not long-term combat. Using them for longer than recommended periods meant severe tissue damage and systemic failure. There was every chance that, should he survive the fight, he would die anyway, his body eaten from the inside out.
A flicker of irritation shadowed Injiri’s tired, sweaty face as beatific pleasure washed across Garth’s. When his opponent’s eyes closed, the elder assassin felt a momentary thrill of exhilaration. When Garth not only continued to block his efforts to win but also actually got faster, Injiri knew instead that he was dead.
Garth was in a place of pure and perfect silence. He felt and heard nothing, sensing Injiri’s attacks not as they came but as subtle depressions and cessations of molecules being disturbed seconds before they arrived. Everything beyond the moment melted away into a distant background. He continued moving, faster and faster until Injiri’s attacks no longer seemed to exist. Garth opened his eyes as he delivered a mortal blow to his opponent, an open-palmed punch similar to the one he’d stopped Firnkle’s heart with; for a brief second, the sight –an endless, almost featureless blaze of uniform white- burned into him and then…
…The reality he’d fallen out of touch with crashed remorselessly inwards, lashing him to the ground even as Injiri-san’s midsection disappeared in a haze of blood, guts and bone. Garth tried willing his heart and body calm down, to find even the smallest jot of the silence he’d discovered. By fits and starts, he managed to ease his into his body, straining mightily against unseen tidal forces. Head swimming deliriously, barely able to control the meat housing his mind, Garth dragged himself over to the bed. He flopped onto it, gasping raggedly.
Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, a voice from out of his past commented with detached clinical interest on the physiological damages of exiting ex-dee without first preparing the body …
A few seconds after Injiri’s killing blow, the hotel primary noticed a momenta
ry surge of power great enough to short-circuit the motive commands of the spEyes across four floors. Following routine directives, the primary adjusted camera coverage in the banquet halls until new spEyes were ordered; the surge itself was logged as an unidentifiable flux in the Hotel power grid and relegated to a list several thousand items long.
It would be a long time before anyone noticed the specifics, and even longer still before anyone thought to check it out. By the time that happened, it’d be too late.
xxx
Five minutes later, Garth struggled to an elbow, grunting with the effort, seriously exhausted and aching along every joint. But the physical pain was instantly bettered by the realization that he was buzzing with a layer of memories from his past life. Garth lay there for a moment, eyes unfocused, reliving a summer spent in what he assumed to be the Ukraine; much of what he saw was chaotic and disjointed, but they were memories. His. Sneaking into a dilapidated theater to watch a bootleg copy of an illegal American movie, running down back streets being chased by an angry UK pimp who’d just been conned out of his money, singing bad Karaoke songs poorly in an upscale bar. There was the sense that beneath all of those experiences there were deadly serious reasons for being in that part of the world at that specific moment, but he took the memories for what they were: a part of himself he’d never known.
Shelving the past for a moment, Garth worked up the energy to sit upright.
Bluntly, the room was a fucking mess. Garth didn’t envy the people who’d have to go through it in an effort to find out what’d happened; going ‘ex-dee’ –whatever that was- had allowed him to channel a fantastic amount of kinetic energy into the final punch, turning Injiri Katainn into a pulped mass of blood, bone and tissue. Closest to the bed were the remains of Injiri’s lower legs and his head. The rest of the Yellow Dog assassin was a gory picture of blood, pulverized organs and shattered bones covering the back of the room from floor to ceiling. Death had come so quickly that the EuroJapanese assassin looked comically outraged at the manner of his own death: Injiri’s eyes were wide open, no doubt shocked by the mysterious transformation his opponent had undergone.
Garth found himself wishing he’d had the foresight to bring a spEye into the room so he could see -and just maybe understand- what’d happened in those final moments. Knowing he was the sole cause of the gruesome mess, he could still hardly credit himself with the kill. It looked like Injiri had swallowed a live grenade.
Crawling gingerly off the bed, he made his way carefully around the edges of a crime scene nightmare. No matter their vaunted technical superiority, it was highly unlikely anyone working the case would come up with a definitive explanation about what’d happened. Nor would he have to worry about being identified; any genetic material of his in the room would be labeled ‘unidentifiable matter’ and shelved. The average Latelian mindset was too narrow to come up with the right answers. No one would believe that so much damage had come from a single punch delivered by an Offworlder. That was great, because he didn’t believe it either. Let them think it was a meteor strike or some other equally implausible but easy to digest lie. Moving slowly so as to not strain his already aching body, Garth worked his way into the bathroom and began his ‘escape’.
DAY FIVE:
Lady Ha’s Ministrations and Someone (Else) Tries to Kill Garth
The next morning found Garth awake, refreshed. For the first time since landing, the ever-present sense of danger was remote enough for him to relax. Even with the pain keeping him awake for several hours, Garth welcomed the reprieve. The absence wasn’t a pardon because none of his long-term goals had even gotten off the ground. Killing Injiri had been nothing more than an exercise in preemptive problem solving. The twin goals of rescuing Huey and sneaking into the museum to check out The Box’s credentials while avoiding arrest and interrogation by eager OverSecretary minions were going to be the tough nuggets to crack. If Injiri’s death brought some momentary respite to his personal threat-O-meter, it was welcome only in the sense it was one thing less to worry about.
Staring into the bathroom mirror, Garth once again wished he’d had the foresight to divert some spEyes to capture the fight. He’d never forget the sublime feeling of utter freedom coursing through his veins during those last few seconds or the shocking eruption of long-buried memories. Garth wondered fiercely what he’d looked like in that precious moment through Injiri’s eyes.
Of the two new experiences, the memories were most important; for a long time, serious doubts as to whom or what he was had plagued him every step of the way. Following Sorenson, it’d been even worse, because that action had kicked loose just enough quarter-felt memories to drive him up the wall whenever he stopped moving.
While made-to-order super soldiers and clones weren’t as commonplace as they could be –mostly owing to Trinity’s vengeful eye towards such things-, they happened often enough to give him serious doubts over his own existence. Providentially, battlefields and deep cover weren’t places where debilitating doubts promoted long life, so his concerns had eventually vanished the longer he’d spent on the job.
Huey’s increasing interest in the old SpecSer video feeds had unfortunately brought resurrected all those old misgivings; the Trinity AI was a manipulative bastard-machine and Garth knew for a fact it’d done some hinky shit through the millennia to get what It wanted. It’d be the work of a few moments to arrange for a ship full of ‘mysteriously amnesiac super-soldiers’ to be found, especially since It used science and technology It banned the rest of Humanity from even knowing about, much less use.
The arrival of crisp new memories was driving all that hoo-haa away quite nicely. And so what if they were lacking in the ‘that makes sense’ category? They were his and that was that.
Garth stuck out his tongue, grimacing at the taste in his mouth. For what it was worth, he hoped to hell and gone ‘going ex-dee’ wasn’t the cause of the god-awful funk roaming around his pearly whites. It was like an animal had crawled in overnight and died. He started brushing his teeth rigorously, plumbing his new memories as he did so.
Satisfied now that the dead animal taste was gone, Garth hopped into the shower and began a thorough head-to-toe wash that’d do an OCD victim proud; he’d only been capable of a cursory wash down before hitting the bed and there was nothing grosser than sleeping with dead guy still on you.
Garth went to work on his toes, but had to sit down as an intense memory barreled its way up through images of a gorgeous Russian stripper and into his conscious mind…
…a religious scientist babbling about harmonics…
…blazing hot forges filled with an eerily glowing alloy…
…repetitive tests to ensure all expectations were met…
…screen after endless screen of diagrams, fiendishly confusing equations, and even more monstrous trial-and-error reports literally downloaded into his cortex…
Ten minutes passed before the ‘memory’ seemed inclined to slow, stop, and eventually vanish, leaving in its wake an astonishing revelation: Latelyspace’s number one protective asset wasn’t worth the electronic paper it was printed on. All he’d need to turn the system on its head was the right equipment and a few thousand tons of duronium. And hey, he happened to have all the money ever made, so he could damn well buy what he wanted. When that happened, all bets were off. The unflinchingly smug Latelians would be introduced to quadronium, which made duronium look like damp tissue paper trying to suspend an elephant over a baby kitten.
Breathless, Garth smiled to himself, suddenly stricken by the irony of the situation. If good ol’ Kant Ingrams were to learn that he’d been right, nothing in the world would keep the spastic Historical Adjutant from trying to haul his number one failed suspect into the hoosegow. Too bad for Ingrams that said suspect was now a free citizen and could do whatever the hell he felt like so long as it wasn’t illegal, immoral, or against Trinity’s wishes.
Whistling a tune so ancient that it no longer even counted as m
usic, Garth finished in the shower, considering his options for the day as he did so. It never dawned on him to wonder why he was remembering things beyond his own understanding.
As promised, Lady Ha made contact with proper instructions for her meeting with Garth right after the shower. The directions -masterfully couched inside a two-minute advertisement for what he couldn’t help but think of as a ‘rub and tug’ parlor- gave him a very specific route to ‘Si Shurimi’s House of Relaxation and Plentiful Joy’. It was easy to suss Lady Ha’s reasoning for forcing him into such a circuitous route; assuming the hacker was as high-profile as Turuin implied, she was taking an inordinate risk by helping an Offworlder gain access to a fully functional –and non-exploding- Military proteus. The route would probably make him the most visible and seen man on Hospitalis.
Garth was going through the ad for the third time when Si Mijomi immediately accosted him. Disturbed by the fact that the awful cow gave the impression that she’d been waiting by the elevator doors for hours to leer gruesomely at him, Garth shoved past her asking, “What in the hell do you want?”
The lobby was a scene out of CSI: Hospitalis. Men and women wearing a rainbow of departmental colors stormed around the place, setting up workstations, coordinating efforts and making enough noise for a rock concert. Groups of four officers clustered around the entrances and exits while groups of two made their presence felt by strolling through the crowded foyer. As he struggled to get through to the lobby doors, Garth caught sight of the ‘ERT’ woman who’d questioned him over Firnkle’s corpse. Unlike last time, she was now in a uniform that screamed ‘Secret Agent’ so loudly Garth was surprised he hadn’t heard it upstairs.