by Lee Bond
“What makes him so successful?” Alyssa couldn’t see a man afflicted with what Vasily had just described as being anything but a burnout.
“In direct violation of Trinity’s laws concerning the machine/mind interface, the FrancoBrit is more than eighty percent cyborg, and there are … there are rumors concerning those implants and enhancements.” Vasily clenched his jaw thoughtfully.
The claims and reports he’d come across, pointing to Offworld abduction, experimentation and training… all of it had to be part of Trinity’s eternal dissemination.
The OverCommander saw no other explanation as to why the AI would allow –if it was true- anyone or anything like Chadsik al-Taryin to persist. If but a quarter of the rumors were to be believed, the FrancoBrit assassin violated hundreds of Trinity’s Laws.
“Between the drug intake, the augments and his mental state, there’s no telling just what his actual frame of mind is at any given moment. The only thing anyone can agree on is that when he is working, he is unstoppable.” Vasily snorted derisively when he read the next part for the third time. It never failed to amuse him. “His star is burning out because of ‘artistic integrity’.”
Alyssa frowned. “I beg pardon?”
Vasily shrugged. “The man considers himself an artist. He spends most of his time watching his target, waiting for inspiration to strike. When the Muses speak, he has to obey, and dispatches his duty accordingly. Those are his words, not mine.”
“I should hope so.” Alyssa pursed her lips. “Is he a match for our God soldiers?”
The question forced Vasily into a difficult position.
In the eyes of the entire system, their heavily cyborged, genetically enhanced God soldiers were unstoppable. They’d gone to great lengths throughout history to ensure that Latelians the system over believed this; media relations had relatively unfettered reign when it came to spinning God soldiers and their abilities. It served to bolster patriotic behavior.
Fact was far different from fiction.
If the general population of Lately were to learn that everything from duronium to their choice in weaponry was so far surpassed by the meanest of Trinity’s possessions, there’d be panic in the streets. Their God soldiers were unbelievably powerful and equal to any soldier in Trinity’s employ but Chadsik … Chadsik was another story entirely. If the reports were to be believed. “There are …” Vasily paused, trying to find a way to broach the subject easily and failing, “according to rumor, Chadsik al-Taryin’s cybernetic enhancements are both illegal and … non-terrestrial.”
Alyssa sat there for a moment, digesting Vasily’s announcement. Stopping Chadsik in his tracks meant allowing Garth the opportunity to live until the Final Game. Undoubtedly, their newest citizen would manage to cement himself into the minds and hearts of the people around him merely by walking down the street; the more popular he got, the more uncertain it became he’d meet his death at the hands of a God soldier. Alyssa wasn’t above bribing whichever God soldier Nickels encountered during his Final Game, but the soldiers themselves were a tricky breed. They got notoriously honor and hide-bound once they got into the ring.
On the other hand, letting an insane cyborg –one theoretically packing Offworld hardware and multiple psychoses around- into her city, while accomplishing the task of getting rid of Garth Nickels, posed tremendous worries. “How insane is this man?” What a question to ask! What a situation to be in!
“By all accounts? Extremely. However,” Vasily said slowly, “collateral damage appears to only be an option when the target, or ‘Job’, is in a position to be defended by other people. The incidences where he’s bothered with wholesale destruction and murder are limited solely to places where, for example, the Job is in an underground bunker. And Nickels has already proven himself to be quite a loner. My best avatars suggest that the damage will be quite minimal. We could easily play this out.”
“To be clear: either I allow Nickels to live until the Game, risking everything on the very unlikely possibility that he fails to sway the audiences into voting for his continued survival or I allow a mentally unstable alien-augmented cyborg free reign to do whatever he wants in the pursuit of his goal.” Alyssa was less than ecstatic. The overwhelmingly important thing was to keep Garth Nickels away from The Box. She was no idiot. The evidence provided by Garth and verified through Trinity’s Historical Adjutants was painfully true; her least favorite citizen was tied to their Box, however impossible it was to believe.
If opening it was actually possible, he was the one.
And that wasn’t going to happen. Not now, not ever. Trinity’s warnings notwithstanding, if it came down to it, she’d do whatever it took to ensure that her agenda stayed safe, for if there was one man in all of space who endangered those plans, it was Garth Nickels.
Chairwoman Doans gazed out the windows for a time, watching the world that was hers to command. They were already on the precipice. Either they flew or they fell. “We need to be absolutely untouchable if this comes to light, sa.”
Vasily found himself grinning. Wryly, he said, “As it turns out, Si Chairwoman, ex-OverSec Terrance is assisting us.”
“Devious twice in a single sitting, Vasily.” Alyssa clucked her tongue. “Just so long as you remember that a military leader can never be Chairperson, it’s an improvement I encourage.” She rose to sit in Vasily’s lap, clasping her hands around his neck. “Tell me … how is Terrance helping this situation?”
“One of Terrance’s surveillance teams initially assigned to Offworlder surveillance at the Hotel Hospitalis went off the grid shortly after Nickels made planetfall. I believe you are aware of this?” Vasily cleared his throat when she nodded archly. “Having a rogue black ops team roaming around Hospitalis is never a good thing, so I assigned my personal taskforce to locating them. I interrogated Terrance –politely, si, politely- and it’s developed that this team was directly ordered to ignore Nickels and everything he did. It’s entirely likely they witnessed everything we suspect Nickels of being involved in, if not more. It’s my guess being commanded to watch and wait was the catalyst for their disappearance. They are, after all, loyal Latelians, moreso since they work for the government.”
“How does this help me?” Alyssa demanded, threatening to move from her perch. She laughed even as he clutched her tightly to him. Terrance’s decision to use Nickels rather than kill him was almost certainly responsible for the dreadful situation they were in; there was nothing funny in the fact that Garth Nickels was a dark attractor, pulling people and events into his destructive orbit, only to spit the broken pieces back.
“Out of the four person team, one man was located in a small hospital under a false name. It’s safe to say that his wounds go beyond fatal. I’m surprised he’s still alive.”
Offhandedly, Vasily added, “He’s undergoing treatment in a military hospital now. Yesterday morning, rescue teams recovered a badly burned body from one of the chasms at the port. Standard cataloging procedure for any bodies discovered at the Port is to utilize deep tissue DNA analysis. This body has been identified as yet another member of this missing group. The remaining two …” Vasily smiled pleasantly enough. “the remaining two showed up at Densen late last night. They’ve wormed their way into the support staff there and are currently trying to acquire Military Intelligence identification papers to get them onto Penzengraaf. It’s my professional opinion that sometime after Terrance’s orders and just before they went dark, this team was contacted by Jordan Bishop. I firmly believe they are assisting Chadsik al-Taryin. My teams are working to shuffle through the Q-Comm databanks now for verification, but the point is moot.”
“Oh!” Alyssa kissed her lover soundly on the cheek. “That is the best news I’ve heard all week, my love. By all means, do what it takes to get those two idiots onto Penzengraaf without them realizing they’re being herded. Don’t kill them until they’ve taken payment from Chadsik; your guess is right. When they’re dead …”
“T
ake their money and let Chad run free.” Vasily liked Alyssa’s style, but was enormously glad she was Chairwoman and not in the military; it was all too likely she’d have his job. “I will see to it at once, Chairwoman. There is … there is one small problem, though.”
Alyssa’s pleasure at things falling so neatly into place wasn’t affected at all by Vasily’s slight discomfort. Smiling, she pecked him on the cheek, whispering, “Do tell, OverCommander.”
“Owing to Chadsik’s unique nature, it is highly unlikely I will be able to put any of my MilInt people to the task of following him. If he feels threatened in any way, he will react. With absurdly disproportionate levels of violence.”
Alyssa fluttered a hand. “Nothing to worry about, OverCommander. The Office of the Chair will graciously position one of it’s operatives to keep an eye on Chadsik al-Taryin.”
Vasily forced a smile. Barnes. She was talking about Hamilton Barnes. The hunter who stalked hunters. The man was good, possibly the best agent for the Chair on all the worlds in Latelyspace. Certainly, he was wired in ways that were outlawed for anyone other than those working specifically for the Chair, but Chadsik al-Taryin wasn’t a disgruntled Latelian general or an outlawed weapons specialist.
He was a stone-cold killer with augments that defied description. When, not if, Alyssa lost her pet attack dog, she was going to lose her mind.
Vasily shifted slightly, and Alyssa regretfully climbed off his lap. He bowed magisterially. “By your leave, Chairwoman, I will ensure that all is in hand.”
“You may go, OverCommander. All hail Lately.”
“All hail Lately.” OverCommander Vasily swept out of the room as he’d entered.
Chairwoman Alyssa Doans rooted through her drawer until she found the cigarette.
UltraMegaDynamaTron Gets a Home
A God soldier’s lot in life was an uncomplicated one; they fought, they slept, they took orders. It was not their job to question. In the case of many of the God soldiers, they weren’t intelligent enough to formulate an emotion as complex as doubt, let alone the ability to wonder.
Even still, standing in front a building in eight hour shifts was enough to penetrate the thickest of minds, forcing the slowest-witted to realize somewhere between hour six and seven that what they were being asked to do bordered on criminal negligence. When God soldiers got uncomfortable, it was like watching a sleepy herd of mastodons working up the energy to get really moving; they stamped their feet, they shifted back and forth, muttering something in the complicated battle language only they truly understood.
When that happened, the lieutenant would materialize from out of nowhere with just the right words to say. All the Twoesies, Threesies and Foursies were deployed at the Port, forcing OverCommander Vasily to deploy a lieutenant from another military branch to oversee the disposition of the soldiers. The chosen lieutenant, one Gregroy Smith, was not a God soldier. He was an Information Retrieval Specialist. He could barely talk to the Onesies. Every time he opened his mouth to say something, he had to remember to slice his words down to one syllable. Even then, he half-suspected if he could figure out a way to use words with no syllables, well, so much the better.
Gregroy Smith regarded the soldiers under his temporary command and wondered -not for the first or last time- where he’d gone wrong. Even for him, the detail -guarding the Guillfoyle Building- was about as exciting as watching grass grow or paint dry. To date, the most thrilling thing he’d been asked to do was ensure that the soldiers got their food on time and remembered to breathe from time to time. The previous lieutenant had died in the defense of the building only four days ago, but that was then. Now, all the idiots who seemed inclined to raid the building were laying low.
Which was why -in direct contravention of orders- Lieutenant Gregroy Smith spent most of his time inside the command post using the awesome connectivity at his fingertips to watch the Game and pornography.
He was in the middle of a particularly good bout when an alarm erupted through the post with enough decibels behind it to shatter a lesser man’s eardrums. Slapping at the buttons nearest him, Gregroy dumped Game footage off the monitors and watched in curious awe as an aircar zoomed in on final approach. He’d never seen someone pilot a car with such reckless abandon. Greg flicked his eyes over to the screens set to the Goddies, and hastily shouted into the microphones that they should not open fire until the errant pilot did something threatening. His orders came just in time; the soldiers had already unlimbered their weapons. A few were looking into the barrels of their massive laser rifles, which always sent a shrieking stab of fear through his brain.
Gregroy reminded the soldiers that landing an aircar was not an act of war and then headed out of the command post, furious that his afternoon television time was being interrupted.
xxx
“Don’t hyperventilate.” Garth said to his reflection in the rearview mirror. “Just breathe. They won’t kill you. There’s no reason. You haven’t done anything wrong. Well, okay, you have, but they don’t know that. All is well with the world.”
Operating independently of his mind, Garth’s eyes settled once more on the battle line of God soldiers that were camping out on his front lawn. They stood there giving off a ‘just itching to kill and eat someone’ vibe. Garth was of the opinion that, although he’d only be an appetizer’s worth of distraction, the monstrous fuckers would take what they got and talk about it for days.
A soldier, a lieutenant by his posture and general demeanor that he was not-God’s gift to Thinking Man, rolled up and rapped impolitely on his window. Garth lowered said sheet of glass and looked into the man’s eyes. “Hey. What’s up?”
“I could ask you the same thing, sa.” Gregroy looked the man over. There was something familiar about the Offworlder, but he couldn’t place it … no matter. “You’re in violation of about eighteen different regular laws and nineteen hundred military ones.”
“Oh?” Garth asked innocently. As long as the looey was in play, the chances that the God soldiers would spook stayed slim. They shuffled in place like dinosaurs. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was a pack of children hiding around the corner waiting to swarm like those feeder birds or whatever the hell they were, picking up crumbs and lice and, like, abnormally large earwigs. The neural sheathing deep inside him whispered that he should run, that he wasn’t ready. He gritted his teeth and held his breath.
Gregroy pointed to the aircar’s dashboard, which was flickering with a dozen ignored messages. “When your car does that, it means you’re receiving air traffic warnings.” Greg downloaded the messages and read them. “Failure to provide proof of pilot’s license, failure to adhere to local airspace laws, failure to broadcast … Are you even legally allowed to drive an aircar? How is it that you don’t have police harassing you?”
“Good question. I don’t know. Now here’s one for you: why are there God soldiers hanging around my building?” Garth asked politely, neatly incising the lieutenant’s head of steam.
Gregroy paused, mind working furiously … “Oh. Oh.” Someone had bought the building … the lieutenant started rifling through his data files. “Oh.” He frowned.
“More like uh-oh.” Garth opened the door, shoving the lieutenant out of the way with it. He hopped out to survey the damage done to the Guillfoyle building during the raid with an unhappy eye.
Instead of using a fine-toothed comb to go over the building in search of further proof of Guillfoyle’s duplicity, the God Army had opted for the flame-thrower approach; burn everything in sight and if anything survives, kill it with bombs from outer space. There were four concentric rings of disturbed dirt from OIP’s tearing up the place. Damage was so bad from one of the insertion points that Garth could make out the underground tunnels Guillfoyle had used to connect his illegal relay stations to the main building. If repair crews paid any attention to what they were fixing, Turuin’s epic ploy would be discovered.
From where Garth stood, lieutenant a relic of t
he past, it looked to him as though the soldiers had destroyed everything out of habit.
“Fuck me … did you guys leave anything intact, or is the whole fucking thing demolished?” Garth was pissed. If he’d spent hundreds of billions of his not-very-hard earned money on a building that was facing demolition, there were going to be some very harsh words exchanged.
Gregroy opened his mouth to snap at the Offworlder, then clamped his mouth shut as an image flared to life. He could hear his girlfriend’s shrill voice demanding to know how he’d managed to fuck up the mind-bogglingly dull and simple task of guarding a building until the owner showed up. When he told her he’d accosted the owner instead of letting him on the premises … “Uh, Sa Nickels … I, uh, wasn’t made aware that you were coming by today.”
“Wasn’t gonna, but I got free time.” Garth jerked his thumb at the God soldiers. “They gonna stampede?”
Gregroy flashed the soldiers their new standing orders. “No, sa.”
“Why’re you still here then, if I own the place?” Garth demanded, making his way towards the front doors.
In order to get there, he was forced to simultaneously describe a massive arc around the God soldiers and skirt a pod-hole. An irrational surge of anger began to burn through him, hot embers that urged his own brand of destruction. Scenarios began playing in his mind. There were a lot of soldiers, they couldn’t all get him, he could probably kill two or three before they assembled properly …
Shaking, breathless, cold sweat began to bead on Garth’s forehead and down his back. He couldn’t possibly expect to beat a God soldier, not yet. He closed his eyes and waited for the lieutenant to catch up. By the time the nervous soldier started talking, Garth was mostly calm once more.
“Orders … orders are to maintain security on the premises until a suitable replacement has been found. Sa.” Worried that they’d overreact to the angry Offworlder’s body language, Gregroy gestured frantically to the soldiers nearest the front door to move. His orders were crystal clear on Garth Nickels’ survival; he was not to be … feel … threatened in any way.