by Lee Bond
Factually, this was a lie. As far as Vilmos knew, there were perhaps a dozen Suits spread throughout Trinity’s infinite realm. Owners of the Suit ordinarily guarded their highly prized garment. As ever, when the price was right, people were willing to negotiate. Better to let Doans’ sheep imagine a Universe arrayed against them, each bloodthirsty soldier clad in a Last Suit and armed with unstoppable weapons.
Silence amidst the prisoners and the terrorists alike.
Vilmos continued, his tone turning conspiratorial, conversational, as though they were all his friends and this wasn’t the end of years of planning, but the beginning. “Now, you and I know there’s nothing to stop Trinity once we let It in, sis and sas. The artificial intelligence and It’s drones will overrun us. If we don’t give in, they’ll kill us until we cave, and we have little in the way of practical defenses against Trinity’s Army. The gun my own people just fired on me is the second strongest weapon they can bring to bear. The one after this is hovering above our heads in space. There is no other weapon like it, but it’s still not good enough. We cannot protect ourselves as we are now, and yet Doans continues to court Trinity like a lovesick fool.” He put on the easy grin he used when converting placid Latelians to the cause, resting his arms casually on his hips. “Now, do you really want Trinity, knowing that they can do this to us?”
Someone shouted. “Why does It leave us alone, if It’s so powerful?”
Vilmos grinned. He was winning. “Because we’re not a threat. Get it? It leaves us alone because we pose no danger, none at all.”
“You said ‘as we are now’. Explain!” someone else shouted.
Vilmos opened his hands wide. “The weapon they just used against me is a step in the right direction. It’s good, very, very good. It can kill starships if used properly, but again, Trinity has incalculable resources. We need to back away from the precipice the Chairwoman has us on, we need to go back to the tyrannical practices that brought her to the Chair. Under her guidance and using these stolen weapons for advanced research, we can become a superpower worthy of making Trinity panic! In a hundred years’ time, we will be able to wage proper war against a proper enemy!”
With that rousing finish, four dozen captives rose to their feet, shouting and hollering, excited beyond words. Vilmos let them come down to the staging area, gesturing widely and grandly as they passed. Once alone, someone from the core group would vet them for sincerity. If any of them were actually worthwhile, they’d learn a few things about the real world.
xxx
Gurant dropped the billion-dollar weapon to the ground, tremendously disgusted. The control leads tore out of his prote with a sickening sound. He hadn’t been involved in such a washed-out, embarrassing debacle since the Morning Sky Incident and that had been … a long time ago.
Gritting his massive mouth irately, Gurant stalked off the scene, itching and burning to destroy something; the only reason the legendary Foursie hadn’t thrown the FARS-gun as far away from him as he could was thanks to the presence of his commanding officers. Everyone who saw the deadly look in his eyes knew how the man felt, though.
They stayed out of his way.
xxx
Fuming, OverCommander Vasily read over the manifest for what felt like the millionth time; in the fifty or so years they’d taken to actively infiltrating Trinityspace, spies, agents and thieves abroad in Trinity had never been able to lay their hands on a Last Suit. For Vilmos Gualf to have even one …
It wasn’t that they were unavailable. Vasily knew half-dozen black market operations spread throughout Trinityspace that were willing to sell hard-to-acquire Last Suits to the Latelian Regime at a moment’s notice.
It was the price. Each ‘garment’ was available for purchase at the ‘low’ price of two billion Trinity dollars apiece. Owing to the difficulties in acquiring a Last Suit, not one of the six or so ‘salesmen’ was willing to drop below that mind-bogglingly high price. The blueprints themselves were literally beyond price.
Vilmos Gualf wasn’t better than the Latelian government in any way. He didn’t –couldn’t- have better contacts, more money, or influence. For him to have a Suit…
Clenching his jaw repetitively, Vasily toggled his prote, sending his command to every single person above idiot his demands. “Find me everything you can about Vilmos Gualf. Who is family is, who his friends are, where he lives, what he eats, where he’s been. Everything. I know it’s a cliché, but if I don’t have this information yesterday, everyone hearing this won’t have a tomorrow.”
Ending the comm with a furious snarl, Vasily looked around his command station. He desperately wanted something to throw against a wall. The OverCommander chided himself a few seconds later, wondering how his team would react at the sight of their leader behaving … well, behaving like the Chairwoman.
Whomever Vilmos Gualf was friends with was dangerous. After the … the unveiling … of the Last Suit, it was apparent to him –and he hoped to Doans as well- that there was another level of the game being played out in The Museum. You simply didn’t reveal a massive advantage like the Last Suit for something as pathetic as a terrorist revolt.
Appetite for testing out new gadgets summarily destroyed by the utter failure of the FARS-gun. OverCommander Vasily issued a command for sorties against The Museum to begin. He watched the spectacle of Gualf surviving a light-speed bullet again, the spectral blue imagery of the feed mesmerizing.
His jaw stopped clenching. There was no telling what else that bastard had, not at all.
He authorized the final activation sequences for the Gunboys.
xxx
Chadsik leaned back into his chair, exalted. He barely even heard The Voice nattering on in the back of his mind; so rapt was he on the leader that its insanity was just a whispering buzz. The cyborg vaguely recalled laughing and hooting at the Vilmos' astonishing display of intestinal fortitude. Who in their right mind would wait to be shot by something that could kill a starship? Chad wasn’t totally certain he’d do the same, even though it was likely he’d survive and all without having to wear a suit of armor. This Vilmos had a very interesting form of madness, wasn’t that the truth?
Now the man had converted loads of the sheep in the audience to his ‘cause’, things were getting really interesting. He’d waited all fucking day for the shit to hit the fan, and finally, after what felt like a million fucking years, it was. If all the running around his followers was doing was any indication, the man in charge outside was plenty pissed. As he well should be.
Chad liked Vilmos. He felt that they shared a sort of kindred bond. The man was undoubtedly willing to do whatever it took to get his message across, which was what he, Chadsik al-Taryin, tried to do every time he took a Job. Of course, that would mean nothing if any of the gun-toting morons down there –or Vilmos himself- got anywhere near Garth Nickels. Bond or not, if that happened, the leader of this terrorist farce was going to have his intestines wrapped around his body, head to toe.
Still, though. Vilmos was a properly smart cookie, having laid down the filanet first. Even if it only gave him and his another ten minutes of preparation before the God Army rebooted their playbook, that was six hundred extra seconds the invading forces wouldn’t have.
Naturally, once the OverCommander and the Chairwoman realized that the terrorists were infinitely better prepared than anyone could’ve possibly imagined, it was going to be a British Bulldog rush for the fucking walls.
At that point, everyone was going to go completely apeshit. Chadsik looked at the person to either side of him, wondering which one would like to have their hands removed first. In the rush, no one would notice someone killing.
Chad sighed. Something had better happen soon. He was certain The Voice was getting obnoxiously bored and suspected it was telling people it was going start killing them soon. He knuckled down.
xxx
Naoko whispered into her ear bud. “Garth… things are getting very dangerous in here.”
xxx
Garth/Harry finished knocking out the last of the crews seeded throughout The Museum. Naturally, he’d heard the explosion; people on the last planet in Latelyspace had probably heard. In his haste to continue taking care of the terrorists dispatched to deal with him and the religious warriors stalking the halls of The Museum, though, he’d opted to discount the furor as being, well, ‘unimportant’.
Clearly, this wasn’t the case.
Rising from the last unconscious terrorist, wiped his hands free of imaginary dust. “That’s okay, Naoko, I’m on my way back now. I put down thirty of these maniacs as well as many of those other weirdoes as I could get my hands on, so when the Army comes in things’ll be easier.”
“There were … there were volunteers from the crowd, Garth.” Naoko whispered sadly.
“Oh.” Garth’s stomach dropped.
It was a wonder most Latelians had the ability to get up in the morning and choose which shoes to wear without contacting someone in the government for their opinion. They’d literally had obedience bred into them. That was the ultimate problem with regimes and dictatorships. You got so accustomed to people in positions of authority and strength guiding you, you more or less joined whoever was strongest … and closest.
“How many?” Garth braced himself for the worst. Situations like this usually went sour in really shitty ways.
“Fifty or more.” Naoko took a deep, tremulous breath. “I… I didn’t have time to count them all. They’ve been given guns and now I can’t tell the difference.”
“Da… rats.” So all the effort, all the running around trying to put a lid on the terrorists, all of that, undone by whatever or whoever was responsible for the explosion that’d shook the building. Fantastic. “All right, I’ll see you in a while.”
“How … how are you going to get in without being caught?” Naoko’s confusion was tangible. He’d used those first few chaotic moments to sneak out, but with the gun sentinels and the terrorists themselves firmly entrenched, she could see no way for him to make it safely back in.
Garth hefted the sap-sized mace. “I’m gonna use the force.”
The Traitor’s Tongue, Aerial Attacks Gone Wrong
Once a gregarious man –at least within the confines of the realm he’d controlled-, Ashok Guillfoyle found the ‘trials’ the lack of a tongue bestowed upon him surprisingly welcome. In his previous life as an executive of the highest order, it’d been expected –nay, insisted upon- that he be articulate, witty and always on his best behavior when dealing with clients.
He’d been born with a silver tongue, allowing him to follow through with lip service of the highest caliber. In his time as master of Guillfoyle Enterprises he had wined and dined and smooth-talked some of the most notoriously recalcitrant and reluctant venture capitalists and peers in the system into seeing his way of things.
Until Garth Nickels, that is. Until that damnable foreign devil had descended upon the house of Guillfoyle like the veritable Antichrist himself. Until that had happened, he’d been one to people listened to. Now, hardly anyone listened.
Ashok loved it.
Who would have thought that losing his tongue, that one tool which had brought him back from the lowest gutters of Port City to the topmost levels of high society in Central –where he and his family had fallen from so long ago- would bring such … such … such freedom?
No one asked him anything because he could not speak. Having once loved the sound of his own voice as a collector of antiquities loves Exodus relics, Ashok now reveled in the silence.
No one asked him to weigh in on such weighty matters as the condition of the toilet-pit’s squat box or the dubious provenance of the ‘meat’ being served for their one meal a day.
His hauteur did not get him into trouble because he could say nothing scathing in response to the hurtful jibes and barbs hurled his way. He could make none of his fellow inmates feel stupid or moronic or that their own crimes were useless so they had no reason to hate him beyond the usual, pointless reasons for hating someone in the cell next to you.
The guards didn’t molest or torture him any more than was strictly necessary because they could not feed off his screams. The semi-mute squawking and bleating was more disturbing than amusing and so the vampiric bastards moved on to the next cell with all due haste, pleased their task in punishing a Traitor was expedited so quickly.
He hurt, though, was in pain all the time, hunger for most of the day, experienced bouts of fear and paranoia and maniacal eruptions of rage, but that was to be expected. He was a Traitor, he had intentionally lied to every man, woman and child in the entire solar system, had bilked them of billions of dollars. There was no denying he’d done those things. Given a choice to relive the past, there was every possibility he’d do them again, just as before, only with more preparation for the visitation of an unholy demon with black hair and ice blue eyes.
As a Traitor, he was the most valueless commodity in The Peak. Even were he not outfitted with the Traitor’s First Tongue –most foul and hideous cybernetic contraption that it was- still, no one would speak with him. He was a pariah.
Against all odds, it seemed that his stock could rise again after all.
‘Guests’ of the infamous Peak were not without their methods –the longer you were in, the more … friendly … the guards-, and in no time at all, news of the terrorist uprising reached the ears of everyone from the Headmaster all the way down, down, down to the traitors and political prisoners and monstrous murderers locked in the vast mountain fastness.
Someone was in control of The Museum.
This ‘someone’ was a pro-Regimist fanatic of the highest order and was already responsible for the deaths of something like two hundred men, women and children. The leader for the unnamed terrorist group had -just fifteen minutes ago- survived an assassination attempt, the God Army using an experimental rifle never before seen, and was now apparently gearing up for a major defensive even as the Army prepared to take him down with absolutely insane levels of prejudice. Ashok tried to snort and failed. No one had given him leave to speak, and so the Tongue made him regret the action with a shiver of pain.
They were talking about the FARS-gun.
Ashok knew all about the FARS-gun. His teams had designed the interface chips connecting the RailSniper’s logistics to the wielder’s cybernetic prote. A good gun, easily one of the most effective ‘anti-everything’ weapons out there, capable of sniping a human being just as easily as a row of approaching tanks. What it was not effective against was The Last Suit. Ashok wanted to laugh but dared not even think of it for fear of cybernetic reprisal; just as he could make no noise, if he forgot himself and started making any appreciable attempts at speech –and laughter was identified as such- inexorable pain began crawling through his nerve endings, liquid hot fire burning away his sense of resolve.
Ashok knew much more, though, and no one would think to ask. He knew who the ‘someone’ was; Vilmos Gualf, AKA Vilmer Guillfoyle, long-ago banned black sheep of an already morally bankrupt family.
Heir to nothing but a bad name and a few measly dollars, Vilmer became Vilmos and dropped the ‘oyle’ following that long-ago disgrace, thereby transforming himself into a completely new person. The ‘remade’ black sheep had then vanished for a few years, reemerging as a vicious pro-Regime agitator with a shocking penchant at remaining behind the scenes.
Their brotherly communiqués –thankfully brief and exceptionally rare- had been filled with idle claims on Vilmos’ part that he was waiting for his ‘big moment’ to show the system the wisdom, his wisdom, in keeping the Latelian system a proud, controlling tyranny.
He’d found work with Chairman Scottsdale and unsurprisingly, when that had gone south, flipped to work with the rabidly zealous OverSecretary Doans in her attempts to secure the Chair, only to vanish once again, this time obviously distraught at being played so masterfully by a woman.
It looked as though the elder Guillfoyle -cl
ose to his sixties at last count- had finally found his big moment, and was using his youngest brother’s secrets to the benefit of that enormous political statement.
Ashok didn’t care. Shortly after it became apparent that his efforts to produce quadronium weren’t going to do much more than get him killed by a rampaging mob of destitute investors, he’d made the effort of getting in touch with Vilmos. The Elder Guillfoyle had agreed to commit a small portion of his then-small network of hidden subversives to an actual uprising against the Chairwoman in exchange for access to Guillfoyle technologies should things go terribly wrong. At the time, it’d seemed like an even exchange.
But disaster hadn’t come in the form of vengeful shareholders, or a wrathful Chairwoman or even a willfully destructive OverCommander. It’d come in the form of Garth Nickels, a man who’d so thoroughly destroyed his life –in a single evening, no less- that the Guillfoyle name was now stricken. It was only a matter of time before he and his were Sigma’d. Squatting in his miserable, dank cell, Ashok admitted that had probably already happened. It was only fair.
Terrified at the time of his arrangement with Vilmos, Ashok hadn’t seen anything wrong in familiarizing his older brother with hard-wired access codes to military chips or with feeding him the occasional location of anything interesting making its way into Latelyspace from Trinity.
Now that information, that access to Trinity’s military-grade equipment, was being used to extraordinary effect.
The situation amused the hell out of Ashok. Truly, Vilmos was fulfilling a revenge scenario for his baby brother. Naturally, the elder Guillfoyle would deny any such thing and again, Ashok would be unsurprised. He’d looked deep into Vilmos’ eyes once and seen a rampaging swarm of cunning madness. He truly believed that the system needed a marauding dictator in order to survive.