Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2)

by Lee Bond

  Looking out of the corner of her eyes, Naoko watched as Garth/Harry slid Allyn Devince’s working force mace into the giant foam finger. She opened her mouth to protest the theft of a national treasure, but a very foul word from Garth stopped her cold. Worried, she asked, “What is the matter?”

  Electric fire worse than anything he’d felt in quite some time started burning through his arm, a sheer, agonizing pain rippling out from the wound and spreading to every inch of him. Fighting the urge to scream and thrash at the rampaging hurt, Garth sat in his chair, teeth clenched, eyes wide; around him, all around him, the world swooned nauseatingly. Appallingly, the lighting dipped and bowed in synch with each pain-addled breath rattling out of his tortured body.

  He was going ex-dee! Right there, right now, in front of Naoko Kamagana and the entire world. Garth grappled with the pain, struggled against the inexorable tide of energy that was a part of whatever ‘ex-dee’ was, knowing that if he did suddenly vanish in a swirl of power, the resultant explosion would probably destroy everyone in the room. He needed to fight it, to push against the tide. He knew he’d done this as a child, so he should be able to do it now. He needed to find that resilience, even though Bravo had blocked, buried and stolen his memories.

  What was happening? How was it happening? Breathing as deeply and as calmly as he could, the ex-SpecSer continued fighting the impulses grinding through him. Pathetically unable to do anything but sit there, he was powerless to do anything but watch the lights throb in time with his breathing. To a one, the terrorists were turning their heads comically, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Beside him, Naoko watched in helpless fear.

  The sensation burning through him was utterly unlike the peaceful –if torrential- transition into ex-dee; by comparison, this was a wild, rampaging beast and he was strapped –poorly- to its back. Power raged through him, taking his breath away, threatening with one final push of grating, ardent anguish to consume him whole and then … it vanished.

  The lights snapped back into full effect and the assembled agitators went back to what they were doing.

  Breathless and suddenly concerned the bullet wound from the Arbalest was much worse than he’d assumed, Garth went to examine his shoulder, chuckling a bit in the face of Naoko’s worry that he’d forgotten he was still dressed as Harry.

  Happily, there was no longer a need to be Harry Bosch now that the imaginary ex-God soldier had crushed a bunch of spastic terrorists into the dust. With enough media coverage, Harry Bosch would supplant Garth Nickels as the system’s number one Hero from pretty much the moment people walked out of The Museum.

  Since whatever mysterious calamity’d threatened to pull him into ex-dee had passed with nothing but an all-over aching reminder of the pain he’d endured, Garth went to deactivate the Bosch program.

  His hand encountered an impossible resistance.

  Naoko watched in confusion as ‘Harry Bosch’ started slapping frantically at his prote. She chewed nervously on her lower lip. She wasn’t an expert in holographic displays by any sense of the word, but even she knew that there was no way Odin –irrespective of how powerful it truly was- was built to produce interactive holograms, not and maintain the overall illusion. She’d seen the flickering around edges of the Harry Bosch display as it’d encountered various bits of geography and knew that what she should be seeing was a fake hand passing through a fake arm.

  That is not what she saw. Not at all. All signs of that flickering were gone. Naoko couldn’t find a single answer as to how this could happen. Her mind was a total blank.

  Garth slapped at his arm again. The same resistance. “This can’t be fucking real.” He muttered under his breath, so distraught that he didn’t even look at Naoko. He tried gingerly pushing a finger through the arm. Nothing.

  Naoko reached out, delicate fingers brushing against the hard, unyielding–but-curiously-inhuman surface of something that felt almost like what she imagined Harry Bosch’s hand would feel like. Goosebumps crawled up her arms and her eyes went wide.

  Garth swallowed. He vaguely -almost like reminiscence- felt a butterfly’s worth of pressure on the hand his girlfriend held. Naoko’s eyes were wide as pie plates, her hands trembling. There was a bit of a loopy look in the corners of her beautiful green eyes, so he smiled as encouragingly as he could. This was fine, this was totally … normal.

  All right. He took a deep breath and turned back to his prote, pushing impossibly hard fingers against the holographic representation of a prote, a simulacrum that shouldn’t work at all. Odin instantly filled his update requests, which was a whole other barrel of weird that his already beleaguered brain refused to even notice.

  A statistical avatar came online to announce that his personal threat level was sufficiently high enough that it was inadvisable to deactivate the chameleon program, regardless of the wearer’s discretion. Incredulous, Garth read on; his prote was 'monitoring the situation in real-time and the moment everything was deemed safe, automatic shutdown procedures would commence'.

  Still refusing to admit that his holographic prote was somehow operating the real, hidden prote and his mind boggling at the complexity of the avatars presently running his systems, Garth requested clarification on Harry Bosch’s sudden solidity. Null statements flickered across the screen. Trying to outguess the moment, Garth fired off a half-dozen different iterations of the question, hoping it was just a matter of finding the right phrasing for the avatars to work with.

  Nothing. Each request came up with identical null statements. As far as the prote was concerned, Harry Bosch was … Harry Bosch.

  Of course, Garth suspected he knew the answer; it was just … well, freaky. With the Bosch skin firmly in place and solid as anything, there wasn’t going to be any real way to tell, but Garth was fairly positive he’d gone and bled all over Odin. With his prote being the most advanced machine on the planet -if not in the entire system- and laden down with heavily manipulated nanotech, it was possible that, instead of blowing up after exposure to neural-sheathing laced blood, it’d somehow assimilated the inexplicable power surge, unbelievably bootstrapping itself into an entirely different level of functionality.

  Impossible? No. Certainly implausible, but it was the only theory on deck. Some part of the neural sheathing must’ve identified the mountainous surge of energy pouring into him as lethal. Going into defensive mode to bleed extraneous –and undoubtedly deadly- back power into ex-dee, those sheaths had formed a never-ending circuit of power; as quickly as whatever machines drove the sheaths could burn the ex-dee energy back into wherever it came from, the severity of the wound combined with the short-circuiting Odin pulled more in. Stabilized by the sheaths, it seemed Odin was –no doubt thanks to the inventive fugue from which it’d sprung- capable of utilizing the raw torrent of power funneling into it from ex-dee to do things not ordinarily possible.

  Solid holograms. And all the tech had ever needed was him as the fucking power source.

  Garth looked into Naoko’s eyes. “Uh,” he said gently, “uhm. This … well … Well. You’re not going to believe this, Naoko, but I’m stuck this way.”

  Naoko gripped Garth’s ‘hand’, holding it against her face. “But … I can feel this … this hand. How…” she trailed off, bewildered.

  Again, the ghostly sensation of pressure filled his senses. If he concentrated, he could feel the stadium chair against his back and legs and even fainter still, air breezing against exposed ‘skin’.

  There was only one thing to do, confronted as he was with a mystery as profound as anything he’d come across in his long and storied career in Special Services. He grinned, leaned back in his chair, and squeezed Naoko’s hand tightly. “Weird, right? Once this whole thing’s over, the program will shut itself down. My personal threat assessment level is apparently ‘high’.”

  Reiterating Garth’s earlier statement, Naoko looked seriously into Harry Bosch’s dull brown eyes. His ‘threat status’ would be high go
ing to the grocery store for eggs. “When we get out of here, my love, we have a lot to talk about.”

  Watching the terrorists employ push brooms to glass and body parts, Garth nodded. “Oh yeah, do we ever.”

  xxx

  Vasily took the loss of the twelve Goddies with a brief shrug. There were millions more at his disposal.

  At least now they knew that one of the many Trinity weapons Vilmos had stolen three years ago did, in fact, include the monofilament net. Avatars tasked with comparing equipment displayed by the terrorists with the inventory from the destroyed moon base were currently highlighting a veritable trove of possible items Vilmos could have at his disposal. It wasn’t pretty. The programs were, however, finally beginning to illuminate things Vilmos could not possibly have, which was a relief.

  Three of his tactiSheets blazed with demands from Foursies and their non-augmented commanders, all of them howling for permission to storm the encampment.

  The Foursies, having arrived en masse without orders, were the most ardent in their demands. Vasily ignored them; most had never been trained in Trinity military weapons (defensive or offensive) and were showing their ignorance by persisting in the futile belief that the worst of the damage was over.

  Making matters worse was their failure to understand the implications behind Vilmos Gualf’s relationship to Ashok Guillfoyle. Vasily hoped they were ‘just’ ignoring the data: if they’d actually dismissed the flash, he’d almost certainly order their executions once he’d had time to examine their protes and Sheets for signs of extremely absurd indifference.

  Dismissing for the moment Guillfoyle’s numerous contacts in Trinityspace –the most likely explanation behind Vilmos’ battle suit was his younger brother’s dealings with Trinity Conglomerates-, there was his duplicity with the Spaceport’s operating systems.

  Configuring a netLINK system to make someone invisible implied a level of technical puissance that frankly made Vasily’s testicles shrink and they’d barely had the time to investigate whether there were other compromised systems or not. Ashok Guillfoyle had summarily proven that he was quite capable of enduring the agonizing punishment of the Traitor’s Tongue rather than answer truthfully about the depth of his criminal activities.

  If –and sadly, Vilmos was willing to bet his currently shrunken testicles that it was true- their military systems were similarly compromised, any actual conflict was going to be a bloody, grueling mess.

  Vasily scanned the list of demands from his various regiment leaders and settled on a series of sonic bombardments. One of the craftier generals had obviously seen through the carefully phrased warnings about possible weaknesses in their weapon and vehicle systems. The general had mounted his mortar cannons on rooftops six miles away.

  It was a violation of in-city deployment rules, but Alyssa was just going to have to suffer the resultant wailing from the general population. If it got to be too much, he knew his love would simply issue a Sigma and dispatch Watergate Men to quell further moaning. Actually, he hoped she was close to that point already.

  The OverCommander ran the proposed attack plan through his own avatars and signed off with a few minor changes. Originally asking for a meager dispersal pattern -five three-ton sonic warheads- the new plan called for ten of the beasts to ring The Museum, with a final one released right through the dome. There’d be thousands of people needing cybernetic eardrums, which the Latelian government would gladly supply for a lifetime of indentured servitude.

  It was a double-pronged, win-win plan. It was safe to say that if the attack failed, Vilmos was using his brother’s Trojan netLINK to twin their military equipment. That was a win if for no other reason than confirmation of the massive gap in their security measures. Obviously if the bombs went off without hindrance, everybody inside would be knocked silly and they could stroll on in.

  Win-win at its finest.

  A tactiSheet announced that the heavy aerial transport carriers lugging two of the Gunboys and their Proctors from The Peak’s underground military camp were no less than twenty minutes away. The pilot announced that they were cresting the front of the rainstorm destined to cover most of Easson and at least part of Central by nightfall.

  Vasily arranged the time frame in his mind. It’d take at least that much time for the general to oversee deployment of the additional mortar and who knew how long to bring the Gunboys and their Proctors online. The OverCommander genuinely hoped the sonic bombardment worked.

  He hated rain engagements almost as much as the Onesies and the bloody Gunboys were a frightful mess to deal with in the rain.

  xxx

  Still hidden behind quantum-level shielding, Griffin dismissed the errant notion of checking out the Gunboys. There was little point and it’d been some time since he’d been surprised by anything, so it was with great pleasure he decided to cool his heels.

  Whatever the Gunboys were, they had both Doans and Vasily hot and bothered. The two leaders obviously imagined them to be the most dangerous thing at their disposal, which –given the deep levels of fucked up everywhere in the system- was saying something.

  Griffin, who had access to most of Trinity’s databases, couldn’t understand Trinity’s kindly disposition towards the Latelians, not when you considered that –in addition to the already comprehensive list of machines you could build and sciences you could investigate- Latelyspace was currently home to the top three most illegal items in all of History. It frankly messed with his mind.

  One, obviously, were the God soldiers themselves; systemic oddities allowing nanotech to work inside Latelyspace put aside, there were no guarantees that Goddies would remain in control of their various functions on a prolonged venture inside Trinityspace. Past military conquests had consisted entirely of smash and run planetary raids, with a Goddie’s longest recorded exposure to a non-Latelian biosphere four days. Leave a God soldier alone and unhampered in any system for longer than that and they could have themselves a Gorensworld all over again. As ever, Trinity denied access to explanations as to why It allowed Latelian tech to persist, which was maddening to Griffin.

  The second illegal item in space was now the FARS-gun; it used to be Chairwoman Doan’s Uber-prote, but the potential lethality of a ground-based sniper cannon that was as mobile and relatively ‘discreet’ as the Fully Automated RailSniper made shooting warships in space a dangerous reality. With its belt-fed rounds and duronium slugs, Griffin calculated that with enough FARS-guns on the ground and ready to roll, Hospitalis could start plinking ships out of the sky well before an invading army got into range.

  Technically the third ‘item’ was Chadsik al-Taryin, but there was little point in fussing over the freaky FrancoBritish assassin; Trinity’s disinterest in explaining Itself compounded a hundred thousand times over when it came to the oddity that was Chadsik. There was absolutely no reason to let something or ‘someone’ as dangerous as Chadsik al-Taryin walk around unharmed and it was only a matter of time before the guy’s odds-end assortment of psychoses started working together towards the same goal.

  Griffin would bet the farm that when that happened, everyone was going to have a bad day.

  Griffin’s Enforcer suit picked up chatter from dozens of units, each making wildly bizarre guesses about what the Gunboys were. Some thought they were upgraded VapoRaptors while others opined that they were some kind of robotic Walker similar to the ones they used to use thousands of years ago.

  Under his helmet, Griffin pursed his lips. Curiosity was getting the better of him, but he held himself at bay by simply reminding himself that whatever these ‘Gunboys and their Proctors’ were, they were likely to catapult themselves right into the A-Plus Gold Star category of illegal and condemned sciences. Maybe Trinity would lose It’s shit and let him take care of the Latelians the way they needed to be taken care of: with fire and lightning.

  He could wait.

  Nevertheless, there were rules to heed. Griffin sent off a brief tachyonote to the AI about the latest d
evelopments in Latelian ground-based weaponry, finishing up with a tantalizing hint about ‘Gunboys and their Proctors’. It persisted in the obvious fallacy that It used informants in Latelyspace, and would find some reason to punish him if he didn’t follow ‘protocol’.

  Hell, the damn machine mind would probably file the information under ‘interesting’ and continue on letting the Latelians do whatever the hell they wanted and all because they’d played unwitting host to Bravo for the last five thousand years.

  What Griffin wanted, what he really wanted to do so damn bad he could taste it, was fly over to Bravo and see what the excitement was all about. He didn’t know a damn thing about Bravo other than that it existed, none of them did. When they’d all dropped into suspended animation thirty thousand years ago, the only vessel any of them had known about was Alpha. Bravo seemed to be a thing only Trinity and Garth N’Chalez knew anything about and the former wasn’t telling anyone what It knew and the latter had been so completely mindfucked by Lisa Laughlin that he was here on Hospitalis because of a ‘dream’.

  Griffin snorted at that.

  They were all dancing to Lisa’s tune, the goddamn Pied Piper of the future and there was no way to stop or even know what was real in their own heads. Lisa was one of the reasons he’d joined up with Trinity. Protection from her –upon discovering her freakish Kith’kineen ascension- had become paramount within seconds of learning what she’d become.

  Yet he didn’t begin looking for Bravo. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The Enforcer suit was being actively prevented from locating the ancient ship and from previous bouts of cat-kill-you-curiosity, Griffin knew sorely well what happened when he pushed the boundaries of Trinity’s patience. In this, the machine mind’s ‘endgame’, it would likely mean his death.

  So Griffin waited to see what the Gunboys were and tried to pretend there wasn’t a ship on the planet that could conceivably give him a way to break free of his new, worse prison.