by Lee Bond
Which would, of course, violate Trinity’s other command, that of keeping Garth N’Chalez alive. It was an order that Griffin planned to disobey in every way, shape and form, but there were ways and there were ways of being disobedient. Turning Hospitalis into charred glass to kill Garth would not only be excessive and far too impersonal, it’d piss Trinity off.
Now, killing the man as he lay unconscious inside The Museum and making it look like he’d been crushed by falling concrete… not even Trinity could expect an Enforcer to be in more than one place at a time, right? Such a tragedy, that falling rock…
Griffin shuddered a second time before launching towards Pauly. This time, he was going through a fucking ear. The journey was shorter and he’d be able to go through the esophagus instead of crawling through fifty feet of meat. Some things were doable only once.
Pauly died quickly. Griffin used the resulting confusion of the hundred foot tall cybernetic corpse collapsing to enter The Museum unnoticed.
A Lost Friend’s Rage
Helmet in hand, the Kin’kithal-turned-Enforcer stood above Garth N’Chalez. It’d been ten long years since he’d been this close to his old commanding officer. Griffin shook his head in … well; he couldn’t rightly define the swarm of emotions running through him. Certainly somewhere in there was regret and sorrow.
They’d had such bold plans, all of them, great, Universe-encompassing plans where they’d save Humanity from the Heshii, where they’d all become heroic enough for a million lifetimes. Where they’d be accepted.
They’d willingly followed Garth N’Chalez, the so-called ‘First Kin’kithal’ into battle, fighting the brutal Kith and Kin. Some of whom had been their parents. They’d allied themselves with the Armies of Man on his command; at his word, they’d undergone the ‘tests and trials’. They’d tried to endure the sheaths for him. Griffin could still remember the indescribable sensation of those machines crawling beneath his skin.
All for him.
They’d assisted the motherfucking Armies of Man in trying to turn the tide of not just the Kith and Kin but of their damnable Harmony Army and when it’d become apparent that no amount of resistance could stop the Heshii advance, they’d followed Garth N’Chalez into temporal suspension.
A few years.
That was how long the journey was supposed to’ve been. A quick trip around the solar system, hidden and shielded by powerful hy-tech engines created by none other than Garth fucking N’Chalez himself. Long enough to let the barely controllable appetites of the Kith and Kin run unfettered, long enough for the Harmony Army to disband or implode, theoretically long enough to fool the Heshii into thinking they’d won.
A few years.
Not thirty thousand.
Griffin bit back a laugh that was part rage, part sorrow, and all disgust.
Garth N’Chalez. Their leader, their commander. Their brother and their father. He’d convinced them that humans were worth it, that whatever goal the Heshii worked towards was inherently dangerous to the very fabric of the Universe. He'd convinced them of their need to fight, to use their Heshii continuum-spawned powers to stop them.
They’d listened, partly because the alternatives were to fight with the Kith and Kin or to find themselves hounded by all sides in a war not of their own creation.
Trinity refused to say whether Humanity had won. It claimed it didn’t matter, but Griffin suspected otherwise.
Thirty thousand years.
And now, finally, here, on Hospitalis, were answers, answers that apparently Trinity didn’t want anyone except Garth -who was a liar, a traitor, a cheat and a thief- to possess.
Griffin realized he was clenching his jaw rhythmically. He’d loved Garth as a brother. He’d idolized the apparently underpowered Kin’kithal, accepting the man’s towering genius and undeniable martial prowess as the only effect of their cellular connection to the extra-dimensionality without need for further explanation.
On that last day, he’d seen the truth. Griffin rubbed a thumb across his jaw, suspecting that the memory was one he wasn’t supposed to remember. Whatever ex-dee shenanigans Garth had gotten himself up to fighting the Mark IV God soldier had burst Lisa’s block like a soap bubble. The Texan Kin’kithal couldn’t make up his mind as to if he should be happy or sad about that.
Garth N’Chalez wasn’t underpowered. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He possessed abilities that dwarfed the rest of them, made all of them seem like shadows dancing in the window.
He’d willingly sacrificed that power, surrendering himself to the malicious Armies of Man and their fucking torturous neural sheathing project when he … when he …
When he should’ve fucking risen up and crushed Humanity, made them slaves.
He’d always ignored the brethren’s subtle entreaties to do just that, citing bullshit philosophies from his father, the legendary Kith Antal, who was himself the greatest butcher ever known to Mankind.
“We could’ve been Gods, commander, we could’ve been the rulers of this far-flung future instead of that fucking idiot machine!” Griffin kicked Garth in the leg. “Victors, not victims. Conquerors, not the fucking conquered!”
Garth was out like a light. Under normal circumstances, Griffin would’ve preferred to do this honorable way, but these were anything but normal circumstances. He’d never admit it, not even to himself, but he was more than half-afraid that Garth N’Chalez was unstoppable, even when dead to the world.
“We could’ve been Gods, you asshole.” Griffin raised a hand, mentally bypassing the suit’s controls over his own, natural powers. Burning the asshole to cinders with the very abilities he’d hidden from them was poetic.
Rather, he tried to burn Garth N’Chalez to ash and beyond.
Griffin cursed. He’d been hoping that whatever mystery was keeping Trinity at bay within Latelyspace had extended to a lack of control of the Suit. No matter. Using his Kin’kithal powers to kill Garth wasn’t necessary. The Enforcer suit was more than adequate. Griffin raised a hand again, this time intent on using a world-killer to deal with the traitorous First Kin’kithal.
Then, against all credible belief, his helmet flew into the air and slammed down on his head, sounding uncomfortably like the final nail in an indestructible coffin. Griffin flinched when he realized he was insensate beyond the confines of his armor.
Trinity’s voice whispered quietly into his ear. “Silly Griffin Jones. You are mine. As is N’Chalez. You will not jeopardize My goals.”
Pain-ablating software normally kept the wearer of a suit from experiencing the impossibly agonizing torture that physical flesh endured when traveling through the more esoteric phases of time and space.
When Griffin Jones phased out of existence to reappear elsewhere, Trinity ensured that said software was not active.
Aftermath, from Garth’s Eyes
Garth awoke to a Viewing Room very nearly completely obliterated, the stench of cooking God soldier reaching his nostrils before he’d even had time to process the agonizing ache blotting out nearly every other sense he owned. He rose unsteadily, roughly taking in the devastation with a seasoned eye.
“What in the fucking hell happened?” The Army had swept through The Museum with legendary fury.
A broad swathe of Central’s storm-wracked skyline confronted Garth. Turning around in a circle, head craned upwards, he tried to envision something other than what his decade of experience was telling him had happened; there had to be another explanation, the Latelians had to have some kind of gun that made giant finger holes everywhere.
Garth shook his head. Try as he might, there was nothing in the vast storehouse of his brain except giant robots to explain away the very specific manner in which the Dome of The Museum had been torn apart. Gaps and holes in the walls surrounding the Viewing Room were evenly spaced, precisely the sorts of perforations he’d make if he’d needed to climb something in a hurry.
The utterly ruined center of the Viewing Room drew Garth’s atte
ntion, and so, after a brief examination of Naoko –she was unconscious, and completely unhurt, probably the only person in the entire Museum to claim such luck- the ex-SpecSer staggered clumsily across broken rock, shattered bodies, and bits of people to investigate further. Garth willfully pushed what his subconscious was trying to tell him away, marveling as he moved at how painfully wrung-out he felt. There were greater mysteries that needed solving.
As he made his way awkwardly to his destination, more details of the conflict presented themselves, filling Garth with a special kind of woe. He’d done his very best, his absolute one hundred percent level best to keep the carnage to a minimum and he’d failed spectacularly.
So many people were dead and for no good reason. If he’d gone ballistic, if he’d been the Specter he’d been upon first hitting Hospitalis, hell, they’d probably have been able to leave hours ago. He could've seen to it that all of them still lived and with none of this misery to haunt them for the rest of their days.
Lisa Laughlin’s warnings echoed in his ears and he missed a step. Falling ass over teakettle into one of five ten-foot grooves that’d been dug into the floor, he lay there, staring up into the stormy clouds over Central City, rain pouring down on him, lightning sending garish streaks of light across a bruised sky.
A thought occurred to him. Hospitalis, Latelyspace, didn’t need a Specter. They never had. The hostage taking, the terrorist occupation, the spaceport, everything that’d happened had occurred thanks to his incredible lack of patience and foresight. Bravo was to blame in there somewhere, naturally, but unwittingly or not, he was the architect of this day simply by being who he’d been.
No, as much as it pained him, he’d taken the right path today, even if the casualty count was so very much higher than it would’ve been had he simply destroyed everything in sight. There was no way to know, at least on Hospitalis, just how that kind of action would spin out. Nothing seemed to go the way it should here, nothing at all.
It was hard, this ‘cleaner’ path. Garth understood Lisa’s fear now, her palpable concerns that he’d become an irredeemable destroyer. Violence and destruction had always come easy to him. What little he remembered of his time before suspension said he’d always struggled with that fact and the difference between then and now, Garth feared, was that there might not be a way back.
Lisa was right. Well, she’d always been right, but in this particular instance, the numinous woman was something more than merely ‘correct’; Trinity had indeed manipulated him, slowly but inevitably driving him to a point where it was easier to conquer than to join, simpler to destroy than to build.
In the process, no doubt intentionally engineered by that damnable AI, his adaptive morphology had transformed him into something infinitely less human.
How long would it take to undo ten years of death and destruction? Laying there in the rain, watching bolts of impossibly bright lightning transform the thunderclouds into something less dark, Garth shrugged.
It’d take as long as it took. His promise to Lisa, to himself, asserted itself with iron determination. If he planned to master what was inside Bravo, if he even wanted to have a chance at keeping Trinity away from whatever secrets lay within, he needed to be better than he’d ever been.
Everyone –everything- around him had had thirty thousand years to prepare for the coming revelations.
He needed to be better. Smarter. Cleaner.
“I can do this.” Louder. “I will do this.”
A big foam finger poked him in the nose. Garth rose as lithely as his battered body would permit. As soon as he was upright, his arms grew full of squiggly, crying girl. A thrill went through him. Garth allowed Naoko to pick up some of his weight.
“Do you know what?” he said slowly, various rebellious portions of his body reluctantly coming online, “I’m thinking we should go for dinner. Somewhere quiet. With, um, less terrorists and more people serving fancy dinner rolls and wine where you have to smell the cork before you can drink the wine. Also, someplace with no freaky assassins.”
Which reminded him; where had that bastard gotten himself? There were no signs of the lanky FrancoBritish cutthroat anywhere in the shattered remains of The Museum, which was not good news; trying to accomplish his goals while being hunted by that maniac would make things really goddamn difficult.
“Sa?” Naoko frowned, wiping away tears with the back of her hand. “Are you all right?”
Garth nodded. “Totally. Well, I’m really blo...fu…da… I’m pretty tired and all, and I sure as he… da… hope that everyone back there thinks Harry Bosch is somewhere else in The Museum, but other than that, I’m groovy. How about you?”
“I am fine!” Naoko shouted breathlessly. She kissed Garth on the cheek, and then planted one on his lips. “Did you see the giant God soldiers? Those people over there say two gigantic Goddies reached in and just grabbed all the terrorists up!” She squished her hands together, mimicking what’d inevitably happened to the remaining hostage-takers.
Garth waved the accusation away, marveling as he did so at the genetically inbred bloodthirstiness of Latelians. He couldn’t think of any other planet in any other solar system where anyone would think that was neat. And he’d been places. “No, no there weren’t. Couldn’t have been. The holes in the walls and the big finger shaped indents everywhere are utterly explainable by non-gigantic God soldiers. Like, some kind of, giant … finger … cannon. No one is that crazy.” He snorted. “Giant God soldiers.”
Naoko crossed her arms. “Do you think I am lying?” She pointed at the survivors, who’d started chanting Harry Bosch’s name repeatedly. Many of them were looking anxiously around, no doubt hoping their cheering would draw the man out of hiding. “Do you think they are lying as well?”
“No. Of course not.” Spying a way across hundreds of feet of rubble to the ‘outside world’, Garth took Naoko by the hand and the two of them -followed closely by the thousand or so remaining guests of The Museum- made their way cautiously free. “Well, It’s … just that I have a hard time imagining anyone would build gigantic God soldiers and set them loose on terrorists. That seems like something you’d want to hold on to until, like, you got invaded by a guy big enough to eat planets or something.”
Naoko pointed at the remains of Old Tim, and then at Pauly. “What do you call those, Sa Nickels?”
“Those?” Garth stared at the size billion foot closest to him, eyes bulging. “I think … I think … this is some kind of spaceship debris. Yeah. Vasily, like, decided to see if dropping spaceships on the terrorists would work. It totally did, too.”
“Ahah!” Naoko punched Garth lightly in the arm. “You will learn one day, sa, that when I say I see something, I am telling you exactly what it was that I saw and not something else.”
“You’re right.” Garth admitted wearily. Welcome to Latelyspace, he thought morosely, home to unbelievably insane people who do the most awful shit to themselves for no reason I can figure out. “Those are giant God soldiers. Now, how about dinner?”
“I would love … oh no.” Naoko saw Uncle Vasily stalking across the broken concrete, followed by several thousand bluecoats. “I … think we are going to have a long talk with my Uncle first.”
Garth looked around, bewildered. The only person he recognized at all was the OverCommander, and Garth still felt like an ass over his comments the last time they’d ‘met’.
The commander for the entire Army of God soldiers, some forty million strong, was not pleased. Small wonder, given that a theoretically unimportant terrorist uprising had not only taken all damned day to overcome, but had cost the lives of several thousand innocent people as well as God soldiers and the unveiling of different technologies that should’ve been kept secret for a trillion years.
Garth swallowed. “This guy’s … your uncle?”
OverCommander Vasily’s gaze bore down on Garth Nickels, who, again, turned the imperious stare aside with aplomb. “It is a very small world, is it not, S
a Nickels?” With precise flicks of his hand, Vasily indicated the various signs of systemic secrecy littering the once-majestic Museum entrance. “You do not see this, none of this exists …”
Garth held up a hand and wiggled his fingers. “I am not the droid you’re looking for.”
Nonplussed, the OverCommander turned to his niece. “Naoko. How are you? This day must’ve been awful.”
“Oh.” Naoko put an arm protectively around Garth. “I am fine, Sa OverCommandersa. I am tired and we are hungry. Are you here to kill us all for being infected by poisonous Trinity ideas? If you are, could we please eat something first?”
Garth blinked and then fought to keep from throwing up. He felt his head turn as if it was on rusty ball bearings, his eyes wide open and, somewhere in his brain, a very tiny shout of fear was starting up. This man was the OverCommander! No one was ever –even if they were related by blood- allowed to talk to a guy who had possession of hundred foot tall cyborg super soldiers in that way. Not ever!
Even he, probably the stupidest guy in a million light years, wouldn’t talk that way. Especially right then, when the whispers in the back of his mind suggested he wouldn’t be able to fight his way out of a choice between chocolate and vanilla.
Vasily tried not to wince at the caustic anger in his niece’s voice, and very nearly succeeded. Perhaps, though, perhaps it was his fault just as much as it’d been Tomas’; his brother-in-law had driven -shoved- them all away when the trials had reached a fevered pitch and Maurna’s sickness had grown monstrous. In his own way, he too had abandoned the Kamaganas. God soldiers weren’t supposed to abandon their mates, their family, and he’d done just that. He smiled as gently as he could with an army of bluecoats at his back, policemen and women and no doubt more than a few spies from various agencies all filtering through the survivors making their way shakily out of the rubble.