by Lee Bond
Chad made a big show of checking the time on a watch he wasn’t wearing. “We’ve got about five minutes. Take your time. I is not mindin’.”
The ‘Priests exchanged looks. Volumes of unspoken data passed between them, dimpling the fragile nature of the Unreality in which they lived. One of them sighed, broken glass over hot coals.
“Erg1 is …” Sine17 hesitated. “Erg1 is insane. We … we are not capable of waging proper war. We are capable of defending ourselves to the limit of our abilities, but we cannot engage. It is a design flaw. Even now, today, we did not engage the mercenaries and security teams directly. We waited for them to attack us. It is …”
Volt789 finished the sentence. “It is why we created you in the first place. To lead us. Where you command, so we follow.”
Chad couldn’t help himself. Laughter burst out of him, filling the heavens with utter hilarity. He laughed so hard he snorted, and coughed, and started spluttering. Momentarily afraid he’d choke to death from laughing so hard, Chad eventually found himself doubled over, hands on his knees, giggling and snorting. “Cor, ain’t that a kick in the fucking pants, hey? The Universe’s great nihilists, enemies of the Unreality and Reality alike, possessors of a warped Harmony capable of unspooling matter an’ energy and wotnot with a twitch of your will and you can’t do the one fuckin’ fing you want. No wonder you lot is mad as ‘atters.”
Sine jerked his head at the skyline. A pure white contrail split the bruised sky. “The Enforcer comes, Chadsik al-Taryin. We must flee.”
“Nah.” Chad continued smoking his cigarette. The confusion spilling out of the CyberPriests was enough to knock lesser men unconscious. Happily, he wasn’t lesser men. He was Chadsik al-fucking-Taryin. He was, for lack of a better word, a goddamn God. He explained this, finishing with, “You lot can all fuck off back to the underground. I is gonna deal wiv this silly Enforcer and then, when I is showin’ back up at your dank man-cave, you is explainin’ in very simple words why exactly we need this girl. You can use diagrams an’ pictures if you want. Orl right?”
The ‘Priests nodded. Permission given, they disappeared, Naoko in tow. The sparse sounds of FrancoBritish resistance from the floors beneath Chad’s feet. The assassin shook his head. That was one of the many problems with his brothers and sisters; they refused to give up the fight, even when it was fucking obvious that they were trying to tear down a brick wall with a piece of straw.
Chad looked around for something to lean on as the Enforcer made his final approach, frowning when he realized there wasn’t anything remotely suitable. He wondered if the armor-clad maniac would wait long enough for him to move things around so the scene could be set properly, wrinkling his nose when he decided that probably the only person in the entire Unreality that’d not only let that happen but who would also appreciate the gesture was Garth Nickels.
“Bollocks.” Chad muttered to himself. Then, because standing around smoking a cigarette while waiting for a truly kick-ass battle without being able to lean on something looking cool was hardly worth the goddamn effort, he flicked his cigarette over the edge and stared moodily downward.
A scene direct from Hell greeted him. The destruction of Jordan’s five towers had transformed fifty square miles of Zanzibar into a furnace of death and mayhem. Thick smoke, carnal red and despoiled black, guttered and billowed as though some great beast breathed in and out. Fires raged, bursting up into cyclonic spirals of death that gutted more of Jordan’s holdings. Bursts of electricity miles in length split and spat and flared like supernovas as generators and engines cracked into splinters. Hungry growls of Death Incarnate thundered across the sky.
It was a maelstrom.
“Cor.” Chad pursed his lips thoughtfully. He figured he didn’t need to set the mood. Fighting an Enforcer directly above the Forge of Hell Itself would work well enough.
A sonic boom ruptured the air directly above Chad. A Devil-may-grin creased the FrancoBrit’s pale, austere face. He rolled up his sleeves and motioned for the Enforcer, who hovered some ten feet away, to engage in Marquis Rules.
***
Gwyleh Ronn paused and considered the unlikely scene that’d unfolded before him. The Suit identified the man in front of him as Chadsik al-Taryin, one of Trinity’s inexplicable ‘favorites’. It had failed –and was continuing to fail- in identifying even a single one of the beings that’d been with him just moments ago.
A bit troubling, that; there was, to Ronn’s knowledge, nothing in the Universe that could hide from an Enforcer Suit once it was put to the task. Connected directly to knowledge and information accumulated over thirty thousand years, everything should already be catalogued.
Whoever had been with Chadsik had used some form of teleportation or matter transference to flee, hauling Naoko Kamagana along with them, but Gwyleh Ronn wasn’t terribly worried about that. The area was positively littered with her DNA and pheromone signatures, not to mention her psychic mark.
No, once he was done dealing with Chadsik al-Taryin, finding one Latelian woman amidst the rotten, reeking splurge of Humanity that infested the crummy planet beneath his feet would be no trouble at all. If anything, it would be a nice vacation.
The Enforcer considered Trinity’s thoughts on preserving the strange and unique. As the only Empator-Tyrene left , Ronn understood that he himself was one of those strange, unique things that the machine mind so loved to keep around, either as a reminder of how unpredictable everything could be or as a living Museum piece.
Then he wondered what Trinity would think about one ultra-rare entity destroying another.
Then he decided he didn’t care.
Gwyleh Ronn powered up his singularity cannons. The strange-sounding sine wave oscillation of the magazines pulling energy from the fabric of the Universe hissed against the roiling thunder of the Hell below. He’d reviewed footage of Chadsik’s shenanigans throughout space and was well aware of how powerful, how durable, how resilient the cyborg was to traditional arms. Singularity cannons, though … these were weapons of mass destruction that no being could withstand, least of all because they’d been designed to tear apart Generation Warships as large as planets.
Chad readied his own weapons, trusting one of hims to do right by the rest of them and pull something pretty spectacular out of their ass. “Orl right,” he crowed, “in our left ‘and we’ve got summink one of me says is a Wicked Twister, which sounds like summink I is buying from a prostitute, and in our right ‘and we got a fing wot is apparently called a BFG. And once I is done blowin’ you up, Enforcer Man, I is gonna ‘ave a chat wiv the rest of me’s because these guns are fuckin’ ridiculous an’ I feel like I is takin’ the piss wiv myself.”
“I’ve got dual Singularity Cannons pointed at your beady little head, stupid FrancoBritish cyborg.” Gwyleh sneered beneath his helmet. “There isn’t anything in the known Universe that can withstand these weapons. I’ve used them to destroy warships the size of your moon.”
“Well,” Chad barked back, trying to convince one of him to pull something more threatening that a ‘Wicked Twister’ out of a pocket Universe and failing, “it’s really fuckin’ unlucky for you then, my son, because I isn’t from around these parts. I is from all the parts that ever were. If you got summink on you that can destroy the physical iteration of a hundred thousand or more versions of Reality, well … actually, I is suggestin’ you don’t use it on account o’ it’ll probably destroy everyfing. Hm.”
The two combatants gauged each other coolly. This wasn’t something you could rush into quickly. They were evenly matched; Gwyleh Ronn didn’t know where Chadsik had gotten his weapons, but the Suit’s AI didn’t like what was being pointed in his direction. That same AI was giving him very iffy odds on the Singularity Cannons doing anything more than giving the assassin’s coat a bit of a thorough going-over.
In a fight like this, between two Titans wielding powers greater than anything anyone should possess, the first strike really was the most important.
That first blow, lucky or unlucky, destructive or dismissive, counted.
They circled each other warily.
As they made one circuit, Hell grew larger and louder. Ships began arriving to either rescue lives or to raid Jordan’s cracked domain. Momentarily distracted by the carnage surrounding them, it took both Gwyleh and Chad a few seconds to realize that that they weren’t alone.
“Hey. Um. Hi.” Huey waved a hand feebly. “Is this, uh, gonna … gonna take long? I got a thing.”
Gwyleh stormed into action, shifting the cannons from Chadsik to the curiously eyebrowless Latelian who’d somehow managed to sneak onto the set of his most impressive battle to come. His AI was having no luck identifying their unwanted guest.
“Actually,” Huey gestured and the Suit suddenly froze where it was, servomotors whining piteously with the effort of trying to move, “um, yeah, I’m not here for you, Enforcer type guy.”
Chad shook his head irately, un-fucking-able to figure out where his life had truly gone to shit. He wanted to blame Arcade City for being a really awful place to come kicking and screaming into the world, but he knew several FrancoBrits that were actually quite well adjusted. He could blame his dad, but blaming a psychotic raving nutter for things he did was like trying to blame sunlight for being bright and shiny. He even really desperately wanted to blame Jordan Bishop for hiring him to take a wander over into Latelyspace to kill a guy that’d turned out to be the fucking physical incarnation of War and Murderous Technology, but none of those seemed appropriate. Were it possible his life had been shit from before he’d been born? A few Chads accepted this might be the case, then suggested the main Chad pay more attention to what was going on in front of them. Him.
“Wot ‘appened to yer eyebrows?” Chad was surprised at the question, but decided to roll with it. Gwyleh Ronn was busy shouting his damnfool head off inside his presently frozen solid suit of armor.
“Don’t ask.” Huey walked up and rapped the Enforcer suit. It was really well constructed. A bit old, though. In his efforts to locate the one man who could possibly get Garth N’Chalez out of Bravo, Huey’d run into a lot of data concerning the armor-clad Enforcers, data Trinity would most definitely prefer not be available to anyone. Though this was his first live Suit encounter, none of that data suggested any new Suits had been forged for quite some time. Gwyleh’s … Gwyleh’s had reportedly been worn by three Enforcers down through the years. Why, even Griffin’s suit was a hundred years old. He squinted at Chad, then groaned. “Look, having a body is still kind of new for me. I couldn’t figure out the purpose of eyebrows. I shaved them off to see how they affected … expression. And they won’t grow back.”
Chad cackled. “A fucking lot is the answer. Christ, you look like a burly drag Queen wivvout ‘is lady-costume.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.” Huey grumbled.
Chad put his guns away and rummaged in one of his pockets until he found a marker. He brandished it with a salacious wink. “Oi, ‘ow about you is lettin’ me drawr in some eyebrows for you? I can make you look pretty decent. One of me was a cross-dresser. I can make you look real serious or very, very confused.”
Gwyleh Ronn continued howling inside his Suit. Nothing was working. The AI was shut off, the base mechanics of the blasted armor weren’t working, nothing was happening.
When Chad saw that Huey wasn’t having any of it, he turned serious. “Why is you ‘ere?” He gestured around himself. “In case you is not noticin’, I is in the middle of this whole fing.”
“Yeah, no, I totally get that.” Huey strolled over to the side and looked down on the destruction that Chadsik had wrought. “Why’d you do this?”
Chad walked up beside Huey, running a hand through his pale white hair. “Honest answer, I was sort of ‘opin’ that the ‘Priests would be all freaked out an’ leave me alone. Sorta … sorta forgot about them bein’ nihilistic idiots, ter be ‘onest. A bit awkward, really. Fellas din’t even blink.”
“You killed somewhere in the neighborhood of a five hundred thousand people and destroyed Jordan Bishop’s empire so they’d leave you alone?” Huey wanted to judge, wanted to condemn Chad… hell, he even wanted to walk away and leave the mad cyborg to whatever Fate provided, but he couldn’t; his creator and friend had perpetrated a scam stretching thirty thousand years that would ultimately –if successful- cause the destruction of every single atom in the Unreality. A huge death count before that moment was inevitable, and as much as it made him sick to his stomach, Huey needed Chad. There was no one else in the entire Unreality with even a chance at getting into Bravo. It was galling, what he was being asked to ignore. “Couldn’t you have just asked them politely?”
“Well, Huey or ‘amilton or whoever the fuck you is, you isn’t that stupid.” Chad lit a cigarette and offered one to Huey, who declined. Shrugging, the assassin took a deep toke. “You know wot they is wantin’. Wot I is not knowin’ is wot you is wantin’. You is a long way from ‘ome and the last time I checked, Latelyspace is sealed behind the biggest shield anyone ‘as ever seen. As cake on top of delicious pudding, on the uvver side of that shield is the amassed military might of the Army and, more excitin’, all of Special Services. They is ‘avin’ the Deep Strike teams and everyfing. As wotever it is the fuck you is, I would fink you would be there, ‘elpin’ that chubby new Chairman out wiv fings. An’ it’s only been, like, a few weeks, yeah? Wot’s it gonna be like out there in a month or two, I is wonderin’.”
“Chair Herrig is fine.” Huey responded. For the first time in his life, Herrig DuPont was doing precisely what he’d been born to do. Never in its five thousand years of existence had Latelyspace been run so smoothly, so efficiently, so well. And all thanks to Herrig DuPont. If things grew too terrible, he could always call on Fenris and the others, but with the hytech shield surrounding Latelyspace, there was absolutely no way SpecSer or the Army could get anywhere.
Chad nodded knowingly. “Oh, aye, aye, that he is, that he is. On the telly all the time, your new leader, askin’ Trinity all polite-like to fuck off. Funny thing is, ‘e’s getting’ a bit more pissed off each time ‘e asks for the military aggression to cease. ‘ow long, I wonder, before your polite, ever-so-polite bureaucrat flips ‘is shit and ‘as them all blown to fuckin’ bits?”
If he was honest with himself, Huey’d been worried about the same thing for a few days now. While not nearly as aggressive as Chairwoman Doans’ speeches shortly before her downfall, Herrig’s most recent message to Trinity had indeed been more forceful than the others. ‘Direct action’ and ‘cease all attempts to breach the Wall’ had featured more than once in the fifteen minute broadcast. Making matters worse was the fact that Trinity was airing the footage in a way that made Herrig and all of Latelyspace the ire of every man, woman and child in Its Domain. If enough time passed, the AI would succeed in making any eventual confrontation –Huey wasn’t stupid enough to imagine it’d never happen- between Latelyspace and Its armies popular.
Phrases like ‘we’re going to blow you out of space’ and ‘hold on to your fucking hats because it’s going to be raining gigantic goddamn God soldiers all over everywhere’ weren’t too far down the road.
“That,” Huey took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then released it slowly, “is actually why I’m here. I need your help.”
Chad blinked. He replayed the last few seconds of conversation back. Nope. No hallucinations. No drugs in his system, either. He turned incredulously to confront the Latelian. “I is checkin’ to see if I ‘as done some drugs I is forgettin’ about, and I is sadly as clean as a whistle. Now I is askin’ if you is high. I remember some of the drugs I was jammin’ down your throat. One or six of ‘em was quite addictive. If you is ‘avin’ a problem, mate, I can ‘elp. It is nuffink to be ashamed of. Drug addiction is a serious fing.”
“Haha what?” Huey held up a hand. “No, I’m not high, you idiot. I need your help. To rescue Garth.”
Chad stood there in sil
ence, watching a large ship garishly marked with the lurid colors of Voss_Uderhell’s Acquisition Branch lumber around BishopCo remaining buildings like a drunken wildebeest, a half-dozen BishopCo attack jets laying in with an impressive amount of firepower. The cargo transport caught fire, then burst into flames as rounds struck the fuel chambers. A thunderclap heartbeat later and the armored vessel cracked in half and started falling towards the grumbling inferno below.
“Now I know you is mad.” Chad sniffed. “Wot makes you fink I would do such a fing? It’s bonkers. I was ‘ired to kill the man. ‘e ain’t likely to forget that, mate.”
“No. It isn’t.” Huey grabbed Chad by the shoulder and turned him around. When he was certain that the assassin wasn’t going to mistake the gesture for an attack, the Latelian/AI hybrid continued, though hurriedly; sooner or later Trinity Itself was going to realize that the data packets being uploaded through Gwyleh Ronn’s Suit were fake. Once that happened, It would release more Enforcers, and while it was easy to hack into the protocols of one, perhaps two more Enforcer Suits at the same time, there were limits he needed to impose lest the systemic AI discover who was doing the hacking. Old Earth wouldn’t survive that, oh no, not at all. “Look, there are three options left to those of us who know what’s really going on.”
Chad spent considerable time every day not thinking about that very topic, but he didn’t think he was going to be able to get Huey to shut his gob. “I is listenin’.” He hoped his tone suggested that, while he was in fact, listening, he wasn’t enjoying the conversation.
Huey spoke. “It is an undeniable truth that the Unreality is going to end, yes?”
Chad nodded, albeit huffily. He still wasn’t entirely certain about the whole ‘End of Everyfing’ bit and had only just sort of gotten to the point where he could contemplate the ‘reality’ that everything he’d known for the his entire life wasn’t even technically real. “Go on.”
“There are three ways this is going to happen.” Huey raised a finger. Technically, he wasn’t about to lie to Chad; as far as he was concerned, Garth was going to take care of the other problems represented by Mad Goth King Blake, Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseille and Trinity Itself. Those three things weren’t on the table. Hell, he was only lumping the ‘Priests in the list to play on Chad’s intense dislike of the weird holy men.