Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  Bolo looked around for a chair to sit on so he wouldn’t have to … have to sit on the sticky floor. Every chair was mysteriously absent and there was a glint to Chad’s eyes suggesting the Offworlder wouldn’t tolerate a visit to the nearest furniture store.

  Swallowing a surge of bile, Bolo seated himself in front of Chad, unable to tear his eyes away from Reywin’s head. The blank eyes stared accusingly at him, as if to say it was his fault she was dead. It took him a few seconds to find his voice. “What … what happened here?”

  Chad took a chem-popper full of some kind of drug and pressed it against his neck, smiling blissfully. He tossed the empty popper over his shoulder, banking it artfully off Rey’s leg and reached blindly into the bag. “Oh, this silly old twat. She asked for more money. I explained to ‘er that our employer don’t like to renegotiate on anyfing, regardless o’ the spot o’ trouble you ‘ad in the execution o’ your duties.”

  “And then?” Bolo shivered his way through a small moment of panic. Running was all he wanted to do, but running was a surefire way to die.

  “Well, then she suggested I give ‘er some of my money. At gunpoint.” Chad pulled a few tabs of something labeled ‘Grunt’ out of the bag and stuck them to various parts of exposed skin. Whatever he’d popped was making the air devilishly thick. “I explained to ‘er that my money is my money and that yours is yours, but she shot me in the ‘ead wiv this.” He tossed the bent gun over to Bolo, who looked at it with disbelief. Chadsik explained. “I’ve got a PSI rating strong enough to bend steel-VII, fool, which makes your duronium look like toilet paper.”

  “She shot you.” He’d never seen anyone do ‘Thick’ and ‘Grunt’ in the same sitting. Not and live, at any rate.

  “I did, Bolo. Right in the head. Kerpow.” Reywin sighed miserably. “Because of my drug-fueled paranoia and hallucinations, I forgot the most important thing about our best friend in the whole wide world, which is that he is a unique cyborg and that anything less than a full-scale assault won’t work.”

  “Wh-what happened then?”

  Chad shrugged apologetically. The Voice answered. “I am afraid I sort of lost my temper. I don’t quite recall what took place. I could examine my files, if you’d like.” He grabbed a purple popper and jabbed it against his neck.

  Bolo shook his head frantically. “That’s okay.”

  Chad blew some more smoke rings, enjoying the way the air seemed to move gelatinously. The Voice grunted unhappily, retreating as it did so deep into the bowels of madness. “Crikey, mate, that med-popper is effing fantastic. Wot’s in it?”

  “The man I bought it from is an ex-Goddie. Says it’s built to work on heavily upgraded humans. Called it ‘Thick’.”

  “Thick, hey?” Chadsik peeled the tabs off his arms. “Good stuff. Now then, down to business. You is not ‘ave any intentions of lookin’ for more money, is you?” When his audience indicated no such plans, he continued. “Great. Now. I suppose that on account of you is being the only man wot is left standing, the whole purse goes to you. Isn’t that exciting for you? All that money?”

  “But?”

  “It’s sort of like this, my son.” Chad shrugged. “Reywin is tellin’ me as she was beggin’ for her life that you is some sort of hacking genius. I’ve ‘ad a bit of a poke around the networks and wotnot an’ it seems to me as ‘ow I could be in the market for someone as knows ‘ow to work the angles around ‘ere a bit better, ey? I s’pose I could do it meself, but I fink I knows of a fella wot is willin’ to make some extra dollars? I is not in the mood to learn anyfing new. Not right now.”

  Bolo pointed to Reywin’s puppet-head, fighting off a black bubble of nausea. “As long as you lose the head and promise not to take mine.”

  Chad shook Rey’s head off, firing it into the bathroom. His eyes glittered madly. “Absolutely effing fantastic, mate. First fing we needa do is get a better place to stay. This one smells like someone ‘as died in it. Come on. Oy,” the assassin paused thoughtfully, nose wrinkling, “you want to stop off at a clinic or summink, ‘ave that cut on your arm looked at better?”

  The truth was that Bolo would love nothing more than to spend the rest of his life in a carefully guarded medical center being treated for whatever type of madness he was suffering from, but felt it would be imprudent to introduce the assassin to anyone else.

  What rankled so severely was that by that that simple offer an insane drug-addled Offworld assassin had shown more concern for him than his partner had.

  The Philosophical Brotherhood’s Peeper Starts Peeping

  Garth waved hello to the omnipresent security cameras spaced every three feet in the underground lot of The Palazzo and parked his stolen aircar in between a very expensive looking hot red Ferrari-esque speedster and a luminous black minivan that was all curves and swoops and neat looking airfoils.

  Before climbing out, he went over the list of infractions he’d begun accumulating driving from UltraMegaDynamaTron to the Hotel. It was a wonder he hadn’t been arrested; he wasn’t savvy when it came to Latelian airspace laws, but was he pretty sure buzzing pedestrians at two hundred miles an hour was against someone’s rules. He’d done it for fun, which wasn’t something your average Latelian would recognize if it bit them on the ass and introduced itself as ‘Funpants McWhee’.

  Garth emptied the infraction log, checked his gear, and headed out.

  Rather than enter the Hotel proper by means of the elevator, Garth made his way slowly through the car park itself, wondering if he was being paranoid or if there was a legitimate concern; on the way in, he’d briefly caught sight of something that hadn’t made any sense then, and even less now!

  What in the hell was a Latelian doing skulking around The Palazzo’s rear entrances, dressed in a robe that had him looking like he should be selling wine off the back of a mule-driven cart?

  Garth didn’t like weird when it came in flavors like that, so while he was almost certainly wasting his time going to check out a guy dressed like a monk, he didn’t have anything else to do.

  The night air was picking up a cool breeze from somewhere off the coast, turning the skies above darker. According to an all-weather channel, there was a nasty storm brewing off the coast that was threatening to turn into a full-scale hurricane. It was so far away that no one was forecasting any potential troubles for Central, but the weatherman opined that the rain would send some of the ash and other debris shot skyward during the spaceport explosions back down to the earth. Parts of the continent-girding city Hospitalis could well find themselves ankle deep in muck.

  Garth regretted not hiring Chauncey to whip up a couple jackets.

  A warning rumble of thunder rolled across the city. Garth looked across the street towards where he’d originally seen Man in Outdated Robe. Buddy was still there, leaning against an alley wall, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette and looking up at The Palazzo between drags.

  Memorizing the weirdly dressed guy’s location, Garth trotted across the street in the opposite direction, giving the finger to someone who leaned on the horn –reminding him all too keenly of a spastic New York cabdriver in the process-, and disappeared down a different alley. He was really glad that geeky city-planners had gone to all the trouble of laying Central down in a very regular, very symmetrical pattern. There were occasional inconsistencies, like the park/alcove that was UltraMegaDynamaTron’s front entrance, but overall, the layout was as regular as a guy who ate a lot of bran. If you knew how one particular section of grid was constructed, you could make your way blindfolded to nearly any other part of the city.

  Garth popped out of the alley, gave another angry car-driver the finger –this time with both barrels - and hurried towards the other side street. He heard a car door slam and someone shout loudly. Garth stopped running and turned around, eyebrows crawling up his forehead.

  Sure enough, he’d pissed someone off. Garth stared at the adolescent Latelian, a look of absolute humor on his mug. The kid looked for the entire
world like the Latelian version of a puppy with too-big paws.

  Morton stared right back at the Offworlder. He was totally pumped from watching the last part of the Offworlder Finals, and couldn’t believe his eyes; Offworlders had no right to be anywhere but on the Screens, beating each other senseless. He couldn’t wait to tell his friends that he’d been given a chance to beat on an Offworlder! They were going to be so pissed they’d stayed at the bar!

  “I don’t have time for this, Junior.” Garth snapped idly, uncomfortably aware that people were gravitating towards the scene; this was going down in front of an outside restaurant, and some of the customers closest to the street were eating slower. Grimly, he noticed that more than a few were angling their protes his way. He hoped to hell and back that Si Alix’s paperwork had gone through, that nothing of what was going to happen –could happen- would be captured for the Big Three.

  “You gave me the finger.” Morton shouted. “No one gives me the finger.”

  “Look,” Garth replied evenly, itching to get to the alley, “there’s only one way this is going to end, and that’s with you having some kind of broken bone and me being very angry indeed that I missed my friend who’s in the alley over there. I might get so angry,” he continued, reaching out and grabbing hold of the fancy wrought-iron railing of the restaurant beside him and yanking, “that I might come back very upset.”

  Morton watched the metal bend in the Offworlder’s grasp like butter. Then, brain reeling from what he’d just seen, Morton accepted the bent piece of metal and watched as the Offworlder ran down the street and into the very alley he’d indicated.

  A customer commented around a mouthful of food on how she thought young Latelians who were lucky enough not to be bent into shapes bodies weren’t meant to be bent into should go out and buy some lottery tickets, because they were incredibly lucky. Then she mentioned that the man any young, foolish Latelians might’ve threatened was probably the survivor of the Spaceport Disaster, a national treasure and shining beacon of amazingness.

  Morton dropped the mangled ironware and got back into his car, intent on erasing the moment from his mind forever.

  “Awww, fuck!” Garth kicked the wall nearest him in frustration. Dude in Robe was gone. “Shit.”

  No matter. Now that he knew he should keep his eyes peeled for anyone wearing robes from the wrong millennia, Garth knew he could count on his trusty paranoia to blip quicker the next time around.

  He hurried across the street and into The Palazzo.

  xxx

  The young man in the light green robe climbed free of the garbage can, heart pounding furiously. He’d come very close to being caught, and Green would disapprove at losing yet another believer. Green’s warnings concerning Garth Nickels were fully appreciated now. The Offworlder-turned-Latelian was positively psychic, a nerve-wracking and unhinging realization.

  Light Green made a silent promise to his Lord and Savior that there would be no next time, that he would be infinitely more cautious when watching Garth Nickels. He stooped to pick up his cigarette butts, pocketing them with a churning stomach; there was no percentage in being remembered, being seen.

  Hamilton Barnes Is on the Scene

  Hamilton Barnes processed the scene alone because doing so allowed him to destroy evidence without also having to kill nosey agents bucking for promotion. And this crime scene was one of those ones that could make or break an ordinary agent’s career. It was a bloody-minded affair of epic proportions.

  Barnes knew from bloody-minded, yes he did.

  During his time as Chairwoman Doans’ attack dog, Barnes had seen –had been directly responsible for- horror shows the likes of which would drive ordinary people mad. He had done things in the name of the Latelian Regime that would burn netLINKs to melted metal in fear of his presence.

  His job had no description; he did what Doans wanted and that was the end of it. The things Doans needed doing under cover of darkness was nothing that anyone needed to know about. It was bad enough people suspected and gossiped about him. Proof? Proof was something Hamilton Barnes was a master at removing.

  Right now, Doans wanted Si Reywin duFresne … misplaced. Her career was already sanitized, reduced to a mere handful of cases, her ties to Terrance severed and buried. Colleagues of Reywin’s might go looking for her in the ‘LINKs and when they found the cleansed files, they would back off and his legend would grow. They would wonder and speculate at what one of their greatest assets had gotten herself up to, but they would do so in the quiet hours of the morning and that was all. It was easy to manipulate the flow of data when you knew what you were doing and you had the right access. It was as easy as pushing a few buttons.

  The physical mess that’d once been Reywin duFresne required more attention to detail. Very few people could handle what’d been left behind. Barnes couldn’t abide the thought of personally leaving such a catastrophic mess behind, but he was a professional.

  Barnes had no problems cleaning up the mess, not at all; he’d done similar things in his own time. His career had inured him to the worst that Man had to offer. What bothered him was the assassin, the man who’d done this. Where he’d perpetrated horrors and nightmares on someone for the continuance of the Latelian ideal, by no means had he enjoyed himself, nor had he … made a puppet of someone’s head.

  Chadsik al-Taryin was a maniac of the most reprehensible sort and he was loose on Hospitalis.

  Ever loyal, it never occurred to him to condemn the Chairwoman’s decision, dangerously foolish though it might be. Barnes found himself hoping the situation resolved itself quickly so the murderer could be … dealt with. Who knew? The Trinity AI might even laud the disappearance of the bizarre cyborg.

  Barnes spoke with Doans, artfully scorching the major body parts with an industrial grade laser, reducing them as much to ash as possible.

  “Chairwoman, there are no signs that the other black ops agent, Bolobo, is dead.” Against better judgment, Barnes was arguing the point that Chadsik al-Taryin was using the man. “We need to change our security encryptions now. Right this minute.”

  “There is little to suggest that Chadsik has any intentions of doing anything other than what he was brought to our neck of the woods to accomplish, Sa Barnes.” Doans replied coolly. “Re-encrypting all our communication lines will take hours to complete, during which time we leave our necks exposed to attack from other quarters.”

  “I’ve familiarized myself with Bolobo’s skills, Si Chairwoman.” Barnes persisted, moving onto an arm; a portable air recycler masked the stench from the burning body parts. “The man was solely responsible for bringing down an Examination Supervisor, si. He hacked into all the major servers on the planet and coordinated a fraudulent scenario that distracted the supervisor from even noticing the manipulation. This … cyborg,” Barnes spat the word, “is outfitted with alien technology as well as Trinity-spec military equipment. He represents a danger of the gravest kind. I cannot stress enough how much we are putting at risk by letting him ‘use’ Bolobo.”

  If it’d been left to him, Barnes would’ve vaporized Chadsik at the Q-Tunnel. The loss of the space station and the massive troop ship nearby would’ve been a difficult one, but better that than this. Barnes was an old hand at destruction and he felt something in his bones, something he neither liked nor understood.

  Chairwoman Doans smiled thinly. “We risk nothing. I risk everything. In your casual surveillance of Garth Nickels, have you discovered anything running counter to my assessment? Has he suddenly decided he no longer wants to open The Box?”

  Barnes moved on to a foot, gritting his teeth to keep from snapping at his mistress. Up until the end, Reywin duFresne had been a loyal, noble supporter of the Latelian cause, regardless of her allegiances to Terrance.

  “No, si. As I understand, he is keener than ever.” Casual surveillance was barely adequate to describe how utterly cautious he’d been in watching Garth Nickels. The man’s situational awareness was phenom
enal. In the earliest hours of following the Offworlder from quite a distance, Barnes had learned to school his feelings of outrage, to marshal thoughts of violence; it seemed, then as now, that Nickels was somehow capable of feeling that hate, those dreams of mayhem.

  A man who’d fought across The Cordon, a man who’d survived without aid of cybernetic enhancements or genetic modification was a man worthy of respect.

  Garth Nickels was another man he, Hamilton Barnes, would’ve blown out of space, no matter the consequences. Alas, Terrance had cast that die himself and now they were living through the fallout, none more harshly than Reywin duFresne and her agents.

  The entire team’s abandonment of legality lay at the OverSecretary’s feet; had he allowed them surveillance privileges, had he thought for one moment beyond his own petty dreams, no one would be in this mess. Nickels wouldn’t be in The Palazzo, virtually the woman’s entire team wouldn’t be dead, the Spaceport disaster wouldn’t have happened. Terrance’s crimes were as far-reaching as they were moronic.

  Doans struggled with the urge to sigh. “We’ve all seen the same reports, Barnes. We cannot let him near The Box. He will open it, and that will be the end of things as we know them. There is no knowing what is in there, but if, by some fluke, he represents what is held within, we must prevent that from happening at all costs.” Doans paused, hoping that the mere concept of such drastic changes frightened Barnes; they did her. “We cannot move directly against Nickels. Not only is Trinity extremely interested in his well-being –to the point where It might do anything at all if we disobey It’s ‘request’- Garth is now being represented by Si Alixia van derTuppen. The only way, the only way, to ensure his death without being held responsible is to allow Chadsik al-Taryin to do his job. Failing that, our only other moment to rid ourselves of Nickels without our being directly responsible is in the Final Game. He’ll surely triumph against the division champion, and possibly make his way to the Last Fight. But no further than that! If allowing Chadsik to succeed means letting him use this Bolobo, so be it. However, how much aid Bolobo will be is in question. I’ve read the preliminary reports from Vasily’s MilInt ops, and they indicate Bolobo underwent a serious medical procedure in one of Densen’s autodoctor facilities. The nature of the wounds…”