Subversive Elements (Unreal Universe Book 2) Read online

  Still, the cost –whether in money or The Dead’s horrible merchandise- was great. It was only because of the gravity of the material and the depth of her need that Naoko didn’t loathe herself for recruiting Morgan the Dead –however temporarily- into her employ.

  It was no great surprise that the man was a soldier from Trinity; he’d already proven his combat skills in the Arena, doubly so against Antonio Yrtzog, so there were no surprises there and he’d essentially corroborated his history on News4You last night. Naoko pursed her lips. Now, all of Latelyspace thought they knew Garth, but the man they ‘knew’ was very … one-sided.

  There were hundreds, thousands, of hours of video footage of Garth’s life in this … Special Services, covering his comings and goings every minute of every day until he’d quit to come to Latelyspace. Naoko had the prescience of mind to realize that she was possibly one of very few who understood how deadly their newest citizen was.

  Worringly, Morgan now numbered in that group, a sadly dangerous fact. All the young Latelian woman could do about that was hope Morgan wasn’t foolish enough to do anything. Garth Nickels wasn’t the sort of man who’d deal lightly with someone like Morgan.

  Were there not some of kind of link connecting the two of them, Naoko would be appalled that Garth had been let into the system; his talents were singular, his skill terrifyingly impressive, and his will unstoppable. Never in her life had she seen or heard of someone so suited for war, and she’d been raised in the belief that God soldiers were the embodiment of that lifestyle. More knowledgeable than most concerning what the God soldiers had done for the Latelian Regime, Garth’s records were astonishing.

  In addition to the prolific volume of data concerning Garth’s life in Special Services –too much to read through, even in a hundred sittings- were video feeds from before his time in Special Services. Watching these broke Naoko’s heart even as they confused her to her marrow.

  Each file, every video, stamped with this ‘Historical Services’ logo … the thin, dour-looking Kant Ingrams … how could anyone have come out of such treatment without being filled with hate and rage? She’d never seen one human being treat another in such a way. Naturally, Naoko realized that more –and worse- was happening that minute in The Peak, even admitted to herself that it was distastefully necessary, but this man, this … Kant Ingrams …

  He’d gone too far in his efforts to push Garth to the edge and beyond.

  Going through the Historical Services documents and videos that first time around had fill Naoko with the hope that Morgan the Dead had given her falsified information. The questions, the claims, the implications, all were frankly too impossible to believe, even in a Universe where an Artificial Intelligence ruled most of Mankind and people could travel from one solar system to another in the blink of an eye.

  It was the sort of thing he’d done frequently during her … internship … but after engaging in an intensive search on official sigils and seals used by Trinity, her point of view changed.

  Drastically.

  The most staggering, the most shocking claim in all the files were those concerning Garth’s Decanting! As remarkable as it seemed, the man was thirty thousand years old!

  Thanks to whatever method of cryogenic suspension had been used to store him for thirty long millennia, Garth Nickels was in his thirties … but Naoko found she couldn’t think of any other number than thirty thousand.

  Thirty thousand years! He’d slept through such history!

  What a remarkable man! To have survived a slumber greater than any other recorded in History, to have passed Kant Ingram’s ceaseless interrogation without getting angry, to have pushed through a torturous military career in Special Services, to have developed gravnetic generators, to have made his way here, to Latelyspace, to succeed, thrive, and to still be able to smile and laugh. Through it all, Garth suffered from a persistent case of amnesia preventing him from knowing anything more important than his own name.

  If a powerful connection hadn’t already bound her to Garth, Naoko felt certain that –especially after learning how he’d spent the last ten years- she would’ve fallen in love him anyway.

  In many ways –particularly after seeing proof repeatedly in starkly comprehensive SpecSer footage- Garth typified the sort of behaviors too many young Latelian men prided themselves on. In the course of his duty, Garth had drank and fought and killed his way across hundreds of worlds. In service to the government, that kind of behavior was not only permitted, it was expected.

  Absorbing a decade of service into her mind, Naoko saw something take place over that stretch that filled her with a sorrow so profound it nearly broke her.

  On those earliest missions, never had he taken the life of an innocent. Or a child’s. Or a woman’s, unless directly threatened by overwhelming firepower or absolutely no other choice. He repeatedly went back into fire zones to rescue fallen comrades or to stop fellow infantrymen from succumbing to the evils of war, of which there were many. Those times when an innocent fell as a direct result of his actions, the man suffered in silence, filled with sorrow and remorse.

  The longer his career in Special Services grew, though, the harder he became. Missions locked under impenetrable layers of code and identification requests that would need an AI to hack -missions labeled ‘Goren’, ‘Shoemacher’s Grave’, ‘Tannhauser’s Gate’, and a few others- revealed stark, bitter, brutal changes. Whatever had happened to Garth in those places … he came back quieter, more determined. Angry.

  All too aware that war and conflict changes a person, Naoko watched in terrible awe as the man she felt an inexplicable, overwhelming connection to transform into something … wondrously frightening.

  Wondrous, because of the things he became able to do. Frightening because even as he continued to succeed, continued to transform, it was blatantly obvious he struggled every step of the way against those changes. Day in, day out, battling against dark urges … Naoko shook her head and cursed the Trinity AI.

  Until, finally, sorrowfully, he stopped resisting. Reassignment to Deep Strikes -where he fought alongside impossibly augmented cyborgs dubbed ‘Heavy Elites’- pushed him past the edge. Out there, in the dark, beyond where any sane man would go, Garth Nickels surrendered, however briefly, to the rage.

  It was … horrifying to see a man change so. To be so intimately aware of the nightmares endured, of the pressures withstood, of the choices –none with a ‘good’ outcome either way- needed. Wars on worlds, in systems, millions of light years past The Cordon, against beings beyond description... Naoko shuddered at the gory spectacle of it all. Intelligence side notes gathered after Garth’s involvement in wars deep inside The Cordon labeled him ‘The Specter’, with other teams sometimes using little more than the threat of the black-haired, ice-eyed monster to subdue whole systems.

  She watched Garth crush and kill, sobbing tears sometimes doubling her up in pain. All she could see was the man he’d been at the beginning, the man with the easy smile and the off-color jokes and the … weird … words. She knew from whispered regrets and condemnations to himself on the recordings that he knew what he’d become wasn’t right, that he needed to find a way out, a way back. Even as he rained death and damnation on his enemies, still he railed.

  Then, marooned. Alone, trapped on a planet with no one but himself to talk to for weeks, a change appeared. Not much of one, but enough, and by the time rescue came, he’d decided to request transferal back to regular duty, regular assignment, if at possible nowhere near The Cordon.

  Naoko witnessed the way Garth shrugged off the worst of the nearly inhuman brutality he’d adopted to survive alongside the insane Heavy Elites, but saw how difficult it was to rid himself of the arrogance and the overconfidence that having done things no mere mortal could do produced.

  She witnessed firsthand the depression, the sorrow, the heart-rending nightmares that kept him awake for days, weeks, months. She saw him flail desperately to find purchase on some fresh new grou
nd, scrabbling –unawares- at any chance to redeem himself.

  Naoko watched and wept freely as Garth withdrew further from the good men and women who’d agreed to fight with him as part of Armageddon Troop One. She understood the reasons even if he did not; he saw himself as unworthy of their company, a blight on their good natures.

  He missed their respect, their love, their absolute adoration, their complete and total recognition that their Mercenary Captain was trying to redeem himself and failing at every turn. He struggled; they turned a blind eye to moments when ‘The Specter’ rose out of him.

  By fits and starts, Armageddon Troop One had worked tirelessly to pull their commander out of his personal abyss. It was evident from the footage that they knew they could only help the man so much, and they accepted that in silence.

  Gloriously, finally, freedom. Garth won his release from Special Services after ten difficult, monstrously violent years of service to the Trinity AI. The recordings stopped the moment Garth completed payment to Tynedale/Fujihara.

  Throughout Garth’s career in Special Services, Naoko had seen men and women emulating his behavior, striving to become the best they could be as the man they cherished fell. Even amidst the sickening cruelty that seemed to be a necessary component of carrying out those Deep Strike missions, Naoko had witnessed hitherto sadistic cyborgs and Offworlders stepping back from the worst of their atrocities, as if silently saying ‘we have gone too far, we shall go no further, look at what we have done to the best of us’. They’d been happy to see Garth leave, pleased that he’d discovered in himself a reason to try to undo what’d been done. Garth’s presence had made changes right through every level of Special Services, slowly but surely transforming entire legions of Specters into something more than they’d been.

  His early, easy, friendly manner and his seemingly casual successes had given the layabouts, the washouts, the fools and the criminally minded a reason to change.

  His later, darker, grim and frankly chilling incarnation had thrown into harsh resolution the demon you could become if you lost all hope.

  Garth had transformed Special Services by being the best and the worst a human could be, and, trapped inside his own mind, hemmed in by amnesia, he’d missed that impact.

  While he’d only ever really come into contact with a small number of Specters during his decade-long career, he’d burned himself into the minds of everyone he’d met. Naoko had no doubt that if she could access other Specter recordings, she’d see and hear whispered stories of Garth Nickels, of how to be, of how not to be, of The Specter, of how a man could rise and fall and try to rise again.

  In Latelyspace, countless people were being exposed to Garth Nickels. By now, trillions of men, women and children knew the Offworlder, and after last night’s N4U coverage, trillions more.

  How would he react to the monumental pressure of such focus? For unlike his time in SpecSer, he wouldn’t be able to turn a blind eye to the affects he had on those around him. Owing to the nature of war, it’d been easy enough; rarely had the man come across the same unit more than once or twice during the entire ten-year stint, allowing him the mistake of regarding any changes in those he met again as ‘naturally evolved’.

  An entire system, though? Could Garth ignore the effect he had on trillions of people? Men, women, and children who idolized him, who adored him? Could anyone? That kind of pressure would crack the most unbreakable metals; wear thin the thickest armor plating.

  Naoko nodded, absolutely committed to helping Garth more than ever.

  It wasn’t about surviving The Game any longer, not for Garth.

  It was about helping him rediscover who he was under such an onslaught. She knew he wanted to change simply by the way he tried so very hard to be … normal … around her.

  Naoko blew a noisy, tired breath through puckered lips. Easy enough, she supposed. She wasn’t the sort to let charisma blind her, so keeping Garth grounded would just be a matter of her being there. By using his simple need to be gracious, charming, and ‘regular’ around her to her advantage, Naoko knew she could bring him to a point where he could be that same man when he was off on his own.

  Chad’s Progress and French Fries over Breakfast

  Bolo retched noiselessly and let out a keening whine that hardly sounded human. For a few minutes, he was deliriously –happily- unable to piece together what was going on. He ached to hang in the confusion for the rest of his life.

  It all came back with a vengeance when he saw Chadsik al-Taryin puttering around a few feet away, humming tunelessly to himself: the pain, the torture, the humiliation.

  Around a mouthful of missing teeth, Bolo spoke hoarsely. “I thought we had an agreement.”

  “What?” Chadsik asked absentmindedly from the workbench. His attention was focused almost entirely on a piece of hardware that had once been on the inside of Bolo’s chest. “What agreement, exactly?”

  Bolo tried to concentrate on one spot, but his left eye refused to cooperate. “I help you, I get my money, and I go away and life to fight another day.”

  “I don’t remember saying anything of the sort.” Chadsik prodded the semi-organic lump of machinery with a fingernail. As far as he was concerned, it was shoddy workmanship, but since he’d been rebuilt with foul Offworld science, he was a bit of a techno-snob. “I do remember biding my time, waiting for your return.” He chuckled. “And some … puppetry.” He shook his head, bemused. “The things I do.”

  “But …” Bolo whined. “It’s not fair.”

  Chad swiveled his head around. “Nah, mate, wot’s not fair is expectin’ to get a big bagful of money when you is not doin’ your job. I mean, really. ‘avin’ me sit in a room waitin’ for you, bein’ forced to land in a milit’ry hangar, croakin’ like a bird wot ‘as not been alive for thousands o’ years, not ‘avin’ the vaguest idea of where my target is … really.” Chad stood, clump of organic machinery clutched in his left hand. He stalked over; thrust the wobbly thing under Bolo’s nose. “Does you know wot this is?”

  Thankfully, Bolo was too wracked with pain to see much, so he woefully shook his head.

  “I will tell ya, then, my son.” Chad tossed the biotech over his shoulder. “It’s a bit of machinery, wot I is findin’ inside your body.” He poked one of Bolobo’s exposed ribs. “Right around there, it was. Motherfucker to get out wivvout makin’ a bit of a mess wiv the rest of your internal organs, but I is not a surgeon. I is an assassin.”

  “What the … what the fuck are you talking about?” Bolo asked weakly, his mind preoccupied with trying to find out why he couldn’t move his arms and legs.

  Chad grabbed a handful of Bolo’s sweat and bloodstained hair, yanked the crucified man’s head backwards and started slapping until both eyes were opened and looking in the same direction.

  “You is a cyborg, sonny Jim. Not like me, of course, but enough of one to count. Looks to me like it was some sort of cybernetic integration unit. All sorts of metallic fibers runnin’ up alongside the back o’ your spine and into your noggin, eh? No wonder you was a bit of the ol’ genius on the hacking and whatnot, eh? Eh?”

  “What … does … what does this have to do with any…anything?” Bolo shook his head free of Chadsik’s grasp and let his chin hit his chest. He regretted the small triumph; as his head bounced off his chest, he had an all-too-unwelcome view of the bloodstained floor behind Chad.

  “Truth? Nuffink.” Chad answered honestly. “I just thought you might like to know wot was goin’ on insider ya.”

  The miniaturized Q-Comm in his pocket interrupted him mid-thought, which was upsetting. Since he suspected it was The Man, the assassin stowed his frustration for later.

  It was Jordan Bishop, calling live and direct trillions of light years away. Chad whistled. Unlike Latelian transmitters –which were terrible even when brand new- his was capable of broadcasting and receiving video feeds. Jordan wasn’t looking pleased, but Chad reflected that whatever was weighing heavily on his emplo
yer’s mind wasn’t anything to do with him. He was right on track. He bent his knee in honest supplication. “Allo, guvnor, ‘ow is we doin’ today?”

  “Are you on Hospitalis?” Jordan demanded.

  “That I am, that I am. Landed quite a few hours ago.” Chad winked at Bolo. “Been keepin’ busy, I has.”

  “Is the caveman dead?”

  “I is just sayin’ I is only just landed, Jordie my son.” Chad rolled his eyes at Bolo, hopefully expressing how ridiculous employers could sometimes be. The humor appeared to be lost on poor Bolo, who was crying into his chest cavity. “My contacts on the ground proved to be a little less ‘elpful than advertised.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” Chad pointed the Q-Comm at Bolo’s crucified body, giving Jordan a wonderful panoramic shot of the dying agent’s opened ribcage in the process, “this little bit of dead man is wanted by the feds for crimes against the Regime so I cannot ‘ave him walkin’ around wiv me whilst I craftily stalk my prey. This world is programmed to look for blokes like him, dontcher know. The bim wot you contacted was a stark-raving lunatic who decided she wanted more money. Worst of all, Jordan, she was a drug addict. I is sayin’ I is very disappointed in your ‘irin’ practices. I was forced to show ‘er the error of ‘er ways. I is ‘opin’ in the next life she will be more intelligent when it comes to dealing wiv insane cybermen.”

  Jordan pressed his lips tightly together to avoid shouting. When he was calm, he said, “I was under the impression that you didn’t like to … sully … your work by engaging in side projects.”

  Chad brought the Q-Comm back to his face. “Well, that is the truth, innit?” He licked his lips thoughtfully. He thought it might be a poor idea to mention The Voice and it’s … assistance in both Reywin and Bolobo’s demise. Jordan would neither appreciate nor understand the burden of being saddled with two minds. Besides which, the fact that The Voice was making it’s demands heard through the haze of drugs was … worrisome. It was something that’d never happened before. He flashed a brilliant, toothy grin.