CHADSIK-AL-TARYIN, MASTER ASSASSIN AND BONA FIDE LUNATIC

Satisfied that everything was going well, Jordan Bishop completed his meeting with BishopCo heads in the other systems. Inwardly, Jordan was glad that the talks were over; midway through the lengthy discussion, fifteen vice-presidents had been terminated for their failure to meet projected goals, which was always somewhat … distasteful. Thankfully the graphic display of violence, specifically tailored to exploit the fears and secret terrors of the remaining members, had been more than sufficient to point everyone in the right direction as far as BishopCo was concerned. Jordan was secure in the knowledge that his business maxims would be followed with rigorous, if not religious, fervor for at least a solar year, following which the whole process would be played out again. It was a vicious cycle that propagated itself throughout his mighty empire, and it was acceptable so long as the results were positive. The Conglomerate CEO finished up some relevant paperwork then simply sat there for a moment, enjoying the spectacle of making Spur wait.

The android AI claimed not to feel emotion, but Jordan knew better; one of the Emperor’s greater claims was that Spur’s design would allow the android to one day achieve true awareness, transforming him into the first non-organic, sentient entity. With Trinity’s rules imprisoning Spur inside BishopCo’s Headquarters for more than two thousand years, there was an unbelievable wealth of information, both video and textual, tracking the android’s growth across the millennia. Data files hidden so deep in ancient and forgotten computer systems that not even Spur would think to access them was footage of an AI android vastly different than the one in front of Jordan. So when Jordan sought to irritate the unwanted android, he damn well knew Spur was bothered, immaculate EuroJapanese façade or not.

Jordan grew tired of the android’s immobile patience and motioned it forward. “What is it?”

“Sire, I have received word from Yellow Dog.”

Jordan permitted himself a smile of satisfaction. Under normal circumstances, he would have preferred to avoid dealing with Yellow Dog at all; much like their namesake animal, the EuroJapanese mafia nipped restlessly at his heels, killing employees and worse, stealing cargo. By agreeing to work for him showed that perhaps the so-called Elders –none of them over a hundred years- were beginning so show signs of true wisdom. “Tell them their assistance in this matter will not go unappreciated.”

“Sire.” Spur did not bow, which turned Jordan’s smile into a frown. “They have not heard from Injiri Katainn since they delivered the assignment.”

Jordan had long since become a master at filling Spur’s inordinately sparse delivery with information. “What are you saying, Spur? That Injiri Katainn, a Yellow Dog master, failed to execute the caveman?” Jordan couldn’t believe his ears. The caveman’s removal had come at a steep, non-refundable, price. Spur dipped his head. “It would seem this is the case, though the gentleman I spoke with remains hopeful that Injiri is simply not in a position to make contact.”

“What are the odds of that?” Jordan snapped angrily. The entire affair was rapidly spiraling out of all proportions. Thanks to the caveman, trillions of credits were gone, and he was losing more every day as dozens of planets literally leaped at the chance to be protected by gravnetic shields. To make matters infinitely worse, it seemed to Jordan that the Trinity AI was going out of its way to put him in the poor house by making the transition to the new technology smooth and painless by expending enormous personal resources to speed things along. Every nano that Garth remained alive was a reminder that the entire Universe was against him.

“If we were to contact the OverSecretary or one of the other politicians working to maintain BishopCo’s pick of the crop, we would easily know the truth; anything else I posited would be nothing more than sheer guesswork.”

It was an option, but not one to take idly. Jordan didn’t want to have to rely on the Latelians for anything, not even the killing of a single man. He liked their relationship just the way it was; he paid certain men and women in office a small annual stipend, and he received advance lists of the best and brightest Latelian programmers the system had to offer. Jordan was certain that any one of those people would hasten to do his bidding, possibly even for free, but then they would have a nugget of information that could be used against. Jordan didn’t want to risk being blackmailed by a backwater politician who was afraid of everything Trinity had to offer but not so afraid to contact the AI for a reward.

Jordan closed his eyes for a moment. “Contact … contact Agent Reywin duFresne. I believe she still works for OverSecretary Terrance, and is the sort of person who would welcome some additional funds. The profile I obtained during my last trip to Hospitalis indicates a strong dislike towards Offworlders and a ridiculously entrenched patriotic loyalty to her country. If Garth N’Chalez has not already done so, it would take very little effort to convince a woman like Reywin that he is an extreme threat. If she agrees, make the dossier we have compiled on Garth N’Chalez available.”

Spur bowed. As a machine with perfect recall and a limitless storage capacity, Jordan’s ability to recall the names, allegiances, penchants and weaknesses of thousands –if not hundreds of thousands- of people was a source of continual amazement to the android. In all their years together, Spur did not think his master had forgotten the name of a single person. “As you wish, my lord.”

“It would also be in my best interests if you were to begin a search for another assassin. Preferably someone unassociated with mercenary or criminal organizations. Dealing with them is like dealing with politicians; interminably dull and needlessly risky.””

“Are there any specifics you would like me to focus on, sire?”

“Yes.” Jordan said after a moment. “It would also be simpler if the assassin owns his or her own spaceship. It strikes me that a sort of cottage industry is springing up in the form of people sitting around Q-Tunnels watching who goes in and out, and it would do me no good to have my name attached to an assassin. Beyond that, I want someone who’s capable, Spur. I want this situation resolved, and the sooner the better. Every second this caveman lives is a second of torment for me.. Now go.”

Spur bowed again, leaving. Jordan could not know it, but the requirements laid down by him pointed to a single assassin, but Spur needed to be one hundred percent certain of the man’s reliability before approaching Bishop with the information; Chadsik-al-Taryin was a notoriously successful master assassin, known in a hundred systems, but he was extremely volatile, fundamentally deranged, and on his way down and out. Giving the FrancoBritish assassin a job of such noteworthy attention could bring the failing murderer out of the darkness, but Spur would not risk it if Chad seemed even the tiniest bit flaky.

It was a truism that Chadsik-al-Taryin was a master assassin. Most would argue that were it not for his unstable personality, the heavily modified cyborg would be the assassin. The circles through which Chadsik moved all agreed that the FrancoBrit’s skills were unparalleled, perhaps even legendary in scope; had he not designed a cannon so devious, so powerful, that his target died an entire planet away, the bullet itself taking three long weeks to make it into the man’s skull? Had he not also dared to break into the most guarded Holy Sanctuary of Markoss Frieze, killing a thousand dedicated warrior fanatics to get to the leader himself, only to infect the religious despot with a hideously deforming genetic disease rendering him immune to all medical treatment? It was also true that Chadsik’s list of accomplishments in the assassination game was long and varied, carrying with each the hallmark of a Master working his craft; the cyborg was an artiste who designed a unique death for each and every one of his targets.

And this is what made Chadsik unreliable.

Plagued with the insistence of a hot-tempered artist, Chadsik could no more follow the instructions laid down to him by an employer than he could simply shoot someone with a sniper rifle. Death was a noble thing, and if he was going to be the hand that killed someone, their death was going to mean something; it was going to leave a mark on history’s indelible pages. So when it became apparent that Chad’s adherence to his form outweighed all other demands –such as the death looking like an accident, or that it happened at a certain time, or that it seemed to be done by someone else- he became the man to hire when there was no one else who could do the job.

Chadsik didn’t mind. The people who didn’t want to appreciate his art could go fuck themselves with a plasma torch for all he cared. He was an artist whose Great Work was still on the horizon, and until then everything he did was just filler.

Though he’d been born on the tortured island called Arcade City, Chadsik had long since adopted the underbelly of Zanzibar’s pristine universe home; arguably the largest of all the landmass sized city/states, Zanzibar straddled much of what had, once upon a long time ago, been North America. Though much of the land was poisoned by nuclear war, biochemical attacks, and the destructive force of the Dark Ages, there was a single stretch of land directly beneath the center of that glorious city that remained relatively untouched, and it was called Ground Zero.

Most citizens didn’t even know it existed. Planetary officials denied it was there, and local officers did everything in their power to prevent people from looking for it, but the siren call was too much for some people to ignore. Zanzibar was a place where the rich and powerful could enjoy whatever sybaritic pleasures their minds could imagine, but the flesh dens, smoke parlors, torture chambers and everything else the ‘nobility’ took for granted up above had their humble beginnings three miles down and entire strata of civilization away. Ground Zero was where people fell when they thought they could fall no further. Ground Zero was a world beneath the world, a place where Trinity did not exist. It was a breeding ground of madness, despair and loathing. It was a fiefdom run by lunatics who were sponsored by men and women like Jordan Bishop.

Chadsik-al-Taryin loved every grime-soaked centimeter, every scabrous whore, every drug, and every ounce of human misery that leaked from the pores of the doomed citizens.

Except for the smell, it was almost like Arcade City.

Chadsik sat idly on his hovertrike, smoking his hundred and thirteenth cigarette in a row, concentrating fiercely on a display screen set into the bike’s control panel.

Forty meters away, one of the more ‘upscale’ clubs boomed and rocked and thumped with music loud enough to wake the dead. Some of those dead –hardcore drug addled peasants a fraction above single-celled organisms- milled around outside, their minds so far gone that they could barely remember to breath, let alone what their own names were. To alleviate his boredom, Chad occasionally shot one of them, marking down a number from one to ten on the dirt encrusted fuel tank of his bike. It was his misfortune that most of the zombies that night were on their way to total mindblank; the fuckers just stood there, heads cocked to one side as they tried to figure out where the sounds were coming from. Not one of them offered up a touch shot, making his score abysmally low. If things didn’t start looking up, he’d be forced to move to another location and start the count over.

The screen was relaying a live video feed from the dance club. Earlier in the day, Chad had gone in under the pretense of wanting to kill everyone who had eyes. As they’d fled in panicky droves, he’d taken the time to place a few choicely located cameras so he could catch the gleaming, sweating faces of bastards who liked to look but not touch. Chadsik figured anyone who’d pay to look at a naked woman but not to touch had something seriously wrong with them, and deserved to die.

Chadsik perked up when one Santos Grillo-Basque, aka The Job, sat down at one of the empty tables, grinning nervously and licking his upper lip every three seconds. It was about fucking time. Chad didn’t like perverts, and he absolutely hated perverts who didn’t stick to a tight schedule. He lit a cigarette –one hundred fourteen- with the glowing cherry of the old one and shot the butt across the parking lot. It arced perfectly, beaning a zombie in the back of the neck. The hollow man batted at the back of his head then turned around just in time to get a flechette dart in the eye.

Chadsik hawked a gob of spit onto the sidewalk, peering at the contents when the ferrocrete started sizzling. He was going to have to switch drugs again, which was a considerable pain in the arse. He’d built up such a tolerance to Quadra-19 that he was now taking lethal amounts to get high, and he was pretty sure the poisonous crap he fed into his veins was eating away at his cyborg innards. Reminding himself he was On The Job, Chadsik turned back to the screen to watch The Job’s creepy predilections in action.

Santos grinned feverishly at the fleshy delights parading back and forth on the screen, and Chadsik shivered, repulsed. The assassin knew he was many things –completely mad being one of them- but sexual deviance was something he just couldn’t get on board with. Unless it was done in the course of his Art, in which case, all bets were off. But torturing yourself for no apparent reason was just … mad.

“CHADSIK-AL-TARYIN!” a magnified voice boomed throughout the enclosure, startling the drugged out zombies and pissing the assassin off.

Chad craned his head upwards and saw the idiot/s who’d blown his cover. Moving slowly down one of the few air passages connecting Ground Zero to the bright and shiny world of Zanzibar was a Conglomerate hovercar. Not an unusual appearance in this neck of Ground Zero, given the sort of merchandise available, but shouting out a chap’s name while he was working just wasn’t done. He fished around in a saddlebag, pulled out a small rocket launcher and sent a few rounds upwards. He cursed when the pilot deployed a large amount of chaff, nullifying the idiot sensors on the rockets; the jet-propelled explosives spiraled out of control and slammed into a building three blocks away.

“Wot I’d like to know,” Chadsik demanded loudly as he flipped a switch on his bike, “is wot the bloody fuckin’ ‘ell is goin’ on. Fella’s on the job, ‘e ought to be left alone.”

The hovercar descended another ten meters before exploding in a brilliant red ball of fire. The pilot might have been smart enough to deactivate or jam all the other explosives running up and down the air channel, but nothing in the world could stop a few hundred pounds of thick gelsplosive and archaic radio transmitters. Chadsik prided himself on being thorough, and when he was On the Job, he liked to cover all the bases; it wasn’t the first time a rival or an overeager customer had attempted to blow his current job, and it wouldn’t be the last.

As the smoke cleared and the debris clattered noisily to the ground, a second hovercar lowered itself further.

“Come on, mate.” Chad muttered plaintively around his cigarette. “That just is not fair, it isn’t. Bloody ‘ell.” He hadn’t thought to pack anything more destructive than the rocket launcher, and he’d literally shot his wad with the gelsplosive. The assassin grimaced. He was going to have to wait and see what was going to happen next. It was a grim reality that his commission for killing Santos was right out the fucking window, too.

The bottom of the hovercar resolved itself into a very large video screen depicting Spur’s albino EuroJapanese face.

“Oy, I know you.” Chad shouted upwards at android’s face. “You’re that robot wot’s bin stuck away in the mighty effing Jordan effing Bishop’s giant turd of a building.”

“Chadsik-al-Taryin.” Spur’s lip curled against his will. Some people were so rank, so vile, that even he, an artificial intelligence, could not contain his disgust.

Chad exhaled a noisy plume of smoke. “’s me, you great bloody robotic wanker.”

Spur hesitated. Chadsik-al-Taryin was a far different animal in person than on paper. Hiring him could put Jordan in a difficult position. The eight foot tall assassin was over eighty percent cyborged and not exactly a difficult person to miss. There were also persistent rumors that much of the … man’s … parts were of alien origin, which could cause legal problems with Trinity if Chadsik were to go into Latelyspace. “Oy,” Chad shouted, “if you just dropped in to ‘ave a bit of a gander at me and my ‘andsome face, ‘ow’s about you fuck off and let a fella get back to work?”

Spur made his decision. Other than his clearly insane pathology, Chadsik was one of few assassins who would do what they promised and not brag about it later; he trusted his panache with killing to do word of mouth advertisement for him, and he’d never once failed. “There is something I need you to do.”

“Would this be a job opportunity?” Chad smiled lazily. The second wave of Quadra was kicking in and the world was taking on a decidedly hazy, multicolored fringe. “For you, or for the man?” he asked when the android nodded tersely.

“Jordan Bishop.”

“Ain’t you worried about all these people askin’ questions or sellin’ your boss out?” Chad asked, waggling his hands at the drug zombies and the small crowd outside the dance club. He grinned toothily at Spur’s expression, and howled in laughter when the hovercar flipped over to reveal a battleship’s worth of rockets and laser cannons. The pilot of the vessel took great pains in demolishing everything and everyone in a one block radius, leveling everything higher than a very small dog into charred ashes. “Oy! My target was in there.”

The hovercar flipped over again to reveal Spur’s haughty countenance. “If you had answered your telephone, Chadsik-al-Taryin, none of this would have taken place.”

“I do not answer my phone when I am On the Job.” Chadsik replied arrogantly. He surveyed the damage with a professional’s eye and shrugged. Total effing washout, like he’d thought. “But seein’ as ‘ow I find myself temporarily in need of work, let’s us ‘ave a chit-chat. Only,” he said dubiously, “someplace a little quieter, yeah?”