DAY THREE:

GOD SOLDIERS, ATTACK!

Garth wondered how in the hell any one of the Contestants hoped to win the Contest if they spent most of their nights drinking their damned fool heads off and getting into unsanctioned fights with each other. As a man who needed very little sleep, he was accustomed to having the wee hours of the morning to himself, time that he spent in deep contemplation of the navel or whatever happened to be on television. Unfortunately for him, all of the stuff on the television at three AM on Hospitalis was a total regurgitation of the stuff they aired during the day, and he already knew what his navel looked like, which had left him with ample time to learn everything he could about the gun he’d stolen from the corpse. And, of course, listening to the screams and howls and battle cries of five hundred or so drunken loons cavorting through the Hotel trying to kill their enemies.

Thankfully the protean system within the Hotel was one of the only things working properly; the air conditioning problem in the main lobby had been replaced with a heating conduit problem, and if you stood still for more than a minute, you started cooking.

In short order, Garth learned the handgun –oversized even for his larger-than-average hand span- was classified as an Obenstrech .60 caliber automatic machine pistol. The ‘Stretch-gun’, as it was more commonly known, was a favorite for street thugs because they were easy to come by. For over four hundred years, they’d been the official sidearm for God army infantrymen. Less than fifteen years ago the handgun had been decommissioned in favor of high density energy weapons. Enterprising soldiers in charge of destroying the weapons had made themselves a fast buck by selling off entire caravans of the weapon to the highest bidder before getting caught in an internal investigation. There was a glut of Stretch guns throughout Latelyspace.

Footage of what Latelians did to traitors was interesting, in a Marquis de Sade kind of way.

His Stretch gun had been remodeled to make it work with a silencer –itself a remarkable piece of high-tech sound-baffling in that it was a mere two and a half inches long-, which made its previous owner something more than an average thug out to riddle some poor schmoe full of holes: only top notch thugs and gangsters had the dollars to spring for silencers.

Just why someone with that kind of juice wanted him dead after less than 24 hours on the planet was a mystery that needed solving, but research into the logo engraved onto the credit chips hadn’t yielded any usable results, other than that it belonged to ‘a gang’. If he wanted to get any further than that, Garth suspected he was going to need Huey’s help to distil thousands of hours of data into just a few lines; the Latelian network and file-storage protocols were bizarre even by his phenomenally lazy standards.

Other than the particulars of the Stretch –who made it, why, the methods of making it, interesting side notes- it developed that any citizen caught with one of the guns, even in a collector’s box, was guaranteed a one-way ticket to some place called ‘The Peak’. Garth guessed it wasn’t a fine dining establishment.

Lucky for him, though, anyone could own the bullets for the gun. At first he was worried that someone calling up a gun store and asking for a few dozen cases of .60 cal shells would attract attention, but in the course of looking for a local distributor Garth discovered that there were a number of groups and clubs who went out of their way to get hold of new and exciting rounds. He could order up the boxes as easy as one two three and if anyone questioned him, he’d say he was a collector. Garth entered a request with a place called ‘Sa John’s Bullet Emporium’ for a few boxes and headed down for a quick breakfast getting his day started.

As soon as he got into the banquet hall, Garth was immediately accosted by one of the handlers. Since the debacle the day before, the Contest promoters had decided it was in their best interests to assign one handler per person.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!”

Garth, mouth full of cheese Danish, turned to look at the man shouting to get his attention. He was down earlier than most of the other Contestants, so the banquet hall was mercifully quiet. A few of the other guys he’d made eye contact with the day before were eating and talking quietly amongst themselves. Serious competitors, unlike the gomers sleeping off their alcohol-induced comas. “Yeah?”

“You Garth N’Chalez?”

Swallowing noisily, Garth reached out and grabbed hold of the man’s proteus bearing forearm. He twisted until he could see the little screen. He nodded at the image. “Sure looks like me.” He let the handler go. One of the men at a far table had seen the move and was nudging his buddies to pay attention.

Undaunted, Sa Robret Chavez bulled his chin forward. He wasn’t afraid of any Offworlder, no matter how dirty and savage. “There is some information missing from your registration files, and I need to ask you some questions.”

Piling his plate full of sausage, egg, bacon, and something that looked a lot like cornbread, Garth nodded to an empty seat. Balancing the full plate with one hand, he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down. His handler sat down opposite him. “Who’re you?” he asked, attacking his plate with gusto.

“Robret Chavez. I work for the Contest.” Robret kept his hands folded on the table; getting one of his fingers near the blur of eating utensils, teeth and food was likely to result in a trip to the hospital. He’d never seen someone eat that way in his entire life, and he had a brother in the God army.

“Don’t look Latelian to me.” Garth muttered around some cornbread.

“I … that’s none of your business.” Robret replied hotly.

“So what,” Garth asked after taking a good, long, thoughtful sip of coffee, “makes you think anything about me is your business?”

“If you expect to fight in the Contest, your records need to be complete.” Robret looked over his shoulder at the other men in the room. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought they were paying him and Garth more attention than was warranted. As a matter of fact, it looked like they were making bets.

“Wait here.” Garth got up and loaded himself another plate, this time grabbing a double-handful of bacon. Fuck the other Contestants. He sat back down and repressed a smile as he saw how unhappy Robret Chavez was getting. “Why don’t you tell me what’s missing and I’ll decide if I want to fill in the blanks.”

Frowning fussily but seeing there was going to be no easy resolution, Robret conceded defeat. “Each of the Contestants, even you Offworlders, needs to have a press packet drawn up for reporters and journalists. This is to prevent you from answering the same questions over and over again. This information is also used to generate collectible memorabilia for Contest enthusiasts.”

“I get any money from the sale of those items?” Garth flashed a wink at the assembled Contestants. One or two were actually taking notes now, on how to deal with their own handlers, who were looking on in astonishment.

“Um, no.” Robret couldn’t believe the audacity of the man. It was an honor to fight in the Contest. The fact that the horrible Offworlders had even been given a chance to open the Box if they were the last man standing was incredible. Money shouldn’t even be an issue.

“Then why should I care if the information I gave you is incomplete?” Garth belched loudly. He gave Robret a sloppy grin. “Nothing burps better’n bacon.”

“Sa,” Robret felt his cheeks turn red, “if your life is in danger in the ring, your popularity with the viewers could very well save it. The more in-depth your press kit is, the more detailed your collectibles, the more likely it is people will vote to let you live.”

“Oh.” Garth said, pretending that he’d never even considered that as a possibility. “Well. What are you missing?”

“Everything from before five and a half years ago seems to be missing.” Robret said, heaving a sigh of relief. “And large portions of those five years seem to be blacked out.”

“Sucks to be you, pal.” Garth shrugged. He slopped some eggs onto a piece of cornbread and shoved the resulting pile into his mouth. “Wasn’t around five years ago. Other stuff’s classified.”

Robret sat there, watching the Offworlder stuff his face with food, a look of utter incomprehension on his own. It simply wasn’t in him to understand a man who had no interest at all in putting his best foot forward. Every other Contestant in the Hotel, and those currently being shipped in, had willingly told everything they could about themselves, sometimes lying so badly about past exploits that they’d actually started laughing. It didn’t matter, just as long as the promoters were given something to tell the gameheads. “But …”

“Look,” Garth smiled easily, “if it makes it any easier for you, just make some shit up. I talked with some guy named Sa Miguel Hertzog at the registration office about all this, and he said it’s really not necessary for my press kit or whatever to be truthful.” Actually, it’d taken a modest bribe to convince Miguel of this, but that was beside the point. After killing four members of a local gang, he didn’t want anyone knowing his service record. Someone in office would probably take it the wrong way.

“I can’t do that.” Robret said indignantly, stiffening up. “It would be wrong.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Garth snapped, his patience worn thin. “I was raised by rabid wolf-men on 166-Kierny-12 in the Portsmouth System. Living on nothing but roots, tubers, and the occasional stupid backpacker who got lost in the woods, I eventually learned how to speak by listening to a malfunctioning hooker-bot. I killed a park ranger, got thrown in jail. While there I learned how to knit. I like boats, and fluffy kitties.”

Robret nodded, giving in. After thinking about it, the Contest handler realized it really didn’t matter what was said about the Offworld Contestants, so long as no one said anything different. He gathered from Garth’s attitude that anything would go over just fine with him. His primary concern was being left alone. Knowledge that he was going to have to talk more with Garth made Robret sincerely regret his decision to move from Marketing into Handling. He was a much better designer. “I have your itinerary for the day.”

Garth pushed his plate away with a clatter of cutlery. “Again, sucks to be you. I read over the requirements on the way back from registering yesterday, and it doesn’t say anywhere in there that I’ve got to follow the whole thing. I get four hours a day alone time. I’ve got shit to do this morning. I’ll be at this weigh-in thingie that’s going on later in the day, and then it’s me, on the couch, eating and drinking and occasionally farting. And if you don’t like it, you can try and stop me.”

Robret, who’d heard about Garth’s little display of physical prowess from one of the other handlers, was in no mood to risk his life over something that was intended to do nothing more than keep the Offworlders out of trouble. If Garth N’Chalez wanted to roam the streets inciting good, honest, hard-working Latelians into a riot, then so be it. If everything worked out well, Garth would get killed by a rampaging mob and he could go back to Marketing.

Si Mijomi leaped out at Garth as strolled casually out of the banquet room. He was smug with satisfaction. “What do you want, Si Mijomi?”

The terribly thin woman glared daggers at him, and actually drew her lips back in a snarl when she caught sight of his proteus. She remembered the words of warning from Management, though, and bit back her scathing words. “You are not allowed to have things delivered here.” She hissed.

“Why not?” Garth asked, continuing on towards the front doors. He couldn’t believe how hot it was in the lobby. The few plants lining the Front Desk had wilted away into nothingness, and the carpet was actually starting to grow. He expected if the problem wasn’t fixed by the time he got back, most of the Contestants would be cooked alive. At least then Mijomi could have something to eat.

“You just aren’t.” Anticipating dissent, Mijomi had prepared a Sheet containing Management’s reasons why not. She thrust it into his hands. “You are lucky Hakimi’s called to double-check the address, Offworlder. I would have just thrown the network into the street.”

“Something tells me you wouldn’t be terribly broken up about that.” Garth loaded the Sheet’s info onto his proteus and tossed the useless wafer back to Mijomi. “Forewarned is forearmed, Si Mijomi. I’ll take care of the matter.”

“See that you do, Offworlder.” Mijomi’s face split into a caricature of a smile, and she stormed back to her perch at the Front Desk.

“Egads.” Garth shuddered. Mijomi was a horrible woman.

Outside, while he waited for the cab driver from the day before to pick him up as they’d agreed, Garth contacted Hakimi’s and asked them if they’d hold onto the main system for him until he could find someplace to store the thing. His idea to get the main system past Port security was still in the planning stages, and he needed some place safe to examine the innards without drawing suspicion. When Sa Turuin said that it would be no problem, Garth promised the flighty salesman one more time that he’d call back the moment he figured out how to program a proteus in 3D.

Then he called Bullet Emporium and asked them to put the order on hold until he got back in touch with them later on that day. Sa John didn’t look too pleased at having to do that, but once Garth promised to buy a couple cartridges of something called ‘.60 cal splitshot’, he relented.

Five minutes later, Jimmish Dorn rolled up in his taxicab and Garth hopped in. “Heya, Jimmy.”

Jimmy looked at his fare through the rearview mirror. For an Offworlder, Jimmy supposed the guy was all right. He was a good tipper and didn’t act like he was better than anyone else. More importantly, he’d given him a good solid tip on who to bet on during the Contest. “Not too bad, Sa Garth.”

“You know where we’re headed?” Garth booted up a sketch program and started doodling out the gang logo he’d memorized.

“Oh yeah, sure.” Jimmy merged onto the freeway that would take them directly to the space port. Every time he came out this way, the cabbie was amazed at how much traffic there was. It was like an epidemic. “’s one of my regular runs.”

“Get into any trouble with your boss over me?” Garth wanted to avoid getting Jimmy into problems. The cabbie was friendly, and willing to put up with all the stupid questions an evil Offworlder had, which was a rare commodity as far as Garth could tell; working under the assumption that the government was spying on him, Garth wanted to avoid getting Jimmy into trouble.

“Sa Stephan don’t care who I pick up so long as I log the fare.” Jimmy cut a delivery truck off before the fool could cut him off. “It’s not unheard of for cabbies to drive one person around all day, especially, you know, around Central.”

“Just so long as everything’s cool.” Garth finished up the logo sketch. “Hey, Jimmy … your prote set up to receive data?”

“Hold on a sec.” Jimmy propped his knees up against the steering wheel, tapped a few commands into his well-worn proteus, then took control with his hands again. “Go ahead. What you sending me?”

“A logo I saw yesterday.” Garth sent the small picture off and settled back into the seat. For some reason, he found the rush and roar of traffic very relaxing, and he started to daydream about what was in the ship.

“Oh yeah,” Jimmy said with a laugh, jerking Garth out of his reverie, “I know those guys. Gang name of The Port Side Boys. Big-time, from what I hear. One of the other cabbies who drives this area told me they tried to shake him down a couple months ago.”

“Any idea what they’re into?”

“They bothering you or something?” Jimmy tried to gauge Garth’s reaction, and failed miserably.

“No. Saw their logo, got curious. Wanna make sure if I do run into ‘em, I know what to expect.”

Jimmy nodded. It made a lot of sense, seeing as how Garth was an Offworlder fighting in the Contest. If anyone was going to attract the attention of those guys, it’d be someone who wasn’t really all that welcome in the first place. And a rich guy like Garth was an even better target. Jimmy didn’t know how rich Garth was, but he was getting a thousand dollars an hour to drive the guy around, so he figured rich enough to get the Portsiders’ attention.

Garth waited patiently while the Security Officer, this time a man twice as big as any Latelian he’d seen so far, went through the motions of frisking him and checking him for illegal substances and evil intentions. It was all an act, because Garth had already done his due diligence by contacting Port Authority to warn them he was coming; the avatars running the interface had informed him that as a precautionary measure, Meadowlark Lemon was now under camera surveillance, at no extra cost. The supposedly non-sentient Port avatars had also been very succinct, in their warnings about any perceived criminal activities; if they didn’t like what they saw, the spaceship would be immediately fried and he would be thrown into the deepest, darkest cell on the planet. Being manhandled by a guy with hands big enough to wrap his fingers around a basketball was very uncomfortable. Garth was very happy to be let go, and suggested that the next time the guard wanted a good time, dinner and dancing should be involved.

Meadowlark Lemon was still all by its lonesome on the far end of the landing docks, surrounded by an additional ring of anti-AI devices and a dozen glaringly obvious cameras. The presence of an AI on the planet was making someone very nervous. So nervous, in fact, that it was actually kind of funny. Whoever the mystery worrier was, they would never know they were wasting resources and sleepless nights; because Huey was now officially a rogue AI, he would do whatever it took keep his inorganic ass alive and functioning, even if it meant putting up with stupid rules and regulations.

Garth waited for the security systems clamped on the doors to cycle open, then climbed in.

“Where in the hell have you been?” Huey demanded the moment Garth was in and the doors were closed.

“I had some things to do, little buddy.” Garth couldn’t believe he’d spent almost a month in the little ship. He certainly didn’t miss the patina of stink that being cooped up in tight spaces gave birth to; even if it was his own odor, it wasn’t pleasant. He was beginning to understand why the previous owner had spent so much time having sex with anything that moved.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Huey demanded. “Five minutes after you left, they wheeled in these gigantic screens and started showing me all kinds of television shows on how great life is without artificial intelligence. When they got bored of that, they started trying to trick me into sticking my head out. They opened up data channels all over the place. They pretended to be you, calling for help. Day and night, boss, day and night.”

“You seem okay.” Garth offered, walking through the ship, looking at the deck plates and bulkheads. He opened one of the access panels for the ridiculously small ‘engineering’ section of the ship and began poking through various readouts, his vague plan to help Huey slowly taking shape.

“Yeah, only because I’m about a million times smarter than these guys.” Huey retorted scathingly. “Never seen such bad acting in my entire life.”

“Tell me about it.” Garth took some snapshots with his proteus of the various readings for later examination then made his way aft, towards the engines. For a ship that had cost him more than four hundred thousand credits, Garth sill had major reservations about being inside for any length of time; the design of the Meadowlark Lemon was not one he had any good feelings about. The furthest point from the operations center of the ship was the bedroom where the previous owner had engaged in any number of carnal violations on helpless men, women and animals. On the other side of those walls –triply thick and guaranteed to keep radiation and other deadly emissions away- were the engines, formally identified as Roussard-Myiol fusion reaction drives. Informally, they were one of the most dangerous and explosion-prone drives in existence. The slightest imbalance in the fuel cell matrixes or in the combination chambers and the whole damned thing would go up like the Fourth of July. The fact that the engines needed constant monitoring was presumably why the last owner had decided to buy Hubert the Passionately Lame AI; Lord knew Garth didn’t have the patience to adjust the flow every twenty minutes, so there was no way in hell a sybaritic hump-freak could.

Separating engines from sleeping quarters was six feet of solid metal specifically designed to absorb, redirect and otherwise diminish the risk of lethal doses of radiation. For reasons never explained by Gary the salesman, the ship didn’t possess the software or the scanners required to prove or disprove whether or not the engines, which were about seventy years old and in dire need of maintenance, leaked radioactive materials. Convinced of his own immortality after the seven different types of hell he’d gone through working for Special Forces, Garth had nevertheless been uncomfortable testing his theoretical indestructibility out with the engines; the few times he had slept, he’d dozed fitfully in the pilot’s chair, feet propped up on the consoles.

“What’re you looking for?” Huey asked warily. The thoughtful, vaguely deceitful look in Garth’s eye was one that the AI would never forget. The last time his owner had gotten that shifty expression on his face, he’d been viciously assaulted and reprogrammed. It was therefore logical and eminently practical to assume the shifty-eyed, devious countenance would always mean trouble.

“Hm?” Garth planted an ear against one of the thick bulkheads and rapped his knuckles loudly. “Working on an idea to give you some freedom.”

“Like?”

Garth made a notation on his proteus. “Too soon to tell yet.” He walked back to the flight cabin and sat down. All of the monitors showed different sections of his personnel records and mission debriefs. “What’s going on in here?”

“Since,” Huey began tightly, “I am going to be locked up in here for months, I decided I’d take the time to learn more about the maniac who owns me. To, you know, get a feel for the kind of danger and lunacy I’m likely to be involved with. Which, after going through your mission files, seems to involve a hell of a lot of explosions and getting shot at.”

“And what have you discovered?” Garth activated one of the keyboards and started looking for the blueprints to Meadowlark Lemon. They came up immediately, and to his immense satisfaction, he learned right off the bat that most of the interior stress-bearing struts that shored up the vessel were independent of one another. If the ship were to experience, say, a collision with another vessel or a meteorite of a specific size, the bulwarks under the deck plates and closest to the point of impact would absorb the majority of the kinetic transference before any others were affected. The central portion of the ship, that path directly from the sleeping quarters to the ‘flight deck’ would also be very well protected during such an occurrence; the foamed metal superstructure of Meadowlark Lemon was thick enough to prevent any collisions of a ‘natural’ origin from breaching the hull. As the comm jockey from Smash All Infidels had so rightly pointed out, the armor simply wasn’t rated to protect the occupants from missiles, lasers, or other types of offensive weaponry.

The super good news was that the hull of the ship was durable inside as well as outside; any explosion or similar detonation inside the walls could be contained, if things were done … properly. The appearance of the damage sustained would seem to be more catastrophic than it really was, and if someone were to assist that destruction by preparing a specific path for it to follow, it would seem a thousand times worse.

“I think your records are incomplete.”

“Why’s that?” Garth asked, typing some equations into his proteus. So long as he kept the screen and the miniature keyboard away from any of Huey’s cameras, he’d be able to keep the AI in the dark until the last minute. His plan was gaining wings now, but there was always the possibility that Huey wouldn’t agree. Giving the rogue machine mind any hints about what he was planning before he was certain it would work would only give Huey more time to think up reasons not to do it, which wasn’t an option. There was so much that was going wrong with Hospitalis’ society that Garth knew he couldn’t do it on his own. He needed something or someone intelligent enough to run the op with him, and unless he could find a Latelian willing to possibly destroy the one thing that’d kept Latelian civilization from self-destructing thousands of years ago, Huey was it.

“Your medical records are missing.”

It’d been bound to happen sooner or later. Garth stopped his calculations and leaned back in his chair, cupping his head with his fingers interlaced at the neck. “How much do you know about where I came from before I joined Special Forces?”

“Well…” Huey gave a mental shrug. “Attached with your service records were some documents that were sealed and accessible only by Trinity personnel. It wasn’t difficult to defeat the security passwords, especially with me being rogue and all.”

Garth thought he heard a bit of braggadocio in Huey’s voice, but let it pass. “So you know that I was found in a spaceship ten thousand years older than the first recorded manned flight to Pluto.”

“I only know what the documents say, boss, and they do say that, yes.” Huey started loading the illegally obtained files onto the monitors for Garth to look at. He was especially excited by the assumption that the ship was made from alloys or metals stronger than anything in existence today, and by the possibility of a new form of energized fields that stopped time and made things invisible. “Is all of this true?”

The data was very precise and ordered, and completely lacking anything resembling bias. For all of his reprehensible actions, Kant Ingrams had compiled his report with a jeweler’s precision. “If you read through the entire thing, then you know that I’ve got amnesia.”

“Yeah, a freakishly bizarre, inexplicable form of memory loss that kept you from remembering even the simplest thing about home but didn’t prevent you from turning the science of gravity technology upside down or from hacking a supposedly impossible to hack AI, not once, but twice. Oh yeah, and it seems to be fading, boss.” Huey said exuberantly. “Lots of people’d miss it, even if they did have access to all of these effing files, but I got nothing but time on my hands, and I have to say it looks like you’re slowly coming to. Then, there’s the holorecordings of your ship. I compared them to the Box, and they’re really, really similar, so you’re not wrong about that, either.”

Garth held up a hand. “I think we’re getting sidetracked here. You already know why I’m on Hospitalis. You wanted to know about my missing medical records”

“Well, yes, but …”

“There are no medical files.” Garth interrupted Huey again. “I was never wounded on the field.”

Huey re-examined the video footage he’d already digested, this time paying particular attention to those moments where Garth had fallen under hostile fire or had been in dangerous situations. “I haven’t looked at all the field recordings yet, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt.”

“You can do all that later on. All you’ll find is that I’m not lying. I was never hurt.”

“Okay,” Huey said, willing to concede the point until he had an opportunity to do exactly that, “but I do have video footage of you keeping up with the rest of your team during forced marches. I do have footage of you lifting an armored vehicle by yourself. And other things like that. Before you interrupt me, I have gone over the detailed medical examinations Kant performed on you, and I know his conclusions. He filed a report with the Trinity government claiming that you and the others had undergone some kind of physical gene therapy in the 24^th century that might have been a precursor to the battle augmentations in use today. He also said that, in his estimation, whatever genetic modifications you had done to you weren’t anywhere near the efficacy of even level one body modification. The limited reports from Forces medical personnel indicates that your physical condition was very different from when you awoke, and that, in their estimation, you were –at that time- undergoing some kind of rapid physical mutation. They couldn’t prove it because of that thing you did to them, but they totally thought you were somehow managing to upgrade yourself genetically. From what I can tell on these tapes, your other team members, the heavy infantrymen especially, had some serious work done. And yet you actually managed to outlift them by at least ten thousand kilos on more than one occasion. Basically, I wanna know what the fuck you are.”

Garth made a mental note. When he got finished with Hospitalis and the Box, he was going to have to find a way to get rid of all the copies of those battlefield recordings. He’d never been particularly thrilled with the 24-7 recordings to begin with, but he’d never once been in a position to prevent them from being taken; even his solo missions, where he’d gone undercover, had been recorded to protect Trinity. It was a horrible breach of personal security, and as he saw with Huey’s reaction, it did him absolutely no good. One or two or even a dozen people might miss the fact that he’d never opted for the body modifications the other Special Forces operatives took, but sooner or later someone would notice exactly the same things Huey had. The only thing he had going for him was that the doctors on 9-Nova would keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. “I don’t really know, Huey.”

“How can you not know what you are?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m human, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He felt human, looked human, had dreams that human beings had, and for all intents and purposes, he came from a point in human history where the first interactions with alien races were still hundreds of years off. There was a possibility he was a clone, or an engineered being like Kant thought, but it didn’t diminish the fact that he felt human. “I mean, I am human. I know it.”

“So what about these supposedly useless body modifications Kant Ingrams found evidence of, and you’re mystery strength?” Huey demanded. “What about them?”

“Only thing I can say is maybe his equipment wasn’t good enough to detect the subtleties of the work.” The first time he’d done something that should have been impossible without the heavy-duty body modification that was standard requirement for Special Forces field duty, he’d almost lost a leg by freaking out. But others had seen it happen, and had accepted it without reservation. No one in the field cared one way or the other how something was done, just so long as it got done

Later, when other … symptoms … of his inexplicable talents began manifesting themselves Garth had found himself in the unenviable position of being ‘volunteered’ for point man on every ground assault. In addition to stronger than normal strength and all the requisite modifiers that came with it, Garth had some kind of sixth sense when it came to danger; even the slightest subconscious hint of danger made it impossible to relax or think about anything other than discovering the source of his unease. During one of his earliest missions, he’d hunted through an entire village to stop the tingle along his spine, eventually locating and disarming a bomb large enough to turn ten square miles of real estate into smoking glass and carbon ash

Garth N’Chalez knew he was a human being, but he didn’t know what kind of human being.

Huey read Kant’s notes, reread the files pertaining to Tynedale/Fujihara’s initial scans of Pluto. The procedures used by T/F to plumb the depths of Pluto’s body were standard and had been in practice for hundreds of years, the machines demilitarized deep-space scanners originally used to hunt for pirates very skilled at escaping detection. The graphs and reproductions of the inner planet were high-definition, and showed no sign of a ship anywhere. And yet there it had been, and here Garth was. “All right, assuming that this is true, you have any idea what your upper limits are? I mean, pretending for the time being that the same level of technology that made your ship invisible and let fifteen people sleep unharmed through ten thousand years went into your implants or augments or whatever they are.”

“Truthfully, I don’t know.” The video footage Huey was talking about, where he’d picked up an armored car and turned it upside was the last time he’d ever done something like that, but he still felt the power of that moment coiled under his skin, waiting to be unleashed.

“All right. So you’re freakishly strong and ten thousand years old and have never been hurt or sick a day in your life.” Huey said, trying to lighten the mood. “But what have you done for me lately?”

Garth stifled a laugh. He looked at the output his proteus was providing based on his first series of equations and he liked what he saw. He’d need Huey’s help to iron out some of the more complex portions of the plan, but he was certain it was going to work. As long as Huey climbed on board. “I have a plan, but it’s going to take a few more tracks to lay down. Before I tell you, you’ve gotta promise to listen with an open mind and understand that this is the kind of thing I used to do for a living.”

It’d taken a surprisingly small amount of coercion on Garth’s part to get Huey on board with his idea. Leaving Huey to crunch the numbers to work up a far more precise plan of attack gave Garth the opportunity to get on with the rest of his day; there was less than two hours left before he had to be at the weigh-in at some location in Central City. Garth wasn’t looking forward to it because the press was going to be there. He was going to be photographed about a zillion times, and he was undoubtedly going to be expected to speak. His name and his face was going to be plastered all over the media channels, not just on Hospitalis, but throughout the entire system, and the goddamn press kits and collectibles the gameheads were going to buy would put his TV-Q at an unacceptable saturation rate. Unless he could get Huey out of his imprisonment and into a location where he could help him with surveillance, doing anything covert was going to be absolutely impossible.

Jimmy pulled the cab up outside the port. When Garth climbed into the back seat, he pulled away quickly and headed off towards Central. “Sa Garth, I did all of the things you wanted, but …”

“You feel uncomfortable.” Garth nodded understandingly, catching and holding Jimmy’s eye in the mirror. “I don’t blame you.”

“I mean, industrial strength adhesive tape, a hundred meters of black nylon rope, a thousand titanium climbing pitons? Four hundred meters of duronium wiring? What’s all this for?” Jimmy took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “You’re not asking me to do anything illegal, are you?”

“Not at all.” Garth replied casually. “You were outside the Hotel, you saw all the guys there. All of them are my competition.”

“I mean, if all you’re doing is buying stuff to sorta, you know, take some of those guys out of the running, that’s one thing, but I gotta tell you, sa, the person I bought this stuff from gave me a funny look.”

“That’s because he was trying to figure out what in the world someone could use all of it for in connection with each other. Haven’t you ever gone into a grocery store and bought all the weird little items you forget to pick up on a regular trip? Like toothpaste and underwear and, oh, I dunno, a steak? Same look, I bet.”

Jimmy thought about that for a long while, driving moodily along the freeway. As a gamehead, he wanted to have more information than the next guy, and had stooped to some pretty interesting lows in order to get the upper hand on betting. He didn’t know a person who wouldn’t. “You gonna kill some of those guys?”

Garth shrugged. “Would it bother you?”

The cabbie burst out laughing. “Not really, no.” He smiled, conscience eased. “I got that storage room you wanted, too. Big enough for you to train in, just like you asked. I had to put my name on the lease, but you’re listed as a person who can go in and out, so if you’re gonna kill anybody, don’t do it there. I put all the stuff you asked for in there before coming to pick you up. Here’s the info.”

“Awesome.” Garth relaxed as the data entered his proteus. For a minute there he’d been certain Jimmy was going to go the other way on him, which would have been a shame.

“You really own your own spaceship?” Jimmy asked after a few more minutes of silent driving.

“If you can call it one.” Garth shook his head unhappily. “It’s a hunk of junk, and the AI is going crazy.”

“You got an AI on that thing?” Jimmy couldn’t even imagine what it was like to own an AI. Some of the new shows on television were comedies set in Trinityspace, but he doubted a real artificial intelligence was as, well, as stupid.

“Sure do.” Garth laughed, and leaned forward on the seat. “You wanna hear something funny? Your government is trying to drive it crazy so it commits suicide or some crazy damned thing. Isn’t that a laugh?”

Jimmy did indeed think that was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard. “Is it working?”

“I really think it is. Tried to fire the engines while I was inside.”

“Get out!” Jimmy looked sidelong at Garth, who was the picture of deadly serious dismay. “What happened?”

“I managed to stop it in time, but I gotta tell you, Jimmy, I for sure think that son of a bitch is going to try and kill himself any day now.” Garth shook his head. “I’d hate to lose that ship, you know? I spent a lot of money on it. And I’m pretty sure the Chairwoman’d be pissed if the Space Port blew up.”

“Well sure.” Jimmy owned his cab, and he knew just how he’d feel if something happened to it. Losing the cab would be like losing a part of the family. And when his wife found out, he’d probably lose his life as well. “Anything you can do?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s an AI, right? Nothing can stop an AI from going crazy and trying to kill stuff, you know what I mean?” Garth snapped his fingers. “I know what I could do, though!”

“Yeah?”

“Look, my ship’s a big one. It’s crappy, sure, but it’s got some pretty big-ass engines on there that’ll cause a lot of damage if the ship blows up. I managed to stop the fucking thing today, but only because I got there in time.”

“How big are the engines?” Jimmy asked, worried.

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. Big enough to push a ship through space. Big enough to maybe blow up part of the space port.”

“You got to tell the government!”

“Yeah, I should.” Garth sat back down, pretending to mull the idea over. He rolled his head on the head rest, obviously very unhappy. “Only thing is, they’d prolly make me leave before I even get to start the Contest.”

Jimmy felt a wave of depression sweep over him when he realized Garth was right; he was a stand-up sort of person, but he was still an Offworlder. Jimmy really didn’t care one way or the other if Garth came from Trinity or if he was an alien in disguise. What mattered was that he’d already confided in his horrible wife that he had the inside track on the man to win the Offworld portion of the Contest. He’d managed to convince her to promise she’d put some of her own personal money on the wagers. By now, the word had probably spread to the rest of her extended family, and some of those guys weren’t the sorts of people you wanted mad. If Garth went to anyone in the government, they’d throw him out of the system so fast it wouldn’t even be funny. “What were you thinking you could do?”

“If I could only get onto the space port without anyone knowing about it, I bet I could really fix that ship so it won’t blow up at all. I’d of done it today, but they’re suspicious about me enough as it is. If they saw me monkeying around, I’d for sure get kicked out of Lately. I’d need a lot of metal, some cutting and welding tools, and enough time to make the adjustments.”

Jimmy sighed. “I might know some people who could help you out with that, sa. They’re pretty rough people, though.” His wife’s brothers. Jimmy shuddered. They were more than rough, but he was also very certain that Vernita had talked to them about Garth N’Chalez. He’d rather run the risk of being involved with an illegal activity and get away with it than have to explain to them why their sure thing was being deported.

Garth leaned towards Jimmy. “All I know is, Jimmy, that I want to fight in the Contest, and if that ship blows up or starts causing problems, it won’t happen. How long do you think this’ll take to set up?”

“These guys are going to want to meet you before they decide to do anything, Garth. A couple of days after that, probably. You’ll have to pay them.”

“I’d be suspicious if I didn’t.” Garth clapped the cabbie on the back. “You’re a good man, Jimmish. When this is all over, you’re going to be so rich you’ll never have to drive a cab again.” Satisfied that he’d managed to pull the wool over Jimmy’s eyes without too much trouble, Garth leaned back in the cab and set about enjoying the ride.

Jimmy, who was at heart a very unimaginative man, frowned at Garth’s prediction. “What would I do without my hack?”

Garth was tired and irritable, but he couldn’t rest. The weigh-in had been an utter catastrophe from the word ‘go’. For reasons that he couldn’t personally understand, the promoters for the system-wide event had opted to do the whole thing outside. For the first twenty minutes, things had gone smoothly, with the suave and well-toned announcer whipping the resulting crowd of reporters and gawkers into a respectable frenzy of interest. It was, after all, a show, and if they didn’t get enough viewers from the beginning then there was little or no hope that the Offworld collectibles would move.

And then a riot had started.

Hundreds, possibly as many as a thousand ‘civilians’, had started trying to push their way past the sloppily built barricades to get at the Offworlders. Since no one could have possibly predicted that the normally peaceful Latelians –their dislike for many of the Chairwoman’s policies notwithstanding- would go off the wall like that, the police presence had been appropriate to what should have been a non-issue. The cops, a token presence to satisfy legal requirements, were buried in the first wave.

Reacting decisively, Chairwoman Doans released the hounds. Or in her case, God soldiers.

Garth had never seen anything like a God soldier in his entire tour of duty for Special Forces, and he’d seen things in the field that still made his hair stand on end and his skin crawl when he stopped to think about it. From his vantage point safely behind a shatter-proof wall dropped into place seconds before the soldiers had made their official presence known, Garth had watched the infantry mow through the crowd with absolute disregard for human life. There were no tactics displayed during those first initial moments because there hadn’t needed to be any; relying on their massive size and frightening appearance, the God soldiers had subdued the easy ones without harm before moving on to more violent measures to deal with the core group of instigators.

The average God soldier, and Garth had counted fifty of the monolithic warriors swarming through the crowd, stood no smaller than ten feet tall, and was easily half as wide and so densely muscled that there had to be little or no room at all for organic organs.

Having spent more than enough time in the company of cyborgs and other, similarly enhanced beings, Garth recognized the tell-tale fluidic grace of people so completely remodeled underneath the skin that they were more machine than Man. The God soldiers moved slowly, almost with great effort and strain, unless they were called upon to respond to a crisis, in which case they moved so quickly that only someone trained to follow at such speeds would ever know what was truly going on.

The agitators who’d whipped the fragile crowd into a riot produced what Garth thought of as the Timeless Classic Riot Weapons; Molotov cocktails, shotguns, bricks, and other homemade implements. Terror weapons not really intended to do anything but make some kind of point, the only thing to have any effect was one of the cocktails; the huge freak, blanketed in a smothering blaze of fire, had paused just long enough to put himself out before pulling his antagonist’s head off.

By the time the main targets had been subdued into fine red paste on the sidewalk, some of the other, non-involved, rioters discovered the stones to get back into the fray. Rather than deal with these men and women on a hand-to-hand basis, the God soldiers deployed noxious gas grenades that dropped everyone other than them to the ground, vomiting and shitting themselves uncontrollably.

After the smoke had cleared, arrests were made, bodies were carted off, and formal statements issued to the press. Garth thought Chairwoman Doans, who’d shown up almost before the God soldiers, was a good-looking older woman who was also an incredibly talented spin doctor. Thirty seconds into her televised address, she had the public eating out of the palm of her hand by commandeering previously shot footage of the crowd moments before the riot had broken out. The evidence was abnormally clear; the Offworlders hadn’t engaged the crowd in any way, shape of form unless it was on the scale, or during an interview behind closed doors. The fault lay entirely with a few specific people in the crowd, and the deaths were on their hands.

Two things bothered Garth greatly. No, make that three.

One, the Chairwoman seemed abnormally willing to use her God soldiers against regular, hopelessly inadequate citizens. Actions like that hinted at tyranny or despotism, neither of which Garth enjoyed very much.

Two, the rioters, those men and women who’d actually started the demonstration, had to have known how the Chairwoman would respond; the appearance of the God soldiers had been so bloody quick that all fifty of the giant tank-people had to have been around the corner just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. That spoke of one or two possibilities; the first was that the mastermind behind the riot didn’t care one way or another that innocent people got hurt so long as their point –most likely some kind of anti-Offworld rhetorical drivel- got made. The second was that the event had been staged by the Chairwoman herself, which was also not very cool.

The third and most important thing that worried Garth so much that he doubted he’d ever sleep again was the realization that if his mission went poorly, he’d find himself face-to-face with a God soldier. Fantastic and mysterious strength notwithstanding, the average God soldier was fifteen times as big as Hercules and easily mean enough to eat babies.