Prophet Margin (16 page)

In the course of an eventful career, Johnny had awoken to some truly revolting sights.

On Siblus 17 he'd regained consciousness halfway down the spectral gullet of a fractalworm, requiring the swift application of a semi-digested vibroknife to escape. He'd been cued back to consciousness by the frenching of a hungry spleenleech on Dethibar Prime, by the amorous attentions of a Glikkik oviposter wasp and by the amniotic embrace of a jellychav from Zouw. Then there were the years of his youth, hefted out of bed each morning by his father's angry shouts, cuffed ears, slapped cheeks...

The point was: he'd had his fair share of rude awakenings.

But nothing he could think of could outdo in sheer nastiness the spectacle that greeted him when he awoke on the floor of Stanley Everyone's suite.

"Awright?" said Kid Knee, from a distance of three inches.

The headless man was propped up on his one good knee, his other leg lifted to bring his squinting features down to Johnny's level. Thus his first waking sight was a closeup of his partner's crotch, and his second, following rapid directional adjustment, was an even closer closeup of his partner's beaming face. He wasn't sure which was worse.

"What happened?" he managed, nauseous.

The Kid shrugged his headless shoulders. "Dead weird. This little punk shows up shouting like a banshee. Went on and on and on, like
AaaOOOoooOO-
"

Johnny winced. "I
meant
, how come he stopped?"

"Don't worry." The Kid gave his best 'cool' grin. "I took him out."

"Took him out?"

"Yep. Lamped him one. Smack inna kisser."

Johnny arched an eyebrow. "How did you manage that?"

The Kid sneered. "What you mean is, how come I, unlike certain others who shall remain nameless, didn't faint like a big sissy girl?"

"No." Johnny shrugged. "I meant, isn't it a bit late in life for you to be learning how to throw a punch?" The Kid's face fell. "But, okay, since you mentioned it - why aren't you unconscious?"

"Dunno. Reckon it's 'cos my ears are closer to the ground. Avoided the Direct Brunt Of The Assault, sort of thing."

"Yeah," Johnny mumbled, too quiet to hear. "Thicker skull too." A thought occurred, and he began wriggling out from beneath the Kid, glancing around. "What happened to Everyone?"

The jowly face scowled. "What do you mean, ev-?"

"
Stanley
Everyone."

"Oh." The Kid coughed. "Him."

"Where is he? Unconscious?"

"Not... not as such."

"Not as such? Where is he, as such?"

"Well, he's... gone. As such."

Johnny clenched his jaw. The Kid waved a panicky hand. "L-look, it's not my fault, is it? He just sort of went all gloopy and slurp - no ears. Just strolled off."

"And you were too busy beating up on children to stop him?"

"He was killing you! What else was I gonna do?"

Even in the midst of a professional stroppage, Johnny registered the abject misery crossing the Kid's lumpy features. The pity/intolerance seesaw flopped back into a sympathetic position.

"Sorry," he sighed. "You did the right thing."

He cracked his knuckles.

The suite of apartments was a wreck. Neatly bifurcated by a chasm, with walls covered in splinter lines and fractures, it had the look of an earthquake's epicentre. The cause of the devastation, a scrawny youth of perhaps seventeen years, lay spreadeagled in the middle. Johnny checked he was still unconscious before returning to survey the wreckage. Dust and mortar still swirled, and as he paced across the rubble it circulated around him like a bow-wave.

"Which way did Everyone go?" he said, voice thick with resignation.

The Kid gestured towards a descending flight of stairs in one corner.

"Podpark." Johnny said, without any real surprise. "Snecker'll be halfway to the spaceport by now." He slumped onto a cracked chair.

The Kid sidled up awkwardly. "Don't worry, eh? Something's bound to show up. Maybe Wulf'll have more luck."

"It's useless. We don't even know for sure Grinn's tied up in all this. For all we know, Standing-snecking-Algie was having one last laugh and we're chasing shadows. The whole thing's snecked."

Kid Knee struck what he presumably thought of as a philosophical pose. "You know," he said, "at times like this, I always think a drop of Lutvuber's Slakemalt does wonders for the confide-"

"I pitched it out the airlock, remember?"

The Kid flopped down beside Johnny with the look of a man who's been told he has two hours to live. "You're right," he said, staring into space. "The whole thing's snecked."

A voice began to laugh.

Thick and treacly, it contrived at one and the same time to be rich with warmth and yet uncomfortably frosty. Johnny sat bolt upright, milky eyes flashing. "The monitor!" he hissed, clambering to his feet. "Everyone was on the comm. when we came in!"

The Kid frowned, spooked by the disembodied laughter. "W-what?"

"Find the monitor! I know that voice!"

Together they heaved aside rubble, upended collapsed console stacks and dug about in the debris, enduring the sickly-sweet giggles that filtered from the few remaining speakers. They found the mirrorscreen cracked and warped, hidden behind an avalanche of tacky decoration.

There was a man staring out from the monitor; standing in a dark place and dipped in heavy shadows.

He stared and smiled. And smiled.

And smiled.

"Long time no see," said Johnny, voice like lead.

"Ah, Mr Alpha. A long time, yes, yes."

"Where are you, Grinn?"

"Here and there." the man giggled, smile stretching wider. Kid Knee looked away.

"I'll find you," Johnny said, eyes flaring like beacons. "You know that."

"I don't think so, Mr Alpha. You're running out of clues. And time. Ta-ta for now."

The monitor shut down with a hiss. Johnny roared.

Mr Grinn.

First name: unknown. Age: unknown.

Status: bastard.

More specifically, status: sadistic perverted snecked-in-the-head überscum pondslime bastard.

Not a nice man.

He'd first been recorded by the GCC forty years previously in connection with the salabrect world Gaelacet. The salabrect were a strange race, each ten feet tall, intelligent enough to communicate with the documentary-makers who discovered their world but stupid enough to make audiences back home feel comfortably superior. Their defining characteristic - beyond their array of tusks, horns and claws, all for mating purposes only - was their method of propagation. Every night their females tilted gastral sacks towards the stars and blasted volley after volley of spores into the atmosphere.

Naturalists theorised that, having utterly overrun their planet, the salabrect had speed-evolved the ability to seed other planets. It was hailed as a miracle, as a natural coup-de-grace, as a monument to the righteousness of Charles Darwin and, of course, as proof of the existence of God.

Whatever force had endowed the salabrect with their bizarre reproductive equipment, it had failed to anticipate the black hole cluster circulating the Gaelacet system. Even the naturalists eventually admitted it was pretty dumb to blast hundreds of tonnes of biological material into the hyperdense heart of a collapsed star every night.

Grinn spent two weeks with a fleet of asteroidal harvestdrones intercepting every mortarlike clump of spores that came his way. When the hold of his craft was thick with juvenile salabrect he simply switched on hypnotic muzakconditioners, told the transfixed gribblies that he was their father, and virus-bombed the planet below back to the days of primordial sneck-all.

Within months he was hiring-out his exclusive army of salabrect soldiers to needy (and rich) regimes. The sight of a legion of drug fuelled spiky monsters, ably supported by columns of biological artillery, was the last thing to be seen by many a plucky rebellion commander. Amniotic Spore Howitzers featured in
Blasters 'n Lazcells
as the number one support weapon of choice ten years running.

When eventually the authorities caught up with him, Grinn simply vanished. Over the next twenty years he turned his hand to scam after vicious scam: Hijacking food-aid convoys, laser-blasting inhabited worlds to get at precious molten cores, charging populations exorbitant amounts for safe passage from dying planets then opening the airlocks in deep-space. No crime was too great, too audacious or too cruel.

Not that he perpetrated exclusively on a gargantuan scale. Wherever he went there followed a trail of petty murders, casual torture and exploitation. He developed a reputation for rewarding those who helped him, but punishing those who crossed him with equal enthusiasm. When GCC officers found Sammy "The Slice" Sever, Grinn's renowned lieutenant, his internal organs had been dangled, attached to a variety of arcane life-support machines, from the ceiling of his hab. Without skin or bones, he'd screamed and dangled for three days before the ceiling gave way and the whole caboodle splashed. Sever, it was widely reported, had mistaken Grinn's glass of milk for his own and had taken an illicit sip.

On Varico, apparently on a whim, Grinn made use of prototype analytic-teleport technologu to steal candy from every child on the planet. After proudly announcing his crime he nuked the population centres and jettisoned both teleporter and candy, opining that he'd never really needed either in the first place.

There was also the small matter of Grinn's appearance. Every year, on his birthday, he treated himself to a little plastic surgery; widening his mouth by a single centimetre. At first the self-mutilation was almost unnoticeable; a pronounced grin that became a little more macabre every year. Towards the end of his career, before his incarceration, the neat gashes had crawled upwards almost to his ears, cutting across not only flesh but also bone and nerves. He'd had new muscles inexpertly grafted into place, new molars stuffed into the raw gums, new lips extending like earthworms across his face. When he smiled now, the hinges at the base of his skull parted with a grim creak, lips crawling back in some dragonlike leer, levering his entire head open like a mantrap.

Down through the years, the GCC had sent no fewer than thirty-two Strontium Dogs after Grinn, each returning empty handed, or more often, not returning at all.

It was only when a Search/Destroy agent named John Alpha, accompanied by his new temporally displaced partner, Wulf Sternhammer, cornered Grinn on the bridge of a Brass-Class Electrodecraft (planning to electrolyse the oceans of Pacifica IV to extract the trace gold in its water), that his reign came to an end.

He came quietly, to everyone's surprise.

And then, five years later, he escaped.

Roolán awoke to the unwelcome prodding of a blaster barrel. Under normal circumstances, the natural reaction to such a situation would certainly be to scream.

Roolán sucked in a breath.

The gun - too close to his eye to focus upon - drew his gaze along a green limb and up to a man's face. Enclosed in a droplet shaped helmet that sloped forwards into a suggestively shaped crest, his features were craggy and hard; centred not by glaring eyes but two empty patches of light, like torches in the dark.

The scream, well matured by now, was racing upwards towards Roolán's larynx when the tall man placed a gloved finger against his lips and said, "Sssh."

The scream curled up and died.

"No noises," the man explained. "I get twitchy."

Roolán lay on the floor of Stanley Everyone's suite, surrounded by the devastation that he was slowly remembering creating. Staring up, he gradually became aware of a second shape looming over his captive's shoulder: a sweaty mass covered by gaudy kevlycra, lacking discernible shape or purpose. It was only when a fatty leg raised a gouty face that Roolán realised, with a jolt, what these men were.

Freaks. Outcasts. Abominations.

Mutants.

Just like him.

The unfortunate presence of the gun rather precluded him from saying so.

The helmeted man leaned down, blocking what little light filtered through the cracks of the walls. His eyes seemed to flare, their smouldering light intensifying, brightening to twin supernovae. The radiance washed across Roolán's mind; scurrying tentacles into his memories and around his thoughts, scuttling like spiders inside his skull.

The voice seemed to come from a long way away.

"Were you sent to kill us? Don't speak. Just think it."

Tentatively, feeling ridiculous, Roolán formed the words in his mind:
L-like this?

"That's it. I said, were you sent to kill us?"

You're reading my mind?

"No. Just your eyes."

I don't under-

"Look, kid. I'm in a hurry. Are you here for us or not?"

No! I don't know who you are!

"So why are you here?"

I... I came for Everyone...

"Right. And what did old Stanley do to warrant your murderous attentions, huh?" The voice dripped with scorn. "Sold his shares in your favourite cartoon?"

No. Nothing like that.
The thought was like ice, cutting a frozen path through the contact, slicing to the fore:
He killed my parents.

The link broke off. The man staggered backwards, shocked by the ferocity of the thought. He pursed his lips and stared down as if confused.

The knee-headed man fidgeted. "Johnny," he muttered, voice thick with nasal urgency, "he's getting away."

The gun dipped, slipping back into its holster with a hiss. Roolán gawped at the sudden absence of imminent death, astonished. The man continued to glare, pearlescent eyes impenetrable. "Let's go."

"What about him?" the fat one said, gesturing down towards Roolán.

Somewhere outside the devastated mansion sirens were wailing, lights flashing against the broken edges of the walls.

"He's a mutant," the white-eyed man said. "They'll eat him alive."

"So?"

"He's coming with us."

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#5 Natalhia Dover-Dover-Cutler Matthews