Prophet Margin (17 page)

This is all highly irregular, you know. One is not in the habit of awaking under conditions of such acute confusion, and unless an explanation is forthcoming I shall be very, very cross. Allow me to list my vexations:

I do not know where I am.

I do not know how I arrived here.

I do not know why there is a seven-foot ruffian with a horned helmet staring at me across the room.

I do not know why there appears to be a gravitational deficiency or why there are pieces of a dissected corpse bouncing off the walls. If this is someone's idea of a joke, one is not amused.

But more than anything else, I do not have a clue why I, wife of the QuantumDiamond billionaire Henri Dover-Dover, trendsetter to the stars, heiress to a priceless empire, should be awaking to discover myself wearing a matte black catsuit.

BergllerThredds
^TM
, as anyone knows, went out of fashion two years ago. If anyone sees me in this ridiculous apparel my reputation will be utterly ruined. It's too much!

(Also my arms appear to have been cut off and I'm slowly dying of bloodloss.)

Matte black! I ask you!

However. I did not get where I am today by panicking. Quite apart from anything else it raises the possibility of breaking a sweat, and - let me make this clear - I do not sweat.

If anyone can carry off this stylistic disaster it's me. Poise, Natalhia.

Oh, look. The hairy man is trying to hold me upright. It's incredible how detached one becomes whilst bleeding to death but, still... I do wish the plebeian wouldn't actually put his hands on me. I read an article in
Echelon
magazine in which they proved that physical contact with commoners could be infectious. The grizzled creature barely even speaks English, for Boddah's sake!

And now, to top it all, there's something going on in the back of my brain. If it wasn't so bally undignified I might actually consider screaming.

Very, very, very vexing.

Splut
.

In zero gravity, a detonation creates a perfect sphere of expanding force and matter. Debris does not arc towards the ground, smoke does not rise and, notably, gobbets of brainmatter - like catfood mixed with clay - do not slump downwards to spray a colourful blast radius around their former owner's body. They go outwards.

In the control room of the Kostadell Zol, the assassin gave a split second scowl before her head exploded like an overfilled balloon. Wulf, whose attempts at staunching her blood were not going well, was drenched in a tsunami of gore.

"By der gods!"

Held in place by its gravboots, the assassin's body jerked outwards on the cusp of the explosion, shins crackling. When its ragdoll fluctuations ceased it was left leaning spectrally against the air - as if hanging from an inverted ceiling - shattered neck and lower jaw flapping.

The nebula of fluids and bonelumps, still expanding, pattered against the walls like polarised raindrops, and Wulf was left blinking a sticky film of claret from his view. He couldn't get the look of snobbish bewilderment on the woman's face out of his head: her eyes bugging out, lips wobbling. Whatever she'd been up to, working so industriously at the consoles, she was as unaware of the hows and whys as was Wulf himself.

Only now, in the aftermath, were the ramifications of her exertions becoming obvious. The whole asteroid was shaking. Spitting sparks, the computers had shut down with a terminal hiss. And now his only lead, his only interrogatory hope of finding out exactly how much shit was on its way towards the metaphorical fan, had exploded like a soggy piñata.

Pushing himself back towards the consoles, drifting through air so thick with beads of blood that he had to cover his mouth to avoid drowning, he tapped experimentally at the controls. All the obvious startup commands (the buttons that were labelled "startup", for example) refused to acknowledge his frustrated thumpings, and the second ace up his sleeve - pressing everything at once - failed inexplicably to yield results. He glowered at the instruments as if personally insulted.

Even at the best of times Wulf's approach to modern technology tended towards the simplistic. One had only to learn which button to press, which trigger to pull, which lever to snap: not how they worked, or why. The upshot was that if the resort's controls had been designed by a moron with no sense of security, Wulf still would have struggled to get the systems operational. In the midst of an alpha-lockout with power drain, random cycle password encoding, hackproof cutouts and net-severance capabilities, he stood about as much chance as a plutonic Etherbeing in a hurricane.

No controls meant no communications. He couldn't even tell anyone what was happening.

Not that he knew what was happening.

Some subtle change affected his sense of balance: a sensation of weightiness was returning where previously there had been nothing. Without appreciating how such a thing could happen, the idea cheered Wulf immensely - perhaps the resort's failsafes had kicked in.

Except... it occurred to him that the slow build of gravitational weightiness was pulling him not towards the floor where the assassin's body was slouched, but the plastered ceiling above. The blood in the air, equally as affected, began to puddle against the roof's inner surface.

Bewildered, Wulf risked a glance through the doorway, recalling his first view of the Kostadell Zol that morning. He half expected to find again the vista of tropical loveliness greeting his eyes like some shimmering pearl, sunlight sparkling across the wide bay, braindead tourists nursing hangovers all along the beach. Some hope.

Quite apart from anything else, they'd left the sun behind.

The Kostadell Zol asteroid tumbled through the void like a bowling ball, careening towards whatever galactic skittles had taken its fancy. Leaving behind the star that had supported it for so long, its day and night cycles became a blue blur, punctuated by the flash-flicker of an dwindling sun. The heavens became a dizzying kaleidoscope, tumbling over and around like some cheap special effect, stuck on a loop. If anyone had been staring at it, it might have seemed pretty impressive.

As it was, very few people were paying much attention to the stars.

The asteroid was shaking off its tourists. As its rotational velocity increased the centrifugal spin went beyond simply negating its inherent gravity, becoming instead an expelling force that pushed everything outwards from its centre. As the revolutions sped whole crowds found themselves floating upwards to be pinned to the inside surfaces of the oxygen dome, crushed outwards like fluids in a centrifuge. Thus scattered, butterflies pinned to the page, they stared down at the landscape below and alternately shrieked or laughed as their narcotic consumption dictated.

That might have been the end of their ordeal, had there not been a vast artificial ocean to take into account.

Slowly at first, in incremental bursts of droplets that licked higher and higher above each wave, the sea rose into the sky. When the surface broke apart, hurled upwards by the violence of the asteroid's revolutions, even those holidaymakers still chortling in narcotic amusement began to scream.

They were drowned upside down.

Wulf stayed inside the control room and thanked his lucky stars for the presence of a sturdy roof.

The roof began to crack.

"This is not being fair!"

THIRTEEN

The Dilûu Manta was first discovered by marine zoologist Carriadne Tooker, undertaking a solo taxonomy of the ocean moons of Pacifica IV.

Sucking water into their mouths and expelling it from a fluted trumpet-gland on their rears, these bizarre creatures ejected water at such speed that Tooker's notes likened them to biological torpedoes: screaming through the oceans at unsavoury speeds. Tipped with a set of bristly barbels with more sensory acuity than the surveillance department of a paranoid dictatorship, the Dilûu had little trouble in tracking the sprot-shoals that passed through their territory.

And yet, despite their strangeness, Tooker's interest in the Dilûu might well have finished there. She had, after all, spent that same day cataloguing Sonic Octopoids, StrobeUrchins and Quasi-visible Belchfish. In a world of oceanic peculiarities, the Dilûu was just another aquatic oddball.

On the final day of her expedition, with her equipment packed away, Tooker witnessed first-hand the evolutionary miracle that was to make her fortune. Whilst finishing off her surplus film, Tooker's interest was caught by a flock of WeeGee birds. Happily snapping away at the musical avifauna, she was astonished to find a fully grown Dilûu rising spectacularly into her frame, circling the panicking flock, then gulping them down in one vast gulletfull.

The peristaltic jet of the Dilûu didn't only work underwater. The sneaky critters had managed, all on their own, to evolve vacuum propulsion: sucking in and expelling air at such ridiculous speeds that they could sustain aerial manoeuvres almost indefinitely.

Tooker took a long look at the frontier charter she'd signed, laying out in black and white her dedication to scientific purity and non-profit. She tore it into little pieces and patched through a call to the University of Galactic Innovation to make a few discreet enquiries upon the subject of behavioural control.

It took only two years for the Dilûu, battery bred in vast farms, each fitted with a TookerTec
^TM
control-collar, to find their way onto the personnel vehicle market. On affluent worlds stocks crashed in hovlimos as the rich and famous clamoured to purchase their very own living car.

They were fast. They were agile. They ran entirely on cheap fuel (a bucket of sprot once a day and a modest sponging down with salt water could keep a stud in top condition for ten years). And, notably, twitching their bristles like prehensile moustaches, they were very, very good at finding their way around.

"Hoooooo-eeeeeee!"

Kid Knee was enjoying himself. Sitting cross-legged at the Dilûu's controls in the comfortable bubbleplex howdah on its back, he'd finally found a vehicle that he could pilot without, say, accidentally getting drunk and smearing across the landscape. Technically speaking the Dilûu was driving itself, sniffing along with every sensory organ at its disposal, but Johnny wasn't about to ruin the Kid's fun. Ever since he'd heard the phrase "biologically non-viable" the headless wonder had been sulking like a, well, a Kid, and it was good to see him lightening up. A barrage of enthusiastic swooshing sound effects filtered through from the cockpit.

The sudden lack of nursemaiding the Kid required also allowed Johnny to concentrate on the real kid in the equation:

"I don't get it, Roolán," he said, staring at the gawky youth in the howdacab's back seat. "Why would Everyone want to sabotage a concert?"

The boy shrugged, correcting his balance against the oscillations of the Dilûu's body. The beasts might be fashionable, but no one ever claimed they were fun to ride. Roolán looked like he was about to puke.

They'd picked up the beast from a rental firm near Everyone's mansion. YoCassok being YoCassok, only the most expensive and exclusive vehicles were available.

Being honest with himself, Johnny frankly doubted the sense in pursuing Everyone at all. The shapeshifter had a head start, could blend easily with the crowds, had vast financial resources at his disposal and, more than anything else, had a very, very fast groundcar. He'd be at the spaceport and away before Johnny & Co had even mounted up.

And yet, to his surprise, the situation had salvaged itself. Kid Knee - a closet car anorak - had spotted the Dilûu in the rental firm's backlot with a hoot of excitement, enthusing upon the beasts' tracking abilities. "Find a blade of hay in a needlestack, these sneckers!", as he'd put it.

Problem number two, the lack of money, had been solved with equal alacrity. Roolán, who had remained sullenly silent since the mansion, wordlessly handed over a cred card loaded with his deceased parents' moolah. Johnny had yet to give any real attention to the boy's presence. He'd initially decided to bring him along in a moment of mutant solidarity: leaving a genetically impure youth to face the authorities - all of them one hundred per cent pureblood, of course - at the scene of some grand-scale property damage was a sure way to incite a lynching. Besides, there was something about the youngster; some quality that endeared him to Johnny. Maybe it was the intensity in his eyes, maybe the anger burning just below the surface.

Maybe he reminded Johnny of himself.

Or, maybe it was the fact that the child was effectively a human-shaped sonic nuclear bomb, which is just the sort of thing that could come in handy in the course of pursuing a galactic crimelord.

At any rate, he was along for the ride, and in offering to stump-up the wedge required to hire the Dilûu it was clearly going to be a voluntary association.

Problem number three - an anticipated vanishing act on Everyone's part - proved groundless. Johnny allowed the Dilûu to snuffle its way through a handful of the sticky residue left behind by Everyone, then it was simply a matter of tapping a few commands into the creature's control collar - the behaviour-manipulation equivalent of throwing a stick and shouting "fetch!" - and the hunt was on.

And the trail, wherever it led, didn't go anywhere near the spaceport.

They'd left the city behind, stopping only once to restock on the more fundamental items of ammunition in their heavily depleted arsenal. Johnny spotted Kid Knee surreptitiously scuttling into an off licence but decided against commenting. He'd been pining for hyperdestructive artillery ever since his skit with the ion-cannon, and alcohol seemed the best replacement.

Beyond its populated affluence, YoCassok was little more than a swampy wilderness. The manta glided across marshes and forests, every farting expulsion driving it onwards. In the howdah, Roolán scribbled on the pad of paper Johnny had liberated from the rental firm's office, hands betraying a slight quivering that he pretended not to notice.