Toxicity (44 page)

And then it dawned on Horace.
This was the ultimate assassination. The ultimate mission. The final kill.

The final kill to bring about...
freedom.

I will use myself,
he thought, his understanding
complete.
I will be the trigger.

Will you do this? For Amaranth?

I do not wish to kill your
psi-children.

We are willing to die. For our
planet. To save the world. To purify Amaranth of its pestilence...

Horace considered.

“I will do it,” he said.

~ * ~

THIRTEEN

LUMAR
DROPPED TO one knee to steady her aim, whilst Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV stumbled
backwards, flapping his arms above his head and making a noise like a little
girl attacked by school bullies. Return fire boomed from Black Jake and his
bandits, but as soon as the gunfight had started, it ended. And it ended
because the mountains began to scream. Thunder rumbled overhead, only it wasn’t
thunder, but the mountain itself, shaking and growling, and the very rocks
vibrating, stones pattering down the steep sides of the canyon where the
antagonists stood... Lumar and Svool stumbled backwards, towards the tunnel
entrance and Herbert’s fat metal behind, whilst Black Jake and his cronies,
superstitious to a man, looked around in wonder and awe and fear as the
mountains shouted at them...

“The Gods are shouting your name!”
cried one bandito.

“So they are!” shouted Black
Jake, beaming, staring up at the sheer eight-thousand-foot wall of rock that
towered above him, all the way above the clouds, all the way up to the ice and
snow.

“Rockfall!” screamed Lumar,
turning at last and charging at Herbert. She hit him with all her strength, all
her weight, all her speed, and with an
“Oof!”
and a sound like a rock
dropped into meshing gears, they burst through into the tunnel in a tangle.
Svool strolled in after them, grinning for a moment and presumably about to
make some quip about metal animal sex, when a wall of rock went
whoosh
directly
behind him in the blink of an eye, scant inches from removing the back of his
skull.

~ * ~

BLACK
JAKE RAISED his arms to the Gods and beamed and prayed. The mountains were
talking to him! His God was talking to him! The rocks and snow and ice came
tumbling down from thousands of feet up. A wall of it. Black Jake frowned as
his vision filled with an unspeakable horror. There was a name for this sort of
thing. The name was
avalanche...

Black Jake and sixty-nine of his
bandit henchmen were crushed in an instant. Compressed under a hundred thousand
tonnes of rock and ice, dislodged by the foolish ignition of discharged pistols…

One bandit survived, standing at
the back of the group and scratching his chin. He blinked, and instead of
seeing a huddled group of his colleagues squeezed into the canyon neck, pistols
at the ready, plumes of brown sputum erupting from rotten mouths like sewage
from a holiday beach overflow, suddenly he stared at a thirty-foot-high pile of
rock. Several stones trickled down and bounced off his nose.

He took a step back, looked up at
the wall, and decided that perhaps, on this day, the Gods were possibly against
them...

~ * ~

IN
THE TUNNEL, dust was thick in the air. Svool turned and stared at the wall of
rock not one inch from his face. One inch, one second, and he’d be dead. Bent
in half like a rubber toy. He gulped, choking a little on the thick dust, and
staggered forward towards Lumar, who was busy untangling herself from Herbert’s
metal body.

“Why’ve you got so many
fucking
legs?”
she was snarling, and finally found her feet, and gave Herbert a
hearty kick with a
clong.
Then she turned to Svool, and saw the shock
and horror in his pasty white face. “You nearly get squashed, buddy?”

“Yes.”

“Dogmeat.”

“Yes.”

“Fishpaste.”

“A-huh.”

“Are you
okay?”

“Yes, yes. Shit, yes. I’m great.
I’m fine. Shit, I’m
alive,
baby, I’m alive! I wasn’t squashed! It’s a
miracle, lo! We have much to rejoice about!”

“We do?”

“We certainly
do.
Weren’t
you listening, bitch?
I, the Great Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos,
am alive!”

Lumar snorted a laugh. “Fuckwit.
We’re trapped in these psychopathic mines under the Mercury Peaks, led here by
a metal robot horse who’s stripped his thread, snapped his bolt, and popped his
cogs.”

“Hey, there’s nowt wrong with me,”
said Herbert. It was tight for him in the tunnel, but he managed, hunkering
down and sucking in his arse. Behind him, they saw the robot figure of
Angelina, and suddenly realised she was
why
they could see. Light
radiated from her robot nostrils.

“Can you do that?” said Svool,
kicking Herbert on the leg with a
clang.

“A cheap party trick,” snorted
Herbert in derision. “A
real
Robotic Special Friend doesn’t lower
himself to such trinkets of performance. Next, you’ll be bringing on the
dancing bears.”

“Look,” said Zoot, buzzing over
to them in the gloom where long shadows sent spiders scampering up the walls. “I’ve
been monitoring the atmosphere down here, and it’s, er, dangerous. Our metal
muppet over there wasn’t kidding when he talked about poisons and toxins and
nuclear waste. My scanners are showing huge caverns down here - no doubt
through which we have to pass. And each one is full of... something.”

“Something?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of something?” said
Lumar.

“Dangerous something,” said Zoot.

“Let’s get moving. The sooner we
get out of this shithole, the sooner we can go home.”

“Home!” wailed Svool, wiping away
a tear from the corner of his eye. “Alas, a place I wish...” He stared down at
the end of Lumar’s pistol. He saw she had the primitive weapon cocked. The
safety catch was off. And she had her finger on the delicate trigger.

“Don’t fucking push it,” she
growled, forked tongue flickering. She turned to Zoot, and the PopBot glowed at
her. “You’re able to map out the internals to this place?”

“Yes. It is a labyrinth indeed.
Herbert has certainly led us to the most dangerous craphole on the planet, by
my reckoning. But I can scan no life. These toxic creatures he was babbling
about, I cannot locate them.”

“Maybe he was mistaken?” said
Lumar, eyes narrowed again. “Zoot. You fly up ahead and navigate. I’ll follow,
and Svool can come behind me because... well, he’s a useless moron...”

“I saved you!”

“Okay, I’ll grant you a lucky
shot and the balls to give it a go; but I wouldn’t put my trust in you if I had
to. You’re flakier than a chocolate flake. Right, then Angelina can follow, and
finally we have Herbert bringing up the rear.”

“Why am I at the back?” snorted
the horse. “It’s those at the back who get picked off first by deranged toxic
beasties! I’ve seen it, in the filmys at the Bacillus Port Filmy Showhouse.”

“Yeah, well it’s your fault we’re
in here. So you can take the greatest risk.”

“Charming.”

“And besides,” smiled Lumar. “You
obviously have the widest arse. I wouldn’t like to get trapped behind you again
during an impending rockfall, would I? So
you
go at the back. That way,
your bulbous arse condemns nobody but yourself.”

~ * ~

THEY
WALKED FOR hours. Lumar padded along, alert, using Zoot’s weak but effective
travel lights and the projected glow from Angelina’s nostril headlamps to light
the way. The narrow tunnel ran through miles of rock, all rough-hewn and
seemingly hacked by hand using primitive tools. The place had the air of long
abandonment. Lumar couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.

Before long the tunnel split into
seven other tunnels. Zoot guided them, and they padded off into the darkness,
heading down. Before long, one wall fell away in a jagged diagonal, and they
walked alongside an underground river. It was wide and flat and dark, and
flowed swiftly and without sound; without the light of Angelina’s headlamps,
they could have quite easily toppled in. The smell was much stronger here as
well, and the group eventually halted on a natural stone platform overlooking
what appeared to be a lake. Angelina shone her lights across the vast still
water, but they could not make out any far shore.

“It’s real creepy,” said Svool,
who seemed subdued now. The reality of the situation was encroaching past his
ego and manic self-belief. He was starting to feel claustrophobic, and the
smell did nothing to help him. His head hurt, and he was sure he could see
modest fumes rising from the surface of the lake.

“I wouldn’t like to fall in,”
murmured Lumar, nodding across the expanse.

“Rubbish!” beamed Herbert. “It’s
totally safe! I’d wager you could fall in, swim around, and get out just as
happy as a punter on a fairground rollercoaster with a big stack of sticky
candyfloss.”

Svool looked at his horse. “You
really are an annoying gimp,” he said.

Herbert winked. “Better get used
to it, buster. You’ve got me for the next thousand years.”

Svool stared at the horse, then
at the lake. An idea occurred to him. “I tell you what. Why don’t
you
jump
in and prove your theory correct? Go on. If you do it, I’ll buy you a banana.”

“An apple.”

“What?”

“Horses like apples.”

“Whatever,” said Svool. “Go on,
pal.
Jump in.
Let’s see how long it takes you to melt...”

“Actually,” said Zoot, whizzing
over, “that’s no over-exaggeration. I’ve just completed a toxic analysis of the
lake, and of course the river that feeds it. It is highly dangerous. Lethal.
Deadly. A killer. It would kill both you and Lumar instantly. And yes, it would
melt Herbert - within about three minutes.”

“What is it, then?” snorted
Herbert.

“It’s unrefined lirridium,” said
Zoot quietly.

“Unrefined... you mean
spaceship
fuel?” said Svool.

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that flammable?”

“It has its moments. In this
state, it’s more stable, but trust me, if you give it enough heat, or enough
spark...
VOOM!
Goodbye Grandma.” Zoot turned on Lumar. “So you need to
put the pistols away. For good. If you fire them down here, you could ignite...”

“Yes?”

“Well, the whole damn mountain.”

Carefully, Lumar packed away the
pistols. She stared at Herbert, shaking her head.

“What?” he said.
“What?”

They followed the edge of the
lirridium lake for a while, and Svool jogged up to stand beside Lumar. “Hey,”
he said. “Why do you think all this is down here, then? An accident?”

“This is no accident.”

“What is it, then?”

“This is something to do with
Greenstar. Some massive underground reserve. Why? I don’t know. But what I
do
know is it shouldn’t fucking
be here.
It’s just another example of
their pollution, their control, and their open lack of respect for the land,
the earth, the world.”