Prophet Margin (11 page)

"Givvim some room, geez. Let him stand, saahnd as a paahnd."

"H-Harvey? Dis is Wulf..."

"What's going on, big guy? Sounds like a party out there."

"I-I think they are being getting my hitchhiker signal."

"Thassit geez. Thassit, thassit, thassit. Original funk Samaritans, thassus."

"So you're not about to die then?" Harvey almost sound disappointed.

"No sneeeckin' dying round this place, this face, this ancient race, blud. Big sneckrider's coming on holidays."

The man in the dark flicked off the signal interceptor in disgust. He glanced down and scowled, noticing without surprise that he'd inadvertently crushed the armrests of his chair into misshapen steely twigs.

There was only one thing Stix hated more than competitor bounty hunters.

"Tourists," he hissed.

NINE

Oishallob M'Ollo slouched against the bar and drained a shot of cigarjuice, enjoying the stab as it scorched his throat. Old Gizzard's Liquorhouse might not have been the most salubrious of premises but they surely did serve the strongest baccydrinks on Nama's Moon.

M'Oloo ordered another from the barman with an energy-saving dip of his head and regarded the other patrons. Scattered around stained tables, only the most morose, intolerant and cantankerous xowpokes ever stayed in Gizzard's long enough to become regulars. Legend held that tourists had been known to spontaneously combust after walking in by mistake. M'Oloo could believe it.

The Great Xow migration, supposedly one of the 345.3 Wonders of the Galaxy, occurred once every decade and lasted three hours. During that short period over three billion mature xows, shaped and coloured like bus-sized turds, would rise from the swamplands of Nama Prime to streak en masse towards the local sun. Once the heat became intolerable they would explode, releasing countless spores - a few of which miraculously found their way back to the swamplands. This had been going on for millennia before the gourmets of the galaxy decided that the rarity of Xowflesh more than made up for its execrable taste. So now at every migration the xowpokes would be waiting, hovbikes and harpoodoes at the ready, to snag a xow or three to tide their bank accounts over for the next few years. The upshot was that the average xowpoke was unemployed for 99.99658 per cent of their lives.

The crime rate on Nama's Moon was, it would be fair to say, astronomical.

M'Oloo nestled into his well-worn groove at the bar and raised another cigarjuice. He was feeling uncharacteristically cheerful. That evening he would be meeting Ziggig and the boys to divide their recently acquired earnings in a fair and democratic fashion, so he was anticipating a fun night of double crosses and friendly knife fights.

The saloon doors squealed. What little conversation there was - mostly the exchange of bored insults - halted, and booted footsteps crossed the floor. M'Oloo kept his back to the newcomer, sneaking a hand towards his knife. Caution paid, on Nama's Moon.

He watched a figure approach the bar from the corner of his eye, dipping his head in the universal gesture for "gimme a drink". The barman, M'Oloo couldn't help noticing, was grinning like a chezhir felinox. He risked a more substantial glance to the side, careful to avoid eye contact, and choked on his cigarjuice.

The newcomer was a boy, no older than seventeen. His attempts to look manly by thrusting out his chin and scowling, succeeded only in making him look constipated.

"New in town?" the barman sneered. Some of the other patrons were tittering, probably for the first time in their lives.

The boy nodded and perched himself on a xowhide stool, eyeing the cigarjuice bottle. The barman shrugged and poured out a shot, clearly as intrigued as the other patrons.

The kid downed the shot in one and almost died.

Like a gun discharging, the bar exploded with laughter. M'Oloo joined the mirth, sniggering through yellowed teeth. The youth's eyes looked like they might pop out.

"Snecking hell!" the kid hissed.

The bar fell silent. Faces fell mid-guffaw, brows knotted together and mouths hung open.

The kid's voice wasn't natural.

"That's... hkk... that's strong stuff," he said.

M'Oloo almost slipped from his groove in the bartop.

The voice did something strange to his mind, shivering along his spine and sending pinpricks dancing across his neck, like spiders under his skin. If he'd been asked to describe the surreal tones he might have mentioned strange echoes, unnatural pitches that rattled his skull. He might have alluded to whalesong, or jabberbat squeals, or the tinny rattle of electrolysed metal. He might have used adjectives like "haunting" or "resonant". But, this being him, he would probably have settled instead for "snecking weird."

A brief glance around suggested that his fellow xowpokes were inclined to agree. And in M'Oloo's experience, things on Nama's Moon that were considered weird were only a moment or two from being considered dead. He put his hand back on his knife.

"We ain't real fonda freakos round here," he growled. The voice was still scratching around in the back of his mind, like a crow hunting a worm.

"Feeling's mutual," the kid said. M'Oloo resisted the urge to throw up, his stomach deciding that it couldn't cope with the voice either.

"W-whaddaya want here?" the barman said, propping himself upright with one meaty fist. He was sweating.

"Looking for some folks," the kid said, eliciting another chorus of groans. "Looking for some folks with hovbikes. Would've come into some money recently. Maybe just came back from their holidays."

Even through the haze of nausea, M'Oloo heard warning bells.

"Maybe," the kid said, "these folks have an interest in
concerts
."

The last word was delivered with such bitterness that the glasses along the rear of the bar shattered, a galaxy of shards which the patrons were too busy vomiting and rolling about to notice.

"You boys heard of anyone like that?"

There was now so much puke splattered across the wooden boards that the token sprinkling of sawdust had given up soaking duties and was instead floating merrily beneath the saloon doors.

M'Oloo tried to draw his knife in shaking hands. His eyes, going the way of Niagra Falls, noted the look the kid gave him. He gave up on the knife and sprinted for the door.

"I'll take that as a yes, then." said Roolán.

They came for him at midnight, demonstrating a stunning lack of imagination.

Roolán was waiting for them. He'd been waiting for them for two weeks, one way or another. Waiting for the authorities to dump him on some mudball planet three parsecs from Shtzuth, waiting for the hospital to discharge him, waiting for the pangalactic solicitors to confirm he'd inherited everything his parents owned, waiting for the local fuzz to announce that their investigations amongst the xowpoke communities of Nama's Moon had been fruitless, waiting for a passenger shuttle to arrive, and - most importantly - waiting to pluck up the courage required to pursue the revenge he wanted.

He felt obliged.

Watching them "sneak" (a charitable expression) along the central street, knives and guns stashed in pockets crammed with whiskysmokes, Roolán came to a very sudden and very unhelpful realisation:

He was scared absolutely shitless.

The man from the bar - an oily creature with a combover and threadbare clothing - was conducting a fraught conversation with the group's leader, a thug almost as wide as he was tall. Roolán could have guessed at their topic of discussion even if the morons had attempted to keep their cigarjuice-drenched voices down.

"Telling you, Zig, it's dangerous! We should t-"

"Should nuthin', Oish. One kid askin' questions is all. Knifework inna dark. No trouble."

Roolán shuddered. The gutter he was clinging to squealed as his weight shifted, forcing him back into the shadows of the hotel's roofspace. He needn't have bothered - the goons were so fixated upon swaggering that nothing short of a flying naked supermodel would have persuaded them to look upwards.

"But his voice, man! I'm tellin' yo-"

"All you're tellin', geek, is this little sneck's got himself a throat infection."

"No! It's different to that! Did things to my head, man!"

"Snecking baccjunkie..."

"No, man! His voice wasn't natural!"

"Damn straight it ain't natural - snecking kids comin' round, making trouble. And you let him get away."

"I came straight to you, Zig! I couldn't ju-"

"Shht." The big man silenced M'Oloo with a dismissive wave of his hand and paused outside the hotel, squaring his shoulders. Given their size, this took a while. "Look alert," he growled. "All you boys, blades only. Let's not cause a fuss."

Then they slouched into the lobby.

Roolán took a deep breath and ignored the shakes creeping along his limbs. The night was cold and he pulled the folds of his xowpoke jacket, bought earlier that day, tighter around his chest. He wondered whether he should have bought a knife, or even a gun. He wondered whether he would even get a chance to use one.

Actually, scratch that: he wondered whether he'd be
able
to. He wasn't so much out of his depth as he was treading water above the Mariana trench with sharkbait stapled to his legs whilst wearing a faulty lifejacket.

He took a deep breath and reminded himself that adversity was nothing new.

He'd been banned from uttering a single sound since he hit puberty. When his parents discovered they'd sired a mutant - when his voice broke, literally, at twelve - they'd left earth in a hurry, saying farewell to their prim and proper friends, quitting their prim and proper jobs, leaving behind their prim and proper car and house and swimming pool and life membership at the local gym and quiznight at the upmarket winebar and-

And all the other things they told him, time and time again, that they'd left behind because of him. They'd moved onto a ball of shit in space. They'd sacrificed everything, they said, to raise him where he wouldn't be victimised, to give him a chance at life. All they asked in return was for him to shut the sneck up. Siring a mute could be forgiven, in social circles. Siring a mutie could not.

Only now they were dead and given that they'd made such a big snecking effort for him, it seemed like the right thing to do to get even.

From below him, through a layer of roofing tiles came the unmistakable
crump
of a door being kicked-in. He tensed. A few muffled clanks followed the passel of goons through the room.

Demonstrating the sort of attention to detail that only the greatest of criminal minds ever grasped, a voice said: "Little puke's not here."

Roolán swallowed. It was now or never:

"Lost something?" he shouted.

He was still getting the hang of controlling his voice. He hadn't uttered more than twenty words in the last five years, so it was unsurprising that he hadn't quite perfected the abilities beneath his command...

The roof cracked. Every window for two blocks belched outwards. A light rain of jabberbats tumbled from the sky, pipes popped at their joints, hydrants sluiced the streets, milk soured in fridges and in every neighbourhood dogs howled with a sort of bewildered indignation.

Roolán's patch of roofing gave up the ghost. He dropped like a stone, landing with an ungainly crunch amongst the wreckage of his hotel room. So much, he thought, for playing it cool. Lying there in the dust, waiting for someone to slip a knifeblade across his throat, he opened his eyes and glanced around.

The goons hadn't fared much better than the jabberbats. They sprawled in various states of concussion, bleeding from noses and ears. One or two were unconscious and the others looked like they'd
like
to be, groaning like foghorns.

It wasn't just that his voice was loud, though it was. It wasn't just that it extended beyond the normal spectrum of audible sound, though it did. It wasn't just that it seemed able to poke and prick at anything it chose, oscillating through scales to find that one exact tone that resonated with the atomic vibrations of any material, shaking it apart at its molecular seams. Though it did.

It was something more than that.

If music was a pair of hands to massage the senses, then Roolán's voice had claws.

He picked himself up and surveyed the devastation. He'd fallen on the head of the greasy little snecker from the bar. The man dribbled disgustingly and snored, oblivious to the rapidly-growing lump on his scalp. Roolán hoped it hurt when he awoke.

The big man, the leader with the wide-load shoulders, the man right now lying half-propped against the wall, watched Roolán through a haze of sweat and snot. His eyes weren't behaving themselves.

"Wha... whaddasneg..." he burbled, mouth slick with blood. Roolán guessed he'd bitten down so hard that he'd broken some of his teeth and found himself, bizarrely, hoping it was nothing more serious. He wasn't ready for murder. Yet.

"Figure you boys set that bomb," Roolán whispered. Whispering was worse.

Whispering didn't break things or concuss people. It just slid like a knife through the mind. Like a maggot in the skull.

"Figure someone paid you to do it."

The big man choked on his own vomit.

"Figure someone had to have a reason."

The man's knife clattered to the floor. Roolán crouched down beside him.

"Give me a name..." he hissed, and there was no way in the world that anyone - not even a braindead xowpoke called Ziggig - could disobey.

"N...name of... of..."

"Stanley Everyone".

Kid Knee rubbed at his temples, lifting his leg to accommodate. He'd just woken up. "Who the sneck is Stanley Everyone?"

Johnny took a deep breath and counted to ten. On those few previous jobs that he'd shared with the Kid he'd found it took about two weeks in the washed-out mutant's company for his tolerance to snap. This time the headless wonder had outdone himself; going from Novelty Underdog Charity Case to Intolerable Menace in the space of four days.

He glared back from the pilot's seat of the rental starskeet
Peggy Sue
to his partner, slouching nauseously against the impact webbing of a plushchair. Johnny found himself unconsciously checking the fastenings of the restraints: he was damned if he was going to let the Kid waste another deposit by getting anywhere near the controls.