Prophet Margin (12 page)

"Stanley Everyone," he repeated. "He's a mutant. Used to be a Stront."

"What about him? Oh sneck, my head..."

"What about him? Kid, I've told you four times!"

"So tell me again. I'll remember this time. Promise."

Johnny rubbed his featureless eyes, exasperated.

"Ten, fifteen years back, Stanley Everyone was the SD's top dog. He got a run of good jobs, earned himself a stack. Decided to quit."

"Good for him."

"Yeah. But not good for us. Everyone's a shapeshifter."

"Well, I'm not."

"No, I mean
he's
a shapeshifter. Made of this sort of... goop. That's how come he was such a good Stront."

"Like, getting close to the enemy undetected. That sort of thing?"

"Exactly." Johnny was impressed. Briefly.

"So what's he got to do with us?"

"He's the mark!"

"Why? What's he done?"

Johnny glowered. This conversation had been boring the second time, four times ago.

"Don't look at me like that," the Kid grumbled. "S'not my fault I'm a, a non-viable organismismism."

"Oh, don't start that again."

"No, no. It's a perfectly valid point, okay? Like, you got them wibbly eyes, and there's Knuckles Davenport and Redman the Belly and Jenni Various and... and..."

"I get the point, but-"

"But nothing! Where's my psuedopods of flailing doom, eh? Where are my exploding fingernails? And now we got this Everyone geezer, he can slurp himself up into any shape he wants and he's
still
gone rotten. See? I couldn't even make it as a criminal!"

Johnny drummed his fingers against the dashboard. He hated it when people cottoned to their own inadequacies, quite apart from anything else it was amazingly difficult to say anything comforting without lying.

"At least you don't leave dollops of yourself behind everywhere you go."

The Kid looked blank.

"Stanley Everyone. He can't hold a new shape for long, see?"

The knee high expression didn't change.

"That stuff I found on the aquarium in the studio?" he held up the scanalyser bottle from his pocket. "I ran a check against the Doghouse DNA records. That's the whole point, Kid. Everyone was there the day of the explosion. Everyone was there when whatever was in that tank went missing. Everyone's in this up to his blobby snecking neck!"

"Everyone was in the studio?"

"Yes!"

"Oh. Right."

"You get it now? You're with me? You understand what's going on?"

"Well, yeah, but..."

"But...?"

"Well, the studio wasn't that big. I mean, a small crowd - fine, but everyone?"

Johnny swivelled back to the controls, beat the heel of his hand against his forehead and plotted a course for YoCassok: the elite, expensive and most of all
guarded
home of Mr Stanley Everyone Esq.

He was seriously beginning to wonder whether a million creds was worth this much hassle.

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#4 Zeiphelgrub T'rakrak

Seriously, okay - no, hear me out - seriously, I'm telling you the truth.

It's real. I saw it with my own two eyes, man. The beastie.

And look, before you get on yer high horsedroid, I'm not tripping. Look at these eyes, man? Any dilation? Any mucal membranes? No. 'M not even drunk, sneckssakes. Haven't taken nothing for two days if you must know, so it's not like you can even blame the DTs. I ain't even shaking all that much. See?

Anyway, yeah, the beastie. I saw it down that alleyway with the Shluxi restaurant out the front. You know, the one with the dumpster with all them freaky eyeball bits and snot and stuff. Good pickings on a Zubday, long as you don't mind alien chow. My old broodpa used to say: "Spawn 'o mine, what you got to remember is, down-on-their-luck useless desperado junkie braindead scumaddicts can't be choosers." I've always 'membered that.

The point is, the point is that I'm down this alley, minding my own business and slurping on some manky old guts or something, when I see it. Right in front of me, bang, it just appears. It's big, I'll tell you that. And sneck only knows how the thing was standing there 'cos I sure as elephantbeans didn't see no legs. Maybe it flies, I dunno. But, look, the most important thing - the thing you don't forget in a hurry, that thing is: teeth. Lots and lots and lots of 'em.

Now, I'm down this alleyway with old Mor'hoktep - he's the guy used to be a broker, fell on hard times when he figured investing in musical contact lenses was the way forwards - and he's too busy rummaging to notice. And I ain't about to scream, know what I mean?

I been living on the streets round these parts twelve years. Good pickings round here. Lotsa rich folk, see? Eating out at restaurants every night, spare cred for the presentable-looking tramp. All you need round here is what you might call a pragmatic approach to edibility.

Course, in recent times, things have gotten tough. Right outta the blue a whole bunch of the rich folk up-sticks and clear off, whoosh, just like that. Bit of a local mystery. Upshot is, not as many leftovers, see? So you got to share.

Now Mor'hoktep, his approach was the pragmatic-est of all. Put a lot of concentration into finding the smallest bit of meaty shit, did old Mor'hok. You'll notice I'm using the past tense.

Long story short, the critter ate him.

So it's fair to say I'm running by now. I got blood all over me and I'm thinking the YoCassok cops don't take a real shine to tramps with veinjuice in their hair. And I'm pretty sure - though I'm not about to turn around to check - that the big snecking beastie is following m--

Unk
.

TEN

Professor Koszov stared at Wulf, eyes magnified ghoulishly through thick omnispecs.

Seated in a chair so padded his legs didn't touch the floor, he wore exactly the sort of clothes one would expect a lab-scientist to take on holiday: massive Bermuda shorts, a shirt so colourful he looked like a psychedelic graffiti victim, open-toed sandals with socks up to his knees, and a white handkerchief (knotted at each corner) draped on his head like a tablecloth.

Apart from one minor detail he looked every bit the relaxed holidaymaker.

Halfway between the omnispecs and the handkerchief, the entry hole of a high powered energy beam exposed the dark interior of Koszov's skull to the world.

Wulf stared at the body for a moment before the vacant eyes, rheumy in death, began to creep him out. He swivelled the comfychair around to escape the empty gaze; though the rearview - where the exitwound had blasted a ragged lump of chair stuffing and skull lumps outwards - was hardly any easier on the eye.

Kostadell Zol, its distance from earth giving it a kind of faddish chic, had at one time been the most desirable holiday location in the galaxy. Spread across one surface of an asteroid, enclosed within a vast atmospheric bubble, the Zol was an artificial resort sporting fifty kilometres of imported beaches, sixteen hours of sunlight every day and three hundred pubs, clubs and restaurants. It was this last feature which dramatically altered the fortunes of the resort.

Financially mobile patrons began to complain that the asteroid lacked culture. The resort's attempts to introduce 'natives' with improvised traditions failed and in a panic the hotel owners began offering cut price deals and - importantly - free drinks.

Within the week, seven million eighteen to thirty year-olds descended upon the asteroid in a plague of bad music, acne and alcohol. Now, ten years on, the entire populations of nearby planets were employed in the manufacture of Zol-related products: alcohol, gonedoms, cigarettes and unadventurous Earthfood.

There was no way in hell Professor Koszov had come here voluntarily.

And now he wouldn't be leaving in a hurry either.

"So much for following der lead," Wulf huffed, rummaging in a drawer.

His journey to the Zol had been a miserable experience; crammed into the smoky cockpit of the hippyship piloted by "Cheez" and his menagerie of mates. Wulf understood less than one in twenty words they said, sampled less than one in a hundred narcotics they tried and imagined himself throttling each of his rescuers less than... no, every time he closed his eyes.

Cheez said it was lucky they'd picked him up. Cheez said it was spooky the way they'd got stoned and steered so far off course that they'd picked up Wulf's hitching signal.

Actually, what Cheez said was: "Skaaaaandrivin'
blatted
, hornyguy. Wikkid didmeth-trip brung us down this way, right - totally outRAYjus - at gonzo-correcto-tiempo. Loodikrus vibes. Sneck the spooks, gig."

Despite the mode of delivery, Wulf was inclined to agree: coincidences had always seemed to him to exist only to bring bad situations into conjunction. For everything to turn out "just right" was, he reflected, about as dodgy as an Ice Giant with a bottle of suncream. By the Karma principal, he was due a fall. A big one.

On their arrival, the hotel manager was nice enough to assist Wulf with his enquiries. A psychopath wearing a horned helmet will tend to encourage that sort of thing. Cheez & Co had lost interest when Wulf began searching for "der small man in der glasses," and wandered off to see who could contract a novelty STD first.

Koszov showed up in apartment 43134 under the name "J Doe", deader than discojazz, with - Wulf was rapidly discovering - absolutely nothing incriminating amongst his possessions. His lack of cranial fluid was pretty much the only thing that set him apart from the other holidaymakers on this overcrowded, hot little asteroid.

He slumped onto the cheap bed and wiped sweat from underneath the helmet. He'd entertained the faint hope that the tropical heat would expand it enough for whatever weird gizmos holding it in place to release him. Instead, as it overheated, the helmet's control-electrodes were playing up, randomly zapping him.

He was stumped, frustrated, grumpy, and image-conscious. He wished Johnny was around. He always knew what to do in situations like this.

If truth be told, Wulf was doubting his efficacy as a solo agent. Investigations were alien to his way of working - his specialities involved hitting things with his happystick and, well, hitting them again. He took a deep breath and concentrated.

Professor Koszov's body was his only lead. Someone had come in here and shot him in the head, without him even standing up. And the door hadn't been broken down (until Wulf arrived), so the professor had
invited
his killer inside.

Wulf risked a smile, pleased with himself, moving from the shallows of Deduction into the piranha-infested rapids of Speculation.

"Someone he was here to be meeting?"

He drummed his fingers. He was no expert in forensic science, but after a lifetime of converting things from being alive to being dead he recognised certain telltale signs. Quite apart from anything else, the dried blood splattered across the wall and floor were red rather than the usual black/brown patina of clotted goop. The murder was recent, then.

Perhaps "motive" was the way to think. Why kill a harmless old guy?

"To be shutting him up?" he said to himself. The helmet zapped him lightly but he ignored it, refusing to let go of the nugget of an idea. He was onto something here.

If Koszov had been killed to protect whatever it was he knew, why hadn't the killer disposed of the body? If Koszov was involved with Grinn then the mere fact of his body showing up could make life uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Unless...

Unless his body wouldn't be found.

Wulf was at the door and running before he'd finished the thought.

He was too late.

Stepping out into the hot noon, he ran headlong into a knot of spotty tourists, all staring in confusion at the sky. Glancing about, Wulf saw that on every boxy veranda, on every cheap balcony, all along the beaches and concourses of the Kostadell Zol, crowds were looking upwards.

The sun was setting. Very, very quickly.

The Zol's claim of offering sixteen hours of uninterrupted sun was no idle boast. At either end of the peanut-shaped asteroid was a vast stack of engines and jets: as though the asteroid was some misshapen urchin; its bristles confined to scraggly patches at either end.

At the end of every day, when the nightclubs were fully stocked on alchopops, when the peddlobots had all been returned, when the greasy hordes were returning to their apartments for showering, shaving, dousing-with-industrial-strength pheromonal odours and selecting progressively more revealing anticlothing, when the general consensus seemed to be heading for a state of 'nightishness', the resort director could simply lean forwards in his chair and flip a switch.

The jets would ignite, blasting great nuclear cones into space, firing in prearranged sequence to balance their movements. Like a great Catherine wheel the asteroid spiralled around its central axis, tilting the resort away from the sun and towards the magnificent starscape on its posterior aspect.

During the resort's development, its designers had encountered a minor problem in this "daylight mobility" function. Namely: gravity. A distinct lack thereof.

Turning the Kostadell Zol too quickly created what amounted to an asteroid-sized centrifuge; divorcing objects from the grav-engines buried at the meteor's core. The solution was twofold: first, the transition from day to night should be, if not slow, then at least unhurried. And second, during the asteroidal manoeuvring the gravengines should be turned up to compensate. Ideally, nobody in the resort should ever feel any difference in their personal gravity during the transition.

Wulf didn't know any of this.

Not that he was stupid, or backward. Upon his arrival in the future (or the present, or whatever) he'd quickly figured out that the world was neither flat nor growing from the shaft of Odin's world-tree. Being told that there was a kind of stickiness which held people onto the surfaces of their planets seemed as good an explanation as any.

Even so, when Kostadell Zol had its quickest ever sunset and the gravity engines died with a lurch, it didn't take Wulf long to figure out that something was going horribly wrong. The way his booted feet were parting company with the floor was the giveaway.