Prophet Margin (19 page)

"Hmph," he said, contriving to express with that one syllable all the frustration, exhaustion and irritation bubbling through him. Quite apart from anything else his beard was an unwilling subject of the new gravitational regime and had developed an irritating habit of flopping over into his eyes. Only his feet appeared to be inclined towards adhering to the normal rules, and that was only because of the bulky gravboots enclosing them.

He'd gone through hell in the process of getting to where he was, and the rustling whatever-it-was beneath the mangled spacecraft parts was
not
helping his mood.

He was in the pod-park of the Zol. It looked like someone had staged a war there.

Herculean challenge number one had taken place back in the control room. Removing boots from a dead body is hard enough, but doing so in a reverse gravity situation where the roof has become the floor and the boots have remained fastened to what is now the ceiling is an entirely different matter. Putting the boots on oneself after that is, put bluntly, almost impossible.

The corpse of the ex-assassin had gone sailing merrily through the ceiling and down (or up, or whatever) towards the bowl-shaped ocean still forming in the atmosphere-bubble around the resort. The balance-bending difficulties of resolving what was up and what was down had become a moot issue: without the boots, Wulf had little to look forward to except a two-thousand foot drop into water clogged with dead tourists. Thus motivated, getting the footwear on had become somewhat easier.

The second challenge lay in traversing the half-mile or so of terracotta walkways, balconies and bar fronts between the control room and the resort's reception, where stood the stairwell to the underground car park. He'd decided that his only course of action, being unable to resurrect the resort's communications systems, was to hotwire a vehicle and get the sneck off the asteroid. Again, a relatively simple task - walking between two points - was given an air of pant-wetting terror by the abyssal void between him and the inverted ocean below, not to mention the profound embarrassment of dangling from the ceiling by one's feet whilst wearing a kilt.

Herculean effort number three, at a point where exhaustion and hopelessness were already setting in, lay in preventing himself from going utterly stark raving mental when, having reached his destination, he found that some malignant piece of space-sneck had taken it upon themselves to blow up all the parked spacecraft. Their shredded remains hung above his head like a junkyard sea.

And now something was moving through it and he had nothing to shoot it with. What was the point of frustration if you couldn't take it out on random moving objects?

"Who is there?" he shouted down, face bright red. "I have got der gun here!"

The moving hillock of debris yelped and poked out a head, wide junkie-eyes darting around the cavern in terror.

Wulf groaned.

"Up here," he said, shaking his head. He recognised the face.

"R-rads, Hornyguy!" said Cheez, focusing on his fifth attempt. "Whyzzit way downs-upside, geez? Up onna roof. Up onna ceeee-ling."

"What are you being doing in here?" Wulf barked, feeling surreally cheated. "Why are you not going und... und sailing away up into der ceiling with all der others? Eh?"

"Dude!" Cheez's big empty face split into a vast grin. "You tripping! Crotching no reals!"

Wulf closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer to the old Gods. Real or not, it had to be worth a go.

But no, it wasn't a dream. It wasn't all an enormous trick. He really
was
stuck on an out-of-control asteroid with no means of escape, clinging to the ceiling in the company of a trip junkie so profoundly irritating that he could have driven saints to murder.

If truth be told, Wulf was feeling more than a little hard done-by.

At one time - a time before its cellular growth was speeding up, before its genetic encoding was set in stone, before its gestation was underway - it was a shark.

Prionace glauca
. A blue shark. Sleek, efficient, deadly.

Its development in the common tradition of its ancestors - whose evolutionary effectiveness was such that they had remained alike for millions upon millions of years - lasted somewhere in the region of thirty minutes.

Thirty minutes of embryonic decisions, growths and portends, before some smartarse dumped twenty kilos of strontium-90 into the aquarium in which it and its thousands of cloned siblings, grew silently within weed-like eggsacs.

Most had died. Those that didn't grew monstrous.

And those few whose monstrosity was deemed useful, beneficial, were studied and photographed and dissected with indecent enthusiasm.

But
its
growth had been... different. Monstrous, yes, but not the monstrousness of arbitrary biology. Not the monstrousness of legions, tumours and sores. Not the monstrousness of physical violation, of finding some esoteric benefit in freakishness.

It swam an ocean of reality. It breathed dimensions. It dipped into corporeal existence with the grace of a breaching whale, flicking lazily between liquid chance and time. And it fed. Often.

"Johnny," said Stanley Everyone, leaning with a smile against a rocky ledge, "meet Scheider. Scheider, meet Johnny."

It was huge.

Sleek to the point of liquidity, tapering away in a haze of dimensional distortion to a tailfin that left incandescent lightstreamers hanging behind it, the beastie seemed to be winning a struggle against the laws of physics. It hovered above the ground, crackling with blue light, grey skin shimmering like an acid-trip made real. Its gills bled colour, its pectoral fins swept open like the wings of a Spitfire, hazing in-and-out of reality.

And its eyes, black and empty and beady, regarded Johnny with alien fascination.

It moved like a warpdrive on uppers.

One great flank rasped itself along Johnny's arm, tendrils of fluorescence ebbing across his eyes. He hadn't even had time to think, let alone move. The blow blasted him off the path and into the uneven maze of boulders and misshapen rocks to the side, landing with an ungainly clatter. The air left his lungs in a rush.

Above him, the shark turned and gulped at the air, translucent jaws shimmering; a glitter of shadows and glowspots oscillating across their surface. It snapped them closed like a bear trap, as if debating whether Johnny was worth eating or not.

With adrenaline monkeying through his body, racing his mind like an overseer with a whip, he snapped his blaster into position and squeezed on the trigger.

The creature vanished. The shot ricocheted away with a whine.

And a great pair of jaws clashed open behind him, bleeding out of the air like steam-in-reverse.

"Kid!" Johnny yelled, diving aside with another bone jarring tumble across the rocks. "Shoot the snecker!"

Again, thirty feet of semi-corporeal predator gusted past him, gnashing for effect, lazily flicking one graceful pectoral to scrape a gouge across his shoulder-guard. As nonchalant as it was, the blow flipped him into the air on a plume of smoke - electrical spasms racing through him as if he'd been hit by an electronux set to "Deep Fry".

It was playing with him.

He'd seen how fast it could move. If the inclination took it it could have snipped off his arms and legs faster than a rutting PistonElk during mating season. Instead it curled lazily around him, dissolving into the air then flourishing elsewhere, light blossoming from its surface as it rushed and flickered by, butting and scraping like an artist kneading clay.

"Kid!" he shouted again, struggling into a culvert off the path. "Shoot it!"

It was no good. Kid Knee had frozen up.

Blinking in the ghoulish show of lights that tumbled across the beast's flanks, he stood transfixed: jaw hanging open, blaster dangling uselessly from one fingertip. The shark seemed momentarily indecisive, thrashing itself sideways, turning one eye upon Johnny then rippling across reality like a living echo, reforming with the other buttonlike orb glaring at the Kid.

Johnny could almost
see
the decision unfolding in its mind. He wished Stanley would stop laughing.

Blurring at its edges, it turned and dipped its head towards the Kid, coalescing with a hiss. Its maw gaped.

"No!" Johnny growled, pumping a tight cluster of cartridges into its flickering side. The shots passed through it like jets cutting through clouds, blasting a cratered patch in the cliff-face beyond.

"Kid! Get down!"

It was too late - Johnny could already see that. And the creature wasn't interested in playing any more: serried ranks of needle teeth glittered, lower jaw hingeing open. The tail flicked across an aurora of whisplight, the dorsal fin glowed like a streaking comet, and the mouth slammed shut with a
crack
.

On thick, blubbery grey flesh.

Two tonnes of speeding Dilûu thumped Kid Knee to one side with all the finesse of a fat arse hitting a sandcastle. Farting excitedly, its chorus of honks and whoops rapidly became squeals as the shark tore a great lump of flesh from the beast's hide. The killer backed-up in a bizarre series of dimensional
pops
, outline staggered, eyes rolling in perplexity at its unexpected meal.

Kid Knee, who had landed with a gurgle after the Dilûu's meteoric arrival, staggered upright with a shriek, the inclination to freeze drying-up like a dehydrated slug. He vaulted over the boulder where Johnny was hiding with surprising agility, dropping onto his haunches.

"G-good thing I got him o-out in the open like that," he stammered. "R-right?"

Johnny ignored him. Not that he had much experience with the behavioural attitudes of aquatic predators, but it looked to him as though the shark was very, very pissed-off. It rolled on its side and clashed its jaws, flashing in and out of reality like a faulty light. Every now and then it dipped to slash another strip from the Dilûu's flanks; gore and lightning streaming in all directions.

Even hopelessly outclassed the Dilûu made a decent stab at fighting back, curling its conical head to gurn at the air, dragging itself along with great blasts from its trumpetlike rear. In these moments the shark could easily evade its opponent, vanishing in a haze of neon to reappear; teeth invariably bared and ready. It was clear from the start that there could only be one winner.

"Where's Stanley?" Kid Knee cringed, sticking his leg cautiously out of cover for a look.

"What?"

"Where's Stanley?"

Johnny cursed himself. Watching the shark in fascinated horror, he'd neglected the reason that he was here at all. The fat man had indeed vanished, and as Johnny's eyes glowed ferociously they could catch only the most tenuous of heat-traces from near the foot of the path.

"He's snecking gone!"

Johnny pounced from his cover and started to run, oblivious to his sudden vulnerability. Beside him the shark twitched as if electrified, registering his sprint with a full-body spasm of white light. Johnny kept running, ignoring the danger. Everything rode upon the capture of Stanley Everyone - from the all important hunt for Grinn to rather more practical concerns: if the Dilûu continued to be so effectively minced by its aggressor, Everyone's car was the only way back to civilisation. And, of course, there was Roolán - if the youth had stayed at the foot of the path he'd be easy prey for Everyone. Somehow Johnny doubted the youngster would let the fat shapeshifter go without a confrontation.

Except...

Except he'd told Roolán to stay with the Dilûu. And, now he came to think about it, the great sweaty animal cars weren't renowned for their aggression, or their 'come-to-the-aid-of-your-master' loyalty. That's what the control collar was for.

And the control collar needed an operator.

"Sneck," Johnny said, stopping in his tracks. Kid Knee, unburdened by the curse of logic, bowled into his back with a thump.

"What are you doing?" he wailed.

"We can't go." Johnny was already turning back, blaster drawn.

"Whaaat? But, E-everyone! He's getting away! And, and I don't want to get eaten!"

"Nor does Roolán."

The boy was in the howdah.

"I told him," Johnny growled to himself, stamping back along the pathway. "I told him the plucky young companion tries to help and gets killed! Would he listen? Would he?"

The onset of parental righteousness, perhaps mercifully, didn't have the chance to flourish. At that instant the shark materialised directly beside them, mouth gaping in a great triumphant grin
¹⁰
.

^{10. Under other circumstances, Johnny might have acknowledge that sharks don't have much choice when it comes to sporting a perpetual grin, but when one of the sneckers is about to eat you it's easy to mistake biology for smugness.}

"Aw, sneck," said the Kid, with uncharacteristic composure.

At which point Roolán stood up in the Dilûu's howdahcab, behavioural controls held in one hand and started to sing.

Somewhere above, hanging like a great silver mobile above the planet, shrouded behind the clouds, a fantastically sophisticated piece of surveillance equipment bolted to the side of a needlelike starcraft named
Slinky II
focused its array of cameras, heat-signature detectors, sonar mappers, subspacial energograms and assorted technowizardry upon the rocky pathway. It was about the size of a small church and there was a human man inside.

Well. Probably human. The jury was still out.

En route to YoCassok, he'd stopped off at Ombud-Pol to earn some quick cash. This was a trick he'd learned years before, when jobs were scarce and he needed money fast. The work compromised certain of his... ethical guidelines, but he'd learned long ago that they were just that - guidelines - and if in breaking them he could fund a speedy return to his true vocation, then so be it.

On Ombud-Pol, seventy percent of the people were politicians. The other thirty per cent didn't lead very interesting lives. On Ombud-Pol, the air was subject to taxation. Whole continents had been surrendered to the buildup of outbox paperwork. So great was the Ombud-Pol reliance on political wrangling that a vote was chaired every morning before dawn to ascertain whether the sun should be allowed to rise. Nobody knew what would happen if one day the motion went uncarried.