Prophet Margin (2 page)

The Man Without Eyes wiped a kaleidoscopic dollop from one bright shoulder-guard. This was getting boring.

He briefly toyed with the settings on his blaster, wondering whether to risk a standard execution round or to live a little and use a number "four" cartridge, the favoured tool of the "blow everything to bollocks first, ask questions later" school of wholesale destruction.

The dilemma rapidly became a moot point as an arc of superheated plasma punched a smoking "o" into the hunter's cover, collapsing the metal sheet and leaving it bubbling. The Man Without Eyes had vanished.

He reappeared behind the mark in a cute sparkle of glittering energy. This effect was entirely unnecessary, but at the very least prevented potentially expensive lawsuits as a result of fatal coronaries. Finchleycorp[tm], the arms-manufacturers who had developed the personal short-range teleporter, was nothing if not safety conscious.

The mark hadn't even noticed the hunter's presence, too absorbed in demolishing a coachful of Munteppians which had clearly offended him. The Man Without Eyes considered shooting him in the back, then discarded the idea in the name of fairness. As ever, it felt an awful lot like hypocrisy.

"Hey," he said.

The mark turned around. The Man Without Eyes shot him. All fair and square.

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#1 Algernon MacGregor Durant (AKA: "Standing" Algie)

Lava lamps.

I snecking hate lava lamps. They're so completely beyond the realms of the merely "uncool" that, you ask me, an admission of ownership is right up there with ethnic genocide and geo-orbital bombardment on the evil-o-meter.

I'm sounding a little irrational, perhaps. Allow me to explain:

My mother collected lava lamps.

She owned, in fact, the largest collection in the Aggrethian sector. She had them all: temperature reactive ripploids, oscillating nanite fountains, holorific culograms with globule enhancers, semi-sentient liquipets in conical tanks. She even had an antique lamp that used - get this - convection currents to make the blobs of coloured snot go round and round. Must have been worth a fortune, that.

My mother and I didn't get along.

When I was eight, the year after dad eloped with his AI filofax, my mother paid to have the skin of her right hand surgically reinforced. She'd complained that her children were so disobedient that, in dishing out all the clips, slaps, smacks and spanks required to enforce her dominance, her skin was in danger of wearing away. For about a year my school nickname was "BlisterArse". I still can't sit down without wincing. I sneck ye not.

My mother's dead now, thank the Boddah.

The problem with having a paranoid obsession with lava lamps in a multi-species galaxy - when there are more cultures mooching around than you can shake a Nibullian counting-stick at - is that you never know where one might turn up. Say you're on Madaxxus 9, you're safe in the knowledge that kitsch lighting is number one on the fashion police's list of crimes. But head across to the Zahin'r satellite worlds, just next door in galactic terms, and
bang
. Guess what's at the top of every infant's pile of sporeday presents?

Lava lamps catch you by surprise. They creep up on you, right when you least expect it. Take my current situation, for example.

Two days ago I'm out in the Zang sector, fleeing for my life from the security agents of the TookerTec[tm] research-world I'd just robbed blind, when I get this warning transmission from a couple of Stronts. They reckon they're on my tail and it'll save me a whole load of trouble if I just give it up and come in quietly.

Kiss, as I put it, my heavily-scarred arse.

Strontium Dogs. Search and Destroy agents. Bounty Hunters. Snecking muties, for Boddah's sake.

So up pops this little o-class planetoid on the scanner, nice and out of the way, and I think, yep. That's for me.

Only nobody told me - no snecking snecker of an information file thought it might be clever to let me know - that the indigenous life consists of six foot smart-arsed snecking lava lamps! I'm not even kidding. These things communicate by changing the colour and rotational direction of their innards. You can't tell me that's right!

It would be fair to say I lost it somewhat. By "it" I mean "the plot". My temper. My self control. Whatever.

It would also be fair to say there was a spot of collateral damage, a few wobbly goo-filled locals got themselves slightly dead and, sneck it, I was sort of too busy with my kill-crazy thermonuclear rampage to bother hiding from the Stronts.

All of this is now academic. There's a guy in a green jumpsuit pointing a handcannon this way and I'm about to die. Fingers crossed, I won't have to put up with any irritating playback of my life. All that flashing-before-your-eyes stuff makes me nauseous.

Then I remember the hardcore dose of giga-class neurochemical narcotics I shot shortly before arriving on this world and all hopes of a speedy departure go right out the window.

Blam
.

TWO

The knack, he knew, was in the reaction.

Anyone with a spare year or seven could learn the skills. Anyone with time and effort and - these days - money could invest in the training, the equipment, the lifestyle. Oh, there were variances, of course: differences in background, ancestry, biology, state-of-mind. Some were more successful than others, some lasted a lifetime, others ended abruptly.
¹
This was beyond the point.

^{1. The shortest recorded career of any officially sanctioned Bounty Hunter was that of Zim "Zalla" Bim, whose tenure with the Search/Destroy Agency, thanks to an illegal time-travelling incident, lasted minus four hundred and fifty-six years.}

Regardless of whether the skills required were obtained from fifteen years in the Milton Keynes ghetto or from the latest combat stimchip; regardless of whether those skills were even learnt at all, anyone in the entire universe could snap their fingers and call themselves a professional killer.

The talent, the soaked-into-your-genes gift that separated a born hunter from, at best a successful amateur, lay not merely in the ability to squeeze a trigger, but in what happened afterwards.

The Man Without Eyes reholstered his gun - a Westinghouse blaster in unfashionable gunmetal and silver, sporting variable cartridges and an antique filed-tip muzzle - slotting its heavy barrel into its holster with practiced precision. A brief trickle of smoke followed it down.

He nodded.

There was a purity, almost, to the profession. Almost.

Killing the guy who looked at you funny, killing the guy who stole your girl, killing the guy who turned your face into puff-pâté in the school playground: these were the hallmarks of a murderer. Killing a guy for money, well... that's business.

The way to look at it, he knew, was this: you're not hunting people. You're hunting a profit. Your basic illegal killer, he worried about evidence, cops, alibis. The Man Without Eyes worried about tax breaks.

Across the street, tangled in burnt architecture, a raggedy shape twitched, splattering a thick paste of blood across the scorched masonry. It attempted to stand, failed and watched its guts slap onto the floor. This had clearly never happened to it before.

The Man Without Eyes had seen kids on their first hunt - good kids with all the right moves, all the best gear - ruined in moments like this. He'd warned them. He'd said, expect it to get messy. Expect pleading and gagging and dribbling and farting. People don't die quick or easy.

It still took them by surprise, those first timers.

Anyone can pull a trigger, once. The knack was in doing it again and again, in watching people shuffle off their jagged little coils in the sure and certain knowledge that it was you who had put them down, that you'd do it again, that you did it for money...

That you didn't regret it.

Anyone could be a killer, once. It took a special kind of mind to shrug it off.

Johnny Alpha, the Man Without Eyes, the Alpha-Ray hunter, the All-Seeing-Guy, stood over his prey, biting away the regret, the horror, the guilt. It all happened automatically these days.

Algernon "Standing" MacGregor, not standing any more, was taking his sweet snecking time about going the way of the Dodo.

"Hey," Johnny said, keeping his voice slow and clear. The slab of meat twitched, eyes swivelling. "You're dying. You know that, right?"

Standing Algie moaned, a cappuccino froth of dribble and gore lathering his chin.

"Thing is..." Johnny poked vaguely at a puddle of slime nearby, formerly one of the locals. "Thing is, I reckon you're saveable. You took it in the guts. That's got to hurt, right? But, you don't mind me saying, you look pretty wired. Could be a big help, situation like this. What are we talking here? Dren? PulseGo? A neuronet?"

"Ss-stimmZap..."

"StimmZap, right. Fashionable. Probably saved your life." He pursed his chin. "Yeah, I've seen guys go two, maybe three days without biting it, wound like that. What I'm saying is, there's every chance you could pull through, if we get you to a sawbones."

"H-hurrtss..."

"It would. Look, Algie, you don't mind if I call you Algie, do you? I want to help you. You've done some pretty bad things and, well, I think you killed maybe fifty of these blobby guys but... I'm not one to judge. I'm trying to help you here."

Johnny tugged a sheaf of paper from a pocket and held it up. The mugshot that glared back, beyond the obvious lack of saliva and bloodsplatter, was a reflection of Algie's face. The self-translating holotext jumbled itself into standard English: "Reward: 8000cr. Alive or Dead".

"Call me old fashioned," Johnny said, "but I prefer 'alive'. You with me?"

Algie did something slippery that might have been a frantic nod. Johnny waited until the hope and relief was fully ignited on the man's face, before dropping the bomb.

"Only... The thing is, my partner... he doesn't see things that way."

At the crest of a nearby hill, thick with scorched buildings, a distant shape was picking its way through the tongues of flame.

"Wh-whuh?"

"He's what you could call a..." Johnny searched for the word, pantomiming his uncertainty, "a hardliner."

"H-hardliner?"

"Well, okay, he's a bloodthirsty bastard. The way he looks at it, you keep a guy alive, you're just going to regret it. Food, med bills, bed for the night. It all adds up, he says."

Algie's eyes widened as the ramifications of this bombshell sunk in.

"Cuh-couldn't you... Couldn't you t-talk him - uuh - out of it?"

Johnny made a show of wincing, stroking the stubble of his chin with a gloved hand. "Not a chance. He's not the sort of guy you mess with." The distant figure was almost at the foot of the hill now.

"P-please!"

Johnny glanced down, reproachful. "Listen, you weren't there last time this happened. That whole 'let's-be-reasonable' routine. I've seen it tried." He leaned down, whispering "They never found the guy's remains."

"B-buh, but, but-"

"Sneckssakes, breathe! Look, I'm not in the business of messing with heads. Just thought I'd give you time to... pray. Whatever. Going to need a heavy incentive, that's all I'm saying."

"W-what do you want?" It was almost a squeak.

"The usual. News from the rotten criminal underbelly of society, that sort of thing."

"I don't know anyth-"

"Oop, here he comes."

"Okay, okay, okay!"

Something twitched behind Algie's face, making him shiver. Johnny frowned. Through his eyes the activity of Algie's brain was picked out in a haze of colour and shape, a haze currently fluctuating weirdly, coruscating in strange patterns before settling.

"I've got a name," the dying man said, his voice strangely calm. "A lead."

"Go on."

"It's about Mr Grinn."

Johnny wasn't in the habit of being surprised. He almost choked.

The threat of a murderous partner had kept him in business with lowlifes and nobodies from the wanted lists during the leanest of times, but he'd never expected anything like this. Tired mobster sell-outs, a local crime snitch or two. Conmen, gravsmugglers, tax dodgers - their kind sold each other out all the time, particularly when threatened by the chimera of some black hearted mutie sicko, lurching ever nearer. But not
Grinn
.

"T-there's a scientist..." the man winced, a gobbet of bloodpaste slugging its way across his chin. "D-did some work for Grinn. Got mixed up in stuff..."

"What scientist?"

Across the street the approaching figure paused to clamber over a blast melted goods vehicle before resuming its theatrical advance.

"Name... name of Koszov. Big on... hah... mutation..."

"Koszov. What's his connection to Grinn?"

"H-hey!
Kkh
. You got to promise! You got to keep that snecker away from me!"

"No deals. Talk! Then we'll see."

"You gotta protect me from the... the..." An arm thrashed in the direction of the onrushing figure. Johnny peered up to gauge how close his partner was, hoping for another minute or two of bargaining time, and swore under his breath - the big goon was way too early. Algie's moist mumblings petered out.

The shadow that fell across Johnny and Algie was unremarkable, in mutant terms. It described a broad figure with a bouncing beer-paunch, fingers crooked into menacing claws, heavyset legs stamping forwards with a lurch. Despite its best attempts to growl and mutter, this was clearly not the physically outrageous collection of spikes and teeth that Algie had imagined.

The uncertainties began when his eyes tracked upwards to inspect the figure's face. This posed something of a difficulty.

It had no head.

"Rrrraaa!" it said unconvincingly, from somewhere near the ground. Johnny rolled his eyes.

"Oh, sneck..." said Kid Knee, catching sight of Algie, his voice returning to its naturally whingesque cadence, "I can't stand the sight of blood."

Persuading Algie to spill his guts (rhetorically) thereafter was an object lesson in futility. Johnny couldn't claim to be surprised: of all the physically grotesque mutants that the Search/Destroy agency could have offered him in his period of partnerlessness, Klarence Kneeble Jr ("Kid Knee" to his fr-... acquaintances) didn't rate highly on the "terrifying visage of dribbling fury" front.