Prophet Margin (26 page)

Sneck! Whatever this place is, it hurts my eyes. I can... see things. Things that aren't there. Faces in the data.

I guess Wulf is zapping around somewhere in here too. It's not a reassuring thought.

With teleporting, we're all just data.

I joined the S/D agency when I was still a boy. Sometimes you got to wonder how clever that was. Someone like me, someone like Roolán. There's no mystery. The hunt's in the blood.

They say, "Hey, only job a mutie can get." And maybe that's a part of it. Maybe for someone like Kid Knee, that's exactly right.

And yeah, I tell myself the same. All about the money, I say. Don't make it personal. Keep your distance. Stay professional. Money, money, money. It's dead simple.

Only, that's a damn snecking lie. I know it, and you know it.

Sneck. This place, it's messing with my head. W-what was I saying?

Professional. Be professional.

The Finchleycorp
^TM
short-range teleporter can be rigged. I joined the S/D agency when I was still a boy, and this was one of the first tricks I learned.

Overload the 'porter, pump in three times too much juice, aim down a line-of-sight just like normal and - if you're careful - you can go for miles. Factor in gravity. Factor in matched velocities. Factor in careful guidance programmes run on an eccentric ship's-AI analysis machine and, most of all, factor in dumb snecking luck. You don't get anywhere in this game without it.

The idea was: we 'port direct into enemy territory. The idea was: tooled up like a snecking army, there's not a raggedy-arsed bunch of religious freakos in the universe could stop us. Even if they're hostile which, let's face it, they're probably not.

The idea was: you see Grinn, you shoot him.

Or Stix.

Stix... Stix is everything I'm not. Stix is a businessman. Ask him, it's about being the best and eliminating competition. Me, I take it personally. I'm a hunter. And I've spent my whole life keeping it under wraps, forcing the spiky peg into a square hole, being professional. I've spent my whole life telling myself it's about money. It's not.

So, the job: we teleported without a problem. The lurch, the cold white nothingness, and then-

More of the same.

And more.

Your basic teleport, illegally boosted or not, lasts about three seconds. Your body gets picked apart at an atomic level, reduced to data, and blasted towards its new destination. Feels like a sneeze for your whole body.

This one's lasted something like two hours. I'm a splintered prisoner in a data cell, my mind isn't working properly, and spending eternity as an un-reconstituted victim of a teleporter malfunction would not be a good way to go.

Be professional about it. Yeah, right.

And then the fizzing light clears, my body melts back into reality and I'm...

I'm...

Where the sneck is this?

I'm in a courtyard. I'm standing on the flat surface of a statue. My gun is gone. My grenades, my time bombs, my helmet. Everything is gone. This is not good.

There are something like three hundred guns aimed at my head.

There's a man in white looking up at me. He's smiling. He's smiling a lot.

Someone in the crowd shouts, "Look at his eyes! It's him! Praise be!"

The man in white smiles some more. He also has a gun.

I came here because of money. Perhaps, with my last breath, I could reflect upon the futility of avarice. Perhaps I should save this moment for something profound, some lasting utterance that would give value to my mercenary little life in this mercenary little galaxy. Something that would matter.

But all I can think is: this isn't fair. All I can think is: you bastard, you beat me. All I can think is a load of stuff which isn't about money, or politics, or business. All I can think is:

I should have made this personal. It snecking well is now.

And all I can say is:

"Sneck."

Then Grinn shoots me in the heart. And I die.

Johnny Alpha, the man without eyes, the all-seeing-guy, jolted once.

The S/D badge pinned over his heart was gradually obscured, blood brimming up from the perfect puncture at its centre. He frowned. He couldn't understand what was happening. The colour seemed to be fading out of his eyes, the world closing up like a photograph developing in reverse.

"This..." he said, then changed his mind.

The crowd watched, silent. The prophet stared and smiled, a lazy serpent of smoke coiling unctuously from the barrel of his gun.

Johnny's voice was little more than whisper. "It's..."

His eyes glowed, whiteness flaring and flickering like a pair of faulty spotlights.

"It's cold."

Then his shoulders stooped, his head slumped, his knees gave way, and - twisting and scraping as he fell - he collapsed to the ground and didn't move.

For a long time, nobody spoke. A couple of camera drones, regarding events with dumb disinterest, corkscrewed to get some footage of the corpse.

The prophet smiled, handing the gun to an assistant. A second acolyte passed him a bundled package, which he uncovered with the sort of slow exhibitionism favoured by strippers galaxy-wide.

It was The One Book, removed from its accustomed place. He thumbed his way toward the final chapters, smiling. With a long index finger tracing its way across the page he wanted, he looked up to run his eyes across the crowd, grinned hugely, and began to read.

"And the Great God that is Boddah," (he said) "be-his-name-remembered-throughout-history-as-long-as-it-may-last, did come upon me, his holy prophet, once more, being this time the Third Time.

"And spake he thus:

"'And lo, for there shall be an Third Sign of the End. And as unto the Second Sign, it shall be in the form of a servant of He Whose Name Dwells in the Buttock Of Iniquity, and that is Ogmishlen, and that is the Reality Devil.

"'And as unto the Second Sign, the servant of He Whose Name Dwells in the Buttock Of Iniquity and Etc Etc, shall commit great mischief and ruin upon the servants of the Boddah, and so shall you know him.

"'And the Children Of Boddah shall see Ogmishlen's wickedness, and tremble.

"'And as unto the Second Sign, the servant of He Whose Name Dwells in the Buttock Of Iniquity and Etc Etc, shall be overcome only by the Chosen of the great god, that is his holy Prophet, and so shall you know him.

"'And the Children Of Boddah shall see the prophet's righteousness, and rejoice.

"'And the name of the Third Sign shall be The White-Eyed-Warrior.'"

The prophet closed the book and looked up. The crowd didn't move a muscle.

"Thirty-two of the Boddah's faithful were slaughtered today, by this... this creature, before I could summon it to this place of reckoning."

A vid-screen mounted on the wall behind the prophet burst to life, faithfully displaying images of a (rather indistinct) figure in green and yellow armour, gunning down shrieking believers in cold blood. The crowd booed and shook their heads.

"Let it stand as final proof, were any needed, of Ogmishlen's devilry!"

A couple of the more enthusiastic members of the crowd fired shots into the air. The prophet continued with limelight-savvy slowness.

"And let its defeat stand as proof of the Boddah's righteousness!"

A thousand pairs of lungs sucked in air and a thousand goggle-eyed morons roared their appreciation into the sky. And all across Splut Mundi, those who weren't watching events in the flesh gawped at their TV screens, punched the air, prayed to the Boddah, and told each other that they knew it was true all along.

The body of Johnny Alpha was dragged away.

Above, eyes fixed unwaveringly on a viewscreen, Stix's cheeks almost cracked from smiling so hard.

TWENTY

Even before Johnny and Wulf had left, Roolán was determined that one way or another he was going down to the surface of Splut. He couldn't exactly explain what was going on in his mind, and Johnny's departing words had effectively dropped a dambuster into the already turbulent waters of his thoughts, but all he could say with certainty was that he wanted revenge on Stanley Everyone.

It was just that he couldn't work out why.

After all, his parents hadn't exactly been nice people. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realised that Everyone had probably done him a favour, that his parents were complete bastards, and that if the shapeshifter hadn't done it by hiring a gang of Xowpokes to bombard Shtzuth with orbital debris he probably would have done it himself sooner or later with a pitchfork.

However. Nursemaiding a pair of chronically inebriated morons whilst the blood in his head was rushing about chanting
kill-kill-kill
, was not something he was prepared to accept. As soon as Johnny and Wulf had vanished in a haze of light and their teleporter interfaces had popped up on the cockpit's screens, he'd already been thinking up ways to get down to Splut.

There were no teleporter arrays left. The
Peggy Sue'
s controls were frozen solid, and every time he commanded, then asked, then
begged
the AI to help him, it blandly replied that it could only accept orders from a qualified Strontium Dog. Johnny had clearly thought of everything. Roolán had flown into a sulk, threatened to shoot Kid Knee and Cheez through their fat sleeping heads unless the AI capitulated, and threw an almighty tantrum when the shrewd computer called his bluff.

And then the disembodied voice had announced an anomaly in the teleportations. It seemed that both signals, far from correctly terminating with a "successful transmission" blip, had gone awry. Someone, somehow, had snagged the datastream and diverted it, severing any link between the hunters and the ship.

"Bugger," the computer muttered.

As far as Roolán was concerned, that settled the matter. If the AI wouldn't indulge his desire to reach the surface for his own sake, surely it would acquiesce for the sake of the lives of its renters? Roolán began appealing to its sense of duty, its top-of-the-range status, its honour, loyalty and commendable bravery. It was only when he found himself typing:
You know, there's nothing more impressive than a hundred tonnes of metal that remains faithful to its owners even when the chips are down,
that it became obvious the ship's help wasn't all he was securing. The
Peggy Sue
turned out to be a complete flirt.

At some indistinct point between the upper atmosphere of Splut and the endless lines of luxurious spacecraft parked around the city, the computer's emotionless tones had softened into those of a breathless, giggly woman. Roolán suffered its advances with panicky decorum, tapping out polite answers on the keyboard, doing his best to tread the awkward line between romantic submission and playing hard-to-get. Given that his enforced isolation had never prepared him for a real romantic conquest, let alone an electronic one, he did pretty well.

The
Peggy Sue
settled beside the inert voidpalaces and megaships with a flirtatious bump and unhinged its disembarkation ramp, asking whether Roolán liked the curvature of its secondary engine-cluster, how he felt about maybe spending some time in the VR interface, and whether he fancied a vibro-massage quickie via the pilot's chair.

He was out the door and sprinting before the echoes of the final breathless exclamation marks had faded away.

Something a little like light punctured the world and blossomed. Warmth returned in tiny increments to fingertips, legs, lips.

The light guttered, dancing at the edges of perception. A flame, then. Chains rattled abruptly, an icy music puncturing the silence. His hands were bound.

It was cold. He was cold. He vomited. In the dark he curled on the stone floor, blinked his eyes, tasted bile in his throat, and waited.

After an hour there were footsteps. The flame, which his eyes had decoded as a burning torch set into a wall bracket, moved, a pale hand holding it close to his face, sweeping it across the length of his body. The heat didn't help.

There was little point in playing dead, he guessed. The shivering wouldn't stop.

"Ah," a voice purred. "You're awake. Yes. Yes, good. Good."

A figure dressed all in white settled cross-legged nearby.

"This," the voice trilled, softly menacing, "is what you might call... gloating."

"I suppose, if I'm being honest, you did me a favour. Five years ago, I mean. You caught me. Nobody ever catches me, but you did. I can't explain enough how much I hated you. There aren't... words for it. You beat me, and I spent weeks - months - dreaming of revenge."

Slowly, reflected light twinkling in his eyes, the man in white lowered the flaming torch until it rested against the shivering figure's legs. The bright fabric of his uniform began to blacken, rubberised surface bubbling and melting, acrid smoke ebbing upwards.

Too exhausted to react, the prone man could only groan.

Grinn grinned, and raised the flame up again.

"It all sounds so tacky, now," he said. "Tell me, have you ever seen inside a macrojail? I don't suppose you have. They do things to your mind. They make the inside the outside. Don't ask me how. Psionics, maybe. Virtuality simulators, trancemantra broadcasts, who knows?

"They take away your self from yourself. They suck up your senses and turn them inwards. You are your world. You are your environment.

"They lock you up inside yourself. It's not pleasant."

The torch dipped again, this time tracing delicately along the lines of the recumbent man's arm, dragging a streak of scorched material behind it. Grinn giggled like a little girl.

"Only one way to make life bearable in a place like that," he purred, "and that's to make
yourself
bearable. Model prisoner gets an easy ride. Self improvement. Morality classes. You name it, it helps. You act the nice guy, pretty soon you
are
the nice guy. That's the theory."

The curled figure gagged, flames tickling across his shoulder. Grinn "hemmed" beneath his breath and lifted the fire away again.