Prophet Margin (30 page)

"See you soon, big guy," he told his partner, and rushed out into the corridor.

Wulf didn't hear him.

TWENTY-FOUR

Kid Knee was undergoing something of a life changing experience.

Awaking with a cosmic hangover, his shivering misery was compounded by discovering that not only had he been tied up, but that there was something soul-destroyingly vile in his mouth. He had a pretty good idea what it was.

Ever since they'd first met, the Kid had never seen eye-to-eye with Wulf. Or eye-to-knee.

Several years later, and in the Kid's groggy state of mind it was clear that it had only ever been a matter of time before Sternhammer pulled something like this. The Viking's celebrated method of silencing captives was well known.

The Kid had a sock in his mouth.

The taste, in as much as he could describe its repugnancy, brought to mind diseased frogspawn, putrid Hiu'hit shitsoup, week old toxic spillage and a heavy sprinkling of hospital waste. Balled into his mouth so tightly that he couldn't even raise his tongue to eject it, the Sternhammer Silencer eventually proved to be the agent of its own downfall. The Kid was so nauseated by its demonic flavour that the resulting sluice of projectile vomit catapulted it from his mouth and across the room.

Which left him tied-up and able to shout for help. Which he did. For about an hour.

Unsuccessfully.

In response to his pugnacious demands, the computer was forced to apologetically remind him, fifty-six times, that it lacked the mandible limbs, cutting implements or remote hov-drones that it would require to free him. The one function it did have was a series of auto deploy life pods that could be materialised at any point aboard, which both parties agreed was an impressive but totally unhelpful announcement, given that the ship was currently grounded. It was in this demoralised state, with dried puke sticking to his shin, that the Kid had his epiphany.

Had his head been in a "normal" position, he slowly reasoned, it would have protruded from the top of the elasticised webbing, beyond its reach. As it was, by simply manoeuvring his leg a fraction he could bring the thick rope directly into his mouth. As dusty as it was, after enduring an hour or more of the Sternhammer Silencer it was like tasting the sweetest ambrosia.

"Non-viable life form, eh?" he growled savagely. "I bite low, you bastards! I bite low!"

And then he started to chew.

It took him a little less than an hour to free both arms, and thereafter ten minutes to extricate the rest of his body. Finding himself thus liberated, he turned his hazy thoughts to the problematic issue of What To Do Now.

Drink, he decided, would feature heavily.

So it was, half an hour later, with the happy miasma of alcohol around him and an empty hipflask in hand, that he stumbled onto the bridge and demanded to know what in the name of Frankie C Sneck was going on. The computer announced that he was sitting on the surface of a boring little planetoid that was due to be obliterated by an asteroid in approximately one hour.

The Kid's eyes bulged.

"Then get us... getusthesneck out of here," he blurted, waving his arms. "T-take off! Quick! Now!" He leapfrogged the captain's chair with a drunken squeal and started yanking the control column, jabbing at random buttons. Given that the ship was powered down this failed to have much of an effect.

The computer, being a calm and rational sort of artificial personality, attempted to remind the Kid that his comrades were still on the planet, and wouldn't it better to wait for them?

There was no answer: the headless drunkard's bout of leg stamping had brought his forehead into sharp contact with the underside of the cockpit dashboard and the AI's internal cameras discovered him lolling unconscious in the pilot's chair, dribbling and muttering dirty songs under his breath.

With no additional instructions, and on the basis that it had to obey commands issued by the fully licensed S/D agents amongst its crew, the computer performed the datastream equivalent of a weary shrug and raised the embarkation ramp, completely unaware that at that very moment an uninvited guest was clambering aboard.

Ever since Alpha and the
Peggy Sue
had arrived at Splut, Stix had been watching. Whatever else he might have thought of Alpha he was forced to concede that the white eyed bastard was as tenacious as a terrier with lockjaw.

Lurking within the ionosphere, by the time the
Slinky II
began to pick up the meteor on the edge of its scanners, Stix had tracked a pair of teleporter beams onto the surface. In the face of his fury at Alpha's continuing involvement, it had been a pleasant surprise when both appeared to have somehow been intercepted: stored away on some seriously clever technology, divested of chunks of data (their weapons, he correctly guessed) and reformed in separate locations. And then when he'd observed from high altitude as his nemesis was shot down in front of braying crowds, Stix couldn't believe his luck.

Then he'd got down to business.

Clearly teleporting was not an option. He set the
Slinky II
down on the city's eastern edge and walked.

As ever, the crowds stayed out of his way. People tend not to bother you when you're a seven foot badass in a trench coat carrying a handgun. He made his way to the villa at the city centre, reasoning that a criminal as megalomaniacal as Grinn would certainly be found in the largest and most luxurious place going. Someone had inconveniently destroyed the lower segments of the stairwell, but Stix had conquered this problem by simply pushing his cold hands into the bulkheads beyond the debris, tearing handholds into the metal without effort.

At the top of the tower, completely unexpectedly, without facing a single challenge or resorting to violence, he'd found what he was looking for. It was, perhaps, a little fatter than he'd anticipated, but the facial features were unmistakeable.

It was Grinn. He'd been shot in the head.

Stix lifted the rigid body onto his shoulder without any effort, glanced around in distaste - as if disappointed at the ease with which he'd won - and left.

It was whilst making his way back to the
Slinky II
that Stix had learned a new and relevant lesson. It's true that people tend not to bother you when you're a seven foot badass in a trench coat carrying a handgun, but give it a go whilst also carrying the mortal remains of their messiah and you're in a whole world of bother. To say that Stix found himself in hot water would be an understatement.

Not, of course, that he couldn't have coped. Given time and inclination he could have cracked heads all day, slugging his way through hordes to reach salvation. As it was, the meteor's arrival was imminent, the body was in danger of being torn to shreds by the zealous idiots grabbing it, his ship was too far away through the heaviest sections of the crowd, and Grinn found himself in a new and unfamiliar situation.

Without labouring the point - he'd run like a gazelle. And when he'd turned a corner to find a ship powering up to lift-off he didn't pause to glimpse at its nameplate, making his way directly for the boarding airlock on its fat, blocky behind.

TWENTY-FIVE

Roolán led Johnny back to the control room with his head slumped against his chest. Unable to speak at the best of times, he now radiated an air of juvenile sullenness, which even Johnny - himself preoccupied - couldn't help but notice.

"You okay?" he asked, halfway up the square staircase from the dungeons where they'd been held. Again, the strange stratification of architecture was all too obvious: rickety stonework poorly concealing gunmetal walls, as if someone had painstakingly concealed a hi-tech labyrinth behind cheap whitewash. At one point the stairs halted abruptly beside a huge rack of trumpetlike chimneys, hanging downwards from the ceiling. Johnny wondered what strange religious function they might serve, clambering up the rickety ladder that Roolán indicated and through a metal grille. The opening put Johnny uncomfortably in mind of an engineering service-duct, although what such a thing was doing in the centre of a temple was anyone's guess.

Roolán nodded absently in response to the question, walking onwards with his purloined gun slung over his shoulder. He put Johnny in mind of a child who'd spent all his pocket money on a bag of Zargo
^TM
whoopee-sweets
¹⁵
only to trip and drop them down a drain. It was a profound change from the enthusiastically angry youth he'd been hours before, and Johnny could guess what had caused the transformation.

^{15. "A different thermonuclear reaction with every mouthful!"}

Anyone can be a killer once, he reminded himself. It takes a special sort of mind to shrug it off.

If "special" was the right word.

Roolán had the shaken look of someone who had taken his revenge and hadn't enjoyed it nearly as much as he'd anticipated. There was hope for the boy yet.

They reached the control room at the top of the villa and Johnny's suspicions were immediately confirmed. A thick sluice of blood and cranial goop decorated the polished floor. Someone had died here. A figure reclined nearby: a cassock-wearing alien with a shaved head, a vast tentacle-like nose and a bruise across the side of his face. The blood hadn't come from him, Johnny could see, but he'd been put to sleep with a more-than-effective thump nonetheless.

"Good hit," he muttered. Roolán didn't even react, staring at the bloody patch with a mixture of horror and bewilderment.

"What is it?" Johnny said.

Roolán fumbled for his writing pad.

Stanley Everyone.
The scrawl read.
Dead. Gone.

"You, you sure you killed him?" Alpha said, then immediately hated himself. The stricken look on Roolán's face was all the answer he needed.

Silence settled again, thick and uncomfortable. A countdown on the wall revealed the imminence of the meteor; now a little less than forty-five minutes away. Johnny shook his head, annoyed. A bastard as slippery as Grinn was bound to be far, far away by now. The killer in his mind gnashed its teeth in anger at the prospect of being denied its prey.

Roolán thrust a sheet of paper under his nose. Ship. I landed it. Just outside in the city.

Johnny threw him a puzzled look, hope briefly flaring inside him.

"It's here?"

The youth nodded.

Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes to get out of the villa, to find the
Peggy Sue
, to kick start the engine and to get sufficiently far enough away that the impending detonation of planetary debris wouldn't be a problem. It was a long shot. He began pushing Roolán towards the first stairwell, bloodlust lost behind the far more primal urge to survive.

As if deliberately puncturing his hopes, someone broke the silence with a giggle.

"Alpha," a voice trilled, sweeter than a river of golden honey. "Quite the escapologist, aren't we?"

Johnny's fists tightened.

"You know," Grinn said, standing in the doorway of the central elevator, "you mutant types are becoming a real menace."

Johnny's hopes of a satisfying kill were adeptly dashed in the face of a large handcannon, brandished by the grinning criminal in his direction. He'd given up on the pretence of morality now: all that was left was the call to hunt, to destroy and to make it personal - but doing so whilst staring down the barrel of a Westinghouse variable-cartridge blaster is harder than it sounds.

"That," he hissed, "is my gun."

"Ha, yes. A man needs a decent souvenir from his defeated enemies, don't you think?" The villain smirked. "Poor little puppy. Some people just aren't designed to come second."

Grinn flicked a laconic eye across the bloodslick on the floor.

"Dear old Stanley. Terribly useful, having a shapeshifter on the payroll - though he never could quite get my eyes right. Good enough for an occasional public appearance, mind you." He smirked. "Or for the eyes of a casual murderer."

Johnny noticed a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. Glancing down at the slick of gore between him and Roolán, he could clearly see the youth's hand reflected in the puddle's grisly surface, creeping slowly backwards. Grinn was too busy grandstanding to pay much attention to the youth.

The youth who, Johnny recalled with a heartskip, had a rifle slung over his shoulder.

"What do you mean?" he blurted, as much to distract himself as to occupy Grinn. The thought of Roolán going for a gun filled him with hope and horror in equal measure.

Grinn waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, some fellow came and pinched the body. Big chap in a hat. Long coat. Friend of yours?"

Alpha half shook his head, quietly mollified by Stix's error. The bastard wouldn't be a happy bunny if he tried claiming the bounty on Grinn using an impostor's corpse.

"I saw it all on the security system downstairs," Grinn purred. "Of course, I would have intervened, poor old Stanley deserved better," he shrugged, sardonic, "but I'm afraid I had some last minute business to conduct. My bank manager - lovely chap - is now eagerly awaiting authorisation from two million autoinheritance accounts, each one containing several billion credits. They," he pointed vaguely towards the skylight and the city beyond, "think it's all part of some big sacrifice. Thank god for religion, eh? And business, of course."

Alpha shook his head. "It's not business, Grinn. It's genocide."

Grinn ignored the accusation with a shrug.

"To say that I'm about to become the richest man in the galaxy," he trilled, "would be an understatement." He glanced at his watch. "In thirty-eight minutes I'll be able to
buy
the galaxy."

Johnny's mind raced, desperate to hold Grinn's attention. "And the small matter of the meteor?" he said. "You're as dead as the rest of us, rich or not."

"Oh, come now. Haven't you worked it out yet?"

"In thirty-eight minutes we're all pâté," Johnny snarled, losing his patience. "You've got to be wrong in the head, Grinn! All this self-congratulatory sneck - anyone with half a brain would've been out of here hours ago. I'd rather die of a blaster wound than debilitating smugness."