Prophet Margin (32 page)

Grinn shrieked and staggered, eyes bulging, blood ebbing from his wide maw. Johnny didn't bother to repress the snarl of pleasure that filled his throat, planting a perfect uppercut beneath the man's chin and crushing more of his teeth with a swing of the remote control, shards of enamel flickering outwards. It felt better than smashing priceless art. Better than taking a Blamball bat into a china shop. It felt better than breaking windows just for the pretty noise, better than throwing an invaluable AI matrix off a ten-storey building, better than being the one, that lucky bastard, who gets to press the detonator on a demolition site.

Johnny wiped the grin from Grinn's face, and it felt great.

Standing over the wheezing man, Johnny knew he shouldn't enjoy the sensation, the violence, the power. But he smiled and, sneck yeah, he
did
.

He stooped to raise his blaster.

"Th-the ship," the villain coughed, staggering drunkenly away. "Need to... to restart... hh... engines."

"Too late for that," Johnny said, kicking the ruined man's legs out from beneath him. "Think you can warm up the engines and get into orbit in twenty minutes? Delusions of grandeur, Grinn."

"Buh-but," an idea flashed behind the madman's eyes, smile rucking upwards. "Y-your teleporters!" he squealed. "I have them in the armoury! One for you, one for me! We can share the money!"

Johnny thumbed back the hammer on his gun. "Money won't do you any good," he hissed. "Not where you're going."

"You want to d-die too, is that it? Where's the point in
that
? We can get away!"

Johnny considered Wulf, maybe alive, maybe dead, fighting for his life somewhere far below. He thought of Roolán, clutching at the air as the life went out of him. He imagined Kid Knee, sitting drunk and insensible in the
Peggy Sue
, waiting for the meteor. He imagined all his friends, all his comrades and all the idiotic little socialites partying in the streets of Splut Mundi. He imagined it all, and he imagined how he'd feel if he, accompanied only by the one man who'd caused it all, came out of this alive.

"It's the end of time, Grinn," he hissed, clarity flooding his senses. "You're delivering your flock to the Boddah, right? Least you can do is stay and watch."

"D-don't be a fool!" the voice had devolved utterly: all trace of its honeyed warmth lost. "W-we can teleport out! Y-you can take me in! I'll come quiet! Think of the profit!"

"It's not just about profit," said Johnny.

And he placed the blaster against Mister Grinn's sweaty forehead, smiled, and squeezed the trigger.

WORDS FOR THE DEAD

#8 "MISTER GRINN" (REAL NAME UNKNOWN)

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm -

Oh, Boddah, this can't be ha-

Blam
.

When the time came, a silence fell across Splut Mundi. The parties stopped, the faithful exchanged cheerful farewell hugs, and two million necks craned up at the sky.

Even through the coruscating red light still painting the horizons, the asteroid was clearly visible: a bright blossom growing with every second, tumbling and trailing its devastation behind it.

In the controlroom at the apex of the temple/starship, a bedraggled, bruised, beaten and bleeding Viking staggered up from the stairwell, running blackened eyes across the blood-splattered devastation. Grinn and Roolán lay side by side, each as dead as the other. He found Johnny slumped against the central console and nodded in exhausted greeting.

"Got der bad guy?" Wulf mumbled, not entirely sure what else to say.

"Yeah." Johnny almost succeeded in keeping the bitterness out of his voice. "We got the bad guy."

"You tried contacting der
Peggy Sue
?" Wulf threw a glance across the multifarious controls. "Maybe is enough time for der AI to... come get us?"

Johnny almost smiled, directing a tired gesture towards the countdown timer on the wall. It read
00h:14m:37s
.

"Sneck," Wulf grumbled, sinking onto the floor beside his partner.

"Is going to be quite der show," Wulf observed awkwardly, staring through the huge skylight.

"Only from the outside." Johnny muttered through a puffy-lipped smile.

The silence resumed. The asteroid grew a little larger.

"Don't suppose you came across the armoury on your way up?" Johnny said, without much enthusiasm.

"Armoury? No. Why you wanting in there?"

Johnny sighed. "No reason."

"Is a shame about der boy," Wulf said, watching Johnny from the corner of his eye. "I think he would have been der good hunter, one day."

Johnny took a long time to reply. "No, no, I don't think so. I think maybe he wasn't the type."

"No?"

"No."

The sky brightened around the onrushing rock. Wulf scratched thoughtfully at the remains of his beard.

"Good for him."

Johnny smiled. "Yeah. Good for him."

Wulf fidgeted for a better view, grunting as something dug uncomfortably into his back. He rummaged behind him and produced a slim remote control; deserted and broken on the floor.

"You know what this is?" he said, fiddling. A dial on the side seemed to cycle through a list of names, each one appearing in the cracked display window.

"Remote control." Johnny shrugged. "Grinn used it to direct your fishy friend. Get it to do what he wanted."

"And all der names?"

"All the poor sneckers he fitted with an implant. "Meat puppets", he called them. Nice guy."

Wulf shrugged, even less interested in the vagaries of technology in the instants before his death than normal. He scrolled through the names as a distraction, noting glumly the abundance of multi-barrelled nomenclature.

An entry in the list caught his eye and he held it up for Johnny's inspection.

Everyone, Stanley Zippo.

Johnny nodded glumly. "Yeah, Grinn mentioned all his goons had the implant too. Easier to keep them in line, I guess. Bit late now. Especially for Stanley."

"Is dead?"

"Yeah. And gone."

Wulf threw him a bewildered glance.

"Poor old Stix. Guess he thought it was Grinn's body."

"Ha! He got der unpleasant surprise in store."

"Too right." Johnny grinned, then returned his eyes to the sky. Stix wasn't the only one facing impending unpleasantness.

The pair sat in silence for a moment, mesmerised by the oncoming meteor.

"Meh," Wulf scowled, briefly glancing back at the remote. "All der techno-crap. It get you nowhere in this day-und-age. You got to rely on your friends."

Johnny smiled at him and gripped his shoulder, the red light brightening around them.

Wulf flicked the remote away, clasping Johnny's hand.

"So long, Johnny weird-eyes."

"So long, old friend."

On the other side of the console, sneaking silently towards the two hunters, Abrocabe Zindatsel divided his confused attention between the dead bodies on the floor, the view through the skylight, the conversation of the intruders, and the digital readout on the wall.

It read 00h:09m:03s.

He'd awoken in the strip-lit control room with a thumping headache and what he suspected was a broken trunk. His beautiful prehensile shnoz totally failed to respond to his mental commands. It was therefore with a minor twinge of guilty pleasure that he noted one of the two bodies belonged to the kid who'd hit him. The other corpse, quite unmistakably, was that of the prophet.

Abrocabe was utterly confused: he'd caught a glimpse in a reflection of the two intruders, and unless his eyes deceived him one of them was the White-Eyed Warrior. The spawn of Ogmishlen. Could it be that the Reality Devil had triumphed after all, striking-down the prophet in the process?

Abrocabe was getting himself into a better position to confirm his horrible suspicions when a spinning lump of plastic and metal, hurled casually from the other side of the console, thumped him in the middle of the forehead and returned him to oblivion.

Quite unnoticed by Johnny or Wulf, the remote control came to rest against Abrocabe's vast nasal protrusion with just enough pressure for the tip of his trunk to flip a small red switch. The device blipped cheerfully.

Had anyone bothered to look - which of course they didn't - they would have seen that the tiny label beneath the red switch was marked "Disable Subject."

In the cracked viewscreen, the name picked out in distorted digital characters remained unchanged:
Everyone, Stanley Zippo.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Kid Knee wasn't enjoying himself.

"I-I don't work well under pressure," he warbled.

The man behind him - if that's what he was - nudged him in the small of the back with his gun.

"Quiet."

"I-I'm just s-saying, that's all. I-I could do with a drink. Calm my nerves, sort of thing."

"Quiet. Steer."

"T-truth be told, Mr Stix, I-I'm not much of a pilot and what with one thing and another I wonder if we sh-shouldn't... g-go back. For, uh, for Johnny."

"Alpha? Dead. Seen it happen. Wouldn't go back anyway. Steer. Steer and stay quiet."

"L-look, I don't know why I sh-should take orders from a... a stowaway. I'm in ch-"

Click
.

"RightyouareMrStixnoproblemjust
please
putthegundownandwe'llsaynomore."

Silence resumed. Briefly.

"Wow! That must be the asteroid, huh? Looks a lot snecking bigger from up here, doesn't it?"

"Quiet."

"Yeah, sorry. I'm just saying, that's all. Going at a rate of knots too, ain't it?"

"Quiet. Stay clear of it."

"Right you are. And, listen, if we're going to be travelling together, I think it's a bit much that you've brought that... that body up here with you. 'C-cos, listen, I'm not that good around blood and, and I know I don't have to look at him or anything but I still know he's there, and oh my God, is his head expanding? Why the sneck is it doing th-?"

Splat
.

The interior of the
Peggy Sue'
s cockpit was abruptly redecorated in a lurid shade of Gore Surprise. Kid Knee's eyes rolled upwards into his he... leg, and he fainted with a sigh.

"Knee?" his companion hissed. "Wake up. Wake up."

Stix curled his lip.

"Computer? Respond."

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm permitted only to accept orders from qualified S/D agents on the rental-crew manifest."

"Meteor. Going to crash. Evade."

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm permitted only to acc-"

"Computer! Rot you! Evade!"

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm-"

"Sneck."

TWENTY-EIGHT

Isaac Newton, the man popularly credited with the discovery of gravity and the invention of the domestic catflap,
¹⁶
ascertained that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain so unless an external force gets involved. In the vastness of space, where the gravitational effect of planetary bodies is far less than it is, say, on the surface of a cozy little 1G planetoid, it takes a lot less to divert a travelling object than would otherwise be the case. In such an instance, a difference of a single degree in trajectory could be enough, given adequate distance, to pull off the much-celebrated "slingshot" effect and escape a planet's gravity: preventing catastrophe and making the aforementioned ballistic object some other snecker's problem.

^{16. This is really true. It's worth noting that in almost every piece of forward-thinking fiction involving space travel, gravity has been overcome by artificial means (to prevent crews from floating around willy-nilly and to keep special effects costs down in movie adaptations). Even in the most futuristic of literature, however, the noble catflap - beyond the odd flashing light or motion sensor - remains happily unchanged: a fitting tribute to Newton's genius.}

In layman's terms, the
Peggy Sue
mashed into the side of the tumbling Kostadell Zol like a marble striking a bowling ball, compacting tidily upon impact and jettisoning a trio of autodeploy spontaneously manifesting life capsules. One contained an insensible junkie who, one imagines, had probably written off all his recent escapades as an unlikely but interesting hallucination. One contained a comatose mutant with no head who, when he awoke, would be delighted to discover that the ejection cubical the AI had rapidly created for him still contained his hidden stash of hypergin in its door-release mechanism.

The last contained one very, very, very snecked-off badass, who, in a fit of irritation, was finding it increasingly difficult not to rip the walls out of his prison as a therapeutic aid.

Behind the three spinning pods, the large stash of weapons and - more importantly - extraordinarily explosive alcoholic substances in the
Peggy Sue'
s hold detonated with a silent burst of flame, shunting the asteroid almost imperceptibly to one side.

It roared across the skies of Splut Mundi like a streak of living fire, scorching the clouds and leaving shards of debris tumbling into the atmosphere for weeks. It blurred across the heavens and was gone, punching its way out of the planet's gravity and spinning off into the darkness of space, heading for who-the-sneck-knows-where.

Slumped on the floor of the control room at the heart of the city on the planet below, listening with a frown to the angry howls of the crowd outside, Johnny Alpha turned to his partner and mumbled, "Snecking hell."

Wulf nodded sagely.

The timer on the wall read

00h:00m:-01s.

00h:00m:-02s.

00h:00m:-03s.

Despite the fact that the meteor missed, it later transpired that the memory-purge technology implanted in the "High Devotion" members of the Boddah's flock was programmed to activate at the end of the countdown, come what may. Something in the region of two thousand snobs were reduced to gibbering vegetables when the implants triggered, wiping every memory they'd ever had. It was considered a minor miracle by some (and a crying shame by others) that most of them retained the ability to breathe.