Toxicity (25 page)

Horace shrugged. It was
irrelevant, unless it made the target harder to kill. And in this case, and
flicking through the news papes on the aircar media channel, Juliette JohNagle
would hardly be hard to miss...

Now, also thanks to his torture
victim, Chris, who had overheard a damn sight more than he should have done
back in that police boardroom, Horace had a location for his target. Not some
wild stab in the dark, like was offered by the Fat Man. This was Meltflesh
City. A beach hotel on the slick oil beaches of the Biohazard Ocean, where
Juliette JohNagle, no doubt, was fucking and snorting his/her/its way into an
oblivion heaven of powder puff whores and beyond. If the papes were anything to
go by.

So, target and location secured.

Another set-up? Maybe. But this
time, Horace would be ready.

He brought the aircar around in a
massive thirty-mile loop in order to avoid any follow-up PUF traffic. He’d
disabled the craft’s onboard trackers, and flew without lights, low, returning
to a slumfest back-alley a few streets away from the Bacillus Hilton. This
time, he needed the big guns. And this time, he needed backup.

Horace moved slowly through dark
and steaming alleyways, nostrils wrinkling occasionally at the toxic vapours
that emerged from the sewers.
What’s the point?
he thought.
What’s
the point of sewers, when the whole damn city stinks like this?

He made it back to his hotel room
without incident, and as he slowly closed the door - and not exactly relaxed,
but at least stepped down from his highest level of tension - he left the light
off and moved around in the darkness.

Fresh clothing. A fresh suit.
After all, one must always present a professional image at all times.

“That went badly,” said Silka,
her young, smooth voice penetrating the room with a crisp clarity.

“I fear it was a set-up.”

Silka considered this. He saw her
outline on the bedside table. She was preening her fur, and making a tiny
purring sound. So, she had chosen her non-chameleonic phase. It must be that
time of the month.

“You should have taken me with
you,” said Silka.

“No. I wanted to check it out
alone.”

“Ha! And nearly get killed,
foolish android.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said
Horace.

“And the wound to your bicep?”
Horace had used the BMW aircar’s emergency staplegun to punch the wound shut.
It had hurt. A lot. But it
was
the most effective fast way of closing an
open flesh wound and getting on with the job, which was why the PUF carried
them. A shame none of the wounded officers were repairable... “You bit off more
than you could chew.”

“No. There were three androids,
then ten officers, then three special forces snipers. I’d say I did pretty well
okay to take that lot out and only suffer a single cut to the arm.”

Silka jumped down from the
bedside table and bounded across to him, tail swishing. She leapt onto the bed,
tiny muzzle and whiskers twitching, and stared at the wound as Horace removed
his jacket with a wince. “Made by a bullet, foolish android. One inch to the
right and you’d have lost the use of your arm. Then it
would
have been
game over.”

“I’m getting old,” said Horace,
and sat on the bed.

“We all get old,” said Silka, and
rubbed herself against him in the manner of a cat.

Horace picked her up - and if
this had been anybody other than Horace, they would have immediately lost three
fingers. Silka may have looked like a cross between a ferret and a domestic
cat, but her bite was worse than her bark. In fact, she had been known to bite
off entire heads. Yes, it took her a while to gnaw through the spine, but it
was doable when she put her mind to it.

“Take me with you,” she said. “On
your next target.”

“No. It’ll be dangerous.”

“You know I love danger,” purred
Silka.

“Too dangerous.” And yet he knew
he needed her, and that he was playing a charade. Why play? “Okay,” he said. “Your
offer is much appreciated. I do need the backup, and I think this game is
bigger than both of us realise.”

“You think Greenstar have finally
grown tired of you?”

“I think I’ve done so much dirty
work for them, one day that eventuality must be inevitable. I just didn’t think
it would come... now. Not with so much still to do.” Horace stood, and stripped
off his ruined suit. He moved to his case and pulled free a small plastic ball
- an example of the Ultimo™ Packing System. He pressed a button and tossed the
ball on the bed, where it made a
zwang
noise and opened up into a full
suit. Horace had a quick shower, dressed, checked his T5, then picked Silka up
in one hand. She scurried up his arm and sat on his shoulder for a moment.

“What will you do?”

“Fulfil my mission.”

“Even thought the mission may be
compromised?”

“We’ll find that out soon enough.”

“Will you share your thoughts?”

“Yes.”

Silka pushed her nose into Horace’s
ear, and he closed his eyes for a moment as she rifled his memories. It
tickled. Horace smiled. Horace liked smiling, but recognised there was very
little for him to smile about.

Finally, she emerged. “Ahh. I
see. A man-i-woman. Juliette JohNagle. Interesting.”

“Meaning?”

“I have seen this person. On the
media. They have also been on the news many times, and stood trial for crimes
against Amaranth.”

Horace shrugged. “About that, I
do not care. They can poison the whole fucking Quad Galaxy for all I care. All
I care about is life...”

“...and death,” whispered Silka,
little more than an exhalation caressing his face. She kissed his cheek. “Let’s
go.”

~ * ~

DAWN
HAD ARRIVED, and with it, huge bruised skies filled with towering rainclouds.
Rain clattered against the aircar’s panels and windshield, and Horace kept the
BMW low and away from civilisation. They headed east out of Bacillus Port,
moving on past millions of simple block adobes and then past a kind of shanty
town, where hovels had been constructed from... waste. That was the only way to
describe it. Scavengers had obviously taken advantage of the open dumping
policies of Greenstar, and created their own city on the outskirts of the city.
Nothing had been
wasted.
Houses were built from stacks of old TVs,
planks of corrugated asbestos, wood and metal off-cuts, car panels and old
tyres; old propane cylinders formed the corner supports holding up asbestos
roofs. Oil tanks had been upended and turned into sleeping chambers. Walls had
been constructed from bright yellow bags of medical waste, piled up like
sandbags. Need a used needle in the middle of the night?
Just rummage
through the wall.
Old garage doors had been leant against one another,
forming vague rusted wigwams of second-hand mild steel. The variation and
creativity was intense; and went on and on and on.

“You have to admire them,” said
Silka after a while.

“Admire them?”

“The Scavs. Down there. Rummaging
through their short lives, existing amongst all this shit.”

“It’s amazing the lengths a human
being will go to in order to survive. I have seen it. Many times.”

“Yes, you’ve seen it on the end
of a scalpel or drill-bit. I’m talking about their
ingenuity.
Look down
there! A house built from old fish tanks, the weight of water giving the walls
stability, and the top one - where the water is freshest - feeding drinking
tubes down into the chamber. Simple, yes. Basic, yes. But effective.”

“Did I really hear you use the
word ‘fresh’ about
this place?”

“You know what I mean.”

They left the slums behind, and
turned northeast. Before long the huge, towering Yellow Virus Peaks to the
north could be seen. There were five mountains, each towering to thirty-five
thousand feet. The summits were crusted with ice and snow; yellow ice and snow.
The joke on the underground streetslam was that Greenstar had dumped a trillion
tonnes of horse piss which had immediately frozen, giving the mountain range
its colour and its name. In reality, it was a rare mineral found in the rock
that turned the snow yellow. But what
was
true was the highly toxic
nature of the mountains - the Yellow Virus Peaks were a serious no-go area. Not
unless you wanted to contract something biologically devastating and end up
shitting your stomach out of your arsehole. And yet, every year, a hundred or
so “mountain adventurers” would arrive from other planets, drawn in like moths
to a candle with the promise of adventure, danger, and being the
very first
to
conquer this hazardous mountain range. Their survival rate was 0%, and as a statistic,
this should have been warning enough.

They flew for most of the
morning, and eventually the toxic storms abated and green sunshine sparkled
from above, making the barren land, stripped of all vegetation, at least
seem
a little more hospitable. Horace had seen some dreary, inhospitable places
in his life, but this wasteland took the cherry from the top of the cake.
Deserts had vegetation, or at least the noble sculptures of dunes. Even arctic
wastelands could be stunning, with a savage beauty created from snow and ice
and wind. But this... this
desecration,
this was the pinnacle in an
exercise of poisoning. There was no joy here. No pleasure could be found. Only
pain. And desolation. And death.

They crossed the River Tox, which
ran from the Yellow Virus Peaks and down for a thousand miles, from north to
south, a vast winding tributary that eventually flowed past the port cities of
Encephalitis Dance and Shitdump, then out into The Sea of Heavy Metal.

“Sunshine,” murmured Silka.

“Yeah. That’s probably why they
call this holiday complex
Melt flesh
City.”

“That, or the chemicals in the
ocean,” said Silka, and Horace could hear the laughter in her voice. She was
the one thing that stopped him descending into a perpetual morbid depression.
She was like a breath of fresh air over a corpse. Like a kiss from a virgin. A
sigh from a satisfied lover...

“I often wish you were human. Or
even better, android.”

“It would never work,” said
Silka.

“Why?”

“You think you know me. You do
not know me. Our minds work... so very differently.”

“But you appear so...”

“Appear, yes,” said Silka, and
her eyes gleamed in the weak light of the aircar’s cockpit.

After another hour, they saw the
distant cityscape of Meltflesh City. Vast towers ranged like teeth along the shores
of Biohazard Ocean. Even from this distance, a shimmering light seemed to hover
above the vast expanse of houses and towerblocks, cubescrapers and skyscrapers.
It was vast. As big as Bacillus Port, Amaranth’s capital, surely; and home to
the most select. The wealthy, the privileged, and the fucking
insane.

Horace laughed. “What a fucked-up
place this is.”

“Better believe it,” said Silka,
shifting to sit on his arm. “Why are you landing?”

“I want to approach under the
cover of darkness.”

“Yes. Let us wait, then.”

~ * ~

THE
HOTEL WAS a huge complex, with ten swimming pools, swim-up bars, children’s
areas, entertainers, and fake plastic palm trees. The main difference between
any normal hotel in the Manna Galaxy Bubbles and this one was the regular
detox
points,
see-through plastic cubicles where you could pop in your toxic kids
and let them have a happy chemical wash down before they melted. Lovely.