Toxicity (4 page)

Dawn broke, green tendrils
pouring across the sky. The horizon cracked open like a rotten egg.

“Where am I?” murmured Svoolzard.

“On Toxicity,” came a voice from
behind him, a voice he knew well, filled with familiarity and attachment; it
was a voice he loved and adored, and which he knew loved him. A grin cracked
his face in two, showing perfect white teeth. Svool turned, and beamed down.

“Lumar! Am I glad to see you!”

“Hmm,” she said, glinting green
eyes fixed on him. The sun rose behind her, making her reptilian skin glow in a
most incredibly beautiful fashion. The effect was not lost on Svoolzard, who
was, it had to be said, a walking erection.

“Oh, yes!” he prattled, almost
forgetting his pain and discomfort, and the fact that their starship had just
crashed. “I was lying here on the rocks, pin-pricked by this damn cracked glass
suit - which was not my choice, I think you’ll both agree and understand - and
wondering just how the hell I’d been party-shelled to such an extent that I no
longer remembered the drugs and the girls and, of course, your fine vagina,
dear Lumar” - he chuckled, and climbed down a few jagged black rocks towards
her - “and I was starting to realise that we’d crashed, and of course, the
real
problem with that sort of thing is not having, y’know, your loyal and
faithful
staff
around to take up the slack, to do the shit, you know, to
perform those all-important
little things
that make life so worthwhile.”
He stopped, and started panting a little. The sun was rising fast, and the heat
climbing, especially when magnified through a glass and diamond three-piece
suit.

Smiling, he held out his hand to
Lumar, palm down, fingers quivering.

She looked down at the long,
tapered fingers, the nails painted with magnificent scenes. Not so long ago,
Lumar had sucked those fingers and made murmuring sounds of pleasure. Now, she
stared at them, and then, very slowly, lifted her green lizard eyes to stare
unblinking at Svoolzard.

“Yes?” she said, voice made
modestly sibilant by her forked tongue.

“You may kiss the hand of your
master,” he said regally, lifting his chin a little and, for the first time,
noticing the jungle beyond. It twittered and warbled, now the sun was up, and
steam was rising from dense foliage. But there was something
not quite right
with the vision across the green rocky beach.

“Really?” She raised an eyebrow,
stepped in close, and delivered a beautifully well-balanced right hook that
rattled loose three teeth and dropped Svool to his rump as if poleaxed.

“Gnk,” said Svool, as Lumar
loomed over him.

“That
is for being a
cunt!”
she
snarled, and Svoolzard recoiled from the pure animal hatred in her eyes, in her
face, in her spittle, and then he watched her whirl about and head off across
the green pebbles, which crunched in a strangely musical way.

Svool sat, rubbing his jaw, a
billion stars of confusion fluttering like escaped butterflies in his mind.
What?
Why? Where? Who? What? I... I just don’t understand.
And truly, he did not.

Wincing as shards from his suit
dug into buttocks and thighs and biceps - the suit was getting worse; more
fractured by the minute - he pushed himself to his feet and spat blood on the
rocks.

“Wow,” he said, frowning. He
watched Lumar clamber up more distant rocks and stare off across the ocean,
shading her eyes with her hand.

Svool looked around himself.
There was nobody else visible. No people. No animals. No servants. No wine. No
cunnizinga liquor. No SLAP-snort. No ship.
Oh shit, no ship.

Svool climbed down from his rock
and started off after Lumar, hobbling a little in his glossy high-heeled boots,
hand on the hilt of his jewelled sword. All the while he was shaking his head,
and wondering what the hell had swayed his Mistress and turned her Massive Love
against him.
It must be a serious concussion,
he rationalised.
That’s
it! A massive blow to the head during our recent crash, despite the crash foam.
It’s left her unknowing, and stupid - an idiot, in fact.
He nodded to
himself at this train of deduction.
Of course. She’s now an idiot. What else
could there be?

He crunched to a stop on the
glinting beach, and stared up at Lumar. “Lumar?” he crooned. “Lumar, my
darling. Come down here for a moment, my sweet, ripe little butterfly peach.”

“Fuck off.”

Svool frowned. “Hey, baby, now
listen to me, I understand you may have taken a rather nasty bump to the
head...”

“Bump to the head?” she shrieked,
and her rage and hatred were real animal things as she bounded across the rocks
like some lithe, supple leopard, for a moment
all humanity
lost as she
proudly displayed her alien physiology and utter physical power. She landed on
all fours before Svool with a crunch, and uncoiled like a striking serpent. She
leaned close, until her mouth was just inches from Svool’s tender battered red
lips, and he could see a raging green fire burning like a supernova inside her
eyes.

“Er?” he ventured.

“What am I?” she hissed, forked
tongue flickering out and tickling Svool.

“Er, my Mistress, a creature of
great physical pleasure, a female kroona who has shared my bed for many months
now and brought me squealing and moaning to massive multiple orgasms, a sexy
alien SLAP-snorting culacoca-licking bitch of the highest degree.” He nodded,
getting into the flow of it. “And appointed by my management company to cater
for my every flippant whim... and I
know
you were very happy to comply,
because a) you signed the contract, and b) you were so naturally
happy
to
comply to the whims of a natural genius of my truly natural awesome reputation
and ability and genius!”

Lumar was shaking her head, and
she took a step back. “You truly don’t understand, do you?”

“Understand what?” He was wearing
a look of injured pride. As if she should
dare
question him on the finer
points of their contract.

“I am your
slave,
Svool.
Your fucking
slave.
The kroona are persecuted across Manna; we are the
lowest of the low. On my planet, my sister was taken hostage by the kroon ganga
gangs. I was sold into slavery in order to earn big fat wages for the Men in
Power, and to stop my sister, my own flesh and blood, from being murdered.”

Svool opened his mouth to speak,
saw the fire in her eyes, and closed it again with a
clack.

“You have abused me for five
months, Svoolzard. You have used me for drugs and sex and sport. And I have
taken it. I know my position in the galaxy. And I know the kroon ganga gangs
are the most dangerous of bastards to cross. For once in your life, I want you
to
use
your brain and think about what I’ve just said. Really
think
about
it.”

Svool frowned even harder. He
thought about it. Finally, he licked his wet lips. “So, you faked your orgasms?”
he managed.

Lumar hissed, and tossed back her
green dreadlocks, moving away from Svool and walking in a tight circle before
returning to him. She thrust her angry face close, and Svool shivered, not used
to seeing such primal expressions on the face of a lover he had so much adored.

“You are an idiot,” she snarled.

“I don’t get it!”

“You
owned
me. Well, your
management company owned me. I had to play ball and they paid the gangs. And my
sister would live. Surely you can understand the simple concept of trade?”

“But... but why didn’t you go to
the police?”

“The PUF? Ha! Do me a favour, you
docile lump of tard.”

“Now listen, I’ve had just about
enough of your insults, young lady. If you’re not careful, I’ll...”

She came even closer, oozing
malevolence. Svool stepped back, stumbling on one high-heeled boot.

“You’ll what?” she asked, eyes
narrowed. And he saw her claws had emerged.
Wow. She has claws. Like a cat!
If only I’d known that during our sex games, I could have used them...

“I’ll, er, I’ll...” The claws
were glinting in the green sunlight, each one an inch of razor-sharp
wickedness.

“You could write a fucking poem
about it,” she mocked, and the barb flew straight to his heart, sharper and
more deadly than any intrusion of serrated steel.

Svool deflated. “That’s a
little... unfair. Okay. Okay. You win. I won’t do anything. I just... find it
hard to understand, hard to comprehend this sudden change.” He realised his
voice had emerged as a squeak. He felt tears at the corners of his eyes. He
would have dabbed at them theatrically, only his cuffs were made of chipped
glass-shard.

“Your company bought me. And I
played their game. But now? Now we’re on our own.” She gave a nasty little
smile.
“You
are on your own.”

“Er,” said Svoolzard.

Lumar retracted her claws and
looked around, and then at the jungle that was swaying...
oddly.
She
pointed. “That way is north. If I’m right, this place is Jusko, the largest
island of the archipelago into which we have plunged. It has a trading port,
which means people and ships. But there are bad things out in the jungle,
Svool.
Real
bad things. So be careful, yeah, mate?” She winked. “Be
careful, lover.”

“Be careful?” he echoed, stricken
with horror as her words sunk into his detoxing brain.

“And goodbye.”

She started crunching up the
green pebble beach and suddenly, as if lurching onto this side of reality,
Svool realised the beach wasn’t
green pebbles
but
green bottles
and
many still had part-faded jagged plasti-labels, which read things like
Arthur’s
Piss Whiskey Gin
and
Puke Puke Tonic
and
Raw Sewage Alky - Great
For All You Cheap & Nasty Drunkers.

What? What the hell is this?
He stared at the ground as if it
had betrayed him.
I
don’t get it.
And distant words drifted to
him, words spoken by a machine in a soft lilting female voice.
The planet of
Amaranth in the Zynaps System is run by The Greenstar Recycling Company,
sometimes referred to planetside simply as The Company. The Greenstar Recycling
Company recycles the majority of Manna’s waste, leaving the rest of the galaxy
free to pursue its Heavenly Pursuits.

Svool stared at the quite
obviously
non-recycled waste
under his glossy boots. Then up towards the
jungle, and the athletically disappearing figure of Lumar. Within the blink of
an eye she had vanished, and Svool realised he was alone. Alone, with no bodyguards,
on an uncultured world fondly referred to by the locals as
Toxic World.
Tox
World. Toxicity. Or even just
Shit City.

“Great,” he muttered, and drawing
his jewelled sword, more for his own morale than as any real form of
protection, he started awkwardly up the bottle beach, his glass suit prickling
him all over and his heels playing havoc with the slippery glass underfoot.

What I’d give for some fresh
drugs,
he
sulked.

~ * ~

SVOOLZARD
HUNG UPSIDE-DOWN from a tree, twine cutting into his ankles and giving him a
particularly intense new type of agony, as he watched the collection of short,
waddling, hairy men and short, waddling, bare-breasted hairy women with weary,
cold-turkey eyes. He wondered how his life had gone from
damn-near-perfect-with-a-thousand-whores-on-tap
to
sucking-on-the-lollipop-of-imminent-death
in such a short period
of time.

“Shit,” he said. He coughed, and
spat, which is harder than it sounds if you’re upside down.