Toxicity (50 page)

“What’s going on, PopBot?”

“We’ve been found! Rescued! By a
crack military team of military crack specialists! After your horrible terrible
crash, the Shamans sent out search parties, and all these bulky heroic soldier
types have been scanning the waves and sands and mountains for you, beloved
Svoolzard, the greatest of poets.”

“So... they found us?”

“Yes! Isn’t it wonderful!”

“So... our adventure is... over?”

“YES!”

“So, no more, y’know, adventures
with Lumar?”

“Correctamundo!”

Svool’s head was buzzing. It felt
familiar and yet alien at the same time. He forced out several words, but they
slurred into a slurry of oblivion. His vision started to waver uncontrollably. “What’s
wrong with me?” he managed, through thick rubber lips.

“Oh, the soldiers brought you
lots of pampering, Turkey Whiskey - which they’ve fed to you intravenously -
and 10mg of SLAP, a snort of TWAT and a hefty dollop of SPUNK. All delivered
straight to your no-doubt pining and drained drug-fuelled metabolism!”

“No, oh, no!” groaned Svool,
sinking back on his bed with his head spinning. And that was the feeling, and
it felt bad, and he realised - suddenly - that during his time on Amaranth, on
Toxicity,
in a massive ironic reversal, he had thrown off the shackles of his
internal toxicity - his drug dependency. He’d gone cold turkey and survived.
And now the bastards had force-fed him another circulatory system full of
shite.

Claws tried to drag him back down
to sleep, but instead he forced his legs out of bed and stood up, swaying. He
was naked, but that didn’t matter. Giggling, a horde of young hellakunga girls
came stumbling in, long breasts wobbling like streams of jelly.

“Ooh, Svool, remember us?”

“The times we had!”

“The suckling we did!”

“Your tongue is so horny!”

“Your hands are so thorny!”

“Come and sit on my face!”

“Can I sit on your face?”

“Oooh, Svool, recite us some
poetry!”

“Want to feel this? Touch this?
Squeeze this?”

“Gah,” said Svool, and pushed his
way through the quivering jelly-flesh, a selection of nubbins and lots of
nuzzling warm noses. Outside, in a sterile alloy corridor, where it was so cold
Svool’s breath emerged as smoke, Lumar L’anarr was waiting, her green eyes
focused on him. She was dressed in fresh combat fatigues and looked...
incredible.

Svool blinked and took a deep
breath. He felt the drugs thundering around his veins like a freight train.
Make
it stop, make it stop, make it stop!
But of course, it wouldn’t stop,
because it was inside him, in his flesh, in his blood, taking over his
control.
“Shit,” he said, and leant against the wall, and vomited.

“You okay?” Lumar crossed to him,
and patted him on the back.

“They force-fed me SLAP, TWAT and
SPUNK!”

“That’s what they thought you
wanted. Sergeant Hardspore, well, I tried to reason with him, but he had his
instructions.” She slapped a fake salute at her head and wobbled her lips. “You
know what these bureaucratic army types are like.”

“Instructions?” snapped Svool,
standing up and wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Suddenly he smelled
perfume, and in disgust realised it was his own golden curls, which had been
oiled and combed with rancid scent. “What docile dumb son-of-a-bitch muppet
gave the stupid dumb docile bastard instruction to perfume my hair, fill me
full of drugs and let a platoon of naked jelly-tit hellakunga girls loose on
me? Eh?”

“You did,” said Lumar, smoothly.

“Er. Eh?”

“Here. Look.” And she handed him
a document on a metal leaf, and it said in big bold letters: IN THE EVENT OF ME
BECOMING LOST, OR DETACHED, OR OTHERWISE KIDNAPPED OR SOME SUCH NONSENSE... and
went on to specify exactly
what
the Quad-Gal Authorities and the Shamans
of Manna should do in order to have their favourite poet returned to them...

“Ahh,” said Svool as he read down
the sheet. “Ahh. Oh. Ahh. Yes, I see. Oh, dear. Oh, bugger.”

When he finished, he met Lumar’s
steady green reptilian gaze. “I bet you think I’m an idiot.”

“Oh, no...” she said.

“Oh, yes.” He held up one hand,
and tried to look regal.

“No. Let me finish. I don’t
think
you’re an idiot. I
know
it. However, I am willing to look past your
failings, because Chorzaranalista brought us here for a reason. She has a plan.
All the children of Toxicity have a plan. And we are to be involved... if you
can get the skag out of your brain for a moment.”

“Hey! I was force-fed this
shit...”

“Under your own instruction.”

“Admittedly
under my own instruction,
however, I have changed, my time on this planet has changed me; my time here
with
you
has changed me!”

“How so?”

“Well, once I would have tumbled
into bed with all those jelly girls!”

“So why don’t you go back to
them? Svool? Hey? After all, you are... the
Poet Master.
Behold,
Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos, poet, swashbuckler and bon
viveur,
a legend in the hallowed halls of poetic creation, in the art of verse and
alliteration, in the dazzling creation of metaphor and pun, sexual athlete,
comedy chef, genius extraordinaire, Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV!”

“You’ve got a good memory,”
coughed Svool, averting his gaze.

“Yes, I have.”

“Er. Listen. We’ve come this far
together. I have a proposition.”

“Oh, yeah? Go on, fucker, make my
day.”

“First, we will do whatever
Chorzaranalista requires of us. And I mean
whatever.
What I’ve seen on
this world, well, nobody should have to live like that. Such levels of
pollution and disregard; it should never have happened. Greenstar are evil, and
they need to stop their polluting right now. They need to be stopped!” He
stared hard at Lumar. “We need to stop them!”

“Good. At last. Now you’re
talking. Outside, there’s a military film crew, Chorzaranalista wants us to
make a... documentary. A film. About Greenstar. About the pollution they have
wrought. She wants us to head for the Greenstar Factory Hub - and film it.”

“We can do that.”

“And Chorzaranalista wants you to
write a poem about it.”

Svool stared at her, eyes
narrowing. “Are you taking the piss?”

“Noo-oo,” she said, softly. “If
you write a poem, and recite it in front of the Greenstar Factory, you’ll hit
the news big time.
You
will get us more coverage across Manna than if
somebody nuked a planet. It will make everybody take notice.
Your fame
will
make the Shamans take notice. Then, everybody will have to sit up and watch and
fucking
do something
to halt this aberration! Don’t you see, Svool? In
the past, you’ve always used your skills for the purposes of
entertainment.
This
time, you can actually do something to
help.
Something worthwhile.
Something that will change people’s lives. Change the galaxy. Something that
will make a difference, my friend.”

Svool considered this.
If you
do it, and it doesn’t work, then your reputation will be ruined. You will have
sold out, used your wonderful God-given poetry, your genius, for something that
flopped. And as any entertainer knows, with a big flop resting across your
shoulders like some huge and terrible turd, well, that’s the kiss of death for
any poet of perfection.
Svool started to imagine a million scenarios where
he lost his ability to be a poet; to perform; to change the world using
personification.
Hot-damn-and-bloody-buggery! What can I do? What shall I
do?
He eyed Lumar, and licked his lips.
What must I do? For the good of the
planet, the people, and the whole Galaxy of Manna?

Svool coughed. Quietly, he forced
out the word, “Okay.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Yes.”

“Well done that man! So the guilt
of Amaranth’s terrible predicament finally got to you, eh? To put your entire
career on the line, your entire reputation as the Poet Master, your entire
world
and history!
Wow. That’s some sacrifice, Svoolzard Koolimax.” She kept a
perfectly straight face.

“I’m not doing it for Amaranth,”
said Svool. His gaze had become intense.

Lumar was looking down, checking
her pistols. “What?”

And then he spoke, and it all
came out fast, all came in a rush as if the TWAT and SPUNK had taken hold of
his brain and riddled his mind with mental diarrhoea. “I didn’t do it for
Amaranth, Lumar, because all I can ever think about is
you,
and all I
ever dream about is
you,
and all I ever want is
you,
and you can
laugh and mock me but I don’t care, because I’m in love with you, Lumar, in
love with every little smile and gesture and movement, and I know what you
think, you think I’m a sexual athlete, but that isn’t anything to do with this,
it’s not about sex, it’s about wanting to be with you, and spend the rest of my
life with you, and when we get out of this shit, I’m going to use all my wealth,
and all my contacts and all my personal mercenary warriors, to head to your
homeworld and find these dastardly kroon ganga gangs, and we’ll find and rescue
your sister, and kill all the bad kroona mafia, and you’ll never have to worry
about anything ever again.”

He stopped abruptly, and realised
he was staring at his feet. His feet were naked and cold. Svool realised he was
shivering, quite violently, but it had nothing to do with the cold.

He looked up, a quick movement.

Lumar was staring at him, her
mouth open, tongue flickering.

He looked down again.

There came a long, long pause.

Outside, heavy military engines
were revving. Sergeant Hardspore probably wanted to be on his way. After all,
there were heroic things to do and machine guns to fire and bad guys to blast.

Lumar gave a little cough. “You
mean that?”

“Yes.
All of it.”

“And... about rescuing my sister?”

“Yes. We’ll find her. We’ll
snatch her from the claws of those nasty mafia gangster people.”

Lumar stepped closer. Svool could
smell her scent, and it was an intoxicant cutting through his own rancid
perfume. She looked deep into his eyes, and he felt himself lost to her, lost
to her magic. It was like she had cast a spell on him, and the magic ripped out
his brain and spinal column and beat him savagely over the head with them.

“I love you,” he said, speaking
the words he once used to mock, as he left award ceremony parties with five
girls on each arm, laughing and saying he would never, ever utter such a
platitude...

Lumar kissed him. It was a good
kiss. Like no kiss Svool had ever experienced.

“Come on,” she said, finally. “We
have a lot to do, and time is running out.”

“Time until what?”

“Until Chorzaranalista tries to
destroy the Greenstar Factory Hub.”

~ * ~

JENNY
FOUND HERSELF ducking involuntarily, although to be caught in the direct blast
of an E3 Accelerator would compress a person to the size of a bucket. Instead,
Jenny, along with Zanzibar, Meat Cleaver and Nanny, were all picked up and
accelerated
down the single train carriage, where they connected with the forward
bulkhead, leaving dents in the alloy, and all landed in a crumpled heap. The
rear of the train bent and twisted and screamed, a huge section disintegrating
as flowers of sharpened alloy splinters twisted and folded around themselves,
chasing the ECO terrorists for half the length of the carriage...