Toxicity (55 page)

“Stand up, Jenny. We have a lot
to discuss.”

“Why?” she said, looking down
meaningfully at Zanzibar, who still rested against her, as if the big man was
asleep. “Why did you kill him?”

Candle’s face went hard, then. “He
turned against us, Jenny. They all turned against us. You were a pawn. Part of
a bigger game. A bigger tapestry. But you will see. I will show you. You will
understand. Come with me.”

He held out his hand. It was a
large hand, powerful, and Jenny found herself staring at it.

Who did she trust?

Did she have any option?

Slowly, she eased Zanzibar down
to the ground with as much respect as she could muster, then climbed to her
feet. Her head hung low, her SMKK dangling on its strap. Every limb felt
lead-weighted, useless. All the fight had gone out of her. All the life had
poured from her.

They stepped into the corridor,
and there was a squad of twenty soldiers. They wore the olive-green of
Greenstar, their gold logos emblazoned proudly on military jackets and berets.
Their weapons were held smartly. To attention.

Jenny went for her SMKK in a
rush, but Candle reached out, steadying her with his strong hands. She looked
into his face. He reminded her of her father. He smiled at her, and shook his
head.

“You are Greenstar,” she said,
understanding dawning.

“Yes.”

“But why?
Why
betray us?”

“I have not betrayed you. I have
always been Greenstar.”

Jenny wrestled with this. “Greenstar,
the very fuckers who we hunt down and kill and bomb and exterminate - they
employ us to do this? Greenstar own and organise and run and supply the Impurity
Movement?” She started to laugh, and the laugh was touched with hysteria. “Greenstar
use ECO terrorists to bomb their own factories?” She was laughing openly now,
tears tumbling down her face.

“Yes.”

“But why? Why, you bastards? I
don’t understand!”

And Jenny was in his arms, a
small child again, a small child needing protection from the world of the
grownups. Because this was a different place, a different game. Jenny no longer
understood the rules, if indeed there were any. Jenny was divorced from reality,
cut out from the equation of life. Everything she knew and trusted and believed
and fought for - all of it was built on a foundation of quicksand.

Candle squeezed her, hugged her,
murmured soothing noises into her hair.

“Come on,” he said, whispering in
her ear. “We must go to the Director’s Office. There, everything will become
clear to you. There, everything will be explained. Do you trust me?”

Jenny looked up through her
tears. “I trust nobody,” she said.

“That’s okay. Come on, come with
me. I’ll answer all of your questions there. We won’t hurt you. Nobody will
hurt you again.”

And weeping, Jenny allowed
herself to be led. Like a lamb on a leash.

~ * ~

HORACE,
ANARCHY ANDROID, otherwise known as The Dentist, swam through the toxic sludge.
Slowly, he could feel his body failing him. His new, incredibly powerful toxic
body - it was failing. The lirridium in the sludge, filtered through in
channels, in skeins, was burning him. It was decaying his toxicity. It was
neutralising the acids and alkalis, reducing the pollutants, halving the
half-lives. And yet he fought on, pushing through the tox, swimming through the
miles and miles of vast pipes that ran under the ground and under the rock,
under villages and towns and cities, taking in their crap, taking in their
toxicity and pumping it
somewhere else.

Horace pushed on, only one
thought in his mind now. And he realised they were lining his route, the
psi-children, hundreds of them, thousands of them, products of evolved toxic
waste, products of the world of Amaranth that had been abused and crushed and
dumped on, a living breathing toxic
Hell,
and he had to push on,
had
to
make a difference...

Had to be the Trigger.

Now his body was soaking up
lirridium, it was flowing into his mouth and ears and nostrils, flowing into
his lungs, his bloodstream, his lymphatic system, and he became infused with
the fuel, infused with the liquid gold so important to space travel, so
important to Greenstar, so important to Amaranth, so important to Manna...

And realisation hit him like a
hammer.

To become the trigger, the spark,
the ignition, the detonator.

He knew how it would be done.

And all around him, the
psi-children began to sing... they sang a long, low, crooning song, a song of
lamentation, a song of desolation, for their lost world, for their dying world,
for their dead world.

~ * ~

THE
DIRECTOR’S OFFICE was the top floor of the Greenstar Factory Hub, at the
pinnacle of the central tower. It was a vast space, incredibly opulent, with thick
glass carpets, marble windows and mercury furniture, which rippled gently on
contact.

The lift doors hissed shut,
leaving behind the squad of Greenstar military.

Silence greeted Jenny, and she
looked up, looked around, absorbed her new surroundings.

Mr Candle left Jenny at the door,
still with her weapons, and walked forward to a massive boardroom desk. By the
wall, decorated with original paintings by some of Amaranth’s most famous and
unique “Toxic Painters,” renowned across Manna for their work using toxic
materials to create
art,
Mr Candle poured himself a drink from a crystal
decanter and lifted the small glass in his huge hand. He turned and looked back
at Jenny.

“Why don’t you come in, Miss Xi?”

Jenny stared at him, then shifted
her gaze. Several figures were seated around the mercury boardroom table. There
was Renazzi Lode, the Director of The Greenstar Recycling Company. Small and
powerful, she sat upright, hands clasped before her, a forced smile on her
face. Jenny could tell it was a forced smile; she could smell insincerity from
a thousand yards.

Jenny padded forward across the
carpet and stopped, staring at the people before her. Mr Candle made
introductions. “Renazzi Lode, I am sure you are aware, is our Director. She
handles every facet of the company from the top down, and makes all our truly
important decisions - as any thoroughbred director should.” He gave a small
laugh. Jenny’s keen eyes moved from Renazzi Lode to the others seated around
the table.

“This is the Assistant Director,
Sowerby Trent.” Jenny looked her up and down, the barbed-wire hair, the face
like a puckered cat’s arse, small and shrivelled as if worn down by decades of
bowing and scraping and fighting, fighting, fighting to get to the top, top,
top and beyond... but never succeeding. “She aids Renazzi Lode with some of our
more complex ethical problems.”

Jenny switched her gaze to a
small man, small and squat and looking uncomfortable in his expensive suit, as
if he really shouldn’t be wearing one. He had a massive explosion of boils
across his neck and the side of his head, which Jenny attributed to some kind
of contact with a toxic substance, perhaps. She smiled inside at this, but not
very hard.

“Aaul Thon Lupy, Chief of
Recycling Management. We have a joke in The Company. We call him
The Toxic
Poisoner.
Obviously, the joke being that he doesn’t so much
recycle
waste,
rather he poisons every single thing around him.” A ripple of brittle crystal
laughter went round the head of the table.

Jenny did not smile.

“Now, quickly moving around the
rest of our management team, we have Helle Mic, Head of Communication Services”
- Jenny stared at the slim, acerbic-looking woman, hair back in a tight
ponytail, overbite sturdy enough to crack the caps off a bottle of beer;
indeed, the wheels off a JCB - “this is Head of Public Relations Management,
Sanne Krimez, the woman responsible for smoothing over, shall we say, some of
our
biggest
social networking disasters” - he gave a little chuckle - “and
lastly our Foreign Affairs Director and keen pink leather motorbiker, Arroon
Lupar, the man responsible for making sure we don’t get a Halo Strike up our
arse for upsetting the Shamans.” He laughed again, only this time with less
enthusiasm.

Jenny looked around at the group,
in their neat suits and fake smiles, and they all seemed to be watching her
expectantly. She was also painfully aware of the SMKK hanging slack by her hip
with a pretty much full clip. One twitch, one spray of bullets, and she could
wipe out the bastards who had done this to Amaranth. The fuckers who had
crucified her world. But first, some answers...

“Explain it to me,” said Jenny.

“Which part?” said Mr Candle.

“Start with the Impurity
Movement. Why the fuck would a company intent on poisoning a world then employ
its own terrorists to bomb its own factories? It doesn’t make sense.”

Mr Candle had moved to stand
before the window, which took up the entire wall and looked out over Amaranth.
He gestured for Jenny to join him, and warily she padded across the rich
carpets. It was late, and the green sun hung low in the heavens, casting
beautiful rays over the planet below. The scene was... stunning. And yet the
beauty was marred by distant factories and towers belching smoke, scarred by
the dumps and slag heaps and teetering towers of waste -all waiting to be “recycled.”

“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,” he said,
and placed a hand on her shoulder. She was sorely tempted to draw her combat
knife and smack it through the back of his hand, but she resisted. Just.

“Don’t keep saying my name, you’ll
wear it out,” she said.

Mr Candle looked down at her. “What
Old Tom used to say, right?”

Jenny stared at Candle for a
long, cool time. “How could you know that?” she said, eventually.

Mr Candle grinned at her. “Don’t
you see the family resemblance? Of course you do, you just won’t admit it to
yourself. I’m your uncle, Jenny. I am Old Tom’s
brother.
I am Kaylo Xi.
They call me ‘The Candle’ because I stand alone, a solitary flame against the
dark.”

And it clicked into place.
Everything
clicked into place, like a videogame of falling bricks which suddenly
aligned in a rush and a blink of an eye, aligned and popped and buzzed and
progressed you to the next level
of understanding.
Mr Candle was Old Tom’s
brother. Jenny’s uncle. And she remembered: distant memories, toddling around
when her huge kind Uncle Canny used to come and visit, always bringing her
wonderful gifts, sitting her on his lap and bouncing her. She would pull at his
neat moustache and he would roar with laughter...

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” said Candle, eyes
sparkling. “Greenstar Recycling Company is
my company.
But more, it was
also Old Tom’s. We had a 50/50 share. That other fifty percent - well, now that’s
yours. On your thirtieth birthday... which is...”

“Tomorrow,” said Jenny, mouth
dry, eyes watering.

“Now. To answer your previous
question. Greenstar are aware, of course, that our actions are not favourable
to a very large part of the Amaranth population. Fucking do-gooders always
getting in the way. Well, it was your father’s idea. If we began an ECO
terrorist group, made them high profile in the media, give them some redundant
or useless targets to destroy - then...”

“Then they’d attract every
like-minded individual to their cause,” said Jenny, her voice like gravel, a
voice of the tomb, a voice of the dead. “You would assemble a massive army of
terrorists - whom you would control. No rogue bastards destroying Greenstar
stuff, oh, no; you’d pull the strings. If there were going to be rebels, going
to be terrorists, then you might as well control them, right?”