Like a gun discharging, the bar exploded with laughter. M'Oloo joined the mirth, sniggering through yellowed teeth. The youth's eyes looked like they might pop out.
"Snecking hell!" the kid hissed.
The bar fell silent. Faces fell mid-guffaw, brows knotted together and mouths hung open.
The kid's voice wasn't natural.
"That's... hkk... that's strong stuff," he said.
M'Oloo almost slipped from his groove in the bartop.
The voice did something strange to his mind, shivering along his spine and sending pinpricks dancing across his neck, like spiders under his skin. If he'd been asked to describe the surreal tones he might have mentioned strange echoes, unnatural pitches that rattled his skull. He might have alluded to whalesong, or jabberbat squeals, or the tinny rattle of electrolysed metal. He might have used adjectives like "haunting" or "resonant". But, this being him, he would probably have settled instead for "snecking weird."
A brief glance around suggested that his fellow xowpokes were inclined to agree. And in M'Oloo's experience, things on Nama's Moon that were considered weird were only a moment or two from being considered dead. He put his hand back on his knife.
"We ain't real fonda freakos round here," he growled. The voice was still scratching around in the back of his mind, like a crow hunting a worm.
"Feeling's mutual," the kid said. M'Oloo resisted the urge to throw up, his stomach deciding that it couldn't cope with the voice either.
"W-whaddaya want here?" the barman said, propping himself upright with one meaty fist. He was sweating.
"Looking for some folks," the kid said, eliciting another chorus of groans. "Looking for some folks with hovbikes. Would've come into some money recently. Maybe just came back from their holidays."
Even through the haze of nausea, M'Oloo heard warning bells.
"Maybe," the kid said, "these folks have an interest in concerts."
The last word was delivered with such bitterness that the glasses along the rear of the bar shattered, a galaxy of shards which the patrons were too busy vomiting and rolling about to notice.
"You boys heard of anyone like that?"
There was now so much puke splattered across the wooden boards that the token sprinkling of sawdust had given up soaking duties and was instead floating merrily beneath the saloon doors.
M'Oloo tried to draw his knife in shaking hands. His eyes, going the way of Niagra Falls, noted the look the kid gave him. He gave up on the knife and sprinted for the door.
"I'll take that as a yes, then." said Roolán.
They came for him at midnight, demonstrating a stunning lack of imagination.
Roolán was waiting for them. He'd been waiting for them for two weeks, one way or another. Waiting for the authorities to dump him on some mudball planet three parsecs from Shtzuth, waiting for the hospital to discharge him, waiting for the pangalactic solicitors to confirm he'd inherited everything his parents owned, waiting for the local fuzz to announce that their investigations amongst the xowpoke communities of Nama's Moon had been fruitless, waiting for a passenger shuttle to arrive, and - most importantly - waiting to pluck up the courage required to pursue the revenge he wanted.
He felt obliged.
Watching them "sneak" (a charitable expression) along the central street, knives and guns stashed in pockets crammed with whiskysmokes, Roolán came to a very sudden and very unhelpful realisation:
He was scared absolutely shitless.
The man from the bar - an oily creature with a combover and threadbare clothing - was conducting a fraught conversation with the group's leader, a thug almost as wide as he was tall. Roolán could have guessed at their topic of discussion even if the morons had attempted to keep their cigarjuice-drenched voices down.
"Telling you, Zig, it's dangerous! We should t-"
"Should nuthin', Oish. One kid askin' questions is all. Knifework inna dark. No trouble."
Roolán shuddered. The gutter he was clinging to squealed as his weight shifted, forcing him back into the shadows of the hotel's roofspace. He needn't have bothered - the goons were so fixated upon swaggering that nothing short of a flying naked supermodel would have persuaded them to look upwards.
"But his voice, man! I'm tellin' yo-"
"All you're tellin', geek, is this little sneck's got himself a throat infection."
"No! It's different to that! Did things to my head, man!"
"Snecking baccjunkie..."
"No, man! His voice wasn't natural!"
"Damn straight it ain't natural - snecking kids comin' round, making trouble. And you let him get away."
"I came straight to you, Zig! I couldn't ju-"
"Shht." The big man silenced M'Oloo with a dismissive wave of his hand and paused outside the hotel, squaring his shoulders. Given their size, this took a while. "Look alert," he growled. "All you boys, blades only. Let's not cause a fuss."
Then they slouched into the lobby.
Roolán took a deep breath and ignored the shakes creeping along his limbs. The night was cold and he pulled the folds of his xowpoke jacket, bought earlier that day, tighter around his chest. He wondered whether he should have bought a knife, or even a gun. He wondered whether he would even get a chance to use one.
Actually, scratch that: he wondered whether he'd be able to. He wasn't so much out of his depth as he was treading water above the Mariana trench with sharkbait stapled to his legs whilst wearing a faulty lifejacket.
He took a deep breath and reminded himself that adversity was nothing new.
He'd been banned from uttering a single sound since he hit puberty. When his parents discovered they'd sired a mutant - when his voice broke, literally, at twelve - they'd left earth in a hurry, saying farewell to their prim and proper friends, quitting their prim and proper jobs, leaving behind their prim and proper car and house and swimming pool and life membership at the local gym and quiznight at the upmarket winebar and-
And all the other things they told him, time and time again, that they'd left behind because of him. They'd moved onto a ball of shit in space. They'd sacrificed everything, they said, to raise him where he wouldn't be victimised, to give him a chance at life. All they asked in return was for him to shut the sneck up. Siring a mute could be forgiven, in social circles. Siring a mutie could not.
Only now they were dead and given that they'd made such a big snecking effort for him, it seemed like the right thing to do to get even.
From below him, through a layer of roofing tiles came the unmistakable crump of a door being kicked-in. He tensed. A few muffled clanks followed the passel of goons through the room.
Demonstrating the sort of attention to detail that only the greatest of criminal minds ever grasped, a voice said: "Little puke's not here."
Roolán swallowed. It was now or never:
"Lost something?" he shouted.
He was still getting the hang of controlling his voice. He hadn't uttered more than twenty words in the last five years, so it was unsurprising that he hadn't quite perfected the abilities beneath his command...
The roof cracked. Every window for two blocks belched outwards. A light rain of jabberbats tumbled from the sky, pipes popped at their joints, hydrants sluiced the streets, milk soured in fridges and in every neighbourhood dogs howled with a sort of bewildered indignation.
Roolán's patch of roofing gave up the ghost. He dropped like a stone, landing with an ungainly crunch amongst the wreckage of his hotel room. So much, he thought, for playing it cool. Lying there in the dust, waiting for someone to slip a knifeblade across his throat, he opened his eyes and glanced around.
The goons hadn't fared much better than the jabberbats. They sprawled in various states of concussion, bleeding from noses and ears. One or two were unconscious and the others looked like they'd like to be, groaning like foghorns.
It wasn't just that his voice was loud, though it was. It wasn't just that it extended beyond the normal spectrum of audible
sound, though it did. It wasn't just that it seemed able to poke and prick at anything it chose, oscillating through scales to find that one exact tone that resonated with the atomic vibrations of any material, shaking it apart at its molecular seams. Though it did.
It was something more than that.
If music was a pair of hands to massage the senses, then Roolán's voice had claws.
He picked himself up and surveyed the devastation. He'd fallen on the head of the greasy little snecker from the bar. The man dribbled disgustingly and snored, oblivious to the rapidly-growing lump on his scalp. Roolán hoped it hurt when he awoke.
The big man, the leader with the wide-load shoulders, the man right now lying half-propped against the wall, watched Roolán through a haze of sweat and snot. His eyes weren't behaving themselves.
"Wha... whaddasneg..." he burbled, mouth slick with blood. Roolán guessed he'd bitten down so hard that he'd broken some of his teeth and found himself, bizarrely, hoping it was nothing more serious. He wasn't ready for murder. Yet.
"Figure you boys set that bomb," Roolán whispered. Whispering was worse.
Whispering didn't break things or concuss people. It just slid like a knife through the mind. Like a maggot in the skull.
"Figure someone paid you to do it."
The big man choked on his own vomit.
"Figure someone had to have a reason."
The man's knife clattered to the floor. Roolán crouched down beside him.
"Give me a name..." he hissed, and there was no way in the world that anyone - not even a braindead xowpoke called Ziggig - could disobey.
"N...name of... of..."
"Stanley Everyone".
Kid Knee rubbed at his temples, lifting his leg to accommodate. He'd just woken up. "Who the sneck is Stanley Everyone?"
Johnny took a deep breath and counted to ten. On those few previous jobs that he'd shared with the Kid he'd found it took about two weeks in the washed-out mutant's company for his tolerance to snap. This time the headless wonder had outdone himself; going from Novelty Underdog Charity Case to Intolerable Menace in the space of four days.
He glared back from the pilot's seat of the rental starskeet Peggy Sue to his partner, slouching nauseously against the impact webbing of a plushchair. Johnny found himself unconsciously checking the fastenings of the restraints: he was damned if he was going to let the Kid waste another deposit by getting anywhere near the controls.
"Stanley Everyone," he repeated. "He's a mutant. Used to be a Stront."
"What about him? Oh sneck, my head..."
"What about him? Kid, I've told you four times!"
"So tell me again. I'll remember this time. Promise."
Johnny rubbed his featureless eyes, exasperated.
"Ten, fifteen years back, Stanley Everyone was the SD's top dog. He got a run of good jobs, earned himself a stack. Decided to quit."
"Good for him."
"Yeah. But not good for us. Everyone's a shapeshifter."
"Well, I'm not."
"No, I mean he's a shapeshifter. Made of this sort of... goop. That's how come he was such a good Stront."
"Like, getting close to the enemy undetected. That sort of thing?"
"Exactly." Johnny was impressed. Briefly.
"So what's he got to do with us?"
"He's the mark!"
"Why? What's he done?"
Johnny glowered. This conversation had been boring the second time, four times ago.
"Don't look at me like that," the Kid grumbled. "S'not my fault I'm a, a non-viable organismismism."
"Oh, don't start that again."
"No, no. It's a perfectly valid point, okay? Like, you got them wibbly eyes, and there's Knuckles Davenport and Redman the Belly and Jenni Various and... and..."
"I get the point, but-"
"But nothing! Where's my psuedopods of flailing doom, eh? Where are my exploding fingernails? And now we got this Everyone geezer, he can slurp himself up into any shape he wants and he's still gone rotten. See? I couldn't even make it as a criminal!"
Johnny drummed his fingers against the dashboard. He hated it when people cottoned to their own inadequacies, quite apart from anything else it was amazingly difficult to say anything comforting without lying.
"At least you don't leave dollops of yourself behind everywhere you go."
The Kid looked blank.
"Stanley Everyone. He can't hold a new shape for long, see?"
The knee high expression didn't change.
"That stuff I found on the aquarium in the studio?" he held up the scanalyser bottle from his pocket. "I ran a check against the Doghouse DNA records. That's the whole point, Kid. Everyone was there the day of the explosion. Everyone was there when whatever was in that tank went missing. Everyone's in this up to his blobby snecking neck!"
"Everyone was in the studio?"
"Yes!"
"Oh. Right."
"You get it now? You're with me? You understand what's going on?"
"Well, yeah, but..."
"But...?"
"Well, the studio wasn't that big. I mean, a small crowd - fine, but everyone?"
Johnny swivelled back to the controls, beat the heel of his hand against his forehead and plotted a course for YoCassok: the elite, expensive and most of all guarded home of Mr Stanley Everyone Esq.
He was seriously beginning to wonder whether a million creds was worth this much hassle.
WORDS FOR THE DEAD
#4 Zeiphelgrub T'rakrak
Seriously, okay - no, hear me out - seriously, I'm telling you the truth.
It's real. I saw it with my own two eyes, man. The beastie.
And look, before you get on yer high horsedroid, I'm not tripping. Look at these eyes, man? Any dilation? Any mucal membranes? No. 'M not even drunk, sneckssakes. Haven't taken nothing for two days if you must know, so it's not like you can even blame the DTs. I ain't even shaking all that much. See?
Anyway, yeah, the beastie. I saw it down that alleyway with the Shluxi restaurant out the front. You know, the one with the dumpster with all them freaky eyeball bits and snot and stuff. Good pickings on a Zubday, long as you don't mind alien chow. My old broodpa used to say: "Spawn 'o mine, what you got to remember is, down-on-their-luck useless desperado junkie braindead scumaddicts can't be choosers." I've always 'membered that.
The point is, the point is that I'm down this alley, minding my own business and slurping on some manky old guts or something, when I see it. Right in front of me, bang, it just appears. It's big, I'll tell you that. And sneck only knows how the thing was standing there 'cos I sure as elephantbeans didn't see no legs. Maybe it flies, I dunno. But, look, the most important thing - the thing you don't forget in a hurry, that thing is: teeth. Lots and lots and lots of 'em.
Now, I'm down this alleyway with old Mor'hoktep - he's the guy used to be a broker, fell on hard times when he figured investing in musical contact lenses was the way forwards - and he's too busy rummaging to notice. And I ain't about to scream, know what I mean?
I been living on the streets round these parts twelve years. Good pickings round here. Lotsa rich folk, see? Eating out at restaurants every night, spare cred for the presentable-looking tramp. All you need round here is what you might call a pragmatic approach to edibility.
Course, in recent times, things have gotten tough. Right outta the blue a whole bunch of the rich folk up-sticks and clear off, whoosh, just like that. Bit of a local mystery. Upshot is, not as many leftovers, see? So you got to share.
Now Mor'hoktep, his approach was the pragmatic-est of all. Put a lot of concentration into finding the smallest bit of meaty shit, did old Mor'hok. You'll notice I'm using the past tense.
Long story short, the critter ate him.
So it's fair to say I'm running by now. I got blood all over me and I'm thinking the YoCassok cops don't take a real shine to tramps with veinjuice in their hair. And I'm pretty sure - though I'm not about to turn around to check - that
the big snecking beastie is following m--
Unk.
TEN
Professor Koszov stared at Wulf, eyes magnified ghoulishly through thick omnispecs.
Seated in a chair so padded his legs didn't touch the floor, he wore exactly the sort of clothes one would expect a lab-scientist to take on holiday: massive Bermuda shorts, a shirt so colourful he looked like a psychedelic graffiti victim, open-toed sandals with socks up to his knees, and a white handkerchief (knotted at each corner) draped on his head like a tablecloth.
Apart from one minor detail he looked every bit the relaxed holidaymaker.
Halfway between the omnispecs and the handkerchief, the entry hole of a high powered energy beam exposed the dark interior of Koszov's skull to the world.
Wulf stared at the body for a moment before the vacant eyes, rheumy in death, began to creep him out. He swivelled the comfychair around to escape the empty gaze; though the rearview - where the exitwound had blasted a ragged lump of chair stuffing and skull lumps outwards - was hardly any easier on the eye.
Kostadell Zol, its distance from earth giving it a kind of faddish chic, had at one time been the most desirable holiday location in the galaxy. Spread across one surface of an asteroid, enclosed within a vast atmospheric bubble, the Zol was an artificial resort sporting fifty kilometres of imported beaches, sixteen hours of sunlight every day and three hundred pubs, clubs and restaurants. It was this last feature which dramatically altered the fortunes of the resort.
Financially mobile patrons began to complain that the asteroid lacked culture. The resort's attempts to introduce 'natives' with improvised traditions failed and in a panic the hotel owners began offering cut price deals and - importantly - free drinks.
Within the week, seven million eighteen to thirty year-olds descended upon the asteroid in a plague of bad music, acne and alcohol. Now, ten years on, the entire populations of nearby planets were employed in the manufacture of Zol-related products: alcohol, gonedoms, cigarettes and unadventurous Earthfood.
There was no way in hell Professor Koszov had come here voluntarily.
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