And now he wouldn't be leaving in a hurry either.
"So much for following der lead," Wulf huffed, rummaging in a drawer.
His journey to the Zol had been a miserable experience; crammed into the smoky cockpit of the hippyship piloted by "Cheez" and his menagerie of mates. Wulf understood less than one in twenty words they said, sampled less than one in a hundred narcotics they tried and imagined himself throttling each of his rescuers less than... no, every time he closed his eyes.
Cheez said it was lucky they'd picked him up. Cheez said it was spooky the way they'd got stoned and steered so far off course that they'd picked up Wulf's hitching signal.
Actually, what Cheez said was: "Skaaaaandrivin' blatted, hornyguy. Wikkid didmeth-trip brung us down this way, right - totally outRAYjus - at gonzo-correcto-tiempo. Loodikrus vibes. Sneck the spooks, gig."
Despite the mode of delivery, Wulf was inclined to agree: coincidences had always seemed to him to exist only to bring bad situations into conjunction. For everything to turn out "just right" was, he reflected, about as dodgy as an Ice Giant with a bottle of suncream. By the Karma principal, he was due a fall. A big one.
On their arrival, the hotel manager was nice enough to assist Wulf with his enquiries. A psychopath wearing a horned helmet will tend to encourage that sort of thing. Cheez & Co had lost interest when Wulf began searching for "der small man in der glasses," and wandered off to see who could contract a novelty STD first.
Koszov showed up in apartment 43134 under the name "J Doe", deader than discojazz, with - Wulf was rapidly discovering - absolutely nothing incriminating amongst his possessions. His lack of cranial fluid was pretty much the only thing that set him apart from the other holidaymakers on this overcrowded, hot little asteroid.
He slumped onto the cheap bed and wiped sweat from underneath the helmet. He'd entertained the faint hope that the tropical heat would expand it enough for whatever weird gizmos holding it in place to release him. Instead, as it overheated, the helmet's control-electrodes were playing up, randomly zapping him.
He was stumped, frustrated, grumpy, and image-conscious. He wished Johnny was around. He always knew what to do in situations like this.
If truth be told, Wulf was doubting his efficacy as a solo agent. Investigations were alien to his way of working - his specialities involved hitting things with his happystick and, well, hitting them again. He took a deep breath and concentrated.
Professor Koszov's body was his only lead. Someone had come in here and shot him in the head, without him even standing up. And the door hadn't been broken down (until Wulf arrived), so the professor had invited his killer inside.
Wulf risked a smile, pleased with himself, moving from the shallows of Deduction into the piranha-infested rapids of Speculation.
"Someone he was here to be meeting?"
He drummed his fingers. He was no expert in forensic science, but after a lifetime of converting things from being alive to being dead he recognised certain telltale signs. Quite apart from anything else, the dried blood splattered across the wall and floor were red rather than the usual black/brown patina of clotted goop. The murder was recent, then.
Perhaps "motive" was the way to think. Why kill a harmless old guy?
"To be shutting him up?" he said to himself. The helmet zapped him lightly but he ignored it, refusing to let go of the nugget of an idea. He was onto something here.
If Koszov had been killed to protect whatever it was he knew, why hadn't the killer disposed of the body? If Koszov was involved with Grinn then the mere fact of his body showing up could make life uncomfortable for a lot of people.
Unless...
Unless his body wouldn't be found.
Wulf was at the door and running before he'd finished the thought.
He was too late.
Stepping out into the hot noon, he ran headlong into a knot of spotty tourists, all staring in confusion at the sky. Glancing about, Wulf saw that on every boxy veranda, on every cheap balcony, all along the beaches and concourses of the Kostadell Zol, crowds were looking upwards.
The sun was setting. Very, very quickly.
The Zol's claim of offering sixteen hours of uninterrupted sun was no idle boast. At either end of the peanut-shaped asteroid was a vast stack of engines and jets: as though the asteroid was some misshapen urchin; its bristles confined to scraggly patches at either end.
At the end of every day, when the nightclubs were fully stocked on alchopops, when the peddlobots had all been returned, when the greasy hordes were returning to their apartments for showering, shaving, dousing-with-industrial-strength pheromonal odours and selecting progressively more revealing anticlothing, when the general consensus seemed to be heading for a state of 'nightishness', the resort director could simply lean forwards in his chair and flip a switch.
The jets would ignite, blasting great nuclear cones into space, firing in prearranged sequence to balance their movements. Like a great Catherine wheel the asteroid spiralled around its central axis, tilting the resort away from the sun and towards the magnificent starscape on its posterior aspect.
During the resort's development, its designers had encountered a minor problem in this "daylight mobility" function. Namely: gravity. A distinct lack thereof.
Turning the Kostadell Zol too quickly created what amounted to an asteroid-sized centrifuge; divorcing objects from the grav-engines buried at the meteor's core. The solution was twofold: first, the transition from day to night should be, if not slow, then at least unhurried. And second, during the asteroidal manoeuvring the gravengines should be turned up to compensate. Ideally, nobody in the resort should ever feel any difference in their personal gravity during the transition.
Wulf didn't know any of this.
Not that he was stupid, or backward. Upon his arrival in the future (or the present, or whatever) he'd quickly figured out that the world was neither flat nor growing from the shaft of Odin's world-tree. Being told that there was a kind of stickiness which held people onto the surfaces of their planets seemed as good an explanation as any.
Even so, when Kostadell Zol had its quickest ever sunset and the gravity engines died with a lurch, it didn't take Wulf long to figure out that something was going horribly wrong. The way his booted feet were parting company with the floor was the giveaway.
All across the resort, those tourists not within easy grabbing distance of something firm found themselves placidly rising into the darkening sky. It was quite a sight.
Johnny pressed his electronux against an alleyway wall, checking its charge. A bright spark smouldered across the air, making Kid Knee yelp in the shadows. Johnny sighed. In a brawl, the one thing more useful than a high voltage knuckleduster was a reliable partner.
They'd checked for messages from Wulf at the hotel. Nothing.
"Keep it down to stunners," Johnny said, reducing the power-gauge on the grip of his blaster. "The less collateral damage, the better."
Kid Knee nodded - a barely discernible action given how much he was shaking - and said, "Right."
Johnny regarded his partner dubiously. He was beginning to regret flushing the Kid's hipflask out of the Peggy Sue's airlock: a mouthful or two might have conceivably settled his partner's nerves to the extent that he actually became useful.
Then again, a drunk with a tendency to sing rude songs during stealth missions was perhaps just as undesirable as a coward and Johnny could have happily done without either.
He'd almost left the Kid asleep in the Peggy Sue at the spaceport, though then he'd gone and found civilian pay registers for the YoCassok militia on the 'net. It turned out there was some sort of exodus going on: households of millionaires packing up and leaving. By all accounts the principal city was down to about half its usual population. This meant there were a lot of hired goons going spare, and it looked as though Stanley Everyone had hired all of them.
So maybe taking the Kid along was a good idea after all. If only so the guards had more to
shoot at.
"Ready?" he said.
"I... I..."
"Good enough for me. Let's go."
Stanley Everyone's stately home stood apart from the selection of pseudocastles, boudoir temples and pleasuredomes that formed the basic architecture of YoCassok. Here the judges, the film stars, the models, the planetary dictators and the dynastic tycoons came to hang up their crowns, to watch their megadoom star-weapons gather dust, and to direct from afar. They ruled the finances of the galaxy with iron malice from comfortable armchairs, sipping brandy, smoking cigars and mumbling orders into ornamental subspace communicators.
They came to YoCassok when the rigours of being filthy rich in a galaxy peopled by the merely filthy became too much. Here, they could settle down. Take it easy. Play hypergolf.
These were the not the sorts of people who "retired". They delegated.
When one established oneself within the monetary bourgeoisie by moving to YoCassok, one did not expect interruptions of a violent nature.
Johnny remotely detonated a fusion grenade he'd planted at the opposite periphery of Chez Everyone earlier and grinned, wondering how many politicians he'd just woken up.
"Go!" he shouted, leaping upright.
Pushing Kid Knee ahead, dodging spikes, he vaulted over the wall and landed with every sense on overdrive, every muscle tensed and ready, blaster in hand.
Kid Knee landed like a damp sponge.
Johnny didn't wait for him, springing across fuzzbloom lawns with his eyes piercing every sculpture and ornamental pagoda.
In the far distance, flickering against his irradiated retinas like drunken glow worms, a knot of guards descended on the smoking hole in the wall. "Distraction worked!" he grunted, sparing a brief glance backwards, where the Kid was loping along with the expression of a rabbit caught in a jet turbine's backwash.
"Cuh... Can we... heff... slow d-down?"
Johnny didn't bother to reply.
He hurdled an exotic shrub, avoiding the bright polyps on its upper twigs. He tended to regard anything more garish than his uniform as probably deadly.
As if in confirmation, a huge Koi with bands of orange and purple stripes broke the surface of a nearby fishpond, eyeing them moronically. Johnny slowed.
"Aww..." wheezed the Kid, catching up. "Lookit the cute... huuh... little guy. Must be curious."
Johnny grunted. In his experience curiosity not only killed the cat but also skinned it alive, ate its spleen, murdered its family and dropped orbitmissiles on its home.
The fish opened its mouth, revealing an unexpectedly metallic inner surface, and belched a salvo of thermal fragmines.
"Killpet!" Johnny yelled, lifting his blaster to get a bead.
The Kid barrelled into him like a freight train, dragging him off his feet. "No time!"
In the explosive confusion that followed, Johnny had to admit it: the headless buffoon might not be the greatest of bounty hunters, but when it came to getting the hell out of dodge he could have won medals. A sizeable section of the lawns enjoyed a personalised Armageddon, great swathes of fuzzblossom blown apart on a froth of fire and shrapnel. Roles briefly reversed, Johnny followed the Kid's lead and scampered on hands and knees (or, indeed, faces) away from the pond, patting out the fires on his legs as he went.
"So much for 'cute,'" the Kid grumbled, in between facefulls of singed earth.
"Yeah. And the element of surprise."
The guards, alerted by the fireworks, came at them in a tangle, tripping over each other in their haste. Even half a croquet-lawn away, Johnny could hear the telltale cries of lesser-spotted testosterone junkies:
"Hut-hut-hut!"
"Lock and load! Vape the muggasneckas!"
"Frag an' tag, in the name of the Boss!"
Johnny rolled his eyes. Kid Knee squealed and froze, burying his knee in his hands.
Not prepared to wait meekly for incandescent fiery death, Johnny snatched a flattened disc from his belt and hurled it as hard as he could to one side. Then he charged headlong at the guards, knuckles tight around his blaster's grip.
The goons opened fire with a cacophony of whirligig energies: ionic stormjets and plasma droplets churning the air.
Johnny kept running.
At the last possible instant, when the maelstrom had found its range, when great sooty craters mouthed gumlessly at the sky, when smoke and debris and shrapnel formed a fluctuating wall of noisy death that Johnny hurtled towards without slowing, the beam polariser - the flat disc he'd thrown casually to one side - activated with a crackle.
Johnny kept running.
As if someone had switched on the world's strongest leafblower, the firestorm curled in mid-air; its energies gobbled like a fine meal. The polariser acted like a sponge, absorbing not water but kinetic energy, sucking it away and storing it inside its armoured carapace.
Under other circumstances, had Johnny been charging down a single shootist, the polariser probably could have lasted much longer.
As it was, struck by the nuclear arsenal of a small country, the small device was overwhelmed within seconds. It glowed fiery red, blipped in alarm, then detonated; lifting a bulbous mushroom cloud above the lawns.
By which time Johnny's blaster, carefully attuned to escape the polariser's pull, had already fired an entire clip of stun-charges.
The guards went down like dominoes.
"Hey, Kid," Johnny said, standing over their twitching forms. Their massive weapons blipped at his feet, smartsystems dumbly analysed their surroundings. Johnny grinned. "Let's knock and see if Stanley's home."
An alarm whooped; red lights spinning like the least imaginative disco ever.
A man wearing security regs and a kevlar cassock checked a schematic and noted the advance of a red 'intruder' icon. He could already smell gunsmoke and ozone, and the throb of artilleryfire was difficult to ignore.
In a professional capacity his name was Freddie (lt)SE-LEH3-2SP. At one time or another he dimly recalled having a surname, but like so much else it had been lovingly burned from his brain by the Shaman-Lobotomyst at his enrolment ceremony.
The rich folk of YoCassok hadn't just turned their personal security into a fine art. They'd turned it into a religion.
Sure, there was money involved, but the gigawealthy had discovered that a surgically reconditioned worshipper is more likely to take a bullet for his employer than a well built bloke in sunglasses earning minimum wage.
One didn't become a sergeant in the bodyguard militia through martial prowess alone; but rather through a complex series of exams, tests-of-faith, sacrifices and acts of obeisance. Freddie's new name, as much of a mouthful as it was, acted not only as a personal badge of his loyalties, but as his CV: (loyal to) Stanley Everyone, Lower-eastern hallway three, second division, Sergeant-Priest.
"Let us pray," he said, clasping his hands. His squad craned their necks, earnestness painting their faces.
"Give us the strength, oh Lord," Freddie intoned, "to confront this test of our zeal."
The other soldiers nodded and mumbled.
"Lord Stanley, we beseech you: let our guns fire true, let our hypervelocity macroenergy pulsars inflict righteous injury upon the enemies of your honour, and let our courage remain steadfast in the face of what demons may afflict us."
Something heavy exploded nearby. The artillery rattle made the corridor shake, gouts of flame licking at the nearby intersection. One or two soldiers, youngsters with only the most rudimentary cranial surgery, exchanged glances. Freddie pressed on.
"In your name, Lord Stanley, and by the sacred paycheck, we obey. Amen."
The squad echoed obediently. "Amen."
Freddie opened his eyes and racked his gun, taking up position. "Get ready," he grunted, all trace of devotion gone from his voice. This was business.
The squad deployed with machinelike efficiency, months of drills and training paying off. A section of wall at the end of the hallway heaved, throbbing shell impacts obliterating the expe
nsive frescoes across its surface. The group fidgeted in alarm, fingers tightening on triggers.
"Hold," Freddie growled, a thick soup of loyalty coursing through the heavily tampered pathways of his mind.
The noise of the weapon was deafening now, filling the world, pounding at the ears. It felt as though a juggernaut were approaching, rumbling its way along the corridor, crushing all before it.
"On my mark!" Freddie shouted, sighting along his rifle. The intruder was almost in sight, flickering tongues of muzzlefire licking around the corner, shrouded in gunsmoke and flame.
The squad tensed, muscles bunching.
And a man in green and yellow blinked into existence behind them, coughed politely to get their attention and hurled a small ball at Freddie.
Which he caught.
"Oh, Stanley..." he mumbled, realising what it was.
Fzzk.
The FinchleycorpTM strategic time grenade, as expensive as each was, was generally regarded by Search/Destroy agents to be priceless. This was due largely to its "zero liability" guarantee.
Hit someone with a time grenade, the adverts assured, and no court in the known galaxy could convict you of murder. Your only crime was to transfer an individual to some specifiable point in their near future. Half a minute, twenty seconds - hardly a case of chronological dislocation. Even calling it "abduction" was pushing it, but murder? Certainly not.
To the fantasist, the idea of a temporal acceleration device appeared to have limited offensive value. Blast someone with a time grenade, they would point out, and boomf - thirty seconds later they're back, just as dangerous as before.
This point of view failed to take a fundamental matter into account: In the space of thirty seconds the average one-gee planet moved approximately three thousand miles in the orbit of its attendant star. Reappearing half-a-minute into the future was all very well, but it lost its SF charm when it was discovered that rematerialisation was an exercise in voidborne decompression.
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