With a sense of inevitability, Wulf turned his eyes upwards. The helmet zapped him lightly, as if acknowledging his thoughts.
"Cool as der cucumber," he sighed, grinding his teeth.
Then he was through the door, head down, swooping like the galaxy's strangest torpedo. There was a figure in black hunched over the twinkling lights of the console. As good a target as any.
His first surprise, as he felt the satisfying thud of contact against the helmet, was that the grunt of breathless astonishment his attack elicited was less of a grunt and more of a shriek. A decidedly female shriek.
"B-by der gods," he rumbled, trying to propel himself.
The second surprise, when indeed a vertical position had been achieved, was that his target didn't seem all that bothered by the hole in her shoulder. She pirouetted away - more hindered by her gravboots than the squirting crater and fumbled for the little laser hooked into her belt.
Wulf's alarm at his victim's gender was hurriedly dissolved on a caustic sea of Viking pragmatism. He hit the assassin hard: an assault that resulting firstly in the laser spiralling out of her hand, secondly in the black mask splintering away from her face, and thirdly Wulf tumbling backwards at the same rate as his punch.
In zero gravity combat, Newton's third law of motion is a real nuisance.
Ricocheting off a lumpy piece of equipment and thumping into the ceiling, Wulf hooked his hands onto a cable line, swivelling to get a bead on his opponent. He felt as though he was fighting underwater; every second that he spent tumbling through the air, trying to get his body facing the right way was a second in which he expected to feel the hot tug of a laser knocking neat little holes in his back. Finally managing to turn, he expected to be staring down the barrel of a weapon.
Not so.
The woman hunched over the console as if oblivious to the globules of blood that parted company with her broken nose. Surprise number three, for Wulf, was the woman's age: far from being some lithe young ninja-babe with moviestar cheekbones, he faced a withered middle-ager wearing smudged makeup and photoemotiove lipstick. Whatever she was doing to the console was clearly far more important to her than her new "LumpyFace" nose and the wound on her shoulder, still bleeding happily. It was therefore a pretty good bet, Wulf considered, that whatever it was she was doing didn't bode well for the rest of the resort.
With time to survey the scene properly, Wulf noted the various body parts flopping about, and the pearls of blood in all directions. His gronk-hide tunic was beginning to look distinctly polka-dotted.
"Woman!" he shouted. "You get away from der buttons or I... I stick der horns to you der second time!"
As far as threats went, it was pretty lame. The woman ignored him as if she hadn't even heard, eyes vacant.
"Woman!"
Wulf launched himself a second time, preparing to push her away from the console. Given that he was built along the same lines as the proverbial brick shithouse,8 and hardly the most flexible of individuals, he was unused to the sensation of flight. It provided a sense of freedom that he thought he could happily get used to - providing, that is, that his targets weren't in the habit of, say, suddenly turning to face him with brandished vibroknives. Which is precisely what happened.
8. In 2057 the Council For Semantic Correctitude tested this phrase by inviting a succession of well-built gentlemen to attempt to knock over a freestanding toilet built of bricks, using only their bodies. Following an afternoon of concussions, broken bones and, in one case, death, CSC opinion held that the phrase should be changed to "Built like a cardboard shithouse" to prevent confusion. It never really caught on.
"Sneck!"
The woman took a wide swipe at him, glancing the thrumming blade off the camber of his helmet. He might have been cautiously pleased with how the headwear had now come in handy twice in quick succession - had the damage to its exterior not immediately resulted in a further barrage of electric shocks into his head.
Screaming, with sparks playing havoc with his beard, Wulf bounced away from his target for the second time, thumping against the wall like a sack of potatoes, where he clung and considered his position. Upside down.
The helmet's charge faded, allowing him the temporary courtesy of thinking straight. He couldn't even hope to get close to the zombie-woman whilst she had that knife handy.
The woman in question, apparently unphased by the skirmish, laid the blade down and continued to tap at the console. It was as if Wulf had ceased to exist as soon as he was beyond her immediate range. He noted that several of the surrounding screens were flickering with warning signals and liability notices. Whatever she was doing, she was nearly finished.
Just as Wulf's frustration threatened to become another bout of wall-based headbutting, the discarded slicelaser curled past him like a gift from the gods. He plucked it out of the air like an infant scooping up a soapy bubble, and the expression of childlike wonder that spread across his face - albeit somewhat hairier - was just the same.
Time to get serious.
"Woman," he said, aiming the miniature barrel towards the back of her head. "You be telling der truth now. What are you doing, eh? You tell old Wulf and he won't be making you dead."
Nothing. Not even a twitch.
Wulf sliced a groove in the metal console beside her hand, hoping for at least a reaction. Again, there was nothing.
Wulf drummed his fingers and regarded the smoking laser. Nodding to reassure himself that yes, a healthy disregard for chivalry still burned brightly inside him, he turned the weapon towards the woman-
And chopped off her arm.
If he'd expected a horrified shriek he was disappointed. The woman continued to work with her remaining arm like some bizarre robot, even as its amputated counterpart detached stickily from its shoulder. A network of exposed veins and arteries choked a long scarlet streamer, pattering across a nearby wall.
"Is not natural!" Wulf hissed, astonished.
With the hornetlike buzz of a hundred static charges earthing, every screen in the controlroom burst to life with a single word, picked out in glowing red:
++CONFIRM?++
The woman paused. Thrown into sharp relief by the scarlet light, she raised her remaining hand towards the confirmation key.
Wulf cut her other arm off.
Several things happened in quick succession:
The woman folded at her waist, broken nose smashing into the console with a liquid splat.
The screens flickered and changed.
++COMMAND CONFIRMED++
Then:
++ENGINE SEQUENCE FIRING++
++COMMAND LOCKED++
Wulf gulped.
With twin arterial sprays giving her the look of some bizarre ornamental fountain, the woman abruptly appeared to wake. Confronted by the sea of blood suspended in the air around her, and more acutely by her abrupt lack of upper limbs, she gurgled breathlessly before finding her voice.
"B-by the Boddah. What's h... happeni...hhh..?"
Wulf took a breath.
The asteroid moved.
TWELVE
Stanley Everyone had come a long way since his days of hunting for the SD agency.
In those heady times he'd seemed all but indestructible. He'd arrived from the Milton Keynes ghettoes with big ideas and bigger ambitions; a scrawny youth with a lattice of pigmentation follicles across his skin, oozing a sweaty slick of goo every time he morphed. They'd called him Kid Octopus, the Chameleon Ranger... and then just "sir".
From the start he pursued only the biggest contracts, the toughest outlaws. He made three million creds in his first year and invested it all in subspace commerce. He was a billionaire within four shakes of a carothhian whippet's tail, yet wealth, it seemed, had not been kind.
Nowadays his host of disguises was somewhat limited.
Sumo wrestlers; no problem. Overindulgent chocolate-fiends; easy. Intergalactic mobster alien slugs; fine. He could even become a modest hillock; at a pinch.
He fussed and stalked - or, rather, rolled - around the luxurious suite at the heart of his home, waving his podgy hands in the air and shouting at a two way mirrorscreen set into the wall.
"'...ruins everything!' he was saying. 'They must have brought a snecking army!'"
The voice that replied was silky smooth, the vocal equivalent of a cat's purr. "I told you to be ready, Stanley."
"I was! I am! It's just... sneck it, this is sooner than we expe-"
"Excuses are not welcome. You know that."
Stanley blinked, as put off by the voice's syrupy charm as ever. "I-I did my b-"
Something exploded in his mind, a sliver of fire that snaked its way along his synapses and scorched his thoughts. He sagged to his knees, a menagerie of faces and colours flashing across his features. Each change had its inevitable waste, a transparent slime sweating from his pores. He wiped it out of his eyes - currently the vivid blue of some long-forgotten movie star - and struggled to his feet.
"Consider that a lesson learned," the voice from the screen trilled, still suggesting nothing more than friendliness in every sugar sweet cadence.
"I-I will, sir." Stanley said, tangling his hands together. "But t-the intruders... What should I do?"
The face filling the screen smiled. This took some time.
"I rather think escape might be your best course of action, don't you?"
Johnny stepped out of the shadows and levelled his blaster at Stanley's head.
"Not a good idea," he said.
And then the world became nothing but noise.
Johnny and the Kid had spent a long time considering their assault on Chez Everyone.
In the run up to the attack, Johnny had conducted surveillance with a variety of cunning spying devices, had spent hours poring over architectural plans and militia rosters, had carefully formulated strategies and had done as much homework as humanly possible on his target. He knew Stanley Everyone as intimately as anyone would ever want to.
The point was, impetuosity was not a tool in Johnny's arsenal.
Roolán's assault was somewhat more direct.
He arrived straight from Nama's Moon on an overnight ferry. He stepped from the spaceport and directed a snotty robotic cab towards the fortress mansion of Mister Stanley Everyone. He'd learnt to whisper by now, causing only minor damage to the taxi en route.
So focused was he on his revenge that he totally failed to notice the signs of several things being amiss. To whit: fires raged on opposite sides of the compound, alarms rang in all directions, lights flashed and dozens of guards were lying in various states of concussion.
He stared at the main gate, read its chirpy little motto ("Everyone's a Winner!"), and started to scream.
Roolán had never heard of the Red Sea, or the unlikely feat of hydromanipulative partition that supposedly allowed a dusty group of desperadoes to escape their persecutors several thousand years previously. Nonetheless, as the gate sheared into two and the lawn ripped aside, as the driveway gravel powdered, as the mansion's front wall collapsed like a stack of cards and the foundations rucked-up on either side, he couldn't help feeling there was something indescribably biblical about his actions.
"Everyone!" he shouted. Splinterlines danced across the fortress's exposed structure, opening it up like an immense dollhouse.
Roolán ran up a flight of stairs, its surrounding walls shaken away, and cracked open the centre of the fortress with a snarl. The devastation was a drug, buzzing through his muscles and making him laugh, shedding bricks and mortar like dried skin. The walls of the suite at the mansion's heart spiralled away on the rush of one final howl, exposed like the cavity at the core of a rotten fruit.
Roolán exulted in his own power.
"Arsehole!" shouted a man with no head, punching him shakily in the face.
In the course of an eventful career, Johnny had awoken to some truly revolting sights.
On Siblus 17 he'd regained consciousness halfway down the spectral gullet of a fractalworm, requiring the swift application of a semi-digested vibroknife to escape. He'd been cued back to consciousness by the frenching of a hungry spleenleech on Dethibar Prime, by the amorous attentions of a Glikkik oviposter wasp and by the amniotic embrace of a jellychav from Zouw. Then there were the years of his youth, hefted out of bed each morning by his father's angry shouts, cuffed ears, slapped cheeks...
The point was: he'd had his fair share of rude awakenings.
But nothing he could think of could outdo in sheer nastiness the spectacle that greeted him when he awoke on the floor of Stanley Everyone's suite.
"Awright?" said Kid Knee, from a distance of three inches.
The headless man was propped up on his one good knee, his other leg lifted to bring his squinting features down to Johnny's level. Thus his first waking sight was a closeup of his partner's crotch, and his second, following rapid directional adjustment, was an even closer closeup of his partner's beaming face. He wasn't sure which was worse.
"What happened?" he managed, nauseous.
The Kid shrugged his headless shoulders. "Dead weird. This little punk shows up shouting like a banshee. Went on and on and on, like AaaOOOoooOO-"
Johnny winced. "I meant, how come he stopped?"
"Don't worry." The Kid gave his best 'cool' grin. "I took him out."
"Took him out?"
"Yep. Lamped him one. Smack inna kisser."
Johnny arched an eyebrow. "How did you manage that?"
The Kid sneered. "What you mean is, how come I, unlike certain others who shall remain nameless, didn't faint like a big sissy girl?"
"No." Johnny shrugged. "I meant, isn't it a bit late in life for you to be learning how to throw a punch?" The Kid's face fell. "But, okay, since you mentioned it - why aren't you unconscious?"
"Dunno. Reckon it's 'cos my ears are closer to the ground. Avoided the Direct Brunt Of The Assault, sort of thing."
"Yeah," Johnny mumbled, too quiet to hear. "Thicker skull too." A thought occurred, and he began wriggling out from beneath the Kid, glancing around. "What happened to Everyone?"
The jowly face scowled. "What do you mean, ev-?"
"Stanley Everyone."
"Oh." The Kid coughed. "Him."
"Where is he? Unconscious?"
"Not... not as such."
"Not as such? Where is he, as such?"
"Well, he's... gone. As such."
Johnny clenched his jaw. The Kid waved a panicky hand. "L-look, it's not my fault, is it? He just sort of went all gloopy and slurp - no ears. Just strolled off."
"And you were too busy beating up on children to stop him?"
"He was killing you! What else was I gonna do?"
Even in the midst of a professional stroppage, Johnny registered the abject misery crossing the Kid's lumpy features. The pity/intolerance seesaw flopped back into a sympathetic position.
"Sorry," he sighed. "You did the right thing."
He cracked his knuckles.
The suite of apartments was a wreck. Neatly bifurcated by a chasm, with walls covered in splinter lines and fractures, it had the look of an earthquake's epicentre. The cause of the devastation, a scrawny youth of perhaps seventeen years, lay spreadeagled in the middle. Johnny checked he was still unconscious before returning to survey the wreckage. Dust and mortar still swirled, and as he paced across the rubble it circulated around him like a bow-wave.
"Which way did Everyone go?" he said, voice thick with resignation.
The Kid gestured towards a descending flight of stairs in one corner.
"Podpark." Johnny said, without any real surprise. "Snecker'll be halfway to the spaceport by now." He slumped onto a cracked chair.
The Kid sidled up awkwardly. "Don't worry, eh? Something's bound to show up. Maybe Wulf'll have more luck."
"It's useless. We don't even know for sure Grinn's tied up in all this. For all we know, Standing-snecking-Algie was having one last laugh and we'
re chasing shadows. The whole thing's snecked."
Kid Knee struck what he presumably thought of as a philosophical pose. "You know," he said, "at times like this, I always think a drop of Lutvuber's Slakemalt does wonders for the confide-"
"I pitched it out the airlock, remember?"
The Kid flopped down beside Johnny with the look of a man who's been told he has two hours to live. "You're right," he said, staring into space. "The whole thing's snecked."
A voice began to laugh.
Thick and treacly, it contrived at one and the same time to be rich with warmth and yet uncomfortably frosty. Johnny sat bolt upright, milky eyes flashing. "The monitor!" he hissed, clambering to his feet. "Everyone was on the comm. when we came in!"
The Kid frowned, spooked by the disembodied laughter. "W-what?"
"Find the monitor! I know that voice!"
Together they heaved aside rubble, upended collapsed console stacks and dug about in the debris, enduring the sickly-sweet giggles that filtered from the few remaining speakers. They found the mirrorscreen cracked and warped, hidden behind an avalanche of tacky decoration.
There was a man staring out from the monitor; standing in a dark place and dipped in heavy shadows.
He stared and smiled. And smiled.
And smiled.
"Long time no see," said Johnny, voice like lead.
"Ah, Mr Alpha. A long time, yes, yes."
"Where are you, Grinn?"
"Here and there." the man giggled, smile stretching wider. Kid Knee looked away.
"I'll find you," Johnny said, eyes flaring like beacons. "You know that."
"I don't think so, Mr Alpha. You're running out of clues. And time. Ta-ta for now."
The monitor shut down with a hiss. Johnny roared.
Mr Grinn.
First name: unknown. Age: unknown.
Status: bastard.
More specifically, status: sadistic perverted snecked-in-the-head überscum pondslime bastard.
Not a nice man.
He'd first been recorded by the GCC forty years previously in connection with the salabrect world Gaelacet. The salabrect were a strange race, each ten feet tall, intelligent enough to communicate with the documentary-makers who discovered their world but stupid enough to make audiences back home feel comfortably superior. Their defining characteristic - beyond their array of tusks, horns and claws, all for mating purposes only - was their method of propagation. Every night their females tilted gastral sacks towards the stars and blasted volley after volley of spores into the atmosphere.
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