Naturalists theorised that, having utterly overrun their planet, the salabrect had speed-evolved the ability to seed other planets. It was hailed as a miracle, as a natural coup-de-grace, as a monument to the righteousness of Charles Darwin and, of course, as proof of the existence of God.
Whatever force had endowed the salabrect with their bizarre reproductive equipment, it had failed to anticipate the black hole cluster circulating the Gaelacet system. Even the naturalists eventually admitted it was pretty dumb to blast hundreds of tonnes of biological material into the hyperdense heart of a collapsed star every night.
Grinn spent two weeks with a fleet of asteroidal harvestdrones intercepting every mortarlike clump of spores that came his way. When the hold of his craft was thick with juvenile salabrect he simply switched on hypnotic muzakconditioners, told the transfixed gribblies that he was their father, and virus-bombed the planet below back to the days of primordial sneck-all.
Within months he was hiring-out his exclusive army of salabrect soldiers to needy (and rich) regimes. The sight of a legion of drug fuelled spiky monsters, ably supported by columns of biological artillery, was the last thing to be seen by many a plucky rebellion commander. Amniotic Spore Howitzers featured in Blasters 'n Lazcells as the number one support weapon of choice ten years running.
When eventually the authorities caught up with him, Grinn simply vanished. Over the next twenty years he turned his hand to scam after vicious scam: Hijacking food-aid convoys, laser-blasting inhabited worlds to get at precious molten cores, charging populations exorbitant amounts for safe passage from dying planets then opening the airlocks in deep-space. No crime was too great, too audacious or too cruel.
Not that he perpetrated exclusively on a gargantuan scale. Wherever he went there followed a trail of petty murders, casual torture and exploitation. He developed a reputation for rewarding those who helped him, but punishing those who crossed him with equal enthusiasm. When GCC officers found Sammy "The Slice" Sever, Grinn's renowned lieutenant, his internal organs had been dangled, attached to a variety of arcane life-support machines, from the ceiling of his hab. Without skin or bones, he'd screamed and dangled for three days before the ceiling gave way and the whole caboodle splashed. Sever, it was widely reported, had mistaken Grinn's glass of milk for his own and had taken an illicit sip.
On Varico, apparently on a whim, Grinn made use of prototype analytic-teleport technologu to steal candy from every child on the planet. After proudly announcing his crime he nuked the population centres and jettisoned both teleporter and candy, opining that he'd never really needed either in the first place.
There was also the small matter of Grinn's appearance. Every year, on his birthday, he treated himself to a little plastic surgery; widening his mouth by a single centimetre. At first the self-mutilation was almost unnoticeable; a pronounced grin that became a little more macabre every year. Towards the end of his career, before his incarceration, the neat gashes had crawled upwards almost to his ears, cutting across not only flesh but also bone and nerves. He'd had new muscles inexpertly grafted into place, new molars stuffed into the raw gums, new lips extending like earthworms across his face. When he smiled now, the hinges at the base of his skull parted with a grim creak, lips crawling back in some dragonlike leer, levering his entire head open like a mantrap.
Down through the years, the GCC had sent no fewer than thirty-two Strontium Dogs after Grinn, each returning empty handed, or more often, not returning at all.
It was only when a Search/Destroy agent named John Alpha, accompanied by his new temporally displaced partner, Wulf Sternhammer, cornered Grinn on the bridge of a Brass-Class Electrodecraft (planning to electrolyse the oceans of Pacifica IV to extract the trace gold in its water), that his reign came to an end.
He came quietly, to everyone's surprise.
And then, five years later, he escaped.
Roolán awoke to the unwelcome prodding of a blaster barrel. Under normal circumstances, the natural reaction to such a situation would certainly be to scream.
Roolán sucked in a breath.
The gun - too close to his eye to focus upon - drew his gaze along a green limb and up to a man's face. Enclosed in a droplet shaped helmet that sloped forwards into a suggestively shaped crest, his features were craggy and hard; centred not by glaring eyes but two empty patches of light, like torches in the dark.
The scream, well matured by now, was racing upwards towards Roolán's larynx when the tall man placed a gloved finger against his lips and said, "Sssh."
The scream curled up and died.
"No noises," the man explained. "I get twitchy."
Roolán lay on the floor of Stanley Everyone's suite, surrounded by the devastation that he was slowly remembering creating. Staring up, he gradually became aware of a second shape looming over his captive's shoulder: a sweaty mass covered by gaudy kevlycra, lacking discernible shape or purpose. It was only when a fatty leg raised a gouty face that Roolán realised, with a jolt, what these men were.
Freaks. Outcasts. Abominations.
Mutants.
Just like him.
The unfortunate presence of the gun rather precluded him from saying so.
The helmeted man leaned down, blocking what little light filtered through the cracks of the walls. His eyes seemed to flare, their smouldering light intensifying, brightening to twin supernovae. The radiance washed across Roolán's mind; scurrying tentacles into his memories and around his thoughts, scuttling like spiders inside his skull.
The voice seemed to come from a long way away.
"Were you sent to kill us? Don't speak. Just think it."
Tentatively, feeling ridiculous, Roolán formed the words in his mind: L-like this?
"That's it. I said, were you sent to kill us?"
You're reading my mind?
"No. Just your eyes."
I don't under-
"Look, kid. I'm in a hurry. Are you here for us or not?"
No! I don't know who you are!
"So why are you here?"
I... I came for Everyone...
"Right. And what did old Stanley do to warrant your murderous attentions, huh?" The voice dripped with scorn. "Sold his shares in your favourite cartoon?"
No. Nothing like that. The thought was like ice, cutting a frozen path through the contact, slicing to the fore: He killed my parents.
The link broke off. The man staggered backwards, shocked by the ferocity of the thought. He pursed his lips and stared down as if confused.
The knee-headed man fidgeted. "Johnny," he muttered, voice thick with nasal urgency, "he's getting away."
The gun dipped, slipping back into its holster with a hiss. Roolán gawped at the sudden absence of imminent death, astonished. The man continued to glare, pearlescent eyes impenetrable. "Let's go."
"What about him?" the fat one said, gesturing down towards Roolán.
Somewhere outside the devastated mansion sirens were wailing, lights flashing against the broken edges of the walls.
"He's a mutant," the white-eyed man said. "They'll eat him alive."
"So?"
"He's coming with us."
WORDS FOR THE DEAD
#5 Natalhia Dover-Dover-Cutler Matthews
This is all highly irregular, you know. One is not in the habit of awaking under conditions of such acute confusion, and unless an explanation is forthcoming I shall be very, very cross. Allow me to list my vexations:
I do not know where I am.
I do not know how I arrived here.
I do not know why there is a seven-foot ruffian with a horned helmet staring at me across the room.
I do not know why there appears to be a gravitational deficiency or why there are pieces of a dissected corpse bouncing off the walls. If this is someone's idea of a joke, one is not amused.
But more than anything else, I do not have a clue why I, wife of the QuantumDiamond billionaire Henri Dover-Dover, trendsetter to the stars, heiress to a
priceless empire, should be awaking to discover myself wearing a matte black catsuit.
BergllerThreddsTM, as anyone knows, went out of fashion two years ago. If anyone sees me in this ridiculous apparel my reputation will be utterly ruined. It's too much!
(Also my arms appear to have been cut off and I'm slowly dying of bloodloss.)
Matte black! I ask you!
However. I did not get where I am today by panicking. Quite apart from anything else it raises the possibility of breaking a sweat, and - let me make this clear - I do not sweat.
If anyone can carry off this stylistic disaster it's me. Poise, Natalhia.
Oh, look. The hairy man is trying to hold me upright. It's incredible how detached one becomes whilst bleeding to death but, still... I do wish the plebeian wouldn't actually put his hands on me. I read an article in Echelon magazine in which they proved that physical contact with commoners could be infectious. The grizzled creature barely even speaks English, for Boddah's sake!
And now, to top it all, there's something going on in the back of my brain. If it wasn't so bally undignified I might actually consider screaming.
Very, very, very vexing.
Splut.
In zero gravity, a detonation creates a perfect sphere of expanding force and matter. Debris does not arc towards the ground, smoke does not rise and, notably, gobbets of brainmatter - like catfood mixed with clay - do not slump downwards to spray a colourful blast radius around their former owner's body. They go outwards.
In the control room of the Kostadell Zol, the assassin gave a split second scowl before her head exploded like an overfilled balloon. Wulf, whose attempts at staunching her blood were not going well, was drenched in a tsunami of gore.
"By der gods!"
Held in place by its gravboots, the assassin's body jerked outwards on the cusp of the explosion, shins crackling. When its ragdoll fluctuations ceased it was left leaning spectrally against the air - as if hanging from an inverted ceiling - shattered neck and lower jaw flapping.
The nebula of fluids and bonelumps, still expanding, pattered against the walls like polarised raindrops, and Wulf was left blinking a sticky film of claret from his view. He couldn't get the look of snobbish bewilderment on the woman's face out of his head: her eyes bugging out, lips wobbling. Whatever she'd been up to, working so industriously at the consoles, she was as unaware of the hows and whys as was Wulf himself.
Only now, in the aftermath, were the ramifications of her exertions becoming obvious. The whole asteroid was shaking. Spitting sparks, the computers had shut down with a terminal hiss. And now his only lead, his only interrogatory hope of finding out exactly how much shit was on its way towards the metaphorical fan, had exploded like a soggy piñata.
Pushing himself back towards the consoles, drifting through air so thick with beads of blood that he had to cover his mouth to avoid drowning, he tapped experimentally at the controls. All the obvious startup commands (the buttons that were labelled "startup", for example) refused to acknowledge his frustrated thumpings, and the second ace up his sleeve - pressing everything at once - failed inexplicably to yield results. He glowered at the instruments as if personally insulted.
Even at the best of times Wulf's approach to modern technology tended towards the simplistic. One had only to learn which button to press, which trigger to pull, which lever to snap: not how they worked, or why. The upshot was that if the resort's controls had been designed by a moron with no sense of security, Wulf still would have struggled to get the systems operational. In the midst of an alpha-lockout with power drain, random cycle password encoding, hackproof cutouts and net-severance capabilities, he stood about as much chance as a plutonic Etherbeing in a hurricane.
No controls meant no communications. He couldn't even tell anyone what was happening.
Not that he knew what was happening.
Some subtle change affected his sense of balance: a sensation of weightiness was returning where previously there had been nothing. Without appreciating how such a thing could happen, the idea cheered Wulf immensely - perhaps the resort's failsafes had kicked in.
Except... it occurred to him that the slow build of gravitational weightiness was pulling him not towards the floor where the assassin's body was slouched, but the plastered ceiling above. The blood in the air, equally as affected, began to puddle against the roof's inner surface.
Bewildered, Wulf risked a glance through the doorway, recalling his first view of the Kostadell Zol that morning. He half expected to find again the vista of tropical loveliness greeting his eyes like some shimmering pearl, sunlight sparkling across the wide bay, braindead tourists nursing hangovers all along the beach. Some hope.
Quite apart from anything else, they'd left the sun behind.
The Kostadell Zol asteroid tumbled through the void like a bowling ball, careening towards whatever galactic skittles had taken its fancy. Leaving behind the star that had supported it for so long, its day and night cycles became a blue blur, punctuated by the flash-flicker of an dwindling sun. The heavens became a dizzying kaleidoscope, tumbling over and around like some cheap special effect, stuck on a loop. If anyone had been staring at it, it might have seemed pretty impressive.
As it was, very few people were paying much attention to the stars.
The asteroid was shaking off its tourists. As its rotational velocity increased the centrifugal spin went beyond simply negating its inherent gravity, becoming instead an expelling force that pushed everything outwards from its centre. As the revolutions sped whole crowds found themselves floating upwards to be pinned to the inside surfaces of the oxygen dome, crushed outwards like fluids in a centrifuge. Thus scattered, butterflies pinned to the page, they stared down at the landscape below and alternately shrieked or laughed as their narcotic consumption dictated.
That might have been the end of their ordeal, had there not been a vast artificial ocean to take into account.
Slowly at first, in incremental bursts of droplets that licked higher and higher above each wave, the sea rose into the sky. When the surface broke apart, hurled upwards by the violence of the asteroid's revolutions, even those holidaymakers still chortling in narcotic amusement began to scream.
They were drowned upside down.
Wulf stayed inside the control room and thanked his lucky stars for the presence of a sturdy roof.
The roof began to crack.
"This is not being fair!"
THIRTEEN
The Dilûu Manta was first discovered by marine zoologist Carriadne Tooker, undertaking a solo taxonomy of the ocean moons of Pacifica IV.
Sucking water into their mouths and expelling it from a fluted trumpet-gland on their rears, these bizarre creatures ejected water at such speed that Tooker's notes likened them to biological torpedoes: screaming through the oceans at unsavoury speeds. Tipped with a set of bristly barbels with more sensory acuity than the surveillance department of a paranoid dictatorship, the Dilûu had little trouble in tracking the sprot-shoals that passed through their territory.
And yet, despite their strangeness, Tooker's interest in the Dilûu might well have finished there. She had, after all, spent that same day cataloguing Sonic Octopoids, StrobeUrchins and Quasi-visible Belchfish. In a world of oceanic peculiarities, the Dilûu was just another aquatic oddball.
On the final day of her expedition, with her equipment packed away, Tooker witnessed first-hand the evolutionary miracle that was to make her fortune. Whilst finishing off her surplus film, Tooker's interest was caught by a flock of WeeGee birds. Happily snapping away at the musical avifauna, she was astonished to find a fully grown Dilûu rising spectacularly into her frame, circling the panicking flock, then gulping them down in one vast gulletfull.
The peristaltic jet of the Dilûu didn't only work underwater. The sneaky critters had managed, all on their own, to evolve vacuum propulsion: sucking in and expelling air at such ridiculous speeds that they could sustain aerial manoeuvres almost indefinit
ely.
Tooker took a long look at the frontier charter she'd signed, laying out in black and white her dedication to scientific purity and non-profit. She tore it into little pieces and patched through a call to the University of Galactic Innovation to make a few discreet enquiries upon the subject of behavioural control.
It took only two years for the Dilûu, battery bred in vast farms, each fitted with a TookerTecTM control-collar, to find their way onto the personnel vehicle market. On affluent worlds stocks crashed in hovlimos as the rich and famous clamoured to purchase their very own living car.
They were fast. They were agile. They ran entirely on cheap fuel (a bucket of sprot once a day and a modest sponging down with salt water could keep a stud in top condition for ten years). And, notably, twitching their bristles like prehensile moustaches, they were very, very good at finding their way around.
"Hoooooo-eeeeeee!"
Kid Knee was enjoying himself. Sitting cross-legged at the Dilûu's controls in the comfortable bubbleplex howdah on its back, he'd finally found a vehicle that he could pilot without, say, accidentally getting drunk and smearing across the landscape. Technically speaking the Dilûu was driving itself, sniffing along with every sensory organ at its disposal, but Johnny wasn't about to ruin the Kid's fun. Ever since he'd heard the phrase "biologically non-viable" the headless wonder had been sulking like a, well, a Kid, and it was good to see him lightening up. A barrage of enthusiastic swooshing sound effects filtered through from the cockpit.
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