The rifle hit Johnny in the chest, the world went white, his gun skittered from his hand, and the wall of the room - which he could have sworn was a long way behind him - thumped him on the back. He landed with lights flashing in his eyes, hoping he hadn't just picked the last brawl he'd ever fight.
"Lowered your gun," Stix drawled. "Good of you. Honourable. Stupid."
Johnny forced his eyes open, fighting for breath. Stix's blow appeared to have transported him from one side of the room to the other. His chest felt like it'd been stamped on by something heavy. A building, maybe.
"You," he said through gritted teeth, "aren't human."
Stix's lip writhed. "Mutant. Better than human."
The killer switched his attention to the rifle in his hands. He'd been gripping the barrel so hard he'd left neat fingerdents all along it, and he tossed it aside with a shrug, crackling his knuckles noisily.
Just as soon as he could feel his legs again, Johnny vowed, he was going to get up and fight back. Any minute now. Aaaaany minute.
Cold fingers wrapped themselves around his chest bandolier, lifting him without effort.
"My contract," Stix hissed, somewhere above. "My hunt."
Johnny tried to blink through the pain. "Agree to disagree?"
Then he was flying again, streaking the length of the room like a novelty tennis ball. Only a spot of quick thinking and mid-air agility prevented a bad case of total cranial obliteration, leaving him slumped in the corner. He spat blood.
"The best," Stix said, somewhere near. "What they say about you." His footsteps thudded across the room, drawing closer. "Reckon not."
Johnny waited until the last instant, when the chill that hung off Stix like BO was washing over him, before making his move. He'd slipped the electronux onto his hand at some indistinct airborne point halfway through his most recent battering. Summoning every scrap of energy, he thumbed the charge-control to its highest setting and lashed out with a shout.
The device impacted against Stix's cheek with all the force and effect of a high voltage elephant. Briefly, Johnny was buoyed by a rush of adrenaline. Briefly.
Stix barely wobbled.
Despite the violence of its discharge, flaring angry blue light, the blow had no more dramatic an effect than turning Stix's face to one side.
He sneered, head rotating with reptilian slowness, as if reacting to a blow that would have thrown a gorilla across the room was beneath him. Smoke drifted cheerfully from his cheek.
Yep, said a hysterical little voice in Johnny's head. Definitely not human.
Grey hands wrapped around his neck and everything went dark.
When Kid Knee and Roolán staggered into the facility a little later, after they'd pulled themselves from the non-wreckage at the heart of the crash site, and after Stix's ship had blasted off into the night sky, they found Johnny unconscious and battered, purple welts decorating his face like trendy tattoos, ammunition stolen, cred-chips taken. Stix had detonated the incendiaries he'd placed, leaving Johnny in the centre of the burning room, smoke filling his lungs, flames creeping closer.
They found Stanley Everyone's Skodashrike parked in a dark corner beside the launch pad. As they bundled Johnny inside and pulled away from the burning facility, Kid Knee blurted the question they'd both been dying to ask.
"Why didn't he kill you?" he said, holding his leg up to the dashboard to steer. "Looks like he had more'n enough of a chance, sort of thing."
Roolán paused in swabbing Johnny's cuts with a no-septix blotter, watching the mangled hunter swim from the dregs of unconsciousness to reply.
"D-didn't need to. W-we're out of clues. Trail's gone cold. He said he knows wh-where Everyone's gone. Gloated. He's already won. A man like him, that's enough."
The remainder of the journey back to the city passed in silence.
The room was small and white. A couple of chrome surfaces interrupted the tedium, and in opposite corners machines bleeped every few seconds for no real reason.
Abrocabe Zindatsel scowled at yet another sequence of purple blobs dancing before his eyes - sensations that he put down, with the feeling of cobwebs brushing his face - to the metal implement being poked about inside his brain. It felt a little like being tickled from the inside out. His nose kept going rigid without him intending it to: a highly embarrassing phenomenon.
"Not long now," said a smiling face. Abrocabe vaguely recognised it as belonging to his friend Bolster, and fought against the desire to punch him. It was, after all, his fault that Abrocabe was undergoing radical cerebral alteration in the name of faith. He wasn't too faithful right then.
"You're doing wonderfully," said a more welcome voice. Sianne gripped his hand to one side, squeezing it every time he stiffened under the robosurgeon's proddings. She'd undergone the surgery herself that morning, and the fact that she seemed more-or-less normal was mildly reassuring.
"Now don't you worry," Bolster said, punching him on the shoulder like an old buddy. "The implant's going in now, then it's all over."
"G-great," Abrocabe murmured, pleased to find his ability to talk unimpaired. "So I can get on with being a zombie in peace."
Bolster guffawed. "Don't be daft! You know as well as I do that-"
"It doesn't work until the sacrifice." Abrocabe finished the sentence for him. It had become something of a catchphrase around the "high-devotion" (HD) parts of the Splut Mundi city.
It was true, of course. Just as with the sacrifice itself, the implant came with insurance: if the omens didn't show up, if the whole caboodle turned out to be a waste of time, the device wouldn't trigger. Abrocabe would continue to be himself - sins, guilty conscience and all - right up until the moment that the sacrifice was made and time came to a halt. Only then would it instantaneously frag every one of his memories and reduce him, Sianne, and all the other HD Boddihsts to memoryless children.
It was a good plan, as far as earning the heavenly reward went.
But it had still required Abrocabe to shave off his exquisite mane of platinum-silver hair prior to surgery, and he was indulging in a bit of serious begrudging before it was too late.
Bolster abruptly stiffened, eyes glazing.
"I... I've just remembered," he said, voice strained. "I've got to go now."
Sianne blinked. "Now? But the surgeon's almost fini-"
"Now. Sorry. Got to meet a new arrival. Deliveries. That sort of thing." He smiled vaguely, patting Abrocabe on the shoulder.
"So long," he said, and walked off.
"How odd," Sianne said, shrugging.
"Yeah," Abrocabe mumbled, gloomily. "Not at all zombie-like."
He tried to shake his head. The robosurgeon buzzed in annoyance.
SEVENTEEN
Two days trickled past like syrup.12
12. Insert, if you must, a torpidly edited montage sequence involving rising and setting suns, stirring but jaunty music, and a variety of characters doing boring non-noteworthy things.
In the cavernous bowels of what had once been the Kostadell Zol, Wulf's mood steadily deteriorated. Sometime during the first twelve hours he'd parted company with the gravboots and slumped onto the inverted ceiling. He did so against his will - surrendering to gravity meant that he could no longer maintain a sanity-preserving distance from Cheez - but the strain of hanging upside down had left him with a constant nosebleed, an uncomfortable cranial pressure and the continued irritation of a misbehaving kilt.
Cheez's companionship wasn't much help. The roodboy had awoken from his spell of enforced unconsciousness in a chirpy mood, blabbering an unending stream of bollocks and pausing occasionally for an impromptu rap. It was only when he started making annoying mixer effects with his lips, nostrils and armpits that Wulf lost his temper. Cheez's earnest encouragements for him to join in ("Keepin' dis spirits up, streetpunka") did not help.
Tedium set in; a suffocating blanket of Dull-Dull-Dull. After sixteen hours or so the wall-lights had died, and suddenly they were not only mind-nu
mbingly bored but freezing and unable to see as well. Things just kept getting better.
After about twenty hours, when Wulf had managed to build a fire, Cheez started to show the strain. He was going through something he hadn't experienced in years: detoxification. In his moment of need he found himself without so much as a Thorrian Orgastimm to tide-over his dangerously purified blood. After twenty five hungry hours cooped up with a curmudgeonly Viking, his mood swings had reached a kaleidoscopic pitch: one instant singing happy songs, the next attempting to throttle Wulf, the next sweating like a clonepig, and the next screaming that he needed a walk on the beach before attempting to open the sealed bulkheads using only his forehead.
It was all getting out of control.
To make matters worse, Wulf's stomach would not stop gurgling. He hadn't eaten a full meal since before his arrival at PastCon and all that hanging-about upside down hadn't been conducive to digestion. By halfway through the second day, when the cold was really beginning to bite and Cheez had his third consecutive shouting-fit, Wulf began to seriously consider his cannibalistic options. There wasn't much meat on his young companion but there was definitely enough to sustain a carefully rationed appetite for a week or so.
Wulf shook the thought from his head. It was just the isolation getting to him; that and the sense of failure. The comms array had seemed like such a good idea at the time - but its meagre battery had lasted all of twelve hours before fizzling out. There was nobody coming. There would be no rescue.
Perhaps, he thought sourly, he should have addressed the message differently. Perhaps he should have dispatched a general SOS, or tried to contact some sort of rescue-authority. At the time he'd discounted both options: people could be relied upon to either assume the message was a hoax or to ignore it anyway. Wulf may have travelled several centuries from the past, but the prevailing attitude hadn't changed: "Not my problem". He doubted there was much call for a galactic organisation whose remit included rescue-from, and disposal-of, rogue meteors and people weren't in the habit of doing things out of the goodness of their own hearts. Or gills. Or whatever.
In fact, the only other population Wulf could think of who might be interested enough in his news to do something about it were whichever unfortunate bastards lay in the asteroid's flight path. And given that he didn't have a single snecking clue what the flight path was, this wasn't much of a help.
Besides, if he'd beamed a message, as sense would suggest, stating "Help! Stuck on rogue meteor! Planetary bodies: watch out!" in all directions, and (miracle of miracles) someone had bothered to pay attention, what were they going to do? Option number one, spend time, effort and money on a dangerous attempt to save his and a profoundly irritating roodboy's lives, or option number two, blast the whole snecking thing to hell to prevent any more collisions? No contest.
So he'd taken the only logical course of action open to him and, after a great deal of head-scratching and directional umming-and-ahhing, he'd pointed the array of dishes, transmitters and cable-pulsars in what he hoped was the direction of YoCassok. Johnny was about the only person in the galaxy who could be relied upon to have a stab at saving Wulf's life.
If Johnny was still on YoCassok, of course.
Or still alive.
Or could catch-up with the asteroid.
Or, or, or...
It wasn't looking good.
By the end of the second day, Wulf's little puddle of worries, insecurities and morbid premonitions had swelled into a raging torrent, ably fed by his noisy stomach. When Cheez sat bolt upright in his nightmare haunted sleep with a beard-raising screech, the torrent broke its banks.
"Shut up!" Wulf roared, snapping Cheez awake with a well-aimed kick to the shins. "You be shutting up or I be shutting you up! Always you are being der annoying idiot! Always you are saying this und that, und, und singing und shouting! No more! You shut up now!"
The rude awakening did not have the desired effect. Already inhabiting a profoundly paranoid state of mind, Cheez squealed like a pig and ran from Wulf as fast as his shaking limbs would take him. Given the confinement, this led to him sprinting in circles around and around the fire, letting off all manner of explosive shrieks and howls as he went. Wulf saw red.
Pouncing, he cornered Cheez against a jagged pile of spaceship parts and punched him squarely, hoping for a lazy collapse and blessed, glorious silence. Instead the squealing rose.
"Chegs! Ee! Eeeee! Needastimmneedastimmneedastiiiiim! Eeeeeee!" He was shaking like a Dildivar Vibropet, eyes flashing in all directions.
Clearly, Wulf reasoned, specialist equipment was required.
Holding Cheez in place with a throat-constricting hand, he bent down and rummaged in the shadows at his feet. He came up clutching something in his fist, teeth flashing a nasty grin.
"You got der two choices," he said, voice cold. "And both of them will be making you shutting up."
"N-nakkarak?" Cheez dribbled. "N-nuh wub wub..." His heart clearly wasn't in it any more. Wulf's eyes held him fascinated.
"One," Wulf said slowly. "You can be letting me strangle you till you are deaded. Then I will be eating you, und very happy. Cool as der cucumber."
Cheez appeared to have stopped breathing.
"Two," Wulf continued, bushy eyebrows dipping together. "You can be opening der mouth und letting me be making you silent. It not kill you, but is not very nice."
Cheez's eyes rolled in opposite directions. He was sweating, cheeks quivering with whatever chemical trauma was flashing about in his bloodstream. Slowly, shaking, his mouth hinged open.
"Good," said Wulf, ignoring his protesting belly. He raised his fist and revealed its bundled contents.
"This," he said, "is der Sternhammer silencer. Is worser than death."
In his hand lay a crumpled, shaggy sock - coiled like a cobra and emanating an aura of unrepentant evil. The smell was making his eyes water.
Cheez started to shriek, slamming his teeth closed.
"You be opening up, now," Wulf demanded, leaning down with an ugly grin. His calloused fingers closed around the youth's cheeks, forcing open his mouth. The sock drew perilously near.
And a blast, like a thunderstorm in his ear, wobbled Wulf in his spot.
"What der?"
Behind him the cargo-bay doors ripped off their hinges with a garish blast; clouds of smoke boiling from their edges. Wulf gurgled, aware at some instinctive level that he had only an instant before the vacuum beyond reached out and sucked the air, the fire, all the mangled spaceships and, most importantly, him into the void. He braced himself, pointlessly.
The Great Suck never occurred.
In the shifting smoke, the chasm between the jagged doors revealed not the empty expanses of the void but the crumpled segments of a docking-umbilicus, and the unmistakable shape of a human figure peering into the cavern, holding a cutting-torch in one gloved hand. Its eyes seemed to glow.
Wulf became aware that he was still holding the sock, arm tensed above Cheez's gaping mouth.
"No!" a familiar voice shouted. "Put it down! Wulf, whoever he is, whatever he's done, he doesn't deserve that!"
"J-Johnny?" he said.
The reunion, as fond as it was, suffered various indignities. Safe aboard the Peggy Sue, and pulling slowly away from the asteroid with its growing tail of bodies and oceanic ice-crystals, Johnny and Wulf struggled to bring each other up to date on their various hardships.
For a start, and despite Wulf's earnest attempts to dissuade him, Johnny had insisted that Cheez accompany them. "Can't just leave him here, big guy," he'd apologised. "He's just a kid."
"He's just der moron," Wulf grumbled, to no avail.
The upshot was that Johnny's account of his visit to earth and subsequent struggles upon YoCassok were frequently interrupted by shrieking cold-turkeyisms and senseless wails of horror. It was only when Cheez came upon one of Kid Knee's concealed stashes of gigaGin (this one stuffed into the autodeploy life pod mechanism, incidentally), that his d
etoxified woes eventually halted.
The second impediment to the various details being recounted was Roolán, whose attempts to make an impression on Wulf were crushed against his Viking impatience. The big man couldn't be bothered to wait for the youth to write down, and quickly got cranky when Roolán kept interrupting Johnny's accounts by waving bits of scrawl-covered paper in his face. Just as Johnny reached the part about the hypershark, Roolán started flapping his pad in an excited attempt to impress Wulf with how it had been him who'd saved the day - at which point the Viking decided to announce that he didn't believe a "little worm-boy" could do so much damage just by shouting, and that he thought Johnny knew better than to take in every waif and stray he came across.
To which Roolán responded by telling Wulf to piss off. Out loud.
So after the various headaches and nosebleeds had been allowed to settle, and with Roolán and Wulf sulking, Johnny had finally been able to continue with the story.
At which point the final impediment to a successful recounting came to the fore. By the time that Johnny was recalling Stix's attack, a persistent source of inaudible mutterings from somewhere around shin-height was growing in volume.
"Got back to the city in pretty bad shape," Johnny was saying. "That's when we stopped by the Swandive votel, just in case, and they said there was a message waiting."
"Ah," Wulf nodded sagely, "was hoping it would be so. Addressed it carefully, but wasn't sure of der direction."
"You got it bang on, old friend."
"Snecksakes, you two should just get a room."
Johnny looked down.
"Did you... ah... did you say something, Kid?"
Kid Knee shook his leg innocently.
"Right. So anyway, we played it back when we got to the ship." Johnny cleared his throat and parroted Wulf's heavy accent, "'Viking to Johnny Veerd-eyes. Beach resort becoming der cruise. Holiday-from-Hell. Vish you vere here. Really, really, really, really vish.' Clever, that."
"Ach, you are thinking so?" Wulf preened, giving a playful wave of dismissal. "Wasn't sure if it would being working."
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