"Well, we headed out here straight away."
"Yeah, anyone woulda thought you'd sent him a coded proposal."
"What was that, Kid?"
"Nothing, nothing."
"Well, anyway, it's good to have you back, big guy."
"Is good to be seeing you too, Johnny."
"Oh, pass me a bowl. I'm gonna puke..."
"Kid, what are you muttering about?"
And so on.
All of which irritations and impediments contrived to make even the "long-story-short" version last well beyond what the ship's AI assured its passengers was midnight. It was therefore in the midst of universal tiredness and three-way sulkage, that the hunters' gloom at losing their prey manifested.
"Well," Kid Knee yawned, "so much for Grinn. Reckon Stix'll be well ahead of us by now."
"What do you mean?" Wulf scowled, tinkering with a variety of tools in a doomed attempt to remove his helmet. The Kid had already exhausted every smutty joke on the subject, and Wulf was beginning to despair of ever removing it.
"The trail's dead," the headless man said, unscrewing his hipflask. "We're out of leads, sort of thing. No more clues. Wouldn't expect a Viking to understand, right Johnny?"
"Supposing meaning of what?" Wulf's brows bunched.
"I think you'll find it's 'what's that supposed to mean?'" Kid Knee smarmed. "Sounds much more menacing."
"You heading right for der Sternhammer silencer, no-head-weirdo! I give it to you, cool as der cucumber!"
Wulf dropped his screwdriver and began to loosen his boot. The Kid took another cowardice-banishing swig of grog.
Johnny wasn't listening.
"Yeah," the Kid whined, skating past the shoals of wind-up and straight into the lagoon of trouble. "What is it with the cucumber thing? I always meant to ask."
"You be quieting or-"
"Maybe I should ask Johnny, eh? Seen his cucumber recently, Johnny?"
"You asking for it, worm-freak ma-"
"Guys," Johnny said, quietly, still not turning to face them. "Look."
"But, Johnny, the big lug's calling us frea-"
"But der worm-man is thinking we are more than j-"
"Guys," said Johnny, not listening. "Look." He was staring through the cockpit window, transfixed. "Kid, you said we haven't got any more clear trails to follow, right?"
"So?"
Johnny smiled. "They don't get much clearer than that."
Through the thickened plexiglass, several million tonnes of former-holiday-resort tumbled end over end towards...
Well, towards somewhere.
Blip.
++INCOMING Sub/S TRANSMISSION++
++IDENT: UNKNOWN++
++ACCEPT_____?++
Blip.
"This is the Splut Mundi control computer. To whom am I speaking?"
"Sorry. Splut what?"
"Splut Mundi, sir."
"Is that a planet?"
"Correct, sir. To whom am I speaking?"
"The name's, uh, Gamma. Frankie Gamma. A planet, eh? Right."
"Can I help you, Mr Gamma?"
"I, well, I'm not sure. It's a slightly odd situation. I don't want to cause a panic."
"Sir, I am a series-3000 colony control AI with self-regulating negemotion protocols. I do not panic."
"Right. So, are there many people on Splut?"
"Approximately two million, sir. More of the Boddah's faithful arrive every day. What would be the cause of this theoretical panic, sir?"
"Look, there's no easy way of saying this, so... Well, there's a gigantic out-of-control asteroid heading your way. We ran a vector-projection using the ship's computer and yo-"
"Sir, did you say an asteroid?"
"Yeah. A big one."
"I see. Goodness."
"Look. Have you got any... any orbital defences, maybe. Or nukes? Nukes would do it."
"Nukes sir? No. Why would we require nuclear weapons?"
"To blow it up! It'll kill you all!"
"Yes. Sir, it's nothing to concern yourself with."
"You wh-?"
"Thank you for the news, sir. The first sighting of the Holy Mountain. The prophet shall be highly pleased."
"What the sneck are you ta... Have you been expecting this?"
"Of course. I'm afraid I must sever this contact now, sir. I have many duties to perform."
"Wait!"
Blip.
Johnny turned to look at Wulf.
"Sound like they are being waiting for it," the Viking shrugged.
"No shit." Johnny sunk into the pilot's seat. "Okay, let's think this through. So Grinn sends an assassin to disrupt the aste-"
"Was not being an assassin, I think. Just der woman with - how do you saying - der brain cleaning?"
"Brainwashed?"
"Is right. Very-empty-eyes. Also, she is looking like der... der snob. Und also, her head is popping before she is dying."
"Her head blew up?" Johnny exchanged a significant glance with Kid Knee. "Just like Standing Algie."
The Kid briefly looked green. The memory of Standing Algie's gore-splattered end burned bright.
"Right," Johnny continued. "So Grinn sends this woman to do away with Koszov and sabotage the asteroid."
Wulf nodded. "And to be aiming it for der peoples of this Splat-planet..."
"Who don't sound too worried about it. That's the other thing. I keep hearing this name 'Boddah'. Who the hell is Boddah?"
Wulf waved a dismissive arm. "Ach, is just der weirdo god who is saying all der history is lies."
Johnny stared at him.
"How do you-"
"Ach, just some of his peoples tried to be killing me at... at der... PastCon..."
Wulf's voice trailed away.
"They tried to kill you?" Johnny said.
Wulf nodded, face clouding.
"And this meteor, Grinn's gone to a bunch of trouble to move it. And it's heading right for them? And they want it to?"
Another slow nod.
"So Grinn's doing favours for these Boddihsts?"
"I, I suppose."
A thought hit Johnny like a well aimed train. "Sneck," he breathed, the morass of confusion clearing away like rising fog. He looked at the Kid. "Harvey told us Grinn got religion in Macrojail,"
"A-and?"
"And we never asked which snecking one!"
EIGHTEEN
A small panel bearing a communication grille and a two-way transmitter bleeped. Stanley Everyone stiffened.
After two days of hard work, the rig was coming along nicely. All the heavy lifting was complete, the foundations had been tested, the struts were in place and, vitally, the specialist equipment had been correctly mounted. All that remained was a few fiddly electronics, and Stanley could handle those himself.
"That will do," he said, speaking into a small remote control. The initiates, vacant expressions turning in his direction, paused in their various menial exertions. "You may return to the city. You've been meditating in your cells all this time. Yes?"
"Yes master," they droned, dribble dangling like bungee cords. They quickly clambered aboard an old hov-speeder and shot towards the horizon.
Everyone took a deep breath and depressed the "answer" switch on the comms panel, forcing the quaver from his voice.
"Yes sir?"
"He's late," the voice said: a feline purr, thick with cotton bud warmth and sickly sweetness. "I expected some sign by now."
"I see."
"You see?"
"Y-yes, I-"
"I don't care about you seeing, Stanley. I want to know what you're going to do about it."
"H-he's on his way sir, I'm sure of it. I left the holy book, just like you said. He's not stupid. I, I'm sure he'll be here."
"For your sake, I hope so."
"S-sir, we have a little time, don't we?"
"No, Stanley," a tiny undertone of venom played at the edge of the warm cadence. "We do not have a little time."
"B-but I th-
"
"The asteroid has been sighted. We have one day. He has one day."
Stanley wiped sweaty goo from his eyes. "He'll be here." he said firmly.
"We shall see."
"Yes. Y-yes, he'll be here." He couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Activate the equipment at once." Stanley could almost hear the smile in the voice.
"Y-y-yes sir."
The comms channel closed with a crackle.
Stanley gawped for a moment, viscous slime pouring off him. Shaking, he snatched up a screwdriver and dived into the morass of cables around the base of the equipment, pausing only to shake a blobby fist at the sky.
"The book, Alpha! The book!" he yelled. "In the bloody desk drawer! I mean, what do you want? A snecking neon sign? 'Dangerous villains on Splut Mundi - Come Get Us!'
"Get a snecking move on, you weird-eyed bastard!"
On the cusp of the void above Stanley Everyone, shielded behind layers of atmospheric ionisation and bristling with apparatus, the Slinky II performed the technojargon equivalent of holding a drinking glass against the wall and listening.
Nestled inside, sporting a pair of headphones that utterly failed to complement the brown-and-dusty fashion statement he sported, Stix twisted thin lips into a smirk, watching Everyone's tantrum.
"Alpha ain't comin'," he hissed, fingering the holy book he'd taken from Everyone's desk.
A quiet chime from the vocal analyser confirmed what he'd already guessed: the voice on Everyone's comm matched the file-ident of Mr Grinn.
On the screens, Stanley scrabbled to connect cables around the vast equipment his teams had been unloading from his ship. Looking a little like a row of bus-sized cannons on pintle mounts, albeit with crystalline covers, Stix could only guess at their intention. He shrugged, not caring. It didn't matter what they were for - he'd found his prey, and without Alpha's lead.
With enormous satisfaction, and a little smugness, Stix piloted his craft away from the empty steppe where Everyone toiled and followed the tiny hov-speeder that was wending its way across the grassland towards the city, where Stix knew he'd find his prize.
"Grinn," he whispered. "Comin' for ya."
Abrocabe Zindatsel was polishing off a bowl of gruel with only a minor twinge of nostalgia for the feasts of Badgerspleen and Narsukkian nipplecandies he used to enjoy, when Biggie Bolster sauntered into the dining cabin.
"Ah, Abrocabe," he smiled, rubbing at bleary eyes. "How did the, ah..." his voice dropped, "operation go?"
"Good," Abrocabe replied, coiling his trunk. In truth the loss of his hair was causing him frequent twinges of regret, but a reassuring conversation with Sianne had left him certain that the Memory Purger brought him closer to Boddah's purity and a pleasant bout of nookie (totally in accordance with the guidelines within The Book, of course)13 had been enough to cure the most persistent gloom.
13. A galactic survey concerning the attitudes towards sex of various religions demonstrated that twenty per cent preached the exclusive use of a single "Holy Position" (or alien equivalent), thirty-four per cent had used the phrase "Abstinence is the best contraceptive" in their literature at some point, and a staggering ninety-one per cent regarded procreation as being "a bit taboo", despite their holiest records being jam-packed with raunchy tribe-on-tribe action, incest, pornographic "creation" mythologies and sexy nuns. No conclusions were drawn.
"Where have you been?" he asked, noting Bolster's oil-smeared hands. "We haven't seen you around for two days."
"Oh, you know. Meditating in my cell, awaiting the holy omens, that sort of thing."
Abrocabe's cynicism went unmentioned: at that moment a loud shriek rang out from outside, the believers seated at the table nearest the window fell off their chairs and a ruddy light filtered through the open door like a bloody haze.
"What the sneck...?" Abrocabe muttered.
The cabin emptied in a rush, gruel left to solidify. All across the city the faithful came tumbling from their meditation booths, struck dumb.
The sky was red. From horizon to horizon, pulsing with ruby tones, it was as if everything had been drowned in blood. For a minute, there was silence. Jaws hung open, eyes bulged.
And then the cheers began, and people danced and waved and prayed, frothing and wetting themselves.
"The first sign!" they shrieked, "the first holy omen!"
On Splut Mundi, an impromptu party broke out. It lasted well into the night.
Sven Dor Dow almost certainly didn't deserve what happened to him.
It was true that, prior to his Boddhist devotions, he'd been the CEO of a ruthless real-estate firm, but he had - where possible - maintained a careful distance from the lower echelon brutality of his employees. He'd never formally sanctioned a Squattersplat, made a habit of media noteworthy donations to charity, never fired anyone who didn't deserve it, hired PA's on the strength of their talent as well as their bust size, and kept an extensive menagerie of Mloopixx GrassBeetles for breeding and conservation purposes.
He had a lovely wife, a charming selection of homes, had raised his family in a largely squabble-free environment and was, if not entirely blameless, then at least not an evil man. He was just another face in the abundantly wealthy crowd.
You might therefore say he was chosen entirely at random.
Just as the celebration was dying down, as the first cases of holy wine were running out and the remixed ravehymns were petering away-
The shark struck.
It had grown. Strange lumps dappled its flanks like the tentacles of an anemone, waiting to snare any prey foolish enough to wander near. Its ultramarine flukes, swollen with spongy scales and ridges of bone, flashed and dilated in semi transparency, as if undecided on whether solidity was worth the bother. From its nose to the tip of its whiplike tail it reached some thirty feet, vast and sleek and terrible. It coalesced from nowhere, spinning in flickering light, dragging a net of psychedelic luminescence behind it.
Fracturing and reforming as it moved, it curled like a great worm, gnashing a single time, slicing Sven Dor Dow into two tattered halves.
The ferocity and speed of the attack had much the same effect on the remains of his body as a subdermal hand grenade.
Naturally enough, pandemonium ensued. A great concentric stampede began, bloody cassocks flapping damply, voices raised in panicky alarm. The shark didn't bother with pursuit: content to shred Sven's body with a toss of its great head; fizzling and sparking.
Even before the full horror of the beast's arrival had set in, before it had finished guzzling Sven's obliterated remains and turned its attentions elsewhere - snapping up a squealing woman with contemptuous ease and exploding a fat alien with a flick of its energised tail, the screams were mingled with joyous shouts:
"T-the star beast! The Swimmer-Beyond-The-Veil!"
Five assorted millionaires had been ripped to shreds, and another six were lamenting the missing parts of their anatomy, when the prophet came forth.
Several dozen cameradrones wobbled around him as he strode from the courtyard outside the temple-villa, collecting a montage of images as they went: the rapturous crowd, the prophet's serenity, the shimmering gowns billowing around him, the pall of silence in his wake. Then, widening their views, they turned to record the savagery of the monster, its bizarre lurch of surprise as the prophet approached, its sudden fit of shivering and crackling, as if in fear, and, spectacularly, its smouldering destruction dissolving away in a haze of perfect light as the prophet reached out his glowing arms and touched its flanks.
It was great TV.
In a thrice it was gone, the prophet stood smiling benignly, face all but concealed behind the natural radiance of his body, and the crowd cheered so hard that throats all across the city were irrevocably damaged.
Within two hours edited footage of the prophet's defeat of the Swimmer-Beyond-The-Veil had found its way into just about every meditation cabin on Splut Mundi. It was titled, simply, The Second Sign.
Johnny checked the rope for the third time. Any looser, he decided, and a concerted bout of ankle wiggling could have resulted in escape. Any tighter, it might have severed the circulation of blood through the prisoner's leg. For the man in question, that sort of thing could prove fatal.
Kid Knee belched in his sleep. He'd conked out halfway through a flask of cherry flavoured omnigrog, much to Wulf's delight.
"I hate this," Johnny grumbled, staring down at the tightly-bound mutant with a shake of his head.
"Is der right thing to do," Wulf shrugged, loading cartridges into a shiny new Webley HandBlaster. "He will only be getting himself killed otherwise. Is not... is not fit for being in der big fightings."
"Hmph."
As reluctant as he might be, Johnny was forced to agree. He peered briefly through the ship's window at the dull little world below, trying to imagine Kid Knee coming in handy at any point during their planned attack. Without a reliance upon exotic vehicles, alcoholic expertise or heavy-weapons psychosis, nothing was forthcoming.
The group's journey to Splut Mundi had passed without calamity - to Johnny's astonishment. They'd paused only once en route, at a grim little frontier planet just outside the asteroid's path, where a colony of planktonic arms dealers had refitted them with the long list of weapons and supplies they'd requested, forwarding an ugly bill to the S/D agency. The crate of high-strength teleporter energycells alone had cost more than they'd earn from an average bounty.
If this hunt didn't end in success, Johnny knew, he and his companions were going to be in debt with the GCC for a long, long time. Which, incidentally, was something they didn't have much of. Even at its top speed, taking into account the brief stop-off, the Peggy Sue arrived at Splut just half a day ahead of the asteroid. It was going to be tight. The anxiety was taking its toll.
Except, that is, on Kid Knee. For him, the brief stopover had presented a brilliant opportunity to stock up on the one resource that was guaranteed to comfort him in a time of hardship. Johnny didn't have the heart to stop him, even when the drink vats outnumbered the weapons crates.
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