What seemed like a million miles away, but was in fact just on the other side of the room, Stanley Everyone said, "Nuh-", and collapsed, a blaster wound punched neatly between his eyes.
The arm around Roolán's neck abruptly released its pressure. "No!" the voice shouted, hysterical.
Abrocabe Zindatsel sprinted up to the body, ignoring his former strangulation victim and collapsed in a sobbing wreck beside his beloved - and very dead - prophet.
Roolán tried to say "sneck", but all that came out was a whiny "ss".
He thumped Abrocabe Zindatsel around the head with the stock of his rifle, was annoyed to discover this didn't make him feel better, and got on with the difficult business of breathing.
Jagged canines snagged at Johnny's shoulder, lifting him off his feet like the proverbial ragdoll. Even as he tumbled his attacker vanished; dissolving in a flashy lightshow and reappearing an instant later above, muzzle lifting to expose the teeth glittering within. It gnashed, flickered, and burned phosphor-bright.
Shivering like an agoraphobe at an all-comers openvoid concert; as unarmed as a snake; lacking teleporter, time-grenade and run-like-a-bastard-capability, and backed up by a partner whose recent confinement within a degraded data-stream had left him unable to discern the difference between up and down, Johnny found himself, not to put too fine a point on it, snecked.
He landed with a thump and rolled, ignoring the sounds of crashing teeth. The trick, he'd already established, was to keep moving.
The beast vanished again and this time didn't reappear, allowing Johnny the brief respite required to spring to his feet, all too aware of the cuts and scrapes across his body. The fleshwound on his chest continued to trickle blood lazily; the burns that Grinn had inflicted were itching and blistering; the scrapes he'd picked-up at Stix's hands continued to give him grief, and he now sported three ragged wounds where the shark's assaults had come too close for comfort.
Wulf was faring little better. Staggering around with many a curse, his frantic leaps were far too slow: already the creature had ripped a gash in his shoulder, its eye rolling appreciatively as his blood splattered its maw. To his credit, Wulf's way of coping with pain consisted largely of ignoring it. His face, Scandinavianly pale at the best of times, had emptied of all blood, and even the spastic jolts of the electro-helmet elicited only perfunctory yelps. He looked like he might stumble at any moment.
With the monster gone, the pair moved wordlessly into the centre of the room, back to back, vigilant for its return.
"Need to get out of here, big guy," Johnny muttered, eyeing Wulf's injuries. Turning his gaze upon the layers of rock around the door, he could tell there was little hope of dislodging the iron frame, and the opening switch was in the corridor outside.
Wulf, characteristically stalwart, managed to interpret Johnny's comment as a slight upon his courage. "Need to be killing der big brute!" he roared. "Not going to be running from der fish."
"It'll snecking eat you! You can't kill it!"
Johnny remembered a little too late that questioning a Viking's ability to achieve something was just about the only guaranteed way of ensuring he'd attempt it.
"Ha!" Wulf barked, staggering like a drunkard. "You think, eh? Then I give it der indigestion!"
Silence resumed, now tinged with the uncomfortable tension of an accepted challenge. Wulf, if anything, looked as though the prospect of proving Johnny wrong was helping him overcome the data-bends.
Every shadow became a threat.
The shark had pulled this trick twice already; eking out the suspension, leaving the hunters shifty and scared, expecting an attack from any angle. Even Johnny's shimmering eyes - enough to give him the advantage in all but the most lopsided of mismatches - were useless. The creature could bleed in and out of reality like stepping through a door.
"Seriously," he hissed, "Grinn's getting away. This is a waste of ti-"
The shark oozed from the rock below his very feet, semi corporeal skin fizzing where it touched him, beady eyes regarding him hungrily. He dodged, aiming a kick at its nose as he tumbled. His foot passed right through it.
"Sneck!"
It gusted after him at an impossible rate: a maw-tipped comet. Slamming into the wall, driving the air from his lungs, he flipped backwards on impulse, clearing the creature's mouth and catching instead on its rippling dorsal fin, billions of surface tendrils scratching at his skin. The shark didn't even bother to alter its trajectory, bursting through the rock wall like a fog, popping out of existence.
This time its return was rather more immediate.
Apparently deciding that Johnny's acrobatic evasions were too much bother, it turned its attention to his companion. For all his size and stamina, Wulf presented a far easier target. It splintered its way out of the subreal abyss, spiralling down upon the Viking like some obscene hawk, gills burning with blue fire.
"Wulf!" Johnny yelled, thumping his friend in the small of the back, propelling him forwards by all of half-a-foot. It was, as it turned out, half-a-foot of pure deliverance.
Thus denied its prey, the monster twisted like some luminous maggot, broad muzzle flexing around, jaws gulping. As impressive as its gesticulation doubtless was, it brought the creature's torpedo head within range of a pair of weapons more deadly than the sharpest of razor-teeth.
Wulf pushed his thumbs into the monster's eyes and pulled it into a bearhug.
The shark, predictably, went insane.
Perhaps most spectacular of all, as Wulf clung for dear life to the back of the galaxy's strangest bucking bronco, was the way in which he found himself subject to the same dimensional aberrances as his steed: dissolving and crackling, shimmering with weird light, becoming briefly translucent then snapping back into hard focus.
He screamed throughout pretty much all of it.
As Johnny scampered to avoid thrashing fins and flailing boots, something caught his eye. Out in the corridor something was moving: something astonishingly welcome.
"Roolán?" he shouted. The youth, ogling through the bars, sported a massive purple bruise across his neck.
"Open it! Open the door!" Johnny yelled, turning in time to see Wulf finally parting company with the monster in a snap of sticky ichor. He hit the floor with a thump, helmet adding insult to injury by electrocuting him. Out in the corridor, Roolán stabbed at the release control and opened the door.
"Shout!" Johnny ordered, trying to drag Wulf out of the way of the wounded monster, webs of light flickering all around it, "use your voice!"
Roolán pointed to his throat helplessly, gasping with little more than a pathetic squeak.
Johnny swore.
The shark lunged from nowhere, new and undamaged eyes coalescing with a neon burst, teeth mashing down with a bone crunching chomp on Wulf's neck.
Everything went slow.
"No!" Johnny howled, beating his fists uselessly against the monster's skin, even as it slurped away into the ether. Nausea and fury jockeyed for position in his mind, turning his head to see what ruined mess the beast had made of his partner.
"Is... is okay..." Wulf mumbled, looking just as astonished as Johnny felt. There was a notable lack of jugular spray.
The shark had made the same fundamental error that had doomed many of Wulf's various opponents throughout his long brawling career: mistaking the voluminous bulk of his beard for his neck itself. The attack had completely failed to even break his skin, achieving little more than slicing off his facial hair an inch below the base of his chin. To Johnny, this was a revelation of such enormous relief that he cried out, overjoyed.
Wulf, of course, didn't see it like that.
"L-look what it did," he whispered, holding the lacerated remains of his pride and joy in his hands. "Look what it did!"
Johnny had little time for Wulf's damaged pride, pulling him towards the door. It wouldn't be long before the creature returned, fizzling into reality and just as deadly. He didn't intend to be around when it did so.
"Der maggot worm fish! Is been eating my beard! I kill it! I kill it!"
Roolán grabbed Wulf's other arm and tried to help Johnny pull him away. It was like manhandling an iceberg.
"Is no good!" the Viking roared. "Der fish will only be chasing us. Must put der end to it here und now!"
Johnny had other priorities. "But Grinn! He's getting away!"
Wulf turned a bloodshot eye on his partner. He'd gone the colour of a beetroot.
"Y-you be getting to der Grinn," he said, struggling to contain himself. "I be dealing with der fish-worm, cool as der cucumber!"
"But-"
"Not is any buts! You be going!"
The shark hazed back into reality, eyes rolling, mouth gaping, daring his opponents forwards. Wulf bared his teeth.
Johnny could see arguing was useless. Wulf was stubborn when he was enjoying himself. With Roolán tugging at his arm, with the voice shrieking in his head Make it personal! Make it personal! and with Wulf's attention not even remotely focused on him, Johnny made a decision.
"See you soon, big guy," he told his partner, and rushed out into the corridor.
Wulf didn't hear him.
TWENTY-FOUR
Kid Knee was undergoing something of a life changing experience.
Awaking with a cosmic hangover, his shivering misery was compounded by discovering that not only had he been tied up, but that there was something soul-destroyingly vile in his mouth. He had a pretty good idea what it was.
Ever since they'd first met, the Kid had never seen eye-to-eye with Wulf. Or eye-to-knee.
Several years later, and in the Kid's groggy state of mind it was clear that it had only ever been a matter of time before Sternhammer pulled something like this. The Viking's celebrated method of silencing captives was well known.
The Kid had a sock in his mouth.
The taste, in as much as he could describe its repugnancy, brought to mind diseased frogspawn, putrid Hiu'hit shitsoup, week old toxic spillage and a heavy sprinkling of hospital waste. Balled into his mouth so tightly that he couldn't even raise his tongue to eject it, the Sternhammer Silencer eventually proved to be the agent of its own downfall. The Kid was so nauseated by its demonic flavour that the resulting sluice of projectile vomit catapulted it from his mouth and across the room.
Which left him tied-up and able to shout for help. Which he did. For about an hour.
Unsuccessfully.
In response to his pugnacious demands, the computer was forced to apologetically remind him, fifty-six times, that it lacked the mandible limbs, cutting implements or remote hov-drones that it would require to free him. The one function it did have was a series of auto deploy life pods that could be materialised at any point aboard, which both parties agreed was an impressive but totally unhelpful announcement, given that the ship was currently grounded. It was in this demoralised state, with dried puke sticking to his shin, that the Kid had his epiphany.
Had his head been in a "normal" position, he slowly reasoned, it would have protruded from the top of the elasticised webbing, beyond its reach. As it was, by simply manoeuvring his leg a fraction he could bring the thick rope directly into his mouth. As dusty as it was, after enduring an hour or more of the Sternhammer Silencer it was like tasting the sweetest ambrosia.
"Non-viable life form, eh?" he growled savagely. "I bite low, you bastards! I bite low!"
And then he started to chew.
It took him a little less than an hour to free both arms, and thereafter ten minutes to extricate the rest of his body. Finding himself thus liberated, he turned his hazy thoughts to the problematic issue of What To Do Now.
Drink, he decided, would feature heavily.
So it was, half an hour later, with the happy miasma of alcohol around him and an empty hipflask in hand, that he stumbled onto the bridge and demanded to know what in the name of Frankie C Sneck was going on. The computer announced that he was sitting on the surface of a boring little planetoid that was due to be obliterated by an asteroid in approximately one hour.
The Kid's eyes bulged.
"Then get us... getusthesneck out of here," he blurted, waving his arms. "T-take off! Quick! Now!" He leapfrogged the captain's chair with a drunken squeal and started yanking the control column, jabbing at random buttons. Given that the ship was powered down this failed to have much of an effect.
The computer, being a calm and rational sort of artificial personality, attempted to remind the Kid that his comrades were still on the planet, and wouldn't it better to wait for them?
There was no answer: the headless drunkard's bout of leg stamping had brought his forehead into sharp contact with the underside of the cockpit dashboard and the AI's internal cameras discovered him lolling unconscious in the pilot's chair, dribbling and muttering dirty songs under his breath.
With no additional instructions, and on the basis that it had to obey commands issued by the fully licensed S/D agents amongst its crew, the computer performed the datastream equivalent of a weary shrug and raised the embarkation ramp, completely unaware that at that very moment an uninvited guest was clambering aboard.
Ever since Alpha and the Peggy Sue had arrived at Splut, Stix had been watching. Whatever else he might have thought of Alpha he was forced to concede that the white eyed bastard was as tenacious as a terrier with lockjaw.
Lurking within the ionosphere, by the time the Slinky II began to pick up the meteor on the edge of its scanners, Stix had tracked a pair of teleporter beams onto the surface. In the face of his fury at Alpha's continuing involvement, it had been a pleasant surprise when both appeared to have somehow been intercepted: stored away on some seriously clever technology, divested of chunks of data (their weapons, he correctly guessed) and reformed in separate locations. And then when he'd observed from high altitude as his nemesis was shot down in front of braying crowds, Stix couldn't believe his luck.
Then he'd got down to business.
Clearly teleporting was not an option. He set the Slinky II down on the city's eastern edge and walked.
As ever, the crowds stayed out of his way. People tend not to bother you when you're a seven foot badass in a trench coat carrying a handgun. He made his way to the villa at the city centre, reasoning that a criminal as megalomaniacal as Grinn would certainly be found in the largest and most luxurious place going. Someone had inconveniently destroyed the lower segments of the stairwell, but Stix had conquered this problem by simply pushing his cold hands into the bulkheads beyond the debris, tearing handholds into the metal without effort.
At the top of the tower, completely unexpectedly, without facing a single challenge or resorting to violence, he'd found what he was looking for. It was, perhaps, a little fatter than he'd anticipated, but the facial features were unmistakeable.
It was Grinn. He'd been shot in the head.
Stix lifted the rigid body onto his shoulder without any effort, glanced around in distaste - as if disappointed at the ease with which he'd won - and left.
It was whilst making his way back to the Slinky II that Stix had learned a new and relevant lesson. It's true that people tend not to bother you when you're a seven foot badass in a trench coat carrying a handgun, but give it a go whilst also carrying the mortal remains of their messiah and you're in a whole world of bother. To say that Stix found himself in hot water would be an understatement.
Not, of course, that he couldn't have coped. Given time and inclination he could have cracked heads all day, slugging his way through hordes to reach salvation. As it was, the meteor's arrival was imminent, the body was in danger of being torn to shreds by the zealous idiots grabbing it, his ship was too far away through the heaviest sections of the crowd, and Grinn found himself in a new and unfamiliar situation.
Without labouring the point - he'd run like a gazelle. And when he'd turned a corner to find a ship powering up to lift-off he didn't pause to glimpse at its nameplate, making his way directly for the
boarding airlock on its fat, blocky behind.
TWENTY-FIVE
Roolán led Johnny back to the control room with his head slumped against his chest. Unable to speak at the best of times, he now radiated an air of juvenile sullenness, which even Johnny - himself preoccupied - couldn't help but notice.
"You okay?" he asked, halfway up the square staircase from the dungeons where they'd been held. Again, the strange stratification of architecture was all too obvious: rickety stonework poorly concealing gunmetal walls, as if someone had painstakingly concealed a hi-tech labyrinth behind cheap whitewash. At one point the stairs halted abruptly beside a huge rack of trumpetlike chimneys, hanging downwards from the ceiling. Johnny wondered what strange religious function they might serve, clambering up the rickety ladder that Roolán indicated and through a metal grille. The opening put Johnny uncomfortably in mind of an engineering service-duct, although what such a thing was doing in the centre of a temple was anyone's guess.
Roolán nodded absently in response to the question, walking onwards with his purloined gun slung over his shoulder. He put Johnny in mind of a child who'd spent all his pocket money on a bag of ZargoTM whoopee-sweets15 only to trip and drop them down a drain. It was a profound change from the enthusiastically angry youth he'd been hours before, and Johnny could guess what had caused the transformation.
15. "A different thermonuclear reaction with every mouthful!"
Anyone can be a killer once, he reminded himself. It takes a special sort of mind to shrug it off.
If "special" was the right word.
Roolán had the shaken look of someone who had taken his revenge and hadn't enjoyed it nearly as much as he'd anticipated. There was hope for the boy yet.
They reached the control room at the top of the villa and Johnny's suspicions were immediately confirmed. A thick sluice of blood and cranial goop decorated the polished floor. Someone had died here. A figure reclined nearby: a cassock-wearing alien with a shaved head, a vast tentacle-like nose and a bruise across the side of his face. The blood hadn't come from him, Johnny could see, but he'd been put to sleep with a more-than-effective thump nonetheless.
Prophet Margin Page 23