Toxicity

by Andy Remic

  “I fear it was a set-up.”

  Silka considered this. He saw her outline on the bedside table. She was preening her fur, and making a tiny purring sound. So, she had chosen her non-chameleonic phase. It must be that time of the month.

  “You should have taken me with you,” said Silka.

  “No. I wanted to check it out alone.”

  “Ha! And nearly get killed, foolish android.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Horace.

  “And the wound to your bicep?” Horace had used the BMW aircar’s emergency staplegun to punch the wound shut. It had hurt. A lot. But it was the most effective fast way of closing an open flesh wound and getting on with the job, which was why the PUF carried them. A shame none of the wounded officers were repairable... “You bit off more than you could chew.”

  “No. There were three androids, then ten officers, then three special forces snipers. I’d say I did pretty well okay to take that lot out and only suffer a single cut to the arm.”

  Silka jumped down from the bedside table and bounded across to him, tail swishing. She leapt onto the bed, tiny muzzle and whiskers twitching, and stared at the wound as Horace removed his jacket with a wince. “Made by a bullet, foolish android. One inch to the right and you’d have lost the use of your arm. Then it would have been game over.”

  “I’m getting old,” said Horace, and sat on the bed.

  “We all get old,” said Silka, and rubbed herself against him in the manner of a cat.

  Horace picked her up - and if this had been anybody other than Horace, they would have immediately lost three fingers. Silka may have looked like a cross between a ferret and a domestic cat, but her bite was worse than her bark. In fact, she had been known to bite off entire heads. Yes, it took her a while to gnaw through the spine, but it was doable when she put her mind to it.

  “Take me with you,” she said. “On your next target.”

  “No. It’ll be dangerous.”

  “You know I love danger,” purred Silka.

  “Too dangerous.” And yet he knew he needed her, and that he was playing a charade. Why play? “Okay,” he said. “Your offer is much appreciated. I do need the backup, and I think this game is bigger than both of us realise.”

  “You think Greenstar have finally grown tired of you?”

  “I think I’ve done so much dirty work for them, one day that eventuality must be inevitable. I just didn’t think it would come... now. Not with so much still to do.” Horace stood, and stripped off his ruined suit. He moved to his case and pulled free a small plastic ball - an example of the Ultimo™ Packing System. He pressed a button and tossed the ball on the bed, where it made a zwang noise and opened up into a full suit. Horace had a quick shower, dressed, checked his T5, then picked Silka up in one hand. She scurried up his arm and sat on his shoulder for a moment.

  “What will you do?”

  “Fulfil my mission.”

  “Even thought the mission may be compromised?”

  “We’ll find that out soon enough.”

  “Will you share your thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  Silka pushed her nose into Horace’s ear, and he closed his eyes for a moment as she rifled his memories. It tickled. Horace smiled. Horace liked smiling, but recognised there was very little for him to smile about.

  Finally, she emerged. “Ahh. I see. A man-i-woman. Juliette JohNagle. Interesting.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I have seen this person. On the media. They have also been on the news many times, and stood trial for crimes against Amaranth.”

  Horace shrugged. “About that, I do not care. They can poison the whole fucking Quad Galaxy for all I care. All I care about is life...”

  “...and death,” whispered Silka, little more than an exhalation caressing his face. She kissed his cheek. “Let’s go.”

  ~ * ~

  DAWN HAD ARRIVED, and with it, huge bruised skies filled with towering rainclouds. Rain clattered against the aircar’s panels and windshield, and Horace kept the BMW low and away from civilisation. They headed east out of Bacillus Port, moving on past millions of simple block adobes and then past a kind of shanty town, where hovels had been constructed from... waste. That was the only way to describe it. Scavengers had obviously taken advantage of the open dumping policies of Greenstar, and created their own city on the outskirts of the city. Nothing had been wasted. Houses were built from stacks of old TVs, planks of corrugated asbestos, wood and metal off-cuts, car panels and old tyres; old propane cylinders formed the corner supports holding up asbestos roofs. Oil tanks had been upended and turned into sleeping chambers. Walls had been constructed from bright yellow bags of medical waste, piled up like sandbags. Need a used needle in the middle of the night? Just rummage through the wall. Old garage doors had been leant against one another, forming vague rusted wigwams of second-hand mild steel. The variation and creativity was intense; and went on and on and on.

  “You have to admire them,” said Silka after a while.

  “Admire them?”

  “The Scavs. Down there. Rummaging through their short lives, existing amongst all this shit.”

  “It’s amazing the lengths a human being will go to in order to survive. I have seen it. Many times.”

  “Yes, you’ve seen it on the end of a scalpel or drill-bit. I’m talking about their ingenuity. Look down there! A house built from old fish tanks, the weight of water giving the walls stability, and the top one - where the water is freshest - feeding drinking tubes down into the chamber. Simple, yes. Basic, yes. But effective.”

  “Did I really hear you use the word ‘fresh’ about this place?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  They left the slums behind, and turned northeast. Before long the huge, towering Yellow Virus Peaks to the north could be seen. There were five mountains, each towering to thirty-five thousand feet. The summits were crusted with ice and snow; yellow ice and snow. The joke on the underground streetslam was that Greenstar had dumped a trillion tonnes of horse piss which had immediately frozen, giving the mountain range its colour and its name. In reality, it was a rare mineral found in the rock that turned the snow yellow. But what was true was the highly toxic nature of the mountains - the Yellow Virus Peaks were a serious no-go area. Not unless you wanted to contract something biologically devastating and end up shitting your stomach out of your arsehole. And yet, every year, a hundred or so “mountain adventurers” would arrive from other planets, drawn in like moths to a candle with the promise of adventure, danger, and being the very first to conquer this hazardous mountain range. Their survival rate was 0%, and as a statistic, this should have been warning enough.

  They flew for most of the morning, and eventually the toxic storms abated and green sunshine sparkled from above, making the barren land, stripped of all vegetation, at least seem a little more hospitable. Horace had seen some dreary, inhospitable places in his life, but this wasteland took the cherry from the top of the cake. Deserts had vegetation, or at least the noble sculptures of dunes. Even arctic wastelands could be stunning, with a savage beauty created from snow and ice and wind. But this... this desecration, this was the pinnacle in an exercise of poisoning. There was no joy here. No pleasure could be found. Only pain. And desolation. And death.

  They crossed the River Tox, which ran from the Yellow Virus Peaks and down for a thousand miles, from north to south, a vast winding tributary that eventually flowed past the port cities of Encephalitis Dance and Shitdump, then out into The Sea of Heavy Metal.

  “Sunshine,” murmured Silka.

  “Yeah. That’s probably why they call this holiday complex Melt flesh City.”

  “That, or the chemicals in the ocean,” said Silka, and Horace could hear the laughter in her voice. She was the one thing that stopped him descending into a perpetual morbid depression. She was like a breath of fresh air over a corpse. Like a kiss from a virgin. A sigh from a satisfied lover...

  “I
often wish you were human. Or even better, android.”

  “It would never work,” said Silka.

  “Why?”

  “You think you know me. You do not know me. Our minds work... so very differently.”

  “But you appear so...”

  “Appear, yes,” said Silka, and her eyes gleamed in the weak light of the aircar’s cockpit.

  After another hour, they saw the distant cityscape of Meltflesh City. Vast towers ranged like teeth along the shores of Biohazard Ocean. Even from this distance, a shimmering light seemed to hover above the vast expanse of houses and towerblocks, cubescrapers and skyscrapers. It was vast. As big as Bacillus Port, Amaranth’s capital, surely; and home to the most select. The wealthy, the privileged, and the fucking insane.

  Horace laughed. “What a fucked-up place this is.”

  “Better believe it,” said Silka, shifting to sit on his arm. “Why are you landing?”

  “I want to approach under the cover of darkness.”

  “Yes. Let us wait, then.”

  ~ * ~

  THE HOTEL WAS a huge complex, with ten swimming pools, swim-up bars, children’s areas, entertainers, and fake plastic palm trees. The main difference between any normal hotel in the Manna Galaxy Bubbles and this one was the regular detox points, see-through plastic cubicles where you could pop in your toxic kids and let them have a happy chemical wash down before they melted. Lovely.

  Horace had parked up on the outskirts of the city and headed in on foot. The city - and indeed, the resort - was only a kilometre wide, a stretch of tourist-based hotels and restaurants that flanked the Biohazard Ocean like a bad case of genital herpes. As Horace approached, despite the late hour, the streets were serpents of hedonistic flesh. He shook his head in wonder, “Who in the name of hell comes to Amaranth for a holiday?”

  Silka, tucked inside Horace’s suit jacket, said, “It takes all sorts, Horace my dear. I would expect many are inhabitants of the planet, possibly Greenstar employees who feel their chemical and biological protection tablets give them enough immunity to brave the air and soil and waters. Others are probably alien-based life-forms with a natural resistance to toxicity. And yet others are lunatic humans drawn to what they consider a danger-holiday; an adventure-fest.”

  “Hmm,” said Horace.

  He walked along the pavement, ignored by the partying revellers. As Silka had predicted, there were a wide range of humans and aliens alike, everything from single-sex stag parties to tentacled couples with children. It boggled Horace’s mind. Assassination was a much simpler concept. Life and death. A monetary transaction. No emotion. No empathy. But this... this wanton self-destruction was much harder to comprehend.

  At least I am built this way.

  At least I understand.

  At least I have a singular function.

  Horace walked. To his right, lit by a million fluorescent tubes, the ocean crashed on the sandy shore. The beach was a jungle of scrap, as was to be expected for a junk world. Everything from half-submerged, rusting motorbikes, to old tyres, boxes, plastic bags and bottles, and even an old half-beached nuclear submarine, its vast, matt-black hull pitted and corroded in blotches as if it had been subjected to the world’s largest acid bath -which, in fact, it probably had.

  “A nuke sub,” said Horace, shaking his head.

  “You’re beginning to sound like a grumpy old man,” chided Silka.

  “Sometimes, I’m fucking glad I’m an android. Life is much simpler this way. Humans are so... damaged.”

  The incessant party noise pounded and thumped, screamed and chattered. Music spilled from ten thousand bars. The ocean crashed, a rhythmical percussion of poison. Horace located the hotel and bought himself a hot-dog (With Cheeze and Chillees!!!) from a shop-front vendor he’d normally execute rather than look at. However, trying to remain inconspicuous, he held the hot-dog (With Cheeze and Chillees!!!) and nibbled at it without enthusiasm as his eyes took in the cubescraper where Juliette JohNagle was supposedly a guest. Horace even had a room number, gibbered on a stream of phlegm and blood by Chris the Helpful Special Forces Victim, in an attempt to not be brutally executed. Unfortunately, Horace did not take prisoners.

  “Looks good to me,” said Silka.

  “We’ll hang back. Wait awhile. See what happens.”

  Horace followed his unwanted hot-dog (With Cheeze and Chillees!!!) with a coffee, then a sugary donut. A PUF car pulled up and two fat cops waddled over, buying a bucket of donuts each. “Go easy on the sugar, darling,” one said through his rolls of fat, six chins wobbling, “I’m on a diet” - before making eye contact with Horace.

  For a long thrilling second Horace thought he’d been bubbled, and would have to fight his way free of Meltflesh City, the worst holiday resort he’d ever encountered. But then the fat cop waddled back to his groundcar, squeezed his bulk through the door, setting the suspension rocking wildly, and cruised off, face crusted in sugar.

  “Close,” said Silka.

  “Lucky for them,” said Horace.

  After an hour, Horace could take the party atmosphere no longer, with the drunks and the vomiting (was that down to alcohol, or toxic kidney poisoning?), and muttering to himself that if he died, then he fucking died, he strode down the pavement, Silka warm against his chest, hearing one another’s heartbeats and sharing the pleasure, and he approached the steps and foyer of the Grand Meltflesh Hotel.

  The front of the hotel, a massive blocky cubescraper with fancy plastic graphics, overlooked the Biohazard Ocean from a raised platform and had its own section of private beach, patrolled by guards with hefty wooden peacemakers.

  Horace strode confidently up the steps and into a foyer with low-level lighting. Plastic shrubs littered the space like tumbleweed, and leather sofas in a hundred different styles lay seemingly at random; Horace wondered if they were actually junk salvage put to an interesting new life.

  Horace moved across thick sticky carpets, boots pressing softly, and smiled at the two girls behind reception, who returned his smile in a pleasant fashion, then lowered their heads back to work. Horace crossed to the lifts and pressed the CALL button, listening to a grinding of gears, then stepped inside the compartment. One wall had a window overlooking the Biohazard Ocean, and as the lift climbed he got a brilliant bird’s eye view of the ocean in all its terrible poisonous monstrosity. At least twenty ships lay wrecked in what must have been a modestly shallow bay, some of them on their sides, all rotted and holed by the acidic ocean. They formed a jagged set of teeth on the horizon, giving the ocean jaws. A wind whipped yellow and purple froth across the waves, and the puke-coloured ocean lapped at beaches where even now, at this late hour, people were happily paddling and swimming under the onslaught of so many powerful beach lights.

  “What a shit-hole,” murmured Horace.

  “Your people made it this way,” said Silka.

  “Well, they should be exterminated for the sacrilege,” said Horace.

  “You’re hardly honouring your employers,” laughed Silka.

  “Honour? What’s that?”

  Suddenly, the lift stopped with a grinding clang. Horace frowned. They were between floors: a ridge crossed the window at eye level. Horace pulled out his T5 and, with a punch, destroyed the in-lift camera.

  “Trouble?”

  “Always,” said The Dentist.

  Horace punched the keys on the console, but it had gone dead. No power. He moved to the doors and started to lever them open, his powerful fingers hacking into the gap and exerting a force far greater than any human could ever administer. There came a screeching sound, a grinding of gears, a tearing of steel bolts. Horace gritted his teeth and pulled harder. The doors opened several inches, along with more sounds of tearing steel.

  There came a click.

  Horace’s head snapped up, his eyes searching the roof. There were holes. Lots of holes. Horace frowned. From the holes spat a sudden spaghetti of long white worms, but these weren’t normal white worms, these
were something far more terrible and dangerous and alien...

  They landed on Horace’s shoulders and head, each one about ten inches long and slightly metallic. They were silent, and squirming, and Horace caught a sight of their tiny metal jaws, chomping, chewing, searching for flesh. He brushed frantically at his shoulders, felt a piercing pain at the top of his skull and he grabbed its tail as it began to burrow into his flesh. He pulled it free, feeling it slither from his own skin, and crushed his hand into a fist, destroying the worm. But more fell. And more. It was snowing worms... killer worms...

  Trapped, Horace stamped on the worms on the floor, crushing their bodies into pulpy white paste. But still more poured from the ceiling holes and he felt one go down his shirt collar, and tried to grab it but missed. It started to burrow between his shoulder blades and Silka was there in an instant, chewing a path through his shirt and suit and biting through the worm.