Prophet Margin (14 page)

The Kid's eyes moved between the top of the stairs and the Ion cannon, like a man asked to choose between two lovers. "B-but, my cannon-"

"Isn't exactly the stealthiest thing in the world."

"B-but..."

Johnny sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Leave it here, huh? We can pick it up on the way out."

The Kid didn't look comforted.

Even amongst the menagerie of noncomformity that was the Strontium Dog agency, there were puritans. Individuals for whom the art of combat transcended any restrictive "goal", focusing instead upon an almost religious experience. They honed their bodies, making the most of whatever twisted mutations they bore. They eschewed technology, relying on physical prowess, spiritual determination, strength of endurance.

They were the sword-bearers, the mace-wielders, the martial artists. Through the years their kind had created bounty hunting legends - the story of Tie Quorn Zho, the bittersweet tao of Spins-With-A-Blade, the triumphant exploits of Fingers Fruitful. Each one, in their own way, glorified the sort of technophobic neo-luddite combat that had impressionable young mutants galaxy wide clamouring to join up.

Their legends, even when retold in extra-large print editions, weren't very long. They were all very, very dead now.

Johnny, who took a more pragmatic approach (one that wouldn't get him killed within seconds), favoured the "goal" mindset. Apart from the occasional nod towards fairness or honourability - and the rather crippling preference to not kill people if at all avoidable - he figured he could do whatever it took to get his man.

The point was, when he commanded several thousand creds worth of compact gizmos designed solely for him to run rings around people who wanted to kill him, it would seem like a criminal waste not to use them.

Note the "
when"
.

"Stun cartridges are out!" he yelled back at the Kid, flipping his blaster end-over-end and smashing its heavy stock across a goon's face. His pockets were all empty. The stealth tactic hadn't lasted long.

The world at The Top of the Stairs, besides an increase in the number of expensive artworks, seemed little different to below. Every gallery hall was a minefield of sensors, every corner an ambush opportunity. With only metres between him and the inner core of the fortress, after an hour of running, shooting and hiding, it would be fair to say that Johnny was knackered.

Running out of ammo at this point, he felt, was a rather unfair twist of fate.

The Kid squealed somewhere behind him, diving for cover.

A horizontal blizzard of laserfire, flickering from within the pall of gunsmoke at the corridor's apex, knocked smoky craters in the walls around them. In his haste to get clear Johnny was forced to duck beneath a poorly aimed bayonet, thumping its wielder hard in the balls with his electronux. The charge had run out several minutes before, but given that it still amounted to a strip of studded metal at the forefront of a perfectly executed uppercut, it seemed to do the job. Johnny grabbed the doubled-up trooper and pushed him forwards into the smoke; a handy human shield.

The Kid's own supply of non lethal ordnance had run out quite a while before: largely because of his preference for the "close-your-eyes-and-keep-your-finger-on-the-trigger" way of doing things. So far he'd managed to stun four statues, three decorative paintings, sixteen walls and one of Stanley Everyone's prize poodles.

Not that Johnny was keeping count.

Things were getting desperate.

Somewhere in the clouds of smog at the head of the landing a Captain Bishop shouted a prayer and triggered another salvo of laserblasts: rapidfire shards of energy that shredded Johnny's hapless human shield like salt under a tap. Johnny leapt aside, gory patterns painted across the smouldering walls in his wake.

It's not murder, he told himself, if you didn't pull the trigger yourself. After years of hunting, making internal excuses for collateral damage came as naturally as breathing. Besides: when you're under fire from an electromagnetic gatling gun, pausing to self-analyse isn't high on the list of priorities.

"Kid!" he yelled, ducking into cover moments before perforation. "A little help?"

"O-on my way!" The rodentesque tones didn't inspire confidence.

Johnny rolled from the alcove as the wall collapsed, chunks of mortar rattling on his helmet. He tripped on a body, bashed his shoulder on the opposite wall and dived for the ground.

A las-shard bit a deep crease into his shoulder guard, scoring across the edge of his flesh, choking him on acrid fumes. A neat patter of blood eked its way out of the wound, dribbling annoyingly across his shoulder and back.

Enough, he thought, is enough.

He snatched a grenade from his belt. A
real
grenade. A big spherical highly explosive grenade with no clever electronic stunners, no temporal shenanigans, no hypnotic sonic trance inducers, no gimmicks. A big, old-fashioned designed-to-make-people-dead grenade.

"Fire in the hole!" he shouted, and threw it along the corridor.

It plinked twice against the walls and dropped to the floor somewhere inside the pall of smoke. Johnny tensed.

The Captain Bishop hurtled out of the smoke gabbling about the Holy Punishing Flame of Stanley The Lord and ran directly into the Holy Punishing Outstretched Fist of Johnny the Violent.

No explosion was forthcoming.

"Always check for a pin." Johnny muttered, nudging the prone figure with his foot. He retrieved the unexploded grenade and, feeling nasty, rolled it beneath an antique hoversofa. Kid Knee shrieked and erupted from the shadows like a rocket.

"Whenever you're ready." Johnny said, turning towards the door at the end of the hall.

ELEVEN

The way it worked, the Book explained, was this:

At the instant that time began - somewhere in the region of one hundred and eighty-six years ago - and the Great God Boddah awoke from his rest to witness the sudden crappiness of his creation, he booted his assistant Ogmishlen out of heaven and considered his options.

The problem was that time had a great deal in common with an out-of-control juggernaut, which is to say, getting it started required some effort, but
stopping
it was going to be something else altogether.

The Boddah had on his hands a case of snowballing time-flow and returning his beautiful creation to its intended state - lifeless - was not just a case of snapping his multidimensional fingers.

What made matters worse was that Ogmishlen's mischief continued unabated. With his squadron of rumour-wasps, the Creator's ex-assistant continued to invent historical matters all across creation, even going so far as to generate the insidious technologies of timetravel, something theoretically impossible, given that there was no history or future to travel to. Ogmishlen manipulated the minds of men who claimed to have experienced time travel, he created relics and objects that they had brought to the present, he pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone concerned and he loved every last minute of it.

Ogmishlen had, it would be fair to say, fallen from grace in a pretty spectacular way. In fact, his smugness at his little ruse grew beyond all bounds and he quickly came to consider himself the
true
master of creation. Every death, every appointment that wasn't kept, every missed train, every irritation that befell the creatures of the universe as a direct result of time, Ogmishlen saw as a small sacrifice in his name.

Thankfully the Boddah was a cunning old cove, and before he even began the arduous task of disassembling chronology, he decided to prepare the component parts of his masterpiece for the day when his exertions would be complete.

He found a man and he spoke to him. He told him what had happened and asked him to record it all. He told him to call it
THE DEATH OF TIME
. It was a large book, as religious references go, and besides retelling the story of creation it was primarily concerned with what the Boddah was going to do about it all. It was something of a messianic "to-do" list, with the everyday reminders to go shopping, feed the cat etc, replaced with the unravelling of physics, the reverse engineering of the fourth dimension and a lot of mathematics that nobody really understood. The book prophesied how the creator was going to deal with the situation, what would happen when he'd finished, and - importantly - how people would know when he was ready for the end of time.

The Great God Boddah, the book recorded, had made a decision. He'd come to the conclusion that, as perfect as his initial creation was, it was largely unsalvageable. A write-off. Besides, in the interim he'd thought of one or two improvements to atomic chemistry which it was far too late to try out now, so it made sense for him to start from scratch.

Reality Mk 2.

Only this time he'd do everything himself, he'd stay well clear of fabricated memories, he'd cut out any nods towards advanced cognitive abilities and he would definitely, definitely not be allowing any greedy malcontent assistants to get trigger-happy with the laws of dimensionality. It would be a work even more wondrous to behold than the first: stripped-down, simplified, streamlined, purified. But of course he couldn't get cracking until time had gone the way of the dinosaur,
⁶
and therein lay the problem.

^{6. Or, rather, the way the dinosaurs would have gone if they had ever existed. Which, of course, they hadn't.}

Ogmishlen was being a little overprotective. Downright hostile, in fact.

So Boddah, in his wisdom, appealed to his flock for assistance. All it required, he told the Chosen One, was a sacrifice of such mind throbbingly copious proportions that Ogmishlen would be too busy basking in glory to notice the Boddah hitting the metaphorical "off" switch. And, knowing as he did that his sentient creations were more than capable of cruelty and avarice, the Boddah promised the greatest reward conceivable to those true believers who helped him; to those who contributed to the great sacrificial gift that would distract Ogmishlen for the split-second required to exterminate time:

A place in the heavens, a seat in the eternal and timeless viewing gallery outside space and time, to witness the magnificence of the Second Reality.

All this he set down in the book, using the prophet as his mouthpiece. All that remained was to specify when the sacrifice must occur - a rather tricky bit of synchronicity - and the prophecies were complete.

The Great God Boddah would present four holy signs. He would show his flock where and when they must gather, he would reveal the Four Great Omens to herald the end of days, and he would stop time in its tracks.

It was pretty heavy stuff.

"Last night," the voice said, clear tones carrying it across the titanic crowd, "the Boddah came to me in a dream!"

The audience gasped, heads nodding like a subdued Mexican wave. Lost in the throng, Abrocabe Zindatsel - newly clothed in a grey cassock - gasped and nodded along with everyone. For the first time in his life he was part of the mass, one of the crowd, just another guy. Joe Normal.

He liked it. He rubbed shoulders with celebrities and politicians and writers and businessmen. He waved his hands in time with billionaires and wealth magnates, he chanted devotionally with pop stars and sporting icons. And every last one wore dull, boring, unflattering grey. And every last one of them was smiling.

"The Boddah came to me," the voice cried, "just as he came to me at my Choosing! On that day, he filled me with his holy voice and I recorded it! I wrote his book, and he has sustained me! One hundred and eighty-six years, I have carried his Word!"

"A miracle!" the crowd frothed. "A miracle!"

"He has sustained me, and now he has spoken again! He has filled my mind with his promise!"

The crowd flexed and dribbled and howled. "What did he say? What did he say?"

"I will tell you..."

Silence descended, thicker than the winner of the all-comers Knuckledragging Olympics. Eyes bulged, breaths were held.

"He told me," the voice said, "that he is grateful for our patience. He told me the wait is almost over.

"He told me the signs are at hand! He told me we will see the Omens soon!"

The crowd burst to life with a roar and somewhere at its head - an insignificant speck at the crest of a grey wave, his features utterly obscured by the holy light surrounding him - the prophet smiled.

The assassin gave the resort director a small prod. The nudge was enough to overcome whatever fluidic inertia held together the edges of the laser-incisions riddling the corpse: the dead extremities spiralled away with a sound not unlike ice cream parting with its cone. An arm bounced off the wall like a slow-moving boomerang.

On a screen at the controlroom's centre an array of spacecraft sat in a drydock, lined up one beside another. This was the ship-park: a subterranean cavern below the resort, complete with colossal loading bay and steps to the hotel's reception. Every conceivable shape and size of starcraft jostled together, though mostly the vessels reflected the budgetary constraints of their pilots - tatty or second hand,
⁷
battered and painted in lurid colours. Each one sported at least twenty bumper stickers ("If this ship's a-rockin', don't be airlockin'!!!!"), several window signs ("HolidayMakers Do It Once A Year!!!!") and a wide selection of fading fadlabels from bygone years ("Not on a Mission!!!"). Only the multiple exclamation marks gave them any sense of unity.

^{7. "Previously Enjoyed", as the dealers had it.}

With a certain amount of satisfaction the assassin brought a gloved finger down on a red button. The charges that had taken so long to plant around the fuel cells of the larger vessels detonated with a heavy
thump
, shaking the entire asteroid. Before the monitor went dead it faithfully broadcast the ships slipping and crashing together, dragged apart by the conflicting forces acting upon them.

The assassin nodded. That should stop any embarrassing escapees ahead of schedule.