Prophet Margin (3 page)

Shaped like a pear with arms, dressed in faded kevlycra, the Kid would find it hard to terrorise a granny, let alone the hardened scum of the galaxy. Johnny grudgingly allowed his regard for the pathetic specimen to crank its way down from "low-level loathing" to "pity". This was happening with annoying regularity, and didn't tend to last long.

Some mutants were born with psionic powers. Others could knock down walls with their fingertips, or sprout claws from their elbows, or fire digestive acid from their nipples, or any one of a million "defects" that could potentially come in handy.

The Kid had been born with his face on his right knee. End of story.

It was hard to imagine
any
situation where the special talent of having a biting-altitude of half a metre would save the day. Johnny shook his head and returned his mind to the current dilemma.

When confronted by further demands for information, Standing Algie, to Johnny's surprise, had eschewed the "your-pet-freak-doesn't-scare-me" attitude and slipped instead into a bizarre rendition of the "don't know nuffink" routine.

"Tell me more about Grinn."

"Who?"

"You know who. Mister Grinn. Mister-snecking-evil-crimelord-Grinn."

"I... I don't know any Grinn..."

"A second ago you fingered a guy who could lead me to him, now you've never heard of him. Spare me the sneck, Algie..."

"W-what guy? I don't know no-"

"A scientist, you said. Man called Koszov."

"Don't know any Koszov..." His eyes bulged, the ragtag remains of his stomach bubbling over. "I'm snecking dying here!" he squealed, as if suddenly remembering, "I need a hospit-"

"I'm not buying it, bozo. Spill."

This, as it turned out, was a bad choice of words. The guy's guts were already making a spirited - and noisy - stab at freedom. Johnny sighed.

"If I get you to a doctor, you'll tell me what you know, right?"

"I told you! I don't know anyt-"

"Yes or no, Algie. Simple as that. 'Alive or dead', remember?"

"Boddah's piss, I'll tell you whatever you want! Whatever! Just get me to a d... kk... a doct... a... hkk..."

"Algie?"

The man's eyes crossed. A strange noise bubbled in the back of his throat.

"Algie? Algie!" Johnny shook the moist body, stopping when it occurred to him that there probably wasn't much holding the scraps together anyway. Changing tack, he scrabbled in the utility pockets of his belt, hunting medical supplies.

Not that he tended to carry them. Or would know what to do with them even if he did. He was in the business of making holes, not fixing them

He swore out loud. Algie choked, eyes bulging like pingpong balls.

"Kid!" Johnny shouted.

A meaty leg appeared around a hunk of wreckage, piggy eyes wincing. "W-what...?" it quailed, chunky fingers covering its eyes at the first hint of blood.

"I need some..." Johnny frowned, on unfamiliar ground. "I don't know... bandages. Or something. Medicine!"

"Why?"

"Why do you think? He's dying! Look!"

The command was a mistake. The Kid looked.

It was testament to a lifetime of coping with his deformity that, when he fainted, he tumbled backwards onto his well-padded arse rather than a fatal slump onto his knees.

"Kkk!" was Algie's response. And, as it turned out, his last word.

There was a noise like something wet hitting the ground, and it was only when the sudden mist of red vapour cleared, and a single moist eyeball slurped stickily from the pommel of his helmet that Johnny realised what had happened.

Algernon "Standing" MacGregor-Durant's head had exploded like an overripe melon.

"This," said Johnny to no one in particular, "is so snecked-up."

THREE

"And would regularly descend upon isolated coastal villages in their warships - known, by the way, as Lungboats - with the sole aim of raping livestock, slaughtering men and looting from women."

Grin, smarm, grin, puff-out chest, grin.

"Our archaeological digs in actual Viking settlements paint a disturbing picture of this horrific and savage race," (frown, earnest shake of head, grin) "which, we now know, were directly responsible for the collapse of the Roman empire, the disappearance of Atlantis and, significantly, the loss of the Sphinx's nose." (pause, grin, ingratiating blush) "Naturally all this is covered in the new book
Ignoble Savages
, by me, Marteh Gumption. In all good dataoutlets, ahaha."

Grin, smarm, nod.

The crowd cheered with an intensity beyond the realms of mere obsession and breaching the turgid waters of religion. Somewhere at the front a trio of Urchinslags from Kapardia 9 waved their spines suggestively, at which the man on the stage unleashed a withering assault of embarrassed waves in their direction. All but one fainted, and she was left hyperventilating through her thirteen anus-mouths.

At the back of the stage a holographic banner opened; a vast grinning representation of Professor Marteh Gumption, magnified so enormously that each tooth reflected the lights in a supernova of smarm. The man himself, brandishing lecture notes and a copy of his book, basked in the adulation of his flock grinning, nodding, puffing out his chest and grinning some more.

Such was the volume of applause that the unmistakable sound of someone smashing chairs in fury at the back went entirely unnoticed.

PastCon, the industry festival for historians, archaeologists, palaeontologists, revisionists, recordists, evolutionists, macrodimensionalists, tempusfugitists and thimble collectors,
²
was traditionally held throughout the first ten storeys of the Kentucky Fried Holiday Inn on the halfworld Sebraxus. Given the propensity for the attendees - released from the drudgery of their professional lives - to go overboard on drinks, narcotic substances and pandimensional blue movies, any hopes of confining them quickly faded. By the end of the week, Sebraxus would become a commune for spaced-out professors, considering complex historical problems through a haze of uppers, downers, inners, outers, rounders and throughers. This was considered all part of the convention "experience", and was therefore a taboo subject for the rest of the year.

^{2. Who, lacking the organisation or financial clout to hold their own intergalactic meeting, were the subject of almost parental pity on the part of whichever trade-event they decided to piggyback. The DeathRock MusicFest of '34, during which the popular "Skreeming Angst" range of thimbles were launched, was amongst their most successful years.}

On the first night of the current shebang, such wilful disgrace had yet to be embraced. The hotel bar was a quiet zone of concentrated drinking, where historians with unfashionable specialisms - theorists in temporal impossibility, ethertologists, proponents of big bang denial - vented their bitterness in a storm of silent alcoholism. The multi-limbed alien behind the bar distributed drinks wordlessly, well used to the kamikaze approach to drunkardness, and in quiet moments traded wagers with the AI drinks dispenser as to which customer would perish first.

The one small fly in the barman's ointment was the patron occupying the dingiest alcove-stall, whose thickly accented calls for mead, of all things, were growing progressively louder. On the somewhat redundant premise of collecting used glasses (for which a small army of drones and clonepets were poised), the barman slithered from his hangperch and slipped in for a closer look.

The customer was human, the barman was fairly sure, but if he was indeed a historian it was for an obscure branch of research involving, by the looks of it, a prodigious amount of firepower, blunt weaponry, grizzled attitude and ultraviolence.

The man was big - easily seven foot tall, with shoulders stolen from a steroid-abusing bull. Draped across his neck and chest was a thick pelt - gronkhide, by the barman's estimation - which only half succeeded in concealing the arsenal of knives, grenades and pointy objects poking from his armoured jerkin. That his only projectile weapon was a small handblaster was not reassuring: the giant looked as though he could stamp his authority onto a crowd of aggressors using a toothpick.

The man's face - as vast as it undoubtedly was - was visible only as a shrewd pair of eyes beneath heavy brows and a hatchet-nose that owed its ancestry to an eagle; every other scrap of pale flesh was buried beneath flame red hair. It hung in braided locks from his scalp, exploded in all directions from his jowls and matted itself so thickly below his chin that, had he been going grey with age, it would have been difficult to gauge where his beard ended and his fur-pelt began.

Halfway down the pocket-adorned strap between belt and shoulder-guard, a lozenge of red fibreplastic picked out the letters "SD" - telling the barman absolutely everything he needed to know.

"Sneck," he said, whistling cautiously through his second mouth and wobbled his way back to the bar to hide.

Wulf Sternhammer was not a happy man. This was unremarkable.

Raised in a proto-democratic society approximately one thousand, four hundred years earlier, his life had taken more twists and turns within the last decade than any self-respecting Norse chieftain had any right to expect. Being blasted the best part of a millennium-and-a-half into the future had certainly challenged his perceptions of the world.

Some days, the fjords and the farms of his youth seemed more like a hazy dream than the formative aspects of his life, with the lurid colours of twenty-second century life superimposing themselves with far more vivacity.

The gods were dead.

He remembered the slow trickle of realisation (and disappointment, often) as the esoteric elements of his life - a thunderstorm, the changing seasons, the spread of disease, the spinning of lodestones - ceased to find explanations in the machinations of deities and demons and became instead the realm of science and technology. Longboats went through space here. Raiders didn't just steal the gold from the local monastery; here they digitised people's memories, scabbed their credit-wafers and stole their vital organs. Farmers twiddled their thumbs whilst dronebots ploughed their land or, better, left the whole tedious business to self-nutrifying aggriworlds and snecked off to a TotalImmersion
^TM
arcade to get laid.

Wulf chugged back his mead, pulling a face at the synthetic goop that frothed around his beard. So much for technology.

Still, somehow this world, this existence, this... well, this bar, for starters, seemed more real. There had been
then
, with its mists and its voyages and its sagas, and there was
now
- a solid kaleidoscope of weirdness, violence, ridiculousness and solemnity. And bad mead, but you couldn't ever have it all.

Wulf felt like he'd missed out on joining the Eternal Feast in Odin's Valhalla, and found the VIP strip-club out the back instead.

"Isn't meaning," he muttered, vaguely aware he was slurring, "that old ways should be being all..." he struggled for the word "forgotted. No." He waggled a finger at the air, trying to focus. "Mister sailing-in-der-Lungboat and raping-of-der-animals. Huh!"

The invitation had been no surprise. Since the news spread that a Strontium Dog named Johnny Alpha had returned from a timejob with a Viking, the historical world had been clamouring to enthuse, denounce or vaguely waffle-at-length upon the subject of Wulf Sternhammer. Year after year he'd return to the Doghouse from some lengthy hunt to find a cute invitation awaiting him. Attending PastCon as a "guest of honour" had never really appealed: being prodded by the drunken hordes of academia was not a career move he fancied.

Well, this year, it couldn't be helped.

Never in the history of the Search/Destroy agency had times been so lean. It was as if morality had suddenly infected the entire galaxy, leaving scores of hardened bounty hunters kicking back their multijointed knees and twiddling their innumerable telescopic thumbs.

No serious acts of genocide, no primitive-world slave racketing, no warcrimes, no colourful archvillains, no fiendish plots, no nefarious schemes, nothing. Nada. Nowt.

Except Grinn, of course.

At the start of the year the most depraved criminal überintellect in the history of snecked-up bastards escaped from macrojail and set the tongues of bounty hunters everywhere wagging. Wherever Grinn went one could be certain that every sicko, freakage, villain and thug would come crawling out in his wake.

"Only not being so this time..." Wulf said, the alcoholic oscillations of his brain failing to differentiate internal and external commentary.

Grinn had vanished. The authorities tracked him to a pilgrim world deep in the Narheel Nebula where the trail abruptly went cold. The thugs and crims stayed at home, the Strontium Dogs sat and played increasingly desperate games of stabber
³
with each others few remaining funds, and Wulf returned from some half-cred hunt to find another nibbly-bordered invitation with a new and unexpected addition.

^{3. Like poker, but more so.}

The cheque had a lot of zeroes.

In the bar, he pulled a crumpled sheet of plaspaper from a pocket of his bandolier, squinting at the immaculate script that changed colour - tacky autopigmented ink - as his eye roved across it.

Dear Mister Sternhammer, (it said)

Please find attached a cheque for C.15,000 as the opening payment in an exclusive contract I hope you will sign. It has come to my attention that for the past few years the organisers of a certain academic soirée have attempted without any success to secure your attendance. Clearly these poor beasts are devoid of conviction or imagination. I have decided to make amends.

It is my understanding that you are currently enjoying employment with the Search/Destroy agency in the geostationary orbitplatform known as the "Doghouse". How fascinatingly coarse! As an
Enforcement Freelancer
, if you will, it seems obvious you are acquainted with the concept of monetary persuasion. Thus the cheque.