Toxicity

Welcome to
Manna
- the utopian galaxy where all races exist in harmony. Ruled by Shamans, perfect alien machines, Manna is a place of wisdom, technology and art. On the edge of the galaxy, away from romantic holiday cruises, hides TOX1C, a reprocessing planet run by The Company and dealing with all Manna's waste - heavy metals, tox chems, nuclear sludge; there's no poison The Company will not "recycle".
Jenni Xi, ECO Terrorist
, is fighting a cleanup war against
The Company
. When a sabotage goes horribly wrong, she learns the future of the planet - and it's far worse than she ever dreamed...
Svoolzard Koolimax, poet, swashbuckler, bon viveur
, is Guest of Honour on a Masters Cruise when a violent attack leaves his Cruiser crashed in NukePuke.
Horace is a torture model Anarchy Android
, known simply as The Dentist. Horace works for The Company. Soon, he will meet Jenni and Svool - and the fate of Manna will change forever... GOV HEALTH WARNING -DO NOT READ- TOXICITY WILL LEAVE YOU FEELING DIRTY

~ * ~

Toxicity

[Anarchy 02]

Andy Remic

No copyright 
 2012
by MadMaxAU eBooks

~ * ~

AND
LO! The earth dries up, and dost wither,

the
world languishes, and dost wither,

and
the exalted rich posh dudes of the earth languish!

The
earth is defiled by its people dudes;

they
have disobeyed the nine toxic laws,

violated
the statutes and nature and

broken
the everlasting covenant.

AND
LO! Therefore a curse consumes the earth.

The
new wine dosteth dry up, and the vine withers;

and
all the merrymakers do groan from fat aching bellies.

The
gaiety of the gay tambourines is stilled,

the
noise of the puking reveller dudes hast stopped,

the
joyful harp is - LO! - silent.

No
longer do they drinky drink wine with a merry song;

the
beer is (lo!) bitter, to its drinkers.

AND
THUS! A curse dost consumeth the earth.

And
its people must bear their guilt.

New Isaiah 24:4-6

The Revised & Rewritten
Testament

Bible II: The Remix [Manna
Edition]

~ * ~

PROLOGUE

RENAZZI
LODE, DIRECTOR of the Greenstar Recycling Company, stood on a barren, scorched
heath and surveyed The Lirridium Store. A lake of concentrated shuttle fuel, it
spread away in a glittering flat platter, still and silver like glass over
mercury. Renazzi turned, and with one finger touched the comm at her ear. She
surveyed the prisoners, who were cuffed and on their knees, without emotion.
Behind them stood fifty Greenstar soldiers wearing olive-green uniforms and
bearing the flash of gold on their berets which was the mark of The Company.

The captured, once members of a
nearby village clan, had made the choice decades earlier not to leave the
planet of Amaranth when Greenstar moved in to begin its new Recycling Policy.
Over the years, many of these unfortunates had been
altered
by the severe
toxic waste pumped into the water table, into the air and into the soil. Now,
they were a sorry bunch of twisted deformations, kneeling, and drooling, and
twitching.

And Company Policy?

Renazzi smiled, a narrow,
tight-lipped smile. She signalled the soldiers, who drew short black swords. They
could not use bullets here; it might ignite the unrefined lirridium. What,
then, would the Shamans of Manna use to fuel their starships?

“Are you sure?” she said into the
comm, lips hardly moving, words little more than a murmur.

“Yes. Do it.” An instruction.
Hell, a
command.

She paused a pause bordering on
insubordination. “There are women. And children.”

“So? They need to learn.”

Renazzi gave the signal, and
fifty swords cut down, followed by the dull slaps of bodies hit the ground.
Renazzi watched blood soaking into the toxic soil, returning to the earth;
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She clicked her fingers, and a
Z-chopper was there in an instant. She climbed aboard, and it soared into the smoke-stacked,
pollutant-overloaded sky.

~ * ~

IT
WAS NIGHT. A green-tinged Amaranth night.

Renazzi stood barefoot on the
thick glass carpet of the Director’s Office, which occupied the entire top
floor of the Greenstar Factory Hub. It was a vast space, with massive
plate-glass walls overlooking the subordinate factories around them. Her vision
was filled with a manic bustle of activity: chimneys belching sulphur and
smoke, men scurrying like ants, pipes vibrating with full lirridium payloads,
shuttles loading and unloading, cranes and trucks working and roaring and
churning mud, fumes spilling out, engines drooling black oil.

Behind her, a voice said, “She
will
come back to us. I know she will.”

“Yes.” Renazzi lit a thin
cigarette and smoked. Her eyes watched the constant activity, searching for
error. She was neat like that. Pedantic and anal. “But... I fear you will
regret it when she does.”

“Nonsense! It is ordained. You
said so yourself. Those fucking psi-children predicted the event. The outcome.”

“Yes. Only
their
prediction
was... more than just a simple visit.”

The male voice laughed, a deep
rich sound. He moved forward, placed large hands on Renazzi’s shoulders and
gazed out over Amaranth. “You put too much faith in these toxic freaks. You know,
if the Shamans heard you talking like this... Well. We’d
both
be dead.”

“The Shamans are
machines,”
she
snapped. “Floating like lords through Manna in their vast derelict battle
ships. They seek to control us by intrigue and diplomacy. Sometimes, as today,
there is a need for violence; although I do not agree with murdering children.”
Her voice was iron. Then she sighed, and broke. She was a woman without choice.
“However. I recognise that with certain primitive peoples, it is all they
understand.”

“Primitive?” He raised an
eyebrow, but she did not see. “So you believe in love over violence?
Forgiveness over revenge?”

“No,” said Renazzi carefully,
watching the ten-lane freeway. It was full of digging and mining equipment.
Huge machines with buckets and drills, hammers and hydraulic pistons. Many were
as big as a hotel, and they lumbered down the freeway with lights blazing,
lirridium engines pouring out streams of pollutant to fill the skies over
Amaranth - over what the media had christened
Toxicity
- with even more
filth and poison and death.

“That’s a great shame,” said the
man, turning Renazzi around. He kissed her, then, but her face did not change.
Renazzi did not have emotions; or if she did, they were buried in a deep, dark,
key-locked place. Emotion was something that happened to other, weaker, people.

As he kissed her neck, she said, “The
world can only take so much waste. If we continue, we
will
destabilise
the environment with a toxic overload; and the Shamans would be... displeased.
They like to maintain an equilibrium. We are getting too large, my love.
Greenstar is becoming too powerful.”

“Fuck the equilibrium,” he said,
pulling away, his dark, glittering eyes staring at her. “Look out there! At
what we’ve achieved! Look at our wealth! Our power! We will go to war against
the Shamans if necessary... We will bring back a natural order of chaos. We are
flesh, not machines. We cannot be controlled. We cannot be defined with binary
code. We don’t want everything nice and cosy. We want random deaths. We want
agony. We want war!” He smiled. “Because
that
is life. That is chaos.
That’s reality, my love.”

Renazzi pulled back and gazed up
into his face. “The psi-children. You recognise they are a very real danger to
Greenstar? To everything we have built, or fought to destroy?”

The man turned away, waving his
hand and reaching for a drink. “Go on, then. Hunt them down. Kill them all. I
know this prophecy frightens you.”

“I do not need to hunt them down,”
said Renazzi. And now it was her turn to smile. Her turn to narrow glittering,
malevolent eyes. “The psi-children are a part of this place; integral to the
planet of Amaranth. I will not need to hunt them down because... because
they
will come to
me.
In time. You will see.”

Outside, three thousand
Terraform-Class Excavators rumbled on.

~ * ~

ONE

ALL
HE REMEMBERED was the heat. A searing inferno. And screaming.
Lots
of
screaming...

~ * ~

ENGINES
HUMMED. MACHINES whined. Against the folded velvet of deep space, where neutron
stars glowed and red dwarfs died, where nebula clouds oscillated in coruscating
waves of pulsating colour and fire and energy and exploded heavy metals, it
slammed suddenly into existence - from nothing to something, from Cable Jump to
Stationhalt, from snakehole to freedom in the blink of a blink of an eye. It
hung there, solid, a mammoth ship in the shape of a bulbous, fattened donut,
polished alloys and steels gleaming under the rays from a nearby green star. In
discreet letters stencilled on the hull, the ship’s name read:
The Literati.