Toxicity (13 page)

“Bacillus Hilton, good sir.”

The taxi moved from the rank and
the rain started again, hammering down, gushing black through crap-filled
gutters. A thick snake of commuters hurried down pavements, their silver
shining umbrellas up-spraying black tox water at one another. There came many curses,
and several fist fights on the pavement as people pushed and shoved, jostled
and hassled. It made for grim watching.

Lights flickered across Horace’s
pale white face, as they sped through the narrow streets of Amaranth’s capital.

~ * ~

HORACE
WALKED THROUGH the night, his suit drenched through with toxic rain, his gloved
hands carrying a slick wet briefcase. Horace liked the rain. In the rain, the
majority of people became invisible, heads down, scurrying, thinking only of
getting
out
of the rain; of keeping dry and getting home for that hot
mug of cocoa or dram of whiskey juice. Horace gave a brief smile; a flicker
across his lips. Yes. The rain was good. It distracted people. Made his job
easier to carry out. Much, much easier.

His boots waded through mud as he
walked up the edge of the road. He was on the outskirts of Bacillus Port now,
and the dark night sky, lit only by a few green stars, contained a corrugated
horizon, a serrated skyline of a thousand factories, towers, cooling humps and
reprocessing plants. Many were privately owned, companies having jumped on the “recycling”
bandwagon trailblazed by Greenstar, and indeed, fed down crap by Greenstar in
their capacity of appointing sub-contractors. But Greenstar were the Masters.
This was their planet of crap, and they would never let go their stranglehold
and monopoly.

The Fat Man had misled Horace a
tad. Horace found this annoying, but he internalised the situation and dealt
with it. The Fat Man had said
a director of Greenstar
was feeding information
and pass codes to the ECO terrorists; he’d never said which one, but they were “on
it.” Well, no new intel had come through. And the problem with
that
was
that there were a lot of directors. Greenstar had turned the
entire
planet
of Amaranth into a waste zone, a dead zone, a planet of rubble and tox and
broken glass. There were whole cities that were factories dedicated to
reprocessing; nearly the entire population worked the factories. This was an
industry based on waste. A hive of shit, the leftovers from a hundred thousand
planets all brought here to be reformed into something
positive.
Or so
the advertising spiel went.

Lirridium.

A New Fuel for a New Space Age!
Created Entirely From Your Waste!

Yeah. Right.

Greenstar had no less than nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine
directors. So Horace’s task was a little more difficult than first envisioned.
The directors were organised into a tier which shuffled up and down due to
performance - presumably, financial performance. Greenstar was one of the most
financially buoyant companies in the entire Four Galaxies.

There were five tiers. Horace
would start in the middle. Horace liked the middle. The bottom tier or two
would contain the slackers and the useless. The top two tiers, admittedly,
would contain the best; but also the complacent, the wealthiest, the most
heavily protected. But the middle tier! Ahh, the middle tier would have the
fighters, the scrappers, those with the most knowledge and data; for knowledge
and data were key in screwing and clawing and biting your way to the top.

And Horace had a trump card.

He knew from whence the intel was
leaked...

Horace walked, through rain and
mud. Occasionally a truck would pass him on the road, a great lumbering beast,
gears crunching, engine labouring, tyres grinding through mud and sludge on its
way to or from a rendezvous with waste. Horace tended to step back from the
road when such a vehicle passed, lowering his head. No need in advertising his
whereabouts unnecessarily, he reasoned. And he knew he was invisible to these
people; these drivers and workers and wastemongers. He was a ghost.

The lights on the hill twinkled
like a beacon, and Horace stopped in the mud by a road sign warning “NO
TIPPING.” Ahh, that would be Greenstar’s amazingly surreal sense of humour,
would it?
No tipping? On the Toxic World?
Boom-tisch. Comedy at its most
sophisticated. Horace stood for a while, watching those distant lights, then
his eyes traced the winding road back down the steep hillside, twisting like a
snake to his present position.

He continued to walk, trudging
along, his pace never faltering. Behind him, even through the darkness, a green
smog hung over Bacillus Port like a bad toupee. Horace pushed on, legs working
hard, his bald head slick with dark rain. But no matter. Soon he would have his
answers, and head back to the Hilton, and dry off, and freshen up...

The gradient increased, and
Horace had to work hard, but still showed no signs of fatigue. After all, he’d
climbed a thousand mountains in his life; both physical and metaphorical. None
of them caused him problems.
Not one.
Horace didn’t get tired. And he
never got angry.
Never get angry...

Because.

Well, because
bad things
happened
when he was angry.

It took him a half hour, and
closing on the house - which wasn’t so much a house, as a vast mansion of the über-wealthy
- Horace slowed and observed. There were high iron gates and a high chain-link
fence. Horace’s experienced eyes picked out surveillance cameras. There was
also a sign. For attack dogs. Horace moved off the road, swift now, sure-footed
on the drenched, hardy heather of the hillside. He crept around the edges of
the perimeter fence until he found a suitable spot, distant enough from the
imposing white house, and situated on a rear corner of the property. He moved
to the chain links, scanned them, witnessed the anti-intrusion wires. He placed
his briefcase on the heather, finding a nice flat spot, and listened to the
rain drumming on its cheap leather for a moment before opening it and taking out
several pieces of filament silver. These, he wove into the fence, and watched
them ripple and then
merge.
He removed cutters, and starting at
hip-height, cut downwards to create his entry point. He could hear the tiny
snicks
as the filament wire intercepted digital signals, blended them, and soothed
the system so that there was no alarm.

Through the fence, dragging his
case after him, Horace settled into the darkness and surveyed the surveyors.
There were twelve cameras he could detect from this position; and until he
could get to a master hub, he would have to do it the hard way. The Seeker P5K
fired a narrow-range atomic pellet. Horace took out the cameras one by one. He
knew if there was somebody
physically
monitoring the cameras, it would
be a dead giveaway to intrusion; but then, that mattered little at this point.
This was mostly to prevent leaving any evidence. Horace was in. And the police,
guards, army - they were at least five minutes away. That was enough. That was
always enough.

Horace moved forward in a
commando crawl, which must have looked ridiculous to any onlooker; a bald man
in a suit with a briefcase, commando crawling across lawns and gravel drives.
But it worked for him. Horace had little use for comedy.

He reached the wall, a mixture of
stone and rendering. The windows were old and made from steel. Glancing left
and right, Horace heard the attack dogs coming from the darkness, with a
pitter
patter
of promised violence. The lead dog snarled from the darkness, a huge
black and tan beast baring its fangs, saliva drooling at the thrill of a fight
and a feast. It leapt for Horace, and was easily half his size, rippling with
muscle and a coiled spring of aggression.

Horace moved fast, stepping
forward, left hand grabbing its long snout in mid-air, right hand cutting
under, between the dog’s legs, and grabbing its cock and balls in one great
handful. The dog, surprised at this sudden turn of events, grunted and
Horace...
folded it in half,
with a terrible cracking of breaking spine
and neck and jaw. The dog hit the ground limply, as its four brethren emerged
from the darkness like demons. They were growling, eyes fixed and focused, long
strings of saliva pooling from twisted fangs.

Horace held both hands wide,
almost in pleading, in supplication, in a posture begging forgiveness.

“Here, doggy doggy,” he said, and
the dogs leapt...

The night was soon filled with
snapping, cracking and breaking sounds.

~ * ~

HAVING
REMOVED HIS shoes, Horace padded silently through the house. The place oozed
opulence, but in bad taste. The sort of opulence
learned
by a poor
person who’d made it good and rich, as opposed to opulence instilled by decades
of breeding and education. It mattered little to Horace. Because Horace was The
Dentist, and he was here to do his job.

He’d found the central console
for the alarm system, and with deft fingers, had twisted, removed components,
and isolated the entire camera and alarm system to external alert. It was
almost with disappointment that he realised there were no armed guards to kill.
Obviously, this particular politician-slash-Greenstar-company-director hadn’t
quite upset enough people
just yet.
But it would come, Horace knew. It
always did.

The stairs were broad, sweeping
in a generous curve to a wide balcony overhead. Horace moved at a leisurely
pace. There was no hurry. His target wasn’t going anywhere, he would be asleep
and fat and snoring, with his snoring fat wife beside him, both of them pumped
and slumped on rich food and red wine and bad perfume and drunk sex. After all,
it
was
Saturday night.

He searched through various rooms
before finding the master bedroom. The door opened softly on well-oiled hinges,
the work of a master craftsman; ironic to find one operating on a planet filled
with junk. Still, Horace was wise enough to understand the entire planet of
Amaranth would hold these pockets of perfection every once in a while. Power
and wealth bought quality no matter on what shit-hole one decided to exist.
Horace chose the word
exist
as opposed to
live.
For Horace didn’t
believe that people such as this, with planetary atrocity on their tox-smeared
hands, could ever truly
live.
Living was what the noble of heart did.
Existing... well. He smiled. That was left to the rest of the trash.

The bed was large and vulgar, as
befitted a director of Greenstar. Two blubber mounds were tunnelled under the
blankets like fattened, hibernating pigs. One was snoring like bubbles blown
through a mouthful of marbles. Horace gave a narrow, straight smile.
Oh, the
comedy of the situation! It will be a pleasure cutting the slabs of fat from
your distended bellies...

Horace’s nostrils twitched and
his eyes flared and he knew in an instant something was wrong. A metallic
scent. The scent of...

A boot hit his head, slamming him
backwards to the ground, where he rolled fast, savagely, into a crouch. The
figure, highlighted by weak starlight, landed, whirled, and Horace caught the
flash of silver. A knife. The attacker came at him again, knife slashing down
left, right, left. Horace shifted from each stroke, then grabbed the wrist,
ducked under a right hook, spinning behind the attacker, and dragged the knife
back into the attacker’s own chest. Horace let go and front-kicked the attacker
away, and an almost sixth sense alerted him and he twitched, as a second
attacker flew by him. He grabbed the figure from the air by the ankles,
swinging it around and launching it at the wall, where there came a crash and
the smash of a large mirror, and assailant, mirror shards and broken frame all
landed on the bed, revealing the dummies within.

A set-up.

Horace smiled grimly. A fucking
set-up?

That normally happened to
other
people.

The two attackers were on their
feet, a knife in the chest not even slowing the first figure. Clouds had shifted
outside, and by green starlight Horace saw the two attackers were - women. This
didn’t matter. He’d killed women. Children. Priests on the job. Politicians on
the toilet. It was all the same kettle of mashed-up organic pulp from where he
was standing.