Johnny was too busy watching his feet to pay much attention to what was going on around him. The engine noise was still deafening and the dust was getting into his nose. He wished he'd thought ahead and wrapped a kerchief around his mouth before disembarking. The thin Martian atmosphere forced his lungs to take great, uncharacteristic gulps, and he was inhaling red sand along with the air. It didn't help that his hands were aching from the weight of the chamber.
"You okay there?" asked Nigel.
"She ain't heavy," said Johnny.
"I hate Mars," said Wulf, craning his neck to see how much further they had to go. "It gives me der red bogies."
"Hey," laughed Nigel. "You're talking about my new home."
"You think?" said Johnny.
"For the foreseeable future," smiled Nigel. "Moving around is too damn difficult."
Johnny grinned as they reached the bottom step and their load was horizontal again. He looked around for the ambulance.
A red light sat on the roof of the vehicle, sending a powerful, bloody glow in Johnny's direction every second and a half. It was a squat, thin-looking thing that reminded Johnny of a white hearse, and it had large radiator fins protruding from its side. Its repulsor field was so jacked that the ground underneath it seemed to shimmer and crawl, shot through with swirls of agitated red dust. It was built for speed. The two crew cut men in white were jogging over to them now, steadily narrowing the distance between them.
"Who are these guys?" breathed Johnny.
"They're from the clinic," said Nigel, happily.
"Mr Webster," said the first of the men. "This way, please." He nodded politely at Johnny and Wulf. He was young, barely out of medical college. He seemed nice, exuding the charm of medical professionals who had not yet been disillusioned by his job. His fellow paramedic grabbed one of the forward handles to help take the load off the struggling Viking. As he did so, he began to tug the stasis chamber towards the souped-up ambulance waiting beside the others.
"What's with the souped-up vehicle?" asked Johnny.
"Time's tight," laughed the lead paramedic. "We got the fastest crate. But don't worry, sir, we still have..." he looked at his watch and checked it against the data panel on Ruth's chamber, "oh, maybe twenty-five minutes to get her to Carter. And even then, there's no guarantee she will give birth immediately."
"Good," Nigel and Wulf exclaimed in unison. They looked at each other and grinned enthusiastically, pleased that it was all coming to an end.
"No," said Johnny, as they slid the stasis chamber into the car. "Wait."
The lead paramedic turned to look at him, compliant but agitated.
"Sir," he said, "we really don't have much time."
"The gene-splicing unit is in Lowell," said Johnny. "It's in the city hospital." He pointed at a long white building in the distance. "I can see it from here."
Wulf followed Johnny's arm. Sure enough, he saw a giant red cross rotating on the roof of the building Johnny was pointing at.
The other paramedic clambered into the driver's seat, slamming his door shut behind him. His associate looked quizzically at Nigel.
"We're not going to the city hospital," said Nigel. "These gentleman are from a new facility."
"You betcha," said the lead paramedic. "We've only been around for-"
"What new facility?" asked Johnny. "Where are you taking her?"
The other paramedic walked at a measured pace around to the front passenger side door. He spoke as he walked, polite, but really in a hurry.
"We're with the GR unit," he said, yanking his door open. "Are you family, sir? Because if you are-"
"You snecking bet I'm family!" yelled Johnny. "What the hell does GR stand for, anyway?"
Nigel climbed into the rear side passenger door. "Sorry, Johnny," he said.
"Genetic Re-Alignment," said the paramedic. He saw the white, empty eyes of the man standing by the car, and if the guy was family, well, then that explained a whole lot about Mr Webster's problem. He pulled a card from his top pocket and handed it to Johnny.
"No room and we've gotta run," he said. "But come and see us."
Johnny stared at the card, open-mouthed, reading between the lines of their careful terminology of re-advantaging and potential augmentation. The word that really hit home was "normalisation".
"Holy sneck," he snarled.
"What is it?" said Wulf, squinting at the tiny print on the card.
"What can I say, my friend," said the paramedic with a smile. "We can't do much for you, but your kids could have a chance."
"What is he meaning?" asked Wulf. "Your kids?"
The souped-up ambulance engine churned into life with a throaty roar that settled almost immediately into a caged purr. The driver spun the wheel with practised ease and slowly began to manouevre through the crowd of former passengers and mundane medics.
Johnny grabbed at Nigel's window.
"The baby!" he shouted. "It isn't snecking ill at all."
"Depends on what you mean by ill, Johnny," said Nigel, carefully.
"The baby's snecking fine," said Johnny.
"That's a matter of opinion," said Nigel angrily. "Ruth wants this! She wants our kid to have a chance!"
"A chance at what?"
"At a normal life," said Nigel.
Johnny pulled his gun, pointing it through the window. "Stop the car," he said.
The driver looked over at him sadly. His fellow paramedic nodded and gestured for him to drive on.
"Stop the snecking car," said Johnny, forced now to jog alongside the vehicle as it reached the road.
"What? You're gonna shoot me now?" called Nigel, through the window. "You're not gonna shoot me."
"You lied to me," said Johnny.
"Nothing personal," said Nigel. "Really, you're a great guy, Johnny. But don't you wish you had had a better chance?"
"Ruthie wouldn't do this," said Johnny. "She wouldn't do this."
"We can talk about this later, okay?" said Nigel, putting on a kindly face, even as he hit the button to raise the window glass. He pointed towards the hospital, ahead of the car, his eyebrows raised in a conciliatory fashion. He pointed down at the address on the card, looking into Johnny's eyes for some sign of acknowledgement. But all he saw was white rage.
The ambulance motor kicked in and it shot off along the straight road like a red and white dragster.
"You snecked me over!" yelled Johnny. "You lied to me!" But he was shouting at the red Martian desert, and at a distant plume of dust and exhaust vapour.
Johnny walked back towards the shuttles, shoving his Westinghouse back into its holster with exaggerated displeasure. He stared down at his feet as they kicked up the red dust. He tried to think of something to say, but could think of nothing. He felt shattered, torn apart.
Wulf was sitting on the steps of the shuttle, minding the Gronk.
"If der baby is a he," Wulf was saying, "perhaps they will call him Wulf."
"If the baby is an it," said the Gronk hopefully, "perhaps they will call it the Gronk."
Wulf looked up and saw the look on Johnny's face.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Get our stuff," said Johnny through gritted teeth. "We're out of here."
The Gronk looked over uneasily at Mister Wulf. It could see something was wrong.
"Is Ruthie going to be all right?" asked Wulf.
Johnny nodded sourly. "Oh yeah," he said. "She's gonna be peachy snecking fine. The baby, too."
"Then this is der good news, jah?" he said carefully.
"Depends on what you mean by good," said Johnny, bitterly mimicking Nigel's phrasing.
Wulf waited for an explanation.
"They're gonna fix it," he said. "The GR Unit scrubs dirty genes. They're gonna fix the baby so it's grade-A pure."
A penny slowly dropped in Wulf's Viking brain.
"Ruthie does not want...?"
Johnny stared after the swiftly receding ambulance until it was a dot on the ho
rizon.
"She doesn't want her kid to turn out like me," he said.
They didn't have any money. The police had already snecked off with Dr Malcolm. If they wanted to hook up with their main bounty and see some serious cash, they were going to have to improvise. Lowell City Port Authority had provided a couple of buses to get the China passengers into town. Johnny, Wulf and the Gronk perched on the hindmost seat and tried not to feel stupid.
"Der baby is not with der life-threatening disease, then?" asked Wulf.
"No," said Johnny.
"It is fine."
"Yes," said Johnny.
"But it might be a mutant?"
Johnny sniffed and toyed idly with the files on his phone. Past his head, Martian scrub bushes could be seen clinging onto the red dirt by the roadside. The lights of Lowell City bounced and grew larger in the window.
"That's about right," Johnny mumbled.
"Might be," repeated Wulf.
Johnny nodded. His head felt hot. He couldn't work out whether he was over-reacting or not. Would he have wanted a better chance, as Nigel put it? If he had been just John Kreelman, pure as the proverbial, would his life have been all that different? He would have played with the other kids. He would have spent less time with the dying Diana. He would have read less. He would have been popular at school, maybe, like Ruthie always was. He would have been normal. And that was a good thing, he guessed.
And when his teen years came round, when there was no reason to run away from home, and no reason to live in the wilderness and fight for his food, would he have rebelled? Or would he have been a good little Kreelman? Would he have stood up to his dad in the most destructive way imaginable, by leading a revolution and forcing a coup? Would he have been a hero of the oppressed, and an exile from his homeworld? Johnny wondered, and he didn't like the images his imagination conjured. A grown-up John Kreelman, with standard-issue blue eyes, going into politics or business, supporting the system that trampled on the mutants. He thought of all the battles that would be unwon, the bad guys still on the loose. He thought of a world where he had never met Middenface McNulty, or Evans the Fist, or Sick Squid, and a world where Wulf Sternhammer had been dead for over a thousand years. John Kreelman would be married by now, to a Terran girl with money, or maybe he would be New Britain's most eligible bachelor. Ruthie would have never left Earth. She'd still be Ruth Kreelman Less, happy with Nigel, and getting ready to have her first baby in the Bunker Memorial Wing at Salisbury General.
Johnny guessed the Ruthie in that reality would be panicking by now. She'd be fretting like all mothers-to-be, worrying that her child was going to turn out wrong. And if Nigel dearest came up with a scheme that would check the genes, then she'd go along with it for sure. It wouldn't matter how much a Ruthie in another universe, a Ruthie she would never know about, loved her mutant brother. Given the chance, she'd take it, so that her offspring would never have to endure the kind of stuff that this Johnny, this Johnny Alpha dealt with on a daily basis.
"You are angry," said Wulf.
Johnny shook his head. "I guess," he said after a while. "I guess it makes sense. Kind of."
It was Ruthie's life. Johnny couldn't make her decisions for her. Nigel was a sneckwad for lying to him, but, well, maybe he had no choice. Maybe he thought it best. He loved Ruthie and he wanted her to be safe, and maybe that meant being economical with the truth when dealing with. Ruthie's loose cannon brother.
"I am wondering," said Wulf, "if you would have been helping Nigel if you had known."
Johnny bit his lip. He was wondering that, too. He looked down at the screen on his wrist, scrolling through Doghouse bulletins, images, old photos of arrests and fellow bounty hunters.
"Yeah," he said after a while. "She will always be my sister, and I'll always be there for her. No matter what."
"So," said Wulf happily, "we sort out der paperwork, we sign off on Malcolm, and we go to der hospital with der big bunch of flowers, jah?"
"Yeah," said Johnny, still toying with the idea of punching Nigel out, just for old time's sake. "Let's do that."
Johnny Alpha thought about the blue-eyed John Kreelman that never was, and would never be, and hated him all the same.
REMORSELESS
The wide Martian road had its roots in the city itself. The buildings around them grew taller, and traffic more abundant. At the very centre of town, huge skyscrapers towered unnecessarily high. This was where Lowell City's pressure dome had once been highest, back before the atmosphere became arguably breathable, and the panels had been dismantled and used for other things. Now the dome was a memory, a shadow only revealed by the gentle curve in building heights as the centre of town grew nearer.
The bus, as was its wont, took a bus lane, marked out thirty metres above ground level. For a while this made no difference, but before long, the civilian traffic began to bunch up and jam. The bus motored past while the passengers looked down at the ground-hugging vehicles below them. Many of the Martian cars had wheels, and they crawled along the surface in the old-fashioned way. The bus shot past overhead, heading to the centre of town.
The Gronk dozed, snoring lightly, its four arms splayed across the seat as it slept off a busy couple of days. Up ahead, Johnny saw rotating blue lights of squad vehicles. The police, too, had gravity fields, and were simply jetting home over the roofs of the civilian cars below.
"Good," said Wulf, seeing the lights, too. "We are catching up. It would not surprise me at all if the Squid was taking all of the credit."
"He'll be lucky," said Johnny. "He doesn't even know who he's got." Johnny frowned. That was true. His phone brought up the picture of Tuka from the files. It was the same man he had seen in the mind of the guy he killed on the China. Beautiful, blond, buff; he had the face of a model and the body of a Greek god. This was the Tuka on the Doghouse radar and the Wanted posters. This was the Tuka that Erik had met.
Wulf peered over Johnny's shoulder at the picture.
"He has changed a bit," he said with raised eyebrows.
"He has changed a snecking lot," said Johnny.
"Plastic surgery?" suggested Wulf.
"Yes," he agreed. "No. Maybe." He looked down at the picture of the blond hunk-Tuka and tried to think logically. Erik had seen Tuka, and Tuka was the super-handsome guy. But Erik had seen Dr Malcolm, too, the darling of the face-changing plastic-surgery clinic. Johnny remembered it distinctly. Even as Erik's other memories had sputtered and died in Johnny's brain, he remembered the sight of a young Dr Malcolm from Erik's memories.
"Malcolm was at the Tammerfors hospital for years," said Johnny, rocking as the bus temporarily changed altitude to take a junction.
"So you are saying," said Wulf.
"So if he's Tuka, intergalactic man of mystery, crime lord and whatever, why would he take a snecky little day job at a hospital?"
"Der nurses are nice," offered Wulf.
"The hours are terrible," countered Johnny. "Yeah, he must have been pulling down a big salary, but why would a crime lord want a salary?"
"You mean, why is he not in der private castle with der dancing girls and der barrels of mead?"
"Well, sort of," Johnny replied.
"Because of der navy," said Wulf. "Because it is too difficult to be being der pirate or body shark. He has gone straight..." Wulf tailed off, realising that "going straight" did not include seizing civilian ships by force.
This close to Earth, the Doghouse computer was only seconds away, thanks to a mirror-site up on Phobos. Johnny pulled down the sheet on Tuka.
"Look," he said, waving his wrist comp in front of Wulf. "Tuka's been going for decades. Malcolm just isn't old enough."
"Jah," said Wulf, intrigued. "But neither is the pretty-boy in the photograph." He pointed at the blond Tuka everyone had been looking for. Johnny scrolled on to the ancient picture of Alnitak, with its disturbing resemblance to the body they had found in the tomb.
"Stookie," read Wulf out loud. "He is der addi
ct to the long-life drug?"
Johnny shook his head. Malcolm had been in no position to shoot up during captivity. A stookie addict would be in meltdown by now. "This doesn't add up," he said.
"It'll be fine," said Wulf. "You are still angry about der Nigel thing."
"Snecking right," said Johnny. "This whole trip has gone from one cock-up to another." First they lost all the bodies on Vaara, and then they heard the news that Ruthie was involved in a domestic dispute, which turned out not to be true, because actually, she'd been kidnapped, by the body sharks who her husband had snecking stupidly hired to get her to Mars, where she was going to pfaff with the genetic code of her unborn baby, which didn't add up either, because if she could, why didn't everyone? And then there were the pirates on the China, and the wild goose chase to Kajaani, and the pointless trip into the tomb. Johnny was sick of it all. He wished he'd never set eyes on Nigel. He was glad the body sharks had beaten the little snecker up, leaving him black and...
"Blue," Johnny whispered.
"Excusing me?" said Wulf.
"Nigel was blue in the hospital room," said Johnny. It was blue from the menders because his body was messed up by criminals, and he was angry enough about it to take it out on his kidnappers in the warehouse.
"Jah," said Wulf. "From der beating up."
"Malcolm operated on him?"
"Jah."
Johnny scrolled around the Doghouse computer, looking for any known associates of Alnitak. He found an old mugshot of Nimbus. And here, here was someone called Torogone who looked familiar, and a Lev who he distinctly remembered strangling himself. He recognised a couple of others from the China. They were Alnitak's men, all right. And here was another one of Alnitak's men, a nasty looking thug called Morgan, holding up his number card and snarling into the camera. The face was familiar, but not the name. Johnny tried to remember why.
He dredged around his own mind until he saw Nigel in his mind's eye, arguing with a kidnapper in the warehouse.
"How's it feel now, bitch?" Nigel had shouted, shooting a man called Morgan with a small, ceramic pistol.
Johnny sat bolt upright.
Ruthless Page 23
