The blast rattled Amber’s teeth. Its force almost pushed him up into the field as well, despite his magnetic clutch to the side of the building. Desperately, he slung his foot down and hooked it securely into the force-rung and thus was merely battered and blown about by the impact.
Hurting badly from his wounds and the general jostling of the explosion, Amber extricated his bent foot from the rung and gingerly stepped back upon the blackened window ledge. A taste like biley river sludge clung to the roof of his mouth. He slid through the window and gagged at the stench. The walls, mangled and tattered brutally from the explosion, were blackened and buckled and pitted with the frags. Damned effective little toy, Amber thought as he stepped over the shreds of the strewn Peevian.
This would have to be quick now.
Amber staved in the closet door, half-busted and hanging from its hinges anyway. Inside hummed the force screen generator, which bubbled the shield about the outside wall. With his weapon he welded the control to its off position. A speedy exit would no doubt be necessary. He then fused the outside access doors to the Lock position to detain the reinforcements due any moment.
A few muted luminescent lights were on in the hall, lending the large, two-tiered apartment an eerie glow. The ruins of the living room appeared the relic of some futuristic Gotterdammerung. Amber stalked forth, an agent of conquering chaos.
The blueprints to this particular stormed fortress had been provided Amber by his employers. Durtwood’s bedroom was just down the hall. With all this commotion, there could be no doubt that the man was quite aware that something disturbing was afoot, and no doubt well prepared.
Here, in the wing that had not been touched by the grenade, Amber noted peripherally the finery that petty crime paid so well for. One entire side of the hall was devoted to a long Arcturian mood bath, its vestiges of blurry sparks and lengths of membranous filaments in evidence even in the dimness. On a panel to one side was a highly polished drink cabinet, attached to a mahogany bar. No doubt it held a wealth of contraband; crystal dream; powder blue; Night: everything in the drug line available with the right money. Amber considered a change of occupations if he escaped from this job. Take this Durtwood fellow: a lousy two-bit crime overlord in a crummy one-bit city on an unutterable planet. The joker was living better than Amber was.
The bedroom had only one door. A light patina of smoke from the blast wreathed it now. No doubt Durtwood would have a gun trained on that door, waiting to scorch the first intruder. So—a diversion should be arranged.
He unhooked another of his frag grenades. Limiting its blast perimeter, he fastened it to the bedroom wall as far from the entrance as possible, constantly wary of any sign of an escape attempt or the intrusion of outside help. He gave the grenade a five-second time fuse and then found cover.
With a slightly quieter explosion, the grenade blew a round hole in the wall. Dust spumed, and the floor rocked. Amber wasted no time in his planned ploy. Figuring Durtwood would expect the Enemy to dive through this new entrance, Amber used a lock baffle to quietly open the sliding bedroom door.
Carefully, he belly-crawled in, his gun at the ready before him, his entry masked by the thick ubiquitous smoke slowly being cleared by air circulators coughing with the strain.
The gangster’s bedroom was opulent ... that was obvious enough even in the dimness. Diamonds glittered through the chemical haze, reflecting the light from glow-pods and the luminescent creatures in the gurgling aquarium. Kinetic sculptures glittered atop stands; tri-D frieze renderings of exotic landscapes exuded ghostly effulgence from the walls.
Durtwood cowered behind his mink-covered bed, the muzzle of a Chezzarri proton rifle trained on the recent hole in his wall. A glossy blond young woman, her hair a softly nimbused affair, sat, stunned, against the back of the bed.
Aligning the automatically tracking cross hairs of his gun to his target, Amber fired. The proton rifle was caught by this volley of fire. It jerked from the man’s hands, ending up embedded in the wall behind, a ruined mass of cherry-red steel and melted plastic. The man moaned; his hands, burned, contorted into blistering claws. The impact of Amber’s fire burst had tossed him heavily against the wall.
The woman in the bed surveyed the damage with azure eyes, and she screamed.
Amber stood. “Mr. Durtwood, I am your assassin. I will provide you twenty seconds to make your peace with whatever deity you hold dear—or make his or its speedy acquaintance. I am not without a trace of compassion. However, time grows short.”
Sometimes Amber wondered if this part of his style—used only in face-to-face confrontations—was truly compassion of an odd sort, or simple sadism. Sometimes, like this time, he just didn’t care.
Durtwood leaned his head against the glittery wallpaper stolidly. “You’ll never escape. My other guards have been alerted from below.” Despite his air of self-confidence, his lower lip trembled. His finely-muscled body was propped against the wall like that of some carelessly battered mannequin. Hair black as crude oil was pasted down his smooth forehead by sweat. The face had a feral handsomeness, with piercing, angry brown eyes. He was like a wild beast, cornered. A young body, true—but Amber could see the age in his eyes and expression. No, even en a backwater world like this, it took time to gain power of any sort.
Amber was growing impatient. And, lately he had niggling second thoughts. Vestigial uneasiness—phantoms of a conscience he once owned—would arise. Never, thank the stars, beyond manageability, robbing him of his paycheck. “If those ‘guards’ are anything like your bodyguard, I’ve got no problem. You have ten seconds, Mr. Durtwood. I don’t give you this time to bargain, but to compose your mind.”
“I don’t want to compose my mind. I don’t want to die.” Anxious fear glimmered in the man’s eyes. “Listen, I know who you’re working for. They’re rat snakes. They’d kill you sooner than pay. How much they promise?”
Amber considered answering with the gun ... but, dammit, he could use more money if he had thoughts of retirement. “Twenty thousand, plus expenses,” he murmured.
Durtwood’s eyes lit with relief. He laughed. “Shit, man. I got three times that much stored away in the bedroom. Now in negotiable chits, good on any planet. You are good. So besides that, how ‘bout me hiring you for an occasional job myself? Not right now. Sometime in the future. I’ll let you go back to where you’ve come from, think that part over.”
Hell! Sixty thousand Galcreds! Now that wasn’t an amount to sneeze at. “I confess interest, Mr. Durtwood. I need a moment to think. Call off your boys.”
“Done.” Painfully, he crawled to his relay radio, nosed on the transmitter. “You guys. Stay put. You try to get in, the game’s over for me. Hear?” He turned it back off, stared back at Amber. “Now don’t get any ideas about killing me and getting the loot here too. You’d never have time to find it. Listen, you go with me ... ” He nodded at the girl on the bed. “You can take Suzzle here at gunpoint. Suzzle means a lot to me. I wouldn’t risk her to get at you. How’s that sound? No chase. Maybe even a little protection from the hoods you’ve double-crossed, eh?”
He wouldn’t have to kill. That sounded very nice indeed.
Damn. His right arm, where the Peevian had scored it with the spurter, hurt like crazy. He reached over absently with his left hand to rub it, check to see if it was deeper than he thought. “All right, Mr. Durtwood sounds like a fine bargain to me. I never much liked—” As his fingers touched the wound, a jag of agony overrode Amber’s voluntary motor control. All in an instant, the arm spasmed and its forefinger tightened on the trigger, pressing it down. A wide, angry glare shot from the nozzle, ripping off Durtwood’s youthful head and cindering it even before it hit the wall. The smoking body jerked once and slumped into final stillness.
And still the beam poured on, frizzling the wall deeply. Fires flickered up, and the smell of melting plasteel and aluminum plasterboard cur
led up in wisps of dense smoke. Amber had to pull the trigger finger away to make the pulsing beam stop.
He cursed, most foully. An extra forty thousand ... burned away in the beam. A victim, along with Durtwood, of his peculiar curse ... and cheap bodies.
He swiveled to the woman, gun ready in case she tried anything. She was almost past even speech, her creamy features wrinkled with a horror terrible to behold. “Don’t ... kill ... me please!” she gasped, her ample bosom heaving beneath a blue diaphanous nightgown.
“Sit down, dear. I didn’t mean to kill him. Don’t worry.” She had seen his face. But then, this particular face wouldn’t last long. He dashed from the room, through the death-quiet wreckage of the living room to the ruined window. Even as he stared out into the paling sky, he could hear the arrival of the guards, no doubt called by Suzzle, and their noisy attempts to gain entrance into the penthouse. It wouldn’t take them long, either. No, he didn’t have much time to get clear at all.
Diving through the window, he let himself fall a long way.
The lighted windows sheeting past him blurred quickly. Then he cut on his grav suspensor controls in accordance to the readout instructions on his wrist computer.
He felt the telltale galvanizing trickle of energy through the mesh in his body—but something seemed wrong. Amber checked the wrist computer frantically.
GRAV SUSPENSORS OPERATING UNDER THREE QUARTERS POWER, the flickering red letter told him. Wind whooshed all about, nightmarishly seeming to suck him down to the hard paved road below. He could feel the gentle tug of deceleration. But the suspensor felt like barbed hooks rammed through their placement points. He felt as though he were covered in a sheath of blood; but it was merely a chilly sweat.
Another screw-up, thanks to the shoddy material of this Godforsaken hick planet!
Feet first, dammit! He yanked himself away from fear freezing paralysis in time to remind himself. Feet first. Land on his head, and good night Charlie. Above all, protect the head. The head ...
Struggling against the screaming currents, he fumbled with his magnetic field controls, then frantically stroked with his arms to realign his position.
Slowing, slowing ... but not enough. The street below reached up to slap him like a black hand of Death. He had to maneuver hard to avoid a hover-lamp. The sidewalk drifted up inexorably and ...
Dammit, not on one foot ...
He twisted, but too late. His right leg hit first at an odd angle, and even though he threw his weight and rolled, the flesh “crack!” and the interior lightning bolt of pain told him the leg had been broken. He seemed to roll forever, shredding his suit on the rough permacrete, clattering as the control smashed and scraped against the sidewalk. When he hit the parked hover car, he was rolling just fast enough to knock his breath from his diaphragm.
Gasping and wheezing, he lay there, dripping blood. His roll path was strewn with oddments torn from the control belt. Meters away, an old pedestrian looked at him, nonplussed. “Need some help, mister?” A tiny dachshund on a leash growled at him as the elderly man cautiously approached. “Get you an ambulance or something?”
Amber felt as though the lower half of his body had been shorn off. A sluggish nausea crept from his stomach up his esophagus. His blurred vision cleared soon enough to see the dachshund was sniffing his ripped pants leg, and then turning sidewise to lift a leg.
“Get away!” he growled at the dog, and the sound of his own voice lent him the reassurance that he was yet alive. Despite the sickness in his gut he felt revived. His skull seemed okay. He heaved himself up and nodded at the old man. “Late with the rent,” he muttered as he swallowed back his agony and hobbled away into the grim light of false dawn.
* * *
Just after dawn, the taxi let Todd Spigot off at the Body Parlour.
The driver, a snobbish college-type, wrinkled her snub nose at the neighborhood as she accepted Todd’s chit. He wanted no record of this visit on his cred-tab, “You gonna be okay here, tough guy?”
Beyond a simple acknowledgment of his destination, these were the first words she had spoken to him. A cute girl, her pageboy-style brown hair bobbed slightly as she looked down at the hand into which Todd was counting the chits. She glanced at his heavy-set body critically, grimacing as she examined his face. Her eyes moved lazily as Todd put the last of the red squares into her cupped palm and they stopped as she noticed the sign over the Body Parlour. A knowing smile dimpled her freckled cheeks. “’Oh.”
A deep flush crossed Todd’s face as he saw her amused eyes. He had spent the ten-minute ride in the back seat, dreamily watching the woman, fantasizing.
He’d been about to dole out a healthy tip, but he checked himself, considering giving nothing at all. But her smile dived into a “Come on, buster. Get with it.” frown, which so intimidated Todd, he gave her a nice tip anyway.
She shook her head with seeming disgust and jetted away quickly, leaving Todd crouching in a whirl of exhaust fumes and dust blown up by her fans.
Screw them. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all!
But the angry thought relieved his hurt not at all, robbed of its bitter impact after years of repetition. No, he hadn’t shown anyone anything—except that he was a spineless, fat slug who still clung to his mother. This whole trip wasn’t the solution ... not at all. It was just a temporary escape. Eight months’ worth of delusion. His only hope was that eight months of delusion and illusion might help him to restructure his reality. He sighed and shuddered.
The Parlour sat in a seedy section of town indeed. Its services were not the respectable kind the common Portown citizen condoned, nor were they the classy kind dished up for the pleasure of the upper classes, which serviced most of them in the fabulous spas of far removed planets. The building, squat and plain, was shouldered by two scroungy tenements. The whole block-sectioned neighborhood looked diseased, feverishly lost in a welter of fleece-joints and scum.
Purple paint from the Parlour peeled down its side. Its scruffy door was chipped and dented, as though attempts to batter it down had more than once been made, and more than once succeeded. A webbed crack radiated over one corner of its cheap plate plasglass window. Hanging on the surface of this, like a crucified alphabet, were faded remnants of poorly rubbed-off lettering from previous businesses.
God, this is awful, Todd thought. Perhaps he should just forget the whole thing.
A puff of the morning’s phlegmatic wind scuffed a scatter of candy bar wrappers and sandwich papers into an already clogged gutter. The air held an old, distasteful scent of bitter memory and silent desperation. A frustrated hatred nagged at Todd as he thought of the city that had held his life.
He stared at the front window absently, considering. Opposite him lay a clearer spot in the filthy window, which provided dim reflection. Peering back at him was a lumpy lob of flesh still young enough to hold at its top a chubby baby face dominated by a big knobby nose. Sprinklings of stubborn blemishes clustered here and there.
He swallowed. He set down a battered, second-hand black valise. He opened the front door.
Fronted by a claustrophobic reception room, this part of the Parlour looked more the funeral sort than the body type. Todd almost tripped over the palm plant—wilted halfway to Flora Heaven. The air stank of alcohol ... or was that formaldehyde? Somewhere an asthmatic air conditioner coughed and spat.
Behind a small desk, poring over a Newsfax printout hunched a rumpled man in mismatched striped pink pants and blue paisley print shirt. From a nostril dangled a nosesmoke. The face looked like a slept-in bed, wrinkled and comfortable. Sandy hair waved above, like a snapshot of seaweed.
The relaxed man did not look up when Todd approached, nor did he acknowledge Todd’s presence when he let his luggage plop heavily onto the threadbare violet carpeting.
Todd slipped his appointment card from the inner pocket of his orange blazer.
He tapped it resoundingly onto the desk and cleared his throat nervously. .
“Faucet?” said the man; rheumy eyes seemingly adhered in place staring at the Newsfax.
“No sir. Todd Spigot.”
“Faucet, Spigot, Toilet. All plumbing to my ears.” He finally tossed the Newsfax onto the chipped plastic desk and directed his full attention to Todd. “Problem, Spigot. Doc Chiro’s indisposed today. We got an intern from the CentHosp to stand in. Mind?”
Todd blinked. “Um—is the insurance still good?”
“Oh, sure. But you won’t need it. Shit, we ain’t messed anybody up yet, and we sure as hell don’t plan to. All done with computer surgery anyway. Intern just had to press the buttons right.” He pulled the nosesmoke from its yellowed nostril, tapped green-brown ash into a small tray. He licked his lips thoughtfully and stared Todd square in the eye, almost challengingly. “You game?”
“Uh—yeah,” said Todd. “Yeah, sure. Doctor Chiro showed me everything before on my first visit. I’d prefer him to take charge of the operation—but at this point I don’t have much choice. I’ve got to catch the shuttle up to the Star Fall before eleven.”
The man’s graying eyebrows raised a trifle, betraying interest grudgingly. “You takin’ the Star Fall to Earth?”
Todd nodded, pleased with himself. “Uh huh!”
“Hey—as I recall, that’s one damn expensive trip.”
“Ten thousand credits,” Todd said. “I’ve been saving for a long time.”
The man relit his smoke lovingly, and then stuck it back up his nose. “You sure waited for the last minute to come to us.” He reached underneath the desk and pressed a button.
Star Fall Page 3
