Ruthless (30 page)

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 horizon.

"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 addict 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.

"Nigel had one of the non-metal guns," he said. "He had it before any of us got onboard the
China
."

"Now now," said Wulf slowly. "You are just looking for der excuse to get back at him."

The bus jerked to a halt, the front end dipping as the repulsors took the load. Wulf grabbed onto the seat in front for balance, and Johnny fumbled to hang onto his phone.

"Now what?" complained Wulf. He scowled up ahead at the traffic through the windscreen of the bus and got a grandstand view of exploding police cars.

"What the hell?" yelled Johnny.

Sporadic chatters of gunfire broke out on the street, and then they heard the screams.

"Sneck it," said Johnny. "Malcolm's busting out."

He kicked at the emergency exit at the back seat, immediately setting off an alarm. The Gronk stirred woozily.

"Stay here!" shouted Johnny. "Stay here and stay down." He dropped from the emergency exit to the ground, drawing his Westinghouse as he ran. He heard Wulf's footfalls right behind him as the two men clambered over parked cars and stalled vehicles, advancing on the knot of cars up ahead where a gunfight was going on in broad daylight.

The attackers had hit the first vehicle in the police convoy with a rocket launcher, blocking the road for the others and forcing the van carrying Malcolm to stop. The officers in the trailing squad car were pinned down, their vehicle's repulsors turned off so it was flat on the ground, giving them some cover. Johnny saw Squid crouched behind the vehicle, dragging the unconscious form of Blarg to safety.

Shots rang out in the dusty Martian day, and Johnny searched intently for their source. A white van, a rental, bobbed on jacked-up repulsors nearby, the ground shimmering beneath it. A man leaned out of the back door with an assault rifle, peppering the squad car with bullets. Johnny saw the crouched forms of civilians wisely cowering for cover.

He hefted his Westinghouse and looked for anyone not hitting the deck who wasn't wearing blue. There was a man with another rifle leaning flat against the van that held Malcolm, the limp hand of the dead driver dangling from the window. Malcolm's boys were trying to spring him, and Johnny was damned if he was going to sit and watch. He raised his gun and fired at the would-be rescuer, his first shot punching a white hole in the dark police truck, the second punching a red one in the crook's chest. Two more gunmen jumped up from behind their own car, returning fire at Johnny.