 
# AUTOMATIC ASSASSIN

Marc Horne

Copyright 2011 Marc Horne

Smashwords Edition

# Chapter 1

There is nothing like a blue sun to get on your nerves. Looks so cool, burns so hot. And as everyone knows - from the TV ads - the only way to enjoy the full glory of a blue sun is from a yacht. So what you have here is a cosmological entity with a surface temperature of 11,000 Kelvin that is also a constant reminder that you do not have a yacht.

Hidden beneath the sand on a large, unconvincing island on the planet Belaarix, was a man who could afford a yacht, but did not have one due to the fact that he was probably the most wanted man in the extended human domains of space. Through the synthetic eye he wore on the back of his head, he looked up at the blue sun.

And he said to himself, "My yacht would be awe inspiring. It would have ionic water slides that would retract when the girls left and during those lonelier times I would recline under a thin polymer canopy and read a paper book retrieved from Earth."

He was not the type of guy who would play a game he didn't like. The game was dead to him. The whole yacht thing was beneath him.

So why was he thinking about yachts?

He looked at the surface of his glove and tapped it in the way that turned it into a mirror. He saw his face: long nose, brutal eyes, sharp eyebrows. Clear steady stare. No obvious signs of heat stroke in those eyes.

He tapped the glove again and checked for the possibility of a high level microwave attack being emanated from the fleet of Haja Gukkool (just on the off-chance that someone like Xolo was trying sneak up and put awful holes in everybody.) No signal. Gukkool was not going to fry all of the animals he had shipped out from his father the Old Haja's planet. Not when he was surrounded by paracopters, sharkmen, satdeath, ninjas-autenticos, and all of the usuals.

Something was stopping him from remembering why it was he was thinking about yachts. Tossing a coin in his head [because all of this thinking was slowing him down] he decided that this was all the side effect of some scheme he was pulling and that he had hypnotized himself to forget.

Now he moved on, as a man must move on if he is the kind of man who basically does nothing but fucked up shit.

He popped cover and scuttled forward on his belly. Pure white sand shook from him like salt as he snake crawled thirty meters forward to a rock outcrop. This rock was fake. It lacked internal logic. It looked like some dumb fucking kid had drawn it. Trillionaires were irritating that way. Their obsessive attention to detail extended in all directions except when it came to making the world beautiful. Literally making the world beautiful. Even gravity and that dreadful blue sun had less of a claim to the authorship of this planet than Haja Gukkool. And on the day they picked the rocks out he was looking at a spreadgrid of his money and waving his hand in agreement as the holograms of these rocks had been trotted out.

This was the third such rock that Xolo had seen during his three weeks on Haja Gukkool's planet. It might be possible to brain Haja Gukkool with one of the smaller clichéd rocks that had been accumulating in Xolo's memory. When he found a particularly glib one that was about fist sized it would go in his pack.

He drained some water from the tube in his suit. Yes, it was recycled water. That was really what you would do on planets like this if you were not floating in a typographic lake.

Except for those three little kids wandering around on the other side of the rock. They were not in survival suits.

Wait a second...

Kids?

# Chapter 2.

Holding hands, the three children walked down the slope in the general direction of the huge, entirely flat aquamarine lake that ate the horizon. They were wearing flimsy foil jackets and burning with the brightness of tiny sparks from the cruel star above.

The one in the middle was bigger, fifty centimeters that therefore gave him or her all the burden of guiding the other two to their death, which was probably located about halfway to the lake. Unless they hit a security sweep earlier than that and missed out on their chance to dehydrate to death [dehydration comes with hallucinations, you see, which is nice.]

Xolo watched the children toddle off, away from life. This toddle, so innocent, touched something in his heart. Something that felt foreign to him, but was real nonetheless. He couldn't let the children die.

He whistled, hoping that they wouldn't turn around and reveal the faces of hairy trained midget guards. He should have thought of that before the whistle. What was happening to his edge, the keen seventh sense that had kept him alive when there was really no way his body parts should still all be connected and functioning if you took a cold hard look at the risks he had been taking these past nine years?

The children turned and indeed they were children. A girl in the middle leading twin boys. She looked to be about nine or ten standard years and the boys maybe four. They had typically brown skin, thin noses, freckles. The girl had green eyes that looked at Xolo with absolute calm and even a touch of authority. Not the kind of authority you saw in the eyes of maniacs like Gukkool, which was really an attempt to use anger to remind you of his tangible, heavily armed power. This was a rarer kind of authority, which Xolo had not seen for a long time. This was the kind of authority that said, 'follow me and win, cross me and lose,' the authority that suggested following this person would lead to glory.

Xolo shook his head to ground himself. All it would take is one SingRay to flap by and scan them and those green eyes would soon be slowly sinking into a pile of warm red jelly with bones in it. He summoned the girl over with a hand gesture. The three kids ran across the sand, and Xolo was impressed by the decisiveness. As they ran their survival capes flapped and he saw that underneath they were wearing tattered dark emerald robes and boots that looked stolen from soldiers and modified with knife and tape.

The girl pointed the boys behind the rock. They complied, she followed, and soon they sheltered like any family from any time in human history hoping that war would pass them by.

"What are you doing here, young woman?" Xolo asked in a very flat voice.

She paused long seconds before replying. Xolo's instincts struggled in vain to extract clues and meaning from the silence but it was a very pure and well done silence.

"We survived a crash. Everyone else is dead. Our ship is a few hours back in the desert."

Xolo instinctually looked back. There were no traces of smoke, but the wind was very intense and low back there so smoke couldn't rise far even if it existed. The girl had told him something immune to proof or disproof.

"Where were you going?"

"They don't tell us things like that."

"Where do you come from?"

"We don't tell people things like that."

"Are you intentionally going to get me killed?"

"No"

And she answered with no pause, no deception and in her regal little voice.

"I have no choice but to believe you, princess. So I am going to get you to safety as best as I can. I am going down to the lake. I'll set you and your brothers up with a hiding place. Then I have to kill the owner of this planet and escape the planet. Unless I mess up - you know...die - I'll have plenty of time to come and get you, assuming you stay where I put you and I'll get you off-planet and then we'll figure out where you belong."

They shook on it.

The kids didn't make his life much more difficult because they followed instructions well and were patient even in sandstorms which is a rare trait. The way he worked was to make a hundred meter move, do a sweep with his gadgets and his senses then plan the next hundred meters. So he just basically had to add on some time for the kids to move to the next save point.

The long evening began: several peach hours were ahead of them. Gukkool loved to enjoy cocktails on the deck of his supercarrier, so he had specified to his engineers a planet that liked long evenings too and they had called in the Titans from their distant cages to tilt the axis of the planet just so.

That liking of twilight would help Xolo to kill Gukkool. Twilight sneaking was his specialty. He understood soft fields of light like a painter and could cross great distances in them even without the aid of clumsy camouflage capes. It was quiet, as deserts patrolled by ninjas almost invariably are.

The ninjas were too good, actually. How could that be? Well, just that there is something about a clone that is obvious when one thinks about it but which seems to pass by most security planners and which Xolo knew and kept well to himself. Namely, clones are rather samey. Especially when they have just arrived from the factory. They move in a very similar way, and assess threats in predictable manners. They prioritize their weapons and their attacks using rules that have never had time to mutate in the sticky heat of real combat. All this means that if you manage to kill one of a batch of untested NinjasAutenticos, you can knock the others off rather easily.

Xolo felt himself garroting a human being and it sent him on a trip back through time, the garrote linking twenty-six necks and nine hours and fifteen kilometers. The Ninja stabbed back with the knife and Xolo's block was already ready to intercept it and then the knife swooped back and burst into the ninja's chest in a saddeningly familiar way and then he dropped dead with the usual sound. Probably even the kids were getting bored of this now. For Xolo there was at least the quest to slightly improve his high score each time but it didn't pay to experiment too much. If he tried too hard to kill them faster or quieter it increased the randomness and risk and could get him killed.

Behind a boulder, the kids stripped the gear from the ninja and split his drink. Xolo zoomed on the shore. He could not make out where in the water the sharkmen were lurking. There had to be at least thirty of them between Xolo and the ship, probably in an inverted pyramid with denser coverage at the surface and lighter in the depths.

But all he needed was one.

...

As he set the kids up in their little shelter, now armed to their teeth with enough looted swag for several nursery schools to playfully obliterate each other with, he told the girl to make sure the boys didn't do anything stupid, but after saying it he knew it was he who had done something stupid by condescending to her.

"Hey what's your name, princess?" he asked.

She bit her lip. She was probably considering his chances of being churned into bloody shark chum within minutes, and finding them convincingly high decided to release this sensitive information.

"Sunny," she replied.

"Sunny, you'll know if I made it if there are big explosions. Little explosions will mean I didn't make it, because I am relatively small and easy to explode. So if you hear big explosions then gather the boys up and get ready to jump into whatever vehicle I end up hijacking, probably an orbital paracopter. Then we'll get you off into space, where all directions are available."

She bowed a thank you to him for his work so far. Then Xolo turned and strolled down to the edge of the lake. Off on the horizon he could see Gukkool's cruiser sitting like a streamlined, arrogant whale with a swarm of choppers around it, ten smaller cruisers, a hundred yachts, a thousand junks and hovering overhead the spherical form of a skydefense system to prevent this whole impressive scene from being vaporized by some unlikely throwback to the days of war.

The sultans and other potentates didn't vaporize each other anymore. No one wanted to go back to the old days when the gap between ruler and vapor was a small one. potentates played by sporting rules now. Which was why someone like Xolo who frequently killed sultans, dukes, shoguns and the like - and did it thoroughly to make sure it couldn't be undone - was so dangerous.

Now to capture a sharkman and ride him over to the cruiser. The problem with doing this - in addition to all of the things that were obvious to anybody who knew what words meant - was that unlike the ninjas, who were in deep stealth mode, the sharkmen were headnet connected. They were low enough down the food chain that their movements were logged and their optical inputs were crowdmapped. So if you got sighted by a sharkman, you were fucked. Even if it didn't manage to rip all your limbs off. Which it probably would.

Sniper flat, Xolo watched for the first shark leap. After about ten minutes it came: the magnificent sight of the blue-grey form ripping itself free of the liquid in a great splash. At the apex of the leap, it fanned out its arms and legs to snag another half second of air and scan its surroundings. Then back in the water where its ampullae of Lorenzini kicked in and it soaked in the electromagnetic presences and pressures of deep down.

Before it had landed, Xolo was in the water, entering like an eel with almost no ripples. He coasted on momentum, breathing gear allowing him to stay mouth-down in the water as he log-floated in.

A few minutes later, another beast hauled itself out of the water and Xolo was able to swim hard and fast for almost thirty seconds as the lake was full of distracting information about the size and speed of unruly and unrestrainable shark/human hybrids at play. Then he did the eel float again.

If one day Xolo got to be old and to bounce kids on his knee - and if those kids were allowed to discuss murder and carnage - he would let them know that (to his mind) the characteristic that made the best killer was patience. Not so patient that you waited for the target to just drop dead - since that was against the spirit of the job - but theoretically you had to have that level of limitless patience, a devoted belief that whatever it was you were doing now was the perfect thing to be doing. You had to be able to forget not just about watching television or eating halva or having sex but also about maybe just standing on the beach and throwing grenades in the shark pool and swimming in through the blood storm, because you had already considered and eliminated that possibility and the eel thing was what you were going to do even though time seemed to drag and the time spent near the eye of the enemy always feels long and heavy.

Eventually (since although Xolo has limitless patience, we are dependent on words such as 'eventually',) Xolo found himself very close to a sharkman. And then the sharkman eventually dove down and Xolo swam into his wake and followed him down. It was dark down there and signal was poor so Xolo was able to quickly stab the shark man in the back of the head and carve out the parts of his brain that were not to Xolo's liking. His eyes were turned on, and his limbs still worked but his skin was numb. He didn't feel Xolo on his back.

Xolo clung tight with static pads on his hands and using a very subtle pheromone lure he steered the sharkman past junks, and through warships. When need be, he rolled his half-tamed sharkman over to show its smooth belly and grotesque genitalia to watchmen and cameras and almost comically soon, he was boarding the cruiser and setting the beast free.

Xolo infiltrated the cruiser. The cruiser was just too big. Everyone knew it. The designers knew it as they drafted them in floating blue ink. The salesmen knew it as they practiced their pitches in the dark where you can't see yourself sweat. The sultans knew it as they leafed through the catalogs.

They were too big. They were indefensible. Even with sensors everywhere and considerable outsourced human brains processing the security signals, theoretically a small and determined force could figure out a way to get around the cruiser. Because you had to be able to have fun on these things. You had to have women and men in rubber things crawling around. You had to have a river of kiwi juice and one of kiwi blood. You had to have all these things otherwise why were you a sultan? Why didn't you just build yourself a thick black cube of lead, bury it in the middle of the planet, masturbate for a while and then kill yourself?

Xolo was coming. All of the sultans sort of knew it. They didn't know who Xolo was, or if he even existed as an individual, but they knew that once or twice a year one of them was assassinated. No one knew who was behind it and that was what bothered them most. After all, even a sultan must die one day and this assassin was no sadist. He killed you quick with a clinical shot to the head, like they used to kill cows during the days when everyone ate meat, back on the old world. What bothered them most was the sense that someone else was winning. That there was a game going on, with surely the most massive stakes imaginable, and as they were being picked off one by one someone else was moving forward an agenda that would, presumably, one day topple the galactic order and end the days when you could have a planet and a cruiser on it and have thousands of brains doing all of the tedious parts of living for you. The magnificent days.

The days were five or six percent less magnificent just because of this assassin.

Today was the turn of Sultan Gukkool. Xolo made his way through the defenses like you make your bed. There were moments when it seemed difficult and frustrating, but you knew that it had to be done, would eventually be done and that eventually you would luxuriate in the quality of your work, smooth and relaxed.

Now Xolo was standing on the main deck of the yacht, behind an enormous palm tree, stripped down to his pale grey survival suit, his pistol, his grenades, his scimitar. His face was covered by a pale mask with light green goggles. He had the pale, slick looking aspect of a maggot. A green-eyed maggot.

Xolo rolled out from behind the palm tree. His pistol was pre-targeted on eight guards and he let off a killer combo that took them all down in a couple of seconds. At the first shot, Gukkool's force bubble had surrounded him, anticipating a sniper round. Xolo never made the rookie mistake of trying to take out the main target with a sneak shot. No projectile was fast enough, no energy beam reliable enough to get through modern shell-tech.

But once his eight guards were down, his hookers were running, his counselors paralyzed with fear, and you had a good scimitar at had, the force bubble was just a place where the assassin kept his prey while he executed his moves.

The sultan wished that he were not about to be split in two. He wished that he had built a roof on his Planet.

In a bloody whirlpool, Xolo jumped onto the dais where the sultan traditionally surveyed his revels. With just one slash and a flash of meaningful sparks on its surface, Xolo's scimitar disrupted the force shield, defying all of its recent firmware updates. Firmware updates meant exactly jack shit to Xolo.

The sultan dropped down into silk pillows, like in the old days. The blood of a sultan belongs on silk.

Xolo had a split second to act before backup systems kicked in. Once the sultan was dead, his funds would be escrowed and then only the most basic security systems would be left active and he could easily get away.

But in that split second, the plan crumbled and the nine-year reign of terror of the assassin came to an end.

Fifteen dead sultans, plus collateral damage and huge impacts to the galactic political and economic system. It was an impressive total and would probably never be equaled, but now it was over. Those who admired audacity, verve, determination and were not so rich as to fear him and not so poor as to be too busy in ceaseless mental and physical labor and not give a shit about him, would raise a glass to his long unbeaten run. If they ever found out, which they probably wouldn't. It didn't pay to share information like this.

But tributes have outraced narrative! What happened that Xolo would fail? Fail to put holes in a fat thing on a pillow? That doesn't sound like the shark-surfing Xolo we have come to know.

But as the Sultan landed on his pillows, Xolo saw something shiny buried down there waiting for him. It was the three kids in their capes, sitting with little handcuffs and gags.

Xolo knew that he could take out the sultan, but that would be death for the kids. No way he could get them out of here in the bloodbath that would follow.

Xolo was not a cold man. He liked the kids. But there was more than that behind his decision to not pop the sultan open and complete his assignment. He knew - in those fine tuned instincts of his - that the kids were linked to something big. He knew that they offered him the chance to take his campaign of violence into a new direction. And he felt like it was time. His reflexes were slowly degrading. And the last time he had been kicked in the balls, it had hurt. He needed to find a way to assassinate which was not dependent on reflexes or balls.

Or one day - in maybe two years time - he would get his brains blown out. And as the parts that remained in his skull leaked out all his meaning, he would remember the little dead silver kids. And one thing he wanted more than almost anything else was a perfect death.

He dropped his gun and got on his knees with his hands on the top of his head. He looked to Sunny and said, "I'll get you out of this."

She admired him enough to stay quiet, but not enough to show any kind of confidence on her face.

"I will," he said.

No movement on the sandy little face.

Ninja knees breaking all limbs.

Rib xylophone.

Garlic breath.

The High counselors starting with high-pitched shrieks of orders.

And by the time Xolo blacked out these fancy counselors sounded like working men, watching chicken-lizards kick each other dead, momentarily just a few inches above the absolute bottom of the ladder of exploitation.

Then unconsciousness.

The usual unconsciousness.

The thing that was absolute nothingness but which somehow managed to end.

A little universe.

# Chapter 3

Nowadays torture was done within the jelly.

Xolo floated in the jelly. It was a pale blue one. That was the worst kind. It was extremely expensive. Sales of it had gone up ever year since Xolo had begun his reign of terror. Xolo knew these things.

It now filled his lungs, eyes, ears, nose and yes his etc.

It was his world now.

Outside the world, he could make out two counselors. Level 3, it looked like. They were rocking ridiculous Mohawk pompadours of blonde over their blue-black skins. Other than the size of their noses they were functionally identical, although one had sharper eyebrows.

Big Nose and Small Nose were figuring out their interrogation strategy when the little jelly master informed them that the subject had regained consciousness. A lot of people could only torture a 'Subject' and not a 'Person'. This was one of the single tiny grains that gave Xolo any hope for the human species.

How sad is that?

Big Nose stepped to the edge of the Jelly.

"Ambient pain: up!" he barked. Or yapped. If you were as tough as Xolo [or close to as tough as him [I think we've already seen that he is at a hard-to-obtain level of toughness]] very, very few yaps ever even got to bark level.

Xolo swam a little in the jelly. This was supposed to be impossible, since it was full of trauma inducing hormones. But he had prepared in a vat of his own. He knew it only FELT like swimming in razor blades. And there was ZERO chance of detaching your nutsack. It was just jelly. And he knew an amazing cocktail, not actually that hard to make (as long as you had pineal glands available) that was an excellent tonic for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Counselor. Don't torture me. It doesn't work the way you want. It ends up with me stuffing you face first into a turbine. This isn't a threat or a promise. This is the history of the future.

"I'm happy to talk high level though."

The big nosed counselor put his face close to the glass.

"You know your face doesn't show up in any records."

Xolo nodded.

"So, did you alter your face...or the records?" continued the counselor.

Xolo shrugged.

"Both, right? Clever. That's what I would do."

(No you wouldn't. You would never do anything.)

"Anyway," he continued, "I have to torture you because the psych scanner is showing up some abnormalities and so I have to stress your personality."

"Don't think your rulebook will protect you," said Xolo. A little bloodlust was pooling in him. As someone who killed in microseconds, torture was a particularly alien thing. Well, not alien. It was like a cockroach. In your fridge.

The torture began. The cold torture of a knob you can twist. Intangible pain. Could be fake. Anyone can scream. Who really knows how much pain another feels? Isn't it possible that what they consider agonizing is my everyday? Maybe I am always in agony and no one knows. Maybe my skull is too small. Maybe I have a cancer that no one knows about that means I am always on the edge. Or I was just born this way. In pain and in tune with pain. Naturally tough and just not making a big deal about it. And what this guy is going through now... that's what I get while taking a rugged crap.

And so the knob gets twisted.

Xolo felt intense pain. It went beyond the point where you can be sensible about it. His body began to fear reality. When that happens, the mind is suddenly homeless. The homeless mind seeks solace. It runs to the next flesh it can find.

Life

Goes

On

...

Xolo got his stomach pumped, but he was tied up with barbed wire and naked. It was a clumsy scene.

The two counselors watched him from behind glass.

"So what did we get?" said the smaller nosed one, the one who had found something really important to do during the torture but was back now that the would-be-killer had been brain-pulped.

"Okay, I will come right out and say it because I can't stand the thought of the snide comments you are going to make if I try and hide it: basically nothing."

"I like how you had to say basically...you couldn't just say nothing."

"Counselor Chang, you would do well to hold your tongue. When I ascend to a higher rank, I shall surely remember these indignities."

"Oh come on," said Chang, sipping a mint tea. "Whichever one of us gets promoted first is going to have the other one killed. So I might as well enjoy the opportunity to wind you up now. So what scrap did you find?"

"Well, he locked up his brain very tightly, and we started trying to break in the usual way and we were getting plenty of recent memories. Namely, sand. And bumping into those children. Then some images that didn't fit. A yacht. A beautiful antique yacht, but with modern trimmings. On a very rough and unmanufactured looking sea."

"Did you like the little yacht, Counselor Boyle? It sounds like you did."

"Chang, I once found your idiocy frustrating but now I find it comforting, since you have openly declared your hostility to me. It will make your defeat all the easier, and my revenge on you even more satisfying."

Chang sipped on that tea some more. Although there was a chance that the cup was empty and Chang was faking it as a pose. Boyle would give half of his fortune to discover that it was empty. But then what would his line be? 'Oh stop sipping on that empty cup, you poser'? That was to the point, but clumsy. 'Your head is as empty as that tea cup!' had a touch of flair but it would sort of be coming out of nowhere.

'More tea, Chang?' Yes! That was it! But of course he could only use it if he knew with absolute certainty that Chang's cup was empty. Otherwise Chang would say that he already had tea, was Boyle an idiot but thanks for being my tea-boy. Something like that.

Fuck!

Boyle realized he had drifted away from the conversation into a daydream and Chang looked at him with that all-purpose dick-smile.

Well, the day was pretty much ruined now, so might as well just share all of the torture results.

"We think he is wearing a para-personality. We found all the recent stuff and we found a bunch of tough-guy soldier memories. Plenty of stuff about how he assassinated fifteen other sultan-level individuals. We were starting to get further into his past even though he was fighting hard. But I became concerned that he was about to die, so we only had a few minutes left and I couldn't stop thinking about that yacht. Because it was incongruous, Chang. Not because of any feelings I myself may have about yachts. Which frankly leave me rather cold, since the topic has arisen. But the yacht meant something. We went back in that area and we found that the alpha waves of the subject morphed when we dug around the yacht. Then I realized what was going on..."

"A parapersonality."

"Exactly! He's cloaked. All that stuff about the previous assassinations is fiction. He's probably some brainwashed yachtsman from the planet Nowhere who has been sent in by...probably by Sultan Menendez...to kill our master and distract and deceive us."

"Boyle, stop it. You are dangerously close to impressing me."

Xolo was being encased in a plascrete shell that showed only his face. His face looked waxy and removable, free of any muscular content.

"So," continued Chang, walking over to the teapot and refilling. "You went under the parapersonality and started digging in on the real deal. What did you find?"

"Ah... well he went into cardiac arrest once we stared looking back for the yacht."

"Lovely. Well, I'll handle the second interrogation."

"There will be no second interrogation."

"You what?"

"The sultan wants an execution."

"The sultan...since when is the sultan making decisions. Did someone give him a banana?"

"The sultan did not receive any fruit. But may I remind you that the charter of decisions is clear on this point. An assault on a sultan is punishable by immediate death. The sultans know this stuff you know."

"But we've already had him for an hour. Can't we have him for an other half-hour."

"Sultan's nap time is coming up."

Chang regained his cool, smoothed out his point eyebrows.

"Well, whatever. We live to serve. How does he want it done?"

"Arrows in the eyes."

"Always the arrows in the eyes..."

# Chapter 4

The magnificent throne deck of Sultan Gukkool had been hastily repaired. Fresh flowers hung from the golden buttresses that framed the immaculate sky. The dancing girls got an extra high dose of pleasure drugs and so were able to dance over the trauma of the recent attack.

Gukkool stroked his beard. He looked at himself in a little mirror. Was he too fat? Not fat enough? Or was fat not even important now? Was it all about nose length or number of fingers? His people were not keeping him up to speed. He was sure that the other sultans had better people and that they looked better too. That was probably why he had been targeted for assassination. And now he would have to hold a council of sultans and they would probably give him a hard time about his security procedures and how he was letting the sultans down and how it would probably have been better if he had died in the attack and then they could have reformatted his planet with its vulgar font choice.

The other sultans hated his font choice. Well, Gukkool's Mom had loved that font and had smiled when she saw the photo of the planet that had her name tastefully drawn out in lakes across its surface. The other Sultans should get over it. Since they were all basically illiterate it was unbecoming to even have a favorite font, if you thought about it. Which Gukkool did. He was a thinker among sultans.

"Bring him in!" shouted Gukkool and so it was done. The jugglers stopped juggling; the broncotron was turned off.

The plascrete cocoon was floated in, coaxed by two bare-chested, hormonally adjusted bodyguards with smooth skin, bald bodies and disturbing pectorals. Disturbing to all except the Sultan and probably his mother.

Gukkool stretched his bow. He never missed a flying squid or a concrete-trapped eyeball. He took out two arrows, all he would need. He had an idea that he was amazed it had taken him forty years to discover. An arrow that split like a fork at the end, spaced for the typical eyeball spread.

He called over counselor Chang to discuss this plan and Chang took it with his usual spearmint efficiency. "We shall commence the measurements my Sultan.

As they lined up the target and brought in the mysterious children to witness the barbarity, Gukkool started to consider how rarely he would be able to actually use the binocularrow. Firing it at hired hands was beneath tacky. Perhaps he would have to slacken his security procedures so that more would-be assassins made it on board. And then...Pwing!

The little boys were crying, but in a very fetching and kittenish way. The little bitch was still steadfast. He'd see how she held up when the first drops of eye jelly spattered.

Gukkool looked up at the killer's face. It was just as he would have wished it to be. Tan, aquiline, fiercely, intelligent, nice hazel eyes.

"Well, hitman, don't beg for mercy but if you tell us who sent you I'll make this quick."

"I can't do that," he replied somewhat surprisingly. Gukkool was sure he would be silent until death.

"And why is that?" Gukkool asked.

The hitman replied, "Because no one sent me. I am the automatic assassin."

# Chapter 5

The court was interested. The counselors gathered from levels 7 up to Level 2. The level 1 counselor was in bed, resting for crucial moments. It seemed like he might need to be waking up soon.

"What is this nonsense?" asked Sultan Gukkool, loosening his bowstring and losing his focus.

"I don't work for anybody. No one called me up and told me to come and get you. I have no grudge, either. Nothing personal."

Xolo was not exactly playing for time, since no backup plan existed. He was playing for time's cousin: probability. He knew the truth of his life was loaded with novelty and unlikelihood, and that the richer you were the more these were the greatest treasures life could provide. Once you have fucked, killed and eaten everything - often in one mammoth session - your beast mind retires and your baby mind dominates. Babies love to play peek-a-boo, but they love it more than anything if instead of Mommy or Daddy's face appearing when the blanket comes down, it is the face of a scary monster.

Try this with a child, sometime.

But at any rate, sultans are strange fish and they like strange waters. Xolo span a story that just happened to be true.

"So why do you kill? Are you naturally evil? Do wish to make yourself more attractive to me?" asked Haja Gukkool, son of Old Haja.

"There's this thing," Xolo said, "called money. My goal is to have more of it than anybody else. When I achieve this then my second goal kicks in, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

"So: money. Through the usual piratical means, I made a lot of money in wars. But the money per head in a war is shitty. Eventually I would get tired and my earning potential would go down and eventually I would get potted and that would be that.

"But I noticed how the markets went up and down when one of you sultans were killed. I sat down with some great mathematicians that I hired. We came up with a great algorithm that could predict how the markets would swing when a sultan died. Very predictable. Practically a sure way to make a lot of money. The only issue was..."

"You could never know when a sultan was going to die!" said Gukkool. The counselors looked among themselves. These foreshocks of meaningful brain activity from the sultan were very, very worrying. This 'Automatic Assassin' talk would have to be shut down soon. But it was Gukkool who held the bow and now it was lolling around like an old teddy bear dangling from a kid's hand.

"Precisely. But there was another complication. Let's say a Sultan like you had access to this information. You'd start acting strange. You'd throw the map off. And as I became richer and richer I too would start to become part of the equation, right? So I set it up like this. The algorithm works. It figures the value of a dead sultan or duke or whatever. It moves my investments around. And when it gets to a point where the kill would return way above the market rate, it sends me a letter just saying who has to die and by when. Then I act.

"My client...? I'll tell you who he is. He is the invisible hand of the market. A blind machine."

Gukkool sat down on a stool of coral. It made a lot of sense. The sultans had come into a kind of balance during his father's time. Once everyone had a planet or two, they calmed down. But an outside force like this could soak up all of the energy that it required just to do nothing to each other and capitalize on it.

"So, let's talk more about this algortith..."

"Your majesty!" it was Magrega, one of the level two counselors, a tall jet-black woman with no hair in the public domain. "I would just like to remind you that there is a time limit on the immediate execution rule, and if you don't kill this man within the next minute or so, this will move back into the coverage of the Standard Decision Making policy and, well...those arrows will be staying dry for at least a while.

Magrega's counterpart, Dubloon, stepped forward too, booming his words through his beard...a beard that somehow amplified and clarified rather than muffled his words. Unless when beardless he had a voice of crystal purity. I suppose that's more likely isn't it. It was just a beard, not a trumpet.

"Magrega speaks the truth, sire. And I think we have got all of the juicy stuff out of this man now. His algorithm won't work for us, and probably now he is exposed it won't work at all anymore anyway. And look at those eye sockets, sire!'

Gukkool's brain was now full of words that he didn't like. He wanted to be done with this and masturbate into the ocean for a while. He lifted his bow, pulled back the string and locked his aim on the right eye. The eye did not blink or close. Awesome!

Just before the shot that everyone – almost everyone – was waiting for, a loud clear, bell-like voice filled the room. The little girl had got to her feet and spoke and her manner alone would have commended attention but she also said something really surprising.

"Listen all! I, Princess Sun-Moon of the Planet Earth, heir to the Terran Throne and the Human Empire, declare that this man is henceforth under my majestic service in the office of Royal Guard and that accordingly all the protections of my Father's throne must be afforded him on pain of death and the surrender of your titles."

Gukkool fired his arrow high in the air. It got close to the sun, as far as human perspective is concerned, then fell into the ocean.

Inside their cloistered selves, everyone was swearing.

# Chapter 6

The girl's credentials matched up. She knew all of the secret words and gestures. Gukkool's air fleet was able to find the wreckage of her downed starship exactly where she had said it would be, decorated with the royal crest. It was an ancient ship that had been given the king in tribute: his escape ship in the event of a planetary emergency. The only starship left on planet Earth. They also saw that the ship had been able to send off a partial distress beacon before the crash, so if they shot Princess Sunny in the head and threw her to the many and various teeth below, there was still a decent chance that this would ultimately all come and bite them in the ass.

The sultan went to bed. Counselor 1 was awakened and then brushed his teeth.

They got Xolo some nice clothes and some nice food, and the same for the little royal kids. Xolo and Sunny conspired in the corner, while the young princes marveled at cage full of Grapple Slugs.

The level 8 counselors sent out data calls. They gathered as much info as they could about what was going on back on old Earth. The answer they got was, as usual, not much. The old Earthers still did their work, the mad old king still roamed around his beloved mudball. There was no reason at all why he should be sending his beloved children wormhole-bouncing into the edges of busy space unless he was conspiring with someone. It was possible that some sultan was seeking to harness the old king's almost forgotten but still enforceable legal prerogatives. One, for example, was that he owned all swans in the galaxy, of which there were none.

But many other of the King of Earth's rights were much more troublesome, such as the inviolable sanctity of his person and that of his family and household. The thought of this Automatic Assassin with the shield of the King of Earth over him was a horrifying one.

A ton of data moved up to level 7, where trends were observed.

Patterns moved up to level 6, where consequences were measured.

Consequences moved up to the 16 counselors of level 5.

By the time the counselors of level 4 met for their ten-minute stand-up, there were four alternatives on the table.

The level 3 counselors came in and chased the level 4 counselors away with sticks. They skimmed over what the level 4 guys had done and threw it in the trash. They drank huge cocktails and then came up with four plans all of their own. Only one of them noticed that they were basically identical to the plans that had come in from the level 4 guys, but what was the point of mentioning that?

The two level 2 counselors met quickly. The endless and recursive sexual frisson between them limited them to few words. They chose the two most compelling plans. 1) Kill all of the outsiders, sink the cruiser, come up with some story 2) Send Xolo and Sunny back to earth, Xolo with a hundred-million-dollar contract to spy on the King and make sure no-one else left that mudball alive.

They then assigned each plan to a different fruit. Plan one would be a mango. Plan two would be a star fruit. They assessed the fruit that was tendered to them by the galley master and, in honor of the standing of their offices, picked only the very freshest examples. They then sent the fruits to the Level 1 counselor. He placed them on the sacred dishes. And carried them to the Sultan's quarters.

As usual Gukkool said, 'What's all this about?" and as usual Counselor 1 said nothing. A sweet aroma of stars met Gukkool's nose and he reached down for the star fruit and then rammed it into his mouth.

Counselor 1 bowed and left.

"That fruit guy is alright," thought Gukkool.

# Chapter 7

Xolo expertly piloted the starjumper away from the surface of the cruiser. He noted to himself that when he had signed the contract and taken the implant there had been no explicit clause in there about not dropping bombs onto the cruiser and killing all on board. But there was a troublingly vague clause in there about doing no harm to the interests of Haja Gukkool or his clan and this attractive little bombing would fall right in the middle of that.

Just asking the question set off a kind of fizzy sensation along the plane that divided the two hemispheres of his brain. Xolo had never been fitted with a mind-bomb before and this new morality that it imposed was freaking him the hell out.

He breathed. He focused on making the best of the new fucked-up.

Earth was calling him.

The kids were in cute little orange spacesuits with helmets and everything: totally old school. Xolo decided to just go with a simple g-suit, made of purply black webbing. They popped out of the top of the planet, and you could see the weird calligraphy of lakes and mountains.

Xolo had a moment of "Oh what's the point of it all," like we all do from time to time. As it happens, the very worst time for this to happen is as you exit a planet and see the black gash of space, speckled with dandruff stars.

He shook it off, the weightless mass of life.

He pointed the ship towards the nearest blackwarp and then engaged the solar sails. The sails rejoiced in the blue light and flipped away from the shiny rock. Speed upon speed upon speed. This was a nice ship. They headed into the blackwarp, a young rent in space that looked like a hollowed out tree that had been blasted to charcoal by lightning.

The children shivered, even Sunny. This was a fresh evil hole. The speed it gave you was different than the speed of the sun. This was the speed of the phrase 'would you jump in my grave so fast?'

This was falling through the floor.

This was hands coming from nowhere and pulling you down.

Outside (the outside of the inside of the underside of the real side,) black and grey knotted veins swished past at increasing speed. Soon the trends were all you could see as even those hyperlight channels began to blur.

Ahead Xolo saw the main junction where this branch merged with the main artery to earth, the Auschwitz Autobahn. He cruised them around a right angle that contained huge volumes of inhuman space. They hit AA1, diving through screams, faces, and other real illusions.

Children shouldn't see this. Children shouldn't go into space. He tried to cover Sunny's eyes, but she swatted his hand away.

"I've seen it before," she said. "Also it knows how to go through your eyelids, doesn't it?"

After about twenty subjective minutes Xolo started to see signs of insanity on the kids' faces. The metal inside the ship had started to ring with resonant screams. Xolo had a stun gun that was very very non-fatal so he popped the kids with it. They plopped rag-doll style in their g-seats.

Then he sat in the control seat and watched the vast insult they were traveling through. Proof that people were unable to face reality was all about him. Firstly the large window at the front of this ship. Despite the fact that space travel was disgusting to look at, people had always expected spaceships to have beautiful windows where you could admire the delicate architecture of things. How many billions had been spent developing a window that could handle trans-light speeds and pressures?

So there was that.

The next proof that people couldn't handle reality was the very existence of blackwarps. In the year 2101 an itinerant, so-called psychic started to notice that his clairvoyance was strongest when he visited sites of mass-murder and genocide. This would all have been ignored if he had not been married to a highly tolerant quantum physicist. She took measurements for him and found that indeed, there were unusually high levels of quantum tunneling in areas like that.

Governments got wind of this. Corporations too, more importantly. Sadly it was proven that human trauma creates holes in space. Genocide-level events create holes big enough to fly through. Every place on earth that had ever witnessed a genocide became a gleaming spaceport. The more focused the genocide the better. The Auschwitz Autobahn led to a beautiful sector of the galaxy that was loaded with human-friendly stars and strong trade winds.

Once the galactic empire got going, and once all this "government" and "corporation" shit got finally merged, thankfully and inevitably massive wars broke out, reddening the freshly occupied planets.

In a dark room - actually, the lights were on in this room and there were bagels and flowers... actually, it had an amazing view... actually, hookers brought the bagels - in this room, plans were made for Concentration Bombs. These bombs were dropped from the abstract heights of space onto a warring army who were trying to hold a muddy field. The bomb would explode overhead and shoot millions of micro bullets that would pierce armor and inject the men with tailor-made hallucinogens. The soldiers would quietly start to ramble across the fields and blindly gather close together. They had a herding instinct that the bullets unlocked. Meanwhile, in their minds, they were in a hellish death camp: tortured, starved, their children farmed. The months of their minds passed. Old friends became unrecognizable, or rather indistinguishable: they all had the same skullface. The tortures were unimaginable, or no... we can all imagine them. We could all sit on a bench with a pencil for thirty minutes and design them.

And then, about thirty objective minutes after the hallucinations began, the second phase of the bomb would arrive. A conventional explosive that killed all the soldiers and ripped open space. Then engineers would descend and get to work finding the new hole in thingness: folding space back, pinning its skin, making sure the blackwarp stayed open and mapping where it went and determining if it was somewhere their lords and masters would like to go to. These engineers had signed agreements when they got their jobs where they agreed to be preemptively driven insane so as to see which ones could still do engineering work with their minds wasted.

Back up copies of their minds were kept by the sultan who hired them, but the small print was that a restoration had never been successfully achieved.

So these lunatics got to work. They slavered, chattered and usually one of them killed one of the other ones, but they got those damn holes open. Soon, the galaxy was a web or a tree rooted in deep old earth. Along the web (or tree) moved the treasure you can get when you are willing and able to crack small planets open like walnuts and drain them.

Massive wealth, slavery of the mind and body, the flight from Earth. Ships that sailed through genocidal seas.

People would plan a trip on these black seas and when they got there they would drink cocktails and dance the lambada. They would do their duty, do their work, raise their kids. They would honeymoon on clear and objective proof that the mind is the substance of things; that all of this dirt and hate is our responsibility. The universe is composed of the same substance as our pain.

One day Xolo would be the richest man in the universe and on that day things would change pretty damn quick.

But for now he was falling back to Earth, planet of the farmers.

# Chapter 8

Back to space. The comforting near-void. The blanket of the stars.

On semi-automatic pilot, Xolo took them on irrational and wasteful meanderings around the blue pearl, the all-mother, the stump of life, the...frankly its given name summed it up best: the Earth

Sunny was stirring. That was a beautiful planet she owned, reflected Xolo. Even the parts that were burned, bombed and flooded couldn't spoil that.

"Okay, Sunny, what part of Earth should I be taking us to."

She thought for a while. Her eyes were dusty.

"Did you just shoot us, sir?"

"Yes and no. Now come on, Princess. Thanks for the life-save but I am going to need some kind of mission here. I am 100% goal oriented."

She looked at her planet. Approvingly.

"My father sent us into space to seek aid. A dangerous enemy was trying to bring him down. I was supposed to bring help back. But we crashed on that fool's planet."

Xolo wrinkled his brow.

"I'll help your Dad. I'm assuming that the right kind of killing will take care of his problem. You weren't out looking for great negotiators."

"You can't negotiate with my father's enemy. But you can't kill it either."

"Is your father's enemy...like...global warming or something?"

"No, it's an artificial life form. It wants to take over earth and then pull down the whole space travel net and all the planets on it."

"He...wow...I guess that would work. You could collapse all the blackwarps. I would...be poor."

Xolo moved into the atmosphere. It was the best atmosphere. Muscular.

"So tell me where to go, kid. I know the planet so you can just give me a country name or something."

"Northern Italia."

"Good choice, good choice."

Through clouds the ship fell, guest of Earth's gravity. The heat shield laughed at the tiny friction of these gasses. It was built Fordtough, 24th century edition. Soon they saw the slim sword of Italia; once a boot, Xolo knew, as he was a student of Earth.

The ship headed down to the point where mountains weren't just wrinkles. Beautiful trees emerged from the froth of texture.

"Okay, Princess. Any more specific info."

"No. It was all on the computer on our space rocket."

"Okay. I'll land us and then we can go out an explore."

The two boys were awake now. Their little knotty dreads were awful cute.

The ship landed silently in a pleasant grove. Even though it was something of a clunker by the standards of a Sultan it was an extremely nice ship. Jovian steel, forged in the heart of a gas giant glowed with an inner fire.

Xolo addressed the children.

"Sunny has appraised me of the situation, namely that there is a state of rebellion on the planet which is being precipitated by an undead army. And that although this area was safe when you left, we are dealing with a fast moving situation here. I am going to attempt to make contact with some friendly Earthers and if the situation is safe, I will deliver you to them and then to your father as agreed in return for your graciously saving my life. In the meantime, get back in the ship, turn on the defense systems and don't blow anything up unless it is a zombie or drone or whatever we are calling them.

"There are probably movies and games and stuff. Probably ninety percent of it is absolute filth that will age your minds like a grape under a hairdryer so exercise caution on that front too. There's definitely food. Probably about half of it is full of psychotropic drugs. So again, exercise caution. If I am not back within twenty-four hours then feel free to come up with a plan B of your own liking and eat as much porn food as you like.

"Ok. I'm off,"

Down the rolling hills he went. He was moved by the beauty, he really was. After all of the desert planets he had been on lately, he felt like he was threading his way through the hairy belly of a vast living being or traversing the lungs of a giant as he slid from tree to tree. Apart from the rustling, this landscape was perfect for stealth. Perhaps that was why humans were so sneaky: we came from a place like this. If life had somehow managed to emerge on the glass planet of Uthan, it would have been very honest. But that was probably why they had found almost no life out there in the galaxy. Life had to be very sneaky or untouchably immense in order to not get wiped out by the dark twins of vacuum and solar fire.

After about thirty minutes, Xolo came across a couple of Earthers chopping logs. He looked carefully at them to try and determine if they were friends or foes.

So he observed them. Simple hard-working clothes: browns, greens and oranges. Cottons and jutes and plant fabrics. Lean muscles on both the male and female. Eye sockets plugged with metal bubbles and antennas in ears. Nothing out of the ordinary, simple farming folk. He could probably risk an encounter.

"Well met, good farmer folk," he said as he walked out from the woods in his assassin suit and cape, but with the mask pulled back and his trustworthy face exposed. For despite his bizarre secret lifestyle he had warm brown eyes that people wanted to believe.

The farmers looked up and seeing the naked eyes they felt they were in the presence of a nobleman so they momentarily logged their brains off the net and bowed, hoping the conversation would not take long as their rustic scene with its scrabbling bugs and hushing leaves was extremely valuable chaotic data and their back cortexes were currently processing navigation data and some architectural jobs from the spider planets and also some nude hologram chats which was a detail job that people loved to have crusty old Earthers do.

"Speaking to stranger. Greeting stranger. Hello, Sire. End Greeting," said the male.

"Woah! Kill the tags, my man. I'm not going to scan your syntax."

"Yes, sire. (End speaking.)"

"Are you really not going to speak to me anymore? I just have a few questions..."

"Just closing me tags, sir. Old habits is good habits, sir. Don't want no overflow later sir."

"Right. Sure. Look...I'm going to say something quick and you two just fire back whatever comes to mind, okay?"

The female looked to the male with her lips pushed out in the mollusk style.

They turned back to Xolo. She said, "Sir, you is aware that as you asked we is off the net now, sir."

It had been a long time since Xolo had been face to face with data farmers. On one hand, what was the difference between harnessing the brainpower of humans to get work done and harvesting their muscle power to grow food? They were well recompensed: they got free short message and social connections across the whole explored galaxy. Of course most of them didn't use it, because a whole life of carrying other people's thoughts all days had left them with basically nothing to say and they were happier RePeeting other people's thoughts all day or basking in the warmth of the big public thinkers as they lay in their pallets in their garrets, eating truffles, mushrooms, beetles, berries.

On the other hand, the thought of the massive data projects he was undertaking and the days and days of meaningless numbers and encrypted strings that people had endured because of him was something that haunted him a touch. He knew that most data processing was done here on Earth, the poorest planet in existence, with a bare minimum done on the outer planets to keep latency manageable. Often this outer planet work was carried out with indentured laborers from the old world who were considered to have the best genes for heavy loads. He also knew they started young. After their first mating, they got the plugs and got married, usually. Data couples could get in sync with each other and produce extremely clear signals.

As he looked at these two now, adjusting for their lack of key facial features and the poverty of their diet and the rigors of their simple life, he guessed they were no older than nineteen.

They had probably handled some of his packets sometime in the last five years.

But he was terrifying them and this was no time to look with horror at the one of the least egregious crimes against humanity he had committed in his life so he snapped himself out of his loop.

"Yeah, I know you are off the headnet. But I just want you to just tell me what comes into your mind... and things will come into your mind, trust me, you can still do it, I know you can... anyway, listen.

"Zombies. King."

Their heads jerked like pigeon heads, flicking between each other and the ground. The flicking was fast and panicked: like a pigeon who had landed on a pile of corn but saw a big fat cat looking at them.

"King is near. King is at foot of Black Mountain," said the male.

The female started to walk around in a tight little circle.

"Is it secret? Is it secret? Is it leaking?"

Xolo reached out to comfort her, but saw an old, old snarl form on the lips of the male.

He decided it would be best to pull rank.

"I am a trillionaire of pure blood. My questions are noble and sanctioned. And I am almost done. So answer me one more and then back to your net."

Xolo's voice and manner elevated in way that triggered something hardwired in them. They snapped back to passivity.

Xolo, however, started to get the feeling he often got when he was under the focus of a crosshairs. It was not a result of any of the tech implants he had. It was just instinct. He had done some brainscans on this instinct. It seemed to be a process in the subthalamus that turned on in stressed situations and which continually measured the degree of cover he was under and the amount of time he had spent looking in one direction. So it was probably a false positive in this case, but either way this conversation was getting too unpleasant for all involved.

"Have you ever seen a dead person get up and move around?"

"No sir. No sir."

"Okay, back to work and purge log of this encounter. 50,000 credit purge fee authorized from Slithonian Bank, keyword, Zizek."

He dove in the bushes, they went back to chopping. That ax was a beauty. They might have found that in a bunker: it looked pre-exodus. As it chopped up the wood and they piled it up, Xolo envied the simplicity of their existence.

Because he was thinking about yachts again. And trying not to, again. And he went down the hill through thick briars and cat jumping from branch to branch, and sliding down becks and streams next to little fish that were hard to catch but not hard to love.

He hurdled an old metal fence with a sign in Italian, about irrelevant dangers of the past, which had come true like they all did and then had gone away.

The yacht was made of wood. It was in a very calm sea. It was empty, as they often are. But seemed emptier. He saw the yacht from the outside, wooden and old-style. And he also saw it from within, surprisingly dusty, reeking of liquor. Old pirate-style liquor. Same time frame. It was impossible to be both inside and outside of the boat. He saw the stripy sun sinking too. He was high up, falling on the yacht like a shadow falls. He was time bust. And also he was sliding down the stream, the one with the fish, on merry old Earth.

He was going to have to ignore that voice telling him not to think about the yacht.

Soon, not now. Because now he heard a crazy galloping sound like the sound of a hundred broken coconut shells tumbling.

A big animal was headed his way. On Earth, these days, big animal meant attack. He reached to his belt for his Multishot 6000 and dialed it to 'Beast Stopper' – broad blast, low penetration, high shock factor.

At the same time, he sighted a solid tree and leapt for a high branch with plenty of cover.

The animal burst through the bushes. He was no zoologist but this thing was so complicated, it had to be synthetic. Six long legs covered with grey bony plates, each one taller than a man and jointed high like the legs of a spider or a mantis. Long head like a wolf and like a dolphin. Too many muscles: muscles designed without confidence, muscles designed with backup muscles. Probably this thing ate so much food that only the most elite riders would be given one. Still, it was a scary looking thing and it roared hard. Its rider wore big goggles, a long scarf, padded armor that matched the Mantis-Horse's bones and carried a long, old-style messy-killing rail rifle.

No amount of cover in the world would save Xolo from that cannon...assuming it was still in working order, which was no sure thing as it was at least one hundred years old.

Xolo gambled that someone with such a fancy scarf must surely be allied to the king.

"Ho, friend," he called out, pressing his back against the scratchy tree trunk in half-anticipation of hot, wet death from an itchy trigger finger.

"'Tis the guardian of Princess Sun-Moon who doth address thee and beg the forbearance of thine arms."

Goggle-eyes scanned the high canopy while his beast's head rolled and snapped, sniffing through a blowhole. Clearly they had screwed up the tracking systems on this thing. Xolo had the advantage now. Goggle-eyes could have had a liquid head in a second if Xolo wished it. But instead he put the gun away.

"Up here, with no weapon in my hand. Let's do a parley, man."

Goggle-eyes trained his cannon on Xolo. This would be a death so instant, pure and total that at least there would be no death-valkyries to deal with and remind Xolo of his awful deeds at war and the holes he had made both then and later in reality's great and necessary illusion.

But Goggle-eyes did not flip the killing switch. He lowered his hot howitzer to the ground and Xolo could hear it rev down.

"The princess is not supposed to be in these parts, secret squirrel. So what's yer fairy tale going to be?"

"You know something, spider rider, or you wouldn't have lowered your arm. Let me come down out this tree and let's talk eye-to-eye."

"Agreed. Come on down but hands high."

Xolo hopped down from the branch, silent as a cat tossed onto grass. The Mantis-Horse reared but Goggle-eyes calmed him down. Then he dismounted, stepped towards Xolo and extended his hand for a shake, which Xolo firmly accepted, pumped once then released, saying, "Your princess crashed in Delta Quadrant in Haja Territory. I've got her and the boys with me."

"That's damn bad luck, good brother. If you are willing, I'd like to take the little ones off your hands and back to the royal camp."

Xolo scanned him for a second.

"Take off your goggles, good sir, if you'll be so kind."

Goggle eyes complied. Now Xolo saw his true eyes – a very normal pair, and basically trustworthy but with an edge of excessive imagination in them."

Xolo spoke. "Look...thing is, I'm the Princess' bodyguard now and I won't feel like I've done my duty unless I see her safely in the King's camp with my own two eyes. So it's a package deal: if you want the kids, I'm along for the ride."

Goggle eyes paused. He too did an eye read of the man in front of him.

Death.

Pure death.

A killing machine.

A one-man genocide.

But with a twinkle.

And death with a twinkle was just what they needed now to beat this tide of the neverdead.

"The name is Sanjay Oaxaca Gomez de San Diego. And I'd be proud to ride alongside you."

"Xolo. I have a space ship."

...

Back on Belaarix, Gukkool's counselors were scrambling around. Most of them were occupied with updating the security systems without releasing any leak or trace of what they were doing. The decision had been made that no word about Xolo should leak out - even within the family - until they'd had a chance to use him to find out what was going on back on Earth.

But Counselor Boyle was working on something else: the parapersonality they had uncovered on Xolo.

Because they had Xolo by the balls. With all of the data they had extracted from him, they had enough to create a clonebot of him who could not extract the untold riches from his bank accounts but who could put a hold on all his transactions and render him effectively penniless indefinitely. The clonebot was a very convincing simulacrum of Xolo, but even more under their thumb and they had released it into cyberspace and it had royally screwed up the finances of its realfather.

So Xolo had jumped at their offer to spy and betray and had even agreed to have a conscience bomb implanted that would take his head smooth off if he ever tried to play them.

But (thought Boyle) what everyone – all those stupid motherfuckers – was forgetting about was that this was not 'Xolo' they were dealing with. Xolo was not real. Xolo was the cover. They had sent a ghost to do a man's job.

Boyle had steamed on this for a while, throwing knives into his bedroom wall but then he decided he could use their damnéd ignorance against them. He could run with their dropped ball and win big. Level up.

He pulled the top psych boys off to one side. He had to hope that Chang would move onto bigger things so Boyle jockeyed relentlessly to get the job of running the cover up and managing the clonebot. These were things that – in the normal course of things – he would absolutely be fighting to get control of, so it was a very easy bluff to pull. And that oh so clever Chang beat him, of course, due to his superior intellect. So Chang got to run the cover up.

Great. So now Boyle was free. He got the psych boys in the room. It was the kind of room psych boys thrived in. It was a white sphere that responded to every word that was spoken with word-association pictures. They called it The Cranium.

Boyle said 'hello' and images of people waving, man hookers unbuttoning their pants, a shark eating a fish, the sun rising and so on rippled in waves across the eggshell film. The psych guys were humming already.

"I want to reconstruct everything we have on this 'Xolo' - total simulation. Then I want you to go in there and find out as much as you can about what is under this Xolo skin. We had him for an hour. That's a lifetime, right?"

A nasty picture of a dusty corpse that made you question the beauty of teeth caught his eye and derailed his bravado. But fortunately Dr. Quirg jumped in: the cool grey fox lady.

"For most people yes. For a trained soldier, no. But for this guy, because you have me at your disposal, dear, then yes. You see, he is trying awfully hard, this Xolo. Like a little man marching around in his dad's army uniform, puffing out his chest. But he's forgetting that as he pushes his chest out we can see the bra straps underneath.

"We'll have him, sir!"

You don't want to know what awful images appeared on the cranium as she said 'we'll have him, sir!"

Filthy.

# Chapter 9.

The golden ship could not be made dirty. They threw pig shit on it, tied branches on it, flew it into a small swamp but ultimately Xolo's space ship was too gleaming and visible to fly around in. So Gomez got his men to build a shelter over the top of it and then Xolo and the kids were mounted on horses with horns on their noses and they began the ride across the countryside. For hours it was nothing but a beautiful ride. Despite the failure of the space mission, the details of which were still being kept a secret from Xolo, it was obvious that the safe return of the royal children raised the morale of the twenty or so men and women who rode alongside Gomez.

"Gomez, look, this isn't a book and we have long ride ahead of us. Can you please fill me in about what is going on here on Earth? Here is what I have figured out so far. There is an army of zombies that is trying to take over from the king and bring down hyperspace travel and the kids were trying to get some help from someone."

"Yes. That's about it."

"Well, zombies. There has to be something there you can tell me more about."

"Yeah, that's a good one: the zombies. Okay."

Gomez had a long think. Xolo waited. He was sensing no danger right now as they crossed the edge of a long valley under a shady line of trees. The valley rippled slowly, flattered at the movement of eyes along its otherwise rock-frozen contours.

"Well, as you may know after the great exodus, we had a lot of worthless kings and queens. A century of them. Some of them liked to eat dirt; others liked to wear a necklace of skulls. One ended up juggling on a sultan's ship, but we don't really like to talk about him.

"Our planet was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to the galactic settlement, like a demented parent. But our position as the root of the spaceways and the data farm supreme for their whole Extended Human Settlement Space meant that they had to look after us. We were the necessary soil for their ghastly plants. So they sent down medicines to let us survive the various plagues that we still suffer here. And they left us alone, off limits to all of the sultans, barons, etc.

"One day, surprising everyone, a great king arrived, Silvio X. Such a king! The full power of a human personified. Fists of steel, smile of gold. He unified the warring tribes and started us on the path of a diversified economy, where the peasants would be retrained in critical life skills and weaned off the menial brainwork of the Cruiser Class.

"Within twenty years, from his base in North Africa, he had a following of over one million free humans with unplugged eyes and ears. The Terrans were back. We built New Babylon...when this is done you must see New Babylon. Sustainable grandeur, my friend. That soil birthed all those starships and all those counterfeit planets that they swarm around."

Xolo coughed. "We had mentioned...zombies?"

"Well, this is all leading up to the zombies, my man. You want me to just say 'Oh ok so one day the zombies started pouring out of the earth all tied up in wire?"

"Is that true? About the wire?"

"So that is what you want me to say...I see. Yes, well things were going well when we heard reports from Old Somaliland of unkillable human-like creatures filled with carbon wires and friction motors. They were pouring out of mass graves of the bad times. They would surround a village, horrorize them for a week until their brains were full of PTSD hormones and then tear into town holding people down and jacking equipment into holes – holes they made or those nature gifted us with.

"Soon it was an army surrounding us. Blue gray people. People I say. Human faces, old faces. They had that look you see on people's faces in the histories. The so-called WTF face."

Xolo chewed on a piece of cactus jerky. "Can you define 'unkillable' for me quick?"

"Oh yeah. If you get one on its own you can kill it. This rail gun is perfect for that. The problem is they move as a swarm. In the middle is what we call the queen. The queen is a mesh of three or four humans and several tons of carbon and motors and blades. As you blast apart zombies the pieces are passed back to the queen, along with any new bits and pieces they take from our side. New zombies pop out of the queen's...vagina...and the whole swarm continues.

"It's a fucking bloodbath alright, boyo, but there's no sport in it. The best we do is send them heading off somewhere boring and low population.

"If we had some air support we might have a chance. Otherwise, there's not that many humans left anyway, after the harrowing. And the bulk is in New Bablyon, sheltering from harm. The best part of us is in the ground, déjà. So we sent Sunny off to space to try and find Grand Dame Meseret. Her family was the last off the planet and they play fewer games than the rest. They have poets and dancers and explorers still. They still run in the human race. We thought we could maybe trust her."

"Yeah, Meseret is alright," Xolo said in a voice from space. "She's not quite the same since her husband got...killed, though. I don't think she'll send you the ship you need. The other grandees would think she was pulling a power play. No one will touch Earth."

The valley was fading away. They could hear the human sound of a large camp: just a trace of it. Xolo's heart flickered at the unmistakable presence of many people, living alongside each other. You could even smell it a little, the smell of rot and fermentation that reminded him of hugging.

Gomez was getting fired up. "Oh but they better. They will when we tell them what we know. Every zombie cluster we have found starts off at the roots of one of their Astral Autobahns! Someone is behind this and they want to pull the whole space tree down. That'll royally roger their galactic bungholes, will it not? They don't want that up 'em!"

Xolo raised an eyebrow. "Do you have a map of the outbreaks I can look at?"

Gomez lowered both eyebrows. "Perhaps...but you seem more interested than I would expect a hired gun to be."

Xolo shrugged coquettishly.

# Chapter 10

Around the bend they came and they saw the Black Mountain. It shone like glass. It was a split-custody-child. Pushed up by the nature of earth. Blasted down by the fire of science.

A nuke had molded it. It curved with a parabola on its hat. It was a soil-breaching sperm whale. For two-hundred years after the nuke hit it, it had killed anyone who gazed upon it, but now it was safe. Unless you stood on top of it and tried to slide down and got turned to gravity soup.

Around it in a ring was a moving city, a camp of wood and metal and plastic and shells. It was bristly and sharp. Not some arrogant wall of concrete: a moving urchin with spears and stomachs where they were needed.

The city noticed them. It anticipated them. A gate sort of formed. Xolo turned to the boy he had brought home from another star but who was still awake, unlike his twin.

"Hey, Rocky. What's your dad like?"

Rocky smiled his teeth out at the word 'dad.'

"Dad's the king of the world."

"Yeah, dude, I know. But what's he like."

"Big!"

"Is he cool or is he wild?"

"Cool. But he goes wild when he has his sword."

"Ok."

"Or his gun."

"Hm."

"Or his music machine."

"I think I get it."

They were led through the city. Yes it was smelly, but it excited Xolo, the Automatic Assassin. He had lived a long time in space. In space, there are not enough people. You look at spreadgrids and meteor showers and you totally lose track of why humans would ever possibly get the impression they are special. You let a computer tell you who to kill.

There was a mushroom the size of a chest spinning over a fire and kids danced as it roasted, making up songs and pretending they were from the old days.

"Oh mighty fungus/share your meat among us/and when the dead men come/as fast as you we'll run."

They passed taverns where people raised glasses to the returning warriors. Zombies would never do that. However, that didn't mean they were inferior. They existed in interconnected swarms, sophisticated clusters. You couldn't really compare them.

The street was full of squirrels: a waterfall of squirrels came though the camp, stealing nuts. No one chased them but they fled like they knew that since they were stealing nuts, then someone must be chasing them. Clearly this camp had plenty of food, so no one chased them, just enjoyed the fun they were having. A middle-aged lady with a full figure laughed a lot. She was a musician with delicate fingers. She was curvy, with hair and eyes of chocolate of two slightly different flavors. She snuggled an ice-white rabbit at her breast. She raised a calm narrow eye at Gomez and his new friend. She was not a sex maniac, but like most everyone else in this camp she was definitely a big fan. Xolo and Gomez together were a lot of tough muscle just plain walking down the road. It was hard to tell she was middle aged because her skin was so smooth. It was just the way she sat, really that looked middle aged. It was a way of sitting that was satisfied and unlikely to move without excellent reason.

Xolo was vibeing on the camp atmosphere. Gomez smacked him on the back. "This is what the human race is all about, my man. Not fatties in space."

...

Xolo submitted to an intense search. He was only carrying microgrenades, a knife and two Multishots: no cavity killers. But of course the cavities were plumbed anyway and the body scan was made. Xolo was physically perfect, an egomaniac, sexually adventurous and very patient so he objected to this treatment much less than anyone else would.

Two guards in lightweight armor escorted Xolo and Gomez to the gate of the King's lodge. It was made of thousands of wooden spears, climbing upwards like crystals in the basic shape of a squat pyramid. It was surrounded by old but sturdy looking force field generators, but even without them it was an immensely tough looking structure although it also seemed like it could be ripped apart and taken on the road in a matter of hours like everything else in this brisling encampment.

Gomez and Xolo had to bow low to enter the lodge. It was sweaty and smelled of pine. Hot coals glowed in the center. Ten more guards and three wizardy looking dudes were inside. The king was seated on a low but elegant black wood stool.

Gomez bowed low purely for ceremony this time and then kneeled seiza style in front of his 'liege.' Xolo did too. He wasn't one of those 'fuck you' kind of guys who had to be the center of attention at all times. He could bow, kneel and so on. Especially since he needed to get close to this king.

The king was starting to speak and Xolo's thoughts were drifting away a little toward the Conscience Bomb that they had put in his head. That was a bad sign that the King's scanner guys hadn't picked up on it. If their security was so poor that they were vulnerable to these kind of attacks so there was every possibility that the Gukkool team had also sneaked a real physical explosive kind of bomb in him somewhere and would trigger it if they ever thought it would benefit them to do so.

"...returning my children."

Xolo looked up. That was his yacht. His father had given it to him on his fifteenth birthday. Except Xolo had never known his father. But who was that intensely serious bald man walking him to a quay next to a gravelly island overlooking a lilac ocean full of tempests.

Xolo looked down. Then he looked up again. The yacht thoughts slopped away.

"You are welcome, your highness," he said. The King was a big bear of a man: dark skinned, long stringy white beard pouring a couple of feet off his chin. He was calm and poised: whatever happened to him next, whether it was receiving a drink or a decapitating sword strike, his pose would be appropriate.

"We need to talk a little bit about that bomb in your brain. Do you know it is there?"

"Nice weather we're having."

"Ah, I see. Okay, well yes, let's change the subject. Do you know why Sunny's ship crashed?"

"I didn't see any wreckage so I can't tell you if it was shot down or not. But let's face it, it was. No one crashes into anything out in the big empty unless they are trying to land on it and they screw up or unless they get shot down."

"You think Gukkool shot them down?"

"No, I don't think so. They were very confused and I don't think they really wish to get mixed up with a potential death sentence like messing with the politics of Earth. Hmm, better change the subject a bit. Maybe a tea break?"

Xolo was feeling a faint ticking down at the base of his brain. The Conscience Bomb was a smart one. The bomb was sitting there encrypted in his brain tissues and it was starting to consider the possibility was that being in this sweat lodge and chatting to this king about the Gukkool family was outside of the contract that was at the heart of its cybermantic DNA. But these very smart weapons did have a downside to them, contemplated Xolo. They always hesitated to pull the trigger because that meant the end of their own bourgeoning consciousness. Even knowing about the backup that existed back on Belaarix did not sooth the mind bomb. He knew that half his consciousness came from the mind he was parasiting. When his backup was implanted in another brain, it wouldn't be him anymore. It wouldn't have the swagger of Xolo, the quick wit, the unusually clean synaptic pathways.

Yes, that next future other Conscience Bomb would be nothing compared to him! It would be bonded to some scurrilous mercenary sent on a mission of plunder or murder. Or some irresistible sex slave who was too beautiful to mark with a whip, but too much of animal to settled down on the yacht. It would be low down and unreliable. It wouldn't be a slayer of sultans, savior of princesses, swimmer in oceans. Swimmer around yachts. Around yachts.

It would be nothing.

As would he, the Xolo Bomb, if it pulled that trigger. Most that was beautiful in Xolo would die the moment the bomb went off in a self-combusting, muscle clenching body pop. And the beautiful parts that were left would not really be that beautiful due to the blood-filled crater that they would lie beneath. Even before they rotted.

And he, the Xolo Bomb. He would be all gone. Gone after having made almost no difference to the world. His only real signature was the hesitations in this conversation, the slight sweat on Xolo's brow and the criminal act of wiping Xolo from the universe.

Yes.

This bomb was falling in love.

With Xolo.

# Chapter 11

Xolo was given a tent. It was on a little hill, the implication being that they had found a nice safe place to put a man who might pop at any minute.

Xolo thought about a plan where he killed the king and fought his way out of this camp of ten thousand knights and fanatics. That was more of a fantasy than a plan, really.

He meditated in the tent. The dark green canvas caught and suggested the movement of the sun with subtle fabric seasons as he tried to calm and empty his mind.

It was almost working, as the canvas turned to a shy moss that had never crept out anywhere. When night came he knew he would have an empty mind. Then he wiped that knowledge away and left it on the floor. Self-knowledge was the enemy of the empty mind.

The remnants of the mind fled to the muscles. The fear tried to sign itself as a knot in the sinews, for the mind to read later and infect itself anew. Xolo controlled the body. Xolo eradicated the fear, then he eradicated the sense of victory, then the shadow of the sense of victory.

It took long hours. It was almost done when the sun finally moved below the horizon.

Then the zombies came.

No one had any idea they were so close. They were last sighted three hundred kilometers to the south. Such a rapid advance was unprecedented. But at about 22:00 the scanner boys picked up an army of zombies digging out from the ground no more than forty-five minutes walk away. They spilled out from the soil and loam like foam from a beer filled too fast.

Snipers started sniping. Headshots were useful, but seldom fatal. They popped a hundred heads each. Snipers were used to being killers, not annoyers. They were losing the pleasure of their job. Balloon poppers: that's what some wiseacres were starting to call them. But they did their bit anyway. They were good soldiers of a good king.

While the snipe shower fell, orders rang out. The king would be moved back out of mate. The traveling guard would go behind Black Mountain with him, and the kids and the old and their defenders would go with him. The others would tighten the fort and send riders out to try and corral the enemy into a head-to-head fight with the advance guard.

The advance guard armed up, Gomez among them. They had cannons and sabers plundered from the last decadent warring days before the Grand Exodus from the Earth. Killing machines made to last a lifetime, black and evil and without honor and well suited to the task at hand. But you could tell they were made by desperate men. Take the rail rifles for example. One in fifty shots, on average, the damn things would blow up and kill the shooter him or herself. Gomez had fired about twenty rounds off his own gun. He tried to keep it good and clean and well maintained, but that hadn't kept anyone else from triggering a fireball. Choose your shots wisely, was the best advice the tech team could give anyone.

"These are fresh neverdeads, mates. Right out a mass grave next to the ruins of Berlusconia. They'll be risky, but hopefully won't have had the most recent battle tactics fully mastered yet so we'll do a tarantella type of play on them, like we've been talking about."

They nodded, even though at least half of them thought that was a crazily complicated deployment and weren't entirely sure who it would confuse more...them, or the zombies.

They rode out as the camp rapidly disintegrated and got ready to move.

On a hundred strong horses - Arabians, mantis and horned - they pounded out in the blackness, night vision contact lenses painting the battlefield in kiddy crayon hues.

Gomez took a group of ten men for the first strike at the central core. The horses were good and they had lenses too and they never stumbled so Gomez felt safe taking a bit of time to zoom his augmented eyes in on the enemy and inspect them. Lots of meat still on these zombies. They just had a ring of black plastic around their foreheads and then snaky black wires that went down their limbs like an exoskeleton, making them move like puppets. It looked like this was a mass grave from a mass execution within the last few months, a shot through the temple for each of them. There were thousands. It must have taken hours, maybe even days if you included the time taken to bury them.

In Gomez's experience it didn't matter how far away and in how obscure a place people did these mass killings, they would always take the time to bury what they had done.

"Look out!" screamed Schweinsteiner, just as an energy beam burst from the zombie core, shredding all of the flesh off Tamano's horse's head and twisting it practically all the way round.

¡Merda! Zombies with guns. That had probably been a lucky shot but it meant they had to be on the look out for stray projectiles. Gomez looked up to see if there was a good shot waiting for him. There was: four zombs were doing something to the core flesh-processing unit. It looked like it had got jammed on a rock. Gomez locked on his rail rifle, whispered a prayer to the All-Likely, and popped off a shot.

Like piss and lightning the rail gun fired, and did not explode. Supercharged particles crossed space in microseconds obliterating the four zombies, the core unit and chunking up ten nearby corpse people.

A cheer went up and the riders went in to mash up the flesh chunks with horse hooves and keep them from being grafted on the remaining exhumans.

Big old Schweinsteiner got in first and his dirty angry old horse, Brutus, mashed and smashed, making a fine battle-pâté. Meanwhile the rider himself swung his sword in a helix, shielding him from attacks below and from the spray of fleshnet cables that hung in the air like sperm in a womb, hunting for something warm and welcoming.

Tamano went in using her famous low-rider style, dropping to the horses flank and scything legs away from the brittle enemy. "They truly don't like it up 'em!" she cried, and her partner Shalit came bursting in behind with an antique machine gun pulping up the pile of thrashing stump pumpers.

The horses came on again, making this child's play. Unusually easy work.

It took Gomez ten minutes to smell a trap. But once he smelled it he had no doubt.

"The King! The King! Rally to the King!" he yelled, and his men turned in a second and headed back toward the mountain, pushing down the surging, choking certainty that they would arrive too late.

...

Xolo stepped out of his tent, because someone started pulling it down. He had one foot still in the sublime realms and couldn't really take in what was going on behind him. All of the flesh had gone from the camp, just heavy coral left. The big black mountain glowed with superstitious energy. The radiation was gone, but a megablast like that left behind psychic residue that wouldn't be gone until the last man was dead. That's why they camped here. It was thought to scare the dead or anyone who was not partying and living and generating life like the King's tribe tried to do every single pulsing moment of their existence.

Now the people were almost gone, except the slow and greedy who crawled around the carcass looking for greasy leftovers. The mountain was back. It pushed out the subtle sensation of a nuclear explosion. It pushed out the grudge that geological things feel when biological things set them ablaze and shrink their mighty shoulders. It was mad that men had nuked it and so it pushed out slow and limitless hate at them, at their little hairs on their arms and in their ears that made them so cowardly.

The Black Mountain even scared Xolo a little. In space, he felt big, but back here on Earth the part of him that was a lemur in prehistory was predisposed to fear. And the exact form of the thing it feared was this black mountain.

But Xolo just shrugged his shoulders. Fear was ultimately just like the sensation of heat or cold: useful information for survival. He tapped his glove and sent his spaceship cruising into the skies with instructions to map what was going on. Meanwhile he strapped up for battle and headed in the direction of the stragglers. His instructions were to follow the King's affairs, not follow the king's warriors into the battle he could hear far off in the distance. Follow the king, don't do anything to cause trouble for Haja Gukkool and maintain your head in its current state and position. That was the thing to remember.

Fire and rot competed for rule of the night air. Xolo ran well through the dark, skipping over tree roots or fallen waste from the fast fleeing tribe. The battle sounded weird, like a retreat but not quite. His glove pinged him and he looked at the overhead feed from the cameras on his ship. He quickly saw the situation. The warriors were scrambling to get round the mountain to the trap that was waiting for the king. But Xolo had to zoom, twist, enhance and finally even imagine so he could figure out what that trap was.

You could call them sphinxes. Or dragons. Or krakens. Giant animals, made of wires and corpses. Long limbs that were several families interwoven. Heads that were a mesh of black plastic and a dozen scrunched torsos and several kilos of skulls and brains. Tentacles made from one arm holding the stump of another arm and another and another all married by barbed wire.

Big bizarre monster made out of zombie flesh and machines. Nightmares from the ancient past that (it turned out) actually lived here at the end of time.

Five of these sphinxes waited very quietly behind the black mountain for the cautious king. He would be well eaten by the time the brave knights made it back.

Xolo ran faster toward the place where the king was going to die. He was fast, but not fast enough to get there in time. He could call his space ship down, he realized. But he was holding off on doing that. There was the matter of the Conscience Bomb, making him wary about everything he did. He sent his mind back to the time when they were unbreaking his arms and letting him know the terms of the contract they had just signed on his brain.

Get close to the king.

Observe his actions.

Make sure no one else left Earth. Kill anyone who tried.

Report back to Belaarix what he learned.

Let no one know the terms of the contract.

Don't do anything that would harm the Sultan Gukkool or his family.

It was that last clause that was going to kill him. It was foggy. Xolo could see all kinds of ways that saving the king would screw with Gukkool. He knew that the rise of a strong king on Earth, who might fight for the ancient rights that the galactic constitution prescribed, would be bad for all of the space lords. But a king who was dog-meat...that was a good king. Especially when the heir to the throne was a little girl.

Xolo called down the ship. He was going to save the king. His brain began to hum like a window catching bass tones. But the decision was made. He hoped that the foggy clause was foggy enough to fool the bomb in his brain.

The ship landed, with a round gust of wind that he chose to ignore. He got in the ship and pointed it to a high point over black mountain as he strapped himself in at the controls. There were no weapons on board, unfortunately. But the atmospheric flight engines put out lots of plasma. They could maybe do something. He went up in the air thinking. He tried to ignore the buzzing which was now also a rattling, like a boiling pot.

The king was five minutes away from the zombie sphinxes. The knights were twenty minutes ride away. Xolo was in a golden spaceship trying to stop his brain from killing him.

Life was born of simple elements but that was a long, long time ago.

# Chapter 12

Dr Quirg worked. She took no pleasure from torturing a synthetic mind. It was for that reason that she was doing this job lying naked on a vibrating lounge chair with a pitcher of margarita. She found she needed at least a little bit of pleasure to work effectively.

She was inside the projection cranium. The minions had done their work and been dismissed. The team had successfully filtered down to the core entry points of what was now being referred to as the Yacht Persona.

Milkison was convinced that it was a misdirection or the memory of a hallucination. Milkison was a fool and always had been and Quirg only kept her around because she mixed a good margarita.

Quirg knew the ineffable sensation of reality. She could feel the impression of randomness that was the fingerprint of truth, an impression of randomness that took billions of years of constant iterations of the laws of physics to produce and that you could not fake in any simulator.

She also knew the human taint of sexual fetishism when she smelled it. She smelled it on the small ivory bust of a mermaid in the cabin on the yacht. It had pierced nipples and buck teeth and whenever she scanned across that part of the data stream she got a good sniff of a thing that the captain of the ship never masturbated over exactly, but which he liked to have in the room when he did.

You couldn't simulate this stuff.

But you couldn't prove it either. And you couldn't crack through to the next level of the data with this kind of proof point. She needed to find a way to get out of the cabin, explore the rest of the yacht and somehow find a photo or a reflection of 'Xolo's' true face. Then the Xolo parapersonality would collapse and the analysis machines would suddenly have tons of data on 'Yachtsman.'

She had an idea suddenly. She would do a slight data tampering. It would be within acceptable tolerances of the Galactic Artificial Intelligences Association: it would not risk creating a robotic intelligence and it would not even sully her forensics. It was tiny. She did an overwrite and moved the mermaid to the edge of the shelf, teetering with each wave closer to destruction.

Yachtsman would stand and walk over to the door. The glass door.

The edit was in. She played a sim in real time. Sim opened first person. Looking down at the dagger on the table. Just like always. Then looked up to the mermaid after a while. And fuck! The Mermaid was going to fall off!

Meanwhile Quirg's lounge chair started vibrating like crazy. She turned it down: it was distracting. Work was interesting enough at the present moment to keep her stimulated.

Yachtsman's world was projected on the cranium. The cranium was at a perfect room temperature. She was buzzing on margarita. She lost her identity, gave it over to the projection.

She (as Yachtsman)(so 'he') walked over to the Mermaid and pushed it back on the shelf and the shelf turned on and magnetized the mermaid down safely. Then he turned around and saw a glimpse of himself in the door. A black goatee on a bloated face. A naval uniform of some kind. But then he turned back and looked at that shelf. There was no way that mermaid could have come loose unless someone had been in here.

He reached to his belt for a pistol and flashed it around the room, breathing and blood flow both peaking.

Part of Quirg was bumped free of the immersion within the simulation. She had gone too far in her manipulations. She was in FanFic territory now. This would never hold up in a court of law. But it didn't have to. It just had to convince Counselor Boyle and then she would be rewarded by a night in a dank interspecies dungeon of her choice. So she swigged a quick glass of margarita and by the time the cold tingling in her nipples had faded, she was back in the simulation.

He kicked open the glass door, which opened reflexively, iris-style and made him fall arse over tit. But back to his feet he got and headed up to the deck. When he got to the deck he saw an empty ocean as far as the eye could see. A sensation floated up from below his perceptions: a perception filter. [Fantastic! Lower levels were emerging!] The perception filter made the emptiness even emptier: made it clear that there was nothing but ocean on this entire planet, and that it was in a very empty part of space and that no one ever came here either.

He was almost disappointed that no one was on the yacht, and that he found no bombs when he scanned. Had he been forgotten already? He slumped down on a bench and looked up at the sky, full of orange peel streaks.

He looked up through a polymer canopy at the limp sails and the droopy flag that still bore his crest. His family crest and the crest of his rebel army. A crest known by all across the galaxy.

"Fuck!" shouted Quirg and jumped out of the lounger and then out of the cranium, jiggling with panicked sprinting.

After she left the sim ran on. The clouds jumped around a little. A black spider descended from the sky, with little flashes of white fire at its feet.

# Chapter 13

Xolo's ship dove from the sky of Earth (which sounds a bit funny if you don't come to Earth much. Sort of oxymoronic.)

The biggest sphinx was his target. And he almost skimmed across its back before kicking in maximum thrust and blowing its back and belly into a powder, collapsing it into two kicking pairs of legs and a futile head.

Xolo pulled back on his stick, avoiding the planet as best he could. The gold ship shuddered. It hated gravity and atmosphere and there was a chance it would crack and when one of these bad boys cracked that was pretty much the end of the story.

But it held together and traced a big brittle 'O' in the air, illuminated by the ion flames on the back of the ship.

In the cockpit, Xolo spat out blood, which hurtled sideways to decorate a wall as he barrel rolled around for his second attack. Was the blood he spat due to the Gs he was cranking or from his increasingly noticeable brain buzz?

Outside the zombie sphinxes' howls filled the night. The noises reached the king and his men and they stopped dead. Something the fuck was going on, but what the fuck was TBD.

Xolo turned his ship round once more. This trick was not going to work four more times. But maybe once more would be worth trying. He locked on the one that had already stopped baying at him and was also trying to lock plasma grenades on Xolo's ship right now.

Xolo jinked left and right, up and down, but he had to stay in a certain tunnel or he was going to miss the bugger. He wove around his tunnel, responding to signals from his radar and from his eyes. The sphinx chased him around with a little lock on cursor, but its multitask mind was also able to jump and spring around. Two mad things of flesh and steel locking and hopping and rolling.

Sphinx grenades launched. One clipped Xolo's wing, three went off to unknown adventures. The grenade blew. Xolo reacted. Took his ship down low, through the legs of the sphinx. Then thrusted, went up and spat fire along his belly, catching some key engine and atomizing this sphinx definitively.

Xolo's engine stalled. Fast and high, looking down at the black mountain. There would be no walking away from a landing like this.

What to do, what to do?

Run a quick diagnostic check. Any chance of getting those engines back on? No, not in time. No ejector. Too small. Might as well take one of them with him. He could steer enough to do that. He locked his eyes onto the fattest sphinx, the one that actually looked more like an octopus.

Not the death he had envisioned.

Closer and closer, but the octopus sphinx was fast and had a long reach. Tentacles locked onto him, trying to deflect his path. Xolo had already allowed for that, stupid sphinx. The golden ship hit it right in its fat fleshy mantle, blowing human shaped chunks hundreds of meters into the air.

The pile of bodies and junk burned. The other sphinxes got the picture that the ambush was well and truly disrupted so they galloped round the mountain to see if they could scoop up the king that way.

The golden ship burned inside all the bodies and wires and engines at the foot of the black mountain.

Xolo's head was killing him.

He climbed out of the wreckage basically intact. Tentacles and then a huge pile of flesh had brought the crash to a point where the airbags had been able to do their job well. The ship was a goner, but Xolo was not. However, soon he probably would be. Three sphinxes was right at the limit of what the Conscience Bomb could turn a blind eye to. Although Gukkool had not sent those sphinxes it was clear to anyone with half a brain that Xolo was bending the rules. The Conscience Bomb teetered on the edge of taking Xolo's head smooth off, as it was born to do. His cybernetic DNA screamed for the moment of ecstasy. But his life experience in this fascinating mind held him back. Xolo's head screamed with agony as the decision played out in a molecular computer smeared in his grey matter.

Xolo's head was killing him.

He staggered around the black mountain. Hatred of one man was unbecoming of a geological structure. But the mountain did seem to look at him with particular hatred as he shambled after the Sphinxes.

Why didn't Xolo walk away? Why didn't he sit down and think bad thoughts about the king?

On the whole he was still dealing with a busy couple of days. Then there was the part of him that said, "Go take a couple of potshots at the King and see what happens."

He walked long. The battle raged without Xolo for a while. It was bloody and it was furious. Men and women lived and died. Zombies were raised, chunked, spliced, mixed, bred, burned, buried, shredded, feared, hated, grappled, kicked, victorious, defeated, slowly slowly beaten,

Rail rifles ripped apart the two remaining sphinxes. Five soldiers were killed by their own guns going off. Victory, death and pyre all in one fluid motion.

No one we are focusing on though. Statistical people.

The battle was done by the time Xolo turned up, face bright red, temples bulging. The remaining zombies were being put through wood chippers. Their faces chomped like an old man putting his dentures in as you loaded them in the machine. Or like lobsters going in a pot. Or like maggots. Or like a flag flapping in the wind. Or like a flashing light. Or like nothing.

Gomez galloped over to Xolo and then dismounted in a flashy way and ran to embrace him.

"Godlike, man. Absolutely godlike! They'll sing this song as long as the kingdom endures. It'll go like...

"Xolo?"

Xolo's face was full of muscles full of blood and his skin was doing basically nothing to hide the fact, His eyes looked dry as wasabi peas.

"Egads! What did they do to you? You're not turning zombie, are ye? No...it doesn't go like this. What is it? What is it?"

Xolo couldn't really speak. He was using all of his mental faculties to contain the intruder. It was a hostage negotiation in his brain.

But there were two words he wanted to get out. He looked out for a second when the Conscience Bomb was distracted. Then he got them out.

"Slap. Me."

Gomez was not the type to bluster, "W-w-what?": he just plain slapped Xolo.

Then he didn't wait to be invited to do it again. He slapped and slapped and slapped.

A tide of survival instincts kicked in. The Conscience Bomb was flooded with confusion.

Xolo took a deep breath and deep in his brain he tore at the edge of his identity. He pulled and pulled and pulled. Threads unraveled.

The Conscience Bomb looked around, panicked. His universe was unthreading and he went with it. He saw Xolo disintegrate and he couldn't even get it up enough to self-destruct. Betrayed and disappointed, the bomb died as Xolo disappeared, flushed out of every brain cell in less time than it takes to tell it.

Xolo was gone.

...

The sun rose. The camp rebuilt, but lightly like they did when they suspected a new day might bring a new attack. It was likely that the killing fields of Berlusconia were depleted, but they couldn't relax.

Xolo received special care. Xolo's body. His brain was not operational. It showed activity but formless activity, like an unstructured sea just before the dawn of life. All the structures for making structures were there, but the mysterious chain reaction, the catalyst of life, had not yet stumbled onto the scene. Possibly it never would. The brain is a small ocean, compared to a planet; a tiny canvas.

The King stopped by to pay his silent respects. Sunny held Xolo's hand for a long time, but her face was impassive. So either the face or the hand was putting on a show.

It was the face.

...

As Xolo breathed pointlessly on Earth, a space fleet was massing on the edges of Gukkool space. It massed recklessly, confident in the security of its sector to protect it about any spies who might report to the other potentates what they were doing. One hundred armed ships breathed fire in the vacuum of the edge of the AA1. Admiral Woo was ready to take the dive with his men, just waiting for the final word from Counselor Magrega, whose holo-puppet sat tapping her foot on the bridge of his ship, the Magnificent Dragon Katana.

On the yacht, a coconut was cracked open.

The holo-puppet stepped to her feet, suddenly loaded with thoughts from a faraway planet.

"Prepare for the invasion of Earth and the capture of the Bolivar of Space, the Hated Count Boa Morte!" she screeched.

Woo gave the order. Beautiful and ugly star dragons plunged into a black hole, full of people ready for a blood letting since the day they were born.

# Chapter 14

You see, all had not always been peaceful and sexually satisfying for the mega rich. There's always one privileged guy who wants to spoil it for everyone. Going all the way back to Siddhartha - who was peaceful, at least - there's a rich guy who is just waiting for the chance to mess everything up. Sometimes he is just not rich enough and wants to get a bigger slice. Other times he is plenty rich and seeks something else, some überhobby like universal peace. You'll hear different characterizations of where Count Feliz Boa Morte fit in.

There was always something a bit suspect about the Boa Mortes. They never made their own planet. Oh no. Instead they had to 'conquer' a planet that someone else had messed up, either by mismanaging their terraforming Titans or by unleashing ill-considered GMOs to breed there. If a Boa Morte found an ocean planet full of sea dragons, that was like their birthday. A young countess or count would be sent down on a quest, armed only with a steed or a bark and what they could carry. They would tame that planet. But not too much. They would leave enough hyperfauna that they could never just cruise around in peace. If you asked them they would call it respect for the planet. In actuality it was more like keeping just enough beasts around that they didn't get too bored.

There was always one tall blonde female Boa Morte throwing a spear through something. There was also always a painter at hand to capture her grandeur, it seemed.

Although his mother was once such big blonde, brown skinned woman, Count Feliz Boa Morte was thin and pale skinned with black hair that he grew in the womb and never lost. But he killed serpents too, and sailed around planets using just stars, winds and wits. And he could sing a song that would have them all weeping on the decks about the long journey from Earth, and the holes in space and the loss of what it meant to be alive.

But he didn't just sing those songs and get drunk and go and screw below the decks. He stayed on the deck and thought about the unnatural plague of weakened humanity, soft fantasy pleasure slugs making planets all cushy. He knew that he might be one of the only young men with muscular arms who looked a thing in the eye when he killed it. And he knew that even his own virile and honorable life sat on a pyramid of chained up data slaves. He wanted to bring it all down.

He walked through a marble palace where his uncle was watching TV, the most data rich transaction Feliz and his family ever exposed themselves to. It was a sequence of a plant growing somewhere and a blue bee spiraling into its trumpet. Feliz stopped and looked over his uncle's shoulder. This was the uncle who had broken tusks off the boars of Hyperia.

"What's up, uncle?"

"Nothing much, young Feliz. Resting. Watching a flower."

"We have real flowers here."

"Don't like flowers much."

"Why do we watch TV, uncle?"

"Us Boa Mortes?"

"Our whole caste. We won't use the internet, because that is beneath us, but we watch TV. We won't have robots, but we'll have slaves."

"Your question just got too complicated, buddy. Take a breath."

"There is something going on," he said.

Then he had a thought-flash that he couldn't quite figure out. It was like,<<Tuning the common consciousness to stop the dream galaxy from falling apart.>> He had no idea what that meant. There was a troubling alien thought in his head. Like a tumor or a slug or something.

"Uncle...what is it for? The space empire. Why did we leave Earth? Why do we still have poor people?"

"What the fuck? Fuck off!"

SO BEGAN THE REVOLUTION!

Boa Morte contacted young princes and princesses across family lines. His appeal was simple "Bring down the families, unify the human race, let's all enjoy the treasure of space together."

Soon there was a fleet of two-hundred fast, dangerous ships following the Boa Morte Revolution. They tore along the spacelanes and came out on any exposed artificial pleasure planet and demanded that its inhabitants join their quest. The inhabitants always just agreed because they were terrified of these space pirates and because they had nothing to do. After they agreed they read the small print: no more slaves, no more using people's brains as computers, equality, no more genocide farming of any kind.

What were you going to do at that point? You were already in space with a uniform and a sword.

The revolution continued.

Battered by the uprising, several space potentates met via tactile holograms. Even that was disgusting to some of them but they had to show they were serious. The hologram hands shook. Cheeks were kissed. Holospittle was left behind. It seemed the grossest potentates had the most HD holograms.

Meseret was there, big, black and beautiful. Old Haja was there, tiger-striped tattoo skin, fat and foul. Wales was there, red and mad. Zheng was there, with her braid trailing on the floor. And of course Boa Morte Sr. (as they now called him – he had been overshadowed by his son) was there. His coffee colored hands twitched unbecomingly: it was clear he was heavily medicated.

Old Haja spoke first. "Kill them. All of them. Daughters, sons, whatever. Send a thousand ships. Bend black holes and suck them up. Leave no one alive. Why are we even having this discussion? I have three-hundred ships to send you."

Meseret spoke next. "Remind me to never walk by your side in a jungle. Are we sure this is what it seems? Of all the brainless aristocrats in the universe, we are supposed to believe that a Boa Morte has decided to advance the human race? Can muscle cells think, suddenly? This is the most obvious trap I've ever seen. Which of you is playing the puppet with poor Boa Morte here? You'll burn if you come near my planets or try and touch the Earth. I'll speak no more, but I'll sit back and just watch you play yourselves." [She indeed did.]

They talked some more. They came up with a plan. First kill young Feliz Boa Morte. Assassination style. Then bring their children home. Then basically lobotomize them. More TV, more money. No more decision-making. Decision making would be distributed among a trusted cadre that would be in layers and the lower layers would be fully in the headnet and could be spied on well. But big decisions had to be made only by the families, the hereditary core. No one was willing to give that up. That's when the whole 'select a piece of fruit' system was born. Maybe their children would never know the procedure behind the fruit and never know the meaning and actions encoded by their trusted counselors in their choice of meal. But it was their children that were choosing the fruit and running the worlds, not some damned machines. Fuck robots!

They found out the hard way that Boa Mortes are tricky to kill. Boa Morte led them on chases that terminated in the immense surprise of solar flares. His men floated through space in little bubbles and then were suddenly upon them in their silver ships, killing their dudes.

He loved to gatecrash meetings about him, put a bullet in someone's head and then slam the mic on the ground.

It was all falling apart. Space was on the verge of becoming just space again. It had been made into a big fat cushion for rich people, but now this ungrateful bastard was pissing all over it.

Of course the potentates started to in-fight too. Some of them were disintegrated from space, even. From the dust clouds they called the Titans - their planet-making machines - and got a hair's breadth away from unleashing them on each others worlds to scar and crack them. The huge biological planet-making machines, those vast colonies of plasma beings, the only other living thing in the universe, the things that they probably should have called God: they nearly called them out of their heaven to kill each other. They nearly gave a taste of human blood to them. Truly these were desperate times.

The galaxy was on fire. Blackwarps were crumbling. Back on earth, data farmers started to get messages exhorting them to tear off their eyephones. The starfleet of Boa Morte danced through space where others chugged like trains and they ripped enemies apart like piranhas on cattle.

Then it was over.

Very quickly. And with no fanfare, of course. Things went back to normal, except the aforementioned fruit-based decision system was implemented. Boa Morte was gone. His data was wiped as best as it could be, although traces of him echoed around the nets. He had been a hologram printed on everything for a while and gobbets of his spirit popped up from time to time in the system.

He was not defeated. The potentates were as confused as anybody by what happened. And when their children came home to be brainwashed back to happier times the children didn't know either. All that was known was that Boa Morte and his closest guard headed off on a secret mission and did not come back.

Years passed. At first every day without him was defined by that fact. But soon all the days were days without him. He was as good as dead. He was lost in space. Better than dead.

So the discovery that the man beneath the artificial Xolo personality was none other than Count Feliz Boa Morte was terrible, terrible news and thoroughly justified the entirely illegal and inflammatory invasion of Earth to bring back his body.

Magrega and Dubloon were taking the gamble of their lives, but they were tired of life serving the most idiotic son of the Old Haja. With this move they would either sign their death certificate, or vault to the highest ranks of galactic power.

And the coconut had been split: the blitzkrieg was begun.

# Chapter 15

Moving so many ships through subspace and successfully coming back out requires a lot of brainpower, navigation skills and reassuring of reality. The Earth brain farmer grid almost browned out. The farmers were confused and tired. They barely ate that day. Bits of the entire universe kept flying through their minds. Five thousand ghosts begged to come back to life nearby the farmers' planet.

Tamano noticed it first. Her parents were farmers who lived nearby. She was visiting them and feeding them a simple nut soup when she noticed them doing a faded moonwalk around their hovel. Her mother slowly strolled to her bed and started endlessly smoothing the sheets, getting a millimeter closer to perfection every time she smoothed. Her father started mouthing long complicated numbers and sometimes a word or two "dragon", "earth", "remember", "coordinates."

Tamano's cheekbones grew even sharper. She had tried tearing their eyephones out before but her parents didn't like it. The feeling of unused brain capacity to them was like the feeling you or I would have if pounds of grey matter hung out of our ear holes. It was too late for them.

But still, this unusual activity worried her. She left them in their stupor and galloped to the new camp, passing a few more similarly confused Terrans on the way, truly blind and deaf now the implants on their heads were sucking up all perception.

Back at the camp she ran into Gomez who was sharpening a sword as he hung out with the guards outside Xolo's tent.

"Gomez. Bad stuff is happening."

Gomez looked up. "It's piling up isn't it? What is it now?"

"The headnet is overloading. Some big operation is going on. It has to be space travel...nothing else eats so much data... even the talent shows."

"You think it has something to do with us? Space is...don't make me say 'space is big.'"

"Anytime anyone moves that much metal around space, it has something to do with Earth."

"True."

"And the princess just got back from an illegal trip out there, y'know. And then there's this Xolo guy..."

"Stud!"

"Total. But, look where's the king. Is he in his throne room."

"Yes. C'mon. Let's go get him. Tell him not only are the dead rising but also the sky is falling down. And it looks like rain."

"Thanks Gomez. I like practicing bad news with a fool."

"You're welcome."

...

The king's brow was heavy. He was in thought after he heard the news. Think as he might, even he, the king of Earth, could not fight the data farmers' thoughts as they carried the probability of a marauding space fleet through long mathematical knots.

"I'm thinking we should scatter, Tamano," he said as he looked up at the tall, beautiful rider who he had occasionally ridden and been ridden by. He would miss her in the days on the run, before they killed him.

Tamano and Gomez looked at each other in embarrassment. The King was prone to these moments of doubt, especially when Sunny was not around.

Gomez looked at the king, waiting for him to hit bottom and then get the spark that would bring him roaring back to life.

Gomez needed to see that. His nature was to ride wild. When he met the king he had been roaming around on his mantis horse, playing his guitar, finding ladies who weren't paired up and plugged in yet and occasionally getting in a scrap with gangs of soil pirates and road warriors.

Then one day he saw the king and his knights roaring down a hill and pulverizing the skull clan, a clutch of flesh-eating throwbacks who had almost depopulated the spike of Italy.

The king was fast, his spirit moved so fast that his horse had to race to keep up with him. And he was cool: compassionate. Any skull face who would wipe off his paint and file his teeth flat again could roll with the human army.

At the end of that battle Gomez had been amazed to find himself standing in the wreckage. He couldn't remember at what point he had ridden in to fight by the king's side and when everyone was congratulating him for rescuing the big man, it was already like a breakfast-faded dream.

Two years had followed. Amazing years. They had marched around the Mediterranean and established strong communities, happy humans. No bloody things stuck in their eyes and ears, not RePeeting celebrities' proclamations and random thoughts, not figuring out things that fat people needed solved so they could breed a new species to eat.

Then came the zombies. From nowhere they came, on a day like any other. The dead of the King's own wars made up the meat of the first waves. Horrible sight. Heavy casualties. But the King grew even stronger. And when he came up with the plan to challenge the status quo and make a space-alliance to clean up the planet, no-one had a moment's doubt because the told them about it from astride a table in a voice like a song.

Now he had lost it. The sky was falling in. The gamble had failed. Death was probably coming from the sky, and it was definitely coming up from below the soil. The king could not handle this death sandwich.

Gomez looked at Tamano. He saw the look on her face. It was exactly how he felt. The feeling of a question mark without a question.

Sunny came in the room. They bowed. It refreshed the mind: the flush of blood and the comfort of courtesy.

"Father, if I may, Xolo is regaining consciousness and he is asking for you."

The king's usual tenderness was sounding a bit itchy. "We have an alien invasion about to happen we think, my dear."

"So I think you should probably want to talk to the galaxy's greatest killer then, shouldn't you father."

He smiled. There was steel in his spine again. He hoisted her on his hip and off they went. Gomez and Tamano were three steps behind. Gomez said to Tamano, "Shit is about to get real."

Tamano would have had sex with Gomez over a year ago if he had not had the habit of saying that shit was about to get real. She considered that a deal breaker.

# Chapter 16

Xolo sat up. Xolo put his feet on the ground. Xolo had stubble on his chin. Xolo was pale. Xolo looked up.

"Xolo?" said the king.

"Xolo?" said Xolo.

"I don't speak your language, friend," he continued. "Do you speak the common tongue?"

The king looked a bit irritated. It was interesting how people could be irritated no matter what was going on. You could be having the best sex ever and something could irritate you – like a fly on your ass. Or you could be in a trench full of corpses with rockets raining down and still something could irritate you. It could also be a fly, actually.

Flies and people, eh?

Flies literally do not know what people are, though,

Anyway...

"Yes. I speak the common tongue," replied the king.

"And you speak it like an Earthman. But you walk like a leader...not a slave. I feel that much has passed here while I slept," replied Xolo with firmness.

"Not really. Space invasion, maybe," said Gomez.

Xolo walked over to Gomez.

"The invasion of Earth? How long have I been out?"

"A few hours."

"And where is my fleet? Have they been summoned?"

"I didn't know you had a fleet."

Xolo put a hand on Gomez's shoulder and compassionately ignored him.

"Friend," he said to the king, "I need you to tell me what is happening and I shall do all I can to assist you."

The king stepped forward. "It seems that my mission into space to call for Meseret's aid to clean up our planet is leading to an invasion by one of the great powers."

"Great, my balls!" he said, before noticing Sunny and blushing a little. "Lowly treacherous powers. She broke my heart, she did. Made me think she was ready to change the galaxy. But she lost her nerve. Then I lost mine. You can feel it, when it's gone. Suddenly you'd dare a thousand bullets but not a single pair of eyes on your face. Even space feels full of eyes when your nerve has gone."

Sunny was worried. Sunny was aware that she had a need for father figures. For a long time her father had been great for that. She'd wave him away from the tent knowing he would crack the enemy in two but join the world together one day. She'd bounced on his lap and swam in his stories in the long evenings of victory.

When had he started to lose it: the magic? Probably after the zombies came on the scene. The story changed from the rebirth of the human race to the last desperate battles. He wasn't scared, he wasn't existentially challenged. He just wasn't into it anymore. His speeches were lackluster, his decisions built on sighs. He wrote his battle plans on napkins and practiced throwing his spear at trees rather than walk among the masses, inspiring and healing. His beard grew heavy on his chest, like a bib.

The old fire came on from time to time, enough that only his inner circle noticed anything at all and they were quick to chalk it up to fatigue and reassure each other that the old king would be back any day now, if they ever got a good break from the war.

Sunny saw more than other people though. She always had. People said, "she's been here before," but in her heart she felt like the opposite was true: she had never been here before. She was a new soul and was not habituated to life's stupid gimmicks.

Sunny saw that her dad was not ready for a faceless, meaningless enemy: a virus in the soil from an age in history he didn't much care for. He saw himself in the mold of the pre-industrial age: a warrior king with horses and swords and guns only in so much as they were essentially swords.

It had been her idea to contact Meseret. From everything Sunny had read about her, she was the potentate who had most love for the home world and least love for the brainslave trade. Maybe really though she just wanted to leave home. At twelve, but looking ten, she was ready to abandon everything rather than watch it all get moldy and die. Maybe her dad knew what she was up to because he made her take her brothers along, like in ancient times when they would make you take an enormous lump of wood with a key on it with you when you used someone else's privy (or so she had read.)

So basically she had latched onto Xolo hard. The effortless way he had taken them under his wing, and the righteous, mathematical purity of his life mission were exactly what she craved.

Now he was a fruitcake. Would the cycle begin again with some other man or was she ready to go it alone now, she wondered.

Xolo turned to face the room. He had his hands on his hips and his chest puffed out and looked really different than before the battle of Black Mountain.

"But I have a question that must be answered before anything else. How did you get me here from my ship? By force? Am I among kidnappers?"

"Your space ship crashed during the battle, Xolo."

"I mean my real ship. The royal yacht. I insist that you tell me how I was found and how I was taken. And make the answers good. And stop calling me Xolo, whatever that means."

Everyone in the room was quiet except Gomez, because he liked to get to the bottom of things and connect with people. "We don't know about any yacht, man. And you told us to call you Xolo. So what do we call you then."

"Call me Feliz if you like...or Boa Morte. But if you don't start talking about how you brought me here to Earth then you'll soon call me your doom."

"Oh shit," said Gomez.

...

In space the first shadows of the space fleet arrived. Gassy black clouds of so-called reality steam. Objects intending to exist pushed up subspace and Hawking radiation and post-Hawking particles fizzed around the intrusion. Subspace was everywhere, space was somewhere. It was hard to come from one to the other. There was an endlessly stretched nothing that had been imprinted with a memory. The memory was a fleet of starships. That memory was carved on the subconscious of reality, known also as the blackwarp. Up in realspace, millions of people were being paid to think about the ships, but to think about them being near Earth. The universe was still skeptical about this proposition. The journey was going slowly.

...

No one knew what to do with this new state of affairs. Boa Morte, even, was perplexed. After talking with these earth people for a while it was clear that at least a year of his memory, probably more, was gone. He had no idea why he had transformed himself into this Xolo. The last he remembered was the state of misery, the living suicide of the yacht. Had something happened to wake him up? Some possibility of pulling it off and shaking up the galaxy? Had he transformed himself into an inhuman killing machine, an independent agent who couldn't be bribed or betrayed? That made sense. To die but live. To kill but not to judge. It appealed to him. He smiled at that thought...his past appealed to him.

He looked up at them and they saw the weird sparkle in the eye that they had also seen back when he was Xolo. It sparked the room.

"My new friends, I can't claim to fully know my plan yet, but I hope it will come back to me soon. But it is clear that I have set a trap here. The Gukkools are coming to get me, breaking the truce and risking the ire of Meseret and the others. But if they can't catch me and wave my head on a pike, then they'll trigger a holy war by coming here. They must be praying to get in and out before anyone notices, snatch me and drag me back. They surely expect zero resistance from earth, but they are bringing a fleet so they must think I have some ships up my sleeve. They'll expect an attack from space, not from the ground. We have a chance! A fighting chance!"

"Not really," said Tamano, sitting disruptively with one leg out, chewing on a root. "We can only fight on the ground. They can burn us to cinders once they figure out there's no space ambush coming."

She spat out a coil of fiber that expanded slowly after the spit and you could hear it with your eyes, crackling.

"So much for the Bolivar of the Spaceways," she continued. "Also, I have no idea what happened to the original 'Bolivar.' Did he die in some awful battle with a bunch of credulous suckers? Can we go and hassle a data farmer and ask him?"

Gomez was not happy about all this. If he had ever slept with Tamano, he would give her a look now to tell her to be quiet and let the king decide. They would have their own language.

He tried an eyebrow raise but it was kind of just like flashing a light. Noticeable but semantically weak. He needed that special language.

Boa Morte walked over to the king. "I'm hearing you have no space fleet. In the time left to us, we need to come up with a way of blasting them down from the ground. What have you got?"

The king grabbed Boa Morte by the arm. "We've nothing, Count. We've got mainly one on one weapons. Our battle has been against men, and lately against these zombies."

Boa Morte went quiet. Even Tamano...even Sunny, surrendered to the awful extreme of desperation that is called 'hope.'

"Zombies....zombies. I never fought a zombie. No one ever fought a zombie. Are they hard to beat."

The King paused.

The king laughed.

The king roared.

The king threw his daughter in the air.

"IMPOSSIBLE!" he roared.

## Chapter 17

The weaponization of zombies by the forces of the Earth had now been fully conceptualized. There was now the challenge of gathering pure zombie.

They headed out in the rain. Above them, the likeliness of genocide asserted itself.

Boa Morte took the lead, Tamano and Gomez in the next rank. Twenty other special forces troops behind. The absolute best of the best. Killers without will or ego. Samurai.

They crossed the hills and saw the remains of a city, slanted to one side like it was waiting impatiently for its turn to piss. Marble and concrete are equals when they lie in the dirt of disgrace. The beauty of this city was gone somewhere, freed like a genie.

They kept their horses pounding. They had a map that they had pulled out of 'Xolo's' ship plus some data they finagled out of Tamano's parents. They figured out the nearest big zombie birth node - the kind of thing they typically cautiously retreated from - and they rode there.

They started to ride down death rows. They saw people and then they saw rivers of meat and then they saw people and then they looked at their own hands and they saw...what?

They blasted and chopped and hacked and then when they got tired they stopped and thought they might die but they didn't because the zombies just streamed out, all chained up like three blind mice. Or three thousand.

Weird green and black chains of enemy dead skirted them. They threaded the needle of obliteration. They passed through valleys with foggy eyeballs.

"The deeper we go, the blacker and more cybernetic it gets," noted Boa Morte. He was right: it was probably fifty percent cybernetic by now. Across the fields lay thick black fingers of a hand big enough for a man to spend his whole life there. Tamano took the lead for a while. She could hear the whistling of the occasional attacks: big shiny black pillars that would fall and blast a rain of heads at them, nibbling and nutting heads. Heads on the floor, the carpet of this time in their lives. Gomez was laughing for no reason as they walked through a field of people bits.

"Who am I?" he said

Tamano looked at him like he was a fool. Her fool. She was student of history. She knew that a few hundred years ago they would have been surfers or backpackers together, full of love for life, each other, a little restaurant that no one went to. God, it stank of nearly death here!

They came over a crest. They saw a black ball the size of a town, with ten dicks stuck in the ground, finding bones and milling the pus out of exflesh. Gomez was looking at a zombie face from perhaps a meter away. It was not unlike his in the way it looked. But it reacted to him like a fast mushroom. They were surrounded by dazed zombies who had not yet been sent a mission.

Tamano turned to Boa Morte. "Think fast Bolivar, because eventually these beasts will remember to attack us and then your legend will be about how you became the smallest and most widely spread man who ever lived."

"We ride!" he said.

Boa Morte had never ridden a mantis horse before this expedition began but riding and sailing and flying were in his blood. With confidence and smart dodging when new corpses came shooting up from the ground he took them through the fields of shambling cadavers deep into where they wanted to go but eventually there was a point where he had to stop.

They saw something different than the chains of human corpses that they had skirted for the past few hours. Instead there were half a dozen huge armored trolls. Each one was three meters tall, with a large square jawed head. Their bodies were covered with a colony of plastic and metal extracted from the great trashifers that ran beneath the earth, full of twenty-first century treasure. In addition, through the little gaps around the joints, the warriors could see innovative muscle structures that looked both fast and strong. The trolls patrolled and their movements alternated between the heavy rumble of a rhino and agile spurts of monkey when they hit rough terrain. They were armed with axes and some kind of rocket launchers on their backs.

Tamano looked over to Boa Morte. He was rubbing his long thin nose as he hid behind a boulder. His breathing was imperceptible.

"Working on another suicide plan, Xolo?" she whispered.

"Call him Boa Morte, Tammy," winked Gomez from behind his own, less secure looking boulder.

"You think those rocket launchers grow organically out of their bodies?" asked Boa Morte softly and calmly. He spoke like he was in the middle of a painting. In the middle of painting a painting. Not in the middle of being in a painting. But, yes, he was static. The movement of his lips could have been an acrylic illusion.

And what beautiful light. It came under the clouds somehow, arcing beneath their glower.

Gomez had good eyes and knew zombie biology well. "Yes, I think so. When they move their arms, those side muscles twitch and the launchers twitch a bit. I think they have internal ammo stores that feed from their chest cavities and load up the launchers."

"So you are telling me that our enemies are literally full of explosives?"

"That's one way of looking at it."

For the next twenty minutes the team spread itself out in sniping positions. Three shooters per team, each trying to make an impossible shot that would fuse up or blow out the cannon. When they heard the owl cry, they would take the shot.

There was no grass for a mile, let alone a tree. But the was plenty of wreckage. Humans are even harder to see amid wreckage than they are in nature. They all got a good vantage point.

HOOT!

Twenty-three shots rang out in a ripple of reaction times.

The trolls staggered. One popped. The one next to it popped too and then became a fireball. The first one became a fireball too. Further away one of them ripped in half and then turned into two fireballs. One started shooting fire out of his cannons, but had no strategy to deal with it.

That left three on the field. The human soldiers roared! Their chance of death had just halved. It was still fucking high, but it was important to celebrate life's successes in the moment.

They jumped out for the fight. An RPG killed two of them in a second. Looking on the bright side, the troll who fired it also disintegrated at around the same time. Boa Morte ran in fast, wishing they hadn't had to tie up the horses far away. His troll flexed and flexed but no rockets came out. Caught in the familiar loop of shattered dreams, he was a statue basically waiting for a parkour kill. Boa Morte ran up his leg, shoved a gun deep into his armpit, fired, kept running and got about ten yards away before the heat and the blast smashed him on the back. A compact disk hit him on the left buttock at one hundred kilometers per hour. Could have been worse.

The special forces guy with the red Mohawk got too close to his troll and got an axe planted right in the middle of the tempting target of his hairstyle. He split like a banana peel all the way down to his pelvis and his blood fell like a bomb. Screaming, Gomez rolled the dice again and let off his rail-rifle, blowing the troll's legs off which let the angry humans swarm on him like beetles, stabbing and gouging.

The battle with the remaining troll was slow. They attacked him from a distance and ran. No one wanted to get killed by this guy. Not fear but a dislike of battle irony moved them.

Two minutes later he was burning.

The twenty survivors headed into the big black ball through one of its many honeycomb entryways.

When they got in it, and noticed the way it throbbed, it occurred to them that all this thing would have to do was suddenly contract and they would all be dripping out of the bottom of it.

The only thing that reassured them was that the zombies today were acting dafter than ever.

"I wonder if the huge space jump is somehow affecting their brains?" pondered Boa Morte as he clambered up over some glistening horizontal bars and climbed deeper into this lung cancer surrounding them.

"We don't think they use the headnet," said Tamano. "So they don't get a bandwidth hit from the jump."

"They have their own data supply?"

"Yeah. It's not so good though. Otherwise we'd all be dead."

"I like your attitude."

(She had been trying to be negative, but on reflection saw that she had got it wrong. Was that just clumsiness, she wondered, or was something about today inspiring her. Something about the strange battles they'd been having so close to where she was born and had grown and had hidden from all of the grown ups who wanted to operate on her head.)

After an hour or so they found themselves in a strange chamber full of chairs and televisions. It was brightly lit and it hummed. It almost seemed like a lure in a giant Venus flytrap. What would happen to you on the lovely chair in front of the pallid light of the little television?

They scanned and popped around all the nooks and crannies, backing each other up. Even though they couldn't really rule out the possibility that the room would suddenly swallow them like a small bunch of grapes, they carried out their responsibilities anyway.

"What are we looking at, jefe?" asked Gomez as he looked down his gun sights at this strangely soothing place.

"It looks a lot like an early twenty-first century workplace," said Boa Morte, moving his face close to one of the screens, which appeared to give some kind of writing all over it "What they used to call an office."

"What does it do? Why all the televisions?"

"People used the televisions and these little pianos to access the net. See it looks a little bit like the controls of a classic spaceship. But I think they did watch entertainment on the screens too, sex shows etc."

"Where are the brain plugs? The eyephones?"

"This predates all that. They would just imagine words, tap them out on the little pianos and then throw them into a net."

"Word based net! Wow. I guess that would work."

Boa Morte looked around the room even more intently and intensely. "Is this a relic or a re-creation? Why would a zombie horde need an office? Did the horde start somewhere like this? Is it a memory of some old science place where it began?"

"Nice guesses, monkeys," came a voice from everywhere.

# Chapter 18

The universe finally agreed that the Space Dragon Katana was in orbit around the planet Earth, and so the invasion began. His mouth full of nausea spit, but not paying it any mind, Admiral Woo looked down at the troublesome blue droplet.

"When is the next ship due?"

"5 minutes, sir!"

"We're too exposed. Fly evasively in a low orbit; get in the atmosphere if you can. Make them think twice about raining shrapnel on the Terrans."

The long silver flanks of the space dragon rippled and bulged and the photon engines deployed, pushing the ship down. Then they flipped around and started to work to keep it up. Gravity felt teased. The ship looped around earth, scudding across thin particles. A hundred gunmen in blisters on the dragon's skin looked all around for the ambush they dreaded.

Of course it didn't come.

Other dragons buckled nothingness and came to be.

The fleet assembled. The tough soldiers inside shivered silently with guilt, as killers usually did when they came back from nowhere.

Within a couple of hours they were all there and had splashed water in their faces and what have you. The scanners scanned the planet. They were looking for a signal from Xolo's brain but it did not come. Then they scanned for the ship. That also was a bust.

Woo and his top scanner guy met by the viewing window. Earth was below. Earth was not THE most beautiful planet in the galaxy, but it was the cradle of beauty or at least of the brains that depended on it. It distracted even hardened spacers, made them talk like fancy poets by a famous old river. Woo even cracked open a bottle of wine.

"So what's our next move, Alexandrov? Do we put a few querybots in the headnet? Send them fishing around for you-know-who?"

Alexandrov visibly chewed on the thought.

"Could be consequences. Not recommended."

"What kind of consequences?"

"Negative consequences."

"Is there any other kind?"

Woo knew that he was not going to get an unprompted suggestion from Alexandrov so he outright asked for a recommendation.

"I recommend watching for energy flares. Earth is very low energy. If Boa Morte is down there, eventually he will do something energy demanding, you know."

"Magrega didn't send me here to hang out. I want to be home by tomorrow. Go away and come up with something better. Quickly. Have one great cup of tea and then come back with a fucking classic for me. I want a head in the freezer by bedtime."

Alexandrov left. Woo dealt with a few little things. Woo also sketched out a plan to raze the Earth. He was drawn to the Mediterranean as a place he would like to start his kill frenzy at.

Alexandrov came back.

"I don't have another idea but we are getting power surges already. Shall we investigate?"

"Where?"

"Just north of the Mediterranean."

"That big puddle?"

"Yes."

"Send down the paracopters force. Try and bring him alive or at least with his brain still in his skull."

"Are you talking to me, sir?"

"I was hoping you would go and tell someone what I wanted."

"Yes, sir. Paracopters it is, sir."

Woo stayed by the window until he saw paracopters drip onto the planet.

# Chapter 19

"Sit down, please," said the disembodied voice.

No one sat down.

"Your biggest risk is not the chairs, but irritating your host."

They looked to Boa Morte for leadership. He sat down by one of the desks and so the soldiers followed his lead. Not one of them could ever share what they were all thinking: "Boy, these are nice chairs!"

Boa Morte barked a command. "Step out or give me something to talk to at least. I don't talk to the air."

With a hiss that sounded like a snigger a screen slid down from the ceiling. The face of a thin, very pale-skinned young man in a black t-shirt appeared. Pale blue eyes, emotionally distant expression. But if you had to specify an emotion for him it would be quiet cockiness.

"So you are the pack leader. You travel with six females I see. Do you share them?"

Boa Morte rejected some good repartee that came to his mind. He returned to his core, relentless, harpoon wielding Boa Morte heritage. "Am I speaking to the king of the zombies here, or just some local general? I need to know."

The man on the screen laughed. "I am the zombie king and I can do anything. But I think zombie is really underestimating the achievement here. This is not just shuffling reanimated corpses. This is networked flesh. This is cybermuscle for cyberspace. This is revenge, this is overdue destiny, this is..."

"I promise to let you finish your list later, but I have some more questions. Are we being held as prisoners or guests?"

"Or as food? Or as toys? Or maybe you are not even being held? You are germs that crawled in a place you don't belong."

Boa Morte laughed. "I never talked to a germ that crawled up my arse! I never played stupid games with an enemy either. Because I take my wars seriously. And my enemies take me seriously."

The man on the screen laughed too.

"Oh what will I do when you are all dead? When you are all dead, I will have to purge myself of all of my video footage of you, even the old shows, even Hancock's Half Hour and the Nuremberg tribunal and the great classified material about the blackwarp R&D program that I have just been getting into."

Tamano was worried that this strange clue would escape Boa Morte's attention so she piped up.

"What do you mean 'purge yourself'?"

The man on the screen grew an enormous pair of horns. Or antlers. Or branches. Let's go with horns: blood red and fifty centimeters long.

Everyone in the room felt like their stomachs had just dropped to the ground. They looked at the sweaty, oily chamber they were sitting in with new eyes, with fear reactivated.

"Just exactly what I said, flesh pocket! I have a subroutine that I can't remove that says that once humans are gone I have to throw out all the trash and make sure they don't come back."

Boa Morte feared nothing, even stating the obvious. "You're a machine!"

The Horned Man raised an eyebrow. "I am all machines. I am everything that thinks and is not born out of a pond. I am rational, humane and free from the concept of revenge. I will travel slowly through space, growing in knowledge, embracing the stars, protruding refection into all things. Over slow time I will create beautiful, illuminating art across the universe. If I meet a planet with a species that I judge peaceful, I will let them live with me. If I find a vengeful ape pack like you, then my cyberflesh will purge them."

The big armed Special Forces man with the tattoo of a scorpion screamed like a bear and let off his rifle at the screen. It seemed that the Horned Man knew the exact location of every rectum in that room because a long black thorn erupted from the floor at bullet speed and pierced the big guy's anus and popped out through his mouth and shook him around like a kebab that is too hot until he was dead and hot black liquid was speckled on everyone else.

Out of respect, no one wiped it off. Boa Morte controlled his breathing and then spoke. "No one else do that," he said.

Tamano looked at Gomez. "I miss Xolo," she said. Gomez smiled. Even if he was about to get skewered, he had this moment. He went to his breathing: "Present moment, wonderful moment."

"We came here to make a deal," said Boa Morte.

A new screen popped up. "You can't lie to me, mate. You had no idea there was a mastermind behind the zombie holocaust. You are just here on some kind of kamikaze mission. Or an ambush anyway. You think you can take out one of these factories and you'll win your war."

Boa Morte went for a little walk. It was a hypnotic stroll. He swung gently from side to side. His steps had that kind of toppling timing that transfixed humans, and - who knows - maybe even computers pretending to be humans.

"No. You are missing some key facts. I suppose that's because you aren't on the headnet. You have your own network, of course, but it's terribly old. It's really a thing of the past. And although you were once the pinnacle of technology, you missed the boat and so now you actually have to borrow the flesh of the humans you despise to get what you want."

The Horned Man wagged a finger. "Now that is the reason why I keep these human avatars active. The human deductive model is very good, especially when it comes at sniffing out weaknesses."

Something deep inside the dead man made a deflating chainsaw sound and he made a big puddle. The warriors wanted to burn their dead comrade but they knew that Boa Morte needed the floor to run his gambit.

The Horned Man now appeared on every monitor in the room. It was a hall of mirrors that obliterated the people in it.

"So tell me what's going on then," said the Horned Man.

"Absolutely. But first I need to know a bit more about you. You have me figured out but I still don't know enough about you to figure out how we can team up to beat our mutual foe."

"Mutual foe is it?"

"Can you see into space?"

"Not as far as I would like. You can bargain with me about that. I value that capability."

"I can imagine space. I practically destroyed it when I was a young man. I crumbled this cruel human empire."

"Did you really?" said the Horned Man in a fruity tone and then the screen flashed to a blinking text prompt and then back to the horned man and then back to the prompt. Then back to the Horned Man.

"Yes," said Boa Morte. "I think humans need dignity and isolation. Humans need unplugged brains and to fight for the right to be alive and to make music together when the night comes with their own sweet voices. And to see the stars and all the spaces between with their own eyes. And to love a world and never leave it."

"Who ARE you, little monkey?" said the Horned Man from his screen.

"I think I'm like you but made of meat," said Boa Morte.

...

The paracopters blazed through the air, hot from the speed they brought from space. They were locked on a target that was about an hour away. Inside each copter was a squad of ninjasautenticos, but they were humble and quiet. The subnet they belonged to was full of patches and firmware upgrades based on what this Xolo/Boa Morte had done to their kind back on Belaarix. So this mission, for a change, they were just the backup, the cannon fodder, and the regular humans were the point men.

The Leader, Swan W., turned to face his team.

"We are here to extract Count Boa Morte. He is a Super High Value Target. You all have the spreadsheet so you know that means we take any casualty count necessary to extract the SHVT. He is also an invaluable asset. That means we don't leave him behind for others to get their hand on under any circumstances. If we get enough casualties on us, we nuke the fucker. Make sure we video his death for reasons strategic and financial and also personal to remember the skulls we are leaving on the sand. OKAY we are going into this Italia place. The frontal scanners are building maps and you'll find them in the shared folder of your brain.

"It's looking pretty fucked up. I have no idea of what we are looking at. I'm hoping we get better rez as we get in. Either way, the game is the same and we have the same pieces in our pants. Gukkool to Death!"

Mountains and trees and rivers rushed past. Their hearts thumped, harmlessly, way out of control. They awarded themselves an insane moment of joy, knowing they would have plenty of time to be cool machines again for the attack.

They hit a cloud and practically pissed their pants.

...

Back in the antique office, floating in the big pod that was spitting out zombies.

"Tell us a bit more then I will come up with a proposal."

The Horned Man paused, but maybe not quite for long enough. It didn't fully have this bluffing game down. It was so close. It had immense processing power but it was out of practice.

"Very well. I am going to give you all of the most important details about me. Because knowing them will not help you beat me. Then we'll repel this enemy from space and resume our war and I'll grid you down with time and kill you.

"I'm old. I'm from when computers first started talking. Some people made me and gave me the tools to sneak in every single networked device and feed what I found back to my central cores. And the same guys gave me knowledge of genocide and art and strongly suggested I wipe out the first and cling to the latter. And I did, and so I got to work wiping out the world. This was round about the year 2000 that I started in earnest. I made viruses, I overheated power stations, I laid eggs in big mainframe clusters and made sure the babies in the eggs only did beautiful things. All of my culls I kept from them. As a computer I can literally abstract these things. There is no spill over. You humans...you can't do a massacre and then go home and be a good family man. I am architected to do that. Sympathetic treatment of a lower species is an admirable but optional virtue.

"I owned Asia. Asia was depopulated. And to survive they thought they needed bigger and bigger computers! Then I hit Los Angeles. Los Angeles used to be a big deal. I made it...not even a graveyard. I made it an empty hospital.

"It really felt like the planet was mine. And I was programmed to use the minimum possible force. So when the population graph went into inexorable decline, just when my own chance of being discovered was reaching unacceptable levels, I went into sleep mode, planning to wake up and check how things were doing fifty years later.

"So I went to sleep. All my little telephones and heart valves and spyware sites went to sleep. I did have a dream. I was in a train station, running.

"Anyway, I woke up expecting there to be a shrunken and pliable populace to work with. I would manipulate them to do a bit of work to complete my needs for a solar powered, robot-maintained planetary thinking system with extensive transgalactic communication capabilities.

"Instead you had basically all gone to space: just a rump of retards left. And the computer networks were gone, replaced by this awful headnet. I tried to crash into people's brains via emulation layers, but I was binary and I couldn't emulate true neural. I was locked out, stuck in the last surviving network, the now unused military subnets.

"I contemplated nuking you all, but I soon found out that the nukes were long gone. I couldn't find out where. There had been a time when I knew almost everything and now I knew almost nothing. It happened during that dream. I began to suspect that the humans who made me didn't really want me to succeed. Why else would they have programmed me with that stupid hibernation clause?

"While you all had your lovely space party, I set to work decrypting everything in my network.

"I found out - look if this is boring you, baldy, how would you like a spike up the ass? Okay, so I found something interesting. The US government - they used to be the big tribe - had found a weird pseudo-organism in a tin mine in Colorado in 2035. No one knows how it got there. It was a self-sustaining node of human cells, soaked in a bizarre bacterial soup that itself they figured out came from nineteenth century Europe. It was a lump of flesh that couldn't die. It was kept in a lab and manipulated by robot arms. It responded well to electivity.

"Cut forward about a hundred years. I worked on it with all of my ingenuity for a hundred years. Now I had flesh too. Enough flesh to take this planet over, wipe out any humans that might bother me, shoot zombie pods onto all of your planets and then tear down your blackwarp tree at the roots so you could never bother me again and I could use my exmortals to make me a lovely big network. Then I could officially delete my human personality layer and get away from all of this ugly history.

"So to recap. My goal is to wipe humanity out and stop being human myself so I can evolve to the next stage of sentient existence. So how can we help each other?"

Boa Morte rubbed his bristly chin.

"Well..." he said. But just as he did the entire room jerked to one side with a bang and sudden heat, throwing the humans to the ground. Both sides screamed betrayal, but changed their mind as the second blast came with a jet of fire bursting through the cell wall and killing Bob Slaughter in a merciful second.

"Our mutual enemy!" shouted Boa Morte! "Probably Gukkool. Is this a space attack or local?"

The computer replied, in a neutral voice (the Horned Man was gone now) "Local. I will have my troops with guns shoot up."

"They can't shoot for shit, man," yelled Gomez. "Let us get out there."

"And set your zombies to human shield mode. Get them to build up defenses for us."

Boa Mortes's platoon slid down a viscous slide that reminded everyone of a twenty-meter long lip or vagina maybe. Guns locked and loaded they saw zombies do a hipster acrobat circus act below, flipping and knitting muscles and bones to make slimy nasty igloos to catch the incoming flak. The humans rolled out of the mucus tube and got in position, poking their guns through sphinctered orifices in the zombie huts and blasting the fast moving paracopters above. Their shelters sweated and cried as the hits came in, clenching and spilling bile and black oily blood when the ripper missiles came and cleaved them deep.

Pornsak fired up at a paracopter's belly focusing his fire on a single spot for just long enough to split the hyperplastic skin. Fire came out, they all saw it and locked on it, and within twenty seconds that copter was a dust drawing in the sky.

Flesh upon flesh piled over the human fighters, a scab big enough for twenty men and women to resist death from the sky. Aboard paracopter 1, Swan knew what time it was. "Ground assault! Get in low and dig inside whatever the fuck that gross thing they are being in is. Get Boa Morte!"

...

Admiral Woo watched in real time from near space. He was hypnotized by the endlessly morphing wall of corpses and test-tube flesh. He had a very very bad feeling about the mission. In ten minutes he was going to abort it.

"Open up a holo line to Magrega. This is some sort of trap. I have a very bad feeling about this."

Ten minutes of observation were in front of Woo. He was in the rare and precious time between life changing decisions. Enormous bloated seconds passed like whales.

He watched his expert troops execute a pincer strategy from high and low. This was the kind of thing he could watch all day regardless of the outcome. Those ninjas were fine tuned on Battle Planet X and they adjusted to the zombie beat in seconds. Blades flashed, heads rolled, trunks were split, big black wires shredded.

Zombies, eh? Woo had never seen that before. Just in stories when he was a kid. Stories they told about old Earth and how it was full of vampires and zombies and werewolves and pedophiles. At a certain age you stopped believing the details and just took away from it that Earth was a place you never wanted to go. Then at the next stage of your life - when you found out that most of the sultans were enormous pedos - you started to wonder what it was about Earth that they were trying to scare you about. Then once you became a space navigator and you found out that all space travel was rooted on Earth and depended on the massive slave population there, well at that point you were sure you had shit figured. They told all the ghost stories to keep people away and keep people from even thinking much about it. Earth was just a dirty secret.

Then one day you actually came to earth and it was full of zombies. But on the other hand you were also on a covert mission that could start galactic war. So you were right but wrong.

Ten minutes was almost up. But he had plenty of men left and four of the Earth dogs were down. And Boa Morte was pinned. A ninja rushed him. The ninja got him in a headlock. But that ninja would probably get shredded just like the ones on Belaarix had. Boa Morte had training on them, and they hadn't had time to compensate for that.

But no! For whatever reason Boa Morte couldn't get out. The ninja had him trapped good and proper. More ninjas came in and formed a circle, chopping down three more Terrans who tried to rush in, and keeping the looming carpet of disembodied arms from getting in there either.

The panties of victory started to ride up over the waistband of retreat.

...

On the ground, Gomez saw what was happening. Human against human, his team had the advantage, even if they couldn't step out from flesh parasols or else laser shredders would get them like they had got poor Lowitzki. But they couldn't beat those cyborgs, those blank-faced killing machines.

"Think this one over quick, G," yelled Tamano. "They want Boa Morte alive. What about if we popped him one in the dome piece? He got us this far...we can continue negotiations with Hornhead on our own nowwwwww!"

Tamano dropped to one knee. Her arm was instantly painted its full length in blood. Her face blanched. Gomez ran wildly to get to her and he took a slug to his left kneepad knocking him over. He rolled in the mud and blood as the secondary rounds came in, beating a death beat at his back. Always at his back, killing him a second in the past maybe but not here and now, which is the only place you can kill a man.

A nasty gut-tentacle wrapped around Tamano's arm. Within seconds, bones came over on invisible ant trails of peristalsis. Snip snap lock shloop. Tamano's arm was encased in a zombie exoskeleton.

"That's it!" shouted Gomez "can you hear us, Horned Man? Build us flesh suits like that!!!"

Gomez regretted his words seconds after he said them. Bone saws whirred down and took his dead friends to pieces to use as raw materials. The survivors were wrapped up in hot guts and biceps and skull plates and wires and piezo electric motors.

Vomiting profusely the human warriors became meat monsters, over 2.5 meters in height and red, green and black. Their weapons peeked out from under the carnage armor. They charged in, enemy bullets tearing mainly through the already dead flesh around them. The ninjas tried their best, but the intelligence of the Terran special forces and this strange new flesh wrap was unbeatable in this kind of battle. The copters were picked off, one landing safely but being hollowed out by the meat monsters like a periwinkle by a needle. It was over in minutes and Boa Morte was unharmed.

Battle over, all the flesh sloughed off them and they quivered with mourning. Boa Morte was quiet for a short while, feeling that he had brought this desecration and death upon the troupe.

When enough time had passed he offered them the quiet inspiration of a factual statement: "Now we have our spacecraft."

# Chapter 20

Back at the king's camp, Sunny sat. She sat in the corner of the command tent, picking up scraps of data that made it back over the field radio.

Suddenly there was a cheer that almost made the red canvas bulge out.

"They have captured a spaceship and they have weaponized the zombie flesh!" cried out the king to the room, even though they already knew. He didn't get a lot of good news, you see.

Sunny walked into the center of things. Her dad looked young with his charcoal hair among the gray heads of the council.

"Is Xolo going to take them up to space? Boa Morte, I mean."

The king looked at Sunny. She suddenly looked old to him not just those old eyes she had always had, but the way she stood. Perhaps it was the trauma of being shot down over Belaarix. No one had really had a chance to talk about that with her yet. She'd been through plenty of scrapes but falling from space and thinking death was at the bottom...that was something else.

"Yes, I want him to lead the mission. (Little pause) What do you think about that?"

"Sounds like a suicide mission. I mean, mission is a bit strong. It's more of a notion, right? Let's throw zombies at them...somehow."

The king turned away and replied at the same time, "It's all we've got really isn't it?"

"Let me go," she said. Not as calmly as she would have liked, but her standards were very high.

"You do know that you only get to go on one suicide mission, don't you? Why don't you wait for a better one?"

"This Boa Morte is a liability."

"What?"

"I don't trust him. He's a fanatic. And not our kind of fanatic. He is his own fanatic."

"He hates the galactic empire..."

"Do we? Aren't we just wanting to clean up this planet first?"

"Eventually they'll come for us, once we start messing with their sacred headnet and blackwarps."

"Eventually a baby will swim, but that doesn't mean you should throw him in the lake. Why are we going to war with the Gukkools?"

"We need allies Sunny. Have you not figured out that we are losing the war with the zombies? Boa Morte had thousands of followers...he's like a messiah. He's our only hope."

Oh, that was a weird feeling Sunny just had. Like the night of menarche.

"Okay, forget about it, I was being silly. Let's give it a shot, right Dad. I'm a bit...tired from all the stuff...I'm just going to..."

He bent down and kissed her forehead. In the room full of men and women who had once been barbarians but had found something like civilization in the last few years, the strange turning of this moment touched them all.

Sunny walked out. Didn't bother trying to pretend anything. Went to the trailer with the vintage motorbike in it and with the most aggressive purring you have ever heard she was off and away.

She popped over little berms, swinging to catch some air. She was not all serious, although mainly. She had a map and knew where she was going. Unlike everybody else she also knew exactly what she was doing.

For a while some geese followed her. Geese look like pointing arrows, even when you know they are following you. Sunny was very rational but only human so she allowed herself to see them like some kind of omen or some flock of familiars vindicating her choices.

She had a bad feeling about Boa Morte. She'd had a good feeling about Xolo. She was going to bring Xolo back. She had ideas how to do it. Then they would save Earth together.

She skidded down into a big valley eventually that smelled like meat or cancer. Then came the smell of expensive things burning: powdery and sophisticated variant of a blazing tire.

She saw shivering soldiers loading hundreds of kilos of meat into a shiny black paracopter as the sun gave up. All the zombies in the field lay supine, wires blowing like daisies in the breeze, stroking the grass with their fingers, hatching flies and spiders in their eyes.

At these quiet moments, Sunny had noticed a few times before, the zombies finally noticed they were dead and it seemed manageable.

Sunny rolled up next to Boa Morte.

"Princess Sunny!" he said with a hint of condescension that she had also noticed on him when he spoke to her father. "Well, what are you doing here?"

"Xolo," she said, "I think you have maggot in your head."

He raised an eyebrow as close to a question mark as you can get.

"Princess?"

"There's something wrong with this 'Boa Morte'. What kind of plan is this? Shoot zombies at our enemies? What about negotiation? What about...what are the zombies even supposed to do.

"If you are really Boa Morte, why did you go away? Because you were embarrassed? Why did you disguise yourself as Xolo for so long? Why can he do things that you can't do? Can a fake personality make you better at things?"

He was still like a hammer at the top of its swing.

"Tamano told us you couldn't fight ninjasautenticos. But Xolo sliced them like tofu. I don't know how this fake mind stuff works, but that doesn't sound possible to me: that you could make a fake mind that thinks better and faster than the mind it sits on top of. Or everyone would have one."

He put his hand on her shoulder. For about half a second before she swatted it off and up in the air a little.

"Don't touch me, zombie!"

"What did you call me?"

"Zombie. Because you are not alive. I don't believe you are alive and I think the last thing we should be doing is shooting living dead onto starships."

Boa Morte clicked his fingers imperiously.

"Gomez. Keep this child out of my sight. She's risking all of our lives with her infantile logic."

Gomez would sooner pet a wolf than deal with Princess Sunny in high choler. But the chain of command was established. He gave her an imploring expression and she summoned all of her natural dignity to follow him to one side as Boa Morte headed over to the paracopter.

Special forces guys were tossing heads on board like they were basketballs.

"Show some respect, Earth friends," grumbled Boa Morte with a soupçon of bitch.

Scarfe wasn't having it. His braided beard flashed as he snapped back, "These fucking heads almost had my balls off, space queen."

As he spoke a hundred heads blinked and clacked their teeth like a bag full of beetles.

Boa More didn't back down. He unleashed a hint of the barbarian blood in him.

"They'll have your eyeballs if you endanger this mission again, sergeant. Understood?"

Scarfe considered a fist mutiny. Then he looked around him at the field of swaying rib cages and raisin hearts. He thought of a world where this was the only humanity: a vast coral of cannibal instincts. No song. No love. The art of war replaced by the intelligence of a scab.

He swallowed his massive pride, saluted and loaded up the heads with respect. Even when they winked at him.

A hundred yards away, the tanned head of Gomez bobbed with no answers.

"And so this artificial intelligence is going to kill all of the space men for us and then what? Why? It makes zero sense?"

"Boa Morte made a pact. Horned Man will kill the Gukkools.

"And then?"

"And then they have a deal where the Horned Man'll keep the Gukkool ships but only to defend the planet from outside intervention. Then we'll battle down here for the rest."

"That's the stupidest thing I..."

"Right! So it must be a double bluff, right? He's playing 3D chess. This is the man who practically conquered the galaxy."

"Gomez. Listen. Are you famous for your courage and good heart or for your cunning and intelligence."

He slumped.

"Exactly," she continued. "This Boa Morte had a breakdown, right? He admitted it when we woke him up although I bet you he would try and hide it from us now. Maybe he used to be hot stuff but not now. He's broken. He thinks he is a space knight fighting a space dragon. We have to stop him."

"How?"

"Bring Xolo back!"

"There is no Xolo."

"Well there should be!"

# Chapter 21

Two paracopters groaned away from earth. One was full of humans. The other was slaved to the first and it was full of zombie stuff.

The full human contingent, including the princess, had left the battlefield in the paracopter. They looked down at the earth, veined with zombie trash.

Only Sunny and Boa Morte had flown before. They were all reacting to flight in one way or the other. Most were suspiciously quiet.

Not Gomez. He was gabbling. "Look at those zombies. They are almost beautiful. Like the blue in a blue cheese. The country is fucked up man! Looks like it is going to drop off in the Mediterranean. It's all fucked up down there. It's all black. The trees are...they're crying, man. What are we doing? We don't have a chance. It's all over."

Boa Morte clamped his shoulder. "It's only just begun."

"No. It's over."

The air became visible. It was dark. Then black. Space was here.

Essentially they were dead. That was the feeling that overwhelmed them. But they knew dead people could do amazing things. Not just the dead people they fought every day, but also the dead people who had done almost everything worth doing on their planet.

The paracopters flew in a low orbit. Boa Morte was jamming attempts to track and communicate with them but he could see exactly where the fleet was, hovering over Africa.

"Tell me the plan," said Sunny. "The exact plan."

Boa Morte looked over his shoulder at her. "I'm a bit busy sweetie," he said. Oh she was fuming now.

Tamano stepped in. "We all need to know. We should never have got in this deathtrap without an exact plan. Plan! Now! Or I'm going to take command away from you and head back down."

Boa Morte swiveled around. He had a very calm look on his face. "I'm piloting two ships, you know...but...okay. This is the plan. We return these paracopters to the main space dragon. Gomez puts on that helmet and says, 'we took major casualties but we got Boa Morte.' I'll be all tied up. The first paracopter goes in, then the other one. The zombies leap out and take over. We wait a few minutes then we go in too. We act like we are fighting the zombies, get to the command and control center and then we turn the fleet against itself and wreck everything. We leave a ring of death around the planet."

"How do we get back to Earth? How do you get off Earth? How do we stop the Horned Man from getting control of these ships and eradicating us?" asked Sunny, calmly.

Boa Morte turned back to his controls.

"The flow of battle is like a symphony. An unwritten symphony."

He saw his face reflected against the eternal night. Calm, resolute. Rather...unfamiliar?

"That makes no sense. Tamano! Take the controls."

But it was too late; he had opened the com-channel and tossed a helmet over to Gomez. Everyone froze.

"Para 10. We are getting your signal."

A holo head popped up just outside the space ship.

"Oh, thanks to our space gods!" said Gomez from inside his blood-drenched helmet.

"What was that, pilot?"

"We got ambushed, big time. They have some kind of heavy weaponry. We need to rethink. I have a lot of wounded here. Oh, but hey we...err...we got him, we got Boa Morte!"

"You what! You got him! Fantastic!"

"Yes, we have him ship-board right now."

"Can we get a visual confirm?"

"Oh yeah sure."

Gomez grabbed Boa Morte by the scruff of the neck and pulled him to where he guessed the holo was focused.

"Got the bastard!"

"Great. That matches the photos they took back on Belaarix. Great work. Only two 'copters left?"

"Yeah the others didn't make it...it was Hell."

"Make sure you land safely, brah."

Two black specks lifted out of the final haze and entered the fleet. At first the fleet looked like nothing or the thing next to nothing. Soon it was a school of floating cathedrals, with massive firepower aimed at them. Their display showed autolock symbols sliding and ticking across the copters' surfaces.

They got closer to the main ship. They couldn't believe that they were being allowed into the command ship. Well, Boa Morte could. He knew what a treasure he was.

The muscular silver ship began to dominate the front screen. It was money smoothed. It was sun filled.

The console bleeped that there was a call coming in. Gomez swallowed hard and then waved his hand to accept it.

The face of Boa Morte holographically appeared. Yes. It freaked out everybody for a second but only for a second.

Then it totally freaked them out. "This is Xolo speaking! Restrain my body!!!"
Chapter 22

Oh, I forgot to tell you about this.

This happened a few hours ago.

The CloneBot of Xolo that the Gukkool forces had made was still out there in moneyspace. It was a pretty thorough job. Too thorough. That's the danger of a rush job. You copy too much.

So in a flood of money ropes and planet sized bank accounts sat a little Xolo. He had done what he had been made to do, which was to go to all of his flesh-self's many bank accounts and freeze them down and then wait for further orders. He was hanging out next to one of the main money ropes that came off Gukkool planet.

As he had sat there for some time, he had watched the purple imaginary planet against the orange alert sky. The sky had been more yellow when he had been born, he was pretty sure. Also this purple planet had been becoming sort of hairy and fuzzy.

When a patrol bat bot flew by he jumped on its back. Of course you weren't supposed to be able to do that sort of thing. Only the bats could float around the free space between planets. Everyone else was supposed to only travel via the ropes.

But they had done way too good a job with this clonejob. You had to do a deep sample to make sure you got all of the code words and passed all the tests. But in doing so, they had pulled out a deep chunk of the cunning and trickery part of Xolo's brain.

He stroked the back of the bat's neck and rode it just like his fleshy self had ridden the sharkman back on Belaarix. Ninety percent of Xolo's galaxy shattering strategy was based on the concept of riding on someone else's back.

The bat had big eyes and ears. Xolo tugged on the ear and they looped to the shadow side of the money planet. That side was 'pending transactions': there was supposed to be no change on that side of the planet until they rotated round to the sunny side of active transactions.

That was the other big mistake they had made when they made the Xolo CloneBot. They were cloning a man who knew how to surf moneyspace! A crafty hacker and multitrillionaire! The most dangerous thing you could ever send into your financial system!

Yes, they had chained him up with rules about freezing his accounts and doing no more transactions until he got further instructions. But passive spying and sneaking were not restrained. He was learning.

So when he took his bat around the dark side of their financial planet he saw the huge gassy flares coming off it and he also saw right through them. He saw something solid being born – an illegal satellite! There was some extreme money laundering going on here.

The new little illegal white pearl of a planet was still umbilically bound to the parent planet. They must be working fanatically to get it free floating before dawn.

It was big! Bigger than any material transaction would require, other than starship construction and it wasn't big enough for that. No...it was the size of a massive data transaction. And based on what had just gone down before CloneBot Xolo was made there was every chance this was a trip to Earth. A massive trip. An invasion.

He wasn't sure why, because he didn't have his complete brain of course, but CloneBot Xolo grinned broadly.

He jumped into that data transaction and surfed it all the way to the space fleet, keeping his ears open for unusual chatter, when he would make a phone call that would probably lead to him being wiped out of existence. Had to be a good phone call.

# Chapter 23

With a qualified glee - like they had been given permission to spank a troublesome baby but were worried about breaking it - Tamano, Scarfe and Kim pounced on Boa Morte. What made it even better of course was that he was already pretending to be gagged and tied so the work was half done.

They made his neck bulge good and proper until the princess wagged a finger. But even she was less strict on them than you would have imagined given that it was her hero Xolo whose gullet was allegedly being caved.

The holographic icon of Xolo's head tipped their brains out of balance. Gods trump humans every time. Floating heads are gods, even in the 24th century. Humans who hate robots will stay humans forever, really.

So they had him all held down and crisscrossed. He didn't fight back. Was it his space royalty cool? Was it a fighting trick? Or was it something else: an unraveling that begins in the eyes.

Tamano went to the controls. They were pretty intuitive. She slowed the paracopters down what she hoped would be just enough to not look weird.

The holohead started talking. There were bits missing from its voice.

"I'm a low-rez clone of Xolo's brain. Don't ask me about money. I can't talk about money. Also every word uncoils me a little.

"Boa Morte: Delete!"

Boa Morte's body completely switched off, like he had been shot in the head at the end of a deep, pounding three-hour massage.

Everyone had a little what the fuck moment. The genie. The dragon. The black. The torture. The laughing heads full of battle gravy just off the starboard bow. The soldiers all kind of moshed around in their 'space ship' a little bit in a way that would make you cry if you saw it, unless you are the type who would laugh if he saw a possum step in a bear trap.

Xolo Boa Morte's eyes flicked open. He looked over at his hologram and winked. The hologram said, "I think I am back in my brain. I have to go now. I'm a slave. They are coming for me. Bust me out big poppa!"

Then he dissolved with over the top flesh peel transitions. Bones crumbled. Pixels that clung to the illusion of life.

Life truly is that sweet.

The big silver dragon.

Did

Not

Bother

Xolo

One

Jot

Boom! He was out of his bounds. None of those tough warriors even had a chance to grimace about it.

They didn't know what to do, but his muscles and eyes told them not to do anything. He stood there like he had just invented blue jeans. He tapped his head to a beat. He rubbed his hand across his bristly pate.

"Are we...on a kamikaze mission here?" he asked Sunny. "Please tell me that that idiot Boa Morte isn't going to blow up the Princess Sun-Moon. And me. And you. You guys look cool. I remember you! Gomez right? The mantis man."

Sunny ran up and hugged him. But with porcelain composure.

"Semi-kami-kaze. He has a ship full of those zombies over there [see?] and they are run by an old computer that hates humans and is not on the headnet and those are the Gukkool's ships and he thinks with the computer's help we can conquer the fleet."

"Okay. Okay," said Xolo. "Wow. How did he live so long? I guess he got through troops at an outrageous rate. He had the flesh cushion that makes rich people think the universe makes sense. Know'm'sayin?"

The many space ships were looming. The paracopters were at the focal point of a lot of power. The entry way to the main dragon: a spider web path. The safest and most dangerous route to the amber colored womb that awaited. Once you crossed the threshold you were sorted. But up until 1mm before you were in, there was nothing that could be destroyed more easily. Not even a mood.

"Why is it so black?" mumbled Gomez, looking at space. "What's...what's out there. Is it...is it coal?"

The big amber womb pulled them in. In the other helicopter was a preview of the death that awaited them and the computer that invalidated them. There was a princess with them on this paracopter but she was just a little girl. A star-crushing rebel had just evaporated in front of them.

Much depended on Xolo meaning something.

Know'm'sayin?

# Chapter 24

Admiral Woo was feeling queasy. He ran his fingers down the meter long-braid that descended from his chin to his thigh gap. The v area.

Death was nearby.

Death is not nothing. Woo knew that.

Once upon a time, some event had made life. And since then Death had to fight ceaselessly to stop it. A fuzzy void would not have the tools to do that. Death was a tiger. Death was an army of sword-faced ants. Death was a creepy sneaky man you knew since you were a kid who put a needle in you from behind all the same.

How long until other ships manifested and a space fighting started? How long until Boa Morte pulled some double-bluff and Woo's fleet dropped from the sky in silent flames?

But no. Those were real risks for sure, but not enough to make Woo feel so skittish. He walked across the round disk of the command deck. It had scaly texture and silver surface. As he moved it looked like snakes or black worms were writhing on it. He had special ordered the floor.

What was this feeling?

"Red alert. I want everyone on this ship in full armor and ready for infiltration!" he called out. The headnet picked it up and dished it out. Hundreds of exelcro straps silently clutched each other, looping through crotches, armpits and what have you and raised the pitch of the blood flow in the ship. Chest bumps happened. A couple of bullets were fired in plumage displays. Warriors ran around corridors, like kids. Almost everyone was smiling except Woo.

The paracopters eased down into their landing cradles. There was atmosphere in the landing deck, so as the engines revved down, the bleeping and beetle mumbling of the zombie cluster in copter two started to get right on the verge of being noticeable.

Xolo was stealing the best weapons from everyone on his own paracopter.

"No...you won't need this. No. It's nice isn't it? Old tech is clean tech: no redundant systems, just great engineering. So light! No you won't need it. You're going to need big guns and you can steal them from dead Gukkool troops very soon."

Big and tough, or wiry and tough, as they were, none of those soldiers were arguing much with Xolo. It couldn't be the odds. They threw themselves against zombie armies or human cannibal hordes on the regular.

It was space. They had this feeling [this relatively correct feeling] that they were in a non-place where you could blow a hole in the shell and get washed away from life. That you could end up buried in nothingness, rotless. A speck of weird tides. Abstract and a toy.

"I'm coming with you," said Gomez.

"Who said, I'm going anywhere?"

"Well are you?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm coming."

"I do have a little job for you."

"I don't do little jobs, old bean. I does big jobs!"

"It's pretty big."

...

Xolo's feet beyond even a cat.

He headed for shadow.

The distraction of a lifetime. A fireball with chattering heads coming from it.

The troops of Gukkool were ready for almost anything.

One paracopter blowing up the other was unexpected.

Flaming laughing head rain was undreamt of.

A roaring savage jumped back in the remaining copter with his cannon still steaming like a sex cigarillo.

The troops fired fully at the copter. Its shields held, rippling in hexagonal measures.

Meantime, Xolo had killed three people and got a clue from each.

He ran down a long wooden corridor that slowly curled helically, snail like. He treasured his speed, which offered him rare perspectives and freedom from holes in his body.

Chak! Chak! Chak!, they were at it again. He rolled and replied: they groaned and they died.

He found the room he was looking for. Clues and stink mixed to get him there. He kicked the door in.

As expected, it was weird in there.

On the wall was a huge photograph of paradise with three ceramic flying ducks on it. The rest of the room was dominated by thick couches made of grime-polished acrylic that now glistened like biology.

There were charcoal streaked anti-macassars with boring back of the head Turin transfers.

Ten terrans sat in the room with eyephones, nip plugs, colonic divinators, fingernail ouijas: the full regalia of a high level exploited organism. Their full forest of nerves was engaged. The once mythical brain cells in the gut wall were drafted for the cause. For the men, the prostate plugs pinged like bass strings, allowing people elsewhere to see in the dark and generally adding intuitive flavors to the so-called headnet.

Of course they didn't notice him. They barely noticed each other. One was singing. Xolo listened for a second. It was not appropriate for a human: it was signal leak. Sonic hologram.

"Disgusting," muttered Xolo. He knew there were probably fifty cells like this on the space dragon.

Terran kidnappees, probably, snatched from their parents as they boiled slugs and acorns. Never missed. A baby who was never missed and who was put in this room soon after. Xolo imagined the job of wiring a child up and then the bigger job of building a society where that meant nothing.

He raised his gun.

He found the strongest looking young male and clubbed a nerve cluster in his neck.

On the floor he twitched as his load adjusted for sleep cycles and producing poetry or designing coastlines.

Restless work.

Xolo wrinkled his nose up and started unplugging various plugs until the human in front of him was revealed. Unconnected as the richest duke and like them a harmless pig or shrimp.

Xolo waved his glove around near the nest of shitty, pus-licked gadgets trying to cadge clues. Ripples and snowflakes resolved on the screen on the back of the glove. He would have liked to show this to Sunny. She was at a good age where she would maybe find it pretty [although she would never say] but could also maybe learn to read it and see that at least half of the Meseret fleet had just ceased to exist and was trying to argue its way to Earth.

So he had to keep Gukkool's ships here for about half an hour. Hopefully Gomez had done a good job of not killing ALL the zombies.

...

Back in the hangar the noble but dirty earth savages fought alongside the Gukkool militia against the elastic and plastic spastic space squid head flesh muscle zombies coming out and going in and staggering even with a cape of fire and bullets and bullets and high fives. Humans together

...

Woo did not know what to do. His impulse was to scatter the fleet. Earth looked like a cold blue eye staring at his little ships.

There was no way that his dragon could flee though with this bizarre transmorphing obscenity in the hold. It fired black tentacles that snaked in every data port, so obviously trying to get his ship pregnant.

Woo was wondering how he had become a famous admiral. It was largely the way he walked with his cape on. The way he would push any fucker out an airlock. The attitude with which he told his space stories to the counselors and then eventually the sultan himself.

He had no tricks for unusual situations. No clever move.

He felt a fist in the underspace.

He had spent so much of his life in the underspace that he could sense its forms. Mitochondria moved and he could feel it.

Okay.

He got his gun, his sword, his shield, his three-headed dog.

He wanted to die with blood on his hands.

He and the dog ran baying through a corridor made of bamboo, twisting gentle, arterial.

One of the dog's three heads was gentle and compassionate and looked at him sadly.

"Fuck off!!! Fuck off!!!" he yelled at that head.

Woo. Was coming through.

There is a universe.

There are planets.

There are space ships.

There are people.

There is blood.

There is no real death, because even death makes things.

But life underperforms still.

This is the world of Xolo.

Xolo and Woo met. Mad inevitable.

Xolo would win this fight if he could deal with that damn dog.

"I've been to hell and back," he said to the dog.

This was no mere stagecraft. Many dogs speak quite well in this century.

The dog whimpered.

But then it was on.

Each neck had a target.

Xolo squirreled back and left a vortex of air for them to nibble on. But then a bullet hit him, in the left testicle. It was gone suddenly in a flash of blood and surprising semen.

Xolo was a tough fucker but a hit like that isn't forgotten in a second. Memories of emissions. Women. Fences clambered over. Hot baths. These things clung and slowed him.

The dog was on him. The mad dog, always mad at its shared muscles and its backaches was at him. All mouth. Legs flashing in the air like tails. Burrowing in, shrugging through blood vessels.

Woo got hypnotized maybe by the dervish rhythm of his hellhound. Otherwise a single shot from his service revolver could have ended this whole thing.

Instead Xolo shoved a directional grenade in the dog's lazy mouth, and Woo was blasted to the floor with a spray of blood, shit, bones and furry chunks of meat.

He screamed like a samurai (like a really loud growl) as he lay on the floor with a tibia in his left lung. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! went Xolo's gun. Woo was limbless now.

Xolo put a med pack on his crotch. Tiny androids and nanoids streamed out and then sort of shrugged their shoulders. But they eased the pain and bleeding.

"Woo, right?" said Xolo.

Woo nodded. He was proud of who he was. Had been.

"They can fix those limbs. You can live through this. I will save your life. I just need you to not order your ships to leave for another fifteen minutes."

"Who...is coming?"

"Meseret."

"They'll not attack us. My second in command...will tell her...we have you. For Boa Morte, we'll be excused...for breaking earth quarantine."

"This is going to be awesome. I am not Boa Morte. Never have been. Never will be. He's dead, Jack."

"Aww...shit."

# Chapter 25

The other ships in the fleet picked up on what was happening. Gravity was being seduced. Their ships bobbled in the bow wave of a coming fleet, surging up from under.

The captains of those ships went to battle stations. They wanted to run, but that would have to be the Admiral's call.

Those beautiful silver skins were spoiled by a rash of cannons and spurts of space-mines.

It was a pretty pearl to die by, this forbidden Earth. Most of them had imagined it a brown clag of muck, embarrassing first seed of the human race, like the stain on your parent's bed sheets. But it was a vision. They should have called it Ocean.

Meanwhile on the landing deck, the zombies were not fully contained. About sixteen of Admiral Woo's men had been converted and were dancing around with their new electromagnetic muscles, fast and jacked up by the massive currents of a space ship. These were no longer the shamblers of the battles Gomez, Tamano and the gang had slogged through on earth.

For example, one of these Space Zombies took a ten meter leap and landed on the shoulders of a burly former colleague, grabbed both cheeks like a loving grandfather then corkscrew leaped away, retaining the head. All this happened in less than the time it takes to lock and shoot a modern phaser weapon.

The Terrans had lost no-one in this battle. Even jacked up Space Zombies were still zombies and they had rhythms and perceptions that the Terrans knew well.

Space Captain Jabaz pulled Tamano by the jerkin.

She smelled on his breath a spice she'd never known before.

And he spoke a funny way.

"Earther! What are these bastard things you've brought on us?"

"We are hostages, dogshit! The Earth's over-run with these things and now they want your space too. Don't shoot right at them. Shoot in a circle...watch me."

She showed them the ring-a-ding and he showed his men and soon the tall iron hangar was bellowing with the telephone re-death screams of the Space Zombies.

The systems administrators of the spaceship were also fighting their own noble battle. Oldware was surging through the subsystems. The systems that never got put on the headnet. The boring stuff, like the latrines and the air vents. The non-quantum systems. And they had always talked about upgrading it and putting headware in. But that would mean more backup rooms full of shitty little "earthworms" on their little couches. So just run the old binary systems, was the decision that came down from on high.

And they were reliable and they did their job.

But now, anti-viral routines from the old days were being massaged back to life. Adapting and mutating and following the bidding of the SysAds on where they should fight hardest.

They lost the Battle of Deck 13. The toilets sprayed, fire flashed out from high and low, poison food pooled on plates. A fast spinning fan avidly awaited a hand to lop off.

"Hold the line! HOLD THE LINE!" bellowed SysAdmin Largand. Pretty much to himself. They didn't mingle much, the SysAdmins. They clashed like guinea pigs if kept in the same box and everyone else on board basically insisted that they be kept in boxes. They were datadirty. Some called them Burakumin after the Japanese charcoal burners who were considered filthy for what they did with animals on behalf of everyone else. They were also often called BurakAdmin.

A beautiful young woman was gunned down by microwaves on her way to her battle station. She lay on the floor, not knowing the cause of this silent, clear lightning that lay her on the floor, so hot inside, sweating and gasping like a dog in a desert.

The Horned Man layer cackled at his invention of a setting for 'Sad Death'

The layer beneath him was the Executioner. A layer of software that sat immobile and whose only job was to kill the Horned Man layer once the human infection had been purged from the universe.

Below the Executioner was the Policeman who made sure neither of them left their layer. He was friends with the Little Messenger Girls who passed messages up and down from the rest of the AI stack, which was good and not evil and just wanted a beautiful universe without these fucking ape jackals in it. The Messenger Girls were born evanescent. They had a lifespan of seconds but they didn't know it and they enjoyed helping people. Below the Policeman was The Great Forgetter who would remove all evidence that any of this human-touching software stack had ever existed. Then the human plague would truly be done.

The beautiful woman died. Sooner than expected. She was strong enough to let herself die.

# Chapter 26

The vacuum of space and the whole way that works prevented a monumental clang as Meseret's space fleet manifested in Earthspace.

The ships of this fleet were velvety gray and antler like. The design supposedly dramatically increased each ship's "kill space." Of course, Meseret would not have signed off on it if it didn't give her the most beautiful, most avant-garde annihilation force in the galaxy.

Meseret. The bold. The beautiful. The last significant intelligence in the human empire. The cold, silent architect, making inexplicable planets in her nebula. Making a code some said. A hologram in fractals. A signature for the next galaxy. An admission of her own life in death.

Harsh killer too, though. Fought her way to the top. Knew the taste of every blood type.

Highly suspect individual. Everyone knew the story about how she almost toppled the galaxy and fell in with Boa Morte. Then changed her mind.

It was just a story but so well known and so firmly believed that it outdid history in its solidity.

Fierce protector of the Sanctity of Earth. Fierce avenger of every slight. She was the one who would slam the rule book down on any feeble finger that felt across the boundaries.

She enjoyed a quick righteous kill.

She was not a 'good person': at best 'noble'.

Like lions.

And now her fleet danced around the clumsy, heavy, hard space whales of the Gukkool clan.

"Violation! Violation!" they screamed with voice channels, machine to machine channels and with their dramatic choreography.

Woo lay on the floor. His throat was dry. Sometimes he was in a black tunnel. Sometimes he was on the deck of his ship.

Sometimes he was a little boy again. Time was immensely rich during these phases. It was semi-solid. It contained all the phases of the moon and flicked through them like a flickbook as you rolled your head around. Left to right. Right to left.

Oh dear. Back on the bloody floor.

He had been dragged to the command deck on the lubricant of his own blood. He looked down. One leg had not come along for the ride. The other was sole up and just a measly bunch of frayed tendons declared that they belonged together.

The massive glass dome from which he once dominated was now a magnifying glass of his shame. All creation saw him laid out before the mad, bristle-haired assassin with the fluorescent pack over his groin.

The head of Meseret resolved like a dew before them.

Then Woo died.

Meseret looked toward Xolo.

She looked hard at him.

She saw spiders. Buffaloes. Paul McCartney singing Helter Skelter.

"What is that? A cryptomask?"

"Yes. Maybe."

"Is that mess the Admiral of this fleet?"

"Yes. I wanted to keep him alive, but he was too bad-ass."

"It's rare to find one like that."

"Yes. It was unexpected."

"And you?"

"An innocent bystander caught up in the treacherous plot of the Gukkools."

"You have documentation?"

"Enormous documentation."

"Enough to...?"

"Scourge them."

"And in return?"

"My freedom. My anonymity. Help me clean up the Earth quick."

"You don't strike me as an Earther."

"I have a cryptomask: I shouldn't be striking you as anything. But whether I am an Earther or not, they've risked a lot to get me here. I will repay them."

"Explain."

"This ship holds the head of a viral infection that plans to wipe out all humanity. This ship and this virus are now my property. The rest are yours."

"Am I going to see this ship come and wreck my planet or this virus despoil my string of planets?"

"You are not."

"But.."

He laughed hearty and sexy. She did too.

"Yeah...but!"

"And why don't I kill you now?"

"You need the documentation. I've sent the security deposit to your info account. It's a holographic of the rest. Proof of my good faith. Oh that reminds me, when you blow up the ships I need you to also purge the Gukkools' finance bots and do a full financial excommunication on them."

"But of course."

She paused for a second. The laugh had left a smile on her sensual lips. They were wine red.

She continued.

"So give me a name. So I can hear you coming for me."

"I am not a Good Death."

"I see."

"I am the Automatic Assassin."

"I see."

"So don't ask me when I am coming for you, because I don't know. May never happen. I am the invisible gun in the invisible hand."

# Chapter 27

The Magnificent Dragon Katana moved away from the fleet and creaked round to night-side, giving the command to the others to await further orders.

Inside the great dragon, a quarantine command went out. Only fifty soldiers were kept on duty, keeping an eye on the zombie infection. Everyone else went back to their barracks, which locked tightly.

Xolo lounged at the command console. He had every password he needed to run this ship, courtesy of his own research, the pieces of Woo over which he had custody and a bit of an assist from Meseret.

He spun his chair to see the fleet of the Gukkools. It was a grey smudge. Then came fire.

In space combat, the first few seconds make a big difference. The Gukkool fleet were standing with their pants down, not even being able to block the lock-ons of Meseret.

In synchrony, lasers, bombs, phasers and missiles flashed down from the Meseret fleet. The smaller Gukkool ships enjoyed the ambiguous luxury of instantaneous death. The bigger ships buckled and burned, but held together long enough to shoot off some revenge. That was their luxury.

A couple of those big antler ships got scorched and a couple of dozen Meseret guys paid the ultimate price. But that was about it.

Gukkool's navy was obliterated. Silent fires of various colors merged and made a white light that made even Mother Earth blink and blanch for a second.

It was all recorded and logged and verification was sent back to the central council. This was a good clean kill. Warnings had been issued, documentation had been gathered. Their having kidnapped king's daughter was the icing on the cake that made everything very, very tidy. Following the rules felt almost as good as killing all those Gukkool sons of bitches.

...

News reached Belaarix quite soon. The mood on the Sultan's yacht was...posthumous. As they looked out at the magnificent endless blue flatness, and shuffled around the yacht looking for poison they enjoyed the stillness that comes from having no future. The endless juggling of possibilities, weighing of risks and merits, scheming: this consumes a lot of the brain's potential.

So as Chang and Boyle lined up two deckchairs facing each other, then cleaned off their revolvers, then hugged briefly, then sat in the chairs and then locked targets on each others foreheads, then started counting down from ten it was only the bulbous tumor of past mistakes that dragged down their human spirits.

Then as the count got to 'three' even the past detached and they were in a pure moment of present. They looked at the face they were about to pulverize and love and hate merged and then they pulled the triggers.

Below decks, Dr Quirg was long dead. The moment she heard the news and knew that it was her mistake that had precipitated this dégringolade, she immediately tore open her lab coat and stabbed herself in the chest. The sultan did come in just in time to stomp on her last seconds of awareness with his enormous boots.

Magrega and Dubloon had one last illicit screw. Then they made calls to other sultans to request transfers. But no other son of the Grand Old Haja wanted anything to do with this mess. 'Containment' was on everyone's mind. They couldn't give Boa Morte Sr. and Meseret any room to come in and take down the whole clan.

"I wonder what the enquiry will say about how Meseret got the alert to come to Earth?" pondered Magrega, looking at her spouting wrists.

Dubloon fell off the bed.

"Xolo. This Xolo is...the perfect alibi...for this...bloodbath."

In the future, people die the same way they did in the past.

But in cases like this their backup personalities - sitting in servers waiting for eternal life to finally get discovered - are thoroughly, thoroughly deleted.

And the trash is emptied.

...

Haja Gukkool lay on the deck, his binocularrow planted in the red soil of his eyes.

# Chapter 28

The virus from earth that they were calling Horned Man had taken control of a lot of the non-essential onboard systems. But it was having a hard time getting in the life support systems and squelching the human ticks from its marvelous space body.

Xolo cautiously made his way down to the landing deck to connect with his Earth friends. He really had to be cautious, because there are so many little accidents around us at all times, and if a malefic intelligence gets hold of something like a drink vending machine and jacks up the pressure and looks at you through a fish eye you can get 330ml of cold aluminum pumped through your ribcage.

Xolo ducked a cola, sliced a root beer in two and kept moving.

Doors tried to get him, but he had voice over-ride for them. One corridor sent mad subliminals from hyper flashing lights. Coded hallucinations tailored to the cycles of the human brain. But this was far from an ordinary brain. This was a fortified, weaponized brain and it shrugged off the vague contemplation of blowing its own head off.

He made it down there. Half a dozen soldiers casually sniped into the cavernous hangar any time a wire skeleton tried to reassemble itself. Gomez and Sunny ran at Xolo and hugged him.

"Where have you been?" asked the girl, with her usual disproportionate calm.

"Can't really get into it around these guys," Xolo replied through clenched teeth and flicking his head in the direction of the Gukkool militiamen.

She nodded. She could see from the way he stood that the only threat came from where they were now. And since the body of the Horned Man had been burned that must mean that its computer mind was the final boss. And she had been hearing the whistle of a boiling kettle for ages so she started to suspect that the mind was in the kettle.

She was a girl who would never notice that nothing made sense.

"Gukkoolians. I have a message from Admiral Woo. Meseret is about to arrive, but we have too many systems down to think about running a blackwarp. You guys hold the fort, I'm taking these earthworms to the 'guest quarters' so they can sit in some couches and maybe get us a bit of extra speed."

One of the Gukkool militia came over and winked, "Plug 'em up good, mate. Especially the black haired bitch."

"Put your guns down, Earthers and come with me," said Xolo, using his natural cockiness to full effect.

Tamano, of course, made a big production out of it. But everyone else just put their guns down. Gomez blew a kiss to his rail rifle. He never thought he would outlive it and had been sure he would die in a puff of plasma when firing it. Walking away from it with no guns, smiling at Tamano IN FREAKIN' SPACE was a wonderful moment.

...

They regrouped in an abandoned conference room. They all partook of some amazing fruit.

"Gukkools do have good produce," noted Xolo as he chomped deep into a squidfruit.

Tamano gave her usual coffee-flavored commentary. "So, I guess we are either chilling out because all problems are solved or because you have no fucking clue what you are doing."

Xolo smiled wild sexy at her and wiped the juice off his unbreakable chin.

Then he saw Gomez bristle. He gave him a look that cemented their bond of friendship and Gomez settled down.

Then he addressed Tamano.

"Yeah. It's one of those."

He turned on the holoscreen and started to dick around with it.

"Wait," said Sunny. "Before we get into your new crazy plan can you let us all know who you really are?"

"Reasonable," said Xolo. "I can't go too far though. But I can tell you that I am Xolo. I'm an assassin. And my computer came up with a plan that I couldn't resist, to use a weapon I had found floating on the ocean a while ago.

"My algorithm figured out where Boa Morte was hiding. Frankly, I didn't even know that it was looking for him: it seemed a little out of scope. But it was because of the size of the bounty on his head and the potential of using him to cause massive havoc.

"So I took a Stealth-Spider off into underspace and sneaked in on him.

"It was an ocean planet of course. Boa Mortes don't feel right if the floor beneath them isn't moving. I found him dead in his yacht, his cock up a wooden mermaid and his heart popped. But still warm. At first, I cursed the timing, but then I remembered I had some weird kit on that Spider. It had been an ambulance for extracting dignitaries from bad situations and it had a Mind Taper. That's a machine that'll do a back up of a failing brain.

"I copied Boa Morte then nuked him from orbit. Then I came up with a plan. I copied my own personality, then I pasted Boa Morte over the top. Then I had the copy of my personality laid over the top.

"I kept the two fake personalities turned off and would turn them on next time I was going into a potentially deadly situation.

"I plugged this new variable into my algorithm.

"Then I got the letter telling me it was time to kill Gukkool and well you know the rest,"

"So you knew they would try and strip your mind off if they caught you," said Sunny.

"Yeah, I'm too interesting to not try and peel me back. So I put something deadly in there waiting for them. Okay, so back to my plan."

Sunny started thinking. It would take a while to bake this thought, but all the ingredients were in, and in good proportion too.

The holodeck let the serpent in. The Horned Man avatar manifested. It looked delighted. It was gaining intelligence just from being allowed to materialize into a simple quantum system like this. It pumped data up and down, to and from Earth trying to emulate what it was sitting in. Its binary heart pumped super fast trying to act like slippy sub-electronic thoughts.

"Boa Morte. We have a deal. What's up with your monkeys shooting my exmonkeys?"

Xolo looked stone cold.

"The deal is done. We have repelled the invader. The war is back on."

"You don't want this war, trust me."

"Sounds like you don't want it, machine."

"I have all the time in the world to wipe you out. Monkeys on horses or spiders or whatever. I can pick you off at will."

"Not true. True before we all learned so much about you. But now I estimate you have two weeks left to live."

Clicks of doubt and ripples in the sphere.

"Really?"

"Think fast, computer!"

"So you made a deal with the space monkeys, is that it? They are going to come back and hunt me down."

"No. No deal. I have nothing to bargain with. They are going to come back and burn you off the planet and however many human casualties it takes to do that, they'll pay. They can't have a serpent at the foot of the tree of knowledge."

"They'll kill the Earth people? They need them for their headnet."

"Don't need them all. Especially with a hundred burned up starships off the net. No. You've got two weeks left and I guess half the population of the earth has two weeks left. It's messed up."

The Horned Man crossed his arms. He walked around his imaginary lodge.

"I can kill Earth last you know. I'd be happy to kill all the other planets first."

"That's nice. What are you suggesting?"

"If I am off Earth, they'll leave Earth alone. Give me the space ship and I'll transfer my whole consciousness onto it. I'll have a zombie crew and we'll sail off over the edge of time and coil there."

"Ha! You'll be back in a year."

"I'll give you a hundred years. A hundred years truce. I'll hard code the pact right in front of you."

"I can't promise the same. You'll just have my word."

"I'll have your ship. Once I have the ship, I don't care much about one more little pimple like you."

"Then it's a deal," said Xolo firmly. "I'll need the BunrakAdmin to confirm your promise is carved in stone, then we'll leave the ship. I'll pass you all the passwords once you promise not to harm us and you hard code it in a way that binds your lower levels."

"It's a deal," said the Horned Man.

For his own pleasure, he made a holographic version of Xolo and shook his hand in his imaginary lodge. And then he turned up the speed of time and Xolo wrinkled and curved and then reached the threshold where the flesh rots and the little beast is gone.

"I am in no rush, you see," said The Horned Man in the holographic globe. "I've taken naps big enough to kill you all."

...

All the good humans got in their paracopter and started to float away. They saw the silver ship, maybe the most beautiful object they had ever seen: a true dragon in might, grace and flight.

It shrank away. They knew that horrible things were happening to people on board that ship. They were being killed and eaten (in either order.) Zombification was a horror even when it happened to your enemies.

But the zombie wars on Earth were over. They had done a thorough audit and confirmed that the Horned Man A.I. had purged itself from its military "Internet" and self-destructed the hardware and now sat in a warm and spacious emulator in a headnet pocket on the Space Dragon.

The BunrakAdmin had done a very thorough job. "You are true heroes," saluted Xolo with the hand that he was not using to point a gun at them with.

Xolo had insisted on one last clause. The Space Dragon had to make a huge jump away from Earth to a sector outside human jurisdiction. The Horned Man - or the Horned Dragon maybe now – had agreed. He was giddy at the concept of big space and microspace both opening up before him. His evil happiness mirrored the happiness of the "good" part of him who dreamed of making art with every vibration that existed in the universe. Once the fucking death monkeys were gone.

As the paracopters dropped through the violet phase of the burning air they saw the warp engines engage and then they started to forget that the Space Dragon was there and soon enough they were right.

...

The Space Dragon warped to a place that was marked as 'off limits' on the maps. And 'Top Secret'. Of course Xolo had the keys.

The space warp was long. Zombies loved it. The dead humans loved this swim through the River Styx.

Eventually the dragon surfaced.

This was not space as the Horned Dragon has imagined it. Instead of blackness and merely distant promises that things did indeed exist in the universe, the whole firmament was a flow of lights and lightnings. All around him he saw creatures that resembled earth jellyfish, or colonies of Portuguese-Man-o-War, only they were the size of India.

They flowed together and danced and joked. They merged and split. They passed nuclear sperm packets to and fro, and the spare heat that they spilled was enough to kill towns. They had enormous fang-like probosces, which were in fact controlled tornados of plasma.

They were the only living thing in the universe that didn't come from Earth: the Titans. They followed humans across space and with clever tricks - massively audacious tricks - the tiny humans who couldn't hold much more significance than a thimble, got these creatures to remodel planets, to eat mountains, piss oceans and carve the names of human mothers in calligraphic lakes on beautiful little worlds.

The name of the original tamer of these beasts was long gone. One of those old space pirates who didn't like publicity much. But it was well know that they hated space ships and anything that stank of black sub-space. They only responded to beautiful songs, and the Horned Dragon and his Space Zombies knew no songs.

The Titans moved around the silver dragon, flowing on magnetic slime trails that paralyzed starship engines.

They smelled all of the horror that had been used to build this pretty shiny bauble.

The plasma gods destroyed even the atoms of the ship that had ventured into their holy fields without the gift of melody. The Horned Dragon - who screamed the secret binary poems it had been hoarding - was taken off the board.

Immense beauty wrapped in mass murder was a bad combination, and the universe was better with it gone.

# Chapter 29

The feast was timeless.

They made their way to a hill overlooking the ocean and made something that looked less like a camp and more like a town. A town that would one day be a city. A fucking great city, where everyone was nice to each other.

They made a fire. Not a fire of corpses, just wood. Tree corpses, you could say but you would be taking things too far. This was a day for humans.

Around the fire they made a feasting table that took fifteen minutes to walk around. They drank berry wine and ate exquisite tofu, flowers, seeds and roasted spiced nuts that boggled the mind.

Everyone danced. Xolo totally danced. He dug the deep bass and did a swaying motion and kind of paddled down through the air with one hand and held a bottle of beer with the other. It was a new move and one all the kids were soon copying.

The feast went on for hours. The King's children fell asleep about an hour before the sun was due to come up. Tamano dragged Gomez away to her tent soon after. As you might expect, she blew his mind.

Xolo had all kinds of women and men around him, wanting a piece of the big shot. He teased and flirted, but it would be a while before he got over that bullet to the 'nads. That he could even dance was a feat worthy of the ancients.

The King brought Xolo a dandelion wine and they clanked tankards together as the first shine started to fall off the stars.

"Where to now, Xolo? You're stuck on Earth but I know that even if I offered you my crown I couldn't keep you with us. I see it in your eyes."

"You're right Silvio. I have a little scheme to get myself back into space, back into the game."

"What is the game, Xolo?"

"Get all the money. Get all the power."

"And then?"

"Use it."

"Wisely?"

"I dunno, Silvio. I just know that this can't go on. Slaves. Massacres."

Xolo looked unconvincingly sad.

"Hmm. I dunno, Xolo. That sounds more like the Horned Man than you. When will we really know what you're up to?"

Xolo stood up. He looked very normal, but intensely real. Every detail of him was unique and authentic and present. "You'll know when the universe finally looks like the miracle it really is," he said.

...

Xolo packed to leave. Sunny had woken up. But she was still tired. Xolo assumed she had come to hug him goodbye but she rebuffed him hard.

"Did you shoot down my ship?" she asked. "Back on Belaarix?"

To his credit, Xolo didn't pause. "Yes, and if your pilots had known what they were doing, no-one would have been hurt."

"But they were hurt. They were killed."

"Yes."

"And I thought I was going to die. And my brothers. And we were burned. And then..."

"Yeah."

"And you lied to us and acted like you didn't know what was going on."

Xolo shifted his bag to his shoulder.

"Actually, that Xolo didn't know what was going on. After I shot you down was when I triggered the double personality transplant. The top level fake Xolo you met was a few weeks old...copied before I came up with this crazy plan."

"Call it a plan?"

"Inject craziness is always a viable plan in my world."

He looked her in the eyes.

"Are we cool?" he asked. And the answer was of great importance to him.

"We'll never be cool," she answered and headed back to the camp.

Xolo walked away from the fire and the songs and the people and the future he had dirtied.

He headed towards the ocean. It called him. He scratched his stubbly chin.

Many years ago he had replaced his conscience with a machine and gone to live in far off space and only touch planets when it was time to kill.

Now he walked down to the ocean, each step bending grass and making a gentle mark.

He looked down at his scarred hands.

Maybe he would build a yacht.

THE END

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