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  "Aye, weel, join the club," said Middenface.

  Realising there would be little more he could find out from his fellow mutants, Johnny allowed his eyes to wander round the room, taking in and analysing every detail. It was maybe fifteen metres square, with a ceiling almost of the same height. The floor was paved in glistening, gold-coloured tiles. Johnny knelt and pressed his hand against the surface of one of the squares. It was cold, and just a little soft. Johnny realised that it wasn't just gold-coloured; it was gold, stretching out over every square metre of the floor. Which meant that the elaborately etched, silver-coloured walls probably were silver. And the giant chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling, dripping with long strings of diamond-bright crystal, was probably worth more than every bounty Johnny had ever taken.

  Despite the size of the room, it seemed cramped, overcrowded with furniture, much of it upholstered in brightly patterned fabrics that were so ugly they just had to be expensive. Scattered around the furniture were vases and statues and candlesticks and knickknacks from a hundred different worlds. So, there was at least one thing Johnny knew about their host. He had more money than either sense or taste.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the subliminal hum of another transporter beam. It struck the floor beside Middenface, and he took a hasty step back as the unmistakeable figure of Durham Red materialised beside him.

  "That was a dirty trick you played, Johnny," she said. "You damn near wrecked my ship and I only just had it repaired."

  "Ain't life a bitch?" he said.

  Red had just opened her mouth to reply when the huge double doors at one end of the room swung open, and the Strontium Dogs were given the first sight of their host. Eleven hands leapt to eleven holsters. And eleven people realised simultaneously that they were empty.

  The figure walking through the door laughed. "Pardon my caution," he said, "but I took the liberty of arranging for the teleport to bring you down without weapons. I hope you don't think that rude of me."

  Finally, he stepped into the light. He was tiny, little more than a metre tall, a small, pink, defenceless thing that looked like nothing so much as a baby bird, fallen from its nest far too young. He might have looked rather pathetic - if not for the four-metre-high exoskeleton in which he was housed. Or the huge multi-phase blaster clasped with casual strength in one of the exo-skeletal arms.

  There was nothing pathetic at all about Don "Chick" Delater - mutant, psychopath, and the galaxy's most wanted crime boss.

  "Well, I must say," he said. "You don't look very pleased to see me."

  Without needing to discuss it, Johnny and the other bounty hunters began to spread out, moving to encircle Delater so that he couldn't cover them all with his blaster. But after a few strides, Johnny heard a sudden sizzle, and felt a sharp pain as his leg met an invisible but impenetrable barrier. A force field.

  Secure behind this shield, Delater dropped his blaster to his side. "Now now, let's all be civilised about this. I am, after all, a potential customer. And isn't the customer always right?"

  Middenface beat his fist against the force field, so angry that he didn't flinch as it spat sparks towards his face. "Ye ugly wee scunner! The only custom ye'll be getting aff us is a blaster bolt up the arse!"

  Delater's small pink face scrunched up in simulated sorrow. "Don't you feel you may be rushing to judgement? After all, you've never actually met me before. For all you know I could be a terribly nice man."

  Durham Red sneered at him. "Yeah, so nice you murdered five thousand colonists on Sigma Prime, just because they refused to let you perform medical experiments on their children to find a cure for your mutation."

  "Well, they should have realised I wasn't going to take no for an answer," Delater said. "They had only themselves to blame."

  One of the group of five, a huge furry lump of a man who looked like the offspring of a union between a bear and a weasel, lifted up a slow paw and poked it in Delater's direction. "I heard tell y'all done gone and killed a man jist fer forgettin' to 'bless you' when you sneezed."

  Delater shrugged. "I've always said that manners maketh the man. But we really are wasting time, and time is the last thing we have to spare."

  Johnny stepped up to the barrier, careful not to get too close. He stared straight into the crime boss's beady black eyes. The force field might stop solid objects, but it would be powerless against Johnny's alpha rays and after a moment Delater looked away, rocking back on the huge metallic feet of his exo-suit. Johnny smiled grimly. There wasn't a man, saint or sinner, who didn't have some secret he was afraid to see dragged out into the light.

  "All right," Johnny said. "You got us here. You don't want us dead, or we'd be dead already. So just what do you want?"

  The other Strontium Dogs stepped back a little, unconsciously accepting Johnny as their spokesman.

  "Ah," said Delater, still keeping his gaze carefully averted from Johnny's. "A man after my own heart. Blunt, concise and to the point."

  Johnny folded his arms over the hard plate of his chest armour. "I'm still waiting," he said.

  Delater smiled without humour. "But I thought my messenger would have told you. I have a job that needs doing. A bounty that needs collecting and you seemed to be just the right people to do it."

  Red stepped up beside Johnny, as if she alone was unwilling to let him take control. "Listen scumball, we hunt criminals; we don't hunt for criminals."

  "The lady's right," Johnny said - and Red shot him a glance, half gratitude, half annoyance. "If you think we're gonna do your dirty work for you, you'd better think again."

  Pinned inside the exo-skeleton like a worm nailed to a board, Delater's delicate pink body wriggled with excitement. "But that's precisely it," he said. "The man I'm hiring you to find is a criminal. In fact, he's a former associate of mine. You may have heard of him - he calls himself Bad Boy O'Blarney."

  Middenface scratched his lumps. "Oh aye, he's the wee nyaff wha stole the crown jewels."

  "No, you're thinking of Wicked Willy McWilliams. Bad Boy O'Blarney would never set his sights so low. He specialises in... how can I put this delicately? Terminations..."

  "Terminations of mutants, from what I heard," Johnny growled.

  "Yes," Delater admitted. "But I foolishly thought I could trust him. O'Blarney betrayed my trust, stole our earnings and disappeared. I want you to bring him - or at the very least his head - back. As for his hatred of mutants, I'm sure that will just give you more motivation as you hunt him down. That and the fact that I'm offering to give whoever finds him ten times the bounty that you'd be able to collect from the Galactic Commission."

  At those words, several of the Strontium Dogs' ears perked up - literally, in some cases. Johnny shook his head though. "Nice try, but we ain't buying." He ignored the murmurs of discontent from some of the others at his words. "We ain't criminals. Job we do might not be pretty, but it's honest and we'll take the honest wage for it." He deliberately looked round at the ostentatious opulence of the room. "Might not make us rich, but least I get to sleep at night."

  "Oh, believe me, Mr Alpha, I have no trouble sleeping. And I think you'll have no trouble taking this job, when you hear what the alternative is. You see, when I teleported you down here, I didn't just take you weapons away from you, I gave you something back in return..."

  Johnny felt a horrible lurch in his stomach, the sort you get when you're just about to be given some very bad news. "Yeah," he said. "What was it - a good luck card?"

  Delater stepped right up to the force field, his feet clanging loudly on the gold floor, leaving a slight imprint in the soft metal as they passed. "Close, but no cigar. In fact, you're each now the proud owners of a very small balloon."

  "You whit?" said Middenface.

  "A micro-balloon." Delater smiled, enjoying himself. "I had the teleporter rigged up to place one inside each of your chest cavities. If all went according to plan, you should find yours located somewhere between your lungs and you
r heart. One tries to be precise, but it's hard when working with mutant anatomy."

  By this time, all the mutants had approached the barrier and were staring at Delaney with expressions that ranged from baffled to contemptuous. Only Johnny still felt the sour knot in his stomach, and it showed no sign of untangling. He was beginning to realise just what Delater's threat meant.

  Hot Rod, though, clearly didn't. "A balloon!" he sneered, laughing with released tension. "Well, whoop-de-do - must remember to get it out when it's time for my birthday."

  "You won't be able to get it out," Delater told him. "At least, not without some top-class surgical equipment, and at the first sign that you're using that... all it will take to blow up those balloons will be the push of one button." He gestured at the waist of his exo-suit, and Johnny saw what looked like a small control console strapped there. Several of the other Strontium Dogs were beginning to see the picture, and none of them were any happier about it than Johnny. Red had put her hand to her chest, as if she might be able to feel the little invader in her body beneath the bulk of her armour.

  Only Hot Rod didn't get it. "So snecking what?" he said. "So you can blow up some balloons - I'm quaking in my boots!"

  "Oh, you will be," said Delater. His smile broadened, revealing pointed little teeth and a sharp pink jab of a tongue. His hand moved towards the control console at his belt.

  Johnny reached out his hand, pressed it against the sizzling surface of the force field. "Don't-" he shouted.

  But Delater was having too much fun to stop. Johnny suspected that he'd hoped for this moment, longed for one of the Strontium Dogs to doubt his power over them so that he'd be given this excuse to demonstrate it. "Mr Rod clearly doesn't believe me. And I don't take well to being doubted."

  With a tiny movement of his gleaming steel finger, Delaney pressed a button at his waist.

  For a split second, it looked as if nothing had happened. Then Hot Rod's eyes opened wide with shock. "What the..." he said.

  He put a hand to his chest, which was already expanding, pressing his armour away from his body. As the first strap on the armour snapped, Hot Rod realised what was happening and screamed. The other straps tore off one by one, till none were left and the armour plate fell from his body and clattered to the floor. The shirt beneath had already ripped, revealing the hideously distended skin of his chest.

  Hot Rod's scream turned into a horrible gargle and blood frothed out of his mouth. His eyes caught Johnny's in a helpless plea. Instinctively, Johnny reached out to help him, but there was nothing he could do. When Hot Rod tried to speak, all that emerged from his mouth was a gush of scarlet fluid. And then the balloon expanded further, up through his neck, cracking his skull, and the life dimmed from his eyes.

  All that was left of Hot Rod now was a round globe of skin, the doll-like remnants of the mutant's limbs hanging limply from it. From where he was standing, Johnny could still see Hot Rod's face, spread out over the surface of the balloon like butter on bread. It was all he could do not to gag.

  Taking advantage of the bounty hunters' frozen moment of horror, Delater calmly switched off the force field, then strode forward - and popped the balloon with a long needle.

  As the enormous pressure inside released, the balloon that had once been Johnny's fellow Strontium Dog whizzed towards the ceiling with a high-pitched farting noise that in any other circumstances might have been funny.

  Delater turned to Johnny, and this time he did meet his eyes. "So," he said, "had any second thoughts about taking that job?"

  3 / CRASH LANDINGS

  Middenface had never thought he'd be glad to see the inside of that shuttle again, but it was amazing what seeing one of your mates brutally murdered could do to you. He'd taken the controls this time, leaving Johnny to sit beside him, chewing a thumbnail and scowling fit to curdle milk. Middenface knew his partner, so he didn't need to ask what was bugging him. Johnny was going over Hot Rod's death in his mind, wondering if there was anything he could have done to prevent it. It wasn't in Johnny's nature to stand by and watch an injustice be done. Come to that, it wasn't in McNulty's nature either.

  He hated the fact that they were doing that lowlife scunner Delater's bidding, but what choice did they have? Delater held all the cards, with a few extra aces up his sleeve for good measure. And so here they were, setting out to capture one of the most dangerous criminals in the galaxy.

  And, to make it worse, Delater had told them that O'Blarney had hidden away on one of the most dangerous planets in the galaxy: Epsilon Five, otherwise known as Speed.

  The planet was only a few dozen light years away from the asteroid field that housed Delater's base, so it shouldn't take more than a few hours to reach it. But it wasn't the length of the journey that was worrying Middenface. He gazed out of the forward viewscreen, at the hypnotic vista of stars shooting past them like long, thin streamers of light, and tried to remember everything he knew about Speed.

  Middenface wasn't a big one for watching the news - everyday life was depressing enough without finding out about all the other crap going on in the universe - but the accident on Epsilon Five had been such a big deal even Middenface couldn't avoid it. A time bomb had gone off there, a big planet-busting one, and there'd been a whole barrel of theories about who should take the blame. The media had been particularly keen on the story because a bunch of students from Sea of Sorrows University had been camping on the planet and they'd been caught in the blast. The parents of the most attractive girl had been shown weeping on the news, sitting in front of a hologram of their daughter. Middenface didn't really care about that, though. It was the effects of the time bomb that were the problem.

  When the bomb struck, everything in its blast zone - which meant every single thing on the planet's surface - was speeded up to roughly four hundred times its normal rate. It was like someone reached out their finger, pressed fast forward, and then didn't let go. Of course, to someone down on the planet, nothing would have changed. From their point of view, it was the rest of the universe that suddenly took it into its head to slow right down.

  What it would be like on the planet's surface was anybody's guess. Speed had been quarantined immediately after the accident to shield unsuspecting travellers from the unpredictable effects of the chronodiation. Or to cover up a vast government conspiracy if some of the nuts Middenface had seen on the viewscreen were to be believed.

  To top it all off, Delater had insisted that they leave all their time-weaponry behind. He'd said it might interfere with the time field on the planet's surface, cause what he'd called "a lethal chronal feedback that could wipe out the entire sector." Middenface thought that sounded like a load of bull, but Delater hadn't given them a choice. He and Johnny still had their blasters, of course, along with the net grenades they'd recently started using for takedowns, Johnny's beam polariser and short-range teleporter and the Electronux Johnny used for hand-to-hand brawling, but Middenface felt uneasy without the time grenades. They'd helped him and Johnny out of many a tight spot in the past.

  "I guess it makes sense that O'Blarney chose Speed," Johnny suddenly said, startling Middenface.

  "Och aye," Middenface agreed, though he had no idea what Johnny was talking about.

  Johnny leant back in his chair, eyes closed, looking like he was sunning himself on a beach, not heading off on a potential suicide mission. But it was just Johnny's way. Underneath the relaxed surface Middenface could see that he was coiled tight as a spring.

  "I heard anyone down there ages at the same rate as the planet," Johnny said.

  Middenface frowned. "But I thought only what was there when the bomb hit got speeded up."

  Johnny tilted his head towards Middenface, but didn't bother opening his eyes. "Yeah, but everything gets hit by the ageing effect. Something to do with the chronon fallout from the blast. Puts us at a double disadvantage - we move slow but die quick."

  Middenface thought about that a little. "So hoo come this O'Blarney ladd
ie's living doon there?"

  Johnny eyes flicked open, as if surprised Middenface had to ask. "O'Blarney's a robot."

  "A robot?" Middenface said, sitting up straighter. Artificial life forms gave him the creeps. "What kind o' robot?"

  "The nasty kind. He was built by the Boer Five norm separatists to hunt down the mutant population. From what I heard, he loved his work. When the war there ended, the Galactic Commission wanted to put him on trial for war crimes."

  "Didn't think they'd care aboot a few o' us muties getting taken oot."

  "Generally speaking they don't," Johnny said, "But O'Blarney got carried away. Killed so many even the Commission couldn't ignore it."

  "So I wouldnae be wrong in thinking O'Blarney's got some serious hardware an' kens hoo tae use it?" Middenface liked the sound of this less and less.

  Johnny scratched a hand through his stubble. "Yep. He was built to fight. And he was built to last - could age five thousand years and still be as good as new. There's no limit to how long he can stay down on Speed."

  Middenface had a sudden realisation. "Unlike us, ye mean," he said. "So jist how long can we survive doon there?"

  Johnny shrugged. "Far as our bodies are concerned, a day on the planet lasts as long as a year. If the mission takes more than a month, we'll be old men by the time we get back."

  Durham Red wasn't happy. The day had got off to a bad start when Johnny beat her in their race, then there'd been the revelation of their host's identity, the death of Hot Rod and now, to top it all off, she was having to hitch a lift to Epsilon Five. Johnny's little stunt in the asteroid field had left her own ship so damaged it was unlikely to make it to the nearest planet, let alone through a four-hour hyperspace journey. Delater had promised to repair it for her while she was gone. For some reason, she didn't believe him.