As Yancey Slide exited the street door of the walk-up tenement firetrap that had been the domicile of the former Johnny Yuma and the Blimp, he had noticed the stretch Hummer limousine that rolled slowly past him. The absurdly extended, laughably impractical vehicle was impossible to ignore or overlook, even for one as preoccupied as Slide had become since, on the phone, Doc Zen had told him that he was "reverberating from there to fucking eternity." He hadn't, however thought too much about the limo, dismissing it as the transport of idiot celebrities looking for drugs and the dubious thrill of coming to cop in a grahzny neighborhood. Such was the way of it in a C21 reality of free-falling civilization. As if in confirmation, a P.D. black and white swung in behind the Hummer, but with its sirens quiet and no lights flashing, delivering a warning rather than making a stop. In a clearly decaying and resentful part of town, the cops didn't need any rich and slumming narco-tourists. Satisfied the limo had nothing to do with him, Slide turned his attention back to the sidewalk, and the deft negotiation of all the lurking beggars, wino-bums and wandering alkies, plus the soft parade the baby-bouncing nadsat juvies, and hormone geeks talking to their invisible friends that made walking awkward, and the you-imagine-it-I'll-do-it shvat-whores in their tight-high-and-low-cuts, with whom he should avoid eye contact so as not to start a keening chorus of the ritual "meee sooo horneeee, babeee." With his attention thus wholly engrossed he never gave the ludicrous limousine the kind of deep idimmu examination that would have revealed Nuygen von Bulow as the passenger within. Later Slide would try to blame his oversight on the occupied body of Johnny Yuma. The body was starting in on a chemical jones, and that might well prove to be an annoying problem. Non-specific receptors wanted a random combination of stimulants and narcotics, and bio-figured that just about anything would do as long as it delivered the buzz and stopped the itching and sniffing, but Slide knew that once the buzz was in place, it would probably start whining for physical gratification. He fallen into a body with a bad case of permanent dissatisfaction. Right at that moment, the need was only a slow jangle, but he knew it would undoubtedly grow worse as the day progressed. Fuck you, Johnny Yuma, wherever you were. He considered making a body jump. The last thing he needed was to be on the lam with a hold-over, secondhand, multiple-abuse addiction. He had more important things to do with his time than to be running down hole-in-the-wall drug dealers for a marginal body that was aching and sweating, stumbling in slow-motion indolence, or twitching and babbling. Maybe a pint of tequila would be enough to set the body to temporary rights. He made a mental note to stop at a liquor store once he had seen Doc Zen, and wondered if codeine was sold over the counter in this particular C21. A couple of shots of tetradetoxin would have brought the damned body under complete control, but where could you get tetradetoxin in a shithole like this?

Inside the Hummer, Sharkboy thumbed the Apex to standby and minimized the safety in preparation for locking onto Slide. "Do I take him now?"

Nuygen von Bulow rolled over on the vehicle's teardrop command bed, peered out of the smoked glass window, and shook her head. "He's on his way to Doc Zen. If we wait, we can take both them, or at least have Slide when he knows a bit more. I would imagine, right now, he's close to clueless."

The limo was multi-dimensional and customized Tardis-style, so it was massively more spacious within than the exterior of the stretch Hummer could ever have indicated. Outside the smoke-black glass of the window was twenty-first century Earth, inside was her own world of drencrom conditioned depravity, a fluid and tubular space that undulated like a section of some vast intestine, in crude pseudo-sympathy with the Great Flux, and had irregular asymmetric windows and lozenge-shaped display screens set in the continuous wall. A murmuring mercury cascade made patterns between them, and streamers of blue and purple vapor decorated the air. The Humiliation lay at Nuygen von Bulow's feet, licking and suckling on the long cruel heel of her left boot with rapt concentration, blurring the mirror finish of the patent leather with its breath. Its maleshape was fixed by steel clamps and a locked exoskeleton, while pleasure/pain drip-catheters protruding from the remaining soft-sections.

The Humiliation had been with von Bulow longer than most could remember, and some rumors claimed she had owned the creature for centuries, although the rumors never quite defined by what timescale these centuries were calculated. That Nuygen von Bulow should not dismiss and replace her attendant Humiliations with anything like the rapidity that she changed the rest of her entourage, was, of course, highly understandable. Of those

who attempted the initiation only a tiny percentage ever survived, and even less were ever deemed suitable for servitude. Even the current Humiliation was put away for long periods, stored frozen and dreamless in the null-void while not wanted, as when von Bulow had been in Manchuria with Shiro Ishi for the Unit 7-31 atrocities, or when it had lingered longer still while she had been imprisoned by the High-Soviet Knights of the KGB.

In a black skinsuit of tuck-and-roll, armored latex, and wearing the silver eagle insignia of the Ninth Legion to which he was in no way entitled, Sharkboy crouched over the y-tech, assisted by a Zeech in its personal life-tank. Sharkboy was fairly new to von Bulow's traveling retinue, and, as she saw it, he would be lucky to remain much longer. The combination of his insolence and feral overeagerness to inflict painful and lingering fatalities was beginning to irritate her. Normally she would not have entertained any objection to a techhand who combined gratuitous cruelty with a killer relish, but she sensed the Sharkboy harbored a concealed but nonetheless vaunting ambition. Nuygen von Bulow expected nothing short of fawning devotion, and, in one who though more about his own advancement than her's, devotion could never be anything but a temporary and self-serving sham. She had flogged, lacerated, and electrocuted him on a number of occasions, well beyond any capacity on his part to enjoy the punishment, and, although he had bowed bloody from the whip, blade, and super conducting paddles, and appeared chastened to the point of abject, she sensed his contrition was an act, another deception, and she was of a mind that, very shortly he would have to go. Indeed, Sharkboy must cease to exist. Even in his short time with her, he had seen far to much to be allowed to stray loose-lipped and untrustworthy.

Unaware of these thought of his doom, Sharkboy turned from the y-tech displays and the controls of the multi-dimensional vehicle and looked at von Bulow. "I could take Slide easily. Piece of cake."

"I said wait didn't I?" "I have him in the cross-hairs. I could at least lock on to him."

Von Bulow jerked into a sitting position, lacerating the Humiliation's tongue with the heel of her shoe, and all but cracking its beak in the process. "Don't reveal yourself as more of a fool than you have already demonstrated. He's idimmu. He would notice the lock immediately."

"It would be very easy."

"You crave yet another electrical beating?"

The Zeech wetly distanced itself as Sharkboy lowered his head in faux subservience. "No ma'am."

"Then do as you are told and be quiet."

"Yes, ma'am."

The Humiliation made a moist blubbering sound, and von Bulow slapped it sharply across its approximation of a penis with a slim black glove. Sharkboy was silent for slightly more than a local minute, and then glanced back again. "Ma'am?"