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Out on the river one of the big paddle-boats was sailing past, churning up a big wake of frothy water as its bows drove against the current. Colonists were lined up along the rails, and they all seemed to be looking at her. She grinned and waved at them.
Group Seven was sailing tomorrow. The real adventure. She stared wistfully after the boat as it slipped away upriver.
That was when she saw the thing caught around a support pillar of the next jetty. A dirty yellow-pink lump, about a metre long. There was more of it underwater, she could tell from the way it bobbed about. With a whoop, she raced forwards, feet kicking up fans of water. It was a xenoc fish, or amphibian, or something. Trapped and waiting for her to inspect it. Names and shapes whirled through her mind, the didactic memory on full recall, trying to match up with what she was seeing.
Maybe it’s something new, she thought. Maybe they’ll name it after me. I’ll be famous!
She was five metres away, and still running as hard as she could, when she saw the head. It was someone in the water, someone without any clothes on. Face down! The shock threw her rhythm, and her feet skidded from under her. She yelled as her knee hit the rough, unyielding polyp. She felt a hot pain as she grazed the side of her leg. She finished up flat against the embankment, legs half in the water, feeling numb all over and sick inside. Blood started to well up in the graze. She bit her lip, eyes watering as she watched it, fighting not to cry.
A wave lifted the corpse in the river, knocking it against the support pillar again. Through sticky tears Jay saw that it was a man, all swollen up. His head turned towards her. There was a long purple weal along one cheek. He had no eyes, only empty holes where they should be. His flesh was rippling. Jay blinked. Long white worms with a million legs were feeding on the battered flesh. One oozed out of his half-open mouth like a slender anaemic tongue, its tip waving around slowly as though it was tasting the air.
She threw her head back and screamed.
The rain which came after the sun sank from the sky an hour later that evening was a big help to Quinn Dexter. Between them, Lalonde’s three moons conspired to cast a bright spectral phosphorescence on the night-time city: people could see their way quite clearly down the slushy streets, but with the thick clouds scudding overhead the light level was drastically reduced. Durringham didn’t have street lighting; individual pubs would floodlight the street outside their entrance, and the bigger cabins had porch lights, but outside their pools of radiance there was only a faint backscatter of photons. In amongst the large industrial buildings of the port where Quinn lurked there wasn’t even that, only gloom and impenetrable shadows.
He had slipped away from the transients’ dormitory after the evening meal, finding himself a concealing gap between a couple of single-storey outbuildings tacked on to the end of a long warehouse. Jackson Gael was crouched down behind some barrels on the other side of the path. Behind him was the high blank wall of a mill, slatted wooden planks rearing up like a cliff face.
There wouldn’t be many people wandering around this part of the port at night, and those that did would probably be colonists waiting for a boat upriver. There was another transients’ dormitory two hundred metres to the north. Quinn had decided that colonists would make the best targets.
The sheriffs would pay more attention to a city resident being mugged than some new arrival who nobody cared about. Colonists were human cattle to the LDC; and if the dopey bastards hadn’t worked that out for themselves, then more fool them. But Jackson had been right about one thing, the colonists were better off than him. Ivets were the lowest of the low.
They had discovered that yesterday evening. When they finally arrived at the dormitory they were immediately detailed to unload the lorries they had just loaded at the spaceport. After they finished stacking Group Seven’s gear in a harbourside warehouse a group of them had wandered off into town. They didn’t have any money, but that didn’t matter, they deserved a break. That was when they found the grey Ivet jump suit with its scarlet letters acted like a flashing beacon: Shit on me. They hadn’t got more than a few hundred metres out of the port before they turned tail and hurried back to the dormitory. They’d been spat on, shouted at, jeered by children, had stones flung at them, and finally someone had let a xenoc animal charge at them. That had frightened Quinn the most, though he didn’t show it to the others. The creature was like a cat scaled up to dog size; it had jet-black scales and a wedge-shaped head, with a lot of sharp needle teeth in its gaping mouth. The mud didn’t slow it down appreciably as it ran at them, and several Ivets had skidded onto their knees as the group panicked and ran away.
Worst of all were the sounds the thing made, like a drawn-out whine; but there were words in the cry, strangely twisted by the xenoc gullet, human words. “City scum,” and “Kid fuckers,” and others that were distorted beyond recognition, yet all carrying the same message. The thing hated them, echoing its master who had laughed as its huge jaws snapped at their running legs.
Back in the dormitory, Quinn had sat down and started to think for the first time since the police stunned him back on Earth. He had to get off this planet which even God’s Brother would reject. To do that he needed information. He needed to know how the local set-up worked, how to get himself an edge. All the other Ivets would dream about leaving, some must have made attempts to escape in the past. The biggest mistake he could make would be rushing it. And dressed in his signpost jump suit, he wouldn’t even be able to scout around.
He had caught Jackson Gael’s eye, and flicked his head at the velvet walls of night encircling the dormitory. The two of them slipped out unnoticed, and didn’t return till dawn.
Now he waited crouched against the warehouse wall, stripped down to his shorts, nerves burning with excitement at the prospect of repeating last night’s spree. Rain was drumming on the rooftops and splashing into the puddles and mud of the path, kicking up a loud din. More water was gurgling down the drainage gully at the side of the warehouse. His skin and hair were soaked. At least the drops were warm.
The man in the canary-yellow cagoule was almost level with the little gap between the outhouses before Quinn heard him. He was squelching through the mud, muttering and humming under his breath. Quinn peered out round the corner. His left eye had been boosted by a nanonic cluster, giving him infrared vision. It was his first implant, and he’d used it for exactly the same purpose back at the arcology: to give him an edge in the dark. One thing Banneth had taught him was never fight until you’ve already won.
The retinal implant showed him a ghostly red figure weaving unsteadily from side to side. Rain showed as a gritty pale pink mist, the buildings were claret-coloured crags.
Quinn waited until the man had passed the gap before he moved. He slid out onto the path, the length of wood gripped tightly in his hand. And still the man was unaware of him, rain and blackness providing perfect cover. He took three paces, raised the improvised club, then slammed it down at the base of the man’s neck. The cagoule’s fabric tore under the impact. Quinn felt the blow reverberate all the way back up to his elbows, jarring his joints. God’s Brother! He didn’t want the man dead, not yet.
His victim gave a single grunt of pain, and collapsed forwards into the mud.
“Jackson!” Quinn called. “God’s Brother, where are you? I can’t shift him by myself. Get a move on.”
“Quinn? Christ, I can’t see a bloody thing.”
He looked round, seeing Jackson emerge from behind the barrels. His skin shone a strong burgundy in the infrared spectrum, arteries and veins near the surface showing up as brighter scarlet lines.
“Over here. Walk forward three steps, then turn left.” He guided Jackson up to the body, enjoying the sense of power. Jackson would follow his leadership, and the others would fall into line.
Together they dragged their victim into the outhouse—Quinn guessed it had been some kind of office, abandoned years ago now. Four bare wooden slat walls and a roof that leaked. Tapers of slime ran down the walls, fungal growths blooming from the cracks. There was a strong citric scent in the air. Overhead the clouds were drifting away inland. Beriana, the second moon, came out, shining a wan lemon light onto the city, and a few meagre beams filtered through the skylight. They were enough for Jackson to see by.
Both of them went over to the pile of clothes they had left heaped on a broken composite cargo-pod. Quinn watched Jackson towelling himself dry. The lad had a strong body, broad shoulders.
“Forget it, Quinn,” Jackson said in a neutral voice, but one that carried in the silence following the rain. “I don’t turn on to that. Strictly het, OK?” It came out like a challenge.
“Hey, don’t lose cool,” Quinn said. “I got my eye on someone, and it ain’t you.” He wasn’t entirely sure he could whip the lanky lad from a straight start. Besides he needed Jackson. For now.
He started to pull on the clothes which belonged to one of last night’s victims, a green short-sleeved shirt and baggy blue shorts, waterproof boots which were only fractionally too large. Three pairs of socks stopped them from rubbing blisters. He was strongly tempted to take those boots upriver, he didn’t like to think what would happen to his feet in the lightweight Ivet-issue shoes.
“Right, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said. They stripped the cagoule from the unconscious man. He groaned weakly. His shorts were soiled, and a ribbon of piss ran out of the cagoule.
Definitely a new colonist, Quinn decided, as he wrinkled his nose up at the smell. The clothes were new, the boots were new, he was clean shaven; and he had the slightly overweight appearance of an arcology dweller. Locals were nearly always lean, and most sported longish hair and thick beards.
His belt carried a fission-blade knife, a miniature thermal inducer, and a personal MF flek-player block.
Quinn unclipped the knife and the inducer. “We’ll take those with us upriver. They’ll come in useful.”
“We’ll be searched,” Jackson said. “Anything you like, we’ll be searched.”
“So? We stash them in the colonists’ gear. We’ll be the ones that load it onto the boat, we’ll be the ones that unload it at the other end.”
“Right.”
Quinn thought he heard a grudging respect in the lad’s voice. He started frisking the man’s pockets, hoping the dampness in the fabric wasn’t piss. There was a citizenship card naming their victim as Jerry Baker, a credit disk of Lalonde francs, then he hit the jackpot. “God’s Brother!” He held up a Jovian Bank credit disk, holographic silver on one side, royal purple on the other. “Will you look at this. Mr Pioneer here wasn’t going to take any chances in the hinterlands. He must have been planning on buying his way out of any trouble he hit upriver. Not so dumb after all. Just his bad luck he ran into us.”
“Can you use it?” Jackson asked urgently.
Quinn turned Jerry Baker’s head over. A soft liquid moan emerged from his lips at the motion. His eyelids were fluttering, a bead of blood ran out of his mouth; his breathing was erratic. “Shut up,” Quinn said absently. “Shit, I hit him too hard. Let’s see.” He pressed his right thumb against Jerry Baker’s, and engaged his second implant. The danger was that with Jerry Baker’s nervous system fucked up from the blow, the biolectric pattern of his cells which activated the credit disk might be scrambled.
When the nanonic signalled the pattern had been recorded, he held up the Jovian Bank credit disk and touched his thumb to the centre. Green figures lit up on the silver side.
Jackson Gael let out a fast triumphant hoot, and slapped Quinn on the back. Quinn had been right: Jerry Baker had come to Lalonde prepared to buy himself out of fifteen hundred fuseodollars’ worth of trouble.
They both stood up.
“Hell, we don’t even have to go upriver now,” Jackson said. “We can set up in town. Christ, we can live like kings.”
“Don’t be bloody stupid. This is only going to be good until he’s reported missing, which will be tomorrow morning.” His toe nudged the inert form on the wet floor.
“So change it into something; gold, diamonds, bales of cloth.”
Quinn gave the grinning lad a sharp look, wondering if he’d misjudged him after all. “This isn’t our town, we don’t know who’s safe, who to grease. Whoever changed that much money would know it was bent, they’d give our descriptions to the sheriffs first chance they got. They probably wouldn’t want us upsetting their own operations.”
“So what do we do with it, then?”
“We change some of it. These local francs have a cash issue as well as disks. So we spend heavily, and the locals will love giving a pair of dumb-arse colonists their toy francs as change instead of real money. Then we buy a few goodies we can take upriver that will make life a lot easier, like a decent weapon or two. After that . . .” He brought the disk up to his face. “It goes into the mud. We don’t leave any evidence, OK?”
Jackson pulled a face, but nodded regretfully. “OK, Quinn. I guess I hadn’t thought it through.”
Baker moaned again, the wavery sound of a man trapped in a bad dream.
Quinn kicked him absently. “Don’t worry about it. Now first help me put Jerry Baker into the drainage gully outside where he’ll wash down into the river. Then we’ll find somewhere where we can spend his fuseodollars in style.” He started looking round for the wooden club to silence Baker and his moaning once and for all.
After visiting a couple of pubs, the place they wound up at was called Donovan’s. It was several kilometres away from the port district, safely distant from any Group Seven members who might be having a last night in the big city. In any case, it wasn’t the sort of place that the staunchly family types of Group Seven sought out.
Like most of Durringham’s buildings, it was single storey, with walls of thick black wood. Stone piles raised it a metre above the ground, and there was a veranda right along the front, with drinkers slouched over the railing, glass tankards of beer in their hands, watching the newcomers with hazed eyes. The road outside had a thick layer of stone chippings spread over it. For once Quinn’s boots didn’t sink in up to his ankles.
Their clothes marked them down as colonists, machine-made synthetic fabric; locals were dressed in loom-woven cloth, shirts and shorts hand sewn, solid boots that came up to the top of their calves, caked in mud. But nobody shouted a challenge as they walked up the steps. Quinn felt almost home for the first time since he’d stepped off the spaceplane. These were people he understood, hard workers who pleased themselves any damn way they chose after dark. They heard the xenoc animals even before they went through the open doors. It was that same eerie whine of the thing which had chased them yesterday evening, only this time there were five or six of them all doing it at the same time. He exchanged a fast glance with Jackson, then they were inside.
The bar was a single plank of wood running along one side of the main bar, a metre wide, fifteen metres long. People were lined up along it, two deep, the six barmaids hard pushed to cope.
Quinn waited until he reached the bar, and held up the Jovian Bank disk. “You take this?”
The girl barely glanced at it. “Yeah.”
“Great, two beers.”
She started pulling them from the cask.
“It’s my last night here before I sail upriver. Do you know where I can maybe get a bit of sport? Don’t want to waste it.”
“In the back.” She didn’t look up.
“Gee, thanks. Have one yourself.”
“A brightlime, thanks.” She put his half-litre tankards down in the puddles on the bar. “Six fuseodollars.”
Which Quinn reckoned was three times what the drinks should cost, unless a brightlime was more expensive than Norfolk Tears. Yes, the locals knew how to treat transient colonists. He activated the credit disk, shunting the money to her bar account block.
The vicious black catlike animals were called sayce, the local dog-analogue, with a degree more intelligence than Earth’s canines. Quinn and Jackson saw them as soon as they pushed aside the rug hanging across the doorway and elbowed their way into Donovan’s rear room. It was a baiting arena; three tiers of benches ringing a single pit dug into the floor and lined with cut stone, five metres in diameter, three deep. Bright spotlights were strung up on the rafters, casting a white glare on the proceedings. Every centimetre of bench space was taken. Men and women with flushed red faces, cheering and shouting, soaked in sweat. It was hot in the room, hotter than the spaceport clearing at midday. Big cages were lined up along the back wall, sayce prowling about inside, highly agitated, some of them butting the bars of that ubiquitous black wood, emitting their anguished whine.
Quinn felt a grin rising. Now this was more like it!
They found a bench and squirmed on. Quinn asked the man he was next to who was taking the money.
It turned out the bookie was called Baxter, a thin oriental with a nasty scar leading from the corner of his left eye down below his grubby red T-shirt neck.
“Pay out only in Lalonde francs,” he said gruffly.
A man mountain with a black beard stood at Baxter’s side, and gave Quinn a cannibal look.
“Fine by me,” Quinn said amicably. He put a hundred fuseodollars on the favourite.
The fights were impressive, fast, violent, gory, and short. The owners would stand on opposite sides of the pit, holding back their animals, shouting orders into the flat triangular ears. When the sayce had reached a fever pitch of anger they were shoved into the pit. Streamlined black bodies clashed in a snarl of six-clawed paws and snapping jaws, muscle bands like steel pistons bunching and stretching the shiny skin. Losing a leg didn’t even slow them down. Quinn saw them tear off legs, jaws, rip out eyes, rake underbellies. The pit floor became slippery with blood, fluid, and sausage-string entrails. A crushed skull usually ended it, the losing sayce being repeatedly smashed against the stone wall until bone splintered and the brain was torn. Their blood was surprisingly red.
Quinn lost money on the first three fights, then picked up a wad of six hundred francs on the fourth, equivalent to a hundred and fifty fuseodollars. He handed a third of the plastic notes to Jackson, and put another two hundred fuseodollars on the next fight.
After seven fights he was eight hundred fuseodollars down, with two and a half thousand Lalonde francs in his pocket.
“I know her,” Jackson said as the next two sayce were being goaded on the side of the pit by their owners. One of them was an old bull, his skin a cross web of scars. That was the one Quinn had put his money on. Always trust in proven survivors.
“Who?”
“Girl over there. She’s from Group Seven.”
Quinn followed his gaze. The girl was a teenager, very attractive, with longish dark hair falling down over her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless singlet with a scoop neck; it looked new, the fabric was shiny, definitely synthetic. Her face was burning with astonishment and excitement, the taste of forbidden fruit, sweetest of all. She was sitting between two brothers, twins, about thirty years old, with sandy blond hair, just beginning to thin. They were dressed in shirts of checked cotton, crudely cut. Both of them had the kind of thick brown skin that came from working outdoors.
“Are you sure?” With the glare of the lights it was difficult for him to tell.
“I’m sure. I couldn’t forget those tits. I think she’s called Mary, Mandy, something like that.”
The sayce were shoved into the pit, and the crowd roared. The two powerful vulpine bodies locked together, spinning madly, teeth and claws slicing through the air.
“I suppose she’s entitled to be here,” Quinn said. He was annoyed, he didn’t need complications like the girl. “I’m going to have a word with Baxter. Make sure she doesn’t see you, we don’t want her to know we were here.”
Jackson gave him a thumbs up and took another gulp from his tankard.
Baxter was standing on the ramp leading from the pit to the cages, head flicking from side to side as he followed the battling beasts. He acknowledged Quinn with a terse nod.
A spume of blood flew out of the pit, splattering the people on the lowest benches. One of the sayce was screeching. Quinn thought it was calling, “Help.”
“You done all right tonight,” Baxter said. “Break even, beginner’s luck. I let you place bigger bets, you want.”
“No, I need the money. I’m going upriver soon.”
“You build nice home for family, good luck.”
“I need more than luck up there. Suppose I bump into one of those?” He flicked a finger at the pit. The old bull had its jaws around the younger sayce’s throat, it was slamming its head against the side of the pit, oblivious to the deep gouges the other’s claws were raking down its flanks.
“Sayce not like living near river,” Baxter said. “Air too wet. You be all right.”
“A sayce or one of its cousins. I could do with something with a bit of punch, something that’ll stop it dead.”
“You bring plenty gear from Earth.”
“Can’t bring everything we need, the company doesn’t let us. And I want some recreational items as well. I thought maybe I could pick it all up in town. I thought maybe you might know who I needed to see.”
“You think too much.”
“I also pay a lot.”
Down in the pit a sayce’s head virtually exploded as it was slammed against the wall for the last time. Pulpy gobs of brain sleeted down.
Quinn smiled when he saw the old bull raise its head to its cheering owner and let out a gurgling high-pitched bleat: “Yessss!”
“You owe me another thousand francs,” he told Baxter. “You can keep half of it as a finder’s fee.”
Baxter’s voice dropped an octave. “Come back here, ten minutes; I show you man who can help.”
“Gotcha.”
The old bull sayce was sniffling round the floor of the pit when Quinn got back to Jackson. A blue tongue started to lick up the rich gore sloshing about on the stone.
Jackson watched the spectacle glumly. “She’s gone. She left with the twins after the fight. Christ, putting out like that, and she’s only been here a day.”
“Yeah? Well, just remember she’s going to be trapped on a river cruise with you for a fortnight. You can work your angle then.”
He brightened. “Right.”
“I think I got us what we need. Although God’s Brother knows what kind of weapons they sell in this dump. Crossbows, I should think.”
Jackson turned to face him. “I still think we should stay here. What do you hope to do upriver, take over the settlement?”
“If I have to. Jerry Baker isn’t going to be the only one who brought a Jovian Bank disk with him. If we get enough of them, we can buy ourselves off this shit heap.”
“Christ, you really think so? We can get off? All the way off?”
“Yeah. But it’s going to take a big pile of hard cash, that means we’ve got to separate a lot of colonists from their disks.” He fixed the lad with the kind of stare Banneth used when she interviewed new recruits. “Are you up to that, Jackson? I’ve got to have people who are going to back me the whole way. I ain’t got space for anyone who farts out at the first sign of trouble.”
“I’m with you. All the way. Christ, Quinn, you know that, I proved that last night and tonight.”
There was a note of desperation creeping into the voice. Jackson was insisting on having a part of what Quinn offered. The ground rules were laid out.
So let the game start, Quinn thought. The greatest game of all, the one God’s Brother plays for all eternity. The vengeance game. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see what Baxter’s got for us.”
Horst Elwes checked the metabolic function read-out on his medical block’s display screen, then glanced down at the sleeping figure of Jay Hilton. The girl was curled up inside a sleeping-bag, her facial features relaxed into serenity. He had cleaned the nasty graze on her leg, given her an antibiotic, and wrapped the leg in a sheath of epithelium membrane. The tough protective tissue would help accelerate natural dermal regeneration.
It was a pity the membrane could only be used once. Horst was beginning to wonder if he had stocked enough in his medical case. According to his didactic medical course, damaged human skin could rot away if it was constantly exposed to high humidity. And humidity didn’t come any higher than around the Juliffe.
He plucked the sensor pad from Jay’s neck, and put it back in the medical block’s slot.
Ruth Hilton gave him an expectant stare. “Well?”
“I’ve given her a sedative. She’ll sleep for a solid ten hours now. It might be a good idea for you to be at her side when she wakes up.”
“Of course I’ll be here,” she snapped.
Horst nodded. Ruth had shown nothing but concern and sympathy when the sobbing girl had stumbled back into the dormitory, never letting a hint of weakness show. She had held Jay’s hand all the time while Horst disinfected the graze, and the sheriff asked his questions. Only now did the worry spill out.
“Sorry,” Ruth said.
Horst gave her a reassuring smile, and picked up the medical block. It was larger than a standard processor block, a rectangle thirty-five centimetres long, twenty-five wide and three thick, with several ancillary sensor units, and a memory loaded with the symptoms and treatment of every known human illness. And that was as much a worry as the epithelium membrane; Group Seven was going to be completely dependent on him and the block for their general health for years to come. The responsibility was already starting to gnaw at his thoughts. His brief spell in the arcology refuge had shown him how little use theoretical medicine was in the face of real injuries. He had swiftly picked up enough about first aid to be of some practical use to the hard-pressed medics, but anything more serious than cuts and fractures could well prove fatal upriver.
At least the block had been left in his pod; several other items had gone missing between the spaceport and the warehouse. Damn, but why did Ruth have to be right about that? And the sheriffs hadn’t shown any interest when he reported the missing drugs. Again, just like she said.
He sighed and rested his hand on her shoulder as she sat on the edge of the cot, stroking Jay’s hair.
“She’s a lot tougher than me,” he said. “She’ll be all right. At that age, horror fades very quickly. And we’ll be going upriver straight away. Getting out of the area where it happened is going to help a lot.”
“Thank you, Horst.”
“Do you have any geneering in your heritage?”
“Yes, some. We’re not Saldanas, but one of my ancestors was comfortably off, God bless him, we had a few basic enhancements about six or seven generations ago. Why?”
“I was thinking of infection. There is a kind of fungal spore here which can live in human blood. But if your family had even a modest improvement to your immune system there won’t be any problem.”
He stood and straightened his back, wincing at the twinges along his spine. It was quiet in the dormitory; the lights were off in the centre where the rest of Group Seven’s children had been settled down for the night. Bee-sized insects with large grey wings were swarming round the long light panels that had been left on. He and Ruth had been left alone by the other colonists after the sheriff departed to examine the body in the river. He could see some kind of meeting underway in the canteen, most of the adults were there. The Ivets formed a close-knit huddle in a corner at the other end, all of them looking sullen. And frightened, Horst could tell. Waster kids who had probably never even seen an open sky before, never mind primeval jungle. They had stayed in the dormitory all day. Horst knew he should make an effort to get to know them, help build a bridge between them and the genuine colonists, unite the community. After all, they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Somehow he couldn’t find the energy.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. We’ll all be on the ship for a fortnight, that’ll give me ample opportunity.
“I ought to be at the meeting,” he said. From where he was he could see two people standing up for a shouting match.
“Let ’em talk,” Ruth grunted. “It keeps them out of mischief. They won’t get anything sorted until after the settlement supervisor shows up.”
“He should have been here this morning. We need advice on how to establish our homes. We don’t even know the location we’ve been assigned.”
“We’ll find out soon enough; and the supervisor will have the whole river trip to lecture us. I expect he’s out prowling the town tonight. I can’t blame him, stuck with us for the next eighteen months. Poor sod.”
“Must you always think the worst of people?”
“It’s what I’d do. But that isn’t what worries me right now.”
Horst sneaked another look at the meeting. They were taking a vote, hands raised in the air. He sat down on the cot facing Ruth. “What does worry you?”
“The murder.”
“We don’t know it was a murder.”
“Get real. The body was stripped. What else could it be?”
“He could have been drunk.” Because God knows a drink is what I need just looking at that river.
“Drunk and taking a swim? In the Juliffe? Come on, Horst!”
“The autopsy should tell us if . . .” He trailed off under Ruth’s gaze. “No, I don’t suppose there will be one, will there?”
“No. He must have been dumped in the river. The sheriff told me that two colonists from Group Three were reported missing by their wives this morning. Pete Cox and Alun Reuther. I’ll give you ten to one that body is one of them.”
“Probably,” Horst admitted. “I suppose it’s shocking that urban crime is rife here. Somehow you don’t imagine such a thing on a stage one colony world. Then again, Lalonde isn’t quite what I imagined. But we’ll be leaving it all behind shortly. Our own community will be too small for such things, we will all know each other.”
Ruth rubbed at her eyes, her expression haunted. “Horst, you’re not thinking. Why was the body stripped?”
“I don’t know. For the clothes, I suppose, and the boots.”
“Right. Now what sort of mugger is going to kill for a pair of boots? Actually kill two people in cold blood. God, the people here are poor, I’m not denying it, but they’re not that desperate.”
“Who then?”
She looked pointedly over his shoulder. Horst turned round. “The Ivets? That’s rather prejudiced, isn’t it?” he asked reproachfully.
“You’ve seen the way they’re treated in the town, and we don’t treat them any better. They can’t move outside the port district without getting beaten up. Not with their jump suits on, and they don’t have anything else to wear. So who is more likely to want ordinary clothes? Who isn’t going to care what they have to do to get them? And whoever did murder that man did it inside the port, uncomfortably close to this dormitory.”
“You don’t think it was one of ours?” he exclaimed. “Let’s say, I’m praying it wasn’t. But with the way our luck is turning out, I wouldn’t count on it.”
Diranol, Lalonde’s smallest, outermost moon, was the only one of the planet’s three natural satellites left in the night sky, a nine-hundred-kilometre globe of rock with a red ochre regolith, half a million kilometres distant. It hovered above the eastern horizon, painting Durringham in a timid rose-pink fluorescence when the power bike skidded to a halt just outside the skirt of light leaking from the big transients’ dormitory. Marie Skibbow loosened her grip on Furgus. The ride through the darkened city had been sensational, drawing out every second, filling it with glee and excitement. The walls slashing past, sensed rather than seen, the headlight beam revealing ruts and mud patches on the road almost as soon as they hit them, wind whipping her hair about, eyes stung by the slipstream. Taunting danger with every turn of the wheel, and beating it, living.
“Here we go, your stop,” Furgus said.
“Right.” She swung her leg over the saddle, and stood beside him. Now the weariness swept through her, a frozen wave of depression that hung poised high above, waiting to crash down at the prospect of the future and what it held.
“You’re the best, Marie.” He kissed her, one hand fondling her right breast through the singlet’s fabric. Then he was gone, red tail light sinking into the blackness.
Her shoulders drooped as she made her way into the dormitory. Most of the cots were full, people were snoring, coughing, tossing about. She wanted to turn and run, back to Furgus and Hamish, back to the dark fulfilment of the last few hours. Her brain was still fizzing from the experiences, the naked savagery of the sayce-baiting, and the jubilant crowd in Donovan’s, blood heat inflaming her senses. Then the delicious indecency of the twins’ quiet cabin on the other side of town, with their straining bodies pounding against her first singly then both at once. That crazy bike ride in the vermilion moonlight. Marie wanted every night to be the same, without end.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Her father was standing in front of her, mouth all squeezed up that way it did when he was really angry. And for once she didn’t care.
“Out,” she said.
“Out where?”
“Enjoying myself. Exactly what you think I shouldn’t do.”
He slapped her on the cheek, the sound echoing from the high roof. “Don’t you be so bloody impudent, girl. I asked you a question. What have you been doing?”
Marie glared at him, feeling the heat grow in her stinging cheek, refusing to rub it. “What’s next, Daddy ? Will you take your belt to me? Or are you just going to use your fists?”
Gerald Skibbow’s jaw dropped. People on the nearby cots were turning over, peering at them blearily.
“Do you know how late it is? What have you been up to?” he hissed.
“Are you quite sure you want a truthful answer to that, Daddy? Quite sure?”
“You despicable little vixen. Your mother’s been fretting over you all night. Doesn’t that even bother you?”
Marie curled her lip up. “What tragedy could possibly happen to me in this paradise you’ve brought us to?”
For a moment she thought he was going to strike her again.
“There have been two murders in the port this week,” he said.
“Yeah? That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Get into bed,” Gerald said through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
“Discuss it?” she asked archly. “You mean I get an equal say?”
“For fuck’s sake, can it, Skibbow,” someone shouted.
“We want to get some sleep here.”
Under the impotent stare of her father, Marie pulled her shoes off and sauntered over to her cot.
Quinn was still dozing in his sleeping-bag, struggling against the effects of the rough beer he had drunk in Donovan’s, when someone gripped the side of his cot and yanked it through ninety degrees. His arms and legs thrashed about in the sleeping-bag as he tumbled onto the floor, but there was no way he could prevent the fall. His hip smacked into the concrete first, jarring his pelvis badly, then his jaw landed. Quinn yelled out in surprise and pain.
“Get up, Ivet,” a voice shouted.
A man was standing over him, grinning down evilly. He was in his early forties, tall and well built, with a shock of black hair and a full beard. The brown leather skin of his face and arms was scarred with a lunar relief of pocks and the tiny red lines of broken capillaries. His clothes were all natural fabric, a thick red and black check cotton shirt with the arms torn off, green denim trousers, lace-up boots that came up to his knees, and a belt which carried various powered gadgets and a vicious-looking ninety-centimetre steel machete. A silver crucifix on a slim chain glinted at the base of his neck.
He laughed in a bass roar as Quinn groaned at the hot pain in his throbbing hip. Which was too much. Quinn grappled with the seal catch at the top of the bag. He was going to make the bastard pay. The seal opened. His hands came out, and he kicked his legs, trying to shake off the constricting fabric. Somewhere around the edges of his perception the other Ivets were shouting in alarm and jumping over the cots. A huge damp jaw closed around his right hand, completely around, sharp teeth pinching the thin skin of his wrist, their tips grating between his tendons. Shock froze him for a horrific second. It was a dog, a hound, a fucking hellhound. Even a sayce would have thought twice before taking it on. The thing must have stood a metre high. It had short grizzled grey fur, a blunt hammerhead muzzle, jowls of black rubber, wet with gooey saliva. Big liquid eyes were fixed on him. It was growling softly. Quinn could feel the vibration all the way along his arm. He waited numbly, expecting the jaws to close, the mauling to begin. But the eyes just kept staring at him.
“My name is Powel Manani,” said the bearded man. “And our glorious leader, Governor Colin Rexrew, has appointed me as Group Seven’s settlement supervisor. That means, Ivets, I own you: body, and soul. And just to make my position absolutely clear from the start: I don’t like Ivets. I think this world would be a better place without putrid pieces of crap like you screwing it up. But the LDC board has decided to lumber us with you, so I am going to make bloody sure every franc’s worth of your passage fee is squeezed out of you before your work-time is up. So when I say lick shit, you lick; you eat what I give you to eat; and you wear what I give you to wear. And because you are lazy bastards by nature, there is going to be no such thing as a day off for the next ten years.”
He squatted down beside Quinn and beamed broadly. “What’s your name, dickhead?”
“Quinn Dexter . . . sir.”
Powel’s eyebrows lifted in appreciation. “Well done. You’re a smart one, Quinn. You learn quick.”
“Thank you, sir.” The dog’s tongue was pressing against his fingers, sliding up and down his knuckles. It felt utterly disgusting. He had never heard of an animal being trained so perfectly before.
“Smartarses are troublemakers, Quinn. Are you going to be a troublemaker for me?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you going to get up in the mornings in future, Quinn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. We understand each other, then.” Powel stood up. The dog released Quinn’s hand, and backed off a pace.
Quinn held his hand up: it glistened from all the saliva; there were red marks like a tattooed bracelet around his wrist, and two drops of blood welled up.
Powel patted the dog’s head fondly. “This is my friend, Vorix. He and I are affinity bonded, which means I can quite literally smell out any scams you dickheads cook up. So don’t even try to pull any fast ones, because I know them all. If I find you doing anything I don’t like, it will be Vorix who deals with you. And it won’t be your hand he bites off next time, he’ll be dining on your balls. Do I make myself clear?”
The Ivets mumbled their answer, heads bowed, avoiding Powel’s eye.
“I’m glad none of us are suffering any illusions about the other. Now then, your instructions for the day. I will not repeat them. Group Seven is going upriver on three ships: the Swithland , the Nassier , and the Hycel . They are currently docked in harbour three, and they’re sailing in four hours. So that is the time you have to get the colonists’ gear loaded. Any pods that aren’t loaded, I will have you carry on your backs the whole way to the landing site upriver. Do not expect me to act as your permanent nursemaid, get yourselves organized and get on with it. You will be travelling with me and Vorix on the Swithland. Now move!”
Vorix barked, jowls peeled back from his teeth. Powel watched Quinn skitter backwards like a crab, then pick himself up and chase off after the other Ivets. He knew Quinn was going to be trouble, after helping to start five settlements he could read the Ivets’ thoughts like a personality debrief. The youth was highly resentful, and smart with it. He was more than a waster kid, probably got tied in with some underground organization before he was transported. Powel toyed with the idea of simply leaving him behind when the Swithland sailed, let the Durringham sheriffs deal with him. But the Land Allocation Office would know what he’d done, and it would be entered in his file, which had too many incidents already. “Bugger,” he muttered under his breath. The Ivets were all outside the dormitory, heading along the path to the warehouse. And it looked like they were gathering round Quinn, waiting for him to start directing them. Oh well, if it came to it, Quinn would just have to have an accident in the jungle.
Horst Elwes had been watching the episode with a number of Group Seven’s members, and now he stepped up to Powel. The supervisor’s dog turned its neck to look at him. Lord, but it was a brute. Lalonde was becoming a sore test for him indeed. “Was it necessary to be quite so unpleasant to those boys?” he asked Powel Manani.
Powel looked him up and down, eyes catching on the white crucifix. “Yes. If you want the blunt truth, Father. That’s the way I always deal with them. They have to know who’s in charge from the word go. Believe me, they respect toughness.”
“They would also respond to kindness.”
“Fine, well you show them plenty of it, Father. And just to prove there’s no ill feeling, I’ll give them time off to attend mass.”
Horst had to quicken his pace to keep up. “Your dog,” he said cautiously.
“What about him?”
“You say you are bonded with affinity?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you an Edenist, then?”
Vorix made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.
“No, Father,” Powel said. “I’m simply practical. And if I had a fuseodollar for every new-landed priest who asked me that I would be a millionaire. I need Vorix upriver; I need him to hunt, to scout, to keep the Ivets in line. Neuron symbionts give me control over him. I use them because they are cheap and they work. The same as all the other settlement supervisors, and half of the county sheriffs as well. It’s only the major Earth-based religions which maintain people’s prejudice against bitek. But on worlds like Lalonde we can’t afford your prissy theological debates. We use what we have to, when we have to. And if you want to survive long enough to fill Group Seven’s second generation with your noble bigotry over a single chromosome which makes people a blasphemy, then you’ll do the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a settlement expedition to sort out.” He brushed past, heading for the harbour.
Gerald Skibbow and the other members of Group Seven followed after him, several of them giving shamefaced glances to the startled priest. Gerald watched Rai Molvi gathering up his nerve to speak. Molvi had made a lot of noise at the meeting last night, he seemed to fancy himself as a leader of men. There had been plenty of suggestions that they form an official committee, elect a spokesperson. It would help the group interface with the authorities, Rai Molvi said. Gerald privately gave him six months before he was running back to Durringham with his tail between his legs. The man was an obvious lawyer type, didn’t have what it took to be a farmer.
Group Seven was sailing tomorrow. The real adventure. She stared wistfully after the boat as it slipped away upriver.
That was when she saw the thing caught around a support pillar of the next jetty. A dirty yellow-pink lump, about a metre long. There was more of it underwater, she could tell from the way it bobbed about. With a whoop, she raced forwards, feet kicking up fans of water. It was a xenoc fish, or amphibian, or something. Trapped and waiting for her to inspect it. Names and shapes whirled through her mind, the didactic memory on full recall, trying to match up with what she was seeing.
Maybe it’s something new, she thought. Maybe they’ll name it after me. I’ll be famous!
She was five metres away, and still running as hard as she could, when she saw the head. It was someone in the water, someone without any clothes on. Face down! The shock threw her rhythm, and her feet skidded from under her. She yelled as her knee hit the rough, unyielding polyp. She felt a hot pain as she grazed the side of her leg. She finished up flat against the embankment, legs half in the water, feeling numb all over and sick inside. Blood started to well up in the graze. She bit her lip, eyes watering as she watched it, fighting not to cry.
A wave lifted the corpse in the river, knocking it against the support pillar again. Through sticky tears Jay saw that it was a man, all swollen up. His head turned towards her. There was a long purple weal along one cheek. He had no eyes, only empty holes where they should be. His flesh was rippling. Jay blinked. Long white worms with a million legs were feeding on the battered flesh. One oozed out of his half-open mouth like a slender anaemic tongue, its tip waving around slowly as though it was tasting the air.
She threw her head back and screamed.
The rain which came after the sun sank from the sky an hour later that evening was a big help to Quinn Dexter. Between them, Lalonde’s three moons conspired to cast a bright spectral phosphorescence on the night-time city: people could see their way quite clearly down the slushy streets, but with the thick clouds scudding overhead the light level was drastically reduced. Durringham didn’t have street lighting; individual pubs would floodlight the street outside their entrance, and the bigger cabins had porch lights, but outside their pools of radiance there was only a faint backscatter of photons. In amongst the large industrial buildings of the port where Quinn lurked there wasn’t even that, only gloom and impenetrable shadows.
He had slipped away from the transients’ dormitory after the evening meal, finding himself a concealing gap between a couple of single-storey outbuildings tacked on to the end of a long warehouse. Jackson Gael was crouched down behind some barrels on the other side of the path. Behind him was the high blank wall of a mill, slatted wooden planks rearing up like a cliff face.
There wouldn’t be many people wandering around this part of the port at night, and those that did would probably be colonists waiting for a boat upriver. There was another transients’ dormitory two hundred metres to the north. Quinn had decided that colonists would make the best targets.
The sheriffs would pay more attention to a city resident being mugged than some new arrival who nobody cared about. Colonists were human cattle to the LDC; and if the dopey bastards hadn’t worked that out for themselves, then more fool them. But Jackson had been right about one thing, the colonists were better off than him. Ivets were the lowest of the low.
They had discovered that yesterday evening. When they finally arrived at the dormitory they were immediately detailed to unload the lorries they had just loaded at the spaceport. After they finished stacking Group Seven’s gear in a harbourside warehouse a group of them had wandered off into town. They didn’t have any money, but that didn’t matter, they deserved a break. That was when they found the grey Ivet jump suit with its scarlet letters acted like a flashing beacon: Shit on me. They hadn’t got more than a few hundred metres out of the port before they turned tail and hurried back to the dormitory. They’d been spat on, shouted at, jeered by children, had stones flung at them, and finally someone had let a xenoc animal charge at them. That had frightened Quinn the most, though he didn’t show it to the others. The creature was like a cat scaled up to dog size; it had jet-black scales and a wedge-shaped head, with a lot of sharp needle teeth in its gaping mouth. The mud didn’t slow it down appreciably as it ran at them, and several Ivets had skidded onto their knees as the group panicked and ran away.
Worst of all were the sounds the thing made, like a drawn-out whine; but there were words in the cry, strangely twisted by the xenoc gullet, human words. “City scum,” and “Kid fuckers,” and others that were distorted beyond recognition, yet all carrying the same message. The thing hated them, echoing its master who had laughed as its huge jaws snapped at their running legs.
Back in the dormitory, Quinn had sat down and started to think for the first time since the police stunned him back on Earth. He had to get off this planet which even God’s Brother would reject. To do that he needed information. He needed to know how the local set-up worked, how to get himself an edge. All the other Ivets would dream about leaving, some must have made attempts to escape in the past. The biggest mistake he could make would be rushing it. And dressed in his signpost jump suit, he wouldn’t even be able to scout around.
He had caught Jackson Gael’s eye, and flicked his head at the velvet walls of night encircling the dormitory. The two of them slipped out unnoticed, and didn’t return till dawn.
Now he waited crouched against the warehouse wall, stripped down to his shorts, nerves burning with excitement at the prospect of repeating last night’s spree. Rain was drumming on the rooftops and splashing into the puddles and mud of the path, kicking up a loud din. More water was gurgling down the drainage gully at the side of the warehouse. His skin and hair were soaked. At least the drops were warm.
The man in the canary-yellow cagoule was almost level with the little gap between the outhouses before Quinn heard him. He was squelching through the mud, muttering and humming under his breath. Quinn peered out round the corner. His left eye had been boosted by a nanonic cluster, giving him infrared vision. It was his first implant, and he’d used it for exactly the same purpose back at the arcology: to give him an edge in the dark. One thing Banneth had taught him was never fight until you’ve already won.
The retinal implant showed him a ghostly red figure weaving unsteadily from side to side. Rain showed as a gritty pale pink mist, the buildings were claret-coloured crags.
Quinn waited until the man had passed the gap before he moved. He slid out onto the path, the length of wood gripped tightly in his hand. And still the man was unaware of him, rain and blackness providing perfect cover. He took three paces, raised the improvised club, then slammed it down at the base of the man’s neck. The cagoule’s fabric tore under the impact. Quinn felt the blow reverberate all the way back up to his elbows, jarring his joints. God’s Brother! He didn’t want the man dead, not yet.
His victim gave a single grunt of pain, and collapsed forwards into the mud.
“Jackson!” Quinn called. “God’s Brother, where are you? I can’t shift him by myself. Get a move on.”
“Quinn? Christ, I can’t see a bloody thing.”
He looked round, seeing Jackson emerge from behind the barrels. His skin shone a strong burgundy in the infrared spectrum, arteries and veins near the surface showing up as brighter scarlet lines.
“Over here. Walk forward three steps, then turn left.” He guided Jackson up to the body, enjoying the sense of power. Jackson would follow his leadership, and the others would fall into line.
Together they dragged their victim into the outhouse—Quinn guessed it had been some kind of office, abandoned years ago now. Four bare wooden slat walls and a roof that leaked. Tapers of slime ran down the walls, fungal growths blooming from the cracks. There was a strong citric scent in the air. Overhead the clouds were drifting away inland. Beriana, the second moon, came out, shining a wan lemon light onto the city, and a few meagre beams filtered through the skylight. They were enough for Jackson to see by.
Both of them went over to the pile of clothes they had left heaped on a broken composite cargo-pod. Quinn watched Jackson towelling himself dry. The lad had a strong body, broad shoulders.
“Forget it, Quinn,” Jackson said in a neutral voice, but one that carried in the silence following the rain. “I don’t turn on to that. Strictly het, OK?” It came out like a challenge.
“Hey, don’t lose cool,” Quinn said. “I got my eye on someone, and it ain’t you.” He wasn’t entirely sure he could whip the lanky lad from a straight start. Besides he needed Jackson. For now.
He started to pull on the clothes which belonged to one of last night’s victims, a green short-sleeved shirt and baggy blue shorts, waterproof boots which were only fractionally too large. Three pairs of socks stopped them from rubbing blisters. He was strongly tempted to take those boots upriver, he didn’t like to think what would happen to his feet in the lightweight Ivet-issue shoes.
“Right, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said. They stripped the cagoule from the unconscious man. He groaned weakly. His shorts were soiled, and a ribbon of piss ran out of the cagoule.
Definitely a new colonist, Quinn decided, as he wrinkled his nose up at the smell. The clothes were new, the boots were new, he was clean shaven; and he had the slightly overweight appearance of an arcology dweller. Locals were nearly always lean, and most sported longish hair and thick beards.
His belt carried a fission-blade knife, a miniature thermal inducer, and a personal MF flek-player block.
Quinn unclipped the knife and the inducer. “We’ll take those with us upriver. They’ll come in useful.”
“We’ll be searched,” Jackson said. “Anything you like, we’ll be searched.”
“So? We stash them in the colonists’ gear. We’ll be the ones that load it onto the boat, we’ll be the ones that unload it at the other end.”
“Right.”
Quinn thought he heard a grudging respect in the lad’s voice. He started frisking the man’s pockets, hoping the dampness in the fabric wasn’t piss. There was a citizenship card naming their victim as Jerry Baker, a credit disk of Lalonde francs, then he hit the jackpot. “God’s Brother!” He held up a Jovian Bank credit disk, holographic silver on one side, royal purple on the other. “Will you look at this. Mr Pioneer here wasn’t going to take any chances in the hinterlands. He must have been planning on buying his way out of any trouble he hit upriver. Not so dumb after all. Just his bad luck he ran into us.”
“Can you use it?” Jackson asked urgently.
Quinn turned Jerry Baker’s head over. A soft liquid moan emerged from his lips at the motion. His eyelids were fluttering, a bead of blood ran out of his mouth; his breathing was erratic. “Shut up,” Quinn said absently. “Shit, I hit him too hard. Let’s see.” He pressed his right thumb against Jerry Baker’s, and engaged his second implant. The danger was that with Jerry Baker’s nervous system fucked up from the blow, the biolectric pattern of his cells which activated the credit disk might be scrambled.
When the nanonic signalled the pattern had been recorded, he held up the Jovian Bank credit disk and touched his thumb to the centre. Green figures lit up on the silver side.
Jackson Gael let out a fast triumphant hoot, and slapped Quinn on the back. Quinn had been right: Jerry Baker had come to Lalonde prepared to buy himself out of fifteen hundred fuseodollars’ worth of trouble.
They both stood up.
“Hell, we don’t even have to go upriver now,” Jackson said. “We can set up in town. Christ, we can live like kings.”
“Don’t be bloody stupid. This is only going to be good until he’s reported missing, which will be tomorrow morning.” His toe nudged the inert form on the wet floor.
“So change it into something; gold, diamonds, bales of cloth.”
Quinn gave the grinning lad a sharp look, wondering if he’d misjudged him after all. “This isn’t our town, we don’t know who’s safe, who to grease. Whoever changed that much money would know it was bent, they’d give our descriptions to the sheriffs first chance they got. They probably wouldn’t want us upsetting their own operations.”
“So what do we do with it, then?”
“We change some of it. These local francs have a cash issue as well as disks. So we spend heavily, and the locals will love giving a pair of dumb-arse colonists their toy francs as change instead of real money. Then we buy a few goodies we can take upriver that will make life a lot easier, like a decent weapon or two. After that . . .” He brought the disk up to his face. “It goes into the mud. We don’t leave any evidence, OK?”
Jackson pulled a face, but nodded regretfully. “OK, Quinn. I guess I hadn’t thought it through.”
Baker moaned again, the wavery sound of a man trapped in a bad dream.
Quinn kicked him absently. “Don’t worry about it. Now first help me put Jerry Baker into the drainage gully outside where he’ll wash down into the river. Then we’ll find somewhere where we can spend his fuseodollars in style.” He started looking round for the wooden club to silence Baker and his moaning once and for all.
After visiting a couple of pubs, the place they wound up at was called Donovan’s. It was several kilometres away from the port district, safely distant from any Group Seven members who might be having a last night in the big city. In any case, it wasn’t the sort of place that the staunchly family types of Group Seven sought out.
Like most of Durringham’s buildings, it was single storey, with walls of thick black wood. Stone piles raised it a metre above the ground, and there was a veranda right along the front, with drinkers slouched over the railing, glass tankards of beer in their hands, watching the newcomers with hazed eyes. The road outside had a thick layer of stone chippings spread over it. For once Quinn’s boots didn’t sink in up to his ankles.
Their clothes marked them down as colonists, machine-made synthetic fabric; locals were dressed in loom-woven cloth, shirts and shorts hand sewn, solid boots that came up to the top of their calves, caked in mud. But nobody shouted a challenge as they walked up the steps. Quinn felt almost home for the first time since he’d stepped off the spaceplane. These were people he understood, hard workers who pleased themselves any damn way they chose after dark. They heard the xenoc animals even before they went through the open doors. It was that same eerie whine of the thing which had chased them yesterday evening, only this time there were five or six of them all doing it at the same time. He exchanged a fast glance with Jackson, then they were inside.
The bar was a single plank of wood running along one side of the main bar, a metre wide, fifteen metres long. People were lined up along it, two deep, the six barmaids hard pushed to cope.
Quinn waited until he reached the bar, and held up the Jovian Bank disk. “You take this?”
The girl barely glanced at it. “Yeah.”
“Great, two beers.”
She started pulling them from the cask.
“It’s my last night here before I sail upriver. Do you know where I can maybe get a bit of sport? Don’t want to waste it.”
“In the back.” She didn’t look up.
“Gee, thanks. Have one yourself.”
“A brightlime, thanks.” She put his half-litre tankards down in the puddles on the bar. “Six fuseodollars.”
Which Quinn reckoned was three times what the drinks should cost, unless a brightlime was more expensive than Norfolk Tears. Yes, the locals knew how to treat transient colonists. He activated the credit disk, shunting the money to her bar account block.
The vicious black catlike animals were called sayce, the local dog-analogue, with a degree more intelligence than Earth’s canines. Quinn and Jackson saw them as soon as they pushed aside the rug hanging across the doorway and elbowed their way into Donovan’s rear room. It was a baiting arena; three tiers of benches ringing a single pit dug into the floor and lined with cut stone, five metres in diameter, three deep. Bright spotlights were strung up on the rafters, casting a white glare on the proceedings. Every centimetre of bench space was taken. Men and women with flushed red faces, cheering and shouting, soaked in sweat. It was hot in the room, hotter than the spaceport clearing at midday. Big cages were lined up along the back wall, sayce prowling about inside, highly agitated, some of them butting the bars of that ubiquitous black wood, emitting their anguished whine.
Quinn felt a grin rising. Now this was more like it!
They found a bench and squirmed on. Quinn asked the man he was next to who was taking the money.
It turned out the bookie was called Baxter, a thin oriental with a nasty scar leading from the corner of his left eye down below his grubby red T-shirt neck.
“Pay out only in Lalonde francs,” he said gruffly.
A man mountain with a black beard stood at Baxter’s side, and gave Quinn a cannibal look.
“Fine by me,” Quinn said amicably. He put a hundred fuseodollars on the favourite.
The fights were impressive, fast, violent, gory, and short. The owners would stand on opposite sides of the pit, holding back their animals, shouting orders into the flat triangular ears. When the sayce had reached a fever pitch of anger they were shoved into the pit. Streamlined black bodies clashed in a snarl of six-clawed paws and snapping jaws, muscle bands like steel pistons bunching and stretching the shiny skin. Losing a leg didn’t even slow them down. Quinn saw them tear off legs, jaws, rip out eyes, rake underbellies. The pit floor became slippery with blood, fluid, and sausage-string entrails. A crushed skull usually ended it, the losing sayce being repeatedly smashed against the stone wall until bone splintered and the brain was torn. Their blood was surprisingly red.
Quinn lost money on the first three fights, then picked up a wad of six hundred francs on the fourth, equivalent to a hundred and fifty fuseodollars. He handed a third of the plastic notes to Jackson, and put another two hundred fuseodollars on the next fight.
After seven fights he was eight hundred fuseodollars down, with two and a half thousand Lalonde francs in his pocket.
“I know her,” Jackson said as the next two sayce were being goaded on the side of the pit by their owners. One of them was an old bull, his skin a cross web of scars. That was the one Quinn had put his money on. Always trust in proven survivors.
“Who?”
“Girl over there. She’s from Group Seven.”
Quinn followed his gaze. The girl was a teenager, very attractive, with longish dark hair falling down over her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless singlet with a scoop neck; it looked new, the fabric was shiny, definitely synthetic. Her face was burning with astonishment and excitement, the taste of forbidden fruit, sweetest of all. She was sitting between two brothers, twins, about thirty years old, with sandy blond hair, just beginning to thin. They were dressed in shirts of checked cotton, crudely cut. Both of them had the kind of thick brown skin that came from working outdoors.
“Are you sure?” With the glare of the lights it was difficult for him to tell.
“I’m sure. I couldn’t forget those tits. I think she’s called Mary, Mandy, something like that.”
The sayce were shoved into the pit, and the crowd roared. The two powerful vulpine bodies locked together, spinning madly, teeth and claws slicing through the air.
“I suppose she’s entitled to be here,” Quinn said. He was annoyed, he didn’t need complications like the girl. “I’m going to have a word with Baxter. Make sure she doesn’t see you, we don’t want her to know we were here.”
Jackson gave him a thumbs up and took another gulp from his tankard.
Baxter was standing on the ramp leading from the pit to the cages, head flicking from side to side as he followed the battling beasts. He acknowledged Quinn with a terse nod.
A spume of blood flew out of the pit, splattering the people on the lowest benches. One of the sayce was screeching. Quinn thought it was calling, “Help.”
“You done all right tonight,” Baxter said. “Break even, beginner’s luck. I let you place bigger bets, you want.”
“No, I need the money. I’m going upriver soon.”
“You build nice home for family, good luck.”
“I need more than luck up there. Suppose I bump into one of those?” He flicked a finger at the pit. The old bull had its jaws around the younger sayce’s throat, it was slamming its head against the side of the pit, oblivious to the deep gouges the other’s claws were raking down its flanks.
“Sayce not like living near river,” Baxter said. “Air too wet. You be all right.”
“A sayce or one of its cousins. I could do with something with a bit of punch, something that’ll stop it dead.”
“You bring plenty gear from Earth.”
“Can’t bring everything we need, the company doesn’t let us. And I want some recreational items as well. I thought maybe I could pick it all up in town. I thought maybe you might know who I needed to see.”
“You think too much.”
“I also pay a lot.”
Down in the pit a sayce’s head virtually exploded as it was slammed against the wall for the last time. Pulpy gobs of brain sleeted down.
Quinn smiled when he saw the old bull raise its head to its cheering owner and let out a gurgling high-pitched bleat: “Yessss!”
“You owe me another thousand francs,” he told Baxter. “You can keep half of it as a finder’s fee.”
Baxter’s voice dropped an octave. “Come back here, ten minutes; I show you man who can help.”
“Gotcha.”
The old bull sayce was sniffling round the floor of the pit when Quinn got back to Jackson. A blue tongue started to lick up the rich gore sloshing about on the stone.
Jackson watched the spectacle glumly. “She’s gone. She left with the twins after the fight. Christ, putting out like that, and she’s only been here a day.”
“Yeah? Well, just remember she’s going to be trapped on a river cruise with you for a fortnight. You can work your angle then.”
He brightened. “Right.”
“I think I got us what we need. Although God’s Brother knows what kind of weapons they sell in this dump. Crossbows, I should think.”
Jackson turned to face him. “I still think we should stay here. What do you hope to do upriver, take over the settlement?”
“If I have to. Jerry Baker isn’t going to be the only one who brought a Jovian Bank disk with him. If we get enough of them, we can buy ourselves off this shit heap.”
“Christ, you really think so? We can get off? All the way off?”
“Yeah. But it’s going to take a big pile of hard cash, that means we’ve got to separate a lot of colonists from their disks.” He fixed the lad with the kind of stare Banneth used when she interviewed new recruits. “Are you up to that, Jackson? I’ve got to have people who are going to back me the whole way. I ain’t got space for anyone who farts out at the first sign of trouble.”
“I’m with you. All the way. Christ, Quinn, you know that, I proved that last night and tonight.”
There was a note of desperation creeping into the voice. Jackson was insisting on having a part of what Quinn offered. The ground rules were laid out.
So let the game start, Quinn thought. The greatest game of all, the one God’s Brother plays for all eternity. The vengeance game. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see what Baxter’s got for us.”
Horst Elwes checked the metabolic function read-out on his medical block’s display screen, then glanced down at the sleeping figure of Jay Hilton. The girl was curled up inside a sleeping-bag, her facial features relaxed into serenity. He had cleaned the nasty graze on her leg, given her an antibiotic, and wrapped the leg in a sheath of epithelium membrane. The tough protective tissue would help accelerate natural dermal regeneration.
It was a pity the membrane could only be used once. Horst was beginning to wonder if he had stocked enough in his medical case. According to his didactic medical course, damaged human skin could rot away if it was constantly exposed to high humidity. And humidity didn’t come any higher than around the Juliffe.
He plucked the sensor pad from Jay’s neck, and put it back in the medical block’s slot.
Ruth Hilton gave him an expectant stare. “Well?”
“I’ve given her a sedative. She’ll sleep for a solid ten hours now. It might be a good idea for you to be at her side when she wakes up.”
“Of course I’ll be here,” she snapped.
Horst nodded. Ruth had shown nothing but concern and sympathy when the sobbing girl had stumbled back into the dormitory, never letting a hint of weakness show. She had held Jay’s hand all the time while Horst disinfected the graze, and the sheriff asked his questions. Only now did the worry spill out.
“Sorry,” Ruth said.
Horst gave her a reassuring smile, and picked up the medical block. It was larger than a standard processor block, a rectangle thirty-five centimetres long, twenty-five wide and three thick, with several ancillary sensor units, and a memory loaded with the symptoms and treatment of every known human illness. And that was as much a worry as the epithelium membrane; Group Seven was going to be completely dependent on him and the block for their general health for years to come. The responsibility was already starting to gnaw at his thoughts. His brief spell in the arcology refuge had shown him how little use theoretical medicine was in the face of real injuries. He had swiftly picked up enough about first aid to be of some practical use to the hard-pressed medics, but anything more serious than cuts and fractures could well prove fatal upriver.
At least the block had been left in his pod; several other items had gone missing between the spaceport and the warehouse. Damn, but why did Ruth have to be right about that? And the sheriffs hadn’t shown any interest when he reported the missing drugs. Again, just like she said.
He sighed and rested his hand on her shoulder as she sat on the edge of the cot, stroking Jay’s hair.
“She’s a lot tougher than me,” he said. “She’ll be all right. At that age, horror fades very quickly. And we’ll be going upriver straight away. Getting out of the area where it happened is going to help a lot.”
“Thank you, Horst.”
“Do you have any geneering in your heritage?”
“Yes, some. We’re not Saldanas, but one of my ancestors was comfortably off, God bless him, we had a few basic enhancements about six or seven generations ago. Why?”
“I was thinking of infection. There is a kind of fungal spore here which can live in human blood. But if your family had even a modest improvement to your immune system there won’t be any problem.”
He stood and straightened his back, wincing at the twinges along his spine. It was quiet in the dormitory; the lights were off in the centre where the rest of Group Seven’s children had been settled down for the night. Bee-sized insects with large grey wings were swarming round the long light panels that had been left on. He and Ruth had been left alone by the other colonists after the sheriff departed to examine the body in the river. He could see some kind of meeting underway in the canteen, most of the adults were there. The Ivets formed a close-knit huddle in a corner at the other end, all of them looking sullen. And frightened, Horst could tell. Waster kids who had probably never even seen an open sky before, never mind primeval jungle. They had stayed in the dormitory all day. Horst knew he should make an effort to get to know them, help build a bridge between them and the genuine colonists, unite the community. After all, they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Somehow he couldn’t find the energy.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. We’ll all be on the ship for a fortnight, that’ll give me ample opportunity.
“I ought to be at the meeting,” he said. From where he was he could see two people standing up for a shouting match.
“Let ’em talk,” Ruth grunted. “It keeps them out of mischief. They won’t get anything sorted until after the settlement supervisor shows up.”
“He should have been here this morning. We need advice on how to establish our homes. We don’t even know the location we’ve been assigned.”
“We’ll find out soon enough; and the supervisor will have the whole river trip to lecture us. I expect he’s out prowling the town tonight. I can’t blame him, stuck with us for the next eighteen months. Poor sod.”
“Must you always think the worst of people?”
“It’s what I’d do. But that isn’t what worries me right now.”
Horst sneaked another look at the meeting. They were taking a vote, hands raised in the air. He sat down on the cot facing Ruth. “What does worry you?”
“The murder.”
“We don’t know it was a murder.”
“Get real. The body was stripped. What else could it be?”
“He could have been drunk.” Because God knows a drink is what I need just looking at that river.
“Drunk and taking a swim? In the Juliffe? Come on, Horst!”
“The autopsy should tell us if . . .” He trailed off under Ruth’s gaze. “No, I don’t suppose there will be one, will there?”
“No. He must have been dumped in the river. The sheriff told me that two colonists from Group Three were reported missing by their wives this morning. Pete Cox and Alun Reuther. I’ll give you ten to one that body is one of them.”
“Probably,” Horst admitted. “I suppose it’s shocking that urban crime is rife here. Somehow you don’t imagine such a thing on a stage one colony world. Then again, Lalonde isn’t quite what I imagined. But we’ll be leaving it all behind shortly. Our own community will be too small for such things, we will all know each other.”
Ruth rubbed at her eyes, her expression haunted. “Horst, you’re not thinking. Why was the body stripped?”
“I don’t know. For the clothes, I suppose, and the boots.”
“Right. Now what sort of mugger is going to kill for a pair of boots? Actually kill two people in cold blood. God, the people here are poor, I’m not denying it, but they’re not that desperate.”
“Who then?”
She looked pointedly over his shoulder. Horst turned round. “The Ivets? That’s rather prejudiced, isn’t it?” he asked reproachfully.
“You’ve seen the way they’re treated in the town, and we don’t treat them any better. They can’t move outside the port district without getting beaten up. Not with their jump suits on, and they don’t have anything else to wear. So who is more likely to want ordinary clothes? Who isn’t going to care what they have to do to get them? And whoever did murder that man did it inside the port, uncomfortably close to this dormitory.”
“You don’t think it was one of ours?” he exclaimed. “Let’s say, I’m praying it wasn’t. But with the way our luck is turning out, I wouldn’t count on it.”
Diranol, Lalonde’s smallest, outermost moon, was the only one of the planet’s three natural satellites left in the night sky, a nine-hundred-kilometre globe of rock with a red ochre regolith, half a million kilometres distant. It hovered above the eastern horizon, painting Durringham in a timid rose-pink fluorescence when the power bike skidded to a halt just outside the skirt of light leaking from the big transients’ dormitory. Marie Skibbow loosened her grip on Furgus. The ride through the darkened city had been sensational, drawing out every second, filling it with glee and excitement. The walls slashing past, sensed rather than seen, the headlight beam revealing ruts and mud patches on the road almost as soon as they hit them, wind whipping her hair about, eyes stung by the slipstream. Taunting danger with every turn of the wheel, and beating it, living.
“Here we go, your stop,” Furgus said.
“Right.” She swung her leg over the saddle, and stood beside him. Now the weariness swept through her, a frozen wave of depression that hung poised high above, waiting to crash down at the prospect of the future and what it held.
“You’re the best, Marie.” He kissed her, one hand fondling her right breast through the singlet’s fabric. Then he was gone, red tail light sinking into the blackness.
Her shoulders drooped as she made her way into the dormitory. Most of the cots were full, people were snoring, coughing, tossing about. She wanted to turn and run, back to Furgus and Hamish, back to the dark fulfilment of the last few hours. Her brain was still fizzing from the experiences, the naked savagery of the sayce-baiting, and the jubilant crowd in Donovan’s, blood heat inflaming her senses. Then the delicious indecency of the twins’ quiet cabin on the other side of town, with their straining bodies pounding against her first singly then both at once. That crazy bike ride in the vermilion moonlight. Marie wanted every night to be the same, without end.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Her father was standing in front of her, mouth all squeezed up that way it did when he was really angry. And for once she didn’t care.
“Out,” she said.
“Out where?”
“Enjoying myself. Exactly what you think I shouldn’t do.”
He slapped her on the cheek, the sound echoing from the high roof. “Don’t you be so bloody impudent, girl. I asked you a question. What have you been doing?”
Marie glared at him, feeling the heat grow in her stinging cheek, refusing to rub it. “What’s next, Daddy ? Will you take your belt to me? Or are you just going to use your fists?”
Gerald Skibbow’s jaw dropped. People on the nearby cots were turning over, peering at them blearily.
“Do you know how late it is? What have you been up to?” he hissed.
“Are you quite sure you want a truthful answer to that, Daddy? Quite sure?”
“You despicable little vixen. Your mother’s been fretting over you all night. Doesn’t that even bother you?”
Marie curled her lip up. “What tragedy could possibly happen to me in this paradise you’ve brought us to?”
For a moment she thought he was going to strike her again.
“There have been two murders in the port this week,” he said.
“Yeah? That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Get into bed,” Gerald said through clenched teeth. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”
“Discuss it?” she asked archly. “You mean I get an equal say?”
“For fuck’s sake, can it, Skibbow,” someone shouted.
“We want to get some sleep here.”
Under the impotent stare of her father, Marie pulled her shoes off and sauntered over to her cot.
Quinn was still dozing in his sleeping-bag, struggling against the effects of the rough beer he had drunk in Donovan’s, when someone gripped the side of his cot and yanked it through ninety degrees. His arms and legs thrashed about in the sleeping-bag as he tumbled onto the floor, but there was no way he could prevent the fall. His hip smacked into the concrete first, jarring his pelvis badly, then his jaw landed. Quinn yelled out in surprise and pain.
“Get up, Ivet,” a voice shouted.
A man was standing over him, grinning down evilly. He was in his early forties, tall and well built, with a shock of black hair and a full beard. The brown leather skin of his face and arms was scarred with a lunar relief of pocks and the tiny red lines of broken capillaries. His clothes were all natural fabric, a thick red and black check cotton shirt with the arms torn off, green denim trousers, lace-up boots that came up to his knees, and a belt which carried various powered gadgets and a vicious-looking ninety-centimetre steel machete. A silver crucifix on a slim chain glinted at the base of his neck.
He laughed in a bass roar as Quinn groaned at the hot pain in his throbbing hip. Which was too much. Quinn grappled with the seal catch at the top of the bag. He was going to make the bastard pay. The seal opened. His hands came out, and he kicked his legs, trying to shake off the constricting fabric. Somewhere around the edges of his perception the other Ivets were shouting in alarm and jumping over the cots. A huge damp jaw closed around his right hand, completely around, sharp teeth pinching the thin skin of his wrist, their tips grating between his tendons. Shock froze him for a horrific second. It was a dog, a hound, a fucking hellhound. Even a sayce would have thought twice before taking it on. The thing must have stood a metre high. It had short grizzled grey fur, a blunt hammerhead muzzle, jowls of black rubber, wet with gooey saliva. Big liquid eyes were fixed on him. It was growling softly. Quinn could feel the vibration all the way along his arm. He waited numbly, expecting the jaws to close, the mauling to begin. But the eyes just kept staring at him.
“My name is Powel Manani,” said the bearded man. “And our glorious leader, Governor Colin Rexrew, has appointed me as Group Seven’s settlement supervisor. That means, Ivets, I own you: body, and soul. And just to make my position absolutely clear from the start: I don’t like Ivets. I think this world would be a better place without putrid pieces of crap like you screwing it up. But the LDC board has decided to lumber us with you, so I am going to make bloody sure every franc’s worth of your passage fee is squeezed out of you before your work-time is up. So when I say lick shit, you lick; you eat what I give you to eat; and you wear what I give you to wear. And because you are lazy bastards by nature, there is going to be no such thing as a day off for the next ten years.”
He squatted down beside Quinn and beamed broadly. “What’s your name, dickhead?”
“Quinn Dexter . . . sir.”
Powel’s eyebrows lifted in appreciation. “Well done. You’re a smart one, Quinn. You learn quick.”
“Thank you, sir.” The dog’s tongue was pressing against his fingers, sliding up and down his knuckles. It felt utterly disgusting. He had never heard of an animal being trained so perfectly before.
“Smartarses are troublemakers, Quinn. Are you going to be a troublemaker for me?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you going to get up in the mornings in future, Quinn?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fine. We understand each other, then.” Powel stood up. The dog released Quinn’s hand, and backed off a pace.
Quinn held his hand up: it glistened from all the saliva; there were red marks like a tattooed bracelet around his wrist, and two drops of blood welled up.
Powel patted the dog’s head fondly. “This is my friend, Vorix. He and I are affinity bonded, which means I can quite literally smell out any scams you dickheads cook up. So don’t even try to pull any fast ones, because I know them all. If I find you doing anything I don’t like, it will be Vorix who deals with you. And it won’t be your hand he bites off next time, he’ll be dining on your balls. Do I make myself clear?”
The Ivets mumbled their answer, heads bowed, avoiding Powel’s eye.
“I’m glad none of us are suffering any illusions about the other. Now then, your instructions for the day. I will not repeat them. Group Seven is going upriver on three ships: the Swithland , the Nassier , and the Hycel . They are currently docked in harbour three, and they’re sailing in four hours. So that is the time you have to get the colonists’ gear loaded. Any pods that aren’t loaded, I will have you carry on your backs the whole way to the landing site upriver. Do not expect me to act as your permanent nursemaid, get yourselves organized and get on with it. You will be travelling with me and Vorix on the Swithland. Now move!”
Vorix barked, jowls peeled back from his teeth. Powel watched Quinn skitter backwards like a crab, then pick himself up and chase off after the other Ivets. He knew Quinn was going to be trouble, after helping to start five settlements he could read the Ivets’ thoughts like a personality debrief. The youth was highly resentful, and smart with it. He was more than a waster kid, probably got tied in with some underground organization before he was transported. Powel toyed with the idea of simply leaving him behind when the Swithland sailed, let the Durringham sheriffs deal with him. But the Land Allocation Office would know what he’d done, and it would be entered in his file, which had too many incidents already. “Bugger,” he muttered under his breath. The Ivets were all outside the dormitory, heading along the path to the warehouse. And it looked like they were gathering round Quinn, waiting for him to start directing them. Oh well, if it came to it, Quinn would just have to have an accident in the jungle.
Horst Elwes had been watching the episode with a number of Group Seven’s members, and now he stepped up to Powel. The supervisor’s dog turned its neck to look at him. Lord, but it was a brute. Lalonde was becoming a sore test for him indeed. “Was it necessary to be quite so unpleasant to those boys?” he asked Powel Manani.
Powel looked him up and down, eyes catching on the white crucifix. “Yes. If you want the blunt truth, Father. That’s the way I always deal with them. They have to know who’s in charge from the word go. Believe me, they respect toughness.”
“They would also respond to kindness.”
“Fine, well you show them plenty of it, Father. And just to prove there’s no ill feeling, I’ll give them time off to attend mass.”
Horst had to quicken his pace to keep up. “Your dog,” he said cautiously.
“What about him?”
“You say you are bonded with affinity?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you an Edenist, then?”
Vorix made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.
“No, Father,” Powel said. “I’m simply practical. And if I had a fuseodollar for every new-landed priest who asked me that I would be a millionaire. I need Vorix upriver; I need him to hunt, to scout, to keep the Ivets in line. Neuron symbionts give me control over him. I use them because they are cheap and they work. The same as all the other settlement supervisors, and half of the county sheriffs as well. It’s only the major Earth-based religions which maintain people’s prejudice against bitek. But on worlds like Lalonde we can’t afford your prissy theological debates. We use what we have to, when we have to. And if you want to survive long enough to fill Group Seven’s second generation with your noble bigotry over a single chromosome which makes people a blasphemy, then you’ll do the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a settlement expedition to sort out.” He brushed past, heading for the harbour.
Gerald Skibbow and the other members of Group Seven followed after him, several of them giving shamefaced glances to the startled priest. Gerald watched Rai Molvi gathering up his nerve to speak. Molvi had made a lot of noise at the meeting last night, he seemed to fancy himself as a leader of men. There had been plenty of suggestions that they form an official committee, elect a spokesperson. It would help the group interface with the authorities, Rai Molvi said. Gerald privately gave him six months before he was running back to Durringham with his tail between his legs. The man was an obvious lawyer type, didn’t have what it took to be a farmer.