“I should have known. It’s a rat hole. Just the place a Red Blade would want to go.”
Kang put a heavy paw on Hansen’s shoulder and pushed him along. Then he peered over his shoulder at Marten. “You still owe me a round.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Marten said.
6.
Smade’s Tavern was dim. An oaken bar stood in front a mirror where an ugly bartender hid like a troll under a bridge. Waitresses went to him and sauntered back with drinks on their trays. Booths and tables littered the gloom. Serious drinkers hunched over their glasses. A few nibbled on peanuts.
The four of them sat at two mini-tables that Kang had shoved together. With his thick fingers, Kang twisted a vodka bottle’s cap, breaking the paper seal. The clear liquid gurgled as he poured into a glass filled with ice cubes. He lifted the glass and stretched out his lips, slurping.
“Ah…” Kang said.
Bushy-eyed Hansen grinned like a fox.
Marten and Omi sipped spiced tea, a pot of it on the table. They had declined any liquor or party pills.
“Do you know why Hansen is so happy?” Kang asked Omi.
Hansen cleared his throat, shaking his head when Kang glanced at him.
“They didn’t call Hansen
“No?” Omi said.
“A moment, please,” said Hansen.
Kang frowned as he poured himself more vodka. “You interrupting my story, you little maggot?”
“You know me better than that, Kang,” Hansen said. “But why rehash bad feelings? I’m not that man and you’re no longer chief of the Red Blades.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kang asked.
“Only that life has committed one of its constant pranks and rearranged our roles,” said Hansen.
You calling me a mule, a drug runner?” Kang asked.
“No, no,” said Hansen, holding up his slender hands. “Simply that once you ran a vicious—the most vicious— gang in Sydney. Who dared tread on your territory? None!”
Kang stared at Hansen.
“Now,” said the thin man with sly features, “I run Level 49, the Pleasure Palace.” He leaned forward, whispering, “Chief Monitor Bock is my only superior.” Hansen leaned back and crossed his arms, grinning.
“They put a petty thief in charge of security?” asked Kang.
Hansen shook his head. “Kang, Kang, let bygones be bygones. Otherwise I’ll—”
Hansen stopped because Kang dropped a hand onto his wrist. “What’ll you do, you little maggot?”
Hansen licked his lips, and he minutely shook his head.
Marten, who had reached for the teapot, glanced around, trying to see whom Hansen had signaled. He spotted two big men at the bar. They wore silky shirts with billowing sleeves. One of them palmed a gun of some sort. The other slid his weapon back into a sleeve-sheath. Monitors! Marten realized. Secret policemen to back up their— Hadn’t Hansen said he reported to the Chief Monitor? Did he mean the chief preman monitor of the entire Sun Works Factory? As Marten poured tea, he noticed another pair of monitors sitting several tables over. They were a man and woman team, but too hard-eyed to be partygoers, too observant and tense, and too intent on watching Kang.
“Listen up, maggot,” Kang told Hansen. “I know you got a few bully-boys around here. I’m not blind. But you’re in the last stages of syphilis if you think we’ve switched places. You still slink around sniffing people’s butts. I still kill.” Kang tapped the shock trooper patch on his jacket. “Even if you and your thugs could take me out—” Kang leered. “I turn up missing, you little maggot, this party-town gets trashed as the HBs search for me.”
Hansen laughed, a trifle uneasily it seemed to Marten. “Oh, what does it matter? We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
Kang breathed heavily through his nose, let go of Hansen’s wrist and poured more vodka. After a stiff belt, he said, “Omi used to be a gunman for Eastman.”
“Really?” said Hansen. “Eastman always broke people too soon—in my professional opinion. But then that must have given you a lot of work,” he said to Omi.
Omi shrugged.
Hansen laughed more freely now. “Oh, the old days. I don’t miss them, I’ll tell you. The gang leader and the gunman, two toughs that nobody wants to meet in a back alley or in his home. Good old Sydney! But now you’re shock troopers, hired guns fighting for the Highborn.”
“So speaks the part-time drug runner and full-time informer,” Kang said.
Hansen slapped the table in outrage. “Now see here, Kang. Maybe I smuggled a tot or two of black sand—I won’t deny that among friends. We all lived in the slums, after all, and had to make ends meet. But this charge of, of…” He angrily shook his long head.
“Informer,” Kang said. “Job training, in your case.” He snorted. It was his way of laughing.
Hansen’s foxy eyes narrowed and his veneer of joviality vanished, leaving him sinister seeming.
“Bet I can guess you how you got this far,” Kang said. “You must have fast-talked the HBs when they were looking for people to trust. Yeah, sure, I bet that’s how you did it. You’d learned enough about undercover work to fool them into letting you be a monitor.”
“You used to hold your liquor better,” grumbled Hansen.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Kang said. “We’re all friends here, like you’ve been saying. A gang leader, a gunman, a drug runner and a—Marten, you didn’t live in the slums.”
Marten shrugged.
“Where are you from?” asked Hansen, a bit too eagerly, no doubt to stop talking about old times with Kang.
“He’s from here,” Kang said.
“You’re from the Sun Works Factory?” asked Hansen. “That’s very rare for someone here to have made it into the shock troops.”
“He emigrated to Earth first,” Kang said. “Didn’t you, Marten?”
Hansen lifted his eyebrows, giving Marten a more careful examination. It heightened Hansen’s narrow features, the weakness to his chin and the crafty way his pupils darted. He seemed like a weaker animal, one that constantly judged danger and how close it was to him. “How did it happen that you emigrated to Earth?” he asked.
“It’s a long story,” Marten said. He slid his chair and stood. “Nature calls.”
“He’s a quiet one,” Marten heard Hansen saying as he limped away. “They’re always the most dangerous. Remember the time…” Then Marten went to the restroom, relieved himself and as he returned, he noticed a woman in the main doorway glancing about the tavern. He might not have noticed her but she seemed so out of place and frazzled, worried, at wits end.
She wore an engineer’s gray jumpsuit with heavy magnetic boots and a tool belt still hooked around her waist. An engineer’s cap with a sun logo showed that she serviced the habitat’s outer sun shield. Marten idly wondered what she was doing in Smade’s, what she was doing in the Pleasure Palace all together. She had a heart-shaped face, was pretty and of medium height and regular build. Despite the jumpsuit, it was clear she was well endowed. Alert eyes, small nose and a mobile mouth, a kissing mouth, Marten thought to himself.
Their eyes met. He nodded. She looked away, then back at him as he sat down. Her gaze slid onto his tablemates. Recognition leaped onto her face as resolve settled upon her. She strode toward them.
Hansen and Kang argued about something, so neither of them noticed her. Marten saw the two monitors by the bar glance at her, each other and then jump to their feet.
She beat them to the table. “There’s a problem,” the engineer said without preamble.
Hansen looked up. “Nadia Pravda, what are you doing here?”
