She said, “We’ll work out the terms later.”
I offered a queasy smile, and left in a hurry, emerging from the transport just in time to see the hands closed tight on Gibb’s neck.
15. ARRESTS
I heard the fight before I saw it.
A pair of angry voices, one male, one female, were both lost in the kind of argument where being heard was no longer as important as making sure the opponent was not. Both participants had passed well beyond the border that separates shouting from screaming, their voices distorted past intelligibility, their words reduced to bursts of concentrated rage.
I didn’t recognize either voice. They were too distorted by volume. But in that instant before my eyes tracked the disturbance to its source, I was able to put faces to some of the other participants. I heard Oskar Levine cursing in disgust, Cif Negelein crying something I couldn’t make out, and Robin Fish screaming for intervention.
Then I spotted the crowd across the hangar and caught the unmistakable sound of somebody’s palm smacking somebody’s face.
Then half a dozen people fell to the ground as two hurtling forms bowled over the line of spectators. A few just stumbled backward, some went to their knees, but two who caught the full brunt of the impact went down hard.
I broke into a run just as the two combatants joined those two unlucky bystanders on the floor.
Li-Tsan Crin had landed on top, screeching hatred and bile as her knees slammed hard into Stuart Gibb’s abdomen. She’d wrapped her hands around his neck and dug both thumbs into the vital soft spot separating Adam’s apple from windpipe. Gibb had grabbed her wrists, first attempting to break her stranglehold and, then, failing that, digging his nails into her tendons in an instinctive attempt to make his murder too painful a job for her to finish.
Before I could reach them, Negelein and Lassiter both seized Li-Tsan by her left arm and two others I didn’t recognize took her right. Their combined efforts succeeded only in lifting Li-Tsan and Gibb off the deck together, in a fused ball of hate. The combined weight proved too much, and Li-Tsan took advantage of that as she once again drove the back of Gibb’s head against the deck.
With Negelein, Lassiter, and the others continuing to hold on to Li-Tsan’s arms, two more indentures, including a woman I’d spoken to briefly and a man I hadn’t encountered at all, went in on their hands and knees to pry Li-Tsan’s thumbs from Gibb’s neck.
The woman yelled, “Don’t make me break them, Li!”
Li-Tsan cried something so incoherent that the only word I recognized was “bastard.”
The crack of bone and the sickened gasps of the crowd fought each other for the title of ugliest sound.
The two indentures responsible for snapping Li-Tsan’s thumbs joined the others in pulling her off Gibb. She called them all bastards and slime-sucking sacks of shit and put all her strength into a single, two-legged, gravity- defying kick that impacted with nothing but air.
Gibb, still purple despite the release of his windpipe, pushed away a woman who had rushed to his aid and stood up, his teeth pink and his lips gleaming with blood.
“I’ll fucking murder you!” Li-Tsan screeched, her fury overwhelming the mob struggling to hold her.
A woman with a shaved head went to restrain Li-Tsan’s legs and was sent flying, with a freshly bruised jaw for her trouble. Another two went in low and wrapped themselves around those legs, weighing them down.
The eight people restraining Li-Tsan now comprised three on each arm and two hugging her legs like koalas clinging to tree trunks. Even rage couldn’t lend Li-Tsan enough strength to overcome that many people. But though effectively helpless, she hadn’t given up; she was still thrashing, still rippling every muscle, still making her captors work for every instant they held her in check. Even as half a dozen voices in the crowd called her name, trying to cut through this moment of insanity with compensating reason, she still pelted Gibb with abuse, passing from the relatively dull epithets available in Mercantile to the more vivid images afforded people who can bare to fit their tongues around the harsh consonants of Grechilissh.
I don’t know much of that second tongue, a minor dialect spoken by the settlers of an industrial world not worth visiting unless you have an overbearing craving for sulfur and soot. But the very harsh and very hard-to- pronounce epithet Li-Tsan had just spat with perfect intonation was a notorious adjective applying to the practitioners of a rare, possibly extinct and most probably apocryphal perversion involving the surgical removal of visual organs to facilitate the sexual exploitation of the empty eye sockets.
You can describe the practice in Mercantile, just as in any other language, and it will always be nasty. But in Grechilissh, the word sounds a lot like what it’s describing. It’s nasty, painful, demeaning, and, worst of all, evocative—the kind of name you don’t apply to another human being unless you really want to risk an immediate fight to the death.
Gibb’s purpled complexion went a shade darker.
He went for her.
Despite the provocation, there was no way to look on what happened next as fair. Li-Tsan was being restrained by all four limbs. Gibb was free to act. Nobody made any special effort to stop him as he leaped forward and delivered a roundhouse punch to her jaw. The onlookers were still gasping from that one as he followed up with a left that shattered her nose.
At his current rate of attack he might have had time to hit her another two or three times before anybody in the crowd thought of intervening.
Long before any of them had a chance, I stepped forward and tapped my index and middle fingers to the base of his jaw.
The jolt made his muscles spasm, the eyes roll back in his head, and his bladder release. He stumbled backward, conscious but unable to regain his balance. Somewhere along the way his feet tangled up and he began to fall.
Lastogne caught him under the arms.
Everybody else froze, including Li-Tsan, whose bruised and bleeding face joined all the others now staring at me.
Gibb focused, broke from Lastogne’s grip, and managed to stand. “What the hell was that, Counselor?”
I brandished the shiny metal cap I wore over both fingertips, removed it, and replaced it at my collarline, where it turned liquid and became a Dip Corps insignia again. “Insurance.”
He fingered the swelling blister on his jaw. “That’s not exactly standard issue, Counselor. Do you have any idea how many treaties you just broke, carrying a concealed weapon into another government’s territory?”
I raised an eyebrow. “If you can prove that the device I just used has no purpose other than weaponry, quite a few. But everything’s a weapon, sir. Including tools, blunt objects, and, as we’ve just seen, our own arms and legs. Short of amputating our limbs every time we cross a border, and being wheeled around on hand trucks by the natives, we can only assure our hosts that the items we carry with us are not weapons at the moment, and won’t be used as weapons unless we find ourselves forced to improvise with the materials we have at hand.”
Gibb’s blister popped. He glanced at a fingertip now glistening with blood. “That’s a lovely argument, Counselor. Does it ever work for any of the people you prosecute?”
“No. When I prosecute, you’ll have to do a whole lot better than that.”
Give Gibb credit for recognizing the implied threat. His injured jaw may have trembled as he bit back half a dozen angry responses, but he did bite them back. Li-Tsan also calmed; her captors didn’t trust her enough to let her go, but she followed the exchange with a certain dry-eyed, grim-faced fascination. The lower half of her face glistened with blood from her shattered nose.
I turned my attention to the silent figure behind Gibb. “Mr. Lastogne?”
His curled lips flashed his usual amount of sardonic amusement. “Yes, Counselor?”
“Order these two people placed under arrest. Don’t do it yourself, I’ll want to talk to you. Make sure they’re separated from each other and, as much as possible, from anybody who saw the incident from the beginning. Have them restrained if necessary. I’d rather have them isolated and in chains than closely guarded by anybody whose
