“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
