“Hey, girly!” it yelled in its sneery baritone. “Hey, Enforcer!”
Still chewing a mouthful of succulent meat and pastry, Fringe turned slowly to confront the aggregation. Its left arm had been disassembled, probably for parts, leaving only a forearm and hand unit, but the muscular right arm was complete, including a shoulder cantilevered from the modulator core. The assembly had a weapons belt strapped around it, hanging low on one side. Fringe choked on a bit of crust. It looked like a caricature of the Guntoter icon. Like an animated costume rack in some ancient predispersion gunfighter myth. Fringe had seen them all as re-created by the Files. When she was about ten she’d watched nothing but gunfighter re-creations for days at a time. She swallowed the laugh that came bubbling up, reminding herself survivors didn’t laugh at challenges, no matter who they came from.
A long time back, you might have laughed at some idiot carrying a weapon because you knew he had no skill. Then technology superseded skill, and the weapon itself did the killing. The one the dink was carrying was a case in point, a broad-beam aitchem that could do her serious damage if merely discharged in her general direction. Fringe had only a pain needler on her belt. In skilled hands that would ordinarily have been quite enough. Unfortunately, most dinks had been disconnected from pain. The worst she could do was make it itch, which the dink damned well knew.
Bloom’s doorway was full of dink eyes, watching, dink ears, quivering.
“Are you provoking a fight, dink?” Fringe called curiously. “That what you want?”
“Damn right,” yelled the dink, its hand jerking up and down near the weapon.
Fringe dropped the remains of the tart and herself to the street, rolled sideways with her legs curled under her, came up with her right hand full of the weapon she had been carrying in her right boot, and shot the dink assembly through the modulator, upper left corner, where the brain can usually was. Her boot weapon was always loaded with explosive slugs. Shreds of the dink flew in all directions while what remained sizzled, smoked, and fell apart into disparate boxes, some of which trembled for a time while the voice went “Gaaaaaahhhhhh,” in a terrified and dying wail.
The dinks who’d been watching disappeared inside Bloom’s place like snakes down a hole.
“For a dink to provoke a fight with an Enforcer is not a smart thing,” she remarked to nobody in particular, the monitor, maybe, if the stupid thing was listening. “Which information should be disseminated to every cocky box as it arrives.” She walked forward and blew the dink’s weapon apart with another ear-shattering jolt. No point leaving it around for some crazy to maim thirty noninvolved pedestrians with.
Bloom’s door had closed abruptly, but something moved at the upstairs window. She brought up the weapon, but it was only Zasper, waving. He’d been watching the whole thing. She waved in return. Bloom’s door opened, and a salvage machine with a Guntoter icon on its snout came out to suck up the shreds of the dink. Fringe walked back to the food cart and told the recumbent vendor to get up off the street and give her another tart to replace the one she’d rolled on. She took it from his trembling hand and climbed the stairs to the corner, leaving the Swale.
Behind her, in the window of Bloom’s place, Zasper turned to the man beside him, the player who’d been winning steadily.
“She killed it,” Zasper said.
“Thought she would,” said Danivon Luze, his fingers stroking the medallion at his neck. “No hesitation at all.”
“Were you expecting hesitation?”
“I was expecting something,” said Danivon Luze in an unsatisfied voice. “Something I smell about her. Something sort of … uncertain.”
“There’s nothing uncertain about Fringe’s skills,” said Zasper stiffly. “I told you she was good and I meant it. Any uncertainty has to do with other things. Wouldn’t want you to mistake that, Danny! You sure she’s the right one to go along?”
“Oh, yeah, she’s the right one. One of the right ones.”
“You didn’t tell her about the petitions, but I bet Boarmus told you!”
“Haven’t told anybody. Not even Curvis. I will, when it seems appropriate.”
“I told her.”
“Well, damn, Zasper.”
“She’s a friend of mine, Dan.”
“So?”
“You know. Treat her like a friend.”
“Do my best,” said Danivon, flushing, not sure what his best might be in this context.
“What is it you’re smelling, Danivon Luze?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Everybody talking about dragons and petitions and possesseds, scared of all of ’em, scared of anything new because it might mean changes. Of course, expecting Council Supervisory to welcome change is like expecting a chaffer to fly. ‘Change’ is a naughty word on Elsewhere. We all know that.”
Zasper stared in the direction Fringe had gone and nodded, well aware that everyone did, indeed, know that.
In Tolerance, Jacent was attending his first committee meeting.
Business before Council Supervisory, Complaint and Disposition Review Committee A., Day 26, Period 10, Year 1353 P.S. (Post Settlement)
AUTHORITY: Articles of Organization, Council Supervisory of Elsewhere, Rule Number 53, Paragraph M, Section xiii. “All dispositions entered by C&D machines shall be reviewed by Council members (human) before implementation.”
AGENDA
COMPLAINT AND DISPOSITION
Items one through one hundred fifty-nine
of this date.
ITEM 1: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinkajins, City Fifteen (category ten); one of their members wantonly killed while traveling in Enarae.
DISPOSITION: Official warning to brotherhood of dinka-jins that members travel at their own risk. Enarae is category seven, confrontational, weapons-using society, and killing is not untypical of that province.
No penalty.
“Aye,” said the members of the committee.
ITEM 2: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinka-jins, City Fifteen; citizen of Enarae found using category-nine bionic prostheses in category-seven province.
DISPOSITION: Complaint denied as not meeting criteria for legal standing. Only Enaraen citizens may complain about internal matters.
No penalty.
“Aye,” said the committee again, as with one voice.
ITEM 3: Complaint by the brotherhood of dinka-jins, City Fifteen; citizen of Enarae guilty of importing
