“Tough guy,” the man said, nodding, an articulation for which his neck was not really engineered. “I like it. But how tough you really?”
“I don’t think it’s any of your business, but you’re welcome to try me.”
The servitor loitered near us for a few more moments before deciding to float to the next cluster. A few other people had just drifted into the commons, looking around with sickly expressions. It was ironic that after crossing so many light-years between stars, this little slowboat transfer was for many of us our first conscious taste of space travel.
He eyed me. I could almost hear the little gears working away in his skull, grinding laboriously. No doubt most of the people he approached were more easily intimidated than I was.
“Like I say, I am Vadim. Everyone calls me that. Just Vadim. I’m quite character—part of what you might call local colour. And you are?”
“Tanner,” I said. “Tanner Mirabel.”
He nodded slowly, wisely, as if my name meant something to him.
“That real name?”
“Yes.”
It was my real name, but I lost nothing by using it. There was no way Reivich could have learned my name yet, even though it was clear that he knew someone was following him. Cahuella kept a very tight lid on his operation, sheltering the identities of his employees. The best he could have managed was to weasel out of the Mendicants a list of everyone else who had been on the Orvieto—but that would still not have told him who amongst those people was the man who intended to kill him.
Vadim tried to inject a tone of comradely interest into his voice. “Where you come from, Meera-Bell?”
“You don’t need to know,” I said. “And please, Vadim—I was serious just now. I don’t want to talk to you, local colour or not.”
“But I have business proposition, Meera-Bell. One you should hear, I think.” He continued to stare through me with one eye. The other gazed obliquely past my shoulder, unfocused.
“I’m not interested in business, Vadim.”
“I think you should be.” He had lowered his voice now. “It is dangerous place where we are headed, Meera-Bell. Dangerous, dangerous place. Especially for newcomers.”
“What’s so dangerous about the Glitter Band?”
He smiled, then cancelled the smile. “Glitter Band . . . yes. That is really quite interesting. I am sure you’ll find it at odds with . . . expectations.” He paused, caressing his stubbled chin with one hand. “And we have not even mentioned Chasm City, nyet?”
“Danger’s a relative term, Vadim. I don’t know what it means here, but where I come from, it implies more than just the ever-present hazard of committing a social gaffe. Trust me, I think I can handle the Glitter Band. And Chasm City, for that matter.”
“You think you know about danger? I do not think you have first idea what you are walking into, Meera-Bell. I think you are very ignorant man.” He paused, toying with the rough fabric patches of his quilted coat, refraction patterns racing away under the pressure of his fingertips. “Which is why I am talking to you now, understand? I am being good Samaritan to you.”
I could see where this was heading. “You’re going to offer me protection, aren’t you?”
Vadim winced. “Such crude term. Please, do not say it again. I would much rather we talk about benefits of mutual security agreement, Meera-Bell.”
I nodded. “Let me speculate here, Vadim. You really are local, aren’t you? You haven’t come off a ship at all. My guess is you’re pretty much a permanent fixture on this slowboat—am I right?”
He grinned, quickly and nervously. “Let us just say I know my way around ship better than average recently defrosted slush puppy. And let us just say I have influential associates in neighbourhood of Yellowstone. Associates with muscle. People who can take care of newcomer, make sure he—or she—does not get into any trouble.”
“And if this newcomer were to decline your services, what would happen then? Would these self-same associates just possibly become the source of the same trouble?”
“Now you are being very cynical man.”
Now it was my turn to grin. “You know what, Vadim? I think you’re just a slimy little con-artist. This network of associates of yours doesn’t really exist, does it? Your influence extends about as far as the hull of this ship—and even then, it isn’t exactly all-pervasive, is it?”
He unfolded his colossal arms and then refolded them. “Watch your step, Meera-Bell—I am warning you.”
“No, I’m warning you, Vadim. I could have killed you already if I thought you were any more than an irritant. Go away and try your routine on someone else.” I nodded around the commons. “There are plenty of candidates. Better still, why don’t you crawl back to your smelly little cabin and work on your technique a bit? I really think you need to come up with something more convincing than the threat of violence in the Glitter Band, you know. Maybe if you were to offer fashion advice?”
“You really do not know, do you, Meera-Bell?”
“Know what?”
He looked at me pityingly, and for the tiniest of instants I wondered if I had fatally misjudged the situation. But then Vadim shook his head, unhooked himself from the commons wall and propelled himself across the sphere, his coat flapping behind him like a mirage. The slowboat had ramped up its thrust again now, so his trajectory was a lazy arc, bringing him expertly close to another solitary traveller who had just arrived: a short, overweight, balding man who looked pasty-faced and dejected.
I watched Vadim shake hands with the man, beginning to run through the same spiel he had tried out on me.
I almost wished him better luck.
The other passengers were an equal mixture of male and female, with an egalitarian blend of genetic types. I felt sure that two or three people were from Sky’s Edge, aristocrats by the look of them, but no one I was interested in. Bored, I tried to listen in on their conversation, but the acoustics of the commons blurred their words into a mush, from which only the occasional word emerged when one or other of the party raised their voice. I could still tell they were speaking Norte. Very few people on Sky’s Edge spoke Norte with great fluency, but almost everyone understood it to some extent: it was the only language which spanned all the factions, and was therefore used for diplomatic overtures and trade with external parties. In the south we spoke Castellano, the principle language of the Santiago, with of course some contamination from the other languages spoken in the Flotilla. In the north they spoke a shifting Creole of Hebrew, Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi and the old ancestor tongue of Norte called English, but mainly Portuguese and Arabic. Aristocrats tended to have better grasp of Norte than the average citizen; fluency in it was a badge of sophistication. I had to speak it well for professional reasons—which is why I also spoke most of the northern tongues, as well as having a passable ability in Russish and Canasian.
Russish and Norte would almost certainly be understood in the Glitter Band and Chasm City, even if the mediation was done by machines, but the default tongue of the Demarchists who had refounded Yellowstone was Canasian, a slippery amalgam of Québecois French and Cantonese. It was said that no one without a head full of linguistics processors ever really achieved genuine fluency in Canasian—the language was just too fundamentally strange, too much at odds with the hardwired constraints of human deep grammar.
I would have been worried, had the Demarchists not been such consummate traders. For more than two centuries Yellowstone had been the hub of the burgeoning interstellar trade network, feeding innovation out to nascent colonies, drinking it back in like a vampire when those colonies reached a basic level of technological maturity. It would be a commercial necessity for the Stoners to cope with dozens of other languages.
Of course, there would be dangers ahead. In that sense Vadim was entirely correct, but the dangers were not the kind to which he alluded. They would be subtle, arising from my own unfamiliarity with the nuances of a culture at least two centuries beyond
my own. The outcome was less likely to be my own injury than the abject failure of my mission. That was enough of a danger to make me wary. But I did not need to buy a spurious assurance of protection from thugs like Vadim—whether he had his contacts or not.
Something caught my eye. It was Vadim again, and this time he was causing more of a commotion.
He was wrestling with the man who had just come into the commons, the two of them grappling with each other while remaining anchored to the commons wall. The other man looked like he was holding his own against Vadim, but there was something in Vadim’s movements—something languid to the point of boredom—which told me that Vadim was only letting the man think that he had the edge. The other passengers were doing a good job of ignoring the scuffle; grateful, perhaps, that the thug had selected someone else for his attention.
Abruptly, Vadim’s mood changed.
In an instant he had the newcomer pinned to the wall, in obvious pain, Vadim pushing his brow hard against the man’s terrified face. The man started to say something, but Vadim had his hand against the man’s mouth before more than a mumble emerged. Then what emerged was the man’s last meal, streaming vilely between Vadim’s fingers. Vadim recoiled in disgust and pushed himself away from the man. Then he secured himself with his clean arm and drove his fist into the man’s stomach, just below the ribcage. The man coughed hoarsely, his eyes bloodshot; he tried to catch his breath before Vadim delivered another blow.
But Vadim was done with him. He paused only to wipe his arm against the fabric walling of the commons, then unhooked himself, ready to kick off towards one of the exits.
I calculated my arc and kicked off first, savouring an instant of breezy freefall before I impacted with the wall a metre from Vadim and his victim. For a moment Vadim looked at me in shock.
“Meera-Bell . . . I thought we concluded negotiations?”
I smiled.
“I just reopened them, Vadim.”
I had myself nicely anchored. With the same casual ease with which Vadim had struck the man, I struck Vadim, in more or less the same place. Vadim folded in on himself like a soggy origami figure, emitting a soft moan.
By now the rest of the people were less interested in minding their own business.
I addressed them. “I don’t know if any of you have been approached by this man yet, but I don’t think he’s the professional he’d like you to think. If you’ve bought protection from him, you’ve almost certainly wasted your money.”
Vadim managed a sentence. “You’re dead man, Meera-Bell.”
“Then I’ve very little to fear.” I looked at the other man. He had regained some of his colour now, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. “Are you all right? I didn’t see how the fight started.”
The man spoke Norte, but with a thick accent which it took me a moment to penetrate. He was a small man, with the compact build of a bulldog. The bulldog look didn’t stop at his physique, either. He had a pugnacious, permanently argumentative face, a flat nose and a scalp bristling sparsely with extremely short hairs.
He unrumpled his clothes. “Yes . . . I’m quite all right, thank you. The oaf started threatening me verbally, then started actually hurting me. At that point I was hoping someone would do something, but it was like I’d suddenly become part of the décor.”
“Yes, I noticed.” I looked around at the other passengers disparagingly. “You fought back, though.”
“Fat lot of good it did me.”
“I’m afraid Vadim here doesn’t look the type to recognise a valiant gesture when he sees one. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I think so. A little nausea, that’s all.”
“Wait.”
I snapped my fingers at the servitor, hovering in cybernetic indecision some metres away. When it came closer I tried to buy another shot of scop-dex, but I had exhausted my shipboard funds.
“Thank you,” the man said, setting his jaw. “But I think I’ve sufficient funds in my own account.” He spoke to the machine in Canasian, too quickly and softly for me to follow, and a fresh hypo popped out for use.
I turned to Vadim while the other man fumbled the hypo into a vein. “Vadim; I’m going to be generous and let you leave now. But I don’t want to see you in this room again.”
He looked at me with his lips curled, flecks of vomit glued to his face like snowflakes.
“Is not over between you and me, Meera-Bell.”
He unhooked himself, paused and looked around at the other passengers, obviously trying to regain some margin of dignity before he departed. It was a pretty wasted effort, since I had something else planned for him.
Vadim tensed, ready to kick off.
“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think I’m going to let you leave before you pay back whatever you’ve stolen, do you?”
He hesitated, looking back at me. “I have not stolen anything from you.” Then to the other man. “Or you, Mister Quirrenbach . . .”
“Is that true?” I asked the man he’d just addressed.
Quirrenbach hesitated too, glancing at Vadim before answering. “Yes . . . yes. He hasn’t stolen anything from me. I didn’t speak to him until now.”
I raised my voice. “What about the rest of you? Did this bastard con you out of anything?”
Silence. It was more or less what I had expected. No one was going to be the first to admit that they had been duped by a small-time rat like Vadim, now that they had seen how pitiful he could become.
“See,” Vadim said, “there isn’t anyone, Meera-Bell.”
“Maybe not here,” I said. I reached out with my free hand and snagged the fabric of his coat. The rough quilted patches were as cool and dry as snakeskin. “But what about all the other passengers on the slowboat? Chances are you’ve already fleeced a few of them since we left Idlewild.”
“So what if I did?” he said, almost whispering. “It is none of your concern, is it?” Now his tone was changing by the second. He was squirming before me, shifting into something infinitely more pliant than when he had first entered the commons. “What do you want to stay out of this? What is it worth to you to back out and leave me alone?”
I had to laugh. “Are you actually trying to buy me off?”
“It’s always worth try.”
Something inside me snapped. I dragged Vadim back, slamming him against the wall so hard that he was winded again, and began to pummel him. The enveloping red haze of my anger washed over me like a warm, welcoming fog. I felt ribs shatter under my fists. Vadim tried to fight back, but I was faster, stronger, my fury more righteous.
“Stop!” said a voice, sounding like it came from halfway to infinity. “Stop it; he’s had enough!”
It was Quirrenbach, pulling me away from Vadim. A couple of other passengers had arced over to the scene of violence, studying the work I had inflicted on Vadim with horrified fascination. His face was a single ugly bruise, his mouth weeping shiny scarlet seeds of blood. I must have looked about the same when the Mendicants had finished with me.
“You want me to be lenient with him?” I said.
“You’ve already gone beyond leniency,” Quirrenbach said. “I don’t think you need to kill him. What if he’s telling the truth and he really does have friends?”
“He’s nothing,” I said. “He doesn’t have any more influence than you or I. Even if he did . . . this is the Glitter Band we’re headed to, not some lawless frontier settlement.”
Quirrenbach gave me the oddest of looks. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You really think we’re headed to the Glitter Band.”
“We’re not?”
“The Glitter Band doesn’t exist,” Quirrenbach said. “It hasn’t existed for years. We’re heading for something else entirely.”
From out of the bruise which was Vadim’s face came something unexpected: a gurgle which might have been him clearing his mouth of blood. Or it might just have been a chuckle of vindication.
TWELVE
“What di
d you mean by that?”
“By what, Tanner?”
“That little throwaway remark about the Glitter Band not existing. Are you planning on just leaving it hanging there enigmatically?”
Quirrenbach and I were working our way through the bowels of the Strelnikov to Vadim’s hideaway, my progress made all the harder because I had my suitcase with me. We were alone; I’d locked Vadim in my quarters once he had revealed the location of his berth. I assumed that if we searched his quarters we’d find whatever he had stolen from the other passengers. I had already helped myself to his coat and had no immediate plans to return it to him.
“Let’s just say there have been some changes, Tanner.” Quirrenbach was wriggling awkwardly behind me, like a dog chasing something down a hole.
“I didn’t hear about anything.”
“You wouldn’t have. The changes happened recently, when you were on your way here. Occupational hazard of interstellar travel, I’m afraid.”
“One of several,” I said, thinking of my bruised face. “Well, what kind of changes?”
“Rather drastic ones, I’m afraid.” He paused, his breathing coming in hard, sawlike rasps. “Look, I’m sorry to shatter all your perceptions in one go, but you’d better start dealing with the fact that Yellowstone isn’t anything like the world it used to be. And that, Tanner, is something of an understatement.”
I thought back to what Amelia had said about where I would find Reivich. “Is Chasm City still there?”
“Yes . . . yes. Nothing that drastic. It’s still there; still inhabited; still reasonably prosperous by the standards of this system.”
“A statement you’re about to qualify, I suspect.” I looked ahead and saw that the crawlway was widening out into a cylindrical corridor with oval doors spaced along one side. It was still dark and claustrophobic, the whole experience feeling unpleasantly familiar.
“Regrettably . . . yes,” Quirrenbach said. “The city’s become very different. It’s almost unrecognisable, and I gather much the same goes for the Glitter Band. There used to be ten thousand habitats in it, thrown around Yellowstone like—and here I’m going to indulge in some shameless mixing of metaphors—a garland of fabulously rare and artfully cut gems, each burning with its own hard radiance.” Quirrenbach stopped and wheezed for a moment before continuing, “Now there are perhaps a hundred or so which still hold enough pressure to support life. The rest are derelict, vacuum-filled husks, silent and dead as driftwood, attended by vast and lethal shoals of orbital debris. They call it the Rust Belt.”