Ned was staring out the train window at the landforms that rose and fell, the shoulder-high strawgrass and the semi-succulents like towers that had spines as long as his arm. Thinking about nearly having been murdered. “Those fighting-suits,” he said, “Lyhhrt didn't make them, I guess?”
The Lyhhrt said, “If we had you would be dead.”
“I bet they cost a lot just the same. They wouldn't put all the troops in them?”
“Maybe front line attackers if they were using flamers. They would still cost.”
“And if they didn't work they'd cost a lot more.” He did his best to think of other things.
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Port City was the first real city built and settled on Fthel IV. Inland southwest toward the center of the continent, it rose out of a wrinkled basalt desert, the overflow of an ancient volcano. It had been built prefab in straight lines, there were few gardens or gracious lives there, and the air was always hot, not warm. Its citizens sneered at effete towns like Miramar for their boutiques and historical atmosphere, and most often referred to them as The Refinery.
Only at night did the city flower with coldlight and neon designs on every building, and then it burst into riots of color, and occasionally riots of whacked-out navvies and construction workers stopping in for a boost on the way home.
Ned stood on the main street's walkway, gripping the handrail, Lyhhrt to one side, Spartakos to the other. Below him the monorail hummed, and far across shuttles lifted into
the evening sky on spurts of fire aimed at orbiting ships. The passersby, who had already seen everything coming and going, paid no attention.
“Where now?” Hire-hall and Legion Hall had come up empty, and Ned wanted a beer and a sit-down. He sighed. “I know two or three places around here ⦠.”
“Let us go, then,” the Lyhhrt said.
The bar was as Ned remembered it, down a long lane, very much like the one he had run with his heart thudding only yesterday, behind slivered boardwood doors between a PiKwiK and a CashNow. Ned pushed through the doors into a blazingly lit room blaring with drums and cymbals, and centered with a canvas-floored ring where three beefy life-forms of indeterminate sex and species had wrestled themselves into a grunting pretzel-knot.
On the walls the same winking, gesturing holograms of buccaneering men and women who had piloted the traders/ smugglers of the spacelanes in the last couple of hundred years; in a corner the same chrome-plated form of a giant woman with classic features and breasts tipped with spigots: Goddess of Beer. She carried a lightning bolt in her left hand and her right hand held a copper mug, which she lifted stiffly to her mouth with bended elbow and set down again with a clank, lifted and set down again. In moments when the music paused her joints gritted faintly.
Spartakos paused to stare at her. “That is not an auton,” he said.
No friend for Spartakos there. “No.”
“That's not seemly, Ned.”
“The beer isn't very good either,” Ned muttered, wishing he'd chosen some other place. His nose prickled with smokes and perfumes. A lot more of the jhat here. He searched for a table, sidling through the usual crowd of rawboned sweatband-headed men with skin half sunburn half tattoo, wrapped around hefty women wearing real jewels. Mostly
they were workers around the port or on permanent time-and-a-half in mines, factories, construction and on derricks, and most of them knew Ned, mainly because of Spartakos.
:
Look who's here:
the way the Lyhhrt transmitted it, seemed to flash through all the minds at once.
“Here's the one lives off his robot like a fucking pimp,” a voice said.
Ned had sometimes run a couple of whores in an earlier life to cover his work for GalFed. He looked hard at the voice's blue-jawed owner. “I want work. Who's hiring?”
“Nobody wants pugs no more. This is a port here with rousters and tuggers, and around it's factories, mines, construction. If you're good at that you'll find it.”
A woman came from behind the beer goddess to take orders: she was an O'e, and the look that passed between her and Spartakos, and then at the Lyhhrt-as-O'e, was a laser beam.
Ned touched Spartakos's shoulder.
The woman said nothing except with her eyes. With difficulty, Spartakos turned his eyes away. Ned almost felt the circuits flashing.
Drinkers jeered at the O'e and put out legs to trip her, but she was nimble and stepped over them neatly. Ned turned his glance away carefully and Bluejaw dug his snout into his beer.
The wrestlers unraveled themselves into a Varvani woman, a bulked-up male Dabiri and a genuine Asiatic sumo wrestler. Ned found his voice to say, “I been to all your hirehalls.”
A quiet thin voice said from a dark corner, “Been a lot of hiring for offworld.”
“Depends where.”
A loaded silence. Then, “Aren't we choosy,” Bluejaw said with an elaborate titterâ
âthen something like a shifting of viewpoints, orâ
The O'e woman was whispering to the Lyhhrt, “You are so lucky to have Spartakos protect you!”
âa sense of infinitely reflecting mirrors, of minds rebounding from each other, of a heavy body with silent feet, powerful swinging shoulderblades, a whacking tail, thirst and hunger â¦
⦠resolved through the doorway into a big red cat with red eyes flashing green eyeshine, a black V stripe running from her forehead down along her flanks. Her telepathy marked her as female, an Ungrukh woman.
The Ungrukh, a mutant version of Earth's own leopards, were, along with Lyhhrt and Khagodi, one of the three species Galactic Federation depended on when they needed telepaths. But Ungrukh did not like following orders and were not very sociable, even with each other. They worked only to feed themselves on their fierce and rocky world.
Ned, about to sit down with his squeezer of beerâhe had never drunk from the beer goddessâstood watching the Ungrukh. The bar had fallen silent; the drinkers knew this cat and their eyes were on Ned now.
The Ungrukh woman came straight to Ned, stood on hind feet and clapped her paws on his shoulders.
She opened her jaws and said in raspingly guttural English: “Harroo Ned Gattsss! You mooff here naow?”
Some of the drinkers spluttered in their beer, others laughed, and the rest twisted their mouths in disappointment.
Ned grinned. “Just visiting, Rrenghaâwhat about you, sweetheart?” Her saber-teeth were so close to his face that his breath made her whiskers quiver. He was panting, but he stood quietly and let her finish her little joke. “I wondered what happened when I didn't see you around the plaza in Miramar.”
“That's a long story.” Rrengha relaxed into competent lingua and dropped to the floor. “All because I am trying to get to Khagodis.” She looked up at Spartakos, and then at
the Lyhhrt-as-O'e, and did not mention that she knew what he was.
But the whole room seemed to be listening now, or perhaps Ned's uneasiness had become paranoia. He stepped off the razor edge he had been walking on and sat down a little calmer. “Let's hear it.”
“First,”âthe bartender himself was approaching with a big bowl brimful of chunked raw meat to set down in front of herâ“my dinner.” After she had gulped this down and slurped the last drop of blood she said, “For now I am earning my living as the guardian of peace in this place.” She looked about and found everything peaceful, while Ned took a suck of his beer and left the Lyhhrt to brush away the O'e woman.
Then Rrengha panned the room with a look and the customers kept their eyes to themselves. “It is some years ago that Galactic Federation tells Ungruwarkh there is a request from Khagodis for consultation with us because both of our species are so strange. Neither one grows out of the life on its world. We originally believe the god Firemaster comes from our volcanoes to make us in the colors of our land and his fire, but now even the most ignorant of us knows that a powerful alien being from the depths of space picks animals off your old world and makes us Ungrukh out of them for his amusement. That is hard to swallow, but we manage.
“The Khagodi are also not related to any other of their life forms, and they have ten times ten kinds of religions to explain their beginnings. But when they dig up an ancient ship that comes from some other world their scientists and priests want to know the truth and ask us for advice.
“Not so simple. Nobody is offering any money.” She gave a meaty belch as politely as possible for an Ungrukh. “We never have much and there is little to find when all you want to buy is knowledge. And you know we don't care much about writing our history when it is mostly about old
battles. Khagodis is having trouble with politics and the Ix and the Lyhhrt, and they don't care what their learned people want.
“Galactic Federation says, what Khagodi want is not our business, but after a lot of arguing they agree to pay one person's way to Khagodis by whatever route is cheapest. My people say, Rrengha, you are here on Ungruwarkh four times ten, and ten again years, your mate is dead of old age and your cubs have grandchildren, you are not much use around here, so it is your turn to tell those fools on Khagodis what they want to know, and let them pay your way home.
“All very well, next delivery of cattle embryos on Ungruwarkh that ship picks me up and by one or two jumps here I am in this ugly cityâwhich is somewhat nearer to ships and cheaper than your beautiful oneâstill waiting for the lift that takes me to Khagodis.”
The Lyrhht said suddenly, :
And you found this place. You would not be working here if there was no information coming.:
:There is a matter of being given admission, Lyhhrt ⦠they must trust me first.:
:And they had better do it soon,:
the Lyhhrt said. :
We also would like to do a favor to Khagodis. Not to wait.:
“Yeh, that is a long story, Rrengha,” Ned said, playing up, and also wondering how Rrengha and the Lyhhrt had become so close so quickly.
Rrengha said in a mindvoice that was like letters of fire, :
We two peoples know each other many long years, Ned Gattes
.: And then, loudly, “Aar! Pretty soon I get tired of moping about here. I want lots of space and fresher smells!” A thump of her tail signified that the conversation had ended.
Ned, because he was an old hand at the business, felt one of those synapses, at once insight, resentment, relief: first the realization that Rrengha was a Galactic Federation agent, at least a temporary one, because GalFed never deals out any
money without exacting service, if only on a while-you're-at-it basis; resentment at adding another member to the team at the risk of making it unwieldy; relief that the new addition was as powerful a force as Rrengha.
Even though Ungrukh and Lyhhrt had had their disagreements during their long years of history. Spartakos, at least, was peaceful, having pulled away from his concentration on the O'e woman and shadowed himself in a corner.
Ned muttered, “We can't hang around here forever. In the meantime there's no bloody lift.” He rose and sauntered to the dark corner where the man with the quiet thin voice had said,
Been a lot of hiring offworld.
:
Be careful with that one!:
the Lyhhrt said sharply. :
He is well armed.:
Ned said, :
So am I.:
If Lyhhrt/Spartakos/Rrengha with their minds/lasers/fangs were not weaponry, what was? He sat down at the small corner table and regarded the man, who looked back at him mildly enough. “My name's Ned Gattes.”
“Lek here.” He was a scrawny man with rough-cut hair, a scrag moustache and a point of beard under it. He was wearing clothes as worn as himself and a conical felt hat with a curled brim, and had no woman or jewelry to show off. He drew on a dopestick and let the smoke curl away from his mouth. “I know of you, and everybody's heard of Metallo Man but that other one doesn't look useful.”
“They come with me, that's all.”
“Are they worth anything?”
“Depends what you want them to do.”
“That half-rotten O'e?”
“He'll fight for my sake.”
“I can find a fight for youânot in any arena, not in this bar either ⦠not on this world. You'd have to pick a side.”
“That's what you expect in a fight. What kind of sides?”
“What kind do you want?”
Ned sucked the last drop from his squeezer. “The one with the money.”
“Good choice.” The O'e woman came forward to clear the table and Lek set down his mug, and smiled. She turned her head and shoulders away as if she were warding off a blow, and hurried away quickly. He watched her beaded helmet glittering and the swirl of her flowered gown and said, “Some of them aren't bad looking if you don't look too close ⦠.”