Marik Quarter, Halifax

Vanderfox, Adhafera

Prefecture VII, The Republic

7 July 3134

Even close to dusk, the yellow-white light beat down like the hand of an unmerciful god that would see Adhafera’s inhabitants dead before the blessed rains came. Staring up at the cobalt sky totally devoid of even a wispy hint of white, Petr found it hard to believe the locals were already preparing for the savage rainfalls they said would be arriving any day.

Moving into the shade of an eave—he felt sure the hammer of light targeted his head with brutal and malicious efficiency—he watched an elderly woman across the street for a moment. She stooped to grasp an apparently light, yet unwieldy sheet, which she then heaved into place with a snap across the front window of her store; he’d heard it mentioned several times the wind could drive raindrops so hard they would break glass. The rainy season threatened, which is why the cattle slaughtering normally occurred at this time.

Petr stepped away from the curb and began walking briskly down the street, still hoping to find Snow. And to bleed off anger; his temper flared again as he thought of the local merchants’ most recent behavior. Stupid spheroids. Didn’t matter that he moved among their worlds. He was trueborn bred and trained, and the spheroids’ ways might as well be alien intelligences for all he could understand them at times.

They had a deal. How dared they back away at the last minute!

He felt the lightest of brushes against his right elbow and immediately spun to the left, down and around into a defense crouch. He’d been downside on worlds that made him feel as though he moved in powered-down battle armor, their crushing gravities making even walking arduous. But on Adhafera, with its .77 standard Terran gravity, he could move almost as lithely as though still on the grav deck of his ship.

The old lady he’d watched for a moment screeched and took several quick, mincing steps backward. Sha knew many Clansmen, especially those still confined within their occupation zones, who would be revolted by the skein of wrinkles that mapped her life in relief across her bronzed skin; Petr didn’t bat an eye, too accustomed to seeing this and worse in ports of call.

Still, he couldn’t believe the audacity of this hag to touch his person, and the familiar warmth raced along his blood, setting off the dull thump that would soon soar to a roaring beat, the soft, tickling sensation on his skin that would eventually set him afire.

“You got no right to frighten me so,” the hag scolded, speaking to him before he could begin to chastise her properly; her face wore the look of a sibko trainer about to berate an errant shiv. The beat in his ears grew by increments.

“She tells me to tell you, that’s all. She gives me good C-bills, so I don’t mind. But I got work to do. With Pappy gone, I’m all the store’s got. So I didn’t see ya gawking and suddenly you’re walking like hell’s on your tail.”

The internal heat grew as the brazen woman stepped a little closer and the musk of fresh soil and age, mixed with good clean sweat, sailed up his nostrils as he breathed deep to keep it under control. She began to shake a finger at him.

“Then I come near to knocking myself off—ticker not so strong anymore—and then you leap about like some weasel and look like you gonna hit ol’ Timma.” She gummed her mouth several times; his lips curled at the dentures.

“Don’t matter what that ugly women say to me, taking a message to you offworlders not worth the time to spit.”

Frigid waters cascaded across his temper, sublimating it in a flash that almost stunned him; without conscious thought he stepped toward the woman and assumed his most disarming look, casually slouching his body to appear less threatening. “My good Timma, I must apologize for my actions. Where I hail from, we simply do not have the great spaces you enjoy in which to live. To work. As such, we are accustomed to not touching one another.” He broadened his smile, added a twinkle to his eye. “It’s a way to create artificial space where none really exists. You simply startled me.” Contractions were always a nice touch with spheroids.

She cocked her head at him and gummed her upper lip several times; this close, he could see the fine dirt that filled most of her wrinkles; he suddenly felt she was a soil etching in need of a good dousing to reveal the true sculpture beneath. “You got no right, still, to be surprising me like that. Bang, could’ve been dead. Then how sorry you be?”

Petr added a hint of sorrow to his features. A warrior on the field needed no such subterfuge, but this was a battlefield, if of a different sort, and like a heavy medium laser from his Tiburon, he would use whatever resources he found at hand. “Then I would hold your spirit on my conscience for all the days of my life. A specter to haunt my CargoShip.” A touch of a smile.

She wrinkled her forehead even more—if that were possible—then burst into loud laughter. “That’s exactly what I be doing to you. You be careful, offworlder, or you have a flock of old women haunting your spaceship.”

Petr bowed low to accept the rebuke; his eyes flashed once as they were hidden, returned to their charade by the time he finished the flourish. “Timma, you spoke of a message a woman gave you to pass on to a Sea Fox Clansman, quiaff?”

“Don’t be knowing nothing about no kiaf, but this wasn’t for just any offworlder.”

She stabbed a finger at him and almost touched his chest. Glad she didn’t; he would hate to slip and ruin what he had wrought.

“She describe you down to the tip of those fancy space boot thingies you got. No doubt you the man.”

“And this message? What is it?”

“Just be glad Timma the forgiving type, or I be walking away. Can still feel the ticker a racing.”

Please do not walk away. Had to keep this clean, especially after the negotiations became blocked; the coolness began to thaw.

“She tell me to say to this offworlder—you, o’ course—to meet this woman (ugly!) at Dipson’s Five and Dime Diner.”

Petr simply strode away, knowing exactly where to find the eating establishment—calling it such brought a sardonic smile. He didn’t look back once to see the gaping mouth of Timma, flabbergasted out of speech by the way Petr simply dropped her presence and sped away like demons from Hell snapped at his heels.

It took him most of an hour to cross this portion of Halifax. They called it the Marik Quarter, but he could find no distinguishing characteristics—neither architecture, nor smell—to tell it apart from any other portion of the city. By the time he reached the diner, full dark quenched the light and cast up its own pale imitations; without the streetlights, he would have found the going difficult.

Opening the door, he stepped in and for a moment wondered if the stench he sought to escape so many times at the Merchant House had found its way into this building as well, waiting to pounce upon him once more.

Dim and dirty. Few occupants. It fit the image he had carefully crafted of Snow over the last few weeks. A cockroach would revel here and so would she.

He moved away from the door, weaving in and out of aisles of chairs sitting askew, his boots conveying the squelch and smack of every puddle of liquid—the aroma told him some of them were not just spilled alcohol—and morsels of soggy food. Though several people raised their heads, most were too drunk to give him more than a passing glance. The one or two whose eyes actually quickened at the realization a Sea Fox strode among them quickly resumed their previous postures as his blazing eyes swept the room and turned any interest to ash. The anger stirred, roared; he should be glowing, his skin an incandescent covering to the blazing furnace within.