The lawyer opened her mouth to reproach him, but he looked bleakly at the pair of them and said, ‘The Oumaru.’
Solace’s fighting reflexes kicked in instantly. Angels of Punching You in the Face, and she was ready to make good on the name. The man was beefier than Colonials normally got, even broader than Magdan’s Voyenni soldiers. His hair and beard were cropped to a stubble and his knuckly face was blotched with blue and purple discolorations. There was something very wrong with him too. His clothing was slit from the neck to the small of his back, because some creature was implanted there. It was a thing between a lobster and a bee, armoured in parts, bristly with jagged hairs. Several limbs were dug deep into the man’s body, the flesh around them warped and lumpy. Its handful of stalked eyes flicked about, scanning the crowd. Solace had no idea what it was, except nasty. Very nasty.
Kris very carefully set down her plastic beaker, ‘Oumaru. Should that mean something?’ she said.
The newcomer regarded them without humour. ‘You brought her back from deep void.’ His Colvul was accented strangely. ‘My employer has an interest in her. Tell me where she is, please.’
‘Nope,’ Kris said.
‘Not our fleas, not our circus,’ Solace added. Which, from their expressions, wasn’t a saying that had travelled outside the Parthenon.
The man – the symbiont, Solace decided – smiled thinly. She wondered whether the joining of flesh also meant a joining of minds. ‘Do not make a game of this,’ he continued. ‘My employer is desirous that his staff have access to the ship. This can be a pleasant matter of contractual recompense or it can lead to matters less pleasant.’
‘Take this up with our factor. I’m just crew,’ Kris said carelessly.
‘The Hanni says you are already under contract. I did explain that this was problematic to my employer, but the little crab would not be moved. To avoid the unpleasantness I come to the crew. Show me the ship now, please.’ He put his big hands on the bar and Kris instantly moved several steps away. Danger hung about him like he sweated it.
‘You don’t want to kick off any unpleasantness with me,’ Solace told him evenly.
He merely grinned. ‘You’re the Patho they told me about. Good for you. You’re not the only ones who fight. To the ship now, please.’
Solace stood, calm and battle-ready now actual face-punching was imminent. When violence erupted from two tables away, it caught all three of them entirely by surprise.
She aimed a fist at the symbiont out of sheer reflex, and he’d gone for her in the same moment. She twisted aside as her blow glanced off a cheekbone hard as steel. A moment later, someone in red robes was thrown into the pair of them. Symbiont hit the bar with his elbow, cracking the counter and yelping in surprisingly high-pitched pain. Solace herself went with the momentum and put the bar between them. She ended up half covered by robes, shouldering aside the dazed cultist-turned-missile. When she put her head above the parapet, the whole room had erupted into fighting and Symbiont was gone. For a moment she thought Kris had been carried off as well, but the lawyer was also crouched behind the dubious cover of the cracked bar.
‘What is this?’ Solace demanded, feeling as though their own fight should have taken precedence over this random farrago. Even as she spoke, Kris shouted, ‘Idris!’ and was off into the melee, drawing a narrow-bladed knife from her sleeve. Solace vaulted the bar and was right behind her.
At a booth across the room were Idris, Rollo and Olli. Solace’s heart sank to see that someone had driven a dagger into their plastic tabletop, because she knew precisely what that bit of theatre meant. The Betrayed. With their ‘humans for humans’ sentiments. Between her and them was a room full of brawling people either trying to get into or out of a fight, all representing a serious obstacle. A core of young Colonial men were going for anyone wearing cult robes or Hegemony regalia.
A cultist stumbled into her, robes flapping, and tried to punch her in the face. She blocked and elbowed him in the jaw with brutal efficiency. He spat blood from his savagely bitten tongue and reeled away. She felt absurdly indignant, because frankly none of this was their fight. However, a man had Idris by the collar, and she remembered that Intermediaries were on the Betrayed’s long list of race traitors. How they’d identified Idris for what he was, she didn’t know, but presumably that was why someone was trying to choke him to death. Rollo slugged the man, who let the Int go and lurched sideways. He hit an electrified prong that Olli had jabbed out from her walker frame and fell, shuddering. Then a bulkier opponent appeared, popped Rollo in the nose and kicked Olli back into the wall.