Solace powered through the fist-happy crowd. Halfway across the room she had a sudden crisis of conscience and looked for Kris, surely at the mercy of the mob. Except Kris was tight at her back, knife held along the line of her arm. Even as Solace glanced in her direction, the lawyer took a cultist’s arm, twisting it viciously to bend the man backwards. She then kicked her victim’s legs out from him, her blade remaining unbloodied. No need to escalate just yet.
A bundle of bodies cannoned into Solace even as they moved forwards: two spacers laying into a cultist. One of them saw her, processed her as an ally, then realized his mistake. He was a particularly ugly customer, his own Nativist sympathies on show with the cross-hilted knife inked onto his forehead. The Parthenon was right at the top of the Betrayed’s hate-list.
She swayed back from his right fist’s wild swing, and then his left came at her with a knuckleduster studded with nails. His friend was right behind with a knife.
Escalation it is, then. Knuckles came for Solace with both fists this time. She caught one, rammed it back into its owner’s face, and then deflected the other so the knuckleduster raked across Blade’s abdomen. Then Blade rammed into her, knocking her over. She rolled out from underneath him, ramming an elbow into his head, but Knuckles got a grip on her knee and drew back his fist full of nails for a pounding.
Kris cut his ear off.
For the briefest moment, mid-brawl, Solace and Knuckles both stared at the ear as it flopped to the floor. Kris had stepped back, knife poised, and the back of her other arm presented to block.
Knuckles rose, roaring, to his full height, Solace forgotten on the ground. He grabbed for Kris and received the myrmidon’s booted foot right in the groin. She reckoned she’d fractured the man’s pelvis. She kicked Blade in the head for good measure as Kris hauled her to her feet.
Over at the table, Barney had appeared and was wrestling fiercely with the man who’d hit Rollo. Solace punched their antagonist in the back of the head and floored him.
‘Where’s Idris?’ Kris yelled.
‘There!’ Olli had righted herself and was pointing a truncated arm across the room. Solace spotted a knot of red and purple figures, with Idris’s slender form in the middle.
‘Oh for . . .’ It seemed particularly unjust – in the middle of this fight-that-was-not-their-fight – that they’d have to go toe-to-toe with both sides. A moment later Idris was gesturing, apparently unharmed, and they shouldered their way over. Medvig was sheltering amongst the cultists too, Solace saw, and Kittering had been under the table all along. They had sensibly decided against getting trampled by a roomful of mad humans.
The cultists were armed with shock batons and coshes, more than ready to give any marauding Nativist a run for their money. Around that time station security finally arrived and started cuffing rioters, or at least any rioters without Hegemony colours. Rollo made the call that perhaps they were with the cultists after all.
Soon the bar was quiet again and security were considerately removing the unconscious bodies. Solace stared at the dagger stuck into the crew’s erstwhile tabletop.
‘So that’s a thing,’ Kris agreed, following her gaze. ‘The Betrayed. They’ll all get rooted out of here sharpish by the cult, now the Hegemony’s taken over.’
Solace nodded. The Betrayed were a relatively new faction within internal Colonial politics. They were officially decried by Hugh and yet, mysteriously, they’d never been outlawed. The Parthenon didn’t care for the legitimate Nativist movement either, which was all about returning to one unified human identity. They celebrated old Earth and embraced the rhetoric of humanity’s past glories. The Betrayed went a step further, preaching that humanity would have been the galaxy’s dominant species, if allowed to fight the Architects ‘properly’。 But Intermediaries had made some sort of sham peace, they claimed, part of a grand conspiracy to keep humans down. Needless to say, the Hegemonic cult was right up there in their sights as well, which brought them round to . . .
‘Who are your new friends, my wayward son?’ Rollo asked.
Before Idris could speak, a thin greying woman amongst the cultists said, ‘Captain Rostand, of the Vulture God?’
‘A responsibility that seems to bring only trouble these days,’ he agreed warily.
She managed a creditable smile. ‘My hierograve has asked me to invite you to dinner, sir.’
Rollo looked over the ruin of the bar, then back to her. ‘That so?’ he asked, his usual loquaciousness deserting him in the fact of this unexpected development.