FEUD

1541 4D

The next night, Andrew and his friends Nexi Harren and Gej Tonda went juicing at TightWad, Andrew‘s favorite drainhole in Poly Town. There the Astrans found them.

It had been a high night, when all the burdens of the death and the funeral fell away, and the brew was good, and the rhythms of the panpans and tams wove a spell in the dark cavern. TightWad‘s array of chemtube dispensers, a vast tangle of pipes and flashing lights, shone and rippled with psychoactives; knots of skinsuited couples, threesomes and foursomes, danced, groped, copulated, and chattered. At a blue-lit alcove table, three tall aliens, distinctive hardshell skulls shining, waved tendrilled hands at each other and poured tanks of brew for themselves from their table’s spigots.

Andrew, Nexi, and Gej, full of warring pharmas and hot-spiced bonestalks and brew, hunched over their small table and sang to the insistent rhythms. A few other Hejji joined them in the responses and the improvs.

They finished three songs, banged for brew, and Gej started a new chant. A hand fell on Andrew‘s shoulder.

“Tell your pet frog to clap it shut.” It was Mentrius. Behind him Lusin and two other Astrans moved up behind Gej and Nexi. Gej stopped singing.

“Leave us alone,” Andrew said.

“You didn’t seem to get our message last time,” Mentrius said. “Our cousin saved you from getting it the hard way. Not this time. Not after Herindina.” His grip on Andrew‘s shoulder tightened and pulled back; Andrew‘s chair tilted.

He would get a boot in the face, and a poison bullet in the gut, and then it would be Nexi and Gej against all four of these turds, and for nothing. It was up to him.

Andrew kicked out, rolled to his left as the chair went down, and landed on his right foot, crouched. His crossed arms caught Mentrius‘s boot on the way to his face; he grabbed the ankle and heaved, and Mentrius dragged his other foot just enough to lurch into Lusin, who steadied him. The noise and the beat continued around them as if they were part of it.

“Leave us,” Andrew said. His knife was in his hand.

“We’re taking your cocks,” said Lusin, waving a heavy blade.

Gej moved quickly at Andrew‘s left; Mentrius spun and flicked his wrist. A flash of a stickblade, and Gej staggered back, clutching at the blood that fountained from his neck.

The shine of Lusin‘s weapon caught the edge of Andrew‘s horrified vision; he barely parried it, sidestepped Lusin‘s second lunge, and slipped his own knife into the Astran‘s muscled side. Lusin fell like a boulder, jerked once, and lay still.

Silence. Six huge men in streetarmor, the TightWad keepers, surrounded the fighters. “Go,” the largest said. “You want City chains down in Babiar?” These men were not to be challenged; they had andro speed and strength, probably virus-induced and highly illegal.

“Let me take him out from here,” Andrew said, pointing to Gej, lying dead on the stone floor. The eyes of his friend still hung wide open, the mouth in an incongruous smile, the hand limp across a gaping blood-smeared neck wound.

A green mote of light, the size of a tiny pinfly, sparked before the dead face of Gej, and disappeared; Andrew blinked at it and shuddered, as if something alive and strange had touched him in his sleep.

TightWad‘s cleanercritters slurped at the widening pool around the body.

If only he had listened to Leil. Andrew bent and took his friend’s body in his arms. Now he would have to bring the news to Gej‘s family. He clenched his jaw, and hoisted the body over his shoulder, grunting with its weight.

“I will take my kinsman,” Mentrius said, ignoring Andrew. The music had slowed, turned to a heavy pulse; as the Astrans and Hejji, shouldering aside the curious and the indifferent, lugged their dead out through the back corridors, voices began to rise again, and over the insistent beat, syntrells skittered new melodies that the door behind Andrew pinched off to silence.