NO OFFENSE TO YOU

1563 4D

The smell of fresh-baked bread warmed Andrew as he entered a large dining room lit gently by clustered lamp globes. Strong-featured and well-proportioned andros sat at many tables in heavy work suits, drinking and eating rapidly. Anjive, the buzz of high-frequency andro communication, flew everywhere, soft but insistent as the wind, underlayered by the hum of human voices. Andro sensi feeds murmured and gestured in high-mounted corner holos. Fingering a reed-thin steel flute, a fine-featured andro man sitting alone at a tiny table stared at Andrew with pale-yellow eyes.

“Come on,” Martin said. They wound their way to a table near the rear of the room, next to a large and intricately-crafted metal door. They sat down in round, sticklegged formchairs. Andrew‘s chair molded itself comfortably to his back and thighs — no lumps like the ones he had had at the farm. He closed his eyes and let the hum and hiss of voices bubble over him.

Martin said, “Tubers two times, and two tanks for two, thanks.” Andrew looked up. A chunky server andro waggled two fingers in acknowledgement, laughed, and chittered something in anjive to another server a few tables away.

A moment later a scattered chorus of andros called, in perfect unison, “Martin‘s here!” Laughs and stares.

Andrew glared. He wasn’t in the mood for this. “I want to look around again up there, up at the farm.”

Martin nodded slowly, his smile fading. “You can, if you can get through Arlen‘s fence. Look, why don’t you just come down to Tarbruk and stay with me and Varnell for a while? You don’t want to get taken out in a sack like that guy you saw, do you?”

“No, but I want to find out what happened. Let me think.” The tanks of brew arrived, and Andrew put both hands around his. Good. They’d warmed it, for the wet weather. He raised it to his lips and let a hot trickle fill his mouth. Much better. He swallowed three times, set the tank down, and looked over Martin‘s shoulder.

At the table behind Martin, a human woman Andrew‘s size, with dark skin and a black braid over one shoulder, sipped from a hot tank and leaned to her left to talk with a pale giant, an andro with short-cropped orange-blond hair. She scanned the whole room as she spoke, and saw Andrew; her dark blue-green eyes looked into his as she whispered aside to the big man.

Martin turned to see where Andrew was looking, and called to the couple. “Hana, Ezzar, this is my brother Andrew. Andrew, this is Ezzar. She’s a regular up here, her and Grendel. Hana, Grendel. Come on, Andrew, I want them to meet you.” Andrew picked up his tank, finished it in a long warm pull, and followed his brother. They sat down, Martin facing Ezzar, Andrew facing the big man.

“Andrew,” the woman said, nodding. She didn’t introduce the andro Martin had called Grendel: an old name, one of those names the andros liked to pull up out of the decayed parts of the Colonist Archives. Seated, Grendel seemed about a head taller than anyone in the room, with a well-proportioned face and a massive upper body. He devoured a huge mound of spiced tubers from a steel bowl, forking the brown-crusted hemispheres to his mouth with three fingers. Spotting Andrew watching him, he grinned, showing a set of crowded teeth. He had to be Ezzar‘s man; Martin had said ‘hana' in greeting each of them.

“You’re the brother?” Ezzar said, her voice low and harsh. Her eyes locked with Andrew‘s.

He didn’t like her. “Yeah.”

“Look.” Martin took Andrew‘s sleeve and drew it back to show the tracery of scars cut like a scourging on his arm. “This looks like Arlen‘s work, doesn’t it?”

She squinted at him, and smiled. “I never knew any Hejji could do anything to bother Arlen. No offense to you.”

Andrew had heard this kind of collechi insult often, but this time it grated; maybe her smile mocked him. He snapped, “Our father nearly peeled us off the Hejj when they sold out the Long Lease. So what’s your family? Novander Wye? They like to ask lots of questions.” He beckoned for the server, thirsty for another hot brew.

“Good for your father. I’m not Novander. I’m Arcus.” Ezzar‘s eyes gleamed. She had Novander Wye enemies, no question. Of course, a lot of people did.

“Then your people are fighting, right? I would have joined if the Hejj hadn’t been shut out of it.”

Ezzar countered, “You know, Arlen doesn’t let people go alive, not usually. Why you?”

“His people left me for dead. They held me over the winter, and then threw me out.”

“That doesn’t make sense, not with what I know about him. He almost never lets people go or dumps them unless he gets something for it. What’s he after?” Ezzar leaned back and sipped at her tank.

Andrew recalled the tracer the doctor had taken out of him. She had a point. “He kept asking me about the ores under my land. He said, ‘I know you’ve got it. The meter’s got you pegged.’“

“The meter?”

“He had this huge machine, some kind of tank of liquid about the size of a small house. It took up half the warehouse they held me in. I saw a datapanel on it with several holos. He and some woman kept arguing about N-emissions. I didn’t follow any of it. Whatever he was after, it must have been valuable.”

“And he thought you had it. Lucky you. It doesn’t add up, does it, Rennie?” Ezzar turned to Grendel, who shook his head. “This guy talks like he doesn’t have any of Arlen‘s drugs in him, like he’s a normal person.”

“The only one I ever saw,” the andro said.

“I think he let you go,” Ezzar said, “and he’s got people following you, or biotrackers collecting their little threads of genesign. You’re putting a lot of people here in danger, just by being here.”

Andrew stood up. “Fine. You can have this table to yourselves. I didn’t ask for this. You got Arlen‘s people after you, or something? Is that what’s cranking you?” He scooped up his nearly-empty tank and moved back to his first seat. “Come on, Martin.” Martin followed.

The front door flew open. Figures in gray and blue, wearing pale blue helms, crowded into the doorway which had somehow become blocked with a large jam of andro servers all trying to get past each other.

Ezzar glanced angrily at Andrew, then at the crowd. “Oh, shit, not the corpos again. They just left.” Looking for an exit, she twisted around, toward the large and intricate metal door leading to the next room.

From the front, a crash. An andro server had dropped a tray, and was fighting with another andro in a black worksuit. Like a flash fire, the fight spread, bodies and limbs vaulting and blurring at each other. The bird-chatter of anjive rose into screeches like ripping metal, and chairs flew through the air in a grotesque ballet to clang and smash against cellstone walls. Shouts came from the helmed intruders, now nearly invisible behind the ruck of the high-speed brawl.

Andrew watched in shock. He’d been in many fights in the City, but this one raced like nothing he’d seen, even in the worst barholes in Poly Town. A woman curled and straightened in mid-flight across a table to kick the head of a man who was just bouncing up from the floor. Two men caromed off the wall to Andrew‘s left, rose in a paired leap almost up to the seventeen-foot ceiling, narrowly missing black struts to which another man clung by one hand, and slugged each other twice, in mid-air, before they landed on a table to send dishes and stew flying. Dozens of people of both sexes hurled themselves in movements too fast for Andrew‘s eyes to follow, screamed at pitches that gouged his ears. A hand gripped his shoulder, hard.

“Come on, you two,” a deep voice growled, “We’re sitting out this dance.” Grendel. A chair, punctuating his words, shattered into clanking pieces against the floor at Andrew‘s feet; Grendel had the right idea. Following Ezzar and Grendel, he and Martin ducked and squeezed through a crowd of watching andros past the great metal door into the barroom.