Hunter’s Run

‘You hear about the ambassador from Europa?’ Patricio said. ‘He got in a fight last night at the El Rey. Some crazy pendejo stabbed him with a bottle neck or something.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. He died before they could get him to the hospital. The governor’s real pissed off about it.’

‘So what are you telling me for?’ Ramon asked. ‘I’m not the governor.’

Elena was still as stone beside him, her eyes narrow in an expression of low cunning. Ramon quietly willed Patricio away, or at least to shut up. But the man didn’t pick up on it.

‘The governor’s all busy with the Enye ships coming in. Now he has to track down the guy that killed the ambassador, and show how the colony is able to keep the law and all. I’ve got a cousin who works for the chief constable. It’s ugly over there.’

‘Okay,’ Ramon said.

‘I was just thinking, you know. You hang out at the El Rey sometimes.’

‘Not last night,’ Ramon said, glowering. ‘You can ask Mikel if you want. I wasn’t there all night.’

Patricio smiled and took an awkward step back. The chupacabra made a weak, synthesized roar and the crowd around it shrilled with laughter and applause.

‘Yeah, okay,’ Patricio said. ‘I was just thinking. You know …’

And with the conversation trailing away, Patricio smiled, nodded, and limped back down the hill.

‘It wasn’t you, was it?’ Elena half-whispered, half-hissed. ‘You didn’t kill the fucking ambassador?’

‘I didn’t kill anyone, and sure as hell not a European. I’m not stupid,’ Ramon said. ‘Why don’t you watch your fucking parade, eh?’

Night came on as the parade wound down. At the bottom of the hill, in a field near the palace, they were putting a torch to the pile of wood surrounding Old Man Gloom – Mr Harding, some of the colonists from Barbados called him – a hastily cobbled-together effigy, almost twenty feet tall, with a face like a grotesque caricature of a European or a norteamericano, green-painted cheeks, and an enormous Pinocchio nose. The bonfire blazed, and, wreathed in flames, the giant effigy began to swing its arms and groan in seeming agony, a somehow eerie sight that sent a chill up Ramon’s spine, as if he had been given the dubious privilege of watching a soul being tormented in the fires of Hell.

All the bad luck that dogged people throughout the year was supposed to be burning up with Old Man Gloom, but watching the giant twist and writhe in slow motion in the flames, its deep, electronically amplified moans echoing off the walls of the Palace of the governors, Ramon had a glum presentiment that it was his good luck that was burning instead, that from here on in he was headed for nothing but misery and misfortune.

And one glance at Elena – who had been sitting silently with her jaw set tight and white lines of anger etched around her mouth ever since he had snapped at her – was enough to tell him that it wasn’t going to be very long before that prophecy started to come true.

CHAPTER TWO

He hadn’t intended to go back out for another month. Even though they’d fucked passionately the night before, after one of their most vicious arguments ever, tearing at each other’s bodies like crazed things, he’d decided to leave before she could wake up. If he’d waited, they’d only have had another fight, and she probably would have kicked him out anyway; he’d taken a swing at her with a bottle the night before, and she would be outraged at that once she’d sobered up. Still, if it wasn’t for the killing at the El Rey, he might have tried staying in town. Elena’d probably calm down in a day or two, at least enough that they could speak to each other without shouting, but the news of the European’s death and the governor’s wrath made Diegotown feel close and claustrophobic. When he went to the outfitter’s station to buy rations and water filters, he felt like he was being watched. How many people had been in that crowd? How many of those would know him by sight – or name? The outfitter didn’t have everything on Ramon’s list, but he had bought what was immediately available, and then had flown his van to Manuel Griego’s salvage yard in Nuevo Janeiro. The van needed some work before it could head out into the world, and Ramon wanted it done now.

Griego’s yard squatted at the edge of the city. The hulking frames of old vans and canopy fliers and personal shuttles littered the wide acres. In the hangar, it was equal parts junk shop and clean room. Power cells hung from the rafters, glowing with the eerie light that all Turu technology seemed to carry with it. A nuclear generator the size of a small apartment ran along one wall, humming to itself. Storage units were stacked floor to ceiling; tanks of rare gas and undifferentiated nanoslurry mixed in with half-bald tires and oily drive trains. Half the things in the shop would cost more than a year’s wages just to make use of; half were hardly worth the effort to throw out. Old Griego himself was hammering away on a lift tube as Ramon set his van down on the pad.

‘Hey, ese,’ Griego called out when Ramon popped the doors and came down to the working floor. ‘Long time. Where you been keeping yourself?’

Ramon shrugged.

‘I got a power drop in my back lift tubes,’ he said.

Griego frowned, put down his hammer, and wiped greasy hands on greasy pants.

‘Put on the diagnostic,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a look.’

Of all the men in Diegotown and Nuevo Janeiro – or possibly on this world – Ramon liked old Griego best – which was to say, he only hated him a little. Griego was an expert on all things vehicular, a post-contact Marxist, and, so far as Ramon could make out, totally free of moral judgments. It took them little more than an hour to find where the lift tube’s chipset had lost coherence, replace the card, and start the system’s extensive self-check. As the van stuttered and chuffed to itself, Griego lumbered to one of the gray storage tanks, keyed in a security code, and opened a refrigeration panel to reveal a case of local black beer. He hauled out two bottles, snapping the caps free with a flick of his thick, callused fingers. Ramon took the one that was held out to him, squatted with his back against a drum of spent lubricant, and drank. The beer was thick and yeasty, sediment in the bottom like a spoonful of mud.

‘Pretty good, eh?’ Griego said and drank a quarter of his own at a pull.

‘Not bad,’ Ramon said.

‘So you’re heading out?’

‘This is going to be the big one,’ Ramon said. ‘This time I’m coming back a rich man. You wait. You’ll see.’

‘You better hope not,’ Griego said. ‘Too much money kills men like you and me. God meant us to be poor, or he wouldn’t have made us so mean.’

Ramon grinned. ‘God meant you to be mean, Manuel. He just didn’t want me taking any shit from anybody.’ A quick vision of the European, mouth gaping open, blood gushing out over tombstone teeth, came to him, and he frowned.

Griego was shaking his head. ‘The same thing again, eh? This time’s the one, just like every other time you been out.’ He grinned. ‘You know how many times I heard you say that?’

‘Yep,’ Ramon said. ‘This time’s different, just like always.’

‘Go with God, then,’ Griego said. His grin faded. ‘Everyone’s been scrambling. Trying to get things finished. Aliens caught everyone with their pants around their knees, coming early like this. Funny, though. I don’t see a whole lot of people heading out right now. Pretty much everyone’s coming in for the ships – except you.’

Ramon sneered, but he felt the constant fear in his breast tighten a notch.

‘What? They’re going to give half a shit about a prospector like me? What’s there for me if I stay?’

‘Didn’t say you should,’ Griego said. ‘Just said there’s not many people going out right now.’

I look suspicious, Ramon thought. I look like I’m running from something. He’ll tell the police, and then I’m fucked. He clamped his hand around the bottle so hard his knuckles ached.

‘It’s Elena,’ Ramon said, hoping the half-lie would be convincing enough.

‘Ah,’ Griego said, nodding sagely. ‘I thought it must be something like that.’

‘She kicked me out again,’ Ramon said, trying to sound hang-dog despite the relief washing through him. ‘We had a fight about the parade. It got a little out of hand is all.’

‘She know you’re taking off?’

‘I don’t think she cares,’ Ramon said.

‘Right now, maybe she doesn’t. But you fly out of here and three weeks later she decides that all is forgiven, she’s going to come around tearing up my place.’

Ramon chuckled, remembering the incident that Griego was talking about. He was wrong, though. That hadn’t been about making peace; Elena had convinced herself that Ramon had taken a woman with him when he went out in the field. She hadn’t stopped raging and ranting until she found the girl on whom her paranoia had fixed still in town and involved with one of the magistrates, and even then she still seemed to hold a grudge. Ramon had had to spend almost half the money he’d gotten from his survey work just buying beer and kaafa kyit for all his business contacts whom she’d alienated.

Griego didn’t laugh with him.

‘You know she’s crazy, don’t you?’ he asked instead.

‘She does get pretty wild,’ Ramon said with a half-smile, trying the expression out like it was a new shirt.

‘No, I know wild girls. Elena is fucking loca. I know you like that girl down at the exchange. What’s her name?’