Their clothes marked them down as colonists, machine-made synthetic fabric; locals were dressed in loom-woven cloth, shirts and shorts hand sewn, solid boots that came up to the top of their calves, caked in mud. But nobody shouted a challenge as they walked up the steps. Quinn felt almost home for the first time since he’d stepped off the spaceplane. These were people he understood, hard workers who pleased themselves any damn way they chose after dark. They heard the xenoc animals even before they went through the open doors. It was that same eerie whine of the thing which had chased them yesterday evening, only this time there were five or six of them all doing it at the same time. He exchanged a fast glance with Jackson, then they were inside.
The bar was a single plank of wood running along one side of the main bar, a metre wide, fifteen metres long. People were lined up along it, two deep, the six barmaids hard pushed to cope.
Quinn waited until he reached the bar, and held up the Jovian Bank disk. “You take this?”
The girl barely glanced at it. “Yeah.”
“Great, two beers.”
She started pulling them from the cask.
“It’s my last night here before I sail upriver. Do you know where I can maybe get a bit of sport? Don’t want to waste it.”
“In the back.” She didn’t look up.
“Gee, thanks. Have one yourself.”
“A brightlime, thanks.” She put his half-litre tankards down in the puddles on the bar. “Six fuseodollars.”
Which Quinn reckoned was three times what the drinks should cost, unless a brightlime was more expensive than Norfolk Tears. Yes, the locals knew how to treat transient colonists. He activated the credit disk, shunting the money to her bar account block.
The vicious black catlike animals were called sayce, the local dog-analogue, with a degree more intelligence than Earth’s canines. Quinn and Jackson saw them as soon as they pushed aside the rug hanging across the doorway and elbowed their way into Donovan’s rear room. It was a baiting arena; three tiers of benches ringing a single pit dug into the floor and lined with cut stone, five metres in diameter, three deep. Bright spotlights were strung up on the rafters, casting a white glare on the proceedings. Every centimetre of bench space was taken. Men and women with flushed red faces, cheering and shouting, soaked in sweat. It was hot in the room, hotter than the spaceport clearing at midday. Big cages were lined up along the back wall, sayce prowling about inside, highly agitated, some of them butting the bars of that ubiquitous black wood, emitting their anguished whine.
Quinn felt a grin rising. Now this was more like it!
They found a bench and squirmed on. Quinn asked the man he was next to who was taking the money.
It turned out the bookie was called Baxter, a thin oriental with a nasty scar leading from the corner of his left eye down below his grubby red T-shirt neck.
“Pay out only in Lalonde francs,” he said gruffly.
A man mountain with a black beard stood at Baxter’s side, and gave Quinn a cannibal look.
“Fine by me,” Quinn said amicably. He put a hundred fuseodollars on the favourite.
The fights were impressive, fast, violent, gory, and short. The owners would stand on opposite sides of the pit, holding back their animals, shouting orders into the flat triangular ears. When the sayce had reached a fever pitch of anger they were shoved into the pit. Streamlined black bodies clashed in a snarl of six-clawed paws and snapping jaws, muscle bands like steel pistons bunching and stretching the shiny skin. Losing a leg didn’t even slow them down. Quinn saw them tear off legs, jaws, rip out eyes, rake underbellies. The pit floor became slippery with blood, fluid, and sausage-string entrails. A crushed skull usually ended it, the losing sayce being repeatedly smashed against the stone wall until bone splintered and the brain was torn. Their blood was surprisingly red.
Quinn lost money on the first three fights, then picked up a wad of six hundred francs on the fourth, equivalent to a hundred and fifty fuseodollars. He handed a third of the plastic notes to Jackson, and put another two hundred fuseodollars on the next fight.
After seven fights he was eight hundred fuseodollars down, with two and a half thousand Lalonde francs in his pocket.
“I know her,” Jackson said as the next two sayce were being goaded on the side of the pit by their owners. One of them was an old bull, his skin a cross web of scars. That was the one Quinn had put his money on. Always trust in proven survivors.
“Who?”
“Girl over there. She’s from Group Seven.”
Quinn followed his gaze. The girl was a teenager, very attractive, with longish dark hair falling down over her shoulders. She was wearing a sleeveless singlet with a scoop neck; it looked new, the fabric was shiny, definitely synthetic. Her face was burning with astonishment and excitement, the taste of forbidden fruit, sweetest of all. She was sitting between two brothers, twins, about thirty years old, with sandy blond hair, just beginning to thin. They were dressed in shirts of checked cotton, crudely cut. Both of them had the kind of thick brown skin that came from working outdoors.
“Are you sure?” With the glare of the lights it was difficult for him to tell.
“I’m sure. I couldn’t forget those tits. I think she’s called Mary, Mandy, something like that.”
The sayce were shoved into the pit, and the crowd roared. The two powerful vulpine bodies locked together, spinning madly, teeth and claws slicing through the air.
“I suppose she’s entitled to be here,” Quinn said. He was annoyed, he didn’t need complications like the girl. “I’m going to have a word with Baxter. Make sure she doesn’t see you, we don’t want her to know we were here.”
Jackson gave him a thumbs up and took another gulp from his tankard.
Baxter was standing on the ramp leading from the pit to the cages, head flicking from side to side as he followed the battling beasts. He acknowledged Quinn with a terse nod.
A spume of blood flew out of the pit, splattering the people on the lowest benches. One of the sayce was screeching. Quinn thought it was calling, “Help.”
“You done all right tonight,” Baxter said. “Break even, beginner’s luck. I let you place bigger bets, you want.”
“No, I need the money. I’m going upriver soon.”
“You build nice home for family, good luck.”
“I need more than luck up there. Suppose I bump into one of those?” He flicked a finger at the pit. The old bull had its jaws around the younger sayce’s throat, it was slamming its head against the side of the pit, oblivious to the deep gouges the other’s claws were raking down its flanks.
“Sayce not like living near river,” Baxter said. “Air too wet. You be all right.”
“A sayce or one of its cousins. I could do with something with a bit of punch, something that’ll stop it dead.”
“You bring plenty gear from Earth.”
“Can’t bring everything we need, the company doesn’t let us. And I want some recreational items as well. I thought maybe I could pick it all up in town. I thought maybe you might know who I needed to see.”
“You think too much.”
“I also pay a lot.”
Down in the pit a sayce’s head virtually exploded as it was slammed against the wall for the last time. Pulpy gobs of brain sleeted down.
Quinn smiled when he saw the old bull raise its head to its cheering owner and let out a gurgling high-pitched bleat: “Yessss!”
“You owe me another thousand francs,” he told Baxter. “You can keep half of it as a finder’s fee.”
Baxter’s voice dropped an octave. “Come back here, ten minutes; I show you man who can help.”
“Gotcha.”
The old bull sayce was sniffling round the floor of the pit when Quinn got back to Jackson. A blue tongue started to lick up the rich gore sloshing about on the stone.