Keet licked his lips. "You've already got them?"
"Clot yes," Sten said. "Folks don't care. They breed 'em like klarf. Wait till they hit ten, then sell 'em. We've had two for about a month. Breakin' 'em in right."
"Then there's the deal," Keet said. "Plus you provide the rations and the drink—and make sure we hit the transport on time."
The four beamed at each other, and Sten signaled for another pitcher to seal the arrangement.
Outside, the salt air hit and instantly sobered Sten. He'd had just enough drink to seriously consider telling the two men in gray what was going to happen to them, and why. Instead, he fell back from Keet one half a pace and dropped his hand. His curled fingers freed the muscle holding the knife securely in his arm, and the blade dropped free into his hand. He gave the nod to Alex.
Alex spun and swung, knotted three-gee muscles driving his fist straight into Ohlsn's rib cage. Ribs splintered, and the punch-shock impacted the man's heart.
Ohlsn was dead, blood gouting from his mouth, before he could even realize.
Keet's death was somewhat neater, but no less sudden, as Sten's knife slid into the base of the man's skull, severing the spinal cord.
Old Mantis reflexes took over. They caught the corpses as they toppled and eased them to the boardwalk.
The bodies were quickly stripped of weapons, uniforms, and ID packets. From a nearby piling, Alex grabbed weighted bodybags they'd stashed earlier; and they struggled the corpses into them.
Minutes after they'd died, the two bodies splashed into the harbor to sink tracelessly and dissolve quickly. Ten hours, and nothing but a revolting slush would remain for forensics specialists.
Alex bundled the uniforms together and tucked them under one arm. "Of a' the sins Ah hae on m'conscience," Alex mused. "Ah never consider't pollutin' th' ocean'd be one a them."
"Alex, help," Sten said plaintively.
"A min, lad. A min. Ah'm lockit up noo." Alex was indeed quite busy in the tiny slum flat they'd rented. Kilgour was feeding the ID cards, personal photos, and such from Keet and Ohlsn into one of the few Mantis tools they'd brought with them. The machine was copying the ID cards and personal data from the two originals then altering them so that Sten and Alex's pictures and physical characteristics were implanted on the documents.
"Sergeant Major Kilgour, I still outrank you, damn it!"
The final photo clicked out a shot of Keet arm in arm with some female-by-courtesy who must have been the love of his life. The new photo, however, showed Sten as the erring lover. Kilgour beamed and fingered a button. The machine began hissing—in less than a half a minute the original documents in the machine, and the guts of the machine itself, would be a nonanalyzable chunk of plas. He turned to see what Sten's problem was.
"I am not," he said firmly, "a clottin' seamstress. I am a captain in the Imperial Guard. I do not know how to sew. I do not know how to alter uniforms to fit, even with sewing glue and this clottin' knife. All I know how to do is glue my fingers together."
Kilgour tsked, poured himself a now off-duty drink, and sadly surveyed Sten.
"How in hell did y'manage to glue both hands together? M'mum w'd nae have trouble wi' a simple task like that."
Before Sten could find a way to hit him, Alex solved the problem by dumping his mug of alk over Sten's hands, dissolving the sewing glue, which Sten had rather ineptly been using to retailor Keet and Ohlsn's uniforms. The mug was swiftly refilled and handed to Sten, who knocked it back in one shot.
"Ah," Alex pointed out wisely after Sten had finished choking and wiping the tears from his eyes. "Y've provit th' adage."
Sten just stared lethally at his partner.
"Ah y'sew, tha's how y'weep."
Kilgour, Sten decided, was definitely rising above his station.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
His muscles complaining as he automatically tensed his legs against the greasy tug of the water, Dynsman waded out through the receding tide. He was still way too new at the game yet, and hadn't learned to let the steady pull of the sea help him walk. It was the same at Conch time, when the day was officially ended by the shoreline horn. Then it was a matter of walking with the incoming tide and trying to keep one's balance. Dynsman still fought it. And the penalty was sleepless nights of agony as his legs knotted and cramped.
Adding to his problems was the knife-sharp sea bottom, littered with gnarled rocks and razor-edge mollsk shells. He had only thin plas boots to protect his feet.
"Clot!" A misstep, and a tiny slice of flesh was nipped off by a shell. He stopped, dragging himself back against the tide. His heart pounded wildly for an instant as he looked about him. He could almost feel the blood oozing from the tiny abrasion. Dynsman thought about all the things that sniffed for blood in the mollsk bed and shuddered.
He fought back the panic and tried to regain his bearings. On each side of him, forty other prisoners of Dru eased out through the surf like slow-beating wings. They moved cautiously through the water, watching for the telltale bubbles of frightened mollsks.
Dynsman had never worked so hard or been so frightened in his life. He would much rather disarm a sloppy bomb then pursue the wily mollsk. Dynsman really wasn't good with his hands even when working on the delicate mechanisms that make things go bang; his seven remaining fingers were mostly numb, blunt objects. He had lived at his trade as long as he had by being canny and what-the-hell-let's-go-for-it lucky.
"Dynsman!" came the bellow from the shoreline. "Get your ass behind it or I'll put my boot in."
The bellow hit him like an electric shock, and Dynsman stumbled clumsily forward, his mollsk-plunger held somewhat at the ready.
Like most tasks on Dru, what Dynsman was about involved a product that was exceedingly exotic, expensive, and lethal. The tender mollsk was prized in many systems for its incredible taste and mythological aphrodisiac qualities. It was a mutant Old Earth bivalve creature, containing on average a kilo of delectable flesh, guarded by a razor-sharp shell about a half meter in diameter.
It had been bred to its present delicious state over many centuries. The problem being, for the hunter, that the same genes that made it so large and tasty went along with a highly efficient system of mobility. The creature lived in the mud and preferred chill; krill-swarming seas.
When it fed, it opened its huge top shell like a fan, guiding the microorganisms into its stomach-filter system. The mollsk could not see or feel, but judged the environment for mating or danger by a highly evolved system of smell. Which, in addition to convenience, is why mollsk hunters worked as the tide rushed out. In theory, the smells of the decaying shore life would mask the odor of an approaching mollsk hunter. But only until the last moment, when the hunter was a meter or so away. Then the mollsk would smell the hunter, take fright, and burrow deeper into the mud, leaving a trail of roiling bubbles. That's when the hunter captured it. Or if you were Dynsman, tried for it.
Like the other hunters, Dynsman was provided with a mollsk-plunger. It consisted of two handles, a little more than a meter and a half long, that connected to a pair of very sharp shovel jaws that were spring-loaded and sieved. The plunger was held at the ready as the intrepid hunter waded out through the surf watching very carefully for the bubbles that marked panicked mollsks. Aiming at the point where the bubbles just disappeared, and making allowances for light refraction, the tool was plunged into the mud at just the right moment, triggering the spring. Then the mollsk-plunger was hauled to the surface spewing mud and water, and the creature was popped into the bubble raft towed behind the hunter.