Rahel nodded. “That’s right.”
A splash of ammonia-bitter stench flared through the room. Rust-and-cream Larry jittered off in a circle, leaving his arm splashing in a pool of mustardy blood on the floor. Rahel jerked back into the doorway with her stomach riding a wave of acid up into her throat.
“Not-adult. Not-tlict.” Something in Gertrude cracked like breaking glass when she pushed upright. “Abomination.”
“It’s our nature!” Rahel shoved both hands into her pants pockets, suddenly wanting the snooze pistol even though she no longer believed it could help her. “It’s the way evolution made us—we didn’t get any choice!”
Gertrude snatched another Larry out from under her, swinging it above her body almost as high as the ceiling. “Abomination,” the translator whispered coolly. “Abomination. Not-tlict. You.”
Skating for purchase on the smooth deck, Rahel pushed off against the doorjamb and tumbled as much as ran into the open corridor. A tlict body shattered against the bulkhead behind her. She felt the splash of fluid from its ruptured organs, heard the crash when it slid down the wall, choked against a surge of bile when the stink of the Larry’s death chased her down the corridor. Horses panicked at the smell of blood; Savanna dogs could be whipped into a killing frenzy. Rahel didn’t wait to find out what the tlict would do when perfumed by the scent of their own deaths.
She bolted the dark corridor with snooze pistol in hand, alert for the clatter of tlict feet on metal, primed to shoot any spindly movement ahead of her. No one and nothing tried to stop her. While the route proved significantly shorter at a dead run, Rahel suspected she had the slow diffusion rate of smell through atmosphere to thank, and not some sudden clemency on the part of the tlict. She slid into the airlock without slowing, slapping at the controls several more times than necessary. Even so, she could see tlict wandering into the corridor she’d just fled while the airlock hatch banged closed.
Running all the way back to her docking bay was simply impossible. Rahel realized that even as she banged on the outside lock door to try and make it open faster. The Interface was larger than most planetary cities, webbed together by transit tubes and slideways, and spiraling outward from its central hub like an intricate crystal helix. So when the tlict jumpship disgorged her, she jumped from the hatch without waiting for the gangway and made a head-down run for the nearest tube portal. As long as Larry didn’t catch her before the next train screamed into station, she could be half a station away by the time her breathing slowed.
Plunging up the ramp to the transport level, Rahel caught the bulkhead to swing herself around the comer and into the tube train vestibule. An orange light throbbed above the row of open tube doors, and a sexless, species-less voice announced in conflicting languages, “This transport now departing for Docking Rings One, Four, and Nine, and for Central Hub Levels One through Seven. This transport now departing—”
“Wait!” Fear of failure—of being caught, of being killed by aliens who couldn’t even explain what she’d done wrong—shocked her muscles with adrenaline and kicked her heart so fiercely she nearly went to all fours trying to scrabble the last distance. “Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait!’’ Her final lunge jammed one shoulder between the closing doors, then a twist wrenched her torso into the narrow opening, and another half-second’s squirming squeezed the rest of her inside. Duacs scattered with yowls and jangles when she thumped to the train floor among them.
“Proctor Tovin.” The glottal rattle preceding the dkaktu’s greeting was nearly lost in the shower of ringing that marked the tube train’s slide into motion. “The mazhet welcome your barter.”
She levered up on her elbows and earned a wet duac nose in the eye. “I’m glad somebody does,” she grumbled, recoiling from cold snuffles at her nose and mouth. Pushing the duac’s head irritably aside only made room for another cat to nudge in and take its place. Rahel finally had to struggle over onto her bottom so she could sit up and use both hands to fend off the curious paws and tongues and whiskers. “You know, I don’t even let my dog give mouth kisses.”
The duacs didn’t seem impressed.
Climbing to her feet, she swiped half-heartedly at the sand and cream hairs clinging to her trousers, then glanced about at the slim statues crowding the silent train. The simple volume of mazhet pressed into the car was enough to drive a person colorblind. Rahel pinched the bridge of her nose, abruptly weary with a headache she hadn’t realized she was nursing. “Did I just bull my way into some kind of private mazhet dining car or something?”
“The mazhet do not eat in public,” the train’s single dhaktu informed her. Rahel couldn’t tell if one of the vibrant alien merchants had first clicked that little bit of data or not. “This vehicle is for transportation services only.” A ribboned and turbaned mazhet with the scarlet robe and chain-link veil of a caravan dohke drifted its hand through the dhaktu’s silky topknot. “Do you wish to initiate barter? The mazhet may construct such facilities as needed.”
“That depends.” She shivered at the thought of where she’d just been, and scrubbed at her arms to try and warm them. “I have need of information.”
The dohke blinked dark glass eyes lazily. “The mazhet possess all manner of information.”
Which didn’t surprise her in the least. “You even have the information I want, I suspect.” She flicked a finger through a string of duac earrings and cocked her head across the train car at the dohke. “Can you tell me how long the mazhet have conducted dealings with the tlict?”
“No.” The dohke’s only sound was the sparkling ring of its shaken hand. The dhaktu’s voice was ruthless.
Rahel resisted spitting a frustrated oath toward the floor. “How well do you know them, then?” she persisted. “I mean, if 1 had questions about how to handle my dealings with them, would the mazhet be able to supply me with answers?”
Another wave of ghostly chiming whispered through the car as it slowed to match up with another station. “Much about the tlict is not knowable.” Sparks of light danced off the spangled arm the dohke raised to the wall beside it, gold coins fluttering like candle flames in the leftovers of the car’s momentum. “Speaking to the color of your odor, it would seem your dealings with the tlict run quite deeply already.”
“My odor?” She lifted her shirt front to sniff at it, then realized what the dobke must be saying just as the train doors sighed open on either of her. “You mean I smell?”
“Larry tasting.” A dull tlict translator voice joined the clatter of multiple feet on the train car’s floor. “Not-tlict you. Abomination.”
Panic shot through her like lightning. Darting aside, she stumbled over scattering duacs and fetched up hard against a wall of mazhet in her effort to distance herself from the tlict. The Larry, his upper thorax already pushed through the open doors, struggled to cram his forward legs in as he flashed both primary arms with gripping spines extended. Rahel ducked down and back, into the silk aurora of brilliant mazhet finery—
And both tlict appendages snapped off above the elbow. Gripping spines, melted into a row of blackish knobs, splattered like chocolate where the arms hit the floor. Rahel didn’t have time to recoil, nor did she even think to, before the tlict jerked back out the doors as if kicked. When the doors whisked shut to hide it, Larry had already thumped his abdomen flat to the floor, legs and arms and thorax curling into an awkward fist, like a spider left to dangle in the heart of the web where it had died.