Joseph raised his brimming stein to his nose and sniffed dubiously.
"It smells like meat," he said.
"Meat!" Alvec sniffed his. "Mine's okay. Whaddaya mean, it smells like meat?"
"To me," Joseph explained, "this 'beer' smells like raw meat."
Alvec looked at him.
"Yeah, well," he grinned, "I can't wait to have a steak on your world."
Joseph took a tentative sip and smiled.
"You shall have one of the best when you visit my rancho," he promised, "if you will bring the beer."
He was raising his still brimming stein to touch glasses with Alvec when a shabby fellow in a once-yellow ship suit elbowed him aside; beer slopped over Joseph's sleeve and down the front of his robe. He set the remainder down and wiped the fabric with a napkin. The spacer ignored him… until he poked a rigid finger into the man's shoulder.
"That," he said, "was clumsy."
The spacer turned to him; when he spoke it was with a strong accent, wheezing and sharp. "Donchu touch me you bastard son of a whore!"
Ooops. Alvec thought. Joat had told him a little about Bethel, and he'd accessed more from the Wyal's database. That was not a good thing to say to a Bethelite; especially in Joseph's case, because it might well be literally true.
The bearded man handed Joat a credit chip and a blue datahedron.
"The information is protected by a very nasty virus, so I warn you, don't try to access it or you may find yourself drifting in hyper-space until you become a ghost story."
She smiled. "Smuggling is like any other business, there has to be an element of trust or nothing can happen."
He leaned his head to one side in acknowledgment, then looked over sharply to the bar.
Thwack.
She had never seen Joseph look quite like that. His face was pale, with paler circles around his wide blue eyes. He was holding a spacer in a yellow suit with one arm twisted up behind his back. Blood ran down the man's face from a broken nose.
"Apologize, you furrower of pigs," the Bethelite said quietly, in a voice that carried. "For the insult you gave my mother."
"Fardle you and your mother, like your pig daddy!"
"That was unwise."
Joseph's other hand gripped the spacer by the back of the neck and slammed his face into the glassteel surface of the bar again. Thwuck. This time something else broke.
Joat started to rise; that was not like Joseph. She also started to shout a warning, as another spacer in a yellow shipsuit rose with a chair in her hands. Alvec moved before she could speak, a quick snatch for the chair and a short chopping punch to the stomach-much less hard than he could have dealt, because the spacer simply staggered back clutching her gut rather than collapsing. The bartender had ducked down; he rose again, with a short bell-mouthed weapon in his hands.
Sonic riot gun, Joat thought, as she prudently dropped flat. That didn't block her view of a beer stein sailing through the air and thunking with solid authority between the barkeeper's eyes. He fell backward, and this time stayed down.
Her new business acquaintance had vanished silently. Good idea, Joat thought, crawling towards the bar. Good idea, prudent idea. The tables were bolted to the floor, providing reasonably safe passage to the thick of things; bodies and pieces of furniture sailed through the air above, and grappling pairs dropped down to her level but couldn't roll past the table legs.
Joat encountered the waitress under one of them, just lighting up the stub of a dream-smoke stick and looking mildly entertained.
"I like the little blond one," she said to Joat, blowing a stream of smoke towards Joseph.
The Bethelite had just kicked a tall humanoid in the crotch, seized his head under one elbow as he bent over-evidently a vulnerable spot in that species, too-and was energetically punching him in the face.
"I got a thing for guys with muscles," the waitress went on. Alvec picked up another yellow-suited spacer and threw him in the direction of the door, clearing a pathway.
"He's married," Joat told her.
"So?"
"Uh," Joat shrugged, "whatever. Have you called Station Security?"
"Oh sure. We got a button under the bar, they'll be here in a couple a minutes." She drew deeply on her dream-smoke stick and offered it to Joat.
Joat shook her head. "No, thanks. I'd better be going."
She crawled under the next table and found herself beside Joseph and Alvec. Joat leaned out and grabbed their sleeves to get their attention.
"We're leaving. Now. Out the back."
"Aw, Joat-" Alvec began.
Another spacer was struggling with a stationer just behind him; the stationer staggered away, clutching at an arm. The spacer waved a long blade and shouted something blurred, lunging wild-eyed for Alvec's back. Joat and Joseph moved with the perfect coordination of dancers; Joat grabbed handfuls of cloth at wrist and shoulder and pulled the attacker forward, redirecting his force and hip-checking him into a sideways stagger. Joseph whirled aside like a matador as the lunge was thrown his way, stepping inside the curve of the outstretched arm and driving the stiffened fingers of one hand up under the spacer's ribs.
The figure in yellow collapsed, wheezing, and curled into a ball. Joseph toed the knife up against the brass rail and broke it with a quick stamp of his heel.
"Yeah, I see what you mean," Alvec said. "Fun's fun, but knives are cheating. Let's go, Cap'n."
Joat picked up a pseudosilver tray; Alvec picked up a chair and pulled it apart, like tearing the wings off a chicken. That left him with two lengths of gleaming alloy. Joseph walked between them; a knife of his own appeared in one hand, curved and looking sharp enough to cut light. They put their backs together and moved in a rotating circle towards the doors at the rear of the bar, through a kitchen that made Joat glad she hadn't ordered any food, and then through a hatch marked danger into an access corridor.
The lights blinked. "Station Security," a voice said, vibrating through the metal of the circular corridor. "All wrongdoers will cease disturbing the peace and submit to arrest. Station Security-"
"This way," she gasped.
The access door three spaces down was dogged shut, and she fumbled in her jumpsuit for the picklock. It hung beeping for a nerve-wracking twelve seconds, and then the hatchway hissed open and they tumbled through into a dark and narrow corridor smelling of greasy food and dirty rest rooms. A weedy youth pushing a floater full of dirty plates and glasses stopped and gaped at them, his eyes going wide, and paled at the sight of the weapons.
Joat tossed her tray onto the floater. Behind her she heard a clank as Alvec dropped his chair-legs; Joseph's knife had never made any noise, coming out of the hidden sheath or going back in.
"You never saw us," she said, tucking a half-credit piece into the pocket of a stained white apron.
The chinless face smirked. "Saw who?" he said, and pushed the floater on through a door whose lying stencil read sanitation.
"You two go clean up," she snapped, looking at their grazed, bloody faces. "I'll get us a table, and we'll make innocent. Just what I needed, arrest on a breaking-the-peace charge with stolen goods on me!"
She pushed through an opaque forcefield door; it was maladjusted, and the harmonics set her teeth on edge. There was a corner table by the wall-window free; it gave an excellent view of Rimrunner's patrons being dragged out of the premises next door by helmeted Station Security police in light-impact armor. Shockrods snapped amid shrieks and curses; brawlers were lifted and tossed bodily onto the flat-body back of the Black Mariah, where a tanglefield held them in uncomfortable stasis, just as they fell. One of the police was sitting on the pavement with a compress on his flattened nose.