Russish and Norte would almost certainly be understood in the Glitter Band and Chasm City, even if the mediation was done by machines, but the default tongue of the Demarchists who had refounded Yellowstone was Canasian, a slippery amalgam of Québecois French and Cantonese. It was said that no one without a head full of linguistics processors ever really achieved genuine fluency in Canasian — the language was just too fundamentally strange, too much at odds with the hardwired constraints of human deep grammar.
I would have been worried, had the Demarchists not been such consummate traders. For more than two centuries Yellowstone had been the hub of the burgeoning interstellar trade network, feeding innovation out to nascent colonies, drinking it back in like a vampire when those colonies reached a basic level of technological maturity. It would be a commercial necessity for the Stoners to cope with dozens of other languages.
Of course, there would be dangers ahead. In that sense Vadim was entirely correct, but the dangers were not the kind to which he alluded. They would be subtle, arising from my own unfamiliarity with the nuances of a culture at least two centuries beyond my own. The outcome was less likely to be my own injury than the abject failure of my mission. That was enough of a danger to make me wary. But I did not need to buy a spurious assurance of protection from thugs like Vadim — whether he had his contacts or not.
Something caught my eye. It was Vadim again, and this time he was causing more of a commotion.
He was wrestling with the man who had just come into the commons, the two of them grappling with each other while remaining anchored to the commons wall. The other man looked like he was holding his own against Vadim, but there was something in Vadim’s movements — something languid to the point of boredom — which told me that Vadim was only letting the man think that he had the edge. The other passengers were doing a good job of ignoring the scuffle; grateful, perhaps, that the thug had selected someone else for his attention.
Abruptly, Vadim’s mood changed.
In an instant he had the newcomer pinned to the wall, in obvious pain, Vadim pushing his brow hard against the man’s terrified face. The man started to say something, but Vadim had his hand against the man’s mouth before more than a mumble emerged. Then what emerged was the man’s last meal, streaming vilely between Vadim’s fingers. Vadim recoiled in disgust and pushed himself away from the man. Then he secured himself with his clean arm and drove his fist into the man’s stomach, just below the ribcage. The man coughed hoarsely, his eyes bloodshot; he tried to catch his breath before Vadim delivered another blow.
But Vadim was done with him. He paused only to wipe his arm against the fabric walling of the commons, then unhooked himself, ready to kick off towards one of the exits.
I calculated my arc and kicked off first, savouring an instant of breezy free-fall before I impacted with the wall a metre from Vadim and his victim. For a moment Vadim looked at me in shock.
‘Meera-Bell… I thought we concluded negotiations?’
I smiled.
‘I just reopened them, Vadim.’
I had myself nicely anchored. With the same casual ease with which Vadim had struck the man, I struck Vadim, in more or less the same place. Vadim folded in on himself like a soggy origami figure, emitting a soft moan.
By now the rest of the people were less interested in minding their own business.
I addressed them. ‘I don’t know if any of you have been approached by this man yet, but I don’t think he’s the professional he’d like you to think. If you’ve bought protection from him, you’ve almost certainly wasted your money.’
Vadim managed a sentence. ‘You’re dead man, Meera-Bell.’
‘Then I’ve very little to fear.’ I looked at the other man. He had regained some of his colour now, wiping his sleeve across his mouth. ‘Are you all right? I didn’t see how the fight started.’
The man spoke Norte, but with a thick accent which it took me a moment to penetrate. He was a small man, with the compact build of a bulldog. The bulldog look didn’t stop at his physique, either. He had a pugnacious, permanently argumentative face, a flat nose and a scalp bristling sparsely with extremely short hairs.
He unrumpled his clothes. ‘Yes… I’m quite all right, thank you. The oaf started threatening me verbally, then started actually hurting me. At that point I was hoping someone would do something, but it was like I’d suddenly become part of the décor.’
‘Yes, I noticed.’ I looked around at the other passengers disparagingly. ‘You fought back, though.’
‘Fat lot of good it did me.’
‘I’m afraid Vadim here doesn’t look the type to recognise a valiant gesture when he sees one. Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I think so. A little nausea, that’s all.’
‘Wait.’
I snapped my fingers at the servitor, hovering in cybernetic indecision some metres away. When it came closer I tried to buy another shot of scop-dex, but I had exhausted my shipboard funds.
‘Thank you,’ the man said, setting his jaw. ‘But I think I’ve sufficient funds in my own account.’ He spoke to the machine in Canasian, too quickly and softly for me to follow, and a fresh hypo popped out for use.
I turned to Vadim while the other man fumbled the hypo into a vein. ‘Vadim; I’m going to be generous and let you leave now. But I don’t want to see you in this room again.’
He looked at me with his lips curled, flecks of vomit glued to his face like snowflakes.
‘Is not over between you and me, Meera-Bell.’
He unhooked himself, paused and looked around at the other passengers, obviously trying to regain some margin of dignity before he departed. It was a pretty wasted effort, since I had something else planned for him.
Vadim tensed, ready to kick off.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You don’t think I’m going to let you leave before you pay back whatever you’ve stolen, do you?’
He hesitated, looking back at me. ‘I have not stolen anything from you.’ Then to the other man. ‘Or you, Mister Quirrenbach…’
‘Is that true?’ I asked the man he’d just addressed.
Quirrenbach hesitated too, glancing at Vadim before answering. ‘Yes… yes. He hasn’t stolen anything from me. I didn’t speak to him until now.’
I raised my voice. ‘What about the rest of you? Did this bastard con you out of anything?’
Silence. It was more or less what I had expected. No one was going to be the first to admit that they had been duped by a small-time rat like Vadim, now that they had seen how pitiful he could become.
‘See,’ Vadim said, ‘there isn’t anyone, Meera-Bell.’