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  Duboe approached, and shook hands with a few of them, accepting a shot-glass of amasec from the girl.

  ‘Budris… good work, that strathid. Worth the wait, I’m sure.’

  Budris, a sallow man with two lean bodyguards, nodded his satisfaction.

  ‘Skoh. What can I say?’ Duboe slapped hands with a heavy-set, square-jawed man with sandy-white hair. Skoh’s bulky figure was sleeved in leather armour. ‘Perfect saurians as always.’

  ‘I may have some long-tusks come winter,’ said Skoh. ‘Interested?’

  ‘Only if they’re the aggressive kind. The dociles play really bad here. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Verdendener. I haven’t forgotten that crap-fest last summer.’

  A bespectacled agent turned his head, miffed. ‘I was assured of their quality—’ he began querulously.

  ‘Take another drink, Verdendener,’ Duboe smiled. ‘You’ve redeemed yourself with those ursids. Never seen bears so nasty. Leave the long-tusks to Skoh here.’

  Skoh nodded appreciatively.

  Duboe looked over at another game agent. ‘Murfi… stop bringing me shit crocodilians, or I’ll turn them back.’

  Murfi hung his head. ‘Sorry, Duboe. They seemed class to me.’

  ‘They weren’t class. They were shit. Doped.’

  ‘I had to dope them to get them in transit.’

  ‘Next time load them with a spike to get them kicking. Those bastards just lay there in the frigging pool, like it was midsummer with nothing to do.’

  ‘Sorry, Duboe.’

  Duboe finished his drink and set the glass down. ‘That’s all for tonight, gentlemen. I’ve work to do. Pick up your fees from the drome office. I’ve stamped your dockets. Get on with you.’

  The group broke up. Duboe tugged Skoh by the arm and drew him aside.

  ‘Post-match, we’ll talk. I’ve got demand. Can you deal?’

  ‘I’ll talk to Captain Thekla,’ Skoh said.

  CAR-CAR-CARNIVORA!

  The main stage slid down out of sight. An outer rim logeum rose with two raptors from Quinze on it, slavering at their chains.

  In the underpits of the cavae, Harlon Nayl walked up behind Duboe and fell in step with him. Duboe was busy shouting out at a team of gangers who were about to let a bull-cat out of its cage.

  ‘Duboe?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Let’s take a walk and talk.’

  Duboe stopped and looked at Nayl. They were eye to eye. Duboe was a big man and he didn’t take shit from anyone.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Duboe said.

  ‘And yet… I think so,’ said Nayl. ‘There’s a Tronsvasse 50 in my coat pocket, and it’s looking at you.’

  Duboe frowned. ‘Just a word, and my staff will have you over. Gut you. Feed you to the animals. I don’t know who you are, but get out of my frigging way.’

  Nayl smiled. ‘You want to go for it? Look to your left. Catwalk. See the big guy? He’s watching out for me. That’s a rotator cannon. Let’s see your staff deal with that.’

  Duboe shrugged. ‘So, you’re heavyweight. Hardcore. I’m impressed. What do you want?’

  ‘Cooperation,’ said Nayl.

  Duboe nodded. ‘Look, mate, if I don’t release these cygnids, the circus master will have my guts.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Duboe aimed a control wand and frothing dog-beasts dashed out of their cage and up the trap towards the stage.

  ‘You said cooperation,’ Duboe said. ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘Flects. You deal. I know. I want a source.’

  Duboe laughed.

  ‘Funny?’ asked Nayl.

  ‘Like I’d tell you. You’d need more than a gun in your pocket to get that out of me.’

  ‘And there I was being nice,’ smiled Nayl.

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ Duboe said. He looked back at Nayl. ‘Rip-fish. What do you know about them?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rip-fish. Are you familiar with them?’

  Nayl frowned. ‘They’re from Antigula. Antigula, right? Like eels, but voracious. Strip a human to bones in a second…’

  He paused.

  ‘Why the frig are you asking me that?’

  Duboe grinned and raised the control wand. ‘Because you’re the one standing on the trapdoor.’

  The hatch parted under him and Harlon Nayl fell.

  Below, the water chute was a frothing madness of famished rip-fish, boiling the water to hell.

  AMID THE CAVAE’S din and activity, no one seemed to notice what had happened for a moment. But Mathuin had his eyes on Nayl, and started forward along the catwalk with a cry.

  Duboe, hurrying on his way, clapped his hands and roared an order. A mob of waiting handlers immediately unlatched a main pen, and herded horned grazers out towards the central up-ramp. They were big, jittering beasts, designed to be the third party distraction in a large-scale man/predator showfight.

  Mathuin cursed. Surging forward, the grazers suddenly created a flowing wall of haunches, bellies and hooves between him and Duboe. He ran along the catwalk further, to where suspended steps gave him access to a higher walkway.

  ‘Duboe’s running,’ he voxed as he moved. ‘Duboe’s running and Nayl’s down.’

  Duboe himself moved quickly across the main floor-space of the handling chamber. He was talking fast into his headset, making it look like business as usual, but in fact he was calling in his inner circle. Already, three or four veteran handlers were heading after Mathuin. Two others were heading across the understage to check the rip-fish had done their job and to close the tank shutters.

  The pair of them approached the deck-hatch and heard the wet thrashing from below. One of them went towards the winch-post that manually controlled the hatch.

  Upright, a slightly surprised look on his face, and his hands at his sides as if to keep balance, Nayl rose up out of the tank-pit, suspended on empty air. He wasn’t even wet. Duboe’s goons blinked at him. Nayl landed on his feet, gently, on the edge of the tank in front of them.

  ‘Where did Duboe go?’ he said, as if nothing untoward had happened.

  Scared more than anything else, the goons drew out short-bladed estocs and lunged at him. Nayl delivered a backhand slap across the face of one whose headlong charge became a disorientated backward stagger. Then he sidestepped the other. The second man was only wrong-footed for a moment. He turned, to come in at Nayl again.

  But he cried out in alarm. Although his feet had stopped moving and he was willing his body around, he was continuing to surge forward. His feet dragged and pumped weightlessly on the pit edge and then he was suspended out over the tank itself, held in space by some soft, invisible force.

  A force that went away again as suddenly as it had come.

  With a shriek, he dropped out of sight.

  The other goon rallied at Nayl, who grabbed his knife-hand, snapped the wrist and punched him so hard in the face that he fell down and didn’t get up again.

  ‘Thanks,’ Nayl said. ‘I thought I was fish-bait there.’

  Kys walked into view, breathing hard. ‘Sorry it was a bit last minute. You’ve put on weight.’

  Together, they started to run across the chamber. Many of the handlers and pit-crews had seen the brief, violent altercation, and had stopped work, glancing around in confusion. Some were calling out for Duboe.

  ‘To the left. That way,’ said Kys, running ahead of Nayl. Pit-men got out of their way in a hurry.

  ‘Mathuin?’ Nayl voxed.

  ‘Busy,’ the link answered.

  Mathuin was up on the higher catwalk by then. Duboe’s hefty teamsters, a couple of them twists, were coming up ladders at either end. The bounty hunter slid to a halt, looked up and down the walkway, and then swung the cradle-brace around so the cannon’s multi-barrels covered the west end of the walk.

  Two men ran up into view. One had a drawn stub pistol.

  ‘Drop it!’ he shouted.

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Mathuin replied. He tipped up the barrels with a slight tug and fired off a blurt. The sound of it boomed across the chamber. Hyper-velocity shots howled over the heads of the two men in front of him. The one with the stub pistol fell down the steps in an effort to duck, and knocked the man behind him off the stepway entirely. Falling, the man tried to grab a suspension strut, but missed and landed badly on a cage-roof below. The small, biped saurians in the cage began to leap and snap up at him. The man struggled to balance on the curved roof-bars and yelled out for help.

  The sound of Mathuin’s cannon had caused other trouble. There was genuine panic in the cavae now. The penned animals began straggling against their cages. Several others in the process of being moved, including a spiger and the grazers Duboe had signalled, went berserk and broke free. The spiger – a three metre long felidform with eight legs and a furred, segmented body – snapped its leads, brought a servitor crashing over and started to chase pit-men across the floor. The grazers stampeded in all directions, crashing into cages, into chute-walls, into guardrails, into crates and barrels, into men. Six of them, in a tight, galloping pack, broke all the way round the saurian lockers and trampled two handlers on the loading ramp behind them. The grazers had big, V-shaped horns growing up from thick bone-masses above their flaring nostrils, and when they ran, they put their heads down. There were marrow-mashing crunches. A body was tossed up into the air, terribly gored, and came down on the locker roofs. It lay there, leaking blood through the bars and driving the caged saurians into a frenzy. More handlers ran in, firing scatter-guns, and cracking lashes. Other workers fled for the exits.

  From his vantage point, Mathuin glimpsed Duboe running through the pandemonium towards the northern cargo-docks. He voxed the sighting to the others, then ducked shots at him from behind. Several pit-men, firing small-arms, were rushing along the walkway after him.

  Mathuin turned and felt the rotator-cannon shudder against his hip. White flame danced around the muzzles. His pursuers pulverised explosively in puffs of blood and meat and several shots tore into the catwalk itself, shredding the decking and shearing support cables. A whole section of catwalk tore away and plunged twenty metres to the floor below.

  Mathuin turned grimly to continue on his way when something of extraordinary force struck him on the left shoulder and wrenched him off his feet. He spun off the walkway and into the air. He blacked out for a microsecond, then woke in time to black out again when he smashed, face first, into a cage roof.

  Fifty metres away across the cavae’s crowded, chaotic floorspace, the game agent, Skoh, lowered his custom-made long-las.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Duboe. ‘Now come on.’

  ‘This is my neck on the block here too, Duboe. Who are these people?’

  Duboe smiled at the game agent, pushing pit-men out of his path. ‘They’re dead,’ he said.

  MATHUIN WOKE WITH a start. Before he had even tried to remember where he was, he knew he was hurt bad. Broken ribs, seriously frigged arm and shoulder.

  He was face down, suspended across the bars of a cage roof. His head, right leg, right forearm and the business end of the rotator-cannon were all hanging limply down through the iron rungs. He tried to move, but it seemed too painful, and the bars were so widely spaced that if he rolled too far, he might well slip down between them entirely. Slowly, he raised his right hand to clasp the nearest rung, then his right leg, hooking his foot around a rung for support. Then he tried to raise his head. Pain made him close his eyes. Whiplash, maybe, from the fall, combined with the damage the las-load had done punching through his shoulder.

  For a second, Mathuin felt hot, damp, stinking air blow up at his face, and wet droplets spatter him. There was a sound like two heavy wooden boards being smacked together.

  He opened his eyes.

  Four metres below, the cage’s occupant, a mature crocodilian, looked up at him with lidless yellow eyes. It lunged vertically again, its great maw wide open and, pain be damned, this time Mathuin pulled his head up. Another hot blast of breath and saliva. Another hollow smack as the jaws closed empty.

  The thing slithered round beneath him. He pulsed the trigger of the cannon to rake it to pieces, but got nothing except the pinging misfire tone. The fall had screwed the cannon, jarring the munition feed out of its lock.

  The crocodilian powered up again, driving itself against the cage floor with its massive tail. This time it got him. The tip of the massive jaws closed around the dangling end of the cannon barrels.

  ‘Oh shit…’ Mathuin gasped as the gigantic weight began to pull the cannon down between the bars, and him with it.

  FOR A MOMENT, across the heads of the milling crowd, Nayl saw Duboe. Then he was gone again, and trouble was rushing Nayl and Kys from all sides. Pit-men and twists, paid well to be loyal, piled in with fists and blades and goad-staves.

  Nayl was in no mood now. With a snarl, he lashed into the first one, crashing a nasal bone, and chopped an elbow elsewhere into a throat. An electroprod stung him a glancing blow on the right hip, but the armour of his bodyglove soaked the worst, so he tore the prod out of the man’s hands and stung him back into the air with it. Then he brought the crackling prod round one-handed like a sabre and felled the next.

  ‘Patience!’

  ‘Right with you,’ she said, making her words audible over the commotion by way of a little T-nudge boost. Two pit-men were already on their hands and knees at her feet, coughing blood. She straight-armed the heel of her left hand into the solar plexus of a third, catching the barbed pole the man dropped with a little telekinesis and then spinning the pole straight into the face of another. A twist with a cleaver swung for her, but she did a nimble three-sixty walkover to get out of his way and then TK’ed the floating pole round in a fast circle and cracked the twist around the back of the skull with it.

  Kys stepped forward over the twist and drew four kineblades that had been concealed as boning in her bodice. The four sharp slivers began to orbit in slow circuits around her. Nayl tossed aside the now buckled electroprod, and tackled another handler using an arm-lock, and pushed the yowling man out of their way.

  Duboe had already disappeared through the shutters into the northern cargo-docks.

  RAW AGONY TORE through Mathuin’s shoulder and neck. The crocodilian was beginning to shake its snout. He couldn’t reach around far enough with his right hand to release the cannon’s harness straps. He felt himself beginning to slide. ‘Help… me…’ he gasped.

  ‘GET OUT OF here,’ Duboe told Skoh as they crossed the cargo-dock. Skoh had just used his long-las to cut down a maddened grazer that was bucking and jerking across the deck. ‘I’ve got things to do. Get out and I’ll meet you at the usual place.’

  Skoh nodded and hastened off towards his truck. Duboe turned and went the other way towards his private offices under the north-end terraces. By then, the whole stadium knew something was amiss in the under-stage. There was a lot of discontented noise from upstairs. A squad of six armoured marshals came pounding out of the stair access to his left. Regularly posted at the circus, the officers recognised Duboe at once.

  ‘In there! The cavae!’ Duboe yelled. ‘Reckon it’s some of those frigging anti-blood sport maniacs. They’re armed, so watch it!’

  The marshals pumped their shotgun grips and spread out towards the cavae hatchways. Duboe reached his office, punched his code into the door plate, and was felled from behind by a hefty blow.

  He looked up, dazed. One of the frigging dance-crobats. She was pointing a compact at his face.

  ‘What the hell…’ he growled.

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ she said. ‘Right now. Before this gets any further out of hand.’

  Duboe grinned. ‘Ekkrote,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Kara.

  Ekkrote was one of the Carnivora’s headline gladiators, something of a local hero in G. Two and a half spans tall, an ex-clanster, formed like a mountain range from grafter muscle, he was blessed, oiled, armoured in
gold mono-bond ceramite armour, armed with a chainsword, and loyally in the pay of his friend and dealer Ranklin Sesme Duboe.

  He was also standing right behind Kara Swole.

  NAYL AND KYS came up out of the cavae into the dock, and straight into the path of the Magistratum squad. They saw the heavy pistol in Nayl’s hand and aimed their riot-guns and red laser-taggers.

  ‘Where you are! Drop the handgun!’

  Nayl glanced sideway at Kys. She didn’t even break stride. The four kineblades zipped away from their orbit around her and flew into the open barrels of the four nearest pump-guns. Two misfired on the spot, blowing their users back hard. A slamming wave of telekinesis and the butt of Nayl’s pistol left the rest sprawled and disarmed.

  Nayl and Kys broke into a run.

  FACED WITH A choice between keeping her gun or keeping her head, Kara opted for the latter, and threw herself into the longest impromptu dive of her life to avoid the gladiator’s scything chainsword. She had no time to prep for a decent landing and the compact bounced out of her hand as she sprawled over and rolled.

  Ekkrote was also fast. She rolled hard and then had to back-flip just to evade the singing edge of the sword as he stormed after her, swiping at her.

  His blade tip cut a groove in the rockcrete floor, then nicked a pillar. Kara ducked and did a handspring sideways, landing neat and next to her fallen compact. She snatched it up and fired off four or five shots. Ekkrote’s armour and surface muscle stopped them all. The chainsword mangled the muzzle of the compact and she ditched it, turning a backwards somersault as the gladiator closed the distance between them again.

  Kara was out of breath. Her muscles burned. How much longer could she stay out of the bastard’s reach?

  THERE WAS A shot – something chunky like a las-carbine – and the crocodilian let go and flopped over onto the cage floor, leaking black ichor from its split brain pan.

  Mathuin sagged as the weight released. His left arm felt like it had been torn out of its socket. He saw the barrels of the rotator were twisted and deformed.

  He peered around, upside down. Carl Thonius was staring up at him from outside the cage, carbine slung in his hands.