Hunter’s Run

CHAPTER ONE

Ramon Espejo lifted his chin, daring his opponent to strike. The crowd that filled the alleyway behind the ramshackle bar called the El Rey formed a ring, bodies pressing against each other in the tension between coming close enough to see and retreating to a safe distance. Their voices were a mixture of shouts urging the two men to fight and weak, insincere exhortations to make peace. The big man who was bobbing and weaving across the narrow circle from him was a pale European, his cheeks flushed red from liquor, his wide, soft hands balled into fists. He was taller than Ramon, with a greater reach. Ramon could see the man’s eyes shifting, as wary of the crowd as of Ramon.

‘Come on, pendejo,’ Ramon said, grinning. His arms were raised and spread, as if he were ready to embrace the fighter. ‘You wanted power. Come have a taste of it.’

The shifting LEDs of the bar’s signs turned the night blue and red and amber in turn. Far above them all, the night sky shone with countless stars too bright and close for the lights of Diegotown to drown.

The constellation of the Stone Man stared down at them as they circled, a single star smoldering balefully like a red eye, as if it was watching, as if it was urging them on.

‘I ought to do it, you ugly little greaser!’ the European spat. ‘I ought to go ahead and kick your skinny ass!’

Ramon only bared his teeth and motioned the man nearer. The European wanted this to be a talking fight again, but it was too late for that. The voices of the crowd merged into a single waterfall roar. The European made his move, graceless as a falling tree; the great left fist made its slow way through the air, moving as though through molasses. Ramon stepped inside the swing, letting the gravity knife slip from his sleeve into his hand. He flicked the blade open in the same motion that brought his fist against the larger man’s belly.

A look of almost comical surprise crossed the European’s face. His breath went out of him with a whoof.

Ramon stabbed twice more, fast and hard, twisting the knife just to be sure. He was close enough to smell the nose-tingling reek of the flowery cologne the man wore, to feel his liquorice-scented breath panting against his face. The crowd went silent as the European slipped to his knees and then sat, legs spread, in the filthy muck of the alley. The big, soft hands opened and closed aimlessly, slick with blood that turned pale when the LEDs were red, black when the light shifted blue.

The European’s mouth gaped open, and blood gushed out over his teeth. Slowly, very slowly, seeming to move in slow motion, he toppled sideways to the ground. Kicked his feet, heels drumming the ground. Was still.

Someone in the crowd uttered an awed obscenity.

Ramon’s shrill, self-satisfied pleasure faded. He looked at the faces of the crowd – wide eyes, mouths open in little, surprised ‘o’s. The alcohol in his blood seemed to thin, sobriety floating to the top of his mind. A sinking sense of betrayal possessed him – these people had been pushing him on, encouraging the fight. And now they were abandoning him for winning it!

‘What?’ Ramon shouted to the other patrons of the El Rey. ‘You heard what he was saying! You saw what he did!’

But the alley was emptying. Even the woman who’d been with the European, the one who had started it all, was gone. Mikel Ibrahim, the manager of the El Rey, lumbered toward him, his great bear-like face the image of patient, saintly suffering. He held out his wide hand. Ramon lifted his chin again, thrust out his chest, as if Mikel’s gesture was an insult. The manager only sighed, shook his head slowly back and forth, and made a pulling gesture with his fingers. Ramon curled his lip, half-turned away, then slapped the handle of the knife into the waiting palm.

‘Police are coming,’ the manager warned. ‘You should go home, Ramon.’

‘You saw what happened,’ Ramon said.

‘No, I wasn’t here when it happened,’ he said. ‘And neither were you, eh? Now go home. And keep your mouth shut.’

Ramon spat on the ground and stalked into the night. It wasn’t until he began to walk that he understood how drunk he was. At the canal by the plaza, he squatted down, leaned back against a tree, and waited until he was sure he could walk without listing. Around him, Diegotown spent its week’s wages on alcohol and kaafa kyit and sex. Music tumbled in from the rough gypsy houseboats on the canal; fast, festive accordion mixing with trumpets and steel drums and the shouts of the dancers.

Somewhere in the darkness, a tenfin was calling mournfully, a ‘bird’ that was really a flying lizard, and which sounded uncannily like a woman sobbing in misery and despair, something that had led the superstitious Mexican peasants who made up a large percentage of the colony’s population to say that La Llorona, the Crying Woman, had crossed the stars with them from Mexico and now wandered the night of this new planet, crying not only for all the children who’d been lost and left behind on Earth, but for all the ones who would die on this hard new world.

He, of course, didn’t believe in such crap. But as the ghostly crying accelerated to a heartbreaking crescendo, he couldn’t help but shiver.

Alone, Ramon could regret stabbing the European; surely it would have been enough just to punch him around, humiliate him, slap him like a bitch? But when Ramon was drunk and angry, he always went too far. Ramon knew that he shouldn’t have drunk so much, and that whenever he got around people, it always seemed to end like this. He’d begun his evening with the sick knot in his belly that being in the city seemed to bring, and then by the time he’d drunk enough to untie that knot, as usual someone had said or done something to enrage him. It didn’t always end with a knife, but it rarely ended well. Ramon didn’t like it, but he wasn’t ashamed of it either. He was a man – an independent prospector on a tough frontier colony world less than a generation removed from its founding. By God, he was a man! He drank hard, he fought hard, and anyone who had a problem with that would be wise to keep their pinche opinions to themselves!

A family of tapanos – small, raccoon-like amphibians with scales like a hedgehog’s spikes – lumbered up from the water, considered Ramon with dark, shining eyes, and made their way toward the plaza, where they would scavenge for the dropped food and trash of the day. Ramon watched them pass, slick dark paths of canal water trailing behind them, then sighed and hauled himself to his feet.

Elena’s apartment was in the maze of streets around the Palace of the Governors. It perched above a butcher’s shop, and the air that came in the back window was often fetid with old gore. He considered sleeping in his van, but he felt sticky and exhausted. He wanted a shower and a beer and a plate of something warm to keep his belly from growling. He climbed the stairs slowly, trying to be quiet, but the lights were burning in her windows. A shuttle was lifting from the spaceport far to the north, tracking lights glowing blue and red as the vessel rose toward the stars. Ramon tried to cover the click and hiss of the door with the throbbing rumble of the shuttle’s lift drive. But it was no use.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Elena yelled as he stepped inside. She wore a thin cotton dress with a stain on the sleeve. Her hair was tied back into a knot of black darker than the sky. Her teeth were bared in rage, her mouth almost square with it. Ramon closed the door behind him, and heard her gasp. In an instant, the anger had left her. He followed her gaze to where the European’s blood had soaked the side of his shirt, the leg of his pants. He shrugged.

‘We’ll have to burn these,’ he said.

‘Are you okay, mi hijo? What happened?’

He hated it when she called him that. He was no one’s little boy. But it was better than fighting, so he smiled, pulling at the tongue of his belt.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘It was the other cabron who took the worst of it.’

‘The police … will the police …?’

‘Probably not,’ Ramon said, dropping his trousers around his knees. He pulled his shirt up over his head. ‘Still, we should burn these.’

She asked no more questions, only took his clothes out to the incinerator that the apartments on the block all shared, while Ramon took a shower. The time readout in the mirror told him that dawn was still three or four hours away. He stood under the flow of warm water, considering his scars – the wide white band on his belly where Martin Casaus had slashed him with a sheet metal hook, the disfiguring lump below his elbow where some drunken bastard had almost sheared through his bones with a machete. Old scars. Some older than others. They didn’t bother him; in fact, he liked them. They made him look strong.

When he came out, Elena was standing at her back window, arms crossed below her breasts. When she turned to him, he was ready for the blast furnace of her rage. But instead, her mouth was a tiny rosebud, her eyes wide and round. When she spoke, she sounded like a child; worse, like a woman trying to be a child.

‘I was scared for you,’ she said.

‘You never have to be,’ he said. ‘I’m tough as leather.’

‘But you’re just one man,’ she said. ‘When Tomas Martinez got killed, there were eight men. They came right up to him when he came out of his girlfriend’s house, and …’

‘Tomas was a little whore,’ Ramon said and waved a hand dismissively, as if to say that any real man ought to be able to stand up against eight thugs sent to even a score. Elena’s lips relaxed into a smile, and she walked toward him, her hips shifting forward with each step, as if her pussy were coming to him, the rest of her trailing behind reluctantly. It could have gone the other way, he knew. They could as easily have passed the night as they had so many others, shouting at each other, throwing things, coming to blows. But even that might have ended in sex, and he was tired enough that he was genuinely grateful that they could simply fuck and then sleep, and forget about the wasted, empty day that had just gone by. Elena lifted off her dress. Ramon took her familiar flesh in his arms. The scent of old blood rose from the butcher’s shop below like an ugly perfume of Earth and humanity that had followed them across the void.

Afterward, Ramon lay spent in the bed. Another shuttle was lifting off. Usually there was hardly more than one a month. But the Enye were coming soon, earlier than expected, and the platform above Diegotown needed to be fitted out to receive the great ships with their alien cargos.

It was generations ago that mankind had raised itself up from the gravity wells of Earth and Mars and Europa and taken to the stars with dreams of conquest. Humanity had planned to spread its seed through the universe like a high councilor’s son at a port town brothel, but it had been disappointed. The universe was already taken. Other star-faring races had been there before them.

Dreams of empire faded into dreams of wealth. Dreams of wealth decayed into shamed wonder. More than the great and enigmatic technologies of the Silver Enye and Turu, it was the nature of space itself that defeated them, as it had defeated every other star-faring race. The vast dark was too great. Too big. Communication at the speed of light was so slow as to barely be communication at all. Governance was impossible. Law beyond what could be imposed locally was farcical. The outposts of the Commercial Alliance that humanity had been ‘persuaded’ to join by the Silver Enye (much as Admiral Perry’s gunships had ‘persuaded’ Japan to open itself up for trade in a much earlier generation) were wideflung, some outposts falling out of contact for generations, some lost and forgotten or else put on a bureaucrat’s schedule of concerns to be addressed another generation hence by another bureaucrat as yet unborn.

Establishing dominance – or even much continuity – across that gaping infinity of Night was something that seemed possible only from the provincially narrow viewpoint imposed by looking up from the bottom of a gravity well. Once you got out amongst the stars, you learned better.

No race had been able to overcome such vast distance, and so they had striven to overcome time. And it was in this that humanity at last found some small niche in the crowded, chaotic darkness of the universe. Enye and Turu saw the damage done by humanity to their own environment, the deep human propensity for change and control and their profoundly limited ability to see ahead to consequences, and they had found it more virtue than vice. The vast institutional minds, human and alien both, entered into a glacially slow generational agreement. Where empty planets were, intractable and inconvenient and dangerous, with wild flora and unknown fauna, there humans would be put. For the slow decades or centuries that it required to tame, to break, to pave over whatever marvels and threats evolution had put there, the Silver Enye and Cian and Turu and whatever other of the great races happened by would act as trade ships once had in the ancient days when mankind had displaced itself from the small islands and insignificant hills of Earth.

The São Paulo colony was barely in its second generation. There were women still alive who could recall the initial descent onto an untouched world. Diegotown, Nuevo Janeiro, San Esteban. Amadora. Little Dog. Fiddler’s Jump. All the cities of the south had bloomed since then, like mold on a Petri dish. Men had died from the subtle toxins of the native foods. Men had discovered the great cat-lizards, soon nicknamed chupacabras, after the mythical goat-suckers of Old Earth, that had stood proud and dumb at the peak of the planet’s food chain, and men had died for their discovery. The oyster-eyed Silver Enye had not. The insect-and-glass Turu had not. The enigmatic Cian with their penchant for weightlessness had not.

And now the great ships were coming ahead of schedule; each half-living ship heavy, they all assumed, with new equipment and people from other colonies hoping to make a place for themselves here on São Paulo. And also rich with the chance of escape for those to whom the colony had become a prison. More than one person had asked Ramon if he’d thought of going up, out, into the darkness, but they had misunderstood him. He had been in space; he had come here. The only attraction that leaving could hold was the chance to be someplace with even fewer people, which was unlikely. However ill he fit in São Paulo, he could imagine no situation less odious.

He didn’t recall falling asleep, but woke when the late morning sun streaming through Elena’s window shone in his face. He could hear her humming in the next room, going about the business of her morning. Shut up, you evil bitch, he thought, wincing at the flash of a lingering hangover. She had no talent for song – every note she made was flat and grating. Ramon lay silent, willing himself back to sleep, away from this city, this irritating noise, this woman, this moment in time. Then the humming was drowned by an angry sizzling sound, and, a moment later, the scent of garlic and chile sausage and frying onions wafted into the room. Ramon was suddenly aware of the emptiness in his belly. With a sigh, he raised himself to his elbow, swung his sleep-sodden legs around, and, stumbling awkwardly, made his way to the doorway.