Engineman - Eric Brown [54]
Then he saw the small, dark girl standing against the far wall, talking to a young man. For a second, Hunter's heart skipped - then he realised that he was mistaken. She was so very similar that it pained him to look at her. The girl looked him up and down with a glance of cool contempt. Hunter turned away, embarrassed. Even her superior disdain brought back painful memories.
Miguelino touched his elbow.
He followed the direction of the Engineman's gaze and stared at the man approaching them through the crowd. At first he thought it was a dwarf on stilts. Certainly, his cramped facial features were those of a dwarf, and the fact that he walked with a peculiar lurching gait suggested stilts. Then he emerged from the press and Hunter saw that the man's legs had been amputated at the thighs. From each naked stump a silver rod extended in place of the femur; the artificial legs were articulated at the knees with ball-joints, and terminated in wedge-shaped footpads. The dwarf wore a silversuit, had long grey hair and chewed the end of a cigar.
"Gentlemen," he greeted them nervously. "How can I help you?"
"Cut the shit, Quiberon," Miguelino snapped. "I told you - we know you have a tank."
"You're KVO officials?" Something like panic showed in his eyes.
"Just lead the way, Quiberon," Miguelino said, "and no smart tricks. We have your place surrounded."
Quiberon glanced at the three men. The cigar shuttled from one side of his mouth to the other. He hesitated, weighed up his options, then said, "Follow me."
He led them through a door at the rear of the bar and across an empty street. The music receded in their wake. There were no lights here. Hunter was aware of a disgusting mulch underfoot, the occasional snagging grasp of a ground-vine. They came to a tall iron gate in a stone wall, the bars of which served as a trellis for the climbing plants. Quiberon, bobbing and lurching, unlocked the gate and ushered them through. Hunter clutched a small automatic pistol in his jacket pocket. They were in an ancient, ramshackle cemetery. By the faint light of the stars and the industrial orbitals, he made out lichened gravestones, coy statues of angels with trumpets, kitsch Madonna figures and the occasional blockhouse monstrosity of a family tomb. The alien vegetation had overtaken the place in a riot of vulgar blooms and speckled leaves, a profanity entirely in keeping with the maudlin sentimentality of the ecclesiastical architecture.
Quiberon stilted down a short flight of steps, unlocked and pushed open the timber doors of a subterranean crypt. He touched a wall-switch and flooded the interior with a dull red light. Hunter, Sassoon and Miguelino followed the elevated dwarf inside.
"My customers are eight E-men," Quiberon said. "They wouldn't give me away... How did you find out?"
Ignoring him, Hunter approached the tank installed in the corner of the crypt. Miguelino was beside him, silent, awed.
It was a Larsen Class II, a silver, torpedo-shaped flux-tank that Hunter guessed was no more than twelve years old. By the look of it, the tank had never seen service in a 'ship.
Miguelino was down on his knees, caressing its streamlined length, checking its dials and metres. He might only have been a Beta, Hunter reflected, but all Enginemen, irrespective of their grade, craved the flux.
Quiberon looked from Hunter to Miguelino and back again. "Are you from the KVO?" he asked desperately. "You haven't been snooping around for years. I thought the restrictions were being relaxed, that was the talk on the street. And I do provide a genuine service..." He eyed the Engineman, clearly unable to equate an official KVO investigation with the behaviour of Miguelino.
Hunter asked, "Where did you get it?"
Quiberon hesitated, decided to co-operate. "The Larsen factory. I had contacts when it closed down."
"How good is it? In what state of repair?"
"I've never had a bit of trouble. It's mechanically perfect."
Miguelino looked up at Hunter, a plea in his eyes.
"Set it up for a Beta," Hunter said. "Thirty minutes,"
Quiberon fell to