The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [72]
“Powaqa, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kolichiyaw said, now looking profoundly irritated. “This is a damned inconvenient time to measure a man for a new suit.”
The woman reeled the metal strip most of the way in, then took a quick horizontal measurement of Kolichiyaw’s shoulders.
“Not if it’s the suit he’s likely to be buried in,” she said.
“Goddamned corporate royalty,” the old man beside Brooks said as he cast a scowl in Kolichiyaw’s direction. “Think they own the whole damned planet, while we just live on it like the fleas on a big, red, dusty dog.”
“What’s it gonna be, Koli?” Sheriff Kwahu said, tempered steel behind his voice now, his gaze as hard as the local granite.
Despite the obviously sincere warning, neither Kolichiyaw nor the tall, slender woman he had called Powaqa made any move to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Brooks leaned toward the old man who sat beside her, still— amazingly—typing his manifesto. Hiking a thumb toward Powaqa, she said, “Who is she, the town tailor?”
“Yup,” the old man said without looking up from his padd.
Plagued by stereotypical images of the black-clad frontier town morticians for whom pistol-wielding gunfighters created so much business in those ancient Wild West films, Brooks was relieved to hear that Powaqa was merely a clothier.
“She’s the undertaker, too,” the old man continued, grinning as he typed. “Saves a lot of time.”
Qaletaqu entered the room at that moment, rapidly approaching the pool table at the room’s center.
His shoulders suddenly slumping, Kolichiyaw’s defiant manner collapsed into a heterogeneous mixture of resignation and the grumblings of a little kid caught misbehaving. After spending another heartbeat or two in sullen silence looking at the sheriff, he spared a glance at Qaletaqu before meekly taking his seat. The undertaker-cum-tailor did likewise, but not before casting a brief glance at Brooks—a conspicuous stranger in Canyontown, after all—which warned her that Powaqa probably saw her as a potential customer, visitors to Mars sometimes being insufficiently detail-oriented to survive that first (and potentially last) hike outside the safety of the pressurized habitats.
“All right,” Kolichiyaw muttered as the sheriff sat beside him. “Let’s get this damned thing over with before those last three whiskeys start to wear off.”
Okay, so these people do have a few rules, Brooks thought as the air filled with convivial greetings for Qaletaqu, who wasted no time hopping up onto the pool table, an astonishingly graceful-looking move in the weak Martian gravity. They just don’t believe in standing on ceremony over the really trivial ones.
It was now becoming crystal clear to her that the truly important rules—such as the ones that required people to stay sober in extremely unforgiving environments such as airlocks, the Martian surface, and local political conclaves—had to be enforced to a fault in order to ensure the long-term survival and continued smooth functioning of the entire settlement. It makes sense, she thought. Especially considering that these people have managed to survive for nearly half a century out here on the ragged edge of human existence.
That thought reminded Brooks that Canyontown’s almost entirely Hopi/Pueblo population, around twenty-thousand strong at present, had descended from North American desert cliff dwellers, people who had also “lived on the edge,” quite literally, for millennia. Some of these same people had adapted that heritage to the clusters of high-rise towers that had arisen all over the Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; they had become the iron workers who fearlessly walked the narrow paths of steel beams and girders that crisscrossed the skylines they’d helped to fill with iconic monuments of steel and glass.
It was no wonder that these people could eke out a living in a precarious place like Mars,