Predators and Prey: A Short Story

Rizzo's
looking mean tonight. He's razor sharp, edged out on something expensive and
illegal. He wants to do a deal and doesn't realize I'm out of the business. It's
not going to make him happy.

"Back
off," I say, but he's having none of it. He grins as he stalks towards me,
chromium incisors reflecting the glare from neon signs over dark alley doors.
Black, wet hair is pasted to his skull from the warm drizzle, looking as dark
and sticky as the aftermath of a nasty scalp wound.

"I
know,
Jimbo
. I know." He's grinning wide,
wafflestomper
boots going stomp-splash, stomp-splash, as he
draws ever closer. "I
know
you're holding. Let's have some."

"Listen,
Rizzo," I say, raising a hand and backing a few steps away, "I left
home to get away from this shit. Give me some space . . . it's not that kind of
town."

He
stops, shallow black ripples spreading from his firmly planted feet. "Not
that kind of town?" He cocks his head back, raises an eyebrow. "Look
around,
Jimbo
. It's exactly that kind of town."

He
snaps his fingers, and two bully-boys separate from the darkness behind him,
stalking to his side. "
Tweedle
-dee and
Tweedle-dum
are going to help you find what I'm looking
for." They start toward me, two genetic freaks who obviously couldn't
memorize plays or they'd be making bank in the Trinary Football League. I'm
still in decent shape; street-
muling
sniffware
kept me quick and lean. But each of these guys
out-masses me by half again and more.

"Wait,"
I say, holding up one finger. Like that's going to stop them. They ignore me,
grab me one to an arm,
lift
me off the ground. With
their free hands they each give me a rough and thorough pat-down, none too
careful in the sensitive areas, either.

They
pull my wallet, pull my
comcard
. I haven't a thing
else on me.

"Clean,
Rizzo," Dum says.

Rizzo
folds his arms across his chest. "
Jimbo
, you're
not carrying the old fashioned way, are you?" He gestures with one hand
and the
Tweedles
drop me. "It's really not worth
the cavity search, is it?"

The
thought gives me the willies. "Rizzo, I told you, I'm out of the business.
I—"

"No
one's ever out of the business,
Jimbo
. You've been
here two months. I know you must have connections." He pulls up a wet
sleeve, checks his watch. "Two hours. Two hours and you call me on the
card and I'll tell you where to bring it." He crosses the distance between
us in three quick steps, reaches up to pinch my cheek. I'm not foolish enough
to raise a hand to stop him. Not with the
Tweedles
here.

"Because
if I don't get any," he pinches harder, twisting, "the only thing
that's going to keep me happy will be dicing you into little, tiny pieces.
After the cavity
search, of course."
The
Tweedles
laugh.
Rizzo saw my flinch. Not one to miss an opportunity like that; not Rizzo.

"Let's
go, girls," he says, and they start to walk away. Rizzo tosses one last
dig over his shoulder, "Maybe you should have run a little farther,
Jimmy.
. . dug your hidey-hole a little deeper."

It's
the first thing he's been right about all night.

"
Kye
," says Duncan when I enter his lab and hang my wet
jacket on a hook. A few of the
indiginies
hiss, chirp,
or make completely improbable noises at me from their wall cages.

"
Kye
," I reply, hiding my contempt for the
Xeno
standard greeting.

He's
got a Parron on the bench in front of him, chest cavity open and flaps pinned
back, probing it's innards under the lamp. It's a nasty critter with a
wingspread no larger than my hand, four
taloned
claws, leathery wings, a beak like a snapping turtle, and one hellacious
appetite.

"What's
eating you?" he says, flipping up the magnifying goggles against his
shaved head, giving me a glance when he notices I'm pacing the lab.

"The
past just caught up with me.
A Gothic scumbag, just a minor
acquaintance from back in York.
By coincidence or bad karma, he's
relocated here. Transit and Colonization must be taking just about anyone these
days."
"They took you, didn't they?" He laughs at his own wit, showing
perfect white teeth that must have cost his family a fortune. He knows I paid a
premium for University citizenship and an
apprenticeship,
he just doesn't care to remember. "Speaking of apprenticeship, how about
cleaning up under those cages and tossing the
Grats
some chow before you start some studying?"

Duncan's
five years my junior, but had the luck to be born into a family that could
afford to put him through school. He's really not a bad guy, and most of the
time, we get along fine. As my resident mentor, when I'm not sleeping, in class,
or cleaning the lab, he's teaching me the ins and outs of this semi-terrestrial
biosphere.

It's
not his fault that when I signed up for the outbound
quickship
I had this vivid picture in my mind of raising animals—cows, pigs, chickens and
stuff—on a sunny agro-world, apprenticed as a veterinarian or something
similar. I should have researched the specific meaning of
Xenobiology
,
and the Indigenous Adaptation Department, just a little more thoroughly. And I
should have verified that the University province here on Symphonie housed
something more than a colony of penal-program refugees.

Four
of the wall cages hold
Grats
, dumpy little fungus
eaters squatting like fat Chihuahuas. They make a '
squirp
,
squirp
' appeal when I pick up the mushroom bucket and
fill their trough. Three of them are keepers; Duncan's doing a
pheremonal
study on them to see how they attract each other
when they mate, without attracting the
Parrons
.
Natural selection has left them one of the few indigenous surface dwelling
animals larger than a lab mouse.

The
fourth
Grat
will find its way into the Parron cage
sometime this week, where it will be picked to the bone in a matter of moments.
Having seen it once, it's something I have no need to see again.

"You
know," Duncan says, gesturing at the Parron pinned and splayed upon the
table, "almost half of the brain nodes in these things are dedicated to
smell. That mass just back of the lung is basically the nose. Cut it out and
they starve."

"Amazing,"
I say without enthusiasm. I have more pressing interests and concerns.

The
lower cages are mini-habitats, with clever dust-gray rodents that pop their
heads from their holes when I tap the sides. They sniff, turn over, and use
long tails to curl and scoop the mix of seeds and nuts down behind them. I envy
them the safety of their homes.

So
much for my fresh start.

I
finish the feeding, sweep and dispose of the crap and tell Duncan I need to
head out again for a little while.

"This
is really bugging you, isn't it?"

I nod.
"You have no idea."

"Well,
let me know if I can help." He pulls down his goggles and gets back to his
work.

Outside,
the drizzle has tapered off, and the night sky looks like it might even start
to clear. I've never understood why the city isn't domed instead of netted. It
would make more sense during the rainy season. I pull out my
comcard
and access my directory. Of the twenty names I have
listed for this world, none are worth a damn.

I'd
purposely severed all connections with the old business. Necessity can
sometimes make for odd first careers; unfortunately I hadn't had the good
fortune to be gifted with a lack of a conscience. Seeing living corpses curled
in piles of filthy rags, strung out on the chemical of the month . . . well, it
hadn't set well with me. Even when the money was good, and chemical
splice-houses were seeing to my every worldly whim, I couldn't sleep. "Drugs
don't kill people, people kill people," they used to joke when they saw my
discomfort and concern.

I
avoided the puddles as I started up the block toward the food district. Up
ahead, I thought I saw a bulky form separate from the lamppost on the corner
and slip into the shadows beyond. I didn't look too closely. That Rizzo would
have at least one of the boys watching me was no real surprise.

I'd
known someone was on to me for at least a week. The tiny flat the
Xeno
department provides me was ransacked top to bottom
during an afternoon class. No one guts an apprenticed student's mattress
looking for money; even a
Grat
would know better.
Someone was searching for drugs, someone who knew I'd vanished back in York,
sometime between making a large pickup and never showing at the delivery. I'd
never taken the University's guarantee about their records system being
confidential and
unbreachable
very seriously. Where
do they think the best hackers-for-hire come from, anyway?

Choochi's
is down a few steps, stuck between a
bakery (closed) and an adult media store (always open). The door swings heavily
when I push it, a slate-gray hunk of plastic that
Choochi
swears is a relic from the original colony lander. If one of the
Tweedles
is tailing me, he's going to be a bit disappointed
with my destination.

Inside,
the place isn't much wider than a coffin, with a white food counter running the
five-meter length of the place. The only stool is behind the counter and
occupied by
Choochi
.

"Hey,
Jimmy.
Late night
hungries
?"
Choochi
is Asian, and must be at least ninety years
old. He looks back to the HTV he keeps behind the counter, watches a few more
seconds of his
serio
-sitcom, chuckles and turns it
off.

"Crappy
TV," he says, "but good crap, if you know what I mean. All set?"

"Number
two," I say, picking from the photo menu on the wall.
Fish-salad
sandwich and a bowl of veggies and noodles.

"Good
choice.
Lots of protein and carbos."
He fiddles
under the counter, removes some wrap from a bowl, puts it in the
nuker
. While he's at it, he says, "You in some kind of
trouble, Jimmy?"

What
tipped him off to that? "Nothing I can't handle," I lie.

"Ah,"
he says, placing a plate with my sandwich and a flowered carrot garnish in
front of me. "Then that explains the very large eye that just peeked in my
door."

So
Rizzo
is
keeping a close watch on me.

The
nuker
beeps,
he pulls out my
noodles and hands the bowl to me with disposable chopsticks.

"It's
no big deal,
Choochi
." I
unwrap
the sticks, snap them apart and start in on the food.

"I
see," he says, "sounds like you forgot to make your bed before you
left your home."

"Huh?"

"It
doesn't translate well. How about, 'Misfortune often comes through the door you
left open'."

"What's
that, ancient Chinese wisdom?

Choochi
smiles.
"No, axioms of
the Mafia manager.
They're a bit more useful than the ancient Chinese."

I
smirk, eat some more noodles, and think about the time. Even if I had two days,
I doubted I could come up with anything that would satisfy Rizzo, but I always
think better on a full stomach.

An
unhappy Rizzo is a dangerous thing. Back in York, he was into a lot of dirty
shit.
But he was a user, and rumor had it that he blew most
of what he made on any variety of sniff.
A smart-ass street kid once
sold him a batch of Wipeout cut with chili powder. The operative word is once.
We all witnessed that example: Rizzo put him up to his neck in a concrete
block; hung him upside down in his warehouse. Every day he told him he was
going to drop him, up until the day he finally starved. The kid was all of
thirteen.

That
was the day I dumped my last load through a sewer grate, cashed out my savings,
and went on my way.

I
finish up the food. "Add it to my tab,
Chooch
."

"Sure,
sure," he says, genial as always. "Maybe I should have you pay it off
now, if you're in some kind of trouble."

"Nothing
I can't handle. I'll pay you Friday, just like always."