Hunters Run Page 0,4

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 pants 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 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 cargoes.

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 porttown 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 wide-flung, 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 among the stars, you learned