“I could?” He sat up straighter. “Yeah, see there. You tell ’em, Sam.”

Pep concentrated on racking the balls so she wouldn’t bust out laughing. I gnawed the inside of a cheek so I’d not join her. “Well, it could be, Rusty, that the GGF is part of whoever took the grid down. They weren’t around before the grid went down. They might have arrived, made a deal with PADSU to help them out, creating discord here so something else could happen.”

“Nothing is going to happen now, though, Donelly.” The bartender, Max Leary, replaced Rusty’s beer with another sweaty bottle. “News came up from Overton. The DropShip that burned in last night had a Republic Knight on it. Looks like the piece will be here keeping the peace.”

“Piece?” I shot the bald man a hooded glance. I knew he’d used the term piece to rile Pep, since she’d rejected more advances from him than I had fingers and toes to count—and that was just this afternoon. Of course, with her being so small and him being so, well, round, they would never hook up. Save for the lack of gun turrets and his wearing lumberjack castoff clothing, Leary could have been mistaken for a Union–class DropShip.

Pep ignored Leary, so the bartender growled at me. “Yeah, some beauty-queen Knight was the main cargo.”

“You catch a name?”

“Why, you looking to ask her on a date or something?”

I nodded solemnly. “That’s right. I am in powerful need of female companionship.”

I’d said that with a smile and braced myself for the barbs that would be flying in my direction, but then a funny thing happened. Actually, it was a coincidental thing, which really led to an eruption of stupidity.

In through the door came two women. Gorgeous women, beer-ad gorgeous they were, and one was even clad in the sort of baby-doll T-shirt and short shorts that’s the style in beer ads. Young enough to look innocent, old enough to know how to use that look of innocence, with blond hair and a dazzling smile, she paused inside the door and looked at all of us.

She had luscious azure eyes.

By the way, my using the word azure, that’s how you know this is literature. If it wasn’t, I’d have just said blue. Sapphire could have worked, too, or lapis lazuli, but she had that sort of softness that doesn’t make you think of minerals.

But I digress, which is another literary thing to do, just in case you were keeping score.

Her companion seemed a bit older and harder, so I could use minerals to describe her, except she had nothing rocky about her. I could have called her hair rusty red, but that would be confusing, and her eyes weren’t dark enough for emeralds, and there are so many shades of jade that just saying jade wouldn’t really tell you what color they were. Nice green eyes, though, very much alive and wary, taking us all in for more reasons than her companion did. She moved fluidly, stepping from behind her friend quickly, freeing her to act if she needed to. Her red hair had been gathered back into a braid and I noticed it had been tucked down into the collar of her shirt.

This is where the whole explosion of stupidity thing began to boil over. They were both PADSU—if the coeds-on-a-hike attire hadn’t told us that, the little info-disks the blonde held in her left hand did. And while the blonde might be here to enlighten us, Red was clearly prepared to fight, and starting a fight with lumberjacks is just dumb. You might beat them up, but at least one of them will hunt you down and his ForestryMech will saw your house into a duplex.

Leary knew what was coming. He started to put the good liquor under the bar. Both bottles.

I turned on my stool and slid from it. “Excuse me, Miss.”

The blonde, who had been halfway to Rusty, reading him rightly as the most susceptible to PADSU’s message, stopped and gave me the sort of smile that would have had me investing in a brewery a keg at a time were a brand name plastered over her chest. “Do you want to help us save the Mottled Lemur?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Oh, you should.” She spoke in one of those little-girl pouty voices and, just for a moment, I felt my resolve weakening. “There are only fifteen thousand mating pairs left on Helen. Their natural habitat has been greatly reduced through logging and mining operations that have despoiled hectare upon hectare of pristine nature. Hundreds of thousands of divergent species of plants and animals have perished.”

I held a hand up. “And bugs. People always forget the bugs.”

The blonde blinked and hesitated for a moment. “Yes, and insects, too.”

“Arachnids.” Pep smiled and chalked her cue. “And bacteria. No one ever remembers them.”

I nodded. “I seriously lament the death of slime molds. No one can remember if they are plants or animals, so I think they should be mourned twice.”

Blondie stared at me, her face slackening. Her lower lip began to sneak out in a pout and her shoulders sagged just a little. In a heartbeat I knew the lower lip was going to quiver and tears would gather in those azure eyes. “This is very serious. We’re trying to save lives.”

“I know, darlin’, so am I. I’m trying to save yours.” I reached out and took hold of her left arm with my right hand. “We’re not the audience you’re looking for.”

“Get your hand off her.”

I glanced past Blondie at Red. “You don’t want to be making an idle threat in here.”

Red had three choices. She could talk and just delay making a choice between the other two. She could back down and they would leave. Or, like every other woman who dyed her hair Natasha Kerensky-red and thought she was tough, she could act.

She picked number three, which did have the desired effect of making me take my hand off Blondie’s arm. As Red took a step forward, planted her left foot and snapped her right leg around in a kick—rather quickly, too, I’ll give her that—I, too, stepped forward. I caught her thigh in my ribs and locked my left arm down on it. I sank my fingers stiffly into her hamstring, which added a gasp to her snarl of frustration.

Then I crashed my right fist down into her face. Twice. I think it was the second punch that broke her nose. I know it was the first that broke her jaw. Then I pitched her off into a table, from which she rebounded heavily and hit the floor hard but limp.

I turned to look at Blondie. Color had drained from her face, or had been washed from it with the tears. “Oh, my God.”

“Rusty, help this young lady get her friend into their hovercar and down to the trauma center in Kokushima.”

Rusty drained his beer, then stood, straightened his plaid flannel shirt and smiled. His smile wasn’t as dazzling as Blondie’s, but she had more and whiter teeth than he did. Still, she reciprocated and he helped her drag a moaning Red from the bar.

One would think, of course, Leary’s Eyrie had been home to enough stupidity for one night, but this would be because one was not taking into consideration Boris. Boris was frustrated because he was just sitting around waiting, which runs contrary to his self-image as a man of action. His job driving a ConstructionMech adapted to clearing underbrush runs contrary there, too, but Boris lives in his own little world, which, unfortunately, allows him to emerge into mine.

“You didn’t ought to have did that, Sam.”

“I shouldn’t have did, er, done, what, Boris?”

Boris carefully set his cue down and waded across the bar floor toward me. His shadow fell over me and I actually felt a chill. Leary might have been a DropShip, but Boris was a planet. “You hit a woman.”

“And?”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“Uh huh. You missed that she tried to kick me, right?”

Boris shook his head, which, in a way, amazed me. He looked so like a granite statue, with strong features and black hair that never seemed to shift out of place, that half the time I didn’t think he could move. Fact was, that hair came out of his neurohelmet that way, which just is not natural.