Free Guardian of Night by Tony Daniel Page B

complex.
    “Just let me by, dear, and I’ll come back and pass a pipe around the campfire later,” he said. “Hell, I’ll bring the THC. Got sources you wouldn’t believe. Just move aside for now—”
    “Fuck you ,” said a male voice, close to his ear. He turned to see a pencil-thin guy in his late twenties. He wore an old-fashioned punk getup, with sewed-on pegged jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket over a T-shirt. “You think you can go around dressed like that”—he nodded toward Coalbridge’s dress uniform—“and get away with it ? Children are dying in Africa because of you fucking Extry baby-killers.”
    Coalbridge shook his head and was about to make his way around them in bemusement when the Peepsie punk reached out a quick hand and shoved him into the side of a bus.
    His head whacked into the paper-covered sheet metal. Shot of pain through his skull. Yellow-tinged floaters momentarily in front of his eyes.
    The Peepsie punk was stronger than he looked.
    Reaction and training took over Coalbridge’s body. He had to end this quickly, and he wasn’t going to be able to use reason. Coalbridge reached between his coat buttons, felt the truncheon’s handle, activated it with a twist and spun around to face—
    Some other dude.
    This one was entirely People’s Front, a real Chavista down to the torn dungarees and paisley shirt. There was something much more authentic about him, too—if it was a him. A mane of curly, tangled hair, and underneath—yeah, it was a guy. Who smelled of patchouli and cheap incense. A chest draped in beads. Dirt—or something grimy—smeared into the wrinkles of his exposed skin.
    Was this the Peepsie version of a medicine man or shaman? Did they even have those?
    But the Peepsie-shaman was not confronting Coalbridge. Instead he was smiling benignly at the punk guy and Joan Placid, putting a firm hand on the punk’s shoulder.
    “Come on, brother, you know better,” said the shaman in a low, calm voice. “Violence won’t solve anything.”
    For a moment, the Peepsie punk glared hatred at Coalbridge. But the calming hand of the shaman and Coalbridge’s truncheon, glowing with a pale purple Q-generated fire, gave the punk pause.
    “If you go after him, you just prove him right,” said the hippie-shaman. “War is the problem, not the solution.”
    The shaman pointed to the bus behind Coalbridge. “This man’s victims see him, don’t worry,” he said.
    Coalbridge turned and looked behind him. Nothing but the bus, the poster-like plasterings. Faces. Hundreds of faces, staring out at him. Some smiling, some mysterious, some even sexy. Then he realized what he was seeing.
    The Peepsies, or someone, had turned the sides of the bus—all the buses—into remembrance walls. They were plastered with photographs of the dead. Some had a short paragraph, a birth and death date. Some had no lettering at all, but silently, wordlessly attested to the fact that this person had been here, had walked the Earth, and was no more.
    The Peepsie punk started to say something else to Coalbridge, but the shaman gave the punk a sharp look. Finally the Peepsie punk shook his head like an angry, confused bull. “He fucking started it,” he said to the shaman. “His kind started the whole thing. All the fucking suffering. They violated the Limit and brought the retribution down on us.”
    The Peepsie punk was making correlation into cause. The sceeve had arrived shortly after the first Q-based FTL drive had been sent to the Centauris. There was talk that humanity had set off a trip wire that alerted the sceeve to come marauding.
    “Maybe so, maybe so. But we have to end this, brother,” said the shaman. “Haters only breed more hate.”
    Another moment of fuming hesitation from the punk. Another glance at the truncheon. Then the punk turned away. “I guess you’re right. . . .”
    “This one will wake up one day and realize that there’s innocent blood on his hands, that he’s