Free Shooting the Rift - eARC by Alex Stewart Page A

any case.
    Feeling uncomfortably conspicuous, I glanced at the nearest shops and taverns, looking for some other clue as to her whereabouts. Given her reason for going out in the first place, bars seemed the most likely place to try, so I concentrated on those, trying to narrow down the possibilities. Not the one with the music; traditional tunes and instruments were decidedly not to her taste. The closest one was crowded enough for its customers to be spilling outside, and I knew she preferred to drink quietly—besides which, nearly half the people milling around the doorway were transgeners, and however blasé Aunt Jenny was about such things, I still found myself a little unnerved by their outlandish appearance.
    That left an unassuming frontage, little more than a large banner bearing a cheerful abstract design, which curtained off a shadowy area between a couple of storage tanks. Signs outside promised drinks, food, drinks, which accorded well with my current priorities, so I strolled over to it, twitched the corner aside, and slipped through the gap I’d created.
    I’m not sure quite what I expected to find on the other side; probably a whole bunch of people who’d stop what they were doing and stare at me, in the way far more common in fiction than in real life, but no one seemed even to notice my arrival.
    No one, that is, except for Aunt Jenny, who glanced up from a booth at the back, where she had a good view of the billowing pseudo-wall behind me, and nodded an affable greeting. Her companion was less visible from where I was standing, all but a shoulder and upper arm obscured by the corner of the booth, but I got the impression of a large man in the kind of utility garb common among artisans; an impression rapidly confirmed, as he turned in response to the shift in my aunt’s posture, and glanced in my direction. His beard was more or less neatly trimmed, and his jacket bore the universally recognized sigil of the Commerce Guild on the left breast pocket: a stylized hand cupping the swirl of the galaxy, symbolizing either the Guild’s reach across the entire Human Sphere, or its perpetual readiness to squeeze a profit out of it, depending on your level of cynicism. (Or, quite possibly, given the miniscule fragment of the galaxy humanity actually occupied, the Guild’s staggering level of hubris.)
    As I made my way between the tables, which had apparently been scattered arbitrarily around the floor, I noticed a number of other Guild sigils, adorning shirts, coats, caps, and at least one evening gown half the hostesses on Avalon would cheerfully have committed murder for. I hesitated a moment, to allow a serving drone to hum past my head and land on an intermediate table with its cargo of drinks, before finally arriving at my aunt’s booth.
    “That was quick,” she greeted me, adding what do you want to drink? as our ‘spheres interpenetrated.
    “Ale,” I said verbally, and she kicked the order over to the drone, which had delivered its cargo, and was now aimlessly orbiting the room with its fellows, waiting for another set of instructions. The drink seemed appropriate in this kind of setting, and I wanted something I could make last without seeming to.
    Aunt Jenny nodded, and glanced at her guest. “John?”
    “Same again.” He drained something amber-colored from the bottom of a tumbler, and replaced the glass on the table, as I slid onto the arm of the U-shaped bench directly across from him. He looked at me the way Guilders look at everything, which is to say with a kind of guarded neutrality—at least until they’ve determined whether you’re harmless, dangerous, or likely to be useful to them in some way. “John Remington, of the Stacked Deck .”
    “Simon Forrester,” I said, “of nowhere any more.” That kind of slipped out, and I mentally bit my tongue, conscious of having revealed some vulnerability he’d certainly exploit if he could. But it seemed to have been the right thing to