“I hold the reins right now. If I decide to do something that you don’t like, you won’t be able to stop me … neither you, nor your female friend.”
“So Mara’s against you too?” Rynason said.
“She made a few remarks earlier,” Manning said calmly. “She may regret it soon enough.”
Rynason looked at the man through narrowed eyes for a moment, then strapped on a gunbelt and loaded one of the stunners. He snapped it into the holster carefully, wondering just what Manning had meant by his last remark. Was it a threat in any real sense, or was Manning just letting off steam? Well, they’d see about that too … and Rynason would be watching.
Within half an hour close to sixty men had collected outside Manning’s door. They were dirty and unshaven; some of them were working in the town, a few were miners, but most of them were drifters who had followed the advance of the star frontier, who drank and brawled in the streets of the town, sleeping by day and raising hell at night. They stole when they could, killed when they wanted.
The drifters were men who had been all over the worlds of the Edge, who had spent years watching the new planets opened for colonization and exploitation, but had never got their own piece. They knew the feel of these planetfall towns on the Edge, and could talk for hours about the worlds they had seen. But they were city men, all of them; they had seen the untamed worlds, but only from the streets. They hadn’t taken part in the exploring or the building, only in the initial touchdowns. When the building was done, they signed on to the spacers again and drifted to the next world, farther out.
Rynason looked at their faces from where he stood in the doorway, listening to Manning talking to them. They were hard men, mean and sometimes vicious. Nameless faces, all of them, having no place in the more developed areas of the Terran civilization. And maybe that was their own fault. But Rynason knew that they were running, not to anything, but from the civilization itself. Running … because when an area was settled and started to become respectable, they began to see what they did not have. The temporary quarters would come down, to be replaced by permanent buildings that were meant to be lived in, not just as places for sleeping. Closets, and shelters for landcars; quadsense receivers and food integrators. They didn’t want to see that … because they hated it, or because they wanted it? It didn’t matter, Rynason decided. They ran, and now they were here on the Edge with all their anger and frustration, and Manning was ready to give them a way to let it out.
At the side of the mob he saw a familiar grey shock of hair—Rene Malhomme. Was he with them, then? Rynason craned his neck for a better view, and for a moment the crowd parted enough to let him see Malhomme’s face. He was looking directly toward Rynason, holding a dully gleaming knife flat against his thick chest … and his lips were drawn back into the crooked, sardonic smile which Rynason had seen many times. No, Malhomme at least was not part of this mob.
“We already know which direction they went,” Manning was saying. “Lessingham will be in charge of the main body, and you’ll follow him. If he gives you an order, take it. This is a serious business; we won’t have room for bickering.
“Some of us will be scouting with the flyers. We’ll be in radio contact with you. When we find out where they are we’ll reconnoiter and make our plans from there.”