Kill Station by Diane Duane & Peter Morwood Read Free Book Online

Joss said, as he swiped the man's legs out from under him with a leg sweep and knocked a table over on top of him, just to give the guy something to think about for a few minutes.
    He paused a moment to see what Evan was doing. Evan was doing just fine. He had "Smith" in one hand, and another man in the other, and he was banging their heads together. The resultant sound was not altogether musical. Didn 't hit him hard enough, Joss thought with mild regret that he had made extra work for Evan. As someone grabbed his right shoulder from behind, Joss spun around the other way and put a punch just to the left of where the right shoulder had been. The woman who was standing in that spot, with her fist cocked and ready, went down. "Oh, crap," said Joss, and then three people jumped him from
    SPACE COPS 35
    three sides. He went down, and one of them sat on his head.
    It was a bad moment. Joss lashed straight out with one fist at the last target he saw before his vision was obscured. It was a focused strike, maybe a little too focused, but it made sure that at least one of the men would have to give recreational sex a miss for a good while. The peculiar hooting screech he immediately heard confirmed that. His only remaining business at this point was to shift his own lower body as fast as he could, to keep anyone from doing anything similar to him.
    A moment later the weight came off his head and was flung away to one side, to judge by the thump and screech that followed. "Come on, old son," he heard Evan say, and a hand the side of a ham closed on his upper arm and hauled him to his feet.
    "Wait a minute; I don't think we should leave this unfinished," Joss sad, looking around him hurriedly.
    "There are only—" He did a hasty headcount of the crowd closing in. "Uh, there are only thirty of them—"
    Evan backed toward the door, and Joss went with him. He didn't have much choice, any more than did most human beings or other heavy objects Evan picked up and threw over his shoulder. "Why do you start these things when I don't have my suit on?" Evan asked.
    "Whaddaya mean, / started it?"
    "I could have wiped this whole place up," Evan said ruefully, but not too loudly, since about fifteen of the thirty people were pacing them toward the door, though at a safe distance. "Now we're getting thrown out of a bar. This is not going to do my reputation any good."
    "Thrown—You can't throw us out," Joss shouted. "We're leaving!"
    "Aah, shut your cakehole," Evan said in good-natured disgust. "At least there's this: everybody on the station is going to want to talk to us now, to see if they can get us into a fight. It's an ill wind, and so forth.
    Come on, let's go clean up and get some dinner."

TWO
    THE WILLANS POLICE STATION WAS IN A DOME.
    Evan was scandalized; the place should have been properly dug into the asteroid, for security's sake if not for the safety of the staff who worked there. It was not the first time that morning he had been scandalized, and he was getting unhappily used to it.
    When they had emerged that morning—Evan after a prolonged battle with his 'fresher unit, which was defective, and needed more than the usual picking out with a pin that he found himself doing to shower heads and 'fresher fixtures all over Sol system—the landlord, that shrunken-souled creature, had tried to hit them for several new charges that they had not agreed to the evening before, including a blanket O2
    charge which did not exist. Evan had leaned over him, at his chipped, stained little desk, and glowered.
    This was normally a technique Evan was too proud to use. His size was an accident; the good God had decided to make him two point one meters tall. He hated to make capital of it, but this man was a walking excuse for intimidation—and not by some blackmailing lywdllych thug of a miner, but by someone with the law on his side. Evan stood there, therefore, eyes narrowed, expression darkening, leaning closer and closer to the man, and