Originators by Andrew Lane

Author:Andrew Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books

8

More Tea, Vicar? was a retro bar on the north side of Bermondsey Square run by a former galactic smuggler and her extended family. Forty years ago it had been the last classic pie and mash caff in London, but the people who’d eaten there had gradually moved away or died. Newcomers did not understand a solid meat pie, lumpy mashed potato, and parsley gravy made with flour and the water used to boil eels. Gliese and Cancri, yes, but that was just too alien. They did not like to feel that a dying elephant had moved into their lower bowels. The caff was sold. Now it was artfully, some would say archly, decorated like an old-fashioned English tea room, all chintz and black oak-style compound wood. There was a bar. There were tables with comfortable chairs. More Tea, Vicar? was also a thieves’ den, and it didn’t stop at thieves. Just as there were Official and Unofficial Assassins, so too there were licensed and unlicensed criminals. And EarthCent decided who got the licences.

You couldn’t stop crime. So it was better to accept it, control it and let criminals police themselves, keeping out the riff-raff who gave crime a bad name. No guilds or associations. They were tried but within a matter of hours there were breakaways, splinter groups and blood was spilt. There was demarcation, though. A licensed pickpocket might not steal from a house. A licensed confidence trickster would be unwise to try mugging. Licensed shoplifters did not engage in prostitution. In fact, few people did. These days anyone could enjoy the full simulity experience, complete with Fresh-Clean body-form suit offering one thousand senso-matic pleasure points and the vagina or penis or both of your dreams. People had been known to die in there.

But you would find none of these criminals at More Tea, Vicar?

At the Vic, as it was known to its members, you only found corporate criminals who dealt in information. Mercenaries and Official Assassins who dealt in death. Those who bankrolled drug dealers. Smugglers of entire factories. Dealers in bootleg alien tech. Visiting warlords. Those involved in galactic activities that were not so much illegal – there was no law in space, and it changed from colony planet to colony planet – but obviously, achingly wrong. It was said that on any given night there were enough people in the Vic with the skills to take over a small city state, and probably a couple planning to do it. There was an understanding of how far any one individual or group could go. Ignore it, and an Official Assassin, perhaps someone you met and drank with at the Vic, would kill you. Ostensibly hired by a competitor but, as Kara Jones now understood, yet another set of strings pulled by GalDiv.

She wondered if knowing the truth might shadow her eyes into a thousand-light-year stare. Customers at the Vic were astute and always watchful.

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