The white quartz sand of the private tiered arena was still smoking where Titus’s sixty-foot descent had crushed the brass auctioneer’s podium into glowing metal dust.
In the velvet-draped corporate viewing boxes above, the twenty oligarchs, mine directors, and black-market syndicators were coughing wildly on crushed glass, burned ozone, and fine rock dust. Several were nursing bleeding cuts from the shattered bulletproof barriers, while others cowered behind overturned dark wood drink carts. He grabbed their silver-tipped canes like scared schoolboys caught in an artillery strike.
In the center of the sand ring stood Arthur Vance, his ARC-7 mag-carbine held at low ready, his eyes scanning the gallery with the detached, cold and exact scrutiny of a coroner arriving at a mass-casualty scene.
Beside Arthur’s knee sat the mutilated Ashen hound. Its shivering body leaned against Arthur’s leg, resting peacefully under the analgesic haze of the newly injected painkiller.
Arthur knelt in the sand for a moment. He pulled a small brass-handled bone chisel and wire cutters from his vest. With gentle, steady fingers, he removed the two crude silver-steel brackets that had been screwed into the hound’s cheekbone, relieving the painful tension on the animal’s temporomandibular joint. He irrigated the puncture sites with silver-sulfur antiseptic and applied a sterile gauze compress.
