There were still gangs, of course, but they all rode hover-bikes and that just wasn't the same.

Decelerating, Chris dropped back a little to check up on Willie, and grinned across him at Ham, riding on the other side.  It had been Chris' idea, that he and Ham take off on a pal's weekend -- something they hadn't done in years -- and Ham's that Willie join them.  They'd bought him a refurbished Harley for Christmas, taught him how to ride it (much to Thelma's chagrin) and here he was, straddling the saddle of a low-rider, reaching up to the high handles above.  They were an odd sight, not only because ground-contact vehicles were rare these days and legally limited to use outside of city limits.   Chris had already joked about 'geriatric hooligans' as he, 51 and streaked with grey hairs, had donned his leathers and black sun-shields.  Even Willie looked older, because he'd discovered that his permanently youthful looks disturbed the humans who were visibly growing older around him, and promptly went to the 'Second Skin' store for a more mature plasti-flesh body.

Willie grinned at his companions and shot off unexpectedly ahead of them.  This motor bike riding was fun!  He wished he'd learned to ride much sooner.  It was almost like flying a Disc back on the homeworld, except that on a motor bike you had to sit down.

Chris chuckled, exchanged a spirited look with Ham, and together they roared after the speeding Saurian.  Caught up in the mood of it they raced each other to Inneston, 20 kilometres down the road.
 
 

"You get to buy lunch," Chris told him cheerfully.  Willie accepted that with his usual good grace and they wheeled their bikes into the storehouse, paid the holding fee and walked into town, which did not allow contact-vehicles within its limits.

There was a bar off the main street and it was full of middle-aged bikers.   Chris waved greeting to a few he recognized as Ham found them a table.   Most contact-riders these days were over 35, and the majority were in their early fifties, like Chris and Ham.  Young people these days preferred the hover-transports available to them.

Willie watched the crowed with some nostalgia.  Kyle Bates would probably have been here, if he had not died, and thinking of Kyle always brought memories of Elizabeth.  They had no contact at all any more, though he still kept his scrapbook of her.  She was still a leading figure in Human/Saurian affairs, very involved in the diplomatic and political intrigues that went on as the two cultures mingled more and more.

His train of thought was interrupted as Chris plonked a tube of beer in front of him.

"Havin' fun?" Tyler asked, tucking his sun-shields into his top pocket and sipping on his Saurian brandy.  Willie smiled and nodded vigorously.

"It's very... exhilarating.  I am glad this Second Skin is partially organic and linked with my own skin.  I can feel the wind in my face... "

Chris guffawed.  "Least if it blows your hair off you can get some more.  Poor Ham here had all his blown onto the back of his head!"  Then he chuckled at Ham's offended expression.

Willie watched bemusedly. After all this time he still hadn't quite got a handle on the relationship between these two.  Next to Alex, Chris seemed to be the only person in the two worlds who could insult Ham Tyler with impunity.

A commotion at the door drew their attention and they turned to see a dozen or so young people, a mixture of Humans and Saurians, burst into the bar, full of energy and noise.  They wore the tight, seamless black pants and shirts of a hover-gang, the insignia on their left sleeves proclaiming them to be the Cannibals.

Willie glanced at his friends, marking that they had both tensed, Ham reaching automatically for the gun he habitually carried under his jacket.  He relaxed again, just, but he remained wary.

The Cannibals surged rowdily into the bar, commandeered the counter and proceeded to make a nuisance of themselves. The old-time bikers resolved to ignore them, but the youths did not want to be ignored.  They took over tables, deliberately jostled elbows and feigned apology, helped themselves to others' food and drink.  Then one made the mistake of taking a liking to Chris' battered old bike jacket.

At 51 Chris was not as fit as he used to be, but he still had strength.  The offending Cannibal, in the midst of helping Chris out of his jacket, found himself inexplicably flying across the room.  He landed heavily on the floor.

Ham looked askance at his partner.  "Was that really necessary?"

Chris shrugged and drained his beer.  "The place needs pepping up."

It pepped up all right.  The brawl began in a record 15 seconds.  Bikers vs Cannibals, and though the young ones had all the energy, the older ones knew all the dirty tricks.  Willie sought refuge beneath a table but Ham and Chris found it more rewarding to be in the thick of it.

With his hands full of belligerent Human, Chris absently shifted his burden around to block an oncoming blow from a Saurian in black skin-tights.  He grinned at Ham, eyes sparkling.

"Ain't had this much fun in years!"

Ham's only reply was a lupine smile.

Ten minutes later the police arrived.  One minute after that the place was empty and there was no-one left to charge.  Bikers had as much love for the cops as the hover-gangs.

There was a nervous coughing from somewhere in the midst of the wrecked bar and a uniformed man retrieved a sorry-looking Willie from under a collapsed table.  He smiled wanly.

"There you are!" Chris and Ham entered the room, escorted by a few more of Inneston's Finest.

"Found these two coming back," reported one to his senior.

Sheriff Theo crinkled his unmasked lizard face sourly, surveying the damage done, and cast his eyes on the two bikers.  Trouble makers, the pair of them, with no respect for order.  "Book them.  The three of them," he nodded at Willie as well, "Then get after those Cannibals.  I've had it with them trashing this place."

Suddenly, the bearded lout smiled.  "Perhaps, Sheriff, we could do a trade... "

A few hours later the three of them were on their Harleys, ten kilometres out of town.

Finding the Cannibals' camp had been simple enough with some old Indian tracking techniques.  What to do next was the hard part.  Chris, and Ham (who had adopted his most charming persona for the task) had talked the Sheriff into a trade-off.  If they could bring in the Cannibals, all charges against the leading figures of TFE would be dropped. There was no chance of them skipping -- road-contact vehicles, being so rare these days, were damned simple to trace and they'd be found and arrested in no time.  It was easier (and more fun, insisted Chris) to go ahead with the deal.

An hour or so had been spent on the construction of some simple but useful devices and a quick lecture to Willie on gang warfare, then they headed off.

Now they sat on their silent bikes, regarding the hills ahead.  Extremely loud music -- a bizarre mixture of heavy metal rock and the apparently unstructured wailing of Saurian instruments -- vibrated up through the trees.

"So... who gets to go in first?" Chris wanted to know.

"It was your idea," Ham pointed out, "You go."

"But you look meaner'n me.  More worth beating up... "

"How 'bout Willie?"  They both scrutinized him until he shuffled uncomfortably.

"I don't know... he'll bring out their 'strangle-the-kitten' instincts for sure... "

In the end Willie didn't get much opportunity to protest.  He looked like Bait and got volunteered for the part.  He didn't mind, really.  It was all quite exciting.  He hadn't felt like this since the War.

The Cannibals' camp was haphazard and noisy.  A 5cm square boom-box was playing a disc at top volume and half a dozen were adding their voices to the cacophony.  A Saurian boy, wearing the trendy half-plasti skin in spirals about his body was dancing for some of the girls, who were cheering him on with whistles and lizard-hisses.  More were scattered about -- arm-wrestling, arguing, carrying out minor repairs to their hovers.  When Willie burst onto the scene, sailing over a small rise then taking off through the middle of the camp and down towards the road again, all previous activity came to an abrupt halt.

Tyler glanced across Chris' bike to where Willie was hurtling down the hill, a pack of howling Cannibals on his tail.  He grinned wolfishly at Chris.  Chris' answering smile was just as gleeful as they dropped their sun-shields over their eyes and surged down the road on their Harleys.

Willie caught up with them, spurred by some fear and the Saurian equivalent of adrenaline, and they manoeuvred into a triangle as the Cannibals closed the gap.

"We won't outrun them!" Willie called out, taking a goggle-eyed glance backwards.

"Don't need to," Chris called back, "Just get ready!"

In moments a swarm of hover bikes were overhead and Willie yelled in sudden fright as something bit into his arm.  A small but ferocious grapple had closed its teeth on him.   It had slid over his own skin and was tearing away a good portion of his plasti-flesh.  It tingled rather than hurt, because the organic connections to his own skin broke as the surfaces parted, but he was dismayed.  He'd only had it replaced a few weeks ago.

"Willie -- grab it!" Ham nodded at the metal, snake-like chain leading from the grapple to the rider above.  Willie snatched it in one hand and instinctively pulled with all his Saurian strength.  The human rider promptly catapulted forward as his momentum carried him over the low bars of the suddenly slowed hover-bike.

Willie released the coil, realizing that the riderless hover was about to run amok, which it did, rather satisfyingly, knocking one Cannibal askew and tangling a second up in the grapple.  He was the wild hover careening higher and faster away with the surprised victim of the grapple in unexpected tow.

A shout reclaimed his attention and he sped up to avoid a lead weight dropping down from above.  Ham, he noticed, had some blood on his sleeve and a tear in his leather jacket from another grapple.  He dealt with it effectively, jamming the grapple's teeth onto the bars of his bike, then slamming on the brakes.  The hover arced gracefully nose-first into the ground, its counter-gravity unit losing out to momentum.

Ham unhooked the grapple and, glancing up, tossed it straight up into the belly of another hover.  It landed luckily and tore out the stabilizing control.  Scratch another Cannibal.

Chris was speaking instructions into the tiny tag-mike pressed into his jacket collar, then reached into a jury-rigged box set on the fuel tank.  He pulled out a small bronze polyhedron and pressed a tab on one of its facets.  It glowed incandescent turquoise.  Slewing off to one side he waited for a speeding hover to give him a low pass.  When it did he aimed and threw.  The device settled on the underneath of the hover and its turquoise field quickly negated the soft pink one of the counter-gravity unit.  The hover dropped like a stone, and Chris smiled.  The little null-field was one of his own toys and he was quite pleased with the result.

He disabled another four this way before nearly having his face torn off with a grapple.  Ham drew alongside and untangled the thing with one hand from his partner's bear and savagely swung it at a nearing tree.  It dug well into the branches, and the hover into the ground beside it.

Willie was having trouble.  A grapple had fastened itself onto the fuel tank.  There was no spillage, naturally, since even this old machine had been converted to Perpetual Energy, but it held him on a puppet string to the Saurian woman above, and he was spending his time trying to dodge the sharp, teardrop shaped lead weight being dropped on him.  His plasti-flesh was ripped in a few places and starting to tatter in the wind.  Chris homed in on one side, distracting the rider.  He daren't use a null-field on this one, with that damned umbilical holding Willie directly under the hover, but there were other means available. Ham drew in on Willie's right, his gun now firmly in his left hand.  Keeping pace with Willie's erratic speed wasn't easy, but he held alongside long enough to pass the gun to Willie.  He nodded at the grapple chain then peeled off to the right to take care of someone homing in to interfere.

The bike wobbled dangerously, due to Willie's one-handed steering, but he held the compact weapon to the taut coil and fired.  The searing light and sudden release of tension on his vehicle nearly unseated him.  The hover, suddenly minus the anchor it had been stressed against, shot up skyward.

"Ahead!" Ham called, spotting a pass between two hills to the right.  The three Harleys veered off the road and the remaining Cannibals shot after them.

"Don't stop!" yelled Tyler, sitting low in the seat.  Chris chucked his enjoyment and signalled to the uniformed policeman waiting in secrecy.  The hover-bikes flew straight into a broad null-field net set up in the pass.  Sheriff Theo already had some of those scattered down the road, and in various states of injury, and got ready to load this lot into a wagon.

"Hey, where'd those bikers go?"

"Should I get after them, sir?"

The sheriff looked around at the Cannibals.  "No.  We'll get them next time."

"Yeeeeee... hooooooooo!"

Ham smiled at Chris.  Damn, that had been the best fun he'd had in years!  Even Willie was grinning like an idiot, at least where his human face hadn't been torn off.  They all had their battle scars for the day -- Ham regretted the hold in his only remaining leather jacket but hell, it was better than a hole in his arm, right?  And anyway, he didn't seem to wear much leather these days, 'cept for occasions such as this.

With a sudden laugh, Ham opened up the throttle and took the lead.

"Fifty klicks to Sangster's Waterhole, and the last one there gets to catch the dinner!"
 

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