I was called for patronage twice, both times humans, both some unlucky run-off-the-mill pirate crew members who died within hours of getting to the hellish place. I tried to help, but they wouldn’t listen. Hardened criminals thought they were tough, well, compared to Xan’s population, the outside world was a playground. If it wasn’t for my Technomancer abilities I would be sitting in Vogron’s cell, waiting for the six-armed behemoth to rape me senseless. I shuddered at the very thought.
I waited for my dependent while scouting the new recruits. A lot of Shia again. They were very represented in Xan, and even though I had no idea about their numbers, I swore there was a Shia for every other race in the prison. A Takkari was there too; he looked frightened as hell. He should have been. Prisoners didn’t like Takkaris. Many of them worked for Takkaris and many of them were in Xan because of a Takkari. Not to speak of the fact that the warden was one.
Eventually, the room cleared and only two guards remained aside from me.
“Where’s my dependent?” I asked.
“What’s your number?”
I hated that question. They all had a primitive version of an INAS installed and could recall our names and bios themselves. Asking for our numbers was a pure power play.
“L-93231.”
One of the guards smiled at the other.
“Ah, yes, the Bloodmancer.”
I said nothing. That was the name the audience gave me in the arena. I didn’t mind as it made my enemies nervous, but the guard feigned ignorance to piss me off. They all watched the fights and betted on them. I knew he knew me.
I kept my head down, avoiding eye contact. They wouldn’t get a reaction out of me; they never had and they never would.
“Here you go,” the guard said while handing me something. I instinctively took it from his hand. It was a piece of tech. Maybe a part of a ship’s navigation computer or something. I looked at the guard with a stern expression on my face.
“What the—”
“Just wait,” he said with a broad grin plastered to his ugly face. A whitish goo suddenly oozed out the piece of machinery and dropped onto my hand. I flinched, dropping the tech and trying to get the goo off my hand.
“What the fuck is—”
“Easy there, Bloodmancer, that’s your dependent. It won’t hurt you,” the guard laughed. For a long time. “I guess!”
“What the hell is it?”
Before any of the two guards could answer I heard a faint voice.
“Let me stay, please,” it said weakly.
“Huh? What the hell? Who’s talking?” The guards shook with laughter at my strange predicament. “What the fuck is going on?”
“It’s me, I’m the goo on your hand, as you called me just now.”
“How the hell are you talking to me?”
“I infiltrated your INAS. I’m sorry, please, just give me a second to explain.”
“You’re inside my head!”
“No, no, no, I can’t invade biological tissue. I’m inside the artificial parts of your body. You have plenty and you have so many nanites. Mitto can live here well.”
“Live here? Who said that you could live inside of me? Get out! Now!”
The two guards must have known what would happen because they were both hunched over from laughter as they watched me run around the room talking to myself.
“Please!”
“Get out of me! Now,” I hissed, readying to push the nanites through my skin and, with them, the little hitchhiker who dared to make me his hotel room. The thing must have sensed the nanites moving because it begged for its life again.
“Listen, please! Please give Mitto a chance! I can only survive around electromagnetism and you’re the only one in this prison that has enough of it!”
“Lies! There’s plenty of prisoners who have more tech in their bodies than I do!” I pushed the nanites again as a warning not to lie to me.
“Ok, ok, you’re right. I lied, sorry. Mitto doesn’t make a habit of lying. They’re all insane. I checked the databanks for this prison. You’re the only one with a pinch of decency in this place. Please, the others will certainly kill me and I can’t survive without a host. I won’t bother you, I promise.”
“No way in hell am I letting another being live inside of me.”
“I can be useful, just wait,” it said as the nanites slowly started escaping through my skin.
“How?”
“Mitto can go into computers and cameras and chips. Mitto can help you tons! And Mitto doesn’t always have to be in your head. It’s enough if you let me sit on your shoulder. I only need to feed sometimes. I can help you become stronger and live a better life!”
Damn it. I was sure I would let the thing disappear, but it was more opportunism that saved Mitto than compassion at that moment. In Xan, you had to get an edge over others one way or another. Being a good fighter in the arena made heads bow in the hallways, but being able to fight didn’t mean someone couldn’t poison you, stab you in your sleep, or just arrange for you to be indefinitely in solitary.
“Mitto, let’s make one thing clear then. This is my head, and you stay out of it whenever I tell you to.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
“Another thing, you don’t get to call me boss.”
2
“It’s unwise to keep this thing around,” Fars said casually as he stuffed his face full of meat. Real meat, that is. Straight from the Mortians’ kitchen. He was a savage when he ate, and it was hard to look at that blue 400-pound muscle beast tear into another hiksha leg.
“Then stop stuffing yourself with all that food if you’re so against Mitto. If it wasn’t for him, I’d never crack the code on the food dispenser.”
“I’m just using the opportunity we were given, nothing else,” he muttered while chewing on the bones of the chicken-like alien. He ate meat, skin, and bone as if it was nothing. An Eres’ jaws were like that of a hippo from back on earth. It would have been a stupid thing to underestimate them as they could gnaw through almost anything.
I was about to say something about it, but then I remembered seeing him once smuggle an Oshamian’s arm out of the arena and then eat it raw in our quarters after the lights went off. That also meant that I had the greatest of times when Fars got rid of the little waste his eating habits produced. Especially because we shared a toilet in our quarters.
“Mitto can be helpful,” Mitto said as he sat comfortably on my shoulder and even nested himself in against my neck.
The goo creature managed to give off weak sounds with the help of my nanites, but the sound was just loud enough for us to hear. I had grown ever more used to the strange parasite. One of the first tricks he showed me was how to manipulate the food dispensers into giving us food meant for the hacks. It was the first time we ate something other than the creamy brown puddle of nutrients we simply called “The Brown.”
“He is not an honorable creature is all I’m saying.”
I sighed. Fars was easy to judge, especially those who he thought were weak, but he failed to see his own mistakes. It was a trait shared by all Eres and one that went on my nerves. If only I could always tell him that he was no better, but I wasn’t interested in getting my arm chewed off in rage or losing my friend.
“Drop the matter, Fars.”
“It isn’t honorable for us to associate with it.”
The big Eres outcast always managed to stun me with his outings.
“But it is honorable to eat the food that he provided?”
“Take the card that was dealt to you, right?”
“So it’s out of your hands? That hiksha leg you just ate, that’s not your fault? It just happened to fall into your mouth?”
“Don’t school me, Richard Stavos. I may have lost my honor in the eyes of my brothers, but I will never forget our ways.”
Fine. I learned not to get into that argument with Fars or any other Eres for that matter. Their concepts of honor were so complicated, they had so
many nooks and crannies that I stopped trying to understand it a long time ago. Somehow, whenever we talked about the issue, it turned out that whatever Fars decided to do was the honorable thing to do, no matter that perhaps a day earlier the very opposite was the honorable thing.
“So, are you full? Can we do this now?”
“Yes,” he said calmly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “It will be an honor.”
I focused my H-Nan cells into the bloodstream of my hands. The nanites drove through the pores into my skin and my Ro Sword materialized in all of its glory. Like every time Fars saw the sword General Qualt gifted me on Detera, he spoke two lines in the language of Old Eres and slammed his fist against his chest three times. Then it was my turn. I cut Fars’ palm open and the blood immediately pooled there. I opened my left palm and let Fars’ blood drip onto it. The nanites absorbed Fars’ blood and I could feel it entering my system.
My body temperature instantly skyrocketed throwing me into a now familiar half-consciousness. Tomorrow was my first match in the Sulan Xan Games and I couldn’t risk being left without enough nanites. By tomorrow, my body would have absorbed the nanite-rich Eres blood and increased my nanite capacity by a third.
The Ro Sword disappeared as I leaned back in a drowsy mood.
“Are you sure that...” I said as my eyes began to close, “that you didn’t take any of that shit?”
“You dishonor me, Richard Stavos,” Fars said while helping my legs up on the bed.
“Nah, I never—” I mumbled as I descended into sleep. As the last of my vision disappeared, I saw Fars pulling a small package out of his pocket. He waited for after the blood transfusion to snack on his beloved snapp. Sure he was an addict, but at least an honorable one.
Since I was thrown into Xan, I fought up to twice a week in one of the many arenas across the planet. The fights were extremely popular with both the prison population and the uncountable visitors from other planets. Nowhere else in the galaxy did the many races meet, greet, and then kill one another to a cheering crowd like in Xan. It was both a way for it to make ridiculous amounts of credits from gambling and keep the prison population from growing out of proportion.
In the beginning, I thought I had made it to hell. The moment I finished my first set of fights, which I barely survived, they threw me into gen-pop. My patron was a Shia named Harra, who had led me to one of the Shia wavemasters, who in turn were something like bosses of Shia gangs. They tried to persuade me to kill one of Vogron’s men who owed them creds. When I refused, they sent three Orros after me later that day. I had to kill all three in plain sight of the hacks to survive. After that, the Shia learned to leave me alone, but the hacks threw me in solitary for a week. That was the first time I was in solitary and it scared the shit out of me. I promised myself to never let them throw me back in again, but I broke that promise so many times now that thinking of it made me laugh.
Today’s fight wasn’t in some random arena. It was in the very heart of Xan. A giant stadium with hundreds of thousands of seats called the Redemption Tomb. As I walked the corridor in chains while surrounded by eight Mortian guards, I felt the walls tremble from the audiences’ uproar. A fight was already taking place and they were enjoying it. If I remembered correctly, Lord Insten was fighting against the Hadron. I had seen the scoreboards and theirs was the third in a series of fights scheduled for the day.
I betted my money on Lord Insten and so did most prisoners. And yes, we also partook in the gambling with what little creds we had. Though I shunned the idea at first, there were only two things you could kill time with in Xan: fighting was one, gambling the other.
Lord Insten was more robot than a creature. He was a noble-born Greth, one of the races that held much of the territory in this part of the galaxy. Apparently, he hadn’t been noble enough because he ended up with the rest of us in Xan. I never saw the Hadron, though, only heard stories and from those stories, I had made an educated guess.
There were a lot of legends about fighters both living and dead in Xan. Hadron’s legend was a bit too murky for my taste. Apparently, he had single-handedly slain six Corovian Babka beasts in the arena, tore their eyes out, and ate them. Whoever had fought a Babka beast knew that their eyes, together with the rest of their face, melted away the moment their hearts stopped working. I knew it because I fought them on several occasions, but Hadron probably hadn’t.
At the end of the corridor was a gate large enough for a tank to pass through. The guard prodded me to move, so I did.
“Wait at the bars until your name is called out,” he said and looked away. I was about to ask him if this was the best they had to offer but then thought the better of it.
There were eight corridors leading into the arena. The authorities had to make sure we wouldn’t mix before the fights. You could easily lose a fighter that way before he ever stepped foot on the sands—and with it, probably millions of creds.
I peeked through the bars and pretty much saw what I expected to see. Lord Insten was beating the hell out of the Vakaz known as Hadron. The frog-like creature used a giant two-handed flail, and though some dents in Lord Insten’s armor told the story of landed hits, the purple blood oozing from its crevasses and the limp in its walk foreshadowed the winner.
Lord Insten was a dangerous creature. He had to prove himself in Xan twice as much as the average prisoner. Not only was he a Greth, but he was a noble Greth and it took a small army of dead assassins to prove to the other prisoners that the only thing hiding behind his aristocratic upbringings was a very dangerous killer.
Lord Insten slammed his cybernetic fist into Hadron with enough force to rupture the incredibly thick hide of the Vakaz. The color of its bulbous eyes turned from a sharp yellow to white in seconds. The crowd cheered, though they were somewhat reserved. Lord Insten wasn’t popular with the visitors. The commoners despised him for his noble background and the nobles despised the idea of one of their own falling from grace.
It was good to be popular in the arena. The more cheers you gathered, the fatter the warden’s wallet became. Get on the audiences’ bad side and the authorities sent you fighting ten contestants at once.
A swarm of Shia carried the dead Hadron away as Lord Insten bathed in his infamy for several long seconds. He quickly grew bored by the lack of cheers and left the sands of the arena as the next fight was announced.
“From the very heart of the Partak Sector, we bring you Solez Rin the Shadow!”
The announcer went on speaking, and unlike with Lord Insten, the audience roared when Solez was announced. He was very well known across Xin. I had never met him before, but I heard the legends. A Sintagmian clone that went rogue and acquired a whole personality. It was unprecedented to have a self-aware clone, but it turned out his creator was fumbling with a new and improved cloning technology, which backfired when Solez murdered everyone involved in the project. He lived as a pirate for decades, some said centuries, before he was finally caught. Though these legends were often just that, legends, Solez still managed to send a shiver down my spine.
“A disgraced warrior of the Commonwealth Federation, Richard Stavos the Bloodmancer!”
Again, the crowd roared though not as much as for Solez I noticed. That didn’t surprise me too much if I had to be honest, as no one in the Partak Sector liked the Commonwealth Federation. Though not in open war, the few times the races of the Partak Sector united was to resist the Federation’s advances on their territory. Deals were struck, and the Imminy left the Partak sectors to their rightful rulers, but their presence was ever felt across the sector. The Aloi didn’t seem to care for the barren place. They never even came close to trying and conquering the region.
I stepped into the arena while keeping my eyes on Solez Rin the Shadow. My INAS couldn’t identify either its race, sex, or anything else of import for that matter. Perhaps some of the legends floating around were true.
Solez was the size of a human. He was covered in some sort of bl
ack, rock-like material. Two long blades extended from his forearms and I immediately noticed that the blades could move in all directions and change their size as well as shape.
I cursed under my breath as I imagined one of them passing right through me. Damn aliens and their appendages! In the end, it meant that I just had to be very careful in a swordfight because I could never know how far his next strike would reach.
“Let there be graves for the Redemption Tomb!” the announcer roared theatrically, pulling me back from my thoughts. The fight began and at the very same moment, Solez Rin completely disappeared.
I threw on my Blade Shield and scanned the arena with my INAS as my Ro appeared in my hand, but no indication of Solez Rin was to be found. No scent, no vibration, and not a gush of air that caressed my skin. One would think that an alien made from rocks wasn’t going to be as stealthy as a cat, but there we were.
A sudden sensation of dread washed over me just as the tiniest of drafts touched down on my neck. Then I felt it, a presence behind me. I turned around and lunged back, blocking an overhead attack as his blades materialized. Sparks showered our bodies as the blades clashed and I noticed him wince slightly.
The impact was incredibly strong for something of Solez’s size. The blow pushed me back and into the ground. I slid to the side and kicked out, catching him in the chest as his blades deflected off to the opposite side. Using the momentum, I stepped into his reach and stabbed the sword at his neck, straight like a fencer. He bolted to the side and deflected my jab before disappearing again.
The crowd roared in approval at our brief but competent display of force. Every single one of them enjoyed when prisoners ripped each other apart, but the thing they loved even more than pure death was a show of skill that would build up their anticipation to extreme heights at which they got off.
Redeemer: A Military Space Opera Series (War Undying Book 2) Page 2