by Logan Jacobs
“Huh?” I started to say but was interrupted when PoLarr lunged forward and palmed my forehead like a basketball. I had barely a second to utter a surprised “Hey!” before tiny forks of white electricity shot from her palm into my skull.
The room faded away, although I felt as if I could still see it, as if I floated above it. PoLarr and I floated higher than the ceiling of the shooting range should have been. PoLarr was surrounded by light and actual wings with black raven feathers stretched out behind her. She was clad in shiny Nordic-inspired plate armor and her guns had been replaced by swords that hung at her hips. A large, many branched tree stood behind her on a piece of earth that looked like it had been dug out of the ground and floated in the air. Its roots were many and ran deep. If I wasn’t mistaken, it was the Tree of Life. Then our eyes met and a jolt of energy surged through me.
PoLarr’s memories began to flow into my mind. It was as if I was her and not her at the same time. We flew over sections of her memory from high above as if they were fields of wheat. We stopped on PoLarr in her late teens, one of a group of nine young women who sat before a wizened old crone in a decorated military uniform. I could almost hear the woman as she spoke to us but the words were like ghosts and evaporated just as I was about to understand them. Then we flew again and found young PoLarr practicing a tai chi style martial art. It was slow, steady, and purposeful. She did the same moves over and over and over again as she time-lapsed through her teens and into her early twenties. Then the memory of pain and struggle as she went through boot camp hit and my muscles ached, my feet blistered, and my resolve hardened.
The memories flowed faster and faster now. PoLarr and the same nine women, older, in military uniforms as they ran kata-like drills with their guns. A shadow of a memory of flying for the first time, blue wings against a dark sky. Fear and excitement of her first battle. Remnants of heartache as she watched a sister perish.
Finally, the whisper of a remembrance of PoLarr alone on a scorched battlefield as an army descended upon her. She stood like a granite cliff, and the army broke like a wave upon her. I could see her moves in my mind’s eye, feel them in my bones and muscles, her utter devotion to the moment, the now, as she laid waste to the entire army.
Then as quick as it started the vision was over and we were back in the shooting range. PoLarr released my head, and we both sat down on stools near the table, exhausted.
“What the hell was that?” I asked as I tried to catch my breath.
“A Nemmidian Soul Gaze!” Artemis yelled. “It’s similar in function to the data we download into your nano chip but instead of technology it is a psychic ability PoLarr’s species has that connects the two of you. She freaking Soul Gazed you! That is so fantastic gravy! Nemmidian’s hardly ever Soul Gaze other beings.”
“Fantastic gravy indeed, Artemis,” Grizz said in awe. “I truly was not expecting that.”
“We’re not betrothed through all eternity, are we?” I joked and hoped the answer wasn’t yes.
“No, Marc,” PoLarr finally said. Her face was pale, and tiny tears of orange blood dropped from her eyes. “A Soul Gaze allows us to see each other how we truly are without the trappings of our physical senses. Who we are before we are.”
“You were amazing,” I remembered, “a frightful angel.”
“You were a protector, Marc,” she recalled, “and a destroyer. Two sides of the same coin. If you survive to hone your skills, I would not wish to face you as an enemy, human.”
“Why do I feel like I’ve known you my whole life now?” I asked, the feeling like a dull throb.
“A by-product of the Soul Gaze is shared memory,” she answered as if that were perfectly normal. “We have shared experience now, Marc. As long as we both draw breath, you will be able to access my memories as if they were your own, both mind and body. Reflex memory. Muscle memory.”
“And you have mine?” I asked. “You should skip most of the teenage years. Nothing but angst and uber horniness.”
“Duly noted, Marc,” she chuckled.
“Why me though?” I asked. “I’m assuming you don’t run around Soul Gazing every Champion that comes through this place. Although if you did, that would be your choice, I’m not Soul Gaze shaming.”
“My people are very good at reading others, Marc,” she said as she looked into my eyes. “Maybe it is a byproduct of our psychic ability? But from the moment you walked in the room, I could sense a great destiny in store for you. I did not know I was going to do it until the moment it happened.” She nodded once. “Most would not realize Ar’Gwn is not just for violence, but I suspect you understand that.” She stared at me for a long moment and when I didn’t reply she smiled. “Are you ready to try your hand at Gun Slinging? I’ll be by your side to walk you through it.”
I was going to object but a small voice in my head urged me to say yes.
“Yes, I am.”
“Excellent,” PoLarr said and handed me a holster-harness rig almost identical to her own. I shrugged into the shoulder straps and yanked them tight before I buckled the holsters around my waist. The guns sat heavy in their alien leather sleeves, their molded, polished wood handles gleamed in the rooms artificial light.
“You should get a feel for how balanced the pistols are,” she said as we walked back to the center of the room.
“Uhhh, ohh--” I started to say, but she interrupted me.
“Skin those heaters, Havak!” She barked.
Surprisingly, I didn’t flinch and my body did as it was told without a second thought. With sure, lightning fast motions, almost as if I’d practiced them a hundred thousand times, my hands shot down and caressed the pistol grips, then yanked up with short, economic moves. Just as the barrels were clear of the top of the holsters, I pulled my elbows back until the guns were held just above hip height and pointed in front of me. A huge smile broke across my face.
“This is way better than the dumb C.N.I. thing!” I shouted over my shoulder to Grizz and Artemis. “It’s like I’ve been doing these moves all my life.”
“I have, therefore you have,” PoLarr said, “my young Padawan. Wait. What the hell is a Padawan?”
“Ah,” I uttered, “looks like you might have gotten my penchant for annoying pop culture references. So, you have that going for you, which is nice.”
“Groundskeeper from out of nowhere,” she responded despite herself. “Oh, this is going to be awful.”
“You have no idea,” Artemis yelled from the computer station.
“You hold two custom-made GX72 Equalizer pistols,” PoLarr explained as she studied her own guns. “They were designed and hand made by the finest gunsmith in the galaxy who also happens to be my father.”
The Equalizers were perfectly balanced and sat in my hands comfortably. Any angle I turned the guns, they still sat effortlessly in my palm with the barrels which always seemed to align with the sights on the backs of the guns.
“They fire three millimeter explosive rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger. Each load out cylinder holds fifty rounds. To reload, you break the muzzle open, pop the spent cylinder, and slide in a new one.”
The construct began to assemble itself around us, and the environment morphed into a crowded bar with no space to maneuver. PoLarr and I were surrounded by angry aliens armed with everything from knives to sub-machine guns. They were completely motionless at the moment as if someone had hit pause on a DVD.
“A Slinger is never overwhelmed, never outgunned, never out of position.” PoLarr said calmly like some forty-four magnum Jedi. “War be with you, Havak.”
“And also with you, Inarra,” I replied reverently, and it was indeed with us.
The bad guys sprang to life, and I thought for sure we were going to be overrun as they crowded onto us. Then the pistols barked, and we became death incarnate.
My first shots came from the hip and took out the two closest bad guys. I spun on my heels and fired point blank into a snarling face with my right ha
nd and blew off another alien’s leg with my left. Without conscious thought, I ducked and spun again and again, always in constant fluid motion, like a dancer or martial artist, as each shot from my Equalizers ripped flesh from bone.
PoLarr was like a six-gun siren whose sole business was to send souls to hell. And baby, business was booming. Soon, her pistols ran dry. She holstered them without trying to reload, yet her hands weren’t empty for long. PoLarr disarmed two bad guys with a Jiu-jitsu like move, simultaneously shooting them with their own guns as she took them. She now had a gnarly looking short-barreled laser machine gun in one hand and a snub-nosed little pistol in the other. The machine gun rattled off short bursts of instant death as the little pistol fired long tongues of purple energy that blew one alien literally in half.
Soon those were empty as well, but that didn’t slow her down. The machine gun became an extension of her arm as she smashed it into the mouth of a bad guy who fell back choking on his own blood. She hurled the small pistol at an attacker and hit him in the throat. He sputtered and coughed as his hands dropped the Steampunk Nerf guns he had been holding and went to massage his throat. PoLarr coiled her long legs and launched herself at the choking alien.
She rolled as she hit the ground so that she landed on her back and slid across the white tile floor that was now splattered with so many colors of blood that it looked like a Pollock painting. She slid to a stop at his feet and caught his falling guns. The alien’s eyes went wide with shock before the shots from his own guns blew the top part of his body to smithereens.
By this point my Equalizers had spent their bullets and clicked empty. They became extensions of my hands as I mixed the ar’Gwn with several vicious Krav Maga strikes. Teeth broke. Knees shattered. Blood spilled.
I holstered them just as I walked past PoLarr who did a kip-up off the floor onto her feet. She tossed me one of her guns that I caught single-handed as we pressed our backs together, arms stretched out, and began to spin. Our bullets found homes in chests, groins, and foreheads.
When those guns were empty, we sprang forward in opposite directions. I whacked a nearby bad guy in the neck with the butt of the gun and as he sputtered to his knees, I advanced on him and grabbed the matching semi-automatic pistols that fell from his stunned hands. They resembled classic Colt 1911A1s, but had thick triangular barrels with a muzzle opening the size of a small BB.
PoLarr roundhouse kicked an assault rifle out of another bad guys hands, caught it as her momentum swung her around, and stitched a line of neat little holes up the center of his body.
The fighting had gotten even more up close and personal, practically hand to hand, and that made our dance of destruction even more devastating. The guns became ballistic boxing gloves as we punched and blocked at point blank range.
The muzzle size on my borrowed pistols had been deceiving as the small projectiles behaved like fifty caliber rounds and obliterated all they touched. It was almost as if I could see a thin blue line that wove in and around everything that surrounded me. I flowed between attackers in ‘Bullet Time’ slow-motion like dandelion wisps on the breeze, effortless and free, as I changed direction on a whim.
I saw PoLarr duck just as a blast of plasma almost took her head off. She sprinted toward the wall, ran up it, and flipped backwards as she contorted her body into a spin in a move that made The Matrix look like Sweatin’ with the Oldies. Bullets flew as she spun in the air, her arms held tight across her chest, the guns across her body. When she landed, the last bad guy’s head was cleaved open, and he fell to the ground.
Our eyes met from across the room. Then, like we were doing some kind of combat mirror game, we dropped our borrowed guns, and quickly reloaded the Equalizers which cracked open like cheap dime store cap guns, the kind that took the round, red ring of caps. PoLarr ejected a cylinder of spent shells from each pistol and slapped home new ones that looked like concentric circles shoved into a cylinder. I did the same. Just as we simultaneously holstered our guns, the door of the construct room burst open, and twenty more bad guys poured in.
PoLarr stood still, a serene smile on her face, which was disconcerting seeing as how she was literally surrounded by piles of dead bodies. The new onslaught of bad guys were almost upon her when blue wings of pure flame extended eight feet on either side of her, incerating several of the closest bad guys as she took off into the air. She burst through the wall and hung in the air, framed by the massive hole she had just made, and looked like a futuristic angel. When all eyes were on her, I unslung my pistols and ran toward the bad guys, arms stretched out in front of me as I pulled the triggers again and again.
PoLarr’s pistols filled her hands as she dove like a raptor. With one of us on land and the other above, we annihilated those who would do us harm. By the time she landed in front of me there was no one left standing.
We were practically face to face, our breath heavy as sweat covered our bodies. We holstered our guns at the same time. A shiver ran through each of our bodies. It was like we’d just fucked each other’s’ brains out. PoLarr deactivated the wings as the constructs disintegrated around us.
Artemis and Grizz stood in awe. Grizz’s mouth even hung open.
“Well, done, human,” PoLarr said with a satisfied smirk. “You attacked hard and powerfully. Hammering into them again and again, unrelenting.”
“It was the only way to bring the situation to a climax,” I shot back with my own smirk.
“There is a pants party going on right now in my jumpsuit, and I don’t know why!” Artemis yelled from the sidelines. Her cheeks were flushed, her breath fast and shallow. “I think my hormone manufacturing glands are broken because I am so hot, and I just want to dry hump things.”
Grizz nonchalantly took a silent step away from her.
“Male offspring of a monotheistic deity, that was sexy!” she huffed as she fanned her face with her hand.
PoLarr and I had made our way over to the table, and I laid a very big kiss on Artemis.
“I couldn’t agree more, A-Train,” I whispered in her ear as the kiss broke.
Just then, Artemis’ LED display on her arm beeped with an incoming message. She read it over, and her eyes went wide.
“What is it, Artemis?” Grizz growled impatiently.
“Thanks to Marc’s stellar performance in the first two trials,” she answered, “Earth is officially spared from indentured servitude.”
“Really?” I asked hopefully, “Like, if I were to die tomorrow, I’ve at least saved humanity from space slavery?”
“That is correct, human,” Grizz answered, but Artemis still looked troubled.
“What’s up, Artemis?” I asked.
“The qualifying trials are officially over,” she offered, her voice excited but with an undertone of worry. “All that has occurred up to now is prologue. The Crucible of Carnage begins tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirteen
If you’d have told me a week ago that I would find myself on a ghost planet on the far side of the galaxy surrounded by thousands of slobbering cyber zombies while locked in a hand to hand death fight with a pink, slime-covered alien who was being a real jackass, I’d have said you were clearly off your meds and needed professional help. But, that was exactly the situation I was in at the moment.
A goopy, human-embryo pink forearm was jammed under my chin as said jackass alien attempted to shove me over the railing of the exposed stairwell we were in. Two feet below me, I heard the moaning and clacking of gnashed teeth as the rotted, robotically enhanced undead clambered to feed as they spotted my torso bent over the rail. I couldn’t tell if the fungus mixed with gasoline smell from the slimy throat-crushing appendage or the hot, wet, meaty, rotten egg smell of decomposing flesh from the ground was worse. To be fair, they were both equally disgusting. As I simultaneously struggled to keep the viscous gunk from getting in my mouth and from being flipped over the rail to a painful zombie death, I remembered that just a few short hours earlier I’d actually
been having a pretty goddamn good day.
After my crash course in ar’Gwn and the Soul Gaze from PoLarr yesterday I had been completely wiped, so I passed out on my bed the second I got home. I awoke in the morning very refreshed and possibly a few pounds thinner after I saw myself in the bathroom mirror. I definitely had the beginnings of some sweet four-pack abs going. That REM pod thing was no joke, apparently. While I was only on day three of waking up on an alien planet as a glorified space gladiator, I felt like I’d been here for weeks. My days as a truck driver from a shit town in Delaware seemed like a whole other lifetime ago.
My kitchen bot had made an incredible pot of coffee, some delicious Belgian waffles with fluorescent, highlighter blue, protein-infused syrup, and it had even packed me a lunch. I’d kissed it sarcastically on the cheek before I left for the day and could have sworn I heard it hum contentedly.
The ride to the Hall of Champions was pleasant as the cab driver took a different route, and I got to see a whole new part of the city that was a neighborhood that looked like a tropical swamp stuck smack dab in the center of the city. The various amphibian-based life forms reminded me of immigrant parts of Philadelphia that I’d driven through on deliveries.
When I arrived at the Hall, Artemis greeted me at the entrance. She was a bundle of energy and excitement.
“I am so very glad you are here, Marc,” she blurted out in a rush. “You have a very important interstellar transmission coming in five minutes.”
“Who is trying to call me?” I asked, genuinely confused. I was pretty sure I wasn’t listed in the space phone book yet.
“You’ll see,” she teased as we walked back to our training room.
Grizz met us at the computer station, which had become our go-to spot in the room to hang out, and seemed back to his gruff, disapproving self.
He’d ‘changed’ his outfit into what can only be described as space barbarian formal wear. He had on a form-fitting dark purple waistcoat that buttoned up the side of his ribs and across the top of his chest with polished silver clasps. His loincloth had been replaced by loose-fitting hunter green, velvet trousers tucked into knee-high black boots that had been polished to a mirror shine. The broad sword was gone and, in its place, was a medium width blade with an ornate basket hilt. The kicker to the entire ensemble was an orange ascot that was tied around Grizz’s neck and tucked into the front of the waistcoat.