Prime Deceptions

by Valerie Valdes

  “The champion sits over there,” Yeon-ha said, pointing toward the booths. “He’s in the back.”

  “Min, you can stay with your friend,” Eva said. “But if I say we have to leave, we leave, okay?”

  Min nodded, then swung away from Eva so fast her braid whipped around. “Yay, okay, so tell me about every single bot here,” she told Yeon-ha as they began moving through the crowd toward the fighting area.

  Eva briefly debated sending Sue with them, then decided against it, since Sue was liable to get lost immediately. Instead she continued to tow the girl along like a wayward escape pod. Short as she was, she couldn’t see over the crowds, relying instead on Vakar’s steady movements and Pink’s constantly scanning eye along with the occasional tiptoed peep to be sure she hadn’t been moved off-course by the currents of people.

  As she got closer, a single voice stood out from the rest. It wasn’t that it was especially loud, compared to the blaring music and the many other conversations going on simultaneously. But it was, as Yeon-ha had said, incredibly irritating, the kind of voice pitched at just the right register to trigger a fight-or-fight response—as opposed to fight-or-flight. Eva’s own words, spoken moments earlier, immediately came back to haunt her, and she closed her eyes and prayed that she had heard wrong even as she continued to approach the person speaking.

  Her prayers, as they often did, went unanswered.

  “Well, actually,” the voice said, and the crowd parted in front of Eva, leaving her face to pale, skinny, intensely punchable face with Miles fucking Erck.

  Chapter 7

  A New Challenger Appears

  For several long moments, Eva became intimately acquainted with how she assumed Mari felt every time Eva was being exasperating in a conversation. She stared at Miles, sitting in his booth surrounded by hangers-on, his arms draped over the back of the seat in a pose of utter relaxation, his limp blond hair hanging over one half-lidded eye.

  How had he even survived? When she left him at the Fridge facility, he was unconscious under a table because she’d knocked him out for being a mouthy comemierda. Presumably he’d awakened with enough time to reach an escape vehicle, or his friend—Emily? Emle?—had managed to drag him to safety. And then he had either escaped on his own, or he was one of Josh’s two mystery companions on that whirlwind intergalactic tour.

  She forced her breaths to come evenly, in and out of her nose, until she mastered herself enough to plaster on a smile and approach the table.

  “Hey, Miles,” Eva said in the friendliest tone she could manage. “It’s been a while.”

  Miles looked up at Eva, first with his mouth half-open in confusion, then with a sneer that bordered on lewd. “Captain Innocente,” he said. “It’s been six months, actually.”

  “It certainly has.” Madre de dios, she thought, her hand curling into a fist.

  “I’m surprised you’re not dead yet,” he continued. “Doesn’t Gmaargitz Fedorach still have a bounty on you?”

  Eva sensed a dozen sets of ears perking up at the word “bounty.” One set belonged to a dark-haired man sitting near Miles, wearing a blue exosuit and a scowl that could curdle milk. He stared at Eva as if his eyes were lasers that could zap her into dust, but his only visible weapon was a large cannon that either covered his right arm or had replaced it. Android? Cyborg? She wasn’t sure. The weapon looked familiar, though . . .

  “No bounty anymore,” Eva said, and the attention died. “Turns out even rich, powerful emperors can only waste so much time and money on one lucky human before their subjects start sharpening the guillotines.”

  “Well, actually,” Miles said, “the gmaarg don’t use guillotines. They prefer to feed people to giant worms that are basically living oubliettes.” He rubbed his hands together gleefully at the thought.

  Eva could feel her smile slipping, so she struggled to slide it back into place. “Miles, just to be completely certain before I continue this conversation: you’re the current bot-fighting champion here, is that right?”

  “Current, and future,” he said smugly.

  Behind Eva, Pink groaned loud enough to wake the dead. This was going to be a “secret bourbon stash” kind of day.

  “I’m looking for someone you were working with at The Fridge,” Eva continued. “Josh Zafone. Do you remember him?”

  Sue leaned forward eagerly, peering out from behind Eva.

  “Well, actually, I do,” Miles said. “I saved his life, you know, when everything was blowing up. We were on the same project. I would tell you about it, but it was highly confidential.”

  “The Proarkhe artifact, yes,” Eva said, relishing the frown that flashed across his features before they returned to his normal resting punchface. “Did you and Josh travel together after you escaped, or did you come straight here, and he passed through later?”

  Miles crossed his arms and leaned back. “I don’t have to tell you anything. I don’t even have to keep talking to you losers.” He snapped his fingers. “Nara, get rid of them.”

  “Nara?” Eva blinked, sure she must have heard him wrong.

  From the shadows behind the booth, the hulking form of Nara Sumas emerged. Over two meters tall, in her trademark suit of armor with its smooth black helmet and miniature plasma cannon, Nara was normally employed as an extremely expensive bounty hunter. Eva had first met her on Garilia, then again on La Sirena Negra when her dad, Pete, had stolen it briefly, and she’d last seen the merc while dropping her ass off somewhere with the rest of Pete’s motley crew after the Fridge facility was destroyed.

  Vakar, who had stood by quietly up to this point, managed to become somehow more present despite his Wraith armor rendering him scentless. If it made a difference to Nara, she didn’t show it.

  “Larsen,” Nara said, her voice modulated by the helmet.

  “It’s Innocente,” Eva replied coolly. “Is the economy that bad, that you’re slumming it here playing bodyguard for this comemierda?”

  “She isn’t his bodyguard.” The dark-haired guy next to Miles spoke, climbing out of the booth to stand next to Nara. He wore giant boots over his exosuit, and as she watched, a series of yellow status lights on the side of his arm weapon lit up.

  “Well, actually,” Miles said, “she’s on my team right now, which means she does what I say, or she doesn’t get what she came here for.” He sneered at the man, who glared right back.

  “And what did you come here for?” Eva asked.

  “Confidential,” Nara replied.

  “And none of your business,” the other man said.

  Sue, who had always been a pro at reading a room, stepped forward then. “Please,” she said. “I just want to find my brother. Won’t you help me?”

  Miles leaned forward eagerly, a weird glint in his eye that made Eva want to slap her forehead. “You’re Josh’s little sister? He talked about you all the time.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Sue said, backing toward Eva again.

  “He said you were even better with bots than he was,” Miles continued, his expression predatory.

  “I . . . Maybe? He’s really good.” Sue fidgeted nervously.

  Nara and the dark-haired man appeared to have a silent argument, given the way he was staring at her and making faces. Eva wondered about that, and whether she should shut Sue up before something else sensitive slipped out. But this felt like a chance to get Miles to slip up, too, so she let it ride.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Miles said, turning his attention back to Eva and steepling his fingers like a caricature of a holovid villain. “Let’s have a little bet, you and me. We’ll have a fight in the pit, and if you win, then I’ll tell you everything I know about Josh.”

  Eva was going to punch him. She really, really was, one way or another, and it was going to be better than sex.

  “And if you win?” Eva asked.

  Miles gestured at Sue. “Then she stays here and upgrades my bot. With my supervision and approval, of course.”

  “Wha
t?” Sue squeaked. “No!”

  “For how long?” Eva asked, and Pink made a disgusted sound behind her.

  “A month,” Miles said.

  The silent conference between Nara and the other man seemed to intensify. Eva desperately wished she knew what the hell it was all about, but she had more pressing concerns. She couldn’t afford to lose Sue for a month, not when they were trying to find her brother well before that. But could she beat Miles? Was she sure enough to bet Sue on it?

  Raising a finger at Miles, Eva turned around to Pink and Sue, leaving Vakar to watch her back. “He is, without a doubt, the biggest sinvergüenza I have ever had to deal with,” Eva said. “But he knows something, and we need to know it, too.”

  Pink shook her head. “Min could probably eat him for breakfast, but she’s out of practice and it’s risky as hell. We should figure out another way.”

  “Oh, we need a backup plan regardless,” Eva said. “This way we get to beat his ass until he cries like a baby with a dirty diaper.”

  “Not worth it.” Pink paused. “Okay, theoretically worth it, but still. Min doesn’t even have a bot.”

  “Um, yeah, she does,” Sue said, and both Eva and Pink looked to her simultaneously.

  “What are you—oh no,” Eva said, shaking her head. “I know you’re not talking about that mess of parts I’ve been graciously ignoring all over the cargo bay.”

  Sue’s pale face flushed pink, but she frowned and jutted her chin out at Eva. “It works fine, I just like tinkering. I can have it ready to fight in under an hour.”

  “That wouldn’t give Min much time to learn how to control it,” Pink said. “But she did manage to get qualified for deep-space jaunts faster than a scared rabbit, so I expect she can handle this.”

  “And in the meantime, we figure out our contingencies,” Eva said. “Sue, are you sure you want to do this?”

  Sue’s face hardened like her features were setting in concrete. “Yes. It’s like you said, he knows something.”

  Eva squeezed the girl’s shoulder and leaned in to whisper in her ear. “If he wins, no way are we leaving you here for a month,” she said. “We’ll bust you out, okay?”

  Sue nodded, raising a clenched fist. “We won’t lose.”

  Pink rolled her eyes but nodded acceptance.

  Eva turned back to Miles, unable to conceal her grin. “You have a deal, Erck. Better warn your boss that his champion is about to get spanked by a professional.”

  “Well, actually,” Miles said, “I’m going to win, so I don’t have to tell her anything, and also you’re not a professional bot fighter.” He raised his eyebrows and smirked as if he’d just scored a point and leaned back in his seat again.

  Before Eva could respond, one of the people in his booth leaned over and said something to him that made him sigh. “I forgot,” Miles said. “Tonight is mixed-team fights. So unless you can find two friends to help you out, the bet is off.”

  Eva rolled her eyes and turned back to Sue and Pink. “Maybe Min’s friend would join up?”

  Pink shrugged. “We can ask. But we’d still need a third, and a second if they aren’t interested.”

  “I can fight in Gustavo,” Sue said. Eva and Pink started to berate her, but she waved them off. “I can do it. You know I can.”

  She wasn’t wrong; Sue had been a help during several Fridge raids in the past six months. Mostly she set things on fire or had her little yellow bots rush out to mob her opponents, but it worked, and she’d only been injured badly once when she slipped on one of her own bots while standing up inside Gustavo to shoot at someone with a pistol.

  “Fine.” Eva scripted a quick q-mail message to Min, then pinged her to check it in case Min had turned off her notifications.

  The response came back quickly: “Yay I will crush him, Yeon-ha won’t fight him sorry” with a crying bunny face picture appended.

  “Me cago en diez,” Eva said. “We need a third.”

  Miles must have seen her glum expression, because he laughed, and his laughter spread like a farty methane fire to his companions. “Looks like you’ve already lost.” He spread his legs wide under the table and rested his arms on the back of the booth. “It’s too bad. If your bots are anything like your terrible spaceship, they’d fall apart before they even made it to the pit. You probably wouldn’t have enough useful pieces left to fit in a suitcase.”

  Eva opened her mouth to reply, then shut it, a slow smile spreading across her face. “Funny you should mention suitcases. I just remembered I have exactly the one I need. See you later, champion.” She flipped off Nara and the black-haired man for good measure before turning around and heading toward the exit.

  “What in the blue blazes are you talking about?” Pink asked, once they were far enough away that Miles wouldn’t hear them.

  Eva’s smile widened and she sighed happily. “I’m going to get to punch him myself.” She whistled a cheerful tune and held on to that thought for their entire trip back to La Sirena Negra, feeling like she’d found a winning lottery ticket and couldn’t wait to cash it in.

  Eva and her crew returned to Medsammensvoren later. Although bots were presumably a regular sight in The Sump, theirs still earned a lot of curious looks from the people milling about in the streets. Sue sat inside Gustavo with a bunch of her tiny yellow creations climbing all over her making nervous squealing noises, the rest either waiting on the ship or tucked away into their own secret compartments in the mech. Min had immediately christened her new bot Goyangi and was using it to carry her human body in its arms like a baby, occasionally shifting position for comfort. Fully assembled, it was almost three and a half meters tall, humanoid and bulky and built like a tank.

  Eva strolled along happily next to Vakar, who carried a certain stolen briefcase with its bright-red caution tag still intact. His smell was an unpleasant mix of tar, incense, and farts, and he had made clear that he wished she wouldn’t use the Protean armor because of its inherent dangers, but they agreed it was their only option if they wanted to engage with Miles on his level.

  “The odds of it collapsing in the middle of a fight are, what, tiny,” Eva had said.

  “Thirteen percent,” Vakar had replied.

  Eva had paused. “I’ve had worse.”

  Pink carried her own case, a doctor’s bag full of medigel, bandages, splints, quick-casts, a fresh roll of Everseal with its cheerful Grippy the Seal logo, and the disassembled parts of her sniper rifle, Anthia. At Eva’s insistence, she had also included a nanoscalpel and a small pistol, though she had insisted on bringing a range extender for it.

  Yeon-ha waited for them at the back door, clapping with glee when they saw Min’s bot. “I love it!” they said. “It’s so different from Daltokki, but still pink.”

  “Totally 4D,” Min agreed. “I can’t wait to hit things with it.”

  Sue ducked her head shyly at the compliments, hiding in Gustavo more than usual.

  They headed for the designated waiting area, the crowds parting to allow them through. Fights had already begun, and an assortment of other bots milled around or rested on transport platforms, or in one case were being put together from a stack of boxes. There were remote-controlled models, like Min’s, and mechs like Sue’s, but no one else seemed daring—or foolish—enough to opt for Eva’s approach. The buzz of conversation was almost louder than the clashing of metal on metal and the discordant music from the band, which was still playing off in the background, and between that and the smells of grease and ozone and soldering fumes, Eva was working on a wicked headache.

  “So you finally showed up,” Miles said, the crowd parting around him.

  Eva’s headache immediately intensified. “I know you were hoping I wouldn’t, since we’re going to kick your ass so hard,” she said.

  “Well, actually, I can’t wait to show you what a real fight looks like.” He gestured at Nara and the black-haired man from earlier, who flanked him. “Nara and Jei are going to be on my team, as
a little test for them.”

  “Test?” Eva raised her eyebrow at Nara, whose expression was hidden behind her shiny black armor. Jei frowned but said nothing.

  “Not your problem.” Miles smirked and made a show of examining Eva and her team. “I only see two fighters here. Where’s your third?”

  Eva gestured at the briefcase Vakar held. “I’m the third.”

  “Is that Protean armor?” Miles laughed. “This is going to be fun. You’ve got a shitty mech, a bot that looks like it was built from scraps, and that death trap. I’m not even going to have to tag in.”

  Eva didn’t dignify his taunting with a response. Let him be surprised when Min beats him like an egg, she thought.

  Meanwhile, Sue had climbed out of Gustavo and approached Jei with an awkward smile.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Sue. I really like your arm cannon. Is that modular?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Jei asked coldly.

  Sue blushed and fiddled with a pocket of her jumpsuit. “Sorry, I was just curious. I didn’t mean to—”

  “Keep your curiosity to yourself,” he said.