by Dan Davis
Sifa held him, pulled, twisted his arms and pressed herself against his body. Her skin was hot, smooth, firm. The only soft part of her body was her chest and even there her nipples were hard as they brushed across his arm.
“Hold on a sec,” Ram said and broke off, turning his back so she would not see his erection.
“What's wrong?” Sifa asked.
“Just wait a minute,” Ram said and he crouched to his towel and opened his water bottle keeping his back to her. “Milena,” he mumbled into his bottle. “Are you there? What the hell is going on? Can you help me out?”
“Oh dear,” Milena's voice came in clear. “Are you experiencing unwanted tumescence?”
“It’s not funny,” Ram muttered. “Help me out, here.”
“I have increased your testosterone uptake which is increasing your sparring performance but also giving you a touch of irrational anger here and there. And your body has elevated levels of vasopressin along with it. Let me just sort that out for you. Give it a moment and don't worry, my dear, it happens to all the boys when they grapple with Sifa.”
Bediako shouted across the room. “Rama Seti, what in the shit is wrong with you, you goddamn lazy asshole, get up off your ass and get to work before you get PT-X'd.”
“You ready now?” Sifa asked when he stood up. She glanced at his crotch.
“Sure,” Ram said. “Sorry.”
“You need to learn this,” Sifa said. “Right now. Who are you going to spar with next? One of the others who will break you? Come now.”
She threw him to the ground a dozen times. It was astonishing to Ram that for all his enormous mass and strength he could do little to resist Sifa. The tall, lithe woman looked fast and agile so her speed was totally expected. The way she twisted and slipped from his grasp made sense. But she was also able to push him back and overpower him in simple clinches.
“Muscle mass is not necessarily related to muscle strength, you know. And anyway, grappling is mostly technique,” Sifa said when he complained of this. “It is angles, it is geometry and physics. Your strength means nothing if you cannot bring it to bear. Assuming I am standing motionless when you push me away, what is the limiting factor in how much force you can use on me?”
“Don't know,” Ram said, frustrated. “How thick my bones are?”
“A poor guess. It is how much of that force you can transfer to the floor.”
Ram shook his head. “I don't understand.”
“If you used all your strength, your feet would slide across the floor. Your shoes have non-slip soles and we have these mats underfoot. But you know from the Avar that the floor of the Orb arena is some kind of smooth metallic or ceramic surface? It provides more friction that you would expect and they’ve replicated it as best they can with the floor tile surfaces throughout the Victory but it’s still a flat surface. You will find that pushing your hands hard against a wall causes your feet to slip away. The force you can exert overcomes the amount you can transfer into the floor. So what is the use of all your mighty strength if you cannot use it? Technique is everything.”
Ram nodded. “I understand. Can you show me?”
“What I can, I will show. But it takes a lifetime to learn. You have six months.”
“It's not like I'm going to fight the alien, right?”
“Indeed.” Sifa glanced across the mats to where Mael was elbowing Genesis in the face. “But there are other fights you must win.”
“Rama Seti,” Bediako shouted. “You lazy piece of shit, you time wasting, fat, useless fuck. You might be used to pissing your own life away but you are mine now, you belong to me and you will not waste my time, nor the time of any of my real fighters. Stop fucking talking and move your fat ass or I’ll kill you myself, I swear it by all that is holy. Move it!”
Ram and Sifa continued for an hour. When Ram was covered in bruises and drenched in sweat, Bediako shouted out the next partnerships. Ram waited for his name to be called. But Bediako waited, saving the words Ram feared the most for last.
“Alright, let’s see how you shirk your way out of this one, Rama Seti,” Bediako shouted. “It’s time for you to fight Mael.”
Ram felt everyone's eyes on him as he walked, a condemned man, to where Mael stood waiting.
Bediako clapped his hands together with an echoing slap. “What are you bunch of lazy shits waiting for? This is not a spectator sport. Get on with your own work.”
Mael's grin was as wide as his face. “Here we are at last.”
“Look,” Ram said, from as far away on their sparring mat as it was possible to be. “I know you want to prove a point or something. But think of the greater good here.”
Mael sneered. “Oh, I am. You are weak. They gave you an obsolete body. You were born with an obsolete mind and lived a wasted life. By your presence here, you weaken us.”
“I am trying to learn—”
Mael darted forward and smashed Ram's jaw, throwing him down. Ram rolled and stood, turning to face Mael. But his opponent came instead from the side, stamping on Ram's knee before he could react. He threw out an elbow, hitting nothing but air, swinging again and limping back. Mael punched him in the kidney, hard as a blow from a horse.
Melina was shouting in his ear but he couldn't focus on what she was saying.
Ram knew he was being toyed with and the knowledge filled him with rage. The fire of it flowed through his limbs down to his fingers and toes. He threw out an arm and somehow connected with something solid. He followed up and grabbed what he realized with surprise was Mael's neck. Ram squeezed with all his might and pulled the man toward him, throwing his greater weight down on top of him, wrapping his arms about Mael's chest. Mael twisted and they both fell, Ram on top, his head smashing into Mael's face and crushing his nose. Ram butted him again, hard and tried to get an arm free from Mael's grasp. He punched Mael in the side of the head and in the face. Ram had time to feel a thrill at how well he was doing.
The voice in his ear came through. It was Milena, calling out a warning.
He caught a fragment over the sound of his own breathing and grunts of exertion.
“He's toying with you,” Milena was saying. “Just stop. Stop and get away from him.”
Underneath Ram, Mael was laughing. Ram punched as hard as he could at the awkward angle and held Mael down with the rest of his body and yet Mael was laughing like crazy, even as Ram's fist crashed repeatedly into his neck and jaw and temple.
Ram was defeated by that laughter. Still, he kept fighting, as hard as he could. But Mael wrapped his legs around Ram's, threw his hips over and Ram found himself on his back looking up as Mael, still laughing, rained blows into his face.
Ram found his arm in Mael's grip for just a moment. Ram strained against Mael’s hands but it was no good.
His forearm snapped, halfway between wrist and elbow. The pain shot up and died away, echoing through his shoulder. He threw a punch with his other arm. Mael grabbed that fist with both hands and started to twist, trying to break it too.
Rama wasn’t thinking clearly. Milena shouted without meaning in his ear. He felt as though he was underwater or in a dream, powerless to stop what was happening to him. Helpless in the face of incredible power.
He had a flash of memory of himself as a boy, fighting his father. He remembered the familiar futility of trying to do anything. But Ram had grown quickly as a boy, overtopping his father when he was still in junior school. Then, in his memory of that one fight, the last ever play fight with his dad, he threw out a hand that thumped into his father’s face. There had been blood streaming from his father’s nose and mouth and Ram’s head echoed with his father’s furious cries as he beat Ram unconscious. You unnatural freak. You’re not my son. His mother screamed off to the side for his father to stop.
“Fight back,” Milena shouted in his head.
Ram punched Mael with his broken arm.
The pain of the impact was incredible, throwing waves of nausea over him. But it wa
s worth it to see the shock on Mael's face as his nose was broken, blood exploding everywhere. He only had a moment to enjoy the sight of it before Mael retaliated, opening up with a flurry of blows into Ram’s face.
They slammed into his cheeks, his lips and teeth,
His world became a sea of stars that faded into an infinite blackness.
17. MISSION #2
“I thought that while you recover from your injuries, we can still do useful work,” Milena said the next day. They met in the special counseling room in the ludus ring.
Ram’s face was a terrible mess and he had four broken ribs. Dr. Fo assured him that he would be completely healed inside twenty-four hours.
“We can do useful work?” Ram said. “Do I have to write an essay on why I’m the most useless subject in the UNOP’s history?”
“Yes, very amusing,” she said. “I think I’d have you write ten thousand words on why you suffer from so much self-doubt.”
They sat opposite each other in the counseling room, Ram on a metal stool, her in an upholstered armchair, though it was as much bolted to the floor as every other piece of furniture on the ship. He wished he could have a chair as comfortable looking as hers.
Ram attempted a smile at her self-doubt joke, though it hurt to move his face much and the joke was painful too. “Why I’m suffering from self-doubt? Are you serious? I thought you were supposed to be a psychologist, Milena. You know what my problem is, don’t you? I was abducted, I had my own body removed and my head placed on a synthetic monster. I have lost years of my life from being kept unconscious and since you woke me up I’ve been in genuine physical danger from my supposed peers who I am also locked up with constantly. I’m not only a prisoner in body but in mind, with you manipulating how I feel and what I think constantly, even when I’m having an intimate moment with another person, in private. I can’t get away from you. In fact, I only find out after that it was you, sitting in an office somewhere on the ship, getting this body to release hormones to make me horny. And despite all this, the single reason I’m here is to be a punching bag. I have to be honest, I think a little self-doubt is to be expected, don’t you?”
Milena sat quietly after he had finished. “I apologize. I know you’ve been through a lot. What UNOP has done to you, the great bureaucracy, is clearly unethical. Personally, everything I’ve done with regards to your endocrine system has been to help you. That might not mean a lot to you but my intentions have been good. In fact, that’s why we’re here today. I want to help you to engage fully with this project.”
Ram rubbed his chest. His bruises were fading but still he was sore all over. “I haven’t been fully engaged?”
She tilted her head to one side. “Ram, you know you haven’t. You’ve been looking for a way out since you got here and that’s understandable. But I know you, remember. I know you through unethical means, yes, but I know you. And I know that you have been running whenever things are hard, you’ve been doing it your whole life. Well, it’s up to you to decide if that’s how you want to continue with the life that you have left to you, now, on the Victory, on this mission. You don’t have much freedom left but you can choose how you perceive your reality and it is in your power to do that. That’s one thing that I can’t help you with, not really. I can jack you up on testosterone and make you bullish and confident but that wouldn’t address the underlying problem and you would not be in control of yourself.”
He sat quietly for a few, long moments. “Alright, so, what are we doing?”
She nodded, sat back. “You’re going to review the events of the Arena Combat Phase of Mission Two from sixty years ago. Diego the Intelligence Officer is on his way over to take us through it. One of the AI’s flagged up that you have not watched the replays of the previous missions.”
She waited for him to respond.
“I read about the missions on the networked screen in my room.”
“We know but you stop the footage before it plays. No need to try to explain, I know why you don’t watch them. It’s an avoidance tactic. It is your fear of witnessing the horrific reality of this situation.”
Ram touched his face. “Actually, I witnessed that in the mirror this morning pretty well.”
“What I want to do in our next Avar session is to run through the replays of the old missions in the simulated Arena. Many subjects find it useful to see precisely where the previous missions went wrong.”
“Sounds great,” Ram said.
The door hissed open and Diego the Intel guy stepped in. He was a small guy, small shoulders and kind of hunched. But his teeth shone in his dark face when he saw Ram and the smile seemed genuine.
“Diego, just in time,” Milena said.
“Hey, man,” Diego said, jerking his head in greeting and sitting on a wall perch he pulled out. “Ouch, your face.” He winced. “Once, when I was a boy I walked thirty miles through the bush to the next town just to see a girl. On the way, I saw a rotting goat lying by the side of the road. It was all bloated and swollen after heavy rain and then lots of sun, half caved in and exposing the innards. Your face right now kind of reminds me of that goat. Anyway, let’s do this.” He clicked on the wall screen.
Ram didn’t think it was all that funny. His face was the only thing that was left of the real Rama Seti, the thing that made him unique.
“You know, guys,” Ram said. “I could just watch this by myself in the barracks, I don’t need to be talked through it.”
Diego and Milena exchanged a glance as the screen flicked into life.
“What?” Ram said.
“You have a tendency to avoid difficult, graphic images,” Milena said.
“Well, yeah because I’m a normal person.”
Milena slowly raised a hand to point in his face. “Exactly. Which is a serious problem. If there’s one thing we can’t have, it’s you being a normal person. You have to put aside your compassion and empathy to get through the next few months.”
Ram sighed. “How do you suggest I do that?”
Milena shrugged. “We can always do a lot of that chemically. But it would be better if you could do what you can to stop caring about the physical and emotional wellbeing of yourself and your new colleagues.”
“I don’t care about them,” Ram said, lying. “But I’m not sure how I can stop caring about myself.”
“You don’t care about dying in Avar. Try to cultivate that.”
“But—”
Milena spoke over him. “Good, let’s do this Diego?”
“Right on,” Diego said. “Check it out.” He scrolled through a few clips and pulled the one he wanted onto the screen. “Mission Two Arena Combat Phase took place back in 2139. That’s almost sixty years ago, in case you’re suffering from memory loss due to brain damage in that smashed up head of yours. You know about the selection process?”
“Yeah, after the Mission One disaster they recruited military personnel from all over the world. I’m not sure how many thousands of people they went through but they ended up with this guy at the end of the mission, a Brazilian.”
“Rafael Santos, known as Onca,” Diego said.
“Yeah, the briefings just call him Onca, what’s with that?”
Milena sat up, a little smile on her face. “We Brazilians enjoy our nicknames. Onca is jaguar. His friends called him that from when he was kid, even before he joined the military because he was quiet, solitary and an absolute killer. A perfect ambush predator.”
Ram raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah, so what’s your nickname?”
She smirked and sat back. “None of your business.”
Diego cleared his throat. “Onca made Major in the 1st BF Esp., which is Brazilian Special Forces, by the time he was twenty-eight. That unit specialized in counter-terrorism and all the usual special forces ninja stuff. Their motto is ‘Any mission, anywhere, anytime, anyway.’ And Onca certainly lived that. A lot of his service history is still classified, even now and even from us, so we expect he go
t up to a lot of off the books work, probably assassinations but who knows. Enough of his missions were conventional, in the special forces sense and he quickly became a legend within that community. Everyone who worked with him, and he worked with a lot of people, always said he was a genius. He could do it all, long range shooting, close-up stealth, urban, jungle, amphibious, airborne, everything. Just an enormously gifted, natural soldier.”
Ram was tempted to make a joke of some sort but he remembered he was about to see this legend get graphically murdered so he held his tongue.
“Anyway,” Diego continued, “like a lot of the guys back then he retired early, when he was about thirty and set up a private outfit called the Sabre Rubro. A cooperative made up of other ex-special forces that was commissioned immediately by the Brazilian Government to crack down on the pro-human terrorists cropping up all over. I don’t know if you know your Brazilian history but when the crazies were out in the Amazon, no one really cared that much but when these cells started taking over company buildings in Sao Paulo state, well, you can imagine the reaction.”
“What companies?” Ram said.
“Biotech, pharmaceuticals, same as usual. Onca’s Urban Security Co-op bounced around these towns, storming buildings and shooting terrorists. Amateur recordings everywhere on our system, you got to check them out, here I’ll bookmark some for you. Anyway, his team gets called into this giant siege operation at the HQ of Abora Biopharma, huge firm utilizing unique Amazonian compounds for use in the medical industry. Specifically, they developed solutions for the synthetic amniotic gel for the exogenesis tanks being first rolled out worldwide at that point. This helped to spur the interplanetary resources boom back then.”
“They helped make the Artificial Person asteroid miners and colony support workers,” Milena said. “And they were, and still are, a significant member of the UNOP Commission.”
“Got it,” Ram said.
“Cameras of the world were on this siege. Millions of people watched live when Onca’s Sabre Rubro went in. You can see it from a dozen angles from all sides of the compound, from choppers and drones and satellite. But it was a trap, really. All the disparate, warring factions in the pro-human movement had come together to sucker Onca’s guys in by posing as a new group, Sangue Puro. There were dozens of terrorists there, heavily armed. They never had any genuine demands. They were never going to let any hostages go or expected to get out themselves. The crazy bastards inside fell back to a central area then blew up the whole bloody, goddamned building, man.”