Grand Central Arena

by Ryk E. Spoor

  But even forcing his thoughts down that path was difficult, leaving a bitter mental taste in his mouth. I manage to avoid this kind of thing for almost fifty years, push K right out of my life, and now that I’m myself, I can’t even make myself remember the reason I do avoid it? Idiot! She deserves a hell of a lot more than you could give her. Or maybe a lot less than you’d give her.

  ‘‘So you’re sure you can handle the transitions, Ariane?’’ Simon was saying.

  The tall, slender pilot smiled again. ‘‘Tested it out there. There’s four gravity varying sections in the test course, plus the adjustable obstacles I was flying around. This little baby,’’ she patted the ship, ‘‘has jets and control surfaces in all the right places; I can do a roll, a somersault, banking turns, whatever, choose which surfaces repond, use air brakes grabbing the wind or even full thrust reversers, choose which controls respond for which maneuver easily . . . it’s one of the smoothest handling ships I’ve ever flown, even if she is awfully strange in some ways.

  ‘‘Transition from freefall to gravity is a bit of a jolt at first, especially since it happens over a pretty short range in the Arena. We can hit multiple Mach speeds in these ships, which may be puny by our spaceflight standards but is pretty damn fast in the Arena, since you have to worry about maintaining speed in atmosphere, friction, all those kinds of things. But once you’ve done the transition a few times, you know what it feels like.’’

  ‘‘What about dirty tricks?’’ DuQuesne asked, having gotten himself under control. Time to focus on the practicalities. ‘‘There’s a lot at stake in this race, both objectively and from the point of view of face. We’re the newbies—if we lose to a massively powerful Faction like the Blessed, okay, it’s going to hurt, but it won’t really damage our rep much, especially if we make a decent showing. But if the Blessed lose, it could really hurt. So they’ve got a pretty strong reason to try to get away with anything they can in this Challenge.’’

  Ariane nodded. ‘‘I talked about that with Orphan. People try things even in our races, you know; hell, Simon was there when Hawke and I tried to get each other killed in a keyhole. Orphan says that there are some minor stunts that Sethrik might try, but any truly major cheating will be caught and he forfeits the race. Still, I’m going over the tricks he might try, and it is a fairly open-rules race. He’s certainly not forbidden to try to cause me to crack up if he can.’’ She grinned suddenly, a smile with a razor-sharp edge. ‘‘Of course, neither am I.’’

  I love a woman who can swim with the sharks . . . and that’s a bad, bad thought, he said to himself as that smile blazed out. Mr. Superman, can’t you keep your eyes off her? He flicked his gaze to the side, only to meet Simon’s level green glance; even that momentary meeting showed that the physicist was—as he had always been—completely aware of DuQuesne’s focus on Ariane. He knew even before I did. Well, before I allowed myself to recognize it, anyway. ‘‘We’re going to be able to watch, right?’’ he said quickly, realizing even as he did that he sounded . . . hurried, too elaborately casual, not quite himself.

  It didn’t seem to register with Ariane, fortunately. ‘‘From back at Nexus Arena, yes. At the actual race site, it will be just me, Sethrik, our support crew—one person each—and the two witnesses and intermediaries, Orphan and Nyanthus. Orphan’s our advocate, Nyanthus is Sethrik’s. Not because the Faith necessarily like the Blessed, but because each intermediary or advocate has to come from another Faction than your own in cases like this. So just six people . . . and the Arena, whatever it is.’’

  He nodded and looked over the little modified fighter craft. It was very pretty, a sleek sharp central body with wings hearkening back to the classic jet fighters, with a second wing above and behind, angled back instead of forward, both with active-memory material control surfaces and control jets that could swivel in nearly every direction on each wingtip; the whole thing was polished a gold-touched silver except for the emerald-green of the cockpit; a huge jet intake began near the front and ran to the rear—though front and rear were more conveniences; the design of the thing would allow it to fly backward almost as easily as forward. ‘‘Well, you did handle her well through most of that practice, and allow me to say that the ship matches the pilot.’’ Watch it!

  ‘‘Well, as Gabrielle might put it, how sweet o’ you to notice!’’

  ‘‘Got a name for her, Ariane?’’ Carl asked. ‘‘Gotta give me time to blaze it on her front, and it’d be bad luck to go out without a name.’’

  ‘‘I sure do. A special name for me and for my second-in-command, even if no one else gets it. She’s the Skylark.’’

  As the name and her smile pierced straight to his heart, Marc C. DuQuesne suddenly truly appreciated how very much trouble he was in.

  Chapter 48

  Almost time, Ariane thought to herself as she ran her hand over Skylark’s forward contours once more, staring at the display of the race course. ‘‘Carl . . . ’’ she started.

  ‘‘Yeah, I know, time for your pre-race focus. Getting out now, you won’t see me until launch time. You got . . . ten minutes.’’ Carl gave her a quick friendly peck on the cheek and strode out, leaving her to her pre-race ritual.

  She smiled and then began to concentrate. The basic details of the course were spectacular, yet simple. From their launch point within the gravity well of the selected Sphere (which, as far as she could tell, belonged to none of the races currently active), they would have to pass what Orphan and Sethrik called a Skyfall, something like an avalanche in space. There was then a carefully laid out, slowly shifting set of asteroid-sized bodies which they had to weave between, not outside of; a huge cloudbank which included potential debris, living creatures native to the Arena, and so on; another gravity source (temporary—at Mach speeds they certainly weren’t getting to another Sphere anytime soon!) around which they were to loop and return, going through the same very large cloud, a different set of asteroids, a small flock of zikkis (a rather stupid type of aerial predator which, while incapable of actually damaging the flyers, could deflect them or slow them down for a while), past the Skyfall again, and so around. Three loops, each probably taking a couple hours, for a six hour race. She was in her space and crash suit, which had adequate sanitary prep, and quite sufficient water and concentrated nourishment.

  The inclusion of the zikkis had rather bothered her at first. It was one thing to put rocks in the way, but living creatures? However, Orphan had found her concern somewhat . . . amusing. ‘‘You will find that it is not a matter of using them as . . . how might I say it . . . disposable speed bumps, Captain Austin,’’ he’d said, with his little buzzing chuckle. ‘‘The zikki is a terribly formidable creature in many ways, a pack-predator which hunts flying creatures capable of very similar speeds—if not armored nearly so well as your flyers—and which can also dig out other creatures that lair within solid rock and ice. You may injure one or two, I admit, but they will recover.’’ She still didn’t like it, but the Arena had selected that obstacle and refused to change it, so she had to live with it.

  Recharging the ships in flight was done by matching alignment with a sort of ‘‘pit stop’’ through which the flyer would drag a superconducting charging loop connected to the main batteries. Part of their crew’s duties was to make sure that the ‘‘pit stop’’ matched straight-flight vector with the ship (since they did have to divert from the main course to use them, and the longer it took to perform the more time they would lose) and that a full charge would be delivered. Carl had been practicing with that for the past couple of days. The energy demands of the course were such that at least one such refuelling would be necessary.

  She began to go over the course in her mind, scaling the threats according to time. The first—

  ‘‘Pardon me, Captain Austin.’’

  The voice had come from behind her, space that should have been completely empty, and accompanying the voice was a buzzing undertone that sent shivers up her spine. She
whirled.

  Standing no more than ten meters from her was a shape in the black robes of a Shadeweaver. But unlike the vaguely humanoid Shadeweaver she had encountered before, even the loose-fitting robes here could not conceal the crab-like body and upright torso beneath, the seven leg-ridges and bulges in the upper area leaving no doubt that the thing in front of her was a Molothos. ‘‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought—’’

  ‘‘—that the Arena excluded all others besides the racers, their support, and Advocates from this area. Yes. But the powers of the Shadeweavers are not so easily set aside, not even for the Arena.’’ The creature made no move towards her, but she shuddered again at the underlying sound and the semi-arachnoid outline she could make out under the curiously weightless cloak. ‘‘We can . . . perhaps not trick the Arena, but bargain with it, convince it to avert its gaze or to allow a door to remain open, a connection to remain accessible.’’ Something in her posture must have finally become recognizable to it, for as it began to step forward it suddenly stopped and then stepped back.

  ‘‘My apologies for upsetting you. It was not my intent to do so; indeed, I came to wish you good fortune.’’

  What the hell are you up to? she wondered. ‘‘Well . . . that’s very nice, but why here and now? For that matter, why at all?’’

  ‘‘Here and now, because the Shadeweavers do not, of course, publicly take sides in most conflicts, either Challenges or other. Therefore, only in privacy may I express these sentiments.’’

  The fighting-claws emerged from under the cloak through unseen slits, made a strange crossing gesture that rocked back and forth. ‘‘Also, because I wish to both . . . apologize and warn you.’’

  ‘‘As far as I know,’’ she said warily, ‘‘I haven’t encountered you at all before. And I have to say that I thought the Molothos were . . . a lot less polite overall than you.’’

  A buzz translated as a chuckle. ‘‘It is even so, that my people do not speak kindly or well to others. Indeed, I am by their standards utterly mad, lacking the attachment to our people that most possess; from their point of view, I am a sociopath. Odd, is it not, that empathy and concern for other species is, to my people, what a lack of empathy and concern is to most others? Yet this is the price I have paid for the power of a Shadeweaver. In my mind, when I took the Oaths, their mutterings of leaving others behind were just that, mutterings of a deluded and inferior kind who simply had access to a power I did not; and with that power in my claws, I would then bring it to my people.

  ‘‘Others with similar plans usually fail in their deception, or cannot complete the training; some simply die upon attempting their first . . . manifestation of power. Why I did not is unclear, even to many meditations of vision. But survive I did, though not as I was; instead the universe opened before me, and I saw my people through other eyes, and my own eye was shamed for the sights it had seen, and nearly I tore it from my head; but instead I opened it wide to see all that had never been seen by my people.’’

  The Molothos Shadeweaver crabstepped sidewise. ‘‘But I waste your time in this. True, you have not met me; but others of my Guild you have, and they have an . . . interest in your people. I do not know all that they intend, for while there are basic rules that guide our actions, we are not a Faction in the same sense as many. We can act independently for many reasons, and even within the Guild may be webs within webs. Amas-Garao and his clique have some plan involving your people, perhaps even more focused upon one or two of you.’’

  ‘‘That’s the name of the one who spoke with me?’’

  ‘‘Yes. So I offer an apology, for those who have already attempted to channel you through a canyon of their own, and a warning that such will continue. I know little of what they intend, but I do know that we have long sensed turmoil approaching; portents have been clouded and difficult to read, and even charts of probability have been confused. The direction of the Survivor was one of the few clear indicia, yet its results . . . were unknown until the very event.’’

  Ariane blinked. ‘‘The direction of the Survivor . . . you mean that Orphan was sent to us?’’

  ‘‘Did you not know . . . but I see, of course you did not. Yes, it is clear. Now I understand. Good luck again, Ariane Austin. You shall be in need of it.’’

  ‘‘Wait a minute!’’ she said, stepping forward despite her inherent squeamishness. But even as the creature stepped backward, the shadows seemed to simply grow heavier, obscuring, blending with the black robes . . . and then the light strengthened, and there was nothing but shadow under Skylark’s rearmost wing.

  Dammit but I hate that! And right before the race? And what the hell is going on with Orphan?

  A quick thought showed she had only two minutes left. And with all this crap, I’m going to have a hard time getting in the groove. I wonder if that was the real point, and all the rest was just smoke and mirrors?

  ‘‘Fine,’’ she said to the empty room. ‘‘I’m still going to win this race!’’

  Chapter 49

  Skylark lunged forward at ten Gs, the most that Ariane wanted to risk for the initial run. With her racing and (relatively) new combat mods, she could take at least twice that, but she wanted to make sure she was really on before pushing both her envelope and that of Skylark.

  In a way, it was almost comforting that Sethrik had also named his ship—a sense of commonality existed there. The fact that the ship was named Dellak after one of the six original Minds, however, was not comforting, and she felt almost sorry for Sethrik. She had nothing against AIs—she still missed Mentor, her own AISage—but the Minds were a different matter.

  The Skyfall loomed before her, and seeing it for the first time in reality sent a chill of awe down her spine. A vast gray-brown cloud was trailing through the Arena’s endless sky, a cloud composed of dust and pebbles and billions of chunks of shattered rock ranging up to several hundred meters across, the remnants perhaps of some pseudo-world that had formed, and been destroyed, somewhere in the inter-Sphere space.

  But where that cloud crossed the almost knife-thin border—less than a kilometer across—where weightlessness became fully 0.96-G—it became a roaring waterfall of destruction, a sheeting fall of screaming stones plummeting through a gravity field almost forty thousand kilometers high. Given the relative motions of cloud and Sphere, the edges of the Skyfall were not completely precise; some stones shot far forward, perhaps even moving fast enough to reach and impact on the habitable upper surface, and others formed a scattered spume-like spray at the edges of the mighty atmospheric cataract, carrying the brown tinge of the gas and dust with them and glowing in the light of the artificial sun, or ‘‘Luminaire,’’ that was passing almost directly overhead.

  Sethrik had chosen to accelerate somewhat faster, and for the moment she let him take the lead. He was more familiar with the environment, and—dirty tricks or no—he would take a course that he felt was reasonably safe. The Blessed pilot gave the Skyfall a wide berth, leveling into a flight that would stick with the flat plane of the general course outline.

  The light of the Luminaire flickered some as her course took it behind the Skyfall, but there was still plenty of light. One good thing about the rather limited speed was that they wouldn’t get all that far from the contest Sphere or its Luminaire, which was good; according to many accounts, there were parts of inter-Sphere space that were blacker than night and more dangerous than easily described; some of the rumors she’d heard sounded almost like ancient mariner’s tales of monsters, haunted ships, and accursed seas.

  Looming up through the mists she could see the vague dark outlines of the asteroids, massive chunks of rock drifting slowly in a contained ballet. She tried not to think about how much power was implied in this racecourse, in something so obviously assembled by the Arena specifically for this contest. The thought terrified her more than the Arena itself, mainly because this was something she could grasp.

  Skylark’s radar returns showed a line of
at least twenty asteroids, between two and ten kilometers across, some less than a hundred meters apart, moving in a complex ballet. The Dellak adjusted course, dipping down slightly, then coming back on line; she realized Sethrik was trying to align himself for the straightest shot possible through the grouping. She thought he was slightly off, though the irregular nature of the damn things made it hard to tell; there were hundred-meter spiky mountains jutting from some of them, and they were not just drifting, but rotating like very lazy grinding wheels.

  Time to start racing. Both of them had long since backed off on acceleration—since it wasn’t possible to maintain such acceleration in atmosphere for long anyway, even if you had the power to do it; you’d burn up, no matter what you were made of (Well, Ariane thought, unless the Arena gave us ships made of that CQC stuff.). Now Ariane pushed that envelope, watching the energy and heating sensors, cutting a line just inside of Sethrik’s. Slowly, she pulled up on the Blessed vessel.

  Suddenly a jagged monolith loomed into view, black-edged stone so close that she thought she could see crystal formations in the rock. ‘‘Holy crap, Ariane, watch it!’’

  Carl’s voice sounded in her ears. ‘‘Cut it too close and we’ll have to send someone out there to bring you back in a butterfly net!’’

  Her heart was hammering from the close call, but it was exhilarating at the same time. She was past Sethrik now, and she had the line. She’d clear the entire line of . . . thirty, looked like, asteroids, in a full three seconds less time than Sethrik, who seemed to have been slightly taken aback by her daredevil passing move. ‘‘Don’t you worry about me, Carl, you just have my pit stop ready when I come around the back turn of the second run-through. Unless Sethrik wants to just concede now?’’