Grand Central Arena

by Ryk E. Spoor

  Wait a minute . . . She followed their gazes, watched their movements.

  I think I see. And if so . . . She ran to Carl. ‘‘You and Gabrielle, follow me!’’

  Amas-Garao screamed in fury and frustration; every time he almost had one of the two attacking him, the other would throw his aim off. He’d shattered parts of the stairs and left a hole in the nearby wall already.

  But they couldn’t maintain the rhythm forever. The Shadeweaver’s defenses may have been weakened by whatever the thing Orphan held was, but they were far from down, and anger was lending a focus to the Shadeweaver despite his injuries. At the peak of his rage, he shrugged off DuQuesne, and saw Orphan, just two steps below him, stagger, a perfect target; Amas-Garao’s hand blazed blue-white and sent a lethal bolt straight for Orphan’s chest.

  At the last possible second, Orphan dove—a dive so perfectly timed, so accurately calculated, that it was suddenly clear that even the stagger had been a deliberate ruse. And it was far too late for Amas-Garao to recall the blast he had just unleashed.

  Blazing starfire thundered into the white-glittering wall, shattering it like glass before a sledgehammer into a billion razor-shards; Ariane, Carl, and Gabrielle were mostly sheltered by their position, crouched right against the sides of the gateway, which the wall had filled. Through the settling icy dust the three humans lunged into the street; DuQuesne and Orphan followed a split-second later.

  Amas-Garao started down the steps towards them, but pulled up short as an Adjudicator seemed to materialize out of nowhere. The armored figure said nothing, but it was clear that even the Shadeweaver did not care to push things any farther.

  ‘‘Thus is this encounter concluded,’’ Gona-Brashind buzzed calmly. ‘‘While we cannot enforce and will not enforce our will upon you, Captain Austin, I ask—purely as a favor—that you not speak of this incident to the general public. Within your circle of allies and your own people, of course, I would not expect you to be silent.’’

  Help you save face? Okay. Maybe you will owe me one. ‘‘I will consider it.’’

  Orphan suddenly dropped the little rod with an oath; it smoked. He gingerly picked it back up, juggled it, and with difficulty replaced it in the bag.

  Amas-Garao stared at them a moment; then without another word or gesture, he strode away, fading out of existence. The other Shadeweaver also vanished.

  ‘‘I don’t think this is over, not by a long shot.’’ DuQuesne muttered, leaning on Carl. Carl did not look entirely happy to be trying to support someone who outweighed him by at least a factor of two.

  ‘‘No,’’ agreed Ariane. ‘‘But it is for now.’’ She turned to Orphan. ‘‘Thank you, Orphan.’’

  The leader and sole member of the Liberated suddenly collapsed.

  ‘‘Orphan!’’

  Chapter 56

  ‘‘Will they be all right, Gabrielle?’’

  DuQuesne had collapsed just moments after the hastily-located shuttle-taxi had brought them to the Embassy, and Orphan had been looking steadily worse, his color going from black and pine green to something closer to spring leaves and dark gray. As the only doctor present, Gabrielle Wolfe had immediately taken charge as best she could.

  ‘‘Should be,’’ the diminuitive blonde replied as she emerged from the Embassy room she was using as an impromptu sickbay. Simon followed her out, still packing various instruments into his own kit, with Laila trailing behind, clearly going over mental notes and only half-seeing everyone around her. ‘‘Hard to be sure, of course, what with Orphan being not at all human.’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ Simon said, ‘‘The problem was quite a multidisciplinary one. Not just for Orphan, either.’’

  Ariane blinked. ‘‘What do you mean?’’

  ‘‘Hyperions don’t get sick, and ones like DuQuesne are hard to hurt, and when they get hurt, they usually take care of the problem themselves,’’ Laila said absently. ‘‘Taking care of one is a delicate business, because they’re all unique—one-off creations of bioengineering with some unknown set of modifications, whose origin isn’t known and stability is uncertain. I wouldn’t say he’s as alien as Orphan, but Marc isn’t one of us, either.’’

  She remembered Marc’s insistence—and pain—on the fact that he wasn’t human. It somehow hurt worse to hear someone else confirm it so matter-of-factly. ‘‘So what’s wrong with them?’’

  Simon put a hand on her shoulder. ‘‘Don’t worry, Captain—Ariane. Marc’s sleeping now, but he’s going to be fine. He took an incredible beating for something like twenty minutes there, and fought for most of it. He wasn’t a mass of broken bone because his bones . . . aren’t bone, entirely. One of his modifications causes his bone structure and a number of other structural members like tendons to create natural—if you can call it that—ring-carbon composite. There’s at least some of it protecting all vital areas.’’

  ‘‘It’s amazing, and explains a great deal about some of the described capabilities of the Hyperions,’’ Laila said, more enthusiastically. ‘‘And, of course, he was running at top gear all that time—had to be, from your description of the opposition. That’s what really has him down for now.’’

  Ariane glanced at Gabrielle for clarification. ‘‘What does she mean?’’

  ‘‘Honey, you know we can’t keep up with Marc, not even you. Well, nothing like that comes for free—something has to pay for it. Basically Marc’s metabolism skyrockets during that kind of sequence, everything runs faster, and he burns through his reserves like lightning. Near as I can tell, he must have lost three to six kilos of mass in that long fight. Now he’s trying to recover, and everything else really got to him. Also, I don’t think he’s exactly got insulation all through him, so the lightning balls that son of a bitch was throwing couldn’t have been helping.’’ She looked at Ariane oddly. ‘‘You seemed to throw them off pretty quick, though.’’

  The gaze made her uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to follow that discussion—it wasn’t relevant. ‘‘Maybe I was lucky and didn’t get shocked as hard as everyone else. What about Orphan?’’

  ‘‘Oh, now there is a very interesting situation.’’ Simon said. ‘‘The issue of calculation of odds was rather thrown into sharp relief here, and so when I was helping Gabrielle examine Orphan, I was alert for certain . . . possibilities.

  ‘‘Artificial intelligences don’t work here, but it is possible for nanotechnological enhancements within the body to exist and function, and to some extent these can be used to augment brain as well as bodily functions. It appears that there is a long-established set of nanotechbiotech structures in Orphan’s brain which, as near as Laila and myself can determine, basically assist in the accurate evaluation of situations and probabilities, on a much more basic level than we can perform them. This means that Orphan—and, by extension, I suspect many, if not most, of the alien species we have encountered—have what amounts to an instinctive ‘gut feel’ for probabilities that we essentially lack. They react to probabilities against them in the same way we would react to proportionate threats.’’

  That does start to make sense of this. ‘‘So to them, facing down a probability against them of a million-to-one is like, what, nerving yourself to open a door when there’s a T-Rex behind it?’’

  ‘‘Something not very far from that. There are, of course, survival-oriented cutoffs—there’s no percentage in having people who are fighting for their lives just give up. As near as I can tell,’’ Simon went on, ‘‘Orphan managed to trip those by focusing on how his mental freedom was, to him, equivalent to his physical survival. But it had the emotional effect on him of . . . oh, deliberately placing your head between a spaceship and its docking port. And he was at the same time also confronting something which, in and of itself, he viewed as nearly impossible to defeat. Add to that the quite considerable battering he took, and he effectively went into shock.’’

  ‘‘Without Laila’s advice, we might have lost him, too,’’ Gabrielle said sobe
rly. ‘‘My medical training didn’t tell me anything about giving first aid to some kind of human-bug crossbreed.’’

  Laila looked uncomfortable at the praise, and scandalized by the description of Orphan. ‘‘I simply was able to deduce what kind of mechanisms could be used to produce artificial respiration, and how he needed to be stabilized. He is hardly any form of crossbreed, Dr. Wolfe! His people are a magnificent, and alien, lifeform whose similarities to any Terran lifeforms are purely coincidence—and perhaps suggestive of some parallel courses of evolution, or of something even greater. We should never make—’’

  Gabrielle raised her hands defensively. ‘‘Sorry, don’t you get so riled up.’’

  Ignoring the exchange, Ariane pressed ahead. ‘‘How long before they wake up?’’

  ‘‘I’m not sure for Marc,’’ Simon said. ‘‘He opened one eye, seemed to recognize he was safe, and shut back down again, so I would presume it’s a semi-autonomic function which prefers to run its course if in safe surroundings. Orphan, on the other hand, is already awake. He wants to speak to you, Captain. In private.’’

  She looked at the three with an exasperated glance. ‘‘Why the hell didn’t you say so before?’’ She didn’t wait for an answer—after all, she had asked other questions, too—but strode past them into the sickbay.

  Orphan was laid on a bed tailored to his form; at least they’d learned how to control that sort of thing by now. He was propped up by the bed and, while still far from his normal coloration, no longer looked as though he were a terribly faded photograph. ‘‘Captain . . . Austin.’’

  ‘‘Orphan.’’ She sat down in a nearby chair. ‘‘Orphan, you gave far more than I asked. I didn’t realize . . . how very much it was going to cost you. I’m sorry.’’

  ‘‘Please, Captain! I . . . I hold no grudge or blame against you here. Indeed . . . I must thank you.’’ The wingcases tried to shift, the body move in a way that she knew would be a weak smile. ‘‘It seems that only under such terrible duress was I truly able to see myself clearly, and recognize how I was being led to the service of others, where I had sought to free myself. As I said to Amas-Garao, perhaps one day you and I shall be enemies, not allies, but that will be because it serves my purposes, not those of some other Faction which is not my own.’’

  The words were a clear cautionary warning; Orphan wanted her to be aware that he had not risked his life out of some noble heroism. She smiled. ‘‘Orphan, it doesn’t matter to me why you did it. What does matter to me is that if you hadn’t, we’d be either dead, or more likely going happily about our business without even realizing we’d been totally screwed by that bastard. Who,’’ and her voice hardened as she spoke, ‘‘had better not think that this is over for me.’’

  Orphan shuddered. ‘‘I overcame my fears in that moment, Captain, but hearing you so . . . eager to come again to grips with so formidable an opponent is enough to make me ill.’’

  ‘‘Sorry.’’ Ariane thought a moment. ‘‘You surprised the hell out of all of us with that little gadget—including the Shadeweaver. Where the hell did you get it? The Faith?’’

  He managed a small laugh, with a ghost of his usual ironic, superior tone. ‘‘Oh, never from the Faith, nor the Shadeweavers. Perhaps there are others—or rather, I must assume there are other such devices—but never have I heard of one elsewhere.’’ He looked off into the empty distance, a very human pose. ‘‘I will not tell you exactly where, or how . . . at least, not at this time. That is a secret of inestimable value, I am sure you will agree. But . . . in the interests of our alliance, I will say that I still prefer to not believe in magic . . . but the place and time at which I acquired that device did indeed severely test my preferences. Then again, the Shadeweavers do the same.’’

  She studied Orphan, whose body language and tone showed an unusual intimacy or openness . . . one perhaps born of the danger they had shared. ‘‘So . . . much as I hate to open this can of worms, but do you have any real reason not to believe that the Shadeweavers are magicians and the Faith the priests of the gods?’’

  Orphan’s laugh was somewhat stronger. ‘‘Ah, Captain Austin, an excellent question. I have no direct evidence in that direction, no. If there were, undoubtedly the Factions would fragment more violently over matters of belief and doctrine. But it is, to me, rather suggestive that the Shadeweavers themselves insist that the Faith are but charlatans, by implications Shadeweavers in disguise, while the Faith appear quite sincere—most, at least—and describe what do indeed sound like a contact with something nigh unto a god.’’ His hands flicked out weakly. ‘‘I am not sure exactly why this makes me doubt that there is a supernatural force, but something about it bothers me. Perhaps it will come to me later.’’

  The interval had allowed her to figure out an approach for the important question. ‘‘So, if we are even now, does that mean we are not allies?’’

  Orphan tilted his head, then mimed the bob-bow gesture. ‘‘In that we have no direct and immediate commitment, yes. Yet . . . as I said to you before, I was told that there was one chance to save my Faction, my true people, and I have yet to finish the path I was shown. I have not been the Survivor by neglecting my interests, Captain Austin; while certainly this means that there may come a time when I must relinquish our association, and even work against you, in this case, and at this time, it would seem to me the height of folly to abandon you. Your stock, so to speak, is on the rise. We shall not speak of this incident outside, yet it will be known that something happened, and that it likely involved the Shadeweavers, and that we all returned. There will be whispers and rumors and all manner of useful uncertainty to be exploited.’’

  ‘‘Glad to see I judged you right,’’ came a low murmur from the other bed. DuQuesne was looking at them. ‘‘You’re an opportunistic bastard who might sell us as soon as shake our hand . . . but you’d rather be up-front about it when you can.’’

  ‘‘Marc!’’ She found herself by his bedside without even thinking about it, taking his hand. ‘‘You crazy . . . don’t you dare go do anything like that again, you hear me?’’

  DuQuesne chuckled, then winced. ‘‘Believe you me, I’ve learned my lesson. How are you, Ariane?’’

  ‘‘I’m fine. A little bruised, nothing much else; Gabrielle said whatever species the Shadeweaver is, the blood’s mildly toxic, but I’d have to practically bathe in it to be in danger.’’ She squeezed his hand. ‘‘I’m just glad we won that one.’’

  ‘‘We didn’t win that one, Captain, and I hope none of you are really fooling yourselves into thinking we did.’’

  ‘‘It was at least a tie,’’ Ariane argued.

  DuQuesne shook his head. ‘‘We got damned lucky. Twice over, in that fight. First that Orphan decided his personal survival was bound up with us, at least for that moment, and second that he had something to give us an edge. An edge that looks like it probably couldn’t have held out more than a few more minutes, and maybe won’t work ever again.’’ He glanced at Orphan.

  The alien looked uncomfortable. ‘‘You . . . may be right. I had of course never used it before. It was a reserve I have hidden for a long time, in case I ever found myself in a dispute with the Shadeweavers.’’

  ‘‘In any case, it’s for damn sure it won’t surprise them next time. They’ll be ready for it.’’

  Ariane’s elation at Marc’s recovery was fast fading. ‘‘So you think they’ll be trying this again?’’

  ‘‘Not the same thing, no. But something.’’

  Orphan nodded, deliberately imitating the human gesture. ‘‘Dr. DuQuesne is, I am afraid, all too correct. The

  Shadeweavers will not permit us to believe that we can escape without suffering consequences; even those who refused to participate in Amas-Garao’s plan will not oppose a campaign to instruct us in the error of our ways, as long as it is reasonably subtle and not overly violent.’’ ‘‘If they’re not going to do it directly, then what?’’

  ‘�
��My guess?’’ DuQuesne yawned, looking astounded and realizing his own body wanted him to shut back down. He fought it off for a moment. ‘‘My guess? Things are going to just get a lot more difficult for us from now on.’’ His eyes began to close, but he managed to finish his thought. ‘‘ ‘Just business . . . nothing personal.’’’ he quoted.

  Oh, damn.

  Chapter 57

  There are times, DuQuesne thought dryly, that I wish I wasn’t right.

  It hadn’t taken long for his prediction to come true. The day after the race, Carl and Ariane had gone to visit Ghondas, the Powerbroker Orphan had introduced them to previously, and she had been much more approachable. In fact, it had seemed that she was willing to discuss the possibility of selling them enough power to go home, based on the significant track record they had already established, and allowing them to simply owe something of a debt to her. The two had come back extremely cheerful, and spent much of the later part of the day searching through their possessions and knowledge for material that would make a useful ‘‘good faith’’ down payment.

  The next morning, just before they set out to meet the Powerbroker, Ghondas had called and broken off the meeting. There was no explanation given. Ariane insisted on going anyway; DuQuesne, now at least somewhat recovered, had decided to go with her.

  It had taken considerable argument to even see Ghondas—the normally-open area before her station was closed—and when she did come out, the usually expansive and pleasant creature was curt, nervous. ‘‘I have simply reconsidered my risks and decided that it would be unwise at this time,’’ she said. ‘‘Can you not accept this is my right as a Powerbroker?’’

  ‘‘Of course it’s your right.’’ Ariane said hastily. ‘‘I just don’t understand why. Everything seemed fine yesterday.’’