The Champion

by Scott Sigler

  Becca put her hand on Quentin’s arm.

  “Q, please,” she said. “If what Petra says is true, then Hulsey is right — this isn’t just about Jeanine anymore.”

  He took a deep breath. Becca’s voice and touch calmed him. He didn’t believe Petra’s story, but that didn’t matter right now. All he had to do was play along.

  “Sorry, Hulsey,” he said. “I’ll pay attention.”

  Hulsey nodded slightly. “Then we’ll begin.”

  Her robe’s light blinked out, leaving Quentin in complete darkness.

  “I can’t see nothing,” Ju said. “Ow! John, quit poking me.”

  “Wasn’t me,” John said. “Must have been George.”

  “Leave me out of it,” George said. “We are about to learn something grand, something that the firmament of the cosmos chose to eclipse from the knowledge of ...”

  His words faded off as a single spot of light appeared farther into the room, a pinprick of brightness in a sea of black — a star, distant and powerful. Then another blinked on, and another. In moments, the room filled with stars. Over there, the wisps of a glowing nebula — mostly yellow, not purple, so it wasn’t the Portath Cloud.

  The stars grew larger, until they were the size of golf balls. Some glowed dark orange, some red, some yellow, others a light blue. They were so detailed Quentin could see little sun spots, watch tiny solar flares blossom up in slow motion.

  Then the stars began to shrink, from golf balls to marbles, then to peas, then back to dots of light. As they did, more stars appeared, racing in from the edges of the room until their light blended, merged, became tiny parts of a new shape: a spiral galaxy, curved arms glowing softly, center blazing bright.

  “It’s the Milky Way,” Quentin said.

  Becca shook her head. The light of a million tiny stars lit her face in pale yellow.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe it’s the Andromeda?”

  The galaxy continued to shrink, from the size of the room to the size of Quentin, then Quentin’s chest. When it was the size of his head, it stopped shrinking, just hung in the room’s pitch black, so real he might have reached out and held it.

  Another glow caught his eye, some twenty feet to his left: a second spiral galaxy, thicker 111 the middle where it was the brightest.

  “Ah,” George said. “That’s the Milky Way. I’m sure of it.”

  The Milky Way. The galaxy in which lay Mason, Stewart and the other planets of the Purist Nation along with Micovi, the colony where Quentin had been born. Ionath and the worlds of the Quyth Concordia, too, were somewhere in there. And Earth, capital of the Planetary Union, birthplace of his species. The Sklorno Dynasty, the Ki Empire, the Ki Rebel Establishment, the Harrah Tribal Accord, the Prawatt and Leekee and Whitokians, the Creterakian Empire — all life that was known.

  And also, somewhere in that spinning disk of stars, the Portath Cloud.

  From the first galaxy, a new spot of light flashed. Green this time. And it was bigger, not to scale — had it been, the dot would have represented something larger than a thousand stars lined up one behind another.

  The scale shifted again, the first galaxy expanding so fast that outer stars shot past Quentin and he almost lost his equilibrium even though he was standing still.

  “Cool,” John said. “This is trippy.”

  “My head’s spinning,” Ju said. “I hope I don’t spew.”

  The green dot stayed fixed in location and size, the focal point for the enlarging galaxy. Seconds later, as the stars there expanded until black space was between them once again, the green dot separated into three distinct individual shapes — long silvery ships, tapered at both ends. Portath vessels, not that much different from what he’d seen when Rosalind had first been surrounded.

  Those ships hovered around a mostly pink planet spotted with mountain-streaked green continents. White puffs of clouds curled across land and pink oceans alike. So beautiful. So real.

  Then, flashes all across that globe, sharp sparkles that Quentin instantly knew were massive ground-shattering explosions.

  The image zoomed in again. The pink planet grew so large it towered over Quentin, almost filled the room. He saw more Portath vessels, thousands more, yet they were heavily outnumbered by evil-looking, angular wasp ships — it was a pitched battle of crushed hulls and shredded metal, a battle the Portath were losing.

  The scale zoomed out again. The pink planet shrank. As it did, the surface darkened, changing from pink to a soft red, then to a deep crimson. Quentin knew, somehow, that the time scale had rapidly accelerated, that he was looking at hundreds of years passing by in mere seconds. The wasps had changed the planet, maybe even killed it — along with everything on it.

  The entire room’s image spun again, turning and zooming farther out — those first three Portath ships, the ones that had seemed to be a single green dot, were far away from their murdered homeworld, their path represented by flickering green comet trails. They shot straight for the other galaxy: straight for the Milky Way.

  The ships, their green comet trails, the individual stars and the Milky Way all dimmed, then faded out. The room returned to blackness.

  Hulsey’s robe slowly illuminated, lighting up the faces of Becca, George, John, Ju and Quentin.

  “Good movie,” John said. “Could have used more explosions, though.”

  “And some girls,” Ju said. “I like ships and war and all, but still, some girls.”

  George shook his head. “What we just saw isn’t possible. If that was the Andromeda, it’s two and a half million light-years away. Nothing can punch that far.”

  “That we know of,” Becca said. “If the Rewall can jump from one end of the Milky Way to the other, who’s to say the Portath can’t jump between galaxies?” She looked at Hulsey. “Is that true? Did the Portath really punch that far to get here?”

  Hulsey nodded solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been told. The Portath did not evolve in this galaxy.”

  What she’d been told — like that mattered. Quentin had been told all kinds of things as a child, most of which he’d believed, most of which turned out to be lies.

  “So a planet was destroyed,” he said. “That’s happened in this galaxy, too. The Sklorno destroyed Ionath, and that’s now where we all live.”

  “The Abernessia didn’t just destroy a couple of planets,” Hulsey said. “They exterminated entire species. The Portath knew of seven other sentient races in their galaxy. The Abernessia wiped all of them out of existence, forever. Only the Portath escaped.”

  She painted a grim picture. Was Petra justified in her actions? No, no she was not — true diplomacy didn’t involve attacking innocent people.

  “You asked us to watch, and we did,” Quentin said. “Now will you take me to see my sister?”

  She didn’t hide her annoyance, as if she couldn’t believe the history lesson hadn’t moved Quentin to tears.

  “Yes. She is in the Stretch. I’ll take you to her. Come with me.”

  20

  Jeanine

  MORE POLISHED CORRIDORS, more walking, more Portath swinging overhead in both directions, more silver robots scurrying along the curved walls and floors. There were other Humans, too, wearing the same red robes and slave collar that Hulsey wore.

  Quentin had no interest in any of them.

  Becca fell in next to Hulsey. Becca wanted to talk, which was fine, because Quentin did not. He stayed a few steps back with George. John and Ju brought up the rear.

  “This Stretch you’re taking us to,” Becca said. “What is it?”

  “It’s where we trainees live,” Hulsey said. “It’s also where we spend our time when we are not training.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” Becca said. “Training for what, exactly?”

  Hulsey pointed up. “To crew the ships on the outer hull, of course. The Portath have warned us about the Abernessia all our lives. We’ve been trained in combat, knowing that someday
we might need to fight to survive.”

  Quentin huffed. “What do you do in combat, Hulsey? Polish the hallways so the Portath can watch their own pretty colors?”

  She stopped, turned suddenly.

  “I am second commander of the Polemos, a battleship formerly of the Tower Republic. When the Abernessia come, I will sail out to face them and kill their ships by the thousands.”

  Becca glanced doubtfully up at the corridor’s ring-lined ceiling. “Wait a minute, you’re telling us that all of those dead ships still work?”

  “They do,” Hulsey said without looking away from Quentin. “When war comes, I will fight. What will you do, big man? Hide with your sister and pray someone else does the fighting for you?”

  John started laughing. “Nice Lady, you annoy the hell out of me, but maybe there’s a little linebacker hidden in that tiny body of yours.”

  Hulsey’s nose barely reached Quentin’s sternum. Just one of his legs probably weighed more than she did. How could she be both a slave and a second commander, whatever that was?

  “I don’t do war,” Quentin said. “If sentients want to slaughter each other, that’s not my business. I’m a football player.”

  Hulsey sneered. “Ah, so that’s why you’re an oversized eyesore. I should have guessed. Grown men and women playing a game. How noble. We’ll see how much football there is when the Abernessia come.”

  She spun again and strode down the hallway, so fast Quentin and the others had to speed up to stay with her.

  Hulsey turned right, into a narrower hallway that ended at a large oval door.

  “Welcome to the Stretch,” she said.

  The door opened to a brightly lit, round platform with a waist-high rail around the edge. Standing at the rail were Kimberlin, Bumberpuff and Beatrice. Doc Patah floated above them all.

  At first, Quentin only had eyes for the X-Walker.

  “You get what you need, Bumberpuff?”

  “I believe I did,” the Prawatt said. A long fingertip tapped the center of the X-body. “It is in here. I did not see all of it, but from what I did see, the Portath have an enormous amount of data on their enemy. Rosalind also has a copy — she’s been released and is waiting for us.”

  The last few words didn’t really register, because Quentin saw what was past the platform’s edge — a vast open space, so huge he reactively bent his knees for balance to keep from falling, as one might if elevator doors unexpectedly opened not to a firm floor but to a bottomless black shaft.

  He silently walked to the rail and looked down upon a sprawling, living landscape far below.

  The eight-kilometer-long ship was hollow, or at least partially so. A row of artificial suns blazed from the curved roof above, stretching far off to both the left and the right. A long, narrow lake ran lengthwise down the middle, flanked on either side by wide swaths of farmland, which in turn were flanked by thin strips of green forest. His mind told him he was looking at a valley, lush and verdant, yet perhaps a kilometer straight out from the platform, a gleaming ship wall curved smoothly upward from the greenery.

  Quentin saw a boat on the water, three Humans in it, apparently relaxing. One light-blue-skinned woman, a pink-hued man and an all-white-skinned man. Even from this distance, where people looked like insects, Quentin could make out the black infinity tattoo on the white man’s forehead.

  Near the boat, water rippled as a half-dozen black-striped blue bodies broke the surface and arced through the air. The aquatic creatures turned sideways before landing, letting the flats of their bodies kick up a spray of water that splashed the Humans in the boat. Quentin heard the faint sound of laughter echoing up from the lake.

  “Leekee,” Kimberlin said, shaking his head slightly in amazement. “During the Second Galactic War, 2537 I think it was, forty-seven Leekee warships tried to travel through the Cloud to surprise Whitokian forces. The forty-seven ships were lost forever.”

  Becca leaned on the rail, her face wrinkled with doubt. “They’ve been here a hundred and fifty years?”

  “Can’t be the original crew,” Kimberlin said. “Leekee life spans are only about sixty years. You’re probably looking at the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of those crew members.”

  Hulsey nodded. “We’re on the third and fourth generation of the original crew’s descendants. They’ve never known anything but this ship, the Stretch and their training. Trainees keep their own cultures and traditions, and are free to pursue any religion they like.”

  That explained the infinity tattoo. It made sense: so many Purist ships had been lost here that the crews could have formed a good-sized colony.

  Quentin stared out at the stunning display. Trees, sunlight, water, sentients relaxing and playing ... the place buzzed with life.

  Ju pointed off to the left, off and up.

  “Jiminy,” he said, “They even got birds.”

  A flock of two dozen, maybe, moving as one, all angling left or right at exactly the same moment.

  “Not birds,” Doc Patah said, his synthetic voice thick with disgust. “Those are Creterakians.”

  The flying creatures came closer, and Quentin could make out tadpole-shaped bodies driven forward by membranous wings. They were bats, all right, wearing suits of the same red material that made up Hulsey’s robes.

  “The Takeover,” Kimberlin said. “Back in 2640, the Creterakians sent nine hundred ships into the Cloud to try and conquer it, just as they had conquered the League, the Union, the Nation and the others. Those nine hundred were never heard from again.”

  Quentin remembered the first time he’d met Manny Sayed, on the liner that had carried Quentin from Micovi to the Combine. Manny had talked about the Takeover, when the bats had invaded the Purist Nation. The Creterakians packed their soldiers in tight, a million to each ship — nine hundred ships entering the Portath Cloud meant an invasion force of nine hundred million. How many had died? How many had the Portath captured? Had those captured individuals flourished, bred far more of their kind?

  Leekee, Creterakians, Humans from Tower and the Purist Nation ... just how many “trainees” did the Portath have?

  “There are more ships like this one,” he said. “Aren’t there.”

  “There are,” Hulsey said. “Although none as big as this. This is one of the three original ships that came from the home system. The other two were lost after the Portath first arrived in this galaxy.”

  John crossed his arms. “I don’t get it. There’s a whole planet out there, nice lady. Looks like the booger-bags haven’t touched it. Why don’t you live on it?”

  “For the very reason you will be the first to leave here — the Abernessia,” Hulsey said. “We harvest renewable resources from that planet, but are careful to leave no trace of any kind. We prepare for war, but always knew that if the Abernessia came to the Cloud and didn’t detect us, we could slip away, find another place to hide. If they found evidence of our culture on the planet, they would know they were on the right path and continue their hunt. Our fleet is always ready to evacuate.”

  For the first time, Quentin felt bad for the Portath, even for the trainees. An entire race of sentient beings with no planet, no orbital station, no fixed point in the universe to call their own. Their ships were their homes. Food, manufacturing, family, culture — all mobile, ready to go anywhere on a moment’s notice. A nomadic people, forever wandering the Portath Cloud and wherever else their travels might take them.

  “But now you want to fight,” Quentin said. “Thousands of years of hiding, and now you want to fight. Why?”

  Hulsey smiled. “We hid because if the Abernessia know the Portath are here, they will come for us first. That’s why we couldn’t contact other races, why no other races could be allowed to see us. We always wanted to fight; we just never thought we could win. If Petra can bring the races together, maybe we can.”

  Quentin had to stifle a dark, biting laugh — like Petra could bring anyone together, anyone other than her own ki
nd. A few Prawatt playing football wasn’t going to change the fact that the rest of the galaxy hated and feared her species.

  He pointed over the rail to the valley below. “Is my sister down there?”

  Hulsey nodded. “She is. I’ll take you to her now.”

  • • •

  JEANINE AND FRED WERE WAITING for them in the thin strip of woods. When she saw Quentin, she ran to him and launched herself into his arms. He squeezed her tight, smelled her hair and felt her squeeze him back.

  “Quentin, I can’t believe this,” she said. “How? How did you find us?”

  He gripped her shoulders, looked her up and down. She’d cut her hair short, but there was no mistaking that caramel skin, those eyes that were so similar to the ones that looked back at him from the mirror.

  “Are you okay? Have they hurt you?”

  Jeanine shook her head, but reached up and touched the thin golden collar wrapped tightly around her neck.

  “Not permanently,” she said. “But every day Fred and I go to the Hypatia for training. If we don’t do what they ask, or we do it incorrectly, the pain is ... I’ll call it severe”

  Quentin’s lip curled. His hands started to squeeze, an automatic reaction to blinding anger, but he caught himself before he hurt his sister. He let go, let his hands drop to his sides. At that moment, if he could have handed the entire Portath race over to their extinction-hungry pursuers, he would have done it without a second thought.

  He glared at Hulsey.

  “Not a slave, huh? You torture my sister into doing what you want?”

  “Combat is pain,” Hulsey snapped. “Your sister has superior reaction time. She’s being trained as a cannon operator. If we go into battle and she hesitates, if she misses, she could die, as could others on the ship. Pain helps her understand the ramifications, that every shot is critical. You call that torture? Don’t be so weak. Our collars make sure we execute orders that will keep the fleet safe.”

  Hulsey was so far gone there was no reaching her. Logic wasn’t a part of her nature, it seemed. Earlier, Kimberlin had said, with religion, all manner of behavior is possible. All manner of behavior, and also all manner of justification.