by Andy Kasch
The crowd roared, the video screen went red, and the Callian calmly drove his chair to his piece bin. He took two of them out, went up to Jumper’s piece and made the expected defensive move. It seemed he anticipated the next move and had his next piece ready to place. Jumper obliged him, and there were quickly four pieces in the frame.
This time, Jumper wasted no time in branching out to a gambit variation. He placed his third piece off by itself on the upper portion of one side of the frame.
The Callian reacted the same way Alan would have. That was disappointing. Alan had learned how to occasionally beat Jumper in his wild gambit-style openings by basically mimicking what Jumper did. That is, build his own offshoot pattern on the other side of the main cluster. This was going to be a tough game. Jumper wished Alan was here to watch it.
Several moves later, the Callian made the first blocking move. It was a good one, because it simultaneously created a possible offensive threat. It was the kind of move that made Jumper prefer the straight pieces over the curved.
The Callian, in fact, played the straight pieces in roughly the same manner Jumper was prone to play them, and Jumper soon found himself on the defensive as a result. That first blocking move of the Callian’s was perfect. Extat, it’s why the curved pieces weren’t the advantage everyone thought they were. Jumper regretted being the first winner of the semi-finals.
The frame continued to fill with pieces. The Callian played a slow, methodical game. He didn’t make any risky bridging propositions. At this rate, the frame would be nearly full before a winning pattern emerged. It’s what Jumper and his friends referred to as a blackout game. In a blackout game, the winning pattern would seem to appear from nowhere, connecting its way through the mess of pieces in the frame and suddenly making sense out of them all. It wasn’t all that unusual of a way for a game to end, but the way this one was going Jumper thought it would be the straight pieces that emerged victorious. And he wasn’t seeing any way to stop it.
The crowd didn’t notice these subtler nuances, as they continued cheering after each of Jumper’s moves. Jumper knew they were going to be shortly disappointed.
Sometimes in polwar, when things weren’t going Jumper’s way, he found it helped to take his focus off the game for a minute. He decided to move around some. He ended up driving his chair up over the top of the game frame, to the delight of the crowd. It was kind of cool to be up here.
The video screen flashed red, but then it showed something that caught Jumper’s attention. He thought he saw Alan on it. Were his eyes playing tricks on him?
He drove the chair off to the left side of the game frame and looked up at the screen. It now showed a picture of him, looking precariously perched above a corner of the huge frame. He realized he looked ridiculous there, but didn’t care at the moment.
Jumper began scanning the audience. Most of them were grouped together in sections by race, so they were easy to survey.
He saw them. Directly across from him, surrounded by native Torians, midway up in the stands. It was Brandon, Alan and Kayla. They were here! What’s more, they were cheering.
Alan waved at him and made the peace sign. Jumper returned it. Brandon waved. He looked to be smiling. Brandon then gave him a thumb’s up.
It looked like Kayla was holding something. Something that was moving. An animal. No—that couldn’t be right.
Kayla blew him a kiss. Jumper reached out with one hand and pretended to grab it. The crowd went wild. Jumper then noticed Brandon, Alan, and Kayla were back on the big video screen, but as soon as Jumper looked to it the picture changed and held a view of Jumper with his fist outstretched. He looked like a total idiot now. Jumper laughed at himself.
It was all good. His people were here for him. That made all the difference in the world. Jumper was about to lose this game, but at least he got to play in the finals with his own true fans here to witness. And Uncle Brandon was being so cool about it, so supportive. It was almost enough to bring a tear to Jumper’s eye—but not quite.
Jumper took the chair back down to the game again. He then decided to back it all the way out to get a farther-away view. The Callian was still sitting in place, waiting patiently.
That’s when it happened.
Ever since the lights came on in the stadium, the brass game pieces had been reflecting sparkles, even more as the overhead sky grew darker. But what Jumper saw now he recognized. It was different than the flashes from the pieces—barely. It happened in an open area near the bottom on one side of the main cluster. It was not a place where current action was taking place. On the surface, it looked like a great place to waste a move and let the Callian gain the final momentum to quickly win.
But the flash move always looked like that when it came. Jumper trusted his instincts. And he really had nothing to lose at this juncture. He took the chair down, grabbed a piece, and placed it in the spot where the special flash had appeared.
The crowd didn’t cheer. That was the first time they remained silent after he moved. Jumper did hear a soft applause coming from somewhere, though. He looked to see if it was from Alan, Brandon, and Kayla. It wasn’t. It was coming from the Callian section. It must have looked to the audience that Jumper had just made the same mistake the Sinlo champ had in the semi-finals; that of letting spectator participation throw him off his game.
The Callian sat still and studied Jumper’s move. He was a good player, disciplined enough to not take anything for granted.
Finally, he moved. Jumper could tell he had completely dismissed Jumper’s last move as a detrimental, amateur mistake. The Callian broke from his attritional blackout game and made a bold bridging move, revealing his conviction that he now had Jumper against the ropes. Jumper didn’t blame him. At this point, Jumper couldn’t see any use for his last move, either.
Jumper was forced to an immediate defensive blocking move. The Callian then made another direct bridging move from one of his side patterns. Jumper blocked that, too. But many of the Callians mini-patterns were beginning to join together. He then made a skirting move, around Jumper’s last blocking move. Jumper was peddling backwards, fast.
Then he saw it. That innocent, mistake-looking flash move could now be bridged through the cluster of pieces in the middle to connect to his last two blocking moves. There was just enough room to fit a new curved piece in there. It was a beautiful thing. Jumper felt his heart rate increase as he released the piece.
The Callian disregarded Jumper’s move and continued his skirting pattern. Jumper ignored it and bridged his outside pattern in the upper left to his connecting structure through the middle of the field.
His opponent stopped this time and studied the game for a few minutes. Suddenly, Jumper had a formidable structure in place. The crowd was slowly becoming noisier again in the background.
The Callian moved. He completed the skirting pattern around Jumper’s last blocking piece, connecting his own middle-to-outside structure. But it wasn’t yet a completed pattern.
Jumper smiled. He realized his next move would look completely irrational at first. But Jumper remembered a game with Alan that ended like this. It was positively silly. He placed a curved piece by itself near the top of the frame, horizontally with the ends facing downward, barely touching his mini-pattern in the upper left corner. It seemed like another wasted move, something a first-time player would do.
It was the winning move. Jumper knew it. He moved his chair all the way out backwards again and basked in glory that only he yet recognized. It would take a couple of minutes before his opponent realized he couldn’t move. There was no use to it. Jumper had a beautiful structure in place that was strewn throughout the playing field, and nothing could upset it.
Jumper raised his seat higher. The Callian gradually lowered his seat, got out, and walked away. Just like that, it was over. Jumper had won the tournament.
He raised both hands above his head in victory. The crowd became uncontrollable. They had certainly never
witnessed such play. It was a game worthy of the finals.
There was a new noise now, an outside sound growing on top of the crowd’s wild cheering. Jumper looked up. The formation of alien ships was coming over the top of the arena again. This time, there were only ten.
Suddenly, the small conductor antennae on top of the game frame came to life. They shot rays of intense white light upward. A short ways in the air above the stadium, they came together and formed an enormous single beam.
That crazy Belle-ub had built a laser into the top of the game frame. A huge beam was now firing straight up from the stadium into the night sky and beyond. But it was in the path of the fly-by ships buzzing the stadium. Could they move out of the way in time?
Jumper cringed as they flew straight into the beam. The bottom of the ships’ hulls lit up brightly as they passed through it, but that was all. The beam resumed its straight path upward afterwards.
It wasn’t a laser. It was a spotlight. A fantastic signaling spotlight that reached far out into space above them.
Minutes later, Jumper stood on the terrace with Belle-ub. The video screens flashed red and the crowd quieted down. Belle-ub asked Jumper what his prize request was. Jumper looked around at the crowd before answering.
“My prize request is a private matter between Belle-ub and myself. It does not impose upon any visitors.”
The crowd was silent with disappointment. But then, gradually, many of the alien races began applauding and cheering. The natives remained quiet. Jumper thought he heard some of them grumbling.
Jumper noticed a group of spectators on the right-hand side who were short and hairy. There were the Narshans. Jumper saw the one who had been his opponent shaking his head.
Jumper’s stomach tightened again. He glanced to the field at the game set where he and the Narshan had played in the second round. Then he looked back to the Narshans—but they were gone.
*
The Dirg ships remained engaged. They never broke and regrouped from the safety of the space station as the Torian fighters frequently did. Jol2 thought he knew why. They were likely still afraid of the light weapon themselves, and didn’t want to be accidentally targeted by it.
That made Jol2 start to regret the Torian’s reforming patterns. It left the Dirgs out there alone, greatly outnumbered, and they were the ones who had come to help.
“We’re going to have to stay engaged, boys,” Jol2 radioed over the command channel. “We can’t leave our allies out there like this. Follow me back in. Let’s take them home this time.”
Jol2 ignored the High General’s cursing objections that followed on the speaker and led the entire fighter fleet forward for what would be the final attack move, however long it would take, whatever the result. A handful of wounded Torian fighters had already been forced to dock in the hangar at Cardinal-4 after sustaining damage from collisions with debris, and they weren’t going to be the last.
The enemy dark ships seemed to sense the finality of the new engagement as well. Instead of waiting to return fire from a stationary position, they moved this time. The direction they moved in was synchronized. The way Jol2 reacted, with the entire fleet following him, resulted in in circular battle. Individual ships broke free and engaged in dogfights in the middle of the circle, mostly the ones at the rear of each end of the formation who were easy targets. So it quickly became messy, but the battle was now mostly conducted in a continuing clockwise rotation.
The Latians must not have liked the proposition because they broke for Amulen. The Dirgs pulled out and followed them. Jol2 was concerned about that, and radioed for his personal squadron to follow.
Just as Jol2 thought, the Latians were making a run at the largely unprotected Dirg transport ships, which were unwisely left in Amulen orbit. Several of the transport ships fired weapons as the Latian fighters approached, but they were still much too far out of range. The Dirgs obviously wanted the Latian attackers to know the transport ship captains were watching, and that those ships were armed. But it looked to Jol2 like a desperate saber rattle. It certainly didn’t slow the Latians down any.
That’s when the ITF1 fleet appeared. All nine of them, forming a shield in front of the Dirg transport ships. As soon as their dags cooled, they started firing everything they had forward—including missiles and those powerful larger laser beams from the lower turrets. The Latians were now running straight into a lethal barrage.
That slowed them. In fact, it made them pull up and fly back around in a clockwise rotation. The Dirg fighters followed and so did Jol2’s squadron. It looked to Jol2 that they were about to engage in a mini-version of the larger rotating battle behind them.
But many of the ships in the rear skirmish broke and came to the forward battle. There were two general engagements now, both of them rotating in a similar manner, with a trail of fighters pursuing each other from the larger battle behind to the smaller one in front. Shortly, the front engagement became the larger of the two. It reminded Jol2 of an ancient tape recorder, with both sides spinning and the tape eventually ending up all on one side. Individual dogfights were still taking place here and there outside of the main battle formations.
When the former rear engagement had been fully absorbed by the front one, the Latians broke again from it. The Dirgs chased them again, and the scenario repeated itself. This time, the front battle was near the Amulen atmosphere, on the dark side of the planet.
Jol2’s flying and the skill of his gunner had kept them from taking more than minor damage thus far. Jol2 fought with confidence and wasn’t afraid to lead his squadron into direct engagement. It often inspired the rest of the fleet. Sadly, many of them were not as skilled and they were losing pilots. Jol2 had already lost two fighters from his own squadron.
The Dirgs joining the fray had failed to dissuade the dark enemy. What would it take? Who were these guys? Their attack satellites were all destroyed. Was the enemy really going to stay here and keep this up until both their fleets were completely decimated? Why?
The Torians needed more help. They needed some kind of convincing discouragement—like a couple more alien fleets showing up to fight on the Torian side. Jol2 knew that wasn’t going to happen. If only they possessed that mysterious light weapon. Of course, even if they did, the enemy would still have to make the mistake of being drawn within its range.
Maybe another highly-coordinated, concentrated REEP cannon blast from ITF1 rear turrets would do the trick. Olut6 had just sent the ITF1 fleet in to defend the Dirg transport ships, which was the riskiest move he’d made with them. He appeared to be willing to engage them now. If the Torians pulled back to Cardinal-4 to reform positions one more time, the ITF1’s might be able get a fix on a stationary position of the enemy and pull it off.
A great beam of light suddenly shot into space from Amulen’s surface.
“What the extat is that!” Jol2 said.
“Let’s hope it’s friendly,” his gunner replied.
The light beam was closest to the front circular battle, which was now about even in size with the rear one. But everyone saw it. It was enormous, and shot out into space beyond them.
The enemy broke. First the Latians, who headed towards the Torian sun. The dark enemy sped away in the opposite direction. The Dirgs chased the Latians. The Torians chased the dark ships—but stopped at the space station.
Jol2 observed the new enemy position from the safety and vantage point of Cardinal-4. There they were, in the distance, back in the same area where they had originally massed after placing the attack satellites over Banor.
Fiery rings of light materialized all throughout the enemy’s formation. Some were much larger than others. The dark enemy was dagging out. The fire rings grew bright and vanished.
Jol2 then led three squadrons back towards Amulen. He could see the Dirg fighter fleet returning from beyond it. They must have had enough fighting for the day.
Were the Latians still out there? Jol2 led his squadrons in the direction
they were last seen headed, where the Dirgs were returning from. Eventually they came to the Latian transport ship fleet, just in time to see them light up and dag out. They had gotten those fighters docked fast.
The battle was over. Jol2 flew back over Amulen and came close—but not too close—to the light beam.
“General,” he radioed, “this beam from Amulen. It scared all our enemies away. But it doesn’t look like the light weapon that came from the space station in the prior battle. It has more the appearance of a …harmless spotlight.”
Olut6 answered. “Your analysis is correct, Captain. We have confirmation from our sources on Amulen soil. That’s exactly what it is. Only a powerful spotlight.”
Chapter Eighteen
“That looks like Jumper, there,” Alan said.
“Where?” Brandon circled the shuttle over the south end of the Belle Sheen village and eyed the special guest spots where he had previously parked. This time no one was signaling for him to land. Brandon didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t set down there again, invited or not. The valley to the west was barren now. The last of the visiting aliens embarked on their return voyages several days ago.
“There,” Alan said, “by the first fire pit clearing.”
Brandon squinted. “You sure?”
“I think so.”
Brandon decided to do a low fly-by. There was a group of about fifteen natives standing in the area Alan pointed at.
Someone waved at them. It wasn’t a native.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Brandon said. “Let’s land.”
“This is the village, isn’t it?” a voice from the shuttle cabin said. “Where the evil leader lives?”
Brandon turned his head towards the cabin. “We never said he was evil, Rupert. The jury’s still out on that.”