I looked at Diamond and grinned. She was so very beautiful. “Let us go upstairs,” she whispered. “I want to be alone with you.”
“Alright,” I said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.”
Flickering candles lit the room. The carpets were deep, the walls and ceiling covered in mirrors. The bed was plush, soft and wide. Diamond kissed me as soon as we walked in, her tongue probing my mouth. I kissed her back. “Let me undress you,” she said.
I grinned. “Let’s undress each other,” I said, and we did, caressing and nibbling on each inch of skin as it became exposed. Soon we were lying naked on the bed, her body twined around mine. I held her close, her back pressed against my chest, one hand caressing her nipples. “You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.
“I want you,” she said. “Enter me from behind.”
I smiled, cupped her breasts, squeezed softly, reached up further with my hands and pressed on both carotid arteries. She gasped. “Yes,” I whispered, and squeezed. “Yes.”
She drew a great, shuddering breath. Her body trembled. “Oh,” I gasped. “Oh.” I moved back and forth, panted, shuddered and groaned. Then I rolled over on my back, sighing. “You are absolutely wonderful,” I whispered. “I could make love to you forever.”
She didn’t answer. She was unconscious. “Diamond?” I shook her gently. “Wake up.”
She stirred and gave a little groan. “Too much to drink,” I muttered. “Ah, well...”
I got out of bed, found my clothes scattered around the room and put them back on. I moved slowly and staggered a little, shaking my head, pretending that the drugs in Diamond’s body were starting to affect me. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “Sleep well,” I whispered for the benefit of those who I knew were watching. “You’re amazing. You’re absolutely fantastic.”
Ten minutes later, I found my guards, glumly waiting for me by the bar, drinking water and resenting it. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’ve had enough for one night.”
On the way toward the door, we passed Celim Bakar, sitting with a small group of men. He looked grim but his eyes lit up when he saw me. He saluted me with his glass as we passed. I winked at him and he nodded back, smiling.
Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.
Chapter 7
“The political situation here is more complicated than we realized. There are factions.” We had the morning to rest, thank God. Captain Jones, Commander Boyd and I were sitting in the Endeavor’s control room. Low intensity lasers constantly licked at our ship. The lasers could detect minute vibrations and presumably allowed Gath to listen in to our conversations. We played an innocuous tape of mundane chatter to distract them while the three of us sat in a shielded room near the center of the ship.
“The majority faction, the Interventionists, believe in world domination.” Commander Boyd was looking at his screen, frowning as he spoke. “They’re convinced that they have a destiny to rule all the inferior races. They consider themselves the legitimate heirs to the First Empire and the only ones who’ve preserved the martial heritage of our illustrious ancestors.”
Captain Jones rolled his eyes. The Commander grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“But they have opposition,” I said.
“They do.” He squinted at the screen. “Until about twenty years ago, Gath was a predominantly agrarian society with a large but basically low-tech military. A lot of nomadic herders. The land is fertile but winters in the north are harsh. Almost thirty percent of the population migrates with the seasons, going south when the weather grows cold and moving back up with the reindeer herds in Summertime.
“All of that changed when Atif Erdogan came to power.”
I knew this, of course. Gath had been a society dominated by its elders in a limited form of democracy. In order to vote, you had to be over fifty years old and own property, not necessarily land; a herd of reindeer would do, anything that gave you a stake in the outcome. Such systems are generally conservative. Decisions tend to be made slowly, after much consideration and debate.
Atif Erdogan was fifty-five years old when he was elected to be head of the ruling Presidium. He quickly moved to replace retiring government ministers with his own adherents. A threat developed over a disputed border with Serevak, their neighbor to the north and the Presidium voted Erdogan executive powers in order to respond. The executive powers were never rescinded. At the same time, Erdogan encouraged the development of a more advanced technological base. The economy improved. Luxury goods, while still not common, became more available. Erdogan was popular. After ten years, his real agenda became apparent, or perhaps he changed his views. Who can say? In any case, the Interventionists slowly grew in power and when Erdogan died, his hand- picked successor, Idris Kartal, took over.
“A backlash has been developing. Despite the news blackout, these people are not completely isolated from the world. They are aware of outside events and what happened in Meridien was too much to swallow for at least some of them. I mean, most don’t care. Many approve but a significant number understand the implications. They don’t want to be at war with the world. The Conservative faction has been growing.
“Nasim Bakar won the grand tournament five years ago. He’s popular and he currently leads the Conservatives.”
“Celim Bakar’s brother,” I said.
Commander Boyd nodded. “Yes.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s just great.”
The final challenge of the games was a trek across two hundred kilometers of wilderness, basically a much larger version of the obstacle course. We all wore Gathian Wayfarer uniforms with the insignia removed, light, comfortable and tough, able to withstand a lot of punishment. We were issued a knife, a canteen and a tube of iodine tablets to purify drinking water, and that was it.
Scoring of the trek was complicated. The time you took to reach the finish line counted, of course, but it was less than fifty percent of the total. Points were awarded for overcoming obstacles, for ingenuity, for avoiding injury. You were expected to do more than merely survive. In order to win this phase of the competition, you were required to prevail. There could be only one overall winner but cooperation with your fellow contestants did receive points. You also received points for eliminating competition.
Fighting with each other was not allowed for the first hour of the trek. After that, it was no holds barred. We could all calculate the odds. Like chess, the endgame becomes easier as pieces are removed from the board. We were dropped off one-by-one, a few hundred yards apart.
The truck slowed to a stop, I jumped off and started running. I didn’t see any of the others at first and that was fine by me. I had twenty kilometers of grassland to get through before I reached a range of foothills. The grassland was inhabited by modified buffalo, smaller than ancient Earth bison but occasionally aggressive. I could smell a small herd in the distance and another off to my left. I circled around them both, adding some time to the run but avoiding possible trouble.
Suddenly, I stopped; a strange scent on the air, not a scent that I recognized, pungent and rank and straight ahead of me. The grass wasn’t high enough to block my vision, just high enough to make running difficult. And then something stood up. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, some sort of modified bear. It wasn’t quite as tall as me but was much wider and heavier and no doubt much stronger. It saw me, opened its mouth, roared and charged. The knife was in my hand before I even thought about it and as the bear thing came toward me, I dropped, rolled to the side and swiped at the Achilles tendon of its left leg. It roared louder, and in the distance, something just like it roared back.
I flipped to my feet and ran. Nothing can run with a slashed Achilles tendon. The thing roared in rage and it tried to lumber after me but its roaring grew fainter as I gained distance and I soon left it behind.
Whatever it was, it was nothing that I had ever heard of or read about, some deliberate mutation or perhaps something exoti
c purchased from offworld.
I crossed a small ditch and saw a stand of trees in the distance: an oasis. We had been shown maps of the course. I knew where I was. The oasis contained a small water hole and I couldn’t go a full three days without water. They gave us a canteen but we were required to find our own water.
There is a curious sort of mutual agreement that takes place among animals in the wilderness. Every living thing needs water and water can be hard to come by. Lions truly do lie down with lambs (goats, actually, and small deer and gazelles) by a water hole in the wilderness. The grass was greener near the water. Shrubs and flowering plants grew in the sunshine. A small fish jumped in the pond. A wading bird looked at me, curious, but otherwise ignored me. Two buffalo grazed stolidly and a large feline with spots on its sides lazily brushed a fly off its fur with its tail and yawned as I walked up to the bank.
I kneeled, filled the canteen and put in an iodine tab. It would be safe to drink in thirty minutes.
I frowned. A few meters away, grass was piled behind a boulder. One of my fellow contestants was hiding under the grass. I could smell him.
He was quick and almost silent but I was ready when he came at me. I whirled, his knife passing over my head. I dropped below his swing, continued with my turn and planted my own knife in his abdomen, all the way to the hilt. I twisted, pulled and watched as his guts and a fountain of blood slid out and dripped wetly to the ground. He looked at me with disbelief.
“What did you expect, moron?” I asked.
His lips trembled. He tried to say something but then the breath gurgled in his throat and he collapsed and didn’t move again.
I recognized him. His name was Berat Feyyaz. He was twenty-five years old and had a mother and two sisters. I had noticed him last night at Club Menagerie, sitting with a group of friends, looking like he hadn’t a care in the world…and now he was dead because I had killed him. Of course, he had tried to kill me first. All fair enough, I suppose, but it still felt wrong.
The oasis was silent. All the animals, the big cat, the two buffalo, even the bird were looking at me. Overhead, three buzzards already circled in lazy arcs. I shrugged and left his body for the scavengers to take care of. I tried to ignore the cameras planted in the trees and the drone flying overhead, transmitting everything that happened for the entertainment of the world.
I went on.
Chapter 8
I made good progress in the foothills but the trail soon grew steep and it narrowed as the hills gave way to a range of low mountains. A rumble of thunder sounded in the distance and the sun turned into a dimmer orange ball as haze and then clouds began to obscure it. Shadows lengthened. Evening was coming on and I was hungry. I had grabbed a handful of berries and some edible ferns growing alongside the trail but I would lose too much time if I stopped to forage. I needed protein.
I didn’t think food would be much a problem, though, not for me, and as the evening turned into night, I was proven correct. Most of the birds had returned to their nests. Squirrels and rabbits cowered in their burrows, hiding from the owls, the lynx and the snakes.
None of them could hide from my augmented senses. The night grew cool and the heat signature emitted by living bodies shone brightly in my sight. A bird’s nest hidden in some brush gave me three eggs. I ate them raw, sucking them out of the shell as I walked on, and I finished the berries that I had picked up earlier.
Anything tastes good if you’re starving but I decided to give a pass to the slugs and the insects. It might come to that in the end but I wasn’t hungry enough yet for the more exotic options and I hoped that I never would be.
Another rumble of thunder stopped me. The night was growing colder and I had no desire to be wandering around in the rain. Time to seek shelter. I found some dried branches, about two meters in length, tied them together with small vines, forming open rectangles, then covered the rectangles with sheets of bark that I stripped from trees. I placed the resulting panels against a rock outcropping, giving me a crude but functional lean-to. One piece of wood had a larger diameter than the others. I hefted it in my hand, liking the weight.
The rain was steady. I wasn’t going anywhere until it stopped and I had all night. I crouched down in the lean-to, took out my knife, picked up a sharp piece of rock and began to carve. I soon had a deep groove in the wood and a modified handle on one end. Another small tree branch fit snugly into the groove: an atlatl—a primitive spear thrower, and a spear, with a blunt, rounded end that would also serve as a staff. You never know when a staff, a spear and a spear thrower might come in handy. I took a few minutes more to sharpen one end of the improvised spear and tucked them both into a corner of the lean-to.
A pile of soft leaves served as a bed and I closed my eyes as the rain continued to fall. It had been an eventful day, but a depressing one. I hoped that tomorrow would be more boring. Sometimes, I thought, boring is good. Finally, I dropped into a fitful sleep.
Birds chirping over my head woke me a few hours later. I was still tired and sluggish but I couldn’t afford to waste any more time. Dawn was starting to break and the rain had passed on by. I needed to be on the move. Too bad that I couldn’t bring the lean-to but I had no way to carry it. I tied the spear and the atlatl to my back with some vines, checked to make sure that I could move my arms freely and then started jogging.
Within an hour, I came to a small canyon. Trees clung to the steep walls but it didn’t take long to climb down to the bottom and then back up the other side. A few kilometers further on, the ground grew soft, and soon after, it turned into a swamp. I probed the sodden mud with my new staff, avoiding the softest parts of it but soon came to open water. I considered my options and didn’t like any of them, then shrugged, and waded out.
I was halfway across when I saw a wake slowly coming toward me. I looked at it and groaned. Alligators were uncommon here. We were close to the Southern end of their range, but it appeared that I was out of luck. I stood very still as the wake came closer. It wasn’t a big one, just big enough to have no fear of men. It came faster at the end, reared up out of the water and opened its jaws wide. I jammed the spear into its mouth and pushed back. It thrashed its tail and rolled over but I stayed on top of it, shoving the sharpened end down its throat. I rose up and pressed with all my weight, forcing the gator against the bottom. The spear went deeper and the reptile’s struggles grew frantic but I held on and after a few minutes, they slowly ceased.
Food. I smiled and dragged it to the opposite bank by its tail.
It isn’t hard to make a fire if you have a built-in source of electricity. I touched the tip of my knife to a small pile of dry leaves and shot a jolt of current down the blade. The leaves smoked and quickly caught. I piled on some small sticks, then a few larger ones and in less than a minute I had a good blaze going. I cut off the gator’s tail and skinned it, carved out the tenderloins from the carcass, hung the meat on some sharpened sticks and broiled it over the flames. It wasn’t too hard to improvise a bag with some large leaves and a few pieces of vine and soon I was back on the trail, feeling pretty good about the day, so far.
Thankfully, the ground began to rise again and finally, I left the swamp behind. I made good time for about twenty kilometers, chewing on a piece of cold alligator as I jogged along the trail. Not the best meat I had ever tasted but not the worst, either. A little salt would have helped.
I stopped. The birds had stopped singing. Never a good sign. I sniffed. Rich earth, loam, turned over dirt and somewhere, faintly, the scent of a human. No…I sniffed again—four humans. Not too close to me, not yet. I climbed a tree. From ten meters up, it wasn’t hard to see them. They had dug a pit across the trail and covered it with a layer of fallen leaves, probably over a woven frame, and probably there would be sharpened stakes at the bottom. Four men crouched behind trees, waiting. Three carried spears; one with a stone point lashed to the shaft. The fourth held a crudely improvised bow.
What to do? I sat in my tree and
considered the question. Points would be awarded for confronting them but that would only help me if I lived through the confrontation. I was tempted. I didn’t know these people but I knew that I didn’t like them. I’m prejudiced that way.
“Psst,” I looked down. Peering up at me through the leaves was the smiling face of Celim Bakar. His hands were empty and spread to the sides. He stood there, posture quite deliberately not threatening. I scanned the area around the tree. He was alone.
“Come down,” he whispered. “We should talk.”
Why not? At the moment, it was four against one. A little cooperation seemed like a good thing.
A few minutes later, we were sitting next to each other on a fallen log. “Alligator?” I asked.
He smiled. “No, thank you. I killed a small gazelle and smoked the meat. I have enough to last until the end of the contest.”
“Would you like to trade some?”
He appeared to think about it. “No,” he said, “but thank you.”
I wondered how he had made a fire. That old rubbing two sticks together routine is a lot harder than it seems. And I really would have preferred some gazelle meat to the rest of the alligator. “How do you know Diamond?” I asked.
“Diamond?”
“The woman at Menagerie. You warned me about her.”
“Ah. Elena,” he said. “We were in the Junior guard together. She was ambitious.”
I had to smile. Ambitious. “Yes, I could see that about her.”
“I’m glad that you survived. Some don’t.”
“I understand,” I said. “What can I do for you, then?”
He looked away, frowned. “There were twenty-five of us left before the trek began. I had the most points but that no longer matters. We are all close enough so that whoever wins the trek will win the tournament.”
The City of Ashes Page 5