by Henry Gee
Chapter 12. Contender
Xandarga Station, Earth, c . 55,680,000 years ago
Then were they condescended that King Arthur and Sir Mordred should meet betwixt both their hosts, and everych of them should bring fourteen persons; and they came with this word unto Arthur. Then said he: I am glad that this is done: and so he went into the field.
Sir Thomas Malory—Le Morte D’arthur
The fight took place in the basement below the bar. It was a huge, low-ceilinged space supported by monumental, square pillars. Ruxie wondered if it had once been a parking garage. If so, no longer—the pillars, the floor, indeed every corner was occupied by punters eager for spectacle. The program started with music, acrobats, jugglers, clowns and fire-eaters, for all the world like an old-time circus troupe that had rolled into some nowhere town rather than the Capital of the Galaxy. There were dancers, too.
Xalomé was not dancing tonight. She was wedged in next to him. Her hand groped for his, and met it. There was little chance that any spoken word would have met its target through the fusillade of excited noise. Ruxie and Xalomé stood on a bench, three or four rows above ringside. Above, and to the left and right, people were thronged. And more than just people. Some of the fight fans cast inhuman shadows under the pillar-mounted sconces. Scent rose, the sweat of expectation. A golden aura flowed across the floor like dry ice in the spotlights.
It was time for the fight to begin.
The referee entered. Wizened, ornately robed, one of the few Uqbar masters to have survived a career unscathed. But no—one of his hands was surely prosthetic, though it was hard to tell amid the folds of his kimono.
“Ladies and Gentlemen!” brayed an announcer from a commentary box that Ruxie couldn’t see: “Give it up for Rating Spaceman Ko Handor Raelle, soon to be of the 17th Rigel!”
Screams as Ko, the challenger, entered the ring like he already owned it, robed in scarlet and black, preceded by tumblers and acrobats, and flanked by two burly supporters. The home crowd bawled deafening appreciation. Ko made the required three circuits of the ring, waving and bowing.
Then, the reigning champion. “Make a crushing Xandarga noise for Axaxaxas Mlö, undefeated heavyweight champion of the Southern Tethys!” Yells, cheers, howls. More tumblers and acrobats, and then a tightly bunched nest of women, naked, shaved and oiled, writhing in a complex choreography that concealed the form within. On a signal the women dispersed, trailing multi-colored streamers. Unfurling from within, the champion drew himself to his full height. The crowd was quenched into silence.
They had known it, all the time. Of course they had. But the sight of the champion in the flesh was breathtaking. As was the sheer audacity of Ko, in having thrown down the gauntlet in an elaborate ceremony three days earlier. Ruxie gulped. What had Ko let himself in for? Axaxaxas Mlö, the color of space relieved only by blood-red eyes and white fangs, was a Khong, and among the last vestiges of an ancient adapine race now confined to the high forest plateau of South Polar Gondwana. The Champion must have been almost three meters tall and weighed in at least three hundred fifty kilos, all of it muscle and bone. His fists looked like boulders of black basalt.
In the center of the ring, the champion and the challenger made their ritual obeisances, and retired to diagonally opposite corners of the ring, where they were armed and armored according to ritual evolved over hundreds of centuries and now considered as eternal as the void. Vambraces. Helms with full-face visors. Knee pads. Indrico-leather boots. Knuckle-dusters, rough-cast from depleted uranium shell casings, blue-gray vertices shining raw under the lights.
The whistle blew.
Ko barreled himself straight at the champion before the Khong could draw breath. He smashed his balled fists into his adversary’s groin. Blood spurted in crimson gouts. The Khong grunted and looked down, almost abstractedly, as if his siesta had been interrupted by a mosquito. He picked up Ko in both hands, ground his spiked visor into Ko’s face, and hurled him across the ring. The noise of the crowd could not conceal the crunch of bones as Ko’s face hit the deck. The referee started to count time in a keening ritual song, but Ko rose just before the end. Blood streamed from inside his visor and down his neck, congealing above his collar bone. Ruxie was glad that he couldn’t see Ko’s face.
Axaxaxas Mlö lumbered over, looked down at the puny contender, and laughed. The noise of it was horrible, hideous. The Khong swung one fist on the end of a meter and a half of pendulum arm. It hit Ko’s visor with the impact of a wrecking ball on a watermelon. Ko’s head snapped backwards and he flipped onto the floor where he lay in a puddle of what looked like bone chips, blood and his own piss.
“Ruxie—I can’t look.” Xalomé turned and buried her face in his neck. Ruxie said nothing. He felt that whatever he wanted, whatever he wished, he was forced to watch the ritual dismemberment of his friend by this monster.
But, once again, Ko recovered, although much more slowly than before. He turned himself onto his hands and knees, slithering on the slimed floor of the ring. The champion lumbered over, once again, joshing and hamming it up to the crowd before he dealt what could only be a death blow.
It was to be his undoing. As the Khong bent over to examine its prize, Ko sprang upwards, smashing his helmet into the Khong’s abdomen, winding him. The Khong toppled over Ko’s back, so that his immense legs lay like tree trunks on either side of Ko’s body. Slicked in his own fluids, Ko was now an unstoppable demon. He turned himself onto his back, sat up, grabbed the champion’s loincloth, shredding the supple leather with the heavy metal blades of his knuckle-dusters, pummelled at the champion’s genitalia with armored fists. Axaxaxas Mlö roared in pain and shock, but could not rise from the surface of the ring, now as slippery as the deck of a whaler in a storm. Ko now moved in for the kill. He unstrapped his helm, tearing it from his head and flinging it into the crowd. His face was a mask of blood.
Then from a fold of his loincloth Ko drew, with great theatricality, a set of false fangs, which, like knuckle-dusters, had been sheared from spent battle-armor. Fitting them into his mouth, he rose above the prone form of the Khong, sought cheers—and got them—and then dove, like a vulture into the bloodied hole of a carcass. The identity of what Ko drew up between his teeth, sinewy, red and still pulsing, Ruxie dared not even think about. The crowd screeched in maroon-flecked ecstasy.
The celebration surged well into the night, the tables of the harbor-district tavern crowded with glasses both full and spent, the floors awash with beer and bodies. Ruxie and Xalomé were among them, but Xalomé remained curiously remote, detached; unwilling, it seemed, to join in the spirit of things, in contrast to the many other women now wrapped round Ruxie’s colleagues on benches or on the floor in every imaginable state of abandon.
Ruxie was now resigned to this. He forgot Xalomé. He forgot the other women. He hooked up instead with a group of barrack-mates and concentrated on downing as much beer as he could. One of his colleagues looked down, wide-eyed, at a bulge in Ruxie’s crotch.
“Ruxie, man—is that a pistol you’re packin’… or…? And if not, why aren’t you flaunting what you’ve got? After all, there are babes about.” General laughter. Ruxie was puzzled, at first, until he reached down the inside pocket of his pants and, in a state of shock, realized that he’d walked out of the weapons range that afternoon with a Higgs projector. He hadn’t signed it back in. Nobody made that mistake. Not ever. He’d be toast for sure. But with the ingenuity with which only the seriously drunk are blessed, he conceived a plan. If he snuck into the weapons range before daybreak, fiddled the records slightly, no one would ever know, would they?
Result.
“Well… er… it is a pistol. Actually.” He was as nonchalant as he could manage. “So… well, make my day.”
There was a commotion at the door of the tavern. Ruxie could not, at first, see what it was all about. A chaos of shouts and confusion. He was dimly awar
e that Xalomé had gone, and he could no longer see Ko, either. Either he was buried in the crowd, or the party was going on without him. The shouts from the door morphed from yells of indignant rage into screams of agony and pain, and then Ruxie could see the cause of the disturbance.
Oh no. Another monster. Without needing to be told, Ruxie knew that the shadowy Mr Spektor had sent another of his associates to collect Ko’s winnings. An associate who would be quite capable of bending Axaxaxas Mlö and any other likely champion into pretzels. Ruxie felt beer and bravado inflate inside him and rose from his seat, side-arm in hand. Months of practice that could not be dulled by alcohol kicked into action. Ruxie’s fingers primed the charge. At that moment the crowd near the door was brutally thrown aside by the newcomer. Bodies flew through the air, and from amid the chaos emerged a moving monolith, towering, gray, apparently unstoppable.
“Shit, man—it’s a Flintsider. We’d better split,” said one of Ruxie’s drinking partners. Ruxie said nothing. The eye of stillness in the storm raging all around him, Ruxie held the weapon at full arm’s length and pulled the trigger. As he did so he thought of Xalomé. The thought hit him like a kick in the ribs just as the Flintside enforcer imploded with a sharp crack, its component silicon carbide molecules and gallium neurites redistributed at several quintillion random points throughout the Galaxy. Silence descended. With all eyes on him, Ruxie calmly pocketed the particle projector and left the bar.
Ruxie walked back to the barracks through silent streets. He first took a detour to return the purloined projector to the weapons range, a plan that went off without a hitch. He felt deflated after the night's events. Although he'd returned the weapon, discharging it in a public place, and killing a civilian—even an alien hood—would, surely, have serious consequences. Given that the balloon went up in a bar patronized by spacers, he wondered why he hadn't been picked up by Naval Police within minutes. But where he should have been anxious, he was filled with empty apathy. He passed unhindered into the compound, and felt and saw very little until he was in his own dorm, facing his own bed.
The first thing that struck him was the noise. The same noise that had swirled around him at the boxing match: the animal baying of spectators. It came from all around him, but was directed, focused, at his own bed, now before him. A bed drenched in the saffron aura of sex.
It was Ko’s bare back he saw first, and his bare hindquarters, as he pumped away at a woman on her knees and elbows, on Ruxie’s bed. The crowd roared its appreciation. The woman was screaming for Ko. Screaming for him to push deeper. Screaming for him to rip her insides out, to take her as he'd taken down the Khong.
The woman on Ruxie's bed was Xalomé.
Ruxie turned on his heel and walked out. Five hours later he shipped out for the Trifid Nebula.