Arena Book 7

by Logan Jacobs

  The President clapped his hands together and turned to the photographer he’d brought with him. “Make sure you get a good one of all of us together,” he said. “I want everyone to know who saved my daughter from the terrorists.”

  “Don’t forget Captain Har’Gitay,” I reminded him. “And the rest of Team Havak is still somewhere in the building fighting those terrorists. They need backup.”

  “And lo, we got back up,” PoLarr’s voice floated from somewhere in the crowd. She pushed through two Marines and grinned at me. Her clothes were torn and there was a big gash across one of her cheeks, but otherwise, she looked fine.

  “PoLarr!” I ran to her and threw my arms around her. “I hated leaving you. Is everyone else okay?”

  She returned the squeeze and patted me on the back. “Tempest twisted her ankle when she landed on a chunk of concrete after she triple-kicked three Skalle Furia in the face,” she reported. “That’s about it.”

  “It was an incredible sight,” Nova said as two more Marines parted to let her through. “The triple-kick, not you tripping on the concrete. And I agree that it wasn’t there when you jumped. That explosion moved everything around.”

  Tempest laughed in Nova’s arms and looked very satisfied with herself. “Thank you, Nova. Anyway, these guys started pouring in when I was sitting on the floor feeling kind of silly. I’m pretty sure they can handle whatever Skalle Furia are left.”

  “I swear, Tempest, I will put a book on your head and make you walk across the room in high heels,” Aurora scolded as she stepped from the depths of a shadow. “You can’t just go around spraining your ankle like one of the Doctor’s companions, I can’t shield you from that.”

  “You watch Doctor Who?” I asked Aurora. I knew that PoLarr had access to all the movies and TV shows I had ever watched, as well as all of my opinions about those shows, and that Tempest had her own cache of Earth media she’d won gambling, but Aurora tended to surprise me when she referenced Earth pop culture.

  “Watch him?” Aurora responded. “Sugar, I’ve met him.”

  “I’m more confused than ever…” I responded.

  “Make sure I get a picture with Marc and these ladies,” the President told his photographer. He slid his arm around Nova’s waist.

  Nova flicked the President away from her side. “We don’t have time for pictures. If everyone’s safe, we need to get back to Valiance City immediately or we will miss the match.”

  “Oh, I would love to see you in a match, Marc,” the President’s daughter cooed.

  “It’s settled!” the President said. “We’ll go to Valiance City to watch Marc and the gang. I want to check on my hotel over there anyway. It’s the greatest one in the city.”

  The military helicopter had flown away, and Phil’s teardrop-shaped silver spaceship hovered in the warm Los Angeles air, Phil himself waved from the spaceship’s hatch. “C’mon, folks, the meter’s running!” he called.

  I realized that the President and his daughter weren’t behind me. “Aren’t you guys coming with?” I asked.

  “Your ship looks lovely,” the President’s daughter said politely, “but Daddy has some restrictions on how he can travel now.”

  “We’re taking Space Force One!” the President said excitedly. “Our Space Force is absolutely tremendous.”

  I took one last look to where Thomas laid surrounded by medics. They were still working on him. They’d stuck an IV tube full of blue liquid into his arm, and a forked clear oxygen tube ran into his nostrils. Those things weren’t a guarantee that he would survive, but they did mean they hadn’t decided he was past rescue. I swallowed the lump in my throat and sent out a silent plea to the Universe or whatever higher powers that might be listening to spare my dad, and then I stepped into Phil’s ship.

  Once we were settled inside the earth-toned Salvador Dali interior of the ship in our grey foam recliners, Phil handed bottles of Blue Betty around. “I thought you’d want a little pick-me-up,” he explained. “Hell of a long day for you guys. Anyone need anything else before we head to the Nexus Station?”

  Olivia raised her hand. “Do you have a sickbay?” she asked. “I’d just rather be somewhere with plenty of medical supplies right now.” She looked calm, and there was a white bandage over the spot she’d been shot, but her skin was still a lighter shade of sky than it should have been.

  “Sure do,” Phil said. He pressed a button on the side of her recliner. It levitated a few feet in the air. “It ain’t exactly Sector General, but we’ll get you patched up until we can land in Valiance City.”

  “Is there a galley you wouldn’t mind us raiding?” PoLarr asked. “We’ll replace whatever groceries we eat.”

  “Down that way, turn left, first door on your right,” Phil said. He led Olivia’s floating chair toward a hatch. “I keep it stocked up for passengers as well as Poda and myself, so don’t even worry about it.”

  “I’ll help you carry the victuals back,” Nova said to PoLarr.

  “I won’t say no to help with snacks,” PoLarr replied. They walked through a hatch together and disappeared from sight.

  “Sugar, don’t you want to get your ankle checked out in sickbay?” Aurora asked Tempest.

  Tempest reached down and felt her ankle, then wiggled her foot back and forth. It looked pretty normal to me. “Nah, it already feels fine,” she reported. “I think I just pulled a muscle.”

  Between my regenerative mods and the Blue Betty, I was already starting to feel my bruises and aches start to fade too. “So I think I figured out why they really chose Nakatomi Plaza,” I began.

  “I was wondering about that,” Tempest said. “That city seems like it has a lot of places where it’d be easy to kill someone. Like the tar pits, or that big observatory from Rebel Without a Cause, or the Hollywoo sign…”

  “The Hollywood sign,” I corrected her.

  “It’s not Hollywoo now?” Tempest asked. “I thought someone stole the big D.”

  “I’ll steal your big D,” Aurora purred to me as she slid her hand over my thigh.

  “As long as you put it back when you’re done,” I joked. “I use that thing to pee through.” I rested my head on her ivory shoulder.

  Damn. I was tired. What a day, and now we had a match.

  “That’s not all you do with it, sugar,” Aurora smirked. Her hand moved to my big D and gave it a gentle squeeze. I hummed in pleasure and pressed my nose into the crook of her neck. She smelled like electricity and something floral and musky and dangerous, always enticing.

  “Let me guess,” I said to Tempest, “you got a DVD of Bojack Horseman in that gambling win.”

  Tempest shrugged. “I know it’s supposed to be based on real people, so I figured it was based on a real thing that happened, like someone stole part of the sign on a bet or something,” she said. “But I did wonder why I didn’t see any animal people in most of the other movies or when we were on Earth. I thought it might be a civil rights thing.”

  “Like...animal people aren’t in other movies because they’re oppressed?” I asked.

  Aurora nodded. “Most planets got rid of their rules against hybrids or people who looked like they might be hybrids, who were persecuted under the laws even if they’d evolved that way naturally,” she recited, as though recalling a long-ago lesson from a history class. “But there’s still prejudiced people out there.”

  I remembered Grizz casually calling Fallon a “Kaunchveet,” a slur that made as little sense to my Earthling ears as most of the slurs I’d ever heard anyone use on Earth. “I don’t think we have any animal people on Earth except in cartoons and mascot outfits,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes pretty soon.”

  A hatch opened up on the side of the room. “Snacks!” PoLarr announced. She stepped through the hatch with an armful of bags. Nova followed her with several circular food storage containers in her arms. They started to lay out the snacks on the small bean-shaped tables that littered the roo
m.

  “We have noaqui seed crackers, poron root chips, and crunchy mesami sticks,” PoLarr said. “All great sources of protein.” She set out a bag of bumpy lime green hexagons, a bag of deep purple chips, and a bag of what looked like small, wavy orange breadsticks.

  I tried one of the poron root chips. It crunched like a potato chip, but the taste reminded me of custard pie.

  Nova set down the food storage containers and began to pry the lids up. “I found some Kravilian yogurt dip, some aged snerp cheese, and some slices of smoked Perfectly Normal Beast,” she said. Inside of the storage containers were a pink spread with flecks of blue and purple, cubes of a pale green cheese with magenta veins running through it, and round slices of some kind of meat that didn’t look particularly weird to me, but also wasn’t quite the color of any cold cuts I had ever seen.

  I peeled a piece from the pile of meat and bit off a piece. It tasted like smoke and garlic, with a rich, mushroomy flavor that made my tongue sit up and beg for more. I shoved the rest of the piece of meat into my mouth and chewed happily.

  We dug into the snacks hard, and no sound was heard for several minutes except for the sounds of crunching, chewing, and slurping. The noaqui crackers had a satisfying nutty flavor that went well with the tangy, salty snerp cheese, while the mesami sticks had a bitter nori taste to them that was surprisingly good with the smooth, fruity Kravilian yogurt dip. More importantly, we wouldn’t have much time to rest and refuel from our battle in Nakatomi Plaza before we were flung into the next match of the Crucible, whatever dangers that might hold for us.

  I chased the last piece of Perfectly Normal Beast meat with the last swig of my Blue Betty and settled back in my chair. Tempest burped loudly. PoLarr held the bag of mesami sticks by its bottom and emptied the crumbs into her mouth. Nova wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and let out a satisfied sigh. Aurora ran her finger around the inside of the Kravilian yogurt dip container and popped her finger into her mouth, then slowly slid her finger out from between her luscious lips as she stared at me.

  Pink gas began to pour out from vents in the walls of the room. We’d finished our meal just in time to make it to the Nexus Station. I lay back and closed my eyes as I let the soporific pink smoke overtake me. My muscles relaxed, and my eyelids closed as the pink faded to black.

  Next thing I knew, I was on the roof of Nakatomi Tower. It was night instead of day, and the lights of Los Angeles lay before me. The famous Hollywood sign stretched over the city in the valley, outsized and enormous as landmarks often are in a dream. As I watched, the D at the end of the sign slipped from the framework, hung by one corner for a second as it swung back and forth, and then fell from the sign entirely. It was followed by the O before it, and soon all the letters had fallen from the sign. I wondered if they’d crushed anyone.

  “I had two pigeons, bright and gay, fly from me the other day,” a smug British voice said behind me. I turned around. Alan Rickman stood there in a trenchcoat with his white Metatron wings extended. His skin was brick red, like Dolos, and his hair and goatee were fuschia.

  “That’s the wrong Die Hard movie,” I told him. “You’re quoting the wrong Gruber brother.”

  “Birds of a feather flock together,” he responded. He started to walk towards me. The roof crumbled in behind him with every step he took. “You must tell them that you’re quitting the Crucible, Marc. If you don’t, your father will die.” He gestured past me.

  I whirled around to see my father tied to a balloon dog office chair in a Marine dress uniform. The back legs of the chair balanced on the very edge of the roof, which had suddenly lost all of its safety rails.

  “No,” I breathed. “No, you can’t make me make this choice.”

  “Don’t worry, Marc,” my father said. “I’ve got you.” He pressed the soles of his boots to the ground and then pushed with his feet. The front legs of his chair rose a few inches off the ground. My father looked into my eyes, and then he toppled backwards over the edge of the roof.

  “NOOO!” I screamed again. I rushed to the edge of the roof and stared down to the pavement below. It was empty, no wreckage of the chair, no gore from my father’s body.

  I heard a low chuckle from behind me. “You played right into my trap,” my nightmare composite of a villain informed me. “While you were rushing to save your father before the clock ran out, I was putting the final phases of my plan into action. Look at the sky, Marc.”

  I looked up at the sky. The full moon hung huge and red on the horizon. As I watched, cracks appeared in its pitted surface. The chunks of moon started to drift apart slowly.

  “I think that’s bad,” I said. “I think we need the moon.” I wracked my brain and tried to remember precisely why we needed the moon, but I couldn’t remember what I’d learned in my second grade science class. It was something about gravity or oceans or shit.

  “We need the moon because it keeps us pinned in space,” I said slowly. “If you pull the moon out of the sky we’d fall down.”

  “Yes,” the nightmare composite villain said. “I want your planet to fall down and never stop falling. Ha ha ha ha ha!” He actually said the words “ha ha ha ha ha” out loud instead of laughing.

  I looked at the moon drifting apart into chunks, and I looked down at the sidewalk to where my father had disappeared. Now the sidewalk was black and glittery. “Oh,” I realized. “I’m in a dream.”

  “Crap, I’m gonna lose my fare,” the nightmare composite villain said in a suddenly Midwestern accent.

  “Since this is a dream, I can just go back and try again,” I said. “And this time I’ll know your evil plan.” I tried to decide how to jump over the edge. Should I casually walk out into the thin air? No, then I might actually just walk out onto thin air like a Looney Tunes character who hasn’t yet realized that their cliff has run out under their feet, I thought. I would have to land head-first for a quick and painless dream death.

  “No!” the nightmare composite villain cried. “I don’t want to go back to selling real estate.”

  I launched myself head-first over the side of the roof with just a thought. As I plummeted toward the sidewalk, I realized that I wasn’t going to land on pavement at all. I was falling through a void of stars, and unless I happened to be pointed straight in the direction of a planet, I was never going to hit the ground.

  Nova tapped me on my shoulder as I awoke. She’d removed her mask, and her familiar orange skin and glowing green eyes were a welcome sight. “We’re at the Hall of Heroes,” she said. “We need to hurry. There’s only ten minutes left until the match starts.”

  I shot up out of my chair. “Ten minutes? That’s barely enough time to piss.”

  Phil shooed us out of the ship and onto the sidewalk. “Go, go go, good luck!”

  I caught my reflection in the silvery surface of Phil’s ship before it sped away. I still had the faux skin from my earlier disguise on. I peeled the mask from my face and jogged into the sleek white Hall of Heroes.

  “Eight minutes to go!” Nova announced as we burst through the door to our private gym area.

  “We made it!” I cheered. “Let’s get armed up and into those tubes.” I ran over to where Artemis sat at her computer console and wrapped my arms around her from behind. “Artie, baby, what’s the word?”

  “Cancelled,” Artemis sighed mournfully.

  I froze in the middle of bending down to kiss her head. “What?”

  “The match you hurried across the universe for has been cancelled,” Grizz explained. His shoulders slumped, and his holographic face looked quizzical. “But you seem to have been successful in your mission to rescue the princess of Earth, and for that I congratulate you.”

  “I left a message on your ansible,” Artemis said. She turned around and leaned her head against my chest. “They’ve never cancelled a match before in the history of the Crucible. Marc, what’s going on?”

  “Ohh shit, this has to be related,” I sighed. “Artie and Grizz,
I have something really big to tell you both.”

  I explained about Dolos and my revelation about Tyche and the Skalle Furia.

  “And we don’t know what Tyche’s really up to,” I concluded. “You’re the only person who knows him well enough to have an idea of what he wants out of all of this.”

  “By the hammer of Leroy Jenkins, this is bad,” Grizz muttered. “His agenda is as inscrutable as his code is complicated.”

  “My brother’s dead,” Artemis said softly.

  “Well...yeah.” I hugged her. “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “I feel sorry for him,” Artemis murmured into my chest. She sniffled. “Tyche pitted us against each other, and he set it up so only one of us could win. And I thought for a long time that Dolos was the winner. But he wasn’t, Marc. He lost. His prize was that he did whatever Tyche said, and Tyche used him. And my prize is that I’m free and that I get to love you.” She grabbed my shirt and kissed me passionately. Her kiss was sweet even through the salt taste of her tears.

  “Damn,” Tempest remarked, “and I was really looking forward to busting some more heads today. Sorry for your loss and all.”

  PoLarr frowned. “But why cancel the match?” she asked. “Tyche doesn’t seem like the sentimental type.”

  “No, but he does strike me as a control freak,” Aurora said, “and I’m going to guess that today did not go the way he’d planned.”

  “A princess in a tower and two ticking clocks,” Nova murmured. “If he orchestrated it all, he must have bet that we wouldn’t make one of the deadlines. And that you’d never leave a damsel in distress.”

  “Yeah, and he chose the coolest possible place for it,” I said. “Bait. It was all bait. If we’d died saving the President’s daughter, he wouldn’t have to deal with us anymore. And even if we’d all lived and still didn’t make the match, he still wouldn’t have to deal with us anymore.”

  “This is not what the Crucible is for,” Grizz said with a troubled frown. “It is a fair test of muscle and mettle, a test of the warrior’s will for the entertainment of the galaxy. It is not meant to be used to eliminate one man’s enemies.”