by Rick Partlow
“No,” I commented drily, “they just assassinate each other, kill off a bunch of soldiers who think they’re fighting for a higher cause and massacre any civilians who happen to stand in their way. That’s much better.”
Her face began to turn so red that I thought her head might explode like a volcano, but I ignored her and turned back to Joon-Pah.
“What if we just leave?” I wondered. “What if we got on our shuttle and took off and fuck it! We don’t even have to ride back with you, just call the Jambo and we’ll get on board and not mess with you guys. Would they call this off, then?”
“I’m afraid not,” he told me, and I wasn’t sure if he was imitating the expression of sadness of a human intentionally, to convey how he felt, or if he’d simply been around us so long now, it came naturally. “Once the challenge has begun, only the challenger can call a halt. And Gafto-Lo-Mok has been looking for an excuse to challenge his leadership for years.”
“I have made my decision,” Caan-Fan-To said, and I turned back to him, to where a line of Helta soldiers held the weapons Joon-Pah had listed.
Caan-Fan-To chose what looked more than anything like a cross between a boar spear and a halberd. Joon-Pah had called it a spear, but I was sure that was an inexact translation. He held the heavy weapon across his body with what appeared to be little effort, his big hands closing around the wooden haft confidently.
The younger Heltan, Bron-Min, grabbed the other of the pair of spears and spun the heavy weapon in his hands like a majorette in a marching band twirling her baton. If Helta body language was at all like a human’s, this young male was oozing confidence, and God alone knew how much of it was real and how much was a bluff.
“Oh, I don’t like this at all,” Strawbridge said. “There just has to be some way to stop this.”
There was. But she wasn’t going to like it. I touched a control on my comm unit to contact Pops.
“Pops?” I asked when there was no answer to the ping. I pulled the comm unit off my belt and checked it. The ping hadn’t returned. There was no connection. “Shit.” I tried Julie and got the same result.
“What’s wrong?” Strawbridge asked me.
I scanned the huge chamber, looking for someone watching me. Someone here knew what was going on, but the Helta were focused on this challenge, the two males squaring off at the center of the ring. Except Vandas-Gol, the Tertiary, the aide. He was staring straight at me.
“We’re being jammed. I don’t know how long it’s been going on.” Her eyes went wide and she tensed, but I was at Joon-Pah’s shoulder. “Do you guys jam signals coming from outside the chamber as a matter of course?” I asked him. “Like, for security or something?”
“No, I have never heard of such a thing.” The Heltan captain touched the communications device on his shoulder. “Truthseeker control, are you receiving?”
There was no audible response and from the look on Joon-Pah’s face, he didn’t hear one on any earpiece he might have been wearing.
“This is irregular.” Joon-Pah was, as always, the master of understatement. “Once the challenge is ended, I will go outside and try again.”
The only problem with that was, once the challenge was over it would be too late.
“May the spirit of the Elders be with the righteous!”
I didn’t know who’d shouted the platitude, but it served as the starting bell for the fight. The spears began twisting through a complex pattern as the two Helta males high-stepped around each other in a well-choreographed dance. This wasn’t just a couple dudes hitting each other with sticks, I intuited. This was like a local martial art of some kind. Which was comforting. If they practiced this for sport, they’d be used to pulling their punches and not just going straight for the jugular. Or at least that was what I was trying to reassure myself with.
Caan-Fan-To jabbed at the younger man with the blade end of the weapon, but it was a feint, and he swept the weighted, metal butt around at his opponent’s legs. The kid hopped over the shaft of the spear with more agility than I’d ever had, using his own weapon like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole, then dropped into a crouch and jabbed backward.
The butt of the challenger’s weapon struck Caan-Fan-To low in the gut and the Prime Facilitator folded over the blow, his wind expelled in an agonized wheeze. I leaned forward, about to intervene and damn the consequences. Caan-Fan-To wasn’t a complete amateur, though. He sucked up the pain and straightened quickly enough to deflect his opponent’s spear shaft as it arced at his neck. The wooden shafts smacked off each other with a clack that echoed on the ceiling of the dome, and then both of the Helta were circling again.
They came closer to us and I put a hand on Strawbridge’s shoulder and pushed her behind me as I backed out of the way. The way those spears were swinging, it wouldn’t take much for one of them to go out of control and slice one of us us by accident, and the gleaming silver blades at the business ends looked awfully sharp.
I studied the younger man, the challenger, looking for weaknesses in his game. Not that I had any experience fighting with spears, but I’d had bayonet training, which was…well, obsolete as shit, but maybe bore some similarities to this. The kid had great balance, but then all the Helta did compared to me. His footwork seemed odd and formulaic, sticking to a routine like a martial arts form, but so did Caan-Fan-To’s. If he broke that pattern, he might catch the kid unawares, but he’d probably learned to fight the same way.
I wanted to yell something, encouragement if not advice, but none of the Helta cheered, nothing louder than whispers to each other, a finger pointing in excitement here and there.
“Can people not talk to them?” I asked Joon-Pah.
He stared at me as if I’d said something nonsensical.
“They are too busy to talk,” he told me, like it was obvious.
“I mean like cheering for one side or the other.”
“Your people would cheer something like this?” he wondered.
“Well, I would if I needed my guy to win or my whole mission’s going to fall apart!”
I hadn’t meant to yell that last bit and I bit my lip, trying to pin my frustration inside. What I really wanted to do was pull the Glock out of my waistband and put a 9mm slug into Bron-Min’s leg and see how well he hopped around then. I looked at Strawbridge, hoping she’d have some ingenious, sneaky bureaucrat plan to end this whole thing, but she was watching with the same wide, helpless eyes as me.
Caan-Fan-To gathered his wits and his breath and made another lunge at the kid, this time stabbing at the challenger’s groin. The move brought a gasp from the crowd, and I wondered if Caan-Fan-To had finally stepped outside the spear-kwon-do rulebook and tried something different. It nearly worked. Bron-Min spun to one side and actually fell to a knee, losing his footing. Caan-Fan-To sliced sideways with his spear’s curved side-blade, pressing his advantage, and hope surged in my chest. All it took was a fucking cut, a scratch, just enough to draw blood. Blind luck could do it.
But all the blind luck was on Bron-Min’s side. He threw himself flat, inches below the slice, then flipped backwards, using his spear shaft as a fulcrum and ending on his feet. Caan-Fan-To kept pressing, thinking he still had the advantage, but Bron-Min was just so damned agile and so damned quick. He’d been holding his spear vertically, the butt grounded, and when Caan-Fan-To jabbed at his chest, the kid leaned into the spear and spun around it like the world’s ugliest, hairiest pole dancer.
Caan-Fan-To stumbled as his spear point struck a lot of nothing, and he wasn’t nearly as agile or acrobatic as Bron-Min. He stopped himself, the sole of his sandal scraping a the polished wood floor, and tried to turn, but it was far too late. Bron-Min swung the metal butt plate of his spear like a baseball bat, and it struck the Prime Facilitator in the side of the head, where the temple would be on a human.
You never forgot that particular sort of crunching sound. I’d heard it for the first time in Basic Training when some dumbass city kid thought h
e was a superhero and tried to climb down the outside of the barracks at night from a second-story window while I was on fire watch. The second time had been in a small village about twenty miles outside Caracas, when I’d been jumped by a local while trying to dig a hasty shit-hole with an e-tool. It’s amazing what an e-tool can do to a human skull.
So, the second I heard that crunch, I realized this wasn’t a ceremonial contest to first blood, where one fighter would be embarrassed and the other wouldn’t have to buy drinks for a month. The Prime Facilitator was dead before his body hit the ground.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
“Oh, dear God,” Strawbridge whispered, her fingernails digging into my shoulder.
Blood trickled from Caan-Fan-To’s mouth, staining that beautifully polished floor, making it official.
Bron-Min cast his spear aside, allowing it to clatter to the floor, his shoulders heaving with effort and probably adrenaline. I was fairly sure the Helta had adrenaline. What would a human do after just beating their opponent to death with a club? Yell? Puke? Dance? Cry?
Bron-Min did none of those. He made a gesture of obeisance to Gafto-Lo-Mok as she stepped to the spot where Caan-Fan-To had stood, raising her hand into the air.
“Do any contest that I am now the Prime Facilitator?”
“Joon-Pah,” I said to the Heltan, eyes locked on Gafto-Lo-Mok. “Can you challenge her?”
“I am not a Facilitator,” he said. “And even if I were, there must be one passage of our moon, approximately three of your weeks between challenges. Until then, she is in charge.”
“I regret the death of Caan-Fan-To,” the female said, gesturing at the body being carried out by a group of what might have been soldiers or perhaps the Helta equivalent of paramedics. “He was a capable Facilitator who sought what he thought the best for our people. That he was mistaken should not stain his legacy.” She turned and speared Joon-Pah with a glare. “And I have proven right, as witnessed by the spirits of our ancestors and the will of the Elders. But I will not have my detractors say I am vindictive in my triumph. I will not seek the death or exile of citizen Joon-Pah, though I will demand his immediate resignation from the Self-Defense Force, and have him replaced as the captain of the Truthseeker.”
I expected Joon-Pah to object, at least expected him to say something, but he merely made a gesture of respect and backed out of the center circle, toward the far exit. My jaw dropped and I had to force my mouth closed before I swallowed one of the local flies.
He’d abandoned us. I couldn’t make myself believe it. He wasn’t human, and maybe I should have tried harder to remember that, despite all the English he’d learned and the human mannerisms he imitated, he was an alien, born in another culture. I shouldn’t have made assumptions about him. What had Strawbridge called it again? Yeah, humanocentrism. I’d been guilty of it again.
“However,” Gafto-Lo-Mok went on, and the translator gave her tone a harder edge as she turned her attention to us humans, “there can be no mercy for these monsters, for have we not learned our lesson? Have we not shown enough compassion and understanding to their kind?” She bared her teeth. “The only mercy I shall show them is a painless death, which is more than they have given to our people. Security, take them now.”
And that was it. The time for talking was done and I was in charge. I grabbed Strawbridge by the shoulder and pushed her toward the exit, my right hand slipping under my jacket and pulling out the Glock 9mm.
“Is that a gun?” Strawbridge exclaimed in what might have been the most stupid question I’d heard since leaving the military.
“No,” I assured her. “I’m just happy to see you. Move!”
I expected the Council of Facilitators to surge off their comfy beanbag seats and charge after us, but they stayed where they were, apparently happy to let the guards do their dirty work. The tap-tap of their boots on the wooden floor was growing louder, advancing toward us from the other side of the building—where the toga-clad opera singer had come from—but I didn’t think they’d open fire in here, with all the politicians standing around being useless.
Well, all except Bron-Min. The kid was still hyped up on adrenaline and made the mistake of believing that, since he could brain an old man with a spear, he could definitely overpower me, a stupid, hairless ape, by hand. He moved with the same dancing footwork I’d seen during the challenge, almost hypnotic with its spinning, circular arcs. It reminded me of kung-fu, and it also reminded me why kung-fu practitioners did so poorly when went up against boxers, wrestlers and jujitsu students in the early days of MMA.
I stepped inside one of those beautiful, circular swipes and smashed him in the face with the slide of my Glock.
On Earth, bears are a lot stronger than humans, but the reason for that has a lot to do with how their weight is distributed, how their limbs and feet are attached, the size of their shoulder muscles and the like. When the Elders took a sun bear and re-engineered it into something bipedal and tool-using and versatile enough to be a technological sentient, they’d had to make compromises, and one of them was the strength of that neck. I’d never have been able to stun a black bear by hitting it in the face. Its neck muscles and shoulder muscles are just too strong. But the Helta were no longer bears and Bron-Min went down like a sack of shit.
A gasp went up from the crowd, as if they were amazed their champion would wimp out so easily. I wondered what they expected since they thought we were the same as the Tevynians who’d been kicking their asses for years.
“Clanton, stop!” Strawbridge said. “We can still make them listen to reason!”
“Reason went out the window with the whole thing about killing us,” I said, still pushing her ahead of me. The exit was a patch of daylight fifty yards away, but the Helta politicians weren’t trying to get between it and us.
I snuck a glance back at the security guards, finally getting a good look at them. There were ten of them, way too many to shoot all of them even if I was of a mind to, dressed in the familiar Napoleonic artillery officer uniforms with the addition of a weird, formal headdress, making them look more like the Swiss guards at the Vatican. Except these guys weren’t carrying pikes, and they weren’t carrying lasers either. I didn’t recognize the rifles, but I had a horrible feeling they were some sort of nonlethal weapons, which would make them more likely to use them in the crowded auditorium.
I turned back to see a half dozen more coming in from the exit in front of us and I suppose I should have known even the Helta wouldn’t just leave an open escape route. I’d been acting on instinct, hadn’t really been thinking, and didn’t have any sort of plan for after I got out that door, but outside was infinitely preferable to inside. I didn’t slow down, didn’t let Strawbridge slow down either, just charged straight into the mass of them, hoping I could get to contact distance before they fired.
That didn’t work out so well. The six of them were in a loose wedge, not a formation as much as their commander leading from the front and the rest letting him, and he raised that weird rifle with the bell-shaped muzzle and fired. Banshees screamed inside my head and ripped at my consciousness and I could tell he missed because the shimmering in the air from the agonizing sonic vibration passed a yard or so to our left instead of slamming straight into me.
I threw myself off to the right, pulling Delia Strawbridge with me and putting my arm between her head and the ground, paying for it with a nasty wrench of my shoulder that probably would have taken me out of action before the Helta’s medical technology had taken care of the bursitis I’d developed there.
I didn’t want to kill any of them, but I didn’t want to get zapped with that sonic ray thing either, confident from the near miss that it would be enough to put me under at least long enough for them to get the Helta equivalent of handcuffs on me. I made the decision before my conscious mind caught up with the process and the snap-crack report of the 9mm surprised me.
It surprised the hell out of the guard command
er, too, when the slug took him in the right knee and he bellowed with the pain and went down on his face, the sonic weapon clattering against the floor and sliding the ten yards toward us. I swung the Glock toward another of the security officers, but the rest of them were already scattered, diving for cover.
Strawbridge yelped as I pulled her to her feet, cursing me, cursing the military, just cursing in general with enough ferocity and variety to do a Marine drill instructor proud. Another sonic blast went off behind me, but this one I just heard rather than feeling and I thought they must be firing wildly, unable or unwilling to stand still long enough to get a bead on us.
Then we were through the entrance and outside and the Helta roaming the catwalk were rubbernecking civilians, no more eager to get involved than the politicians had been. I ran through the gaggle, dozens gathered, I supposed, for the spectacle of the council meeting and the drama of the challenge, and now getting more of a show than they’d bargained for.
“Where the fuck are we going?” Strawbridge demanded, trying to yank her arm free of my grasp. She was out of breath and I was getting there myself, not from the actual exertion but the adrenaline coursing through me. “Have you even fucking thought about that?”
Well, of course I hadn’t, because I hadn’t thought about anything. I hadn’t had the time. But I was outside now, and the catwalk branched ahead of us, offering me the choices I hadn’t considered before. To the right was the way we came, and my instinct was to go that way, to try to get to the Delta team. I knew there was no way Pops would let any pissant Helta security squad take him out and he would be coming our way.
But I also knew there was no way Gafto-Lo-Mok would be unprepared for them, not after we’d demonstrated the powered armor for her at the Executive Residence. She wouldn’t have tried to pull this off without being prepared, but how well was she prepared? She hadn’t known I’d have a weapon; it hadn’t even occurred to her.