THE RIDER (Galactic Football League Novellas Book 4)

by Scott Sigler

  Pete had been swallowed once, three seasons back. That spider-bear gulped him right down. Once Pete got over the terror of being inside a predator, he’d actually been a little grateful to spend a day in there before the spider-bear puked him back up — grateful, because he really didn’t want the 10,000 fans in attendance that day to know he’d literally crapped himself when the spider-bear’s big head had shot in for what should have been a fatal bite. Spending a day trapped in a sealed suit with your own poop? Un-fun, but at least he’d been able to keep that secret to himself.

  He absently ran his hand across the orange numbers on his Krakens jersey. The GFL players wore full-body armor, too, but nothing like the Dinolition rigs. Football armor was pricey, but didn’t have the same life-support tech. A rider’s suit cost almost as much as a mount did, all part of the massive expense of fielding a Dinolition team.

  Every time Pete saw someone’s armor on a rig like that, he thought of grade school, of an image he’d seen in an ancient history class. A warrior sect from old Earth called the “Samurai” had worn armor that didn’t look all that different from what riders used. It had been protective plate and nothing else, of course, not even a shred of real protective tech, but on display in some forgotten museum, it could have passed for rider armor if you blurred your eyes enough. And, of course, if you imagined that armor fashioned for a much smaller Human.

  Clark looked up as Pete approached. “Ah, there you are, Cap.”

  Pete frowned. “You could take the night off, Critter. You know we won, right?”

  Clark shrugged. “And let you be a martyr about how you’re always working while the kids go out and party? Naw. Besides, I won’t sleep right unless I know I got these cracks melded and test the full seal.”

  “What, you’re not tough enough to handle a couple hours of stomach acid? You big baby.”

  Clark nodded. “I prefer to be the digestor, not the digestee. I might not be long for this universe, Boss, but I’d rather keep all the days that I have left. Don’t want to spend my final years eating my meals through a straw like Walker.”

  Any mention of that name brought with it a sobering chill. Dominique Walker had ridden for the Frontier Ancients over on Wilson 4. Three matches ago, Clark had shown a stunning display of skill, launching Missy in a leap over Walker’s megatherioides that finished with Missy back-kicking Walker right off her saddle. The kick, unfortunately, had hit Walker square in the head — even advanced inertia-dampening and hardened Crysteel can’t protect the brain from bouncing off the inside of the skull.

  “Critter, I’m getting tired of hearing you be all guilty over that. The game was Dismount. You dismounted Walker — that was your job.”

  Clark nodded, leaned closer to the crack in his armor and squeezed more repair cement into it.

  “Ayuh,” he said. “That I did.”

  Pete stopped talking for a moment and watched his friend’s sure hands slowly fill the cracks. The Ridgebacks had a team armorer, Luscious Buhari, who came in the day after a match, but she rarely had anything to do — real riders knew their gear was the difference between life and death, and did every repair they could on their own to make sure it was done right. The armorer would do diagnostics on the electrical system, the power cell, comms and all that, but for straight-up plate integrity, Clark took care of that himself.

  “Looks like your suit took more damage than I thought,” Pete said.

  “This?” Clark pointed to the crack. “’Tis but a scratch, boss. I’ll fix this up then flight-check all the systems. It’ll be fine.”

  “Make sure you’re there when Luscious checks it tomorrow,” Pete said. “I don’t want her lazy ass missing anything. You’re there tomorrow, you hear me?”

  Clark stood. He stared, his face a picture of patience.

  “Be there to watch Luscious like I am every single time that hack lays hands on my rig? That what you mean, Pete?”

  Pete sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Of course. Sorry, I know you’re there every time, I just—“

  “It’s Tumult,” Clark said. “I get it.”

  Pete nodded. “Bess, too. She almost lost an eye tonight.”

  “You better talk to Guestford about Yopat,” Clark said. “That little orange-furred bastard needs a whuppin’.”

  “Considering how I let my temper slip after the match, I figure she’ll talk to me before I can talk to her.”

  Clark shook his head. “We aren’t kids anymore, Cap. Don’t you think we’re getting a little old to be brawling?”

  Pete wanted to give a smart-ass answer, but that pain in his back told him there was nothing to say. Clark was right. Pete knew it. He’d known it before he’d started that fight, yet he’d started it anyway.

  “You annoy me,” he said. “I gotta check on the girls.”

  Clark turned back to his work. “Goodnight, then.”

  Pete left the armory and walked to the supply room’s doorway. Inside were Tony Koester and two other dwarfs — Dar, her skin and hair just as white as Tony’s, and Rob Stikz, a blue-skinned native of Satirli 6. The three were taking post-match inventory of the equipment boxes. Salton the Grimy — the Ridgebacks’ owner — was so cheap a missing piece of tackle was cause for a blowout.

  Stikz rummaged through the crates and called out item numbers. Dar touched her messageboard with each number called. Neither had dressed for that day’s game, which meant they drew check-in duty. Every rider had a role, even the ones that didn’t ride.

  Tony, however, had dressed, had ridden, and therefore wasn’t responsible for check-in. Just like Clark, the kid should have been out celebrating the win. Pete felt a swell of pride that the youngster was here, helping out with equipment check-in instead of partying like a rock star.

  Dar looked up, saw Pete standing in the doorway. Her face lit up with a wide smile.

  “Pete! Did you bring your armor? I have to check it in so it’s ready for Luscious to examine tomorrow.”

  “In the locker room,” Pete said. “Go fetch it for me.”

  Dar’s smile vanished as her nose wrinkled. “Fetch it your own damned self, you old bastard.”

  “I’ll go,” Stikz said. He headed the way Pete had come.

  Pete high-fived Stikz as he passed. Stikz was the team’s second-youngest rider, and always seemed eager to please.

  Pete walked up next to Dar and peered into the container. Scratched and battered pieces of red and black rider armor filled the high lipped box. Looked like Ian’s gear.

  “Everything where it should be, Dar?”

  She smirked. “Exactly where it should be, except for Clark’s armor, and — of course — yours.” She looked down at the messageboard and scrolled through the entries. She leaned in close to Pete and whispered. “Tony already cleaned Tumult’s tackle. I re-entered it into unattached inventory.”

  Pete shook his head. “Put her gear in a separate box.”

  She raised her brows. “Um, why?”

  “It’s being retired,” Pete said. “Tony, thanks for getting everything square.”

  The white-skinned dwarf ran his hands through a tangle of long, ivory hair. “No, problem. You going to see Guestford soon?”

  Guestford, Guestford, Guestford ... was she the only thing his teammates wanted to talk about?

  “Probably,” Pete said. “Can’t say when.”

  “You going to ask about raising league minimum?”

  Pete sighed. “For the tenth time, Tony, you’re not getting more money this season. Wait until after the tournament and I’ll ask her” He walked past the table to the supply room’s far entrance.

  “We not slaves, Pete,” Tony yelled after him. “We deserve to get paid!”

  Pete didn’t bother replying. Slaves. How ridiculous. Tony could hang up the saddle anytime he wanted, no one was making him do this job.

  Pete entered the hall and followed it to the end, then opened the door there and stepped into Ranch Ridgeback’s sprawling dino area. The clear roof
thirteen meters above revealed a few clouds and a dense mass of stars. The city was far enough away that the sprawl of urban lights didn’t obscure things too much. When dawn broke, the ceiling automatically tinted to keep the dinos in the shade.

  In front of Pete lay the wide, circular training ground, itself rimmed by the individual, gated pens for the mounts. The individual pens surrounded it, allowing riders, trainers, gene-slingers and vet-techs to take individual animals straight out into the open space.

  Pete followed the training grounds’ left-hand curve toward the achillobator pen. With Tumult gone, only three of them on the roster: Birdy, Bandit and Bucky. As Pete approached, they raised their green- and blue-feathered heads and stood at their full height. The creatures were nearly six meters long from snout to tail and almost two meters tall at the hip. Bucky, the largest of the three, stepped around the trough and pressed against the fence, leaning her head over and prancing in place as Pete walked up.

  Pete stood still as the ostrich-like dino offered one of her short, feathered arms. The clawed hand splayed open. Pete gripped it with his own and gently squeezed. The dino snorted, then lowered her long neck to caress his cheek with her face.

  “Good girl, Bucky.” Pete rubbed his face against hers and patted her neck. She let out a low, mournful moan.

  Pete sighed. “I know, girl. I’m sorry.”

  He had to put on the stone face in front of the media and the other riders, but not in front of the mounts. His connection to them, to all of them, ran deeper than any he had with sentients. Sentients could lie, cheat and steal. Sentients could betray you, sentients could change, loving you one day and not loving you the next. Mounts, especially young ones like these killeys, wanted very little out of life; they wanted to eat and sleep, they wanted to play, they wanted to fight out in the arena, and they wanted to love. Mounts had been engineered as more than some reptilian ancestor — they had been created as a combination of lethal beast and loyal family dog.

  Be good to a mount, be kind to one, and they would love you without reservation until the day they died. Hell, even if you weren’t nice to them, the probably loved you anyway, and would follow you wherever they could, hoping that maybe you’d change your mind and give them just a little scratch, a kind word, maybe play with them, just a little. Mounts were all the things that sentients were supposed to be: brave, sweet, protective, hard-working and loyal until the end.

  And as creatures that loved deeply, they also felt loss with just as much intensity. Bucky lifted her head, glassy eyes looking out across the training ground to a pen on the other side, the only pen with a concrete building. Birdy and Bandit whistled and then hissed, their eyes following Bucky’s.

  Pete bent over and slid under the fence’s lower bar, then stood up once inside. The other two dinos pushed their heads into him. They were usually so hyper — running and jumping, pushing at each other, barking and playfully biting — but today they were quiet and calm.

  No, not calm ... sad.

  He patted all three heads.

  “We’ll all miss her.”

  The killeys nuzzled him, nearly knocking him off balance, almost as if they recognized that he was consoling them, that his acknowledgement of their missing pen-mate made things somehow better.

  The three killeys looked at one another and then turned back to the trough. The sounds of their jaws crunching on branches and leaves was a welcome distraction. If he heard them moan or whistle again, he was sure he’d lose it.

  Pete walked along the fence’s curve, passing mostly empty pens. In the dark back area of one pen, he saw movement, heard rustling of something far too small to compete in Dinolition. Pete smiled to himself. Three Compsognathus longipes — the compys — maybe playing some kind of stalking game with him. The little troublemakers were always up to something. Or, he realized with a sobering thought, perhaps they had picked up on the heavy, solemn vibe of the entire complex, and were staying out of sight. Pete hoped it was the former.

  He came to the largest pen in the complex. Bess’s thirteen-meter long form was sprawled on a floor of hay. Out of her armor, she still looked dangerous, but ... different. The last of her adolescent feathers broke up the outline of her famous head, spotty clumps of the soft things still hanging on behind her eyes and in a streak pointing almost to her nose. Pete remembered when she’d come out of the incubator, her red and black striped skin covered in soft, reddish down. As she’d grown, she’d steadily lost the feathers up her legs, then up her tail, then her hips and stomach and back, a steady march up her body toward the head. Now only those few clumps remained. Another month, maybe, and she’d be feather-free, released of any trapping that made her look young.

  Getting old is a helluva thing. She was just coming into her prime, Pete knew that by her increasing agility, strength and aggression, yet the League of Planets scientists still didn’t know how long she would live.

  Bess’s huge tail swayed slightly. Doc Baiman, her ever-present white smock streaked with blood and offal, stood before the giant creature. Jared Archer, the team’s vet-tech and also a decent backup rider, stood on the T-Rex’s other side. His small hands held a portable X-ray machine. He was checking Bess’s ribs for damage.

  Baiman was the Ridgeback’s bioenginner, although the trade was more commonly known as gene-slinger. All experiment, little regulation, slingers were the reason the prehistoric beasts had risen from extinction in the first place. Baiman was just as responsible for the birth and rise of Dinolition as any owner or rider.

  Pete nodded to Archer and spoke to Baiman.

  “Well, Doc?”

  Baiman spun on one heel to face him. “Bites. Scratches. Deep, but not too deep. She’ll be fine. As always.”

  Pete smiled up at Baiman. He was short, sure, but the bioengineer made even normal-sized Humans feel small. At over two meters tall, the crimson-haired HeavyG woman towered above him.

  “Bess needs rest,” she said. “At least two days, preferably three. And absolutely no movement for the next three to four hours, until she passes Sabat the Nifty.”

  Pete had all but forgotten how Bess had swallowed the Stompers captain. The T-Rex’s yellow eyes were calm, but sad. She was watching him. She snorted.

  “Hello, girl,” Pete said.

  Doc sighed and turned back to her charge. She knelt down, picked up a staple gun and returned to suturing the large gash in Bess’s side.

  Pete cleared his throat. “Doc, you, uh ... you going to necropsy Tumult?“

  “Of course,” Baiman said. “A shame to lose such a specimen.”

  Pete felt a flush of anger. “She wasn’t just a specimen. She was a great mount. And a good friend.”

  Baiman said nothing. She stroked Bess’s side and then put another staple into the wound. The T-Rex didn’t flinch.

  “We must get Salton to pay for some better medical equipment,” the HeavyG woman muttered. “This is barbaric.”

  Pete walked around the large woman to stand next to Bess’s head. He stroked the T-Rex’s snout. A large tongue slithered forward between huge teeth and flicked his chin. Pete grinned.

  Baiman shook her head. “So unhygienic.”

  Pete patted Bess. “Rest easy, girl.”

  He left her pen. There was one more place he had to visit that night, and that was in lone concrete building — the bioengineering compound.

  Like the dino pens, Baiman’s compound opened onto the training ground. He didn’t bother with the gate, just slid under the lowest rail as he’d done at the achillobator’s pen. He heard his footsteps shift from a dirt-crunch to the clack of his boots on bacteria-killing treated copper sheeting. Just inside the concrete building’s open, wide entrance lay a tarp.

  A tarp with a big body under it.

  Pete pulled back a corner and looked down at Tumult’s corpse. The dino’s serpentine neck bent sharply at the middle, the result of a broken vertebra. Tacky blood covered her blue and green feathers. During the second game of the match — four
laps, it had been — Ian/Tumult and Clark/Missy had attacked the Nightmare Beast’s flank in order to slow it down. Instead of attacking together, protecting each other’s sides like fighter craft wingmen in a dog-fight, Ian had rushed forward, actually made Tumult high-step to draw oohs and ahhs from the crowd. Like this was a goddamn theater production and not a vicious blood sport. The Nightmare beast — which itself had been in the league for four seasons and was more experienced than most riders — had kicked out with one of its large, armor-clad legs and snapped Tumult’s neck like a twig.

  While the armor protected the mounts from most bites and bludgeons, the achillobators were unable to handle blunt trauma to their long, thin necks. Because of Ian’s bit of crowd-pleasing flash, Tumult was dead.

  Clark had managed a springing strike on the Nightmare Beast, distracting it long enough for Ian to escape his fallen mount and run to the dugout. The game had continued without Ian and Tumult.

  Down to only three mounts, the Ridgebacks had had a hell of a time fighting both the Beast and its teammates, a pair of Spider-Bears. The Bears weren’t nearly as fast as achillobators, but they were stronger and better at handling damage. For four laps, holoprojectors illuminated a glowing five-meter-wide track around the inside of the arena wall. A specified mount from each team needed to complete four full laps without being knocked off the track. At four-against-three, the Ridgebacks should have won easily. Thanks to Ian’s blunder, however, the numbers were even, which meant the Stompers had a significant weight advantage.

  Thanks to the heavier mass of the Spider Bears, every time Clark/Missy and Tony/Dusty drew alongside to pass, the Bears just shouldered them off the track. And while Bess could handle the Nightmare Beast one-on-one, on the narrow track the wider Sklorno mount proved almost un-passable.