Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  Five armed men walked forward, one of them carrying an electric harpoon gun. It was Sheriff Heath.

  “You, you son of a bitch,” said the Sheriff. “You’re under arrest.”

  I fumbled for my pistol and dropped it. I found the other harpoon in my back but I couldn’t reach it to pull it out, and then Heath switched it on again, and I shook like a man having a heart attack as the electricity pulsed into my body.

  “Bastard!” I screamed but no word came out.

  Then a nanonet flew into the air and landed on me, and covered me totally, and I couldn’t breathe, and I crashed to the floor, and my eyes closed, and blackness consumed me.

  “The fucking bitch! She called the cops?” I marvelled, and the Sheriff kicked me hard in the face with the heel of his boot.

  My head shot back and smashed into the side of the police van. The side of the van buckled. I regretted the vigour of my movement.

  “Bastard!” I screamed, to cover my blunder, and the Sheriff booted me again.

  The police van took off. I was shackled hand and foot, my hands savagely pinned behind my back, and I was hooded, with full sensory deprivation, in blatant contravention of the Belladonnan penal code. And the electric harpoon was still embedded in my back, where it could be remotely activated if I tried to put up a fight.

  “I’ll kill you, you bastard, when I get out of here! And I’ll find that evil Grogan bitch, and I’ll rape her, and I’ll—”

  The Sheriff kicked me hard, again.

  “No prison can hold me,” I crowed, as I was hustled down the corridor of the cell block. I was still hooded, strong hands were dragging me, the shackles around my ankles forced me to walk in mincing pigeon steps.

  “You fucking tell ’em,” roared a voice, and then I heard a cell door slam open and I was hurled inside.

  “I demand water, food, access to an attorney,” I bellowed through my hood.

  A baton smashed me in the face, and I felt an eye pop.

  Annie Grogan stood in the witness box, wearing a demure body-length black dress and black gloves.

  “There were riots on the street,” she told the Judge. “My brother and I were in the Saloon. This man,” she pointed at me, “said he was going to leave, and he was almost out of the door when my brother stopped him and searched him. Billy was a hard and suspicious man, he was always convinced people were stealing from him.”

  Annie’s eyes covered the courtroom in a steady sideways sweep; every man and woman there saw her determination, and her sisterly love.

  “On this occasion,” she continued, “he was right. This man,” she pointed at me, “had stolen money from the safe. The wrap still had our seal on it. Also, he had jewellery that my grandmother had left to me. And furthermore, he had the pearl-handled plasma pistol that my father had left us. Billy went berserk, he started shouting and screaming. And then this man,” she pointed at me again, “drew two pistols and fired them. He blew my brother’s brains out. Billy didn’t stand a chance. And then this man,” she pointed at me, “put the gun near my mouth, and he pushed the gun into my mouth, and he threatened to blow my brains out if I refused to have sex with him. And I refused. He didn’t, thank heaven, carry out his threat. And then he left. And I—” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t deny my brother was a criminal, but he was a good man too. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  I stood up. “You lying fucking bitch! That never happened! None of it!”

  “You’ll have your chance to put your case,” said the Judge, mildly.

  “Bitch!” I roared.

  “It is the verdict of this court that the accused, Thomas Matthew Dunnigan, is guilty of murder in the first degree. The court also finds that Thomas Matthew Dunnigan is guilty of theft, and attempted rape, and gross contempt of court. And it is the opinion of the court that the accused is a recidivist of the worst kind, and cannot be redeemed, or rehabilitated or reformed, or forgiven.

  “The accused, Thomas Matthew Dunnigan, is therefore declared to be noxii, and is sentenced to be damnati ad bestias, after which his skull and brain will be incinerated by plasma beam until he is true-dead.”

  An underground moving walkway conveyed the prisoners from the court building to the arena. A dozen prisoners were contained in pod-cages on the walkway, surrounded by cylinders of breathable oxygen. The tunnel in which the walkway was housed was filled with poisonous gas that would burn the throat and lungs of anyone rash enough to try to escape.

  I stood alone, isolated from the others, for I was the only one deemed to be noxii, and sentenced to true-death. It was a brutal verdict for a relatively minor crime – the murder of one gangster by another. But the Sheriff had paid good money to get this result. Now, I was doomed.

  Unless I survived. For, as I had learned when I leached all the data from the AI-spire, it is a city ordnance that any gladiator who can survive damnati ad bestias was deemed to be a freeman, and given a place of honour in the ranks of the servants of the ancien régime. This was an historic tradition, but a sorely neglected one – for no one, in the whole long history of the Belladonnan Gladiatorial Games, had ever survived damnati ad bestias.

  And, despite my hardmetal body and my superstrength and my concealed weapons – the fingerspikes, the acid spit, the disruptor-pulse eyes – I wasn’t feeling in the least complacent about the battle that lay ahead of me.

  For I knew, from surveying my database and my most recent download of The Encyclopedia of Alien Life, that even Doppelganger Robots had been killed by beasts less fierce than those I would face today.

  “Die Well.”

  “Die Well.”

  “Die Well.”

  “Die Well.”

  “Die Well.”

  “I ain’t,” I snarled, “gonna die.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said a seven-foot-tall black gladiator. “We die, we’re reborn, that’s the way of it. There are worse punishments, believe me.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked the black gladiator.

  “They call me the Spartan Terror.”

  “Your real name.”

  “My real name is Claudio. I was born on Sparta. Hence, Spartan Terror.”

  “My name is Tom,” I said, “and I am noxii. Abhorred by the state; damned by the state. A pariah among pariahs.”

  The black gladiator grinned. “Fuck, you must have pissed someone off really bad.”

  “I have pissed,” I admitted, “a lot of people off. Listen, Claudio, I need help.” I looked around at the motley crew of gladiators – some warriors, some scrawny street gangsters terrified at finding themselves in loincloths and leather tunics, and about to embark upon mortal combat. “And I can pay.”

  “I already got money,” Claudio said. “I’m a professional warrior, I’m good at this shit.”

  “I can pay enough to accelerate your rebirth, should you fail in the arena and die. I’ll throw in some more for extra augmentations, and ten million scudos to enable you to buy a dacha in space, for when you retire.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “And the rest of you? Same deal?”

  Murmurs, mutters, nods; the answer was yes.

  “So,” said Claudio, “what do you want us to do?”

  From the catacombs, we could hear the roar of the crowds, and the sound of the band playing its strident guitar and saxophone and air-piano riffs.

  Then the Games Herald entered our dungeon. He was a stocky, ugly man, with a nasty little smile that promised horrors galore. He gestured to me, and the guards unshackled me. Earlier, my “girlfriend” – Macawley – had been allowed to bring me a clean fighting outfit – the loincloth, the armoured box and armoured tunic, swords, the knives, the bolas, the leather wristbands and the body harnesses. So I looked and felt the part.

  I limbered up. A short pretty woman oiled my body, and rubbed healing salves into the flesh. It would make little difference in the battle ahead, but I found the ritual strangely calming. And my skin – rich in sen
sory detectors – was able to fully register the pleasurableness of her firm hand-massage of my near-naked body, and the rich cloying scent of the oils and salves she was rubbing in, and the extraordinary nearness to me of this highly desirable, by human standards, beautiful woman.

  And then I limbered, and stretched, and grinned. And I was ready.

  I began my slow walk along the underground corridor up into the arena. The walls were covered with holos of former acclaimed gladiators. I could smell sweat and skin and body oils. I was aware the cameras were on me, so I walked proud, and flexed my pecs as I strode.

  I emerged into the arena. Huge TV holos hovered in the sky above us, and every seat in the amphitheatre was full. From their ornate and spacious boxes, richly decorated with gilded statues of angels and past gladiatorial heroes, the cold-eyed anciens watched the display that unfolded beneath them.

  Dead bodies and ripped-off body parts were being cleared away from the floor of the arena. A half-torso of a woman was groaning, one eye to the cameras. The star performers would be rejuved and restored within weeks or months; the ordinary convicted criminals might wait a decade or more to be fitted with replacement limbs and organs. But this was showbusiness, pure and simple: blood and gore for the masses, provided by trained performers.

  But I was different. I was condemned to true-death; it was a darker spectacle altogether.

  As I stepped out into the arena I heard a roar of support from the crowd. I raised a fist in triumph. I was conscious that one of my eyes still bulged large. After it had popped out of its socket earlier, I had pushed the eye back with finger and thumb, but the fit wasn’t perfect.

  The Animal Gates opened, and two lions and a tiger padded out. The crowd roared again.

  I hefted my sword and stepped forward, body hunched, senses attuned. The big cats ambled into the arena, cocked their lazy eyes at the crowd and, almost in unison, sat down.

  Two gladiators ran on with haunches of meat and threw them to the three big cats. They slowly got up and trotted over. The tiger snarled. The two lions settled down to eat. I waited.

  A short man ran up and threw a bucket of blood over me. I spat blood out of my mouth, and raised a fist, and the crowd roared again. I began to worry that, if I didn’t see some brutal action soon, I would start to feel the cold.

  Then the lions and the tiger chewed their meat and realised it was fake. They roared with rage, and leaped up, and padded away, then smelled the blood on the strange human, and padded back. The three beasts warily circled me.

  The lions roared. The tiger snarled.

  Then the tiger leaped. I rolled under, slit it from neck to groin with my blade, and rolled free. The tiger crashed to the ground, howling with pained puzzlement.

  The lions attacked in unison. I took their noses off with sword slashes, then butchered off their legs. I killed each of the lions with a sword-thrust through the eye, then I went across and finished the tiger in the same way.

  The crowd roared.

  The warm-up was over.

  I stood alone in the arena, feet scuffing the synthetic sawdust, aware that everything I did was being broadcast on TV screens across the planet. I held my sword two-handed and horizontal in martial-arts style. A trickle of blood ran down my cheek, from a tiger-swipe I hadn’t even noticed. I was utterly still.

  From the depths of the catacombs came an awesome roar. I was amused at the deception: my database identified this as the cry of a Barsoomian-Hyena-Bird, a tiny and entirely harmless creature. My guess was that none of the vast monsters I was about to face had a roar half so fierce.

  That’s showbusiness.

  Then one of the Animal Gates started to shudder, as the creature behind crashed and barged into it. The latches were remotely shot open. The gates creaked apart. Red eyes appeared.

  And at that moment, out of the blue sky, clouds swept down at me with talons extended. I had already spotted them with my radar vision, but I allowed them to swoop close to my head before I “casually” looked up and saw air moving towards me like a whirlwind with claws. It was a flock of Stealth-Hawks, camouflaged to be almost invisible in air. These remarkable creatures were the major predator on the planet of…

  I ignored the constant drone of information from my database, and leapt aside to dodge pecking beaks and ripping claws, then leapt forward again, and swung with my blade. Red blood appeared in the air, as the first Stealth-Hawk was chopped in half. And the other six Hawks plunged at me, and I rolled and dived, then threw knives at them and planted each knife in the skull of one of the vicious predatory beasts.

  But the Stealth-Hawks were unperturbed, and flew away, knives still stuck in skulls. My database primly reminded me: the cerebral cortex of this creature is located in its posterior region, not in its skull.

  I realised, with annoyance, that this had been a feint. The birds were unlikely to have hurt me seriously, but in the course of fighting them, I had thrown away all my knives.

  Yet I still had my sword, and the bolas. And the Animal Gate was open now and a monster was charging at me. This time I listened more attentively to the briefing from my database:

  The Gullyfoyle Diamond-Hound, cold-blooded, no heart or lungs or vulnerable organs, skin is hard as diamond, hence the common name, eyes shine in the dark like rubies. Vulnerable points are—

  The Hound was fast. It leaped at me, and I was on the verge of rolling under it when an intuition made me leap up, somersaulting in the air, over the vast six-legged crystalline monster. As I flew over it, I slashed down with my sword and the blade shattered into pieces on the beast’s hide. Then I landed, and spun around, and saw that the sawdust in front of me was steaming acid. The creature had pissed downwards as it leapt, and its urine must be acidic. (I swiftly checked my database and found that indeed it was so.)

  Now I had no knives and no sword, just the bolas, which I whirled and threw and it missed, and the Hound lunged again.

  But the bolas could be remotely controlled by subvocal commands: it missed, then turned in mid-air and flew back and wrapped around the creature’s neck and severed it. Green blood oozed on to the sawdust of the arena. The beast twitched and rolled. It wasn’t yet dead, but it was no longer a threat to me if I kept my distance. However, this meant I couldn’t get at my bolas, and so now I had no weapons at all.

  Fifteen seconds had elapsed since my arrival in the arena.

  I was enjoying myself.

  I bounced on my heels, waiting for the next monster, as the headless Diamond-Hound tripped and slipped on its own blood and slime. Its eyes and ears were in its severed head, but the “brain” of the creature was in its spinal cord, and it could only be killed by burning it, or shredding every inch of it.

  A second Animal Gate opened and the crowd roared with approval. It was a Mulligan’s Dragon! This huge beast had feathers not scales, fiery breath, and broad dagger-pointed wings, though it could not fly. And its eleven eyes glittered red as it attacked.

  I ran towards it, and rolled and ducked. I knew that if the flames touched me, all would be lost: fire could not hurt my hardmetal frame but it would burn off all my flesh – revealing me to all as a cyborg.

  But there was a four-second gap between flares, and that allowed me to run underneath the beast’s neck. Once there, I plunged my hand into the creature’s mouth and down its throat and then – unseen by the crowd – I transformed my fingers into spikes and gouged out its brains.

  And as it died the creature snorted flame from its nostrils, but I dodged the fire, and pulled my hand out of its throat, and stabbed its eyes out one by one with my fingers. Then I lifted the creature up high and carried it across the floor of the arena. Flames poured forth from its mouth again and lapped at the body of the Diamond-Hound, which screamed, then ignited, and burned, and then burned faster, and finally melted.

  I threw the corpse of the Mulligan’s Dragon into the air, and it crashed to the ground, dead, and I took a proud bow.

  The crowd erupted.


  Then all the Animal Gates opened at once and monsters appeared on all sides. A Sand-Leopard, a One-Horn, a three-eyed Shiva with scales that rippled the colours of the rainbow, dozens of Snake-Birds, a roaring Giant-Beetle-Thing, two hairy five-armed Kongs, and a Weisman-Bandersnatch – the foulest, largest, scaliest, horniest, most-multiple-mouthed, many-clawed, viciously bloodthirsty predator ever discovered by humankind.

  And I raised my arms up high, and laughed, for I had no weapon still. And the crowd applauded my spirit.

  But one gate remained closed: the Gladiator Gate. And as the creatures pawed the earth and roared and prepared to devour their foolish prey, this gate opened, and a tall black gladiator walked through brandishing a sword the size of a man. He carried it as though it were as light as a new-born baby, and with a similar loving reverence; then he threw it through the air.

  And it flew and it flew –

  And was caught by me.

  And the monsters began their attack; I took my stance; and with this huge, sharp broadsword, I slashed and lunged and slew. The sword was unwieldy but devastating in its effects, and it had a blade in the hilt that allowed me to kill one creature with a downward stroke before slashing the head off another with the blade.

  Then I buried the sword tip in the hide of the Weisman-Bandersnatch, and to my horror, the entire sword was gulped and swallowed into the monster’s flesh. I had to release the handle of the sword, or risk losing my own arm. And then the monster spat out shards of hardmetal and its eleven eyes glittered with evil. And I ran.

  The Bandersnatch pursued me, with astonishing speed. But I ran faster and reached the Gladiator Gate, where two more gladiators stood proud. And one of the gladiators held a burning brand and the other held a jewelled knife and as I approached they threw these weapons into the air and I caught them, then turned back.