She didn’t know if she’d ever go back. There was no romance, and certainly there been no sexual attraction. She’d had the heat cut out of her, after all. But it had been nice simply to chat with an intelligent man who appreciated her for what she’d become. When he’d shyly offered her the broach, she didn’t even consider refusing him. And now, it was a reminder of why she had become a gladiator. He was a paramour, so he was a different case. He’d like her no matter what. But he represented the teeming masses of humanity, and they were why she was fighting d’relles while waiting for the Brick to come visit.
She still missed Jonna terribly, but she thought she’d turned the corner. She was ready to get back into the saddle.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Warden Mantou walked up on the stage and behind the podium. The gathered gladiators, staff, and even the candidates quieted as the director cleared her throat.
“Good morning. As some of you know, I’ve been to the UAM headquarters for the last few days. I’ve met with the Secretary-General as well as the heads of quite a few governments, to include the Brotherhood, the Confederation of Free States, and the Federation. We, that is our leaders, have come to a conclusion that will affect all of us.
“As you may know, since we have clashed with the Klethos, we have fought 398 times. We have lost 139 of those fights, losing 139 worlds. In this galaxy, we have over 2,000 worlds of interest, so if we continue along this path, we could lose the galaxy to the Klethos in about two centuries.”
So what else is new? Tamara wondered. The talking heads discuss this all the time.
“However, as you are well aware, there has been an increase in the tempo in challenges. If this increase continues, we could run out of human worlds in about half a century.”
That got Tamara’s attention. Most of the people alive today could live to see that happen.
“So, with that in mind, we, humanity, are going to go on the offensive. We are going to challenge the Klethos to take back our lost worlds, and who knows, maybe after that, go after more prime real estate.”
The was a complete silence for a moment before cheer sounded, reverberating through the auditorium. Tamara yelled out as loud an ooh-rah as anyone else shouting.
The director used her hands to quiet everyone down so she could continue.
“So how does that affect us? Well, some of that is to be determined. But we are going to start with Class 84-6. You’ll be moving to Module 2 next week.”
Even louder cheers sounded coming from the candidates.
Don’t cheer too loudly until you know what you’re getting into, Tamara thought, not seriously, but remembering the torture of the module.
“We will be expanding the school, and recruitment will increase to fill larger requirements. And all of you gladiators, those who haven’t fought yet, your time is coming.”
Beth was sitting beside Tamara, and she jumped out of her seat and cheered.
Tamara was no different than most of the people in the auditorium. She welcomed the news. It didn’t seem logical on one level, to cheer a greater chance of an early, or earlier, in their case, death. But all of them were first selected for their warrior mentality. That had mentality had been artificially enhanced during the genmod. They were fighters, pure and simple, and that is what they had to do.
As a Marine, Tamara had been trained to attack, to be an offensive force. It felt good to her to take it to the Klethos instead of reacting as they controlled things.
This was going to be an interesting ride, and Tamara welcomed the change. If she was going to pay the price of her position with the Brick, she wanted to send as many of the bastards before her as possible before that time came.
BYB-10
Chapter 40
The first “Take Back” world attempt was the non-inhabited BYB-10 in the Brotherhood’s Third Synod. BYB-10 had a workable atmosphere, but the rest of the terraforming had been halted at 62% after the Klethos had taken the world. Tamara had been rather surprised at the choice. She would have thought they would try and take back one of the more valuable worlds, ones with intact infrastructure and from which there were still large numbers of refugees.
From the little that made it way down the chain to Chicsis, there were others who felt the same as Tamara, but without knowing how the Klethos would react, it had eventually been decided that a relatively “valueless” world would be the first target. If there was an unexpected reaction by the Klethos, choosing BYB-10 made some sense. For all humanity knew, the Klethos might practice a scorched earth policy if they lost a planet. With BYB-10, if they did, there was just not that much to lose.
There was also the concern that there might be a minimum time between losing a world and when reissuing a challenge would be accepted, so BYB-10, which had been one of the earlier worlds lost, fit that concern better.
How the secretive contact team issued the challenge, or what were the Klethos reactions, Tamara didn’t know. She didn’t even know exactly how the Klethos issued a challenge. But evidently the Klethos accepted, and the fight was on.
The selection of a gladiator echoed the policy of “not much to lose.” Warrant Officer Beth Hralto, UFMC, finally had her turn in the breach. Beth was overjoyed, and Tamara was glad for her, but she was angry at the implied lack of respect for Beth’s value.
Beth decided on an amazingly jarring chartreuse, turquoise, and pink hair pattern, which Tamara was sure was her giving the proverbial finger to the staff. She had a chip on her shoulder, but she was not going to turn down the opportunity to fight. It just gave her more motivation to prove the doubters wrong.
Her choice for a second, Elei, had raised some objections, but she was the gladiator, and she had the final say. Well, not the complete final say. After discussions with the staff xenobiologists, it was decided that Elei had to take off her prosthetic arm. The fear was that even as a second, the Klethos might feel it was too close to an armored combat suit.
Tamara waited for the other witnesses at the ring. Five Klethos waited opposite of them, and the d’relle waited patiently in the ring. Other than the twenty witnesses, only five other humans were present, four UAM staff and a holocorder. Two Brotherhood ships were in high orbit over the ring, every sensor on recording the events through an entire host of spectrums, but there was only the lone holocorder at ground level.
All the procedures were being felt out as they went. Everyone knew how the Klethos managed their challenges, and the humans were attempting to follow most of the same pattern. One big difference, though, was that the human contingent had landed the day before at the designated spot, then erected portable habitats to wait for the appointed time. Beth and Elei were given their own habitat while the rest shared another.
When the witnesses and the UAM observers marched the 900 meters to the ring, the Klethos were already waiting. So the witnesses waited as well. Tamara thought it all rather surreal, the fate of a world in the balance, yet here they all were, human and Klethos alike, just sitting and staring at each other.
Finally, exactly on time, Beth and Elei marched up the hill to the ring. Beth was carrying her ichi-katana, and as soon as she entered the ring, she lunged into the challenge, complete with an ear-piercing shriek. Her kata was, well, unique. She’d evidently patterned it after the puckalicious dance movement, where “dance,” which suggested some sort of style, was decidedly lacking. She looked like she was going into an epileptic fit as she shivered and shook around the ring, her sword an afterthought.
Oh, you go girl, Tamara thought, knowing full well that the UAM public affairs division were probably having a fit as they observed.
This wasn’t the image of the noble, stallworth gladiator that they liked to project.
Tamara could give a flying fig. It was the sacrifice and the fight that mattered, not the hair color and haka.
Coming back in front of her opponent, it looked like Beth lost her balance. Tamara could hear the intake of breath from the UAM staff behind her, but at the
last second, Beth stuck out her foot, landing in the correct challenge lunge.
If Beth’s disjointed haka bothered the d’relle, she showed no signs of it. She broke out into a pretty standard d’relle haka, full of jumps and spins, full of whistling swords cutting through the air. Almost four minutes later, she stopped in her own lunge.
Challenge issued, challenge accepted. Nothing unexpected—so far.
Tamara tensed up as the two circled each other. Beth was a decent fighter, but she hadn’t been the best. Jonna had been far better in the ring, and Jonna was now dead. Tamara didn’t want to lose another friend.
Beth suddenly rushed the d’relle, her sword singing as it whipped through the planet’s thin air. The d’relle parried, and the two broke apart, neither being touched. Beth immediately launched another attack, sword moving almost too fast to follow. Just as quickly, the d’relle parried and riposted. As the two broke apart, a thin line of red appeared on Beth’s side. Beth ignored it as the suit pressed together to its memory position, the pressure dampening any blood loss. Still, that was not good. A cut, any cut, weakened and slowed down a swordsman. The advantage swung to the d’relle.
Someone must not have told Beth that, though. She moved in again, a flurry of blows aimed at the d’relle’s legs. The Klethos countered, and with a sudden shift, Beth’s sword went high, aiming at the head. The d’relle saw it coming and ducked back, the katana skimming just past its cheek, but cutting deep into the feathered crest, slicing off a third of the feathers in two. The d’relle screamed, then backed up a step.
Score one for Beth!
Tamara never understood why the d’relle fought with their crest displayed. It was a vulnerable part of their body, yet it had had no protection. Regular Klethos warriors often fought with flattened crests, as recordings of the first two full-scale battles revealed, but not the d’relle. They did try to maneuver to keep their crests out of reach of the gladiators, but sometimes, that just didn’t work.
A little more blood leaked out from the cut on Beth’s side, but she didn’t let up. Pressing hard, she unleashed a flurry of slashes that the d’relle had to counter, and with its balance compromised, she was having a harder and harder time, and she was getting a tiny bit later on each parry. She wasn’t going to give up easily, though. She tried to punch Beth with her right lower arm, but she was just out of reach, and the effort, along with her damaged crest, threw her off balance. Beth’s next slash struck her across the left upper arm, and the one after that cut ten centimeters off of her beak.
The d’relle drove herself backwards to get out of range, but Beth was on her like tan on sand. She cut the d’relle’s right thigh to the bone, then came back and cut through her opponent’s neck, nearly severing the head. Blue blood spurted out while the d’relle tried to catch herself before toppling over.
Beth stood over the d’relle, katana high over her head, but she held the blow. It was over. With her sword hand, she reached over to the slash on her side and touched her blood. She bent over and rubbed her blood on the undamaged part of the d’relle’s crest, then using the same hand, daubed up some the d’relle’s blood. She rubbed that on her forehead, then bent back, face to the sky, and shouted out her victory call.
“Holy Mother of God,” Zuneba, one of the other witnesses, said under her breath. “What will they make of that?’
Whether she meant the UAM, the public, or the Klethos, Tamara didn’t ask. All of them fit the question, though.
Beth marched over to the witnesses.
Pointing her bloody sword through the gladiators to the head UAM observer, she said, “OK, I’ve done my job. Now it’s up to you what happens next.”
With that, she spun around, and with a beaming Elei in tow, marched back in the direction of the temporary, or maybe now permanent, camp. With one last look at the dead d’relle, Tamara turned to follow.
Beth was right. The world had been re-taken. Anything else was up to the civilians.
MALIBU
Chapter 41
Tamara stood looking in the mirror. She was naked, and she carefully watched her reflection as she slowly moved her left arm from outstretched to across her chest until her left hand touched her right shoulder. She switched to her right arm and made the same movement, then back to the left. Visually, she couldn’t see a difference between the two. That didn’t relieve her.
The pain that she had first noticed while lifting weights not only hadn’t gone away, it had spread from her left pec up to the left side of her neck.
You’re being paranoid, she told herself.
People who’ve been genmodded, especially those with an extensive genmod, often had little quirks with the results. The recipes were the same, but Mother Nature did not follow computer programming, and the genmod affected each individual differently. This was probably just one of those glitches in the programming. The pain was minor, and it didn’t affect her fighting.
It was nothing, she kept telling herself. She simply refused to consider the possibility that it was anything else.
Chapter 42
Over the next two months, the UAM issued 19 challenges, and 14 worlds were won back. The Klethos only issued one challenge, winning San Cecilia. Instead of a slow but steady loss of worlds, humanity had reversed the tide and was regaining human homes.
The Klethos seemed unperturbed by the trend. No one except for a very select few knew what went on during the challenge process at the highest levels. Where or how the initial notifications of a challenge were issued was not something privy to the population at large; but on a very regular basis, Chicsis got the warning order, and a gladiator was given her notice.
With so many fights in such a short time, the witness party was reduced to ten fellow gladiators. Still, Tamara had been on three such parties, watching two victories as well as one loss. None of the three had been particularly close to her, but she still mourned the loss of Jillian Win, the new gladiator she’d watched die.
The new class had 300 candidates, but even on fast track, it would take them almost 18 months to become functioning gladiators. Simple math indicated that until then, if the tempo remained the same, pretty much all of the active gladiators would get at least one fight, probably more as their numbers were winnowed.
So it wasn’t a surprise to Tamara when only a month later, she received her next fight: New Budapest.
New Budapest, where Tamara had been a witness when it was lost, was one of the most important worlds taken over by the Klethos to date. Given the fact that it hadn’t been lost too long ago, the infrastructure should be mostly intact, and the hope was that the old inhabitants could rush back in and fall upon their old lives as if nothing had happened. Tamara wasn’t sure that would be the case, but she was excited to be given the opportunity.
Tamara sat through the briefs, trying to will them to finish. She didn’t care about the GNP of the two nations on the planet. She didn’t care about the five major mountain ranges or the proliferation of Andean condors in two of those ranges. All she cared about was the fighting ring and when she had to be there. After a morning of briefs, she hurried to her medical checkup. Once that was over, she could get in a half day of training before embarking the next morning.
Her mind was more on who to pick as her second than anything else as she stripped and stood behind the over-sized bioscan projector. The scan was made, and the tech watched the readout screen intensely as Tamara started to get dressed.
“Um, Miss Veal? If you could, I’d like to run this again,” she said.
Tamara shrugged and took off her shirt and shorts again and took her position behind the projector once more. The machine hummed for a few seconds, then went silent. Tamara stepped down, then went back to her clothes.
“Am I done?” she asked, tying here dungarees and stepping towards the door.
“Uh, Miss Veal, have you been feeling anything, well, different?” the tech asked.
A cold hand descended on Tamara’s heart and slowly star
ted to squeeze.
“Not. . .not really. Why?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant and failing miserably.
“I. . .I don’t think it’s up to me to say. I’m a technician, not an MD. I think I’d better go get Dr. Vanderhorst.”
As the young tech started for the door, Tamar moved to block her, 400 kilos of gladiator. The tech stopped and looked up at her with a frightened expression.
“Look, Tyra, is it?” Tamara asked, trying to put the girl at ease.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tyra, you’ve seen lots of body scans while working here, right?”
“Yes.”
“But does that machine over there make diagnoses?”
“Well, no. It gives us all the data and tells is what it thinks is wrong, but it takes a doctor to make the actual diagnosis.”
“And that’s because the machine can make a mistake.”
“Well, not a mistake, ma’am,” the tech said as she began to relax a little. “The B2050 determines probabilities based millions and millions of previous studies.”
“But sometimes the option with the smallest probability is actually the case, right?”
“Well, yes. Sometimes, I guess.”
“So I’m asking you know, what does the machine say about me. What is the probability?”
Tamara still refused to use the term. It was as if by not naming it, she could keep it at bay.
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