GAMEWORLD
1
“Who’s ready to die?”
The words blasted out of the speakers and a thousand voices roared back in one huge, inarticulate bellow of bloodlust.
The club’s owner, Sake Chiba, grinned like a ghoul. He was dressed in a glittering green suit with pinned-back collars and a pair of lizard-skin shoes that cost more than most soldiers made in a month. Hogarth Fix watched him from the competitor benches, shouting when the others shouted, screaming when they screamed.
“Who wants to see blood on this deck?” growled Chiba, pointing a stiff finger at the metal floor on which he stood. The pentangle was not padded or sprung, there were no mats. Only unforgiving steel and paint. All of the colors were bright whites and yellows so that blood would stand out. There was always blood. Most of it was red. Some of it was human. All of it was spilled for pay.
Fix sat at the end of the second row of fighters. He wasn’t on tonight’s card and, with any luck, wouldn’t ever have to step into the pentangle. He was a good fighter, maybe as good as most of the men and women here, but men and women weren’t the only things he might have to fight. In the Special Forces, they taught you how to win fights by any means necessary, including a hell of a lot of ruthless, no-compromise hand-to-hand; but they usually sent their operators in loaded down with guns, knives, and explosives. And wrapped in body armor.
Chiba wasn’t about that.
Fighters wore spandex shorts. The women were allowed a sports bra. No cups, no pads. Tape on the hands, but no bite shields or Kevlar-4L, no spider-silk limb pads. None of that. Meat and muscle, blood and bone, and the advantages of knowledge and experience.
Against monsters.
Last night the title match featured a big Serbian kid who had served five tours with the Interglobal Soviet People’s Army, and who had a win record in mixed martial arts matches on Earth of twenty-eight and one. Moose of a guy. Fix wouldn’t have wanted to meet him in a dark alley with anything short of a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. The Serbian went in as the odds-on favorite and if he had thrown down against any of the other guys on this bench he might have walked out. Instead they shoveled him into a body bag. The parts of him that the tiger hadn’t eaten.
If you could call that cocksucker a tiger. Transgenics is a funny thing. The body was tiger, but the jaws hinged open like a snake and the neurotoxin sacs in his mouth were from a puffer fish. The Serb lasted longer than anyone would have guessed once Chiba trotted the beast out of its cage. Eighty-seven seconds. Everyone in the first six rows were speckled red.
That was how this worked. If the Serbian had beaten the tiger, or even lasted the full three minutes, he’d have pocketed enough cash to buy a farm on one of the terraformed moons. A good-sized farm, too. Maybe grow hashish for the crews of the long-range haulers. Instead the cleanup crew had collected enough of him for burial purposes, and his participation fee—a few thousand—went to his mother back on Earth. Fix wasn’t sure what kind of message went with it. Probably airlock failure. That was always popular.
Sake Chiba was still whipping the crowd up for the next bout. He was a big man himself, a former sumo wrestler from New Osaka, who’d retired while he was still on top and invested half his money in promotion and the rest in technologies stocks. He was one of the new class of trillionaires who seemed unable to stop making money. His latest enterprise, Gameworld, was technically off the books, but people knew about it. Whispered about it. Bragged about having been there.
Chiba was why Hogarth Fix was here. Not the fights. Not the mutant monsters. Not this fucking crowd of bloodthirsty privileged dickheads who spent insane amounts of money to watch illegal matches.
Chiba.
If you wanted to bet on it, have sex with it, eat it, or kill it, Chiba could set it up. And because Gameworld was in “the rocks”—a part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that had questionable territorial affiliation—he got away with it.
That was going to change, Fix promised himself. And when it did, Chiba was going to the mat and Fix was going to stroll off with enough money to make sure his kids never had to want for anything. Not ever again. Not after this.
Fix watched Chiba’s eyes as he worked the crowd. The man fed on this. Not on the fun, not on the energy, maybe not even on the money. No, he was like a vampire. He fed on the adoration, and that’s what this was. People worshipped him as the celebrity’s celebrity.
“Do you want blood?” demanded Chiba.
People—some of whom were as rich as Chiba—were screaming hysterically, pumping their fists in the air, faces flushed red, eyes wild. One of them, the actress from London who was in those movies about the ice dancer on Europa, started the chant.
“Blood! Blood! Blood!”
The rest of the crowd took it up at once.
“Blood! Blood! Blood!”
Fix glanced around at his fellow competitors. Eighteen men, eleven women, one surgical hermaphrodite. Five of them had won several matches here. This wasn’t the Roman circus, as one of them had told him during training. Sometimes it was human against human. Sometimes the fighters on this bench won out against the trans-G animals. Helga, the troll-like woman next to him, had broken the neck of an orangutan last Tuesday. She still had bandages over the stitches, but she’d won, and when the bandages came off she swore to go back onto the floor to “paint my name in the blood of anyone or anything they send out of the gate. Take that to the bank, newbie.” That’s what she’d told him.
The animals weren’t the only things here that had paid a visit to their local Dr. Frankenstein. Helga’s muscle mass had no origin in nature. The metal struts supporting the Mexican wrestler’s back sure as hell weren’t original packaging. But that wasn’t something the Gameworld recruiters told guys like Fix. Not until they’d already signed on. Which meant that half the people on the competitor bleachers were as unenhanced as he was.
The Mexican had talked about it with him the other night. “They need someone to die out there,” he said philosophically, “because people don’t come all the way out here to watch us thumb wrestle. You don’t pay these ticket prices to see two knuckle-draggers batter each other to a split decision. Fuck that. You got to have something dead on the floor by the end of the night. Chiba’s got a reputation to keep up. But… screw it. Who wants to live forever, right?”
That was how it was.
Fix pretended to smile, faked his war chants, shook his fists, and felt his heart hammering against the inside of his chest. He had been a soldier for a lot of years, and a rough and tumble street kid before that. He’d killed with guns and knives and his own hands, and he’d walked off battlefields littered with fallen comrades. But he had never, not in all his life, been this scared.
2
They didn’t call Fix’s number that night.
Or the next.
Or the next.
“Don’t worry,” said Helga. “You’ll get your shot, sweetie.”
“Can’t wait,” he lied. He was sure he’d told bigger lies than that, but he couldn’t remember when.
Life on Gameworld was strange. Long periods of calm and even some luxurious living, interspersed with intense workouts and shocking violence. Every day.
This was day sixteen for him. Most fighters, he learned, didn’t get their first undercard match for a month or two. There was that much competition to be noticed as having fought for Chiba. They called the dormitory the Box of Scorpions, which was a name that everyone seemed to think was stupid and juvenile but no one could shake. It was mentioned in a lot of the press, and customers could even pay to bunk down with the fighters. A few—only the really tough ones or the abominably stupid ones—paid to train with the team. Everyone else was scared off by the wording of the personal injury waivers.
The fighters could choose to train at any time. Never against each other, of course. But Chiba seemed able to tap an endless supply of willing sparring partners. Fix spent a lot of time watching the other fighters train, studying their moves, gauging their skill, calculating how much was natural talent, how much was learned technique, and how much came from actual experience. That was one of his gifts, perhaps his most useful one. He could read people. He’d been able to do it growing up in the slums of Gary, Indiana, fighting for food money, fighting for money to keep his three younger sisters fed and dressed and healthy after their single mother rode a needle into the big black. It served him well, even against better fighters, when a judge suggested he box in a local gym or spend six months in juvie. It helped him when another judge suggested that the military might be a better calling than working a prison detail mining precious metals on an asteroid. And it had kept him alive all through his twelve years humping battle rattle around the solar system.
It had not, sadly, helped him figure out that his ex-wife had been sleeping with nearly everyone who had a dick, a pulse, and a good credit rating. That blindsided him as surely as she’d been blindsided by an autonomous-drive UPS glider. Life’s a quirky bitch like that.
On a busy Friday morning he climbed into the sparring ring with a new training partner. A black guy with a shaved head and cat’s eye implants that were supposed to psych people out. Fix rarely looked at an opponent’s eyes. Bad fighters don’t know where to look and good fighters use their eyes to fool you. As Fix and his sparring partner—Owl— began moving around, Fix watched the other guy’s body.
They moved in a counter-clockwise circle, Owl moving forward with a rocking motion, shifting weight between front and back leg with a lot of springy tension.
He’s either a jumper or kicker. Or both.
Owl tried a few experimental jabs to try and provoke a counterpunch from Fix. That was telling. When Owl jabbed there was nothing behind the blows. They were light and fast, but he wasn’t even trying to hit. Not a boxer, Fix decided. A boxer who could kick moved differently than a kicker who could throw a punch. Boxers had pride in their jabs, and there was always something to them. There was often a momentary set of body mass to make sure all of the PSI went down the arm and into the other guy instead of the way this guy did it. When Fix blocked Owl’s jabs the lack of weight placement caused some of the force to recoil against his own mass, and Owl rocked back each time.
Fix filed that away.
Sometimes a good boxer will pivot, even on a jab. Not a lot, but just enough and at high speed to make sure there was some authority to even the lightest punch.
Couple more jabs and he’s going to kick, thought Fix. A low Thai kick to the thighs. Something to keep me from outpacing him.
It was inevitable. Owl jabbed, jabbed, faked, jabbed, and then kicked. A Muay Thai shin kick. Very, very fast.
Fix evaded it because he saw it coming yesterday. He could have swept the man right there and then. He could also have J-stepped into him, checked the kick on his hip, and done some of what his old coach had called “neighborhood work”—a series of body blows designed to bruise the ribs so bad that breathing would take too much effort. Fighters who lose their wind lose their fights. Owl was good, but he wasn’t good enough for Gameworld.
Some of the trainers and staff were wandering around, watching the sparring matches. Out of the corner of his eye, Fix saw Chiba come in, and that split second of inattention earned him a creditable front kick to the gut. Fix rode it backward, letting the kick spend its force as a push, and then he danced sideways and let Owl chase him until Fix caught his breath.
Owl seemed to think he was winning the fight because he charged after Fix with a series of mid-height kicks that would have done a lot of damage had any of them landed. Fix worked his way backward and around, not letting the kicks drive him to the edge of the ring but instead tapping the incoming legs and using the force of his taps to power sideways cuts and jags. The kicks were very fast and as Owl got more frustrated the kicks carried more power. Too much. Fast kicks using snap were okay for a flurry, but heavier smashing and thrusting kicks used more of the kicker’s body mass to deliver them, and that drained energy. Fast. Owl was sweating heavily and the match clock said they’d been going for only two minutes.
Then Owl’s frustration overwhelmed his common sense and he tried to close the deal with a huge, max-power spinning heel kick. Had it connected it would have knocked out Fix and everyone he was related to.
But it was too big a kick for a match like this. Fix could have gone out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and been back before that spin brought Owl’s heel anywhere near his intended target. The problem was Owl had committed so heavily to it that Fix was going to have to dent him to keep this from getting truly ugly.
Fuck.
He stepped in, chin tucked, shoulder hunched and checked the spin at its source by jamming hard against the thigh. It was where the spin was most vulnerable. And, because there was no other way of wrapping this up, he did some neighborhood work.
He could see the look of confusion and then understanding in Owl’s eyes as the man realized how badly he had underestimated his opponent. Fix was in his late thirties and his hair was prematurely salt-and-pepper. Bad posture and scar tissue made him look like someone who’d been living the hard life. He looked older, slower and smaller than he actually was.
Owl went down to knees and palms, choking and gagging and trying to breathe. Fix sighed and stepped back, feeling sorry for the man.
When he turned away he immediately stopped because Sake Chiba was standing ten feet behind him. The big sumo wrestler was smoking a fat Europan cigar and grinning.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
3
They were in Chiba’s office, which was the size of most hotel lobbies, seated on opposite sides of a huge hardwood desk that must have cost a fortune to ship all the way out here, where everything was plastic or metal. One wall was filled with shelves crammed with trophies and awards from Chiba’s days as a pro wrestler. The opposite wall was a massive glass aquarium in which transgenically-designed mermaids swam. There were harsh laws about human-animal hybridization, but Fix thought that the upper halves of each mermaid was a real adolescent girl. There was a vague look of self-aware horror in the oversized eyes of the swimming creatures. It was appalling.
Behind the desk was a wall safe with a massive steel door and a complex locking mechanism set with several kinds of biometric scanners. Fix longed to raid that safe, but there was no chance in the universe that he’d ever even glimpse what was inside. More than he’d ever need in ten lifetimes. Shit, even if that vault was stacked floor to ceiling with currency it couldn’t be more than a drop of piss to someone like Chiba. The man was worth—according to the financial news—six point six trillion dollars. His beer money would pay every bill Fix would ever have and still leave enough to buy Texas.
Chiba waved him to a seat and poured them both a good knock of gin over frozen cherries.
“That was a very interesting exhibition,” said Chiba as he settled into his own massive chair.
“Just a sparring match, sir. Owl’s got some nice moves. Made me work for it.”
Chiba grinned. “Bullshit. I saw eleven separate times where you could have hurt him and you didn’t. I could see that you didn’t. Not until he gave you no choice.”
Fix sipped his drink, said nothing. Waited.
“Why not?” asked Chiba.
“Just a sparring match,” Fix repeated.
“Ah,” said Chiba, brightening. “You didn’t want to go all out because there were no stakes.”
“That’s part of it, sure.”
“Let me guess the rest. There were other fighters in the room. You didn’t want to school them on how you really fight.”
Fix nodded. “That’s about it, boss.”
Chiba swallowed half his drink and sat crunching a cherry, his eyes studying Fix. “You’re ex-army?”
“Yes. Been out for a while now.”
“Special Forces, as I understand it.”
“Sure.”
“Where did you see action?”
“Here and there. Lot’s been going on around the system. Mostly by the time they sent us in things had either gone to hell or cooled down. The movies they make glamorize it, but we didn’t do anything too crazy.”
“Oh? It’s my understanding you were a team leader when SpecOps breached the prison ship after it had been taken over by the inmates.”
Fix said nothing. The records of that mission were sealed. No one outside of the military high command should be able to read that file.
Chiba continued, “Then there was the Rubio Cartel on Mars that got wiped out virtually overnight. And the rescue of the ambassador and her entire staff. A twelve-man team goes in and saves the lives of eighty-six people in a hot zone. One hundred and seventeen hostiles dead. Shall I go on?”
“Guess you don’t have to.”
The big man nodded. “And now you’re here.”
“Now I’m here.”
“And why is that, Mr. Fix?”
“If you know everything about me, then you already know why I’m here.”
“Fair enough,” conceded Chiba. “You have three kids. Your wife is dead and you are sinking in debt. Your youngest—is her name Daisy?”
“Daisy,” said Fix hoarsely.
“Daisy. She has cancer. Your health coverage doesn’t begin to stretch far enough to cover the medical bills. Not if you can get her into the new treatment program in Stockholm. You could never hope to beg, borrow or steal that much money.”
Fix said nothing.
“So, while I can understand what might have made you look in my direction—I am known as a generous employer and fight purses will stretch far enough to provide for your family—why risk it? You can’t earn enough money if you’re dead.”
“Actually,” said Fix, “I can.”
“Life insurance policy?”
“Yeah. With an off-world danger clause. The way I figure it, either I earn enough and bring the cash home, or I die trying and my estate planner and lawyer make sure Daisy and the other kids are taken care of. As long as I fight, I can’t really lose.”
“You’re not afraid of dying?”
Fix was prepared to lie, because he lied a lot. He didn’t give Chiba a lie in answer to that question.
“Of course I am. But I’m a lot more afraid of failing my kids.”
Chiba finished his drink and poured another, then he sat back and studied Fix for a long, quiet time. A slow smile formed on his face. “I’m not sure I can remember the last time I was impressed by personal integrity.”
“Um… thanks?”
“But I like you. I like the moves I saw downstairs. I like the fire I see in your eyes. And I even like the fear I see there. Ruthless fighters are a dime a dozen. They’re entertaining in the short term but boring overall. You, on the other hand, might be something else. You’re not fighting because you hate everyone, or because you’re dead inside. No, you’re fighting for love. Not sure I’ve ever seen that before. Certainly not on Gameworld.”
Fix sipped his drink. His pulse had suddenly jumped.
“I want to offer you a fight,” said Chiba.
“Okay,” Fix said neutrally. “Kind of why I’m here, though, isn’t it?”
“I’m not talking about a brawl with one of the lunkheads in the Box of Scorpions. No… I have a special card coming up and I’ve been looking for exactly the right fighter for it.”
“Why is that me?”
“Because I like what I saw today, and I like what I’ve seen in your military record. You are that rare kind of counter-fighter that is a kind of scientist of combat. It’s there in the after-action reports from your SpecOps missions and it was evident in the way you fought Owl. You analyze, you deconstruct and assess, and then you adjust your own fighting style accordingly. That’s an old samurai skill, and it’s very much the way I used to fight. It’s why I won so many times. It’s why I’m good in business, because I study my opponents and can anticipate what they will do, how they’ll move, when they’ll act.”
Fix studied Chiba over the rim of his class as he took a micro-sip. “If you’re talking about asking me to fight a grizzly or some shit, then I don’t see that as a real career opportunity for me. I trip and fall out of an airlock and the insurance company will still pay off to my kids. I don’t need to be humiliated in some stunt match.”
“Stunt match?” echoed Chiba, mildly miffed. Then he shrugged. “Sure, okay, you got me on that. The rubes love them, though.”
“I’m not a rube.”
“No,” agreed Chiba, “but that’s really not the kind of fight I have in mind. No bears, no tigers, no growth-enhanced centipedes. And… I don’t think I want to waste you on mouth-breathers like Helga or the other idiots you’ve been bunking with.”
“Who’s that leave?”
“Not who,” said Chiba, beaming at him. “It’s really more of a what.”
4
“What in the hell is that thing?”
Chiba and Fix stood on a catwalk above the lighted rim of a containment tank. The tank was circular and thirty feet deep with smooth walls and a floor covered with straw and piles of dark green matter that stank like shit. Fix realized it probably was shit, despite the color. There were bones and pieces of torn meat scattered around the pit. No bed, no furniture.
A single figure stood in the center of the pit, staring up at them.
“I have no idea,” said Chiba happily.
“How can you not know? You made it, didn’t you? Or your pet scientists?”
Chiba shook his head. “No, I told you, this isn’t one of my genetic toys. Quite frankly none of us know what this thing is. And isn’t that wonderful?”
“Is it… is it… human?” stammered Fix.
Chiba pointed down at the creature. “Human? That? You tell me.”
The thing was vaguely manlike, in that it had two arms and two legs, a muscular torso, a head and two eyes. Beyond that any resemblance to humanity faltered and died. It stood a little over six feet tall and its limbs were packed with dense, corded muscle. It had skin as pale and mottled as a mushroom. The hands were hideous, with long clawed fingers ending in wicked claws. Fix couldn’t see its face because it wore a helmet of strange design, but braided hair hung like dreadlocks down to its shoulders. The only clothing it wore was a pair of trunks made from dark brown leather and some kind of netting that covered its limbs and massive chest. Some of the netting was torn, Fix could see, and there were green lines, like scars, crisscrossing its body, and from a few of these thin lines a more luminous green oozed.
Chiba noticed him looking at that and said, “Blood. My science guys are having orgasms trying to figure out its chemistry. It’s nothing they’ve ever seen, which makes them all very, very happy. They’re badgering me about whether they’ll be able to publish. Which, of course, they won’t.” He grinned. “Possession of an alien life form is illegal. Even way out here in the rocks. It’s one of the few things all governments agree on.”
“‘Alien’…?”
“It was discovered in the wreckage of a crashed ship on the dwarf planet Ceres,” said Chiba. “They’re terraforming Ceres, you know, doing a nice job of it, too. They’ve found a lot of wonderful mineral deposits and a lot of water ice. More than the surveyors said to expect. But they never expected to find anything as remarkable as this.”
“This is incredible. God, how come everyone doesn’t know about this? This changes… shit, it changes everything.”
“Sure, I could sell it to a government or a museum and make a quick billion. But, let’s be real, that is very small change compared to what I can make with this thing in my stable of fighters.”
Fix shook his head. “If you put this… thing… on a title card everyone’s going to know about it.”
Chiba snorted. “Oh, I have that covered. We can bounce a video signal out to the rim, jog it around a bit and then send it back as if it comes from somewhere outside of anyone’s territory. Our signal boosters are on military grade stealth satellite pods with EMP and explosive failsafes. Trust me, Mr. Fix, I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
Fix nodded. Someone as rich as Chiba had more than technology on his side. He could afford to bribe, threaten or own key people in the agencies that were supposed to regulate or arrest people like him.
They stared down into the pit.
“My people tell me that you will need at least a million to pay for your daughter’s treatment over the next few years. And you’ll need half of that to settle debts and care for your other kids. Round it up for inflation and you need two million. Does that sound fair?”
Fix cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“If you can last three minutes with our friend down there I will pay you nine million.”
Fix wheeled around. “What?”
“That is three million per minute. But here’s the kicker, my friend, I want you both alive at the end. Hurt it, break it, I don’t care, but I need it alive because my molecular biologists have a lot of fun things planned with its DNA.”
“What kind of fighter is it? I mean, does it have special skills?”
“It has training,” said Chiba. “It moves like a warrior. It’s incredibly strong and fast, it has excellent reflexes, and it is definitely a killer.”
“Meaning…?”
“Even badly injured and starving it managed to kill seven members of the crew of eleven on the salvage ship that found it. And since I acquired it, I’ve done a few experiments.”
“With people?”
“Not at first. Animals. A cougar, a mountain gorilla. Like that. People came later. Came… and went. Our friend down there seems to enjoy extreme combat. It’s one of his most endearing qualities.”
“Has anyone come close to beating it?”
Chiba shrugged. “In exosuits with military-grade shock rods, yes. Otherwise… well, we’re on the wrong side of the learning curve with him. His injuries are mostly healed, except for a few recent scrapes from our ongoing tests. It’s worth nine million to me to put him in a ring with a fighter with your skill set. Someone who can use his brains as well as his fists. Nine million is nothing to me, but it’s everything to your family, Mr. Fix, and that makes this a fair contract. You were ready to throw your life away against transgenic animals or bio-enhanced fighters. This is single combat of the most basic kind. No weapons, no armor. Only whatever natural gifts you both bring onto the pentangle. This will be the most important fight in the history of… well… fighting. This will be history. And win or lose, you’re going to be the most famous warrior in the solar system. So… do we have a deal?”
The creature in the pit raised its head as if it could understand Chiba’s words. The lenses on the helmet prevented Fix from seeing its eyes, but he knew if he could there would be nothing there but hatred. He knew that his own eyes were probably filled with different emotions. Need. Desperation.
And fear.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah, I’m in.”
5
The prep work for the event took weeks.
During that time Chiba provided Fix with the best trainers, the best sports medicine people, the best food and every luxury Fix might want. Fix turned down the prostitutes and the AI sexbots. He trained and trained, and recorded long videos for each of his kids to try and tell him the things a father would. He repeatedly requested the chance to view any video files of the “tests” conducted with the creature that involved combat, whether against humans or animals. Chiba refused on the grounds that it would “pollute the integrity of the event.”
With each day Fix felt his tension growing. He slept badly and had to eat antacids by the handful to keep from throwing up his guts. The doctors gave him shots of vitamins and they monitored his health, often offering sleeping pills, dream gas, or medical sex therapy, but Fix bulled through without any of that. This was going to be tough enough without his brain being fogged. After a while, though, he forced himself to try and get more sleep, to meditate, to eat a saner diet of protein-rich foods.
The weeks melted down to days and then hours.
On the morning of the bout, Hogarth Fix woke from a terrible dream of running through a jungle being hunted by something that he could not see. Something that filled the air with flashes of red that tore through flesh and bone and stone and trees. He ran past the bodies of every soldier he had ever known, and although many had died on worlds or moons far away from Gameworld, their bodies were all in the dream, freshly killed, slaughtered, skinned, hung up like deer carcasses after a hunt. The invisible thing pursued him all the way into a trap—a cave filled with the skulls and spines of all of those dead. A mountain of them. Fix fell to his knees and looked around at the walls, seeing trophies hung there. The skulls of the great hunting cats, cave bears, elephants, alligators. And more—dinosaurs and other creatures Fix had only ever seen in museums. All dead. All conquered. He sank to his knees.
A sound made him turn, and behind him, in the cave’s mouth, a massive form was appearing out of nowhere. At first there was only a shimmer and then it appeared. Monstrously tall, massively built, heavily armored. Dreadlocks whipped back and forth as the creature looked around its trophy room. It was much bigger than the thing in the pit. Impossibly tall. It raised one arm, fist closed, and a set of three wicked metal blades sprang from sheaths built into the gauntlets. There were smears of fresh blood on those blades. Fix looked down at his own stomach and saw that his shirt and flesh were torn. His guts slid out and flopped wetly to the ground between his knees.
Fix screamed himself awake.
In a happy, chirpy voice the AI system said, “Good morning, Hogarth. It’s fight day. Would you like scrambled eggs and coffee?”
6
Fight day.
There had been a lot of matches at Gameworld since Fix agreed to this fight. Humans against humans, humans against transgenic animals, teams against teams. Fix had watched them all, trying to prepare his mind for this. As if that was even possible.
He was going to fight an alien.
Yeah, history.
Shit.
He stood in a shower hot enough to boil a lobster. He lost it in there, too. Weeping and pounding his fist on the wall.
Chiba called him a warrior. Sure. Fix had known a lot of them. Only the fools went into battle without fear, and they were usually the first ones to fall. Most good soldiers were like him. Professional, yes; capable, to be sure; but human. They hid their fear because fear is both personal and contagious. They carved religious symbols into their gear. They wore religious medals or good luck charms. They wrote out death letters. Some took pictures of their loved ones with them; others refused to even name their wives or husbands or children for fear it would jinx them. Some took confession and others let hot showers wash their tears away in hopes that it cleansed them of excess fear.
Then they got ready for war.
With Hogarth Fix the ritual was all about being quiet. He toweled off and dressed in fighting trunks. He said nothing at all to the corner man who wrapped the tapes around his hands. Before the match he sat on a stool in the locker room, not praying, not thinking, just letting a silence fill him inside. He meditated, drifting right below the surface of wakefulness while his preconceptions dropped like pebbles to the bottom of his pool of awareness. When he heard the game bell, Fix stood and looked into the mirror, into the eyes of the scarred and ugly man who stared back at him. Into dead eyes that told him nothing and would betray nothing to his opponent. There was no hate in those eyes. No judgment, no anger. There was nothing, not even a mirror for the enemy to see his own strengths and weaknesses.
He stood up, turned, and walked out to the war.
7
The crowd was enormous. Every seat was taken and there were people standing in the aisles and crowding the balconies. The bleachers for the fighters were filled with past champions, each of them wearing their victory belts and sashes. Fix saw their eyes, saw the resentment, let it slide off of him. He knew that there were better fighters among them. Stronger, younger, faster, more talented. That was what it was. Chiba had picked him. Over the last few weeks Fix had gone through the agony of doubt, wondering if Chiba could be trusted, wondering if the promoter had picked him as an appetizer, intending Fix to be killed in order to show how tough the alien was. Probably. That was okay. Chiba still wanted a good fight. A long fight. Only record-keepers and trivia freaks ever really wanted a fight to end in the shortest time. Fans wanted to see the competitors fight it out all the way to the final bell. They wanted to see something.
They wanted a war.
That’s what Chiba had to want, too. A big, showy fight that commentators could dissect on news programs all over the solar system. A fight that would show human ingenuity and skill against something beyond all human experience, but which would end with the human—with Fix—dead on the deck. Dead or crippled, but the loser either way. That way the ticket or logon price for the next bout would be higher, and there would be no end to the list of fighters who would want to be the one who not only fought an alien, but defeated it. A victory by the next guy was the only possible bigger fight news.
Chiba walked into the center of the pentangle in a blood-red sequined suit, his massive bulk seeming to fill the place. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of rabble rousing. The din became one vast homogenous roar, like white noise turned high. Fix tuned it out. It was irrelevant and therefore a distraction, if he allowed it to be such.
When his name was called, he walked out onto the floor and did what he was expected to do. He raised his arms and danced on the balls of his feet, turning this way and that, grinning like an ape so that every camera could get a good shot. Looking mean. Acting the part.
“And facing our champion, Hogarth Fix, today is a new fighter. New to Gameworld, new to the pentangle, new to our kind of fighting,” bellowed Chiba, and a pregnant hush dropped heavily over the chamber. “I can guarantee you, my friends, that this is a fight like nothing you’ve ever seen. Like nothing anyone’s ever seen. You are about to witness a fight between one of the toughest men who I’ve had the privilege to know and an opponent so strange, so rare, so new that none of us know what’s going to happen in the next three minutes. I don’t know his name but once you take a look at him you’ll understand why we all call him the Nightmare Kid!”
With that a section of the pentangle floor hissed open and a big metal cylinder rose into sight. It was opaque and painted with images from a couple hundred years’ worth of horror stories. The cylinder turned slowly so everyone could see. Bug-eyed aliens, lumbering moon-beasts, spiders from Mars, space invaders, bat-winged monstrosities, and more. The creatures of books, comics, and film. Fix recognized some of them and others he didn’t.
Then the revolving cylinder dropped back down, revealing the figure of the hideous creature standing there, wrists and ankles secured by heavy shackles attached to retractable steel cables. The monster was dressed in black trunks now, but the torn netting was still there. And now he wore no helmet.
Fix could feel a cold hand of terror reach past his professional calm and clamp icy fingers around his heart. That face.
Dear god, that face.
It was every bit the nightmare promised by its nickname. Not even vaguely human, with spiked mandibles that were like some parasitic monster, or a spider, or a crustacean. It hissed at the crowd, and the spiked corners of its lips peeled back to reveal sharp, deadly teeth.
There was one long, lingering moment when all sound in the room suddenly died as the people stared at the thing. This wasn’t a publicity stunt and it wasn’t transgenics, and everyone seemed to grasp that all at once.
And then the crowd went absolutely wild.
Forty guards with shock rods came trotting out of a side corridor and surrounded the pentangle. The creature turned its head to watch them and there was hatred and something else in its eyes. Not fear, Fix thought, but a wariness. The kind that comes from experience. It remembered those shock rods and seemed to understand the odds against it. Forty big men in full riot gear. A moment later a ceiling vent opened and a turbo-cannon dropped into sight, its laser sight finding and locking onto the Nightmare Kid. The creature looked down at the spot where the laser sight hovered and then he looked at Chiba, who stood a few yards away.
“That’s right, you little cockroach,” murmured Chiba in a voice only Fix and the creature could hear. “You try any of your tricks and you’ll get worse than you got downstairs.”
The crowd had gone insane. Local and long-range cameras swiveled into position. A senior tech gave Chiba the thumbs up. “All of the subscribers are logged in, boss. We are live from Neptune to Mother Earth.”
Chiba returned the nod and amped up the wattage on his grin.
“Are you ready for blood?” he roared to the crowd.
Their response shook the whole place. Everyone was cheering, even the fighters on the bench.
“Then let’s put three minutes on the clock,” bellowed Chiba, and a large digital display showed the time in seconds. It was a more dramatic countdown. Two hundred and forty.
Chiba stepped off of the pentangle and took position behind six of the biggest guards.
“Shackles off!” he yelled and the bonds disengaged on ankles and wrists and were whipped out of sight beneath the floor, which closed over them.
The monster stood his ground, looking around, cautious, adjusting what he had experienced so far to what was happening now. Fix could understand it and even follow the obvious logic. He had been captured, overpowered, poked and prodded, been given opportunities to fight and had won each time. Maybe Chiba had tried to tame him with the shock rods and other tools. If so, Fix did not believe it had been a successful attempt. Now it was in a protected enclosure with another possible enemy. Even if it did not know what Gameworld was, it could put two and two together. This was a fight.
It turned toward Fix.
On impulse, Fix raised his left arm, fist clenched. It was a salute but also a test.
The creature considered him, then it, too, raised its arm. Fix saw a tiny twitch of its right shoulder before it raised its left. That was very interesting. Did that mean it was right-handed? Did it mean that it was conditioned to salute, and to do it with its right? If so, why did it use its left? In straight imitation?
Maybe.
Fix was right-handed, too.
Chiba yelled out the Japanese word to begin, “Hajime!”
The clock started. The crowd roared.
The creature instantly shifted its stance, feet wide, knees bent, body leaning forward, the muscles of chest and shoulders and biceps tensing. Making a show of it as it let out a terrifying, challenging roar.
The movement was tribal and ritualistic.
And telling.
Then it attacked.
The monster was fast. Good lord it was fast. For all its size and bulk, it seemed to turn into a blur as it came straight at him, claws slashing toward Fix’s throat.
The claws cut only air though.
Fix saw the muscles tense in the creature’s thighs and calves, read the coiled power, knew the lunge was coming. Nothing moves without some kind of tell. Not even the greatest fighters in history. The body is an interconnected series of tightly meshed ligaments and muscles, bones and moveable flesh. When one part of the body moves there is always a compensating flex or shift. The best fighters can minimize this so that they appear to go from zero to full speed without any intermediate process of acceleration. Fix was good at that.
He was even better at reading it.
The Nightmare Kid tore through the spot where Fix had been, but Fix was moving with light, quick steps on an oblique angle. He moved like a fencer, like a tennis player, his weight balanced on the springy balls of his feet, knees bent to act like shock absorbers, everything else loose so as not to drain energy.
The alien whipped around and tried it again, relying on his speed and greater reach to end the fight quickly.
The tips of those nails brushed across Fix’s hip and there was a sudden flash of heat. The monster was faster even than he looked, and those nails were scalpel sharp. The creature howled in triumph, owning the moment of first blood. He reared back and bellowed at the crowd.
Fix darted in and to the right and punched him on the outside of the thigh, driving a corkscrew knuckle punch at the juncture of two big muscles. The creature hissed and dropped to one knee but slashed again to chase Fix away from a combination off of that hit.
The crowd screamed.
The Nightmare Kid got back to his feet, chest heaving. Was he angry that his moment of triumph had been spoiled? Fix thought so. Interesting. Very interesting.
The creature leaped at him, getting great height and distance for his bulk, and Fix had to twist away from him, but once more those claws drew lines of fire, this time along Fix’s upper back.
Fix immediately countered with a sideways lunge and punch, hitting exactly the same spot. Harder. The creature’s knee hit the deck and it launched again from there, trying to slash its opponent’s legs out. Fix slap-parried the thing’s wrists and hit him with two fast left jabs in the side of the face.
That became the rhythm. The monster tried a dozen different angles of attack, relying on its enormous power, speed, and reach, each time trying to deliver a crippling blow. Each time Fix read the thing’s body language and moved with the attack. Those claws, though, found him time and again. Never deeply, but enough to hurt. Fix had to force the pain and the fear that it brought back down to the bottom of his pond of mental stillness.
Each time the Nightmare Kid attacked, though, Fix counterattacked with a left-hand punch, often striking the same spot on the monster’s leg. The monster was starting to limp, but it was clearly no slave to pain. It seemed to eat the pain and use it to fuel another attack, and another. If it was tiring, it did not show.
The clock said one hundred and two.
It felt like hours.
Out of the corner of his eye, Fix saw an aide hand a small communicator to Chiba, who covered one ear and listened. Fix saw Chiba’s brows knit with some kind of consternation. There was no time to observe more, though, because the alien nearly killed him with a double high slash followed by a savage kick that Fix almost, but not quite, evaded. Instead the kick propelled him into the air, and the monster dove forward to be under him when he fell. A nice trick. Like a cat might do.
Fix tucked and turned and came down feet first, stamping down onto the monster’s arms and missing the claws by inches. Fix pitched forward and rolled, came out of it without rising and spun on the floor, sweeping the monster as it charged after. The Nightmare Kid fell hard and lay stunned, but Fix wasn’t fooled. The landing wasn’t hard enough to do that much damage. It was a trick and Fix wasn’t buying. Instead he backed up and began circling, waiting for the creature to stop playing and rise.
It did, but when it was halfway up Fix attacked, punching it once more in the leg, pivoting backward off the impact so that he was chest to back with it, and then laying into the thing with some hardcore neighborhood work. He drove solid punches into kidneys—if it had kidneys—ribs, under the shoulder blades, into the vulnerable soft spots below the armpits. He worked it fast and hard, torquing his body for maximum power and then bailing fast by skipping backward.
The creature went down onto both knees and for a moment it looked like it was truly dazed.
But it got back to its feet once more and began stalking Fix.
There was something different in its eyes now. Fix wanted to call it a loss of confidence, but that was probably only partly true. It had the muscle and stamina to win this. Fix was breathing heavy and there was still a million years to the end of those three goddamn minutes. Fix was bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts. The alien didn’t even look bruised.
It limped, though. There was that.
Seventy-three seconds on the clock.
Christ. Might as well be forever.
Chiba was on the far side of the pentangle and Fix frowned as he saw the big man moving away, heading toward his private elevator, his six men surrounding him. Some of the crowd were looking at Chiba, others were talking on private communicators. More than half the crowd was no longer looking at the fight.
The Nightmare Kid did not seem to notice any of this. Instead he lunged in again and this time his claws tore into Fix’s left forearm, detonating white-hot agony. Fix kicked it in the knee and backpedaled to safety. His arm was hurt, the fingers sluggish, blood welling thickly from two deep cuts.
With a howl of pure animal joy, the monster came at him, driving in toward Fix’s left side, confident that its opponent was crippled.
Fix knew that there was a time for playing the game Chiba wanted him to play, and there was a time to fight for his life. For his kids.
He accepted the rush and then shifted left, pivoting to kick at the monster’s knee, but then launching a series of blows with his right. With his dominant, much faster right. He’d underused it all through the fight, training the monster to regard him as a left-dominant counter-fighter. Schooling it for this moment.
The creature was tough but it was also strangely naïve. It bought the fiction and had built its strategy around it. And now Fix made him pay for that lack of perception.
As the Nightmare Kid slashed, Fix leaned out of the strike path and hammered its forearm with two punishing blows to the point where the muscles stretched thinnest behind the wrist. Then he stamped on its foot, grinding hard to break bones, then he headbutted it, accepting a deep cut on his own forehead to break one of the mandibles. He grabbed with his bad left hand, needing only a marginal grip, and hit the monster with a series of brutal, full-speed snap punches to throat, groin, eyes, throat, heart, throat, temple, and throat. Then he sidestepped, cocked his right leg, and heel-kicked the same point on the thigh he’d been hammering since the fight started. The creature went down and Fix shifted behind him and was one micro-second away from grabbing its head to try and snap the thing’s neck when the wall behind the fighters’ bleachers exploded.
The force plucked Fix and the Nightmare Kid up and hurled them into the audience, chased by a storm cloud of flaming debris and bleeding body parts. Fix hit two people in the face and heard necks snap as he fell.
He landed badly and lay there, nearly unconscious, blinking through blood and smoke and madness, taking in what happened next in haphazard images.
There were flashes of red lightning. Or… laser pulse blasts? Something like that. Fix fought for consciousness. People screamed and fell. When a red blast caught someone, they simply flew apart. Customers trampled each other, clawing and fighting, kicking, and biting to escape.
Someone yelled, “It’s the police!”
But that was stupid. It was wrong. Hurt as he was, Fix knew that. The police used machine guns and lead bullets, even out here. And they used high-intensity gas guns for microgravity EVA fights. Who the hell used pulse guns outside of deep-sea mining?
* * *
Chiba was banging on the button for his private elevator, his face pale with panic, eyes wide. He had a pistol in his hand. His guards were battering at the crowd, using the shock rods to keep them away from the elevator door.
Some of the fighters—those few who had survived the explosion—had grabbed chairs, fallen shock rods or anything else they could grab and were crowding toward whatever had breached the wall. Fix saw them fall.
One.
By one.
By one.
One of them—Helga, the trollish woman—had a big commando knife, God only knew where she’d gotten it, and with a furious battlefield shriek dove into the smoke.
A moment later she came out again.
But Fix could not at first understand what he was seeing.
Helga hung writhing in the air, her body torn and bloody, dangling in the smoke like a puppet on broken strings.
And then it emerged.
Just like in his dream, a thing appeared out of nowhere. There was a shimmer in the troubled air and suddenly a form took shape. Monstrous, unnatural, armed, and armored. It held Helga up and now Fix could see that three steel claws had been thrust entirely through her body and the bloody tips stood out from between her shoulder blades. The creature wore the same kind of helmet that the Nightmare Kid had worn when Fix first saw him. The pale flesh of its body was covered in the same netting, but instead of a simple pair of trunks it wore complex armor, hung and fitted with exotic weapons. Knives and guns and other things Fix could not begin to identify.
The monster was huge. Much bigger than the creature Fix had fought. At least a foot taller and half again as broad in the shoulders. The brute peered at Helga, seeming to take note of her musculature, her scars. It made a series of weird clicks, sounds nearly lost beneath the screaming, and then it flung Helga away. Her dying screams chased her across the pentangle and she landed with a bone-breaking thud five feet from where Fix lay, the knife still in her hand, its blade smeared with green.
Fix tried to get up, tried to reach for that blade.
Then a shape pushed itself up from beneath a pile of debris and corpses. The Nightmare Kid, bleeding bright green blood, wild-eyed, furious. It looked down at Fix and hissed at him, the three remaining mandible spikes twitching, claws flexing. It took one threatening step toward its enemy and then it stopped and wheeled, looking first toward the much larger killer who was now tearing into the remaining fighters, and then at Chiba, who was crowding into the elevator with his men. The door wouldn’t close, though, because of all the people trying to claw their way in.
The Nightmare Kid howled in fury, and all of its rage, all of its hatred shifted from Fix to Chiba. It bolted toward the elevator, slashing people apart even as they fought to get out of its way.
Fix struggled to his feet just as the smaller of the two monsters smashed its way through the crowd and into the elevator. The doors closed behind it and Fix had a brief view of electronic flashes from the shock rods and a spray of bright red blood.
The larger monster was killing its way across the floor. The remaining guards rallied and attacked it with shock rods, and for a moment they seemed to drive it back, though at the cost of many of their own lives.
And in a moment of sudden crystal clarity, Fix put the pieces to all of this together.
The nickname Chiba had given to the alien—the Nightmare Kid—might have been more apt than he knew. From the size of the newcomer, and the superb combat skills it demonstrated, and the comparatively smaller size and more naïve skills of the Nightmare Kid, Fix realized that he had been fighting just that. A kid. A younger, less experienced, less dangerous version of the true nightmare that was slaughtering the most skilled fighters in the solar system. This creature—mother or father—had come looking for its kid. It had attacked a whole space station full of people to protect its own.
And now that kid was fighting for its life, either in the elevator or in Chiba’s office. Fighting against armed killers and the brutish champion sumo wrestler. The kid was outnumbered, outgunned, and—because of the last few seconds of the fight—injured.
Before he knew he was going to do it, Fix was up and running, his fatigue forgotten, his pain channeled into some other part of his brain. He grabbed the knife and used it to cut his way to the elevator controls. The customers, already hurt and shocked and frightened by the last onslaught, and by what was happening in the area, gave way, cursing and weeping. And dying.
The elevator opened and Fix stepped inside and punched the button for the office. The walls of the lift were smeared with human and alien blood, and three of the six security men lay in broken heaps on the floor.
Below, even through the doors and distance, he could hear the frustrated roar of the thing’s parent. Had it seen its child escape? Was it losing this fight to save it?
No way to tell.
Then the elevator shuddered as something struck the frame. A blast or a fist?
The door pinged open and Fix jumped out and to one side, narrowly evading the swing of a shock rod. He ducked low and cut high and the guard sagged back as blood erupted from his upper thigh and groin.
Across the room Chiba was fighting the Nightmare Kid. Fighting, and winning. The young alien had taken a lot of damage in the elevator fight and was barely able to stand, and Chiba, for all his size, was a champion and a killer. He battered the alien with one after the other of devastating blows. Even so, the kid kept fighting. It was clear it was never going to stop fighting. Maybe it was the thing’s nature, maybe its culture. Whatever. It was losing the fight that would kill it, but it was going to make Chiba earn that victory.
The two remaining guards were torn—help their boss or stop Fix?
They split the difference. One of them rushed over and jabbed the Nightmare Kid with his shock rod, which made the creature stagger down to hands and knees. Chiba used that moment to lunge toward a gun safe bolted to the wall and begin punching a code.
The other guard rushed at Fix, jabbing with the shock rod as he circled for the best angle. Fix had no armor and a metal knife. Not good odds against a professional with an electric weapon. They dueled and darted and Fix saw his moment. The guard tried for a long reach, leaning into it with too much weight on his lead leg. Fix collapsed beneath the glowing end of the rod and stamped out at the man’s shin. The guard fell hard and Fix caught him, rolled with him, rolled atop him, and drove the point of the knife through the guard’s right eye socket.
He looked up to see Chiba whip the door of the safe open and pull out a heavy caliber navy automatic. He leveled the weapon at Fix and pulled the trigger.
At the exact moment the elevator door exploded inward. Fix, sprawled on the floor, felt the steel door whistle overhead and saw it smash Chiba’s desk to pieces.
Then the larger alien jumped out of the shattered elevator shaft. It was covered with bleeding cuts and one eye was swollen shut. Some of its weapons were smashed and melted from multiple impacts of the shock rods. Its hands and chest and thighs were soaked with bright red human blood.
Chiba shoved the remaining guard toward the alien, wrapped a powerful arm around the smaller alien’s throat and jammed the barrel against the Nightmare Kid’s head.
“No!” roared the sumo champion.
The moment froze.
The big alien stood there, panting with exertion and pain, glaring at the humans in the room. The smaller alien hissed but did not struggle to break free.
The guard gaped in naked terror, his confidence in his shock rod gone.
Fix was on the floor, ten feet from Chiba, two feet from the guard, six yards from the big alien.
He read the scene, read the moment. He understood because understanding the nuances of combat was who and what he was.
He had kids at home that he knew he would never see again. The insurance was there, though. They would be taken care of. It hurt so bad to think that he would never see them again, but at least he hadn’t failed them.
So he did what any father would do.
He swept the foot of the remaining guard and while every eye went to that man falling, Fix threw his knife.
He did not throw it at the guard, or at the big alien, or at Chiba, who was too well hidden behind his inhuman shield.
No, he threw the knife to the Nightmare Kid.
The young alien caught it, twisted, biting down on the gun arm of the distracted Chiba and then turning more and using that knife. Using it with the ferocity of a warrior; using it with the precision of a butcher.
No, of a hunter.
Gutting, ending, emptying, destroying.
Chiba tried to scream but there was not enough of his throat left for that. There was no air in his ruptured lungs. There was nothing left of him or for him, and the alien stepped aside to let the heavy body fall.
The guard flung his weapon away, got to his knees and begged for mercy that was not his. Fix slapped away the pleading hands and chopped him across the throat.
Then he fell back onto the floor, spent. Nearly gone.
The big alien crossed the room in a few long strides. He stepped over Fix without even looking at him, grabbed the younger alien, slapped him hard across the mouth, once, twice, hitting him so hard the lights flickered in the Nightmare Kid’s eyes. Then the big alien gave the younger one a single, fierce hug and shoved him roughly away, adding one more slap for emphasis.
The younger alien staggered, swayed, but stayed on his feet. He held the bloody knife up and hissed. The bigger alien looked at it, at the blood, and nodded.
Fix watched in horrified fascination as the younger alien rolled Chiba onto his stomach, slit him from crown to anus, tore open the fatty flesh and with a savage grunt tore the entire spine and skull out of the sumo champion’s body. It was disgusting and it was terrifying. The Nightmare Kid stood there, panting, admiring his trophy. Then they turned and looked down at Fix.
There was absolutely nothing Fix could do. He had barely outfought the younger one and the adult was so far beyond his skill as to be absurd. This was where he, too, would die.
The big alien studied Fix for a long time. It looked over his head at what was left of Chiba, then at the knife its child held, and at the trophy, then back to Fix.
It gave him a single, small nod.
After a moment, Fix returned the nod.
Warrior to warrior. Parent to parent.
He lay there and watched the aliens move to the elevator shaft and then jump down to where the sound of screams could still be heard.
It took Fix a long time to get to his feet.
It took him nearly an hour to figure out how to open Chiba’s safe. As it turned out it was a biometric scan. A full palm print was all it took, and the aliens had left Chiba’s hands nicely intact.
He stood for even longer in front of the open safe.
Smiling.