One of the roadies closed the door behind him, cutting off the sounds of conversation from the main hall, a whistling PA. Dicko gave me and the other girls a shallow bow, then handed an envelope to Jacob. ‘Your appearance fee.’
The envelope disappeared into Jacob’s sleeveless leather jacket.
Delicate silver eyebrows lifted a millimetre. ‘You are not going to count it?’
‘Your reputation is good,’ Jacob told him. ‘You’re a pro, top notch. That’s the word.’
‘How very kind. And you, too, come well recommended.’
I listened to him and the rest of the team swapping nonsense. I didn’t like it, he was intruding. Some teams like to party pre-bout; some thrash and re-thrash tactics. Me, I like a bit of peace and quiet to Zen myself up. Friends who’ll talk if I want, who know when to keep quiet. I jittered about, wait-tension making my skin crawl. Every time I glanced at Dicko’s girl her eyes dropped. She was studying me.
‘I wonder if I might take a peak at Khanivore?’ Dicko asked. ‘One has heard so much . . .’
The others swivelled en masse to consult me.
‘Sure thing.’ After the old boy had seen it, maybe he’d scoot. You can’t really shunt someone out of their own turf.
We clustered round the life-support pod, except for the girl. Wes turned down the opacity, and Dicko’s face hardened into grim appreciation, a corpse grin. It chilled me down.
Khanivore is close on three metres tall, roughly hominoid in that it has two trunklike legs and a barrel torso, albeit encased in a black segmented exoskeleton. After that, things get a little out of kilter. The top of the torso sprouts five armoured tentacles, two of them ending in bone-blade pincers. They were all curled up to fit in the pod like a nest of sleeping boa constrictors. There was a thick twenty-centimetre prehensile neck supporting a nightmare head sculpted from bone that was polished down to a black-chrome gleam. The front was a shark-snout jaw with a double row of teeth, while the main dome was inset with deep creases and craters to protect sensor organs.
Dicko reached out and touched the surface of the pod. ‘Excellent,’ he whispered, then added casually: ‘I want you to take a dive.’
There was a moment of dark silence.
‘Do what?’ Karran squeaked.
Dicko beamed his dead smile straight at her. ‘A dive. You’ll be well paid, double the winning purse, ten thousand CUs. Plus whatever side bets you care to place. That should go a long way to easing the financial strain on an amateur team like yourselves. We can even discuss some future dates.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘And that’s from all of us,’ Jacob spat. ‘You screwed up, Dicko. We’re pros, man, real pros. We believe in beastie-baiting, it’s ours. We were there at the start, and we’re not letting shits like you fuck it over for a quick profit. Word gets out about rigged bouts and we all lose, even you.’
He was smooth, I’ll give him that, his cocoon of urbanity never flickering. ‘You’re not thinking, young man. To keep on Baiting you must have money. Especially in the future. Large commercial concerns are starting to notice this sport of yours, it will soon be turning professional with official leagues and governing bodies. With the right kind of support a team of your undeniable quality can last until you reach retirement age. Even a beast which never loses requires a complete rebuild every nine months, not to mention the continual refinements you have to stitch in. Baiting is an expensive business, and about to become more so. And business it now is, not some funfair ride. At the moment you are naive amateurs who happen to have hit a winning streak. Do not delude yourselves; one day you are going to lose. You need a secure income to tide you over the lean times while you design and test a new beast.
‘This is what I am offering you, the first step towards responsibility. Fighters and promoters feed each other. We always have done, right back to the days of the Roman gladiators. And we always will do. There is nothing dishonest in this. Tonight, the fans will see the tremendous fight they paid for, because Khanivore could never lose easily. Then they will return to watch you again, screaming for victory, ecstatic when you win again. Struggle, heartache, and triumph, that is what demands their attention, what keeps any sport alive. Believe me, I know crowds far better than you ever can; they have been my life’s study.’
‘So has money,’ Ivrina said quietly. She’d crossed her arms over her chest, staring at him contemptuously. ‘Don’t give us any more of this bullshit about doing us a favour. You run the book in this part of town, you and a few others. A tight, friendly little group who’ve got it all locked down. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been. I’ll tell you what’s really happened tonight. Every punter has laid down their wad on Sonnie’s Predators, the dead cert faves. So you and the boys did a few sums of your own, and worked out how you can profit most from that. Slip us the ten grand for a fall, and you’ll walk off with the mega-profit.’
‘Fifteen thousand,’ Dicko said, completely unperturbed. ‘Please accept the offer, I urge you as a friend. What I have said is quite true, no matter what motives you assign me. One day you will lose.’ He turned to look at me, his expression was almost entreating. ‘You are the team’s fighter, by nature the most practical. How much confidence do you have in your own ability? You are out there in the bouts, you have known moments of doubt when your opponent pulled a clever turn. Surely you do not have the arrogance to believe you are invincible?’
‘No, I’m not invincible. What I have is an edge. Didn’t it occur to you to wonder how come I always win?’
‘It has been the cause of some speculation.’
‘Simple enough; although nobody else could ever use it. You see, I won’t lose to the Urban Gorgons, not while they have Simon as their fighter.’
‘I don’t understand, every bout cannot be a grudge match.’
‘Oh but they are. Maybe if the Urban Gorgons team fronted a female fighter I’d think about taking your money. But I’m virtually unique; none of the other teams I know of use a female to boost their beastie.’
‘This is your advantage, your legendary edge, women fight better than men?’
‘Motivation is the key,’ I said. ‘That’s why we use affinity to control the beasts. These creatures we stitch together have no analogue in nature. For instance, you couldn’t take a brain out of a lion and splice it into Khanivore. For all its hunter-killer instinct a lion wouldn’t be able to make any sense of Khanivore’s sensorium, nor would it be able to utilize the limbs. That’s why we give beasties bioware processors instead of brains. But processors still don’t give us what we need. For their program a fight can never be anything more than a complex series of problems, a three-dimensional chess game. An attack would be broken up into segments for analysis and initiation of appropriate response moves. By which time any halfway sentient opposition has ripped them to shreds. No program can ever instil a sense of urgency, coupled to panic-enhanced instinct. Sheer savagery, if you like. Humans reign supreme when it comes to that. That’s why we use the affinity bond. Beastie-baiting is a physical extension of the human mind, our dark side in all its naked horror. That’s the appeal your punters have come to worship tonight, Dicko, pure bestiality. Without our proxy beasties us fighters would be out there in the pit ourselves. We’d kill each other, no two ways about it.’
‘And you are the most savage of them all?’ Dicko asked. He glanced round the team, their stony faces, hunting confirmation.
‘I am now,’ I said, and for the first time bled a trace of venom into my voice. I saw the girl stiffen slightly, her eyes round with interest.
‘A year or so back I got snatched by an estate gang. No reason for it, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Know what they do to girls, Dicko?’ I was grinding the words out now, eyes never leaving his face. His mask was cracking, little fissures of emotion showing through.
‘Yes, you do know, don’t you. The gang bang wasn’t so bad, there was only two days of that. But when they finished they started on me
with knives. It’s a branding thing, making sure everyone knows how fucking hard they are. So that is why, when the Urban Gorgons send their Turboraptor out in the pit tonight, I am going to shred that bastard to pieces so small there’s going to be nothing left but a fog of blood. Not because of the money, not even for the status; but because what I’m really doing is carving up that male shit Simon.’ I took a step towards Dicko, arm coming up to point threateningly. ‘And neither you nor anyone else is going to stop that happening. You got that, shitbrain?’
One of Khanivore’s tentacles began to uncoil, an indistinct motion beneath the murky surface of the life-support pod.
Dicko snatched a fast glance at the agitated beastie and gave another of his prissy bows. ‘I won’t press you any further, but I do ask you to think over what I proposed.’ He turned on a heel, snapping his fingers for the girl to follow. She scampered off through the door.
The team closed in on me with smiles and fierce hugs.
Time for the bout, they formed a praetorian guard to escort me out to the pit. The air around the arena was already way too hot, and becoming badly humid from the sweat and breath of the crowd. No conditioning. Naturally.
My ears filled with the chants rising from the seats, slow handclaps, whistles, hoots, catcalls. The noise rumbled sluggishly round the dark empty space behind the stand.
Under the scaffolding, reverberating with low-frequency harmonics. Then out into an unremitting downpour of harsh blue-white light and gullet-rattling noise. Cheering and jeering reached a crescendo. Every centimetre of wooden seating was taken.
I sat in my seat on the edge of the pit. Simon was sitting directly opposite me, naked from the waist up; lean, bald, and sable black. A stylistic ruby-red griffin tattoo fluoresced on his chest, intensity pulsing in time to his heartbeat. Big gold pirate earrings dangled from mauled lobes. He stood to give me the grand fuckittoyou gesture. Urban Gorgons fans roared their delight.
‘You OK, Sonnie?’ Ivrina whispered.
‘Sure.’ I locked eyes with Simon, and laughed derisively. Our side’s supporters whooped rapturously.
The ref bobbed to his feet halfway round the side of the pit. The PA came on with a screech, and he launched into his snappy intros. Standard soundbite fodder. Actually, he’s not so much a ref as a starter. There aren’t too many rules in beastie-baiting – your creature must be bipedal, no hardware or metal allowed in the design, no time limit, the one left alive is the winner. It does tend to cut out any confusion.
The ref was winding up, probably afraid of getting lynched by an impatient crowd. Simon closed his eyes, concentrating on his affinity link with Turboraptor.
An affinity bond is a unique and private link. Each pair of cloned neuron symbionts is attuned to its twin alone; there can be no interception, no listening in. One clump is embedded in the human brain, the other is incorporated in a bioware processor. It’s a perfect tool for Baiting.
I closed my eyes.
Khanivore was waiting behind the webwork of scaffolding. I went through a final systems check. Arteries, veins, muscles, tendons, fail-soft nerve-fibre network, multiple-redundant heart-pump chambers. All on line and operating at a hundred per cent. I had the oxygenated blood reserves to fight for up to an hour.
There wasn’t anything else. Vital internal organs are literally that: vital. Too risky to bring into the pit. One puncture and the beastie could die. One! That’s hardly a fair fight. It’s also shoddy combat design. So Khanivore spends most of its time in a life-support pod, where the ancillary units substitute functions like the liver, kidneys, lungs, and all the other physiological crap not essential to keep it fighting.
I walked it forward.
And the crowd goes wild. Predictable as hell, but I love them for it. This is my moment, the only time I am truly alive.
Turboraptor was already descending into the pit, the makeshift wooden ramp sagging under its weight. First chance for a detailed examination.
The Urban Gorgons team had stitched together a small bruise-purple dinosaur, minus tail. Its body was pear-shaped with short dumpy legs – difficult to topple. The arms were weird, two metres fifty long, five joints apiece – excellent articulation, have to watch that. One ended in a three-talon claw, the other had a solid bulb of bone. The idea was good, grip with the talon and punch with the bone fist. Given the arm’s reach, it could probably work up enough inertia to break through Khanivore’s exoskeleton. A pair of needle-pointed, fifty-centimetre horns jutted up from its head. Stupid. Horns and blade fins might make for good image, but they give your opponent something to grab; that’s why we made Khanivore ice-smooth.
Khanivore reached the pit floor, and the roadies hauled the wooden ramp away behind it. There was silence again as the ref stretched out his arm. A white silk handkerchief dangled from his fingers. He dropped it.
I let all five tentacles unroll halfway to the floor, snapping the pincers as they went. Sonnie’s Predators fans picked up the beat, stamping their feet, clapping.
Turboraptor and Khanivore circled each other, testing for speed and reflexes. I lashed a couple of tentacles, aiming to lasso Turboraptor’s legs. Impressed by how fast it dodged with those stumpy legs. In return its talon claw came dangerously close to the root of a tentacle. I didn’t think it could cut through, but I’d have to be vigilant.
The circling stopped. We began to sway the beasties from side to side, both tensing, waiting for either an opening or a charge. Simon broke first, sending Turbo-raptor at me in a heavy run, arm punching the bone fist forward. I pirouetted Khanivore on one foot, whipping the tentacles to add spin-momentum. Turboraptor sliced past, and I caught it across the back of the head with a tentacle, sending it slamming into the pit wall. Khanivore regained its footing, and followed. I wanted to keep Turboraptor pinned there, to hammer blows against it which it would be forced to absorb. But both of its arms came slashing backwards – the bastards were pivot hinged. One of my tentacle tips was caught in its talon claw. I brought more tentacles up to fend off the punch from the bone fist, simultaneously twisting the captured tentacle. Turbo-raptor’s punch slapped into a writhing coil of tentacle, muting the impact. We staggered apart.
The tip of my tentacle was lying on the pit floor, flexing like an electrocuted snake. There was no pain; Khanivore’s nerves weren’t structured for that. A little jet of scarlet blood squirted out of the severed end. It vanished as the bioware processors closed off the artery.
The crowd was on its feet, howling approval and demanding vengeance. Slashes of colour and waving arms; the roof panels vibrating. All distant.
Turboraptor sidestepped hurriedly, moving away from the danger of the pit wall. I let it go, watching intently. One of its pincer talons seemed misaligned; when the other two closed it didn’t budge.
We clashed again, colliding in the centre of the pit. It was a kick and shove match this time. Arms and tentacles could only beat ineffectually on armoured flanks while we were pressed together. Then I managed to bend Khani-vore’s head low enough for its jaws to clamp around Turboraptor’s shoulder. Arrow-head teeth bit into purple scales. Blood began to seep out of the puncture marks.
Turboraptor’s talon claw started to scrape at Khanivore’s head. Simon was using the dead talon like a can opener, gouging away at the sensor cavities. I lost a couple of retinas and an ear before I decided I was on a hiding to nothing. Khanivore’s mouth had done as much damage as possible, it wouldn’t close any further. I let go, and we fell apart cleanly.
Turboraptor took two paces back, and charged at me again. I wasn’t quick enough. That pile-driver bone fist struck Khanivore’s torso full on. I backpedalled furiously to keep balance, and thudded into the pit wall.
Bioware processors flashed status graphics into my mind, red and orange cobwebs superimposed over my vision, detailing the damage. Turboraptor’s fist had weakened the exoskeleton’s midsection. Khanivore could probably take another couple of punches like that, definitely no more than three.
I slashed out with a couple of tentacles. One twined round Turboraptor’s bone fist. The second snared the uppermost segment of the same arm. An inescapable manacle. No way could Simon manoeuvre another punch out of that.
I shot an order into the relevant control processors to maintain the hold. Controlling five upper limbs at once isn’t possible for a human brain. We don’t have the neurological programming for it, that’s why most beasties are straight hominoids. All I could ever do with Khanivore was manipulate two tentacles; but for something simple like sustaining a grip the processors can take over while I switch to another pair of tentacles.
Turboraptor’s talon claw bent round to try and snip the tentacles grasping its arm. I sent another two tentacles to bind it, which left me the fifth free to win the war.
I’d just started to bring it forwards, figuring on using it to try and snap Turboraptor’s neck, when Simon pulled a fast one. The top half of the talon claw arm started to pull back. I thought Khanivore’s optical nerves had gone haywire. My tentacles’ grip on the arm was rock solid, it couldn’t possibly be moving.
There was a wet tearing sound, a small plume of blood. The tentacles were left wrapped round the last three segments of the arm, while the lower section, the one which had separated, was a sheath for a fifty-centimetre sword of solid bone.
Simon stabbed it straight at Khanivore’s torso, where the exoskeleton was already weakened. Fear burned me then, a stimulant harder than any adrenalin or amphetamine, accelerating my thoughts to lightspeed. Self-preservation superseded reticence, and I swiped the fifth tentacle downwards, knowing it would get butchered and not caring. Anything to deflect that killer strike.
The tentacle hit the top of the blade, an impact which nearly severed it in two. A fountain of blood spewed out, splattering over Turboraptor’s chest like a scarlet graffiti bomb. But the blade was deflected, slicing downwards to shatter a hole in the exoskeleton of Khanivore’s right leg. It slid in deep enough for the display graphics to tell me the tip was touching the other side. Simon levered it round, decimating the flesh inside the exoskeleton. More cobweb graphics flowered, reporting severed nerve fibres, cut tendons, artery valves closing. The leg was more or less useless.