“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Rocket shouts. He has drawn his backup weapons, a matched brace of long-barreled Spartoi laser pistols. He brandishes them, arms straight, a deadly pistol in each of his disconcertingly human-like hands. Your Human Culture thematic reference point here, loyal reader, would most likely be the two-handed gunplay of Chow Yun-Fat. Or a buccaneer.
Yes, most definitely a buccaneer. The only thing that would make Rocket Raccoon look more like a buccaneer right now would be a macaw or some rigging.
He fires at the advancing Badoon: right, left, right, left—one pistol muzzle rising with the recoil as its partner blasts. Three War Brotherhood warriors caught by the shots collapse sideways into one another and sag, sliding halfway to the floor and forming a tragic Badoon teepee.
Rocket Raccoon is about to look even more like a buccaneer.
“Groot! I said we’re high-tailing it now!” he shouts over the thunder of gunfire. “Stop having fun and get with the program! It’s time to make like a tree!”
“And leaf?” I inquire, suspending mute for a second. I cannot help observing and enjoying the old heroic-banter trope.
“No,” Rocket snaps, correcting me. “And fall!”
With that, he leaps into the hole he has shot in the floor.
I hesitate. The presumption is that I should follow this reckless course, but now that the moment is actually upon me, I find myself reluctant.
At that point, however, I am picked up by a tree and tucked under its arm. Then the tree makes the decision about jumping for me, and I am obliged to go along with it.
THUMP!
I am…dazed for a second. I realign and reboot, stabilizing my sensory systems. Gyro positioning tells me we have descended approximately eight meters. Groot puts me down. I find myself standing on ground made from a dusty, mica-based sand material. It is, I notice, stained in patches.
There is a roaring noise. An excited, lusty ululation.
It is coming from the crowd. The crowd is, it seems, surprised but pleased to see us. It seems collectively keen to see what happens next.
“The general layout schematics of Leery’s,” I observe, “indicate it is possible that the pit-fight arenas are situated directly beneath the main bar level.”
Rocket Raccoon turns very slowly and glares up at me. I feel that this is his way of informing me that I might have mentioned this fact earlier. Before we jumped, for example.
The pit is a broad, circular arena. The baying crowd—now unanimously punching the air with many fists, and exchanging rapid wagers and counter-wagers—is contained behind the high stone wall that surrounds the ring. On the sand around us, various large gladiators and pit-fighters—clad in brutal spiked plate-armor, clutching hatchets, cleavers, pikes and tridents—assess us with professional curiosity. So do the vast fighting beasts specially imported from Sakaar. They snort and whinny; saliva drools from their immense, fanged maws.
The stains on the sand, processing tells me, are blood…at the very least.
Groot glances up wistfully at the hole in the roof. It suddenly seems much more like a worthwhile escape route than it did from the other side. It is, however, absolutely out of reach.
“Oh well,” mutters Rocket Raccoon with a world-weary affect. He twirls his pistols defiantly in his upraised, disconcertingly human-like hands and growls, “Place your bets.”
• CHAPTER FIVE •
LET THE GAMES BEGIN
A SIREN sounds, urging the start of combat, but it is superfluous. The gladiators are already rushing us. The squealing Zen-Whoberian ring girls barely have time to scatter and get themselves and their round cards behind the pit barriers.
Rocket aims his pistols at the nearest charging gladiator, a raging Saurid giant in a houndskull helm. He fires.
Nothing happens.
Rocket gurgles, “What the flark?” and ducks hard. He darts between the legs of his oncoming foe, allowing the armored bulk of the gladiator to pass right over him and smack face-first into Groot’s waiting fist. Suddenly, the houndskull helm is not so much a wolf as a bulldog.
The gladiator drops on his front.
“My blasters don’t work!” Rocket yelps, trying them again to be sure. Groot is also attempting to discharge the Nitro 66, without success.
“The pit levels are fitted with jamming fields that prevent the firing of energy weapons,” I point out.
“Why?” Rocket begs, rolling hard to avoid the downswing of a battleaxe the size of a patio table.
“Because that would be unsportsmanlike,” I reply.
“Un-what?”
“Unfair. The sport here is close-combat pit-fighting,” I explain. “The use of ranged and energy weapons would disadvantage the gladiators.”
“Disadvantage the gladiators?!” Rocket shrieks back at me. He is being chased around in circles by an immense cyborg creature with a sword the size of an ironing board. Rocket has a point. The disadvantage is all ours. Of the three of us, only Groot is physically capable of contending at this level. He is punching anything that gets close. Rocket is surviving by speed alone—running, jumping, darting, ducking, and leaping. He is too small and fast to hit. For now.
I am, myself, only surviving because Groot is being kind enough to keep picking me up out of the path of danger and putting me down again somewhere temporarily less risky. It is as though he is fighting while simultaneously using me as a chess piece. This is an activity that, I fear, cannot be successfully maintained for long.
The crowd is on its feet, howling.
Rocket ducks under the cyborg’s sword, executes a leap that uses another gladiator’s shield as a springboard, and somersaults into the air. He lands on the shoulders of a Shi’ar brute with a huge gene-amped musculature. This pit-fighter has immense steel shoul-derguards and an intimidating, low-slung, chrome sallet helm. Rocket has holstered his pistols. He grabs the rim of the gladiator’s helm with his disconcertingly human-like hands and yanks it down around the brute’s ears. The Shi’ar barks in outrage, dropping his cleaver and hand axe, and staggers around blindly trying to loosen his sallet helm and pull it back up. It will take him some time and effort to realign his eye-slits.
Rocket bounds off him, lands on the sand, and scoops up the discarded hand axe. It was a small thing to the Shi’ar, just a secondary hacking tool. To Rocket, it is a mighty battleaxe, and he has to prop the haft over his shoulder to get a good grip.
Another pit fighter rushes him. Rocket swings the axe, deflecting the prongs of the fighter’s trident. The fighter stumbles. Rocket swings again and puts a dent in the fighter’s belly plate, winding him. The fighter drops to his knees, and Rocket brings the flat of the axe blade down across the back of the fighter’s head, rendering him unconscious.
“Who else wants some?” Rocket snarls, darting away and glancing around. He dashes up the spine of a Taurian gladiator coming for me, and brains him with the axe, leaping off his shoulders as the thug starts to sprawl.
I have the distinct impression that, despite everything, Rocket Raccoon is almost enjoying himself.
The gladiators are one thing. The pit beasts are quite another. They are monsters, loyal reader, born from fevered nightmares. Each one is at least the size of a modest building. Their origin world was the notorious planet Sakaar, a place that no longer exists except in memories or databases (or for those with access to temporal technology), but its monstrous creatures were so feral and impressive that many specimens still exist in arena bestiaries the Universe over.
One of the things sharing the pit with us is some kind of centipede the length of two or three subway cars. Hellish, spiked limbs ripple around the sides of its churning, segmented body. Its razor-sharp mouth-parts clack and chop.
Another resembles a vast, pustular toad with the head of a deep-sea fish. It has an underbite and eight rows of needlelike teeth, any one of which would have served Rocket Raccoon as an adequate lance. Its glistening flesh is almost translucent, so that its bones and some pulsi
ng organs are actually visible. Its eyes are great, dead orbs like milky ponds.
Another is a giant, ursine quadruped with a spiked collar. It is partially armored across the back, flanks, and cranium with plates of rusty iron. It is trailing heavy chains that seem, distressingly, to have been snapped. Its mouth, jutting from beneath the rim of its iron head-guard, is so large that a small family car could easily be parked inside it. Its teeth are like sharpened tombstones.
The ursine surges forward, roaring. It tramples several unlucky gladiators and tosses others high into the air. Groot sees the ursine coming and moves me out of its path, but this places him in the way of the centipede thing. It sweeps toward him like a runaway train on a curved section of track, legs rippling. It reeks of ammonia.
Groot is still carrying the Nitro 66. It is the only weapon he has at hand. Because it won’t fire, he jams it into the thing’s jaws in an attempt to thwart the snapping mouth-parts.
The shearing mandibles bite down on the gun. Though the arena’s jamming fields prevent the discharge of energy weapon systems, they have no power to affect the explosive containment failure of a power-mag that has been bitten in half.
The unfeasibly large gun explodes as the entire energy load of its munition pack releases in one go.
The blast, a white-hot ball of light, throws Groot onto his back and disintegrates the head of the metameric monster. Yellow ichor and fragments of chitinous plating fly in all directions. Galvanized by neural aftershock, the immense, segmented body of the suddenly headless arthropod convulses violently. The entire freight-train length of it whips and thrashes in the most devastating fashion, churning up the sand and hurling hapless pit-fighters, broken and mangled, into the air. Then it all but up-ends, and its lashing body and flailing legs topple into the wall of the ring and into the crowd.
A section of wall collapses under its grinding weight. Venomous leg-claws and squirming, spiked body segments do grievous harm to a large section of the audience in the cheaper seats.
The crowd is no longer roaring. It is rather more screaming and flooding for the exits. Suddenly the pit fight doesn’t seem so much like a good night out anymore. This is a definition of the term “bloodsport” for which the crowd had not signed up.
The centipede thing takes a long time to accept that it is dead. Its thrashing, snapping body brings down more of the wall and smashes four tiers of seating—and the crowd members in them—over into the arena. Pit-handlers and marshals try to contain the mayhem, but the task is far beyond their abilities.
The translucent toad-beast smells blood and hurls itself through the collapsed section of wall. Perhaps it merely identifies a way to escape its prison, or perhaps it realizes that members of the audience will make less challenging snacks than its usual diet of armored gladiators who fight back.
Besides, the crowd has been jeering at it for far too long.
Rocket Raccoon surveys the carnage. Given that the “Oh What the Flark Event Horizon” was comprehensively crossed earlier in the evening, he has no idea what kind of event horizon this is.
However, I realize that he is deep in the machinations of tactical genius. I am disappointed with his initial findings.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he says.
“I am Groot,” Groot agrees. There is clearly more to Rocket’s plan than I have appreciated.
Rocket is scooping spare power-mags out of the pouches of his bandolier. He starts to scamper away from us. I see he is plucking the containment plugs out of the power-mags.
The consequences of the centipede thing biting the Nitro 66 have given him an idea.
“Grab the Recorder-dude!” he yells over his shoulder. Groot obligingly picks me up and starts striding across the sand after his tiny friend.
At first, it looks as though Rocket is heading for the immense portcullis gate that leads out of the pit into the animal pens. But no, this is not the case.
He is heading for the ursine quadruped.
The ursine, only moments earlier, had thundered past us chewing on some gladiators and pitmarshals who had the misfortune to wind up in its parking-garage mouth.
Rocket leaps and manages to grab hold of one of the broken chains it is trailing. He races up the links, climbing up the beast’s flank and onto its plated back. This is a deed akin to climbing the reins of a runaway horse. But Rocket is nimble and agile, and his disconcertingly human-like hands evidently afford great prehensile grip.
He is on its back. He is between its shoulder blades, hanging on to the huge, rusty spikes of its collar. All we can see of him is his bushy tail, flapping around at the back of the ursine’s head. From our vantage point, loyal reader, it appears the ursine is wearing what you would call a “Davy Crockett hat.”
“Steer, flark you!” he yells at the ursine he is riding. The ursine does not respond to the various tugs and heaves Rocket is applying to the spiked collar, so Rocket snakes his admirable, silky brush of a tail around and uses the tip to tickle the beast’s right ear.
That does it. Irritated, the ursine steers to the left, directly toward the cage gate of the animal pens.
Rocket yells, “Yeeeeee-haaaw!”
He rises in the saddle and hurls the power-mags.
Power-mags are containment reservoirs that hold considerable amounts of energy, as the now-headless centipede thing will no doubt attest. They are designed to remain inert and highly stable—not exploding or releasing all their energy in one go, for example—to survive the rough-and-tumble of space war.
That is, unless the containment plugs are deliberately removed, something a sane person would only do the moment before sliding a power-mag into a weapon’s receiver slot.
The destabilized power-mags sail through the air. As was the case with the one bitten in half by the centipede, they are not in any way influenced by the arena level’s jamming fields.
They strike the bars of the portcullis and detonate.
The portcullis explodes. The archway surrounding it shivers upward in a cloud of flame, then rains down in an avalanche of stone blocks. This in turn causes another large section of the ring wall and the seating tiers it supports (along with quite a number of fight-night aficionados) to collapse. Utter mayhem ensues.
{halt expositional protocol}
—the superlative limits of the term mayhem will evidently need to be upgraded and redefined during the course of this narrative. I estimate I should have done this at least three times already, and we have only just started, really.
{resume narrative mode}
Rocket leaps from the ursine’s back. It keeps going at full gallop and crashes through the ruined gateway, tearing down everything that the power-mag blast hasn’t.
Still carrying me under his arm, Groot follows Rocket through the ruins of the gate. They pick their way over smoldering blocks and twisted shreds of metal. Up ahead, we can hear the noisy devastation being caused by the still-galloping ursine.
“Gotta be a way to an exit somewhere,” Rocket advises. “A loading dock, something.”
A few pit-workers run past, ignoring us. The air is full of smoke. Debris rains down from the ceiling. A figure looms out of the murk. It is the Shi’ar gladiator with the chrome sallet.
Rocket reaches for his pistols, but the Shi’ar just looks at us and shakes his head.
“No fight from me,” he growls. “This is not what I signed on for. I’m just looking for the exit.”
“Any suggestions?” Rocket asks him, raising his hands to show he is no longer going for his sidearms.
“Me, I’m heading for the subbasement,” says the Shi’ar. “They say there are ways out down there. Into the Dive-town undercity, the rock-pile levels. Maybe from there to the trash wastes. Who knows?”
“Good luck with that,” says Rocket Raccoon.
“Good luck yourself,” the Shi’ar replies darkly. “All hell’s coming down. The cops are inbound. Nova Corps. I even heard someone say the Luminals had mobilized.”
“Xarth’s Mightiest, huh?” says Rocket.
“I don’t plan on sticking around to find out,” the Shi’ar says. “I’m just going to slip out the back door. You got other plans?”
“Always,” Rocket replies.
The Shi’ar turns to go. He pauses.
“Who are you people?” he asks.
“Rocket and Groot,” says Rocket.
“Never heard of you,” says the Shi’ar.
“Same old, same old,” sighs Rocket.
The Shi’ar vanishes into the smoke, shaking his head.
“I am Groot,” says Groot.
“The undercity?” asks Rocket. “No, not that way. Even with the heat coming. We need to accelerate our exit strategy. Let’s get up to the landing pylons.”
We start to move again, clambering through the wreckage. Rocket locates a broken security shutter that leads into a dank stairwell. Sounds of explosions, screams, and redefined mayhem echo down the concrete shaft.
Just inside the doorway, a man is propped up against the wall. He’s a Xarthian, wearing the robes of a merchant. Something, probably a galloping ursine, has recently trodden on him. He has crawled into the stairwell to find refuge. Rocket pauses to see whether there’s anything he can do for the poor fellow. It becomes rapidly apparent that an ursine footprint is not the sort of injury you can easily bandage.
“Just…j-just came looking for a q-quiet night…” the man murmurs through his pain. “H-have a drink…maybe d-do a little b-business…”
“What line of work are you in?” Rocket asks, trying to distract the man from his mortal injuries.
“Z-zunks,” the man says. “I’m a zunk trader. I w-was just hoping for a little b-business…not this. Just a little d-deal. Something sweet. M-maybe looking to move between forty-seven and forty-nine t-tons of zunks. N-not a lot to expect, eh?”
“No,” says Rocket. “I tell you what —”