“It has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more than Kadmin’s assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his transgressions and it would be . . . quite hazardous not to fulfill their expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came here expecting to survive, did you, Mr. Kovacs?”
I remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.
“No, I suppose I didn’t.”
Quiet footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance toward the sound and found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.
How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.
I smiled grimly. “If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first.”
“But she was younger in those days.” Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth against the tanned skin. “Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to my copy of Furies got it right.”
“Harlan’s World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we get on with this, please?”
Beyond the windows, the noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.
CHAPTEr THIrTY–SIX
Out on the killing floor, the noise was less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still couldn’t pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down at me.
“Remember my brother, you motherfucker!!!”
I glanced up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was building like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had screamed like this at the Newpest Freak Fights, and guessed that we probably had. And we hadn’t even known the combatants who flailed and clawed at each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.
On the other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn’t render the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn’t really worried about the knuckles; it was Kadmin’s Will of God enhanced response wiring that concerned me most. A century and a half ago, I’d been up against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on Sharya, and they’d been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was heavy-duty military biomech, and against that, Ryker’s neurachem, recently fried by stunbolt, was going to look pretty sick.
I took my place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the crowd quieted down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip’s cameras, he looked like a malignant doll out of a child’s nightmare. A fitting consort to the Patchwork Man. He raised his hands, and directional speakers in the walls of the converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.
“Welcome to the Panama Rose!”
There was a vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting. Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.
“To a very special, and very exclusive, Panama Rose event, welcome. Welcome, I bid you welcome, to the most final and bloody humiliation of Elias Ryker.”
They went wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of civilization stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.
Carnage’s amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quieting noises with both arms.
“Most of you will remember Detective Ryker from some encounter or other. For some of you it will be a name that you associate with blood spilled, maybe even bones broken.
“Those memories. Those memories are painful, and some of you might think you can never lose them.”
He had them damped down now, and his voice dropped accordingly.
“My friends, I cannot hope to erase those memories for you, for that is not what we offer aboard the Panama Rose. Here we deal not in soft forgetfulnessbut in remembrance, no matter how bitter that remembrance might be. Not in dreams, my friends, but in reality.” He threw out a hand to indicate me. “My friends, this is reality.”
Another round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn’t expected to be bored to death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage’s theatricals were just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.
“This is reality,” Emcee Carnage repeated. “Tonight is reality. Tonight you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.”
The crowd erupted.
I wondered briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry’s Closed Quarters, the way Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker’s face. Jerry himself telling me about the Mongol’s run-in with the cop whose body I was wearing: Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back. And then there was Bautista on Ryker’s interrogation techniques: He’s right on the line most of the time. How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?
What would Ortega have said?
I thought about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I’d left her at the Hendrix, she’d take Kawahara down for me.
Knowing it was enough.
Carnage drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A relative quiet descended on the chamber.
“The coup de grâce,” he proclaimed. “When our matador has put Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is no more.”
He released the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theater. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upward to a height of about five meters at the midpoint of the killing floor.
“Let us begin,” Carnage said, withdrawing.
There was a magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass around a whiskey flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden script we were being forced to play out.
We began to circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin’s body language for clues.
The Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on that account, they had told us prior to the Sharya landings. The imperatives for the builders were strength and speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness, it is that their combat patterning has no random-select subroutine. Right Hand of God martyrs will theref
ore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very narrow band of techniques.
On Sharya, our own enhanced combat systems had been state-of-the-art, with both random response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker’s neurachem had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long enough for my conditioning to analyze the Will of God’s fighting pattern and—
Kadmin struck.
The distance was nearly ten meters of clear ground; he covered it in the time it took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.
The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counterattack was out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to block low, and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head, and I reeled backwards, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand side-strike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost casually. A low-level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.
It was like someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was left far behind on the surface of my skin, and a sickening numbness raged through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it was crippling. I staggered back three steps and crashed onto the mat, twisting like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.
Turning my head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.
I understood.
Round One.
Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight, it’s a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down, but this wasn’t a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where the suffering was to be maximized for the benefit of the audience.
The crowd.
I got up and looked around the dimly seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my guts, spat on the killing floor, and summoned a guard stance.
Kadmin inclined his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks, and instead of giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin’s path. It took him the shreds of a second to realize what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every member of the chanting crowd.
The hawk nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed around, looking for neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head against the mat. I tasted blood.
I rolled upright and saw Kadmin backing off and wiping some blood of his own from his broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenaline surge that seeing his blood spilled had given me, and raised both my own hands in an expectant gesture.
“Come on, you asshole.” It croaked out of my damaged mouth. “Put me away.”
He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.
On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs, and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm, and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down toward the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin’s grip, and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.
I came down on the injured ribs, and my vision flew apart in splinters. I twisted, trying to fight the urge to roll into a fetal ball, and saw Kadmin’s borrowed features a thousand meters above me.
“Get up,” he said, like vast sheets of cardboard being torn in the distance. “We’re not finished yet.”
I snapped up from the waist, striking for his groin. The blow was out, spending itself in the meat of his thigh. Almost casually, he swung his arm, and the power knuckles hit me in the face. I saw a scribble of multicolored lights and then everything whited out. The noise of the crowd ballooned in my head, and behind it I thought I could hear the maelstrom calling me. It all cycled in and out of focus, dip and whirl like a grav drop, while the neurachem fought to keep me conscious. The lights swooped down and then back to the ceiling as if concerned to see the damage that had been done to me, but only superficially, and easily satisfied. Consciousness was something in wide elliptical orbit around my head. Abruptly I was back on Sharya, holed up in the wreck of the disabled spider tank with Jimmy de Soto.
“Earth?” His grinning blackout-striped face is flashlit by laser fire from outside the tank. “It’s a shit hole, man. Fucking frozen society, like stepping back in time half a millennium. Nothing happens there; historical events aren’t allowed.”
“Bullshit.” My disbelief is punctuated by the shrill scream of an incoming marauder bomb. Our eyes meet across the gloom of the tank cabin. The bombardment has been going on since nightfall, the robot weapons hunting on infrared and motion track. In a rare moment when the Sharyan jamming went down, we’ve heard that Admiral Cursitor’s IP fleet is still light-seconds out, fighting the Sharyans for orbital dominance. At dawn, if the battle isn’t over, the locals will probably put down ground troops to flush us out. The odds are not looking good.
At least the betathanatine crash is starting to wear off. I can feel my temperature beginning to climb back toward normal. The surrounding air no longer feels like hot soup, and breathing is ceasing to be the major effort it was when our heart rates were down near flat-line.
The robot bomb detonates and the legs of the tank rattle against the hull with the near miss. We both glance reflexively at our exposure meters.
“Bullshit, is it?” Jimmy peers out of the ragged hole we blew in the spider tank’s hull. “Hey, you’re not from there. I am, and I’m telling you, if they gave me the choice of life on Earth or fucking storage, I’d have to give it some thought. You get the chance to visit, don’t.”
I blinked the glitch away. Above me, the killing knife glinted in its grav field like sunlight through trees. Jimmy was fading out, heading past the knife for the roof.
“Told you not to go there, didn’t I, pal. Now look at you. Earth.” He spat and disappeared, leaving the echoes of his voice. “It’s a shithole. Got to get to the next screen.”
The crowd noise had settled down to a steady ch
anting.
The anger ran through the fog in my head like a hot wire. I propped myself up on an elbow and focused on Kadmin waiting on the other side of the ring. He saw me and raised his hands in an echo of the gesture I had used before. The crowd howled with laughter.
Get to the next screen.
I lurched to my feet.
You don’t do your chores, the Patchwork Man will come for you one night.
The voice jumped into my head, a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly a century and a half of objective time. A man I hadn’t soiled my memory with for most of my adult life. My father, and his delightful bedtime stories. Trust him to turn up now, when I really needed the shit.
The Patchwork Man will come for you.
Well, you got that wrong, Dad. The Patchwork Man’s standing right over there, waiting. He’s not coming for me, have to go and get him myself. But thanks anyway, Dad. Thanks for everything.
I summoned what was left from cellular levels in Ryker’s body and stalked forward.
Glass shattered, high above the killing floor. The shards rained down on the space between Kadmin and myself.
“Kadmin!”
I saw his eyes rise to the gantry above, and then his entire chest seemed to explode. His head and arms jerked back as if something had suddenly thrown him wildly off balance, and a detonation rang through the chamber. The front of his gi was torn off, and a magical hole opened him up from throat to waist. Blood gouted and fell in ropes.
I whipped around, staring upward, and saw Trepp framed in the gantry window she had just destroyed, eye still bent along the barrel of the frag rifle cradled in her arms. The muzzle flamed as she laid down continuous fire. Confused, I swung about, looking for targets, but the killing floor was deserted but for the remains of Kadmin. Carnage was nowhere in sight, and between explosions the noise of the crowd had changed abruptly to the hooting sounds of humans in panic. Everyone seemed to be on their feet, trying to leave. Understanding hit. Trepp was firing into the audience.
Down on the floor of the chamber, an energy weapon cut loose and someone started screaming. I turned, suddenly slow and awkward, toward the sound. Carnage was on fire.