“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 that 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 little over a century 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 quietened 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 civilisation stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.
Carnage’s amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quietening gestures 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 forgetfulness, but 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 theatre. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.
“Let us begin,” said Carnage, 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 round a whisky 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 sub-routine. Right Hand of God martyrs will therefore 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 analyse the Will of God’s fighting pattern and—
Kadmin struck.
The distance was nearly ten metres 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. Counter-attack 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 backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand sidestrike, 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.