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 maximised 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 realise 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 round, 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 backed 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 adrenalin surge that seeing his blood spilt 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 towards 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 foetal ball and saw Kadmin’s borrowed features a thousand metres 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 multicoloured 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 shithole, 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 towards 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 flatline.
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 chanting.
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.