by Rick Partlow
“Without the help of my friends,” Kan-Ten spoke in English, making a point, she guessed, “the Matriarch would be dead or captured instead of alive and with us.” He gestured toward the private office up a short set of metal, grillwork stairs at the far end of the building. “Without the help of these two humans, I would be dead and the half of the weapons I guarded would be in the hands of Jordi Abdullah, the human you trusted, who betrayed you and killed our brothers.”
“The humans who attacked us were not my allies,” Vala-Kel declared, switching back to Tahni, making a point of his own. “They must have been the vigilante force organized and armed by the Constable.”
“Constable Freeman is not responsible for the attacks on your people,” Fontenot interrupted, making her best attempt at speaking Tahni despite vocal cords not evolved for it. “He only wants an end to the violence.”
“Of course, you would say this,” Vala-Kel addressed her for the first time, in English again. “You were seen in his office; you likely work in his service, betraying us to him.”
“And I killed his men and rescued your friends why then, exactly?” she demanded, trying to keep anger out of her voice, knowing it would be lost on him. “Your words make no sense in either language.” She switched back to Tahni for a proverb she’d heard from Kan-Ten several times through the years. “You flee the truth for the light it would shed on your misdeeds.”
Several of the workers who had kept at their tasks despite the distractions stopped now, staring at the two of them. Vala-Kel began to bring up the weapon he held, but Fontenot’s Gauss pistol jumped into her hand as if it had always been there.
“Just give me an excuse, motherfucker,” she said, not caring if he missed the subtleties of the human expression.
“Vala-Kel,” Kan-Ten said, stepping between the two of them, “I would like to know how you think our enemies knew of our mission to retrieve these weapons.”
“What do you accuse me of, brother?” He still had his weapon held at the ready, the muzzle halfway between them. “Do you side with the humans now?”
“I side with my friends, whether they be human or Tahni. I wish I could believe you were among them.”
“If you are accusing me of betraying our people,” Vala-Kel said, tossing his KE-gun to the floor, the hard plastic and metal clattering loudly at his feet, “then there is only one remedy.” He made an elaborate gesture that Fontenot didn’t recognize, beginning with his hands palm-out over his head and ending with them clenched at his sides. “I challenge you, Kan-Ten, in the name of the True Emperor, for the sake of the Path, and may the truth favor its own.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Fontenot demanded, her pistol still in her hand, but held down at her side.
“It is a fight, as you would say,” Kan-Ten told her, eyes locked with Vala-Kel’s. “With bare hands and to the death.”
She felt her guts tie themselves into knots at the thought. Fair fights were for suckers.
“I didn’t know you guys did that kind of shit.” It sounded a bit primitive even for the Tahni.
“It is not something that has been done in a long time,” he admitted. “And when it was, it was between claimants to the title of the True Emperor…in stories of old times.”
“Then don’t do it,” she suggested, throwing her hand up in disgust. “It’s like some asshole challenging me to a joust or some shit.”
“We don’t have time for this nonsense.” Singh’s voice was flat and full of disdain, his Gauss machine pistol somehow already in his hand, and Fontenot thought for a moment that he was going to shoot Vala-Kel right then and there.
She noticed the other Tahni closing in around them, a few of them already armed with the KE-guns taken from the crates, and she put a restraining hand on his arm. He paused, glancing around with a scowl and an obvious estimation of whether he could kill them all before they got a shot off at him.
“What transpires?”
The turn of phrase was odd, and in English accented all to hell, Fontenot thought. She looked over to the staircase leading up to the garage office and saw the Matriarch coming down, her younger assistant at her side. It had been the assistant who’d spoken; she doubted the Matriarch would bother learning English.
“There has been a challenge issued, Matriarch,” Vala-Kel called to her. “I await a response from my opponent.”
“Do you believe this is the time of legends?” That was the Matriarch and in her own language. Trying to follow the conversation was giving Fontenot a headache. “Do we not have enough enemies without creating them in our own ranks?”
“I accept,” Kan-Ten said abruptly, throwing down his own weapon and stepping up to Vala-Kel, stopping only centimeters from the other male.
“Are you fucking nuts?” Fontenot asked him, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him around to face her. “What the hell are you trying to prove?”
“Do you want to stop the violence in this city?” he asked her. “You seek to solve one half of it. This,” he gestured at Vala-Kel and the other males who surrounded him, “is the other half. If I allow his version of the truth to go unchallenged, there will always be those who believe it.”
“And some half-assed gladiator match is going to change that?” she asked, shaking her head.
“To them, it will.” His beady black gaze locked with hers. “This must happen, and you must not interfere. Promise me that you won’t, Korri.”
She let her hand fall off of him, rolling her eyes.
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
“If this foolishness is to be done,” the Matriarch said, coming no closer to the party of males, “it will be done as I dictate. You will fight until one either yields voluntarily or is no longer able to go on, but not to the death. This is my command.”
“Very well,” Vala-Kel acknowledged, and Kan-Ten gave what she recognized as a gesture of assent.
“You males,” the old Tahni female ordered, “form a ring, weapons out. Let no one interfere.”
“No one” meaning “us,” Fontenot thought, giving the old biddy the stink-eye.
The collected group of workers and guards who’d gathered in the garage to unload the shipment clustered around Kan-Ten and Vala-Kel, leaving them a circle about ten meters across of bare concrete floor. Two of the males retrieved their fallen KE-guns and pulled them away, while another checked to make sure neither carried any other weapons, then retreated into the curving line of onlookers. The males held their newly-acquired guns awkwardly, pointing them at the floor or the ceiling or, in a couple cases, each other, and Fontenot thought sure they’d wind up shooting someone by accident.
There was enough of a gap between the males that she could see Kan-Ten squaring off with his old friend within the ring they’d formed. She paced back and forth, nervous energy propelling her as much as the isotope power packs that ran her cybernetics. She should, she knew, just kill this asshole and back everyone off; they didn’t know how to use those guns and wouldn’t be that hard to intimidate. Then she could drag Kan-Ten out of there and go find Jordi. That’s what Sandi and Ash would want her to do.
“You want to make a play,” Singh hissed in her ear, as if he were reading her mind, “I’ll back you.”
She considered it, wondering if she could trust the man to pull it off without just slaughtering the Tahni. She looked at Kan-Ten, saw him looking back at her and knew he’d never forgive her.
“No,” she ground out by way of answer to the bounty hunter. “We have to let him do it.”
“You’re as big of a fool as he is,” Singh muttered, but he stepped back, seemingly surrendering to the inevitable.
One of the older males, the one who’d complained about her and Singh’s presence earlier, stepped into the ring of guards and put a hand on the necks of each of the fighters. He said something in Tahni, something she didn’t recognize from her limited experience with the language. When he stepped back among the other males, Vala-Kel lunged at Kan-Ten, h
ands held in a high-and-low stance that seemed awkward and unnatural to Fontenot.
She felt herself tense up, but Kan-Ten stepped easily aside from the rush, and she recognized the martial arts stances and motions she’d taught him over the years in his technique. He slapped aside Vala-Kel’s clawing fingers, then swung his right forearm in a clubbing strike across the other male’s neck. Vala-Kel grunted as he stumbled aside, and Kan-Ten surged forward to follow up, but his old comrade was fast and experienced at his own form of fighting. He caught Kan-Ten by the wrist and twisted him into a hip-toss, throwing the other male across the floor, rolling into the legs of two of the guards.
Fontenot’s stomach muscles knotted with the effort of not running in to help her friend as Vala-Kel stomped down towards his face. He managed to catch the descending boot in the crook of his arm and twist Vala-Kel’s leg, bringing him to the ground and lunging on top of him. Kan-Ten’s right hand came down in a hammer-blow that caught Vala-Kel square in the chest, and Fontenot could hear the breath leave his lungs in a pained whoosh of air.
Just as she’d taught him, Kan-Ten followed through with his advantage, ramming his knee into his opponent’s side again and again. Vala-Kel caught some of the blows on his arms, and he managed to throw Kan-Ten off of him in a desperate thrashing of arms and legs in ways that human joints couldn’t have bent, then scrambled to his feet.
“Damn it,” she murmured. Fights that lasted longer than a few moves usually wound up indecisive, and they needed this fight to be decisive.
Kan-Ten jumped up in time to avoid another rush, circling around the perimeter of the surrounding Tahni males, watching Vala-Kel carefully, his eyes on his opponent’s center of gravity. She’d taught him that, too. People---humans and Tahni---could couch their eyes, could fake you out with their hands or their feet, but they couldn’t fool gravity. If they were going to make a move, it would show in their hips first. When Vala-Kel went for a low leg sweep, Kan-Ten dived over it, his arm sweeping across the other fighter’s chest and slamming him back to the floor.
“Now,” she whispered as if he could hear her. “Finish him.”
She’d coached Kan-Ten in the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu she’d learned in her youth, but she’d never been sure how much use it would be grappling with one of his own people. Tahni joints bent different ways, had different tolerances than human ones, and the leverage had to change along with those differences. One thing was the same for humans and Tahni, however: they still pumped blood from a heart in their torsos up through their necks to their brain. So sinking an arm into the arteries of a Tahni’s neck still cut that blood supply off, with predictable results.
Kan-Ten moved with speed gained in long, arduous practice sessions, sliding around to Vala-Kel’s back and catching his neck in a vice-like grip between his upper and lower arms. Vala-Kel jerked and thrashed and struck backwards with futile and strengthless blows, but Kan-Ten’s head was tucked into his shoulder, and the strikes spent themselves without doing any damage. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, Vala-Kel’s struggles grew feebler until he went limp, and still Kan-Ten held him in the choke until the Matriarch spoke.
“Let him go.” Her voice was clear and piercing even from forty meters away across the building.
Kan-Ten disengaged, letting Vala-Kel’s unconscious dead-weight fall away from him as if he was discarding something distasteful. He stood, looking over at the old female expectantly.
“The Truth has emerged victorious,” she declared formally. Her stance shifted into something that seemed less hieratic and more exasperated. “And now, if you males have finished with your boyish contests of strength, we have more important things to do…”
Fontenot felt a relieved breath hiss out of her, as if she’d been under acceleration in the ship and they’d just throttled back to one gravity.
“That was pointless,” Singh was saying quietly beside her. Then he paused, brow furling thoughtfully. “Unless this was…”
…a delaying tactic.
The building exploded. That was how it seemed to Fontenot. There was an overpressure that slammed into her with a hammer-blow of hot wind, and she stumbled backwards, metal shrapnel slicing into her arms as she threw them over her face, ripping through clothes and synthskin but ricocheting off her metal limbs. The pressure was followed by a wave of heat and a billow of black smoke, and only her bionics kept her on her feet, only her thermal and infrared filters letting her see anything at all.
She was the only one left standing, though Singh had fallen catlike into a crouch beside her; everyone else, all the other Tahni, were laid out on the cement floor, a few of them bleeding from minor wounds, and some obviously unconscious, while others were rolling and coughing fitfully. Her bionics had kept her upright, but the blast had stunned her and she felt as if the fog and smoke and clouds of particulates drifting through the garage had penetrated through into her thoughts as well. The only thing that pierced the veil of the concussion was the sight of Kan-Ten, writhing in pain and confusion on the floor beside the Tahni warrior he’d just defeated, barely in better condition.
She forced herself into motion, cybernetics acting when biological limbs would have failed her, and lunged forward to grab her friend by the arm, yanking him to his feet with her left hand as her weapon jumped into her right. Her natural ear was ringing, nearly whistling, but the pickups in her bionic audio disc heard the heavy footsteps of the troops on the concrete of the garage’s entrance ramp, and she knew she had seconds before they were inside…and she also knew there’d be too many to take with just the two of them.
Kan-Ten was tall, and broad, and very heavy, nearly two hundred kilograms, but she threw him over her left shoulder as if he weighed nothing, and ran. Her first instinct was to head for the rear exit, but she knew they’d have that covered, so she sprinted for the stairs. The Matriarch was still at the head of the staircase, collapsed atop her protégé, both of them barely conscious. She wanted to help them, wanted to make sure they got out; but she knew that she couldn’t, that there wasn’t time, and she passed them by.
Singh was behind her, she realized, following her either in affirmation of her sound tactical judgment or simply because he couldn’t think of a better idea. Her steps were ringing gongs off the metal grillwork of the stairs, where his were the soft kiss of a pouncing cat, and she was sure he could have gone faster if he wanted to; but he kept with her, and in a second, they were up on the landing of the catwalk where the sheet metal construction of the office was bolted into the exterior walls of the garage.
Below her, she felt more than saw the attackers pouring through the garage’s main entrance, heard their shouts and one or two shots echoing upward and wasn’t certain if they were aimed at her or at the Tahni. They’d come for the rest of the weapons, she was sure, and they’d been led here by Vala-Kel. She knew it in her gut, and she figured Kan-Ten had as well. Vala-Kel might want to keep the Matriarch and the others alive for his own purposes, but if the three of them were captured, they’d likely be killed out of hand, or turned over to Jordi for a less pleasant death.
She knew there was a fire exit from the second-floor catwalk; she remembered seeing it from the outside of the building, also recalled that it was on the opposite side from the office, and she turned that way off the landing, hoping against hope that Jordi’s thugs would be so busy with the others that they wouldn’t notice her. He’d be somewhere down there too, she knew. He’d never trust an operation this important to a subordinate, not as paranoid as he was.
There it was, the fire door, a metal hatch with a paddle lock across it; if it was still connected to the automatic alarm that the ancient warning sticker promised, everyone was about to know exactly where they were.
“Hey!” a voice called from the first floor, rough and petulantly insistent. “Up there!”
Fuck it, she thought, slamming the sole of her boot into the door with an impact that shivered her through her spine. That’s torn it.
The door swung op
en with a wrenching, squealing scream of rusted metal and the golden light of dawn shone through, nearly blinding her. She knew the hopper was right below the fire exit, and she knew just as well that they wouldn’t have time to take the drop-down ladder. There was a metal gate across the railing where the ladder went down, and she stepped atop it with a single bound, then dropped straight down.
She fell six meters, but it felt as if her stomach stayed at the second-floor platform, only catching up when her boots slammed into the hard pavement below with enough force to crack it. The servos in her bionic legs whined plaintively with the effort, Kan-Ten’s weight compressing her chest with a rush of outgoing breath. Her surroundings rushed up to meet her senses with as much force as her feet had impacted the concrete. She was standing next to their stolen hopper, marked with the faded crest of the Gennich Constabulary, and surrounding it were the same vehicles she’d seen back on the road to the Tahni weapons stash.
Most of Jordi’s people were inside, but he’d left a small guard with the vehicles, just four of them that she could see, three men and a woman. They’d heard her fall and turned toward her, their appropriated KE-guns swinging around at the new threat. The kick of her Gauss pistol was a packet of data sent through the neural feedback of her artificial hand, barely registering, her attention fixed on the one she’d instantly deemed the biggest threat. He was lean and ragged, but he had a look to him, the look of a stone killer, a look she knew well from her time in the Pirate Worlds…and from her mirror.
He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the tungsten-wrapped ceramic slug erased that look, along with most of his head. She was shifting to the next in her snap-judgment priority list, but a blast of tantalum needles sliced through the woman’s chest armor as if it weren’t there, and she stumbled forward, dead before she hit the ground. That was Singh, still trailing her and still as deadly as ever. They split the last two, killing both of them before either got off a shot, and she was about to head for the hopper’s cockpit when Singh rushed by her towards a parked rover.
