A howl…a tug…and 3.2 seconds of joint-locked agony later, a tap.
“Winner!”
The crowd around the triangle erupted, and Danny Tucker bounded to his feet—gloves high in the air—hell-bent on soaking up every last adulating second of it.
“Yeahhh!” he shouted into the wall of sound. Meanwhile, Mason, still clutching his arm, slammed his good fist into the mat before picking himself up and hobbling back to his corner—a corner, Danny noticed, that was suddenly devoid of a cheering section.
Seeing his opponent’s look of utter disgust, Danny responded in kind with one of equal amounts revelry. “Hey, Mason?”
The big man glanced up.
“Thanks for coming out tonight. Seriously, you were a good sport, and it was a lot of fun.”
Mason looked confused. “Ah, yeah, sure. But how did you—”
Danny shooed him off with his hand. “Here endeth the lesson, son. You may go now.”
Mason snorted a final protest before turning to leave, but Danny ignored it. Instead, the Bombshell’s newest middle-weight champion stripped off his gloves and began pacing the ropes, high-fiving and fist-bumping everyone he could before heading back to center-ring where the announcer stood clapping alongside the bar’s owner: a short, balding man who carried with him that most hallowed of trophies. Gaudy, absurdly huge, and covered from buckle to faux-leather strap’s end with fake jewels and faux gold plating that remained forever scuffed, the Bombshell’s ten-year-old title belt might’ve been the single ugliest thing Danny had ever seen. But damn it all if that worthless piece of crap isn’t gorgeous tonight.
“That is so not going on the trip,” Madisyn said once he’d been officially declared the champion and awarded the belt. “You know that, right?”
Chuckling, Danny turned to find her standing at ringside next to Anders, Katie, and Wyatt, boasting a flat smirk that was only slightly betrayed by the twitching smile of pride beneath it.
“Never even crossed my mind.” Danny tossed the strap over his shoulder and looked around. “What happened to Reeg?”
“He’s settling up with the house to get you paid tonight instead of next week,” Anders said. “He knew you wanted the cash for your trip.”
“That’s my boy,” Danny said.
“So how do you feel?” Madisyn pointed to the fresh set of cuts on his face.
“I’m sure it looks worse than it is,” Danny said. “Couple of stitches here and there, and I’ll be good to go for tomorrow.”
Madisyn pursed her lips and poked a particularly dark splotch on his right side.
Danny grimaced.
“Good to go, huh, stud?”
He shrugged. “Hey, I’m not on crutches, am I?”
Madisyn rolled her eyes, though Danny didn’t doubt for an instant it was all a front. Whether she liked it or not, she was proud of him.
“Come on,” Madisyn said, motioning him out of the ring as the chants of speech, speech, speech began to echo off the walls. “Let’s go kick the tires with the med staff and make sure you’re all in one piece. Then we’ll score up your winnings and get outta here.”
Danny halted her by the arm. “Not quite yet. Just gimme a second.”
Madisyn looked perplexed, but returned to Katie’s side anyway.
Danny signaled for the mic as the crowd began to quiet.
“How we doing tonight, Bombshell?”
Another surge of cheers.
“Awesome.” Danny spotted Reegan at ringside with a cloth satchel and an ear-to-ear grin. “I want to thank everyone who came out tonight to show their support of this match. Don’t get me wrong—as fighters, we love what we do because we love the competition. But, amateurs or not, you guys make us feel like rock stars for it, and we’re grateful.”
“Ruah!” someone shouted from the back.
“I also want to thank my manager, Les Reegan, for setting all this up, and the Bombshell for giving me another crack at the title. They didn’t owe me anything after my last fight, and yet they gave me a rematch anyway, in spite of the mile-long waiting list of younger, more talented guys ahead of me.” He tipped a light salute to the Shell’s owner, then to Reegan, who brandished the satchel with a jubilant thumbs-up.
From there, Danny returned his gaze to Madisyn. “Having said all of that, I made a promise to someone when I came in tonight…someone very special to me. And while I might not be good for much, I am a man of my word.”
Reegan’s expression sank when Danny pulled the belt from his bruised shoulder and regarded it—its scarred, fake-gold plating shimmering in the spotlight. “As such, while it is my sincere honor to bring the middle-weight title back to the 102, I must announce that the job of keeping it there will fall to someone else. For as of tonight, I am officially retired from Kachuro competition.”
A mixture of cheers and boos rained down on the ring as Danny gave his final wave to the crowd and descended the steps at his corner to rejoin the others. This time, however, Madisyn didn’t try to hide her smile.
“Thank you for that,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that now. You could’ve savored this for a few more days, or even weeks if you’d wanted to. I would’ve understood.”
Danny shook his head and smiled back at her. “Everything I want to savor is right here. Now what do you say we bail outta this dump and go home? We’ve got a trip to pack for.”
* * *
Sitting in his office aboard the Kamuir, Alec Masterson was scanning the morning’s duty roster when the comm terminal on his desk began to chime. He touched a thumb to the respond key. “What is it, Captain Briggs?”
“Sir, it’s about that Auran staff sergeant you asked me to find. I may have something.”
* * * * *
Chapter 19: Deadlock
Descending the last spiral of stairs onto the parliamentary palace’s ground floor, Lucius Zier rushed to collect his thoughts in preparation for the emergency session that, as of 0650 this morning, awaited him.
Gods, this is moving fast. He wasn’t completely surprised. As expected, word of Masterson’s findings in the expanse had spread like wildfire upon the Kamuir’s return to Alystier last evening. And while the resulting political unrest alone would’ve warranted a swift response, today’s headline in the Eurial Sun had pretty much demanded it.
“Major Announcement Forthcoming from Parliament in Wake of Commandant’s Return,” the front page had read. Of course, the source of the story remained anonymous, as always, but Zier knew better.
Walking past the entrance to Harth Gallery on his right, Zier arrived at the main atrium outside of the Chamber of Ministers and crossed the imperial seal in the center to halt, as he usually did, before the all-too-familiar statue standing guard over its entrance. Clothed in the tattered rags of an Auran militiaman, the bronze soldier brandished a rifle above his head and wore the rigid, teeth-bared face of a triumphant battle cry.
Zier regarded his father with hard incredulity. “You always were a bullying son of a bitch,” he muttered to the statue, then pushed through the door into the grand hall beyond, where two hundred eleven men—all dressed in formal minister’s garb—rose to their feet in customary, albeit mostly disingenuous, applause.
“Be seated,” Zier said on his way to the podium down front. Flanked on each side by three flags, all fitted with ornate golden top-caps, the podium faced into the chamber: a lavish, tri-tiered theater comprised of six sections of benches—four in the lower levels and two in the balcony.
As was tradition, Zier’s primary cabinet members filled the first row while the Alystierian commandant, wearing his usual stoicism, sat on stage beside the chancellor’s throne.
The two exchanged looks as Zier took to the podium. “Gentlemen. As always seems to be the case of late, the issues requiring our attention are myriad. Alas, on this day, we all know there is but one that transcends them all, so let us dispense with the formalities and get down to it.” Zier glanced around the hall at multiple nods of
agreement. “By now, you’ve all had a chance to review the commandant’s report on both his encounter with the aliens while in the Rynzer Expanse, as well as the ship that encounter produced—a ship, I would note, whose technology remains mostly a mystery to us, much like its creators. Even so, Commandant Masterson feels confident enough in his dealings with these Kurgorians to deem them worthy of an alliance with the empire, a belief he’s seen fit to put forth to us by way of a motion to call for a vote. So, brothers of Alystier…what say you?”
Minister Saul Doering of Rondow Province stood up on his cane in tier two, and Zier felt his stomach turn.
“I see no other alternative but to support such a treaty, and I stand ready to lend my vote to it at once,” declared the nine-term statesman, creating a stir around him. “We need these aliens’ technology. In the span of five years, and in spite of the commandant’s best efforts, the Aurans have gone from nearly defeated to attacking us in our own space, and all because their scientists beat ours to a C-100 breakthrough. Now we have the chance to rectify that and level the playing field, so I say we trust the commandant’s judgment and seize the chance while we can.” The old man snorted. “Honestly, Chancellor, I don’t even know why we’re discussing this.”
Insolent old fool. Doering was the parliamentary establishment’s unofficial ringleader. Like Ministers Kean, Felling, and others, he’d been among Zier’s most ardent opponents for years, having challenged his position on everything from immigration to his repeal of the Reid Act—that horrific disgrace of legislation that’d banned non-enlisted women from having children.
“Tell me, Minister Doering,” Zier said. “How is Marshall Ellerman these days? In good health, I presume, given Firefall Industries’ lofty financial record of late.”
Doering cocked his head. “What does he have to do with this?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Zier said. “You see, your entire stance on this issue is built on your belief that Alystier’s shortfall in the C-100 arms race gives us no choice but to ratify this treaty, and now.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point, Minister, is that I find that stance highly peculiar since, nine years ago, it was you who not only championed, but stamped your name on a bill that effectively barred two-thirds of our outer-system interests—Detron City comes to mind—from competing for our most lucrative R&D contracts. As such, many of those companies were forced to close their doors, which then allowed Firefall Industries and a handful of others to control the market and inflate the cost of doing business—an outcome, I’d submit to you, that set our C-100 program back a decade, while allowing your friend Ellerman to bleed us dry for tens of billions in defense funds.”
Doering’s face turned red. “How dare you accuse me of manipulating the market! That bill was about keeping our funding at home where it belongs, not out on the border with a bunch of outworld Auran sympathizers!”
Ah, the patriotism card, Zier almost said, but didn’t.
“Furthermore,” Doering went on, “we gave that task to a special financial advisory committee, and it was their findings that informed our shaping of the bill, not the forecasted profits of an honest businessman, as you suggest.”
This time Zier couldn’t help himself. “An honest businessman,” he scoffed, not bothering to hide the condescension in his voice. “Remind me again, Minister Doering, how much did Firefall contribute to your reelection campaign again?”
Another stir of the crowd.
“Enough,” said Roan Tully, a sitting minister from Ledington Province and a respected moderate. “Chancellor Zier, while I haven’t historically agreed with Minister Doering on much of anything, I must side with his logic in this instance. No matter how we got here, the hard truth remains that we cannot continue to stand toe-to-toe with the ASC on conventional technology alone. We just can’t. In the last five years, the Aurans have reclaimed nearly every world we’d taken from them prior to Dulaston—and that’s after we established blocking protocols to keep their Makos out of our carriers! Now it is our worlds that fall to their forces. Thaylon, Fyndahl, Kaulia, and of late, Vendale 2; all lost in the last eighteen months. There are even whispers of amassing armies in the Thaylon and Fyndahl systems as part of an eventual invasion of Krenza Province.” Tully glanced around the room at the heavy faces of his peers, then back to Zier. “We cannot do this any longer, Chancellor. C-100 technology must be ours if the empire is to survive.”
“On that, Minister Tully, you and I are in total agreement. But trusting a race of aliens we hardly know is not the way.” Zier returned his focus to the collective. “Brothers of Alystier, I beseech you. Do not be so quick to give up on our own scientific community, for it is with them that the solution to this crisis may yet still live.”
“With respect, Chancellor,” said the always-curt Armand Felling, a prominent member of the science directorate and another ally of the contracting elite. “Your lack of faith in our Dr. Tarsus’s work as head of the C-100 program is well documented. Why do you now believe he can succeed?”
Zier folded his arms. “Frankly, Minister Felling, I don’t believe he can. Not alone, anyway. And just for the record, I have nothing personal against Miles Tarsus, though at best I do find him extremely overwhelmed by this assignment, if not altogether unqualified for it. Gentlemen, what I am proposing is that, rather than closing this project off to the public—as if our lack of C-100 technology is somehow a secret—we open it up to them, free of restriction, and let anyone with a viable idea follow it through to fruition until we arrive at a working beta drive.”
“So you’re suggesting what, exactly?” Tully asked. “That we promote some sort of competition among developers?”
“To some degree,” Zier said. “What I propose is an entirely open production model whereby anyone with expertise in caldrasite—be they engineers, mineralogists, programmers, or what have you—is given universal access via free license to all of our current C-100 data and hyperdrive specs, along with the freedom to alter any aspect as he or she sees fit. From there, any of those new designs can then be redistributed at will throughout the development collective, thus facilitating maximum collaboration and, with any luck, an expedited outcome.”
“Preposterous,” Doering spat. “Never mind the fact that we’d be in violation of no less than five dozen multi-billion-credit contracts, what you’re proposing flies in the face of everything the Doering Bill stands for, which is to protect our interests at home by keep—”
“The Doering Bill is wrong,” Zier said. “And it alone is to blame for our technological stagnancy…it and, well, men like yourself and Marshall Ellerman, who would put their own greed before the good of the empire.”
Doering looked as if he were about to explode. Unlike nine years ago, however, the room wasn’t entirely behind him. He must’ve seen it, too, because he held his tongue and sat down.
“Think about it, gentlemen.” Zier seized on the momentum. “How many worlds have we added to our ranks in the last half century? How many worlds, with how many minds, capable of producing how many ideas with the potential for benefiting us all, be it technologically or otherwise? So why, in our most desperate hour, would we not leverage that for all that we can? Here and now, let’s correct the mistake we made in this chamber a decade ago, and put our fate back where it belongs…not in the hands of politicians, committees, or special interest groups, but with the innovative force that is the Alystierian people. It’s the only chance we have at a timely solution.”
“With all due deference, Highness, you don’t know that,” Masterson said, at last rising to his feet and shooting a quick glance at Max Larson down front.
Damn traitor. Zier fought back a sneer as his eyes met those of the commandant. How many lives have we lost on account of you and your blood-thirsty media cabal?
Masterson strode to the podium.
“Therein is the rub, you see,” Masterson said with an eye on the assembly. “Sire, you may well be right i
n your belief that more minds attacking this problem will yield a faster solution, but you can’t know that for sure, and the empire is out of time. The Kurgorians, meanwhile, stand ready and willing to give us the technology now.”
“But at what cost?” Zier asked the increasingly restless hall. “Heed my warning on this, ministers. Do not rush to associate yourselves with these people. Not yet. That is not to say that, in time, the Kurgorians won’t prove themselves every bit the allies Commandant Masterson believes them to be. But for now, let us get to know them. Who are they? What principles do they adhere to? What code do they follow?” Zier shook his head in frustration. “For gods’ sakes, brothers, we’re talking about granting them access to our own space! Are these not questions worth asking?”
“So ask them,” Masterson said, his expression cool.
Zier studied him. What are you up to, Alec?
Masterson pointed to the holo-emitter in the floor at the center of the rostrum. “Chancellor, Ministers of Parliament, if I may…The commander of the Kurgorian ship thought you might feel this way. So in anticipation of that, he has moved his vessel into transmission range at the edge of the expanse. We need only hail him.”
You slippery son of a bitch, Zier thought. Realizing he had no choice, though, the chancellor stepped aside and returned to his throne while Masterson dimmed the lights and cued up the emitter from the podium. Seconds later, the center of the floor spiraled open to release a cylindrical spray of light into the air. It swirled about for a moment, fluctuating in shape, then redirected onto the floor where it converged into a single, solid figure.
Tall, thin, and dressed from head to toe in extravagant black robes befitting a high-ranking official, the being appeared mostly humanoid, with the look of a male. The skin of his hands and head, however, told the stark difference in his anatomy. Bright red and covered in scales that seemed to glow like crystal in the light, the man’s entire countenance all but radiated fire.
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