by Scott Sigler
“I’m starting the clock now,” Chai said. “I ask a question, if you don’t answer in two seconds, I kill you. One ... two ...
“The Reef,” Patah said.
Chai stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You need time to recover,” Doc said. “It is the only place I could think of where you could remain ... invisible.”
“The shucking tail-end of known space? You’re sending me to the shucking Reef?”
“Yes,” Doc said quickly. “We’re there, actually. I would have liked to have given you more time in the tank, but we are here, and you must go.”
Chai shook his head. Even that hurt. “Give me a rundown on what you did to me. How bad am I shucked?”
“You’ll heal. You will also limp. The things you did to your knee ... well, modern medicine can only go so far. The knee will never be normal. You have one functioning eye left. I replaced the segment of bone in your face that ... well, needless to say, I had to calcify an entirely new fragment.”
“Why the cheap organic crap? Why did you take out my gear?”
“The Creterakians. They use the mods to track professional fighters.”
“You think the bats are at the shucking reef, man?”
“They are everywhere. They find those with mods. They always have. You didn’t really imagine they’d let unaffiliated super-powered warriors wander their space unchecked, did you?”
Chai didn’t answer, but neither did he look surprised. “So I’m not really alive.”
“I’m afraid you can’t be. The entire galaxy watched you die. Gredok the Splithead would kill us both, and everyone we have ever cared for in this life.”
“Everyone I care for is already dead.” That much was true. The ones he did care for — Brocka the Razor-Barbed, Korak the Cutter ... those magnificent creatures, those teachers of life, those creators of Chaiyal, they were dead because Chai had killed them with his bare hands.
“Shucking Gredok,” Chai said. “The little fur ball out-played me.”
“And me,” Doc said.
Faint instinct, like the dulled edge of a sword, flashed within Chai. A part of him still wanted revenge, still wanted what it always wanted, to conquer his enemies and see them broken at his feet. But the impulse, the drive had changed.
Since the first moment he’d entered the ring, a fire had raged inside of Chaiyal. The more he fought, the more intensely it burned, until it became a constant inferno, a fiery beast that demanded to be fed. It drove him, day and night, to train, to learn, to compete. Nothing could quench it save that one all-consuming goal: to be the best, beyond any question or measure.
But now, there was nothing. Inside there was only a cooling, a calmness. He’d awakened to find hell frozen over. Korak was dead, and whatever billions of mindless drones thought, he, Chaiyal North, had defeated the Quyth fighter. There was no one else left. Chai was the last being standing, the undisputed king of gladiator mountain. The Gate of Life belonged to him alone.
And that fire had been extinguished.
“Shuck it,” Chai said.
He forced himself to swing a leg over the tank and stand on his own. Chai’s muscles screamed in a hellish chorus of pain, and his blood rushed like jets of liquid flame. He refused to yield to either, nor to the almost crippling nausea produced in the pit of his gut. The floor was warm and clean, a temporary white floor laid down over rusted steel and composite. Doc might have been sneaky, but he clearly didn’t like germs.
He began flexing his limbs. More torture, but it was the only way to get his body to begin regenerating.
“Chai, you should rest. You have much healing to do.”
Chai ignored the advice. “What now?”
The doctor relented. “I have clothes for you.”
Patah flew to a pile of clothes. As he did, Chai looked around. Now able to see more than just the ceiling, his one eye took in an array of medracks. Most of them were crusted with dried blood and bits of flesh. When Doc had finished with a particular piece of gear, he’d pushed it aside and moved onto the next. Considering the obsessively clean tank and the floor, that mean Patah had worked with a desperate sense of urgency to not clean the equipment when he finished. It also meant Doc had worked alone.
If Chai killed him, killed the freighter crew, then no one would know he existed at all.
Doc’s mouth tentacles dropped a selection of garments on the floor a few feet from Chai. Doc was still keeping his distance. Smart. The clothes and accessories were designed for a Human male. Chai cherry-picked a simple shirt, pants and a good pair of boots. He also pulled out a cloak made from some type of synthetic animal hide. It looked like a monk’s robe. Not his style. Chai used one of Doc’s metal tools to cut the sleeves from it, slicing the stiff hood into a high collar. In a few minutes he’d turned it into a savage-looking duster and was pulling it on.
“How do you expect this to play out?” Chai asked. “A missing body from a heavyweight championship match is going to bring up questions. Marcus won’t be satisfied unless he can take a torch to it on a pyre himself.”
“I took care of that,” Doc said. “You might be pleased to know Marcus did just that. Your face was rather ... damaged. Your tattoos provided identification of the body.”
Chai’s hands shot to his shoulder tat, and he craned his neck down to look. The inverted cross — gone. Normal skin in its place.
“You cut off my tats and put them on ... who?”
“Do you really care?”
Chaiyal shrugged, sending shock waves of agony all the way to his toes. Somehow Doc had come up with a modded body and faked a corpse. That kind of crap took planning. Then again, planning was implied for a sentient that could inject a Human with a drug that would stop his heart, then spirit away the body and bring him back to life.
“By the way, what did you use on me?”
“Karmelian neurotoxin,” Doc said. “Completely shuts down your nervous system, puts you into a coma. The antidote is a simple injection. As long as you get the antidote within twenty minutes, there is usually no brain damage.”
“And how long did it take you to give me that antidote?”
“Thirty-five minutes,” Doc said. “The ring was very crowded.”
There was a fog-laden surgical mirror affixed to one of the bloody gear racks. Chai examined everything above his neck. His face was no uglier than it had been, just a little fresher, bruised and swollen. The shape of his face had changed, his nose, his cheeks — he barely recognized himself. Korak had really dished out a beating, savage enough to shatter Chai’s face. Even in death, Korak the Cutter continued to forge a new man out of Chaiyal North.
Patah had provided a selection of hoods and head wear, Chai guessed to help hide his appearance. Chai pulled out a nondescript skullcap and stuffed the smashed melon that was his cranium inside of it. He also chose a wide-brimmed hat and fitted it snugly over the compressed mass.
It did the trick.
The remnants of Doc Patah’s ministrations filled several gleaming metallic tubs aligned atop a table. Stained surgical tools, chunks of gore and removed pieces of hardware were all marinating in several inches of pooled blood. Chai sifted through it briefly. Shrapnel from Korak’s hard carapace was still lodged in Chai’s gear. He selected a piece the size of a sand dollar and began cleaning it off.
He used one of Patah’s laser scalpels to shape it. When he was satisfied, he set the piece aside and reached for Patah’s micro-bolt gun with one hand, pulling the gauze from his ravaged eye socket with the other.
Holding the carapace coin over his blinded eye, Chai stamped it into place. He flinched as each bolt pierced his flesh and entered his skull, but no more than most beings would flinch at a pinprick.
Doc Patah watched all of this without comment, unsure whether he was looking at a trophy or a shrine.
“I’m afraid you’ll be on your own,” Doc said. “I don’t have much in the way of money to offer you. I spent what I h
ad to arrange for your care and transportation. And accessing your own accounts is obviously out of the question. I’m sorry I couldn’t plan things out better.”
The Harrah was a shucking magician, and he was apologizing for bad planning? Guy probably apologized for everything. “Money never really mattered. I’ve never even carried currency on me. People have always just ... given me what I needed, what I wanted. Because of who I am, what I can do.”
“I think you’ll find that will change.”
For the first time, Chai smiled. “No, it won’t. No matter how the universe changes, some things will always stay the same.”
Chai stuffed several changes of clothes into a beaten field pack Doc had also provided, along with a small stock of pain medication and rations.
“Do you have any idea what you’ll do?” Patah asked.
“Do? I’ll do what I’ve always done,” Chai said. “I’ll do it until I can’t do it anymore.”
The Reef? Nothing like changing everything all at once.
Chai turned his back on the doctor, and his booted feet carried him out the cargo hold door. He never thanked Patah.
Patah never expected he would.
• • •
The Johnson Branch of the Reef was more occupied than most of the ancient, sprawling construct. More occupied, which was to say, it actually had a bar with more than two patrons. Chevy Mac’s Tavern was dirty and ramshackle, and new waitresses never lasted long. Few pretty girls made it to the Reef, and the ones that did make it usually weren’t pretty by the time their first shift was over. Dezra was young and petal-faced. Maybe a six by the standards of universal Human beauty, an unblemished girl like her was a raging eleven on the Reef. An hour into her debut shift, a trio of roughnecks came in. Adhering to pack rules, their leader was the biggest and the meanest. Dezra did her best to placate him while keeping out of arm’s reach, but it didn’t take two drinks before things began to spiral out of control.
By the time she slapped him, the roughnecks had already decided how they were going to entertain themselves that night. They grabbed her and threw her on top of their table. The bartender, aging badly and with a bum leg, clenched his withered fists against the bar top and gritted his teeth. It wasn’t the first time he’d been a helpless witness to such an act, and he had no illusions about it being the last.
“I’ve got a joke for you boys.” The voice came from just inside the door, so deep and commanding it actually halted the entire room.
The roughnecks took in the sight of him: big shucker, long coat, wide-brimmed hat, hard patch over one eye. He would’ve been a laughable cliché if it weren’t for all the scars and the look in the eye he had left.
“A joke?” the leader said. “I love a good joke. Lay it on us, Cyclops.”
The new arrival only nodded. “What has three teeth, two tongues and no balls?”
No one had a guess, but that didn’t matter. The stranger spent the next sixty seconds delivering the punch line in graphic detail. It took less than half that time, as she was stepping over all the parts of the roughnecks he’d torn off, for Dezra to decide she’d go home with him that night if he were so inclined.
“I’d say that earned you a free drink,” the bartender said, his whole body quivering with relief.
“I’d say that earned me a free dinner.”
“Dinner it is, on the house,” the old man offered without hesitation. “In fact, if you’d like to stick around, dinner is on the house every night — part of your pay for keeping the place respectable.”
For the second time in as many weeks, Chaiyal North smiled.
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