by Murray, Lee
“Rowan.”
Damn.
Rowan turns and jogs to close the distance, slipping in behind Mathilde and Tonya and next to Ari, as they make their way to their accommodations in the Conclave Village.
“What are the odds on us?” Ari asks when they are shoulder-to-shoulder.
Rowan shakes his head. “Didn’t catch them.”
Brushing away the tentacles of an inquisitive Silicess, Ari nods, his expression solemn. “It’s probably best not to know,” he says. “Whatever they are, they’re not going to be promising.”
He’s right. The chances of a Terrean victory are grim. At the last Conclave, the team had come a dismal second-to-last, only narrowly avoiding disqualification from these Games. In fact, only once in the 7000-year history of the Conclave Games have the Terreans placed in the top ten—and many believe that was just a lucky break. The Phemeres, on the other hand, have won three times, giving them ultimate directorship over the League of Governors and control of the universe for the past three thousand years. Rowan had known about the Phemeres’ rule, of course: it’s an obligatory part of the Terrean school curriculum, but being selected for the team was the first Rowan had known about the surprise hiding in his DNA. Who knew he was a direct descendant of Spartacus?
Yeah, just my luck. Who needs that kind of legacy?
Ari gives Rowan a jab in the ribs. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have asked. They’re just odds. Even the bookies have no idea what kinds of challenges the amphitheatres will throw at us. It’s anyone’s bet.”
Rowan smiles weakly, Ari’s optimism doing nothing to calm his nerves. Even without hearing the odds confirmed, Rowan knows that the chances of any of them making it past the first amphitheatre are next to nil.
They’re approaching the gates to the Village now, the two carved pillars visible above them in the distance, but closer in the crowd is even tighter, making progress slow. Galileo tucks into the slipstream of what Rowan guesses must be a Fhage, its jelly-like form cutting a swathe through the hordes. It’s a good move by the guide as Fhageans aren’t fussy, happy to ingest anything that gets in their way. Passing through the narrow streets in the creature’s wake, their progress improves. At the back of the group, Rowan takes the opportunity to observe as many of the Games visitors as he can. It’s his first visit off-Terra, and he knows only a little about the other species here. Any information could be helpful when the Games begin.
Something brushes against his neck.
“Hey.”
The Silicess again. Reasonably common on Terra, Silici are curious beings. Just as a Terrean baby puts new objects in its mouth, the short-sighted Silici taste their environment by touching things with their hairy tentacles. But this one has a serious problem with respecting personal boundaries. Rowan bats the tentacle away gently. “Cut it out, will ya?”
Abruptly, a roar vibrates behind him, so loud even the dust is startled. Rowan’s blood runs cold. He whirls, his arms raised, prepared to protect himself. But it seems the howl wasn’t directed at him. He watches as a being—one Rowan doesn’t recognise— whips out a mollusc-like tongue and, in a rapid-fire action, slaps the Silicess across the pathway. Stunned, the Silicess lurches backward and tumbles in the dust, its tentacles flailing, their hairy receptors grasping at the substrate. It lets out a high-pitched shriek, whether of pain or indignity Rowan’s not sure, but the sound makes his eardrums ache.
This isn’t good. Rowan needs to get out of here. He glances around, but Galileo and the others have gone. He can’t see them anywhere in the crowd. Cursing under his breath, he pushes out in the direction he last saw them, but the horde, sensing violence, moves en masse to create a circle around the combatants. Rowan is shunted bodily to the front, his back to the throng. The crowd pack in, eager for a better view, their stench sickly and stringent. Rowan chokes back a wave of nausea. He’s got to get out.
“Thirty cregals on the Gyptor!” yells a man.
The Gyptor bellows again, approaching the Silicess, its armoured hackles raised in a show of strength. So close, Rowan can’t help cringing. The Gyptor is a formidable sight. Surely, confronted with its rival’s towering form, the Silicess will chicken out? Crawl away? Instead, it shuffles upright on its hind appendage and excretes a pungent white substance. The crowd screams its delight.
“It’s hunkering down,” a Cron screams in Rowan’s ear. “The Silicess is cementing itself to the ground. It’s going to fight.”
“Twenty on the Silicess!”
Hungry for a fight, the spectators chant for their favourite.
“Gyptor, Gyptor!”
“Silicess!”
Shit, things are about to get really ugly.
Rowan tries again to get out of the circle, flexing his legs and pushing hard backwards against the mass of bodies and limbs, but he’s hemmed in tightly by the frenzied crowd. All he can do is shrink back as the Gyptor attacks, dropping its tongue from height, the rasp-like radula slicing through a Silici tentacle. The detached appendage rolls to a stop near Rowan’s feet and twitches in the dust. The crowd roars. But now that the Gyptor has moved in closer, the Silicess can see it. It pivots on its ‘foot’, coiling its tentacles, then slashes at the Gyptor in an arc of venom. The strike is ineffective; the Gyptor’s amour has already closed over its precious tongue. But a man near Rowan howls, as the fast-acting poison causes his eye to swell and explode.
Enraged now, the Gyptor hacks mercilessly at the Silicess, landing blow after blow, while its adversary sways and bobs on its tethered foot, unable to defend itself from the onslaught. In seconds, the Silicess has lost three more of its hairy tentacles, the severed stumps oozing pink body fluid. The Gyptor, sensing victory, moves in for the kill. The crowd shriek for blood. The Gyptor raises its tongue a final time and Rowan winces, anticipating the strike on the hapless Silicess.
Suddenly, the Klaxon sounds. The Games have started.
2
Safe in their accommodations at Conclave Village, members of the Terrean team pull up a semi-circle of chairs in the living area to discuss their strategy. With just hours remaining before the Games begin, there’s little time left to prepare. Though there hasn’t been much in the way of planning so far. Instead, all the focus has been on the brawl in the market-place, and Rowan’s presence in the front row. As if he’d wanted to be there.
“And you just stood there,” Galileo grumbles as he paces the length of the room. “Beside an angry Gyptor with an unsheathed radula. What if that Gyptor had decided to hack you up instead? Don’t you know that I’m responsible for your safety until the Games start? If anything had happened to you, I could be facing a disciplinary hearing.”
Still shaken from the event, Rowan’s brows knit together. The irony of the guide’s comments claw at his gut. Just a few hours more and the team will be off his hands, and Galileo will be free to go about his business. What Rowan wouldn’t do for that freedom. A little disciplinary hearing? Bring it on! Instead, a few more hours and who knows what might happen to him? In a few more hours, Rowan could die an excruciating death and no one would give a rat’s arse.
“So then, what happened?” Ari says. Ari has pulled his chair closer to Rowan’s. Officially, Ari is their leader. No other Terrean teen has more Spartan blood than Ari, and the psych tests prove it: he’s decisive, determined, and resourceful. A science major, he’s an all-rounder too, top kayaker, plays badminton. And Ari likes Praxel Cyrus and his band—has practically the same iSplaylist as Rowan—all of which make him a good guy in Rowan’s book.
Rowan replies with a shrug. “That was it. The Klaxon sounded, the Gyptor withdrew its tongue-thing, and everyone shoved off.”
“Why would the Gyptor back down?” Tonya asks, reminding Rowan of how little she knows.
“It’s a condition of Conclave,” Galileo explains. “A rule dating back nine and a half millennia. In those days, battling Terrean tribes would gather at Olympia, where each tribe would put forward their champions
to compete in events to test their speed, strength and agility…”
Tonya rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I get it: every tribe fought for the glory of their kind, blah blah… If you’re going to tell us the rules, can you at least spare us the long-winded history lesson?”
Galileo flashes her a look, but carries on with his story anyway. “During those Games, all hostilities would cease to allow the athletes to train and compete. Conclave is based on this old practice, so the same rule applies.”
“So the instant the Klaxon sounded to announce the start of the Games, the Gyptor had to stand down,” Ari says, for Tonya’s benefit. “It had no choice but to spare the Silicess.”
“If it didn’t want to see its own team disqualified from Conclave—yes.”
“You ask me, it’s a pity the Gyptor didn’t kill it,” Tonya interjects. “It would’ve made one less team for us to worry about.”
The team members are quiet for a moment because she has a point.
Eventually, Mathilde breaks the silence, asking, “What about the Silicess? Did it survive?”
“What does it matter?” Tonya says. “They’re only dumb creatures. Some of them not even smart enough to know when to keep their hairy tentacles out of other people’s business.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Tonya,” Galileo says. “Species competing at the Conclave have to be intelligent. They have to be sentient. They wouldn’t have been invited to the Games otherwise. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate them. The Gyptors, the Crons, the Fhageans, even the scatter-brained Silici are dangerous adversaries. You mustn’t take a single species for granted.”
Putting aside his anger, Rowan thinks back to his neighbour’s ruptured eye and the four Silici tentacles left behind in the dust, and nods his agreement.
“Exactly,” says Mathilde. “Silici have feelings, too. I hate to think of any creature suffering.”
“And there’s another mistake right there,” Galileo says, addressing Mathilde now. “You’ll be lucky to get past the first challenge if you think like that. You have to remember that these beings are about to be your opponents. In those circumstances, unnecessary sentiment can be a liability. Just because a being is capable of feeling, it doesn’t mean that feeling will be compassion. Or any other emotion we might understand. Confronted with the same situation, other organisms won’t necessarily behave like you or I.”
“Don’t sugar-coat it, old man,” Tonya says. “What you’re saying is that every last beastie in this high class hotel is out to kill us.” Her brown eyes flash in anger at the futility of their situation. Rowan can understand it. They’re all here against their will, chosen for their genetic connection to the ancient tribes, but Tonya’s situation is especially desolate. She hadn’t been part of the original team, but the other girl—the one who should be here—had found her own way out, somehow managing to get hold of a lethal dose of methadone on the eve of their departure. When he’d heard, just for a second, Rowan had envied her. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about offing himself, going gently into the night, and letting some other poor bastard come to Conclave in his stead. He’d even considered ways to do it—jumping out a window or strangling himself—but in the end, those options had seemed sordid and cowardly, so maybe there was something in the noble bloodline argument, after all? Anyway, the thing about suicide is that it’s final. Melin clearly wouldn’t be competing, so the Council had rechecked the DNA databases to determine who had the next highest titre of the slave-tribe blood. It was Tonya. Lucky for them—not so much for her—she fitted the requisite age-group. She was fit and healthy. So, with no time to prepare, or even to farewell her family, she was forced to take Melin’s place. Tonya’s here by default. Little wonder she’s bitter. Rowan tries to imagine how he’d feel if he’d been denied those last few months back home on Terra.
All those lasts.
There was Rowan’s last trip to the farm to visit his grandmother, his last pizza with the guys from the band, the last hug with his dog, Bernie—plunging his face into her coarse fur, and her turning over for a last rub of her belly—and the first and last time he would ever kiss Lisa Singh under the willow in his mum’s back yard. And what about that last cycle ride up to the lake with his brother, Andy, where they’d spent an hour skimming stones like they used to back when they were kids…
“Let’s see you beat that, then!” Andy had laughed, punching the air with his fist when his stone skipped a full six times before plopping into the lake. Rowan had smiled, letting his brother bask in the glory, knowing they might never skim stones together again.
Rowan couldn’t have faced the Conclave without those goodbyes. Even with them, it hadn’t been enough for Melin, but Tonya had no time for goodbyes. Rowan feels a pang of pity for her.
“No, that’s not true,” Galileo is saying, “the killing of other competitors isn’t condoned. That wouldn’t be sporting. The ultimate goal is to be the first team to complete all the challenges, not to eliminate members of other teams. There are judges…”
“But once you’re dead, registering a formal complaint with the judging committee isn’t going to count for much, right? ‘Oh dearie, I object. Someone decapitated me. Naughty them’.”
“Now you’re being rid—”
But Tonya cuts the guide off. “Look, no one expects us to win. No one even expects us to survive. The Council will be ecstatic if we can just hold on long enough to allow a Terrean team to compete at the next Conclave. To do that we need to avoid being eliminated at the first amphitheatre. That’s all.”
“It’d be nice to survive to the finish,” Mathilde adds quietly.
But Rowan is riled up now. “We’ve got no chance if Tonya is going to take that defeatist stance,” he says hotly.
“I’ll take any stance I effing well like,” Tonya retorts.
“Hey,” says Ari. “Cut it out, you two. There’s no point in fighting each other. If you want to fight, how about you wait a couple of hours—I’ll let you take on the entire universe.”
Ari’s remark fills Rowan with shame. If they’re to have any chance at all against the other teams, they’re going to need to work together.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
Tonya shrugs and moves away to pour herself a drink from a carafe on the lodging’s kitchen counter. It’s as much an apology as Rowan can expect from someone so prickly.
Galileo brings them back to the present. “Right, well, if you’re quite finished, the Council has asked me to show you some of the previous amphitheatres before I head back to Terra. They want me to give you some idea of what you could be up against. Gather round, please.” The team members take their seats again as Galileo pulls up an iSplay and projects the hologram into the room. “I apologise for the quality. The recording is pretty scratchy on this one. It’s from two Conclaves ago.”
He touches a screen with his finger, and instantly a conical shaft of light descends from the ceiling. The team are projected into a desert. Apart from the rippled contours of the dunes, nothing can be seen for leagues.
“Where’s the challenge?” Rowan demands. “I can’t see anything.”
“Look, there are the competitors,” says Ari, pointing. “But they must be a long way behind at this point. I can’t see any of the other teams.”
The Terreans stagger slowly into the field of view, their bodies stooped.
“What’s wrong with them? They’re so slow. It’s like they’re swimming through a swamp,” says Mathilde.
Ari squints through the glare. “It’s the gravity,” he says, grim. “The gravity is different. Their weight has altered.”
“Is that all? That’s not so terrible,” Rowan says.
“It depends. If the gravity is strong enough and they’ve been out there for a while, it could cause difficulties with their circulation. Blood would struggle to get back to the heart, and their organs might collapse under their own weight,” says Ari.
Their predecessors make a tortuous passag
e across the glaring white of the scorched earth, every step clearly an agony for them.
Mathilde gasps, puts her hands over her mouth, and turns away.
“No! Keep watching,” commands the guide.
Reluctantly, Mathilde forces her eyes back to the projection.
Suddenly, the ground opens behind the Terreans and a gigantic red centipede erupts from the fissure. Opening its maw, it spears the trailing team member between razored pincers before plunging back into the earth, the skewered body still in its grip. The others, realising immediately that their team-mate is lost, break into a run, trying to put some distance between themselves and the carnivorous arthropod. But the oppressive gravity prevents their progress. One by one they drop to their hands and knees as their hearts strain under the load. The iSplay zooms in, cruelly. Their faces are contorted in terror.
Rowan is horrified. This is so unfair! How could anyone prepare for this? What could those Terreans have done? A few extra push-ups? Some altitude training? Total waste of time. There’s no fitness training, problem-solving, or team dynamic that will help if you’re thrown into an amphitheatre so hostile, it won’t support your physiology. Those poor shits. They must have known they were dead the minute they found themselves in that hell-hole. Rowan searches his team-mates’ faces. All are tense with anticipation. Mathilde has pulled her knees up to her chest and is rocking softly. In just a few hours they’ll be facing their own amphitheatre, possibly even worse that this one. How will she handle it?
Tonya bites her lip. She breathes in sharply. Even Ari winces.
Something is happening on the projection. In spite of himself, Rowan is compelled to watch. It’s another centipede—or perhaps it’s the same one. This time the colossal body emerges in front of the pitiful Terreans, stopping them in their tracks.
“Why don’t they fight?” Tonya whispers. “Use a knife or something?”
