THE RIDER (Galactic Football League Novellas Book 4)

by Scott Sigler

  Davenport: But you’re glossing over the fact that riders are the worst-paid athletes in elite professional sports, if you count Dinolition as an elite sport.

  Pete: It is an elite sport.

  Davenport: And the riders taking all this risk aren’t getting paid like elite athletes. That opens up room for corruption.

  Pete: Then find the riders taking a payoff and do that story, Davenport. You’re barking up the wrong tree here. Are we done?

  Davenport: Ten franchises now, but two have already been lost. The Hallen Creatures went bankrupt, and the entire Akara Bears organization — riders, mounts and management alike — was lost when their ship blew up. How does this affect the league’s stability?

  Pete: The Akara tragedy is always on our minds. It’s a tribute to the risks our fellow teams take whenever they head out for a match. Akara barely had enough money to get their mounts together, let alone keep a proper bus in service. But their team was good and we’ll miss them in competition as well as in friendship. Hallen? Well, that’s a different matter. Their owner couldn’t run a business for crap. He spent too much, too soon. Their mounts have been bought up by the two new teams that will join next season, so that’s good news — it shows that there is demand for the sport and people with money who want to get into it. The fans are starting to discover the sport. Attendance is up, as is viewership and merchandise sales.

  Davenport: But is it going up fast enough for the entire league to avoid bankruptcy? The league is still hundreds of millions in the red, Pete.

  Pete: You’ll have to ask Commissioner Guestford those questions. I don’t have answers for you.

  Davenport: All right, I get the hint. Pete, you’re the second-oldest Human in the league and you’re a five-year veteran. You’ve been hurt several times. How many years do you think have left in you as a Rider?

  Pete: As many as I can get. I’m still in fantastic shape and Bess and I are fighting as well as we ever have. I have a great team, great mounts, great owner ... I don’t see anything stopping me any time soon.

  Davenport: Poughkeepsie Pete, thanks for being on the show.

  Match Week 11

  Chachanna Resurrected at Roughland Ridgebacks

  x = Qualified for Dinolition championship tournament.

  Pete stood in front of his living room holotank. The rest of the team was there, lounging in chairs and couches specifically made for their smaller frames.

  Film review, an event that was half team bonding, half review of the previous game, and half prep for the next contest. Pete knew that was one half too many, but that’s just how important review was.

  “I hope you’re all relaxed for this,” he said. “We’ve never faced the Chachanna Resurrected before. League’s only Sklorno team. I don’t know if you’ve all been studying or not, but they are undefeated and the team to beat this year.”

  “Whatever,” Stikz said. “We’ll pound ‘em, Cap.”

  Stikz sat sideways on Pete’s favorite chair, his legs dangling off an armrest. He was playing with one of Pete’s knives, a Bowie as long as Pete’s arm. For a normal-sized man, it was a knife, for Pete or Stikz, it was basically a sword.

  “Stikz, my weapons case was locked.”

  The young rider smiled. “Come on, Cap — when has that ever stopped me?”

  Pete crossed his arms and glared. Stikz sighed and slid off the chair. He walked to the weapons case mounted on the wall and put the knife into its spot, right between a chrome Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, one of Pete’s trademark war hammers, and a mean-looking blackjack.

  “Do you want me to pretend to lock it, Cap?”

  “Don’t bother,” Pete said. “Just get back here.”

  Stikz did as he was told. He was relaxed, at ease. He could be, considering that he was a backup rider and probably wouldn’t suit up against the Resurrected.

  Pete found a spot next to Clark on the couch. Clark was munching away on a bag of spider snacks he’d brought with. Clark had to bring them with if he wanted them, because Pete sure as hell wasn’t going to pay money for those disgusting things.

  His players were full from the food he did provide: steaks, Rodina onions (both fried and raw), a big platter of Madhava cheeses, chips for dipping and several dips, including Pete’s specialty: zero-G possum apple cheddar. He always provided a case of mag-cans (Smithwick’s of course, one had to support the team sponsors), along with wine, which Tony and Jared preferred.

  The team spent enough time at Ranch Ridgeback as it was. Pete’s living room made for a more relaxed environment. He also wanted the younger players to see what was ahead of them if they stayed with the sport long enough to earn bigger paychecks: a house of their own, great food, great drink, a large holotank that took up the middle of the room ... something far beyond their current wages.

  “I have highlights from the Resurrected’s match against the Goliaths,” Pete said. “Let’s take a look.”

  He led off with the most disturbing bit of footage. A large scorpion-type thing marched across the pitch wearing the green and blue armor of the Resurrected. Scorpion was the only word that seemed appropriate, although the animal was so alien it was hard to find the right way to describe it.

  Three tails hung over its translucent, segmented body, each ending in a clump of heavy bone or chitin, Pete wasn’t sure which. Two back-folded legs, somewhat like a cricket’s or a grasshopper’s, although the six-tonne animal was on a different scale than those insects. Stubby arms reached from the underside of its chest, limbs good only for pressing against the ground to help the beast keep balance in a fight, or to just rest so it wasn’t standing upright. The blue and green armor plates that protected the joints barely hid sharp bristles of hair that jutted out. Its head was a heavy thing, balanced on a long, thick, serpentine neck. Four armored eyestalks waved like snakes, and below them, armored chelicerae that would have made the galaxy’s nastiest spiders feel inferior by comparison.

  It was a mimtai, a prehistoric Sklorno animal rescued from extinction using methods not all that dissimilar to those Doc Baiman used to create the dinos.

  On its back, at the base of the neck, rode what looked like an egg-shaped clump of armor — a male Sklorno. The females weighed ten times as much as the males, extra weight that the team would rather invest in mounts. Letting males compete was still a major problem in Sklorno space, where female athletes were worshiped as demi-gods, and males were expected to be seen, not heard.

  “What’s the game, Cap?” Tony asked. He had drunk too much, too soon, and was already slurring.

  “Dismount,” Pete said.

  The camera view panned back, showed that the mimtai was heading straight for a dino that looked an awful lot like Bess, save that this one was a few meters smaller, a couple of hundred kilos lighter, and wore armor decorated in purple and crimson. It was a tarbosaurus, a smaller relative of the tyrannosaurs.

  Dar clapped. “Sweet, I love to watch Yim.”

  Pete stayed quiet. He’d already seen this footage.

  The mimtai loped toward the tarbo, back-folded legs eating up the distance. On the back of the tarbo — Patch, was the mount’s name — Yim Guiying, captain of the Goliaths, leveled her lance, ready for the impact.

  Patch and Yin closed in, and then disaster struck. The mimtai’s three tails shot forward, heavy ends smashing into Patch’s head armor like hammers smashing into raw meat. A purple and crimson piece of helmet spun away. Mount and rider both crashed to the ground. Yin managed to kick free before her leg was crushed beneath many tonnes of tarbo, but she hit hard and was clearly stunned.

  “Oh, no,” Dar said. “Yin, get up!”

  Yin did, but barely, and not before the mimtai was on her, chelicerae scooping her up. Yin’s armor instantly turtled, pulling her into a tight fetal position and locking her motionless — the creature stuffed Yin into a wide mouth and swallowed her down.

  “Bad form,” Jared said. “She was already dismounted. Give those fur-balls an oun
ce of independence and just look how they act.”

  “Knock it off,” Pete said. “None of that racist talk in here.”

  Clark crossed his arms. “Technically, that’s sexist, not racist, Cap — Jared’s only insulting male Sklorno.”

  “You’re not helping,” Pete said. “Watch the damn playback.”

  A voice announced over the stadium sound system that the game was over, that the Resurrected had won the match 3-0. The nasty, nightmarish, green-and-blue-armored Sklorno mounts scuttled toward their end of the arena. The now-riderless, purple-and-crimson-armored dinos of the Goliaths did the same toward their end, as the three Goliath riders who hadn’t been eaten did the walk of shame to their dugout.

  Patch, however, didn’t move.

  “Dammit,” Ian said. “Sometimes I hate this sport.”

  It was the only thing the kid had said all night.

  The tarbosaurus lay crumpled on the pitch, a river of blood flowing from its open jaws. Its limbs twitched and then it lay still.

  Clark sniffed. “Patch was tough, man. That was a good mount.”

  “Patch didn’t make it, obviously,” Pete said. “That’s what were up against. We’ll watch the rest of the footage, but you all need to understand that the Resurrected are brand-new this year and well-funded — they have better armor, better tech and faster mounts. Bess gives us a size advantage in the bigs category, but as you can see, I’m going to be very careful with her around that mimtai.”

  He paused the footage, again stood in front of the holotank.

  “We’re six and four,” he said. “Two games left in the regular season. We win them both, we’re in the championship tournament. If we split those games, there’s a chance we can still make the tourney, but I don’t want to leave it up to chance. If we want to control our own destiny, we have to beat the Resurrected. We can beat them. We will beat them. If any of you doubt that, then feel free to go home right now.”

  He stared, looking for doubting eyes. He saw none. He saw hunger. The Resurrected’s undefeated record didn’t intimidate him, and it clearly didn’t intimidate the others. Ruining that potential perfect season would make the win that much sweeter.

  “Good,” Pete said. He sat down again. “Let’s go over the other Resurrected mounts, starting with the Apiom.”

  The mimtai’s image dissolved into a frozen still of a much smaller creature. Six legs instead of the mimtai’s two, and more spider-like than back-folded. It was a lean, lethal-looking creature clad in blue and green armor. The head featured four armor-clad eyestalks, like most other native Sklorno species, but it had fangs so big they, too, had to be covered in armor.

  “This is the Resurrected’s main speedster,” Pete said. “Roughly six meters long, two meters wide at the front shoulders and it tapers down from there to the stubby tail. This one’s named Princeton. Seven hundred and eighty kilos. Apioms are fast. Damned fast, the equal of our achillobators and gallimimus.”

  “U, G, L, Y,” Stikz said. “You ain’t go not alibi.”

  “You’re ugly,” Jared finished. “You, you, you ugly.”

  “Shut up,” Ian said. “This isn’t the time for jokes, you idiots. I’ve been studying their physiology.”

  Clark’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been studying? Studying physiology? What happened, mummy and daddy go on a cruise somewhere and leave little Ian all alone in the fancy house they bought you?”

  Ian’s face flushed red. He stood up and pointed. “Keep talking, old man, and we’ll—“

  “Enough,” Pete snapped. “Ian, sit your country ass down.”

  The youngster glared at Pete, but did as he was told.

  “And Clark, knock it off,” Pete said. “Stikz and Jared, you can practice your cheers some other time. Ian, you were saying?”

  Ian’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “Uh, right,” he said. “I was studying them. I think their rear section is a weak spot, that narrow bit at the end, including the tail. That’s where all their internal organs are.”

  Pete hadn’t known that. He reached out and turned his hand. The holotank read his motion, turned the image of the apiom around so the riders were looking at it’s armored posterior.

  “It’s butt?” Dar said.

  “You’re telling is to hit it in the butt?”

  All eyes turned to Ian. He seemed flustered. It was one thing, apparently, to be the smart-ass, the one always cutting down everyone else’s opinion — it was another to have to defend an opinion of his own.

  “I think so,” he said. “I ... it’s just an idea. What I read said their bodies aren’t wired like Terran bodies. The have a front brain that’s really tiny, but that one doesn’t manage pain signals. Pain is managed by the posterior nerve cluster.”

  Dar giggled. “It’s butt-brain?”

  Jared and Stikz laughed, pushed at each other as they did.

  Ian’s face turned even redder. “Yeah. The butt-brain.”

  After the meeting, Pete would study that himself — if he could find time to add another few hours of work, time that he didn’t have — but for now, this was a chance to encourage Ian’s initiative.

  “All right, so the ass-end is vulnerable to a concussive strike,” Pete said. “The armor can’t stop the kinetic energy. Ian, would you say it’s like how a helmet can protect our head, but can’t stop our brains from bouncing off the inside of our skull if we get thunked too hard?”

  Ian relaxed briefly, even smiled for a moment, but he forced his mouth straight. He nodded.

  “Yeah, Cap. I think it’s like that.”

  “Excellent,” Pete said. “So keep that in mind, everyone, but the apioms are known for a powerful back-kick. Speedsters need to make sure the apiom is engaged before attempting a rear attack. Got it?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Good,” Pete said. “Now, the final Sklorno mount — femora.”

  The tank flashed again and filled with the image of a beetle-shaped creature, a comparison only helped by blue and green armor. Six legs on this one, too, but the rear legs were higher than the rest, making a body that slanted downward from back to front. A wide, blunt head obviously had thick bone beneath the glossy armor, a mass of solidity that would even put Jerry to shame.

  Stats flashed on the screen:

  Name: Washington

  Species: femora

  Weight: 593 kilos

  Length: 4.5 meters

  Height at rear hip: 2.5 meters

  Ian and Dar stared at the screen with grim faces. Jared and Stikz were both pale.

  “Ah,” Pete said. “I see you weren’t all lazy and watched at least some of your footage. You know what this bug can do.”

  Critter Clark nodded. “Ayuh. That thing is a whole mess of trouble.”

  Pete nodded. “Femoras have a vertical leap of over five meters,” Pete said. “They can cover fifteen meters horizontally from a standing jump. It was an ambush predator, leaping high and coming down with those hard front claws to crush its prey.”

  Jared whistled. “Six-hundred kilos on a fifteen-meter leap?”

  “Like being rammed with a hover car,” Dar said.

  Pete nodded. “Exactly. Our bigs are going to have to take hits, there’s no way around it. But if one of our speedsters takes a shot from a femora?”

  “It’ll be murder,” Clark said. “We’ll have dead mounts if that happens.”

  “So we can’t let it happen,” Pete said. “But, there’s good news. They can’t keep springing along. Once they land, they need a couple of seconds before they can leap again. So if you time it right, they’re sitting ducks. In practice, we’ll work using our speedsters to draw them into a jump. As soon as they leave the ground, we’ll have someone in position to hit them when they land. And take a close look.”

  He zoomed in on the femora’s back.

  “Huh,” Dar said. “Two riders?”

  “Right,” Ian said quickly. “One to control normal locomotion, one to fight. The femora a
re so hard to manage that the Sklorno have an exemption that allows two riders.”

  Pete rubbed his hands together. “As far as I’ve seen, male Sklorno couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Their mounts are superior to ours — stronger, faster, pack a bigger punch as a whole — but this sport isn’t just about mounts. Every chance you get, people, you beat the living hell out of those Sklorno riders. So far, dino teams have tried to win with finesse. We’re going at it different — we’re going to turn this into a brawl, and we’ll knock the crap out of them.”

  Stikz raised a hand.

  “Yeah, Stikz, what is it?”

  He put his hand down. “Cap, I don’t know if male Sklorno actually have crap that we can knock out of them. Maybe we can have Ian study their physiology for us?”

  There was a pause, then Clark started laughing. Ian dove off his chair and onto a giggling Stikz. Dar and Jared grabbed Ian to pull him off.

  Pete rubbed his eyes and shook his head. Kids, man ... kids.

  • • •

  The sun had managed to rise above the distant mountains. The grassy training ground — the parts that hadn’t been stomped free of grass, anyway — glowed with a reflected, orange-red light. Pete stared at Jerry. The trike youth had his head down, but its eyes up, narrowed with focus and more than a little bit of excitement.

  Pete nudged Clark. “Ready with that stopwatch?”

  “Ayuh,” Clark said.

  “Good,” Pete said. “Jerry, charge.”

  The ground shook as three tonnes of dinosaur rushed forward. Patches of grass flew from behind Jerry’s trunk-like legs. His bony crown stayed low to the ground, horn-points out in front.

  Pete rotated as the mount flew by him. Green grass blades and black-red dirt spattered across his dungarees. Pete’s hair blew back from the rush of air.

  The trike’s short tail wagged as it ran. Pete chuckled at the sight: big bad dinosaur on the outside, and on the inside, a dog so full of excitement it couldn’t contain itself.

  Jerry kept going, pounding forward toward his target — a big rubber mock-up of a nightmare beast. Jerry turned sideways at the last second, let his momentum carry him into the thick rubber legs, sending them flying. Had that been a real nightmare beast, two of its legs would have been knocked out from under it, if not shattered outright.