Petrichor

by R J Johnson

  He chuckled, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  Meade looked back down to keep taping his left hand. Emeline jumped down and got in his face, snapping her fingers to get his attention back.

  “Hey, seriously...” Emeline said with a concerned tone. “What if you don’t win?”

  He shrugged. “Not a problem I’m particularly concerned about at the moment.”

  “You might need to start worrying about that in the next twenty minutes. It’d be smart if you had yourself a few alternative ideas for retirement, say, like… a real job maybe.”

  He ignored the dig, deciding that his left hand needed to be redone. He began unwrapping the tape when Emeline took his hand.

  “Here, let me get that,” she said, and she expertly began to rewrap his hand.

  “What’re the odds on me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t check.”

  “Em…”

  “I didn’t check!”

  He sighed and looked at her. Emeline was trying to protect his feelings, and that meant the odds had to be worse than he imagined. The people who calculated them had a mountain of computer power and statistics behind them that made their predictions very reliable. He finally caught her eye, and she sighed.

  “You’re sitting at nearly fifty to one.”

  He whistled. That would mean a lot more money than he originally thought if he won the match. He was surprised (and a bit insulted) that the odds were as long as they were. He might not be one of the biggest names in the fights, but he had definitely been able to hold his own while making his way up the ranks to get this match. His strategy was a good one, and a great many more experienced fighters had been unable to adapt to his style in time before finding themselves on their backs with the ref finishing the count.

  But tonight’s match was different. He was fighting someone who had made a real name for himself in the fights. Kevin Chau was ranked as one of the best in the league and Meade was only supposed to be filler — a piece of meat for the soon-to-be-champ to get some exercise with before the championship bout later in the week.

  As one of the premiere fighters in the zero-G league, Chau had built a brutal reputation for himself over the last year and a half. Meade always knew that his fight wouldn’t be easy, but fifty to one was an impressive set of odds to beat.

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “I’m pretty sure fifty to one is only if you survive the match,” Emeline said, her signature gallows humor on display.

  “Trying to cheer me up won’t make me reconsider, Em. I’m telling you, I studied his vids. I know what I’m looking for.”

  He hopped down from the med-bay bed and shadowboxed a few moments. “No one in the arena will see it coming, I promise.”

  “Pretty confident for a dead man walking.”

  The voice came from the doorway. Meade and Emeline spun around to see a tall man wearing a fashionable pinstriped suit, his hair slicked back. A pencil-thin beard followed the outline of his jaw and was neatly trimmed to a point under his chin.

  “Palmetto,” Meade said sarcastically. “I didn’t know you were a fight fan.”

  “More than just a fan, Mr. Meade,” Michael Palmetto said lazily as he entered his dressing room, “I have quite a nice stake in your opponent.”

  Meade chuckled. “Well, everyone makes bad investments on occasion.”

  Palmetto locked his eyes on Emeline, staring at her. “I’d like it if we could speak alone.”

  Emeline glanced at him and Meade waved her off. “It’s all right. Em was just leaving to place a bet.”

  She looked at him and he nodded, silently telling her that it would be fine. She frowned in frustration, a small wrinkle appearing between her eyes and left the room. It was clear from the cloud of discontent she left behind that she didn’t like leaving him alone with the dangerous Warlord of E-Block.

  Palmetto turned and closed the door. He grabbed a metal folding chair and dragged it across the cold tile, the sound grating on Meade’s nerves.

  “So, Mr. Meade…”

  “Palmetto, if you got something you wanna say, get to it. They’re expecting me out there.”

  “They will wait.” Palmetto unfolded the chair and sat down in front of Meade, crossing his legs and picking a piece of lint off his trousers. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “You don’t even know what I have to say,” Palmetto replied, somewhat amused.

  “Maybe,” he said, inspecting the wrap job Emeline had done on his left hand. She did good work. “But I already know how this goes. You offer me money to do something I’m not interested in doing, and I say no. You’ll up your offer, and I’ll refuse again. You’ll threaten me; I laugh. You offer me more money than I’ve ever seen in my life…”

  “But you still choose to say no,” Palmetto finished, sounding bored.

  He stood and approached the Warlord, placing his face inches away from the man who terrified so many on his Block. “Let me save us some time. I will never work for you or your blood money.”

  “Mr. Meade, be reasonable!” Palmetto said, chuckling at Meade’s outburst. “You’re a runabout. You can’t make any money in the Coalition mines without a SecureCard installed on your ArmBar, and it’s not like you have any opportunities with the Consortium forthcoming. The very best you can hope for is some lucky million-to-one hit at the casino or be forever used as fodder for fighters who long ago passed you in skill and opportunity. You have no hope of making a living on this planet if you don’t play ball with someone, whether it be with the Coalition, the Consortium or me.”

  He plucked another imaginary piece of fluff off his suit, “Besides, after tonight, you’ll need one of us,” Palmetto said, staring at Meade with his piercing blue eyes. “Because, believe me, you’ll wish you had someone watching your back.”

  Meade shook his head and moved to the doorway, “Go to hell, Palmetto. I’m not your errand boy.”

  Palmetto rose and put his hand on Meade’s bare chest, stopping him from leaving the dressing room.

  “You will come and work for me eventually, Meade. One way or the other, I will have you on a leash.”

  “Not today.” Meade pushed past the Warlord in charge of his local block and moved down the hallway towards the arena.

  The roar of the crowd grew louder as he approached the doorway to the arena. He was stopped by a man wearing a headset.

  “You ready?” the man asked.

  “About as much as anyone can be I ‘spose,” Meade replied. The nervous energy he had so far managed to contain was now bubbling just beneath the surface and felt somewhere between excitement and drop dead fear. Too late to back out now, he thought.

  The sound of heavy rock music filled the arena, and the announcer’s voice echoed out to the fans, informing them of the top bout of the night. While Meade’s chances didn’t look good to the odds makers, he’d racked up a fairly impressive streak of recent wins in the undercards. His strategy was simple: Watch as much vid as he could find of his opponents, and make one less mistake than they did.

  Tonight’s bout was to settle who would face the current ZFC Champ, Titus Greene. Meade had earned his spot at this level, but no one expected him to beat Kevin Chau and move on to the championship bout. Chau was a beast who had been responsible for the deaths of the last two men he faced on his path to the champ.

  While preparing for this match, Meade had studied hours upon hours of Chau’s fighting techniques, and after his careful research, believed he found a weakness that he could exploit. Of course, that all depended on whether or not he survived the first few rounds, which wasn’t always guaranteed in a fight with Chau.

  The crowd roared at the announcement of Meade’s name — some in approval, but mostly what Meade heard was booing. He stepped through the doors and walked through the gauntlet that led to the ring.

  The crowd, expressing their displeasure with the no-name on the fight card, showered
him with beer cups, both empty and not. Some of those cups were filled with liquids other than beer, though Meade did his best to avoid thinking what those liquids might be.

  The walk to the ring wasn’t far. There, an official opened the door to the cage in which the ZFC fighters fought and let Meade through. He raised his fists in victory, hoping to elicit something of a positive reaction from the crowd.

  “Tonight’s bout is scheduled for five rounds, with the winner facing the Martian Heavyweight Champion, Titus Greene, for the ZFC Championship!”

  The crowd roared as bookmakers on the sidelines began taking last minute bets. Emeline pushed her way through the crowd and spoke with one of the bookies near the ring. The man nodded as Emeline transferred the credits Meade had borrowed from the loan shark. She ducked under the rail, showing her ArmBar credentials to the officials standing there, and approached the ring, looking up at Meade giving him the thumbs up.

  He nodded and began to nervously bounce on the balls of his feet to expend the nervous energy he was feeling. No matter what happened next, it was too late to go back now.

  “In the yellow trunks, standing at six feet, two inches, one hundred and ninety five pounds… the Martian Menace… James MEEEEEADE!”

  The jeering rose in volume again, which made him smile. Sounds like Chau’s got his fan section in attendance.

  The announcer leaned in to Meade, holding the mic away from his mouth. “They’re out for blood tonight. I hope you’re ready to put on a show.”

  Meade didn’t respond. He had enough on his mind without worrying about putting on a good enough show so that the moles didn’t riot by the end of the fight. There was nothing worse than Martian miners who were bored and drunk.

  The mood changed as the lights above Meade in the arena flickered. Three spotlights tracked over to Chau’s entrance ramp as fog began to roll out of the doorway. A low drumming began to echo through the arena as the crowd chanted Chau’s name. The music became more intense as the chanting became louder and louder. The announcer stepped away from Meade and jutted out his chin.

  “In the blue corner… standing at six feet, six inches high… weighing in at two hundred and thirty-five pounds… from parts unknown… Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevin CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAU!!!”

  The doorway exploded as pyrotechnics helped bring Kevin Chau out into the arena, to the crowd’s acclaim. He stood looking out at the crowd with a grim expression. The huge black man’s arms snaked with thick muscle put on by hours of dedication at the high-grav gyms. Swirling tattoos covered his exposed skin, each one incredibly intricate in its design. As he slowly made his way down to the ring, the cape he wore billowed behind him.

  Meade never got scared, exactly; he always chalked up whatever he was feeling to an upset stomach. In fact, it was one of the rules he had to keep him from making questionable choices.

  Rule Number Fourteen: Don’t get scared; fear makes mistakes.

  However, the second Chau stepped into the ring, Meade had to admit what he felt was the slightest tinge of fear stabbing at his guts. He swallowed it down and continued staring Chau down as hard as he knew how. Chau entered the ring, his eyes never leaving Meade as his entourage began taking the fighter’s ornaments off.

  Meade shook himself out of his robe and approached the middle of the ring as Chau tested his gloves by punching his fists together. Satisfied, he approached the center of the ring, where a large red number 1 was emblazoned on the green canvas. The circle that they stood within in the center of the ring was one of five scattered throughout the ring. Each one, depending on which round it was, would alternate between zero gravity and higher than Earth-normal gravity.

  The manipulation of gravity was accomplished by the Higgs generators beneath the rings, which affected the level of gravity that was in effect at any given time.

  After each round of a zero-G fight, the amount of gravity each circle generated increased by a factor of 1. The second round’s circles alternated between projecting twice the normal amount of gravity and zero-gravity. The third round would have three times the amount within the circles, and so on. By the fifth round, if a fighter found himself trapped within a 5G circle, the fight was generally over.

  Suddenly, the Coalition national anthem began blasting out of the loudspeakers overhead. Meade glanced away from his opponent for the first time since he entered the ring and looked up into the crowded arena.

  Above him, a large procession was filing into the VIP boxes. Two of the spotlights that had been fixed on Meade and Chau quickly tracked up to the VIP Box. There, he could see Coalition Ambassador Andromeda Corcoran, along with her chief of security, William Hugh, entering the private box. She paused and waved to the people she represented. The crowd dutifully cheered as the last bars of the national anthem trickled out of the stadium’s speakers.

  Meade was surprised to see the Ambassador in attendance. He knew she was a fan of the Zero-G League, but he never imagined that she’d deign to attend one of his matches.

  He looked back at Chau, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off him, and realized she wasn’t there for him. She was there to watch Chau take him apart in the brutal fashion for which he had become so well-known.

  The referee approached Meade and Chau, checking their gloves for any foreign objects that might rub off into their opponent’s eyes or otherwise injure him. Meade didn’t figure Chau for a cheater; if there was one thing the Warlords took seriously, it was the zero-G fights. There weren’t many stupid enough to cheat — there was far too much money involved, and if one Warlord decided to cheat, it would send the sport into a debilitating spiral.

  “Keep it clean, gents. I see enough blood and I don’t give a good goddamn what you say, I’ll stop this fight. You get it?” The ref said in a gruff tone that left no doubt that he was a man of his word.

  “Roger that, Cochise,” Meade said lightly and offered his gloves out to his opponent.

  Kevin Chau stared at him wordlessly, his shaven black head gleaming with sweat. Chau was there for blood, but Meade intended to help the man get used to disappointment.

  Meade smiled and winked at the man. Chau slammed his gloves together as hard as he could.

  “Back to your corners, and when the bell sounds, you’re on, gents,” the ref said.

  Meade backed away to his corner, never taking his eyes off of Kevin Chau, who didn’t look away, from Meade either.

  Emeline appeared at his corner and hissed at him to get his attention.

  “Are you sure?” Emeline asked once he had crouched down to her eye level.

  “Little late for me to get cold feet. Besides, I’m fairly sure if I don’t fight in here, the crowd’ll tear me to pieces.” He motioned to the crowd, which was whipped up into a frenzy, looking for a good fight and as much blood as the fighters were willing to spill.

  He pointed up to the VIP Box. “I even rated a visit from all those upper muckety mucks and they didn’t come all the way down here just to watch me run away.”

  Emeline laughed derisively. “She’s got other things to worry about.”

  Emeline was referring to the upcoming meeting of the Coalition Parliament on Mars. It was an annual meeting of representatives from each Block to air their grievances and vote on bills that would appropriate money to each Block for structural improvements.

  The Coalition Representative House had long ago been taken over by the Warlords, with each of them pushing their own pet projects. It was how it always was; the rich got richer off the poor. It was one of the biggest reasons Meade remained a runabout and eschewed politics altogether.

  “Better her than me,” he said, shrugging. The bell rang and he put in his mouthguard. “Time to go to work. Keep my seat warm.”

  He gave a mock salute to Emeline and moved cautiously to meet his opponent.

  Buy Change in Management HERE!

 

 

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