Another round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn’t expected to be bored to death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage’s theatricals were just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.
“This is reality,” Emcee Carnage repeated. “Tonight is reality. Tonight you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.”
The crowd erupted.
I wondered briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry’s Closed Quarters, the way Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker’s face. Jerry himself telling me about the Mongol’s run-in with the cop whose body I was wearing: Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back. And then there was Bautista on Ryker’s interrogation techniques: He’s right on the line most of the time. How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?
What would Ortega have said?
I thought about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I’d left her at the Hendrix, she’d take Kawahara down for rue.
Knowing it was enough.
Carnage drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A relative quiet descended on the chamber.
“The coup de grâce,” he proclaimed. “When our matador has put Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is no more.”
He released the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theatre. The weapon hung in the air, glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.
“Let us begin,” said Carnage, withdrawing.
There was a magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass round a whisky flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden script we were being forced to play out.
We began to circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin’s body language for clues.
The Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on that account, they had told us prior to the Sharya landings. The imperatives for the builders were strength and speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness it is that their combat patterning has no random select sub-routine. Right Hand of God martyrs will therefore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very narrow band of techniques.
On Sharya, our own enhanced combat systems had been state of the art, with both random response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker’s neurachem had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long enough for my conditioning to analyse the Will of God’s fighting pattern and—
Kadmin struck.
The distance was nearly ten metres of clear ground; he covered it in the time it took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.
The techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counter-attack was out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to block low and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head and I reeled backward, fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand sidestrike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost casually. A low level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.
It was like someone sinking a grappling iron into my guts. The actual pain of the punch was left far behind on the surface of my skin and a sickening numbness raged through the muscles in my stomach. On top of the sickness from the stunner, it was crippling. I staggered back three steps and crashed onto the mat, twisting like a half-crushed insect. Vaguely, I heard the crowd roaring its approval.
Turning my head weakly, I saw Kadmin had backed off and was facing me with hooded eyes and both fists raised in front of his face. A faint red light winked at me from the steel band on his left hand. The knuckles, recharging.
I understood.
Round One.
Empty-handed combat has only two rules. Get in as many blows, as hard and as fast as you can, and put your opponent down. When he’s on the ground, you kill him. If there are other rules or considerations, it isn’t a real fight, it’s a game. Kadmin could have come in and finished me when I was down, but this wasn’t a real fight. This was a humiliation bout, a game where the suffering was to be maximised for the benefit of the audience.
The crowd.
I got up and looked around the dimly-seen arena of faces. The neurachem caught on saliva-polished teeth in the yelling mouths. I forced down the weakness in my guts, spat on the killing floor and summoned a guard stance. Kadmin inclined his head, as if acknowledging something, and came at me again. The same flurry of linear techniques, the same speed and power, but this time I was ready for them. I deflected the first two punches on a pair of wing blocks and instead of giving ground, I stayed squarely in Kadmin’s path. It took him the shreds of a second to realise what I was doing, and by then he was too close. We were almost chest to chest. I let go of the headbutt as if his face belonged to every member of the chanting crowd.
The hawk nose broke with a solid crunch, and as he wavered I took him down with an instep stamp to the knee. The edge of my right hand scythed round, looking for neck or throat, but Kadmin had gone all the way down. He rolled and hooked my feet out from under me. As I fell, he rose to his knees beside me and rabbit-punched me in the back. The charge convulsed me and cracked my head against the mat. I tasted blood.
I rolled upright and saw Kadmin backed off and wiping some blood of his own from his broken nose. He looked curiously at his red-streaked palm and then across at me, then shook his head in disbelief. I grinned weakly, riding the adrenalin surge that seeing his blood spilt had given me, and raised both my own hands in an expectant gesture.
“Come on, you asshole.” It croaked out of my damaged mouth. “Put me away.”
He was on me almost before the last word left my mouth. This time I hardly touched him. Most of it happened beyond conscious combat. The neurachem weathered the battering valiantly, throwing out blocks to keep the knuckles off me, and gave me the space for a couple of randomly generated counterstrikes that Envoy instinct told me might get through Kadmin’s fighting pattern. He rode the blows like the attentions of an irritating insect.
On the last of these futile ripostes, I overreached the punch and he snagged my wrist, yanking me forward. A perfectly balanced roundhouse kick slammed into my ribs and I felt them snap. Kadmin pulled again, locked out the elbow of my captured arm and in the frozen frames of neurachem-speeded vision I saw the forearm strike swinging down towards the joint. I knew the sound it was going to make when the elbow exploded, knew the sound I was going to make before the neurachem could lock the pain down. My hand twisted desperately in Kadmin’s grip and I let myself fall. Slippery with sweat, my wrist pulled free and my arm unlocked. Kadmin hit with bruising force, but the arm held and by then I was on my way to the floor anyway.