“Twenty-two percent on this ship, Puffernuts!” The Captain was touchy. “Or twenty-two point zero one if we jettison you!”
“Naw.” Pavanaz picked his nose. “See, I dropped a line to Earth to let people know I was coming—and aboard which scow. Also, I researched this bucket. I discovered you run a tight ship, Captain—so no more horror stories about spacing your passengers and such. Hell, you run such a tight ship you even monitor internal power drain! It’s how you found me: the juice my ’Vader was burning.”
“Your what?” the Captain scowled. And Pavanaz explained.
When he was through they went back down to storage and examined his machine. Pavanaz glowed. “She was the latest thing in Ozzie’s Arcade back on Gizzich IV. But at a centricred a shot you could go broke getting yourself a decent score. So I entered Ozzie’s place kind of late one night and sort of, well, rearranged the wiring. Fixing these things was my job, see—or in this case, unfixing them. So Ozzie sent for me the next day and I checked her out, and told him: “No way—she’s a goner—computer’s cracked.” He sold her to me for scrap.
“I put her right, added a few tricks, played till my fingers went flat. It took time, but now I’m the best there is.”
What Pavanaz didn’t say was that Ozzie had called round his place a week later and found him playing the machine. He’d flared up, likewise Pavanaz; somehow the latter’s razor-edged knife had contrived to cut the Arcade King’s throat. Living at the edge of one of Gizzich IV’s biggest swamps, it was no big deal. Ozzie had gone down slow but sure in a mile of mud.
The odds against anyone tagging Grint Pavanaz as a killer were in the seven figures bracket, but he’d panicked anyway. He stole a little money, crated the machine, paid for its passage to Earth, then climbed in the crate with the ’Vader….
The 1st Mate snapped his fingers. “The Game Show!” he said. “The big TV tournament, coming in three months’ time. While they watch, twenty-five billion kids match their skills alongside the best in the Federation.”
Pavanaz grinned, blew on his fingernails and polished them on his shirt.
“Is that what this is about?” said the Captain. “You stowed away to Earth to play games?”
“October, 2482,” said Pavanaz. “Eliminations for a month, the quarter- and semi-finals played off on the 29th, finally the Big Game on the 30th. I shall be there, gentlemen…you are looking at the new champion. A million creds in it, a half-million for the runner-up, and a quarter-million for—”
“We get the picture,” the Captain cut him short. “So you’re that good, eh? Care to show us?”
“Sure,” said Pavanaz. “Want to make a small wager?”
Pavanaz was a skinny twenty-one-year-old. Less meat than a mantis, short-cropped black hair that wouldn’t fall into his eyes when he played, fingers like a pianist, and a razor-honed mind. And a slant to his mouth that told of a special sort of cynicism. A brilliant kid, thought the Captain. Most kids were these days, but all wasted. In all the entire list of charted, settled systems there wasn’t enough real work to go round. Oh, plenty of farming out on the new frontiers, lots of dirty fingernail jobs, but nothing for one like Pavanaz. Except one chance in a million that he’d make a million and retire to one of the resort worlds. Cullis was more or less right, that was all Pavanaz wanted: a million credits, a beach and the latest model ’Vader. The problem was, he didn’t care how he got them. Cullis did care, but he was saving it for later.
Pavanaz climbed into the bouncing, swiveling bucket-seat of his machine and sat there with his eyes closed for a couple of seconds. ’Vaders had been around for five hundred years and more. At first they were expensive toys, then trainers for pilots on Mother Earth, finally trainers for pilots off the Earth. For when men moved out into space and found the Khuum waiting, the ’Vaders had been given a new lease on life; but updated, faster, full of tricks that the kids of the late 20th Century never even dreamed of. Trainers, yes—for the guys who lived through, died in, and at last won the Khuum wars. Since when, what with virtual reality and all, they’d evolved, and evolved, and….
“You gone to sleep, kid?” said the Captain. Pavanaz opened his eyes, switched her on, and showed them who was asleep. They didn’t have the con, but they could look round him and cop some of the excitement. And his game was exciting, indeed inspired, a virtuoso performance. Wraparound 3D made it as close to real as possible, and Pavanaz played it that way: no longer a skinny kid but a fighter pilot out among the stars, on patrol, searching for the enemy.
Out there in deep space his hands, eyes and brain were like parts of the computer he controlled, or half-controlled. No one ever “won” one of these games; the machine won; the idea was to last longer than anyone else and rack up a higher score. For no matter how many of the enemy you destroyed, the computer would conjure up bigger, faster, more powerful Khuum ships. The big ones carried the highest score, but before you could reach them you had to kill off all the small-fry who were trying hard to kill you! So in fact you played yourself, because your skill governed the strength of your opponent: the harder you fought, the greater the machine’s efforts against you.
A fleet of Khuum was out there; they spotted Pavanaz and began to pivot; he was into and through them, killing them off fore and aft, port and starboard. They were no match for him. He looked for bigger fish and found sharks! Behind the scattering fleet, a dozen highly conjectural vessels with all the regular Khuum tricks and then some, turned their needle snouts on him. Pavanaz launched into them, zigzagged to avoid their beams, set his bucket-seat fishtailing. Strapped in, he somehow ignored the motion to concentrate on the game in hand.
At first surprised, the aliens burst asunder, blew up in mad blasts of light and sound which were real enough to add to the reality, quickly threw up their shields. Pavanaz discharged shield-scramblers, following up with Takka Beams that homed on the scramblers, like iron filings to a magnet. And once through the disrupted alien screens, then they homed in on the ships. Pavanaz sliced through debris aware that the Khuum had regrouped and were hot on his littered trail.
His score mounted on the monitor; he dripped sweat till his clothes stuck to him; his hands moved like crazed spiders over the controls. The din of exploding ships was deafening as their beams crept ever closer. Pavanaz’s score went up and the computer compensated. A Khuum battle-cruiser swam into view, and behind it a carrier launching mines and missiles. Pavanaz tripped into hyperspace, burned the cruiser with his exhaust, threw all power to his screens and deflected the carrier’s hypermissiles. He tripped back into normal space and found his screen full of heavy metal! The carrier was dead ahead! No one had ever taken out a carrier before!
Pavanaz hit all of his firing buttons simultaneously and chewed a passage right through the carrier’s belly. All around him, white and yellow light blazed like the heart of hell; his earphones were full of the scream of metal warping out of existence; disintegrating debris blinded him…so that he didn’t even see the whirling, buckled girder that smashed his cockpit and ended the game….
His bucket-seat stopped gyrating; Pavanaz hung limp, drenched over the controls; the scoreboard was alive with flashing lights, and his score was 4,202,786.
“Phew!” said the 1st Mate. “Here, let me try.”
“You?” Pavanaz got down, steadied himself against a bulkhead. “You have hands like…like plates of meat!”
“Kid,” the 1st Mate glowered, “I was doing it for real when you were navigating a hole in your Ma’s tights!” He got aboard, switched on, lasted seventeen point three seconds before being blown to hell. His score was 21,002. Which didn’t say much for his war stories. The others didn’t do nearly so well, and Captain Cullis got the lowest score of all. Pavanaz sniggered somewhat, which wasn’t a good move.