“Right,” Erin said. “How could I forget the best part?” She was not looking forward to exposing her flabby, middle-aged body to a bunch of aliens. She wondered if there was still time to kill herself.
“Ready to go again?” Darrow reset the board to its starting position.
“Why are we even bothering?” Erin stood up. “I barely have time to learn this game, let alone get good at it. I might as well concede and save myself the humiliation.”
“If you forfeit, we all become prisoners of war.”
Erin groaned. She wanted to pace, but there was no room. The Myrmidon wasn’t designed to carry passengers. Most of this compartment was still taken up by supply crates.
It was pure dumb luck that Erin had ended up here. A piece of space debris had killed her stardrive, and she’d spent nearly a week adrift before the Myrmidon happened into range of her beacon. Unfortunately, a Quggano destroyer had also heard Erin’s distress call, and intercepted the Myrmidon right after they picked up Erin’s ship.
When Captain Yokota demanded a champion game—a variation on the ancient Quggano single-combat tradition—the aliens had named Erin as their opponent. That had surprised everyone on Myrmidon, but the Quggano’s rules did allow each side to select a specific enemy champion to challenge. It didn’t happen very often. Usually, neither side knew who was on the other ship, and the respective ship captains acted as champions by default. All of Myrmidon’s senior officers had been trained to play Ton-Gla-Ben, and the XO, Lieutenant Darrow, was the best. So he was teaching Erin.
“You could get lucky,” Darrow said. “You never know.”
Erin sighed and sat down again. “Fine. Not like I have anything better to do with my last few hours of life.”
“Wait,” Darrow said as she reached for a light pawn. “Say the word. You have to say it when you start the game.”
“I can’t say the damn word.”
“Just try. Please?”
Erin grumbled. “Gaalaann.”
“Close,” Darrow said. “But not quite. Gaalaann.”
“What the hell does it even mean?”
Darrow shrugged. “Who knows? It’s just part of the ritual. Come on, try again. More of an accent on the second syllable. Gaalaann.”
“I can’t hear the difference,” Erin said.
“Listen closely,” Darrow said.
The door chimed and slid open. Rayley, the ship’s science officer, burst into the room, looking very excited.
“We’ve got something,” Rayley said. “A way for you to win.”
“A kid?” Erin gaped. “They’ve got a child on board?”
The conference room display showed an interior scan of the enemy destroyer: an overlay of radar, thermal imaging, and other passive radiation scans. There was definitely some kind of smaller creature running back and forth between two adult Quggano, an indistinct blue-green blob flanked by large, eight-legged, insectoid forms. Erin felt like she was watching some kind of bizarre nature documentary.
“Rayley hacked into their comms,” Captain Yokota said. “The adults are some kind of state dignitary and his mate. Their presence aboard a destroyer is unusual, but not unheard of.”
“And now you can call out the child,” Rayley said. “Name him as your opponent.”
“You know it’s a boy?” Erin said.
“We know his name, his age, his bedtime—”
“It’s allowed,” Darrow said. “They never asked us to name an opponent. Most champion games involve the captains of the respective warships by default. The Quggano named Miss Bountain because they knew she was a civilian, and therefore hadn’t been trained to play Ton-Gla-Ben.”
“And neither has this kid,” Rayley said. “He won’t know anything about the game; his family’s not military caste. But he’s old enough to serve, according to their laws. They have to honor your champion request.”
“The losing champion dies.” Erin looked at the captain. “I’m not going to kill a kid. You must be considering other options.”
“Sure,” Yokota said. “I can blow up my ship.”
Erin blinked. “What?”
“Nobody here is going to become a Quggano POW,” Yokota said. “If you lose the game, we trigger the auto-destruct and hope we take those bastards with us.”
“This is the worst day of my life,” Erin said as she walked into the airlock.
“Stop saying that. You could still win,” Darrow said, joining her inside and closing the inner door behind them. “And win or lose, you’ll have more than done your part for the war effort. We’ve already transmitted a sitrep back to Fleet Command. Now that we know how the champion callout ritual works, we can target Quggano warships carrying civilians—”
“Great,” Erin said. “So I’m going to cause the deaths of more innocent people.”
Darrow stopped working the airlock controls and frowned at her. “They’re not people. They’re aliens.”
Erin felt a headache starting. “Anyone you can have meaningful communication with is a person,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re human, or alien, or some kind of hyperintelligent computer virus. Life is life.”
The airlock began cycling. Darrow turned back to face Erin and raised both hands, palms out in surrender. “I’m not qualified to argue philosophy with you, ma’am. All I’m saying is, we’re at war, and I’d rather it be us instead of them who wins.”
“Nobody wins if we’re all dead,” Erin said.
Darrow avoided her gaze, instead watching the airlock status lights very intently. “Miss Bountain, there is one thing I’d like to give you before you go in there.”
Erin stepped back. “Look, Darrow, I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all, but I don’t even know your first name—”
Darrow gave her a shocked look. “I’m not propositioning you.”
Erin hoped she wasn’t blushing too much. “Well, I am just about to take off all my clothes here.”
Darrow shook his head. “Not to boast, ma’am, but if we were going to do, um, that, I think I would last a little longer than the two minutes it’s going to take this airlock to finish cycling.”
“Fine. Sorry. My mistake.” Erin felt like dying already. “What is it you want to give me, then?”
Darrow reached into a tiny pouch hidden inside the left sleeve of his uniform jacket and pulled out a small red capsule. Erin didn’t need to ask what it was. She didn’t want to accept it, either, but Darrow pressed it into her hand.
“Hide it under your tongue,” he said, lowering his voice as if someone could eavesdrop over the noise of atmosphere filling the docking tunnel between Myrmidon and the Quggano ship. “It’s all organic compounds, even the capsule itself, so it won’t show up on any scans. If you need to use it, just bite down to break the seal. The chemicals will mix together and activate the—” He stopped and shrugged.
“Poison,” Erin said, finishing the sentence.
“It’s very fast-acting,” Darrow said, “and completely painless.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Look,” Darrow said, “we don’t know what the Quggano do with the losing champions. But no human who goes into the competition chamber has ever come out again. If it looks like they’re going to do something that—if they’re going to torture you, or worse—this will let you end it quickly.”
Erin hated not being able to argue with him. She hated being afraid like this, feeling powerless and limited to only bad choices.