Was this kid just playing by rote? Did he have any idea what he’d been dropped into here? That he was literally fighting for his life?
Erin’s vision blurred. She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked up at Mikey again. She had no idea what he was thinking, and she couldn’t ask him, given the language barrier. They couldn’t even talk about what was happening. They just had to go through with this ritual, and then one of them had to die.
It was an impossible choice. She knew how to break through Mikey’s tower defense—if that was what he was playing—but she couldn’t condemn this kid to death just because he didn’t know how to play a damn game.
On the other hand, how could she sentence the entire crew of the Myrmidon to death, just because she couldn’t stand the thought of being a murderer? Was her own psychological well-being worth all those hundreds of lives?
Mikey made a noise, jolting her back to the game. Erin interpreted his utterance as impatience, and she reflexively made the next textbook move, sliding her other side-rook forward to defend her knight.
As soon as her hand released the dark piece, Mikey moved his tall-bishop in for the kill, using another arm to remove the dark knight and set it on the table beside the game board. He lifted his head and made a cawing noise that might have been laughter.
Erin shook her head. He was playing exactly the way Darrow had shown her not to. Sure, Mikey’s tall-bishop was now inside her lines, but he had left himself wide open to a counterattack. Erin could take out his tall-bishop with her side-rook, then send her other two knights in through the opening he had just made. She could decimate his pieces in half a dozen moves. There was still no guarantee that she would win, but if all Mikey knew about Ton-Gla-Ben was what he’d read in a book, she actually had a fighting chance.
“AAARRNNN,” Mikey said, fluttering his antennae. He tapped the table with two legs. “AAARRNNN GAALAANN.”
“Okay, okay,” Erin said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
She captured his tall-bishop with her side-rook. Mikey stared silently for a moment, then moved his other tall-bishop forward, setting up to capture her side-rook.
Erin gaped for a moment. He’d just gone off-book, but not in a good way. There was no advantage to taking her side-rook now. Sending his other tall-bishop in was an obvious mistake. Was he just baiting her? Testing to see what this dumb human would do?
“What the hell are you doing?” Erin muttered.
She decided to do something off the wall. She took her rightmost pawn and shoved it forward. The move was completely irrelevant to everything that had happened in the game so far. Would Mikey ignore it and take her side-rook in an act of short-sighted vengeance?
He didn’t. He moved his own light pawn forward, blocking the dark pawn she’d just released. Now they were deadlocked, removing an entire section of the board from play.
Erin frowned at him. “What the hell are you doing?” she said out loud.
She grabbed her leftmost pawn and moved it out, mirroring her last move. Once again, Mikey blocked with his own pawn. Now two entire lanes were unplayable.
“What the hell are you doing?” Erin repeated.
He stared back at her with giant, unblinking eyes. “GAALAANN.”
Erin looked down at the board, then up at Mikey again. If he was going to play like this—short-sighted, reacting to low-value captures, focused on retaliation and spite instead of long-term gain—there was a very good chance Erin could beat him. And this was a single contest, not some kind of tournament.
One game, and then one of them would die.
“GAALAANN,” Mikey repeated, tapping four arms on the table.
Impatient. Childlike.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t send this kid to his death. She couldn’t live with herself if she did that.
If Captain Yokota chose to blow up his ship and kill his own crew, that was on him. That wouldn’t be Erin’s fault. It wasn’t her fault that the Quggano had named her to play this stupid game, or that this idiotic war was happening in the first place.
But it would be her fault if she killed this child.
Her hand trembled as she reached forward and picked up a dark short-bishop. It was entirely too early in the game for her to send it forward, especially now that every piece would be channeled into the center of the board, but it was the surest way to guarantee a quick loss. Once her short-bishops were gone, she would have no close-in defenses for her king.
She dropped the short-bishop onto the board and withdrew her hand. She looked up at Mikey.
“You’re not that dumb,” she said. “Come on, let’s just get this over with.”
He tilted his head at her. He leaned forward to study the board. Then he picked up a light side-rook and moved it up behind the light pawn in his left side lane.
Erin blinked. He had just locked up that piece, too. Nobody was moving out of the side lanes until one of those pawns got captured, and that wasn’t going to happen until somebody risked sacrificing a knight to do it.
“Look,” Erin said, moving her center knight into position to attack the light pawn in her right side lane. “Look. See that? What do you do about that? Come on, this is basic—”
Mikey seized his other side-rook and placed it behind his right side lane pawn.
“What the hell are you doing?” Erin stood up. Her hands clutched the sides of her head. “Oh my God, what are you doing?”
Mikey tilted his head up toward her. “GAALAANN.”
Erin folded her arms and sat down. “Don’t tell me. That word does not mean what I think it means.”
Mikey repeated the sound. Erin strained to hear any difference in inflection or tone, but her human ears hadn’t been trained to understand Quggano. Mikey waved his arms at the board. Erin felt anger warming her cheeks.
“No,” she said. “Fuck you, kid. There is no way I’m winning this game. Fuck. You.”
With the last two syllables, she picked up and then dropped her third knight, putting it right in front of a light short-bishop. It was a ridiculously dumb move, exposing her to at least three different attacks, and it should have been irresistible to any opponent.
Mikey ignored the knight and moved his tall-bishop out of attack position.
Erin couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She looked over the board, then looked it over again. Both light and dark positions were a mess. There was a chance that they could both end up blocking all possible avenues of attack and—
She gasped and looked up at Mikey. He tapped his arms on the table next to the board, dancing between the light side-rooks and pawns in the outermost lanes. The lanes which were now completely blocked.
He hadn’t been impatient. He had been trying to draw her attention to his strategy.
“Smart kid,” Erin said, smiling. “All right, short stack. Let’s do this. Gaalaann.”
She moved another short-bishop into the center of the board. Mikey made that cawing-laughter noise again, then moved one of his own short-bishops forward. Yes. Erin could see it now. She could see exactly what he was doing, and what he wanted her to do.
Neither of them wanted to win this game. Neither of them wanted to be a killer.
They were going to work together to reach a stalemate.
She tried not to think about what would happen after they finished the game. Darrow hadn’t briefed her on what the Quggano would do with the champions if their contest ended in a draw. She expected it wasn’t a possibility in single combat. Even with Ton-Gla-Ben, stalemate was rare, because it was easy to exploit even the smallest mistake.