Balance Point (17 page)
Authors: Robert Buettner
“Ladeeez and gentlemen!”
The lights in the sports book dimmed, the Coliseum lights shrank to a pencil spot that shone down onto the center of the circular tank’s surface.
The crowd roared, and a tuxedoed announcer slid into the spotlight, standing on a doughnut skimmer platform that wobbled ten feet above the water. He clutched the skimmer’s grab yoke with one hand and grasped a microphone in the other.
Quiet.
“Tonight, for the unlimited fighting championship of the universe, an unrestricted battle to the death with a sixty-minute time limit.” The announcer paused until the echoes of his voice died.
The crowd roared, but in reality the announcer was promising more entertainment than one of these actually delivered. Funhouse death matches were spectacular, but seldom lasted longer than a hand job.
He pointed up and out, at the circling red lights. “In the scarlet livery, from Bren, weighing in at one hundred ninety-eight thousand Trueborn pounds, and measuring ninety-seven feet nose to tail, the challenger—”
Another roar.
The sky crane thrummed in above the Coliseum’s far parapet as the lights came back up.
“Cronus the rhind!”
Bren’s fauna paralleled Earth’s, but retarded back to the Cretaceous period. Except for Bren’s human population, including Syrene’s Marini, which was introduced there thirty thousand years ago by the Slugs.
Rhinds essentially paralleled Earth’s extinct short-necked pliosaurs. Pliosaurs were air-breathing reptiles that resembled whale-sized crocodiles but with flippers replacing their legs. Pliosaurs were so agile, powerful and quick that they literally ate Cretaceous great white sharks for breakfast. Bren’s rhinds grew to more than twice the size of Earth pliosaurs.
Cronus the rhind had been captured on Bren and shipped to Funhouse as a fellow passenger with Ya Ya and me aboard
Iwo Jima
. Cruisers actually landed on Funhouse precisely so captured monsters from all over the universe, like Cronus, could be delivered to Funhouse in fighting trim. On Funhouse, they would eventually kill or be killed by other monsters, so that humans could have less boring vacations. If full contact titanopod racing was insane, kidnapping and killing other species for sport seemed criminally insane.
Many humans found a starship trip relaxing, but Cronus’ voyage had not mellowed him. As he dangled above the Coliseum’s lip in his sling, like a hundred-foot-long, black stadium hot dog writhing in a crimson bun, a flagpole on the Coliseum’s canopy came within range of his jaws.
The pole was plasteel as thick as a man’s waist, but Cronus snapped it like a chopstick, then spit it back onto the canopy. Spectators cringed and retreated from seats below the severed pole.
I turned and glanced at the tote board to see what the late money did. Cronus’ bad-ass display had narrowed the odds against him to ninety-two to one.
As Cronus’ sky crane settled him toward the vast water tank’s surface, his thrashing caused him to rock like a pendulum in his sling, so that the rear third of his length swung above the lowest fifteen rows.
Cronus chose that instant to relieve himself, a deluge that would have filled the average Trueborn backyard pool, and it inundated the spectators in the lowest fifteen rows.
These incidents taught me two things.
First, the lowest fifteen rows were the cheapest seats in the house for good reason.
Second, differences of opinion between bettors are what make gaming fascinating. Cronus’ latest behavior caused even more late bets to, uh, flood in. But the odds scarcely changed. That was because as many bettors thought Cronus would fight better lighter as thought he was so scared to fight that he had peed himself.
As soon as Cronus had been released into the tank, he undulated around it in confident circles like the supreme predator he was.
Meanwhile, the introduction ritual was repeated for Cronus’ opponent, who drew even bigger roars because she was so heavily favored.
“—undefeated champion of the universe, weighing in at four hundred six thousand Trueborn pounds, and measuring one hundred forty-six feet nose to tail, She of the Thousand Arms, Funhouse’s own favorite daughter, Leeeviaa-athan!”
Leviathan had done this before, eleven times, in fact, according to her official bio. So she dangled aloof as her sky crane lowered her. Her given name was also her species’ common name. Leviathans were aquatic air breathers native to Funhouse. They resembled the translucent gray love children of needle-toothed, gelatinous anacondas bred with four-eyed millipedes.
As Leviathan dangled with her thousand wormy prehensile arms twitching scant feet above the tank, the jumbholo flickered back to life. The feed showed Cronus’ belly and flippers from below, as he paddled slowly back and forth, thumping his tail against the tank wall every few seconds.
No fewer than twelve ‘bots, both submarine and flying, would feed every detail of the fight not only to the crowd here but to a pay-per-view audience.
I glanced at Ya Ya, who sat smiling and seemingly unconcerned, though his rookie was outweighed two-to-one, out-reached by fifty feet, and out-armed by one thousand.
When the gong sounded, and Leviathan belly-flopped into the tank like a launched cruise ship, I checked the tote. The alien animal on which Ya Ya Cohon appeared to have risked everything he had went off as a one-hundred-four-to-one underdog.
They say you have to have skin in a game to care, but even though I personally didn’t stand to lose or win so much as a cup of coffee, my heart hammered. It had just occurred to me that if Ya Ya lost his whole bazoomba in the next few minutes, and couldn’t make any remaining payoffs he might owe on my behalf, my path to Yavet and to Orion could be blocked.
TWENTY-FIVE
Leviathan circled the tank along the wall at the surface, pushing white water ahead of her as though she had a bone between her teeth. Out in the tank’s center, Cronus jumped completely clear of the surface, arcing through the air like a black rainbow and sucking a collective gasp out of the crowd. When he plunged back, his momentum torpedoed him to the tank floor.
The bottom-mounted ‘bot cam showed Cronus’ quick reversal. Then he rocketed up through four hundred feet, toward the target silhouetted against the water’s surface. Cronus’ snout struck Leviathan’s lower midsection with a force that, if one did the math, probably equaled that generated by an old-fashioned runaway railroad locomotive.
Again the crowd gasped.
Ya Ya glanced at me, pumped his fist, and grinned.
But Leviathan just kept swimming, her arms churning the tank water to foam. The bottom cam showed she was leaking the yellow circulating fluid that functioned like a leviathan’s blood, but in unsubstantial quantity. More a razor nick than a fatal gore.
Cronus repeated his maneuver three more times, with similarly ineffectual results. Then he meandered at the surface, seemingly either exhausted, bewildered or both.
The crowd’s small pro-Cronus faction had cheered his furious beginning, but now fizzled. Leviathan had given her fans nothing to cheer about so they fizzled, too.
As the two competitors circled, some in the crowd stamped feet, whistled for action. Leviathan seemed to swim slower, the foam churned by her arms less frothy, as if her puny challenger bored her.
Even apart from my self-interest stoked by Ya Ya’s wager, I found myself pulling for sleek, acrobatic Cronus against butt-ugly do-nothing Leviathan. No style points were on offer, but if there had been, Cronus would have been running away with the bout.
Suddenly, Cronus spun and drove at Leviathan. He had no room to build speed, and his resultant head butt into Leviathan’s flank seemed like a mere tap.
But Leviathan thrashed once, floated inanimate for an instant, then sank like four hundred six thousand pounds of mush in a one-hundred-forty-six-foot-long sock.
The crowd outside in the arena and up here in the book went still.
After thirty seconds, Leviathan settled onto the tank’s floor in a loose, lifeless coil, her condition flashed on the jumbholo from four angles. She of The One Thousand Arms didn’t claw for the ropes with even one of them.
Leviathan was down for the count. Cronus seemed to sense it, tail-walked across the surface, then dove down four hundred feet. He clamped down, shook his great head and tore a limousine-sized chunk from the former champion’s flank. The wound in Leviathan’s carcass bled clouds of yellow slime into the crystalline tank water.
Ya Ya was the first inside the book to find his voice. He sprang to his feet alongside me, hopping foot to foot in a jig, fists punching the air in counterpoint. “Oh yeah! Oh yeah!”
Down in the arena bucket, one in one hundred bettors joined Ya Ya’s celebration. Others grumbled, booed or headed for the exits.
Up here in the book, bettors mobbed my table mate, pounding his back. Ya Ya Cohon had arguably broken the promise I had heard him make earlier today to “win many bets,” because he had won just one. However, that was mere semantics. One hundred million may not have been the number it used to be, but one hundred million times one hundred four was an uncountably large number on any day.
The celebration flowed and ebbed for perhaps three minutes before I heard the first shout.
“Fix!”
I shook my head, smirked. There were sore losers in any crowd.
Then I looked round the book from our perch on top of the gambling world and noticed a knot of gray-suited Gaming Authority regents huddled together beneath the blue totalisator wall. Moment to moment, one of the regents, then another, would glance our way.
I muttered to myself, “Crap.”
Not all Howard’s flag-waving nerds spent their time trying to weaponize telepathic, pyrophobic, eleven-ton grizzly bears. Oh no. Some of them fabricated weapons almost as odd but far more attainable. Like micro-bore, neurotoxin-packed sniping bullets, fabricated from an organic ceramic, that hit no harder than bee stings, then dissolved slowly and left scant trace of bullet or poison in the target’s body. The shooter could be miles away before the target abruptly dropped dead. Kit and I had never actually popped anybody with one, but we had trained with them for some jobs.
The universe was full of nerds who, unlike Howard’s nerds, would fabricate anything, not for a flag, but for a price. The discreet way to have such a suspiciously single-purpose round fabricated, that was right-sized and right-juiced to kill an alien monster, would be to commission the work far from where the round would be used, then smuggle it in.
A monster-stopper round would have to be bigger than the bee stinger that could kill a person, perhaps as big as a dill pickle. And so it would have to be fired from some kind of elephant gun. But there would be no need to smuggle an elephant gun in. They had to be easily obtained on a planet where the scorpions grew as big as crocodiles.
As for hitting a hundred-forty-six foot-long target in her ass while she swung spotlit up in the dark, a few hundred feet above a million secure hides, for twenty minutes? That would be a piece of cake for some anonymous journeyman sniper, who would never even see, much less be able to identify, the one-eyed gnome who hired him. Which one-eyed gnome wouldn’t have trusted just any normal mule to smuggle in the disappearing poison bullet.
Four gray-suited Gaming Authority regents muscled through Ya Ya’s well-wishers.
The lead gray suit said to Ya Ya, “Mr. Cohon? Could we have a private word with you,” the regent nodded at me, “and your partner?”
Partner?
Moi
?
Two hours later I paced from one end to the other of the main room in a lavishly appointed suite in the Funhouse Sporting Club’s hotel tower. Ya Ya and I weren’t technically under arrest. The Gaming Authority just wouldn’t let us leave the room. And so, by extension, the planet.
On Yavet, if you were a peep with a starving mother, caught in the upper levels and suspected of stealing a bean bar, cops in body armor kicked the shit out of you with chain-mail boots. On Funhouse, if you were a high roller suspected of stealing ten billion and killing the universe’s most valuable broodmare as collateral damage, cops in gray suits gave you a fruit basket.
Ya Ya sat on the sofa, feet up and the basket in his lap, and peeled an apple with a gold knife. “Sit. You make Ya Ya nervous.”
“I can’t sit. Ya Ya make
me
nervous.”
Ya Ya waved up the suite’s music ‘bot, crooked a finger so that I came close, then he whispered, “Is perfect plan. Today regents mad at Ya Ya suspected fixer. Tomorrow is no evidence. So big hypocrite regents say, look! Poor one-eye dwarf win big in Funhouse on up and up, so why not you? Book trip now!” Ya Ya balled his fingers into fists, then pantomimed scrubbing tears from his eye and eye patch with them. “Warm heart story make you cry from happy.” He dropped his fists into his lap, shrugged. “Couple days, you and me walk.”
I spread my hands, palms out and pleading. “Ya Ya,
Iwo Jima
upships tomorrow. A couple days is too late for me. Why did you get me into this?”
“Ya Ya no get you into this, you do. Plan is plan before you come. Little mother dying. Very sad. I make you most first-class price.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s fair. Thanks. But you didn’t have to drag me along into
this
mess.”
He tongued an apple slice off his knife blade, shrugged. “No mess. I do boy of little mother big favor. Bet the ’dog, Ya Ya say. Boy not listen.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, sighed. “I’m sorry. That was very thoughtful. But I didn’t come on this trip to get rich. I came to get to Yavet. Quietly.”
He set his knife and apple down. “Okay. Tell you what is. I call local mouthpiece. You upship with no skin on teeth, maybe. But you upship. Not cheap for Ya Ya, but I make you most first-class price.”
At “mouthpiece,” my heart had leapt. Then it sank. “Ya Ya, I don’t have that kind of money left to pay you.”
“I say most first-class price, not money.” He smiled. “You kiss little mother for Ya Ya. Promise?”
I nodded, and my eyes got moist. “Promise.”
In fact, after considerable negotiation with the gray suits, which negotiation on my behalf may have haircut Ya Ya’s eventual payday by a hundred million, Ya Ya’s local mouthpiece himself dropped me off at
Iwo Jima
’s gangway ten minutes before it was pulled in.
So I upped ship aboard
Iwo Jima
an hour later with plenty of skin on my teeth.
Maybe it’s true that great lying, scheming minds think alike. It was actually a favorite expression of Howard Hibble’s that his people sometimes made it by the skins of their teeth, but he believed they would always make it.
Whatever else Ya Ya Cohon had done in his life, he had done the right thing by me. I hoped he would always make it, too.
As things turned out,
Yorktown
was running just two days behind
Iwo Jima
. So if I
had
missed
Iwo
I simply would have transferred my ticket and used it to board
Yorktown
when Ya Ya and I walked, the promised couple days later. There’s really not much aboard one starship that isn’t aboard another. It probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.