Steemjammer: The Deeper Truth (5 page)

A familiar cackle could be heard coming out of the attacker’s helmet.
Bram
.

“Popped you again, Ren-stink!” his hollow-sounding voice crowed. “Five victories for me. For you, none!”

It was against the rules to attack someone once their white flag had popped, but no referee stood by. Bram kicked him in the chest. Cackling with distorted laughter, he faced Will, who’d just gotten himself untangled and had been unable to help his cousin.

“Told you he was sleeb,” Bram leered.
Slime
. “As for you, Stevens, I thought you had some snap. I’m thinking maybe I was wrong about you.”

Bram expertly banged his armored fists together and took a cheap shot at Cobee’s head, laughing harder. It didn’t hurt him, but it was humiliating.

Infuriated, an inner rage took over Will. Without thinking, he leaned forward and charged. He tried cocking his right arm back for a punch, but he did it so badly that it ended up twisting the suit, making himself fall forward. As it so happened, his shoulder went under Bram’s guard and smashed him in the chest, knocking him backwards.

CLANG! Bram hit the floor, flat on his back. Will came down on top of him and rolled off. For a moment he lay there on his side, dazed, while Bram struggled to right himself.

“Get up,” thought Will.

“Hey Stevens!” Bram shouted through his suit’s diaphragm. “What the stroont was that?”

Will wasn’t sure what that meant, except he didn’t think it was a word he’d ever heard his mom or dad use.

“Just showing a little ‘snap,’ Bram,” he replied, finally finding a button that made the speaking system work. Wondering if he could pull off another lucky move, he rolled onto his stomach and pushed up into a crawling position.

Bram scrambled to his feet amazingly fast and kicked him in the head. He kicked again while Will’s knees slipped back and forth on the floor. This was getting very annoying. He could hear Bram cackling with glee. Also, his sister was shouting something from the stands, but he had to focus on the fight.

Timing it just right, Will dropped flat. Bram’s next kick went over him, and the young Raz lost his balance. While he teetered, struggling to recover, Will repeated one of the few motions he understood and hurled himself up and into Bram, who toppled to the floor. To his amazement, Will found himself on his feet.

“Vershpletter hem!” he could hear Cobee’s muffled yell.
Splatter him
!

He kicked Bram in the face plate. Again and again, he kicked him. The helmet absorbed the blows, and Bram felt no pain. But from his growl, Will knew he’d angered him.

“I’ll get you now!” Bram shouted.

Faking a lunge at Will’s legs, Bram instead hopped back on his feet and began jabbing. His armored fists came in too fast for Will to dodge or block. Even worse, he noticed the gauge inside his helmet that indicated his suit was taking damage. Some of Cobee’s playful whacks had already advanced it, and now Bram was about to cause his suit to shut down and surrender.

No way, Will thought. He was not going to let that happen. Because his armor was too loose, he found he could free his right arm and shove it up inside the fighting suit’s chest cavity toward the gauge.

BAM! Another hit. An experienced steemsuit fighter would not have used such an ill-fitting suit and could never have done what Will was trying. He was just able to worm his hand up inside his helmet, in front of his face.

Bram punched him. “Push the glass cover on the gauge,” Will thought. He managed to duck Bram’s next swing. One more hit and his suit would freeze up.

“Yes!” Will shouted as he heard a click.

The tiny cover came loose, and he shoved the gauge’s needle back to zero, tricking the system. His suit registered as unhit. Bram kept swatting him, but it no longer mattered.

Now, Will finally felt he could try something. Worming his arm back into the suit, he blocked the next punch and hit back. Then, he kicked, planting his heavy, armored foot into the young Raz’s gut. Though Bram continued landing punches, Will found that if he timed it right, he could counterstrike and sometimes land a hit.

“What is this?” came Bram’s frustrated shout.

Tired, Bram found he couldn’t swing anymore, and Will connected a series of easy punches. Lowering his head, he rammed the young Raz. Bram fell to his back.

“All right, Stevens,” he shouted. “You got snap.”

Will kicked him.

“That’s enough! Stop it!”

Another kick. HISS! Bram’s suit froze up, and the embarrassing white flag popped out of his helmet.

“Winst!” came Cobee’s muffled but triumphant shout.
Victory!
“Ya, winst!”

“Now we show him,” Will thought, and he brought back his leg to kick Bram, really hard.

But he hesitated. It didn’t feel right. Of course, he needed to pretend to be working for Bram. He shouldn’t have done this. Even though Bram had broken the rules and behaved horribly, attacking Cobee from behind and then kicking him while his suit was frozen, Will just didn’t feel good about doing the same to him. He backed away.

HISS! Will’s suit froze up. The little white flag, however, did not pop out of his helmet. Still, his suit no longer responded. Someone had cut off his steam.

“That’s enough,” came a voice from above.

They looked up to see a blue-eyed man with a waxed moustache in a high window. Cobee had told Will this was Robert Axworthy, a descendant of the man who had invented Steemball and a professional referee over many sports. He was also in charge of the arena.

“These suits are dinged up enough as they are,” Axworthy said. “See that they’re stowed properly, and no more mischief.”

“Miserable swine,” Bram mumbled, and Will realized it was directed not at Axworthy but
him
.

Steam returned to them, and they stomped over to the safe area where they could get out of their suits and leave. Angelica jumped up and down, clapping and cheering, until Bram opened his visor and shot a chilling look at her.

Will noticed the bodyguard in the stands, and he worried. What if his actions had made the young Rasmussen suspicious? Bram lifted his visor and sneered at him.

“You sleebish cheater,” he accused bitterly. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what?” Will replied, lifting his visor and playing dumb.

“You took far more hits than should have been allowed. I actually beat you!”

Will saw his chance and knew exactly what to say.

“Of course you did, Bram,” he agreed cheerfully. “You’re a great fighter. I just didn’t like you thinking I had no ‘snap.’”

Bram stopped Will and let Cobee go ahead. He leaned in, whispering. “That was un-gaaf!”
Uncool
!

“What?” Will whispered, thinking fast. “You told me to be sleebish to you around others. What else was I supposed to do?”

Bram started to growl a retort but found he couldn’t say anything to that. His lip curled with frustration. “What are you doing, wasting time like this?”

“I couldn’t get away from them. Thanks for roughing up Cobee. Maybe he’ll leave me alone, and I’ll be able to go downstairs and do some proper searching.”

Bram was about to say something nasty but stopped, leaving Will to guess that he’d told him exactly what he needed to hear.

“Fair enough,” Bram said. “It felt good ringing that sleeb Ren-stink’s bell again.”

And it felt good, Will thought, making you send up a white flag. The young Rasmussen mistook his satisfied grin as support for his comment against Cobee.

“Remember,” Bram warned, “what you find here determines what you earn from the Protectorate, so don’t blow it.”

Flipping his visor down, he stomped off to a different changing area.

***

“Extremely clumsy,” Cobee assessed Will’s performance at lunch, acting out parts. “Tangled in the hose, smashing into the walls, but the way he tripped into Bram’s chest and knocked him on his backside, puur ontzagwekkent!”
Pure awesome
!

They ate with Cobee’s friends inside a steem contraption or steemtrap they’d been working on for months. A junior-league version of the destroyers used by adults in Steemball, the kids had improved their device since Will had last seen it. It now had metal side panels and a roof.

“Then, somehow - bap, whap, bap,” Cobee continued. “Will hit him, and up went Bram’s white flag of shame!”

Jack Waterford, a boy their age from New London with brown, messy hair, cheered. His twin sister Kate, who often hid her pretty face behind cascading, long brown hair, seemed less shy and withdrawn now. She smiled with admiration.

Sully Spinoza, a skinny kid with huge glasses and a mop of red curly hair that kept wanting to fall down over his eyes, gave a thumbs-up. His sister, Rachel, clapped. Her hair was much like her brother’s but easier to control. Having befriended Angelica, they sat together.

Will made a face. With the new panels on the steemtrap and the fact that the workshop outside them was very noisy, no one was likely to overhear them. Still, he wished Cobee had told no one about the fight. Then, guilt built up inside him as he realized how much he’d yet to tell them.

“Please,” he said. “We can’t have people talking about this.”

“Are you kidding?” Frog exclaimed between bites of pickled herring. “No one’s popped Bram’s white flag. It was a zeega!”
Triumph
!

His real name was Hoondarus Naaktegboren, which – like many Dutch names on Old Earth and B’verlt – had a bizarre translation:
naked born
. With eyes set far apart and an extremely wide mouth, he went by the rather obvious nickname of Frog.

“It was luck,” Will insisted, “and I don’t want any attention drawn to me. Please, don’t mention it at all.”

He noticed that Giselle didn’t look too happy. Angelica put down her pofferjees, uneaten, and climbed out the hatch.

“Luck?” Kate said. “I’d call it something else. Goot steem!”

“Hear, hear!” Jack agreed. “Goot steem right in his ratty Raz face!”

As they cheered, Will smiled, but inside he felt conflicted. The whole fight he’d stumbled and fallen about. It had only been good luck and cheating that had let him win, he felt sure, and not goot steem.

“Seriously,” he said when they quieted down. “I don’t want anyone knowing this for now. Can I count on you?”

They reluctantly agreed. To change the subject, he got them talking about the big Steemball tournament starting on Thursday, the same day the verltgaat was supposed to reopen. They speculated eagerly on favorite teams and who might win the right to represent New Amsterdam in the championship games to come.

Frog and Jack favored the Green Guard, a group of militiamen whose history went back to the founding of New Amsterdam. They always fielded a strong team and fashioned their steemtraps after fantastic or mythical beasts. Kate agreed they’d probably do well but said she’d be rooting for a new team called the Vanishing Points.

“They’re a bunch of artists who made the most beautiful steemtraps I’ve ever seen,” she explained. “They’ll get crushed, but I’m cheering them on, anyway.”

Cobee seemed depressed by the topic, and Will knew it was because he feared they’d have to completely miss it. Giselle, he noticed, had gone to try to comfort Angelica, and a feeling of guilt welled up inside his chest. Again, he was asking them to keep information from others, to mislead. What if, he worried, it ended up damaging them as it had him?

He looked up and noticed Kate, who normally allowed her thick hair to hide her face, was staring at him. She didn’t quite seem herself, and he noticed she wasn’t blinking, like she was in a trance. It made Will uncomfortable.

“I know who you are,” she said in a quiet voice.

Cobee and the other boys had left the trap to tidy up and throw away the paper sacks their lunches had come in. No one else was close enough to hear her, but still, Will felt alarmed.

“You do?” he asked.

“Well,” she whispered, “it’s more like I know who you’re not. You’re not Will Stevens.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’ve got a secret.”

“That’s true. Do you know what it is?”

“I could guess.” She continued staring at him, but while she’d early seemed to be in a daze, she now appeared to be calculating. “But maybe I shouldn’t try. Whatever your secret is, the Raz shouldn’t know, right?”

Will’s relief was palpable. “You got that right.”

“Don’t worry,” she said in a more natural sounding voice. “Jack and I hate the Raz, too. They ruined our family’s business and drove us out of our home. We think they killed my uncle, but we couldn’t prove it.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “We refined rare chemicals for industry. They either saw us as competition to get rid of, or maybe they wanted our machinery. The important thing is that I won’t betray you. You can count on that, Will.”

Letting her hair cover her face, she got up and went out of the steemtrap. Will was left wondering just how much she knew or if she’d been bluffing. He also wondered if Steemjammers were the only ones who could see deeper truth, or perhaps others could see hidden truths. He felt he could trust her, but if she could tell he wasn’t who he said he was, he worried that the Rasmussens could or soon would. Now, he felt a lot more vulnerable than he had before.