Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 24
This conclusion was reinforced by the constant jeers and boos descending from the arena’s crowd. There had to be tens of thousands of fine, upstanding bone-people in the audience, all clamoring for what I assumed was my demise. Then again, given the scale of the situation, they didn’t seem like individual beings at all. They were just a homogenous mass of arms and bones and tusks. A mob.
Directly above, visible through the arena’s domed aperture, was the crystal-dotted darkness of the creature’s mouth. It was my only reprieve from the strikingly bright pearl-and-bone architecture. Then again, those design choices were at least tasteful. They had character. I was not as fond of the spliced-in, salvaged parts of the arena—rusty buzzsaws poking up through the salt, automated turrets waving back and forth on their posts, secondary thrusters that had been modified to shoot flames (and probably barbecue skin)… They’d built themselves a monument to butchery.
Now, you might be thinking I’m overplaying the scale of this arena, or indeed the entirety of this mouth-city. How could a primal, skeleton-like species cram an entire civilization into a space-serpent’s mouth, right? The answer is, I have no idea. But at that moment, I didn’t really care. I had bigger things on my mind.
One such thing was my crew, which had been dumped into a large wicker cage and suspended over the arena. They were still out cold—I would later find out that they’d been drugged with a few helping doses of “sleepy juice” to keep them under control.
Curiously enough, Umzuma was nowhere to be seen. I never did find out why they let him stay in place, though I have my theories. My two best guesses are that he was either too cumbersome to move, or too disturbing and goopy to haul away. Or both.
“So… what’s our play?” Chitta Mini asked.
“Our play?” I replied, offering a few halfhearted waves to appease the crowd. “You’re the superintelligence here, aren’t you? Work something out!”
“Do you think they’re gonna eat both of us or just you? They might think I’m, like, an appetizer or somethin’…”
“Think, Mini.”
But deep down, I knew there wasn’t much for the chitta to think about. We were going to become an afternoon special on the bone-people’s menu. The arena’s walls were at least thirty feet high, and the salt floor below us was densely littered with dehydrated heads and other human-looking bits. If you don’t understand how those corpses ended up there or what would happen in a few minutes’ time, you haven’t spent much time in the world of blood sports. Luckily (or sadly), I have. As soon as the Circle of Torment’s announcer gave the green light, I’d be torn apart by the saints and valedictorians on the pillars around me. This was a fight to the death, and I was nothing more than this week’s guest star in their snuff film.
Before I could ponder this too much, however, a chorus of rumbling horns filled the arena. At this, the crowd went into an ear-shattering frenzy. The source of their excitement, I soon realized, was not the music, but the movements occurring up on the arena’s highest tier. A crimson-robed figure stepped up to a balcony railing made from ribcages and lifted their arms high, adding fuel to the crowd’s fire.
“Children of calcified purity,” the speaker—a woman—boomed, “intruders from beyond the Maker’s realm have journeyed here once again, no doubt with the same intentions. They have come to corrupt us, to pilfer the Maker’s great works, to open the floodgates that will bring about the end of our people. And to this, what do we say?”
The crowd gave a practiced reply of, “Death! Death! Death!”
“Oh, just wonderful,” I thought to Chitta Mini. “They’re under the impression that we’re tomb robbers.”
“I mean, technically speaking, aren’t we?”
“Of course not. We’re tomb seekers. Big difference.”
Chitta Mini hummed. “Y’know, these fine folks might be the reason we never heard back from anybody who went into the Untraversed. They seem pretty touchy about the Maker’s stuff.”
“You’re right.”
Suddenly realizing that the Maker angle could be our only way out, I lifted my hand high and waved at the arena’s announcer. Not that my voice would be any good, even if she did grant me speaking privileges. I was about half a kilometer away from her, stranded at the bottom of a pit that had probably been acoustically engineered to contain the screams of its victims.
To my surprise, the crowd seemed to catch my gesture. Their hollering and chanting trickled down to a mild sea of discontent, then an eerie silence.
The announcer turned her gaze to some sort of operations den in the upper-left overhang of the arena. She made a few vague hand gestures at it, which prompted the technicians within to crank some levers and vent steam through a series of misshapen pipes.
Seconds later, the sinewy wires trailing from the operations den to the arena floor began to contract and wobble. They looked like intestines locked in an epic digestive struggle. Now, I couldn’t tell whether they had fluids or electrical current running through them, but I could tell that they powered everything from the traps to the turrets around me. And more importantly, they were no ordinary wires. These were organic, through and through.
An idea sprang to mind.
“Speak, and do so briefly,” the announcer said. “We have little time for the words of the unclean.”
“Unclean?” I blurted out, only then realizing they had, in fact, activated some sort of local microphone. My throat-clearing produced a terrible feedback echo. “Uh, hello. My name is Bodhi Drezek, and I’m not here to steal anything. Far from it. Now, you all seem like you’re good, hardworking people who appreciate the Maker’s… realm. My crew and I also appreciate it. That’s why we’ve come here to protect it.”
Murmurs and hisses came down from the crowd. Even my fellow pillar dwellers seemed to snicker at my words.
“You are not the first to have lied to our people,” the announcer said, pulling back her hood to reveal an elaborately war-painted face. “Even so, interloper, we have tolerated your words. If you survive this test of strength, you will be able to plead for your life in a test of honesty. But I shall waste no further breath speaking of these things… none of your fellow humans have ever made it beyond this test.”
“I haven’t lied!” I shouted, though they’d already killed my microphone. “Not here, anyway…”
“Prepare yourselves,” the announcer called down.
Various weapons began sprouting up through the salt below us. Axes, knives, rusty one-shot pistols… all the instruments needed to brutally dismember fellow arena captives. They didn’t just want to kill me—they wanted to give these people a show.
And I would give them one.
Still working overtime from the amphetamine injection, I whipped around and scanned the walls, the overhead scaffolding, the crowd… no dice. Not until I noticed the small, glossy-looking panel embedded in the bones directly behind me, about five feet above the salty floor.
Just as I’d expected, it had dozens of small, glistening tubes snaking outwards through the masonry and into the surrounding gadgets.
What exactly was it, you ask? Why, a wetworks board, of course. Still lost? Don’t fret; I’ll break it down. Way, way back in the day, before us pesky humans had explored or innovated enough to get our hands on inorganic AI constructs, we’d gone the biological route. You know, like chittas. Intelligence and architecture that could be grown in vats, ripened on vines, and powered with an all-natural diet of carbon and glucose. After all, why spend hundreds of years to reverse engineer a conscious computer for piloting when you can just clone and beef up an organic brain? But that’s tangential to the main point. See, ancient humans didn’t just stop at computers. They’d also grown entire information systems and ships through biological means. And these ships were governed by—you guessed it—wetworks boards.
All of that is a long, superfluous way of explaining why that board was going to save my life. The fools up in that operations box weren’t controlling anything—they were just feeding commands to the real CEO of the arena: the wetworks board.
“Oooooh,” Chitta Mini said, “is that what I think it is?”
“Look familiar?” I replied.
“Nostalgia, man. Nostalgia. They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
“May your blood and sweat nourish Jomandir, the World Serpent,” the announcer continued, droning on in that brash, imperious tone of hers. “May your flesh sink into the…”
Admittedly, I tuned out at that point. I got the point—it was time to die, you’re going to feed our giant space-snake, yadda yadda.
“Mini,” I thought, still staring at the wetworks board, “I don’t need to tell you what to do, right?”
He laughed. “I was made for this. Literally.”
And with that, I yanked Chitta Mini out of my pocket and threw him directly at the wetworks board. He splooshed against it, only to instantly plunge his tumor-tentacles into the board’s array of ports and hold on for dear life.
“Your time has come,” the announcer said, her voice rising to a crescendo. “You will know death, and you will—”
In the spirit of full disclosure, I was busy looking at a cracked fingernail when the first arena combatant exploded. Therefore, I must assume that the announcer fell silent in response to this surprise. I did, however, look up just as the first victim’s head fragments—mostly bone, with a few reddish bits—went spraying across the salt.
Screams and a general uproar erupted from the crowd, but the chitta’s handiwork was already in motion. The arena’s other automated turrets swiveled toward their assigned targets—that is, my competition on the pillars—and unleashed their deadly payload. Legs, chests, necks, shoulders, and spines exploded in brilliant red puffs.
I raised my arms in a show of victory when the last competitor kicked the bucket, but Chitta Mini didn’t seem content to stop. He kept pounding the already-minced, crushed, and pulped bodies with high-caliber rounds, simultaneously operating all of the turrets like a gang of cats pouncing on doomed mice. Pretty soon, there was nothing left but organ-splattered pillars and red sand. Rather embarrassing, really. Each time I opened my mouth to make a speech, he let off yet another “final” round, further incensing the traumatized crowd.
Not that anybody dared to draw a weapon on me, of course. Not even the warriors standing guard between the crowd sections. Brutish as they were, they clearly understood that I was in control of those turrets and thus their fates.
“Forgive me for being hasty,” I called up to the announcer, “but I believe it’s time to parley.”
Sixteen
Some corporate bigwigs believe a hostile takeover is the right way to assume control, but I’ve always believed in the lost art of negotiation. That being said, negotiation is significantly more effective when you’ve just delivered instant death to an arena full of would-be killers.
After nearly twenty minutes of proposals, counterproposals, threats, and even a few veiled compliments, I found myself escorted to what I took to be the local equivalent of a courtroom. The low ceilings, flickering lights, and fungus-riddled industrial décor suggested that the locals had ripped this place straight out of a ship and “repurposed” it. They’d also added their own touches, mostly in the form of corpses nailed to the walls and insane screeds painted across the floor.
Not the lap of luxury, by any means, but it would do. I had, after all, come here for a civilized discussion about getting myself and my crew out of the jaws of death—not figuratively, either.
My captors had accidentally followed the universal law requirement of “trial by a jury of peers,” having dumped my still-unconscious crew members into a holding pen. Which is not to say I had a warm reception. The scaffolding and various pits surrounding the courtroom floor were packed with seething, gibbering hordes of bone-people who were not so jazzed about the stunt I’d pulled.
“Y’know, I don’t think this is an ideal situation,” Chitta Mini said through our renewed tendril link. “I don’t see any more wetworks boards in this joint.”
I did my best to appear calm and orderly, even as the masses surged against the guards holding them at bay. “Just relax, Mini. I can talk my way out of hell itself. Which I’ve done. Twice.”
“Yeah, well, at least demons make deals. I’m gettin’ bad vibes from these skeletons.”
The chitta made a good point. Our captors seemed to operate on the principles of “might makes right” and cruelty. Now, this being the case, our little reversal of fortune in the arena had probably earned me some respect. But it had also made me a much more viable target. Hunter-killer societies love to seek out and slaughter suitable prey.
After a few more minutes of hubbub, pale lights lit up the front of the courtroom. Some semblance of order quelled the crowd. The arena announcer stepped up at the highest pulpit, while two lesser “judges”—both wearing black robes and beads around their heads—took their places at the desks on either side.
“I did not expect to see you here, human,” the announcer said. “Your kind are a frail, fearful bunch. Surrender your name.”
I bowed on my illuminated dais. “Bodhi Drezek, at your service.”
“Bodhi… a most curious title.”
“Sure, let’s go with that. And who am I speaking with?”
“I am High Priestess Jalisa, and these are my arbiters. But I suspect you will not live long enough to make use of this information.” Just then, I felt the rigid point of a blade pressing into the small of my back. “This is your test of honesty, human.”
“Test away. I’m an open book.”
The high priestess glanced at both arbiters, then nodded. “True or false… you have ventured here from the Fallen World.”
“You mean… the rest of the universe… outside this fine purple sphere?”
“True or false.”
I shrugged. “True? We’re just passing through your little slice of heaven.”
Whispers passed through the crowd.
“How have you learned our tongue?” the high priestess asked.
“Implant.” I tapped the side of my head. “Top of the line, you see.”
She lifted her chin. “The others have not understood our words.”
“Not surprised. I don’t cut corners on linguistics, ma’am.”
“Why have you come to our domain?”
“We’re trying to stop something bad from happening to the… Fallen World. There’s bit a been of an outbreak.”
“You speak of Kruthara.”
“Yes!” I just about shouted. Finally, some common ground. “We’re trying to fix that mess.”
Again, more unrest in the crowd. I’d touched a nerve.
The high priestess waved the commoners to silence, then leaned forward. “More lies from the outsider. We know that you are a servant of the corrupted one.”
“Me? Serving Kruthara? Listen, lady, you’ve got this all mixed up.”
“Maybe you oughta let me handle this,” Chitta Mini piped up. “These people are a little too lost in the crazy sauce.”
I did my best to nonchalantly hush him, but I couldn’t deny the thrust of his argument. There was no room for logic here. This is often the case in primitive spacefaring societies, where anything other than the established fear-and-power dynamic is punishable by death.
“Explain yourself, then,” the high priestess growled.
She swiveled in her chair, facing what initially appeared to be a blank, grimy wall. Only for a moment, though. The wall began to bubble and swirl, gradually conjuring an image that reminded me of a mirage. The image was that of our staging bay, which still had a few piles of Kruthara-dust scattered across its panels.
“What, you think I was smuggling Kruthara into this place?” I asked, incredulous.
The three judges said nothing.
“This is a misunderstanding,” I babbled on. “We were escaping from Kruthara, and it managed to get on board. Your… domain… took care of that.”
The high priestess steepled her fingers on the metal pulpit. “You admit that the corrupted one gained access to your vessel.”
This prompted yet another flurry of bloodlust from the crowd.
“It didn’t infect any of us,” I said. “If it did, we would’ve been sorted out the moment we came to this place. We’re clean!”
The arbiter to the left of the high priestess slid over and whispered something to her.
She nodded, then stared down at me. “Do you know how our people have thrived here for so long, human?”
“Sounds like a rhetorical question.”
“We have taken extraordinary measures to prevent the corruption from overtaking us. We have spent thousands of years evolving, culling our herd and its beauty to produce the very bodies you now see. We surrendered everything—our homeland, our destinies, our culture—to live within the Maker’s sacred space. We made our home in the jaws of this terrible beast, this majestic avatar of the Great Maker. And most importantly, we eradicated all that posed a threat to our people. The scourge of the corrupted one has no place here.”
The crowd cheered at that, but I was less impressed. If the high priestess’ account was true, their entire civilization had cast itself into an endless dark age just to hide from a threat that, until recently, hadn’t even existed. They’d spent their whole history preparing for a war that was just now beginning.
Sighing, I tried a new approach. “First of all, let me congratulate you on winning the survival game this long. Second, let me reiterate that I haven’t come here to spread anything or steal anything or even touch anything. We’re trying to escape from the same thing you are.”
“You will not find refuge among our domain, human,” she hissed. “We have exterminated entire fleets that sought to pillage these stars. This domain was created by the Maker for his chosen people, and we have guarded it ever since… we will guard it until the end of days.”
