A Second Chance at Eden (2 page)

Then I had my mishap, and acquired my killer edge.

The buzz from the hub motors on the other two vans faded away, and the rest of the team joined me among the weeds and cat pee of the yard’s concrete. According to a London Administration Council sign on the gates the yard had been designated as a site for one of the proposed Central-South Dome’s support pillars. Though God knows when construction would ever begin. Central-North Dome was visible above the razor wire trimming the yard’s wall. A geodesic of amber-tinted crystal, four kilometres in diameter, squatting over most of the Westminster district like some kind of display case for the ancient stone buildings underneath. The struts were tiny considering the size of it, a type of superstrong fibre grown in orbit, glinting prismatically in the achingly bright sun. Empty gridworks for the Chelsea and Islington domes were already splintering the sky on either side of it. One day all cities will be like this, sheltering from the hostile climate which their own thermal emission has created. London doesn’t have smog any more. Now it just has heat shimmer, the air wobbling in the exhaust vents of twenty-five million conditioning nozzles. The ten largest ones are sitting on the Central-North dome, like black barnacles spewing out the surplus therms in huge fountains of grey haze. London Administration Council won’t allow planes to fly over it for fear of what those giant lightless flames will do to airflow dynamics.

Karran came over to stand beside me, setting a wide panama hat over her ruff of Titian hair. Ivrina stood a few paces back, wearing just a halter top and sawn-off jeans; UV proofing treatment had turned her Arctic-princess skin a rich cinnamon. Wes snaked an arm protectively round her waist as she sniffed disapprovingly at the grungy air.

‘So how’s the vibes, Sonnie?’ Karran asked.

They all fell silent, even Jacob who was talking to the roadie boss. If a Baiting team’s fighter hasn’t got the right hype then you just pack up and go straight home. For all their ingenuity and technical back-up, the rest of the team play no part in the bout. It’s all down to me.

‘Vibes is good,’ I told them. ‘I’ll have it wrapped in five minutes.’

There was only one time when I’d ever doubted. A Newcastle venue that matched us against the King Panther team. It turned into a bitch of a scrap. Khanivore was cut up pretty bad. Even then, I’d won. The kind of bout from which Baiter legends are born.

Ivrina punched a fist into her palm. ‘Atta girl!’ She looked hotwired, spoiling for trouble. Anyone would think she was going to boost Khanivore herself. She certainly had the right fire for it; but as to whether she had the nerve to go for my special brand of killer edge I don’t know.

It turned out that Dicko, the arena’s owner, was a smooth organizer. Makes a change. Some bouts we’ve wondered if the place even existed, never mind having backstage gofers. Jacob marshalled the roadies, and got them to unload Khanivore’s life-support pod from the lorry. His beefy face was sweating heavily as the opaque cylinder was slowly lifted down along with its ancillary modules. I don’t know why he worries so much about a two-metre drop. He does most of the beastie’s body design work (Karran handles the nervous system and circulatory network) so more than anyone he knows how tough Khanivore’s hide is.

The arena had started life as a vast tubing warehouse before Dicko moved in and set up shop. He kept the corrugated panel shell, stripping out the auto-stack machinery so he could grow a polyp pit in the centre – circular, fifteen metres in diameter, and four metres deep. It was completely surrounded by seating tiers, simple concentric circles of wooden plank benches straddling a spiderwork of rusty scaffolding. The top was twenty metres above the concrete floor, nearly touching the condensation-slicked roof panels. Looking at the rickety lash-up made me glad I wasn’t a spectator.

Our green room was the warehouse supervisor’s old office. The roadies grunted Khanivore’s life support into place on a set of heavy wooden trestles. They creaked but held.

Ivrina and I started taping black polythene over the filthy windows. Wes mated the ancillary modules with the warehouse’s power supply. Karran slipped on her Ishades, and began running diagnostic checks through Khanivore’s nervous system.

Jacob came in smiling broadly. ‘The odds are nine to two in our favour. I put five grand on us. Reckon you can handle that, Sonnie?’

‘Count on it. The Urban Gorgons have just acquired themselves one dead beastie.’

‘My girl,’ Wes said proudly, slapping my shoulder.

He was lying, which cut deep. Wes and I had been an inseparable pair for eight months, right up until my mishap. Now he and Ivrina were rocking the camper van’s suspension every night. I didn’t hold it against him, not consciously anyway. But seeing them walking everywhere together, arms entwined, necking, laughing – that left me cold.

An hour before I’m on, Dicko shows up. Looking at him, you kind of wondered how come he wound up in this racket. A dignified old boy, all formal manners and courteous smile; tall and thin, with bushy silver hair too thick to be entirely natural, and a slightly stiff walk which forced him to use a silver-topped cane. His garb was strictly last century: light grey suit with slim lapels, a white shirt with small maroon bow tie.

There was a girl in tow, mid-teens and nicely proportioned, sweet-faced, too; a fluff-cloud of curly chestnut hair framing a composed demure expression. She wore a simple square-necked lemon-yellow dress with a long skirt. I felt sorry for her. But it’s an ancient story; I get to see it countless times at each bout. At least it told me all I needed to know about Dicko and his cultivated mannerisms. Mr Front.

One of the roadies closed the door behind him, cutting off the sounds of conversation from the main hall, a whistling PA. Dicko gave me and the other girls a shallow bow, then handed an envelope to Jacob. ‘Your appearance fee.’

The envelope disappeared into Jacob’s sleeveless leather jacket.

Delicate silver eyebrows lifted a millimetre. ‘You are not going to count it?’

‘Your reputation is good,’ Jacob told him. ‘You’re a pro, top notch. That’s the word.’

‘How very kind. And you, too, come well recommended.’

I listened to him and the rest of the team swapping nonsense. I didn’t like it, he was intruding. Some teams like to party pre-bout; some thrash and re-thrash tactics. Me, I like a bit of peace and quiet to Zen myself up. Friends who’ll talk if I want, who know when to keep quiet. I jittered about, wait-tension making my skin crawl. Every time I glanced at Dicko’s girl her eyes dropped. She was studying me.

‘I wonder if I might take a peak at Khanivore?’ Dicko asked. ‘One has heard so much . . .’

The others swivelled en masse to consult me.

‘Sure thing.’ After the old boy had seen it, maybe he’d scoot. You can’t really shunt someone out of their own turf.

We clustered round the life-support pod, except for the girl. Wes turned down the opacity, and Dicko’s face hardened into grim appreciation, a corpse grin. It chilled me down.

Khanivore is close on three metres tall, roughly hominoid in that it has two trunklike legs and a barrel torso, albeit encased in a black segmented exoskeleton. After that, things get a little out of kilter. The top of the torso sprouts five armoured tentacles, two of them ending in bone-blade pincers. They were all curled up to fit in the pod like a nest of sleeping boa constrictors. There was a thick twenty-centimetre prehensile neck supporting a nightmare head sculpted from bone that was polished down to a black-chrome gleam. The front was a shark-snout jaw with a double row of teeth, while the main dome was inset with deep creases and craters to protect sensor organs.

Dicko reached out and touched the surface of the pod. ‘Excellent,’ he whispered, then added casually: ‘I want you to take a dive.’

There was a moment of dark silence.

‘Do what?’ Karran squeaked.

Dicko beamed his dead smile straight at her. ‘A dive. You’ll be well paid, double the winning purse, ten thousand CUs. Plus whatever side bets you care to place. That should go a long way to easing the financial strain on an amateur team like yourselves. We can even discuss some future dates.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘And that’s from all of us,’ Jacob spat. ‘You screwed up, Dicko. We’re pros, man, real pros. We believe in beastie-baiting, it’s
ours
. We were there at the start, and we’re not letting shits like you fuck it over for a quick profit. Word gets out about rigged bouts and we all lose, even you.’

He was smooth, I’ll give him that, his cocoon of urbanity never flickering. ‘You’re not thinking, young man. To keep on Baiting you must have money. Especially in the future. Large commercial concerns are starting to notice this sport of yours, it will soon be turning professional with official leagues and governing bodies. With the right kind of support a team of your undeniable quality can last until you reach retirement age. Even a beast which never loses requires a complete rebuild every nine months, not to mention the continual refinements you have to stitch in. Baiting is an expensive business, and about to become more so. And business it now is, not some funfair ride. At the moment you are naive amateurs who happen to have hit a winning streak. Do not delude yourselves; one day you are going to lose. You need a secure income to tide you over the lean times while you design and test a new beast.

‘This is what I am offering you, the first step towards responsibility. Fighters and promoters feed each other. We always have done, right back to the days of the Roman gladiators. And we always will do. There is nothing dishonest in this. Tonight, the fans will see the tremendous fight they paid for, because Khanivore could never lose easily. Then they will return to watch you again, screaming for victory, ecstatic when you win again. Struggle, heartache, and triumph, that is what demands their attention, what keeps any sport alive. Believe me, I know crowds far better than you ever can; they have been my life’s study.’

‘So has money,’ Ivrina said quietly. She’d crossed her arms over her chest, staring at him contemptuously. ‘Don’t give us any more of this bullshit about doing us a favour. You run the book in this part of town, you and a few others. A tight, friendly little group who’ve got it all locked down.
That’s
the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been. I’ll tell you what’s really happened tonight. Every punter has laid down their wad on Sonnie’s Predators, the dead cert faves. So you and the boys did a few sums of your own, and worked out how you can profit most from that. Slip us the ten grand for a fall, and you’ll walk off with the mega-profit.’

‘Fifteen thousand,’ Dicko said, completely unperturbed. ‘Please accept the offer, I urge you as a friend. What I have said is quite true, no matter what motives you assign me. One day you will lose.’ He turned to look at me, his expression was almost entreating. ‘You are the team’s fighter, by nature the most practical. How much confidence do you have in your own ability? You are out there in the bouts, you have known moments of doubt when your opponent pulled a clever turn. Surely you do not have the arrogance to believe you are invincible?’

‘No, I’m not invincible. What I have is an edge. Didn’t it occur to you to wonder how come I always win?’

‘It has been the cause of some speculation.’

‘Simple enough; although nobody else could ever use it. You see, I won’t lose to the Urban Gorgons, not while they have Simon as their fighter.’

‘I don’t understand, every bout cannot be a grudge match.’

‘Oh but they are. Maybe if the Urban Gorgons team fronted a female fighter I’d think about taking your money. But I’m virtually unique; none of the other teams I know of use a female to boost their beastie.’

‘This is your advantage, your legendary edge, women fight better than men?’

‘Motivation is the key,’ I said. ‘That’s why we use affinity to control the beasts. These creatures we stitch together have no analogue in nature. For instance, you couldn’t take a brain out of a lion and splice it into Khanivore. For all its hunter-killer instinct a lion wouldn’t be able to make any sense of Khanivore’s sensorium, nor would it be able to utilize the limbs. That’s why we give beasties bioware processors instead of brains. But processors still don’t give us what we need. For their program a fight can never be anything more than a complex series of problems, a three-dimensional chess game. An attack would be broken up into segments for analysis and initiation of appropriate response moves. By which time any halfway sentient opposition has ripped them to shreds. No program can ever instil a sense of urgency, coupled to panic-enhanced instinct. Sheer savagery, if you like. Humans reign supreme when it comes to that. That’s why we use the affinity bond. Beastie-baiting is a physical extension of the human mind, our dark side in all its naked horror. That’s the appeal your punters have come to worship tonight, Dicko, pure bestiality. Without our proxy beasties us fighters would be out there in the pit ourselves. We’d kill each other, no two ways about it.’

‘And you are the most savage of them all?’ Dicko asked. He glanced round the team, their stony faces, hunting confirmation.

‘I am now,’ I said, and for the first time bled a trace of venom into my voice. I saw the girl stiffen slightly, her eyes round with interest.

‘A year or so back I got snatched by an estate gang. No reason for it, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Know what they do to girls, Dicko?’ I was grinding the words out now, eyes never leaving his face. His mask was cracking, little fissures of emotion showing through.

‘Yes, you do know, don’t you. The gang bang wasn’t so bad, there was only two days of that. But when they finished they started on me with knives. It’s a branding thing, making sure everyone knows how fucking hard they are. So that is why, when the Urban Gorgons send their Turboraptor out in the pit tonight, I am going to shred that bastard to pieces so small there’s going to be nothing left but a fog of blood. Not because of the money, not even for the status; but because what I’m really doing is carving up that
male
shit Simon.’ I took a step towards Dicko, arm coming up to point threateningly. ‘And neither you nor anyone else is going to stop that happening. You got that, shitbrain?’