Screaming Science Fiction (20 page)

“Aces,” Pavanaz nodded, casually. “And…friend?”

“Pavanaz,” said Aces, short on greetings, “this is Gaddy. He’d like to see you play. If he’s impressed, maybe he’ll let you try to take some money off him.”

“Gee, I’m honored!” said Pavanaz.

“You should be,” the newcomer growled, like gravel sliding down a chute. And Pavanaz looked at him more closely.

Hal Gaddy was five-seven in his high-heeled boots, weighed maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and was tanned a permanent brown to match his trappings. While his jacket and trousers were of a fine, thin leather, his leather gloves looked almst painted on his hands. But inside those gloves Gaddy’s hands themselves were trembling where they hung loosely, yet awkwardly, at his sides.

Gaddy’s forearm under rolled-up sleeves were deeply scarred; likewise his face, which was equipped with eyes that were piercing blue and looked like cold moons rising behind the hollow crags of his weathered cheeks. His mouth was straight, but a small piece of his upper lip was missing on the left, letting an eye-tooth show through like naked bone. The many lines etched into his skin around his eyes and mouth could be from laughter or pain, Pav wasn’t sure. He suspected, though, that Gaddy hadn’t laughed in a long time.

“See,” said Pavanaz after a moment, “it’s a game of skill. Good eyes, hands, nerves, and an ability to anticipate bordering on the supernatural—that’s all it takes. Over twenty-two or three and you’re slowing down, twenty-five and you’re plodding, more than that and you’re in reverse. I see that back on Earth a sixteen-year-old black kid has run the first three-minutes-forty mile! Why don’t you go in for athletics, Mr. Gaddy? I mean, your chances would be a lot better.”

“Stow the mister,” said Gaddy. “Call me Gunner.”

Pavanaz knew what that meant and for a moment felt a genuine thrill. Gunner! If so, Gaddy was a fighter pilot from the Khuum wars. Or…he was a fake, a bum living someone else’s legend for whatever crumbs got thrown his way. But the Khuum had pulled out a quarter-century ago, so it was just possible.
Just
, because surviving Gunners from that mess were so few you could count them on one hand with several fingers missing. So Pav had always understood it.

“The real thing, eh?” he said, finally nodding, but knowingly, cynically. “Maybe. Or…just another stowaway?”

“Stowaway?” Gaddy lifted an eyebrow.

“Sure.” Pavanaz shrugged. “On Gizzich I knew a couple of ‘Gunners.’ One was a cook retired off cruisers, and the other was a colorblind son of a no-account prospector from Faggul V. But they’d read the manuals and you couldn’t fault ’em—until they climbed into a bucket. Gunners?
Naw!
Just stowaways hitching a ride on a legend.”

“Pavanaz, you’re a—” Aces started forward, his jaw jutting.

“It’s OK, son,” said Gaddy, his chipped lip lifting a little. And to Pav: “I’d heard you had lots of mouth, Pavanaz, so that kind of garbage doesn’t worry me. What? I should lose my cool just before a game?”

Pavanaz scowled. “Who said you were going to get one?”

Gaddy took out a five-credit note and waved it under Pav’s nose. “This says so,” he said. “Also the fact that you’re dying to know. ’Cos if I’m the real thing, you’re not going to meet another one in a long, long time.”

“Hah!”
Pavanaz snorted. “I should play for fives? Against grandfathers? For the thrill of gutting a tired old Gunner?
If
you’re for real?”

“The word is,” Aces grated, still sizzling, “you’re down to playing for twos, hotshot.”

“Well—” Pavanaz started, paused, and eventually continued, “—see, it’s like this: the twos are for amusement. But five on a grudge is cheap and nasty. I mean, it
would
be a grudge game, right, Aces old buddy? You brought this guy in here to wipe the floor with me, to see me sweat for a miserable five, right? I’m not amused, and I’m not desperate either. But for fifty…?”

“Now that’s greedy,” said Gaddy, shaking his head. “That’s a lot of credits. You’re expensive, Pavanaz…but,” he sighed and shrugged, “I’ll go along with it—if you play first. See, it’s rumored your ’Vader has a couple of embellishments, stuff the other machines don’t have? And lord knows you’ve had plenty of practice, right? It seems only fair I should get to see what I’m up against.”

“Like in the Khuum wars?” Pav made a gawping, idiot face. “They’d show you their hardware before a dogfight, right?” He laughed at Aces’ raging expression, then sobered. “Fair enough. I go first and we play for fifty. And good ol’ Aces here can hold the pot.” He handed over his money and Gaddy matched it. And without more ado Pavanaz got aboard and opened her up.

He played hard but not too hard and clocked three million. But to do it he had to show almost everything the machine had. Gaddy knew what he was up against…from the machine if not from its owner. But Pav figured it like this: If Gaddy was the real thing and
if
he still had it, then maybe—just maybe—he could win. And of course he’d want to do it again. Except next time it would be for
real
money and Pavanaz would
really
play. And if Gaddy was a fraud…well maybe he’d come back for more anyway, especially if his score wasn’t too far behind.

But it seemed that Gaddy was indeed faking it: he scored close to three million but not close enough, and Pavanaz pocketed the kitty. Glancing at Gaddy out of the corner of his eye, he could see how choked he was. “If you can’t stand losing,” said Pavanaz, “then you really shouldn’t gamble.”

“Yeah?” Gaddy grunted. “Maybe. But for all your newfangled gewgaws, hell, I nearly had you!”

“Nearly doesn’t cut it,” said Pav.

At that Gaddy’s lips tightened. “We go again!” he snapped, and Pavanaz got the feeling that even though this was what he’d intended, still it was a rerun of something or other.

“Oh yeah?” he said, playing it like always yet feeling it was playing him. “You can afford three hundred, can you, Gaddy? ’Cos that’s what this one will cost you…three hundred
minimum
! Take it or leave it.”

Gaddy took out a tight little roll and opened it up. Just three notes in there, but they were all Big Ones. Bigger than hundreds, certainly. Three grand, which he handed to Aces for safekeeping. And as the notes passed before Pav’s eyes, Gaddy made sure he saw the zeroes. “Just to get the adrenalin flowing,” he growled. “Can
you
afford it, Pavanaz?”

Pav’s eyes bugged and he breathed a small sigh. It was all there: his ticket to Earth, his gateway to a pad on a beach on one of the resort worlds! Three thousand credits, the key to a million more! And this tired old man hadn’t even seen him play yet. Not
really
play!

He counted his cash into Aces’ hand, ventilated and hyperventilated his lungs, climbed yet again into the bucket. And as he switched her on, too late to stop and think again, suddenly he remembered something he’d said or thought: that Gaddy hadn’t seen him play yet. But the fact was that
he
hadn’t seen Gaddy play, either. The old guy had scored nearly three million, and never a drop of sweat. As for his shaky old hands: once they’d settled to the machine’s controls, there hadn’t been a single shake in ’em!

But too late because Pavanaz was into the game. And with three thousand credits and his entire future riding on it, he couldn’t worry about anything now except survival—
his
survival, out among the cold, impersonal stars. And Pav played like never before, played it for real and for true and for life and for death, and for all of his past and all of his future, the future he’d killed for and would kill for again if necessary. Except it wasn’t necessary, for he need only win this game.

And at seven million one thousand nine hundred and sixty, a shatter-beam found him and shivered his ship to shards. Pav, too, the way he slumped there in the bucket when it was over.

As they lifted him down, he groaned: “No need to play it off if you don’t want to, old-timer. Let’s face it, it would only be embarrassing. Aces, give me my money.”

But Gaddy only told him, “Son, that was a good game and twenty-seven years ago we might have had a use for someone like you. Except you wouldn’t have been interested because you’re only interested in you. As for giving you the money: the eggs aren’t hatched yet, Pavanaz.” And then
he
played.

But where Pavanaz had only played for real, Gunner Gaddy played for
real
.

27102 Gunner Gaddy H, he’d been, “Khuum-Killer” to his friends, the young men who joined up and went out into space, and often as not didn’t come back. Brief friends, anyway. But Gaddy had kept on coming back, so that he’d have been a legend if there’d been anyone keeping count of his missions. But when the going got rough even the Brass went out, and most of them didn’t come back either. And the new Brass didn’t know Gaddy at all: he was just another kid who killed Khuum and was destined to get killed himself, like all the rest.

Khuum-Killer Gaddy, he’d been then…and still was!

The patterns their ships made in space were familiar to Gaddy as the lines on his hands had…had
used
to be. That was before the aliens who saved his life gave him his gloves. Since then there’d been no lines on his hands at all, and when he took the gloves off….

But this wasn’t the time or place to let that surface again. This was Khuum-killing time, and they knew he was there and were taking up defensive positions as he swept in towards them. No game, this, not for Gaddy, just a replay from life, a rerun of the only thing that had ever brought his mind fully alive and set the adrenalin in his blood to full flow. And yet not really a replay, either, for now his ship was that much more sophisticated and his weaponry so much more devastating. While the Khuum…why, they were just the same old bad old Khuum as always!

In a move the ’Vader didn’t know it possessed, Gaddy spun his fighter end over end, howling through the Khuum ranks in a Catherine wheel of destruction, his fingers—no, his gloves—a blur of fluttering motion on the firing studs. Spinning like that, it appeared the Khuum were everywhere, and not a one of them who passed his crosshairs came out the other side! Then he was through them, killing his spin, sensing them reforming behind him, and tripping into hyperspace before they could fix their Warpers on him.

Back there in normal space they burned in his exhaust; but Gaddy was out of hyperspace just as quickly as in, looping back on himself, coming down on them where the dumb bastards opened up on his afterimage. They never knew what hit them, vaporizing all around him as he worked all his studs at once!

But so many Khuum fighters? What the hell?—they must be riding shotgun on something big, something
huge
! It was the ’Vader compensating, except Gaddy wasn’t thinking ’Vader but death to the Khuum. The machine had never experienced so much computerized destruction so fast, and it was answering Gaddy the only way it could: by speeding up the game and bringing forward
The End
that much faster. And to do so it was sticking up the Big Stuff on the screen, the invincible stuff, the stuff that carried the highest scores.

But…
something big
, Gaddy thought.
Something huge!
And yes, there it was!

Cutting in his visiblizers, Gaddy saw its dull metallic gleam for a moment where the object furrowed space behind its No-see screens, false stars sliding along its vast hull stem to stern to make him think it was empty space. A battle-station!—a
mother
!—launching carriers and tiny Khuum-manned suicide darts; and the carriers launching cruisers, mines, missiles; and the cruisers lining up their entropy torps; and the darts intent on death and glory, but mainly intent on nailing Gaddy. And all this hardware firming into reality as it came screaming out from under the battle-station’s No-sees.

The battle-station was impregnable to anything Gaddy had, but he knew how to get it. The station was about to launch its last carrier; Gaddy must get the carrier before it cleared the launch-tubes and threw up its screens. Twisting and writhing like light-speed snakes of green fire, the Takka-beams leaped the light-seconds to their target. Programmed to follow the beams, the Warp-torp zigzagged around and through everything the frantic Khuum tossed at it. The Takkas found the carrier, and a micro-second later so did the torp. The carrier, still sliding out of the battle-station’s belly, warped out of existence like a small sun gone nova. And the battle-station had no option but to go nova with it!

“Got you, you bastard!”
Gaddy tried to scream, nothing coming out but a choking cough, his throat was
that
dry. But strange, because he did hear screams. Except…they weren’t his.

“No—no—
no
!” Pavanaz danced beside the ’Vader like some demented puppet-master’s doll, clawed at the jiving bucket-seat and leaped up alongside, to wrench Gaddy’s hands—no Gaddy’s
gloves
—from the controls.

Gaddy was about to trip into hyperspace; with no one at the controls his ship tore into the battle-station’s planet-wide fireball. Khuum disruptors followed it; stripped down its armor to an eggshell that withered in the nuclear furnace….