Baskov glanced down at the glass in his own hand and noticed it was empty.
He was a drinking man, he’d admit that. Perhaps a heavy-drinking man.
On his darker days, those days when he was tempted to be honest with himself, maybe he’d acknowledge being a step beyond that, even. A step toward being what his father would have called a
serious
drinking man. But not a drunk. Never that. No, drunks couldn’t get things done the way he could. Drunks didn’t run corporations.
The bartender slid another scotch toward him. Baskov dropped two notes on the counter, and as he took the first sip, his eyes snagged on someone across the top of the glass. At the far end of the skybox, the man’s shaggy blond mane set him apart from the older, conservative crowd, and when the face turned into full view, Baskov recognized Ben Wells.
Baskov scanned the crowd around him and was glad to see the young man wasn’t accompanied by his troublesome boss. Ben was alternately munching on a plate of chicken wings and talking heatedly with a man Baskov recognized as a representative from a pharmaceutical company—a pharmaceutical company that happened to own a controlling interest in a particularly lucrative bacterial gene patent.
When the announcer came on again, Baskov moved back to his position near the glass, and the flags of Germany and India climbed their poles. He could rouse only faint interest in which flag would come down; his mind was already ahead, on the U.S.-China competition. And he was certain that would be the matchup they’d face, the United States vs. China. What he wasn’t at all certain about was which flag would be coming down after
that
fight.
The most recent intelligence reports, which they’d paid so dearly for, had been anything but encouraging. China was going to be a huge obstacle.
He took a deep swig of his scotch, keeping Ben in the corner of his eye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
S
ilas unwound himself from Vidonia and collapsed next to her on the bed, breathing heavily. She was smiling now, and propped her head up with her hand, elbow planted deeply in the soft pillow. The flickering light of the holo-screen lent a shifting, semi-strobe quality to her features, and he thought again of how beautiful she was, the angular nose balanced perfectly by the full mouth.
She didn’t say anything at first, just looked at him with that soft, self-satisfied grin he’d come to know so well, a sweep of dark hair cascading casually over her cheek.
He closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of her body pressed closely against his. It was in these moments, just after, that he felt closest to her, when their bodies were theirs alone again and he could still feel the connection, like words unspoken between them. She never talked during these times. She looked into his face and smiled. But what she was thinking, he had no idea. She’d tell when she was ready.
He opened his eyes and looked over the tops of his feet at the glowing images.
“Indonesia and South Africa,” she said, in anticipation of his unspoken question. She was good at that.
The two creatures were so poorly constructed, and so tangled in battle, that he couldn’t be sure where one began and the other ended. Finally, they broke, and the dichotomy became clear.
“Iguana-lion meets bull-hyena-leopard?” she said.
Silas looked closely at the creatures and had to agree that was a pretty fair assessment of the combatants. The bull thing had a clear advantage at this point, and was using its enormous, twisted horns to drive its adversary across the arena. The horns were eight feet wide, asymmetrical, and as thick as a man’s calf. One curled slightly forward, and the other spiraled out to the side for four feet before hooking upward in a vicious barb.
The crowd went absolutely crazy as the iguana-lion backed itself into the corner, hissing and pawing at the air. It had nowhere left to go.
The bull roared as no bull would, then charged. The impact was amazing. Silas clearly heard the snap-crackle of bone splintering as the iguana-lion was driven into the unyielding iron. Purple loops of gut spurted along the wall precisely the way a frog’s guts might squirt out from beneath the shoe of a sadistic child.
Whether there was still life left in the carcass, Silas didn’t know, but the bull spun the body on its bizarre horns and sent it tumbling into the air like an off-luck rodeo clown. It landed in a heap several yards away, and the bull charged again. It scooped the pulped animal off the sawdust and sent it tumbling toward the night sky, spraying blood and bile through the netting and into the first and second rows of the audience. The crowd orgasmed.
Silas tried not to look at Vidonia as the scene played across the screen. Not for the first time in the last couple of days, he felt self-conscious about what he did for a living. All that talk of truth and the statue of David seemed far away now. Just a story he’d been trying to convince himself of. This was science whored out for entertainment.
Eventually, when the cries of the crowd began to ebb, the automatic icers maneuvered the strutting bull back beneath its door with a fine spray of freezing particles.
Silas had to hand it to the Indonesians for their originality. They’d used territoriality for internal motivation rather than a typical predation drive. It was an unusual approach, and it had worked beautifully. Their gladiator hadn’t taken so much as a single bite out of the vanquished
animal. Bulls aren’t carnivorous, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t aggressive.
Silas turned his head away from the screen and nuzzled himself into Vidonia’s breast, trying to block out the color commentary blathering through the speakers.
Across the bottom of the screen, a news bulletin broke in.
There are reports of a disturbance outside the Olympic stadium. Protesters have converged on the entry gates; police are handling the situation
.
The announcers droned on, oblivious.
The commentary continued for several more minutes. Silas shook his head. How many times did he have to listen to the same two guys saying the same tired lines about a fight he had just watched with his own eyes? He had almost drifted off to sleep when he heard the word “America” and sat bolt upright in bed. Suddenly, he was very much awake.
He felt a cool hand at the back of his neck. She didn’t say “Calm down.” She didn’t say “Relax.” Just that hand against the back of his neck. He wondered how she had come to know him so well in so little time.
Two flags were raised, similar for their use of stars but worlds apart, both geographically and culturally. The Chinese flag beat the United States to the top. Silas wondered if that was an omen.
A swirl of conflicting emotions spun through his head as he waited for the fight to begin. His heart galloped in his chest. He was surprised at his physical reaction and realized it was fear that his body was reacting to.
What am I scared of? Losing?
No. That wasn’t it. He realized that the emotion he’d feel if the Chinese contestant won was this: relief. He wanted the U.S gladiator to lose. To die. He was rooting against himself.
He looked over at Vidonia and wondered if she suspected. He’d kept it hidden. From her. From himself.
Her dark eyes were unreadable.
His hand slid across the bedsheet to hers, and he turned back toward the screen, concentrating, trying to put conscious thought out of his mind. He pushed himself into his senses, trying to see and hear only, while feeling nothing. It would be over soon. That was his one consolation. One way or the other, it would be over soon.
H
AND IN
hand, they watched in silence as the China door began its ascent. Silas knew they intentionally programmed the doors to open slowly to heighten the suspense, and he felt a surge of anger at being manipulated so easily. But he pushed that away, too, focusing on the expanding rectangle of shadow.
A striped yellow shape ducked under the rising door and lumbered into view.
It turned its head from left to right, splayed nostrils sucking at the air, eyes scanning the arena. The head was enormous, wide, and vaguely bearlike in conformation. The front of the body, too, was bearlike, broad and hulking, enormously wide at the chest. But the torso was long, and tapered into a graceful striped tail that flickered with excitement.
“Bear-tiger?” There was awe in Vidonia’s voice.
“I think so,” Silas said, then, “Has to be, but there’s something more.”
The bear-tiger sauntered casually around the arena, eating up an amazing distance between each long-legged stride.
“They’ve done something to the limbs,” Silas said.
“I don’t recognize it.”
“Yeah, me, either. They look … extended somehow. We may not be the only ones with a little independent engineering up our sleeves.”
This creature didn’t have the awkward, disjointed appearance of most of the earlier contestants. It looked more natural. Nobody would confuse it with Mother Nature’s handiwork, but it was something you could imagine her giving a kind of begrudging approval to.
By Silas’s estimation, the gladiator probably weighed more than two
tons. More than twice the weight of the U.S. contestant. He silently hoped that extra mass would be enough.
Feeling a squeeze in his hand, he looked over at Vidonia, but she was lost in the screen and didn’t realize how hard her grip had become. She sucked in her breath suddenly, and when he looked back at the TV, the United States door was rising.
The bear-tiger reacted instantly, maneuvering off to the side. It settled onto its haunches fifteen yards away, coiled like a spring; Silas could see the cat in it moving to the forefront.
The door continued its ascent, revealing nothing more than a growing rectangle of shadow. The grip on his hand tightened while the tone of the crowd lowered to a rumble, like the idle of a fast car.
Something moved then, a shadow within the shadow, shiny black contrasted against flat emptiness, a color that was not merely the absence of light but something more. Something alive. The idling car of the crowd revved a notch.
And then the gladiator simply stepped into view.
There was a hesitation from the crowd before it reacted, a collective gasp of pulled-in breath.
And then the crowd exploded.
The cheer was deafening.
The bear-tiger stayed in its crouch, eyeing this new strange beast. Silas supposed the upright stature of the U.S. contestant might have confused it. The stance was too human.
The shiny black creature dropped to all fours and bounded toward the center of the arena, away from the bear-tiger, away from the security of the shadowy doorway. Its wings were folded tightly against its back like the carapace of some strange gargoyle beetle.
Silas was barely aware of the commentator’s voice bleating wildly in the background. He supposed the voice had a right to be excited. But the man behind the voice hadn’t seen the creature with the goat, hadn’t seen it take the end of Silas’s finger. The man behind the voice hadn’t seen it with the training robot, or with Tay. He hadn’t seen anything yet.
The crowd continued to cheer. The creature was like nothing they’d expected or imagined. Huge and dark and winged. Vaguely humanoid but massive.
A fallen angel.
Large gray eyes blinked against the harsh lights, looking up at the net that enclosed the fighting pit, then past it to the crowd.
Now! Strike now, while it’s still adjusting to the lights
. But the Chinese gladiator stayed back, watching, measuring. It had obviously been well trained and wouldn’t be pulled into the fight before it was ready.
The U.S. gladiator did a slow pivot, turning toward the Chinese bear-tiger. The two creatures locked gazes, and for a moment, neither reacted. The Chinese contestant’s predation drive was out in the open now, exposed, naked. It had the thousand-yard stare of a big cat eyeing prey on the open savanna. The glare had weight to it, and an almost incandescent intensity. There was no anger or malice; it was the glint of hunger that shone in the bear-tiger’s eyes. It was the look of a predator making its living. No more, no less. Silas wasn’t sure what he saw in the other eyes, the gray eyes, but he was certain there was more than that. More than hunger.
Something darker. Something angry.
The U.S. gladiator howled then. The head reared back, fleshy snout peeling away from the strange double row of teeth, and it sang out high and strong. The sound reverberated in the expanse of the arena but soon drowned in the howl of the masses that rose to greet it, becoming just another voice in a sea of thousands. Then its mouth closed with a scissor snap, and when it locked eyes on the bear-tiger again, its pupils were sharp black ellipses. Muscles bunched beneath the dark shine of its hindquarters, gathering, gathering …
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
T
he mob
.
Marchers shouted angry slogans as they moved through the streets. Cars waited through green lights. Television cameras rolled from the sidelines. The crowd attenuated as it approached the arena, became a line—the amoeboid mass grown suddenly filamentous
.
The men with bullhorns prodded the crowd forward. The bright lights of the arena rose above, merely blocks off now, a shape closing in the distance
.
Up ahead, the police stood their ground, drawing their own lines. Olympic steps rose at the officers’ backs
.
At the final turn, the head of the crowd stopped a hundred yards from the police. But the rest of the crowd filled in from behind, still coming on, like a climbing rope cut from some height, pooling in widening loops as it fell free, gathering strength—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred people. Until the crowd filled the intersection completely, blocking traffic here, too, in both directions
.
The two groups faced each other
.
The policemen stood firm, riot shields brandished in a clear plastic wall. A man in a crisp blue uniform lifted his own bullhorn
.