The Champion (15 page)

His friends clearly felt the same.

John and Ju started screaming obscenities at the aliens, begging each one they looked at to come and be the first to die.

Crazy George bent at the waist, put his left hand on his knee. He grinned, circled his right hand inward:
come on, let’s do this
.

Becca had her fists out in front of her and a snarl on her face. Quentin felt an unexpected flush of love and admiration for her; Becca, his Valkyrie, a warrior that would submit to no one.

Bumberpuff started to shake, his metallic body creating a rattling sound that screamed
danger
to all that opposed him.

Kimberlin spread his long tree-trunk-thick arms, making himself look as big as possible.

“We can’t kill all of you,” Mike said, his bass voice booming off the domed ceiling. “But those few that live will remember who you fought this day.”

Hulsey stared, horrified. She held up her hands, palms out, fingers splayed, a gesture that said
just stop, just listen
.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “They don’t want to make you
slaves
, you’ll become
trainees
.”

She believed what she was saying. Quentin felt pity for her, that she had been born here and probably didn’t know what being free actually meant. Then the Portath ring closed in behind Hulsey,
tightened
, and those thoughts vanished.

He didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to hurt anyone, but there was no choice. Frustration and fear for his sister and his friends finally overwhelmed him, pushed all rational thoughts aside — his temper bubbled,
blossomed
, and this time, he welcomed it.

“Kimberlin makes a hole,” he screamed, his quarterback growl instantly galvanizing his friends, telling them that there was
a plan
, that they would act together as they did on the field. “Tweedys guard his flanks, everyone else protect their backs and follow them to the nearest door. Everyone ready?”

John ripped off his shirt and screamed. He flexed his rippling muscles. Obscene tats scrolled across his body.

The others let out their individual war cries, their barks of agreement. They would not be enslaved. They would not die on their heels.

The Portath’s amorphous bodies pressed in, tightening the circle like a throat about to swallow down a bite of food. Colors flashed, protrusions waved, weapons came closer.

“All right, Krakens, here we—”

A deafening electrical
crack
cut off his words as he reactively flinched away from a simultaneous blinding blue flash. It hadn’t come from the Portath — the light and sound had come from one of his own, from Cormorant Bumberpuff.

The Portath backed away, the ring finally expanding instead of contracting. They stared at Bumberpuff, as did the Krakens, the former threat and the plan to attack suddenly forgotten.

The Prawatt captain stood there, stumbling slightly, thin curls of smoke wafting up from his porous body.

“I don’t feel well,” Bumberpuff said in a weak, strained voice. “I felt this once before, back on Sanctuary ... when ... when ...”

Black arms and legs snapped stiff, stuck straight out from the X-body. Bumberpuff stood still for a moment, then slowly tipped, picking up speed — before Quentin could reach out and stop the fall, the rigid Prawatt
clanged
against the metal floor.

A sheen of holographic blue rose up from the center of the X, swirled and shimmered, wavered, then began to take the shape of a Human body. The head coalesced, showing the face of a woman ...

No, not a
woman
— the face of a
girl
.

“Portath,” the hologram said. “I am the Old Ones of the Prawatt Jihad. You must listen to me.”

There floated the blue-tinged image of a teenage girl with a pierced nose and well-sculpted hair hanging over one eye. A scarf hid her neck, the frayed ends dangling down past her waist. A strap ran from her left shoulder to the bag on her right hip, a bag that had once held a computer when computers were a thing people carried around with them.

Quentin stared at the hologram of Petra Prawatt: an uploaded consciousness nearly seven centuries old that had given rise to one of the galaxy’s most dangerous threats.

The Petra hologram looked around the room.

“There are enough of you here,” she said, her words sounding from Bumberpuff’s still form. “That’s good. Witness what I have to say. Can any of you translate my words for the Portath?”

Hulsey stepped forward.

“I can,” she said.

Petra nodded. “Excellent. First, however, an image that needs no explanation.”

The hologram of Petra sparked again, shifted, twisted. The shape of the girl bent into something else ... a starship. It floated there, a fuzzy image hovering a few feet off the ground, slowly coming into greater detail.

Quentin had never seen the like of it, not anywhere, yet the shape made terror flutter in his belly, made his heart hammer the same way it had during his days in the mines when he’d first seen a roundbug crawl from a shadow-clad crack in the rock. The ship was all that was
wrong
. The ship was instinctual, irrational fear of the dark hammered into mind-shearing reality. It was all thin jutting angles, all bumps and bristles and irregular
biological
shapes, an abstract artist’s rendition of a mechanical spider or fly or flea or misshapen centipede, were that spider/fly/flea/centipede stretched out, magnified and transformed into something that could hunt prey among the stars.

The hologram finally crystalized into a sharp, finished image.

No, not like a spider/fly/flea/centipede, something more delicate and yet more dangerous ... something like a
wasp
.

Almost as one, the Portath let out a hideous sound, the wheels of a ground truck screeching against concrete, a noise filled with anguish and rage and hate that transcended any language barrier.

“Hulsey,” Quentin said, shouting to be heard over the insanity. “What is that ship? Why are the Portath so angry about it?”

She trembled, staring at the image as if she didn’t have the power to look away.

“Ships like that drove the Portath from their own galaxy,” Hulsey said. “Ships like that nearly wiped the Portath out of existence.”

The hologram shifted, changed: once again a teenage girl hovered above Bumberpuff. The Portath stopped screaming — Petra had their undivided attention.

“Now, translate,” she said. “Make sure you get it right.”

Hulsey nodded. When Petra spoke again, Hulsey’s robe went from red to rapidly shifting patterns of color, patterns similar to the visual cacophony that flashed along soft Portath bodies.

“We have seen them,” Petra said, pounding her left fist into her right hand. “We call them the Abernessia. There is time before they arrive, but make no mistake — they
are
coming, and when they get here they will ravage our galaxy exactly as they ravaged yours.” Her holographic face wrinkled with fury. “The Abernessia will slaughter all of us, system by system. The Milky Way governments — including the Portath —
must
unify. Together, we can stop the Abernessia. We can
defeat
them.”

Quentin’s heart hammered. Somehow, once again, he was at the flash point of war.

The Prawatt god calmed herself. She adjusted her shoulder bag, swept the hair from her eyes.

Hulsey’s robe flashed madly, a crazy, endless pattern of colors and shapes and swirls as she caught up to Petra’s words. When Hulsey’s robe returned to red, the Prawatt god continued.

“Your kind fled the Abernessia once. If you flee again, they will find you again — someday, your descendants will run out of places to hide. The Prawatt and the Portath must forget about our conflicts and work together to stop this invasion. The Human, HeavyG, Prawatt and Harrah sentients you see before you, they are my messengers, my proof that I can work with other species. Do not harm them. I want them and the ship they came on to return to me, along with your answer.”

Petra’s hologram blinked out; she was there one moment, gone the next.

“Huh,” John said. “Guess she didn’t want to stick around for a
kibitz
.”

The Portath backed away from the center of the room, away from the Krakens. Quentin tried to watch them, tried to focus on the next thing he had to do to keep his teammates alive, but his brain was elsewhere. His thoughts swirled around one obvious, horrible fact — his sister hadn’t been targeted by the Creterakians, by Gredok, by Anna Villani or any of the other crime lords that wanted to control how he played on Sundays.

The guilty party? None other than the living god known as Petra Prawatt.

This had all been about getting Bumberpuff into the Cloud, in front of the Portath, where he could deliver that message. Jeanine’s life — and Fred’s — had been put at risk for this. Quentin’s predictable reaction to save them had been part of Petra’s play.

One of the Portath rolled forward, colors flashing all over its waving protrusions. Quentin readied himself, felt his friends doing the same, when a second Portath rolled out of the pack, blocking the first’s path. The second one was larger, possibly the largest Portath in the room. It’s skin flashed madly, a hectic pattern of reds and oranges.

“Hulsey, what’s happening?”

She watched for a moment more, observing the exchange.

“The smaller one is Taker of Souls,” she said. “He wants to kill all of you. Bloodletter says you need to live so you can give Petra information on the Abernessia.”

Bloodletter
 ...
Taker of Souls
 ...

For once, Quentin found himself admiring the goofy names of the Prawatt.

The two Portath flashed brighter, with increasingly spastic color patterns. They started screeching at each other. The first one, Taker of Souls, stretched protrusions higher, trying to make itself look bigger, just as Mike had done. The larger one, Bloodletter, actually shrank, compressed in on itself. Quentin at first thought Bloodletter was showing submission, but it wasn’t that at all — the Portath seemed to be in some kind of fighting stance, more at-the-ready than ready-to-surrender.

The screeching suddenly stopped.

“A challenge has been issued,” Hulsey said. “Bloodletter and Taker of Souls are both leaders of this ship. They will fight to see who wins.”

John clapped. “Sah-
weet
! Let them booger-bags mess each other up. Can we watch?”

“You must,” Hulsey said. “They are fighting over you. If Bloodletter wins, you go free. If Taker of Souls wins, you die.”

John didn’t seem as excited about that.

“Bummer,” he said.

The horde of Portath thinned, individuals moving to the oval doorways, reaching up to the rungs and then swinging off down the corridors.

Bumberpuff stood, helped to his long feet by Becca and Kimberlin.

Quentin glared at Bumberpuff, wondering if the captain had been a knowing participant in Petra’s ploy or just an unwitting pawn. If it was the former, it was a betrayal so deep Quentin didn’t know how he would react.

“Hulsey,” he said, “when does this fight take place?”

“In a few hours. You can stay in this room until that time.”

“Most of us will,” Quentin said, his eyes never leaving the black X-Walker who had tricked him into coming here. “But I need a place to have a word with one of my teammates, in private, and I need it
now
.”

17

Believer

WITH A DOZEN SILVER ROBOTS
following along, Hulsey led Quentin and Bumberpuff down a gleaming corridor and into an empty room. The small space was like everything else he’d seen so far, more bubble than room, but there was nothing in there other than polished metal walls, a floor and a curved ceiling embedded with rings.

Hulsey stood at the door. “Will this do?”

Quentin nodded. “It’s fine. Leave us.”

She had to know Quentin was on the edge of murder — from the slit-eyed scowl he felt on his face, from the uncontrollable sneer twisting his mouth — but she didn’t seem to care. Perhaps it was as she had said earlier: on this massive ship, life was cheap. She left the room. Her squadron of silver robots stayed behind. The knee-high machines moved to the smooth walls, where they stood as still as statues.

The door hissed shut.

Quentin stared at Bumberpuff, at his supposed
friend
.

“Tell me why you put my sister’s life at risk,” he said. “Tell me why you put Fred’s life at risk, all our lives at risk. Tell me why you
lied to me
.”

The last three words came out as an unexpected scream, grating and coarse in the small, smooth space.

Bumberpuff didn’t move. Some of the tiny metallic minids that made up the X-Walker’s limbs started wiggling, rattling in place. Maybe the captain sensed Quentin’s open hostility, maybe the biotech body was reacting on its own, the Prawatt equivalent of a nervous twitch, of blinking too fast, of an anxious fear at being alone with someone who could hurt you, who could
kill
you.

“Quentin, I am not sure what happened, but I give you my word that I had no knowledge of it. I was once a soldier — I would never put civilian lives at risk.”

Even now, after all this time, it was hard to reconcile that perfectly Human voice with a
machine
, alive but still artificial. Bumberpuff had no face, very few physical signs of emotion. But if you didn’t look, if you just
listened
, you couldn’t tell a Prawatt apart from a Human.

So that’s exactly what Quentin did.

“Tell me again,” he said and closed his eyes. He wanted to
hear
the truth, whatever that truth might be. “Tell me you were used just as badly as I was. Tell me you didn’t betray me — tell me you didn’t use my sister like a cheap political sacrifice.”

“I would
never
betray you,” Bumberpuff said, the words coming instantly, urgently. “You are my
teammate
.”