Zeroboxer (20 page)

In the close quarters, Carr felt like just one of the guys again, for the first time in a long while. He'd gotten used to other zeroboxers going a little quiet when he entered a room, even older, bigger ones, even ones he trained with. They treated him either with a kind of wary awe or with too much cheerful backslapping and loud talk, as if to prove his stardom didn't mean anything to them. Knowing they were now all fellow Terrans competing on the same side instead of against each other changed things. He could hang out with them almost the way he used to. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed it.

“I've been wearing a cooling top all day for weeks,” Adri “the Assassin” Sansky commented over a training break that had begun with a comparison of their respective supplement formulations. Carr hadn't seen Adri in months, and he was pleased to learn she was now the top-ranked Terran female midmass fighter. “That's what I've heard is the hardest thing to get used to in the domie system. The cold, and the thin air.”

“It won't be that bad,” Carr said. “They're bringing the oxygen in the Cube up to Terran levels, and they negotiated the temperature halfway—a little too cool for us, a little too warm for them, so they figure it's fair.”

“They have home advantage,” she said, picking compulsively at the edge of her glove. “Every little bit helps.”

Carr couldn't blame her for being worried. The WCC had a larger and stronger pool of female zeroboxers than the ZGFA, and no one really expected the eight Terran women to win; just to not lose too spectacularly.

“I'm betting you girls will deliver an upset for the highlight reels,” DK said encouragingly. “Save some glory for the guys, yeah?”

“Sure, just for you. I'll try not to steal all the thunder.” Adri rolled her eyes but smiled at DK's pep talk. “Back to practicing those damn corner reversals.” She grabbed her squeeze bottle of supplement shake and floated off, leaving Carr and DK alone.

An awkward moment of silence descended. DK cleared his throat. “Blake says his arm is doing okay. He might be back in the Cube in a few months.”

“That's good to hear.”

“Just thought you might want to know.”

“Yeah. I did. Thanks.” Carr searched for something else to say. A part of him wanted to extend the olive branch to his old friend; the rest of him was too proud to hear anything of it. DK looked good; he'd put on mass to compete with bigger fighters and he was carrying it well. For the first time, he and Carr would be in the same division. When the media had brought this up with him one-too-many times, DK's response had been more sarcastic than typical: “Yeah, I'll finally be in the same division as the guy you all won't stop asking me about.”

Carr glanced over briefly. “So … ”

They were rescued from further conversation when everyone's cuff flashed the new audio message alert at the same time. Carr picked it up and the ship's captain, sounding a shade agitated, advised them all that there would be a five Martian-hour delay in their arrival at Surya station, due to
“border issues.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” DK wondered aloud.

“It means,” Gant said, pulling himself into the room with a scowl on his face, “that politics are getting in the way. Listen up everyone!” He waited for the zeroboxers in the room to give him their attention. “Last night, the Martian Council of Settlements declared it would be suspending Terran mining and export licenses in retaliation for Earth withholding terraforming technology. After the news reached Earth, protests in front of Martian embassies turned violent, and now Mars is considering moving its diplomats to Luna.” He made a
pah
noise of frustration and disgust. “So, in short, we're showing up at a bad time and are being held up for no good reason.”

“The WCC won't cancel the tournament, will they?” someone asked.

“Are you kidding? If anything, they'll promote it even more heavily. Martian Airspace and Customs is denying us surface rights, though. We'll be allowed to land on Surya, but that's it. Anyone hoping to go to the planet to visit Olympus Mons, or the Valles—sorry, you're out of luck.”

When they finally docked, half a day late, they were met by a
welcoming committee that included the mayor of Surya, the city-station tourism director, the president of the WCC, a contingent of Martian zeroboxers, and a handful of reporters. Gant and the rest of the big shots greeted each other with Martian x-shaped handshakes: right hand to right hand over top, left to
left underneath. Carr looked out across the rest of the docking hub's plaza in amazement. He had never seen so many Martians before: men, women, and children, dressed in such different clothes, many of them pausing to watch the arriving Terrans with curiosity and wariness.

Carr took a step forward and nearly lost his footing from putting too much force into it. Of course—Surya's lower artificial gravity was designed for Martians. The air was cold and dry, like the inside of Gant's office. The decorative plants adornin
g the public plaza were nothing like the lush, broad-leafed, bright green ones he'd grown up around, but hardy-looking things with thin needles or bulbous bodies, descendants of species from the far northern deserts of Earth. Only now did it strike him that he'd really left home altogether, traveled beyond Greater Earth orbit for the first time in his life.

In the midst of much chatter and introductions, Carr found himself shaking hands with the line of Martian zeroboxers and matching them to the video footage he'd studied for the last few months. Suddenly he was looking into the face of Kye Soard, with his fight-flattened nose and shaved, lumpy head.

For half a second, neither of them spoke. A feeling passed through the air between them—the animal recognition one good fighter has upon meeting another. It had already begun: the measuring, the flickering gaze taking note of size and stance and the way the other man moved.

“So you are Luka,” Soard said. “The best of these earthworms, yes?” He had a Southern Highlands accent that Carr couldn't place. Argyre? Hellas? His Martian geography was sketchy at best. Soard clappe
d a hand on Carr's shoulder
with a force that straddled the line between friendly and
aggressive. Carr forced himself not to tense, not to yield the mental edge. They were within a couple of kilograms of each other, Carr knew, but Soard was more stretched out. He probably had at least a fist's length advantage in reach. He looked … Carr searched for the right description.
Efficient.
His body looked efficient. “Welcome,” Soard said. “We will show you a good time! Then send you back home in pieces, my friend.” He grinned with a condescending, chee
rful menace that suggested he was joking, and not joking.

Car
r was surprised to discover that he liked and disliked the man in equal measure at once. “Or maybe I'll be taking a bit of domie hide back as a souvenir,” he said with an equally threatening smile, then moved on to shake the next man's hands.

A chartered bus ferried them to the hotel where they would be staying. Even the vehicles looked different here, like the bullet-shaped skimmers capable of navigating terrain on the Red Planet. As they drove through Surya, Carr squeezed Risha's hand. “Does it feel like home at all?” he asked.

“A little,” she replied, staring pensively out the windows at the rounded architecture, the people on the streets, the shops and restaurants advertising different regional specialties:
tzuka
from West Marineris, Northern Lowlands curry, Tharsian imported ale. “It's a strange feeling.”

It
was
strange. Surya Station wasn't like Valtego at all. It was a real
space settlement, a place where people lived. Valtego was Earth's playground, vibrant with energy and bright lights, but not the sort of place most Terrans imagined staying for more than a week
unless you had reason to work there. Most Terrans did not imagine anywhere in the universe to be habitable except Earth. Why would they?

“Damn domie cold,” Uncle Polly muttered, pulling on a sweater. “This place sure has gotten bigger.”

“When were you last on Surya?” Carr asked.

“A long time ago. I was maybe a little older than you. Stopped over on leave for a month after two years on my first mining vessel, the
Breaker
. Even back then it was a mecca for zeroboxing. For anything zero gravity.”

Risha nodded. “The Martian Space Dance Academy is headquartered here. The WCC, of course. Plenty of weightless spas in the central concourse. Recreational and competitive spacewalking is big here too—I think they have three or four major rac
es a year.”

The hotel was new and luxurious, though the rooms were small by Terran standards. Martians were used to having far less space. Carr stood beside the curved, wraparound window of his room, admiring the view. Phobos, the larger of Mars' moons and one of the busiest shipping hubs in the solar system, loomed large to one side. On the other, the Red Planet hung like a copper disk against a black canvas. He squinted hard, and his optics focused in as far as they could go until he could make out some of the features of the surface: the enormous craters and basins, the flat plains and deep canyons, the soaring mountain ranges. The great domed cities wer
e mere dots.

Thin wisps of white, like shredded gauze, swirled over the surface of the planet. A nascent atmosphere, nothing like the dense cotton cloud cover of Earth. He couldn't see them, but he'd been told that thousands of enormous solar reflectors orbited Mars, slowly heating it. Whole tracts of the planet were already murky green with algae and plant cover, fed by the water mines that ran day and night.

“Will Mars really be like Earth someday?” he wondered. “With oceans and forests, and people walking outside?”

Risha came up beside him. Her voice held nostalgia and melancholy. “Who knows? Terraforming is enshrined in the Constitution of the Martian Settlements. Pro- and anti-terraformist politicians are constantly arguing about it. It's been going on since before my grandparents were born, and it'll probably still be going on after we're dead. But whatever Mars becomes, it won't be like Earth. It'll be its own thing.”

Carr knew that Martians portrayed their ancestors as courageous and intrepid visionaries, the best and brightest of Earth, the ones who saw the necessity and potential for humankind to evolve and progress to the stars. A more Terran view was that they'd been desperate, enticed or coerced to risk their lives to escape poverty and unemployment and submerging homelands. Which was it? Were they equally true? Did it
matter?

“I think,” Carr said, “I can see why Mars gives Terrans
the heebie-jeebies.”

“Come on,” Risha said, turning away from the view, “Your first press conference is in an hour.
”

Even though Martian days were thirty-seven minutes longer than Terran ones, the week before the start of
War of the Worlds
went fast. Uncle Polly was unrelenting, as strict about every detail as he'd been before Carr's earliest amateur tournaments. He kept Carr in thermal clothes and on a strict hydration schedule to manage the dry cold, sent him to get a radiation cleanse, kept track of what he ate and how much he slept. “Can't risk getting sick or injured now, can you?” he warned at least twice a day.

The Dr. Drew Ming Athletic Mall on Surya was even larger than Valtego's Virgin Galactic Center. Risha told him it was named after one of Mars' visionary geneticists. Martians, she said, named things after scientists the way Terrans used war heroes and politicians. Carr and the other zeroboxers spent every available minute getting acclimated to the new stadium. The Martians were there too, and the Cube was constantly occupied in hour-long practice shifts.

Adri gave voice to the generally shared sentiment: “The domies creep the hell out of me.”

“Don't let them,” Carr said. He looked over at the two Martian women emerging from the Cube, unfastening their gloves and toweling the sweat from their faces. The WCC fighters looked good, all of them fit and preternaturally graceful in null gravity, their otherness highlighted by the sight of so many of them. Most of them treated the Terran visitors coolly, though they complained loudly about the extra heat.

“Dust, it's hot in here,” one of the women exclaimed. “How do the earthworms stand it?” Her eyes were shaped like a cat's. The skin over her taut abs and small chest was the color of wet sand. Carr had wondered if he'd find all Martian women as alluring to him as Risha, and was surprised and mildly relieved that he didn't.

On the first day of the elimination rounds, Carr was up early in the draw and handled both his fights easily. The first ended by knockout at 4:05 in the first round. The guy was too nervous, wouldn't look at him during the staredown. Carr wondered if maybe it was the first time he'd even seen a Terran up close. The second match, two hours later, was more challenging—“the Droid” fought methodical as hell, and kept taking Carr's ample punishment like he didn't feel pain, but the judges handed Carr a unanimous victory. He figured he'd been deliberately favored in the match-ups so the organizers could be assured of their star fighters meeting in
the Cube for the semifinals.

When he was done, Carr iced his bruises in the locker room, watching the other fights and waiting to find out how the rest of the Terrans did.
Scull was packing up their supplies.

“Nice job today,” Carr said, and the kid flushed a little, nodding. Quiet and nervous, Scull was no DK or Blake, but nevertheless he was a reliable, competent cornerman. One that Carr was confident wouldn't go sour on him because of rivalry. Scull had only three pro fights under him—one win, two losses—and he knew his job cornering the Raptor at
War of the Worlds
was to stay out of the spotlight by not screwing up.