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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 11: Slade 254
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 259
“Is there a manual backup control?” Slade asked. “Say, an emergency control?”
“Yes, but it’s computer locked.”
“Huh, slide over.” His driver did, going over to the passenger side as the front car seat conformed to his desires. Slade took out his kinetic blaster. Hopefully this would work, or he was just hastening his versing out. But if a manual control was locked out by computer override--a bad design, but no one was perfect--one way around things was to knock out computer control by, as one of his customers used to say, ‘the judicious application of force’.
He fired once into the steering ball. Another shot went, and the car shook. He paused. Fired again.
“cOMpuzzz CONTOzzzz dammagedzzzzzz.” A click was heard from the dashboard, and a small ball popped up. His driver slid over, and took control of the vehicle. Slade’s wrists ached as this was his first attempt at shooting in four gravities.
“Where to?”
“Just go back to our first plan, the meeting. Have someone check over the car, and fix it.”
The flying car surged and moved off, descending as it went. The flight was not as smooth as the power and computer assisted flight, but the Chombito knew enough to easily handle pure manual control.
You alright, dear?
It was Shella.
Yes, someone messed with the car, but I got it ‘fixed’, and our driver friend and I are fine. It was an attempted assassination.
The pause was lengthy enough for him to begin to smile. Shella was wonderful and gorgeous, and had been through enough crazy that she took a lot of it in stride. But ‘Hey, dear, someone tried to murder me today’ was a bit of a thing.
Off to slaughter the villains?
He loved her so much. Not sure who is guilty. By the way, how did you know I might be in trouble?
Well, I might, just might spy on my husband a bit by using the verser sense. He got a guess of emotional embarrassment at that. So when you were moving in an odd direction, I wondered.
Going nearly vertical. He went on to explain things; they had a companionable chat. But an idea was tapping his shoulder, and so he closed the conversation and thought for a bit until the flying car landed in a park with twenty other flying cars. The local traffic control informed them that the whole park was ‘rented’ for two hours, but he was an ‘expected guest’. Arriving, he got out and his driver took the car off to a repair shop for a thorough examination.
He walked over to a clot of fighters, which he could identify by the way they stood. Everyone of them was inhuman, and some very inhuman--Fennix with their mass of fur, Chlorophyte the little green men, Chombito with their muscles upon muscles with almost no body fat, and others as well--but the physics and mentality of using sharp edged weapons or distance energy projectors spoke in a universal language of force and angles and implied violence. They turned to greet him, and at the same time not let him just walk up on them without eyeballing him first. Polite greetings in English, along with snorts, and gaughs, and other noises came his way. Slade responded calmly with a ‘Hello, I’m Slade, rank twenty-five in Primitive Weapons, Human leader’.
This led to the twenty of them replying likewise as Slade struggled to remember. Then one of them, a Fennix spoke.
“Why was your flying car on emergency, Warrior Slade?”
“You could tell?”
Several of them nodded. Some could see the tiny jerks a sentient driver made, and others could hear a vibrato that the engine produced which was smoothed out by the computers, but Slade could not. It was, apparently, two octaves above his hearing range.
So he told for the second time the events of the morning. To his relief, no one showed any inclination to back out--although that might change, as no one else had been targeted. But he did get four serious offers ‘if you need to have someone help’. It seemed as if a group feeling of mutual support was forming among the warriors.
After that, the lead, who was the other Fennix that had not yet spoken, cleared his throat and caused all his lengthy furs to wave at once.
“Let us begin. We’re not the only group doing this, but we are one of the first. We’d like to arrange a competition for less skilled individuals in this area. Prizes, of course. But we also need very good medical gear, and a space to be rented. Considering the efforts by the Syndicate last time, we’re going to have to spend a lot of effort making sure the fixers are kept out.”
“We might need to protect the higher rank fighters, even at their houses.”
“What’s the range of prize monies? Is it just factory seconds, or do we toss in other incentives like a chance to meet a favored fighter, or even a private match?”
“Or a training session.”
Several dozen other questions were raised and dealt with.
In the end, Slade signed up for a huge chunk of factory seconds as prizes. He also offered to meet ten contestants for five minutes each, and to do a private sparring session with one. He would also have duties to emcee, and to ‘stand around looking scary’. Others took different burdens. Although he was offered the chance to judge certain special contests (the robots would do the most of them with the sentient biological judges more as a novelty factor), he declined on the basis that he simply was not as knowledgeable about alien biologies.
The meeting had taken two hours, and although he found several of the attendees annoying, he had sensed no outright red flags. One thing he did shoot down was calling it the ‘Happy Fun Earthtime Fight’. The others were surprised, and he was puzzled. That is until one of them pointed out that he had been heard to call this a ‘gladiator’ fight. He still did not understand until one of them said.
“Glad means happy doesn’t it?”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #524: Twisting Worlds. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
