Fonda Lee
Zeroboxer
Originally published by Flux
CHAPTER ONE
Carr Luka woke from a nap three hours before his fight. He ate two hardboiled eggs, a handful of raw almonds and a bran muffin, then drank a bottle of water and spent twenty minutes stretching on the floor of his single-room apartment in the inner ring of Valtego Station.
The Moon’s desolate, pock-marked dark side loomed large across the upper right corner of his wall screen. Beyond it, the sunlit blue and white marble of Earth hung suspended in the vast black infinity of space. It wasn’t a real view of course—probably not even a live feed, just an old recording. The real views belonged to the expensive premium suites, reserved for Valtego’s high rollers. They were betting 3:1 against him, as of yesterday.
He didn’t usually follow odds, but Uncle Polly had fake-casually dropped that tidbit on him, angling to amp him up, get the I’ll-show-those-bastards juice flowing. It had worked all right—not because he cared that some bettors thought he might be a flame out, but because he hated to think that, after the disaster of his most recent match, Uncle Polly might secretly agree with them. Other promising young fighters had been broken by an early loss; he certainly wouldn’t be the first.
Carr stood, shaking out his limbs, reaching for his warm-up clothes. He didn’t need to be reminded of the stakes. He’d been on Valtego for a year and a half. This sixth and final fight in his contract would determine whether he landed a new deal, or found himself on the next flight back to Earth, relegated to fighting in orbital dives reeking of pot, where the vacuum plumbing regularly gave out and big bubbles of pee floated in the bathrooms.
He made a face; not about to happen. He was no planet rat.
Carr tapped the cuff-link display on his forearm to play something high energy—the neo-urban skid music that was popular earthside these days—as he packed his bag. Gripper gloves and shoes, cup, mouth guard, fight shorts, a towel, a change of clothes for the press conference and after party. He zipped up the bag and slung it over his shoulder. After a final look around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, he stepped out of his room and navigated the halls of the apartment complex up to the main thoroughfare and into Valtego traffic.
The streets were crowded, echoing cavernously with the noise of people and music and cars. Well-dressed couples, families, and packs of young men and women spilled onto the main concourse. When Carr looked up, past the reddish simulated evening light, through the enormous sky windows into the docking hub, he could see that even more ships had arrived since yesterday. Half a dozen Earth-Mars cargo cyclers, a few private solar sailing yachts, and plenty of commercial passenger craft. It was one of those times when summer in Earth’s northern hemisphere coincided with dust storm season on Mars, inciting residents of both planets to travel. Super high season at Valtego.
He caught the intra-station shuttle bus just as it pulled up with a pneumatic hiss, its silver body flashing the usual promotional banner: Valtego: It’s More Fun on the Dark SideTM. Carr didn’t bother to sit down; he was only taking it a few stops. He stood near the door, closed his eyes and let the burble of voices from the other passengers float around him. He heard English in American, British, and Martian accents, Mandarin, Mars Hindi, Spanish and German. In his mind, he turned the hum of conversation into a growing swell of cheering, a thunderous crowd calling his name.
His cuff vibrated and a rising chime played in his ear. He glanced down at the display on his forearm, then smiled, shut off the music and took the call. “Enzo,” he said. “Are you going to watch my fight?”
“No, I happen to be hiding in my closet with my screen, under a blanket, for no reason. OF COURSE I’m watching!” Enzo’s voice, transmission-delayed by a couple seconds, sounded, in Carr’s cochlear receiver, as if the boy was shout-whispering an urgent secret. “My mom is going to go fusion if she finds me.” He gave a wheezy, excited cough. There was a pause, and Carr winced, picturing the boy sucking hard on his inhaler.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Carr asked.
“Whatever. School is useless. You barely went.”
“Sure I went,” he lied. “And I was tutored.” Which was true, if you could call Uncle Polly helping him fudge through remote study modules ‘tutoring.’ “Besides, you’ve got to make a living using your brain someday.”
The boy gave a long sigh. “It’s so unfair.” He sounded as morose as he had when Carr had first left for Valtego. Carr felt a pang of worry. Now wasn’t the time to question the kid, but Enzo was small, he didn’t have many friends; who was watching out for him, spending time with him, now that Carr was living in deep orbit on the far side of the Moon? Carr wouldn’t trade his place here for anything, but Enzo was one of the few things he missed about Earth.
The shuttle bus left behind the rows of densely-packed apartment entrance tubes for Valtego’s less wealthy residents. It passed shops and restaurants catering to visitors from the planet, before turning and sliding to a stop at the gravity zone terminal. The doors opened onto a wide platform bustling with people and lined with colorful holovid ads promising the best deals on theater tickets, spacewalks, hotels. “I wish you could see this place,” Carr said. “It’s something else. I’m going to bring you up here someday and show you around.” If I’m still here after today, came the unwelcome reminder.
“Would you? That would be so stellar,” Enzo whispered. “Oh shit, I think my mom is home. Okay, I just called to say: Good luck! Make him float!”
“Thanks, little man.”
The connection clicked out as Carr stepped onto the terminal platform. Uncle Polly and DK were waiting for him, looking comically mismatched standing together—old, pale and lean, next to young, dark and muscled. DK clapped Carr on the back. Uncle Polly put his hands on Carr’s shoulders and broke into a slow, approving smile that made his left eye squint. “You’re a hundred percent ready,” he said. On fight days, Uncle Polly underwent a magical transformation. Every other day, he could chew Carr out in practice, find fault in every detail, cuss at him if he wasn’t pushing hard enough, but on fight day, he was optimism incarnate. Carr felt himself grinning, buoyed.
“Where would you rather be right now?” Uncle Polly demanded.
“Nowhere, coach.”
“What would you rather be doing?”
“Nothing, coach.”
“You ready to fly?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Get in the car.”
He strapped his duffel bag into the overhead compartment before climbing in. Once everyone was seated, the harness straps tightened, the doors closed, and the vehicle shot down the freeway tube. Carr ran an appreciative hand across the smooth tan upholstery. He took the commuter bus to the central zero-g zone every morning, but the routine trip was far more enjoyable in a private car. Another special fight day perk.
As the bright lights and artificial gravity of the city’s rings receded, Valtego spread out around them in all its slowly-turning immensity before the view opened up into a breathtaking expanse of space. Carr craned his neck against the mild g-force pressure, looking past the shadow of the Moon and catching, for a few seconds, a glimpse of Earth—a real view, not a projection. The planet always looked smaller in real life than on the wall screen.
Uncle Polly ran through the game plan once more. “What are you going to do in the first round?”
“Stay out of his grab zone. Wear him out, frustrate him.”
“He doesn’t like to climb. Make him climb. Second round?”
“Hit him from the corners. Use my fast launches and rebounds.”
“Good, good.”
“Third round, spin him hard and finish him off.”
“You got it. What’s your strength against him?”
“My space ear.”
“Always fear the better ear! You’re ready.” Uncle Polly was not really Carr’s uncle. He wasn’t even old, maybe sixty-something, but he was scrawny and bent-backed from a career spent on mining ships and in orbital gyms, during a generation when zero gravity alleviation therapy wasn’t what it was today, and so many years in space took a heavy toll on one’s body. He had a full head of short, gray hair and a permanently grizzled jaw. But he moved and spoke with the fire of a younger man, and when he slapped his hands on his thighs, he radiated confidence like a solar flare.
The zero gravity complex, recently renamed the Virgin Galactic Center, loomed ahead of them. As the vehicle slowed, the familiar transition to weightlessness tugged at Carr’s stomach, pressed his chest against the harness and drew his limbs upward. They glided past a group of tourists on a beginner level spacewalk, the suited figures cycling arms and legs slowly and awkwardly as their guide coaxed them along with gentle bursts of his thrusters, like a shepherd leading a herd of nervous farm animals.
The car docked in the parking hold. Carr drifted up to retrieve his bag, and pushed it ahead with one hand while he unclasped his belt tether and hooked it around the hallway guide rail with the other. It was an irritating requirement; he could easily climb this place free floating and blindfolded, but there was a fine if you were caught untethered, even if you were a Valtego resident. Management didn’t want anyone setting a bad example for the tourists and seasonal workers who might hurt themselves crashing into things or get stranded in the middle of a room and create extra work for the maintenance folks who would have to rescue them.
DK tethered himself and tilted his head to one side, listening. “You hear that?” Already, the low thrum of a crowd was growing over the steady whoosh of shuttles and cars docking, one after the other. Distant loud music began pulsing through the thick walls of the parking hold. DK smiled, showing small, brilliant white teeth against tropical bronze skin. “Full house tonight, I’ll wager. All here to see you, kid.”
That wasn’t exactly true; the headline fight was between Danyo “Fear Factor” Fukiyama and Jorge “Monster” Rillard, but DK had told Carr that his match had the most hype he’d ever seen for the undercard. Of course, maybe DK was just saying that to pump him up. DK was not a large man—a natural feathermass—and he looked slightly rodent-like, with his big ears and fists, large eyes, and small nose, but he exuded a gregarious charisma that was rare in this sport. He was also one of the best young zeroboxers anywhere. His full name was Danilo Kabitain, but no one called him that. He was DK to his flymates, “Captain Pain” to his opponents and the media, and a hell of a man to have in one’s corner.
They climbed along the hallway using the spaced rungs, turned right, and passed through the athlete’s entrance. The locker room and adjoining warm-up space were empty except for two men, one of them seated on a bench, his feet hooked under the stabilizing rod, elbows on knees, broad shoulders hunched forward. He looked as if the universe had just ended.
“What’s the matter, Blake?” Carr asked.
“My fight’s canceled.” Blake Murphy didn’t look up. “The other guy tested positive for endurance-enhancing nanos. Bastard.”
“Damn. Sorry to hear it.”
Blake’s trainer glanced over from where he was furiously shoving his fighter’s gear into a bag. “You’ll be up early then.” He pointed to the small wall screen which showed the evening’s two commentators, Xeth Stone and Jeroan Culver, up on deck. Carr swiped the volume up and Xeth’s energetic voice filled the locker room. “…change in lineup, it won’t be long now before we see one of the most anticipated matches of the night!”
“That’s right, Xeth,” Jeroan replied in a straight man monotone. “Carr Luka is still something of an enigma to this crowd. He burst onto the ZGFA scene not long ago, gained a strong following when he racked up four impressive wins in a row, and then choked in his last fight against “Death” Ray Jackson. Now he’s going up against the third best zeroboxer in the lowmass division, and the question on everyone’s mind is: does he stand a chance of coming back against Ferrano?”
“I think he does, Jeroan,” Xeth enthused. “I don’t think Luka is a flash-in-the-pan like some people have been saying. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I tell you, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a guy, born on Earth no less, with the kind of instincts he’s shown in the Cube. That kid can fly. Did I mention he’s still seventeen?”
“Sure, he can fly, but Ferrano is an expert grabber. How’s he going to do against that?”
Zeroboxing commentators liked to speak of fighters as ‘grabbers’ or ‘fliers.’ It was rather artificial, Carr thought, since any good zeroboxer had to be both, but there was some truth to the distinction. To inflict any bare-handed damage to a person in zero gravity, you had to establish a brace or a point of leverage—preferably a vulnerable part of your opponent’s body—to keep them from floating away while you hurt them. Or you had to treat space itself as a weapon, using the infinite angles of movement to strike and rebound, strike and rebound, faster and harder than the other guy.
“Luka is an ace flier,” Xeth agreed, “But his grabbing game is solid, and it’s getting better with every match. I think we’re going to see—”
Uncle Polly slashed his hand across the front of the screen to turn it off. “You heard ‘em, you’re up early! Get changed and warmed up!”
Carr untethered himself, stripped out of his clothes, and handed them to DK, who stuck them to the magnetic locker pegs and passed him his shorts. Uncle Polly hurried to find the ZGFA official, a dour bulldog of a man who inspected Carr’s gripper shoes and gloves and watched as DK wrapped Carr’s hands. He flashed a retinal reader across Carr’s eyes, checked his vital stats off his cuff—heart rate, blood pressure and temperature—then gave him the go-ahead. “Forty minutes,” he said.
“I need to take a leak,” Carr said.
“Make it fast,” Uncle Polly warned.
Carr climbed over to the stall and dug his feet under the toe bar, streaming into the vacuum funnel for what felt like an eternity. Everyone said that for a young zeroboxer, he was remarkably composed, never visibly nervous before fights, but his bladder knew better. Maybe that was a good sign; he hadn’t been nervous enough before the last match.
The wash dispenser squirted a bubble of soapy water onto his fingers. Blake emerged from one of the other stalls and pulled himself over to the neighboring dispenser. “Rotten luck,” Carr said, feeling obligated to put in a few more words of sympathy. “You’re bound to get another fight soon. At least they caught him. You wouldn’t want a loss on your record because the guy cheated.”
Blake looked up, his eyes like two pale blue gas fires. “Who says I would’ve lost?”
Carr hesitated, wiping off the water with a towel, not sure how he’d somehow given offense. “No one. But even if you won, the guy doesn’t deserve to be in the Cube.” It made Carr mad that some people tried to fool the system, to take shortcuts around putting in the years of time and effort. It was mentally weak.
Blake’s mouth sagged a little, his eyes cooling, losing their anger. You never could tell with Blake. Most of the time, he was one of the most polite and soft-spoken guys Carr had ever met. But in a fight…well, he wasn’t nicknamed “the Destroyer” for nothing. As he turned to leave, he looked back at Carr and said, “Good luck out there. Stay out of those corners, yeah?”
Corners. They had never been a problem for Carr, not until his last fight, when “Death” Ray Jackson had flown him hard for two rounds, then trapped him in a corner in the third and ground it out to win in a split decision. Carr did not take losing well (who did?), especially since he was certain he could have won, and had only his own overconfidence and ill-preparedness to blame.
Uncle Polly had given him hell, and he’d deserved it. He could barely look at his coach after the fight. For days, he’d felt so low he couldn’t bring himself to leave his apartment. Uncle Polly had shown up on the fifth day. His face had been severe, but his voice had been gentle. “It’s good for you, to know what it feels like on the other side, for once. Now you know. It’s shit. So—you planning on whimpering back to Earth for a planet rat job, or are you going to get off your ass?” He’d gotten off his ass. It had taken time though, weeks, to shake off the malaise, and he suspected the loss would stay with him forever, like a benign cyst under the skin.
Carr clambered back out to the warm-up area, shaking his head to clear away the unpleasant memory and refocus on the present. He had another chance, that was what mattered. DK helped him pull on and bind his gripper shoes. Carr wiggled each of his enclosed toes and gave a thumbs-up. He took off his cuff-link and handed it to his friend. Keeping a fighter’s cuff for him during a match was an important job for the cornerman and symbolic of trust; DK put it on next to his own. Carr’s gloves went on, over his wrapped hands, bound securely several inches up his forearm, leaving the wrists fully mobile. Some zeroboxers opted for the heavier gloves with more wrist support, but Carr didn’t think it was worth sacrificing climbing agility.
“Thirty minutes,” the official in the hallway called.
“Terran or Martian?” DK retorted, cheeky. Zeroboxing rounds were always measured in the fractionally longer Martian minutes, so it was an ongoing joke that zeroboxers had no sense of standard Terran time.
“Get moving,” Uncle Polly said. “You know the drill—five times around the room, then wall-bounces.”
Carr swung into the square warm-up room and jogged the walls, up, down and around, exerting himself just enough to raise his heart rate. There was a lumpy target dummy secured to the center of the room with cable wiring; he launched off a wall, somersaulted to strike the target with both feet, and rebounded to another wall. He worked the dummy from each wall and corner, and in the last five minutes, Uncle Polly called him back down for a brief recovery. Carr was warm now, just beginning to feel a sweat. Uncle Polly drifted in front of him and did a final check on his gloves and shoes. He clapped his fists down over Carr’s. “Let’s do this.”
The official’s voice called down the hallway, “Luka, you’re up!”
A deep thrill of nervous energy raced through Carr’s veins. He faced the hall, drew in a long, uneven breath, and let it hiss out, slowly. “We’re right behind you,” DK reassured him. Carr gripped the rungs and climbed. At the stadium entrance, the rumble of the crowd suddenly faded as the music and lights dimmed, and blue spotlights began sweeping back and forth. The announcer’s bass voice bellowed, “Fighting out of the red corner, with a mass of seventy kilograms, and a record of four wins, one loss, CAAARRR…‘THE RAPTOR’…. LUKAAA!”
CHAPTER TWO
Carr kicked off the final hallway rung and through the entrance. He somersaulted tightly, then uncoiled, reached, and landed in a dramatic crouch on the deck, gripping it easily with the balls of feet and fingertips. The crowd roared its approval, and as he straightened, Carr saw close-ups of himself on the huge screens hanging around the stadium.
Great stars, there were a lot of people. They filled the tiered stands that stretched in all directions, blurred into shadow beyond the stark, glaring lights. Carr’s pulse sped up, beating in his palms and the soles of his feet. Zeroboxing was the sort of thing people watched on screens at home; most planet rats couldn’t afford to travel beyond atmosphere very often, and even those that could generally liked their artificial gravity. These spectators were the really hard core fans, the ones who would rather be strapped into seats, drinking beer from squeeze bottles and brushing away floating globs of spilled orange soda and candy wrappers in order to see the fight live. Tonight, there were thousands of them, some still pulling themselves along the tether rails to their seats.
Below the deck hung the Cube, empty, like an enormous minimalist ice sculpture. The sweeping spotlight beams distorted on its transparent surface, tingeing its edges and corners with cool blue light. Even experienced zeroboxers got shivers looking at the thing. To willingly enter it was to be completely imprisoned, and utterly exposed. It was the prism of truth. There was no hiding in the Cube, no angle from which you could not be seen, and no way out until you had been proven victor or vanquished.
The announcer, Hal Greese, had a thick neck and a gut that, without gravity, migrated upward from the region of his waist to fill out his torso in a kind of general bulbousness. He turned in a slow circle in the center of the deck, one arm raised in anticipation. “Fighting out of the blue corner, with a mass of seventy-one kilograms, and a record of nine wins, three losses, JAY…‘DRACULA’…FERRRANNOO!”
Jay Ferrano shot through the entrance, twisting like a corkscrew, and caught the landing deck neatly. A wave of enthusiastic noise vibrated the Cube beneath their feet. Carr looked across at his opponent. He seemed larger than he had in the videos Carr had studied. ‘Dracula’ had gotten his nickname after an early fight when he’d let loose a bellow and accidentally swallowed a floating bubble of his opponent’s blood. The fans had loved it and the clip had gone viral. Ferrano had apparently taken to his name, because the suspended screens zoomed in for a close-up of the liquid tattoo stretched across the back of his neck: a bat flapping its wings.
They met in the center of the deck, both of them ignoring the rails and walking steadily on gripper shoes alone. The referee said a bunch of the usual stuff, about wanting a good, hard, clean fight, and so on. Carr didn’t hear any of it. He watched Ferrano. Sometimes you could tell what kind of a fighter a man was by looking at his face in the seconds before a match. Some guys looked calm and cool as ice, and fought the same way, patient and technical. Those who didn’t even look you in the eyes were either too nervous, or were, in their hearts, nice fellas who would rather not think of their opponents as human beings they would have to hurt. The ones who growled and glowered as if they wanted to rip your limbs off—they fought because they were angry people.
Ferrano sniffed, and cricked his neck from side to side. He looked strong, and mean, and here to play.
The referee told them to touch gloves. They did, and retreated to opposite sides of the deck. Carr was tingling from fingertips to toes. Uncle Polly was murmuring, “You’re ready, you’re ready. I’ll be in your ear the whole time.” DK put his mouth guard in, then spread coagulant gel on his face; it lessened the chance he’d get cut, and in the event he did, it would keep most of his blood on him instead of mucking up the air.
The attendant technician held an activation penlight up to his eyes and told Carr to look at a point straight ahead while he fixed the beam on each eye in turn. After a couple of seconds, he said, “Connection’s good,” and one of the screens above flickered and shifted into the view from Carr’s optic cameras, now being fed live to his subscribers.
The deck, which took up one entire outside surface of the Cube, had two entry hatches set into it. The border of Carr’s hatch flashed red and slid open. He went to the edge of it and stood like a man with his toes on the lip of a cliff, staring down into two hundred cubic meters of empty space. Then he dove through the opening, like a swimmer into water. He piked his body backward and flipped, catching the wall behind him, hands first, feet second, finding spread-fingered purchase on the textured surface, the magnetic pull on his gripper gloves, shoes, and the waistband of his shorts, holding him against the wall.
On the other side of the Cube, Jay Ferrano shot through his hatch. Both entrances flashed once more, Ferrano’s blue, Carr’s red, before sealing off. The bell rang, loudly outside the Cube for the benefit of the audience, more quietly in his ear. The fight was on.
Ferrano opened with a straight launch, propelling himself across the Cube with both legs, hands up in a guard. Carr judged the man’s path and leapt for an adjacent wall, kicking out at his passing opponent. His foot connected, not with enough power to do damage, but that wasn’t the point. It pushed the man in one direction and accelerated Carr’s travel in the other, setting up his rebound.
Ferrano turned off the wall and shot straight back. Carr tucked his legs, powered off the surface and sailed just out of reach. He shot a hand out for the wall, grabbed it, and climbed; for a calculated moment he was directly above Ferrano’s head, and he swung down, fists flying for his opponent’s face. He nailed a right hook, followed the momentum of his weightless spin with a left elbow, but Ferrano wrapped a leg around his, halting both their rotations and creating a coveted opening to grab, and land punches.
“Cover! Cover and break!” Uncle Polly shouted, his voice tinny in Carr’s receiver.
Carr tucked his head between his forearms as Ferrano’s right fist started raining down blows. The man’s other hand was cupped behind Carr’s neck, right leg anchored tight around Carr’s thigh. He had to move before Ferrano could lock him up further. He drove his right knee up, against his opponent’s chest and surged back. They came apart, Carr kicking out to speed up their separation.
“Stick to the plan,” Polly urged. “Stay out of his grab zone! Make him fly!”
All planet-born people instinctively assigned a sense of up and down; it took years of zero gravity training to develop a good space ear, to navigate 360 degrees of movement comfortably, without nausea or disorientation. Carr was a natural. He twisted in the air, stretching for the wall with the balls of his feet. His left shoe found magnetic grip while the rest of him kept traveling; he arched his back and shot his arm out, bracing himself into one of the Cube’s right angles. Ferrano was coming after him, but too slowly; he hadn’t gotten off a strong push. Carr scrambled across the corner and attacked from behind, punching both heels into his opponent’s back, slamming the man into the wall and sending himself flying again.
Ferrano’s broad back tensed with frustration and he began chasing the younger fighter around the Cube. They traded blows, but Carr kept moving, kept Ferrano coming after him. Uncle Polly’s voice was a chant in his ear: “That’s it, make him climb, you’re good, you’re good.” The bell sounded on six Martian minutes. The hatches flashed and slid open; Carr climbed sideways toward the glowing red square outline and pulled himself onto the deck.
Carr sat, hooking ankles under the stabilizing bar as DK took his mouth guard and squeezed water into his mouth. Uncle Polly appeared in front of him, and for a couple of seconds, his voice had a weird double timbre as Carr picked it up a second time from his receiver. Polly stabbed his cuff to mute, and squatted down on his gripper shoes, talking fast and excited. “You’re pissing him off, and wearing him out. That’s exactly what you want. Pick your places. You can fly circles around him; he’ll tire long before you do.”
Carr felt good, slicked with sweat, but his energy still high. Long before he was given his Cube name ‘the Raptor,’ his nickname around the gym had been ‘Last Man Standing’ because of his staying power. Uncle Polly was certain that cardiovascular endurance and his uncanny space ear were the key to him winning against more seasoned fighters. Carr sloshed water in his mouth and spit it out, the spray breaking into wobbly bubbles that DK swiped away with a towel. “It looks like I’m playing it too safe,” he said. “Like I’m not taking it to him enough.”
“You look great, kid,” DK reassured him, pressing an ice pack to the back of his neck.
Two scantily-clad Cube girls drifted above the deck, taut bodies undulating like mermaids as they circled a big, spinning holovid of the number two. Carr bit back down on his mouth guard, unhooked his feet from the bar, and dove back through the hatch just as the bell sounded on the second round.
Ferrano had adjusted his game plan. No immediate power launch and energy-expending chase this time; he wasn’t going to be drawn into trying to out-fly Carr. He stuck to the walls, looking for an opening, fighting tight and deliberate. It didn’t take long for Carr to start feeling like a crow harassing a porcupine. He was landing hits, but Ferrano had good, swift defense and the blows didn’t do a lot of damage.
Carr grit his teeth, his gut surging with anxiety. He couldn’t be sure of winning, not if the rest of the round went like this. The judges might tilt in his favor, but he couldn’t count on that. Not for this fight. He needed this fight.
He ran up the corner, bouncing off the right angles on the balls of his feet and leapt back down at his opponent, legs scissoring for Ferrano’s neck. The man evaded by less than a hand’s width and grabbed Carr’s leg. They both spun. Ferrano went for a leg lock. Carr twisted out of it, but the move gave Ferrano a brief opening. He threw his legs around Carr’s waist, taking rear control and flinging his arm around Carr’s neck.
Carr tucked his chin in time to avoid being immediately choked out. Ferrano had him around the jaw instead of the throat; the man’s forearm began sawing back and forth.
Uncle Polly was shouting, “You have legs! Legs on a wall!”
He was being ridden and choked piggyback, but in the Cube, up and down were easily reversed. Carr kept his head down, braced his legs and kicked hard off the wall, sending them both shooting backwards.
Ferrano’s back slammed into the opposite wall and bounced. It knocked some of the wind out of him, and though he didn’t let go, his grip slipped enough for Carr to pull the stranglehold loose, twist his body a little sideways and start nailing his opponent in the ribs with the tip of his elbow. Ferrano grunted but held on, tried to maneuver back into the choke with his other arm. They turned in space, locked together, everything barrel rolling by slowly as they fought for advantage. With his free hand, Ferrano started hitting Carr in the head, forcing him to give up his elbow strikes to protect himself. Uncle Polly was yelling something, but Carr couldn’t hear it; his head was ringing with each blow.
Watching the video of the fight later, Carr would hear Xeth Stone exclaiming at this point, “It looks like Luka is in trouble now—they’re drifting and Ferrano is not going to let go! He is just pounding him! This is not looking good for Carr Luka!”
“This is exactly how Ferrano wins,” Jeroan said. “He may not look as nimble in the Cube, but you can’t underestimate his tenacity.”
Everything began to blur and swim. The wall advanced slowly in the column of vision between Carr’s raised forearms. Desperate clarity pierced through the roar of blood in his ears and the tinny incomprehensible noise from his implanted receiver. His body began to slacken; Ferrano dug in the choke and started to squeeze.
“Oh…oh, this is it!” Xeth Stone yelled. “Ferrano’s got it! He just wore Luka down with those punches.”
Jeroan said, “Luka is going to have to tap any second now.”
Blood and air were no longer reaching Carr’s brain. Pain and blackness closed in. Ferrano growled with effort, completely focused on impending victory. Just tap and it’ll stop, his meaty, sweaty forearm seemed to promise with each additional millimeter of pressure.
They reached the wall. Carr shot out hands and feet, catching the surface with all four magnetic grippers, and launched himself straight up with every remaining ounce of power in his limbs, as if shooting up the vertical side of a swimming pool toward air. The crown of Ferrano’s head, higher than his by a couple inches, slammed into the Cube wall above them.
The impact jarred Carr as well, his tenuous hold on consciousness nearly giving out, darkness scudding across his eyes. But Ferrano’s arm fell away and the flood of returning oxygen was like a slap of cold water to Carr’s face. His body responded with a wave of sudden energy. He broke free and turned the corner like a spider, crouching in its hollow. The walls, though solid, were designed to partially cushion impact; Ferrano was more dazed than injured, his eyes unfocused as he reached out clumsy hands to steady himself. Carr came at him from above, fist connecting square across the chin. Ferrano’s head spun first, his body followed, and he went limp as a drifting rag doll.
Peripheral sounds and sensations returned. Outside the Cube, lights strobed, the crowd roared—one giant incoherent mass of noise.
“DID I JUST SEE THAT?” Xeth Stone squealed.
“We have a floater!” Jeroan’s usually unflappable voice held a note of awe. “Carr Luka just floated the third best zeroboxer in the lowmass division, in the second round, when it looked like he was done for.”
“What a stunning reversal! Ferrano did not see that coming at all! None of us did! I don’t know how Luka could take those hits, and hang on through that choke, and still have enough left in him to pull that off! What an opener! That might be the fight of the night, Jeroan!”
The referee and a doctor navigated over to Ferrano and examined him, then took hold of his arms and carried him back over to his side of the Cube, propelling themselves with handheld mini-thrusters. Residual adrenaline pulsed through Carr’s body with each heartbeat; he felt as jittery as a bug as he jogged, hands and feet, back to his hatch and out onto the deck. As the referee took his arm, Hal Greese’s voice boomed, “At four minutes, thirty-eight seconds in the second round, the winner, by knockout, CARRRRR LUKAAA!”
The sweet high of victory swept over Carr, dizzying him more than any gymnastic feat in the Cube. He saw his own face on the suspended screens—red, puffy and bruised, shiny with pebbly sweat clinging to a layer of gel—and broke into a grin he felt would never stop. The shadowy tiers of spectators rippled with movement, chanting their approval. He was surrounded by people: DK and Uncle Polly hugging him, the doctor coming to check on him, the technician disconnecting his optic cameras and telling him that his cochlear receiver had been jolted and he’d need to get it fixed—that was why in the last seconds of the match he hadn’t heard Polly’s voice, only a high, distant whining. Sports journalists materialized out of nowhere, their tethers crowding the rails, raising their cuff-links above each other to catch his words. Carr scrabbled distractedly for what he was supposed to say right now.
“I just want to thank Jay Ferrano and the ZGFA for putting on a great fight. I’ve got to credit my incredible coach and my cornerman. To my mom and Enzo, back home on Earth—I love you guys.” There were more shouted questions, but DK and Uncle Polly ushered him back to the locker room. Carr barely felt the hallway rungs as he floated out of the crush of people.
He looped around the room like a drunken bird, bouncing off the banks of lockers, and barreling into DK, who whooped and laughed and threw him into a spin. When he pulled out of it, Carr hooked one foot under a toe bar and leaned back, still grinning stupidly as DK helped him out of his gripper shoes and gloves, toweled him down, and placed a squeeze bottle of electrolyte drink in his hand.
Uncle Polly stood in front of him and leveled a stern finger at his face. “What was that? You were going to stay out of clinch.”
“He wasn’t falling for it, coach. I couldn’t count on being far enough ahead by the end of the third.”
“Hell of a risk. He nearly choked you out.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Don’t be smart with me. You were impatient to win and you got reckless.”
“C’mon, Polly,” DK said. “Your boy did good tonight. That knockout is one for the highlight reels.”
Uncle Polly huffed. Then his tough demeanor fell away, a slow, crooked smile brightening his stubbly face. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it sure was.” He put his hands on either side of Carr’s face, giving his cheek an approving smack. “Not what I would’ve done, but damn, it worked.”
Carr relaxed. He didn’t want Uncle Polly unhappy with him. He got dressed and no sooner had he put his cuff back on than it vibrated with dozens of messages. Congratulations from friends and teammates, new subscriber stats, media hits…he touched the screen to queue it all, not planning to deal with it until later, but one high priority message flashed insistently. His cochlear receiver was still messed up; when he tried to play the audio tag, it was shrill and jumbled. He saw who the sender was though, and his stomach did a small, nervous dive, like the final, weak aftershock of an earthquake.
Uncle Polly was watching him. “Well?”
Carr looked up and nodded. “The Martian wants to see me.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Martian’s name was Bax Gant, and he was the co-owner of the Zero Gravity Fighting Association. His business partner, Terran entertainment industry tycoon Bran Merkel, was the money behind the ZGFA, but only occasionally seen on Valtego; Gant managed all the day-to-day operations. He was called the Martian because he probably was the best known Martian on a city-station that was still overwhelmingly Terran, but also because, in zeroboxing circles, he was the sort of singularly influential personality who merited a the when spoken about, such as, the Bossman or the Bastard. The Martian.
Carr stood in Gant’s office, trying not to look uncomfortable. He’d gone to the clinic for an injection of rehab/repair nanos; between the pricey cell-mending molecules and a dose of ibuprofen, post-fight pain wasn’t the main problem. He’d had his receiver fixed too, and he wasn’t even badly hungover from last night’s after party. It was just that Bax Gant’s office felt like a walk-in refrigerator. Comfortable for a man from Mars, but not for someone raised in balmy Toronto. He imagined that Gant must feel the reverse; the whole rest of Valtego probably felt like a mild steam bath to him. No wonder he seemed to live in his office.
“Sit down, Luka,” Gant said. “Coffee?”
Carr was about to decline, then remembered that he had just finished a fight and could eat and drink whatever he wanted to for a while. “Sure, thanks,” he said, and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. The last time he’d been in here was the day after his sixteenth birthday. Uncle Polly had sat next to him. The Martian had said, “You’re training them from the womb now, are you, Pol?” and then turned a skeptical look on Carr. “The pros aren’t like the ammys, kid. You think you’re ready?” and Carr had said, “Yes, sir,” but he’d been scared. This morning though, Uncle Polly had cupped Carr’s chin in his hand and said, “You’re not a kid anymore. You’re a pro fighter with a good record and you’re going to get re-signed, or I’ll eat my towel. Now go in there and talk to that domie, man-to-man.”
Gant filled two mugs from the pot on the counter and walked back to the desk. He was the shortest Martian Carr had ever seen, barely six feet tall. Decades spent in Valtego’s nearly Earth-level artificial gravity had thickened him, rounded him out a little. The faint hint of red in his hair suggested some European ancestry from way, way back. The man could almost pass as Terran, though the telltale sheen of his dark, radiation resistant skin gave him away.
He set one of the mugs in front of Carr, slipping a coaster underneath so as not to mar the surface of the mahogany desk. Real mahogany wood, not synthetic. There was a lot of wood in the room—the desk and chairs, the floor, the shelves that held mementos and photos from big fights Gant had promoted. Precious few non-agricultural trees on Mars; the man had a borderline obsession with furniture and objects made from natural materials. Behind his desk was a bamboo framed watercolor print of Olympus Mons at sunset. “Nice painting,” Carr said. “Have you been there?”
“I’m from Tharsis,” Gant said, sitting down across from him. “Never appreciated the view until I left.”
“Nice place?”
“Used to be. Crowded now. Too many tourists.” His snorted at this irony, and Carr wondered what passed for crowded on a planet with a fraction of Earth’s population. The Martian drank from his mug and studied Carr from across the desk. Carr lifted his chin. He could have had his bruised face and swollen jaw fixed up at the clinic, but it was ironclad tradition for zeroboxers to keep their facial wounds for at least a few days—the nastier-looking, the better. Gant said, “What’s your story, Luka? Parents were refugees and shipped off-planet? Father was a drunk and used to beat you?”
Carr shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. You’re not angry the way some of them are. So why do you fight in the Cube?”
Carr shrugged. “I’m good at it.”
“Hmm. After last night, I don’t suppose I can disagree. Five-one; not too shabby for a guy born on soil.”
“The ‘one’ got away from me.”
“That’s what they always say.” Gant leaned forward onto his desk with folded arms. “What did you think of the crowd last night?”
“It was big.”
Gant nodded, pleased. “Sold out stadium, and millions more watching on the Systemnet.” He jerked his head back towards the painting behind his desk. “I left Mars twenty-five years ago, saying I was going to grow the sport with Terrans. I was practically laughed off the Red Planet. All the best zeroboxers in the Martian system, the top dogs in the Weightless Combat Championship, you know what they said to me? Everyone on the old planet is a planet rat. The most daring and inventive Terrans left generations ago to build Mars and the station settlements. Why would a place with countless gravity-dependent sports want anything different? It’ll never catch on.”
Carr took a swallow of strong coffee. “Guess they were wrong.”
“Guess so.” Gant jutted his lower jaw slightly forward as he sized Carr up like a buyer considering an item at auction. Carr did his best to wait without fidgeting, without thinking too much about how his future depended on coming down on the good side of this man’s ruthless business acumen. Whether you loved or hated the Martian was largely correlated with how useful he thought you were.
Gant picked up his thin screen and tapped it. “Have you looked at your subscriber stats or media hits?”
“Not yet.”
“Good; if your head gets too inflated, you might get the mistaken idea you can weasel a better deal out of me.” He handed the screen to Carr. “This is what you’ve been waiting for.”
Carr took the screen, suddenly glad that the meat locker temperature kept his hands from sweating. He read the new contract quickly, then read it again, his eyes lingering on all the key numbers. His heart began to dance a jig in his chest. Three years, ten more fights guaranteed, his pay starting close to double what he’d made on his first six matches, and rising steadily if he won. He’d thought Gant might low-ball and make him negotiate, but this was more than Uncle Polly had told him to expect.
His hand hovered over the fingerprint signature box, not quite believing his fortune.
“Show it to whoever you need to—your coach, your lawyer—but I’m not going to bullshit you: it’s a good deal.”
Carr pressed his finger to the screen, waited for the confirmation and handed it back to Gant. “Thank you. Really.” His voice had gone a little squeaky; he cleared his throat. “This is what I want to do. What I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Your contract isn’t a payout. It’s an investment,” Gant said. “The ZGFA’s investment in you. Don’t think for a second this means you’ve made it, that you don’t have to train your ass off harder than ever to keep putting on a good show in the Cube.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Because there are a hundred guys out there who would eat each other alive to take your place.” Gant smiled, not in a cruel way, just: that’s the way it is. “One other thing. You’re getting a brandhelm.”
Carr’s eyebrows furrowed. Marquee athletes had brandhelms, of course, and so did every other famous person, from celebrity chefs to CEOs, but Carr was less than a couple of years into a pro career. “I can’t afford a brandhelm,” he said. “I mean, the deal is fine, but it’s not like I’ve got extra cash right now.”
“It’s your lucky day then,” said the Martian. “Merkel Media Corporation hired heavy on the marketing side and Bran has me convinced we should use the extra manpower up here, promoting our up-and-coming zeroboxers. I’m assigning someone to you.” He drummed his blunt-nailed fingers on the desk. “Like I said, an investment. Just to be clear, I don’t do this for every hotshot who comes into my office for his first contract renewal.”
“No, sir.”
Gant stood up and Carr stood with him. They shook hands, Carr’s fingers numb with cold, Gant’s warm and fleshy.
Do it, Carr urged himself. He had, somehow, miraculously, made it into the Martian’s good books, at least for now. Go on. Ask. “Another thing. Jay Ferrano was the third-ranked lowmass zeroboxer. Now I am.” He steeled his gaze. “I want to fight for the title.”
The Martian grunted. “Every fighter who’s ever been in here has given me that line. They all have the same dream as you do. Some of them, I bet big on—the way I just bet on you—and they never lived up to their promise.” He eyed Carr, calculating. “You’re not special, Luka. Not yet.”
* * *
From Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee. ©2015 by Fonda Lee. Use by permission from
Flux Books.
Originally published by Flux
CHAPTER ONE
Carr Luka woke from a nap three hours before his fight. He ate two hardboiled eggs, a handful of raw almonds and a bran muffin, then drank a bottle of water and spent twenty minutes stretching on the floor of his single-room apartment in the inner ring of Valtego Station.
The Moon’s desolate, pock-marked dark side loomed large across the upper right corner of his wall screen. Beyond it, the sunlit blue and white marble of Earth hung suspended in the vast black infinity of space. It wasn’t a real view of course—probably not even a live feed, just an old recording. The real views belonged to the expensive premium suites, reserved for Valtego’s high rollers. They were betting 3:1 against him, as of yesterday.
He didn’t usually follow odds, but Uncle Polly had fake-casually dropped that tidbit on him, angling to amp him up, get the I’ll-show-those-bastards juice flowing. It had worked all right—not because he cared that some bettors thought he might be a flame out, but because he hated to think that, after the disaster of his most recent match, Uncle Polly might secretly agree with them. Other promising young fighters had been broken by an early loss; he certainly wouldn’t be the first.
Carr stood, shaking out his limbs, reaching for his warm-up clothes. He didn’t need to be reminded of the stakes. He’d been on Valtego for a year and a half. This sixth and final fight in his contract would determine whether he landed a new deal, or found himself on the next flight back to Earth, relegated to fighting in orbital dives reeking of pot, where the vacuum plumbing regularly gave out and big bubbles of pee floated in the bathrooms.
He made a face; not about to happen. He was no planet rat.
Carr tapped the cuff-link display on his forearm to play something high energy—the neo-urban skid music that was popular earthside these days—as he packed his bag. Gripper gloves and shoes, cup, mouth guard, fight shorts, a towel, a change of clothes for the press conference and after party. He zipped up the bag and slung it over his shoulder. After a final look around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, he stepped out of his room and navigated the halls of the apartment complex up to the main thoroughfare and into Valtego traffic.
The streets were crowded, echoing cavernously with the noise of people and music and cars. Well-dressed couples, families, and packs of young men and women spilled onto the main concourse. When Carr looked up, past the reddish simulated evening light, through the enormous sky windows into the docking hub, he could see that even more ships had arrived since yesterday. Half a dozen Earth-Mars cargo cyclers, a few private solar sailing yachts, and plenty of commercial passenger craft. It was one of those times when summer in Earth’s northern hemisphere coincided with dust storm season on Mars, inciting residents of both planets to travel. Super high season at Valtego.
He caught the intra-station shuttle bus just as it pulled up with a pneumatic hiss, its silver body flashing the usual promotional banner: Valtego: It’s More Fun on the Dark SideTM. Carr didn’t bother to sit down; he was only taking it a few stops. He stood near the door, closed his eyes and let the burble of voices from the other passengers float around him. He heard English in American, British, and Martian accents, Mandarin, Mars Hindi, Spanish and German. In his mind, he turned the hum of conversation into a growing swell of cheering, a thunderous crowd calling his name.
His cuff vibrated and a rising chime played in his ear. He glanced down at the display on his forearm, then smiled, shut off the music and took the call. “Enzo,” he said. “Are you going to watch my fight?”
“No, I happen to be hiding in my closet with my screen, under a blanket, for no reason. OF COURSE I’m watching!” Enzo’s voice, transmission-delayed by a couple seconds, sounded, in Carr’s cochlear receiver, as if the boy was shout-whispering an urgent secret. “My mom is going to go fusion if she finds me.” He gave a wheezy, excited cough. There was a pause, and Carr winced, picturing the boy sucking hard on his inhaler.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Carr asked.
“Whatever. School is useless. You barely went.”
“Sure I went,” he lied. “And I was tutored.” Which was true, if you could call Uncle Polly helping him fudge through remote study modules ‘tutoring.’ “Besides, you’ve got to make a living using your brain someday.”
The boy gave a long sigh. “It’s so unfair.” He sounded as morose as he had when Carr had first left for Valtego. Carr felt a pang of worry. Now wasn’t the time to question the kid, but Enzo was small, he didn’t have many friends; who was watching out for him, spending time with him, now that Carr was living in deep orbit on the far side of the Moon? Carr wouldn’t trade his place here for anything, but Enzo was one of the few things he missed about Earth.
The shuttle bus left behind the rows of densely-packed apartment entrance tubes for Valtego’s less wealthy residents. It passed shops and restaurants catering to visitors from the planet, before turning and sliding to a stop at the gravity zone terminal. The doors opened onto a wide platform bustling with people and lined with colorful holovid ads promising the best deals on theater tickets, spacewalks, hotels. “I wish you could see this place,” Carr said. “It’s something else. I’m going to bring you up here someday and show you around.” If I’m still here after today, came the unwelcome reminder.
“Would you? That would be so stellar,” Enzo whispered. “Oh shit, I think my mom is home. Okay, I just called to say: Good luck! Make him float!”
“Thanks, little man.”
The connection clicked out as Carr stepped onto the terminal platform. Uncle Polly and DK were waiting for him, looking comically mismatched standing together—old, pale and lean, next to young, dark and muscled. DK clapped Carr on the back. Uncle Polly put his hands on Carr’s shoulders and broke into a slow, approving smile that made his left eye squint. “You’re a hundred percent ready,” he said. On fight days, Uncle Polly underwent a magical transformation. Every other day, he could chew Carr out in practice, find fault in every detail, cuss at him if he wasn’t pushing hard enough, but on fight day, he was optimism incarnate. Carr felt himself grinning, buoyed.
“Where would you rather be right now?” Uncle Polly demanded.
“Nowhere, coach.”
“What would you rather be doing?”
“Nothing, coach.”
“You ready to fly?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Get in the car.”
He strapped his duffel bag into the overhead compartment before climbing in. Once everyone was seated, the harness straps tightened, the doors closed, and the vehicle shot down the freeway tube. Carr ran an appreciative hand across the smooth tan upholstery. He took the commuter bus to the central zero-g zone every morning, but the routine trip was far more enjoyable in a private car. Another special fight day perk.
As the bright lights and artificial gravity of the city’s rings receded, Valtego spread out around them in all its slowly-turning immensity before the view opened up into a breathtaking expanse of space. Carr craned his neck against the mild g-force pressure, looking past the shadow of the Moon and catching, for a few seconds, a glimpse of Earth—a real view, not a projection. The planet always looked smaller in real life than on the wall screen.
Uncle Polly ran through the game plan once more. “What are you going to do in the first round?”
“Stay out of his grab zone. Wear him out, frustrate him.”
“He doesn’t like to climb. Make him climb. Second round?”
“Hit him from the corners. Use my fast launches and rebounds.”
“Good, good.”
“Third round, spin him hard and finish him off.”
“You got it. What’s your strength against him?”
“My space ear.”
“Always fear the better ear! You’re ready.” Uncle Polly was not really Carr’s uncle. He wasn’t even old, maybe sixty-something, but he was scrawny and bent-backed from a career spent on mining ships and in orbital gyms, during a generation when zero gravity alleviation therapy wasn’t what it was today, and so many years in space took a heavy toll on one’s body. He had a full head of short, gray hair and a permanently grizzled jaw. But he moved and spoke with the fire of a younger man, and when he slapped his hands on his thighs, he radiated confidence like a solar flare.
The zero gravity complex, recently renamed the Virgin Galactic Center, loomed ahead of them. As the vehicle slowed, the familiar transition to weightlessness tugged at Carr’s stomach, pressed his chest against the harness and drew his limbs upward. They glided past a group of tourists on a beginner level spacewalk, the suited figures cycling arms and legs slowly and awkwardly as their guide coaxed them along with gentle bursts of his thrusters, like a shepherd leading a herd of nervous farm animals.
The car docked in the parking hold. Carr drifted up to retrieve his bag, and pushed it ahead with one hand while he unclasped his belt tether and hooked it around the hallway guide rail with the other. It was an irritating requirement; he could easily climb this place free floating and blindfolded, but there was a fine if you were caught untethered, even if you were a Valtego resident. Management didn’t want anyone setting a bad example for the tourists and seasonal workers who might hurt themselves crashing into things or get stranded in the middle of a room and create extra work for the maintenance folks who would have to rescue them.
DK tethered himself and tilted his head to one side, listening. “You hear that?” Already, the low thrum of a crowd was growing over the steady whoosh of shuttles and cars docking, one after the other. Distant loud music began pulsing through the thick walls of the parking hold. DK smiled, showing small, brilliant white teeth against tropical bronze skin. “Full house tonight, I’ll wager. All here to see you, kid.”
That wasn’t exactly true; the headline fight was between Danyo “Fear Factor” Fukiyama and Jorge “Monster” Rillard, but DK had told Carr that his match had the most hype he’d ever seen for the undercard. Of course, maybe DK was just saying that to pump him up. DK was not a large man—a natural feathermass—and he looked slightly rodent-like, with his big ears and fists, large eyes, and small nose, but he exuded a gregarious charisma that was rare in this sport. He was also one of the best young zeroboxers anywhere. His full name was Danilo Kabitain, but no one called him that. He was DK to his flymates, “Captain Pain” to his opponents and the media, and a hell of a man to have in one’s corner.
They climbed along the hallway using the spaced rungs, turned right, and passed through the athlete’s entrance. The locker room and adjoining warm-up space were empty except for two men, one of them seated on a bench, his feet hooked under the stabilizing rod, elbows on knees, broad shoulders hunched forward. He looked as if the universe had just ended.
“What’s the matter, Blake?” Carr asked.
“My fight’s canceled.” Blake Murphy didn’t look up. “The other guy tested positive for endurance-enhancing nanos. Bastard.”
“Damn. Sorry to hear it.”
Blake’s trainer glanced over from where he was furiously shoving his fighter’s gear into a bag. “You’ll be up early then.” He pointed to the small wall screen which showed the evening’s two commentators, Xeth Stone and Jeroan Culver, up on deck. Carr swiped the volume up and Xeth’s energetic voice filled the locker room. “…change in lineup, it won’t be long now before we see one of the most anticipated matches of the night!”
“That’s right, Xeth,” Jeroan replied in a straight man monotone. “Carr Luka is still something of an enigma to this crowd. He burst onto the ZGFA scene not long ago, gained a strong following when he racked up four impressive wins in a row, and then choked in his last fight against “Death” Ray Jackson. Now he’s going up against the third best zeroboxer in the lowmass division, and the question on everyone’s mind is: does he stand a chance of coming back against Ferrano?”
“I think he does, Jeroan,” Xeth enthused. “I don’t think Luka is a flash-in-the-pan like some people have been saying. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I tell you, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a guy, born on Earth no less, with the kind of instincts he’s shown in the Cube. That kid can fly. Did I mention he’s still seventeen?”
“Sure, he can fly, but Ferrano is an expert grabber. How’s he going to do against that?”
Zeroboxing commentators liked to speak of fighters as ‘grabbers’ or ‘fliers.’ It was rather artificial, Carr thought, since any good zeroboxer had to be both, but there was some truth to the distinction. To inflict any bare-handed damage to a person in zero gravity, you had to establish a brace or a point of leverage—preferably a vulnerable part of your opponent’s body—to keep them from floating away while you hurt them. Or you had to treat space itself as a weapon, using the infinite angles of movement to strike and rebound, strike and rebound, faster and harder than the other guy.
“Luka is an ace flier,” Xeth agreed, “But his grabbing game is solid, and it’s getting better with every match. I think we’re going to see—”
Uncle Polly slashed his hand across the front of the screen to turn it off. “You heard ‘em, you’re up early! Get changed and warmed up!”
Carr untethered himself, stripped out of his clothes, and handed them to DK, who stuck them to the magnetic locker pegs and passed him his shorts. Uncle Polly hurried to find the ZGFA official, a dour bulldog of a man who inspected Carr’s gripper shoes and gloves and watched as DK wrapped Carr’s hands. He flashed a retinal reader across Carr’s eyes, checked his vital stats off his cuff—heart rate, blood pressure and temperature—then gave him the go-ahead. “Forty minutes,” he said.
“I need to take a leak,” Carr said.
“Make it fast,” Uncle Polly warned.
Carr climbed over to the stall and dug his feet under the toe bar, streaming into the vacuum funnel for what felt like an eternity. Everyone said that for a young zeroboxer, he was remarkably composed, never visibly nervous before fights, but his bladder knew better. Maybe that was a good sign; he hadn’t been nervous enough before the last match.
The wash dispenser squirted a bubble of soapy water onto his fingers. Blake emerged from one of the other stalls and pulled himself over to the neighboring dispenser. “Rotten luck,” Carr said, feeling obligated to put in a few more words of sympathy. “You’re bound to get another fight soon. At least they caught him. You wouldn’t want a loss on your record because the guy cheated.”
Blake looked up, his eyes like two pale blue gas fires. “Who says I would’ve lost?”
Carr hesitated, wiping off the water with a towel, not sure how he’d somehow given offense. “No one. But even if you won, the guy doesn’t deserve to be in the Cube.” It made Carr mad that some people tried to fool the system, to take shortcuts around putting in the years of time and effort. It was mentally weak.
Blake’s mouth sagged a little, his eyes cooling, losing their anger. You never could tell with Blake. Most of the time, he was one of the most polite and soft-spoken guys Carr had ever met. But in a fight…well, he wasn’t nicknamed “the Destroyer” for nothing. As he turned to leave, he looked back at Carr and said, “Good luck out there. Stay out of those corners, yeah?”
Corners. They had never been a problem for Carr, not until his last fight, when “Death” Ray Jackson had flown him hard for two rounds, then trapped him in a corner in the third and ground it out to win in a split decision. Carr did not take losing well (who did?), especially since he was certain he could have won, and had only his own overconfidence and ill-preparedness to blame.
Uncle Polly had given him hell, and he’d deserved it. He could barely look at his coach after the fight. For days, he’d felt so low he couldn’t bring himself to leave his apartment. Uncle Polly had shown up on the fifth day. His face had been severe, but his voice had been gentle. “It’s good for you, to know what it feels like on the other side, for once. Now you know. It’s shit. So—you planning on whimpering back to Earth for a planet rat job, or are you going to get off your ass?” He’d gotten off his ass. It had taken time though, weeks, to shake off the malaise, and he suspected the loss would stay with him forever, like a benign cyst under the skin.
Carr clambered back out to the warm-up area, shaking his head to clear away the unpleasant memory and refocus on the present. He had another chance, that was what mattered. DK helped him pull on and bind his gripper shoes. Carr wiggled each of his enclosed toes and gave a thumbs-up. He took off his cuff-link and handed it to his friend. Keeping a fighter’s cuff for him during a match was an important job for the cornerman and symbolic of trust; DK put it on next to his own. Carr’s gloves went on, over his wrapped hands, bound securely several inches up his forearm, leaving the wrists fully mobile. Some zeroboxers opted for the heavier gloves with more wrist support, but Carr didn’t think it was worth sacrificing climbing agility.
“Thirty minutes,” the official in the hallway called.
“Terran or Martian?” DK retorted, cheeky. Zeroboxing rounds were always measured in the fractionally longer Martian minutes, so it was an ongoing joke that zeroboxers had no sense of standard Terran time.
“Get moving,” Uncle Polly said. “You know the drill—five times around the room, then wall-bounces.”
Carr swung into the square warm-up room and jogged the walls, up, down and around, exerting himself just enough to raise his heart rate. There was a lumpy target dummy secured to the center of the room with cable wiring; he launched off a wall, somersaulted to strike the target with both feet, and rebounded to another wall. He worked the dummy from each wall and corner, and in the last five minutes, Uncle Polly called him back down for a brief recovery. Carr was warm now, just beginning to feel a sweat. Uncle Polly drifted in front of him and did a final check on his gloves and shoes. He clapped his fists down over Carr’s. “Let’s do this.”
The official’s voice called down the hallway, “Luka, you’re up!”
A deep thrill of nervous energy raced through Carr’s veins. He faced the hall, drew in a long, uneven breath, and let it hiss out, slowly. “We’re right behind you,” DK reassured him. Carr gripped the rungs and climbed. At the stadium entrance, the rumble of the crowd suddenly faded as the music and lights dimmed, and blue spotlights began sweeping back and forth. The announcer’s bass voice bellowed, “Fighting out of the red corner, with a mass of seventy kilograms, and a record of four wins, one loss, CAAARRR…‘THE RAPTOR’…. LUKAAA!”
CHAPTER TWO
Carr kicked off the final hallway rung and through the entrance. He somersaulted tightly, then uncoiled, reached, and landed in a dramatic crouch on the deck, gripping it easily with the balls of feet and fingertips. The crowd roared its approval, and as he straightened, Carr saw close-ups of himself on the huge screens hanging around the stadium.
Great stars, there were a lot of people. They filled the tiered stands that stretched in all directions, blurred into shadow beyond the stark, glaring lights. Carr’s pulse sped up, beating in his palms and the soles of his feet. Zeroboxing was the sort of thing people watched on screens at home; most planet rats couldn’t afford to travel beyond atmosphere very often, and even those that could generally liked their artificial gravity. These spectators were the really hard core fans, the ones who would rather be strapped into seats, drinking beer from squeeze bottles and brushing away floating globs of spilled orange soda and candy wrappers in order to see the fight live. Tonight, there were thousands of them, some still pulling themselves along the tether rails to their seats.
Below the deck hung the Cube, empty, like an enormous minimalist ice sculpture. The sweeping spotlight beams distorted on its transparent surface, tingeing its edges and corners with cool blue light. Even experienced zeroboxers got shivers looking at the thing. To willingly enter it was to be completely imprisoned, and utterly exposed. It was the prism of truth. There was no hiding in the Cube, no angle from which you could not be seen, and no way out until you had been proven victor or vanquished.
The announcer, Hal Greese, had a thick neck and a gut that, without gravity, migrated upward from the region of his waist to fill out his torso in a kind of general bulbousness. He turned in a slow circle in the center of the deck, one arm raised in anticipation. “Fighting out of the blue corner, with a mass of seventy-one kilograms, and a record of nine wins, three losses, JAY…‘DRACULA’…FERRRANNOO!”
Jay Ferrano shot through the entrance, twisting like a corkscrew, and caught the landing deck neatly. A wave of enthusiastic noise vibrated the Cube beneath their feet. Carr looked across at his opponent. He seemed larger than he had in the videos Carr had studied. ‘Dracula’ had gotten his nickname after an early fight when he’d let loose a bellow and accidentally swallowed a floating bubble of his opponent’s blood. The fans had loved it and the clip had gone viral. Ferrano had apparently taken to his name, because the suspended screens zoomed in for a close-up of the liquid tattoo stretched across the back of his neck: a bat flapping its wings.
They met in the center of the deck, both of them ignoring the rails and walking steadily on gripper shoes alone. The referee said a bunch of the usual stuff, about wanting a good, hard, clean fight, and so on. Carr didn’t hear any of it. He watched Ferrano. Sometimes you could tell what kind of a fighter a man was by looking at his face in the seconds before a match. Some guys looked calm and cool as ice, and fought the same way, patient and technical. Those who didn’t even look you in the eyes were either too nervous, or were, in their hearts, nice fellas who would rather not think of their opponents as human beings they would have to hurt. The ones who growled and glowered as if they wanted to rip your limbs off—they fought because they were angry people.
Ferrano sniffed, and cricked his neck from side to side. He looked strong, and mean, and here to play.
The referee told them to touch gloves. They did, and retreated to opposite sides of the deck. Carr was tingling from fingertips to toes. Uncle Polly was murmuring, “You’re ready, you’re ready. I’ll be in your ear the whole time.” DK put his mouth guard in, then spread coagulant gel on his face; it lessened the chance he’d get cut, and in the event he did, it would keep most of his blood on him instead of mucking up the air.
The attendant technician held an activation penlight up to his eyes and told Carr to look at a point straight ahead while he fixed the beam on each eye in turn. After a couple of seconds, he said, “Connection’s good,” and one of the screens above flickered and shifted into the view from Carr’s optic cameras, now being fed live to his subscribers.
The deck, which took up one entire outside surface of the Cube, had two entry hatches set into it. The border of Carr’s hatch flashed red and slid open. He went to the edge of it and stood like a man with his toes on the lip of a cliff, staring down into two hundred cubic meters of empty space. Then he dove through the opening, like a swimmer into water. He piked his body backward and flipped, catching the wall behind him, hands first, feet second, finding spread-fingered purchase on the textured surface, the magnetic pull on his gripper gloves, shoes, and the waistband of his shorts, holding him against the wall.
On the other side of the Cube, Jay Ferrano shot through his hatch. Both entrances flashed once more, Ferrano’s blue, Carr’s red, before sealing off. The bell rang, loudly outside the Cube for the benefit of the audience, more quietly in his ear. The fight was on.
Ferrano opened with a straight launch, propelling himself across the Cube with both legs, hands up in a guard. Carr judged the man’s path and leapt for an adjacent wall, kicking out at his passing opponent. His foot connected, not with enough power to do damage, but that wasn’t the point. It pushed the man in one direction and accelerated Carr’s travel in the other, setting up his rebound.
Ferrano turned off the wall and shot straight back. Carr tucked his legs, powered off the surface and sailed just out of reach. He shot a hand out for the wall, grabbed it, and climbed; for a calculated moment he was directly above Ferrano’s head, and he swung down, fists flying for his opponent’s face. He nailed a right hook, followed the momentum of his weightless spin with a left elbow, but Ferrano wrapped a leg around his, halting both their rotations and creating a coveted opening to grab, and land punches.
“Cover! Cover and break!” Uncle Polly shouted, his voice tinny in Carr’s receiver.
Carr tucked his head between his forearms as Ferrano’s right fist started raining down blows. The man’s other hand was cupped behind Carr’s neck, right leg anchored tight around Carr’s thigh. He had to move before Ferrano could lock him up further. He drove his right knee up, against his opponent’s chest and surged back. They came apart, Carr kicking out to speed up their separation.
“Stick to the plan,” Polly urged. “Stay out of his grab zone! Make him fly!”
All planet-born people instinctively assigned a sense of up and down; it took years of zero gravity training to develop a good space ear, to navigate 360 degrees of movement comfortably, without nausea or disorientation. Carr was a natural. He twisted in the air, stretching for the wall with the balls of his feet. His left shoe found magnetic grip while the rest of him kept traveling; he arched his back and shot his arm out, bracing himself into one of the Cube’s right angles. Ferrano was coming after him, but too slowly; he hadn’t gotten off a strong push. Carr scrambled across the corner and attacked from behind, punching both heels into his opponent’s back, slamming the man into the wall and sending himself flying again.
Ferrano’s broad back tensed with frustration and he began chasing the younger fighter around the Cube. They traded blows, but Carr kept moving, kept Ferrano coming after him. Uncle Polly’s voice was a chant in his ear: “That’s it, make him climb, you’re good, you’re good.” The bell sounded on six Martian minutes. The hatches flashed and slid open; Carr climbed sideways toward the glowing red square outline and pulled himself onto the deck.
Carr sat, hooking ankles under the stabilizing bar as DK took his mouth guard and squeezed water into his mouth. Uncle Polly appeared in front of him, and for a couple of seconds, his voice had a weird double timbre as Carr picked it up a second time from his receiver. Polly stabbed his cuff to mute, and squatted down on his gripper shoes, talking fast and excited. “You’re pissing him off, and wearing him out. That’s exactly what you want. Pick your places. You can fly circles around him; he’ll tire long before you do.”
Carr felt good, slicked with sweat, but his energy still high. Long before he was given his Cube name ‘the Raptor,’ his nickname around the gym had been ‘Last Man Standing’ because of his staying power. Uncle Polly was certain that cardiovascular endurance and his uncanny space ear were the key to him winning against more seasoned fighters. Carr sloshed water in his mouth and spit it out, the spray breaking into wobbly bubbles that DK swiped away with a towel. “It looks like I’m playing it too safe,” he said. “Like I’m not taking it to him enough.”
“You look great, kid,” DK reassured him, pressing an ice pack to the back of his neck.
Two scantily-clad Cube girls drifted above the deck, taut bodies undulating like mermaids as they circled a big, spinning holovid of the number two. Carr bit back down on his mouth guard, unhooked his feet from the bar, and dove back through the hatch just as the bell sounded on the second round.
Ferrano had adjusted his game plan. No immediate power launch and energy-expending chase this time; he wasn’t going to be drawn into trying to out-fly Carr. He stuck to the walls, looking for an opening, fighting tight and deliberate. It didn’t take long for Carr to start feeling like a crow harassing a porcupine. He was landing hits, but Ferrano had good, swift defense and the blows didn’t do a lot of damage.
Carr grit his teeth, his gut surging with anxiety. He couldn’t be sure of winning, not if the rest of the round went like this. The judges might tilt in his favor, but he couldn’t count on that. Not for this fight. He needed this fight.
He ran up the corner, bouncing off the right angles on the balls of his feet and leapt back down at his opponent, legs scissoring for Ferrano’s neck. The man evaded by less than a hand’s width and grabbed Carr’s leg. They both spun. Ferrano went for a leg lock. Carr twisted out of it, but the move gave Ferrano a brief opening. He threw his legs around Carr’s waist, taking rear control and flinging his arm around Carr’s neck.
Carr tucked his chin in time to avoid being immediately choked out. Ferrano had him around the jaw instead of the throat; the man’s forearm began sawing back and forth.
Uncle Polly was shouting, “You have legs! Legs on a wall!”
He was being ridden and choked piggyback, but in the Cube, up and down were easily reversed. Carr kept his head down, braced his legs and kicked hard off the wall, sending them both shooting backwards.
Ferrano’s back slammed into the opposite wall and bounced. It knocked some of the wind out of him, and though he didn’t let go, his grip slipped enough for Carr to pull the stranglehold loose, twist his body a little sideways and start nailing his opponent in the ribs with the tip of his elbow. Ferrano grunted but held on, tried to maneuver back into the choke with his other arm. They turned in space, locked together, everything barrel rolling by slowly as they fought for advantage. With his free hand, Ferrano started hitting Carr in the head, forcing him to give up his elbow strikes to protect himself. Uncle Polly was yelling something, but Carr couldn’t hear it; his head was ringing with each blow.
Watching the video of the fight later, Carr would hear Xeth Stone exclaiming at this point, “It looks like Luka is in trouble now—they’re drifting and Ferrano is not going to let go! He is just pounding him! This is not looking good for Carr Luka!”
“This is exactly how Ferrano wins,” Jeroan said. “He may not look as nimble in the Cube, but you can’t underestimate his tenacity.”
Everything began to blur and swim. The wall advanced slowly in the column of vision between Carr’s raised forearms. Desperate clarity pierced through the roar of blood in his ears and the tinny incomprehensible noise from his implanted receiver. His body began to slacken; Ferrano dug in the choke and started to squeeze.
“Oh…oh, this is it!” Xeth Stone yelled. “Ferrano’s got it! He just wore Luka down with those punches.”
Jeroan said, “Luka is going to have to tap any second now.”
Blood and air were no longer reaching Carr’s brain. Pain and blackness closed in. Ferrano growled with effort, completely focused on impending victory. Just tap and it’ll stop, his meaty, sweaty forearm seemed to promise with each additional millimeter of pressure.
They reached the wall. Carr shot out hands and feet, catching the surface with all four magnetic grippers, and launched himself straight up with every remaining ounce of power in his limbs, as if shooting up the vertical side of a swimming pool toward air. The crown of Ferrano’s head, higher than his by a couple inches, slammed into the Cube wall above them.
The impact jarred Carr as well, his tenuous hold on consciousness nearly giving out, darkness scudding across his eyes. But Ferrano’s arm fell away and the flood of returning oxygen was like a slap of cold water to Carr’s face. His body responded with a wave of sudden energy. He broke free and turned the corner like a spider, crouching in its hollow. The walls, though solid, were designed to partially cushion impact; Ferrano was more dazed than injured, his eyes unfocused as he reached out clumsy hands to steady himself. Carr came at him from above, fist connecting square across the chin. Ferrano’s head spun first, his body followed, and he went limp as a drifting rag doll.
Peripheral sounds and sensations returned. Outside the Cube, lights strobed, the crowd roared—one giant incoherent mass of noise.
“DID I JUST SEE THAT?” Xeth Stone squealed.
“We have a floater!” Jeroan’s usually unflappable voice held a note of awe. “Carr Luka just floated the third best zeroboxer in the lowmass division, in the second round, when it looked like he was done for.”
“What a stunning reversal! Ferrano did not see that coming at all! None of us did! I don’t know how Luka could take those hits, and hang on through that choke, and still have enough left in him to pull that off! What an opener! That might be the fight of the night, Jeroan!”
The referee and a doctor navigated over to Ferrano and examined him, then took hold of his arms and carried him back over to his side of the Cube, propelling themselves with handheld mini-thrusters. Residual adrenaline pulsed through Carr’s body with each heartbeat; he felt as jittery as a bug as he jogged, hands and feet, back to his hatch and out onto the deck. As the referee took his arm, Hal Greese’s voice boomed, “At four minutes, thirty-eight seconds in the second round, the winner, by knockout, CARRRRR LUKAAA!”
The sweet high of victory swept over Carr, dizzying him more than any gymnastic feat in the Cube. He saw his own face on the suspended screens—red, puffy and bruised, shiny with pebbly sweat clinging to a layer of gel—and broke into a grin he felt would never stop. The shadowy tiers of spectators rippled with movement, chanting their approval. He was surrounded by people: DK and Uncle Polly hugging him, the doctor coming to check on him, the technician disconnecting his optic cameras and telling him that his cochlear receiver had been jolted and he’d need to get it fixed—that was why in the last seconds of the match he hadn’t heard Polly’s voice, only a high, distant whining. Sports journalists materialized out of nowhere, their tethers crowding the rails, raising their cuff-links above each other to catch his words. Carr scrabbled distractedly for what he was supposed to say right now.
“I just want to thank Jay Ferrano and the ZGFA for putting on a great fight. I’ve got to credit my incredible coach and my cornerman. To my mom and Enzo, back home on Earth—I love you guys.” There were more shouted questions, but DK and Uncle Polly ushered him back to the locker room. Carr barely felt the hallway rungs as he floated out of the crush of people.
He looped around the room like a drunken bird, bouncing off the banks of lockers, and barreling into DK, who whooped and laughed and threw him into a spin. When he pulled out of it, Carr hooked one foot under a toe bar and leaned back, still grinning stupidly as DK helped him out of his gripper shoes and gloves, toweled him down, and placed a squeeze bottle of electrolyte drink in his hand.
Uncle Polly stood in front of him and leveled a stern finger at his face. “What was that? You were going to stay out of clinch.”
“He wasn’t falling for it, coach. I couldn’t count on being far enough ahead by the end of the third.”
“Hell of a risk. He nearly choked you out.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Don’t be smart with me. You were impatient to win and you got reckless.”
“C’mon, Polly,” DK said. “Your boy did good tonight. That knockout is one for the highlight reels.”
Uncle Polly huffed. Then his tough demeanor fell away, a slow, crooked smile brightening his stubbly face. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, it sure was.” He put his hands on either side of Carr’s face, giving his cheek an approving smack. “Not what I would’ve done, but damn, it worked.”
Carr relaxed. He didn’t want Uncle Polly unhappy with him. He got dressed and no sooner had he put his cuff back on than it vibrated with dozens of messages. Congratulations from friends and teammates, new subscriber stats, media hits…he touched the screen to queue it all, not planning to deal with it until later, but one high priority message flashed insistently. His cochlear receiver was still messed up; when he tried to play the audio tag, it was shrill and jumbled. He saw who the sender was though, and his stomach did a small, nervous dive, like the final, weak aftershock of an earthquake.
Uncle Polly was watching him. “Well?”
Carr looked up and nodded. “The Martian wants to see me.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Martian’s name was Bax Gant, and he was the co-owner of the Zero Gravity Fighting Association. His business partner, Terran entertainment industry tycoon Bran Merkel, was the money behind the ZGFA, but only occasionally seen on Valtego; Gant managed all the day-to-day operations. He was called the Martian because he probably was the best known Martian on a city-station that was still overwhelmingly Terran, but also because, in zeroboxing circles, he was the sort of singularly influential personality who merited a the when spoken about, such as, the Bossman or the Bastard. The Martian.
Carr stood in Gant’s office, trying not to look uncomfortable. He’d gone to the clinic for an injection of rehab/repair nanos; between the pricey cell-mending molecules and a dose of ibuprofen, post-fight pain wasn’t the main problem. He’d had his receiver fixed too, and he wasn’t even badly hungover from last night’s after party. It was just that Bax Gant’s office felt like a walk-in refrigerator. Comfortable for a man from Mars, but not for someone raised in balmy Toronto. He imagined that Gant must feel the reverse; the whole rest of Valtego probably felt like a mild steam bath to him. No wonder he seemed to live in his office.
“Sit down, Luka,” Gant said. “Coffee?”
Carr was about to decline, then remembered that he had just finished a fight and could eat and drink whatever he wanted to for a while. “Sure, thanks,” he said, and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. The last time he’d been in here was the day after his sixteenth birthday. Uncle Polly had sat next to him. The Martian had said, “You’re training them from the womb now, are you, Pol?” and then turned a skeptical look on Carr. “The pros aren’t like the ammys, kid. You think you’re ready?” and Carr had said, “Yes, sir,” but he’d been scared. This morning though, Uncle Polly had cupped Carr’s chin in his hand and said, “You’re not a kid anymore. You’re a pro fighter with a good record and you’re going to get re-signed, or I’ll eat my towel. Now go in there and talk to that domie, man-to-man.”
Gant filled two mugs from the pot on the counter and walked back to the desk. He was the shortest Martian Carr had ever seen, barely six feet tall. Decades spent in Valtego’s nearly Earth-level artificial gravity had thickened him, rounded him out a little. The faint hint of red in his hair suggested some European ancestry from way, way back. The man could almost pass as Terran, though the telltale sheen of his dark, radiation resistant skin gave him away.
He set one of the mugs in front of Carr, slipping a coaster underneath so as not to mar the surface of the mahogany desk. Real mahogany wood, not synthetic. There was a lot of wood in the room—the desk and chairs, the floor, the shelves that held mementos and photos from big fights Gant had promoted. Precious few non-agricultural trees on Mars; the man had a borderline obsession with furniture and objects made from natural materials. Behind his desk was a bamboo framed watercolor print of Olympus Mons at sunset. “Nice painting,” Carr said. “Have you been there?”
“I’m from Tharsis,” Gant said, sitting down across from him. “Never appreciated the view until I left.”
“Nice place?”
“Used to be. Crowded now. Too many tourists.” His snorted at this irony, and Carr wondered what passed for crowded on a planet with a fraction of Earth’s population. The Martian drank from his mug and studied Carr from across the desk. Carr lifted his chin. He could have had his bruised face and swollen jaw fixed up at the clinic, but it was ironclad tradition for zeroboxers to keep their facial wounds for at least a few days—the nastier-looking, the better. Gant said, “What’s your story, Luka? Parents were refugees and shipped off-planet? Father was a drunk and used to beat you?”
Carr shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. You’re not angry the way some of them are. So why do you fight in the Cube?”
Carr shrugged. “I’m good at it.”
“Hmm. After last night, I don’t suppose I can disagree. Five-one; not too shabby for a guy born on soil.”
“The ‘one’ got away from me.”
“That’s what they always say.” Gant leaned forward onto his desk with folded arms. “What did you think of the crowd last night?”
“It was big.”
Gant nodded, pleased. “Sold out stadium, and millions more watching on the Systemnet.” He jerked his head back towards the painting behind his desk. “I left Mars twenty-five years ago, saying I was going to grow the sport with Terrans. I was practically laughed off the Red Planet. All the best zeroboxers in the Martian system, the top dogs in the Weightless Combat Championship, you know what they said to me? Everyone on the old planet is a planet rat. The most daring and inventive Terrans left generations ago to build Mars and the station settlements. Why would a place with countless gravity-dependent sports want anything different? It’ll never catch on.”
Carr took a swallow of strong coffee. “Guess they were wrong.”
“Guess so.” Gant jutted his lower jaw slightly forward as he sized Carr up like a buyer considering an item at auction. Carr did his best to wait without fidgeting, without thinking too much about how his future depended on coming down on the good side of this man’s ruthless business acumen. Whether you loved or hated the Martian was largely correlated with how useful he thought you were.
Gant picked up his thin screen and tapped it. “Have you looked at your subscriber stats or media hits?”
“Not yet.”
“Good; if your head gets too inflated, you might get the mistaken idea you can weasel a better deal out of me.” He handed the screen to Carr. “This is what you’ve been waiting for.”
Carr took the screen, suddenly glad that the meat locker temperature kept his hands from sweating. He read the new contract quickly, then read it again, his eyes lingering on all the key numbers. His heart began to dance a jig in his chest. Three years, ten more fights guaranteed, his pay starting close to double what he’d made on his first six matches, and rising steadily if he won. He’d thought Gant might low-ball and make him negotiate, but this was more than Uncle Polly had told him to expect.
His hand hovered over the fingerprint signature box, not quite believing his fortune.
“Show it to whoever you need to—your coach, your lawyer—but I’m not going to bullshit you: it’s a good deal.”
Carr pressed his finger to the screen, waited for the confirmation and handed it back to Gant. “Thank you. Really.” His voice had gone a little squeaky; he cleared his throat. “This is what I want to do. What I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Your contract isn’t a payout. It’s an investment,” Gant said. “The ZGFA’s investment in you. Don’t think for a second this means you’ve made it, that you don’t have to train your ass off harder than ever to keep putting on a good show in the Cube.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Because there are a hundred guys out there who would eat each other alive to take your place.” Gant smiled, not in a cruel way, just: that’s the way it is. “One other thing. You’re getting a brandhelm.”
Carr’s eyebrows furrowed. Marquee athletes had brandhelms, of course, and so did every other famous person, from celebrity chefs to CEOs, but Carr was less than a couple of years into a pro career. “I can’t afford a brandhelm,” he said. “I mean, the deal is fine, but it’s not like I’ve got extra cash right now.”
“It’s your lucky day then,” said the Martian. “Merkel Media Corporation hired heavy on the marketing side and Bran has me convinced we should use the extra manpower up here, promoting our up-and-coming zeroboxers. I’m assigning someone to you.” He drummed his blunt-nailed fingers on the desk. “Like I said, an investment. Just to be clear, I don’t do this for every hotshot who comes into my office for his first contract renewal.”
“No, sir.”
Gant stood up and Carr stood with him. They shook hands, Carr’s fingers numb with cold, Gant’s warm and fleshy.
Do it, Carr urged himself. He had, somehow, miraculously, made it into the Martian’s good books, at least for now. Go on. Ask. “Another thing. Jay Ferrano was the third-ranked lowmass zeroboxer. Now I am.” He steeled his gaze. “I want to fight for the title.”
The Martian grunted. “Every fighter who’s ever been in here has given me that line. They all have the same dream as you do. Some of them, I bet big on—the way I just bet on you—and they never lived up to their promise.” He eyed Carr, calculating. “You’re not special, Luka. Not yet.”
From Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee. ©2015 by Fonda Lee. Use by permission from Flux Books.
Universal Print
Originally published by Crossed Genres
“Well, the coolant system is fucked.” Ray Cutter emerged from the underbelly of the starboat. He pulled off his grease-stained Universal Print Delivery & Service jacket and threw it into the dirt at his feet. “We’re not getting off the planet.”
Art Strung stared at the grounded vessel, then turned in a slow, disbelieving circle. The afternoon Thedesian sun beat down on the scrubby, arid landscape: dusty, rolling purple hills dotted with copses of bushy blackish-green trees, and in the distance, piled rock formations that made Art think of enormous heaps of animal dung.
I’m screwed, Strung decided. I am so going to be fired.
“We’ve got to call this in,” he said.
“No way.” Cutter kicked the side of the boat. “If we call in, we’re done for. They’re going to ask why we’re so far off course, and how the hell we ended up in the Thedesian system. No one is going to believe we jumped into it by accident when we’re supposed to be making a delivery to Phobos. They’ll search the ship and check our flight logs.”
“Yes, do tell.” Strung’s lip curled back. “How did we end up jumping into low orbit over Thedesia? Who the hell mixes up the coordinates for Tharsis with those for Thedesia? Huh?”
“It was an easy mistake! Anyone could have done it!”
Strung found a flat rock in the shade and sank down onto it. A small eight-limbed purple lizard scurried in front of his foot and under a nearby prickly plant, waving its feelers and chittering indignantly. He felt a tension headache coming on.
Cutter was pacing back and forth, purple dust puffing around his feet. “I’m not going to jail, man, not for this small time stuff. They’d lock us up with real smugglers, hardened space dogs. Those guys would eat us alive.” He shook his head, the usual slack insolence of his face replaced, for once, with actual worry. “We’d be better off staying on this remote rock forever.”
“This is all your fucking fault,” said Strung, because it was. Though, Strung admitted, he had been stupid enough to a) help his serially unemployed old school buddy get a job as a deliveryman at Universal Print in the first place and b) let him start with the little side trips that had inadvertently landed them both in the Thedesian desert.
“Okay,” Cutter said. He stopped pacing and ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. We get on the first transport back to the Terran system. When we get there, we tell them we got hijacked at our last stop and the thugs took off with all the cargo. We barely escaped with our lives.”
Strung glared at him. “How often do you think transports come out to Thedesia? I don’t think this planet even has a commercial spaceport. Who knows how long we could be out here.” Sweat trickled down the back of Strung’s neck and between his shoulder blades. He wondered if he could get a message to Renata to send help, but if she found out what he’d been up to, she’d kill him. Then she’d leave him. He hauled himself to his feet and stalked back to the starboat. “We need to find a mechanic. Then we burn the contraband, get the hell out, and hope U.P. buys the story that we got hopelessly lost, and fires us instead of pressing charges.”
Cutter stared after him. “Burn it? Are you out of your mind?”
Strung opened the back cargo hatch and hauled the cover off the first printer, the one supposedly on delivery to a Mr. D. Sing living in New Rio, Phobos. It was a brand-new, high-capacity UP3122X: gleaming and sleek, in a neutral eggshell color that would complement any home decor. Strung threw the door open, reached inside with both arms, and swept out a dozen black canisters. They tumbled out of the printer and across the threshold of the cargo hatch, spilling out onto the ground.
Cutter ran up with a howl of protest. “Do you know how much all that is worth?”
“I don’t care! Do you know how much trouble it’s gotten us into?”
Cutter fell to his knees and began collecting the fallen canisters like a child frantically gathering candy. “We’ll hide it. We’ll come back for it.” He swung his head from side to side, scanning the open wilderness for a suitable storage place. “Hey look!” He motioned with his chin toward the crest of the hill to the east. A plume of indigo dust was making its way down the slope toward them. Strung paused to squint at it. He could make out the shape of an approaching vehicle, bearing down fast.
A huge wheeled buggy ground to a halt in front of them, sending up a storm of grit. A man hopped out of the front seat. He gaped at them. Then his tanned face broke into a grin, and he let out a bark of laughter. Strung couldn’t blame him. They were probably the most ridiculous thing he’d ever seen: two Universal Print deliverymen, frozen wide-eyed amid the small pile of black canisters scattered behind their broken starboat, steaming in the desert.
The Thedesian pointed to the starboat and said a bunch of words.
“Uh, we don’t speak Thedesian,” said Cutter.
“It’s German, you idiot,” Strung hissed.
The man pushed up the rim of his broad hat and adjusted the woven belt around his loose-fitting tan clothes. He pointed to the boat again and said in halting Standard, “You need fix.”
“Yes! Yes, need fix,” Strung agreed. “Can you help us?”
The man pointed from the boat back to the enormous dune buggy. “I take to town, yes?”
Cutter and Strung looked at each other. “Yes, that would be great,” said Strung.
The man tapped the middle of his left palm with a finger.
“We can pay.” Cutter took out his pay tag and held it up.
The Thedesian made a scornful face. “Real money only.”
Cutter looked to Strung in confusion. “What does he mean?”
“Ah, crap.” Strung glanced again at the Thedesian’s simple, woven clothes and callused hands. “I read about this. Thedesia is some kind of alternative lifestyle colony. The people here choose to live in traditional ways and don’t allow any Interstellar Age technology. I think they still use physical currency.”
“Physical currency?” Cutter frowned. “Like what? Pieces of gold?” He followed the Thedesian’s curious gaze and in a flash of inspiration, snatched up one of the black canisters and thrust it at the man. “How about that?”
The Thedesian unscrewed the lid and peered inside. He sniffed it. Then he smiled, closed the canister, and tucked it under an arm. Without another word, he got back into the buggy, pulled it in front of the delivery boat, and dragged out a pair of towing cables. He eyed the other canisters that Cutter and Strung hastily stuffed back into the ship’s cargo hold. “You sell?”
“No, no, we don’t sell,” Strung said.
“We’ll make an exception for you, of course,” Cutter amended quickly. Strung gave him an evil look.
They rode into town on the back seat of the buggy, towing the ship on its hover runners behind them. It was not a long trip, just enough time for Strung to have a good angry stew about how he’d gotten into this mess. It was not supposed to have been a big deal. Cutter knew this guy, who knew this guy, and all they had to do was take a little detour once in a while and pick up several canisters of the highest-grade Siryean white snuff, hide it inside the printers they were delivering, and take it through customs and inspection to a distributor on Tharsis for a little duty-free kickback. The printer had a tamper-proof activity log, but as long as they didn’t turn it on, no one would know they were using such an expensive piece of machinery as a container.
Strung had not liked it at first, just as he had not liked it when Cutter had tried his hand at breeding Andromedean fighting rats, or when he’d borrowed two paychecks worth of money to buy asteroid real estate derivatives that “couldn’t go down” but promptly had. Not to mention the time he’d conveniently skipped town and left Strung to explain why the rental car smelled like monkey piss. The exotic pet trade in Gliesian pygmy tamarins, it turned out, was not remotely worth the trouble.
Yes, he really should have known better this time. But Cutter had been persuasive. “It’s easy money, pickup and delivery only. No risk. No one at a huge company like U.P. will notice an extra jump here or there for ‘personal errands,’ and even if they did, no one cares. People do it all the time.”
“I’m coming up on three years at the company, Cutter,” Strung said. Being a deliveryman was far from stimulating, but it was easy, and it sure beat some of his previous jobs. “I don’t want to get fired over one of your stupid ideas.”
“Look, I set this whole thing up, but I’m going to split the money fifty-fifty with you. How about that?”
In the end, the money had been too tempting. Renata was always on his back about getting a bigger place, and a better printer. “You work at U.P. and they don’t even pay you enough to afford a decent model,” she griped. “That’s bullshit.” He agreed with her. With a stream of extra money earned on the side, plus the employee discount, he could get a brand new UP3122X. It was the revolutionary, fully programmable model, capable of printing in 546,455 material combinations, updated daily with all the latest apparel, accessories, household items, and edibles. It boasted unheard-of scan and replication accuracy, and could complete jobs in a fraction of the time taken by previous models. With a UP3122X, he could print Renata that hot new dress she wanted, the boots to go with it, new fixtures for the bathroom, and custom decals for his bike. When Strung had put on the jacket with the Universal Print logo and climbed into the delivery boat mere hours ago, he’d run a hand longingly down the side of the UP3122X and murmured, “I’m going to have one just like you soon.”
He cursed his stupidity.
The small Thedesian town appeared as soon as they’d driven over the hill. It filled the valley on the other side, a quaint sprawl of small buildings straight out of a history museum. Smoke curled out of chimneys, and wheeled vehicles chugged down paved streets. As they drew closer, Strung saw that the homes were made of heavy materials—wood and brick—and as far as Strung could tell, everything in sight had been constructed, not printed. Making or changing anything here must be incredibly slow and difficult.
“Wow.” Cutter whistled. “Talk about untapped printer market.”
The Thedesian towed their boat right up to the outskirts of town and left them there. Before he went, he asked for another of the canisters, and in exchange, he counted out a handful of round metal disks into Cutter’s palm. “Real money,” the Thedesian said with a grin. “You buy food, drink, room, girls, eh? Then get ship fixed.”
Cutter held one of the engraved coins up to the sun. The cheap metal gleamed dully. “I’ll be damned.”
They walked into the first public building that smelled of food. At their entrance, the room quieted and half a dozen heads turned to stare. When he and Cutter sat down at the nearest unoccupied square wooden table, conversation resumed, but Strung could feel the many curious, flickering gazes directed their way. He glanced around cautiously. Everything looked heavy and worn. The chairs were scuffed, as if they’d been around for years, and some of the woven clothes on people’s backs bore stains or frayed edges, suggesting they’d been used many times. Dust motes swam through the shafts of sunlight streaming in from the small windows. A few folks met his wandering gaze and nodded politely before turning away. The Thedesians didn’t appear unfriendly; they just didn’t seem to get visitors very often.
When a young woman brought them two bowls of chunky stew, Cutter spread the handful of coins on the table. She chuckled, took three of them, and left. They watched her go; her curvy hips swayed as she walked, and her long dark hair cascaded in waves down to the middle of her back. Strung turned his attention reluctantly back to his bowl. Its rim was slightly chipped. He shook his head in amazement. These people reused nearly everything. They couldn’t just dematerialize and print new stuff whenever they wanted.
“How old do you think these bowls and spoons are?” he whispered to Cutter. His stomach turned slightly at the thought of eating off of them. “How many people have used them before?”
Cutter made a face, then shrugged. “They must wash them.” He dipped his spoon in and ate.
Strung followed suit hesitantly. To his surprise, the food tasted good. He kept eating, and refocused on the larger predicament. “Coolant systems are pretty simple, right? Someone in this town must know how to fix one.”
Cutter pushed the remaining coins around the surface of the table with a finger. He stared after the waitress with a slack expression. “What’s the big rush?” He took another bite, then pulled a black marker from a front pocket and started doodling. Cutter did this all the time; he could never keep his hands still. “This place doesn’t seem half bad. Kind of like an olden days theme park. It’s going to be while before anyone notices we’re missing anyways.”
“Maybe we can get back before anyone does,” said Strung. He looked up, then nearly coughed out a mouthful of food. “I don’t think you can do that.”
“Do what?”
“Draw all over the table.”
It was too late. A gray-haired but immensely broad-shouldered man, who Strung surmised was the proprietor of the establishment, was standing beside their table, glaring down at them. His face was darkening to a curious shade of pink, and his jaw was working back and forth as if he was chewing something sticky and unpleasant. Strung hoped sincerely that the restaurant owner and the young woman who had served them were not related because Cutter had drawn a lewd exaggerated picture of the waitress’s bare ass. It filled up most of his side of the table. “Something the matter?” he asked.
The man unleashed what Strung suspected were choice German profanities.
“Hey, it’s just a table.” Cutter stood up and spread his hands in defense. “How was I supposed to remember you use the same shit for months?”
The restaurant owner’s expression suggested he was considering slamming Cutter’s head into the defaced furniture. After some profuse apologizing on Strung’s part, and the offer of most of the metal coins they possessed, the man was mollified into merely showing them out the door with a glower. Outside, Cutter snorted. “Can you believe that guy was upset about a stupid table, and instead of asking us to print him a new one, he takes a bunch of metal chips instead?”
“The metal chips are worth more to them than the table, you moron. And thanks to you, we have barely any left.” Strung rolled the few remaining coins in his hand and hoped it would be enough to buy a way off the planet. He had had enough of this place already. He did not like the scruffiness of it, or the purple dust, and he was sick of being around Cutter. “I’ll look around and try to find a mechanic. You go back to the ship and get rid of the dope. I don’t care how you do it. Burn it, bury it, give it away, hide it in a tree, I don’t give a damn. Just make sure it’s gone by the time I get back. We can still solve this mess and get out of here before we get into any deeper shit.”
Cutter said, “I have a better idea.”
“Oh no,” said Strung. He recognized the shifty, excited twitch in Cutter’s shoulders, the lopsided, cajoling smile. “No.”
“Aw, come on. You’re not even going to hear me out? It’s a really good idea this time.” Cutter bounced on the balls of his feet, winked as if to say, Who are you kidding, you do want to know, I know you do. “What are you so knotted up over all of a sudden? Are you really that anxious to get back to your girl, because it can’t be the excitement of our jobs that you’re dying to get back to. You can’t turn all lame on me now, man.”
Strung stabbed a finger at Cutter’s chest. “I don’t care what crazy idea you have cooked up in your head right now, I am not interested in hearing it. You are the reason we are on this wacky planet that time forgot, and if we end up stuck here, or get fired, or thrown in jail, or Renata kicks me out, I am going to beat the piss out of you.” He made his face as hard as he could. He’d never been able to make Cutter take his warnings seriously, and that truth made him want to grab his friend around the throat and shake violently. Cutter would only laugh, like he used to after their childhood fights. He was much bigger than Strung, always had been, and he would lie there, rolling around and laughing, while Strung whaled on him, and then he would get up, brush them both off and continue right on doing whatever it was they were going to do anyways, as if overcoming Strung’s protests, objections, or tantrums was all part of the fun. Which it was—had been—until now.
“I mean it, Cutter,” Strung said. “I’ll meet you back at the ship.”
Cutter was not at the starboat when Strung returned three Standard hours later.
The good news was that there was no sign of the black canisters full of Siryean white snuff. The cargo hatch was open. The UP3122X stood gleaming in the sunlight, its door cracked slightly open.
“Dammit.” Strung shielded his eyes and squinted at the nearest line of brick houses. After half a dozen broken and pantomimed street conversations, he’d finally managed to find a mechanic who agreed to come out to take a look at the boat. She was a short, well built, unsmiling woman with blackened fingernails, who sighed a lot but spoke passable Standard. She dropped her bag of tools with a clunk, pursed thin lips, and heaved out a weary breath before opening the starboat’s engine hatch and poking around in what Strung hoped was a productive way.
A glint of metal in the dirt caught Strung’s eye. He bent down and picked it up. It was a Thedesian coin, like the ones that had purchased their meal and placated the angry restaurateur a few hours earlier. A short distance away, another glint of metal: another coin. In short order, he found three more, leading away from the ship, as if someone had dropped them in haste.
“Oh no,” said Strung, feeling his stomach descend through his body. He opened the UP3122X printer. The sides of the printer were warm, and a burnt metallic smell laced the interior of the starboat’s cargo hold and stung his nostrils. The control panel was flashing a completion message. SCAN AND PRINT JOB COMPLETE.
It takes a UP3122X printer twenty Standard seconds to print a small metal disk. According to the printer’s finished job queue, scanning the initial model, then printing four hundred Thedesian coins had taken one hundred and forty minutes, plus an additional seven minutes to print a nylon bag large enough to carry all the canisters and the coins together.
Strung wondered what you could buy on Thedesia for that much white snuff and cash.
Then he considered, without optimism, his prospects for continued employment after a Mr. D. Sing complained to Universal Print about the activity log of his supposedly new UP3122X.
The mechanic crawled back out from under the engine hatch and wiped her hands on a black-stained rag. “Done. Should work now.” She slammed the hatch shut and looked at Strung expectantly.
He dropped all of the remaining coins into her hand. “If it’s not enough, my friend—” he paused, “former friend—will pay the rest.” He climbed into the starboat’s cockpit. “He’ll be easy to find in town—he’s not going anywhere for a while.”
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