other. Agonising minutes must have passed in real-time as this martial ritual was observed.
The engagement was as sudden and brutal as a pair of sumo wrestlers charging into each other. At first, Jitendra’s machine appeared to have the upper hand. It flexed itself around the enemy, using rows of tractor limbs to gain purchase, sinking their sharpened tips into gaps in armour plating. Articulating its head end, it brought the whirring nightmare of its circular cutting teeth into play. As they contacted its opponent’s alloy head, molten metal fountained away on neon-bright parabolas. Reflecting Jitendra’s initial success – and the changing spread-patterns of bets – the statistics shifted violently in his favour.
It didn’t last. Even as Jitendra’s robot was chewing into it, the other robot had retaliatory ambitions. Halfway down its body, armoured panels hinged open like pupal wings, allowing complex cutting machinery to scissor out. Servo-driven vacuum cutters began to burn into the belly of Jitendra’s robot, clamped into place with traction claws. A kind of peristaltic wave surged up the body of the assaulted machine, as if it was experiencing actual pain. It relinquished its hold, bending its body away, disengaging the whirling vortex of its cutting teeth. The stats updated. Pink vapour jetted at arterial speed from the wound that had been cut into the side of Jitendra’s robot: some kind of nuclear coolant or hydraulic fluid, bleeding into space.
The two machines rolled away from each other. The enemy retracted its cutter, the body armour folding back into place. Jitendra’s machine staunched its blood loss. Stalemate ensued for objective seconds, before the resumption of combat. The enemy twisted its head assembly and locked on with clutching mouthparts, horrible girder-thick barbed mechanisms. It was chewing – drilling, tunnelling – into Jitendra’s robot, metal and machine bits spraying away from the cutting head. From the rear of the enemy machine, from its iron anus, a grey plume of processed matter emerged. It was chewing, eating, digesting, defecating, all in mere seconds. Jitendra’s stats were now dismal and falling.
But he wasn’t finished. The enemy bit into something it couldn’t process as easily as moon rock: some high- pressure jugular. Bad for Jitendra, even worse for the machine trying to eat him for dinner. The enemy jolted, regurgitating a large quantity of chewed-up machine parts. Mouth-mechanisms spasmed and flopped as a wave of damage ripped through its guts. Jitendra’s machine twisted sharply out of reach. It had been bitten into around the neckline, but its whirling drills were still racing. It reared up like a striking cobra and hammered down on the enemy. Machine parts skittered away in all directions, cratering the arena. Now it was time for Jitendra’s machine to spring out additional grasping and cutting devices, hull plates popping open like frigate gun doors. Jitendra’s stats rallied.
But this wasn’t going to be a victory for either machine. The enemy was wounded, perhaps fatally, but so was Jitendra’s charge. Its drill parts were not turning as furiously as they had been only a few moments before. And its entire body was sagging, no longer able to support itself off the ground even against the feeble pull of the Moon’s gravity. When the end came, it did so with startling suddenness. Jitendra’s machine simply dropped dead, as if it had been pulled to the ground by invisible wires. For a moment the enemy machine made a valiant attempt to regain the advantage, but it was in vain. It too had suffered catastrophic systems failures. Like a deflating balloon, it collapsed to the ground and fell into pathetic corpselike stillness.
In a flash, recovery teams arrived. Tractors shot out from silos. Tiny figures – frantic space-suited Lilliputians – swarmed out of the tractors and bound the fallen monsters in drag-harnesses, cobwebbing them from head to tail with comical speed. The figures buzzed around and then vanished into the tractors again, as if they’d been sucked back inside. The tractors lugged the dead machines to the arena’s perimeter, gouging runway-sized skid marks in the soil.
That was the end of the bout. Geoffrey knew because he was being pulled back into real-time. He felt the chemicals metabolising out of his bloodstream. The visa digits slowed their tumble. The transcranial stim was over, the helmet rising back away from his head.
‘Well?’ Sunday asked, standing over his reclining form. ‘What did you think?’
For a moment his mouth wouldn’t work.
‘How long was I under?’ he managed.
‘Four and a half hours. June’s gone back to work.’
If she was lying, then so was the visa.
‘I guess everyone says the same thing. It didn’t feel like it.’
‘That was a short bout, as they go. Seven, eight hours isn’t unusual,’ Sunday answered, pushing a drink into his hand. ‘Twelve, thirteen, even that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.’
His neck had developed an unpleasant crick. Jitendra, who was being hauled from his cockpit, had the wiped- out, dehydrated look of a racing-car driver. Friends and associates were already mobbing him, patting his back and making sympathetic bad-show faces.
‘I’m sorry,’ Geoffrey said, teetering over to Jitendra. ‘I thought it was going your way for a while there. Not that I’m an expert or anything.’
‘I lost my concentration,’ Jitendra said, shaking his head. ‘Should have switched to a different attack plan when I had the window. Still, it’s not all bad news. A draw gives me enough points to retain my ranking, whereas they needed a win not to go down the toilet.’ He worked his shoulders, as if both his arms had popped out of their sockets and needed to be relocated. ‘And I don’t think the damage is as bad as it looked out there.’
‘Nothing that can’t be welded back together,’ Sunday said.
‘One good thing came out of it,’ Jitendra said, before burying his face in a warm wet towel.
‘Which was?’ Sunday asked.
‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen.’ He gave them both a grin. ‘I figured that bit out, anyway. And I was right. Those numbers do mean something to me.’
When they were back at the apartment, Sunday and her brother prepared a simple meal, and they shared another bottle of wine, one which Geoffrey had insisted on buying by way of celebration for a successful day. They dined with Toumani Diabate providing kora accompaniment. The recording was a hundred years old, made when the revered musician was a very elderly man, yet it remained as bright and dazzling as sunglints on water.
When the dishes had been cleared and the wine glasses refilled, she knew that the time had come to invoke the construct. This was the crux, she felt certain. If Eunice could offer no guidance on the matter, then all they had was a dirty old glove and some cheap plastic jewels. And with the possibility of mystery safely banished from their lives, they could all return to their mundane concerns.
‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said, speaking Swahili. ‘Good evening, Jitendra. Good evening, Geoffrey.’
