But even so – even at that early date, nobody seriously doubted that the ultimate competition would be between the Ebrell Islander Lupus Lon Oliver and the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch – because those two had already established themselves as the best of the best.
Chapter One
Singlefighter: aka Scala Nine singlefighter: a Nexus warmachine, a flying hunter-killer designed for deployment in a planetary atmosphere. It is powered by corrosion cells, in which small quantities of antimatter are destroyed by controlled contact with normative matter. The corrosion cells will power the machine for three days without recharge.
So burning down from out of the sun
The weapon struck -
Hooked down from sundark sky -
From sundark blindness burning -
Brightness inexplicable in a shock
Which sheered the dark to light,
And by this revelation wreaked – - so burning down from out of the sun, burning down from out of the blind brightness, the singlefighter struck, and the hapless foe screamed in pain across the Openband, and wrecked went down in flaming agony. As the enemy fighter fell, Lupus Lon Oliver sent his own craft plunging down the gravity well. Down from the sky he came, his singlefighter hurtling down, low and lower, so low that the warning klaxons shrilled and screamed:
'Pull up! Pull up!'
Lupus pulled up, pulled out, pulled hard, wrenching his craft away from disaster in a wetness of sweat and orgasmic release, and screamed in triumph. In the throes of his battle-glory, he had a momentary vision of red-hot blood. The blood was seared across his vision-screens. The entire world was blood: blood made blind, blood made glory, triumph's glory, victory.
'Ah,' said Lupus, easing the singlefighter into a long slow barrel roll, feeling the sweetness easing to languorous content as the cosmos rolled about the axis of his craft, the briefness now completeness.
'Ah… '
Yes.
But even already now this phase was passing, sliding, going, gone, with the sheen of all colors loosing their gloss, with the world becoming routine, the crashed wreckage of the downed enemy fighter now nothing but an inert blip on his locator screen.
Lupus eased his singlefighter round in a long slow circle and made a visual inspection of the wreckage which lay far, far below. From this height, it was still only a blip, a blip unbenefited by any theatricals of smoke and fire, a blip amidst the sands of a desert pigmented with a bright red not so terribly different from that of the Plain of Jars.
'Mission complete,' said the voice of Lupus's singlefighter, the voice of his ship. 'Illusion ends in a ten-pulse. Counting now. Ten. And. Nine. And.'
The training sequence was finished, so Lupus would automatically be returned to the world of the Combat College at the end of the ten-count, unless he elected otherwise.
'Eight. And. Seven. And.'
And then Lupus knew what he wanted.
'Six. And. Five.'
What Lupus wanted was not the blip seen from a distance but the real thing seen at close quarters. He wanted a close-to-close with the work wrought by his hands, wanted the smashed heat of the ruptured metal, the bloodworks of the dead, the confirmed corpse, the smashworks, the blood-dust smoking under the crunching heat, the proof.
All this he knew in a moment – one of those moments when thought outraces speech.
'And. Four. And.'
'Kill the count,' said Lupus abruptly, tilting his joystick and spilling his singlefighter down through the sky, down in a canted spiral, a gyre of gain. Victory by descent. Stooping to conquer, he sought the proof, the fact, the flesh. Thus he sought because, for all his much-proclaimed allegiance to the dataflow civilization of the Nexus, Lupus was still a true child of Dalar ken Halvar, still intellectually wedded to the proofs of brute matter, to weight and inertia, the stubbornness of intractable physical form and the proof of the senses.
His projected and anticipated and indeed habitual and inescapable and unavoidable and wanted and needed gloating – the heart of his nature, this! the heart of his life! – would be confirmation, and confirmation a reassurance, the measurement of a mass of scrapmetal wreckage a sure proof of his superiority. To Lupus, triumph in combat was ever important, since it gave him assurance of that the manifest superiority which was to him both the source of his wellbeing and the justification of his life. So Lupus Lon Oliver eased his Scala Nine singlefigher down and down in that closing gyre, down and down until the blip on his visual display became a wrecked machine.
So descending from the heavens -
So descending – Lupus Lon Oliver – Lupus, the hope of the family Oliver – descended from the heavens in a buzzard's declining circle then grounded his singlefighter on the vermilion sands of the scragland desert. Grounded with a slight bump, for his landings had always been sloppy – no grace of glory there. Grounded within javelin distance of the wreck.
Here the javelin distance mentioned is that distance to which the gymnastic dart can be thrown by the average male athlete on any of the Standard Planets of the Nexus, those many planets which are so alike in their conformity to norms of atmosphere, of gravitation and of mooncycle illumination that theorists have conjectured into life an unknown race of masterful and long-gone Experimenters in order to allow for a thesis of organized and systematic creation which could account for their many and indisputable similarities.
Thus Lupus landed, and Lupus said – 'Pah!' said Lupus, breathing out a tension which he had previously not acknowledged, a tension which he had thought to have been drained away by the sweet joys of victory.
Now he was truly relaxed – or at least so he thought. It was only natural for him to have been tense earlier on, for had he lost his battle then he would have fallen in flames, and though this was an illusion tank, nevertheless – If he were to be defeated in an illusion-tank battle then the moment of loss would be the same as in life, the fear the same, the pain the same, the shock the same, and the damage to his sense of superiority an equal reality. So the illusion tanks were never a game, not entirely.
So when he grounded the singlefighter, when the tension eased off for real, Lon Oliver felt uncommonly tired.
Yet eager regardless.
'Door,' said Lupus, his voice pitched for Command. 'Open.'
'Environment inimical,' said the door.
The singlefighter's exit door was a cautious device, sometimes over-cautious; an 'inimical environment' could be anything from a hot beach dosed with ultraviolet radiation at suntan grade to a hard vacuum infested with deflation mines.
'Elaborate,' said Lupus.
'Ubiquitous carcinogens in multiplicity,' said the door.
It did not list the carcinogens in question or itemize their effects. Not yet. Not when there was no need. The military designers of the Nexus had been acutely cautious of the dangers of information overload, particularly in a battle environment; consequently, Stormforce machines were apt to give a bare minimum of information, and would typically give too little rather than too much.
'Carcinogens?' said Lupus. 'Is that all?'
'Environmental exposure threatens long-term health degradation,' said the door.
Lupus did not laugh. Did not even smile. In the days of his adolescence, he had sometimes had difficulty in taking illusion- tank scenarios seriously. The earnestness of machines such as the singlefighter's door had struck him as being risible. But these days he took his training very seriously, for what happened in these tanks would
