'Startrooper Shona! What are you doing with that Combat Cadet?'
'I haven't quite decided,' said Shona, keeping a tight grip on the delinquent Dog Java. 'But if he doesn't agree to keep the peace then I'm going to break his wrist.'
'Agreed!' said Dog, who was sweating hot agony.
'What's agreed?' said Shona. 'That you behave yourself? Or that you get something broken?'
'I'll be good,' wailed Dog, his last reserves of courage and dignity broken.
'Yes, well,' said Shona, giving Dog a little shake, and almost breaking his neck in the process. 'I hope so. Because I'll be watching you.'
Then she let him go, so suddenly that he went sprawling to the floor. Shona stooped, secured Dog's knife, then went to help Hatch, who was administering first aid to Scorpio Fax. Meantime, Manfred Gan Oliver moved to join his son, and father and son embraced.
'What's wrong with him?' said Shona, as Hatch checked out Scorpio Fax.
'He's been beaten badly,' said Hatch, stating the obvious.
'Other than that, I can't say. Help me move him, and we'll shift him to the clinic.'
Half a dozen people, Shona included, helped shift Fax to the Combat College cure-all clinic. It was small, a six- berth unit, hence easily overloaded if general disaster saw too many smashed and maimed bodies brought gasping to its rescue. But for the moment it was clean, bright and empty. Several Combat College students had undergone running repairs in that clinic that night, but for the moment it was unoccupied apart from Fax.
And so the cure-all clinic claimed Scorpio Fax, lulling his pain to a dark nothing with the balm of an extinguishing anaesthetic, needling for his veins then pumping into those veins an artificial substitute for the lost blood.
When the cure-call clinic was close at hand, so much that was murder elsewhere was of little ultimate consequence. So smashed fists so broken bones so eyes gone missing so bloodloss – all fixable, all granted remedy. Thus like the heroes of the animated cartoons of the Eye of Delusions, the combatants rucked and mauled by the most outrageous brawls could be patched up to the point of perfection, could lie back grinning in perfect confidence of the reliable mercy of the supporting machinery. Like any entertainment hero, they too would live to fight another day.
But Fax was not grinning, for he was too full of pain. And even after the cure-all clinic had punched him full of peace, he had nothing spare for bravado.
'You'll come out as good as new,' said Hatch, unsure whether the anaesthetized Fax could hear him. It mattered not: his words were, after all, more to reassure himself than to reassure Fax.
The body could be mended, so physical injuries could in theory be lightly dismissed, but the shock of having one's fellow citizens turn animal-ape was not so easily sidestepped. Hatch presumed that Fax had been caught by a hostile mob of the Unreal, the Yara, the underclass of Dalar ken Halvar, and systematically beaten.
As Hatch watched, tubes sprouted from the wall and crawled into Fax's nose to feed him oxygen. A surgeon descended from the ceiling and hung just above Fax's face, suspended by a thick and flexible hose of fluorescent orange. The surgeon was a globular machine which sprouted scalpels and suction tubes, and it got to work on Scorpio Fax right away, cutting and slicing, sucking and dicing, squirting out flesh-paste and moulding it into position.
'I've seen enough,' said Shona. 'Come away.'
Hatch lingered just a moment longer, then began making his way back to Forum Three in Shona's wake.
'Well, Hatch,' said Manfred Gan Oliver, as Hatch entered Forum Three. 'Are you ready to die?'
'Die?' said Hatch, startled and confused. 'Did you come here to murder?'
'I came here for the pleasures of the Season,' said Gan Oliver.
'This is no Season,' said Hatch. 'This is but – '
'I spoke as a poet,' said Gan Oliver. 'A poet of blood, though I have no words to my name. As for what this is or is not – don't lecture me, Hatch. Here I trained. Here I grew from boyhood to manhood. I know this place as well as you or better. My son will see you dead in this Season of ours.'
'The illusion tanks – '
'I'm not talking illusion!' said Gan Oliver. 'Once you leave this place, you're marked for death. The Free Corps is going to put an end to the Frangoni, Hatch.'
'The emperor – '
'The emperor is gone, Hatch. Missing or dead. We've overthrown him.'
Hatch was fast losing track of what had actually happened in Dalar ken Halvar, or what was claimed to have happened.
'You might have grabbed the palace for the moment,' said Hatch, presuming from Gan Oliver's lordly attitude that the man had reason to think himself the master of the city, 'at least in the night's confusion, but tomorrow – '
'Hatch, you fool,' said Gan Oliver. 'The Free Corps has been planning its coup for the better part of a generation. We were waiting for the moment, that's all. This revolution, so called, it gave us our moment. Make it easy for yourself, Hatch. Find yourself a sword, then fall on it.'
This was almost too much for Hatch to absorb at once. What was happening here? Had the Free Corps truly seized effective control in Dalar ken Halvar? And did the Free Corps think it could hold the city permanently? Would Gan Oliver really have Hatch murdered once he left the protection of the Combat College, or was that threat merely an exercise in psychological warfare?
'You're pirates,' said Hatch, hoping to push Gan Oliver into self-revelation. 'And pirates tainted with treachery at that.'
'We are the bringers of a new age,' said Gan Oliver, with what sounded like level-headed sincerity.
'Not while I have anything to do with it,' said Hatch.
'You don't have anything to do with it,' said Gan Oliver.
'You don't and you won't. My son Lupus will kill you in battle in the world of illusions. Then you will leave the Combat College.
Then I will kill you for real. Our swords are waiting in the kinema, Hatch. Once you step outside the lockway, you're dead.'
'Kill me you may,' said Hatch, giving way to his inborn love of rhetoric. 'But the blood that lives will seek vengeance.'
'Who will revenge you, Hatch?' said Gan Oliver, sneering at this sally. 'Your sister? Your brother? They're doomed to the same fate, Hatch. Once the Free Corps has won Dalar ken Halvar, we will cleanse Cap Uba and have done with the Frangoni.'
'You would not dare!' said Hatch, hoping that Gan Oliver would not dare, and hoping that this twice-repeated threat of genocide was sheer bluff. 'We have a Treaty.'
Here Hatch spoke of course of the Treaty between the Silver Emperor and the Frangoni people. That Treaty made all Frangoni males in Dalar ken Halvar the slaves of the Silver Emperor, but also safeguarded the rights of the Frangoni to enjoy peace and safety on their own rock on the western side of the city.
'You had a Treaty,' said Gan Oliver, emphasizing the past tense. 'But your Treaty was with the Silver Emperor, who is missing, believed dead.'
'We had a Treaty, yes,' said Hatch, 'and have a treaty now.'
'And I,' said Manfred Gan Oliver, 'have a fist.'
Gan Oliver's easy confidence was as inscrutable as anything else Hatch had ever had to deal with. It was impossible to know whether the man was serious. Hatch needed information, lots of it, and fast. How many men had the Free Corps rallied? How many officers of the Imperial Guard had thrown in their lot with the Free Corps? Where were the revolutionary leaders? What exactly had happened at the silver mines?
'Well, Hatch?' said Gan Oliver, as Hatch counted his question marks. 'What do you say to that?'
'Asodo Hatch has no time left for argument,' said Paraban Senk, intruding on this debate. 'The arc is half-gone and combat begins at the end of the arc. Combatants should now proceed to the initiation seats. Asodo Hatch. Lon Oliver. Proceed to the combat bays.' – Half an arc?
– Time enough.
So thought Hatch.
But he knew he would have to hurry.
