Challenge of Steel Read online

  Challenge of Steel

  Memories of Earth, Book 1

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. Geo-Plankton Viewing Platform

  2. New Gate City Southside

  3. Seaview Apartments, New Gate City Coast

  4. Bridge Services

  5. New Gate MPB Headquarters

  6. Near Orbit

  7. Gene Seer Facility 793

  8. The Archives

  9. Facility 793 Control Room

  10. Aurora Borealis, Northern Hemisphere

  11. Challenge Hub, part 1

  12. Hecta Space

  13. Challenge Hub, part 2

  14. The Surface

  15. Tabletop Ridge

  16. The Central Jungle

  17. Nightfall

  18. Dawn

  19. Bunker

  20. Hecta 3 Far Orbit

  21. The Challenge Pit

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  1

  Geo-Plankton Viewing Platform

  Hectamon 7

  The dark waters of a vast sea spread toward the horizon, which glimmered with the bright lights of the coast. The towers, domes, and sky-bridges of New Gate City were far away from this quiet place, though, little more than a whitening haze.

  It was nighttime on the seventh world of the Hecta System, but the seas weren’t black. They were purple and mauve, blue and indigo. Racing across them were spreading fractal patterns of bright white light, all fluorescing with the same incredible symmetry.

  If it wasn’t for the way the patterns shimmered and bobbed with the waves, the onlookers who paced the floating viewing platform would have thought they were looking at a digital pattern.

  But of course, they were not. The wealthy people dotted over the crystal-glass floor were looking at the seasonal blooms of the geo-plankton, which strangely only created exact symmetrical shapes. It was a marvel of the territory known as the Golden Throne. There are many such marvels in the twenty-seventh century.

  “Those little things are sentient, I tell you. Who wouldn’t call that art?” asked the envoy from Terevesin, a young woman from the small world in the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy. The envoy wore, as was the fashion in imperial society at the moment, the shimmering gauzes of micro-woven cloth fashioned into a long dress. Hers was silver and blue, but she had added a note of her home-world—a living pendant of Terevesian ivy that waved and moved in response to noise.

  “You Terevesians are more in love with your plants than you are with your people!” grumbled the much larger shape of a man dressed in red machine-plate. Hector Bendis was one of the Red Judges, the desert people who favored strong-gravity worlds, turning them into near giants with prodigious strength. As the goliath of a man with the short-cropped white beard chuckled, the red scales of his auto-plate moved and sighed in perfect unison.

  “And you judges care only for your rocks and metals!” The envoy’s laughter was light and chime-like. The woman appeared to be in her mid to late twenties, but that could have been the effect of the gene therapies that everyone seemed to have now.

  The floating platform itself was encased in dark blue metals—better for the Hecta geo-plankton to be seen through the floor. Arched metal doors led to the restrooms, saunas, and other luxurious facilities. Anything to please the visitors before they left in the early hours, back to the city on the coast. Drone-waiters—floating white semi-circles that contained a variety of light wines—circulated through the crowd.

  “Attention, Honored Guests!” a voice broke through the murmurs. In the center of the room, the holo-form of a young man dressed in tabard and hat flared to life. Everything about him was gold, from the clothes he wore to the color of his skin. He struck a pose, one hand raised in the air, and dutifully, all the assembled citizens and colonists stood a little straighter.

  He was a Herald of the Throne, a visitation that could be beamed seemingly anywhere that the Golden Throne—and Empress Helena I—wanted.

  “I don’t believe it, myself…” whispered Hector the Red Judge, ever as pragmatic as his people. “I think it’s a simulation.”

  He was talking, of course, about the generally held belief that the heralds were in fact real people, not just digital creations. That somewhere, at the feet of the Eternal Empress herself perhaps, this young man would be standing in his real, golden flesh.

  “What, you don’t think that we can create gold skin pigment now?” whispered the scandalous envoy from Terevesin. She lowered her voice still further and mouthed the word, “Heresy!”

  Even the Red Judge had to hide a grin at that, but it was a cautious sort of a grin—the sort that made him wonder if the plant-lady from Terevesin would report him to the throne for daring to question the official story.

  “You are gathered here today as special guests of the Eternal Empress, here to celebrate the five-hundred and seventy-sixth year of our beloved Helena Tri’Vi’Pathian the First, the Queen of Earth!”

  “I see she didn’t make it here in person,” the envoy from Terevesin managed to whisper to her colleague.

  “She’s beaming the exact same message to all the thousand worlds. I tell you this is all a recording,” the monstrous form of the red giant muttered. Even if it was scandalously close to treason, no one around him seemed to notice.

  “Excuse me, excuse me…” Hector was suddenly jostled by a much smaller—and much thinner—human. Well, he would have been jostled, if the Red Judge wasn’t so large.

  As it was, the smaller man merely bounced off him.

  Hector Bendis glared.

  But the smaller man didn’t even appear to notice him. The man had a round, completely bald head and perfectly smooth features, and wore a simple ochre and orange encounter suit. He looked out of place there, the Red Judge immediately recognized, but that wasn’t all that was wrong with him.

  His features were too new. Too shiny. As if he were a baby without wrinkles or worry lines or laughter creases. Even his eyebrows only had the softest suggestion of fluff, not hair at all.

  Hector recoiled a little in his suit.

  “Terevesin,” the man-baby said, looking at the envoy beside the Red Judge. “Terevesin,” the man repeated—

  Just before his head exploded in a shower of bloody gore.

  2

  New Gate City Southside

  Lt. Anders V’Mhol’Corsigon ducked the first swing of the Secari and only had a moment to jam his stunner into the side of the creature’s chitinous head. The Secari was a full two feet shorter than the tall human, but the alien made up for it by being a good two feet wider as well.

  Someone had made the mistake of calling the bulbous, pink and white form of the Secari what they looked like to humanity: crab-men. Which wouldn’t have been an insult some two centuries ago, before the creatures with the large bone-chitin plates had worked out that crabs, shrimp, and other shellfish were considered a delicacy to the humans of the Golden Throne.

  Now they bloody well think that we’re all out to eat them, Anders thought as he backed away from the stocky creature.

  Thump. The human military police officer hit one of the tables of the synth bar, spilling the day-glow drinks behind him. Nowhere left to go.

  In front of him, the Secari flexed its claw-like hands and hunkered still further, and the two on either side of it did the same.

  Oh crap
. It was the traditional fighting display of their kind. Given the job that the man had—policing the communities of the Golden Throne—he had to know about such things.

  It didn’t help that the Secaris were drunk. Their swamp world of Seca in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way had no indigenous mammalian life—only reptiles, crustaceans, mollusks, and bugs—which meant that they had developed no enzymes to process cow’s milk. The result of consuming said milk often led to trouble like this.

  Yup, I am about to get ripped apart by a bunch of bugs high on milk. Anders might have found it humorous were it not so horrifyingly true.

  It also didn’t help that the Secaris had arrived on Hectamon 7 for the inauguration of the Challenge—a vicious fight-to-the-death contest to take place on the Hecta’s third planet, heavily terraformed for the process. The Secari nation, of course, had their own challenger in the fight and were here as a part of the roving band of admirers, followers, and spectators.

  This happens every damned year. Anders groaned as the first Secari made his move.

  Luckily, the creature was drunk so it was easy for Anders leap out of the way, planting another shock from the silver rod of his stunner as he smacked it across the shoulder.

  But Secari were tough, and even though it collapsed onto the table and shivered with electricity, Anders knew that it would get back up again any moment—

  “Ooof!” Anders was suddenly thrown back as one of the milk-fiends barreled into him, sending him flying across more tables, drinks, and patrons. Somewhere, there was the high peep of an alarm—either from the manager of the bar itself or one of the patrons who had set off their personal alarms.

  But Anders had been doing this job a long time, and he had faced far more dangerous criminals and thugs than these.

  “Alright then!” the man shouted, snatching his service pistol—a simple laser pistol that he could set to light or heavy—from his thigh.

  Considering the size of the things, his thumb flicked the switch to heavy.

  “Any more of you so much as wave an eyestalk at me and I’ll blow a hole right through your chitin!” Anders roared, rising from his crouch with the chrome stick of the stunner still in his right hand. One of the few genetic edits he’d had as a younger man was to make himself ambidextrous—which hadn’t cost as much as you would have thought, and it was surprising how useful it was.

  For a moment, the military policeman caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar, seeing the slim, athletic form of a human dressed in a form-fitting light encounter suit. His job description, although technically imperial military, was still considered part liaison, which meant instead of the gold and tan colors of a military uniform, he wore mostly black, edged with gold.

  He stood just about six-foot-tall—there were plenty of humans taller than him, and plenty of ways that he could have enhanced his stature with growth hormones, but Anders never had. It wasn’t that he disapproved of gene-tech or the work that the Gene Seers did for the throne. It was just that he knew he needed to be able to relate to people on-the-ground, and it wouldn’t help getting information out of someone if they were terrified of him.

  Also, the side-effects of the treatments could be horrible—nausea, headaches, and nightmarish visions that could last for regular Sol months before they finally cleared. And Lt. Anders never had that amount of time to not be at the top of his game.

  So here he was, a man in his late-thirties with short, mousy-brown hair. There was stubble on his chin that he hadn’t had time to get rid of this morning, given the stresses of the Challenge.

  The third Secari—that hadn’t done any attacking yet—waved its talons in the air and made a chittering noise. The small translator node on its neck plate pulsed and turned it into Imperial English.

  “Steady there, police-man… My friends are just a little excited. This is how we Secari let off steam…” the less drunk crab figure said.

  “Don’t give me that ‘this is all cultural’ crap!” Anders advanced anyway, looking as though he might just blow a hole through the nearest one anyway. “Or do I have to remind you that you are on a Throne World, and that it’s our laws that stand?”

  Anders wasn’t actually as annoyed as he pretended to be, but he was making a show of force. He knew that he had to, as he couldn’t let it be known that he, Lt. Anders, was a pushover. He was a policeman of sorts, as well as a detective and a reservist. If the lowlifes of the Hecta System thought that his insides were as soft as these Secaris’ were, then he would be dead before the week was out!

  “Okay, okay… We don’t want any trouble…” the not-very-drunk Secari was saying.

  “Tickets,” Anders said uncompromisingly.

  “What? No!” the chitin-plated men started to chitter. Was this human really going to take their tickets to the Challenge away from them?

  “Assaulting an Officer of the Throne, on throne territory, is a crime subject to immediate punishment. Surely they told you that at the space dock?” Anders growled. Everyone knew that ‘immediate punishment’ basically meant that one of the military police could do almost whatever they want, within reason.

  It was a way to alleviate stress on the throne’s overburdened courts system, and also a way to avoid the tricky cross-nation, ambassadorial, alien-relations issue. The courts were already clogged up with appeals and deportations from one world to another. As such, this decree was one of the few of the Eternal Empresses that Lt. Anders actually approved of. It meant that he could issue fines, restrict travel, and even execute in the course of pursuing a dangerous criminal.

  “Oh, come on!” the Secari tried to argue again.

  “You heard me. Tickets!” Anders menaced them with the gun.

  One by one, each of the crab-men flipped open one of their ‘outer’ plates to reveal an implanted data-screen, from which they ‘threw’ into the air the holographic blue and silver forms of their Challenge tickets.

  But I am not so COMPLETELY stupid as to have three angry Secari wandering around the system with nothing to do… Anders pocketed his stunner and snatched each one out of the air with his free hand, laying the almost see-through holo-structure on the nearest table, keeping his gloved forefinger over each one.

  The data-node on his lapel flashed, and his personal holo-field came up with a list of commands—everything from invalidate to destroy.

  Instead, he placed an official warning mark on each one, knowing that it would be flagged by authorities everywhere they went for the next thirty days. The Challenge authorities would, of course, see them when these three bozos went to the viewing stations, and then they would be allocated only minimal milky drinks, as well as their own personal surveillance drone to keep an eye on them. That should keep them out of trouble, he thought irritably as he flung each ticket back to them.

  “Thank you, Officer… We appreciate it!” the soberest of the three was saying as his—or hers? Theirs? Anders had never managed to work out their gender—‘brood brothers’ grumbled. They had come here to get loaded up on bovine goodness and cheer for their champion.

  What was his name again? Anders wondered idly as he brushed the broken glass from his suit and watched the three shuffle out. Uskol. That was it, wasn’t it? Uskol something-or-another. The Secari challenger would right now either be on route to the system, or otherwise be in one of the training facilities, flexing his chitin.

  Anders didn’t even know who the human challengers were. There was always a mass of them from various worlds—sometimes as many as a hundred or so, other times only twenty to thirty. Each challenger had to be approved almost a full Sol year in advance, as that allowed the Imperial Authorities the time to monitor their gene therapies and make sure that no one tried to smuggle in illegal weaponry.

  Whatever. The policeman shook his head. The whole thing was just barbaric as far as he was concerned. Maybe that was what dealing with violence on a day-to-day basis did to you.

  “If I wanted to get into a fight, I can just walk
into my local synthbar!” Anders muttered, taking out his data-pad to start recording the incident and filing a report so the bar manager could claim back any expenses.

  Anders hated the bureaucracy, but data and code and bits of information made the universe turn, right?

  Sigh.

  The man was just about to start when he saw that there was already an urgent message scrolling across his data-screen.

  Immediate Call-Out for Lt. Anders.

  Code: Sus. Hom.

  14 Seaview Apartments, Hecta Port Authority

  “Oh great,” Anders groaned. Sus. Hom meant ‘suspected homicide,’ and in his experience, if there was already enough evidence to suspect a homicide, that usually meant there was a homicide.

  Anders hated Challenge season. Everything went crazy.

  3

  Seaview Apartments, New Gate City Coast

  Okay, so I guess that this counts as a homicide, Lt. Anders thought.

  The body hanging in front of him was, in every sense of the world, awful. It was a human male, and from what Anders guessed, he had to be somewhere in his very early twenties. He almost looked like a teenager, in fact, but he was a tall teenager if that was the case. The cadaver was strung up to the ceiling fan by the neck with a length of poly-filament cord. Which was entirely unnecessary, given the fact that the man’s throat had been slit and dark blood had sheeted over his encounter suit.