Chapter Twelve

 

One-on-one.

 

Hand-to-hand.

 

Man againstman?

 

"Aw, shit," Ryan cursed as he saw his foe for the first time.

 

One essential fact had gone unmentioned by Lucas when the one-eyed man had insisted on accepting the challenge of the pit to assist J.B., and that was the key piece of information about his intended opponent.

 

The sec droid was a familiar sight to Ryan Cawdor. He'd faced them before. Like droids he'd fought in the past, this one was vaguely humanoid in construction, legs slightly bent at the knees, arms dangling apelike at its sides. Each arm was slightly longer than a man's would be, in direct proportion to its height.

 

One arm ended in three fingerlike digits. Two of them were pincerlike, with deadly honed edges. The third was a stubby hammer. The other arm appeared to have been broken at the wrist, and a studded mace added in place of what once were additional appendages.

 

The android was bent and squatty, less than five feet tall and hunched over. Both legs were stubby, ending in flexible platforms for feet. One foot had three toes, the other twoif one wanted to call the sharpened edges sticking out "toes."

 

Unlike some of the other androids Ryan had seen, there was no attempt at providing any sort of "flesh" on this creation. The droid was open and bare, with a thick metal skeleton made up of rods of once gleaming but now faded and pitted chromed steel.

 

Perched on a flat wide metal collar serving as a neck was the robot's head, a head that looked exactly like a scuffed goldfish bowl. Small red crystals embedded in the circuitry gleamed evilly from behind the unbreakable glass dome.

 

This one came with the surprise addition of a narrow and open mouth beneath the clear dome, which was unusual since sec droids were known for being silent and deadly, their mouths usually consisting of nothing more than a metallic slit. Razor-sharp teeth gleamed behind the droid's metal lips.

 

The construct's broad chest was armored, and the first spot where Ryan could sense a weakness. There were definite repairs to be seen here, patches of flat steel soldered into place to cover previous blows. Come to think of it, the neck on the thing was all wrong, as well. Every sec droid Ryan had ever seen came with a tubular, articulated neck that let the head swivel in all directions.

 

No, this was no factory mint sec droid hidden away to be liberated from within the confines of a redoubt, like the band of five that Ryan had once inadvertently activateda costly mistake where the one-eyed warrior had merely walked down the wrong hallway and sent them lurching into action with his genetic imprint tattooed on their sensors. After that, Ryan always figured he'd already had his worst experience with the killing machines.

 

"Hey!" Ryan bellowed into the lights. "Nobody said anything about fighting a bastard droid!"

 

"It's up to you. There's still time to call this off. You forfeit your entry fee, but you can back out and slink away," the appointed referee of the match yelled back from the observation box mounted high over the onlookers.

 

Back down below, Ryan eyeballed the robot. He knew the onboard computers and data banks that gave the commands to the head and limbs of the droid were housed in that broad chest. His job was going to be figuring out how to pry off one of the patches for a look inside without having the droid's mace crush his skull or, even worse, ending up with a bladed foot sunk up to the ankle in his crotch.

 

Still, those plates had been cracked open before, in battle and in the repairs he knew a combat machine such as that would have required.

 

Ryan debated. He knew his comrades would understand if he passed on this deadly duel. No one had expected his foe to be a sec droid. Ryan felt tricked, placed in the situation of being between a rock and a hard place. They needed the jack he'd ponied up as an entry fee. J.B. needed new peepers, or they would have to get used to running around with a near blind man in tow.

 

"I can take this bastard," Ryan whispered to himself.

 

"What's your decision? Fight or hide?" The ref's query was amplified by the former stage's still functioning sound system.

 

For a second, Ryan felt the world tunneling in on him, as if a camera lens was zooming in on his own grim visage and he was also outside himself, witnessing it.

 

He had to make a decision. "I'm staying," he yelled, to the happiness of all the watchersexcept his companions'.

 

Inside his head, a voice seemed to be repeating, "Killer robot, killer bot"

 

A rubber ball wrapped in a strip of white cloth was dropped down into the pit, where it bounced, up and down, up and down, and off one of the curved walls before rolling to a stop near Ryan's left boot.

 

The sec droid lurched forward the instant the ball stopped moving, causing the crowd above to cry out in anticipation and joy.

 

"Nothing like live entertainment," Ryan said under his breath as he readied himself for the endurance test to come.

 

One hesitant step forward, and already Ryan could sense his earlier estimation was correct. This droid had seen better days. One foot up, then down. Left foot, then the right. The arm weighed down with the mace remained motionless, but the second one telescoped outward, the scalpel like pincers opening and closing.

 

Yelling ferociously, getting his blood up after the shock, Ryan sprang forward, waving his arms. "Piss off, you clanking piece of junk!"

 

The droid stiffly hopped back in a defensive maneuver.

 

Odd. He'd heard these things could exhibit learned behavior, but against a single man? Perhaps the programmers had made this a fairer fight than Ryan would have believed upon first seeing the droid.

 

"Come any closer and I'll rip off those skinny arms and shove them sideways up your metal ass!" Ryan bellowed.

 

The onlookers exploded in appreciative laughter.

 

In response, the sec hunter again took another step toward Ryan, its glass head turning slowly from side to side as if making sure no other attacker would be coming out of hiding or from the guard rails of the pit above.

 

"Fuck you, One-eye," the droid said in an inhumanly flat and mechanical tone that came from a hidden speaker buried deep inside the creature's thick neck. The deadly metal teeth moved in synchronization with the words. "You're nothing to me but fresh red meat, you dumb-ass outlander."

 

More laughter from above, and despite himself, Ryan felt his blood start to sing in his ears at the string of insults. Obviously, in addition to the numerous repairs and replacement parts to this rusting unit, someone had decided it would be a laugh riot to give their pet techno-assassin a voice.

 

"Chicken-shit," the android announced to even more guffaws from the rim of the pit.

 

Ryan held his anger. Even the blackest of humorists would be amused at a sentient being growing angry at the prerecorded insults from a collection of circuit boards and killing metal. This thing wasn't alive. All the android was to Ryan was an obstacle, a hunk of junk dropped in his way, a mass of metal he had to remove so he could go about his business, earn his reward, get J.B. his spectacles and forget he'd ever been inside this shrine to the long dead concept of consumerism.

 

Now that he was closer, Ryan could hear the loud, strained whining of gears and servo motors attempting to keep the droid on both feet. The sounds told him a crucial fact. As he had hoped from his first impression, the internal clockwork of his foe wasn't meshing properly. The hunter could be toppled.

 

Ryan took a deep breath and examined his options. He knew from previous battles with the droids that even if he'd been well heeled with a blaster, the armor was still a deterrent. The thing was programmed to be lightning fast, but a man would have the edge in maneuverability. Plus, he could see this hunter was well along in years and use, and he'd heard Lucas say that the champion had been beaten before.

 

Ryan slid the panga from the oiled leather sheath and took an offensive stance, balancing himself on the balls of his booted feet.

 

"Come on, you coldhearted tin can. Bring it on," he said.

 

"Make me," the bot replied.

 

Ryan squatted, still keeping his back straight and his eye on the android as he moved around the arena floor. After a second or two of feeling around with his free hand, he found what he was searching for.

 

"Heads up, clanky," Ryan said, and threw the ball tossed down earlier to start the match. The ball hurtled toward the bot, thrown with all of Ryan's might. The rubber sphere whizzed through the air and impacted high on the clear dome of the sec droid's head, hitting with a bonk before bouncing up wildly into the air.

 

Interestingly enough, the droid had made no effort to dodge the lobbed ball.

 

Ryan was starting to feel even more confident.

 

Until the modified sec hunter hopped up like a frog, bounding once, twice, three times before almost landing right on top of his unprotected skull.

 

Ryan dodged and slashed out with the panga, aiming at an exposed metal cable in the bot's hip joint. The blade gave out a clang, but otherwise had about as much effect on stopping the sec hunter as the thrown rubber ball.

 

The android responded to the knife jab by swinging its monkey arms high, right where Ryan's head would have been if he hadn't already decided to go low.

 

Ryan stayed in motion and swung his leg to let the sec droid taste boot leather, feeling two of the toes on his right foot shatter in protest against the force of the impact from the desperate roundhouse kick. The only good the blow did was to leave a black smear across the clear dome of the opponent's observation bubble.

 

"No good, shitface," the machine said, the tone still inflectionless. Before Ryan could give a retort, his foe chose to undertake another of the rabbitlike leaps, straight up into the air. But this time when it landed, the one-eyed man was on the receiving end, pinned down hard.

 

"Fireblast!" Ryan wheezed as he struggled to breathe from the droid's terrible weight. "Get off my gut."

 

Gritting his teeth, Ryan pushed back with his left forearm while jamming the panga into one of the small cracks in the repaired areas on the droid's chest. He worked the blade back and forth, striving to find an in. The bot whirred and clicked as servo motors gave back as good as they got. The small onboard comp analyzed the stress the android was currently enduring and chose yet another programmed quip from the select file of profane insults. Sensing a possible victory, the hunter droid came up with a classic.

 

"Fuck you, asshole," it retorted in a cold metallic voice.

 

"Fuck me?" Ryan spit, his voice rising in disbelief. He knew his mounting rage was totally inappropriate, but he couldn't help himself. "Fuck me ?"

 

The android was silent as it relentlessly continued to apply pressure.

 

"No, not fuck me. Fuck you !" Ryan roared, and shoved with all of his remaining strength. The bot flew back as if it had been launched like a torpedo, rolling over on one side and using its strong steel arms to try to push itself back up.

 

Ryan had leaped onto the machine's back, keeping his head low as he locked his legs around its middle and hooked his arms under the metal appendages. The droid struggled in Ryan's grip as he applied pressure, using the moment to try to catch his breath as he rode the metal unit around the pit.

 

This avenue of attack was unfamiliar to the hunter. Usually prey tried to stay away, not come in and stay attached. The obvious tactic of lunging backward and smashing Ryan into a curved pit wall was a tactic not programmed into the device's defense comp, so all it could think of to do was spin and hop.

 

Ryan hung on, squeezing the droid's arms back even harder. He felt one of the shoulder sockets start to give, and a small burst of sparks flashed out from the joint. He focused renewed energy on the spot, feeling his own recently injured shoulder start to throb in reflected agony.

 

Then the entire arm ripped free in a spray of sparks and smell of burning wire. Ryan was flung backward when the arm gave way, carried by the momentum he'd generated.

 

The injury seemed to extend beyond a lost arm. The droid began to thrash and buck in place, a horrible, almost human screaming coming from the speaker that had earlier been tossing out quips.

 

Ryan staggered to his feet, using the broken arm as a support. Then, once he was erect, he placed the limb on his shoulder and swung it like a baseball bat, smashing it across the side of the bot's face.

 

The hunter fell like a cut tree to the floor of the pit.

 

"Hate you, you and all who made you!" Ryan yelled as he smashed the steel rod again and again over the clear housing of the sec hunter's head. He had already decided he wasn't going to stop until the glasslike substance shattered.

 

Krysty came running through the lower stage door, with Mildred close behind. Dean, Jak and Doc remained in the stands with J.B., who had been unable to clearly see the battle from their viewpoint at the top of the pit. To the Armorer's dismay, Doc had provided a running commentary in the most flowery of language describing what Ryan was doingand having to endurein the pit.

 

"Thanks to Gaia. Ryan. Stop now, stop," Krysty said, her pale skin flushed a deep pink in a mix of relief and excitement now that the combat had ended with Ryan the victor. Her red, prehensile hair was coiling and moving along her skull like a living thing as she tried to penetrate the killing rage that had fueled Ryan's victory.

 

Not responding, Ryan brought down the arm a final time across the machine's upper torso before allowing the steel limb to fall from his fingers. He kicked out with his uninjured foot, and the toe of his boot made a dull thudding noise as he smashed it into the pitted steel of the now inert bot.

 

"He appears to be all right, but I need to examine him," Mildred announced in a voice tight with anxiety, helping Krysty support Ryan as they walked him briskly away from the eyes and cries of the cheering crowd. They passed twin techies, in coveralls and tool belts, who had also come out running to try to see to the damage to their own champion.

 

"You didn't have to rip his damn arm off," one of the two whined.

 

"Piss off," Krysty retorted, "before I go pick up that arm and beat your heads in myself."