The night of the fight, Tamiko met Mere in the locker room before the fight. Mere thought she’d come to walk her to the cage, like most managers did, but then saw Tamiko's face.
“I just got a call from Daniel,” Tamiko explained. “He said Aeron was a warning. Next time they’ll call the police instead of leaving it there for us to find.”
“Next time?” Mere asked. “What did he say he would do?”
“I’ve got a lot of androids,” Tamiko answered. “He said he wants you to lose the fight tonight. Let Collin knock you out.”
“Is that what you want?” Mere asked.
“No,” Tamiko answered. “But the security at the Imperial-Asia is too good for me to get anyone near him. It’s up to you. Either way, he could just frame me again. It’s not like his word is worth anything.”
Tamiko got up to leave, and then paused and turned back to Mere. “He did offer 50,000 naira if you take the dive. I’m mean, 50,000 for you.” She turned and left without saying anything else.
50,000 naira? Mere was only going to be paid 10,000 if she won. But Daniel’s word really didn’t mean anything. Losing to Collin Zhang could kill her career, and she’d just be left with the 2500 naira the loser was going to be paid. She decided to win. Tamiko could afford the best lawyers. Besides, Danial had killed Aeron and all those other androids, just to send a warning? Over a hundred androids had been killed for a warning?
As she pushed her way through the crowd, she realized it was far more packed than it usually was, but then again, she wasn’t an opening fight anymore. Most of the fight-fans apparently didn’t show up until the opening fights were over. Collin was in the cage waiting as she stepped in. The cage door closed, the light turned red, and he advanced.
It had finally happened! After almost a decade of waiting it was here, well, the other side of the planet, but close enough! War! Shahzad Ebrahimi had been dreaming of the next war since the last one ended, and he knew exactly who he was going to kill first. That fat Mexican that worked at Materfer VacTube that was always leering at him. He had only gotten the delivery job so he would have access to the important Sudamericans, and now the time had come.
He wished he could just blow up the entire Materfer Complex, but there was no way he could get his hands on explosives, or the components to build explosives. He was a Persian, living in a Sudamerican occupied colony, where non-Sudamericans had extremely limited rights and no rights to weapons of any kind. The Persians had been there first before the Sudamericans had laid claim to their colony and deployed their lanceros to occupy it. But that didn’t matter, not now. Now he’d have to settle for shooting that fat Mexican, and whoever else he could before they took him down.
He’d rather believe he could survive somehow, escape to fight another day, to kill another day. But that was fantasy. The Sudamericans would kill him, almost immediately. At least he could get access to the Materfer Complex, that was more than most Persians had, other than that traitor that worked for them. He’d shoot him too if he had the chance.
The insulation of the thermal-suit was good as well, she couldn't feel the icy air touching any part of her skin, but after an hour or so, a cold ache set into her arms, and then her feet, and then legs. By the time she reached the airship the ache had spread up her back, and the Cyber Heads-Up Display implanted in her eyes was reporting mild hypothermia. She suddenly realized she had been running through the darkness, and wondered if Cheng could have even made the journey without waving around a light that would have let everyone on the airship know he was coming. Did the Confederacy implant its troops this CHUDs?
She knew she should have just flown back to Hangtian with Cheng. That was all that was required. Find the missing strato-freighter and report its location. But this was an American airship, and she was going to be damned if she let a bunch of rebels rescue it. America might have lost the war against these Eco-Rebels on Mars, and America might have fallen to its own eco-revolution back home, but damn it, America could still rescue its own ships!
General Rome waited until the mercenaries were in the airlock before jumping to his feet and grabbing his duster and respirator mask. "I'll be back," he said to the waitress as he ran to the door into the motel. He swung the duster over his shoulders as he stepped into the lobby airlock, then pushed the respirator mask to his face as he hit the button for the outer airlock door. As he stepped out into the swirling sand, he pulled the strap of the respirator mask over the back of his head, and the mask pressurized. Across the lot, a vehicle had just landed. All Rome could see through the sand were the lights, but based on their spacing it had to be a truck or a bus.
He saw the shapes of the mercenaries moving around near the pub's airlock and ran out into the sandstorm at a right angle to the vehicle so the mercenaries wouldn't see him. When he couldn't see them anymore, he curved back towards the vehicle. It was a bus, a long-range transport, the type usually used to connect smaller settlements to major hubs. Someone was climbing out, several people. General Rome ducked under one of the short wings that supported the turbofans, and crept up behind the new arrivals, he couldn't see the mercenaries anywhere. Rome pulled out his pistol and dagger but left the dagger's plasma-blade turned off as the light would immediately alert everyone to his presence.
Eve started to laugh. She was standing in her home of the past decade, an airship that might as well be dead. The only way she could get it functional again was to make it back to the colony, across sand-pits that could swallow her whole, and then get the neural processor back from Tadeusz before it starved to death, and before the algae in the airship's oxygen recyclers and fuel-cells starved.
From somewhere inside her there came a deep swell of emotion, and she screamed. Some of it was from the loss of her husband. Some of it was fear of these terrible people. Some of it was just anger. But most of it was a nameless emotion, something primal, the feeling that an animal might have when after being chased into a corner, it turns to attack its predator. That emotion when not only does it need to fight, but a switch in its mind has been thrown and now it wants to fight.
