Just One More Fight Read online

  Just One More Fight

  A Novella

  By Craig Martelle

  Copyright © 2016Craig Martelle

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and the places exist solely in the imagination of the author. Any resemblance to a real place or a real person is wholly unintentional. Enjoy the story.

  Other Books by Craig Martelle

  The Terry Henry Walton Chronicles, a Kurtherian Gambit Series

   Book 1 – Nomad Found (January 2017)

   Book 2 – Nomad Redeemed (2017)

   Book 3 - Nomad Unleashed (2017)

   Book 4 - Nomad Supreme(2017)

  Free Trader Series

   Book 1 – The Free Trader of Warren Deep (February 2016)

   Book 2 – The Free Trader of Planet Vii (March 2016)

   Book 3 – Adventures on RV Traveler (April 2016)

   Book 4 – Battle for the Amazon (August 2016)

   Book 5 – Free the North! (September 2016)

   Book 6 – Free Trader on the High Seas (October 2016)

   Book 7 – Southern Discontent (January 2017)

   Book 8 – The Great ‘Cat Rebellion (2017)

   Book 9 – Return to the Traveler (2017)

  Cygnus Space Opera – set in the Free Trader Universe

   Book 1 – Cygnus Rising (Sep 2016)

   Book 2 – Cygnus Expanding (2017)

   Book 3 – Cygnus Arrives (2017)

  End Times Alaska Series, a Winlock Press publication

   Book 1: Endure (June 2016)

   Book 2: Run (July 2016)

   Book 3: Return (August 2016)

   Book 4: Fury (December 2016)

  Rick Banik Thrillers

   People Raged and the Sky Was on Fire (May 2016)

   The Heart Raged (2017)

  Short Story Contributions to Anthologies

   Earth Prime Anthology, Volume 1 (Stephen Lee & James M. Ward)

   Apocalyptic Space Short Story Collection (Stephen Lee & James M. Ward)

   Lunar Resorts Anthology, Volume 2 (Stephen Lee & James M. Ward)

   Inanna’s Circle Game, Volume 2 (edited by Kat Lind)

   The Expanding Universe, Volume 1 (edited by Craig Martelle)

   The Misadventures of Jacob Wild McKilljoy (with Michael-Scott Earle)

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter 1 Impressions

  Chapter 2 A Brutish Fellow

  Chapter 3 Heavy G With a Twist

  Chapter 4 The Pain

  Chapter 5 The Landmark

  Chapter 6 The Fury

  Chapter 7 Recovering More Information

  Chapter 8 Run For Your Life

  Chapter 9 One Last Battle

  Author Bio

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is always good to challenge yourself, and that’s what we’ve done here. I hope you enjoy the fruits of a furious two-day writing effort thanks to Kat Lind and Inanna’s Circle.

  This one’s for Aletha. Everyone needs that special someone to live for and to run away with.

  Chapter 1

  Impressions

  Everything a man does is to impress a woman. Even if she isn’t impressed, he still does them.

  Hoping.

  The glove zipped past the opening and connected with his jaw, a glancing blow, but it peeled the skin back. His sweat ran into the open wound, burning. He smelled the blood, saw the glimmer of hope in his opponent’s eye, felt the furor rise within him. Focus, his inner voice growled.

  He ducked the follow-up swing and jabbed.

  Then jabbed again, before driving his fist into the exposed abdomen. A jab to the nose, four more to the abdomen and when the other fighter dropped his hands, a roundhouse ended it.

  The crowd chanted, “Aspen, Aspen!” in his honor. He held his hands up, feeling soreness in his shoulder. His face hurt, but not as much as the loser’s. Some lackey jumped into the ring to remove his gloves. Aspen held out his hands as he smiled and nodded to the adoring crowd. He looked, knowing that Aletha was watching, but not there. Not in person.

  The cut over his eye helped hide the tears. Another win. Another night with only a fleeting glimpse of her. But his next fight... He’d ask them to stage it on a different planet, maybe with an alien. He hoped that when he reached the pinnacle, he could retire, go to her as her champion and never fight again, never do that which she abhorred, the only thing he was really good at.

  He dreamed of it, knowing that fighters never retired.

  The virtual reality (VR) case opened, exposing the carapace of an Insectoid, three meters tall, ichor dripping from its mandibles, sizzling slightly when it touched the surrounding metal. The ichor was his, the real response that the case gave when he failed to defend against the all-too-real attacks of his opponents. His people died in the cases every day, but the virtual reality of it was better accepted by the viewers, orders of magnitude greater than a real fight between live opponents.

  He enjoyed fighting using a human replicant. It was so limited compared to his real-world abilities. One hand tied behind his back, he repeated the human expression, something used before the Insectoids exterminated the human race as if they were vermin.

  Aletha was real. When the program played on after the fights, he would find her, talk with her, mesmerized by her human beauty, taken by her words to a different existence. Funny. He was already in two places. He wondered if she was, too. Few of the participants fought, many more played roles in the audience, outside, elsewhere, using their own replicants to maximize the experience.

  And there were those who only played the role of a three-dimensional projection. Those creatures winked out of existence when they were no longer interested in attending the fight. It was less expensive for an Insectoid and carried no risk, but limited what one could feel.

  Aspen winced as the medical team worked on him. They set a broken arm. He had five more. He could do without that one for a while. They used a bioplastic to seal three different tears in his carapace. He hadn’t thought he’d been wounded that badly. A little cut over his eye, a tear along his jaw line. Nothing he hadn’t experienced before, but the cracks in the shell over his segments suggested he’d been terribly injured. He wondered about the other, he hadn’t seen his opponent rise before he was removed from the ring.

  Maybe the other fighter died. Aspen had lost focus during the bout. That had been happening more often lately. His trainer would be angry with him for that. He already was. His trainer was Aspen’s secondary mind, in the third segment of his five-segmented trunk. He could feel the secondary mind already reaching out, trying to get his attention.

  No. Not yet. Aspen needed peace, think about things on his own for a while. Try to understand how he’d let himself get so badly hurt. Think about finding Aletha. She had to be one of his own race. She was too real to be a computer construct.

  If only he had a little more money he might be able to hire someone. Maybe.

  Just one more fight…

  Chapter 2

  A Brutish Fellow

  It took Aspen longer to recover than he wanted. This time, it worked in his favor as the fights shifted from earth to space. Had he been ready sooner, he’d have fought in the old city of New York before a massive audience, but it would have been another human fight. He was happy to wait and heal. He wanted the exotic to get a ratings boost, get him one step closer to a title bout.

  He took his time as he trained his mind. His trainer ordered him into a meditation practice. It grated on his soul to crouch in a circle with ten other Insectoids, eyes closed, doing nothing but thinking about one’s own shortcomings in orde
r to put them into a closet, closing the door, and locking it tightly.

  Time passed, Aspen learned, and then he got his wish. An alien planet, fighting aliens. He’d seen the profile of his replicant and he was mildly amused.

  The creature was a brutish fellow as all the hot-bloods were. He wanted to work out with the creature’s body, in the VR case, but the medical staff wouldn’t let him. The biofeedback elements in the case would stretch and strain Aspen’s repairs, reinjuring him, taking him off the schedule. If he stayed out of the fights for too long, he’d drop in the rankings and be condemned to start over, fighting in front of small audiences with unworthy opponents.

  He listened to the professionals and stayed in his real world. He lived beside a swamp bordering a great sea, even though he didn’t enjoy the water. He knew how he ended up there. That’s where the best fighter lived when Aspen decided to try his hand at the games. He came for a youth summer camp and never left. He was on the wrong end of numerous beatings, but he learned from each one and got better. Dhanesh, the universe’s greatest fighter took an interest in him.

  Actually, it wasn’t Dhanesh himself. It was one of those who ran the camp, but the legend was important. His opinion mattered to Aspen. He helped Aspen became a better fighter. Soon, he was the one delivering the beatings. Then, there was no one left to challenge him. He started in the ring at the age of nine. Average for Insectoid fighters. By the age of ten, he was already in the rankings and climbing quickly.

  When Aspen’s idol, Dhanesh, passed away, the next bout was brutal. Aspen took out his anguish on his opponent. That was his mentor’s parting gift. It was what the people wanted and vaulted Aspen into the Champions League.

  He was the elite of the elite, fighting for supremacy where the creatures didn’t only fight to win, but to destroy their opponents. The higher he climbed, the more dangerous his opponents became as evidenced by the horrible injuries to his body in what seemed a simple boxing match.

  Maybe it was good that he was taking time off.

  If only he could find Aletha so she could help him understand what she wanted from him. If he’d only listen.

  Maybe he could stop fighting. No, the promoters wouldn’t allow that. But the fans! Cheering for him, yelling his name, over and over. His opponents, bloody and beaten. It was a rush. All other endeavors paled compared to winning a fight.

  Aspen went for a walk along an old road outside the city. No one was there. It was a little-used track. Even though the bouts were VR, he had to maintain his physical conditioning as if he was a live fighter. The stresses and strains were every bit as great. He couldn’t run, jump, or powerlift yet, but he could walk. He walked and tried using the meditation techniques from his class, but they weren’t working.

  His thoughts always drifted back to two things. The next fight and Aletha. He spent little time reviewing the last one once his secondary mind dissected it, highlighting his successes and failures. The last bout was nasty, but Aspen survived the berating his secondary mind gave him. And then they moved on. The brutish fellow. Limited vertical leap, massive trunk strength, a muzzle with bite that could break bones, four long-clawed paws.

  He felt the power of the beast surge through him, but in space, some of the challenges might come through low gravity, or extra heavy gravity. They wouldn’t find out until the fight began, when they took ownership of the replicant’s bodies. That was the challenge. Whoever could overcome the handicap more quickly would win. He needed to focus.

  Aspen walked. For hours, he walked. The old road turned into a trail, and that continued until it hit an open roadway with a pristine surface. It looked brand new without any sign it had been used. Aspen wondered. The Insectoids used mass transport, not personal vehicles. They hadn’t needed any new roads as they congregated in cities, in colonies. They didn’t travel as the humans had. A new road. An anomaly.

  He checked himself to make sure he wasn’t in the case. He didn’t think so, seeing himself at three meters tall, five segments, cracks sealed and healing, a broken arm set within a cast. No. He was all alone in the real world.

  Aspen screamed until his voice box felt shredded. Then he screamed some more, until he was hoarse. His body shook from the effort, the agony that caused it, the pain that lingered. If he stopped fighting, could he be what Aletha wanted? Would he be satisfied with that? Could he be satisfied without her?

  Aspen tried to scream anew, but his voice box said no. He sat, then rolled to the pavement. His eyes didn’t have tear ducts, but he remembered vividly what it was like for his human replicant to cry. It was strangely comforting. He rotated his back legs behind his body and sawed them together, creating the sound of his people. Aspen wasn’t musically inclined and rarely expressed his sadness in that way.

  He was alone, and it seemed right.

  A brutish fellow.

  As all hot-bloods were. He hated the weakness he was feeling. He looked around, making sure that his sawing hadn’t attracted any unwanted visitors. Any other Insectoids in the area would have appeared to watch and listen. It was how they judged each other. Fighters were easily recognized, but unattractive. The people rabidly cheered during the fight, but shunned them in real life because of the violence and the scars.

  But he wasn’t violent at all. The people would never know that about him. The scars told the only story they listened to. They wouldn’t talk to him and he liked it that way. Aletha would. If he could only find her.

  Chapter 3

  Heavy G with a Twist

  Aspen was cleared to train at the last minute. He’d mentally prepared, going through all the scenarios and had joined with the replicant body through the power of the VR case, but he had not gotten to work it out, run it through its paces. He felt wholly unprepared when he appeared on the planet surface. He was angry, letting that take him to a place where he had the right attitude. If he couldn’t win through strategy, he would overwhelm the other through sheer determination.

  He looked up at the black of the sky. No atmosphere. He was probably on a moon, maybe even earth’s moon, on the dark side, but no, it felt heavy here. The stars twinkled and soon, he could even see the colors of nebulae and other galaxies. It was the wonder of the unimpeded view of the universe.

  How small he was. He turned around, enjoying the view through the replicant’s eyes. It took in colors so much better than his own eyes could. He smiled, in his mind, as his beast didn’t have lips and neither did he. He embraced human mannerisms because they were more expressive than he could be with his own Insectoid body. He found the humanisms particularly gratifying, like the ability to smile when happy or cry when sad.

  The lights came up slowly, breaking him from his reverie. He turned to face his opponent, letting the anger boil and fury seize him. The other beast’s eyes were already fixed on him, as if he’d been watching the whole time. Hatred. Anger.

  Is that the best you’ve got? Aspen asked in his mind. There was no taunting in the ring, so he never bothered trying to speak through his replicants. He settled for a snarl and let the rage continue to build. He felt the beast’s adrenaline gland kick into overdrive. Power surged within.

  He felt strong in this one, stronger than he’d ever been before. His power, the other beast’s vulnerabilities. The weakness in the mind of the other Insectoid. How would he manipulate the replicant body during the fight? What would the other see as Aspen’s weaknesses?

  Aspen had felt the gravity, but didn’t want to move in the dark. Now that the lights were up, he took a few tentative steps. He felt heavy, almost prohibitively so. These creatures were incapable of jumping. Too bad, an attack from above would be devastating. The creature’s back was vulnerable as it couldn’t reach there to dislodge a determined enemy.

  Maybe this would be a stand-up fight. He tested his arm swings. The open paw slash seemed best. He watched his opponent do the same thing, running through a series of boxing moves.

  Aspen settled on his attack. The second move. He’d let
the other try something. His creature breathed in great gulps of air. He salivated, and Aspen let it drip from his half-opened mouth, fangs bared. The other did the same, frothing as he snapped his jaws repeatedly.

  Nice touch, Aspen thought, appreciating the other’s showmanship. Too bad, you’ll be lying in your own blood shortly, begging me to let you live. Maybe not begging, except with your eyes. Fighters never begged for mercy as none was ever given.

  He’d known from the second he learned of the beasts that would be used in the bout that it was to the death. The brutish creatures knew no other way. They weren’t equipped like human boxers in a ring. Aspen wondered briefly if that would be the remainder of his fights, before listening to his secondary mind screaming at him to focus.

  He walked forward, dragging his feet through the moon’s thick dust until he realized how much work it took to walk without looking like he was drunk. Or weak. He picked up his feet, testing without letting his opponent know. Aspen didn’t posture. It wasn’t his way. The other was going through a complicated series of maneuvers and physical taunts, including thrusting his privates in Aspen’s direction.

  Hold that pose right there, dickhead, I’ll be along shortly to help you out of your clothes, he thought as he reacted more angrily to the taunt than he wanted. He also appreciated the human expression. Insectoids didn’t have privates, not like that anyway.

  Focus.

  Focus the anger. Focus the power. Aspen felt the beast’s eyes narrow. The clear dome disappeared. The stars beyond the lights – gone. Nothing else existed. He was ready.

  He moved in making a couple weak swings, letting the other line him up. A side slash came quickly and Aspen flexed, bent his side inward to better deflect the blow. The other’s claws shredded flesh as if the claws were made of a chef’s keen-edged blades. The wounds burned like fire. Aspen danced backward as much as the gravity would allow him to “dance.”