Bread and the Circus

Chapter 11, Part 1

Chapter 11

“Nuts.”

Yeah, I know the word has been used as a euphemism for some other pretty dirty words in Human history, but my parents raised me right: I don’t swear…but I do cuss.  And “nuts” pretty thoroughly summed up how I felt right then, spitting onto the dirt staining the flagstones under our feet as I glared defiantly at the assorted creatures already milling around outside.  There was a lot of them, that was for sure, and I traded out my clubs for the flint chopping knives I’d picked up, figuring that their stabby bits would work best in our present close quarters.

Even without the stuff on my HUD (including the now very unhelpful “DUNGEON” light, which I decided to shove somewhere out of sight as soon as I got a free moment), the stat suit was ridiculously useful.  I mean, all I had to do was grab for the knives with intent to draw, and the loops I’d stuck them in immediately vanished, while the moment I slid the shillelaghs into the same place, the loops were back, and just like that I was ready for go time.  Hmm, maybe I should’ve grabbed one of those two spears on my back instead…oh well, plenty of time for it soon enough, once those critters outside decide they wanna tackle us.

Except they didn’t.  There Neph and me were, weapons ready, him with his spear and me with my long knives, muscles tensed, hopefully looking pretty awesome as we prepared to make our last stand (after all, if you’ve gotta go, you might as well go with style), and it became steadily more obvious that nobody was in the mood.  The buggy wolves were milling around on one side of the cave mouth, and I could see a medium-sized lizard-thing looming large and scary behind a bunch of the little lizard things on the other, but none of them seemed interested in heading into the dungeon.

Guess these places intimidate them as much as they do me.

“Huh,” I grunted, glancing at Neph, and slowly starting to relax when I saw that he was doing the same.  “That’s an anticlimax, isn’t it?”

“I think they know something we don’t,” Neph answered, looking rueful as he started to turn, though cautiously, so as to better look down the hallway we’d entered, rather than focusing all his attention on the enemies that had us hedged in.  “Something about frying pans and fires comes immediately to mind.”

“Lucky for us they don’t use ranged weapons,” I growled, continuing to glare at the milling monsters, who mostly seemed hopeful now, rather than having the psychotic eagerness for battle they’d had before; they just wanted us to come out and ‘play.’

“Obviously they’re waiting around to see if the situation changes,” Neph continued, now turning his back completely on the monstrous hordes, many of whom were starting to seat themselves outside the place, getting as comfortable as they could, setting up for a long wait.  As long as was necessary.  “Actually, if what you said earlier is right, and these creatures were made for the Arena, then what they’re doing makes a lot of sense: their controllers up in the Circus would want to keep things down here at least slightly organized.  Letting the monsters down here roam wherever they wanted would muddy the waters, causing all sorts of chaos, and in that chaos, it’s unlikely that any of the contestants would live for very long.”

“Not good business,” I agreed with a nod, taking up the half-turned stance he’d been using just a little bit before, not ready to give up watching those critters just yet, not when they were drooling on the rocks just outside the door.  “People watch the Arena to see people succeed, beating ridiculous but incremental odds, not get pointlessly slaughtered.  Well, except for the gorehounds, of course.”

“Of course,” Neph chimed in.  “There’s always a few of those in even the most functional society, but they’re not typically the majority, or even the ones in charge, as long as a society’s more-or-less benevolent in nature.  We’re living representatives of the dream that keeps the Republic alive, after all, facing a hostile universe, striving together, and overcoming whatever stands in our way on the road to success.”

“And occasionally stabbing each other in the back when the lure for fame gets too great,” I added sourly.  “Politics as usual.”

“Pretty much!” Neph laughed.  “But back to my theory: these monsters can’t enter a dungeon, because that would be breaking with their programming.  I’ll bet they’ve got a genetic imperative to stay in their assigned living space, or maybe even some cybernetics that we can’t see; brain implants, or something similar, like what I’ve heard they sometimes use on prisoners on the more out-of-the-way penal planets.  Either way, if I’m right, the only things allowed to murder us in this dungeon are whatever we find in the dungeon itself.”

“Comforting thought,” I grumbled.  “Makes sense, though, based on what we can see.”  Just to try it out, and because I was feeling ornery, I did actually turn away from the entrance, taking my eyes off the critters now nettled down out there, waiting hopefully on us.  “Not as much of a comfort as I’d like, though: it means those uglies have us stuck between a choice of evils, like you said earlier.  Way I see it, we can either turn around and cut our way through one of the two factions of monsters that have us penned in here – and both at once during the initial breakout – or we can head forward, into the dark.”

“The devil we know, or the devil we don’t,” Neph mused with yet another of his much-loved platitudes.  Then he squared his shoulders, his jaw taking on a determined set that I had to admit suited his fine, aristocratic features.  “My vote is the devil we don’t.”

“Why not?” I agreed.  “The idea of getting eaten by some monster on a hostile world isn’t the way I’d like to go.  Better to face up against the robots I hear are standard in dungeons.  At least then there should be more of me to send home.”  I shrugged at the look Neph gave me.  “Sue me: I did my homework so I’d get at least a vague idea of what to expect.  Even watched a couple episodes of the Arena on a friend’s thrid viewer just to get a feel for how things would look when they finally made it to general distribution.”  I looked down at the knives I was holding, the blades of each a bit longer than my outstretched hands, heel of palm to fingertips, and shifted them so that their points were facing forward, to make them reach a little better in the dark space close around us.

“More than me,” admitted Neph as he fell in slightly behind me, his spear’s point near my side, allowing him to thrust around me: actually a pretty decent tactic in these quarters, where a whole lot of side-to-side maneuvering wasn’t really an option, even if we could theoretically stand shoulder-to-shoulder where we were right now, given the width of the passage.  “I wanted to avoid learning anything about the Arena beyond the facts they require you to know before they’ll accept your application.  If I knew too much, I figured I’d psyche myself out before I got on the transport.”

“Smart,” I chuckled, both of us pressing forward into the steadily-deepening gloom of the dungeon.  “Wish I’d thought of that, instead of looking at it like a homework assignment…whoa.”

We both came up short for a moment, weapons up and ready, as the walls to either side of us starting lighting up, reducing the gloom somewhat, even if it didn’t completely dispel it.  The light was coming from all sorts of intricate runes etched into the stone with some pretty incredible detail.  I mean, they looked like the sort of stuff you’d find in some fantasy dungeon somewhere, old and arcane and mystical.  Sort of like what I’d imagined Elves or Dwarves might use, if they were real.

“I can’t read a word of it,” I told Neph after looking the runes over for a bit.  “You figure the translation feature in the suit only covers what we hear?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered, frowning at the weird runes.  “We were able to read the menu in the cafeteria, after all.”

“Even if it still didn’t make much sense,” I laughed.

“True,” he acknowledged with a grin, then motioned back to the runes with his chin.  “But this stuff, I think it’s either just meant to be decorative, or else it’s from one of the languages of the outer edges of the Republic.  You know, one of those planets the survey teams occasionally run across while they’re out exploring, looking for new races to add to the Republic, or to leave alone and study, depending.”

“Or to take genetic samples from to make new monsters for the Arena,” I couldn’t help but growl out.  “I’ll bet that’s where the lizard-things came from: probably some primitive species out on the fringes, and its genes made for great monsters…and its art looked cool on the walls of a dungeon.”

“You think this place might be modeled on something real?” Neph asked, both eyebrows raising in surprise, but not incredulousness, before he turned his attention back to the runes, bending slightly to take them in more studiously.  “They do look awfully authentic…”

“Don’t stare too long, Neph,” I cautioned him.  “It’ll ruin your night vision, and we don’t know if or when the lights might cut out on us somewhere up ahead.”  I turned back to the worked stone passage ahead of us, fixing it with an expression I hoped would look good for the cameras watching us.  “C’mon, let’s…ah!”

“Mac!” Neph cried out, diving for me, pulling me back, too late to save me from the whizzing blade that snapped out of the wall (the bone breastplate doing nothing to stop it, of course – the bones were set horizontally, so the horizontal swing of the scissor-scythe slipped right between the close-set slats), but in time to keep me from getting caught by another scissor-scythe that snapped out of the opposite wall an instant after the first one, angled a lot higher, and obviously meant to finish whatever job the first one started.  “Mac, are you all right?”

“Huh,” was my initial reaction as I looked myself over, dropping both my knives to give my body a patdown.  “Not sure yet.  I think…sss,” I sucked in breath as I moved wrong, and a sudden sharp sting ran across my abdomen.  “Yeah…yeah, it got me.  Help me lift the breastplate and take a look, will ya?”

Neph lifted the breastplate obediently, and we both took a look at the damage.  There was a long, thin rip right across my lower ribcage, where it met with my abdomen; if I’d been a little taller, actually, it would have sliced right into my belly.  Not a happy thought, I had to admit.  Still, while the slice had been a shock, it didn’t look too wide or too deep, and though it stung a bit, I’d jerked back in time to avoid the worst of it, instincts saving me from getting gutted.  Now if I’d been fat, or a full-grown man, the diagnosis might have ended up being a lot less optimistic.

“Look,” Neph said wonderingly.  “It’s sealing itself up.”

Sure enough: right before our eyes, the stat suit’s black mesh started to knit back together, first in little strands that thrust out like tiny tentacles, before it built up enough of a mass, and pulled itself closed, not even leaving a seam where the cut had been.  A few moments after that, I noticed that the pain from the cut started to lessen.

“It’s not hurting so much now,” I reported to Neph, who frowned thoughtfully.

“Pull up the diagnostic screen, Mac,” he instructed me.  “The one that shows your personal health.”

He walked me through how to reach that screen, and before too long I was looking at an outline of myself, complete with a clearly-visible red line right across my tummy at about the spot where I’d been nailed.  Except…huh.

“Looks like the stat suit’s healing me up,” I told Neph.  “I mean, it’s not like it’s making the wound just vanish, but it’s definitely smaller than it was right before the suit sealed over it.  Getting smaller, too, unless I’m letting optimism paint my eyes rosy.”

“It’s probably putting some pressure on the wound, too,” he added.  “I’ve heard that pressure travels faster to the brain than pain, so that might be why it’s not hurting you as much.  I’ll bet that, as long as we don’t tax your body overmuch, your wound should be completely gone in a day or two.”

“Miracles of modern science,” I chuckled, getting back to my feet and pulling the breastplate back into place; it might not have saved me from that particular attack, but the way I saw it, something was better than nothing, at least until something better came along.  “Guess we shoulda expected this, huh?”  Then I frowned, pulling out one of my spears after I’d replaced the knives into the handy holders the stat suit gave me.  “And I’d say we don’t want that happening again: I got lucky that time.  I don’t believe in luck that you don’t make for yourself.”

Now standing way back, making sure Neph stayed just a step behind me, I stretched out the haft of the spear.  Pretty soon I discovered that I had to take a few steps forward anyway, since I’d misjudged the spear’s length, but a prod, then a second, and I found the pressure plate I’d stepped on before.  I jerked back the spear in a hurry while we watched the one-two slice-chop of the twin scissor-scythes, and Neph shook his head.

“This is going to slow us down a lot, isn’t it?” he asked, mostly rhetorically.

“Better than getting diced up,” I answered anyway, then blinked as he shouldered his way to the front.

“Guess we’d better take turns, then,” he said with a sigh, hopping over the pressure plate I’d found (which looked like pretty much all the other flagstones, I couldn’t help but notice – no visual cues here).  “We share all the burdens evenly, the same way we share all the rewards.  It’s the only way to make sure we keep everything fair.”

“You sure?” I couldn’t help but ask as I hopped over the pressure plate once he took a step forward, making room for me, but he just turned to give me a Look.  “You’re sure.”  I shook my head.  “Just until you find the next one, all right?”

“Shouldn’t take long,” he replied with a wry smirk, already starting to tap the floor in front of him like a blind warrior.  “Say, how do you think those squamous slayers got such a fine edge on these flint weapons?  I wouldn’t have thought that would be possible without some modern technology.”

“Beats me,” I answered, both our eyes trained on the floor every time he tested a new flagstone, both of us equally careful not to stomp down on one that hadn’t been tested.  “Maybe it’s not exactly flint, but something like it.  It’s not like Earth has a monopoly on the stuff, after all, and alien environments could make all sorts of weird little differences in the local rock.”

“I remember reading in a Tarzan book once,” Neph chimed in, his voice more than a little tense as he pressed on another flagstone, “that the King of the Apes made a stone knife really sharp by heating up its edge over a fire, then chipping at it until it was as thin and deadly as a razor.”

“Pulp at its finest,” I laughed.  “Racist, sexist, but still a lot of fun if you can get past all that.”

“I never said I only read classy stuff,” Neph huffed, though not too seriously, giving his spear’s butt a good, hard jab down on the next flagstone.  “A guy’s gotta have his guilty…eep!”