“They made the request this morning, Harry,” Schmidt said. “It’s not like I’ve been keeping it from you. We told them about you, they made the request and ten minutes later I was being hustled off to the shuttle back to the Clarke to tell you. And here we are.”
“What is this ‘skill contest’ they want me to have?” Harry asked.
“It’s a ritualized combat thing,” Schmidt said. “It’s physical combat, but it’s done as a sport. Like karate or fencing or wrestling. There are three rounds. You get scored on points. There are judges. From what I understand it’s mostly harmless. You’re not going to be in any real danger.”
“Except for being punched,” Harry said.
“You’ll heal,” Schmidt said. “And anyway, you can punch back.”
“I don’t suppose I can pass,” Harry said.
“Sure, you can pass,” Schmidt said. “And then when the mission fails and everyone on the mission is demoted into shit jobs and the Korba ally themselves with our enemies and start looking at human colonies they can pick off, you can bask in the knowledge that at least you came out of this all unbruised.”
Harry sighed and drained his drink. “You owe me, Hart,” he said. “Not the Colonial Union. You.”
“I can live with that,” Schmidt said.
“Fine,” Harry said. “So the plan is to go down there, fight with one of their guys, get beat up a little, and everyone walks away happy.”
“Mostly,” Schmidt said.
“Mostly,” Harry said.
“I have two requests for you from Ambassador Abumwe,” Schmidt said. “And she said for me to say to that by ‘request,’ she means that if you don’t do them both she will find a way to make the rest of your natural existence one of unceasing woe and misery.”
“Really,” Harry said.
“She was very precise about her word use,” Schmidt said.
“Lovely,” Harry said. “What are the requests?”
“The first is that you keep the contest close,” Schmidt said. “We need to show the Korba from the start that the reputation the CDF has is not undeserved.”
“Not knowing what the rules of the contest are, how it’s played or whether I’m even physically capable of keeping up with it, sure, why not, I’ll keep it close,” Harry said. “What’s the other request.”
“That you lose,” Schmidt said.
*
“The rules are simple,” Schmidt said, translating for the Korban who stood in front of them. Normally Harry would use his BrainPal—the computer in his head—to do a translation, but he didn’t have access to the Clarke’s network to access the language. “There are three rounds: One round with Bongka—those are like quarterstaffs, Harry—one round of hand-to-hand combat, and one round of water combat. There are no set times for any round; they continue until all three judges have selected a victor, or until one of the combatants is knocked unconscious. The chief judge here wants to make sure you understand this.”
“I understand,” said Harry, staring at the Korban, who came up, roughly, to his waist. The Korba were squat, bilaterally symmetrical, apparently muscular, and covered by what appeared to be an infinite amount of overlapping plates and scales. What little information Harry could uncover about the Korban physiology suggested that they were of some sort of amphibious stock, and that they lived some of their lives in water. This would at least explain the “water combat” round. The gathering hall they were in held no obvious water sources, however. Harry wondered if something might not have been lost in translation.
The Korban began speaking again, and as he spoke and breathed, the plates around his neck and chest moved in a motion that was indefinably strange and unsettling; it was almost like they didn’t quite go back in the same place they started off at. Harry found them unintentionally hypnotic.
“Harry,” Schmidt said.
“Yes?” Harry said.
“You’re all right with the nudity?” Schmidt asked.
“Yes,” Harry said. “Wait. What?”
Schmidt sighed. “Pay attention, Harry,” he said. “The contest is performed in the nude so that it’s purely a test of skill, no tricks. You’re okay with that?”
Harry glanced around the gymnasium-like room they were in, filling up with Korban spectators, human diplomats and Clarke crew members on shore leave. In the crowd of humans he located Ambassador Abumwe, who gave him a look that reinforced her earlier threat of unending misery. “So everyone gets to see my bits,” Harry said.
“Afraid so,” Schmidt said. “All right, then?”
“Do I have a choice?” Harry asked.
“Not really,” Schmidt said.
“Then I guess I’m all right with it,” Harry said. “See if you can get them to crank up the thermostat.”