Free Storm Force: Book Three of the Last Legion Series by Chris Bunch

get tired.”
    “It’s my clean living, and sanctity.”
    Enide giggled. “My foot seems to have worked loose. Would you tie it up again?”
    Yoshitaro hoped Enide was just being stupid, and not trying pillow talk to get Yoshitaro to slip on his cover story. He’d rather deal with a dumb agent than dumb control. The last thing he wanted was getting his fingernails pulled out from some misunderstanding.
    “Should I use the belt again?”
    “Yes, please.”
    • • •
    “Of course I like sports,” Njangu lied to one of his bodyguards, whom he’d dubbed Goon Alpha. “What sort do you play here on Larix?”
    “Well,” the big man said, “now it’s fall, an’ so we play Challenge. That’s like old-timey army games, with blunted spears, and bows and arrows, and fencing and things like that.”
    “Which I like,” Goon Beta said. “I did real well in the barefist division, back when I was a gosling.”
    “You want to fight, join the army,” the first bodyguard said. “That ain’t my sport. It’s bigger on Kura, where all those bastards do is chase each other around the hills with clubs. Anyway, after Challenge’ll come Rattes.”
    That was a team game played inside stadiums, with long netted hurlers and a ball with a variable center of gravity.
    “Not bad,” Goon Beta said. “Considering it’s winter. But in spring, we get harnhuns. I like that.”
    “It’s pretty good,” the first guard allowed. “Get a man running, bunch of people go after him. They catch him … it’s all up for his ass.”
    Harnhuns set district against district, town against town, until a final champion survived.
    “Best of all’s mobbal, when summer comes,” Alpha said, and Beta nodded vigorously. “I was pretty good at that, almost good enough to be a pro. Whole planet stops for the finals.”
    It took several hours to explain the rules to Njangu, or its lack of them. It was played with a ball, outdoors. At a district or suburb level, it’d be played in a local park, with goals at each end. The number of people on a side could be set by agreement, or played by as many as wanted. The object was to move a ball past a goal, using any means possible short, Njangu learned, of knives or nuclear devices.
    At a more organized level, professional teams from cities, then provinces, then worlds, played. There were frequent riots when favorites lost, or umpires made “bad” rulings, riots that sometimes required the army.
    Njangu made another mental note:
If people aren’t allowed any political say, and the boot’s kept firmly against their neck, let them work it out with sports. Make the sports violent, and make the games a good testing ground for potential soldiers
.
    He was starting to admire Redruth’s cleverness. Redruth or, more likely, his predecessor question mark predecessors.
    Njangu tried finding out more about the history of the system. There was almost nothing, other than that the original colonists of the two systems had been fleeing something or someone when they arrived, some hundreds of years ago. How they’d built up Larix so quickly wasn’t recorded. And the four or five … the records weren’t certain … men or women who’d preceded Redruth weren’t given much in the way of space, either.
    One file in the
Planetary Encyclopedia
did give him something:
    Womblies: Term given to the original inhabitants of the Kura system, who were instinctively inimical to humans, and opposed our necessary colonization of their disused lands. Little is known about them, since they were wiped out by the cleverness and leadership of the First Protector, and physical descriptions vary so widely there is no point in cluttering a scholarly work with them. Many legendary traits are ascribed to them: invisibility, the ability to sense man’s presence and even his intent, and retaliate in horrifyingly unpleasant ways. Folklorists aver there are tales on Kura that the Womblies were not completely destroyed, but linger on in