Free Champion of Mars by Guy Haley

the Hohman crossing between Mars and Earth over and over again. Each craft carried three hundred passengers.
    Streamers of air whirled off its wingtips, the heat of re-entry generating a contrail from its body.
    There was the crack of a sonic boom. The plane drew down to the horizon, flaps opening, engines firing. Activity boiled on the runways down at the port. Vehicles withdrew to the terminal buildings, emergency lights flashing. The windows on the port had filled up, curious onlookers jostling to welcome the first wave of mass immigration to the red planet.
    The sun dipped behind a horizon that swelled with the bumps of the Tharsis Montes. It would be night soon.
    Jonah took his face from the binoculars and watched the planes come in, one after another, and taxi into position. Support vehicles rolled out to the landing strip and crowded them.
    After a time, the doors opened, and they disgorged new Martians by the hundred.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    The Arena of Kemiímseet
     
    Y OECHAKENON STANDS IN the great arena of Kemiímseet. The noise of the crowd is the noise of a beast. When resting, it murmurs; when angry, it hisses; when excited, it roars.
    Now, it roars .
    The gates opposite Yoechakenon clank open, heavy bronze grids pulled on chains; the arrangement deliberately primitive. This is a place where the spectators can get a sense of life as it could be: unlinked, solitary and savage. Such is part of the ritual of the arena.
    The crowd members have their programmes, they have their tickets and their whispers. They know what to expect. Yoechakenon does not. I do not. And although he feels no fear, I fear enough for the both of us. He is without his armour, he has been hurt before. He is not invincible.
    From the noise it makes – the cheering, the yells, the heated debates over wagers large and small – the crowd anticipates a challenge to their champion. I listen with him as he moves his hearing over a number of these exchanges. He does this without applying his full concentration, his mind focussed upon the door opposite. The minor whisper I have tasked with monitoring the crowd is barely acknowledged, either by his consciousness or by the other semi-autonomous valets which cluster round about it.
    Even all together, these minor valets of no use compared to I, Kaibeli. True, they are part of me, voices hived off from my soul choir, but I as myself – my whole, integrated self – am forbidden to communicate with him as he fights. I am barred, and painfully so. My connection with him is reduced to one of the second degree. Only my prayers reach him.
    The noise of the crowd thunders in both worlds of Mars, but Yoechakanon’s connection with the Great Library, once so intimate, is reduced to a voyeur’s glimpse, the clamour of its halls a distant susurration.
    We are prisoners here, both of us.
    His tactical advisor, a barely aware collection of murderous advice, catches something his ears have heard but that he has not.
    “Your opponents are three sand giants,” it says, “large specimens, brought in by flitter thirteen days ago.” It is a simple being, hungry for violence. I am glad to be rid of it. “They are not sick, nor are they drugged. They are paid, and they are warriors. One quarter of the crowd are wagering upon them.”
    Yoechakenon shifts his shortsword from hand to hand and spits upon each of his palms in turn. “Let the crowd bet on them,” he says. “Let them lose their money.”
    He tenses the tendons in his hands and flexes his fists, a pre-combat habit he has carried these last seven lifetimes. He passes the sword back to his right. He thinks a command at the blade’s rudimentary mind and it warms. He hefts it; he misses the glaive. Heat weapons are primitive, but the crowd likes the swirl of red-hot metal, the showers of sparks that spatter from every hit. His tattooed body is naked bar a closed helmet and a run of plate on his right arm. His status allows him an energy field, built into