Free Champion of Mars by Guy Haley Page A

his vambrace, but this he does not activate yet.
    “Sand giants; biomorphs endemic to Ipulloni Desert of the Tertis hinterlands. First example documented twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-three years...” Yoechakenon ignores the drone of the advisor. He has heard information like this so many times that it is scratched indelibly into his biological and eternal memories. It bores him. He rotates his shoulders, stretching prison stiffness from his muscles, and he waits.
    The gates are open. The sand giants stride through, and the crowd’s noise becomes deafening. Yoechakenon loathes the crowd, but they love him. They cry out not because they think he may be beaten; rather, they revel in seeing their champion given a challenge. A challenge by their reckoning, at any rate. Yoechakenon does not find the giants so impressive.
    They are not real giants; there are no such things on Mars, only the tall tribesmen who inhabit the plateau where the mirror suns no longer shine and the land is cold and poor. Time and gravity have worked their spell upon them since the long-ago days of settlement, a time I do not remember. They stand taller by a head and a half than the tallest of other Martians. They are heavy-featured, with heads out of proportion to their thin frames. Their eyes and nostrils are hooded, their skin a darker red than Yoechakenon’s.
    They move warily, as cautious of the crowd as they are of Yoechakenon. They hold themselves well, handling their spears as men who have been born to them. Yoechakenon has their measure, tall though it is. He lifts his visor and spits on the sand. There will be no honour in their deaths. This is butcher’s work, not combat.
    They fan out to attack him from three sides at once, one poised to rush him as the others close in from the flanks. It is a tactic they use on the great desert lions.
    Yoechakenon is deadlier than any lion.
    He stands motionless, searching for hidden strength and finding none. Wind stirs stray hairs that have escaped his braids.
    The crowd falls silent.
    The giants look to one another, nod, and lower their spears.
    Yoechakenon charges. He leaves his energy shield inactive.
    Blood soaks the sands of the arena floor a deeper red.
    None of it is Yoechakenon’s.
     
     
    “Y OECHAKENON. ” I SPEAK aloud. The champion reacts angrily when I communicate thought-to-thought after a bout. Voice is better, although in truth he is best left alone entirely until the mood passes. This will not wait. I let a moment go by before calling him again.
    Yoechakenon is beautiful. He is two and a half metres tall, long and lean, his limbs attenuated by the standards of his ancestors, yet he is muscular and strong. Yerthmen would have found his skull and face elongated and incongruously delicate, although they too would have thought him handsome.
    There are no Yerthmen now.
    His skin is smooth, like the surface of a dune, and as red; covered in motile tattoos denoting his rank and histories. They are defaced with luminous bars, imprisoned as we are. Yoechakenon’s hair is bone white, its braids terminating in beads of turquoise and limestone. Four large and three small interfaces wrought of half-metal glitter in his skin around his spine. Beyond his physical form I see his energy field – manipulated over and over again in his long quest to become champion – as butterfly wings about him. I see his enhanced musculature shiver with electricity as it repairs itself, and his tattoos’ pain under the sigils of shame, their anguish revealed to my eyes alone.
    His imprisonment has left his bearing untouched. He is tall and proud and arrogant still, but he is not the same man who slew the Spirefather of Olm. That man is gone, and I do not know well he who stands in his stead.
    Yoechakenon’s golden eyes are expressionless. He looks through the window over the empty arena. All the cells look onto the arena floor, another torture devised by the Door-ward, that its prisoners may