Zeroboxer (18 page)

EIGHTEEN

T
he pre-fight promotional spot opened with a high-octane series of short clips showing Blake Murphy landing brutal shots on bloodied opponents and roaring into the camera like a madman. “TONIGHT,” Xeth Stone's voice promised, “the Destroyer faces the Raptor, in an epic showdown of SAVAGERY versus SKILL that you will NOT WANT TO MISS.”

“He's making a big mistake taking me on, and I'm going to make him pay for it,” Blake said to an off-screen interviewer. After the violent clips, the man's soft voice made him seem menacing. “I'm not worried about the Raptor. I'll fight anyone they put in front of me. When we get in that Cube, all bets are off.” He looked into the camera. “You hear that Luka? All bets. Are. Off.”

“The fans can love him or hate him.” DK's voice spoke over shots of Blake preparing for the match—running, hit
ting pads, working the trampoline. “But with Blake Murphy, what you see is what you get. There's a lot of hype in this business. Some guys get a lot of attention. Others just keep doing what they have to do, getting back in the Cube, win or lose, no matter the odds, no matter what anyone thinks of them. That's the Destroyer.”

Carr had shut off the screen and not seen the rest of the trailer. It was obviously meant to build his opponent up, make people think the lowmass champion wouldn't be able to handle the power he'd see at the next level. It served a different purpose for Carr. Any lingering discomfort he might have had about laying hurt on his old cornerman had vanished.

They were halfway through the second round now, and Blake was tiring. The man was tough, the toughest Carr had faced since the Reaper. In the first round, Blake had landed several clean body shots that made Carr wobbly. Once he'd sent him spinning into a wall so hard Carr felt as if he'd barely hit the surface before he was off it again, like a rubber ball bouncing off a steel plate, no time at all to set up a rebound, just his rib cage flattening and the air shooting right out of him. But even then he recovered too fast for the Destroyer to finish him with a knockout or submission, and Blake had burned himself out matching the pace Carr dictated.
Dictate the pace and you own the fight.
Just like Uncle Polly had taught him.

He'd trained with Blake often enough in the past to know that the man compensated for fatigue by getting angrier. He jabbed at Carr's head, face contorted, trying to distract him before diving low, aiming to upend Carr and plow him into the wall. Carr leaped up and back, pulling his knees out of Blake's tackle. The motion took him into a flip, his back arching in a crescent, his arms reaching. He landed hands first, feet second, in a crouch on the wall, dug his gloves into the surface, and whipped his legs around to land a kick to Blake's rib cage. The man flew into the corner and bounced before regaining his feet.

Blake shook his head like a stunned pit bull. “You're going down,” he growled, then shot back at Carr.

It was hard to recognize his friend—his
former
friend—as the same soft-spoken man he'd known outside of the Cube. Inside the Cube, as the pre-fight footage had made abundantly clear, the Destroyer was an animal, as vicious as the father who'd left him with the scars now tattooed over with images of barbed wire, who watched his son's fights from the inside of a penitentiary on the Moon. Carr had to be careful; even though he'd put on a few kilograms for the fight, Blake Murphy was bigger and possibly stronger than him, and he'd never shown any compunction about sending opponents to the hospital even when he didn't have to, even if they were already losing and looking for a way out.

Anger, though, was a liability in the Cube. It clouded heads, made men careless.

“He's getting sloppy with his left,” Uncle Polly's voice said in his ear, and Carr nodded in silent agreement as he evaded Blake's attack and countered to the head. He smacked the man across the ear with an open hand, as if he were a coach drilling a student about keeping his guard up. “Come on, Murphy, pick it up!” he called, his voice thickened by his mouth guard. He broke away, taking two strides up the wall. When Blake came after him, Carr put his gloved hands up around his head to defend against the blows as he waited for his opponent's slow left to drop and give him another opening. He cuffed Blake across the ear again, broke off, and climbed. “That all you got, Blake? Is that it?”

Fury and humiliation turned Blake's face a terrifying shade of scarlet. “I'm going to kill you,” he said.

They might have trained together, cornered for each other, hung out swapping stories of fights and girls, but right now, Carr was sure Blake would break his skull open if he could. Through the Cube wall he was crouching on, Carr could see DK on the deck, his face bright and whitewashed by the harsh stadium lights, watching and smoldering, his lips moving as he yelled instructions into Blake's receiver.

Carr doubted Blake was listening to anything his cornerman had to say; he was all heat now—he made another wild, easily evaded grab. That was what Blake would do from this point on; he was too tired to fly hard and was counting on pinning and holding Carr long enough to submit him or beat him senseless.

“Quit playing around!” Uncle Polly's voice. “You've got ninety seconds left. Get to work!”

Ninety seconds would be enough. The fight was his now; he could always feel when the fight became his because it started to seem like something he'd already done. No need to drag this into a third round. Carr braced himself into the corner, and as Blake came for him, he slid left, as if to dodge, but let himself move too slowly. Finally seeing a chance to catch hold of him, Blake reached, overextending his arm, and in a swift move, Carr caught it and pulled it straight as he raced his legs up and across the man's body, locking his knees around Blake's torso, pulling the trapped limb into an armbar.

Blake reacted at once, trying to escape the submission hold by kicking off the wall with all his might and jolting both of them hard. The side of Carr's head and his shoulders slammed into the Cube wall, but he shook it off and held on. He lifted his hips and pulled back with his upper body, slowly bending Blake's elbow backward. They were mostly floating now, Blake scrabbling at the wall with his feet, trying to find some angle to take the pressure off of his captured joint. His free hand tried to punch Carr in the groin, even though that was illegal, but thankfully he didn't have the right angle. Carr pulled harder.

Blake's snarl turned into a howl of pain.

Tap, you moron.

Blake screamed curses at him with every epithet in his vocabulary. But he didn't tap.

“Nine seconds,” said Uncle Polly.

“Blake! Tap, goddamn it!”

“Fuck you!”

Carr gritted his teeth and arched his spine. There was a sick
snap
and the limb he held trapped against his own body went limp like a marionette's. Blake's body jerked in a violent spasm under his legs and the crowd's collective gasp seemed to suck away all the air inside the stadium.

The referee came careening toward them, thrusters firing, waving them apart and calling for a doctor. Disgusted, Carr released his hold and pushed away, pulling himself toward his hatch without looking back.

“The son of a bitch wouldn't tap,” he said to Uncle Polly, who didn't answer, just nodded with lips jammed together. “He wouldn't tap.” Scull put a bottle of water into his hand and toweled off his neck and chest. Carr lifted his face to watch as the referee and the doctor helped Blake out of the Cube and stabilized his arm, wrapping it tight to his body with a makeshift sling until he could get to the hospital. As the crippled Destroyer emerged unsteadily onto the deck, a deep hush fell over the packed stands. Then, slowly, a collective cheer rose up. Blake raised his head. On the screens all over the stadium, the cameras captured his expression: exhausted, in pain, but still indomitable, a tremble in his cheek as DK came up to support him, embracing him and putting Blake's good arm over his shoulder.

The crowd cheered louder. They cheered for the loser, for the fighter who'd refused to admit defeat.

Watching Blake and DK standing together on the other side of the deck, Carr felt suddenly that he'd rather have a broken elbow than this angry ache, this sense of having lost even after having won.

The referee called them to the center and Hal Greese boomed, “Winning tonight in the weltermass division for the first time, and still the undefeated, undisputed, Lowmass Champion of the Universe … the incomparable … the one and only … the Raptor, CARR LUKA!”

As the referee raised Carr's arm, the cheering, which had been weighty with admiration and respect, freewheeled into something high and wild and exuberant. For the first time in his whole life, Carr didn't relish the crowd's adoration. The sweetness of victory had been stolen from him.

Suddenly, as the cameras zoomed in, Blake turned and put his good arm around Carr in an embrace. “I made you do it,” he said. When he pulled back, he didn't look like the psychotic, red-faced Destroyer anymore, just plain old Blake with his lazy drawl and ice-blue eyes. It was as if having his arm broken had done something for him, lanced a boil, burnt something away. “We screwed with each other in there. But you didn't wuss out. You respected me at least that much.” He squeezed his hand down on Carr's shoulder and turned slightly. “What do you say, DK? Pretty goo
d fight. He's still the real deal in my book.”

DK stood to the side, watching their exchange. You would think, looking at him, that he was the one who'd just lost. His jaw was working back and forth, sullenness lidding his large eyes. If Blake had won, would DK have taken it as a personal victory for himself as well? As proof or validation of some kind?

“Sure, Murphy,” DK said, with a darker trace of his usual good humor, “if I knew you could be won over with a snapped limb, I'd have done it myself a while ago.” He gave Carr a curt congratulatory nod and turned away.

“
Why?
” Carr demanded of Blake. “Your arm—what if it's messed up for good?” A pang of concern shot through him. A strange bond forms between men who've foug
ht honestly, and Carr was suddenly worried that Blake might end up like Manon—who'd lost more than just a fight and the title, but something else too, and hadn't been the same since.

Blake shook his head. “You've never been to that place.” Was it a good or bad sign that Blake was weirdly at ease, his eyes distant? “That place where you know you can't win … but you can decide not
to lose.”

At the post-fight press conference, Gant was as pleased as punch.
War of the Worlds,
the very first Terran-Martian zeroboxing championship, would happen in four months (February on Earth, Virgo on Mars) on the Martian city-station of Surya. The announcement had been perfectly timed; it had gone out on the Systemnet seventy-two hours before the Luka v. Murphy match, swelling viewership of the event by twenty percent, according to Risha's estimates. Gant stood behind the podium at the front of the room and rattled off several impressive figures—attendance, viewership, revenue, trending. “These are the highest numbers we've seen since the lowmass title match,” he finished, “so I'd say we've had a very good night here, ladies and gentlemen.”

A reporter in the first row asked, “Can you comment on the quality of the card tonight, and on the main event in particular? There's obviously some controversy about the way it ended, and whether the fight should have been
stopped.”

Gant nodded. “We had a very strong card with excellent fights all around, which just proves that the caliber of Terran fighters is the best it's ever been. Of course, whenever you have an event anchored by the Raptor, you know you're going to get big numbers, and we got that. Whether the fight should have been stopped, I'm not going to say for sure since I haven't reviewed the footage yet, but with five seconds left in the round, I think this is a case of two tough competitors giving it their all, and I'm not seeing any fault on the referee's part.” He pointed to the next reporter.

“Carr,” the reporter called, “this is your first time fighting in a different mass division and you won pretty convincingly. How do you feel about the fight tonight, and what's next for you?”

Carr leaned forward in his seat next to Gant's podium so the microphones could amplify his voice. “I felt good going into the fight. I wasn't thinking too much about it being a different mass division. Blake is obviously a really tough zeroboxer, so I knew I had to be at the top of my game.” He looked across at Murphy's empty seat. “People get injured—that's part of our sport—but I didn't want to see the fight end the way it did. I hope he recovers and is able to get back into the Cube soon, I really do.” He glanced at Gant, then back out at the packed conference room. “As for what's next, I'm happy to take on whatever challenge my boss comes up with, and he's pretty good at coming up with them. In a few months I'll be competing on Surya, which will be a huge first, so right now I'm not thinking about anything beyond doing my best there.”

“Now that is a humble, respectful champion, right there,” Gant said proudly.

“Speaking of
War of the Worlds
,” Brock Wheeden called from his seat, “there's already a lot of hype around this event, and no lack of Systemnet discussion about whether Terran fighters are going to be able to put on a good showing on Surya, or whether Martian body design is going to be too big of an advantage to overcome.”

Gant said, “I'm very excited about this event, because, coming from Mars myself many years ago, I can tell you, I think our Terran zeroboxers”—and he looked pointedly at Carr—“are up to the task. On average, are the Martians going to have an advantage in reach and endurance? Probably, and we're already thinking about that and training for it. But Martian genetic traits are strictly designed and regulated. Terrans are all over the map, and the population of Earth is so much greater. Who's to say the best fighters from our
planet aren't as good, or better, than what Mars can offer?”