“Your women, they say they stay in here, near pit itself. Boy already here. Too many. Against rules,” the little man said firmly.
“Don’t worry. My boy’s going back up to the top to watch. The women are healers,” Ryan explained. “I need them close. Might need their help triple fast after this fight.”
Lucas pondered Ryan’s words. “Doors will be sealed to the pit floor. They cannot help you until match is over.”
“Understood.”
“Boy will take females’ blasters with him to top. They stay, okay, but unarmed.”
Krysty and Mildred both took out their pistols and handed them to Dean, who was already weighted down by Ryan’s heavy SIG-Sauer. The boy didn’t complain. He accepted the hardware and departed the way Mildred and Krysty had come into the dressing area.
“Hurry back, lover,” Krysty said, giving him a quick peck on the lips. “There’s more where that came from.”
“You can count on it.”
Ryan took another deep breath and looked at a large clock hanging on the wall. High noon. Time to go. He stepped past them to the reinforced door leading out to the pit floor itself. He lifted the handle, and the door swung out into the arena. A loud cry of excitement was ignited with his appearance as Ryan ducked slightly and strode through the opening.
Instinctively he looked up. The bright stage lights used for illumination prevented him from seeing into the upper reaches of the stands. As he moved farther toward the center of the pit, the voices above got even louder.
Across from Ryan, a twin to his own exit door was recessed into the wall.
The door opened, swinging out. Ryan continued to stare, waiting for the first look at his foe. A canopy overhang cast a dramatic curtain of black over the entryway, allowing for a resplendent entrance.
Like everyone else around the pit, Ryan was waiting. He wasn’t expecting death himself to come gliding out of the shadows.
Chapter Twelve
One-on-one.
Hand-to-hand.
Man againstman?
“Aw, shit,” Ryan cursed as he saw his foe for the first time.
One essential fact had gone unmentioned by Lucas when the one-eyed man had insisted on accepting the challenge of the pit to assist J.B., and that was the key piece of information about his intended opponent.
The sec droid was a familiar sight to Ryan Cawdor. He’d faced them before. Like droids he’d fought in the past, this one was vaguely humanoid in construction, legs slightly bent at the knees, arms dangling apelike at its sides. Each arm was slightly longer than a man’s would be, in direct proportion to its height.
One arm ended in three fingerlike digits. Two of them were pincerlike, with deadly honed edges. The third was a stubby hammer. The other arm appeared to have been broken at the wrist, and a studded mace added in place of what once were additional appendages.
The android was bent and squatty, less than five feet tall and hunched over. Both legs were stubby, ending in flexible platforms for feet. One foot had three toes, the other twoif one wanted to call the sharpened edges sticking out “toes.”
Unlike some of the other androids Ryan had seen, there was no attempt at providing any sort of “flesh” on this creation. The droid was open and bare, with a thick metal skeleton made up of rods of once gleaming but now faded and pitted chromed steel.
Perched on a flat wide metal collar serving as a neck was the robot’s head, a head that looked exactly like a scuffed goldfish bowl. Small red crystals embedded in the circuitry gleamed evilly from behind the unbreakable glass dome.
This one came with the surprise addition of a narrow and open mouth beneath the clear dome, which was unusual since sec droids were known for being silent and deadly, their mouths usually consisting of nothing more than a metallic slit. Razor-sharp teeth gleamed behind the droid’s metal lips.
The construct’s broad chest was armored, and the first spot where Ryan could sense a weakness. There were definite repairs to be seen here, patches of flat steel soldered into place to cover previous blows. Come to think of it, the neck on the thing was all wrong, as well. Every sec droid Ryan had ever seen came with a tubular, articulated neck that let the head swivel in all directions.