Gladiator

Chapter One

     Rriiiiiiiii...

     Somewhere in the world, a fire alarm was going off; an insistent, strident call to arms, rousing a sleeper into reluctant wakefulness.
     Two bleary yellow eyes opened and with no small degree of effort focussed on the source of the insistent shrilling of the alarm, which gradually resolved itself into a mere alarm-clock.
     The owner of the eyes scowled, gave a grunt and planted a palm onto the excited appliance with the intention of silencing it, but only succeeded in flicking it off the bedside table. It skipped once off the rug beside the bed and bounced somewhere inaccessible behind the chest of drawers, where it continued to warble energetically.
     "All right, all right, I'm up, I'm up...!" the sleeper grumbled, and sat up, rubbing her eyes, fumbled for the alarm clock and finally managed to silence it. "Bloody thing..."
     Aileena was a hybrid. On the face of it, she looked primarily Corvian (read: biped and gangly), but she had a large quantity of amphibian genes in her genetic makeup, and a similarly large quantity of mammalian ones as well. Her skin was primarily bluish-grey on top, with a cream-yellow underside; the border between the two colours was quite rigidly defined, a long jagged line with speckles of each colour against the other. Three flat crests arced over her head; one broad one down the centre of her skull, ending at the nape of her neck, and a shorter one either side that curved more sharply under her ears, which were longer than the average Corvian's, and edged with spines. Her long, lean fingers were lightly webbed, as were her narrow feet, and a broad, flagged tail dropped to a foot or so shy of the floor behind her. She was not overly tall, nor particularly skinny, but she was elegant, gentle and graceful, and had two rather visible assets in front of her, which meant she had no shortage of "admirers" - although most days she'd have been grateful for a little peace and quiet...
     That day had started out pretty much like just another day. The boss called her early, with another of those on-the-face-of-it rather pointless jobs, and so she was up and breakfasted and ready soon enough - but she was to find that today marked something of a turning point in her life.

     She strode down between the two rows of specimens towards her employer's work room; he was a prominent scientist, and, while not the one that had actually created her, he was the most respected genetics engineers currently working here - some said the entire world, for that matter. The row of pens on either side of the corridor held mostly "pures" - wild-caught specimens of different species, some of them relatively large, although not so large as a lirk, others tiny.
     One - looked like a bizarre hybrid of some hairy little forest creature and Skelna, although she could see from its notes that its species looked like that - lifted his head and said "good morning" as she passed.
     She paused. "Morning."
     "You go to work again?" Yen was a dour-faced little creature, with a blunter muzzle than most of the worker Skelna here, sharp pricked ears, and soft, solemn, dark brown eyes. He regarded her through the bars of his little prison, sitting on a low platform that brought him up to her shoulder-level, apparently having been grooming that soft, thick fur-coat. Even though the lab technicians here had quite severely clipped his coat to stop him overheating, leaving him considerably scraggly and bedraggled, she'd noticed he still spent a long time in grooming...
     "Yes," she put a hand between the bars and scratched idly at the base of those big, pointy, radar-dish ears. "Setro said he had a job for me..."
     "Pah," he ducked his head away from her hand, and sullenly chewed a stubborn knot between the fingers on his left paw. "It is not fun, this life in a little box, na."
     She sighed, softly, taking her hand back. "I'll come back and talk to you later..."
     "Hm," he replied, softly, then added; "Go, go!" he scolded. "Do not be late on my account, or they may put you in the little box also..."

     Her employer - a certain doctor Setro - was waiting for her in his office. He was an overweight, considerably-more-than-middle-aged Yen-toh, the scientist in charge of the complex where they both worked. "The Complex", since no-one knew it as anything more interesting than that, was engaged in creating cosmetic hybrids, mainly. You wanted a new worker for the "public face" of your company, per se, and you could have one, so long as you could cough up the cash. Aileena herself had been intended for an oceanographic company to the south of the continent, on the coast somewhere - until it had transpired that her prospective buyer had not in fact got anywhere near the funds needed, and was going to simply take her and run. This individual was now languishing in jail, somewhere, and his lack of funds meant he was likely not going to get out for a very long time. The labs had offered her a job, so not to waste the money spent on her development, and so now here she was.
     Setro had joined his first company as a younger Yen-toh, full of ideas and ambitions. The reality of science and finance and what you could do with each had soured his view of the world, but he was still proud, and still full of ambition. He'd started up the current complex around eleven years ago; in their earlier days they had been in competition with another two labs involved in genetics and hybrids, but Setro's brilliance had shown through. One lab had been merely ground into bankruptcy, the other one had already been struggling against Setro's renown when it suddenly went quiet. Investigators later claimed that the owners had quit while they were ahead and gone into more secure trades, such as novelty drugs design, and whether or not that was true was no concern to Setro; once he'd got his first paper published, it was onward and upward. After all, he'd been the first to get an embryo of an intelligent creature to survive - a pretty little part-mammal part-songbird part-Corvian hybrid, who'd later gone off to be a "public relations officer" for one rather seedy but very rich Cartel company. The poor creature had only lasted until he was two; his job was simply to try to placate the customers, angry at being duped, so the Bosses weren't in any danger. One angry customer had decided he'd had enough of the hybrid's empty apologies and simpering manner, and ordered his own aide to loose the "pet" lirk, who'd said the hybrid was very tasty if not very satisfying, burp. The other labs working on creating hybrids had trailed in his wake for many years until they'd closed down - the wilds around one of them was full of "failed" hybrids, which had nonetheless bred prolifically...
     "Ah, good morning, Aileena..." Setro looked somewhat distracted this morning. He didn't look up as she walked in, merely waved a clawed hand at a stool to one side of his office, indicated that she sit.
     "You had some work for me, sir?" she asked, settling on the stool.
     "Hm? Oh yes, work... yes, we've got something for you to do," he picked up a folder and handed it to her. "An old employee we'd like you to go and pick up for us."
     "Another runaway, sir?" she asked, opening the file and skimming over the page of genetics information.
     "In a way, yes. His place of employment was destroyed, so technically he didn't make a run for it in the literal sense... but he didn't make any effort to return to us, so he counts as deserter."
     "What if he's dead?" she glanced up from the file, looked up at the portly Ye-toh and watched him bustle about.
     "We've had reports of him out to the East - we know he's alive."
     She flicked idly through the pages of the file; it was an old one, the cover dusty, the hand-written pages inside gone pale, some of the photos bereft of a good deal of their colour. But it was still legible, and you could still see what was on the photos, and what she saw intrigued her. A hybrid, like she was, only stranger. Tall, he stood on his toes, his legs somewhat runnerbeast-like but longer, and much straighter. He looked to be primarily Skelna, as he had a Skelna face, tail and long, dextrous fingers, but there was enough Corvian in him to give him a leaner build, bulk out what would have likely been rather spindly upper arms to a more "normal" size. The Corvian parts of his genetics had also given him feathers - a rather striking shaggy scarlet and maroon crest that ran backwards over his head to just below his shoulderblades - and had given the usually baleful red Skelna eyes a softer, altogether more engaging golden-yellow hue. In all, he was actually rather handsome...
     That was, until she flicked over the page and discovered the picture had been taken during his youth. Employed as a gladiator, he'd lost half his tentacles off his face, and had acquired a shocking pale scar across his left eye. A collection of bright copper rings studded his long backward-pointing ears, two surgical-steel barbs had been implanted at the tip of his powerful, prehensile tail, and his fangs had been replaced with two-inch long false gold ones, ones that protruded from his jaw and likely made closing his mouth difficult. The claws on his toes had been similarly replaced; each one now at least two inches long, and made of surgical carbon-steel, so would be wickedly sharp. He stood looking off to one side, apparently waiting to be given the go-ahead to go out into the ring and fight some poor prisoner, a long, knife-tipped staff held loosely in his long hand. He still had somewhat "rugged" good looks, but was no longer as gracefully handsome as he'd been as a youth.
     "He doesn't look so bad," she said, thoughtfully.
     Setro gave her a solemn look. "Appearances can be very deceiving, and I want you to be careful, my dear," he said, seriously. "He may not look it, but he's very dangerous. You name me any species, and he's likely killed one. If he hasn't, that's probably only because he's never encountered one."
     She smiled. "You're scaremongering, aren't you, sir?" she queried. "Surely that's an exaggeration... the very biggest soldiers, per se, I doubt he could-"
     "Turn the page, Aileena," the voice had a warning note in it.
     She did as told, flicked over. It was a page full of notes from his later days in the Arena, listing injuries sustained by him, opponents, their weapon (there were never guns on there, for obvious reasons), and - frighteningly - times taken to kill them. There were a large number of Corvians and Skelna there, with details of reasons they'd been put in the Pit to fight, a few failed crossbreeds that needed disposal, a soldier or two, and a few species whose names she didn't recognise. Everything on the list showed that it had been killed, most in minutes, some taking a while longer, none taking more than half an hour; most fights had left him pretty much unscathed.
     "If you were to face him in the Arena," Setro said, calmly. "You would be highly unlikely to get out with your life. The old saying went 'if it breathes, he can kill it'-"
     "Even with guns, sir?" Aileena cut in, and at his withering stare wished she'd gone with her second choice and kept her mouth shut.
     "I am trying to be serious here, Aileena," Setro snapped. "Stupid questions you know the answer to are neither helpful nor amusing. As I had been trying to say, you will certainly prove no problem to him if for some reason he has cause to be concerned at your reasons. I want you to be careful, and to tread very cautiously. We don't want to lose you. Now," he turned back to his computer terminal. "We suspect his base of operation, so to speak, is that town out to the east - Khufa, or something. A flier will take you most of the way; it'll probably let you off some where near the outskirts, although not so close that it gets a lot of notice..."

     The way out to the flier pens took her past Yen once more.
     "You leave us again?" he asked, catching her attention as she headed down the aisle.
     "Yes - Setro's given me a job to do. Someone to find and bring back here..."
     "Ach," he gave a disgusted snort and lowered his head to nibble at the fur of one foreleg; she'd noticed his species tended to fuss over grooming if they were nervous or embarrassed over something. After a few second's worth of annoyed grooming of the short, clipped fur, he added, softly; "I have no-one to talk to."
     "I'll come and talk to you when I get back..." she promised, putting one hand between the bars and scratching the base of his ears.
     "Hm," he paused his grooming, cocked his head to one side and leaned against her hand. "I vill be dead when you return, you know," he informed her, solemnly.
     "That's silly," she replied, frowning faintly. "Why should you be dead?"
     "I hear them talking. They have no more use for me, people do not want the furry creatures, na. So, they will kill me, make room for new specimens."
     "Maybe I can say something..."
     "Ach, you know they will not listen, na. Never do," he sighed, softly, and sank to his elbows. "At least it will get me out of the little box."
     "I'm sorry, Yen..."
     "Pif," he gave her a look. "If so sorry, why do you go out to catch this runaway to put him in the little box also?"
     She paused, and sighed. "I don't know, to tell the truth," she replied, faintly. "Perhaps I'm scared of getting put in a little box myself, if I don't do what they ask..."
     For a few moments, both were silent. Then the little creature gently nudged her fingers with his blunt nose, and said, solemnly; "Go, go. You talk too much, ja? And you do not want the angry master, he will not be happy if you waste the time, na."
     She gave him a sad smile, nodded, and carried on her way towards the hangar.

On to Chapter Two