The Darkmoon Dogs

Calibration Arena

Three hundred paces to the Calibration Arena, and I counted every one of them, because counting was better than dreading the arrival.

The walls down that stretch were a green they must have chosen purely by price. The colour of something barely kept alive. A cadet came past me going the other way with his shield harness still on, straps cutting red grooves into his shoulders, holding his ribs the way you hold something broken. He favoured his left and somebody had noticed that he favoured his left. That somebody had gone at that side until it stopped being a habit and started being an injury.

I catalogued it without meaning to. Right-handed opponent, exploiting a weak rotation. The Academy trained everybody the same way, so most of us fought with the same three mistakes, and if you paid attention you could take people apart with a list.

That sounds arrogant. It isn’t, I’ve tested it.

I smelled the arena from thirty paces out. Sweat, and that sharp electrical bite off the shield generators, and under it something coppery. Fear sweat runs different from the working kind, higher in copper, and it comes through the skin carrying the stress hormones out with it. You end up knowing that sort of thing if you spend enough years fighting over ration chits in the darker places, learning what a desperate man smells like just before he swings.

The octagon was black matte tile that gripped your boots and made everything look expensive for the cameras. Above it, the observation gallery, a long band of glass with shapes moving behind it. Instructors and sponsors, deciding which of us was worth buying and which of us was worth burying, with a form for both.

There was a wall panel at waist height on the far side, three metres in from the perimeter line, and I stopped walking when I saw what had happened to it.

Duels shouldn’t do that to a wall. A duel is two men leaning on each other and cooking, and the worst a wall gets out of it is scuffed. That panel was scorched in a fan and pushed in about two centimetres, and something has to arrive very fast indeed to leave a shape like that.

A Mirror does one thing. Push a blade into the field and the field takes hold of it, and everything you put into that swing comes back at you as heat in your own kit. That is a duel. Two men heating each other up and waiting to see whose harness gives in first. But go fast enough and the field stops taking hold and starts throwing, and it throws the thing back out along whatever angle it came in on. Forty metres a second is the line. Everybody knows the number. Nobody thinks about it, because nothing in a duel goes that fast. A blade tip at full swing is thirty. And nothing the field does is free. Whatever it throws back, the mount pays for as heat, so a man who gets hit often enough is cooked by his own shield whether anything gets through it or not.

I looked at the buckled plastisteel for ten seconds and then I went and stood on my mark.

Caius Vane was already inside, running his thumb along the seam of his harness.

You could tell what a man’s family was worth from his harness, if you knew where to look. Mine was standard issue, which meant one broad strap over the collarbone and a prayer. When a Mirror turned a hit, all that force had to go somewhere, and standard issue put it through the clavicle. Caius wore a Vane Industries rig with eleven mounting points, and it spread a strike across his whole back like a hand pressing rather than a fist punching.

The shield doesn’t save you. It just decides where you take the hit.