Battlecry: Sten: Omnibus One (Sten Omnibus) Read Online Free Page B

mill would run an extra thousand hours between servicing if the clearing exhaust didn’t exit just above the computer’s cooling intake. With great ceremony, they knocked a full year off Amos’ contract.
    Amos, always one for the grand parlay, used that year’s credit to buy a Xypaca.
    Sten hated the reptile from the first moment, when a lightninglike snap of its jaws almost took off his little finger.
    So Amos explained it to him. ‘I ain’t real fond of that critter either. I don’t like the way it looks, the way it smells or the way it eats. But it’s gonna be our ticket off of Vulcan.’
    His spiel was convincing. Amos planned to fight his Xypaca in small-time preliminary fights only, betting light. ‘We win small – a month off the contract here, a week there. But sooner or later it’ll be our ticket out of here.’ Even Sten’s mother was convinced there was something to this latest of Amos’ dreams.
    And Sten, by fifteen, wanted off Vulcan more than anything else he could imagine. So he fed the Xypaca cheerfully, lived with its rank smell, and tried not to yell too loudly when he was a little slow in getting his hand out of its cage after feeding.
    And it seemed, for a while, as if Amos’ big plan was going to work. Until the night the Counselor showed up at the fights, held in an unused corridor a few rows away.
    Sten was carrying the Xypaca’s cage into the arena, following Amos.
    From across the ring, The Counselor spotted them and hurried around. ‘Well, Amos,’ he said heartily, ‘didn’t know you were a Xyman.’
    Amos nodded warily.
    The Counselor inspected the hissing brute under Sten’s arm. ‘Looks like a fine animal you’ve got there, Amos. What say we pitch it against mine in the first match?’
    Sten looked across the ring and saw the obese, oversized Xypaca one of the Counselor’s toadies was handling. ‘Dad,’ he said. ‘We can’t. It’ll—’
    The Counselor frowned at Sten.
    ‘You letting your boy decide what you do now, Amos?’
    Amos shook his head.
    ‘Well then. We’ll show them we’re the best sportsmen of all. Show the other corridors that we’re so bored with the lizards they’ve got that we’d rather fight our own, right?’
    He waited. Amos took several deep breaths. ‘I guess you haven’t decided about the transfers over to the wire mill yet, have you, sir?’ he finally asked.
    The Counselor smiled. ‘Exactly.’
    Even Sten knew that handling the mile-long coils of white-hot metal was the deadliest job on Amos’ shift.
    ‘We – me and my boy – we’d be proud to fight your Xy, Mister Counselor.’
    ‘Fine, fine,’ the Counselor said. ‘Let’s give them a real good show.’
    He hurried back around the makeshift ring.
    ‘Dad,’ Sten managed, ‘his Xy – it’s twice the size of ours. We don’t stand a chance.’
    Amos nodded. ‘Sure looks that way, don’t it? But you remember what I told you, time back, about not handling things the way people expect you to? Well – you take my card. Nip on out to that soystand, and buy all you can hide under your tunic.’
    Sten grabbed his father’s card and wriggled off through the crowd.
    The Counselor was too busy bragging to his cronies about what his Xy would do to notice Sten shoving strands of raw soy into the large Xypaca’s cage.
    After a few moments of haggling, bragging, and bet-placing, the Xy cages were brought into the ring, tipped over, and quickly opened.
    The Counselor’s thoroughly glutted Xypaca stumbled from his cage, yawned once, and curled up to go to sleep. By the time he was jolted awake, Amos’ Xypaca had him half digested.
    There was a dead silence around the ring. Amos looked as humble as he knew how. ‘Yessir. You were right, sir. We showed them we’re sure the best sportsmen, didn’t we. Sir?’
    The Counselor said nothing. Just turned and pushed his way through the crowd.
    After that, Amos couldn’t get a fight for his Xypaca in any match at any odds. Nobody mourned