Negasi rushed out of his corner and landed a sharp jab in Jeridan’s face. Jeridan replied with a one-two punch Negasi shrugged off before replying with a killer right hook. It looked like his gunner really was mad about losing the ship.

  Well, so was he. Jeridan covered up, ducking and circling, awaiting his chance.

  It came when Negasi launched a series of jabs that aimed a bit too high, leaving his sides exposed. Jeridan landed a hard right hook into his copilot’s ribs that made the man grunt, but Jeridan didn’t expect the right cross that nearly broke his nose. He got his glove up at the last instant.

  They started circling again, ducking, jabbing, feinting. The cheers of the crowd faded into background noise as both men focused on the fight.

  Jeridan took a couple of hard jabs but managed to land a tricky left hook that made Negasi stagger. Hopefully that would fog up his brain some. Negasi had come up with a clever opening that put pressure on Jeridan’s queenside pieces and hampered some of his favorite plays.

  The bell rang.

  “Gentlemen, you have thirty seconds to rest. Jeridan is white this time,” the holographic referee said.

  They walked over to the chessboard, passing through the hologram of the ropes without feeling a thing. Both men were bathed in sweat.

  Jeridan breathed deeply, collecting his thoughts. The referee followed them to the table, pulling up one of the ropes so he could duck in between. The hologram maintained the illusion as much as possible. He raised a hand.

  “Ready … go!”

  Jeridan’s timer started to run down.

  Jeridan went for a semi-open game, starting with moving the king’s pawn.

  “Pawn e4!” Jeridan said. The piece moved of its own accord.

  “Pawn c5!” Negasi replied. Sicilian Defense. Of course. Well, Jeridan had the solution to that.

  “Knight f3.”

  “Pawn d6.”

  “Wuss,” Jeridan said. “Pawn d4.”

  They continued as the timers ran down. By the time three minutes had passed, Jeridan dominated the center at the expense of a pawn. His pieces were more developed, but Negasi had the advantage of one pawn. He’d seen his gunner come out from underneath that plenty of times.

  Now it was back to boxing.

  After the second round, Jeridan was feeling pretty confident. His face stung from a couple of good hits, but he’d landed some on Negasi too. The two were equally sharp for the next round of chess.

  Jeridan grabbed a center pawn right off, then had to waste some of his development extracting his queenside knight from a tight spot. That gave Negasi breathing room to develop his own pieces and get out from some of the pressure Jeridan had put him under.

  Jeridan compensated by going on the offensive in the next boxing round. He knew his gunner always got overconfident if he reversed one of Jeridan’s openings and that overconfidence showed in his boxing. Negasi came on too aggressively, leaving himself open for counterpunches. Jeridan landed several good hits that shook Negasi up before the next chess round …

  … which Negasi played terribly. Jeridan pinned a bishop, took a pawn, and sacrificed a knight to take a rook.

  “See if you can get out of that one,” Jeridan said as they went back to the boxing ring.

  For the first two minutes of round four, everything went Jeridan’s way. He knocked Negasi around the ring, landing a couple of good body blows and some glancing hits to the head, which would keep Negasi off his chess game. He had this match just about wrapped up.

  Then, disaster.

  A right hook came out of nowhere and the next thing Jeridan knew, he was on one knee and the referee was counting over him.

  “Two … three …”

  Two? What happened to one?

  Jeridan bided his time and let his head clear.

  “Four … five … six … seven … eight …”

  Jeridan got to his feet. He didn’t wobble, and the room didn’t spin. A good sign.

  “Medscan indicates no serious damage,” MIRI said. “Jeridan is able to continue the fight.”

  Jeridan avoided Negasi for the last minute of the round, keeping up his guard and backing away while not letting any solid punches through to his head. Negasi focused on body blows, making Jeridan’s every breath painful. In the chess round, Jeridan played conservatively, not developing his strategy and not giving anything away. He needed time to let his head clear.

  Rounds five and six were frustrating. Jeridan kept landing punches that didn’t take Negasi out, and while he gained ground on the chessboard, snapping up a bishop and a knight and cornering the king, the timer ran out without a checkmate.

  So it all came down to who had won on points in the boxing match.

  Jeridan and Negasi stood at the middle of the ring while the holographic judges bent over their table, tabulating their notes. Of course, MIRI had calculated the winner within a nanosecond of the round finishing, but she kept up the illusion. More fun that way.

  The referee consulted with the judges and came to the center of the ring.

  “The winner, by unanimous decision, with a score of 57 to 56, is Jeridan Cook!”

  The crowd cheered. Jeridan pumped his fists in the air and hugged Negasi.

  “Good match, buddy.” Jeridan always tried to be a gracious winner. He could act smug later, and would.

  “I can’t believe you won on points. I knocked you on your ass!”

  “Just to one knee. That was the only round you dominated.”

  “Correction,” MIRI said. “Negasi dominated in two rounds.”

  “Barely,” Jeridan said as he took off his gloves. “And anyway, that makes it 161 to 158. I’m winning overall.”

  “I’ve won more times at chess, though. I’ve checkmated you 79 of my wins,” Negasi said. “You only checkmated me like 30 times.”

  “Forty-one times,” MIRI corrected.

  “And,” Negasi added, “I’ve knocked you out more times.”

  “Twenty-seven to twenty-six,” MIRI confirmed.

  “But I’ve won more matches, so I’m still the better chessboxer,” Jeridan said. “Let’s hit the showers and go get drunk.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Finally, something we can agree on.”

  The boxing ring and crowd vanished, replaced by the bare, padded room. Negasi pulled MIRI out of the wall slot.

  “Hey, I won!” Jeridan said. “I get MIRI.”

  “Not if you get knocked down,” MIRI said. “That was a rule you agreed on in match number 207. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night, Jeridan.”

  “Nah, I’ll just knock him down again,” Negasi said.

  “Can’t win for losing,” Jeridan said, shaking his head. “Story of my life.”

  A hot shower and a few minutes with a medikit got rid of most of their aches and pains and bruises. A good night out on the town would take care of the rest.

  By the time they left the hotel, it had grown dark. Only a few stars twinkled through the glow of Fletcher City’s skyline. The thin crescent of Sagitta Prime’s nearer moon hung low in the sky. Two smaller, more distant moons, visible only as bright points of light, shone near the zenith.

  A group of Earth pilgrims stood on the curb, mostly older men and women hoping to finally see the home world before they died. A woman stood at the center holding a tablet up at the sky. On it was a star map corresponding to what they could have seen if it hadn’t been for the city lights. A faint white dot was circled in red.

  “I’ve upped the magnitude so you can see it,” the woman said as Jeridan and Negasi came out. “At the next port of call, we’ll be able to see it with the naked eye.”

  “Where are you stopping next? Siaru?” Jeridan asked.

  The woman turned to him. She had a deeply lined face framed by long gray hair. She stood erect, her manner calm.

  “That’s right. Do you know it?”

  “I do. It’s only forty light years away, so the trip won’t be so bad. Make sure you bring plenty of tranquilizers if you’re going on the Interstellar Bus.”

  The woman nodded. “We’ve been on it before. Thank you for your concern.”

  Jeridan pitied them. At only 1.05 light years per day, they’d be on the damned thing for more than a month.

  “Siaru is a desert world,” he said. “Get away from the spaceport and you’ll have clear skies. You’ll be able to see Sol no problem.”

  She smiled. “We’ll do that. Thank you for the advice.”

  “Breath some Earth air for us,” Negasi said.

  “I’ll breath it and say your names,” the woman said in the customary reply. “What are they?”

  Negasi told her. The woman touched the pad, scrolled down a long list of names, and added theirs to the end. Jeridan and Negasi shook everyone’s hand, wished them safe travels, and summoned an autocar to take them into the city center. For a minute, neither spoke.

  “When did you meet your first pilgrim?” Jeridan asked at last.

  “Oh, I don’t know. When I was thirteen or fourteen. Butara Prime is off the primary routes. We didn’t see many of them. I asked him to breathe in my name, though.”

  “I did the first time I met one too. I was only nine. Man, that’s almost twenty-five years ago. He must have made it by now.”

  “They all make it,” Negasi said. “It takes time, but every one of them makes it. Lots of people have breathed our name on Earth.”

  Jeridan didn’t reply. The pilgrims didn’t all make it and Negasi knew that as well as he did. Pirates, raiders, wars between solar systems, hostile aliens, ship malfunctions … probably only one in five pilgrims ever lived to see Earth. But no one ever talked about that. It was better just to believe.

  The autocar whisked them down a broad avenue as other vehicles hurtled past in both directions. Sagitta Prime was a fairly high-tech world, one of the more prosperous ones that still had natural resources to exploit after the Galactic Civil War made all the jump gates go offline. Gleaming office buildings rose to either side, with holographic advertisements shimmering in the night. The place looked like paradise compared to the decrepit star base Jeridan’s family had escaped from, or the boring farm planet Negasi had left.

  “Welcome to Fletcher City, capital city of Sagitta Prime,” the autocar’s female voice purred. “There are a host of budget dining and entertainment options where you can enjoy the best the planet has to offer for a low, low price.”

  Jeridan grunted. Of course, the autocar’s computer was hooked into the planetary credit network, and their credit rating had just gone down the toilet.

  “The only thing we want is the local whiskey,” Negasi said. “And some loose women wouldn’t be too bad either.”

  “Good man,” Jeridan said.

  “Prostitution is illegal on Sagitta Prime and punishable by—”

  Negasi cut the computerized voice off. “I’ve never paid for it in my life and I’ve never taken what wasn’t on offer. I want a hookup joint.”

  “Cupid’s Arrow has a 9.3 romance rating,” the autocar purred.

  “Out of ten?” Jeridan asked.

  “Out of twenty. It’s the highest ranking of any venue for someone of your budgetary limitations.”

  “Take us there,” Negasi grunted.

  “Come on, let’s look for something better!” Jeridan said.

  “With what money? Take us to Cupid’s Arrow. Is it still happy hour?”

  “Happy hour at Cupid’s Arrow ends in 27 minutes. It will take an estimated 8 minutes and 57.9 seconds to arrive.”

  Within 27 minutes, Jeridan and Negasi were gloriously, exultantly, irretrievably drunk. Cupid’s Arrow had pulsing lights, a busy dance floor, and a long glass bar filled with Teminans. The florescent, sluglike aliens changed hue with different pitches and tonalities of sound, so they were the perfect decoration for any hopping nightspot. Teminans lived far below the surface of a sea world a hundred light years away, a place of silence punctuated only by the ultrasonic song of its various denizens. Treble and bass were alien to the Teminans and acted as a drug for the sentient species.

  Teminan junkies were the in thing for bar decoration on human planets.

  Jeridan was getting hooked on the things himself. As the dance music thudded, the intelligent deep-sea slugs gyrated and turned brilliant hues of azure and emerald, teal and ruby. They dazzled his eyes with their intricate, ecstatic dance, their colors heightened by the effect of the alcohol in his system.

  Jeridan wasn’t seeing double yet, but he was working on it. He drained the last of his local whiskey, waved over a real human waitress—a nice touch—and ordered another. Negasi gulped down the last of his and did the same.

  “We’re not drunk enough yet,” Negasi shouted over the music.

  “I agree,” Jeridan shouted back. “But I thought you wanted to find someone for the night.”

  Negasi waved his hand sloppily over his head. “Nah, look at this crowd. Bunch of young service workers. Store clerks and waiters on their one night off this week. How did we sink so low?”

  “Missed shipments. Backstabbing middlemen.”

  “And greedy banks.”

  “I know!” Jeridan slammed his fist on the fake marble table. “So we were three trips past due. Can’t they have a little confidence in us? Where’s their sense of adventure? Where’s their joi de viv?”

  “Joi de vivre.”

  “What?”

  “Joi de vivre. You’re saying it wrong.”

  “Shut up. I’m captain.”

  “A captain who says things wrong.”

  Their whiskey came, lovely Sagittan whiskey that tasted and felt like the real thing but gave no hangover at all. The recipe was a closely guarded secret, and heavy export duties meant only the elite on other planets could ever afford it. If Jeridan and Negasi could get those crates off planet without paying duty, they could sell them at a discount price and still get rich.

  Jeridan shook his head. No time to think about work. He raised his glass, his friend raised his, and they drank.

  “Who cares how you say stuff in some dead old Earth language?” Jeridan declared. “The point is that those bankers have no imagination. No balls.”

  “Like this crowd,” Negasi wrinkled his nose and waved his hand again. “Squares. I don’t want to sleep with any of these losers. Ugly and boring.”

  “Boring, sure. But ugly? Don’t be unfair.”

  “They’re ugly, I tell you!” Negasi shot back, shouting now. “Ugly because they chose the easy, dull life. I could have stayed a farmer. You could have gotten some tech job on that godforsaken station. We would have had stable lives. We would have known where our next meal came from, but for what? Would we have seen those volcano sprites on Gamma Sagitta? Or dodged that battle between the Deep Space Alliance and the Grish? We would have done nothing with our lives.”

  “You’re right,” Jeridan raised his glass, which was already half empty. “But I still say the rich are worse. It’s kind of understandable why the poor are scared, but the rich? If they have a boring life, it’s because they’re cowards. They have the credits, but no balls.”

  “True enough,” Negasi declared. “Credits and no balls.”

  “CREDITS AND NO BALLS!” they bellowed together, turning to the crowd.

  They were about to shout it again when the words caught in their throat.

  A group of well-dressed young men was passing their table. Now they stopped. They had the aquiline noses, perfect hair, and fashionable strobecolor capes of the idly rich youth of this planet.

  Jeridan hated them instantly.

  One of the crowd arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow, looked down his nose at them, and said, “Excuse me, were you addressing us?”

  “There’s no excuse for you,” Negasi slurred.

  The rich kid looked them both up and down, taking in their flight suits and their obvious inebriation. “I do not wish my evening spoiled by sharing a venue with a pair of drunken spacers. Be off with you. Go to some dreary spaceport bar.”

  Jeridan and Negasi looked at each other.

  “Was that a threat?” Jeridan said.

  “You’re jumping the gun,” his friend replied. “We’re supposed to say something witty and mildly insulting, then he loses his temper and ups the insult. Then we call his bluff and force him into action in order to save face.”

  “Oh, right. Ah, to hell with it.”

  Jeridan stood. He wavered for a moment as the room tilted at an odd angle before it righted itself. Those luminescent slugs at the bar turned bright orange as a new song came on.

  He made a show of counting the rich kids. “Thirteen of you. That’s my lucky number. All right, we both know how this works. You’ve been raised on nanovitamins and growth hormones and you’ve probably all taken some sissy hand-to-hand combat class at your elite university. You’ve decorated your rooms in daddy’s mansion with participation trophies. So you come here slumming, thinking you’re going to go home with some working-class girl who will be impressed by your hovercar and cultivated diamonds, but then you come across two real men and get worried about the competition. So you pick a f—”

  A fist rudely interrupted him before Jeridan got to finish his speech. A pity. He was really getting into it.

  He rolled with the punch, which barely registered on his whiskey-dulled nerves, and buried a fist into the rich boy’s stomach. Jeridan followed with an uppercut that sent the bastard flying into the arms of his friends.

  Things got a bit blurry after that.