The Armoured Ghost (4 page)

Stamper and some of the other young Gladiators used the junior cadets as their slaves. They got them to do jobs for them, bullied them and sometimes even practised some of their nastier fighting moves on them.

Rake had stood up to Stamper when he first came to the Academy. And ever since, Stamper had targeted him for the worst treatment. Rake lifted his hands to his face. He wasn’t a wimp, but Stamper was a Gladiator now. He could make Rake’s life a misery. If Rake told on the older boy, nothing would happen and everybody would hate him for being a squealer.

‘You shouldn’t have offered to hit him with the stick,’ Snow said from behind him. ‘Maybe if you stop giving him all that attitude, he’ll leave you alone.’

Rake looked up. Snow was standing on the concrete slope, behind and to the left of him. Sitting down next to him, she stared at him with her big innocent eyes. Rake often wondered how
this
quiet little girl had ended up in the Academy, training to be a Gladiator.

‘I’ll never stop,’ he told her. ‘Stamper can go and rot. Someday I’ll be a Gladiator too, and I’ll kick his backside from one side of the Arena to the other.’

‘I bet you will,’ she said. She even sounded as if she believed it. ‘Listen, I was talking to Oddball in training. He was helping me on the chariot simulator. I’m still useless at it. Anyway, you know Oddball works in the Armour Department, right?’

Rake nodded. Oddball was a bit of a geek, but he was OK. He was mad into doing little experiments and liked to make things with bits of scrap he dug out of the bins in the Armour and Weapons Departments. He talked about weird stuff all the time, as if his mind was on some other planet. Rake shook his head. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him that Snow and Oddball would be friends.

‘Well, I asked him about Mad Jack’s helmet,’ Snow said. ‘You know, to see if they were fixing it. To find out if there was anything strange about the helmet. And he doesn’t know about Mad
Jack’s
armour, but he’s been watching the guy who’s in charge of making the armour – that old guy, Salt.

‘So, Oddball, he’s pretty good at making stuff himself. He reckons that Salt is fooling with the armour sometimes. Oddball thinks that Salt is designing some of the armour so that it’s
made
to break when someone hits it.’ Snow frowned, puzzled by it all.

Rake’s face was twisted up, not because he was confused, but because he was getting angrier by the second.

‘Why would they do that?’ Snow asked. ‘Why use fake blood to pretend someone’s injured, or make armour that’s designed to break when it gets hit?’

‘Because somebody’s cheating,’ Rake growled. ‘Gladiators come from all over the galaxy to compete in the Games. When the Armouron Knights disappeared, the Gladiators became the greatest warriors in the galaxy. Billions of spectators watch every fight from the stands or on the web. People can make a lot of money by betting on who will win a fight. Imagine how easy it would be to get that money if you knew
someone
was going to lose on purpose. Or if they lost because their armour was easy to break.’

He looked out at the city and took a deep breath.

‘And the audience loves it when a Gladiator gets hit so hard his armour cracks open. You get extra points for that in a competition. The crowds go wild. Somebody is cheating – they’re fixing the competitions so they can make money. And if Salt is messing with the armour, then he’s right in the middle of the whole mess.’

Rake stood up and turned towards the door that led into the stairwell.

‘There’s something else he told me,’ Snow said, pointing at the medallion on Rake’s belt, the one that marked his cadet grade. ‘Our medallions – they’re not just plastic discs.’

‘I know. They have all our identity info on them,’ Rake said.

‘And each one has a tracking device,’ Snow added. ‘If you’re wearing your belt, the instructors know exactly where you are.’

Rake stared down at his belt. Any cadet who was found out of their dorm without their belt on was severely punished. He gritted his teeth and
headed
for the stairs.

‘What are you going to do?’ Snow asked him.

‘I’m going to find out what the clack is going on,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ Snow chirped, as she followed him down the stairs.

Chapter 6

The Investigation

IT TOOK RAKE
a while to convince Snow that she couldn’t come with him. It was past lights-out: they were both supposed to be in bed. Cadets caught anywhere outside their dorm rooms after lights-out would catch hell from the instructors. And to make things worse, Rake was leaving his belt under the mattress of his bed. He didn’t want to be responsible for getting her in trouble. And he wanted to do this alone.

Creeping along the dimly lit corridors, he made his way to the manufacturing block of the Academy. This was where the armour, weapons and chariots were made for the Gladiators. This part of the complex was made up of workshops
and
rooms filled with heavy machinery. Some of the lights were still on. As part of their training, the cadets had to learn about each section of the Academy. The large room that Rake had come to was Salt’s workshop, and the old man was still working.

The door was only open a crack and Rake peeked through, watching the old engineer. Salt was a tall, stocky man. He looked about sixty, but could have been older. Despite his lined face and grey hair, he looked in excellent shape. There was a welding mask covering his face now. Salt put down the blowtorch he was using to weld a joint in a shield. He took off the mask and sighed, wiping sweat from his face.

A hand came down on Rake’s shoulder, nearly making him jump out of his skin. With a thumping heart, he turned, expecting to see one of the instructors behind him. But it was only Oddball.

‘Hey! Snow said you’d be here,’ Oddball whispered. ‘I want to join your investigation.’

He was a big guy, older than Rake, but like Rake he was a Grade Three. Dark-skinned, with short dreadlocks, Oddball wore a pair of goggles that
never
seemed to come unstuck from his face. Rake wondered if he slept with them on.

‘I’m not “investigating”
anything
,’ Rake growled back. ‘I’m just checking out some stuff. Get lost!’

‘Nope,’ Oddball said, shaking his head. He always spoke very quickly, as if he couldn’t get the words out fast enough for his hyperactive brain. ‘You’re going to need me. You don’t know your way around here well enough. And you don’t know anything about armour and materials and chemistry and stuff. If something was wrong, you wouldn’t be able to see it. Me, I’ve got the grey cells.’

Rake was about to argue that he had enough grey cells of his own, when he spotted Salt coming towards the door. He pushed Oddball in front of him into a room on the other side of the corridor, closing the door after them. They watched through a narrow gap, as Salt came out of his workshop and headed off down the corridor, striding along with a walking stick and a heavy limp.

The two boys crept out into the corridor after he was gone, and made their way cautiously into the workshop. The place was filled with workbenches, racks of hand tools, power tools and
pieces
of armour. Rake wasn’t sure where to start, so he went over to examine the shield Salt had been working on. He recognized it. It belonged to a Gladiator known as The Boulder.

‘It’s been made so it will break into pieces,’ Oddball said from behind him, reaching round to point at it. ‘See the lines, here and here? This gets hit and
KA-BAM
! It’ll break like a piece of glass.’

‘Yeah,’ Rake said. ‘These are weak seams. The Boulder’s going to be in for a real shock when he goes to protect himself with this. So Salt is making
faulty
armour on
purpose
. We have to report him to the instructors. But we’ll need proof – something that’s small enough to sneak out of here. Let’s have a look and see what else we can find.’

They had just started searching around when
Oddball
suddenly pushed Rake down behind a workbench that held a huge power drill. Someone was at the door of the workshop. They held their breaths, thinking that Salt had come back. But it was a much smaller figure that slipped in through the doorway. It was a girl, taller than Snow, but shorter than Rake. She moved quickly and quietly around the room, exploring every inch of the place.

The girl was tanned, with an untidy mop of brown hair and a wiry build. Rake and Oddball exchanged looks. They didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t a cadet. Her clothes were like those of someone from the city. Brown baggy trousers with pockets on the legs, a grey sweater with a hood and grey trainers. The intruder wore no medallion on her belt, no identity disc at all.

She had a backpack with her and she was picking up some of the smaller pieces of armour and tucking them away into her pack. So the girl was a thief. She was coming closer to the workbench, but stopped at one of the computer consoles. Switching it on, she started to use the hologram screen to search the Academy database.

‘Grab her!’ Rake barked.

Oddball jumped up and went to snatch hold of the girl. She kicked him in the stomach and leaped over the bench – but Rake was already moving around to the other side and he caught hold of her left arm as she landed. She tried to punch him with her right fist. He blocked the strike and spun her round. He forced her against the bench, locking her arm behind her. The girl wriggled and thrashed and spat at him.

‘Japes! It’s like trying to hold onto a fish!’ he grunted. ‘You’re not going anywhere, I’m good at this. Who are you and how did you get in here?’

‘Go smack yourself,’ she retorted.

‘Are you in with Salt?’ Rake pressed her. ‘Are you helping him fix the fights?’

‘What?’ she said, frowning. ‘What are you talking about?’

Rake and Oddball looked at each other. If they took her to the Academy’s security guards, they’d have to explain why they were in the workshop themselves. Salt would be called for. They’d have to accuse the head of the Armour Department of cheating, right to his face. Suddenly, they were both very frightened. They weren’t sure what to do. What if he could explain the faulty armour?
What
if the security people were in on it? Then it occurred to Rake that this girl might be useful.

‘The old guy, Salt,’ Rake said to her, loosening the armlock a little. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Not much – but I know he’s hardcore,’ she replied, giving in a little as she twisted her head round to study Rake’s face. ‘I . . . I was caught stealing last night, by three of the White Knights.’

The White Knights were the armoured police who enforced the law in Nu-Topia. After the Armouron Knights had disappeared, Earth had collapsed into chaos. Then the White Knights had come along. They were good at their job. There was almost no crime in Nu-Topia.

‘It was just a burger from a street stall,’ the girl told them. ‘I was really hungry, so I grabbed it and ran and they came after me. They caught me in this back alley. I think they were going to bag me up and . . . and . . . make me disappear. It’s happened to a bunch of people I know. So, anyway, this old guy was on the street when the White Knights started chasing after me. They caught me in the alley and . . . and I thought I was
toast
. But suddenly he’s behind them, wearing a scarf round his face. Standing there, armed with nothing but this walking stick, telling them to let me go. They went to grab him as well . . .’