Chapter 3

If the first day was endurance, the second day was finesse. Starting in a gymnasium, the remaining candidates, down one since the previous night, gathered for a series of trials. The easiest and the hardest for Gavril were the knife fights. He was completely comfortable with a knife in either hand, and had been forced to keep his skills up because of the jungle fighting. However, his opponents were unnaturally fast, had no sense of self-preservation and never, ever backed down. In his third of three fights, he had been forced to switch hands and punch the slippery bastard in the jaw — that dropped him. Even so, Gavril bled from a dozen cuts and one shallow stab wound.

The medic slapped on some skin melt and sent him off to his next trial. He groaned when he saw what was in store. The woman running the trial was Tolaydo. The gravity of the Tolaydo's planet was heavy by human standards, which had produced particular human traits to come to the fore. The inhabitants were short, squat and broad, strong as bulls, and had little discernable use for humor. Even the women had more upper body strength the most males of other planets.

This trial was the swinging of kettle weights, large balls of solid metal with a kettle-like handle that allowed a one or two handled grip. It was an ancient form of military weight training from Old Earth. The task was to mimic the moves made by the leader as she swung, lifted, and maneuvered the ball through a series of acrobatic exercises. The task was damnedably worse because there was only one ball. She performed the maneuver and then passed the ball to the candidate, at speed. The key was to anticipate and to smoothly shift the weight of the kettle before it wrenched the arm from its socket.

Gavril watched the man in front of him take the hand-off with a sudden grimace as the weight registered across his body. He got halfway through the swing around his back when his hand slipped and the balled landed with a resounding thud that no one could ignore.

The Tolaydo woman snorted with a look of disgust on her face. Men like Gavril were not supposed to be afraid of women with weights, but he was terrified. He saw what she could do and he knew that he couldn't. Somehow he had to gain an advantage or he would also drop the kettle. He could do nothing about the weight but maybe he could try being polite to the woman. After all, if he was terrified of her, many others probably were as well. He calculated that his fellows were probably as rude to her, if not more, as they were to him.

She motioned him forward and asked him in her thick accent if he was ready.

He nodded but then added, "Don't hurt me."

"What?" she said with a confused look on her face.

"Don't hurt me, please," Gavril said.