"How is this noteworthy? A weapon is anything used to inflict damage on a being. That is the definition of a weapon. It could be anything you pick up, anything you use."
"Yes, but don't forget that with their nimble hands and tough fingers, humans can pick up almost anything they are strong enough to lift."
Algo skimmed the first several pages, then chaptered ahead in his reader. "Hm. It says here that humans don't actually need weapons as such. What is this?"
"Ah, I see you have skipped ahead to 'hand to hand combat.'"
"Yes. What does that mean? Assuming the combatant even has hands."
"Humans - indeed, most of the lifeforms on their whole backwards planet - can engage in violence against others with no weapons whatsoever. It's a side effect of their rigid skeletal frameworks. Even though the musculature is relatively forgiving in any kind of impact, the rigid structure makes it possible to concentrate the impact forces in a small area. Other rigid creatures are easily damaged by such forces."
Algo puffed up, turning colors slightly. "Well, that's useless against us." He flattened himself out, then pulled himself back into a sphere. "Being amorphous, I can't see how a human could damage us. This is going to be an easy win."
"Algo, just read the book. Quickly. Your bout is tomorrow and it's a no-holds barred free for all. The betting spread is closing and the human's deficit is almost gone. The crowd is starting to swing their way."
"Pfeh." Algo waved dismissively at his handler, who surged orange and sailed angrily out the portal.
The next morning, Algo squared up - literally, assuming various geometric shapes and colors to amuse and thrill the crowd - against his unimpressive opponent.
The creature wasn't especially large. It was maybe only a half-portion of his own mass, not changing shape at all and the shape it had was singularly unappealing, limbs and bumps and the odd cloud of extra-fine cilia around one protuberance at the upper end.
The referee warbled the usual warnings. Algo ignored them; a free for all was just that: do what works, however it works. No killing, either combatant could tap out at any time. Incapacitate, force a yield, win.
The combat was to take place in a Type 3 Simulated Environment, representing a typical spacecraft interior with the usual appointments: bulkheads, enclosures, the equipment a vessel would need to navigate between secondaries in a jovian system. It was a pretty big system with several major jovians, each of which swarmed with secondaries. The spacecraft type wasn't specified but required by the rules to have details representative of vessels from all the major species including Algo's own and even humans, to ensure neither combatant had an unfair advantage.
The bout began. Algo surged ahead to engulf the human, which kicked off the ground to sail above him in the low gravity. That was to be expected, but he hadn't anticipated that the human would be so comfortable. According to what little research he had done, humans had evolved in a relatively high-gravity environment and were heavily specialized for that.
Oops. The human, with its rigid framework, had the magical advantage of leverage and had been able to push with great speed and force, and now here he was dawdling through the central volume of the space and unable to change his main mass's vector significantly, except...
He launched an extension at the human to grab hold of it, but when he did make contact and began to wrap around the human's appendage, the human made a funny motion with its limb and wound the extension up and up until it had been wrapped up faster than he could extend more of his mass into it. The extension pulled loose.
Not a big deal - extensions popped loose all the time. It wriggled and squealed and appeared to be trying to engulf the human's limb but had entirely too little mass to make any progress. Separated from his intellect, it might rely on instinctive actions, however being completely incompatible biochemically, it didn't dare try to digest the creature.
But it did. Separated from his main body mass as it was, Algo's separated extension was now pretty dumb and acting on very primitive instincts indeed. He saw it change colors slightly as it concentrated digestive juices close to the human's skin surface, then change again, violently, as the reaction took place.
"Frikkin' OW!" The human made the first sound Algo had heard from it. "Ya little shit!" The human leapt off the wall it had sailed toward while battling the extension, and flew through the open portal.
In an enclosure resembling a ship's galley, the human jerked open an insulated box and thrust the arm with the extension inside. Suddenly subjected to the freezing cold, the extension instinctively contracted to a minimum surface area shape - a sphere - and turned nearly black. The human slammed the door on the shape.
Algo came surging through the portal behind the human, just as the human whipped a cooking vessel off a rack and scooped it through Algo's body mass. He felt a tremendous portion of his mass come away and as it did, another portion of his intellect went blank. The human slapped a lid onto the cooking vessel before the portion could escape, and stuffed the pot into another insulated box and slammed that door too.
Algo felt he had lost nearly half his mind and his entire mass advantage, now approximately equal to the human and the wretched combat had only been going on for two standard minutes! The human was examining him carefully.
"Everything is a weapon," the book had stated. While the human was unarmed, it nevertheless had adapted found objects to violent needs. This room appeared to be mostly representative of human technology, and it was using human gadgets to disable him in pieces. He needed to move the battle to a space where the human might be less familiar with its surroundings.
Algo surged out the portal and down the passageway. He had an idea and needed to act on it before even more bits of his intelligence were wrestled away from him.
"Oh no you don't," the human called after him. It came out the portal as well.
Perfect. Come and get me, he thought.
But it didn't.
Gina watched the blob recede into the distance. She hadn't been sure she had understood the briefing materials clearly - they had been translated through two different languages before winding up in Terran Standard - but apparently she'd picked up some of it well enough. The creature wasn't grievously injured by having bits of itself torn off, and the tearing itself wasn't a big deal. They really were a kind of nonspecialized cellular colony. The bigger they got, the smarter they got.
Native to the warmer depths of the system's second major jovian planet indecipherable they do not fare well in lower temperatures; the instinctive response to sudden chills is to assume as small and dense a form as possible, to fall back to where life sustaining heat might be found. When fighting an infection, a indecipherable will also assume this same shape, to better conserve its heat and raise its internal temperature to kill off the pathogen.
The book, "Weapons are Useless Against the Unkillable," had been some of the strangest briefing materials she had ever clapped eyes on, but the gist of it boiled down to: the indecipherable were essentially invulnerable to anything short of fire. Striking them made a ripple in their body mass, cutting simply separated this part over here from that part over there...and then the two parts flowed back together again. But they definitely had a preferred temperature range, several degrees warmer than that of humans and precious little tolerance for cold. Whoever had written the book had been quite impressed by the creatures' durability.
But they hadn't known any humans.
And when she had stuck her arm with the blob of indecipherable into the freezer, sure enough the critter had condensed and balled up. It was easy enough to contain it then. But her skin still itched - had it tried to absorb her? Did that constitute a violation of the rules?
"It says 'no biting,' but this thing doesn't have a mouth."
"Human Gina," said the voice in her ear, "I can lodge a complaint if you like, but if the fight is stopped, we waive all wagers. You will have to pay a forfeiture fee."
"Dammit Booj, I was just thinking aloud."
"I do not understand." Her local handler, an immense but low-density native of one of the medium-sized moons, had a voice like a bass guitar. "Are you experiencing a cognitive failure? Do we need to cancel the contest?"
"NO! I'm fine. No cancelling, no failures! I'm not talking to you."
"But you were talking."
"Unless you hear me say your name, I'm not talking to you! Leave me be."
Damn Booj was like a mother hen and the worst kind of boxing promoter in one oddly contradictory role. He wanted to back a winning fighter, but he was willing to throw the fight at any moment. How did that figure?
That would have to wait.
The indecipherable - dammit, that was too clunky. "Booj, what do these people call themselves again?"
A teeth-grating screech sounded in her earpiece. "Holy smokes, is that the word?"
"Yes, Human Gina. Do you need to hear it again? Do you need assistance with the pronunciation?"
"How the hell do you even say that? I didn't know you could hit such a high pitch."
"I cannot. That was a recording."
"Well for Pete's sake. Booj, what do you call them?"
"In my language they are," and a luscious twanging with resonant overtones came through the earpiece, which tickled.
"I can't say that either. What did that mean in my language?"
"I am looking it up. Ah. It means Blobs."
Well, hell. "Okay. Thanks, Booj."
The Blob had skedaddled toward the aft end of the simulated ship, notably away from the simulated galley which clearly was too like human spaces with human-friendly stuff in it. So if he had gone toward somewhere else, he was looking to find something that skewed the environment in his favor.
She had determined by the Blob's resting coloration that it was considered a male, though how an amorphous creature that reproduced by some mechanism that emphatically was not intercourse considered itself male, she didn't really understand.
Unimportant. Ask him afterward. Whatever.
She couldn't wait for him here while he waited for her there. After a certain amount of time, passivity forfeitures would start to tick off against their winnings. No camping allowed, both combatants had to be actively engaged in pursuit, escape or combat, with a nominal amount of latitude permitted for conferring with handlers, resting and emergency self-care.
Her skin still itched. She leapt after the Blob.
Algo raced around the enclosure. It was a cargo space tailored to his own kind, racks of receptacles to secure bulk cargo spheres against acceleration in any direction. A fair amount of rigid structure, no hindrance to him moving in any direction - he could flow right around anything that got in the way - and plenty of hard things to clunk the human against if he could just get hold of her.
True to any cargo space, there was almost nothing loose here. Cargo spaces were designed with "loose" as a description to be avoided. Probably for the best, the human had made entirely too much use of things it was able to rapidly manipulate.
Here was a restraining strap. Against a creature of such constrained form as a human with a skeleton, it could be useful...except Algo himself couldn't really use it well. If he tried to pull too hard on it, it would simply pull through him. Straps were used in conjunction with winches. Except...
After his handler had stormed out, Algo had read a bit of the book despite his protestations. Not much, it wasn't very interesting despite the title. "Anything Is a Weapon," yes, that made sense if you thought about it. But context mattered. In his many contests-for-hire, he had used all manner of attacks against all manner of creatures, including once taking a very large and succulent vegetable and slowly, inexorably digesting it before the terrified eyes of a creature whose religion deified it. He had actually regretted that particular attack; the food had been very disagreeable, though the payoff had salved his rattled biochemistry. But in the section describing constrained-form lifeforms, he had become interested at the limits such constraints put on the lifeforms' mobility. Where the human had the advantage of sheer strength and no need to brace against anything to bring it to bear, its internal bracing meant that it couldn't flow. How far it could bend was limited, too. Whereas bits of himself could be scooped away from his mass and contained and he still be functional, the human could be constrained just by having a single limb trapped.
The human bashed through the hatch and was immediately entangled in the dangling mass of restraint strap that Algo had strewn through the air in front of the opening. A low whine emanated from across the cargo bay as a winch began reeling in the slack, and some of the lazily floating loops began to close around her.
Gina whirled to disentangle herself, but not before a loop closed around her leg, hauling her toward the cargo racks. She recognized the threat immediately.
Look at the racks themselves. No luck there: no sharp edges, and of course not. You wouldn't want sharp edges that might fray the straps. She pulled hard and listened as the winch groaned to a halt.
Huh. They don't pull them very tight. I wonder...she bit at the strap and was able to make a nick in it. Her leg wasn't going numb against the tension, but she certainly wasn't going anywhere until she got the entangling strap off...
The Blob came surging up from the floor - she guessed it might be the floor, in this nearly-zero-gee environment it hardly mattered - and she kicked a foot at its approach, missing but fortuitously throwing a loop of strap around the approaching pseudopod. She jerked the loop shut and the pseudopod was severed from the body mass. The smaller mass emitted a shrill screech and surged away.
Oh ho! The bigger they get, the smarter they get. But that also means that little bits are not smart. In fact if they're very small, that is, very not smart, they just try to escape. The little blob of Blob was still going, trying to put more distance between itself and her.
...wait...
...where the hell was the rest of the Blob?
Algo surged down the rack until he had engulfed the human's head. He wasn't proud of this attack but lacking other, more direct methods he would be satisfied to smother the creature with his own mass until it either tapped out or lost consciousness. It was proving far too fast for him to construct any kind of useful trap, constraints notwithstanding. It was strong and clever - just like he had thought himself, before part of his intelligence had been stuffed into a pot, another part shoved into a freezer and now part of it just running away. He had to end this quickly. And another of the constraints pointed out in the book had been that in such differentiated creatures, respiratory gas intake was consigned to a shockingly small part of the body, one that he could engulf despite his reduced volume. Gotcha, he thought to himself, trying not to feel too smug.
Gina felt the mass touch at the back of her neck like warm water, and then flow completely around her head. She spasmed for a moment, trying vainly to scoop it off and throw it, but her hands only thrust through the mass like viscous syrup, and it stayed put.
Sonuvabitch, she thought. He actually thought of a way to choke me out. The Blob couldn't squeeze, couldn't put pressure on any blood vessels and force her to lose consciousness quickly, but this would work unless she thought of something quickly. She couldn't hold her breath for much longer, not after all this exertion.
Giving up on using just her hands, Gina grabbed the hem of her snugsuit tunic and rapidly whipped it up and over her head, scooping the Blob away in a mass and, conveniently, completely clearing her mouth and nose.
Gotcha. There was precious little of the mass that wasn't captured inside the shirt, and she twisted it shut at the waist, pinching the neck closed and walking her fingers rapidly to reel in the sleeves as well.
Still tied to the cargo racks by the strap, she had nearly all of what was left of Algo inside her shirt.
Now what? Whacking him against anything would have no effect whatsoever. She couldn't let go of any part of the shirt to get loose from the strap.
The little bit of him she'd cut loose was nowhere to be seen. Chances were that the Blob would have had to chase it down himself, once the fight was over.
Oh, wait. No. Could that work?
She stretched the bundled shirt out, and twisted. Twisted, reset her grip, and twisted some more.
A garbled screech emanated from inside the shirt, but too late. She reset her grip and twisted even more, and the Blob squeezed in streamers through the fine fabric, droplets that tore loose and, all of them screeching in thin, tiny screams of alarm, swam away through the thick air of the cargo bay.
Gina observed the droplets all streaming away in panic, as if she had somehow frightened away a thick fog. She still held a sizable blob of Blob in her shirt, and reset her grip again.
The last bit of Blob she hadn't contained or torn asunder, the bit that had squeezed out of the neck hole as she peeled her shirt off, swam in front of her.
"Tap?" It said, in plain Terran Standard. It swam over to the cargo rack and tried, weakly, to knock against the rigid surface. "Tap?"
Gina held off wringing more Blob out of her shirt. "What are you saying, little guy?"
"Tap?" It tapped on the cargo rack again. "Tap?"
"Do you yield?"
"Tap!"
"Are you tapping out?"
"Tap!" It knocked on the cargo rack again.
Gina spoke into her earpiece. "You hear that, Booj?"
"We hear it," his basso voice rumbled. "That was remarkable. No rigid has ever beaten a Blob before." The lighting in the cargo hold brightened, and the winch reversed itself so the tension on her leg let off.
"Cool." Gina opened the shirt and carefully turned it right side out, releasing the trapped mass of Blob as she did. It immediately surged over to absorb the little delegate that had offered to end the contest.
"Help?" said the Blob.
"Sure." Before trying to mop up the Bloblets that were too small and unintelligent to do more than avoid them, she took the Blob back to the galley, where she reunited him with the larger chunks she'd stuffed into the freezer and refrigerator. He immediately became much smarter and more eloquent.
Gina watched as the Blob went through something like a convulsive shudder, if a free-floating blob of goo could shudder.
"That is very unpleasant. No portion of me has ever been that cold before."
"Sorry about that. No holds barred."
"Yes. I thought I had you at the end."
"You almost did. It was close."
"I thought humans were constrained? How did you take yourself apart?"
"What?"
The Blob extended a pseudopod to indicate the shirt, now tucked into the waistband of her snugsuit pants. "You took this part of yourself loose and constrained me within it. I had nowhere to grab, nothing to engulf. You engulfed me...and then did something strange and I could feel bits of myself tearing away..."
Gina chuckled, and took a moment to pull the shirt back on. Among such blatantly non-humanoid creatures - creature? There was just the one of him after all - she hadn't felt naked until they had started talking about her clothes, which was weird. "Sorry, friend. This isn't part of me. This is clothing. I can take it off whenever I want, put it back on, it's just clothing."
"It's a weapon."
"Well, no. But yeah. Anything is a weapon, depending on how you use it."
"I am learning that."
"Come on, let's go find the rest of you."
"My name is Algo."
"Call me Gina. I'll go where you go, Algo."
"This was an educational experience. I will treat rigids with more respect hereafter."
Together they sailed back toward the cargo bay, to chase down the terrified and hiding bits of Algo's escaped ego.
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