by Tristan Vick
Her armor’s thrusters fired and propelled her to cruising velocity. She straightened her body, flattened her arms to her sides, and entered a zero-gravity freefall.
She turned her head to the side and glanced at the drop ship. She made eye contact with the pilot, and he tapped his fingers to his helmet and saluted her, letting her know he had eyes on her, and she nodded and turned her attention back toward the web of glistening silver balls that formed a protective barrier around her fleet.
Jegra brought her arm display up and tapped a passcode into her holographic HUD. The smart-mines parted, allowing Jegra and the drop ship to pass through unaccosted. Once they were safely through, the gaping hole sealed itself up behind them.
“We’re through,” Jegra said into her headset.
“Copy that,” Lance Bishop’s voice came back over the comm. “The knights will run their final drop status check and join you shortly.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Jegra said, smiling behind the glowing orange and green lights of her visor’s heads up display.
Lance turned toward his brotherhood of knights and said, “Helmets on.” Everyone, including Brei’Alas secured their helmets and then prepared for zero-gravity space drop.
Once his helmet was secured, his visor flashed and he checked his own HUD, making sure they were all a go. Everything checked out, so he turned and gave the thumbs up.
“Alright brothers and sister, we are go for a ship-to-ship space jump. Prepare for depressurization in three, two, one...” Reaching up to the red button on the wall next to the rear bulkhead, he smashed it and the loading ramp opened right into the blackness of interstellar space.
The air of the cargo bay seeped out with a swoosh that ruffled Brei’Alas’s EV suit and caused her to brace herself so she didn’t get blown out the back.
All 1,800 meters of the Qui’tek’alon came into view and Jegra used her maneuvering thrusters to bring the ship into dead center of her freefall. The drop ship opened up above her and one by one the knights leaped out from the ship, fired their thrusters, and joined her in the freefall.
Lance Bishop and Brei’Alas were the last to make the jump.
All twenty-two of them fell into formation and Jegra gave the signal for them to fan out. They did as commanded, and then, the Qui’tek’alon coming up fast, the knights fired their reverse thrusters and set down all along the ship’s hull with barely a sound.
Lance Bishop set down next to Jegra and gently placed Brei on her feet. She nodded, thanking him for the assist, and he nodded back. Then, drawing out his plasma sword, he thrust it into the hull of the ship.
All twenty knights did the same, all along various strategic access points on the ship, cutting their way inside.
“Knock, knock,” Jegra said into her helmet as she dropped down through the glowing ring of molten korridium and onto one of the upper decks of the ship.
Almost as soon as they’d breached the ship’s hull, the structural integrity shields came on with a flicker and then solidified into a static field of blue energy.
As soon as the deck had pressurized, Jegra tapped the side of her helmet and it unfurled itself and automatically retreated back into her suit. She motioned with two fingers for Sir Bishop to go left and she gestured toward Brei to accompany her right.
“Where are we going?” asked Brei.
“Hunting,” Jegra replied without looking back.
39
Several heavily armed Dragonian lizard men escorted Danica, bound and shackled, out of the arena and down a winding trail which led to a white sandy beach along the shoreline. It was ironic, she thought, that the Dragonians were now the slave race. They were once a race of galactic conquerors, but now, they merely comprised the hired help.
Roughly five thousand years ago, if her memory served correctly, the warrior lizard race of Dragonians had led an invasion force to Dagon Prime and, using their brute strength and sheer force of numbers, sacked the ocean city of Korsa.
What the Dragonians hadn’t counted on, though, was Ra’hallek, the warrior emperor’s, love of battle. A genius level strategist, he gathered his finest warriors and marched into battle right alongside them.
That marked the Blood Campaigns, as he had used EMPs to knock out the Dragonian’s unshielded technology and then laid them to waste in hand to hand combat. Although the lizard men and women were fierce warriors, the Dagon soldiers matched them in size and strength. It was like letting two Titans go at it.
But the Dragonians had made a grave miscalculation. They didn't know about the Dagons’ fusion with Dygra crystals and were not aware of the energy abilities of the blue-skins. As such, even without working technology, the Dagons had the clear advantage.
With the war won, Ra’hallek erected the first official gladiatorial games in honor of the fallen men and women who had valiantly defended their homeland and their world.
At first, the victorious Dagon race forced the Dragonians to fight one another to the death, as punishment for their war crimes. When the novelty of watching leather-necks die finally wore off, Ra’hallek issued a decree that opened up the games to other war criminals.
After a few hundred years of sending the worst criminals to die in the arena, however, the games were dissolved, being considered degrading and unnecessarily cruel under the new Commonwealth Alliance peacetime accords.
It wasn’t until Loki’Alloran Rhadamanthus, a rebel in his own right, and Dakroth’s father, reinstated the games as a means of prisoner control and as a way to regulate violent offenders and maintain a peaceful republic. But there was one caveat. The Intergalactic Gladiatorial Syndicate had to oversee them. This third-party oversight served to avoid any potential corruption from within the Imperial government.
IGS now acted as the largest warrant collecting agency in the galaxy and were known as the “Peace Keepers.” They were, essentially, space marshals, and had near unlimited jurisdiction. They were also the ones that outsourced to bounty hunters like Raven Nightguard. Space was a big place; it was easier to pay a freelancer a meager sum than have to run an entire team, ship, crew, and supplies to catch one lowly bail jumper.
And, speaking of IGS, that’s how Danica came to find herself stuck on Arkadia, wearing nothing but a flimsy floral patterned bikini two sizes too small for her.
As they wound down the path toward a grove of palms, the scorching hot beach sand burning her feet, Danica felt like she’d melt beneath sweltering heat of the sun.
“My how the mighty have fallen,” a voice quipped as Danica approached a small outdoor encampment set up in the shade of the leafy palms.
Stretched out on a sunbathing bed, a Bre’lal woman basked in the hot, mid-day sun. She had on a white bikini with an exotic purple print, and beneath the spaghetti straps of her back she could make out the light olive colored lines where her dark olivine skin had kept its original pigment.
Although her face was turned away, making it impossible to tell who she was, she had three servant girls who diligently attended her every need. Coincidentally, Danica recognized one of the girls as the same one who’d fallen into the arena yesterday. The girl she’d rescued.
One of the girls fanned their mistress with a giant palm leaf while two others kept her margarita topped off and applied a healthy lather of tanning oil to her skin, keeping her glistening and beautiful.
The woman tossed her forest green hair to the side and slowly raised her face, her eyes opening slightly as she turned her maudlin gaze toward Danica before lackadaisically taking another sip from the straw of her margarita, which sat on a small table next to her.
When Danica saw that it was Onelle Te’Legra Agnar, she rolled her eyes and grumbled, “Onelle? I should have known it’d be you. Only you require this much pampering just to take a stroll along the beach.”
“It’s true,” she admitted. “I have a taste for the finer things in life. But there’s nothing wrong with that.” Waving Danica over, she gestured for her to stand in the sha
de. “Care for a drink?” Onelle motioned for her servant girl to pour Danica a margarita.
“No, thanks,” Danica replied. When Onelle went back to sipping on her straw as though she had nothing more to say, Danica sarcastically quipped, “If that’ll be all.”
She turned to leave, but stopping her were the crackling tips of six charged stun-rods and a group of angry looking Dragonian guards. Deciding it was probably against her best interests to take on six Dragonian security officers while in shackles, she raised her hands in surrender, blew a tuft of hair away from her eyes in a fit of annoyance, and pivoted back to face Onelle’s smirking expression.
“We’re finished when I say we’re finished,” Onelle informed the gladiatrix. Sitting up, Onelle swung her legs over the edge of her long beach chair and rose to her feet. The girl from yesterday handed her a towel so she could dab herself dry, and once she’d finished, she handed back the towel and turned her attention to Danica.
Beads of sweat already reforming on her green skin, glistening trails began to run down the humps of her breasts, which were being held in place by the white and purple bikini top. Onelle cleared her throat, as if to say my eyes are up here, and waited for Danica to look up.
Onelle placed her hands on her hips, met Danica’s gaze, and held it, showing she wasn’t in the least intimidated by her.
“You have my undivided attention,” Danica answered, her voice betraying her as it sounded awfully impatient, as if she had better things to be doing.
“Imagine my surprise when I heard that the infamous Cassera Van Danica Amelorak was fighting in my arena,” Onelle said, trying her best to sound imperious. “Now, imagine how much more surprised I was when I was told that you’d denied my pardon.” She paused and, then, in dramatic fashion, threw her hands up and added, “I just don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get?” Danica replied. “I didn’t ask to be pardoned.”
“You also didn’t ask to be tossed back into the lion’s den, quite literally speaking,” she said, glancing up at the bandage wrapped around Danica’s arm, which concealed the puncture wounds she’d received in her bout from the quills of the Scalios razorback lions.
“It’s my burden to bear,” she answered stoically, “and mine alone.”
“If I didn’t know any better, it almost sounds as though you’re punishing yourself for something, my dear Cassera. But for what? Tell me, what is it you’re running from?”
“If you must know, it seems my whole life has been a series of failures. I failed my emperor. I failed my empress. I even failed myself. You probably wouldn’t understand this, but getting sent here was Fate. This, right here, right now,” she said thumping her chest, “is my chance at redemption. I’ll either die in the arena, or I’ll be victorious and gain my freedom.”
“You’re absolutely insane,” Onelle said, shooting Danica an unamused look. Danica merely responded with a shrug.
After a moment’s reflection, Onelle let out a long, dramatically overly vexed sigh and replied, “Fine. Have it your way.”
Danica bowed and then uttered a diminutive, “Thank you.”
“Won’t you have at least one drink with me?” Onelle grinned and offered Danica another margarita of which she politely rescinded.
“I’d better not,” Danica answered, maintaining her posture and standing off to the side like a statue. “I have a match later this evening.”
Onelle waved her hand in a dismissive manner and let out a disappointed sigh. “In that case, our conversation here is done. You’re free to return to your dank cell and play with your little pirate girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Danica growled angrily.
Onelle, startled by the unexpected vitriol in Danica’s voice, looked over at her and smiled. Seeing her rage seep out like this was delightful.
“Really? In that case, you truly don’t have anything better to do.” She offered Danica the drink a third time and this time Danica gave in and accepted it.
“Excellent,” Onelle chirped cheerfully.
Danica looked over at the slave girl, who was familiar to her, then back to Onelle. “Do you think, maybe, that I might get an oil massage, too? It helps with the circulation and rejuvenates the muscles.”
Onelle thought about it for a moment then smiled and snapped her fingers. “What’s mine is yours, Cassera,” she said, using Danica’s old name. Turning toward her three servant girls, dutifully waiting for her commands, she cleared the frog from her throat and said, “Bring another long chair for our guest and a decanter of my finest birtchkum seed oil.”
The three girls raced off, their feet leaving dainty footsteps in the sand as they scurried off to do her bidding.
“And what about these?” inquired Danica, holding out her arms and showing Onelle her shackles.
Without hesitating, Onelle snapped her fingers at one of the Dragonian guards and pointed at Danica’s shackles. “See to those, will you?”
The guard hesitated, looking warily at Danica then back at Onelle. As a trained gladiator, he knew that she could kill all of them in the blink of an eye and then take a leisurely sunset stroll along the beach afterward.
“Did I stutter?” Onelle barked. “Unshackle her, now!”
The guard quickly undid Danica’s shackles and then drew back. Danica rubbed her wrists and, looking up at Onelle, said, “I appreciate that.”
Onelle smiled briefly then waved off her guards. “Your services will no longer be needed here gentlemen, return to your posts.”
The guards bowed and then, in unison, spun on their heels and marched back toward the arena in formation.
Once they were on their merry way, Onelle swiveled back around and sprawled out on the towel laid out for her on her tanning bed. A couple of servant girls, waiting in the shade of the palm, poured birtchkum into the palms of their hands and began lathering Onelle’s back up with the glistening oil.
Onelle looked up at Danica and motioned for her to lay down on the long chair that had been set out beside her. Once Danica had settled in beside Onelle, the servant girl from yesterday came over to her.
“This is Aidora, my personal girl. She’ll see to it you get the best treatment while you’re here on Arkadia.”
Aidora bowed reverently and then poured some oil into her palms. “If it stings your wounds, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
Danica looked at the girl from the corner of her eyes and recognized that the spark she’d seen in her eyes yesterday was completely missing. Something, or someone, had snuffed out that joyous innocence less than twelve hours ago.
Although Danica couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, she also had tried to warn her. If you want to do well in this life, you have to do more than just try to survive. You have to fight for everything you need.
“I’ll let you know if it gets to be too much,” Danica said. She waited till Aidora had lathered her up before adding, “Sometimes, you have to embrace the pain. Because the pain is what reminds you what you need to grow stronger so that you won’t ever experience that kind of pain again.”
Aidora nodded. It made perfect sense to her. She needed to learn how to fight. How to defend herself so that she never had to endure what she’d gone through yesterday ever again.
“Maybe after this evening’s match, you can send Aidora around to my chambers for another massage. I have a feeling I might need it after tonight’s fight,” Danica said.
Onelle, her face buried between the ribbons of the chair, waved her hand as if to say go right ahead. “My servant girl is yours for as long as you want her.”
It was of Aidora’s opinion that Onelle didn’t actually need her. But for some reason she was keeping her around. Maybe it was that philosophy thing again. That saying she’d heard once before. Something about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. If Onelle felt for one second that Aidora might be an enemy, then keeping her close made sense.
But Aidora didn’t want to be any
one’s enemy. What her people were doing was out of necessity of survival. If they had disobeyed H’aaztre’s wishes, then their world would have ended up like Galliforn and Earth. Obliterated.
Of course, her people’s hyper religiosity did seem to make a large portion of her society more prone to blindly following H’aaztre, no matter how evil he proved himself to be. But ever since he’d destroyed Earth simply out of spite, she had begun questioning whether his motives were pure. And she knew that other Nyctans were starting to have their doubts, too.
She shook the thought out of her head and got back to running her fingers through the folds of Danica’s soft skin. Even though she was toned, and had ample muscle definition, a year of the easy life had given her an extra layer of shapeliness that only seemed to enhance her beauty.
The muscle was still there underneath, but now she looked more feminine and more voluptuous than ever. Gently, Aidora traced the scars of the lion’s claw marks. Danica had obviously had a medic close her wounds with a binding wand, but the scars would remain there, without further treatments.
“Will you be keeping these,” Aidora asked.
Tickled by the question, Danica smiled. “As a matter of fact, yes. Why? Don’t you think I should keep them?”
“It’s not up to me, Mistress Valencia.”
“Imagine you were me,” Danica continued. “What would you choose to do?”
“I’d most definitely keep them.” Aidora grew so excited over the prospect of having actual battle scars that she began to dig into Danica’s deep tissue harder than planned, and solicited a light moan from Danica’s lips. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized for her mishap.
“No, it feels great. Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Alright,” she replied, glad that her little mistake had actually proved to be a win.
“That settles it,” Danica finally said. “Alright, you’ve convinced me. I'm going to keep every battle scar I receive.”
“Really?” Aidora asked, taken aback by Danica’s courageousness.
