by Kennedy King
“Cannons ready!” Tygon declared. His fists tightened on the navigation bars. Deidra’s took the controls of her weapon. When she leveled it at her target, though, her fingers went numb. It was the Dreamweaver. It floated just beneath the Crystal Ice Core. In the overwhelming white light from within the frosty globe, the green ice cove and the silver-trimmed ship shimmered bright. The man Deidra recognized as Rey journeyed out on the Dreamweaver’s prow, to tear the Core from a tangled web of frozen cables.
Deidra’s eyes wandered, just for a second, to the ship’s bridge window. They fixed on Galia, as Galia’s fixed on her. Both grasped their weapons. Both hesitated just long enough to change the course of both their lives. A third ship tore into the cavern from the entrance behind the Dreamweaver. It charged straight past them, pistons kicking out from the flank. That launched Galia and her ship out of its way, into the wall...
“Brace up- it’s the Ham-”
Tygon’s final words were left open-ended. Rex deployed a heavy cannon from the underside of the Hammer’s hull. A single three-foot titanium shell crashed through their bridge. It ripped Tygon’s innards back through his seat, and sprayed them around the room. Devin froze. Jack fled for the escape pods. Olivia screamed:
“I don’t want to di-”
Her wants were of no concern to the next shell that tore through the bridge. It tore Olivia’s turning torso from her hips. Her halves were wrenched to opposite sides of the bridge. Deidra thought to move for the navigation bars only when the nose of the Brazen pointed down. She hopped in the cockpit. Blood smushed out from beneath her fingers when they squeezed the helm. She yanked up on the controls, but couldn’t fight the pull of gravity. Shell after massive shell from the Hammer had severed the weakened front half of the Brazen from the back.
“It’s alright, DD,” Devin told her, when he saw her clench so hard to pull the Brazen up. He knew she couldn’t.
“No, it’s not!” Deidra screamed. She throttled the handles until their leaking fuel lines met flame on the right side of the ship. A great beast of flame roared through the bridge. It swallowed Devin in a single bite. Teeth of smoldering steel sliced in around him. The lack of fear in his instantly dead eyes was the last thing Deidra saw before the blast tossed her from the hole in the bridge window.
“That’s it, folks! The match is over!” Cybil’s voice haunted her darkening vision. Deidra gazed hazily from body to body around her. Some were people she knew. Others were ice harpies. A downpour of flaming wreckage brought her head up from the frozen ground. She saw only small pieces of the Brazen coming down, as the main body of it was behind her. Its impact rattled the Ice Bucket just before Cybil said, “The bonus for this round goes to single combatant, Daniel!”
Deidra found his small, sleek ship just behind the Hammer. He’d slipped in and claimed the Ice Core right from under Rex’s bloodthirsty nose. Deidra’s head thunked against the ice. This time, she didn’t care how long she slept.
“What’re you doing, big G?” questioned Rey, when his tense shoulders relaxed at last, “The round’s over. We made it. Let’s get the hell out of here.” Despite Daniel’s triumphant brush of the Crystal Ice Core against his pinstripe suit jacket, Galia brought the Dreamweaver down to the debris below. She had her eye on a body, flung from its wrecked ship.
“Come on Rey, you saw. I’m not leaving her,” Galia shook her head. Rey had seen, he just wanted to hear her admit it. That under the alcohol and taxotrol, under the harsh mask, there was still a beating heart. Even the dreaded Galia Hattel couldn’t leave Deidra to die.
Chapter Eight: A Chance Worth Hating
“Morning,” a vaguely familiar voice bounced through the lightening shadows. “Well, afternoon. Sit up slow and be warned. You’re not where you were, when you shut your eyes.”
“Thank God,” murmured Deidra, before a concrete thought crossed her mind. Then it all zipped through her brain at once, like an injection. Tygon, Olivia, Jack… Devin. The fire, the blood, the flying titanium. Deidra shot up, only to be stopped by a firm hand on her collar. Galia had stopped her an inch from collision with a rusted iron plate. It was the second bunk underside of an iron-framed bed, Deidra saw when her eyes started to adjust. Everything in the room, the walls included, were that same weathered metal. The designers had perfectly captured the energy of an old, abandoned factory even in the dormitories of this building.“Where am I?”
“The… Blasting Zone? Bombing Zone, maybe? I don’t really remember - some cutesy name for the town around the next arena,” Galia told her. “The Ba-”
“Where’s everyone else?” Deidra blurted. Galia sighed. Her amber eyes sunk to her lap, made to glow even brighter by the orange sunburst of evening outside.
“You know where they are, Deidra,” she forced herself to say. Lying to her now would only draw out the mourning process. Galia knew that better than most. It was an agony still fresh in her own chest.
“No… no… they were in the Brazen. They were there, with me. Right next to me. Then…” Deidra’s voice hid from the truth that her mind had to continue. Tygon’s back emptied all over the bridge. She shook her head to stop it.
“Deidra…” Galia sucked wind to get out, “The Brazen is in two pieces, on top of the recycling heap. Did you… see anything inside the ship?” The last still frames of lifelong friends surged through Deidra ’s brain. Jack running for escape. Olivia ripped in two. Devin swallowed by fire.
“No,” Deidra replied. Her eyes fixed on a particular rivet, driven deep in the metal sheet of the wall. It was as good a spot as any to stare. A crystal pearl pinched from the corner of each eye when she blinked. They burned hot streaks down her clammy cheeks. “Did… did anyone survive? Besides me?” Galia bunched up the knees of her gray fatigues. Her teeth gritted through her twitching lips.
“If anyone did… would you be here, in my room?” asked Galia.
“Why would they give me to… you rescued me?” Deidra realized, streaming eyes still stuck on that nondescript rivet. Galia shrugged. She held back a bit of the urge to dispel the positive implications. Sure, she had an image to maintain, but Deidra was numb. When that numbness wore off, she’d be in pain. Galia could afford to go a little easy.
“I figured we could help one another,” she said. “I’ve got an opening in my crew. You don’t have a ship.” Those last five words brought it all to life. I don’t have a ship. I don’t have a crew. I don’t have any friends left. Deidra’s mind raced away from her. Then she remembered, she did have one left.
“I have to go,” she said. She jammed a palm in both eyes and rubbed them dry, then raw. She pressed on them hard enough to stop up her flooding tear ducts. Deidra moved for the rusted, iron door. A hand snapped around her sore wrist. Galia pinned her in place. “I can’t stay here.”
“Listen to me. You’re in shock,” said Galia. Deidra knew that much. It didn’t change the fact that she had to go. She’d wanted to run from this absurd competition before it had chewed up and swallowed every one of her close friends. Her best friend. Deidra saw Devin’s fearless eyes in the dark every time she closed hers.
“I’m done,” she declared. She ripped her hand away.
“Everybody loses,” Galia said, a fact that hurt her to admit. Deidra’s heels froze in the half-open, steel bolted door. It was far lighter than it looked. It swung without a creak. “Places, things, dreams… people. If not in here, then somewhere else. I lost someone this round... Her name was Carol. Hit her head too hard.” It was enough to ground Deidra for a few seconds. Then she thought about Jack, Olivia, Jeff and Tygon. She thought about Devin.
“I’m sorry,” said Deidra. She pushed her way out into the rustic iron hallway.
The whole hotel and the Blasting Zone, the town around it, was built of the same riveted iron sheets and pillars. Deidra began to suspect, after forcing her way through five or six doorways, that the rust was simply discolored multerium. Everything was too functional for genuine decay. It had the look,
though. If not for the bodies rushing all around the arena town, Deidra would have believed it was an ancient ruin. Smokestacks spewed gray imitations of the greenhouse gasses that had once ravaged the Homeworld’s atmosphere. Neon signs in store windows flickered and buzzed, as if about to pop. None of it was of concern to Deidra. She jabbed her index finger into the speaker switch on her Gold Standard collar.
“Show me the Forge,” she whimpered. A tiny lens projected a three-dimensional map of the Blasting Zone before her. A golden dot blinked out the location of the closest thing Deidra had to a home.
Eight miles outside the fringe of the Blasting Zone, the Forge jutted up from a hill of overgrown grass. A web of streets converged in a gigantic paved lot around it. Hovercabs filled almost every parking dock. Deidra burst through the front doors. A hundred faces turned from their tankards. Lips hung agape, and a few whispers even swept the crowd at the sight of the dark-skinned girl in The Gold Standard uniform. She shuddered at the first crack. Then another jumped out from the other side of the room. Deidra didn’t have a chance to figure out what it was before the whole Forge raged with claps and cheers. Her feet dragged forward on instinct. Her eyes fixed on the familiar woman at the bar. The screen behind her switched from the eliminated teams, Scorch and the Brazen, to the Dreamweaver. Their survival rating had dropped by five points after the risk of an unnecessary rescue.
“What in the hell are you doing here, girl?” Clarabelle hissed. Deidra didn’t even realize she’d drifted all the way to the bar.
“I don’t know,” muttered Deidra under the applause she couldn’t quite fathom was for her. “I just had to go somewhere. I… I came here.” She stared at Clarabelle the same absent way she had that rivet in the hotel. The old barkeep turned her head, to scream:
“Donny!” Her rarely needed assistant popped up beside her instantly. “Watch the bar for a few.” Clarabelle left him without a chance to answer. She dragged Deidra to the very back of the kitchen by the arm, out of sight from even the nosiest customer. Clarabelle knew better than to trust words to get across what she had to say to Deidra. Her two strong arms around the girl said I’m sorry, I’m here and I love you, better than her mouth ever could. Clarabelle squeezed the tears from Deidra into her collar. “Get it all out. Be sure you’re done before you let go. Because then, you have to let it go.”
“A-al-al-alright,” Deidra heaved. She wheezed and whimpered and emptied every last drop of water from inside her. Devin’s dead, she forced in, to force out the cries. Her partner for twenty years, her oldest friend, her brother in all but blood. He’s dead. Deidra’s shoulders trembled without the weight of emotion to hold them up. She was spent.
“That’s it,” Clarabelle said, when the girl finally drew back from her. She hardly cared that her blouse was wet enough to have gone through the shower. “Now you’ve got to get back to the Blasting Zone.”
“Wha-ha-what?”
“They’re going to count you as withdrawn if you don’t get back to the hotel before the next challenge,” said Clarabelle. Deidra drew back, but could go no further than the bartender’s grasp on her shoulders.
“Clarabelle,” the name sounded alien on Deidra’s lips. Clarabelle had always been ma’am to her and Devin. But one of them was gone now, the other a survivor by the skin of her teeth. Had that shell not ripped a hole through the bridge screen and Tygon first, she might not have been thrown from the wreck. Deidra had slipped just past the bony fingertips of Death herself. “I am withdrawn. I ran. I’m here. Here in the Forge, working with you. That’s where I belong, not in the goddamn Olympia Gold! If Devin had just accepted that, he might still…”
“Ah!” Clarabelle stopped her from devolving into hysteria by jostling Deidra’s shoulders. “That’s enough of that. Devin gave everything so you could break free of this. No matter where you think you belonged before, you owe it to him to see this through.”
“I owe it to him to die in these stupid games?” Deidra shouted at Clarabelle, something she would never have dreamed of before just then.
“You’ll die if you withdraw,” said Clarabelle in such a way that grounded Deidra. Her tone was absolute.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think happened to the loans the others took out to buy the Brazen? You think The Gold Standard forgave them because the rest of the crew didn’t make it? They’re down a ship, and they’ll exact that fee on whoever they can,” Clarabelle told her.
“There go my glory years,” Deidra shuddered, “Sorry Clarabelle, but life in chains is better than burial in a rusty coffin.”
“Deidra. You won’t have a life in chains. Your head was barely above water before, with your daddy’s debt alone. I’ve seen what they do to people with this much,” Clarabelle told her, again in so deep a voice it could only be the truth. The rumors are true, then, Deidra realized, about how long she’s worked for Koslav.
“What do you mean?” she blurted.
“They’ll say you’ve got the debt of six people. They’ll work you like you are six people. Back to back to back shifts. Every day. They’ll pump you with drugs to keep you from sleeping. They’ll work you to injury, then medicate you, then work you some more. Rinse and repeat until you end it yourself,” Clarabelle told her. Deidra raised a mortified eyebrow. “Trust me, you will, before they let you die.”
“Clarabelle, I can’t…” Deidra whimpered. Clarabelle squeezed her shoulders again.
“Ah! You have to. Not another word, but that you’ll go. Go back,” she said. Deidra forced herself to look Clarabelle in the eye. She found two dams filled with water, about to burst. “You go back to that captain that rescued you. You join her crew, and you finish this.” Deidra sniffled up the last of her hesitation.
“Yes, ma’am.”
When three hard knocks rattled her wrought iron door so late in the evening, Galia figured it was Rey. She opened her door, instead, to a disheveled, dark, freckled girl in a Gold Standard uniform.
Chapter Nine: Rust and Fire
Their night in the Blasting Zone hotel was one of the worst nights’ sleep Galia and Deidra had ever had. At first, it was the noise of the cars and intoxicated spectators outside. Gradually, as she drifted away, it was Galia’s snores, for Deidra. After three hours of forcing her eyelids shut, she finally managed to catch the rest she’d been chasing. Then it was the nightmares, for both of them.
Deidra saw Devin. Time after time, she saw him crunch to nothing inside steel and fire. She saw him sitting up in the Brazen, dead before he knew it. Before she could say goodbye. She saw it a thousand times on repeat, until the sun rose.
Galia saw herself in the reflection of a taxotrol bottle. She looked younger then. There weren’t half the stress lines she had now. The permanent bags she hid with makeup hadn’t been painted under her eyes yet. It was the first time her cough knocked her off her feet. The first time she considered popping an extra pill to chase it away. Part of her still thought, back then, that she could pass the tests she needed to. She just had to stop coughing long enough to impress her supervisor. She just needed one more purple pill. Galia’s nightmare was the moment she finally let herself believe that. When she twisted the taxotrol cap back off instead of shoving it in her drawer, or calling for Elaine.
“Morning,” Galia moaned, when a sunbeam finally crept across the iron floor of their room.
“Mm…” Deidra grunted. She turned her face away from the light. She coiled herself in the sheets, wrapping herself in hesitation, to pretend for five more minutes that her life wasn’t on the rusty, iron line. Galia had other designs.
“Let’s go,” she said. She tugged the curtains away from their window. Light flooded Deidra ’s eyes like two fishbowls as she rolled over. The black dots of her pupils honed in on Galia.
The lines of the older woman’s lacy green bra cups danced along the top edge of her nipples. Her breasts were pinched in tight hills by the band. Her hips stretched the rim of her underwear out from the di
mples of her thighs. What am I doing? Deidra realized. Heat flushed her cheeks at just how long she had stared. She chalked it up to the early hour of the morning and sat up to get dressed herself. She hesitated with the sheets over her scant nightclothes.
“Would you mind…” Deidra muttered.
“Oh, sorry, your highness,” Galia chuckled her way into a bow. At the low end of it, she grabbed the waistband of her gray fatigues. Galia tugged them up over her muscle and bony curves, wiggling her way into them. The only thing that tugged Deidra’s eyes away from the bounce of Galia’s chest was the device that flew up at her face. “So long as you wear this,” said Galia, after she tossed it. Deidra caught it deftly, one-handed and found herself looking down at a steel band with a thin holo-panel on it.
“What is it?” asked Deidra.
“Emergency blast shield,” Galia said into the corner of the room, averting her eyes, as requested. “Only protects the front, so be careful.”
“Thanks…” said Deidra. She latched it around her wrist, then slid out of bed. By the mighty force of habit, she was in her Gold Standard uniform in seconds. The flutters in her chest chased something from her - whether it was a true attempt to connect, or just an expression of nerves. “An-any word on the challenge for today?”
“It’s a maze called the Bangbox,” Galia told her. She threw a rough, dark synthetic jacket over her shoulders.
“Ships?” asked Deidra. She pulled her frizzy tails of hair back in a ponytail.
“No. We’re on foot this time,” said Galia, “Listen, I don’t know if you’re a fighter or not-”
“I’m not,” said Deidra. Galia’s eyes roved over Deidra’s body for a moment and a frown creased her forehead, but she didn’t challenge the younger woman’s stance.
“Alright. Glad I gave you that shield, then. You’re a defender. Stay close to me. We’re getting the bonus this round,” Galia grinned. She zipped her jacket up midway over her shirt. Deidra had no idea it was as flame retardant as it was stylish.
