by Deck Davis
With the increased activity came renewed crowd pressure. Someone pounded out a dull beat on a drum. When the camera split to the crowd, I saw that in the middle, sitting on someone’s shoulders, was a bare-chested man with a bass drum strapped to him. He pounded a deep, almost tribal beat. Boom-boom-boom. The crowd began to follow him, some stomping their feet, others clapping, until the whole stadium sounded like it was under a steady barrage of artillery fire.
With the Cardano team’s stage vomit gone, Lucas seemed to relax a little more. He grinned at the crowd. “And I would like to welcome to our stage, for your listening pleasure, The Simmer Dogs!”
The crowd went wild as four rock stars walked out onto the stage and started to take their places behind the instruments. I was around five years behind the times, but even I’d heard of the Simmer Dogs. They’d released an album a few months ago that had gone platinum ten times over. The Kinohelm VBR used their track, “Hunger Cry,” as the music for their battle intro.
“I liked the Dogs before they were famous,” said Eddie.
“Sure you did,” said Wolfy.
As the Simmer Dogs burst to life with the groans of an electric guitar, I turned away from the gel-screen.
“What’re you doin’?” asked Eddie.
“It’s intermission,” I said. “He must be calling the rest of the teams afterward.” Looking around, though, there weren’t many of us left to call—maybe thirty teams in total out of one-hundred-twenty. I’d expected us to be near the bottom. Team Perlshaw was relatively new, we were coal-rated, and we hadn’t paid a single bit to the overseers’ holiday fund to boost our call-out time.
As the singer launched into his first lyrics, I heard something else compete with the noise. It sounded like Lucas was talking.
Sure enough, when I looked at the screen, I heard his lips moving. He was still stood at the podium, still talking to the audience, except his microphone was drowned out. The camera panned to the audience and showed that not a single person was paying attention to Lucas. Instead, the adrenaline and beer-fueled spectators were transfixed on the antics of the Dogs.
It was then that the auditorium door bust open. A man in shirt and trousers, and with a strip of gel on his earlobe that must have served as a headset, looked around. He had a badge fixed to his shirt with ‘NE VBR’ written on it.
“Team Perlshaw?” he said, scanning the faces of the fighters in the room.
I held my hand up. “That’s us.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? The overseer just called you.”
“Now? It’s intermission.”
The man looked at me strangely. “There are no intermissions during the unveiling. Get on stage before you lose your place.”
“That low-down scumbag,” said Eddie.
We were in complete agreement on this point. As we left the auditorium and walked down the cramped maintenance hallway, with the feedback from the Dogs’ amplifiers shaking the walls, I started to piece together what Lucas had done. This was on purpose, I decided. There were one-hundred-twenty teams competing in the New Eden Team VBR. With four fighters per team, that made a total of four-hundred-eighty fighters. Lucas must have gone through the list looking for my name. When he’d found it and saw what team I was on, he had arranged for us to be called when the band was playing. This way, the audience would hardly even notice we were there. You couldn’t get bits from spectators who weren’t even watching you.
“This is a bit of a block on the cock,” said Eddie. “You can’t act like you don’t give a crap if the people you’re acting in front of don’t give a crap back.”
I stopped walking. Eddie bumped into the back of me, but then the rest of the team stopped.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“I’m gonna wait.”
The stadium employee, with his gel-made clipboard and earlobe strip, looked worried.
“For God’s sake, you need to hurry up.”
“When the music stops, we’ll go out,” I said.
“The overseer will spit feathers. Either take your turn now or lose it.”
I shrugged. “Then we’ll lose it,” I said.
The man gave me a patronizing stare. It seemed like the attitude of the overseers dribbled down and coated those who worked for them. “You are jeopardizing your place in the VBR.”
I smiled. After spending years with Dad and then fighting on the VBR circuit myself, I knew a thing or two about regulations. “No, we’re not. An unveiling isn’t part of the official procedure before a VBR. It’s pageantry, pure and simple. We could send out a troupe of suited monkeys to take our place on stage, and there’s not a damn thing you, Lucas, or even Overseer Sternbuck can do about it. It’s not regulation.”
“But I assur—”
“Didn’t you hear him?” asked Eddie. “It ain’t regurgitation!”
“Regulation,” Glora corrected.
A look of doubt spread across the man’s face. “I will have to check on this.”
“Check all you want,” I said. “C’mon guys.” I knew I was right. There were a few steps that every VBR had to take before each battle. These included a complete safety check of gel capsules, an inspection of fire doors, and a drill for the VBR center staff on what to do in case of an emergency. These steps, however, didn’t include parading fighters out on stage. It was just a frilly extra. Lucas couldn’t do a thing if we didn’t go on stage.
We went back into the auditorium. A few of the other fighters looked surprised to see us back. Others didn’t care; they were too wrapped up in their own upcoming stage appearance to think about anything else.
The band’s music steadily lowered to a stop. The crowd gave a giant, unified ‘woooooo’ that seemed to last minutes. Lucas stretched his hand out on the podium and leaned into it. He cleared his throat.
This was the interesting part to me. Would Lucas call our name out again? If he did, then everyone would hear, and his little stunt to make us ignored would have failed.
“Can we please have to the stage,” he said, “Team Gerranem.”
I shrugged. I hadn’t really expected him to call us again.
“What now?” asked Glora.
‘Screw it,’ I thought. “Now, we go into the city, and we find a bar. In the bar, we order a round of whiskeys.”
“Woo-hoo!” said Eddie. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
I held my finger up. “But just one, okay? To let off a little steam. And then it’s bedtime. We’ve got two days until the VBR starts, and it’s gonna be a damn busy two days.”
We left the auditorium by a side door, expecting to be able to slope off away from the section of New Eden cordoned off for VBR fighters, to escape into the city itself and blend into its neon lights and hum and chatter. Instead, as soon as we left the auditorium, we walked into the flashes of a dozen cameras. There was a mill of people waiting outside for us. A barrage of questions hit me all at once, and it was hard to figure out what any of them said.
“…clock news. Do you…”
“…you comment on why…”
“Chuck Listner, the New Eden Times. Why has your team…”
They were reporters. I should have known. While the crowd in the stadium, and, by extension the people at home, would have been focused on the band playing, the reporters were looking for something else. They would all have to write a report on the unveiling for their websites, and each of them needed a fresh angle. Maybe by refusing to be called out by Lucas, we’d given that angle to them.
“Can you explain why you didn’t appear on stage today?” asked a woman with blonde highlights and a sharp look in her eyes.
“Sure,” I said. “We—”
“Hold up a tick,” said Eddie.
There was a four-foot-by-six-foot piece of fastik propped up near the wall. It must have been left there for recycling. Eddie kneeled next to it, took a vat of gel from his pocket, dabbed his finger, and then scrawled something across the fastik.
&n
bsp; “What’s he doing?” said Wolfy.
I shrugged.
When he was finished, Eddie held up the board so that the camera could see. Glora looked at it, and she groaned.
I peeked.
TEAM PERLSHAW
Bit WALLET ADDRESS: XyGG564V1X1X9popLAN52B
P.S. TINA (AND HER MOM) I’M SORRY, BUT IT JUST DIDN’T WORK OUT!
“Bloody hell,” said Wolfy, shaking his head.
Eddie gave the reporters and their camera a made-for-tv grin. He was built for this kind of stuff, it seemed. Where stages and crowds of people worried me, Eddie owned them. He handed Wolfy the board with our bit wallet address printed on it.
“Make sure it’s always in view of the cameras,” he said. Then he stepped forward and spread out his arms. “Now… Who has questions for us?”
Chapter Three
Time is such a predictable, fickle, never-ending, fleeting thing. You never know where you stand with it. A guy named Einstein once said something like, ‘Ten minutes sitting on top a hot stove can seem like an eternity, whereas ten minutes chatting to a pretty girl can seem like a second.’ Twenty-four hours until a VBR, it turned out, was no time at all.
There was no time to practice, not a second for us to log into a localnet VBR simulation and rehearse our moves. We did, however, carve out a few hours to go over strategies. We’d already talked about it before, of course. On the wagon, drinking back glasses of Amber Rose, we’d gone over what we’d do when the New Eden VBR started. The only problem, of course, was that we didn’t know what the map was going to be like. The New Eden map, Overseer Lucas had boasted, was a never-before-played map which was commissioned solely for the biggest team battle royale ever held.
Glora, though, didn’t seem perturbed. She’d tapped her nose and said, “Let me take care of that.”
As captain, it was my job to make the calls, to decide how we were going to play it. I just had to have trust in my experience and VBR knowledge that when we launched from the zeppelins and plummeted down onto the map, I’d know what to do. The only certainties I had were in our classes and our runes. I knew what everyone’s skills were, and what that would mean. Eddie was a rogue, specializing in stealth and secrecy, but with a bit of his own added flair. Wolfy was a dark ranger. Scouting was his thing; he sensed danger before it hit us while hunting with his bow. Glora was a hexer, which meant that she had all manner of skills aimed at dealing with the NPC monsters that were sure to cause hell when we landed.
Eddie’s stunt with the reporters and the fastik earned us a couple of thousand bits. I had to give him credit; it was way more than I’d expected us to get. It let us add a couple of new runes to our collection. One granted a team shield bonus when the wearer, who we’d decided would be Wolfy, used it. Another, Cloak of Night, would let the wearer blend better into shadows. That was my rune, as I’d need to get close to other fighters to be able to use some of the abermorph’s abilities; it would help quite a lot if they didn’t see me coming.
The night before the VBR, Glora had asked me if she could borrow five hundred bits from the team kitty. I’m no Scrooge, but it did seem a little odd she’d ask for that much.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“I feel like getting rat-ass drunk. Y’know, going a little crazy.”
“Really?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
“How about you just tell me what it’s for?”
“Nah. I wanna know if you trust me. Give me the bits, and then we’ll see.”
I thought about it. Did I trust her? I hardly knew her, after all. Bernli had taught me that people weren’t to be trusted, not even people you knew. I’d given Sera all of Wolfhound’s bits to place a bet. I’d put a hell of a lot of trust in her, and we all know what had happened there. However, the fact that Glora obviously trusted me meant that I had to give her the bits. After all, trust was a two-way street. By taking me into their team and then making me captain, Eddie, Wolfy, and Glora had put a hell of a lot of stock in my word. If they were going to trust me, then I’d trust them.
I held my wrist up and touched it against hers.
500 bits deducted from team wallet
[Total: 15 bits]
After watching this, Eddie looked at me. “So, you trust me?” he asked, giving me his most solemn look. “I’m good for it.”
When Glora took the five hundred bits and left our quarters, Wolfy and Eddie decided to go out.
“We’re going for a walk,” said the big guy.
“Want to come?” asked Eddie.
“I’m just going to cool it here a little,” I said.
After they all left, I lay back on my bunk and rested my head against the pillow. For all the good it did me, the bed might as well have been made of jagged rocks. I was too on-edge to relax, too consumed with the idea of beating Team Wolfhound and of wiping the smirk from Overseer Lucas’s face, of repaying the faith Elder Arin and the town and Perlshaw had put in me, and of returning to them with a wallet brimming with bits.
from outside the room, I heard the chatter of raised voices from a bunch of fighters playing a poker game, from coaches drilling their teams, and from strategists making plans. It was noisy, too damn noisy. The overseers had made some temporary quarters for all the VBR fighters, which they’d built in the east area of New Eden, not far from the docks. For the next week or so, this would be the home of everything VBR-related. I’d visited busy VBRs before, but nothing like this.
I’d finally persuaded my nerves to calm down and my eyes to close when I felt my bed sag under the weight of someone sitting on it. I opened my eyes to see Glora perched on the edge.
“Check this out,” she said, with a mischievous grin. She pulled a tube of gel from her pocket and squirted some on her open palm. With a blink, she commanded a holo-face to appear on her skin. I saw her eyes flicker as she adjusted something on her own holo-menu, and then something appeared on her palm.
I saw mountains, rivers, roads, abandoned buildings. They were tiny at first. It was a birds’ eye view of some sprawling landscape. As I watched, Glora commanded the view to zoom in, and I began to see things in more detail. It was a map.
“Is this…?”
She nodded, obviously proud of herself. “A little birdie tells me we might be spending some time in a place like this, soon.”
“But how did you get it?” I looked over her shoulder to make sure our door was closed. If we got caught with this, we would have been in trouble.
“I have contacts,” said Glora.
Uh-oh. I knew someone else who had contacts. Sera. She was supposed to use her ‘contacts’ to place the bet for us, and instead, she’d screwed me over. You needed to keep an eye on someone with ‘contacts.’ I suddenly felt uneasy.
“Not that I don’t trust you, but I need to know who you got it from.”
She shrugged. “A guy I used to date.”
“Is he a fighter?”
“That’s a loose way to put it. Guy does more ducking and diving than fighting. He’s in New Eden, but I don’t think he has a team.”
“Who is it?”
“Jeez. His name’s Rynk. Okay, father?”
Suddenly, this made a lot of sense. If there was one person who was shady enough to somehow be able to get hold of a secret overseer map, then it was Rynk. In a weird way, the fact that he was so shady made me trust the map more. You see, guys like Rynk didn’t steal and deal just to make bits. No, they did it because they got off on the idea of screwing over the overseers.
I sat up. The adrenaline and nerves were back, at double strength now. My bed of jagged rocks was going to have to do without me sleeping on it tonight. I had plans to make.
“We need to strategize,” I said. “This is the edge we need. Rynk will have sold it to other teams. He’s not exactly loyal. But if it gives us an edge over even half the teams competing, then we’re laughing.”
“And your profound sense of morals doesn’t thro
w up any objections?” she asked.
Hmm, maybe I would have objected to this kind of thing once, but now, I was so consumed with beating the other teams—and let’s not kid ourselves, beating Team Wolfhound in particular—that I felt strangely okay with it.
“Where are Eddie and Wolfy?” I asked.
Glora shrugged. “Haven’t seen ‘em.”
“Damn. Well, I’m not wasting time. You and I, Miss Expanse Charter, are gonna plan until our asses explode. And then when the guys get back, we’ll fill them in.”
