Tales From the Crucible

by Charlotte Llewelyn-Wells

  A svarr elf patted him on the back. Given their relative statures, even with him sitting down, she was only able to reach about halfway up.

  “Some good shooting back there,” she said. “I never even saw you coming.”

  Paul raised his glass. “You made us fight for it this year.”

  The svarr wandered off to join the two dozen elves, humans, goblins, saurians and one frostbitten giant installed around the five large wooden tables. Most of them were still in mercenary attire, brandishing convincing replica firearms in the hands they weren’t currently drinking with. About twice their number of animated, insectile krxix occupied the rest of the chairs and the standing areas around the bar.

  Paul knew them all.

  Except for the krxix.

  They just knew a party when they saw one.

  “A most profitable æmberheist, indeed!” Ribs shouted over the music.

  Everything about the goblin’s attire, like Paul’s, was period specific. The trench coat was an exact replica of the one worn by their hero. The gloves had been hand-made, the designs culled from yellowed magazine articles and breathless contemporary reporting by the enthusiasts of the day. And so what if they had a few too many fingers for their actual hands? Accuracy was everything. The goblin had pulled their goggles up onto their forehead, revealing rings of green where the seals had pushed into the thick layers of white face paint to real skin. They held a long-stemmed glass in each hand, a piece of fruit floating in both, and eyed the gathering suspiciously.

  “It’s right that you don’t carouse with the rank and file!” said Ribs. “There are parts of Hub City where that kind of fraternization would get a commander disintegrated.” They struggled with their too-big gloves to bring the left-hand glass to their lips, and muttered into their cocktail. “Or so I’ve heard!”

  “The game’s over now,” said Paul. “You don’t have to stay in costume.”

  “Costume?” Ribs quickly reset their goggles, looking shiftily about the hired room. “I don’t know what you mean!” they said loudly and then, clutching their drinks, scurried off to find a corner.

  Paul felt a smile break through.

  He liked Ribs.

  He had a lot of colleagues and acquaintances, most of them either here now, or through his day job as an aircab pilot, but not so many friends. He liked to believe that Ribs was one. Even if he didn’t know their real name. They took authenticity seriously. At the time of the battle of Gregson’s Vault, the insertion of Nova Hellas into the Local Group had still been a good five hundred years into the future and so there had been no martians around to take part. Paul appreciated that level of commitment. Why Ribs insisted on remaining in character and actually pretending to be a goblin even when they weren’t role-playing was a mystery that Paul had given up trying to get to the bottom of.

  An avalanche of gravelly laughter drew his attention from the unsolved problem.

  Mica was squatting at one end of a long table and, having shed her Hardpan persona, had surrounded herself with krxix and costumed mercenaries as the very magnetic core of the party. Sylicates did not technically eat or drink, but this was Hub City, the civilized heart of the Local Group. If an establishment couldn’t squeeze a few æmbits out of the more physiologically bizarre elements of its clientele then it wasn’t going to stay in business long. Tasting bowls heaped with the salts of rare earths were scattered amidst the mercenaries’ drinks. She reached for one. Her laughter rattled the full length of the table as a vaguely disinterested saurian in the long white coat, head mirror, and twitching surgical arm of a logos mender regaled her with a joke that Paul couldn’t quite hear.

  He thought seriously about getting up, going over there.

  Sipped his cocktail.

  “Beep, beep.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Paul. “I think she enjoyed it.”

  “Beep, beep, beep.”

  Out of character, the robot, Smiles, betrayed a voluble side.

  His rectangular unit was perched precariously on a bar stool, the various forces and counterforces at play subject to infinitesimal adjustments of his limbs. At the same time, apparently independently and carefree, one quadruple-jointed limb delicately tweezered the stem flute of a kettle bottom. Wherever the Twenty-One-Oh-Eighters met, week to week, to catch the latest vault battle, or admire one other’s expanding collections of vault memorabilia, the robot always demanded the same drink: a kettle bottom. Failure to provide it could provoke… instability. It had come to the point that, as event organizer, ensuring that a venue had the requisite ingredients on menu had become an integral part of his working week.

  The curiosity was: Paul had never seen the robot take a drop.

  “I don’t think she really gets it,” he said.

  “Beep, beep.”

  ‘We’ll work up to that.’

  “Beep, beep, beep.”

  “We work together. And you know the trouble we’ve had finding a sylicate to play Hardpan after Shail decided to take two weeks’ vacation in Macis at Pearl’s Spa right in the middle of battle season.”

  Various bulbs winked on and off.

  “No. I don’t think he ever did take this seriously.”

  “Beep, beep.”

  Paul sighed. “The owner wasn’t happy about it, I’ll tell you that. Even after I coughed up more than the price of the door by way of apology. I think we’re going to have to find somewhere else for the æmberheist next year.”

  “Beep, beep, beep.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He lifted his glass and stared through it.

  “Beep, beep?”

  “Early shift tomorrow. A group of kids from New Horizon. Booked me for the whole day.”

  Paul wondered how it had all come to this. He had studied the old vault battles, read the semi-autobiographical I am Raymon D’arco fifty times, and run away from college to find a berth on a stormkin guncutter, only to be put back aground on Cirrus after a week in the air.

  How had he ended up taxiing tourists around Hub City for twenty æmbits a half hour?

  “Beep.”

  An arm telescoped from the robot’s chassis and patted him on the shoulder.

  With the exception of Mica, who wasn’t really a member, at least not yet, Smiles was the most recent addition to the Twenty-One-Oh-Eighters, having found them about three months ago through an advertisement in Vaultheads magazine. Most who signed up that way weren’t looking for anything more than someone to share a can and to watch the vault battle with, and either turned up infrequently or allowed their membership to lapse when confronted by the more… obsessive elements of the hobby. Smiles, however, had swiftly turned out to be one of the club’s most enthusiastic members: a passionate collector, an earnest role-player, and ever reliable with an interesting titbit of vault trivia or an obscure stat. Before its membership of the Twenty-One-Oh-Eighters, the robot had roadied for the still anxiously remembered Noisefest, a Brobnar rock festival. Spent two hundred years following the rock star Spiretown free climber, Slazz the Indestructible, until her untimely death in a well-publicized mid-climb collision with a flying saucer. Been a member of the Emotional Landscape Free Ramblers Association. And, most recently, the Hub City Historical Society.

  Whatever the robot was searching for, Paul was sure it had found it here.

  The robot pivoted its chair towards the long tables. It waggled its antennae, blinked its lights.

  “Beep, beep, beep.”

  “You really think I should?”

  “Beep.”

  “You’re right,” said Paul, largely to himself. “It is what Raymon D’arco would do.”

  Paul downed his cocktail, took a deep breath, stood up, pulled the creases out of waistcoat and doublet, thought about the tricorn, left it, hesitating long enough to need a second breath and then finally made a decision. The robot made an encouraging “Beep,” flashing him with his most strident bulb, which Paul translated as “Go get her, skirate,” as he strod
e manfully into the crush of bodies.

  Moving quietly through a crowd of krxix is next to impossible. Everyone wants to shake your limb analogue of preference and inquire excitedly after your day. Mica saw him coming a mile off, and raised a big, warmly glowing hand, like a set of landing strip lights to guide him down. He extricated himself from a trio of the breathlessly clicking insectoids before they could make firm plans for the weekend after next, and hurried over to join her.

  The saurian she was with raised a glass in one tiny arm. The surgical implements attached to the other clicked and whirred. His vertically slit eyes narrowed as Paul crossed to join them. The saurian politely stood. Mica, sufficiently huge to deal with an upright man at eye level, remained seated.

  “D’arco,” he said.

  “Director,” said Paul.

  The saurian’s scales were the prismatic blue-green of the Photic Ocean carnosaurs. Paul had long suspected some kind of topical cosmetic behind their iridescence, although the saurian would stamp his feet and deny it even if Paul were to find the jar in his pocket. Even in the full logos pomp of whitecoat, mirror hat, and field specialty badges, he somehow managed to give the impression of dressing down for the benefit of the lesser species he indulged with his company.

  Turquoise lips peeled back from a row of clean, white, very sharp teeth.

  “Paul,” he said.

  “Alos.”

  “Mica was just telling me what she thought of her first vault battle experience,” said Alos, his reptilian anatomy leaving behind only an odd click between vowel sounds and a trace of accent.

  Paul turned to Mica, eager enough that he didn’t even bother to point out that it hadn’t, technically, been a vault battle. He could tell from the way Alos was fidgeting that the urge to do so was just about killing the saurian.

  “The æmberheist of Director Sloane is one of the pivotal events in vault battle history,” said Paul. “The penultimate encounter before the Battle of Gregson’s Lot. Raymon D’arco and his companions broke into the Director’s compound and made off with over a million æmbits worth of raw æmber, overcoming fifty hired guns of the DarkZone Shadowgangers to get it.” He flicked Mica an embarrassed smile. “In case you were wondering, the club only has enough active members for us to put on about twenty. No one likes to get dressed up in the cold to play the bad guys.”

  Alos sniffed. “Arbitrator Taurex of the Piscus Letalis obtained his æmber without firing a single shot. He encountered an Inspired on the dark side of the World Tree and persuaded her to part with her æmber.”

  “Which always makes for a thrilling re-enactment,” Paul muttered.

  Mica masked a snigger.

  “It is a little cerebral for most species’ tastes, if that is what you mean.”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “That’s what I mean.”

  “Well, good.”

  Mica coughed politely. “Actually, I was just telling Alos how sorry I was about the office door. I hope I didn’t cause you too much trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Paul. “Happens all the time.”

  “Did Paul tell you about the time he got himself picked up by a pair of Rublex Bounty Hunters looking for a fugitive skirate matching his description?”

  Mica clapped her hands in delight. “No!”

  “He was halfway to Quantum City before they realized they had the wrong sentient.”

  “It’s no great surprise really,” said Paul. “I did fly with the stormkin, for a little bit.”

  ‘A very little bit,” said Alos.

  “Anyway,” Paul shrugged. “It just goes to show how accurate this costume is, doesn’t it? I’d like to see you convince a logos theorist that you’re really an arch-mechanist in that get-up.”

  “What about the time I closed the Dis Library after telling the patrolman there was a snufflegator loose in the basement?”

  “He thought the patrolman was Ribs in a different costume,” Paul explained for Mica’s benefit.

  Alos shrugged.

  Paul wished he could be that cold-blooded.

  “I’ve watched plenty of vault battles on the screencasts,” said Mica. “I’ve even seen a couple from the stadium zones.”

  Paul and Alos both nodded approvingly.

  Aside from a re-enactment, the simulated experience of a properly outfitted stadium’s psi-projectors was as near to the genuine vault battle experience as a committed punter could get.

  “But I had no idea there were people who took it so… seriously.”

  “It’s not weird or anything,’ said Paul.

  “It’s history,” said Alos.

  Paul nodded.

  “Actual real-life scholars study the Archons, you know,” the saurian went on.

  “Some people collect klaxon race cars,” said Paul.

  “Or old æmbit coins,” said Alos.

  “Building a modest collection of genuine vault battle memorabilia isn’t so outlandish.”

  “It’s archaeology,” said Alos.

  “I’ve heard that a lot of fans choose to support a single Archon,” said Mica.

  Alos looked sidelong at Paul. “I wouldn’t say choose.”

  “Of course, there are casual fans in the stadiums, but it’s not the same thing,” said Paul. “It’s not fun unless you pick a side.”

  He glanced at Alos.

  Alos peeled his lips back over his fangs.

  “You support Archon Thrurm, is that right?” said Mica, oblivious.

  “Thrurm the Glorious,” said Paul. “That’s right.”

  Mica turned towards Alos.

  “Ralleigh,” the saurian said. “The Widow.”

  “That’s its name?” said Mica.

  Alos shrugged. “They hardly pick their own, do they?”

  “Why do you follow them when neither one of them has fought a battle or even been seen in over a thousand years?”

  “The mystery!” said Alos.

  “The Battle of Gregson’s Lot was listed in Vaultheads magazine, issue 2108, in the Local Group’s Top Ten Vault Battles,” said Paul. He hesitated, reminiscing on a past, but still-raw grievance. “Personally, I think it deserved to be higher than eight.”

  “The writer was a fan of Kelroc the Remorseless,” said Alos. “And you know how the magazine’s sponsorship back then was tied up with Gilethlan the Golden Lady.”

  Paul nodded. “Dark times.”

  “So what was so special about this battle?” said Mica.

  “About the battle itself?” said Alos.

  “Nothing really,” said Paul, and then grinned. “Except for how it ended.”

  “Or didn’t end,” said Alos.

  “Or didn’t end,” said Paul, with an irritated glance at the saurian.

  “What happened?” said Mica.

  “Nobody really knows the answer to that,” said Paul. “Both Archons had spent months, years, building their teams and acquiring the æmber they needed to forge their keys. They had brought them to the vault, ready to contest their rival for it in battle.”

  “It began at exactly 11:54, Hub Time,” Alos interrupted. “The build-up had been well publicized. Not least by the director himself, who had spent the preceding weeks attempting to wrest his æmber back from Thrurm. But as you know, there’s very little that even an evil genius can do to inconvenience an Archon.” He cleared his throat, reining in his train of thought. “Depending on your source, somewhere between two and five hundred spectators turned up on the day to watch.”

  “The infamous Wrecker, Jim James, was trialing his Mk XII Boundary Buster from Cirrus that same day,” said Paul. “He attracted a lot of the live audience.”

  “More watched the psi-casts and flashbacks afterwards,” said Alos.

  Paul snorted at that obscene statement of the obvious.

  “It began ordinarily enough,” Alos went on. “Both Archons’ vaultwarriors engaged with the vault’s defenses, and with each other. But just as Ralleigh’s warriors looked to be gaining the
other hand and moving in on the Vault–”

  “Pffft,” said Paul.

  “–just as they were moving in on the vault, both Archons suddenly disappeared.”

  “Raymon D’arco tried to keep on fighting,” said Paul.

  “Although, of course, without the Archons involvement there was really no point in carrying on. It was Arbitrator Taurex who talked him down.”

  “He told a Vaultheads reporter afterwards that he’d thought it was just another part of the vault battle. That’s the thing about vault battles. And Archons. You can never know what might happen next.”

  “And neither Archon has been seen or heard from since,” said Alos, with committed seriousness. “No one knows where they went. Or why they both surrendered the vault at the exact same time the way they did.”

  “Maybe they did it for the fame?” said Mica.

  “I beg your pardon?” said the saurian.

  “Smiles tells me they were both relatively obscure Archons before Gregson’s Lot.”

  “It’s not easy to try and guess at an Archon’s motives,” said Paul. “But it is half the fun.”

  Reaching into one of the all-weather pockets in his skirate waistcoat, he pulled out an image card in a clear plastic sleeve. The bright colors were bleached, but still showed a figure in golden armor and a crested helmet, light beaming from the wrists in place of hands and from the “T” shaped slit in the visor. A paragraph of heavily faded writing filled the bottom third of the card. A half dozen attribute stats ran down the side.

  He showed it to Mica.

  “Is this Archon Thrurm?”

  Paul nodded. “An actual card from the time of his last battle. They can assume any form, but tend to keep to their known avatar when involved in vault battles.”

  Mica brought one slab-ended finger towards the card, but she had been long enough in the company of the Twenty-One-Oh-Eighters to know better than to touch it.

  “What’s this that he scores a ten in?”

  Paul grinned, proudly. “Guile.”

  Alos arched his neck to poke his long snout over Paul’s shoulder

  Paul lifted the card to let him see it. “I got it from a dealer in Big Merch.”

  The saurian shrugged, then looked disinterestedly away. “Not bad.”