by Kennedy King
“Yes ma’am,” Deidra and Devin said at once. Both reached up for the solid gold collars around their throats. The click of a button dispelled the invisible atmospheric field they projected around the wearers. Unlike others who wore variants of the device around Greymoor, Deidra and Devin weren’t able to remove their collars, even when unneeded. The Gold Standard rarely let their dogs off-leash, after all.
“The anchors are on the left side of the bar,” said Clarabelle. She didn’t look up from the hot-plate she was configuring. Deidra moved to retrieve them without a word and went to the rows and columns of empty tables.
The transformation the Forge would undergo in a few days would astound anyone who hadn’t seen it as many times as Deidra had. For now, it served as the dormitory for Gold Standard servants and employees while they prepared feasts and recruited spectators and crews. It was a mausoleum for the grim revelry of Olympia Golds passed. Desolate. Quiet. This was owed to its remote, undisclosed location in the moors. Only those who slept there were privileged with the information to find it. When the terraforming was done, the Forge would make its nigh incredible journey from Greymoor to Ares. There, Deidra and Devin would be ousted from residence, to make room for thousands of spectators. The place would explode with drinks, screens full of combat statistics, betting, and inevitably violence over it all. Deidra treasured these last few days with Devin and old Clarabelle. The quiet before an inescapable storm. She’d heard whispers the barkeep had been in service of Koslav Gold almost as long as Deidra had been alive.
“You got something better to do?” Devin laughed while his friend struggled with one of the anchors. When she refocused, Deidra easily snapped the steel ring around the table’s central pillar. She twisted it into place on the floor. A grenade detonation wouldn’t pop it free of the floor now.
“Besides waste time talking to you? Plenty,” Deidra smirked. Devin moved to the next row of tables. He snapped anchors on in record time.
“Just look what Clarabelle’s turned us into,” Devin chuckled quietly.
“We’re still alive, aren’t we?” Deidra countered.
“Sure,” Devin said, strangely somber. Deidra glanced up at him, just in time for him to look away. Behind her, Clarabelle chewed her lip, too quick for the girl to catch. Deidra smelled something sour, though, something besides the unspiced pots in the back of the Forge.
“The stuff in the back’s starting to stink the joint up,” Clarabelle said suddenly. She curled a fist against the programming panel of her hotplate, which had little to do with her actual frustration. “Why don’t you go take care of that? Both of you. We’ve got plenty of time to anchor the rest of the tables.”
Deidra nodded for fear of the fury that’d come with refusal. Clarabelle was, after all, a paid employee of The Gold Standard, natural superior to two servants. Though she’d never invoked rank, it was an unspoken understanding between them. More than that, it was testament to Deidra and Devin’s gratitude. They could never repay her for the extra scraps Clarabelle slid them under the table. For the blankets she misplaced over them, when they should have been reserved as backups for paying guests. Deidra did, however, hesitate by the kitchen door when the old girl stayed put at the bar.
“You’re… not coming?” Deidra dared to say. It would be the first time she and Devin were left in charge of anything in the kitchen, without constant breath down the backs of their uniforms.
“What I do is none of your concern,” said Clarabelle. She went on tinkering with her hot plate. “You two know the recipe as well as I do. Maybe better. Go on.”
“Ye-ye-yes ma’am,” Deidra nodded and disappeared along with Devin.
“Don’t forget the ta-”
“The tarragon, got it!” Devin finished for her. They were ready. Clarabelle waited until the door swung shut behind them to hang her head. She had to let it out. She had to whimper, just once.
Deidra and Devin huddled close over rising steam from a pot as wide as the two of them combined. The last of the orange spice they’d sprinkled in dissolved in their stirring spiral. Deidra took a long whiff. Devin opted for a spoonful of their work. Both let out a simultaneous mmm. Everything was taken care of for the day at last. At last, Devin had nothing left to hide behind. He’d been studying his friend all day, to see how she’d take what he was about to say. He knew it wasn’t the perfect time, but then there never was one.
“We’re entering the Olympia,” said Devin. Deidra squinted at him. She’d sensed something between him and Clarabelle, hung in the air. She hadn’t expected it’d be a bold-faced lie.
“Who’s we?” Deidra snorted. Devin took another deep breath and leaned back over the kitchen counter. Her smile said she didn’t believe him for a second. Holographic disks of flameless heat shimmered behind him without threat of burning his coattails, even on contact.
“Me, Jeff, Jack, Olivia, Tygon…” Devin watched Deidra’s eyes darken with each name of another servant she knew. They had come through the door to the Forge for the night with tickets and applications any minute now. She wondered if they had as much foresight about this announcement as she did. “You?”
“Tell me, do all of them know they’re friends with a psychopath?” Deidra prodded. She devolved into real laughter, then downright hysteria as Devin’s eyes fell towards the floor. “What did you, just sign everyone up? Make up a ship name? Hope for the best?” Deidra chortled and coughed. Her throat caught when she saw how downtrodden her friend had become. The wrinkles across his forehead were anything but humorous. Deidra calmed herself long enough to say, “Did you? Oh my God, Devin, did you-”
“We came up with the idea together. They all agreed. You’re… the only one I didn’t talk to yet,” he admitted.
“This is ridiculous,” Deidra chuckled, though every ounce of humor had pulsed out of her heart in a hard thump.
“Deidra, just listen to me-”
“This is ridiculous!” exploded from her before she could stop herself. Deidra was left with heaving shoulders and a continuous leak of fury from the vault she kept sealed tight, deep inside.
“Deidra. Do you want to live like this for the next hundred-sixty years?” said Devin.
“What?”
“We’re good workers. We’re young. We’re an investment, DD… The Gold Standard’s never going to let us go. They’ll give us the best healthcare money can buy to keep us alive, to keep us working, until we can’t. We’ll be stuck here for the rest of our lives if we don’t do something about it. We might taste a handful of years of freedom at the end of our sentences, if we’re lucky. Who knows if we’ll even want it, by then?” Devin’s every word deepened the reality of the situation and Deidra’s fury about it. They didn’t talk about this, so it wasn’t real. All she and Devin had to do was put their heads down and work, and everything would be fine, at the end of the day. She was fine, with table scrap dinners and blankets they weren’t supposed to have, in the back of the Forge. They’d never had anything else, after all. Why did he have to make it real?
“We have no training! No experience! Half the Olympia challenges need a starship! We don’t have a ship, you dipshit!” Deidra roared. Devin’s continued calm in the face of her long-caged fire only served to fan it.
“We have plenty of training. To work when others are tired. To carry on through silence, and darkness, and pain like others will never know. We can do this,” he said.
“And what about the ship? Where are we going to get one of those?”
“That handful of years we might have, at the end of our sentence? That’s worth something, isn’t it? No one of us could afford another loan that size on our own, but if our crew splits it six ways, we can pay for a Gold Standard ship with our last drops of freedom,” Devin did his best to explain, without lighting another fuse.
“You want… to trade a guaranteed out at the end of the road, for a very unlikely shortcut?” Deidra rephrased. Devin had expected resistance, but this was too much. He slammed the
kitchen counter. The soup pot teetered on its heating disk behind him.
“Come on, DD! You of all people know how unfair this is! I mean, hell, the rest of us actually made mistakes to land us in this mess! Yeah, petty theft or a few late payments is hardly grounds for a life sentence, but at least we did something! You… this wasn’t your fault,” Devin laid out line after line he regretted as he said it. But he knew he was trying to move a mountain. He needed the proper tools.
“Don’t you dare,” Deidra warned.
“You’re suffering the fallout of someone else’s choice. You did nothing to deserve this. Do something about it, Deidra,” Devin challenged her. She stomped within an inch of Devin’s face. She balled up his collar in two bruised fists. “You’re angry,” he said.
“You’re damn right!”
“You want to hit me? Are you angry at me, Deidra? Are you?”
“No!” Deidra roared.
“Who are you angry at?” Devin screamed, “Who do you want to fight?” Deidra’s fists unclenched. She let Devin go, only to slam a dent in the counter.
“Damn you,” Deidra muttered, while his shoes flattened on the floor.
“Damn me? Or the people who don’t let us take these off?” Devin tapped the collar around his neck. Deidra walked away from him. She had to. She had to stomp it out, to try and refocus her anger on anything less dangerous. Devin. The other servants. Even that guy that’d picked a fight with them in the streets would have been better. None of these vessels, however, were nearly big enough to house Deidra’s fury. She marched back to Devin a full hour later, more frustrated than ever that he was right. The only ones she really wanted to hurt were the ones that hurt her, every day.
“Does the ship… have a name?” Deidra asked.
Chapter Five: The Roster
“Toss me another one of those!” bellowed a man named Roran. Galia leaned back in her seat, arms crossed. She raised a brow to the burly man. It seemed to her, after knowing him for an hour, that his immense mass served only as a way to hide how small he was inside. Every word out of his mouth was another explosion set to dwarf the last. He had to be the loudest, the most outrageous. But even Galia had to draw the line somewhere.
“Trust me, pal, you’re done,” she smirked at him through two pinched fingers. Between her index finger and thumb was a glossy purple capsule. It was a drug she knew better than anyone in that bar. Better than anyone in the galaxy, most likely. “You keep going higher, you won’t enjoy the fall when it’s all done.”
“No one says when Roran’s done but him!” laughed one of his many enablers, the rest of his crew. Galia could only hope she wouldn’t see the name of their ship, Scorch, on the massive screen behind the bar in another minute.
“Pass me another!” Roran guffawed.
“You’re digging into my private stash. I’ll say when you’re done,” Galia declared. The literal accompaniment to her foot going down shook the floor under their table. Half-empty glasses of various colored liquor rattled between them. The grin vanished from both Galia and Roran’s faces at once. Both their crews rambled down to an intense simmer.
“Give. Me. Another.” Roran’s teeth gritted through each word, a primal show of force. Galia leaned forward to glare at him with two orbs of crystalized amber. He really is as impulsive as he seems, she noted.
“No.”
“Hey, it’s coming on!” Rey’s voice shattered the stagnant tension between them again. All heads darted to one direction. The television behind the bar. Even the bartender about-faced. He cranked up the volume over the intent silence that befell his tavern. Petty squabbles were pushed aside. There were only two voices that mattered now. That of Koslav Gold in his opening message, then the galaxy-renowned Cybil Cerano himself, his chief announcer. It was enough to quiet even Roran.
The man that appeared on the screen was clad in the finest silver tuxedo credits could pay for. The threads that held it together were so fine and glossy, he shone like he was made of steel. His tie was woven from actual strands of gold. He pushed glasses, rimmed by that same precious metal, up his long nose. His red lips grinned through a beard that somehow still had pepper mixed in with the salt, even at a hundred-fifty years old.
“Thank you,” said Koslav Gold.
Time froze for Galia. This moment was the culmination of ten years of work. It had to freeze. She took it all in. The musty tavern. The people in it; potential combatants. There were countless men and women like Roran; too big to see the people beneath them, the ones binding their ankles. There were a few calculating ones, sitting back quietly. They nursed booze to keep their mouths occupied while their ears drank in every last bit of information. They were more dangerous, but also obvious in their own way. There were people like Galia. Well, there was her, anyway. It’d be impossible to tell if anyone else was like her, listening like the calculators while acting like the big dogs. Those were even worse, the ones she’d never see coming.
Then there was the man in the corner. He was the most confusing, if not the most dangerous himself. That man had been eying Galia from afar all night, but he hadn’t said a word. Not to anyone. He hadn’t ordered a drink or food. He just sat there, in the far corner, in his pinstripe gray suit jacket with a black tie underneath. His few inches of blond hair were slicked back so his bright, almost unnatural jade eyes could watch Galia with nothing in the way. His lips curled in the slightest whisper of a smile.
“Thank you all,” Koslav said again, and time ticked on once more. “Viewers. Participants. Gold Standard crew. None of this could happen without you. On this fifty-sixth year of the Olympia Gold intergalactic competition, I implore you all to remember why it began. Directing the flow of economy towards research, towards helping people. Competitors, good luck. Spectators, enjoy the show. Thank you.” Koslav nodded with one last charming smile. The screen blinked black, then back to color with a very different face.
“Hel-lo everyone! Thanks always to Mr. Gold for his outstanding speech,” announced Cybil, announcer of the Olympia Gold for twenty-five years running. He bowed to show his technicolor braid of hair. His face popped back up with a painfully white grin that burned through the rest of his dark face. An old man, one of his eyes had been replaced with a bright red prosthesis that intentionally clashed with his natural blue one. “I won’t try to compete with the man himself. Let’s get on with the announcement you’re all tingling to hear. The roster for the fifty-sixth Olympia Gold!” The tavern erupted in a momentary thunder of fists on tables.
“About damn time!” Roran and about ten other carbon copies of him piped up from around the tavern. Galia rolled her eyes, until Rey squeezed her shoulder with a reassuring hand. He didn’t need words to tell her: we’ll get in. Galia looked to him to answer with a silent look: we’d better. She clenched her knees under the table to hide just how nervous she was that they might not. As quickly as it had loudened, the bar silenced again.
“The first crew is… the Hammer!” Cybil announced. Rex and his crew cheered from behind Galia. The name came with a brief collage of pictures- the ship and each crew member. It also came with a number. A survival rating, based on data from previous Olympias. The scale ran from 0 at the bottom to 70 at the top, seven intervals of ten to represent the seven participating teams. The Hammer’s rating was 53, putting them towards the top end. Every crew tensed between participants’ names, only to burst out in screams or sighs with the next.
“Scorch!” Their rating was 35, even. Galia felt like throwing fists at the celebratory eruption that almost tipped their table. Her knuckles went white all the way up until Cybil called out,
“Dreamweaver!”
“We’re in!” Rey murmured under the rumble of the rest of their crew. Their restraint sent a pulse of pride straight to Galia’s brain, even as their pictures appeared on the screen. She was a little insulted at their 30 rating, but still, we made it.
“Whoo!” she permitted herself a single hoot, then crossed her arms and smiled for
the duration of the crew announcements.
“The Torrent!” They were branded at 20. Galia figured they would be the bottom of the range. After all, Gold was a showman - his company didn’t often include throw-away teams on the roster. Nonetheless, Cybil went on to say:
“Brazen!” the number 8 flicked across the screen. Galia had hardly recovered from the unbelievable number when she realized she knew two of the faces in the pictures beneath the obviously Gold Standard ship. It was Devin and Deidra, if her memory served correctly.
“The Terra Eagle!” Cybil called out with all the gusto the title deserved. She was, after all, a regular year after year. Some people applied to participate in the Olympia just to meet the Terra Eagle, her crew, and her ship of the same name. She was one of few participants no one would find in a tavern before the games. How and where the Terra Eagle prepared for the Olympia Gold was as much a mystery as the face beneath her exosuit mask. The survival rating of 66 beside her picture was no surprise.
“Daniel,” said Cybil last. Just when Galia thought their competition had reached the height of shock. A single combatant. It was rare, but it happened. The Terra Eagle was one of few that had done it and lived to tell the tale. What was more, Galia recognized Daniel. Her eyes bolted for the corner of the room. It was empty. The smirking man in the pinstripe suit had vanished from the tavern, only to appear on the screen under the name. Daniel.
“That has to be a mistake, right?” Galia whispered to Rey, when Daniel’s survival rating scrolled up on the screen.