by Kennedy King
“To those… we lost,” the three smoldered. Deidra clenched two fists and stumbled up from her stool. She would have charged just then, and been incinerated by the barrier Koslav’s golden tie projected around him, had the Eagle not grabbed her arm. Just the radiant heat from it kept at least a foot of open space around him as he wandered the crowd, yet left him comfortably cool.
“Now. This next round is my favorite… symbolic of all things in our Universe. Eternal and finite at once. All things must end, like this wonderful planet my designers have wrought will tomorrow. In fire. Then, from its ash and wreckage, Ares will be reborn anew. Again it will end. Again it will be born. Just so like we are, in the perfect cosmic machine… But I haven’t come to stop your festivities. I’ve come to join them!” Koslav cheered, and the Forge followed suit. The commotion rumbled back to half of its previous volume. “If you’d like a word, speak to my assistant. Otherwise, raise a glass to Ares’ final night!”
Deidra was more interested in a knife than a word with Koslav. Every time she thought she might see his assistant about it, the Terra Eagle was there to stop her. Clarabelle kept glasses coming her way, between trips to the kitchen. She was cooking up something besides more soup, Deidra knew, she just couldn’t figure what. She was too deep in the bottle even to figure that her tasteless shots were only water. A brief moment of lucidity did come over her, however, when she spotted someone she knew leave the Forge just a second before Koslav. A pinstripe grey suit with a black tie, then a glossy silver one with a gold tie. The strangest thing about it was how Koslav slipped away, without his assistant. Two suits… the lingering liquor puddle in her brain refused to accept it was a coincidence. Deidra made a break for it.
“Deidra, wait!” the Eagle hissed, but her arm missed the girl by an inch this time. Deidra poked her head through the door of the Forge. I knew it! Koslav and Daniel’s jackets flickered around the corner of the bar. Later, she would appreciate the sheer happenstance that what she “knew” turned out to be something. For now, Deidra did her best drunken tiptoe to the side of the Forge. She dared not peek out at them from behind the dumpster that offered her cover. She only closed her eyes and listened.
“Come to scold me?” said a voice she didn’t recognize. It had strange, almost inhuman sharpness to it.
“I should do more than scold you. This was not part of our arrangement,” said Koslav. Only then did Deidra realize she’d never heard Daniel speak. Not until now.
“Neither was a team of vengeful servants!” he countered in that sharp tongue-whip.
“I never thought… they would risk what little freedom they had to look forward to,” Koslav admitted, “But I couldn’t refuse them entry. That might have sparked disobedience. I don’t need a rebellion of my debtors. But… that has nothing to do with your participation! You should never have taken any bonuses, let alone three! What were you thinking, putting yourself in the spotlight like that? Discretion. That’s how we make this work.” Deidra inched closer to the edge of her dumpster to listen closer.
“Koslav… I don’t get a chance to let it out much. You know that. You know that every day is hard for me. The Olympia… is supposed to be the one thing that isn’t hard for me,” said Daniel.
“Yes, but…” Koslav started almost as sharply, but softened mid-sentence. He let out a long, shaky breath. “I know, Yuri. I know.” Is that… his real name? Deidra only had time to wonder so far, before a hand grasped her shoulder. She stifled the urge to scream as it dragged her away. She thought it must be Koslav’s assistant, all the way until it took her through the doors of the Forge. The Terra Eagle threw her back in her barstool.
“Learn anything worth your life?” she bit, in her digitized tone.
“Koslav and Daniel have some sort of ar-”
Deidra’s lips sealed at the flick of two fingers. One was Clarabelle’s, over her lips for quiet. The other pointed at Koslav’s assistant within earshot. Deidra nodded her understanding. Clarabelle then relocated the finger from her lips to a piece of electronic paper on the bar. Deidra tried to read it over, but the legal jargon was only bewitched her intoxicated brain.
“What is it?” she surrendered after reading the same line for the fifth time.
“The deed of sale to my ship,” said the Terra Eagle, “I can’t donate you a ship that’s already entered the Olympia under a different crew name. But, if it legally belongs to you, you can re-title it as whatever you want. Even Dreamweaver.” Deidra’s bursting eyes jumped from her to Clarabelle.
“How did you get this so fa-”
Again, Clarabelle silenced her with a finger. She tapped the line at the bottom, where Deidra needed only sign. She rolled a stylus across the bar.
“I’m giving it to you for a fair price,” said the Eagle, “I’m expecting it’ll come back to me for one, when the Olympia’s over.” Deidra’s smile swallowed up her whole face. While she wove out her signature.
Ship Designation: Dreamweaver
Captain: Deidra Benier
Chapter Eighteen: Olympia
Despite the spikes of torture inside her body, Galia shuffled from one foot to the next, like a child about to pee themselves. She stared up into her own, bright-eyed reflection in the armor of a dream come to life.
“You’re sure you don’t want to fly it?” Galia asked for the fifth time, “I mean, you’re the legal captain.” Deidra indulged in a chortle at the first time she’d seen Galia so excitable. Looking at her just then, an outsider never would have guessed there was an alien sickness eating her alive. She never would have guessed Galia was entering the final found of the Olympia Gold. Just then, none of it mattered, because she was about to fly the fully refurbished Terra Eagle. Sure, legally, it was the Dreamweaver now, but there was no contesting with its incredible design.
“Nah, I want to live. You fly it. Besides, I’m more comfortable on the guns now,” Deidra waved her off. “We should… probably get in.” Galia shook from her trance, only to enter another, giddier one.
“Yes, yes, yes,” chimed Galia. She jammed a switch on the side of the Eagle’s mounting gear, it’s talon. A lift pod sunk down to carry them up. Galia and Deidra squeezed in together. “Everyone who thinks about entering the Olympia dreams about just seeing the Terra Eagle. I’m about to fly it!” Galia couldn’t help herself. Her scream echoed through the loading bunker a mile from their hotel. She pressed Deidra into the glass of their pod with her body, before they got into the ship. The two did a dance of lips and tongues until the doors slid open.
Galia skipped down the narrow platform of the Eagle’s innards the second she could. It had low ceilings and no carpet on the floor, but that hardly mattered. This tiny craft was built for speed and maneuverability. Galia planned to do it honor as she slipped into the cockpit, the head of the Eagle. Deidra laughed her way to the shoulder guns beside her. She and Galia grinned to one another, and interlocked fingers while the feathers of the ship flickered alive.
“Ready?” Deidra said, when the sleek frame of the Eagle rumbled alive.
“Let’s fly,” said Galia. The Eagle’s wings flapped down once. A shockwave lifted them from the ground. A pulse of jets launched it to the sky.
Galia hooted and hollered while she had the luxury. Deidra laughed along with her while their ship screamed across the artificial beauty of Ares. Mountains. Ice spikes. The great iron walls of the Bangbox. The pink auroras of the Reverie Lake. The last of their laughs trickled away with the rise of the audience’s blasting cheers. They hovered on what the Gold Standard called “spectator stations”, floating highrises entirely enclosed from the elements by a forcefield filled with artificial atmosphere. From them, they could enjoy the whole show through cameras throughout the planet, then their own eyes. The destruction of planet Ares.
Galia and Deidra held tight to one another as the Eagle floated through the cluster of spectator stations. Galia turned the nose of the ship down towards a black hole in the planet.
The gates
to the most spectacular event of the Olympia Gold was the only part of it that reflected its true nature. It wasn’t glamorous. It was dressed up, or trimmed. It was a cave. Deep. Dark.
The Terra Eagle’s talons chewed into the tough multerium walls of Ares’ core. Daniel’s sleek, long-nosed ship was already there. Deidra and Galia came down through the pod beneath their ship. They stepped out into the cavern, along with their final opponent. The man in the pinstripe suit. Murderer of Deidra’s father, and countless others. Daniel. Yuri. For once, the three were without an audience, in person at least. Only three stood in the faint, warm light. A soft shimmer of gold that hardly licked the cave’s softly rippling walls. All three combatants lifted their eyes to the source. A disk on a ribbon, the object of worship for which gallons of blood were spilled every year.
The Olympia Gold Medal. Any hopeful combatant knew the Gold part of the title meant only its color and the light it emitted. It was made of something far more valuable than gold. It was ten ounces of solid multerium, the only supply of it authorized for sale by The Gold Standard labs. Deidra’s freedom. Galia’s cure.
“Spectators and combatants,” even Cybil’s voice was subdued in the cave, a murmur in place of a boom. “It all comes down to this. Removal of the Olympia Gold Medal, the regulation core of the planet, will cause a chain reaction. Ares will tear itself apart. Whoever escapes the atmosphere with the Medal earns the right to sell it and hold the title of Olympia Gold Medalist.” Cybil’s voice fell away for a few moments of almost somber silence. When he came back on, it was with a jarring note of finality.
“Combatants. Anything is permitted to win this challenge. You may use any weapon. Any channel of transport. All service tunnels, even restricted ones, are open. All arenas are unsealed. Good luck… Begin.”
Galia snapped her flower-launcher from over her shoulder. She leveled it on their opponent’s chest. Deidra stomped once to blast a wave of blue force from the jet-disks in the bottom of her boots. It catapulted her forty feet in the air. She snatched the shimmering Gold Medal from its stabilization orb. Deidra landed a short arc from where she started, next to Galia. The cavern’s semi-solid walls rumbled into crashing waves of multerium. The stabilization orb glowed hot white in the absence of its counterpart. In minutes, its combustion would rival that of a miniaturized star.
“Not interested in the title?” Galia asked, finger ready to launch a flower. The man in the pinstripe suit shrugged.
“Not supposed to win,” he said in a sharp accent. His slightly grinning eyes moved to Deidra, “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
“Yo-yo-you knew I was there?” she sputtered, after she jammed the thin disk of multerium in her pocket. The man gave her one deep nod. Galia lowered the nose of her flower-launcher an inch.
“Which means you know a few more things you shouldn’t. My true name, for example,” said Yuri. With two tender hands, he adjusted the collar of his flawless suit. He straightened his tie, which was already remarkably straight. “I don’t need to leave Ares with the Medal. But ripping it out of your hands is the perfect cover to keep privileged information from getting out.” Galia gave him another second to strike, but Yuri was still, calm. Even while layer after layer of the planet destabilized around them. Galia threw the flower-launcher back over her shoulder.
“Like to see you catch us,” she smirked, then grabbed Deidra. She dragged the girl back into the pod-lift of the Terra Eagle. Yuri waited until he climbed into the ship to say:
“You will.”
By the time Galia and Deidra found their seats inside the Eagle, its frame clattered around inside the devolving core. Galia pulled up the talons. She turned the beak for the tunnel they’d come through and took flight without a glance back.
“Watch it on the left!” Deidra called out.
“Thanks!” Galia jerked the Eagle around a dislodged chunk of rock. Ares had begun to splinter. “Run scans for branching service tunnels, in case we have to abandon course!” A crack that put the loudest thunderbolts to shame rocked the cavern. As if on cue, five sawteeth of jagged rock collided before them to close the way. If it wasn’t this ship, this pilot, they might have plowed straight into it. Galia, however, brought the Eagle to a screeching near-instant stop with the flick of its wings.
“Four o’clock!” Deidra cried out. Galia wrenched the Eagle’s beak around, and zipped down the path. They burst from darkness, into a bright blue house of mirrors. The Ice Bucket. Galia skidded the Eagle around icicles and ripped ever-forward until the ship jostled, despite every perfect evasion. “Missile fire,” Deidra told her, haunted that he could find them even deep in the subterranean maze between Ares’ arenas.
Yuri’s ship hurtled from an icy mouth, seconds before it closed. His javelin prow shot up at them. Galia managed to spiral the Eagle around it by a margin of feet. Deidra turned her cannons along with the swivel of her chair, which pulsed back with the kick of launch. Her particle beam seared a line across the bottom of Yuri’s hull. Not a second later than the beam dissipated, a blinding white light frothed over from the hole it left in the ice.
“The hell is…” Deidra started but then realized what in the hell it was.
“The stabilization orb blew. This place is going to melt in minutes,” Galia shuddered. Deidra focused turret fire on Yuri to keep him busy and dodging. All the while, she used the rim of her vision to scan for things she recognized. After all, she’d been a Gold Standard servant for twenty years. Her brain was trained to find and recall discreet tunnels to scuttle about, unseen by paying customers.
“Seven o’clock,” Deidra told her captain, “A few hundred meters. There’s a tunnel to the Bangbox.” Galia swept ahead with her eyes until she found it. It was hard to keep her sights trained on it, with the coughs that ravaged their way up her throat.
“He’s gonna… try to block us…” Galia managed between heaves. She saw his long-barreled cannon telescope out of his side hull.
“On it,” Deidra said, cannons poised to address it, “You need your taxotrol!” Galia’s cough deepened with the laughs mixed in. A spray of scarlet spat over the helm and her lap.
“Took… the last of it… this morning.”
“Wha-”
“Stay on him!” Galia forced out. She spun the helm. The Eagle dove for the tunnel. Yuri launched a dense thermal shell. Deidra fired a high-caliber shell straight through it. The crimson blast wave threw the two ships in opposite directions: Yuri into a wall of softening ice, the Eagle down the shaft to the Bangbox.
“Galia…” Deidra mumbled. In a momentary ceasefire, in the cascading dark of the tunnel, she allowed herself a glance at her captain.
“Behind!” was Galia’s reply. The tunnel lit with muzzle flashes from Yuri’s top-deck turrets. Deidra deployed their shields, but not before a few rounds could crack their jet-disks. The Eagle slowed from a blur to a haze, which was just enough. Yuri gained on them by the second.
The Terra Eagle shot out into the wide corridors of the Bangbox, followed by Yuri, followed by a flood of white flame. Galia dodged their ship to the side of their foe’s skewering prow. She tried to jerk the helm to point at the sky, but Yuri rammed them from the side. The Eagle’s wing ground against the rusted iron panel wall until one of them burst. Both ships spiraled to the other side of the maze, an inferno spiraling around them. In the chaos, Galia got the Eagle’s talons in Yuri’s hull.
“Get in the cockpit!” she screamed in a voice so grizzled and hoarse that Deidra leaped from her seat immediately. She plopped on Galia’s lap as the head cocked back to drive into their foe, with them inside. Before it could, Yuri’s prow snapped out of place, in a ball-joint. It swiped once, a beheading strike. The Eagle’s head skidded across the floor of the Bangbox, free of its body.
There was smoke in Galia’s eyes when she got them open again. She hardly understood what was happening anymore, but Deidra was still fighting. She pulled both boots back, and kicked the glass of the cockpit. Galia fo
cused the very last drop of her might to throw a kick of her own beside her. The Eagle’s head popped open, only for a hand to reach down inside. Galia turned her aching, tired eyes to Deidra, who floated out of the cockpit.
“I thought… you didn’t want this,” she coughed.
“I don’t… but it would hardly be convincing if I didn’t make look like I did,” said Yuri through that eerie half-smile. He tore the Gold Medal from Deidra’s clutching hands, and dropped her back in the cockpit. Galia sputtered an unintentional mist of blood. Yuri boarded his ship and zipped off. Galia closed her eyes, and drifted away. She had the vaguest memory of arms lifting her. Then, nothing. Only whispers from reality in the dark of her nightmare come true.
“Galia? Galia! Damnit, wake up!” Deidra throttled her by her jacket lining. Part of her was sure the iron panel beneath them would burst any second. But then, what more climactic an end to an Olympia could there be than two lovers, swallowed by the explosion of the whole planet? It was only minutes away, with the fountain of white fire from more and more tunnels around them. “I… I won’t do this without you…” Deidra whimpered. Her tears splotched holes in the soot on Galia’s cheeks. Then she felt something, between the fingers of her left hand. Something in Galia’s pocket. Deidra let her down to pull it free.
“No way… thank you, Rey!” Deidra kissed the folded up map of the Bangbox. Just then, her mind skipped ahead through possibilities and plans faster than it ever had before. She traced the paths with her fingers in search of a tunnel that might lead to the Thruway. She’d seen something there in passing, a service station. They were down a ship, but there was something else at every service station no Gold Standard servant was as familiar with as Deidra. What was once her only pleasure was now her only tiny shred of hope.