by Bear Ross
SECOND GATE ZONE
RED IRIDIUM ARENA
“Kramer! Kramer, you're late again, primate,” Sgok, a Skevvian, said. He rose up on his main set of tentacles, peering over the edge of his desk as she tried to sneak by unnoticed. A holographic display of tonight's fight schedule hung in midair over the pit boss’s podium, reds and blue denoting the duels about to happen and the various combatants' states of readiness. The column next to her name blinked red. Sgok's writhing appendages pulsed with chloroplasts that changed color according to his emotional state. Judging from the throbbing red and brown pattern, the mech arena’s pit boss was not in a good mood.
“Uh, sorry, Sgok, I got held up dealing with a Gatekeeper. You know how it is. The mouthy little blobs take forever just to finish a sentence,” Jessica said, trying to downplay the Skevvian’s signals of indignation. Her hair kept falling out from under her helmet liner cap. She brushed it back into place as she poked at the command display next to her gladiator mech.
“I don’t care if it was one of the GateLords, themselves, human,” the pit boss said, clicking his hard beak in disgust. “The least you can do is show up to work on time.”
“I, uh, got caught in traffic. There was a bad wreck on the hoverpath descending to the arena. My skimmer almost ran out of propellant. No, really, I swear,” Jessica said, avoiding eye contact with the mottled, tentacled being.
“Yeah, sure. You and I both know you live right around the corner, over by that robo-bar. Lucky for you, I scrambled the matches around. Hold still while I buzz you in,” Sgok said, raising a scanner in his left tentacle cluster.
“Oh, c'mon, Sgok, I'm running way late, you just said so yourself,” Jessica protested, pulling her helmet on as she ran a quick series of boot-up checks for her mech’s reactor core. “Just check me in manually and let the other guy know I'm ready to go, would ya?”
“You know the rules, Kramer,” Sgok said. “You get bio-scanned in for enhancers and other drugs, just like every other fighter who isn’t fighting in Unlimited status. I don't need the portable detector, though. I can smell the alcohol coming off you from here, vertebrate.”
“It was just a few suds,” Jessica said. “Just enough to take the edge off some pre-match jitters, Sgok, honest. Hey, cut me a break.”
Sgok scowled, his colors showing his deepened resentment. He put the scanner away and pressed a button on his desk. The display status next to her name changed to a mint holographic green. Jessica pumped her fist in victory.
“Not so fast. I knew your folks, back in the day, Kramer,” the pit boss said, his other tentacles twitching in annoyance. “They were good people. Your pops would have never dreamed of showing up to a match drunk. Void, even your wild-man of a brother, Jered, never went into the arena in your condition. You want some advice? Junctionworld is one big party, all fun and games, until it isn't. You'd better watch it, kid.”
A large elevator descended from the killing floor above them, and the light and noise of the crowd flooded through.
“Sure, sure, Sgok,” Jessica said, her mood suddenly cold. “Thanks for rubbing the old family legacy in my face right before a match. Really appreciate it.”
She climbed the rungs welded to the side of her mech’s hull, slammed the cockpit glass down over her, and made her mech suit jump up to the elevator with a small flare of jets. Papers and empty beverage containers flew from Sgok's cluttered desk.
“No gate-damned jets in the pits, Kramer!” Sgok yelled, pointing his tentacles at a prominent warning sign. “It says so, right there!”
Jessica made her mech shrug its shoulders in an exaggerated non-apology, mimicking the movement with her own body. She waved goodbye with the armor’s large hands as she disappeared up the elevator shaft.
“Gate-damned bone-squid,” she said under her breath as her combat armor came online.
The spotlights of Red Iridium focused on her as she and her mech rose through the horizontal elevator portal. She burped, breathing out beer fumes, and tapped her consoles and panels to check her main systems’ readiness. The weapons and power reports flickered, then presented themselves slowly. She frowned at the sluggish combat computer’s less-than-stellar response time.
“You're definitely no 'Judah,' are you, you nameless thing?” she said into her helmet’s microphone. The mech's computer burbled a muted response as it struggled to compute an answer to the query.
“Cancel question,” Jessica said before the simple command module tangled its pathways up trying to evaluate her sarcasm. Gates, I need to buy an upgrade.
“Nameless... nameless... heh. ’NoName.’ I like that,” she said, grinning to herself. “Computer, change ident to ‘NoName.’ Give me a readout on the opponent mech after you’ve updated your self-cog files.”
A pulse and whirring sound, and tonight's challenger mech revolved on one of the holographic displays in front of her. A RevShock Series Five. Light biped armor, fitted for close combat. Decent, but nothing spectacular. Three single-shot missiles to her two. Her blades were nastier, though.
“Who the void picks a vibro-spear for their main weapon, anyway?” she said. “Who's the pilot?”
The mid-air image of the mech faded, and her control computer showed a light purple humanoid's face and short biography, along with a kill-knockout-disabled-spared record of zero, three, two, and one. No kills yet, since his only battles had been shield matches like this one. The other pilot was aged and scarred, with dark purple burns mottled along one side of his face, head, and neck.
“A little late to be getting in the fights, old man,” Jessica said as she continued to read. “Ah. A Fifth Gate refugee. He came through with those other purple-skinned bipeds a few years ago, before the blobs nuked the whole damned zone. Stupid venter must think he can just show up and be a pilot. No drugs, no implants, just raw meat,” she said.
NoName's visual indicators pulsed as the computer tried to interpret her musings as a data request.
“Zerren Beff... Beff,” she said to herself as she scanned the scarred man’s details. “Where have I heard that name before?”
A rippling ring of fireworks cascaded from the top of the dome above, interrupting her recollection process. The air around her crackled, but it wasn’t due to the fireworks. She sneered as her mech’s league-required internal force field blinked on, a dancing nimbus forming just outside her cockpit glass.
Gate-damned rookie shields. They’re just going to slow me down, she thought.
The sparse crowd cheered and clapped behind their own protective shielding, even though the overhead display was just a hologram. A place like this, in a bottom-rung fighting league, couldn't afford real pyrotechnics.
This was Limited Ordnance, Light Exo Class, and a Shield Match, to boot. Most matches weren't to the death, unless something went really wrong with the flickering force fields that surrounded both mech’s cockpits. There was nothing really at stake, no real jeopardy. This was the equivalent of padded power armor, or wearing a grav-harness when learning to ride a skim-racer. Jessica Kramer hated being lumped in with has-been slugs on their way down or shiny rookies trying to make their way up. This place doesn't deserve me. Mikralos's offer was proof of that, she thought.
As the firework holograms faded away, Zerren Beff's cockpit armor slid from concealed panels in the hull, large scales forming protective interlocking plates over his command module. Now, he was protected by both armor and force fields.
He raised his mech's main weapon overhead, showing off for the crowd as he activated the vibro-blade-tipped spear. The spearhead sparked and blurred as it achieved its ideal cutting frequency.
Jessica's own protective armor came together in a similar fashion, a double-cocoon of metal and force fields enveloping her in sickening security. She rigged her mech to strobe its running lights as each piece of cockpit armor slammed into place. With each beat of light, gleaming blades slid farther and farther out of each forearm of her mech suit, until both cutting weapons
were at full extension. It was a stunt, a minor crowd-pleaser, but it gave her mech a tiny bit of style.
“Skill keeps a pilot alive in the arena,” her father, Solomon, used to say to her. “Style, though, is what keeps the Gatekeepers booking you for matches, and gives you more chances to beat them in the long run.”
Through the booze, her thoughts drifted from the match ahead to memories of her father. She felt for a metal container in her jumpsuit's chest pocket, above her holstered weapon, and tapped it twice for good luck.
Her internal displays glowed bright within the now-enclosed cockpit. A side video feed showed the sports network cameras' view of her and her mech, its twin blades held aloft.
Her light mech was a converted industrial unit, scavenged and parted together, with a lobotomized control computer. Like her opponent, she was equipped only with single-shot missiles. League rules said she was allowed to substitute a light cannon with limited reloads instead of the missiles, but the stop-off at Jev's bar cut into her wrench time.
The crowd produced muted applause when the house announcer introduced her opponent, Beff. When her own name came over the speakers, NoName’s external microphones heard louder applause, assorted jeers, and a faint, but distinct, hooting call. Her ears pricked up at the familiar sound. It came from someone close to one of the camera turrets. She turned her mech’s sensors to scan the crowd in their armored enclosure. An Ascended, similar in build to an oversized, evolved orangutan, held a hand-drawn sign over his head, his height making him stand out among the crowd. ‘House Of Kramer’ was scrawled in large letters.
She laughed in surprise as she recognized her father’s and brother’s old crew chief, Prath. She pointed her mech's right arm towards him in recognition and salute, and he pointed a big brown hand back. He flipped the sign, and 'For Our Freedom, And Yours' was written on the back of it. She smiled and touched the screen, blinking away the tears before they could start.
Oh my gates, it’s Prath, after all these years. What was he doing here? She thought. Memories of Jered rose up, but she beat them down, hard and cold. Time to focus on the fight, girl.
Red Iridium Arena's floor tonight was a Stygus-pattern layout, named for the first Gatekeeper to come up with the design. A tall, X-shaped structure formed the center of the kill ring, blocking direct fire between the combatants from their floor-level elevator entrance platforms. The layout called for rings of smaller x-barricades interspersed around the arena. None were large enough to hide a complete mech behind. The design forced the match’s action to the center where the mech-gladiators either slugged it out, or one party picked the other apart while they tried to seek inadequate protection.
A giant four-sided hologram counted down from eight to zero, and the Gatekeeper word for 'fight' appeared. Jessica launched her mech into a run to the left, trying to find a flanking shot around the center obstacle. The exterior feeds from the house cameras cut out, since they were banned from in-cockpit use by the gladiators. Red Iridium's floor was more than a mile wide, but the two light mechs moved fast, even faster when they engaged their jets. Jessica pushed her armor forward, seeking the inadequate protection of the nearest small barricade while she evaluated the situation. The internal shielding provided a sluggish gyroscopic effect on her mech’s movement, robbing power and momentum as its refresh rate struggled to keep up with the rapid movement of her giant armored suit. Gates, I hate Shield Matches, she thought.
“Between the beer and the shields, it feels like I’m fighting in a lead overcoat, NoName,” she said to her battle computer, which made another puzzled attempt to interpret her meaning.
Beff's mech wasn't in sight, yet. He must have made a mad dash straight for the... yup, there he was, vaulting over the top of the center X-barricade with a flash of his jets. His mech held the giant vibro-spear in both armored hands, its blade a smeared visual blur. His mech pivoted to face her, the large pole-arm at the ready. He pulled back hard behind the center X's nearest wall, but not before firing a missile at her. The launching charge spit the rocket out with a dull puff, then the main motor engaged with a flash.
The unguided rocket scorched past her armor, missing it by a wide margin. She flicked on power to her own forearm blades, and they began to glow. A small channel of super-heated plasma raced in a magnetic groove where the cutting blade would be, fed from her mech's reactor.
Jessica continued her attack run towards the central X-barricade, arcing into the far side from Beff. She hoped to catch him flat-footed on the ground by storming in from behind. If she poured enough power on to her jets, she could tear him a new—damn, there he was, already, up high. The beer was making her sloppy.
Beff's red and purple mech arced up over the barricade again, his jets flaring as he made a meteoric jump. His second rocket flashed as it launched, and Jessica put up one arm by reflex to block the shot. She was in too close. She grunted in pain and shock as the rocket hit.
The concussion of the shaped charge warhead stunned her, even through the armor and protective shielding, and the right forearm of her mech fell away in a billow of smoke and tattered metal. Alarms screamed in her helmet and interior displays, and NoName started overloading her with damage reports.
Right arm was gone, and the blade with it; just a smoking wreck from the elbow down. It was a rookie mistake, or he was just lucky, or she was hung over from mid-day drinking. Or all three. The crowd's sudden roar when the rocket hit added to the swirl of stimuli, and she chewed back the urge to puke from the impact. Can't stand still, assessing the damage, girl. Gotta move! She thought.
She hammered her jets while dashing to the side. She caught the sight of him mid-air, coming right at her. He landed hard, the twenty-foot-long vibro-spear spiking into the arena floor where she had been seconds before.
She fired one of her rockets, but he was too close, and the warhead’s proximity safety didn't disengage. The missile skipped off Beff's cockpit armor with a shower of sparks, corkscrewing away. It then detonated forty feet up in the air. Shrapnel spattered them both, but Jessica's ringing ears paid the metallic rain no mind.
NoName displayed an attack vector for her, and gave the ready signal from her jets. She hit them hard, and her intact left arm swung in as she hurtled towards Beff's mech. The fool was still trying to wrestle his spear from the floor plates when he saw her attack begin. He tried to backhand her with his mech’s arm, but she dodged, slashing the back of one of his armor's legs in the same fluid motion. Flaming hydraulic fluid erupted from the strike of the plasma blade. Another spinning backhand from Beff's armored fist rang off her cockpit, sending her tumbling. The crowd roared its bloodlust-filled approval.
“Dad always said to go for the hips on RevShock armors, NoName,” she said. The computer burbled agreement.
Jessica shook off the thump from the glancing punch. She set up another pass at Beff’s damaged armor, her jets flaring as she made her move. Her opponent stood, waiting for her, favoring his mech’s damaged leg. As she homed in for the kill, Beff's armor staggered and flowed into a feint. He pivoted on the flaming limb and the spear shaft, then executed a backwards roundhouse kick with the other leg.
The back of his mech's foot caught her armor high in the torso, ripping off a bank of booster jets. The unexpected impact sent her mech sprawling to the floor, spitting parts, and the crowd shrieked and cheered at the sight of the two armored titans whirling at each other like colliding buzzsaws.
Beff's own computer had staunched the damage, and the flames slowed to a trickle as he took short, limping jet-hops away from her. Away from her? Gate-damn it. He was trying to open the distance and use his last rocket to full effect.
She tried shaking off the sudden rolling impact, shaking her head inside her helmet.
“Old guy’s got some tricky moves, huh?” Jessica said to herself. NoName shut off the fuel flow to her damaged jets and gave her a new combat assessment of her mobility. It didn’t look good.
She tried to bring her mech u
p from its prone position, but the lack of an arm and a damaged rack of jets hindered her. NoName burbled an electronic warning and flashed a series of red pulses. Beff was now out of proximity safety range, and his last warhead was armed. She still couldn't right her machine. The deployed forearm blade was of no help, hindering her efforts to get back up.
Her mech continued to flail, kicking up sand and sparks. The armored cover of Zerren Beff’s third missile pod flipped open, and she found herself looking directly down the distant launch tube. His mech's hull disappeared behind the flash as the main rocket motor engaged.
Jessica kicked the legs of her mech sideways and slammed the controls to the right. Beff's third rocket struck, and her mech's right foot was gone in another “krumf” of soot and flame.
She screamed in frustration from the damage and helplessness. Her mech flopped on its side, smoke billowing from the elbow and ankle stumps underneath it. Beff charged in, his giant spear held high to skewer her. Tonight’s crowd expected a minor match. They were getting one void of a show, and their cheers and applause thundered through the cavernous building.
“NoName, kill the left blade and shunt the plasma to whatever jets we have left!” she yelled to her computer. Beff’s charge at her crippled mech continued as NoName ticked off the closing distance, the sight his blurred spear-tip filling Jessica with dread.
NoName’s targeting features demanded she fire immediately at Beff’s cockpit. She canceled the command with the stab of a finger against a display.
“No! Wait for it, then put it here!” she said, pointing at the oncoming enemy mech on another touchscreen.
Her remaining blade retracted and powered off, and she popped her armor up to a sitting position with a tiny, jarring flash of jets. Her footless leg folded underneath her, and she launched her last rocket just before her opponent entered the safety interlock distance. The projectile caught Beff's armor in the side, just above the hip.
The already-damaged leg flew off in a fury of pieces and parts. A chain of small explosions stitched up from the hips to the spine and shoulders of the opposing mech. With a loud groan, Beff's momentum carried him forward. The shattered armor stumbled and crashed to the ground, flames riding its back all the way down. The vibro-spear clattered to the deck, sliding and hissing past her as it dug a furrow through the scattered patches of sand and exposed metal.