Challenge of Steel

by James David Victor

  Anders let go.

  Uskol roared in defiance as he fell to the nest of pillars below, and there was a resounding crack! Anders saw the man cough and splutter blood.

  Fool. Anders cursed the man’s stupidity and his savagery. “I’m coming down!” Anders shouted, swinging himself over the edge of the shaking pillar and landing lightly on the balls of his feet.

  The Red Judge lay before him, spread-eagled, making minute movements with his hands. He coughed and gurgled.

  “I can carry you,” Anders said, reaching for the man’s shoulders. “Something terrible is happening up there. The Challenge has to be over. We’ll get you to a medical facility…”

  “Wh— why?” the Red Judge coughed.

  Anders looked at the dying man’s eyes.

  “Because I’m an officer of the law,” Anders said, feeling the rightness of those words. “I’m here for one thing and one thing only: the truth.” He reached down once again, but, with apparent effort, the Red Judge waved him off.

  “No. No… It’s too late for me. Save yourself. The name you want…is Black Rose. The Black Rose. She hired me to kill that freak,” Uskol whispered just before his head fell back with a thump. He was dead.

  Anders stood there, looking at the man for a moment before he was shaken from his musings by Moriarty.

  “Sir. You have to climb. Now,” the simulated intelligence urged. “There has been some sort of glitch in the Challenge satellite servers, allowing me to read them. There has been some sort of terrible incident above Hecta 3 space. A crash or an impact. Those explosions on the surface are bits of the debris hitting the planet.”

  Anders shook his head at the news. Something terrible had gone wrong with the Challenge, but at least now he had a name. The name. The person who had ordered the killing of the clones. Who had something to do with the clone PK army.

  The Black Rose.

  Epilogue

  “Congratulations for surviving, contestants,” said the man standing before them. He was a blonde, square-jawed sort of a guy, dressed in black tactical gear, striped with several bands and chevrons of gold.

  He also wasn’t the Challenge announcer. Anders frowned.

  Anders crouched warily by Dalia and Patch, outside the bunker, feeling exhausted. The Hecta skyline was smeared with pillars of smoke where several of the Challenge satellites had fallen to the surface. Following his duel with Uskol Hecatia, there had been no flashing skies as the Challenge had been completed.

  Instead, there had come a series of security transports burning through the atmosphere, laying down streams of plasma fire a few miles out from the Challenge site, which presumably would keep away any of the dangerous beasts that roamed the planet.

  Out of one of the shuttles had stepped this man, and a large compliment of Throne Marines, all in their customary bronze and gold battle suits.

  “They’re not fooling around, are they?” Patch whispered.

  “Can you blame them?” Anders nodded up at the sky.

  The Marines had rounded up the remaining contestants, of which there were now only a handful, and sat them down far enough apart so that they could be shot with ease.

  “Drop your weapons. All of them,” the black-suited officer said.

  He’s a commander, Anders read the suit insignia as he tossed his knife on the ground in front of him. No, a commander-general. Across from him, there was a variety of thuds as assorted blades, points, spears, and cudgels where thrown down.

  “Moraines.” The man singled out the blood-drenched Lisa, on her knees and shaking with exhaustion and grief. “Moraines!” the man said again. This time, Lisa looked up, but not at the commander. She was staring daggers at Anders, and the lieutenant knew precisely what she was saying as she threw her weapons to the ground—that she would find him, when they were free, and she wanted to kill him.

  Well, she can try. Anders shook his head a fraction. But she will fail.

  “What’s going on?” asked one of the few other contestants, a bald man with a scar down one side of his face.

  “Contestants, I am afraid to tell you that we are at war,” the commander-general said.

  “What!?” Anders said, already rising from his seat. If this was true, then he already had a job to do. He would need to get back to Hectamon 7. He would be on the reserve list for the New Gate City defense forces…

  “Don’t move, Lieutenant,” the commander-general said coldly. Anders halted, staring at the man. Why wouldn’t he let a serving MPB officer fight for him?

  “The eyes of the throne are on us,” the commander-general said, rather cryptically, “as well as a few billion viewers from all across the Reach.”

  Anders had seen the clouds of surveillance drones that had been released by the shuttles. All of this was being broadcast to the Challenge viewers, who must be as confused and shocked as he was!

  “The empire is now in a state of emergency, so your celebrations will have to be postponed. However, this year’s winner was the Unknown Ilythian,” the man said through clipped tones, and it sounded as though it was effort for him to speak.

  Dalia! Anders thought. He remembered seeing the pile of bodies around her as she had fought. Of course. If the winner was the one with the most kills, then she clearly had to be it.

  “But seeing as the Unknown Ilythian is now a combatant of an enemy empire, her title has been revoked,” the man went on. “Marines, place this woman in custody. Now.”

  Dalia hissed as she sprang to her feet.

  “Wait, stop!” Anders moved to intercept, before something hit him in the chest. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, staring up at the broken sky and his jaw ached awfully. “Wha— What happened?”

  “They got you with a stun dart, Lieutenant,” whispered Patch, appearing over him. “Here.” The young Voider hauled him up, and Anders felt his body tremble with the memory of the electric shocks that must have torn through his body.

  “Dalia?” he muttered, only to see that she was on her knees with her head in the dirt. Two of the stun darts were clearly visible sticking from her back and arm, and now the Marines were busy applying magnet cuffs to her wrists and ankles.

  “Where are you taking her?” Anders managed to cough, slumping forward. “What do you mean, she’s an enemy?”

  “Didn’t you hear me, Lieutenant?” the blonde commander-general said. “Your friend here is a spy for the Ilythians. And the Golden Throne is now at war with the Ilythians.”

  What!? Nothing in that sentence made sense. “Moriarty, update!” Anders hissed, thinking that perhaps the simulated intelligence could at least tell him something.

  But there was no reply from Anders’s node. It remained a stubborn, dark bauble of metal. No lights and no power coursed through it. The electric shock must have deactivated it. Or destroyed it.

  “And so, Lieutenant, given the situation, I must announce that you are the current winner of this year’s Challenge. Hail, Lieutenant Corsigon!”

  There was a dazzling flutter of lights from the surveillance drones as they swooped and soared around them.

  “I demand that you release my friend!” Anders was saying, already wobbling to his feet.

  “You know I can’t do that. This is a time of war, Lieutenant,” the commander-general said, nodding at the Marines nearest to him to step forward with blasters raised.

  “The throne thanks you for your amazing effort and skill during the Challenge, and as a reward, we will be enlisting you into the Throne Marines, effective immediately.”

  “No, wait, I have a job to do… The Hecta people need me!” I have to catch the Black Rose, Anders was thinking.

  “The people of the throne need their heroes right now, Lieutenant Corsigon,” the commander-general said with a cold, thin-lipped smile. “And what better hero will there be than the current winner of the Challenge? You will be at the very forefront of the coming war with the Ilythian Empire!”

  Anders growled like a wolf as the
Marines closed ranks around him. He would find a way out of this. He would rescue Dalia, somehow.

  He would find the Black Rose.

  Commander-General Cread sat alone, as he preferred at times like these. He felt the need to reflect on what had just taken place. A monumental occasion, if he allowed himself a moment of indulgence. Sobering as the necessity of the action was, he felt no small amount of thrill at the beginning of this new era of war, one he himself had ushered in.

  The empress could not have orchestrated it half as well without him.

  Turning to his desk, he poured himself a small glass of a dark liquor—a rare Ilythian blend, as irony would have it. He relished the warmth of the liquid as it coated his throat with the slight burn that he loved so much.

  Yes, everything has gone very, very well, he mused, leaning back in his chair.

  Cread’s mind wandered to the future, and what a war with the Ilythians might hold.

  I will have to be prepared to take my proper place.

  A knock came at the door, swift and formal.

  “Come in.”

  He placed his glass on the desk and turned. A smile grew on his face as a woman, dressed in black with rich red curls, entered, her hips swaying with just the right cadence to make a man’s heart race. He was particularly proud of that. The mannerisms were the most difficult to get just right in a clone.

  “Thousands now dead, and a populace filled with righteous fury, and a lust for war,” he crooned. “It was all planned well, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded her response and leaned back against the doorframe.

  “Hmmm,” he hummed, and fingered his glass, pausing, as if reminiscing the recent destruction. Raising the amber liquid to catch the light, he gazed into it for a moment. “We finally have what we have worked so hard for.”

  He lifted his glass, and regarded the silent woman by the door, “To the war, and to you, my Black Rose.”

  THANK YOU

  Thank you so much for reading Challenge of Steel, the first story in the Memories of Earth series. Anders and Dalia finally found their assassin, but they’ve got bigger problems to worry about now, don’t they?

  The next story in the Memories of Earth series is called Into the Void and the first order of business will be Anders escaping his “captivity” as a Throne Marine before he meets an untimely end.

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