The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  “Checkmate,” Pete said. “Hold your applause, I’m here all…”

  Something twitched and Palawi let loose another burst of electricity, this one catching Mermari square in the face and forcing her back. It had been well placed but fortunate, black burns spread over Mermari’s face and neck. They looked painful. The cat howled in pain, Palawi looked better for the injuries but in no less pain. The golden fur was slick with blood, one eye slashed shut, an ear torn.

  “… Week.”

  Scott shook his head. He wasn’t too worried about the injuries. They could be fixed up. Since spirits weren’t technically alive anymore, fixing the damage was simple. Relatively. There were people who had machines to do that in no time at all. Even death wasn’t permanent in this game. That was little more than what most bouts were. Fights to the death.

  “Truce?” he asked. “It really worth it?”

  He held out a hand. “Maybe I am a bit rusty. But there’s time yet. I will get better. Don’t want to peak too early, do I?”

  Pete shook the hand, moved in to give him a begrudging hug. He returned it, felt a little uncomfortable. He wasn’t a hugging person. On the bout though, not too bad a result. “Ah, not that bad. Palawi looks stronger.”

  Scott grinned at that. Always nice to get compliments on your spirits. And just because he’d been on holiday, just because he was rusty from actual bout practice didn’t mean that he’d avoided working on his spirits and strategies.

  “Hey, definitely. I’m curious though. How’d you survive that blast on the water?”

  Pete tapped his nose and grinned. “Oh, that’d be telling. I’m not letting you steal my ideas. I’m just glad it worked.”

  Classic Peter Jacobs in other words. Scott bit down a biting retort and only smiled.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess this was a good workout.” He glanced around, saw the disapproving looks of other guests. Even some of the approaching staff members looked less than pleased, security guards and an irate manager, enmity in his eyes.

  He’d seen that look before. Unless he was very much mistaken, the next words that were spoken to the three of them were going to be requests to leave the premises as quickly as possible. Probably with the addition of not coming back as well.

  “Good thing we’re about to check out anyway, right?” he said, giving Jess a sideways glance. With her back to the staff, she hadn’t seen them approaching, something she quickly moved to put right by craning her head around. Scott saw the hint of anger flush into her cheeks, a hint of scarlet almost the same colour as her hair and he blanched to himself.

  Uh oh!

  He was probably going to suffer for this somewhere down the line.

  Chapter Two. Troubled Luxury.

  Reims Enterprises. Founded sixty years ago by budding entrepreneur Thomas Coppinger, this company has always set about finding tomorrows products today. From humble dawns, it has evolved into something monolithic. Now we have our business interests in as many fields as possible, casting a wide seeking net across the five kingdoms. To grow is to seek.

  Reims Enterprises, summed up in a few sentences by one of their representational videos at the Springbirth Business Conference.

  The eighth day of Summerdawn.

  It was happening again and she could do nothing but watch it unfold before her.

  Torment wracked every sight that befell her eyes, no matter where she looked, she saw the things that broke her heart. Wherever she gazed, she felt a little piece of her die inside, so much so that she felt hollow inside. She’d have been sick if she had anything left. Slowly, she stepped through the wreckage of what had once been civilisation, her feet brushing through the spongy undergrowth. All of this had once been cities, towns… Prosperity. So much of it had been hers. Now it belonged to nobody but them.

  Them…

  She’d not seen them. Nobody had. Not since that first day but their presence had been heavily implied. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t need to be. Not when they had a weapon to use to such devastating effect. It had come from everywhere it felt, spread in with all the uncompromising mercy of a tidal wave and consumed everything in its path. There had been those that stood against it, man and spirit alike, bringing all manner of weapon to bear against its insatiable force and yet they’d failed.

  Everyone had failed. She was the last one left alive. The last of humanity. Sole survivor. Alone. More afraid than she’d ever been before. Far in the distance, she could see the Senate building, it should have been on Five Point Island but she hadn’t crossed any water. The great vines ripped through the brickwork and the outer defences as if they weren’t there, cutting a formerly majestic building into great chunks of useless wreckage in a matter of seconds. She thought she could still hear the screams.

  Far to her right, the ICCC building had already gone the same way, Ronald Ritellia strung up outside by a tangled web of thorns, his eyes still twitching, blood breaking from the corners of his mouth. On her left, Unisco was burning in a green fire, faceless individuals trying to save themselves. It felt like they hadn’t yet realised their fate was sealed…

  And amidst all this, they were coming for her. She narrowed her eyes, tensed up. She needed to run. Not that it’d make a difference, she already knew that. You didn’t outrun a force of nature like this. You couldn’t.

  Sooner or later, it’d catch her. It’d consume her. Painfully.

  And then she’d wake up.

  She didn’t like to waste time in bed. Sleep normally came soundly for her, no matter the length, no matter the location, it would sate her. She’d slept as sound on a rough boat ride as she had in the best hotels around the world. Wasting time struggling to sleep just didn’t figure into her way of life. It was a decision she’d made, training she’d put her body through to ensure that she dropped off as promptly and efficiently as possible. Why waste time with it? Why waste time with bad dreams? All of those were for people with lesser problems than her.

  Her worries were few and those that she did have weren’t those she wanted to worry about in her sleep. Enough was focused on them while being awake. The wedding, for one thing. That was coming up on the horizon and it was taking much more time than she’d have liked. It was, if she was honest, more trouble than it was worth. But her daughter was insistent. Paying for it was never going to be a problem. Presenting the right image would be the challenge. That was always the problem with events like this. The right image. She scowled in the dark. Children. If she’d known they were going to lead to this much trouble and stress…

  No regrets. It was possible to love someone without necessarily liking them that much. Her entire life was a case in point to that standard.

  With all that in mind, why did the dreams continue to plague her, haunt her even. Every decision she’d ever made to run her life and yet she was still at the mercy of her subconscious. The first time, it had terrified her. The first bad dream since she was a child and she’d been disgusted with herself. Still she’d chalked it up to a bad meal of shellfish the night before and put it out of her mind, determined not to let it haunt her longer than it needed to. That had been ten years ago.

  Ever since then, they’d been recurring, at least one a week, sometimes, often even, more. She’d seen a sleep therapist, thrown down a medley of prescribed medication to blot them out. Hadn’t done a damn thing. If anything, she’d seen them get worse. Every time she closed her eyes and surrendered to unconsciousness, her dreams had been plagued with the terrors of the unknown, visions of the end. The end of everything she’d come to know about the kingdoms, everything she’d taken for granted. All torn down in a moment.

  Except they hadn’t stayed unknown for long. She possessed a fine mind and she’d put it to work, eventually working out the recurring factors in the dreams, everything she saw and put it all together. She’d seen the pieces, managed to work out the whole picture from the bits she’d managed to pry out her own memories.

  That was when she’d realise
d what it was that she had to do.

  It was time to get up. She threw back the covers and got up, pressing her toes into the deep red carpet as she did every morning, finding the divots and resting for a moment. Once awake, there was no point in lingering between the sheets. Time waited for nobody, rich, poor or indifferent. That was what dear old dad had always said and she’d tried to live by it. Caution was fine. Hesitation was a deadly foe, even a fatal one. Time was there whether you wanted it to be or not. Gravity had been conquered to a fashion. Physics can be twisted and challenged with enough will. Time could not be fought. Nobody had ever broken it.

  She’d always wondered about that though. Why? Why couldn’t the laws of time be shattered? Stranger things had happened. Just. So why could this not be the case? Time couldn’t be stopped but a watch could. Of course, the watch was only a small part of time. Not even a true representative, no more than a DNA sample represented every single person in the five kingdoms. Time was one thing. Reality was another. Both felt like lofty goals. She thrived on challenges. If there was to be a riddle, then she would somehow find the answer. Somehow.

  If there was to be an answer, it would not be one she found in her sleeping clothes. She was awake now. No point in staying in bed.

  Some of the rich people she’d known kept more servants than they needed. In the circles she moved in, it felt like everyone was an equal or below her. Where she stood right now, kings and presidents stood wary of her. Wealth on her scale meant she could cause problems for anyone. It was a rare day she’d have the inclination to do that though. It was the sort of attention she just didn’t need.

  She didn’t like to flaunt the wealth more than she had to. She had an exceptional bodyguard, all the protection she’d ever want, but she could never rule out the chance that someone would want to make a name for themselves in history. Always there were revolutionaries wanting to string up those better off than them. That couldn’t be allowed for her, not yet. She still had her own history yet to complete and she didn’t want it to be an abridged version. Hence the lack of servants where others had dozens.

  It was an idle quirk that she’d always found amusing in a dry sort of way. Why? She could afford a thousand servants a day for the rest of her life. Why? Why waste the credits on such an extravagance? The rich didn’t stay rich by frivolous spending. If there’d ever been one lesson she’d tried to teach her daughter, it was that, although it had taken time to sink in, more time than she’d have liked. Make your own mistakes; you pay your own way. Those so-called friends of hers at that school had turned her head briefly; it wasn’t a turn she’d experienced twice. One of the truly fantastic things she’d worked out in her life was exceptionally creative punishments. Making her work back the money across half the year, punishing twelve-hour weekend shifts at a time had broken that.

  There’d been seething resentment at the time. Meredith had even threatened to run away at one point. She’d never given into threats. Suffice to say that she wasn’t starting here and Meredith hadn’t fled. She wouldn’t dare. The life had been very comfortable. Exceptionally comfortable by most standards. Would probably have been damned near close to luxury in most eyes. And to go from that to nothing, she doubted Meredith had the character. She wouldn’t dare risk being disowned.

  The wedding was the exception. Getting rid of her only child? That was worth the expense. Even in her head that sounded cynical and more than a little unfair. Meredith wasn’t that bad. She thought she’d done a good job with what she could. Parenting had been the greatest challenge she’d faced and perhaps the only one she couldn’t have claimed a unanimous victory on. The working off her debt part had probably been simultaneously the high and low point of it all. High because she’d won. She’d laid down her authority, gone through with what she’d always promised would happen if she was defied. Low because she’d seen that look in her daughter’s eyes, that feeling of hurt and betrayal. There’d been more than a little hatred in there.

  She’d seen the reproach every single day that she’d sent her off to Reims to work. If one day she was to inherit the company, she could at least find out how it worked. And it hadn’t been the glamorous jobs either. It had been with the cleaners and the cafeteria staff and the fetchers and the carriers. If regulations hadn’t prevented it, she’d have had words for her to be sent into the ventilation system. A real shame she’d thought at the time, but perhaps for the best. Sometimes things went too far. If a drone could do it twice as well in half the time, then perhaps it wasn’t the best thing to do, even in the case of teaching her daughter a lesson, as enjoyable as it she might have found it to herself deep down.

  What she wouldn’t do under any circumstance was pay for someone to get her clothes out. That was something she did regard as a frivolous expense. She dressed quickly and casually. Today she could deal with matters at home; she wasn’t going into the office. Truth be told she rarely needed to go into the office at all these days. But she wanted to. She didn’t want to be one of those owners who left it to everyone else and spent her entire life in somewhere a lot hotter.

  Work was like her drug; it was a hard habit to kick. She’d worked ever since she was fourteen years old in one capacity or another, some roles had been more instructive than others in the greater picture. Besides there was always work to be done that had nothing to do with the running of Reims. The greater picture was something she could never forget about. Still, it would be nice to see sun on a day to day basis.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have set up in the capital of Canterage. Home to some of the worst weather she’d ever experienced. It did nothing but rain here sometimes. Retire to Vazara, spend her days in the villa… For someone else, that’d be bliss. She’d bought it, rarely used it, not since the whole Quin-C bid there had kicked into overdrive. She loved that kingdom, wished she could spend more time there. The villa had been her way of giving herself an opportunity to do that, yet it hadn’t yet materialised completely that way. Impulse purchase gone wild. Who said she had to obey her own rules? That was the beauty about being a parent. She could afford to be hypocritical.

  Meredith wasn’t here right now. Out with her partner to be? Perhaps. Or those ghastly friends? More than likely. With her away from here, she had privacy. Privacy that would be handy later. Nobody needed to hear what was going to happen. Her big venture… She didn’t want anything to compromise that. That would be fatal in so many ways. Too much planning had gone into it for stupid errors now. She’d made that clear. Anyone who screwed up would have nowhere to hide. She hadn’t made her reputation by being forgiving. Not in the business world anyway. Hard as it might have sounded to some, her daughter was her blind spot in that regard. Blood was blood. If you couldn’t forgive your blood some minor transgressions, what were you coming to? Sometimes it was hard. Forgiveness wasn’t an easy thing to find in a heart as tired as hers.

  She did keep a chef on employ. That was one of her extravagances and one that she freely admitted that she didn’t mind spending out on. Perhaps it should have bothered her more that she couldn’t cook worth a damn. Her food was more likely to kill after it had been prepared rather than before. Besides, she could live with that. As much as it had pained her to admit in her younger days, nobody could be an absolute master at everything. Her father had later told her that it was better to be the top dog in one or two regards rather than merely passable in several dozen areas. Spread yourself thin and you will never know who you are. She’d worked out who she was not long after that.

  Her father had died and she’d risen to inherit the company at a tender age. Destiny had a way of working out that you played the part it had meant you to. Her part had been to take this seat and although it had been initially uncomfortable, she’d found her way into it. That was what she’d been trained for. That was the role she’d thrived in. Destiny was subjective though; she couldn’t help but feel that. The life she’d grown up in gave her more chance of being the boss than the average man off the street. Not th
at she was complaining. Reims had more than doubled its annual profits on a consistent basis since she’d taken the helm. Things were rosy. She had more credits than she could ever realistically spend. Maybe that was the driving force behind the Venture. Everything she had and she might as well do some good with it.

  On the other hand, she could have taken the approach her daughter looked to be taking. Away from her. Away from the company. Once she’d wanted her to succeed her one day, to take her place. Now, she dreaded where that would leave the family business. Thankfully that looked less and less likely with every passing day. And although she couldn’t approve the choice of partner, it looked like Meredith would be happy with that. There’d be somebody within the business more suited to the role. It’d mean that control of the company went out of the family for the first time in its existence but sometimes to survive was to change. Rather the right person who didn’t bear her name than the wrong person who did.

  She took all her meals at home in the giant dining room with the great table, long enough to seat thirty and heavily polished oak. It had been here since the days of her grandfather. She liked eating alone at it, the sensation made her feel small and anonymous, an unusual enough feeling for it to be novel. Four generations of her family had lived here, helped build the name. From small acorns the company had grown into one of the biggest in the five kingdoms. You could count the competition on the same level on the fingers of one hand. Her breakfast was already on the table, a platter of hard cooked eggs, a selection of cold local meats and salty Serranian cheeses, all for her choice.

  A news pad had been left on the table. She should know, she had left it there the night before. Already it was uploading the morning news for her to pore over. Still in the news was the disappearance of Selena Stanton. That spirit dancer had gone missing, last seen checking into a hotel in her home city and nobody had seen her since. Not technically accurately, somebody had to have if she’d been kidnapped. That was being pedantic. Not really in her field of interest. She’d show up sooner or later. The whole spirit dancing thing was ridiculous anyway.