by David Ryker
It was times like that I wished I’d just stayed on Genesis. And that was saying a lot, because Genesis was a really shitty place.
I passed the guy with the beard and the curly hair taking someone else’s rig three-quarters of the way to the door and he gave me a cursory nod, smirking as he did.
I sighed. Yep. Dying on Genesis would have been better. Much better.
8
I rode upwards in silence, the elevator moving smoothly and quickly — too quickly for my liking. I was trying to drag out the walk as long as I could, but the elevator seemed to have different ideas.
It still made me feel nauseous, and when the doors opened, if my stomach hadn’t been completely empty, I would have vomited more.
The upper levels of the deck that we were all staying on were reserved for the higher ranking officers in the Federation. I stepped off the elevator and realized immediately that it meant that this deck was a lot nicer. We had stark concrete and a plain rail. Up here, they had a tiled walkway, foliage lined balconies, and a polished glass wall that stared down over the five hundred meter drop. I took one look over it and felt my feet squirm. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but the glass was gleaming and crystal clear, and if you didn’t look twice, you’d think it wasn’t there at all. Even the doors were nicer than ours, their lettering engraved and bronzed where ours was stenciled on. I sighed and held up my communicator. The message from Volchec was flashing there. 44-31. Now.
I swallowed and pulled left, counting down the numbers until I hit the thirties. I wished I’d stopped to get something to drink. My mouth felt sickly sweet with the taste of vomit and my heart was thumping slowly like someone was hitting a huge drum. I could feel it against the back of my tongue, threatening to leap out of my throat.
I dragged myself in front of door 44-31 and stopped, not knowing what the hell I was going to say. I pulled my hand back and closed my fist. I was halfway to knocking when she called my name.
“Red!”
I straightened abruptly and turned to see Alice running toward me. She looked different. Well, not different, but not like I remembered her. I didn’t know if it was just my mind idolizing her, shutting out the image of her battered face and swollen jaw… Or before that, the bruising she carried back from Draven. I tried to remember her like she was on the Regent Falmouth — when we’d first met. Young, confident, cocky, but endearing somehow, too — someone I loved to hate. Now, though, she looked like she would have kicked dirt in that girl’s face.
She jogged up to me, having lost none of the spring in her step, and slowed to a halt, panting a little. She was wearing a pair of worn overalls folded down and tied around the waist. On top, it was a white tank top that was stretched tight against a flat, muscled stomach. Her shoulders were defined and strong, her arms sinewed. Her chest rose and fell with her breath, slow and deep. A rusted nut was hanging on a leather lace around it. She’d kept up with her training, that much was clear. Her face had healed beautifully, too, though her jaw seemed more angular than before, her cheekbones a little more pronounced. She’d grown her hair out too, at least on one side. One half was shaved short, and a thick mess curled over the top and swept back behind her ear, which had been pierced a couple of times. The clean-cut academy brat I’d known was long gone. She’d grown up by the look of it, and out of the pilot’s life. The Federation required us to keep our hair short — women too, and tied back. Piercings were a no-go, as well. I didn’t know what had happened, but I couldn’t stop staring.
“Red?” she asked, snatching her breath back, planting her hands on her hips and scowling at me. That was the first familiar thing about her. She snapped her fingers and I jerked to attention and blinked. My mind was racing. I couldn’t believe she was standing there.
“Alice,” I said, suddenly short on breath myself.
She shook her head, and leaned in awkwardly, stepping forward and then back half a step like she’d decided to hug me, and then backed out at the last minute. The first thought that crossed my mind was that if she did she’d probably smell the vomit on me, and as such I sort of stood off a little so she couldn’t. She cleared her throat instead and locked her hips, planting her hands again. “What the hell are you doing here?” she said, her voice sharp, but not without a certain warmth.
I cleared my throat and hooked a thumb toward the door. Was this actually happening? Or had I lost my mind at some point in the last hour? Maybe I’d bumped my head in the fight and this was a hallucination. “I’m, uh, here to see Volchec.”
Alice looked at the door and back to me. “No, not here.” She shook her head. “Here on the Athena.”
“We were called here for the tribunal hearing—” I screwed my face up. “What are you doing here?”
She sighed and stared at the ground. “Living a waking nightmare,” she growled.
I narrowed my eyes. “What?”
“What?” she laughed. “What do you mean what? Never finished your English classes at the academy, did you?” She gave it like we’d not been apart for thirteen months, and like the last time we’d seen each other she hadn’t hated my guts.
I cleared my throat and made myself smile. “Last I heard,” I said, trying to must an air of aloofness, “you were on a ship in the Leeam system, with your father — recovering.”
She looked at herself and then spread her arms emphatically. “As you can see, I’m all better.”
“I can see that,” I said, looking at what she was gesturing to.
She snapped her fingers again. “Eyes up, Red. Jesus, you haven’t changed a bit.” She smirked and shook her head again, her chocolate hair shaking over her shoulder. “Except now you can actually grow some facial hair.” She reached out and grabbed at my cheek.
I pulled away, batting her hand away, forcing a laugh. I didn’t know this Alice. She wasn’t the Alice I’d first met, and I didn’t know what to make of the change. “How did you get here?”
She sighed and laughed, feeling it come a little easier. I watched her neck move, the muscles tighten there. “Oh, shit — where to start. Yeah, we were on the Kincaid, for a while. Dad—” She cut herself off and assumed a more serious tone “—Colonel Kepler was offered a post on the Athena — a desk job, and you know,” she said, shrugging, “he’s not as young as he used to be, and it was a permanent gig. So, he brought us over — me, Mom.”
I wondered what her mother was like — and her father. I couldn’t see him being anything other than tall, ramrod straight, and strict. Maybe her mother was a softer touch. Maybe that was rubbing off on Alice. She certainly seemed more relaxed than she used to. I didn’t interrupt.
“And yeah, we live here, on the Athena.” She looked around, wistfully at first, and then grimaced. “It fucking sucks.”
“Does it?” I raised an eyebrow. “What am I missing here? You’re not flying with the corps?”
She gestured to herself again. “What does it look like?”
“Uh…”
“Rhetorical, Red. No, I’m not.”
“How come?”
She ground her teeth and showed them between her lips in frustration. “Because I haven’t been cleared for active duty.”
“You said you were all healed up.” I felt just as dense as I always had speaking to her. She was leading the conversation, as usual.
“I am.” She rolled her eyes and sighed. “But considering what happened with the Falmouth and then on Telmareen… Dad’s just a little protective, is all.”
I nodded and bit my lip. “Yeah, I get that.” But I didn’t. I’d never had anyone give two shits about me.
“So I’ve been confined here for the last eight months. Trapped.” She laughed and it tailed off and died abjectly between us.
“And, uh, what about your title? Queen of the Arena?” I couldn’t help but smirk.
I expected her to blush, but she just grinned. “You’re goddamn right.”
“How did that happen?”
She shrugged. “I lost my
rig on Telmareen — didn’t look like I was going back on duty any time soon… Sim started getting boring, then I found the Arena. The rest is history.”
“Where’d you get the Alpha? That’s a hell of a chunk of steel.”
She smiled to herself. “Hell yeah, it is. It was up as a stake for the winner of a ground-fight — same as what we did earlier, just on foot.” She held her shoulders up and turned her hands out. “What can I say, I don’t like to lose.”
I cleared my throat again, the scratchiness from the retching tugging at it. My guts twisted up and I thought of Greg. “Yeah, I know,” I said with more bite than intended.
She measured me for a second, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t want to just jump right into that conversation,” she said coldly, “but just what the hell were you thinking?”
I swallowed and said nothing.
She huffed and shook her head at me. “You really haven’t changed. Betting with someone else’s steel. Federation steel. You know what they’ll do to you, right?” She watched my expression change and read it like a book. “You didn’t even know, did you? What — you just thought, hey, this sounds like fun, and you just signed the contract, didn’t you?” She chuckled quietly in disbelief.
I set my teeth, feeling my hands curl at my sides. “They hardly made it clear what I was signing.”
She scoffed now. “Why would they? Dumb shits like you are the only way they can keep the games going. You think people are lining up to give their Mech away? You know how much those things cost?”
I didn’t. Not accurately, at least. I knew it was more than I’d make in a lifetime. “The ad wasn’t exactly forthcoming, either.”
She sucked her teeth, speaking airily. “You’ll get castrated for this — maybe just plain ejected. You know that, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Yep.” There was no getting away from it now.
“I’m surprised that you didn’t try to make a break for it,” she laughed.
“I was thinking about it.”
“Chuck show you his gun?”
“That dick with the beard?”
She cocked an eyebrow.
I nodded. “Yeah. Looked like he’d use it too.”
“He has.”
“Mm.”
“You signed it over, though — your rig, I mean.” She looked right at me now, arms folded. “Chuck said you didn’t really put up a fight, either.” She took a breath and restained a grin. “Said you cried, though.”
I didn’t realize I could cringe that hard, my cheeks burning. “I…” I trailed off. I didn’t really have any defense. “When I realized what had happened, it was… Greg and me…” The catch came back to my throat and I felt it close up. “I let him down — I shouldn’t have risked him. It was stupid.” I didn’t know why I was telling her. Maybe I sort of hoped she’d pass it on — tell him I was sorry, if it would mean anything.
“You’re not going to ask me to give him back?” She raised both eyebrows now, the little rings on her ear shimmering in the lights above. “Beg, maybe? Appeal to my better nature?”
“Would it make a difference? I lost, fair and square. And… I don’t think he’d want to have me back as a pilot, anyway. Not after that.”
“Jesus, Red, he’s a goddamn slab of metal.” She looked away. “And yeah, he didn’t sound too pleased with how it all went down.”
“You spoke to him?” I perked up a little now.
“He spoke to me — talkative for an AI, isn’t he?”
I nodded. “Yeah, he’s special. Just don’t… Don’t throw him away, if you want the parts, I mean.” I pulled my cheek up to my eye, thinking. “If you are, can I have his core back? Only so I can find something new for him, eventually.” I was saying it, but I didn’t know if that would ever happen.
“You’d do that for an AI?”
“He’s my friend.”
“That’s sad,” she said ruthlessly.
“Not really,” I replied just as bluntly.
She ran her tongue around her bottom lip. “He is a weird one — asked me to tell you that if I saw you,” she started, looking up as she tried to remember the message, “that he’d told me, that it wasn’t you that shot at me, it was him. He said you didn’t want to.”
“He did?”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing, “but he also said that you’re an idiot who didn’t grasp the basic rules of a last man standing competition.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That sounds like something he’d say.”
She exhaled slowly, rocking back and forth on her heels. “We spoke a bit — he got me up to speed on what’s been going on with you guys. Said that you were all here. Mac, Fish, Everett… Volchec. Told me which room you were in — I went there first. This was my second stop, hence the run.” She’d caught her breath now, but I could still see the beads of sweat around her collarbones. “And now that you’ve been cleared of everything, you’ll probably be heading out soon on another mission — well, not you, of course, because you fucking blew the whole arena thing.”
“Get to the point.”
She rolled her shoulders up and down. “So what’s say we make a deal, huh?”
“A deal?”
“Yeah — you do something for me, I do something for you.”
“I know what a deal is, Alice,” I said gruffly.
“Of course you do, Red. You know all about deals, and bets, and contracts—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. She hadn’t lost her cutting sense of humor, that was for sure.
“How would you like to hold on to Greg for just a little bit longer?”
“You want to give him back?” I tried to keep my voice even, but I did a terrible job of it.
“No. Not give. Trade.”
“What do you want?” I said eagerly.
She laughed a little. “Alright — well, I’m, uh, dying to get off this fucking station. Moving in with your parents after you’ve lived away isn’t exactly an ideal situation — I was in the academy from twelve. Living back with them is…” She stuck her bottom lip out.
I’d never lived anywhere except the education facility. I couldn’t say what it was like to live with parents, but I guessed it was better than an orphanage. Still, with Greg’s metal hide on the line, I didn’t say it. “What can I do?”
“Well, if you’re heading in there—” she nodded to the door “—Volchec’s room — I’m guessing it’s because she’s about to brief you on a mission.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. “Yeah.”
“I want in. I want off this station, and you guys are my easiest ticket out of here.”
“But what about your parents, the arena? Your title?”
“Think bigger, Red — Jesus. I don’t want to be stuck here forever. I want to be back out there, doing something.” I could hear it in her voice, she was going stir crazy here.
“Okay, so what can I do? You’re not cleared for duty.”
“No, but it’s not Medical, it’s my dad. Volchec could pull strings, get me cleared — we’d be out of here before he even realized. Humph, not like I see him much anyway. Doubt he’d even notice for a few days.”
I definitely didn’t like where this was going. “That sounds a little fucked up. Going behind your dad’s back like that?”
“What would you know about it?” she said, voice sharp.
Rage burned inside me. I didn’t like where this was going. I was about to get exploited, and I wondered how quickly she’d put together her plan after taking me out of the competition.
Alice had changed, sure, but not totally. She still had some of the Academy brat inside her, that entitled entitled pilot academy stink she’d had when we first met. But she was also dangling the only chance I was going to have at getting Greg back in front of me. So I bit down on it.
“Nothing,” I growled. “Go on.”
“That’s what I thought. Anyway — if she can pull strings, you know, get me cleared, and I
can get off this junkheap, and, well, if that happens, then maybe I just tear up that requisition order, and it’ll be like none of it ever happened. All I need you to do is help me plead my case. Back me and tell Volchec that you need me back on the team. You do that, and that hunk of steel is all yours.” She cocked her head and held out her hand. “What do you say?”
“And what if I can’t convince her?”
“Then I’ll tell Volchec that you bet Federation property in the Battle Arena. And lost.”
“I’m pretty sure I can convince her.”
Alice laughed. “That’s what I thought.”
9
She stepped close enough to me that I could smell the sweat on her skin and reached for the door.
“Alice, wait,” I said, my voice quiet, our faces close.
“Yeah?”
“It’s— it’s good to see you. You look good.”
She smiled, the corner of her mouth tucking into her cheek until a dimple formed. “It’s good to see you too, Red.”
“Are we good?” I asked, finally saying it. I mean, she was being nice enough, but I didn’t know if she was just playing me to get my support for her pitch to Volchec.
She held her tongue between her lips and laughed under her breath. “Yeah, we’re good.” She socked me in the arm, harder than I thought was necessary. “You kinda saved my life, right?”
I clenched my jaw but said nothing. I really couldn’t tell if she was fucking with me or not. And right now I was strung up tighter than a Free rebel in one of the Federation’s dark zone internment camps.
“Relax, Red. I know I wouldn’t be here without you — seriously.” She dropped a few tones and nodded at me assertively. “We’re good. It’s been a year — I’m over it.”
It seemed like all the tension drained out of me at once. It’d gone from me about to have my head on the block having lost Greg, to maybe having him back, and seeing Alice, too? I swallowed hard, not able to take my eyes off the lines on her neck, the pulse of blood below her jawline, the way her hair was brushed back over her ear. I’d never noticed how small they were before.