Love of Olympia- Tournament of Stars Read online

  “We don’t need to take the Highroad, Dev. He’s not exactly on our heels,” Deidra reported. She watched the man’s burly frame vanish amongst the swirling tides of bodies. Devin led them deeper down the cold hall anyway.

  “Who cares? We’re gonna get crammed either way, now! We might as well enjoy the view while we can,” he countered. They would have been fine, had they not struck a potential customer. But Deidra wouldn’t complain one bit, and neither would Devin. That guy deserved every inch of bruise he got, even if it meant a few days of dark silence.

  “Alright,” said Deidra. She and Devin jammed their leftover paperwork deep in their pockets. When it was all stowed, Deidra took a knee with two hands cupped for Devin’s foot. Her support gave him the height boost he needed to reach a hooked rod hanging from the fire escape above. Devin yanked down the ladder. He and Deidra scrambled up the ladder with their hook, then pulled it up and locked it in place. Their pursuer tumbled through the mouth of the alleyway, bewildered at their disappearance. Deidra and Devin had already climbed to the roofs.

  At the top of the spiral fire escape, a land of rooftops only slightly more colorful than the clay below stretched out. Each was connected to another by pieces of scrap metal, discarded ship wings, or rickety ladders. Peeled paint and rust were the esthetic touches of what these two called the Highroad. It was a place they shared with a few other local vagrants fortunate enough not to be owned by The Gold Standard, but not fortunate to have homes of their own. Up there, kids with as many patches as rips in their clothes gathered to trade and watch the planet Ares take shape. It was overhead even now, a hazy orb against the light of the Homeworld. It was left blank, an empty husk, at the end of the last Olympia Gold. Now, on the eve of the next, it changed a bit each day. A mountain erected itself here. A lake trenched itself there. Entire towns spread across the surface of Ares, all for the purpose of the glorious games. Two more shapes joined twenty others that had already gathered to see what was different today.

  The Highroad was a place Devin and Deidra preferred to avoid. They’d see enough of Ares in a few days for a lifetime. Not just the glamorous battle these other vagrants wished they could afford to see, either. As servants of The Gold Standard itself, they would be down in the arenas after each match, to scrape the defeated from the walls. To retrieve fresh organs in buckets for transplant salvage. To scrub gore until they were bloodier than those who’d met the wrong end of a light-cannon. Devin and Deidra shouldered their way along the Highroad, eager to get away from this viewing stage for their personal, recurring Hell.

  “Hey, if we make it to the other side of the Skyport, we might still meet our quota for the day,” Deidra smiled, to distract herself.

  “Won’t get us out of the Cram, though, if that guy calls in the assault,” Devin shook his head.

  “You think he can keep it straight long enough to call it in?” Deidra laughed, right up until one of the Highroad vagrants called out,

  “Sentries!” He, along with every other one of the transients, scrambled for the nearest building ledge. It wasn’t exactly legal for them to linger there.

  “Damnit, already?” Deidra hissed. She glanced around for the nearest escape route. “There?”

  “Good as any!” Devin answered. He and Deidra bolted for the side of the roof, along with eight others. If they could get even a few more hours of sound and light before the Cram, it’d be worth it. “Ladder, or window?” Devin asked one of the others they ran with.

  “Window!” she told him. Devin and Deidra sprinted out ahead of the crowd. They checked over the ledge of the roof, then spun to swing down through a long, open window on the side. Their shoes flattened on a top stair of cement. Bodies rushed in around them just before a spotlight ray shone in. Devin and Deidra ducked under taser spikes from Gold Standard drones. Three bodies fumbled down the stairs around them.

  The two spiraled down the stairs just ahead of light flashes through the windows. They lunged down floor after floor. When the stairwell finally let out at the ground level, Devin stumbled. Deidra grabbed his arm. She yanked him down the alley for another busy street. The buzz of drones dove down behind them. They moved too fast to tell if anyone was still with them, but they had to get to the crowd. Light shone down behind their heels just as they leaped out into the street.

  “Hey, are you two handing out-”

  The woman never got a chance to finish her inquiry. Deidra barreled straight into her. She, Devin, and the rough-looking woman tumbled in a human knot that didn’t untie for about five feet. The Devin managed to pull himself away first. He jumped up, only to have a spotlight blaze over him from beneath a drone. The beige rectangle hovered over him a second longer to calculate its shot. By the time he turned to flee, it spat two electrically charged needles into his neck. Devin stiffened to a human plank. He thunked on the ground beside his friend and their thwarter.

  Deidra peeled away from the woman while the drone loaded a new set of needles in its taser. She didn’t have enough time to get higher than her knees, which was just enough time to get a good look at the woman. Her head was shaved behind her right ear, which had a single golden loop in it. The other side was a cascade of golden locks. Between the two contradicting hairstyles were a pair of hazel eyes so bright, they looked amber. A tattoo of black flame flickered around one of them. A diamond stud glittered in the left side of her nose. Her lips hung open, pursed in a soundless question. In that instance of eye contact, this woman in a frilled leather jacket, with the glinting bracers of a grappler, looked just as shocked as Deidra.

  “Galia!” a man called out to the woman from nearby. It was the last thing Deidra heard before two needles pierced her neck.

  Chapter Three: Sign Here

  Galia tossed her head back. She opened her throat to let liquid fire pour over her guts. The crowd roared up around. Her fist curled against the weathered wooden table.

  “Come on, Rex!” one of her rival’s crew piped up. Rex, Galia committed to memory behind her vacuum-tight eyelids. The last drop of Grey Fire swirled down her gullet. She slammed her mug on the table, to a resounding cheer. The crowd gathered around her banged on tables and hooted while Rex let his mug down, face twisted with the sting of the drink.

  “Yes, come on, Rex,” Galia chuckled. The heat of alcohol climbed up into her cheeks. With her skin tinged rose, any onlooker could see the slew of thin scars across her fair face. They could not, however, count them. There were too many. Galia hoisted her mug to the ceiling in a victory cry, along with her audience, then let it down at last. She threw a playful punch at the flushed Rex. He jerked his left hand to catch the blow, even in his impaired trance.

  “Don’t kick a man while he’s down!” Rex laughed, “Honestly, I couldn’t hope more that you and your crew get into the games. A man like me against a maniac like you… that’s the stuff legends are made of.”

  “Why wait for the games, then?” Galia popped him an eyebrow. She pushed her fist into Rex’s grasp. Both trembled against the might of the other. Galia let up only when a firm hand grasped her shoulder.

  “Alright, big G. You made your point,” laughed Rey. The only member of her crew she saw as her friend was the only one she ever needed, and the only man who’s hand she’d abide on her shoulder.

  “Reymond! Just in time to spoil the fun!” Galia laughed, and the tension in the room shattered to a million drunken pieces. She pulled her hand back from Rex. “I’ll see you out there, captain,” she said.

  “Same to you, I hope,” said Rex. Galia shook to her feet. She let Rey help her to the entrance of the musty old tavern. As soon as the door shut behind her, she wiped the stupor off her face. She straightened up and pulled her arm away from Rey. It’d take something a little more potent than Grey Fire to challenge Galia’s tolerance.

  “Fun should be number two on the docket, Galia,” Rey chided, though not without a certain reverence for her acting.

  “It is. I’ve been looking for a signup all day.
I haven’t seen one since the drones nailed those kids,” Galia told him. That was five days ago. Every glance to the sky showed the planet Ares slightly changed. It sent a pang through Galia’s chest.

  “Gah, they must be pulling back staff since there’s only a few spots left,” Rey figured. He punted a loose brick with his high, steel-toed boots. “Everything we put into the Dreamweaver… it’s all just cargo if we don’t get into the Olympia.”

  “No kidding,” Galia huffed. She drove her hands down deep in her fleece-lined pockets. There was hardly a chell left in there. She’d whittled away what little was left over from her precious Dreamweaver’s upgrades away on food and drink. “We’ll find a signup. We’ve got no choice.”

  “Sure, I’d just prefer it was before you drank us into the ground,” said Rey. Galia grasped his arm. He looked to find that dastardly, calculating grin on her lips.

  “How well you know me, Rey? You think that was about the drinks? I couldn’t nail number one, and fun’s actually number three. I moved to number two: recon. Rex, the captain of the Hammer, is left-handed.” Galia recalled his instinct when she threw her punch.

  “You crafty bi-”

  “Hey, look who it is,” Galia silenced him with a slap to the chest. She motioned to a snack stand across the cement-block street. Through exhaust fog from passing buggies and an ever-changing current of bodies, she’d spotted two faces she knew.

  Both of them were twice as haggard as the last time Galia saw them. The girl’s hair frizzed out in bursts from her brunette braid. Her knuckles were red, presumably scraped. The young man had a deep purple stain around his right eye. Galia knew, as she had before, that the two were servants of The Gold Standard by their uniforms. It was the only clean thing about them. A sleek black collared shirt under a long gray jacket. The golden emblem of the planet Ares glittered on their chests. Two gold stripes glared around their sleeves. Through soot and freckles on her already dark-skinned face, two crystal blue eyes on the girl’s face found Galia and Rey coming towards them. They filled with dread, then anger.

  “We’re out to the fifth row, folks! The longer you wait the more you’ll have to squint to see the blood!” Deidra turned to shout, to anyone else but that woman. Galia. That name was the last thing she’d heard before… well, she didn’t care to think about it, now that they were finally out. She’d even rather sell tickets than talk to Galia. She’d rather bark a flimsy sales pitch - most customers who could afford an Olympia Gold ticket could afford enhancer goggles to see from well past the fifth row. That was besides the hundred hanging screens showing footage around the arenas.

  “As I was saying, before we were interrupted,” Galia said. She paused for a glance left and right, for hypothetical drones. But Deidra and Devin had managed to avoid drunken hecklers so far today. “Are you two handing out Olympia Gold applications?”

  “He is,” Deidra pointed to Devin with her nose. She turned her head to shout out more ticket offers instantly. Her turned-up nose wrinkled her entire face. Something about it, so pretty, so twisted in frustration, plucked one of Galia’s long-quieted heartstrings.

  “Look, I’m sorry I got you caught,” Galia said. Deidra eyed her sideways against her will. Her voice was a softer song than any woman with that many scars had business singing. Then it changed key. “But… the fact you were running lends itself to the suspicion that you’d done something.” Deidra’s face scrunched again. For once, it was Devin that reached to stop Deidra. He couldn’t reach her in time.

  “Something like hitting a man back?” Deidra let crack the furnace inside her, and unleashed the fire, “Committing the crime of thinking, for a second, that we’re more than property?”

  “Now who needs to take it down a notch?” Devin whispered, “We just got out of the Cram!”

  “The what?” Galia interjected.

  “A box with just enough blacked out air holes to keep us alive. It’s a shoulder wider and a head taller than me. Soundproof. Lightproof. They cram us in there when we do something… wrong,” Deidra explained with all the spite it’d left in her. Galia’s eyes betrayed a hint of true sympathy. She blinked it away before anyone might catch it. If she was going to make it in the Olympia Gold, she had to wear the mask she’d worked so hard to forge. “Devin’s got the applications, if you want in. There are only a few spots left. Good luck.” With that, Deidra turned back out to the crowds. She managed, for the rest of their conversation, to pretend Galia wasn’t there.

  “He-he-here you go,” Devin stammered. Even he was taken back by the brazen hand that popped out from Galia, expectant. He slapped a paper packet in it. His shock deepened by leagues when she filled in the top lines of her Olympia Gold application. The edges of the circuited paper shimmered with each completed word, uploading the data to the virtual database attached to the last resort hard-copy.

  Name: Galia Hattel.

  Ship: the Dreamweaver.

  “You’re…” Devin muttered. Galia met his eyes with a debonair spark and a smirk to match. Behind her, Rey rolled his eyes. You’ve got to enjoy it to sell it, she’d say. On paper, the Dreamweaver was a commercial freighter, but Captain Galia had been building a reputation for off-the-books operations in arms dealing for years.

  “That’s right,” said Galia. She threw in a wink for good measure.

  Chapter Four: Forging Ahead

  One of the few things Deidra enjoyed about Greymoor was its actual moors. Out past the edge of Ganera, away from the Skyport and the thousand peddlers selling their souls, was barren rock. There were craters. There were crags. There were trenches, overlooks, and silence. And so there was Deidra, smiling, while her hair whipped around her. Her thighs, strong despite her lack of sustenance, crunched the sides of her Gold Standard hoverbike. The glittering gold racing stripe down the side of her vehicle warned any peeping raiders away. It said, without words: “this girl is the property of someone you don’t want as an enemy”.

  “You’re something else, Deidra. You know that?” Devin called out. He jammed his heels back on the throttle pedals to try and keep pace with her. He clenched his teeth to even go near the speed she wove between rocky spires and cleared boundless crevasses.

  “Something else besides what?” Deidra laughed. The only time she did laugh was out here. Between the city and the Forge. Between zones of high expectation and strict roles. It was the only place Deidra understood, vaguely, as freedom.

  “Besides sane! You’re going too- woah!” Devin jerked his guide-bars to rush around a gray spire. His hoverbike turbines flickered until he found his bearings, then seared bright blue again. He picked up speed to tail his friend.

  “I’ve told you before, Dev,” Deidra laughed, “If you don’t like going fast, be last!”

  “And what if I want to talk to my friend?” Devin answered.

  “Then keep up, or wait till we get to the Forge!” Deidra chuckled. She put her face down, level with the guide-bars. The hyper-magnetic plates on the underside of her bike glowed bright with acceleration. A mist of clay dust stung her cheeks. The big jump was right on the other side of the hill that rose before her. Others would call it the Outer Bridge, but not Deidra. She couldn’t be bothered crossing what she could jump clear over.

  “This is what I mean!” Devin cried out as her hoverbike ripped out further ahead. “You clam up and clench the whole time we’re at the Skyport, then you go wild out here!” Deidra turned back over her shoulder to answer, which mortified her friend. All he could see was the hill quickly cresting. But Deidra had taken this jump every day since they docked here. She knew the height and distance in her bones.

  “The moors never hit you, or called me property!” Deidra shouted through the mist. Three… two… she counted down in her mind. Her face snapped forward. Deidra drove both heels back into the throttle. Her hoverbike turbines surged. Every exposed piston pumped with an audible click. Gears spun triple time inside its engine. The mist thickened until the hill vanished beneath her.

/>   It folded away all at once. Deidra burst from the clay cloud, over a two-hundred-foot wide canyon. Its black depths called her, but she wouldn’t answer. Deidra let her head back, shoulders relaxed despite every instinct to tense up. She let the wind caress her the way human arms never had. Devin would take the bridge below, and he’d miss it all. The crisp gusts. The folding, furling clouds of lunar dust. The vacant fields and peaks of stone sprawled out below. Another mile away, visible from only so high, was a single building. It’s neon lights were a lone beacon in the endless gray. Sure, Devin would find it just fine with the tracker built into his hoverbike, but he wouldn’t see this. The Forge glowed like a torch for shackled and wayward souls alike.

  Deidra grinned, pulled up on her guide-bars, and enjoyed the rest of her ride down.

  “Ah-ah-ah! What is this, your first night? Boots off before you step in!” Clarabelle screeched at the crack of the door. Devin froze with his foot up to step in. He retreated, half-deflated in a sigh. Deidra laughed her way past him in her “atmosocks”. The only thing left, after an acid-bath! Their most recent, ridiculous, ad in the Olympia broadcasting boasted. She beat her friend inside by seconds but had to wait for him to switch off her collar.

  “It’s our sixteenth, actually,” Devin corrected while he wrestled with his second boot, just outside the door. He plopped it down on the magnetic mat outside the door. “Which is what makes it so easy to forget, after a long day.”

  “Forget simple things like that, and you don’t stand a chance,” said Clarabelle. Deidra tilted her head to her. Behind the high, rich wooden bar, Clarabelle scowled at Devin. Her hair pulled back in a flawless ponytail, her dark but kind eyes burned into him through stress lines on her cheeks and forehead. Her cruel-to-be-kind balance seemed more on the cruel end today; Deidra wondered why for all of four seconds. Then Clarabelle flipped the switch beneath the bar to remotely slam the door. It locked automatically. “Get in already, would you? We’ve got tables that need anchoring and soup that needs spicing.”