Chapter Text
THE PEOPLE’S PERIODICAL
Thursday, July 11, 30XX | Citizen ID Log In | Guest Log In
Skolotiyan | 官话
A Century of Unity
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Transcript of the speech by Representative Sotnyk A. for the Annual Viche Conference on the anniversary of the Interstellar Revolution
Citizens of the Republics, the Great Tianxia, and all those in the free and contested space who yearn for liberation! Today we celebrate one hundred years of freedom. Freedom from all things that once seemed inescapable: the suffocation of oligarchy, the miasma of commerce, the crushing boot of inequality which doomed us to eternal labor on inhospitable planets. Above all: freedom from the variant and withering flesh, its nature as cruel and careless of justice and merit as the humanity it engendered. Today we say: there are no more excuses. Now that we are masters of the human body, now that we weave the bionic, the neural and the cybernetic to our will, there is no excuse for domination, for disparity, for the utter failure of solidarity which we still observe in the wider space.
That is precisely why our enemies still conspire against us. Why the Albion Interplanetary Federation and its petty vassals deny our progress, spread lies about us and decry us as abominations against nature and “god”. It is because they like to hallucinate themselves gods.
But a dying order’s temper tantrum is just that. The march of progress continues. Just this year, we have generously supplied the Unaligned Space with thirteen point four billion hryvnias worth of medical-grade nanograft material. We shall not abandon any victim of the senseless wars the Albion Federation wages through its puppet states and proxy warlords. Meanwhile, even as they spend billions on futile and brutal conquest, the Albion Federation lets their very own citizens starve in their golden halls.
Our offers of aid to Albion itself are roundly rejected as always, of course. They know we are the solution. They know that once the fire of revolution is stoked, it cannot be extinguished. They know we are inevitable. And when the regular citizens of the Albion Interplanetary Federation are welcomed to our capital for this year’s Spartakiad, they will witness the full extent of their destitution: from the mundane perfection of our cities to the full might of our champions on the sports field. | Continue…
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***
THE SENTRY
Thursday, July 11, 30XX | Subscribe (£50/month) | Log In
How can we expect integrity from a culture of traitors?
by Joanna Foucault
I remember attending my first Women’s League match. My sister and I accompanied Mum on the overnight from Fingringhoe to Cockermouth, though we could hardly sleep a wink. As a lifelong fan of the Amazons, Mum couldn’t pass up the opportunity to witness a semi-final against their longstanding rivals, the Scythians, not when it was slated so close to home. I still remember what it felt like to hold her hand, standing on a packed platform amidst a crowd of women, watching these heroines duke it out in the flesh.
Today, it seems such a match may never occur again.
Decency and trust are the pillars upon which a society is founded. The willingness to see eye to eye, to agree on what’s important even when we have our differences. It is this sort of respect for order and dignity that has kept the Federation together through all manner of trials and civil unrest. Not once have we ever wavered on our most foundational values and principles—until now.
Or perhaps it has been the case since the Armistice. For even though the Skoloto-Tianxian hordes, who threw away their very humanity in their desperate bid to overcome the might of the Albion Interplanetary Federation, begrudgingly acquiesced to a generous truce, they have unceasingly sought to undermine us at every turn. Today is merely the day they succeed—if, as I suspect, the sporting bodies continue to tolerate the Interstellar Republics’ continued rules-flouting and blatant attempt to smuggle males into the women’s division.
Our age of information is collapsing, because today we can no longer agree on the most fundamental tenets upon which our societies are founded. We have been compelled by our feckless politicians—whether cowards or collaborators I cannot say—to continue to treat a society of authoritarians and cheats as equals, even as they make a mockery of everything the civilized world is founded upon. … | Continue…
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Chapter One: All the Odds
Alekha is starting to forget what the world outside Immigration looks like.
Three of the walls are featureless, plain. The one across from her, clear glass, the bustle of the spaceport on the other side muffled. She sits at the end of a row of empty plastic chairs with too-small leather cushions, each fused to the wall behind her. Immobile.
Itchy.
She shifts in her seat, trying to stave off the pins and needles in her feet, and clears her throat. Scratchy; not quite parched, but getting there. Her eyes feel dry; her stomach rumbles. If she squints, she can almost make out a vendor at the far end of the spaceport, sitting under yellow-and-green lights. The phantom smell of salt and spices makes her mouth water.
Where’s the bloody immigration officer?
Alekha stands up, stretches, and drifts closer to the counter behind which a clerk ought to sit. It remains unmanned, the screen above it dark. No clocks anywhere, either. Alekha’s tablet was confiscated as soon as she arrived at the Solidarity-6 spaceport. Is it even still the first of September?
She observes the PIR capital’s biggest spaceport through the glass. It’s truly overflowing this week. Oversized displays list delayed arrival and departure times for both the orbital lift and the connected shuttles. Travelers scurry like multicolored ants, rushing through check-in terminals and luggage ports and ID scans, all to queue up in long crawling lines. Citizens from all over the People’s Interstellar Republics have come to the city of Askoldiv for the Spartakiad, and now they’re ready to leave. Their laughter and merry banter is a cacophonous din, a low vibration on the glass.
As Alekha’s stomach lurches again, a swarm of insect-like drones rises above the crowd. She watches closely as they ascend and get to work on the ceiling, removing and replacing colored tiles. The mural is transformed within minutes: pixel by pixel, the image of a stoic, muscular worker hammering an anvil becomes an approximation of the Scythians, tonight’s winning team. Their ace, the newly recruited Kampbell Artemida, occupies the central place of honor. With their work done, the drones practically disappear—Alekha barely catches one slipping into a wall panel that briefly opens to accommodate it.
No one in the spaceport so much as glances up. To the PIR citizens, this must not be all that high-tech. Even their attire is more akin to spacesuits than mundane textile clothing. Everyone Alekha’s seen so far wears form-fitting bodysuits, enveloped in something between glass and metal, translucent but for the ability to display light of any color. It’s seemingly customizable on a whim. Some choose to appear wrapped in dull and lifeless gray, like wearable stone. Others display flashing colors or dazzling patterns, turning themselves into walking displays.
Tonight, most suits in the spaceport are the patriotic blue-and-silver of the PIR’s national crest, with the Scythians’ signature green a close second. Still others play highlights from the final match on their chest and back. Alekha desperately wants to see the whole thing, but she’s had to be content with watching clippable moments on loop, distorted by the curvature of bodies.
A group of five, standing in line just across the glass from Alekha, has organized itself into a rough circle. They laugh and talk animatedly, popping open fizzy drinks and passing around a bag of chips. No matter how hard she peers at their lips, Alekha can’t make out a single word, but one of them plays a post-match interview with Artemida on the back of their suit. Alekha squints and focuses her ocular enhancements to read the subtitles.
“How do I feel about beating my former team? Well, they’re every bit as formidable as I remember them, though there’s something missing in their offense.” Artemida winks at the camera.
A question asked by someone off-screen flashes under Artemida’s face.
“Rumors abound about your future appointment to the PIR’s interplanetary team. That’ll make you the youngest athlete to ever represent the PIR against the Albion Interplanetary Federation. Would you care to comment? Do you think your history with the Federation will give us an edge against them?”
Artemida’s eyes narrow slightly, but her winning smile doesn’t waver. “Well, I certainly would love to make it to interplanetary. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I very much wish to represent the PIR at the Olympiad, and I intend to do my best at the qualifiers next month—”
A loud rattling suddenly fills the room. Alekha’s head snaps to the side.
Seams appear in the wall behind the counter. With clanging reverberations, the rectangular section they mark out slowly slides into the floor. The immigration officer finally enters, carrying a large, bulky tablet in both hands. Three heavy steps shake the floor under Alekha’s heels before he deposits himself into his seat, and the wall reseals itself behind him.
“Next,” he calls out. No one else is here.
Alekha quickly approaches him. “Hello! My name is—”
“Hands off the counter.”
“Right!” Alekha flinches, and her palms recoil as though from a hot griddle. “Sorry. My mistake. Anyway, um, hello. My name is Alekha Indrajeet.”
She gives the clerk a moment to respond. He does not.
“Right. I’m Alekha, and I’m sorry for any irregularities—it’s my first time traveling to Askoldiv, you see. Well, my first time traveling to the People’s Interstellar Republics, or traveling off-world at all, really. Haven’t left Mahameru until now. I’ve seen all the vids obviously, but the capital really is something to behold in person. Not that I’ve beheld much. The tram network is breathtaking, though—and the buildings! We don’t build them that big back home, on account of the, ah, radiation… background. Issues.”
The clerk continues to ignore her, tapping away at the tablet.
“Either way,” Alekha says, voice getting higher with each syllable, “my ID should have my travel pass tabbed to it, as well as my admission—my confirmation, I mean—my acceptance letter. To Askold. Academy. I was admitted to Askold Academy. That’s why I’m here, just going through to go up the—what’s it called again? Orbital lift? Space bridge? I’ve never been on a space bridge before, either. It’s been a very exciting day. Could I possibly get the time? I need to report for orientation by—”
“Clan name.”
“—Pardon me?”
The clerk rolls his eyes. He turns the tablet around and slides it forward so Alekha can hunch over to peer at it.
“You didn’t fill out your clan name,” he says. “On the arrival form.”
The tablet displays said arrival form, its text superimposed over an image of Alekha’s face. She tries not to wince. Despite her best efforts, Alekha can’t ever seem to photograph well, and the travel pass optical scans are far from anyone’s best efforts. Her wavy black hair hangs drab and stringy, and her copper-toned complexion looks inexplicably tinged with dust-gray.
“I see.” Alekha bites her lip. “Well, the issue is I’m not sure if I—that is to say, I don’t think I know my clan name?”
The clerk stares at her, unblinking. “You don’t think you know it?”
Alekha sways on the balls of her feet, hands behind her back. “So, caste is a complicated thing on Mahameru. Customarily I’d be in my father’s caste, but I don’t have a father, and I don’t know either of my mothers’ castes anyway. Didn’t really keep up with the family after my moms were excommunicated for—”
“I asked for your clan name, not your caste, and certainly not your life story.” He taps on a tab; the arrival form’s text morphs into Alekha’s travel pass. “How do you not know it when it’s right here?”
He points, and Alekha squints.
“Oh, my family name!” Alekha smacks her forehead. “Got it, got it—you call them clan names here. Makes sense.” She pauses, a hint of a frown creasing the corners of her eyes and lips. “Well, I did tell you my name was Alekha Indrajeet.”
Somehow, the clerk’s expression gets stonier.
“Perhaps I did mean your caste after all,” he says, withdrawing the tablet. The sound of metal scraping on metal hurts Alekha’s ears. “Both castes, even.”
“Ah.” Alekha’s grip on her own wrist tightens. “If I could have my personal tablet back, I could contact—”
“Personal effects travel separately.”
“Right. I see. Of course.” Her breathing quickens. She glances over her shoulder at the empty row of plastic chairs. “Is there another way I could make an intercall?”
At this, the clerk snorts. “Doubt you could afford it.”
Her nails dig into her skin. A lifetime of preparation, years of nothing but training, one FTL shuttle and six maglev tram transfers have all brought her here, now, where the only thing between her and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream is one smug, bald clerk. Briefly, Alekha imagines how hard she could punch him if she were wearing her combat undersuit instead of a tee and shorts. One step, a full-body rotation, and his skull would be a smear across the door he came through. Though of course, her bodymods could do most of the heavy lifting. Bringing her fist down on his shiny head is more than enough to just cave it in.
It probably wouldn’t end well for her. She still considers it.
Too satisfied, the clerk returns his focus to the blasted two-generations-old tablet. “If you have no clan names on your ID, then I have no choice but to refer you to—”
Behind him, the wall section begins to rattle once more. The clerk stops speaking midsentence; his eyes widen and he swivels his chair around. Alekha peers over his head.
The entrance slides open to reveal the sternest face Alekha’s ever seen. High cheekbones, lips pressed into a thin line, and narrowed eyes that glint bright and gold in the harsh lighting. The stranger’s red hair is tied up in a tight bun, and as more of her is revealed, Alekha notes that her bodysuit is a cut above the clerk’s, or really any that Alekha’s seen. Segmented, armor-like plates link geometrically at the joints, and the quicksilver material beneath appears thicker, not quite skintight. The gold and crimson hues of it shine resplendent against the clerk’s muted blues and grays. Under the right angle, the woman’s suit could almost blind.
A tut of displeasure escapes her lips; she steps over the door rather than waiting for it to recede into the floor. She turns her head and glares at the clerk as she approaches. Alekha spots glimmering lines of gold tracing the curve of her jawline, extending from ear to throat—implants. An embedded communication device of some sort, one that can pick up inaudible vibrations from the throat. Such bodymods are a rare sight on Mahameru, often merely imitated cosmetically.
The armored woman comes to a halt next to the clerk. She’s close enough now for Alekha to recognize she’s seen this face before, one among many in an extensive information package. It’s Madam Kachyhyna, the Dean of Combat at Askold Academy.
Behind her, the clattering of the door finally ceases as it disappears into the ground. It resumes a moment later.
“Keep the bloody thing open.” Kachyhyna’s voice is deep, her tone brusque.
The clerk scrambles to find the controls on his tablet and taps a button. The door goes silent once more. He then tries to stand up.
“Leave it,” Kachyhyna says. “At ease, or whatever you say here. Your lot’s wasted enough of my time.”
“My apologies, Madam Kachyhyna.” The clerk clears his throat. “Our system just flagged an issue with this individual’s arrival forms. We’re trying to—”
Kachyhyna cuts him off with a raised palm. “Please do let me know what grave issue you unearthed that Interplanetary Customs overlooked at planetfall.”
The clerk glances at Alekha with a truly delicious degree of panic on his face.
“There’s no clan name on the—”
“Are you serious?” Kachyhyna’s voice is frosty enough to chill Alekha to the marrow, despite not being the one addressed. “Your department detained my student for hours, made her miss her scheduled orientation, and refused to give me a straight answer about her whereabouts on the comms, all over information that is at the top of her travel pass?”
“I—she—” The clerk clears his throat again, louder. “Clan names on Mahameru work differently—”
Kachyhyna’s communicator glows amber. She makes a low, rumbling sound and taps a finger under her ear. The lines of her implant grow dim again.
“I’ve submitted a personnel report on you and your colleagues’ conduct today,” Kachyhyna says. “Your inability to process paperwork is not the Askold Academy’s responsibility to rectify. I suggest hiring someone who can read.”
Deflated, defeated, the clerk’s face crumples completely. Alekha barely has time to enjoy it before Kachyhyna turns on her heel and calls for her.
“Come along, then.”
Kachyhyna walks towards the glass wall. A pointed glare from her and the clerk hurries to hit the controls; the whole wall slides into the floor.
Alekha can finally leave.
Without missing a beat, she strides after Kachyhyna, following the Dean into the spaceport and past the near-dormant queues. Whispers and stares follow them as Kachyhyna leads Alekha from one end of Solidarity-6 to the other. Alekha tries her best to smile. She puffs out her chest, hoping to make the front of her tee, with Artemida’s face printed on it, a bit more prominent.
Past a flashing sign saying STAFF ONLY in both Skolotiyan and Guanhua, into a cylindrical glass elevator. Kachyhyna’s throat rumbles, her implant flashes, and the elevator soars to the top floor almost before Alekha registers that it’s moving. They emerge onto an external walkway suspended high above the city.
From the tram, Askoldiv appeared an endless expanse of glass and steel. An ever-shifting landscape of brightly lit towers reaching skyward; massive news bulletins whose sheer size dwarfed buildings back home; dense, intricate networks of traffic flowing endlessly, ceaselessly. A behemoth of technology and infrastructure that Alekha could scarcely wrap her mind around—and here it is in miniature, splayed out beneath her feet. A luminous colossus reduced to a collection of twinkling trinkets.
Alekha breathes. The air is thin here, straining her lung enhancements. Her ear implants filter out the worst of the gales swirling about her head, and her core begins producing more heat to keep her warm.
In front of her, strips of green light mark the edges and railing of the silvered footbridge. Alekha can see, with her ocular implants, that it stretches ahead to connect the top floor of the spaceport to a massive spire in the distance. Larger in diameter and taller by far than even the tallest skyscraper Alekha zipped past, it stabs into the inky blackness of space. No matter how much Alekha cranes her neck or zooms her sight, she cannot spot where it ends.
But it’ll transport her there soon enough.
“We are taking an unscheduled express trip,” Kachyhyna says, above the noise of the whipping wind. “We’ll have to borrow a first-class dome, of course. This will likely delay every dome after ours by at least twenty minutes and reflect quite poorly on the workers’ timetable.” She looks back at Alekha over her shoulder and winks. “Something they ought to have considered before holding you up.”
Alekha beams at Kachyhyna. She’s about to express her thanks when the Dean’s implant lights up. Kachyhyna turns away and resumes her brisk pace, her guttural intonations barely audible. Alekha resists the urge to break into a jog.
Best to step carefully at this elevation.
The workers at the end of the footbridge have their bodysuits set to high-vis neon yellow. Their chests and backs spell the word Maintenance in Skolotiyan and Guanhua. Kachyhyna nods curtly to acknowledge their prompt parting and mumbled honorifics without so much as slowing down.
One of the bowed workers straightens up as she passes, stretching out an arm to impede Alekha.
“You there! Travel pass and ID—”
Kachyhyna halts and turns to face the maintenance worker, whose words abort with a choked gasp.
“—Carry on.”
Just like that. The worker withdraws her arm and Alekha skips after the Dean. Up a short flight of stairs, past a set of sliding doors, and Alekha settles into a cushioned velvet armchair beside Kachyhyna in a spacious miniature dome. It’s empty save for the two of them.
“A bit of an upgrade, isn’t it?” Kachyhyna asks with a smirk.
Alekha nods fervently. Askold generously provided for her travel expenses, but she still had to take the commercial lines. The dome she was supposed to board carries supplies, mail and other assorted cargo, with a densely packed passenger section largely slated for station crew and janitorial staff. Too cramped an arrangement for Kachyhyna, clearly.
The Dean’s communicator glows brass, and she taps her ear.
“All other domes have been detained at their current floors,” she says. “We have a straight shot to Askold.”
“Wow.” Alekha gulps down air. Her fingers dig into the armrests. “So we’ll be there in—”
“A few minutes, if that.” Kachyhyna smiles. “Enjoy the view while you can.”
Tremors rock the dome as soon as Kachyhyna finishes speaking. Alekha’s teeth clatter against each other, and for a moment she experiences the certainty of weightlessness right under her navel, the gut feeling of being dropped from a great height to dash against the rocks below. But then mag-locks kick in with a smooth, assured hum, and the dome is pulled cleanly into the very center of the cylindrical tunnel. Suspended in the air for a single moment that stretches on and on, far longer than it ought.
“Not used to this, I bet?” Kachyhyna says.
The moment ends.
Up. Alekha knows the pod must ascend, and in theory she observes it happen. Attempts to make that observation, to adequately parse the visual stimuli. In practice, however, the dome’s acceleration is too high even for augmented senses. Blink, and more of the continent looms into view; blink, and the curvature of the horizon sharpens; blink, and Alekha can see the edge of the hemisphere, glittering at the border of night and day.
“Transparent materials,” Kachyhyna says, “resilient enough to withstand the tensile strain of connecting two orbiting celestial bodies—such things are not found in nature, Indrajeet. How difficult do you imagine they are to manufacture?”
“Extremely,” Alekha says.
“And expensive, too.” Kachyhyna nods, seemingly satisfied. “The PIR could very well have constructed this orbital lift to be dull and opaque. If nothing else, it would have been much easier and cheaper to clean.” Kachyhyna flashes a broad grin at Alekha. “We spare no expense for our best.”
Alekha smiles back. “Indeed, Madam.”
Kachyhyna keeps Alekha’s gaze, still smiling, as the dome rotates, the planet no longer below them but above. Despite her enhancements and her knowledge to the contrary, Alekha can’t help but feel like she’s falling, the Dean’s golden gaze the only unmoving constant in her sight. For a mortifying moment, Alekha thinks she might vomit.
But then the dome stops. The world realigns, the stars above and the planet below. Alekha exhales.
“And here we are.” Kachyhyna sounds relaxed as the orbital lift descends towards the Academy.
But Alekha doesn’t spot it right away. Instead, her eye is drawn to the terrain. Snow-capped mountains, icy and windswept, next to a jagged shoreline battered by frothy waves, bordered by an overgrown jungle beside scorching sands and rolling dunes. Askold Academy hovers above the tessellated surface of an artificial moon, its varied and geographically impossible environments carved up into neat, geometric sections.
A hundred battles both remembered and imagined flash through Alekha’s mind. Wider treads, longer cables, skis—she lists the most obvious modifications her exo-frame would need for each battlefield and files them away for later review. After a lifetime of only fighting on flat stretches of dirt, the prospect is exhilarating.
Not that Askold itself is any less awe-striking. The orbital lift docks to a fixed point, but the Academy as a whole is not a singular structure. Rather, it is a network of stations, each a cubical module, a haphazard lattice of retractable bridges and connectors. Clouds of smaller subdivisions and transports drift over the arenas, connecting and disconnecting according to a schedule Alekha is yet to learn.
The dome’s doors slide open. For a moment, Alekha just sits there, before she realizes she’s finally free. She can just stand up and walk out into her new life. Unimpeded.
Kachyhyna is already standing over her, looking amused.
“Welcome to Askold Academy, Indrajeet Alekha.”
***
Alekha steps into a gleaming corridor, nearly blinded by the chrome finish on every surface. Somehow, Kachyhyna makes the floor under their feet morph into a conveyor; Alekha nearly loses her balance. They ride in silence for half a minute or so before Kachyhyna takes a step to the side and turns it off. A doorway wide enough for one person opens in the wall and the Dean strides through without breaking her step. Alekha rushes in after her.
It’s a small, empty room. A black grid pattern affects the appearance of tiles on pristine white surfaces. At Kachyhyna’s prompting, Alekha stands on an unmarked spot roughly in the center of the room, at the grid intersection.
“Strip,” Kachyhyna says.
“Um.” Alekha hesitates. “Can I—?”
But Kachyhyna’s eyes and communicator both glow, and she’s staring up at the ceiling anyway, likely focused on something in her virtual interface. Alekha decides not to make a fuss—and surely she’s supposed to leave her underclothes on. It’d be uncouth to even ask.
A series of panels slide open in the ceiling, walls and floor. Mechanical arms emerge, and a drone drops down from the ceiling to retrieve Alekha’s outfit. It zips up into the station’s bowels before Alekha can protest.
“Your things arrived before you, on the scheduled dome you missed,” Kachyhyna says. She summons a different drone with a flash of her communicator. It places an object in her palm. “Most of them are waiting for you in your quarters, but this will be confiscated.”
Alekha blinks rapidly, trying to keep up with Kachyhyna as the mechanical arms whir around her body, tracing her contours with bright, blinding laser scans. “But that’s my personal—”
“The metadata may be made available to you on request, but students are not permitted devices of their own.” Kachyhyna returns the tablet to the drone. Alekha doesn’t even see it vanish back into the wall. “All external communications are handled through the school’s network.”
“Okay.” Alekha bites back the words congealing in her mouth. “I see.”
Not that she has much license to speak. The mechanical arms stop their optical mapping and seize her limbs. Two clamp around her ankles while another tugs at her wrist; speakers play messages at her in sync, first in Skolotiyan, then Guanhua: “Straighten your arms! Spread your legs! Shoulder length! Wider! Less wide!” The voices are artificial, the words auto-generated and without emotion, yet the sentences are so clipped and quick that they acquire a barking cadence.
About a minute of adjusting her pose, and the arms are satisfied. One after the other they withdraw into their chambers and return bearing cuboidal hunks of an obsidian substance. Spellbound, Alekha stares as she is encased limb by limb. Drones buzz around her body, fusing and welding. She recognizes the material just as the robots ignite their laser array in concert and begin carving away at the excess.
The combat bodysuits at Askold are certainly very bespoke.
One of the drones inhales falling dust and slag, while the other prints circuitry and connections into the nascent armor. Slowly the mechanism begins to release her. Before long Alekha can clench a fist, then the other; her knees then bend without impediment; finally, she twirls and pirouettes as the very last traces of superfluous raw material burn away. She rotates her arms, hops from foot to foot and punches her knuckles together with a wicked grin. With how well-connected the circuit lattice is to her nerves and muscles, and how quickly her bodymods sync with its firmware, the suit may as well weigh nothing. Makes her old suit’s enhancements seem nonexistent.
Not that the fitting was entirely seamless. Nanogel floods Alekha’s skin, injected wherever the lasers hewed a little too close to home, leaving an odd burn or a cauterized wound. Not that many, ultimately, and Alekha bore them without so much as betraying a hint of pain on her face. She’s been built to withstand much more damage than a few errant nicks. Between the gel and her accelerated healing, it’s hardly worth registering.
“Apologies for the awkward fit,” Kachyhyna says.
Alekha looks up from admiring the elbow joints. “Oh, don’t even mention—”
“We had to throw together a new design, you see.” Kachyhyna gestures, unmistakably, between Alekha’s legs. “Since we do not usually get students of your… anatomy. Hopefully it works just the same.”
Alekha can’t speak.
The air in her lungs is ice. Her lips and tongue are frozen on the last syllable she uttered, and her eye won’t stop twitching. She inhales, desperately willing herself to move, to close her mouth and clear her throat and attempt a sentence anew.
“I see,” she says. “It works great.”
“Excellent.”
Don’t look down, Alekha tells herself. It’s probably fine. It’s most likely not a massive, blocky, unmissable jockstrap that marks her as different from every other student in the Academy.
“Hold still! Hold still!”
That’s all the warning Alekha gets from one of the robot arms before it latches onto Alekha’s temples. It locks her head in place, and with teeth clenched behind closed lips, Alekha obeys its instruction: straighten up, stretch the neck out. The vacuum-drone, done cleaning residue off the floor, flies up to her face. A metallic tube emerges from the underside of its body and approaches Alekha’s neck.
It takes all of Alekha’s willpower not to pry it off. She easily could, especially with her new suit. But whatever is happening must be part of the orientation process—Kachyhyna certainly isn’t acting as though anything is out of the ordinary. She’s standing in the corner, arms crossed, watching the machines with an expression that Alekha can only describe as bored.
So Alekha lets the drone press the tube into her flesh, hot and sharp. It injects something just below her skin—small, viscous and hot and crawling at first but then quickly cooling, solidifying, finding root under Alekha’s dermis. She doesn’t cry out or yelp. She must not.
A moment later, the machines let her go. As one they retreat into their secret crevasses. The room is left bare and spotless before Alekha so much as begins rubbing the spot under her ear.
“Barely a sting, no?” Kachyhyna says.
Alekha winces. “Yeah. Um, what was that?”
“The implant connects you to the Academy’s intranet.” Kachyhyna’s eyes shine, flickering slightly. “Oh, I see—it is still installing the drivers to interface with your OS. You should be online in a few minutes. Apologies, but it is not designed to work with such outdated systems.”
“Right.” Alekha flushes.
“The implant also displays your ranking—zero for now, meaning no rank, but after your first fight, you’ll be placed somewhere between the worst, at one hundred and fifty, and the best, at one,” Kachyhyna says. “As a student-athlete, this is the measure of your performance at Askold. We do not have exams as such. Your battles against other students are your exams.”
Several questions come to mind, none of which seem safe to voice. The biggest and most pressing one—why would a subdermal implant be necessary for functions the suit could easily perform, and non-invasively at that? Student-athletes have to wear their suits as their uniform. Why would they need to display their rank or be connected to the school’s systems outside of class?
But it’s not Alekha’s place to question how the Academy does things.
So instead she says, “That makes sense, thank you. Will I not be ranked until the end of my first term, then?”
“Not quite,” Kachyhyna says. “Every new batch is evaluated through 1v1 matches against Academy students, usually those from the lowest quartile. In some sense, that is your true orientation. The intranet should have all the information you require.”
“Understood.” Alekha’s implant is still stuck on 97% installed. She suppresses a sigh and bows. “Thank you, Madam Kachyhyna.”
Kachyhyna nods, regarding the nails on her left hand with a frown. They change color from indigo to emerald. “Of course. Report to my office first thing tomorrow morning for your match. Dismissed.”
“May I know which way the canteen—wait.” Alekha blinks rapidly. “Did you say my orientation match is tomorrow?”
But Kachyhyna was already walking away before Alekha even finished speaking. The Dean’s communicator glows; the door opens to let her through and closes behind her. The fitting room’s lights dim as soon as she leaves, reduced to dull strips reflecting on mirror-polished walls.
Alekha is left standing alone.
No. Not quite alone. In the dark wall before her, where the door sealed behind the Dean’s back, now stands a stranger. She has Alekha’s body—that much is immediately obvious, as there isn’t a layer of fabric to hide or affect a curve or an edge; her lanky frame, her lean muscles, her machine-tousled hair, her startled eyes. It is all engulfed in dark navy, lined with silver along the joints. If customization is permitted, it’s yet to load. There’s padding on the soles of the feet, at least, like a bare-minimum reproduction of the concept of a shoe, and thin, half-decorative plates on the knees and elbows and shoulders, a dream-thinned memory of a military uniform. Alekha doesn’t quite dare linger on her crotch, except to notice the unmistakable outline.
Just above her collarbone, the suit terminates. In searing, gleaming silver against her dark skin: 000. Illuminated by nanodiodes so as to be visible even in darkness. Zero. Nothing. Zilch. After all this, all the effort to get there, she hasn’t yet proven herself to be anything except zero. Earn, earn, earn.
She grits her teeth. How many points, for instance, for smashing through this damn wall?
Installation complete.
Lights flicker back on. Alekha’s software suite hums, syncing with Askold. Information repositories, a map of the station; the school’s internal social media; system controls for the doors, floors, lights, drones—everything is connected to her at once.
Alekha straightens up, rolls back her shoulders and gives the command.
The wall parts for her with a barely perceptible gust. A minute whirr of machinery.
She walks out without smashing anything. No need to overreact on her very first day—everything is fine, and going as intended.
At first Askold’s halls struck Alekha as drab—white and chrome walls, cold metal floors, all featureless but for the odd indicator or railing—but access to its intranet changes everything. It’s almost too much now. A bright dot pulses on a miniature blueprint in the corner of her vision—current location. Arrows and text and symbols appear before her, overlaying the physical space or floating in the air in front of her. She’s almost drowning in the deluge of miscellaneous information. Alekha squeezes her eyes shut, desperately trawling through the specs—there. She turns it all off.
One at a time.
First, Alekha selects an option to highlight the drone vents. Circles appear around her, marking where the little helpers emerge from and vanish to. She’s then prompted to select her preferred color, outline shape, font and text size for the indicators, and whether she’d like to make them always visible.
She dismisses the prompt and switches to the Paths app. Glowing arrows blink to life on the floor, showing Alekha which parts are static and which can be morphed into moving walkways. Carefully, she gives the command and advances—and ends up halfway across the sector with a single thought and less than half a dozen steps. A whole new set of overlay outlines blinks into view.
Not exactly max velocity in an exo-frame, but it definitely beats walking.
“Again,” she says to herself. She’s unable to suppress her giggles.
Zipping around on the moving paths is so quick and fun that Alekha ends up circumnavigating the floor a few times. Only when her stomach rumbles does she stop and recall again how long it’s been since her last meal.
“Okay, so the canteen is—this way?”
She steps on a glowing square patch marked out by the Lift app. The ground under her opens up, and she falls. Three whole floors before deceleration kicks in and she lands, completely safe—and not nauseous this time. But definitely not quiet.
“Gosh.” Alekha glances to the side at two nearby students regarding her with alarm. “Sorry for the screams. I’m, uh, new.”
They activate a nearby Path and zoom off without a word, leaving Alekha cringing.
Descending three floors was the easy part. Alekha resummons the mini-map, places a marker on the canteen and tries to puzzle how to navigate to it. All the moving paths seem to overshoot it—unless it’s possible to not travel the full length of a path? Didn’t Kachyhyna do that earlier, turning the walkway off in the middle of traversal?
Maybe Alekha can practice doing that. Curfew’s still far off.
Getting the hang of it doesn’t take long, but isn’t quite as enjoyable. Not that the novelty of the moving paths has worn off. It’s more that the level connected to the orbital lift was mostly abandoned. Here, there are actually people around. Not that many, given how late it is, but enough to make Alekha self-conscious about her aimless flitting about and giddy snickering. Skolotiyans are a severe sort, and Alekha is almost certainly indulging in too much whimsy. Every fellow student she sees greets her with a stony expression and a blank stare, turning away when she meets their gaze or avoiding her entirely.
Perhaps she ought to get on with securing dinner and retiring for the night.
Especially if she actually has an orientation match first thing in the morning. That couldn’t possibly be the case, could it? Alekha has to assume Kachyhyna misspoke. It’d be absurd to expect her to be combat-ready the very day after her arrival—she would’ve surely been informed beforehand if so.
Why is the blasted canteen so difficult to reach?
Frustrated, Alekha tries to activate a nearby Path, only for the app to notify her it’s being used by someone going in the opposite direction. She pins the Path usage indicator to her custom UI and waits a tick. The person in question appears before her, their cropped spiky hair and bodysuit both a bright pink. On the side of their neck, in the same spot as Alekha’s triple zeros, gleams 073.
She greets them with a wave. “Hello! My name is Alekha. Could I possibly ask for your help with something? I’m trying to get to the canteen.”
The pink-haired student doesn’t answer right away. Their eyes narrow. Alekha wonders whether they didn’t understand her. Surely her accent isn’t that thick.
“We all know who you are, loshka,” the student finally says.
“Oh. Okay.” Alekha decides against correcting the egregious mispronunciation of her name, to be friendly. “How do you—oh! The social media app! Of course.”
No wonder her attempt to introduce herself was so ill-received. Alekha spins up the student’s social profile—Mariyka, she/they.
Mariyka rolls their eyes and walks away from Alekha, towards another Path.
“Wait, I’m sorry,” Alekha says, “I really don’t want to be a bother, but—”
“Just use the Navigation app, loshka.”
They depart, leaving Alekha feeling quite silly, and somewhat concerned that Mariyka wasn’t mispronouncing her name at all.
At least the app works. Alekha selects her destination and watches it furnish her with the shortest path to the canteen within seconds. The relevant sections of the mini-map light up, and arrows appear on the ground in front of her. Perfect.
She goes to close the social media tab when something makes her stop in her tracks.
Under the prompt asking her to complete her profile: a list of trending topics, with her name at the very top.
Why would Alekha be trending on Askold’s social feed?
Alekha paces along the arrows, taking the leisurely route—for now. There are a few reasons her admission is notable, of course. She’s the first person from Mahameru to ever be admitted to Askold, and one of the very few to transfer to a PIR academy from outside its territories. But she’s just another student nevertheless, here to earn her rank and secure a placement with the Interstellar Host. Just like the rest of them.
What exactly is everyone saying about her?
With mounting dread, Alekha pulls up the feed and dives in. She retrieves today’s most popular thread—almost a thousand replies—and reads the top-level post.
“They let that village boy into the school after all. I just saw her things arrive—she’s in the room next to mine!”
Village boy.
Her head spins. She leans on a wall and slides down, resting on her haunches.
The post is controversial—that’s somewhat reassuring. But not as controversial as it should be. Some chide the poster for her insensitivity—the PIR has a responsibility to elevate the uncultured, don’t you know? Others—far fewer—take issue with referring to Alekha as a “boy”. None who are in Alekha’s year.
“It’s all right for you to lecture us on this,” reads a response from a younger student. “You don’t have to compete with a genetic freak!”
A tight knot forms in her chest. She ought to stop reading.
She doesn’t.
Someone asks what they mean by “genetic freak”. The follow-up contains a bizarre rant about “these people” needing fewer bodymods to achieve superhuman resilience, a complete misunderstanding of how hormones and especially testosterone work, and a link to a news piece whose headline makes Alekha’s heart drop.
“Diplomatic Disgrace—National Security Compromised by Soft-Hearted Futurism.”
Alekha accesses the article without thinking.
What she reads doesn’t make much sense to her. It’s about her admission to Askold, no doubt, but it’s so dense with references to unfamiliar events, politics and people, and so sparse with anything about her. What is she supposed to think of all these figures giving their opinions on Alekha’s admission and what it means for the “national integrity of the Republics”—all without so much as using her name?
An administrative official provides a statement. “The decision to allow this was not made lightly. Mahameru is an important junior partner whose trade relationship to the PIR…”
A retired admiral of the Host expresses skepticism. “Paupers who think themselves kings—that’s all these “unaligned” backwaters are. Anyone from a nation that double-deals with both the PIR and Albion is not to be trusted. Likely a spy sent here to…”
The principal of Mazepa’s Military Institute makes no mention of the fact that Alekha declined their offer of admission to attend Askold. “What this student represents is nothing less than a tainting of the PIR’s national character by Federation gender ideology…”
It’s not the only article on her. Apparently, PIR outlets have been discussing her admission for a while—and the controversy is notable enough for FedNet outlets to join in.
“This is nothing less than an attempt by the Republics to attack and demean the very notion of sex,” writes Duchess Faulconer, a sports correspondent. “They are free to let their barbaric transhumanist ways erode the very difference between men and women, but the Albion Interplanetary Federation does not have to agree to play against their mixed-sex teams. Here, we know what a woman is.”
The feed recommends a video statement by someone named Panchenko Nadiya defending the decision to admit her. Instead, Alekha turns the whole feed off. These “defenses” make her stomach churn nearly as much as the accusations.
Shakily, she rises to her feet. Her appetite may be gone entirely, but she’s nearing six hours without a bite to eat.
Tabloids. They’re just tabloids, haranguing low-level clerks and crotchety retirees to spice up a non-story. It’s surprising that the PIR would tolerate such poor journalistic standards, but Askoldiv was not liberated in a day, as Mother says. A little idle gossip and attempted muckraking. Exaggerated and provocative though it is, it won’t affect Alekha’s stint at Askold in the slightest. This is a prestigious academy—the most prestigious academy in the PIR—not a theater or a zoo. Let the bottom-feeders have their entertainment before they move on to the next inconsequential event of note. Perhaps the principal of Mazepa’s will install a flashy neural implant that imparts her manners.
A half-trip on the last Path brings her to the canteen’s entrance. A large section of the wall shunts rapidly into its recess—clearly the entrance is intended for a crowd, but presently, Alekha stands in its center awkward and alone. She gazes out onto a long silver hall. Its west wall is a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a fighting arena—blinding snow, now—and its east wall is adorned with an augmented-reality mural. For the occasion: Scythian emerald green. The team’s champions soar through the PIR’s constellations with victorious smiles and raised fists. Far ahead, Alekha spots refrigerated shelves of what must be food. The dim blue lighting brightens slightly in her immediate vicinity as she strides past rows of tables and seats—mostly vacant, save for a tightly clustered gaggle by the entrance—and she searches her interface for an app to communicate with the food dispensers.
“You aren’t supposed to be here.”
Alekha’s foot catches on the underside of a chair. She stumbles forward, but manages to grab the backrest and not fall flat on her face. Dismissing the interface, she takes a deep, shuddering breath and turns around.
Eyes blue as cobalt and cold as frost bore into Alekha’s with an unblinking stare. Staring down, too—it’s rare for Alekha to face someone of her own height, let alone a beast of a person; broader, taller. Curled lips reveal fangs—actual sharp, pointed, yellow fangs. Close-cropped gray hair matches tufts of real fur sprouting out of her arms and legs and presumably everywhere between. Alekha thought she saw heavy cosmetic bodymod use on her trip to Askold, but all of it is dwarfed by comparison.
Judging by the matching bodysuits, it’s one of the gaggle. Republic silver limned with the official crest’s navy blue, an inversion of Alekha’s coloring. The number on the lupine woman’s neck glows an unimpressive 103, but that doesn’t seem to deter her from snarling at Alekha in the least.
A social profile briefly flashes an overlay: Sirko Oksana, she/her/ze/zir.
“Hi,” Alekha says, “I’m—sorry, I’m still not used to the socials. You clearly know my name.”
Oksana cocks her head. “How astute.”
Even her voice is gruff, canine, grating on Alekha’s ears. She resists the urge to take a step back.
“In any case, apologies for the bother,” Alekha says. “I just wanted to grab a snack, and the interface didn’t say the canteen’s closed—”
“Oh, it’s not closed,” Oksana says, snickering. Loudly. Out of the corner of her eye, Alekha notices Oksana’s companions also giggle, no doubt watching. “But our stable reserves the canteen at this hour, every night. For debriefs.”
“Oh.” Alekha holds Oksana’s gaze as she looms closer. She feels hot breath on her face. “I didn’t know, sorry.”
Oksana barks out a laugh. “There’s a lot you don’t know, loshka.”
Alekha can’t stop her hands from curling into fists. “That’s not how you say my name.”
“Oh?” Oksana’s eyes narrow. “Your uncivilized tongue is no concern of—”
A flash of white stabs Alekha’s vision and triggers her optical filters. At the same time: a deafening crackle, and the stench of burnt hair. Alekha blinks; her eyes adjust and compensate to display the reason for Oksana’s interrupted sentence: a ring of blue static arcing around her neck. Her muscles are rigid, tense, her eyes closed and teeth clenched.
Alekha staggers back. The electricity winks out and Oksana collapses to her knees with a grunt of pain.
“Don’t be rude, mutt.”
The voice is low, smooth as silk and twice as rich. Alekha instinctively swivels her head in response, and her breath catches in her throat.
Oksana’s cosmods were tame. Alekha now beholds someone who scarcely seems human: yellowed sclera with dark slits for pupils; body covered in iridescent pink and purple fur; pointed ears poking out of an actual mane, framing a face whose angular features are as sharp as the claw-like nails. There’s a macabre majesty to it. A human body pushed to the very limits of possibility, every inch of its surface remade and shaped to a singular will. Alekha has never seen someone more terrifying or beautiful.
She almost misses the 002 glowing through the fur on the neck. Second best.
Finally, Alekha’s AR helpfully appends Fang Jing, xe/xer to the air above xer head.
Xe delicately steps around Alekha. “I need a chair.”
Alekha almost says “Okay!” as she looks around for a chair that isn’t bolted to the floor, which leaves her unprepared for what happens next.
Oksana drops to all fours with a whimper. With a serene expression, Fang sits down on her back and crosses xer legs, one hand idly stroking the back of Oksana’s furred neck.
“Don’t mind Oksana,” Fang says airily, as though nothing is out of the ordinary. “She’s got more bark than bite, once you get to know her.”
“Right.” Alekha does her best to keep her voice steady and her eyes straight ahead. Ignoring the way Oksana quivers at every touch of Fang’s long, delicate fingers. “Apologies for the, um, intrusion.”
“Intrusion?” Fang’s gaze flickers up to Alekha’s grimacing face. “Not at all. After all, you have as much a right to be here as anyone else, don’t you?”
If Fang’s syrupy-sweet smile and honeyed syllables weren’t enough to get the point across, the audible tittering from the rest of the—stable?—make it evident. A part of Alekha wants to snap at them all, to hiss and stomp her feet and be the furious, rabid savage they clearly all expect her to be—be the animal they pretend to look like.
Except: 002.
The gaggle behind Fang’s shoulder is xer posse, she’s certain. They made no protest or even acknowledgment when Fang shocked Oksana. And now they’ve fallen silent, watchful. As Alekha scans their faces, she sees no sign of worry or fear that she might pose a threat to them. Only giddy anticipation.
The whimpers are hard to ignore. In spite of herself, Alekha lets her gaze drift down to what a second ago was a growling wolf in uniform. Now, on all fours, Oksana is drooling. Wanton haze has cloaked all viciousness from her eyes. Another lazy stroke along the spine teases out a moan.
All that bravado, obliterated in a blink.
So Alekha swallows the bile rising in her throat and starts moving towards the exit, giving the bizarrely amorous display a wide berth. “I’ll be taking my leave now.”
“Oh, do as you will,” Fang says. Xe traces a claw down the nape of Oksana’s neck, making her shudder. “Your comfort is clearly more important than any of ours.”
Not a damn word.
Alekha rounds her back on the lot. Tearing her eyes away from Fang’s effortless air of supremacy, from xer wicked grin and blazing eyes. The last thing she hears before the canteen door seals itself shut behind her is a single sentence from Fang, each word dripping with all the roiling venom xe clearly wanted to spit in Alekha’s face.
“I’m putting her on her hands and knees for a week once Radora’s through with her.”
***
“But this has to be a mistake.” Alekha tries to keep the panic out of her voice.
“Not at all,” Kachyhyna says, tone infuriatingly serene. “That is who you have been assigned to fight.”
Alekha turns around, takes six steps, and turns around again. Her stomach feels both queasy and acutely empty at once, and she’s trying not to hyperventilate or raise her voice. She wanted to make this call in her quarters, but they’re too cramped to pace. Hopefully no one’s going to reprimand her for doing it in the hallway.
“Halych Radora is ranked number one,” Alekha says through gritted teeth. “You said—”
“I informed you that new students may be assigned opponents from the lowest quartile,” Kachyhyna says. Alekha can’t tell if she’s imagining the hint of smugness.
“That’s what’s in the orientation packet too,” Alekha says. “So surely, I was erroneously matched against the top-ranked fighter—”
“There’s no error.”
Alekha stops in her tracks, fighting the urge to scream. The orientation matches are rank-agnostic. It won’t matter that Alekha was put up against the best fighter in the school—if she’s defeated too quickly to score on any of the metrics, she’s all but guaranteed to be ranked at the bottom.
Her career at Askold will be ended before it begins.
“If that is indeed the only reason for your call, I must remind you that I am only to be contacted in case of a genuine emergency.” Kachyhyna sounds almost bored.
Tears fill Alekha’s eyes. “I’m going to be humiliated.”
What did she ever do to Kachyhyna? To Fang? To any of them?
Kachyhyna scoffs. “You are at Askold to be evaluated on your combat ability, not to be coddled. Whether you are humiliated or not tomorrow is entirely up to you, Indrajeet. Good luck.”
The call terminates.
***
According to the blueprints, every sector of Askold’s interlinked stations has an observation deck on the highest level. This one is a vast, open space furrowed with plots of soil to simulate a verdant biosphere. Rows of shrubbery and young fruit trees are interspersed with an impressive variety of flowerbeds, and Alekha finds herself surrounded by crimson tulips and pink peonies and gilded marigolds wherever she walks. The grass underfoot is false, though, designed to be trod on by heavy exo-frame-wearing students without being crushed.
Alekha follows fractal paths in near-complete silence but for the faint buzzing of pollinator insects. Seemingly, no one else is here. The only other presence she notes is a large four-limbed robot crouched over a bed of marigolds. It looks of a kind with all the drones Alekha has seen, only curiously anthropomorphic at a glance, and dressed up in a simple gray turtleneck and slacks. Must be a pet project for someone from another major. Engineering, probably. Alekha could imagine a scientist version of Oksana costuming her drone to look like those people, for a laugh.
Camera arrays placed on the outer surface of the station upload their feeds to a central cloud. They collate and compute into a single 3D video stream anchored on the observer’s location, permitting Alekha to view the opaque walls of the room as transparent, or even nonexistent. She rests on a bench between two bushes, staring up into the empty reaches of the speckled firmament. She lowers her gaze occasionally to watch the sun’s rays sparkle on the planet’s surface. From above, like the PIR’s crest, its world is overwhelmingly blue. Couldn’t ask for a more beautiful view.
The urge to scream is gone, at least.
But there’s nowhere on Askold that will truly let Alekha leave her troubles behind, now that she’s synced to it. A notification pops up to inform her she’s in violation of curfew. She dismisses it. Then, after a moment’s thought, she puts the whole system on standby, Paths and Navigation and social media and all. Not like Kachyhyna’s going to expel her without making an example of her first.
None of it makes sense. Alekha’s mothers raised her on stories of the PIR and its forward-looking ideals, its commitment to a world where the old divisions between people no longer hold weight, unlike the neo-feudalist regimes of the Albion Federation or Mahameru. She remembers learning the PIR’s anthems in lieu of nursery rhymes. Her mom sang her poems about a land free of tyranny. No fathers, no bloodlines, no yoke of tradition. Someplace where what Alekha’s made of herself would matter more than the circumstances of her birth.
Where is the land of her mothers’ dreams?
“Cheddar wrap?”
A sigh escapes Alekha’s lips; she thought she was alone. She glances to her side and almost falls off the bench.
It’s the robot. No—person. Up close, there is flesh, yes, and visible respiration, and a heartbeat that Alekha can tune her ears to hear. But the limbs are too long, and obviously mechanical; the skin is a pale shade of gray and too smooth; there is no trace of body hair, or any hair, save for fiberglass eyebrows and lashes she could not see from afar. Two seams as if between armor plates trace the stranger’s head, splitting it into neat vertical thirds. And the eyes that focus on Alekha make no pretense of the fact they are cameras. The apertures shutter and widen as the stranger blinks without blinking.
Alekha’s fingers grip the edge of the bench, and she forces herself not to recoil in shock when a pale alloyed hand extends towards her.
There is, in fact, a wrap in the stranger’s fist.
“I heard your tummy grumbling from the other end of the room,” they say. Inside their mouth, their flesh is pink. “Want my spare?”
Alekha inhales sharply. “You know what, sure.”
She accepts the wrap. It’s flaky. Unexpectedly warm, too. Alekha sinks her teeth into the toasted flatbread, tearing out a massive chunk. Anything would’ve tasted amazing to her after forty-eight hours of traveling and the attendant transit food, but the wrap really is delightfully fatty and cheesy—and seasoned well, too. She chews the mouthful, only as much as she needs to, and noisily swallows.
The stranger giggles. An oddly cute sound. “Glad you like it.”
Alekha gulps down her second barely macerated mouthful to answer. “It’s lovely, thank you.”
She hesitates for a moment, before sliding off to one side of the bench. The stranger sits down next to her with a small smile.
“Got a lot on your mind?”
Alekha considers the question as she chews her next bite more thoroughly. “I’m sure you know who I am.”
A pause. Then, “I do.”
“There you go, then.” Alekha stares at the minty sauce leaking down her fingers. She licks it off. “I had such high hopes, you know.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Alekha reconsiders another bite. She lowers the wrap, turns to face the stranger, and opens her mouth to speak.
She bursts into tears before a single word comes out.
She has no grip on herself anymore. Alekha’s entire body is wracked with loud, keening sobs; her eyes and nose stream freely; she doubles over, weeping into the false grass with one hand covering her mouth, the other still holding the last of her wrap.
Something flat and cool alights on her hand. Then it retracts, and alights again. It’s like she’s being pet with a spatula.
“There, there,” she hears the stranger say through the noise in her ears. They sound stiff, limp and awkward.
The absurdity of the situation is what makes Alekha stop, mostly. She wipes the tears off her face with the back of her hand and straightens up. After a few blinks and some help from her bodymods, she can see clearly just how strained the stranger’s smile is now. Perhaps, in a different body, they would be blushing.
“Better now,” she says. “Thank you.”
“Oh, good.” Sounding relieved, the stranger quickly withdraws their hand. “Um, would you like my other wrap? I’m not that hungry after all.”
Alekha glances at the last mouthful in her hand. She pops it into her mouth, nods, and gratefully accepts the second wrap.
“Sorry, I’m just very—I didn’t really get a chance to eat anything but tram food today,” Alekha says sheepishly. “The canteen was, um, occupied.”
The stranger nods. “I see. Did Fang kick you out?”
“I wish.” Alekha winces. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have seen what goes on between xer and xer girlfriend." Alekha shudders. "Never mind. I’m sorry. It was just a lot.”
“Do you mean Oksana?” The stranger squints. “She’s not Fang’s girlfriend, just her bitch.”
Alekha stares.
“Right, that doesn’t—so that’s what we call auxes here. Auxiliaries.” The stranger coughs. “The higher-ranked students get to be primaries in 2v2 matches and pick a lower-ranked student to be their auxiliary. From the bottom fifty in the ranking. Supposedly to, like, mentor them, but not really. And by “pick them” I mean usually win. In a fight. You know, like a trophy. Whoever drops your rank below 100 gets first dibs. And they also get to, well—okay, explaining this to someone new reminds you how weird it is.”
Alekha raises a trembling hand to her forehead. “You’re telling me that’s what’s going to happen to me when I lose tomorrow?”
The stranger is silent for a little while. “You might not lose?”
A harsh laugh escapes Alekha’s lips. She puts her half-eaten wrap between them on the bench. “Thank you. I’ll leave the rest. I find that I lost my appetite again.”
She stands up to leave.
But before she can, a cold metal hand closes around Alekha’s wrist. Gently. Alekha’s breath hitches in her throat when she looks down at it—color and texture aside, it’s a remarkably lifelike replica. Brimming with power and strength. It’s difficult to tell, but it might be powerful enough to rip right through her suit.
So she stays very still.
“Wait, I’m not—” The hand opens and the stranger flinches back. “I wasn’t—my apologies. I just wanted to say something.”
Alekha lets out the breath she was holding. “Okay?”
They lock eyes. Alekha’s still tear-streaked. The stranger’s turbulent, oddly full of emotion for something so mechanical.
The stranger lowers their gaze. “You said you had high hopes. That isn’t your fault. Askold does an excellent job masking what it truly is. The best and the brightest, the hope of the future, scions of the Republics’ glory. Or whatever they’re pushing now.” They scoff. “A cover for a den of debauchery. A playground for the talentless children of technocrats and officials, with the occasional handful of low-class scum thrown in. Makes for good propaganda if they succeed, and amusing toys if they don’t. A fine system, all in all.”
Bile and bitterness drip from every uttered syllable. Alekha finds herself staring again, taken aback as much by the stranger’s brusqueness as by their words.
They shake their head. “This place is full of people who fill their empty, meaningless lives with pointless cruelty and violence because that’s all they know. Because they think they’re here to be ‘forged in fire’, to become cutthroat and ruthless and great. But no one here is becoming great. All they’re becoming is—is empty.”
The stranger stands up too. A head and a half taller than Alekha, now that she can compare them on their feet.
“Whatever happens tomorrow, don’t forget that,” they say, walking away. “Everyone here—we’re nothing. But you aren’t. You’re something. Please stay that way.”
Alekha watches them go. They turn right and disappear behind the marigolds.
***
Alekha’s old school didn’t have a “hangar”, as such. There was a designated area on campus where she could recharge her frame and perform repairs. All by hand, of course. On a good day she could replace armor plates, restock spent ammo and swap out any damaged parts—sourced herself and barely discounted by her stipend—over the course of a day, maybe two after a fight.
Askold’s facilities could do all that for her in under ten minutes.
The hangar is the lowest level of the sector, dimly lit with fluorescent blue at this time of night. Alekha pulls up its massive interface and cordons off a temporary section for herself in one corner. It’s all the interface will allow her. Large enough to maneuver around, but not nearly enough to put the frame through its paces. Sleep would be nice, too. Her bodymods can “overclock” her, keep her alert and stave off the worst of the effects of sleep deprivation, but it’s no substitute for a good night’s rest, especially after days of travel. But Alekha has to fight the best combatant in the school in a little under six hours. And a good night’s sleep won’t help her win.
It’ll have to do.
The transparent surfaces of the section emerge around her, rising up from ground to ceiling. A panel in the floor slides open, and a platform bearing the components of her exo-frame raises itself in the center of her workspace. Alekha performs a quick check to ensure everything has been retrieved from storage. Satisfied, she taps a virtual toggle and gestures with her hands. Her AR projects a paused video onto one of the section walls.
She’s going to have to multitask.
Materials first. Alekha accesses the menu and is instantly notified that she has no “Funds Key”, no “Team ID”, and therefore no credit balance to spend. Which is alright. She briefly scrolls through all the grayed-out options and whistles softly, impressed—some of these goodies would be great to have. But even Askold’s “generics”, freely available to all students, beat the stuff she had to resort to when she was cobbling her frame together back home. Alekha instructs the robot arms—now set to “Silent Mode”—to swap out her armor plates with ones that are both lighter and more durable. As the drones get to work, she contemplates the shield generator options, rubbing her chin with one hand and hitting “Play” on the paused video with her other.
Halych Radora is not a flashy fighter. The collated match highlights Alekha was able to track down show her opponent to be brutal, ruthless, almost single-minded. Alekha selects the lightest shield array, turns to the video, and pauses it. She zooms in, frowning, trying to study Radora’s chassis as much as the video quality will allow. It’s aerodynamic, streamlined and uniformly steel-gray all over, all wings and fins and propulsion. The woman herself is barely visible, a pale core ensconced in shining armor that never touches the ground and moves at speeds that’d turn anyone unenhanced into bloody mulch. Even her helmet is opaque, mirrored, as if to disabuse any observer of the notion there might be a soul behind it. She is a missile in semi-human form.
All the recorded fights have one thing in common: they’re over quick. In almost every one, Radora beelines for the opposing primary and overwhelms them with superior mobility and sheer firepower. She practically ignores the auxiliaries, and Alekha has a hunch that Radora might be more comfortable with 1v1s than with paired matches—unfortunate.
Sometimes the other team has some kind of plan, attempting to slow Radora down or forcing her to go through the auxiliary first. It never works. Radora either takes down both her opponents in quick succession or outmaneuvers the auxiliary enough to knock the primary out anyway. Alekha notes down the weapons used: forward-mounted laser cannons, a flamethrower, shock gauntlets for close range, and in one instance, simply ramming her opponent hard enough to knock their battery core loose.
Rewind, pause, slow down, play—there. Alekha squints, zooming in and sizing up the image as much as she can. It’s hard to see, but the armor on Radora’s exo-frame is dynamic. She was able to relocate the material, concentrating it into a battering ram on her shoulder, when she chose to jet-tackle her opponent out of commission.
Alekha can use that.
Lighter cables. More tensile strength. Higher launch power. Alekha opens a program and carefully traces out a new shape of grappling hook for the drones to 3D-print—more clamp than hook, really, with a spike in the center.
The selected arena for their match is mostly flat ground—bumpy and uneven in places, but no real cover to speak of. No verticality to the terrain at all. They’re expecting Radora to dispatch Alekha quickly, like everyone else. Offering her up to the champion as a squatting target to rain hellfire down on from high. And it might have worked, too—Alekha can’t match Radora’s specs in sixty hours, let alone six.
But specs aren’t everything.
Finished. With a little over two hours remaining, too. Alekha smiles, satisfied with her handiwork.
Put it on me, she commands.
The arms reach for her limbs.
Gently!
No glove, no item of clothing, nothing has ever fit her this well. Alekha’s exo-frame slips on like a second skin, and its core purrs like it never has before. She thinks of spinning around on the spot, and the motion begins before her thought ends. The bodysuit connects her nerves to the exo-frame’s electronics with barely any latency. Familiar sensations of becoming something more than her flesh wash over Alekha, flooding her with adrenaline and endorphins.
Virtual targets materialize around her. She moves all her arms at once; the whole array of targets is struck and dismissed almost before it’s finished conjuring.
Sleep is for the weak. Alekha’s as ready as she’ll ever be.
Something seems to be missing as she looks down at herself, though. Alekha recalls all the match snippets she watched, over and over, studying every second and every frame for the most minute details. Aside from Radora, every combatant had personalized their frame in some way. Painted it purple or green or red, or sported some symbol or writing on the sides.
Alekha tries to picture Radora’s lifeless exo-frame with flame decals and giggles.
One final thing, then. Alekha resummons the robot arms, steps out of the exo-frame with their help, and pulls up a color palette.
***
White. A shimmering expanse of white, hazy and glittering, leaving sparkly pinpricks in your eyes that won’t be blinked away. Alekha’s vision swims, blurs. Her lids close, involuntary, trying to shut off the pain.
Inhale, slow and deep. Alekha reaches a hand up and wipes her cheeks dry. No avoiding it, then. She juices her stim-glands again, upping the adrenaline output. Lets her heart rate climb, her muscles shake, her limbs tremble. She’ll be on the field soon enough, anyway. No harm getting ready in advance.
Just have to push through.
She opens her eyes again. The powdery sheet below comes into focus, stretching off into the distance in every direction. Windswept snowpiles snake across a smooth and polished surface of thick ice, occasionally broken up by frigid ponds.
Alekha waits in a capsule high above the arena, already in her frame. Watching the patterns in the snow. Waiting to be released onto the frigid waste that is meant to be her demise.
But first, the entertainment. Alekha rolls her head slowly, cracking the stiffest spots in her neck, before tapping her implant and switching the commentary back on. It hums to life, vibrating to transmit sound up her jawbone.
“—and for the opening ceremony, Askold’s two top-ranked students will now face off in a friendly match!”
Two other capsules descend to the ground, their ovoidal shapes drifting downwards to land softly on snowbanks. A seam appears before the capsules split in half lengthwise, revealing the fighters within.
Halych Radora rockets up without delay, screaming skywards, leaving a puddle in her wake. A silver bullet burning through likewise white snow. She swoops around her opponent in a tight circle, to raucous applause and cheering from the commentators.
Hardly impartial, Alekha thinks.
Below her, seemingly unfazed, stands Jing Fang. Even with most of her cosmods removed, presumably for comfort in combat, Fang is unmistakable. Xe glances up at Radora circling above xer with a bored expression, and mimes a stifled yawn.
At least, Alekha’s quite certain it’s mimed.
Xer frame is a fascinating model—still blue and silver, the patriotic PIR colors, but more vivid, more vibrant, like sapphires mixed into mercury. Fang almost looks like a knight-errant, an armored combatant transplanted into the modern era with two mini-cannons strapped to xer back. The exo-frame is bulky in a stylish way, concealing likely propellers and moving parts while still appearing holistically designed.
Well, Alekha will get the opportunity to design one too, once she’s trounced these technological marvels with her bucket of bolts.
A deafening roar booms out as Halych Radora stops tracing circles for the camera array and twists in the air, taking aim. She launches a brilliant beam of sizzling red from her arm-mounted cannon. Fang takes a step to the side, letting the shot sail past xer. It carves through the ice, turning a pile of snow into steam and slush.
Fang rolls xer eyes, then narrows them. Alekha catches the cruel sneer on xer face just before xer visor closes, encasing xer head in a silver helmet with—does it have fucking cat ears?
Audio from the combatants is collected throughout the fight, but rarely played for the audience. There are more interesting things to fill the air with than grunts and swears, after all. Now, however, the commentators choose to stream the weighty, clunky sounds of Fang’s exo-frame shifting and reshaping itself around xer, along with Fang’s own guttural, brutal snarling as xe “psychs xerself up for the hunt”, per a high-pitched speaker.
Corny line. The thought of Fang snarling like that in her ear, meanwhile, makes Alekha’s hairs stand on end.
Radora fires again, but Fang’s long gone, a silver-and-blue bullet racing across the ice—on all fours. Metal claws extend from each—paw?—giving Fang enough purchase to sprint without slipping. Shards of ice fill the air with each loping step, and Fang races to the spot directly beneath Radora.
It’s not merely the exo-frame, Alekha realizes. Yes, the frame changed shape—but so did Fang’s limbs, xer joints. Xer very spine. Fang’s body-modding is extensive, close to the absolute limit of what the PIR is capable of.
No doubt close to the limit of what a human body can take without tearing itself apart, or going mad.
Fang skids to a halt under Radora, gouging a deep furrow along the ground. For a moment, xe coils xer hind legs under xer, throwing xer arms out. A pair of blades extends from Fang’s wrists, their superheated metal blazing blue. The snow around Fang begins to melt.
Xe pounces.
“Fang’s uniquely mobile style is due to xer—whoa! Xe’s already—xe’s off! Um, going right for the throat, as xe does.”
Fang’s jump practically matches Radora’s takeoff velocity. Xe swings wildly, xer burning blades arcing through the air—but xer target is gone. Radora kills her vertical jets and zips sideways, a silver blur. Fang engages xer own propulsion so that xe isn’t at gravity’s mercy on the way down. Xe zigzags on the fall and hits the ground running to avoid Radora’s fire.
Or rather, to avoid any fire that Radora very much can lay down, but isn’t.
Alekha frowns. She thought this whole opening ceremony would be a bombastic affair. Part dance and part expo, an orchestrated meeting of Skolotiyan and Tianxian combat styles in a flashy show match. Neither combatant is showing off much at all, however—Fang hasn’t even engaged xer dorsal turrets. Xe only seems interested in sprinting at Radora full speed and trying to tear her out of the air. And Radora just swerves from side to side, again and again, like a target practice drone—if drones could taunt. It all looks neither choreographed nor tactical. Certainly not entertaining.
“It’s um, it’s amazing—they’re putting so much pressure on each other that neither can so much as line up a shot!”
Even the commentator barely sounds like they believe what they’re saying. Radora could easily shoot at Fang, or otherwise stymie xer approach with her flamethrowers, or even strike back with her gauntlets once Fang is in melee range. But this isn’t a real match—and they were clearly not supposed to treat it like one.
Fang obviously has other plans.
The cat finally catches xer prey. Fang uses xer own thrusters to alter the trajectory of xer jump, predicting the direction of Radora’s dodge. Xe latches onto Radora’s frame with the claws on xer back legs and stabs into her battery core with one vicious strike. Together they drop like stones. They lose altitude, rapidly, until they crash in an explosion of snow immediately pulverized into vapor. Radora lays under Fang, steaming. A brief crackle from the commentator speakers—they killed the audio feed. Fang pops xer helmet off and rears back for a final blow even as they skid along the forming ice, the tip of xer blade aimed right for Radora’s throat.
For a brief second, Alekha thinks it’s actually going to happen. There’s a crazed rage in Fang’s eyes, a twisted jeering grimace on xer face. Alekha bites back a scream.
Radora remains still. Fang strikes.
“NO!”
But moments before the blade would pierce her, Radora shifts. Not out of the way—down, digging her elbows into the snow, as if, for some inscrutable reason, to redirect the blow from her neck to her forehead. The momentum of Fang’s strike wavers. Xer blade dims, dull and lifeless, as it retracts into xer frame—but Radora herself jerks towards it, smashing her helmet into the gauntlet with a deafening crack.
Metal warps and shatters. The force of recoil smacks Fang off Radora and to the side, into snow. Automatically, Radora’s frame ejects the damaged pieces of her visor and sends them scattering. Where her skull slams back, cracks spread across the ice. That there’s no blood is a testament to how enhanced she must be. Though Alekha doesn’t know what degree of enhancement it would take to survive something like that.
She gets an answer soon enough. Radora raises her head, shakes it slightly, and glares up at a heaving Fang. As the commentators do their best to play it off and apologize for the delay in the placement matches, since naturally the fighters’ frames will need repairs, Alekha stares.
The robot-person with the cheddar wraps was Halych Radora.
It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Alekha can feel herself shaking—she clasps her hands together to stop the tremors. Just a bit longer—but why? Did Radora know? Of course Radora knew—every student Alekha came across recognized her on sight. There’s no way Halych Radora didn’t know the name and face of the woman she was ordered to humble.
So why approach Alekha? Why say these things to her knowing that she would be the instrument of Alekha’s downfall? Was it to soften the blow? To butter her up? An apology—or a taunt?
By the standards of this impenetrable culture, or this twisted school, it could be either. Alekha rubs her eyes. She thought she saw warmth and kindness in that hollow visage that glared so disapprovingly at Fang just now, but she could’ve been mistaken. Is Alekha sure that she didn’t imagine it, didn’t see something that wasn’t there in her desperate attempt to find something, anything about this place that could provide even a shred of comfort?
The pod begins to descend.
It won’t matter for much longer.
“And now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Our first placement match will be between our esteemed Halych Radora, facing off against the newcomer—Indrajeet Alekha! The first-ever student from Mahameru to attend Askold Academy, Alekha has been the talk of the town. Will we get to see why Indrajeet Alekha was afforded this unique honor? Or will we see the Jetstream end yet another match in under a minute?”
They’d like that, wouldn’t they? Alekha sets her jaw. She chooses to keep the commentary on.
She doesn’t want to miss the moment they realize what they’re dealing with.
Radora’s repairs don’t take long. A swarm of drones dispatched to the field rush back to their niches, and the number one combatant of the Askold Academy looks exactly as she did before the showfight began. She hovers dozens of feet above the ground, a living missile on standby, waiting for her target to materialize.
Stand tall, Alekha reminds herself, as the pod splits to reveal her in all her glory, covered from head to toe in Askold generics. Alekha’s chassis is sleeker than it was yesterday, but still a blocky affair nonetheless. Her armor may be parts that fit together well enough, but they still look like parts, like components patched together playing at the unity of purpose and intent that Fang and Radora’s exo-frames effortlessly exude. By contrast, Alekha’s body is nestled within a collection of metal cuboids, a patchwork project.
Only two features distinguish her from the most basic exo-frame models. The first is that her legs end in wheels: massive, broad, heavy, treaded for the snow. They add a considerable amount to her frame’s sheer height.
The other is the pair of massive, weighty and menacing robot arms jutting out of her back, curving over her head like twin scorpion tails. If scorpion tails ended in artillery, that is. Her original frame only had one, but Askold’s targeting software, lighter materials and efficient electronics array allowed her to upgrade. She was even able to add a few bells and whistles.
And so Alekha stands tall, her armor painted pitch-black with gold trims, angling her head up at the shining beacon of Askold’s biotechnological supremacy. Alekha knows that she isn’t like the rest of Askold’s students. She’s always been aware she’s fortunate and even privileged in some ways, but she isn’t affluent. Which is, apparently, still a concept that matters in the PIR. Frames like hers have fallen out of fashion in the PIR—hell, even Albion—long ago.
But she does have years and years of experience making every purchase, every design choice, every weapon and tool in her arsenal work as hard as she does.
She paints a lock-on target on Radora’s body for the benefit of her semi-autonomous cannons, and waits for the kickoff signal.
As soon as she hears it, she rotates her wheels on their vertical axis and blasts off sideways, narrowly dodging Radora’s instantaneous shots.
Alekha changes the angle of her wheels. Her propulsion array isn’t powerful enough to let her fly like Radora, or even jump as high as Fang can, but they can help her brake and accelerate on flat ground, making her—hopefully—slippery. Radora’s barrage of follow-up shots misses her, again and again, as she alters her trajectory on a dime.
Is she surprised, Alekha wonders? Angry that an insect like Alekha can possess such agility? Pleased, somehow? What feeling hides in those apertures?
Alekha resists the urge to look. There is nothing to see, and she can’t afford to lose focus.
In the middle of Alekha’s last swerve, Radora accelerates. Propulsion jets blaze, and she launches herself at Alekha full-tilt, her gauntlets crackling blue. Her armor plates migrate towards her chest and shoulders.
“Looks like this match lasted just over ten seconds—our condolences to those losing their wagers by mere milliseconds.”
With a frame like Alekha’s, vertical mobility is bound up in grappling hooks. On flat terrain, with nothing to hold on to, the best one can hope for is a few pretty twists and turns before a monster like Radora dismantles you in close quarters.
Unless, of course, Alekha spent half the night redesigning her grappling hooks and reinforcing her cables.
She engages her boosters to hop just above the ground, throws one arm out and fires a cable down and to the side. The spike punches through the ice, the clamps flare out, and Alekha finds purchase as she retracts the cable.
All her simulations paid off. Rumors of Halych Radora’s instant victory prove greatly exaggerated as Alekha switches directions even quicker than her motors will allow. She pulls herself aside a moment before Radora barrels through where Alekha used to be—which conveniently exposes Radora’s currently unarmored back. Exposed jets—how careless. Alekha paints her targets.
“Wait a minute—Indrajeet Alekha’s still moving! They’re still going—the match isn’t over!”
There’s barely any lag between Alekha’s command and her guns firing—but there’s still some. Radora twists around, reconfiguring her armor on the fly. Only one of her boosters is blasted off. Radora faces Alekha, staving off the follow-up blasts, her chassis recalibrating the placement of the surviving propulsion array. Stable. Still in the fight. Still dangerous.
But slower.
Alekha decides to test how slow. She pulls her grappling hook out of the ice and whips it at Radora. The tip of the spike strikes Radora’s visor right before she withdraws.
A glancing blow. Harmless. It wouldn’t possibly have done any damage. And yet, retracting the hook back into her frame, Alekha made her point.
Almost immediately, Radora makes Alekha wish she didn’t.
Not enough distance. Alekha didn’t put enough distance between herself and Radora, and now Radora’s going to make her pay for the blunder. She rockets at Alekha again, firing both her arm cannons at once, on either side of Alekha. Alekha drives backward for a spell, her cannons firing back, but it doesn’t even slow Radora down—she’s too maneuverable, easily weaving around Alekha’s blasts. Barely, Alekha exploits a small gap in the firing pattern to launch another cable and hurtle aside. In response, Radora kills her jets, somersaults in the air and launches herself at Alekha anew, redirecting herself and closing in.
Her fists glow bright blue.
Alekha brakes as hard as possible. Tires locked, jets to kill her momentum, both her grappling hooks spearing into the ice beside her. She leans back so far that she’s almost parallel to the ground and lets Radora sail over her. For a moment, she can hear the lightning-charged fists clearer than anything. Even through the helmet, everything reeks of ionized air.
She uses her wheels, jets and hooks to throw herself forward at max velocity. The distance between her and her opponent grows, farther and farther across the now half-melted field.
Her gambit worked—except.
“Her arm’s gone! Halych punched one of Indrajeet’s guns clean off!”
Black and gold, lying in the snow, gleaming in the sunlight—but Alekha can’t think about that right now. Radora’s a much more tactical fighter than she first appeared. The sheer number of shots she took carved a small lake into the ice, and Radora was trying to corral Alekha to the shoreline to deny her ground. Alekha zigs and zags, away from the massive hole in the ice sheet. She needs to go on the offensive soon—she can’t dodge Radora forever.
“Indrajeet seems to have no tactic other than running away—but Halych’s guided missiles are sure to pin her down!”
“The WHAT?” Alekha says out loud, then cringes. The commentators are going to play that clip for everyone watching.
Twin munitions emerge from Radora’s back, long and sleek, racing towards Alekha with Radora herself close behind. Not a single clip Alekha saw so much as hinted at Radora packing limited munitions—she seemed entirely reliant on lasers and tasers and a bottomless power source.
Alekha doesn’t bother scanning the missiles—they’re definitely strong enough to take her out if they meet their mark. She takes potshots at both with her remaining cannon—the guided missiles dodge, also semi-autonomous.
But how well-programmed are they, really?
It’s surely time. All in, now or never. Alekha inhales, goes over the calculations one more time, and takes aim.
The first missile alters its flight path to dodge Alekha’s grappling hook—but it doesn’t account for the clamps, flaring out and closing around its fins. Alekha tugs and pulls the missile down into the ice, sacrificing her grapple in the process. A massive cloud of steam and snow and spray washes over her—and more importantly, obscures her.
The second missile explodes as well, another opaque cloud. Radora must surely be wondering where the shot came from.
Radora pulls up immediately, abandoning her frontal assault, finally realizing. She was so focused on what was in front of her face. Alekha grins, tasting blood. If Radora has any rear cameras—and the bitch probably does—she should check them sometime. Then she might’ve seen Alekha’s abandoned arm cannon, ripped from her frame but not destroyed, shooting the missile.
And now it’s flying towards them.
Like everyone else at this school, Radora has no idea how much she underestimated Alekha.
The second grappling hook emerges from the snow-cloud and clamps around Radora’s neck. Jets blasting, cable retracting, Alekha ascends, reeling herself into Radora at top speed. She brandishes her free hand; her leg plates detach and assemble into a hulking mass of metal around her forearm. Radora’s altitude dips. She amps up her thrusters to dodge away—and it doesn’t work, because Alekha’s attached to her, closing the distance. Radora reaches for the cable, but too late. Alekha’s on top of her.
Laughing.
Alekha can’t help it. Laughing, practically cackling, Alekha pulls herself up to Radora’s chassis. Frame cobbled together from spare parts and cast-offs, and still she managed to catch the school’s top student off-guard. No matter what else happens today, Alekha knows she could’ve won if she had half the resources these spoiled children tossed aside.
“Without any flight capabilities on that frame, Indrajeet is forced to hitch a ride on Halych’s!”
Even if no one else will admit it.
She reels into Radora and slams her encased fist into Radora’s visor, realizing a fraction of a second later she is the second one to do so today.
But this time, the visor holds. The force of the punch reverberates back into Alekha’s makeshift gauntlet; her frame and bodymods scramble to absorb the impact away from her flesh and bones; she feels the heat of it on her skin anyway. Metal crumples.
For all the force behind Alekha’s blow, she can’t so much as dent the frame that Fang shattered with just xer fist.
It really was hopeless all along.
Radora swings her gauntlets wildly, forcing Alekha to respond. Alekha realigns her propulsion jets, aiming their exhaust at Radora, and engages it, engulfing Radora in flames. Radora’s shield array flares up in response, and her cooling systems begin to dissipate the excess heat as steam.
That exo-frame is simply too advanced, too durable. Alekha’s been left with no choice. She has to resort to her final gambit, even if it destroys her own frame in the process.
So Alekha triggers her pair of concealed missiles and fires them at Radora, point-blank. She can’t get clear of the explosion in time—no fucking flight capabilities, after all.
Alekha’s shields deplete instantly. Her armor chars, and the skin of her legs feels like it’s boiling, cooking within the exo-frame. Alekha falls out of the sky, hurtling towards the ground like a dropped stone, leaving Radora inside a spherical inferno.
For a moment, it almost seems like it worked.
But the flames dissipate, and the smoke clears, and at the center of the erstwhile fireball still hovers Halych Radora, champion of Askold, her exo-frame barely glowing orange. A portion of her armor is ejected, the rest cooled, but she retains enough components—more than enough—to remain functional. Meanwhile, Alekha’s exo-frame is out of shields, out of ammo, practically out of battery, and certainly out of tricks.
It’s over.
There’s no rhyme or reason for it—Alekha knows she’s beaten. Perhaps she has enough juice left to cushion her landing, to hit the ground on rolling wheels and put together a last-last-last-ditch attempt.
But fuck it.
Alekha closes her eyes and issues a command to her detached cannon, still making its way back to her, to fire a shot that she knows Radora will effortlessly dodge. She does it anyway because she needs to go down fighting, needs to throw everything she has at Radora to the last doomed second, even if it achieves nothing more than—
“—Wait, what’s this? Radora’s power source—she’s—Radora is hit! How can this—Halych Radora is going down!”
That can’t be. It’s absurd.
Alekha opens her eyes.
There she is. A silver human missile, falling like a shot bird.
Radora didn’t dodge. Radora, who can cross the arena with a thought, didn’t get out of the way of the shot—did she not see it? She had to have seen it. Alekha can’t believe her eyes—this doesn’t make sense.
Why didn’t she dodge?
Alekha’s frame is barely functional. Almost all of her remaining power is used up to divert her into a snowbank. She crashes through it wheels-first, nearly shattering both the ice and her ankles—but both hold, and she slides along the slippery surface. Alekha falls briefly to her knees, skids for a few more meters, then rights herself, getting back to her feet.
Moments later, Radora crashes through the ice in front of Alekha, plunging into the freezing water.
The commentators shout, barely audible through the ringing in Alekha’s ears. Her head pounds, her legs burn, and the edges of her vision blur into an amorphous white haze. The frame finally winks out, powering down completely. Every inch of her feels heavy and leaden and weighed down by lifeless metal.
Dimly, Alekha makes out a swarm of drones descending upon her. Another flies down to Radora as the champion’s visor retracts from her head and neck. Alekha thinks she sees blood-red in those scalp seams, and she can’t help smiling at that. But then stabbing pain in her eyes compels her to close them, shutting out the overwhelmingly bright snow.
The last thing she sees before darkness swaddles her is the glow of the implant on Radora’s neck, flickering from 001 down to 105.