“It is. I’ve been looking for a signup all day.
I haven’t seen one since the drones nailed those kids,” Galia told him. That was five days ago. Every glance to the sky showed the planet Ares slightly changed. It sent a pang through Galia’s chest.
“Gah, they must be pulling back staff since there’s only a few spots left,” Rey figured. He punted a loose brick with his high, steel-toed boots. “Everything we put into the Dreamweaver… it’s all just cargo if we don’t get into the Olympia.”
“No kidding,” Galia huffed. She drove her hands down deep in her fleece-lined pockets. There was hardly a chell left in there. She’d whittled away what little was left over from her precious Dreamweaver’s upgrades away on food and drink. “We’ll find a signup. We’ve got no choice.”
“Sure, I’d just prefer it was before you drank us into the ground,” said Rey. Galia grasped his arm. He looked to find that dastardly, calculating grin on her lips.
“How well you know me, Rey? You think that was about the drinks? I couldn’t nail number one, and fun’s actually number three. I moved to number two: recon. Rex, the captain of the Hammer, is left-handed.” Galia recalled his instinct when she threw her punch.
“You crafty bi-”
“Hey, look who it is,” Galia silenced him with a slap to the chest. She motioned to a snack stand across the cement-block street. Through exhaust fog from passing buggies and an ever-changing current of bodies, she’d spotted two faces she knew.
Both of them were twice as haggard as the last time Galia saw them. The girl’s hair frizzed out in bursts from her brunette braid. Her knuckles were red, presumably scraped. The young man had a deep purple stain around his right eye. Galia knew, as she had before, that the two were servants of The Gold Standard by their uniforms. It was the only clean thing about them. A sleek black collared shirt under a long gray jacket. The golden emblem of the planet Ares glittered on their chests. Two gold stripes glared around their sleeves. Through soot and freckles on her already dark-skinned face, two crystal blue eyes on the girl’s face found Galia and Rey coming towards them. They filled with dread, then anger.
“We’re out to the fifth row, folks! The longer you wait the more you’ll have to squint to see the blood!” Deidra turned to shout, to anyone else but that woman. Galia. That name was the last thing she’d heard before… well, she didn’t care to think about it, now that they were finally out. She’d even rather sell tickets than talk to Galia. She’d rather bark a flimsy sales pitch - most customers who could afford an Olympia Gold ticket could afford enhancer goggles to see from well past the fifth row. That was besides the hundred hanging screens showing footage around the arenas.
“As I was saying, before we were interrupted,” Galia said. She paused for a glance left and right, for hypothetical drones. But Deidra and Devin had managed to avoid drunken hecklers so far today. “Are you two handing out Olympia Gold applications?”
“He is,” Deidra pointed to Devin with her nose. She turned her head to shout out more ticket offers instantly. Her turned-up nose wrinkled her entire face. Something about it, so pretty, so twisted in frustration, plucked one of Galia’s long-quieted heartstrings.
“Look, I’m sorry I got you caught,” Galia said. Deidra eyed her sideways against her will. Her voice was a softer song than any woman with that many scars had business singing. Then it changed key. “But… the fact you were running lends itself to the suspicion that you’d done something.” Deidra’s face scrunched again. For once, it was Devin that reached to stop Deidra. He couldn’t reach her in time.
“Something like hitting a man back?” Deidra let crack the furnace inside her, and unleashed the fire, “Committing the crime of thinking, for a second, that we’re more than property?”
“Now who needs to take it down a notch?” Devin whispered, “We just got out of the Cram!”
“The what?” Galia interjected.
“A box with just enough blacked out air holes to keep us alive. It’s a shoulder wider and a head taller than me. Soundproof. Lightproof. They cram us in there when we do something… wrong,” Deidra explained with all the spite it’d left in her. Galia’s eyes betrayed a hint of true sympathy. She blinked it away before anyone might catch it. If she was going to make it in the Olympia Gold, she had to wear the mask she’d worked so hard to forge. “Devin’s got the applications, if you want in. There are only a few spots left. Good luck.” With that, Deidra turned back out to the crowds. She managed, for the rest of their conversation, to pretend Galia wasn’t there.
“He-he-here you go,” Devin stammered. Even he was taken back by the brazen hand that popped out from Galia, expectant. He slapped a paper packet in it. His shock deepened by leagues when she filled in the top lines of her Olympia Gold application. The edges of the circuited paper shimmered with each completed word, uploading the data to the virtual database attached to the last resort hard-copy.
Name: Galia Hattel.
Ship: the Dreamweaver.
“You’re…” Devin muttered. Galia met his eyes with a debonair spark and a smirk to match. Behind her, Rey rolled his eyes. You’ve got to enjoy it to sell it, she’d say. On paper, the Dreamweaver was a commercial freighter, but Captain Galia had been building a reputation for off-the-books operations in arms dealing for years.
“That’s right,” said Galia. She threw in a wink for good measure.
Chapter Four: Forging Ahead
One of the few things Deidra enjoyed about Greymoor was its actual moors. Out past the edge of Ganera, away from the Skyport and the thousand peddlers selling their souls, was barren rock. There were craters. There were crags. There were trenches, overlooks, and silence. And so there was Deidra, smiling, while her hair whipped around her. Her thighs, strong despite her lack of sustenance, crunched the sides of her Gold Standard hoverbike. The glittering gold racing stripe down the side of her vehicle warned any peeping raiders away. It said, without words: “this girl is the property of someone you don’t want as an enemy”.
“You’re something else, Deidra. You know that?” Devin called out. He jammed his heels back on the throttle pedals to try and keep pace with her. He clenched his teeth to even go near the speed she wove between rocky spires and cleared boundless crevasses.
“Something else besides what?” Deidra laughed. The only time she did laugh was out here. Between the city and the Forge. Between zones of high expectation and strict roles. It was the only place Deidra understood, vaguely, as freedom.
“Besides sane! You’re going too- woah!” Devin jerked his guide-bars to rush around a gray spire. His hoverbike turbines flickered until he found his bearings, then seared bright blue again. He picked up speed to tail his friend.
“I’ve told you before, Dev,” Deidra laughed, “If you don’t like going fast, be last!”
“And what if I want to talk to my friend?” Devin answered.
“Then keep up, or wait till we get to the Forge!” Deidra chuckled. She put her face down, level with the guide-bars. The hyper-magnetic plates on the underside of her bike glowed bright with acceleration. A mist of clay dust stung her cheeks. The big jump was right on the other side of the hill that rose before her. Others would call it the Outer Bridge, but not Deidra. She couldn’t be bothered crossing what she could jump clear over.