“Yo-yo-you knew I was there?” she sputtered, after she jammed the thin disk of multerium in her pocket. The man gave her one deep nod. Galia lowered the nose of her flower-launcher an inch.
“Which means you know a few more things you shouldn’t. My true name, for example,” said Yuri. With two tender hands, he adjusted the collar of his flawless suit. He straightened his tie, which was already remarkably straight. “I don’t need to leave Ares with the Medal. But ripping it out of your hands is the perfect cover to keep privileged information from getting out.” Galia gave him another second to strike, but Yuri was still, calm. Even while layer after layer of the planet destabilized around them. Galia threw the flower-launcher back over her shoulder.
“Like to see you catch us,” she smirked, then grabbed Deidra. She dragged the girl back into the pod-lift of the Terra Eagle. Yuri waited until he climbed into the ship to say:
“You will.”
By the time Galia and Deidra found their seats inside the Eagle, its frame clattered around inside the devolving core. Galia pulled up the talons. She turned the beak for the tunnel they’d come through and took flight without a glance back.
“Watch it on the left!” Deidra called out.
“Thanks!” Galia jerked the Eagle around a dislodged chunk of rock. Ares had begun to splinter. “Run scans for branching service tunnels, in case we have to abandon course!” A crack that put the loudest thunderbolts to shame rocked the cavern. As if on cue, five sawteeth of jagged rock collided before them to close the way. If it wasn’t this ship, this pilot, they might have plowed straight into it. Galia, however, brought the Eagle to a screeching near-instant stop with the flick of its wings.
“Four o’clock!” Deidra cried out. Galia wrenched the Eagle’s beak around, and zipped down the path. They burst from darkness, into a bright blue house of mirrors. The Ice Bucket. Galia skidded the Eagle around icicles and ripped ever-forward until the ship jostled, despite every perfect evasion. “Missile fire,” Deidra told her, haunted that he could find them even deep in the subterranean maze between Ares’ arenas.
Yuri’s ship hurtled from an icy mouth, seconds before it closed. His javelin prow shot up at them. Galia managed to spiral the Eagle around it by a margin of feet. Deidra turned her cannons along with the swivel of her chair, which pulsed back with the kick of launch. Her particle beam seared a line across the bottom of Yuri’s hull. Not a second later than the beam dissipated, a blinding white light frothed over from the hole it left in the ice.
“The hell is…” Deidra started but then realized what in the hell it was.
“The stabilization orb blew. This place is going to melt in minutes,” Galia shuddered. Deidra focused turret fire on Yuri to keep him busy and dodging. All the while, she used the rim of her vision to scan for things she recognized. After all, she’d been a Gold Standard servant for twenty years. Her brain was trained to find and recall discreet tunnels to scuttle about, unseen by paying customers.
“Seven o’clock,” Deidra told her captain, “A few hundred meters. There’s a tunnel to the Bangbox.” Galia swept ahead with her eyes until she found it. It was hard to keep her sights trained on it, with the coughs that ravaged their way up her throat.
“He’s gonna… try to block us…” Galia managed between heaves. She saw his long-barreled cannon telescope out of his side hull.
“On it,” Deidra said, cannons poised to address it, “You need your taxotrol!” Galia’s cough deepened with the laughs mixed in. A spray of scarlet spat over the helm and her lap.
“Took… the last of it… this morning.”
“Wha-”
“Stay on him!” Galia forced out. She spun the helm. The Eagle dove for the tunnel. Yuri launched a dense thermal shell. Deidra fired a high-caliber shell straight through it. The crimson blast wave threw the two ships in opposite directions: Yuri into a wall of softening ice, the Eagle down the shaft to the Bangbox.
“Galia…” Deidra mumbled. In a momentary ceasefire, in the cascading dark of the tunnel, she allowed herself a glance at her captain.
“Behind!” was Galia’s reply. The tunnel lit with muzzle flashes from Yuri’s top-deck turrets. Deidra deployed their shields, but not before a few rounds could crack their jet-disks. The Eagle slowed from a blur to a haze, which was just enough. Yuri gained on them by the second.
The Terra Eagle shot out into the wide corridors of the Bangbox, followed by Yuri, followed by a flood of white flame. Galia dodged their ship to the side of their foe’s skewering prow. She tried to jerk the helm to point at the sky, but Yuri rammed them from the side. The Eagle’s wing ground against the rusted iron panel wall until one of them burst. Both ships spiraled to the other side of the maze, an inferno spiraling around them. In the chaos, Galia got the Eagle’s talons in Yuri’s hull.
“Get in the cockpit!” she screamed in a voice so grizzled and hoarse that Deidra leaped from her seat immediately. She plopped on Galia’s lap as the head cocked back to drive into their foe, with them inside. Before it could, Yuri’s prow snapped out of place, in a ball-joint. It swiped once, a beheading strike. The Eagle’s head skidded across the floor of the Bangbox, free of its body.
There was smoke in Galia’s eyes when she got them open again. She hardly understood what was happening anymore, but Deidra was still fighting. She pulled both boots back, and kicked the glass of the cockpit. Galia fo
cused the very last drop of her might to throw a kick of her own beside her. The Eagle’s head popped open, only for a hand to reach down inside. Galia turned her aching, tired eyes to Deidra, who floated out of the cockpit.
“I thought… you didn’t want this,” she coughed.
“I don’t… but it would hardly be convincing if I didn’t make look like I did,” said Yuri through that eerie half-smile. He tore the Gold Medal from Deidra’s clutching hands, and dropped her back in the cockpit. Galia sputtered an unintentional mist of blood. Yuri boarded his ship and zipped off. Galia closed her eyes, and drifted away. She had the vaguest memory of arms lifting her. Then, nothing. Only whispers from reality in the dark of her nightmare come true.
“Galia? Galia! Damnit, wake up!” Deidra throttled her by her jacket lining. Part of her was sure the iron panel beneath them would burst any second. But then, what more climactic an end to an Olympia could there be than two lovers, swallowed by the explosion of the whole planet? It was only minutes away, with the fountain of white fire from more and more tunnels around them. “I… I won’t do this without you…” Deidra whimpered. Her tears splotched holes in the soot on Galia’s cheeks. Then she felt something, between the fingers of her left hand. Something in Galia’s pocket. Deidra let her down to pull it free.
“No way… thank you, Rey!” Deidra kissed the folded up map of the Bangbox. Just then, her mind skipped ahead through possibilities and plans faster than it ever had before. She traced the paths with her fingers in search of a tunnel that might lead to the Thruway. She’d seen something there in passing, a service station. They were down a ship, but there was something else at every service station no Gold Standard servant was as familiar with as Deidra. What was once her only pleasure was now her only tiny shred of hope.
“Come on, Galia,” Deidra muttered, more to herself than her unconscious captain. She hoisted Galia up onto her shoulder, to follow a route memorized from paper by pure adrenaline. “Come on. You’ve still got… so much to teach me.”
Everything was a bright haze. Bursts of light jumped across Deidra’s eyes. She couldn’t discriminate detonating panels of the Bangbox from the expanding white inferno of Ares’ core. She steered more from the strength of tremors through her shoes than anything she could see. Deidra hardly noticed the extra weight on her back. She only trotted on.
Heat swept over her from behind. The sensation of her feet lifting off the ground felt eerily more whimsical than frightening. Deidra rode the hot wind of an explosive shockwave. She held tight to Galia, even as the burst flung them in a twenty-foot-high arc. A different story started when Deidra touched down again. A story about two girls in trouble, scraping across hot rusted iron while a planet combusted around them. It might have ended when Galia rolled away and the Bangbox itself splintered at the seams, if not for Deidra.