Love of Olympia (Olympia Gold)

“How?” Deidra pouted.

“Same way I knew the rest of it. One of the Terra Eagle’s gunners. Run these games enough years, you see similar arena schematics.”

“Devin… why would they tell you that, with any level of honesty?” Deidra dug in.

“There was… alcohol involved. And the Eagle’s a veteran, right? She knows what strings to pull, to set the games in their favor. The more teams that stay in it until the end, the less of a pain it is to make it through the Reverie,” said Devin. It was a solid enough idea. The Reverie… she could hardly imagine making it that far. The second-to-last round of the Olympia Gold was the only one consistent through every year. A chance for defeated crews to seek their vengeance. Less defeated crews meant less punishment.

“Alright, alright… considering I’m fool enough to believe you: where is this Crystal Ice Core?” Deidra sighed at last. Devin smirked but found himself forced to tell her on the way when Cybil announced,

“Combatants. This is your fifteen-minute warning. We’ll see you in the lobby for boarding, then on the big screen.”

“Welcome folks, from Homeworld, from Greymoor, from the furthest colonies of Alpha Centauri and beyond… to the first official challenge of the fifty-sixth Olympia Gold. This…” Cybil let the word repeat itself through the brisk, glassy blue caverns. Deidra’s heart pounded twice between each echo. “Is the Ice Bucket! Contestants have access to their ship and their full, personal arsenals in this round. The goal is twofold. Survive your opponents. Claim the Crystal Ice Core from the esero mederi; ice harpies from the WBO’s outer research colonies, to attain the bonus. The round doesn’t end until a crew holds the Ice Core for their own. For anyone unversed on the Olympia, a crew who attains three bonuses wins the Olympia Gold Medal, instantly. That is, of course… unless the runner-up for bonuses challenges them.”

“It’s the sea green tunnel,” Devin murmured to Tygon. He held the helm steady. The Brazen’s wide nose pointed at the center of an open, icy atrium. It was the shared focal point of all seven ships in the games. “It’ll take us straight for the Ice Core.”

“Yeah, it’s the sea green tunnel that everyone will be gunning for,” Deidra hissed in Tygon’s other ear, “Forget about it! Go for the stalactites. They’re decent cover, and we can-”

“I’ve got a plan,” Tygon assured her, or at least he thought he did. Deidra wouldn’t be assured. Not with six other ships poised to strike. Not floating inside an open jaw of icy teeth. Not with timers ticking down the destruction while audience booths in the ice walls rumbled with applause.

“Begin!” Cybil’s voice was drowned by an immediate explosion of firepower. Lights flared through viewing windows, ships bounced back from one another’s blasts, and ice walls splintered. Deidra gripped the controls of her long-barreled cannon to steady herself. She thanked whatever deity would listen when Tygon jerked the Brazen for the ceiling. It went nose-up. Icy javelins plunged around them. Then a shockwave rose through her seat. Something struck them from below hard enough to catapult her into the ceiling of the Brazen. A second later, the ship slammed into the ceiling of the cave.

“Kostic, stabilize the secondary wings, damnit!” Galia barked. She fought with the navigation bars to point the Dreamweaver back at the center of the free-for-all.

“On it, Cap’!” Kostic answered. She’d deployed the smaller, secondary wings from the bottom of the ship at Cybil’s commencement. It helped keep them from drifting too far with enemy fire.

“Rey, who the hell is on us? And who’s injured?” asked Galia. She craned her neck to glance at the others through the viewing screen, but all she saw was smoke and more cannon-blasts. The Terra Eagle ripped through. One of its wings flicked out to slash the Torrent, which also emerged from the smog. Fire unfurled from the gash it left.

“Carol’s out, but breathing. And take a guess who’s on us,” Rey called back with the perfect note of irony to cue her in. Scorch. Carol had slammed her head on a missile-guiding visor pretty hard when the first rounds struck.

“Keep her upright and hooked in,” Galia grimaced. She readied her thumb on the dissolution gun, for Roran and Scorch. The ones that had done this. “Damage report,” Galia issued to the Dreamweaver itself, then “Give me a direction,” to Rey.

“Shields at seventy percent. Minor impact damage to the starboard plate,” the Dreamweaver’s digitized AI voice piped up. A flat diagram of the ship blinked on a screen to Galia’s left with a faint red zone.

“Looks like… five o’clock!” Rey told her when the analysis was complete.

“Alright, kill the jets!” Galia decreed. Her crew complied in complete trust. The Dreamweaver dropped towards a hundred stabbing ice-spears. Galia wrenched the navigation bars. The ship spun around to five o’clock. The cannon crosshairs settled directly on Scorch. “Bring ‘em live!” The Dreamweaver’s disk jets blazed back on to suspend it in relative safety. The dissolution cannon shone with life.

The only thing faster than Galia’s finger was the Terra Eagle’s particle beam. It seared a gaping hole through Scorch’s central engine stack. The inferno that burst from within splintered the ship into fifteen flaming chunks. Roran and his crew rained down in similar division onto icy pikes. The audience cried out for first blood. Eight people dead, most of the crew. Galia couldn’t afford to think about it just then. She jerked the Dreamweaver around cannon fire from the zipping Terra Eagle.

“Return fire! Don’t expect to hit her, just keep her busy!” Galia decreed. The Dream

weaver’s glowing belly skimmed the walls of the icy cove. In the corner of her eye, Galia caught a glance of another ship in duress. The Brazen.

The Gold Standard servant crew had climbed high in the stalactites overhead when the Hammer’s homing missiles converged on it. The blast kicked the ship high. Their pilot made the interesting choice of charging straight into the roof of the Ice Bucket. A bold and creative choice, Galia had to admit. The Brazen took some heavy battering, but in turn, battered the ice. Countless stalactites dislodged from above. They rained down over the other five crews. Each spear stabbed deep into whatever part of the cave it found.

“They’re breaking up the fray,” Galia figured.

“What’s the plan, Cap’?” said Rey.

“Find a tunnel and disappear. Hang tight!” Galia shouted. She swung the Dreamweaver wide, straight down an icy, sea green branch.

“Holy hell, Tygon, did you have to hit it so hard?” asked Devin, while he massaged the massive bump on his scalp. Tygon was too preoccupied with keeping the smoking Brazen centered in the green tunnel to look his way.

“You’re damn straight I did. What happened to Scorch was a few seconds from happening to us in that open theater. We had to break it up. What in the hell are those?” Tygon’s sharp tongue flicks broke Deidra from her own concussive trance. She squinted through the smog of their flying shipwreck at the shapes that littered the cave just ahead. Bodies. Their teal, leathery skin was a sharp contrast to the red stains spreading around them. Their scaly wings folded around them like funeral shrouds.

“I think those are the ice harpies,” Deidra said, numb. Every last one of them laid dead. “Someone’s been here.”

“Someone’s here now,” Devin pointed through the Brazen’s bridge window.