Day pulls a goggled headset from her thick armrest. Settling this on her nose, she looks out over the arena. The bleachers’ arched shape allows for an unobstructed view, even in the high seats. A tremendous clear wall encircles the arena, laced around with super-transparent, honeycombed energy dampeners. Day can see clear to the other side, more than a hundred yards. Magnifying the view through her goggles, with just a thought, she can make out faces and details in the crowd, down to a nose ring. Her eyes drift across the freak show, humans and genex, but her mind is quiet, waiting intensely. Music is beating.
With the rhythm, coming steady, her view lands on the two giant robots, battling to death in the arena. The larger one is over fifty feet tall. Day recognizes it, called Marksman. It is humanoid, a phthalo blue skeleton with four arms. Thick black dreadlocks, with glowing white stars painted on them, swing around its head. Fangs and eyes are painted on its flat face. The machine is fierce, armed with an electric katana, a long spear slung over its back, and two automatic handguns in its curved, blue, electrified grips. Day leans forward, turning a dial on her headset. Now she sees through cameras in Marksman’s eyes, the other robot. Red type in the display reads its name: Kami. Statistics roll across her view, showing its win to loss ratio and vitals. Highlights fill her in on their hardware in real time.
Kami is hooded, forty-five feet tall, with an orange cape that moves behind, circling in toward her. Fuel drips from its open jaw, sharp. She has three green eyes. It moves with humanoid legs, feminine but jointed backward, and two bladed hands are seen. Further shapes shift at her back, dark.
A quick burst of gunfire does little as magnetic armor pulses, sending metal projectiles drilling into the wall. Holding two arms up as shields, Marksman steps in, unloading more self-propelled bullets, tearing through her hood with a spray of steel. Her pulse armor fires again, knocking him backward. Day switches the view to a radial third person, this time with just a thought. Lunging back twenty feet, Kami unfolds huge yellow wings. Marksman strides forward at the same moment, a quick but precise form keeping his sword ready. His dark dreadlocks swing. With a stuttered, purposeful step, Marksman readies his electrified blade and drives it squarely into her dark body, twisting and slicing upward, rending. The girls on both sides of Day scream.
“Santa mierda!” cries a voice in the sky. “That’ll be the end for our challenger from the east! What a show. Let’s give it up for the still-reigning champ! The Marksman V9 flatout rules middle-weight PTM3A. Keep your head on!”
His dark dreadlocks glitter. His painted, slitted eyes give no emotion. Now his power is cut and his lights dim to black. Smaller machines move around the scene, clearing debris. The arena for the Team Laser Assault begins to self-assemble before he exits. Mirrors, risers and walls come out of the floor.
The announcer appears on the massive vid-screens, his collared suit made half of see-through plastic. “Well, not a bad show but it’s still going to be a couple of minutes before the TLA Tournament begins. Stick around, citizens.”
Day shakes, thirsting for some sort of mellowing. She laughs, hysterically, quietly breathing out. She mutters, “Don’t be a tourist.”
The audience is hungry, booming above him. Orion stands in the dark, in the cluster of his team, on a large round platform elevator. Strobes flash overhead. In the darkness he put on a spare set of SLRs, strapping them over his civilian clothes at his wrists and ankles. The belt and shoulder strap holster his weapons. He snaps the buckle of his modded helmet under his chin now, flips the visor down. There are nearly as many hypothetical deaths in the TLA as in highway traffic, he thinks, and nobody dies on the road.
Slowly they rise toward the light. Tiny helicopters whir over their heads; cameras throwing closeups to all the screens, including the giant ones high above. The upper stories of the maze-like battlefield shine—bunkers and turrets, catwalks and towers, a futuristic 3D terrain.
Without noise the elevator stops, still well below ground level. The players around him draw weapons. Rifles and swords come out. They all carry more. A woman nearby unhinges a long folding bo staff from her hip.
The Coliseum is dim. Glittering fog emanates from vents throughout the arena. The announcer bellows, “Are you ready for this?! For the best in live action entertainment? Witness the tricks, the wits and the shock! Are you ready for the best of Asturian TLA?” He holds his breath, then answers himself, “Yes!”
The colossal audience riots with affirmation.
Echoing via satellites, the scene is relayed to over a million live viewers, in digital waves, like a bird among the stars. Faith watches the chaos horizon, where hypotheticals and futurespace crest to become history. Events with high visibility are error-checked in real time. The Accuracy Quotient today is way lower than usual, due somewhat to her personal actions, at .99997, adjusted to minimize the effects of causal holes.
She finds herself rethinking the basic science, wrapping her mind around things her emotions refuse. The science is not that choices do not exist, but that they are nearly always predictable. People are driven by macro forces of thought, emotion and personality, and the Attractor models these. Faith has had no time to work through all of the tested possibilities. It would take lifetimes to fully comprehend the potential paths of even twenty-four hours. Yet in them all Orion, and so with Faith, refuses to believe he is not in control.
Embedded in his visor, a heads-up-display flickers on, indicating the zero score, his capture flags, the charge of his weapons and a small radar map, dense with a cluster of dots representing his team.
Cameras hover around.
TLA fashion varies by theme and modification, sexuality and style, from layered jumpsuits to oriental robes. Even without any genex in this division, the players are impressively fit. They wear shock limiters at their wrists, waist, neck and calves, and these turn on now, running with dark blue lights. The gauntlet is worn on his left arm. Orion looks at this now, selecting options manually from a holoscreen. The QB has playcalled for a seeker-heavy lineup, with two catchers. Orion selects one of the open support positions and confirms. The large light on his gauntlet engages, turning a dark violet.
A wave of something like vertigo washes over him, and he puts a hand out to steady himself on the wall. Thoughts compete for his focus.
He wonders if Harmony is watching through his lens.
What is a kiss compared to years?
One of his teammates walks past, changing position, and puts her hand on Orion’s back. “Glad you made it.” Then the elevator is rising again, into the noise and the light.
Each moment opens, blooming before Faith’s eyes. Lasers flash through the fog. The opposing team, Marilia, is lit in red, and their seekers, with orange gauntlets, are advancing deftly between obstacles under cover fire. Orion is on the support line, and draws a bead with his anglesight around a corner. An enemy he tracks exposes herself just enough that he fires his rifle. Instantly the red limiter ring on her neck takes a hit. Shocked in the shoulder, she flinches backward. A tally light shows in his hud, Orion’s capture flags rising by one. This flag is also rendered in living hologram, coming out the base of his helmet and down his back. As players gain score, their flags trail behind them, tied together in victorious tatters. His shot having given away his location, Orion immediately ducks toward the next cover, a wall of mirrors. Two members of his team spread out at the same time, in other directions. A shock grenade rolls in. It sparks at his back, a prism of color that lights the walls nearby, striking him in three places at once. The energy pulses through his limbs like tasers, nearly dropping him—his flags decrease by two, and though he staggers he does not stop, coming up a small set of stairs.
A scout on his team releases a bird—a drone—and its video comes up on Orion’s screen. Two reds ascend uncontested stairs, gaining higher ground, while a third plays support below. A seeker with Halcyon is making her move across some open space ahead. Orion covers her, though he sees no opponents. He lights up the obstacles ahead of her, then pivots and steps around the next corner. TLA is like playing chess, he often thinks. While dancing. He rests his hand on the baton at his waist. Beams cut through ahead in numerous directions, but Orion hangs back. A button on his rifle creates a sonic pulse, showing two red dots on his radar display, two opponents, closing in on him from behind a wall. The pulse lights up his position with a visible flash. He pulls the pin on a decoy at his waist, palming it to a low wall as he steps across the gap to his left, away from the incoming seekers. Without pause he comes around the next opening, circling toward them. The clearing to his right now is lit, through the smoke, by an oversize hologram, a bird twice as tall as a man, raising its wings. Behind her is a tower, five stories high. It has three arms, enclosed catwalks coming off in curves toward the balconies, giving the impression of a huge tree.
Out of cover he moves fast and the two shots that trace him both miss, by slim margins, before he is around the next wall. In one motion Orion swings his rifle to his back, where it is pulled to the magnetic shoulder strap, and unsheathes his control baton. With a cracking sound it extends automatically in his grip, two feet additional. This noise is easily missed in the chaos of the arena, but the sound coming from his modded decoy is not, blaring an industrial-metal cover of the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, audible now from two walls away. His captured flags have made him a target, fluttering at his back. Orion hits his radar again. Two more reds follow him now. He cuts right, without seeing them, behind another wall. Breathing steady he holds tight to the corner. Another blue converges on his position, giving a nod in his direction. A bird zips past, red.
On both sides of them burst clouds of inky smoke, tendrils expanding, quickly filling the space. Orion’s hud responds with thermal imaging, so that he sees the Marilian coming, her staff spinning in his direction, just in time to duck and counter. She is faster, avoiding him and following through with a stuttered feint toward his teammate. The two Halcyonites move in concert, swinging in on her. She dodges, blocks Orion, and then connects, fierce with his partner’s chest, knocking him, stumbling back into the smoke. As she sweeps toward Orion he brings his baton down across her forearm and then forward. Orion’s flag-count increases again as he tags her, fast in the abs, and the lights on her limiters go out. Meanwhile another red seeker dashes past, a kimono trailing behind, toward the Halcyon team flag.
As Orion gives chase, above him through rafters on the next level, shines a burst of emerald light, then another.
He does not hesitate—he changes direction, ducking an offensive drone. The baseball–size sphere turns too slowly, but releases a screeching sound, drawing attention. His baton retracted, it snaps onto his belt. With a movement of the wrists Orion draws his two pistols.
Heedless of the fog lighting up all around, he moves quickly from one corner to another through the maze, leaping up another small staircase to the second level. Taking cover by a low wall, he depresses levers on the handles of his guns and they unfold into discs in his hands. Orion releases these drones into the air, where they hover nearby him. The light on his gauntlet turns white, identifying his change of position from support to scout, though this is a ruse. As he comes around the next opening a beam nicks his shoulder, but it is scarcely enough to slow him down. Another shot knocks one of his drones out, sputtering into the wall. He does not stop. Coming around again into the clearing, he sees, behind the maelstrom of smoke, light and flight, the tree-like tower.
Orion. Harmony said his name like dew on a warming morning, hiking in the hills beyond Halcyon. The sun was behind her, and the wind to her side.
Day digs her fingers under the edge of her seat, watching in her headset through the camera in his visor, as he climbs the long ladder in the tower. She clenches her fists as he emerges on top, and bracing against the transparent guard-wall takes hold of the twin handles of the turret there, swinging it up and around, squeezing both triggers. Four Marilians are on the uppermost tier, sitting in a circle uncontested, in a séance formation, and Orion lays waste to them. Two floors below he can see one of the green-lit Enforcers they have summoned, clearing Orion’s teammates with genex agility and speed.
Behind him the guardwall is lit by opposing fire, from another tower now claimed by the enemy.
The big man is too quick. He dashes to the side, unscathed by Orion’s light, raises his cannon, but hesitates. With the next shot Orion finds his target, knocking him back. Orion’s hair stands on end, as with a risen electricity in the air. Alternating barrels now he drives him back to the wall. The Enforcer almost drops his weapon. Instead he draws a line on Orion and fires.
With a loud slam a drone outside smashes into the wall behind him.
There is no significant time between the pull of the Enforcer’s trigger and the impact of the light on the front of the turret.
In that second as it lurches, unnaturally, he feels a strange release, like flight, out of control. The shock travels through his fingers, through his arms to his chest. Orion cannot let go. Sparks erupt from his gloves as they melt to the handles. They do nothing to protect my love.
Harmony is watching through the large vidscreen, embedded in the glass door of the waiting room. A thick dark-skinned girl, with long white dreadlocks, stands nearby. Power is cut to the tower immediately, but this does not help him, as the pent energy releases with an explosion. She is helpless witnessing his flight, backward right through the shattering guardwall and fully into the air, his bracers flashing against his black clothes.
His body hits the dark ground, in silence. It shakes her, tremors through her. Harmony chokes, on a surge of helplessness and pain.
Glass settles. A thin line of smoke rises from his fingers.
Her next breath eventually comes, in a rasp, like fire.
From the other side of the arena Sayd watches his brother go down. Dressed in a green-circuited jumpsuit, he drops his cannon and vaults over a railing, landing with deft grace. Removing his helmet, he walks slowly to Orion’s side. Kneeling, he places one hand beneath his neck, cupping his head in his palm. Leaning close, he struggles in disbelief at what is happening. He wonders if Harmony is watching through his eyes.
A slight motion touches his ear, near Orion’s mouth.
Putting his large hand on Orion’s neck, Sayd checks for a pulse, but cannot tell. He does not seem to breathe.
Kneeling there, he expects somehow to know if what he holds is no longer Orion. This knowledge does not come. He raises his eyes to the bleachers, all those faces, met with silence.