62 years later…297 A.A.

  Twilight was devoured by a blackened deadness, leaving in its wake nothing but his yearning for stars.

  Daiko stared into the sky as night truly set in. He could imagine something vast and unseen stepping between the planet and sun, sweeping across the contours of space. If such a being existed, one so terrible as to cast a shadow like that, bearing its primordial attentions would bring not suffering but instantaneous annihilation.

  Daiko clicked his tongue, and turned his back on that imagined demiurge. He had his own business to be about today.

  Metal shrieked upon the race track before him. The gale, and tremendous sound accompanying it, hit his skin a moment later as it charged around the race track like a starved demon—250,000 fans marking its passing with undulating zeel. This was their triennial ritual, this was the Empire’s and the people’s greatest expression, this was the Apostar Primera.

  Daiko surveyed the stadium. Even with his decades of experience in meck engineering, and having seen the wonders that the Empire had created to travel between the planets, this was an urban-industrial colossus. Fifty kilometers of track circumnavigated and split the very air above them, creating hairpin turns, vertical drops and climbs, and narrow choke points which all but invited conflict between pilots.

  The arena—which sat below the spiraling race track like the eye of a maelstrom—laid flat and bare, entirely circled by a battlement wall which Daiko stood upon now.

  The wall was segmented into sixty-four sections called pits—one per team competing in the Apostar Primera—and each resembling a castle bastion with its crenellated parapet and brick finish. The gladiatorial mystique was part of what made the Primera grand, it was also a level of pageantry that his meck team were far from familiar with.

  The roar returned a few minutes later, thundering by in a kaleidoscopic storm of color. From this close, details blurred, but Daiko still caught a flash of magenta and cyan near the front where his dash meck pilot held his own among the leaders.

  Fifteen meters tall, the mecks pumped their limbs like speed skaters, hitting 600 kph in a straightaway.

  Among the great Asparian exportations, the multi-environment combat kit was its primary currency. Builders of cities, instruments of conquests, and for the past three centuries: an inter-planatary spectacle.

  Daiko leaned back in his team manager’s chair as his holo display pinged once again, indicating Erin had passed the lap line for the forty-third time, earning his team—Westwood Motors—another point. Seven more laps to go before the real race begins.

  An enormous leaderboard hovered above the vacant arena. The projection, transitioned between opaque and translucent at various parts of each lap to give the fans a better view of the race, or to show them each lap’s chosen highlight. At the Primera, that usually meant highlighting one team knocking out another team. Which was in their best interest as teams earned an additional point for each KO they earned.

  Westwood Motors sat in 8th place overall with forty-three lap points and an unpopular zero KO points. Daiko was unphased. Though this was his team’s first Primera, even he knew that leads and winning the event itself, was all about timing. Besides, it wasn’t Erin who was responsible for KOs today. That duty would fall to Daiko’s other pilot, and she’d have every opportunity to have her fun in seven short laps.

  Daiko expanded one of his displays in order to get a better look inside Erin’s cockpit. Even after all this time at the sticks, the young man’s face was tireless and without expression. In Daiko’s experience—for he had more than likely any in the whole stadium—quiet stoicism was a very strange knack for a pilot to have.

  The duraglass floor beneath Daiko’s feet shook. Sighing, Daiko peered through the transparent surface, down into the pit below. Three tiers of catwalks climbed the outer walls of the tall and rectangular room. It was large enough for two mecks to be suspended in the middle, but the Westwood Motors’clash meck wasn’t suspended so much as it was dangling at the moment.

  Erin might be halfway through their race having spoken less than a dozen words, Cenn was a different breed entirely. She hung from her cockpit, barking orders at the pit crew as they scrambled to align her meck’s tract pads—the blades attached to the bottom of the machine’s feet—with the launch gate.

  They managed it fine, for a crew of five anyway. Some argued that more bodies were better, but Daiko had been in meck carriers, battles, and field operations most of his life, and the leaner team always had fewer fingers to point when things went wrong. You had to have the right people, of course. And after nearly a decade competing in these wannabe war competitions, he believed there was no crew better.

  Mina, Daiko’s daughter and assistant manager, fumed on the second story catwalk as Cenn finally sealed herself inside the cockpit. No doubt she believed Cenn was responsible for the near-crash. She pounded commands into the slab cradled in one arm and several windows appeared on Daiko’s holo, showing Cenn’s external feeds. Together, they formed a panoramic view of her meck’s surroundings. He maneuvered the collection of feeds beside Erin’s so they mirrored one another.

  The final feed flickered on at the center of Cenn’s feeds, showing her in the cockpit, head-on so that it looked like she was nearly staring right at him. She was shouting something, but Daiko had decreased the volume on her com ahead of time.

  Mina climbed the steps to the roof while the crew cleared the pit causeway. As she approached his chair, the dash mecks passed again, whipping her braid above her head. He doubted she noticed for her eyes—copper and green like her mother’s had been—never left the slab.

  “You would think,” She said, once at his side, “competing in an event like the Apostar Primera would straighten them out.”

  Unfortunately, she’d inherited Daiko’s disposition toward frivolity—at least what it had been when she was growing up. Living your first ten years on a warfront would have that effect.

  “No point fixing a thing that works, little hammer.”

  She peered through the duraglass at the pit below, a scientist gazing through a microscope. Arthur hobbled across the pit with his crutch in one hand and carrying far too much in the other, while Roman watched with a waiting grin cut into his martian face.

  Mina cleared her throat, “waiting for a thing to break is committing to wasting my time later.”

  Daiko raised an eyebrow, it was a fair approximation of his voice. She raised an eyebrow right back at him. He turned his attention to arranging his holos, fingers swiping through the flood of feeds as he tried not to look impressed.

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  “DId one of your university professors teach you that?”

  “No, just this crotchety war hero moonlighting as a SportMeck manager.” She cleared her throat before he could reply. “Anyway, the metrics look good. Our modifications to Erin’s meck have kept him out of the pit and I’m not seeing any signs of severe degradation yet.”

  Her words reminded Daiko to peer in at the rest of the competition, and how they’re pit stops were going. He expanded the Primera info tab on his holo showing each team competing today line by line. All but Westwood Motors included at least one notch next to their name and team card, indicating they’d brought their dash meck in at least twice since the race started.

  Per industry standard, mecks needed to stop. The Primera itself had evolved so that every team would have that opportunity. With the clash looming just laps away, each team was bringing their dash meck in to replace its light armor with something more durable. It would decrease their top speed to do so, but the tradeoff involved a higher likelihood to survive what was to come.

  Daiko scratched his chin, hardly impressed to see the events playing out exactly as he planned. A fool could predict how and when teams would likely pit their mecks… Which is why Westwood Motors would be doing something different: the only way Erin was coming back to the pit was as Primera Champion, that or a wreck.

  The emcee had already called attention to this ‘unconventional tactic’, but they, along with the other team managers, likely assumed it was because Westwood Motors were technically an amateur class team at their first Primera. It was better for them to assume that then pay too much attention to the fact Westwood Motors was the first amateur class team to compete at the Primera in its centuries long history.

  The dash mecks completed their 48th lap—two more to go—and Mina practically glowed as she followed the magenta blur with her eyes.

  Daiko cleared his throat, “how’s the governing board?”

  She looked back at her slab, smile widening, “the board’s stable.”

  “Good. And what about your opinion on my designs?”

  “You mean the irreversible changes you made on a whim three weeks ago without telling anyone? Those designs?” She hid her real frustration behind a shrug, “I’m sure I could find another one of your idioms about the folly of pride if you’d like. Or you can just wait another fifty laps before gloating.”

  “Prime idea.”

  The stadium trumpets blared, drowning all other sounds. The lights dimmed a second later and the leader board flickered out. The only source of light in the whole stadium were the bulbs affixed to the sinuous track. The crowd’s anticipation broke open as they were plunged into darkness.

  Feet stamped, songs of immeasurable length flitted into one ear while another began from the other side. The moment, the clash, had finally come.

  A cone of violet light launched into the sky from the empty arena, stripping shadows from the sections of track above as fog started to pour from the arena in tidal waves.

  To raucous applause, the silhouette of a man appeared in the cone of light—another projection—its figure couldn’t be seen within the cone all at once and swayed back and forth for dramatic effect. The emcee’s voice accompanied the silhouette, and it hummed from every speaker across the stadium at once.

  “Citizens of Dearth, good people of Tosamir… I have a feeling… That this… Will be… The greatest Apostar Primera of all time!”

  The crowd roared their opinion on the matter. Daiko even felt the avalanche of cries from just outside the stadium where those without tickets stood in pilgrimage to watch the event play out on the exterior walls. Daiko checked his feeds to ensure his pilots were managing despite these distractions. Erin wasn’t the least bit affected, while Cenn visibly chomped at the bit.

  “128 athletes, 64 teams, but only one will be crowned Apostar Primera Champion. Which of these competitors will earn the glory for their Imperio and Imperia? Ladies and gentlemen, once again, your monarchs, Alistar and Aliscent Aralto.”

  A spotlight struck the grandest of viewing boxes where the Imperio and Imperia stood in an unnatural V formation with their eight children fanning out to either side like ornamental blades. The rest of the Regia brood—near and distant relatives of the ruling blood—loomed in the background, their jewelry sparkling in the bright light. Daiko’s lip twitched into the beginnings of a snarl.

  “Before we get to the clash you’re all waiting for, let’s take a moment to honor the brave Asparians fighting our war across the cosmos. Thank you all for your valor.”

  The crowd’s fervor relented but only marginally. And here it comes…

  “Of course, let us also praise the memory of Harold Van Met III, Alfa’s own forerunner, sent back to us from the Geos vermin with a message: to win glory and liberty for the people of our empire.”

  Harold Van Met III, Asparia’s titular messenger had died only months prior, making this the first Primera without HVM3 in attendance. A spotlight shone on a banner with his initials billowing from stadium rafters.

  Daiko looked about the stadium, wondering how many people knew the truth about the war. How many even guessed that their empire’s war, lauded as a man’s pursuit for providence, was deadlocked. That imaginary deity Daiko saw in the sky from time to time, was no thing of pure imagination. It was the Geos in full force and might. A race of being unimaginably more advanced than they were at every level, yet they too toil in a decades long conflict fighting skirmishes rather than defeating Asparia’s navy outright.

  Mina tensed beside him, though he wasn’t sure whether it was because of her own sentiments or predicting his own. She’d never forgotten his worst days, coming home from Jupiter a widower where each day was darker than the last.

  Daiko looked into the pit as the emcee repeated the same sentiment and call to action every Asparian heard for the past sixty years: that everything was going well, that they would soon win, that it would all be worth it.

  Down below, Arthur was standing in the center of the room, exactly where Daiko expected him to be, equipment and responsibilities discarded as he held a military salute—right hand on left shoulder, elbow forming an arrow pointing forward, onward. Always onward.

  “Now buckle up, fans! The time you’ve been wait for is upon us! Pits will soon be closed, and remain so until the 89th lap. So teams get your mecks back onto the track!”

  Teams complied with the emcee’s demand, for there came a cacophony of hissing air as dash mecks were jettisoned out of the pits.

  “Westwood Motors may be in the lead on the lap counter, but they still trail behind the standings. A word of advice for the uninitiated, finishing all 100 laps before anyone else won’t win you the race if you’re behind in points. Try throwing a punch once in a while? That’s why we’re all here!”

  Grid lines appeared on the otherwise arena floor, glowing brightly in ten meter square tiles and penetrating then dispersing the rolling fog. One by one, the tiles rose two dozen meters forming columns, corridors, and chambers—a maze—with each team’s garage opening to a winding path toward a section of arena left flat, and running from end to end.

  Mina had been waiting for this part, and was already starting a route analysis before the last wall slid into place.

  “Are you ready to clash, or do I have to ask again?”

  The emcee’s grinned widened, white teeth splitting its silhouetted face in two like a devilish cheshire cat.

  “Count with me Asparia! 10…9…8…”

  The emcee’s cone of light flickered between that unsettling smile and a red countdown timer. The timer, Daiko realized, was the lap clock measuring how far the lead meck was from starting the fiftieth lap. And since Erin was leading the field in laps, it was clocking his time. A narrow spotlight shone from above Erin’s Meck, painting it red.

  “That’s new,” Mina said, more than a little frustrated, “they might as well put a target on our back.”

  “Little hammer, we’re the first amateur team to compete in the Primera, the target’s been on our back since we left the gate.”

  “7…6…5…4…”

  The stadium lights returned—violent and blinding.

  THUD

  Several barriers of the track along the arena shifted, turning the dash mecks route to take them through the flat runway and out the other side. The pack of dash mecks in the lead stampeded into the arena, making for the new lap line which crossed halfway between the track entrance and exit.

  “3…2…1…Go!”

  Erin’s meck crossed the line, triggering the trumpets to blare once again. Flood lights erupted at the base of each pit’s garage as their doors slammed open, and Cenn was launched into the maze with a blast of compressed air. Even with her com volume dialed low, her war cry came through loud and clear.

  “Time to clash mother fuckers!”

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