VI – Götterdämmerung
Outside of CSDS
The ring was dirt and firelight, and Nyla had stopped counting how many times she had watched men bleed into it.
She sat on the upper rail of the scaffold overlooking the pit, rifle across her knees, visor passive. The readouts flickering at the edge of her display were not what held her attention. Korren was.
He stood at the ring's edge, arms loose at his sides, cybernetic eye making its slow pass across the fighters below. His chin stayed level. His weight stayed back. She had learned the difference years ago between a man watching a fight and a man building a list.
Twenty-odd men in the dirt. Some already paired off, trading weight and testing reach. Others are circling the edges, reading the room but too scared to move in and get committed. The firelight did what firelight always did, made everything look more serious than it was. Nyla had learned to subtract for that. Performance lived in the shoulders and the noise. The real thing lived in the hips and the breathing and what a man's rear foot did when he thought no one was looking at his rear foot.
Two men near the far side had apparently decided that a circle of gang members placing bets constituted participation. One kept throwing jabs that landed on air, pulling the last inch before contact, glancing toward Korren between exchanges to see if the gesture had registered. The other was grinning, actually grinning, the way men grinned when they expected to be somewhere safe. Since the boss should have been very familiar with such a scene, they thought the boss just might wanted to see them fight so they cheer even louder.
But then, completely unnoticed from the cheering group, Korren drew his prized revolver by the waist height, low enough to not being noticed, yet visible enough for him to roll the full-round revolver which the sound entirely clouded by the wall of circle sound they formed as a ring. The sidearm was a large-frame revolver, old enough that the bluing had worn to bare metal along the barrel and cylinder, the grip wrapped in layered cord that had darkened with years of handling. It did not look maintained so much as used until use had become its natural condition. He shot them both in one unhurried motion, one in the thigh, one through the shoulder, the revolver's report hitting the air with the flat, heavy authority of something that had never needed to be loud to be final.
Yet, they still think this was the game, they kept on folling his orders. They went down hard and the ring did not stop.
"Keep fighting," Korren said. "Last one standing gets something worth having."
The other men registered it the way they registered most things Korren did, with a brief recalibration and then continuation. The two on the ground made noise for a moment before they were shot down by the one who Korren just glared at, signalling, and that was the death sentence.
"Anyone who fights and wins," Korren said, still at the same volume, "leads the entry team. One to five, depending on what I see. Winners choose their gear from the trophy line." He paused. "Fight like you did just now, go on, entertain me."
The crowde cheered, they even made the betting with higher loot now, adding some of their own stolen jewelery of the old world.
Korren, smilled, his eyes glared at the fighters, hand pushed the revolver through the right holstered by his belt.
Nyla watched him watch them. His posture held. His expression held. He was running tolerances the same way he ran them on everything, isolating specific properties and discarding the rest without sentiment. She had seen him do it since the day she was taken in, when children of ten were put in a ring and made to settle things permanently. Same economy. Same man. Just the bodies changed and the longer beard, the darker skin.
Then, there was a small fighter near the center using something low and angular, an elbow-dominant style that kept pulling him inside his opponent's reach rather than maintaining distance. He was not the largest man in the ring. He had not lost an exchange yet. Talgat would have read his weight in the first two seconds, she thought. Would have gone for the trailing ankle. Third move, fourth at the latest.
Talgat was not here.
She sighed, as she had not let herself finish that thought in three days. She finished it now and put it away.
Rogan had been standing outside the ring, smiing, and laughing, with his arms crossed, watching with the patience of someone who had already made his decision and was choosing his moment. He was built the way load-bearing structures were built, without concession to anything unnecessary. The tribal ink across his chest and shoulders caught the firelight in sharp geometry. When he finally stepped in, the two men nearest him moved aside without being asked, not from fear exactly, from the particular physics of proximity to something that did not leave room for negotiation.
The fight he chose lasted less than a minute. He did not punish the man. He removed him, one controlled application of force to a joint not designed to absorb it at that angle. The man went down and stayed down. Rogan stepped back and looked at Korren.
Korren nodded once.
Rogan turned. His gaze traveled up the scaffold and found her without searching for it.
"How about her, boss." His voice carried across the pit without effort. Korren openned his lips, "what?"
"Can I have her.", Rogan's gaze had already climbed the scaffold before the question left his mouth, settling on her the way a claim settles before paperwork catches up to it.
The fire cracked. One of the men Korren had shot was dragging himself toward the ring's edge by his elbows. No one moved to help him or to stop him.
Korren exhaled through his nose. A short sound, almost irritation, the specific register he used when a resource allocation had no clean answer.
"There are plenty of girls," he said. "Why do you want our best shooter."
Rogan said nothing. He waited with the same patience he had used before entering the ring.
Korren glanced up at the scaffold. His cybernetic eye caught the firelight and held it, molten gold against the dark. He looked at her the way he looked at everything he was considering spending, with the flat attention of a man calculating yield against cost.
Then he looked back at Rogan.
"Show me what you can do," he said. A pause. "I'll make her yours, now prove yourself and fight."
Nyla's palm traced the socket of the AXMC in a slow, practiced stroke, cloth wrapped twice around her fingers.Her breathing did not change. She had learned both disciplines inside this camp, from someone who was not here, and she was not going to spend either of them on a reaction Korren was watching for.
She moved her gaze left instead.
The cage sat twenty meters from the ring, close enough that firelight reached it in thin orange strips. Four women inside. One lay against the far bars with her arms pulled close to her chest, her plain white dress torn along the side, the fabric darkened from the hip downward in a way that had nothing to do with dirt.She was not moving. The other three sat against the near bars with their knees drawn up, not looking at the ring. One of them was crying without sound, her shoulders moving in the small rhythmic way that meant she had been doing it long enough to forget she was doing it.
Nyla looked at them for exactly as long as it took to understand what she was looking at.
Then she looked away.
She almost wish that she had enough power to help, but she wouldnt know how she would have survive this world herself. too.
Lucky. The word arrived without warmth or comfort. She had been lucky, or Talgat had made her lucky, and she had spent enough years inside this camp to understand that those were not the same thing even when they produced the same result. Without him she was inventory. She had always known that. The knowing sat in her chest the way old injuries sat, present, unremarkable, something that she had taught herself long since decided to work around.
The ring continued still. Rogan stepped back in. The men who remained fought with the particular focus of people who understood that the alternative to winning was not losing. Korren watched them with the same patient attention he had given the selection from the beginning. The same absence of anything like entertainment. Just a sadistic excuse to turn people into toys.
She thought about the ridge. About the invisible dome settlement, now, not yet visible on the dark horizon, its false sky holding its color against the wasteland dark. About Talgat somewhere inside those walls doing something she did not have enough information to predict, and her cybernatic eye no longer catch his heat signature anymore, perhaps he was behind some kind of reinforced-spaced wall or somewhere hidden.
She thought about the cage twenty meters away, and how close it had always been.
She thought about the word lucky and wondered what it actually meant when survival depended entirely on someone who wasn't even present.
This circus ends, she thought. She did not know yet what ending it looked like or what it cost or whether she would recognize it when it arrived. She only knew that whatever it looked like, it did not include this scaffold, this ring, this fire, and Rogan's back as he dismantled another man inside the ring, working through each body with the same unhurried efficiency as something that had been built only for that purpose and had never been asked to be anything more.
Korren watched Rogan finish the last exchange. His weight had not shifted from the position he had taken when the fights began. His arms were still loose at his sides. His cybernetic eye had gone still, no longer sweeping, fixed on the man in the ring with the particular quality of attention that meant he had found what he came to find.
He did not celebrate. He did not smile. He simply watched Rogan stand up from the last man and understood that the asset was ready and that the operation could proceed.
He turned to the group of men which were earlier forced themselves into a circular cage-light for their own amusement, as the men were still not done traideing their stuff as the bet was closed.
"You mutts and dogs, get five men, and go hurl some CCs from the back of the caravan setting them out at the designated spot, and cut the chain out."
"Why cut the chain, boss?" one of the skinnier men asked.
The revolver answered before Korren did.
"Who asked you to ask before I could finish." He did not raise his voice. The revolver was already back in his belt. "Talgat is inside, setting the stage. We get this settlement, we get the grid, we get the vault. You boys want to know how big a territory looks when it runs on Thorium?" He let that sit for a moment, eyes moving across the circle of faces. "Bigger than SAI."
Then his earpiece crackled. Talgat's voice, distant and strained, breaking through the channel from somewhere inside the dome's maintenance grid.
Nyla's hand came up to her earpiece before she had decided to move it.
And as soon as the fight had ended, Korren waved to one of the men.
"Cut her channel. If she wants to save him, she can do whatever she wanted to make sure we get the place ours by toniight.", Korren smiled, "Because if you don't, some girls may be able to answer you how brute Rogan treated our girls", he chuckled, "if he wasnt this daring, i wouldnt keep him here either."
Nyla pulled the earpiece out before the line closed. The small device sat in her palm for a moment, warm from her ear. She closed her fingers around it, then set it on the scaffold rail without throwing it.
She picked up her rifle. Checked the scope. Stood.
The ridge was east. The dome was east. Talgat was east.
She started moving.
"Rogan, one more thing.", Rogan startled, he thought the boss didnt focus on him anymore, before Korren continued, "if you failed, you can either die by your own hand, or with my bullet in your head, dont fail me."
"Y…yes boss, i won't.",
looking at a sight, a man only two third of the opponent, gazed up to talk down on the bigger guy. truely a circus, no less.
At the Merchant Quarter
The merchant quarter's interior corridor had already filled with crimson by the time Qiran and Elara reached the cargo bay. Several of the guild's mechanical security droids followed behind them, blasters raised vertically, servos grinding with each step, the sound preceding them like an announcement of distance.
The thorium transformer relay grid's devastation in the eastern sector had stopped short of this section. Located in the south, buffered by several restaurants and market stalls, the ventilation system here ran heavier-duty, drawing out any evaporated thorium residue before it could settle among the civilians. Therefore, the merchant tier stood intact, and that was almost certainly bydesign: damage here meant their assets went with it.
Daren stood at the terminal near the merchant exchange dock, his gaze fixed on the flat-surface HDI, hands moving across the flickering display with a tremor he seemed unaware of, sweat beading at his temple. He muttered under his breath, fingers shifting with the focus of a man who still had unresolved and dangerous business to finish.
The dock occupied the forward section of the cargo maintenance bay, positioned directly in front of the office cluster whose frosted partition panels still held the faint outline of Qiran's merchant guild seal etched into the glass. Along the near wall, a row of self-service weighing stations sat bolted to the floor at even intervals, each one a squat alloy platform with a recessed scale bed and an overhead reader arm that hung in a rest position.
At the nearest station, a dock worker in a stained gray vest was running a transaction hurriedly, the crimson overhead and the distant structural ticking still moving through the bay's frame registering somewhere at the edge of his attention. He set a small parcel on the scale bed. The reader arm descended, the aperture opened, and it held position while the display panel above the station populated with a new figure. Seventy-three sparks. His expression shifted the moment a slip of paper fed from the side slot: brownish-to-pitch-black grainy paper, white-burnt font-and-barcode lines pressed into it with the particular permanence of something he had half-anticipated and still hoped would read otherwise.
"The Crimson Veil Protocol is engaged. Please present this barcode to exchange for your sparks after the Crimson Veil has been lifted. Thank you for your cooperation. Central Security Autonomous Logics."
The slip was barely longer than his thumb. The text ran across it in the standard font, and beneath each character, a thin barcode line extended downward from the letter's base to the slip's bottom edge, the note and its verification mark printed as a single continuous thing rather than two.
His eyes tracked the line once. The tightness in his jaw loosened, then reset harder, something underneath it collapsing inwardly.
"Daren, you fuck, don't let me see you. How am I going to buy milk powder for my daughter, you fuck?"
He drove his fist into the structural iron pillar at his right, held still for a breath, then turned back to the parcel. The scale bed's reader arm had already completed its cycle; a laser etched the exchange barcode directly onto the parcel surface in one clean pass. A small two-wheeled droid dispatched from its dock beside the cargo office, a rectangular unit with a panoramic glass panel across the front, its interior dark and empty, the inside swallowed in crimson-tinted shadow. The droid collected the parcel without acknowledgment and rolled back toward its station.
Daren moved quickly, crouching low, angling toward the back of the large container box away from the dock worker's sightline, the repositioning placing him closer to Qiran's office.
The dock worker watched the droid go, then turned and walked back through the bay, passing the weighing row without looking at the dispenser column he had been twenty-seven sparks short of reaching. He passed the container without slowing; the man crouched behind it pressed almost horizontal against the floor, both arms clutching his HDI, trembling, his face completely drained of color, invisible to anyone moving with purpose toward an exit.
"Bram, I'm sorry," Daren murmured. He lifted his eyes briefly toward the now-emptied plaza, then dropped them back to the screen and started again, quieter, the words pressing out between clenched teeth.
"Just one transfer. Come on, fetch the signal. Don't fail me now, one signal. Where the fuck are you, Korren?" He bit his lip and wiped his sweaty right hand against his shirt before wrapping it back around the HDI casing.
"Daren, you mutt." Elara's voice suddenly cut through the humming growl of the crimson lattice.
Daren startled and quickly turned toward the sound, his eyes widening; at that moment, the HDI suddenly slipped out from his drenched-sweaty hand. His shoulders pulled inward, chin dropping half an inch, eyes cutting once toward the exit before he caught her eyes. "You don't understand. They'll kill us all if I don't."
Then, suddenly he lunged for the dropped datapad.
"Sorry—who kills who? " Elara's voice came out flat and hard, the kind that left no room for an answer. Her eyes fixed on him; despite still being an arm's length apart, he could almost feel the heat. "Do you think if you don't puss out like this, who can trespass on us? You got a boy here; what do you think if he knows you sold the place out for your own wealth in this deserted land, you fucking moron?"
Elara swung the reinforced baton she had pulled from the console clamp on the way in.
"Oh…no…don't," the sound echoed.
But her swing already landed square across his temple with the kind of sound that ended conversations permanently. He went down and stayed down, the datapad skidding from his fingers across the floor.
The cargo bay settled into quiet.
"Come on, beloved, why don't you wait for the questioning first in case they got other stuff under his throat too?"
"Sir, i know you are wise in trade, but you are completely lacking in every other department, you know that.",
"Was that a compliment? Well, thanks. I always knew you would appreciate my intellect."
She sighed in response. "So will you be a gentleman and cuff him for me? I don't want to touch him."
"Yes, ma'am, anything for you." Qiran smiled as his glistening eyes looked up on her agitated face.
Qiran crouched beside the unconscious man, still smirking up at Elara as he worked the cuffs into place.
"Alright, let's see what he left us."
He reached for the datapad beside handcuffed Daren, tilting the screen without lifting it from the floor. The merchant frequency channel remained open. The last outbound transmission carried a timestamp. He noted it.
Qiran rose to his feet, gaze settling briefly on the unconscious man at his boots. Then he turned to Elara.
"Here, I bring a spare sealed-cap water along the way; your elegant and precise execution deserved it."
Qiran looked toward the approaching sound, now the several armed merchant-guild droids running toward them.
"Now that we have finished the work and they have just turned up." He glanced at the approaching security droids, then turned to Elara. "I think we might need to upgrade them soon. They are tough enough for street brawlers, but compared to Lao Zhang's militia type, they fall short of real protection. Otherwise we keep relying on mercenaries, and that is its own problem."
"Sir, I told you before, the only way was to get the system and assign a man and get another system to assign over that man; that's how Lao Zhang does things."
Elara twisted the sealed cap free and drank. She wiped the sweat from her brow with her grey handkerchief from another hand which was still holding the baton.
"Come on, let me take the baton for you, thanks for this Elera."
"It's fine, sir. I never liked him anyway. But I've seen you associate with everyone from young children to the worst scum on the frontier, but Daren never sat right with me."
"Yeah, who would have thought. He always brought up that sales pitch over drinks: cryps in every settlement from here to the eastern ridge, the north, the northeastern. The old-world gold standard for the recovery age, he called it." Qiran's gaze moved briefly to Daren on the floor. "I told him the same thing I tell everyone. Not until I know whose hands are holding the scale." His gaze drifted. "Speaking of the children, the two we met the other day, I hope they're all right."
"We'll make sure of that. Shall we get on with this, sir."
"Yes, my beloved, we shall." Qiran smiled as he stole a glance at Elara from the side, catching the faint lift at the corner of her lip.
Her breathing had steadied, but the tremor had moved inward, the kind that did not show unless you knew where to look. "He nearly doomed us all."
"And now," Qiran replied, picking up the flat-screen mode HDI and sliding it into his jacket pocket, "he'll tell us who paid for the risk."
He pressed his own hdi wrapped around his wrist for comm. "Zhang, the fucker has been secured. Should I have my droids to send him for you, or will you spare me yours?"
"I'll send mine, but don't leave the merchant guild area yet," Zhang replied.
"Wait, why…?" Qiran shot back almost immediately.
"Can't explain right now. Tell all your men to stay where they are, find some food, grab some drinks, and ride out the night until they get my confirmation; they don't go back to their residential sector yet."
"Yah, alright, i'll inform them that then."
Qiran's brows knit at the order as he glanced toward Elara for a second, then he tapped two fingers against his comm in acknowledgment.
Qiran looked down once more at Daren. The man's face in unconsciousness held none of the calculation it had carried through every council meeting, every trade session, every conversation where he had been building toward this for longer than any of them had noticed.
"I don't want to think too harsh on you old friend, but hope you think more about your motherless boy, mate." Qiran said quietly, as he sighed.
"MS-1 and MS-3, pick him up and give geotag for Lao Zhang's i guess Mark unit will come to pick him, now let's go back to my office first, and Elera, you can go rest first, i'll take care of it from here, thanks again."
"Thank you, sir." Elara bowed, then let her gaze drift across the bay. "An emptied plaza at early dusk. Unusual sight indeed." The corner of her mouth lifted.
Qiran passed the baton to MS-2, then drew his tobacco bag and small pipe from the belt pouch, packed the bowl as he walked, thumbed the Zippo open, and touched the flame to the tip. The furrow between his brows had settled into something that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the investment a man carries when he is wrong about someone and wishes he had been right. At the intersection he turned right, toward his office at the corridor's end. The droids fell in behind him, servos clicking against the floor. Beneath that sound came the slow, unconscious breathing of a man who had wagered his own fate on a single turn of the wheel.