Content warnings: Nudity, prostitution, references to sex and sexual violence, violence, injury detail, and extremely loud music
The music is loud and psychosexual. I take a seat in the Press Booth, bulletproof glass overlooking the arena. Fairest seats in the house. I can see the whole arena from here, arrayed below as though this were the bridge of a crawler-dreadnought. Across from me is the music pit, suspended high above on the domed ceiling, strobe-lights pulsing purple and red, the band swaying behind a ring of swaying nude femenoid augmentees coated in pure white silicon that eats the light-show, genitals and areola outlaid in black. The man conducting the affair tears at rings of keyboards with ten jerking limbs like the instrument raped his mother, two more punching fists into the air with every beat, the crowd roaring along with him. The sound is muted in here by insulation, for now, but I can feel it through the carpeted metal floor. Stamping. The sound of a boot on a human face, over and over.
I shouldn’t be here. I cover the softer combat sports for the Emtu-Rafich People’s Gazette- boxing, fencing, wrestling.
But Heigen Rosk is dead. Heart attack from a cocaine overdose in his shower, augments still sticky with cleanser when they found him. I’m here in his stead.
I walk to the edge of the glass, the pane itself leaning outward as though suicidally embracing the drop into the pit below, the scarred concrete sitting hard below the forty-meter drop into the pit.
I don’t have the guts for this.
A man slides up beside me, leaning in with his arms behind his back. He is Emenraali, his face a perfect sculpt of polygons in clean white ceramite, wearing a suit perfectly tailored to his perfectly uniform body. But behind it his eyes are wet and hungry, veins standing out as I meet his gaze.
“The gazette?” he asks, voice clipped.
“Millisen Telisse,” I reply. “I’m here to take the place of-”
“Heigen, I heard,” he replies. “A great man, indeed.” He leans in, a white-jointed augment-hand settling coldly on my shoulder. “You have shoes to fill,” he says. And something about him- his stance, the way he leans in a little too close, or maybe it’s just those eyes- I snap a little.
“Isn’t this a bit low for your perfect society?” I say, and immediately I regret it. The music fades out for a drop, and for a few seconds there is silence.
“Who is to say that this isn’t, in some way, perfection?” he says, turning his back and making for his seat. There’s a smile in his voice, in those wet eyes.
I make for my own seat.
The conductor of the terrible music builds to a pulsating crescendo and then crushes it, the roar of the crowd standing on the rings of concrete surrounding the arena coming to a stop.
“WELCOME,” he screams, “TO THE THRRRRRREE-HUNDRED AND SEV-EN-TY-SEC-OND MECH-A BRRRRRAWL GLADIATOR CHAMP-I-ON-SHIP!”
Screams. I take notes, writing down sensation, specific, images, the flashing lights, black, white, the dancers whirling. The Announcer’s name- Krittgan the Rake- the smell of the seats, the feeling of the broiling masses below, howling anticipation.
“THE FIRST! MATCH!” he yells, multiple throats and multiple sets of lungs in that huge, long torso bellowing through hundreds of immense speakers, “TRIPLE KING! VEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERSUS!”
Pause. Edging the spectators.
“RRRRRRRAEKRIG! IN-DE-FATIGABLE!” he howls.
And the crowd breaks open like a dam wall. God, they want this. They want this so bad. That name. That title. Never beaten. I can feel it, too- somewhere in my chest, at the base of my gut, the fishhook wanting to see a legend either broken or made tonight. Or, no- I scratch out my notes.
No, I want hyper-violence. I want blood and diesel.
The first contestant strides in under the slowly raising blast door on the left side of the arena, ducking under swiftly before it can fully rise. It is silver, fifteen meters tall, built like the a King of Diamonds split vertically. The right side of a titanic sculpted visage leads into the back of another, three times, and in each of its three right arms above its three right legs it carries a sword. It spins, fast, faster- then drives each blade into the ground and rests on them, head bowed to the door. It’s a popular mech- two wins under its belt, a recognisable silhoette for what merchandise there is (though this isn’t corporate in the right ways- the people want violence almost as they want to pretend they don’t.) Nobody knows who the pilot is- not that it matters, for pilots come and go. No, only some make their name and face a part of the act, though in combat there is no act. Two mechs enter, one mech stands. The winner fights the next, until there are no more mechs to fight.
Raekrig’s blast door groans open. Slowly, slowly.
Then nothing.
The crowd is subdued. Where is he? Where is their champion, their fighter? Where is Raekrig, Indefatigable? Never beaten, never cowed?
K-tnnk.
Another.
K-tnnk.
A shape, coming out of the dark. Huge, broad, heavy. Another footfall, K-tnnk.
Raekrig hits the light, and it’s like the sun has come back.
He’s huge- not as tall as Triple King, but he feels huge in a way the other mech doesn’t. Weighty, dark plate seared with burns and rust, his mask an ugly, asymmetrical wielding of three huge jaws, three sets of steel teeth. Ribs stretch over the bent trunk, hanging from them dozens, dozens of arms. One from each dead pilot. One for each mech Raekrig has killed. The camera at my waist comes up and I snap one, two, five pictures, blurry, my hands shaking, the film over-exposed in the insane light.
He strides into the centre of the arena, dragging behind him a huge chisel-nosed flail on a chain, two rocket engines on the back burning low and flickering to keep themselves alight, melting the frost on the concrete floor.
He turns slowly. Raekrig doesn’t need to show off for the crowd. They scream, chant his name in unison, and he eats it up, filthy and huge, victor, standing before death or victory with glowering apathy. As he turns I take note of the hatch on his back. Wielded shut dozens of times over, half-melted, a solid block of immovable scarred metal. There is no pilot and mech with Raekrig. That, too, is a part of the performance. There is only Raekrig. There is only the arena. And when he leaves it, he stops existing.
“FIVE!” Krittgan yells, mouths swirling the word around, enunciating it in mockery, in joy, “FOUR,” and the crowd picks it up, “THREE,” I can feel it, my pen slacking on my notepad, my fingers fumbling for my camera, “TWO!” the dancers whirl, faster, faster, the lights, the crowd, the music, “FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!”
Triple King is the first to move, blades flashing as the spotlights burn down pure white, all other lighting secondary to illuminating the spectacle below. It spins, building up momentum on its tripod of legs and already moving to lash out at Raekrig, but in the instant before its blade would have hit that huge flail cracks, spinning in Raekrig’s thick fist and blurring into a parry, engines firing on full. Triple King moves back, spinning, but it made a mistake. The fist lets out a little more chain and the flail stops impossibly mid-air, inertia modulators within firing and spitting fragmented glyphs into the air that hurt to look at, the flail cracking down and hitting Triple King in the side. The leaner mech whirls, this time against its will, and stumbles, an abscess torn in its side. Raekrig whirls the flail, faster, blurring, but the cracking downward blow is met by three crossed swords in parry, the sound reverberating between the concrete walls and echoed in the crowd, the ravening crowd.
Triple King stumbles, the joint of a leg shattered by the force of the blow, and before it can move Raekrig brings it down again. It cleaves under the swords and hits the silver mech in the chest.
Screaming. That is all I can hear. The screaming of the crowd. Not even as the music swells does it leave my ears, victory announced and strident melodies playing as Raekrig lifts Triple King above his head and tears into it, the limp body of the pilot small and streaked with red as it draws it out between two clumsy fingers. Tears off a limb, a small, limp organ trailing rapidly freezing blood. And with surprising delicacy spears it on a waiting hook at his waist.
Tracked tugs hook Triple King with winches and drag it back into the entrance it came from. The glimmering silver of its armour plate glints once more in the light before it vanishes, the moment captured on 35mm full-colour film, the exposure correct this time. I can see it now, that picture: Raekrig standing above the vanquished, a pile of gored scrap, and below it two hundred words to relate the course of this match.
“Caught up in it, my friend?”
The Emenraali is speaking. His polygon lips do not move, permanently set in a faint smile. But his eyes, his eyes are steady, wet and watching.
“The next match will be a doozy,” he says without waiting for a response, leaning back in his seat and aiming a bulky camera with a lens longer than his forearm. “Real fun. Quite the rivalry, these two have. I do hope you enjoy it.”
“NEXT FIGHT!” Krittgan screams, building up, the music swelling, “RAEKRIG, INDEFATIGABLE! VERSUS!”
The music pulses. The dancers sway.
“RANCID! THROATFUUUUUUUCK!”
The blast door begins to grind open and a figure, tiny, human-sized, appears in the gap, glinting glistening brass. She strides out, ornate and sinuous, multiple huge pointed appendages appearing behind her and forcing the blast door with a titanic protesting of mechanisms. The pilot sways, arms raised wide in challenge, body an artful mesh of hyper-feminine curves, breasts and hips and exposed polymuscle. Behind her trails a long cable, running from the back of her skull to the darkness rimmed by limbs of gleaming rainbow-sheened bronze.
She stops, turning so that all the crowd can see her, building up, head thrown back in laughter. You open the window in front of you and angle your camera down, zooming right in. Her mouth is set with mandibles, complex sets of pincers and grinding plates framing the lower part of her face. She’s Khapratensq, the paramaterial keratin-bronze forming her augments a dead giveaway, but she lacks the beard that signifies belonging to that faction. My camera slides down her torso and I note with a pang of discomfort that her bare crotch bears ornamental genitals in an alien configuration.
She twirls, ducking under her skulljack-cable and giving the audience the finger.
Pause. The music builds, giving her a countdown.
Her mech bursts into the light with the crescendo, the lights flickering as it unfolds. It is huge, spindly but almost half again the height of Raekrig, twelve legs and four huge mantis-claws punching out at the air blisteringly fast in challenge. Her pilot convulses, breast and hips folding flat to her body and rendering her ungendered and foetal as she locks together in a protective ball, a clawed insect-lip reaching down and scooping her into the gut-cockpit of the mech.
Rancid Throatfuck screams, the sound itself a faint audio hazard as the inverted skull of its head vomits a long, thick drilled proboscis, spitting acid that steams and burns at the concrete, billows of smoke crawling to the ceiling. The mech circles her side of the arena, scuttling unpredictably, waiting for the countdown.
And Raekrig just stands there. Waiting, flail hanging from its fists swaying gently back and forth, fins flexing and glowing in the heat of the engines’ exhaust. They have fought before, the match leaving both scarred and beaten, unable to continue, unable to land a killing blow. A draw. So they have the rarest and most wonderful thing in the arena. A feud.
“FIVE!” and I’m readying my camera, already deaf to the sound of the crowd, the sound of the music, registering it not as individual sounds but as part of the feverish sensation “FOUR!” of the arena, of the pit, of “THREE!” the mechs prowling, the way they stand making clear a real, genuine, “TWO!” animal hatred, waiting, waiting, and-
“FIGHT!”
Rancid Throatfuck is the first to move, bolting to the side and running along the circular wall of the pit, angling to get behind Raekrig’s bulkier and heavier form. But Raekrig dives, the huge mech rolling almost clumsily into the centre of the arena and whipping out his fail, hammer-head lashing out a horizontal arc where he had been standing, maintaining his area of control. Huge feet slam down on the frosted concrete, raising chips of cracked stone as he spins the rocket-flail into a spinning shield of chain. He is on guard, tense and precise in a way he was not against Triple King. But Throatfuck is fast and canny, already digging legs in and leaping to the side, jumping aside as the hammer-head slams into the concrete even as she whips it back around and in, the pause in the momentum of the huge block of metal enough for her to cut into Raekrig’s open guard. The mantis-arms punch out and Raekrig draws the chain taught between his fists, sheltering behind the guard and taking the terrible blows on aged steel plate before lasting out with a left hook, right elbow, gaining ground back and before Throatfuck can realising positioning her above where the flail lays. He lights the thrusters and it fires straight up, cleaving clean through a leg and an arm and smashing into Throatfuck’s insectile torso. The mech reels but does not break, lunging further in and scrabbling for purchase on Raekrig’s rotting pilot-arm ornamented torso, legs and arms whirling. I snap pictures, tense and precise, as though each click of the shutter darts me in and out of the fight between those titanic blows.
Throatfuck tries to crawl onto Raekrig’s back as the stronger mech tears at it with open fists, wrenching limb-joints off and landing heavy fisted blows on the insectoid mech’s torso that it always, somehow, twists to dodge or blunt. That huge proboscis worms out and tries to drill into the back of Raekrig’s neck, acid burning and drillbits lighting sparks, but Raekrig twists and grabs Throatfuck by the neck, wrenching it free and pinning her to the ground with all his strength and weight. Left fist rises, falls, SLAM! SLAM! heard more in the chanting of the crowd than in the sound of the impact, and then once more.
The music lowers, growling, low, threatening, as Raekrig stands and staggers to where he dropped his flail. Thick, clumsy fingers grasp the chain and I imagine it clattering as he hefts it, chain strung between two clenched fists. Step, stumbling a little- Throatfuck has done damage, it seems. The fire has gone out in the thrusters and he grasps the hammer-head up, snapping his fingers and setting alight the plume of fuel and oxygen. The lights cut out, timed, and for a second only that plume of flame lights the arena.
The killing blow awaits. He hefts the chain, spins the flail twice widdershins, and then inverts it and cracks it down on the limp, tangled body of Rancid Throatfuck-
-who lunges at the very last instant and spears him in the chest, at the thickest part of his armour. Mandibles grasp on parasitoid and the hammer-blow lands on her chest as billows of smoke rise, digging through and in. Raekrig twists the hammerhead around where it lays on the floor and sends it rocketing toward Throatfuck’s cockpit-gut, pinning it against his chest, huge plumes of fire and smoke emitting as it forces the metal to crumple and crush, but still the acid spews and the drill digs.
The music stops. The mechs, mecha, mechanika, motile armoured chassis, gladiators of the pit, locked together, slowly keel over. Dead.
And the crowd howls as the beat drops.