Mick walked up the stairs from the cargo bay while gnawing on an apple, holding it in a towel to catch the drippings. He walked down the corridor and stopped at the side doorways to his quarters on the left and the crew's quarters on the right.
He looked up at the hatch to the dorsal airlock to see that it was closed.
He walked to the door of the crew's quarters, wiped his free hand on the towel, and poked a computer screen by the side of the door. The screen changed to show the women sleeping inside, with false color accounting for the lack of light. Mick poked the screen again and it returned to its previous state.
Mick entered his bridge to see the armored Alex Smith sitting limply in a chair. A tall cup sat on the console with a trace of golden liquid at the bottom. "I think that's my beer. You leave any for me?" Mick knocked on Alex's helmet. There was no response. "Sweet dreams if you have them." Mick raised the apple to his mouth.
Scene: Crew's quarters
Jill walked into the crew's quarters from the side washroom door. The bunks were empty. Having slept last, she had been the last to wake up.
She pulled some clean clothes from her bags and took a long look at two differently colored rolls of socks, imagining which would go better with her new outfit.
Scene: Mick's ship, bridge
Mick greeted Jill as she walked onto the bridge. "Hey there sleepyhead! Glad you could join us. While you've been out we've been getting Tia some flight hours, bopping around the system, scanning rocks and saying hello to some of the freighters. These guys are bored and happy to talk to someone. Hey, you had breakfast yet? You don't know where we keep the food, do you." Jill shook her head, so Mick gave directions. "Downstairs and on your right. I could show you around if you want."
"I'm not that hungry." Jill lied. She was more impatient than she was hungry.
"That's fine," Mick said. "Wait an hour or two and you can have a better meal at the base."
Jill wanted answers. "Where is this base and what is this base? Is it like an army base or something?"
Mick laughed. "Oh, no. It's just a little place I own. Why don't I show you." He turned to Celestia who was in the pilot's seat. "Tia, bring up the dimension address catalog. You push that button there to back out, and then it's on the left there." She had done this a few times before and no longer needed such specific directions, but the guidance helped. A table appeared containing two columns of symbols, a long column labeled "key" and a shorter column labeled "split". The top entry was labeled "Alex Smith 9" and the second entry was labeled "Jill Ross 3."
Mick patted Celestia's armored shoulder. "Yeah, you got it." Then he turned to Jill, knowing of her ability to manipulate computers. "You see this list of numbers? Never ever change them. Those are the shorthand representations of the much, much larger numbers that the ship uses to identify dimensions. Those addresses are stored in the main computers, which you will not mess with. One flipped bit in the wrong place and we will never be able to get back to a place unless you had somehow memorized the trillions of trillions of digits that defined it, and I don't think you and your nanites can do that."
Jill understood enough of that to know that Mick did not want her touching the computers. She nodded and kept her hands close.
Mick turned back to Celestia. "Now bring up home base. Oh, you already did. Good." The new display was divided into sections for temporal targeting, diagnostics, and spatial navigation. "Go to the navigation screen. Now stick us in space in a low orbit, outside of the planet's path. If there's a glitch in the chronometer, I don't want to risk being a microsecond off."
That was something that Celestia had not done before. "How do I view the planet's path?"
Mick pointed to one of the many icons at the top of the display. "Crossreference with temporal data. One more to the left. There you go. Choose a timeslice of-" Mick shrugged, signaling the unimportance of this figure for their needs. "A day." Celestia entered the parameters. The navigation screen showed a colored arc through the planet's orbit. A white diamond beside the planet represented their entry point. "That'll work. Okay, lock it in and hit the big Jump button."
Celestia did that. The dimension-hopping engine hummed for a half second, and then the stars outside were different. The edge of the planet glowed blue and white in the main viewscreen. Mick gave his pilot-in-training simple directions. "Get an ear on the beacon, set up a flight path, glide us in." She began looking around the interface for the commands to do that. Mick turned to Alex, the power-armored bounty hunter who was well experienced in spaceflight. "Alex, keep an eye on the numbers and make sure they are stable. If anything goes wrong let me know and I'll flip on the antigrav, boost us out, or hop us out if we need to."
A flight path appeared on the viewscreen, leading toward a green circle that had been drawn on the planet.
Mick smiled proudly. "Beautiful, isn't it? I own it outright. It's not on loan or anything. And down there where that circle's lit up is where I have my base and training room."
Jill had more questions. Many more. "What kind of training are you talking about, and how many people are at this base?"
Mick opened his arms wide, gesturing toward the crew. "It's just us. I used to have a few others, but they retired or moved to other teams. I had to sell the rights to one of them to stay afloat, but that's over and done with. We're rebuilding!" He smiled confidently.
"And this training," Jill asked, "is it like army training?"
Mick chuckled. "Oh, no, it's..." Then he accepted that she was kind of right. "Sort of. You see, we do have combat training but it's mostly practice for the Crash Championship. It's all regulated so no one can get hurt as long as everything is working right. Isn't that right, Tia?" Mick teased Celestia, who blushed and lowered her head.
Jill wondered what Celestia had done, and: "Who got hurt?"
Alex answered. "Anyone who gets in our way."
Mick tried to calm Jill down. "Hey, let's not scare her any more than she already is." He tried to explain. "Alright, here's what happened. Tia here... broke some stuff, so they wouldn't let her into the tournament. It's too bad. She would have been great. That's all that happened."
Jill knew that was not all that had happened. "Yesterday, Tia was talking about mercenary work. You had us buy armor for protection. And there's..." Jill pointed to Alex.
Mick explained Alex Smith. "Oh, Alex is here to help you train. You see, there is another, a different Alex Smith fighting in the tournament."
"You mean a clone?" Jill asked. She had enough familiarity with science fiction to be aware of the concept.
"Not quite." Mick explained. "The owner of the root license to Alex's dimension sublicenses splits. Let me explain that. What we can do is we can freeze the dimension at a point in time, split it, which gives us a copy of the dimension, and play around with the copies as long as we don't do anything to cause them to collapse into each other. These splits are not exact copies. There are slight differences from one to the other, but that makes them more interesting!"
Mick continued on. "I'm not allowed to bring this Alex into the core worlds but I can bring her--" Alex looked up and glared at Mick. Mick corrected himself and continued. "I can bring Alex onto my base, which is far enough outside the Core Worlds that it is outside the jurisdiction of the Transdimensional Authority. Anybody who fights the Alex on my base will be ready to fight the other Alex once they're in the tournament."
Mick had not answered Jill's question, so she repeated it. "So, what about the armor and the talk of mercenary work?"
Mick had hoped to leave that for later, but now was as good a time for explanations as any. "Oh, yeah. If you're really good, there are people who will hire you to do some fighting outside of the arenas. This is the dangerous stuff where you could get hurt. That's what the armor is for. I think you'd fit into that kind of work right away if the tournament doesn't work out for you."
Jill was apprehensive. "That's not... Okay, that is actually exactly what I signed up for, but it's not what you have been talking about since I signed up."
Mick casually explained the difference between tournament fighting and mercenary work. "Ah, I see why you are confused. These are two different lines of work. They are similar, they both involve fighting, and I'll be managing both of them. The tournament is the priority. That's where you are going to get noticed, and you don't get the job offers unless you get noticed first." He smiled. "That's where you are going to make me some money."
Jill was even more apprehensive. "I'm not sure if I want to get noticed."
Mick doubted that. "What, you never wanted to be rich and famous and have everybody love you?" he asked teasingly.
Jill didn't know how to answer that. "Maybe when I was a teenager."
Mick chuckled. "Alright. Let me show you something." He turned to the console and poked the interface a few times until he found the video he was looking for. "This will show you what this is all about." He turned back around to face Jill. "This will explain everything."
Jill stepped forward to watch as a shimmering rectangle of golden particles appeared in front of the main viewscreen and solidified into a barely transparent three-dimensional picture with full color and a few inches of perceptible depth. It was a chaotic amalgam of quick images in very rapid succession: a fast blue and white hovercraft zipping around a racetrack, some grunting figure in a yellow racing helmet strapped to a seat, and the same person standing, posing, or in what appeared to be archival footage, punching different people in the face: an aging man in a pinstripe baseball uniform, a silver-haired man outfitted in camouflage and tactical gear, a woman in a regal red gown spotted with thin pink speckles, a steely-eyed young swordsman who wore the emblem of a ruby-eyed skull on his black armor, and a fifth combatant whose identity was well hidden by a face mask, wrappings, and a navy blue cloak studded with white gems. An announcer's clear voice broke through the chaos of the the zooming racecraft and the grunting pilot.
Zoom!
"He drives fast!"
"Huh!"
Zoom!
"Yeah!"
"But what drives him?"
"Hooah!"
Zoom!
"Whoah!"
"Why does Sergeant Hawk drive so fast!"
Zoom!
"Hah!"
Zoom!
"Yeah!"
Zoom!
"Wha-ha!"
Zoom!
There was a split second of the pilot, Sergeant Hawk, holding a beverage container in his hand before the video cut away to several scenes of his hovercraft zooming back and forth. Hawk's voice was overlaid over the sequence. "I have to get to Red Dog for my Hawkochino Supreeeme!" The final scene showed his hovercraft entering the parking lot of a coffee shop. This scene was just as quickly interrupted by a new scene of Hawk holding the drink aloft in a victorious pose and shouting "Hawkochinooo!" for about a second and a half, the longest single take in the series of images.
The announcer continued speaking over multiple scenes of Sergeant Hawk sipping the drink, posing with it, and grunting his approval. "Get your own delicious Hawkochino Supreme at your local participating Red Dog. Our lines are guaranteed to be fewer than thirty vehicles long or we'll talk half a chain off the cost of your order."
Sergeant Hawk delivered the final lines. "It's delicious! Go to Red Dog!"
The holographic vision shimmered out to nonexistence in an instant. Jill's jaw had dropped open somewhere near the beginning and was still hanging open. All that she could manage to ask was "what... was that?"
Mick stood up and explained the business. "That was an ad. Sergeant Hawk gets a chain for every five thousand Hawkochinos that Red Dog sells. His agent gets half of that. That ad... sold billions of Hawkochinos. It was even bigger than Lady Midnight's Dark Chocolate Mochatta, which I personally think is the better drink, but then I'm a sucker for dark chocolate. And they had to discontinue it when she retired, but there are places that make knockoffs. Anyway, this is where the real money in the tournament is made. Product endorsements. Advertising. You can make good money in Crash if you win all your fights, but you can make better money doing this and all you need to do is be popular."
Jill could not believe what she was hearing. "But... I'm not like that! I'm not popular. I'm not exciting. I'm just me."
Mick shrugged. "Not everything that people buy is exciting. You could sell tampons. It's a huge market. Half the mammalian multiverse uses them." Noting Jill's disgusted shock at the suggestion, Mick recovered. "That was only one idea. I can come up with some other ones, but first we have to get you some exposure. And before that, we have to get you in the tournament to begin with. And before that, I want to be sure you can fight to the level of the tournament. If you can't win, you won't get contracts. Unless you're... more exciting than you are. And you can learn to fake that."
The egglike ship fell through space, approaching the planet below. They were now close enough to the planet that it filled the entire viewscreen. This sight was familiar to Mick but it still filled him with awe every time. "Would you look at that." He turned to Jill. "You ever flown into a planet from space before?" Jill shook her head. "It's beautiful, isn't it. You're not afraid of heights, are you?" Jill shook her head again. "Good."
The egg shot like a bullet through the planet's atmosphere, its twin tails creating enough drag for it to safely make an unpowered landing.
Mick raised a screen on a nearby computer console. "Let's look at my to-do list…" A long list of items appeared, covering the display from top to bottom, where the bottom displayed "Page 1 / 3". Mick cast it aside. "Ugh. I'll get to it later." Celestia quietly dragged the list to her console and began reviewing the items.
"Clouds are breaking." Mick looked at the main viewscreen. The ship was much closer to the surface now. The land was filled with the dark green of forests, while there was a sea to the north and west. The viewscreen centered on a semicircular cove where the coastline traveled in an easterly direction and slightly north. A sharp eye could make out some blue and grey objects just south of the cove.
The ship floated toward a distant landing pad that sat beside a blue three story building that itself sat beside a large rectangular building that looked like it was made of concrete.
Mick pointed out the features to Jill. "There's the base. There's the landing pad. And that," Mick said proudly, "is the Death Box."
Jill's face fell.
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