"Sensing the space," he had said, as if that explained everything. Yaurel had been working in his shop for several weeks by that point, and had learned that you had to pry a little bit if you wanted anything more than the man's most perfunctory response to questions. None of the other garage monkeys seemed to care whether he ever said more than was absolutely necessary to get his ideas across, but Yaurel had already started to glimpse other levels in him, so she probed further.
"You mean, like the ambient temperature? The air quality?" Those were the only things she could think of that would influence what was about to transpire. Some of the jankier arenas could have significant atmospheric weirdnesses in them, especially if they were downwind from a particularly disreputable processing plant. Such stuff could mess with more delicate mechanisms.
"No," Olson said. "It's the people. It's the only way to really get the feel of the crowd... their adrenaline, their sweat, maybe what they had for dinner, the cost of their perfumes. You can start to gauge what they're secretly looking for from tonight's entertainment. If it comes down to a thumb vote, giving them the show they didn't even know they came to see could make all the difference."
She couldn't argue with that... Turning the fight's result over to the crowd happened more often than you'd think in this kind of competition. Not many who weren't in on the backstage deets realized that dealing a powerful death blow often came at the expense of shorting out something or other in a robot's internals. Which meant that to a noob, matches often looked like they ended in a tie. If the refs couldn't quickly pin down which combatant had shut down first, they were likely to throw it to the crowd to decide. Thumbs up or thumbs down.
Olson was smart that way. It was why Yaurel had wanted to come work for him in the first place, even though he was one of the last old-timers. For most jockeys, the name of the game was to overwhelm and dominate. This tactic made for a real shrapshow that would be talked about for weeks, but those matches were few and far between. To Yaurel, knowing that Olson was looking past the flash and bang, that he valued a technical win as much as a total blowout, meant that he was the one to back. So she had thrown in with him as soon as her engineering grad cap had hit the floor.
Getting started hadn't been without its difficulties, though. She'd had no direct arena experience, and although she's carried a portfolio full of fanciful schematics and conceptuals under her arm, she was way behind the rest of the team when it came to actual hands-on know-how. Most of them had grown up in the build garages, learning how to put things together with their fingers first, and mastering the tech specs later. Olson had seen something in her, however, and brought her on. He must have seen how quickly she learned, and how fundamentally sound her idea pitches were. It made all the hazing from the rest of the crew worthwhile -- which was mild, judging by the horror stories she heard from other teams. Once she'd established their trust and faith in her abilities, things had gotten easier.
Now, seven months in, she watched Olson even more closely as he stepped just inside the heavy vinyl curtains that kept the industrial air outside from infecting the crowd gathered in the 3,500-seater arena, and draw in his customary long, deep breath. She was the only one in the crew who still watched him do it, holding the entry flap aside for him so she could steal a few more precious moments of one-on-one consultation during the walk back to the prep area.
"So... what do you think?" Yaurel ventured. "Is it her night?"
"Could be, could be," Olson said, the tips of his unruly white hair winking like fiber optics as they passed through widely-spaced pools of hallway lighting. "They haven't seen blood in the sand for a while. Do you think our girl can deliver for them?"
Yaurel grinned as she walked alongside her mentor. "Give a limb or a stray hose to grab, and she'll make it gush."
"Good," he said, and spoke no more, which was the highest vote of confidence she had heard Olson give, ever. She was ready for the unveiling of her first creation. Well, she had worked on all the team's current projects in some capacity, but this one was her baby.
The idea had come to her while spending an evening drinking wine and strolling through some mechanical best-practice vids, hunting for inspiration. One of the older 2Ds featured something called an Industrial Shredder. It was basically a shallow pit housing two thick, jagged worm gears, diesel powered, that just churned and churned like waves, or an endless zipper, until something was thrown into them. In the vid, the victim had been a restaurant-grade refrigerator, and the whole thing compressed and disappeared into the maw as if it had been made of softened butter. The sight had literally taken her breath away, and she immediately knew it had to be the centerpiece of her first solo work.
Olson had tried to talk her out of it, of course. "Let me get this straight," he had said up in his grimy office, which was an old railroad car suspended above the expansive build floor by chains that in a former life had suspended a battleship's anchor. "You want to build one of these shredders into the bot's *chest*?"
Yaurel couldn't stop nodding enthusiastically as she explained. "It's counter-intuitive, right? Which is why it's revolutionary. Instead of trying to keep opponents *away* from the chest, *away* from the really vital parts, this bot will actively be trying to pull them in close! To get them within biting distance of the shredder! I don't know if anyone puts any effort into giving a bot leverage to pull *away* from a fight."
"True, true," the old man mused, flipping through the schematics pile of his desk again. "And how to you propose we capitalize on this weakness? How will we get them close enough to drag them in?"
Yaurel flipped the papers over until she came to the more conceptual ones, those she hadn't fully fleshed out with all the servos and hydraulics yet. "With these... a ring of six scorpion tails coming from around the back, with barbs and grapples. Hold onto the enemy, then retract the tails, dragging them forward and into the teeth."
Olson tapped his heat-chapped lips with his fingers, mulling it over. "This thing's going to be extremely front-heavy. You have any idea how much a shredder big as we need it to be is going to weigh?"
Yaurel didn't even have to look at the specs. "Almost a thousand kilos. But we can add a counterweight on the back, I'm thinking a proper tail, for balance. Maybe one with spikes. It doesn't really need to be functional, but the armor it'll need will just add to the weight."
She knew she had sold it when he stopped looking a the diagrams. He stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and wandered over the window, looking out over the build floor. Welding sparks from a half-dozen places below highlighted his grizzled features, and just for a second Yaurel thought she could glimpse the younger man he had once been, the hotshot who had taken the battle-bot world by storm thirty years before, head of a team that would go on to stomp the gears out of nearly every opponent. Before it all went to shit, that was. Now his crew was lean -- lean enough to accept strays like her, anyway -- and contained more than a few second-generation builders in it, kids of the dedicated few who had still believed in Olson, even after the glory days had faded.
"I'm thinking of 'Grinderella' as a name," Yaurel said quietly, not sure if she really wanted him to hear her. "Even the name's a rope-a-dope. She'll stroll in looking like a chrome princess, but when she pulls you in for a hug she'll tear your junk off."
His shoulders jerked once, twice, and Yaurel had started to stand, thinking he was having some kind of seizure, until she realized that he was actually chuckling silently.
"So..." he said finally, once his subdued version of a fit had subsided, "How soon can we see a prototype? Keep in mind that we're in season, and I can't spare any leads to help you."
Yaurel was glad he wasn't looking at her, or else she would have had to expend every ounce of energy on not smiling. "I think I can do it in three weeks, if I can get Bolshoi to help me."
This time he turned halfway back around. "Bolshoi? You're sure about that?"
Yaurel had thought a long time about this, and it was the one answer she had prepared. "My girl's gonna be hefty, sir. And if Bolshoi can help me hoist her framework, it's going to go a lot faster than my trying to position the heavy steel with limb augmenters. I've been watching him work, and I'm sure. He's the one who can help me the most."
The longest moment of silence she had experienced in her life followed. "Sounds fair," Olson said finally, and even the structural decrepitude of the suspended box-car office could keep her from jumping around a little in celebration.
The timing for starting Yaurel's project couldn't have worked out better; Bolshoi, whose actual name was some combination of Cyrillic syllables no one could remember, was just finishing up some heavy lifting for Team Bangsnap's latest combatant, the Tarkus VI. It was a big tank-treaded beastie, something that could really hold its own in a multi-player battle. The exciting part came in the fact that its entire upper chassis -- and the buzzsaws that ringed it -- could pivot around and around and not get its innards all wound up. That had taken a lot of fine detail work, but that wasn't Bolshoi's strong suit anyway. Olson approached him with Yaurel at his side, and when they explained a little about Yaurel's vision with him, he got more excited about it than she had ever seen him. Which meant that he shrugged his shoulders, grinned a little, and stoically slurred, "What bay we start in?"
Olson bequeathed them one of the older work pits, which meant they were relatively far away from the noisy work of the team's main projects, but conversely they had to think ahead to make sure they didn't have to walk halfway across the factory to get equipment every time they realized they needed it. Yaurel and the big Russian hadn't worked together closely before, so she was a little apprehensive about how he would feel about taking direction from her, someone only about half his size. She had done what had always served her before in similar situations where she felt intimidated, which was to be as enthusiastic and effervescent as possible, keeping the tone of the work as light and fun as possible. But even more than usual, it was exhausting being the zippy yang to his near-silent yin, and by the middle of the first week she mostly let it drop, convinced that just inside his stony exterior, the Russian wore a slightly smaller, just as stony interior. Their collaboration became almost entirely joyless, and she trudged through the next few days being almost as sullen as he was.
That was, until she saw him hoisting the heaviest preliminary piece into position. He was moving a eighty-five kilo piece of steel framing, and wasn't using augmenters at all, only his bare hands. It would have been impressive if he hadn't been doing similar things all week. Yaurel was only half-watching him as he levered it into place, but just as he had almost fixed the position, he shifted it slightly so it was misaligned.
She sighed and started to walk over him, her voice already feeling sharp in her throat. But as she drew in a breath to rebuke him, she realized what he had done. It dawned her that by slightly misaligning the parts the stress capability was actually increased.
Her voice came out softer than she had thought it would. "I see what you did here. Won't we need to shift over the routing on the primary power?"
Bolshoi shrugged, his all-purpose noncommittal gesture. "Only coupling bracket. Rest can run through here... see?" He ran his calloused index finger along an imaginary channel that his respacing of the frame had opened up.
He was right. More than right; it was a brilliant move, the kind of insight that Yaurel needed on her side. "Wow," she said. "Thanks. I would never have seen that."
Bolshoi looked just as he always did when she looked back at him. His massive shoulders heaved in another patented shrug. But things changed between them after him. Together, they assembled a one-third scale model in just under twenty days, hoisting the heavy metal (either with his raw strength, or the aid of forearm augmenters), and Yaurel piecing together the scorpion-tail mechanisms and the fine, if rudimentary, innards. Bolshoi voiced his opinion a few times, and acted like he felt more of a collaborator instead of the workhorse role he usually played. Yaurel found that it didn't take a whole lot of compromise on her part to make him really feel like they were working on Grinderella together, and she had to admit that there were oversights he caught, and streamlining she wouldn't have seen otherwise.
Yaurel started noticing several of the other team members drifting over on their breaks, small groups gazing down into the bay to watch the massive shoulders of the Russian and the relatively tiny noob girl working together on something that looked like the offspring of an Alien facehugger that had used Godzilla for a host. She never heard any comments from these observers, although she could see them murmuring among themselves, and took that as a sign that she was headed in the right direction.
The two of them ended up polishing off her checklist without even realizing how close to the end they were. One afternoon, they just stepped back -- in tandem, as they more and more often found themselves moving -- and realized they were done. They looked at each other and smiled. "Is beautiful killer," Bolshoi said, the longest sentence he had spoken all day.
Yaurel nodded back in thanks. "She is, isn't she? Thanks, big guy." She had to actually jump in the air to playfully sock him in the shoulder. He even pretend to wince, and rubbed the spot comically. By the time someone had run to get Olson to come and watch their initial run test, the entire team had gathered around the upper rim of the bay to watch. Yaurel made sure that she and Bolshoi pushed the boot-up button together.
---
Now, with the full-scale ready to step onto the arena floor, Yaurel's heart was racing. She wished that Bolshoi had come with them that night -- she hadn't realized until now how much she depended on his rock-steady, treetrunk-armed, barrel-chested presence to help her navigate the feelings of uncertainty that intricate tech engenders in people -- but there were other projects to work on, and outside of the control team Olson didn't like to have mechanics around. She had tried to explain how Bolshoi had ended up being more instrumental in the robot's design than it seemed, but Olson was set in his ways. Mechanics got too emotional watching their work get bashed around on the kill floor, he claimed. That comment almost made Yaurel laugh, wondering if Olson had ever actually met Bolshoi, but bit it back. She suspected that he felt that the crowd still wanted him to believe that he was the primary mind behind a lean, mean, team. She tried not to let her partner's absence bother her too much. Anyway, for all she knew it didn't bother Bolshoi. He seemed satisfied just to send their girl out of the work bay knowing he had put his best work into it.
She turned instead to the event that was about to take place. Yaurel had been to plenty of rumbles before; back where she came from, they were monthly events that everyone attended, with available tickets ranging from royal skyboxes to cheap seats close enough you might end up with hydraulic fluid in your eyes. But she'd never been on the other side of things before. The most intriguing part of it, she found, was how little backstage was actually necessary. The teams backed their trailers up, emptied them out, and rolled their contestants almost directly into the ring. There wasn't a lot of waiting around, or extraneous prepwork on anybody's part. That must be the deal when your star attractions are perfectly-constructed stacks of machine parts that require nothing more than a flick of a switch to get prepped.
She paid extra attention to Olson as she escorted him back in from his traditional pre-show inhalation, to see if she could determine anything he was thinking from the look on his face. His wrinkles, unfortunately, betrayed no insight. Yaurel had promised herself she wasn't going to bug him, because she knew he absolutely hated any amount of public exposure... the only reason he felt he had to make an appearance at bouts was because he was the last man standing from the "auteur" age of the sport, when punk kids would piece together monsters in their garages and earn international acclaim running it all by themselves. The sport had gotten huge since then, but people still liked to believe there were still a few mad geniuses left, old men and women cranking out masterpieces even after a few score years. Again, Olson helped perpetuate the myth because it might sway the crowd's decision at the end of the match, if it even came to that. Yaurel doubted it would tonight.
There wasn't long to wait. The bot teams had no need to arrive more than ten minutes before the show began, so the preliminary battle was already underway. She followed Olson back the short distance to where they had parked their trailer and got mentally prepped to watch her first creation's official unveiling. The control team, a half-dozen people acting much like a well-oiled machine themselves, arranged themselves in formation, tightening their comm headsets and holding their six bulky remote boxes tightly. The trailer's doors swung open, and the gorgeous monstrosity took her first steps into the professional world.
The full-size Grinderella was a gloriously imposing sight, decked out in purple and chrome with accents of acidic neon green, a broad body sturdily balanced on two bowed heavy-duty legs. Her chest was wide open, a slowly twirling maw of titanium gears housed inside. Although their constant churning looked ineffectively slow from anything other than close range, those inward-facing gears could pull and crush with deceptive force, shooting the pulverized remains of whatever it caught out the back of her chassis, aided by an airflow cannon to give the debris a disconcerting spray arc through the air. Yaurel couldn't wait to see a real opponent pass through that portal to robot hell.
Even at a regulation-abeyant nine feet tall and with a twelve-foot armspan, Grinderella stepped with surprising grace, thanks to the long, ponderously heavy tail that followed behind her, as thick as a small motorcar. Because it was studded with glittering panes of glass and torn sheets of metal, and more because it never touched the ground, it looked like it might be one of her primary weapons, even though it was there mostly for the weight, counterbalancing the one-ton engine of destruction that she held where her heart should be. Her head, also purple and ringed with matching green light, was low-slung and held two vestigial eyes, shining lures that would subliminally invite her enemies to aim for them although they were of no real use.
Olson's hand clapped twice on her shoulder in congratulatory fashion as she stood there staring at it, literally open-mouthed in awe. "Be proud," he said to her, barely audible above the sound of the thousandfold rotors and servos. "This is going to be fun." Then the team was off, jogging to keep up with Grinderella's enormous strides, constantly chatting among their headsets to keep her moves coordinated. Yaurel ran behind, already out of breath.
There were flatscreens up outside the massive entry doors to the arena that showed the current action on the kill floor, and the team distractedly half-turned to them to see what was going on in the arena. Within the heavy metal mesh cube that still bore the name "ring", two mid-size bots -- one that had a flailing cloud of filaments with metal weights knitted into their ends for a head, and a boxier one with multiple water jets so tightly focused they could cut through metal at close range -- clashed in the center. Yaurel watched them whip and slash at each other -- sparks flying, suddenly superfluous appendages arcing through the air -- without it really registering; there was too much else on her mind.
She found herself immediately second-guessing every design choice she had made on Grinderella, all the compromises she had made to ensure that the massive gearbox up front wouldn't topple the whole thing over. Was it bad that Olson had never suggested any changes? Even after the first proof-of-concept test, he hadn't given any feedback at all, only nodded and walked back to his office, hands clasped behind his back. She'd taken that as a good sign at the time, but was it really? She chewed at her fingernails, tasted the deep-down oil and grit that never fully came out from under them. What was her opponent going to look like? Had she gone over every possible strategy with the control team? How would she be feeling when she walked out of this arena tonight?
A resounding cheer came from the arena beyond the flatscreens, and Yaurel shifted focus to the televised image to see that the flail-bot had been incapacitated by the water jets of its opponent, and was presently emitting splashy fire as its central brain was being bored into, the remaining stubs of its whips thrashing ineffectually in its death throes. She took a deep breath, preparing for the main event as the remnants of the vanquished were dragged and/or hosed off the arena floor. The smell of fresh sprinkled sawdust permeated the air, even here on the dark side of the vinyl flaps.
Then the music started, and it was time to move. It was tradition for the head of the team to walk down the wide entry ramp first, and Olson took the lead with practiced professionalism, waving to the adulation of the crowd. Yaurel walked behind him abreast of the lead coordinator of the control team, grateful to not be the focus of such attention, even though this fight was really more hers than her boss's. Maybe someday she'd have the confidence to be the public face of Team Bangsnap, but today wasn't that day. At this point, she'd be fine just going home in any state above abject humiliation. Bringing up the rear were the rest of the control team, striding in step with each other to demonstrate how in-sync they were, an indication of how they could use the massive control boxes in their hands to dish out impeccably coordinated robot death for the entertainment of one and all. The overhead loudspeakers blatted an incoherent, distorted introduction for them, which only stoked the crowd further.
As they reached the immense mesh cage, Yaurel finally got a look at her opponents on the far side. It was those smug assholes from Team Cherenkov Blue, a young upstart group had come out of the gate making big gestures, and now clearly thought their best play was to take down one of the old stalwarts. She hoped that Grinderella would be able to put those plans to bed, read them a story, and then punch them to death.
Unfortunately, Cherenkov Blue weren't that easy to dismiss. They were an intimidating crew, serious-faced and seemingly oblivious to the cheers/jeers of the crowd. Yaurel didn't have much time to wallow in their presence, however, because here came their challenger bot, slumping into the ring, eclipsing them as it arrived. It was a squat, chrome behemoth, and true to its team's name, it leaked eye-searing blue light from every seam. With her first pang of design regret, Yaurel eyed its general rounded smoothness, which played against Grinderella's proclivity for grabbing onto protrusions and dragging them into her mouth.
The Cherenkov monstrosity lumbered with some buoyancy like one of those children's spring toys, giving it a lightness that contrasted with Grinderella's obvious solidity.
Yaurel caught Olson out of the corner of her eye, because he had taken an extra half-step forward from Bangsnap's spot at the bottom of their entry ramp, as if to show his lack of intimidation. She couldn't be sure, and maybe it was just what she wanted to see, but there seemed to be a spark in his eye that she didn't recall ever seeing before. She decided to focus on him, drawing from his fortitude.
While he was standing forth, she heard the crowd's enthusiasm spiked again, but she was only peripherally aware that it was because her creation was stomping its way down the ramp behind her. Even as she knew she was missing her own debut entrance, she got the sense that what Olson was doing was more important. He was studying the big opponent, appraising it in full within just a few seconds, watching the way its handlers reacted to his own team's entry. To her, it looked like Team Cherenkov were just standing there, stoically observing Grinderella's descent toward the battle ring. But perhaps he was seeing something more.
By the time she was fully paying attention to what was going on around them again, the tall metal-mesh walls had temporarily lifted, allowing the robots to enter the killing floor, and then settled back into place again. The combatants -- one chunky and purple with a massive swinging tail, the other an oil-slick chrome beast leaking blue light everywhere -- stood in rest pose, arms raised and looking like they were just about to spring at each other. Which they were.
High above the ring, a massive four-sided screen displayed a countdown clock of 120 seconds, and began ticking them off.
Olson pivoted on a heel, suddenly moving like a man thirty years younger than he was, and swung an arm in the arm, calling "Huddle up!" In a flash, the control team had gathered around Olson and Yaurel, remote boxes upright, thumbs on gimbals, ready to take whatever last-minute advice the makers had to offer.
Yaurel was glad she didn't have to give any instructions. Olson always reserved that privilege for himself, and honestly she was too caught up in the moment for any of his words to grab onto anything in her mind. She could hear him, of course; he was digging deep into his banks of knowledge about any robot that he had ever seen that looked anything like the Cherenkov. He spoke all stress points and leverage and torque, and Yaurel registered precisely none of it. Her eyes kept drifting out and up, over the ranged banks of the audience, all of them already on their feet and raring to see some serious shrap. This crowd was hot; she felt as if they would be going home disappointed if at least a hundred of them didn't get burned by drops of molten slag.
"On three..." The familiarity of Olson's words brought Yaurel back into her head. Although it was his rote ending to the huddle, his "One two three --" was met by a heartier "Bang! Snap!" from the remote crew than Yaurel had heard before, and this did more than anything else to assuage her nerves. Then they pivoted, moving again as one, and stepped up onto the command dais.
As the countdown clock drew closer to zero, its amplified ticking sound began to fade. The crowd picked up on this and gradually fell into near-silence as well, until the last three seconds before the match began felt suspended, two teams looking across two walls of wire mesh at each other, lit only occasionally by a beam from the swinging spotlights that never stopped strafing the arena's vast interior.
The clock hit 00, and everything seemed to explode. The lights all came on, the crowd resumed roaring as if it only been momentarily put on mute, and the two iron titans seemed to expand as their power started flowing. Grinderella reared up, the shredder in her chest already whining to life, her sextet of scorpion tails starting to uncoil themselves from where they had been bundled behind her back. Her main arms spread out like a wrestler's, and then she lunged forward. The giant robots slammed together, a collision of weight that was felt in the air just as much as heard. The first hit of a bout had always taken Yaurel's breath away, ever since the first she had experienced when she was young, and now that she was right here, down in front with nothing between her and the action, it did so even more.
The Cherenkov was immediately rocked back on its heels by Grinderella's sheer mass, but before it could slide back more than a meter the rough treads of its unusually wide, flat feet, they caught on the grated steel of the killing floor, halting progress. Its similarly flat, rounded "hands" came up and clamped down on each of Grinderella's sides with twin clanks, clearly employing the aid of magnetization (which was legal, within certain parameters). Hearing them latch on, Yaurel almost squealed with glee, realizing that this grabbing tatic unwittingly played into Grinderella's hidden strength: close combat. Her scorpion arms immediately levered out and swung closely around the bulk of her body, deftly avoiding the thick, blue-light-leaking arms, and spearing into various points on the Cherenkov's body.
With the two machines locked together this way, Yaurel heard Grinderella's tail slamming down to the floor. Suddenly gaining the leverage of a massive tripod, the robot began to lean forward, and she could see less and less airspace between the front surface of the Cherenkov and the churning maw within Grinderella's chest. Yaurel held her breath, waiting for the telltale shriek of metal that would signal that the grinding teeth had begun to sink into its target... but the sound that resulted instead was so high-pitched that it almost couldn't be heard. Yaurel imagined that the local dog population would be affected most.
The Cherenkov began to vibrate, a sure sign that Grinderella's inner gears had begun to spin against its smooth chrome surface. Even as it did so, Yaurel could also see its squat, round "head" tilting forward and down. It it had been a human fighter, it would look like it was dropping its chin to its chest. The suggestively weakened motion made Yaurel think that her robot was already close to winning, and only in the last instant did she wonder if it might actually be designed to make her think that way...
The shock wave that radiated outward as the Cherenkov's broad head popped forward and collided with Grinderella's upper chest vibrated the very cells of Yaurel's body. The extended "neck" of the Cherenkov had a mirrored surface, blasting that gorgeous blue interior light in every direction. Yaurel's eyes overloaded and she blinked hard to clear them, thankful that her remote team's tinted lenses would have automatically flared extra shade to compensate and keep them in the game.
When Yaurel's vision cleared, she saw that the massive punch Grinderella had absorbed had only rocked her back and up onto her tail, like a kangaroo preparing to kick. And although the Cherenkov released its magnetized hand grips in tandem with its ramming-head maneuver, several of Grinderella's scorpion tails were still stuck in its body, their hydraulics being stretched to their limit. Yaurel blinked and squinted, trying to see just how bad the damage to Grinderella's upper body was. Please, she thought, don't let the shredder housing be bent already...
But it wasn't. In its haste to not be pulled into the twirling gears, the Cherenkov had released its head ram a fraction of a moment too soon, and the hit had just missed impacting the framing edge of Grinderella's main weapon. The gears still twisted in place, as innocuously ferocious as before, and the big girl was already starting to retract her barbed tails, tearing open new glowing gashes in the Cherenkov as she started to reel them in again.
The enemy robot's head didn't return to the top of is body, but remained tipped forward, and it was anyone's guess how long it would take for it to summon enough power to make it punch forward a second time. In the meantime, the Cherenkov raised its semi-circular hands again, this time clapping them together in the rapidly-diminishing space between the bodies of the combatants, magnetically clanking them together to make a chrome ball that it held up to Grinderella's crushing central maw as a shield.
Yaurel held her breath, realizing only the moment before it happened that the crowd was about to get a real demonstration of what her creation could do. Then the chrome ball was being pinched as it sank into the gears, giving out a horrific squeal as it was dragged forward and into the eternally spinning teeth. Almost immediately, a confetti shower of chrome chips and metal streamers flew out of Grinderella's open back, spraying out with such velocity and volume that it immediately started forming a mat of debris against the inside of the wire mesh wall at the edge of the ring. It would end up obscuring the view of about a quarter of the paying crowd, but the reaction of the remaining seventy-five percent made it entirely worth it. Even Yaurel couldn't help but throw her fist up in the air at the sight and give a triumphant yell.
As impressive as the carnage was, it didn't seem to faze the Cherenkov much. As soon as it was clear that its hands were going to be pulled into the shredder whether it liked it or not, it simply detached the ball it had made of its hands. Yaurel could see that the thick bands that suddenly found themselves at the end of the Cherenkov's arms were already responding to the loss by expanding, forming into a somewhat boxier, but still functional, new set of hands. It did leave the arms shorter than they had been, however, which Yaurel hoped her robot could use to further her advantage.
Meanwhile, the crowd was still going visibly nuts, marveling at the power of Grinderella's abilities. Many of them jumped to their feet when the last of the Cherenkov's hands-turned-confetti blew out her back and plastered its mass against the wire mesh. Most of the pulverized chrome had fallen off by that point, but several large clumps and streamers of it, randomly magnetized by its trip through the gears, still clung to the outer wall.
Yaurel didn't want to lose the momentum Grinderella had gained with this last maneuver, and she found herself windmilling her arms wildly through the air, yelling "Again! Again!" to the control team over the ecstatic roar of the crowd.
Although they gave no sign of hearing her, the six controllers seemed to share her sentiment, because they coordinated their movements to take Grinderella another step forward, trying to get more of the Cherenkov's body close to her endlessly twisting gears. The blue-lit robot responded by swinging its new, shorter arms around, managing to snap off the three scorpion tails that were still embedded it its body. Fully separated again, the robots pivoted their bodies around, trying be the first to align their central weapons with their opponent's body. Now that the Cherenkov had lost its bulky primary hands, the biggest protrusion from its body was that lowered battering-ram head, and it looked like Yaurel's team was trying to find a way to lower Grinderella's heart-shredder down onto its rounded bulk. The trick, however, was that no one knew exactly when that ram would regain enough power to plunge forward again. If it hit Grinderella squarely in her heart, and the gears got even the slightest bit bent or damaged, she would be apt to lock up entirely, and the match would be all but lost.
Then Yaurel saw it... the way the blue light inside the Cherenkov was intensifying around the neck of its lowered head. It was a barely perceptible tell, signifying how power was being routed inside the huge robot, and she drew a sharp breath in through her teeth as she believed she could feel the air pressure in the arena dropping, making her ears feel like they needed to pop. She opened her mouth to yell, to somehow warn the remote team, but if any sound came out, as any number of dreams she had had, it went no farther than the top of her throat, forceless.
The control team, however, must have seen the shifting light too. Grinderella suddenly threw herself backward onto the counterweight of her tail, shifting back just enough so that when the Cherenkov's massive head did punch forward, it stopped ineffectively at the end of its lunge, slamming against nothing but ozone-filled air.
The arena erupted, loving how Grinderella had feinted away from the punch. Yaurel actually jumped in the air herself, only noting when she came down again that Olson was standing stock-still right next to her, his arms crossed. She chanced a look at his face, and found a slight smile laid across his weathered features. She took this as permission to keep jumping around.
As quickly as she had bent back, Grinderella tipped forward, throwing her gears onto the extended ram before it could begin to retract. A horrific squealing and cracking filled the air, and blue lightning shot out the back of her torso as her teeth started to dig into the chrome piston head. Both robots began shivering with momentum and effort -- the Cherenkov trying to back away, Grinderella striving to push forward to keep its weapon lodged between her crushing gears. And all the while, the Cherenkov's head looked increasingly pinched and pulled, visible chunks of its chrome plating popping off as its surface buckled.
Yaurel had stopped outwardly celebrating. She was just standing there now next to her mentor, watching in awe at the sheer power of the machine she had designed and assembled, as it literally chewed through its opponent. She was simultaneously pumped full of adrenaline and paralyzed, powerless to do anything but feel the energy swooping through her system, around and around like a perfectly insulated circuit.
The spray of debris exiting Grinderella's back was even more impressive this time, lovely burnished metal devolving into an even more beautiful spray of glittering chunks. Some of the finer particles made it through the protective mesh and started drifting out over the crowd, which reached their arms upward as a unit, wanting to feel the heat of impending victory against their palms.
The Cherenkov finally managed to wrest itself out of Grinderella's maw, and stumbled backward. Its imposing ram-head looked sad now, depleted to about half its mass and horribly puckered like a steamed dumpling. As it staggered back, the smaller robot raised up its stubby hands, looking like nothing its was in the process of surrendering. Grinderella, partly in pursuit and partly because she had been pushing forward anyway, followed the retreating foe.
The Cherenkov's arms did stop at the top of their upswing, however. They kept rotating backward, and as they reached the point where they were fully pointing away from their enemy, the whole robot began to tip backward, as if it were going to do a theatrical pratfall. Yaurel's fists balled at her sides, longing to hear the car-crash sound of the thing hitting the floor in defeat... but that's not what it did.
The truncated arms had swung far enough back that the Cherenkov's toppling body was caught. Then its feet kicked off the floor, and the robot was suddenly doing a handstand. Ice splashed over Yaurel's heightened senses as she remembered the weird symmetry of the Cherenkov; as the robot flipped over, another top half rotated up into view, which she now realized was a twin of the first, complete with a second piston head, which was already lowering into position--
She almost rushed forward, wanting to grab a remote from one of the control team and take over, just to feel like she had some control over the ensuing events as time slowed to a crawl. Grinderella, her bulk carrying so much momentum, went from pursuing her enemy across the ring to stepping well within range of its *second* primary weapon in a fraction of a second, and she had no way of pulling up short this time.
The crowd's sound died out for just a second, as everyone’s' hearts skipped ten thousand collective beats, realizing just as Yaurel had what this meant. Then the Cherenkov's heavenly blue light began to flare, and its backup ram became aligned with Grinderella's whirling destroying heart, even as she closed the gap between them to five feet, three, two--
The center of the arena exploded in a blue supernova. The expanding shock wave audibly rattled first the wire mesh cage, shaking free even more of the tattered metal that clung there, then vibrating the ribs and teeth of the surrounding humans. Yaurel felt her eyes quivering in their sockets with the sheer force of the blow, and in the ensuing seconds she would convince herself that this was the reason they spontaneously spilled over with water.
The combined kinetic energy of Grinderella's forward motion and the Cherenkov's ferocious punch combined to almost entirely blow out both robots' systems; instead of knocking either back, it effectively fused the two combatants into one entity, both their power centers shorting out in one cataclysmic instant. They transformed into a frozen tableau but did not topple, braced from one side by the Cherenkov's shortened legs on one side and Grinderella's tail on the other, the ram completely annihilated but also irrevocably fusing Grinderella's gears into one solid block of smoking, impenetrable metal. Though the robots' stunning blue/green glares immediately died out, and even with her emotional investment in the outcome of the match, Yaurel couldn't say with any certainty which one went dark first.
The crowd's enthusiasm died out again, but this time their excitement went with it as they began to realize that the match was truly over. Yaurel was in sympathy with them; she felt like the rightful, spectacular, violently decisive end of the match -- which she had earned through all those weeks toiling in the pit with Bolshoi -- had been suddenly ripped away, denied to them all, and that fact was beyond cruel.
Nothing moved on the floor of the arena. It was as if the combatants had been instantly frozen in ice, just at the moment when the fight was going to be decided one way or the other. Yaurel didn't realize she was inching closer to Olson until she almost bumped into him, standing just as he always had, feet planted, arms crossed. It was as if he had been lock in place, right along with the robots.
In the sudden hush, he was able to speak to him in a normal tone of voice and be sure that she heard her. "Don't worry. It will go to a thumb vote, and yours was the best show tonight."
Yaurel almost smiled, but it was only because she saw how much confidence he had in her. She knew that, if the crowd were asked to decide, they would go for the shininess and lights and symmetry, over the functional and powerful.
There was already a judging team making its way ringside, scanning for any signs of mechanical or electrical operation, anything that could decisively hand the match to one team or the other. The crowd was now actively holding its breath, waiting to see if they would be called upon to make the final decision, already murmuring among themselves a debate about the pros and cons of each robot's performance.
Finally, there seemed to be some unspoken consensus among the inscrutable faces of the judges, and one of them raised a tablet to enter their verdict. Yaurel's head swiveled up to the quartet of jumbo screens suspended above the cage, where the results would be displayed. She imagined she could hear the collective neck-tendon stretch of the entire crowd doing the same.
From out of the overhanging darkness, a flashy hand logo appeared with the words "THUMB VOTE!" Next to her, Olson actually pumped his fist, but it did nothing to dispel the knot in Yaurel's stomach. Grinderella had made the better fight, but there was the ingenuity of the symmetrical Cherenkov bot to think about, the pure hypnotic showmanship of all that serene blue light...
The screens above changed. "RAISE YOUR THUMB FOR TEAM CHERENKOV!"
The rules were simple: all those who thought that the blue-lit chrome combatant had put up the better fight, or put on the better show, would give a thumbs-up and hold it high. For those who thought Grinderella deserved the W, they had to similarly raise their hands, but turn their thumbs toward the ground. The crowd would be laser-scanned from on high, and a pattern recognitor would tally the ups against the downs. Some thought it was too easy to rig such a process, but it had proven itself over the years to be the fairest way to determine a victor.
After thrusting her own downturned thumb into the air and holding it there, Yaurel slowly spun around. She didn't like what she saw; there were an *awful* lot of upraised thumbs out there. She felt something cold twist itself into existence down in the pit of her stomach. Her eyes tried to stretch out as far as they could over the sea of arms, trying and failing to determine Grinderella's fate -- and by extension, her own.
Suddenly, she was aware of a certain pair of eyes watching her. There was a figure standing a little too close to the bottom of the ramp, a bit too near the remote team's dais... it was only because he wasn't supposed to be there that it took her so long to recognize Bolshoi. His quiet bulk, the outline familiar from almost wordlessly working with him in the work bay for all those weeks, stood out clearly against the more amorphous darkness of the crowd.
He did not speak, just looked at her with those infinitely patient eyes. Then, once he was clear he had her attention, he reached into his grease-stained work shirt and hooked his thumb around a chain that hung around his neck. He pulled it free from the worn, fraying collar, until a tiny length of sparkling metal popped out.
She knew immediately what it was. And just like that, her fearful mind sputtered back into full analytical mode. Suddenly, playing out in her mind as if it had just happened, she recalled a conversation the two of them had early in the planning stages of their dueling titan, now frozen solid in the ring behind her.
"What is in tail?" he had asked, his voice making her wonder he was so quiet because of the sheer weight of his accent dragging his voice down into a lower register. He punctuated his question with a tap of his thick finger on the spec sheet they had been studying during their initial consult.
"Um... nothing in particular," she said; this had been back before even she had fully internalized that she was in charge of the project and how to act like it. "It's just a counterweight for the shredder."
His response was the first in a long series of slow nods that she would soon learn to interpret as comprehension. And that had been his last mention of it, until the last day of prep before the viability test before Olsen and the rest of the crew. Just as Yaurel was reinforcing a few last cosmetic spot-welds -- really just refusing to accept the fact that the work was done -- she realized that Bolshoi had been standing next to her hunched form for some time. By then, she had learned not to be startled by the big man when this happened; it was just his way.
His arm was extended toward her, and once Yaurel removed the vision-limiting melder's mask, she saw that there was a thin chain dangling from the fist, a tiny weight at the end of it. The weight turned out to be an thin, inch-long semi-cylinder of metal with a bluish-green tint. Only a few telltale notches along its length marred the smoothness of what turned out to be a pendant necklace.
"What's this?" Yaurel asked him, and he responded by fishing its twin out of his own grimy workshirt. She was more touched by the gesture than she let on, but could tell that her eyes were getting a little blurry as she took the offered gift out of Bolshoi's enormous fist. "Thanks," she said, and no more was spoken about it. He hadn't spoken more than that one word, but the message was clear; it was not only an offering to commemorate their first collaboration together, but to thank her for listening to him, in a way that no one else likely had. She had resolved to always wear it as a reminder to herself, that at least once she had been the kind of person she had always intended to be.
And this was why, in an arena that was once again starting to audibly fill with the crowd's enthusiasm, as they debated among themselves and those near them about whether to turn their thumbs up or down, that she was able to pull on the chain around her neck and produce the counterpart of the jewelry that Bolshoi now held up as a sign of solidarity with her co-worker.
It came as more than a mild surprise when she saw a smile cross Bolshoi's face as she held up the little notched ingot. She had long stopped noticing the way it swung against her as she moved about, sometimes the cool curved metal of one side touching her breastbone, sometimes the flattened side. It had become just another part of the background of her day. But the way Bolshoi now looked at her across the dense arena air made her think that there was more to it than just her partner showing his support. He had come here against fight protocol, but she didn't yet know why.
Once it was established that they both had their matching necklaces, he motioned her toward him with his other hand. Her first instinct was to stay put; the recognitor had already started its sweep of the crowd, the telltale green line limning the contours of every person as it swung around, assessing and tallying her fate. But the two of them had developed and implicit trust over the days and weeks of putting Grinderella together, and she felt that pull overriding her other impulses.
As she crossed toward him, he moved over to the remote team leader, who was now standing at parade rest, head tilted up toward the jumbo screens above, awaiting the results like everyone else. Yaurel and Bolshoi's trajectories coincided where he stood, and they came to face each other across the small bank of controls he had strapped across against his chest like an old-time popcorn vendor.
Yaurel watched Bolshoi pop the clasp of his necklace, sliding the little metal piece off its chain. With complete trust, she did the same to hers. He took it delicately in his large hand, turning its flat edge toward her as he held it in the very tips of his fingers. She mirrored his move, and when the two pieces of metal met over the remote box, they clicked together, the two semi-cylinders magnetically forming one piece. Yaurel jumped a little, but did not let go. She noticed that Bolshoi was no longer looking at her; instead, his eyes had focused on the control panel they stood over. Her gaze followed his, and she realized what he was looking at.
The control boxes that the remote team held had a few open expansion slots at the top, just in case there was some kind of augmentation for running the particular robot they were called on to direct. Most of the time, these additions were for boosting the signal of specifically fine-tuned controls, and she had heard rumors that in the past they had been implemented with circuitry that would jam the other robot's remotes -- a tactic that had eventually led to the practice being banned. In this case, there was only one slot filled, consisting only of one raised area centered around a tiny circular hole... one that was exactly the same diameter as the newly created cylinder that Yaurel and Bolshoi held between them.
Yaurel raised her eyes to his, and saw an emotion in them that she had never seen. He smiled, then silently mouthed a Russian phrase she had come to learn in their time working together.
"Spasiboh". Thank you.
Together, they lowered the cylinder and dropped it into the circular hole, feeling internal pins hitting the notches like a key sliding into a lock. It sank in place with a second, satisfying magnetic click, and then Yaurel heard the crowd going silent again. She turned her head toward the arena, knowing that as she did she was mirroring Bolshoi. Together, they witnessed what was happening there.
Something was happening with Grinderella. She did not move, but a peculiar whining sound began emanating from somewhere inside her. There was a glimmering flash of light, so brief it almost seemed like it might have been merely a random splash of an arena spotlight reflecting off the surface of her tail... but then it happened again. This time Yaurel saw what it was. There were purely decorative plates of broken glass embedded in Grinderella's tail, giving it an appearance similar to that of a stegosaurus. With the second flash, she could see that there was light coming from inside the tail, being radiated out through the glass and illuminating the jagged edges.
The hush continued to spread. The whole crowd, even Yaurel herself, was not sure what the flashes meant. It could just be a few final gasps of a deteriorating electrical system, the final circuits blowing out. And then Grinderella's tail began to rise off the floor.
As it lifted almost meter into the air, it trembled, as if doing so took tremendous effort. And knowing how much weight they had implanted in that appendage, Yaurel wasn't surprised. But a smile spread across her face anyway, knowing that her creation wasn't down and out just yet.
Of course, none of this meant that they had won the match. The recognitor laser sweep proceeded, even as the crowd became distracted into lowering their thumbs by the uncertainty of the situation. They knew, just as Yaurel did, that there was one criterion that Grinderella had to meet in order to clinch victory. She held her breath, not daring to hope that Bolshoi had secretly modified their titan so she could fulfill that criterion. With her hand still poised on the key, just as his was, she waited to see.
The mammoth tail swung first one way, then the other. No more than half a meter in either direction, but all the while it continued to spark internal flashes, and its arc increased in amplitude a little more each time, until eventually the whole thing was lashing from side to side. Yaurel realized she hadn't breathed in several seconds. When she did, it expelled itself immediately, carrying the whispered phrase, "Bolshoi, what did you *do*?"
The giant Russian did not answer, only watched with her as the tail began to bend into a curve at the end of each ever-increasing swing. The tip was beginning to move at a very interesting speed, and it was getting ever closer to wrapping itself past Grinderella's legs and reaching the frozen Cherenkov. If it did, that final criterion would be fulfilled.
The crowd quieted again, assuming the irreplicable silence of three thousand people listening for a particular sound. Another quiet swing of the robot's tail was followed by another, and just as they collectively began to believe they would never hear what they were leaning forward to hear, it rang out, small but decisive.
At the apex of one of its swings, the tip of Grinderella's tail touched down on one of the legs of the Cherenkov with a ping. So slight, but it qualified as a hit. The last robot that could still fight would be declared the victor.
Yaurel's eyes instantly went blurry as the crowd exploded behind her, their triumphant yell seeming to be hers alone, merely needing all their lungs to help bring its enormity out into the world. Just outside the cage, the lead judge made a barely perceptible hand signal, and the jumbo screens blazed back into life with the words "WINNER: GRINDERELLA", washing out the light of the recognitor sweep, rendering its count ineffective.
Yaurel threw two thumbs in the air, spinning around and looking at Olsen. The old man hadn't moved, but a marked smirk now crooked the side of his mouth, and he nodded at her. Then she turned to Bolshoi, and ran around the stunned remote team lead to jump into the Russian's arms. He was startled, but managed to catch her. She still had to stretch her neck up to plant a wet kiss on his cheek, then she hopped back down. She grabbed his wrist and threw their combined hands into the air, dragging him with her as she swung around until they were facing the crowd, who were all on their feet, cheering for them (or, at least, the thing they had created together).
They shared a look in that moment, punctuated by the rhythmic clank of Grinderella's tail continuing to smack her opponent at each end of its long swing. Through it, they both conveyed through a prism of resignation and happiness, This is the feeling we're going to be chasing from now on, isn't it? And along with it came the answer in tandem, Absolutely.
Yaurel even risked one glance over to Olson’s side of the control area. He hadn’t moved, but she watched him close his eyes and his chest rise slowly as he took another long, deep breath. He did that too, she had learned, after every win. Beyond even the smell of anticipation , he loved the smell of victory.
