Chapter 1: Clash of Titans
The air in the Alpine valley held a bite that went straight to the bone, a clean, antiseptic cold that smelled of pine and frozen gravel. Bronco Davies hefted the front end of their sled, the “Aussie Arrow,” her gloved hands finding familiar grooves in the carbon fibre. The weight was a comfort, a known quantity.
“Left a bit, Skip!” called Chaz from the rear, his voice muffled by his helmet strap.
“My left or your left, you muppet?” Bronco boomed back, a laugh echoing off the high steel girders of the overhead walkways. She adjusted her grip, muscles in her shoulders and back settling into the lift. They were a moving island in a river of coloured lycra and focused faces, navigating the chaotic concourse of the Olympic training area.
The track itself was a monster—a gleaming, twisted scar of ice sunk into the earth, its curves so precise they looked machined. From above came the constant hum of generators, the shriek of a distant sled’s runners biting into a corner, the clatter of tools from a maintenance bay. It was a symphony of controlled violence, and Bronco loved every deafening note.
They were almost to their designated bay when a Swiss crew, all precision and quiet murmurs, crossed their path. Bronco sidestepped, the Arrow lurching. Her boot slid on a patch of spilled ice melt.
“Woah there, big fella!” she grunted, wrestling the sled back under control. She straightened up, a grin already on her face to apologize to the Swiss, and walked straight into a solid wall of dark blue.
The impact was soft but jarring. A pair of goggles clattered to the ground.
“Scheiße!” A sharp, male voice.
Bronco found herself staring at a broad chest adorned with the German eagle. She tilted her head up. And up. The man in front of her was built like a refrigerator, with a jawline that could have been used to calibrate the track’s inclines. His ice-blue eyes were not smiling.
“Sorry, mate! Total accident,” Bronco said, her Australian accent stretching the vowels. She bent to pick up the goggles at the same time he did. Their helmets clunked together with a hollow plastic bonk.
He snatched the goggles from her hand before she could offer them. “You should watch where you are going,” he said, his English perfect, clipped, and cold. “This is not a rugby field.”
Behind him, his three teammates stood like a perfectly aligned set of tools, their sled—a thing of sinister, polished black—resting on a trolley. They looked at Bronco and her crew with the detached interest of scientists observing a chaotic natural phenomenon.
Bronco felt her smile tighten at the edges. “Yeah, got that. The lack of grass was a clue.” She patted the front of the Arrow. “We’re good. No harm done.”
The German’s gaze swept over their sled, then over Bronco herself, lingering on the old, faded tape wrapped around her thumb, the sun-bleathered of her hair escaping her helmet. His expression was one of pure, undiluted assessment. And it found them wanting.
“You carry it like a piece of furniture,” he stated. “It is competition equipment. The most finely tuned instrument here. You treat it with reverence, or you do not deserve to be on the ice.”
The noise of the training area seemed to fade for a moment. Bronco heard Chaz suck in a breath behind her. She felt the familiar heat of a defensive line forming in her mind, the old rugby instinct to shove back.
“It’s a sled, love. We’re here to slide it, not marry it.” She kept her tone light, but the challenge was there.
A flicker of something—annoyance, maybe disdain—crossed the German’s face. “You are the Australian captain, yes? Bronte Davies.”
“Bronco,” she corrected, her voice flat.
“Klaus Richter.” He didn’t offer a hand. “Captain, German squad.” He gave the Arrow one last, dismissive glance. “Your runner tolerances are a public guess. Your weight distribution is... improvised. You rely on spirit.” He said the last word like it was a contagious disease. “Spirit does not lower thousandths of a second. Discipline does.”
He turned, a single sharp motion to his team. They fell into step alongside their black sled, moving with a silent, unified efficiency that made Bronco’s crew look like they’d just stumbled out of a pub.
For a few seconds, no one spoke. The metallic echo of a sled hitting the straightaway below filled the space.
Chaz finally shuffled forward. “Prickly sort, isn’t he?”
Bronco watched the dark blue backs disappear into the crowd. The insult wasn’t to her, not really. It was to the thousands of hours in a borrowed gym in Thredbo, welding spare parts in her uncle’s garage, the fundraisers selling chocolate bars in a country where snow was a novelty. It was to the improvisation that had gotten them here, to the spirit he mocked.
She spat on the clean, salted concrete. The warm globule melted a tiny, dark hole in the frost.
“Yeah, well,” she said, turning back to the Arrow. Her hands gripped the front end again, knuckles whitening under her gloves. “He’s also not wrong.”
She saw the doubt flicker in Chaz’s eyes, in the others’. The German’s words had iced over the easy confidence of the morning. The sled suddenly felt heavier, a symbol of everything they were scrambling to learn.
“Come on,” Bronco said, hefting her end, her voice dropping its boom to something lower, more determined. “Let’s get this finely tuned instrument to its garage. We’ve got a lot of reverencing to do.”