By Chloe Smith
From Goblins & Galaxies #4 Summer 2026
1. All my work here has to count for something.
I know how this sounds, to stand here and ask for gratitude, while they’re still cleaning Archduke Latsan’s blood from a whole row of box-tier seats. Was that his people on the comm just now? I’m sure they want me kneeling on the synthetic sawdust the next time the gorgon beasts of Aerie Prime come roaring into the arena. But I’m begging you: Hear me out. Don’t make a hasty decision you’ll regret.
Think of how much I’ve given the Galactic Hippodrome. It’s been long years, whether you measure them by the Imperial standard, or by the seasons of the home world I can barely remember. What I do remember is a childhood of repairing maintenance bots and polishing gladiator armor. Yes, you saved me from the Infant Battle Royale, but I did everything else a child can do in this place, and I stayed and served after my indenture was paid.
You feel my dedication means nothing, when I had no other options, nowhere else in this dome that would hire a colonial exile, and no way home? Then here are more reasons:
2. The beasts know me. How many times have I faced a massive Centauri pabilsag, its mandibles still gory with gladiator’s blood, backed it into its narrow cage to fight and kill another day? I learned from every menagerie keeper who died in the arena over the years. I have a better fight record than all of them. One accident in the stands shouldn’t outweigh all that.
You say I should control the beasts—but I say no one can. Not because of what happened with the Archduke, but because of how it feels to look into the eyes of a bowed monster as they glare from between the bars of their cage. You know that expression. I’ll remind you what it looks like. See? Don’t pretend you can’t read its vengeful promise.
3. I’ve kept your trade secrets. When the casino palaces and the orbital performance venues wanted to get in on the battling megafauna game, when they sent agents sniffing around the Hippodrome’s back doors, I didn’t give. I may have talked to them. I may have asked them what they thought they were doing, why they wanted to entrap more lives, deliver those into Imperial hands? I may have helped to nurse seeds of doubt and dissatisfaction—but I never cut into your business interests before this.
4. I do what’s needed. I’ve never balked at a job, from lobbing chunks of meat into the maws of the Anjali dragonesques, to sifting the exploding swarms’ nutrient pools.
5. The fighters respect me. I’ve spent years managing the gladiatorial prisoners, showing them their best interests, so that the show goes on night after night, so that they don’t waste their energies fomenting splinter rebellions, doomed to failure? You may have noticed they act together now. They move on my word.
6. No one knows the Hippodrome as I do. I’ve learned the world from inside this arena, watching the gilded aristocrats in their private boxes and the combatants trampled into the ground below them. I’ve memorized the shape of the stadium, its corridors and atriums, its exit plans. I know how to seal them, to make sure there are no paths of escape.
7. I’ve always done what you asked. I’ve made your visions a reality, each planned battle more thrilling than the last. Yes, the fate of the Archduke is on me, but it was your order that I whip Ninotchka the dragonesque with the electroflail, to make her forget her naturally gentle nature and fight the pabilsag queen in your “Battle of the Titanesses.” If I let my control-net slip, if I raised her display platform a tad too high—well, she was maddened to titanic fierceness. As I said, you can bow a creature, not control it.
8. You won’t be able to get anyone else. No one else has my combination of experience, determination, skill, and patience. The ability to manage alien beasts and an Imperial boss, to see the big picture and wait for years for plans to come together. Also, no other candidates are going to be able to find your office to apply. The rubble will bury it too deep.
9. You need me. You may wonder why I’m still talking to you, now that the walls have started to shake and the roars of loosed beasts and coordinated gladiators echo from all sides. It’s too bad this cell-office you assigned me has no windows, so we can’t see them overrun the arena and its stands. The rebellion spreads now, into the streets under the dome, into the Imperial homes, to the ships and orbitals above us.
10. I’m not going to leave you to your fate, one more Imperial enslaver among the rest. I probably should. But you did pluck me from among those doomed children, all those years ago. Everything I’ve learned, I can credit to you, even if some things you didn’t mean to teach me. And what can I say? I have a soft spot for monsters.
So here: I’ll take you down to one of cages beneath the arena. They’re reinforced and all empty now. You can shelter there until the riot ends. Maybe you can dig yourself out afterwards. But I hope you’ll see the world differently, after spending some time in a cage. It will be a different world, too. I won’t need this job anymore.
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Chloe Smith’s short fiction has appeared in Bourbon Penn, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places, and her novella Virgin Land was published in 2023. She is a graduate of Your Personal Odyssey 2024 and a member of the Clarion Workshop class of 2025. When she’s not writing, she works as a middle school teacher librarian. At other times, she’s been a classroom teacher, a proofreader for Locus and Fantasy magazines, a barista, and a ballet dancer. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and posts on Bluesky @chloehsmith. You can find more of her work on her website, imaginaryresearch.wordpress.com.
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