Game of Flames

by Robin Wasserman

  “You’ve seen the little robots who collect lava from the river and bring it behind the wall?” Garquin said. “Those are the sloggers. Cain and I use them to collect the molten lava that powers our domains—but you could use one to carry the Magnus 7 safely back to your ship. That is, if I help you reprogram one to do it.”

  “And what do we have to do in return?” Dash asked.

  “One of my sloggers is spying behind enemy lines. You should find it at the communications hub of Lord Cain’s kingdom. When you find TULIP—”

  “TULIP?” Gabriel echoed.

  “The spy slogger.”

  “You named him TULIP?” Gabriel asked incredulously.

  “I named her TULIP. Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No,” Dash said quickly, giving Gabriel a look that said stop talking now. “No, there definitely isn’t.”

  “I thought not. So, when you find TULIP, she will guide you to the switch that governs Cain’s control over his entire complex. You will flip off the switch and leave him powerless. Then, and only then, I will help you reprogram TULIP to collect and store the Magnus 7 you need. You see? It’s very simple, and we both win.”

  “What I see is that we take all the risk, and win your war for you,” Dash said, “while you stay nice and safe locked up behind your big, strong wall.”

  “Well, yes, that’s another way of looking at it,” Garquin said. “But my way is so much more pleasant, don’t you think? Plus, there’s this: if you agree to help, I will agree not to launch any fireballs at your side of the river until you get safely behind the wall.”

  “And if we don’t agree?” Dash asked.

  Lord Garquin burst into cheery laughter. “Who would be that foolish?” He chuckled. “Unless being incinerated sounds like your idea of fun?”

  “He’s right,” Piper said in a low voice. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “I know,” Dash said, muting the radios for a moment. “I just don’t like it.” He was a little awed by the fact that he’d just been talking to an alien intelligence.

  A little awed and more than a little freaked out.

  “How do we know we can trust anything about this guy?” Dash said. “How do we know anything he’s saying is true? There are a lot of things that don’t add up.”

  “Like what?” Piper asked.

  “Like how come he speaks English,” Dash pointed out.

  “He’s a super-intelligent extraterrestrial,” Gabriel said. “They always speak English. Or, for all we know, he’s speaking Garquinese, and he’s got some kind of super-advanced microscopic autotranslation device that turns whatever he says into something we can understand. That’s how these things work.”

  “In the movies,” Dash said. Sometimes he wondered if Gabriel thought he was starring in a movie of his very own. It was true that in the movies, the aliens almost always found a way to speak English. And it was usually pretty obvious who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. It was easy to know who to trust.

  But this was real life.

  Nothing was easy.

  “Come on, don’t you want to see what’s behind the wall?” Gabriel asked. He was itching to get a look into all the machinery.

  “I’m pretty sure this Lord Cain guy’s behind the wall,” Dash said. “And it doesn’t sound like it’ll be much fun if he sees us.”

  “We’ll be quick and quiet,” Gabriel said. “You know we can do this. Not to mention we have to do it.”

  Dash wished that he could check in with Chris and Carly, but in the end, it didn’t matter. There was no way around it—they needed the Magnus 7, and helping Lord Garquin was their best chance of getting it. “So we’re all agreed?” he asked his team. This was a big decision. He didn’t want to do it unless all three of them were on board.

  “Like I said, we’ve got no other choice,” Piper said.

  “Let’s win us a war,” Gabriel said.

  Dash switched the radio back on. “Okay,” he told Lord Garquin. “Tell us what we need to do.”

  —

  Chris watched Meta Prime through the view screen, trying to calm his nerves. From this distance, the planet looked like an unbroken sphere of gray. It looked whole and at peace. Chris knew better. This was a world rife with conflict. This was a world of machinery and destruction. A world torn between two masters who would stop at nothing to conquer all.

  This was the world he had sent his crew off to. Dash, Piper, and Gabriel were down there, doing their best to survive. And they probably thought Chris had abandoned them.

  Chris sighed. He’d thought he knew what he was getting them into. But something was wrong down on the planet’s surface, something he couldn’t explain. Something, perhaps, that had to do with the other spaceship matching their orbit. Or with the boy on that ship, the one who looked exactly like Chris.

  Chris wondered if he should have told his crew the truth after all.

  He hated lying to them, even if it was for their own good.

  When they make it back to the ship, he promised himself, I’ll tell them everything.

  As soon as they made it back.

  If they made it back.

  Lord Garquin was as good as his word. At his direction, they shadowed the sloggers marching back and forth between the wall and the river. Piper, Dash, and Gabriel each fell into step beside one of the sloggers and marched toward the towering metal wall. A silver door slid open and shut, admitting one slogger at a time.

  “You sure about this?” Dash murmured as he and his slogger drew closer to the door. It whooshed shut with great force and looked sharp enough to slice him in half.

  The slogger itself didn’t seem to know he was there. But Dash couldn’t help but notice the small, raised circle at the center of its chest. It looked a lot like the muzzle of a gun.

  This was exactly what he’d feared: the Base Ten training exercise come to life. Those sloggers had shot laser beams from their chests.

  Those sloggers had also been holograms; their laser beams were harmless.

  This time the Alpha team wouldn’t be so lucky.

  “Step through at the same time as the slogger and you’ll be fine,” Lord Garquin said.

  There was no reason to trust the alien…but what else could he do? Dash glanced over his shoulder. Piper’s air chair hovered alongside her slogger, and Gabriel and his slogger were bringing up the rear.

  “Ready, guys? Here goes nothing.” Dash and his slogger were up. The slogger stood before the immense wall, unleashing a series of beeps and chirps. The silver doorway slid up, and the slogger marched inside. Dash slipped through with him, just as the door slammed down. As it whooshed shut, he felt the hot rush of air at the back of his neck and shivered. It had been that close.

  The door opened twice more, and Piper and Gabriel rejoined him. The three members of Team Alpha gazed around them in awe. Base Ten’s holographic simulation of this place didn’t begin to compare to the real thing.

  It was a factory—a factory the size of a city, teeming with metal life. Conveyer belts crisscrossed through the air, swooping highways carrying sloggers wherever they needed to go. They stretched up and down as far as the eye could see. A column of flame shot up through the center of the vast space, held in place by what must have been some kind of force field. Metal tubes transported flaming lava back toward the outer wall, funneling it into giant cannons. Tunnels and corridors wrapped snakelike around the column of fire, spiraling up and up. There must have been miles of them.

  Everything was in motion, not just the sloggers and the conveyer belts, but the walls themselves. Every surface was covered by steel and brass machinery, dials and readouts, flickering needles and flashing displays, clomping pistons and spinning gears.

  Gabriel felt like he had seen this place in his dreams. A land of machines, everything governed by rules. By specific, understandable physical laws. A world where you could take anything and everything apart to see how it worked. This was the way a world should be, Gab
riel thought. It was the strangest place he’d ever been, and he had never felt more at home.

  Dash, on the other hand, had seen this moving checkerboard floor in his nightmares. There was no solid ground between them and the corridors wrapping around the central column. Instead, the air whizzed with flying brass plates that deposited sloggers from one conveyer belt to another. Back on Earth, they’d trained on a simulated version of this world. After a lot of false starts, Dash, Piper, Gabriel, and Carly had gotten it done.

  But only by cheating.

  “Let me guess,” he said wearily to Lord Garquin. “We’ve got to get across the moving plates and into one of those tunnels.”

  “Indeed,” Garquin said. “The tunnels will carry you deeper into the complex, until you reach its heart.”

  “And how are we supposed to get to the tunnels?” Dash asked.

  Even Gabriel looked nervous. “Yeah, this isn’t a hologram. This time, if we fall off a plate or get zapped by a slogger…” He peered over the ledge they stood on—the complex went down into the ground just as far as it went up. If they fell, they’d be falling for a long time.

  Gabriel slid a finger across his throat. “No do-overs,” he said. “No cheating.”

  “Maybe a little cheating,” Lord Garquin said. “I know these patterns well. I can guide you across.”

  Gabriel was watching the moving plates intently. “But there are no patterns,” he said. “It’s random. Every time it seems like there’s a pattern, it switches up.”

  “What looks random to you, human, is perfectly ordered to a more superior intelligence.”

  “Who are you calling human?” Gabriel said, sensing he’d been insulted.

  “You can really get us across?” Dash cut in quickly. If Gabriel’s pride got dented, they could be here arguing all day.

  “I really can,” Lord Garquin assured them. “The computing devices you wear around your wrist each put out an electrical signal—I can track your motions precisely. As long as you do exactly as I say, you’ll remain intact.”

  “Do you think he still counts it as intact if we have a big laser hole blown through us?” Gabriel whispered.

  Piper cleared her throat. “Uh, guys? There’s just one little problem. Or…” She gestured at her air chair. “Kind of a big one.”

  “Oh.” Dash felt like an idiot. Of course Piper couldn’t jump from one plate to another. The air chair might be a miracle of technology, but there were still some things it couldn’t do. It needed something solid beneath it to hover over.

  Piper hated admitting that most of all. But she wasn’t about to let her pride get in the way of the mission. “It’s okay,” she said. “I can just stay here. Guard the entrance.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Lord Garquin boomed. “Note the girders extending from where you stand to the central column.”

  The Alpha team duly noted the girders. A network of steel bars sloped dramatically up toward the column, supporting its weight.

  “I see no reason you can’t ride one of these girders exactly where you need to go.”

  Piper grinned. “You’re totally right!”

  “Hold on a second, Piper,” Dash said. The girders were less than a foot wide. “How do you know your air chair can balance on those? What if you fall?”

  “What if I don’t?” Piper asked, and before he could answer, she thrust the chair forward.

  “Go, Piper!” Gabriel cheered as the air chair swooped up along the steel slope.

  Dash held his breath as the chair tipped and wobbled from one side to another. She was so high up, and if she fell…

  “What are you waiting for, slowpokes!” Piper slid smoothly over the top of the girder and into the mouth of one of the giant steel tunnels. “Come on up!”

  Gabriel shook his head in wonder. “She pretends to be all cautious and practical, but sometimes I think that girl never met a risk she didn’t like.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of risks,” Dash said, trying to ease the tension in his chest now that Piper was safe. At least, as safe as any of them were in this place. “Maybe the next element is on a nice quiet planet, with a beach.”

  “Getting a little ahead of yourself, human,” Lord Garquin said. “Let’s focus on this planet, shall we?”

  Dash watched the plates whizz back and forth, and tried to block out the memory of all the times he’d fallen off during the training exercise.

  “Ready?” he asked Gabriel. They crouched together, waiting to jump on Garquin’s command.

  “Ready,” Gabriel said confidently.

  “Good,” Garquin said, “because…go!”

  They leapt together onto the large brass plate that sped past their feet, then rode it until Garquin shouted, “Go again, on your left!”

  “Now stop!”

  “Go! Go again! Again! Stop!”

  They jumped; they waited; they jumped again; they leapfrogged from one plate to the next. It was like the world’s most stressful game of Red Light, Green Light.

  One quick jump to the left and then another plate zoomed across at eye level. “Duck!” yelled Garquin, but Gabriel was a half second too late. The plate skimmed his head, knocking him off balance.

  Gabriel teetered, but Dash grabbed his waist and held.

  “Whoa, that was clo—” Gabriel started, but Garquin interrupted.

  “In five seconds, leap as high as you can, and grab hold.”

  “Grab hold of what?” Dash asked as Garquin counted down.

  There was no answer, only “…three, two, one, go!”

  Dash and Gabriel leapt as high as they could.

  Dash stretched his arms wide, reaching, hoping…

  “Yes!” His fingers wrapped around a thin metal bar. He clung tight.

  Gabriel hung beside him.

  They were hanging from the bottom rung of a metal ladder that climbed up the outside of a steep steel tunnel. Their feet dangled over an abyss.

  “Now what?” Gabriel grunted, his grip slick with sweat.

  “Now you join your friend,” Garquin said.

  Dash craned his neck up to see Piper and her air chair hovering at the top of the ladder. Way up.

  “Easy for you to say,” he grumbled, pulling himself up painfully, one rung at a time. His arms burned with the effort. It’s a good thing STEAM bullied them into sticking with their daily training regimen.

  It was a long way down.

  Finally, Dash managed to pull himself up enough rungs to get his feet on the ladder. Gabriel was one step behind him. Slowly but surely, they climbed. Up and up, until finally, they joined Piper back on solid ground. If you could call the mouth of a giant tunnel suspended a hundred feet above the floor solid.

  “What took you so long?” Piper teased, grinning.

  Neither Gabriel nor Dash had the energy to respond.

  “You’re welcome,” Lord Garquin said in their ears.

  “You’re seriously overestimating our gratitude,” Gabriel said. He rubbed his sore shoulders. Dash was right, he thought. A beach planet wouldn’t be so bad next time around. Some tropical smoothies, a little surfing, no carnivorous beasts or snotty aliens with superiority complexes.

  “Onward,” Garquin said. “Your task is to reach the hub at the center of the complex. There you will find what we both need.”

  “Yeah, your spy slogger, PETAL,” Gabriel said.

  “TULIP,” Garquin corrected him.

  “And you’re sure that thing can get the Magnus 7 for us?”

  “I’m sure that if you succeed in shutting down the communications hub, I will direct you on achieving your own goals.”

  It wasn’t the straightest answer in the world. But it was obviously the best they were going to get.

  “This place is a maze,” Piper said as they crept deeper into the tunnel, which quickly forked into three corridors. “How are we ever supposed to find our way?”

  “Have no fear,” Lord Garquin assured them. “I will get you where you need
to go. Now, find the third corridor on your left and follow the tunnel until it branches, taking the fork on your right.”

  Dash, Piper, and Gabriel followed Garquin’s instructions step by step. One turn after another, they made their way deeper and deeper into Lord Cain’s kingdom. It was a labyrinth of brass and steel. At Garquin’s command, they slithered through narrow tubes and climbed more cold metal ladders that seemed to stretch to the sky. They scaled a steep wall by climbing a knotted iron vine. They trudged down stairs for what felt like a mile, then slid down a twisty, slippery silver chute for what felt like another.

  It was like the universe’s most ridiculous ropes course. Or maybe some creepy carnival fun house.

  They saw no sign of Lord Cain or any other living creature. They passed only sloggers, hundreds of them. Sloggers carrying lava from the river. Sloggers returning to the river to get more. Sloggers doing repairs, sloggers carving out new tunnels, sloggers building more sloggers. None of the sloggers seemed to notice they were there. Dash couldn’t help but worry what would happen if they suddenly did.

  “I don’t like this,” Piper said, hovering across a narrow chain-link bridge. The platforms it connected were only a few yards apart—but the chasm beneath their feet was several hundred feet deep. She muted her MTB’s receiver. “Even if Garquin can get us in, what if we need to get out on our own? I don’t know about you, but I have no idea how to do that.”

  Dash couldn’t argue. He’d been trying to pay attention to their route, but they had taken so many twists and turns, memorizing the steps was impossible. He didn’t know how Garquin could do it from memory.

  Of course, that was assuming Garquin wasn’t just making it up as he went along.

  “This place doesn’t make any sense. It’s like some wacky fun house of machinery,” Gabriel said, tiptoeing across the bridge and arriving safely on the other side.

  Dash snorted. “You noticed?”

  “No, the way it’s designed doesn’t make sense.” He’d been following their path carefully, trying to figure out the logic of the place. But it didn’t have any. And that wasn’t logical either. Aliens who were smart enough to build all these robots and a city-sized factory to hold them should have been smart enough to build a factory that made sense. “All these tunnels that don’t go anywhere? Or that go everywhere except where you’d want to be. Think about it, we’re going to the communications hub, right? Why would you want to make it so hard to get there? Why would you make people go up and up forever and then take a big slide back down again?”