by Larry Niven
Dum da dum dum.
“Alert. We have warriors front and rear. Watch every step. They’ll hit us hard, if they can.”
If he had allowed himself to think outside the tunnel of his concentration, Xavier would have gone stone-cold berserk. He was confident in Wu Lin and her silent partner Magique, but that wasn’t the point: He needed focus as he sank into the control board’s master chair. From here, he could watch the layout of the entire dome, monitor the network running the live game, the simulation screens debugging the coming scenarios, and the holostage where his assistants were still modifying the body language for the video overlays.
Everything was in place and running, including all the Earthfeeds. The commercial contracts were long past executed. It was running, dammit. Everything was in place for a great game and Angelique’s savage humiliation if she stepped just one tiny toe over the line. And he knew she would. That would give him all the excuse he needed to kill her nine kinds of dead. Wayne Gibson he would torture more slowly. Kill him out? Hardly. Wayne would live every minute of the game, thrust into a leadership position and completely neutered, incompetence splashed across the solar system until he begged for a death that would not come. He would be the last surviving member of the team, a laughing stock until the day he died.
The world’s biggest audience, for the world’s biggest sporting event, and the world’s greatest revenge. And now this lame nonsense. So a player had had an accident, and someone had grabbed his ID to sneak into the game. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.
And there was another factor: Wasn’t the woman Kendra the ex-wife of one of the gamers? In which case, wasn’t it entirely possible that she was trying to manipulate the situation for her ex? What could their play be? Moving information or equipment into the dome? Breaking Xavier’s rhythm and concentration with some kind of trumped-up excuse? This “Foxworthy” guy was probably sitting back smoking a cigar. He might have actually entered the game, and the whole attempted murder was a distraction. “Oh, sorry,” they’d say later. “There was a misunderstanding…”
And there would go his game.
“Xavier?” Wu Lin said. “We’re about to start the obstacle course. Any last-second changes?”
He broke out of his self-induced coma and ran a checklist in his mind. “Everything’s fine. Let’s see if we can’t kill someone, shall we?”
Wu Lin smiled.
He knew there was only one thing she liked better than killing gamers, and that particular pleasure would wait for their post-game celebration. “Let’s do it.”
“Here we go. Climbing wall active. NPCs coded and standing by?”
“All at the ready,” Wu Lin said.
“Then three… two… one… and go. ”
But in the moment before he dropped back down into tunnel vision, he noted that the computer caught, just for a moment, a flash of unregistered body heat. Almost as if there were other people in the gaming dome, someone neither a technician nor an NPC. But it was only for an instant. Was there someone there, and had they cloaked? Or was it an artifact, just a ghost in their machine?
No time to hunt it down now. The game was afoot.
“Never, ever ever would I try to take a team up something like this,” Angelique said. She was staring up an airwell, a vertical rock tube leading up toward a wavering light. It was about five meters in diameter, studded with rocky nubs up as far as the eye could see. She held something like a polished crystal rock, the size of a hen’s egg. A little guidance device the Selenites had given her. The little flashing red light said it was time to climb.
“But the rules are different here?”
“It’s the Moon. Gravity is low enough that Asako can get her pod up the walls.” In fact, Xavier’s engineers would have to have allowed for Asako. Her pod was a political sop to disabled gamers, and an odd advantage: Once Asako had the go-ahead to enter the game, the layout had to be modified to allow her to play. That gave her a fractional Off the Grid advantage.
Asako’s little pod was already humming around the walls. “There seem to be grips here. The rock is soft enough for my claws, but too wide for the legs to hold me horizontal. I’ll have to climb vertically, but that puts me out of action until I can get back on horizontal. I’ll need coverage.”
Good news and bad news. So Asako’s bubble could climb, but while climbing, she’d be useless in a fight. So Mickey and Maud were right: They were about to get hammered.
“We’ll need two climbers to get up to the top. Drop a safety line to Asako. Then we can leave someone down here with her, climb, and work the line as her pod climbs.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Scotty Griffin said. “I could get up there, secure the line.”
“Then take point,” Angelique said.
For the first time since beginning the game, Scotty Griffin felt at home. Climbing was something he understood. The vertical shaft was about twenty meters high, with irregular boulder-shaped protrusions jutting from the sides. Asako Tabata’s pod would make it, but only just. It would require a gamer at each end, top and bottom, managing a line the entire time.
Why? As he began his climb, that question ticked at his mind. Yeah, maybe the Selenites just happen to have made it this way… but Angelique and Wayne both seemed to think that this guy Xavier had something ugly up his sleeve. If that was true, then if it took two people to control the pod, that functionally removed three people from the fight.
He could have made the climb under Earth Normal gravity, gripping with fingers, bracing feet, twisting this way and that to inch up a foot or so at a time. But here upper-body strength alone launched him up the tube to the next rock. His hand strength was more than sufficient to support his weight easily. This all would have been more fun if he didn’t expect an ambush at any moment.
Just before he reached the top, Scotty looked back down to see the faces tilted up at him, almost lost in the shadows. Showing off by hanging from one arm, he made an “okay” sign with a circled thumb and forefinger, and then scrambled up over the lip.
He had to crouch a little, because the rock ceiling was only six feet high and he didn’t want to bump his head. Glowing fungus lit the front of the chamber, which seemed only a dozen feet wide, but long enough to vanish into shadow. He paused, barely able to discern a scratching sound, something distant, but close enough to unnerve him. Oh, yes, there was something out there.
Scotty yelled down the hole for two more fighters to climb up, producing fast action from Wayne and Kikaya. The kid seemed to be having the time of his life, which was good: God knows it was costing him enough.
As soon as his backups arrived, Scotty unspooled a length of line and dropped it down the well. Angelique attached it to a tether point at the front of the pod, then a second line to the rear.
“What… maybe three hundred pounds Earth Normal?” he said. “About fifty pounds here. Only takes one of us to pull her up, if the other two are keeping guard.”
“I think you’re the strongest,” Wayne said. “Two thieves and a magic user. What say Ali and I take guard while you pull.”
His two companions took position on either side of the well, Ali making arcane hand gestures and torquing his body into strange, spiderlike positions. Have a ball, kid.
Now then. Only about fifty pounds to lift, but he wanted to give Asako a smooth ride. He set his heels, wound the line around his wrist to anchor it and began to pull. Smooth and steady did the trick. He almost wanted it to be harder.
“We’ve got company…,” Wayne whispered.
“I know. Ali?”
Ali hummed to himself, squatting to look into the shadows beyond the pale glow. “Many,” was all he said, voice just a little tense.
“How many is ‘many’?”
“Perhaps twenty. Or more. Hard to say.”
“How far?” Wayne asked.
Ali touched his temples. “We’ve got about a minute.”
Scotty pulled faster, and between pulls yelled down t
he hole. “As soon as Asako is up, get your butts up here!” Now he suddenly remembered his character and added: “The infidels are upon us!” feeling just a bit asinine.
Scrape, scrape. He looked over his right shoulder at Ali, who knelt, peering into the gloom. Scotty couldn’t see a thing. Then… he realized that he was looking in the wrong place. He was looking at the tunnel floor. Wrong. The ceiling swarmed with enemy.
Selenite locomotion was a bizarre cross between termites and human beings, and the only thing that had saved Scotty and his companions was that the enemy was moving gradually, carefully, and not at full swarm. Curious? Fearful?
Wayne couldn’t help himself. “Have you tried: ‘We come in peace’?”
The pod was almost up, the nose rising above the lip, and one more pull and Asako was up.
At the instant the pod’s treads bit into the lunar rock to right itself and take control, the Selenite warriors shrieked and swarmed.
“Get up here!” he screamed, pulled his sword, and the battle was on.
The Selenites bore no weapons, but their claws and jaws were threatening enough, and the humans were outnumbered six to one. When the first jumped, Ali spread his arms and screamed. Light flared from his chest. Scotty noted now, in the fullness of the light, that varicolored, hairy ringlets surrounded their necks. Blue, red and yellow, if the glimpse was accurate. The yellow-fringed Selenites screamed and shriveled before Ali’s onslaught, and three of them fell at once. But the others directly targeted Ali, came right at him. One grabbed his leg, which was instantly bathed in red light.
Ali yelled and kicked it away as Wayne leaped in, sword at the ready. By the time he got there, two more Selenites had grabbed hold of Ali, and Wayne had his hands full.
“Go!” Asako said through her loudspeakers. “I can guard this side.”
He didn’t waste time doubting her, but did snatch a glimpse down the well: The other gamers were coming up. He turned back around just in time for one of the Selenites to jump onto his chest. In lunar gravity, it didn’t weigh what he would have expected. In point of fact… it weighed nothing at all. A brief moment of surprise, then Scotty remembered that he was on camera, and stumbled back, screaming, “grabbed” the creature and threw it to the side.
It made a particularly satisfying splat against the wall, as if the thing was just a bag of green blood. He pivoted, pulling his antique pistol and firing point-blank at a spider Selenite as it dropped from the roof to the floor, catching it in midair. It squished, squealed and flopped back.
From the corner of his eye he caught Asako Tabata’s pod as it righted itself and went on the attack. Twin shotguns poked out of the nose of her craft, doing serious damage to what seemed an endless flood of Selenite bug critters. He saw some of them dropping down the hole, and heard cursing from below as the climbing gamers suddenly found themselves under attack. He saw the red-haired guide speared on a bolt of lightning, thrashing, her hair standing on end.
That must have been great fun. He almost wished he hadn’t volunteered to climb first.
Angelique Chan grimaced as her back slid against the pipe’s side. She lost some of her footing and fell two feet before managing to brace herself again. Damn that Xavier! You never attack gamers while they are climbing without safety lines… but considering the reduced lunar gravity, who really cared? Must have been a special dispensation from the IFGS. No more time to think, because Mickey and Maud and Sharmela, coming up behind her, were shrieking:
“They’re coming from down here, too!”
Angelique had managed to draw her sword, hardly her favorite weapon in such a confined space. The Selenite spiders snapped at her, scratched at her, and when she stabbed one, the yellowish ichor dripped down onto her face. Damn! It was real, and warm, and stank, but tasted like liquorice. Game-toxic, not real-toxic.
A little present from Xavier. She was going to murder that dwarf. Angelique spat out the gunk, and forced her way another few feet up the pipe, stabbed another Selenite and was relieved to find that this one was a hologram.
“Rule Britannia!” Mickey said, right beneath her, and the tube was suddenly filled with bright blue light. Selenites screamed and burst into flame, and ash fluttered down the tube, even as the afterimage from the flare partially blinded her. Angelique slid, but her foot hit Mickey’s head and he howled protest.
“Sorry!” she said and forced her way back up, charging now, stabbing if not slashing, and got one hand over the top. One arm was strong enough to pitch her entire body up, with the flare of an Olympic gymnast if not the balance. She wobbled on her toes and almost fell back down. At the last instant, Griffin stopped eviscerating Selenites and lent her a steadying hand.
Now there were four of them up top, two on each side of the pipe, and the entire tunnel was a sword-swinging, gun-blasting, Selenite-spider-splashing cacophony.
By the time Mickey and Maud made it up top, the battle was almost won. Below them in the pipe, curls of stinking blue smoke suggested that there was little left alive to hound them.
When the last Selenite fell, Angelique was horrified to see Sharmela leaning back against the wall, her hands clutched to a gaping wound in her midsection.
“Maud!” Angelique called. Maud was a primary psychic, with secondary healing powers.
Maud knelt by the wounded girl and ran her hands over the gash. “I don’t know, I truly fear, that Sharmela’s damage is severe.”
“There are healing forces here,” Sharmela gasped. “My powers tell me that”-she paused, probably listening to prompts in her earpiece-“a glowing fungus in the next airwell might… might help.”
She reached out with a bloody hand and gripped Angelique’s arm. “Please, don’t. I think it’s a trap.”
“I-”
And then the lights went out. The glowing fungus in the tunnel just died. The darkness that had been a mere inconvenience was now deep enough to swallow them. This wasn’t the game, it was a major power failure of some kind.
“I’ll be damned,” Angelique laughed. “Never seen this happen to Xavier before. He must be hopping.”
Their laughter had an odd, nervous edge. This was an occasion for genuine amusement. In a few minutes the backups would probably kick in, and then “Angelique,” Wayne said. “Someone’s coming.”
She stood and looked down the tunnel to her left. The darkness was parting now, and three… four flashlight-sized lamps were bobbling as the newcomers approached. What in the world was this? God, sounded like a major breakdown if they were inserting repairmen into the game.
“What a bleedin’ botch,” Mickey said under his breath. “Seen nothing like this since Bizarro World back in ’sixty-eight.”
“Well,” Maud said. “Considering the venue, I suppose you have to make allowances.”
“Stay where you are,” a male voice said. “And listen closely to what we say. If you follow our orders to the letter, no one will be hurt.”
She couldn’t quite place the accent, but understood the message instantly. “What’s wrong? Is there a breach?”
“You might say that,” the man said, and now, finally, she could see him. A huge man with flowing blond hair and a flat hard face. A fan of scars creased the left side of his throat. “All you need to know”-he said. His voice was pure gravel-“Is that your little game is over, and a new one has begun. The stakes are quite a bit higher.” He smiled, and by some unfathomable transformation became handsome. Dashing. The sudden change was quite disturbing. “In this game you win by not dying.”
23
Hostages
1125 hours
“What is this?” Ali asked. “Are you…” He searched for words. In the intense, bleaching light he looked young and lost. “Did Professor Cavor…” He was trying to work it out, make sense of it all in the framework of the game. “Who are you?”
Scotty Griffin’s nerves were burning. He put a hand on Ali’s shoulder and pulled him back, warned him to silence with a shake of his head.
“Very good,” the leader said. “I don’t mind you knowing my name. Before this is all over, everyone on Earth will, and I’ll never be able to use it again anyway. I am Shotz.”
Confusion, not panic, was Scotty’s dominant emotion as their attackers herded the gamers into a room perhaps twenty meters across. This bubble had no Wellsian motif, just a domed space littered with boxes, equipment and costumes.
Prince Ali tensed as the intruders ordered them about, seemed about to swell up like a frog. The wrong damned time to be imperious. Scotty gripped his arm until Ali winced, gave him a quick, warning shake. Not now.
“Move! Move!” The blond woman who looked like a biker angel said the words calmly, but there was a kind of frenzy under the surface, well-leashed. For now. She held some kind of jerry-rigged air gun, and Scotty didn’t want to test her speed or accuracy.
He thought he heard this “Shotz” character call her Celeste.
Even though the gamers, NPCs and techs were herded efficiently, their captors missed one. Just one.
Darla Kowsnofski, killed out right on schedule, had been creeping through back passages, avoiding gamers on her way to an NPC holding area, when the intruders showed up. Now she crouched in a shadow, prying at the edge of a hidden hatch. Muttering a prayer.
Darla cursed herself for a coward. Should she try to help someone else escape? Or just take care of herself, and consider that victory enough? Even as an awkward honor student at Oklahoma State, Darla had always thought of herself as a good person. She had always had more confidence in her mind than in her generous, well-cushioned body… and that mind had taken her all the way to Heinlein. But at this moment all she wanted was to be somewhere dark, and alone, and away from the people with guns. And God help her, there was no part of her that felt guilty about it.
“Please, please, please,” she whispered, prying at the panel. Just before she gave up hope it slid open an inch. She got her finger under it, levered it up, slipped in and was gone.