Soda Pop Soldier

by Nick Cole

  I’m pretty sure the captain has to say that, as per company protocol. But the look that goes with it says, Give me another option and I’ll take it.

  When Carter and the Lufthansa captain leave the suite, I toggle the mic back to live.

  “What do you want?”

  “Everything, PerfectQuestion. I want . . . everything. You know that already. But before I can have everything, you need to be dead. So you can either throw yourself off the cargo deck . . . I have a file I can upload to show you exactly how to override the security parameters to do it because I know Krupp-Lufthansa would never even think of doing such a thing. Or I can board the plane with my recently hired Greater Africa Coalition mercenary team, out of Djibouti, and shoot you in the head. But there’s going to be some awfully messy bloodshed with that plan, I assure you. Or I can shoot down the whole plane. But apparently, that’ll cost extra.”

  The Fasten Seat Belts sign flashes across my desktop.

  “Why don’t you just fight fair, for once.” I pause, letting that sink in. Like it should mean something to him. “You’ll feel better about winning. If you can, that is.”

  He laughs at me. It’s long, slow, and the worst, most humorless laugh I’ve ever heard. It goes on for an uncomfortably long amount of time. “I never fight fair,” he says on a sigh and wipes his brow. “That would be disadvantageous. To me.”

  “Do what you want, Mercator, but I’m going to beat WonderSoft today.” I cut the chat link. He must have been trailing Kiwi’s traffic and found me when I contacted him yesterday.

  The Fasten Seat Belts sign flashes across the desktop again. The speakers in the suite are suddenly hijacked as the sounds of make-believe war and gunfire are interrupted by the very real Skyliner captain, announcing the very real situation. I hear a woman screaming as the Skyliner begins to roll side to side, and then back to level flight again. The pilot’s probably attempting to keep the hijackers from establishing a connection for their boarding plane.

  I return back to the desktop. Chatter and casualty counts come at me in waves above the on-screen machine gunfire and rocket rounds WonderSoft is shooting at us like there’s a sale on rocket-propelled grenades and they’ve cleaned out the store.

  Which is exactly what I want them to do. That the next few minutes will be intense is an understatement.

  “JollyBoy, stand by to push their right flank. We’re counterattacking with everything we’ve got.”

  I hope Mercator doesn’t know the real plan. I hope JollyBoy is the traitor. Otherwise . . . this is it.

  “Moving in to pick up the grunts. Will drop them on the TV tower far side of the bridge,” says RiotGuurl over BattleChat for JollyBoy’s benefit. Her Albatross’s turbines whine in the background as she makes her approach to the staging LZ.

  “Once that’s done, come back and airlift the rest of us onto the tower, roger?” I say, waiting for a reply as WonderSoft’s gunfire grows cacophonous. All around me, ColaCorp machine-gun teams are pouring unreal amounts of fire into the WonderSoft positions on the far side of the bridge. Parts of the building I’m in are exploding inward as RPGs smash into the simulated brickwork.

  “Anything you want . . . ,” says RiotGuurl as an antiair alert suddenly blares in the background of her transmission. A second later, distracted, she finishes, “You got it, PerfectQuestion.” I hear the Albatross’s VTOL thrusters straining above her squadron’s comm traffic.

  I’m frozen. All of it, everything, makes sense now.

  Anything you want, you got it.

  Tatiana.

  RiotGuurl asking me my name. John Saxon.

  The same John Saxon holding a ticket on a Krupp-Lufthansa Trade Jet.

  I open a BattleCam feed to JollyBoy. In front of me, a WonderSoft grenade rolls into the building we’ve shifted into. I jump and throw myself behind some stacked ammo cases. The grenade goes off, killing all the grunts nearby. Two WonderSoft troopers enter the warehouse spraying automatic gunfire everywhere.

  “JollyBoy, reporting for duty, sir!” he says over chat, oblivious to the gunfight on my end.

  I raise my rife and fire a rapid burst into the chest of one WonderSoft grunt as the other fires, hitting me in the left arm. I’m down and bleeding, my screen red with damage.

  “I say, JollyBoy reporting as ordered, fearless leader!”

  I pop a concussion grenade and fling it over the distance between me and the WonderSoft grunts, spraying bullets everywhere as the entire room is torn to shreds. When the grenade goes bang, I empty my magazine into both softies.

  “Fever, where are you, I’m hit at second position for command team, marking my position on your HUD now.”

  “On my way!” is Fever’s reply over BattleChat. In the background of his transmission I hear the rattle of nearby small-arms fire. I hear the rising whine of shock paddles recharging as he gets another of my grunts moving.

  “Perfect, mate.” It’s Kiwi. “We’ve got WonderSoft insurgents on this side of the river. They’re infiltrating our positions.”

  “I know,” I reply. “They just tried and died at my loc. Order all units to keep an eye out for them.”

  “Jolly, you there?” I call out over a private chat link between the two of us.

  “Yes,” he says, theatrically bored. “Proceeding with counterattack through the isthmus, meeting little or no resistance.”

  “I thought you were the traitor . . .” I don’t have time for anything else. The Skyliner is banking so steeply that suite decor is falling from the bookshelves. Then we level out. A moment later, a dull metallic clamp reverberates through the hull of the massive trade jet.

  “Security teams stand by to repel boarders,” says a monotone military voice over the intercom, interrupting the suite speaker’s broadcast of the end of the world warfare going on inside WarWorld.

  “Frankly, PerfectQuestion . . . I am shocked and hurt. A murderous psychopath, yes, of course. But I have standards, and one of which is: a friend in need is a friend indeed. I’d have to be a sociopath to be a traitor. I’m a psychopath. There’s a difference, believe me. Psychopaths believe in something, even if that something’s not actually real.”

  “Where’s RiotGuurl’s Albatross?” I interrupt, cutting off his rising monologue on the nature of mental illnesses. My screen is pulsing red and I have no time to waste.

  I’ve got seconds left before I bleed out without medical attention.

  Outside, in-game, the gunfire along the bridge and warehouses is achieving rock concert levels. Everyone is using everything they’ve got to kill everybody.

  “Her Albatross is approaching the staging LZ . . . ,” says JollyBoy.

  “Listen to me, Jolly, I want you to shoot her down, right now. Do you have an antiair kit nearby?”

  “Do I have rockets? I’ve got loads of ’em, my boy. Now where did I put that rocket? Brass knuckles. Whoopee cushion. Sniper rifle. Ahhhh . . . rocket. Shoot her down, you say? Remember, as a court-certified psychopath, I can’t do it without a reason. See I’m a psychopath not a sociopath. If I were a sociopath . . .”

  “She’s a traitor! She’s been selling us out to WonderSoft!”

  Over the BattleCam feed, I hear the lock-on whine of Jolly’s antiair kit, and a second later the missile shrieks away distantly with a sound-ripping whooosh.

  “ . . . it wouldn’t be a matter for discussion,” continues JollyBoy. “I’d just do it. As a sociopath, that is. Now why am I shooting her down?”

  In my command management screen, I watch RiotGuurl’s status move from Active to KIA.

  Killed in Action.

  “Jolly, I need you to lead those troops right into the center of the battle here at the bridge. Forget the right flank and head for the bridge! You shouldn’t meet any resistance. They’re expecting those troops somewhere else.”

  “No resistance!” erupts JollyBoy. “I like those odds.”

  Switching to BattleChat I ask, “Kiwi, what’s the situation at the bridge?”

&
nbsp; Fever crashes through the shot-to-hell warehouse door and throws out a health pack near me.

  My health meter starts to rise slowly.

  “Kiwi, it was RiotGuurl all along. She was the traitor. What’s your status?”

  “Uh . . . doesn’t look good, mate,” says Kiwi. “We’ve got WonderSoft heavy infantry buttoned up all over the far side of the bridge. Good news is, they’re not getting much farther than that. It’s a stalemate, for now.”

  A stalemate means a loss, for us.

  “Do you think you can punch through their line? JollyBoy’s going to attack from our right flank straight into their center. If we can link up with him, we might be able to turn this around.”

  There’s a pause, then, “I’ll do it.”

  “Pick me and Fever up and order all units to follow us across the bridge. We’re going on the offensive. Set the overall objective to the palazzo on the far side of the bridge near the tollbooths.”

  I hear machine-gun fire, hard and metallic, nearby.

  It isn’t in-game.

  “Palazzo?” asks Kiwi.

  This is real. The boarding party is inside the Skyliner.

  “The big open area between the warehouses and the bridge on the far side.” The palazzo was back at the tower in the Black. The plaza is on the far side of the bridge in WarWorld near the space-age TV tower. My gaming lives are beginning to overlap.

  “Oh . . . that’s what that’s called,” he says.

  Trixie the sky hostess opens the door to the suite and closes it behind her quickly, leaning on the door as if that might help stop the bullets.

  “The captain is telling the lower decks to hit the escape pods,” she pants breathlessly. “I was told to come to your suite and tell you to remain here. The Hindenburg Class Survival System will protect all the occupants of all the executive suites in the event of a crash.”

  That sounds like something she read somewhere once.

  I don’t ask her if it will protect us from heavily armed African mercenaries with state-of-the-art submachine guns. Outside the Skyliner, the two matte-black fighter jets hold their place just above the wide bat wing of the trade jet.

  On-screen, Kiwi’s Mule rolls up in a pixelated cloud of digital dust and grit, twin Hauser machine guns in the mount of his vehicle chattering away at distant targets on the far side of the bridge, keeping everyone’s head down. Fever and I hit E on our keyboards and swing into the backseat of Kiwi’s Mule.

  “Straight through ’em, mate?”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “Straight through ’em.”

  There’s a high likelihood we’ll all be killed shortly.

  “All right then.” He guns the turbocharged engine and swings the fat-tired Mule around, accelerating toward the mouth of the suspension bridge. I bring up my CommandPad and order my machine-gun teams to concentrate their fire on the far side of the bridge. WonderSoft troopers are being ventilated right and left as we swerve through the first barricade. One of the WonderSoft troopers lobs a grenade at us and we roll over it. Seconds later, it explodes underneath the other Mule that’s following us, sending it skyward behind us. I unload a full magazine into a WonderSoft machine gunner who stands up firing as we pass. A bullet storm ragdolls him against the walls of the entrance to the bridge.

  We enter the lower level, swerving through abandoned cars and barricades. Our Mule is already smoking and down to 35 percent integrity. Still, it’s moving. Kiwi’s avatar yanks the wheel hard to make a narrow entrance ramp onto the upper deck. Orange cones scatter across both lanes as the wide panorama of the sky and suspension cables leaps into view. Two ColaCorp Dragonfly hunter-killer jets from the carrier group streak overhead and drop their payloads inside the far plaza. They split, as one rolls over onto its back to watch the damage done below. Green WonderSoft AA tracer fire chases after the other.

  “Why the upper deck?” I ask Kiwi. “We’ll be exposed.”

  “They’ve set charges on every pylon below,” he shouts over BattleChat. “They mean to blow the bridge if they know we’re crossing.”

  “Aren’t they more likely to see us up here on the top deck?” I ask.

  “Sure, mate. But the explosives’ll kill us outright down there. Up here we’ve at least got a second or two to react. By the way, Question . . .” Kiwi yanks the wheel hard and dodges a hail of bright gunfire screaming down around us from an inbound WonderSoft close-air-support Vampire. “What’re we gonna do once we get to the other side of the bridge? We’ll be outnumbered, surrounded, and cut off, mate.”

  I’m still considering what he means by “reacting,” on a collapsing suspension bridge.

  In the suite, Trixie touches her ear and says something. She turns to me. “They’ve made it to the galley. The captain says it’s time to secure the suite. We might have to eject shortly.” She begins murmuring procedures softly to herself. Procedures she once learned in a classroom and never thought she’d need in real life. She opens a panel in the ceiling and detaches two oxygen masks with hoses connected to the inside of the panel. She dons one and then begins to strap the other to my head.

  LOG OUT, NOW!!!!, PerfectQuestion!!! erupts in all caps within the small chat window at the bottom of my desktop.

  I ignore Mercator.

  On-screen back in WarWorld, I’m telling the fire teams on our side of the river to hold position. I don’t want them crossing the bridge now, in case WonderSoft does decide to blow it to kingdom come. Which they really should, if they just want a win. But what they really want is an epic victory. To do that, they’ll need to cross the river and set up missile emplacements to take out our carrier task force.

  I contact RangerSix.

  “Listen, Six, we’re going for it. JollyBoy isn’t the traitor . . . it was RiotGuurl all along.” Another WonderSoft Vampire comes in low and strafes the bridge. Explosions and bright ricochets of ball ammunition chew up the roadway and bridgeworks. “Jolly’s leading the reserves,” I continue once the jet streaks off to the north. “Into the center . . . from our right flank. I need you to ask ColaCorp for that roll now, Six.”

  “Hang on!” screams Kiwi over BattleChat, as shape charges start exploding in front of us at the far end of the bridge, snapping looming support pylons in half. I look behind us and see that the entire bridge is collapsing in sections. Immediately, one side of the road drops away and Kiwi follows its curve.

  “Negative on that roll at this time, PerfectQuestion,” says RangerSix. “Be advised, I am inbound from the carrier group with a patrol boat flotilla. We will support you in ten from the river.”

  Ten minutes is forever in the world of collapsing bridges while speeding head-on into the enemy’s front line. Ten minutes is a clock that never moves.

  Ten minutes.

  Ace-in-the-hole time. I authorize my tagged ColaCorp Special Forces reserve unit to enter the battle via dropship. I select an LZ near the TV tower and order them to take the lobby.

  Kiwi steers the whining turbocharged Mule down the curve of the collapsing roadway and onto the bottom level. We pass through a wall of flames and darkness. Ahead, I see the gray concrete sodium-lit tollbooths of the exit on the far side of the bridge. WonderSoft troopers are running from the mouth, away from us. WonderSoft has detonated the Song Hua Bridge with their own troops still inside.

  Right then, for no real reason that a bookie or banker might accept as collateral, I know we have a chance to win this one today.

  They’d freaked out and blown the bridge with their own troops inside.

  They’re worried.

  Over in-game ambient, the sounds of steel supergirders bending, twisting, then finally shearing, rise above the fading clash of explosions and small-arms fire. Finally, the whole bridge starts to go over onto its side and into the river as we slam through the tollbooth barrier, sparks flying. Fishtailing, the Mule tips over onto its side and comes to a skidding stop at the bottom of the ramp, out in the open.

  There’s gunfire everywhere.

&nb
sp; The space-age TV tower rises up out of the flat concrete jungle that is Song Hua Harbor on the far side of the industrial park. A WonderSoft mobile command cluster is set up at the base of the tower.

  “Sir,” says MarineSgtApone over the chat. I hear the high pitch of a dropship’s engines in the background. I can also hear the whoops of the other Colonial Marines, excited to get into the fight on live network TV. I can trust them. They’ll go all the way. They’re my ace in the hole. “We are thirty seconds out, sir. What’s the status of the LZ?”

  “It’s practically on fire, Sergeant. Got a problem with that?”

  “No, sir. That’s just how we like it.” Then I hear him open the Platoon chat and shout “Lock and load, Marines! Looks like they’re expecting us.”

  We exit the overturned smoking Mule. Fever, Kiwi, and I. We’re half a click over open ground from the entrance to the TV tower. WonderSoft is shooting at us from almost every direction.

  “Cover me!” Kiwi’s hulking avatar runs forward with his ever ready BrowningNox Integrated Systems 5.56 light machine gun. Fever and I take opposite sides of the overturned Mule and pour covering fire into the soft skins of the WonderSoft command vehicles.

  Bullets whip past our heads and begin to ricochet off the underside of the wrecked Mule. Behind us, the few WonderSoft units that made it out of the collapsed bridge are firing at us.

  Rock and a hard place.

  Fever takes carefully aimed shots at the WonderSoft troopers attacking us from the rear. I concentrate on covering Kiwi with short bursts as he moves up toward the command cluster, unloading his entire belt of ammo, as brass flies away from his avatar in a steady stream over his right shoulder. Pinned-down WonderSoft support and command troopers peek out from behind command vehicles, attempting to nail Kiwi with wild, unaimed bursts of automatic gunfire.

  I give them something to think about as I unload a full magazine of armor-piercing rounds into one of their light-skinned messenger Mules. It catches fire and quickly explodes, sending bodies in every direction. Soon enough, Kiwi’s lobbing grenades through the squat octagonal hatches of the larger command and control armored personnel carriers.