Heart pounding, Carlos jumped at the sudden sound. “What is it?”
“I’ve got a situation.” He was whispering.
Carlos scanned his data panels. Everything was okay with Jaq in the executive suite. But the dot on the map that represented Blue was moving down the ramp toward the basement.
Where Scooter sat in his mobichair.
“Okay, don’t panic. Just keep absolutely silent and he won’t know you’re there.” Carlos paged through the security cameras until he found one that showed Scooter, still goggled up and bent over his keyboard.
“The fucking sim doesn’t include the fucking basement,” Scooter whispered. “In about ten seconds he’s going to walk into a blank gray void.”
Carlos’s heart stopped. “Put up a wall. Make it a dead end.”
“No time.” Carlos heard the keyboard clattering. “Once he rounds that corner he’ll know he’s in a sim. He’ll tell his buddies. They’ll open their faceplates.”
On the atrium video, Red stood with employees tiptoeing past him. Weapons pods on his shoulders twitched, tracking the motion, but the wearer was oblivious. For now.
“Get out of there!”
“He’s between me and the ramp.” More keys clattered. “I’ve taken him out of the sim for now, returning his real video feed.”
“But he’ll see you!”
“We cannot let them find out they’re in a sim.” In the executive suite, Green paced back and forth, guns lev eled at the prone employees. “I’m reprogramming the hack to resume the sim automatically after he captures me and takes me upstairs.”
Carlos heard a whine of servos, the thud of metal feet on a concrete floor. The blue-banded battle suit stepped into view on the basement security camera, its head barely clearing the ceiling. “Hands up!” the amplified voice commanded.
Scooter kept typing furiously away.
“Do what he says!” Carlos said.
“Hang on . . .” Scooter muttered low, still typing.
“I said, hands up!” the battle suit said, and pointed its forearm gun.
“He’ll kill you!”
The battle suit took a step toward Scooter. “Step away from the keyboard now!”
“Done!” Scooter said, and began to raise his hands from the keyboard.
Too late. The machine gun clattered, and Scooter fell over backwards, the noise of his chair’s crash lost in the larger sound.
“Scooter!”
The rattle of the machine gun went on and on.
On the security camera view, the battle suit steps out onto the third-floor elevator landing. Carlos ducks his avatar out of sight around a corner, leading the intruder toward the Secret Annexe.
As he dodges and weaves his avatar through the third floor’s warren of rooms and halls, Carlos begins to feel the battle suit’s heavy steps through the floor beneath his chair. Only about five meters away now. Heading right toward him.
Isn’t there any alternative?
Not anymore. Maybe there never was.
Carlos strips off his gloves and headset and heads for the door.
Blinking back tears that he couldn’t wipe away because of the goggles, Carlos focused on getting the employees out. Now, instead of matching the real world, he had to maintain a plausible fiction. As Red continued to stomp around, not realizing he was in a simulation, Carlos moved the avatars on the floor in the same way the real people had reacted. But it wasn’t hard, and as he worked most of his brain was free to concentrate on other things.
Like revenge.
At last all the employees had left, Paul easing the door closed behind the last one. “We’re all outside,” he said a minute later. His signal was weak but he was still within range of the building’s wireless network. “Cops aren’t here yet.”
“Don’t call them,” Carlos said. “Let us handle it.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a plan.” He cut Paul off. “Jaq, listen up. We’re going to put these bastards into an instance dungeon.”
After he’d outlined his plan, Jaq said “Well, the execs aren’t moving around very much; if I leave them alone for a little while Blue might not notice. But I still think you’re crazed. Can’t we just change the map so he, like, walks out a window?”
“Not without Scooter. Got any other bright ideas?”
A long pause. “No.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
Carlos waits, balanced on the rough and guano-spotted wooden beam, his heart pounding nearly as loud as the heavy tread of metal footsteps below him. In one hand he holds a wadded ball of tape and paper: the DANGER— KEEP OUT sign from the second door. Under the other arm he clutches the flat-panel display from his desk.
For the first time in years, he breathes a prayer and means it.
They took a few minutes to discuss strategy and prepare the avatars and macros they’d need. During the conversation Carlos kept one eye on Blue, the one who’d killed Scooter. He had returned to the executive suite—back in the sim and apparently oblivious to that fact—and sent Green out on patrol in his place.
Murderer.
“Okay,” Jaq said at last. “I’m ready.”
Carlos looked at the real-world map, judging the distances of the dots representing Red and Green from the loading dock. “All right, you go first.”
He heard Jaq take a breath. “Here I go.”
In the data pane showing Red’s simulated view, Jaq’s avatar—with a shaven head, as in her badge photo, rather than the dreadlocks she sported today—ran into view, cutting across the corner of the atrium. Making tracks toward the back of the building.
“Hey!” Red called over the heads of the simulated employees. In real life, the battle suit stood in an empty atrium. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Jaq’s avatar just kept running.
Red loosed a burst of machine-gun fire over Jaq’s bald pate, but she just put her head down and ran harder. A moment later she was out of sight. “Damn it!” Red said, and took off in pursuit, the battle suit’s feet pounding the floor.
Jaq took advantage of being momentarily out of sight to move her avatar ten meters farther down the corridor. When Red rounded the corner, he let out a gawp of surprise at the lead Jaq had gained, and ran full-out, pushing the battle suit to its limits. Good. Moving fast, reacting to circumstances, he wouldn’t have time to stop and think about what was happening.
Carlos looked at the map. Time for him to make his move. He brought his own avatar out from a doorway right in front of Green, made it jump in surprise, and took off running. Green didn’t hesitate—he fired right at the avatar. Bastard. Carlos made the avatar stumble, but kept going. Leaving a trail of blood would be a nice touch but he didn’t have the time for that.
It was just like slaying dragons in Chaos World. You had to stay just inside their “aggro radius”—close enough to annoy them but not close enough for them to get you—to keep them chasing you until the rest of your party could jump them from behind.
Dividing his attention between the maps and the first-person view from his own avatar, Carlos kept running. Four dots on the sim map: Red chasing Jaq, Green chasing Carlos. Two dots on the real-world map: Red and Green moving toward the loading dock. Carlos kept his avatar just in Green’s sight as they raced through the empty corridors of the simulation, trying to make sure Red and Green arrived at the loading dock at the exact same instant. The three intruders were yelling at each other in his headphones but he tuned it out as much as he could.
Then Carlos charged his avatar around the corner and onto the dock while Jaq did the same from the other direction. Jaq’s avatar gave Carlos a thumbs-up before vanishing. The two battle suits came barreling into the loading dock right behind them.
Instead of the other battle suit, what each intruder saw in his hacked, simulated view was a four-legged, heavily-armored antiriot mech.
Green swore. Red gasped. Simultaneously they launched missiles.
With a tremendous bang, loud even in the Se
cret Annexe three stories and half the building away, both battle suits vanished in a black cloud of smoke.
With a crash that sends a cloud of dust and scattered papers wafting through the open door below Carlos, Blue enters the Secret Annexe. “Where are you, you little fucker!” he calls, and now Carlos feels the amplified voice in his chest, not just through his headphones.
Carlos squats on a beam above the door. The wall and ceiling behind him are nothing but plasterboard. If Blue decides to fire his machine gun through the wall, Carlos won’t have a chance.
He hurls the flat-panel display.
In the cracked and stuttering security camera view, two smoldering piles of wreckage stood where the battle suits had been. The operators might or might not have survived, but the threat was eliminated.
“What’s happened?” Blue called. “Report! Report, damn you!”
“Good job,” Carlos said to Jaq. “Time for you to head downstairs. Good luck.”
“You’re crazed,” she replied. But a moment later Carlos felt her hand squeeze his shoulder, then heard the door open and close.
Carlos took a breath. Two down, one to go. He waited until Jaq appeared in the doorway of the executive suite, then he walked his avatar into Blue’s sight at the end of a long corridor on the other side. “Hey!” he called, waving.
The battle suit’s head came up and it turned toward Carlos’ avatar. Now most of the executives were behind it. In the security camera view, Jaq began shooing them toward the door; in the sim, their avatars remained on the floor. But Yao and two others were between the battle suit and Carlos and couldn’t see Jaq; they remained prone in both views.
“Hey, asshole!” Carlos called, and sauntered his avatar down the corridor. It was just like hunting dragons. You had to get inside their aggro radius.
But dragons didn’t have hostages. Blue lowered his forearm gun to point at Yao; it was the same in both views. “Put your hands up and lie on the floor, or this man dies.”
“You wanna know what happened to your two buddies?” Carlos kept walking, with a jaunty swagger calculated to commandeer Blue’s attention. He was glad he didn’t have to do anything more than sit in his chair and wiggle his fingers to do it, because his trembling legs probably wouldn’t even support him right now. “I killed ’em!”
Blue hesitated. On the security camera, Jaq scuttled to one side and waved for Yao’s attention. Yao caught the signal and began creeping toward her, keeping one eye on the gun—which remained pointed at Yao’s unmoving avatar. The other two executives followed.
Carlos leaned against the corridor wall with his legs crossed. “Wanna know how I did it?”
The battle suit’s servos whined as it raised the gun toward Carlos. Behind it, Jaq and the three executives vanished through the door.
“With magic!” He waved his hands, triggering a preprogrammed macro, and the corridor immediately filled with smoke. The machine gun chattered wildly, spraying bullets through Carlos’ avatar. He hoped none of them ricocheted.
A moment later the smoke cleared.
The room was now empty of executives in both views.
Blue made an inarticulate sound of rage.
“Can’t catch me!” Carlos yelled, then turned and ran, moving with superhuman speed. Bullets rattled through the space where he’d been.
Behind him he heard the suit’s thundering footsteps, and the dot on the map began to move. Away from the crowd of dots representing Jaq and the retreating executives.
It was a long way from the executive suite to the Secret Annexe, and Carlos had to pace himself, keeping his avatar just far enough ahead of Blue that the intruder would keep chasing and not stop to think. Meanwhile, the real-world map and the security cameras showed Jaq herding the executives out of the office, out of the building, out of danger.
Only two dots left on the map now.
The flat-panel display lands with a crash on the water-logged, rotting lath floor of the unimproved attic space beyond the Secret Annexe.
The Mark IV’s helmet isn’t exactly soundproof. Blue reacts immediately, charging through the door beneath Carlos, the battle suit so wide and tall that the door frame smashes to bits as he passes through it.
For the first time Carlos sees the suit with his own eyes. The scarred metal and lumpy brown paint—and the smell of it, gunpowder and grease and ozone sharp in his nostrils—are right below his feet.
Blue steps onto the ancient, blackened attic floor, which creaks beneath the battle suit’s weight but holds.
Carlos wills the rotted floor to collapse. He’d been so certain it would.
He’d been wrong.
The helmet turns from side to side. “The hell?” he says, and lifts his faceplate. He’s stepped outside the sim and knows it.
Carlos’s heart hammers. He’s all out of options now.
The battle suit turns. The face inside the opened helmet is Anglo, with a black beard and cold gray eyes. He looks up and meets Carlos’ terrified gaze with a satisfied grin.
He raises the machine gun. Takes one step forward.
And falls right through the floor.
The heavy battle suit crashes through the rotted flooring, fractures the beams beneath that, and smashes through the plasterboard and lighting fixtures beneath that. Below that, only air. Blue goes sailing down, down, down . . . three stories down, to smash on the concrete floor of the atrium.
Carlos sighs and lets himself fall back onto the roof of the Secret Annexe. Sweat cools under his arms.
Far below there is a sound like rain, as bits of plaster and metal patter on the little umbrella of the atrium’s cappuccino stand.
Carlos ducked under the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape and crunched across the basement floor. Shell casings and fragments of concrete lay everywhere.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. He should be answering questions, or filling out forms, or talking with the police psychologist. The psychologist would have a fit if she knew he was here. But he’d taken advantage of the chaos upstairs to duck out and see with his own eyes the place where Scooter had died.
They’d already removed the body, and the shattered mobichair with it. But a splash of drying blood stained the concrete floor, and Scooter’s broken headset lay next to it. Carlos knelt and picked the headset up, gently replacing it on the desk next to the keyboard.
Near Scooter’s keyboard stood a framed photograph, five soldiers in desert camouflage. The one in the middle was Scooter, younger and thinner and standing on his own two feet. An engraved plaque at the bottom read 717TH EEOD—TEAM CARNAGE and the photo bore four signatures, each accompanied by a handwritten note. “Thanks Sarge!” read one. “You got us back safe!”
“Thanks, Scooter,” Carlos whispered. “You done good.”
BEING PLAYED
Steven E. Schend
“The four of you have escaped from captivity. You have crawled out onto a rocky outcrop that lets air into the cliffside dungeons. The whipping wind makes you shiver, since you only have your prison loincloths. Below you is an outdoor temple—a concentric series of steps around a dais with five black stone spires around its edge. Centered on the dais is an altar to which you can see a prisoner chained, disemboweled, his torso laid open.
“The Star Mage Dalnoth’s laughter fills your ears until the thunder overwhelms it. The ashen-faced old man stands behind the gory altar, power crackling from the twitching corpse to the five spires around them. He howls, ‘Come, acolytes, and receive Nyrandrull’s Afusmal—take power from your enemies’ veins!’
“Boiling out of the shadows, a score of men and women surround the dais. One by one, each kneels to receive Dalnoth’s blessing. The old man plunges his hands into the cadaver, then clasps hands around his acolyte’s upraised left fist. A cold green light shines among the three hands before he releases his hold. Then, he smears Nyrandrull’s mark on each person’s forehead. Each acolyte walks away, eyes glowing with power and blood drying on their hands and faces.
“I thought Star Mages claimed to be the most civilized of spell casters,” one of the four wondered aloud.
“He’s supplemented his power by becoming a priest of Nyrandrull as well—that’s where that blood ritual came from . . .”
“Hsst! Whispers or they’ll hear us! I’m looking around for something to throw to disrupt the ritual.”
“Only pebbles or what you stole off the guards, Aram.”
The elder of the group interrupted. “They’re iron short swords if they’re Impral-standard issue, right? What color is the rock here?”
“One is a short sword, Kamlar. The other is a Pral keshi mace. And all the rock is black with a dull luster to it. Caena and Osax?”
The two exchanged a look after seeing Kamlar grin widely, and then Caena spoke. “We’re waiting to see what Kamlar’s hatching . . .”
“Fine. While you’re waiting, two more acolytes gain power from Dalnoth. Aram, you find two rocks you might be able to throw. Careful, though—their edges are quite sharp. Kamlar?”
“The black rock is ashyx. It shatters in sheets if you hit it right—you two” he said, pointing at Caena and Osax, “can use the sword to make more weapons. I’m going to give Aram something better to throw. I’ll charge the mace with magic . . .”
“I’m going to slide back into the tunnel and see if I can break off some ashyx, then.”
“Fine, Osax. Caena, what are you doing?”
“I’m out of magic, unless . . . Can we call our bond-animals?”
“Not without alerting the mages to your presence. Kamlar, that mace is made of Dosan bronze. Its chances of surviving the spell infusion are slim . . .”
“If Aram’s aim is true, we won’t need it later.Throw it at the closest spire’s center. Once that hits, subtlety’s done, so that’s when Caena and I can call our familiars.”
Rattling sounds drew the quartet’s attentions. “Osax, you chipped off a blade-sized stone shard. You can wrap a belt around one end to wield it without cutting your hand. Unfortunately, the short sword got wedged in the stone and won’t budge.”
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