by Isaac Stone
“Welcome to the first Killstreak game,” the face told him. “You’ll see more in a few minutes. I want to take a minute to thank everyone again for agreeing to play in the tournament. Oh, one final thing, there are now ninety-nine of you. Ms. Rachel Silverman was eliminated last night when we picked up a signal she tried to broadcast out of her room. My company will not tolerate any violation of the rules of the game or personal conduct when on the premises.”
“Now that I see you are in complete operation,” the face continued, “It is time to get you into the game. Fight well and have a good time.” The face faded away.
Kurt felt the buzz of the gloves under his fingers and tried to clench them. His fingers met with solid resistance and he knew they were responding to a weapon carried by one of the battle robots he would command in today’s game. He moved up one arm and felt resistance. He felt heat on it, which meant they were sent into the local desert, just as they predicted last night. The speakers next to his head crackled and Kurt knew the screen in front of his face would show the terrain where the three of them would engage in combat.
This would be a new experience. Up until now, he’d fought in a computer-simulated environment. This time he’d be in the open air fighting against physical bots, even though the Ares program would make them appear to be something else. He speculated on what this would resemble, and then decided to wait and see.
“Ten seconds till insertion,” a voice called out from his speakers. “Eight, nine, seven…” He watched the countdown on the screen inside his helmet.
Kurt could feel the weapon in his hand better. It had to be some kind of fully automatic one from the weight. He didn’t care; the money he’d win from this tournament would allow him to buy all he wanted.
“We need a name for the team,” he heard Lavon speak into his ear. The audio system worked better than he expected.
“How about ‘Three Skulls’?” Jesse responded as the screen began to focus on the landscape.
“Nope,” Lavon responded. “Somebody took that one already.”
“How about ‘Triple Skulls’?” Jesse countered.
“That works.”
Kurt was a bit irritated they didn’t ask for his input, but held off and didn’t say a word. Besides, it was a good choice.
The landscape faded into recognition and he saw the barren sand dunes in front of him. Kurt almost focused his eyes a second time on what was before him. This was far better than any computer simulation. The sun glared off the rocks around him and he could feel the air dry his sweat away. His suit increased temperature to match his surroundings.
The screen continued to count the time down to insertion via the small clock in the corner. It flicked out, but Kurt new all he needed to do to bring it back was issue a voice command.
He smiled at the assault rifle in his hands. Beautiful. It was an AR-1015, one of the best ones on the market. Equipped with a range finder and optical guidance meter, it was a thing of beauty and death. He tried to remember how many shots it could fire on full auto, but set it back to semi-automatic as he didn’t want to waste ammunition. In this mode, the screen wouldn’t tell him how much he had left. It expected him to check the magazine or keep track in his head.
Kurt turned and looked at Lavon next to him. She appeared in all her glory, with full body armor and the same gun in her hands. He looked at her webbing and saw two survival knives dangle from it. Wasn’t one good enough? To his right was Jesse, also an angel of death in her gear. Both of them had desert cameo on, so he assumed he’d wear the same. Kurt looked down at his tan boots. Although his sense of feeling was limited by what the skinsuit conveyed, it felt as if he was in someone else’s body.
He couldn’t even tell the difference between the mechanical fighting bot they controlled and the images overlaid on the two women. There were a few blurs in some parts, but the illusion was close to perfect. It might cause him some trouble later on, but he adjusted without much trouble.
“So how does everyone feel?” Kurt asked his two comrades. “Are we comfortable in our new skin?” He took a few practice steps and watched his new body respond.
“No complaints,” Lavon replied. Kurt watched her move one hand into position and look at it. She appeared satisfied.
“None here,” Jesse mentioned, as she looked her weapon over. “This is last year’s model. You’d expect they would give something up to date.” She checked the clip on it and made certain she had enough back-ups before turning off the full-auto setting.
“Lacing is not tight enough,” Jesse said as she bent over to pull it taunt. She did it away from Kurt, which gave him a good view of the outline of her butt when she bent over.
She did that on purpose, Kurt thought. It reminded him of the bikini model who used to show up at his old gym and do a deep bend just to watch the reaction of all the men in the mirrors.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kurt saw movement and turned to face it. This time the terrain moved with him. He was accustomed to a screen, which remained static. Now that he had a VR helmet on, the movements of the ground followed his own eyes. He’d yet to see a diagram of the bot he rode, but something told him it was far from human in appearance.
They came around the sand dune and stopped. All twelve of them. In front of the trio stood twelve Nazi Zombies. They even had on the torn black uniforms. It was possible to see the naked, flesh through rips in the uniform. Most of the heads were gone, but some kind of tentacle thing moved around what was left.
The game designers overlaid the enemy bots with enough visual nightmares for ten lifetimes.
The sheer appearance of these creatures in the daylight startled them. By the time the NZ’s had turned in their direction, they swung up and leveled their guns. The women turned to him for guidance, but Kurt shook his head.
“I want to see what they do first,” he whispered to them.
The response by the enemy was fast. The tallest NZ pulled a pistol out of his uniform and aimed it at Kurt. The creature made a gurgling sound as the others formed up behind it.
“Now!” Kurt yelled and pulled the trigger. The two women did the same.
Three automatic rifles sent bursts into the lead Nazi Zombie. The NZ was torn apart and each piece flew in an opposite direction. The noise of the guns were suppressed as they discharged thanks to upgrade mods, for which Kurt was grateful. He didn’t fancy the need for earplugs, no matter how realistic. Shells spun out and ran across the floor of the desert.
Kurt expected the other NZ’s to flee in terror, but these ran at them. Oh right, he reminded himself, zombies. For some reason, each pulled out a dagger and charged. He didn’t have to give out the command again. This time the women unleashed multiple bursts of gunfire on the remaining NZ’s. Kurt looked down the gunsight of his rifle and tore them apart at close range.
The entire encounter didn’t last two minutes.
The concentrated gunfire of all three rifles tore the Nazi Zombies apart before they could reach any of the Triple Skulls. Kurt ripped open three of them as they made the stupid mistake of trying to move up the dune at him in single file. The women swept their fire into the rest of the group and eliminated them.
“Switch to semi-automatic!” Kurt called out when the last ones fell to the ground. “We don’t want to waste ammunition. I have no idea when we’ll be able to get anymore, they never said anything about ammo caches in the briefing,” He walked over to the bodies and looked down at them.
Bits and pieces of NZ’s littered the ground. As the smoke rose from the barrel of his gun, Kurt walked around and looked at what was left. It seemed obvious to him they’d walked in on some isolated group. This wasn’t a full-scale attack. When they first ported into the scenario, he worried the enemy was already waiting for him. However, this turned out not to be the case.
“Can you raise the command?” Kurt asked Lavon. She had the only radio between the three of them.
“Been trying to do that for the past two minutes,�
�� she snapped back. “I can’t get them. We’ll have to wait until we reach a save point.”
The save points were places where the game players could upgrade, buy more weapons, or just communicate with the command of the mission. Kurt didn’t have an exact location where they could be found in this scenario, but they should appear soon. It was easy to find them by the game players lounging out front. Some of them had a way to announce their presence that was consistent with the game.
“Damn weird how they happened on us just as we arrived,” Jesse commented. By now, she had a cigarette out and smoked it. He recalled that was something about Jesse, always paying extra for a cigarette mod, and Rashid's people had apparently done their homework on her ideal loadout.
“They seemed to be surprised too,” Lavon pointed out. “I don’t think they knew we’d be arriving at any time soon.”
“Maybe we should try and figure out what our location is in relation to the town,” Jesse pointed out between puffs. “We need to find the best way into it.”
“You mean that town?” Kurt spoke as he pointed in the distance. The other two turned and looked at the tall, abandoned buildings in the distance. “I don’t see any more. Something tells me that is the one.”
They stopped and starred at them for a few minutes before returning to the bodies of the Nazi Zombies. The buildings looked to be new, and then shifted to resemble abandoned ones. Kurt concluded the game designers experienced trouble when they shifted back and forth from new to abandoned. However, which was the original and which was the simulation overlaid on it? And it didn't it make any difference. After a few more minutes, the buildings settled into a desolation pattern.
Lavon noticed something on one of the torsos that remained from the fallen NZ’s. She walked over, reached down, and, before Kurt could say a word, picked up something from its clothes. He watched as she held it up to the sunlight.
“Arabic,” she announced. “Some kind of identity card. Maybe a driver’s license. Can’t figure out why they’d plant one on it.” She peered at it some more.
“You read Arabic?” Kurt asked her.
“A little bit,” she told him. “The classical format. Learned it at the madrassa my mother dumped me off on every Saturday. I speak it better.” She turned the card over.
“Didn’t know you were Muslim,” Kurt said to her as he scanned the landscape for more hostiles.
“I’m not,” she replied. “Mom reverted after dad ran off. I’m Buddhist.”
“So what else did you learn from the card?” Jesse asked her. She had her gun up and ready as well.
“Card is for some place called Malakallah,” Lavon responded. “That name mean anything to either of you?” She waited for a response.
Both of them shook their heads.
“Small town in lower Mesopotamia,” Lavon announced. “It was on the news awhile back. Lots of fighting for the control of it. I don’t know who owns the territory now.”
“So how does this effect our situation?” Jesse asked her. “We’re supposed to still be in New Mexico.”
“If you believe that,” Lavon told her. “I don’t know where these tin cans were dumped.” She looked down at the simulation over the bots. “We could be anywhere. Maybe it helps the game realism to place references to an obscure town on the other side of the planet. Maybe not. We should keep it in mind.”
“We need to move out,” Kurt announced. He still saw the world through the faceplate on his helmet. There still was an element of unreality to it all. “If there was one group of Nazi Zombies around here, there’s bound to be some more. Jesse you take point, I’ll hang back and make certain nothing sneaks up on us. Let's just keep thinking about that ten million dollars shall we?”
They maneuvered around the sand dunes in the direction of the abandoned town. Kurt found it interesting the landscape was littered with trash and all matter of things, which suggested a major flight from the town. It was another level of realism he appreciated from the company.
Chapter 5
They found more of them later.
Jesse walked over to the fallen body of the first NZ and looked down. She leaned over and kicked the body away from what it covered. Kurt had some trouble watching it happen through his faceplate. Kurt found he could observe her fine if he moved back a few feet and leaned his face down. He noted Jesse, which was a mechanical bot with her image superimposed over it, and it moved slightly different from the girl he knew. Kurt wished they’d given them an option to include the human superimposition or not. It was creepy enough that he knew Jesse’s real form was a metallic robot, more so since a computer generated image was wrapped around it.
“Check out the rifle,” she spoke to Kurt and Lavon. “Why didn’t it use it?”
Below the body was the form of a Russian Gn-600, one of the advanced assault rifles the elite Russian military used in combat. The banana clip magazine jutted out from the bottom. Two more clips lay next to it. She kicked the clips with her left boot.
“Full,” Jesse announced and picked one up. She shook it and Kurt heard the cartridges rattle. “Still doesn’t explain why it didn’t use it. Look, there’s a pistol too.” She pulled out a few shells from the clip and looked at them.
“Maybe it couldn’t get to the gun in time? We aren't the only players running this scenario, could be a few other fire teams or even full squads rolled through here ahead of us,” Lavon suggested. “Gun was slung over back, pistol loaded and ready. It went for the pistol.”
The GN-600 was a gas-powered fully automatic assault rifle. It was accurate up to 700 meters and could throw 600 rounds per minute at a target when set to full auto. This one had an infrared scope attached to the top of the gun for night usage and bayonet below the barrel as well.
“At least the game designers have kept up with the real ones in the field,” Lavon spoke as she walked over and looked at the gun. “Do you think we should take it with us or leave it here?”
“Too much to carry,” Kurt interjected. “We have all we need in our backpacks. Another gun will make us weighed-down. We might be able to use the ammunition later. How much do we have?”
Jesse continued to turn over the shell she’d taken from the magazine. “Useless,” she announced. “This isn’t a standard shell. It uses a 45 mm cartridge. Standard ammo for these things is 39mm.”
“Why the change?” Lavon questioned.
“I’m guessing it’s to keep us from using their bullets,” The other side knows we might get one or more of these guns at the spawn points. They don’t want to help us out by giving free ammunition.”
Kurt had them bury the GN-600. They also buried the other weapons found behind the rocks near the dunes. A determined foe would dig them back up, but he counted on a random patrol discovering the bodies and not noticing what was missing. Let the designer chew on that one for awhile, plus it meant that none of the other players could scavenge the weapons, and if the Skulls needed to, they could return and have a fresh cache.
They headed off in the direction of the town, guns down, but ready to bring them back up if needed. Once more Kurt was impressed by the scenery, bare as it was. There was no duplication attempt, as in the simulated reality terrains he’d encountered in the past. It impressed him that Deathmatch was able to utilize such a large area for combat games, but there were plenty of open space in New Mexico off the beaten path. The processing power alone required to make this happen was staggering, then again so was the fortune being made in pay per view.
The strange ammunition specifications bothered him. If everything was “real” in this game and they merely rode biometric robots with computer simulations over them, then the damn company had bought special GN-600 rifles to use in this tournament. Why did they have some with crazy ammo specifications? It made no sense unless the corporation wanted to make sure the guns didn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people. A rifle with off-spec ammo was useless if you can’t get shells for it. He made a mental note to check o
ut the standard GN-600’s at the spawn point if he found one.
It also implied the other guns used by the opposing force might be rigged the same way. It would make sense. They didn’t want any of the select hundred game players to use any ammunition or weapons captured in combat. That was some pretty advance balancing of the game mechanics. Bravo Rashid.
The voices began from the other side of the sand dune later in the day as they walked. Kurt held up one hand and the others stopped. It could be more Nazi Zombies, or something else. The guide to the game was a bit unclear as to what type of opposition they might encounter. Just because it failed to howl didn’t make it friendly. All of them raised their guns to shoulder level when they heard the sound of boots around the corner. The women fanned to either side of Kurt and waited to see who or what would appear.
A few minutes passed and four men appeared in his gun scope. Kurt wished they allowed him a better Heads up Display on this screen, but he was forced to make a judgement call and hold fire. From the way these four were armed and armored, they had to be fellow game players.
“That is far enough,” Kurt called out to them. “Now put down your guns unless you want to quit the game.” He chambered up his first shot to be sure.
The four men froze and turned in his direction. As they saw three rifles trained on them, all slowly placed theirs on the ground. They raised their hands in frustration. In most cases, this blunder would cost them the game. Kurt had some other plans and let them live.
“So who are you with?” she shouted to them. “And no sudden moves or I open fire. I don’t have to tell you what we can do at this range.”
“We’re not with anyone,” one of the men yelled back. “We didn’t get assigned to a unit and ported in close to each other. We decided to stick together until we reached a save point. Was that your guns we heard a while back?”
“Yes. Did you encounter any hostiles?” He watched them through the scope.