‘What?’
‘I think I can cook us up a little distraction, get those assholes away from the dormitory. I forgot to give you this. You wouldn’t get far without it, in fact. Some transits are passive, so you could walk or fall through them without even realising, like the one that took you here from Starfire. Others need one of these.’
Solderburn held up a tablet, just like the one the Sarge had given him, except that the blank slab of glass had the Mobius strip logo etched in the top-right corner.
‘You know what this is?’
‘Yes, I had one similar that I got from the marines in Starfire, but the Integrity confiscated it.’
‘If you got it from Starfire, it wasn’t worth confiscating, but the Integrity didn’t know that. This is what they assumed you had, because if you’re packing one of these, it means you’re a sworn member of the resistance: a genuine Diasporado.’
Ross gripped it, but Solderburn held on to it for a second in order to underline the symbolism of the moment. He’d never struck Ross as the most sentimental of individuals, but he could tell this meant something to the guy.
‘The one the marines gave you was just an in-game interface, which is why even the NPCs could use it to jump from the single-player campaign mode to the multiplayer maps. This is a serious upgrade.’
‘So what’s new in this model?’ Ross asked, holding it in his palm.
‘Well, for one thing, you don’t need it to be in your hand. Just think: HUD.’
Ross did. The tablet disappeared and instead the information became overlaid upon his field of vision, the text and symbols transparent: an integral Heads Up Display. Instead of merely the tabs governing access to what the marines had called the training arena, there was a whole list of new sub-menus.
‘I’ll take you through it when we got a little more time and privacy, but, for now, let’s get you some new duds.’
Ross followed Solderburn’s instructions and immediately saw an array of images showcasing alternative appearances, from Gralaks and marines to Nazis, GIs and French civilians, plus zombie versions of the latter three.
‘When you enter any gameworld, you’ll automatically get a corresponding selection of models and costumes to choose from. You can choose a face from the list as well, but bear in mind that if you’re wearing one of those, people will assume you’re an NPC. You’ll need to show the real you if you want to start a constructive conversation.’
‘Well the real me isn’t a bloody cyborg,’ Ross said, morphing into a French Resistance costume with a pleasing hint of the beatnik about it.
Strangely, he didn’t feel any different.
‘So what’s the plan?’ he asked.
‘I become “a bloody cyborg”,’ Solderburn mimicked, his imitation extending to the physical as he transformed into a Gralak. ‘It’s you they’re after, dude. I’m gonna make myself nice and visible, and when everybody’s busy looking at me, that’s when you slip through the net.’
‘But how are you going to get away?’
Solderburn toggled through several costumes, much as Ross had seen Cicerus do back in the cell.
‘Don’t worry about me, noob, I’m a gnarly vet at this shit.’
As Solderburn spoke, the door from the transept flew open at troll-assisted speed and the search party poured through it, guns raised. It took them a crucial moment to locate their two targets crouching in the shadows, by which time Ross had switched his machine-gun for the Panzerfaust and pulled the trigger. The rocket-propelled warhead travelled its way along the dark passageway in a split second, giving the incomers no time to react before it hit the troll square in the chest and exploded.
The blast took out all but one of the search party. He was sent sprawling but had recovered into a crouching position behind the troll’s dismembered trunk by the time the smoke cleared. Ross and Solderburn reacted as one, moving either side of the passageway, laying down suppressing fire every time the Integrity trooper stuck his head above the huge barrel of charred flesh. Ross was on the courtyard side, and had to duck away from an open archway as a burst of fire ripped into the stone from the two soldiers who had been positioned below.
The survivor behind the troll saw this as an opportunity to make a break for it, but Solderburn’s concentration had not been broken by the volley from beneath. A round from his shotgun finished the job, at which point Ross lobbed a grenade down into the courtyard, causing the two sentries to break from cover. He stepped back into the archway and raised his machine-gun, but felt Solderburn’s now metal-encrusted hand diverting the barrel downwards.
‘They’re starting the ball rolling for us,’ he said. ‘Let ’em run off and report the big news. I’m gonna head up the bell-tower, make myself visible. You get your ass down to ground level and blend in. When you see them take the bait, you make your move. The transit is at the far end of the dormitory: looks like a window but it’s a hologram. You can pass behind it.’
‘Where does it lead? Is it the next link in the daisy chain or somewhere further?’
‘This far out on the fringes, we’re down to the paths very much less travelled by. You should prepare yourself for things getting a bit weird from here on in.’
‘You mean as opposed to the nondescript mundanity I’ve encountered so far?’
Ross climbed into the archway, a step over the ledge offering the most direct route to the courtyard below. He was in the act of launching himself when Solderburn grabbed him by the collar and hauled him back.
‘Falling damage,’ he warned. ‘This isn’t Quake, dude. Gravity hurts.’
‘Got it.’
Ross was about to walk away, but Solderburn kept a firm hold of him for one more moment.
‘Listen: we get split up for any reason, you seek out the Diasporadoes. They might be a little skittish but they’ll help you. Just don’t piss information around: be careful what you say and who you say it to. And remember, people here may not be who they claim. The Integrity have spies everywhere, and they don’t all wear black. Good luck, dude.’
And with that, Solderburn was off, running back in the direction of the transept and the bell-tower beyond it, his gait still incongruously dainty, even more so now that he was in cyborg form. It seemed that here, the way you saw yourself, the person you really were inside, could become manifest no matter what mask, skin or costume you wore. Solderburn was, after all, a free spirit, a capricious ‘flake’ who didn’t like to be burdened by the needs of pragmatism, and, in this realm, he didn’t need to be. Ross wondered briefly what elemental aspect of his own psyche might be revealing itself despite his disguise, but given that he was engaged in attempting to slip through enemy lines incognito, it probably wasn’t the most constructive line of thinking at that particular moment.
He descended a tightly spiralling staircase that took him down to a cramped and gloomy library. He flattened himself against the wall before peeking out towards the courtyard, where he could see dozens of troops storming towards the abbey, the faceless Integrity drones letting the NPCs take the vanguard. He couldn’t chance going out there, because if he was seen he’d have to join ranks with the rest of the French Resistance guys or risk giving himself away.
He made his way to the back of the library, where he found a wooden door leading outside. He nudged it open just a couple of inches, enough to see the swarm of activity that was surrounding the compound. Integrity commanders were giving orders, despatching units to every entry point, but that still left a lot of personnel in the vicinity of the dorter. As well as the armoured vehicles, Ross could also see the futuristic mega-tank that had first warned him these guys weren’t from around here. It was still beyond the outer walls, approaching the main gate with a slow but ominous ground-trembling trundle.
Then Ross heard a new outbreak of gunfire and the sound of grenade blasts, upon which the besieging hordes erupted into frantic response. He saw soldiers pointing, heard them shout, all previous search directives superseded as they were give
n a specific focus for their attention.
He stepped outside the door and into full view. All it took to be invisible was to stare up at the bell-tower, because that’s what everybody else was doing. Solderburn was hopping around up there like a zinc-galvanised Quasimodo, firing indiscriminately with machine-guns he must have taken from felled enemies.
All around Ross, soldiers were returning fire, but it was clear to him that they would be at it a while. Solderburn was indeed a gnarly vet. He could hold that position for ages, tossing grenades down the staircase at anybody who tried to ascend, and enjoying the elevated angle of fire upon a bounteous profusion of targets below. He concentrated particularly sustained volleys of fire towards the dorter, causing the troops mustering there to seek cover elsewhere, as well as messily thinning their numbers.
Thousands of rounds were fired up in retaliation, but Solderburn was giving a salutary demonstration of why bell-towers and snipers were synonymous. Nothing was hitting him up there, with even the odd stray nick only requiring him to avoid further damage for a few seconds while his health bar regenerated.
The troops on the ground realised that something beefier was called for, and several Panzerfaust were loosed towards Solderburn’s position. The first three shot past and disappeared into the wet and permanent dusk of the skies, but the fourth found its mark, engulfing one of the archways in smoke and flame. To Ross’s relief, Solderburn appeared again a few seconds later, as unharmed as the bell-tower was undamaged. It took him just a moment to suss why: the game environment was non-destructible. There would be a few breakable windows, doors and walls, but, whether for story purposes or for death-match, that tower was supposed to remain standing no matter what.
Ross strode purposefully towards the dorter, now confident that nobody was going to look at him twice. An NPC shouted to him in French, which he ignored, pretending not to hear amid the din. It was nonetheless a warning that he hadn’t chosen the ideal disguise given the extent of his school-learned French, as the ability to ask the location of the Syndicat d’Initiative probably wasn’t going to cut it if some Francophone Integrity officer decided he wanted a word.
He was within yards of his goal when he heard a sound that stopped him dead, the very air around him rippling with movement. Ross turned back once more, and was horrified to see Cuddles hovering at the bell-tower, those huge wings thrashing to hold its nightmarish form at the required altitude. Tentacles, claws, suckers and tongues whipped at the cyborg, but Solderburn’s choice of position was further vindicated, as none of the appendages could quite get close enough, the creature’s head and neck too big to fit through any of the arches. It looked big enough to simply demolish the whole thing with a lash of its tail or even a particularly phlegmy gob, but, once again, the local rules kept Solderburn’s sanctuary intact.
Ross allowed himself a smile and turned away again. Solderburn would be all right.
Then he heard a sound like a thousand steel gauntlets being dragged down a thousand metal blackboards, and in its vibration, deep within himself, he felt an echo of the violating horror he’d endured from the tongues of the black scourge. It had come from the mega-tank, a new turret having emerged upon its back like a pustule, at the centre of which shone a grey beam. It wasn’t light, though; more like an absence of it.
Ross looked back towards its target. He saw the top of the bell-tower briefly transformed into a wireframe outline then completely disappear, leaving Solderburn standing upon an open platform. Cuddles struck almost in the same moment, the feelers and tentacles whipping around him before the wireframe outline had even faded from Ross’s retinas.
At that moment, sheer instinct took over, deferring horror and grief though Ross could sense the magnitude of both. There was absolute clarity, ambiguity casting no clouds. He understood fundamentally that Solderburn had been taken. He understood fundamentally that there was nothing he could do right then to change that. And most of all he understood that he had to escape.
The HUD came up almost by reflex, switching him without deliberation to the zombie version of his French Resistance skin. Nobody would ask him any questions this way, or wonder where he was going. He staggered the last few paces to the dormitory entrance, deliberately catching himself on the frame a few times to convey that authentic ‘NPC failing to negotiate a doorway’ look, then slipped inside.
Like Solderburn had said, there was a stained-glass window at the gable end, above a small altar. Every other window in the place was broken and the draughty hall denuded of furniture, but fortunately, the Integrity had failed to wonder why not a single stray bullet had damaged the big pane at the end depicting Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers.
Ross hopped on to the altar and jumped, bracing himself instinctively for impact and hoping belatedly that he hadn’t missed another stained-glass window elsewhere in the room, otherwise he would end up crashing through on to the grass outside. Instead he dropped into a dark chamber the width of the gable end, evidently a false wall with a second, identical St Christopher window lodged in the real one.
His HUD came up again unbidden, a Mobius icon blinking insistently in the centre. He took an exploratory step to his right, upon which the blinking slowed, then two corrective steps left, resulting in a doubling of the frequency. One more step to his left and half a step forward caused the icon to glow unremittingly and the ants to begin moving. When he looked down he saw that the square foot of floor he was standing on was now superimposed with the same animated logo as appeared on his HUD.
He tried jumping up and down on the spot but nothing happened. Crossing the last transit from Starfire to here had been a matter of falling through a hole, but so far he could see no aperture and no doorway. However, the HUD resembled the multiplayer interface he’d used to reach the training arena, so perhaps it was waiting for some form of input.
From outside, he could hear the beating of giant wings and the sounds of frantic orders being barked as the Integrity discovered they’d been had.
Not a moment too soon, a single word appeared beneath the Escher image:
««« WARP? »»»
Fuck yeah.
We Bought It to Help with
Your Homework
There was no drop this time, and no gradual coming into focus of his surroundings. It was like a light being switched on, an immediate awareness of being somewhere new, but what he saw was no less disturbing than what he’d found in the last world. He feared for a moment that he was in space, conscious of blackness either side. He was standing on what looked like green plastic, a path stretching ahead of him in a perfectly straight line. It felt substantial enough underfoot, but less reassuring was the fact that it appeared to be barely two feet wide. Instinctively he put out his arms for balance, which was when he discovered that the surrounding blackness was the opposite of space. It was like a force-field, or maybe just a glass wall.
Up ahead he could see a staircase made of transparent plastic, climbing ultimately out of sight beneath an arch, and above the staircase there was a ledge, another narrow platform this time made of red brick. Somewhere up ahead he could hear machinery, a busy ticking, whirring and squeaking like some huge clockwork device that Wallace and Gromit might have knocked together.
He became aware of movement behind the transparent staircase, a blue shape coming closer, and as it did, the sound grew louder. Refracted as it was through the zigzag plastic, Ross couldn’t make out much detail, only that it was at least his height and rhythmically pumping in a blur of what could as easily be limbs or pistons. Either way, he was glad the staircase was there to provide a barrier, as it wasn’t like he could sidestep the thing.
This assessment of his options prompted him to look behind, something he achieved a lot faster than he was expecting or was indeed comfortable with. Instead of physically pivoting to execute an about-turn, he found himself facing the opposite direction the instant he thought it. There was no sense of movement; rather it was like blinking and suddenly
seeing the rear view; but strangely this absence of movement prompted something similar to motion sickness, like his body was confused by his eyes telling him something new without the usual corresponding effort.
Perhaps appropriately, the new view wasn’t worth any effort, showing as it did a brick wall at the end of another few yards of green plastic path. The clockwork sound grew still louder, prompting Ross to execute another not-turn in time to see the shape penetrate the staircase like it was a hologram.
‘Bloody hell.’
There was a six-foot Swiss-army knife heading straight for him, blades, corkscrews and things-for-getting-stones-out-of-horse’s-hooves pumping like the arms and legs of an infuriated Showsec concert steward who’s just seen someone enjoying himself and is making a beeline to intervene.
Ross looked behind again, just in case he’d missed a possible holographic aspect to the brick wall hemming him in, or a conveniently breakable grate in the green plastic floor. Could he reach the platform above? It looked too high, but one thing he ought to have learned by now was that every new world had its own rules, and even its own physics. Ross bent his knees and jumped, sending his feet easily six or seven feet off the ground, and his head through the overhead platform as though it wasn’t there. He grasped at it with his hands as he began to descend, but it was like trying to grip clouds. He came back down on to the green plastic and turned to see the Swiss-army knife bearing down, only a few feet away. Instinct took over and he leapt again, soaring in an arc over the clockwork abomination, his feet clearing its top by about six inches.
He felt a rush as he sailed through the air, a mixture of excitement and relief that was familiar enough for him to have worked out what was going on by the time his feet had touched the ground.
‘I’ve gone 2D,’ he said, partly to test whether he could still speak.
He looked himself up and down, and found that his assertion was not strictly true. He was still the same shape as when he’d warped out of the abbey: he hadn’t gone two-dimensional, but he was now most definitely in a two-dimensional world, in which typically you could only move up or down and left or right; or in his case, up and down or forwards and backwards.
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