Status report.
HEALTH: CRITICAL—TRAUMA, BLOOD LOSS, SHOCK
ENERGY: DEPLETED (25% REMAINING)
BODY ARMOR: DEPLETED (10% REMAINING)
Apply medikit.
MEDIKIT UNAVAILABLE
Inventory.
The list scrolls upward in front of his eyes. It doesn’t take long. His body armor isn’t worth shit; there’s no medikit, no field dressings, no painkillers. One more hit, and he’ll be pulped. Kilgore lets fly a few harsh words. A moment ago, he was ready to go out fighting, but this! This is bullshit. Cowering behind a wall, bleeding out into the dirt—that’s no way to die. He raises his rifle, but his shoulder screams in agony with every movement. “Goddammit!” He grits his teeth and starts pushing himself up to his feet, but a wave of nausea floods through his body, and the ground tilts up toward him. Suddenly, there’s something hard and gritty pressing against his face, and he realizes he’s fallen over, his head on the ground. “This is it,” he whispers. He’s lost his life. And since he’s not on a sanctioned mission, he’ll be blasted back to basic training. All those hours I put in, all the money I’ve spent. He grimaces. It’s just not fair. But there’s nothing he can do about it. Not one damned thing.
CHAPTER 2
Are You All Right?
MERVIN STANDS AT THE KITCHEN SINK and listens to his son thudding up the stairs. Funny, he thinks. He makes a lot of noise moving around for a kid who barely says a word. His lips twitch a little, but they don’t make it all the way to a smile. He rubs the back of his hand over his forehead. There’s a film of cold sweat on his brow, and it smears against the dry skin of his hand. He frowns and glances up at the kitchen clock. “Almost time for my meds,” he says. First though, he was just about to do something. But what was it? He looks down. “Oh yeah, the dishes. Jesus, I’ll forget my own head.”
He squirts a good glug of detergent onto the stack of greasy plates in the sink then puts the bottle down and eyes the faucet warily. The old pipes trap air, and these days you almost take your life in your hands every time you want hot water. It works OK for a second, but then it lets fly with a great belch of hot air, spattering scalding water all over the place. There’s probably a knack to it, a certain way to use the damned thing without getting burned, but he’s never found it.
He turns the faucet then steps back as smartly as he can. He narrows his eyes, studying the spiraling stream of steaming water. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. The sink is filling nicely now, the suds swirling and rising up, squeezing their way around the dirty crockery. “Looks like the pipes fixed themselves after all.” The sink is almost full now, and he steps closer to turn the water off.
His fingers are only a half inch from the faucet when it picks its moment to fight back. A burst of hissing, gurgling hot air erupts from the spout, sending a spray of steaming water up Mervin’s arm, stinging his bare skin. “Shit, shit, shit!” He turns the water off so hard the whole faucet twists and turns against the stainless steel of the sink, the spout now pointing in the wrong direction. “Goddammit! Why does every single, goddamned thing have to go to shit? What the hell did I do to deserve...” But he can’t finish the sentence: dares not ask that question. No. Anything but that.
He stares down at the pile of dirty dishes. He doesn’t want to hear the words. Not today. But they come anyway. The voice he knows only too well hisses its filthy lies in the dark places at the back of his mind: You know why, you asshole. You were born a goddamned loser, and you’ll die the same way.
“Shut up, Clyde,” Mervin growls. “You’ve been dead for goddamned years.” And it’s true—Captain Clyde has no business whispering anything to anybody. Not anymore. Whispering! Mervin thinks. And the corners of his mouth droop even lower than usual. Whispering was never Clyde’s style.
Mervin takes a deep breath, exhales noisily, blowing out his cheeks. He puts a hand on his stomach. A thin thread of anxiety is already pulling itself tighter in his guts: wriggling, seething in his stomach like a parasitic worm. He’s got to stop it. He has to squash the memories from those days, has to keep them away. He takes another deep breath. And another. But it doesn’t work. He plunges his hands into the bowl of hot, soapy water. The heat tingles, like a million tiny pinpricks piercing his fingertips, and the skin on his forearms blooms bright red. “Focus, you idiot,” he mutters. “Focus on the task at hand.” But as the words leave his lips, the voice he hears is not his own; it’s Clyde’s, in all its full-throated, rasping belligerence.
“Focus on the task at hand!” Clyde bellows. “My god, if you worthless sons of bitches lose focus for even one goddamned second, I’ll tear out your eyeballs and ram them down your goddamned throats.”
Mervin shuts his eyes, and he’s there—the place he hoped never to see again—the War Room.
The War Room is almost dark. The only source of light is the blue glow from the rectangular screens attached to each virtual reality chair. The VR chairs are arranged in four parallel rows of ten, all facing the same way, and Mervin is in the front row. He’ll be on display the whole time. If he lets his nerves show, Clyde is sure to see.
Captain Clyde is up there now, strutting back and forth across the raised platform at the front of the room, spouting his usual stream of dark threats and vulgar insults.
What an asshole, Mervin thinks. Clyde turns his stare on some poor devil at the back of the room, and Mervin seizes the chance to make himself more comfortable, shifting slightly in his chair. His helmet is heavy, and the room is warm, the air stale. Mervin tilts his head a little to stretch his neck, and a trickle of sweat creeps across his scalp and dribbles down toward his ear. Maybe that’s just the conductive gel, he thinks. It makes no difference either way; a little sweat makes for a better connection. But maybe that’s just another piece of barracks folklore: a snippet of spurious information doled out by old hands to confuse new recruits. It’s too late to worry about that now.
Mervin swallows hard. This will be his first major mission, and he mustn’t make a single mistake. It’s all got to go like clockwork. He takes a slow breath to steady his nerves, tries to tune out the captain’s barrage of meaningless invective. How the hell can I concentrate on anything with you bawling at us all the time? he thinks, but he doesn’t say a word.
Someone tugs at his shirtsleeve, and Mervin risks a quick sideways glance. Jerry is looking up at him from the neighboring chair, his pale-blue eyes eerie in the dim light. “Are you all right, Merv?” Jerry mouths.
Mervin nods once then looks away. If Clyde catches them chatting, he’ll send them both on a ten mile run with full packs. And worse, he’ll pull the pair of them off the Ops Team and put them back on the training roster. To hell with that! He can’t go back to training: all those hours in the VR chair, the threat detection simulation, the endless malware pattern analysis. It was enough to drive a man insane.
Mervin blinks slowly, lets out a long breath. Like clockwork.
“Are you ready?” Clyde bawls, and forty voices are raised in response: “Yes, Sir.”
Clyde’s face, pale at the best of times, is ghostlike in the near darkness, and the cold blue light from the screens throws the pockmarks on his cheeks into sharp relief. Clyde tells everyone he wears his scars with pride: souvenirs from the Syrian War, the last great campaign to be fought on land. But Mervin’s always suspected the scars are the result of untreated acne in Clyde’s youth. Whatever the truth, right now, Clyde’s face is a mask of shocked outrage.
“Oh, my sweet lord,” he hisses. “Did that just happen? Did I just ask a goddamned question and get an answer from a bunch of little girls?” He looks from side to side, his eyes wide in theatrical surprise. “Did I just walk into the goddamned powder room by mistake?”
The troops know better than to answer. The men know better than to grin, and the women know better than to roll their eyes.
“Children,” Clyde says, his voice dangerously low. “I apologize. I was expecting to set some
highly trained operatives loose in a monumental act of cyber warfare. The details are too brutal for your sweet natures, but I regret to say that this stringent action is deemed necessary for the defense of the free world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I may need to raise my voice a little to see if I can encourage an appropriate response from the bunch of gutless new recruits the high command has saddled me with.” Clyde pauses and takes a deep breath. “I said,” he roars. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, Sir!” the troops respond as loud as they can. The yell rasps in the back of Mervin’s throat as though the words are being ripped from his larynx.
“That’s more like it,” Clyde says. “Now I can hear a little steel, a little determination, and by god, you’re going to need it.” He steps down from the raised platform and stands tall, his hands behind his back. He pauses for a moment then begins his inspection, pacing between the parallel rows of VR chairs, glancing at the screens as he passes. “As you know,” he begins, “our esteemed brothers in Detection have informed us that the sneaky little bastards in Eastern Europe have hit one of our firewalls with an almost bewildering array of minor breach attempts. This is, of course, a decoy—a ploy to draw out our defenses. Their true attack will begin at the very second of your deployment. They hope to overwhelm our defenses, expose our vulnerabilities and subsequently, to breach our security protocols and destroy our systems. This is nothing less than an act of outright war—a vicious and unprovoked attack on our great nation.” He stops in front of Mervin’s chair and looks down at him. “They expect an automated response, a damp software squib.” He bends from the waist, puts his face close to Mervin’s and looks him in the eye. He pauses for a moment then speaks slowly, lingering over every word. “Our enemies expect their attack to be met by a security subroutine—a pathetic shadow puppet constructed by some spineless, limp-fingered little worm of a man.”
Mervin sits motionless, struggling with the urge to squirm in his chair. He isn’t going to give that bastard the satisfaction.
Clyde holds eye contact for a moment longer then moves on, still spewing out his crude attempt at a pep talk. “What they do not expect is to be met by real soldiers. Soldiers with the heart to fight and the honed reflexes and intelligence to deal with any threat, no matter how complex or how fast it may adapt.” He turns sharply on his heel and addresses them all. “You are prepared. You have trained long and hard, and each and every one of you has attained the highest standards demanded by our country, our commander in chief and lastly, by me.” He smirks as if the troops will share his little joke. “Today, you will deal out death and destruction to our enemies. You will not simply fend off a few fragments of malicious code, you will trace them to their source, then you will annihilate the sons of bitches that sent them out. You will cripple their systems, destroy their infrastructure. Their planes will fall from the sky. Their power plants will grind to a halt. Their trains will plow through stone walls. They will be devastated—cold, hungry and alone. We will send those misbegotten bastards back to the Stone Age, and they will rue the day they sent their filthy cyber sneak-thieves to besmirch our glorious nation.” Clyde stands at attention and fills his lungs. “Now go to it, and chase every one of those bastards down.” He turns his head to look into the shadows at the edge of the room, and then he nods once.
The techs, Mervin thinks. You forget they’re in the room.
“This is it,” Clyde says. “Check your screens, and get ready. Initiate countdown.”
Mervin snaps into action as his training kicks in. He flexes his fingers and slides them into the custom-made grooves on the armrests of his chair. The thin layer of conductive gel tingles against his skin. His screen shows a poor connection on his left hand so he adjusts his position until the warning blinks off. He tries to relax his shoulders and clear his mind. His helmet is growing warmer now, but that’s to be expected. The latticework of electrodes pressed against his scalp is springing into life, thrumming with a million subtle currents. Soon, his brain’s electrical activity will be in sync with the VR system, and then he’ll be deployed. His screen shows the final stages of the countdown, and the first wave of disorientation hits him. For a moment, the room flickers out of existence, and he feels as if he’s falling, as if he’s walking up some stairs and has put his foot down on a top step that isn’t there. Then his vision clears, and he’s looking at his screen again. Five, four, three. This is it; he’s going in. His chair sways. The whole room lurches sideways then drops away. He’s melting, sinking into the chair like butter on hot corn. The room blurs, fades away, but Mervin can still make out the countdown on his screen. Two, one.
The room is gone, but Mervin sees the last command from the system. The bold red letters float in front of his eyes: DEPLOY.
CHAPTER 3
How Did You Know?
KILGORE GRIMACES, turns his face up toward the sky. The pain in his shoulder is too much. He may as well give in and log off. It means abandoning his mission, losing all his progress, but so what? What choice does he have?
Suddenly, a man’s voice rings out: a defiant yell amid the constant rattle of gunfire. Kilgore tilts his head to listen, mutters, “What the hell was that?” Another yell, and this time, he can make out the words: “Come on, you assholes!”
Kilgore stares into space, his eyes glazed. It has to be another player. Other people were bound to find the coordinates and head this way. He’d hoped to beat them all, but that wasn’t going to happen now. “Goddammit!” he murmurs and wonders for a moment if the guy will even make it. Probably not. Only newbies run around yelling like goddamned maniacs. It’s a miracle the moron even made it this far.
Kilgore lets a slow smile curl his lip. He won’t log off just yet. He’ll wait a while, see how far the new arrival gets before he’s blown away. Hell, it might even cheer him up a little. But his brow furrows as he listens to the firefight. Is he imagining it, or is the sound of battle drawing closer and closer? “No,” he murmurs. “Don’t lead them back to me.” But the wall is the only cover in the whole street; the guy is sure to head straight for it.
At that moment, a man hurls himself over the wall right next to Kilgore. He lands heavily on his shoulder then rolls up into a crouch and throws himself back against the wall. He looks at Kilgore and smiles. “Wooh! That was intense.”
Kilgore adjusts his position and tightens his grip on his rifle. He doesn’t play co-op. Co-op is for little girls and middle-aged men pretending to be their fathers. He fixes the new guy with a stare. “Get out of here,” he says. “This is my position.”
The new guy juts his chin and looks pointedly at Kilgore’s shoulder. “Sure, you’re doing real well.”
Kilgore sets his mouth in a grim line, keeping his mouth shut tight while a host of good put-downs runs through his mind. But he settles for, “Get lost.”
The guy smiles. “OK, I’ll just take care of these assholes first.” He looks down to his wrist pad and taps a couple of keys then inclines his head toward Kilgore, gives him a look. “If you don’t mind, that is.”
Kilgore snorts. “Whatever.”
The man lets out a dry chuckle. “In that case, you might want to cover your ears.”
“What?”
“Just kidding,” the guy says. “Cover your ears, close your eyes, make a wish—it won’t help either way.” He flashes Kilgore a cold-eyed smile then looks back down to his wrist pad.
Kilgore opens his mouth to speak, to tell this idiot to keep his wisecracks to himself and get the hell out. But he doesn’t get the chance. The guy taps one more key on his wrist pad, and Kilgore’s world turns white. For a heartbeat, he thinks he’s been logged out, but then the shock wave crashes into him, pummeling every part of body simultaneously. It slams his head against the wall, forces the air from his lungs, crushes his chest. Then suddenly, it’s over. The white light fades, and the world swims slowly back into focus. Kilgore works his jaw and shakes his head. “Jesus Christ,” he hisses, but his voice is distant, muffled.
He can’t hear a damned thing for the high-pitched whine howling in his ears. He pats himself down, checking for damage. Apart from his shoulder, he’s fine. “What the hell just happened?” he mutters. His brain is scrambled, his head spinning, but even so, it’s obvious the new guy just did something insane. The shock wave must’ve hit him too. He’ll be in pretty bad shape.
Kilgore turns his head to look at the new guy. I don’t believe it! If the explosion had any effect on the man, then Kilgore can’t detect it. The guy is grinning from ear to ear, not a hair out of place. He gives Kilgore a wink then leaps to his feet, turning to face the street. And instantly, he’s transformed: his rifle snug against his shoulder, his head tilted toward his scope. His upper body swivels smoothly, every movement tightly controlled. He’s the movie-perfect model of a soldier: a lethal machine, in perfect harmony with his weapon. He takes aim, fires a three-shot burst then moves on to his next target. And again. And again. Impossibly fast. In seconds, it’s all over. He lowers his rifle and stands tall, surveying his handiwork. The street is silent.
Kilgore stares up at him. He’s never seen anything like it. Never. “Wha—” he murmurs. “I mean how did you...”
The guy looks down at Kilgore as though he’s forgotten he’s there. “Percussion mines,” he says and shrugs his left shoulder. “I dropped a bunch of them as I ran down the street. Set them off from here. Cool, huh?”
Cheatc0de Page 2