Gamer Army

by Trent Reedy

  “I feel like I did when I was in fourth grade and my school put me on the middle school mathlete team,” Jacqueline said. “I had to remember that you can figure out any challenge by breaking it down into more manageable parts.”

  “Mathlete?” Beckett said. “That’s so dumb.”

  “How’s it dumb to get moved up two grades for a math competition?” Jacqueline cut back. She continued as if Beckett hadn’t said anything. “So, step-by-step. First, I’m hungry, and I’m going to order …” Her finger swiped and swiped at her tablet until her eyes widened in surprise. “Some lasagna. Which …” She read the screen. “I guess a service bot will deliver to my room. Step two. Sleep. Good night, everyone.”

  “Wait,” said Takashi. “You going to bed?”

  “I’m tired,” Jacqueline replied.

  “’Cause I was thinking we could all get a pizza,” he continued. “And we could make a plan. My Warcraft Universe guild always does better when we decide who will do what.” He pointed to Beckett. “Like Tank here could go in first, since his armor is so power—”

  “Forget it,” said Rogan. “I’m not trailing behind that slow-moving target. I’ll lead the way.”

  “Yeah right, little ranger boy,” Beckett said. “You think you’re going to be the first to beat the boss or get the artifact or whatever, but—”

  “You’re both nuts,” Shaylyn said. “Good luck outrunning Flyer.”

  “It was a good idea,” Jacqueline said to Takashi over the noise of the other three arguing. “But I think it would be a waste of time tonight.” And with that she headed into her room and shut the door, leaving the other gamers behind.

  Later that night, alone in his room, Rogan ran his implant’s software update before shutting off the light and climbing under the smooth, tightly made sheets and blanket. He wasn’t a baby. At most when he was home, whichever parent wasn’t working would remind him it was time to go to bed or send a text reminding him it was bedtime, or past time for bed if they’d been too deep into their game or checking messages online. Then they’d say good night and Rogan would brush his teeth, download his implant update, and go to bed.

  So he didn’t need to be babied, but it was strange to be so far from home, all by himself without even a good night, and he hated himself for feeling that way. He reached for his Zelda shield pendant on the nightstand and squeezed it. He wished he could have reached over to pet Wiggles, who would have understood all this perfectly.

  Staying here in this dorm room shouldn’t have been any different than staying in his Virtual City apartment. He shouldn’t be lonely or homesick or whatever. He was better than that. Rogan forced himself to imagine that his worries were a person, one of the Covenant aliens in Halo or a Decepticon in his Transformers game. Then he held up his hand to them and said what his parents said whenever they were checking or replying to a message real quick. “Just a second.” And he rolled onto his side to go to sleep.

  The next day the gamers were suited up, back in the belly of their jump ship, heading into the first round of the tournament. There was so much going on, but all Jacqueline could think about was how different this style of playing was going to be from the normal Laser Viper game.

  Shay was thinking about the exact same thing. When playing at home, different missions were connected by the overall story, little movies in cut scenes. In one of those scenes, laser viper CentCom might receive an encrypted secret radio transmission from an intelligence operative with a hot tip on the location of some important Scorpion terrorist targets, and the player would watch his viper character say something like, “Let’s go get ’em.” The player would resume control of his viper when the action picked up for another combat drop.

  There were no cut scenes here. For this contest, gameplay would be divided into a completely different mission for each round. And no matter how many times Takashi had asked about the nature of even the first round of the tournament while the gamers put on their suits, X, Sophia, and Mr. Culum would tell them nothing.

  “Don’t worry!” Mr. Culum had said. “Everything will be made clear in-game.” Shay figured she’d just have to be ready for anything.

  Now the vipers stared at one another, on their way to the first action that would count toward victory or elimination. Nobody said anything, and the glowing V-lines across each viper’s faceplate revealed nothing about their state of mind.

  “OK, gamers. Listen up.” X spoke to them all. “The Scorpion terrorist network has infiltrated a Chinese warship, the Luyang III class destroyer Tianjin. Laser Viper CentCom believes their target is an advanced prototype power generator. We do not know who among the crew is the Scorpion agent or agents, so during this mission you will primarily use nonlethal weapons. At all costs, you must secure the Tian Li quantum ion fusion energon cell before Scorpion can steal it for its own evil purposes.”

  Jacqueline felt the excitement leap inside her. A technical objective. This was the perfect mission for her Engineer.

  “Gameplay is about to start, so I’m sending you your objectives. Pay attention to your heads-up displays.”

  One at a time, each objective flashed into existence in front of her as X read them.

  “Remember. Throughout the Laser Viper Final Challenge, gamers will get no respawns. If your viper is destroyed, you are out of that game round,” X said. “There is no tougher gameplay mode. Good luck. Go get ’em, gamers.”

  The five vipers shot through the bottom of their speeding jet into a blast of roaring wind, out of the dimly lit jump bay, and into the early morning sky, the horizon begining to glow. Below, all was still quite dark.

  “Everyone should switch on their infrared vision,” Healer said.

  Tank laughed. “Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

  With IR view switched on, heat signatures flared in a spectrum from white to red and darker into the colder colors.

  “There it is,” Jacqueline said quietly. Skydiving to land on a ship in the middle of the ocean? This was the toughest combat drop she’d ever done. Let everyone else mess around, talking it up. She’d concentrate on making her landing.

  “Way down there,” Healer said. “Why do they have to launch us from so high?”

  “Keeping our jet out of missile range or something?” said Flyer.

  “They couldn’t have just played a cut scene and then placed us on the ship?” Healer said.

  The target was impossibly far below. Rogan held out his hand and placed his thumb at the back of the ship, his finger at the front.

  “We might want to pay attention,” said Engineer. “This is a hard drop.”

  “Hard for you chumps, maybe,” Rogan said with a confidence he forced himself to feel. He threw himself into a flip and fired his landing thrusters, shooting straight down away from the others like a bullet. “Game on! Ego sum maximus!”

  “No way!” Tank shouted. Not nearly as flexible as Ranger, he struggled to turn himself head down, but when he did, he hammered on the thrusters full power, in a nightmare fall to catch up to his rival.

  “Wait!” Healer called out. “We can’t just charge in there at random. This isn’t a race. We need to work together!”

  Flyer plummeted with ease, a perfectly controlled dive, hundreds of feet per second, her whole body shaking as she blazed straight to the ship. Nobody could fly like she could. First, she caught up to Tank, who himself had nearly come in-line with Ranger. She flew right up to him, belly to belly, and, patting him on the cheek, whipped a corkscrew maneuver away before he could backhand her. Then she increased speed, waving as she passed Rogan. “I’ll see you after I get the energy cell thing. It would be nice if you could keep the enemy off my back until after I’ve won this game.”

  It was as if the Chinese sailors heard her, because the moment her words came over the channel, Rogan’s IR vision flared near the ship. Something had gone hot. Very hot.

  Flyer was closer to the ship. The missiles would be on her in seconds. Her armor was so weak, just one of th
ose would blast her to bits. She could down them with her DEMP, but that would drain her power in a hurry. Rogan reached out, scanned for a target lock on one of the missiles, and fired his high-energy laser. The explosion below was so big, it seemed at first that Flyer had been taken out.

  “Shay!” Rogan called. “Are you—”

  But other missiles rocketed toward them. Rogan kept shooting. Even heavier lasers sliced down from Tank, a few of them suspiciously close to Rogan. The exploding missiles turned the air all around them into a raging storm of fire and shrapnel, but his armor held.

  “I’m good!” Flyer said over the fireteam’s channel. “They’ve launched drones! We’re going to be facing a lot of lasers, real quick.”

  The ship was only two thousand feet below, and coming up fast. Rogan was a little off course and fired his rockets to adjust his pitch. His power level was down to 90 percent already. Tank had come in-line with him.

  “You two have to slow down,” Engineer said. “You’re going to crash.”

  The two rivals flipped right side up and ignited their braking thrusters. Their trajectory was more on target than it had been, but they were still coming down too close to the edge of the ship for Rogan’s comfort. He couldn’t worry about that. Drones were everywhere, turning the sky into a deadly crisscross cage of red-hot laser fire. Smaller heat signatures, Chinese sailors and marines, spilled onto the deck of the Tianjin.

  Healer and Engineer took their time, carefully targeting human combatants. Blue-white electric bolts zipped down below, slamming into one person after another, the energy flash-crackling over their bodies for an instant before the stunned enemies dropped unconscious.

  In the brightening morning light, three drones chased Shaylyn in a course parallel with the ship, so close to the sea that a spray of water flew up in Flyer’s wake. The small airborne enemies fired laser after laser, lighting up the mist, hunting the viper before them. She threw herself into a sort of frantic mid-flight dance to avoid being hit. They were slightly above and behind her, so she flipped onto her back. Trying to ignore how far her power level percentage had already fallen, she locked on to and shot the lead drone with a DEMP. The scrambled robot sparked and wobbled for a moment before its power cut out. It dropped speed so fast that the two behind smashed into it, sending all three robots splashing to their junkyard beneath the waves.

  Rogan kept his attention on the drones. After all, Healer and Engineer could throw down cover fire against the sailors. They’d have a tougher time with the dozen remaining drones.

  “Here we go,” Rogan called. “When we make our landing, Tank, you take out the ship’s weapons. Flyer, all those antennas and satellite dishes up on top: Fry ’em! Don’t let them call for help! I’ll break inside and go for the power cell.”

  “Have a nice swim, sucker.” Tank elbowed Ranger in the chest, just enough to throw him off course.

  “Tank, you scumbag!” Rogan fired a cable, hoping to connect. Splash. Water. Darkness.

  Tank’s heavy feet smashed down hard enough to dent the deck of the Tianjin. He laughed at Ranger’s whiny little protest. One gamer down, four to go. Sailors and marines opened up with AK-47 rifles on full auto. He could feel the bullets bouncing off him, hear the patter, like drops splashing on a raincoat. He and the others unleashed a storm of NLEPs, stunning the Chinese combatants so they fell almost as fast as their guns fired bullets.

  Whipping a tight circle around the bridge tower, Flyer kept ahead of the drones, soaring up just over the top of the ship and opening up with two DEMPs. Sparks, smoke, and fire burst from the communication arrays. Flyer’s power level dipped way down to 56 percent.

  “Ranger!” Healer shouted as he and Engineer landed on deck. “Ranger, are you still in the game?”

  “Who cares?” Tank took off on a slow run toward the bridge. The other two ground-based vipers at his side. “I don’t need him.”

  “We saw what you did!” said Engineer. “It would have been hard enough to complete this mission with five of us. Now, thanks to you, we’re down to four.”

  “Yeah,” Healer said. “So you better stop trying to—”

  Tank’s big arm smashed into Healer, catching him off guard and knocking him to the deck.

  “Um, are you guys inside the ship yet?” Rogan called to the others when he finished using his lasers to cut his way out of the torpedo loading mechanism and had stun-pulsed the security personnel who had scrambled to intercept the intruder. As soon as he had found himself underwater, Rogan had remembered that these ships could fire torpedoes beneath the surface. All he had to do was use his grappling cables to haul himself into position, laser through the exterior hatch, and then crawl right inside.

  “Ro, where are you?” Flyer called.

  “I started in the torpedo bay, but now I’m on the run.” Out in the hallway, two sailors held a massive gun up on their shoulders. Rogan heard a whine increasing in pitch, the weapon powering up. He stunned the operators and examined the machine. His computer identified it as a Directed Electromagnetic Pulse gun. “Be careful, everyone. They’re starting to break out heavier weapons. Another second and they’d have fried me.” Rogan stayed on the move.

  Shaylyn lowered herself down before the window at the front of the bridge, marines and officers inside scrambling to arm themselves. She wound up and punched the glass hard, breaking through with one hand and firing stun pulses with the other, dropping three of the enemy right away.

  “Flyer, move!” Healer called.

  She felt like she was punched in the back, thrown against the steel below the windows.

  Internal alarms wailed. Static sparked through her visuals, and Shaylyn worried her vision would cut out entirely. The drones! In her hurry to catch up to Rogan inside the ship, she’d forgotten the remaining drones. Now she was seriously damaged, and fought to control her panic, remembering X’s warning that there would be no respawns, no second chances.

  Takashi watched Flyer flop down onto a dual set of 76 mm guns. Her back was torn open, her right arm barely attached. He could tell from where he stood that Flyer had a short circuit somewhere. Her battery was dying. “I can fix that!” He rushed to where she’d hit the deck.

  “Tank, you take out the rest of the drones,” Engineer said. “I’ll go in to help Ranger.”

  “Forget that! You losers are on your own.” Beckett ripped a heavy steel hatch off the ship’s mast and ducked to head inside. An EMP slammed him hard. Another. But his advanced armor absorbed a lot of the extra energy. Still, he couldn’t keep taking those kinds of hits forever. He dropped the two sailors who had carried the EMP gun, and then picked the weapon up. Its silver pistol grip and vertical white energy cell that looked like a rifle magazine fit under an enormous smooth black top. The gun’s barrel was as thick as Tank’s big arm. “Oh yeah!” he shouted. “Now this is a gun! All you sailors took on the wrong viper with the wrong weapon. Time to take a nap.” He fired the EMP gun, his powerful arm absorbing the heavy recoil, a bright white, swirling, snapping electric blast crackling down the hallway, dropping every sailor before him. A meter on top of the weapon showed the thing was out of power. Disappointed, he tossed it aside.

  Beckett stepped over their stunned bodies and hurried ahead, ducking and turning his wide shoulders to the side to fit through the low, narrow steel corridor, that tight panic feeling twisting around inside him. He was way too far behind. If he didn’t hurry, that stupid Ranger would seize the objective and win. He slammed his giant armored fist through a computer access terminal in the wall, electric chaos bursting around his arm. “Winner takes all,” he said quietly. “Losers get nothing!”

  Beckett unleashed the full force of his lasers and plasma cannons. The bulkhead melted, solid steel curling back like burning pages in a book. “I will win this! Me!”

  The ship shook. A deeper, more urgent alarm bellowed throughout. The deck began to dip to one side.

  “What is going on in there?” Healer shouted. “I’ve almost got
Flyer fixed. There was an explosion out the side of the ship. Right at the waterline. Was that one of you? Tank? We’re not supposed to sink the ship, are we?”

  “No!” Ranger called back. “Who is sinking us?! We’re on a no-casualty order. Now we’ll have to make sure everybody gets to the lifeboats.”

  Flyer sat up, a new battery installed and flight systems restored. “I’ll start getting people to the lifeboats. I’m at, like, half power anyway, so I better take it easy with my weapons.” She patted the other robot’s arm. “Thanks, Healer.”

  “Gamers, the Tian Li quantum ion fusion energon cell must be removed intact.” X’s voice came over the channel. “It is not submergible. The Tianjin’s engine room is on one of the lower decks. If the ship is taking on water, you may be running out of time.”

  Rogan fought his way in a mad scramble through the ship until he finally entered a larger, more open space, full of machinery. His HUD locked on to the Tian Li seconds later. “I got it! It’s right here!” He rushed up to the device, about the size of the big water cooler he’d seen in an office on TV. It didn’t look too hard for a viper to carry.

  Then he saw all the connections. Steel fittings, wires, pipes, data cables, and electrical conduits.

  Tank burst into the room. “Forget it, Ranger! It’s mine!” He fired two lasers, nailing Rogan in the chest, knocking him to the deck.

  “You idiot!” Rogan shouted. “You keep shooting in here, you’ll break the thing!”

  Tank stepped up and grabbed the power cell, tugging it a little.

  “I highly advise you not to try ripping the objective out of its housing,” X said.

  “I know!” Tank said. “But I can cut some of this away.” He fired a laser to sever a steel clamp.