Gameprey

12

Unable to bear the pain anymore and knowing he was fighting a losing battle against the antivirus programming Peter Griffen had coded into the veeyar, Gaspar Latke ripped the three crimson wires from his eye. He was afraid to look at the wires, terrified that the eye had come with it.

He forced himself up on shaking legs, panting like a bellows as the familiar gut-wrenching ache of a panic attack filled him. “I’m logging off,” he told Heavener. “It’s over here.”

“Then knock out the security programming in the hotel,” Heavener directed. “We have to get Griffen off the premises.”

“Who are you?” a sharp voice demanded.

Gaspar wheeled around, spotting Peter Griffen at the far end of the room.

“What did you do?” Griffen ran at Gaspar, drawing back a hand that suddenly filled with neon gases.

Working hurriedly, dropping back into the hacker’s survival frame of mind, Gaspar made himself two-dee again and wound through the security programming protecting the veeyar.

Peter threw the spinning, gaseous ball.

Gaspar knew the ball contained a trace utility. Cold fear stabbed deep within him. He had no doubts about Peter’s ability to develop a trace utility that would be next to impossible to beat. He oozed through the security programming just before the trace utility splattered against the coding.

Then he was back in the convention center, watching from his holo self as the gaming crowd raced into the Eisenhower Productions booth.

“Hotel security!” a man yelled, pushing past Leif and heading for the besieged booth.

“Los Angeles Police Department!” a uniformed officer bellowed, hot on the security guard’s heels.

Gaspar gazed around at the utter pandemonium that filled the convention center and felt guilty. He’d been to the convention a couple times in the past. He’d never gone legally, of course, always on identities he’d “borrowed” from corporate databases he’d managed to crack. Attending the convention those times had often been highlights of the year.

Now he was responsible for ruining this year’s event.

“Latke,” Heavener called.

“I’m working,” Gaspar said. He took the specially built icon from his pocket, one of the best from his bag of tricks, and fed it directly into the hotel’s computer systems through the reciprocal programming that maintained the holofeeds. He checked the progress of his program against the wristcom connecting him to the hotel security.

In seconds the program became part of the security system and every cam in the hotel went offline. “It’s down,” he told Heavener.

Matt stared at the ironbound chariot wheel swamping through the grainy yellow sand straight at his head. He tried to get up, but the sand kept slipping out from under him. The chariot wheel caught him dead center as the driver yelled out in savage glee.

Pain filled Matt’s body, twisting him up, but it wasn’t anything more than what he’d programmed on the feedback allowed from the Net. He was automatically logged off.

Matt opened his eyes and inhaled sharply, trying to get his bearings.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Matt blinked at the flight attendant, trying to remember where he was for just a moment. Then he felt the familiar sensation of flying. “Yes, thank you. I was playing online. It didn’t turn out so well.”

The flight attendant nodded sympathetically.

“So how’d you get it?” Leif asked. “Find out you had a really slow goblin?”

“It looked liked a Roman war chariot,” Matt answered, “but I couldn’t swear to it. I got shoved into another game from Goblin King. I also saw the dragon there.”

“The one you and Maj saw?”

“Yeah.” Matt glanced at Andy, who lay motionless in the seat beside him. “I don’t think it belonged there, either. How’s Andy?”

“Still playing,” Leif replied. “Why didn’t you think the dragon belonged there?”

“This demo felt like a straight start game, and the dragon was just there, not really interacting at all. Where did you get shunted to?”

“Here. I got taken out by one of those little ships and was logged completely off the Net. I tried to get back into the demo veeyar, but it’s off-line.”

Matt looked at Andy and started to get worried.

“Then where’s Andy?”

Andy studied the heads-up display available to him in the cockpit, recognizing the control configuration immediately. The Space Marines series of games were a personal favorite of his, and he had high scores on a half-dozen Net sites that ran the games.

Cyber-augmented gloves and boots encased his hands and feet and controlled the forty-foot battlesuit. Automatically he ran through the systems displays and weapons checklist. The arms and legs were all in good working order.

The helmet that fit over his head contained the HUD. Pull-down menus kept track of his heading and armament. A long, letter-box-shaped screen fit over his eyes like a visor, giving him a full 360-degree view around the battlesuit as well as overhead.

“Alternative vidscreen,” Andy commanded. “Reduce field of view to one hundred eighty degrees with rearviews on the sides.”

Immediately the viewscreen blurred out of focus, changing from the panoramic spread to an eyes-forward view. Two round sections on either side gave him the view behind him. The radar screen above it pinged targets, then the identify-friend-or-foe function kicked in, reading the signature of the other four cavalry units within the half-klick sweep.

Andy only thought about the sudden change from the Goblin King game to the Space Marines for a moment. It really didn’t matter to him. Gameplay was gameplay. All he wanted to do was roll up a score. I wouldn’t have been able to talk Leif and Matt into this. There aren’t any dragons in Space Marines.

He flexed his hands and feet, moving the seventy-ton war machine into a distance-eating stride. The cockpit swung only slightly, helping create the illusion that he actually was the big battlesuit.

“Open comm,” Andy said.

The comm opened with a crackle of static, and voices immediately filled the void. “Blue Niner, this is Blue Leader, do you copy?” a young male voice demanded.

“Blue Niner copies,” another voice answered. “Have you identified the new guy?”

New guy? That must be me. “Blue Leader,” Andy said. “I need a designation.”

“Affirmative. Blue Leader reads you. Not all of our company made the jump from Space Station Zebra. Evidently we uncovered some anomaly in the targeted space station that transported us here.”

“Understood.” Andy swung the big battlesuit around, falling in behind the four units. “Kind of went through that myself.”

“You weren’t with us at the space station?” Blue Leader asked.

“That’s negative, Blue Leader. Ended up here by accident myself.” Andy easily moved the battlesuit up to a jog.

“Seems you’ve got a lot of experience in the suit.”

“I’ve fought my share of battles,” Andy agreed. Sweeping the terrain around him, he was only slightly surprised to spot the castle under attack ahead.

Space Marines traveled everywhere and fought anyone. As space-bred mercenaries living and dying on huge torus wheels spinning through known and unknown galaxies, they never knew where the next battleground was going to be. One of the Space Marine companies Andy battled with on a regular basis had been in existence for more than two years. He’d encountered futuristic worlds as well as medieval ones.

“Your designation is Blue Thirteen,” Blue Leader said.

“My lucky number,” Andy replied laconically. “What’s the target?”

“Don’t know,” Blue Leader answered. “We were on a pure hit-and-git-shoot-to-kill mission when we ended up here. The way we figure it, everything here is fair game.”

“Magnify vision,” Andy said. His field of view slid forward, zooming in on the castle. One of the Space Marine units stepped through a hole blasted in the side of the castle. The machine gun blazed, driving back a group of men that had stepped forward to challenge the intruder.

Andy took in the banquet area and noted the medieval weapons the guards used. The combat was too one-sided for his taste. “You’re looking at a massacre here, Blue Leader.”

“You say massacre,” Blue Leader responded, “and I say easy points.”

A feeling of wrongness dampened Andy’s mood. It was one thing to play Space Marines when challenging an adequate enemy force, but executions were another matter entirely.

The group Andy gamed with in the Space Marines comprised mercenaries with a conscience. They sold their skills honorably and stood by the contracts they undertook. In fact, Andy and his friends had, on more than one occasion, invaded solar systems in the game where outlaw Space Marines had holed up and killed any new gamers wanting to play in those areas.

The Space Marines walking through the huge hole blown in the side of the castle paused. The machine gun on the battlesuit’s shoulder quivered and spent brass twinkled through the air.

Inside his cockpit, Andy cringed and turned cold inside. It was one thing to jump into a game to blow your friends up for fun, but this wasn’t anything like that. The medieval castle couldn’t even protect itself.

The Space Marine battlesuit in the palace bent down and plucked something up from the ground.

“Magnify,” Andy ordered.

The viewscreen performed immediately, zooming in on the figure trapped in the battlesuit’s three-fingered hand. Andy recognized her at once.

“Hey, Blue Leader, look at the prize I just took.” The guy in the battlesuit swiveled, leaving his lower half locked down as he turned his upper torso.

Andy’s hands flexed inside the cybered gloves. He watched the weapons systems flare to life within the HUD, and he marked the placement of the other three Space Marines. They were all enemies by his personal definition at that point.

He readied the anchor attachment that fit inside the battlesuit’s left arm. Normally the anchor was only used in space battles to link back up with a friendly ship when a battlesuit had been blown free of a transport ship’s hull. He knew he wouldn’t have much time to act before the other three Space Marines turned on him.

“Target,” he ordered. Crosshairs appeared on the viewscreen and glowed when lock was achieved.

“Warning,” a soft, feminine voice said. “The target you have selected has registered on IFF as—”

“Override previous identification,” Andy barked. “IFF is tainted. All controls over to ship’s personnel.”

“Confirmed,” the computer voice said. “Safeguards are down. All systems available.”

Andy closed his left fist and fired the anchor. A full meter of hardened steel flashed from the hollow groove of the battlesuit’s left arm. It caught the battlesuit on the right side of the torso not quite halfway up. The sabot charge fired off on impact and sent the pronged head through the battlesuit, punching out the main servos that operated the suit’s on-board motion computer.

“What the—” the guy in the paralyzed battlesuit shouted.

By then Andy was a blur of movement. He fired a salvo of smoker rounds into the ground immediately around him. A cloud of white smoke roiled up, filled with positively and negatively charged ions as well as burning cinders that would throw off the thermal and radar sensors of the other suits.

He jogged to the right, taking advantage of a copse of trees and the downgrade of the hill there. Hang on, Catie, I’m coming. Normally he wouldn’t have been worried about Catie’s welfare. If she received any serious injuries during gameplay, she’d have been logged off the Net. But he still didn’t know how he’d gotten into the Space Marines game, so he wasn’t certain if a normal log-off was possible.

He crouched down, taking advantage of the short grade of the hill. Machine-gun rounds whipped through the air above him as the other guys in the battlesuits responded to his attack. None of them had him in their sights yet.

“Release the hatch.” Andy slipped his hands and feet out of the control boots and gloves. Pushing himself from the cockpit console seat, he grabbed the emergency jetpack from the space under the seat and buckled it around his upper body. He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses from his jacket pocket.

The front of the battlesuit’s head folded open as the hatch released with a hiss of compressed air. He pulled the jetpack’s control glove onto his right hand and pressed the ignition. The resulting explosion from the combustible engine fired him from the open maw of the battlesuit’s head like a rocket.

Andy kept both hands stretched before him, his legs spread to avoid the jetpack’s fiery contrail and to help him control his flight. He maxed out his speed, hurtling toward the paralyzed battlesuit that stood still as a statue. Machine-gun tracer rounds burned the air above and ahead of him, but he was through the area before the shooter ever got the range.

While playing the game with his friends, Andy had also spent time repairing and beefing his battlesuit up. If the game was played correctly without cheats, a battlesuit warrior spent nearly ten hours working on his vehicle to every one he or she spent operating it. As a result, he knew intimately where all the battlesuits’ weak points were.

He also knew the battlesuit’s secondary systems were struggling to come online and restore mobile capability to the stricken suit.

Andy powered down at the last minute, twisting in the air so he almost stalled out when he reached the battlesuit. He grabbed the clenched fist that held Catie captive.

“Traitor!” the guy inside the paralyzed suit screamed. “I’m going to get you!”

“Andy?” Catie stared at him in disbelief.

“Me,” Andy said with a smile as he took in the frilly dress. “Going to a ball somewhere, Princess?”

“You’d think so,” she replied, only sounding a little tense. “I met a real toad.”

Andy drew the laser pistol from the cavalry holster on his right hip. “Step back.” He fired from pointblank range. The laser cut through the thinner plates inside the finger joint where they had to slide over each other. In seconds the tension cables beneath were bared. Another two bursts and the cable parted with high-pitched squeals.

Holstering his sidearm, Andy stood and grabbed the finger that was taller than and just as broad as he was. It took everything he had to move the finger, but when it opened, Catie managed to squeeze through.

Machine-gun rounds peppered the stationary battlesuit. Andy felt the vibrations shiver through the hardware that warned him the system was coming back online.

The huge hand they stood on jerked spasmodically. The three undamaged fingers closed a little tighter.

“Hold on,” Andy ordered as he wrapped his left arm around Catie’s waist and pulled her to him. She wrapped her arms around his neck, making it hard to keep his head up. He couldn’t walk heavily encumbered, so he chose simply to fall out of the battlesuit’s hand.

No sooner had they left the hand than it snapped closed, sounding like a deadly autobus pileup.

Catie screamed as they fell twenty of the thirty feet to the ground. Then Andy tightened his fist inside the jetpack control glove. The jetpack fired and immediately provided them with lift.

Andy rolled his body, getting them aimed in the proper direction, then fired a sustained burst from the jetpack. He ran close to the ground, no more than five or six feet off the ground. If we crash, we’re not going to have to worry about those guys, he thought.

He flew toward the open head of his battlesuit, cutting power early. He pulled Catie to him more tightly, covering her body with his.

His shoulder hit the upper lip of the access hatch opening, and they ricocheted into the cockpit. He skidded across the steel plate flooring and slammed into the console chair hard enough to drive the wind from his lungs.

“We made it!” Catie shouted in disbelief as she pushed herself up from him.

Andy concentrated on breathing again. Black spots swam in his vision. Getupgetupgetup! he shouted at himself mentally because he didn’t have the breath to speak. They’re not going to wait for you to get ready!