Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  “Over…what?” The surface of the lava below her was separating into globules, changing from a smooth golden-orange to a streaky mixture of the two colors. She could feel that she was still falling, but not moving towards it. Her view didn’t match what her other senses told her. Then suddenly the lava was rushing up at her, much too fast.

  She realized she had seen this before on an avalanche field - everything below her had been momentarily in free fall, throwing off her perspective. That meant she was falling twice as far and about to land much harder than she had planned. Kery jerked her feet to bring up the nose of the board and then deactivated the right foot magnetic clamp. She grabbed for the pointed tip of the board with both hands.

  #

  Mezerello landed and dove to her left as she entered the target warehouse, just barely evading an enemy missile. It detonated against the floor just past her, blowing apart shelves holding boxes or crates and igniting the papers contained within.

  A quick glance showed her the superimposed outlines of Striker 1 and 2, each bobbing and weaving as they engaged the enemy mechs outside. Their silhouettes were striped green and orange, damaged but still operational.

  “Mez, that looked like their entire supply of missiles. They’ve dropped the launch pods. Stay under cover until Wasps can deal with the enemy, then evacuate.”

  “How many?”

  “Five left. That we know of.”

  Mez swatted some burning paper away, brought her rifle up and checked that it wasn’t damaged. “The Wasps can handle them?”

  “Yes, almost certainly. I think you should retreat back the way you came.”

  She eyed the dark hole in the floor. Infrared was useless because of the fires, but her other targeting systems were unable to detect anything. Anything at all.

  “Mez? Did you hear me?”

  She increased the power to targeting. The darkness was uneven, almost like a pool of oil or smoke. Radar and lidar both failed to penetrate it.

  “That’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?” Shadow was clearly distracted by the battle outside. “Oh - yes, I see it. That is unusual.”

  “We’ve never seen anything like this here, have we? Maybe I should get a sample.” The Active took a step closer to the hole.

  “We can analyze the data later, Mez. This is a trap. Enemies are two rooftops over, Wasps are two seconds out, get ready to run.”

  “What would Keryapt Zess do?”

  “What would…? Mez, those shows are entertainment. If you knew the real Keryapt, she wouldn’t advise you to-“

  Mez lifted a small chunk of concrete and dropped it into the hole. It disappeared into the oily smoke, presumably falling towards the lower two floors.

  “-take chances unnecessarily.”

  An odd clang reverberated from the hole.

  “Shadow, that didn’t sound-“

  Something exploded at her feet, shattering the floor where she had been standing. The blast sent her spinning backwards.

  “Mez!”

  Time slowed to an absolute crawl as she flew towards the wall. For a subjective second she watched concrete chunks ping pong around her as she tried to figure out which way was up. “What…”

  “You’re at max speed. Ten seconds to thermal overload. Move!”

  The world was moving in slow motion, but her body and mind regained synchronization. Mez reached for the floor as she sailed sideways but only her left arm responded. Her palm gripper managed to stick and she flopped to a stop. “I’m hurt.”

  “Launching remaining Wasps. Strikers coming to you.”

  “Where’s my rifle?” Dust and debris obscured everything. She glanced at her shredded right arm as she rose and was glad the pain sensors cut out automatically.

  “Forget it! Just get out!”

  The air cleared just enough for the hole to the lower level to become visible. Something monstrous and dark was coming out, clawing the hole wider without regard for the noise it made. Its serpentine head pivoted towards Mezerello. It had cannons instead of eyes.

  Her combat control system drew angry red lines through the air where the cannons pointed. Mez dove and rolled as they fired. The wall behind her exploded outwards.

  Striker 1 fired at the thing through the gap in the wall. It blew divots out of its head and neck but the red targeting lines tracked Mez relentlessly.

  “Get out!”

  “I’m trying to!” She leapt sideways just before it fired again, then scrambled towards the opening to the street. The red line beat her there.

  Striker 1 crashed into the thing’s head an instant before it fired a third time. Its shot blasted at Mezerello’s feet, sending her ricocheting off the ceiling with pain screaming from both legs. It disappeared down into the warehouse. The broken shards of Striker 1 followed it.

  “Thermal overload imminent. You only have a few seconds left!”

  “Legs….broken.” She struggled to her knees and one hand. The gaping passage to the outside was only a few meters away.

  #

  The rear third of the board was warped and littered with blobs of molten rock. Keryapt balanced on her front foot and kicked them off with the other. She got a few of the big pieces off but had to clamp both feet down before she crashed and sank.

  She reconnected her comm system to Survival Dynamics. “Your spectacle opened an ultramafic vent!” Subsurface lava, far hotter than what she had been riding on, was welling out into the channel.

  “Ultra-what? Kery! Listen! You’re at over two hundred million real time viewers!”

  She was about to use the most obscene word in the Fleet tongue to tell him what he could do with his audience, but was stunned speechless by what she saw as she crested the next ridge. The simultaneous detonation of all the packages had shattered the mountainside, unleashing the entire ocean of lava. Now it was all coming apart around her.

  Another tech had bad news and obvious advice for her. “Your shuttle is upside down and not responding. Head for high ground!”

  High ground? There was none. She had to get off the surface entirely.

  “Crash close-up!”

  All four camera remotes abandoned their positions and headed straight for her. She turned the board at a sharp angle, throwing up a rooster tail of lava as she headed for the nearly vertical wall of the course. The coloration of the molten rock had changed from a warm orange to a brilliant yellow, bright enough to throw her shadow on the rock ahead.

  One camera remote died, caught in a splash of lava. She leaned back as far as she could and launched upwards off a half-submerged boulder, trailing a fan of liquid fire as she went. The twisted board tumbled away below her as she caught the first and then another of the cameras, their gravitic engines straining to lift her.

  At first she thought she might be safe, but the pair of remotes was nowhere near powerful enough. As she started to sink back down, she angled towards the island of rock where the board had landed. She moved the first camera remote from her hand to a foot as the last one arrived, grabbed it and set it to maximum lift as well.

  It was almost enough. Maybe if the Sundiver didn’t have so much hardened lava caked on it, but she wasn’t able to scrape it off effectively. It was a slow but unmistakably one-way trip.

  She checked her body’s emergency options. If she could detach a limb or somehow shed some mass then she would, but the Sundiver wasn’t designed to be modular or adjustable. She could open diagnostic panels in various locations, but there wasn’t even a way to remove her cranial pod by herself. Her brain, the only part of her left from her original pre-Active life, was going to be incinerated.

  There was the twisted board below, three camera remotes, a useless wreck of a shuttle and a ship in orbit. There was no one else from Fleet Four in this system, everything was being done remotely. No one was going to intercede to save her.

  She was going to die here.

  A sense of calm came over Keryapt. She cut the communications link to Survival
Dynamics, annoyed at their repeated questions about her plan. She didn’t have one. She was sure that there was a time when she would have known the answer, figured something out, but she wasn’t the same person she had been.

  It might be nice, to be able to stop pretending that she was.

  #

  A hundred million times farther away from Earth than any human had ever traveled, Shadow triggered the emergency protocols. She had been right, Mezerello wrong. This was a trap, designed explicitly for someone like her.

  “Come on, Mez, you can make it.”

  Mezerello lurched forward a meter. Her brain was nearly in thermal overload.

  Shadow’s system interface turned gold and blue, finally. The Admiralty had answered in time.

  “My Active needs orbital fire support.”

  There was an instant of hesitation.

  “Denied.”

  Another meter. Mez was almost to the opening.

  Another crash from behind her. Shadow helplessly watched with Mez as she turned to look. The thing was pushing up through the hole again, the oily blackness flowing with it.

  “What? She’ll be killed!”

  This wasn’t the same serpentine machine. It didn’t have the damage from Striker 1 ramming it. There was more than one of them.

  Mez turned away from it and faced the opening. Slammed a hand into the flooring, hauled herself ahead another meter.

  “Our evaluation is complete. The battle is already lost.”

  The Admiralty connection terminated.

  Shadow’s support team, unaware of the exchange with the Admiralty, jumped when she slammed her fist into the side of her terminal. In her accelerated state their surprised faces all pivoted towards her in slow motion. At another time she might have found it comical.

  She switched her attention on the Wasp missiles in the air. They were Mezerello’s last chance.

  “Hold on, Mez.”

  Shadow left four Wasps to destroy the rooftop mechs and diverted two to the side. They would arc around and go straight in through the opening to hit the thing behind Mez. Together they would obliterate everything and shoot Mez out of the building like a bullet from a gun. Her body would almost certainly be destroyed, but her cranial pod might survive. It could work.

  But then Mezerello’s view flipped and spun. Status indicators for her entire body went red.

  “Mez? Mez! Hold on!”

  The last words from Mez were almost philosophical. “Teeth? Who puts-“

  The connection was cut, leaving one last image frozen. Mezerello was staring down at her own torso where a set of gigantic metal blades had pierced her. Her left hand was just visible next to the thing’s mouth, vainly trying to pry the jaws open.

  The Wasps’ pinpoint sensors showed the target building rushing into view, impenetrable blackness oozing out from where Mezerello had been a second earlier. There was no way to tell where she was now. A direct hit from a Wasp would definitely kill her.

  Shadow was running at the same amplified processing rate as her Active, ten times normal. She had seconds left to decide. What should she do? What could she do? Destroy the entire building?

  This was her first assignment. Her mind went back to her training, but there were no answers there. Before then? Media programs and games. What would Keryapt Zess do in a situation like this?

  Buy more time, then try to sort things out later. She hoped Mezerello would survive to forgive her.

  Before she could alter the missile’s course further, everything went dark. There was no signal coming from the Wasps or the miniature camera remotes fluttering near the scene of the battle.

  “What happened?”

  None of the technicians in the room with her had even started to notice the signal loss, so none of them had an answer for her.

  “Mez? Are you there?”

  She knew that the Active was not.

  Numbly, fearing the truth, she switched to the view coming from the Observatory. Its geostationary orbit put it a tenth of a light second above the Earth, and the resulting delay made it of limited use during the battle. But its main sensors had been focused on the engagement area, telescopically peering at various wavelengths into and through the clouds which covered it.

  Except now the clouds over that corner of the city were scooting away, parted by an expanding shockwave. A pinprick of incandescent white was visible for an instant at the center of the storm.

  The sensors on the Observatory were unequivocal in their analysis. A low yield antimatter weapon had just been used. An entire neighborhood of San Francisco had been obliterated.

  Mezerello was gone.

  #

  Keryapt looked down at the shrinking spit of rock where the board rested. At her current rate, it might even be submerged by the time she floated down. Were the cameras still transmitting? Would the spectacle of her death be seen?

  Did it matter?

  Her communication system chimed with an incoming connection.

  “I told you-“

  “Keryapt Zess. This is an Admiralty override. You are to report for immediate re-Activation and make all possible speed for the Sol system. Full briefing will begin once you are clear of your current situation.”

  “Once I’m clear? Do you realize where-“

  The connection terminated.

  Reactivation. Sol. It took a second, but the significance of that name hit her. That meant…

  That meant she needed to survive.

  She detached the camera remote from her foot, switched off the gravitic drives of the other two and fell, crashing down next to the warped board. She had been focused on fighting against gravity, but now worried it might not be strong enough. There was no time to run a simulation.

  She released the two camera remotes and set them to wait close by. She grabbed the board, scooped up a blob of lava with the tail end and smashed it straight down into a gap in the rock. It wedged in deep, the molten rock filling the space around the broken fins. A quick adjustment made sure it was as close to vertical as possible.

  The brilliant flow on either side rose higher as she accessed the board’s virtual control system. There, and there. Switch that, reverse this, confirm. The thermal pumps changed direction, moving heat away from the tail and towards the tip. She took a moment to order the third camera to a position far above her.

  Part of the island fell away, slurped down without warning. Kery tested the board once, found that the tail was firmly glued into the rock by the now-refrigerated lava. She grabbed the two waiting camera remotes, crouched low and leapt upwards with all the Sundiver’s strength. The pair of remotes powered back on and pulled upwards as hard as they could, adding more to her altitude.

  The third remote joined her at the apex of her leap and grappled on to her foot. She spread her arms and faced downward, using the remotes to hold herself level in a Y position. The board was below, pointed straight towards her. It was impossible to tell if the glow at its tip was from reflected light or its own heat.

  “Annnnd…down.”

  Remote drives reversed, dragging her towards the surface. Diagnostic panels on the torso of the Sundiver opened at her command, revealing the delicate interior components. She barely remembered to dial down feedback from the pain sensors at the last second.

  Her aim was almost perfectly dead on, and the superheated tip of the board punched straight through her body. Kery felt it as a violent tug at her midsection, whiplashing her head and arms down towards the surface. She couldn’t help but close her eyes as she impacted.

  Even before she opened them, she could tell that her body was more sideways than she wanted. Alerts screamed about the shattered structural components and severed control pathways, but she ignored them and focused on deactivating the camera remotes which were still trying to pull her down.

  That done, she pulled her face free of the pulverized rock and confirmed what her sensors were telling her. The board had almost completely bisected her, but the outer shell on
the left side of her waist was intact. There was no sensation from her legs at all, and the board was now firmly wedged into her midsection. Lava was closing in.

  The remote in her left hand was destroyed but the other two were still functional. She ordered them to pull in perpendicular directions to maximize pressure on the shreds of armored skin holding her trapped. She dropped the shattered remote, flailed around for the largest chunk of rock within arm’s reach and beat at the chromalloy at her waist. There was no more thinking, or planning, just an animalistic attack on the thing holding her trapped.

  The island came apart at the same time as her body. The remote at her feet sped to her outstretched hand and the two tiny spheres lifted her top half, just barely, into the air. The board and the bottom half of the Sundiver body slipped out of sight, gone with only the tiniest of bubbles.

  The rest of her drifted up and away from the place where she wasn’t going to die after all.

  #

  The Planning Stage was surprisingly empty. Shadow had been told to report for the briefing without further explanation, which didn’t bode well. She hadn’t even had a chance to speak to her team about Mezerello’s death, to assure them that they had done everything they could and that she would assume all the blame.

  Her physical body was still standing there in the cooling harness used to keep a Shadow’s brain processing at the same rate as his or her Active, but all the sensory data entering her cranial pod was now coming from the shared virtual environment of the Stage. It was used to coordinate teams sometimes separated by vast distances made irrelevant by entanglement-based communications. It didn’t matter at all that the Admiralty and Labworld Command were in entirely different ships. In this place they could appear as anyone, show anything, alter scale to speak intimately or to millions.

  She was positioned in the entrance portal, a convenience used to allow Stage participants to know when someone entered or exited. Her appearance had been changed back to her default, the biological body she had given up years earlier. Before Activation.

  The map on the wall displayed a stylized representation of the location of the Sol system, over twenty light years from Fleet Four. There were other nearby systems shown as well, with names that she recognized.