The Jarg promised to give me the invaluable cargo as soon as I added him to my team and brought him to a safe zone where he could change his res point. Sure, a reasonable measure of precaution. I understood the Jarg completely and agreed to his conditions. Now I had nothing to keep me on Kasti-Utsh III and wanted to get to my star frigate, but sharply stopped. The final touch. I opened the drone control tab and summoned the Small Relict Guard Drone. I told it to fly to me and got the customary warning that this order had a high probability of error. Yes, yes, I knew. I wasn’t actually going to have the drone embark on a long deadly flight. I was looking for one particular line:
Estimated time in flight: 344,802 years, 87 days, 6 hours, 58 minutes.
Much longer than the previous two. That meant I was farther away from the secret base now. I jotted down the new number, hurried back to the ship and managed to extinguish a flare up of conflict. This time Imran wasn’t letting the “toad” in and threatening the explosion risk, pointing his sharp blades at the Jarg.
“Let him through Imran. He’s with us! He’s joining our crew! Uline Tar hire on this Analyst... Look at you, level-57 already... and issue the requisite documents. After that come to my quarters. I want to have a talk with you alone about improving our finances.”
* * *
I hadn’t left the game in quite some time! The last time was more than two days ago to attend a meeting of high-profile faction players and before that... I couldn’t even remember right away. It was so long ago and so many different events had happened since then. I threw back the top of the virt pod and spent some time lying down and getting used to the half-forgotten sensations of my real body. The lack of a mini-map before my eyes or bars for life, hunger and exhaustion was scary at first. But anyhow I quickly came to and sat up, expecting Imran. My Dagestani friend insisted he accompany me “just in case.”
I didn’t argue, because some of my Human-3 Faction allies still treated me cautiously and even negatively. There had been unfortunate events before even during peace time. But now, with a war on, taking a key faction member out of play would help the Dark Faction greatly. I stood up, walked over to the glass and looked at the Dome from way up on the fourteenth floor.
“It’s noon and I almost can’t see anyone,” Imran said as he appeared in the doorway, reacting to the unnatural quiet and emptiness under the Dome.
“Well, there’s a war on. Everyone who can hold a weapon is in the game. The only time people come under the Dome is while waiting to respawn and now some commanders have been sent to rest after two and a half days of harsh battles.”
We went down the spiral staircase and headed down the deserted park paths right to the administration building. Now I wanted to see Alexander Antipov. I had to tell the intelligence director that the Dark Faction knew timeframes I’d only given at our recent meeting of key players.
Fortunately, I managed to catch the fed in his office. But he wasn’t alone today. He was talking with faction leader Ivan Lozovsky. What a surprise! As far as I’d heard from Imran, practically no one had seen our supreme leader for the last two days. I guess they eventually did find him. At the very least in the real world. They both turned their extremely unhappy faces toward me simultaneously. They must have been discussing secret business and this was no place for outsiders. I stopped at the threshold.
“Gnat?” the fed really seemed surprised. “What a rare treat! You have hardly been seen under the Dome at all recently. Come in, don’t be ashamed. Did you have something to tell us?”
Leaving my escort in the hallway, I walked inside and closed the door behind. I immediately noticed that both directors looked gloomy and exhausted. Seemingly they had both only gotten winks of sleep in the last three days.
“I need a list of priority targets to destroy from orbit! Preferably with coordinates if they are stationary!” I blurted out, not wanting to discuss the spy in our ranks around one of the suspects.
Both directors exchanged glances, then Ivan Lozovsky asked when I would need that information.
“The Tolili-Ukh X frigate will come out of warp near earth in eight hours. We’ll need another half hour or so to smooth over formalities with the Geckho and get into geostationary orbit.”
“Good news has been so rare recently that it’s twice as nice to hear!” The faction leader lit up. “Yes, Kirill. You can have all that. But please stick to the plan this time. It might end very badly for all of us if you don’t. I remind you that we still have an agreement with the Dark Faction not to bombard the main forts that are used to establish claim over nodes. Even this flare up of war has not cancelled that agreement, a fact which Geckho Diplomat Kosta Dykhsh has explicitly reminded us.”
“To be sure... We caught hell as soon as our howitzers in the Yellow Mountains landed a volley on the citadel of the enemy Graveyard!” the fed added with a sad smirk. “We didn’t do much damage to the very recently restored fortress, but now our coffers are empty and the list of goods we have to give our suzerains as compensation is a few pages long in small font...”
“And we have to gather and give up the resources on their list. Otherwise the Geckho, as guarantors of the agreement, will declare war on our faction with all the accompanying consequences...”
It was clear that Ivan Lozovsky was seriously upset. I then held back an acrid question with great effort. Still, I wanted to know how our faction Diplomat, whose job it was to remember such things, had allowed us to violate the agreement! But I kept silent. Given the tough war, it was not the right time to start a fight with leadership and accuse our main commander of incompetence. What was more, their faces were black with exhaustion, so I could see they hadn’t been having a great last few days.
Nevertheless, despite the agitation and exhaustion, Antipov didn’t forget the standards of hospitality and offered me coffee or something stronger. I was categorically opposed to alcohol. I hadn’t yet recovered from that Miyelonian party, so in the real world the mere thought of liquor made me want to ralph. But coffee was just the thing for me, which I said. Alexander Antipov pressed the intercom button and asked someone named Anyuta to bring three coffees.
“Two coffees, I’m fine,” Lozovsky quickly corrected the fed and added: “My respawn time is almost up. I need to get right back into the game. I’m afraid if I don’t show up the Chinese won’t know what to do.”
“The Chinese?” I asked in surprise. Alexander Antipov commented with a smirk:
“Yes, our director surprised us all! He took off in a hurry and no one knew where he went. He didn’t say a word. But two days later, the Dark Faction got attacked from behind by a squadron of five hundred Human-1 soldiers. The Chinese overran the few border guards and destroyed a few of the enemy’s new northerly nodes. But most importantly they distracted them. And that gave our soldiers room to breathe and regroup. And we were able to go on the counterattack on the southern front! The Second Legion finally suppressed the enemy in the Rainforest and now they’re tracking the darksiders through the Tropics. What is happening?! Is Anyuta asleep or something...?”
The fed again pressed the intercom button and repeated his order for coffee. Not waiting for his secretary’s answer, he slapped himself on the forehead in annoyance:
“I totally forgot! There’s an active CtA. Anyuta’s in the game. Okay, I’ll make the coffee,” the fed stood up heavily with a slap on the table and headed for the door.
“Anyuta is a pretty good targeter, by the way,” Ivan Lozovsky shouted after him while Antipov was still nearby. “In many ways its thanks to her and our other artillery targeters that our 152-mm howitzers from the Yellow Mountains turned an enemy landing party into dust on Antique Beach. And the fact that the enemy retreated from the Rainforest before they could reinforce was also largely thanks to good targeting.”
“So the Rainforest node has been liberated?” I asked, because this was very unexpected and pleasant news.
“The node is neutral for now,” the faction leader corrected me
strictly. “The enemy destroyed our claim in the first few minutes of attack, but we didn’t let them fortify despite their attempts to build a base in the Rainforest. The Dark Faction lost one antigrav assault vehicle there, and we totaled another two tanks, which they extracted by sea for repair. But the main thing is that they took heavy losses, especially when our artillery started raining down thermobaric rounds on their base every fifteen minutes right where they respawned. In the end the enemy gave up and retreated further south, where our artillery can’t hit them.”
Ivan Lozovsky went silent and turned. He made sure Antipov was gone, leaned in to me and, his voice lowered to a whisper, said:
“We have an incident of a totally different nature on our hands here. This is the definition of a problem coming from where we least expected. Our shared acquaintance Anna the Medic has fled the Dome!”
“How did she do that?” I couldn’t believe my ears. The news was just so shocking.
“I’ll tell you how. Four days ago I helped her write out a pass for leave. Her brother was getting married and, of course, we let her have a day off for that. Plus everything was going well for Anna. She was happy with things and I couldn’t even see even a hint of what she was about to do. But yesterday when I was gone, she walked up to security with a signed pass. There it is on the table, take a look!” the faction head pointed to a small colored cardstock rectangle.
I picked up the thick official form. Number, date, signature. There was also a stamp and exit time written in ballpoint pen.
“The form is real. They can be obtained from the guard post. Yesterday’s date is written there, but the signature is not mine! It’s a very good fake, maybe Anna did it herself. The security workers were surprised. The CtA meant all players should be at their posts, but they still let her through. Then a few hours after that our curators received a photo sent to the Ministry of Defense from another Russian military agency. They clearly show Anna, accompanied by foreign diplomats and entering the Canadian embassy!”
“Canadian?” my former lover’s choice wasn’t easy to understand. Traditionally, which was to say historically, all refugees and dissenters from my country chose either the British or American embassies.
“Yes, Canadian. And when we started digging, we realized that some guests at the wedding work in virtual reality at a secret facility in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Our military intelligence has long known it as one of the three North American centers for studying the game that bends reality.”
“Canada has three factions in the game?!” Today was just full of surprises. “So Canada is the most developed of all countries on earth in the ‘great game’ the Geckho brought us?!”
Ivan Lozovsky looked at the time, shook his head in dismay and said he had to run, but still answered:
“Kirill, I said North American, not Canadian. There’s a difference. The issue is that initially the official authorities in America reacted quite skeptically to information about this new game. So at first the game that bends reality was the realm of a team of volunteer enthusiasts and employees of a few small private game developers. And among them were citizens of the USA, Canada and emigrants from a few Asian countries. As a joke they called their team Children of the Corn like in the Steven King novel. But as soon as it was proven that the space technology imported from the game could work, authorities pushed the volunteers aside and military experts took the reins. All the virt capsules were brought to a guarded military facility in the province of New Brunswick where they instituted a strict regime of secrecy. But the first team remained. What else could they do with them? And the first station became intergovernmental, although the USA and Canada quickly built their own sets of corncobs. Okay Kirill, I’m happy we got a chance to chat and was glad to hear news from distant space, but I really don’t have any time! Good luck! And be ready for unpleasant questions about Anna!”
Ivan Lozovsky hurried to leave and ran into Alexander Antipov in the doorway. He even spilled one of the cups of coffee.
“Aw damn... Okay I’ll make myself another later. Here you go, Kirill. Careful, it’s hot. And I have some questions about your friends.”
Chapter Nine. A New Scourge
IVAN LOZOVSKY was not wrong. For the next half hour I had to recount the details my relationship with Anya from First Medical to the security director from beginning to end. Starting with the online tournament, which she and I were the last survivors of, right up to when I found her at night and without clothes in the faction head’s bedroom. I suspected that most of what I said was already known to Alexander Antipov from other sources, but he still asked questions and demanded details. I hadn’t done anything reprehensible, and certainly not criminal. Plus for the last week Anna and I had practically not spoken, so the fed eventually laid off.
But I felt the opposite. The more I thought over this situation, the more questions I had swarming in my head. Why flee? Anna had no access to important secrets. Yes, she had gotten as close as possible to the faction head, it wouldn’t have been possible to get any closer than that. But the idea that the experienced and secretive Diplomat Lozovsky would open up in bed all of a sudden and share military and technological secrets with his lover seemed dubious at best. So the most Anna could have to tell her new masters was the coordinates of the Human-3 Faction nodes and the approximate size of our player force. That could hardly merit an emergency evacuation from the Dome and sheltering her in the embassy. I mean, where had her character even gone? Had she just picked up and ran over the border despite the war with the Dark Faction and increased security on the perimeter? I asked all that out loud.
“It’s hard to say about her character. In her last session, the Medic was deployed in the Antique Beach node during our first unsuccessful counterattack on the Rainforest. To be honest, it was a huge cock-up and with the vortex of deaths and resurrections, we somehow lost track of Anna. Fourteen of our players were taken captive by the Dark Faction that day and, I have to admit, we actually got off easy. It could have been much worse if the First Legion vanguard hadn’t rushed in. This wasn’t the first time they’d come up against the Dark Faction, lots of players had dozens of battles behind them. But even the veterans noticed that it was like we were playing at a higher difficulty. We got the impression the enemy knew all our moves in advance and was ready with the most effective possible counter!”
The fed went silent, winced and massaged his temples with his fingers. Clearly he had a really nasty headache. I also noticed that his eyes were red from exhaustion and lack of sleep. It was clear he was not only tired but also very wound up by the inexplicable level of information the enemy had about our faction’s activity.
“I think I’m getting sick... My throat is sore, my head is splitting, aspirin is no help,” Alexander Antipov commented, nevertheless continuing the conversation. “As for Anna not having much information, you’re basically right. But Anna does know about our starship and is closely acquainted with its captain. And that is no small factor. She also knows the names of our high-profile players and could even describe them physically. That is more than enough to find them in the real world and determine the identities of their relatives and friends.”
“But to what end? Whoever these foreign agents are after is under the Dome, so getting in touch with them would be a big problem. I mean, all high-profile and more or less significant players are already subject to round the clock surveillance, and now all the more so.”
“You’re wrong there, Kirill! All intelligence services the world over have ways of influencing a person indirectly. They could go through their loved ones, for example. But I’ll agree that it all looks clumsy, not like the work of professionals. And the Canadian and American agencies, beyond all doubt, are professionals. As a spy, she would have been worth more in the long term if she stayed here close to the very head of the Human-3 Faction. There has to be some detail we aren’t seeing. It just doesn’t add up...”
We spent some time in silence, th
inking over the weirdness of this whole thing. Then I asked the much better-informed director:
“Could it be that this isn’t about the real world, but actually about that very North American faction? What do we know about it?”
Alexander Antipov unlocked his computer and turned the monitor so I could see:
“There are very few details. We know its number: Human-8, we know where their center is located. Take a look, your clearance level is high enough. These are satellite photos from the last six months of a military base in the province of New Brunswick. Their corncobs look just like ours, but hold one hundred fifty virt pods a piece. As you can see, three of the cobs were built a long time ago and have been working actively. They started building a fourth but for six months it remained unfinished. It looks very much like the countries involved decided to prioritize their own research centers rather than continue to share valuable information with their neighbors. So they haven’t cut funding, but it isn’t growing either.”
“I wouldn’t say that for sure! Maybe the Human-8 Faction ran into serious problems in the game,” I said, trotting out another explanation for the lack of progress. “Based on the number of virt pods, they have one level-two node and two level-ones. And now they can’t get more than four hundred thirty-five people, so they don’t need a fourth corncob.”
Antipov shrugged his shoulders indefinitely and started clicking, scrolling through the many pictures of the military base in winter and summer from outer space. But then the satellite shots ended and a video began. It was Anna in a place surrounded by a fence and coming out of a big black car with diplomatic plates and, guarded by an escort of five men of athletic build in identical suits, walking into the building. But there was one inconsistency that jumped out at me. I couldn’t even believe it at first:
“Stop! Rewind five seconds. Zoom in on the face. Come on, not Anna’s! See that tan security guy in dark glasses. Who’s he?”
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