Game, Set, Deathmatch

by Edwin H Rydberg

  The room hit another rock, jarring to a stop; the impact rammed her shoulder into the window frame. DaemonS ducked back inside to avoid the splash of toxic sludge as the room dipped and twisted before the current finally forced it free.

  This region had been ground zero well over a century ago when the Bruuz had begun their bombardment of Earth. Whatever energies they had used permanently deadened the land. In the subsequent decades the corporations chose to use the site as a dumping ground. While that practice had officially stopped almost twenty-five years ago, the river still ran a dark brown from the industrial sludge and toxic waste saturating the ground and riverbed.

  Yet another jarring collision staggered the team. This one opened a crack in the lower corner and, as the room tore free of its temporary mooring, a piece of wall crumbled, revealing the river below. Toxic green-brown sludge seeped in, oozing along the lower edge as the room bobbed in the murky water, deepening with each passing moment.

  “Cowgirlz, to the roof, quickly,” DaemonS shouted.

  Bodybag braced herself on the frame, dangling her legs below to use as a ladder as the four teammates clambered onto the benches. Pincer scampered up to the roof, Defcon after her as the level of the thick, smoking liquid rose. The room was filling with toxic fumes and DaemonS was having trouble seeing. Her eyes watered and the room began to spin.

  “You’re next Vorpal, make it fast.” The lithe woman almost slithered up the human ladder and DaemonS moved to follow her. Why wouldn’t the room stay still?

  “C’mon Daem,” came the Cowgirlz’ voices. She couldn’t tell who it was and the sounds all ran together coming at her from every direction. As did the components of the room that spun around her, blurring into a swirl of half-seen objects. She lunged for Bodybag’s leg but it lurched out of reach and she staggered, falling backward, crashing on the side of a bench. The fumes were overwhelming. Thoughts, when they came, were as jumbled as the surrounding sights and sounds. She lay back, unable to remember where it was she had to go. Anywhere but here. But where was the exit? The world spun faster and faster. It was too much. She curled into a ball and let the darkness take her.

  * * *

  Figment had outrun the laughter, but the base was a maze. The corridors endless. Like the bowels of some great beast they wound their way seemingly for miles with no exit in sight. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn this was a dream.

  As he tired and feared losing energy while going nowhere, he was forced to rethink his escape. Lack of pursuit had dulled his initial fear and the fog in his mind was clearing. He paused to catch his breath and think.

  Racing through the corridors had led him nowhere, but for all he knew, he’d been going in circles. He was going to have to do this systematically. As the corridors had proven fruitless, he’d have to start checking room by room, despite the risk, for some clue to an exit.

  The first three were empty. Fortunately. But as he entered the fourth, he froze in shock. Before him was a body, reclined and resting on something that looked like a medical chair. Tubes and tentacles contacted a humanoid form, which seemed to be oddly at peace among the horrifying milieu, almost as if it was having a beauty treatment instead of being the victim of twisted experiments.

  Mesmerized, Figment drew closer but stopped when the being looked up. There, upon the face, a familiar visage stared back at him.

  “NIGEL,” Figment whispered.

  “Hello, loyal Figment.” The voice was as cheerfully bureaucratic as he remembered. He smiled. “Now that you know the truth, what do you think?”

  “The truth? Were you a lackey of that twisted monster all the time?”

  NIGEL paused a moment and a curious look crossed his face. Then he shrugged as best he could while connected to the device. “I don’t remember. Does it matter anymore?”

  “That entire Genilon conspiracy was concocted, wasn’t it? But why?”

  “How else could we get into Genilon?”

  So their interest in Genilon, at least, was real. “But what could you possibly want with Genilon?”

  For a moment it seemed NIGEL was going to tell him. Then he just smiled again and shook his head.

  “I no longer have that information. It doesn’t matter anyway. You. Me. We are to have specific roles and will be given such knowledge as is necessary to our tasks.”

  Despite his mindless rambling, Figment couldn’t leave NIGEL to this fate. Rushing to his side, he said, “Come on. Get up. You’ve been brainwashed. Fight it.”

  NIGEL just returned a mindless smile and Figment, realizing he couldn’t convince the other man, decided to force the issue. Grasping NIGEL’s shoulders, figment attempted to pull him up to a sitting position but stopped when he met resistance. NIGEL’s back appeared to be a mass of rotting tissue that all but glued him to the bed.

  “The change has already begun, dear Figment,” he said, returning to his reclined position.

  “Fine. Stay here. But tell me how to get out,” Figment said, hoping there might be something of the original NIGEL remaining, but the former bureaucrat just laughed.

  “There is no exit. Not if they don’t want you to leave. Haven’t you realized yet? This process animates inanimate matter. Rock, vehicles, the walls of this base, you and me. That’s why they need to kill you first. Think of it as an afterlife. Just not the one promised when we were children.”

  “Looks more like a living death to me.”

  “No,” NIGEL said, wide eyed, with a child-like expression of wonder. “The reanimation pools bring new life.” Then he turned again to Figment. “You will see things differently when it’s your turn.”

  “Not likely,” Figment said, before turning and running from the room. He couldn’t save the New Earth liaison, but he might now be able to save himself.

  Armed with his new information, Figment approached his escape with a different strategy. Instead of following the tunnels, which for all he knew could alter at the whim of whoever was controlling the base, he shot at the walls as he ran. The base might be able to alter its walls, but there still had to be an exit to the upper city somewhere.

  * * *

  The air that woke her wasn’t what anyone would call fresh, but there was no doubt the fumes were thinner on the roof than inside the room.

  “Welcome back, Daem,” Vorpal said.

  “Oh, my head. How did....”

  “Vorpal realized you weren’t behind her and we daisy-chained Defcon down to pull you out,” Pincer explained.

  “Thanks guys,” DaemonS said, looking into the relieved faces circling her, and then to the liquid surrounding them. “Is it my imagination, or are we a lot closer to the river than I remember?”

  “Yeah, the lab is pretty much filled. We’re riding low,” Vorpal said, pointing to the gurgling goop that splashed just below the level of their roof escape. “Must be deep here, because we’re still moving.”

  A glance to her left revealed the wastelands as they slid past, dwindling into the distance. Bodybag caught her eye, “You were only out a few minutes, but we’re movin’ quick, almost past the worst of it,” the big woman said. “But dat don’t means t’ings be rosy.”

  “Yeah,” Defcon confirmed, “our boat is about to become a submarine.”

  DaemonS glanced below, into the room, and saw nothing but liquid slowly, but obviously rising. It was less than two feet from the top.

  “A quarter mile of toxic sludge to either side and our boat is sinking. We need some way to get to shore, any ideas?”

  “We’ve been discussing it while you were out,” Vorpal said. “We can’t swim and it’s unlikely our boat will make it to the shore, pretty much all we have left are the translocators.”

  She’d forgotten them since they’d been inoperative in the Genilon base. “Do they function?”

  “We’ve test-fired and recalled. Everything seems fine.”

  No one reached a Death Match without mastering translocator s
kipping, but even then, this was far longer and more dangerous than most. It required sustained concentration for the quarter mile, and a little bit of luck that nothing interfered with the target’s trajectory. Translocators wouldn’t have been her first choice for this situation, but she had faith her teammates had considered all other possibilities.

  DaemonS was pulled from her contemplation by the feel of liquid seeping through her boots. She opened her mouth in warning, only to hear Bodybag’s voice instead.

  “We’re sinkin’ quick!” Half the roof was floating beneath the surface of the green-brown liquid.

  The river had broadened and their speed was increasing. The good news was that the sludge should be more dilute in the larger volume. The bad news was that it would be harder to reach the shore.

  “We’ve got no choice. Translocators it is. Aim high, shoot fast, and we’ll meet on the other side. Two-by, five second intervals, I’ll pull up the rear. Let’s go!”

  Vorpal and Pincer launched first, arching the translocator targets high over the river to either side of their makeshift boat. At the apex of the paths, the duo vanished, appearing momentarily suspended in the air before a new tracer path raced out from each. Then Defcon and Bodybag fired their own translocators. When they started their second jump, DaemonS launched hers.

  Her first ever translocator jump, what seemed a lifetime ago now, had been terrifying and disorienting. She still remembered the awkward landing as the scene around her was instantly replaced by something quite different. There was a moment where her brain had simply refused to make sense of the new information. She’d landed hard before vomiting.

  With practice she’d improved, as did everyone. The secret was to anticipate the new surroundings before translocating, that way the brain had less work reconciling the two scenes. Now, after several years of tournaments, the motion was automatic; fire the beacon, track it with peripheral vision, mentally filling in a scene surrounding it, pull the trigger. The sequence became so ingrained in any veteran matcher that she needn’t have worried — the five of them were skipping through the air high over the river with no problem.

  Just as she was checking her complacency, trouble struck. Defcon’s target hit a passing bird and deflected toward the river. She quickly skipped and fired again but couldn’t get enough altitude. Her trajectory rapidly deteriorated, spiraling into a drain — a situation where it would become impossible to reorient the launcher to a safe trajectory quickly enough before falling. In a tournament this tended to happen over chasms and ended in a self-frag and respawn. Here it would end in toxic sludge, with no respawn.

  Pulling up the rear, DaemonS was the only one that could see what was happening, as Defcon drew nearer the river with each skip. In moments, she’d be in the river, with only seconds before the fumes overcame her, or the effluent ate through her suit and then her body. There was only one chance, but it had to be timed perfectly.

  DaemonS angled her skips so that each one brought her a bit lower. Fortunately, they were nearing the shore. Unfortunately, they were still too far for Defcon to make it.

  Finally, Defcon failed to get enough altitude and her legs grabbed the liquid flipping her into the river. DaemonS fired her target directly at her teammate then pointed her arm to the sky. Moments before the target hit Defcon, she triggered the skip and appeared above the other woman. Immediately, she launched the target high into the air and, with her free arm, grabbed Defcon before pulling the trigger. As they appeared in the air, the instant increase in weight from Defcon struggled to pull her from DaemonS’s grip, but DaemonS managed to hold for two more skips, until her grip gave as they cross the shoreline and they both crashed to the ground.

  “She’s been in the water, get her out of those clothes,” DaemonS yelled, picking herself up off the sandy shoreline.

  The others complied, freeing Defcon from the remnants of her disintegrating uniform. Minor chemical burns were visible over her back and legs, but they should be treatable when the Cowgirlz returned to the city. As Defcon’s entire suit had been removed, Vorpal and Pincer, the closest to Defcon’s size, each stripped off a few pieces of their own clothes to donate. Modesty wasn’t a big concern for a matcher, but protection was.

  Shoes were a bit of a problem, but the group managed to fashion a crude pair from some of the large vegetation around them. They still had a long way to travel back to the city and traveling barefoot would not do.

  Once Defcon was set, DaemonS took stock. They were all ashore and still alive. Where there was life, there was hope. DaemonS glanced around, taking in their surroundings.

  To one side, the toxin-saturated soil of barren wastelands flowed off to the horizon. On the other, the massive foliage of a dense jungle met them. Tempting as it was to flop onto the beach and recover some of the energy spent in the fight with the river, this was still the edge of the wastelands. Who knew what ten minutes in constant contact with the saturated sand would do.

  “C’mon team, time to get going,” DaemonS said, motioning toward the trees. “Bodybag, if you please.”

  Their tireless teammate set off into the jungle, breaking trail with wicked slashes of her rifle barrel to flatten the tall grass.

  * * *

  but breaking trail through this jungle was like trying to hack through a solid wall. It was far denser than DaemonS remembered any of the Ranir jungles of her childhood.

  The thought of walking all the way back to the city, wherever it might be, was not pleasant. There was no hint of a city skyline, or even the Halandri galaxyscraper, which suggested they were a few hundred miles away at least.

  It seems they all had the same thought, as Vorpal said, “If we run, we might make it back before the Death Match is over.”

  “Assuming it has resumed,” Pincer added. The comment brought a momentary silence as they each contemplated the fate of the teams that had been perma-fragged and thanked their lucky stars it hadn’t been them.

  DaemonS’s tired muscles protested the repetitive rise and fall of her arm as she continued to hack away at vines, branches, and saplings. Sweat stung her eyes and pinched her clothes tightly to her body. Still, she continued. All fell before her as she picked a path through the humid vegetation. It was steady going. But very slow.

  And then, one moment there was a wall of vines, the next she was swinging at air. A body bumped her, shoving her into the clearing.

  “Whoa,” said Defcon, “what do we have here?”

  Bodybag sprinted passed them, bounding off into the area while checked side to side for a trap.

  Pincer laughed, “It looks like a great place for a picnic.”

  “Someone really got tired of the jungle, anyway.”

  Vorpal was right. Although the area was overgrown, filled with waist-high grass and shrubs, it was clearly not a natural meadow. For one thing, the clearing was cut in a perfect square, the edges of the jungle bounded all sides like great, green walls.

  “Over here, yoos guys! Der’s somethin’ here!” They sprinted toward Bodybag, reaching her as she disappeared through the opening in a cracked and rusted wall.

  “Defcon, follow her. We’ll join you after we scout the perimeter,” DaemonS said, turning her attention to the structure before them as her teammate ducked through the same gap.

  The building was a low, rectangular structure with a long, shallow-sloping roof. The grass was tall enough in most places to cover all but the peak of the roof, which was earthen brown with rust and dirt, and blended well with the dirty green of the meadow. As they circled the building, they quickly realized it was square with each decayed wall stretching a hundred meters along the side. A trio of thick, black conduits surfaced from beneath one wall, stretching away into the tall grass. There were few windows, but the roof seemed to have multiple air vents. From their angle, large fan blades were just visible beneath the grating. The only doors were at one end of the facility.

  “Daem, I found something,” Vorpal call
ed from the entrance.

  By the time DaemonS arrived, long stalks of grass lay neatly piled to one side revealing a plaque.

  Asbestos Research Station

  Global Earth Government

  Constructed in G.E.G. 452

  “An abandoned research facility?”

  “Seems that way, Daem.”

  “This place is older than me. Wonder what research they did?”

  “I doubt it matters,” Pincer said, arriving behind them. “Not likely to be much left after ninety years.”

  “You’re probably right,” DaemonS answered moving to the door, “but since we’re here, no harm in checking it out. We wouldn’t want the others to have all the fun.”

  “At least it’s a break from the jungle,” Vorpal added as they entered.

  The inside of the research center was in somewhat better condition than the outside. There were several offices and a meeting room, with the corridor ending in a small waiting space where one wall had been blocked by a pile of shelves and cabinets. Digging through dusty desks and filing cabinets proved to be fruitless; anything of value had long ago been removed or disintegrated.

  “Where are they, Daem?” Vorpal asked, the three meeting in the corridor after their individual forays.

  “Who?” Then it struck her. “You’re right. I haven’t seen Defcon and Bodybag.”

  “Not only that,” Vorpal explained, “but I didn’t find the broken window they entered through. “

  “Then, there’s another door?” Pincer ventured.

  DaemonS shook her head. “I didn’t see anything else outside — except the door we entered and the window they entered.”

  “Then we return to the window,” Pincer said.

  “But it doesn’t make sense that...,” DaemonS was interrupted by Vorpal’s sudden rush down the hallway.

  “I wonder,” she said, moments later, before her soft voice was lost amid the walls. Vorpal had brought them back to the small office near the entrance. Without another word, she began banging the desks, peering around the edges or through the cracks of the bookshelves, knocking on the walls.