Since she'd used Damon's program to wipe all her systems, no one would know she was there. She was trapped.
Gabby took a deep breath. The air wasn't getting stale. There must be holes in the pile allowing air to cycle in. So she wouldn't die of asphyxiation. That would have been ironic considering the theme of Final Raid. Despite her morbid predicament, Gabby laughed, paying the price as shoots of pain ran up her injured ribs, but she laughed anyway.
"Gabriella DeCorte, how do you get yourself into these situations?" She said the words out loud, a spell against the fear that would come eventually.
Gabby felt around again, searching for a loose piece of wood to wedge the bar from her chest. She hammered on a few sections with the palm of her hand trying to dislodge a piece. She couldn't free anything, but she did realize that her automatic was trapped under a beam by her side. Gabby carefully clicked the safety on so she didn't shoot herself in the dark. The saber and the Desert Eagle were both gone. Lost in the flight or falling through the floor.
All at once, it seemed the space was getting warmer. Gabby put her hands flat to the platform feeling heat.
The crackling of fire could be heard through the wood. Gabby bit her lip and quickly exhaled any thoughts of despair before they could form. Unthar wasn't content to leave her trapped in the collapse. He wanted to finish the job by burning her alive. He'd probably heard her banging around earlier.
The air wasn't unbearable yet, but it was uncomfortable. She could taste the smoke on her tongue. She hoped she suffocated long before the burning got to her. The crackling grew louder. Light from the fire filtered in through holes. The space where she was trapped seemed even smaller than her hands had explored.
If it hadn't felt like a tomb before, it did now. The bar across her chest had grown painfully warm. The other side of it was in the center of the fire and it transferred its heat through its length and into her chest. Gabby tried to squirm but she was still trapped.
Breathing became an agony as smoke filled her space. Each cough brought a spike of pain in her side. The fire burned near her feet and soon it would engulf the whole pyre. When the pile shifted, Gabby grabbed the automatic. The movement had freed it from the beam.
Her eyes burned and her lungs screamed. Gabby maneuvered the automatic to fire into the boards beneath her. The crackling became a roar and the pile shifted again. Gabby pulled the trigger and the recoil slammed her hand into a rod, but she kept squeezing it, firing into the wood to weaken it.
She slammed her elbow into the platform, breaking open a section about the size of her fist. She hit two more times and opened it a little wider. There was another floor beneath her. It appeared Unthar had built a fire beneath the collapsed structure, but thankfully, he'd built it away from her location. Gabby kept slamming her elbow into the wood trying to open up the hole. Her elbow was raw from the broken edges of the platform.
When Gabby heard the succession of massive cracks in the supports below her, she grabbed the automatic and closed her eyes. The collapse broke in two, one half falling into the raging fire and the other half falling away.
Gabby was thrown, landing hard on the concrete, broken and burning wood falling all around. Smoke filled the level. Gabby pushed the wood off and struggled to her knees. Keeping low she crawled away from the fire, ignoring the burns and wounds on her knees and feet.
She found the stairwell and stumbled up them, half-blind and starved for fresh air. The collapse had enraged the fire and the whole building was burning. Gabby ran out of the building, smoke billowing out behind her, not caring if anyone was around.
The storefront window of an empty food mart shattered into a thousand pieces when she threw the chuck of concrete through it. The street was empty except for shot up FunCars. The battle in the city was being waged far from her section.
She raided the water first, taking careful sips after coughing up her first chug. Her chest ached from the hot smoke in the fire. Gabby examined her wounds, finding them too numerous to ignore. The store had a small medicine section. Gabby grabbed an armful of bandages and ointments and went into the back to tend her wounds.
After a half hour, she was patched up and her eyes had stopped burning. The clip in the automatic had two lonely bullets. Her other clips had been lost in the fire or the fall.
On her way out, Gabby passed a mirror tucked into a cubby. The store had to predate eye-screens, because she hadn't seen a mirror in a long time. There was no need with the ubiquitous cameras and sensors that could turn the world digital in a blink.
The face staring back at her was one she didn't recognize. Black soot and cuts marred her chin. The weary eyes didn't belong on the eighteen-year-old girl starring back. Gabby saw her parents in her features where she hadn't really before.
Gabby knew what it was. In the last year, Gabby had passed through a one way portal into adulthood. Instead of competing in the carefully structured world of LifeGame, she'd been thrust into the game of life.
Even without eye-screens or FunCars or algorithms, it was still a game. A game to be played and to be won or lost. She'd set off to save her friend Zaela, but the game had grown.
Despite the stakes, Gabby knew that it hadn't gotten too big for her. She knew she had a chance to do anything, and maybe that anything was affecting the course of the GSA and the Southlands and the Freelands, and most importantly her friends and family.
Gabby's hair had fallen down around her shoulders. It'd grown longer in the last year. The edges were burnt and frayed, but real.
Using her nimble fingers, she quickly tied it back into a knot at the base of her neck. Then she adjusted the straps on her automatic, took one last drink of her water, and got back to work.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The heavy fighting had moved to the north of the city. The Queen's fog was patchy—thick on one street and faded wisps on another.
The area around the tower was eerily dead and not just from the bodies littered around the street. Huge white steps led up to the base of the main broadcast tower. White lion statues rested on marble pillars. The left one had been blown in half. Only the back of the lion remained.
The street was too quiet for Gabby's tastes, so she waited in the shadows. Halfway between her and the steps was a dead squad. The faces of former Coders she'd worked with were familiar. But she didn't see any of the Frags which hopefully meant they'd gotten into the tower. Gabby didn't want to think of the other options.
Her patience was rewarded when a patrol of soldiers marched up the street. They scattered when sniper fire took out the lead soldier. Gabby caught a flash of scope flare in a building to her right.
The soldiers fired randomly, none of them even coming close to the sniper's location. The sniper took out two more of them before the patrol fled.
Out waiting the sniper wasn't an option since she needed to get into the tower. She had to make sure her friends didn't blow it up. She had no idea how she was going to stop them, considering they would see her as an enemy and shoot on sight, but she would figure that out once she got there.
Gabby tightly strapped the automatic on her back and crouched into a sprinters position. She burst from the shadows, zigging and zagging as she crossed the wide empty space. A sniper bullet impacted a FunCar tire as she passed. Gabby had the urge to dive behind the lion statue, but once she stopped the sniper would have the advantage. So she sprinted up the stairs, hoping the sniper was a slow reloader.
One more shot exploded by her feet, sending bits of concrete across the back of her legs. Gabby dove through the empty space where the doors had been, sliding across the marble, not before scurrying to her feet and pulling her automatic out.
The gilded foyer was empty except for broken glass. Gabby found the staircase and started up. She kept a decent pace, stopping at each landing to listen, but generally moving upward. Despite the near immolation and exhaustion from long days in the Crimson Queen's game, Gabby felt buoyed by her nearness to the goal.
> After a dozen floors, Gabby decided to check her location. She had no idea what floor the main computers were on. If she were still in the game, the maps would surely lead her to the correct location. But she had no eye-screens and no maps.
She knew the tower predated the technologies Gabby had grown up on. The steel structure on top of the building that made the broadcasts hadn't been added until afterwards. The inhabitants of the tower had to be able to get directions without eye-screens.
So Gabby started exploring each floor as she went up, at least as far as the main entry. She wasn't entirely sure what she was looking for, but she was sure she'd know it if she saw it.
On the third floor she checked, she found what she was looking for, even though she didn't quite know what to do with it at first. Inside a shallow box on the wall was a board filled with names and room numbers behind a thin piece of glass. The bottom of the wooden box was a graveyard of dusty dead bugs.
A tiny cleaning robot about the size of her fist scurried underfoot, picking up dust and dirt. Gabby tapped on the lock. The wall case hadn't been opened in decades, its contents hidden behind a fake digital wall rather than pay a maintenance man to take it down.
Judging by the names, the building had been an office building before it became the main broadcast tower. But even back then, work had relied on computers and server farms. The floor numbers next to the names had a gap in them at floor forty to forty-five.
Gabby took to the stairs. She had a long way to go. She maintained her vigilance by forcing herself to stop at each fourth landing to look and listen. She also used the break to get a breather. If events didn't go as planned - not that she really had a plan - she would need her energy to escape back down the stairs.
When she hit the thirtieth floor, she started checking them to make sure she didn't miss anything. At the thirty-ninth, she heard the sounds of metal on metal even before she went onto the floor.
The other side was dim except for countless blue flickering lights. Black boxes the size of FunCars hunched in neat endless rows. These were the quantum computers that powered LifeGame. Gabby knew this wasn't the only place the servers existed. The GSA had countless other redundant sites, to ensure nothing ever truly failed. The country's success depended on LifeGame's uptime. In the past, politicians had been sacked for even minor flickers in LifeGame's feed. No one ever made that mistake again.
While the quantum server farms powered LifeGame, the information still had to be broadcast and controlled. The main broadcast tower, she'd learned as a Coder, kept everything in sync. The overlapping towers throughout the country kept foreign feeds from pushing their reality into LifeGame. But this tower coordinated the others. Disrupting the main tower would allow the Queen to usurp LifeGame and substitute her reality, making subjects of its citizens.
Gabby followed the sounds of swordplay. Not far from the stairwell, two men, one a beast of a man and the other shorter and stockier, fought with swords. Gabby recognized them both immediately. The smaller man was Malthon.
Gabby was surprised by his presence, but she quickly realized she shouldn't be. The Queen was just being careful and maximizing her odds. She'd probably sent a few of her elite squads with the invasion force to make sure the tower was destroyed.
The bigger man was Unthar. His back was to her, but she would know his form anywhere. Gabby lifted her automatic and thought about taking a shot. She sighted Unthar's back, but the fast movements made taking him cleanly impossible and she only had two bullets. Gabby retreated back to the stairwell, but not before she thought she caught a glance from Malthon.
Gunfire echoed through the stairwell. Gabby ran up them two at a time, ignoring the burning in her legs. It'd come from the forty second floor.
When she opened the door, she realized it wasn't just the forty second floor. The ceiling stretched at least fifty feet above her. A black metal obelisk in the center radiated heat, even from her distance. Already beads of sweat formed on her forehead.
Flashes of light from gun fire erupted in the dark spaces between. Shouts of alarm, including one that sounded like Avony, echoed through the chamber.
Gabby crept to an inner wall. It appeared the obelisk had a door on the fourth floor. Metal stairs led up and circled the obelisk, hewing to its form. Shapes moved all around stairs, guards she assumed, and probably outfitted with the best weapons.
The Frags, or what was left of them, appeared to be on the other side of the tower: Avony, Mouse, and Milton, thinking they were completing the Crimson Queen's game. Gabby wondered what they saw, even though it didn’t really matter. She had to stop her friends, but she didn't want to hurt them.
Gabby heard a footfall behind her. She spun around, ready to fire. Malthon stood there with his hands up. He smiled when she lowered the weapon.
"Ready to finish this?" he whispered as he crouched next to her.
Gabby nodded.
"You put the Queen in quite the tizzy when you disappeared from the game. That's quite a trick."
Gabby swallowed.
"Did you kill him?" She tried to keep her voice from shaking with anger. "The man you were fighting downstairs."
Malthon tilted his head, "Is he important to you?"
"Only that he's dead. He tried to burn me alive."
Malthon's eyebrows rose. "Well, I'm sorry I didn't. He turned and ran off right after you left us."
That Unthar was still alive was going to come back and bite her. Gabby knew it.
"So what's the plan?" he whispered, peering around the wall.
Gabby smirked, remembering something Milton had said. "Kill the Heart. The end. We win."
Malthon chuckled grimly. "I like your thinking. But I don't think your friends would like it."
"What do you mean?"
"Those explosives your friends have are enough to take out this whole room and the Queen can trigger them whenever she wants."
"Then why didn't she?"
"Because you're here. She had special plans for you and had you removed from the game for a reason, but you thwarted her when you dropped out and made your way here on your own. That's why she sent me."
Special plans could only mean one thing. The Delvers.
"So now we have to get them to set the explosives at the tower and get the hell out. The Queen will send a hovership once the tower is down. There's a landing on the thirtieth floor."
Gabby nodded. She had no intention of letting the Queen blow up the tower. While Malthon complicated things, it also made a solution to the problem possible. She could use him to get to her friends since they would see her as an enemy otherwise.
Then she just had to get the explosives away from them and not get taken back to the Southlands, even if that meant that she wouldn't ever see Zaela again. But it wouldn't be fair to trade a chance to see her friend with the enslavement of a whole country, even if she did hate the GSA and LifeGame for what it did to her and her friends.
"Let's go."
Malthon took aim at the guards on the stairs. The man fell after Malthon squeezed the trigger and right after, he had another one lined up.
Three more squeezes, and they were jogging across to meet the Frags.
"Gabby!" They surrounded her, patting her on the back and giving her hugs. Without the eye-screens, Milton was just Milton and not a sleazed up woman in military fatigues, and both Avony and Mouse looked worn down. "We chased off your impostor, the one that snuck in from the Bridge. What happened to you? And why is Red Wolf team leader with you?"
"I'll explain later, now we just have to kill the Heart and we can all go home."
Malthon stood nearby, surveying the room for more guards.
"Hurry up, two platoons just entered the building. We have to set the explosives and make the thirtieth before they get here."
"Give them here," said Gabby, "I carried them most of the way."
Avony handed over the backpack. Gabby climbed the metal stairs until she made the fourth floor. She could have set the
m at the base, but she needed time and darkness to get them out of the room.
Gabby circled the obelisk, feigning to set the explosives at different points, but on the backside, she threw the backpack onto the ground below, away from the tower. She'd have to break away from the group and get them out of the room before the Queen detonated them.
Gabby waved to them from the tower platform. Malthon and the Frags were chatting. Malthon raised his arm in greeting. The Frags had their back to her. Then a gunshot rang out and Malthon crumpled. The Frags scattered, looking for the shooter.
Another gunshot hit the railing by her hand. Gabby dove onto the metal grating, ripping off the bandages on her legs. It appeared there was only one shooter. The Frags opened fire on the location the shot had been fired from. Using that distraction, Gabby sprinted down the stairs, jumping from landing to landing, and ducking her head just in case.
As she reached the bottom, a bullet impacted near her head, blowing a hole into the wall next to her. Gabby dove to the ground and began elbow crawling to cover. Peering through the leaves of a potted plant, Gabby could see the shooter's shape. It could be no one else but Unthar.
She couldn’t tell which direction he was firing. The Frags were shooting in his direction, but he had a thick wall blocking their shots. Gabby took aim with her automatic. Right at the moment she pulled the trigger, the wall near her head exploded, knocking plaster into her eyes. She missed her shot and only had one bullet left. She would have to make it count when the time came.
"We have to go!" yelled Avony. "We can't make the landing before the patrols if we don't go now!"
She needed to get the backpack still, but it would have to wait until they took care of Unthar.
"Keep him pinned!" Gabby burst over the potted plant as the Frags laid down suppressive fire. She thought she'd made it to her friends when a heavy fist hit her in the shoulder and knocked her down.
Coders Page 15
