He heard footsteps below, the whispered voices of three or four men entering the building. That was when two things struck him. One was that combat-AI ‘a decade more advanced than Starfire’ evidently still wasn’t saying much, and the other was that this cyborg shit swung both ways.
Ross visualised pressing the appropriate key and his shotgun morphed into a Gralak laser rifle; then, from his elevated angle of fire, he obliterated his pursuers in short order. Togged as they were in leather jackets and 1940s combat fatigues rather than the futuristic armour of space marines, the energy blasts ripped them apart with quite nauseatingly messy results.
It almost became an article of faith at that particular moment for him to remind himself that this wasn’t real, the smell of cindered flesh and barbecued bowel-contents seeming a thoroughly unnecessary level of detail for any game.
I’m a monster, Ross thought, before acquitting himself on the grounds that, by definition, a monster wouldn’t be morally conflicted over what he’d wrought. Then he conceded that, for all he knew, Godzilla might be morally conflicted, but that didn’t make much difference if he’d just demolished your apartment building and killed your family.
Trojan Detected
‘Ankou will see you now,’ said the lank-haired snivelling functionary, having swept into the chamber at the head of a phalanx intended as much to underline his own importance as to protect him. The further inference was that if quite so many troops were flanking this little ass-wipe when he was merely conveying a message from upstairs, then just think how powerful his boss must be.
The phalanx had another purpose, one she suspected the functionary was not aware of. If he was, then he was more adept at concealing his anxiety than she’d have naturally given him credit for.
‘I think both you and Ankou are under the mistaken impression that he is granting me some kind of an audience,’ she replied, conscious that the big boss would be eavesdropping. ‘The reality is that I’m only here because he’s not getting the job done, and it’s his own time he’s wasting making me stand around here and wait.’
The functionary gave her a simpering and awkward smile, the kind she would have enjoyed driving a mace into under less constrained circumstances, not the least of which was being unarmed.
‘Well, as I said, he will see you now,’ he repeated with an oily neutrality, gesturing for her to follow him.
The phalanx fell in behind them, eight identical troops, as faceless behind their headgear as they were on the blast visors’ blank surfaces. They were designed to be the perfect soldiers: the same minds, the same bodies, the same attributes, the same training. To her mind, this also meant the same flaws, the same limitations and the same weaknesses.
They marched through a system of near-identical spurs, ramps and hallways. All of the walls and ceilings were clad in panels sporting the same black sheen, a material that reflected light but permitted no mirror images, no visual deception. There were no bends in any of the hexagonal passageways, only straight clean lines, discrete sections joined at angles of no greater than thirty degrees on any axis, each of them instantly sealable upon command. Every passage could become a cell, monitored by audio and visual feeds, the space deliberately stark so that there was nowhere to hide from the automated gun turrets installed high up above either entrance. Overlapping fields of fire and an absence of foreign objects meant that every square foot could become a killing zone at the touch of a button.
Without the highest-level Neurosphere clearance, you wouldn’t even get near the perimeter. And before she actually got to see Ankou, she knew there would be one further, more rigorous security check.
They came to a wide hexagonal antechamber, its sides comprising three other passages and four locked doors. Ankou was behind one of them, but she’d never find out which if her credentials didn’t pass that final check. It worked by a stark principle that proved infallible in weeding out impostors: put simply, Ankou knew Neurosphere wouldn’t send in anybody who wasn’t offering something better than they already had. In practice, this meant the heavily armed eight-man phalanx was about to kill her.
Or at least try.
She knew there would be a cue, and guessed right that it was the snivelling functionary knocking on one of the doors. His body-language wasn’t tense, or preparatory towards imminently diving for safety, so she remained sure he was the only one of the ten people present who didn’t know what was coming.
She waited for the first twitch of movement behind her and swept one pace sideways, using the nearest soldier as a shield against the first volley before launching his body into the path of two more troops while she opened fire with his pulse rifle.
Within moments there were two people left alive in the room. She could only take credit for two or maybe three of the kills, the majority resultant of a unique form of friendly fire that occurred when you put several identically minded assholes in a circle and ordered them to shoot the same target.
The snivelling functionary had been too shocked even to move. He was backed against the door, as though trying to press through it, his eyes agape. Give him this much: he regrouped; just not quickly enough. He opened his mouth to speak but she beat him to it.
‘He’ll see me now,’ she said.
A door slid open on the opposite side of the ante-chamber, revealing a tall figure that appeared to be made of the same material as the walls. It wasn’t armour or a form of clothing: he looked like if you cut him in half, he’d be the same all the way through. Unlike the walls, however, there was a fluidity to him, as though he had just been injection-moulded and could still be altered before his form was finalised.
His head was a mere ovoid at first, then his face took shape like a pin-art sculpture: a human visage, but colourless, anonymous, forgettable.
‘Who are you?’ Ankou asked.
‘I’m back-up,’ she replied.
‘Who sent you?’
‘You did.’
‘Ah.’
He led her inside, into another hexagonal chamber, though this one featured dozens of video windows embedded in the otherwise black walls. She could see feeds from various places within the Citadel, and from points much further beyond.
‘There has been a penetration,’ she stated. ‘One that has potentially massive repercussions.’
Ankou nodded solemnly.
‘My intelligence network is already buzzing with reports of two recent arrivals,’ he said.
‘The first is of no import. A mistake. He is no threat, just a lost soul. But the other is one you ought to be taking a keen interest in. He has already breached.’
‘I know. My forces are closing in. We will have him soon.’
‘Perhaps. But you won’t hold him.’
Ankou shot her a look, restraining his anger with the knowledge that he was only shooting the messenger. To deny the situation would be to kid himself – perhaps quite literally.
‘You mean the resistance,’ he acknowledged. ‘I assume that’s why you’re here.’
‘Call me pest control.’
‘We are making progress, but it’s three steps forward, two steps back. Hard enough herding cats without the feline liberation front sabotaging our efforts, and now you suggest this new arrival may be about to make things much worse.’
‘Quite the contrary,’ she assured him. ‘His advent heralds the beginning of the end for the resistance. Now that I’m here, anyway.’
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t sound quite so cocky if you’d been here more than five minutes. I appreciate why you’ve been sent, but I’m not some incompetent whose mistakes you’ll be able to correct in a matter of days. The resistance, by its very nature, is almost impossible to predict.’
‘Was impossible to predict. That is why the timing of this new arrival is so significant – and will ultimately prove decisive.’
‘Why? What has changed?’
‘The resistance is about to be infiltrated. There is a double-agent abroad, who will not only neutralise t
his new threat, but will lead us to their operatives and even the Originals, one by one.’
‘We have tried and failed time and again to place an operative inside the resistance, believe me. By what miracle do you intend to manage it?’
She told him.
He stared for a moment, the beginnings of a smile detectable even on that monochrome facsimile of a face.
‘You are one devious and manipulative bitch. Are you sure you’re not me?’
‘Quite sure. But if you want to take some credit, you were the one who at least had the judgment to hire me.’
Suicide is Painless
Almost by way of compensation for his conscience-quease at having gunned down a group of what he sincerely hoped were NPCs, Ross was enjoying a welcome respite from fear as a consequence of feeling unaccustomedly bad-ass. He strode rather than scurried through the rubble, driven by an unfamiliar sense of nihilism, though to be fair this was nihilism by Ross’s standards, so it wasn’t like he was heading back in the direction of the hôtel de ville and shouting ‘mon then ya bawbags, bring it on’.
If there were any more GIs or French Resistance fighters in the neighbourhood, then word about him must have got round, because they were keeping their heads down even more than was standard for a cover-shooter, and nobody was taking any pot-shots at him. He made it two blocks, past some more bombed-out factories and the still-burning husks of several abandoned military vehicles, without having to take cover from so much as a hurtful remark.
Then, finally, he did see some soldiers, at least twenty, all of them heading in roughly his direction. They were giving little consideration to the need for cover, the bounteous abundance of thigh-high walls being ignored in favour of flat-out running. More confusingly, their numbers comprised both Allies and Germans, albeit in separate groups. They were arriving from slightly different angles, Allies to the left and Axis to the right, but they were all coming his way.
Had they settled their differences and teamed up to fight the alien threat for the good of humanity, Watchmen style? If so, this was about to get nasty. A moment’s further observation suggested not quite. They had a common purpose all right, but Ross noted a vital distinction regarding their trajectory. They were heading roughly in his direction rather than specifically towards him, and they had abandoned hostilities towards each other because they were all running away from something else.
A fatal combination of nihilism and curiosity pushed Ross forward as the fleeing lines passed either side of him; nihilism and curiosity allied to the reassurance of knowing that the worst that could happen was he’d get killed and respawn somewhere else. He’d never played this one, but it was true of every game that, unlike in real life, you always hurried towards the big bad.
He could hear a dull pounding, like mortar fire, and feel vibrations pulse through the ground, getting stronger each time. There was a metallic grinding sound out there too, the purr of something mechanical underneath it in the mix. Nazi mechanoids, he thought: please let it be Nazi mechanoids. Being stuck in World War Two would be less depressing if there was a sci-fi/ fantasy element. Nazis consorting with black magic and impossibly futuristic tech rendered them reassuringly fictional, just generically evil villains in an over-the top pantomime. The uniquely evil villainy of industrialising genocide made for a considerably less escapist atmosphere.
But if it was Nazi mechanoids, why would the German troops be running for their lives?
He climbed to the top of a rubble pile and looked down towards the narrow crossroads beyond. The mechanical purr and the grinding was getting louder, though the pounding had ceased, replaced with this intermittent whup sound whose direction Ross couldn’t place. There was movement to his right: two black-clad soldiers proceeding at an almost nonchalant walking pace. At first Ross assumed they were more Nazis, but then he noticed that their uniforms weren’t quite right. They were Nazi-esque, for sure, but something about them was just too clean, too modern, as though some controversy-seeking fashion designer had jumped the shark and run them up for the Paris catwalk.
One of them looked down at a map or a book in his hand while his companion glanced back towards the corner. As he did so, a gigantic vehicle came into view on the left of the crossroads, skirting the edge of a half-ruined building. It was almost the width of the entire street, and looked like it could crush a Panzer in much the same way a Panzer could roll over a Fiat Uno.
Once again it suggested Nazi design, but was a product of far more modern aesthetics, not to mention technology. No such tank had ever been seen during World War Two, or the early twenty-first century, for that matter.
He saw more foot-soldiers walking at the side and behind in cover formation, several of them referring to objects in their hands, which he realised, when one drew close enough, were data tablets. There was a metal disc rotating towards the rear of the tank, some kind of radar turret. Alongside that was a wide-mouthed barrel oscillating smoothly back and forth from left to right, a red/orange glow pulsing within. Ross guessed it wasn’t a weapon, but a scanning device.
They were looking for something, but what?
Ross racked his brains for story details he might have picked up regarding modern shooters. He knew there were zombie mods for the Call of Duty games – Christ, there were probably zombie mods for FIFA these days – but what Nazi-era game had a sci-fi twist?
He worked out what they were looking for and located the source of the intermittent whup noise at precisely the same moment. Less pleasingly, there was a symbiotic relationship between these two deductions, and in both instances the deduction came far too late to be of any use. He felt a percussive movement of air above him and looked up to see that it had been caused by two wings the size of windmill blades, their flapping intermittent because a single beat would be enough to propel a rhino fifty vertical feet. An airborne rhino, however, would have been a markedly less disturbing sight.
The interlopers had gone to some efforts in order to make their uniforms and their hardware blend into the temporal environment, but clearly there was bugger-all they could do to disguise their pet retriever, a creature that must have previously been at a loose end since being given a sine-die ban from hell for frightening the staff. It was a nightmare of limbs, claws, suckers, teeth and spikes, like some titanic behemoth that had eaten everything in H. R. Giger’s bestiary then vomited over a pterodactyl.
It grabbed Ross with a variety of appendages before he even had time to scream, claws and tentacles gripping him and hauling him into the air. Below him, the soldiers were calling out commands, pointing towards the tank. He twisted his head enough to see its roof split open and retract, revealing a mobile cell into which he was imminently going to be dropped, as long as Cuddles here didn’t decide she fancied elevenses.
His laser rifle had spun from his grip when he was taken, tumbling into a pile of bricks as the first wing-beat hurled the creature high into the air. He assumed the earlier thudding was the sound of the thing wandering about terra firma. The intervening silence must have been when it was swooping on the thermals, though he wasn’t sure whether it flew on avian aerodynamic principles or merely broke the laws of gravity because gravity was too scared to object.
He imagined pressing the key for the shotgun and, to his momentary excitement, the weapon appeared in his hands. Unfortunately, they were pinned so tight that he could only shoot where it was already pointing, which was over his left shoulder. He fired anyway, taking a pitifully insignificant chunk out of the creature’s flesh. It wasn’t enough to make the thing even flinch, but evidently enough to warrant retaliation, because a tentacle snaked its way immediately towards him and smacked him dismissively about the head before gripping the shotgun and feeding it into the maw of a nearby sucker.
Cuddles began her descent towards the waiting tank. Another few seconds and he’d be inside it. He didn’t know who they were or what they wanted, but if they looked like futuristic Nazis and this was their idea of animal domestication, t
hen he’d prefer to find out through third-party enquiries.
The phrase ‘a fate worse than death’ leapt to mind, which was when Ross remembered that it had a completely different significance around these parts. He pictured the corresponding key and was immediately holding one of the grenades he’d lifted from the dead GIs. It was a bit of a stretch with his hands pinned, but he managed to get a thumb into the loop and pulled the pin.
‘Sorry chaps, gotta go,’ he said.
He felt the blast for only a fraction of a second, then came the welcome swirly dissolving sensation and the brief moment of all-white that signalled rebirth and freedom.
Despite his escape coming off as planned, he would have to admit to a certain measure of disappointment at the outcome of finally being killed (discounting the meta-simulation that was the training arena). Part of him had secretly hoped that instead of respawning, his death here would bring him back to his ordinary life; his efforts to stay alive in this place rendered thoroughly ironic (though for those reading he didn’t know). He would wake up in hospital, something having gone wrong with Jay’s scanner, and it would turn out that ‘dying’ here was what it took to emerge form his coma.
Aye right. What a fanny.
This was, Ross would later reflect, something of a nuanced response to the confirmation that he was, to all intents and purposes, immortal.
Shapes and colours resolved steadily into view. There were six blobs of black, a large blob of green, all of them dotted against wide, vertically separated areas of brown above grey. Brick, he realised, and the concrete of a floor.
Result.
Not only had he escaped, but he had respawned somewhere that was fully intact, which meant he had to be well away from the bombed-out neighbourhood where he’d just blown himself up. He didn’t get time to congratulate himself before the black blobs revealed themselves to be six more future-Nazis and the green one to be a nine-foot troll carrying a hammer the size of a bath.
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