‘When did you find out it was the Integrity’s power-base?’ Iris asked.
‘Not soon enough, would be the answer to that one. Because it’s so isolated, they were able to quietly remodel the place and build their Citadel before they started rolling out the troops and announcing their presence.’
‘How recently did they find out about space travel?’ Ross asked. ‘Is that why you were in the neighbourhood when we were attacked?’
‘They’ve known from the start, as far as I’m aware. The reason the Diasporadoes think otherwise is that the Manta-Ray has been picking them off all along. Oh, they must bloody hate us. Made them rethink their methods because nothing they sent out ever made it to its destination, never mind home again. For a long time we thought we’d caused them to give up on space altogether, but they’ve redoubled their efforts of late, and they’ve been getting bolder. Our problem is, this thing might be fast, but it can’t be in two places at once.’
They could make out the Citadel on the screen now, though it was a magnified image. The Manta-Ray was still a few minutes out from its final approach.
‘I thought it would be bigger,’ Ross confessed, in reference to the fortress’s visible footprint, which took up much less of the surface area than he had imagined.
‘That’s just the tip of the iceberg,’ Iris said. ‘It’s mostly underground.’
‘When we touch the surface, I want you to bail out immediately so that we can dust off right away,’ The Captain ordered. ‘The Manta-Ray won’t have the same privileges there as out in the black. The protocols I control cease to apply the second we cross into their airspace.’
She instructed her first officer to escort them to the ship’s rear cargo bay, where they watched on a monitor as the Manta-Ray came in low over the black landscape. Ross felt the pull of deceleration and a gradual lurch as the craft manoeuvred itself in preparation for landing.
‘Suit up,’ Iris said.
He accessed his HUD and, sure enough, there was a stark selection of Integrity uniforms, including all the varieties he had seen on his torturer, Cicerus. Like Iris, he opted for the default. Her transformation was more striking, involving as it did a change of gender.
There was another tug as the ship braked further, then they were thrown to the deck by a violent lurch and a resounding bang. The sudden loss of forward momentum and stark final plunge was unnatural, at odds with the basic rules of aeronautics.
Reverend Scapegoat had lost his previously permanent look of unflappable good nature. He picked himself up and slapped a button beneath the monitor, putting him through to the bridge to find out what had happened.
‘Not a textbook landing, skipper,’ he said, trying to keep the anxiety from his voice.
When The Captain’s face appeared on the screen, it was the first time Ross had ever seen Agnes look genuinely worried.
‘It’s some kind of electromagnetic system,’ she reported.
‘EMP? We’ve still got power.’
‘Not EMP. An attraction force they can switch on or off. One second I’m cruising along, picking my spot, the next we get pulled to the surface like an iron filing to a magnet. We can’t take off again. We’re stuck to it like a limpet.’
Or like there’s an albatross around your neck, Ross thought.
‘We need to find the controls for this attraction force and switch the thing off,’ Iris declared, a male voice matching her appearance.
‘Preferably before they roll out one of those tanks with the guns that can erase things,’ said Reverend Scapegoat.
So no pressure, thought Ross.
Mission Accomplished
The landscape was almost as stark as it was flat, barely an undulation between where they had hit the ground running and the outer walls of the Citadel, which was still some considerable way off in the distance. Underfoot the surface was haphazardly crenulated, like something that had once been liquid then had cooled just a little too quickly. It looked like plastic yet felt as though it had properties of both rock and metal.
Ross called up his scope to get a closer view of the fortress. Through the magnifying lens he could make out huge doors opening in the nearest wall, grinding their way apart. Forces were being despatched.
He ran flat-out to keep up with Iris. She was zigzagging like she was under fire, but he knew it was because she was looking for something.
‘Here,’ she announced, guiding him towards a slightly raised rectangle it would have been very easy to miss, a panel distinct from the ground around it only by its being perfectly flat and smooth. As she crouched before it, part of the black surface transformed into a control pad and asked for a key. A countdown indicated that there was a deadline for compliance, after which it was safe to assume an alert would be triggered.
Ross had hoped that the capture of the Manta-Ray would provide an element of distraction while they made their incursion, but if this part went wrong, they’d be giving away their intention and pinpointing their position in one go. Fortunately Iris had come prepared. She produced a keycard and placed it in the waiting dock. The countdown stopped and the panel slid aside to reveal an access shaft.
‘I generally make it a rule not to engage the Integrity,’ she said. ‘But if you have to kill one of the bastards, my advice is do it somewhere like Quakeworld.’
Ross grinned approvingly. In some games, when you died you lost all the items you were carrying, but in others they didn’t just disappear: you dropped them where you fell, for the first person along to pick up. That didn’t just include weapons, but ammo, power-ups and, crucially in this case, keycards.
Iris led him along a short hexagonal corridor, its floor precisely the same width as the other five panels. She slid another keycard into a slot in the wall and a door opened to reveal an elevator. They stepped inside, an illuminated display on the wall listing twenty levels, but a swipe of still another key caused it to refresh. The image blanked out for a second then listed thirty new floors. Iris pushed a button in the sub-section marked Detention Levels, then Ross felt the platform beneath their feet descend with silent haste.
They emerged into another hexagonal corridor, longer this time, with two Integrity guards patrolling it. Ross kept repeating to himself Iris’s assurance that everything was geared towards preventing escape rather than repelling intrusion, but he was glad that the visor masked the emotion on his face.
He wondered for a moment what would constitute a casual, unsuspicious gait, but as Iris began striding with determined pace, he realised that this was his answer. She marched past the guards with such purpose that it was the guards themselves who were probably more wary of being suddenly put on the spot.
‘As my mother always told me,’ she said once they were safely past, ‘if people want to judge you by the clothes you’re wearing, that’s their lookout.’
They came to a T junction and took a left into a short passage, Iris producing yet another keycard when they reached the blank hexagonal panel at what would otherwise have been a dead end.
‘Took this one off an Integrity unit commander in Black Mesa. Got the stupid ass-wipe to follow me into one of the heat-exchange pipes, then char-broiled his nuts extra-crispy. It should give me full access to the cell admin systems.’
She swiped the card and Ross watched for the hexagonal panel at the end to split apart. It stayed shut. Instead, two halves of a door slammed diagonally closed behind them, and a dull, solid dread formed inside him as he realised they were sealed inside the short section of passage, the proverbial rats in a trap.
Ross was about to ask whether she had the auto-warp gizmo handy when Iris held up a hand as though to say ‘wait’.
He felt lateral movement beneath his feet and realised that the passage itself was in motion, swinging ninety degrees to connect with a different hexagonal corridor. He heard the hiss of a seal locking into place, then the panel finally split, revealing a new corridor with several hexagonal doorways either side.
Iris stepp
ed briskly through the conduit, whereupon a console rose automatically from the floor, presenting a touch-screen control panel showing a grid layout and a list of symbols that meant nothing to Ross.
‘Keep moving,’ she urged. ‘I’ll find which cell we’re looking for and open the door from here.’
A couple of seconds later he heard a quiet bleep from behind him at the console and a near-simultaneous response chime from a doorway ahead and to the left, where the hexagonal frame was now picked out in a dully pulsing glow. As he hurried towards the aperture, Iris hard on his heels, it belatedly occurred to him that he had forgotten to even ask who they were rescuing first.
He stepped through the opening and was confronted not by Solderburn or the Sandman, but by a faceless figure entirely in black, seemingly constructed of the same material as the Citadel itself.
He turned to Iris, who had just made it to the doorway, transformed back into female form and sporting a typically punkish take on Integrity fatigues.
‘Whose cell is this?’ he asked.
Ross felt something erupt from the ground behind him, while several strands of the black rock-metal-liquid-plastic crawled all about his body, snaking around his neck, his arms, his legs, his waist. They snapped taut simultaneously, binding him fast to the hexagonal pillar that now ran from floor to ceiling at his back.
‘Yours,’ she answered.
The Eye of the Bulletstorm
Juno saw a grenade land at her feet, the tiny blue LEDs blinking ever faster to signal imminent detonation. Instinct told her to dive for cover, but there was no cover to dive to. Something more rational overruled that primary impulse and drove the counterintuitive measure of diving towards the device instead. It could go off at any millisecond, but this was her only chance. She fell upon it in a roll, using her momentum to begin the whiplash movement that ultimately launched it back towards its source.
It exploded in mid-air, part of the blast catching her and knocking her on her back. She couldn’t afford to keep taking damage. Her health was close to critical, and the frequency of the attacks was increasing, allowing her less and less time to recover before the next onslaught.
Before being sent sprawling by the blast, she had caught a glimpse of the forces ranged against her. There were at least six Integrity troops closing in, with three times as many NPCs in the vanguard, part human shield, part strike drone. She was out of options, hemmed in at the rear by an unhealthily misty green-blue swamp that belched toxic fumes, while to her right flank her escape was blocked by a tangle of metal from some pylon or watch tower that had fallen, splayed out and twisted amid the rubble like a toppled angle-poise lamp. If she tried to climb over it, she’d be sniper-bait in moments.
She knew she had never been to the old world, and that the emotions she remembered feeling there were digital phantoms. Everything she had felt in this world, therefore, had been new. She had known anguish, confusion, pain, sorrow, anger and so much longing. In a world without death, until now she had never genuinely known fear.
The soldiers scrambled in and out of sight amid the strange, outsize alien vegetation that was overgrowing the ruins. It was a town that had long since been abandoned to its fate as a battle ground, its aesthetic being a confusion of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean and early twenty-first-century Baghdad. This was a world built for war, and in that respect it was an appropriate setting for what was going down right there and then: the Diasporadoes’ last stand.
It was appropriate, but it was not happenstance. You didn’t need to be a military scholar to know that it was always a mistake to let your enemies choose the battlefield, but that was what the Diasporadoes had done. They had been played, of course. The Integrity had succeeded in infiltrating the resistance in order that they might unknowingly lead them to the Originals. Now they had inverted the strategy and used one of the Originals as bait to corner the resistance.
The word had gone out that Lady Arrowsmith had been compromised and was under heavy attack. The surviving Diasporadoes had flocked here to Stygia in response and blundered into an ambush. They had arrived to find that most of the warp transits and all of the spawn points were already under Integrity control. If you died here, you were captured, and on Stygia death came in a thousand different flavours.
Within the resistance it had long been anticipated that they might ultimately have to fall back to the Beyonderland, that archipelago of disparate islets where the uninvited could not pass, but that didn’t look like being an option. This, here in the world of Bulletstorm, would be the decisive battle in the war for control of the gameverse.
Juno knew she had been lucky even to have survived long enough to answer this doomed final call. When she got kebabed by that flying nightmare, she had respawned at the other end of the island, far from both the Integrity forces and the growing corruption. They hadn’t covered the spawn points because apprehending the likes of her hadn’t been their priority: all resources had been directed towards taking down the Sandman.
She had come here by space, having been warned in the SOS that many of the transits were already compromised and others likely to follow. Nobody wanted to play that version of Russian roulette. In that respect, even as she flew to Stygia she knew it was likely to be the end, but that wasn’t why she was so afraid. It was what she saw from the spaceship en route that chilled her to her binary soul.
It had been assumed that captives were taken to the Citadel and thrown in some electronic oubliette, partly to prevent them from inflicting further damage upon the Integrity’s cause and partly pour encourager les autres. Once she discovered that it was they who were responsible for corruption, she had been left confused as to what the Integrity’s cause might be. On her way here, through the view-screen of the spaceship, she had seen the answer on a world below her, a world that used to be the bright and varied landscape of Fable III.
It was a flat, featureless plain, almost like a circuit board, but colourless. Stamped upon this circuit board was a grid comprising thousands upon thousands of tiny cells: enough to hold every last person in the gameverse. As the grid passed beneath her vessel, she understood: the Sandman had been wrong. There was a way out. Just because you were a digital entity and couldn’t go back to the real world didn’t mean that someone in the real world couldn’t extract you from this one. And wherever they were planning to extract them to, the Integrity knew it was a destination nobody would sign up for voluntarilty
Juno checked her inventory: she was down to six rounds.
She heard a scurrying scramble of boots nearby, somebody racing from one piece of cover to the next. Had to be NPCs. The Integrity soldiers didn’t need to worry about it. They could just keep respawning and coming back until she was out of ammo. She stuck her head above the shattered concrete pipe she was hiding behind and stole a glance. This was the end. The Integrity soldiers had broken from cover, spreading out like a net, and now they were going to tighten it.
She saw a flash of blue zipping twenty feet over her head: a grapple beam fixed on to one of the gnarly trees that were growing out of the swamp. That was a bit gung-ho for the Integrity, she thought, and she wasn’t wrong. When she looked up again she saw a figure raining rockets down upon her enemies as he flew balletically through the air. The Integrity troops and NPCs alike were in disarray as he landed, already spreading the pain in a deadly arc of laser fire with one hand while his other untethered the grapple and redespatched it through an enemy sniper’s chest. Finding himself at close quarters with two surviving Integrity infantrymen, he fired the grapple again to rip out his first opponent’s spine, then used his victim’s head as a mace in order to beat the other to death.
Juno had to hand it to him: there was a good reason the kid called himself Skullhammer.
She climbed out from cover to hail him and had to dive back again as he almost took her head off with the grapple. In that fraction of a second she had seen his eyes: he looked wired, frantic, terrified. That was when she realised his heroics
hadn’t been about him coming to her rescue. He wasn’t running towards her, but away from something else.
She looked towards the brow of the hill, beyond the ruins of a burned-out villa, and saw what he was fleeing from. It was a whole platoon of those samnites: huge super-soldier fuckers, each toting one of the weapons she had been violated by on the Sandman’s world. From the look on Skullhammer’s face, he had been on the catcher’s end of one too.
Then she felt a horrible sense of beating in the air and looked up to see something blacken the sky above the advancing platoon. A maenad, she had heard the Integrity call it, but she couldn’t say for sure that the creature bearing down upon them was the one that had killed her once before. This was because there were at least seven more right behind it.
Final Boss
The nebulous entity was looming before him, never quite holding its shape, staring from unreflecting recesses in a shadow of a face. No introductions required. This was Ankou.
Ross, however, gave him no more than a fleeting glance. He only had eyes – stark, accusing eyes – for Iris.
‘You,’ he said. At three letters and one brief syllable it was the only word he felt capable of pronouncing in his choked anger, betrayal and humiliated self-reproach.
‘Yes. She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?’
It sounded like a synthesised echo blending several voices into one. The accent was American, but that was almost as much as it was revealing about itself. The only emotion that it was possible to infer from its blank neutrality of tone was satisfaction.
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