Multiplayer

by John C. Brewer

  “Uh, Hec,” said Laquisha, bringing him back to the present.

  Sand-JarJar spun around and came face to face with a hoard of snarling thorks. He and Laquisha were dead in less than thirty seconds.

  Ch. 8

  Hector stared at the screen in disgust as Sand-JarJar and Laquisha were ripped to pieces by the snarling, orcish beasts. He wasn’t exactly angry. More irritated. He’d not been killed by thorks in a long time. The cut scene changed, and barely identifiable chunks of Sand-Jar-Jar’s head, torso, and limbs drifted in the thick, greenish fluid of the Sulako’s replication chamber. He’d take a week to rebuild, not that Hector cared. Hector brought up a list of his characters and selected Izaak Ersatz. The lid on a cryo-tube opened with a sigh, and Hector’s point of view suddenly switched to Izaak. It felt like donning a comfortable set of clothes.

  Ω

  Izaak pulled the flush lever of the replication chamber, and watched as the fluid and chunks drained away, eliminating Sand-JarJar permanently. He’d done his job. He glanced over to C0L0N3L W35T in cryo and wished the vanguard could join them.

  “Let’s go teach those mutated creeps a lesson,” came a voice, and Izaak looked over to see a massive merc in the slipgate, toting an equally massive chain gun. An auto-cannon and plasmace were slung across his back. Deion always made Hector feel better.

  Moments later they slipped in at the same place at the base of the mountains. But this time they knew what was coming, they had decent characters, and Izaak didn’t stare nostalgically out to sea. Plus, Hector had queued up his favorite slaying tunes. But this was a thork brood pit like they had never encountered. Despite Darxhan’s chain gun and Izaak’s shotgun, and one grenade after another, the creatures kept boiling out of a nearby cave entrance like evil Energizer-bunnies.

  They came in all shapes and sizes. From tiny rat-like creatures that attacked legs with pitchforks, to massive minotaur-like bull-thorks wielding maces. Their attacks were uncoordinated and direct but the sheer numbers were beginning to wear down Izaak’s shields. Even the big merc absorbed a blow or two. The first song played through and they were halfway into the second when Darxhan cried, “What the crap! I’ll be out of ammo before this song’s over!”

  “Bounce!” Izaak cried, and each tossed a nano-smoke grenade then turned and lumbered down the mountain as quickly as possible toward the ruins at the foot of the hill.

  “We ought to be able to lose them in here!” said Izaak, darting into the crumbling outskirts on the north side of Alanya. But it wasn’t like the Alanya he remembered. The real Alanya was filled with crisp hotels and condominiums, exclusive restaurants and clubs, and open-air cafes spilling over with vacationers, families, and townspeople in a perpetual carnival atmosphere. This one was empty and in ruins. Around them were crumbling buildings and derelict cars and machines, all abandoned during the Omega Wars. But the thorks were still snapping at their heels and their numbers had swelled; dozens now, all pursuing them with but a single motive.

  “Scarobs!” said Darxhan, before they’d gone a block. “All we need!”

  Just ahead a swarm of the man-sized, wasp-like creatures were crawling over an old sports car on segmented limbs, cutting through metal body panels with their plasma torches to get at the tech inside. If thorks were the ubiquitous nuisance monsters of Omega Wars, scavenger robots were the cockroaches. Six foot-tall, carbon-fiber and titanium cockroaches that could burn through armor in seconds.

  Izaak tossed his last smoke grenade into the swarm. Their waist-mounted fans roared to life and the scarobs, with their hive-mind, simultaneously lifted into the air with a drone like a squadron of B-17s. In an instant, Izaak and Darxhan were surrounded in a matrix of spinning, razor-sharp wings. Darxhan’s chain gun was useless against them and his plasmace far too cumbersome. Izaak’s shotgun and arc sword were effective, but the semi-intelligent automatons soon learned to avoid them. They kept landing on Darxhan’s back and arcing into his armor and Izaak had to whack them off, at which point he exposed his own back. The only thing keeping them from being overrun was the viscous smoke, and it was beginning to clear. More scarobs swarmed in around them, when the thorks blundered in, snapping and snarling.

  Back to back, Izaak and Darxhan fought off wave after wave as their shields dropped and their ammo dwindled. Thorks and scarobs piled up around them. Before long Darxhan had to drop his chain gun and move to his autocannon which was even less effective against the scarobs. Izaak ran out of shotgun shells and switched to his pistol.

  “We’re going to die here!” cried Darxhan, as another scarob tried to breach his armor.

  Izaak knocked it away at the last second as Darxhan targeted and destroyed a thork rushing up at them. “Sorry I brought you here, man.”

  They were almost completely surrounded now, as the beasts and flying robots herded them into a clearing amidst the ruined buildings to finish them off: an abandoned square that might have once been a park. Thorks and scarobs never worked together, but these seemed to be doing just that. Or maybe it was just that they were all fixated on the invaders.

  “Tank!” Izaak heard Darxhan exclaim. “A friggin’ tank! Come on!”

  Izaak whirled around to see the big merc jogging through the one remaining gap in the enemy swarm. Izaak followed and caught a glimpse of a Marauder. His heart leapt at the sight of the massive steel tank sporting a long, wicked cannon. His health bar was showing all red when they climbed into the tracked dreadnought and pulled the hatch shut above them.

  Relief coursed through him as they took their places: Darxhan in the driver’s seat, Izaak on the main gun. “I hope this baby still works!” Izaak said, as they waited for the controls to come alive, but nothing happened. There was a long pause. Perhaps there were no fusion cells? Maybe it was damaged?

  “We’re screwed!” groaned Darxhan as the sound of the thorks and scarobs came muffled through the digital hull. In seconds, the scavenger robots would start cutting through the plate.

  Izaak glanced around, desperate for any way to save them, when the targeting screen in front of him sprang to life, to show thorks milling around outside. Just after it, the engine rumbled and a surge of energy shot through him. Izaak swiveled the main gun and fired one blast after another as Darxhan drove around the square crushing thorks beneath armored tank treads and mopping up with the heavy machine-gun. By the time the scarobs breached the armor, all the thorks were dead and Izaak was able to dismount and kill the last of the mechanized wasps with his pistol.

  As Izaak surveyed the oozing piles of thork carcasses and heaping mounds of scarob shells, he felt little sense of victory. A mess like this could mean only one thing. Even in the digital world, the first thing people do is clear out the vermin. This was the heaviest concentration of thorks and scarobs they’d ever seen. There could be no doubt: the town of Alanya was empty. They’d come to the wrong place and there was no way back except walking to the nearest slipgate, 350 miles away in Istanbul. Practically out of ammo and low on fusion cells, Izaak recommended they kill themselves to get the replication process started right away.

  But Darxhan convinced Izaak to wait, and after only a little exploring, they’d replenished both their ammo stores and their fusion cells. Better still, they found a well-concealed basement to store everything in, and left a slip-gate transponder behind so they could slip back in any time. Izaak no longer thought he’d find Mal-X here, but was curious to see the rest of Alanya, so after Izaak repaired their armor, they set out across town for the coast, about a mile and-a-half away.

  Traveling through the shattered city was slow going, killing vermin as they went, but they found no more heavy concentrations. As they marched south through the town, the mountainous peninsula rose up above them, the angular stones of the fort-like Ehmedek and the wall that snaked along the cliffs now peering down from on high. Attacking such a place, his father had told him, would have been suicide. The peninsula was exactly as Hector remembered it, even if the town wasn’t.


  When they came to the edge of the main street they stopped. The broad avenue was littered with broken down, rusted out cars and trucks as well as armored vehicles from the Omega Wars. The equilateral triangles, symbol of the Triad Alliance ∆, and inverted horseshoe-like Omega symbols of the Archons Ω, were still clearly visible on much of the equipment, but the scarobs, picking their way over the sprawling tech, didn’t seem to care about political allegiance. This place, Izaak noted again and again, would be a cybertech’s paradise, though it also made him kind of sad. He and his family had really enjoyed their time here. Seeing it like this was sobering, even knowing it was from inside a game.

  They were about to cross the main street when Darxhan hissed in alarm and jumped back. Izaak instinctively followed him. “What do you got?” he asked nervously. The weirdness of this place was getting to him.

  “There,” said Darxhan, and pointed his weapon east along the road.

  Izaak looked and spied two vanguards coming along the road in their direction. So Alanya wasn’t deserted after all. They came to within a hundred yards or so, then turned and went the other way.

  “You take the one on the right,” said Darxhan, readying his chain gun. “I’ll get –”

  “Are you crazy!” snapped Izaak. “Give it a minute. See what they do.”

  After five minutes the pattern was clear. They were sentries.

  “What clan?” asked Darxhan, when they were completing their circuit for the third time.

  Izaak sized them up through the scope of his sniper rifle. “Not Reavers. No markings.” Darxhan pointed out that they had no markings either.

  “Let’s take ‘em down,” said Darxhan.

  Izaak looked over to see the big merc raising his auto cannon. So Deion, Hector thought. Always brute force. “Uh, Deion. Don’t you want to see what they’re guarding first? We take them out and the whole place will know we’re here.”

  Deion agreed, so, they waited until the sentries were out of sight, checked both ways, and stole quickly across.

  On the other side of the road, the flat coastal plain began to lift up. They could not see the ocean yet, but the dark fastness of the Ehmedek fortress now loomed high above them, cutting across the peninsula.

  And it was quiet. That’s when they noticed they’d left the thorks and scarobs behind. Maybe the guards had already taken them out. “We need to check over there,” said Izaak, aiming his weapon off to their left. “There’s a big guard tower down by the harbor. Inside the wall. In the old city.”

  They followed the road until it came to a crumbly medieval wall. There, they saw from a distance two more guards at a large, arched opening, but otherwise the wall was unguarded. Still, they both agreed the fact that there were any guards was odd. This whole area was an under-populated backwater in Omega Wars. What could they possibly be guarding and from whom? Maybe this was a base for whatever clan Mal-X belonged to, but that didn’t make sense with no slipgate around.

  Izaak and Darxhan scaled the wall in an unobtrusive place and found no clues on the other side. They followed the stone divider back through a rubble-strewn alley, but pulled up short when they reached the end.

  “What the…” whispered Izaak, looking around in shock. An exact duplicate of Alanya right down to the lively shops lining the alleyways! No rubble. No burned out vehicles. And characters everywhere.

  “No one is carrying any weapons?” Darxhan questioned.

  He was right. Stranger still, aside from a few mercs and vanguards, the rest, as best they could guess, were either smugglers or maybe empaths. No armor. No real tech to speak of. They seemed no more than townspeople going about their mundane, daily routines as if they lived here. A group of characters sat under an awning. Others tended stores. Like real life. It made no sense. But at least the sentries had a purpose: keeping thorks and scarobs out. But… why?

  Then Darxhan noticed something else was missing – VTTs. Virtual Transfer Terminals allowed players to buy drachmas – in-game money – and transfer information between Omega and the real world. VTTs were always present, and some of the first things to go into a reclaimed area, since both the virtual shop owners and MegaSoft made real money off them.

  “We need to open up a store,” said Darxhan.

  “But that doesn’t explain why there isn’t one already here,” Izaak replied, growing more perplexed by the minute. Then he suddenly remembered something, turned, and stared up at the castle walls farther up the hill. “That’s really weird.”

  “What’s that?” asked Darxhan.

  “I fought Mal-X up there yesterday. It’s called the citadel, up at the top, all surrounded by a wall with towers.”

  “What about it?”

  “Ramps,” Izaak answered. “There are handicap access ramps up there.”

  He could almost see Deion frowning behind Darxhan’s menacing helm. “You mean, like, in the game? Somebody filed a Terrain Change Request to build handicap access ramps?”

  “Yeah,” Izaak said, as Hector nodded back on his couch, “and we’re going to find out why.”

  They did two covert laps around the old town, down to the harbor, past the Red Tower, and back to the gates. The rug shop owner stayed in his store. The fruit stand dealer walked circles around his cart as if waiting for someone to buy a digital peach. Khaki-clad policemen – exactly as Hector remembered – loitered on a street corner. They all seemed… bored. It was real life without the smell!

  “Let’s check out the citadel,” Izaak finally suggested. They hadn’t shown themselves and remained concealed in back alleys until they came to the road leaving town.

  The road up to the citadel looped all the way to the massive cliffs at the southern edge of the peninsula before curving back toward the mainland and snaking up to the top in a series of harrowing switchbacks. Hector remembered the villagers carrying loads of olives, bundles of sticks, and selling bottled water to tourists along the road when he’d hiked it with his family. It had been hot that day and he found himself missing the realism Today, Izaak and Darxhan trotted past just as many people. Everything was the same, except they weren’t trying to sell anything. A creepy feeling descended on Hector.

  Izaak was just about to say something about it to Darxhan when the rumble of vehicles sounded from the road behind them. They scrambled off the road and hid among the sparse trees.

  A long, black limousine, little flags fluttering from its hood, appeared, escorted by a string of police motorcycles. From their hiding place, they stared in shock as the motorcade made its way past them and disappeared around a turn in the road.

  “What the heck is that?” wondered Darxhan.

  Izaak’s heart raced with excitement. “Come on. We’re going to find out.”

  Knowing they could cut overland much more quickly than taking the road on foot, Izaak led them across the street to a path, which headed steeply uphill among the ruined shells of what had once been luxury villas. Unlike the town, these hadn’t been rebuilt, and the destruction satisfied Hector, who had thought the mansions were out of place among the ancient artifacts when he was here last year. But it wasn’t really ‘here.’ He’d vacationed in the real Alanya. This was just a simulation.

  They didn’t run into any scarobs or thorks as they hurried up the hillside and Izaak noted that the Omega characters handled the climb with ease though the same shortcut in real life had exhausted him and his father. Another benefit of virtual reality, he thought.

  They trotted by a resort hotel and Izaak pointed out the minarets stabbing skyward from the mosque beside it. The trail passed among short trees and shrubs as it headed through what had once been prime real estate, until it came to the citadel wall. There, it forked and Izaak led Darxhan to the left until the path abruptly ended at an open field not far from the gates and the parking lot. From here, they could see the ocean. Again, Izaak had to remind himself it wasn’t real.

  The limo had disappeared behind the gates of the citadel, which were now closed. Izaak took
to the short trees clustered along the edge of the field and stealthily crawled along the ground to a concealed spot where he could watch the entrance without being seen. The last time he’d stood here, his father told him how the defenders would pour boiling oil on would-be invaders from the guard towers on either side of the gate. And how the attackers would just back up and wait for the defenders to starve to death or die of thirst. But now, only a half-dozen unarmored characters with small arms stood guard.

  “I think we can take ‘em,” said Darxhan. “What do you say?”

  “This is really weird,” answered Izaak. “A limo? A bunch of unarmored cops? Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “No, but neither does bringing me here and not letting me kill anyone.”

  “Mercs,” Hector laughed. “You’re all the same.”

  Staccato gunfire erupted from inside the castle at that moment, followed by explosions. Smoke billowed over the wall. Darxhan surged forward but Izaak stopped him, watching intently. An instant later, a convoy of vehicles roared up the road. Figures leapt out and fought with the guards as more poured out from inside the castle.

  “I’m going to go see what’s going on inside,” Izaak said, ignoring his friend’s annoyance. “There’s a tower on the west side at the top of a cliff. It’s climbable there.” Izaak paused for a moment, remembering the steep bluffs. “I don’t think a merc could make the climb.”

  “I guess I’ll just wait here, then. Clean my guns,” Darxhan grumbled.

  “That’s why you’re always ready. And if I’m not back in ten minutes,” Hector stammered, “you get in there and save my butt.”

  Darxhan laughed. “Good luck with that one.” Izaak jogged off.