the Deadliest Game (1998)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 02 Clancy

  Shel sat back and contemplated his cup of honeydraft for a moment. Alla watched Delmond unwinkingly, smiling, like a cat waiting to see which way a rat will jump. Then Shel spoke again. "Now, I for one think it would be just a ton of fun to see you dragged off into eternal servitude in the slave pits of Oron the Lord of the Long Death. See, here's the note he sent me this afternoon, requesting the pleasure of your company."

  Shel reached across his map table and poked the smoking scrap of parchment with his knife, wishing privately that the ink on it would stop smoking. The effect was unsettling, and he kept worrying that the note would set fire to something valuable. "Not a ransom offer. It's an offer to buy you. And there are about two hundred other generals, lords and ladies, and petty and grand nobility of the Great and Virtual Dominion of Sarxos, who would strongly suggest that I take the offer. However, I don't like slavery much, and I'm persuaded by my quartermaster that it would be much better business to simply asset-strip you and turn you out to beg for your bread on the roads, so that the peasants whose lives you've made miserable by burning their fields and destroying their livelihoods can throw herdbeast patties at you as you pass."

  Delmond shivered visibly. "Surely it would be more useful to you, politically speaking I mean, to impound my army and send me and my property home with a suitable escort--"

  "Excuse me?" Shel stuck one finger in his ear and began digging. "I could have sworn I heard you claim to have an army. That pitiful crowd of leftover wannabe skinheads in the corral out there, the bike-chained, the saggy-butted, those two hundred people with no horses and no weapons: that army? Oh."

  It had long been said of Delmond that he could not understand irony. Shel now found this to be true. "Not this army," Delmond said hurriedly. "My other one."

  Shel laughed out loud. "I'm sorry," he said. "If you do have another one stashed away somewhere, which I'm not sure I believe, they won't be yours for long. Not after word of this afternoon gets out." And Shel very much hoped that this was true. It was likely enough that Delmond could have another army...but that was no admission that Shel was prepared to make today. "And even if you have another, why would I want it, considering the quality of your troops? If 'quality' is the word I'm looking for."

  "Land, then."

  Shel sighed. "I don't want your lands." Much, he thought, but this was no time to discuss his personal ambitions with Delmond. Today's battle was part of a long string of initiatives discussed with two other Sarxonian generals whom Shel trusted...well, trusted as far as you could trust anyone who was playing in Sarxos: about throwing distance, usually. If things went well, sometime in the next few months Shel would come in and take Delmond's lands by force, and everybody in Sarxos, including the people who lived there, would wholeheartedly approve the change. For the moment, though, Shel said, "No thanks. I'm much more interested in your portable assets, and it serves you right to lose them. I can't imagine why you carry all this junk around with you, except that you're too spoiled to eat off normal dishes in the field, like everyone else. Half an acre of brocade for one tent, half a ton of gold plate, a dozen suits of ceremonial armor, a brigade of dancing girls..."

  "You cannot take these things from me! They are the royal regalia of my house from time immemorial--"

  "Delmond, I've taken them already. You lost the fight today. This is the 'dictating terms' part of the battle. Haven't you noticed? And anyway, you stole nine-tenths of this stuff from Elansis of Schirholz a year and a half ago. Sacked her castle when only her little brother the Young Landgrave was home, with an insufficient force to defend it. Very nasty, Delmond, stealing the family silver from nine-year-olds. I guess it's no wonder you won't leave this stuff at home. You're afraid someone might try the same trick on you. Well, you've outsmarted yourself, because all this stuff now counts as 'spoils of war,' having been taken fair and square on the battlefield. If you'd left it home, no one would be able to touch it.

  "--But Elansis'll be really glad to get the Eye of Argon back again. It'll mean that something will grow in Schirholz's fields this year, and Telairn will acquire a couple of powerful allies that will raise eyebrows from here to the Sundown Sea. That will serve you right, too. I can't believe you stole that thing. It's common knowledge that the Crimson Emerald will bring ruin on anyone who handles it except members of the Landgrave's House. Don't tell me your mother put you up to that, too?"

  Delmond acquired a stunned expression. Shel considered it a moment, and filed it away under "Mothers/stepmothers, wicked, extreme caution when dealing with." "Right," Shel said. "Meanwhile, your surviving nobles will be cared for and ransomed as per the usual procedure. Fortunately, we have had a good number of offers for them. Your surviving infantry will spend a month at labor in Minsar, by way of reparation for the damage they've caused to Talairn territory, and they'll then be released. Who knows, some of them may want to stay with us afterwards. A poorly fed looking lot, they are.

  "You, however, will have a meal tonight and a meal in the morning, and then we'll give you the statutory skin of water and bag of bread and meat, and a horseman will take you ten miles back into your borderlands so that you can start walking home. You might get there by midsummer, if you don't dawdle. The collar stays on, by the way. Flying back home in bird or bat shape wouldn't give you nearly enough time to reflect on the error of your ways."

  Delmond turned a wonderful color of puce, drew a long breath, and began saying dreadful things about Shel's background and parentage. He was just starting to hit his stride when a soft moaning noise began radiating from near the tentpole. Ululator was shivering slightly, just enough so that you could see the patternwelding in the metal shift and move, as if the steel breathed, and the howling got louder. It was like the sound a tomcat makes when threatening another tom...except this was louder, and the threat was absolutely personal, like the angry note in your mother's voice when she works out why you've been in the bathroom with the door locked for so long.

  Delmond abruptly gulped and went silent. "I think you should moderate your language," Shel said. "Howler has been known to get out of my tent at night and go about her own business--I wouldn't go so far as to say her 'lawful occasions'; the things she does aren't always strictly legal. But I always pay for the funerals afterwards."

  Delmond was now sitting very still.

  "So that's the way it's going to be," said Shel. "Azure Alaunt, as a constituted herald of the Dominion, say you now: Is the disposition within the law?"

  "It is within the law," said the herald, looking with slight nervousness at his employer.

  "Fine. I will now hear any formal protest of the disposition."

  Delmond fought first for air, then for words, and after a moment, he burst out, "None of this would have happened if you had not had magic on your side! It was not horses that bore you down the hillsides at us, but devils! We will find out where to get such demons of our own, and then we will crush you where you--"

  "They come from Altharn, mostly," said Shel mildly. "A nice little stud farm up there. I own it. We crossbreed our black Delvairns with the mountain ponies, and there's rumored to be a secret ingredient in the mixture...possibly goat. Don't think you'll have much luck with them, though, Delmond. They bite, and you just have to put up with it...because it's their spirit that makes them so surefooted."

  "Spirits!" cried Delmond, turning to Azure Alaunt. "Did you hear that? He admits it, they were spirits, familiars!"

  Azure Alaunt glanced ever so briefly at Shel--an expression of utter hopelessness that his master did not see, and that made Shel wonder if, at some much later date, he should offer the man a job.

  "Mmmm," said Shel to Delmond. "Not your usual level of response. Things must be getting tough down at the WalMart."

  Delmond went rather darker than puce. It was not considered in the very best taste to refer inside Sarxos to a player's "real life" outside. The game was supposed to be a relief from "outside," after all, a place where the players could leave the pressures an
d mundanity of their lives, and experience something bigger and more exotic in company with many others intent on the same thing. But then lots of things happened in Sarxos that were not strictly "by the book," a fact that the game's creator apparently took as an indicator that the game was progressing correctly, and was in fact becoming its own place, its own self...something slightly alive. And anyway, Delmond had bent a fair number of the rules himself in this engagement. Turnabout was fair play, Shel thought.

  "All right," Shel said. "The disposition is made. Talch?" The guard reapppeared. "Take him out and feed him. Then lock him up in a baggage cart for the move up the road--not one of his, one of ours. Who knows what little surprises he's got built into his own equipment. Have the regulation beggar's bag ready for him in the morning. And what the heck, why should we be stingy? Throw a lump of hard cheese in it."

  Shivering with rage, but silent now, Delmond was taken out. Azure Alaunt paused on the threshold of the tent and said, "A word in your ear, lord, if I may..."

  Shel nodded.

  "His mother is not a safe person to offend. If harm should come to her son on the road--your own play could be damaged."

  Shel sat quiet for a moment. "Boldly spoken," he said then. "And possibly even true. I take your warning at its face value, Azure Alaunt."

  The herald bowed and slipped out of the tent.

  Shel sat still for a moment more, chewing his lip in a thoughtful way. "A little twitchy, that lad," said Alla, getting up and stretching.

  "Maybe. Come on," Shel said, getting up as well. "Let's have the baggage people get this tent down, and get ourselves up the road to Minsar and our dinners. We've done a good day's work."

  Alla nodded, and went out of the tent.

  A moment later, Shel went out into the near-darkness, too, and walked off a short distance through the red sticky mud, trying to find a solid spot. Finally he found one, a place that by some magic had not been completely poached into mire by the thousands of hooves, and looked southward at the first moon, the smaller one, now floating low over the mist.

  He turned to look north, toward Minsar, between the wooded hills. In the moonlight, the upward-reaching tips of the pine trees were slightly paler than the rest of the branches: polished matte-silver as opposed to the slightly tarnished silver and shadow-black of the trees. It had just turned spring in the South Continent, and by daylight you would correctly see the color at the tips of the conifers as that particular shade of new young green. Elsewhere would be the thin faint veiling of green on the opening buds of the oaks and maples; everything shone fresh and new. The fields were dazzling in the mornings; besides the yellow of nevermind in the grass, and the white of the South Continent daisy that comes after the snow, there was other whiteness, too--the new lambs, bouncing around on unsteady legs in the new spring sunshine, astounded and overjoyed to be alive. So when you got the news that somebody like Delmond was at your borders, about to cross over and stamp everything into a bloody pulp--the villages, the people, the lambs, and the daisies, everything that mattered and many things that hadn't, until now--you got cranky, and you stood up to defend the place.

  Shel had started doing that, much to his own surprise, some while back. Shel rarely saw daisies except at the florist's down the road, and had never seen a lamb that wasn't in plastic-wrapped pieces at the supermarket meat counter, but in Sarxos he had come to know what flowers, and livestock, meant to country people, to the smallfarmers and smallholders among whom he had moved. And when he had first "settled" and made this part of Sarxos his home-away-from-home, and someone else in Sarxos had come along, intent on taking the livestock, and killing the people and the daisies--not even out of need, but out of what that person considered political expediency--Shel had said, "The hell with that," and had started raking together an army.

  That first battle now seemed a long time ago...that, and the problems that followed "saving his country" for the first time. Armies, no matter how small--and his was--have a distressing tendency to want to be paid. If their pay is late, they tend to go elsewhere, or turn on you. Shel had found ways to pay them, out of his own pocket sometimes, thereby acquiring a reputation among other generals and rulers in Sarxos as an eccentric.

  Then, along had come the original rulers of "his country," roused from long neglect of it by the action: rulers who felt (with some cause) that Talairn was their property, and who disliked someone raising an army to defend it without their permission. That particular disagreement had gone on for nearly a year, until the rulers realized that fighting with Shel was getting them nowhere, and that the price he was offering them, to buy them off, was actually pretty good. After that, by and large, he had been left alone...except by the likes of Delmond. When people like him turned up in Talairn, Shel stomped them as best he could...because he had fallen in love with the place. He knew that was always dangerous. Love, and you were likely to be wounded.

  But some wounds were worth it.

  Shel stood there for a few breaths more, looking out at the moonlight, and then said: "Gameplay ends here."

  Everything around him suddenly acquired the perfectly frozen look of a still photograph or holo. "Options," said the voice of the server that controlled the "frame" for the virtual experience. "Continue: save: save and continue."

  "Save," Shel said. "Accounting, please."

  "Saved. Accounting for Shel Lookbehind," said the master games computer, as the frozen backdrop began, slowly, to dissolve into process-blue. "Balance carried forward from previous gameplay: four thousand eight hundred sixteen points. Score accrued in this session: five hundred sixty points. Total balance: five thousand three hundred seventy-six points. Query?"

  "No query," Shel said.

  "Confirming accounting accepted, no query. Read waiting messages now?"

  "Save for later," said Shel.

  "Acknowledged," said the master games computer. "Please enter your personal satchel codes for an archival save of this result."

  Shel blinked twice, summoning up his computer's copy of the satchel code "signature" that infallibly verified the game's results as his own to the master games computer. The signature was complex, too much so for an opponent to fake. One part of the code changed with each session, and was combined with a second part, which resided permanently in his machine, and a third, which the "master" Sarxos machine maintained. Shel nodded to the computer, locking in his "save."

  "Save confirmed," said the computer. He blinked a little, realizing for the first time that its voice was really a lot like Alla's. "This session of Sarxos is completed. Sarxos is copyrighted by Christopher Rodrigues, 1999, 2000, 2003-2010, and subsequent years. All rights reserved universe-wide and in all other universes that may be discovered."

  And everything vanished. Once more Shel was sitting in a room crammed with books and tapes and all the other impedimenta of his life, including (taking up most of the room) the big easy chair that let him line up his implant with the link in his home computer. There Shel sat, yawning, in the flesh rather than "in the flash," at six in the morning in his apartment in Cincinnati, with the dawn beginning to lever its way in through the blinds, and his flesh began to complain to him that after a long night of campaigning, it was stiff and sore. The machinery was supposed to speak to your muscles a few times an hour, to keep them contracting, but sometimes these routine movements just weren't enough to get rid of the excess lactic acid that built up in the big muscles when you were under stress. Because of this, steady long-term players were likely to do weights and get a lot of exercise on a regular basis. There might be a stereotype that suggested people who VR'd too much were thin and flabby, but Sarxos players tended toward a surprisingly high level of fitness. You could hardly campaign effectively enough to win a kingdom if your body wouldn't support your gameplay.

  Meanwhile, his body was saying something very specific to him. CORNFLAKES! it shouted. CORNFLAKES AND MILK!

  Shel got up and stretched, grinning at the thought of something to eat, and
at the look on Delmond's face when he had realized he wasn't going to be cut loose with his assets intact for the sake of pleasing his mother. Tarasp of the Hills, Shel thought, looking for his housekeys. What are we going to do about you, lady? You're a menace, even to your own flesh and blood. I've got to talk to the wizards about this....

  He changed into a less-rumpled T-shirt, locked his apartment, and went down the stairs to the street two at a time in an extremely cheerful mood. Despite it being a Saturday, he wouldn't be free today. Evening shift at the hospital started at three-thirty. It would be yet another exciting evening of drawing blood and collecting labwork samples on about a hundred patients, every one of whom loathed the sight of him. Yet despite all this, as he swung into the convenience store and got his cornflakes and his milk, and then spent ten minutes or so shooting the breeze with Ya Chen, the night lady, before she went off shift, Shel's heart sang. What a terrific campaign. What a terrific battle. I can't wait to start dealing with the can of worms that this will have cracked open....

  All the way back from the 7-11 he was laying plans...thinking about which players he needed to consult. The continuing threat from the Dark Lord was on his mind. Exactly what had he meant by that offer to "buy" Delmond? The amount offered had been three times Delmond's potential ransom value. Unless it was some clandestine arrangement of Delmond's mother's with the Dark One. I wouldn't put it past her, Shel thought as he went up the stairs at a run. She's a snake, that one. In fact, wasn't she a snake originally? Some kind of--

  He stopped at his apartment's landing, with his keys in his hand, and stared at the door. It was ajar.

  Don't tell me I left this open.

  He pushed the door open, cautiously, and peered in.

  His heart seized. Someone had been in here. Someone had been in...

  ...and had trashed the place.

  He walked softly through, half wondering whether the intruder might still be there--and half not caring: because at the far side of the living room, where his desk was, and his chair with his interface...was a disaster area. The desk was overturned. The computer lay on its side, its main system box pulled open, the boards everywhere. His monitor was smashed. His system was destroyed.