the Deadliest Game (1998)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 02 Clancy

  Megan shook her head. "And nobody has any idea of who it was?"

  "Nothing that the local police department's forensics have been able to turn up, anyway. But I was hoping that you might be able to help out a little."

  "You want me to go into Sarxos and 'ask a few questions,'" Megan said.

  "You'd be good for the job. You have a pre-established identity--which is handy. Any new character who came in and suddenly started asking about the bounces would attract attention and suspicion immediately. But not just you. I think it would be smart, under the circumstances, to have someone working with you. Another viewpoint could be helpful...and Sarxos is, after all, a very big place. There's a lot of ground to cover."

  Megan chewed her lip thoughtfully. "Someone else in the Net Force Explorers?"

  "Preferably."

  She thought about that for a few moments. "I have to confess I'm not sure which of the Net Force Explorers I know might be 'players.' You don't usually ask."

  "Well," Winters said, "I know of at least one other Explorer with an established identity who's expressed an interest, and doesn't mind if other Explorers know he's playing. Do you know Leif Anderson?"

  Megan was caught by surprise one more time. "You mean the Leif Anderson who lives in New York? The redheaded guy with all the languages? He's in Sarxos?"

  "Yes. He plays a..." Winters stopped and looked down at the paper he was holding, and chuckled. "A 'hedge-wizard,' it says here. I'm assuming that isn't someone who works on your garden using magic."

  Megan snickered. "No. It's a classification that means you're concentrating on doing small wizardries instead of the big dangerous ones. It can either mean that you prefer to work close to the land and the 'common people,' or that you're not very good at what you do and you're trying to cover yourself. Hedge-wizards are supposed to be a little on the incompetent side."

  Winters looked bemused. "Right. Well, will it be a good cover, do you think?"

  "It should be," Megan said, considering it. "Hedge-wizards are always traveling around looking for rare herbs and weird spells and deeds to do. They usually get to know a lot of people. My character does the same kind of thing, but for different reasons...so it should work."

  "Should I have him get in touch with you, then?"

  "Sure," Megan said. "Can it wait until tonight? Life around here is a little busy today."

  "No problem. Take this at your own pace. I would much rather you two take your time; rushing in and digging around too earnestly is likely to make the 'person or persons' responsible go quiet...and you don't want that."

  "Nope. I'll need a list of the other characters who've been bounced," Megan said.

  "Right here," said Winters. With another soft chime, a small slowly rotating pyramid, the symbol for a file waiting to be opened, appeared in Megan's workspace, hovering in the air near her. "If you have any other questions, if there's anything else you need, get in touch."

  "Right, Mr. Winters. Thanks!"

  He and his office vanished. Megan sat there, beginning to feel much more excited than was good for her with what now looked like an interminably long school day still to come. It was one thing to know you were a Net Force Explorer, affiliated (however loosely) with people doing work that could be about the most exciting there was. It was something else entirely to actually be on an assignment, with the people that you hoped you might someday work with watching you...interested and confident enough in your performance to give you a job and see what you did with it.

  This, Megan thought, is gonna be a blast!

  She got up out of the chair and told the computer, "Break interface--"

  --and found herself sitting in the chair in the den, with an unearthly shriek echoing around her. It came from the kitchen. Her mother's favorite kettle, the one with the train whistle in its spout, was now banging and clattering and whistling as if it was about to explode; and Megan's ride was outside, honking her horn.

  Megan tore out into the kitchen to get the kettle off the stove before it burned its bottom out. No tea, she thought, but as she turned the stove off, and grabbed her computer pad and books and disks and house keycards off the kitchen table and dashed for the door, she was grinning with sheer exaltation.

  Sarxos, here I come!

  2

  VIRTUAL DOMINION OF SARXOS:

  GREENMONTH 23, YEAR OF THE DRAGON-IN-THE-RAIN

  The tavern had only one room, and its roof was leaking. The rain, which was falling softly and steadily outside, was coming in through a bare place in the thatch, dripping morosely on the cracked slate hearth of the fireplace, and hissing and steaming where it hit. Smoke from the badly vented fireplace was rolling around, blue as smog, underneath the blackened rafters. A few sputtering lamps hung from those rafters, their light swimming in the smoke, some of the light actually making its way down to the ancient, massive, knife-scarred wooden tables underneath.

  At those tables sat a motley assortment of people, eating and drinking: peasant farmers in from the fields, nobles ostentatiously sitting on their folded-up cloaks so that they wouldn't have to physically touch the benches, mercenary soldiers in scarred leather armor, well-dressed foreign merchants talking animatedly among themselves about the Sarxonian investment markets and how the present wars would affect them; in other words, the usual Moons-day night crowd at the Pheasant and Firkin, everyone swilling down herbdraft or gahfeh or the host's watered (but fortunately unleaded) wine, eyeing one another suspiciously and having a good time.

  In the chimney-corner there was even the obligatory dark, hooded stranger with his feet up on one massive firedog, smoking a long pipe, his eyes glittering from under the hood as he watched the company. A large dingy-white cat with ragged ears and one eye gone milky-blind walked past the stranger, glancing at him, said, "Huh. You again..." and kept on walking.

  Leif Anderson, sitting at the far side of the tavern, alone at a small table near the door, looked around the tavern and thought absently that, in a way, it was the kind of place his mother had always warned him about. The problem was that, in her more protective moods, she was worried that he might stumble into a place like this in the real world, and he very much doubted that there were any: at least, not where he was likely to run into them, in New York or D.C. Outer Mongolia, possibly, or the Outer Hebrides, or the Yukon maybe. He smiled slightly. It always amused him when someone as tough as his mother, who had danced for years for the New York City Ballet, and therefore had a physique like spring steel and a tongue like a razor, got all worried about her "little boy"--as if he had not inherited any of that toughness himself.

  The innkeeper loomed over him suddenly. "You using that other chair?" he said. He was an archetype, just as much as the guy by the fireplace: fat, balding, wearing an apron that had apparently last been washed before the present Dragon cycle began, and in perpetually foul temper.

  Leif looked up. "I'm waiting for someone," he said.

  "Great," the innkeeper said, grabbing the spare chair with one hand. "When he turns up, you can have another chair. I need this for the paying customers."

  Leif picked up the tankard of herbdraft he had been nursing and waved it meaningfully at the innkeeper.

  "Tough," the innkeeper said. "You want another chair, you pay for another drink." He started to laugh at his own alleged wit, exhibiting teeth like something from a dentist's horror novel.

  "It is unwise," Leif said, "to insult a wizard."

  The innkeeper looked him over with a sneer, plainly unimpressed by what he saw--a slender young man in a somewhat ragged robe decorated with faded and obscure alchemical and magical symbols. "You're nothing but a hedgie," the innkeeper scoffed. "What're you going to do? Not leave a tip?"

  "No," Leif said mildly, "I'll give you a tip." He pulled off his hat, fumbled around in it for a moment, and then came up with what he had been looking for. He threw it at the innkeeper, and said one word under his breath.

  The innkeeper caught it by reflex--stared, for a momen
t, at what looked like a piece of rag tied up with string--and then got a startled expression. From nowhere, a puff of smoke appeared and wrapped itself around him. All around the inn, heads turned.

  The smoke slowly cleared. Where the innkeeper had been standing, there was now a small white mouse sitting on the floor, looking around it in shock.

  Leif leaned down and picked up the wrapped-up talisman from beside it. "Even hedge-wizards," he said, "know some spells. That a good enough tip?" And he glanced under the next table before looking back at the mouse. "Have a nice day."

  The mouse turned to see what had caught Leif's attention...and saw the beat-up white cat walking toward him with an expression that suggested it was ready for a predinner snack.

  The mouse ran off across the cracked and worn flagstones of the floor, with the cat heading after it, not really hurrying, just enjoying the prospect of its hors d'oeuvre.

  The other patrons of the inn turned away, not too concerned about this, since the innkeeper's daughter, totally unconcerned, had begun making the rounds and taking drink orders. Leif tucked his talisman away and sat back with his drink again, his attention distracted once more by the sound of the foreign merchants discussing the futures markets.

  Here as in the real world, there was a hot trade among the merchants in hog-belly futures, and Leif had no trouble imagining his father sitting right here with these guys and talking margins and short-sells until the cows, or the hogs, came home.

  I really should try to get him in here sometime, Leif thought idly. We might be able to make some "money." His father's talent with investments, though, kept him hopping all over the planet, physically as well as virtually: so much so that he pretty much refused to spend his scarce leisure time anywhere virtual, or doing anything that sounded even slightly like "talking shop." If I could get him in here, he'd probably much rather be some kind of berserk warrior in a loincloth. Anything to get out of a suit....

  Leif's attention was momentarily attracted by another of the patrons across the room, a tall, lean, intent young man in a dark jerkin who was methodically checking and clearing a gun, some kind of semiautomatic with a Glock in its ancestry. Normally one might have expected this to cause some stir, but the Pheasant and Firkin was located in the little princedom of Elendra, and Elendra was one of the places in Sarxos where gunpowder didn't work. It didn't work in most places in Sarxos, actually. The creator of the game had been making his alternate world mostly for those who preferred strictly mechanical weapons, preferably the kind that meant you and your enemy had to get up close and personal to kill one another.

  But Chris Rodrigues had also apparently suspected that there would always be those for whom life would not be complete without weapons that went BANG, the more frequently and the more loudly the better, and for them, Sarxos had the adjacent countries of Arstan and Lidios, where explosives and other chemical-based weaponry were enabled. They were noisy places, featuring frequent wars with high body counts. Many Sarxonians made it a point to avoid Arstan and Lidios entirely, reasoning that it was better to let the boys and girls who were inclined that way just get on with what made them happy, and not distract or upset them with annoying visions of a world where people did business differently.

  Apparently these visions did bother some players a little, for there were frequent attempts to find some explosive or gunpowder-analogue that would work in the rest of Sarxos as well, despite the game creator's insistence that there was no such substance, nor would there be. Some players--aspiring alchemists, or would-be weapons dealers--would occasionally spend prolonged periods trying to invent such a substance. They tended to have accidents that were hard to explain except by an old Sarxonian saying: "The Rules take care of themselves."

  The black cast-iron handle of the door near Leif turned. The door creaked open, swinging toward him and hiding his view. The patrons stopped what they were doing and stared--they would always do that, even if the person coming in was someone they knew. But it plainly wasn't, this time. They kept on staring.

  The person who had come in now turned and shut the door. Medium height, slim build, long brown hair tied back tight and braided up around her head: dark clothes, all somber colors--brown tunic, black breeches and boots, a tight dark-brown leather jerkin over it all, dark-brown leather bands cross-binding the breeches, a dark brown robe over it all, divided up the back for riding, and a brown leather pack. If she was armed, Leif couldn't see where...not that that meant anything.

  She looked around long enough to complete her part of the staring game--for it was a game. You had to meet the crowd's eyes, let them know that you had as much right to be here as they did...otherwise there would be trouble, trouble that you might or might not start, but would definitely finish. The patrons of the Pheasant and Firkin, perceiving this, became elaborately uninterested in the new arrival.

  She looked over at Leif. He lifted his hat again, enough to let her see the red hair.

  She smiled and came over, sat down in the other chair, and looked around her with a wry expression.

  "You come here often?" she said.

  Leif rolled his eyes at the tired old line.

  "No, I mean it seriously. This place is an utter dive. How'd you find it?"

  Leif chuckled. "I stumbled in last year, during the wars. It has a certain rural charm, don't you think?"

  "It has mice," Megan said, pulling her feet back a little and looking under the table at something that ran by. "Oh, well, it doesn't matter, here comes the cat...."

  Leif chuckled. "You want something to drink? The tea's not bad."

  "In a while. I take it you got the list from Winters."

  "Yup...a few days ago." Leif pushed the tea-tankard away from him and sat looking thoughtful. "Parts of it surprised me. Problem is, if I knew those people at all, I knew most of them by their game-names and not by real-world names--otherwise maybe I would have caught on sooner. Probably a lot of people would have. But what's plain right away is that all the people 'bounced' were very active players. No dillies." Leif used the Sarxos term for "dilettantes," people who played the Game less often than once a week. "And as far as I can tell, no 'minor' characters. All the people who got bounced were movers and shakers of one kind or another."

  Megan nodded. She apparently had noticed this, too. But she looked at him a little cockeyed. "A few days ago? I would have thought you'd want to get started looking around here right away."

  "Oh, I did." Leif grinned at her. "But I wanted to do the first few pieces of groundwork on my own. If it turned out to be a waste of time, well, it was my time, not both of ours."

  "Oh. Okay. So where'd you go for your groundwork?"

  "Up north, mostly." Sarxos had two main continents, one north, one south. From the northerly one a great archipelago reached down in "the Crescent" toward the southern, making thousands of suitable havens for pirates, rebels, and those who wanted to take a few weeks off from the business of gaming to work on their virtual tans. "I was talking with a few people," Leif said. "One of them was a guy whose game-name was Lindau."

  "Lindau as in the storming of the Inner Harbor?" said Megan.

  "Yup. Not that he's been storming much of anything since he was bounced. Also I had a chat with Erengis, who was Lindau's archenemy for so long. She's a regular gossip shop on two legs." Leif stretched, glancing under the nearby table. "And I talked to a few other people who were enemies of Shel's, or some of the other bounced people; and some of their friends."

  He must have looked a little smug, to judge by the expression on Megan's face. "Right," she said. "And did one particular name come up at all? Several times, in fact?"

  Leif smiled slightly. "You're there before me."

  "Argath," said Megan.

  Leif nodded.

  Argath was the king of Orxen, one of the more northerly countries, a place mountainous and short on resources, except for large numbers of barbarians clad in beast-skins--people who loved to go to war at a moment's notice. The place had
earned itself the cognomen "The Black Kingdom" because of a tendency over many game-years to side with the Dark Lord during his periodic risings. Yet somehow it never itself got overrun, a cause of considerable annoyance and envy to some other players.

  Argath had insinuated himself into the kingship of Orxen over the last game-decade by means that were considered normal in Sarxos. He had made a name for himself as an effective general of the Orxenian forces during the period of rule of a weak and ineffective king. No one was terribly surprised when elderly King Laurin apparently had an accident near his fishpond late one night, and was found in the morning head down among the bemused koi by his body-servants, several hours drowned. No one was surprised when the murder failed to be pinned on anyone specific; and no one was surprised when Argath was elected king by acclamation, the unfortunate King Laurin having outlived all his heirs.

  Argath's career after that had been unremarkable, by Sarxonian standards. He campaigned in the summer, like most people did, and intrigued during the winter, setting up agreements with other players, or weaseling out of them. He won battles, and lost them, but mostly he won: Argath was good at what he did. Shel had fought him a game-year or so previously, in the same kind of skirmish that Shel had had with Delmond, and Shel had won, which had surprised some of the locals. Argath's army had been much bigger than Shel's.

  "And Argath," Megan said, "is not a construct--not an artifact or built-in feature of the game."

  "No, he's 'live,' I know," Leif said. "Someone told me once what he does in real life. It sure looks kind of like Argath might have it in for anybody who had beat him in a fair fight."