Decimation Island

by Damien Boyes

  “Not a clue,” Dub says. “Never been much of a gamer.”

  “Connie,” I call out, “can you run SECNet for two aliases: XeroFacks and RainBowWow. Get as much as you can, dip into the funds and use the back channels if you have to.”

  “On it,” she replies from the bedroom. If Dub thinks it’s weird I’m talking to Connie he doesn’t show it. A few seconds later a screen pulls itself open above the fireplace. “Not much to report. Even the undernet’s dry,” she says.

  They’re both basic profiles. Reps just high enough to make the IDs useable, limited link traffic and associations to a bunch of games, but no ties to biokin or any useful real-world data, no profile pictures. Their birthdays are both set to Jan 01, 2000. RainBowWow has their location set to Beverly Hills, but apart from that they’re generic and impossible to narrow down.

  No help there. “Thanks anyway, Con.”

  “Here if you need me,” she answers back, her voice chipper. I’m stung by sudden remorse. How could I have thought about letting Connie go? She’s the only person I can count on—she’d never, ever lie to me.

  Because she can’t. Her programming won’t let her.

  I slam the lid on my warring thoughts. I’ve got enough going on right now, I don’t have the energy to get into this particular clusterfuck. Thank Christ Vae’s shyft is keeping Deacon quiet. With the way my head’s already spinning, I don’t know how I’d keep him down otherwise.

  I sigh and Dub looks up at me. “I have to tell Coach, and then go to the team GM. After Nyx ...” His throat catches. “Whoever stole those skyns already set us back a season. We had a good chance of winning the cup this year, but we needed those skyns. No way can we let Anika compete in the trials. What if she wins and joins the team? She could be working for another ludus, who knows? I can’t let anything else hurt us.”

  “We need proof. If you go to your coach now, what’ll you say?”

  “That Anika ripped us off.”

  “Based on what?”

  “On”—he cocks his big round head at me—“on what you just told me. That she knew about it ahead of time. And she lied about that OVRshAdo guy.”

  “None of that means anything. She’ll have easy enough explanations—yeah she kept her cool during the heist, it’s what she does for a living, and so what if she was gaming with OVRshAdo, that’s no crime, besides, everyone expected that anyway after the DI live game. Plus, I bet there’s no physical evidence she sabotaged the skyn safeguards. She’s clever, and she’ll have covered her tracks. If I hadn’t happened to be standing beside her when this all went down, no one would have suspected her at all. It’ll be your word against hers.”

  “And yours,” Dub says.

  “Trust me, you don’t want me as your sole corroborating witness.”

  “Then what?” Dub says, launching back to his feet and throwing up his hands. “You want I should sit on my hands and let the ludus go to crap?”

  “No, but we need something more than we have now.”

  “So what then?”

  Good question. I could confront Anika, but she’d deny it. Toss some perfectly reasonable excuse at me and I’d never see her again. And I already know I can’t find OVRshAdo. No one knowing who he is or where he came from is part of his whole schtick.

  All that’s left are those other two IDs. They’re working as a team, and if I can find out who’s behind them, maybe that’ll lead us somewhere. It’s not much, but I don’t have anything else.

  “Give me forty-eight hours, just until Sunday morning. If we don’t find anything by then, one way or another, we can go to your coach. That’ll still leave them most of a day to decide what to do.”

  “I don’t know, Fin—”

  “We need to be sure. Anika’s trending right now. If we come at her and we’re wrong, the public backlash could hurt the ludus even worse.”

  “Arg,” Dub moans, and his shoulders slump. “Fine, Sunday. But I really don’t like this.”

  “Trust me, I don’t like it either,” I say. “But this is how it has to be.”

  So that’s it. I’ve got two days to get to the bottom of all this. Two days to figure out if the woman I’ve just fallen for is secretly involved in ripping off a few hundred million dollars’ worth of lethal bio-tech.

  Fuck my life.

  AniK@

  399:56:55 // 14 Players Remain

  You’re only halfway across the road when your camo battery finally dies and an instant later the bullets start flying.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” runs like a chant through your head as you serpentine the rest of the way across the hardpacked dirt, fists out. Your armor takes a pounding but holds up long enough for you to crash into cover behind the back wall of the concrete hut you were sneaking toward.

  Armor’s shredded and you’ve used the last of your camo, but it bought you another sixty seconds. Maybe. But there’s nowhere to go from here.

  You’re up against it, staring down an execution line. There’s only six minutes until the zone closes, and fourteen players still alive—two full four-man squads, a trio, plus OVRshAdo, Zara-Zee, and you.

  The hut’s on the edge of a small town nestled in a sunny valley on the east coast of the island, up north of the Smuggler’s Run hotspot. All the NPC villagers are gone, and the bots are pacing, waiting for their chance to strike. The red’s at your back and closing fast. This is the last slice of protection between you and the center of the safe-zone: a spot in small village made up of two- and three-story buildings. To get there you’ll need to cross a wide, open-air viaduct, and the other teams are perched in the buildings’ upper windows, ready to cut down anyone who tries.

  Looks like you’re gonna die, but the audience is eating it up.

  The two squads holding positions overlooking the viaduct aren’t working together, ’cause officially that’s against the rules, but they’re not shooting at each other either. They’re after meatier targets: OVRshAdo’s stuck on the edge of the zone too, just on the other side of the concrete wall from you, inside the shack.

  At this point you’re just a side dish—everyone is gunning for OVRshAdo. If he makes it to the survivors’ circle this game, it’ll put him at seven hundred hours, only three games from winning the Century. At this point the bounty on killing him is already worth risking a low-hour run on. It’s one of those unwritten rules of the game: when you have the choice, always shoot the guy with the most hours. It’s not enough to win, part of the game is making sure everyone else loses.

  It’s kinda funny. The only reason he’s in this shitty position is because he wasted so much of his game chasing you. If you don’t make it, at least you’ll have the thin comfort of knowing he won’t either.

  But you don’t want to lose.

  “Anyone home?” you call out, and slap your fist against the concrete. You know it’s only OVRshAdo and Zara-Zee in there. You downed HuggyJackson back at the comms tower and you saw on the kill-feed they lost their third an hour ago, and they must know you’re out here. No way they didn’t hear the bullets thudding into their hiding spot.

  A muffled laugh comes as reply. “Well look what we got ourselves into,” OVRshAdo calls back. Then after a second, “So how you wanna play this?”

  You skip right over the idea of fighting. Even if you somehow took both of them out you’d still be sitting at twelfth. Since the zone will hit you before it does anyone else, your safe-time will start to tick down first, and after you were forced to ditch the Redeemer, the only weapon you’ve found that’ll integrate with the camo is a pistol, so there’s no chance the bots don’t get you.

  You hate the idea, but there’s only one way you survive, and that’s working together. Even then it’s a long shot, but at this point you’ve got no other choice.

  “What do you have in mind?” you ask.

  “We’ve got a cell for your camo,” OVRshAdo’s muffled voice replies.

  “In exchange for?”

  “We group up and you share yo
ur safe-time,” he says. “You got a full hundred stocked up, right?”

  You do, and you need it, every second. “What do you have?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  Shit. Thirty-seven minutes. And after the zone fully closes safe-time runs down at an increased rate. That’s less than three minutes before the bots overwhelm them. You could just wait out here and live longer than OVRshAdo. Granted, only by a few minutes, but it’d be something.

  “There’s a window around the corner,” he says. “Come on in when you’re ready.”

  “How do I know you won’t shoot me?”

  “You don’t,” OVRshAdo answers, “but we could have already, if we wanted.”

  It’s probably true. You were lying prone out in a defilade on the edge of town while the zone came in. You knew he and Zara-Zee were in the hut, and there’s a good chance he saw you coming.

  Even though he’s been hunting you for the past few games, you don’t think it was personal. Cold-blooded, sure, but all part of the game. An hour ago killing you might have gotten him further in the round, now it won’t. Basic game math.

  He’ll put a bullet in your back the second it’s in his best interest, but you figure you’re safe for now. Still, you take a breath before you announce, “Coming in,” then slip around the side of the hut and vault in through the window.

  OVRshAdo and Zara-Zee look like shit. They lost their other squad member, myfriendtimmy, a few hours ago in a four-v-three and haven’t fully healed up from the fight. They’re well geared though, fourth-level armor with full visors, and they killed Primus and looted his Archive four times over two games and they’re both double fisting Stingers—two-muzzle SMGs that don’t have much range, but shred up close.

  Zara-Zee has your Redeemer resting beside her, and as much as you resent her having it, right now you’d straight-up trade it for the Stingers. They’re built to integrate with your camo unit and would go invisible along with the rest of you.

  You stare at each other for a moment, feeling each other out. After all, you could have tossed a grenade in here instead of jumping through the window—you don’t have one, but they don’t know that.

  OVRshAdo seems happy enough to wait, as though you’re not all about to be torn apart by rampaging bots, and he watches you with his visor up and a vague smile on his face. Zara-Zee’s expression isn’t as contained. Her pale lips remain set in a tight line, but her brown eyes don’t stop scowling. She isn’t happy you’re here, but when no one moves for a weapon you let yourself relax.

  After another second of staring you down, the guy who’s spent the past three games trying his best to kill you flashes a wide smile and holds out his hand, palm up, and offers the camo energy cell. That’s half an hour of invisibility, plenty of time to sneak into the safe-zone and carve yourself into the top ten, even with sharing your time—but how’s that help him? They’d still be trapped out here.

  He knows he’s handing you the win, so what’s his play?

  You move to take the cell but he closes his fingers over it and flips his fist over. The pulsing white ring on the back of his hand signals the offer to team. Before you can change your mind, you fist-up and punch-in and a trickle runs down your arm as your collected time drains away to your two new teammates.

  They loaded up on tactical upgrades, and when you join the squad their battle-lens shyft automatically loads and layers over your vision, outlining each of them in green. You’ll be able to see them through walls and read each other’s vitals. Plus, you’ve got the wind speed, ambient temperature, and other info you could get to if you needed it. But most importantly, red triangles mark the enemy positions around you. OVRshAdo must have a wasp drone flitting around over there, scouting out movement. They know exactly where everyone is.

  “Welcome aboard,” OVRshAdo says in your head as he opens his fingers, dropping the cell, and the smile never leaves his face. You snatch it before it can hit the ground and quickly replace the empty one in the camo unit on your chest. By the time you’ve got it switched out you’ve run through OVRshAdo’s options, and you know exactly why he’s smiling. He just bought his way into the top ten, and all it cost him was a battery.

  He and Zara-Zee are pinned, but you’re not. You’ve got the enemy positions, and now he expects you to camo up and go kill them. And the thing is, you know it’s your best chance too. He’s not getting off that easy though. It’ll cost him.

  “I need two Stingers and all the ammo you have,” you say matter-of-factly, like there’s no expectation they’ll argue.

  “No.” Zara-Zee takes a step toward you, then silently adds, “I’m not giving her my guns. This wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “I can hear you, dumbass,” you say. “One each. You want me to one-v-four a whole squad or not? If I die we all die.”

  OVRshAdo shrugs, flings out his left hand, and lets the Stinger twirl around the trigger guard to offer you the grip. You get to keep one item with every win, and you didn’t carry over anything last game. The Stingers count as sidearms toward your loadout, so if by luck you somehow scrape your way out of this, you can keep them both. Two Stingers plus the camo unit? If you can survive this round, the next one’ll be a walk.

  You toss your pistol and take the compact assault rifle from him, then wait for Zara-Zee to hand hers over.

  But she isn’t so sure. “I don’t trust her,” she says out loud.

  “You’re just mad she killed your boyfriend.”

  “Which one was your boyfriend?” you ask. “HumanBacon or HuggyJackson?”

  She doesn’t answer, just stares daggers.

  “Huggy,” OVRshAdo says, nudging Zara-Zee with her elbow. “Come on, Zee, get over yourself. We’ve been trying to kill her for three games now, can’t get pissed at her for not dying. All part of the game, right?”

  You glance back at Zara-Zee and raise your eyebrows from behind your visor. She screws up her mouth in a scowl but finally tosses her weapon to you. OVRshAdo hands you a bunch of extended mags and you strap them to your thighs and empty everything you don’t need out of your pack.

  Then there’s nothing else left to say. These aren’t your friends, this is purely a transaction. There’s not gonna be a final pep talk or teary goodbye, but one last thing before you go. You glance down at the Redeemer. “That’s mine,” you tell Zara-Zee, “and I’m gonna get it back.”

  She strokes the long barrel with her fingers. “From my cold dead hand, sweetheart,” she replies, murder in her eyes.

  “Any time now,” OVRshAdo says, pointing to the digits on his wrist. “Tick tock.”

  He’s right. You’ve got a job to do, so move.

  “Either I’m about to get wasted,” you tell the audience, “or y’all are about to see something cool.”

  You feel the pulse of excitement in response as you engage your camo, climb back out through the window, land in a crouch, and creep along the edge of the hut toward the viaduct. The red’s right at your back now, and with your diminished safe-time that means only minutes until the bots come off the leash.

  “Anyone got a smoke?” you ask the team.

  Two canisters whip out of the hut in response, hit the ground halfway toward the buildings, and kick out a dense blue fog. The red dots marking the enemy positions shift in response, expecting OVRshAdo and Zara-Zee will be moving, and you use the distraction to crouch-walk into the open, away from the distraction of the smoke. The only problem with the camo is its refresh rate. It’s not instantaneous, and works best if you move slow, so you’re forced to agonize your way across the open dirt, ease yourself into the shallow aqueduct and then up the incline on the other side, hoping the whole time no one notices the slow-moving blur stalking toward them.

  The decision now is who to kill. There’s three squads left: a trio and two foursomes. The trio’s holed up in a building one up from you, and one of the foursomes is camped in a two-stack just up from that. It’d be easiest to take out the trio, they’re closer and three-v-on
e is slightly better odds, but there are fourteen players left, and even if you wiped the entire team you’d still be one spot out of placement. You’d still need to take on a full four-man, except then they’d know you were coming.

  So a one-v-four it is, and all you have to do is eliminate an entire squad by yourself. No biggie. At least you have the wasp updating their positions. You can do this.

  You get almost all the way across the open field before a rattle of fire rolls out from one of the windows and the red icons superimposed on your vision shudder and stop moving.

  “Wasp’s down,” OVRshAdo states, and the bottom falls out of your stomach. It was gonna be hard enough taking on a whole squad with the benefit of knowing where they were, but now …

  You’re screwed.

  OVRshAdo doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to be encouraging, and you appreciate it. His voice in your head right now is the last thing you need. Your thoughts come in a jumble, searching for any other way out of this, but there’s no time. Nothing to do but muscle up and fight. You’ve still got the camo and the Stingers, and they won’t be expecting you.

  Surprise and overwhelming firepower. It’ll have to be enough.

  Once you’re across the field and into the shadow of a building you pick up your pace, hurry along the concrete wall, skip across a narrow alley between the neighboring building, and travel its length before you cut left, swinging out and around the foursome’s position so you can come at them from behind.

  You move quietly, slinking through the shadows, and spot movement in an upper window of a three-story building ahead, in the dead center of the zone.

  It’s the other four-man squad. It wasn’t the team you were gunning for, but they’ll do. Even better actually. They probably figure their spots in the top ten are a lock, which means they’re your best target.

  You skitter across the laneway and get right up next to their building, then skirt around the perimeter, glancing in windows, trying to find an opening. The safe-time on your wrist is already dropping. OVRshAdo and Zara-Zee are in the red, and as they use up their time it comes off your shared pool. It’s reducing slowly right now, but the red has nearly caught up with you and the second it closes the rate it drops will spike and you’ll all be vulnerable. You need to end the fight before that happens.