Gamer Army

by Trent Reedy

  “Yeah, but the game designers will give us some time, right?” said Healer. “Like, in one of my Call of Duty games there’s a running countdown on screen until a bomb goes off. Maybe there’s a countdown like that before the nonplayer characters in the game blow our cover.”

  “Maybe,” said Flyer. “But I don’t think we can take that chance.”

  “Right,” said Rogan, eager to get started. He had just realized that with Tank out of the game, his Ranger was now the most heavily armed viper. “Engineer, you have a big job to do. Shut down the security system and stop any outgoing communication. The rest of us will have to stun as many people as we can, as fast as possible. Even if one of us stuns our target and finds the PNC, we’ll have to pick it up quick and keep going to knock out everybody else in the place so that we aren’t compromised.”

  Healer laughed. “You guys, this is going to be hard, but you have to admit, it’s so fun.”

  “That’s the truth,” Rogan said. “Flyer, you find a way into the castle from the top and work your way down. Take Healer with you. That way each of us can cover one floor. Give us some time to get in at the ground level, so that we take out as many problems at the same time as we can. Everybody know the plan?”

  “That’s a plan?” Flyer said.

  “Gamers,” X’s voice cut in. “Time is running out. German police and military forces are aware that the Scorpion helicopter has crashed near your location and that the PNC is in the castle. They have been infiltrated by Scorpion. You must secure the device so that it cannot fall into enemy hands.”

  “You heard him,” Rogan said. “We don’t have time to sit around talking about it. Now let’s go get ’em, gamers!”

  Rogan and Engineer ran ahead through the woods while Flyer gave Healer a lift, all of them keeping watch for German soldiers or Scorpion terrorists who might take shots at them, staying together instead of racing one another, so that they could hit the castle and its occupants with a rapid, unified attack.

  Closer to the building, they spotted a group of about sixty tourists standing outside the castle on a balcony that overlooked the serious cliff. The vipers remained under tree cover, but since the tourists were already recording pretty much everything with their cameras and phones, they’d be spotted as soon as they came out in the open.

  “Flyer,” said Rogan. “We’re in position. Start your approach when I tell you to go.”

  A siren went off and the tourists looked around in alarm. Someone in uniform, a tour guide maybe, motioned with some urgency, and people began packing up.

  “They’re evacuating!” Flyer said. “We have to move now or the disguised target will walk right out with the others.”

  Rogan slapped Engineer on the shoulder. “Let’s go! Quick is the key!”

  The two of them scrambled up, alternating between climbing the cliff and the trees next to it, running, rocket-jumping, grabbing handholds and yanking themselves up. Finally, they reached the top, and Engineer vaulted over the short wall first, landing in the stone-floored lower courtyard surrounded on three sides by the castle ahead, with high walls and buildings reaching around them.

  “Flyer, now!” Engineer shouted. “Go!Go!Go!”

  When Rogan joined her in the lower courtyard seconds later, a mob of frantic tourists had run out onto the upper courtyard, the second stone level about eight feet higher than the first and separated by a short wall. Engineer didn’t wait for him. She unleashed her NLEPs, even as she rocket-jumped to the upper courtyard and sprinted toward the stairs that led up to the big arched castle door.

  He saw at once that she wasn’t worried as much about the people as she was about getting inside, hopefully to disable the cameras. “Get in there, Engineer,” Rogan said. “I’ll take care of everybody out here.”

  The tourists were in a frenzy, screaming in at least half a dozen languages, and clearly no longer sure which direction to run. Some tried to go back into the castle, fleeing Ranger. Others tried to climb the wall, like they thought they’d be safe if they could get up inside the big square tower there. Rogan stunned one after another, firing an NLEP and watching long enough to see the pained, seizure-like, locked-up expression on the target’s face before shooting someone else. At least with the new power system, he didn’t have to keep his eye on his battery percentage, a huge advantage.

  He kept hoping that one of these people would sparkle or shimmer from a disrupted PNC, or even better, revert back to his real appearance. But no luck. Just screams and unconscious nonplayer characters. He wanted to scream too, because he knew when he was done he’d need to check everybody for phones or even old cameras that he had to destroy, slowing him down even more.

  A loud pop. A high-pitched beep. Hiss of static. “If you can … hear me. Say nothing.”

  The voice was hard to understand. Distorted. Not Culum or X. Rogan was about to ask who had spoken when the sound cut in again. “—Eliminated—Tournament____________________Never mention. Just raise … right hand—you get this.”

  Was it some kind of test? Rogan had taken care of all the tourists in the area, so he started lasering the phones.

  Static. “—me? … hand up!”

  Rogan quickly raised his right hand and waved it around a little.

  “Testing the—They’re always … watch—”

  The tournament stages were all new. Rogan and the other gamers were probably the only beta testers. It made sense there’d be glitches. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. Rogan moved on. He had a game to win.

  Outside, Shaylyn held on to Healer and rocketed into the action, heading over the steep blue roof and straight for the big, round tower that was the highest point in the castle, hoping it was a way inside and not some fake decoration that served no real purpose. She landed them on a wraparound balcony about halfway up the tower and led the way inside. “You take the first floor we reach,” she said to Healer. “I’ll continue down to the next.”

  She felt a little bad, worried she was gaming like Rogan or Beckett, rushing ahead and leaving the others behind. But this was what she was supposed to do. They had to clear the floors quickly. She emerged from the staircase onto the third floor in a weird trapezoid-shaped room. A complicated network of ceiling archways was decorated in a mind-boggling, almost flowerlike pattern of about a million colors. Big paintings of kings, queens, and knights in a medieval battle covered the top half of the walls. Red-brown wood panels and benches made up the bottom.

  “I’m on the third floor,” she said to the others. “It’s like a throne room, I think, but no throne. Gold walls. Painting of Jesus and angels near the ceiling. Huge gold chandelier—”

  “Yeah, it’s neat,” Ranger interrupted. “We get it. Just clear the floor and move on. We’re in a hurry!”

  Shout in German behind her. Hard hits, like a hammer smacking her back and shoulder.

  Shaylyn spun around and shot blindly, missing the two soldiers holding handguns, and blasting minor burns in the dark wood double doors.

  They shouted something and fired again.

  She was knocked back, but this time aimed her NLEP, firing two quick shots to stun them both. “I have armed guards or soldiers or something on floor three,” she told the others as she stomped the phones and radios of her attackers to bits on the animal-and-tree tile mosaic on the floor. “German flags on their shoulders.” She ran out of the throne room to clear other, smaller rooms on her level.

  Takashi breathed heavy, hot inside his helmet. He would have loved to take the thing off, if only for a moment, but he couldn’t miss any of the game. “There’s nothing here! A big balcony hallway and—”

  He stepped into a giant open room, with a bunch of round golden chandeliers and knights and castle paintings on the walls. “There’s just a big room. No doors.” He ran around, his metal feet clomping on the polished wood floor. “Unless— What if there’s a secret passage? Do we have maps for this stage? What if he’s invisible? Like blending into the walls? Maybe we need
to just shoot everything!”

  His job was fixing vipers, not running around hunting camouflaged enemies.

  A man and a woman, soldiers or maybe police, unloaded into him with rifles, round after round. The bullets smacked his viper’s metal flesh hard. Other internal warnings sounded before he finally dropped the two attackers with NLEPs. “Two armed security people down!”

  “Great, Healer!” Ranger said. “Destroy any communication devices they have. Then move on and find that PNC guy!”

  Jacqueline was surprised by the look of the second floor. The first level had been like walking through an art museum, where every inch of the walls, ceilings, doors, everything was either a painting or sculpture or decorated in some flashy way. There were no plain spaces. The opposite was true on the second floor. It was like all the old cool stuff had been stripped away for the gift shop and other tourist junk.

  “Good work, Engineer,” X said. A yellow line appeared in the air in front of her. “Follow this to the camera room.”

  She crashed through the gift shop, overturning tables and book racks, big stein drinking mugs and ceramic models of the castle crashing all around her. A rack of shot glasses bumped sideways as they fell, as if they’d run into something. But there was nothing there.

  Jacqueline froze. A pair of boot prints stood out darkly in the white powder from crushed pottery. Dust formed the faint outline of the boots and the tucked-in bottom of uniform pants, see-through, like the feet of a ghost. “Target is on—”

  Her vision flashed hot red.

  Another glimpse of laser fire in the corner of her static vision. Blast in her chest. Computer alarms. Shot to the leg. Severed arm …

  Still on the first floor, Rogan stunned three armed soldiers. How many of them were there?

  He stunned three police officers and half a dozen more panicked tourists unconscious and moved on to tedious camera and phone destruction. Bending down to grab a phone from a man’s pocket, his head was knocked sideways. His face. Impact to his ribs. Rogan dropped into a backward roll to escape the attack, but it kept coming. A security guard held a six-foot-long gold candle tree thing right in the middle. He swung it like a battle staff.

  Rogan finally ducked one attack. Jumped over his opponent’s next low swing. He saw his opening and decked the guy with more than enough force to knock him out.

  But the guard spun around, bringing the lamp around to smash Rogan again. Rogan didn’t have time for this. Engineer was in trouble.

  “Engineer!” Flyer called over their channel. “Jackie! You there?!”

  The man spit blood in Rogan’s faceplate and jabbed the lamp at his head. Rogan extended his close combat claws out from the top of his hand. He heaved with all his strength into a vicious overhand downward slash. The claws sliced the pole in half. Retracting them, he threw a hard right cross that dropped his opponent unconscious. Rogan sprinted for the stairs to go help Engineer.

  Jacqueline could finally move again. Visuals were back up, if only in black and white.

  No kidding damage to the arm and pulse weapon. Her arm was missing! She quickly calmed her momentary panic, forcing herself to understand that only her in-game arm was gone.

  Jacqueline cursed. Her viper hadn’t been completely destroyed, but it might as well have been. She would be out of the Laser Viper Final Challenge for sure. She took a deep breath. Maybe she’d lost the tournament, but she could still help the others with the mission.

  She could still crawl. When she looked at her viper body, all she saw was torn-up metal and a chaos of wiring and motors, and she could almost feel the pain she’d be in if this were real. But she wasn’t totally immobilized. It would be up to the others to secure the target, but she could at least wipe the security camera footage.

  When she entered the room, she immediately spotted the hard drive onto which the digital video from the cameras around the castle was being recorded. At first she thought about just shooting the whole computer with her NLEP or CHEL but blasting it might leave recoverable data, and she doubted she even had enough weapons energy left anyway. Hooking herself up to the computer, she quickly began deleting recorded footage.

  Her system also accessed the live surveillance feeds. The camera offered her a view of the slight, shimmering distortion in the spiral stairwell. The light white footprint. Ranger was three feet away.

  “Rogan!” Jackie screamed. “He’s right in front of you!”

  Shaylyn was behind Ranger when the laser blast came out of nowhere, slamming into the armor of his shoulder and knocking him back into her. She reached around him and fired a dozen NLEPs, hoping to hit something. Someone. But nothing.

  “Come on!” Ranger shouted, shooting again and again at nothing as they ran for the second floor.

  Jacqueline watched the crawling progress bar on her HUD menu, moving slower than the loading process on a new game using the worst internet connection. The surveillance computer was almost totally wiped and scrambled. “Come on. Come on. Finally.” One hundred percent. She disconnected from the computer and turned around to try to help the others.

  Engineer appeared in the doorway from the stairs to the second floor, motioning for Rogan and Flyer to follow. She was in bad shape. Her left arm shot clean off. Her right leg barely holding together. It was a miracle she was still walking.

  “Get yourself to safety, Engineer,” Flyer said. “We’ll find the target.”

  “Healer! Where are you?!” Rogan shouted as he and Flyer moved into the gift shop.

  “I’m on the stairs,” Healer answered. “Hang on!”

  “I can’t get to safety,” Engineer said. “I can’t walk. Not sure if I can—”

  Rogan stopped. “Wait. What? Can’t walk—”

  He was slammed in the back and thrown forward, crashing through a big crystal swan.

  “Behind—” Flyer screamed.

  Rogan turned around just in time to see Engineer, or what appeared to be Engineer, laser Flyer hard. One shot to the gut. Another to the chest.

  Rogan aimed his NLEPs but was blasted right in the hand. The imposter was a fast shooter.

  Flyer unleashed two NLEP shots. One of them hit home, and the digital disguise fizzled out, revealing a tough German commando, somehow still on his feet. He lasered Flyer again, damaging her leg pretty bad, and blasting her in the chest. But it was the last distraction Rogan needed. He took out the enemy’s laser rifle with his own CHEL, and the German raised his hands in surrender.

  “Who are you?” the man said in heavily accented English. “What do you want the device for?”

  “Stun him!” Mr. Culum shouted over the channel. “Stun him now and win the game!”

  Rogan didn’t need any more encouragement. Seconds later, the German man was out cold on the floor and Healer finally joined them.

  “Sorry I’m late!” Healer said. His viper’s metal skin was torn up with bullet holes. “Ran into some company on the way.”

  Rogan unbuckled the PNC harness from the man’s chest. He wanted to shout for joy at being the one to obtain the objective. But he still needed to get the thing out of here, and he could hear sirens coming from outside.

  He looked at Flyer, who was at least sitting up. “Shay, you have to fly this thing out of here.”

  “That last shot took out my flight systems,” Flyer said.

  “I can fix that.” Healer leapt at her, tools at the ready.

  “I d-d—d-d-don’t have much—time until shutdown.” The real Engineer crawled toward them, torn up far worse than the one faked by the Polyadaptive Nanotech Cloak.

  “Healer, you have to hurry,” Rogan said. “Otherwise we’ll have to carry Engineer.”

  White-hot welding sparks flew everywhere as Healer worked on Flyer. “I think she’ll be able to fly now. At least for a short time. Enough to reach extraction altitude and get picked up by our jump ship.”

  “There may b-b-beeeeee … m-more phones to destr—” Engineer shook her head.

  “Right,�
� Rogan said. “Well, that’s a problem, because if we hang around too long trying to keep the secret of us from getting out, the whole German army is going to be here.”

  “OK, gamers,” X said. He sounded like the school principal coming on over the intercom. “You have the target. The StarScreamer is on her way. Commence exfil operations immediately.”

  “Can you walk?” Rogan asked Flyer.

  “No,” she said. “But I can fly.”

  A part of him thought he was crazy, but he handed the PNC over to his biggest gamer rival. “Then take this. Get out of here. Healer, you too. I’ll grab Engineer. Hopefully there aren’t any more phones.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to extract her?” Healer asked.

  “I’ll put my exfil rockets on overload and hope for the best! Now go!”

  Two more soldiers rushed out on the floor in front of Flyer. “Sorry, Mario.” Flyer stunned one and punched the other out hard. “But this princess is heading for another castle.”

  As the other two vipers ran out, Rogan reached down to pick up the shredded remains of Engineer. “Nice job,” he said as he strained to lift her. It was one of those times when he wished his game suit had the same strength as his viper would have in real life. But as soon as he started to complain, the cables attached to Jacqueline must have lifted her a little, because he could manage her just fine, carrying her cradle-style, up the stairs away from the authorities closing in. Finally he reached a stone balcony and perched on the edge. In his mind, he knew he wasn’t nearly as high off the ground as he appeared to be in the game, and the Atomic Frontiers people wouldn’t just let him drop down to the floor. Actually, he was probably standing on the flat floor right now. He shook his head. The blurred line between the game and the arena was messing with his mind too much.