by Arthur Stone
“You’re not making much progress here, with a knife at your throat.”
“I’ll make it,” Beetle winked. “If even a tenth of what they say about you is true, you won’t kill me. Maybe you can take me with you. I could be of use.”
“What kind of use?”
“I’m a good tankman, you saw that.”
“I haven’t seen you in action,” Cheater remarked, “and our team already has a mechanic.”
“I said tankman, not mechanic. Don’t take me for some kind of repairman.”
“Well, I don’t have a tank.”
“You’ll find one at some point, and maybe even more than one. I believe in you,” Beetle winked again.
Cheater stared at the translucent map in front of him, trying to discern what kind of place the ambush—according to the tanker—was set up in. Sadly, he could not. He had paid a lot of money for these maps, but parts were missing.
There were too many blurry or outright blank spots.
Even a cartographical genius would be hard-pressed to make sense of it.
Perhaps Beetle knew. “Hey, could you send me your map?”
“I would, gladly, but my Cartography isn’t unlocked. Without it or certain special skills, map transfer isn’t possible. You know that.”
“Yes. So explain this ambush to me, then,” Cheater relented. “I need details. My map doesn’t tell me anything about the spot.”
“You don’t need details,” Beetle replied.
“What? Then why did you tell me all of this?”
“I’ve realized that the rest of your party has already gone ahead. Well, either they’ll lose the three with the bounties on their heads, or they’ll all get themselves shot. You just need to cross the border. There is no passage here. Only death. I can guarantee that. You shouldn’t have come this way; you need to turn back now. I know a few strong traders who can take you across in peace. We’re only one day away from my stash. It’s got a vehicle ready, outfitted and supplied. From there, you can reach a trader in two days, at a casual pace. Hurrying is ill advised. There’s plenty of trouble looking to notice you. Caravans aren’t making the trip very frequently these days, either, so you’ll have to wait a bit. But you shouldn’t have any problems during that time. If we go right now, we can reach the other side in ten days, at the most.”
Cheater sheathed his knife and turned slightly eastward. “You say they sent ten after us?”
“Something like that.”
“And they’re strong players.”
“Maybe not every one of them, but at least a few are veterans. One of the best groups in the region. . And they have this tracker with them. He knows places here that no one else on the whole Continent knows. He does not add this information to his maps. Knowing more than your opponent is half the battle, so that’s what they hire him for. Once he agreed to take the job, that boosts their odds of success by at least 50%. I think they’re well ahead of me by now, perhaps on site already, waiting for your party. The conflict might have happened already.”
Cheater, still staring east, slung his rifle over his shoulder. “I have a more general question for you. Is there a way we can reach the ambush site as quickly as possible? I’d like to get there before the shooting starts.”
Beetle’s mouth dropped open. “You looking to respawn? I mean, it might get you to the trader faster, depending on—”
Cheater was slowly shaking his head. “If you think I’m a fan of dying, you’re not really a fan of mine.”
Chapter 24
Life Nine. Underground
Beetle stopped and crouched, directing the beam of his flashlight along the thin stretch of muddy water trickling through a wide concrete pipe. The structure was, in fact, too big to be properly called a pipe. More like a round concrete tunnel. They had been moving through it for half an hour now.
Cheater took advantage of the pause to move the turret to his shoulder and hastily bump the system test button. These electronics ran on a miniature CMOS-like battery of their own. A few seconds later, it regurgitated information about the state of its main circuits. As long as the green LED lit up, the combat circuit could be primed. A red LED, however, meant something was wrong.
No light at all meant something was very wrong.
The system didn’t react to the button press. Was the turret dead? Unlikely to be repairable? Or, perhaps, was the system check’s private power source dead?
He feared the worse. Beetle had been unable to chart a route that did not lead through a black cluster. He had assured Cheater that Nold technology had some unknown short-term protection mechanism against the work of the dark lands and would survive the passage without consequence. The only alternative path, he said, was prohibitively long and orders of magnitude more risky.
This way, of course, had some adventures of its own. A couple of strong tramplers had noticed the players wandering the black cluster. The infecteds had overcome their fear and rushed into the area.
Cheater took them down with two bow shots, which left Beetle in awe. He was unable to fathom how creatures so dangerous could be killed by an arrow shot from a hundred yards away.
Cheater did not tell him about Explosive Round. Let it remain a secret. He enjoyed the sincere surprise of his new companion.
Then, he took out four smaller ghouls who had followed the grumblings of their larger brothers. There were not many infecteds here, by the border of the black lands, when compared to the city clusters, but still a decent number. Even the quietest attacks could attract more notice.
Thankfully, the stream of ghouls dried up then and there. They treated their shoes with a scent-masking spray, after which they had to move a hundred and fifty yards through an area teeming with infecteds.
This tiny hop took a lot of time. Thankfully, it was night. Yes, the infecteds could see at night, but not as well as during the day. As long as a player made no hasty movements, it was possible to pass directly through their line of vision unseen. Not at a few yards, of course, and not when the ghoul group included smarter, stronger beasts.
Moving through such an area was a strategy challenge par excellence. Get noticed once, and you were done.
So, Cheater had used Flash of Omniscience liberally, and his bow, when necessary. He had highlighted targets and chose those whose death would not be noticed by others, and so had worked through them all. Only once had an infected come to see what was going on. It had fallen like the others, without emitting its dangerous grumbling.
Once the immediate area had been clear, they had set to completing the task for which this minor genocide had been a prerequisite.
Fiddling a bit with the hatch in the middle of the road, they lifted it quietly and successfully. The sewer well was twenty feet deep. Raising the manhole cover was not easy without a tool for doing so, but they managed.
Once they dropped down, Beetle turned on his small flashlight. “At last. I can’t see anything in the dark. Nearly broke one of my legs while I was following you.”
“But I can,” Cheater rebuffed, “and so I can keep leading you, in the dark.”
“Why? The ghouls hate being underground. If we come across a stray, we can deal with it silently. A big one will spot us whether we have a flashlight or not.”
“Ghouls aren’t the only thing we have to be afraid of,” Cheater reminded him.
“This place has a lot of garbage, Cheater, and there is zero light. You expect me to wade through and around all this in the dark? The people coming after your group have flashlights too, you know. Much better than mine. They came prepared for this, but I had to run for it.”
“Fine, you win,” Cheater allowed. “Where to now?”
“Let me get my bearings. I think we go this way,” Beetle waved left.
A concrete tunnel ran in the indicated direction. It was tall enough for the average person to walk through with normal posture, and the floor was nearly dry.
“We get to the fork and pull a sharp turn. Then, we’l
l be close to them. I just hope nothing silly has happened.”
“Silly?”
“What if the group hasn’t reached the spot yet? Then we might run straight into them.”
Cheater tensed. “They’ll be taking this tunnel?”
“Not this exact one. They’ll come underground in a different spot. Through the tube in the London cluster. Then, along a very similar pipe. There are lots of these tunnels under the industrial zone here. They’ll follow it to the same fork, but from a nearly opposite direction. They’ll bear right and follow the same branch we need—it’s a sharp turn left for us. We could encounter them.”
“You said they should have arrived a long time ago.”
“So? This is the Continent. There is no ‘should.’ All kinds of things might have interfered. What if the ghouls killed them? You could check, of course. You could send them a chat message. I know a couple of their nicknames. But if they see your message, they’ll know to be on their guard. We definitely aren’t supposed to be down here, and my crew doesn’t just send PMs. It’ll tip them off.”
Cheater wondered about the chat system. “Is it possible to figure out whether a person is alive or not without writing them anything? What’s to stop that?”
“If you’re in the same region, bad clusters can stop you. And a person’s status is only visible if the person is in your party or friend list. Friend lists don’t work well across dark clusters. Chat doesn’t either. When you send a message, inactivity doesn’t really mean anything. Maybe the player is off to respawn, but maybe they’re just behind a black cluster.”
“Got it. By the way, what are these large tunnels for?”
Beetle shrugged. “They don’t smell, so I guess they’re not actually sewers. What do we care?”
“You’re never wondered?”
“Some industrial purpose. This cluster is surrounded on all sides by city blocks but itself doesn’t have any residential or commercial buildings. Just heavy industrial factories of some kind. But there are no cables, no pipes, no lighting, no signs of waste runoff. I’m guessing they supplied water, but for industrial purposes.”
“These are really wide pipes, then. How could they use so much water?”
“I don’t know. But these tunnels are safe, and that’s all we need to know.”
* * *
They did not encounter anyone at the intersection. The tunnel remained devoid of any signs of life. No rats, no bugs, no flies. There was water, though, including stagnant water—which should be conducive to insects and rodents.
Maybe something was wrong with the water. The pipes might have been moving some dangerous chemical. It seemed like there was no smell but dampness, but some chemicals were odorless.
Beetle stopped, studying the water, apparently thinking the same. First, he just shone at it with a flashlight. Then, he started probing the floor of the tunnel, underneath the water, with a knife. It was at this time that Cheater fiddled with the turret.
He figured it would be a shame if the gun was nothing but a big paperweight now—and here he was dragging it around.
Beetle looked up, grinning cheerlessly. “They’ve already been here. Before us.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s some sediment here, along the pipe floor. It’s covered with water, so it’s not immediately visible. There is a current here, albeit a slow one. Enough to clear the sediment, to smooth it out. Here, it’s still uneven. Very uneven. Someone walked through here. Not one person, and not two or three. More. This happened recently.”
“So what do we do now?” Cheater asked.
“Everything depends on your friends now. They’re unaware of the underground passages, as far as I know. So they went straight through the black, taking the shortest road to the First Steppe. That’s the safest way known to people with ordinary maps.”
“You call that thing the First Steppe?” Cheater clarified. The tankman had used the term before.
Beetle nodded. “The fallen building is the only way up.”
“I saw it, the skyscraper.”
“It’s too short for a skyscraper, I think. Just a building. Strong. It never breaks apart when it falls.”
“Potato, po-tah-to. Skyscrapers are strong and tall, that’s all I know.”
“I don’t care about the name either. Anyway, this buil—uh, skyscraper nearly always falls up against the Steppe. It’s the way. And it’s a pretty easy climb, if you are just considering the layout and not, say, ghouls. Or an ambush. Your friends need to go up, and there’s no better way. Only through the blackness can you reach the skyscraper. And not directly. There’s a river along the border, and I don’t even know if there’s a place to cross it. So they’ll go around. That takes a long time. The fallen skyscraper is the obvious place to waylay the party. Why pursue someone, when you know exactly where they have to go? This tunnel emerges near the building in question. There are several hatches, each emerging into a place with its pluses and minuses. If we can determine which one they used, perhaps we can deduce their intended ambush tactic. You can arrange a little surprise for them. Perhaps you’ll kill them all with your famous rifle. Or perhaps you’ll die yourself. That latter option is probably better. Less pain.”
“Less pain? What do you mean?”
“Do you not know anything about this place?”
Cheater shook his head. “Only March knows why we’re here. He handles everything related to border crossings.”
“Well, what has he told you, then?”
“What should he have told me?”
Beetle grimaced. “We can still head back west, you know. With a little luck, we can make it quickly and safely. Anyone who ascends the First Steppe is practically as good as dead. They say there’s no place there calm enough for anyone to survive even an hour. No one has investigated the steppe so thoroughly, of course, but I believe that statement.”
“So no one has investigated it, but you still believe it. Solid.”
“In this case, it is a reasonable belief. As I’m sure you know, no one has ever crossed the border in this area. I mentioned that, quite a few times. The first time we met, in fact.”
“Well, I thought there were easier ways, and so that was why no one picked this one,” Cheater replied. “You said as much.”
“Yes, that’s true, but it’s not the real reason. People love to cross in places where no one has before. Extra bonuses and all that. You know that better than I do.”
“Of course,” Cheater affirmed.
“Here, there are no bonuses. Here, there is only death,” Beetle pronounced gloomily. “Even this region next to the steppe can be deadly—but up above, there is no hope. Once you are up there, they will not let you return back down. Here at least we can make some decisions, try some things. Up there, there is no try or try not. Only fail. I wasn’t joking when I suggested we go back to the traders. There is no road east here, not even for you.”
“What the hell is up top? Just don’t tell me it’s an Unnamed One.”
Beetle shook his head. “Those who shall not be named dare not show their face here. They fear the Trinity. We all fear the Trinity. And so should you, if you aspire to ascend the steppe. Even though you will not be fearing them for long.”
Chapter 25
Life Nine. Slanted Skyline
Beetle’s final words made Cheater think long and hard. He even doubted his new companion’s sanity. Mention of the Trinity seemed, well, inappropriate here.
Players were superstitious, yes, and often religious. There were adherents of many Continental cults here, and there were those who practiced the traditional religions. This included the main branches of Christianity and other Christian sects, as well as more syncretistic bodies.
But no, Beetle was speaking of another Trinity.
An Unholy Trinity. Some players even went so far as to campaign for the three to be called the Trio or the Trilogy, so as not to offend Christian believers. Including the believers themselve
s. No such change in terminology had sunk in.
