so gut-slammed by all of this?
Angelique Chan, his beautiful room-if-not-bunkmate peered down over the edge of the upper berth and grinned at him. “Because you’ve looked at it all your life, silly.”
“How do you do that?” he asked, shaking his head.
Her smile became even more mysterious. Even upside down, her lustrous hair had taken its own sweet time descending to fringe her face. “Trade secrets. I tell you, and you tell two friends, and pretty soon no one needs me anymore.”
She performed a flipping roll-over only a Cirque du Soleil contortionist could ever have managed on Earth. She landed bouncing on her heels, taking a moment to catch her balance.
“Whoa!” She crouched, settled and then spun to face him. “Are we ready for this?”
“We’ve come an awful long way if we’re not,” he said.
“No… you don’t understand. You really don’t.”
“Then teach me,” he said.
“Everything until this moment? Just preparation.” She came near enough that he could feel her breath on his face, and smell its sweetness. “Everything we say, everything we do is about to be judged. Everyone is watching for advantage. The training is over-”
“But the game doesn’t start until tomorrow-”
“No!” she said fiercely, and grabbed his shoulders. “The game starts now, do you understand? Everything you see and hear that comes from another gamer, or a bribed NPC-”
“What?”
She scrunched up her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me. An NPC who takes a ‘suggestion’ from an associate of this gamer or that Game Master might be fined, or blackballed, but the game’s still lost. There is only one first lunar game, and I wouldn’t put anything past any of them.”
“You brought me here to distract the Man,” he said. “But you’re going to take my advice, too. I’ve come too far to shut my mouth.”
Her jaw worked, then tightened. She was listening.
“Too much emotion. Too much old history. Xavier will want to know that he beat us clean. Above board. I’d bet my socks on it.”
They’d had this conversation before. And until or unless there was definite evidence either way, they’d have it again. “Maybe,” she finally conceded. “Perhaps. We’ll see.”
During the last sleep cycle, a bundled parcel had been left before every door. Wayne unwrapped his. A tall black hat, with a golden cluster and feathered top. A red cloak with two vertical rows of silver buttons, gold chevrons and tasseled shoulders. An officer’s uniform. British, he reckoned.
It took him only three minutes to strip off his clothes and fit into the new garb, which was, despite its appearance, of some light and stretchy material that conformed to his body like spray paint.
Angelique had stripped her package open as well, but her costume was a well-tailored tan explorer’s costume, like something some proper Englishman might have worn on an expedition up the Congo. He doubted Dr. Livingstone had ever looked so edible. The fabric accentuated her form without exaggerating it.
She slipped on her pith helmet and gave it a jaunty slant. “What in the world is that little bastard up to?” she wondered, but he heard the excitement in her voice, in a way he had not in years. Just like the old days.
Hell. Win, lose or draw, this was going to be fun.
It only took Angelique and Wayne a combined total of twelve minutes to pack up their cabin possessions and stuff them into the scan-bags for pickup. Clothing was bundled to be scanned, and everyone wore similarly lightweight pseudo-period clothing. Most seemed British, or referenced some part of the British Empire. India. China. And… Africa? The sun never set, so they said.
When the next bell rang and their room door opened, Wayne and Angelique joined a line of thirty passengers in the hall outside.
Wayne fought excitement and a newly blossoming sense of claustrophobia. He’d bottled it up just fine for the past week, but now, so close to disembarking…
The explosion of relief and anticipation was almost overwhelming.
Angelique’s bound club of lustrous dark hair bounced and settled beneath her helmet’s rim with every step.
He became aware that the man behind him was chanting “The Moon, the Moon, the Moon…” in little breathless exhalations.
Wayne looked back. The guy’s name was Roger something. An NPC, he thought, wearing a white sailor uniform that would have seemed in place on a British frigate.
Roger stood about four inches shorter than Wayne, and had the kind of loose skin around his neck that suggested recent weight loss. The guy was bright-eyed and carrot-topped, radiated “gaming” from every pore. He sighed in exasperated joy as they locked eyes.
“Can you believe this? Everything automated and slick for the last two weeks, but the last two minutes just goes all to hell.”
“Way of the world, old boy.” Wayne grinned at himself. Unbidden, a creaky British accent had crept into his voice.
British Empire. Nineteenth century. Pay attention to the clues.
To his credit, Roger adjusted almost as quickly. “Never better,” he said.
The corridor was lined with costumed well-wishers. Some played their roles impeccably, but others seemed vaguely uncomfortable. He suspected this last group had little gaming experience. They’d be Lunies recruited as extras, playing their parts as best they could for unseen cameras.
Angelique was keeping her smile bright, but she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Damn. I’d hoped we’d have a little time before the”-a swift shift in tones as a brightly lipsticked woman of middle years materialized-“Junie Bug! How are you?”
The two women exchanged bobble-headed air kisses. Even Wayne recognized June Simmons, the publisher and head reporter for the Web’s largest gaming zine, Fan-Tasm. So Earth was sending up the A-team, not just leaving it to the local stringers to file workable stories.
Oddly, that thought pepped Wayne up. He found himself strutting through the doorway into the main hall, where they were hustled into elevators as guides chattered greeting.
A woman who looked as if she might have been Samoan, with beautiful strong curves and a good smile, greeted them in the foyer. “My name is Kendra Griffin, Chief of Operations of Heinlein base,” she said. “It is my honor to welcome you to our home.” She wore a lovely lace-frilled gown that reminded him of a water lily. It offset her golden skin beautifully, and would have been right in place on the lady accompanying a British officer to a regimental ball. “You are on the surface level, only one of seven floors, each disk-shaped and sunk into the lunar regolith to a total depth of four hundred feet. We’re going down to the third level. Your gear is going down to level five, and you’ll rejoin it later. Right now, we want to invite you to look at the chart right here-”
As they proceeded down the corridor, wisps of chamber music rose up to meet them.
The folks lining the hall seemed more… comfortable in their roles, and he suspected that more of these were genuine actors, Non-Player Characters, a few of them even imported up from Earth itself for the event.
Mickey and Maud Abernathy wore vaguely Middle Eastern garb. Did the British Empire have holdings in the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth century? Their Aladdin-esque pantaloons and flaring blouses certainly suggested as much.
“Excuse me,” he asked. “I’m not certain we’ve been introduced.”
Mickey smiled graciously. “The Abernathys,” she said. “We’ve just returned from a research expedition in Egypt, uncovering the lost temple of Solomon.”
Ah. Backstory right there. So, Xavier was letting them keep their names, but changing their histories. The Abernathys were an academic couple from Brighton (Mickey taught history, and Maud was a published fantasy novelist) who usually played as paired psychic sensitives. Saying they were recently returned from Egypt on a dig suggested that their IFGS points would manifest as a combination of human psi-ability and Oriental mysticism.
Marching at Wayne’s side was a plump woman in… what was that? The female version of a nineteenth-
