His teeth were starting to feel as if he was licking a battery, but he refused to let the creepy feeling shut his head down.
Generations of alien feet seemed to have worn the stone smooth. The walls were cool and damp to the touch.
Sharmela held up her hand. “Wait. I sense a vibration from ahead.”
Wayne couldn’t see anything, but his lenses were coded differently. “What?” Angelique asked.
“Near.” Sharmela closed her eyes. Now Mickey and Maud had pulled up even with them, locking hands and rolling their eyes convincingly.
“What is it?”
“Ambush,” they said. “We see… ladders. And stones. And enemies.” Mickey lowered his voice to a portentous growl. “We must face them.”
Dum da dum dum.
“Alert. We have warriors front and rear. Watch every step. They’ll hit us hard, if they can.”
If he had allowed himself to think outside the tunnel of his concentration, Xavier would have gone stone-cold berserk. He was confident in Wu Lin and her silent partner Magique, but that wasn’t the point: He needed focus as he sank into the control board’s master chair. From here, he could watch the layout of the entire dome, monitor the network running the live game, the simulation screens debugging the coming scenarios, and the holostage where his assistants were still modifying the body language for the video overlays.
Everything was in place and running, including all the Earthfeeds. The commercial contracts were long past executed. It was running, dammit. Everything was in place for a great game and Angelique’s savage humiliation if she stepped just one tiny toe over the line. And he knew she would. That would give him all the excuse he needed to kill her nine kinds of dead. Wayne Gibson he would torture more slowly. Kill him out? Hardly. Wayne would live every minute of the game, thrust into a leadership position and completely neutered, incompetence splashed across the solar system until he begged for a death that would not come. He would be the last surviving member of the team, a laughing stock until the day he died.
The world’s biggest audience, for the world’s biggest sporting event, and the world’s greatest revenge. And now this lame nonsense. So a player had had an accident, and someone had grabbed his ID to sneak into the game. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.
And there was another factor: Wasn’t the woman Kendra the ex-wife of one of the gamers? In which case, wasn’t it entirely possible that she was trying to manipulate the situation for her ex? What could their play be? Moving information or equipment into the dome? Breaking Xavier’s rhythm and concentration with some kind of trumped-up excuse? This “Foxworthy” guy was probably sitting back smoking a cigar. He might have actually entered the game, and the whole attempted murder was a distraction. “Oh, sorry,” they’d say later. “There was a misunderstanding…”
And there would go his game.
“Xavier?” Wu Lin said. “We’re about to start the obstacle course. Any last-second changes?”
He broke out of his self-induced coma and ran a checklist in his mind. “Everything’s fine. Let’s see if we can’t kill someone, shall we?”
Wu Lin smiled.
He knew there was only one thing she liked better than killing gamers, and that particular pleasure would wait for their post-game celebration. “Let’s do it.”
“Here we go. Climbing wall active. NPCs coded and standing by?”
“All at the ready,” Wu Lin said.
“Then three… two… one… and go. ”
But in the moment before he dropped back down into tunnel vision, he noted that the computer caught, just for a moment, a flash of unregistered body heat. Almost as if there were other people in the gaming dome, someone neither a technician nor an NPC. But it was only for an instant. Was there someone there, and had they cloaked? Or was it an artifact, just a ghost in their machine?
No time to hunt it down now. The game was afoot.
“Never, ever ever would I try to take a team up something like this,” Angelique said. She was staring up an airwell, a vertical rock tube leading up toward a wavering light. It was about five meters in diameter, studded with rocky nubs up as far as the eye could see. She held something like a polished crystal rock, the size of a hen’s egg. A little guidance device the Selenites had given her. The little flashing red light said it was time to climb.
“But the rules are different here?”
“It’s the Moon. Gravity is low enough that Asako can get her pod up the walls.” In fact, Xavier’s engineers would have to have allowed for Asako. Her pod was a political sop to disabled gamers, and an odd advantage: Once Asako had the go-ahead to enter the game, the layout had to be modified to allow her to play. That gave her a fractional Off the Grid advantage.
Asako’s little pod was already humming around the walls. “There seem to be grips here. The rock is soft enough for my claws, but too wide for the legs to hold me horizontal. I’ll have to climb vertically, but that puts me out of action until I can get back on horizontal. I’ll need coverage.”
Good news and bad news. So Asako’s bubble could climb, but while climbing, she’d be useless in a fight. So Mickey and Maud were right: They were about to get hammered.
“We’ll need two climbers to get up to the top. Drop a safety line to Asako. Then we can leave someone down here with her, climb, and work the line as her pod climbs.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Scotty Griffin said. “I could get up there, secure the line.”
“Then take point,” Angelique said.
For the first time since beginning the game, Scotty Griffin felt at home. Climbing was something he understood. The vertical shaft was about twenty meters high, with irregular boulder-shaped protrusions jutting from the sides. Asako Tabata’s pod would make it, but only just. It would require a gamer at each end, top and bottom, managing a line the entire time.
Why? As he began his climb, that question ticked at his mind. Yeah, maybe the Selenites just happen to have made it this way… but Angelique and Wayne both seemed to think that this guy Xavier had something ugly up his sleeve. If that was true, then if it took two people to control the pod, that functionally removed three people from the fight.
He could have made the climb under Earth Normal gravity, gripping with fingers, bracing feet, twisting this way and that to inch up a foot or so at a time. But here upper-body strength alone launched him up the tube to the next rock. His hand strength was more than sufficient to support his weight easily. This all would have been more fun if he didn’t expect an ambush at any moment.
Just before he reached the top, Scotty looked back down to see the faces tilted up at him, almost lost in the shadows. Showing off by hanging from one arm, he made an “okay” sign with a circled thumb and forefinger, and then scrambled up over the lip.
He had to crouch a little, because the rock ceiling was only six feet high and he didn’t want to bump his head. Glowing fungus lit the front of the chamber, which seemed only a dozen feet wide, but long enough to vanish into shadow. He paused, barely able to discern a scratching sound, something distant, but close enough to unnerve him. Oh, yes, there was something out there.
Scotty yelled down the hole for two more fighters to climb up, producing fast action from Wayne and Kikaya. The kid seemed to be having the time of his life, which was good: God knows it was costing him enough.
As soon as his backups arrived, Scotty unspooled a length of line and dropped it down the well. Angelique attached it to a tether point at the front of the pod, then a second line to the rear.
“What… maybe three hundred pounds Earth Normal?” he said. “About fifty pounds here. Only takes one of us to pull her up, if the other two are keeping guard.”
“I think you’re the strongest,” Wayne said. “Two thieves and a magic user. What say Ali and I take guard while you pull.”
His two companions took position on either side of the well, Ali making arcane hand gestures and torquing his body into strange, spiderlike positions. Have a ball, kid.
