Now then. Only about fifty pounds to lift, but he wanted to give Asako a smooth ride. He set his heels, wound the line around his wrist to anchor it and began to pull. Smooth and steady did the trick. He almost wanted it to be harder.
“We’ve got company…,” Wayne whispered.
“I know. Ali?”
Ali hummed to himself, squatting to look into the shadows beyond the pale glow. “Many,” was all he said, voice just a little tense.
“How many is ‘many’?”
“Perhaps twenty. Or more. Hard to say.”
“How far?” Wayne asked.
Ali touched his temples. “We’ve got about a minute.”
Scotty pulled faster, and between pulls yelled down the hole. “As soon as Asako is up, get your butts up here!” Now he suddenly remembered his character and added: “The infidels are upon us!” feeling just a bit asinine.
Scrape, scrape. He looked over his right shoulder at Ali, who knelt, peering into the gloom. Scotty couldn’t see a thing. Then… he realized that he was looking in the wrong place. He was looking at the tunnel floor. Wrong. The ceiling swarmed with enemy.
Selenite locomotion was a bizarre cross between termites and human beings, and the only thing that had saved Scotty and his companions was that the enemy was moving gradually, carefully, and not at full swarm. Curious? Fearful?
Wayne couldn’t help himself. “Have you tried: ‘We come in peace’?”
The pod was almost up, the nose rising above the lip, and one more pull and Asako was up.
At the instant the pod’s treads bit into the lunar rock to right itself and take control, the Selenite warriors shrieked and swarmed.
“Get up here!” he screamed, pulled his sword, and the battle was on.
The Selenites bore no weapons, but their claws and jaws were threatening enough, and the humans were outnumbered six to one. When the first jumped, Ali spread his arms and screamed. Light flared from his chest. Scotty noted now, in the fullness of the light, that varicolored, hairy ringlets surrounded their necks. Blue, red and yellow, if the glimpse was accurate. The yellow-fringed Selenites screamed and shriveled before Ali’s onslaught, and three of them fell at once. But the others directly targeted Ali, came right at him. One grabbed his leg, which was instantly bathed in red light.
Ali yelled and kicked it away as Wayne leaped in, sword at the ready. By the time he got there, two more Selenites had grabbed hold of Ali, and Wayne had his hands full.
“Go!” Asako said through her loudspeakers. “I can guard this side.”
He didn’t waste time doubting her, but did snatch a glimpse down the well: The other gamers were coming up. He turned back around just in time for one of the Selenites to jump onto his chest. In lunar gravity, it didn’t weigh what he would have expected. In point of fact… it weighed nothing at all. A brief moment of surprise, then Scotty remembered that he was on camera, and stumbled back, screaming, “grabbed” the creature and threw it to the side.
It made a particularly satisfying splat against the wall, as if the thing was just a bag of green blood. He pivoted, pulling his antique pistol and firing point-blank at a spider Selenite as it dropped from the roof to the floor, catching it in midair. It squished, squealed and flopped back.
From the corner of his eye he caught Asako Tabata’s pod as it righted itself and went on the attack. Twin shotguns poked out of the nose of her craft, doing serious damage to what seemed an endless flood of Selenite bug critters. He saw some of them dropping down the hole, and heard cursing from below as the climbing gamers suddenly found themselves under attack. He saw the red-haired guide speared on a bolt of lightning, thrashing, her hair standing on end.
That must have been great fun. He almost wished he hadn’t volunteered to climb first.
Angelique Chan grimaced as her back slid against the pipe’s side. She lost some of her footing and fell two feet before managing to brace herself again. Damn that Xavier! You never attack gamers while they are climbing without safety lines… but considering the reduced lunar gravity, who really cared? Must have been a special dispensation from the IFGS. No more time to think, because Mickey and Maud and Sharmela, coming up behind her, were shrieking:
“They’re coming from down here, too!”
Angelique had managed to draw her sword, hardly her favorite weapon in such a confined space. The Selenite spiders snapped at her, scratched at her, and when she stabbed one, the yellowish ichor dripped down onto her face. Damn! It was real, and warm, and stank, but tasted like liquorice. Game-toxic, not real-toxic.
A little present from Xavier. She was going to murder that dwarf. Angelique spat out the gunk, and forced her way another few feet up the pipe, stabbed another Selenite and was relieved to find that this one was a hologram.
“Rule Britannia!” Mickey said, right beneath her, and the tube was suddenly filled with bright blue light. Selenites screamed and burst into flame, and ash fluttered down the tube, even as the afterimage from the flare partially blinded her. Angelique slid, but her foot hit Mickey’s head and he howled protest.
“Sorry!” she said and forced her way back up, charging now, stabbing if not slashing, and got one hand over the top. One arm was strong enough to pitch her entire body up, with the flare of an Olympic gymnast if not the balance. She wobbled on her toes and almost fell back down. At the last instant, Griffin stopped eviscerating Selenites and lent her a steadying hand.
Now there were four of them up top, two on each side of the pipe, and the entire tunnel was a sword- swinging, gun-blasting, Selenite-spider-splashing cacophony.
By the time Mickey and Maud made it up top, the battle was almost won. Below them in the pipe, curls of stinking blue smoke suggested that there was little left alive to hound them.
When the last Selenite fell, Angelique was horrified to see Sharmela leaning back against the wall, her hands clutched to a gaping wound in her midsection.
“Maud!” Angelique called. Maud was a primary psychic, with secondary healing powers.
Maud knelt by the wounded girl and ran her hands over the gash. “I don’t know, I truly fear, that Sharmela’s damage is severe.”
“There are healing forces here,” Sharmela gasped. “My powers tell me that”-she paused, probably listening to prompts in her earpiece-“a glowing fungus in the next airwell might… might help.”
She reached out with a bloody hand and gripped Angelique’s arm. “Please, don’t. I think it’s a trap.”
“I-”
And then the lights went out. The glowing fungus in the tunnel just died. The darkness that had been a mere inconvenience was now deep enough to swallow them. This wasn’t the game, it was a major power failure of some kind.
“I’ll be damned,” Angelique laughed. “Never seen this happen to Xavier before. He must be hopping.”
Their laughter had an odd, nervous edge. This was an occasion for genuine amusement. In a few minutes the backups would probably kick in, and then “Angelique,” Wayne said. “Someone’s coming.”
She stood and looked down the tunnel to her left. The darkness was parting now, and three… four flashlight- sized lamps were bobbling as the newcomers approached. What in the world was this? God, sounded like a major breakdown if they were inserting repairmen into the game.
“What a bleedin’ botch,” Mickey said under his breath. “Seen nothing like this since Bizarro World back in ’sixty-eight.”
“Well,” Maud said. “Considering the venue, I suppose you have to make allowances.”
“Stay where you are,” a male voice said. “And listen closely to what we say. If you follow our orders to the letter, no one will be hurt.”
She couldn’t quite place the accent, but understood the message instantly. “What’s wrong? Is there a breach?”
“You might say that,” the man said, and now, finally, she could see him. A huge man with flowing blond hair and a flat hard face. A fan of scars creased the left side of his throat. “All you need to know”-he said. His voice was
