<<Okay, Jase, we’re ready. See you on the other side.>>
<<Good luck, Ash. Be safe.>>
<<You too, Jase. Thanks, Johnny. For everything.>>
<<You got it, Ashley. We do what needs to be done.>>
<<Yeah. Always.>>
I tap the red button. The shuttle rumbles to life, executing Jase’s program. Thrusters pop into ignition, then settle into a subsonic thrum. The side door closes, mobile stair cart scurrying away like a frightened mouse. The shuttle’s nose slowly turns, lining us up on the runway, and the hum turns into a roar, acceleration force pressing us deep into the seats. With a start, I realize I’m grinning. All those years playing the Game, and now we’re finally experiencing it in the real. Space.
The nose lifts, and more acceleration shudders through the shuttle, torching us skyward with ever increasing velocity. Light bursts in intensity, the sun reappearing over the Earth’s curve, sky shifting from burnt sunset into lighter blue into ever darker shades of bruised purple, until everything is a strange crystal black, diamonds burning steadily in the distance. My stomach grumbles, unmoored from its familiar gravitational tether, and I want to cry.
Nothing could have prepared me for this. Nothing.
<<One minute to insertion point. Venting interior.>>
Jase’s automated warning brings me back to reality, and I watch a swirl of objects rip past—small bits of paper, a dirty pen, fly carcasses—sucked out by the opened side door. The brief hurricane settles down, and I release my belt harness, feeling myself float slightly away from the seat. I pull myself into the main cabin, where Wind and Slend are busy unhooking the cables from the seats, our crate drifting in the vacuum interior. My purple dress waves from its tangled embrace of a seat, somehow still intact, an ethereal wisp of another life. I join the other two, and we each attach a hook to our suits’ chest plates. Slend taps one last code into the crate’s control panel, setting the parameters for its own chute deployment. Below us, the planet beckons like an azure and emerald gem, white swirls dancing across its facets.
<<This is fucking awesome, Ash.>>
Wind’s eyes glow behind her faceplate and glasses, smile lines crinkling their corners. Slend, unsurprisingly, is silent, but I can see her smiling too.
<<Wait until the boardshits learn about this. Fucking outer space,>> I send back, and we all start giggling, one last calm before the awaiting storm.
A message breaks the moment like a fist hitting a nose.
<<Ash. Jase here. Ahh… you should know that the entire board of WGSK just got annihilated. All dead, homes destroyed. Looks like Gamers, but that doesn’t make any sense… >>
<<And our target? Still there?>>
<<Yeah… weird. Shit’s getting real tense on the socials. There’s talk of Han and Industan regiments on the move. Johnny says… He says to stay frosty, Ash.>>
I shiver. Once. That’s all I can afford to let myself feel.
<<Got it. Thanks, Jase.>>
With the WGSK board out of the picture, convincing Ham’s dad should be easy, at least… but then who’s running all the Gamers…?
The automated voice sounds, and the splintered calm falls away completely.
<<Fifteen seconds until insertion.>>
I feel time’s familiar unwinding, my senses hyperaware, every piece of information processed, analyzed, discarded.
<<Three. Two. One. Beginning descent.>>
<<That’s our cue, ladies. Time to do the impossible.>>
We push our way outside of the shuttle, still hanging on to the open door, watching the sleek shape orient itself downward with brief puffs of gas from impulse thrusters. A slight vibration starts shaking the door in our hands, atmospheric drag kicking in. We used the bare minimum of delta-v, so friction heat shouldn’t be a problem.
<<Glide path established. Begin separation.>>
We give ourselves the lightest of pushes away from the shuttle, door swinging shut behind us, and assume a diving profile, arms tight against our sides, toes pointed back, keeping pace with our kinetic door knocker. My suit starts shaking harder, atmosphere growing more pronounced, the three of us forming a triangle with our gear crate in the middle.
<<Let’s give it some more space.>>
We each extend our arms, legs curled up, and slowly the shuttle moves away from us, continuing its terminal descent almost straight down. A guide path appears in my glasses, mimicked in Slend’s and Wind’s as well, a series of gold rings we plummet through like arrows. The ground below grows closer, wispy clouds starting to form around us, a larger system below. Blue leaches back into my vision, rapidly growing lighter. Our descent roars around us, the shuttle dwindling to a dot, its streamlined shape auguring down, rockets firing one last time. It vanishes into a puffy white mass, and we plunge after it, water droplets streaking across my faceplate. The air starts buffeting us harder, but we maintain our formation, ring after ring flashing around us. I check the time in my glasses.
<<Shuttle impact in thirty. Chutes in eighty-five.>>
<<Check.>>
<<Check.>>
We emerge into another open space, a lower layer of dark and dangerous clouds looming below. Lightning flickers along their edges, and I hope the random number generator sides with us one last time. More golden rings appear, then disappear, the shuttle now a small green bracket no longer visible to the naked eye. We dive into the storm.
<<Impact in ten. Chutes in sixty-five.>>
<<Check.>>
<<Check.>>
The seconds tick by, rain clouds squalling around us, and then the ground reappears once more. A small mushroom bursts into existence among the green, dirty gray bulges billowing out, our chariot reaching its final resting place in a blaze of kinetic thunder and light. The hooks detach from our chests, cables falling away from the gear crate. I watch an altimeter circle slowly closer to zero.
<<Chutes in three. Two. One.>>
Deceleration slams through my body, the high-performance parachutes crawling up and out of our back-mounted packs, unfolding into low-profile rectangles, shedding velocity in open defiance of gravity, gold rings still guiding our way. Below us, the gear crate deploys its own chute, aiming itself for the edge of the steaming crater now resolving into visibility, a broken scar outside a squat and ugly wart. The ground grows closer, swatches of green shifting into patches of forest, then individual trees; gray lumps transforming into cracked concrete and fire. Updrafts buffet our chutes, but we control them with the ease of long practice. The gear crate touches down, a tumbling skid. We follow it, parachutes flapping away, our feet scrambling across the churned and muddy ground. The upper parts of our suits slip away like molting snakeskins, gloves, torso, helmet, their task complete. Flames hiss weakly in the underbrush at the edge of the crater, raindrops relentlessly assaulting their flickering attempts to grow.
I step out of the bulky high-altitude boots and open up the crate, quickly ripping webbing off our duffels. I pull mine to the side and reach for the scabbard, securing it to my back. The bullpup rifle follows it, scarred strap looping over my shoulder. Small clicks sound from Slend’s legs, the mecha forming itself around her, heavy machine gun in her hands, and she feeds a belt of ammo into its hopper, more cases hanging from the mecha’s frame. Wind clips one of her submachine guns to her chest, then cocks the other, a bandolier of grenades running across her hips. Our eyes never stop scanning the broken remnants of layers of dome, a seventy-meter hole gouged from the force of the shuttle’s impact, secondary fractures radiating outward in jagged tears. Smoke pours out from within, and gradually, shapes appear in its depths. I look over at the other two, and they look back. We nod.