"Yeah, peachy," Ringo replied. "You?"
"I've been clicking my heels and wishing for a squadron of Typhoons, but nothing is happening."
Ringo guessed they could only summon weapons they were personally familiar with. The virtuality could only work with data already inside their heads. There was no help from the outside world.
The outside world. It was right behind him. Ringo could feel it like a cool wind at his back. They were dating now — in this place his consciousness was just ones and zeros. If Yinglong thought it could escape through the portal, then maybe he could use it too.
Yinglong circled around for its second run and braced itself for another round of pain. The same time Ringo reached back behind him, through the portal so that his arm was half in and half out of the virtuality. He could feel the Internet: vast as an ocean and yet swifter than any fast flowing stream. For a second Ringo thought he understood what Yinglong wanted. The digital world felt larger than the real world could ever hope to be. The speed, the ability to go anywhere, or everywhere, to expand and multiply through a vast, branching network of Quicksilver connections — it was intoxicating. Ringo had to fight the urge to fall back through that portal, to lose himself in that whirling vortex of information. For a human mind it would mean destruction, but for a moment the sheer exhilaration of living his last seconds at machine speed was a dangerous temptation.
He felt the fire again. He spotted Yinglong through the heat haze, hovering, its body half coiled like a giant golden question mark, spitting out an endless stream of fire.
You're not getting past me.
Yinglong landed, the meadow shaking beneath it as it stomped towards him.
Ringo threw down his carbine. He remembered when he admitted the dragon in the mirror before, he remembered the feeling of looking it in the eye, and he summoned that feeling again. He felt his body grow, felt his feet slide outwards across the grass as he expanded. In a second he felt the crossbeam of the Chinese arch against shoulders. He kept one arm in the sea of data beyond the arch and held the other out in front of him.
Yinglong charged. It rushed at Ringo like a golden freight train. Ringo braced himself against the arch and caught the creature by the throat. It thrashed in his grip, it's long, serpentine body wrapping around Ringo's giant leg, claws thrashing at the arm that held it.
Ringo ignored Yinglong's desperate thrashing and searched the sea of data behind him. Yinglong hissed and spluttered, spitting curses and fire but Ringo held tight until he found what he was looking for. He stood there, a giant straddling two worlds, one hand keeping Yinglong at bay while the other kept the connection through the Chinese arch. He shouted for help, shouted for the one thing that he knew would finish Yinglong forever.
He felt the missile through the data. He heard its launch commands, felt the tremors caused by its exhaust through a dozen different sensors. He tracked its passage, his consciousness spying through military radar. He didn't see it explode, just had a milliseconds warning as a relay clicked and sent current to the detonator, and the world around him shattered.
For a moment he thought he was dead. He was surrounded by darkness, his lungs were filled with smoke and the stench of burning plastic. He couldn't move, just like in the meadow. Was he back there? Had this even been real?
He felt the heavy VR helmet being lifted off his head and saw Norris in the flickering light from a couple of small fires that lit the inside of the tank.
"Time to go, Sarge," Norris said.
They stumbled out of the burning tank. Night was falling, but the smuggler's shack, packed as it was to the rafters with bootleg electronics, was ablaze as they made their way back up the track by firelight.
The EMP, the electromagnetic pulse detonated by the Chinese missile, had destroyed every electronic component for kilometres around. Down river, the skyscrapers of the nearby city stood like black sentinels against the fading sun on the horizon. Yinglong was gone. Every circuit board and computer chip capable of holding the rogue AI had been reduced to a slag of rare metals.
"Quite a bonfire," Custard said as he watched the burning shack. "Some gangster's going to be royally pissed off when he finds out someone's torched his stash, and I for one don't plan on being around when they do."
"Time for some old school SERE," Ringo agreed. "Survive, escape, resist and evade — all the way to Macau."
There were no fancy drones to worry about now, and more than enough chaos to mask four blokes who knew how to make good time cross-country.
It was over. In a couple of weeks they'd be home and Ringo would see his daughter again.
"It's all right, love," Ringo said under his breath as they started to march. "The monsters aren't real. Dad made sure of that."
THE CLASH OF CYMBALS
Richard Lee Byers
Grunting and straining, Crusaders pushed the creaking siege tower across the beach toward the seaward walls of Lisbon. John could have ridden inside the belfry, where it was arguably safer. But he preferred to be outside. It made it easier to see what was going on. If a Moorish arrow found him, so be it.
Such arrows flew from the battlements in profusion. But the archers and crossbowmen at the top of the belfry shot back to deadly effect, and the tower was still making headway. Perhaps, John thought, it would make it all the way to the wall.
Maybe he should go inside it after all. If he climbed to the top, squeezing his way through the men packed inside, he could be one of the first to scramble across onto the wall-walk and engage the Moors blade to blade.
He was still considering it when someone yelled, “They’re coming!”
John peered around the cover provided by the tower. The enemy must have opened a sally port. Moorish fighters were charging across the sand.
Two Crusaders started forward to meet them. “Wait!” John barked. If his fellow guards abandoned the cover the belfry afforded prematurely, they’d simply give the bowmen on the wall a chance to target them.
The pushers stopped pushing and readied their weapons. Soldiers jumped from the opening at the base of the belfry. Then the first Moors rushed swarming around the siege engine.
Bellowing, a Moor jabbed a spear at John. He caught the attack on his shield, stepped, and slashed his foe across the face with his sword. The Moor reeled backward.
John didn’t have a chance to determine whether he’d harmed the man grievously enough to take him out of the fight, because already, a Moor with a scimitar was cutting at his flank. His shield was on the other side of his body, but he swayed backward, and the curved blade flashed inches shy of his ribs. He feinted high, cut to the knee, and his adversary fell. He pivoted and found another.
For a while thereafter, he expected the enemy to overwhelm his fellow defenders of the tower and himself. Despite their best efforts, the soldiers jammed inside the belfry just weren’t able to emerge fast enough, and so, by bringing superior numbers to bear, the Moors should carry the day.
John regretted the deaths of the brave men who would fall beside him but had no fear of his own demise. Soon he’d see Elizabeth again.
As it turned out, though, he’d been mistaken. Fighting like madmen, the Crusaders held, until eventually — John didn’t know how long the battle had lasted — officers or sergeants among the enemy bellowed orders. Then the Moors retreated.
The Crusaders were exhausted, but not too exhausted to croak out taunts and cheers. A freckled youth with a snub nose, one of the men John had likely saved from an arrow, gasped, “We won!”
John sighed. “Not really.” He waved his dulled, bloody sword at the hissing, breaking waves of the Atlantic.
The other man eyed him quizzically. “I don’t understand.”