Most of them would ride the shuttles to the gaming area fully masked. It was going to be Halloween tomorrow, and even the most sober Joes would have to work hard to keep the grins off their sorry faces.
The gamers would walk the halls, getting into mischief and then escaping into their anonymity. He could hardly wait.
Chris brushed his teeth and sealed himself into the shower stall. The hot water bounced back at him from angles highly unlikely under full gravity, and he happily scrubbed and scrubbed. For the next three days, a good bath would be hard to come by. The water clung like a sheath of jelly, but Chris was used to that. He used his hands like blades to scrape water off his limbs into the suction grills. He finished by letting the cyclone whip the moisture back into the vents, air drying.
He stood to look at himself in the mirror. Fit enough, thin, bit of a paunch but nothing to be ashamed of: abdominal muscles just didn’t work as hard up here, whether for breathing or posture, and it was common to see people with toned arms and great, low heart rates, and little potbellies. He was going to be fine.
Chris programmed his bed to start cooling a half hour before wakeup, and asked his clock to monitor his sleep rhythms to find the best time to awaken him within fifteen minutes of 8:00 A.M. lunar standard time. He was sliding into a mild dream state when his door chimed.
“Yes?” he asked as a sleepy-eyed man’s face appeared in his mirror.
“Costume change,” the man said. “You are chosen for an upgrade. It will only take a minute.”
The guy’s voice was vaguely accented, like middle European… Bulgaria or something. He hadn’t seen the guy before, but he figured the Dream Park people had to be sending up all kinds of new talent. No surprise there.
He opened his door. The guy stood maybe a centimeter shorter than Chris, but broader across the shoulders. The ready smile seemed a little too ready, as if he was trying to stay polite and focused after a long, long day.
Hell, he could empathize with that.
The man held a square box in his left hand, and a metal slip with his right. “Thumb here,” he said, and Chris stepped back as he stepped in, lowered his head as the door sighed shut. There was a brief, very brief moment when something in Chris’ mind said This doesn’t feel right Then he felt the arm slip around his neck, and knew he was in trouble.
But then, so was his attacker.
There were many favorite sports Lunies used to keep themselves fit, and one of the most popular was nullboxing. Actually, real nullboxing was performed in zero gravity, a combination of grappling and striking performed in a chaotic cluster of jabbing elbows, gripping hands and frantic head-butts. On the Moon, there was so little gravity that most boxing or karate-type footwork went to hell pretty fast, but the resistance of another live body made wrestling, and nullboxing training, a pretty intense way to get your PT points. And Chris had been there from the beginning, sweating and snarling through his workouts three times a week for the last three years.
And one thing he knew was that newbies, even those with grappling experience on Earth, took time to adjust to the change in gravity. An Earth-bound combat man would have to be ungodly strong and agile to turn a front somersault with a full-grown opponent on his back. Chris was neither. He simply knew that the move was possible, and the man who attacked him did not.
The effect was startling. When they went off their feet, his assailant was taken completely by surprise, and loosened his grip long enough for Chris to slam elbows back into his face.
Only the first one landed, but it was enough. In an adrenaline-crazed frenzy at a sixth of earth gravity, the two men exerted enough energy to send them flying into the walls at jarring speed.
They literally bounced off the far wall, and then…
The back of his attacker’s head precisely struck the corner of a table, and his body spasmed, eyes snapping open and shut again like a marionette with tangled strings. He made a few wet rattling sounds, and then sprawled limp. Bloody spittle drifted toward the floor.
Chris bounced off the ceiling, frantic to grapple before the attacker got his bearings. As the man drifted upward, Chris slammed into him, swarmed around onto his back and got him in a headlock. The man was limp as a codfish. It only gradually dawned on Chris that the man might be His eyes were half open. His muscles were limp. He wasn’t breathing. His head was dented.
Foxworthy made a rapid check of the body, and cursed to himself. He was shaking so hard that his teeth threatened to click.
Dead. A dead man in his apartment. He touched the phone pad. That was the move, to get Security here as soon as possible.
Nothing. The screen wouldn’t respond. What in the hell?
Chris fished his shirt out of the laundry and spoke into the collar. Nothing.
Well, he would run down the hall, call from the first node. “Door, open,” he said.
Nothing. Panic fluttered at the edge of his mind, but he managed to tamp it down. “Door, open.” Nothing. No ready lights. Well, that was all right. There was a manual override…
He wrenched open the panel to the right of his door, and turned the little dial. That should have done it, should make the door pop right open…
Nothing.
Panic was beginning to look like a better and better idea. What the hell was going on here?
Foxworthy turned his attacker over, searched him and found a communications device of unfamiliar design, fist-sized, like an old cellphone. Little green lights oscillated around a three-centimeter color screen with the words Security Override flashing once per second. And beneath that: Enter Code.
This device… this thing had somehow blocked his communications and sealed his door, using some security feature he had never even heard of. And now it wanted him to enter a code to turn it off? There was an alphanumeric pad, and also a microphone for voice entry. “Open?” Nothing. “One, two, three…”
Damn. There could be millions of codes. He was stuck here for the duration, until someone came looking for him. Stuck in a tiny room with a cooling corpse. Had he been the target? Or… something to do with the game? What in the hell was going on?
Foxworthy pounded on the door, screaming for help. Finally, when his hands were sore, he slid down the door and sat, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at his attacker’s body. The dead eyes staring back.
14
Scotty Griffin checked himself and Ali into guest dorm 312, the third floor of a prefab hutch set in a small crater a klick south of Heinlein station’s central bubble. The main facility had good accommodations, and frankly he would have preferred that. Security felt better there. On the other hand, on the Moon the harsh external conditions were a security shield all in themselves. Trekking from dome to dome without proper training was like tap-dancing on a tightrope. Paparazzi would be at a minimum, and frankly there hadn’t been a lot of attention for Ali at the party, which had annoyed his primary no end.
Scotty had to laugh. So far, even considering the training and preparation, this had been pretty easy, and in fact, a lot of fun. He had completed basic space training years before, but old Kikaya paid very well for him to do the kiddie version again from scratch. When this was all over he’d have enough money to take two years off. Do almost anything he wanted…
What he wanted right now was to disappear into makeup, or other anonymity. It was inevitable that silly things would happen during the game, and those silly things would be used against Kendra in the election. Well, she was right about one thing: The miners and construction hands loved their “last of the old-time pioneer” personas. They liked loners, sure, but they liked winners even more.
He was going to give them one. That would be the way to do it. He was going to win the damned game. At the very least, he wasn’t coming in last. That would be fine for a first-time gamer playing at this level. Just don’t come in last.