Ho ho ho.
Wayne watched Asako there at the edge of the drop, a four-foot fissure slicing the narrow tunnel in two. Perfectly easy for most of them to make a jump like that, especially on the Moon. But Asako, in her bubble?
Her withered hands manipulated several controls, and a little rail extrusion grew out of her front bumper, three feet long… and then four. It anchored to the far side, making its own bridge, and her pod began to hitch itself across. When she made it to the far side, they broke into appreciative applause. Then the others just jumped across one at a time. Only Mickey Abernathy had any difficulty at all, and that wasn’t from the length of the gap. He misjudged his angle and hit the wall a meter up, almost bouncing back into the gap. Maud grabbed his tunic and pulled him to safety.
More applause as Mickey pretended to be even more off balance than he really was, wheeling his arms and making a great show of being terrified.
The show must go on.
The bioluminescent fungus glowed just enough to make an effectively creepy passage. Somewhere up ahead of them, water dripped against rock. Angelique held up her hand, and they stopped, listening.
Somewhere up ahead of them, someone or something screamed. The sound was low, so full of echo it was barely discernible as anything originating in a living throat. But it was enough that swords and guns emerged from sheaths and holsters.
Angelique motioned Wayne up to the front, but as he passed Scotty he whispered, “Take the rear. Something’s coming and you move as if you recognize the sharp end of a sword.”
The big black guy grinned like a shark. “Kept me breathing a time or two.”
Why did he have the feeling that that extended outside the gaming world? And was he Ali’s friend? Relative? Lover? Something else? No time now. That echoing sound was closer… and then gone. Silence as they walked through the tunnel.
His skin started creeping again. Dammit! Why was he experiencing that? He’d heard that Dream Park had some trade secrets they refused to discuss publicly. A former DP tech had appeared on a vid special discussing something called “neutral scent” and various subliminal sound cues designed to freak players out.
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.”