“Then take point,” Angelique said.
For the first time since beginning the game, Scotty Griffin felt at home. Climbing was something he understood. The vertical shaft was about twenty meters high, with irregular boulder-shaped protrusions jutting from the sides. Asako Tabata’s pod would make it, but only just. It would require a gamer at each end, top and bottom, managing a line the entire time.
Why? As he began his climb, that question ticked at his mind. Yeah, maybe the Selenites just happen to have made it this way… but Angelique and Wayne both seemed to think that this guy Xavier had something ugly up his sleeve. If that was true, then if it took two people to control the pod, that functionally removed three people from the fight.
He could have made the climb under Earth Normal gravity, gripping with fingers, bracing feet, twisting this way and that to inch up a foot or so at a time. But here upper-body strength alone launched him up the tube to the next rock. His hand strength was more than sufficient to support his weight easily. This all would have been more fun if he didn’t expect an ambush at any moment.
Just before he reached the top, Scotty looked back down to see the faces tilted up at him, almost lost in the shadows. Showing off by hanging from one arm, he made an “okay” sign with a circled thumb and forefinger, and then scrambled up over the lip.
He had to crouch a little, because the rock ceiling was only six feet high and he didn’t want to bump his head. Glowing fungus lit the front of the chamber, which seemed only a dozen feet wide, but long enough to vanish into shadow. He paused, barely able to discern a scratching sound, something distant, but close enough to unnerve him. Oh, yes, there was something out there.
Scotty yelled down the hole for two more fighters to climb up, producing fast action from Wayne and Kikaya. The kid seemed to be having the time of his life, which was good: God knows it was costing him enough.
As soon as his backups arrived, Scotty unspooled a length of line and dropped it down the well. Angelique attached it to a tether point at the front of the pod, then a second line to the rear.
“What… maybe three hundred pounds Earth Normal?” he said. “About fifty pounds here. Only takes one of us to pull her up, if the other two are keeping guard.”
“I think you’re the strongest,” Wayne said. “Two thieves and a magic user. What say Ali and I take guard while you pull.”
His two companions took position on either side of the well, Ali making arcane hand gestures and torquing his body into strange, spiderlike positions. Have a ball, kid.
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 welclass="underline" 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.