Nothing.
“Damn!” Mickey said, and slunk away, defeated. “I’ll take guard.”
Ali advised Maud next, and his attempt at a pincer assault came to no better a conclusion.
Scotty came in to find the boy in depression. “The Selenites split their army. I thought it was a mistake, but they ran a pincer on us. Chewed us up. When we got our cavalry as far as the left wall, the rest of the room lit up.” Ali gestured into a cratered moonscape. “Now we’re trying to figure this next part. We still have three sides, don’t we?”
“Martians there. Wells’ Martian tripod walkers and some big brained wrinkled critters. Selenites there, including a few we haven’t seen before. And those soldiers with us are human. Cavor himself must have played those.”
It was a roughly triangular distribution of troops. Three “front lines,” with a “no-man’s-land” in the middle, and battles along adjoining sides.
“I wish we had more time,” Wayne said.
Angelique said, “Yeah. And while you’re at it, butter brickle ice cream. Scotty, any suggestions?”
“Double cappuccino, one sugar. There must be a way…”
“No,” Darla said. “There doesn’t. This game could be dead. It might not know what to do, and we’re just burnin’ time. We could play this and never win. Or win, and it won’t make a lick of difference-we’re just waiting for the pirates to catch up with us.”
After watching the others flail about, Angelique had decided to try her hand.
East, by Angelique’s ornate compass, was the front door. And East was several ranks of grubs balanced elegantly on thick tails, dressed as British soldiers equipped with rifles and cannon, wagons, a railroad, and a steamship docked on the river.
South: Martian war tripods and other machines, and four spacecraft each built like a diseased potato with a hatch open at the nose. As the Martians marched onto the field, more emerged from the hatches.
North: A variety of creatures, all of the basic lunar insectoid design. They moved onto the field with various gaits.
West was unoccupied.
East: Maud got some soldiers moving in blocks, Angelique advising from the sides.
This time, they detected a weakness in the Martian war formation, a hesitation to engage they were able to exploit. Toy cannon roared, knocking down toy machines. When the hullabaloo was over… no door opened.
“Back to square one,” Angelique said in disgust.
Ali’s turn.
South: The Martian war machines were on the move. North: Four Lunie insectoids of varying shapes put their heads together and babbled in high-pitched gibberish, then set some much bigger creatures moving. Under Maud’s control, the humans declined engagement. The alien armies converged, fought, swarmed, died. Then all suddenly froze, and Reset.
Again and again the armies clashed, with Earth getting the worst of it until, by careful observation, flaws in the defense of Martian and Selenite became clearer.
Slowly, the Martians were driven back, Angelique directing their forces via the mystical Maud. Driving them back opened no door, but grubs toted new, shiny toys out of the darkness, and placed them among the ranks of Earth’s defenders.
“What is that?” Sharmela asked, pointing.
“I think we won something,” Wayne said. “This is different. We must have done something right.”
“Maybe…,” Darla offered, “we captured Martian war machines, took ’em apart and learned their stuff?”
“That would be something Cavor might think of, yes. A lesson for the Selenites.”
And now they were in the right position: Thundering pellets at both Mars and Moon, until their enemies were a smoking ruin. They heard a low, thrumming sound, like some ancient machinery stirring slowly to life…
And then nothing.
“Dammit!” Angelique shrieked. “We won, dammit! We won! What in the hell are we supposed to do?”
Mickey came in. “I’ve been hearing sounds. I think that the pirates are working at the blocked door. What do we do?”
“Stay here,” Scotty said.
“He screwed us!” Wayne snarled. “Xavier snuck something past the IFGS, and we are frickin’ dead. We’re going to die, because he’s pissed at me.”
“Ah… why is he especially upset with you?” Scotty asked. “Anything we should know about?”
“He thinks I narked on him a long time ago.”
“And did you?”
“I’m not going to dignify that,” Wayne said.
“And you didn’t bet on the game, either, right?” No answer.
Scotty hopped down, looked at the game. It all seemed like a confusion of cast-iron pieces to him. Even though some of the pieces curled and crawled in aimless circles, seeking direction, they had run out of ideas. Earth had lost. Earth had pulled a draw. Earth had beaten Mars and stalemated Luna. Earth had beaten both Mars and Luna.
And no door had opened.
Frustration and fear were wrestling for control of his stomach. Could this really be it? If the pirates got through that door… and they would… the gamers were trapped here, and in a straight-up fight, they hadn’t a prayer.
But a last stand was better than no stand at all.
“Drag that topiary over next to the front door,” he shouted.
“The stuff is just foam. It won’t stop them.”
“If they blow the door, it might cushion the explosion. Listen,” he said. “They want Ali. The rest of you were just following my orders.”
“And why would I follow your orders?” Angelique snapped.
Scotty drew close, and said in a quiet voice: “Tell them that I swore I’d beat the shit out of you if you didn’t. They’ll believe you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is that a-”
“I’m trying to save your life, lady. Let it go.”
Her mouth worked a few times without producing words. Then she broke eye contact.
Ali clutched at him. The boy’s eyes were frantic. “No!” he said, voice husky with fear. “I don’t want you to-”
“I’m in charge,” Scotty said.
“You…” Ali looked down. “The woman Celeste is insane. They will kill you.”
Scotty took Ali’s small hands in his own rough ones. “That’s the job,” he said, forcing his voice into a calm that he did not feel.
“You…” Ali’s eyes misted. “You…” Words failed him.
But Maud had found her voice. “Listen up,” she said, a spark of new excitement in her voice. “I may have figured something out.”
“What?” Angelique asked.
“I’m starting with the assumption that there is a solution to this, one that makes sense in context.” She sounded like a British schoolmarm. “The IFGS simply wouldn’t have let that dreadful Xavier back us into a corner without a way out.”
“All right…”
“Follow me. We went about this all wrong. This is a teaching game… for Selenites. That means that the lesson to be learned is for them. We can’t win by beating them, you see? We tried that.”
“What else is there?”
“Join them. The point of the game was of desperate importance to Cavor. Remember what he said? ‘Teach the young generation the rules they will need to thrive.’ New rules. For a new time-a time of human-Selenite cooperation.”
She paused, hands spread a little, eyes wide and mouth open in a smile, as if waiting for them to catch up with her.
And then, Angelique said it: “Truce?” She blinked. “Maud, you are either brilliant, or an idiot.”
“May I offer an opinion?” Mickey asked.
“When pigs fly,” Maud said. “Come on. Let’s be idiots, shall we?”
It looked as absurd as it felt. After requesting “reset” again, scouts from the army of Earth approached the Selenites with little white flags attached to their muskets, around the left side of no-man’s-land, as far from the Martians as possible.
They stood there, at Maud’s direction. There was nothing to be done but wait: Only the Earth forces moved at human command.
But at last, something happened: A caterpillar humped out from the lunar side, a white flag attached to one of its drooping antennae. Xavier’s idea of a joke, no doubt. Human and insectoid confabbed for a few seconds, and then the worm humped back to its own ranks.