“What?” Ali asked. “What is happening?”
Maud’s expression was serene, for the first time in the entire game, she seemed to be in control. “Watch,” she said.
She concentrated, waving her hands in arcane patterns, and the Earth forces turned toward the Martians, attacking with all force, and exposing their flank to the Selenites.
The Selenites did not betray them. Instead, they attacked the Martian forces it had lured into a ground assault, obliterating them, trusting Earth to protect them from the longe-range Martian response.
But the war machines had their mechanical hands full. Upgraded human defenses hammered at them, and grubs wearing little spaceship hats humped across the no-man’s-land and struck at the Martian home base.
The Martians broke, and Earth forces harried them home, inflicting terrible casualties.
The gamers were transfixed, panting as if they’d hiked a hill. The small war game was motionless… and then…
“We won. Where’s the door? Dammit!” cried Angelique.
“There,” Scotty said. He jogged back to the entrance. One of the mirrors was ajar. He swung it wide open. He knelt, as gamers crowded around him. “It’s a ramp. Steep.” He put his hand flat on a darkly shining surface. “Slippery. In fact… frictionless. We’re in for a ride.”
Angelique said, “Wayne, take point. Scotty, you go last, and facing backward. You get the crossbow. Everybody, hang on to your weapons! They could be right behind us. Ready?”
Wayne slid smoothly into the dark opening, air gun in hand. Angelique followed, and the rest, in haste.
36
1821 hours
Wayne dropped, cradling his crossbow in his arms, alert as if something very real and dangerous might be waiting for them. The tilted, twisted floor was very slick, but friction heat was still building up under his butt and shoulderblades.
He hit the water hard, and sank deep. Kicked away and leftward as Angelique dropped in behind him. The water was tepid. Not salty, but something… spent gunpowder? A taste of moondust.
His head broke the surface and he scooped water off his eyes and mouth, and looked around him quick.
The pool was a circle of Olympic size… a hemisphere, in fact, very deep in the center. A ledge ran all the way round under a tremendous volume of rock cave. The slide had dropped them near the middle of the pool.
“Get to the edge!” he cried. “If we’re standing and they’re floating, we can shoot them like sitting ducks!” He started swimming like mad.
Angelique popped up behind him. Others were following.
How much was real? This stone ledge, at least. It seemed to run all the way around, making a perfect swimming pool. Wayne heaved himself out. Water came with him, a sheath that drained slowly in lunar gravity.
The cavern was bathed in blue, a restless wave of azure light washing across the floors and ceiling. The entire room was gray unweathered rock. He was stunned by the size… until Wayne realized that it simply couldn’t be this large. It was larger than the largest caverns on Earth, with stalactites the size of Moon missiles depending from a ceiling high enough to shelter clouds. To the sides… well, there were no limits to the sides, so far as he could see. The room’s light dwindled away to shadows long before it revealed walls. Just… rock. Spars of rock like jagged teeth, broken jaws grinning and gaping at them in all directions.
How much was illusion?
“Nervous?” Angelique heaved herself clear. Her crooked little smile had never seemed so endearing to him. She had watched him with Darla. Angelique had set the rules, from the very beginning. Had she come to regret them?
He turned to her. The others were still far enough behind that they had a moment of privacy. “Angelique,” he said. “Look. Whatever happens now… whatever happens in there, I just wanted to say… thank you.”
She seemed genuinely startled by this. “For what?”
“For the best game anyone ever played,” he said.
Their eyes held each other for a long time, and then she cupped his cheek in her hand. “Let’s play this out, partner. Time for good-byes later.”
“Not always,” he said.
A narrow rock path led up into gloom. The pirates of Neutral Moresnot must have exited the pool and entered the dome from here.
“Wow,” Ali said, rising from the water, Scotty Griffin close behind.
The pool shimmered with a deep and lovely blue light radiating up from the depths. Echoes sent wavelet sounds from every direction.
“I see something,” Maud said. And made a magical gesture with her hand. Her face blossomed into a bright, wide smile such as she had not displayed for at least twenty horrific hours. “The magic is working!”
“Holy shit!” Scotty said. Then paused. “That’s good, right?”
“When the gods are awake, please refrain from blaspheming,” Margie said piously.
Mickey waved them over to the left side, where, hidden in a tumble of rocks, they found strange-looking tumbles of steel cylinders and leather straps. It looked like a cross between traditional rebreather gear and a conch shell. And it was ruined, smashed and bent.
“What is this?” Wayne said, lifting one so that he could examine it more closely.
Scotty pulled it from his hands and examined it himself. “Well, under the plastic I think we have a local version of standard Euro Union search-and-rescue gear. The pirates found it before us, and trashed it.” He looked up. “Nobody’s using this.”
“All right… but what does that mean?”
“It means,” Angelique said, frowning, “that the way out of here is down through the pool. This gear was supposed to get us out of here. That’s why they made sure we were all certified with rebreathers.” She paused, pinched face reflecting a painful thought. “And why Asako’s pod was airtight.”
“What now?”
“Now…” Angelique pushed the red button on her belt, twice. The air above them rippled, and a visual field tried to focus. They breathed a collective sigh of relief. They seemed to have come out of a long, long shadow.
Xavier’s pinched face appeared on the field in front and above them. And for the first time that Wayne remembered, the little guy actually seemed rattled and relieved. “Angelique!” he said. “I… I wasn’t at all sure this would work.”
“What exactly is going on?” she said. “What do we do?”
“Look,” Xavier said. “Neutral Moresnot-”
“The pirates.”
“The pirates scrambled our communications, as you know. And they knocked out most of the control mechanisms. But the aquifer’s on a different grid from the rest of the dome, and they weren’t able to kill it.”
“That might come in useful,” Wayne said. “We’ve got full effects?”
“I’ve run all the diagnostics I can from here, but you’ll need to tell me what you think.”
“There’s no time for that right now. How do we get out of here?”
“There’s only one way-down through the pool.”
“Under water? Are you mad?” Maud asked.
“Opinions differ. But you can’t even do that. According to Kendra, the door is mined.”
“Mined?” Maud again. To her credit, she wasn’t whining.
“Makes sense,” Scotty said. “They’ve thought of everything. And it gets worse, Xavier-”
Scotty’s expression reminded Wayne of something from a cheesy version of the Ten Commandments, Moses staring up into a talking cloud rather than down into a burning bush.
“They’ve destroyed the rebreather gear. Even if the door was unlocked-”
“Despite any personal antipathy, we would have come to get you,” Xavier said. “Listen. We have rescue on the other side of that door. If you can find a way to defuse a booby-trap, we can open it. Wait-”