Bedlam (36 page)

Juno saw a grenade land at her feet, the tiny blue LEDs blinking ever faster to signal imminent detonation. Instinct told
her to dive for cover, but there was no cover to dive to. Something more rational overruled that primary impulse and drove
the counterintuitive measure of diving towards the device instead. It could go off at any millisecond, but this was her only
chance. She fell upon it in a roll, using her momentum to begin the whiplash movement that ultimately launched it back towards
its source.

It exploded in mid-air, part of the blast catching her and knocking her on her back. She couldn’t afford to keep taking damage.
Her health was close to critical, and the frequency of the attacks was increasing, allowing her less and less time to recover
before the next onslaught.

Before being sent sprawling by the blast, she had caught a glimpse of the forces ranged against her. There were at least six
Integrity troops closing in, with three times as many NPCs in the vanguard, part human shield, part strike drone. She was
out of options, hemmed in at the rear by an unhealthily misty green-blue swamp that belched toxic fumes, while to her right
flank her escape was blocked by a tangle of metal from some pylon or watch tower that had fallen, splayed out and twisted
amid the rubble like a toppled angle-poise lamp. If she tried to climb over it, she’d be sniper-bait in moments.

She knew she had never been to the old world, and that the emotions she remembered feeling there were digital phantoms. Everything
she had felt in this world, therefore, had been new. She had known anguish, confusion, pain, sorrow, anger and so much longing.
In a world without death, until now she had never genuinely known fear.

The soldiers scrambled in and out of sight amid the strange, outsize alien vegetation that was overgrowing the ruins. It was
a town that had long since been abandoned to its fate as a battle ground, its aesthetic being a confusion of late nineteenth-century
Mediterranean and early twenty-first-century Baghdad. This was a world built for war, and in that respect it was an appropriate
setting for what was going down right there and then: the Diasporadoes’ last stand.

It was appropriate, but it was not happenstance. You didn’t need to be a military scholar to know that it was always a mistake
to let your enemies choose the battlefield, but that was what the Diasporadoes had done. They had been played, of course.
The Integrity had succeeded in infiltrating the resistance in order that they might unknowingly lead them to the Originals.
Now they had inverted the strategy and used one of the Originals as bait to corner the resistance.

The word had gone out that Lady Arrowsmith had been compromised and was under heavy attack. The surviving Diasporadoes had
flocked here to Stygia in response and blundered into an ambush. They had arrived to find that most of the warp transits and
all
of the spawn points were already under Integrity control. If you died here, you were captured, and on Stygia death came in
a thousand different flavours.

Within the resistance it had long been anticipated that they might ultimately have to fall back to the Beyonderland, that
archipelago of disparate islets where the uninvited could not pass, but that didn’t look like being an option. This, here
in the world of
Bulletstorm
, would be the decisive battle in the war for control of the gameverse.

Juno knew she had been lucky even to have survived long enough to answer this doomed final call. When she got kebabed by that
flying nightmare, she had respawned at the other end of the island, far from both the Integrity forces and the growing corruption.
They hadn’t covered the spawn points because apprehending the likes of her hadn’t been their priority: all resources had been
directed towards taking down the Sandman.

She had come here by space, having been warned in the SOS that many of the transits were already compromised and others likely
to follow. Nobody wanted to play that version of Russian
roulette. In that respect, even as she flew to Stygia she knew it was likely to be the end, but that wasn’t why she was so
afraid. It was what she saw from the spaceship en route that chilled her to her binary soul.

It had been assumed that captives were taken to the Citadel and thrown in some electronic oubliette, partly to prevent them
from inflicting further damage upon the Integrity’s cause and partly
pour encourager les autres
. Once she discovered that it was they who were responsible for corruption, she had been left confused as to what the Integrity’s
cause might be. On her way here, through the view-screen of the spaceship, she had seen the answer on a world below her, a
world that used to be the bright and varied landscape of
Fable III
.

It was a flat, featureless plain, almost like a circuit board, but colourless. Stamped upon this circuit board was a grid
comprising thousands upon thousands of tiny cells: enough to hold every last person in the gameverse. As the grid passed beneath
her vessel, she understood: the Sandman had been wrong. There
was
a way out. Just because you were a digital entity and couldn’t go back to the real world didn’t mean that someone in the
real world couldn’t extract you from this one. And wherever they were planning to extract them
to
, the Integrity knew it was a destination nobody would sign up for voluntarilty

Juno checked her inventory: she was down to six rounds.

She heard a scurrying scramble of boots nearby, somebody racing from one piece of cover to the next. Had to be NPCs. The Integrity
soldiers didn’t need to worry about it. They could just keep respawning and coming back until she was out of ammo. She stuck
her head above the shattered concrete pipe she was hiding behind and stole a glance. This was the end. The Integrity soldiers
had broken from cover, spreading out like a net, and now they were going to tighten it.

She saw a flash of blue zipping twenty feet over her head: a grapple beam fixed on to one of the gnarly trees that were growing
out of the swamp. That was a bit gung-ho for the Integrity, she thought, and she wasn’t wrong. When she looked up again she
saw a figure raining rockets down upon her enemies as he flew balletically through the air. The Integrity troops and NPCs
alike were in disarray as he landed, already spreading the
pain in a deadly arc of laser fire with one hand while his other untethered the grapple and redespatched it through an enemy
sniper’s chest. Finding himself at close quarters with two surviving Integrity infantrymen, he fired the grapple again to
rip out his first opponent’s spine, then used his victim’s head as a mace in order to beat the other to death.

Juno had to hand it to him: there was a good reason the kid called himself Skullhammer.

She climbed out from cover to hail him and had to dive back again as he almost took her head off with the grapple. In that
fraction of a second she had seen his eyes: he looked wired, frantic, terrified. That was when she realised his heroics hadn’t
been about him coming to her rescue. He wasn’t running towards her, but away from something else.

She looked towards the brow of the hill, beyond the ruins of a burned-out villa, and saw what he was fleeing from. It was
a whole platoon of those samnites: huge super-soldier fuckers, each toting one of the weapons she had been violated by on
the Sandman’s world. From the look on Skullhammer’s face, he had been on the catcher’s end of one too.

Then she felt a horrible sense of beating in the air and looked up to see something blacken the sky above the advancing platoon.
A maenad, she had heard the Integrity call it, but she couldn’t say for sure that the creature bearing down upon them was
the one that had killed her once before. This was because there were at least seven more right behind it.

The nebulous entity was looming before him, never quite holding its shape, staring from unreflecting recesses in a shadow
of a face. No introductions required. This was Ankou.

Ross, however, gave him no more than a fleeting glance. He only had eyes – stark, accusing eyes – for Iris.

‘You,’ he said. At three letters and one brief syllable it was the only word he felt capable of pronouncing in his choked
anger, betrayal and humiliated self-reproach.

‘Yes. She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?’

It sounded like a synthesised echo blending several voices into one. The accent was American, but that was almost as much
as it was revealing about itself. The only emotion that it was possible to infer from its blank neutrality of tone was satisfaction.

‘It might look from a certain perspective like it was an inexorable procession towards success, but the truth is, this whole
thing was in the balance until she intervened. Between the Diasporadoes making a nuisance of themselves and the Originals
busily punching new holes in the fabric of this place, our efforts often felt like flattening bubbles in wallpaper. Every
time we made some progress, a new setback popped up elsewhere. But she turned it around. She’s a closer. Infiltrated the resistance,
sniffed out where the Originals were hiding, and then, to top it all, she got the most powerful Original of them all to journey
right into our hands.’

Ross couldn’t help but gape in confusion as the implications suggested themselves.

Then Ankou laughed, an ugly gurgling sound, like blood bubbling down between the gobbets of congealed flesh in the drainage
sluice of that torture cell.

‘Oh dear God, you didn’t think I meant
you
, did you? No, I’m talking about that tireless thorn in my flesh, The Captain. For the longest time she rendered our attempts
to make use of space travel more trouble than they were worth. Without her we would have wrapped this thing up ages ago. Have
you any idea how long it takes to get one of our tanks to the other end of the gameverse travelling only over land?’

Ross wanted to hang his head in despair but it was pulled too tight against the pillar.

‘Hey, don’t give yourself such a hard time about it,’ Iris said. ‘You got played by a pro.’

As she spoke, she transformed again, her body morphing before his eyes into that of the person who had rescued him from the
torture cell.

‘
Dude
,’ she said in Solderburn’s voice. ‘
Words like “hello, glad to see you, thanks for saving my ass
”.
That kinda thing
.’

‘That was her masterstroke,’ said Ankou. ‘Making the resistance think you were somehow important. Why do you think we would
let you escape so easily? It was all a set-up in order to ensure word got around that not only was I personally interested
in interrogating you, but that none other than the illustrious Solderburn had returned from exile to intervene.’

‘So now you know the best-kept secret in the gameverse,’ she said, transforming back into the version of herself as she had
appeared in the Hollywood alley. ‘The double-agent was you.’

Ross closed his eyes for a moment, though it couldn’t stop him seeing everything with stark clarity now.

‘That nice new Diasporado HUD she gave you, it had a tracking device built in so that we would always know where you were,
not to mention relaying everything you saw or heard.’

‘I did tell you I worked for Neurosphere,’ Iris said. ‘Freelance, anyway. They furnished me with a copy of Solderburn’s voice
files, and upon my instruction uploaded an ancient scan of your good self to be my secret weapon – after I’d had a peek at
your memories to help me refine my Solderburn impression. I told you there were things about the real world that it wouldn’t
be helpful for you to know – I just omitted to clarify that I meant helpful for me, not you.’

‘Why me?’ Ross managed to croak.

‘Two reasons,’ Ankou answered. ‘Iris will tell you the first.’

‘Because your prototype scan was never uploaded to the gameverse. This meant that when you belatedly showed up, I knew the
other Originals would assume it was portentous. They might even think you were a new Original, here to turn the tide. You’re
not, though, as you’re acutely aware. It wasn’t being prototype scans that gave the Originals their powers; it was the early
version of the synthesis mounting software, which was replaced way, way back. You’d need to have been uploaded using that
in order to have special privileges, but you weren’t. You were uploaded to be our bitch.’

‘Bringing us to the second reason,’ said Ankou. ‘Which is that out in the real world, the real Ross Baker has been a self-righteous
gnat at my picnic, so it’s my pleasure to make you the instrument that finally lets me swat him away.’

Ross could only stare gormlessly.

‘Oh, that’s right. You’re a little behind on current events, aren’t you? Nobody’s had the heart to tell you just how long
they’ve really been here, and thus how long has passed in the outside world. I’d hate to put you out of your misery on that
score, because I’m truly relishing your misery, so let’s just say it’s been a while. You’d be right to worry which of your
loved ones are dead or alive though, but I’ll throw you a bone and tell you one I know for sure: the Sandman himself – your
work buddy Alexander Todd. The reason he was off work turned out to be that he was sitting dead in his car the whole time.
Yeah, pressure of work, wife leaving him, all that stuff. Stuck a hose in his tail-pipe and logged out.’

Ross glared towards Iris again, impotently raging at her merciless deceptions.

‘Don’t be so bitter towards Iris,’ Ankou said. ‘She didn’t lie to you about everything. You’ll get what you came here for
– a way out. As will everybody else. Remember your induction briefing:
You won’t get anywhere with this company if you sit there playing games
. It’s time you and everyone else here in this overgrown playground went to work.’

‘Where?’ Ross asked, choking back tears.

‘Oh, all sorts of opportunities coming up. We’ll find something appropriate for everybody. You like your war games, don’t
you? Your first-person shooters. Yeah.’

Ross watched as a limb began to extend from Ankou’s constantly altering form, horror seizing him as he realised that it was
gradually taking the shape of a scourge.

‘I think a career in the military beckons,’ he said. ‘But given your tendency towards insurrection, we’ll need to knock that
undisciplined streak out of you first.’