Game Over (10 page)

Then he woke up, his face drenched in sweat, his heart hammering. Panting for breath. He sat up, blinking, looking around him.

But what he saw only made his heart hammer harder.

“Where am I?” he gasped.

11. THE OFFICE

IT HAD BEEN
a dream. Another dream. The fight in the church. The flight down the stairs. The witch in her chamber: Baba Yaga. All another dream.

But he was awake now. He was sure of it. He was awake and wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt he'd gone to bed in . . .

Only this—this was not his bedroom.

Where was he? Where was he?

He turned his head, his heart beating hard, his eyes wide. Like Baba Yaga's room, the room around him was small and cramped. Like Baba Yaga's room, this room, too, was bathed in white light. But this was not Baba Yaga's room any more than it was his. The white light was not coming from a crystal table. It was coming from a computer that sat on the desk in front of him. In the glow from the computer, Rick could make out a small, den-like office. There was a Persian rug on the floor, shelves of leather-bound books all around him, the studded leather swivel chair in which he was sitting . . .

He knew this place. He'd been here before. He
remembered it. It was Commander Mars's office, his secret workplace hidden away deep in the underground heart of the MindWar compound. Besides Mars, Rick was the only person who could've gotten in here undetected. Anyone else would have set off every alarm in the compound. But Rick's dad had given him a flash drive that overrode the underground security. Somehow, in his sleep, Rick had used that drive and snuck into this top secret place.

Dazed, Rick looked down at his hand. Sure enough, the override flash drive was gripped in it, his fingers wrapped tightly around it.

Rick shook his head, trying to clear his mind. How had this happened? How had he come here? And why? What was he looking for?

He lifted his eyes to the computer. What was shown on the screen only confused him more. Numbers. Equations. Some sort of specifications. And diagrams of . . . something . . . something that looked like a satellite . . . a disk . . . a cannon emitting a beam of light. Words leapt out at him: “Strike capacity . . . kill zone . . . solar charge . . .” And the title of the page: “SS-317 Battle Station.”

It all seemed very important—and very dangerous—but what exactly was it? All this math and diagram stuff . . . He was an athlete, not a scientist. He didn't know how to read this kind of thing.

His brain was swimming. The dream. The witch. Favian. Now this. Was it even real? Was he dreaming still? And if it was real, how . . .? And why . . .?

He couldn't figure it out, not any of it. All he knew for sure was that he had to get out of here before someone found him. He didn't want to get into any more trouble with Mars than he was in already.

Rick knew the way back. Into the air vents that piped oxygen through the underground chambers. Back to the compressor room. Up through the vent to the outside. The compressor room was just about the one place in the compound that was rarely guarded for the simple reason that no one could beat the surveillance system that would set off the alarm if you tried to enter. No one, that is, who didn't happen to have the Traveler's flash drive override.

A few minutes later he was out of the underground, out in the night. Pebbles jabbed into the soles of his bare feet as he snuck on tiptoe back to his house. The cold ate through his light clothes, making him shiver. There were soldiers everywhere around him in the darkness, and all of them were tense, watchful, on the lookout for whoever killed the guard in the tower. Several times as Rick hurried across the dirt he had to duck behind a barracks to avoid the flashlight beam of a patrol. Once he even had to hit the ground and hug the side of a latrine barracks, breathing in the sharp stink of ammonia from the toilets inside as a spotlight from one of the towers swept the area.

But finally, he slipped back into his house. It was dark here, quiet. The only light was coming from the Christmas tree, which Mom liked to keep on. Its colored
lights spattered the living room with cheerful spots of red and green and blue and yellow and white.

Rick crept past the tree and headed back to his bedroom. He slipped quietly through the door. He lay back down on the bed again.

He lay on his back, his hands behind his head. He figured he would try to think things through as he waited for morning. He wasn't afraid of falling asleep again. He was pretty sure he wasn't going to be able to sleep anymore tonight.

So he lay there and he thought. And three words kept going around and around in his mind. Three words, one question.

What. Just. Happened?

Along with the words, there came images. The dead monsters charging at him horrifically across the church nave. The spiral stairs going down into darkness. The cackling witch and her crystal table. Mars's office . . .

What just happened?

Had any of it been real? It all seemed impossible to him, and impossibly crazy. But he remembered his father's words . . .

I'm pretty sure it makes sense. We just don't understand the sense it makes.

So he told himself:
Think. Work it. Figure it out. Figure out the sense it makes.

What was it Baba Yaga had told him?

You must go into the belly of the beast. You must learn what he does not know. You must face the horror he cannot face.

He. Kurodar—she must mean Kurodar. You must learn what Kurodar does not know and face the horror Kurodar cannot face. Okay, but how could there be a horror in the Realm that Kurodar couldn't face? The Realm was his place. It was made directly out of his imagination. It came straight out of his own brain . . .

Which reminded him of what his mother had said.

Don't trust your own brain, Rick. Your brain can steer you wrong.

Maybe that's what Baba Yaga was talking about. Maybe there was something in Kurodar's brain—and therefore something in the Realm—that Kurodar couldn't trust. Something that frightened him.

He can't make me leave, much as he may want to.

Those were Baba Yaga's words.

Even I'm his creature, poor soul that I am. But he can't touch me.
That's what she said.
He can't make me leave . . .

Lying on his bed, his hands behind his head, Rick blinked up at the ceiling. He was feeling tired now, worn out by the night's insane adventure. But oddly enough, as his mind began to grow fatigued, his thoughts began to flow more smoothly.

And it occurred to him: His dad was right. There really was some sort of sense to all this when you thought about it.

The Golden City was the source and battery of the MindWar Realm. It was the interface where Kurodar's mind linked with his computers and sent out the energy and images that created the red plains and the blue forests and the yellow sky that served as pathways into American computer systems. The security bots, the fortresses, the airships—everything in the Realm came out of Kurodar's mind by way of the Golden City.

So what if there were things in there—in Kurodar's mind—that he didn't want to have in there. Things he wished he could get rid of but could not.

Don't trust your own brain.

He can't make me leave, much as he may want to.

You must face the horror he cannot face.

Maybe the images in Baba Yaga's crystal table were part of this horror Kurodar couldn't get rid of. Maybe this was the horror Rick had to face.

So what was it? What were the images?

He had seen them. In the dream. He remembered. Baba Yaga had opened the vision of the table to him and he had stepped inside. What was there?

His mind began to drift backward as he tried to remember what had awakened him from his sleep in such terror. He tried to recall those images . . .

Then, suddenly, it was morning.

Startled, Rick realized he had fallen back to sleep. His mouth was dry. His head was muzzy. He couldn't remember what he'd been thinking about. What was it . . .?

But before he could even start to look for the answer, there was a sharp knock at his door. The door came open and his father was there.

“Get dressed, son,” he said. “They need us. Let's go.”

12. TRACE MEMORY

A LIGHT SNOW
had fallen during the last watches of the night. The ground of the MindWar compound was covered by a patina of white that was already melting in the pale early morning sun. As Rick and his father walked across the open space shoulder to shoulder, Rick filled his dad in on what had happened during the night . . . or what he'd dreamed had happened . . . or what he had half dreamed and had half happened . . . whatever . . .

“You woke up in Mars' office?” his father said, startled.

“And there was all this stuff on his computer. Something about a satellite. A weapon, it looked like. Battle Station SS-317—that's what it was called. I don't know what it was, but it looked like top secret stuff.”

“Why would a space weapon be in Mars' computer? What's it got to do with MindWar?”

Rick shrugged. “Don't ask me. I'm just telling you what I saw.”

“Well, how? How'd you find it? How'd you even get into his machine? The flash drive I gave you is just a
security override, not a hack. Mars' keyboard won't even unlock unless it's his fingers that touch it.”

“I don't remember what I did,” Rick said. “I just woke up and all this stuff was right there on the screen in front of me.”

The Traveler nodded thoughtfully as he walked. His spectacles frosted over as the mist from his breath rose up over them. With his watch cap pulled down over his bald head and his scarf pulled up to cover his chin, he looked kind of comical, Rick thought. Just a pair of misted-over glasses in a big overcoat. Like the Invisible Man or something. Even so, Rick could almost feel his dad's powerful mind working through the problem.

“This is definitely worrying,” the Traveler said after a moment. “I think your theory that your dreams are giving you a glimpse inside Kurodar's mind is a good one. Baba Yaga . . .”

“That witch woman.”

“Yeah—Baba Yaga is the name of a witch from old Russian fairy tales. What you may have been seeing is an image from a story that scared him when he was a child. Those images stick with you even if you don't want them to.”

“Right, right,” said Rick eagerly. “Like that movie
The Ring
I talked you into letting me watch when I was, like, ten. I still have nightmares about that. Probably Kurodar heard some scary fairy tale when he was a kid and now Baba Yaga lives inside his brain.”

“She seems to act as the keeper of his secret thoughts.
The things he remembers but doesn't want to remember . . . Was that what she showed you?”

Rick blew out a long breath that sent the frost swirling up around his face. “I only remember some of it. Really ugly stuff. And it wasn't just images either. It was like I was there.” He actually shuddered as he walked. “All around me, there were dead people. So many dead people, Dad . . . and they weren't, like, soldiers from a war or anything either. They were just regular people, like us. Men, and women and children . . . just lying there on the ground like . . . like they'd been tossed away, you know? Like no one even cared about them. And the way their bodies looked. It was like they'd been starved to death. And tortured. And there were living people, too . . . guards. Standing around. Laughing. Laughing at the dead.” Rick shook his head, trying to clear the horrors from his mind. “The guards had caps on. Bars on their colors. One had a star on his chest, I remember . . .”

His father's voice came amid a puff of frost over his scarf, under his misted glasses: “Must've been the gulags—the prisons in the Soviet Union. The Communists slaughtered their own people in the tens of millions. Starved them. Tortured them. Enslaved them. And Kurodar's father was one of their key officials. A KGB agent rounding up anyone who might criticize the regime. He must've been particularly brutal. When the Soviet Union fell, Kurodar watched as an angry mob beat his father to death.”

“Wow,” said Rick. “I get it. So it's, like, maybe Kurodar
keeps these images hidden down inside Baba Yaga's table so he doesn't have to think about what his father was.”

“Yes. And what his country was.”

“Yeah,” said Rick. “I wouldn't want to think about that either.”

They were approaching the building that housed the entrance to the underground facilities. The horrifying images were still floating through Rick's mind, as real as reality. He stopped outside the building and his father stopped. Rick turned to the older man—looked at that comical pair of misted glasses between the watch cap and the scarf.

“Why'd they do it?” Rick asked him. His voice was hoarse and soft. “To their own people. Why'd they do it, Dad?”

His father tugged the scarf down onto his chin so he could speak more clearly. His voice was, as it almost always was, calm and clear. “They wanted to make the world a paradise,” he said.

Rick was about to answer. He was about to say: “It wasn't paradise. It was hell . . .”

But before he could, the door came open. Miss Ferris was standing there. Her expression—if you could call it an expression—was the same as always: no expression at all.

“It's about time you got here,” she said in that flat, toneless voice of hers. “Get inside. This is an emergency.”

13. EMERGENCY

“WHAT'S GOING ON?”

As they traveled down in the elevator, Rick's father took off his watch cap and stuffed it into his overcoat pocket. He pulled his scarf down and started to unbutton his coat. His glasses cleared. He looked like himself again: an absentminded egghead. He looked at Miss Ferris, waiting for an answer.