Soda Pop Soldier (16 page)

In my mind I'm writing her off.

Writing her off as what, I don't know.

I'm just trying to get to know a fellow coworker and suddenly I feel like some creepy stalker. Whatever. Let it go. And just as I'm about to finish the official write-off, she writes back, “Maybe?,” followed by a winking emoticon.

At five till game launch we're airborne, in hover mode, waiting for the gate to open. On visual, I watch the pregame show as Doc Childs and Monty Guzman prepare to call play by play and color commentary for tonight's battle.

“That's right, Monty,” says Doc. “Tonight's match could determine the fate of ColaCorp. Consistent beatings for two months have changed the face of the team. Earlier, when I talked with RangerSix, the team's veteran tactical commander, he had this to say.” Now RangerSix's avatar, in full dress uniform with ColaCorp's red-and-white-striped dress beret appears in a small pop-up. He's standing in front of a Charger IV tank's swivel-mounted rocket racks.

“Frankly we're going for broke tonight. Everybody knows the game; there're not going to be a lot of surprises,” lies RangerSix. “The battle will probably take place, as we all know, right smack-dab in the middle of the rice paddies. Their intel knows our troops hold the high ground. That's our only advantage, Doc, and we're not going to give it up. WonderSoft's got a great commander in GeneralKong, and a great team with professionals like Enigmatrix and CaptainCarnage. Add to that their numbers, which my intel is putting at three to one.” Again RangerSix purposely lies. Estimates are as high as five to one as of five thirty. “And it's going to be a real knockdown drag out fight tonight, that's for sure,” finishes RangerSix.

“It's going to be a slaughterhouse!” erupts a gleeful Monty Guzman.

“No two ways about it, boys,” continues RangerSix. “But we've got a few tricks up our sleeves and everyone's going to fight real hard and give 'em hell. Frankly, WonderSoft's going to be fighting for every pixelated inch of that battlefield tonight, and who knows, maybe we can turn 'em back.”

Now it's back to just Doc and Monty. “Tough words from a tough man,” continues Doc Childs. “But a series of bad breaks and, to be brutally honest, Monty, bad intel, and this team is facing elimination.” Doc smiles, full bright, then seems slightly concerned for our impending and, as far as everybody is concerned, assured doom.

“Cheers, mate.” It's Kiwi, and he's holding a FostersLunar, a not cheap and very large low-earth-orbit microbrew he's got a line on.

“Are you drunk?” I ask.

He burps loudly then hunches over his computer, his enormous face getting twisted by a funhouse effect he keeps on his camera. “Nope, just thirsty.”

“Well, get it while you can. You're gonna be real busy tonight.”

Now the gates are going up and the Albatrosses and other attack aircraft are moving forward. Below, ground troops and vehicles flood through the loadout server, disappearing into blinding white light. Less than a second later, the transition to in-game takes effect.

“Kill 'em all!” screams Kiwi.

The first hour is maneuver and dodge for our spec ops Albatross as we slip away from ColaCorp's main force digging in around the fog-shrouded hills above the rice paddies. I listen in on the BattleChat channels. If we're expecting an immediate assault, then we're wrong. WonderSoft hangs back beyond direct fire range, on the slope below the paddies. Our forces, holding the ridgeline above the large shallow ponds of rice, are centered around a sharp green hump of a jungle-cloaked hill, lying in wait. WonderSoft has to cross the rice paddies to get at the hill. They still haven't crossed into range by the time RiotGuurl transports our little platoon of grunts through the high-resolution canyons of green and mathematically generated lava rock above a soft brown gurgling river well away from the impending action.

For a brief moment, we track a lone Vampire on a scouting mission, far off to the west. The Albatross has exchanged its miniguns and missile launchers for a spiffy sensor package that can cloak us from most electronic detection. As long as we keep it low and slow, it can also passively detect anything that's throwing up enough of an EM signature. We hide once we spot the streaking Vampire, RiotGuurl bringing the Albatross in nice and tight under a beautifully immense banyan tree that hangs over the shallows of the muddy river. She shuts down everything, drops the three landing skids, and settles us gently into the water. The Vampire passes, but it's crystal clear to everyone that it's looking for us.

When it's safe, we power up and move on, leaving the tranquil little stream. If this were a fishing game or maybe a fantasy crawl, this would've been a perfect little spot to relax and enjoy the programmer's art. But like so much of WarWorld, no one will ever fight here. There are vast tracts of unused space within the digital boundaries of WarWorld that might never even witness our digitally rendered passing shadows on this pixel bright day of physics-processed jungle haze.

We race forward toward the airfield, now five minutes out.

“I've got the LZ on radar,” says RiotGuurl over BattleChat.

I do a quick check of the BattleChat channels back at the main action.

The battle is on at the paddies. WonderSoft tries to cross with armor, using their light Wolverine mechs, armed with brutal coax chain guns to sweep the brush just above the paddies. Our side remains silent.

Then RangerSix, in a quiet, understated voice, gives the first command.

“Fire for effect,” we hear him say to the gun batteries behind the hill.

Our artillery begins to pound the advancing enemy with high-explosive rounds. The first strike, as I watch Kiwi's battlecam channel, manages to take out two of the twelve Wolverines. Seconds later, another one of our gun batteries opens up with white phosphorus. Burning hot white rounds impact the water and earth berms, not destroying any mechs. Instead, the white phosphorus ignites the tall waving grass inside the paddies. Some of the unquenchable phosphorus finds its way onto a few of the mechs, smoldering as they advance through the smoke and fire beginning to build within the paddies. After a minute, the battlefield is drifting thick clouds of white mixed with intermittent oily black ropes of smoke.

Another gun battery opens up with SMAFF rounds. SMAFF rounds are ColaCorp's secret weapon, the result of our one superlab capture at the beginning of the Eastern Highlands campaign against WonderSoft. Other corporate armies also have secret weapons. Money, time, and in-game resources such as captured superlabs and supply points allow each side to develop a special weapon. Some teams develop better rifles, specialized grenades, or even a new kind of tank such as the Bull. A relativistic supercannon mounted onto a main battle tank, the Bull renders almost all physical defenses invalid as it has the effect of pulverizing acres of terrain. ColaCorp, on the other hand, managed to capture a weapons lab back at Jihad City or what the designers of WarWorld called Karkand, and we got SMAFF technology. SMAFF is basically a combination of intense IR obscuring smoke and electronic numbing microparticles that can cloak an area in a haze both visual infrared and electronic for hours if the winds are right.

Now SMAFF rounds are falling onto the paddies, and within moments the entire area is obscured in a cream sauce of distortion. On Kiwi's battlecam, I see him glance left and right, checking his company's position, then his troops are up and moving. He orders them to form tight squad-based formations, and armed with thermite charges, they move into the smoke to search out the temporarily blind mechs and destroy them by hand.

I watch as Kiwi low-crawls toward the vicious snub-nosed beast that is WonderSoft's Wolverine light battle mech. The gunner is spraying wildly in all directions as the SMAFF begins to disorient his targeting and order receiving capability; he's probably a grunt. A round or two manages to splash wetly into the muddy water near Kiwi. Stopping, Kiwi raises his AK-2000, aims through the iron sights, and drops the grunt with a brutal burst of short barking gunfire. The coax gun continues to swivel on its turret as the grunt ragdolls backward. Kiwi leaps up and scrambles forward. He exchanges his assault rifle for thermite and plants it on one leg of the mech. His green-and-black-gloved fingers come into view as he enters the arming code, and the bomb is soon counting down to Independence Day. Kiwi hustles back into the soupy gloom of SMAFF and seconds later . . .

“Visual on the LZ,” says RiotGuurl over chat. “Seems nice and cold.”

Ka-blaaam!
The first thermite charge explodes on Kiwi's battlecam. Half a second later, a connoisseur of destruction can detect the
ka-voosh
of the Wolverine's fuel tank igniting in a secondary explosion.

We're off to a good start.

“Ten seconds to insertion.” RiotGuurl's door gunners open up with the swing-mounted fifty-caliber machine guns, firing short controlled bursts into the hangars and control tower surrounding WonderSoft's airfield. I kill Kiwi's cam just as he knifes a WonderSoft infantry trooper in the back. I bring up the Albatross's camera and replace Kiwi's channel with its visual feed.

I start my 'Nam Battle Surf playlist with “Somebody to Love,” by a band once called Jefferson Airplane. Inside the Albatross, the ground lurches upward off to our right as RiotGuurl brings the gunship into a tight turn. Small-arms fire starts coming up at us. WonderSoft's rear echelon troops are scattering across the airfield, leaving three bat-winged gray SkyCamo heavy bombers queued up on the taxi apron.

“Looks good,” calls out RiotGuurl. “Stand by for insertion.” She toggles the attitude thrusters, bringing us in behind a small copse of trees near the north end of the field. Nearby, empty concrete squares serve as landing pads for WonderSoft's own absent version of the Albatross, the Whale hunter-killer gunship, just like ours, only lumpier and more heavily armed.

JollyBoy's marked LZ shows up in a candy-cane-striped box on our individual HUDs. This is JollyBoy's hilariously funny, at least to himself, trademark tactical highlighter.

“Go, go, go!” screams RiotGuurl over BattleChat. We're down a second later as the rear cargo door flops open into a grassy field. The grunts hustle down the back ramp as the door gunners rake the airfield with suppressive fire. Most of the enemy troops disappear into a small refinery on the far side of the airfield beyond a high wire fence. An alarm Klaxon can be heard dimly above the Albatross's whining hover jets and whispering turbines now set to idle as we disembark.

Fever and I are the last out, and already the platoon has formed a half circle facing the most likely enemy positions. An occasional round zips through the trees at us, but that's most likely the scattered WonderSoft support grunts taking random shots while waiting for orders from above. “Above,” in all likelihood, should be freaking out with incoming sitreps about our incursion into WonderSoft's unprotected rear.

I squawk my own sitrep to Command as RiotGuurl pushes the throttle forward and lifts off above the tree line of the copse.

“Good hunting, Perfect, I'll start . . .” She's cut short by the most urgent of modulated tones, rapid and emphatic. An antimissile alert is screaming relentlessly inside her cockpit.

Damn JollyBoy to hell!

“Incoming missile, three o'clock,” yells one of her grunts in the background of her comm channel. I hear RiotGuurl sigh as she works frantically on her keyboard to yank the now fat and stupidly vulnerable Albatross out of the streaking missile's way. Two seconds later, a small missile trailing white smoke darts like some wispy sidewinder across the airfield and into the side of RiotGuurl's Albatross.

I hear the engines of the Albatross strain to gain altitude, as well as the slight
pump pump pump
of her afterburners as she tries to raise the nose and engage them, but nothing's happening for her.

It's at that moment that WonderSoft springs its trap.

Faintly, far off there's a
thump
. Then another. Then another.

“Incoming!” I call out over BattleChat. I open a channel to RiotGuurl, at the same time slewing back to my command menu for the platoon. I direct the platoon into the thick copse of trees for protection. Fever follows them, staying in their center. Above us, RiotGuurl's door gunners jump out of the struggling Albatross, sprouting parachutes at a ridiculously low altitude; that's one of the benefits of fighting in a computer world as opposed to the real one.

One of them has managed to disconnect his swing fifty cal and takes it with him.

“Get out, you're not gonna make it!” I shout to RiotGuurl over the chat.

“Almost . . . ,” she replies, then both hover engines die and the Albatross hangs for just a moment before pitching off to its right and into a death roll. Even she knows it's lost, and a moment later as the first mortar rounds start coming down on us, I watch her little avatar body fall from the burning wreck of the spiraling Albatross as the white flower of a parachute, thankfully, blooms behind her.

WonderSoft isn't freaking out.

They aren't panicking.

They had a plan, and as usual, they're many steps ahead of us. Even though now, at this crucial point, one step is more than enough. We didn't surprise them, they surprised us. Mortars fall directly on top of us, on their own base, right where we'd landed.

The small copse of trees shudders with each impact of the light artillery rounds, designed to kill personnel, not vehicles. Exploding foliage is disintegrating with each burst, spreading shrapnel and mayhem throughout my task force. I drop to the ground, hitting Z on my keyboard, and wait for the barrage to end. At the center of the airfield, the spec ops Albatross, spinning, slams into the ground hard and explodes.

At least that'll prevent the bombers from using the runway to take off for now. A minor victory, if any, for what will now probably be a massacre.