Soda Pop Soldier (26 page)

I'm dimly aware of the dry
click
my rifle makes when the magazine reads empty. The air-dropped machine-gun case smacks into the roof below. RiotGuurl must have had her grunts throw it off the cargo deck after us. As we fall, we continue to course correct our drifting parachutes, gliding down toward the roof of the TV tower.

If we miss the building, then it's all been for nothing.

The AA grunts pull out small black submachine guns and prepare to repel our assault. At the top of the tower, on a raised platform, a WonderSoft artillery spotter, using a handheld spotting monocular, is pointing toward us. Most likely, he's calling in reinforcements from the lobby to get up to the roof ASAP.

I hit the edge of the roof, almost missing it altogether, and reload my rifle as the AA grunts take aim. Above me, four soft whispering puffs emit as JollyBoy fires his two pistols, taking out all four Softies with kill shots in the forehead. Gently he slides to the ground and disconnects from his parachute seamlessly.

“Oh,” he mumbles as if completely surprised. “I expected that to go far worse.”

“RiotGuurl. What's your status?” I call out over BattleChat.

A second later she responds. “Airborne and on station, ready to drop some ordnance wherever you want it.” She'd dodged the Scorpion antiair missile.

“How did you do that?”

“Honestly, Perfect, I don't even know.”

“Ah, beauty and humility,” says JollyBoy. “Two virtues I despise in everyone. On that note, let's go make WonderSoft regret their decision to take the TV tower away from us, whaddya say?” He raises a pistol and shoots the still-gesticulating spotter at the far end of the roof. “Whaddya say, PerfectQuestioney, old friend, old pal, old buddy?”

I enter the building first through the roof access. JollyBoy follows with his pistols out as I lead the way down the stairwell, with the heavy machine gun using its robo-assist sling. Below, I can hear WonderSoft grunts climbing the stairs up toward us. When they're three flights below, we crouch, waiting and ready. JollyBoy pops two grenades and rolls them down onto the landings below, bouncing them off the far wall. Then they wander down onto the next set of stairs. Moments later, an explosion plunges the entire stairwell into darkness.

I surge forward, swinging the machine gun around toward the landing below as I cut loose on two Softies stumbling about in the darkness. The rapid camera flash effect of the firing muzzle from the heavy machine gun gives me brief sudden glimpses of their demise. When I stop firing, the stairwell returns to darkness. Two shotgun blasts illuminate the smoke and gray walls as two more grunts, one with sergeant stripes, both with shotguns, surge up the stairwell below. I fire down at them, hitting the sergeant, flinging him back against the wall as rendered blood-spatter ink blots the clean gray concrete stairwell around his body.

The other grunt fires another blast from his shotgun, spraying me in the legs. The blast is ill-aimed and I'm hit with 23 percent damage. My screen fogs crimson as the shaky cam cuts in, simulating damage taken.

I've got to take this guy out before he can fire again.

I reply with a short burst into his chest. He ragdolls back down into the darkness of the stairwell.

Red emergency lights come on in, bathing everything in black ink and red blood.

“Scary, huh?” says JollyBoy.

“I'll watch the stairs. Radio in and tell RangerSix we're securing the tower from above.”

“Roger, chief!” JollyBoy's avatar snaps to attention with a salute and falls over making a spring-gone-haywire sound in-game.

Great. If he's not actually a double agent, he might just be merely nuts. Which is worse? But I have to give him credit; so far his plan has worked. Or had it worked too well? That's the question.

“Kiwi?” I call over BattleChat. “Kiwi, we're coming down the stairwell. When we get to the lobby just above the ground floor, I'll let you know. We could use an update on the situation down there.”

I get nothing in reply.

“Are you getting anything from the other players, Jolly?”

“Nothing. I don't even have access to my intel satellite. The game must factor in all the signal distortion from the television tower and cut down on our comm and intel access.”

That was a surprisingly sober assessment for JollyBoy. Nothing funny about that.

“All right,” I say. “We'll clear the stairwell until we get to the floors just above the lobby, then we'll see what we can do from there.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Commence mit der shootin'!” roars JollyBoy.

Over the next hour, we fight our way down the stairwell as wave after wave of WonderSoft grunts come up after us. After the first few assaults, the PRK is out of ammo so I loot one of the WonderSoft shotguns off a dead grunt and wade into the next wave.

Chapter 20

J
olly, you ever heard of someone named Faustus Mercator?”

We're five floors above the lobby. Bodies litter the twenty floors above us. JollyBoy's avatar slides two clips out of his pistols and replaces them with two new ones in the dim emergency lighting of the stairwell.

“Faustus Mercator. Hmmmmmmmmmm. Nope! Now, Jedediah Whirlygoogle, on the other hand, I do know, regardless of what my shrink tries to intimate about her actual place in reality.”

My avatar is steadily reloading twelve stubby shells into the barrel of a looted WonderSoft Intimidator twelve-gauge assault shotgun. I've been scavenging ammo off WonderSoft grunts. My health is down to 54 percent.

“Honestly, PerfectQuestioney,” JollyBoy says, sighing, “I never figured you for the fictionalized friend type. But it's always nice to know one's not alone in the world of imaginary buddies. Whirlygoogle's a talking duck.”

“Seriously, Jolly. It's a guy who's been stalking me in the real world. I think he might have something to do with what's going on. Why ColaCorp is losing so much. Unrealistically so much.”

“Faustus Mercator sounds made up,” says JollyBoy. “If you'd told me Bill Johannsen or Scott Wilmsby . . . well maybe not Wilmsby . . . but Johannsen, definitely. Yes, if Scott or Bill Johannsen is somehow after you, out to kill you, stalking you like a hunted animal, well, I might take that a little more seriously. Someone with that sort of name is obviously a serial killer. But Mercator sounds a little too fake. And Faustus—reaching a bit there, don't you think?”

The game is minutes from shutting down. Tonight's match will be over, and the winner will surely be WonderSoft. They've overwhelmed us with an airborne assault and captured the key victory point, the TV tower, thus owning the map and battle of Song Hua Harbor.

We need a game changer in the next few minutes to even earn a draw and fight next Saturday night.

I can't stop thinking about Mercator, about how he's influenced the game for his own ends. Even though I've managed to survive the entire night fighting inside WarWorld, I still have to go out into the dark streets when it's all done. Out there is a man named Faustus Mercator and he's trying to kill me. Why? Because I won't play ball with him and whomever it is he represents. On top of that, someone on our side has made WonderSoft's victories much easier than they should've been.

Someone is a double agent.

JollyBoy had scouted the LZ at WonderSoft Garage, and we'd been ambushed right there.

“Listen, PerfectQuestioney, as much as I would love to swap Dickensian-themed enemies with you, we do have to take out the lobby. I'm guessing we've got about five minutes before the league shuts down the match. In fact, I don't know why it's still going on. That airborne assault did the trick. We're finished. But maybe it happened too early in the night? Maybe they wanted a real big finish type of battle? I don't know and I can't figure out why, but it seems as though WonderSoft has won.”

“Seems like it,” I mumble.

“On that note,” whispers JollyBoy. “Let's go kill everyone in the lobby anyways. Why the heck not? Is it too much of an understatement if I ask, ‘What have we got to lose?' ”

“All right,” I agree. “I'm in.”

“Okay then. What have you got in the way of killing everybody supplies?”

“Ummm . . . this shotgun and a grenade,” I say.

“I've got this much left.” His avatar twirls each pistol on a long finger.

“Grim.”

“Seemingly, PerfectQuestioney. Seemingly. But I do have another plan. Well, not so much of a plan, more of a desire.”

“Desire to do what?”

“Kill everyone.”

“Goes without saying, Jolly.”

“It does and I never tire of it, PerfectQuestioney. Never, ever.”

“All right then.”

“What if I throw a bag of feral cats in there and the cats kill all three machine-gun teams and whoever else is down in there?”

In the silence of the red-lit stairwell I look at JollyBoy's green-haired, grinning avatar.

“JollyBoy?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a bag of feral cats?”

His grin turns into a frown. His avatar runs really nice EmoteWare. I wonder if he has a dedicated graphics card running the BodyFace Scanning Bar.

“No, I don't,” he mumbles. “But I should. I really should.”

“Well, then we can't actually do that, can we, Jolly? Cats killing everyone just isn't an option for us right now.”

A moment later his grin returns. Not evil. Not sinister. Not amusement or even knowing authority. Just glee.

“I do have these, on the other hand. Or to be more correct . . . correct-er . . . in the other hand.”

His avatar produces three antiair Scorpion missiles from his inventory. Each is powerful enough to take out an armored Albatross.

“Did you bring the launcher?”

“Oh, boring old PerfectQuestioney, always with your fuddy-duddy ideas about just shooting things at people conventionally. This . . . will be much, much more fun.”

“Yeah, fun.”

“Laugh out loud, even I don't believe you mean that, PerfectQuestion. No, really, seriously, old pal, old buddy, old PerfectQuestion . . . all we have to do is arm these things and throw them like grenades. Sort of.”

Theoretically what he's proposing is possible. There's a complex minigame for demo ordnance geeks in which they can ignite the rocket in the round after a five-second delay. But what's the use of that? The thing will just shoot off any random direction and explode. Also, if you fail the
Demo Ordnance
minigame, the thing explodes in your face. Killing you and your closest friends.

“All right,” I say, “you do it.”

“I'll do one and Duck-It to the second. You've got to do the other.”

Duck-It Tape is a cross-team sponsor. Everyone, every corporate online army, carries Duck-It. Duck-It even gives you a bonus if you use it and it makes the highlight reel.

“I've never done one before,” I say, referencing the
Scorpion
minigame.

“Phewww,” exclaims JollyBoy. “Me neither. Now I won't feel so bad if I mess up and blow us both to smithereens.”

“How does the minigame work?”

“I'm looking it up now on the wiki. I've got four monitors running. Should be a sec . . . got it. How do you feel about . . . trivia?”

“I've always found it too trivial to have feelings about.”

I can be silly too.

“It's a
Themed Trivia
minigame. Answer five questions and you unlock a tumbler. Two tumblers and you can arm the round with a final question. One minute from start to finish.”

“Themed?” Are we talking funny anecdotes referencing famous algebraic equations?

“Categories . . . ,” says JollyBoy reading the wiki over the chat. “Modern Warfare, Space Exploration, Chinese History, and Sitcoms. Count me out for Chinese History, but I watch sitcoms constantly.”

Does he watch Chinese sitcoms?

“All right,” I say, formulating a plan on the fly. “Let's get down the stairs as close to the lobby as we can. We'll arm them on the last landing and then toss them through the door to the lobby.

“It'll be just like those cats I was talking about, Questioney. Ready?”

“Not really, but that never stopped me. I like your plan, Jolly. You're a good gamer. Despite all the antics.”

“What antics? I take gaming more seriously than any other aspect of my life. That's one of the reasons why I didn't become an organ replacement surgeon.”

We head down the last few steps and stop at the double doors leading into the massive WonderSoft-guarded lobby. I arm the remaining grenade and land it near the double doors. Seconds after the smoke from the explosion clears, we can see the doors crumpled and bent, hanging off their hinges. Since WonderSoft hasn't come charging through, it probably means they're waiting for us to do the honors. Of course, all of them have every laser sight they've got trained on the bent and smoking doors. There's just enough space to get the Scorpions through if we can arm them without blowing ourselves up.

“Ready?” I whisper over the chat.

“Nope. But let's try it anyways,” squeals JollyBoy.

“Go.”

I open the minigame panel on my Scorpion. Two tumblers left to right appear inside a silhouette of the missile. At the far right, an arming switch waits.

“Oh, darn, I got Chinese History,” announces JollyBoy. I block him out and start the game.

Sitcoms.

Great. I've watched a lot of them. But they hadn't left a huge impression on me. Modern Warfare would've been more my thing.

Question One: Complete the name of this sitcom: “
Carmichael and the
. . . ?”

Badger.

Correct.

Fifty-five seconds.

According to Freen's theory of sitcoms, what must happen if a message is left for one of the characters by their employer supervisor?