Soda Pop Soldier (39 page)

A new wave of Blackhorse transports land amid the swirling purple smoke, as Vietnam-era grunts race away from the choppers to set up new fighting positions directly in the path of oncoming WonderSoft troops and armor.

“Trouble, PerfectQuestion!” It's Kiwi.

“Commencing our attack!” screams Jolly over the BattleChat. “Banzai!”

From the rubble on our right flank, Jolly's troops mix in with the WonderSoft armor, taking them by surprise at close range with antiarmor weapons and explosives.

“What's wrong, Kiwi?” I ask.

“Enigmatrix. She's down below with a platoon of combat engineers. My guess is, mate, she's gonna take the lobby and demo the whole tower right here in the plaza with us in it. She gets her way she'll either drop it on JollyBoy's task force or RangerSix at the toll plaza. That'd pretty much ruin everything right about now.”

Good-bye, PerfectQuestion
appears on-screen.

I look out the window. The two black F-15s throttle back and fall behind the Skyliner.

It's time to kill you, for real.

“Tell the captain they're going to shoot us down!” I shout at Trixie. She stares at me in disbelief until I yell at her again. “Do it!”

“Kiwi, got any more explosives left?”

“Why bother even asking, mate.”

“Hand 'em over.”

A moment later, I've armed them. I set the timer for five seconds.

“Good-bye, Kiwi. You're tactical commander now.”

“What are you doing?!” he screams over the battle rattle of his machine gun.

I race for the edge of the observation deck, arming the timer and scream, “Apone, get everyone's head down now!” over the chat.

Five.

“The captain is telling us to stand by to eject!” screams Trixie, almost crying now.

Four.

Hatches explode across the suite as foam floods the interior.

Three.

I pull the mask down and feel cool sweet oxygen flood my face. I'm hyperventilating.

Two.

I race for the edge of the observation deck and throw my avatar over, falling toward Enigmatrix and the waiting engineer's command truck at the entrance to the lobby.

“Heads down, Marines!” yells Apone.

One.

I'm carrying four charges of thermite, in-game.

My legs in the suite are immobilized as a brief explosion erupts beneath my feet. I turn toward the Skyliner window. Enigmatrix and whoever else was with her have just been blown up. My suite races skyward. For a brief tumbling of seconds before the SafetyFoam completely fills my vision, I see the Skyliner on fire and falling away from us. Then I hear a big explosion.

Chapter 28

T
he suite settles into the desert sand of a large dune in the pink late afternoon of somewhere near the North African coast. Its two parachutes following it deflate and lie adrift alongside. The SafetyFoam begins to dissolve with soft hisses and low pops. My Petey thrums with an incoming message. I can't answer it. I'm still immobilized by the foam.

An hour later, Trixie and I are free. Instantly, she returns to the role of air hostess in crisis mode. She activates a panel, and a moment later the door to the suite is blown open. Survival gear is unlocked from an overhead bin, and an inventory of injuries officially taken.

There are none.

Trixie sets up “base camp,” as she calls it, in the long afternoon shadow beneath our dune. I walk to the top of the sand pile as a light desert wind picks up. I check the message on my Petey. It's from Carter Banks.

“ColaCorp won,” he'd written. “I now control a majority of shares, which are currently skyrocketing on all open markets as we speak. Thanks, I owe you one. Let me know where you're at.”

That's a good question. I don't know where I am.

But we won.

That's something.

Below, Trixie in heels and prim little outfit with matching tiny pillbox cap, is busy starting a chemical fire and rehydrating emergency rations. She looks up at me, shields her eyes, and waves. I wave back.

Faustus Mercator is defeated.

I imagine he's pretty mad right now. Revenge mad.

I bring up SoftMaps and sync my location. The cartoon earth whirls and stops, then zooms in on Africa. After that, it closes in on North Africa and finally it lands somewhere south of Tripoli. I expand our location and see the ejected suite in real time, a long silk parachute trailing away from it. A dark spot represents me, but I can't zoom in any farther. I scroll around the area to the north and find more dunes. To the southwest, I find a desert track that leads to a small road that leads to a date palm farm. From there, what looks to be a paved road leads north. The nearest civilized place seems to be a small town called Douz.

I walk down the dune. Trixie feeds me a spoonful of survival-ration beef bourguignonne and rice. I make a face and she asks me if I want some hot sauce on it.

“After it gets dark,” I announce, “we'll start walking toward a nearby town. A place called Douz.”

“But isn't . . . we're supposed to wait here,” she stammers. “Lufthansa will have rescue personnel all over this area retrieving pods and suites in no time. We should be one of the first because of your Hindenburg Class ticket. That's the best, so we'll be first.”

Some people see the world that way. Better means first. First means better. Maybe I see the world a different way.

“It's been two hours,” I say.

She thinks about that for a moment.

“Still . . .” She bites her lip as the wind whips her perfect hair in individual strands across her face. “We should wait.”

I sigh.

“The guy who shot us down has an axe to grind against me, personally.” I let that sentence hang for a moment. “I think it's best if we get lost and show up somewhere on our own terms rather than letting him get to influence how and when we get, quote unquote, rescued.”

“Can he actually . . . ?”

“Yeah, he can. He's powerful and he just lost a lot of money.”

An hour later, we walk through the blue twilight, surrounded by clean dunes and unending desert. It's warm out. Soon we come to the date palm farm. We drink some survival water from metallic bags and rest on a lone bench near an old shed. There is no one at the farm. It's quiet. I run a virus scan on my Petey. No bugs. At least Faustus can't track us that way. There must be hundreds of new signals since the crash, and they have to be going off all over the area, not including the indigenous signals. Plus, the emergency locator beacons from the suites and personal pods are probably too similar for anyone without company protocol software to differentiate who's who. So maybe we're just one of many. Not first. Just part of. Right now that seems better than first.

We start down a graded dirt road that leads away from the date palm farm. A crescent moon appears and we have just enough light to avoid turning our ankles on the old road. We walk until just before dawn. Then we sleep. Or Trixie sleeps, and I listen to the birds in a nearby stand of palms as she holds on to me for warmth.

I'm listening and thinking at the same time.

In two days, I need to pick up the Black game and finish the tower. I need to collect a lot of prize money from the various accounts I've been awarded. I need to contact Carter Banks, ColaCorp, Kiwi, and RangerSix. Find out what happened. But not until I can get a secure and anonymous connection. I can't chance being located. We're too vulnerable.

Pink dawn rises in the east. It's so quiet now. So quiet I can hear my thoughts.

My biggest concern is Faustus Mercator. His plan has just blown up in his face. How leveraged is he? Does he have partners? They can't be very happy about how things have turned out. I'll probably be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.

When I finally fall asleep, I'm so tired I don't even dream. I don't notice the Land Rover that pulls up and the tourists and guide who get out. After they try to figure out if we're alive or dead, they ask us if we have any injuries. Then they ask what the hell we're doing at the edge of the Saharan Desert.

“I say, what the hell are you doing at the edge of the Sahara Desert?” says Freddy Wong, the very British tour guide.

“Our plane went down yesterday afternoon. We walked to the road last night. Can you get us to Douz?”

“Haven't heard a thing about a plane going down!” cries an indignant Freddy Wong. “What sort of plane did you say it was?”

“Skyliner. Krupp Skyliner.
Belle of Berlin,
” pipes Trixie.

“The
Belle of Berlin
crashed!” roars Freddy. “That's impossible, it would have been all over the news channels. I simply shan't believe it.”

“And yet my companion,” I say, indicating Trixie, “stands before you in the uniform of a Lufthansa air hostess. In the middle of the Sahara Desert.”

“Damn peculiar,” mumbles Freddy, producing a pipe and puffing it to life with a wooden match. “Well, climb in and we shall squire you back to Douz.”

The ride to Douz is pleasant. It turns out that Douz is the gateway to the Sahara. Tourists have been coming here for years to begin their treks out into the desert.

“People love the desert,” roars Freddy over the engine of his ancient Land Rover. “Pristine and beautiful. All people really want to do is find a dune, walk across it, and look back and see only their own footsteps. Much easier now since the Bedouins went away.”

“Where did they go?” asks Trixie.

“Oh, they went away years ago.” Freddy Wong waves dismissively over the roaring, rattling engine.

“No, I said where did they go?” she asks again.

“Right, yes. Not when but where, is that what you're asking? Too many years with this old engine destroying my hearing. Ah, as to where, I thought everyone knew that. They were one of the first ethnic groups to sign on, en masse, for the migration to Alpha Centauri. Appealed to their nomadic nature, I suppose. Now it's all criminals and the like being hauled away for that long forty-year flight. But, back during the first big uplifts, the Bedouins thought they'd take a chance. These criminals nowadays aren't going to like it when they get out there and find those Bedouins. Not one bit of it. They don't take kindly to stealing. The Bedouins, that is.”

Douz is a wide sprawl of low, whitewashed buildings. Its narrow red streets crawl through restored villas where the rich play at desert nomad for a few months out of the year. Wong takes us to his villa for a few hours, then I go exploring and manage to find an Internet café where I can do some anonymous calling. I call Kiwi first.

“When I last saw you, I was blowing myself up. How'd it go after that?” I ask.

“Ah, good to see you, mate. I've been trying to get ahold of you since yesterday. Where are you?”

“Long story. Come on, what happened, I heard we won.”

“Have you seen the news?”

“No, that's part of the long story also.”

“ColaCorp split three hours ago. Anyone with shares just made a killing. Right before the battle, we were trading on the almost penny market. Suddenly overnight, we hold some of the most premium adverting spaces in the world. We're flush, mate. WonderSoft fired its VP of advertising this morning at eight sharp. It's a massacre in so many ways, Perfect.”

“Business I can read in the paper. Tell me about the battle.”

“Right. Bet you didn't know you got Enigmatrix and another player when you blew yourself up.”

“No, I didn't.” I'd hoped, but I didn't know for sure.

“How 'bout this? She had tactical control of the entire battle, mate. Her intel was all messed up. She thought she was coming in on our flank. Anyway, her standing orders told her troops to move forward aggressively. Well, she got killed by you, and the grunts and other players just continued to swarm into our kill zone. Aggressively. Which means, stupidly. By the time they retreated and restaged, we had enough points to claim victory. We killed most of their live players, and some noob player, a guy they just recruited last week, had operational control of the entire battle. In the end, he decided to go for a charge-of-the-light-brigade-style assault and ran right up against RangerSix at the toll plaza.”

“And?”

“Didn't even make it halfway across. It was like he just group-ordered everything, circled a spot on the tactical map, and sent everyone in at once. No spacing, no overwatch, nothing. It was embarrassing after a while. I made four thousand plus in bonus kill pay. Nice, huh?”

I talk for a few minutes more with Kiwi. RangerSix is all over the news feeds. People want to know if the series of defeats had been planned all along, designed to lure a cautious WonderSoft into spending everything on one battle. A battle they lost and lost badly. RangerSix humbly tells anyone who'll listen that there is indeed a God, because it was a miracle that ColaCorp survived.

RangerSix is all right.

Afterward, I call Carter Banks. His secretarial avatar states that he will call me later. I order a date mamul from the Internet café owner. A date mamul is a shortbread cake stuffed with date paste and dusted with powdered sugar. I also have a thick, dark, local coffee with it. Outside, the sky is startlingly blue, the desert silent. Nearby, there's an open-air market, but not much going on in it.

Carter calls back.

“All right, kid, first things first. I set up an account I'll give you the number to, once you agree, completely, to my terms. I could read you the whole contract, but I don't have the time because I'm going into surgery to have my shattered spine repaired. That happened in the crash. Suffice it to say, I'm a little woozy from the pain medication. Here are my terms. You agree to everything, and I'll stamp your agreement with a voice ID signature to the contract right now. In plain English: shut your piehole for the rest of your life. In exchange, I will give you one hundred thousand dollars as a broker's fee. Plus, ColaCorp is going to give you a raise and an extension on your contract, plus a merchandise bonus for a new soda line coming out next week featuring the ColaCorp Combat Team with your avatar up front. It's called HardCharger or some jazz. You agree?”