The Starry Rift Part 12

"Oh, we're good at that!"

The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the gameworld. They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage, and they saw the warning spell travel up from the hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away toward the cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn't stop the sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern, a.s.suming that the sentries were nonplayer characters-who wanted to pay to sit around in games.p.a.ce watching a boring road all day?-and to her surprise, the spears followed her. She took one in the chest and only some fast work with her s.h.i.+eld and all her healing scrolls saved her. As it was, her const.i.tution was knocked down by half, and she had to retreat back down the hillside.

"Get down," Lucy said in her headset. "I'm gonna use the BFG."

Every game had one-the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-a.r.s.e weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold, and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-meter bolts that exploded on impact.

"Fire!" Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim toward the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point of view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.

"Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark! Yee-haw!" Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically.

Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their presence and waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking maneuver around the cottage's sides, staying just outside of bow range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the foliage around them fade to translucency.

There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling slings. One had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spellcasting.

"GO GO GO!" Lucy called.

Anda went! She cast a s.h.i.+eld spell. They cost a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of boiling oil on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.

She reached the fifth man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his b.l.o.o.d.y head off in one motion, then back-flipped off the high branch, trusting to her s.h.i.+eld to stay intact for her impact on the cottage roof.

The strategy worked-now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, she could hear the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of two more of the guards.

Shrieking a berzerker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two remaining guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She'd blown a small fortune on spells and rations for this project, with the expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and now it was all lost.

She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run, waiting for the guard's sword to find her avatar's back and knock her into the dirt.

"Got 'im!" It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was wrong, though: despite Lucy's avatar's awesome stats and despite Lucy's own skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to the cleaners. The guard was kicking her a.s.s. Anda went back to her stuck sword and recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another to her knee.

"s.h.i.+t!" Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her sword free-finally-and charged at the guard, ululating her war cry. He managed to get his sword up before she reached him, but she got in a lucky swing and danced back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, moving in for a fast kill.

"Lucy?"

"Call me Sarge!"

"Sorry, Sarge. Where'd you resp.a.w.n?"

"I'm all the way over at Body Electric-it'll take me hours to get there. Do you think you can complete the mission on your own?"

"Uh, sure." Thinking, Crikey, if that's what the guards outside were like, howm I gonna get past the inside guards?

"You're the best, girl. Okay, enter the cottage and kill everyone there."

"Uh, sure."

She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside the cottage before she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.

She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She'd killed four of her adversaries before she even noticed that they weren't fighting back.

In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even nonplayer characters. They moved like total noobs, milling around in the little cottage. Around them were thousands and thousands of s.h.i.+rts. Incredibly, some noobs were still sitting, crafting more s.h.i.+rts, ignoring the swordswoman who'd just butchered their companions.

She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively, she walked up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one side, and she followed him.

"Are you a player or a bot?" she typed.

The avatar did nothing. She killed it.

"Lucy, they're not fighting back."

"Good, kill them all."

"Really?"

"Yeah-that's the orders. Kill them all and then I'll make a phone call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul a.s.s back to the island. I'm coming out there to meet you, but it's a long haul from the resp.a.w.n gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, okay?"

"Sure," Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten. One two one two and through and through, she thought, lopping their heads off. One left. He stood off in the back.

> no porfa necesito mi plata Spanish. She could always paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who cared? She cut his head off.

"They're all dead," she said into her headset.

"Good job!" Lucy said. "Okay, I'm gonna make a call. Sit tight."

Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and s.h.i.+rts. The kind of s.h.i.+rts you crafted when you were down at Level 0 and trying to get basic skillz. Add it all together and you barely had two thousand gold.

Just to pa.s.s the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.

> no [colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial] [money/silver]

Pathetic. A few thousand golds-he could make that much by playing a couple of the beginner missions. Crafting s.h.i.+rts!

She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars showed up. More generics.

> are you players or bots?

she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.

> any trouble?

Well, all right then.

> no trouble > good One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.

> you can go now "Lucy?"

"What's up?"

"Two blokes just showed up and told me to p.i.s.s off. They're noobs, though. Should I kill them?"

"No! Jeez, Anda, those are the contacts. They're just making sure the job was done. Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern, okay?"

As she made her way home, she snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs standing amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand golds' worth of badly crafted s.h.i.+rts.

That month, she fought her way through six more missions, and the paypal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, pounds sterling that she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 meters away from the school gate, next to the candy shop that was likewise 501 meters away.

"Anda, I don't think it's healthy for you to spend so much time with your game," her da said, prodding her bulging podge with a finger. "It's not healthy."

"Daaaa!" she said, pus.h.i.+ng his finger aside. "I go to PE every stinking day. It's good enough for the Ministry of Education."

"I don't like it," he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little potbelly that he wore his belted trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin. She pinched his chin and wiggled it.

"I get loads more exercise than you, Mr. Pot."

"But I pay the bills around here, little Miss Kettle."

"You're not seriously complaining about the cost of the game?" she said, infusing her voice with incredulity. "Ten quid a week, and I get unlimited calls, texts, and messages! Plus play, of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and spellchecker and translator bots!" (Every member of the Fahrenheits memorized this for dealing with recalcitrant parental units.) "Fine then. If the game is too dear for you, Da, let's set it aside and I'll just start using a normal phone; is that what you want?"

Her da held up his hands. "I surrender, Miss Kettle. But do try to get a little more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?"

"Getting my head trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like," she said darkly.

"Zackly!" he said, prodding her podge anew. "That's the stuff! Getting my head trodden on was what made me the man I are today!"

Her da could bl.u.s.ter all he liked about paying the bills, but she had pocket money for the first time in her life: not book-tokens and fruit-tokens and milk-tokens that could be exchanged for "healthy" snacks and literature. She had real money, cash money that she could spend outside of the five-hundred-meter sugar-free zone around her school.

"Go get a BFG," Lucy said. "We're going on a mission."

Lucy's voice in her ear was a constant companion in her life now. When she wasn't on Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running missions into the wee hours of the morning. The Fahrenheit armorers, nonplayer characters, had learned to recognize her, and they had the Clan's BFGs oiled and ready for her when she showed up.

"Sarge?"

"Yes, Anda?"

"I just can't understand why anyone would pay us cash for these missions."

"You complaining?"

"No, but-"

"Anyone asking you to cyber some old pervert?"

"No!"

"Okay then. I don't know either. But the money's good. I don't care. h.e.l.l, probably it's two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all day. One's f.u.c.king with the other one and paying us."

"You really think that?"

Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. "Look at it this way. Most of the world is living on, like, a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every day on a Frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends mom three thousand a month in child support-that's a hundred bucks a day. So, if a day's money here is a hundred dollars, then to an African or whatever, my Frappuccino is worth, like, five hundred dollars. And I buy two or three every day.

"And we're not rich! There's c.r.a.ploads of rich people who wouldn't think twice about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee-how much do you think a hot dog and a c.o.ke go for on the s.p.a.ce station? A thousand bucks!

"So that's what I think is going on. There's someone out there, some Saudi or j.a.panese guy or Russian mafia kid who's so rich that this is just chump change for him, and he's paying us to mess around with some other rich person. To them, we're like the Africans making a dollar a day to craft-I mean, sew-T-s.h.i.+rts. What's a couple hundred bucks to them? A cup of coffee."

"Three o'clock," Anda said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers pat-patted in bits around the forest floor.

"Nice one, Anda."

"Thanks, Sarge."

They smashed half a dozen more sniper outposts before coming upon the cottage.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," Anda breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards, forty or fifty of them, with bows and spells and spears, in entrenched positions.

"This is nuts," Lucy agreed. "I'm calling them. This is nuts."

There was a muting click as Lucy rang off, and Anda used up a scrying scroll on the guards. They were loaded down with spells, a couple of them were guarding BFGs and the fabled BFG10K, something that was removed not long after gameday one, as too disruptive to the balance of power. Supposedly, one or two existed, but that was just a rumor. Wasn't it?

"Okay," Lucy said. "Okay, this is how this goes. We've got to do this. I just called in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob prentices for backup." Anda summed that up in her head to a hundred player characters and maybe three hundred nonplayer characters: familiars, servants, demons . . .

"That's a lot of shares to split the pay into," Anda said.

"Oh ye of little t.i.ts," Lucy said. "I've negotiated a bonus for us if we make it-a million gold and three missions' worth of cash. The Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold-they'll be here in an hour."

This wasn't a mission anymore, Anda realized. It was war. Gamewar. Hundreds of players converging on this shard, squaring off against the ranked mercenaries guarding the huge cottage over the hill.

"On my signal," Lucy said. The voice chat was like a wind tunnel from all the unmuted breathing voices, hundreds of girls in hundreds of bedrooms like Anda's all over the world, some sitting down before breakfast, some just coming home from school, some roused from sleep by their ringing game-sponsored mobiles. "GO GO GO!"

They went, roaring, and Anda roared too, heedless of her parents downstairs in front of the blaring telly, a Fahrenheit in ber-zerker rage, sword swinging. She made straight for the BFG10K. She spelled the merc who was cranking it, rolled, and rolled again to dodge arrows and spells, healed herself when an arrow found her leg and sent her tumbling, springing to her feet before another arrow could strike home, watching her hit points and experience points move in opposite directions.

HERS! She vaulted the BFG10K and snicker-snacked her sword through two mercs' heads. Two more appeared-they had the thing primed and aimed at the main body of Fahrenheit fighters, and they could turn the battle's tide just by firing it-and she killed them, slamming her keypad, howling, barely conscious of the answering howls in her headset.

Now she had the BFG10K, though more mercs were closing on her. She disarmed it quickly and spelled at the nearest bunch of mercs, then had to take evasive action against the hail of incoming arrows and spells. It was all she could do to cast healing spells fast enough to avoid losing consciousness.

"LUCY!" she called into her headset. "LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!"

Lucy snapped out orders, and the opposition before Anda thinned as Fahrenheits fell on them from behind. In short order, every merc was butchered or run off.

Anda waited by the BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahren-heits and saw them on their way. "Now we take the cottage," Lucy said.

"Right," Anda said. She set her character off for the doorway. Lucy brushed past her.

"I'll be glad when we're done with this-that was nutso." She opened the door and her character disappeared in a fireball that erupted from directly overhead. A door-curse.

"s.h.i.+T!" Lucy said in her headset.

Anda giggled. "Teach you to go rus.h.i.+ng into things," she said. She used a scrying scroll, making sure that there was nothing else in the cottage save for millions of s.h.i.+rts and thousands of unarmed noob avatars that she'd have to mow down like gra.s.s to finish out the mission.

She descended upon them like a reaper, swinging her sword heedlessly, taking five or six out with each swing. When she'd been a noob in the game, she'd had to endure endless "grappling" with piles of leaves, just to get enough experience points to have a chance of hitting anything. This was every bit as dull.