Going up sir? In flames sir?
The elevator lobby looked, despite an odd pattern in the marble and the strange writing in some places, just like any elevator lobby he might have seen in the Real. It seemed this was out of necessity. The numbers were standard Arabic digits so the players could actually use them, the elevators themselves were the right size, the distance between them and their orientation across from each other all matched what he would expect to see in the Real. There was even a soft ding that sounded, with an accompanying light, a few seconds before the doors opened, and Nova stepped out, wielding what looked like a short submachine gun and an armored pouch on his back.
“Sup yall. HQs got their eye on us and the ground pounders are getting ready to rush the lane. Let’s go get them a cannon.”
There was a chorus of “fuck yeah”s and soft whoops. Nova got in line just behind the two point-men.
They moved out of the lobby, through what looked like a waiting room, complete with reception desk and chairs, though once again twisted into some kind of sci fi reflection of the real thing, and stepped into a wide echoing hallway lined with frosted glass walls and clear doors. It was fifty feet or so of retail space leading to a bright burst of natural light where the hallway turned into a skywalk. The tower across, from what Gradie could see, had taken some fire. The black squares where some of its windows had been blown in or out seemed to look back at him and whisper of gun emplacements.
Somehow, the skywalk was completely untouched.
“Damn, can’t believe this thing’s still standing,” Maverick said as they formed up in the shadowed carpeted seating area just at the edge of the skywalk.
“What did the scanners say about this one?” Mack said, staring out at the tower.
“Lots of movement a few hours ago, then nothing,” BledRobin said. “My bet is they either left some drones behind before they fell back or they put some special boys on it.”
“Ooh, special ops!” Mack said. “Can’t wait to fuck up their space navy seal larp.”
“All right, hang tight,” Nova said. He had squatted down with his back to the skywalk and now pressed some buttons in the air. There was a soft sound not unlike a zipper, and something that looked like a family of grasshoppers sprung out of his backpack and flew into the skywalk. They spread out, hugging the corners and areas of shadow, and before they had gotten halfway across Gradie lost sight of them.
Sulphyr frowned at the skywalk.
“If they really are special boys, won't their scanners pick those up?”
“If they do, Ill know it,” Nova said. “My drones can detect any sweeps, and if they tap them enough I can triangulate the operators.”
“Right now I’m only concerned with that room,” Maverick said, nodding ahead.
“Well good news,” Nova said. “Looks like that floor’s clear.”
“All right,” Maverick stood up and faced the team like they had been waiting on him. “We cross in twos, give some distance between groups, so if they’ve got the bridge set up to blow, they won’t get all of us.”
“Or, we could all run across at the same time, really fast,” Luke said. Gradie could picture his sneer just from his voice.
“I don’t show any signs they got eyes on this thing, man,” Nova said. “No sensors or nothing. And they can’t see us from above. Not to mention there’re four other walkways. Let’s just hoof it.”
Maverick blew air out of his nose and looked at Nova with a posture that said “really man?”. Nova sighed.
“Ok, right, it’s your rodeo bro. We cross in twos.”
Maverick nodded and smacked Sulphyr on the helmet. They got squared up on the walkway. Maverick looked back.
“See you on the other side,” in a gruff action movie voice that Gradie wasn’t sure was a joke. The two of them skulked down the hallway in low shooting stances, aiming at either side of the tower in front of them. In the soft muffled silence of the entryway they were standing in, and with the flashes of explosions and softened battle noise the filtered out from the wide horizon, Gradie found their movements had a vaudevillian comedy to it.
Luke must have felt the same way.
“Wow, what a card!” he said on the internal comms that only the three of them could hear. “Talk about high-speed low drag! Jeepers!”
Angel laughed on the comms, and the sound was half muffled, as if he was stifling it from even his internal monologue. Nova sighed out loud right next to Gradie and spoke on the comms.
“Maverick takes this really seriously but hes a good guy. Don’t rip on him too hard. Gunmaze is all he does.”
Luke tilted his helmet toward Gradie.
“Oh, wow bro I couldn’t tell.”
“In position,” Maverick said on the group comms, and made a hand motion at the far side of the walkway. Mack and Angel moved across, a good deal faster than Maverick had, and set up in the shadows behind the first two.
“All right,” Maverick started, but before he got anymore out, Gradie was busting ass across the walkway. He glanced out at the city, half expecting the nauseating spread of towers and battlefires he had seen from the ramp be gone, like an illusion looked at from the wrong angle, but there it was, just as detailed and lively as it had been before, only now, after some time in his new skin, it felt less like a spectacle and more like something he could fall into.
“Is it really a whole planet?” he asked on the private comms as he jogged across, his pace slowed by his rubbernecking.
“Yeah,” Nova said. “And every soldier’s a Spirit, if you can believe it. What’ll really blow your mind is this isn’t the only planet in Soulara.”
ChnkMiniNuke bolted past Gradie and shot him a “Don’t wait up or anything!” from the side of her helmet, and he had to stifle a laugh as he stomped off after her. He had hardly had time to look at her since the craft, and her girlish voice bouncing with excitement coming out of a bulbous five foot tall spiked suit of armor straight out of a set of tabletop minis was quite the juxtaposition.
He had barely gotten off the walkway and turned around when Luke sprinted up behind him with Bledrobbin a few leaps behind.
“I said two at a time!” Maverick hissed.
“My bad sir,” Luke said, voice dripping with smile. “I got all scared being back there alone.”
“Oh ok, alone?” Robin said with mock offense. “You mean with no dudes?”
“It’s spooky without my bros, ma’am.”
Everyone but Maverick laughed. He was studying something projecting unseen out of his left wrist and swiping with his right hand.
“All right, we’ve got a couple ways up. Stairs. Elevators. Fucking snack chutes.”
“Bunch of fuckin death traps,” Mack said. “Why don’t we just call em on the intercom and shit.”
“I know bitch! Let me finish! There’s a big stairwell in a reception hall on the south side. Its four floors of open air. With seating platforms and a dance floor and shit.” He tapped something and the map hovering off his wrist became visible for Gradie after he hit ‘accept’ on a prompt.
“It ends right up here in a dining hall. There’s a locked staircase and elevator that leads up to the penthouses.”
“Thought this was supposed to be like a research tower or something?” ChknMiniNuke said.
“They gotta wine and dine the donors somewhere.”
“And the penthouses?”
“Embezzling CEOs need helipad access.”
“You said it’s like an open area?” Robin asked. “Won't we be pretty exposed?”
“Exactly. They’ll probably shoot at us the moment we step in there. Which is what we want. There’s probably not too many of them, or they’d had people on this skywalk, so they want us to come through the chokes where they can maximize their effectiveness. This way we can spread out and even the field and get an idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Luke said on the private comms. “I would like to kiss Maverick on the mouth.”
The twins let the echoes of laughter filter in through the mind link.
“Ready?” Maverick said, and the team gave acknowledgment with various levels of enthusiasm.
“Ok, lets knock them off this fucking tower.”
They formed up and moved through a sliding door that one of Novas little bots got open somehow, and advanced down a hallway that looked like a hospital that had all of its rooms swapped with blast doors. They made it to another door, this one apparently a three-bot job, as Nova's drones crawled over it like confused metal cats trying to find out how to crack open a kibble bag, then when it finally slid in half and disappeared into the walls, they stepped into a wide, tunnel-like curving hallway that looked more Mall than hospital.
They proceeded down it, and Gradie followed their path on the mini map. The tower cross section was a circle, and they were moving toward a big open pizza slize, much different from the grid that made up the rest of the floor, and which must be the open area Maverick had mentioned.
Gradie realized he could navigate the menus with a thought, all while keeping his rifle up and even set up a “script” to clear his HUD if it detected any hostile movement. He tabbed through the team, trying to figure out what weapons they were using and how his “Flex Assault Rifle” would fit into things. He stopped on Angel.
“What’s a “Rad Thrower?” he said on the team comms.
“Shh!” Maverick hissed.
“You’ll see,” Angel said on the private comms, with irritation in his voice. Gradie was taken aback, until the Ghost of Philip’s voice rolled out of his memory.
“Keep the lines clean! Essential info, you moron.” At the time, he had been on a co-op exercise with Luke in the clubhouse, and, ironically, talking to him about video games. Now, here he was, in the Otherworld’s answer to a gamers wet dream, and found himself breaking Philips rules for operating in the Hardworlds.
It felt like a sacrilege, to apply those rules here, to take it seriously, to treat it with the same respect as the Hardworlds, but no matter how he rolled it over in his head, he couldn’t find a concrete reason not to, and the feeling remained just a feeling.
So as they formed up on the wide door leading to the open space, he gripped his rifle like it could kill, controlled his breathing like his body could panic, and decided to treat the world like it could kill him.
