“Yeah.” Matt glanced at Andy, who lay motionless in the seat beside him. “I don’t think it belonged there, either. How’s Andy?”
“Still playing,” Leif replied. “Why didn’t you think the dragon belonged there?”
“This demo felt like a straight start game, and the dragon was just there, not really interacting at all. Where did you get shunted to?”
“Here. I got taken out by one of those little ships and was logged completely off the Net. I tried to get back into the demo veeyar, but it’s off-line.”
Matt looked at Andy and started to get worried.
“Then where’s Andy?”
Andy studied the heads-up display available to him in the cockpit, recognizing the control configuration immediately. The Space Marines series of games were a personal favorite of his, and he had high scores on a half-dozen Net sites that ran the games.
Cyber-augmented gloves and boots encased his hands and feet and controlled the forty-foot battlesuit. Automatically he ran through the systems displays and weapons checklist. The arms and legs were all in good working order.
The helmet that fit over his head contained the HUD. Pull-down menus kept track of his heading and armament. A long, letter-box-shaped screen fit over his eyes like a visor, giving him a full 360-degree view around the battlesuit as well as overhead.
“Alternative vidscreen,” Andy commanded. “Reduce field of view to one hundred eighty degrees with rearviews on the sides.”
Immediately the viewscreen blurred out of focus, changing from the panoramic spread to an eyes-forward view. Two round sections on either side gave him the view behind him. The radar screen above it pinged targets, then the identify-friend-or-foe function kicked in, reading the signature of the other four cavalry units within the half-klick sweep.
Andy only thought about the sudden change from the Goblin King game to the Space Marines for a moment. It really didn’t matter to him. Gameplay was gameplay. All he wanted to do was roll up a score. I wouldn’t have been able to talk Leif and Matt into this. There aren’t any dragons in Space Marines.
He flexed his hands and feet, moving the seventy-ton war machine into a distance-eating stride. The cockpit swung only slightly, helping create the illusion that he actually was the big battlesuit.
“Open comm,” Andy said.
The comm opened with a crackle of static, and voices immediately filled the void. “Blue Niner, this is Blue Leader, do you copy?” a young male voice demanded.
“Blue Niner copies,” another voice answered. “Have you identified the new guy?”
New guy? That must be me. “Blue Leader,” Andy said. “I need a designation.”
“Affirmative. Blue Leader reads you. Not all of our company made the jump from Space Station Zebra. Evidently we uncovered some anomaly in the targeted space station that transported us here.”
“Understood.” Andy swung the big battlesuit around, falling in behind the four units. “Kind of went through that myself.”
“You weren’t with us at the space station?” Blue Leader asked.
“That’s negative, Blue Leader. Ended up here by accident myself.” Andy easily moved the battlesuit up to a jog.
“Seems you’ve got a lot of experience in the suit.”
“I’ve fought my share of battles,” Andy agreed. Sweeping the terrain around him, he was only slightly surprised to spot the castle under attack ahead.
Space Marines traveled everywhere and fought anyone. As space-bred mercenaries living and dying on huge torus wheels spinning through known and unknown galaxies, they never knew where the next battleground was going to be. One of the Space Marine companies Andy battled with on a regular basis had been in existence for more than two years. He’d encountered futuristic worlds as well as medieval ones.
“Your designation is Blue Thirteen,” Blue Leader said.
“My lucky number,” Andy replied laconically. “What’s the target?”
“Don’t know,” Blue Leader answered. “We were on a pure hit-and-git-shoot-to-kill mission when we ended up here. The way we figure it, everything here is fair game.”
“Magnify vision,” Andy said. His field of view slid forward, zooming in on the castle. One of the Space Marine units stepped through a hole blasted in the side of the castle. The machine gun blazed, driving back a group of men that had stepped forward to challenge the intruder.
Andy took in the banquet area and noted the medieval weapons the guards used. The combat was too one-sided for his taste. “You’re looking at a massacre here, Blue Leader.”
“You say massacre,” Blue Leader responded, “and I say easy points.”
A feeling of wrongness dampened Andy’s mood. It was one thing to play Space Marines when challenging an adequate enemy force, but executions were another matter entirely.
The group Andy gamed with in the Space Marines comprised mercenaries with a conscience. They sold their skills honorably and stood by the contracts they undertook. In fact, Andy and his friends had, on more than one occasion, invaded solar systems in the game where outlaw Space Marines had holed up and killed any new gamers wanting to play in those areas.
The Space Marines walking through the huge hole blown in the side of the castle paused. The machine gun on the battlesuit’s shoulder quivered and spent brass twinkled through the air.
Inside his cockpit, Andy cringed and turned cold inside. It was one thing to jump into a game to blow your friends up for fun, but this wasn’t anything like that. The medieval castle couldn’t even protect itself.
The Space Marine battlesuit in the palace bent down and plucked something up from the ground.
“Magnify,” Andy ordered.
The viewscreen performed immediately, zooming in on the figure trapped in the battlesuit’s three-fingered hand. Andy recognized her at once.
“Hey, Blue Leader, look at the prize I just took.” The guy in the battlesuit swiveled, leaving his lower half locked down as he turned his upper torso.
Andy’s hands flexed inside the cybered gloves. He watched the weapons systems flare to life within the HUD, and he marked the placement of the other three Space Marines. They were all enemies by his personal definition at that point.
He readied the anchor attachment that fit inside the battlesuit’s left arm. Normally the anchor was only used in space battles to link back up with a friendly ship when a battlesuit had been blown free of a transport ship’s hull. He knew he wouldn’t have much time to act before the other three Space Marines turned on him.
“Target,” he ordered. Crosshairs appeared on the viewscreen and glowed when lock was achieved.
“Warning,” a soft, feminine voice said. “The target you have selected has registered on IFF as—”
“Override previous identification,” Andy barked. “IFF is tainted. All controls over to ship’s personnel.”
“Confirmed,” the computer voice said. “Safeguards are down. All systems available.”
Andy closed his left fist and fired the anchor. A full meter of hardened steel flashed from the hollow groove of the battlesuit’s left arm. It caught the battlesuit on the right side of the torso not quite halfway up. The sabot charge fired off on impact and sent the pronged head through the battlesuit, punching out the main servos that operated the suit’s on-board motion computer.
“What the—” the guy in the paralyzed battlesuit shouted.
By then Andy was a blur of movement. He fired a salvo of smoker rounds into the ground immediately around him. A cloud of white smoke roiled up, filled with positively and negatively charged ions as well as burning cinders that would throw off the thermal and radar sensors of the other suits.
He jogged to the right, taking advantage of a copse of trees and the downgrade of the hill there. Hang on, Catie, I’m coming. Normally he wouldn’t have been worried about Catie’s welfare. If she received any serious injuries during gameplay, she’d have been logged off the Net. But he still didn’t know how he’d gotten into the Space Marines game, so he wasn’t certain if a normal log-off was possible.