"We have to leave now!" said Lehmann.
Guan stood by him rapidly talking. His command collar fell silent. He spoke in Mandarin, and it did not translate. He shouted in broken English. "We go now! No Grid! Go now!"
Lehmann put a hand on her shoulder. "Valdaire. Veronique, we must go. We have an inbound signal. Stratobomber. It will be here in five minutes."
"Leave me here! Without me, Otto hasn't got a chance." She glanced at the countdown timer ticking, huge in the air over the immersion couches.
Guan shook his head, beckoned to his men and left. Lehmann looked at them, and back at Valdaire and his old commander. He started to go and turned back.
"Lehmann, get out of here!" she shouted at him. "There's nothing you can do here."
He hesitated. Guan reappeared at the doorway. "We go now!" he shouted. "We leave airbike! We go now!"
"OK, OK," said Lehmann. "Good luck, Valdaire."
She nodded curtly, and did not take her eyes from the screen. "Get out of here!"
Otto blasted four shots into key points of the android, and it dropped to the floor. He stooped as he ran on past it, scooping up its stolen weapon as he went.
The Realm House was a complex of two parts. The upper levels, including most of the surface building, were filled with offices, classrooms, laboratories and accommodation for the caretakers and researchers of the thirty-six Realms who dwelt on site. The machinery that held the VR constructs themselves was buried underground. He ran down the roadway that entered the surface building. It dived underground at a steep angle. Once past the upper levels, it passed through a blast door of advanced alloys and toughened carbon compounds. A thermal lance had melted a round hole in the middle; the lance stood by the door, and gobbets of metal and melted plastics were spattered on the concrete road surface. Henson's team's entryway.
Otto ducked through without slowing, running the robot at its maximum speed. Once he was through the door, the concrete lining of the upper tunnel gave way to bare rock, and the air took on a chill. Wind whistled through passive aircon pipes in the ceiling, technology borrowed from termites, chilling the cavern Otto now approached.
The road curved gently to the left, and one side of the tunnel vanished. Otto was in the Realm House proper, a cavern seven hundred metres across and two hundred deep. Arrayed around its bottom were thirty-six servers, house-sized pieces of outmoded technology, arrayed like the separated segments of a vast orange, kept running purely to maintain the lives of the digital inhabitants of the game worlds inside them. A round circle of foamcrete, striped black and yellow, lay at their centre, the cap for the Realm House's fusion reactor. Otto descended the service road, running in a spiral round the inside of the cavern, and he understood why k52 had let Henson's team in. Witnesses. They'd seen all was normal, and then they'd died. And then k52, with full control over what they could see outside, had set about redecorating.
The centre of the cavern was a world away from the images on the screens of the command bunker. Strings of cable ran from server to server in a complex web, spider maintenance drones crawling along them. The foamcrete covers and casings for the energy lines had been cracked, the web leading into the exposed cables at irregularly spaced intervals. Large improvised dishes of silvery thread were spaced around the walls, while the floor of the cavern was deep in water. What k52 was doing was way beyond him, but it could only be some kind of energy transmission network.
A pair of anthropoid drones came at Otto. He dodged a spray of gunfire, and put one down with a return burst. A kick saw the other sent over the low wall guarding the outer edge of the service road. The androids here were weak maintenance models, and the only guns they had had been taken from Henson's five-man team and the initial deployment of National Guard.
It was the spider drones he had to watch for. There were hundreds of them in the complex, robots with tool-filled jaws as well fitted for destruction as for maintenance.
Those were what had killed Henson's men. Otto ran on hard. A few spider drones spotted him and scuttled toward him, and he blew them to pieces.
For a terrifying half-second, his feed cut out, and he was lost in limbo somewhere on the Grid between his own body and the borrowed robot.
The link crackled back on. Otto veered away from the wall.
Carbon feet splashed into water. He was at the web. Spider drones, large as cats, emerged from every cranny of the place, their small, tick-like heads turning toward him. One, then another, then another, took tentative steps toward him, and then they came at him in a rush. He fired his gun until it was empty, shattering spider drones, then unslung the weapon he'd taken from the robot at the doors and did the same. He cast them down into the water.
Not knowing what else to do, Otto tore into the web with his borrowed machine hands.
Valdaire heard a noise behind her. She did not turn from her work. "I told you to get out of here, Lehmann."
A hand grabbed her shoulder painfully.
"What the…?"
She was spun round hard. Her connection to Genie and Otto was broken. Her holograms went out.
Kaplinski leered down at her.
"All we wanted," said Waldo, "was to be left alone," and stood. k52 made to stab at him with spears of energy, but Waldo froze him solid with a gesture.
"Heh," said Richards. "I'm not one for gloating, but I think you rather underestimated Waldo there, k52."
Waldo walked around the Anvil fragment, trailing his hand across it. As he did so it disintegrated into threads of light, and flowed up his arm to join with his body. Hog's corpse sank slowly to the floor. Waldo walked over to it and touched it. The pig-ogre's form evaporated like the altar, leaving the boffin-like human form Rolston favoured in life, then this too dissipated.
"The thing is, Waldo put his heart and soul into creating this Reality, all for his sister." Richards watched Waldo as he walked slowly toward k52. Only Bear and Tarquin remained of his old construct. "So, I think there was rather more of him left than you thought. He encoded his entire mind into it, you fucking moron! k52 the great! Undone by an Italian nerd. It really never does to underestimate the human race, Kay, it's not a mistake I've made more than once. I'd take it on board for next time, only I doubt there will be a next time."
Richards turned to Waldo. "Ah," he said cheerily. "Well done."
Waldo regarded him with a face of pure fury.
"Um, I'm getting a lack of loving here. I am, aren't I? Ah, shit."
Otto ripped at the web linking the realm servers to the fusion plant beneath his feet. Spider drones scuttled from all over the complex toward him. He stamped and slapped the first wave to pieces, careful with his movements, sure to keep on damaging the web as they attacked. More and more crawled up his mechanical shell, mouth parts whirring, cracking the casing of the android. His left arm went slack as one chewed through its wiring. Otto swatted it away. The drones swarmed up him, pulling him down into the water. Plastic legs clicked all over his sheath. His right leg buckled. The drones were poorly armoured, not designed for combat, but there were so many of them.
Otto wrenched one more cable free, his vision obscured by the articulated thorax of a drone. Whirling mouthparts drilled through his cranial casing. As they sawed him apart, he was struck that in a body like this, at least his damn shoulder didn't bother him.
A kaleidoscope of images from his mentaug overcame him, all of them of Honour.
His link was cut.
"You," said Waldo. "You and your kind." He walked slowly toward Richards. "I tried to keep my sister safe. Was it not enough to make her an addict to your false dreams? Did you have to kill her too? We only wanted to be left alone," he repeated. "Alone. There is no such thing in this world, not any more."