Gamer Army Page 21

  Shaylyn carried him up over the giant Dubai Mall, hooking around toward the gulf. Most of the laser fire and bullets dropped off the farther they got from the giant tower, but when their scanners picked up police boats coming in on the open water and aircraft covering the skies, they changed direction.

  “Get us deeper into the city,” Rogan said. “At least then we might be able to find cover.”

  Four hundred and thirty-nine feet behind them, three police cars, blue-and-red lights flashing, sirens blaring, rushed up on the raised freeway. “Trouble,” Rogan said.

  “They’re forever far away,” Shaylyn said.

  The police were closing quick. “How fast can cop cars possibly go?” Rogan asked.

  A Bugatti Levine Maximus, Ferrari V Straaten Quantum, and a Lamborghini Serrano LZT 890-6. As squad cars? They were approaching blisteringly fast. A laser beam lashed out from the Ferrari. Shaylyn miraculously got them out of the way. A second shot from the Lamborghini Serrano hit her hard, and a moment later Rogan fell from her arms and tumbled to the highway, Ranger’s metal skin sparking as it scraped on the pavement while he rolled over and over.

  “Ro!” Shay called.

  The three cars blazed by him as he rolled into a low crouch, wind sucking as they passed, the Lamborghini nearly clipping him.

  “I’m OK,” Rogan said, up on his feet and sprinting away.

  “I’m taking these guys out,” Shaylyn said. “Enough NLEPs and I can fry ’em.”

  “No!” Rogan replied. “They’re just police, doing their jobs. I can ditch them.”

  The Ranger’s max running speed was 120 miles per hour. He’d had the robot up to that speed dozens of times when playing at home and in the brief practice time yesterday, but this was the first time he’d felt the thrill of running this fast with the knowledge he was doing so in real life.

  Unfortunately, 120 was nothing to the Dubai police. His computer clocked them at 240 miles per hour, and he quickly saw that he would never outrun these supercars. Flyer swept in to try to pick him up but police laser fire forced her away. Rogan jumped down off the elevated highway to the road below and launched himself as fast as Ranger would go. He passed a big delivery truck, a Toyota sedan, a Ford Mustang, and even an easygoing Corvette.

  The supercars stayed with him on the road above, at 120, not even close to top gear. More police and military vehicles were on the way.

  “I’m coming to get you!” Shay shouted from above as Rogan ran. “Emirates military drones are coming.”

  They were entering one of the sections of Dubai with taller buildings, towers, and big apartment complexes.

  “Don’t slow down to grab me,” Rogan yelled. “I’ll just hook up with my grappling cable.” Flyer soared under the freeway in a blur. Rogan timed his cable perfectly, and was snatched up off the ground in seconds, swinging around like a jet-fast Spider-Man.

  Rogan unleashed three CHEL shots, exploding three drones. But there were so many of them. He was hit in the back. Another beam cut his cable, and he was thrown forward, crashing and rolling through a cross street, smacking the fender of a car before bursting through a large storefront window and taking out a dozen displays on his way through the back wall.

  Rogan rose from the rubble and took off running again. “Whoever is running the system needs to disconnect me soon,” Rogan said. “Ranger isn’t going to last much longer.”

  He shook off a couple of luxury purses that had hooked on him and sprinted away again. Shay dropped down over his street, her NLEP emitter firing, firing, firing.

  “I’m taking these drones out!” Shay said. But it took about three of her weaker pulses to drop one drone. They moved fast, and there were a lot of them. Two more drones swept around the corner of a thirty-story building, coming in behind Shay. Rogan raised both arms, a grinding noise coming from his damaged right shoulder, and blasted them to pieces.

  “X!” Rogan shouted. “Mr. Culum! Whoever! Get us out of here!”

  The loud thunder of automatic gunfire burst from around the corner of a high wall surrounding a mosque. Rogan was knocked back a step as bullets pelted his front side. Ignoring his computer warning, he targeted the soldier’s Uzi submachine gun and blasted it to pieces a second later.

  “Shay,” Rogan said. “They have us surrounded. You’ll have to get us out of here.”

  She flew toward him, reaching out her arms. Another drone swept in overhead and, before Rogan could destroy it, fired a Directed Electromagnetic Pulse.

  Electric bolts crackled through Flyer’s body. Sparks burst from her back. Shaylyn screamed.

  “Shay!” Rogan shouted. Instead of picking him up, she slammed into him, nearly knocking him down.

  “It hurts, Rogan!”

  “Shay, stay with me!”

  Flyer was still convulsing, flailing around maybe, but moving.

  “My flight systems are fried!” she shouted. “We’re grounded.”

  Two unmarked cars sped up the street, a big Land Rover and a Mercedes-Benz with its passenger gull-wing door up.

  “That’s not police,” Shay said. “Who are these guys?”

  “Shay, go!” Rogan laser-carved the street in front of the cars. Ranger had armor. Flyer didn’t.

  “I don’t want to leave you here,” she said.

  “I’m right behind you. Go!”

  Shay turned and ran. A blue-white sparking bolt crackled past his shoulder, impacting the tall, modern glass-and-steel tower down the street. Electric bolts shock-snapped through the frame of the building’s facade.

  “What kind of weapon is that?!” Shay asked.

  “Some kind of amped-up EMP, maybe?!” Rogan wasn’t waiting around to find out. If it could fry the building like that, it was more than enough to destroy vipers.

  He rounded a corner, only to bump into Shay, who had stopped. A Humvee waited for them. He dove to the ground, accessing a perfect preprogrammed commando roll, and was just coming up on his feet as another strange power bolt ripped the air above him.

  “Control!” Rogan tried again. “Get us out of here! Disconnect us!” Someone had to be monitoring them. Where were they? Unless Culum’s plan was to leave their minds inside the robots until both were destroyed.

  Rogan sent a laser blast into the Humvee’s grille. Sparks and steam burst from under its hood. He ran and leapt to the side of one building, kicking up his feet to lock onto the front wall before launching himself up and back across the street, flipping and readying his cables to start a swing. If he could make it to the top of one of these buildings, he might be able to fire his grappling cable to pick up Flyer.

  “Good moves, Rogan,” Shay said, shooting NLEPs like crazy. “I’m gonna try—”

  A heavy DEMP smashed into her from the Land Rover that had caught up to them. Electric fury crackle-roared through Flyer. Shay screamed—until her voice went silent and Flyer clunked to the ground, the green line in her face plate winking out.

  It was the last thing Rogan saw before a blue-white storm of burning electric power lit up his whole world.

  Rogan gasped, the air rushing into his pounding chest, and the pulsing waves within his body thumping up into his ears and skull. His head throbbed with pain like a hot curling iron was ripping through his brain. He tried to sit up, but his vision blurred and he fell straight sideways. His tongue felt cracked and blistered. It dragged across the dry roof of his mouth like a match on a brick.

  “Water,” someone said, holding a bottle to his lips to help put the fire out.

  He drank gratefully, the liquid life flowing back into him, even if, for the moment, he was far from sure that his stomach could keep the water down. Rolling onto his belly, he raised himself up on his elbows as his vision cleared. A kind of hiss-groan was all he could manage. “Sh-Shay?”

  “Hurts,” Shay said. “Everywhere.”

  He collapsed back to the bed, holding on to its firm stability like it was a raft on a raging river.

  A sight that about made him ba
rf up the water entered his field of vision. Beckett Ewell, leaning down in front of his face. “That was some pretty good work in Dubai.” He smiled. “For a loser.”

  “I’m dead,” Rogan said. “And being stuck with you is my eternal punishment.”

  “If you’d died and gone to heaven, you’d get to be with me,” said Beckett. “But you’re not dead. Congratulations. You made it.”

  Rogan pushed himself through the pain to sit up and take in his surroundings. A blank room with white concrete walls and a low ceiling. Shaylyn sat on a low green cot a few feet from him, looking as bad as he felt. And they were surrounded by Beckett, Takashi, and Jacqueline.

  All that had just happened in the Burj Khalifa and on the chase through Dubai came flooding back to him, and even though he could see Shaylyn was clearly no longer uploaded to her Flyer viper, he held up his hands to make sure they were warm flesh instead of cold metal too.

  “What”—Shaylyn held her hand to her head and sighed—“happened? Where—”

  Jackie spoke up. “Relax. You’ve both been through a lot. Let us explain.”

  It hurt too much to even nod, so Rogan and Shay merely sat still on their cots. Nobody spoke, but finally, after noticing Jackie and Beckett looking at him, Takashi stepped forward. “Um … first, the basics. We were able to hack into the Atomic Frontiers viper signal using a complex transmission that hides itself in the same code used to run the vipers. So the first thing to remember is that the Laser Viper Final Challenge wasn’t a video game at all. We were all controlling viper-class combat robots in the real world, in real time. The whole time.”

  “That—” Shay struggled to speak. Tears welled in her eyes. “That can’t be true.”

  Jackie put her arm around Shay’s shoulders. “That’s what I said when X first brought me here. But listen.” She nodded to Takashi.

  “Mr. Culum and Atomic Frontiers are up to something horrible. It’s more than just a massive company,” said Takashi. “They have operatives in business, military, government, and lots of key positions all around the world.”

  “Call the police,” Shay said.

  “Atomic Frontiers has people with the police, with the CIA and everything. X and a handful of his allies, like sixty rogue CIA, military intelligence, and law enforcement officers, code-named Scorpion, have been doing their best to figure out Atomic Frontiers’ ultimate goal. All those internet interruptions, the website crashes and online chaos that’ve been happening every once in a while for the last year or so? The recent Virtual City blackout that caused those riots?”

  “That was me, by the way,” Beckett said to Rogan, “who chased you out of Virtual City. It was too dangerous for you to be in legit digi-space. Culum’s people could have found you.”

  Jackie spoke up. “Scorpion knows Mr. Culum and Atomic Frontiers have been behind the digi-space chaos, but they don’t know why. They’re not exactly sure what the ultimate goal of the viper program is, but whatever their plan is, Scorpion’s attack on Atomic Frontiers headquarters has sped it up.”

  “Attack?” Rogan asked. “We were just on the run in Dubai. Now … what?”

  Takashi handed him the bottle of water. “X and some other allies imbedded with him at Atomic Frontiers HQ set off a bunch of small explosions as distractions so they could get your bodies and the mind-streaming equipment out of there.”

  “That’s why nobody would answer us when we were being shot at all over the city?” Shay asked.

  “Yeah.” Beckett sat down backward on a metal folding chair. “It was crazy.”

  Takashi continued explaining: “Nobody knew what was going on. But they got you both out. In Dubai, Sheikh Ahmad bin Mohammed Al Abdullah is on Scorpion’s side. That’s why Culum wanted him gone. The sheikh’s private associates were in charge of capturing your vipers with a heavy EMP, to take them out of Atomic Frontiers’s hands. They had strict orders to capture, but not destroy your vipers.”

  Beckett spoke up. “This base is under an old refrigerated warehouse on the south side of Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” Shaylyn said.

  “You’ve been here for the last five days,” Jackie said. “We were starting to worry you wouldn’t wake up.”

  “What about our families? My dog Wiggles?” Rogan said, the sharp fear making his head hurt worse. “If Atomic Frontiers is willing to order assassinations and attacks on battleships, if we’ve messed up their plans and are missing, knowing what we know, our families—”

  “They’ve all been moved to safe, secret locations.” X emerged from the doorway, his rumpled clothes a stark contrast from the perfectly neat appearance he had always presented before. “Your dog too, Rogan. They’ve been told that Atomic Frontiers is involved in dangerous criminal activities and may be targeting them.”

  “What did you tell them about us?” Shaylyn sounded worried.

  “They’ve been told you’ve been secured as witnesses.”

  “I want to go back to my family,” Shaylyn said. “My little brother and sister will be worried about me.”

  “It’s not safe for you to join them,” X said.

  “Just listen to him, Shay,” Jackie said.

  “You can’t join your families now,” X said. “It would put them in danger.”

  “More importantly,” said Beckett, “the world is in danger, and Scorpion needs all of us to save it.”

  “No,” Shaylyn said. “No. I’m done. All I wanted was to play video games, to take my shot at winning the championship and the prize money.”

  Rogan wished he could go home too. Sleep in his own bed. Log on to school. Listen to his dad tell him about whatever game his company was developing. Ordinary life had never sounded so extraordinary before. But then he thought of all the people he and the rest of the gamers had hurt, maybe even killed, during this fake tournament. He couldn’t help them now. But maybe he could help others.

  “If all of this is true,” Rogan began, “and not another part of the video game tournament—”

  “This is real,” Takashi promised.

  “We can prove it,” Beckett said.

  Rogan waited for them to quiet down. His head hurt too much for him to talk over them. “You haven’t been uploaded like we were. If they can put our minds inside robots or inside video games in the form of robots, then they could put us into video game re-creations of our own bodies.”

  “I’ll do everything I can to prove this isn’t a game,” X said.

  Rogan nodded, knowing that once he’d been part of the machine, reality would never be the same for him again. “I believe you.” He added to Shay, “That’s why I think we should listen to them. If this has all been real, we’ve done some bad stuff, and we need to try to make up for it.”

  “We may not have much time,” X said. “Our specialists have decrypted some of the data we were able to steal from Atomic Frontiers computers. We don’t know all of Culum’s plans, but we know whatever he has in mind, it’s big, and part of his goal involves Sun Station One. As you know, the whole idea of the station is to reflect a massive amount of solar energy and transmit that to a giant receiver here on Earth—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Shaylyn said. “We’ve heard all of this.”

  X rubbed his eyes. Rogan wondered when he had last slept. The big man continued. “What no one else has heard about is how Culum’s people have secretly installed a completely different set of reflectors and amplifiers, which will enable the station to fire a beam of devastating high energy with enough power to destroy an entire city.”

  Shaylyn sighed. “What? Nobody saw this coming? Giant, high-energy-beam-shooting space station. Didn’t they ever see Star Wars?”

  “I thought there were United Nations inspectors on the station, making sure it was all safe,” Rogan said.

  “The inspectors are Culum’s people,” X said grimly.

  “Or they’re dead,” said Jackie.

  “Either way, we have to stop them,” Beckett said.

  X nodded. “We
don’t know when Sun Station One will go online, but we’re certain the last required components are on the station. It’s down to how fast the workers up there can finish construction.”

  Shaylyn pulled away from Rogan and stood up, closing her eyes for a moment and taking a deep breath to steady herself. “If Atomic Frontiers has all this advanced technology, how do we—how can anyone—stop them?”

  X smiled. “Follow me.”

  The five gamers were led out of the small, plain, makeshift recovery room and down a short hall. Through a set of battered steel double doors, they entered a giant warehouse space, the freezer units in the ceiling shut down and steel shelves near the walls. As the gamers entered, men and women stood up from their tables and computers. Some rose from cots on the big shelves. For a moment they looked like they might start clapping, but instead, they looked at the gamers, Shay and Rogan in particular, with a kind of exhausted sympathy and respect.

  “Welcome to Scorpion,” X said. “These are the people responsible for getting you out of the hands of Mr. Culum and Atomic Frontiers and for getting your families to safety. Now they need your help to take Atomic Frontiers down.” He led them around a stack of canned food and bottled water to the far corner of the big room.

  There, in a straight line, all fixed up and shining under three low-hanging spotlights, were five laser viper advanced combat robots.

  Rogan and Shay stepped up to their robots, placing their hands on the cool metal armor. Somehow being in physical contact with what had for so long been, to his understanding, simply a character in a video game, made this entire impossible situation seem more real.

  There in front of him was Ranger, with full armor and weapons, simply waiting for its operator. Waiting for Rogan.

  “Jackie and I have been working with Scorpion technicians for the last week, repairing and improving all our vipers,” Takashi said. “They are all ready.”

  Shaylyn turned to Takashi. “You repaired them?”

  “All those technical abilities and programs are just like the preprogrammed combat sequences in Ranger, Tank, and Flyer, still on file in Healer and Engineer. When Jackie and I uploaded to our vipers, we had access to all those technical skills.”