Gamer Army Read online

  “How did you upload to your vipers?” Shaylyn asked.

  “With an improved copy of the Velox Mercury X we borrowed from Mr. Culum,” said X. “We’re not sure what he has in mind, but some version of that transmitter is a big part of it.”

  “It all must fit together,” Beckett said. “The viper robots. The electronic disguise system. The data transmitter.”

  “That’s why we need you to get back into your vipers to infiltrate Atomic Frontiers headquarters, tap into their computers to learn about Culum’s plans, stop whatever Culum and his allies are planning, and expose the truth about all of it to the world.”

  “Why us?” Shaylyn said. “You have police and Army guys working here? Why can’t they do this stuff ?”

  “It’s because of our implants,” Jackie said simply. She seemed to read Shay’s questioning look because she added quickly, “Yep. All of us. Mine was to treat depression. It’s a new technology, and it doesn’t work well when installed in a fully developed adult brain. That’s why, so far, only kids have them.”

  “We need you to do this,” X said.

  “Easy for you to say.” Shaylyn rubbed her temples. “You weren’t fried in that last round. Last time, we were trapped in those robots, and we could have been killed.”

  “I think we’ve fixed that,” Jackie said.

  Takashi nodded. “We’ve altered the system to give you, the viper operator, full control. When you want out of the robot and back into your own body, you just choose to make the switch. So we won’t be trapped.”

  “We’ve also adjusted the pain sensitivity,” X said. “So if your viper is shot by a laser or something, it won’t hurt nearly as bad.”

  “Still,” Shaylyn said. “There has to be someone else who—”

  “There is nobody else,” Rogan said quietly. “Nobody else has the implants to let them connect to our laser vipers, and nobody else has our robot combat experience. Pretty soon, Culum will be armed with a giant space laser.” The bitterness that came from knowing he had trusted and admired Culum so much burned in Rogan. “Who knows what else he has planned? But he’s shown that he’s an expert liar, and he doesn’t care who he hurts to get what he wants. As laser vipers, we’re the best fighting force to stop him. It’s up to us.

  “We have a couple of days to rest and test the vipers?” Rogan looked to X, who nodded. “Then let’s get ready.”

  After a day of testing the NeuroCon uplink to their vipers and the team practicing the little they could in the limited space of the warehouse and in the limited time they had available, the pain in Rogan and Shay’s bodies had faded. The guilt and fear in all of them had not. While a truck hauled their vipers to Atomic Frontiers headquarters in Washington, DC, the five gamers sat on green canvas army-style cots arranged in a circle and talked about what had happened and what was to come.

  “I’m scared right now,” Takashi said. “But then I remember all those tourists in Neuschwanstein Castle. They were terrified.”

  Shay nodded. “Crying. Screaming.”

  “Begging us to let them go,” Rogan said.

  “Now I’m glad I was kicked out after the first round,” Beckett said. “When X first tried to explain about Scorpion and the trouble with Culum, when he had me sent here, I didn’t believe him. I tried to fight. Tried to escape. Then I watched live news coverage of the so-called terrorist attack in Germany. We had access to what I thought was game footage at the same time. I almost threw up. After that, we were trying to break through to be able to communicate with you while you were in the game. I wanted to warn you all so bad.”

  “You almost did,” Rogan said. “Those little interruptions at least had us wondering.”

  “We were lucky X had people to send us here,” Jackie said. “He had orders to …”

  “Culum told him to kill us,” Beckett finished for her. “We might as well be honest about it. He was supposed to kill us all one by one, and then, after we were all gone, I don’t know. Make up some story for our families like it was an accident, maybe, or—”

  “Or he thought by that time he would have accomplished his goals and nobody would be able to stop him,” Takashi said.

  “Really?” Shay asked. “You think it could be on that level?”

  “Oh, this is global,” Beckett said. “I’ve had longer to check out what Scorpion knows about Culum and Atomic Frontiers. They’re everywhere, and they’ve been setting this up for years.”

  “But I fell for it,” Rogan says. “I fell for the whole game tournament lie, for all of it. I feel like such an idiot.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Takashi said. “We all fell for it. Even our parents believed in the video game contest. They signed the forms. They sent us—”

  Rogan shook his head. “No, not just that. Not just the final challenge. I mean I fell for all of it. Culum seemed like such a good guy. So friendly, loved games, and he really seemed to care for people, you know?” Rogan looked around at the four of them. He had a feeling they did know, but no one said anything. “Culum really did build the hypernet and expand it around the world for everyone. And Sun Station One seemed like the best way to finally beat pollution and save the planet. He always talked about equality. Uniting people and bringing them together in peace. Not shooting them. Ego sum maximus? Yeah right. I’m not the best. Ego sum stupidus.”

  “He tricked the whole world, Ro,” Shay said quietly. “He has two Nobel Prizes.” She paused for a moment. Then she smiled. “But yeah, you were pretty stupid for thinking you’re a better gamer than me.”

  The whole group cracked up, a bit too loudly, it seemed, for their Scorpion allies who had managed a little sleep that night. They quieted down, waving and offering whispered apologies.

  “No, but that reminds me of something,” Beckett said. He licked his lips and picked the strings on a frayed corner of his cot. “I, um …” He let out a heavy breath. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. For the way I acted. During the game—er—during the first—the thing on the ship. Also in the dorms.”

  “I was kind of the same way,” Rogan said. “But it’s cool.”

  “We’re a team now, man,” Takashi said.

  Beckett’s eyes were a little red, and he blinked a lot. “When my parents split up, their divorce was like a battle. So I thought that’s how life is. Take what you can get while you can, and who cares about other people.” He finally looked up at the others. “But maybe that’s how Culum is, and I don’t want to be like him.” His body shook a little with a small sob. “Now I might not see either of my parents again.” He put his face in his hands.

  “Hey.” Shay moved over to Beckett’s cot and put her arm around him. “It’s OK, buddy.”

  “We’re all with you,” Jackie said.

  “You will see them again,” Rogan said. “Because it’s like Takashi said. We’re a team. Atomic Frontiers might have tricked us into doing some bad stuff. But as vipers, we’re good in combat.”

  Shay cut in. “Yeah, we beat an entire Chinese warship, and that’s when we were fighting one another almost as much as fighting the sailors and marines.”

  Rogan smiled. “Culum has run things according to his plan so far, but he never planned on the five of us joining together. The situation has just been reprogrammed. He better strap in, because in a few hours, he’s going to be smashed by the full force of the Gamer Army.”

  Rogan must have had at least a few hours’ sleep because Shay finally shook him awake. X stood next to the gamers’ circle of cots. “The vipers are in position. We’re ready for the NeuroCon upload.” He led them to the makeshift med bay in a different corner of the warehouse, where five cots were set up next to complex computer equipment and five cables waited to be connected to each of their brain implants.

  When everyone was in position and connected, X hesitated with his finger over the initiate button. “I’ve been a soldier, and I’ve worked in security and intelligence all my adult life. I’ve spent fifteen years training for combat
and specializing in secret operations. If I had the implant or the time to have one installed, whatever the risks, I would do it, and I would go on this mission myself. I’m sorry for being hard on you during your missions. I was worried you’d be killed, and I wanted you to be the best you could be, to keep you alive. I’m sorry to have to put you all in this position. I know when you’re twelve, you feel like you’re pretty grown-up, leaving little kid stuff behind. But you’re far too young to be sent into a fight like this. I wish there were another way.”

  “Xavier,” Shay said. “It’s Culum’s fault we have to do this.”

  “You saved all our lives,” said Jackie.

  Paradoxically, Rogan’s irritation with the delay helped him push aside his fear of what lay ahead. “It’s like you said. There’s no time. So hit the switch, and let’s do this.”

  X nodded and smiled. It looked like something that he had been holding back for a long, long while. “Go get ’em, gamers.” He pressed the button and dizziness swept over them as the warehouse digi-blurred, to be replaced by the dark, red-lit confines of a semitrailer. They were all standing, and everyone staggered a bit as they adjusted to the transition.

  With X and several other members of Scorpion so familiar with Atomic Frontiers’ security procedures, and with the technical resources the rogue organization had at its disposal, it didn’t take long to program the Polyadaptive Nanotech Cloaks to disguise five vipers as high-level Atomic Frontiers security personnel, and to issue them forged identification cards.

  Moments later, all five of them climbed down from the back of the trailer in Washington, DC, looking like five guards in dark blue uniforms with the electron-over-the-globe-nucleus logo on the front shirt pocket.

  “I’ll never get used to that dizziness and digital dissolve.” Flyer spoke in a deep man’s voice. The others would not have known who she was if their HUDs had not projected her name in the air above her.

  They were on a street with a perfect view of the Capitol building, the White House, and the Washington Monument. Holographic maps floated in the lower left corner of their field of vision, showing the way to their destination, and the five of them set out walking, alone on the sidewalk except for a few early morning joggers, as the sun rose on a new day.

  “It’s weird speaking with someone else’s voice,” Tank said. The security guard he was disguised as spoke with one of those higher, flat, nasally voices. It was almost funny.

  “Weirder than our minds being in robot bodies?” Engineer asked.

  They talked like that, when they talked at all, until they neared the semitruck delivery gate to the supply storage yard at the back of the massive company headquarters.

  “OK, gamers,” X said on their channel. “Here we go. Your vipers are programmed to appear relaxed and comfortable so that you blend in and nobody suspects you, but your words can give you away, so you’ll want to keep the chatter on internal comms. Who wants to be first to test their identification card?”

  Engineer stepped up to the shack next to the gate and presented her fake ID to the guard in front of the service entrance. The man’s eyes were half-closed, and he barely looked at the person he was supposed to be scanning in, but made a pathetic, half-hearted show of holding the card up to compare its photo to the person before him. Then he swiped the card on a reader next to him and waited a moment. When a light flashed green, he handed the card back, grunted, and motioned Engineer through the gate, instantly holding out his hand for the next ID.

  “Easy so far,” Healer said internally.

  “Speak for yourself,” Tank said, struggling to step through the little gate sideways. His PNC might have made him appear as a slightly overweight security man, but no human being was as big as the Tank viper, and this gate was designed for people, not large advanced fighter robots. He saw the gate guard staring at him, confused, and worried about blowing his cover. “I, um …” Tank spoke out loud in his false voice. “I have this weird rash. On my inner thigh. So I have to walk funny or—”

  “Take it up with your supervisor,” said the gate guard. “I don’t want to hear about your personal problems.”

  When they’d all cleared security, they headed through a large paved lot where trucks could drop off deliveries at the five gates. Some materials were stacked on pallets at the edge of this yard under tarps. They followed their maps to a door near the semi docks.

  “You’re in a low-security area,” X told them. “Through the warehouses you should be able to access a level-one security computer terminal. Engineer, whatever else happens on this mission, you need to hack the Atomic Frontiers system and transmit that data to us so that we can get it out to the world.”

  “So in case we can’t stop Culum, others can take a crack at him?” Tank asked.

  “We’ll stop him,” said Engineer.

  “You make it sound so easy,” Flyer said. “If Culum and his people were able to fool all of us and our families, not to mention all this other stuff he’s done, and nobody else has caught onto him, you can bet this will be tough.”

  “At least our PNC disguises are holding up,” Rogan said as he spotted another of the dozens of security cameras they’d passed in the corridors so far.

  They reached a locked door, and Engineer quickly stepped up to go to work. To anyone watching, it appeared as if a security guard had plugged his finger into the lock, but the gamers knew Engineer was at work with one of her sophisticated lock-picking tools. In seconds, she had the door open, and they stepped into a nightmare.

  It was some kind of factory with large conveyor belts and overhead hooks on chains. Robot arms with welding torches, plasma cutters, rivet guns, and other complex tools stood by. The entire industrial system was inactive, dimly lit. And under the quarter lighting, in the shadows cast by the manufacturing equipment, stood a small army of laser viper advanced combat robots.

  The gamers saw them as soon as they entered, and immediately raised their arms, ready to drop their PNC disguises to fire. But the robots didn’t move. The readouts on the gamers’ HUDs showed negligible power readings.

  “It’s OK.” Engineer stepped up to the long line of Engineer mods. “They’re all inactive.”

  “Waiting for operators?” Healer asked.

  “X,” Rogan said. “Are you getting all this?”

  Five lines, one for each mod, stood ten vipers deep. Fifty laser vipers and a factory to manufacture more. It was creepy walking in front of those still robots, like watching a giant formation of mummies. Mummies with enough firepower to level the whole city.

  “Yeah,” X said. “We’re reading you. Recording it all. You’re in one of the secret areas of headquarters, a section where even insiders like me were not allowed. Now I see why.”

  The gamers walked down the aisle among the statuesque robots.

  “Why build all these?” Flyer asked out loud. “What’s Culum going to do, host ten more fake video game tournaments?”

  “Maybe he wants an army?” Engineer stuck with internal comms. “Fifty laser vipers would be enough to take over a small country. Scanning this factory, it looks fully automated. But why build so few?”

  X answered. “Laser vipers are hard to make. The materials are expensive and the process is complex, even when they’re being built by machines.”

  “And we don’t know how long Atomic Frontiers have been building these,” Healer said. “Maybe they only started recently.”

  “OK, but then why shut it all down?” Engineer asked. “Why is all of this inactive?” Even as she spoke, she didn’t notice the twitch in the finger of the tank next to her, the slight movement of a ranger’s head.

  Flyer raised the alarm first, just as Rogan, leading the line of gamers, reached the far end of the viper formation. “Wait a sec. Did that thing move?” She pointed at a flyer mod. “I swear it totally moved its arm.”

  “Stick to internal comms,” Rogan said. “We don’t want to let them know we’re here.”

  The V lines fla
shed to life in the faceplates of all fifty laser vipers. Unlike the different colors in each gamer’s viper, all of these robots glowed red. The ten flyers launched up into the air and slammed down onto the concrete floor ahead of them.

  “Too late,” Engineer said out loud. “They know we’re here.”

  A tank next to Rogan swung its massive arm and bashed him in the face, knocking him off his feet.

  “Drop the cloaks!” Flyer yelled, her digital disguise melting away. “Shoot ’em!”

  Tank ducked two laser shots from a couple of rangers as his PNC shut down and his weapons came online. He threw back his massive elbow to knock an engineer away and then held up both arms to blast full CHELs and plasma cannons straight through the chests of two healers, leaving only the scraps of their arms and legs. “Oh yeah! Let’s tear ’em up!”

  Shaylyn was up in the air fast and dodging a storm of NLEPs from the other flyers who soared up to meet her. One punched her head. Another planted a fast flying kick to her chest. “Too many of them!” Flyer shouted to the others.

  Three tanks unleashed a fierce laser storm straight at Takashi. The enemy fire would have destroyed him, but the Healer thought fast and pulled an enemy engineer in front of him as a shield. He shoved a ranger into harm’s way next. Both enemy vipers were destroyed.

  Rogan cursed at himself for leading his team right into the middle of such an obvious trap. He fired a DEMP at an enemy tank, but only knocked it back. Trying to help Shay, he blasted both CHELs at flyers, which dodged out of the way. Two rangers stepped to either side of him, claws drawn. Sparks flew from his armor as they slashed at him. He accessed his combat programs and whipped out a side kick, knocking one back. He was about to shoot the other when a third ranger’s grappling cable grabbed his arm and yanked him back.

  Enemy tanks and rangers blasted Beckett from all directions, firing and moving too fast for him to adapt. “You guys, I’m in trouble! Who’s controlling these things anyway?”