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  The Deadliest Game

  ( Net Force Explorers - 2 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Diane Duane

  In the future, computers rule the world. The Net Force was formed to protect America from any and all criminal activity on-line. But there is a group of teenage whiz kids who sometines know more about computers than their adult superiors. They are the Net Force Explorers. They go where no one else can go. And they fight crime like no one else in the world…

  The virtual Dominion of Sarxos is the most popular wargame on the Net. Thousands flock nightly to log on and lead their fantasy armies into battle. But something sinister is going on.

  Some players' computers are destroyed by burglars. Another player is attacked and beaten. One thing is certain — someone in the Dominion of Sarxos is taking the game very seriously.

  Net Force Explorers Megan O'Malley and Leif Anderson are asked to investigate. They play the game. They know the world. But nothing can prepare them for the danger when the real game begins…

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Diane Duane

  The Deadliest Game

  PROLOGUE

  WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 2025

  It was the kind of windowless room found in any one of a thousand office buildings nowadays, since the world had become truly virtual and any wall could become a window at the will of the inhabitants. However, the inhabitants of this particular room seemed unwilling to indulge in even the illusion of windowing; or perhaps what they disliked was the basic implication of a window, that someone might be able to see in as well as out. The walls were blind and bare, though they glowed softly white, shedding a cool, even light over the large, shiny black table in the middle of the room, and over the five men sitting at one end of it.

  They were Suits. Some of their lapels or ties were marginally more slender than others, or wider, but only those slight clues to their ages or preferences in fashion made them look at all different from one another. Otherwise, their ties were all subdued, and their shirts were plain white or pale colors, no prints. In nearly all ways they were unremarkable-looking men, and wore that unremarkableness like a disguise.

  It was one.

  “So when will it be ready?” said the one who sat at the center of the group.

  “It’s ready now,” said the man sitting furthest from him on his left, a youngish-looking man with iron-colored hair and iron-gray eyes. “The controls have been in place for eighteen months now, consolidating their positions and getting ready to go into maximal intervention mode.”

  “And no one suspects?”

  “No one. We’ve had zero tolerance for leaks…not that it would have been that much of a problem had there been one. The environment is so intrinsically chaotic that you could drop a tactical nuke in it and get a lot of hair-tearing and recriminations, but absolutely no profitable analysis.” The youngish man laughed a scornful one-breath laugh. “No one there is interested in analysis anyway. The context is completely devoted to raw sensation and ‘experience.’ Even when the program starts running, no one will have the slightest idea what’s going on until everything’s over and it’s much too late.”

  The man in the center turned to one of the two on his right, an older man with a deeply lined face and shaggy blond hair going silver. “What about the people at Ecs? Are they set?”

  The man with the silver-gilt hair nodded. “They had the point of maximum economic result picked several months ago. All the projections have matched real-world outcomes…if ‘real’ is the word we’re looking for. We can move the world, all right. The lever’s ready. All we need to do now is pick the place to stand.”

  The man in the center nodded. “All right. Your two sections will need to work very closely together on this, but you have been anyway. Make sure you pick the right ‘spot’…and when you start to push, don’t spare the effort. I want the whole thing overturned. A lot of people are watching this demonstration, and they’ll expect to see something spectacular for all the funds they’ve diverted. Excuse me. I mean ‘laterally invested’”—the others smiled—“toward setting up the best possible result. Make absolutely certain the endgame position matches the modeling. I don’t want any bull afterwards about ‘equivocal results.’”

  The two men to whom he had spoken nodded.

  “All right,” said the man in the center. “Lunch with the people from Tokagawa is at one-thirty. Don’t be late. We want to make a unified presentation, and you know what a stickler that miserable little old man is for manners.”

  “If this works out,” said one of the men to whom he had not spoken, “we won’t need to mind our manners much longer. He’ll be the one who’ll have to be looking over his shoulder.”

  The man in the center looked at him: a slow, deliberate turn of the head, like a targeting mechanism turning on gimbals and locking on.

  “If?” he said.

  The other man went slightly pale, and glanced down at the table.

  The man in the center held the look for a few seconds more, then stood. The others stood with him. “The car will be here at five after one,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  The man who had gone pale was first out of the room, closely followed by the only one who had not spoken. The young iron-haired man glanced at the man in the center, then followed the others out. The door shut.

  Then the man in the middle chuckled softly. “A nuke, huh?” he said. “It might be funny.”

  The man with the silver-gilt hair produced a slightly sardonic expression, and turned to follow in the wake of the others. “Well,” he said, “frankly, I don’t know if I’d bother. They’d probably just think it was magic….”

  1

  FORDS OF ARTEL, TALAIRN, VIRTUAL DOMINION OF SARXOS:

  GREENMONTH 13, YEAR OF THE DRAGON-IN-THE-RAIN

  The place smelled like a breakdown at a sewage treatment facility. That was what Shel noticed most as he pushed aside the tent’s door-flap and gazed out into the fading sunset light.

  He looked out wearily over the russet-lit, shadow-streaked vista of pine woods and sloping fields and river-banks that had become, at about noon today, a battlefield. Then, for a few magic minutes, it had been exactly what one’s dreams of such a place would be at their best: the armies drawn up in their serried ranks, spears glinting and banners snapping bright in the brisk wind and the sun, and the trumpets shouting brazen defiance across the river that had been the boundary between their two forces, his and Delmond’s. Delmond had come marching down the road to the river with his two thousand horse and three thousand foot, and had sent his herald Azure Alaunt over the water with the usual defiance, or rather the defiance that had become typical of Delmond as he pushed his way across Sarxos’s lesser kingdoms. There were none of the courtesies that one opposing commander usually paid the other — no offer of single combat to spare the armies the bloodshed that must follow; not even the commonplace and pragmatic suggestion that the two armies’ quartermasters meet to investigate the possibility of one side buying out the contracts of the other army’s mercenaries, a move that would often render a battle unnecessary if, as a result, the strength of one side suddenly doubled and the other’s was halved. No, Delmond wanted to take Shel’s little land of Telairn on the other side of the Artel; and more, he wanted a fight — wanted the smell of blood in the afternoon, and the sound of trumpets.

  So Shel let him have it.

  There was no use pretending it hadn’t been satisfying. Delmond’s tactics had been positively insulting — no scouts, no attempt to reconnoiter or secure the battle site ahead of time. He’d simply marched right up the North Road to the River Art
el as if there had been nothing to fear, and after that brief pause to issue formal defiance to the troops drawn up on the other side, Delmond had forded the Artel at the head of his forces, heading straight up the gentle grassy rise on the far side of the river as if there was absolutely no cause to be concerned about attacking uphill, and into cavalry already emplaced.

  Delmond was heading for Minsar, the little city about two miles up the road from the fords of the Artel. He had apparently decided that the mixed force of five hundred cavalry and two thousand foot that Shel had positioned between the river and the road to Minsar was an obstacle easily to be swept aside; more so because, to judge by the lack of command pennons on the great-banner of the Telairn forces, Shel was apparently not with them.

  But the Artel was an old river, winding and deeply oxbowed among the gentle pine-clad hills through which it meandered. Those hills held many secrets for the knowledgeable wanderer. Many little tracks and hidden roads, hunter’s paths and game paths, wound among and over them as the river wound around…and the paths and tracks were all quite hidden under the thick boughs of the towering pines and firs. The ground under those big old trees was cushioned deep with old dry needles that would muffle the sound of anything that moved.

  So it was that, when Delmond’s forces were halfway across the river — the cavalry first, the foot following, and the cavalry beginning almost casually to engage the Talairn cavalry uphill — they had been taken completely by surprise as Shel and eight hundred of his picked horsemen came plunging down from the surrounding hills on both sides of the river and hit both Delmond’s horse and foot in their flanks.

  Delmond’s cavalry, boxed in on the Minsar side of the river or still trying to flounder their way out of the water, was driven down into the mud and reeds and sedges to either side of the ford, and slaughtered there by Shel’s halberd-armed foot. Delmond’s infantry, predictably and sensibly, tried to run away, but there wasn’t much of anywhere for them to run to. The Talairn cavalry, with Shel leading one of the four forces that had come plunging down from the shelter of the pines, surrounded them and began chopping them down like some bloody harvest. Within a very short time, the battle was over.

  Put like that, it sounded simple, but there had been nothing simple about it. Any true account of the battle would have to include the hours and hours, starting before dawn that morning, that Shel had spent getting his mounted troops in place up on the hills, every move being made in strictly enforced silence while he prayed that the early mist off the river would not lift until all his people were under cover. Mention would have to be made of the dead chill under the pines, early on, in which breath smoked and teeth chattered — followed in only a couple of hours by the stifling heat of an unseasonably warm, breathless spring day: the bug bites, the maddening itch of pine needles down Shel’s tunic and under his chain mail as he crept from position to position, making sure his people were where they needed to be, cheering them up with a well-placed word of encouragement here and there, when it was he who needed the encouragement, but dared not show it.

  The description would have to include the lance of pure fear that struck straight through him as he heard the sassy brass challenge of Delmond’s trumpets coming down the road on the far side of the river, approaching the ford. Anticipation mixed with utter dread that even now Delmond might think to send some scouts up into the pines — but then came the flush of combined relief and absolute rage as Delmond did no such thing. Thank Rod for small favors, Shel thought, and a second later, furious; What the hell kind of general does he take me for? I’ll show the sonofa—

  And then one last dreadful thrill of fear as Delmond’s forces forded the river, still playing their blasted trumpets—What do they think this is, a Memorial Day parade?…We’ll see who needs a memorial in a couple of hours! — and made their way up the far side of the ford, toward his troops, waiting there: his troops, under his eager young lieutenant Alla, who had no orders except, “Don’t let them past! Hang on!”

  They hung on. It was very close. They’d had to stay there without relief and fight on their own, long enough to make sure that Delmond’s whole cavalry force took the bait and crossed the river to the unfavorable uphill ground. If any of them had lingered on the far bank of the river, all Shel’s carefully planned tactics would have gone straight to hell. But his enemy’s fighting psychology was all too plain at this point. A few victories against careless or unlucky adversaries had convinced Delmond of his skill as a strategist and tactician, though Shel knew Delmond had little real skill in either art. All it needed now was the obvious opening, for a seemingly easy win, to tempt Delmond into the obvious move. Delmond took it…and even then Shel had had to suffer through many minutes of torment and uncertainty yet while his little force on the far side of the river stood their ground and met Delmond’s first charge—

  Then, along with his picked horsemen, then Shel had been able to vault into the saddle and blow his horn for the signal to charge, and had led his riders whooping down the hillsides in a crash of hooves and dislodged stones, taking Delmond’s infantry at open shields from left and right, and his split cavalry force from behind and both sides. The cry of “To Shel! To Shel!” had gone up from his forces on the Minsar side of the river, their desperation turned to rage and triumph in a moment, and they began cutting their way toward him as he and his horsemen cut toward them.

  The worst of it had really been over about half an hour later, though the cleanup, as usual, took until sunset…not that anything was much cleaner at the end of it all. Survivors were herded together and disarmed, as many of them as could be found. Wounded fighters had to be picked up and brought in; the ransomable, those of them who could be located after attempting to make themselves unrecognizable, had to be separated out, their worth determined, sureties taken from them and parole given. Shel had had to supervise it all, getting tireder and tireder by the moment.

  And now it was all finished, except for the most important part, the reason the whole battle had happened in the first place: dealing with Delmond. Shel had truly not thought this far ahead, and he was still surprised that Delmond had fallen for his tactics at all. But then the Swiss had been surprised, too, when the Austrians had fallen for a variation on this theme at Morgarten. Delmond had never been much of a reader, though, and was therefore condemned to repeat the great military mistakes of earlier centuries. Shel, for his own part, thought it served Delmond right.

  Outside, the trumpets were blowing a tired version of the recheat, signaling that pickup had been made on all the wounded, and it was now safe for noncombatants, the husbands and wives of the fallen who might have been following either force, to reclaim the bodies of their relatives. Shel took one last look at the battlefield, which was becoming more and more deeply drowned in rose-tinged, foggy shadow as the mist rose off the River Artel and crept over the ground, mercifully hiding what still lay there. After a moment he let the tent-flap fall, and went to sit down in the camp chair by his map table, letting out a long weary breath.

  When he had fought his first battle in Sarxos, a few years ago, Shel had come equipped with the usual images of how the aftermath of a mighty battle ought to look: his standard flying bravely over the stricken field, and the standard of his enemy thrown down in the dust. Now, with a little more experience behind him, numerous battles lost and won, he knew that there was precious little dust to be found on one of these battlefields. This morning, in the sunshine, the slight slope leading up from the fords had been a great sheep-cropped expanse of green grass, all speckled with white daisies and the small yellow blossoms of nevermind. Now, after the trampling of twenty thousand hooves and ten thousand feet, it was mud. Red mud — it stuck to your boots with horrible tenacity. His enemy’s standard, trampled well into it, would now be just one more sodden rag, indistinguishable from anybody’s collapsed tent, or from some petty noble’s surcoat flung off to keep its owner from being captured and held for a fat ransom.

  As for the stricke
n field, it was Shel who always felt stricken, the next morning, at the smell. Nor was it any wonder that the husbands and wives and other relatives of the fallen always showed up as soon as the battle was over, or anytime well before dawn, to ask permission to search for the bodies of their loved ones. They knew, from too much painful experience, what the place would smell like once the sun was up and had had a chance to warm things.

  Shel intended to be well away from here by then. His tent was already unable to keep out the battlefield stink of stamped-out guts — or of guts not lost, but just loose, the results of many a brave young warrior’s first encounter with the battlefield. War is hell, went the saying. But at the moment, Shel felt more inclined to substitute another four-letter word for “hell.” Certainly he would have preferred the smell of brimstone to the aroma most prevalent just now.

  “It’s only a game,” he told himself…and then made a face. The game’s creator, a careful and thorough craftsman, had done his job too well for such bland assurances to make a difference. No action was permitted to evade its consequences. The air should have been sweet with the oncoming evening, and wasn’t. There would of course be a great celebration of Shel’s victory later, when he got back to Minsar, a mighty meeting to congratulate the heroes who had contributed to the win, and there the banners would fly and the trumpets would sing, and the bards would chant their praises…but not here. This place could be cleaned up by no lesser force than Nature, and even she would take some months about it. Even after the grass was green again and the daisies bloomed, the sheep that grazed these pastures would be working around swords and arrowheads and the stained bones of skulls for quite a few years.

  At least the grass would be of high quality, and lush, come the later summer. Blood was an extraordinary fertilizer….