The Deadliest Game nfe-2 Read online

  Raist stood there fidgeting, silent. After a moment, Elblai nodded at him. “Go on, then. Be careful on the road. There are a lot of wolves running loose around here at the moment….”

  Raist bowed hurriedly and left, his footsteps echoing down the stairs.

  Elblai sat quietly in the still room. After a moment there were more footsteps on the stairs, and a young blond woman in a long simple blue robe appeared on the landing. “Aunt El?” she called.

  “Over here, honey.”

  Aunt? Leif thought.

  The young woman came in. “So?” she said.

  Elblai sighed and leaned the sword against the arm of her chair. “He’s going to attack,” she said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  Elblai got up and stretched. “I’m going to run him and his troops right into the ground,” she said. “I don’t see that I’m going to have much choice, if I’m to sustain my position. As for him, I’d prefer to avoid the killing, but he hasn’t got the brains Rod gave bluepoint oysters, and he will insist on doing the showy thing. Won’t help him, not this time.”

  The young woman sighed, almost exactly the sound her aunt had made. “All right,” she said. “I’ll talk to the other captains and update them, and we’ll send out messengers to the reinforcements.”

  “Do that. Tell them I think Argath will try to scrape together some more troops from the tributary kingdoms. I don’t think he can find many more than a couple thousand extra, though, not at this short notice. We’re still going to outnumber him three to one — which is just the way I like it. Never had time for these even-steven death-or-glory stands myself.” She snorted — a sound Leif had heard from his own grandmother occasionally, so that he smiled. “Let’s get that seen to…and then go down and have some dinner before everybody eats it all.”

  They went out.

  Once again, Leif relaxed the invisibility spells. To their relief, the buzzing in their ears subsided.

  Leif glanced sidewise at Megan.

  “We’ve got a big problem,” Megan whispered.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Keep your voice down. Weren’t you listening? She’s going to take Argath,” Megan said. “That makes her a prime target for being bounced.”

  Leif looked at her cockeyed. “Wait a minute. You were the one who was going on before about not theorizing without data. We don’t have any more data than we did before…except some about an attack that’s about to happen.”

  “Sure…but you heard it, Leif! She’s got Argath outnumbered three to one. She’s going to cream him. And it’s people who’ve creamed him in the past who’ve gotten bounced.”

  “Listen, I hope she does cream him,” Leif whispered. “He’s not exactly an example of high Sarxonian moral standards, is he? And besides, if his character gets killed and people still get bounced, then maybe we have some evidence that it’s not him doing it.”

  Megan stared at him. “That would be as circumstantial as what we’ve got now,” she said. “Leif, if Elblai is going to be attacked somehow and we suspect it, we’ve got to go out on a limb a little and let her know about it! She’s got a tremendous character running here — it wouldn’t be fair to let her be bounced just for the sake of tempting the ‘bouncer’ out into the open. She’s got to take some precautions.”

  “If we do warn her,” Leif said, “it could warn off Argath, or whoever’s responsible for these bounces. And we’ll lose a chance to find out who he or she is.”

  Megan clutched her head. “I can’t believe we’re having this argument. You can’t just use another player as bait!”

  “Megan, think straight for a moment! Warn her how? We don’t know who she is in real life, and we’re not going to find out. What about the confidentiality rules? If she’s secret, and chooses to be, there’s no way we can find her.”

  “If we got hold of the gamesmaster,” Megan said, “through Net Force—”

  “Sure. Ask them to break confidentiality on a suspicion? No way they’ll do it. Even if we could talk them into it, it would take too long to do any good.”

  “We’ll have to go warn her now, then,” Megan said.

  Leif looked at her for a long moment. Then, rather reluctantly, he said, “All right. You saw her device — that basilisk. There were a few of her people downstairs wearing it. Let’s go down and introduce ourselves…come out in the open about it.”

  “Right.”

  Leif let go of the invisibility, relieved that he didn’t have to hold it anymore, and they went back downstairs again. In the great hall, they looked around, but there was no sign of Elblai herself.

  “There are some little private rooms off the sides,” Leif said. “She might be in one of those—”

  “No,” Megan said. “They’d be guarded. But look there.”

  It was the young woman whom they had seen with Elblai earlier. Over her plain blue robe she had thrown a darker one, with the rampant basilisk badge of Elblai’s people on it. She was looking thoughtfully around the room at the nobles and warriors as they ate and drank and talked.

  Megan and Leif went over to her, causing some interest and amusement among the assembled nobles as they took in the sight of the somewhat oddly dressed party crashers. “Excuse me,” Leif said to the young blond woman, and bowed slightly. “If, as I think, you are with the noble Lady Elblai—”

  “If you’re looking for an audience,” said the woman, eyeing him with an interested expression, “I’m afraid she is not available tonight.”

  “Not an audience,” Megan said softly. “A warning.”

  The woman put her eyebrows up. “Of what?”

  “Argath,” Leif said.

  The woman’s expression became much more guarded.

  “If, as rumor has it, your lady is contemplating an attack on Argath’s forces,” Leif said, “we must warn her that something…unfortunate…might befall her afterwards. People who have beaten Argath in battle recently have been coming to harm…as we see from this gathering tonight.”

  The expression on the face of Elblai’s niece began to get downright chilly. “An interesting warning,” she said. “Who sent you?”

  Leif opened his mouth, closed it again.

  “One might think that such a warning would be to Argath’s advantage,” the young woman said, “if indeed any such attack were in prospect.”

  “No one has sent us,” Megan said. “We’re working independently…and we mean your aunt, the Lady Elblai, nothing but good.”

  The young woman’s eyes widened just a very little, then hardened down again. “That relationship is not widely known,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Uh,” Megan said.

  “We’re investigating the ‘bounces,’” Leif said, and Megan felt a sudden rush of relief that he hadn’t added “for Net Force.” That would have been going a little too far. “We’re afraid that your aunt is in danger of becoming a ‘bouncee’ if she keeps going the way she’s going.”

  “Oh? And which way would that be?”

  How do I put this the most diplomatically? Leif thought, wondering how his father would phrase this. Probably pretty elliptically. “If Lillan and Gugliem and Menel—” Leif began.

  The young woman’s eyes narrowed right down. “One does not normally speak of — external things,” she said, “to people one doesn’t know, and whose bona fides can’t be guaranteed.” Her expression was quite chilly now. “I think I must ask you to leave.”

  “Please — just let us have a word with Lady Elblai.”

  “That is impossible. She has been called away on business: which perhaps is fortunate.”

  “Look, it’s really important,” Megan said.

  “Perhaps it is to you,” said the young woman coolly. “I would take your warning more kindly if it did not seem obvious that you, or someone connected with you, had recently been spying on us. Spies’ advice has two edges, they say, and it’s my business to protect my aunt against those who
would do her harm.”

  “But that’s what we’re trying to—”

  “Good night,” the young woman said firmly. “Leave right now…before I have you removed.”

  They looked at her, then headed for the door.

  Leif looked over his shoulder at the woman one last time as they headed out. Elblai’s niece had beckoned over someone else wearing her aunt’s badge, a tall balding man, and was now whispering urgently in his ear. He looked after Leif and Megan, and then left the great hall hurriedly, out one of the side exits. Megan and Leif were still standing out in the roil and turmoil of the town’s main square when a rider went by them at some speed — and then simply vanished with a clap of displaced air.

  “Great,” Leif muttered. “Now there’s no way to tell where she’s gone off to.”

  “I’m getting a very bad feeling about this,” Megan said. “I think this business with Argath has just heated up somehow. Otherwise, why would he be gone, too?”

  Leif shook his head. “Well,” he said, “at least we tried.”

  “Trying doesn’t get the job done,” Megan said gloomily. “Doing it does.”

  Leif looked at her wryly as they walked through the square. “Ah, the classics again,” he said. “Emerson? Ellison?”

  “My mom,” Megan said. “Come on…let’s get out of here. We need to think, and as much as I hate to say it, I always think best off-line.”

  They logged out of the game and went off to Leif’s workspace. It was something Megan had only seen in pictures, a stave-house in the old Icelandic style, completely covered with shake shingles, its steep gables sporting elaborately carved dragon-heads. Inside, the place was very clean and plain, done in a high-tech version of New Danish Modern, the big polarized windows looking out on a landscape of green rolling fields overarched by a high, pale blue sky.

  Megan wasn’t in much of a mood to enjoy the surroundings or the scenery. She and Leif argued for about an hour over what they’d done and how they could have done it better. At least, it turned into an argument, though that hadn’t been her original intention.

  “I’m not sure how we could have done it better, frankly,” Leif said. “It was a fact-finding mission. Fine. We found facts. And pretty good ones, too.”

  “Yeah…but Leif, we’re not going to be able to find out anything fast enough to do us any good! I can’t get rid of the feeling that we should have gone about this in a more structured way.”

  “Oh? And how long have you had this feeling? I don’t think you had it before we left.”

  “Whatever. I have it now. And I’m worried about those other two Elblai mentioned, too. Fettick and Morn.” Megan was pacing up and down, shaking her head. “Supposing that Argath manages to walk away from this fight that’s coming — which he might manage to do; he’s got a pretty good record of escaping from trouble even when his whole army gets massacred — and then he decides to come down on them? From what Elblai said, they’re going to be in a position to beat him as well…and that’s going to make them potential ‘bouncees.’”

  “It will,” Leif said, “if we’re not running down a blind alley with this whole line of reasoning to start with.”

  “If you’ve got anything better,” Megan said, “I’d really like to hear it.”

  Leif sat down on a severely plain couch and ran his fingers through that red hair in a gesture that said he didn’t have anything else at all. “Look,” he said, “let’s take a break from this, huh? We’re just spinning our wheels.”

  Megan sighed and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Look, when should we meet again?”

  “Maybe tomorrow night?” Leif said.

  “Can’t,” Megan said. “Tomorrow night’s a family night at our place. I don’t game then. I get to watch my brothers sit and eat us out of house and home. The night after?”

  “You’re on.”

  Megan prepared to tell her implant to exit. “Look,” she said. “Sorry I yelled at you.”

  “No, you’re not,” Leif said, and grinned, though the grin was crooked.

  “All right. I’m not. But you were right anyway. We did the best we could, to start with.”

  Leif stuck one finger in his ear as if to clean it. “Must be how long I had to hold that invisibility spell,” he said. “I could have sworn you said I was right.”

  “I’ll say something else in a moment,” Megan said. “And in English. See you the night after next.”

  Leif waved at her as she vanished.

  Megan blinked and found herself sitting in the chair in the office. The lights in the room were way down. She glanced over at the clock. It was very late, for a school night anyway. Fortunately she had taken care of her schoolwork before she ducked into Sarxos to meet Leif. All I need is Mom on my case as well….

  She got out of the chair stiffly. I’ve really got to have another word with the move-your-muscles program. I feel like I’ve been in the same spot for hours. Quietly she moved around the downstairs office, shutting off the parts of the computer that got turned off at night, and paused by the desk, where someone had, for a change, thoughtfully pushed some piled-up books out of the way of the optical implant pickup. Dining with William Shakespeare. Understanding Chaos Futures. War in 2080. The Knight, Death, and the Devil.

  What is he researching? Megan thought, yawned, and went off to bed.

  She came down early the next morning to find her father sitting at the kitchen table and staring at the stereo-video window hanging on the kitchen wall with a rather concerned expression. “Isn’t this something you do in your off hours?” he said, pointing at the window.

  Megan, who was in the act of struggling to pull a sweater on over her shirt, finally got it pulled down into place and stared at the window. It showed the Sarxos logo, and behind that, stereo footage of a stretcher being hovered out of a flyer ambulance into an emergency room by paramedics in the usual rescue-orange coveralls with the blue LifeStar on the backs. “—assault was said by the woman’s niece, a fellow Sarxos player, to possibly be related to a feud or vendetta attributable to some other gameplayer. Ellen Richardson, who plays in the popular Sarxos virtual-reality role-playing game under the nickname Elblai, was on her way to her job at the post office in Bloomington, Illinois, when a hit-and-run driver forced her vehicle off the road and caused her to crash into a utility pole. She was taken to Mercy Downtown Hospital, where she is reported to be in a coma. Her condition is described as ‘critical but stable.’”

  The view changed to that of a woman in a lab coat reading from a prepared statement. “The patient is not responding to stimuli at this time, but she has been scheduled for surgery at the earliest opportunity, and doctors presently give her a seventy-thirty chance of—”

  “OhmiGod,” Megan said softly.

  “You didn’t know her, did you?” her father said.

  She shook her head, unable to look away from the stereo window, now filled with the face of the young blond-haired woman to whom she had been speaking not eight or nine hours ago. It was streaked with tears, and contorted with barely controlled rage. “We received a warning,” she was saying, “that if my aunt continued a certain line of action she was taking in the game, something unspecified but unpleasant might happen to her. My aunt discounted this warning. You hear a lot of this kind of thing during the course of gameplay, people trying to bluff you out of their path. No one had any idea that someone would—”

  She choked with tears, turned away from the camera, waving it away with one hand.

  Megan stood there, going hot and cold with terror.

  We were too late. Too late.

  What if—

  — oh, no, what if somebody thinks that we—

  She ran for the computer to call James Winters.

  3

  When she caught him in his office, the blinds were drawn, and Winters was gazing down thoughtfully at an audiostereo information pad on his desk. “Yes,” he said, not looking up for the moment, “I thought I’d hear from you sh
ortly. How much do you know about what’s happened?”

  “I heard about the lady in Bloomington,” Megan said. “Mr. Winters, I feel so terrible — we were with her just last night—”

  “So Leif told me,” Winters said. “She didn’t know you were there, though.”

  “No.”

  “Tell me something,” Winters said, and then held up a hand. “No, wait a moment. Before we go on to that…” He glanced down at the pad again. “I’ve got a note here from the hospital at Bloomington. She’s going into surgery now. Most of her injuries aren’t too serious. It’s the usual problem with brain trauma, though. You can’t tell how bad it is until the brain’s had time to ‘register’ the injury and react to it. She apparently has a case of what they call ‘contrecoup,’ where the brain hits the inside of the skull and bruises with the impact. If they can get the swelling to go down in time…she’ll be all right. At least it doesn’t seem as if she’s in any imminent danger of dying.”

  “Oh, God,” Megan said, “we should have tried harder, we should have found some way to warn her anyway, we should have—”

  “Yes,” Winters said, only a little dryly, “hindsight does tend to be twenty-twenty. But in this case, you need to step back from the events a little bit and see if your judgment’s being clouded by what’s happened. I’ll admit, it’s shocking.”

  He sighed, and pushed the pad away. “In any case, I want you to step right back from this whole business and let us handle it now. When it’s just machinery involved, burglary, destruction of property, that’s one thing. But when assault starts coming into it — in this case, vehicular assault with a deadly weapon — that’s when it becomes no longer merely Explorer business. I value anything you can tell me, though, about your own suspicions.”

  “Suspicions are all we’ve got,” Megan said. “But I can’t get rid of the idea that they would have been enough to save her.”