“That was this kid.” Had Arnie really not learned Nathan’s name yet? Even though they were champions together? The camera turned in the direction Arnie had gestured.
“Oh, well, it’s, like, the anarchist tank. You know, something different.” It must have been that Nathan was feeling shy under the scrutiny of the newscast. He was not usually so inarticulate, and I winced on his behalf.
“Yeah.” Milan leaned forward again to get the camera’s attention. “As I said before the race, this win is for all the anarcho-punks out there. We were the rebel entry, and we kicked ass!”
“Well, congratulations again on a most remarkable win. I think the Grand Vizier would now like to bestow your prize cards upon you.”
The cameras panned back to show a podium that had been set up in front of the grandstand, with corporate sponsorship signs all over it. The new Grand Vizier was there, looking small and delicate against the vast scale of the spaceport and grandstand. As the cameras zoomed toward him over the heads of the crowd, he began to take on a more appropriately dignified and solid appearance. Something about the scene did not seem quite right. I quickly searched through the many other casts that were being sent by the flying cameras. A shudder caressed the inside of my skull, and I understood what was troubling me. Police were moving into certain definite positions. They were stationing themselves to prevent us from leaving.
“Come in, Athena.”
“Hey, Ghost, what’s up? How does the cast look?” She was still wearing her coms, as we had agreed.
“Get back to the tank right now. The police are going to swoop.”
On the newscast I saw her grab Nath and Milan by the arm. Milan shrugged her off angrily at first, and they were arguing. Arnie was bewildered. They started running away, back down the carpeting laid out for the winners. Left behind, Arnie watched them for a moment, expressionless, and then turned to continue his walk up to the podium.
How hard could it be to drive a tank? I sat in Arnie’s chair and found the ignition for the motor unit; it started with no bother. Then I grabbed the handles that were a larger version of the joysticks that guided the Streamers. By pushing one forward and pulling the other back, I spun the tank, surprising nearby boarders and spectators who jumped away from the squeals and grumbles of the machine.
With a thud, Milan slid in through the turret hatch. A moment later, Athena and Nathan were in, too, and I immediately sent us scurrying forward, heading out of the spaceport in the direction of the wide road that was used at the start of the aircar race.
Sirens began to blare. That was just as well; it helped clear the spectators.
“What’s up?” asked Milan. “I was looking forward to that.”
“The police were closing in.”
“They still are.” Athena was strapping herself into the command seat, already calling up information on her own unrolled computer.
“What’s the plan, Ghost?” asked Nathan.
“Shoot our way out.”
“Confirm that, please. Shoot the police?” Nathan sounded anxious.
“Confirm. It’s that or jail for us.”
“Here we go again.” Milan turned his targeting on and swiveled the turret so that it pointed back behind us. “I have three cars incoming; fire at will?”
“Take the left two; Nath, take the right.” It was reassuring to hear Athena in command of our tactics again.
They were police aircars and much faster than ours. On the other hand, they weren’t armed with cannons. With an uninterrupted series of coughs, green and pink bolts of energy spat out of our weapons. The police cars had shields like race shields except they showed only when our cannon fire splashed across them. They rushed ahead of us, blocking our path.
I already had the accelerator down full, and it wasn’t going to ease up one bit.
“Brace for impact!” shouted Athena.
“Not again,” Nathan said with a sigh.
With a crash of shrieking metal and a shudder, we were through, a scattering of detritus and three spinning aircars in our wake.
“Helicopter!” Athena alerted us. I glanced at the view she was using. From behind the grandstand rose a powerful blue helicopter, propellers front and back. It swung around in an impressively tight arc and accelerated after us.
“Shoot?” queried Milan.
“Shoot!” I shouted back, desperate to get us to some cover but seeing nothing suitable.
“But if we take out their power, they’ll probably all die in the crash,” Nathan pointed out.
“Tough,” I answered.
“I dunno, Ghost. That’s gonna really get us in deep trouble.” Even Milan had his limits. Didn’t he have a terrible scream welling up inside him, the animal fear of capture that so terrified me?
“Shoot! How much more trouble can we be in?”
“A lot more.” Milan would not fire; his cannon was silent.
“Bike!” called Athena, cutting across the discussion. Emerging from the crowds was a black airbike, blasting across the plaza like a bolt of energy from our cannons. It was wider than a street bike, with a sleek curved windscreen covering the driver.
“Shoot?” wondered Milan aloud.
“Same problem,” answered Nathan.
A beeping sound.
“What’s that?” asked Milan in alarm.
“We’ve been targeted by the helicopter. Ghost, get us out of line of sight.” There was a slight tremble in Athena’s normally composed voice.
The problem was we were on an exposed flyover, about twenty meters above the roads below us. There was nowhere to turn off for at least a mile.
“It’s them or us.
Please
open fire, team.” I put all the urgency of the situation into the word “please.”
Even before I had finished speaking, the helicopter had exploded spectacularly, molten debris screaming past us and also thumping into the back of the tank. The dark airbike was ahead of us already, steering through the wreckage, its helmeted driver gesturing with his arm for me to follow him.
“Well, that solves that.” I spoke into a stunned silence, so relieved that I didn’t care that the occupants of the vehicle must have died in the explosion.
“How?” Eventually Milan managed one word.
“The bike. A missile from underneath,” explained Athena.
“Should we follow him?” I asked.
No one answered, so I did.
Whoever it was knew the City. We turned off the road at the first opportunity, and he led us through the warehouses and factories of the spaceport district, as fast as our squealing tracks would take us. There was no sign of pursuit, or of any people on the street. This area tended to be deserted outside working days. But still, a red-and-black tank is not very inconspicuous; sooner or later, a security guard at a factory or someone working unusual shifts would call in a sighting to the police. The airbike came to an old set of raised barriers where a disused railway track crossed the road. He turned left, off the road, his cushion of anti-gravity allowing him to drive smoothly along the track. We, however, jolted along to the accompaniment of a strumming sound like the noise you get when you run a stick along a railing. The disused railway cutting went between two high banks, overgrown with thorny weeds and full of discarded containers that we were crushing under our tank tracks. Back behind us was a trail of flattened bushes and squashed metal drums.
The cutting led us to an abandoned shoe factory, whose faded paintwork read: “Sutton’s Footwear.” Our escort drove straight under a large open shutter and into darkness. I went in after the airbike without hesitation, glad to be under cover. We were in a vast space, nearly empty but for rubble and bare steel girders that rose toward a jagged roof. I switched off our engine. The silence and stillness that followed were much needed. We all appreciated them and said nothing for a while. The others probably felt like me, that what with the race and the escape from the police, life was getting a little stressful.
“I guess we should see who’s on this bike.” Milan eventually stirred and threw open a hatch. The rest of us followed him out onto the top of the tank.
The dark rider was waiting for us, standing near the front of the tank, helmet in hand, looking a lot less frail than when I had last seen him.
“Michelotto,” Athena greeted him.
He nodded.
“Congratulations on your win. It was a truly remarkable achievement. Might I ask who was in charge of the missiles?”
“That would be me.” I stayed on the tank near my hatch. There was something very comforting about the vehicle; I was evidently a tortoise by nature, and this was my shell.
“A particularly impressive performance.”
“Did you have to destroy that helicopter?” asked Nathan with as much as an aggrieved tone as I had ever heard in his voice.
“I saved you from capture.”
“Why?” Milan stood up close so he could look the old man in the eyes. Milan was a tiger, or at least he wanted to be.
“Because I need allies against the Dark Queen.”
“Did the Dark Queen kill Cindella, then?” I felt slightly sorry for her; the magic she had brought into the world had given me hope.
“I don’t believe so. But when Cindella had the Dark Queen at her mercy, she chose not to strike.”
“Why?” Athena asked with genuine interest.
Cindella was still alive then? Good.
“To answer fully would require me to embark on a lengthy explanation.”
“We’re in no hurry.” Athena sat down, legs hanging over the side of the tank. It was strange: she looked so young there, hair in two plaits, wearing her new tank top with the Defiance tag. Yet when it came to dealing with this ancient crocodile, she was every inch his equal.
Michelotto looked steadily back at her, then his posture relaxed slightly and his voice became warmer.
“Very well. This universe we inhabit is not the only one? Would you be willing to accept?”
“Of course,” Nathan answered him eagerly. “We figured that out for ourselves. What with the way that people are appearing and disappearing.”
“Good. That, indeed, is the main evidence for my statement.” Michelotto nodded with an approving smile, but I thought that he was dissembling; not that he was lying, but that he was cold inside, perhaps bored, and that for some reason he felt it necessary to ingratiate himself with us.
“You might not, however, have been able to deduce the relationship between our world and theirs.” He waited to see if we would respond, but none of us had any answers. “The curious fact is that our universe is curled up inside theirs, theirs being closer to the fundamental organic physical nature of the universe and ours being derived from artificial laws, albeit laws based on those of the outer universe.”
“I don’t follow you.” Milan still had a belligerent posture. “Artificial? Ours is the artificial universe?”
“In the sense that ours was created a little over two thousand years ago, yes. Of course, we were created by people, human beings, who themselves inhabit a universe that, as far as anyone knows, is not artificial, so there is a sense in which ours can be considered natural, too.”
“We are a game, aren’t we?” Athena was glum.
“No, but you are correct in two respects. Our universe was created as a game, called Saga by its creators. Secondly, the recent arrivals in our universe believed they were entering a game. What they found, however, was that we have evolved since our creation. That we are living people, not mindless ciphers.”
There was a long silence. Michelotto was waiting for us. What did I think? Straightaway, I believed him. Our world had seams. You didn’t ordinarily perceive them, but when I was boarding close to the limits of my abilities, I felt them, like the frames between the scenes on a piece of video film. But did the others?
Milan picked up a stone the size of his fist; he threw it at the nearest girder. The metal groaned. Then came a louder crash as the stone fell back to the floor, sending up a small cloud of dust.
“See that?” He brushed his hands on his combats. “That’s real.”
“Yes?” Michelotto appeared to be studying him patiently.
“Kick this tank and your toe is going to hurt. Our world is real; what you’re saying is nonsense.”
“Yes, we are real, but we are subordinate to the outer universe. If some human being wished it, they could rewrite the laws of Saga in a way that would not be possible in their own universe. Your rock could have been made to fly out of the roof. The tank could turn to jelly. Almost anything is possible here. At the moment, our environment seems to obey very set physical laws. But, in fact, these could be changed.”
“It’s horrible.” Athena put her head in her hands. “It’s a nightmare.”
“I can see why you might think so.” Michelotto tried to smile sympathetically, but I figured he was out of practice; he looked more sinister than ever.
“So, why didn’t Cindella kill the Dark Queen?” I asked, genuinely wanting to hear more from him. For all that I hated the slippery presence of this man, what he was telling us was exciting. I felt that I was finally getting answers after six years of questions and hopeless uncertainty. Might he even know something about me? A part of me shivered at the thought of asking him;
Stay hidden, stay hidden, stay hidden,
cried the beat of my heart. I listened to it, and resolved not to tell him anything about my own past.
“The Dark Queen wants to reprogram our world to make her future offspring immortal and give them the powers of gods. She has gone insane, corrupted by her genuine powers and the sycophancy that surrounds her from people who need to flatter her constantly to stay alive. To make such reprogramming, she has contacted a distant colony of human beings. First of all, she opened Saga to them; then, after they had created personas in our world, she addicted some two million of the humans, to make them hostages. Once the truth of their situation has been fully clarified, she will allow them access to the programming of our world, confident that they will not destroy Saga, because should they do so, they will suffer two million deaths. Cindella attacked the Dark Queen and defeated her, but decided not to kill her for the sake of those two million lives. In my view, she miscalculated. It would have been better to have taken those losses now; it can only get worse. The Dark Queen has no intention of lifting the addiction after any reprogramming.”