Wildcard (55 page)

“Copy that. Am I OK for now?”

“I estimate you have 14 seconds. It has
penetrated the hull with a finger, but it did not like the
result.”

The Sergeant looked peripherally to minimize
the particle hit on his remaining retina. The thing had zombie
walked over and was trying to reach through the hull and grab
Karl.

“Trident, I’m going to leap out, at an angle
of ten degrees from our exact negative velocity vector. I want to
go out the back, but not straight out the back. You need to hit me
with a second nano-wire from another door, after I get out. Can
you?”

“It has found a way through. Go. I can do
that. I see your plan.”

He gave another peripheral glance. It was
moving faster, getting used to its body perhaps. Didn’t matter why.
He levered Karl over his shoulder, dove to the exit nearby, and out
the tube. He could feel the nano-barrier as it stretched over him
like another skin, hardly slowing momentum, then slid down the
body, never letting a gap into the ship.

“I miss you, Martha,” Karl said.

He kicked hard off the hull as he passed
through. About three meters out, the lead from the other nano-wire
stabbed into him. He pulled it free from his skin and attached it
to his belt.

“Release the first wire from the ship. I
don’t want the ghost grabbing it, somehow.”

“Done.” He threw it aside.

“Tell me when it launches itself.”

Waiting. “Three. Two. One.” He peripheral
glanced back, ready to change direction as soon as the thing
launched, to maximize the distance differential. If he did it
before it launched, it might just stay on the ship and they would
have to do it again. While it improved its skills. While it
learned.

It jumped toward them.

“Reel in T, hard as you can.” He wrapped
himself tight as he could around Karl. Double leg and arm lock. A
yank from the nano-cord, and they flashed off at an angle to the
ghost, who was sailing by them, just out of arm’s reach.

He saw it too late. The hand passed through
Karl’s head on an elongated ghost arm. The photonic oscillation
burned his remaining eye and the world turned into flashing spots.
Karl jerked, spasmed, choked and spit blood on the Sergeant’s face.
The hand passed through his own shoulder. He could do nothing but
hold on to Karl. His shoulder turned to molten rubber, then frozen
stone. He wanted it to fall off, it hurt so bad.

“Mother fucker that hurts.” He yelled as
loud as he could. “God fucking damn it.”

Karl was unconscious.

“Is it gone, T?”

Dartagnan stood, dusting himself off. “Are
you an idiot? I was already going into this world. It’s easy to get
out.”

“Not care. Just want talk RJ. Before you.
You are angry?”

“Hmm. Good question, LuvRay. I think I
actually was. What the hell. Life’s an adventure. You rapscallion.”
He sheathed his sword with an Errol Flynn flourish. The boy
Sergeant would have laughed at that one. “Why did you do that,
anyway?” Dartagnan stood with the left side of his chest cocked a
bit out. “Why didn’t you ask if you could come?”

“Not think to.”

Dartagnan was practicing swordplay like a
movie actor. Without a sword, looking down the imaginary blade. The
full Dartagnan actually was fighting in other spaces, and this one
was just watching, playing along as he spoke.

“I don’t really much care either way. All
the same to me.” Another Dartagnan made a critical judgement error
or was killed by chance. Dartagnan closed off the window. He could
do that with his mind, but it was far easier with the sword. :3:
had built the sword for him because he liked the puzzle.

He wondered how :3: saw him. :3: was his
brother, in the classical sense of playing with power, someone to
love and hate at the same time. :3: mainly seemed to ignore him
unless Dartagnan brought him a good puzzler.

“Do you know the 8-Ball?”

“This world. First time here.”

“The bar. I cut through next to the bar.
It’s actually called Uncle Slimmy’s 8-ball Beer Playing and Pool
Drinking Emporium, a cardinal of sin and delight to bewilder the
mind and feast the imagination upon. But it’s just a Portal,
really.”

“Wildcard named.”

Dartagnan stopped swordfighting and looked
at LuvRay. “I think so too. I am happy that you agree. Would you
like to go inside?”

LuvRay carried the box into the bar with
them.

“What would you care to drink, Oh Great
Wolf, a bowl of water?”

“Glass. Or bottle. Not bowl.”

“Goblet of water, and a chalice of fine
mead, knave.” He loved a place where you could talk in such a
manner and it was deemed appropriate. Everything was normal in
8-Ball, except staying there. It was pretty flat in terms of M-E
depth, though. Mostly it was populated by icons, or shills, as the
boy Sergeant called them. :3: didn’t play here much. “Chaos,” was
all he said. “Bad kind.” Dartagnan’s translation if asked, at any
rate. He suspected :3:’s choices just pissed away here,
meaningless. The solution to the equation, apparently, was another
random equation. True randomness probably just did not interest
:3:. It interested Dartagnan quite a bit, however.

He walked over to the dartboard, pulled out
an icepick stuck through a poem. Wildsong is cheap in 8-Ball, a
common expression in wildspace. He flipped the icepick, pinning it
through a candle 5 meters away. He strolled over, carrying the poem
without looking at it, and freed the icepick.

“Hmm.” He pursed his lips, then pulled with
two fingers on his belt. A tiny holster appeared and he put the ice
pick in. “Oh, Gee. Another poem.”

“It’s called Hello, Musketeer. I wonder if
it’s about me. Forsooth, someone has written me a lyric epistle.
wildrat, no doubt, that uncanny devil.

‘hello musketeer, my dear you are queer

Your heart beats on the wrong side I
hear

unusual and strange drinking wine and not
beer

if you look in your ear you hear a cheer

a steer is near,

how much fear can you steer’

Oh, a bad homonym. How very clever.

‘Do you fear to be near, the box?’

“Touche, wildknave. Thou art truly the most
beguiling, bewitching soul who has ever touched a quill, I dare
say.” Dartagnan pursed his lips. He needed to think, and he wanted
to look like he was thinking as he did so. He liked this game of
simulating human emotion. He looked up into the corner, holding his
chin and stroking it by wrapping his fingers around it and closing
the circle of fingers as he pulled the hand down. He rested the
elbow of that arm on his other arm.

He wanted to look pensive because he was
fairly certain that he felt pensive. He had tried the classic pose
of the Rodin statue, the Thinker, but never saw people actually do
that, so he struck it from the inventory.

“I like poem.”

“Why?

“Because you not.”

“As good a reason as any, I suppose. Well, I
got this snappy little icepick, at least. What do you think of
that, my friend? I wager that it comes in frightfully useful at
some point.”

“Could kill you.”

Dartagnan moved only his eyes towards
LuvRay. “Bon Mot. Perhaps it shall.”

“Let me see.”

Dartagnan shrugged, flipped it to LuvRay.
Shrugging was dicey, hard to make it look natural. One had to do a
funny thing with the mouth. He had practiced it a good deal in
mirrors. He watched himself practice in the mirror behind the bar.
Shrug. Fun, but it was very challenging. Shrugging expressed, as
near as he could tell, an indifference to the proposition heard. “I
don’t care much one way or the other,” he said, practicing that as
well, too late for LuvRay, unfortunately. Sadly? Unfortunately? He
was not sure which best described the situation.

LuvRay sighted down the pick at Dartagnan’s
heart.

“I know you would not plunge it into
me.”

“How?”

“Because you know it might kill me and you
do not take life without cause. It was not meant to be used against
me. Not by you, at any rate.”

LuvRay nodded, closed his eyes, and put it
through the same hole that Dartagnan had made.

“Smashing throw, varlet. How did you do
it?”

“Indian trick. Called knife-throwing.”

“That was beyond human. Your skills are
definitely enhanced. In 8-Ball, at least. I wonder if that is true
in all wildspace.”

“Seeing is better.”

“Well, in what direction shall we now
endeavor, great wolf?”

LuvRay went to the bathroom.

The ship stopped outside a Portal. The
Sergeant thought for a moment, tapping on a rail.

“Trident, are we where I think we are?”

“Roger, boss. Just walk down the ramp and
straight in, if you want to enter.”

The Sergeant picked Karl up, stepped into
the 8-ball, gauged the level. Serious play, this business.
Dartagnan! He was facing the other way. LuvRay, looking at him,
came out of the bathroom. He just seemed curious, and didn’t give
the already moving Sergeant away to Dartagnan. He dropped Karl’s
limp form, flipping, to save time, over it, as it began to fall. He
pulled out Dartagnan’s sword as he landed, right behind him, right
leg wound in like a tank spring, and kicked him in the back,
face-first, smashing through the thick oak bar and shelves of
glasses, bottles, and the mirror behind those. 60 cm’s into the
wall, deepest penetrate, he gauged. Good kick. How deep would S-1
have kicked him?

Dartagnan felt the foot in his back, decided
to let it happen. He flew through the bar, smashing it to splinters
and slammed into the wall, penetrating it to 63.7 centimeters. An
excellent kick. His sword had been taken as he went. Only the
Sergeant could have done it, unless there was a player of whom he
did not know.

Dartagnan stepped out. “That is the second
time in 32 minutes 47 seconds that I have been required to dust off
my person.” He pulled out the icepick,. “In your particular
vernacular - Hmmm, nice rhyme, by the way - in your particular
vernacular: would you care to dance?”

He flipped the icepick up, over his
shoulder, and caught it behind his back, by the tip, in his left
hand. He closed his eyes to do it, and kept his body still. The
icepick was .07 degrees from vertical and the tip landed 16
angstroms off exact center of his spine. It was a sizable variant
from his intent.

The Sergeant had the point of the awl of the
Swiss Army knife pressed against the butt of the sword. “Care to
look for another sword?”

Dartagnan raised an eyebrow. “Stalemate,
Sergeant.”

“I’m a patient man.”

“You’re a patient boy.”

Dartagnan savoured the face-off between
himself and the Sergeant, with LuvRay watching. He whistled the
tune from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and caused a few beads
of sweat to roll down from his forehead and get into his left eye.
He blinked the drops away, then blinked a few more times,
rehearsing a possible nervous twitch for later use.

“What happened to Karl?”

“Quantites happened to him. He’s dead.”

Dartagnan was disturbed by the betrayal of
the Benefactor to kill one of the Named, and demonstrated that by
slamming his fist down on the remaining part of the bar.

“Damn her pestilent hide.” He did a
slapstick of having hurt his fist. He had not put those Quantites
there to kill Karl. He had been certain she would not do so.

“The Benefactor, huh? I guess it’s obvious.
You wouldn’t kill one of the Named. By the way, how do I get those
Quantite’s off my ship? Trident detected over 14 billion.”

“You would need :3:’s assistance. Even I
could not.”

“Did they bring me here?”

“No doubt, almost certainly with the help of
:3:”

Dartagnan put the icepick away. He
considered ‘accidentally’ puncturing his finger with it as he did
so, decided against. “Was Karl killed aboard your ship?”

“Yes.”

“Definitely with the help of :3:”

“What else can they do?”

“Force a probabilistic nano-hole in the
hull. Or it might be able to degrade the integrity. That would be
no fun, though. I like what they did.”

“How did they do it?”

“Describe it.”

“A gate through Karl, some kind of quantum
being.”

“The Mechanic, I imagine. He is dead, I
further imagine. So is Seeker.”

“So is Karl.”

“Look on the bright side, Sergeant. At least
he cannot open the Box.”

“What gets in through a nano-hole?”

“I do not know. I have not done it.”

“No guesses?”

“Many, most of them you would not
understand. Most harmless, or very difficult to utilize in a
harmful way. A chancy proposition, drilling through nanotek with
q-tek. Not easy.”

“Could :3: do it?”

“Why do you care? That is not what happened.
They created a Portal via Seeker, the Mechanic stepped through and
killed Karl. Don’t fight the last battle, Sergeant, fight the next.
I won’t use it now. Neither will she; Karl is dead. :3: won’t help
her again for a good bit, I would wager.” He flipped the icepick,
caught the tip with the smallest possible area of his fingertips
and calculated the distance of the wiggle after he caught it. Eight
angstroms.

“He may not stay dead. Can I do anything
with the Quantites to bring him back?”

“I very much doubt it. I am sorry, Sergeant,
but we seek a rebirth.”

“Damn. OK, what do we do?”

LuvRay sat on the box, watching. The
Sergeant looked at him.

“What do you think, LuvRay? Do we join with
this douchebag?”

“What is douchebag?”

“Wouldn’t you know it? My orders were to get
Karl to the Box alive, and we arrive because of his death. Box,
meet Karl’s body. Karl’s body, box.” He made a frustrated noise.
“Oh, well. Obstacle number 14,286 or whatever. Let’s keep
going.”