Only large Tito and Axel had that “soldier” look, but they both wore similar wide-eyed, scared expressions, betraying the illusion. I knew I had to look similarly terrified. Sam had pulled off his ball cap and shoved it between his body armor and his shirt before putting his on. His long, unruly hair peeked out from under the helmet, and he had to shove his bangs under the lip to keep them from blinding him. Rosita had to take out her ponytail to wear hers properly, and her long, flowing black hair made her look like some sort of fashion model who was only pretending to be a soldier for a photo shoot.
Lulu swam in her body armor, and she was too short to properly wield one of the rifles, so she had taken up a different weapon. It looked a bit like a sawed-off shotgun from a zombie game, but it fired chemically propelled canisters that exploded upon impact. She wore a belt of the canisters over her shoulder. Roger warned that she would have to fire the cylinders in an arc and not aim too low, lest they hit the ground too close to us.
The rhino skittered off east, moving along the road and disappearing toward the woods.
All six of us huddled together, peering over the cracked concrete barrier, looking up at the top part of the Sombrero. The wide warehouse stood just behind us with an east-west road in front of it. The road edged the cliff, or the lip of the Sombrero, mirroring the train tracks about ten meters below. The woods just north of the mayor’s house had been cleared, leaving a green patch all the way down to the warehouse. White rocks spelled out “Burnt Ends” on the green in giant letters, making it look like the words were etched into the side of the hat-shaped hill. You could see the sign only if you approached the town from the north. Heavy woods flanked either side of the residence, moving down the hill until they reached the road.
The warehouse itself stood on the edge of the cliff. Running east, the tracks below ended at a small utility yard for rail maintenance on the edge of town. Going west, the tracks curved north and crossed a bridge over the Pantano, then skirted several farms before they passed the distant town of Pulpeta and continued into the uninhabitable continent.
“Targets one and two are cresting the hill containing the mayor’s residence, and three and four are flanking, coming from below and east on the rail tracks,” Roger said. “It appears all four drivers of the mechs know each other and are communicating with one another and are working in concert. You must concentrate on the two upon the hill, and I will attempt to deal with three and four. I shall use the Heavy drone to draw their fire. It appears all four of the mechs have identical armament. Do not stay so close to one another lest a single missile should kill you all at once.”
I just sat frozen for a few seconds as that last sentence sank in. I looked over my friends. None of us were moving. Axel had his eyes clenched shut so tight, his face had transformed into a series of lines. He panted rapidly as if having a panic attack.
Something in my brain clicked, and I jumped into action.
“You two,” I hissed at Rosita and Lulu, pointing east in the same direction the rhino had gone, “move to the woods over there and get running up the hill. Get at them from the side. Don’t go too close to the cliff, or the other two mechs will see you. Tito and Axel, you two go to the woods on the other side. But not all the way up the hill. Be careful of cross fire. Once these two are down, we’ll all move to the east woods and help Roger with the flankers before we lose too many drones.”
Lulu just looked at me, and then she nodded. “Come on,” she said to Rosita, tugging on her arm. They rushed toward the line of trees as Tito and Axel moved off in the other direction. I could hear Axel wheezing as they skittered off.
Then I heard it. The mechanical clank of walking legs.
“Here, kitty, kitty!” came a booming voice just as the first mech crested the hill above us, moving through the smoke of the destroyed mayor’s house. “Which one of you dirty subhumans was driving the truck that took out Wankette? Man, is she pissed.”
This voice was older than the voice from that Hobie mech, but it was still clearly young. The person speaking was maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.
The three-meter-tall mech fully appeared, clanking up the hill. This was the same dragoon recon model as the last one with the egg-shaped center body, but it was painted in a shiny metallic blue with yellow highlights that blinked in neon. The last one had had green Mohawk-like spikes down the center. This one was decorated in a different way. There appeared to be a large bouncing spring atop the machine. At the end of the spring was a flat round sign waving back and forth like the head of a jack-in-the-box. It was a circular piece of metal or wood painted white with the red concentric circles of an archery or gun target. Curved words circled the round target. They read, “Skeet-Skeet,” on the top. I couldn’t make out the words at the bottom. They said, “Team something.” The words blinked neon, matching the rest of the blue-and-yellow color pattern.
The sign was about the size of a kitchen table, just as wide as the mech underneath it. There appeared to be no purpose to it other than as a decoration.
“Holy shit,” Sam muttered. “That thing is huge.”
The mech contained the same cannon arm and four-pack missile launcher as the first one, but this one had a second arm that was nothing more than a grasping pincer. The mech paused at the top of the hill, looking back and forth.
A second mech appeared. This one was painted and armed in the exact same way, but I could see it was missing one of its four missiles. It had the same large sign bouncing back and forth on a spring. Instead of Skeet-Skeet, this second one read, “Chode.”
“What is with their names?” Sam whispered. “Skeet-Skeet and Chode? What does that even mean?”
The two mechs stopped at the top of the hill as if they were surveying the area. We hid behind the barriers, waiting.
“I’m pretty sure those who play multiplayer games get to make up new names when they go online,” I said. While Sam and I had played plenty of games, we’d never had the proper hardware to play games with Earthers. We mostly played the games that came with us from Earth, meaning ones that were over two hundred years old. “They pick whatever they want. The kid from earlier was named Subhuman Slayer. It’s like Lulu’s Farm Girl Gigi name. And those porn star women—you know, the ones from the vids—don’t go by their real names, either.”
“I don’t think those porn ladies are real people. That one you were showing me the other day had tentacles.”
“Youshowed that tome. And they are all real people. That’s the law. The tentacles were real. A surgical enhancement. We’ve already had this discussion. All human forms have to be real. No filters or CGI enhancement. That’s why Lulu does so well. I guess for a long time, it was all fake, heavily filtered AI bots. Like people were talking to bots like Roger who were pretending to be women on the net. Can you imagine? That’s why all the cartoons have those scrolling banners over them now.”
Sam grunted. “Yeah, I know. But the names are supposed to make you anonymous. For the gamer guys who are already famous, do you think people call them by their tags in real life, like out on the street when they’re going to the store and stuff? Do they say, ‘Here’s your order, Mr.Skeet-Skeet? You know, Chode was just in here. How’s your mom?’ Or do they just go by it when they’re doing their game stuff? Also, no way that tentacle girl was real. How does she wipe?”
I laughed before I realized I was supposed to be terrified.
Roger crackled over my ear. “They are currently live-broadcastingtheir assault on the open net. There is nearly a thirty-second delay, unfortunately, making it difficult for me to use this for intelligence, but I will continue to monitor and record it. This group is known as Team Cannon Fodder, and they are a well-known group of five youths who make an astonishingly good living playing games while other people watch. It appears they were given your positions by Apex Command, who are utilizing heat maps to pinpoint the locations of people from orbit. Team Cannon Fodder paid extra to have this added to their controls. It appears they are only given a general area and not a precise location, so stay down until you have a clear shot.”
Sam mouthed to me,What the fuck?
“Roger,” I said, “send one of the drones up to distract them. Let’s try to get them coming down the hill. Once they fire on the drone, Lulu, try to hit them with your canister gun while the rest of us open fire on their legs.”
“Yo,” Sam whispered as Roger acknowledged he was sending a drone toward us. “So, I have a really dumb question.” He was looking down at his rifle. “What the hell do these things fire? What’s a ‘pulse’? In games, there are usually bullets and shit.”
“It’s balls of energy or something,” I said, “like pulses of plasma. Remember that sheriff deputy guy fired one at the spring festival a few years ago? It was a smaller version of one of these. It caught that scarecrow’s head on fire.”
