Rick stood in the bay and looked around him. Everywhere the fighter planes were catching fire, one after another—an analogue of what was happening in the barn in RL.
But even as some of the planes burned, others were lifting up off the bay floor, tilting their noses upward, ready to head for space.
And now the bay doors slid open—and the Cobra Guards came charging in, some running on their short legs, others slithering with stunning speed straight at him across the floor.
More drones exploded. Flames were everywhere now. But there was no escaping the fire: behind him, the Cobra Guards were moving toward him from every side. One hurled a spear. Rick saw it and ducked. But the spear had eyes! It followed his movement. Rick had to spin away at the last minute, and even then he felt the wind of the spearhead cross his cheek.
Other Cobra Guards were drawing back their spears to throw.
Rick plunged into the midst of the blaze. Arms up to protect his face, he rushed past one burning craft—and then past another craft that burst into flames as he approached it. Spears were flying at him, but even with their eyes, they couldn’t find him in the smoke. He went running past more fiery planes until he saw a small group of fighters that hadn’t caught fire yet.
He wove his way through the flaming wreckage and reached a plane that was still intact. As he pulled the cockpit door open, two other planes beside it shot up into the air and headed toward the open roof.
Rick stepped into the low cockpit with one foot—but then his trailing foot was grabbed; held fast. Rick looked back, wide-eyed, and saw a Cobra coiling its thick body around his ankle, its black eyes trained on him, its tongue flickering, its fangs bared.
Rick punched the snake in the head. He felt cold, scaly skin retract under his knuckles. He hit the thing again. Then again. The snake went limp and fell off him in a jumbled coil.
Rick jumped into the fighter plane. He slammed the cockpit door behind him just as another spear hit the windshield, staring in at him. He settled into the seat. His eyes went quickly over the dashboard. At this point, he was not surprised to see that despite a lot of flashing lights and meters and electronic readouts, the flight controls themselves were ridiculously simple: a steering stick to move the ship up, down, left, and right; a gun stick to aim, with a trigger to fire; an accelerator pedal beneath his foot. It was this way throughout the Realm. Everything here was a cyberimitation of reality, but not very much like reality itself. With his mind flowing through the Internet, Kurodar needed only a digital analogue of the drones in order to fly them. He didn’t actually need to know how to fly.
Rick looked out through the windshield and saw two, then three fighter planes leaving the bay floor to shoot up toward the open ceiling and into the blackness of space beyond. There were no pilots in the cockpits, so he knew that it was Kurodar who was flying them with his mind.
He looked down and saw three, then four more of the planes in the bay catching fire. If his plane went up next, there’d be no getting out of it. He’d burn alive—or, if he did manage to break away, the slithering Cobras would swarm him, a snake nightmare washing over him like a rising tide.
But now his own craft lifted, pulled by the gravity of the blackness. It rose slowly off the floor. Slowly, it turned its nose cone up toward the depths of the night beyond the bay. And then, with a sudden burst of awesome speed, it shot up out of the bay and into the dark, leaving the sea of fire and the writhing sea of Cobras below.
The craft emerged swiftly into the vast blackness. Rick looked around him and took in the scene.
Looming directly over him was the massive WarCraft and the gargantuan Octo-Guardian that seemed grafted onto it, its baleful eyes observing the scene. The Octo-Guardian’s tentacles were waving in the blackness, their single red eyes burning, searching, examining whatever they passed. One tentacle was already moving his way.
To the left was the red horizon of the Lower Realm. Down there was the Golden City and the portals that could take Rick back to RL.
And up ahead? Four other fighter planes. Like him, they had escaped the burning bay. They were just out in front of him and speeding away into space. In the distance he could see something that looked like a gleaming planet, a glowing orb with shining silver buildings rising from its surface. That, he thought, was what the model inside the WarCraft was meant to represent: the true target, the Realm analogue of Washington, D.C. If the fighter planes reached the Washington planet and opened fire, even just these surviving four, they would do untold damage in RL. They would leave untold numbers of real people dead.
Rick had to give chase. He had to shoot those fighters down. He had to stop them.
But before he did he looked to his right. And he saw the Breach.
He didn’t know what it was, of course. He didn’t know that Kurodar had found a way to think straight from his cyber-created imagination into reality. All he knew was that in the midst of this infinite blackness, he could see Real Life in real time. There was a forest. There was a barn.
And there was Molly—Molly with Victor One.
She was sitting on the ground. She was holding Victor One’s head on her lap. Rick felt a twinge of jealousy at the sight, but it was replaced at once with fear and concern. Victor was clearly hurt, hurt badly. And worse than that . . .
Much worse than that, Rick could see about a dozen men, men masked in balaclavas and carrying machine guns. They were spread out in the trees around but slowly closing in. Molly hadn’t seen them yet, but any minute they would break out of the trees and encircle her. She would be a prisoner again, and they would carry her off to who-knew-where. That is, if they didn’t simply shoot her dead.
Rick had to get to her if he could. He had to fly his fighter into that Breach and see if he could break through to RL and save her.
But if he did that . . . He turned to look ahead of him. If he did that, those fighters heading for Washington would reach their mark and launch their missiles.
For a moment, Rick froze, his fighter hovering motionless. What did he do now? How did he decide? Should he save Molly? Or save the thousands who would die in the city?
The power of his feelings for Molly welled up inside him as never before. There was more between the two of them than he had really understood. He remembered thinking that Mariel was part of his soul, but Molly . . . was it possible she was even more than that?
It flashed through Rick’s brain in that moment that his father had probably faced just the sort of choice he was facing now: stay with his family or fight the MindWar, cling to the people he loved or try to save the country.
What if you had to sacrifice everything you love to save everything you love?
That was the question his father had asked Molly’s father before he’d left to battle Kurodar. Rick had been angry at him for choosing that battle over him and Raider and their mother, but now he understood: His father’s love for him was in his sacrifice. His father’s sacrifice was the face of his love.
He forced himself to turn his eyes away from the Breach, away from Molly. He pressed the fighter’s stick forward and dropped his foot onto the accelerator. His craft shot off after the enemy planes.
The craft was swift. The row of enemy fighters ahead of him grew larger in his windshield. The Octo-Guardian’s tentacles still surrounded them all. As Rick put on a burst of speed, the tentacles stiffened. They turned. Their red eyes burned as they stared at him.
Rick’s craft shot past the watching tentacles toward the enemy ships. His right hand tightened on the trigger of the gun stick. He moved the stick and a green target display appeared on his windshield. He centered the target on the enemy ship farthest to his left. He squeezed the trigger.
He felt the fighter buck beneath him. A dotted line of brilliant blue light shot out of the guns under his wings. The light sliced through the darkness, tracking to the center of the target. A split second later, the light struck the enemy craft. It caught the thing midflight, bingo, right on the tail. Instan
tly, the plane exploded into a swiftly broadening ball of fire and debris.
“Yeah!” Rick heard himself shout. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
He shifted the target display to the next craft over. One down, three to go. Just like in a video game. Awesome!
He pulled the trigger again.
Three things happened simultaneously.
There was another stuttered blast of blue light from his guns, another dotted line of brilliance lancing the blackness toward another enemy fighter. The light hit the second ship and that ship exploded, sending red flames and silver garbage sailing through the depths of space.
But even as that happened, the other two enemies realized they were under attack from behind and started to turn around. Rick saw them in his windshield, one wheeling in a broad arc off to the left, one barrel-rolling wing over wing to the right. No way to catch them in his sights when they were dodging like that. And anyway, there was no time to try.
Because now, too, the Octo-Guardian came after him. The beast’s malicious eyes seemed to flare with vengeful fire. Something like a mouth opened in him, and a noise came out of it that filled the vast empty blackness all around. It was a strange ragged roar, guttural and high-pitched at once, a sound that seemed full of both rage and satisfaction. He remembered the baleful eyes of the Troll who had taunted them in his video. That Troll—this creature—they were one being—one being eager to release its fury in a rampage of destruction.
Rick saw the tentacles all around him start to whip and wave. They curled toward him, each with a red eye glowing. At the same time the two remaining fighter planes were coming back toward him, each one rolling and diving in evasive maneuvers to keep Rick from getting his target display trained on them.
The scene was so insane, and so insanely deadly—giant octopus tentacles trying to snatch him out of space while fighter planes zipped in toward him—that for a moment Rick actually wondered if he might be in one of his post-Realm nightmares.
But no, this was real—or as real, at least, as anything in this crazy place. As real, at least, as death. There was no time to hesitate. The enemy craft to his left let out a blast of blue light. The fatal blast zipped toward him.
Rick jammed his foot down on the accelerator and yanked up on the stick. His fighter lifted and shot upward. The deadly burst of light passed under him harmlessly. But up above him, through the windshield, Rick saw two gigantic octopus tentacles spiraling around to lasso him. The Octo-Guardian roared again. And Rick roared back. All his video-game prowess came into play as his body reacted faster than his mind, working the fighter’s stick so that his craft shot right through the spiraling loops of the tentacles and blasted out the other side before they could close around him.
And there—at the top of the tentacle spiral—was the second of the remaining two fighters, waiting for him. The moment Rick’s plane emerged, the enemy opened fire. But even after all this time, Rick’s athletic reflexes were too good. He fired back—and with the same speed that had once helped him spin out of the clutches of onrushing linemen, he hauled up on the fighter’s stick—hauled up so hard that his craft somersaulted backward in midcareer. The windshield flashed as the enemy’s shot went past it, missing by inches. Then space went red as his own shot hit home and the enemy craft exploded. And with that, Rick’s fighter nosed down and plummeted through the unchartable dark.
One fighter left—and sure enough, the sudden loop-de-loop brought Rick onto an intersecting course with that last enemy ship. It was a piece of luck; a great shot. If he could aim fast and pull the trigger, he would hit the thing smack in the side and cut it in half.
But now another gigantic tentacle whiplashed through space and its red eye snapped toward him. Rick should have dodged it, but he had to take that shot at the enemy while he had it. He couldn’t lose the chance. He waited just long enough to press the trigger—and then tilted the stick to the right to escape the tentacle. The last enemy fighter exploded and the flaming wreckage wheeled across his windshield as his craft barrel-rolled to avoid the Octo-Guardian’s reach. But he hadn’t moved fast enough. The Octo-Guardian’s slithery arm couldn’t grab him, but its tip smacked his fuselage and the blow sent his craft spinning out of control.
Rick fought the controls as the fighter tumbled through space, a nauseating roll. He gasped aloud as a tentacle flashed across his windshield. It missed him only because his craft was whirling away so wildly. The Octo-Guardian roared in frustration and the sound was deafening. The thunderous noise made Rick’s craft shudder. But now the fighter’s controls took hold. Rick wrestled the fighter upright and circled back around to face the WarCraft.
The WarCraft, bigger than a city, dwarfed his little plane. The roaring mouth of the Octo-Guardian could have swallowed his fighter easily. The eyes alone—those malignant eyes—were ten times larger than the craft. They glared at Rick with such sick hatred that Rick could feel the force of it in the pit of his stomach.
The Octo-Guardian roared one final time and as it did, it threw its tentacles wide in rage and then brought them snapping forward all at once to seize Rick out of the sky.
There was no way to avoid them. There were too many. They were too big. They were closing on him too fast. There was no chance to escape.
So instead Rick hit the accelerator and charged the beast. With the tentacles ripping toward him, he flew straight for the Octo-Guardian’s black open maw, the gaping hole hovering above the mighty WarCraft.
As he flew forward, he centered his target display on the beast’s right eye and started pressing the trigger. He fired again and again. In his peripheral vision, he could see the tentacles whisking at him from the right and the left, from above and below. Another instant and he knew they would grab his fighter craft and tear it to pieces like an evil child ripping the wings off a fly.
But he didn’t change course. He kept zooming toward the Octo-Guardian. He kept pressing the trigger. The dotted lines of blue light kept shooting from his guns, one barrage after another. They flashed to the center of the target display—the center of the Octo-Guardian’s vicious stare.
Just as the tentacles reached Rick’s fighter, the blasts struck home. The Octo-Guardian’s right eye erupted in a mushroom cloud of red gore. The Octo-Guardian’s scream of agony blew every thought out of Rick’s mind, even the thought of death. Something hit his craft—a tentacle?—and again his fighter spun away wildly wing over wing. But even as it did, he saw the Octo-Guardian lose its hold on the WarCraft and tumble backward, its tentacles trailing after it in a chaotic and slithery train.
The Octo-Guardian roared and flew back and back into the darkness of space. Without the WarCraft to anchor it, the gravity of that blackness sucked the beast in. In a second, it was pulled into the depths of nothingness. In another second, it was lost in the dark entirely and forever. Its furious roar echoed for another moment and then died away completely. The beast was gone.
But the black space of the Realm was far from peaceful then. The violence of the Octo-Guardian’s release had set the immense WarCraft twirling. As Rick got his fighter under control, he saw the vast ship tumbling past his windshield. It was an awesome sight, like watching an entire island go flying end over end. Rick looked on, wide-eyed, as the monstrous craft spun away from him toward the red surface of the Lower Realm. It spun and fell and fell and spun, growing smaller as it dropped toward the red surface of MindWar. Rick could only sit and stare at its long, long fall.
And when the WarCraft struck the surface of the Realm, the impact shook cyberspace itself. The explosion lit the very core of the blackness, the flames opening like the petals of a hellish flower—rising so high off the Lower Realm’s surface that Rick thought they would engulf his own craft out here in space and burn it to a cinder. But no, the flower of flame touched the blackness for only a second and then closed in on itself and winked out, leaving the blackness even blacker still.
Dazed in the vast silence of the aftermath, Rick looked around him. It was
over. The WarCraft was destroyed. The fighters were gone. The city was safe and . . .
Molly.
He had to crane his neck to see her, but there she still was. Looking around now as she heard the masked gunmen moving out of the forest to close in a half circle around her and Victor. There was nowhere for her to run, no way for her to run without leaving the wounded Victor One behind, which Rick knew she would never do.
One last time he wheeled his fighter round. He did not know what would happen if he flew straight into the Breach. Would he somehow cross the divide between the Realm and RL, or would he smack into a cyberwall and explode?
It didn’t matter. For Molly? He was more than willing to chance it. He had to reach her if he could.
He drove the stick forward and jammed his foot down on the accelerator and flew full speed at the Breach.
39. WHITE KNIGHT CHRONICLES
MOLLY SAW THE last drone explode in the sky above the night forest. Her heart felt big with triumph. It was Rick who had done that. She knew it somehow. It was Rick.
She bowed her head over Victor One. Her tears fell on the soldier’s face. He lay still, his head in her lap, his eyes closed, his breath coming hard and slow. She did not know if he could hear her, but she whispered to him anyway.
“We did it, Victor. Us and Rick. It’s over.”
Then, in the woodland silence, she heard the footsteps of the approaching killers. She knew at once who it was: Smiley McDeath’s army of reinforcements, coming to get her, to take her to their leader. Or maybe they would just kill her here.
She stroked Victor One’s hair to give him comfort and to give herself comfort. What happened next was going to be terrible, she knew. More terrible than anything that had happened before. They would hate her for what she had done. Burning their drones, helping to stop their attack. They would hate her for it and they would take their hate out on her. But whatever they did, whatever happened, no matter how bad it got, she would always know that she had beaten them. She and Victor One. And Rick, wherever he was.