The Deadliest Game

1

The place smelled like a breakdown at a sewage treatment facility. That was what Shel noticed most as he pushed aside the tent’s door-flap and gazed out into the fading sunset light.

He looked out wearily over the russet-lit, shadow-streaked vista of pine woods and sloping fields and river-banks that had become, at about noon today, a battlefield. Then, for a few magic minutes, it had been exactly what one’s dreams of such a place would be at their best: the armies drawn up in their serried ranks, spears glinting and banners snapping bright in the brisk wind and the sun, and the trumpets shouting brazen defiance across the river that had been the boundary between their two forces, his and Delmond’s. Delmond had come marching down the road to the river with his two thousand horse and three thousand foot, and had sent his herald Azure Alaunt over the water with the usual defiance, or rather the defiance that had become typical of Delmond as he pushed his way across Sarxos’s lesser kingdoms. There were none of the courtesies that one opposing commander usually paid the other — no offer of single combat to spare the armies the bloodshed that must follow; not even the commonplace and pragmatic suggestion that the two armies’ quartermasters meet to investigate the possibility of one side buying out the contracts of the other army’s mercenaries, a move that would often render a battle unnecessary if, as a result, the strength of one side suddenly doubled and the other’s was halved. No, Delmond wanted to take Shel’s little land of Telairn on the other side of the Artel; and more, he wanted a fight — wanted the smell of blood in the afternoon, and the sound of trumpets.

So Shel let him have it.

There was no use pretending it hadn’t been satisfying. Delmond’s tactics had been positively insulting — no scouts, no attempt to reconnoiter or secure the battle site ahead of time. He’d simply marched right up the North Road to the River Artel as if there had been nothing to fear, and after that brief pause to issue formal defiance to the troops drawn up on the other side, Delmond had forded the Artel at the head of his forces, heading straight up the gentle grassy rise on the far side of the river as if there was absolutely no cause to be concerned about attacking uphill, and into cavalry already emplaced.

Delmond was heading for Minsar, the little city about two miles up the road from the fords of the Artel. He had apparently decided that the mixed force of five hundred cavalry and two thousand foot that Shel had positioned between the river and the road to Minsar was an obstacle easily to be swept aside; more so because, to judge by the lack of command pennons on the great-banner of the Telairn forces, Shel was apparently not with them.

But the Artel was an old river, winding and deeply oxbowed among the gentle pine-clad hills through which it meandered. Those hills held many secrets for the knowledgeable wanderer. Many little tracks and hidden roads, hunter’s paths and game paths, wound among and over them as the river wound around…and the paths and tracks were all quite hidden under the thick boughs of the towering pines and firs. The ground under those big old trees was cushioned deep with old dry needles that would muffle the sound of anything that moved.

So it was that, when Delmond’s forces were halfway across the river — the cavalry first, the foot following, and the cavalry beginning almost casually to engage the Talairn cavalry uphill — they had been taken completely by surprise as Shel and eight hundred of his picked horsemen came plunging down from the surrounding hills on both sides of the river and hit both Delmond’s horse and foot in their flanks.

Delmond’s cavalry, boxed in on the Minsar side of the river or still trying to flounder their way out of the water, was driven down into the mud and reeds and sedges to either side of the ford, and slaughtered there by Shel’s halberd-armed foot. Delmond’s infantry, predictably and sensibly, tried to run away, but there wasn’t much of anywhere for them to run to. The Talairn cavalry, with Shel leading one of the four forces that had come plunging down from the shelter of the pines, surrounded them and began chopping them down like some bloody harvest. Within a very short time, the battle was over.

Put like that, it sounded simple, but there had been nothing simple about it. Any true account of the battle would have to include the hours and hours, starting before dawn that morning, that Shel had spent getting his mounted troops in place up on the hills, every move being made in strictly enforced silence while he prayed that the early mist off the river would not lift until all his people were under cover. Mention would have to be made of the dead chill under the pines, early on, in which breath smoked and teeth chattered — followed in only a couple of hours by the stifling heat of an unseasonably warm, breathless spring day: the bug bites, the maddening itch of pine needles down Shel’s tunic and under his chain mail as he crept from position to position, making sure his people were where they needed to be, cheering them up with a well-placed word of encouragement here and there, when it was he who needed the encouragement, but dared not show it.

The description would have to include the lance of pure fear that struck straight through him as he heard the sassy brass challenge of Delmond’s trumpets coming down the road on the far side of the river, approaching the ford. Anticipation mixed with utter dread that even now Delmond might think to send some scouts up into the pines — but then came the flush of combined relief and absolute rage as Delmond did no such thing. Thank Rod for small favors, Shel thought, and a second later, furious; What the hell kind of general does he take me for? I’ll show the sonofa—

And then one last dreadful thrill of fear as Delmond’s forces forded the river, still playing their blasted trumpets—What do they think this is, a Memorial Day parade?…We’ll see who needs a memorial in a couple of hours! — and made their way up the far side of the ford, toward his troops, waiting there: his troops, under his eager young lieutenant Alla, who had no orders except, “Don’t let them past! Hang on!”

They hung on. It was very close. They’d had to stay there without relief and fight on their own, long enough to make sure that Delmond’s whole cavalry force took the bait and crossed the river to the unfavorable uphill ground. If any of them had lingered on the far bank of the river, all Shel’s carefully planned tactics would have gone straight to hell. But his enemy’s fighting psychology was all too plain at this point. A few victories against careless or unlucky adversaries had convinced Delmond of his skill as a strategist and tactician, though Shel knew Delmond had little real skill in either art. All it needed now was the obvious opening, for a seemingly easy win, to tempt Delmond into the obvious move. Delmond took it…and even then Shel had had to suffer through many minutes of torment and uncertainty yet while his little force on the far side of the river stood their ground and met Delmond’s first charge—

Then, along with his picked horsemen, then Shel had been able to vault into the saddle and blow his horn for the signal to charge, and had led his riders whooping down the hillsides in a crash of hooves and dislodged stones, taking Delmond’s infantry at open shields from left and right, and his split cavalry force from behind and both sides. The cry of “To Shel! To Shel!” had gone up from his forces on the Minsar side of the river, their desperation turned to rage and triumph in a moment, and they began cutting their way toward him as he and his horsemen cut toward them.

The worst of it had really been over about half an hour later, though the cleanup, as usual, took until sunset…not that anything was much cleaner at the end of it all. Survivors were herded together and disarmed, as many of them as could be found. Wounded fighters had to be picked up and brought in; the ransomable, those of them who could be located after attempting to make themselves unrecognizable, had to be separated out, their worth determined, sureties taken from them and parole given. Shel had had to supervise it all, getting tireder and tireder by the moment.

And now it was all finished, except for the most important part, the reason the whole battle had happened in the first place: dealing with Delmond. Shel had truly not thought this far ahead, and he was still surprised that Delmond had fallen for his tactics at all. But then the Swiss had been surprised, too, when the Austrians had fallen for a variation on this theme at Morgarten. Delmond had never been much of a reader, though, and was therefore condemned to repeat the great military mistakes of earlier centuries. Shel, for his own part, thought it served Delmond right.

Outside, the trumpets were blowing a tired version of the recheat, signaling that pickup had been made on all the wounded, and it was now safe for noncombatants, the husbands and wives of the fallen who might have been following either force, to reclaim the bodies of their relatives. Shel took one last look at the battlefield, which was becoming more and more deeply drowned in rose-tinged, foggy shadow as the mist rose off the River Artel and crept over the ground, mercifully hiding what still lay there. After a moment he let the tent-flap fall, and went to sit down in the camp chair by his map table, letting out a long weary breath.

When he had fought his first battle in Sarxos, a few years ago, Shel had come equipped with the usual images of how the aftermath of a mighty battle ought to look: his standard flying bravely over the stricken field, and the standard of his enemy thrown down in the dust. Now, with a little more experience behind him, numerous battles lost and won, he knew that there was precious little dust to be found on one of these battlefields. This morning, in the sunshine, the slight slope leading up from the fords had been a great sheep-cropped expanse of green grass, all speckled with white daisies and the small yellow blossoms of nevermind. Now, after the trampling of twenty thousand hooves and ten thousand feet, it was mud. Red mud — it stuck to your boots with horrible tenacity. His enemy’s standard, trampled well into it, would now be just one more sodden rag, indistinguishable from anybody’s collapsed tent, or from some petty noble’s surcoat flung off to keep its owner from being captured and held for a fat ransom.

As for the stricken field, it was Shel who always felt stricken, the next morning, at the smell. Nor was it any wonder that the husbands and wives and other relatives of the fallen always showed up as soon as the battle was over, or anytime well before dawn, to ask permission to search for the bodies of their loved ones. They knew, from too much painful experience, what the place would smell like once the sun was up and had had a chance to warm things.

Shel intended to be well away from here by then. His tent was already unable to keep out the battlefield stink of stamped-out guts — or of guts not lost, but just loose, the results of many a brave young warrior’s first encounter with the battlefield. War is hell, went the saying. But at the moment, Shel felt more inclined to substitute another four-letter word for “hell.” Certainly he would have preferred the smell of brimstone to the aroma most prevalent just now.

“It’s only a game,” he told himself…and then made a face. The game’s creator, a careful and thorough craftsman, had done his job too well for such bland assurances to make a difference. No action was permitted to evade its consequences. The air should have been sweet with the oncoming evening, and wasn’t. There would of course be a great celebration of Shel’s victory later, when he got back to Minsar, a mighty meeting to congratulate the heroes who had contributed to the win, and there the banners would fly and the trumpets would sing, and the bards would chant their praises…but not here. This place could be cleaned up by no lesser force than Nature, and even she would take some months about it. Even after the grass was green again and the daisies bloomed, the sheep that grazed these pastures would be working around swords and arrowheads and the stained bones of skulls for quite a few years.

At least the grass would be of high quality, and lush, come the later summer. Blood was an extraordinary fertilizer….

The tent-flap lifted. One of Shel’s guardsmen looked in, an old companion called Talch. Shel glanced up at him.

“When do you want to see him, sir?” said Talch. He was a big man, cavalry, still all spattered from today’s work, with mud and blood and Rod knows what else. He stank, but then so did Shel, and so did everyone else for a mile around.

“Twenty minutes or so,” said Shel, reaching across the map table for a pitcher of honeydraft. “Let me do something about my blood sugar first. Has he said anything?”

“Not a word.”

Shel raised his eyebrows, encouraged. Delmond was known for his tendency to brag even when he had lost, as long as he thought he had a chance of getting out of a situation. “Good. Have you had anything to eat?”

“Not yet. Nick’s been out hunting. Got a deer — they’re butchering it. But no one wants to eat here really….”

“Why would they? And we won’t either. Send someone up toward Minsar to start some cooking fires outside the walls. We’ll encamp there tonight. And tell Alla I’ll hear her report now.”

Talch nodded, and let the tent-flap fall. Shel looked at it and wondered, as he sometimes did, whether Talch was a player or a construct, one of many “extra” personnel whom the game itself contained. There were plenty of them, since most people preferred to play more interesting characters than guards and camp-followers; though you never could tell. One of the greatest generals of the twenty-two-year-run of Sarxos, the cavalry-master Alainde, had spent nearly two years playing a laundryman in the service of Grand Duke Erbin before beginning his startling rise through the ranks. At any rate, in the etiquette of Sarxos, “Are you a player?” was not a question you ever asked. It “broke the spell.”

If a player chose to come out to you, that was different, and afterwards you thanked them for their trust. But there were tens of thousands of players in Sarxos who preferred to remain anonymous as to both their names and their status, people who might dip into the Virtual Domain for an evening’s enjoyment every now and then, or who might come in night after night, as Shel did, in pursuit of something specific — amusement, excitement, adventure, revenge, power — or just escape from a real world whose reality sometimes became just a little too grinding.

Shel took a long drink of the honeydraft, and sat and thought, pausing a moment to shake himself, and scratch. More pine needles down his tunic…it would be days before they were all gone. He would really have preferred to do the rest of this evening’s work in the morning, but there was no telling what kind of trickery Delmond might attempt to pull if he were allowed the time. Even in his present strong position, Shel couldn’t ignore Delmond’s slippery reputation. The man’s mother, Tarasp of the Hills, was a wizard-lordling, one notoriously nonaligned, who shifted stances between Light and Dark without warning. From her Delmond had inherited both some small measure of power as a shapeshifter, and a dangerous shiftiness of temperament that made him capable of signing a peace treaty with one hand while holding, spell-concealed in the other, the knife intended for your guts. Once he had actually attempted such an assassination in a tent where he was supposed to be coming to terms with someone else who had beaten him in battle. There were people in the game who admired this kind of tactic, but Shel didn’t think much of it, and had no intention of falling foul of it now.

In the meantime, Shel wasn’t too worried about the success of any assassination attempt on him. Leaning against the tentpole, unsheathed, was his hand-and-a-half broadsword: a very simple-looking implement, gray steel with a slight blue sheen. It had many names, but then most swords in Sarxos did — the ones that were worth anything anyway. The sword that people around here called Ululator (or Howler) had a nasty reputation, and was well known for its ability to protect its master without him having to actually handle it. Few heard Ululator’s scream and lived to tell about it.

Shel cocked his head at the sound of footsteps outside, and the sound of complaints, and then emphatic swearing, in Elstern.

“Talch?”

A pause, and his guard stuck his head into the tent.

“Our boy getting impatient out there?” Shel asked.

His guard produced a sardonic grin and said, “Seems his dignity’s injured because we haven’t given him his own tent.”

“He should count himself lucky his dignity’s all that’s injured.”

“I think most of the camp would agree. Meanwhile, sir, Alla’s waiting, when you’re ready to start.”

“Ask her to come in.”

“Right, sir.”

The tent-flap fell, then was tossed aside again. Alla came in, her mail ringing softly over her long deerskin tunic as she moved, and Shel’s heart bounced, as it had done for a while now when he looked at her after a fight. She was a valkyrie — not literally, but in body type: big, strong but not overmuscled, and dazzlingly blond, with a face that could go from friendly to feral in a matter of seconds…which it did, on the battlefield. She was another of the people about whom Shel was most curious in Sarxos. Was she real on both sides of the interface, or just this one? Again, he wouldn’t ask, but in Alla’s case, Shel’s reticence had just a little more to do with nervousness than etiquette. He would have been unhappy to find that there was no Alla in the real world, and to find that there was one would immediately have raised the question And what are you going to do about it? For the time being, he left well enough alone. But someday, he thought, someday I’m going to find a way to work around to the subject myself…ever so gradually. And if she wants to say anything, well…

“How are you feeling?” Shel said. “Did you see the barber?”

She sat down, making a face that suggested she didn’t much see the need. “Yes…he stitched the leg up all right. Didn’t take long. He says it’ll be healed tomorrow — he put one of those sustained-release spells on it. How about you? Got the shakes out of your system yet?”

“Please,” said Shel. “It’ll be a week or more. I hate battles.”

Alla rolled her eyes expressively. “You must…you have so many of them. You want the accounting now?”

“Yes.”

“Of our forces: one hundred ninety-six dead, three hundred forty wounded, twelve of those critical. Of Delmond’s: two thousand fourteen dead, a hundred and sixty-odd wounded, forty critical.”

Shel whistled softly. The news of this spectacular success would spread. It might keep some of the more land-hungry or fight-hungry denizens of Sarxos’s South Continent out of his hair for a while. Many would think superior strategy had been involved. Even more would think it had been magic…which suited Shel. “Other captives?”

“Thirty unwounded infantry captives. Not a lot of unhurt nobles, maybe ten. Almost all the rest of them are wounded, or went down fighting. Everybody else not accounted for seems to have run away, southward mostly.”

“Back to his cities. What’s the matter with these people? Do they like being cavalry fodder?”

Alla shrugged. She was not overly political. Her preferences ran to fighting and eating, though what she did with the calories was an eternal mystery to Shel, and a cause for some envy. If he even looked sideways at a meatpie or a haunch of roast boar, he gained weight. “Anything else?” Shel said.

“You might want to look at the contents of their baggage train,” Alla said, pulling a piece of parchment out of her tunic and handing it to him.

Shel scanned down it, and as he read, his mouth dropped open. “What the…What did he need all this stuff for?”

“Seems there was going to be a big victory party in Minsar tonight,” Alla said, stretching lazily, though her face was wearing that feral look. “Fancy clothes and fancy food and an exhibition of rich booty for the victors: ritual humiliation for the losers…the usual thing. Nooses around our necks, people pelting us with beef bones and pig knuckles.”

Shel snorted. “As if they were likely to find any. This is sheep country.”

“Yeah, well. Instead of his big victory dinner and massive boozefest, and instead of all the other local rulers getting very nervous, now Delmond gets the scraps, and we get his baggage train.”

Shel nodded, though he was still incredulously reading the baggage manifest. “The absolute stupidity of bringing all this stuff along…I can’t believe he’s this naive…he must be up to something. I wonder. Who has Delmond been dealing with lately that it would be to his advantage to make them think he’s stupid, or mad?”

Alla raised her eyebrows. “Us?”

Shel glanced at her. “You suggesting that he threw us this battle on purpose? Walked into the trap despite expecting it to be there?”

“He doesn’t care much about his people’s lives, if that’s the case,” Alla said. “But that wouldn’t be news.”

“Hmm.” Shel sat there for a moment, thinking about it. “Well, we’ll see. If it wasn’t us he was trying to fool…” He sat back, thinking which of his recent opponents might have been behind Delmond’s actions somehow. Who would it benefit? Argath maybe? Not him…he’s usually a little more straightforward than this. Elblai? No, she’s getting ready to square off with Argath, last I heard…some attempt to undermine the Tripartite Alliance.

Shel thought about that, letting his mind range briefly among the possibilities, and his eyes strayed to something else on his map table, a rolled-up piece of parchment that had been lying there quietly smoking. Alliances were shifting all over Sarxos at the moment, as the Dark Lord began his nine-yearly movement out of his mountain-bordered land, seeking the final conquest of all the lands of the Dominion. Every time he tried this, the Sarxonian lords united to throw him back, but the last union had been a little less organized than usual, the alliance taking almost too long to come together…and the Dark Lord had begun his next round of “diplomatic initiatives” much sooner than usual after his defeat. Almost as if he thought this time he might actually win….

It was complicated, but then most things in Sarxos were. That was what made playing the game worthwhile. Meanwhile, Shel would have to handle Delmond in such a manner as not to bring the man’s enemies down on his back right away — especially his mother, who was a power in the Dominion in her own right, with many potentially troublesome connections. He had to handle Delmond in some way that would seem fair, possibly even make him look good.

“I think you should kill him,” Alla said.

Shel gave her a slight, sidelong smile. “Not enough points in it,” he said, but that was not the real reason, and he knew Alla knew it. She rolled her eyes again.

“He’s a waste of your time,” Alla said.

“If one would be Lord of All the Wide Dominion someday,” Shel said, “one has to behave properly at the start of the game, as well as the finish. Let’s just call this practice, shall we? Anything else I need to know about the cleanup?”

Alla shook her head. “Quartermaster wants to know when we’ll be converting all this junk into money. The troops are getting a little, well, restive at being so close to so much gold.”

“I just bet. We’ll take care of disbursement in Minsar in the morning. Tomorrow’s market day; the jewelers and platemongers from Vellathil will be there, and they’ll be glad to take the stuff off our hands. Tell the troops it’ll be a straight percentage disbursement, and I’m turning over my share to be divided up as a contribution to their funeral funds.”

Alla raised her eyebrows. “You get hit on the head today, Boss?”

“Nope, just want to make sure I’ll have a volunteer force I can depend on in a few weeks. Meanwhile, broach a few barrels of that wine from our provident adversary’s baggage train and distribute it among the troops. And let loose the dancing girls. Assuming they want to be loose.”

“Most of them are ‘loose’ already.”

“Ouch. Just make sure they know they’re free to go where they want.” Shel sighed. “Anything else?”

Alla shook her head. “All right,” Shel said. “Talch?”

Talch put his head into the tent. “Lord?”

“Lord” meant that Delmond was right outside. “Bring in the prisoner,” said Shel.

A moment later, between two guards, Delmond swaggered into Shel’s tent. They had taken away his trademark black armor, but even left only in hose and his quilted haqueton, he was still an imposing figure: broad-shouldered, muscular and stocky, his face presently twisted out of shape with anger. The only item of dress not usual for him was the iron collar locked around his neck, the infallible method for keeping a potential shapeshifter stuck firmly in the shape he was presently wearing.

Following him was a tall, fair, slender man dressed in a herald’s tabard emblazoned with a large blue dog, seated toward the dexter. Both man and tabard were scrupulously clean, Shel noted, as the herald bustled forward to officiously dust off the remaining seat before the map table.

Delmond sat down with a grunt. The herald drew himself up and said, much more loudly than necessary, “I proclaim to your graces the presence of My Lord Delmond t’Lavirh of the Black Habiliment, Prince of Elster and Lord Paramount of Chax.”

Both these titles were accurate enough, but neither was worth bragging that loudly about. Elster was so hereditarily subdivided a country that it had princes by the dozen, and Chax was a small but population-heavy area of Sarxos best known for its ironwood forests, its light red wines, its strategically important position at the confluence of two large rivers, and its habit of being passed from hand to hand among the major gameplayers about once every two weeks. Delmond, however, had come to rule Chax by accident…a fact that seriously amused some of Sarxos’s more established and experienced players. Since he’d won it (by his adversary badly mismanaging a battle), he had been swanning around among the Kingdoms as if he were much more important than he really was.

You got this kind of response with new players, sometimes — people who were lucky early on in their history. Occasionally they steadied down and became forces to be reckoned with. More often, they hit runs of bad luck in diplomacy or battle as spectacular as their good luck had been, got burned out, and left the game; or else they so seriously annoyed their fellow players that the most wildly assorted forces would sometimes be assembled for the express purpose of stamping out the “new-sance,” publicly and with a flourish. So far Delmond hadn’t yet achieved that status, but he was getting close.

Shel glanced at the herald, and then at Alla, and Alla said, not raising her voice, “And here is Shel Lookbehind of Talairn and Irdain, free leader of a free people, who today has beaten you in battle. We will now dictate terms.”

The herald, Azure Alaunt, looked fastidiously shocked, as if someone had suggested a discussion about body odor. “Hear now the words of the Lord Paramount of Chax—”

“He doesn’t get to say anything,” Alla said, “until the victor has spoken and named the terms under which he will accept your surrender.”

Azure Alaunt bristled. “First my lord demands that you show proper courtesy to his army, the fiercely armed, the mighty-thewed, we who have labored to tragic effect in the terrible toils of war today—”

“Excuse me,” Shel said to the herald. “Were you in the battle today, Azure Alaunt? I don’t think so, because you don’t look at all like the rest of us, and you sure don’t smell like the rest of us. So you can just lose the ‘we’ part.”

“Ahem. Remembering that none can stand alone against the massing forces of the Dark Lord, if we do not all hang together, we will all hang sep—”

“Oh, please, leave Ben Franklin out of this,” Shel said. “As for the rest of it, well, ‘Dark Lord, shmark lord,’ that’s what I say.”

Delmond’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth, shut it again. “Let’s you and I get real now,” Shel said. “You shouldn’t find the attitude so odd, because you sold out your contract with the Dark Forces and went freelance as soon as you had a chance. A dim move, but you don’t need me to tell you that now, though everyone did try to warn you earlier. Even your mother. And now here you sit hoping that out of the dumbness — I mean the goodness — of my heart, I’ll be merciful, and ‘respect the usages of war,’ and save your butt from the mess you’ve gotten it into.”

He took a longish drink of honeydraft. “Well, I have news for you. The ‘usages of war’ as they are honored in Sarxos means that I can dispose of an unransomed prisoner as I see fit. My wizards have been talking to all potentially interested parties since earlier this afternoon. They can’t reach your mother, by the way; her under-wizards say this is ‘her day to wash her hair.’ There have been no offers of ransom for you…even when we discounted you. Sorry. So unless there is an offer by tomorrow at this time, which frankly I doubt, I can do with you, personally, whatever I like.”

Shel sat back and contemplated his cup of honeydraft for a moment. Alla watched Delmond unwinkingly, smiling, like a cat waiting to see which way a rat will jump. Then Shel spoke again. “Now, I for one think it would be just a ton of fun to see you dragged off into eternal servitude in the slave pits of Oron the Lord of the Long Death. See, here’s the note he sent me this afternoon, requesting the pleasure of your company.”

Shel reached across his map table and poked the smoking scrap of parchment with his knife, wishing privately that the ink on it would stop smoking. The effect was unsettling, and he kept worrying that the note would set fire to something valuable. “Not a ransom offer. It’s an offer to buy you. And there are about two hundred other generals, lords and ladies, and petty and grand nobility of the Great and Virtual Dominion of Sarxos, who would strongly suggest that I take the offer. However, I don’t like slavery much, and I’m persuaded by my quartermaster that it would be much better business to simply asset-strip you and turn you out to beg for your bread on the roads, so that the peasants whose lives you’ve made miserable by burning their fields and destroying their livelihoods can throw herdbeast patties at you as you pass.”

Delmond shivered visibly. “Surely it would be more useful to you, politically speaking I mean, to impound my army and send me and my property home with a suitable escort—”

“Excuse me?” Shel stuck one finger in his ear and began digging. “I could have sworn I heard you claim to have an army. That pitiful crowd of leftover wannabe skinheads in the corral out there, the bike-chained, the saggy-butted, those two hundred people with no horses and no weapons: that army? Oh.”

It had long been said of Delmond that he could not understand irony. Shel now found this to be true. “Not this army,” Delmond said hurriedly. “My other one.”

Shel laughed out loud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you do have another one stashed away somewhere, which I’m not sure I believe, they won’t be yours for long. Not after word of this afternoon gets out.” And Shel very much hoped that this was true. It was likely enough that Delmond could have another army…but that was no admission that Shel was prepared to make today. “And even if you have another, why would I want it, considering the quality of your troops? If ‘quality’ is the word I’m looking for.”

“Land, then.”

Shel sighed. “I don’t want your lands.” Much, he thought, but this was no time to discuss his personal ambitions with Delmond. Today’s battle was part of a long string of initiatives discussed with two other Sarxonian generals whom Shel trusted…well, trusted as far as you could trust anyone who was playing in Sarxos: about throwing distance, usually. If things went well, sometime in the next few months Shel would come in and take Delmond’s lands by force, and everybody in Sarxos, including the people who lived there, would wholeheartedly approve the change. For the moment, though, Shel said, “No thanks. I’m much more interested in your portable assets, and it serves you right to lose them. I can’t imagine why you carry all this junk around with you, except that you’re too spoiled to eat off normal dishes in the field, like everyone else. Half an acre of brocade for one tent, half a ton of gold plate, a dozen suits of ceremonial armor, a brigade of dancing girls…”

“You cannot take these things from me! They are the royal regalia of my house from time immemorial—”

“Delmond, I’ve taken them already. You lost the fight today. This is the ‘dictating terms’ part of the battle. Haven’t you noticed? And anyway, you stole nine-tenths of this stuff from Elansis of Schirholz a year and a half ago. Sacked her castle when only her little brother the Young Landgrave was home, with an insufficient force to defend it. Very nasty, Delmond, stealing the family silver from nine-year-olds. I guess it’s no wonder you won’t leave this stuff at home. You’re afraid someone might try the same trick on you. Well, you’ve outsmarted yourself, because all this stuff now counts as ‘spoils of war,’ having been taken fair and square on the battlefield. If you’d left it home, no one would be able to touch it.

“—But Elansis’ll be really glad to get the Eye of Argon back again. It’ll mean that something will grow in Schirholz’s fields this year, and Telairn will acquire a couple of powerful allies that will raise eyebrows from here to the Sundown Sea. That will serve you right, too. I can’t believe you stole that thing. It’s common knowledge that the Crimson Emerald will bring ruin on anyone who handles it except members of the Landgrave’s House. Don’t tell me your mother put you up to that, too?”

Delmond acquired a stunned expression. Shel considered it a moment, and filed it away under “Mothers/stepmothers, wicked, extreme caution when dealing with.” “Right,” Shel said. “Meanwhile, your surviving nobles will be cared for and ransomed as per the usual procedure. Fortunately, we have had a good number of offers for them. Your surviving infantry will spend a month at labor in Minsar, by way of reparation for the damage they’ve caused to Talairn territory, and they’ll then be released. Who knows, some of them may want to stay with us afterwards. A poorly fed looking lot, they are.

“You, however, will have a meal tonight and a meal in the morning, and then we’ll give you the statutory skin of water and bag of bread and meat, and a horseman will take you ten miles back into your borderlands so that you can start walking home. You might get there by midsummer, if you don’t dawdle. The collar stays on, by the way. Flying back home in bird or bat shape wouldn’t give you nearly enough time to reflect on the error of your ways.”

Delmond turned a wonderful color of puce, drew a long breath, and began saying dreadful things about Shel’s background and parentage. He was just starting to hit his stride when a soft moaning noise began radiating from near the tentpole. Ululator was shivering slightly, just enough so that you could see the patternwelding in the metal shift and move, as if the steel breathed, and the howling got louder. It was like the sound a tomcat makes when threatening another tom…except this was louder, and the threat was absolutely personal, like the angry note in your mother’s voice when she works out why you’ve been in the bathroom with the door locked for so long.

Delmond abruptly gulped and went silent. “I think you should moderate your language,” Shel said. “Howler has been known to get out of my tent at night and go about her own business — I wouldn’t go so far as to say her ‘lawful occasions’; the things she does aren’t always strictly legal. But I always pay for the funerals afterwards.”

Delmond was now sitting very still.

“So that’s the way it’s going to be,” said Shel. “Azure Alaunt, as a constituted herald of the Dominion, say you now: Is the disposition within the law?”

“It is within the law,” said the herald, looking with slight nervousness at his employer.

“Fine. I will now hear any formal protest of the disposition.”

Delmond fought first for air, then for words, and after a moment, he burst out, “None of this would have happened if you had not had magic on your side! It was not horses that bore you down the hillsides at us, but devils! We will find out where to get such demons of our own, and then we will crush you where you—”

“They come from Altharn, mostly,” said Shel mildly. “A nice little stud farm up there. I own it. We crossbreed our black Delvairns with the mountain ponies, and there’s rumored to be a secret ingredient in the mixture…possibly goat. Don’t think you’ll have much luck with them, though, Delmond. They bite, and you just have to put up with it…because it’s their spirit that makes them so surefooted.”

“Spirits!” cried Delmond, turning to Azure Alaunt. “Did you hear that? He admits it, they were spirits, familiars!”

Azure Alaunt glanced ever so briefly at Shel — an expression of utter hopelessness that his master did not see, and that made Shel wonder if, at some much later date, he should offer the man a job.

“Mmmm,” said Shel to Delmond. “Not your usual level of response. Things must be getting tough down at the WalMart.”

Delmond went rather darker than puce. It was not considered in the very best taste to refer inside Sarxos to a player’s “real life” outside. The game was supposed to be a relief from “outside,” after all, a place where the players could leave the pressures and mundanity of their lives, and experience something bigger and more exotic in company with many others intent on the same thing. But then lots of things happened in Sarxos that were not strictly “by the book,” a fact that the game’s creator apparently took as an indicator that the game was progressing correctly, and was in fact becoming its own place, its own self…something slightly alive. And anyway, Delmond had bent a fair number of the rules himself in this engagement. Turnabout was fair play, Shel thought.

“All right,” Shel said. “The disposition is made. Talch?” The guard reapppeared. “Take him out and feed him. Then lock him up in a baggage cart for the move up the road — not one of his, one of ours. Who knows what little surprises he’s got built into his own equipment. Have the regulation beggar’s bag ready for him in the morning. And what the heck, why should we be stingy? Throw a lump of hard cheese in it.”

Shivering with rage, but silent now, Delmond was taken out. Azure Alaunt paused on the threshold of the tent and said, “A word in your ear, lord, if I may…”

Shel nodded.

“His mother is not a safe person to offend. If harm should come to her son on the road — your own play could be damaged.”

Shel sat quiet for a moment. “Boldly spoken,” he said then. “And possibly even true. I take your warning at its face value, Azure Alaunt.”

The herald bowed and slipped out of the tent.

Shel sat still for a moment more, chewing his lip in a thoughtful way. “A little twitchy, that lad,” said Alla, getting up and stretching.

“Maybe. Come on,” Shel said, getting up as well. “Let’s have the baggage people get this tent down, and get ourselves up the road to Minsar and our dinners. We’ve done a good day’s work.”

Alla nodded, and went out of the tent.

A moment later, Shel went out into the near-darkness, too, and walked off a short distance through the red sticky mud, trying to find a solid spot. Finally he found one, a place that by some magic had not been completely poached into mire by the thousands of hooves, and looked southward at the first moon, the smaller one, now floating low over the mist.

He turned to look north, toward Minsar, between the wooded hills. In the moonlight, the upward-reaching tips of the pine trees were slightly paler than the rest of the branches: polished matte-silver as opposed to the slightly tarnished silver and shadow-black of the trees. It had just turned spring in the South Continent, and by daylight you would correctly see the color at the tips of the conifers as that particular shade of new young green. Elsewhere would be the thin faint veiling of green on the opening buds of the oaks and maples; everything shone fresh and new. The fields were dazzling in the mornings; besides the yellow of nevermind in the grass, and the white of the South Continent daisy that comes after the snow, there was other whiteness, too — the new lambs, bouncing around on unsteady legs in the new spring sunshine, astounded and overjoyed to be alive. So when you got the news that somebody like Delmond was at your borders, about to cross over and stamp everything into a bloody pulp — the villages, the people, the lambs, and the daisies, everything that mattered and many things that hadn’t, until now — you got cranky, and you stood up to defend the place.

Shel had started doing that, much to his own surprise, some while back. Shel rarely saw daisies except at the florist’s down the road, and had never seen a lamb that wasn’t in plastic-wrapped pieces at the supermarket meat counter, but in Sarxos he had come to know what flowers, and livestock, meant to country people, to the smallfarmers and smallholders among whom he had moved. And when he had first “settled” and made this part of Sarxos his home-away-from-home, and someone else in Sarxos had come along, intent on taking the livestock, and killing the people and the daisies — not even out of need, but out of what that person considered political expediency — Shel had said, “The hell with that,” and had started raking together an army.

That first battle now seemed a long time ago…that, and the problems that followed “saving his country” for the first time. Armies, no matter how small — and his was — have a distressing tendency to want to be paid. If their pay is late, they tend to go elsewhere, or turn on you. Shel had found ways to pay them, out of his own pocket sometimes, thereby acquiring a reputation among other generals and rulers in Sarxos as an eccentric.

Then, along had come the original rulers of “his country,” roused from long neglect of it by the action: rulers who felt (with some cause) that Talairn was their property, and who disliked someone raising an army to defend it without their permission. That particular disagreement had gone on for nearly a year, until the rulers realized that fighting with Shel was getting them nowhere, and that the price he was offering them, to buy them off, was actually pretty good. After that, by and large, he had been left alone…except by the likes of Delmond. When people like him turned up in Talairn, Shel stomped them as best he could…because he had fallen in love with the place. He knew that was always dangerous. Love, and you were likely to be wounded.

But some wounds were worth it.

Shel stood there for a few breaths more, looking out at the moonlight, and then said: “Gameplay ends here.”

Everything around him suddenly acquired the perfectly frozen look of a still photograph or holo. “Options,” said the voice of the server that controlled the “frame” for the virtual experience. “Continue: save: save and continue.”

“Save,” Shel said. “Accounting, please.”

“Saved. Accounting for Shel Lookbehind,” said the master games computer, as the frozen backdrop began, slowly, to dissolve into process-blue. “Balance carried forward from previous gameplay: four thousand eight hundred sixteen points. Score accrued in this session: five hundred sixty points. Total balance: five thousand three hundred seventy-six points. Query?”

“No query,” Shel said.

“Confirming accounting accepted, no query. Read waiting messages now?”

“Save for later,” said Shel.

“Acknowledged,” said the master games computer. “Please enter your personal satchel codes for an archival save of this result.”

Shel blinked twice, summoning up his computer’s copy of the satchel code “signature” that infallibly verified the game’s results as his own to the master games computer. The signature was complex, too much so for an opponent to fake. One part of the code changed with each session, and was combined with a second part, which resided permanently in his machine, and a third, which the “master” Sarxos machine maintained. Shel nodded to the computer, locking in his “save.”

“Save confirmed,” said the computer. He blinked a little, realizing for the first time that its voice was really a lot like Alla’s. “This session of Sarxos^SM is completed. Sarxos is copyrighted by Christopher Rodrigues, 1999, 2000, 2003–2010, and subsequent years. All rights reserved universe-wide and in all other universes that may be discovered.”

And everything vanished. Once more Shel was sitting in a room crammed with books and tapes and all the other impedimenta of his life, including (taking up most of the room) the big easy chair that let him line up his implant with the link in his home computer. There Shel sat, yawning, in the flesh rather than “in the flash,” at six in the morning in his apartment in Cincinnati, with the dawn beginning to lever its way in through the blinds, and his flesh began to complain to him that after a long night of campaigning, it was stiff and sore. The machinery was supposed to speak to your muscles a few times an hour, to keep them contracting, but sometimes these routine movements just weren’t enough to get rid of the excess lactic acid that built up in the big muscles when you were under stress. Because of this, steady long-term players were likely to do weights and get a lot of exercise on a regular basis. There might be a stereotype that suggested people who VR’d too much were thin and flabby, but Sarxos players tended toward a surprisingly high level of fitness. You could hardly campaign effectively enough to win a kingdom if your body wouldn’t support your gameplay.

Meanwhile, his body was saying something very specific to him. CORNFLAKES! it shouted. CORNFLAKES AND MILK!

Shel got up and stretched, grinning at the thought of something to eat, and at the look on Delmond’s face when he had realized he wasn’t going to be cut loose with his assets intact for the sake of pleasing his mother. Tarasp of the Hills, Shel thought, looking for his housekeys. What are we going to do about you, lady? You’re a menace, even to your own flesh and blood. I’ve got to talk to the wizards about this….

He changed into a less-rumpled T-shirt, locked his apartment, and went down the stairs to the street two at a time in an extremely cheerful mood. Despite it being a Saturday, he wouldn’t be free today. Evening shift at the hospital started at three-thirty. It would be yet another exciting evening of drawing blood and collecting labwork samples on about a hundred patients, every one of whom loathed the sight of him. Yet despite all this, as he swung into the convenience store and got his cornflakes and his milk, and then spent ten minutes or so shooting the breeze with Ya Chen, the night lady, before she went off shift, Shel’s heart sang. What a terrific campaign. What a terrific battle. I can’t wait to start dealing with the can of worms that this will have cracked open….

All the way back from the 7–11 he was laying plans…thinking about which players he needed to consult. The continuing threat from the Dark Lord was on his mind. Exactly what had he meant by that offer to “buy” Delmond? The amount offered had been three times Delmond’s potential ransom value. Unless it was some clandestine arrangement of Delmond’s mother’s with the Dark One. I wouldn’t put it past her, Shel thought as he went up the stairs at a run. She’s a snake, that one. In fact, wasn’t she a snake originally? Some kind of—

He stopped at his apartment’s landing, with his keys in his hand, and stared at the door. It was ajar.

Don’t tell me I left this open.

He pushed the door open, cautiously, and peered in.

His heart seized. Someone had been in here. Someone had been in…

…and had trashed the place.

He walked softly through, half wondering whether the intruder might still be there — and half not caring: because at the far side of the living room, where his desk was, and his chair with his interface…was a disaster area. The desk was overturned. The computer lay on its side, its main system box pulled open, the boards everywhere. His monitor was smashed. His system was destroyed.

Naturally Shel got right on the phone and called the insurance company. Naturally, eventually, they’d pay for a new system. But the one thing they could do nothing about was his hard drive. Shel would find, later, when he got the hard disk to the shop on Monday, that it had been formatted. And then his last hopes died.

He had not backed up his files to his “emergency” storage before he left. Most particularly, he had not backed up his satchel codes, the complex and completely unrememberable codes that, combined with the codes saved in the master Sarxos games server, gave him access to his character and his character’s history.

It took days for him to stop wanting to bang his head against the wall at his own stupidity. It was going to take weeks to get this mess ironed out — for the Sarxos people were obsessively careful about their security. Oh, eventually he would be able to get back into the game. He would submit the results of his last save from his remote backups (like many computer users these days, he subscribed to a “lifesaver” service, a company that kept copies of his backup files at another site), and copies of the satchel codes that had been used in that save. The company would compare his last-archived files against theirs, and check his other real-world and virtual IDs for validity — and eventually they would assign him a new password so that he could get back in the game.

But until then, there would be no more roving the green fields of Talairn for Shel. He could get back into Sarxos on one of the cheapo “introductory accounts” they sold people who weren’t sure they wanted to get that seriously into gameplay. But he wouldn’t be able to get back in as Shel until his new password came through — and by then, this year’s campaigning season would be over. Two years’ careful preparation of the ground for this year’s campaigning, two years’ amiable scheming with other players — all shot to hell. Some of the people Shel had been conspiring with would be furious; they might want nothing to do with him in the future, regardless of the fact that what had happened to him was in no way his fault. Others, missing him, might simply move on to other alliances.

And what about Alla? If she was real, she might very well drift away for lack of the player she had been working with, maybe even drift out of the game altogether. If she wasn’t real — well, characters who were generated by the game, and weren’t interacted with on a regular basis, tended to be “recalled”—a nice word for “erased.” Sarxos, after all, was an economy, and didn’t waste resources that weren’t being used. The possibility that Alla might just go away, cease to exist, because of his absence, bothered him even more than his lost campaign.

The whole situation was utterly infuriating. But these were just some of the dangers of the game…and there was absolutely nothing Shel could do about them.

He started again, of course. It was not in Shel’s nature to just give up on anything. That was one of the things that had made him stand out as a Sarxos player to start with. But as he began the slow business of getting his virtual life back, and (after they finally reissued his password) started trying to rebuild his character’s credibility, a very important question still remained unanswered:

Why me? Why?

Some days later, it was seven-thirty in the morning, and Megan O’Malley was in the kitchen, rummaging in the cupboards and muttering to herself. “I can’t believe we’re out of it again….”

Having four older brothers had posed many problems over the course of the years, but the worst was that none of them ever stopped eating, or at least that was the way it looked. You would come in for your breakfast, ready to stuff something hurriedly into your face before heading out to school, and find that the kitchen had been stripped bare like some third-world cropland after the locusts had passed through. When the brothers got old enough to go away to college, those of them that did, Megan had hoped the situation might improve, but instead, it only got worse — Mike and Sean had seemed to start eating more to compensate for Paul’s and Rory’s absence. Hiding food from the two who were studying close to home at GWU and Georgetown worked only occasionally — usually, if the food was something they didn’t want — and there were unfortunately too few kinds of food that fell into that category. Muesli had been one, for a while…until late one night Sean, while rifling the cupboards, had stumbled across Megan’s supply. She had had to start moving the stuff around after that. Sometimes this tactic worked.

Not always. “Locusts,” Megan muttered in disgust as she picked up the box she had thought safely hidden down under the sink, behind the bleach and the rubber gloves. It was a box of the genuine Swiss muesli, Familia, not one of the sawdust-tasting local brands. It was an empty box.

She stood up in the big, sunny, golden-tiled kitchen, and sighed, then chucked the Familia box in the trash can and headed for the counter where the breadbox lived, and opened it.

No bread. So much for toast, Megan thought, letting the breadbox lid fall. It’s a pity I don’t need to lose any weight, because I’d be starting. Oh, well. Tea…

That, at least, she found. Her brothers, mercifully, had all become coffee drinkers as soon as it became plain to her parents that it would not stunt their growth (and that, in cold fact, probably nothing could). Megan put water in the kettle, put it on the stove, turned the “hot” burner up to full, and went off to find a mug, glancing at the clock. Seven-forty-five. Half an hour before my ride shows up…might as well check the mail.

She headed into the downstairs den, a big room that housed one of the family’s three networked computers, and that was otherwise stuffed full, from floor to ceiling and around all four walls, with her father’s and mother’s research books. When your mom was a reporter for the Washington Post, and your dad was a mystery writer, this made for a fairly eclectic and occasionally haphazard-seeming collection; and everything inevitably got mixed together, so that books on international politics and economics and the environment and world history, and slightly weird volumes like Nameless Horrors and What To Do About Them and Luftwaffe Secret Projects 1946, wound up shelved with or piled on top of a truly terrifying collection of books on forensics and weapons and poisons, books with titles like Snobbery with Violence and The Do’s and Don’ts of Committing the Perfect Crime and The A — Z of Venomous Animals and Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology. Megan knew her father was perfectly law-abiding and utterly gentle. She had once seen him weep when he’d accidentally killed a mouse he was trying to catch and release outside, after one of the cats had turned it loose in the house. But all the same, she hoped fervently that no one would ever suspect him of a murder. Once they got a look at the downstairs den, no human being could possibly believe that he wouldn’t have known exactly how to do it.

She sat down in the computer chair and sighed at the sight of the inevitable pile of books on the table in front of the main interface box. No matter how many times she reminded them, her father or mother kept leaving their current research material obstructing the working pathway between the machine and the implant chair. But then they used retinal/optical implants, which lined up with the machine well above the level of the table, and Megan’s was one of the newer type of implant, a side-looking neckneural or “droud,” which lined up from a lower angle. As Megan pushed this morning’s heap of books aside — her dad’s, mostly; he typically stayed up writing until three or four in the morning — she looked them over with mild interest. The pile included, at its top, copies of the Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable, Jane’s Guns Recognition Guide, and The Curry Club Book of 250 Hot and Spicy Dishes. She blinked at that one. The potential “plot” for the book he was working on had been shaping itself up perfectly until then. Lure someone onto an obscure Eastern European train, shoot them — and then put them in a curry?

Naah. All the same, she resolved to stop at the store on the way home and pick up some yogurt. If Dad was thinking about making dinner tonight, it would be good for putting out the fire when the chilies got too incendiary.

Megan swiveled the computer chair around into the right position. It took a moment to “remember” her favorite settings, raising her feet up a little, tilting back at the right angle. Megan lined up her implant with the computer’s master interface box, and felt the familiar tiny shock of interconnection, like someone throwing a light switch down in your bones: switching the normal universe off, and another one on.

Megan knew that some people organized their personal virtual “workspaces” as just one more office full of file cabinets. She scorned such smallness of mind. When anything was possible in virtual reality, why didn’t people do, well, anything? For the way they behaved, she had no answers. For herself, she now walked out into the middle of a gigantic stone amphitheater, the tiers and tiers of worn white limestone seating reaching up a couple of stories above her. Above the top tier of seats, black sky with fierce white stars burning in it reached up to the zenith. She looked over her shoulder, out past the “front” of the amphitheater, to see a long “downward” slope of dimly lit pink-stained ice and grit, dusted with bluish methane snow; and low above the horizon, fat and oblate and orange as an overripe peach, Saturn hung, his rings rakishly tilted to one side, the long shadow from the sunward side striping the planet’s surface at a slewed and stylish diagonal. Light reflecting from the planet’s surface dusted the surface of the moon Rhea with a pale golden bloom. Like Earth’s moon, Rhea never turned this face away from her primary, but Megan knew that if she stood there long enough watching, Saturn would slowly start to wane, the rings would shift, and soon the sun would come up over Rhea’s too-close little horizon and change the predominant color of the moon from soft gold to blazing ice-white, with a great shadow thrown over the amphitheater from the high edge of the nearby impact basin Tirawa.

Unfortunately, Megan had a lot of other things to do this morning besides planet-watch. “Chair,” she said, and one provided itself behind her, a close duplicate of the one at home. She sat back and put her feet up, and said to the computer, “Mail, please?”

“Running mail,” said the computer in a pleasant female voice, and started displaying a set of frozen, caption-tagged video-audio “thumbnails” of her waiting messages, without any fuss. Other people might want to personify their computer as a “secretary” that would talk to them in the shape of a person, offer to show them their correspondence, and so on, but Megan preferred to have a machine that simply did the work she told it to, when she told it. She didn’t care for chatty interfaces with overbearing personalities.

“That’s because you’ve already got one of your own,” Mike had said to her when she had mentioned this to him, some months back. Mike had complained about the ensuing bruises for some days thereafter. Served him right, Megan thought, smiling slightly at the memory. If he can’t take the trouble to learn enough martial arts to keep his little sister from laying him out flat occasionally, well, it’s hardly my problem.

The mail was mostly nothing important. “First one,” Megan said, and that small “thumbnail” picture suddenly swelled to full size and three dimensions and began speaking to her. The label underneath it identified it as having come from her high school guidance counselor. Mr. MacIlwain was sitting behind his desk, which rather resembled her parents’—covered with papers and disks and books and heaven knew what else. “This is a reminder that your run-through for the SAT III and SAT IV/NMSQT tests has been rescheduled for March 12th. If you’ve requested Advanced Placement Examinations as well, this run-through has been rescheduled for March 15th. The English Composition with Essay examination will be given nationally only in April, so make sure that you—”

“Yeah, yeah, stop, erase,” Megan said. She had taken care of everything mentioned in the message, and was as ready for her SATs as she was ever going to be — though every time she looked at the Advanced Placements date she thought, The Ides of March, oh, great…As if Shakespeare and Julius Caesar hadn’t done enough to curse that date. Still, the real exam itself was a month and more away from that. Another month to spend twitching…. “Next,” she said.

The next “thumbnail” blew itself up into the shape of Carrie Henderson, another junior at her high school. “Megan, hi! Look, I know you said you weren’t really interested in the dance committee, but we could really really really use a—”

“Stop,” Megan said, “save.” I really really really don’t want to be involved in this, let someone else do it. If I just ignore this for a while, she’ll probably find someone else to do it anyway. “Next.”

The third thumbnail blew itself up into a man in a suit and tie holding up a sample of carpet, and standing on a seemingly unending acreage of the stuff, in a horrendous paisley pattern that ran up against the edge of Megan’s amphitheater and mercifully vanished there. “Dear systems user,” the man said excitedly, “your address has been especially chosen as that of one of an elite group of users who will be able to appreciate the value of—”

“Stop, erase!” Megan moaned. Cyberspam…there must be some way to stop it. She found herself wondering whether any of the anti-cyberspam initiatives that Net Force was presently backing were ever going to make it successfully through Congress. The problem was that the “spam” lobbies were so powerful…and as soon as the government found a way to stop one kind, another sprang up. It meant that her mailbox, as well as that of nearly everybody else she knew, kept getting cluttered with ads she didn’t want. At least the carpet ad had been fairly innocuous. Some of the ads that wound up in her mailbox were so annoying or insistent that she wanted to start practicing thrust-kicks on the computer, or better still, the people who sent the ads….

The water must almost be boiling, she thought, glancing at the remaining few thumbnails’ captions. There’s nothing really important here, these can wait—

An abrupt soft chime sounded in the air all around her, and Megan looked around her in surprise. Someone was trying to reach her for live chat. At this hour? “Who is it?” she said to the computer.

“Message ID shows James Winters,” the computer said.

“Really? Wow,” Megan said. “Accept.”

Off to one side of the amphitheater there suddenly appeared an office somewhat tidier than her father’s and mother’s. Early morning sun was streaming through the venetian blinds in its windows, and lay in broad stripes on the big desk in the foreground of the office. Behind the desk, which was empty at the moment except for a few printouts and letters and a few stacked disks, sat the big broad-shouldered form of James Winters, an active-duty officer in the Net Force, and the senior contact for the Net Force Explorers. He pushed aside the piece of paper he had been glancing at, and gazed “out” at Megan, looking for the moment, in his suit, very much like some harried businessman, except for the Marine haircut and the lazy eyes. Those eyes might be all netted with smile lines, but there was a toughness in them that most businessmen could only wish to achieve.

“Megan? I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

“No, I was getting ready to go to class, but that’s not for a few minutes yet.” But you would have known that, she thought, getting interested. Winters was intimately knowledgeable about all the Net Force Explorers’ schedules. Something’s up!

He nodded, looking past her briefly. “Hey, nice view.”

Megan smiled slightly. “Yeah, it’s summer ‘here.’ For about the next six hours anyway, if you can really call it a summer when the axis tilts by only a third of a degree. How can I help you?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Megan, just check me on something. Your profile shows you as being a Sarxos player.”

Her eyebrows went up. “I drop in there every now and then.”

“More than every couple of weeks, say?”

She thought. “Yeah, I’d say so. Maybe once a week on the average, though sometimes more often if something exciting starts happening. But it’s a good place to just wander around in, even when there’s not a war or a feud between wizards going on. Interesting people there…and Rodrigues did a good job on the game. It ‘feels’ realer than a lot of virtual games do.”

He nodded. “What have you heard about players being ‘bounced’?”

Megan blinked at that. “You mean, people’s satchel codes being wiped out? Viruses, and characters being sabotaged, that kind of thing? I’ve heard that it does happen, sometimes. Revenge, supposedly. Someone taking things too seriously….”

“Someone, if it’s just someone, is taking things a lot too seriously lately. There have been something like twelve people ‘bounced’ in the last year.”

That came as news to Megan. “One a month…but there are hundreds of thousands of players in Sarxos. It doesn’t seem like much.”

“It wouldn’t to me either, unless I knew there hadn’t been any ‘bounces’ for the eight years ending a year and a half ago. Something’s going on, and the companies which sponsor Sarxos are getting twitchy. They would hate to have to shut the server down.”

“I just bet,” Megan said, somewhat dryly. Sarxos players paid by the session or in a yearly “subscription” flat fee. Either way, there would be a lot of money involved, probably, potentially, millions and millions of dollars over any given year.

“Well, we just had a particularly emphatic ‘bounce,’” Winters said. “I’m not going to identify the player by real name, obviously, but a fellow who went by the character-name ‘Shel Lookbehind.’”

“Jeez, Shel?” Megan said, astonished.

“Did you know him?”

“A little, yeah,” Megan said. “I ran across him while he was campaigning about a year ago. A lot of people got interested in those skirmishes he was having with the Queens of the Mordiri. There weren’t any protocols for one person taking over another’s territory before it had officially been declared abandoned, and everyone else wanted to see if any precedents were going to be set. I went down to Talairn to see what was going on there. Shel seemed like a good player, like a really nice guy. At least, his character did.”

“Well, the character is in limbo now, as you might expect,” said Winters, “until the guy running him manages to get his password reissued. And this has been the most physically violent of the ‘bounces’ so far, which is why it came to our attention. Most of them, as you said, have been caused by ‘a person or persons unknown’ infecting the victim’s system with a Trojan or virus of one kind or another. Additionally, there was at least one theft of a home system which may or may not have been a bounce. The evidence isn’t conclusive. But in Shel’s case, somebody broke into his apartment, wrecked the place, wiped his primary storage, and pretty much destroyed his system.”

Megan shook her head. “And nobody has any idea of who it was?”

“Nothing that the local police department’s forensics have been able to turn up, anyway. But I was hoping that you might be able to help out a little.”

“You want me to go into Sarxos and ‘ask a few questions,’” Megan said.

“You’d be good for the job. You have a pre-established identity — which is handy. Any new character who came in and suddenly started asking about the bounces would attract attention and suspicion immediately. But not just you. I think it would be smart, under the circumstances, to have someone working with you. Another viewpoint could be helpful…and Sarxos is, after all, a very big place. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

Megan chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Someone else in the Net Force Explorers?”

“Preferably.”

She thought about that for a few moments. “I have to confess I’m not sure which of the Net Force Explorers I know might be ‘players.’ You don’t usually ask.”

“Well,” Winters said, “I know of at least one other Explorer with an established identity who’s expressed an interest, and doesn’t mind if other Explorers know he’s playing. Do you know Leif Anderson?”

Megan was caught by surprise one more time. “You mean the Leif Anderson who lives in New York? The redheaded guy with all the languages? He’s in Sarxos?”

“Yes. He plays a…” Winters stopped and looked down at the paper he was holding, and chuckled. “A ‘hedge-wizard,’ it says here. I’m assuming that isn’t someone who works on your garden using magic.”

Megan snickered. “No. It’s a classification that means you’re concentrating on doing small wizardries instead of the big dangerous ones. It can either mean that you prefer to work close to the land and the ‘common people,’ or that you’re not very good at what you do and you’re trying to cover yourself. Hedge-wizards are supposed to be a little on the incompetent side.”

Winters looked bemused. “Right. Well, will it be a good cover, do you think?”

“It should be,” Megan said, considering it. “Hedge-wizards are always traveling around looking for rare herbs and weird spells and deeds to do. They usually get to know a lot of people. My character does the same kind of thing, but for different reasons…so it should work.”

“Should I have him get in touch with you, then?”

“Sure,” Megan said. “Can it wait until tonight? Life around here is a little busy today.”

“No problem. Take this at your own pace. I would much rather you two take your time; rushing in and digging around too earnestly is likely to make the ‘person or persons’ responsible go quiet…and you don’t want that.”

“Nope. I’ll need a list of the other characters who’ve been bounced,” Megan said.

“Right here,” said Winters. With another soft chime, a small slowly rotating pyramid, the symbol for a file waiting to be opened, appeared in Megan’s workspace, hovering in the air near her. “If you have any other questions, if there’s anything else you need, get in touch.”

“Right, Mr. Winters. Thanks!”

He and his office vanished. Megan sat there, beginning to feel much more excited than was good for her with what now looked like an interminably long school day still to come. It was one thing to know you were a Net Force Explorer, affiliated (however loosely) with people doing work that could be about the most exciting there was. It was something else entirely to actually be on an assignment, with the people that you hoped you might someday work with watching you…interested and confident enough in your performance to give you a job and see what you did with it.

This, Megan thought, is gonna be a blast!

She got up out of the chair and told the computer, “Break interface—”

— and found herself sitting in the chair in the den, with an unearthly shriek echoing around her. It came from the kitchen. Her mother’s favorite kettle, the one with the train whistle in its spout, was now banging and clattering and whistling as if it was about to explode; and Megan’s ride was outside, honking her horn.

Megan tore out into the kitchen to get the kettle off the stove before it burned its bottom out. No tea, she thought, but as she turned the stove off, and grabbed her computer pad and books and disks and house keycards off the kitchen table and dashed for the door, she was grinning with sheer exaltation.

Sarxos, here I come!