Fiction River: Risk Takers, page 23
Not even a hundred yards ahead, he could see the end of the wood and the locomotive was already past human running speed as they burst out of the other side of the wood.
Into full daylight.
Karl stuck his head out of the side window and peered at the sky, feeling the heat of the sun on the side of his face, before he went back to the engine controls.
Martin took off his hat and stepped to the rear of the platform, just in front of the tender with its thousands of gallons of water and kerosene, and stood with the sunlight falling on his face, a few greasy strands of his thinning hair hanging down. He stood there almost a full minute before he replaced his hat and returned to the front of the cab.
If Martin felt refreshed from his little break, Karl couldn’t see it.
Blue sky showed in all directions, as far as the eye could see. What few wisps of fog that still clung to the ground burned away almost fast enough to see. There was nothing to stop the zeppelins now.
And the Old 197 was still twenty minutes from the Manchester Station.
As the minutes ticked off, Karl lost hope.
One damned cow.
Cost them maybe five minutes but there wasn’t any way to make up that five minutes, not this close to Manchester.
There was barely enough time to get back up to full speed before they would have to start slowing down again. It would not do to roll right through the station and into the marshalling yard because they were going too fast to stop on time for the station platform. The directors would line up to tell him that, one after the other.
Even Martin drooped, his face grey.
“Well, never you mind, Martin,” Karl said. “You did well. I think a thick steak and all the trimmings. You did so well, I’ll buy.” He hoped he said it with more briskness than he felt.
Martin’s answering smile was just a shadow but it did not stop him from going back to his gauges and his valves, doing what a good fireman does.
One long curve, then a one mile straight run through a walled trench that ran into the heart of Manchester. The city had kept growing after the railroad station had been built and the walls were the only way to keep stray children and dogs off the tracks. Sometimes it worked that way.
They had let the steam pressure fall off when the cow got in the way and not bothered to run it back up again, so the needle was well into the white when they rounded the last curve and Karl slacked off the throttle, letting their speed start to fall.
If nothing else, he thought, he could let the natural weight of the train and the friction of the running gear slow the train. He might even be able to slide into the station and barely have to touch the brakes, a feat of skill only the best engineers could manage. That might make him feel better.
Martin grabbed Karl’s shoulder and half-jerked him across the cab, pointing with his other hand.
Far away, just visible in the faint mist still in the sky, a zeppelin cruised, heading for the airfield on the other side of Manchester, only its immense size making its speed seem leisurely.
Martin turned to look at him, streaks of grime and sweat from his hairline to his chin, and said quietly, barely audible over the elemental roar, “We did it.”
Karl stared for a moment, his mouth hanging open.
Then he reached behind him without looking and yanked down the whistle cord, blowing one long blast of triumph, which echoed within the walls lining the track, as they entered into Manchester.
Introduction to “Side Bet”
Lee Allred doesn’t gamble, but he does play Massively Multiplayer Online computer games, although I have no idea how he finds the time. He scripts comics for both DC and Marvel. His short fiction has appeared in several Fiction River volumes, most recently Past Crime, as well as in Asimov’s SF Magazine and anthologies from Baen Books. After serving three tours in Iraq, he graciously agreed to edit our upcoming volume Valor.
Lee’s computer gaming experience plus his experiences with the military give him a fascinating perspective on risk, ending this volume with one of the most original—and tense—stories we’ve ever published.
Side Bet
Lee Allred
I know, I know. You’re not supposed to start out a story with somebody asleep. That’s what they say in all the story conferences at work at least.
Only I’m going to have to start this story with me asleep lying face down drooling on my pillow because that’s how this story starts.
At least my part of it.
Yeah, a lot of the events of this story happened beforehand—some pretty monumental ones such as Earth receiving its first alien visitor (immediately followed by its first ultimatum by said alien visitor)—but I didn’t know anything about any of them. The first I knew something strange was going on was when somebody shook me out of my sleep.
And I do mean shaken.
I work for one of those MMO massively multiplayer online game companies. You know, like Craft of Warworld. Players all over the world sit in their parents’ basements and pretend to be virtual elves and whatnot. Only in our game’s case, they’re roleplaying superheroes. Yes, I’m one of the game developers for Heroic City Capes and Masks. (Email me after this story; I might be able to swing a game subscription discount for you.)
Anyway, we’d just pushed out an update release the day before. Now, I don’t know if you know anything or not about how update release deadlines work in the online gaming industry, but let’s just say that I’d pretty much been awake at my keyboard for the last seventy-two hours straight.
So you can imagine I was pretty dead to the world once I got home and crawled under the covers.
I’d been asleep for nine uninterrupted hours and the plan was to stay that way for another nine when I felt somebody shaking my shoulder and calling my name.
It took me a while to realize it wasn’t part of my dream. Eventually the fact that Scarlett Johansson (who I’d been dreaming of) doesn’t have a basso profundo voice finally tipped me off.
I moaned and rolled over groggily. I blinked sleep-crusts from my eyes, then blinked again. There before me stood two government men-in-black types right down to the Ray-Ban 1950s sunglasses.
Well, I said “men-in-black” but only one of them was male, the basso profundo-voiced black guy built like three NFL linebackers. The lady agent was a rather severe redhead. She was frowning daggers at me.
“Mr. Yamashita?” Basso Profundo growled. “Mr. Ken Yamashita?”
“Uh…” I answered, still half out of it. My tongue was thick and foul-tasting. I could smell my own morning breath. It smelt like Cincinnati.
Apparently “Uh” wasn’t the response he was looking for. He tried again.”Mr. Ken Yamashita of 1132 Verde Drive, Los Gatos California, phone number—?” He rattled off my landline number listed in the phone book.
“Uh…” I repeated, a bit more awake this time.
“This is getting us nowhere,” the redhead snapped. She grabbed my index finger and pressed it to the surface of her smartphone. “Prints match. He’s Yamashita,” she said.
She pronounced it right, Japanese-style. Not “Yama-shEEta” like Profundo. I liked her already. Or would have if she wasn’t some jack-booted black helicopter government-type who’d broken into my apartment without a warrant. She had nice soft hands. For a lady cop.
I yanked my index finger back into my own custody. “Hey! Mind telling me what’s going on here?”
Both of them whipped out their badges. “United States Secret Service,” Profundo added. “You need to come with us, Mr. YamaSHEEta.”
“Huh?” I believe the technical term is “taken aback.” My aback was very much taken by all of this.
So was the rest of me.
Before I could sputter “Could we start from the beginning?” Profundo bodily picked me up like an old gunny sack of spuds and lugged me outside to a parked black SUV the size of Montana and armored-up like a tank.
Me still in my pajamas, smelling of morning breath, gummy from seventy-two non-stop hours at work without a shower, and really, really needing to make a pit stop.
Redhead had her gun out the whole way to the van, but she wasn’t pointing at me, she was doing the whole scanning the perimeter movie thing, like they were protecting rather than abducting me. If this was being protected, I’d hate to see what being abducted looked like.
I tried asking questions. I tried shouting questions. I tried asserting my constitutional rights. Profundo just laughed and muttered something about some “suspension of habeas corpus” or something. Redhead added that I quote, didn’t have need to know, unquote.
Redhead drove the SUV to Moffett Field and then right onto the tarmac where a Lear Jet painted US Air Force livery waited, engines running. My two keepers hustled me aboard the plane. At least they let me walk under my own power this time.
We took off immediately. Plastic shades were pulled down over the windows so I couldn’t see out. When I tried lifting one up, Profundo slammed it back down. Redhead again told me I didn’t have a need to know where I was going. At least they let me use the lavatory in the back of the plane. Even those two couldn’t deny in this particular case I had a need to know. I mean go.
We flew for several hours in silence.
And hunger. They didn’t even have in-flight peanuts.
Eventually we landed in Washington, DC. Great big surprise.
We landed at Andrews Air Force Base, complete with big lighted sign for anybody to read as they exited the plane. The government really needs to rethink this whole cloak-and-dagger stuff.
I had just enough time to read the sign when I was shoved into another tank-like SUV and driven out the gates like a bat out of you-don’t-need-to-know.
I guess government types always default to super secret squirrel mode in a crisis unless ordered not to.
And we were in a crisis. Just how big and from what I soon learned.
We drove through the city, passing the Mall and the White House in the process (and me without my camera!) and out into the Maryland countryside. We drove east then turned north into some woods and some secret military installation.
Again there was a sign.
The one at the gate read “Naval Support Facility Thurmont” but you probably know it by its other name: Camp David, the Presidential retreat.
Five minutes later I was standing in my stinky pjs unshaved, unshowered, and unsure in the presence of the President of the Unites States of America.
***
Look, let’s get one thing straight before I start into the next part. I didn’t vote for the guy. I’m in the entertainment business, remember? We vote for the other team. That’s just how we roll.
Besides, his perfect plastic hair, central casting good looks, and his cornfed “gosh-golly-darn-it-to-heck” vocabulary rather grated on me. What was this, anyway? The Ozzie and Harriet 1950s?
At least that’s how I viewed the man going into all this.
All throughout my long strange trip, I’d planned out this whole indignant speech to fire off at whatever government official my two captors eventually dragged me to. I never imagined it’d be the President himself, but I was still going to let him have it with both barrels.
I never got out word one.
Instead, the President took one look at me and my rumpled condition and came down like a sack of hammers on my two kidnappers: “We’re not in such a great hurry that you couldn’t have let Mr. Yamashita get dressed. I don’t suppose either of you fed him en route, either. Poor man probably thinks he’s been kidnapped.”
Profundo lowered his head and scuffed the toe of his shoe on the carpet.
The President turned to me. “My apologies, Mr. Yamashita—may I call you Ken? Briggs and Stratten here happen to be the very best we have in keeping an assignment alive but they severely lack people skills, bless their hearts.”
He added, “Which is why they’ve spent the last few years in purgatory assigned to a certain ex-First Lady’s protection detail. I’ve half a mind to send them right back there.”
Profundo blanched.
The President pointed a finger at the big guy, “Stratten, please show Mr. Yamashita where he can shower and tidy up. In the meantime, Briggs, Camp David’s a big installation. I’m sure we can find him some clean clothes.”
The two agents made to send me to the showers, but I stood my ground. “Could somebody please tell me what this is all about?”
“They didn’t—?” The President glared at Briggs and Stratten again. “It’s quite simple, Mr. Yamashita…Ken. We need you and you alone to save the world.”
***
A short time later Briggs and Stratten escorted me back to the President. I was showered, shaved, and sartorialized in khaki slacks and blue polo shirt with a President of the United States seal embroidered on the pocket.
The President sat in a conference table. Standing around the room were various science and military types, plus one or two political aides. A grid of flat screen monitors on the wall. A chef was laying a spread of covered dishes on the table.
Breakfast, and none of that hotel continental slop, either.
Scrambled eggs and quarter-inch think peppered bacon so rich and seasoned I could taste it from the doorway. The White House obviously grocery shopped at places a little more upscale than my usual Food 4 Cheap runs.
The President motioned to me with a fork. “Sit down, Ken. Help yourself. One thing I’ve learned about this job: grab a bite while you can when in crisis mode. Otherwise you’ll never get to eat.”
I sat down. “Uh, sir?” The “sir” just sort of slipped out. I still thought his perfect hair was too plastic-looking. “You said something about me, uh, saving the world. You sure you have the right Ken Yamashita?”
“Eat, eat,” he motioned. “Yes, quite sure.” He dabbed a linen napkin to his lips. “This is going to sound a little fantastic, so maybe we better just show you.”
He nodded to one of the flunkies in the room and the wall of monitors flicked on.
“The Moon you recognize,” one of the science types said in her reedy nasal voice. “That big mechanical construct dwarfing it is an alien starship.”
“Alien what?!”
“That was my reaction,” the President said.
“Moving on,” the science lady pressed the remote. “This is its sole occupant, a being who wishes to be addressed as ‘the Gamesman.’”
“Gameswhat?!” I had the sick feeling somebody was trying to put one over on me. One of the major villains in our Heroic City game is “The Gamesman.”
But all this couldn’t be some practical joke. The budgets needed for the sets and special effects would have been too high for any of the jokers I work with.
“Gamesman,” Ms. Science continued. “He told us that, unlike his unpronounceable name, the name was a frame of reference we could relate to. This next photo is a bit blurry. He—or maybe he’s an ‘it,’ we’re not sure—doesn’t photograph too well.
The Gamesman didn’t photograph at all if that fuzzy blob on the screen was any indication.
“To flesh and blood eyes, he looks very humanoid,” Ms. Science said.
“Too humanoid,” the President added. “Perfect, like Greek statuary come to life.” This from the man with the Superman jawline and Robert Redford hair.
Ms. Science continued: “The Gamesman claims to go from planetary civilization to planetary civilization, challenging a planet to any one game of their choosing, so long as the game is from their own culture and is a game of skill, not chance. He’s challenged us to such a duel.”
Fantastic as this all sounded, I still didn’t see what this all had to do with me.
“If we win,” Ms. Science said, “Earth wins his secrets of fusion power and faster-than-light space travel, secrets he obviously has. We could usher in a Golden Age for mankind. Free energy and a whole universe to spread out in.”
“But if we lose,” the President stepped in, “he wins our entire planet. Lock, stock, and Earthling.”
One of the military types, a general (or maybe he was an admiral), grunted. “Seems his other hobby besides playing games is collecting inhabited planets. Displays them on a shelf in his ship.” He spat the last bit out disgustedly. “And—according to him—he’s never been beat.”
The President nodded tiredly. I could see the worry seeping through. “There’s one other little condition for this match: the Gamesman gets to pick his opponent—randomly out of the planetary population.
“Well, he’s made his random choice. He’s chosen you, Ken Yamashita.”
***
I homina-homina-ed for several seconds before I got myself under control.
“Me? You can’t be serious! The fate of the entire—?! I—Mr. President, you gotta cancel this, you gotta back out. I’m not—I can’t—”
The general shook his head. “No backing out, son. Like it or not, this challenge happens two weeks from now. No ifs, ands, or buts. We can’t back out or even refuse his challenge. Spaceboy gave us a little demonstration of what he’d do if we tried.”
The monitor screens shifted to a picture of the dark side of the Moon. I wouldn’t have recognized it but the photo was helpfully labeled.
“That fresh, gaping hole you see there on the surface, twelve miles deep and roughly the size of Ohio, was instantly vaporized yesterday at fourteen-hundred hours precisely, Washington time, by our game-playing friend.”
My brain whirled. “Could…could the photo be fake?”
“Not a chance. Both ours and China’s photo satellites confirm it.”
“We have spy satellites on the Moon?” I blurted out.
The science lady cleared her throat. “Technically speaking, the SELENE-II isn’t a ‘spy satellite’ and it isn’t ‘on’ the Moon,
“Of course we have spy satellites on the moon,” The general growled, his low bass voice drowning out the reedy scientist. “You really want your kids to wake up to Chinese nuclear missile bases on the back side of the Moon?”
