Gods & Legionnaires (Galaxy's Edge: Savage Wars Book 2) Read online

  But now the AI was back and the broken marine was connected to the collective whole. Maestro’s emphasis came back like a sudden storm on the plains. And he was caught, unsheltered. Helpless to resist the downpour of the Pantheon’s omnipotent servant that was Maestro.

  Reclamation is a good word. Credit twenty-five achievement points to player. To be reclaimed is to serve the whole. To lay down one’s life so that others may evolve along the Path.

  The advanced specialty medical reclamation team of the lighter-armored marines…

  Improper word. Not armor. Skin.

  Maestro was on overdrive today, thought the crushed and broken Uplifted marine lying amid their salvage circus on the battlefield that had once been the posh downtown district of New Vega.

  The advanced specialty medical reclamation team of the lighter-skinned marines bearing the jaws of life indicated he might just possibly be salvaged. Life. Insert token. Ready player. Press start.

  Yellow hazard strobes washed across the debris. Few of the former buildings were recognizable now, three days after the Animals, who called themselves the Coalition, attacked the Uplifted’s new home. The next step in the evolution for the Pantheon along the Path was underway. The beginning of the Pantheon’s existence in real-time was under construction and beginning with the demolition of all things Animal. In from the deep dark they had come. Coming to bring their gifts and visions to mortal space-time. So say all along the Path. Faithful adherents every one. So say all within the collective whole.

  The game came back online. New Vega! The battle for it. The colors bright. The rock-and-roll soundtrack thundering. The voices of the commanders, tough and heroic, issuing orders to the Uplifted marines as they fought house-to-house at Triangle Square. Stormed the bank on Main and First. Hunter-killer teamwork to deal with the dying and dead.

  “Kill streak!”

  “Ordnance on the way!”

  “Tango down!”

  “Airstrike inbound!”

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  And…

  “Big prizes!”

  Rock-and-roll video game catchphrases used for combat communication and motivation.

  Then the medic who’d been on the verge of popping his helmet with the can opener…

  Bad word. Bad word. Bad word.

  Negative achievement points!

  No. The can opener has already been used. The Combat Protection Mainframe Armor Access Device. Now he is being reconnected to a life support system and reintegrated with Maestro. Connected to the Pantheon once again.

  “I’m in pain!” he roared. The crushed and broken Uplifted marine. Me. “Need some junk! Some ’ludes, or just fade me into the black! I need to get out of my skin, Maestro!”

  Old life matrix detected… noting for diagnostic report, assessed Maestro from above. Cold and distant. Confident and competent.

  “Hit him with some more Narcoblisserine. That’ll make the extraction less difficult,” said one of the medics who’d argued for salvage. “Fifty cc’s.”

  But again, all of it would sound like a mosquito to one who wasn’t Uplifted. High-speed. Neurotic like a schizophrenic’s sudden breakdown. Like a madman mumbling nonstop doomsday along a dark desert highway.

  They spiked him in the brain. In him. The center of who he really was now. And all that he’d become in the long crossing. He got a glimpse of who he really was and then edited it fast because that way lay sure madness.

  Then he was gone from the battlefield of ruined New Vega. The first of the great battles between the Uplifted and the Animals. The “Savages” and… their pitiful little monkey human ancestors. Their pathetic Coalition had been roundly beaten. Flogged and sent home for good measure to await the coming judgment of the righteous as the Grand Alliance washed over all the worlds of the galaxy. Nothing stood in the way of the Uplifted now.

  He’d earned both honor and achievement points over three days of brutal combat. And glory. He’d been shot several times by the Animals’ energy weapons that burned like hot fire. Explosions had played havoc with many of his systems…

  Bad word. Bad word. Bad word.

  Use… senses.

  Many of his senses were still ringing. Bones were broken. Clan friends were dead. Dead beyond reclamation. Even he knew that when he saw them shot through the helmet. Blown up. Run over by the big tanks the Animals brought out onto the streets when the fighting was heaviest. Ripped to pieces by brutal barrages of artillery and heavy weapons spitting in sudden crossfire storms.

  Even he knew that.

  Do you remember your tag? asked Maestro amid all the pain and memories of battle.

  The broken Uplifted marine tried to remember his very own personal tag as the Narcoblisserine took effect.

  Brutal fighting. Not just street to street and block to block. Building to building. But there, in the hot hours before the enemy airstrike…

  Brutal.

  Room to room.

  Update from Pantheon Recon Intel Analysis and Feedback… airstrike delivered by enemy weapons systems, “Titan.” Comprehensive file available for download from Heaven. Mandatory review of all that is holy and sacred.

  Now that he was once more connected to the Pantheon, and the collective whole, he was getting real-time updates.

  That’s the stuff, mumbled his Bad Old Self as the Narcoblisserine hit solidly in all the good parts that needed scratching. He whispered relief and satisfaction deep down inside the place Maestro hadn’t found yet as the information feed reintegrated with his mind. The place of his own becoming. His own truths. The place that loved… a little candy.

  He relaxed and melted into the arcade. His hiding place. His hidey-hole from the Pantheon. The world where he was god. And god alone.

  Lazer Command.

  The other, more popular arcade, Tilt, was at the nearby mall. But Lazer Command was his preferred haunt for video gaming. A living world made up of unquiet ghosts. Just for him now. Just for him to play with.

  Someone had put something on the jukebox near the back of the dark and neon-lit arcade. He knew the song, and it competed with the whirring, beeping, and whooping of the games along the walls and aisles. The song washed over all of it and made it all the same, and part of. Which was what the Path was all about.

  Please state your tag identifier, said some distant butler the Narcoblisserine scrambled the name of. Master. Mister. Something.

  He faded from New Vega, letting the powerful drug take hold, tasting the sweet candy, heading out into the black. Finally. Bad Old Self was happy to be home after the battle. Happy to be Bad Old Self again.

  The longing for destruction made real.

  He was himself on a tangerine ocean. There was a girl. She had eyes. Eyes like a kaleidoscope. Of all the images he’d kept in his long trek across the years, this was the one that was always there for him. Amid ruin and rubble, victory and glory… she was always there.

  Her name was…

  “He’s out,” said the medic at high speed from across a distant canyon. It sounded like nothing more than a single electronic pip! in real-time.

  And then some butler, master, mister said… “Player Crometheus confirmed for reclamation.” That too came to him from across that far canyon that separated that reality from this one. Their truth and his, becoming one.

  The canyon of bliss was the hiding place. The canyon of drugs. The lost in-between.

  And that too sounded just like a pip.

  He waited for her. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes. Coming to him now as she always did at each new beginning. At each old ending.

  She was always there.

  Gods: Chapter Two

  A song was playing on the jukebox Mr. Webb kept near the booth in the back of the arcade. The booth where you turned in your dollars for Lazer Command tokens. All the machines at Lazer Command t
ook tokens. Or quarters. Either one. You could use the dollar-bill machine, but that didn’t always work, especially if your money was old and wrinkled. Or if you kept it in your shoe like Crometheus did. Or had long ago when he’d been a boy and traveled everywhere by bike.

  He could move now. He could move away from the game he’d been dumping tokens into all night. Battle for New Vega on a Friday night. He turned. The game was still asking him to enter his initials because he’d earned a high score.

  He took hold of the joystick and with a series of deft, almost un-thought movements, tapped the fire button quickly as he entered his three-letter identifier. His chosen tag from long ago. BOO.

  His real name though, he couldn’t remember what it had been. That too had been deleted to make room for the Path. But the initials he’d always signed with… he hadn’t been able to undo that. And truth be told, he didn’t want to. It was his small rebellion against the constant shedding the Path encouraged.

  His one held-back thing.

  His guilty pleasure.

  He’d always been a rebel. Even before the Uplifted.

  Then he was walking toward the front door of the arcade, passing wide of Jim Stepp who stared intently into Devil’s Hollow, tapping the fire button and slamming the joystick side to side. Mouth slightly open in concentration. Feet planted wide apart. Lost in the on-screen action. The older boy was on one of the highest levels in that forbidden game. The screen was almost pitch black and you couldn’t see anything but shadows and brief splashes of subdued demonic light. It was almost impossible to tell what was going on by just suddenly tuning in over someone’s shoulder. You had to have been there all along. Accepting the gradual slide into darkness that was the game’s requirement to progress down through its endlessly abyssal levels.

  Stepp was “deep in the hollow,” as they liked to say.

  Some. Some said that. The few kids in his school who dared speak Stepp’s name aloud.

  Crometheus made the front door of the arcade. It was night out. And late. Which meant after nine and possibly heading on toward ten. He’d come in during the day, after school, and that had reminded him of the time when he’d played Vegas, not New Vega, for the first time. His band back on long-lost Earth. When he was who he’d once been before the Path made him who he’d become. They, the band and the groupies and all the hangers-on, had gone to a strip club after the show. Deep night when they entered, and full bright, washed-out and tired merciless desert daylight when they exited with just a few blinking strippers in tow. He’d felt empty and husky at that moment. Later he’d learn that even that moment long ago, before he’d started down the Path officially, had been a kind of shedding. Standing there on the cracked pavement that was already heating up with the relentless glare of the Vegas desert sun, he felt some gnawing worm in his stomach, telling him that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Not yet. Like a warning to turn back. Or a gradual slide into a darkness at noon all its own.

  Even then he was shedding. Though he didn’t know it at the time, and wouldn’t know it for years to come. Not until he was on the Path. Not until he’d saved himself… from himself.

  He and the rest of the band, and a few of the girls, went to get pancakes in some ironic greasy spoon as the morning commute in busy Las Vegas began back on old and ruined Earth. Long ago.

  That lost moment was like this one now inside his reality within the Pantheon after the battle in which he’d been crushed and maimed. After his many hours at the new upright called Battle of New Vega. Where he fought in real-time as the Uplifted marine he is.

  Big prizes.

  Entering the simulated now as the child he once was, leaving the arcade, was like that memory. Like it might never happen if you knew how to edit your truths. He was fourteen years old now. He’d come into the arcade after school. He’d made his tokens last until now, playing Battle for New Vega, where he’d been an Uplifted marine earning kill streaks and achievement points. And then getting crushed in a final rooftop shootout amid an Animal dustoff under fire.

  It was a pretty good run. But that was another truth inside the many realities. Here in the arcade he was just a kid. It wasn’t like he had all the money in the world. Not yet. Because he once had, long ago. And it didn’t mean anything. Not then. Not now. Now he was just fourteen and good at video games. Like he’d been back then. He thought he might join the navy and fly F-14s. Like in that movie. Top Gun. Like he’d thought a long time ago.

  That was his memory. Not someone else’s. Not some texture or filter to be thrown over a replay as they wandered through the dark with nothing but time to kill. Inventing new lives like someone might edit random footage to make a movie.

  He thought about doing those things just as he had when he was a kid. Instead of ending up where he did.

  Only everything is enough, he reminded himself when he felt some other truth threatening to challenge that assertion. He would only be satisfied with everything, as any Uplifted must.

  Twenty-five achievement points.

  Here now, standing outside the front door of the Lazer Command arcade on a Friday night at the edge of a sleepy suburbia that had existed long ago… and no longer did… this was everything. It had taken him lifetimes to understand that. Thanks to the Pantheon, and the Path, he had it all back now once again.

  Rosebud, again.

  Right?

  He let all the old cryptic codewords that unlocked all the discovered mysteries flood across his brain once more.

  Lazer Command was the touchstone.

  This strip mall with the Wendy’s in one corner, beside the near-silent freeway that ran north and south, and the Togo’s at the other end, still doing late-night sandwich business, was everything. Or it had been a part of the everything he’d once had, and lost, and then found again. He could see kids, kids old enough to have their first jobs behind the windows of the sandwich shop. Cutting bread, cleaning up, closing soon for the night. He knew there’d be music in there. Foreigner or something. Air Supply. Or even some synth band out of the UK. Neuro, it had been called. Some dark-haired older girl with her hair cut short and swept to the side telling him that word for the first time long ago.

  Something before him. Before his time as a rock star. Before who he would become in the becoming of what he one day would be. I know, he thought to himself. It would sound like madness if I hadn’t lived it all.

  He laughed at himself in the night, standing in the darkness between the still-open businesses. The darkness in the parking lot between the islands of light from the streetlamps high above.

  He could go for a number fourteen from Togo’s right now. Or a pastrami with avocado. The sandwich he had invented. All the sandwiches had numbers. Many numbers. Not so many as the years passed and the corporate bean counters narrowed the choices in favor of penny-measured profits.

  Funny what little bits of trivia stick after so long. And…

  Wonderful things are done to death by bean counters.

  He stared out in wonder, silent wonder, at that ancient strip mall that was all his now. Again. Hidden here as it always was. Inside the Pantheon.

  There was the closed car wash. The night was cool and he could smell the cleaning chemicals that had been used all day to wash and polish people’s cars. Friday night was date night for the older kids, so many cars had gone through that place and were now somewhere out there in the night, parked.

  He wondered if the prettiest girl in school was out tonight with some older guy. A guy with a job who sold stereos. Or even pagers. The kind of guy who wasn’t in high school anymore and drove a cool car.

  Like she had been then. Holly Wood had been her unusual and interestingly unbelievable name. Holly. Wood.

  That part was real. Right?

  He wondered where Holly Wood was right now inside this amazing world, not simulation, where he was God. Where she was on this night as s
he had been on all those other nights back on Earth. He could call her up. But for right now, he wanted the fourteen-year-old’s longing he’d once had for her.

  He’d always wondered where she was no matter where he was in his old life. Rocking a hundred thousand at some massive stadium on the other side of the world. Among a sea of groupies. Face-down in his own vomit. Crossing the interstellar darkness to becoming something new after the end of everything on Earth.

  She’d said hi to him once. Long ago. First day of school. The varsity cheerleaders had been part of the freshmen orientation. And she’d been there with her blue eyes that were like a kaleidoscope turning, beach-tan skin, golden-blond hair. And that smile.

  He wondered whatever happened to her. Though he knew. And then… he didn’t. Because he could edit. It was his reality after all. His truth to make as he saw fit.

  His old bike was lying in the dark, off to the side of the arcade, where all the other bikes had been cast throughout the early afternoon and evening. Now it was all alone in front of the darkened tailor’s shop that did business next to Lazer Command. Thrown down on the sidewalk and looking forgotten.

  That’s how things were back in those days. When kids could be kids. The last of such times. You just rode your bike somewhere and dumped it in front of a store. Along the sidewalk. No racks. No locks. No helmets. The world was different then.

  As it always has been in this place of his own making.

  And so were you, he reminded himself as he picked up the old familiar bike. You were different then. And you’re different now. Here.

  The yellow Huffy had a shock absorber that ran from the fork back to the seat. It made the bike much heavier. Older kids who were pros at riding the trick bikes, making ramps and jumping over things, or between everything they could get their hands on, told him so. Told him that the heavy shock absorber that came with the bike made it heavier. And therefore useless.

  But it was his now. As it had once been then.

  He struggled to remember the name of those lighter, cooler bikes. BMW? No, that had been the kind of car all the cool guys who dated the hottest girls in school drove. Older guys out of high school already. So BMW wasn’t right. But it was something like that. Bikes so light you could pick them up with one finger. Trick bikes.