A brush with death

“Nuke, move toward that MG,” Mack said on the comms.

“Great.”

“Don’t bellyache. The moment you take fire, hunker down and sit tight. Sulphyr and I will move up to hit itand we can bound off each other until we’ve got the fuckers surrounded.”

On the mini-map, Gradie saw Sulphyr and Maverick’s icons moving toward the laundry room at the bottom of the chute.

“I think we’re gonna move to the courtyard,” Nova pinged the big circle at the center of the penthouse square, where a strange symbol that looked like an octopus or something was surrounded by small paths.

“There’s a staircase we can use. Plus the tree will screen us from the MGs.” Nova drew lines from the top two corners of the map and showed how the big tree in the courtyard would screen the stairs between the back of the lounge/bar and the courtyard.

“Will it though?” Luke sounded skeptical.

“Yeah bro, it’s like the god damned Deku tree.”

“Oh, well in that case, let’s look out for Skultulas and shit and then move here.” Luke drew a line from the bottom side of the courtyard up around to the top of the map, right between the two MGs.

“Make em think twice before pulling the trigger.”

“Fucking ballsy but it might work,” said Maverick. “Fuck it, let’s do it. But we gotta move now.”

Nuke sighed and got to her feet. Gradie moved to get behind her and a prompt reminded him to loot Mack’s body for grenades and extra ammo.

“Get in tight.” She advised him, and he was glad Mack wasn’t around, though something that felt like the telepathic edges of a snicker wafted over the group comms. He pressed in close and tapped her with one hand on one of the few portions of soft armor just above her hip.

They marched in a half crouch with weapons ready, past crumpled showers and spraying walls towards a door in the back that slid open right as they got within three feet of it. Nuke jumped back hard into Gradie.

“It’s just me,” Nova said on the comms.”

“Jesus,” Nuke hissed, and stepped through the door.

It hit him like being suddenly turned upside down. Nostalgia. Disorientation. Like falling through one part of a dream into another that was trying to pass as waking life.

The pool stretched out longways from where they stood clear to the far end about fifty meters away, where doorways to locker rooms waited in a white wall between the shadows of diving boards. The diving blocks, rounded planks on wire thin supports in this universe, were arranged in front of him, waiting. The high dive, looking as space age as the blocks with its platforms suspended on near invisibly thin metal, loomed above the center of the mirror still surface where the two movable plexiglass walkways blocked in what he knew was the deepest portion, twenty-five meters down the length. One wall of the natatoriam was a solid glass window, while the other was a terrace of silver bleachers looking down over a glass railing at the ground floor where tile shimmered and folding chairs sat empty. Despite the minor tweaks to the fixtures, the only thing truly Sci-Fi about the entire space was the view out the tall windows, where space-opera towers smoked and laser beams flashed in the sinking twilight distance. He focused on that fantastic scenery until the lap pool from his childhood sunk back down into memory and there was only this copy, placed before him like a hollow easter egg.

In his shock, the gap between him and Nuke had widened, and he took two quick steps to catch up. She led him to the right towards the bleachers and a mirror world floated across the pool in that way he had always loved.

“I don’t like this,” Nuke said.

“Can’t swim?” Gradie said, hoping to mask whatever the fuck was going on with him.

“Ha, no, I mean those windows. Quasar, you sure they don’t have eyes—”

In answer, the far wall exploded. The now familiar rapid-fire laser-like tracers ripped through a door and danced around Nuke and Gradie, kicking up so much tile and rubber slip-mat that Gradie thought they were about to get dropped through the floor.

“Ahh go!” Nuke yelled, and for a moment, Gradie stood there, watching everything disintegrate, wondering where the fuck she expected him to go to, while also wondering, in a wordless, guttural way, as if his skin itself was the one having the intellectual crisis, if the pain of being ripped apart by the MG would be like the pain of being shot in the calf multiplied a thousand times, until Nuke reached around and grabbed him by that always convenient handle on the back of his armor, and drug them both into the pool.

The makers had not taken the time, or had been unable to think of a way, to make the inside of the pool look any different from an Olympic length pool in the Real. The night vision function of his helmet, rather than being a monochrome green or blue, rendered everything in a natural full moon night un-darkness, and the blue tile Ts at the far end, the slope, the mirrored reverse of itself wavering above them, created the sensation, for just a moment, that he had fallen straight through in to the Real, or at least into the Hardworlds.

Then Nuke’s armored form floated out of the pillar of bubbles caused by her plunge, and the MG raked the surface with a burst that sent glowing sudsy lines of laser bullet-paths slicing through the water. One round struck Nuke’s chest plate with a soft harmless “thunk” that echoed in the pool, and Gradie realized the rounds had their speed reduced to that of an energetic overhand throw.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Nuke threw her arms up in a stroke and propelled herself down to the bottom of the pool and Gradie followed, the neutral buoyancy of his suit fighting against him. More rounds struck the water and their paths fizzled out into curving chains of circular bubble clusters, not unlike lane ropes, and the sounds of the impacts and the echo of the gun above were softened by the water, so that it felt like he had entered a dimension where nothing harsh or violent could ever persist. A wave of déjà vu washed over him from the way the sensation of the water was kept out by the suit, but he had no idea why.

“Mav, look alive,” Nova said. “You got drones coming your way.”

“I don’t need them.”

“Not mine!”

“What the fuck! Thought you had their tech locked down.”

“Deployed from the roof. Can’t get my tech up there yet. Don’t panic, just sit tight. My flyers are loaded with lightning plus.”

“What the fuck—”

“Dogfighting software! Just give me a second!”

The machine gun fire had stopped. Gradie followed Nuke toward the far side of the pool in a slow, floating march. It was calm and unexpectedly beautiful, as things sometimes were in the diorama worlds of Gunmaze, until something small, dark, and metal dropped into the water on the far side and sunk straight to the bottom as a drone flew by overhead.

“Quasar,” Nuke started, but the strange bass boosted boom cut her off. There was a bright flash that ballooned into a swarm of bubbles rising up in a pillar toward the surface. A few seconds later, the echoes faded and a strange gurgling noise filled in the silence. It grew into the sound of rushing distant water, not unlike a bathtub being drained in the next room.

Lights flashed above the warbling silver surface of the water and gunshots echoed.

“Quasar,” Nuke said again.

“One second!” Nova hissed. Something else dropped into the pool with a thunk and Nuke squeaked and jumped backward, the water turning her panicked motion into a slow-mo backwards float that her bulbous armor gave a comical slant.

The thing descended in a chute of bubbles and clunked again on the pool floor. A broken drone.

“I’m clearing the fucking skies,” Nova said.

“We’re moving on that MG,” Maverick said, and Gradie saw three icons, him, Sulphyr, and Mack, moving through an area labeled “DINING” on the other side of the kill-hall from the pool.

“And just a heads up, be extra cautious. HQ commandeered our clone station at the base temporarily—”

“What the fuck!” Robin said.

“They needed bodies for a supply run. We will get it back once—”

“But they can’t give us fucking air support!”

“I told you, this place is stuffed with anti-air.”

“Which Quasar has mostly fried now anyway!”

“Dammit Robin, we have to make do with—”

The MG cut him off. Nuke went turtle mode as a reflex, but the gunfire was distant and muffled, and none of the rounds broke the shimmering surface of the water.

“Taking fire!” Maverick yelled, and Gradie saw the three icons of Maverick's clone squad spread out perpendicular to the line of fire. For Otherworld gamers, they had decent tactics.

“Mouseholes go both ways, assholes!” Sulphyr yelled, and Gradie saw his icon light up as another, fainter machine gun sound joined in.

“Nuke! Move up!” Maverick said, his adrenaline bleeding through the mental comms, infecting Gradie with an itch to be out of the lowering water. The surface was descending on them like a tin foil ceiling in a slow collapse.

“I’ll pop nano smoke, one sec,” Nova said. A drone moved by over them, a distorted black smear the size of a small bird. The pop of the grenade was the softest sound Gradie had heard yet, like a comforting voice, and the edge of the water darkened like ink spreading across paper.

“Moving!” Nuke said, her voice filled with an excitement that reminded Gradie none of this was real and that fear was foolishness in a shootout where no one died, though the dull twinge in his calf reminded him that it might not all be fun and games if the MG found its mark.

Nuke stomped over to a ladder in the side wall and pulled herself up with a groan of stressed metal. Gradie waited behind her until she snapped at him.

“Grab onto me and jump the fuck up there! Your jump suit!”

Gradie let his rifle swing down, which felt like an invitation for some phantom Philip to float out of the air and kick him, and pulled himself up towards Nuke’s shoulders, now clearing the water. However the jump suit worked, it didn’t activate until he was clear of the surface, and the sudden unexpected and still unfamiliar force rocketing him upward sent him flailing up onto the deck, where he landed in a half roll onto his side.

As Nuke cleared the water, the deck around the ladder posts cracked and groaned, but didn’t give. She stomped up onto the tile, dripping water off her black armor like oil, grenade launcher already aimed at the spreading smoke. Gradie rolled up and got into formation behind her, one hand on her handle, and had to once again respect his new allies' training. How many Hardworlders were headhunted from Gunmaze junkies, he wondered?

She took two steps before the MG fire shot out of the smoke.

“Shit!” she squealed, and turtled so fast that her head dropped two feet in an instant, exposing Gradie to the stream of fire.

“Dammit!” He snapped down into a crouch as the deck and water around him came alive.

“Moving!” Maverick said, and the three icons in the dining area wasted no time in taking advantage of the MG switching targets. They moved in what must have been a full sprint into the area labelled GYM.

“Nuke, move up! He’s firing blind!” Nova said. Gradie looked around him and saw what he meant. The fire was raking the entire natatorium, though focusing mostly on the smoke on the far side of the deck, where the exit door lay hidden. After a few seconds, Gradie noticed something else. Though the MG itself was now firing some kind of tracerless, non-infra-red-reflecting rounds invisible to even his space-age nightvision, the impacts of the rounds let him track the field of fire, and there were some gaping holes in it.

“Nuke, move to that corner!” He pointed with his rifle.

“Fuck you!”

“He’s firing through mouseholes! That’s one of his blind spots!”

“He’s right Nuke!” Nova said.

“Ahhh!” Nuke de-turtled with a groan and shot off toward the far corner of the deck, almost leaving Gradie behind. Like a sudden spot of shade on a hot day, the MG fire became a distant suggestion as they stepped onto the oblong shape of deck untouched by impacts.

“That smoke didn’t do shit!” she yelled.

“You’re alive aren’t you? And he’s got eyes somewhere on the skyline. Wait one sec, gonna smoke the whole room.”

Another drone whizzed by and there was a pop next to the floor to ceiling windows across the pool and more black sparkling smoke spread out in a cloud.

“How am I supposed to see where I’m going?” Nuke said, as the first cloud of smoke flowed over them, and everything disappeared. Gradie held tight to her handle.

“The HUD, remember?” Nova said, and a glowing yellow overlay, like a 3d blueprint, appeared on their HUD. There was even a flashing arrow path on the ground.

“I mapped his blind-spots. You should be good to push him.”

“Should be,” Nuke growled.

Like a flipped switch, the MG fire stopped and picked up again in the far room.

“Fuck! I’m Hit!” Mack yelled on the comms, and something bled through that told Gradie his fears of real pain in this place were far from unwarranted.