25. MISSION CRITICAL
SUDDENLY EVERYONE WAS talking at once. The Traveler, Molly, Professor Jameson, Mars, even Miss Ferris. Their voices were overlapping as they reacted to the news. Kurodar had control of the Battle Station. Three hours before it was operational. Three hours before the United States was in flames . . .
Only Rick was silent. He stood at the head of the table. He went on gazing at the screens along the wall, the images of the Battle Station, the earth, the sun. The meter filling with solar energy.
The same words kept echoing in his mind over and over:
Through me. He did it through me.
“I have to go back into the Realm,” he said quietly.
No one heard him. Molly was snapping accusations at Mars. Mars was defending himself. Miss Ferris was trying to get everyone to calm down. Professor Jameson and Lawrence Dial were discussing possible ways to break Kurodar’s grip on the station.
“I have to go back into the Realm,” Rick said again, louder this time.
Molly stopped talking midsentence and turned to him. Mars turned to him, then Miss Ferris. Finally, the two scientists ended their discussion and looked at Rick. The room was quiet.
Rick said it for the third time: “I’ve got to go back in. I’ve got to break Kurodar’s interface. It’s the only way we can stop him before the weapon charges, before he sets it off.”
The others stared at him. For a moment, no one responded. No one said a word.
Then Miss Ferris said, “But . . . you can’t. There’s nothing there anymore. You said so yourself. The Realm is just blackness now. It almost killed you.”
“The Golden City is still there,” Rick told her. “I’ve seen it. Kurodar has let the rest of the Realm go dark and concentrated all his energies on the Golden City. For this. So he could do this.”
Again, there was a moment of silence as everyone took in his words.
“But we have no portal in the Golden City,” Miss Ferris said. “We’ve never established a presence there.”
Rick looked into her eyes—those robot eyes that were now very human, very afraid. “I have a portal,” he said. “I am the portal. I’m the passage Kurodar used to get into our systems. I can use that same passage to get into his. I’ve done it. I do it every night. All I have to do is go to sleep and I’m there.”
“But . . .,” Miss Ferris began again.
Rick lifted a hand and she fell silent. “I can do it, Miss Ferris. I’ve got to do it. It’s the only way to stop him.”
Miss Ferris looked at him another long moment. Then she turned a questioning gaze to the Traveler.
Lawrence Dial nodded. “It could work. We give Rick a tranquilizer, put him to sleep . . . He might be able to control his immersion.”
“I can control it,” said Rick. “I’m sure of it.”
“If you could,” said his father quietly. “If you could get into the Golden City . . .”
“I can.”
“If you could destroy the Golden City . . . it would sever Kurodar’s interface. The Realm itself would collapse. And Kurodar . . . I have to think he’s blended his brain so completely with his computers that he can’t be separated from the Realm and live.” He gazed thoughtfully at his son. “If you could do it, you could end this.”
“No,” said Molly. She had turned her fierce gaze from Mars to Rick. “No, even if you got in there, how would you destroy it? How would you even know what to do?”
Rick moved from the head of the table to stand close to her, to look down into her eyes. “I’m not sure, but I think there’s a way.”
Molly shook her head. “No,” she said again. But then she said, “What way?”
“I met someone—in my dreams,” Rick said. “In the Golden City. There’s a . . . a sort of witch. Part of Kurodar’s imagination. He doesn’t want her there, but he can’t help it. She goes wherever his imagination goes. She told me I had to travel into the belly of the beast. She told me I had to face the horror Kurodar can’t face . . .”
“But . . .” Molly went on shaking her head. Her eyes had turned soft and glassy now with a sheen of tears. “What does that even mean? Do you even know what that means?”
Rick had to admit it: “Not exactly. I’m not sure, but—”
“Not sure!” Molly said. “Dreams! Witches! You don’t even know if any of it’s real, Rick. You almost died last time. You can’t just go in there and face . . . No one knows what . . .”
She stopped talking but went on shaking her head. And Rick went on gazing into her brown and urgent eyes a long time. He could not imagine why it had taken him so long to figure out he loved her.
“I’ve got to, Mol,” he said finally. “I’ve got to go in there and destroy it. Not just part of it, all of it. For Victor One. For everybody.”
“No . . .,” Molly whispered.
Rick glanced up at the Battle Station on the monitors. The energy bar slowly filling. He turned back to Molly. The sight of her made him ache.
“One last time,” he promised her. “One last time.”
26. DOORS OF THE MIND
THEY WERE IN the deepest part of the compound’s underground complex now. The two glass portal coffins stood in the center of the room. In one coffin lay the body of Fabian Child—the Army clerk who was trapped in the Realm as Favian. In the other coffin was the blinking black box that held the Mariel program. A cot had been placed between them.
Rick lay on the cot. His sleeve was rolled up, his arm bare for the injection. A plastic monitor strip had been wrapped around his brow, colored lights blinking on it. It would project images from his mind into the compound’s computers.
The computer screens and keyboards and servers were arrayed all around the walls. Some of the screens showed images of the Battle Station turning in space, its power bar filling. Others showed Rick’s vital signs. Some were blank, ready to project images of the Realm when Rick got inside. Techs had crowded into the place to monitor Rick’s progress. Lawrence Dial and Professor Jameson both had seats before keyboards and screens.
Molly stood at Rick’s side, holding his hand. Miss Ferris was next to her, a gleaming steel tray beside her. It was the sort of tray you see in a hospital operating room. There were glass vials and syringes laid out on it. Miss Ferris was stone-faced as she fed the chemicals in one vial into a syringe.
Mars wasn’t there. He had slipped away at some point. No one knew where.
“All right,” Miss Ferris said, squirting a little fluid out of the syringe to clear any air in there. “This should relax you.”
Rick smiled wryly with one corner of his mouth. “Nothing’s going to relax me,” he said. Funny that he could smile and joke with his stomach in such a knot. “Just knock me out, that’s the idea. Get me to sleep and I’ll do the rest.”
“Now that I know who Fabian is,” the Traveler said, nodding toward the glass coffin that held the Army clerk, “I’m going to try to program a new portal designed for him specifically, taking into account the damage he suffered: that’s what locks him inside. I’m going to try to inject the new portal into the Realm through your mind. With luck, it should appear wherever you are.”
Rick glanced at him, nodded. “Do your stuff, Dad,” he said. “I promised I’d get him out, so make it happen.”
“As for Mariel . . .,” the Traveler began. But then his voice trailed off.
Rick understood. “Just help me get Favian out of there. Mariel . . .” He glanced at Molly. “Mariel’s just a computer program. She doesn’t know it, but we do. There’s no point bringing her out. She’s not alive, she can’t die.”
His dad nodded. He knew that wasn’t exactly the way Rick felt. Whatever Mariel was in RL, in the MindWar Realm she was noble and beautiful. She had been Rick’s guide and protector every moment he was in that dreadful place. She had armed him and guided him and given him hope. Rick would gladly have risked his life to
save her . . . but there was no one there to save.
Professor Jameson looked at a clock on a control panel. “We’ve only got two hours and forty-five minutes left . . .”
Rick glanced at Miss Ferris. She nodded. “I’m ready.”
Rick looked up at Molly. Molly squeezed his hand and tried to smile. “I’m ready too,” she said.
Rick let out an unsteady breath. “Then let’s do this.”
Miss Ferris approached him with the syringe. Rick didn’t look at her. He just went on looking up at Molly. If this was the last time he ever saw RL, he wanted her face to be the thing he remembered. If he was trapped in the slow, near-eternal death of the Realm, he wanted to be able to picture her for as long as he could.
He felt Miss Ferris swab his arm. He felt the needle press against his skin. He felt a drop of water: Molly’s tear falling from her cheek onto his.
He smiled up at her. “Let not your heart be troubled,” he said. He glanced over at his father, seated by a monitor. “That’s how it goes, right, Dad?” He did not know his Bible the way his father did, the way Victor One had.
But the Traveler nodded. “That’s exactly how it goes. ‘Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ ”
Rick nodded up at Molly. “Neither let it be afraid,” he repeated.
Miss Ferris inserted the needle into his arm and pressed down on the syringe plunger, flooding his vein with sedative.
“Neither let it be . . .,” he began again, but his voice faded. He felt sleep washing down over his eyes like a liquid curtain. Molly’s face swam above him and started to sink away from him. He wanted to tell her he loved her one more time, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Darkness.
Then, seconds later, he was in the worst nightmare of his life.
BOSS LEVEL:
THE KING OF THE DEAD
27. WITCH’S WISH
HE STOOD ON the edge of the valley of death. It seemed to stretch out before him forever. It was bizarre: There was no color to it. It was like one of those old black- and-white movies his mom sometimes watched on TV. On every side, the stony ground stretched out in shades of gray. And everywhere, in shades of gray, lay the bodies.
Of course. This was how he had exited the Realm last time, so this was the only way back in: through the visions of Baba Yaga’s table. The millions—the tens of millions—of people murdered by the Soviet Union, the country—the empire—of Kurodar’s father.
Rick looked around him at the dreadful and macabre scene.
They wanted to make the world a paradise, the Traveler had told him.
Pride, Rick thought. Like with Mars.
He wanted to turn away from what he saw. He wanted to turn back—turn back to the room in the underground MindWar complex where his friends were waiting for him. It was horrible to be trapped in this netherworld between his own brain and Kurodar’s buried memories. He wanted to get out of here now.
But he couldn’t. Somehow, he had to make his way across this endless, hideous plain of corpses. Somehow, he had to return to the chamber of Baba Yaga. Back to Favian. Back to the Golden City.
He hesitated one more moment. He didn’t like to step out among the bodies, but he knew he had to. He took a deep breath. He started walking.
The moment he made that choice, things changed. The scenery around him began—eerily—to move on its own. The black-and-white scenes began to speed back past him, like scenery through a car window. As he continued to walk, the scenes sped up, went even faster until they were going by in a blurred rush. Rick felt as if he were suddenly falling through this landscape of death . . . but weirdly, instead of falling down, he was falling up.
He lifted his eyes in the direction of his fall. Somewhere up there beyond the black and white, a splash of color appeared. It was a dark color, brown streaked with shadows, almost indistinguishable from the grays of the hideous scene. But Rick’s heart rose when he saw it. He knew it was a way out of this terrible Soviet tableau.
The scene rushed past him. The brown gateway grew closer. Soon he heard the soft echoing sound of witchy laughter—in the distance at first, but growing louder, nearer. He began to make out shapes . . . A gleaming white light . . .
Then, the next thing he knew, he found his own shape becoming insubstantial—a sparkling thing like Favian. The high, witchy laughter echoed louder and surrounded him. The gateway spread around him like the open mouth of a monster ready to swallow him. There was a sort of swoosh, and suddenly, he was through the gate. He was back again in the last place he had been, back in Baba Yaga’s chamber, back beside the crystal table, standing in its eerie white glow, while the witch reeled back from the tabletop and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Rick fought to catch his breath.
I made it, he thought.
He had come through the portal in his brain. He was back inside the Realm.
Baba Yaga went on laughing at him, rocking back and forth in her chair. The warts on her face grew whiter as her greenish cheeks grew red. Her malevolent eyes sparkled.
Dazed, Rick’s hand went instinctively to his side. He felt the handle of Mariel’s sword in its sheath there. His fingers closed around it, and Mariel’s presence and power seemed to flow through him, clearing his mind.
He turned to his side. Favian was standing there—just standing, absolutely still—standing and staring into the light of Baba Yaga’s table as if hypnotized. His blue and shimmering light-form was exactly as it had been the moment Rick fell into the witch’s visionary table. Even the look of worry was still there on the sprite’s face.
“Favian? Are you all right?” Rick said.
“He’s fine! Fine, fine, fine,” the old crone cackled. “I put him in a sleep, that’s all, so he would be here when you came back.”
He’s been asleep all this time? Rick thought—but even as he thought it, Baba Yaga suddenly stopped laughing and lifted her wrinkled hands and waved her crooked fingers in the air. At that, Favian blinked and straightened and came to, looking around him, dazed.
“Rick!” he said, his voice cracking with delight as he spotted his friend. “You’re back!” Judging by the look of relief and wonder in his eyes, he hadn’t expected to see Rick ever again.
Rick grinned. “Don’t sound so surprised, man.”
“Well, I thought . . . It was like you turned to light and just swooshed right into the table and I thought . . .”
“Not even a problem,” said Rick, with way more cool than he was feeling. “Show a little faith, you know?”
“Yeah. Faith. I was never very good at that. Anxiety is more my thing. I’m great at anxiety.”
“Enough,” said Baba Yaga in her creaky voice. She rubbed her hands together. “There’s no time for chitchat and camaraderie. A great calamity is coming, greater than anything that has come before.”
Rick nodded at her. “I know. It’s coming to RL too. I came back here to try and stop it.”
“I’ve given you what I can. You have the knowledge now. If you use it in time, you can end this place forever.”
Favian’s eyes went wide at that. He shimmered where he stood like a blue summer dusk. “But . . . But if the Realm dies . . . I die . . . I have nowhere else to go.”
Baba Yaga shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her whether Favian lived or died.
But Rick assured him, “Not gonna happen, buddy. You and I are getting out of here together. My dad is building a portal for you right now.”
He spoke the words as confidently as he could, and he was glad to see a small flare of hope appear deep in Favian’s eyes.
“Really?” the blue man said.
“Hey, my dad could program a computer to tap-dance and whistle ‘Dixie.’ He wrote the programs that got us all in here in the first place, so believe me, if anyone can get us out again, he can.”
“That’s great,” said Favian. “Mar
iel always said you’d free us from this place.”
Rick pressed his lips together. Without thinking, his fingers closed around the sword hilt at his side again. What could he say to that? Mariel had been the only friend and companion Favian had had here. There was no point telling him that she was just a bunch of code: a brain dub—or what had his father called it?—a “connectome” of one or more of the volunteers the Traveler and Professor Jameson had used. Here, in the Realm, Mariel was every bit as real as they were. Back in RL, she was just a black box spitting out numbers. How could he tell Favian that the wonderful water woman would cease to exist the moment the Realm did? How could he even begin to explain that?
Rick reached out and put a reassuring hand on Favian’s shoulder—or what would have been a reassuring hand on what would have been Favian’s shoulder if Favian had been a person of flesh and blood. As it was, he was more a sort of living light show, and all Rick felt when he touched him was an electric tingle against his palm.
“Enough!” screaked Baba Yaga again. “You must go. You must find the center of the city!”
Rick looked at her. He didn’t know whether to trust her or not. Why would she want to destroy this place in which Kurodar’s childhood memories kept her alive? And yet, for some reason, he believed she wanted to be free of the Realm as much as Favian. He sensed the yearning in her—her wish to get out of Kurodar’s imagination even if it meant the end of her existence.
“What do we do?” he asked her.
Baba Yaga leaned over her glowing table and made a few more eerie passes with her gnarled fingers. She peered into the light as if she could see the future there . . . though Rick had seen only Kurodar’s memories of horror and bloodshed.
“Find the silver one,” she murmured, her voice like a creaking door. “She will take you where you need to go.”
“Mariel,” said Favian.
“Where can we find her?” Rick asked.
“There’s water in the dining hall.” She lifted a long, bent, warty finger, pointed at the door. “Below.”