Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Wait, hang on,” Grgur said. He swung the bag way back again, gathered up force, and struck. No Way’s pulse took a last spike and flatlined. His EEG kept going, though, in this really irregular way, like he was still thinking about a few dissociated things, ships and sealing wax and cabbages. Again, nothing happened for a minute. Leonidas’s hands went out of the picture. The image jiggled as Grgur picked up the phone and moved it into a close-up of No Way’s face with its wide-open doll eye and held it steady, long enough to show he wasn’t breathing. His temperature had already dropped a twentieth of a degree.

“Okay,” Grgur said. I got glimpses of the crew pulling the sensors off No Way’s head and cleaning and redressing him and everything, but I couldn’t really pay attention. I did notice they put him in a Chouinard rock-climbing harness, which probably meant they were going to dump him in a chultun like he’d been exploring and fallen. You’d think they wouldn’t even bother being so careful out in a place like this, but I guess they were just trained to be absolutely professional.

Two minutes later the video ended. I didn’t move. I felt like I was bursting with acid diarrhea. And vomit. Or actually a single mass of diarrhea/vomit that was about to spurt out every available orifice.

No Way was maybe my best friend and certainly my only friend left from the vida loca. And he’d always led a dangerous life, but my personally getting him killed was a lot worse for me than his dying on his own. For any member of any blood-brother gang anywhere, if you lead somebody into a trap and he buys it you really owe him, a lot more than if he just took a bullet on the street or something.

Betrayal is an amazing thing. It’s abstract. I mean, in the Warholian sense, like too big and awful even to try to represent. I was feeling a new dimension in my anger, different from the rage I felt at people who were dishonest and stupid and destroyed everything. In a way it was even stronger than my anger at the soldiers who’d disappeared my family, because it was multiplied exponentially by a more personalized invasion. And thinking back on it, actually, of all the strange things that had happened to me, Marena’s treachery was the strangest, the thing I had the most trouble getting my brain around. Because it made the world seem the most alien. Even though I guess in a way I’d expected it.

I watched the video through again and then again. Each time I absorbed the fact of it a little more and I could feel my rage balloon inflating up out of my chest and into my throat in an almost detached way.

She sold you out, I thought. She fucked you all the way up the colon with a Chunnel driller.

No, wait-I thought back-you don’t know how much she knew about it. She may not even know No Way’s dead.

Oh, yes, she does. She just doesn’t know it happened down there. Obviously Lindsay doesn’t tell her everything, but she knows good ’n’ plenty. If she’s curious about No Way, she’s just trying to cover her tight little ass.

Well, first of all, I’ve got to get hold of Grgur. Ask him. What’s Marena’s real deal?

What is this, Harnessing the Power of Wishful Thinking? You want to determine the exact degree of guilt on some scale between Quisling and Mussolini? She fucked you over and one’ll get you ten they’re going to waste you, too, sometime, and she knows about it and doesn’t care. If she didn’t come up with it herself, that is. It’s probably fun for her to fuck a soon-to-be-dead guy. Dead Man Fucking. It’s another PSDL power trip. Your whole life you’ve just been a tool, maybe a sharp tool but disposable, like a plastic razor.

Yeah, you’re right, I thought. Time to rock. I could already see myself boiling over, trashing the whole place, grabbing Marena to interrogate her, a little taste of her own shit Don’t do it, I said. Give in to rage and you’ll screw worse up. Chill. Chill. Get past furious, get to that cold point where you can just nurture that little green flame. Figure out how to record this stuff. Go public. Get them all put away. And then maybe get them killed in prison.

No, wait, better just kill them first. Even if I got them into court they’d hire Scheck, Spence, amp; Dershowitz and everything’ll stay the same and I’ll be hung out to dry. At best. At worst I’d disappear before I got myself into custody.

Okay. Okay.

Goal.

Payback.

Why the shit did Lindsay hang on to that video? I wondered. Maybe he wanted his killers bloody all over. Still Okay. Record. I started downloading the file onto a Zip Chip.

Okay, I thought. I watched the bar graph fill up with deadly data. It said it would take another 1.2 minutes.

You know, you still don’t know what’s going on, I thought. Find out. Do de right thing. Find out. Information isn’t power yet, but it’s on the right track. First you learn what Lindsay’s really doing. Then meticulous planning. Then horrible and merciless revenge. Then party.

I checked Marena’s GPS. She was eight miles west of here, but it looked like she was headed back.

Okay, think. Lindsay’s got a scheme.

Find out.

What’s his plan, what’s his plan, what’s his plan?

Not sure, Shitlock. I entered SEARCH COUNT CHOCULA. Why did the EGP want to check out this guy? If they did at all. For that matter, why were they that paranoid about that stupid-looking Stake place? It wasn’t like it was a secret or anything, it was just another really bad-taste Mormon summer camp. One of dozens. So far it looked like a vintage-1979 Ford trucks dealership in the middle of the rain forest. So, what’s the big deal? The answers to these questions and more are yours next week… in the heart-rending conclusion of Sixty-three files came up.

Hah.

Some of the security windows were as vapid as “Thank you for downloading DrudgePro 1.3.” But some were packed with simple powerful yet powerful statements, like “do not click on any items other than those specified or you may void your bowels.” Still, it all didn’t look too tough. These days you barely have to even hack, you just use reverse-engineering programs. You become a systems manager. No sweat.

I checked Marena’s phone’s GPS dot. She was on Chinikatook Street. On her way. Better hurry.

Looking, looking…

Most of it seemed to be military products, things like bowling-ball- and beachball-sized ground robots. Another division of Warren was developing much smaller “spider robots, which were partly guided by brains taken from pigeons.” Don’t stop to gawk, I thought. Eyes on the bling.

Okay. I found out that LEON was not an acronym for “Learning Engine/Orlando Network.” Rather, it was short for Leonid Bugaev, the Russian researcher who oversaw the Russian military’s time-travel research in the early 1970s, and who came up with the basic equations used in the missile-defense system-a name I heard mentioned during the Racetrack Table Conference.

I was still clue-free about what the Warren Corporation was really doing, though. Were they just contracting for the Pentagon? Or for some other country, maybe?

They weren’t telling me Shit One, that was for dang sure.

I was cold and shaky.

Chattering.

Obviously betrayed, even though I didn’t know quite what the deal was.

For a moment I felt that there was somebody in the room with me. But I looked and there was no one.

The Stake has a fleet of five F-22s, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is actually enough to do quite a bit of damage, and over forty unmanned support aircraft, over five hundred medium-range remote-piloted missiles, and over two hundred freight and troop transport aircraft-also eight attack helicopters and at least thirty noncombat helicopters.