Neal Stephenson - Reamde

They stood there for a minute or so just to enjoy the spectacle: a shock wave spreading out from the middle like a ripple in a pond, eventually freezing to create the rim of a crater. Columns of steam rising up from the vaporized river. Rocks and trees raining down (both Thorakks and Reamde cast warding spells to keep from getting crushed by falling debris). The vast bubble of light and smoke gradually focusing into a column, the column resolving into a bipedal figure: a man with a long white beard, gazing about the crater somewhat in the manner of someone who has just turned on the light in his pantry and is looking for cockroaches. For—as Csongor now understood—this being had literally rode in on the comet, like a child descending a hill on a trash can lid.

“Egdod,” Marlon said in an interesting combination of reverence, disbelief, and pants-pissing fear.

“Never thought I’d see him in-game,” said James indistinctly from across the room. A moment later the words were repeated, in a harsh metallic voice, and with a different accent, by Thorakks.

Marlon was busy invoking new spells, trying to rebuild the defenses he had shut down in order to allow himself to be Yanked and trying, Csongor suspected, to make himself invisible. Noting this, Thorakks said, with mild amusement: “Seriously? You’re going to put up a fight?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to go on the lam from Egdod.”

“I have no choice.”

“Do you know who his player is?”

“Of course I know.”

“Do you know he’s the uncle of your friend Zula?”

Marlon froze for a moment, and Csongor imagined that, in Marlon’s mind’s eye, he was seeing the image he had described to them during the voyage: a moment, just after Ivanov had been shot and Csongor knocked out, when Zula’s face had met Marlon’s through a dirty windowpane, and their eyes had connected for a few moments.

Then his eyes refocused on the screen.

“I will talk to the uncle of Zula when I have the money,” Marlon said, “and have given it to my friends. Their home has been exploded and they are running from the police and from everyone else, and they are depending on me to finish this.”

“Then let’s haul ass,” James suggested.

Marlon poised his fingers on the keyboard, then glanced up at Csongor. “Are you ready?”

“I will be,” Csongor said, “by the time you get there.”

“HEY, BIGFOOT,” CORVALLIS said. “You are rearranging the planet faster than our servers can update the caches.”

“It’s good for you,” Richard muttered. “Call it a stress test and get on with it.”

“It doesn’t help that you’re doing it at one in the morning when most of our senior staff are asleep.”

“It’s Saturday. They’re partying. What do you think phones are for?”

“I’ll try to reach them but—”

“Before you do that, tell me where the little fucker is.”

“So he’s back to being a little fucker now?”

“There are a lot of crushed and incinerated remains underfoot… but he should have survived… I cast a protective ward on him immediately before impact.”

After a lot of typing, C-plus answered: “He’s not there. He got Yanked just in time by one Thorakks. I can give you general coordinates, but they are moving fast and the database is going to lag.”

“Just give me a place to start tracking them,” said Richard, sounding more and more like Egdod himself with every moment. “No, scratch that.”

“Come again?”

“They have to be heading for an LLI,” Richard said, using the ingame jargon for ley line intersection. “There’s only one place they can move this amount of gold.”

AS LONG AS Zula kept herself busy cleaning up the aftermath of dinner, she was able to avoid thinking about keys and padlocks. They had eaten the food from disposable plastic plates, which she collected and stacked, scraping any residue into a garbage bag. She placed the stack of scraped plates into a second garbage bag. The cooking pots she washed using water that she heated up on the camp stove. She left those out to dry. The chain, naturally, confined her to a circular area, and she’d already made up her mind that she would sleep as far away as possible from where she put the garbage, in case it drew vermin or worse. For now, she placed the garbage bags—which were not yet very bulky—into a cooler, just to keep them safe from small critters such as mice. She considered explaining to the men that they should hang their food from tree limbs, then thought better of it. Instead she dragged the cooler as far as she could go in the direction of the tents where the men were sleeping and left it there. Let them deal with the local wildlife. At worst it would give her some entertainment; at best it might cover her escape. Moving as far as she could go in the opposite direction, 180 degrees around the circle from the food dump, she began to arrange her own little campsite. This consisted of a tiny one-person camp shelter, just large enough to house a sleeping bag.

They hadn’t said anything about toilet facilities. As far as she could make out, they were just wandering off into the woods when they needed to eliminate. Does a terrorist shit in the woods? Apparently. But Zula did not have that option. They had equipped her with a large steel serving spoon. She went to a place at the end of her chain, equidistant from the garbage place and the sleeping place, and used the spoon to dig out a shallow pit. The going was easy at first, but then she came to a depth, only a few inches below the surface, where interlocking roots of trees and shrubs made it impossible to go any deeper. She stood above it and wrapped a green plastic tarp around herself for privacy, then dropped her pants and squatted over it, creating a little tent lit up on the inside by her flashlight. She hunched her shoulders and drew the tarp over her head so that she could see what she was doing. The pill of damp cotton came out first, and she was able to pluck it clear before the rest came. When she was finished, she pulled the key out and placed it in a zippered pocket on the leg of her trousers before standing up, getting fully reclothed, and tossing the tarp to one side. Then she used the shovel to fill the hole back in and kicked some more loose pine needles and pebbles over the top for good measure. The men had all long since gone into their tents, the only exception being the sniper Jahandar, who had retreated up into the trees after dinner to, she assumed, keep watch while the others slept. Since Zula was the only person moving in the camp, she had to assume that he was watching her. If so, he was seeing her as a little blob of light bobbing around and tending to chores. After she had finished going to the toilet, she kicked off her Crocs—still the only footwear she was allowed to have—and climbed into her sleeping bag fully clothed and zipped the tiny tent closed, except for a gap down at the bottom where the chain emerged.

She lay there for several minutes just listening. Wondering whether Jahandar or one of the other men might bother to come and check on her. But nothing happened. She could hear Jahandar moving occasionally, but he was just shifting his position, standing up to stretch his legs, pacing around, stretching.

Moving as quietly as she could, she slid a hand down to the side of her thigh, slowly worried the pocket’s zipper open, found the key with her fingers, and drew it out. She brought it up to her neck, wrapped one hand around the padlock to muffle any mechanical clicking noises that might come out of it, and got the key inserted. The padlock snicked open, and she felt the chain go slack around her throat. Not exactly a surprise; but one of her nightmares had been that for some reason it would fail to work.