Charles Stross - Halting State

Venkmann is frozen over the gaping maw of the Iron Maiden, held in place by some unseen force. You turn to confront the intruders and realize that Stheno is outside your zone of protection. Shit. This is going to be ugly. There are four of the things, like gigantic anthropomorphic toads with strangely articulated limbs and great horned heads. You crack open a vial of Neverslow and inhale the bitter fumes, then unsling your blunderbuss as the world around you seems to slow, jerking in stop-frame animation. The gun’s already loaded with coarse-ground silver filings and lead shot, and when you pull, it bangs deafeningly in the confined space, blasting a cloud of smoke and sparks at the nearest of the demonic intruders, who yells raucous rage at you but doesn’t even stop coming. You can see the haze of improbability spiralling around its head, the madness in its eyes— it’s a fucking slaad of some kind! What are they doing here? —and then it raises its webbed hands in a spell-caster’s gesture, and a vast bloom of emerald fire envelops you. Which is a huge relief because it tells you you’re up against a bot; no human player—not even a total noob—would do something that stupid.

Two of the slaad’s fellow gate-crashers run into your Dome of Defence from either side, rattling your teeth as you invert the blunderbuss and reload as fast as you can. Reflexes left over from your munchkin days take over, and you blaze away, trying meanwhile to figure out what it all means. (You were looking for a clan of cannon fodder, not a booby-trapped artefact that triggers a teleport routine to drop a gang of pissed-off midlevel demons on you: Who put it here, and why?) “Stheno, you still alive?”

“Yes! What’s going on?”

“They’re trying to kill us, and they’re a whole lot more powerful than Orcs. Get behind me, I’ll handle—”

“No you won’t.” Stheno steps daintily around the Iron Maiden—Venkmann still wired to it with blue sparks flashing off his hair—and draws a long sword she found somewhere. Her status icon shows that she’s trying to go into some weird-ass haptic combat mode, something only idiot LARPers use, and you swear quietly as you dump a handful of Dust of Dispelling down the smoking maw of your gun and raise it again. One of the slaadi is going for her, which means—

A huge fountain of blood squirts across the room in arterial gouts. Shit, exit one auditor, dashed bad game-play, do you want to reincarnate in the middle of a fight? You shrug and drop the hammer on the demon as it scrabbles with ichor-dripping claws at the edge of your dome. Stupid fuckers, they’ve got a magical arsenal all of their own: Played straight, they could take you down in minutes. Magic stick go Bang and you can see daylight—okay, torchlight—through the beastie’s rib-cage as it takes a tumble. Good. You turn to the next one, only to find that Stheno’s still in the game and has got in ahead of you with that sword. She’s holding it at a weird angle and as the slaad screams and launches itself at her, she twists it and hops sideways, as if that’s going to achieve anything. The predictable thing happens—it takes a swipe at her but misses, probably because she’s accidentally triggered her Tumble talent and gone cartwheeling face-first into the wall.

What the hell? You’re supposed to be in quick time thanks to the dust you snorted, forcing the local Zonespace servers to crank down the time base for everyone else within the game’s event horizon (meaning, this room). Maybe Stheno’s LARP-addled mode can only do real-time, and the god mode Venkmann dropped on you both so casually has stopped the game engines from downgrading her movement rate. Or something like that…You’re still turning towards the next pebble-skinned party pooper as Stheno twists sideways and jabs her frog-sticker at him, misses, and does a neat back-flip. The slaad twitches, roars, then takes a swipe at her. “Why can’t I touch the fucking thing?” she yells frustratedly.

“You’re not equipped for it! And he’s got too many hit points!” you yell back at her, reloading in a hurry because bad guy #4 is sneaking up behind her with malice clearly in what passes for its tiny mind. “Clear the area! No, duck!”

She ducks, still holding on to her hilts like grim death, and you blast a cloud of buckshot across her shoulders and into frogface’s maw. He sneezes, green goop flying, and begins to Incant. That’s a bad sign, those things have big death-magic mojo. So far, the bot’s been playing them clumsily, using a tank to run over individual infantry instead of shelling them from the next county over—but if it gets its shit together, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. As if that’s not enough, you hear a low-pitched warning buzz: Your Shield of Steel Focus is nearing the end of its life, and any moment now you’re going to be unprotected.

You begin to back towards the Iron Maiden, hoping to use it as an obstacle, when Stheno leans over the supine slaad and starts horsewhipping it with her snake-headed dreadlocks. Which, surprisingly, works—the thing must have been pretty near to dead already. There’s a crackling tinkle as the grotesque frog-statue rolls over on its side, and then she vaults over it towards bad guy #4. He’s still busy Incanting—these spells take time—so you follow her, pitching in with all four paws in the faint hope of breaking his concentration roll. Only, no dice. Stheno has another momentary lapse of co-ordination and goes head first into the far wall, limbs spazzing wildly. Slaad #4 emits a strange howl and points, and all hell breaks loose—in the direction of the thoroughly immobilized Venkmann.

You whack the demon alongside his head with an ursine pawful of claws. That gets his attention: He turns and clumsily gouges at you with a scaly hand, gobbling and gurgling incoherently. You whack him again while Stheno leans forward and makes stabby to no particular avail. The gobbling rises towards an angry, incoherent peak, then stops, breaking up like a bandwidth-choked voice call. Another whack, and the slaad subsides in a twitching heap, oozing corrosive juices that eat away at the tiled floor.

“It didn’t work,” she says plaintively. “I kept trying to go into haptic contact-mode, and it wouldn’t work!”

“Whoa,” you wheeze. “You mean, like, full-body input? That doesn’t work in Avalon Four without a hack pack on the side.” Typical noob trick, trying to use an esoteric interface and going arse over tit, instead of simply whaling away with the plus-three Axe of Decerebration. “Let’s check on Venkmann.” You shamble over towards the Iron Maiden, kicking dismembered amphibian parts out of your way. Venkmann’s still wired into the shredder, kicking and twitching, so you call up the debugger console again and drop a break point on the thing. He falls away from it, collapsing on the floor. For a moment you think he’s dead, but he magics up some hit points from somewhere and is back on his feet.

“What the fuck was that all about?” he demands, irritably. “When I catch the mother-fucker who invented those—” He rambles on angrily for some time while you examine the code hooked into the Iron Maiden, which is still sparking and fulminating on an al fresco basis. Interestingly, it seems to have erased itself. If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. “What happened?”

“Who’s got write access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

“Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty, I think.” You stare at the Iron Maiden, then tweak a couple of resources. The cascade of sparks and the violet pulsing aura go away. “Should be possible to look inside that without triggering the trap, now.”