Burning Bright

“Not at all,” Hally answered, and the hanging mask dissolved into the oval of static. Ransome cut the connection.

The Game session floated back in front of him, expanded at a gesture to display its full detail. Belfortune sat with his head in his hands, answered, low-voiced, Lord Faro’s questions. The tension between them was palpable: the players’ affair had been over for years, but its memory still informed their play. Mijja Lyall, the scientist/technician, watched uneasily, her gaze flickering between the two men and the metal face that hung on the wall overhead. Baron Vortex, the Game’s great villain, was overseeing this himself.

Ransome frowned, reached for the library icons, and had to shuffle access spaces until he found dead storage. It had been a long time since he had gone looking for his template libraries. He flicked them back into the working volume, searched the most recent issues until he found Lord Faro’s listing. He had forgotten that Faro had become one of the Baron’s henchmen—that had happened almost two years ago, just after he’d quit the Game. He leaned back in his chair, the images tilting around him, and saw another firework flare through the pattern of the Game. You couldn’t ask for better, he thought, and reached for a hand-held remote to summon the drinks tray.

The machine trundled over, the lid sliding back to give access to the freezer compartment. Ransome chose abstractedly, opened the container, his eyes still on the session unfolding in front of him. Faro was clearly torn between his loyalty to Baron Vortex—a loyalty bought with fear and the promise that Faro’s lost estates would someday be returned—and his— love? desire?—for Belfortune. Belfortune clearly shared both passion and fear, and Baron Vortex watched from the wall. Lioe was handling him well, he admitted grudgingly. Too many leaders made the Baron too villainous right from the start; Lioe was keeping him just reasonable enough—though still with that edge of madness—that it seemed suicidal to oppose him.

Abruptly, he wanted to be there, at Shadows, watching firsthand—or, better still, to be in the control booth with Medard-Yasine. It was the first time in three years that he’d actually wanted to attend a Game, and his lips quirked upward as he realized that at least he now had an excuse for doing what Chauvelin wanted. He closed both fists, shutting down the system—in the corner of his eye, glyphs tumbled headlong as the slaved machines ran through their shutdown procedures—and reached for a stand-alone com-unit and punched codes that would cycle through the helicab companies until he found one that could respond. It took perhaps two minutes, the bar of light flashing in front of him, not quite blocking his sight, and he spent the time searching for his jacket and the cylinder of Mist he was forced to carry. The com-unit beeped at him before he found the red-banded tube, and he scrabbled impatiently for the hand-held unit.

“How can we be of service?”

It was a machine voice, or so the telltale at the base of the unit said—it would have been impossible to tell from the sound alone. Ransome curbed his impatience, and smoothed his tone to be as emotionless as possible. “I need transport to the helipad closest to Shadows—Face Road, by the center of the Dike in the Dock Road District. I think that’s Underface.”

“Just a moment, please.” There was a little silence, not even the hiss of static, while Ransome scanned the cluttered space of his loft for the missing cylinder, and then the machine said, “Yes, Underface is closest. Your location code is Warehouse?”

“That’s right.” The cylinder was lying on the shelf beside the shell for the Syndic’s egg.

“Thank you. Your helicab will arrive at the Warehouse helipad in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” Ransome said, in spite of himself, in spite of knowing it was a machine, and broke the connection. He collected the cylinder, shoved it and his credimeters into the pocket of his jacket, and left the loft.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to reach the helipad—the computers were scrupulous in their calculations—and he barely had time to catch his breath before he heard the soft beat of the muted rotors. Somewhat to his surprise, there was a live pilot, who grinned cheerfully at him as she popped the passenger hatch.

“To Underface, right? Going to Shadows?”

Does everyone on the planet know about this fucking game? Ransome wondered. “Yes, to Underface—and, yes, to Shadows, too.”

The pilot nodded, closing the hatch behind him. “I hear there’s one hell of a session in progress there. You’re like the fifth person I’ve dropped there in the last two hours.”

“Really.” Ransome settled into the center seat, the most comfortable of the three, and adjusted the door controls so that the whole panel went transparent, an enormous curved window on the city spread out below the cliff face.