Soda Pop Soldier. Nick Cole

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СКАЧАТЬ done quick and clean.”

      Not fired.

      I order my unit to pack up and move out to ShogunSmile’s AO. Three minutes later I’m in the OpsDeck screen and going through the briefing on the superlab.

      “Scouts have discovered a hidden complex up-country in the mountains near the city of Song Hua,” begins the briefing program avatar, a military admin type. The high-res photos show a small complex nestled beneath a mountain that’s more a giant oblong piece of rock erupting from the jungle than anything else. Stunted trees cling to one of its misty sides. The other side is a sheer rock face above the complex.

      “Satellite imagery,” continues the briefing, “indicates the complex is a laboratory-class facility where dangerous and illegal superscience research has recently been conducted.”

      WonderSoft will want this, but ColaCorp needs this. Whatever it is. These labs can provide bonus game-changing tech. No doubt WonderSoft will go for it, even if it’s just to deny us the asset.

      The briefing camera, mounted on a recon drone, overflies the facility revealing a night-vision look at what we’re going into. It’s an open perimeter and a jumble of squat buildings in two adjacent locations. One location has the distinct look of a dropship landing pad, but slightly different from any I’ve seen before. The other looks too industrial to be anything but a lab. There’s a construction crane on the far side of the lab complex. The complex is mostly composed of octagonal interconnected modules that lead to a main multistoried building. The briefing asks me to choose which type of unit I’ll request to take into the superlab.

      I tell it to give me the light infantry template.

      The briefing hesitates, then takes me to the unit loadout screen. I try to activate my personal unit, Delta Company, but it won’t let me. “All main force ColaCorp units engaged at this time,” it tells me in its calm, computer voice. The only option available is to pull unknown players from the ColaCorp Special Forces reserve unit.

      Great. I have to use amateurs. I stare at the facility map again. There’ll be three maps. There’re always three maps. I’m probably looking at the first one. So what’s the game?

      Death match? Domination? Infection?

      I check the ColaCorp Special Forces reserve roster. Currently there are over a hundred thousand plus ColaCorp fan-players waiting, worldwide, to join the network televised fight.

      “Isolate veteran-status players and above.”

      “Done,” replies the briefing avatar.

      “Isolate light infantry skill sets.”

      “Done.”

      I want to tell the avatar to remove the ones with poor social skills and negative sportsmanship reviews, but sometimes those ratings are just the results of complaints filed by sore losers. Sometimes being good at online combat doesn’t necessarily make you great at being human.

      “Isolate kill counts ten thousand and above.” Sure it’s WarWorld Live kills, the home game played on console with other amateurs, but ten thousand kills means they’re serious about the game and they’ve got some skills. That’s when I started getting noticed by professional teams.

      “What’s my pool?” I ask.

      “47,754 players meet your requirements,” replies the avatar.

      “Isolate on-target percentage. Above 50 percent.”

      I don’t even ask how many that leaves. I just want shooters now. “All right, fill all five squads from those requirements.”

      A moment later the avatar sends invites to all players fitting my requirements. The first fifty to respond and log in to the OpsDeck are going in-game during prime time with me to take the superlab.

      Within seconds the rosters are full.

      “Please choose tactical insertion method,” the avatar tells me.

      I check the map again.

      I check my options. I’ve only got one. Dropship. In the map, I set the spinning holograph of the LZ marker down on the landing pad. There are three back-blast fences that surround the site. We can use those for cover before going into the main complex.

      WonderSoft, on the other hand, can go in any number of ways. They’ve always got options because they’ve always got money.

      Next I choose my weapons. I select my standard loadout for close-quarter matches like this. I take a gray and graphite black-striped Colt M4X assault rifle with extended banana clips and holographic tactical sights. Three dots, predator style. For my sidearm I take a nickel-plated long-barrel .45 loaded with hollow points. I also take five grenades: three flash-bangs, two smoke. I take my personal avatar skin, which is okayed by ColaCorp for tactical instance maps like this. ColaCorp jungle-pattern camo cargo pants and green tank top T-shirt. Jungle boots. Shaved head and a camo pattern I call SnakeFace. My guy even has stubble. Like me. Except the avatar skin is based on some action hero from the last century. Guy named Schwarzenegger. I’m big on last-century stuff. Things were better then.

      “Going live in fifteen seconds … ,” says the briefing avatar as it begins the countdown to tactical map insertion.

      I switch to BattleChat. Before saying anything, I bring up the unit roster. Most of the player IDs have been set to the default position by the network. Can’t be showing all kinds of disgusting images to the entire world. I check the names. They are the usual assortment of half-thought-through, misspelled crud that marks amateurs. Some outright obscene name choices, almost half, have been changed by the network to “Player” then a random number.

      That’ll teach ’em to take this seriously. It’s their one shot at going online to fight in front of the whole world and no one will ever know who they are because the network changed their tag and used a placeholder name instead.

      On-screen I see the red-lit interior of the dropship Albatross. I pan right and look out through the cockpit canopy. We’re cutting through a thick miasma of dark blue and black clouds. Rain assaults the windshield. I try to get a look at the facility from the air, but all I catch are tiny twinkling lights and shadowy buildings.

      Moments later we’re down on the landing pad and rushing from the Albatross. Players head away from the dropship and go prone in a circular perimeter.

      So far so good, and I didn’t even need to tell them to do that.

      The dropship’s engines spool up and the craft lifts off and away from us, cutting its lights and retracting its landing gears as it disappears into the rain and clouds above.

      King of the Hill appears across my screen.

      I hate this type of match. Means we’ve got to secure the access point to the next map and hold it for three minutes. A King of the Hill match always turns into a shooting gallery for the side that doesn’t want to hold the access point.

      “Listen up,” I say over BattleChat. “Name’s PerfectQuestion and this is the op …”

      Meanwhile I’m selecting the streak rewards I’ll receive after each kill plateau.

      “We’ve got to secure the entrance into this lab. СКАЧАТЬ