The Clan (27 page)

And here I had a couple of grief generators cuddling up right next to me. I personally could scram for a day or two, but Lurch couldn't, and I didn't really need a nutter AI around me. But above all, we had to help the chicks. T
hey were tearing my heart out.

Wincing from the pressure of unwanted emotions, I activated the portal to the Vets. A quick ID check, mutual nods of greeting, a few hundred feet of narrow stairways and corridors, then I collapsed into a chair. It had been a hard day, considering it had only just started, so it was time I made myself some soothing herbal tea. By nighttime, I would sure need some.

Now. Task #1: locate the dragon. A few keyword searches promptly offered the information I needed. Not a minute too soon, though. The administration of the City of Light announced that this very midday, the servants of the God of Light would use the purifying power of sunrays to exterminate the vile spawn of the Dark: the Bone Dragon. Actually, as some independent reporters sneered, the decision had been taken in view of the dragon's explicit unwillingness to live, so that she was about to kick the bucket on her own accord depriving the zoo owners of a stable cash flow. That's why they decided to squeeze the last drops of gold out of the collapsing story: an exemplary execution, entrance fee ten gold. Truly medieval. In another hundred years, they might start burning witches at the stake.

I had about four hours left. Theoretically. The cooldown from yesterday's High Spell would only expire one hour before midday. And I still hadn't got hold of the Reset Potion. Twice had it showed up at the auction and each time the bids exceeded my auto buy's reserve. And in any case, I still had to break into the dome shield as they wouldn't be able to restrain the Bone Dragon with ordinary chains and bars. They did say in the news that she was very weak, the question was how weak exactly. Anyway, we'd have to solve that problem when we came to it. I just hoped she was strong enough to pull her backside off the ground and stay in the air for a few miles.

Task #2: a support group. No one was going to let me deactivate the dome and steal an important dragon in full view from the city square. I didn't want to ask the Vets for help: they would take too much time to get their act together. Besides, I wasn't really prepared to shoulder another moral debt—that's not even talking about the money which I'd have to pay them anyway. It often happens in life that you end up paying more for a friend's service than what professional mercenaries would have charged you. So mercenaries it was, then. I had a few contacts and faces to turn to. I scrolled through my already-long contact list for Zena's name and PM'd her asking for an urgent appointment.

She replied instantly,

Our secretive Max, finally! It's taken you awhile! What caused you to remember the ladies you dumped in the Dead Lands? Okay, RV: Original City, The Pickled Penguin ice cream parlor. If it's something serious, you'd better make it quick. Ladies don't need much: we'll be as high as a kite after a couple of banana splits.

Scratching my head, I searched for the map I'd bought ages ago and found the café in question, then rushed down the stairway looking for the hiccupping Porthos or whoever it was on duty in the Portal Hall.

The next minute I was rubbing my bruised feet after landing on the square's flagstones: the portal had hauled me too high up. It had never happened before: either the wizard had hiccupped while casting the spell or, God forbid, my magic had begun to play up. Which wasn't a good thing considering this square was about to witness a highly publicized event. Moreover, I hoped that the viewers would get a lot more show for their bucks. How interesting could it be, really, watching twenty servants of Light disembody an apathetic dragon which would then crumble to the ground in a heap of bones? But an attack of the Dark Ones and the following mass slaughter, that would be a totally different scenario.

The place promised to be pretty crowded.
Market stalls lined the square already busy with vendors laying out their wares. The city carpenters drove the last nails into the long rows of benches that semi-circled the improvised arena. I estimated the average backside's size, multiplied it by the number of benches by twenty rows and shook my head, disheartened. The organizers were looking at about three thousand spectators. Way too many.

Checking my internal compass, I trotted toward the mysterious café. I located the girls at once: you had to be blind not to notice the massive Troll hugging a bowlful of colored ice-cream scoops the size of a washtub.

"Hello, ladies!"

Zena's purple tongue demonstratively licke
d her spoon. She gave me a wink. "Hello you too, castle conqueror and dead dragon slayer! What brings you here? What on earth would make you remember our green-faced bunch?"

The Troll gave their leader an offended look. "Gray-faced, too!" she boomed grudgingly.

I waved my hands at them trying to extinguish the first spark of the conflict. "Don't listen to them, baby! They're just jealous. I thought more of you than I did of them put together."

"Did you really?" Bomba the Troll stared at me with suspicion.

Not wishing to aggravate my karma with petty lies, I gave her a reconciling smile. "I've got a really nice troll living in my castle, you know. He's strong and agile as a cat, and—he's quite an intellectual. True, he's an NPC but does it really matter? Fancy meeting him?"

Bomba peered into my eyes trying to work out whether I was poking fun at her. Her face
blackened. She lowered her eyes. "Mind if I do? There aren't many of our kind around, actually, and those that are..." her voice trailed away. She made a helpless gesture.

Actually, I hadn't exactly meant it. I
had
been poking fun, to a degree. But nothing prevented me from introducing Snowie to her. Wasn't I myself drooling over Ruata the Drow Princess? If so, why couldn't Bomba meet a single responsible Troll seeking same? You never know how the years spent in the skin of a different race could affect your mentality. I could clearly see these girls had been here for quite a while. I'd have loved to hear their story one day. Their strange racial choice for perma mode made me prickle with curiosity.

An approaching waiter disrupted my musings
. To his "What are you having?" Zena turned to me.

"What
you mean to discuss, is it serious?"

"A contract," I nodded.

She cringed, her face resembling a pickled lemon, then instructed the waiter, "Two Isabellas for me and a bubbly."

"Eight brandies," Bomba mumbled, looking upset. "Make sure they're all different!"

The waiter marked down three more orders in the same vein, then stared at me, expectant. What kind of ice-cream parlor was that? I ventured a guess,

"A few beers, please. One light, one dark and one Elven."

Nonplussed, the waiter jotted it down and left.

Sensing the quizzical silence, I leaned forward and lowered my voice. "Now, girls. I need a group of Dark mercs for a five-minute gig at the main square. Today. In two hours."

They exchanged glances. "How many are there?"

I gave it some thought. "At least three hundred. They are going to have a big event there today. At least three thousand attendees are expected. Plus staff, guards and some rapid-response people. We need to distract all that menagerie to allow me about three minutes of absolute immunity so that no arrow or stray bolt of lightning disrupts my concentration. Which means that I will need a group or two to cast a Minor Power Dome. The rest will have to create a security ring to keep all the potential assailants at bay," I stopped as Zena shook her head. "What?"

Her tiny reassuring hand lay over mine. "Max. What you're offering is not some boss raid or a clan scuffle. We here call it 'interference in the sphere of interests of a large faction'. Your contract would bring our Guild into conflict with the City of Light and the King's administration, the Light priests and God knows who else: the guards, the King's officers, and other clans who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time..."

"Doesn't the merc contract say it doesn't affect your relationship with factions?" I said.

She nodded. "Not officially, no. But in reality, there will be some bad blood left. With time, it might backfire really badly. Imagine if it was your raid we slaughtered while you were busy dishing out the loot? Nothing personal, just business as usual. Imagine for a second that they also know the name of their employer—let's call him Clan X. Imagine that? So you think you wouldn't change your opinion of those mercs? Cross your heart? Ah, you see. So what we need is the Guild Coordinator to sanction it. I can pull a few strings to make sure he sees you as soon as possible. Would you like that?"

Why was life so complicated? I had no choice, though. I nodded.

She seemed to have expected it. Her eyes glazed over, her fingers trembling as she hit the virtual keyboard wording the message to the mysterious Guild Coordinator.

The waiter arrived and began filling the table in front of each of us with a plethora of bowls containing colored scoops of ice-cream. We sat surrounded by whiffs of the aroma best described as an alcohol-delivery truck accident. Finally, he reached me. Placing a crystal thin-stalked bowl onto a lacy napkin, he commented,

"Your order: a scoop of light, another of dark and," he swallowed enviously, "a scoop of Elven ale, 5142 brew. Enjoy your food."

"Cheers," Zena raised a spoonful of burgundy Isabella.

Chapter Twenty

M
oscow. Max's apartment. Current time.

Max's mom Anastasia Pavlovna was finishing her daily manipulations over her son's body. She'd already changed the almost-dry diaper, wiped his skin with a damp sponge, massaged his main muscle groups and replaced the saline bags on the automatic IV drip.

She swept away an unwanted tear and stroked her boy's cheek, dry and scratchy like parchment. He was so gaunt. Not everyone would have recognized him as the once-cheerful young man who could have lost a few pounds. Between his deadly disease and the extended coma, they had eaten his body on the inside and transformed it on the outside.

Anastasia Pavlovna glanced at the dozens of sensors that covered her son's body stretching their bundled cables to a massive console brought into her apartment by the Chronos workers.

It had all changed so quickly. After Max contacted her, she had barely made an appointment when a couple of young and aggressive sales managers stormed into her apartment, pitching to her in the best traditions of neuro linguistic programming. Good job they were followed by a very nice girl called Olga, apparently a friend of Max', who came running after them
—very sweet, intelligent and strangely sad. They would have made such a nice couple. Anastasia Pavlovna would have loved to sit with some grandchildren while she still had time.

The girl had easily overrun the two. Under their pained stares, she had crossed out
half of the contract's clauses fighting for the best offer plus some extras on top from their VIP reserve. Anastasia Pavlovna had herself heard one of the managers whisper in Olga's ear, "You stupid idiot, what do you think you're doing?" She had very nearly asked the bully to leave her house at once and only the sight of her son's pale face had stopped her from doing it there and then.

She hadn't waited for the money transfer from her boy. She signed the contract on the spot and paid the deposit out of her own savings including her 'funeral money'. That didn't matter so much, really. As long as her boy was all right, money would take care of itself. Besides, hadn't Max told her he was earning a good wage in that AlterWorld of his? He definitely made enough to rent that lovely cottage for her. He also had some very no-nonsense friends: one of them, Vladimir, was even now sitting by the kitchen window monitoring (as he called it) the front door. She'd told him so many times it wasn't worth the trouble, told him she was too old to be bodyguarded like that. But he wouldn't listen, would he? He was always one step behind her, turning his head this way and that, checking the surroundings. A fine young man, even though he'd never offered to help her with her shopping bag. 'I'm awful sorry, ma'am,' he'd say, 'but my hands must be free at all times.'

Recently two more had joined him. Oleg usually stayed in the car. Constantine came late at night to replace one of the other two. It would be a good idea to cook some meat balls for them, you couldn't expect them to stay fit on all those pizza orders and rice cakes wrapped in synthetic seaweed.

The heart monitor beeped, its alarm disrupting her thoughts. On its screen, the neat curves gave way to sharp peaks and scary dips. Her son's heart missed another beat, and again, followed by a long pause. The monitor's anxious whine grew as the peaks straightened into a thin horizontal line. Come on now! Start beating! Hold on, son, keep on fighting!

An emergency call light blinked, summoning a Chronos resuscitation team. The hospital's remote operator hooked himself up to the resuscitation equipment that crowded around the headboard of the capsule. The day before, she'd had to sign a hospital waiver and pay for the VIP-class home care. Without that, they would have taken him away to some hospice where he'd have faded away like any other coma sufferer.

The operator sent the charge command to the defibrillator and activated the pulse generator. The sharp click of the jet injector startled her. An empty adrenaline cartridge rolled across the floor.

"Clear!"

Her son's body arced, convulsing. The autosampler methodically injected the contents of the first-aid container into the IV drip. On the monitor screen, the hospital doctor's face frowned, concerned.

"Clear!"

Whiffs of smoke rose from the capsule's sensitive electronic components. There had to be a cutoff system there that disabled any non-core hardware, but it didn't seem to have worked. Again the jet injector clicked, sending an empty atropine cartridge spinning across the parquet floor.

"Clear!"

The monitor was still whining when the corridor filled with the stomping of many feet. The Chronos men were the first to arrive.

Hope in her eyes, Anastasia Pavlovna looked up at the hospital doctor on the monitor screen. He turned away momentarily, then forced himself to answer her stare, shaking his head. Then the monitor blinked, the picture replaced by a list of the resuscitation procedures. The arriving ambulance crew took over from him. He switched off.

Half an hour later, Anastasia Pavlovna sat at the table, barely responsive, clutching some sedatives in one hand and an official pen with a built-in ID check in the other. She wasn't even looking at what she was signing: the death certificate, the ambulance crew report, the burial certificate that stated her son's body was to be laid to rest cryogenically. She was almost happy she couldn't see or hear much: the last thing she wanted to hear now was the squelching sounds of a machine that was pumping extra liquid out of her son's body, replacing it with cryoprotective solution.

A text ringtone made her jump. She froze. This was the tone she'd assigned to messages coming from her son's number.

Not yet knowing what she was doing, the mother looked up at the comms bracelet. She touched the screen, opening the incoming message. A wide smile lit up her face.

He's alive! My boy's alive! Oh, thank you, AlterWorld, thank you!

* * *

We were finishing our alcocreams when my chest seized up quite painfully. I winced, rubbing what had to be the heart area.

"Whassup?" the ever-observant Zena asked.

"Dunno. Feels like my heart's just played up."

Her eyebrows rose. "You're not going to become the first perma who popped his clogs from a heart attack, are you?"

"I hope not," I smiled back, concentrating on my body sensations. The pain seemed to have subsided, or was it my imagination? My nerves were like live wires with all the recent events, and the shock I'd received that morning could have well added its pound of flesh. I was surprised I wasn't hearing voices yet, let alone suffering phantom pains.

Her stare unfocused briefly, then she was back with us. "He'll see you in ten minutes. Are you ready?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Good. Freckles, finish your mojito and give Max a lift to the Guild. And you can show him to the office. He doesn't have much time."

"Sure," the female wizard mumbled, clinking her spoon as she scooped out the last of her soft-green poison of choice from the bowl.

In theory, virtual liquor didn't have intoxicating properties. But in practice... It could simply have been brain chemistry playing up; alternatively, the drink could trigger existing subconscious reflexes
, but it was a fact noticed by many: the alcohol did affect you. Some more, others less, but no one was a hundred percent immune to its effect apart for some die-hard teetotalers and rehab rats whose subcortex didn't possess the necessary neural links.

That explained the fact that the girls were just tipsy enough to move to the next stage of the dating game, some quite prepared to skip it and move directly to the inevitable horizontal stage. Yeah, right. Bomba especially could use a strong male hand. The other girls weren't exactly beauty pageant material, either. Having said that, the time spent in AlterWorld had somehow changed my perception of beauty. To my eye they seemed quite cute even
if a bit homely, though had I met their team in real life, I was guaranteed a few embarrassing moments complete with a pair of soiled pants and some early gray hair.

Freckles checked her bowl again and, finally convinced it was empty, sat back in her chair. She sent me an invitation to join the group, waited for the acceptance notification and announced with the intonations of the first man in space,

"Off we go!"

I had barely jumped to my feet when a micro port pulled us out of the café and onto the
teleport pad opposite the mercs' Guild building.

"After you!" she motioned me into the main gates guarded by a pair of golems.

I forced the last mouthful of Elven beer down my suddenly constricted throat. I pulled the spoon—which could now be considered stolen, I suppose—out of my mouth, studied it in astonishment and hurled it aside. "Come on, then."

The VIP conference room was dripping with over-the-top luxury. Its walls were lined with tapestries depicting the mercs' exploits: the Nagafen raid, the week-long defense of the entrance to the Valley of Gold, and the storming of the Citadel of Gloom.

I sat in a comfortable leather chair. The Coordinator's powerful figure towered across the table opposite. Apparently, the corporate dress code that demanded all minor staff to wear Goblin guises didn't apply to him. Personally, I wasn't sure that a malicious snout with its finger-long fangs sticking out between black lips was a good working image to communicate to his VIP conferees. But judging by the fact that his green mug with its recognizable tattoo on one cheek kept recurring on some of the tapestries, the Coordinator hadn't always been a staff pen pusher. He must have come up through the ranks: his tough-guy appearance must have initially been generated for the battlefield, not office chitchat.

He gave ear to my request, his direct stare unsettling. Then he paused, thinking. He seemed to have made up his mind as he sat back in his chair and spoke,

"You see, dear Laith, there are several problems with your request to begin with. But let me start with a question. How are you going to hack the dome?"

That got me thinking. I really didn't want to expose my ability in front of all that crowd. At first I'd planned on using the Shadow of the Fallen One that guaranteed me some nominal anonymity. Very nominal, because even Snowie was quite capable of putting two and two together and sussing out the ability's proud owner. And I didn't want them to make me do their dirty work for them. But wait
—there
was
a solution. Costly enough to make my inner greedy pig clutch at his heart, but a solution nonetheless.

I reached into my bag, produced my handmade scroll and laid it on the table. The orc peered at it. His nostrils twitched greedily; his hand jerked mechanically as if to grab it.

"Hm. Are you sure you want to waste a unique item like that? Why not sell it to me? I'd pay you two hundred thousand in gold. You don't really need it to deactivate the dome. Just hire an extra hundred wizards and they'll do it for you, for less money too. What do you say to that?"

Yeah, right. I'd give it to him, and then the scroll would resurface at the worst possible moment, probably under my own castle walls. Not mentioning the fact that the spell cost at least a million. The merc wizards would take at least half an hour to break through the shield. As if I had that kind of time! I probably could just about handle the guards with their 15-min respawn times, but regular players could step in, too, and they respawned instantly.

No, giving matches to children wasn't a good idea. "With your permission, I prefer to act fast and be sure. So how much do I owe you for hiring three hundred top warriors for a five-minute coup?"

With a disapproving shake of his head, the orc began talking up his prices. "The minimal hire is twenty-four hours. It would take me about two hours to gather the force you need. Five hundred each, that's a hundred and fifty thousand in total."

"That's a lot," I tut-tutted. "No wholesale discount?"

He gave me an encouraging smile, like, there would be if you wait a bit. "I haven't finished yet. As the proposed op has a more political rather than military character which may potentially affect the Guild's relationship with some of AlterWorld's top factions, a risk ratio comes into play, doubling the price. That's in case I give you my permission to proceed. Which I won't because under these conditions, the money is of less interest and can't serve as a means of payment."

"Then what will?"

He gave an indifferent shrug. "Possibly, the return service of a comparable caliber or," he pointed his eyebrows at the parchment, "a unique item of similar value."

Wasn't he cornering me, the bastard? No, Sir, I don't think so! The higher his interest in the scroll, the less I wanted to satisfy it. I just didn't happen to like shady types with unclear agendas.

Under his sour stare I put the parchment back into the bag. I felt for a Tear of a Phantom Dragon and placed it onto the table. The orc's eyes glistened. Tilting his head, he read the stats and beamed. Gingerly he picked up the stone, his sensitive fingers stroking it.

"Very well, dear Laith. The Tear
is
valuable. I think I know what we can do with it," his eyes stealing toward an enormous scimitar on an expensive mahogany stand. "But... I'm afraid it's not enough."