Read Online Multiplayer by John C. Brewer - Free Book Online Page B

here, man.”
    They were almost completely surrounded now, as the beasts and flying robots herded them into a clearing amidst the ruined buildings to finish them off: an abandoned square that might have once been a park. Thorks and scarobs never worked together, but these seemed to be doing just that. Or maybe it was just that they were all fixated on the invaders.
    “Tank!” Izaak heard Darxhan exclaim. “A friggin’ tank! Come on!”
    Izaak whirled around to see the big merc jogging through the one remaining gap in the enemy swarm. Izaak followed and caught a glimpse of a Marauder. His heart leapt at the sight of the massive steel tank sporting a long, wicked cannon. His health bar was showing all red when they climbed into the tracked dreadnought and pulled the hatch shut above them.
    Relief coursed through him as they took their places: Darxhan in the driver’s seat, Izaak on the main gun. “I hope this baby still works!” Izaak said, as they waited for the controls to come alive, but nothing happened. There was a long pause. Perhaps there were no fusion cells? Maybe it was damaged?
    “We’re screwed!” groaned Darxhan as the sound of the thorks and scarobs came muffled through the digital hull. In seconds, the scavenger robots would start cutting through the plate.
    Izaak glanced around, desperate for any way to save them, when the targeting screen in front of him sprang to life, to show thorks milling around outside. Just after it, the engine rumbled and a surge of energy shot through him. Izaak swiveled the main gun and fired one blast after another as Darxhan drove around the square crushing thorks beneath armored tank treads and mopping up with the heavy machine-gun. By the time the scarobs breached the armor, all the thorks were dead and Izaak was able to dismount and kill the last of the mechanized wasps with his pistol.
    As Izaak surveyed the oozing piles of thork carcasses and heaping mounds of scarob shells, he felt little sense of victory. A mess like this could mean only one thing. Even in the digital world, the first thing people do is clear out the vermin. This was the heaviest concentration of thorks and scarobs they’d ever seen. There could be no doubt: the town of Alanya was empty. They’d come to the wrong place and there was no way back except walking to the nearest slipgate, 350 miles away in Istanbul. Practically out of ammo and low on fusion cells, Izaak recommended they kill themselves to get the replication process started right away.
    But Darxhan convinced Izaak to wait, and after only a little exploring, they’d replenished both their ammo stores and their fusion cells. Better still, they found a well-concealed basement to store everything in, and left a slip-gate transponder behind so they could slip back in any time. Izaak no longer thought he’d find Mal-X here, but was curious to see the rest of Alanya, so after Izaak repaired their armor, they set out across town for the coast, about a mile and-a-half away.
    Traveling through the shattered city was slow going, killing vermin as they went, but they found no more heavy concentrations. As they marched south through the town, the mountainous peninsula rose up above them, the angular stones of the fort-like Ehmedek and the wall that snaked along the cliffs now peering down from on high. Attacking such a place, his father had told him, would have been suicide. The peninsula was exactly as Hector remembered it, even if the town wasn’t.
    When they came to the edge of the main street they stopped. The broad avenue was littered with broken down, rusted out cars and trucks as well as armored vehicles from the Omega Wars. The equilateral triangles, symbol of the Triad Alliance ∆ , and inverted horseshoe-like Omega symbols of the Archons Ω , were still clearly visible on much of the equipment, but the scarobs, picking their way over the sprawling tech, didn’t seem to care about political allegiance. This place, Izaak noted again and