8 – THE INVASION OF PARADISE
Sitting on a thick layered durasteel couch with sharp edges wasn't very comfortable, as the Greens discovered when they attempted to sit down in them. They had just returned from the shoreline and had entertained the idea of relaxing. Kenny let out an anguished groan as he put himself down. "Ugh, how do you guys manage to sit in these things? Even with the padding inside my armor I'm still getting cramps."
"How're you doing that?" a voice said next to him.
Kenny looked over at his side to find Penguin Love Party 1999 staring back at him. Only instead of actually sitting on the couch, Penguin Love Party 1999 had both feet on the couch and was crouching down on his haunches. The way he had turned himself, in this position, to stare at Kenny made the Green find the sight somewhat humorous. "What do you mean, 'how am I doing that?'" Kenny asked. "A better question is, 'why are you doing that?'"
"Doing what?" Penguin Love Party 1999 replied. "I'm just crouching. What I'm wondering is how the hell you're actually sitting down. I had no idea there was an animation for that in this game."
Kenny drew back slightly. "Animation? What're you talking about?"
The other five Greens had been watching the conversation between Kenny and Penguin Love Party 1999 with interest. Skope decided to enter into the discussion and said: "Penguin, are you okay? You're acting just a little bit strange, don't you think?"
Penguin Love Party 1999 turned quickly to face the other five Greens as though he had been insulted. "Me? How am I being-" He paused when he noticed that they were also actually sitting down on the other couches. "You too? How in the fuck are you guys doing that?"
"Doing what?" came an in unison response.
Penguin Love Party 1999 continued to stare at the six of them, moving his visor erratically back and forth around the room, as though he just couldn't believe something was happening. After some moments, he seemed about to make another comment, but before he could-
BOOOM. The entire house shook.
Everyone in the room jumped out of surprise.
"What the heck was that?" Kevin exclaimed.
"I believe it came from outside this structure," said Nome. "The reverberations did not last long enough to be an earthquake, and the only other type of phenomenon that can release that kind of energy is explosives."
Penguin Love Party 1999 moved his helmet around in a semicircle as though he was rolling his eyes. "Ugh, please tell me they haven't started betraying each other again." Then he stopped in mid visor-roll. "Wait a minute, no one ever spawned any explody things that powerful. This is a custom game, not Forge, so they couldn't have."
As if on cue to respond to Penguin Love Party 1999's thought, the six Yellows, along with Exuberant Ned and French Panda, came trouncing through the teleporter in a hurried single-file line. All of them had their weapons drawn. Things became more than a little bit crowded as everyone rushed to the part of the living room containing the couches.
"We're under attack," Hester reported. "Several dozen Reds and a fleet of vehicles just teleported in from somewhere."
The Greens shot up from their seats like a troupe of enthusiastic jack-in-the-boxes.
"So then, they have found us," Nome stated. "I suppose that it was only a matter of time."
"WOW," Penguin Love Party 1999 interrupted. "I just got a lagged message saying that about sixty people just joined the game in about three seconds. Goddamn, we're having all kinds of weird glitches today-"
"It's no glitch," Patton shouted at him. "The war has caught up with us. If you love this map of yours, then you're going to help us defend it."
Penguin Love Party 1999 looked up at Patton and shook his head slowly. "No, no. You're all wrong. This is just some glitch. The maximum capacity for a custom game is sixteen players. We reached that the instant this game began. No one else can join us."
Suddenly the sound of someone panting could be heard from just outside. The source revealed itself to be Angry Wet Sock, who burst into the room running at full speed and blurting out frantic curses. After he exhausted his slew of less-than-elegant words, he shouted out: "A huge bunch of red dudes just popped in from fucking nowhere! They've got Falcons and Scorpions and other hardcore shit with them, too. And they do not look friendly!"
Exuberant Ned grumbled loudly. "I cannot believe this is happening! This is a complete and total invasion of our game privacy. I'm contacting Bungie or 343 or whoever is responsible for preventing this, because this is just unacceptable and I will not stand for-"
An even louder BOOM sounded from just outside, shaking the entire front of the house.
"Oh God, they've been following me!" Angry Wet Sock exclaimed. "They're right outside the house!"
Everyone looked out the front windows to find an army of vehicles, including a Scorpion Tank at the front, several Warthogs, and a variant of Mongooses they hadn't seen before that had mounted rocket launcher turrets in place of the back seat. In the air were three Falcons. All of the vehicles were populated with soldiers in Red armor.
"Shit just got totally real," Kenny observed.
"Everyone to the motor pool!" Exuberant Ned shouted. He raced over to one side of the living room. Everyone followed him through a two way shield wall, and into another, larger chamber that was filled with vehicles.
"Oh, yes!" Ryan exclaimed when he saw what was inside. A Scorpion Tank, Gauss Warthog, Mongoose, and even some of the strangely shaped purple-bluish colored vehicles were situated in the motor pool. Ryan strode towards the tank, but Patton thrust his arm in the weapons specialist's way. "Aw, come on!" Ryan complained.
"You can take the turret seat," said Patton. "But the driver's seat is my thing. I've got a score to settle with these Reds after what they did to our base and tried to do to Command."
Ryan was going to protest by bringing up the fact that they were both in the same Army, not to mention that they belonged to the same base within that Army. But then he remembered that Patton was already annoyed from recent events, and if he had learned anything about his commander while serving under him, it was NEVER to cross Patton when he was annoyed. Patton was in the mood to destroy things, just another one of those kinds of moments. And all Ryan could do was just roll with that.
Patton got into the driver's compartment of the tank while Ryan inserted himself into the turret seat. Meanwhile, everyone else chose a vehicle was well. Nome was about to get into the driver's seat of the Warthog, but the other Greens stopped him, remembering what had happened the last time he had been behind the wheel of a vehicle. Nome agreed that he was much better at aiming then driving, and found a niche in the gunner's seat of the Warthog instead, while the other Greens took the other seats of the Warthog and Mongoose.
Seeing as they were the only ones who had any experience driving the alienesque purple-bluish vehicles, Lime let the four "players" take seats in them. They lurched off of the ground and levitated in place as they were activated.
Meanwhile, Hester, Wren, Amber, and Clair headed up to the second level of the house, to a bay that kept something perhaps more important than any of the vehicles downstairs: a Falcon. Hester got in the pilot's seat while Wren and Clair mounted either gun turret and Amber took up a post in a passenger seat so she could do some sniping.
Patton called up from the tank: "Sharp, I need you to give us covering fire the instant we get out there."
"Talk to my gunners," Hester replied.
"Got it covered, boss," said Clair. "I'll be using the grenade launcher. Just let us know when you're ready."
"We're ready now," said Skope from the Warthog.
"Alright, then," Hester acknowledged. "Wait until I give the affirmative."
The Falcon lifted off of the bay floor. As it drifted up into the air and away from the house, the Red vehicles immediately responded by aiming to shoot it down. Clair released a volley of 40-millimeter HEDP grenades down onto the enemy vehicles. She set them to detonate while they were still a few meters above the ground, which had the effect of releasing a series of electromagnetic pulses among the crowd of Red vehicles.
Everything stopped on the ground. This is the chance Lime Squadron had been waiting for.
"Go!" Hester shouted into her mike.
The other members of Lime Squadron and the four players raced out of the motor pool in their own band of vehicles, swarming the now defenseless Red Army. They rode by, firing off volleys of rounds into the other vehicles, which could only sit and stare at them in response. The three enemy Falcons, still mobile as they were above the ground during the EMP, suddenly vanished into balls of flame as Patton fired upon them with the tank. At the same time, Skope managed to take out an enemy tank himself by boarding the back of it and lobbing a fragmentation grenade into the engine. It exploded as the Green's Warthog completed a loop around it, and Skope hopped back into the passenger seat.
But by now, the effects of the EMP were beginning to wear off. Clair realized too late that one of the Red's Mongooses, one of the first vehicles to be EMPed, was now mobile again, and before she could do anything it had set off a heat-seeking rocket in the Falcon's direction. Hester changed the Falcon's direction erratically, but the rocket was persistent and followed. But just as the rocket came curving in for a hit, something whizzed by Clair's helmet faster then she could see and imbedded itself in the rocket, causing it to detonate prematurely. The Falcon was rocked by the explosion, but it was just far enough away that no real damage was inflicted upon it.
"And that's how it's done!" Amber shouted. She slammed a replacement clip into her sniper rifle's barrel.
"Shit, that was close!" Hester exclaimed.
The Red Mongoose was looking to fire off another shot, but Clair sent down another EMP to keep it stationary while Amber fired a sniper round into its engine, giving both soldiers on it a fiery end to their role in the battle.
With that out of the way, Clair was now free to rain electromagnetic pulse down onto the Red vehicles. The Reds were forced to endure another moment of stuckness as the hail of short-range EMPs bore down upon them and again stopped them in their tracks. This allowed Patton to have more fun in the tank. He pointed the turret one place and something blew up. He pointed the turret at another place and something else blew up. It was as though he was a conductor orchestrating a symphony of destruction. Ryan, still in the gunner's seat of the tank, was getting no kills out of this, though it didn't seem as though he really minded because he was having such a fun time just watching the Reds go boom.
Kevin and Mr. Boom, in the Mongoose, had adopted the role of lure and distraction. Because they were in a small vehicle with no practical armor, the Reds decided they were the easiest target, and were firing at them more than the other of Lime's vehicles. This allowed Kevin to use the Mongoose to attract the enemy into the firing path of Patton's tank. Mr. Boom aided this task by firing at the enemy from the passenger seat with his rocket launcher. The launcher he used didn't fire rockets with heat seeking capability like the Red Mongoose, but they still got the Red's attention, and thereby made it far easier for Kevin to get the Reds to follow his Mongoose.
As all of this was going on, the other Greens, in the Warthog, just focused on killing whatever the tank managed to leave behind. Nome was an excellent marksman, and used the gauss turret to excellent effect. Instead of using the gauss rounds to destroy the vehicles themselves, Nome found it easier just to shoot the soldiers out of them with the gauss turret instead.
As of yet, none of the Reds taken out by Lime Squadron or the players had returned to the battlefield. They took this to mean that when the Reds had entered the map they had somehow disabled everyone's immortality. The Reds had obviously wanted the style of battle where a single kill was everything needed to defeat an enemy. But this time it was not working for their benefit.
The Reds were being pushed back. This was not a difficult thing to realize. The area just outside the house was littered with debris from destroyed vehicles. The Reds were no longer on an ordered line, and instead had devolved into disarray. They were also dying all over the place. Bodies in red armor now littered the ground. The battle, it seemed, was nearly over.
In the Falcon, Hester suddenly spotted something up high. Atop the mountain that dominated the center of the island, at its very peak, was a strange white light, about the size of a beach ball. It flickered like some kind of small star. Then it suddenly shrank to a brilliant point and exploded, releasing a spherical shockwave that pulsed outward with terrifying speed. Hester had no doubts about what it was.
"EMP!" she shouted into her mike. What she was talking about wasn't one of the extremely short-range electromagnetic pulse detonations given off by Clair's grenade launcher. She was referring to a "standard" size EMP blast, which could affect the electronics of half a city of triggered in the right place. This was one of those blasts.
The wave reached the battlefield before anyone could do anything. Like a gust of wind in a strong breeze it swept over everything. The battlefield crackled with the sound of circuits shorting out and also gave a low dying whirr of things powering down.
This was not good for the people in the Falcon. "Prepare for crash landing!" Hester yelled behind her. Looking back at the dashboard, she discovered that all readings on the instrument panel had flatlined. Now out of the pilot's control, the Falcon swept into a tailspin. Everyone yelled and struggled to find something to grab onto. The ground was approaching much faster than seemed comfortable-
The world resolved around Amber. She felt weak. She vaguely remembered something about the Falcon losing power. They had almost certainly crashed. Which meant she was probably suffering from shock. Doing her best to try to move, she began to look around.
She was on her back. The Falcon, or what was left of it, was about twenty meters behind her. Now just a heap of broken metal, it was hardly even recognizable any more. She tried to signal out to see if the others were all right, but her tacpad wasn't working. It had probably been broken by the impact during the crash.
She heard the sound of someone approaching. She turned her head as much as she could manage and discovered a red colored boot standing next to her. Amber looked up beyond the boot, to the legs, then the torso, and finally the helmet. A holographic human skull glared hauntingly down at her, taking the place of a conventional visor.
Then the Red soldier leaned down to her. The skull stared right into her visor, as though it could see into her very soul. Amber shivered and tried to squirm away, but she was still recovering from the shock of impact and was just too weak to move.
The soldier spoke. "Amber Stone?" he asked with a gruff voice.
Amber gasped. "How do you know my-"
The soldier slammed his fist into her visor, and her world returned to blackness.
Hester struggled to get herself free from the cockpit as she watched the Red soldier with the holographic skull for a visor pick up Amber's limp form and set it over his shoulder like a knapsack. Hester reached for her DMR, but it must have flown away in the crash, because it was nowhere to be found. She cursed and slammed the dead instrument panel with her gauntlet in frustration.
Suddenly she heard a cry from behind her in the wreckage. With an exasperated grunt, Clair heaved herself from the remains of the Falcon. She shoved sheets of wrinkled metal out of her way as she strode quickly towards the Red soldier. "You're not going anywhere," she shouted. "Put her down!"
Then someone stepped behind Clair. She whirled around to find another Red soldier. A second skull grinned at her. The soldier was holding a rather large weapon about the size and shape of a dinner plate. The end he held out to her was glowing bright green and humming madly. She raised her own weapon, but before she could fire, the green bolt left the Red's gun and flew straight at her.
Hester watched helplessly as Clair fell to the ground. The second Red soldier picked her up and draped her over his shoulder, much as the first soldier had done with Amber.
The first soldier turned to the second. "Do we really need to take that one as well?" he asked. "This one is the only one we came for." He tapped Amber with his opposite hand.
"One more won't hurt," the second soldier replied. "Vincent will be pleased. He likes prisoners with fight in them." Then he motioned to the unconscious Amber. "I wonder why Vincent is so interested in this one particular Yellow. He sounded almost as though he used to know it or something."
The first soldier shrugged, causing Amber to shift slightly. "Doesn't matter. Let's just get the fuck out of here. We're done here."
The second soldier reached over Clair carefully to get to his other arm, tapped a button on his tacpad, and then aimed his arm at a location in the air just above them. A familiar shimmer in the air appeared.
Hester recognized this immediately. Nome had referred to it as "a distortion in the fabric of space-time" back when they had used a portal just like this to escape Vincent and The Hand. Hester assumed that the English translation of Nome's rhetoric was "wormhole", in which case there was no question that this was the same kind of portal. "Come back here, you cowards!" she shouted after them. She was still hopelessly stuck in the cockpit, the door being jammed by a large piece of metal. But she continued to struggle anyways.
The Reds looked at her and laughed. Then they stepped into the portal and vanished, the shimmer in the air dying off a few seconds after they were gone.
"Dammit!" Hester screamed.
She heard more footsteps. She poised her fist in front of the door, preparing to knock into oblivion the Red as soon as he got in front of one of the holes. Then Patton's visor appeared. She just barely stopped herself from knocking her teammate unconscious.
"Hang on, Sharp," said Patton. "We're gonna get you out of there."
More footsteps approached. There was a chorus of simultaneous grunting, and then the cockpit door was lifted off. The sight of yellow and green colored armor greeted her.
"Wren," Hester enquired. "Where is she?"
"Here," came a reply. "They pulled me out of the wreckage just a second ago," said Wren as she came into view. Hester reached out to her sister, and she took it so that Hester had some support as she climbed out.
"Where are Stone and Sinclair?" Patton asked her as soon as he was on her feet. "We couldn't find them in the wreckage."
Hester shook her head in frustration. "They've been captured."
A series of gasps followed from the others.
"What the hell happened?" Ryan asked.
Hester explained to the rest of Lime everything that had occurred in the last two minutes.
"Their visors had holographic skulls?" Nome asked. "Strange. I have never heard nor seen any soldiers like this before."
"They're probably some kind of elite class of soldier for the Red Army," Skope postulated. "They might have been called in as reinforcements when we started kicking their asses."
"There's more," said Hester. "I think that those two specialized soldiers were sent here specifically to extract Lieutenant Stone. I can't think of any other reason why they would have needed to confirm her name before capturing her, or why they would have left the rest of us alone after taking her and Sinclair."
"Well Amber was in kind of a relationship with Vincent for awhile," said Ryan. "It was kept secret from the rest of us while it was going on, because she didn't want to come off as crazy at the time. But maybe Vincent still has feelings for her."
"Mmmmm, that seems unlikely given the difference in species," Nome put in.
"Do you have a better explanation?" Ryan countered.
Nome shook his head. "Not as of yet. I believe there may be more to this then we know. I highly doubt that Vincent ordered this out of affection for Stone. More likely he has some other use in mind for her. But until we know more, I cannot continue to postulate."
"We have to get them back somehow," Patton stated.
"Yeah, no shit," added Ryan.
Patton turned to look at him.
"No shit, sir!" Ryan corrected.
Patton nodded at him.
"The real question is, what can we do?" Jess asked. "We don't know where they went and have no way of directly following them."
Lime heard more footsteps, and the group turned to find the four players walking up to them.
"I don't know what the hell this all was just now," said French Panda. "But my God, it was awesome!"
"We definitely want to join you," said Exuberant Ned. "But first of all, we've gotta set a few things straight." He cleared his throat. "So then, is it true that you guys are really from another universe, and these Red guys are like Nazis or something and you're at war with them?"
Nome took a few seconds to try to translate what he had heard and then responded: "Yes."
"And it's all for real?" Penguin Love Party 1999 asked.
"Yup," said Patton.
"Ohmyfuckinggodyes," Angry Wet Sock commented.
Exuberant Ned continued his questioning. "And in order to save your universe you need to find someone here called Vincent, a fusion coil, and stop them from doing some crazy shit that's really bad. Is that correct?"
"In a nutshell," Hester confirmed.
"Okay then, we're so totally with you in that case," said Exuberant Ned. "But the thing is, lunch's almost ready at my house, so I have to go now. But I'll be back in maybe an hour or so. Kinda depends on chores and stuff. Anyways, see you guys around."
Angry Wet Sock gasped in sudden panic. "No wait don't go. You're the host-"
The four players dropped limp to the ground, and Lime's HUDs informed them that the four players had left the game.
"Well that was random," said Kenny.
Jess let out a sigh. "So what now?"
"I don't think the trail's entirely cold," said Wren. The attention of the group shifted to her. She was tapping keys on her tacpad. "I've been able to call up the signal from Sinclair's tactical pad," she explained. "I'm not getting Stone's, it was probably broken or something. But I am getting a reading for Sinclair's location."
"Where is she?" Patton demanded.
"In a different dimension, apparently," she reported. "This universe is very strange. It seems to have more than three spatial dimensions, and Sinclair has actually moved along 'spatial axis four'. My knowledge of what that means ends here."
"They are moving along the fourth spatial dimension," Nome translated. "We know of three dimensions that we can perceive, they being length, width, and depth. But in theory, it is possible for more to exist. Here they certainly appear to."
"So then how do we actually travel along this dimension ourselves?" Jess asked.
"The same way that the entities called 'players' appear to," said Nome. "We enter the realm called Halo Matchmaking."
