Deep Ocean Six Read online

  “Bone? Probability: twelve percent. Next up, I predict . . . hmm.” He knit his brow. “Water bottle.”

  His friend and commanding officer, Roberto, wriggled his bare toes in the water chunks that lapped against the shore. “Why don’t you just enchant your rod, Quartermaster?”

  “For a slight increase in the chance of treasure?” Jools scoffed. “Practicing my forecasts is much more valuable.” His bobber dipped, and he reeled in the line again. “Water bottle! I can always use another for my brewing stand.” He put the item aside and typed a figure into the laptop computer that sat open next to him. “What did I tell you? Probability—”

  “I know, I know,” said Rob impatiently. “You’re a hundred percent right. Look, Jools, we’re supposed to be on vacation. Can’t you just relax?”

  Jools narrowed his eyes at the captain. “Rhetorical question?”

  “No. That’s an order.” Rob got to his feet. “After all we went through last month, taking some time off is a—”

  “I know,” Jools broke in. “A mandatory request.”

  They both winced. Rob had issued another ultimatum a while back that hadn’t worked out quite as he’d predicted.

  Who could blame him? Jools knew the cowboy-turned-cavalry commander was still working the bugs out of his program. He’d been thrust into the role of leader as a complete newcomer to the game. Rather than chafe against the young man’s control, Jools had embraced it. He certainly didn’t want the job. And the other members of Battalion Zero were far too self-absorbed to bring the unit together. Who could blame them? That’s what Survival mode was all about.

  So, Jools typically obeyed Rob’s wishes, for the good of the group. He couldn’t change his fundamental nature, though. “Dreadfully sorry, mate. This is how I fish.” He typed something else into his spreadsheet and cast out his line once more. “Next up, I predict: fish.”

  “That’s a long shot,” Rob said wryly.

  “Actually, fairly common, at sixty percent odds.”

  “You know, Quartermaster, there’s more to life than facts and figures. Take girls, for example. When’s the last time you went on a date?”

  A date? Well, there was that school dance I almost went to . . . or the time Jaspreet and I almost went to the movies alone, but Whit tagged along . . . “When’s the last time you went on a date, Captain?”

  Rob colored. “Fraternizing with troops and villagers is . . . discouraged in the cavalry manual.” He sighed and tugged his cowboy boots back onto his air-dried feet. “I’m gonna go rustle up some grub,” he said. “Do me a favor. Try to take it easy. Go for a hike, or something.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jools said, fiddling with his laptop. “I’ll try.”

  The captain wandered off toward their base camp.

  When something struck the bobber again, Jools reeled in a fish. Bored with the easy game, he abandoned his rod and computer, and set off for a walk around the lake.

  The blue pool lay in a red clay bowl surrounded by a spiral of tall rock formations. The two cavalry mates had ridden away from their station at the capital city of Beta to their old hideout in Bryce Mesa—an area of high desert naturally protected by rings of striped rock towers and spiny cacti. Rob had suggested vacationing here, at the site of one of Battalion Zero’s early victories against the griefer army. He thought it might take the sting out of their recent run-in with Termite. The captain and the company vanguard, Frida, were the only ones who’d survived it.

  Jools had to admit the scenery was soothing after the stress of respawning. The clay mesa ground looked so spic-and-span, with a few bare-limbed bushes and trickling blue creeks to break up the expanse. Rock stair-steps climbed above the flat valley floor to meet dramatic sandstone hoodoos—tall spires that seemed to watch over travelers who passed by. The silver and orange hoodoos, green cacti, and lapis-colored waters lent vivid color to the postcard scene. But as soon as the quartermaster acknowledged the splendor of these surroundings, his mind shifted back to work. All he could think about were the many tasks left undone back at cavalry headquarters in Beta.

  “Dying was not on my to-do list,” he murmured. Creating an Overworld rail system was at the top of it.

  He had pinched his transit crew—the six “Thunder Boys”—from a minecart gang that had been plaguing an ice plains village. After a brief training period, they had completed phase one of the rail project, and were about to begin phase two. Under Jools’s direction they had connected a dual loop of track between Beta, Sunflower, and Spike City—the first settlements to join the new unified biome alliance. This linked the Overworld’s central extreme hills with the sunflower plains in the northern hemisphere and the ice plains in the southern hemisphere. Jools was extremely proud of this accomplishment. But travel remained crude, at best. Phase two would posh it all up, with proper rail stations, set schedules, and parlor cars that ore workers would scarcely recognize as minecarts.

  “Now, that’s what I’d call civilized,” he said to himself. He’d taken to the project with a passion, intrigued with transforming lawless gangsters into much-needed transit police. While he’d brought the six scofflaws a long way, he felt less than comfortable leaving them unsupervised for any length of time. If Rob hadn’t practically kidnapped him and taken him on this camping trip, he’d be keeping an eagle eye on them right now.

  Jools’s stomach grumbled. Should’ve eaten that raw fish, he thought. Then he remembered that Rob might be cooking steaks over an open fire. He retraced his steps, retrieved his fishing equipment and loot, and headed back to camp.

  While still a hundred blocks off, though, he heard hoof beats and then saw two riders coming his way. He pulled an iron sword from his inventory and stood his ground. Two stout horses—a smallish black-and-white paint, and a taller bay warmblood—brought their riders swiftly toward him.

  “Jools!” came a familiar voice. Stormie rode the smaller mount, and Kim galloped up on the giant. The young women were dressed for the trail in tall boots and clingy riding shirts and pants. Stormie’s were basic black and Kim’s, her signature pink. The pair skidded to a stop. “Where’s the captain?” Stormie called.

  “We have news!” Kim said.

  Jools felt his blood surge. “Thank the mods! I was halfway mad from all this peace and quiet.”

  Kim jumped down from her stallion, Nightwind, and gave Jools a leg up behind the saddle. “Rob’s going to want to hear this,” she said, mounting and gathering the reins again. “We had to cut our beach trip short. Something crazy happened to the eastern ocean.”

  “Isn’t that where Lady Craven was said to be hiding out?” Jools asked, bouncing a bit on Nightwind’s rump.

  “Could be she’s behind the trouble,” Stormie said, urging her horse, Armor, alongside them.

  “Trouble?” Jools said. “This vacation might turn out better than I thought.”

  *

  The three friends found their captain lounging by the campfire in his chaps, jeans, vest, and western shirt, an empty plate beside him. He’d set up a row of water bottles a few blocks off and was tossing rocks at them for target practice.

  Ting! Ting! Tong . . . crash! He hit three in a row, knocking them all over and breaking the last bottle.

  “Nice one,” Jools said as the horses slowed from a trot to halt before the cavalry commander. Whinnies of greeting came from Beckett and Rob’s black Morgan horse, Saber, who were tied to a spider-string picket line.

  Rob paused his stone throwing. “Corporal! Artilleryman! What are you girls doing out here?”

  Stormie vaulted off of Armor. “Looking for you, sir.”

  “Tired of beach combing?” Rob asked.

  Kim let Jools slide down first, and then she dismounted. “We might have a situation, Captain.”

  Rob tossed another rock and missed his target. “Let me guess. Sunburn?”

  “Seriously, sir.” Stormie’s dark eyes clouded. “Possible griefer army activity in the east.”

  “Goody, goo
dy gumdrops,” Jools murmured wholeheartedly.

  Rob looked less thrilled, but was now all ears. “Report, please.” He let them tie up their horses, then passed around some leftover steaks.

  Between bites, Kim and Stormie told Rob and Jools about their beach trail ride, which had been more disturbing than rejuvenating.

  “We were riding north, up the coast of cold beach,” Stormie said.

  “We made a snow shelter and turned in for the night,” Kim added. “When we woke up the next day, the beach was . . . bigger.”

  Rob cocked his head at Jools, who leaned forward intently.

  “The sand blocks extended out in the ocean farther than we remembered, anyhow,” Stormie said. “Thought we was just seein’ things, or maybe had too much flower water the night before. But the same thing happened the next night, at a camp up the beach.”

  “Are you sure the tide wasn’t just coming in?” Rob asked.

  “Tide? I’ve seen that mod once,” Jools said. “Makes waves. Was that it?”

  Stormie eyed Kim, who shrugged.

  Jools persisted. “Come on. Waves move. They undulate.” He demonstrated a rolling wave with his hand. “Could it have been a tide mod?”

  Stormie shook her head. “It was more like somebody had replaced chunks of ocean with chunks of sand.”

  Jools thought harder. “Or . . . could be they removed ocean chunks to reveal what lies beneath them.”

  “You say this happened twice?” Rob asked.

  Kim nodded. “Twice like that. The third night it was gravel.”

  Jools dropped the remainder of his steak and jumped to his feet. “I sense a pattern forming. We must investigate!”

  “We must tell the judge and colonel first,” Rob countered, referring to the UBO administrators.

  Jools screwed up his face in annoyance. “They’re not our nannies. And we’re on holiday. I say we break camp and ride out to the sea.”

  “With hardly any concrete information, no armor, and no backup?” Rob stared him down. “This sounds big. We’re going to need full ranks.”

  Jools threw up his hands. “Good luck with that, then. We’re one vanguard and one weapons expert short,” he said sharply. Frida was on leave, and Turner was . . . wherever Turner was.

  Rob didn’t respond right away. He and Jools had skirted the subject of the missing sergeant at arms since leaving the city. After the bomb went off, Rob and Frida had fled to safety, seeing to the villagers and horses in Beta. Jools, Stormie, and Kim had respawned soon afterward, but Turner was nowhere to be found. Since this behavior wasn’t unusual for him, nobody worried. At first.

  Days had passed. The settlers moved into the city and set up a volunteer guard, and still the sergeant hadn’t reappeared. He’d left his horse, Duff, safely behind with the rest of the herd. Now, the cavalry mates feared the worst—that either death or dishonesty had parted them from Turner for good.

  Judge Tome suggested the battalion take some well-deserved time off to recuperate. When leave was announced, Vanguard Frida had lit out for the jungle—alone. The commander and the quartermaster chose to camp at Bryce Mesa, while the horse master and artilleryman headed for the beach. Sergeant Turner hadn’t been present to be dismissed.

  Now Jools recalled the last time he’d seen the sergeant at arms, the night they’d all ended up in ­Termite’s underground bunker. The griefer’s plan to exterminate first the battalion members, then the villagers, and—by default—the biome unification effort, had almost succeeded. Trapped in a bomb-rigged room deep inside the city caverns, the troopers had selected Rob and Frida to escape with their lives during the fuse delay. The others—including Jools—had agreed to die, hoping to avoid maximum damage and respawn at their bedsides in cavalry camp. Everyone had—except for Turner.

  “Well,” Rob said, finally, “we’ll need to recall Frida, at least.”

  “How?” Stormie asked. “Turner was the only person who knew her clan coordinates.”

  To his surprise, Jools wished the opposite were true—that Frida could tell them where Turner was. “Where could the big lug have gone?” he asked, knowing no one could answer. Nobody said so, but none of the options were good. Either Turner had taken too much damage during the blast—making it impossible for him to respawn in his familiar form—or he’d lied about synchronizing his spawn point with the others’.

  In any case, Turner wasn’t available to hunt down their scout, and Rob wasn’t brash—or foolhardy—enough to send a splintered battalion into unknown danger.

  Rob pressed his lips together, considering their prospects. “Our intel places Lady Craven somewhere in the vicinity of the eastern ocean. The tracks that Frida found after the explosion suggest that Termite headed that way, as well.”

  “We thought it all added up to more than coincidence, sir,” Kim said.

  “Even I’d hate to meet up with those griefers without Meat on our team,” Stormie said sadly, using ­Frida’s pet name for Turner. “I sure hope he didn’t leave the game.”

  Rob wasn’t feeling so charitable. “For my money, he probably lied to us. If he didn’t change his spawn point—the way he said he did—then he’d reenter play wherever he took his last big licking. He might’ve thrown in with the syndicate. Bluedog and Rafe would be glad to give him work, for a cut of the profits.”

  “Yes,” Jools agreed, in light of the sergeant’s tendency toward deception and self-preservation. “It’s quite possible he’d take up with those moneygrubbing lowlifes. Perhaps we should set out a bowl of emeralds at suppertime and see if he comes running.”

  The girls began to protest when Jools shushed them. Bowl of emeralds . . . bowl of emeralds . . . “Hello? That’s it!” His eyes lit up. “I’ll wager Sergeant Turner’s not permanently dead or unrecognizably maimed,” Jools went on. “He probably didn’t give up on us and go AWOL, either. And . . . he might even have been telling the truth when he said he’d matched his spawn point with ours.”

  “What makes you think so?” Rob pressed him.

  “It was something he said right before the Termite episode. And awhile back—on one of our trips to the Nether.” Jools paused dramatically. “He’s on a job, mates! I’d stake my paycheck on it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “WOULD IT HAVE KILLED THE GUY TO LEAVE A note?” Rob complained after Jools had shared his hypothesis on Turner’s whereabouts.

  Jools regarded the captain with amusement. “Did you ever see Sergeant Turner pick up a pen? Or a book, for that matter?”

  Rob ducked his head. “Not everyone has as complete a command of the English language as you do, Quartermaster.”

  “Be that as it may. I think you’ll agree that Turner hasn’t enough consideration for those who care about him to ease their minds with a simple, ‘Gone to lunch—be back soon.’”

  Stormie clucked. “He might not be that cold-hearted. Maybe it’s a self-image thing. Or maybe he didn’t think we’d care.”

  “I guess we could’ve been . . . sweeter to him,” Kim said slowly.

  Rob snorted. “What goes around, comes around.”

  Jools said nothing. He recognized Turner’s bluster for what it was: a defense mechanism. He and the mercenary were far more alike than he wanted to admit.

  Rob, knowing he couldn’t do without the sergeant’s help right now, accepted the inevitable. “Are we going where I think we’re going, Quartermaster?”

  A grin crept across Jools’s pale face. “A certain Nether fortress, I believe.” He turned to Stormie. “If you collect the obsidian and ignition, I’ll look up the coordinates.”

  I do love solving a cipher, Jools thought to himself. He’d figured out that Turner had lied: to him, when he’d denied changing his spawn point that day in the stable yard. He’d only copped to it in a moment of weakness, later that night when he realized he’d never leave Termite’s bunker alive. It had been a point of pride with the mercenary to keep his origins secret. But Rob had rightfully asked the troopers to sync the
ir spawn points to cavalry camp, to protect their mission. Even Turner couldn’t argue with that objective. The revelation that he’d finally followed the order had certainly shocked everyone.

  So, maybe Turner felt his reputation was tarnished, once the others knew he wasn’t as Teflon as he’d made out. These little disappearing acts of his served to throw the spotlight back on his unpredictability . . . which always made him seem a bit more fearsome. The last time he’d taken unauthorized leave, he’d suffered a court-martial—but there was no guarantee he wouldn’t retaliate, or vanish again. This time, Turner must have respawned in camp but departed immediately.

  “When this is all over . . . when this is all over . . .” The snippet of conversation drifted back to Jools. Turner had planned to take some “personal time,” somewhere. House-sitting, he’d said. Jools didn’t think he’d left the game.

  All it took to determine the sergeant’s destination was to recall another coincidental absence: Colonel M’s. The First War veteran had retreated to his home in the Nether when Termite threatened wide-scale destruction. Epic battle wounds had prevented him from respawning intact, leaving him as just a large, disembodied head. Any further damage . . . Any further damage might wipe the old ghost out completely. He’d left Judge Tome in charge of city affairs until he returned. Until he returned . . . When Colonel M came back, he’d need a house sitter! He had generously donated his iron golems to the new city. A fellow couldn’t leave his personal Nether fortress unoccupied and unguarded forever.

  Jools knew the colonel had been seeking a caretaker for some time. Considering the fortress was full of wither skeletons and that the Nether wasn’t exactly Shangri-la, he hadn’t had much luck. “Only one person I know would take that job,” Jools said to himself as he looked up the colonel’s coordinates on his computer. He silently thanked the mercenary for being so true to form.

  *

  If I were world programmer, Jools decided, I’d hand out, rather than take away, experience points for dying. I think I’m getting better at it. True, he mourned no loss of life so much as his own. However, he’d noticed that this most recent purchase of “The Farm” hurt less than his previous deaths—psychologically, not physically. In fact, it had been a positive experience, other than the sudden drop in XP. Thanks to Battalion Zero, Jools not only regained his own inventory when he respawned, he still held the keys to the company stores. It was the uncertainty over how much he’d lose that’d made death so unattractive in the past.