Coming soon: Viral

I am not dead.

You may have gotten the impression that I am dead, given that I haven’t posted any news since [checks calendar] … oh, man. That is a loooong time. But better months of neglect than spamming you with useless stuff, right? I hope so. Anyway, while I’ve been very bad at keeping you up-to-date, the good news is I’ve also been very busy, writing my ass off, nose to the grindstone, typing my fingers to the bone … all for your entertainment.

… and the end result is that I am [squeezes fingers together] *this close* to finishing a brand new book, titled Viral. Hooray! Okay, well, that’s it from me. Good talk. I’ll check in again soon, I promise.

Hm? What’s that? You want to know what the book is about? Ugh, fine. Well, it’s about her:

That’s Sam. She fights aliens. It goes a little something like this:

In my first battle, I made fourteen thousand dollars in five minutes. I didn’t go viral, not technically … I needed another two million views to hit that mark. But I came damn close, and I got a taste of what going viral was like. And I liked it.

I was also scared as hell, of course. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of deathstreamers: those who admit they’re scared … and liars. Me? I straight up peed in my suit (a little) on my first ride down. It’s a good thing our suits are designed to recycle that stuff.

I was still shaking in fear when the space elevator jolted to a stop. In front of me, over the helmeted heads of the first rank of streamers, I saw the ramps crack open at the top, swinging down to give me my first view of an alien planet. Beneath a grimy yellow sky, the ground was rust-orange mud, which eventually gave way to a set of distant mountains. I saw a white-red gout of flame reach across the battlefield, and a hail of tracer rounds replied. Then the first rank of streamers hurried forward. My clan stood near the back. I know: stupid move. We didn’t know any better. We had called ourselves “Clan Demonium.” It had seemed like a funny name when we came up with it the day before, up in the safety of the barracks. But it turned out to be a bit too prophetic.

I found myself running, following the streamers in front of me, and just like that, my vac-suited boots slipped off the worn titanium of the ramp and into muddy soil – slick, with the consistency of day-old oatmeal. I cleared my throat.

“That’s one small step for woman,” I said, hoping my viewers couldn’t hear the fear in my voice. “One giant: ‘oh fuck, what did I just get myself into?’ ”

Somebody must have been watching, and thought the joke was funny – I got a notification in my heads-up display of a twenty dollar tip. I had made my first buck as a deathstreamer.

“Thanks for the tip, guys,” I said. “Stick around. If you like dry humor accompanied by a complete lack of fighting skill, I’m your girl.”

I surveyed our section of the battlefield through my visor. The firing had stopped, abruptly, and I saw no sign of the enemy. The other clans were taking advantage of the sudden lull, and were all heading towards the perimeter that the first wave had hastily established, about a hundred meters beyond the ramps. I continued turning in a circle, and saw a handful of casualties from the first wave being helped back onto the elevator by other streamers. One girl was hopping on one leg, her arms across the shoulders of two clan mates. Her other leg dragged along the ground behind her, bumping and twisting, dangling from a thin strand of fabric that was all that remained of her suit’s knee pad. My stomach lurched. Her friends set her down on the floor of the elevator, gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and then hustled back outside as the ramps began to close. The doors weren’t even fully shut, and the massive torus-shaped elevator was slipping rapidly upwards again, disappearing up along the massive cable into the haze above.

No turning back now, I thought. Not until the third wave gets down, at least.

“So that’s an Ocho,” I heard Dhia say, over my suit’s internal speakers.

I turned and found the rest of Clan Demonium standing in a loose semi-circle around a mud-spattered form in the dirt at our feet. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Dhia was right – it was indeed an Ocho, the first we had seen in the flesh. A dead one, thankfully – some streamer from the first wave had holed it repeatedly along one of its long, sinewy flanks. The creature’s corpse twitched, suddenly, and we all flinched.

Arliss laughed nervously. “It’s dead, right? It’s bigger than I thought.”

“Look at its legs,” Johnny said. “That’s one ugly motherfucker.”

A burst of gunfire from the far side of the elevator cable caused us to jerk our heads up. This is a battlefield, and we’re just standing around gawking like a bunch of morons.

“What now?” Rowdy asked, about a half second before I could.

“Everybody else headed for the perimeter,” Arliss said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “I think we should join them.”

“I agree,” Naja said. Her streamertag appeared in my heads-up display when I looked at her, hovering just over her helmet: StarKillah. “We need to be where the action is.”

Naja had been a moderately successful videogame streamer before she traded in her joysticks for a real rifle. Most of her fanbase had followed her to see if she could hack it as a deathstreamer – she had become the de facto leader of our clan given the rest of us were completely new to streaming. She set off across the slippery earth, heading toward a section of the perimeter. The five of us followed.

We found a spot of open ground between two other clans and prostrated ourselves, setting up behind our rifles and peering out over the terrain. As usual, the company had anchored the space elevator on a roughly circular rise – a small patch of high ground with good visibility in all directions. If you’re thinking, “well that makes good tactical sense, it’s easier to defend the high ground,” then … sigh. You sweet, summer child. While you are technicallycorrect, StreaMercs picks its landing sites based on two factors alone. Factor one: is it physically possible to anchor the space elevator into the bedrock at that site? Factor two: is it a nice picturesque location with good sightlines for shooting streaming videos? This is show business. Whether streamers stand a good chance of seizing and holding the site with minimal casualties is entirely irrelevant.

I’m no geologist, but the elevator’s base seemed to be well anchored. And they had certainly picked a scenic spot for our first landing on Pentares. Ahead of me, the ground sloped gently away from our position, and continued for several rolling miles, split at intervals by what I could only guess were small chasms. In the far distance, I could see a set of jagged mountains, their deep red sides streaked with white and yellow ore deposits. Above, the mountains’ craggy tops faded into the planet’s hazy yellow cloud layer. Well, not so much clouds … Pentares’ atmosphere didn’t really have distinct clouds, per se, just a gradually thickening layer of toxic gases. Our arrival briefing had talked about which specific gases were in the air, but I had promptly forgotten the details. “Don’t take your helmet off” was the key takeaway, and all I really needed to know. We weren’t there to terra-form and colonize – those folks would come along well after we were done.

A drone camera zoomed by, streaming third-person footage of the perimeter for the viewers. I thought about waving to it and saying something silly, like, “Hi, Mom!” but it was gone before I could do so. And my Mom was almost certainly not watching, having made it clear to me that she had no wish to see her only daughter star in a “glorified snuff film.” Fair enough. I wondered idly what I looked like to my viewers – they could opt to see what I was seeing, or a close-up feed of my face, and most fans choose to watch both, at the same time, via picture-in-picture. I hoped I looked like a badass, but I felt like I was going to hurl.

Next to me, Arliss shifted on his stomach, trying to get comfortable. He held an ancient Thompson sub-machine gun in one gloved hand, an antique from the early twentieth-century. The weapon looked comically undersized compared to our bulky armor, like some kid had mixed up the accessories for his toys, and given his space marine the gun that was supposed to go with a much smaller, cigar-chewing gangster in a fedora and trench coat.

That was Arliss’ shtick: he was hoping to get history buffs to watch his stream by showcasing famous weapons from different eras during each battle. Hence his streamertag: OldSchool. He’d convinced some military museum to lend him a good chunk of its inventory, in exchange for plastering the museum’s logo and URL all over his armor. I had to admit it was a cool idea, especially as I had no such gimmick of my own. And when I had checked the clan’s viewer counts during the elevator ride down, Arliss had far and away the most fans watching, even more than Naja. The fans had a good idea of what was coming, even if we didn’t – they love to watch a dumb noob get schooled.

“Heads up,” Naja said. She was a few meters off to my right, but had broadcast the message to our clan’s radio frequency. I focused through the scope of my e-rifle, scanning the ground below us. A flicker of movement caught my eye – something had popped up, briefly, out of one of the chasms several hundred meters away. But it was gone before I could identify it.

“Was that an Ocho out there in the chasm?” I asked.

“I didn’t see it,” Rowdy replied.

Arliss’ voice came in over my speakers next: “Okay, so for my first battle, we’re testing out the forty-five caliber Thompson sub-machine gun, also known as the ‘Tommy gun’ and affectionately nicknamed the ‘Trench Sweeper’ by G.I.s in World War Two—”

“You’re on the clan channel, Arliss,” Naja told him, curtly. “Save that crap for the viewers on your own stream, we don’t want to hear it.”

“Oh, right – sorry,” Arliss said, adjusting his audio controls.

I realized I should be giving some running commentary of my own for however many viewers had mistakenly stumbled across my stream (I checked quickly: a measly twenty-two thousand), but before I could open my mouth, the chasm I was watching simply erupted. Octipedes – hundreds of them – poured over the edge, like angry hornets whose nest had just been given a particularly ill-advised whack.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, and opened fire, along with everyone else in my clan.

I squeezed the trigger convulsively, not even attempting to select individual targets, just pumping rounds into the thick mass of writhing creatures surging toward us. At that stage in my career, and at that range, hitting individual Ochos would have been pretty unlikely, anyway. Along with my own fire, I could see a deadly network of tracers zipping down the hillside, converging on the Ochos. The aliens in front stumbled and fell under the withering fire, but they were immediately replaced, and still the wave rolled at us. I heard Arliss open up next to me, and the submachine gun was shockingly loud compared to the more efficient cycling of my electromagnetic rifle. I would have yelled at him in annoyance, but the Ocho horde was covering ground fast, and a warning indicator had just appeared in my heads-up display:

>>>Last 5 Rounds – Reload – Last 5 Rounds – Reload …

That’s all for now, but more to come soon!