And I was still safe at home, down in my concrete bunker, unable to do anything but watch my friends die. I felt completely helpless. Like I was a million miles away from Samantha and Og.
But I wasn’t a million miles away, I suddenly realized. In fact, I was only 2.8 miles away.
All of GSS’s combat telebots had already been destroyed, and the handful of home-defense bots guarding my house wouldn’t last ten seconds against the military-grade models Sorrento had unleashed. But I realized that I did still have access to one combat drone that I could take control of to try to save my friends—the one I was currently sitting inside. My mobile tactical immersion vault, which was armed with enough firepower to take out a small army of telebots and drones.
Of course, since I was inside the MoTIV and unable to get out, I was going to have to put myself in the line of fire too. My real self. Just like Samantha had done for Og.
I thought it over for all of five seconds. Then I powered on my MoTIV and linked it to the drone controller station I was already using. It allowed my eyes to see through the two stereoscopic cameras mounted on the front of the MoTIV’s heavily armored hull, which provided me with a view of the interior of my underground concrete bunker.
I activated the elevator and the platform my MoTIV was resting on began to rise toward the surface. But it wasn’t rising nearly fast enough for my liking, and after a few seconds I grew impatient and activated my jump jets. This caused the MoTIV to rocket up the length of the elevator shaft, and out of the launch-bay doors at the top, which opened just in the nick of time. Then I hit the jump jets again to lessen the force of my impact, which was still considerable. When the MoTIV hit the ground, I piloted it forward at full speed and it began to run, bounding down Babbitt Road, taking great leaping strides on its spidery robotic legs. Each step I took left an enormous crater in the asphalt behind me as I accelerated the MoTIV to its top speed.
It took me less than a minute to reach the ambulance. It was still lying on its side in the middle of the road, and there were telebots swarming all over it like insects. They appeared to be attempting to dismantle its armor plating so they could get inside and reach the occupants. And it looked like they were only a few seconds away from success.
As soon as I got within firing range, I unloaded on Sorrento’s telebots with armor-piercing machine-gun fire from the guns mounted on my MoTIV’s shoulders, cutting them to shreds. Once I had cleared all of the telebots off the ambulance, I fired a sortie of heat-seeking missiles at the aerial drones overhead and managed to destroy all of them too.
Then I used the MoTIV’s massive metal arms to pick up the ambulance, with Miles, Samantha, and Og still inside it. I carried it all the way back to my house.
Just as we reached it, more of Sorrento’s killer aerial drones began to descend from the sky, and they opened fire on us once again as I carried the ambulance back down into my bunker and closed its massive armored doors, sealing all of us safely inside.
I tried to call Miles, but he didn’t respond, so I called Samantha and her face appeared on my HUD a second later. She had a big bloody gash on her forehead, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Miles is dead, Wade,” she said. “All shot to pieces, protecting us.”
“What about Og?”
She tilted the camera down so that I could see both of them. Og was strapped into an auto-medic bed—one of two built into the back of the ambulance. Miles’s dead body lay in the other one.
“He’s still alive,” she said. Her cheeks were streaming with tears. “But he’s still bleeding internally, and he keeps fading in and out.”
She was stroking Og’s wild gray hair back away from his forehead while she watched the auto-doc’s robotic hands tend to his gunshot wound and the lacerations he’d suffered during their escape. Luckily Samantha managed to get him safely strapped into the stretcher before the ambulance was hit by that drone missile, so he wasn’t further injured when it was knocked on its side. The gash on Samantha’s forehead indicated that she hadn’t been as lucky.
“If Og regains consciousness, you have to convince him to log back in to the OASIS,” I said. “Tell him that we’ve already collected all seven shards. And tell him we’re trying to retrieve the Dorkslayer sword too. But we need Og to log back in to the OASIS, since he’s the only one who can wield it.”
“I’ll tell him,” Samantha replied. “If he wakes back up. What are you going to do?”