The fire was small. A few broken pallets burned in a shallow pit, casting long, flickering shadows on the sand.
The core team sat on the hood of the luxury rover. The engine block was still warm, radiating heat into the freezing desert night.
Marcus sat in the center. He had wiped the mud from his face, but the exhaustion was etched deep into his skin.
To his right sat Marcia. She was cleaning her shotgun, oiling the mechanism with a rag. She winced every time she moved her left arm.
"Let me see it," Marcus said.
"It's fine," Marcia muttered.
"It's a burn," Marcus said. "From the plasma discharge."
He grabbed a med-kit from the rover's glove box. He unlatched her armor plate.
The skin underneath was angry red, blistered.
Marcia hissed as he applied the gel.
"Stings," she said.
"Better than infection," Marcus said. He wrapped it quickly. "You took a hit for me."
"I took a hit for the mission," she corrected, but her eyes softened. "Don't get used to it."
On his left, Lucilla was jacked into the rover's console. The dashboard screens illuminated her face with a blue glow. She looked like a ghost in the machine.
Galen sat on the roof, eating a protein bar he had looted from the rover's stash.
Narcissus stood guard by the fire. He didn't sit. He didn't sleep. He just watched the dark, his gold eyes scanning for threats.
"Status on Vane?" Marcus asked.
Lucilla didn't look up. Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard.
"He's alive," she said. "Digitally."
"Confirm it," Marcia said. "I saw him fall."
"I intercepted a burst transmission," Lucilla said. "Encrypted. Board frequency. It originated from the Icarus 0.5 seconds before impact."
She projected a waveform onto the windshield.
"It's a consciousness upload," she explained. "He beamed his mind back to Station Olympus. He has a clone bank up there. He woke up in a new body about ten minutes ago."
"So we killed his suit," Galen said, chewing. "Great."
"We killed his ego," Marcus said. "He lost his ship. He lost his Drill. And he lost to us. To 'beta testers'."
"He's going to be pissed," Marcia said.
[ALERT: INCOMING DATA PACKET.]
JARVIS spoke in Marcus's mind. The gold text overlayed the fire.
[SOURCE: GLOBAL BOARD NETWORK.]
[DECRYPTION COMPLETE.]
[MEMO: PROTOCOL ZERO AUTHORIZED.]
"Lucilla," Marcus said. "Check the global threat level."
Lucilla tapped a key.
The screen turned red.
"Protocol Zero," she whispered.
"What does that mean?" Galen asked.
"It means total asset liquidation," Lucilla said, her voice trembling. "It means he's done playing the Game. No more streaming. No more rules. He's authorizing the use of kinetic bombardment. Rods from God."
"He's going to drop tungsten rods on us?" Marcia asked.
"He's going to scour the surface," Lucilla said. "He wants to erase the evidence of his failure."
Silence fell over the group. The fire crackled.
"We can't fight an orbital bombardment," Galen said quietly. "We're in a desert. We're targets."
"We need a bunker," Marcus said. "A deep one."
"Antioch was deep," Marcia said. "Look what happened to it."
"Not deep enough," Marcus said. "We need something shielded. Something the Board built."
He looked at Lucilla.
"Show them the map."
Lucilla pulled up the navigation log from Vane's rover.
A holographic globe appeared above the dashboard.
A single red dot pulsed in Italy.
[PROJECT: OLYMPUS GROUND ZERO]
"Rome," Marcia said. "Why Rome?"
"It's not just nostalgia," Lucilla said. "The Vatican Vaults. The Board chose Rome as their primary server farm on Earth. It's built on miles of lead-lined catacombs. Geologically stable. Shielded against radiation and orbital strikes."
"It's where the game is hosted," Marcus realized. "The central server."
"Exactly," Lucilla said. "If we take the Vatican... we control the network."
"We can turn off the Sentinels," Galen said, eyes widening.
"We can lock Vane out of the planetary grid," Lucilla added. "We can blind him."
"We can win," Marcus said.
He stood up. He walked to the edge of the firelight.
"It's two thousand miles," Marcia said. "Across enemy territory. The Balkans are a wasteland. The Alps are infested with Stalkers."
"We have a rover," Marcus said, patting the hood. "And we have ten trucks."
"We need fuel," Marcia said. "We need food."
"We take it," Marcus said. "We are the invasion force now."
Dawn broke.
The sun rose over the dunes, painting the sand in shades of blood and gold.
The camp was already awake.
The refugees—the Legion—were packing the trucks. They moved with a new discipline. They weren't scrambling like terrified civilians anymore. They were loading crates like soldiers.
Marcus climbed onto the roof of the rover.
He looked out at them. Two hundred faces. Dirty, hungry, scarred.
But their eyes were bright.
"Listen to me!" Marcus shouted.
They stopped. Silence rippled through the wadi.
"Yesterday, we were rats hiding in a hole," Marcus said. "We were waiting to die."
He pointed to the East, where the smoke of Antioch still stained the sky.
"We burned the hole. We burned the trap."
He turned West. Toward the endless desert.
"The Board thinks we are dead. They think we are data to be deleted."
He drew his Vibro-Gladius. He ignited it. The blade hummed, glowing white in the morning light.
"We are not data!" Marcus roared. "We are flesh! We are iron! We are Rome!"
"ROMA!" Decimus shouted, slamming his spear against the side of a truck.
"ROMA!" the crowd answered.
"We are not running away," Marcus said. "We are marching. We are going to the heart of their empire. We are going to the Vatican."
He pointed his sword at the horizon.
"We are going to turn off their lights. We are going to take back our world."
"Are you with me?"
The roar was deafening. It shook the sand from the trucks.
"THEN MOUNT UP!"
The engines roared to life. Diesel smoke filled the air.
Marcus jumped down. He climbed into the passenger seat of the rover.
Marcia was behind the wheel. She put on a pair of scavenged sunglasses.
"You give a good speech," she said.
"I practiced in the mirror," Marcus said.
"Liar."
She shifted into gear.
The convoy began to move.
The luxury rover took the lead, its electric engines silent and deadly. Behind it, the ten heavy trucks rumbled, filled with the last free army on Earth.
Narcissus sat on the roof of the lead truck, his golden eyes scanning the horizon.
[DESTINATION SET: ROME.]
[DISTANCE: 2,140 MILES.]
[ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL: UNKNOWN.]
[THREAT LEVEL: APOCALYPTIC.]
JARVIS flashed a new icon in Marcus's mind. A skull and crossbones.
[LET'S GET DANGEROUS.]
Marcus smiled. He lowered his helmet visor.
"Drive," he said.
The convoy sped out of the wadi, kicking up a trail of red dust that looked like a scar on the face of the desert.
The Tutorial was over.
The Conquest had begun.