“Sergeant Maloney, do you have visual?”

“Affirmative, Lieutenant. We have eyes on the bogey. It appears to be . . . a man falling?”

“That’s correct, Sarge,” Martin Prentice said. His skimmer flew slightly ahead of Maloney’s. “It’s some dude wearing a white lab coat. He’s just falling through the air.”

The com went silent for a moment as the four skimmers raced toward the intrusion. Moments ago, the four were on a routine patrol northwest of Online New York in NeuralNet. Then suddenly, sensors indicated an unidentified flying object and they altered course. Now as they neared the intrusion, it appeared the object was not flying at all.

“I’m going to approach it as slow as possible,” Maloney said. “The rest of you fall back.”

She heard a chorus of men saying, “Yes, Sergeant.”

Joel Farmington spoke up.

“Be careful, Sarge. This is around the place Sergeant Coulter bought it.”

Maloney grimaced in her skimmer. She knew this was indeed the area where her sergeant’s body mysteriously disappeared following an explosion in an online firefight with a mysterious bogie.

“Thanks for reminding me, Farmington. That was a disaster.”

The investigation lasted six months, during which time nobody was allowed back online.

“They ever find his body?”

“Shut up, Patel.”

Ernst Patel was the newest specialist on the team.

He has a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, Maloney thought. On the other hand, he never knew Coulter.

Out loud she said, “Cover me, I’m on approach.”

It’s just a falling body, but who knows if it’s some sort of elaborate booby trap or something?

“Speaking of bodies,” Prentice said, “how did one just start falling out here in the middle of nowhere? A teleport gone bad, you think?”

All four skimmers slowed down, the other three more so. Maloney sped away and approached the falling man at an angle, matching his descent rate.

The man noticed her, of course, and for a moment they locked eyes, at a distance of about three meters.

He looked older, short and paunchy. Miraculously, thick round glasses covering his eyes somehow remained on his face, despite the wind and velocity of his fall. A white lab coat flapped in the virtual wind.

Maloney squinted, perplexed.

“Lieutenant Jackson, are you seeing this?”

“I see it, Sergeant. Maintain your proximity.”

The voice came back over the com in a south Alabama drawl. Lt. Harry Jackson remained in meatspace while E-squad patrolled. He would monitor everything from the control booth at Ft. Meade, while their bodies appeared to sleep in the control room.

“Dude’s gonna die if he goes splat on the ground.”

Maloney said, “Shut it, Patel.”

He was not wrong, of course. Thanks to the implants’ immersive powers, if one died in the game, one’s body treated it as trauma in real life. But this was so close to the area they lost Coulter, no one wanted to think about that right now.

Maloney locked eyes with the man falling. His appeared magnified behind the soda pop bottle lenses.

As if reading her thoughts, the man shouted something, lost in the wind.

“What was that? What did he say? Lieutenant, did you get that, sir?”

“We got something, Sergeant. We’re going to have to enhance the audio to make it out, though.”

The man yelled again, his words whipping away in the wind.

“Uh, Sarge, you’re getting close to the ground,” Farmington said. “Might be time to pull up.”

Maloney glanced down and saw the rapidly approaching landscape.

“I wish I could save this guy, and bring him in for questioning.”

Prentice said, “We don’t know where his body is, Sarge. His real body.”

“Whatever. We could question him here if . . . I gotta pull up.”

She pulled back on the stick and her skimmer slowed, letting the strange looking lab coat man fall away. She angled her nose down to get a good look at the remainder of his descent . . . and imminent demise.

Twenty meters above the ground, his body disappeared.

“Where’d he go? What happened?”

The other three skimmers whooshed above, then circled back to slow down and join Maloney’s.

“Anybody got a visual?”

“That’s a negative, Sarge,” Prentice said.

Farmington said, “I got nothing.”

“Lieutenant? Do you see him, sir?”

“I do not. Return to base and unplug for debriefing.”

Minutes later, Maloney opened her eyes in the real world. She sat up on her cot as the other members of E-squad woke up nearby. Patel stretched and yawned while the other two specialists stood up.

Maloney headed straight for the room’s exit. The others followed. They gathered in the debriefing room and took a seat.

“Dude, I was so looking forward to seeing that guy go splat!”

“Shut it, Patel.”

What is he, 18? Honestly, if he wasn’t one of the best tournament players in high school, he wouldn’t even be here right now, Maloney thought.

The door slid open and Lt. Jackson walked in, a tall thin black man.

“We got a clear voice isolated from the wind distortion. You all gotta hear this.”

He touched the implant under his right ear and a holoscreen appeared in the middle of the table, showing the lab coat man falling at terminal velocity.

This time, Maloney and everyone else in the room heard his words clearly.

“Sergeant Coulter is safe! He’s with us!”

The man fell a while longer, then locked eyes with Maloney, off screen.

“Don’t worry about him!”

A few seconds passed . . . and the man disappeared.

Maloney felt stunned.

“What . . . what was that about? Who was that? And where did he go?”

Jackson shrugged and sighed.

“I dunno. But everyone is gonna want to see this. CID, Counterintelligence. Everyone. I’m sure they’re already looking at it, I’ve already sent this up the chain of command.”

Jackson touched his implant again and the hologram disappeared.

“There’s been a number of odd occurrences in various game worlds lately. Maybe y’all have seen the news. Foreign intrusions and such by unknown outside entities have occurred repeatedly. Now, if someone can appear in Continent, anywhere in North American Online Alliance territory, but specifically at the exact same spot where we lost Sergeant Coulter last year, If this fella can appear and deliver a message like that, then leave without a trace . . . Well, I think it’s fair to say all of NeuralNet has been compromised.”

Jackson paused for a moment as a priority call came through on his implant, his eyes focusing inward.

“Yessir. Yessir, I understand. Yessir, will do.”

When he looked back at the soldiers in the room, he said, “NorAm Online has just moved to DEFCON One.”