Game Over Read Online Free PDF

the cockpit of a small fighter plane—charged directly at the Octo-Guardian’s head, firing at the beast’s raging eyes. He could almost feel the auditorium shake around him as the monster keeled over sideways in space and went crashing down to the Realm’s surface far below.
    Then, as Rick continued watching, his holographic self turned his aircraft toward the Breach: an opening Kurodarhad created between the Realm and RL. Through that opening, Rick could see where Molly and Victor One were huddled together in the woods, a circle of armed men closing in on them, ready to wipe them out. In another moment, Rick knew, his hologram would fly his aircraft straight into the Breach and burst impossibly out of MindWar and into reality in order to pull Molly and V-One from the gunmen’s clutches . . .
    But before that could happen, the three-dimensional picture froze. It just stopped moving completely. A moment later, the lights of the auditorium came up, and there on the stage stood the director of the MindWar Project, Commander Jonathan Mars. Mars was looking directly at Rick, and his eyes were nearly as full of rage as the Octo-Guardian’s had been.
    Mars was a forbidding figure at the best of times. He was in his fifties, with a face that looked like it was carved out of rock then decorated with iron. He had craggy features under silver-gray hair, deep-set humorless eyes under bushy silver-gray eyebrows, and a mouth that seemed to have been chiseled into the space above his chin in a permanent frown.
    â€œI’m not going to ask you what you were thinking,” he said. “Because I already know.” His grumbling voice was quiet, but Rick could hear the fury in it all the same. “You were thinking you would be a hero. You were thinking you would save the day.”
    â€œI was thinking my friends were about to be killed . . .”
    â€œYou were thinking like a child,” Mars said right over him. “Hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake here—millions of lives! The security of your country. The security of weapons systems that could virtually wipe out life on earth if they fell into the wrong hands. And you violated every protocol we have in order to save two people. Your friends!”
    Rick was about to answer, but the words died on his lips. It did sound pretty stupid when Mars put it that way. He supposed he ought to say he was sorry he’d done it. But he wasn’t sorry. Given the same situation, he’d do it again. So there was not much point in saying sorry, was there?
    â€œDo you have any idea the risk you took?” Mars went on, glaring at him from under those impressive eyebrows.
    Rick shrugged. He had flown his Realm craft into the face of a bunch of machine gun–toting thugs, so yes, he was pretty well aware of the risk. “I’ve been back more than a week. Why are you bringing this up now?”
    Mars didn’t answer. He shook his head. He said, “You’re the only MindWarrior we have left. That makes you the only chance we’ve got to stop Kurodar before he strikes full force. If we lose you, we lose everything . . .”
    â€œLook, I know—”
    â€œYou don’t know,” Mars said, cutting him off. “You can’t know because nobody knows. Nobody knows the long-term effects of being immersed in the Realm. That’s bad enough. But the moment you rode that ship through the Breach . . .” Mars fell silent and shook his head.
    â€œWhat?” said Rick. He felt his stomach tighten at Mars’s unfinished sentence. The headaches that were getting so bad . . . the dreams that were getting so real . . . Had flying through the Breach made them worse? Had that somehow amped up the side effects of long-term exposure to the Realm? “The moment I rode my ship through the Breach—what?” he asked again.
    Mars kept shaking his head. “I don’t know. Like I said. No one knows. Kurodar