Cold War Rune: A Virtual Reality novel (Rune Universe Book 2)

by Hugo Huesca

  Same place the CIL got their stealth helicopter and the assault rifles.

  “They have sponsors,” explained Derry. “First, you need to understand the situation you’re in, Dorsett. The CIL killed all those agents just for the chance to get to you. I even believe they had help from inside.”

  All the agents are dead…

  How many had there been? Twenty? Thirty? Men and women who I’d barely looked at twice, gone.

  Only because those insane CIL sicks wanted to reach me.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are they so obsessed with me? God, all those people…”

  Derry’s face was a mask. “Same reason every other terrorist group or organization wants you, kid. You changed the world when you turned on that Signal. You, Dorsett. A random kid suddenly appears in the world’s sights and no one is fully sure why you did it. Some people out there thinks you’re the Antichrist, you know? That’s not even the craziest theory being thrown around.”

  “What does the CIL thinks I am?”

  “No idea. It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “If they get you on their side, their movement is going to get a lot of legitimacy and a lot of attention. That’s what they’re after.”

  “I’ll never help them.”

  “You can help them either by endorsing them or by being executed by them,” Derry said with the cold voice of someone who talks murder for a living. “Both will work.”

  A heavy silence fell over both of us as I processed this information. In a way, it was nothing new. I already knew people wanted to do nasty things to me and my loved ones. That’s why I’d chosen to help the FBI stop some of them.

  I never expected the CIL to be able to fight—and defeat—them so easily.

  They couldn’t get away from something like this, could they? The army had to get involved at some point. Thirty agents…

  “Why am I here?” I asked Derry. That was the question that would make sense of things. “Do you want me for your cause, Derry? What’s it going to be, execution or endorsement?”

  He nudged his seat forward. If I’d wanted to, I could’ve headbutted him at this distance.

  I was more interested in what he had to say.

  “Your help, Dorsett, is what I’m after,” he said. “The CIL is only a symptom of a bigger disease. One I’ve been fighting on my own for a while. The sponsors of the CIL have people inside every States’ agency, even the CIA. We’re compromised.”

  “You’re a fugitive,” I realized. The downtrodden garage, all the dust and the grime.

  “I’m what I need to be to protect my country.”

  I had the sudden suspicion that John Derry might have gone crazy. A lone hobo, working in the shadows, thinking he was opposing some huge government conspiracy. A lethal, highly trained hobo, with access to resources that were enough to take over a small country. That bulletproof car he had in the garage clearly wasn’t purchased in a dealership.

  His eyes, though (at least his good eye), were crystal clear sane.

  Whatever sane meant for someone like John Derry. A person capable of shooting a guy, and then, months later, going out of his way to save the guy’s life and then trying to work with him.

  “I can’t help you,” I told him. “I just can’t trust you. And you need the Army, not an eighteen-year-old—”

  “You’ll have to trust me,” said Derry. “If I could work with anyone else, believe me, I’d do it. But my duty is to swallow my own personal opinion of you, kid, and do what I need to do. The people I’m up against want you, and you aren’t safe with the FBI or anyone else. You will be staying with me, whether you want to or not.”

  My hands were closed into fists. “You can kidnap me, but you can’t make me help you.”

  Derry’s smile was as cold as his eyes. “I don’t have to make you; you’ll want to help me on your own. I know you, Dorsett. I’ve read your file. The new one that Caputi made after the Rune Event.”

  Before I could finish telling him where and how to stuff that file, he got something out of the pocket of his overall. It was a paper image. He showed it to me.

  A white table stood in the middle of a luxurious garden. A yellow parasol covered the sun for the red-headed woman in the middle of the picture, who was sitting comfortably in the shade. She was frozen in place, talking to the Prophet. The kid who had almost kidnapped me. He was dressed in an expensive business suit that did little to hide his battle-scarred face.

  Sitting in the other side of the woman was Irene. She was smiling politely and wearing the same suit I’d seen on TV before.

  I looked at Derry with my mouth agape.

  “Yes,” he pointed out. “There’s a shitstorm brewing and your girlfriend has jumped right in the middle of it.”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to untie you now,” he told me. “Think carefully about what you’ll do next, Dorsett. Right now, I’m your best shot at getting Irene Monferrer out of the mess she’s in. You’ll have to compromise, or risk losing her.”

  He untied me and stood there in front of me with a blank expression, waiting.

  I slowly rose out of the chair. My hands were trembling. I did not attack him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Reunion

  I followed John Derry out of the garage and into a single room. This was his base of operations. There was a sniper rifle reclined against a corner, bloody bandages on a trashcan next to the door, and a bloodied suit of combat armor next to it. There was a dirty mattress lying bare on the floor next to a bunch of microwave-ready food packages.

  It looked like the bachelor pad of the worst freshman ever. Or a surveillance station. It reminded me of Martinez and Doyle’s hole by my apartment.

  In a small table by the only window of the place were a pair of old mindjacks.

  “I’ll explain it all in a bit,” John Derry told me. He walked to the table and swept a bunch of trash out of the chairs. “We’ll be making a visit to your videogame for this. See, it’s much harder to spy on your information there—”

  “I know,” I interrupted him dryly. It was just like he had said. I may be willing to work with him, but that didn’t mean I had to like him. “There’s no way to crack the Signal’s cypher.”

  “No way that we know of. Never think things will stay the same, Dorsett. But you’re right. This is the safest meeting place I can muster.”

  He handed me one of the mindjacks. It was one of the early versions, old enough to be cheap, but not old enough to be retro and thus expensive again.

  “Give me a second to log in to my account,” I told him.

  “No time. The meeting starts now. Unless you’re already close to Veda System, I can’t wait for you to reach it. There’s a 30-day account already paid for logged into the mindjack, use that one.”

  I examined the ‘jack with a frown. I’d never played as any other character. It felt vaguely like cheating on my own avatar.

  I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Derry put on his mindjack and I mirrored him. The hardware felt warm over my head as the pieces inside whirled and cracked.

  I had never used another mindjack other than my Visage Engine, so I’d had no idea how the older models felt.

  It was a sensation hard to define. Like you woke up one day and your skin didn’t fit as well as yesterday. Or your eyes stopped seeing everything in High-Res and were downgraded to a crappier graphics setting.

  Rune Universe looked the same as it always did, the world around me almost indistinguishable from the real one (and most of the differences were improvements), but the sounds and sensations felt fake.

  After logging in, I appeared in a planet-side base. It was a small outpost in the middle of a nowhere-planet in the Veda System. I instinctively went for my visor’s scanner to find out more about the place, but this character was brand new. He was only wearing the gray uniform of the Terran Federation and the starter blaster gun.

  “Took you a while,” said Derry.


  “I had to configure the settings,” I told him.

  His character didn’t look like himself at all. It was an entirely different ethnicity, shorter, scrawnier, and had a patch on his left eye. He was really trying to avoid being recognized.

  “That’s just silly,” he said. “C’mon. The team is waiting for us.”

  “What team?”

  “You didn’t think I was going to wage a single-man war, did you?”

  Derry walked out of the tiny room and deep into the outpost’s interior.

  I could see the planet’s surface out of the window screens—all dust-red and dry-yellow. It looked exactly like I felt.

  Even there, my physical body ached and itched in the places where the gel had been applied. I followed after Derry, feeling awkward in my own skin.

  “By the way, it would be better if you didn’t contact either friends or family while we’re holed up,” he said, with the calm authority of someone used to leading. “Even people with the best intentions can put everyone’s lives at risk without even realizing it.”

  “Sure,” I told him. “Got it. Just tell me what’s going on with my girlfriend already, will you?”

  Mentally, I vowed to contact Walpurgis and Van as soon as I had the chance. While walking behind Derry, I added them to my friend’s list and sent a message:

  I’m Cole. Shit hit the fan. Contact me ASAP.

  Since the character’s communicator was the most basic one, I not only had to wait for them to connect, I had to wait for them to arrive on Earth so the message could reach them.

  We arrived at the place where Derry’s team was waiting for us. It was the command room of the outpost, a place filled with bulky computers and holograms. I a woman and four men, not counting Derry and me. Most of them were new characters wearing the same gray overall as myself, others had on combat armor similar to Derry. Only one was wearing a power-suit.

  “Finally,” said a man dressed in mid-tier combat armor. He was about my height and probably two times my age. He walked with his back so straight you could’ve measured distance with him. “I was hoping the circumstances would’ve kept you from making us wait, Director. This is surely a time to put old habits aside.”

  “I got sidetracked running an errand, Panarin,” said Derry. “I had to fetch one Cole Dorsett from stumbling into the hands of our friend Keles.”

  “Keles has has caused enough problems already. At least we don’t have to worry about a new one,” said Panarin. He was a man used to giving orders, just like Derry. That much I could tell from the way he talked, each word chosen carefully and slowly, because he was sure people were always paying attention to what he said. “Is this Dorsett?”

  He turned to me. The attention of the room shifted in my direction and I immediately felt a tinge of apprehension. It was a dangerous time to be the center of attention.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s me.”

  “Cole? By my beard, they got you, too?” The power-suited guy lowered his helmet and a long brown-red beard unraveled to his waist. I realized that the man had been standing in a chair. He was a short character with a stocky, rough face and a very forced Russian accent.

  “Gabrijel? Beard? What are you doing here?” I asked. This was the last place I’d expected to meet with him.

  “Same thing as you,” he said. “We’ve been summoned for the Council, haven’t we? Shit’s fucked, as the Americans say.”

  I looked at the ex-Director with a frown. “You involved my friends?”

  “They are involved whether you like it or not, Dorsett,” he said without missing a beat. “We’ll be working with an international crew, and my friend Vitaly Panarin will be sharing leadership with me. Asking for the help of Gabrijel Ivanic was a natural decision.”

  I bit my lip and walked towards Beard. “You know that asshole shot at us, right?”

  My friend’s expression was heavy behind his beard. “Yeah. You should hear him out, Cole. Trust me, we have bigger problems.”

  “Very well.” Derry had drifted to the center of the room and just like that had become the center of attention again. Vitaly Panarin stood at his side, regarding the room with a solemn frown.

  Derry played with the holographic controls of a table in front of him and soon the image he had shown me in the real world appeared floating in front of him, scaled and in higher-res.

  “This picture was taken by a spy satellite two days ago, in a mansion south of the suburbs of San Mabrada,” said Derry. “Most of us are already familiar with the first person in the image. Sevin Keles, butcher of Ankara. Presumed dead until two months ago, when he joined forces with the Church of the Intangible Lord and resumed operations in the States. How he managed to avoid detection and entered the country is unknown. Last person is Irene Monferrer, heir of the Monferrer family. Currently working under her father’s directions with the Sleipnir Foundation. Her current involvement with the activities of the CIL are unknown. This brings us to the person tying the two together.

  “Charli Dervaux, former CEO of Odin. Before her disappearance in 2036, she was one of the most influential industry leaders in the States. She managed to survive scandals, constant trials, and the IRS seizure of Odin’s estate. She was spotted in San Mabrada a week ago, same as Keles. Operatives suspect her frozen assets have been restored, at least her remaining ones.”

  When Derry reached the last person in the image, Panarin made a face like someone had smeared something nasty under his nose.

  “This woman embodies all that’s wrong with your world, Derry,” Panarin muttered the words to himself, but loud enough for me to hear.

  Derry ignored him. “Over the last six months, the CIL’s influence over the States has grown exponentially, probably aided by current societal circumstances. Their activities have been concentrated in the city of San Mabrada, where four of the people involved in the Rune Event currently reside. Two of them have already been attacked and another one, the Monferrer girl, is seemingly working with Dervaux.”

  Beard and I exchanged nervous glances while Derry talked. We were thinking the same thing: What game was Irene playing?

  To me, she’d barely mentioned her father or her family, and I had respected that by not investigating any further. She was the daughter of a prominent San Mabrada politician, and that was that.

  And yet here she was, in a picture with Charli Dervaux and the guy who had tried to kidnap and maim me.

  I refused to believe even for a second that she had switched sides. I’d seen her face the wrong end of a gun (that Derry had wielded); she wasn’t the kind to give in to threats.

  Something was wrong. And whatever it was, I was going to get involved.

  “What do they want?” someone behind me asked, one of the generic characters that were created for this meeting. “Besides prancing around San Mabrada, I don’t see the relation between those three.”

  “I haven’t been able to piece together Keles’ motivations,” said Derry. “He’s making some kind of political power play. His involvement with the CIL is circumstantial at best, but they are identifying him as a Prophet and he’s clamoring to capture Cole Dorsett, which he almost achieved today when a FBI raid was compromised.

  “The Monferrer and the Dervaux family had dealings between them in the past,” explained Derry. “Mostly between Charli’s late husband and Irene’s father. We know Irene Monferrer is under government surveillance, but I haven’t been able to access the data.

  “Charli Dervaux herself is… enigmatic. Half of the technological advancement in the last decade came from her different companies. At various points of her career, she has been one of the richest persons in the world, or homeless. This is not the first time she has returned from the ashes. Always with a different objective, that in the end gets her a good deal of influence and fortune—both of which she has no problem tossing to the trash during her next project, over and over again.”

  Panarin interrupted him. “You sound like you admire the bitch, Derry
. Everyone knows about the Dervaux overlord, so please, let me paint a better picture of her accomplishments.”

  Derry’s eyebrow rose a bit. “Go ahead.”

  “Dervaux’s so called ‘progress’ has come at terrible cost, every time,” spat Panarin. “Remember the medicine that allegedly cured pancreatic cancer? Miraculous, they called it. Well, that miracle left a dozen buried villages down in the Congo. Her Xanz company used them as Guinea pigs until they got the genetic markers right. Yes, I do mean ‘buried the villages.’ They hid the mass graves in landfills.”

  “Not even the West has been safe from her blood-soaked fingers,” continued Panarin. “Remember the VR-Brain tragedy? That was her doing, too. She bribed the Safety Board to get her pet project out before the proper security tests were done.”

  The VR-Brain had been one of the early precursors of modern mindjack technology. Unlike the mindjacks we were wearing, the VR-Brain lacked half the security measures that made Deep Dive immersion a safe endeavor. Years ago, hundreds of people had died or ended up in the hospital when there had been a power shortage in some cities. The VR-Brain microwaved their heads.

  If it wasn’t for the huge appeal of Deep Dive, virtual reality would’ve been stopped right there. It was only the love of the gamers that let the broken trust of the public be slowly rebuilt.

  “Everything that Dervaux touches becomes tainted,” Panarin went on, driven by something akin to religious fervor. “And now she has come back from her hiding hole to bleed the veins of humanity in our darkest hour.”

  He looked straight at me and I realized he didn’t think much of the Rune Event. At least he wasn’t pontificating against me.

  “I get it,” I told him. “She’s bad news. But what does she want with the CIL?”

  What does she want with Irene?

  Panarin shrugged. “No idea. If she’s working with them, they must be helping her to achieve her goals. We know what those are. She wants to win an arms race.”

  “What you’re going to hear next is classified. For your ears only,” he looked straight at me for the last part. “Is that clear?”