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

by Hugo Huesca

  “I know what you meant. I’m a sniper, usually.”

  “Uh, another one. I’ve a friend who’ll love to exchange war stories with you. Anything else?” I could see why Derry had picked her, though. In a battle, an end-game sniper was worth her weight in gold, which was one of the main reasons most sensible players going against one simply called in an airstrike at their location and moved on.

  “Well, I’m a min-maxer. I’m a very good sniper,” she said proudly. A min-maxer was someone who was very good at one thing and crappy at everything else. Very useful if you could control a situation in a way that the “everything else” part never made an appearance. Very easy to be killed otherwise.

  “That’s fantastic,” I told her. “Can you snipe every android in the Command Center by throwing our helmets at them?”

  “No need to be a dick about it,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, I got it now. How about you snipe the smugglers’ coordinates out of Jarred’s pockets. Or—”

  “Your poor girlfriend,” she muttered under her breath.

  I shrugged and went back to business. If I hurried, we could be done here before Derry managed to get access to the Command Center, and the mere idea was making my chest feel all warm and tingly.

  Luckily for us, I was a captain. My main skill was Persuasion and a healthy string of other non-combat related abilities. Getting Jarred was a matter of using my team (in this case, Mai and I) in the most efficient way possible.

  Irene would save us so much time in this situation, I thought.

  “The way I see it, we have two options,” I told Mai after thinking for a bit. “Either we get inside that stronghold and interrogate Jarred there, or we catch him while he’s outside and move him somewhere we control.”

  “I like the second one,” she said while a patrol of half a dozen androids passed next to us. Their lifeless eyes flickered to us for a brief second and then returned to the front. They gave us no further notice, but I was sure that could change in a second if they got wind of our intentions. “But the Quest has a time limit of a day, and we still have to deal with the smugglers.”

  “You see the bushes over there?” I asked, pointing at the park down below. “Go there, and hide when no one is looking.”

  “Uh…”

  “You’re good at hiding, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am. I’ve a Sneak of 92… Uh. 101, actually…”

  As a Captain, my crew got a 10% bonus to their two main class skills if we were working as a team. In other kind of games, this was called “playing a Bard,” but I appreciated the extra gravitas that came with the Captain title.

  “And that’s just one of many benefits of playing with Team Cole, Mai,” I told her with my best poker face. “Now be a good minion and go hide in the bushes.”

  She shrugged. “I swear to God all Captains are always the same. When your mouth cashes a check your blaster can’t afford, you’ll come running to me to get you out of trouble.”

  “Don’t you love teamwork? Everyone does their part.”

  She turned away before I could see her laugh. A couple NPC diplomats watched her as she pretended to casually walk like she hadn’t just agreed to kidnap a guy.

  Alright, now it’s time to step two to move to of my plan.

  Step two was to figure out what step three was going to be. I went to the entrance to the residential zone, where a static android patrol was installed among a bunch of flying drones. I wasn’t near them when a pair of laser pointers began scanning me.

  “Nothing to see here, move along,” I told the invisible cyberbrain behind the lasers. I was in a good standing with the Terran Federation, so the lasers ignored me soon enough. The problem was, I’d rather keep the good standing if that was possible, and mauling a respected NPC inside the Command Center wasn’t the best way of doing so.

  So, think outside the box, Cole. What would your crew do in your situation?

  Walpurgis would shoot someone—that’s kind of her shtick. Beard would either blow something up or sabotage the safety measures. Rylena would come up with a complicated plan that would require for the rest of us to synchronize our watches at some point.

  Thing is, my friends had optimized character builds for their favored approaches. I had a lot of Persuasion, a decent amount of Sneak, and an average spread of points in everything combat-related.

  My objective was clear. Get Jarred out of the safe zone and into mauling zone, where Mai was already waiting. I glanced down the rails at the park and even though I knew where to look for her, I realized the girl (the woman? There was no possible way to know here) was practically invisible with her Sneak at 101. She could practically crouch down in front of me and I’d have no idea where she went.

  Not unsettling at all.

  Still, I knew someone with a creepily high amount of skill points in something machine-related. In fact, he was waiting for me on the Teddy. I put on my power-helmet and turned on the communications channel.

  “Hey, Francis, are you there?”

  “Great to hear from you, Master Cole! I was getting bored in here. Is there anything you need?”

  “Yes, actually.” I sent him the coordinates of Jarred. “I’m trying to kidnap this guy, but I need to get him out of his home and away from security first.”

  Francis was the kind of AI that took kidnap announcements in stride. “I can’t recommend a direct course of action, Master Cole. Security AI are notoriously resistant against my charms, and even if I disabled them, the androids would still fry you. In fact, there would need to be at least four Cole Dorsetts working together to have a decent chance of out-fighting the patrols. One Walpurgis would do the trick, too, if you had one. Or one Beard, if his Luck skill actually worked for once.”

  I decided to ignore the implication with as much dignity as befit a Captain. “Fuck you, dude. I’m not going in guns blazing, anyway. People these days, I swear.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “Can you get access to his home security?”

  “What do you think I am, some sort of ultra-powerful NPC that can bend the minds of other AI with minimal effort on his part? Well, let me tell you—oh, never mind. I’m already in! I was only poking at their system to see what’s up, and their barriers crumbled. Guess I don’t know my own strength!”

  “And you totally aren’t showing off,” I told him. Then I added: “Good work, buddy, I knew I could count on you. Now, add a filter to my voice —make it sound like a drone’s, then patch me in where Jarred can hear me.”

  “Done! Next thing you say is going to be heard in Jarred’s home. I’ll admit I want to see where you’re going with this.”

  I aimed to apply my Persuasion Skill by boisterously lying my ass off until the Quest was completed.

  The way the Skill worked, as far as I knew, was something akin to how the real world stuff worked. A high Persuasion may let you speak of a lie like it was the absolute truth, but no more. An NPC would never believe that the sky was green, no matter if you told him so with a Persuasion of 300.

  But get him black-out drunk and put him in a dark room with no windows that smells funny, buy some weird clothes from a thrift web-site, and tell him when he wakes up that you flew him in a spaceship to a planet with a green sky—chances are he’ll believe it… if you have high enough Persuasion.

  “This is an automated message,” I began. Francis did a by-the-second playback into my helmet, letting me clearly hear how my own voice was filtered into the perfect likeness of a drone’s—or in this matter, Jarred’s private security systems. “At approximately 3.4 picoseconds ago, the security system detected and stopped an intrusion.”

  I paused. I was talking to open air with no visual feedback, so it was hard to calibrate my act. On the other hand, the added awkwardness would help sell my con.

  “What the fuck?” came Jarred’s answer. At least, it had to be Jarred. Man’s voice, nondescript, about fifty years old.

  St
ill, I paused. My heart began to beat a bit faster, but I forced myself to remain calm. It would do no good to stutter in the middle of a sentence.

  “What do you mean an intrusion?” said the voice of Jarred. “I pay a shit ton of databytes to your company to avoid this kind of shit!”

  “Request for clarification accepted,” I said in a monotone. “The intrusion was stopped and nullified after just a second of exposure. Data breach is estimated to be minimal, less than one percent. The identity of the assailant has been confirmed.”

  I stopped to think what I was going to say next. Jarred took the silence as a quirk of the system:

  “God-fucking-dammit, tell me their name! You have any idea how valuable my information is? Do you?”

  “Confirmed: I have an idea about the value of your information. The assailant’s address comes from a Federation’s source. Specifically, Internal Affairs.”

  I had done several quests for the Federation before, and I had learned enough about their internal workings to know that Internal Affairs was a bit like the modern FBI mixed with the IRS. It was bad news to hear they had their sights on you, and hacking into your information was in-character for them.

  “Fuck my life,” muttered Jarred. “Fuck. My. Life! One percent breach, you said? Oh no, oh no…”

  I heard the distinct sound of something glass and expensive being shattered against a wall.

  “Internal Affairs is on my ass! I knew it! Those damn Taren idiots can’t keep their mouth shut—”

  He basically cursed a lot after that. While he did so, I breathed with relief and hurried to seal the deal:

  “Communication request. One John Doe is waiting on a private line. Do you accept?”

  “John Doe? This can’t be happening right now, I told them never to call me at home—”

  I opened a private channel with Francis and quickly told him to shut down the drone filter, but add a grainy quality to my voice, like the call had a bad signal. Not one second later, Jarred confirmed the chat request.

  “Oh man!” I began. “You’ll never believe what just happened, man…”

  “Zim? Is that you? You little—”

  In situations like this, it was better to model your character as someone you know from real life. It’ll help sell the story better.

  So, I modeled Zim the smuggler off of Ghoul the Feral, a gang member from my past in Lower Cañitas District.

  “Man, stop!” I told him. “You’re wasting valuable time! What the fuck you think I’m doing over here, taking a bath? I had to fly all the way over there to warn you we have a leak!”

  Jarred’s voice froze. “You flew here? You mean you’re in Argus? You were told specifically never to come here!”

  I knew that tone of voice. Not only he wasn’t buying my shit, he was about to call shenanigans. I couldn’t afford to let him call shenanigans.

  If someone you’re lying to is about to put two and two together, a last resort option is to claim something is on fire. Give them something else to think about.

  “Man! You think I wanted to come here? I’m risking my life just by—shit, they’re here!” I blew air into the helmet’s speaker and Francis helpfully added real interference to my shitty sound effect. I gestured a thumbs up to the air (he’d see it on my visor’s feed). An android on patrol saw me and gave me a thumbs-up back.

  “Zim! What do you mean—!”

  “No time to talk! Listen, I left you a package by the park of the Command Center. I bribed some clerk to hold it for you. Get that package, man, or you’re all going to jail! Worse, man, you’ll all hang!”

  “A package? Are you insane? Zim, what’s going on? What’s going on, Zim! You could’ve transferred the package using translight—!”

  “Can’t talk anymore, man! I’ll hold them as long as I can! Oh, God, the horrible pain! The pain! Aghh—”

  Once more, Francis added some sound effects to my crappy acting. Blaster fire and plasma exploding, from what I managed to understand. Then I cut the feed, but kept audio open on Jarred’s end.

  I heard him curse a lot, once more, but his voice was also tinted with fear.

  Good. Fear is good. Fear won’t let you think straight. I should know, I’d been scared out of my wits a lot lately.

  “Those idiots!” he exclaimed once more. “What was he thinking coming back here?”

  Silence again. I almost could tap into his head. I had a bit of experience thinking like a criminal.

  He would be thinking something like:

  What if the people that got Zim are now coming after me?

  And then, something like:

  The package is with a clerk? Those asses work with the Federation. If they dare take a peek inside…

  Not a second later, I heard the distinct sound of an electric door opening and closing again. Then, Francis said:

  “Target has left the building. Good job, Master Cole! You may have a future in Hollywood after all.”

  “I certainly have the good looks for it,” I told him. “But I think it was mostly just the Persuasion points.”

  I walked to the wall next to the residential zone and waited. Sure enough, two minutes later Jarred walked out, covered in sweat. He was wearing gray overalls not unlike the ones new players wore when they first logged in, but his clothes were several times more expensive. Kind of like those real world jeans that cost a grand, but are torn to pieces to let a rich kid play at being the tough boy.

  What I’m saying here is, I found it hard to sympathize with the guy I was about to kidnap. It made it a bit easier to pretend I was somehow the good guy, even when I was acting for my own benefit.

  “Here he goes,” Francis pointed out through my helmet while Jarred walked nervously into the park, looking everywhere with the trembling fashion of a rabbit trying to guess where the wolves are going to jump at him.

  He got near the spot where Mai was supposed to be lurking—still no movement in that area. For all I knew, she may have gone to future-Starbucks for a coffee while I busted my ass.

  Jarred took a minute to closely examine the spot by the center of the park, a secluded spot without any NPCs other than himself. The bushes trembled slightly. It could’ve been the breeze.

  “And there she goes,” commented Francis. “Dear lord, that’s a lot of damage even for a non-lethal smack.”

  “I didn’t know you could do non-lethal damage with the back of a helmet,” I told him. “Or that a helmet could do sneak attacks.”

  “Get enough points into the skill and you can pretty much ambush and crit a surveillance drone by yelling mean words at him,” said Francis. Down below, Mai was leaning over the twitching body of Jarred. She hit him with the helmet again until the twitching stopped. “Seriously, it’s a very broken mechanic. It should have been nerfed a year ago. Makes snipers really bothersome to play against.”

  Mai slowly carried her victim to the bushes and I decided it was as good a time as any to join her. The coast was clear. All players in the Command Center were questing in the Administrative Zone, and the NPCs didn’t waste time with the park, either, when they had jobs to do.

  “This isn’t really the kind of game that goes for balance between all player classes,” I told my friend while I walked nonchalantly towards the bushes. “Beard is a Merchant, for god-sake, his class couldn’t stand against any Warrior archetype.”

  “Well, he makes enough databytes to pay for his minigun ammo, and for the missiles of his launchers,” Francis argued. “So he isn’t the best example. What about a Captain? He’s a glorified Bard, let me tell you, going around with a blaster pistol and his wits. Lowest survival rate of them all, unless you put him in a dreadnought.”

  “We get all the pretty ladies, though.”

  “You’re mistaking Picard with Kirk, Master.”

  I shrugged, which earned me a couple of stares from distant NPCs. “It’s a bit better than being a megalomaniac AI, anyway.”

  “Nothing is better than being a megalomaniac A
I! At least, when you have the brains to back it up. But you’re missing my point,” he said with a twinge of reproach. “All I’m saying is, how about upgrading the Teddy to a super-carrier? All the cool kids have one. You’ll live longer and I bet Master Rylena would dig it.”

  “Man, I’m not even close to the amount of zeroes I’d need in my account.” A super-carrier was a weapons-light variable of the dreadnought model, a heavy-class ship designed for Alliance warfare. The PDF fielded three, for example, and it was the biggest Alliance around. “And you’d need to feed it and maintain its systems all day long. I’m not sure you’re up to that kind of responsibility.”

  “But I want it!”

  The discussion (if it could be called that) came to an end when I reached the bench where Mai was waiting for me with a smug expression on her face. She was whistling a happy tune.

  “You saw how hard I combo’ed him?” she told me. “I think I broke a personal record!”

  “I’m not sure how you kept him alive,” I told her. “You did more damage with that bash than I do on a headshot with my blaster.”

  “That’s non-lethal for you,” she said. She nodded towards the bushes. “Now, we have a barely-alive NPC hidden in the foliage. What’s the next step of your master plan, Cap?”

  “Next step is, I spew some bullshit at the customs drone until they let us through with our drunk friend,” I told her. “Now, help me shoulder him.”

  “You know, if the fate of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance and I knew you guys weren’t being brutally blackmailed, I’d actually be having fun.”

  “Wait until we meet up with Derry,” I told her as we carried the dead-weight of Jarred’s unconscious frame. She passed his left arm over her shoulders and I did the same with his left. “I bet the fun is going to end soon enough.”

  Her smile faded. “Yeah, he kinda does that to people, doesn’t he?”

  A flash-like memory of Derry standing in front of me, holding a gun—then pulling the trigger—ebbed through my brain and gave me shivers. He was still only a few feet away from me in the real world. The guy who had almost killed half the people I loved.