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

by Hugo Huesca

  We’d have to sleep, eventually. But the idea of closing my eyes around this man was out of the question, even if I’d no rational reason not to trust him (right now).

  How did the fable of the scorpion and the frog go?

  “Found them! Finally,” said Francis. “Those guys are holed up a parsec too close to a quasar. It threw my scans all over the place.”

  “Is it safe?” asked Derry.

  “Sure,” my AI explained. “By ‘close’ to a quasar I mean thousands of light-years away. Not even close. I think my Cartography skill will go up at least six levels after this. Phew!”

  True to his word, the hideout of the smugglers appeared on the main screen. Everyone huddled together to see what we were facing.

  The smugglers’ base was located in the asteroid belt of a gas giant slightly smaller than Jupiter. The gargantuan storms of the planet made it even harder for them to be detected. Once again, Rylena’s insane Battlemind skills may have bypassed it without any problems, but without her we needed surveillance equipment more potent than anything on the Teddy to take a better look.

  Still, what we saw was nasty. Metal and plasteel structures were growing out of more than a dozen asteroids like the worst case of galactic acne, all of them surrounded by industrial-grade forcefields. There were at least three starfighters—like the Teddy—orbiting around the asteroid belt, and probably a dozen or more fighters docked at their bases. Finally, a constant stream of stealth freighters like Beard’s.

  “Nothing we can’t take,” said Mai. “Those structures are building-sized, so there can’t be more than a hundred people in the whole ring. The starfighters are cobbled-together wackjobs, nothing close to this one’s stats.”

  “It would be too close for comfort,” I said. “These are only what we can see, they must have anti-ship defenses all over their bases.”

  Rylena had taught about Rune’s tactics and strategies. The reason the smuggler’s base was spread apart instead of focused in a single fortress was to avoid people using remote-controlled fighters to do a “suicide” run and disable the entire defenses with a single, lucky strafe.

  If those NPCs were smart enough to spread out their defenses, they were smart enough to keep a few tricks up their sleeve in case of an attack.

  “I agree,” said Walpurgis. “We strike directly and we get blown up. I bet you could fit a thousand mines in that asteroid belt. Our sensors wouldn’t see them until we were in their faces.”

  Using mines in space was like trying to catch a shark by punching the sea and hoping to get lucky. Simply too big. Unless, of course, you could choose to face your enemy in a controlled environment, such as an asteroid field where you set up your base.

  “We don’t have the whole night for anything complex,” Mai said. She pointed at her own Quest prompt, where a little timer indicated we only had four hours of real time left to finish the Quest. “Whatever we do, it needs to be simple enough to do fast.”

  What do we have? All the information that Jarred gave us. We had the Teddy. Mai had a fighter ship stashed somewhere in Federation space, and Beard had a freighter…

  “I have a plan,” I said. “It relies on Jarred’s information being true, and we’ll need to call Beard.”

  “Panarin and Gabrijel? Their own investigation was a dead end,” Derry said. “They’ll come. What else do you need?”

  “I’ll call Beard directly and coordinate with him,” I told the ex-Director. “No offense, but time is important here and we have translight messages.”

  “Translight—?” Derry realized he didn’t care at the same instant the words left his mouth. He shrugged. “Fine, do whatever you have to do. I suppose I’m not going to be very useful for this, so I’ll leave it in your hands. Call me if you need anything.”

  And then he stood there, unblinking. One second later, he logged out.

  “I didn’t imagine him for the kind of guy that slithers away from a meeting,” said Walpurgis.

  “He has other things to do,” Mai said.

  In the real world, Derry set his mindjack on the table and went towards the sniper rifle that lay in the corner.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him, with mild apprehension.

  “Those drones,” he lifted the rifle and prepped it with quick, expert hands, “that the CIL employs to look for you. I have to make sure their search patterns aren’t getting close to this location. If they come anywhere nearby, it’s best if we run away. Don’t worry, Dorsett, it’s just a routine inspection.”

  “I’m not worried,” I lied automatically. The image of the CIL swarming the tiny hideout made me shiver. The memory of the shootout was still too fresh in my memory, and I suspected it wouldn’t just fade away anytime soon. “Try not to fall off of a roof.”

  Damn, now you sound like a tween.

  Derry said nothing, and a second later was out of my sight and into the garage where he stashed his car-drone. I didn’t even hear him leave.

  Back to Rune, then. Even with his limp, Derry would be more effective at the surveillance stuff than I would.

  “We can handle things on our own,” I told Mai and Walpurgis.

  Walpurgis froze for a second in the way players did when paying attention to something in the real-world. “You better check this out first, Cole. Your sister just arrived.”

  “Have her log-in!” I said while immediately heading up for the med-bay, a tiny room next to the weaponry storage. “Francis, can you set up a translight hot spot?”

  “Sure, but I’m not paying for it,” Francis said. Translight was expensive, and even more so if one taxed a ship’s systems for it. Expensive for new players, I mean. 4000 databytes was a almost a trivial amount at our stage in the game.

  Soon enough, I saw my social window announce Van’s connection:

  Cole Picard

  -Captain-

  Inventory

  Social

  Quests

  Map

  Options

  Stats

  Spark Bandit (Online)

  Rylena (Offline)

  Walpurgis (Online)

  Beard (Online)

  74,670 databytes

  A second later, the translight connection was established and we could talk normally over a video-window.

  She looked worried, and even with Rune’s avatar transformation, I just knew she hadn’t slept at all. “Jesus, Cole, I thought you were dead!”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but she wasn’t done yet.

  “What are you doing fucking logged to Rune? Do you have any idea how worried we were about you… Mom cried for hours! You didn’t call, your phone went dead… And then Walpurgis told us to run out of the safe house, and that something went wrong with the raid! And you’re here fucking playing like nothing happened—”

  Yeah, I better interrupt right about about now.

  “Wait!” I told her while her worry visibly shifted into unbridled fury. “I can explain! Not what it looks like, Van!”

  To her merit, she paused to let me explain. “Explain.”

  “Well—” How to even begin? “I’m kind of kidnapped right now.”

  Yeah, bad beginning.

  “What the fuck—!”

  She said a couple more words after that. Thing about Van is, she could curse out a sailor after said sailor smashed his toe against a leg of a table. Of course, never around her streaming fans. Or Mom. To most people, I was the foul-mouthed criminal of the family, which paled in comparison to the horrible, horrible truth.

  “I’m explaining! I’m explaining!” So I told her about how these last days went on my end. The FBI raid gone wrong. Keles (I left out the part where a lot of people shot at me). John Derry. The alien schematics. Even my doubts about Rune’s mind. I spoke fast and missed a lot of fine details that we could cover later. We needed to catch up, and I was running on borrowed time.

  When I was done, I felt like I was a thousand years old and had never slept a single day. The day was catching up
to me. All the little pains that I’d been able to ignore while playing Rune felt all too real again. My leg, my scratch-covered arms. It was like reliving it all over again.

  And my day still wasn’t done.

  I briefly glanced at my hands in the real world, on a hunch, and realized my fingers had started trembling without me noticing it. Was that how things were going to be from now on?

  “Shit,” Van said when I finished my story. Her expression had shifted from rage to worry again, then to fear, then to confusion. “This is a goddamn mess.”

  “You’re telling me,” I told her.

  “Any chance you can get away from this Derry asshole? Escape to the police. Or, maybe you can tell Harrison where you are!”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that easy. Derry is the last of my concerns—damn, I never thought I’d say that. The Church of the Intangible Lord is searching for me while we speak; they’re working with this rich lady that must be playing at world domination for what it looks like. And they have Irene with them.”

  “What? They kidnapped her?”

  “I don’t think so. At least, it doesn’t appear that way from the outside. I think she’s being blackmailed.”

  Her dad’s a politician, right? Perhaps they have dirt on the man, and she’s trying to stop him from going to jail.

  “Damn. Oh, that’s why you’re not going to leave…” Van whispered this to herself, but looked up and met my gaze: “Cole, Irene is not a damsel in distress, she’ll be okay on her own.”

  “I don’t think a Terminator would be safe in the spot she’s in,” I told her. “These people are dangerous, Van.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m worried about, dude. You have to get the police involved… You’re in way over your head, and blind luck can only carry you so far…”

  “I know that!” I was so, so tired… “But I can’t even go to the police, sis.” I hadn’t told her what Walpurgis had found in the list of Caputi’s informant, so I opened it in front of the window and showed it to her:

  “This Dervaux woman has people everywhere. This is how Keles knew where to find me, Martinez tipped him off! I don’t even know why she didn’t turn us in from the safe house, it makes no sense! And yet, here we are.”

  My sister had her hands holding the sides of her head. She said softly to herself. “Martinez? Fuck. I thought she was okay.”

  “So did I.”

  For a moment, neither of us said anything. What could we say? She was right. This had gone way over our heads. We weren’t soldiers. It was a miracle that everyone survived last year.

  The world is going down the gutter and carrying us along with it.

  I clenched my hands into fists. It wouldn’t do me any good to feel sorry for myself. I had to keep it together, and come up with a plan.

  What do I want? For my family and loved ones to come out of this one alive.

  “Listen, sis. I’m not going to mess with Dervaux and Keles, so far as I can help it. I’ll do whatever I can to keep them off our backs, and to get Irene out of there. Then we’re all going back into hiding. How does it sound?”

  “Like a bunch of words you say before going out and getting yourself killed.”

  I mean, yeah, maybe. But the other option, going head to toe against Keles and Dervaux, would get me killed faster.

  “I won’t take any risk that I don’t have to,” I told her. “Stay hidden, don’t let yourself be seen. Same with Mom. Tell her I’m fine…”

  Speaking of which…

  “Where is she, by the way?”

  “She and Harrison scoured the city looking for you. She flipped when the FBI denied knowing anything about a raid on the CIL… Shit, knowing her, she probably got herself arrested.”

  She’s safer with Officer Harrison than with me, I told myself in a feeble attempt to manage the ball of fear knotting in my stomach.

  Even if she had gotten arrested, jail perhaps may be the safest place for her right now. Outside the reach of the CIL… I hope. Thinking like this made me feel like the biggest piece of trash on the planet; it was the kind of cold-blooded shit that someone like Derry would think.

  “Can you keep an eye on her?” I asked Van. “See if she’s safe? I’ll try to finish this, sis.”

  “Finish this? You think they’ll leave us alone if you take their prize away? They’ll get even angrier!”

  “I’ll deal with that later.” I was truly overwhelmed. Stefania Caputi was already hot on the heels of the CIL. She knew about the infiltration. She wanted the schematics that Dervaux and Keles were unlocking.

  Perhaps we could help each other out… But it was thinking so far ahead in time that it seemed foolish. First step was surviving.

  “Keep an eye on Mom,” I told my sister. “And be safe. Try not to leave Walpurgis’ house, alright?”

  “I’ll ask your friend Roscoe to see what he can do. He has some experience getting people out of jail after all.” She finally gave up. “Be safe, Cole. Don’t you dare die, or I’ll go to whatever dark place keeps your soul and I’ll kill you again.”

  “Uh. Thanks, I think?”

  She nodded somberly. I realized this could be the last time I ever saw her. The knot of fear in my stomach was painful now. And yet, if I told her I loved her and Mom… Well, she’d knew I wasn’t really thinking I had the best of odds, right? It would sound like I was saying my goodbyes.

  I couldn’t do it. “Take care, sis.”

  “Take care, bro.”

  I blinked furiously a couple of times (must be a bug in the game’s Field of Vision) and reached for the “End Communication” button.

  “Wait! I almost forgot,” said Van. My hand froze in front of the button.

  “What?”

  “It’s about Walpurgis. I figured you’d want to know this…”

  Then she told me.

  “Oh my god,” I said when she was done. “This changes everything.”

  Ten minutes later, Beard and I were setting up the last details of our master plan.

  “I’ll come meet you in the Lucky Star,” he told me. The Lucky Star was the name of his new freighter, a blocky thing that couldn’t out-fly a brick if it tried, but was Beard’s new favorite toy. “Get everything ready.”

  “We’re more or less ready to go,” Mai told him over the translight video-feed. “We have a bit over three hours to get the deal done, boys. If there’s going to be any more delays better get them out of the way now.”

  “I’m always ready to kick butt,” Walpurgis said. “Gabrijel, I have a new weapon I’d like you to tinker with. Spare a minute when we’re on board?”

  “Sure, Walpie. Beard out. I’m glad the company of the ring is getting back together!”

  “You have to end the channel after you say ‘Beard out,’ not keep talking—”

  Beard closed the channel.

  “I think you have about 30% odds of pulling this off with zero deaths,” said Francis. “In-game, I mean. You don’t want to hear your real odds of surviving the week, right? I mean, people get upset over low numbers and I’m not socially oblivious, I can keep my mouth shut to make you all feel better.”

  “You’re letting him get away with this, are you?” muttered Walpurgis with a tired tone.

  “Neight,” I told my friend. “I’ll call him out if his odds are wrong.”

  Her eyes closed. “What did you say?”

  “That I’ll call him out if his odds are wrong.”

  “No, beforehand—forget it, we can’t waste more time. I’ll go make sure the torpedoes are primed.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Mai. “No offense, but I don’t trust anyone else to look after the heavy ordinance.”

  “Right? If you don’t take care of your torpedoes, no one else will,” I heard Walpurgis say as they both left the cabin.

  I was alone with Francis (well, he was technically in the entire ship). It had been a while since I had flown manually in a non-combat situation. I missed the feeling, to be ho
nest.

  To many people, flying through space in Rune got old after a while.

  “It’s all the same,” they’d say. “Only a bunch of stars and black space between them. The cool shit like black holes, or wormholes, or planets made of diamonds, those things are very rare.”

  But flying through the endless darkness, sitting in my favorite chair, in my favorite ship… I loved to silence all noise inside the game, all the alerts, all the alarms, and the messages. Then I would listen to the vacuum as the Teddy surfed through it—at speeds so fast it would make any physicist laugh derisively and shake their heads.

  I swear you could hear the vacuum singing as the ship parted it like it was water. I had to listen closely…

  And if I listened closely enough, the black space, and the stars, those were all the sounds I needed to be entertained.

  But this is not the time to relax, I thought with a twinge of sadness. Perhaps, when this day is over, Irene and I can spend a night flying around, just the two of us.

  She was the kind of person who could sit in silence for an entire evening and then she would tell me it had been a lovely date. On the other hand, she never shut up when we tried to watch a horror movie.

  I miss her.

  But life had other plans for us.

  One hour later, the Teddy was safely docked inside the bay of the Lucky Star. The freighter was big enough to carry six Teddys with space left to move around comfortably. Today, though, it was mostly filled with Beard’s own exports and raw materials.

  As the Teddy’s Captain, I was the last person to disembark, right after Walpurgis, who was carrying Jarred around like he was a ragdoll.

  I glanced around the Lucky Star’s cargo bay. Beard’s materials were more expensive and rare than mine, and he sold them almost as fast as he got them. Adamantine, two grams of livermorium suspended in a diamond-based cylinder, software, fighter weaponry, and other assortment of items which were almost enough to build another ship right then and there. I even saw two rusty exo-suits reclined in a corner of the place, almost forgotten.