by Hugo Huesca
Must be Beard’s own construction suits, I thought, since they were far and away the least exotic item in the place. One of those was far stronger than any power-armor, and was equipped with jet-streams in all its joints and extremities. Of course, they were almost useless in combat, since the engine needed to power them was antimatter based, like a tiny ship’s heart. It was highly explosive, and energy intensive. Still, they were damn useful for non-combat. I couldn’t think of any way they could help us with the smugglers—and we already had less than three hours left.
“Cole! Walpurgis!” Beard called after us. His stout frame seemed even tinier as he walked through the middle of rows upon rows of industrial plasteel until he stopped in front of us. “The band is getting back together, how exciting! I just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Cannot agree more, buddy,” I told him. The three of us walked side by side towards the Lucky Star’s entrails, followed by Mai. “Is everything ready?”
“Sure. The old man just logged out, since he wouldn’t be very useful here anyway. Anders and Joseph are making sure the weapon systems are in order. They’re competent, but I doubt even all of us can take an entire smuggling ring on our own, Cole.”
“I take offense to that,” Walpurgis told him.
“In any case, we’ll be using misdirection to win this Quest,” I told my friend. I even made air quotes for “misdirection.”
“That’s not how air quotes work,” Beard said. “But I’ll let it pass, since you’re still an amateur on a lot of things.”
We reached the end of the cargo bay and after a short while, we reached what appeared to be a casino that somehow got drenched in a Dungeons and Dragons convention. A pair of poker tables built with fake wood and holographic dragon dealers, some Wheel of Time themed slot machines, a waiter drone dressed as a hobbit, and a big-ass mountain of gold coins in a corner of the room, as a dragon’s hoard.
“My personal casino,” explained Beard. “Built it myself as a side-project. What do you guys think?”
“Looks cool, man,” I said while wondering what the hell half the machines were for. I’d never been in the interior of a casino, real or virtual.
“Looks tacky as hell,” said Walpurgis.
“High praise, great!” Beard huffed with satisfaction. “To be honest, it only uses fake money. You wouldn’t believe the amount I was losing on slot machines—”
“Sounds healthy,” Walpurgis pointed out. “And I wasn’t praising you, by the way.”
“Oh, get off your high horse,” I told her while playfully elbowing them both. Jarred swayed in Walpurgis’ hold and moaned pitifully. He was still under the effects of another dose of non-lethal damage from Mai.
In real life, knocking anyone out for more than a few seconds would probably leave them crippled for life, if not outright dead. It was one of the cases where Rune overruled realism in favor of coolness.
“High h—?” began Walpurgis, but Anders and Joseph’s characters walked into the casino right then, and interrupted her. At least, I assumed it was them, since their characters had other names, of course.
“Weapons are optimal,” said Gak Rageshot. He wore a standard-issue power-armor, one the Federation liked to gift as a reward after you had reached a high reputation with them. A grenade launcher was hanging on his hip.
“Good to know, Anders,” said Beard. “Everyone should get into position. We’ve no time to lose and it’s not like the Lucky Star is the fastest ship around. We’ll need a bit of time to reach the Taren System, so the sooner we begin the better.”
“You sure this will work?” asked Nosh Steelbend —this one was Joseph. His character seemed the least advanced of us all, but his suit was geared towards hacking and surveillance, which made him extremely useful in the field. “We can’t afford to lose time in a goose chase.”
“Cole says it’ll work and I’ve no reason not to believe him,” Beard said.
The guys were professionals in real-life, so they knew better than to push the issue with their second-in-command. Still, Anders gave me a dark look before turning back and heading for the cabin.
They’re being blackmailed by Panarin, I thought. Whatever he’s got on them, it must be nasty enough for them to have a lot of stock hanging in the balance.
Better not to fail, then. I had enough people pissed off at me, adding two more to the bucket wouldn’t do for the “Cole Living into his Twenties project.”
“Let’s go,” nodded Walpurgis. She turned back towards Mai. “You know when Jarred will wake up? We need him up and ready.”
“Just dunk him in cold water,” Mai explained. “It works like a charm. Colder the better.”
Another difference to the real world. After a person who had been knocked out cold regains consciousness, they are still pretty much down for the count. Fighting is out of the question, and so is forming complex sentences. In Rune, and in most action flicks, waking up from a knockout would make you groan for a bit, shake your head around, then you’d be able to go and finish your PhD thesis if you wanted.
This, of course, was if you were an NPC. Players couldn’t get knocked out, for obvious reasons.
The Lucky Star’s cabin was as tacky as its casino. Beard may be a great engineer, both in-game and out, but he wasn’t a designer. The dragon, dryad, hobbit, and elf motif was too much when I realized the ship’s AI was a hologram of Galadriel.
“Gal, we’re heading for the Taren System,” Beard told the AI. “Please open up all communication channels and make ourselves as visible as possible. We want them to know we’re coming.”
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” the AI replied, and buggered off to do whatever an AI did when no one was looking.
“It’s getting a bit old,” Beard muttered as an apology when he caught me wincing at a robotic spider (dog sized) frolicking in the miniature forest next to the ship’s computer systems. “But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“I seriously don’t know how you managed to father two children,” Walpurgis told him. Still, when the innocent robo-spider got a bit too close, I saw her hand inch a bit closer to her rifle.
“The trick is not letting her know you’re a nerd until it’s too late,” said Beard. “A day after our wedding I showed my wife my Warhammer army and told her this is what she married into.”
“You monster!” Walpurgis whispered with exaggerated horror.
I went and made myself useful by finding a bucket and filling it with ice-cold water from the ship’s recycling machine. Mai took Jarred from Walpurgis’ arms and unceremoniously dunked his head into the bucket.
“Oh my God!” the man exclaimed, as his entire body shook like he was being electrocuted. He sat down, stunned, and shook his head. “I could’ve—I would’ve followed you without complaining! There was no reason to knock me out again.”
“I just don’t like you,” Mai told him. “That’s a good enough reason. Now listen up, Mr. Traitor to the Federation, this is what you’ll have to do. We’re reaching your friend asteroid belt as we speak. Soon, we’ll open communications with them. We’ll give all the passwords you’ve helpfully supplied us—I have you on video, by the way. At some point, you’ll speak with them, tell them we’re here to buy a… whatever. I don’t even know what they’re smuggling… You tell them we’re here to buy. Make them trust us. We have to get this ship inside any of their bases, then your role is over. If at any point they become even a tiny bit suspicious, the bad man will return. You don’t want to anger the bad man, do you?”
Jarred shivered. “I’ll behave…”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Make me happy and you’ll get to see the light of a next day.”
I didn’t bother pointing out to her there was no day neither here nor on the Argus Station. Wouldn’t do us any good if the prisoner saw us fighting.
“Good. We’ll be there in five minutes. You better get your ass in gear and think of what you’re goin
g to tell them.”
We left Jarred sobbing by himself in a corner of the cabin, watched carefully by Anders.
“You do a lot of work like this for the CIA?” I asked Mai once we were out of Jarred’s hearing range. I was curious. For all my (tangential at most) dealings with the agency, I had never seen them in action.
“Oh, no, not at all,” she laughed. “I’m just a data analyst over there, the only time I’ve shot my gun is at the range… and I’m terrible at it.”
“But you’re a sniper…”
“Well,” she shrugged. “Why not? If I wanted to look at more spreadsheets after work, I’d just do more overtime. The interrogation stuff… Well, it’s in the manual, and the Direct—Mister Derry used to be very formal about all personnel being self-sufficient in a pinch.”
“Huh. Makes sense. To be honest, I forgot you could work for them and not hang around black cars, wearing black suits and sunglasses.”
“The sunglasses do look cool,” she said, more to herself than to me. “But you know what else is cool? Not getting shot.”
“I know just how you feel.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rules of Engagement
The Taren System was displayed on the Lucky Star’s screens. It consisted of six planets and an old gas giant. The two planets closest to the star were burnt to a crisp, or at least their cosmological equivalent. The AI informed us in its Galadriel’s voice that there used to be another planet even closer to the star, but it had been eaten up when the star became a gas giant.
The asteroid belt where the smugglers were hidden waited for us in the fourth planet’s orbit. Taren IV was a tiny Neptune-like rock with an atmosphere of helium and hydrogen and a mantle of water, ammonia, and methane.
Besides the shiny blue hue of Taren IV that would make a nice wallpaper for any computer, the planet was useless for mining or as a habitat.
The entire system was “useless” in the economical sense of the word. There were no rare materials hidden in the mantle of the planets, no research to be done, no secrets to explore. Just perfect for a bunch of smugglers trying to go under the radar of the Federation’s dreadnoughts, since the System was located at the former edge of the universe—before last year’s expansion massively expanded it.
“The asteroid field is now on screen,” announced Joseph, who was manning the radar and the comms.
True to his word, the screen magnified Taren IV until the belt of asteroids appeared to be only a stone’s-throw away from the Lucky Star.
I understood why searching for the smugglers’ exact coordinates had been a necessity.
The asteroid belt didn’t orbit around Taren IV, the hideout was simply located in that point of space. The complete asteroid belt was situated between Taren IV and V, and looped around the gas giant in an orbit of its own. Up close, a single asteroid could be almost a mile high, but most of them were a third of that or less.
“It’s mostly empty space, you know?” I told Beard, who was sitting in the captain’s chair (it was his ship, after all). “In the real universe, we could sail in a straight line through an asteroid belt and we would probably never hit anything.”
“Yeah, but that wouldn’t be as interesting, don’t you think?” Rune’s version of an asteroid field looked exactly like you’d expect an asteroid field to look like. A field of giant fucking rocks everywhere.
Made for some exciting space battles.
With any luck, I’d be having a couple of those in the next hour.
“We’re being hailed by an unnamed base,” said Joseph.
“Return signal with their password,” Beard told him. “Here’s to hoping you weren’t lying to my friends, Mister Jarred. I’m afraid you can’t respawn like we can, so you better keep it in mind.”
“Respawn?” Jarred muttered. He was in the middle of the cabin, where we could all keep watch in case he tried something. Not like there was much a single accountant could do against six people in power-armor, but it was the principle of it.
“Just get ready,” Beard told him.
“Sending password,” Joseph said. Pause. A bunch of alerts exploded on-screen. “We’re being locked-on by all their targeting systems!”
Walpurgis’ hand lurched towards her rifle and Jarred raised his hands instantly. “It’s only procedure! They haven’t even seen your message yet, please wait a bit…”
For a tense half-minute, nothing happened except that the computer had an anxiety fit with the amount of anti-ship defenses being pointed at us.
Defending against a ship-sized threat was easy from a stationary base. Missiles, turrets, railguns… They didn’t have the size limitations that most ships had, so you could pack some serious firepower in a single base.
The weakness, of course, was that a ship could simply look at your guns and just move out of their range. Then it could fry the base defenses from afar while dodging the stationary fire (now limited to a few railguns) until the base’s shield generators gave up.
That’s what fighter squadrons were there to avoid, and the rest of the meager smugglers’ space navy.
In a real space-invasion against a base, you’d need to engage with the base’s fleet first, disable it while your own fleets tried to evade the stationary fire—which is much harder to do when a fighter squadron is at your flank herding you like a bunch of shepherd dogs. Then, after hopefully winning the battle, you could melt the base from afar… Or more probably, accept their surrender before it came to that.
It was, more or less, the standard engagement for all Rune’s space battles. First the fleet, then the base, then surrender or self-destruction. It was how the Federation fought, it was how players fought, it was how smugglers fought. It was as close as it’d get to a fair fight.
Rylena had something of an allergy against fair fights, and after a hundred battles where she was the one masterminding our plans, the entire crew simply adopted her worldview—myself included.
A fair fight is something that happens to other people. Hopefully you can blow them up while they’re distracted with it.
Here are the rules of engagement using Rylena’s book. First of all, the enemy must not know you’re fighting them. Second of all, you have a five second window to start shooting and killing them all—so they can’t figure out how to fight back. Third, there’s no kill like overkill.
Strangely enough, my own sister had developed on her own rules like that for fights in the real world. It mostly meant she went for people’s genitals while they were still talking.
My musings were interrupted by the ping of a new communication and the entire cabin’s crew breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“We have contact,” Joseph announced. “The base has identified itself as the Lion Fang. They’re requesting a communications channel.”
“Patch it through,” said Beard. He wasn’t accustomed to the role of a ship’s captain (he flew alone while on his freighter) and it showed. He lacked the gravitas required for the job. It’s harder than simply saying, “Patch it through.” You have to feel it. Otherwise it’s not showy enough and people get disappointed.
Still, Joseph followed Beard’s command and the face of one of the NPC smuggler appeared on screen. The man was leathery, appeared to be in his forties, old and tough like those cowboys from the old films that the hero killed at the end.
“That password is a month old,” said the man. “State your business with the Lion Fang. Do it quick, or else.”
Beard surreptitiously looked in my direction. I was the one with the high Persuasion, so it was my job to handle the NPC before we bravely shot them in the back.
“Acknowledged, Lion Fang,” I said as I lowered my visor to let him see my trustworthy mug. “We’re here to trade. We came across a cargo of livermorium the Federation misplaced.”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “Livermorium, you say? That’s a hot item, kiddo. The Federation could be hot on your tail for all we know. Perhaps it would be better to obliterate y
ou.”
“That would be bad for business,” I helpfully pointed out. “What kind of reputation would you have if you blew up all your customers?”
“A reputation for being alive and smart,” he said. “A reputation that I’m afraid you won’t share much longer.”
“Persuade him faster,” Walpurgis muttered, out of range of the communicator.
“Wait!” I waved my arms. “We were told you’re trustworthy. We came here on a recommendation.”
“Did you?” Technically, yes. The recommendation of General Jenkins.
Instead, I pointed at Jarred and the camera panned over to him. From my point of view, the accountant’s expression wouldn’t have fooled a five-year-old. Ashen skin—creamy like a wax statue—bloodshot eyes, slumped shoulders, and the general attitude of someone who has been recently knocked unconscious multiple times.
“Maizer the Defiler,” Jarred greeted him. “Long time no see. You’re looking well, bud. That new scar under your eye makes you look very mean and manly.”
“Jarred, you piece of trash,” came the answer. “What are you even doing? I told you never to come here unless it was an emergency. I should blow you up right now.”
“Wait!” This time it was Jarred who interrupted. “Wait, Maizer. I owe these fine folk a favor, they just saved my life…”
This was true. We saved his life by not killing him in the first place.
“What?” For a second, Maizer seemed as confused as Jarred. Behind me, Beard looked like he wanted to smash his head against his control panel.
“When some—some pirates captured me…”
True again. Technically, by assaulting a Federation member, we were pirates. Yo-ho-ho.
“When did this happen?” NPCs defended against Persuasion with some NPC-only variant of the Perception skill. To be a smuggler leader, this skill had to have been fairly high, so Maizer just wasn’t buying it. It didn’t help that Jarred was just a terrible liar all around. Also, he was sobbing quietly.
Time to intervene. “Hours ago,” I told the smuggler. “That’s when we came across the livermorium shipment. We figured the Federation would be looking for those pirates, not for us, so the cargo must be safe… if you’re good enough to deal with a hot shipment.”
