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

by Hugo Huesca

  “I had help, you know. My ex may have found a new employer, but so have I.” I smiled in triumph. “All this time I’ve been under Caputi’s payroll.”

  Doyle laugh stole all my dramatic thunder right from under me. Martinez’ attention shifted away from me and back outside. Even Irene reclined against her seat.

  Meanwhile, my hands were trembling. Trying to keep the triumphant smile on my face was the hardest thing I’d ever done. But I needed to lie like I’d never lied before.

  “C’mon, Dorsett, have some dignity. You’re an edgy eighteen-year-old, not a super spy. You’re only making a fool out of yourself,” said Doyle. “Stefania Caputi! The woman herself! Hah!”

  Mentally, I was counting the seconds. Shouldn’t be much longer for the script to take effect, if it would at all. All the years I’d spent looking at the screen of a Berry, toying with illegal software, had left me with an acute sense of how long they took.

  It had been around ten minutes since I had been brought into the helicopter. Not a single one of my scripts ever took more than fifteen minutes if they worked at all. The firewall either caught them, or they punched through.

  I crossed my fingers, because I didn’t know any prayers.

  “And yet, I had a team of snipers to bail me out when I needed them. Why do you think this is any different?”

  “Because we captured you, you stupid idiot.”

  “Caputi needed to find out how far along Dervaux was in her construction project. She wants the Device for herself, you see. To save her the trouble of building her own.”

  “Sure, kid. Whatever you say.” But Doyle’s smirk trembled a little. And he was still talking to me. Only the masked soldiers weren’t focused on the conversation. In fact, they barely reacted at all. It was eerie, almost like they wanted to be dehumanized. Not even stormtroopers were so quiet.

  “Don’t be dense, Agent Doyle. Only the persons who were inside the Signal when it was activated can use the Device. I can use it. I may not be a super spy like you, but I am useful. Unlike Irene here.”

  “You had no idea about the failsafe until this idiot told you,” he said. Then, turning to Irene, he added:

  “And that is a mistake I’m not going to let pass, Monferrer. I’m sure Madam Dervaux will want to hear about it, how you mysteriously started spilling corporate secrets. She’ll have to think again where your loyalties lie.”

  “Wah, wah, I’m my boss’s little bitch,” Irene said in an imitation of Doyle. “I’m Agent Doyle. Look at me trying to remain useful, so I’m not fired after Cole is recruited. Wah! Wah! That’s you, ass. That’s how you talk.”

  Yeah, it’s Irene alright. No need to hide my smile.

  Martinez spoke to me before Doyle had a chance to reply. “Let’s suppose you’re telling the truth, as ridiculous as it sounds. Caputi’s not the kind to sacrifice an asset like this. She let you into our hands to gain information? Then what? You’re still coming with us.”

  “Well, then she gets her hands on her button presser—that’s me—, and Dervaux’s button presser,” I pointed to Irene with a nod of my head. “Because that’s how she rolls.”

  I’m going to look ridiculous if the script doesn’t pull through.

  And time was rolling. How long did I have? Couldn’t be more than a minute or two, if I had any time left at all. If I kept talking, I was digging my own grave, and no one would take me seriously again.

  Which I didn’t really care about anyway. I was betting it all.

  “Is she? We’re all the way up here, riding a state-of-the-art Sleipnir Whistleblower t-201. How does she even pretend to catch up with us? I can’t hear the jet, Cole,” said Martinez.

  “She’s going to lock this baby down,” I told her, crossing my fingers even harder. “Then she’s going to either land it with all of us safe, or blow it up with a land-to-air interceptor missile.”

  “This is not part of your videogame, asshole,” said Doyle. “You obviously have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I flashed him my best mischievous smile. “Oh. Don’t I?”

  No one spoke. Martinez shuffled nervously in her seat. Everyone’s attention was focused on the smooth flying of the drone. The yellow warning LEDs on the floor bathed our heads in smooth, flame-like light. It made the tension in the air almost palpable.

  Any time now. Any. Time. Now. My smile faltered. Martinez shuffled a bit more.

  C’mon. I wanted to grab my backpack and look at the Berry, shake it around, perhaps switch the scripts. But they would simply grab it from my hands and throw it out…

  “Well,” said Doyle with a nasty smile. “Nice try, boy. Can’t say I’m surprised, though. You never were the brightest of the pack.”

  I felt like a toddler whose ice-cream had fallen to the floor on a hot summer day, then someone had bought him another one, and punched the toddler in the mouth and taken the ice-cream away again.

  Which makes for a poor analogy, but I wasn’t in the mood for analogies.

  I felt like crap, alright?

  I couldn’t bear to look at Irene. What would she think of me? Instead, I turned my gaze to the floor. The life-like image of defeat.

  The warning LEDs flickered.

  Did I imagine that?

  For a moment, nothing else happened, but just as I started to think my mind had been playing tricks on me, they flickered again. The chopper jumped slightly, as if shaken by an out-of-nowhere air current.

  “What—?” whispered Doyle. The LEDs went out for good this time, and so did the other indicators in the cabin. This got the attention of one of the soldiers. He quickly moved towards the spot where the pilot would’ve been if we still used those. He checked the screen.

  “All systems are off,” he said. “Even the engines. We’re coasting.”

  Savor this moment, I thought, glancing at Doyle’s expression. Remember it, so it lasts the rest of your life.

  Then he raised a gun to my temple. He was already close enough for me to smell his cheap cologne, so the pistol’s barrel pushed my head against my shoulder. “Explain. Right now.”

  “Stop that,” I snapped at him with all the authority I could muster. “Stop that or we all die, you idiot.”

  He snarled.

  “Doyle!” exclaimed Martinez. Her hand flicked towards her paramilitary jacket, where she had her pistol in a black holster.

  The gun against my head went back a bit. Then he pushed again, but this time it was a steady, calculated move. “How did she know? The Whistleblower is protected against bugs.”

  That’s one hell of a specific protection, I felt like laughing. That’s why you don’t get the discount stealth helicopter. Still, I was running against time. The systems weren’t fried like an EMP, they were only down. A simple reboot would bring them back online, and the only thing stopping them was that they hadn’t thought of it. I had to keep them looking the other way. I knew exactly how.

  “We used the Signal,” I told them. “No defense for that, yet. I have my mindjack in my pack, so she’s been listening all along.”

  Mindjacks, of course, didn’t work that way.

  “Mindjacks don’t work that way,” Martinez said.

  “This one is modified,” I told her without even missing a beat. I had read a couple dozen science fiction books from Kipp’s hoards, I knew how to bullshit my tech. “Rerouted the sound system’s around the embedded microphone… to capture speech and send it to an in-game location.”

  Nailed. It.

  “Can that even—?” she started. I shut her up.

  “Time is running out!” I told them. “Why don’t you check for yourselves? She wants to talk to Irene. She can hear her out, then the engines will start again. As a courtesy. So you can negotiate your surrender.”

  I pushed my backpack to Irene’s feet with a slow, fluid motion. She didn’t even look at me as she unpacked my mindjack. She held it up so Doyle and Martinez could see it. “He was telling the truth.”

  If I
needed any more proof that she was on my side this made it pretty clear. The only thing my mindjack proved was that I indeed had it in my backpack. It didn’t prove anything else. But it sure gave me more credibility.

  FBI agents were trained to spot this kind of cheap trick, but good luck doing that while on a helicopter held in the air only because gravity hasn’t taken a closer look at how the hell it’s still flying.

  “We have to talk to Dervaux,” said Doyle. His gun started to tremble again. “She will know what to do.”

  The cabin jerked a bit and my stomach lurched with the sudden sensation of falling. Everyone could feel the inclination of the fuselage now, pointing downwards more and more.

  Of course, after a certain altitude shift, the safety mechanisms in the drone would reboot the system by themselves. We weren’t in any real danger of plummeting to our deaths. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

  “No time, Doyle,” Martinez told him. “Use that damn thing. See what Caputi has to say. At the very least we can gain some time for Sleipnir to send some reinforcements.”

  “Yes, Doyle, let’s see what she has to say,” I told him as I stared straight in his eyes, his gun still pointed at my head.

  Irene didn’t wait for his reply, she held the mindjack up high.

  “Wait!” I said. “You have to synch your biometrics to it. Otherwise you’ll waste valuable time. This model has a fast-synch button. Left side, the pink one.”

  She didn’t miss a beat either. “Of course.”

  Her finger flew a bit faster than normal to the button. Doyle’s eyebrows rose suspiciously. Irene’s face betrayed her nervousness, after all. Her forehead furrowed and her lips trembled a little. Of course, that could be explained by the fact she was in a falling drone.

  “Hold it right there…” said Doyle as he started to wave his gun away from me and in her general direction.

  I threw my cuffed hands against his armored jacked, caught his neck, and pulled with all my strength. I used the momentum to headbutt him square in the nose. I gritted my teeth as my own neck trembled with the force of the impact and my brain shuffled against the back of my skull.

  Doyle’s face snapped back, with blood coming from his pulverized nose and spraying everywhere.

  Irene pressed the button. His gun fell to the floor, while he screamed incoherently. I saw how the weapon slid over the metal surface and out of the chopper as the drone lurched forward once again, this time with more violence.

  If my mindjack worked at all, it must be connecting to the new, unprotected network right now. It was a race against the reboot systems… But I had other problems.

  The soldiers around me reacted. In slow motion, I saw them raise their rifles in my direction. The belt around my chest was holding me in place, and I was an easy target. At this distance, the bullets would turn me into mincemeat, no problem.

  The chopper’s systems rebooted. The drone came back to life, it’s silent engines whirred and we regained altitude and speed as the nose corrected itself.

  “Oh boy!” someone exclaimed over the chopper’s intercom. “What an ugly spaceship. It can’t even Jump! No fun stuff, only all these safety systems I just uninstalled.”

  Irene was the first to react. “Is that Francis? Cole, what the f—”

  Damn right it’s Francis! “Francis!” I screamed. “Cheesecake, man! Fuckin’ cheesecake!”

  Try to imagine the scene from Doyle’s perspective, or a random stormtrooper wannabe. Perhaps they wondered if they were suffering from a stroke. The rifles paused for a moment, because they weren’t sure what the protocol said about a guy screaming desserts at them.

  “Got it, Boss! Out with the new, hurray for the old!”

  Francis was not a normal AI. This was pretty clear. A normal AI wouldn’t be able to remotely control a real-life drone, for example, but this was nothing compared to what he did next.

  He unlocked all the seat-belts, except mine and Irene’s. I hadn’t even thought of that.

  Doyle muttered something nasty, but Martinez made better use of her time and locked her arms around her seat.

  Then the chopper simply turned on its right side, like a giant, black, metallic, flying, ninja dolphin doing a trick. My arms and legs flailed around while gravity scrambled my brain in a mix of vertigo and panic.

  Most of the people who weren’t secured just slid out.

  Then plummeted down.

  I saw a soldier disappear from my confused vision without even making a sound. Actually, the only screams I heard were mine, Irene’s, and Doyle’s. The former FBI agent slid out of his seat as his hands hammered away in a fury, trying to grab on to anything.

  “Dorsett!”

  He caught on to my hoodie by the shoulder, but his hold wasn’t strong enough. I tried to twist in his direction and grab his arm, purely on reflex, but my own belt was still holding me in place as securely as before. An instant later, and his grip on the hoodie slipped. Then there was no agent anymore.

  I had just killed a bunch of people. The reality passed through me like a gust of cold wind. Perhaps it was cold wind; the adrenaline made it hard to tell. Made it hard to think at all. My reaction was visceral, out of my control. I regretted it immediately, even if it made no sense. I’d probably saved Irene’s life and my own. And still… tears of horror streaked across my face. They were cold against the skin and didn’t last long in the wind.

  In front of me, Martinez had had better luck. She held on to dear life with a stunned and terrified look on her face. Only three soldiers had managed to grip the metal tubes around the fuselage. Their masks hid their expressions, if there were any. No trace of their rifles.

  The chopper thrashed, jumped, and shook itself around in a manner I didn’t even thought possible. Two soldiers lost their grip and silently disappeared before I could open my mouth to say:

  “Stop! Enough, Francis!”

  “One left.”

  “Stop!”

  “Just wanted to point it out, in case you didn’t know.” The helicopter smoothly corrected its position, like nothing at all had happened.

  I was shaking in my seat, just overloaded with adrenaline. It was still locked.

  Martinez rolled on the metal floor, stunned, while the last remaining soldier climbed back up, slow and steady.

  The agent’s eyes locked with mine while she was on the floor, her short hair strewn across her face. “What have you done?”

  Was someone stabbing me or something? Felt the part. “Martinez, I—I…”

  She shook her head and raised her arm at me, like she wanted to tell me something. She looked around and saw the soldier throwing his legs up to the floor from the edge of the chopper, slowly climbing back into the cabin. Martinez’ face was strained, like someone had put a heavy weight on her shoulders.

  “It’s OK. Cole. You did OK, alright? It hurts the first time. It’ll get easier.”

  What?

  She had already turned to Irene. The girl was still holding the belts that held her to her seat like they may fail her. Her breaths were quick and shallow. When she caught Martinez’ gaze, she opened her mouth weakly:

  “Don’t.”

  “No other way. Sorry. Remember where they have them?”

  Irene couldn’t possibly get any paler, but she nodded yes. This seemed to satisfy Martinez. She turned to face the soldier, who right now was standing up. He seemed unsure of what to do next.

  Martinez wasn’t. She looked back against her shoulder. “Ulma Street, building number 24. That’s where they’re keeping your mother. You’ll need a commando squad to get her out, Cole, so get Caputi to do it.”

  And then, before I even had time to realize what she was going to do, Martinez tackled the soldier like she was hugging him, and pushed him out of the chopper.

  Taking herself with him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Always Comes to Collect

  The Whistleblower flew so high that it pierced the cloud of pollut
ion over San Mabrada. The stars were almost as clear as they appeared back on Rune, but the constellations were different.

  The beautiful background only served to add to the sheer magnitude of what had just happened inside the drone’s cabin. At least to me. Like the world had just gone crazy. It was so quiet and that made it all worse.

  I stood with the starry backdrop in front of me as I firmly held onto the rails at head-level. There was no trace left of Agent Kris Martinez. The drone now flew so calmly that it was hard to realize we were flying at all.

  Irene was still holding my mindjack. Somehow with all the movement she had managed to keep a hold of it. The backpack hadn’t been so lucky and it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it would make the day of some street rat down there in San Mabrada.

  “Your mindjack is running out of battery,” said Francis with a somber tone. “I’ll have to land the drone soon. Any place in particular?”

  I shook my head and turned to Irene. I had to struggle to break the stubborn muteness that had taken hold of me. “You?”

  “You know where I live?” she asked the AI.

  “I looked it up on the net,” said Francis. The drone’s nose changed its course slightly to the right and it began to slowly descend. “By the way, Master Cole…”

  “Yes?”

  “I know you think this is different than all the people we have wasted in my world. But you can’t respawn here, so think twice before risking your only life. I’ve been dead before, and it isn’t that great.”

  It was Irene who broke the following silence, while I looked at how the skyscrapers became bigger and bigger in the background.

  “I had no idea Francis could act in the real world.”

  “He has been helping me from my smartphone.” My voice was hoarse. “I wasn’t sure it would work, but it was all I had.”

  Her hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away from the edge of the chopper. Then Irene had her arms around me. She was warm and soft. “You gonna be okay?”