by Hugo Huesca
“Let me unpack my explosives from the Lucky Star,” said Beard. “I think we can use an antimatter detonator at some point, if we get it past the scanners.”
The plan took shape, solidifying in the mind of the crew.
“You think it can work…?” I heard Derry ask Mai. The woman gestured that she wasn’t sure, but ended up nodding a bit. This seemed to satisfy Derry.
“It’s fitting,” I told Rylena over the private channel. “Kipp ended a pirate queen’s reign like this. And Dervaux is queen of her own domain, isn’t she?”
Rylena laughed. “I didn’t think of it like it, but yeah, a psychologist could have a field day. Still… Dervaux is not the top dog anymore. Sleipnir is but a shadow of what Odin used to be. There’s bigger fish out there, and those are the ones Crestienne doesn’t want to drag into the ring… If Dervaux had them in her pocket, we’d be pretty much screwed.”
“So an evil overlord that lost her strength a long while ago, but could get it all back?”
“Please don’t tell Gabrijel that idea,” Rylena said. “I seriously think he’d fan-girl himself to death thinking we’re living an epic fantasy.”
I only hoped she got the genre right. The only difference between fantasy and horror is the body count.
The Asnain Docking Bay was a trade-center in the Asnain System, very near the random spot in space where Sleipnir was working day and night in their base. It was used by neutral traders not aligned with the Federation, private corporations, and the occasional mercenary.
Unlike Argus, where one could easily find a tiny private hangar for a spaceship, real estate in the Asnain Bay went for a premium and only to people that meant business. In exchange for about fifty thousand databytes or so, the contractor earned themselves half a football stadium as storage and hangar. With the volume of material traded in the Bay, the space was barely sufficient. It was barely used by players and heavily favored by NPCs, so it made sense that Sleipnir went to them to avoid attention.
“We’re interested in exchanging information,” I told the portly NPC that received us after Beard paid for a hangar. The NPC was supposed to be a sort of business facilitator who could tell us where the items we were after could be found, or organize business meetings.
It was the sort of thing that involved players spending real-world weekends looking at and sorting spreadsheets and figuring out exchange ratios of livermorium. From what I could tell, the only person in the entire crew who enjoyed the stuff was Beard. And that was because he thought of exchange ratios as bets. So he skipped the spreadsheets. And guessed the exchange ratios.
“Of course,” said the NPC. He had an accent that could only be described as exaggerated space-British and an affectation to match the image. His suit was also very expensive. He earned a small fee for every transaction he brokered. “I can tell you anything, within reason, of course, about trade windows you can maneuver for great benefit. Are you interested, per chance, in today’s exchange ratio of livermorium?”
“We’re interested in a small group who started activities recently,” I told him. “We know they’re nearby and would prefer to pay them a personal visit.”
The NPC paled a bit. His Perception had to be high enough to realize what a bunch of players armed to the teeth in kill-stuff meant. “I’m afraid that kind of information is closely guarded by the Asnain private authorities. I can’t break confidentiality—”
“Look,” Rylena was by my side working on a tiny computer with a holographic keyboard, “this prompt over here? It’s Asnain’s records for you. See what it says?”
“It says I spent the day attending the matters of Zandier Mining Inc… on the other side of the Bay. It says I brokered a deal of a million databytes…” His eyes narrowed in surprise as he automatically calculated the percentage he’d earn from that. “This… This… is fraud of the higher caliber. I can’t stand by something like this, I have to report you!”
Translation: This is too obvious a ruse, you’ll get found out.
“There really is a Zandier hangar in there, you know,” I told him with a friendly power-armored pat to his back, in case he was thinking of making a run for it. “And they’re really looking to make a million-dollar trade to… Look, I don’t remember their name. Space McDonalds. But the money is real, we already asked. If anyone from Asnain comes asking, Zandier will confirm you were the broker.”
It was true. Zandier and my crew got along well. The z-alloy of the Teddy’s armor came from them—from a Quest where the Admiral Zenn Beckers put us in the path of the haunted Janus Station.
This time, we owed Beckers a hefty favor and everyone’s Quest-log already updated with an entry on it.
Beckers hadn’t asked any questions at all when we called her hangar for a favor; she simply had someone pay off her real broker and send him packing. Then she wished us luck.
Favors from players went a long way in Rune. Apparently, being able to unleash extreme violence and come back from the dead were very useful abilities to mining companies. Who knew?
Our broker’s face was prey to conflicting emotions. Fear. Greed. More fear. More greed. Well, he lacked the emotional depth of other NPCs… But he was already seeing the spreadsheets spitting cash signs in front of him, I could bet my ship on it.
“And only for information on that group’s hangar? Why—? No, wait. Wait, don’t tell me why!”
He stepped back a bit, almost tripping over his own feet. My hand tingled with tension—hovering near my blaster.
Don’t run for it, buddy. Don’t run for it.
What would win? His sense of morals or his love for databytes?
Yeah. Not even a question.
“I’ll see what I can do. Give me all you have on your people and I’ll send a drone back to you,” he whispered, like security protocols even cared about whispers. Rylena already had them looking the other way, in any case.
Turns out, what we had on Sleipnir was enough for a well-connected broker like him to find them out fast. The freighters dealt in battleship-related materials, paid in databytes instead of trading, and also liked to buy expensive translight data packages. The last bit was how they were assembling the physical software in Rune.
“Please, whatever you do in there, try not to blow up the hangar, OK?” said the NPC as he returned from his investigation trip. “I have family here.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll never know we were here.”
As the NPC hurriedly left towards Zandier’s hangar, Rylena and I high-fived each other. The combination of our classes was quite powerful for non-combat situations. Not even taking into account my Captain bonus to her skills. Persuasion worked better when you had someone by your side telling you all the biometric changes in your target. Rylena could tell me their skill ranks, if they were telling the truth or lying, if they were scared or angry.
Yes, it was very useful, but if this doesn’t terrify you even a little bit, you haven’t dated a Battlemind.
Beard, Walpurgis, Mai, and the rest of our haggard crew came out of the Lucky Star and we told them the good news. There was no time to celebrate, we were only getting started.
Now it was a question of how to get in, and who was going and who was staying.
“No offense,” I told Derry. “We know you could wipe the floor with us in the real world, but…”
He had a Sneak rank of 2. Panarin’s was 0. They could be a ninja in the real world and there was a 50% chance they’d get caught anyway.
“You’re the Captain, Dorsett,” Derry said, to my surprise. “Your call. Success or failure is on you.”
It went against my mental model of the man, but after all, he really didn’t have any other options. He was a fish out of water. Perhaps he was coming to terms with it.
“You’ll remain with the extraction team,” I told him. “After we disable the ship’s defenses we’ll need a way out, or their players will simply respawn and swarm us. So the Teddy and the Lucky Star have to swoop in and save the d
ay.”
We ended up taking Mai for the assault team and leaving Joseph behind. Anders was a Field Medic so he came with us.
“Spark Bandit will arrive at your location,” I reminded the extraction team as we prepared to leave. “She’ll take command from there.”
“Is that… your little sister’s username?” Derry’s face was priceless.
“Oh, this is golden,” Panarin said to Derry with such a heavy Russian accent that it was hard to make out the words. “You have managed to put us in a position where a teenage girl will lead us into battle. You’ve really fallen long and hard, old friend.”
Walpurgis, who was in the same physical place as Van, went still for a second and then said:
“The teenage girl says she won’t be tolerating any snark from her subordinates.”
Turns out it was possible to feel sorry for John Derry.
Sleipnir’s hangar was neat, dark, and tidy. It was a strange sight, given the raw amount of items and gear it was packing. There was enough armor and plasma cannons there to build a dozen starfighters like the Teddy.
Well, not quite like the Teddy, since the ship could, if it came to it, go toe to toe with its legendary equivalent. But half a dozen starfighters could give pause to anyone.
All powered by real life money, I thought.
It was enough to make me cringe. If other corporations saw the power opportunities Rune offered, they’d start moving their own resources in.
No, not if. When they did so, Rune would become a very different place.
For a brief instant, I felt like one of those cowboys in the black and white movies that Walpurgis had made us marathon once. Living in the frontier between two lands and two different eras, right before progress arrived on the feet of iron trains and tossed them in the furnace. At least they stopped shooting up bar galleys.
Yeah, I can never tell my friends I just compared us to cowboys. They’d never let me live it down.
“Can you see any trouble, Mai?” Rylena asked over the comms. Mai had the highest Sneak of all of us, so we sent her to scout ahead. This time, she wasn’t wearing my IFG. Since I had the lowest Sneak of the group, I’d use it to even the playing field.
“Freighter’s exterior is clear, they’re inside,” said Mai.
The freighter was an ugly, bulky thing several times bigger than the Lucky Star. The crew for something that size was surprisingly understaffed. Five players and several androids to play bodyguard.
We’d waited outside the gunmetal doors of the hangar for several minutes while Rylena scanned the interior. A constant line of automated Bay drones were still arriving at the hangar and dropping even more cargo. Tricking them into thinking we weren’t there was not a problem.
When Mai gave us the all clear, we used our Sneak skill to crawl through the ventilation vents, tracing the same way she’d gone. The vents were big enough for a power-armored player as broad-shouldered as Beard to fit comfortably through them. Of course, the clanking of the metal was loud enough to be mistaken for a bad techno-symphony. Thankfully for us, security was looking the other way thanks to Rylena’s hacking.
“Seriously, who makes vents this big?” Beard said somewhere behind me through the constant clanking. “I could fit a fighter here. I bet this isn’t even OSHA compliant.”
I reached the end of the vents after a tight curve where I had to use the servo-assisted arms to pull myself through without tearing the structure around me. I crawled out, feeling vaguely like a robot being birthed. After half my body was out, Anders helped me get up.
“It’s on purpose,” said Walpurgis, who was still inside the vents. “There’s vulnerabilities like these all over Rune, so Sneak based characters are not totally useless every time the NPCs aren’t holding the idiot ball.”
“And I’m very thankful for them,” said Mai, who was still out of sight. “I grinded my way through the mid-game from one vent to another. Or the sewers. There’s a surprising number of pipes beneath a spaceship’s corridors.”
“Thanks for the image,” Walpurgis told her. Before crawling out after Beard, she tossed her legendary sniper rifle out and then she followed. The rifle flew back at her not a second after, like she was afraid we’d steal it. She had so many weapons magnetized around her body she practically wore an extra, explosive layer of armor.
Beard was more practical. His minigun was as big as he was, and the backpack he carried with ammo just as heavy. There’d have been no way he fit in the vents if he were a normal height. It was either an amazing character build or an amazing stroke of luck.
Rylena was the last one to arrive. Since Walpurgis was packed with enough boom-making things as it is, she was the one carrying the demolition charges in a military pack slung over her shoulder. One single blaster hit to that pack and we’d be cinders. Probably take the hangar along with us.
Explosives weren’t easy or cheap to get, and after taking into account weapons and ammo, everyone was several thousand databytes lighter than when we started.
I looked to the front, searching for Mai’s route. The agent had skirted close to the freighter, but always around blind spots in the cameras set in the ship’s armor. The freighter’s cargo doors were open. A constant line of dog-sized drones shaped like an unholy mix between can openers and Roombas were carrying items inside. For things too big for them they used trolleys in zero-g. Thankfully, gravity was still on, otherwise trying to sneak around using magnetized boots would’ve been just pitiful.
We followed Mai’s virtual path as it appeared in our visors, trying to be as silent as possible. Sure, the drones were blind and deaf to our presence, at least for the moment, but there was always the chance someone inside came out, or just plain heard us clanking around.
They won’t be seeing me. I’m frickin’ invisible, I thought with a smug, satisfied grin that no one could see. The downside was, my shield’s charge gauge was going down by the second. Not fast enough, though, I still had over 40% left by the time we reached the barrels.
There’s lots of barrels in any shipment. Fuel for machinery, coolant, industrial acid, oil, or just plain old extra water to cover for recycling malfunctions. The barrels we emptied on the floor were filled with an expensive chemical compound used somewhere in the anti-gravity generators. Very expensive.
I smiled as I saw the silvery river soak through a lot of other expensive materials and fall through the ridges of the metal floor.
Mai reached us with the grace of a ghost while we loaded up our weapons in different barrels. “Hurry up,” she said. “The drones are almost done packing.”
“Well why don’t you help me carry this Beard, princess,” Walpurgis told her while her armor’s servos groaned with effort as she tried to help Beard crawl into the first barrel without tipping it over.
“Oh, just push his ass in—” Mai demonstrated the action as she spoke and Beard fell face first into the barrel with a surprised yelp. My friend’s shield indicator fell 1% in my visor.
“I’m okay,” he groaned.
We hurried up into our own barrels, trying as best as we could not to destroy them on accident with our bulky frames. Closing the lids was the hardest part, a task that fell to Anders. He sealed everyone off then, after a bit of waiting in the darkness, I heard him announce he was in:
“I just hope they don’t throw me around,” he said. “Or I’ll come tumbling right out.”
“Hang tight, vaquero,” said Beard.
Time passed slowly as we waited in total darkness for the drones to load us into the freighter.
“I’m so excited,” Beard shared after the first ten minutes passed. “I feel like a space Trojan horse, tricking our enemies into letting us inside their walls. It’s my first ship assault as the boarding party, you know? I’m always the one getting boarded.”
“Huh,” said Mai, “why are we bringing a Merchant player into this?”
“Minigun,” Rylena told her.
“Ah. Right.”
“H
e’s also a better shot than Cole,” added Walpurgis.
“And more handsome,” said Beard.
“Okay, I’m shutting off comms,” I said as soon as I saw the tides shifting against me. “Remain alert, everyone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Battleship Firebrand
The barrels were left undisturbed until the drones were done ferrying everything else. The magnetic lid made it hard to listen to sounds outside and gauge what was going on.
Some player could walk out of the ship and see all the silver liquid spilled everywhere. Or the drones could get rebooted by some security subroutine. Or we could have been dead-wrong about the battleship’s location and were about to assault some poor Alliance just starting out.
Tension is harder to deal with when you’re alone and blind. There’s truth to the saying that everything is less scary in broad daylight.
For me, this had an easy fix. I wasn’t physically in the bottom of a barrel, so I opened a window to the real world. Irene was in front of me, laying against the Whistleblower’s frame. She shifted uneasily, and as if sensing my presence, turned to me and gave me a thumbs up.
“It’ll work,” she said, sensing my concern even through the mask of the mindjack. “Just you watch.”
“You think Dervaux’s auction’s going on now?” I told her.
“Probably. Nothing we can do to stop that one, Cole. We’re not really ninjas, you know. Let the rest of the world handle Dervaux and we can deal with her little foothold in Rune. It’s better this way. We get to live longer.”
I was thinking of Martinez and her family. How many people just like her were around different branches of public and private service? They’d do anything to keep their loved ones safe, just like me, or Irene, or Van, or Beard… It was painful to imagine going to war with people just like me.
The image of Doyle and Martinez falling out of the Whistleblower flashed through my mind and was gone in a flash. Like thunder.