by Hugo Huesca
“I know! I’m near the lift now.” I traveled through the vacuum at a pitifully slow speed. Neither my oxygen streams nor jetpack were functional. If something pushed me out of my trajectory, I’d have no way of correcting for it. Nor did I have a way to gain speed.
I held the block against my chest and managed to leave it there. I needed both my hands to move.
A tiny sphere darted by my shoulder. It was 401. The tiny drone had been deployed far enough from Rylena’s body that it hadn’t gotten translighted with her. It flew in a panicky sort of way.
“It’s you and me once more, 401,” I told the drone, even if it couldn’t hear me. It flew close to me, trying all the while to update my non-functional minimap to guide me home safely. It bounced against my torn armor with frustration.
There were bodies still drifting around when I reached the lift. They were the players who had tried to cage us. The lift’s explosion had gotten the lot of them.
I pushed down the hole left by the lift and reached the first floor. More bodies were laying around. As I touched the floor, I realized that some of them were alive and starting to get their bearings. One mid-level player close to me tried to crawl in my direction, so I grabbed his helmet and yanked it off.
Then I floated in zero-g down the clamped corridors of Firebrand, trying to remember the route we’d taken. How long until someone at the real Sleipnir headquarters realized what was going on and got another two dozen guards online?
The explosives we’d left in our path helped. Corridors had collapsed, entire rooms were now a bunch of flying debris, and parts of the ship were exposed to open space. Power was off, everywhere. The proof was in the lighting. It was a dark sepia, barely enough to see. Candlelight in space. Product of cheap emergency lighting all over the ship, designed to start the second the energy feed was off.
The explosion had disrupted the engines. Great news, while it lasted.
As I floated or crawled or clanked my way out of the entrails of the ship I kept running into survivors, some of whom were already grouping into pitiful patrols. I avoided those, as I favored the collapsed corridors where everyone was either dead or in bad shape, so I was able to see them bumbling about and easily avoid them.
I stumbled into another end-game player with a dead power-suit. He tried to get into a fist match with me, so I put Van Dorsett’s school of combat into practice and smashed my helmet’s forehead into his visor. The metal carved enough to puncture his helmet—and mine didn’t.
I kept going. By my conjectures, I was halfway out. And it didn’t matter.
“I’m not going to make it,” I told Irene. It wasn’t panic speaking, it was simple observation. Math. I was running out of routes to avoid the remaining Sleipnir players. I caught sight of a fresh player out of the corner of my eye. A newbie, sure, but it meant reinforcements were already on the way.
Irene thought I was panicking. “You can do it, Cole!” She grabbed my shoulders as she tried to be encouraging. “Everyone believes in you! I believe in you. Don’t give up!”
“I’m not giving up, it’s just that I’m about to get surrounded.”
401 nudged the back of my head with urgency. I looked back to see one lone player in mid-game armor rush towards me as he raised his blaster. I took a corner and tried hard to put as much distance between us as I could. Someone started shooting at me, and missing. Long, red beams smashed into surface around me, showering me in sparks. They were getting closer.
“Oh,” said Irene, her voice far away as my focus was set in surviving the laser barrage as long as I could. “That’s better, I think. I’m not good at hopelessly cheering… Can you hold them for like five minutes, then? Van and the others are already closing in.”
It’s useless, I thought. Even if the Teddy got as close as it could to the ship, that wasn’t as close as I’d need for a hot extraction. The Firebrand’s computers would jam any attempt to jump close enough to the battleship’s shields. Hell, the targeting systems would take my ship out at close range if Van tried that. She had to know this. Not even Francis and Rylena could hack their way into disabling an entire battleship.
And yet, I can choose to go out swinging.
There was a dead-end to my right, one of the half-constructed hangars that would house row upon row of fighter squads when the battleship was completed. It was dark. I distinguished bulky shapes at the end of the stadium-sized strip of metal.
In front of me, three guards and one end-game player cut the corner and raised plasma rifles as they saw me, while the good folks behind me kept shooting in my general direction.
I ran out of the cramped interior of the ship and exchanged the candlelight pursuit with the darkness of space, only broken by the distant stars, watching me like a cold, all-seeing public.
Sleipnir didn’t rush into the strip as fast as I had hoped. They knew there was no way out, so they had time to regroup. I kept running towards the shapes I couldn’t even see anymore. The shooting started again and red and green lightning cut the shadows in blinding bursts. My visor’s alarms kept blaring at me all the while.
Where are they? I thought when I reached the spot where the exo-suits had been. Sleipnir’s blind shooting wasn’t close enough to be a danger, but they were looking for me with military-grade flashlights. I had less than three seconds.
Where are they?
Two seconds. 401 flew in front of me and turned on his tiny flashlight. There! Less than a yard to the left. I darted for them, every step a painful battle with my boots magnetic field.
401 turned off the flashlight a bit too late. The players had seen us, and they were closing in.
If there had been any sound besides the deafening silence, they’d have heard the buzz of an antimatter engine power on a series of construction servos. I rerouted a bit of its energy towards my own suit. Shields were dead, but the comms turned right back on, as did the rest of the visor.
Minimap was back on, a ton of error messages were flying through the corner of my eye, my KIA teammates were listed at another corner (how the hell was Walpurgis still alive…?), inventory online. I wasn’t blind and deaf to the world anymore.
Sleipnir was rushing in my general direction expecting to execute a torn-down runaway.
Instead, an end-game player got a giant fist to the face as he rushed in to finish me off and claim the kill. The punch tore him out of the floor, pulverized his shields, caved metal in, and sent him out into space. In the perfect silence, it would’ve been poetic if I was more graceful.
“I see your point, Keles,” I said to no one in particular. That punch was very satisfying.
I wanted to punch them some more.
Flashlight beams focused on myself and my exo-suit. Too late. The other four players had followed their leader into combat and were now within my reach.
I swung at them like they were flies and sent two flying back from where they came. The other shot at me with a blaster, several times. Most missed, but I had to deflect the other ones with my exo-leg. If he hit the suit’s core…
So I grabbed his head with one giant hand and smashed him against his other teammate. The second survived, so I tore his crude jetpack and threw him out into space.
“You’re still alive?” Irene asked me in the real world.
“Alive? I’m more alive than ever!”
A dozen beams of light illuminated the hangar as all the remaining Sleipnir population poured down the strip. At least thirty. I could hear men and women bark orders as everyone fanned out, surrounding me with a perfect spread.
Keles was in the middle of them, still in his charred, melted, spark-spewing exo-suit. The left arm was missing, his own armor in worse condition than mine. He was laughing.
“Defiant to the end! This is hilarious, Cole, I even thought you had me back there. Seems you couldn’t rely on your girlfriend to bail you out of your punishment, in the end. You saw what I did to her? She’s not getting off that easy in the real world. Neither are you.”
>
There was a good forty yards between him and I. If I rushed at him, a varied assortment of thirty science fiction weapons would melt me. And disintegrate me. And blow me up. And EMP me. And paralyze me. And hack… You get the picture.
It was over. Behind me was only empty space. I’d done my best. We’d actually gotten pretty close.
But as it turned out, our best just wasn’t good enough.
Or that would’ve been the case if Keles and his cronies had arrived just ten seconds faster.
“You should be watching this, Irene,” I told her in the real world.
“You’ll show me the replay later, big boy. Eyes on the prize.”
There was a detail I’d forgotten about the Teddy and the Firebrand. It was a very tiny detail, and I’d figured it out when the exo-suit powered my comms back on.
“Hey, Keles—”
Your ship’s computers are powered off, asshole.
“No last words this time.” He raised a hand and thirty weapons took aim. “Send him crying back home.”
I dove to the floor. Not to evade the upcoming storm of fire, but to avoid being run over by something else. Reality was torn apart in a starship-sized area above my head.
Teddy jumped straight in front of the hangar, nose pointed space-side. A lot of things happened in a very short span of time. First of all, Keles dashed madly in my direction. People started shooting. A plasma shot took out both of my exo-suit’s legs.
Teddy’s Inertia Dampeners shorted and took the ship’s shields from 100% to 0%. The engines were launching a pillar of fire from the jets at full blast. The fire didn’t kill anyone, but the Teddy did as the momentum of the jump made the starship smash against the hangar like a fist from a god. The Z-Alloy plating absorbed the impact like it was a caress.
The armor of the fifteen or so players it caught underneath its bulk didn’t. The impact was powerful enough to send a shock-wave of fire through the strip, scrambling everyone still standing. Curtains of debris and vaporized hangar exploded in all directions around the Teddy’s impact zone, now almost a crater.
The last thing to happen during this brief fraction of a second was the start of Francis’ battlecry. Francis’ voice took over the public channel with enough decibels to turn my vision red. He screamed:
“OH YEAH!”
Some of the Teddy’s turrets didn’t survive the impact. They weren’t as strong as the armor, after all. The ones that did sprang to life. More players died.
Keles was screaming in a mad fury. The impact had sent him flying in my direction, exactly the same way we’d done to him before.
The cargo doors of the Teddy jumped open. A proud figure walked out as light washed over him.
“Savin Keles,” said John Derry as he unslung a plasma rifle from his back. The confused chatter stopped as everyone, including Keles and I, turned towards the sheer presence of the former CIA Director. Even Teddy stopped shooting. “We meet at last.”
From Sleipnir’s broken ranks came a stray plasma shot that hit Derry in the head and killed him.
The sounds of battle resumed. Keles went back to screaming incoherently at me in a language I didn’t understand. I used my exo-arms to push myself in his general direction, all the while screaming incoherently at him, too. Something about his mother.
I saw out of the corner of my eye how the entire extraction team rushed out of the Teddy, weapons hot and dodging fire as they scrambled for cover behind the wings and back of the Z-Alloy armor. Spark Bandit led the charge with her stun-lance and blaster gun, with her friends at her side, Panarin shooting suppressing fire and Joseph using one of Beard’s missile launchers.
Keles and I reached each other and engaged in a brutal melee. He punched me in the face, and I went flying back several feet, spinning out of control until I managed to grab a hold of the floor and launch myself back at him, roaring. He punched me again and I went back to spinning.
“It’s useless!” he spat over the comms. He used his good leg to rush at me before I could recover and tried to reach for my exposed torso. With the strength of the exo-suit, he was strong enough to crush my avatar in a second. I smacked his hands away, while pushing him back with my other exo-arm.
“You think you’re a fighter because you’ve played this videogame? You think the streets taught you how to throw a punch? Pathetic!” He managed to get a magnetized exo-foot to the ground at the last second and he was back in front of me, laying a barrage of punches I only barely survived.
I’d never fought someone like him, in Rune or in real life. He broke my guard and hit my face with a fast jab that made my helmet’s sealant spray forward like gray blood as it tried to close the dozen tiny leaks. The impact sent me back again, but this time he kept the pace, hitting the helmet over and over again. Mind you, he did this with his only functional exo-arm. Every time I tried to get a good punch in or grab him, he dodged my attempts away or deflected them with short, lightning-fast smacks at the suit’s wrists.
Behind us and the Teddy, the skirmish continued. The Extraction Team was trying to keep Sleipnir away from me, and Sleipnir was trying to stop the Extraction Team from reaching Keles’ position and adding more bodies to the fight. The result was we were going at it alone while everyone else shot the life out of each other. I saw Panarin go down next to Derry’s magnetized corpse, still standing, arms floating as if he was swimming.
It was clear Keles had training in some brutal variant of martial arts, and it was clear he was toying with me. I couldn’t lay a single punch that mattered, and the exo-suit was cumbersome and breaking apart with each move. Turns out construction equipment wasn’t an ideal fighting machine.
A bunch of Sleipnir’s players we had sent to orbit had already regained control of their spinning forms and were flying back into the battlefield. Joseph fell under their fire.
I punched Keles in the face when he started to say something to mock me. The hit fell flat and a finger of the exo-suit fell off after it scraped against the power-suit.
Grenades were popping like candy. Every second, another one filled the dark strip with a blinding rush of neon colors, green for plasma, blue for EMP, the works. It was like a fight to the death in the middle of a rave.
There was now a leak in my visor the sealant had trouble with. I could feel the oxygen rush out through the hair-width fracture somewhere in the metallic layers behind the glass. Breathless, I magnetized the exo-suit’s left arm and spun in place to get enough inertia for a punch. As my spin gave me some distance from Keles, I pulled myself in and went for a punch as hard as I could with my other hand… But he twisted in zero-g around his magnetized leg, exactly the same way I had tried to do. My fist missed and the momentum made me pass Keles by a millimeter. Then he elbowed the suit’s back and I smacked hard against the metallic floor.
“I’ve been fighting in real wars straight out of my mother’s womb,” Keles said as he lifted my breathless frame from my exo-suit. As I tried to fight him off, he used his leg in a poor-man’s judo hold… and then he started pulling on the exo-arm. I could feel the crumble of the servos around the joints…
Somewhere far away, Van swung her spear and impaled a poor fucker as plasma and laser surged around her. Sleipnir’s corpses were pooling in the space surrounding her, as if they were orbiting around their killer.
“You’re insane!” I told Keles as he laughed like a madman and tore the suit’s arm off. I was left spinning widly in a mutilated exo-torso as my own power-armor failed with every passing second.
Spark Bandit’s crew used electrical nets to hold their enemies in place and EMP darts to punish anyone who dared to use their jetpacks too liberally around them. They fought like hunters having the time of their life, but Sleipnir had the numbers and Teddy’s turrets couldn’t shoot them in close combat around what was left of my extraction squad. I saw one of them explode as she ate a grenade few yards away from Van and three Sleipnir players. I didn’t see what happened after, as I was busy spinning like a
n idiot.
Then Keles grabbed my exo-suit and I stopped. He was staring into my eyes, close enough for the helmets to touch. His pupils were dilated and had a murderous glint.
“I even studied some replays of you and your friends,” he said. “To figure out what had made the Signal choose you over someone obviously more worthy. I found nothing special. Just another city kid bumbling his way into some undeserved victories thanks to more skilled, smarter, more capable friends… There’s nothing you can do I can’t do better, Cole. And after today, whatever glitch in this ancient emulator around us isn’t going to matter anymore. I’m going to uplift humanity. And you’re going to watch me do it.”
Keles tore the black block away from my chest and left it floating next to his own head. Then, he reached for my own torso with his suit’s hand. It was big enough to encircle it completely. He squeezed. My avatar’s pain simulators went dark as virtual organs exploded and bones were crushed.
It was over. My vision was almost completely red. It was a miracle I could still move my arms…
I’m going to take this insane fucker out even if I have to bite his virtual neck to do it.
But first, I had to win.
“Get the block to Van,” I whispered with what remained of my breath. “Fast. She has to get to the ship.”
Only the software mattered. If everyone died but the Teddy got away with it inside, it would still be a victory. Skill and Databyte loss was meaningless in comparison.
And there was an opening.
“Who are you talking to?” Keles grip faltered as he looked around. A little too late, though. He didn’t spot 401 flying harmlessly out of his sight, and didn’t spot the little drone dart towards the software-block as if someone had set fire to its inexistent ass.
401 reached the block and magnetized it to its body. Keles finally spotted it. He roared and threw his suit’s hand towards the drone, but construction equipment wasn’t built for combat and trigger-fast reactions. 401 was out of reach in the blink of an eye.
“NO! NO! EVERYONE, SHOOT THAT DRONE OUT OF—” Keles eyes opened wide as they recognized the bunch of torn components and vacuum tubes I was holding in front of his face, like a bloated, beating, cybernetic heart. “What?”
