by G. R. Cooper
“If I had the authority to give her a free month, I would have,” he paused, “sir.”
“Not good enough, Eric,” he said dismissively, “I’ve told you before, you’ve got to be able to deflect these types before it ever gets to that. It should never come to my attention, much less become my problem,” he frowned. “Work on that.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said Eric, turning back to his computer, seething.
Eric left work, a little early, leaving by the side door away from his manager’s office. He walked out into the early September evening, frustrated. He wasn’t concerned with his job; he’d closed off that annoyance as he left his cubicle. He was frustrated by his inability to outfit the HMS Westy as much as he wanted. Needed, he corrected himself.
He boarded the bus home, wondering how he’d raise the funds to buy the cladding that would cloak his ship from pirates. He’d figure that out later, he thought, then began doing the mental calculations for the advantage a cloak would allow him.
If he hunted outside of a gravity well, he only had to get up to the few percent of C required to make a jump. He needed his hunting ground to be far enough away from the likely attack point that the pirate wouldn’t detect his sudden acceleration until it was too late. If he was ten light seconds away, but it took him thirty light seconds to accelerate to jump speed, then his adversary would get twenty seconds notice before the attack.
The Westy had to be, he thought, close enough to be able to “see” the attack quickly, but not so close as to spoil his attack before it began. He’d try one-eighth of an astronomical unit, or AU. That was about a light minute. Sixty seconds.
So sixty seconds after an attack, he’d see it, then go to flank speed. If it took him thirty seconds to get to speed, he’d still be able to jump in on top of the pirate a minute and a half after it had attacked the cargo ship. That was much better than thirteen or so minutes he was used to working with.
In addition to being a larger shock to the pirate, to be hunted so quickly, it would give the Westy a much smaller area of space to sort through; if he was close enough to detect the actual launch of the torpedo, not just the explosion, he’d have a pin-point location to jump to.
Eric smiled into space, confusing the little girl bus passenger who happened to have glanced at him at just that moment. Then Eric stood as he reached his stop and, rejuvenated, dashed off the bus and to his building.
Eric spoke into the phone, this time in his flat.
“Yes, I know I’m a little late on the August payment, but I’ll send it off today.”
He paused, listening.
“No,” he said, “it will just be the minimum amount, I’m afraid. I’ve had a bit of a family crisis, you see,” he smiled, trying to project that friendliness into the phone line and through to the credit card support agent on the other end.
“Thank you, yes, everything will turn out alright for mother, I’m sure,” he continued, “but it would be awfully helpful if I could get a little extension on my credit line. To help her out.”
He listened.
“Really?” he brightened. “Thank you. That will help immensely.”
He closed the line, ending the third such call he’d made to his creditors in the last hour. His lines of credit now extended, he had enough, barely, to add the cladding to the HMS Westy and begin hunting earnestly now. He smiled and, finishing the last of his microwaved dinner, walked into his computer room and sat heavily in his chair.
“Number One,” he said, “bring up the purchase listings for cloaking devices and cladding, if it pleases you.”
Eric looked to his newly updated sensor systems. The cladding he’d just purchased wouldn’t stand up to much of a direct scan; but it would help. He’d need a full cloaking system in order to really be invisible at a distance to an active search, but the cladding would allow him to sit quietly and not have to worry about being detected by a visual scan.
As long as he got to the system well before the pirate, he’d just sit still, quietly, as he usually did. He could now do it much much closer to the action than before. Assuming pirates didn’t suddenly start buying and using active scanning sensors, he was set.
“Number One,” he said, “all ahead full speed to waypoint one.”
He sat back in his chair, watching as the Westy sidled away from the space station and turned, accelerating, toward the preprogrammed jump point.
Eric pulled up the navigation menu, and selected his destination. He looked over the system and noted that the maps had been updated. The third planet in the system was now named Shepherd’s Cross.
“Stupid name,” Eric muttered, suddenly concerned. If someone was terraforming that planet, working toward civilizing the system, would the pirates have to find someplace else to hunt? He frowned, began tapping nervously on his chair’s arm.
Chapter 14
Duncan Sheriden crept through the small copse of trees, the occasional snap of a trodden twig accenting his nervousness.
“Calm down,” he told himself, “the sound of those laser batteries are going to mask just about any noise I can make.” Through the trees, he saw the flash of light followed shortly by the sharp sizzling sound as the Arn batteries fired upward, into space. The firing had been repeated every thirty seconds or so since they’d landed.
“Shit,” said Shannon, slightly panicked, over the radio. “We’re taking a pounding up here. They’re targeting the command ships.”
“Go on,” said Matt.
“Each hit is dropping my shields,” she continued, “faster than I can regenerate them.” They could hear her gulp over the radio, “I’m putting all of my power to my shields. I’ve got nothing left over for you guys, and I’m still going to be destroyed.”
Matt dropped to one knee, his friends mirrored him. The all scanned the area around them, looking through the forest for any signs of an ambush.
The oak-like trees in all directions were spaced enough that patches of grass grew in the spots soaked by sunlight, but most of the area around each tree was a red clay-like soil, frosted white from what Duncan assumed were the remains or the spore from some sort of mushroom like growth around each tree's lower trunk. The leaves on the trees around them shook as another blast from the batteries fired; a few of the white mushrooms fell onto the forest floor.
“I think,” he said, “we all know what we have to do. We have to take out those laser batteries. Fast.”
Vince and Clancey nodded.
“Hurry,” pleaded Shannon, adding urgency.
Duncan looked to his tactical map. The batteries were probably half a kilometer away. On the other side of a small village. That village was likely fortified with Arn. Lots of Arn. They didn’t have time to work their way around it. Their only advantage was that there were many groups dropping into this area, probably all being told the same thing by their controllers. They’d have to hurry to try to overwhelm the defenses.
“A good banzai charge,” muttered Duncan. “Into the valley of death.”
His friends laughed. They all stood, moved to a lateral spread and began sprinting through the woods. Toward the village. Toward the Arn.
They approached to within about a hundred meters of the village when the treeline ended and they shot into open grassland. They hadn’t come under fire, as yet, but they did see the occasional flash as the various groups of humans approaching the town from different sides were brought to the attention of the defenders. Sudden billows of smoke, followed by the whump of explosions, on the verge of the town showed that the fight was being taken to the aliens quickly as the humans approached to within grenade range.
As Duncan got to fifty meters from the first house, he saw movement inside a window on the ground floor and let loose a running, unaimed shot from his plasma rifle that, miraculously, blasted through the window glass and momentarily illuminated the room within. His feeling of triumph was quickly quashed when a decidedly human hand extended from the window, middle finger extended.
> “Watch where you’re shooting, newbie!” yelled the player in the room. “We already cleaned them out of this building.”
“Sorry!” shouted Duncan, high on adrenaline, as he reached, then jumped through, the window into the room. Matt, Vince and Clancey followed and the four of them looked to the four players already in the room, as well as the corpse of an Arn, still smoking, in the room center.
“Taipan!” shouted one of them.
“Oh, hi Blesk,” said Duncan. He nodded to the other three; Third, Tex and someone named Gray Eagle. The Fleet Bigweek clan; friends of Eric West, but nothing like him, as far as Duncan could tell, in demeanor or attitude.
“What is that thing?” Duncan continued, pointing at Gray Eagle.
“Big Bertha,” Gray Eagle responded, hefting a large gatling gun. He smiled broadly through his bushy gray beard, which spread, along with his long silver hair, over the chest and shoulders of his heavy armor.
“It’s how we got in,” said Third, “G.E. laid down a covering fire on the south side of this building while we charged. There are a couple of dead Arn in the next room thanks to him.”
“We’re just waiting here for it to recharge before we move on to the next building,” said Blesk.
“Hang on,” said Tex, “Jordi’s saying that the control ships are still getting hit, but they’ve come up with a routine where the rest of the ships all channel some of their power to the shields of the ships getting hit. All of the ships should be able to give about twenty percent of the power to the ground units, so our shields can be recharged just not as quickly. Same goes for your gun G.E.”
“Let’s group while we wait,” said Clancey.
Matt added everyone to the same group, sharing a radio channel.
“I’m ready, dudes,” said Gray Eagle, moving to the window on the other side of the room. He hefted the gun onto the window sill, looked back at the rest of the group expectantly; and laughed a truly evil laugh.
The groups moved at a sprint between the two buildings, spread roughly into two triangles of three with Duncan somewhere in between the two trios. Duncan could see to his right, in his peripheral vision, another group of humans attacking a different house. Laser lights crisscrossed between the other house and those humans, and explosions shook the ground, as Duncan pounded forward. He looked to the left, there was nothing, then back to the house in front of him, a two story box with six windows on this side; three on each floor.
As they got to within twenty yards, all six of those windows erupted, without warning, laser fire cutting into Duncan’s friends. Several went down immediately, followed quickly by an overwhelming eruption from behind him as the gatling gun opened up, spewing fire over Duncan’s head into the house.
As Gray Eagle sprayed over the various windows of the house, Duncan finished his sprint and dove onto the ground next to its base. He looked back, and then around. He was the only one of the group to have made it. He looked over the ground he’d just run over, at the six bodies of his friends. They’d gone down instantly, their shields and armor overwhelmed by a broadside of fire unleashed from the house.
Duncan was brought out of his shock by another blast of fire from the building, this time directed at Gray Eagle and the house Duncan had just left. Whether the fire was deadly or just suppressive, Duncan didn’t know, but the gatling gun went silent.
Duncan, his heart pounding and his hands shaking, tore open his backpack and started pulling grenades out. High explosive, fragmentation. He started pulling pins and throwing them through the first floor windows, one after another, as quickly as he could. Once he’d thrown the third through the last window, he dropped, rolled into the corner of the building and ground and covered his head.
The three blasts rocked the building in quick succession, and Duncan leapt to his feet and jumped through the leftmost window into the room. He crouched as he landed and swept the barrel of his plasma rifle over the room, from left to right, as he looked for a target. Eight Arn lay twisted, smoking and partially disassembled, testament to the deadliness of his grenades and the gatling gun’s firepower.
There was nothing else alive.
On this floor.
Duncan looked to the stairway, leading up, and moved toward it.
Chapter 15
Phani Mutha read through the listings available to him on the colony administrator control screen, which he had setup on the back wall of the control room of the space station, Shepherd’s Crook, next to the duplicate control that Taipan had placed for the management of the planet, Shepherd’s Cross.
The two screens allowed for the manipulation of the colony facilities for their respective locations, but were currently configured for two very different kinds of activities.
Where the planet’s controller displayed current status for a variety of early stage terraforming activities, the station’s display had only one active option available; ‘Domesticated Animals’.
He reached to the button on the lower-right corner of the screen and pressed it. This allowed him to feed recipes into the system. He began selecting the green, scroll-looking items in his inventory. Canine. Feline. Ovine. He’d chosen those three to begin with; he’d add more recipes as the market demanded.
Phani selected the third he’d entered, ‘Ovine’, and began working through the configuration options. While he thought there might be a demand for lambs, he wasn’t sure that the desire would translate to fully grown sheep, so the first option he set restricted the animal from aging. It would remain forever a lamb.
Then he selected color. He began to run the creation process, while configuring the next. After a few minutes, Phani had several blueprints for lambs, in several shades, that he took to the station manufactory.
Having fed the blueprints, one at a time, he opened his inventory and began pulling the sheep out and dropping them onto the floor. They began to gambol around the room, bleating happily. Phani laughed as he chased them down, one by one, preparing to take them to the apartment on Kepler station he’d rented and outfitted as his storefront - the first of many, he hoped, on stations throughout the galaxy.
He then repeated the process with a number of canines and felines. Some he set to remain puppies and kittens, but most were configured to age according to their time in the game world. He also created multiple colorings of each, but was limited to single, non-specific breeds for each.
Phani read through the licensing agreement provided by the Omegaverse for the propagation and sale of in-game digital objects. He could submit, he saw, 3D objects for inclusion in the game universe; additions to the standard, basic, objects included in the game.
For example, he thought, in addition to being able to sell the generic ‘mutt’ dog available as standard in every ‘Domesticated Animals’ recipe, he could submit the 3D model for any breed he wanted to add. He’d spent the previous evening researching popular American breeds.
Along with the model, he could define, through an easy to use scripting language, the behavior of the animal. He could create a fearsome Rottweiler guard dog, or a sleepy Saint Bernard. A friendly Labrador, or a yappy Pomeranian. All of the above. And he’d retain the rights to the specific models. Any future colony administrator that wanted to add his models to their system would not only have to pay a single up front fee, they’d have to pay a percentage for every individual item they created from it.
Nothing, however, prevented another player from creating and adding their own models as well, so Phani realized that his had to be of the highest quality. The 3D models not only had to be accurate, they had to be highly detailed with an extensive library of movement animations. The more accurate, and thus believable, his models were, the more likely people would want his - and the less likely someone would see his less than perfect offerings as an opportunity to undercut his market.
He lit a cigarette and began making a list of his requirements for each species and breed. The first thing he needed to create were the models, sounds and animations. He
corrected himself; the first thing he had to have created were the models, sounds and animations. Phani had no such skills, but he thought he knew of some who did.
Over the last couple of years, India’s internet infrastructure had been rapidly expanded and fast, reliable connection was now available to most of the billion people in the country. Phani connected, wirelessly, through to a high-speed feed that was routed through a series of large, solar powered, automated aircraft, called Aquila, that circled over Pune day and night; alternately referred to as ‘Zucker-blimps’ or ‘Ambani-balloons’ after the billionaires who, with internet.org, had brought that access to the masses of the Indian cities. Phani wondered at the balloon reference - they weren’t blimps or airships, but flying wings. The wingspan of each was larger than a jumbo-jet, and each flew higher than any airliner, uninterrupted, for months at a time.
He used that connection now to search through listings for Pune’s technical corporations until he found what he was looking for - a small group who specialized in doing outsourced work for game companies; specifically art assets including 3D models and animations, as well as any associated sound effects. He began to write up his proposal, detailed with everything he’d need for ten breeds of cats and dogs, and sent it off.
Phani leaned back in his chair, took a last drag on the cigarette before mashing it out. He needed, he thought, to expand his operations as quickly as he could. To take advantage of any opportunities available to him before someone else did.
He’d seen the growth figures for the Omegaverse; less than a year old, it already had close to ten million players worldwide. That growth rate wasn’t steady, it was increasing. Projections put the player-base at one hundred million by next year.
Phani needed to be prepared for that.
