Devastator

by Isaac Hooke

  “Xander, at what distance can they do that?” Jain asked.

  “At three thousand kilometers, even with their heightened time sense, the Void Warriors will never be able to move out of the way of the energy bolts in time,” Xander said. “The Warriors might be able to get off some quick return shots with raptors before the Hull Burners disable their weapons.”

  “But the damage heavy lasers cause versus energy cannons is minuscule,” Jain said.

  “They’ll definitely get far less than they give,” Xander agreed.

  “Who would have thought that our greatest enemy in the battle between Mind Refurbs and aliens would be fellow Mind Refurbs?” Gavin lamented.

  Jain continued toward the pyramid base.

  “The Hull Burners passed the three thousand kilometer mark,” Cranston said. “They’re decelerating. No wait, only three are. And they still haven’t fired.”

  Jain glanced at his tactical display. Three were coming to a halt, three more were continuing onward, giving the Void Warriors a wide berth.

  “Maybe they just want to babysit us,” Mark said.

  “The three Hull Burners have reached us,” Cranston said a moment later. “It’s kind of a tense stand-off. They’re ignoring communications, keeping their energy cannons pointed at us. The other three are continuing toward you.”

  Jain decelerated and came to a halt five hundred meters from the hull, smack-dab between the Arcane and the Wheelbarrow.

  “Xander, status update,” Jain said.

  “Interface apparatus has been 3D-printed in cargo bay three,” Xander said. “Reactor rods are installed and operational. All activation tests have passed. I’m ready to initiate communications with the alien vessel.”

  “Good,” Jain said. “Open up the cargo bay doors and prepare to execute the VR program Sheila put together. I’m going in. Keep watch on the outside world while I’m gone.”

  “Wait, I’m receiving a message from Sheila’s Accomp,” Xander said.

  “Let’s hear it,” Jain said.

  “Hello,” a deep male voice said. That would be Charlie, her Accomp. In Sheila’s VR, Charlie always dressed the same way as her virtual cabana boys: clad in a loincloth, with muscles slicked in oil. Jain was glad the current conversation was voice-only. “Sheila wants me to send the latest access key your way.”

  “Is she all right?” Jain asked.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie sent. “She hasn’t been answering my queries. But her processor is operating at its highest frequency... she’s definitely occupied in some way.”

  “All right, send those keys.” Jain glanced at Xander. “Ensure they’re routed to the VR program. Continually update them if Charlie sends more.”

  “Will do,” Xander said.

  Jain glanced one last time at his tactical display; the Hull Burners were nearing the three thousand kilometer mark and decelerating.

  Jain upped his time sense to the maximum. “Initiate VR program.”

  His engines redlined as the VR subroutines took control and began to modulate the reactor core, producing the gamma rays necessary to initiate communications with the alien vessel.

  This should be interesting.

  The bridge winked out.

  20

  Jain floated in the VR environment Sheila had created for access to the alien user interface. She hadn’t been kidding when she said it was barebones. He was essentially inside a big cube made of vector graphics, like something one might find on a LIDAR display, but minus most detail. Squares composed of white wireframes covered the walls, ceiling and floor.

  That he was here told him that the latest keys Sheila’s Accomp had transmitted still worked. Or at least, he assumed they did...

  A HUD overlaid his vision, providing a menu that he could activate by focusing on it. There were various options to hook into the alien codebase, obviously meant for real-time debugging purposes, including the ability to execute arbitrary lines of alien code. Their programming language was mostly auditory in nature, and Sheila had represented different code snippets as visual waveforms so he could drag and drop them at leisure. Assuming he wanted to go down that route.

  I’m a SEAL, not a programmer.

  He continued digging into the menu options, until he found something interesting, an option labeled “Current Users.” He focused on it. Apparently, three others were logged into the alien environment at the moment beside himself. One was likely the alien AI, and the other two had to be Sheila and Medeia. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell who was who because the usernames shown were a combination of random characters.

  He focused on the second name, assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the first name would be the alien AI, the second Sheila, and the third Medeia. A context menu popped up. There were only two options. Send Message. And View Profile.

  View Profile came up empty. He tried on the first and third names. Same thing. He went back to the second name, and chose the Send Message option.

  A small microphone icon appeared at the bottom of his HUD, indicating that the system was recording.

  “Uh, hey Sheila, you there?” Jain asked.

  “Hey,” she replied. It was her voice, but that could have been the AI mimicking her.

  “So what’s going on?” Jain pressed.

  No reply.

  “Sheila?” Jain tried again.

  He received a request on his HUD.

  Sheila has invited you to join her VR environment. Do you accept? (Y/N)

  Jain stared at the two options. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this might be a trap. If the alien AI coerced Jain into joining a VR environment that he had no control over, Jain could literally become a prisoner in his own mind, stuck in the remote VR until the alien set him free.

  He sent a quick message to the first user, and the third, trying to confirm their identities, but neither answered. He hadn’t expected the alien AI core to answer, but he had hoped Medeia would. But apparently, she was occupied.

  He stared at the invite request once more. Finally he chose the Y option.

  As he feared, an alert popped up:

  Warning. If you enter this VR environment, your avatar will be under the complete control of the host user.

  He tried not to imagine what kind of tortures might await him in there. While he was still human, he’d heard stories about people who had become trapped in VR while playing horror simulations. Usually when they got out, they were never the same again.

  He sighed.

  Well, I came here to help. I have to at least try.

  He accepted the invite.

  Jain stood on a walkway next to a crenelated wall. Between the crenellations, he could see an army composed of creatures lining the field below. They had a double pair of pincers on the lower parts of their heads, where their mouths were, and multiple tentacles lining both sides of their bodies. They stood on two thick, bulbous legs.

  They were spitting images of the race he had encountered so long ago: Xenon 626.

  The sight momentarily stunned him, and it wasn’t until a fiery rock arced toward him from the field below that he snapped back to the present moment and ducked.

  The rock flew over him.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a medieval castle. Its towers were pocked with blast craters, and many of the stones blazed with jellied gasoline or whatever burning substance the rocks had transferred to the surface.

  He looked down at himself, and realized he wore a suit of plate armor, and held a sword and shield. A chain mail coif pressed against his head. A hit point number showed “100” in the upper right of his HUD. There was an overhead map just underneath that number, which represented the scene from a top-down perspective.

  He turned toward the field below once more, and saw that the Xenon stood between trebuchets: the source of the fiery rocks lobbed at the wall. He wasn’t quite sure why the aliens were using ancient human technology to besiege the castle, nor why he was dressed in medieval armor and defending that sa
me castle.

  A commotion drew his attention to the left. Several Xenon had shoved siege ladders up against the wall and were scaling it, piling over the crenellations at the top. They had slaughtered all of the human defenders in the immediate area and formed a throng around what were presumably the final group. Though Jain couldn’t see any of the members from here because of the way the Xenon were crowded around them, he realized he’d probably found Sheila, and maybe Medeia, too: lopped-off tentacles and pincered heads occasionally launched into the air from the center of the horde. Some of those severed body parts were sizzling and charred.

  “Yup, that’s gotta be them,” Jain muttered. “Great day to pick for a medieval jaunt.”

  He tried to change his weapon, but the interface refused to respond.

  Damn it, I hate not having control of my avatar.

  Though he might not be able to change the external environment, internal knowledge was a different story, however: he still had access to his cloud database. Fortunately, it contained a sword-fighting subroutine, so he quickly downloaded the necessary skill into his avatar.

  Then he rushed the horde, swinging the sword like an expert.

  Unfortunately, the skimpy sword didn’t work too well against the Xenon bodies: he hit one of the aliens on the outskirt in the back, and the blade penetrated maybe a few inches.

  Jain slid it free as the Xenon turned around to face him. It stood to its full height, seeming angered by his little potshot.

  Jain backed away. “Uh.”

  A tentacle shot out and Jain leaped to the side. He tried to increase his time sense to improve his odds, but realized he was already operating at the maximum possible level.

  More tentacles shot out; Jain hit one in a glancing blow with his sword, but it only seemed to anger the alien.

  And then an explosive shock wave shot out from behind and threw the creature right at him. Along with all the other aliens crowded around the defenders.

  Jain landed on the hard walkway, and had to shove away the tentacles that had fallen on top of him. The alien’s back was scorched away, and it didn’t get up. The others lying on the ground around him were the same.

  He shot his gaze toward the source of that shock wave, and saw Sheila and Medeia standing next to a flaming iron brazier. The fires within had shot up fairly high, but they receded to something more normal as he watched.

  Dressed in plate mail, Medeia and Sheila rushed the top of the ladder that was leaning against the crenellations and shoved it off the wall, sending the aliens clinging to it backward; the Xenon landed on their brethren in the field below, and shrieks of agony filled the air.

  Jain ran to them.

  Sheila and Medeia both spun, raising their weapons as if to strike, but then Sheila recognized him and lowered her blade, as did Medeia.

  “Quit fooling around and help us out!” Sheila said.

  “I just got here,” Jain said. “Been trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  Another ladder slammed against the wall nearby, and Medeia rushed it. She swung her longsword at the ladder, cutting through the Xenon that emerged.

  “Well, her sword works better than mine,” Jain said.

  Medeia leaped onto the wall and kicked the ladder over.

  She jumped back down as a flaming rock arced past and barely missed her.

  “I’m in my element,” Medeia said, hefting her blade.

  “You always were a fan of big, poky stabbing things, weren’t you?” Jain said.

  “Now all I need is my cloaking device and I’ll be complete,” Medeia said.

  Another rock came flying over the wall. This time, two tentacled Xenon clung to it. Sheila quickly sheathed her sword and drew the bow from her back; she fired two arrows in rapid succession. When they struck the Xenon on the rock, the aliens exploded.

  “What the hell is this?” Jain said as another ladder landed on the wall several meters in front of him. He ran alongside Sheila and Medeia to deal with it.

  “I dug too deep, almost escalating my privileges, so the ship gave up,” Sheila said, replacing her bow with the sword as she ran. “The vessel is attempting to self-destruct, courtesy of the alien AI core. This is the VR depiction of the virus I’ve created in my attempt to stop it. Meanwhile, the Xenon are the representations of the antiviral code the alien came up with to stop me.”

  Jain hacked at the tentacles of an alien that appeared at the top of the ladder, but had just as much difficultly cutting through as last time. “Why would you choose Xenon 626 to represent the antiviral code?”

  Sheila leaped past him and stabbed the alien, sending it falling; Medeia meanwhile shoved the ladder backward.

  “I dunno,” Sheila told him. “Whenever I think of an enemy, they’re the first that come to mind. And I often spend my leisure time in fantasy settings, so it was second nature for me to pick a castle defense campaign to serve as the backdrop.” She pointed her sword toward the courtyard behind her. “You see that keep on the far side of the courtyard? If the Xenon seize it, we lose, and the ship self-destructs, potentially bringing us three along with it.”

  A dragon roared past overhead, breathing fire. Jain held his shield above him, and deflected the flames. He yelled above the noise: “So that’s all we have to do, defend these walls?”

  Sheila and Medeia didn’t have shields, and instead crouched directly behind the wall of the castle, beneath the arc of the incoming fire.

  When the dragon passed, Sheila stood up and pointed over the wall, toward the field below. “You see that small tent?”

  He gazed between the crenellations; a wide, blue tent lay sprawled across the field behind the bulk of the Xenon army.

  “Inside there’s a small shard,” she continued. “It symbolizes the AI core’s detonation control unit. You take that shard, the self-destruction sequence aborts. All of this ends.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” Jain said. “Question: why don’t you teleport there? Or create a cloaking device like Medeia mentioned?”

  “The alien has already launched a virus of its own to attack my VR subsystems,” Sheila said, racing to dislodge another ladder. “I’ve barely got it contained—you can’t see it, because I’m running two VR partitions at once here. The virus has infected smaller subsystems, severely limiting my influence in this environment. I can’t teleport, or create items like invisibility cloaks. I have to be careful, because that virus is threatening to leak out into my main code.”

  “Fine, I’ll get this shard of yours,” Jain said. “But first of all, I’d like control of my avatar, if you don’t mind.”

  A notice appeared on his HUD.

  Sheila has granted you full avatar control.

  “Thank you,” Jain said. “Now it’s time for a real weapon.”

  “As I mentioned, the virus will limit what you can create,” Sheila said. “Plus, certain weapons are a bad idea.”

  He transformed his sword into a plasma rifle.

  “Like that one for example,” Sheila said.

  Ignoring her, he aimed his weapon at a Xenon that was topping another nearby ladder.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you...” Sheila continued.

  Too late, Jain fired. The bolt struck the alien but immediately ricocheted, shattering into multiple bolts that traveled in every direction.

  He barely ducked behind his shield as some of the bolts almost struck him.

  He glanced at Sheila, who had taken a bolt directly in her chest plate, which was sizzling from the damage. She seemed otherwise unharmed.

  “Sorry about that,” he said sheepishly.

  The alien, meanwhile, had taken no damage, and landed on the walkway. It angrily stalked toward him, but then a blade pierced it from behind, and it froze. The blade slid to the side, and then came back in again, beheading the creature. It toppled, and Medeia stood behind it.

  “I guess I’ll need a weapon more like hers,” Jain said as Medeia leaped toward the source ladder.

 
He created a huge, one-handed, double-bladed battle-ax, the tips lined with deadly blue laser light. He glanced at Sheila. “How’s this?”

  “That’ll work,” Sheila said. “As long as it cuts, your fine.”

  Jain quickly downloaded a double-bladed ax algorithm from his cloud so that he could properly handle it.

  The dragon flew past once again, breathing fire. Sheila immediately dashed ahead of the flames, racing along the walkway in front of it. She had replaced her sword with the bow, and when she shot, an arrow darted skyward—there was a rope connected to it so that when it struck the underbelly of the beast, Sheila leaped onto the hanging cord and began climbing. The hardy dragon didn’t even seem aware that it had been hit.

  “Good luck!” Sheila shouted down at him. “By the way, the closer you get to the tent, the harder the resistance will become. But the same is true with me and my keep! Oh, and those hit points in the upper right of your HUD? Don’t let them reach zero!”

  “Or what?” Jain called.

  “The alien antiviral code will infiltrate your own AI core,” Sheila said. “Becoming a full-blown virus. You’ll have to log off to deal with it."

  “Great.”

  A ladder landed on the wall beside him, and a tentacled Xenon appeared at the top.

  “How are they getting up here so fast?” Jain asked

  “They start climbing while the ladders are being raised,” Media explained.

  “Oh.” He swung his laser-tipped battle-ax. This time, when he hit, the blade passed clean through the flesh, cutting a deep gash halfway through the creature’s tentacled torso, and cutting off three tentacles along the sides to boot.

  The Xenon gurgled, and collapsed.

  “Nice.” Jain leaped onto the ladder and pushed off from the crenelated wall. The ladder arced outward, swinging away from the wall, bringing Jain and all the Xenon clinging to the rungs below him out across the field.

  The ladder reached the apex of its arc and then plunged downward, heading directly toward the horde of hungry Xenon waiting below.