by S. R. Witt
Operation: Snowblind
A Gamer’s Universe Story
Sam Witt
J. L. Hendricks
Pitchfork Publishing
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Thank you for reading!
Books by S R Witt
Untitled
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.
OPERATION: SNOWBLIND
All rights reserved.
Published by Pitchfork Press
Copyright © 2017 by Sam Witt
This e-book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
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First Edition: February, 2017
Created with Vellum
To my family, who kicks me in the butt when they know I need it.
To my readers, without whose support the Gamer’s Universe wouldn’t exist.
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Chapter 1
Zotz flicked the Umbra game display open with his eyes and filtered through the digital flurry of augmented reality data panels with practiced ease. Since the Metal Rats had saved him from a life of slavery and he’d become an Operator in their outfit, he’d almost gotten used to having his life dictated by the shadowy employers who fed them the endless flow of game scenarios that paid their bills. They were free to pick and choose from the missions offered by the Umbra game network, but if they wanted to eat they had to pick something.
In some ways, Zotz missed the old days of crawling through claustrophobic tunnels with racks of heavy equipment strapped to his back. Being a mine slave was a whole lot simpler than the Operator’s life. In the mines, no one cared what you looked like or how you talked. If you met your quota, the masters made sure you got your share of the rancid slop they called food. If you didn’t, they’d starve you until you produced or died—they didn’t care which.
But, for Operators, a flashy performance was worth almost as much as efficiency and natural talent. Operators who could do the work were a credit a dozen; those who could complete the jobs and look good doing it were the ones who made the real money and were showered with upgrades and other perks of the Umbra game.
Fat chance of that with a face like mine, Zotz thought to himself. His owners had changed him, augmented him so he’d be more suited for life in the dark and twisting tunnels of the asteroid mines.
Those weren’t changes he liked to see in the mirror.
Zotz found their current assignment and tapped the update icon with the tip of his finger. It wasn’t necessary to be so hands on, because the same implant that showed him the augmented reality data screens could just as easily click the button at his thought. But Zotz liked working with his hands, and as long as he moved his fingers he could pretend the implant wasn’t reading his every thought and translating it into machine code.
..::||//UMBRA SCENARIO REPORT BEGIN
UMBRA SCENARIO: HARDENED TARGET, MATERIEL SABOTAGE/DESTRUCTION
EXPECTED OPPOSITION: Non-Operator military units (50 biologicals, automated defense perimeter, anti-aircraft batteries)
SPECIAL DEFENSES: Vortex shield installation
OTHER NOTES: Enemy reinforcements within response range
OBJECTIVE 1: Neutralize communications array (1000 points)
OBJECTIVE 2: Cripple Installation (1000 points)
BONUS 1: Stay on Target (No civilian casualties, 500 points)
BONUS 2: I Did This (Transmit Rentaki Giru Victory message on all channels from base, 500 points)
ODDS OF SUCCESS: 85%
.::||\ UMBRA SCENARIO REPORT END
After reading through the details three times, Zotz was satisfied he hadn’t missed anything. It really was as straightforward as it sounded.
Not that this sabotage was a cakewalk. His outfit had spent a miserable week digging the location of Rivicle Base out of a slippery chain of grimy informants, then another three days in cramped, boring transit.
They’d hidden Dragora, their starship, in the bottom of a snow-covered valley where it wouldn’t be spotted by the network of surveillance satellites orbiting the backwater planet.
And, just to put a feather in the annoying trip’s pointy cap, Zotz had the terrifying privilege of climbing up the side of a mountain without any support. His fingers and toes were twisted into painful claws after the six hour climb, and the chill of the high elevations had penetrated his survival gear and settled into his bones as a dull ache. If he stopped moving for even a few moments, his teeth began chattering and his muscles quivered. He clenched his fingers and flexed his toes to work some feeling back into them as he paced the windy ridge.
Tilting his head away from the wind, Zotz pulled off his suit’s closed helmet and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth three times in rapid succession. His genetically modified ears swiveled to catch the echoes and the implant his owners had installed soaked up the sounds and converted them into topological data. It wasn’t perfect, but the cybernetic echolocation gave Zotz a three-dimensional model of his surroundings that showed he was almost to his target.
And just in time. The convoluted whorls of his bat-like nose, another genetic modification courtesy of his former employers, picked up the antiseptic scent of distant sleet and the static signature of lightning in the air. A massive blizzard was coming, and he wanted to be back inside Dragora’s hold before the gale force winds arrived to scrape him off the side of the mountain like a discarded crisps wrapper.
The peak he’d climbed, just like the rest of the range wrapped around the planet’s bulging middle like a spare tire, were ancient. Though they were tall, their summits were rounded mounds rather than jagged spear tips. Zotz slithered across the rounded peak of his mountain, leaving a snail’s trail through the snow, to get a look at his target. He struggled to keep his gaze locked on the base and not on the insane drop from his position to the valley below. His stomach clenched and did a barrel roll as windblown snow sailed past him and spiraled into the yawning darkness so very far below.
Rivicle Base perched on a wide, man-made plateau a hundred meters below the Zotz’s position. A massive, blast-proof wall surrounded the compound on three sides, and the mountain’s ancient bulk provided cover for its fourth side. From where he was perched, Zotz couldn’t see the tunnel, which Dragora’s orbital scans told him were carved into the stone beneath his feet to accommodate a power plant and
the communications array he’d come to wreck.
Zotz adjusted his helmet’s optics to get a closer look at Rivicle Base. It took him a while to get a good focus, because the same scientists who’d tinkered with his genes to grant him extraordinary senses of hearing and smell had screwed up and stunted his long-range vision. While he’d been a miner, crawling through oozing tunnels like a worm in the darkness, it hadn’t been a big deal, but out here…
He muttered to himself as he adjusted the optics too far, and had to back them up. “As soon as I level up, I’m getting ocular implants.”
This mission wouldn’t earn him any fancy Zeiss-Telestra UltraEyes, but he could at least afford a pair of implants that would let him see more than a hundred yards before turning the world into cotton-candy mounds of amorphous color.
He fought off the shivering and quit daydreaming of better peepers when the optics finally focused and showed him his targets. Security guards stalked along the walls in pairs, following complex patterns that reminded Zotz of an ant colony’s soldiers. From this distance, he couldn’t make out their weaponry, but he was confident they carried the Hongro Corporation’s stock kit: a powerful, but only vaguely accurate Teroth sidearm, implanted short-range communications gear, friend-or-foe optic augments, and a Teroth assault rifle that was more useful as a noisemaker than killing things. Nothing fancy, but it was all brutally effective en masse. The Hongro Corporation, who owned Rivicle Base and the rest of the snowball of a planet, was a firm believer in strength in numbers.
Zotz counted at least 20 guards on the wall, and a dozen more stationed near the perimeter defense controls. The inaccessible location and natural defenses made Rivicle Base a tough nut to crack. The addition of corporate goon squads made any kind of conventional assault doomed from the outset. “Glad I’m not going down there,” Zotz mumbled to himself.
A quick flick through the AR screen brought up Zotz’s secret weapons. He initiated the link with his surprise visitors, and watched the status indicators on his HUD light up in an amber arc.
A trio of tagalongs crawled out of his backpack and scuttled up alongside him. They tipped their disc-shaped bodies in his direction and extended their scalloped wings in jaunty salutes. A tinny voice crackled in the back of Zotz’s head. “What’s up, boss?”
Zotz targeted a section of the perimeter wall on his AR display and highlighted it for the drones. “Plant the beacon here, on the outside of the wall. Then hustle back. The storm’s brewing, and I don’t want you getting caught in it.”
One of the blacked-out drones retrieved the targeting beacon from Zotz’s backpack, and secured it to the back of a second drone with a magnetic clamp. One by one, the drones fluttered their wings, wound up their tiny motors, and lifted off. Baffles deadened the sound of their directional rotors, and the fuzzy halo of their active camouflage made the drones almost invisible.
Within seconds of Zotz’s order, the trio had plunged over the edge of the mountain and were halfway to their target.
The augmented reality implant in Zotz’s skull turned the almost-invisible drones into amber dots against the snowy backdrop. They zigged and zagged like bats, flying in a confusing pattern that would be next to impossible for even robotic defenses to land a shot on if they were detected.
And then they were on target, clinging to the outside of the perimeter wall like limpets glued to a freighter’s hull.
Zotz watched his augmented reality display, and triggered his comms the instant the beacon turned green to show it had been planted and was transmitting. ”Beacon’s in place. Confirm signal.”
Zotz waited as his encrypted radio communication traveled from his comm module, back to Dragora, and to the Rentaki Giru weapons platform in geostationary orbit on the far side of the horizon line.
His HUD showed Zotz the beacon was broadcasting, but he needed the outfit’s employers to confirm they were 5 x 5 before he could bug out and return to Dragora’s blessed warmth.
The drones zipped up the side of the mountain, their wings folding into their segmented bodies as they skidded to a halt next to him. They formed a neat single file line and crawled into his backpack on their spindly, arachnoid legs. “Mission accomplished, boss,” their mechanical voices reported.
Zotz messed with his helmet’s optics again, zooming in on the perimeter wall. The beacon was right where he’d wanted it. “Nice work.”
Talking to the drones was silly, he knew, but ever since Hive had upgraded their personality cores, it was hard to see the little guys as just machines. They were his partners, now. Maybe even his friends.
A pair of blazing lights, smeared and spectral by the falling snow, emerged on the side of the mountain below Rivicle Base. Zotz adjusted his optics to get a better look.
“What the hell is that?” He asked himself.
The optics snapped the scene into focus, and Zotz’s mouth went dry. The lights were attached to the steaming grill of a massive truck, and its bed was loaded down with cylinders of black stone. Now that he knew what to look for, Zotz saw more of the vehicles scattered across the mountains surrounding the base.
The weapons platform responded to his earlier report. “We are receiving targeting data. Signal when we are clear to fire.”
The plan had been simple. Zotz would creep up here, send his little buddies down to plant the beacon, then hightail it back to Dragora. The rest of it was up to their employers, who’d shipped a massive bombing satellite into position under cover of Rivicle’s three moons. At his word, the Rentaki Giru Corporation would turn the base, along with most of the mountain, into a steaming puddle of slag.
It was a good plan, assuming you wanted to obliterate a rival’s communication facility and didn’t give a shit about collateral damage.
The presence of a bunch of civilian miners changed that very good plan into a very bad plan. If Zotz gave the order to trash the base, hundreds of non-combatants would die.
“Not today,” he whispered. Not so long ago, he could have been one of those clueless truck drivers about to get a universe of pain express-delivered onto their skulls.
He opened the comms channel to the platform. “Negative, negative. Civilians on site. Strike aborted.”
Calling off the strike was a pain in the ass for everyone, but Zotz knew it was the right call. Not only would it save civilian lives, but it would earn them at least one of the bonuses. Two if they had to do this the hard way.
He switched channels to Dragora’s frequency and kicked on the comms. “This is Zotz. We’ve got a problem.”
Chapter 2
It seemed like there were more miners crawling out of their holes every second. After he’d found the first truck, Zotz couldn’t not see them. Even under cover of night, there was no mistaking the zigzagging mining roads leading away from midnight black tunnels into the snow-swept valleys below. If the base held 50 men, there had to be ten times that number working the mines below. Any kind of aerial bombardment would murder dozens of civilians, and might trigger a cataclysmic avalanche or cave-in that would kill hundreds more in the aftermath. Zotz couldn’t accept that much collateral damage on his watch.
Heck’s voice broke through his thoughts, punching a sharp hole in the static squeal emitted by the communications array. “We read you. What’s the problem?”
Zotz dug one of the drones out of his pack and flipped it into the air. It tumbled for a moment, then its wings snapped out and it stabilized in midair. “Let me know when you have the feed.”
He focused the drone’s cameras on the miners below, sending it in close enough to get a good look. A few seconds later, Heck broke back on the line. The powerful communications array below Zotz distorted her words and filled the space between them with shrill static, but he could make out her anger well enough. ”Great. That fucking sucks. How many civilians?”
Hive’s annoyed mechanical tones burst into the conversation. “Once a few of them die, the rest will evacuate the area. I estimate collateral damage to be min
imal and within operational parameters.”
Zotz blew out an exasperated sigh. “You can’t even see how many people there are down there.”
“Are there fewer than a thousand? A thousand is my threshold for acceptable civilian losses.” Hive, an Awakened drone with an efficiency fetish and an alarming disregard for non-mechanical life, kept raising that threshold.
“We have a bonus for civilian losses. Zero is the only number I’ll accept,” Zotz countered.
Throd’s gravelly voice joined the conversation. “Surveillance footage shows a defensible base. We took this job because it was an easy hit using drones to plant the beacon, and someone else’s hardware to level the place. If we have to go in and take out the communication array by hand, it’s going to get messy. I vote we bail.”
Heck asked, “Zotz, what’s your take? You’re the eyes on the ground.”
Zotz licked his lips and scooted back from the edge of the mountain. Ominous thunder crackled overhead and jagged slashes of brilliant lightning shot through the gathering clouds. The blizzard was coming. “I can’t make that call.”
A young woman’s voice crackled through the line, bristling with anger. Scratch, another stray Heck had rescued from life as a set subject, growled into her comms. ”You guys think those miners want to be here? If we leave, they’ll spend the rest of their life slaving away to keep that base running.”
Everyone tried to talk at once, and their emotional outbursts clogged the comms channel with irritated squawks.
Heck killed the chatter with a firm pronouncement. “Enough. We’re going in.”
Hive’s crackling voice protested. “This is not how to run an efficient operation. We have the platform up and ready to strike. We will lose the bonus, but gain the rest of the objective’s points. That is the optimal way to win this scenario.”
