Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  Nighthawk yawned. “That place looks boring as hell.”

  “Hmm.” Rallek opened a floating window and attacked it with a flurry of finger pokes, typing. “Some people play this game as a trading thing, moving cargo from planet to planet. Buy food on an agricultural world like this, sell it on an industrial planet, and so on.”

  “Bo-oo-rring,” singsonged Nighthawk.

  “AG148 appears to be a randomly-generated world by name, but it also has a mostly human population despite being deep in Kazalor space.” Rallek looked up from his screen. “The capital city is Prakash.”

  “So?” asked Angel813.

  Rallek laughed in Eric’s voice. “One of the game’s creators is named Prakash.” He shifted forward in his seat. “The capital’s surrounded by a forested area with fast-respawning hostile aliens. There’s a bunch of posts about it being a prime spot to grind kills to level up from thirty to forty for people who hate doing quests. Takes forever but it’s simple. A couple villages around the edge of the forest all have repeatable ‘go forth and kill fifty bad guy’ type quests, so you can get mission experience on top of the kill XP.”

  “So…” Fawkes grinned, licking chocolate off her spoon. “This planet is good for farming in more than one way.”

  Kavan groaned.

  “I think that city being named after one of the primary designers is a giant clue.” Rallek pointed at the star map. “We should check it out.”

  Kavan shrugged. “We don’t have a ship mission right now, so… Up to you guys. I still think this prize crap is a load of hooey.”

  “Oh, come on, William.” Fawkes winked. “I know Angel and me are innocent girls, but you can still use bad language in our presence.”

  “I’m in,” said Angel813. “If nothing else, we can kill a couple hours grinding XP. If the farming grounds are as good as Rallek says. Mindless slaughter is a nice break from running around trying to figure quests out.”

  Nighthawk shrugged. “Sure, why not. But the planet looks like solid boredom.”

  “Solid boredom?” asked Fawkes.

  “Yeah.” Nighthawk held his hands up as if cradling a softball. “If boredom existed as a solid… this planet is made out of it.”

  Rallek laughed. “That could be on purpose. No one would think the place is worth going to.”

  “Okay then.” Kavan stood. “I’ll go fly us there.”

  “Be right back.” Nighthawk got a distant look in his eye. “Gotta pee.”

  He vanished.

  Fawkes stood behind the pilot’s chair as Kavan brought the Stormbringer down into the atmosphere of AG148. The trip into the star system had been nail biting. Six groups of Kazalor pirates rushed toward them, but broke off after a scan revealed no cargo. The potentially hostile ships ranged in level from twelve to forty-five, but the game had enough sense for the pirates to ignore a pointless target. As much as the lore suggested the Kazalor would’ve abducted a human crew to sell as pets, Fawkes’ opinion proved correct. That fate appeared limited to NPCs.

  Despite appearing brown on the star map, the visible surface in the viewscreen filled with verdant greenery. Silvery geometric shapes spotted the vegetation here and there, wherever a settlement had sprung up.

  They flew for a while, heading for the capital city, Prakash, which jutted up from the vast field of trees and farmland like a mass of crystalline daggers jammed into the ground. A narrow strip of smaller buildings surrounded a city heart of about 150 high-rise towers made from mirror-like crystal. The star port here, despite the size of the city, amounted to a dirt field where pilots put down wherever they felt like it. Fortunately, the Stormbringer represented the only player-controlled ship in sight.

  Kavan landed in a rectangular patch of brown dirt near a refueling station. “Well, we’re here. Now what?”

  “Well the clue could be anything,” said Rallek. “I’m sure it’s going to be in or near this city. Pretty sure this is a static world, but they wanted it to look like a randomly generated one.”

  “Or it is random and the city being called Prakash is pulling from a database of names,” said Fawkes.

  Rallek shot her a ‘you traitor!’ stare, then laughed.

  She strolled down the boarding ramp, boots clanking. A breeze that smelled of manure and vegetation flipped pink hair across her face. “Ugh, this place is charming.”

  “Eww,” said Nighthawk. “It smells like crap.”

  “Welcome to a farm world.” Kavan took a deep breath in his nose.

  “I don’t smell anything,” said Angel813.

  “Hooray for upgraded helmets,” muttered Fawkes. “Remind me again what the upside of these things is? So far it’s only been bad smells and uncomfortable chills.”

  Nighthawk patted his guns. “Special effects are cooler looking, especially for spells.”

  “Well, the food’s better. Login’s faster… I’m sure once we get into raid content, we’ll appreciate the wider data throughput. No lag when there’s a lot of stuff flying around.” Rallek followed her down the ramp to the dirt.

  “Oh, yeah I guess.” She walked out from under the Stormbringer, turning as she moved to survey the environment. “Wow. This place looks like a cake slice of New York City dropped square in the middle of uhh… Kansas or something. It’s so weird to have big city turn into hayseed farmland so abruptly.”

  “Yeah.” Rallek gazed at the not-too-distant wall of blinding mirror. “Looks like they copied and pasted a section of Thaeleos.”

  “Hey you’re right.” Fawkes studied the profile of the building tops long enough to get a sense of nostalgia for the capital city of the human starting planet, where she’d spent her first forty-or-so hours ever playing the game. “I guess it’s just the ‘human’ style of architecture or something.”

  “It’s out of place here.” Angel813 shielded her eyes, squinting at the high rises. Her waist-long snowy hair flowed in a graceful wave off to the side. “Every other settlement on this planet is just a collection of portable pods. How did they construct advanced buildings like this?”

  “Well, for one thing, this is a video game,” said Kavan. “While your logic would make sense in reality, the lack of materials or construction equipment isn’t a limiter here.”

  “But that also makes it stand out more,” said Fawkes.

  “Hey guys, look!” Nighthawk, a little ways off to the left, pointed at the sky.

  Fawkes glanced at where he indicated, and her jaw hung open. A brilliant point of blue light hung over the horizon, flanked by a pair of orange specks. “A trinary star system with blue in the middle!”

  After a minute or two of staring at a floating screen, Kavan exhaled, making his lips flutter. “There’s nothing on the star map in that direction that’s even close.”

  “Maybe it’s not on the map?” asked Rallek.

  “Let’s check it out,” said Angel813.

  “Right on.” Fawkes jogged back to the ship.

  The others clambered in behind her, everyone going straight to the bridge.

  Kavan powered up the ship and brought it into the air only a few feet, rotating toward the trinary orange-blue-orange system on the horizon. Acceleration pinned bodies to seats as the Stormbringer shot skyward, leaving the planet’s atmosphere a minute or two later.

  “Huh,” said Kavan. “That’s weird.”

  “What?” asked Rallek, looking up from an internet window.

  “It’s gone. I don’t see it anymore.”

  Fawkes leapt out of her chair and ran to the viewscreen, cramming herself as close as she could in the pilot’s nook, her hip bumping Kavan’s armrest. The trinary system had disappeared. “It’s gone…”

  “I just said that.” Kavan shook his head.

  “Systems don’t just disappear!” yelled Nighthawk.

  “Calm down, it’s only a game.” Angel813 patted him on the head.

  He frowned. “I’m not upset. I was quoting Admiral Torellian from Fleet Strike.”

  �
��Clearly, none of us have seen that,” said Angel813.

  “It’s not a movie, it’s another game.” Nighthawk rolled his eyes. “Geez. Only the most popular space sim before Axillon99 came out.”

  “The space stuff is cool, but I’m more of a raider,” said Rallek. “Used to play ROI.”

  “You know, Realms of Infinity is still active,” said Fawkes.

  “What class?” asked Nighthawk. “I played Realms, too.”

  “Had a level 180 necromancer, and I got a planerunner up to like ninety something.”

  “Cool.” He nodded.

  Rallek grinned at him. “Let me guess, you had a hunter no-pet spec?”

  Nighthawk’s expression went blank. “Yeah, so?”

  Angel813 suppressed a giggle.

  “Oh, just saying it fits the sort of player who goes gunslinger is all.” Rallek winked.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Nighthawk.

  Kavan glanced at Rallek, a faint note of warning in his expression.

  “Oh, just an uncomplicated-to-play ranged damage class is all.” Rallek smiled.

  “Hang on!” yelled Fawkes. “What if the star system isn’t really a star system, but a visual anomaly in the atmosphere?”

  “Once more in English?” asked Nighthawk.

  “It’s not real!” yelled Fawkes, bouncing like a giddy tween. “It’s a mirage in the sky pointing us toward something on the planet.”

  “Babe, I hate to break it to you, but none of this is real,” said Kavan.

  She smirked. “You know what I mean.”

  “Right. Back down we go.” Kavan brought the Stormbringer around in a 180-degree flat turn and dove once again into the atmosphere.

  “Don’t land right away,” said Rallek in a tone more asking than ordering. “Can you bring us in to a hover near Prakash, point at the trinary system, and fly that way?”

  “Yeah easy.” Kavan nodded.

  A few minutes later, they glided in as if to land in the same section of star port, but the ship hung in midair about twenty feet off the ground. Kavan swung the nose around until the orange-blue-orange dots appeared on the horizon, and accelerated in that direction. For about twenty minutes, everyone stared in silence at endless rolling plains of wavering grass. Distant mountains grew millimeter by millimeter, shrouded in a canopy of fog and snow.

  When operating in an atmosphere, starships behaved more like airplanes than spacecraft. Going past Mach 2 didn’t happen often since the ships would break apart. They could only use about 1/100th of the speed they pulled out in space. Kavan and Nighthawk got into a grumbling match about how a ship as sleek and as ‘airplane-shaped’ as the Stormbringer ought to be able to go faster planetside than a boxy one. Nighthawk indignantly pointed out that Fleet Strike took a ship’s design into account when determining its handling characteristics within an atmosphere. Kavan agreed with him and they both complained about Axillon99 slacking off on design.

  “Well, that other game is only ship combat. There is no character content really,” said Rallek. “CSI’s trying to find a balance point between the two, so corners got cut I guess. The game’s only been out two years, so give them time. I’m sure they’ll add a ship realism patch in at some point.”

  Fawkes, who hadn’t taken her eyes off the viewscreen, caught a glint of metal amid the endless greenery. “What’s that?” She pointed.

  “Umm.” Kavan pushed a series of buttons on the console, which caused a smaller display box to appear at the bottom of the big viewscreen, containing a zoomed-in image of wreckage. “Looks like a crashed heavy fighter.”

  “Check it out?” asked Rallek. “Kinda weird that it’s still sitting there. Player crashes disappear in like a half hour. It’s gotta be a quest at least.”

  “Maybe it’s what we’re supposed to find,” said Fawkes.

  “A crash site?” Angel813’s eyebrows went up. “Seriously?”

  Fawkes faced the crew. “Most of you want to ignore it, right? I bet that’s exactly what the designers expected. Precisely because it looks like a waste of time, I think it’s the big quest.”

  Kavan slowed the Stormbringer and dropped altitude. “It won’t take long to check it out. Who knows? The kid could be right.”

  “I’m not a kid. I’m twenty-two,” said Fawkes.

  “You’re a kid,” said Kavan.

  Fawkes leaned on him. “Are you playing a grizzled old pilot Kavan as a character or are you really a grizzled old curmudgeon?”

  He laughed while flicking at a silver highlight in his black hair. “Well, Kavan’s well into his forties, but I’ve still got a couple years to go.”

  “So, like thirty-nine?” Fawkes winked.

  “Seven.” Kavan brought the ship to a midair halt, extended the landing pads, and brought it straight down to land in the meadow not far from the crash site.

  “Stay alert,” said Rallek. “If this is part of the big quest, investigating this spot could trigger a combat encounter.”

  “Nothing online about it?” asked Angel813.

  “Nope.” Rallek shook his head. “Another reason I think Fawkes might have a point. If anyone did find this crash site, they haven’t made it public.”

  “There’s a leaderboard already,” said Kavan. “Shows the five closest crews or players to completing the mission, but no indication of how far on they are. It’s only got two names on it and they’re marked tied.”

  “But millions of players have gotten the data pad drop. Aren’t we all tied?” asked Nighthawk.

  “I doubt just getting the quest in your log counts,” said Fawkes. “So at least two groups beat us here.”

  “You sound so serious, like you really think we have a chance at winning that money.” Angel813 shook her head. “It’s going to go to the kid of someone who’s best friends with a bigwig at CSI.”

  “Don’t the contest rules say employees and family aren’t eligible?” asked Rallek.

  “Yeah, but the CEO’s best friend’s kid isn’t an employee or family.” Angel813 walked around pressing an autoinjector into everyone’s arm. The inoculation caused an extra inch of health bar to appear for everyone. “This’ll last twenty minutes.”

  “Neat.” Nighthawk pulled his guns, twirled them, and stuffed them back in the holsters. “Let’s go.”

  Kavan led the way down the boarding ramp into waist-high grass. The crumbled remains of a heavy fighter, a small ship barely 1/5th the size of the Stormbringer lay slumped about fifty yards away at the end of a quarter-mile of flattened grass.

  “Either this thing crashed only an hour ago, or it’s part of the mission.” Rallek pointed at the swath of ruined vegetation. “Grass doesn’t stay crushed forever.”

  Fawkes let out a cheer at the sight of the tail fin art: an orange-blue-orange trinary star system. “Guys, look at the logo on the tail.”

  “Whoa…” Rallek jogged over. “Sneaky.”

  They spent a while searching around the wreckage with little success. Fawkes went for the cockpit, but found it locked. Opaque gold canopy glass gave her a nice view of her distorted reflection, but not a clue as to what lay inside. She plugged in the override kit which started up the hacking mini-game, and displayed a ‘network map’ full of level eight and nine nodes.

  “Holy shit,” said Fawkes.

  Nighthawk laughed.

  “What?” yelled Rallek from beneath a flange of armor some distance behind her.

  “Trying to get the cockpit open and… this node. It’s an eight. I’ve never seen one this hard before.”

  “That’s what she said,” muttered Angel813.

  Nighthawk looked at her in confusion while everyone else except for Kavan laughed.

  “Oh, sorry… aren’t you and Rallek…” Angel813 gestured back and forth at them.

  “Yeah,” said Fawkes, staring at the node map while trying to pre-plan the route she’d take to clear it. Three geodesic spheres representing security nodes would send out red lines in an effort to chase h
er down. If those lines touched her blue one or made it to the CPU node before her, she’d fail the hack and get locked out. “I think I may need to use some software on this one.”

  “What, you guys are like dating?” asked Nighthawk.

  “Yep,” said Rallek.

  “Cool.” Nighthawk squatted to pick up a fragment of electronics with dangling wires. “This is messed up. The ship’s bent and damaged and stuff, but there’s no burning. It looks like a fake crash.”

  Rallek abandoned his slab of armor and walked over to the gunslinger. “Probably because this ship didn’t crash. They put it here pre-crashed. The game engine didn’t render scorching and damage in real time.”

  “Isn’t that a lazy mistake?” asked Angel813.

  “Not if they intended it as a clue.” Kavan set his hands on his hips and gazed around the crash site. “But this could be us overthinking it.”

  “The trinary star logo’s a bit hard to dispute though,” said Rallek.

  Fawkes decided to ignore the ‘bonus data’ nodes that could give cash rewards, start quests, or drop random one-use software hacking tools. She already had a mountain of unused boosts, so missing a chance to get more didn’t matter. It irritated her beyond belief to have something called software be a consumable item, since no one except some virus people wrote programs that self-deleted after execution. However, the gamer in her understood the rationale behind them being temporary boosts.

  She triggered a Crypto soft, which reduced the network’s overall level by 1, then a Freeze soft for a six-second head start before the security system would start hunting her. With one finger poised over an Ice Hammer (another soft that could instantly take over a node without the usual countdown but set off the security), she tapped the first node away from the start point.

  The blue line crept up to that node and began filling it up. By some miracle, she didn’t set off the security pulse, so the red line remained dormant. Her hacking skills were high for a level thirty-eight character, being at rank seven. Not since she’d first started playing had she dealt with hack equal―or higher than―her skill. Especially after the game-wide nerf that made hacks easier due to player whining.