Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Oh, right.”

  “Yeah,” yelled Nighthawk, from the upper turret. “Their weapons are offline. Guess they don’t want to spook us into a fight.”

  “No,” said Angel813. “They probably saw us on that leaderboard and want to know what we know that they don’t.”

  Kavan laughed. “Problem is, we don’t have anything. I’m going to fly around in random circles.”

  Line after line of temporary performance boost scrolled by at the behest of her swiping finger, but nothing looked helpful. The Feral had gotten too close for sensor masking. Even if they managed to disappear from the other ship’s instruments, the pilot could still see them.

  “Ugh,” said Fawkes. “If only the ship could…” She whipped around and stared at Rallek. “That spell!”

  He leaned back, one eyebrow raised, a sly grin starting across his lip. “Can you vague that up a little more?”

  “The one you used on Nighthawk.” She grabbed the front of his fancy armor and shook him. “That lets player abilities work on the ship.”

  “Oh, yeah that one. What about it?”

  She let go of him and grabbed the engineering desk. “Get ready to hit me with it.” She raised her voice at the console. “Kavan, look for a mountain or something we can slip behind to break line of sight with them for a few seconds.”

  “On it.”

  “What are you gonna do?” asked Rallek.

  She shook her head. “For a magic user, you’re not thinking. I’m a rogue. We’re trying to hide.”

  His jaw hung open. “I… don’t know if that’ll work. Stealth is a base ability, not a cooldown. Hang on, let me read the description of Transference. Rallek’s face tinted blue in the light from a floating screen.

  “Got a mountain up ahead about a minute away,” said Kavan’s voice from the console. “What’s the plan?”

  “I’m going to try to hide the ship.” Fawkes widened her stance, gripping the console with both hands.

  “You’re being dramatic,” muttered Rallek. “All you need to do is touch the ship and you can’t help but do that while inside… unless the artificial gravity shuts off.”

  “Well, this feels like a dramatic moment.” She shrugged. “So is it gonna work?”

  “Nothing in the way it’s worded makes me think it wouldn’t… it’s just―well, if it did work, you’d think people would have done it already and gotten it nerfed.”

  She growled. “Don’t get me started on that. Besides, no one mixes technomancer and rogue. It would be a cool idea, but all the low-level stuff in TM is debuffs and summons. Nothing I’d even want is in the tree until ten levels deep and at that point it’s too much of an investment.”

  “Five seconds,” said Kavan.

  Rallek held his hands up and muttered some of his ad-libbed gibberish. Faint white light radiated from his fingertips and surrounded her. “Okay. Spell’s cast.”

  Fawkes didn’t feel any different, but she prepared to try. A chase view on one of her screens showed the Stormbringer enter a left-banking turn around a mountain. As soon as it looked like the Feral could no longer see them, she flexed the mental button that activated stealth.

  The ship lurched forward from a sudden slowdown, and the floor became transparent.

  Angel813 and Nighthawk screamed in panic.

  “What the damn hell did you do?” shouted Kavan. “We just dropped to half speed!”

  “Yes!” shouted Fawkes, grinning like an idiot. “It worked! We’re in stealth.”

  Roaring engines thundered overhead as the Feral shot past them, still a good ways above. Angel813 kept screaming about her fear of heights. Nighthawk’s terrified wail gave way to cheering and proclamations of how ‘cool’ it was to see the ground through the floor.

  “What happened to my ship?” yelled Kavan.

  “It’s because we’re in stealth.” Fawkes stared down at her fingers gripping the edge of the console. She, too, had become semitransparent and didn’t want to move for fear the connection might break. “That’s normal. My character looks like that, too. It’s how the game tells you hiding worked.”

  “Oh,” said Kavan, then laughed. “They’re swinging back and forth, hunting for us.”

  She remained motionless while they flew in the other direction and kept low to the ground. Thirty seconds later, the ship became solid again.

  “Spell wore off,” said Rallek.

  “Right.” She grabbed a weird fictional tool halfway between a wrench and a soldering iron and poked it in one of the cabinets. That combination of tool plus location created a sensor-blocking effect. “There. We’re at seventy percent shields, but won’t show up on anyone’s sensors unless you arm weapons.”

  “Excellent,” said Kavan. “Now, does anyone have any damn idea what we’re looking for on this planet?”

  “A research facility,” deadpanned Angel813. “Somewhere.”

  Fawkes pored over the sensor console, trying to bring up a list of structures and settlements. Nighthawk walked around the ship in an endless pattern, occasionally muttering, “Boredboredbored.”

  She glanced at him as he passed her, heading toward the bridge. He’s not even trying to help. Fighter pilots are such prima donnas. Like oversized children.

  “Huh, I think I’ve been staring at this map too long,” said Angel813 perhaps forty minutes later. “I’m starting to see animals. That brown spot looks like an armadillo.” She laughed.

  “Wait, what?” said Rallek, running out from the engineering deck toward the main room. “Did you say armadillo?”

  Fawkes, curiosity piqued, followed, since the scanners weren’t helping. A huge widescreen map floated over the round table, tinting the whole area dark brown-red. Swaths of greenish forest separated bands of open crimson sand, a bit like Mars. The planet had white polar caps on both sides and millions of large lakes, but nothing big enough to count as an ocean.

  “Yeah.” Angel813 pointed at one of the larger bands of vegetation where a group of brown spots close together created the shape of a half-curled armadillo. “Right there.”

  “Kavan, go to this point.” Rallek stuck his finger into the map hologram. An answering chirp came from the bridge computer.

  Angel813 leaned back, eyebrows up. “Mind explaining the magic armadillo?”

  Rallek gestured at the air and a slab of bright green hologram opened. He tapped at the floating terminal window, a ’net access client, and pulled up the main page of Cognition Systems International. The top left corner of the page had a blue square with the letters CSI in white, and a logo of an armadillo perched on top of the C. “It’s their company symbol.”

  “Oh…” Fawkes’ eyes widened. “Wow that’s subtle as hell.” She grabbed Angel813’s arm and gave her a congratulatory shake. “Nice find!”

  The medic brushed her fingernails off on her armor while making an ‘I meant to do that’ face.

  For sixteen minutes, everyone kept their eyes out for any sign of the Feral, but they’d either gotten bored and given up or searched the wrong part of the planet, far enough away not to see them.

  “Got something up ahead,” said Kavan. “This spot doesn’t really look much like an armadillo. Only on the map.”

  Rallek tapped a finger to his chin. “It would be a lot easier to notice that way. The map doesn’t match the terrain. Proof CSI wanted to make this place difficult to find.”

  Fawkes bounced on her toes, giddy with anticipation. She leaned on Rallek, daydreaming about a life where she didn’t have to spend eight hours a day on her feet getting bitched at about how much espresso went into a cup of milk.

  “What is it?” asked Nighthawk.

  “Building. Pretty big from the looks of it. Gotta be abandoned. There’s holes in the wall full of vegetation. I’m going to land as close as I can.” Kavan sounded unusually optimistic. “Let’s check this bad boy out and see what’s here.”

  Fawkes held on to the wall until the ship came to rest on its landing pads and sto
pped shaking. One nice thing about being a space explorer in a video game compared to reality: most planets had human-friendly air.

  The crew gathered on the cargo ramp, riding it down as it opened with Kavan leading the way. A blast of wind washed over them, carrying an overwhelming smell of ‘vegetation’ with a few subtle notes of rust and industrial chemicals. They’d set down at the edge of a brown patch of bare dirt where nothing grew, a veritable moat surrounding a massive all-metal structure about fifty yards away. The plain rectangular building looked large enough for the Stormbringer to fly around inside it. A pair of towers jutted up from either end, shaped like upside-down kitchen waste bins―if kitchen waste bins stood twenty stories tall. Comparatively thin spars spanned between the towers, suggesting where a spacecraft might have once hung while being constructed.

  Huge gaping holes in the wall fringed with greenery peered in on smashed technology and office furniture. Fawkes looked up at it, whistling in awe at the sheer scale of the structure.

  Kavan followed the ghost of an old access road that curved around to the left end by one tower’s base and connected to an enormous trapezoidal entrance. The door, two immense slabs of metal with interlocking teeth, appeared stuck a quarter of the way open.

  “Whoa, that’s a big door.” Nighthawk whistled. “I could fly the Gremlin through that.”

  “It’s not that wide,” said Rallek.

  Nighthawk pivoted his hand sideways. “I’d roll it ninety degrees.”

  “Wow…” Fawkes craned her neck back to stare up at the crenelations running up the edge of the door on her left. Each cutout looked big enough to stack three cars in, the metal ten feet thick from outside to inside. “Slamming your thumb in this door would hurt so bad.”

  “I don’t think it’s moved in quite a long time.” Rallek kicked at dirt in the track the doors slid in.

  The room beyond appeared to be a staging area for spaceship parts. Boxes, stacks of shipping containers, and the heavy machinery needed to move them around littered the place. Fawkes stared up at the interior of the tower and felt like a mouse dangled over a trashcan. Platforms jutted out of the walls, approximating a floor at every story, though most of the space up the middle remained wide open, save for dangling machinery that might’ve been used to lift chunks of starship up to the top. Gazing into twenty-stories of mostly open space overhead caused a jolt of vertigo that made her stumble.

  “Well, this is definitely some kind of facility,” said Kavan, creeping forward with his rifle poised.

  A shimmer of red light appeared on the ground in front of him with the profile of a speed bump.

  Fawkes shouted, “Wait! That’s a―”

  He stepped on it.

  “Trap.” She let her arm drop.

  Everyone spun to face her, but before any words could fly, the titanic door behind them slammed closed, sending a spray of dirt into the air. Fawkes screamed (not that anyone heard) and collapsed under the ridiculously loud boom of six-story tall steel slabs crashing together.

  Disturbed dirt left a waist-high haze of pale brown fog around them.

  “Little more warning next time maybe?” asked Nighthawk.

  Fawkes got annoyed and jumped upright, pointing. “It just appeared. The game only let me notice it right as he was stepping on it.”

  “You know, it most games, the party lets the thief go first to find traps,” said Angel813.

  “I’m not a thief. I’m a rogue.”

  Kavan tilted his head at her. “What’s the difference?”

  “I’m a stealthy spy-slash-ambusher. I don’t steal.”

  With an ear-splitting screech of scraping metal, a huge pile of stacked boxes slid aside to reveal a twenty-foot-tall humanoid robot, bristling with guns and missiles. It had a glowing red stripe for eyes, big enough to be a window into the pilot’s compartment in the head―but this thing looked like an android, not a vehicle. Parts of its arms and legs somewhat resembled a heavy fighter craft, including folded wings jutting out of its back.

  “Oh, shit,” said Nighthawk.

  Kavan swatted him on the arm.

  “Don’t care. Giant battle mech is an ‘oh shit’ moment.” Nighthawk pointed at it.

  “Kinda looks like a Transformer,” said Kavan.

  “A what?” asked Nighthawk.

  “Old toy.” Kavan rushed forward a few steps to take cover behind a huge metal box.

  The rest of the crew followed suit.

  “Maybe it didn’t see us,” whispered Rallek.

  A blue laser beam as thick as a man’s thigh burst out of the metal container and hit the floor, leaving a neat hole in the steel with flaming edges.

  “Or perhaps it did,” said Rallek. “Hey, look at the upside.”

  An explosion in front of the cargo box everyone hid behind pushed it back ten feet, knocking Nighthawk on his ass.

  “There’s an upside?” asked Angel813 between coughing on smoke.

  Rallek flashed a shit-eating grin. “It’s a robot. My best spells will work on it.”

  “Well, looks like we’ve got two choices. Kill it or die.” Kavan readied his energy shield. “Here goes.”

  He ran out into view, dashing up to the thing’s giant boot-shaped leg while firing his attention-getting shot. Angel813 peered out from behind the cargo box, grunted in annoyance at his getting out of her range, and rushed after him, plucking medi-bots from her harness in preparation to launch them.

  Fawkes ducked into stealth and slipped around to the left. She waited at the corner hoping Kavan would continue his habit of rotating bosses away from the party. After a few more blasts from his rifle, he ran between its legs. The huge robot shook the ground as it pivoted to follow him, exposing its back and a massive double rocket booster ‘jetpack.’

  “If that thing turns into a Starfighter, I’m going to give the hell up on this prize,” said Angel813.

  Fawkes crept closer. Nighthawk stood in place, pelting it with a steady barrage of laser fire the same way he did during most boss battles. She couldn’t help but snicker at Eric’s assessment of Nighthawk’s play style: high damage simple-to-play classes. Then again, most players considered auramancers the ‘easy healer.’ Having played one for a while messing around, she decided that not having to strategize combos to be effective was relaxing. Part of her enjoyed the complexity of the rogue, even if she had to work three times as hard to keep up with Nighthawk’s gunslinger… but taking a break with an ‘easy’ class made the game into a game again, something to do for fun.

  Not to mention even an awesome medic couldn’t match an auramancer for single-target healing output unless they had a significant gear advantage. The big guilds always had one or two auramancers dedicated to keeping the tank alive.

  Rallek lobbed spells at Kavan, likely buffing him up to make Angel813’s job easier.

  “Barely hurting it,” shouted Nighthawk.

  Once Fawkes got in range, she fired an ambush shot. One nice thing about huge bosses, she didn’t have to worry about missing. The ambush hit critically for 180 points. “Whoa, this damn thing is energy resistant.”

  “Ya think?” yelled Nighthawk, who’d been pelting it for a steady stream of about twenty points a shot.

  Fawkes ran closer to the huge metal boot, skidding to a stop about ten feet away. Lasers and missiles flew overhead, showering her with the occasional blast of dust or fragments of blown-up cargo box. She plucked her override tool off her belt and activated its wireless mode, targeting the giant robot.

  “Heads up!” shouted Angel813.

  With a great whoosh of rocket engines, nine missiles flew from the boss’ shoulders in graceful arcs to the ground in a mostly random arrangement. Wherever one exploded, it left a fifteen-foot wide patch of glowing green goop. Naturally, at least one missile landed on top of everyone except Kavan.

  Fawkes yelped at the sensation like an army of two-year-olds smacking her in the shins with wooden spoons. Every second, her health ticked down by eight percent
. She scrambled out of the glowing patch.

  Nighthawk leapt into a flying somersault, leaving his ‘patch of badness’ behind. He rolled back to his feet and kept on shooting. A medi-bot floated up to Fawkes and began spraying her with healing. She looked back down at the override kit and the hacking mini-game. Not caring about wasting unneeded temporary buffs, she invoked a Freeze soft, and an Overclock (which increased the speed of her blue line). Nothing quite made burning a 5,000 credit cooldown feel trivial like trying to hack in the shadow of a giant robot.

  She looked up for a second when Angel813 screamed. Kavan lay flat on his back with five percent health left. The robot reared its hand back to pound him again. Angel813 grabbed two thermos-sized syringes from her belt and ran at him. She dropped into a slide and crashed into him, hitting him with both needles.

  His health bar leapt to 120 percent.

  The fist came down with a thunderous crash, leaving him with eighteen percent health and also taking Angel813 down to five percent.

  She scrambled back, launching a trio of medi-bots around herself.

  “Stay out of melee,” yelled Rallek.

  “No shit,” shouted Angel813. “My big heal’s touch ranged! I had no choice.”

  Rallek cast a spell that projected a stream of wires and glowing circuit lines into the robot’s back. Its health bar chipped down enough to notice, and the robot started to turn toward him. “Crap! I got aggro!”

  Kavan roared at it, and the robot again seemed to want him dead the most.

  The override kit chimed as Fawkes took the final node with a big lead. Stats appeared in a list, plus she applied a ten percent debuff to the robot for hacking it, reducing its health and damage output. Unfortunately, being a ‘boss,’ she didn’t have the option to take control of it. She skimmed the stats, noticing it had a ninety percent resistance to energy damage, but a vulnerability to physical attacks.

  “It’s weak to physical damage!” shouted Fawkes. “Lasers are worthless on it!”