“Better than revealing information to the competition.” Fawkes grinned. “Since there’s no lockout, we should try it.”
“Okay. I’ll just sit here and sip coffee then.” Kavan winked.
The Stormbringer came to a full stop a safe distance back from the pirate space station. Amid a belt of asteroids, some bigger than Earth’s moon, floated a huge cashew-shaped rock with an octagonal metal plate in the center of the curve. The front face of the pirate installation glimmered with thousands of little lights, but most of the facility occupied areas hollowed out inside the asteroid. At both pointy ends of the ‘cashew,’ nests of superstructure moored a handful of fighter ships and corvettes. The enemy ships looked held together by bandages and hope, all with a ‘junker’ aesthetic.
“I’m going to fly in from the side,” said Nighthawk. “Installations like this always concentrate the defenses in front and back, directly up and directly down. We head for the mooring structures on the right tip.”
“Won’t they see you coming?” asked Kavan.
“You’re too into it again.” Nighthawk smiled. “NPCs only react to stuff that gets close enough, even if a normal person should be able to see it. They’re not real people with eyes, just programs reacting to players crossing boundary lines. One fighter won’t set off the corvettes on defense… I hope.”
“Well, it’s just a respawn, right?” Rallek shrugged. “Let’s do it.”
Nighthawk hit the button on the wall to open the floor hatch, exposing the ladder down to the tiny bay where the Gremlin waited, like a full-size SUV crammed into a garage made for a small car. He climbed down the ladder with Fawkes and Rallek going one after the next.
Once her boots hit the metal floor, she did a double-take at the giant particle cannons on either side of the ship. The Gremlin had a silhouette similar to a guitar pick with a notch in the front when viewed from above. Giant particle cannons mounted to the frame near the back of the wing, their nine-foot-long barrels hanging unsupported for most of their length.
“How do those guns not snap off as soon as you turn?” asked Rallek.
Nighthawk shrugged. “It’s a video game.” He climbed up a foldout ladder and slipped into the forward seat. “You guys can share the back seat. is the Gremlin’s a medium fighter with guns that belong on a heavy fighter.”
“Yeah, looks it,” said Fawkes.
She let Rallek go up first and lowered herself into his lap.
“This is… intimate.”
Fawkes grinned at the warm breath on the back of her neck. “Yeah, it is. Hey ’Hawk, you wouldn’t mind if we got it on back here while you fly, would you?”
“Got what on?” asked Nighthawk.
“Way to kill a joke, dude.” She sighed. “Do these things have seatbelts?”
“Harnesses,” said Nighthawk. “But it won’t work with two people in the same seat.”
He hit a button and the canopy closed around them, making the space feel even smaller. Every little creak or shift in the ship made her twitch.
“Wow, this is like too realistic. I’m legit scared right now.”
Rallek threaded his arms around her and held tight. “Just a game.”
“You know I hate those stupid rides at the amusement park where you go up this big tower and they droaaaaaaa!”
The Gremlin plummeted straight down out of the bay with a loud rushing hiss. Fawkes continued screaming as thrust kicked in and her body crushed back against Rallek, who grunted. More stars than she’d ever cared to see spiraled around above her. With only a thin canopy between her and the vastness of space (however fictional it may be), she wound up breathless with fear. It didn’t help that with the Neurona 4 helmet, the icy chill of outer space brushed at her face through the glass.
“Whoa, calm down,” said Rallek. “We’re not doing this for real.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” She grabbed his hands, where he’d interlocked them at her stomach. “Holy crap this is intense.”
“Oh, that was merely launch. That’s not intense,” said Nighthawk. “What we’re about to do is intense.”
She whined.
“I’m kidding. This isn’t going to be half as cool as a six-on-one dogfight. That probably would’ve made you pee your pants.”
“Ha ha.”
Rallek chuckled, and muttered, “Pee your pants?” over a private whisper channel.
Fawkes shrugged. “Maybe they live in a repressive religious commune or something and can’t curse.”
“People in repressive religious communes wouldn’t be playing this game. You know, science and learning are evil and all that… so’s technology.”
“Fair point. Guess he’s just a strange guy.”
Rallek nodded. “Or he’s trying not to swear in front of the delicate lady.”
She sent him a text middle finger.
“Here we go!” Nighthawk shoved forward on the throttle bar, and again, the force of acceleration crushed her into Rallek. “Okay, dude. Hit us with a spell to keep us off sensors.”
Rallek rested his hands on the two side consoles, both aglow with various gauges and flashing lights, most of which meant nothing but decoration. He cast a spell, again chanting his pointless nonsense words.
“Okay, done. We got five minutes before I need to re-up it.”
Fawkes messed with the console in front of her until she found the engineer’s interface. Since the Gremlin lacked the physical space of an engineering bay, she didn’t need to run around with fictional tools. Instead, she simply selected options from a menu. “I added a sensor mask, too. It should have appeared in your hotbar. While it’s on, shields are reduced a bit.”
“Cool,” said Nighthawk. “We are space ninjas.”
She bit her lip. What is he, twelve? “Yeah, sure. Something like that.”
Nighthawk got quiet, seemingly mesmerized by the passing starfield. He steered to the left, taking a wide berth around the pirate installation until one end of the distant cashew-shaped asteroid rotated enough to block the view of its front face.
“You okay?” asked Rallek.
“Shh. I can kinda see the cloaked corvettes,” said Nighthawk.
“Really?” Fawkes leaned up to peer past him. “What ability is that?”
“No ability. ’Cause we’re moving, the stars blur a little at the edges of the ships. It’s hard to see, but I can do it. I was right… they don’t have anything watching the side.”
Fawkes leaned back, not minding Rallek’s hand squeezing a bit close to her rear end. Minutes of tense silent flying passed, her gaze drifting off into space. One star seemed to bend backward like a two-dimensional sticker being rolled off a sheet onto a flat wall. She stared at the spot, and noticed another speck of light move as if someone pulled ‘space background’ wallpaper over a corner.
“T-there’s a ship right next to us,” whispered Fawkes.
Nighthawk snapped his head to the left. “Crap. Hang on. It hasn’t seen us yet.”
He banked to the right and accelerated. The Gremlin pitched and twisted like a rollercoaster. Fawkes couldn’t tolerate watching the asteroids rush by and swim in circles along with the sensation of inertia pushing her around, so she closed her eyes.
“This looks hard, but it’s not so bad,” said Nighthawk. “Imagine a three-dimensional minefield, where the enemy ships have blobs of detection. I gotta fly in the dead spots between the blobs, and we’re gonna make it.”
Minutes slid by, Fawkes’ stomach churning.
“Rallek, kill that, quick!”
She opened her eyes. Nighthawk pointed at an approaching blinking light, a more or less spherical probe made of apparent scrap metal, studded with antennas.
Rallek gestured at it. The dumpster-sized probe rocked as if it hit something, and went dark.
“No funny words?” asked Fawkes, grinning.
“No time.” He repeated the gesture, but nothing happened. “It’s dead.”
She turned her head, tracking the spa
rking lump of metal as it shot by on the left. “Why didn’t you just blast it?”
“Sensors will pick up particle beams. They won’t react to magic.” Nighthawk rolled to the right and accelerated. “Almost there.”
A pair of meatloaf-shaped corvettes phased in out of cloaking, both less than two hundred meters ahead. He emitted a strangled squeal and nailed the thrust boost. Fawkes’ head rocked back into Rallek’s face. The corvettes blurred as the Gremlin zoomed down a narrow canyon between them, nearly as tight as the distance between neighboring houses. Nighthawk swerved about, dodging turrets and protrusions. Four seconds later when they shot past the end of the corvettes into open space, Fawkes screamed.
“We’re in.” Nighthawk clapped and cheered. “One sec, gotta find an open door.”
They skimmed along the outer curve of the cashew-shaped rock for a little while before cresting the point and gliding in among the hundreds of metal spars sticking out of the stone like whiskers. Broken fragments of larger spacecraft, probably victims of piracy broken down for parts, drifted about, tethered by mooring lines.
Nighthawk slipped the Gremlin between two spars sideways, rolled over, and tucked into an open docking bay.
“I feel like a piece of bread in a toaster,” said Rallek.
“Yeah… that was a little tight.” Nighthawk hit a button, which filled the cockpit with five seconds of mechanical thrumming before a heavy clonk.
“What was that noise?” asked Fawkes.
“Landing pads.” Nighthawk nudged the ship to the left, out of the path of the door, and put it down. “Okay, we’re in.”
“You landed in their launch bay,” said Fawkes. “Seriously?”
“Looks like a launch bay, but it’s a giant empty room.” Rallek gazed up and around at the bare steel.
“Yeah.” Nighthawk grinned. “They’re NPCs. They don’t actually have dudes on foot running to get in fighters. Why animate all that when they never expected anyone to be here to see it? The ships just appear out of thin air and launch. It’s kinda cheating, but we could sit here all day powered down and they’d never notice us.”
“Looks like it’s your show now.” Rallek patted her on the butt.
“You’re so sure I can pull this off?” asked Fawkes.
“Yep.” Nighthawk nodded. “This place is going to use the same design as most buildings. There’s gonna be vents. I bet the exact layout of this base is copied dozens of times for all sorts of missions. All you need to do is get to the primary computer terminal in the command room and use it. Since you’re on the quest, it’ll automatically give you the plans.”
She relaxed. Right. Just a game. I don’t actually have to call the head pirate and trick him into giving me his password. “Okay.”
Everyone put their bubbles on. Nighthawk opened the canopy and she climbed out.
The two guys remained with the ship while she scurried across a hundred yards of bare metal littered with stones toward a hangar-sized door on the innermost wall. At the halfway point, a junker fighter appeared out of thin air above her and shot out the docking tunnel.
Roaring ion blast knocked her to the ground in a tumble. Fawkes scrambled upright again and sprinted for the airlock. Unsurprisingly, the door refused to open. She plugged in the override kit and attacked a hacker mini-game. The level four network made her laugh with its simplicity, and in twelve seconds, the panel went from red to green.
She punched the button, and a pair of doors big enough for the Stormbringer to fly through slid open a few feet. After ducking past, she found herself in a featureless metal corridor. Since it contained neither defenses, pirates, nor even any sort of cosmetic decoration, she decided to run.
Fortunately, video game characters didn’t get tired. Though, by the time the half-mile sprint wound to a halt at the end of the passage, her brain and legs had fallen off speaking terms. Consciously, she thought she should be tired, but her legs ignored the past few minutes of hard work as though it never happened.
Another hack got her past the much smaller door at the interior end. She opened it enough to peek inside, and cringed at a hallway dotted with men and women in crude armor. None stood close enough to the door to catch her if she hid, so she dropped into stealth and crept inside. Her eyes on the floor to monitor the red vision cones panning around, Fawkes hurried over to a square hatch at floor level twenty feet away from the door.
She got down on her hands and knees by it. Somehow, six people wandering around didn’t notice her kneeling in the open. At a touch, the hatch slid open on pneumatic struts. Fawkes shimmied into the vent and pulled the hatch closed. In all the time she’d been playing a sneaky character, not once had guards ever reacted to a left-open vent duct. It still bothered her on some deep OCD level, like one day game developers would decide to start programming sentries to notice ‘Hey, that vent wasn’t open five seconds ago, I should check that out.’
Despite having no idea where the command room was, she felt reasonably certain a right turn at the end of the small spar would take her there. Since her entry point sat all the way on the left side of the base (as viewed from the front) it made sense. The command room likely sat in the middle, at the deepest point. This quest had been designed for a group to blast their way in, which set her on edge. The pirates roaming around inside might be tuned for a raid, with four or five times the health of a normal NPC, and probably higher damage output. That meant she wouldn’t have a chance of surviving even a one-on-one encounter.
One nice thing about a game that liked to make stealth important: comfortably large vents. She crawled down a shaft with plenty of room to spare, following a handful of turns closer to the thrum of technology mixed with beeping and tweeping. The bridge of the Stormbringer made the same ‘generic computer’ sound in the background, barely audible over the game’s ever-present musical score.
She found herself humming along with the dramatic ‘pirate’ track as she crawled.
“Hey, how goes it?” asked Nighthawk over comm.
“Vents,” said Fawkes. “Still in the vents. This place is pretty long.”
“Cool. Cool.”
“You okay?” asked Rallek.
Oh, I’m a dumbass. She opened a minimap. The top-down view of the pirate base resembled a croissant more than a cashew, with the ends tapering to points. Inside, a symmetrical arrangement of boxes and rectangles illustrated the interior of the compound. A room at the thickest part of the asteroid, directly opposite the front face, caught her eye. Mostly due to the shape drawn at the back: a curve around a diamond icon. The map didn’t give her any indication of what each room contained, but it did show her position as a blue dot. Fair bet, that diamond represented the main computer terminal.
“Fine for now. I just hope the computer works without the boss being dead.”
“Crap. I didn’t think of that,” said Nighthawk with an odd note of sheepishness.
Rallek hummed for a second or two. “I don’t think it would… the shield mod isn’t part of a major loot drop. It’s an incidental thing that also uses this pirate base. There’s a ship raid mission to take out this pirate.”
“Oh, cool.” Fawkes hung a left turn and crawled into a larger space full of multicolored boxes. A square hole in the ceiling made her frown. “Damn. I gotta go up. Hang on.”
Having done so many times before on stealth missions, she stacked the boxes into a configuration she could climb, and made her way up to the hatch. Her faint grunt echoed in the upper level vent as she pulled herself through and flattened out on the floor.
“Well if my job as an interplanetary spy doesn’t pan out, I can always go into HVAC maintenance.”
“Huh?” asked Nighthawk.
Rallek chuckled.
“I spend so much time in damn vents, I could get a job fixing them.”
“Oh,” said Nighthawk before emitting a forced laugh.
Shaking her head, Fawkes crawled onward, using the minimap to choose turns. She slinked past several
slatted covers that looked out into rooms where groups of pirates stood mannequin still. Some robotically walked around between workstations or consoles. Every so often, a random bit of atmosphere dialogue like, “I can’t wait for another raid. It’s so boring to sit around here” or “any day now, I’m gonna hit it big,” echoed around her.
She headed toward the generic computer noise, which progressively got louder than the background music. Soon, her blue map dot approached the room with the curved wall. She shimmied around a right turn and ahead another fifteen feet to the first visible vent cover.
“Yes!” she whispered.
The slats overlooked a room containing the sort of equipment she’d expect to see on the bridge of a massive starship. Desks and consoles with chairs, giant monitor screens, and walls covered with hundreds of decorative-but-useless machinery. Six pirates milled around. One guy in power armor who appeared to be the boss pirate moved about with heavy clunking footsteps.
Her stomach tightened.
If that guy aggroed on her, she’d probably go splat in one shot. Fawkes leaned up to the slats and strained to examine the left side of the room where the map had the curve. Behind a captain’s chair setup, a raised dais with a small railing around it held a glowing purple gem two feet tall. She recognized it as a Simarin computer, alien technology based on crystal power. They’d used a generic graphic for it, something she’d seen here and there in various places. That made her feel more confident that this plan might work. When they made it part of the money quest, the developers put the shield mod here to be annoying. It had nothing to do with the pirate fight.
Heck. Maybe the developers even wanted someone to do exactly what I’m doing.
She couldn’t see an opening to make it across the room without being caught, but that didn’t necessarily matter. Hoping that past precedent held true, she eased the vent cover open and backed up, watching. After a while, and none of the pirates reacting to it being open, she crawled back over and hovered a few inches short of the point where vision-cone red crept into the duct. From there, she had a good view of the empty computer area.
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