Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  I spend too much time in this game. She cringed as a loud bang came from behind, followed by a raining shower of sparks falling on her. Heh. No such thing as too much. Reality sucks.

  “Yeah it did,” shouted Nighthawk. “Controls are more responsive. The handling got better.”

  “Sweet,” cheered Rallek. “Stat boosters work on ships.”

  “What the hell was that explosion?” shouted Kavan.

  “Something back here blew up. There’s like smoke and sparks now,” said Fawkes.

  Angel813 cackled. “Aren’t you the engineer? Don’t you know?”

  “You realize this is a video game right? I’m not actually a starship mechanic. I see damage bars and poke things with tools.” She twisted around in the seat to examine one of the boxy pods in the middle of the room that somewhat resembled a tiny version of the engine from a giant ocean liner. It had a generally ‘engine’ like shape, but instead of wheels, belts, and hydraulic stuff, panels of cool-looking glowy bits and circuitry covered it. “Umm. I think it’s just cosmetic animation from the shield taking so much damage so fast. There’s no health bar showing on it, so it’s not actually damaged.”

  “That’s good,” yelled Nighthawk.

  Fawkes shot forward, or perhaps she stayed still while the room whipped to the left, ramming the seat belt into her gut. For a few seconds, her only point of contact with the chair was the narrow strip of material across her stomach. She hung suspended like a meat flag, arms and legs touching as the Stormbringer rocketed around in a flat spin.

  “Urk!” she yelled. “Stop!”

  “Oh, this wall tastes lovely,” said Rallek.

  A stream of profanities came from Kavan.

  The ship leveled off hard, slapping Fawkes into the seatback.

  Boots clanked in the bridge, getting louder in the hallway. Rallek came running into the engineering room and leapt into the second chair. His health bar had dipped to ninety-one percent, but he didn’t appear injured. After a few seconds of hard breathing, he reached forward and opened a ’net window.

  “You okay?” asked Fawkes.

  “Yeah. Took me a minute to get my feet under me. I feel like a shoe in a clothes dryer.” He chuckled. “That kid can fly, but damn… Good thing this is a video game or he would’ve snapped this ship straight in half.”

  “Huh?”

  “Physics… The length, shape, and size of this ship shouldn’t be able to tolerate such hard, rapid maneuvers. They didn’t program material stress into the game, or we’d have broken apart already.”

  “Maybe it’s because it’s space and there’s no air friction?” asked Fawkes.

  Rallek typed on a floating holographic keyboard. “That probably helps, but I still think we’re twisting in ways that should’ve crumpled us up like an empty beer can.”

  She groaned from the seat belt biting into her gut. “What are you looking for?”

  The Stormbringer shuddered with another pelting of near misses. Gravity quadrupled in seconds.

  “Ugh,” yelled Fawkes, struggling against the forces crushing her into the seat. She glanced up at the chase view, where the ship careened out a dive, amid a hail of red and orange streaks of light. The hard pull-up left them skimming the hull of the Reckoning with probably only ten to fifteen feet of separation. She looked away. “Holy shit… I can’t watch.”

  “It’s a game, hon.”

  “Yeah, that would be a lot easier to handle if we weren’t shaking, smelling smoke, and basically experiencing everything for real.” She peered through a curtain of pink hair at him. “Guess I’m getting too into it.”

  “A little.” He leaned forward to read something on the panel.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Info on the Reckoning. If anyone has ever posted about boarding it or anything.”

  Kavan tromped down the hall and went up the ladder to the roof turret while Angel813 jumped down the opposite ladder to the underside turret.

  “We got fighters coming after us now,” yelled Kavan. “Rallek, do some of that magic crap!”

  Fawkes grabbed the floating window and pulled it over. “Go. Keep us alive. Do magic or whatever. I got this.”

  “Right…” He put his hand on the console and invoked a spell.

  “Nice. Handling just got better,” yelled Nighthawk.

  “I re-cast the agility boost.” Rallek chuckled.

  While he kept tossing spells on the ship, the same ones he usually used to enhance summoned technological minions, Fawkes skimmed article after article about the Reckoning. About half of them claimed the ship didn’t really exist as anything more than a bit of in-game folklore or a marketing gimmick. Nothing had useful information. Not one player had even encountered the ship before, much less a full raid group to evaluate or comment on potential strategies to beat it. Usually, the world bosses had simpler strategies than the ones inside instanced content, since encountering them depended on randomness. Especially in the case of the Reckoning. A player would have to be incredibly lucky to find it at all, and if a raid group wiped, by the time the lockout let them use their ships again, the battlecruiser would be long gone. Practicing a strategy for it would be a colossal pain in the ass, since a guild might never find it twice.

  The Stormbringer shifted side to side, slaloming giant towers springing up from the hull of the battlecruiser. In the absence of the capital ship laser barrage, everything had fallen to an eerie calm, though the constant ‘pew-pew’ noise from Kavan and Angel813 picking off enemy fighters kept her on edge.

  There’s got to be a way for one crew to deal with this mission. It’s the pirate space station all over again. They just used this ship for the money quest because it’s such a bitch to find. She tossed the internet window aside and accessed the in-game scanning console. Usually, that would give her specs on a ship like its armor values, targetable sub-locations, internal system status, and so on. She’d gotten high enough with the engineer sub-class to read shield points, recharge rate, and identify weapons or critical weak points. Every ship in the game thus far possessed at least one critical spot that, if an attack hit it, would do severe damage. In the case of fighters, it often wound up being the size of a dinner plate. Not an easy shot.

  The Reckoning didn’t show any critical vulnerabilities (nothing turned yellow), but she did notice an odd purple spot a bit forward of the midpoint along the underside. She zoomed in on it, never having seen a ship system appear in that color before. The spot expanded into a rectangle with rounded corners, vertical compared to the hull around it on the side of a raised box. She rotated the image to put the battlecruiser on the bottom of the screen, and the area she’d zoomed in on resembled a bad computer graphics rendering of a simple house with one way in.

  It’s a door!

  She mashed her finger into the screen, tagging that location in the Stormbringer’s computer so it lit up for Nighthawk in the bridge. “I found a way in!”

  “Uhh, that door is way too small for the ship,” said Nighthawk.

  “No kidding.” Fawkes tapped her finger on the console, staring at the purple rectangle. “It’s for people.”

  “Damn…” Rallek glanced over at her. “You think?”

  “No clue, but it’s something to try.”

  Kavan muttered a few more profanities over the comm before raising his voice back to a normal level. “The fighters are so damn thick behind us, it’s impossible to fire and not hit something.”

  “You think the raid fight expects people to go inside the ship?” asked Angel813 between laser blasts.

  Distant explosions outside made Fawkes grin at the old ‘no sound in space’ gripe.

  “No way in hell,” said Nighthawk. “How many pilots could’ve gotten in this close without being vaporized? And there’s only a few corvettes that can maneuver like this. Most of them handle like garbage trucks. No way people are supposed to go inside just to beat the world boss.”

  “Can you get us to that door?” a
sked Fawkes.

  The ship swerved hard left and right, dodging another tower of tech jutting out from the Reckoning’s hull.

  “Yeah. Hang on. The spot she tagged is like a mile away and on the other side. I gotta hug the ship all the way around or we’ll get torn up by the lasers.”

  “Might as well do it,” yelled Kavan. “We’re already here.”

  Rallek cast another spell into the ship, skipping his usual made up chant.

  “Incoming!” roared Nighthawk.

  “Oh, shit.” Fawkes stared at the chase screen.

  The raid script caused the Reckoning to fire six giant torpedoes, each one twice the size of the Gremlin fighter. One of those would eat all the Stormbringer’s shield points and erase probably half the hull points. Since the encounter had been triggered by only one ship, the game couldn’t randomly target separate corvettes for torpedoes―so they all converged on one. Six energy trails wrapped around the hull of the giant battlecruiser as the torpedoes came together in formation a few hundred yards behind them, gaining fast.

  “Umm, torpedoes,” said Fawkes.

  “Yeah,” muttered Angel813. “Wow I’ve never seen ones that big before.”

  Kavan sputtered; Fawkes laughed.

  “Why is that funny?” asked Nighthawk. “Those torpedoes are huge.”

  “We are galactically fucked,” muttered Rallek.

  The Reckoning

  34

  Fawkes stared at the chase screen, transfixed by the six massive torpedoes creeping closer and closer to the Stormbringer. Flashes of green laser continued streaming from the top and bottom turrets, setting off explosions and chain reactions within the dense cloud of tiny fighter ships chasing them.

  “Shoot the torpedoes!” shouted Fawkes.

  Both turrets focused on the torpedoes, but the shots appeared to glance off shields inches from the nose cones.

  “It’ll take too long!” roared Angel813. “The torps have shields!”

  “Focus on the middle one,” yelled Kavan. “We set one off, it’ll destroy the others.”

  The turrets converged on the same torpedo, but it didn’t look likely they’d destroy it before the warheads caught up to the ship.

  “Hang on!” yelled Nighthawk.

  The Stormbringer leapt up and away from the Reckoning’s hull, so vast it appeared to be a land mass of metal instead of a ship. In seconds, the blinding barrage of the large laser batteries filled the blackness of space. Nighthawk dove as soon as they started taking fire again. The bunny hop maneuver pulled the torpedoes into the path of the far more powerful beams from the Reckoning’s primary turrets.

  A brilliant explosion filled the monitor a split second before a concussive wave hit the Stormbringer hard. The expanding blue plasma ball from the multiple torpedo detonation incinerated most of the pursuing fighters, setting off a rain of ash particles that blackened the battlecruiser behind them. Two-thirds of the Stormbringer’s shield collapsed, and the ship went spinning forward like a model airplane kicked into the air. Screaming, Nighthawk managed to get it under control before it flew like a Frisbee into another giant tower of antennas and blinking lights. He flipped the ship over another blast of large lasers and dove back down to skim the hull.

  Grunting against inertia, Fawkes reached forward and set off one of the shield boosts, surging it back up to eighty-two percent.

  “Okay, we’re clear. How long before it launches torpedoes again?” yelled Angel813.

  “I’m going to hope it won’t if we stay close to it. It fired those before we got under the lasers,” said Nighthawk.

  One of Angel813’s vanity pets, a bright violet and pink foxlike creature with wings, raced by on the wall, shrieking and chittering.

  “Door!” yelled Fawkes.

  “On it, we’re―gah!” Nighthawk yelled in surprise, and the ship shuddered with a heavy clank. “Oops.”

  The shield dropped by eighteen percent.

  Fragments of a fighter craft dribbled around the blue bubble surrounding the Stormbringer on the chase screen.

  Three more fighters popped up in front of them. Searing blue beams from the primary laser cannons lanced through the pack, barely slowing down.

  “You shot a fighter with the main guns,” said Kavan in a deadpan tone. “That’s unsportsmanlike conduct.”

  “Usually, it’s impossible to even hit a fighter with them.” Rallek laughed. “He just killed a fly with a hand grenade.”

  “I’m that good.” Nighthawk laughed. “But they were still coming out of a docking port. Sitting ducks. Hey, the agility boost wore off. Rebuff!”

  Rallek cast another spell into the floor.

  “Okay…” Fawkes tried to tune out worrying about the real likelihood of the ship exploding at any given moment. “Set down near the door, let me out, and I’ll go inside.”

  “Not alone,” said Kavan.

  “None of you can sneak.” She gnawed on her finger.

  Kavan’s face on the little comm panel displayed a frown. “We have no idea what’s in there. Rallek can take the turret over. I’ll go in with you.”

  “I should go, too,” said Angel813. “In case you need healing.”

  “We need you on the turret more. If the Stormbringer gets destroyed while we’re inside, we’re screwed.” Kavan fired a sweep of lasers, sending two more fighters spiraling to flaming deaths against the battlecruiser’s hull. “Hah. This is pretty damn fun. Rallek, get up here.”

  “On the way.” Rallek pulled off his seatbelt and stood. “You be careful in there, okay?”

  She grinned. “Not trying to talk me out of it?”

  He leaned in and kissed her. “It’s only a game. Death isn’t permanent. I promise to talk you out of stupid crap in the real world though.”

  “Hah.”

  Nighthawk banked the ship in a series of zigzag turns around columns and superstructures protruding from the cruiser’s hull. The roundabout path kept the ship close enough to avoid taking fire from the big guns. A steady pelting of anti-fighter lasers kept the shields bouncing between ninety-six percent and ninety-nine percent, unable to do damage fast enough to overpower the shield’s normal recharge rate.

  Ugh. I already forgot what quiet is like. Fawkes re-slotted shield boosters and threw in one anti-missile buff before leaving her seat and running down the hall. The ship’s maneuvering to avoid incoming lasers kept tossing her side to side, but she bounced off the walls and kept her footing. Kavan met her in the central hallway, and they hurried down the stairs to the cargo bay. When they reached the wall at the rear end, standing on the ramp door that would lower them out into space, she glanced over at him.

  “Ready?”

  “I guess. But we’re not there yet.”

  “I mean, mentally ready.”

  Kavan activated the shield on his left forearm, examined it, and turned it off. “Yeah. If there’s raid mobs in there, let me die. You stay hidden. We won’t be able to fight our way through them.”

  “I don’t think they put raid mobs inside. They designed this fight for ships only.”

  “Well, I got some good news,” said Nighthawk. “We’re well past the teleport time and it’s still here. Guess it won’t go away until combat ends.”

  “Here come more fighters,” said Angel813.

  With no chase screen to watch, Fawkes listened to the rapid firing of lasers and grumbles of the shield taking small hits, hoping that her imagination interpreted the sounds worse than they were. Gazing at the plain grey steel in front of her didn’t instill any more confidence.

  “Coming ’round the side.” Nighthawk’s voice emanated from a speaker overhead. “I’m gonna set it down by the door, count to four, and take back off. We can’t sit still or the fighters will chew us up. Even four seconds is really dangerous.”

  “Okay,” said Fawkes.

  Kavan hit the button to open the ramp and the floor beneath them lowered. Fawkes went wide-eyed and wrapped her arms around the hydraulic strut at her r
ight. A landscape of metal raced by below, bursting with orange flames wherever fighter parts collided with the Reckoning’s hull. Twenty feet of ship extended out above, the end lit by the glow from the main engines, which emitted a constant, loud roar. She glanced left at Kavan, at all the little blue light spots reflecting on his visor from the fighter craft coming after them.

  “We’re standing on an open door while flying hundreds of miles per hour, thirty feet away from an enemy capital ship,” she yelled over the engines.

  “Yep,” shouted Kavan. “But it’s only a game.”

  “Right. Tell that to my brain.” She laughed nervously. “I think I’m gonna pass out.”

  “Amazing what they can do these days, isn’t it? Used to be, video games were limited to a screen. Then they made this little box that gave off smells. Then the sensory hat.”

  She shivered. “I remember having one of those hats when I was like ten. Some game had spiders in it and the thing made me feel like I had bugs crawling over me. I had nightmares for weeks.”

  Kavan laughed. “Yeah, and now they put us right inside the damn game.”

  Another small fighter ship burst into flames and went spinning to the ‘ground.’ She watched it until the tumbling bits of metal disappeared among the general chaos. “William, do you ever wonder about weird stuff? Like what if this is real and the life we think is boring and mundane is actually the simulation?”

  “Nope.” His helmet turned toward her, revealing a big grin. “Life doesn’t have background music.”

  “I… maybe I just want that to be true. Maybe I’m tired of being a nobody.” A near miss with a tower structure caused an audible whuff despite there being no air in space. She clamped onto the strut tighter, staring at another crashing fighter rolling by sideways like a flaming metal tumbleweed. “When I was like twelve, I got it in my head that I could change the world, do something about all those greedy corporations always getting away with whatever they wanted while the little people suffer… but I’m just some coffee girl with a whole apartment full of deflated dreams.”