Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Why haven’t you chased a career?” asked Kavan, confident in his one-handed grip on the other ramp strut.

  Fawkes shrugged. “I dunno. I have a hat full of reasons; pick one. Lazy. Didn’t want to ‘become part of the machine.’ The café is comfortable. Maybe I hate change.”

  “So the girl who wants to change the world hates change in her own life?” Kavan poked her in the side. “Gotta start somewhere. Where better than from the inside of one of those ‘evil corporations.’ Get in the door, climb the ladder, make changes from within. Companies aren’t inherently bad, it’s usually one jackass at the top. It doesn’t have to be a ‘war,’ you know.” He pointed out the ramp at the swerving metal terrain. “Look what we’re doing here. Big ass ship. We can’t possibly take it on in an up-front fight, but we’re going to infiltrate.”

  She laughed. “Ha. Ha. Are you working up to a joke about a reckoning?”

  He tapped his chin. “No, but now that you mention it…”

  Fawkes sighed. “Well, maybe if we don’t wind up dead or in jail, I’ll send you a resume. It’s not too impressive though. I look like I just got out of college. All my achievements are, uhh, not exactly legal.”

  “You do look like you just got out of college. I’m not saying you’ll get in the door high up the totem pole, but you gotta start somewhere. And tell me you’re making 120 grand a year slinging coffee.”

  “Nah, just thirty-eight bucks an hour. Barely enough to keep my apartment.”

  “That’s about what, eighty grand a year? Not bad for a barista. A couple years down the road, you’ll be over 200 at my place. 120’s a starting salary for a coder.”

  “Where are your horns, o dark tempter?” She laughed.

  “Door coming up!” shouted Nighthawk. “Get ready.”

  The ship decelerated hard, pulling Fawkes back into the cargo bay. Blurry dark metal terrain sharpened into millions of sections covered in circuit pattern, small openings, panels, and glowing lights. They slowed to a jogging pace and overflew a large, plain cube of silicon grey with no textures on it except for a generic armored door on the side facing the back of the Stormbringer. As soon as the ship cleared the box, it dropped the last fifteen feet and made contact with the hull on its landing skids.

  Fawkes leapt off the ramp without thinking too much about it. Red laser shots from the swarming cloud of fighters struck the metal all around them; any one of those beams would mean instant death for a player character outside a ship.

  Jaw clenched in determination, she ran like hell to the cover of the ‘building’ in front of her. The fighters shot overhead, chasing the Stormbringer, which had taken off, leaving them behind. She spun around, back flat against the metal, staring down the artificial landscape.

  “Holy shit. This ship is so big it feels like we’re on a planet.”

  Kavan slid to a stop beside her, shoulder against the wall. “Yeah. Well, we’re not dead, so maybe there’s something to your idea after all.”

  She slapped the panel for the door, but it wouldn’t open. “Of course.” After connecting her override kit, she stared in disbelief at an enormous hacking mini-game node map. “God damn… they really don’t want anyone getting inside.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Fawkes looked up at him. “Hey, who are you talking to?” She winked. “It’s not difficult… just huge. A time sink.”

  “Well get going. My kid isn’t going to be able to fly forever.”

  She nodded and focused on capturing nodes. Against her nature to hoard the one-shot software buffs, she burned through them in an effort to save time, specifically using the ‘instant capture’ ones to take nodes in one second rather than eighteen to twenty-five, and Freeze softs to stall the red security lines chasing her.

  For several minutes, she worked while Nighthawk and the others cheered, screamed, and swore over the comm link. The ‘sky’ overhead flickered with a constant storm of red and blue lasers. Eventually, she took control of the CPU node and unlocked the door.

  Kavan pulled it open and stepped in, raising his transparent force shield like a techno gladiator. She followed, entering a featureless corridor shiny and silvery like an ingot of raw silicon. It had no doors, decorations, or even any light fixtures despite it being bright enough to see clearly.

  “Whoa. This is like base models. They didn’t bother to add any texture maps.” Fawkes hurried forward at a brisk walk. “No mobs at all in here.”

  Kavan followed, his boots striking the metal underfoot with a sharp thunk-thunk-thunk cadence. “If this is part of the quest, they should’ve given it interior.”

  “Maybe they planned on us getting a raid group and blowing it up after all… and finding whatever the quest objective is in the debris cloud.”

  He whistled. “Whatever object we’re supposed to find in here might not even exist until the ship is destroyed. It could spawn only after the Reckoning blows up.”

  “Do you think CSI would force people to form a raid group for the prize quest and then think to go hunting the debris field for some random drop?” Fawkes didn’t slow down. “I dunno. If they’re shitty enough to kidnap me, maybe they did. But we’re already in here. Might as well see where this goes. Even if your kid can keep the ship alive, it would take hours flying around shooting it before we destroyed it. The Reckoning has forty-two million structure points in the hull.”

  “Oh,” said Kavan, “I’m sure the kidnapping was more about the other stuff than the prize money.”

  The featureless hallway hit a T branch after a few minutes. Both sides went a short distance to corners going the same way they had been going already, a giant tuning fork shape. The game provided no mini-map for the interior here.

  “Ugh.”

  She randomly decided to go left. They walked down more unremarkable corridor. Soon, they found branching hallways that led to open chambers full of nothing. From room to room, she jogged, hunting around for anything more useful than areas of an incomplete map.

  “Damn. It’s like the designers made a basic level layout, but never populated it with objects.” She darted across a hall and peered into a huge room that could’ve been intended as a cafeteria or barracks. “It’s so weird that our voices aren’t echoing in here.”

  “Weirder than going out into space with only a little force field over our faces?”

  “You’ve got a full helmet.” She tapped him on the visor.

  “Heavy armor. Most heavy armors do. Doesn’t matter though.”

  Fawkes laughed. “Yeah, we can go out in space and the armor stops us from suffocating, but poison gas somehow still does damage to us.”

  “Oy. Reality taking a back seat to ‘game mechanics.’” He stuck his head down another offshoot passage. “Empty.”

  “Hey guys,” said Rallek over the comm, a steady barrage of laser blasts in the background. “I noticed you were roaming around, and there doesn’t seem to be a minimap available, so I started tracing your route manually.”

  “Awesome. Guide us toward the nose end?” asked Fawkes.

  “Sure. As soon as you start moving. I can’t tell which way you’re facing.”

  She jogged onward. “How’s this?”

  “You wanna turn left ninety degrees whenever you can. You’re heading to the right side of the ship.”

  She doubled back to where she’d seen a turn, and took it.

  “There. Now you’re heading for the nose,” said Rallek.

  Kavan looked around. “Nose?”

  “Well, if there’s a bridge,” said Rallek, “it’s probably closer to the front end, right? This thing doesn’t have a big superstructure type deal. It’s kinda turd-shaped with one really skinny end and one fat end. I guess that’s more of an icicle.”

  Kavan laughed.

  “Space turd,” said Nightwing. “That’s the name of our next ship.”

  “No,” said everyone else at once.

  Fawkes jogged down the hall, taking directions from Rallek wheneve
r the layout forced her to make a turn. Endless hallways the same size, shape, and color gnawed on her brain and made her feel hopelessly lost. Though the game sent no temperature feelings to her head, the stark metal made her shiver with imagined chill.

  Eight minutes after entering the maze of corridors, a violet glow reflecting on a distant wall got her attention.

  “There.” She pointed, and ran for it.

  Kavan trucked along behind her. She rushed down a hundred yard section of corridor before rounding a rightward corner where the light gleamed on the semi-reflective wall. At the end of a much shorter section, perhaps twenty feet in length, the corridor expanded into a big, round chamber with a metal obelisk at its center. The light emanated from a bowling-ball sized orb of violet energy hovering above the pedestal.

  “Well, that’s something,” muttered Fawkes.

  She crept up to it while eyeing the featureless chamber. No seams, turrets, cameras, or anything stood in the way. Upon reaching the middle of the room, she basked in a pleasant warmth radiating from the orb, like a campfire. That she noticed it despite her armor lent an air of supernatural eeriness.

  Kavan sidled up next to her. “Well, that’s something. What is it?”

  “Well, if you want my technical opinion…” Fawkes folded her arms. “It’s a ‘quest objective.’”

  “What do we do with it?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Take it and bring it somewhere probably.”

  Fawkes started to reach for it, but wound up flailing her arms to keep balance when the room shuddered and rocked. “Nighthawk, what did you do?”

  “Umm, nothing. Just trying not to die. Why?”

  “Did something hit the Reckoning? Everything just shook.”

  “Fawkes…” said Kavan in a wavering tone. “You might want to hide.”

  She turned on her heel to look at him, and almost passed out.

  A giant wide-bodied alien being had appeared in the formerly empty space between them and the only hallway out of the round chamber. Easily twelve feet tall and as wide as four humans, with a blobby, pudgy body of purple spotted skin that swelled out between armored panels, it clutched two rifles big enough for her to stick her entire head in the barrel, and missile launchers sprouted from each shoulder. The creature’s head resembled the elongated body of a squid without tentacles. Six yellow eyes as big as tennis balls arranged in two vertical rows of three fixated on them.

  “Oh, he doesn’t look happy to see us,” said Fawkes.

  “Feeling’s mutual.” Kavan activated his shield.

  Fawkes Flickered into stealth before creeping off to the left. After using that ability to hide instantly in plain sight, she had four seconds to get away from its vision cone or it would see her. Kavan raised his shield to absorb a pair of particle beam shots from its ridiculous rifles, but decided at the last minute to dive to the ground. Two rays of blinding orange light as thick as telephone poles flew across the room.

  The alien trundled forward, chasing Kavan, who backed around the pedestal.

  She stepped in behind it, raising her CL32 for an ambush… but froze when she looked at the health bar. It had 2.8 million hit points.

  A raid boss meant to face off against twenty people or so.

  “Shit. We can’t fight this thing.”

  Kavan, being a party member, could still see her. He gave her a ‘well duh!’ stare. In that second of distraction, the alien lunged in and walloped him with one of its rifles (which also had a bunch of blades sticking out of the front end). He flew into the wall so hard he skimmed around the curve and fell to the floor twenty yards away.

  “Ouch,” said Kavan. “Well, that’s my shield gone.”

  The alien emitted a series of burbling grumble noises somewhere between annoyance and indigestion.

  She again raised her weapon, pondering an ambush to draw its attention off Kavan, but chickened out. While he could take a hit or two from this thing, it would paste her in one shot. He leapt to his feet and dove into a somersault to avoid another blast from the particle beam rifles. When he scrambled upright again and ran in circles, he flailed at her.

  “Grab the damn orb!” yelled Kavan.

  “But…” Guilt came and went. Video game. He’ll get back up. “Okay.”

  While the alien boss smacked Kavan around the chamber like a kid with a shiny new ball, she approached the energy orb on the pedestal, holstering her CL32. A tingle spread across her fingers when she grasped it in both hands, like picking up a huge wad of warm cotton. The standard gesture to take an item, trying to stuff it into an inside jacket pocket, worked.

  As soon as the orb disappeared into her inventory, and its purple light no longer flooded the chamber, the giant alien boss spun around to look straight at her. A faint whoosh sound accompanied Fawkes’ body solidifying from semitransparency, as if she needed the subtle clue to tell her she’d been spotted.

  She locked stares with its eyestalks. “Well… shit.”

  Expectations

  35

  Fawkes backed up a few steps.

  The boss trained its gargantuan particle rifles at her.

  Before it could fire, she activated her Evasion cooldown. The extra +90% to dodge caused the beams to miss her by inches on either side. Kavan had pulled it away from the entrance, so she did the only logical thing possible: ran like hell.

  “We need a ride!” shouted Fawkes. “We got a big ass problem in here.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s Glomulus,” said Angel813, no doubt watching her via a ‘spectator’ window. “He’s the second boss in the Stars of Eternity instance. Ugh, I remember wiping over and over to him for like three weeks. What’s he doing in there?”

  “Programmers are lazy,” said Kavan. “For something like this that they thought only a handful of people would ever see if anyone ever saw it, they wouldn’t develop a whole new boss fight.”

  “Why that one though?” asked Nighthawk.

  “He’s considered overly difficult.” Angel813 grumbled. “The Halls of Infinitum, the next raid instance after SoE, is rated one tier harder, but Glomulus is still a rougher fight than everything in there except Hadrian… the last boss.”

  “So,” asked Fawkes while sprinting down a plain grey tunnel, “what you’re saying is, we’re probably not going to kill this guy?”

  “Two of you, not even sixty yet without even one purple item? No way, girl.” Angel813 laughed. “Forty of us in full tier 1 gear took three weeks to learn that fight.”

  “I think Fawkes was being sarcastic,” said Nighthawk.

  Laser blasts, growling, and heavy slamming footsteps chased Fawkes down the hall.

  “Oh, duh, right.” Angel813 laughed.

  “You got the magic pill,” yelled Kavan. “I’m pounding this guy as hard as I can and he’s not even noticing.”

  Rallek laughed. “I’m not going to make a joke out of that since we have a kid on channel.”

  “Hah!” Fawkes giggled. “Don’t make me laugh now or I’m gonna die.”

  As if on cue, a particle beam missed her head by inches. She screamed and dove to the side, darting behind a corner to block line of sight. Without the Evasion cooldown protecting her, a raid boss would not miss a character twenty levels too low to be in the same room with it. A level forty had no business being here. Fortunately, this game didn’t cheat by allowing a boss’ shots to pass through walls. She hated ROI for that bullshit.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” yelled Rallek. “Back toward the nose on the other side.”

  “Shit.” Fawkes scrambled up to a right turn and darted around it.

  “Good thing this guy is slow. But he’s too damn fat for me to get past,” said Kavan. “He fills the whole damn corridor.”

  “Sounds like Mrs. Reinhold,” said Nighthawk amid laughter.

  Kavan yelled, “As long as you’ve got that orb, I can’t get aggro off you.” His voice dropped to normal speech. “And don’t talk about your teachers like that.”
r />   “We’re circling close.” Nighthawk let out a ‘woo hoo!’ “I found a canyon in the hull that’s like a big racetrack loop. Forces the fighters to get really close behind us so Angel and Rallek are mowing them down.”

  “They’re endless,” said Rallek, sounding exasperated.

  “No kidding. They just respawn.” Angel813 faked a yawn. “This is a video game people. It’s not like this ship has a limited reserve of fighters and it’ll run out.”

  Fawkes skidded around another corner two seconds before a missile exploded behind her, flinging her off her feet. She slid a few yards on her chest, bounced off the wall, and rolled to all fours amid a haze of smoke that reeked of rotten eggs. Glomulus thundered into view behind her, swinging his giant rifles up.

  She couldn’t help it and screamed; the scent of metal, the chill of the air, the stink of alien body odor far too real. For that instant, she feared the alien monster more than the men who tied her to a chair.

  Kavan pointed his rifle at her between Glomulus’ legs and fired.

  A pthoonk noise preceded a sharp bang. His knockback grenade launched her out of the corridor into an offshoot less than second before the huge particle beams gouged melt marks on the floor.

  The jolt of getting hurled around by friendly fire snapped her out of the paralytic fear of death. Fortunately, the punt grenade didn’t do damage, only pushed players or creatures around. She clambered upright and sprinted.

  “Left as soon as you can turn ninety degrees,” yelled Rallek.

  “The hallways are all the same!” she shouted, but managed to reach the closest place to turn before Glomulus came into view.

  One corridor blurred to the next. Despite her stealthy character, the strike of her boots on the floor seemed deafening. The corridor started to shrink around her, and her breathing grew difficult. Nighthawk’s cheering reminded her that these people would try to kill an eleven-year-old for something she did.

  Fawkes closed her eyes for a second, swallowed, and got her panic under control. A new determination set in. They’d already pulled off something the developers never anticipated. Or, maybe they did, considering the boss appearing here. Had the developers expected a player to grab the orb and run, or try to take the boss on in a raid fight?