Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  I fell with a loud clang, and Keles-bot started to twist the arm, trying to break the power-armored joints… He lowered his gaze to get a better view of his judo-throw, but he found himself staring at the right end of my blaster instead. Almost instantly, he turned on the orange disk he had installed on his wrist and tried to move to block my clear line of fire.

  Not fast enough.

  The shot melted his visor, punched through the metallic armor under it, turned the virtual meat behind into boiling soup, and then exploded outward. The helmet bent from the pressure and a stream of dense, bloody jelly rushed out of it and spilled all over my own helmet, filling my visor with a red and greasy filter.

  With a groan, I pushed away the stiff body of the bot.

  “Now you chose to be realistic,” I complained out loud to the game engine. I swatted a chunk of cartoonish brain matter away with a careless flick and stood up.

  The Algernon’s cabin was almost completely destroyed. Power was off, and nothing worked but the emergency lights. The third explosion had punched a hole in the wall that connected the place with the corridor and I could see it was powered off, too, as far as my eyes reached.

  Darkness was barely held at bay by the yellow candlelight of the floor’s LEDs.

  The engines. I thought. Could I reach them before the Keles-bots did?

  I knew they’d have to fight off the entire crew of the Algernon before even coming close to the anti-matter engines, but I’d seen the army of copies Keles had created back in the Signal.

  “Abomination,” I whispered. Now that word started to make sense. For all I knew, the bots were infinite.

  Not much I could do to outfight that.

  Then why not flood the Algernon with a trillion of them?

  Only one had assaulted the cabin.

  He’s limited. I’ve no idea why… Perhaps it’s a trick? Luring us into a fake sense of security? Or we still have a fighting chance, and he hasn’t reached critical mass yet…

  The way the Translator had put it, though…“Earth’s already doomed,” he had said.

  Well, I wasn’t going to give up. This wasn’t a dark lord threatening humanity, or an eldritch abomination from the far realm…It was a mad fuck who’d stumbled his way into virtual ghost-hood.

  Like hell I’ll just let you fuck us up.

  I grabbed the rifle from Keles-bot’s cold, dead hands, then his remaining grenades. And I ran towards the engines.

  Combat was raging at every turn. Corpses of bots just like the one I’d fought lay torched everywhere, destroyed by their own explosives as much as by the PDF’s firepower. Some places were so badly damaged that the gravity and atmosphere were out, so heavy walls of shielded metal had fallen to seal entire decks and protect the ships’ integrity.

  The fighting was intense around those seals, since the bots wanted to suck everyone into space and the PDF was trying to politely decline the offer.

  “Dorsett!” a woman called as I reached the third skirmish. Three PDF players against four bots holed up in a hall. I naturally joined up to even the numbers. The three players had taken cover at the corners of the hall and were desperately trying to keep the bots from throwing more explosives at the seal that bisected the hall.

  The bots, on the other hand, kept their heads low and tried to pick the PDF off as they over-exposed themselves while attempting to provide covering fire to a giant metal wall.

  Even as I approached the woman that led the group, another player fell to a lucky plasma shot that melted his chest away.

  “These fucks came out of nowhere! Are they friends of yours?!”

  “Oh, sure, assume the freaky virtual bots of a dead terrorist are related to the only virtual guy you know—”

  “Not the time!”

  She was right. “Sorry!” We shot at one bot that tried to take aim with the rocket launcher and forced him to dash for cover.

  “The Fort was under attack,” she told me. Something in her demeanor struck me as familiar. I glanced at her username. Nikita. Must be a reference to something, but I’d never heard of it. “Hijacked the drones somehow. A lot of people died before they managed to shut them down. Are these NPCs related?”

  She was a gamer, not a soldier, but the more that people knew about Keles the better. In case he managed to smoke me.

  “Yes. Long story short, Keles is the guy from Sleipnir’s first raid. He was a terrorist in real life and a cult leader. Mad as a cow licking LSD out of a barrel. He killed himself after I digitized myself, trying to do the same. I just met his—I guess—his virtual ghost, and he’s even madder. He’s the one attacking us and the one who attacked the Fort. He can make copies of himself… Like if you wrote a program to duplicate your favorite movie until it filled your phone’s hard drive.”

  While I spoke, one of the Keles-bots jumped out of cover and threw a grenade before anyone had time to react. It must’ve shorted in the air though, because it exploded in his own face and took him out.

  “Finally!” the other surviving PDF screamed with glee. “I’ve been meaning to hit their grenades!”

  “So, he’s like we feared those AI’s from the Corporate War would turn out?” Nikita asked as we took potshots at the three scrambling Keles-bots.

  “Exactly like that. Turns out those holo-movies were right, I guess. Only, it’s much worse with the Signal. Instead of spreading a virus over the Internet, Keles has a shit-ton of processing power which with to play God.”

  Two Keles-bots switched to rifles instead of bombs, but I gave suppressive fire as Nikita rushed a column to their left, trying to set up a flanking attack. She managed to avoid the volley of plasma fire that flew in her direction long enough to reach the column and toss an electric smoke grenade in their general direction.

  The gas clouded the entire hall as the chemicals inside the tiny ball mixed in a violent reaction, but only the center of the smoke was electrified. I heard the faint whisper of power-suit’s shields being drained as the bots scrambled backward to get the hell out of the kill-zone.

  “’Nade out!” I announced, throwing another sphere of goodness and happiness their way. This one was a frag from my inventory, designed to breach a suit’s armor after the shields were out. The sphere disappeared in the smoke. The cloud barely shook as the frag detonated, but tiny marbles of carbon alloy smashed themselves against the walls and columns around us and embedded there.

  “I’ll confirm!” Nikita left the safety of her cover and sprinted, hugging the wall nearest to it. She disappeared into the cloud and soon enough I heard her rifle shoot twice in succession.

  “You think she got them?” the other player asked me on the other side of the hall’s entrance. “Those things aren’t NPCs, are they? We’ve been killing them just fine, though.”

  “The real one has no working body,” I told him. “Only his mind floating around and a bunch of textures to play with. Can hack things, I guess, but not really interact with people. No staying power.”

  “So, these are his troops. He’ll use them to claim territory?”

  That’s right. This Alliance likes their war metaphors.

  Yet… Well, every single one of us had grown up in a world where books and movies had already worked over all possible apocalypse scenarios. And the last couple of years, ever since the Rune Event, everyone had the possibility of an apocalypse over their heads, even as they went on their day-to-day lives.

  That the danger came from inside instead of from outer space wasn’t hard to get used to.

  Nikita came back from the smoke as it was sucked into the ship’s life-support systems. “Area cleared.”

  The three of us reunited in the entrance. Nikita’s avatar was tall and built like a tank, while the last player, username Archon, looked like a sharpshooter.

  “What now?” Nikita asked. “Combat’s still going on. So far, we’re pushing them back… But from what you’re telling me, I see no reason these assholes can’t keep respawning forever until the chew us d
own. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. So far, they’re few, but that may change anytime. That’s not important, though. If they attacked the Fort in real life, using drones…”

  “The damage would be terrible,” Nikita concluded with a grim frown muted by the shine of her visor.

  “Almost the entire world runs on drones now,” whispered Archon.

  “That’s why I need to tell someone like Admiral Crestienne about Keles. Perhaps there’s still time to quarantine him or something.”

  Sadly, Roy had been killed before he managed to reach her. Of course, he had probably respawned by now, but elsewhere in the ship. Since the command center’s comms systems had been destroyed, getting a hold of a lot of people across planetary space would take too long…A translight message wasn’t an option until we reached the Terran Federation’s space.

  I hope the other Cole’s still alive out there, I thought with desperation. Perhaps he’d reach Caputi faster than me.

  “That’s going to be hard to do right now,” said Nikita. “No one in our military branch is online now. They were either at the UN or in the Fort when it was attacked. We’re low on their stack of priorities. And we’re civilians, it’s not like I have their contact numbers on my phone—”

  “Lines are down anyway,” Archon said.

  It seemed like I’d run out of luck. And there was something nagging at the back of my head, but the adrenaline and the tension in my stomach wouldn’t let me focus.

  “I can broadcast the message if we reach a comm system. Can’t be the command center’s, that one is gone.”

  Around us, the ship shook like an airplane in turbulence and threatened to throw us off our feet. That couldn’t mean anything good.

  “The bots are tearing the ship apart,” said Nikita. “They’re targeting vital systems first. I’m losing connection to other squads left and right. By the time the rest of the fleet arrives with reinforcements, I doubt there’ll be many comms left.”

  I nodded. That’s how it had looked to me when I saw the holograms in the cabin. “The hangars are well-protected, aren’t they?”

  The Teddy was stationed there. Even if the fight reached it, I had little doubt in my mind that Francis could defend my ship with little trouble. If things got worse, he’d just leave the Algernon as a last resort and go hide using the Teddy’s invisibility field generator.

  And the Teddy had comms systems. Very powerful. Rylena had installed them at the time we built the ship.

  “Yes,” said Nikita. “But they’re a long way from the Algernon’s engines. Opposite from here, in fact.”

  That was the problem. If the Keles-bot were on a sabotage mission, the engines would be a target too juicy to pass up. A failed attack there could leave the PDF flagship crippled and out of commission. A successful attack could vaporize it.

  What’s it going to be? The Teddy or the Algernon. I can’t protect both.

  “We’ll split up,” said Nikita after she caught a glimpse of my indecision. “You go get your ship, and I’ll go for the engines.”

  Archon looked doubtful. “Splitting our forces?”

  “The way I see it,” she said, “the intel you’re carrying is more valuable than either ship, Dorsett. Right now, only the three of us are in any position to reach our bosses, am I right? So, it’d be stupid to keep all our eggs in the same basket. If the Algernon goes boom, I want you ready to spring into action without waiting to get back in position from a bad respawn. If you respawn at all—”

  “Of course he can respawn, what’re you on about—” said Archon, but I cut him off with a gesture.

  “Yeah, she’s right. I don’t know if Keles can figure a way to… delete me, even if he couldn’t before.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Nikita agreed.

  “You sure about this? Chances are the PDF will lose the Algernon if you can’t buy enough time.”

  There was something very familiar about the way she spoke. I had to ask her:

  “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  Her smile was sly. “We’ve never met, so I’m surprised you even remember my voice. We fought together once, briefly.”

  I squinted, trying to place her accent. I was vaguely aware that time was ticking, and that I should be rushing down the aisle to make my way to the hangar. As a reminder, the ship shook again, this time stronger.

  Those are the shield generators. I noticed. They just fizzled out.

  “A while ago,” Nikita said. “Right at the Rune Event. We fought the Iron Posse’s legendary ship together.”

  Recognition flooded through me like someone had broken open a dam inside my head. “The pilot in that PDF fighter? Damn, you took a missile for me.”

  Her smile shifted into one I wasn’t able to place. Self-loathing? Or pride?

  “Thanks to that,” she made a gesture that encompassed the ship around us. “This happened. The Event. You. Because I decided to help you out. Because I was curious about what the hell was hiding inside Validore.”

  Behind us, the sound of a firefight reached our position, and the light of more plasma explosions flashed over the walls and ceilings, giving the LED lighting a necromantic, green twinge. Nikita gestured for me to go the other way, towards the hangars, while she and Archon reloaded their rifles and the guy rushed to cover the corners.

  “All because of me,” said Nikita, still with that strange expression I couldn’t parse. She turned around. “It’s my responsibility, Dorsett. That’s why you can go find your ship. The Algernon won’t fall with me in it.”

  12 CHAPTER TWELVE

  ANTISEPTIC

  THE ELECTRIC BLANKET kept me warm the same way a fever keeps you warm. As the rescue chopper soared over the San Mabrada’s cityscape, the wind was a cold hammer on my forehead which made my eyes misty.

  Last time I’d seen San Mabrada like this I’d been tied down on a Whistleblower headed for Sleipnir’s headquarters. Many people had died that day—good and bad—just like today.

  But I never saw the bodies.

  I was vaguely aware of Officer Harrison’s hand on my shoulder, reaching gently for my attention. Mom was in front of me, covered in a blanket like mine. She turned her head (and her worried expression) towards the city, giving Harrison and me all the privacy she could afford in an evacuation chopper packed to the brim with civilians and the Fort’s wounded.

  “How are you holding up, Cole?” Harrison was a police officer—or at least had been. The city had him on an investigation with paid leave after Sleipnir and a woman called Martinez hijacked Mom and him.

  “They said I’m in shock,” I nodded towards the military medics’ heads, obscured by the other passengers. “I guess that’s how I’m holding up.”

  Harrison shook his head gravely. He’d always acted very paternally towards me. Granted, he’d been that kind of policeman to every street rat in Lower Cañitas. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder how much his attitude was related to the fact that my mother and he had been involved for a while, without me even knowing.

  “You’re tougher than you think,” he told me. “And you’ve done enough. You passed the information along the Fort’s chain of command. It’s in the hands of the government now. Just hold on a bit and you’ll meet with your friends at the hospital. It’s over.”

  The city beneath us was a sprawl of concrete and steel that extended itself in every direction until it reached the mountains and the countryside.

  From this high up, San Mabrada appeared timeless, almost beautiful, all lights and the faint, orderly movement of the cars. There was no sight of the holograms that polluted the sky, or the automated fabrics with the constant stream of automated trucks coming in and out of them, constantly, at all hours. No sight of Lower Cañitas with its thieves and script kiddies sniffing around every nook and cranny looking for a chance to make a buck or two. No sight of the corporate security inspecting every corner of the web for any signs of a leak or a weakness in the network of their enemies.
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br />   It was easy to forget about all that from up here, with the cold wind and an electric blanket, but this sprawl wasn’t the real San Mabrada. San Mabrada was the script kiddies and the powerful corporations and the drones and the holograms.

  I let out a tired sigh and turned my gaze away from the city. Mom was looking out—pretending not to pay attention to our chat—into the city, thinking God knows what. I said to Harrison in a whisper low enough for the wind’s roar to keep just between the two of us:

  “All those times you gave me a ride home after I got stamped with a strike…Was that you being a good officer, or part of your dance to get into my mother’s pants?”

  The question came a bit angrier than I had intended, and Harrison blinked with surprise at the bluntness of it. “Huh.”

  I shrugged. “Shit—didn’t mean it like that—”

  “It just happened,” he told me in the same kind of whisper I’d used, but he threw Mom a look that she caught with the corner of her eye. “I didn’t plan any of it, and I never gave you special treatment—that I’m aware of. More like…A couple times you really earned a punch to the face, you know? That time the Ferals and you scripted your way into Cañitas’ waste management plant—”

  I laughed dryly at the memory. I’d been thirteen at the time. “Yeah, the script turned out to be a virus. I’d had no idea pipes could explode like that, scared the shit out of me.”

  Harrison laughed too. “Two hours chasing after you guys, knee-deep in shit-water. I think Chief Brode wanted to drown all of you by the time we caught up with you. God knows that saint of a man earned his pension after that.”

  Twelve hours in the commissary after that, seven kids smelling like Satan’s bathroom after jalapeño night. When my poor mother got wind of what happened…

  Ah, technically I was still grounded for that one. Van had threatened to give herself up for adoption after we returned home. Later, Kipp had laughed so hard he literally passed out for a bit.