by Hugo Huesca
“You are still going to pursue this mission?”
“If the Hegemony says I’m not the Captain of the Apollo anymore,” James said, “then I’m at the mercy of my crew.”
He turned around and it was like he was making eye contact with every single member of the deck at the same time. “What do you think, guys? Should we turn back?”
The reaction was unanimous.
“Hell no!”
“You’re still my Captain!”
“To hell and back, Cap!”
“I didn’t even like Earth in the first place! It’s a silly planet.”
Not a single person voted to return. James turned to Van and now he was almost shining with pride. “That’s it, then.”
Van nodded. She had observed the crew’s reaction with a poker face, but now she looked ashen. Almost gray.
“James,” she started. She looked over her shoulders once again. Then she said, “Thank you.”
The Captain flashed her a grin. “Anytime, Auntie.”
“Fuck the mobs,” she said in a very unpresidential manner. She was back to the way Kipp remembered her. “They can go drown in a sewer for all I care—”
“Ah, I hope no one leaks that sound-bite,” Faust whispered under his breath. “Then again, she appears cursing in hundreds of them.”
“—my family is not going to die in the middle of bum-fucking nowhere,” she finished. “Take your time. I’ll try and get the charges overthrown when you return. If I can’t, I’ll tell them you took your crew hostage, so there won’t be any charges for them. Hopefully.”
“Thank you,” James said. He meant it.
The tension seemed to leave them like a gas leak. They grinned in a way that reminded Kipp of Cole. Van said:
“You’ll be out of range in a bit. Kipp…There’s a lot I’d like to say to you. It will have to wait until you come back.”
“Of course, Van. We’ll see you around. Congratulations on achieving world domination.”
The feed started going grainy. Someone announced the break was imminent. Van Dorsett laughed and made a simple bow. “Thanks, man.”
And the connection fizzled out.
Kipp had put together a lot of things by now. Still, for his benefit, Faust told him: “Most of the crew inside the Apollo, including me, voted for her.”
“Why?”
“See, she had a videogame stream—”
Kipp’s eyes were the eyes of someone this close to having a violent reaction. “Explain.”
“Well… it sounds weird having to explain this in the first place. Most of us grew up watching her exploits. She started her claim to fame as the sister of Cole Dorsett, the infamous man who unlocked the Signal. She held that fame for her own merits, though. In the end, she led our parents into a massive virtual battle for the fate of the world, against a crazed undead virtual guy…That kind of thing forms a bond between a girl and her fanbase.”
He coughed and continued, “And her stream went on for thirty years. You have any idea how many followers it acquired since then? Van grew up into a fairly competent leader during that time, and everyone was a witness to it. She started guiding her followers into humanitarian aid, for example. Organized international efforts. It escalated from there and eventually she straight up asked that they voted for her in the last two elections.”
As if to validate Faust’s words, the woman at the communications controls added, “Yeah, my entire family voted for her.”
The great majority of the Apollo’s deck crew nodded their agreement. Kipp realized that all these people, who were older than him, were the sons and daughters of his own generation.
From what James had told him, war and conflict had never stopped. But these men and women had grown up hearing the stories of his parents—stories of Rune and the stars—and had ended up believing in his own dream.
Even if he didn’t know their names, Kipp loved them already. They were his own people. He was at home here, in the ship named after the one he had left for his friends a long time ago. It all fit.
“You know what? Stranger things have happened,” he said.
Faust and James exchanged a guilty glance.
“Ah, what a woman,” Kipp said, thinking of Van. “It’s a shame we aren’t going to see her again,” Kipp added.
“Probably not,” said James without missing a beat. “But space is very big, and anything can happen. I wouldn’t lose hope. I have to ask, though. How did you know?”
“Call it a hunch,” Kipp said. Without the hologram, the image of space in front of him was unimpeded. Like he had done many times in the past, he stared at stars that were too far out of his reach with a mixture of melancholy and desire in his heart.
“If Cole and Irene’s ship was going to visit an alien homeworld,” he finally said. “I doubt they…or you, by the way…would be content just turning back to Earth once we rescue them. Because, if it were me in command of this ship…well, I know I’d set route straight at the coordinates of that Alien world.”
James winced as if in pain. “You’re spot on. I’m very sorry for this, Kipp. I made you come along without asking and now it’s too late to turn back. For that, I apologize. But I truly had no other choice.”
Misha cut in before his Captain had a chance to get more sentimental, “The power failure in Cole’s ship interfered with the cryogenic sleep chambers. If they’re to survive, they’ll need stem-reg. The life systems won’t hold on forever, though. The Apollo is a new ship. Faster, and capable of reaching them. And equipped with the world’s first stem-reg chamber. We can reach them in time. But only if we launched the mission yesterday.”
“Which we did,” said Faust.
“The Hegemony would’ve taken too long to green-light the mission,” James added. “There are procedures for this kind of thing. There’s too much invested in the Apollo. So we had to act on our own. We took you with us because there’s no other facility on Earth stem-reg capable right now, and we had to make sure ours functioned perfectly.”
Kipp thought about it. The stars in the window of the ship were unrecognizable from Earth. If only a day had passed…
The speed of the Apollo was something incredible.
“Thank you,” said Kipp. “If my only other option was to miss this trip…well, then that’s not an option at all. I’d have hated to wake up in some hospital bed knowing what Cole and Irene are seeing without me. Thank you, James. For giving me this chance. This is my own dream come true.”
His friends’ son grinned as his shoulders relaxed. Like a weight had been taken from his back. It seemed like James inherited the best qualities of both his parents.
Kipp walked towards the glass that separated the stars from the cabin. It was cold to the touch and he was happily surprised to discover the glass was a real window and not a feed. This was the closest he had been to a real star in his entire life.
“Let’s get our family back,” Kipp said.
28 CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE LONESOME PLANET
THE COARSE, hot sand made the scratches all over my head itch and burn for a long time, but in the end, it was the glare of the sun over my closed eyes that finally woke me up.
I groaned in pain and confusion as I shielded my eyes from the light with my arm. My power-armor was charred and non-functional, so every movement I made was difficult and strained.
How am I still alive?
I lay there for what could’ve been minutes or hours, golden sand all around me and the crash of the waves somewhere behind me, faint and constant, almost like a song. The air was hot and humid and the alien sky had hues of pink and purple that slowly deepened as the day got older.
My brain flatly refused to react for a while, to remember the last minutes of my life. I was content laying in the golden sand, even if the glare of the reflected sun over it hurt my eyes. Life was pink and violet and golden. It was placid.
It was almost enough to make me forget I shouldn’t be alive. Almost.
But there was smoke in the edge of my vision, just a faint trail on top of me, and behind the sea’s smell of salt, was the acrid burn of metal and plasma. It was enough to break the spell.
The truth was, Validore shouldn’t exist anymore. Neither should I.
And this wasn’t heaven, or some other sort of afterlife, because my body hurt all over. My will slowly overpowered my refusal to face reality.
I stood up with a grimace of pain and saw traces of blood—my blood—mixed with the sand beneath my body. Pieces of my armor were scattered everywhere around me, like a second skin that had been shed. My helmet was nowhere to be found.
I was inside the Teddy, was the first coherent thought I had, which didn’t say anything good about my mental state.
The Teddy was behind me, and it was the source of the plasma-fire smoke. The ship had fared worse than I had. The Z-Alloy armor was burnt to a crisp, a blackened shell that surrounded the torn-apart cabin. The wings were missing and the engine was still burning with green flames that cut through the idyllic air like a knife.
Must’ve crashed from orbit, I thought, but I had to reject that idea. Not even the Teddy would’ve survived a crash from orbit, and the ship in front of me was beached on the shoreline, its hull partially hidden by the waves and the rising tide.
It took all my willpower to stand up and make my way to my dead ship. As I walked, I tore apart entire pieces of armor and threw them away like I was shedding a second skin. Or a carapace.
I walked by instinct because there was nothing else I could do. But I couldn’t put up with my questions for long.
There was no Keles-planet floating in the horizon, eating up the view. Reality around me wasn’t collapsing on itself. No Dreadnoughts in orbit around the planet, no distant explosions pointing to a brutal space-battle.
Thinking of the war was almost impossible on this golden beach. But there had been a war. And we had won.
I had the sudden suspicion that I was alone. It was a suspicion so strong, so overpowering, that I stumbled as I reached the crashing waves and almost fell face-first into the emerald water.
Because I knew I wasn’t just alone on this planet. I was alone just like the first cell of life in the first life-sustaining planet had been alone.
There was no living person left in Rune Universe. That’s how alone I felt. Alone enough to weep.
Instead, I made my way to the Teddy through the soft waves, wading until the sea reached to my midsection.
The ship must be half-submerged, I realized. Not for the first time, I had to praise Beard for building the goddamn thing as sturdy as he had. Of course, there was no Beard here. No Rylena, no Walpurgis, no Van…
David did it, I thought. We shut the Core down. There should be no Rune anymore.
That had been the price and I’d paid it gladly. I never expected to wake up after that final flash.
The Teddy’s doors were as melted and charred as the nose of the ship and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to enter through them without the help of a functional power-armor to tear them apart.
I swam farther into the sea, following my ship’s fuselage, until I reached its back. The bay doors were still open. Well, there were no hangar doors on the ship or around it—the impact had torn them away and were nowhere to be seen.
Without even knowing what I was looking for I swam into the flooded cargo bay.
My ship’s interior was covered in darkness and the seawater was cold and thick in the way syrup is thick. This wasn’t Earth’s sea.
I almost didn’t recognize the bay, as it had suffered so much damage. Everything was underwater, and as I floated through the darkness I saw the shapes of weapons and crates of materials either floating midway or stuck to the bottom.
And my crew was nowhere to be seen. But I already knew that, didn’t I?
Floating there, in the darkness, something close to dread threatened to close my throat.
Something had to have gone wrong.
I swam towards the cabin through empty corridors. I passed the weapons’ storage, the turret controls, the engine’s room—the engines were blown and fried—and the medbay. All that greeted me was an empty, silent ship, with the only exception being my ragged breathing and the splash of my arms breaking the stillness of the water.
The cabin was black. It was so dark I could only see back from where I’d come from, the soft glow of the purple sky barely reflected on the water. The glow slowly receded by the moment, threatening to leave me lost in the darkness if I tarried.
The sensation of dread intensified.
“Is anyone here?” I asked. My voice was dry and at first, I couldn’t muster anything stronger than a whisper. “Anyone…?”
My friends and I had been right here the moment it had happened. But there were no signs of them… not that I could see a lot anyway…
As an answer, I hit my feet against something hard in the dark below me. I screamed, more in surprise than in fear (there was nothing in this universe left alive to harm me) and without thinking I dove under. It had been a metallic sphere, I was sure of it. I recognized that shape.
I feverishly searched through the black water. It took three attempts before I found it, nested in what remained of my pilot’s chair.
The sphere was heavy, the size of a small bowling ball, and made swimming out of the Teddy hard but not impossible.
Still, when I finally exited my ship and reached the beach, I was panting and my muscles burned with exhaustion.
Couldn’t you have programmed me with a little more stamina? I thought at the sky. There, the violet was slowly eating away at the pink and becoming more and more intense. It was only missing a neon title to be a perfect album cover. The sun was hidden by the sea already, so nighttime was sure to follow.
I set the sphere next to me in the sand, which was now a dark bronze in color.
“You’re the only one left,” I told the drone carcass. “Just like that time, eh, 401? When we reached the Core for the first time.”
Right here on this planet, actually. Only us. “You were guiding me towards it, weren’t you? Never would’ve done it without your help.”
401 was powered down, which was a kinder way to say…he looked dead.
“You know?” I told the carcass, “I could use your help right now, too. I’m very confused, buddy. I’m hurt all over, wet, scared, and my ship is broken…” And it was getting very cold on this beach.
The drone was as dead as anyone else.
It was frustrating enough to scream.
But it was hard to have an existential crisis when the sky above me was slowly covering itself in so many stars… And the atmosphere was so clear I could see the red dots of the other planets in the Zodia system.
Night in Validore, it seemed, wasn’t spent in total darkness. For some reason, this helped me beat down the panic that threatened to drown me. I took a deep breath and let the salt and the beach cool my body.
While I still had a few minutes of illumination left I reached for the carcass of the drone and turned it around. There was no outside damage that I could see. I took out the back panel that covered 401’s innards and examined it. Drones in Rune didn’t stop working just because of a little seawater.
At first, the components made no sense to me. I definitely lacked the skill and the knowledge—and the tools—to make any complicated repairs… Then I saw it.
I started laughing like a madman. If the stars had eyes they would be very worried about the mental state of the only living person in this virtual universe.
I laughed until tears streaked down my cheeks.
Then, cradling the drone between my knees like one would do when singing a lullaby to a little kid, I reached for his battery and connected the tiny red cable that had come loose next to it.
401 came back to life with a happy buzz of energy and a vibrant, blue light covered his single eye. It floated up slowly, head-level like he, too, was shaking away confusion and sleep.
&nb
sp; “Hey there, buddy,” I told him as his eye focused on me, and I realized he was as confused as I. “Good to see you again. You just earned a ticket to Validore Resort. Population: us.”
401’s eye lamp flickered at me in confusion. I laughed despite myself, letting relief wash over me.
I wasn’t alone after all.
We spent the night building a makeshift refuge out of heavy tree leaves, some of them wider than my arm. 401’s blue light made it easier to work in the dark, and the chirpy drone buzzed around in a blur, scanning our surroundings for anything useful.
When I finished working, the leaves were more a nest than a refuge, but it was close enough for the weather parameters of my virtual body to let me spend the night without shivering. And I was so tired I fell asleep instantly.
The morning was pink and peach, and the light was so white and cozy it had a dream-like blur. The breeze that flowed from the distant mountains carried with it the smell of flowers. Validore had forests? Besides this beach, the only other part of it I’d ever known had been a desert.
As I rose—shedding leaves and dirt—I had the suspicion I would become very well acquainted with Validore. In time.
401 floated a few inches above my head, bobbing expectantly as he scanned me. The drone was as confused as I was, which raised more questions than it answered, but his presence was the difference between going mad and being able to think clearly.
My wounds were healing slowly thanks to the videogame-like physics of Rune, where crippling damage required only a couple days of rest, or less if you had food or medical equipment. Speaking of food…
“You think there’s something to eat around here?” I asked the drone. “I know I don’t need to eat, but I don’t want to spend years and years without food.”
The drone bobbled dubiously before directing his eye toward the horizon, in a direction contrary to the sea. I squinted my eyes against the sun’s reflection… somewhere far away waited a forest, it seemed, surrounding the mountains.
“That’s, what, fifty miles away?” I asked him.
