by Hugo Huesca
By ‘Battle Spoils’, it meant there were some interesting items wherever Walpurgis was holed up. I raised an eyebrow as I dismissed the Quest screen. Rune Universe had absolutely no shame about things like reading the player’s minds.
You got used to it, after a while. As far as I’ve seen, the game was happy making Quest logs like this one. Except when it bent time and space in-game, which I’d only seen happen once.
“So, she’s in some kind of trouble,” I guessed. Blowing stuff up was her modus-operandi when she got in a bind. Well, nothing to it. I’d better move.
The coordinates were a bit far away. I planned a jump route and instructed Francis to make sure we were loaded up on fuel.
It didn’t take long. The doors to the hangar opened with a metallic hiss. It slowly transformed into a launching platform.
A rail system propelled the ship forward for a perfect take-off position, letting me have a panoramic view of the launching bay.
The place was teeming with new and mid-level players. Compared to last year, the Argus was packed almost to capacity, which was completely insane for a station of its size. Like I said, Rune’s userbase had grown. Players from everywhere on Earth were reunited here. Some of them recognized the Teddy, and a couple actively pointed towards it.
The Teddy made an arc as the engines came online and I was out and away from the Argus before anyone could blink.
The Earth dominated the bottom half of my screen. As far as I could tell, it was a perfect geographical representation of the real thing. It was a hell of a sight. A shiny blue expanse with vaporous clouds dancing over it. If I squinted, it was almost like I could see the currents of the ocean.
I had no time to waste with sightseeing, not around heavily populated space.
The warp engine buzzed with energy as the antimatter reactor in the ship fed it with an incredible amount of power.
“Let’s get us some tactical support,” I muttered. The ship jumped.
Reaching Walpurgis took Francis and I a while. Since I had a time limit, I did a series of long, constant jumps. It was much faster than normal interstellar travel, but it also burned a lot of fuel. Which meant it was more expensive.
I could take the hit, though. I bought my fuel directly through an account with Zandier Mining Inc., an NPC corporation for which my friends and I had quested now and then. Building relations with the NPCs often paid off.
Finally, we reached the end of the last jump and the Teddy slipped out into physical space. I ran a scan through the system. It was near the edges of Terran civilized space, a point where few people ventured, if they weren’t miners or pirates. Or, apparently, Walpurgis.
The system was empty. No nearby planets, no asteroids with rare metals, not much of anything. Its star was old, orange, and covered with dark spots on its burning surface.
“There’s a derelict ship nearby,” announced Francis. “It’s position conforms with the coordinates Master Walpurgis gave you, if you take into account its drifting. Do you want me to scan its interior?”
“Confirm there aren’t any lifeforms,” I told him. If it was really a derelict, it should be devoid of life (except for Walpurgis, when she logged in), otherwise it was an ambush.
I waited a few seconds while Francis directed Teddy’s scanners towards the hulk. The ship came to view on my screens. It was an old cargo transport. Its gray hull was bent and twisted all over its surface in those spots where small meteorites had punctured the armor. Bits of debris floated around the ship like its own asteroid belt.
The Teddy’s computers sent a translight inquiry to the Terran Federation’s databases and the derelict was identified as an old supply barge used to deliver ammo to a frontier Space Station in the area, long since lost to pirates.
What was Walpurgis doing in a place like this?
“The ship is devoid of lifeforms,” announced Francis, when the scans were done. “It should make things easier for you, Master Cole.”
“Great,” I smiled with satisfaction. “No more close calls for today.”
“Oh, no, I don’t mean it like that,” said Francis. “I meant to say, it will be easier for you to deal with the assassination androids without having to worry about pirates.”
I had to actively suppress the need to smack my forehead with my power-gloved hand.
“You mean the place is filled with androids?”
“Not at all! Only two,” said Francis. “As far as I can tell, given the state of the ship, they were the ones who made it a derelict in the first place.”
I opened a window to the real world and texted a message to Walpurgis.
What the hell are you doing trying to solo two androids?
Her response arrived almost instantly.
So you’re already there? Great. I’ll log in, give me five minutes. I was holed up at the ship’s cafeteria when the androids retreated and I had to log out for the day.
By the way, there were four androids at first. You’re welcome.
“Damn,” I sighed heavily and went to the back of the Teddy, where the heavy weaponry was stored.
It was a tiny room next to the medbay, filled with special grenades, rifles, close-quarter weapons, and other survival gear.
“What do I use against ninja robots?” I wondered aloud. This kind of thing was better-suited to the specialties of Rylena and Walpurgis. Beard would’ve gone for the minigun, but I suspected the cramped hallways of the barge would make it difficult to use.
I had very few points in the Heavy Weapons skill anyway.
“Take the electric smoke grenades,” suggested Francis. “They won’t hurt the robots, but the electric field will react with their armor and reveal their position. Just switch your visor to Energy Signature Vision when you throw them.”
“Good call,” I took two of those and clipped them to a small magnetic belt on my chest. “I still need something to hit them with.”
“More grenades?” Francis had once been a Personal Assistant, before he had been re-worked into a ship AI. This meant he could see my stats and make suggestions around them.
So he always tried to discourage me from taking any weapons that required aiming.
“Can’t do that,” I said. “The plasma might set off the reactor if we fight close to it. The explosion could even damage the Teddy.”
“Well, you can’t go close range, either. The ninjas would just tear you to bits.”
I made a quick pass over my options. Rocket launcher, rifles, rail guns, a flame-thrower, an electric net, survival machete (useless in a fight), a variety of bombs, Beard’s mingun.
“I need something armor-piercing,” I said. My hand hovered over the weapon that caught my fancy. This one would do, in a pinch. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a bad idea to bet it all on a single shot weapon, Master Cole.” Francis’ voice was trembling a bit.
I had an EMP harpoon in my hand, specially designed to take out electrical equipment. Armor piercing. Single shot and you had to load a new harpoon to the pistol after using it. A direct hit of this thing would fry the Terminator himself if it came to it. Since there were two androids, I’d use two pistols, so I could shoot two harpoons at a time before having to reload.
I loaded them into my personal inventory, left my blaster in the ship, and grabbed a dozen of the metal harpoons to serve as ammo. Those went onto the magnetized belt on my chest. I was ready. As a last step, I chose two industrial-strength floodlights and put them on a magnetized tray.
“Don’t worry,” I told my AI. “I’ll wait until they’re close enough before engaging them.”
“Just don’t wait too long.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Killer Androids
Getting inside wasn’t easy, since none of the doors were functional and the hangar bay was collapsed. I positioned Teddy as close to the derelict’s hull as possible and went into my ship’s airlock.
I sent the tray with the floodlights gently tumbling into space, aimed
at the closed door in front of us. Then I jumped firmly away from the Teddy, but not enough to smash myself against the derelict. If I had done that, I would’ve bounced against the hull and gone spinning into open space.
Instead, as soon as my hands and feet made contact with the metal surface, I magnetized them. I smacked against the metal, but the impact made no sound. I freed my arms while keeping my feet in place and turned just in time to catch the floodlight tray. I clipped it to my suit’s waist with a steel cable and went to work on the door.
The circuits were fried, so I needed to power them enough for the door to open. Since the security of the barge was as dead as the doors (except for the killer robots, that is) I only had to fiddle with the simple circuits hidden by a panel next to the door.
I tore the panel out using the extra brute strength of my own robotic arm. Then, I directed my suit’s shield generator towards the exposed circuit. The shields were down to 50%. The door came online for a second and began to open with difficulty.
The ship had no atmosphere inside.
“Don’t miss the window, Walps.” I didn’t want to be hanging around in the derelict while the androids prepared an ambush.
It didn’t matter how strong you were, or how heavily armed, or how end-game your suit was. If you stepped on a plasma mine or something of the like, and your enemies got the drop on you after that, you’d respawn a second or two later wondering what the hell had happened.
“Scan again, Francis,” I told him. “Can you pinpoint the androids’ signature?”
Pause. “Negative, Master Cole. They raised their personal invisibility fields as soon as the door was breached. I’d say they are waiting for you in some vulnerable chokepoint.”
“I’d say the same thing,” I told him. Instead of walking willingly into the wolves’ den, I threw one of my smoke grenades inside.
I waited a second or two for it to explode and then jumped in, followed by the tray clipped to my belt.
Everything was dark inside the ship. Not a lot of light to go around in space. That’s what the floodlights were for. The beams of light turned the cramped space into something resembling a well-lit horror-movie corridor.
The door led into an smashed airlock, with its door laying charred and burned to one side. The corridor after it was bent and dented with the plasma signals of a fight that had happened long ago. The smoke began to fill my field of view, but I made sure to stay away from it. The point of electrical smoke was to drain shields by tricking the generators into believing they were constantly under attack.
I needed my shields. Instead, I turned the option of my visor to read energy emissions. My field of view became a mixture of black and green, with blue rivulets of energy floating in the cloud of smoke.
The area was clear. Any invisibility field interacting with the smoke would appear as a bright green and blue. Either the androids were faster than I thought or the ambush was farther ahead.
I didn’t like my chances with two against one. Thankfully, Walpurgis was very precise on the time when she would log back in.
My social screen pinged at the edge of my vision, letting me know that her character was online. I opened a channel of communication with her.
“Hey,” she greeted me. “You inside the barge?”
“Just clearing my way through. It may take me a while, though. Can the androids set up traps?”
“Yeah. They were built for guerrilla warfare. The cafeteria is filled with booby traps, so it’s going to take me a while to get out.”
“That’s cheating,” I said. Usually, the mobs and NPCs would avoid a zone where a player logged out. If you quit the game during combat, you would simply leave your body standing there like a mannequin, with predictable results. If you exited correctly, your avatar would disappear.
Normally, the mobs tried to pretend they hadn’t seen that, and went back to doing whatever it was they were doing. That’s because having a battalion of pirates all waiting for you to re-appear a day or two after you infiltrated their base would make the game unplayable.
Of course, players didn’t have that limitation. And neither did traps. I heard an explosion through the channel and the ship shook. This let me know two things. First one was that the killer robots were screwing with the rules, and second was that until now, the cafeteria had been filled with an air pocket.
“Damn it!” said Walpurgis. “Those cheaters!”
“You OK?”
“My shield generator is fried,” she told me. “They put a land-mine right in front of the spot where I appeared.”
It was in situations like this one that I missed having a full crew. Rylena would’ve used her little scout drone, 402, to identify all the traps. Instead, Walpurgis had used the poor-man’s method of dealing with a trap, which was stepping on it.
“Why did you have to log out in the middle of combat with those things?” I asked my friend.
“Dude,” she said. “It wasn’t the middle of combat, it was a stalemate. It had been like fifteen hours real time and neither them nor me were willing to walk into each other’s ambushes. I had to sleep. They aren’t supposed to go around putting traps at my spawn zone, the fucking spawn campers.”
This presented us with a problem. Neither of us were equipped for a siege. I could always ask Walpurgis to log off again, destroy the entire ship using the Teddy, and then pick her off when she came back. This would fail my Quest, though, and would definitely be against the spirit of the game.
Also, Walpurgis had to have flown here in a ship of her own and I wasn’t about to owe her a new one.
“Any plans?” I asked her. I took a step towards the corridor when the smoke density lessened. It was empty, for all I knew. Then again, they were supposed to be invisible.
I took out the harpoon pistols and magnetized them to my arms, where I could reach for them in a pinch.
“First, I disarm my way out of here,” she told me. First and second way of dealing with traps: Disarm them, or set them off from a safe distance. Since Walpurgis was in a cramped cafeteria, she had to slog through the disarm process.
“How high is your Disarm Traps skill?” I asked her.
“Not very,” she said. The ship shook again, this time a tad less. No sound this time. “Ugh. That almost took my head off.”
“Was your suit breached?”
“No, I was far enough away this time.”
Good. Now, while she slowly worked her way out, I had to deal with the robots.
They’d had time to heavily trap the cafeteria, probably other parts of the ship, too. But they weren’t expecting reinforcements to come help Walpurgis, and no one ever wanted to fight a war on two fronts. They were trying to ambush me before she got out of there, so they could deal with her two against one.
The smoke hadn’t caught them in the corridor, so they must be farther into the ship. Probably just after another mine, or a string of nano-wire.
I had only one smoke grenade left with me. A couple more were left in the Teddy (don’t ever carry more than a couple explosives on your person or the enemies will target you just to set them off), but if I went back, they could change their ambush spot for a more favorable location. Like inside the Teddy. I wasn’t willing to let that happen.
Better to make this one grenade count.
“Francis, do you have a map of the barge?”
“The registry is old,” he said, “and it was archived about twenty years ago. I’ve been arguing with a Terran Federation AI while you and Master Walpurgis were stumbling your way into a plasma deathtrap, you know? I feel like I do all the heavy lifting around here, you two need to start pulling your weight!”
Francis’ channel was the same as Walpurgis, so she was able to hear him. “Come down here with us if you don’t like it.”
“I’m good,” he told us. “I’m making progress with the map situation, it turns out the AI was single. Let me see…”
A map overlay appeared on my screen. The way to the cafet
eria was a logistical nightmare. A lot of tiny corridors and small rooms to hide a bomb in.
I hope they don’t want to blow the ship apart or we’ll be in trouble.
“Thanks for the assist, Francis. Walpurgis, here’s what I’m planning to do. I’m going to walk towards your position, so we can reunite. The androids are probably going to ambush me somewhere along the way, in a spot where they have overwhelming advantage. You see anything like that on the map?”
“Give me a second, there’s a fragmentation grenade under the bathroom stalls… Alright, that’s done. Let me see.” Pause. A purple dot appeared in the middle of the map, between the cafeteria and my hallway. “This is the storage pit. I fought them there last time, and it was heavily fortified in their favor. Lots of hiding places for them to pass undetected.”
I nodded. “So, that’s their killing zone. The only problem is going to be getting me inside, right?”
“Yes. If I were them, I’d herd you.”
She meant there would be a trap waiting for me in all the corridors that could get me away from them and into the cafeteria. The only safe way would appear to be the storage area, which would be casually left alone.
If the traps took me out, they would save themselves a good deal of trouble.
“How long until you’re out?” I asked Walpurgis. I began walking in the direction of the cafeteria using my magnetized boots as substitute for gravity. I kept the industrial lights in front of me so every tiny detail of the road ahead was well illuminated. I wasn’t going to take any chances.
“No idea,” she told me. “There’s a lot of booby traps around here—” She went silent, but just as I began to worry, Walpurgis continued: “Gods! There’s a pit in the middle of the floor.”
“A pit? We’re in zero-g…”
“They were banking on me using the magnetized boots,” she guessed. “They filled it with explosives, as far as I can tell. I almost fell for it, damn it.”
I deactivated my magnetized boots and eyed the floor underneath with suspicion.