Cold War Rune: A Virtual Reality novel (Rune Universe Book 2)

by Hugo Huesca

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, just as surprised as the engineer. So far, nothing had escaped Mai and Rylena’s scanning combo.

  “Oh, fuck,” the engineer confirmed. He even instinctively raised his giant exo-hands in surrender.

  Someone behind me shot him in his exposed chest with a laser and turned him into exo-suited coal. Not that it made any difference at this point.

  “Careful, those suits explode,” said Beard automatically, but he was as stunned as everyone else. “Don’t torch the core.”

  Walpurgis cursed. “Run!”

  We lunged frantically into the shaft, trying to reach the exit. If they shot at us through the floor, we’d be fish in a barrel. A barrel filled with acid and hate.

  The alarms bathed everything in a furious red light not a minute into our race.

  “Faster!”

  “How the hell did he get past us?” I called into the monitor as I turned my oxygen stream on (using the jetpack would’ve fried Anders’ face) to gain much-needed speed.

  “No fucking idea! He’d need a radar jammer or an equipment malfunction…” said Mai.

  “He had 34 levels in Luck,” Rylena said while she followed Mai up into a tiny mechanical tunnel. “That’s how.”

  “That’s not nearly enough to bypass us,” Mai said. “Only 34? You’d need to be very lucky to—Oh, GODDAMN IT!”

  “I told you it wasn’t a dump stat!” Beard said with triumph.

  “Well, you’re getting a prize for being right,” said Walpurgis while she followed after Rylena and Mai. “You get to eat plasma! Everyone gets to eat plasma!”

  Personal alarms blared in my helmet as internal motion sensors detected magnetized boots storming close to us as we struggled to exit the narrow killzone. A small part of my brain noted the minimap displayed on a corner of my field of view and realized we were still too far from the R&D section of Firebrand. Much too far. Even if we managed to make way through the dozens and dozens of players, Sleipnir would have more than enough time to set a heavy defense by the labs.

  We needed to give them something more to worry about.

  But first…

  I turned my blaster to a wide-angle shot mode and pressed the barrel up against the metal. The red dots in the minimap were armed players. They were just around the corner…

  The blaster shot melted a perfect angry circle in the middle of the passageway just as three guards armed with laser rifles appeared into view, close together and still confused about what was going on—but anxious to shoot at something.

  My shield sizzled and spat helium that quickly was absorbed into the vacuum as beads of orange flames splatted on my visor and slid harmlessly away from the energy shields. I pirouetted so I was standing upright. Then I turned my jetpack to half-power, drowned our tunnel in flames, and catapulted out through my blaster-made hole and in front of the stunned guards.

  Just before smashing against the ceiling I aimed towards the players and at the same time turned the oxygen streams at my back on full blast. The result was that my own inertia cut a narrow miss with the ceiling and I was propelled like a cannon-ball against the patrol.

  Red streaks of laser shots passed me by, and the next thing I knew, the three pairs of magnetized boots had lost their grip and everyone was gyrating without control and smacking against each other and the walls.

  My armor allowed for more mobility than theirs, so I managed to regain control by using my streams and magnetizing my back against the wall. The guards kept gyrating in complete silence, their distress only reflected in the way their arms and legs trailed about. It was like watching an interpretative dance with a very high budget.

  Rylena and Mai put them out of their misery.

  “Good move,” said Mai. “But more are coming.”

  I could see she was right; more and more red dots were about to swarm us from every side.

  “Beard, cover the rear,” I said as the last of my team exited the tunnel. “Anders and I got the flanks. Everyone else guard our front. Ryl, we need to make things more explodey around here.”

  “Not yet!” she said as everyone scrambled to get in formation. “I still have too many left in the pack.”

  “Then hurry!”

  Beard stumbled behind me, avoiding the charred corpses of the three guards, and pulled the minigun from its magnetized position behind his back. He soon started shooting. I turned over my shoulder briefly to see another low-levelled patrol slam against an open corridor trying to find cover that wasn’t there.

  We had no time to run. Flying was faster.

  Everyone turned on their jetpacks—except Beard, who hadn’t installed one—and flew behind Mai as she tried her best to avoid getting us cornered by enemies coming from all directions. Walpurgis magnetized Beard to her hands and carried him as she went.

  “Here, we need to get on the lift!”

  We reached an open, domed vault with a grav-lift as a heavy duty elevator. It was next to a complex control panel filled with flashing red lights. The lift was locked-down, but we could’ve simply flown up… if the top of the dome wasn’t covered by a thick hatch, dense enough to shrug off anything short of a bomb. “I’ll get it to unlock,” said Rylena. “More reliable than testing our luck with the explosives. Buy me thirty seconds.”

  She made for the controls, explosives still slung over her shoulders. Everyone else flew to the vault’s three entrances.

  I saw Beard mow down a guard that tried to rush us. The guard’s body ricocheted against the walls and darted into the vault. My entrance, just in front of Rylena’s control panel, had smarter guards. I saw the shimmering of shields behind the passageway, beyond the reach of my blaster.

  So I threw an oxidizer grenade at them. In zero-g, the baseball-sized sphere swam in a perfect straight line until it reached the wall in front of them. Someone screamed over the public channel as the grenade went off and bathed the entire group in liquid fire.

  “You’re not really burning to death, you idiot,” someone told the screaming voice.

  “Fire can’t burn in space either,” another voice pointed out. “This shit makes no sense!”

  “It’s compressed oxidizer. Read the wiki, seriously.” A power-armored player looked from behind her cover as flames licked her shields, burning a badass shade of green. She looked like a hell-knight or something, and my visor let me see that her shields were barely dented. And she was carrying a grenade launcher. Before I had time to shoot her, the grenade was already soaring in my direction with a perfect arc only possible thanks to the launcher’s directional systems.

  I only had time to shoot the grenade. I shot at it. I missed.

  It exploded at my feet, a perfect ball of searing plasma.

  My visor flashed a fuck you kind of red and I was propelled backwards fast enough to break speeding limits in any real world highway.

  My back smacked against the wall of the lift and I bounced with enough strength to make me see red again, which meant my avatar’s body had taken damage. My suit’s shields were out and the generator was working at full power to try to refill them.

  Time for a valiant and tactical retreat.

  “Recharge!” I exclaimed over private comms. Walpurgis left her position at Mai’s side and used her jetpack to leap into my vacant spot, which was still roaring hot with the plasma’s leftovers. She didn’t even bother slowing down, she simply landed on the wall, shooting with her sidearm blaster pistol non-stop as laser and railgun bolts flew from the other side into the vault, turning everything in a mess.

  “Careful, she has a launcher!” I yelled to her while I bravely waited for my shields to recharge.

  “Almost done over here!”

  Walpurgis jumped into cover with a stream of oxygen and unslung her sniper rifle.

  I saw two scorched and badly burnt low-level players rush out and try to reach Walpurgis, shooting laser blasts on full auto. The launcher-wielding woman crouched near the corner behind them and took aim.

  “
Incoming!” I said. “Get out of there!”

  Even if Walpurgis head-shotted her, the chances that her shields would let her survive were 50/50. Her plasma grenade would take Walpurgis’ shields out and the minions would finish her off.

  Instead of retreating, Walpurgis looked down the sights while she completely ignored the laser barrage. The woman launched the grenade. Walpurgis shot at it.

  The recoil was powerful and instant and almost physically visible. I was sure my friend was going to fly at full speed right back at me, but before one single second had passed, her jetpack flared at full power. For an instant, it was like she had a pair of wings made of blazing blue fire, and then they disappeared. The jetpack had been turned on for exactly the correct amount of time to nullify the recoil, and no more.

  Two railgun bullets left her rifle and traced a straight chemical path as they went.

  The grenade exploded in the other player’s face. The second bullet passed less than an inch underneath the exploding grenade and hit the other player square in her helmet before the force of the explosion could smash her against the wall.

  Her red dot disappeared, just the same as her minions.

  “And that’s how you do it,” Walpurgis said with a satisfied grin.

  “It’s ready!” Rylena exclaimed as more players streamed down the corridors. I could almost hear the sound of our ammo get thrown out of rifles and blasters, barrels hot and shields fizzling out.

  “Back off, everyone!” I called over. “Don’t let them see your backs!”

  Anders and Walpurgis slowly made their way onto the lift while laying suppressing fire for Mai and Beard. Rylena flew towards me, vaulted off the wall, and shot over Mai and Beard’s heads into the incoming Sleipnir’s players.

  Beard was the last one to reach us, just as the last dredges of his shields dissipated. He threw his overheated minigun our way and jumped in.

  “We could just fly up!” he said.

  “I want the lift to seal the entrance behind us,” Rylena told him as the amount of plasma and laser blasts around us grew too dense for my tastes. The lift went up fast, but not fast enough. Someone got lucky and Anders’ left knee blew up in a shower of gore and pieces of servos and armor.

  “Great, they shot our cleric,” Walpurgis said. The lift reached the open dome and we left the guards behind.

  “Shut up and help me patch it,” said Anders, who was already getting sealant out of his belt and injecting it into his wound.

  “Can you keep going?” I asked him. That leg was right out of commission.

  “Yes, I’ll just fly instead,” he said. He injected another syringe full with stimulants in his mangled leg.

  Technically, he wasn’t in agonizing pain, but in a lot of discomfort. His brain believed he was in pain, though, and the game’s mechanics made his vision red and shaky to simulate being disabled. So the stimulants helped him keep going.

  And we had to keep going. The lift brought us closer to the R&D section, the great empty spot near the Firebrand’s core where they kept the Device’s software.

  We were very close, and that meant resistance was going to become even stronger.

  “Alright, shields back up for everyone?” I asked aloud. As it turned out, shields were only half-full for most of us, but that was going to be as good as it got. We lost any more time and next step we took was going to be straight into an ambush.

  “R&D is right behind those security doors,” said Mai. The thick gunmetal slabs were surrounded with hidden turrets. It was easy to tell when you knew what to look for: A heavy energy signature and big rectangular ridges in the floor, walls, and ceiling.

  “One second,” Rylena planted four explosives at the corners of the lift. “We still need a way out,” she explained.

  We threw a volley of plasma grenades at the doors and got rid of the turrets before they even came into play.

  “I’ll lockpick them,” said Beard. He emptied the last batteries of his minigun on the remaining metal slabs until they were something that resembled postmodern art.

  Behind, we could see a bridge that extended hundreds of yards in the middle of a great, empty space. At its end waited a large, half-built laboratory, filled with exo-suits and construction machinery, along with Rune’s bulky, anachronistic supercomputers, holograms, digital constructs and a contingent of white, clinical drones. The lab was connected to the rest of the ship by a pillar thicker than the Teddy. It buzzed faintly with power and I realized it was connected straight to the Firebrand’s antimatter engine.

  Of course, none of that was as important as the squad of end-game players that waited in front of the destroyed doors, bolstered by at least as many androids and support drones. They were carrying an amazing amount of firepower.

  “Whoops,” said Mai. “Those are radar jammers at their feet.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” Rylena told her.

  The amount of targeting systems trained on our chest was high enough to stall my visor and glitch it, so the jammers were almost unnecessary.

  My screen was strewn with black and white interference, distortion, and image leakage, but I still could distinguish how a tall, broad-shouldered player left the contingent and walked in our direction with confident steps. His black and orange power-armor was bleeding edge, as expensive as a fighter. The helmet was shaped like an eagle’s beak, and I could see the tips of wings carved in the back armor and shoulders.

  “Cole Dorsett,” came the voice of Savin Keles on the public channels. “We meet again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Sleipnir

  They outnumbered us three to one, not counting androids and drones. Oh, also turrets. The presence of Keles was like throwing a hot coal to a guy set on fire.

  It more or less confirmed we were in deep trouble.

  “Ah, we’re boned,” Mai said on private channels. “When the hell did this asshole find time to grind to the end-game? He spent most of his life hiding in the mountains; I’m positive they don’t have Internet connection in war-torn Ankara…”

  Behind us, by the lift, we could hear plasma cutters and other power tools hard at work trying to unlock Rylena’s blockade. When they did so, we’d be trapped between a hard place and a shit-ton of guns.

  Under the circumstances, it was understandable that Keles wanted to gloat a little.

  “And Irene Monferrer is with you,” he went on as I and my entire team stood hands up in the exposed corridor. “What a pleasant surprise. You’re coming here to join Dervaux and I while we celebrate our triumph?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why we’re here. Come over here and give me a hug.”

  He shifted his black visor to transparent so I could see his confident smile. It was his real face, too, the same one I’d seen in the Financial District. Down to the same scars.

  “We’ll have time for physical interaction soon enough,” he said. “Once the States are forced to bow to my Church. This is just a taste of what’s to come, Cole.”

  “Are you flirting with me?” I asked. “There’s this weird vibe with you, perhaps you’re getting the wrong impression.”

  The trouble with taunting the person who has you at gunpoint is that he knows he has won. If he’s smart, there’s no reason to get you at arm’s reach so you can fight him off. Keles was smart and stayed unfazed.

  “I expected more,” he said sadly. “I guess you’re the confirmation of all my suspicions about this world and its people. Merely statistics at work.” He spat the last part like it was a string of curses.

  “OK,” I told him. “Let me guess. You watched that Atlas Shrugged remake and thought it was an instructions manual?”

  Meanwhile, Rylena was standing still, not a single muscle twitching. She was thinking. My only plan was to let her figure something out and distract Keles long enough for it to happen. All the while, the rest of my team was also silently losing their shit.

  “Mai, can you snipe him?” Walpurgis asked the agent.

&nb
sp; “Yes, but your rifle is more likely to break through his defenses,” said Mai.

  “I need to take out that asshole with the micro-missile behind him.”

  “Well, they have two snipers and an EMP net, they’ll gun me down before I can get him with a second shot.”

  “How about you use Beard as a shield? His minigun is out, anyway.”

  “Perhaps, but then the covering fire will take you out.”

  “I’ll use Anders as a shield myself.”

  “But—”

  “I can hear you, you know,” said Anders.

  “Oh, they know,” said Beard sadly. “I just don’t think they care.”

  Yes, the situation was grim. I could almost predict what my team was going to do next. Walpurgis would attempt to kill Keles before his squad had time to kill us. Beard would try to do something heroic and futile, like rush at them with all his grenades armed. I would go for something heroic, yet futile. Perhaps if I distracted them…

  I tried to take a friendly step towards Keles, to bridge the distance between us in the guise of a closer chat, but the amount of barrels that shifted to aiming straight at my chest made me change ideas. “At least tell me what you’re planning before you kill us.”

  Keles laughed and the end-game players behind him laughed with him.

  Well, fuck you, then.

  “Monferrer sacrificed her family’s bright future for this asshole. This is just pathetic,” came the conversation between them. Keles had them shut up with a single gesture.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” said Keles. “Your mere existence demands an explanation from the universe to me if we lived in a just world. But we obviously don’t, so I don’t get to break your spine right now in front of everyone you love, and you don’t get to know my motives.”

  “What the hell did I ever do to you?” I asked him. I was genuinely curious.

  His smile faltered for a second.

  “It’s not what you did, Cole. It’s the fact that you were able to do anything at all that’s the problem. But you’ll see soon enough. You and Monferrer have made a lot of people angry and the kiddie gloves are coming off.”