by Hugo Huesca
Rylena wasn’t moving. I opened a window to the real world, but her mindjack was still on and her small hands were balled into fists.
In Rune:
“Oh, she took out her mindjack,” said Keles. “Turns out she still can be smart. She won’t get to see how I tear her friends apart, piece by piece. Perhaps you’ll want to follow her example. I expect you will stay to the end, though. You have to lie to yourself that you’re a man, instead of a kid who stumbled into history being made.”
What?
“You don’t know me,” I told him. That last taunt had fallen completely flat, like he was speaking to a different person.
He doesn’t know me at all, I thought. The idea made the mad Prophet seem less scary. He wasn’t much older than me, he wasn’t so tall, his black and orange armor was more tacky than scary. And he looked very deluded, to the point of insanity.
Insane people are only dangerous if you believe what they say. Or if they point a lot of guns at you, but you know what I mean.
Keles wasn’t sharing his motives with me, but I knew things about him. I knew he was a murderer with a weird obsession with me, who had appeared not long ago in the States to start his own cult. And he somehow believed his own bullshit.
Whatever you think makes you special is crap. You’re as much a victim of luck as I am. Without Sleipnir you’d be nothing, and the only reason you’re still around is because they need the muscle.
Of course, I was wrong about the last part, but I wouldn’t know this until it was too late.
The rest, spot on, yeah.
Then he started threatening Rylena:
“Are you near that bitch in reality?” Keles asked me. “You should tell her I’m coming to get her, too. That she’ll get to see what I do to you before Dervaux starts on her. Could you do that for me, Cole?”
“Fuck you.”
“Figures. Fine, I’ll assume she’s still listening. Monferrer? Your father will be disappointed to hear he lost his shot at the presidency for his little girl’s fickle whims. But you know what? You’ll disappoint Dervaux most of all. If I read her right, she was hoping you could become a suitable heir, seeing as she doesn’t have any herself. The irony is… turns out Dervaux is a slave to our passions, just like you. She won’t go easy on you when Sleipnir finds you. You’ll get to see how brutal hate can be when it’s fueled by the remnants of maternal love.”
My hands clutched into fists. Keles was threatening her with torture and I was trembling with the desire to get my fingers into his eyes…
“Dervaux loves no one,” said Rylena calmly. “Even if she deludes herself. And you’ll have a lot of explaining of your own to do.”
“Oh, will I?” Keles smiled with triumph. “If I am, you won’t be around to see it, I promise you that.”
“Cole?” Rylena switched over to private comms. “I need you to distract him for at least half a minute.”
I didn’t waste time asking her for an explanation, even if Keles was getting ready to order us to be executed. I glanced behind my shoulder and saw Walpurgis and Beard getting ready to jump in front of Rylena, to buy her time to do whatever she was planning.
“Hey, Keles. One more thing.” I tried to infuse my voice with a confidence I didn’t feel. Keles had misread me, and in doing so revealed a bit about himself. If I was right, perhaps I could buy us more time. “You know your device is useless without me, right? Rylena lied about the safeguard, she was never in the game when the Signal was unleashed. It was all me.”
His eyebrow twitched just a bit, and I might have missed it if my Perception had been just a rank lower. “Don’t flatter yourself, Cole.”
“Okay,” Rylena was saying over the private comms. “At my mark, everyone jumps. Head pointing straight ahead, feet towards the lift. Confirm you heard me.”
My friends started to repeat her words back at her without asking any questions. In the real world, I whispered her words back too, while at the same time talking to Keles in Rune:
“You think it should have been you, don’t you?”
The mad prophet froze. Perhaps he even paled, if that was possible. His hand trembled over his waist, where a hand-sized tube I didn’t recognize as any weapon was magnetized.
“It sure as hell shouldn’t have been you,” he growled. “It doesn’t matter if you’re the only trigger. Not for long, at least—and we’ll get to you sooner rather than later. You’ve achieved nothing. Any last words?”
“Yes,” I told him. “They concern my servo-assisted boot and your ass.”
“Wait a second, Savin,” Rylena said. “I have a confession to make.”
He’ll laugh and order his mooks to shoot us.
But Savin Keles was more pissed off than he let on. Here’s the thing with people pissed off beyond their wits; they really, really want to have the last word.
“Yes, Monferrer? Are you going to beg for the lives of your friends again?”
“It all started a year ago,” Rylena talked with the exact same deadpan she used while telling an overdramatic story. “Before the Signal, in an abandoned, haunted space station called Janus.”
“What are you getting at—?” spat Keles, but he wasn’t going to get us shot until he had the last word. I crossed my fingers. This better be good. I looked at Rylena, trying to guess at her plan. The explosives? No, couldn’t be it, the bag was nowhere to be seen. Could she hack the androids and turrets at this distance? That could even the odds…
“There, we met another player who could do things in Rune that hadn’t been programmed by the fine people of Nordic,” Rylena went on. “Bullshit cheats that gave him an unfair advantage over everyone else. Now I know he must’ve used the Signal’s own language to bypass Rune Universe, the human-made game. Of course, at the time it made me think… could I do something like he did?”
“Oh, I don’t know, do you have a team of scientists hiding in your—?”
“Turns out, the Signal takes the game very seriously, for some reason. Rules can’t be broken… but I can sure as hell bend them. For example, the Hack skill. With enough ranks, I can bypass spaceship’s AI, turrets, security protocols. Why not players?
“Sure would be neat to paralyze some asshole’s power-armor. Or stop him from using his systems in any way. That turned out to be beyond my reach. But you know what wasn’t? The visor. Turns out, you can hack visors. For example, you can make them run a tiny video screen in the corner of their vision. Normally, a combat-useless party trick, you can simply refresh the feed to get rid of it. But no one here has done so yet.”
Keles may have been angry, but he wasn’t so dense as not to realize how a person sounded when she was about to reveal her triumph card. He drew out his strange tube and with a frenetic gesture ordered his players to take aim. At the same time, my eyes trailed over the two (almost never used) commands that let me refresh my own visor’s feed. My field of view didn’t change. Except for one tiny thing. I now knew where the bag with explosives was. It was floating happily close to Keles’ group.
“Jump!” exclaimed Rylena. “Now!” She pressed the explosives’ detonator.
We all de-magnetized and jumped just as Sleipnir opened fire. At the same time, and lightning-fast, Keles created an orange energy disk at his wrist and held it between himself and the pack, like a shield. His jetpack roared at full power, but the explosion was faster.
It didn’t matter that it was silent, I could feel the deafening boom coursing through my bones and organs. The fireball in front of us engulfed Sleipnir minions and Keles himself. It demolished the bridge in an awesome inferno of fire, vapor, and sharpened debris.
Sadly, we couldn’t enjoy the fireworks because the demolition charges behind us exploded with a fury and those four were close enough to tear through my battered shields. The blast launched me like a human javelin in a perfect trajectory into the still roaring ball of fire in front of us… And through it. I had a vague notion of other people covered in liquid fire, flying in more
or less the same direction.
Momentum, I thought in the middle of my confused and short-lived life as a human bullet. I had the faintest notion that moving at huge velocities was a problem if there was no air resistance to slow you down.
I had to slow down. But I didn’t even know in what direction I was going. My visor was cracked with static and the camera in my suit were out of commission. The only company I had to my screaming was a sea of red, panicked alarms blaring in my ears and eyes, but pointing at nothing in particular.
Head-first. That would have to be enough. Perhaps I was still headed in a straight line. In that case, I decided I should unleash my oxygen streams at full power before I smashed straight into the R&D laboratory.
Between that decision and when I finally pointed my arms straight ahead about a second-and-a-half had passed. I smashed against glass before I could even will the streams open, and almost instantly afterward, hard against metal. My shields collapsed and the screen went red. And then black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Keles
I almost tore my mindjack in stunned frustration before I realized the death screen wasn’t coming up. But the blackness was still there. I couldn’t move my body at all, I couldn’t hear, I could speak, but my jaw seemed to be fused with my skull.
Had Rylena killed me so hard I’m in a coma?
Then my brain took his finger out of his ass and offered an alternative solution. The impact had shut down my shield generator when it tried to absorb it and prevent me from becoming Cole-Jello. The generator was out, and the power-suit had suffered catastrophic damage.
It was way too similar to being buried alive to be comfortable. I couldn’t look at my screen, nor access my inventory, and I was shut off from the entire world. If someone looked at me, they’d think I was just a digital body.
My visor flickered for a second, revealing a worrisome spiderweb of cracks in the internal glass. For a second, I could see my hand in front of my face, sizzling with blood and automatic armor-sealant. A spasm of energy shut through the servos.
It’s rebooting, I thought. If the energy source was still online, the servos would at least let me move around.
C’mon. C’mon. If the batteries were out, though, I was done for. The darkness extended for too long.
Rebooting…
The red letters were the most beautiful thing I’d read in a while. The word slid in and out of view as spasms shook the suit while it fought to come back to life.
C’mon!
There was no chance the explosion had taken out every Sleipnir soldier out there. Something told me Keles wasn’t that easy to kill. I had to get back on my feet. The battle wasn’t over yet. This was merely the end of round one. And I was anxious to start the next one.
With a mechanical scream, the joints of the armor came back online as a stream of cooled air shot straight into my face and the life-support system started doing its job. My vision came back online, if low quality and surrounded by a red frame. It said in yellow letters:
Emergency. Total Failure Imminent. Emergency. Abandon Suit. Emergency. Total Failure Imminent…
And so on.
Hold on for a little longer, I willed the suit. I got up as the servos screeched painfully. I was inside the lab. My entire body had become magnetized against the floor at some point through another emergency protocol (to prevent drifting out into space) and I couldn’t undo it, so moving at all was even more of a fight.
The lab looked like a herd of crazed bulls had thrown a bachelor party in the middle of it. A sea of glass floated chaotically out of the destroyed windows.
The bridge wasn’t a bridge anymore, and what remained of Keles’ forces were a scorched mess flying in every direction and smashing against walls and floors. I saw one flapping torso fly down into the abyss below, and out of my view.
Keles wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Let’s assume he’s alive and behind you. I wasn’t going to get jumped by a movie monster if I could avoid it.
He wasn’t behind me, yet, but I quickly spotted my friends as they got up groaning. Everyone’s shields were out of commission and we were covered in soot, blood, and grime. Anders, though, was impaled against the jagged edge of a pillar and blood flew out of his broken helmet and all around us.
I looked away from the mangled corpse. Even with Rune’s slightly cartoonish version of gore, and even knowing he had already respawned somewhere safe, it was stomach-churning.
Rylena entered my field of vision. She gestured at my armor with her fingers in a way that said, “Do you have any leaks?”
“You realize we’re sitting in front of each other, right?” I told her in the real world.
“Fuck! I got carried away for a second.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. We need to get out of the lab fast, before Sleipnir regroups.”
“Let’s find the Device’s software, then. What’s the ETA on the extraction team?”
“Knowing Van and Francis? They’ll arrive at the last possible second.”
“That would have been a minute ago.”
We stumbled like magnetized zombies around the remains of the lab. I had no idea what half the machines in there did, and the supercomputers hadn’t survived the loss of pressure. What did an alien program look like?
“Look for something alien, I guess,” I told Irene.
As we frantically stumbled around, Mai and Walpurgis reached the windows and started sniping the survivors of Sleipnir before they had a chance to regroup. Mai’s rifle was destroyed, so she used her blaster. Without her suit’s stabilizers, Walpurgis’ twin-linked railgun sent her smacking against the wall each time she fired it.
Beard tugged at my arm. We stuck to each other like glue and wasted valuable time separating the armors. Then he shrugged as an apology, and pointed at the ceiling, following several lines of cables and pipes. I raised my eyes and saw what he meant.
“Beard found it!” I told Irene. “Look up.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” she said.
The program was a black block the size of my mindjack, with its surface covered in green lines of energy. Pixel-sized bits of black material floated around it as webs of energy pulsed through them and held them in orbit.
“I have. Once.”
Inside the Signal’s Core. Thousands of blocks of all shapes and sizes, flying towards the green Core, being assimilated, rebuilt, then spat out again so they could complete a cycle that was beyond my comprehension.
It was jarring to see one of those calmly floating in the ceiling. It was covered with a mechanical capsule, which was itself surrounded by cables and machinery not unlike what you’d find in a surgeon’s operating table in the real world. One arm of the machines was pinching a corner of the block, trying to add more pixel-sized material. Like a 3D printer.
“I got it,” I said. I crouched and jumped with the dying strength of my armor with enough force to rip my boots away from the floor. I reached the ceiling almost gracefully, not far from the block. Then I slowly crawled my way to the Device software-block.
Something big moved outside of the lab, far from the destroyed bridge. A pair of metal fingers as big and thick as my torso held to the floor of the surrounding walkway. No one else had seen it. Mai and Walpurgis were still shooting in the other direction, and Rylena and Beard were looking at me.
Hands followed the fingers, then bulky arms covered in armor plates that wouldn’t have been out of place in a tank. The thing rose more, floated for a bit, and regained footing as it stepped into the lab. I recognized what I was seeing.
It was an exo-suit. Like the ones used for construction. No, it was exactly that. Servo-assisted arms and legs around an exposed harness and all the other machinery on its covered back.
I didn’t have to recognize the black and orange armor to know Keles was piloting the thing. Of course he was. Of course he was.
“Irene, watch out!”
My gi
rlfriend followed my frantic pointing just as Keles finished crawling the exo-suit inside the lab. Keles gestured a greeting at her and even bowed, like a sparring partner congratulating the other for a well-placed punch. Rylena tried to scramble for cover.
He ripped a supercomputer apart and flattened the girl under it like he had used a cannon.
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to react. Only when I saw the armored hand of my girlfriend go limp under the collapsed computer did I to scream in fury and fear.
“Not really dead!” Irene jumped at me in the real world. I felt her hands clasp around my forearms and her panicked breath on my neck. “Not really dead, Cole! Focus, you have to get out of there with the software!”
She’s right. I pushed my automatic panic away from me. The program was the only thing that mattered. Our win condition.
I broke the capsule around it with a punch and magnetized my hand around the software-block. Keles turned in my direction and reached for another heavy thing to throw.
Walpurgis and Mai started shooting at him then, and he had to scramble for cover. I realized why he needed the exo-suit as he covered the distance between the two women with the exo-suit’s arms held in front of his own body. His armor had shut down too.
The heavy plates of the arms served as cover for his exposed avatar.
Walpurgis’ sniper rifle destroyed the suit’s left arm in a shower of sparks and hydraulic fluid, and Beard threw himself at the mech’s feet, trying to bring Keles down.
I grabbed the black block and pushed myself out of the lab, through the windows, and into open space, as my friends tried to stop the murderous man and failed. I saw how Keles threw Mai’s mauled body against Walpurgis and sent her flying out of view. Beard got punched into a pulp.
The pulp was carrying a plasma grenade in his hands. I lost sight of Keles in the explosion.
“Are you running for it?” Irene asked frantically near my ear. “No last stands now, Cole, get away!”