GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2)

by Andries Louws

  “Two hovercars seem to have collided. What is your first action?”

  “What are you talk… Wait, I read something about that somewhere. Give me a second…”

  Douglas finds this entire scenario mighty amusing. This beats walking through the desert. This might even be better than messing around with magic. And now he is talking with Evot, who he hasn’t seen in ages.

  “Is it a misdemeanor?”

  Douglas takes a closer look at the scene, studying the nearly entirely rotten heap of rusting matter with a careful eye. “What?”

  “Never mind. How long ago was this?”

  “Long.”

  “Longer than a year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you don’t need to do anything. Any accidents that happen in public areas expire after a year. There’s some other stuff I could check, but I think this one supersedes those laws.”

  “Thanks. I do nothing.”

  “Incorrect. The correct answer is: follow GalaxSec regulations. Please proceed to the next area,” is the sudden and booming answer.

  “That is incorrect,” is Evot’s peeved reply. “Please refer to standard GalaxSec regulation index, section four three…”

  Douglas decides to sit down at first. Evot and the booming mechanical voice keep talking with each other, throwing all kinds of difficult sounding by-laws, regulatory corrections, binding precedents, and other obscure rules at each other. Twenty seconds in Douglas loses track of what they are talking about. Evot seems to be really getting into it, and Douglas is happy that the diminutive woman seems to be in her element. She had often seemed sad or lost during their walk over here. Deciding he might as well get work done, Douglas walks over to the door on the opposite side of the entrance and starts slathering the hardened metal on his ribs. Neither Evot nor the base Synthetic Intelligence makes a comment about his activities. The skeleton happily armors his body in a thin layer of engraved metal, keeping half an ear on the rapid conversation that he no longer is a part of.

  Chapter Twenty – Refusal is Elegance

  Fienak is starting to feel emotions. All her personalities are still, settled inside their neat little sections, but from somewhere that feels both scary and familiar, weird thoughts start bubbling up. Her slave soldier is technically still in control, but that mental framework is such a faint shell, it allows her a lot of room to think.

  “No matter. First, we will need to make some things clear.” The fat, bald man stares at her with wrong eyes.

  Falling back to protocol, Fienak suddenly speaks up. “What is the assessment of our target, sir!”

  “Ah, that walking skeleton wields something unknown. And unknown things will make this galaxy way too interesting…” Once again, his shifty eyes frantically scan his direct environment. “…for them. First, I thought it was some old tech, repurposed with creativity and ingenuity. Now I know better.” Turning on the woman, the fat man waves a finger in her face. “Do you know how long we managed to stay independent? How many aeons have those forces that can swat us like a fly left us be? Because we had nothing to steal, that’s why. And now my stupid, stupid daughter and some walking chew-toy are fucking that up.”

  “Yes, sir!” Any humor and levity Fienak felt is gone. Her soldier self is not thinking much, but behind the scenes, she is mulling things over at a rapid pace. She fears that she is hearing a lot of sensitive information that is so many miles above her paygrade, it’s probably in a different solar system entirely.

  “No matter. No need to keep spilling secrets like that in front of my sole employee, right?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And stop that. You look like a fragmenter to me, someone with a splintered psyche, so drop that fragment and bring out a researcher.”

  Bewildered, Fienak does as he says. Her slave soldier goes back in the box, and a mousy book nerd comes out.

  “What do you know of the Histaff?”

  “Sorry, my good sir. I know very little, mister. I did my thesis on it, but it was quite lacking, I’m afraid.”

  Solan looks at her with such an odd combination of sadness, confusion and pity that it makes her true self sick. The fat guy then takes a deep breath, before taking one of the helmets from the rack above the seats. He fiddles with it for a few moments, tapping on buttons she didn’t even know were there, before handing it over and taking another one for himself.

  “Keep track of team one. Check in that all is fine. Sort out your hand.”

  Sitting down in one of the many empty seats, she sinks into the contouring foam. Only when she fully relaxes, the helmet still clutched into her single intact hand, does the pain hit. She bites down on her lips, not allowing more than a single whimper to escape. First, she puts the helmet on her lap and slides her fingers across her neck in order to undo the head part of her skintight armor. She then puts the bulky helmet on her sweaty head, its rubberised insides sliding across her bald scalp, the warp-net only catching slightly. Warning messages flash across her screen, telling her data about her hand that she already knows. She moves through the helmet’s interface, doing a standard check-in, informing everyone about the hostile takeover of the ship, and that all is fine.

  She then slaps the medkit protruding from her seat across the bleeding mess, sinking further back as her hand is slowly but surely put back into working order. The relatively low powered auto medkit realigns her splintered bones, removing burned tissue while spreading and stretching her intact skin across the raw wounds.

  ‘Full report, right now. - Team Lead Achnuu’

  As she types her reply, she uses the helmet’s interface, tapping into the feeds coming from the second team. She notes that the new kid and the armored father figure are part of the group she is ordered to monitor. Secretly vowing to herself to make the kid who ogled her so obviously a lower priority, she tracks them as they speed through the air on their hoverbikes.

  ‘The first captain is successfully diagnosed and treated. He caught a quarantine patrol captain named Stek Haldane. The second one caught a super high-level spook named Solan. He used an override code that caught me full, but only got Haknu’s armor. Haknu’s cranium got thermally expanded. - Eflec Specialist Fienak’

  ‘Full report on Solan. And stick to proper jargon. - Team Lead Achnuu’

  ‘Solan Tomat Peezes, sir. - Eflec Specialist Fienak’

  Just when she is relaxing, letting the painkillers dull her rigid mind, a new message appears in the common command channel.

  ‘I hereby relinquish control of this team to Solan. Welcome, sir. Orders? - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  “Right. You’re a bit dumb, aren’t you?” Feeling a hand touch her face through the open part of her helmet, she looks up and sees Solan towering over her. “That’s fine. I can build up to something new. Much better than needing to break down some shoddily made personality. Keep monitoring team two for now.”

  Not sure what to think of any of this, Fienak sits back down. She continues monitoring the second team, keeping watch as they execute a very standard scouting pattern. They fly in a tight formation. The ground far below looks sucked dry of all moisture and biological matter. She recognises standard model frontier city layouts, ruins of industrial areas separated by barren patches of ground that used to be recreative parks. Wrecks of vehicles cover the partially wasted roads, and Fienak sees only production patterns that are the cheapest to lease. Not a single new, advanced, or even recent design is anywhere in sight. Switching from the direct camera view to the visual and volumetric analysis features built into the military hardware, she confirms that this was a very poor planet indeed.

  “Hey, Fienak girl. I need someone to talk to, as I’m not handling this very well. Please drop everything and just be yourself for a bit?”

  Something in his voice shakes her from her silent mood. She looks up at the fat man and sees something very painful. She sees the true face of a madman, a being that has totally lost control of reality and is only clinging onto his sani
ty by a thread. She knows that state of mind intimately. She has been in that exact state as many times as she has been thrust into new simulations. Before the realities of her new life could shape a new personality, she felt just like this man must feel right now.

  “What is happening, in a single sentence, sir.”

  Solan steps back as if he is struck. Fienak keeps looking at him, her mind void of any thoughts.

  “I’m going crazy because I died, and now I’m stuck inside a body, not my own, with memories not my own.”

  “So you’ve lost control, sir?”

  “No, not at all! Tha… Yes, I’ve lost control. Each act and event in my life used to be under my direct control. The only uncontrolled parts, I used as honing stones to keep myself sharp. The insults, the work environment, all of them served me in their unpredictability. Now, everything is lost.”

  “Accept that,” is the only thing Fienak can reply. She doesn’t know much about the psychological trauma this man must be going through, but she does know that only pure acceptance of her situation allowed her to start creating a new personality when she was thrust into yet another digital scenario.

  ‘Unknown individuals spotted. - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  “That’s it? I should just accept my current situation? But that is ridiculous. I haven’t had to accept factors out of my control fo-”

  ‘Under fire. - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  “What is this…”

  ‘Histaff long-range construct engaged. Evasive maneuvers. - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  Watching the messages scroll across her helmet’s display, Fienak taps into the visual feeds for team one. She is greeted by a small collection of data sources, two of them black, the others all rapidly spinning and blurring messes. The analysis in her helmet goes apeshit, spewing massive loads of warning messages, percentage estimates and capacity analysis into her face. In mute horror, she watches as projectiles that the processor systems can barely keep up with eliminate and take down hoverbike after hoverbike.

  ‘Casualties, deploying shields. - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  Panicked screams come across the comm links, the entirety of team one shouting in disbelief. Or at least, the ones that are left.

  ‘Shields failing, sending data dump. - Sub-Team Lead Achnuu’

  She sees the blue shield keeping the team leader safe blink out under the constant barrage of high-speed projectiles, the hoverbikes capacitors being draining at many times the normal pace. Each white and red missile hits the shield with a rather unimpressive splash. Each of those tepid impacts drains the energy reserves much, much more than should be possible, as if the attacks hit with a force many factors above what should be possible. And the last screen goes black. Feeling a large knot in her stomach, Fienak looks up at Solan. “Sir, please stop hurting yourself.”

  The fat man stops clawing deep trenches into his own cheeks. “I will. Do I need to accept this too, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “How? How the ever-warping holes did a spec ops team just get eliminated like that?”

  Fienak browses through her stored personas for a bit. She picks two, one an in-field commanding officer, the other a military paper pusher tasked with analyzing dry battle data. The two different perspectives allow her to form a rough estimate of what might have been happening with relatively high precision. “From my prelim analysis, team one flew under all the proper stealth restrictions, sir. They would have needed at least five minutes of procedure checking before they would have gotten access to the non-stealth tools and equipment.”

  “They died because they followed protocol?”

  “An estimated fifty percent of all military casualties galaxy-wide are due to an overly strict adherence to protocol, sir.”

  Solan stares at her, his cheeks slowly dripping a red facsimile of tears down his chin. “It’s down to fifty percent already? Katarenin’s measures must have been more effective than I’d have thought.”

  “Sir, please don’t wander off. Stay in the here and now.”

  “They just died?”

  “Yes, sir. The Histaff are not hibernating, probably due to those two individuals they spotted. Do you want me to take measures, sir?”

  “I just lost fifty percent of my troops like that?”

  Fienak sees that her words aren’t registering anymore. The fat man is obviously going through some form of intense mental crisis, and whether or not he will get out with his mind intact is now up to him. The decision to compose a message to team two doesn’t come from any of her fragments but springs up from her own mind.

  ‘Histaff is fully awake. Team one is down and suspected KIA. Full defensive and evasive mode. Advice; rapid switch procedure. Limit protocol adherence. - Eflec Specialist Fienak’

  “How did I just lose fifty percent of my troops.”

  On the one hand, Fienak could do nothing. She can just sit here, do as she is told and keep watch on team two, who are now rising at speed as they activate their heavy weapons. Or she can help this confused man, who is obviously not used to things not going his way. Fienak has seen many like him before. Or, at the very least, she has seen many of his ilk in her simulations before. She is pretty sure that this Solan person used to be some form of a high-level president, director, or general. How he is surviving the warp madness this long is a mystery to her, but he will probably curl up and go into a psychotic break if she doesn’t do anything.

  Standing up, she stops doubting herself and slaps the shit out of the blubbering fat man. She then hisses and curses up a storm, wondering why she suddenly forgot that her hand is still healing. Wiping the blood from her swollen limb, she puts the medkit back into place.

  “YOU HIT ME?”

  “Oh, shut up you blubbering asswipe! You just lost half your troops seconds after taking control, so what? Are you going to curl up and die? Are you going to cry about it to your mommy?”

  She keeps tearing into the blank-faced man until something new happens. She doesn’t know how long she ends up staring into his small eyes, cursing and insulting him in any way she can think up, but by the time he blinks again, her hand feels much better. She is out of breath now, all of the frustrations she had been feeling with herself fully projected onto the sick man. She saw her own weakness and unwillingness to adapt to each new simulation in him, and apparently that hit a very sensitive nerve.

  “No.” He then takes a deep, deep breath. “My apologies.”

  Fienak can’t help but smile, somehow feeling proud of the way Solan has managed to claw some sanity back to himself. Instead of the constant and wandering confusion, she sees a bit of purpose in his eyes. “My expertise is not in military operations. What would you suggest we do now?”

  Now feeling slightly jealous that the man managed to step over his own ego like that, getting to a stage that usually takes Fienak days in just a few breaths, she also wonders what they should do. Taken aback by the question, Fienak goes over what just happened. First, she was woken from the training regiment that had been all she had known ever since she had been kidnapped. Then the warp and sudden atmospheric entry. Then the two teams had gone out on scouting patrol. Then, she had been forced to kill the feather-headed Haknu, blasting through his wire mesh armor. Then the team had lost half of their scouting force to a flurry of biological missiles that honestly should not have scratched the patrol in full combat mode.

  “The Histaff, sir. Whatever other priority you might have, the fact that we know nothing about the greatest direct threat is the biggest glaring factor in this entire situation.”

  “No, that walking skeleton team one spotted is actually the biggest threat.”

  “Direct threat, sir.”

  Solan seems to have his faculties under control sufficiently to be annoyed. He waves his hand at her, telling her to move on. “I suggest the following…”

  “Team two, volley one.” Solan is sitting in his previous chair, back in the cockpit. He has a military helmet on his head, the hologr
ams and displays on its visor supplemented by the wealth of information played out before him in additional holograms emerging from the cockpit’s dashboard. Fienak hesitatingly touches the first captain’s unmoving form, unwilling to move the pale creature. She had killed and touched many, many corpses in her simulated lives. Vaguely, she recalls that she even made a few in her original life, unfortunate accidents of scavenging runs gone bad. This is the first time she has ever had to haul a cadaver out of a seat just so she can sit in it, though.

  Wishing many pay raises upon the bureaucrat that made watertight clothing mandatory fare for pilots, she is thankful she will not have to sit in his voided bowels. The memories that come from a certain dark and murderous lifetime are quickly shoved back into its box, her fragile mood taking a hint from the unexpected surge of cold anger that seems to suffuse that life. She looks down on the still confused but somehow serene expression on the pilot’s face and closes his eyes. Hauling him out of the chair takes less effort than she expected, and she nearly trips as she moves him to the crew compartment.

  The body isn’t cooling as fast as she would have expected, but as he is of a species that she isn’t very familiar with, her assumptions are probably way off. Leaving the body propped up against the wall, she turns around and seats herself in the still warm chair.

  “Get us up in the air, no need to present an unmoving target.”

  “I’ve had no vehicle operating training.”

  “Just fly it, it’s pretty standard.” Looking up from his work, Solan eyes her with annoyance.

  “No, sir. I have never operated a vehicle, sir.”

  “You’ve got to be… Right, I’ll fly. You take over data gathering then.”

  Fienak’s interface lights up with a new message. Opening the link, she sees it’s a saved workspace. Her previous layout vanishes, replaced with a rigid set of overviews that paint a clear picture of what is happening. Briefly admiring the clean and efficient way in which a large amount of data is visible at a glance, she takes in the situation. Team two is positioned high above a barren star-shaped valley. Looking at the latest planetary mapping data that’s on file, she sees that the star used to be a lake left in the wake of the terraforming process. She spots scorch marks far down below, blackened streaks accompanied by dark haloes of charred stone. Overlaying the data dump her deceased team leader managed to send before perishing, she confirms that they are indeed the places where team one crashed.