by G. R. Cooper
Shannon looked at Duncan, cocked her head, then bent to lift the blanket off of the basket.
Duncan’s apartment filled with Shannon’s sudden, shrill squeals of joy.
“I figured,” said Duncan, “that your heroism and genius deserved a special prize. So, there you are, Omegaverse’s very first basket of kittens!”
Chapter 18
Eric West smiled, looking at the smoking wreck of the pirate, rolling slowly, leaking gasses and randomly illuminated by the flashing light of fires sparked by exposed hot wiring, quickly extinguished as the escaping pockets of oxygen were consumed.
He’d jumped in from one light-minute away less than thirty seconds before; about ninety-seconds after the freighter-cum-pirate had launched its torpedo toward the oncoming cargo ship. For all the good it had done; the torpedo had been a miss. The cargo ship continued on its course, uninterrupted, while the pirate had begun to accelerate to jump speed. Too slowly, though. The more powerful engines of the HMS Westy, a Delta class destroyer - one of the quickest ships in the universe - had reached jump speed first, and Eric had jumped in nearly on top of the pirate.
His first shots, a spread he’d programmed in and named “Beta Strike” had fired five missiles, spread to target vital systems throughout the ship. Two had hit the engines, taking them out, while the remaining three had ripped through the remainder of the ship - the last exploding outside of, and sending shrapnel through, the bridge. It was now dead in the water, coasting and rolling through space. Helpless. Eric brought the Westy in alongside the derelict, matching speed and course.
“Number One,” he began, “send the drone to examine the cargo hold of that bastard, if you please.” He sat back in his chair, began drumming his fingers on the arm rest.
“Aye aye, sir,” said the AI XO. “We’re being hailed, sir.”
“By the pirate?” Eric answered. “Ignore it.”
He thought.
“Wait. Answer it.”
The screen opened into the bridge of the pirate. Eric read through the ship and captain information.
“Never mind,” he said, “chop the communication.”
It wasn’t Taipan, he’d seen. That was the only pirate he wanted to talk to. The only player he wanted to see, humiliated, in front of him. Otherwise, it was just another player. He wasn’t interested in speaking to them; just blowing them out of space. Even Kato and the Inner Lizard fleet held no particular interest for him. He’d killed them; they’d killed him. A fair exchange. Honorable, exciting, combat.
Taipan, however, was a worm. The worst kind of play-acting hypocrite. Pretending to be an upright, law abiding citizen-miner of the universe, while underhandedly stealing from players to enrich himself. No doubt, he thought, that fancy mining ship of his had been paid for through ill-gotten gains.
It didn’t matter, to Eric, that the shipments pirates took were insured - that was part of the transhipment costs - and that the players never really lost anything; their objects were replaced by the system. They never even knew their particular shipment had been attacked, unless they owned the cargo ship itself, in which case the very minimal ship insurance replaced the cargo. None of that mattered to Eric. What mattered was the principle. It wasn’t that Taipan stole, per se, it was that he wouldn’t own up to it, wouldn’t admit what he was.
Eric looked to the view screen. The drone was returning from searching the the pirate. As it arrived, Eric looked through the bounty. Three torpedos. He laughed.
“Just what I need,” he chortled, “weapons for piracy!”
He shook his head, ruefully.
“I wonder,” he muttered, “why this guy didn’t bother to shoot a second torpedo at the cargo ship.” It never occurred to Eric to open a line of communication to ask the other player. He’d already forgotten that the pirate existed.
He looked to the helm station. Fuel was approaching twenty-five percent. It was time to head back to Kepler to refuel, rearm and repair.
“Number One,” he said, “set course for home port, if you please.”
“Aye aye, sir. And the pirate?”
Eric looked to the rolling, smoking wreck once again.
“Him?” he mused. The ship looked like it had several days worth of repair. Destroying the ship might convince the pirate not to continue raiding. That wouldn’t be any fun. As much as he disliked the thieves, he didn’t want to completely drive them away. He wanted them to keep playing. A hunter needed his prey.
“Forget him,” Eric said. “Let him rot.”
Eric walked into the hanger at the station at Kepler 22B. After docking, and initiating the refurbishment and replenishment of the HMS Westy, he’d decided to take care of some Fleet Bigweek business he’d fallen behind on.
He wrote out a missive to the clan, describing, in detail, his recent encounter. Once again - he frowned as he wrote - he had to hunt and attack on his own. He told them that unless they began showing up for the hunts, he was going to have to revoke their membership rule; to bring in some new blood.
The group had formed a couple of decades before, in one of the earliest massively multiplayer games, and had moved through the years and subsequent games as a single unit. They had decided long before, as a group, to limit themselves to their existing membership rolls; they had very occasionally decided, en masse, to ask rare individuals they met in new online spaces to become members.
As he sent the message, he noticed, on the clan management page, that they’d all been grouped with several players, including Taipan. He began to shake. While not actively members, the grouping allowed them status akin to ‘ally’. That, to Eric, implied ‘friendship’. He began reading the description of privileges associated with Taipan. Fleet Bigweek had access to Taipan’s apartment on Kepler station.
He began walking, quickly, toward the transporter.
Eric entered Taipan’s apartment, began looking around. He was shocked when a small puppy ran up to him, wagging its tail and squeaking for attention. He bent to pet it and scratch it behind the ears. It rolled onto its - his, Eric saw - back and presented his belly for a rub. Eric complied, earning a yelp of happiness. He didn’t even know that there were dogs in the Omegaverse, and couldn’t imagine how expensive it was. How expensive everything in this apartment was.
It was, he had to admit to himself, beautifully appointed. He especially liked the fish-tank thing on the wall. He admired it for a few minutes, then wandered toward the wall-sized window. He scrupulously avoided even looking into the bedroom - that felt too much like snooping. He walked with his hands tucked behind his back; ensuring that if anyone, especially Taipan, happened to enter while he was here, there would be no question that Eric was only looking.
He stopped in front of the window, looking out over the breathtaking view of Kepler 22B and the space beyond. He looked down, toward the station’s docking facilities, and watched as a series of drones delivered cargo - presumably replacement missiles - to the HMS Westy. He felt a surge of pride for the ship he had worked so hard to earn. To earn he told himself, forcefully. He’d stolen nothing to gain it.
Unlike Taipan. Everything here, everything around him, smelled from the taint of thievery. As he thought about it, Eric realized what Taipan had been doing. He had his fancy mining ship that he was obviously using as a base of operations. He must have another, small, ship that he was using as his pirate. He was hitting shipping with the small ship, running back to the ring of that gas giant, hiding, then switching back to his main ship. He used that to tranship, via cargo ship, his booty back to Kepler.
That explained the sudden onset of cargo ships that left from the system. That explained how Taipan was able hunt and kill with immunity. That explained why Eric had not been able to find the foxy bastard.
Eric smiled, looking around at the luxury that the bastard had been able to accumulate. He looked to his inventory, to the three torpedos. The beginning of a plan began to form, and he smiled even more broadly.
He bent, pet t
he dog one last time, then turned and left.
Chapter 19
Charlottesville, VA USA
Duncan looked through the menu, the wine list, for the steak-house. While he liked wine, he couldn’t consider himself a connoisseur by any means. He knew which varietals he liked and which he didn’t, but that was about as far as his knowledge extended. He looked to his friends sitting around the table; Shannon, Clancey, Vince, Matt and Jamie.
He handed the list to Jamie.
“What do you suggest?”
Jamie took a quick glance down the list.
“Since you’re paying,” he laughed; a deep throated, friendly laugh that echoed bass, “I’d suggest the Stag’s Leap Cask 23, 2012.”
“But,” he continued, “since that’s $250 a bottle, I’ll keep looking.” He smiled broadly.
“That’s what we’ll have,” said Duncan, nodding to the waiter, “Two of those and a bottle of Veuve for Shannon.”
“I’ll have a Guinness,” piped Clancey, “you guys can drink the grape juice.”
“What’s the occasion?” asked Shannon. “We all get this mysterious dinner invitation, telling us that you want to treat us all, and now you’ve spent nearly six hundred dollars …”
“Six hundred and ten,” said Clancey.
“ … before you’ve even ordered your cow flesh,” finished Shannon.
“Well,” began Duncan, “I wanted to thank you all for dragging me into the Omegaverse. I have,” he coughed, “actually been able to make a lot of money in the game.”
“Yeah,” nodded Vince, “that rail-gun was insane. Twenty-five million credits.”
Duncan nodded as well, “But that was only the beginning.” He paused to gather his thoughts; as much as he’d thought through this speech - through this whole night - he still hadn’t come up with a way to tell his friends about the Shepherd’s Crook that satisfied him.
How to tell his friends that he’d stumbled upon a space station; an object in the game unlike anything any other player owned. Given that a player could buy a Grizzly class battle cruiser, the most expensive object in the game, for about the cost of a new mid-series BMW, he couldn’t begin to fathom how much the station was worth.
Not only that, thanks his equally rare ‘Cowl of the Wolf’ artifact, he had his treaty with the Canis Arcturus that gave him a special, if not unique, trading partnership with an alien race; he was pulling in several million credits a week from mineral trading alone. The price normalization he expected as supply and demand caught up with the anomalous situation hadn’t begun to occur, so prices were still just as lopsided as they were when he began.
His half share in Phani’s new pet venture would probably double that income. All of that combined to the point that he was making more, much more, than he was from his day job - all in a little less than a month.
He coughed, and began telling them, from the beginning.
Duncan poured the last of the bottle of Veuve Cliquot into Shannon’s glass. That was the last of the alcohol. Between the bottle of champagne for Shannon, the endless stream of Guinness for Clancey, and the two bottles of red wine and rounds of scotch for the other four, the result would be a lot of money spent on cab fare after dinner. Not for the first time, Duncan was glad he lived within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of downtown Charlottesville.
Shannon put her head down, sideways, on the linen covered table.
“What I don’t understand,” she said sleepily, “is why you didn’t tell us about the station.”
“I just did,” countered Duncan.
“Before now, poopy-head,” slurred Shannon, sitting back upright.
Duncan pushed the jus covered plate - all that remained of his monstrously huge, dry-aged, prime rib dinner - away from him. He burped.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“But you told Phani about it,” she countered, “kind’a.”
“That was different,” Duncan replied, “he was in trouble.”
“No doubt, and it was,” she paused, hiccuped, “cool that you did. It was just kind’a un-cool that you didn’t tell us ‘til now.”
“Sorry,” Duncan shrugged, ruefully.
“Forgiven,” Shannon smiled, raising her glass. Then she drained it. Duncan never understood how such a tiny, thin woman could put away so much alcohol. He looked around at the rest of his friends, similarly inebriated. The same way we all do, he thought; practice.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Clancey, the most sober at the table. You could always tell when Clancey wasn’t sober; his volume increased exponentially.
“Not sure I understand,” said Duncan, “I thought I told you what I was doing with it.”
“I’m not sure you see the potential,” said Clancey, wagging at Duncan with the chewed half of a breadstick, “a player owned public station, next to a colony, half-way between the two public game stations would be an ideal location for establishing your own faction. As the leader of a faction, you’d get a matching percentage of every faction member’s in-game earnings, which you can use to furthering the faction activities, namely,” he belched, “the terraforming and colonization of Shepherd’s, uhm, Cross.”
“It’s going to be a long, long time, though,” said Duncan, “before a colony is begun on that planet. We’ve,” he pointed at Jamie, who they all convinced over dinner to begin playing the real-time strategy game, “only begun terraforming.”
“Buy one,” said Clancey. “A colony, that is. Grab one of those floating cities and place it on the cloud giant, next to your station. You can have it as your first colony in the system. The first player run colony in the game.”
Duncan literally sobered, just a little, “How much?”
“Fifty, sixty million. Something like that. About the cost of a Grizzly.”
“I can’t afford that,” Duncan shook his head, “yet.”
“Twenty percent down,” smiled Clancey, “finance the rest in game.”
“They do that?” Duncan began to think. Ten million credits to begin a colony. He could afford that. He’d have to talk it over with Phani. He had a lot of reading to do, first, though. Duncan looked up, caught the waiter’s eye, and indicated that he wanted another round of drinks and the check.
Duncan stumbled out of the elevator and began the slow, halting walk down the hallway to his apartment. The night had gone better than he’d hoped. He’d been worried that his friends wouldn’t understand why he’d kept the station a secret. He’d been worried that they’d be angry.
He giggled.
Maybe they were angry, he thought, but a few gallons of alcohol and a belly full of top shelf beef, or lobster tails in Shannon’s case, had helped their mood.
He giggled again.
He pulled the receipt from his pocket, squinted through wine and scotch soaked blur swirling around his head, and read the bottom line. He’d spent, with tip, a bit over twelve-hundred dollars that evening.
“I’ll have to make a few more mineral runs to pay for this night,” he laughed, steadying himself against the wall. He arrived at his door, pulled the keys out of his pocket to open the door. They slipped out of his hand and fell; but didn’t sound like they hit the floor.
He looked down.
His keys lay on top of a cardboard box, about knee high, sitting in front of his door. He grabbed the keys, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. Holding himself upright with one hand on the doorsill, he bent over and pushed the box into his apartment and walked in after it. After he closed the door, remembering at the last second to retrieve his keys - it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d ‘lost’ his keys only to find them still hanging in the lock after a night out - he bent and picked up the box, carried it to his couch and put it on the coffee table.
Duncan tried to read the return address, but found it too blurry. He covered one eye, then focused, hard. He was able to make out, at that point, who it was from.
Omegaverse, Inc.
; He grunted, dropped prone onto the couch and passed out.
Chapter 20
Duncan lifted up and pulled back the bolt on the Winchester Model 70 that lay nestled in the crook of his left arm. The first of his three .300 Winchester Magnum cartridges gleamed as it lay, expectantly, at the top of the rifle’s internal magazine. A sheen of gun oil glistened on the bullet in the noon sun, which beat over Duncan’s prostrate form as he lay on top of a berm next to a calmly babbling stream. The heat from the star was warm, but not uncomfortable.
Duncan reached, with his right hand, and pulled one finger along the length of the cartridge; the cleaning oil - no doubt residue transferred from the gun to the bullet when it was loaded - felt greasy on his finger tip. He rubbed the tip and thumb together, spreading the oil, then lifted his hand to his face and smelled them. The scent recalled countless hours spent cleaning and oiling his guns after a day on the range.
“Good old Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he muttered.
He reached out with his right hand and began to run his fingers through a small patch of the short, blue-gray, grasses that spotted the berm and covered the open, thousand meter long, field in front of him. The pointed, prickly little stems - stiffer than most of the grass he knew from Virginia - served to remove most of the gun oil. He finished cleaning the slickness off on his left shoulder; rubbing the coarse canvas of his camouflaged hunting shirt between the fingers.
After the clean, metallic-tinged, smell of oil no longer lingered, the mustiness of ancient decay and rot of countless years worth of decomposing plant matter once again assailed his nostrils. Powerful, yet somehow pleasant. The smell of death, but of fecundity and rebirth. The humus also provided the yielding, comfortable bed on which Duncan lay.
Duncan once again gripped the rifle’s bolt in his right palm, curling his fingers back over the black-metal, ball-tipped, rod. He drove it forward, which caught the top cartridge and seated the bullet into the Winchester’s barrel. Then he pulled the bolt down, locking it into place; the metallic click adding to the soft, soothing, gurgle of the waterway behind him.