by D. Rus
Murom peeked inside the new space by sticking a chunk of polished metal on a bent handle through the doorway – an improvised mirror. “Counter-boarding turret,” he noted. “Four barrels, the lower left one is warped. No force field. Armor significantly damaged. In the far corner, there’s a service drone holding some short-barreled weapon. Its running gear is melted; it’s completely immobile. I think that’s it.”
He gave me an inquiring look, expecting orders. I had gained a certain authority among the group. Receiving the screenshots Muromets sent me, I ran them through my implant’s analytical module and became thoughtful.
My Alpha-prime brushed aside the plan that involved storming the place while using emergency spacesuits as CASs; the three plasma barrels would shoot through the suits’ force fields in a second. Loss of soldiers, gear, and weapons was guaranteed, and there was practically zero chance of suppressing the turret.
My implant recommended to close the PSH and hide behind the quarantine bot’s passive shield to destroy the enemy’s defense weapons. The firing effect time of the plasma gun was “gun2x0.25” – two to four seconds.
I looked at the field hospital tent, and just in time; Nika, our bot driver, exited through the force field. She had lost both legs in the battle with the Crab. My implant’s tactical module had deemed her injury critical at that time, written her off as a loss, and put up a timer that counted down how many minutes she had left to live “2:46…45…44…” We had absolutely no means of treating such wounds.
But the droid came to her aid, saving her from suffering in the purgatory. She thus retained the small amount of points she had on her RC. Pet controllers had a hard time leveling up without pets.
A green number seven indicated the hospital’s current patient count. Virtually clicking the seven pulled up a more detailed report: names of those in recovery, injury facts, and full recovery times. The last was the most important factor at the moment.
The PSH wasn’t nearly as high-level as a military planetary hospital. Most tasks took it ten times longer. The PSH had approximately 17 more hours of work left. We had neither the time nor the desire to wait that long.
We were running out of oxygen cartridges. The moss degenerated, turning into much-needed food, but not giving us anything to breathe. The waterfall kept getting hotter; the poor slugs fell from the ceiling like gifts from heaven, their shells red like those of boiled crawfish. But it was hard collecting them as they floated around. The water literally boiled by the waterfall. However, this made the slugs more flavorful and improved their healing properties. The group jokingly demanded beer and dill.
The overall situation led me to conclude that we were being squeezed out of this “nursery” noob location and encouraged to travel to upper decks. Amenities, comfort, and sedentism were out of question. We had to keep moving like nomads with minimal belongings and maximum self-sufficiency.
With mixed feelings, I refused my Alpha-prime’s rational plan and announced my decision. It involved using the Crab’s factory plates as armor for our pulse gun sled, turning the sled into a variant of the 45 mm anti-aircraft gun – a lowcannon with an anti- shrapnel shield. This weapon was notoriously known as “Goodbye, Motherland,” its title hinting at the sad fate of its crew.
My implant quickly assessed the shield along with the most reasonable armoring angles, multiplied the modest physical stats by the disorderliness of our untrained soldiers, and displayed the most likely outcome of the battle: a three-to-one chance of winning.
This was a good number, but too small. I requested volunteers for diversionary tactics. They would almost surely die, but could receive bonus points and the elite “Sergeant Sailor” chevron.
Curiously enough, over a dozen guys and almost all the girls volunteered. What motivated them – the passion for collecting medals, the desire to level up at any cost, or simply boredom – I don’t know. I entered them into the battle equation and was satisfied with the new prediction: an 89 percent chance of victory.
Lina worked well with Mac. As the hardware operator, she would be firing the pulse gun in manual mode, aiming the two heavy barrels without the help of servo drives fine-tuned to the last micron. Her slim frame allowed us to significantly decrease the shield area and keep the sled light.
The girl examined the control handles and familiarized herself with the aiming mirror; we hadn’t made holes for sights because plasma tended to spill over any kind of barriers and penetrate all sorts of openings.
Macarius spun around the sled, letting his eyes linger on the girl’s curves as he daydreamed. Being part of a mixed crew devoid of moral standards did its part. Besides, who knows what drugs they had injected the boy with in the virtual capsule. It was hard to forget the “yearly milking” clause…
I wasn’t jealous. Jealousy is weakness, when a better, worthier man lacks of self-confidence. Women instantly feel it, especially Lina. The best response was a condescending smile and reciprocal provocative actions. Your partner must never be sure that you won’t leave. It keeps both sides energetic, leaving no room for old track pants or dressing gowns with missing buttons.
After a half hour of an all-out effort, the sled was combat-ready. Pulling off my face the cowboy handkerchief that protected my lungs from steam and spores, I addressed our striking force with a speech: “Soldiers! For the loot, living space, and rare stripes on personal records! Many points to your RCs! To battle!”
And the group charged. Like mad hares they jumped into the ominous red gateway and dashed around the cabin, taking unpredictable turns as they evaded the deadly plasma shower. Their dance of death could have looked chaotic only to an outside observer. Their implants were united, successfully taking them in different directions to divert the aiming and focus systems’ attention away from the sled.
We pushed the sled in the cabin last. The enemy gun was in the most inconvenient position at that moment – busy finishing off the soldier in the far corner of the hall.
When the pulse turret finally opened close-quarter concentrated fire on the sled, it took a quarter of a second to find the target, evaluate the threat level, and change the target designation. It then took one more second to turn its barrels while going through its mandatory refrigerating fluid cooling cycle. During this time, our gun fired around 40 hard core balls, destroying the enemy’s already damaged armor. The watered-down uranium greedily sunk its teeth into the delicate electronic innards of the plasma gun.
Vrooom! the shells traveling with supersonic speed hissed like bumblebees. They chopped the electronics, smashing the servo drives and making the metal parts spark.
Ding! my implant gave a tinkle, notifying me of the destruction of the target which the system had marked as “very difficult.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! I fired into the dark gateway, hurrying to shoot off the service droid’s arm holding the ancient laser gun. If Lina switched to the droid, she would make mincemeat of it. No “Lego” fan would ever put it back together after that.
Ding! My interface gave a tinkle again, indicating that the hall was all clear and suggesting that we plant our flag.
Lowering the still-hot TT gun, I found Murom looking at me inquiringly. He had prudently stayed out of the battle; if he died in the next 24 hours, his stay in the purgatory would last 20 minutes. And who would want to have to live through 1,200 seconds of having your teeth grinded off with a rusty file and red-hot needles driven under your fingernails? And this allegory doesn’t accurately portray what we had to endure in the virtual dump. Three hundred percent of pain was “actually overboard,” as our inveterate gamer Alex Bubna liked to say. Even now he spent most of his free time crafting, making a deck of cards out of plastic sheets.
I shook my head in response to Murom’s look: “We wait until our fallen warriors respawn. They will plant the flag with us officers. They’ve earned it, and it’s important to level up your top soldiers first – those who stand out from the crowd in terms of spirit, body, or rank.”
&
nbsp; Murom nodded in accord. We were the generation raised by smartphones. We have first-hand knowledge of what is a clan tank, a raid damager, and what role a guild’s top officers play.
Disobeying my orders, the PSH search beetle dove into the gateway. The next second, it peeped in alarm, locating a critically wounded soldier, then gave a droning sound as it activated its force field generator, forming a stretcher and preparing to transport the new patient.
In a minute, the beetle came back, dragging a cocoon containing the soldier. I could see the frightened Ara gaping at us from within the turbid, bloody bubble. The black foam from his busted nanobank bubbled on his stomach. There was an open-end hole in the right side of his chest. Our hero had apparently thrown himself under the laser fire.
Following the cocoon with my eyes, I scratched my brow with a dirty finger. I wasn’t used to this priority system for ranking the wounded. We 21st century humans usually left the lightly wounded to take care of themselves, had the surgeons working on those with medium wounds, and gave the heavily wounded to the junior medical staff to basically play the roulette with fate. The painful truth of statistics dictated this system. If you spent too much time on a heavily injured patient, half of your medium injury patients would themselves slip into the heavily injured category.
But here, it was the other way around. If a wound wasn’t critical, the individual’s implant would take care of it, or keep its bearer alive for long enough. Therefore, those requiring professional assistance were primarily the ones whose life support system was powerless and desperately sent SOS signals via the broadband medical channel.
As we awaited our diversionists’ respawn, we studied their logs. The HI indices screamed out at us – an entire 39 percent! We also carefully studied the loot: layers of precious moss, eight corpses of various ranks, and unknown mechanisms in the center of the hall. And for dessert, there were large safe-like cells dotting three of the four walls like honeycombs.
Alexander Alexandrovich, our supercargo – God knows why they had stuck him in our motley crew of pilots and heavy infantry – easily recognized the module's purpose: “Main caliber ammo chamber. I swear on my foot wraps, they’ve shoved a tunneler of at least a 300-millimeter caliber in here!”
I frowned, “Yeah, shoved. And more than one; the barrels’ channels pass through the ship’s central axis. Marat’s specs are free access. Tell me this; is this cellar adjacent to the medical module? What about detonations?”
Alex dismissed the matter, “What’s to detonate? There’s nothing there but solid transuranium projectile shells. At magnetic accelerator speeds, the shell’s mass is what determines the outcome, not the explosive materials. The energy emitted in the event of colliding with an enemy ship equals that released in a nuclear explosion. E = mc2 is my guess.”
Alex had recently turned 50 years old, therefore his familiarity made me knit my brow. Nevertheless, I continued to press him for information: “Decipher this screenshot. What do you see? What’s this mechanism in the center, and those cells in the walls?”
“It’s simple. In the center are the force field clutches, the lifter carousel, and the high-speed loading drums. The cells are ammo storage, highly radioactive. In the event of nearby explosions or module damage, I wouldn’t allow them to become compressed into a single bundle. It would be much more than their critical mass.”
I nodded. It was clear to me that this chamber would be a pain in the ass. Its benefits were questionable, and if its air-tightness failed, we would all die. Not very quickly, but very painfully.
In terms of loot, the corpses underneath the moss were our best bet. Judging by their huge size, they wore hollow spacesuits. We were in desperate need of such gear.
I could hear Macarius swearing nearby. The turret had damaged his creation; the plasma that had gotten on the front plate of the sled had made the right barrel so hot that it turned white. This rendered the weapon asymmetric. It no longer passed the internal self-test, displaying a whole page of errors and asking to be connected to a fully equipped repair stand.
Scowling, Macarius promised to bypass the factory settings by replacing the damaged barrel with the spare one from the Crab’s second weapon emplacement. By now, the Crab looked like a half-eaten carcass with is open belly, supporting girders sticking out like ribs, and tight coils of many-colored innards soaked in technical fluids.
It was easier to breathe now. The oxygen circulated, raising the HI to a bearable 24 percent and lowering the temperature from that of a killer Russian bathhouse to that of low-power Turkish hammams.
The layers of luxurious moss that had been breeding uncontrollably in our hall swiftly converted carbon dioxide into much-needed oxygen. Having mutated because of background radiation, the plants now bent to the floor under the weight of their black berries.
Our hall gained new scents and colors: ozone, bright mold, and nacreous pollen granting cheerfulness and rendering our fields of vision dangerously narrow. Our most advanced economic executives named the pollen “pure native coffee” and filled all available containers with it.
Finally, the last of our group respawned. The boys and girls looked unwell. Even the last minute before their reincarnation didn’t help. The rapid relaxation only partially revived the mind and hardly washed away the memories of the purgatory. It thus upheld the main guideline; dying without orders is allowed, but extremely scary.
Some of the respawned kept their chin up, however. Those who had received the status “death for the good of the Empire” saw the new side of the purgatory, which was almost like heaven. They enjoyed a 40-minute vacation by a tropical lagoon with warm white sand and fast native women who could’ve made the grade as Miss Universe.
I could only shake my head disapprovingly. We were being trained like Japanese kamikazes: to display implicit obedience, to be an organized team in battle, and to sacrifice ourselves if needed or if ordered to do so. All out of anti-ship missiles? Ram the enemy! You’re riding a hundred tons of composite material traveling at one hundredth of the speed of light. Giving a Bumblebee and a single pilot to vanquish a first-line ship with a crew of 2,000 is always acceptable for a naval commander.
Picking out all the chosen ones, I gave the go-ahead; It’s looting time, gang! They’ve earned it: another honorary stripe, a handful of points added to their RCs, and setting an example for the passive and the weak-willed.
We entered the bunker, trying to step only on those patches of floor which the plasma hadn’t reached. For some time now, we had been careful not to tread on any flora or organic matter, thus protecting our limbs from poisonous thorns and carnivorous plants. Getting a few million spores of the scarlet moss in a trivial scratch on your ankle was a most exotic way to die.
The boys and girls sat in a circle in the center. They carefully tried the berries from the mossy raspberry canes, then started swiftly popping them in their mouths.
My implant factored in the group head count and promised to plant our flag within six minutes. I walked around the massive reloading machine and found a panel for the officer on duty behind it. In the lopsided operator chair sat a senior lieutenant gunner in a perfectly white hollow spacesuit.
He had no visible wounds. Most likely, this officer had been killed with something subtler than steel: a nanite attack via communication systems, a remote hacking of his implant’s life-support modules, or a beam of intense radiation that instantly fried his flesh and made his blood boil.
The deadman’s spacesuit was in pristine condition. A lettuce green marker glimmered on his status chevron, depicting diagrams pleasant to the eye. The microreactor was turned down and barely smoldered. The supply barrels were almost full; the dead man had never taxed his life-support systems. The lettuce green external cleaning nanite patch still crawled over the composite, thoroughly polishing the anti-laser coating.
There was a heavy military “Falcon” in the sturdy holster on his thigh. Although this short-barreled firearm was quite useless in a mode
rn-day battle with a storm trooper in a CAS or an army drone, it still gave its owner a chance.
The thick corrugated handle contained a screened magazine that held only four very expensive bullets created at the peak of technological progress. This tandem-type ammo boasted tips sharp enough to penetrate a force field. The gun’s hollow charge was capable of burning through a standard armor plate with a five-foot thickness. The Falcon’s performance characteristics looked more modest when measured against a composite kit; a few holes in the abdomen wouldn’t stop a cyber-mod, but still…
Unable to resist the temptation, I looked around thievishly, took the holster off the corpse, and pulled out the massive Falcon. It was fully loaded, with no spare clip. No identification was needed to use it.
Let the group complain all they want. The Falcon wasn’t for common battles or chaotic fire on swift janitor servobots. It was a last-chance trump card for a soldier with nerves of steel.
I pressed the holster to my thigh, feeling the force field belts wrap around my leg. I slowly moved my leg, allowing the belts to adjust to my movements and assume a secure position on my body. At last, all mine!
My interface gave a quiet tinkle, indicating that the chamber had been seized. My RC manager erupted with the triumphant ringing of virtual coins, awarding me bonus points for everything: the HI increase, area growth, leading a successful operation, completing a mandatory and an optional tactical mission, and finishing the side quest “Seaman gunner fate.” I received a load of chevrons of all three levels.
The admins awarded the group members a separate promotional booster: ten points per student, and a disgraceful, mandatory sticker on the shoulder, which we aptly nicknamed “Bilge.”
The group chat filled with unusually many voices; the group compared their rewards. I sensed that there would be more volunteers for the next operation. Leveling up was everything in the Amazonians' world. Your level would determine your rank and physical stats by the time you completed your courses. Everyone created their own starting position in the army.