Rune Universe: A Virtual Reality novel (The RUNE UNIVERSE trilogy Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  Sounded very much like Darren, but I couldn’t help being distrustful of Bliss’ suggestion. I’d bet Darren would love to get me all alone if I tried talking to him. Bliss must’ve realized this because she sighed and raised her hands in surrender.

  “Do what you think it’s better, man. Just, well, try and put yourself in Darren’s shoes or something. I’m no psychologist, so don’t ask me to get all deep here. I think he’s more than he lets on. I know that—” she said, and then she bridged the distance between us with a nervous jump. Before I knew what’s happening, her lips were on my lips and in the same breath she drew away, “—just like I know you are. I’m sorry, Cole.”

  She left walking quickly towards the next drone stop, a couple of blocks away. She was hugging herself, as if cold. Or lost. She looked very young and very frightened and she didn’t look back even once.

  The Ferals, huh?

  I touched with my fingertips the spot on my lips where Bliss had kissed me. I hadn’t realized how afraid I was then and how afraid I was now. Life tasted bittersweet, just like that kiss. The beautiful sunset streaked with magenta and orange was created thanks to pollution which would probably kill me when I was forty.

  “I’m sorry, Cole,” she had said. She was crying then, I realized. A new job, out of nowhere, far away from San Mabrada. As I turned back towards my home I had a fairly good suspicion of who had called the police on Darren and the others at Gluttony.

  Goodbye, Bliss. Hope you can leave your demons behind. Bittersweet, just like life. I knew I’d never see her again.

  And it was fine.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Janus Station

  “Now, don’t go looking for a fight,” Rylena admonished me, “because putting you back together last time was very expensive.”

  I threw my hands up in exasperation. Most of our fights, Walpurgis started and usually in the same breath, Walpurgis finished. I was the smooth talker of the group, believe it or not, thanks to the fact no one else had even thought of working on their NPC negotiation skill, not even the merchant of the group. Beard had specced into Luck (level 79) instead, which turns out, was used mainly to win at cards and place bets.

  Want to guess why our brave merchant was broke when he joined Rylena and me?

  “I fight a giant mutant bear mano-a-mano and win and suddenly I’m a violent action hero. I mean, it’s nice you’re all impressed, but the bear took the upper hand at the end.”

  My three friends groaned loudly. Walpurgis made a gun with her two fingers and pretended to shoot herself. There was no appreciation for fine arms-related comedy lately. Probably because I’d been abusing it nonstop since the fight.

  “Stop calling it a murder-bear, you sound thirteen,” Rylena told me, but I could see a smile dancing on the edge of her lips. Her cybernetic eyes also shone a lighter shade of green when she was happy, a detail she had no idea about and I’d just noticed recently.

  “Also, Walpie here got the kill,” added the Beard.

  “Gabrijel, I swear to god, call me ‘Walpie’ again and I’ll fly to Russia and do something violent to you.”

  The Beard wasn’t intimidated in the slightest. “You’ll do that in winter? You should ask a guy named Napoleon how that went for him.”

  “Napoleon wasn’t me,” she boasted.

  “Alright, guys, act professional, we need the negotiation bonus,” I said. Better to interrupt them before the boasts became bets and bets became disasters.

  We’d been in talks with vice-Admiral Zenn Beckers for a couple weeks now. Just like her counterpart in the Terran Federation, we’d already followed her quest-line extensively: captured an escaped prisoner, chased a traitor among her ranks, intervened during the trial with new damning evidence. The works. Now it was time to claim our reward.

  She was the NPC appointment of a neutral mining corporation, responsible for supplying the Terran Federation with the alloy they used to armor their Battlecruisers and Carriers. It was military-grade armor, capable of taking a beating after shields fizzled out. It could be the difference between life or death. Better yet, thanks to the control of the Terran Federation on the material, very few player-driven ships had Z-alloy armor.

  Vice-Admiral Beckers waited for us in her command room inside her flagship, the ICC Exabrupt, a mining station refurbished with railgun-cannons for ship-to-ship combat. Gaining an audience with her, even after all our questing, was mostly thanks to the recommendation of General Jenkins, who was grateful after we returned the experimental dog back to him.

  “Welcome back,” Beckers greeted us when she saw us come into the room, heralded by several combat drones and NPC bodyguards. “I never had the chance to thank you for your intervention in the trial.”

  “Don’t worry, Vice-Admiral, your databytes were more than enough thanks,” I told her with a polite smile.

  “I’m glad to hear that. I see you got a new arm, Picard.”

  I showed her my shiny, endgame cyber-arm. “I actually bought it with money I had saved up before. For a special occasion.” The implant had set me back exactly one hundred thousand databytes.

  Beckers nodded and I judged small talk was done and over with. Time to talk business.

  “Remember our talks about Z-Alloy, back when we met?”

  “I do. We agreed to discuss it later. I’m afraid the answer is still no.”

  Rylena, next to me, winced. It was true we had started the quest-line with the assurance of the Vice-Admiral we would never get even a kilogram of Z-Alloy as a reward for our troubles. The ICC Exabrupt paid their debts in cash and political favors, no exceptions.

  We had agreed to take the risk. I still thought we could get more than we bargained for. “I remember our talks, too. The terms we agreed to apply more to mercenary works than ‘friends of the ICC Exabrupt and the entire Zandier Mining Corporation’ as you called us last time.”

  Zenn Beckers smiled coldly at me in a way that probably meant my Negotiation skill had just failed. “You’d abuse the confidence we deposited in you?”

  “Her heart-rate is going up,” Rylena whispered next to me, “keep talking like that and you’ll piss her off.”

  I nodded slightly and changed my tactics on the fly. Appealing to friendship hadn’t worked, how about exchanging political favors? “I understand that you’re contract bound to the Terran Federation to be exclusive to them on your Z-Alloy supply. But, after getting to know how Zandier works, I firmly believe a corporation like yours always keeps a backdoor open.”

  Beard snickered loudly behind me. I instantly heard his “oomph!” after Walpurgis managed to hit him without making a noticeable move.

  “Perhaps we do, Mister Picard. In that case, what makes you think we’d risk the anger of the Federation to help a mercenary ragtag team?”

  “We are no mercenaries. We have a history of partnership with the Terran Federation and with you.”

  “You do… Still, you’ve only been around for a short amount of time. The amount of trust you’re presuming to have is only gained after years, not months.”

  I winced. We didn’t have years to build trust with an NPC mining company. We needed to finish our ship right now before Rylena and Beard finished deciphering the mural with the coordinates of Zodia 5. Granted, we hadn’t made much progress in that. Most of the equations seemed to be both obscure and codified. Even then, they were making progress. For example, we were now sure Zodia 5 wasn’t in our Solar System.

  “Not enough political favor? Even now?” complained Rylena in a whisper. “Damn it, what now?”

  “We could do without the Alloy,” suggested Beard, “but I’d hate to waste all this effort.”

  There was one approach left, though. As a spokesperson of Zandier Mining, Beckers was unmovable. What about as simply Zenn Beckers? “Zenn, if we are not going to reach an agreement, we understand. It’s your work, after all. I’m sure policy has your hands tied. There’s so much a single person can do in a gigantic corporation like Z
andier. At that size, we are more cogs in a machine than humans with free will, right? So, no hard feelings.”

  I stood away, ready to leave.

  “Wait one second,” Beckers called back, “you’re right, we don’t negotiate with our Z-Alloy. You are wrong about one thing, though. I do have some degree of say in the matter.”

  “You do?” I said as I tried to suppress a victorious smile.

  “As I said, our Z-Alloy is out of the table,” she opened a holographic screen and studied it. “Sometimes, shipments are lost. A warp-jump that goes wrong, a hyperspace stint that gets assaulted by pirates. I’m looking right now at something like that. About half a ton of Z-Alloy was lost five years ago when our merchant ship and its escorts had to make an emergency landing in Janus Space Station. Communications ceased shortly after and our recovery teams failed to return. Janus is an abandoned station, Mister Picard. Of course, all information on it, including its location, is classified.”

  She stood up from her chair, straightened her white uniform and walked away from the table. “So, I’m afraid negotiations are over. Janus is deemed too risky by Zandier Mining and you can’t have the location. I’m leaving now. Please, escort yourselves out when you’re ready.”

  She left the room, leaving the hologram with the Janus’ coordinates standing right there on the table.

  “See? Build NPC trust, not corporation trust,” I told my team, gesturing towards the image. “Now, we only have to go on a suicide mission against a killer space station.”

  “I love abandoned space stations,” whispered Beard as Rylena retrieved the data. “They’re always such a great time.”

  “Actually, you’re right,” said Walpurgis with an excited smile.

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  Just like Beckers had said, Janus had been abandoned for a long time. It even seemed as if the space around it was blacker than normal, possessed by the kind of silence you can find in a graveyard. The Station had housed ten thousand Federation personnel before its life support system malfunctioned, according to the dossier Zandier had on it. Since it was in frontier space and it was believed the systems were still malfunctioning, the Federation had called it a total loss and moved on.

  Now it drifted across space, perpetually caught in the orbit of the lifeless planet it was anchored to by gravity.

  It was a tomb, I realized, as I looked at the dark bulwark that waited for us. A tomb with still-armed missiles and faulty threat systems.

  Alarms blared all around Beard’s merchant ship.

  “Hang on!” I exclaimed to no one in particular since my entire team was already hanging on for dear life. “Beginning evasive maneuvers!”

  The station had launched a barrage of twenty missiles towards us. Each of those station-grade missiles were enough to vaporize us instantly if it hit our freighter.

  Granted, the ship was insured, but the item, databyte, and skill loss would still set us back several weeks of farming. To us, that was a fate worse than death.

  I turned the ship starboard, gritting my teeth all the while; A merchant ship didn’t have the best turn speed. The missiles had precious seconds to catch up to us and accelerate. This meant trouble, as the best timeframe to defeat a missile is right after it launches. That’s when it hasn’t had enough time to accelerate.

  What we lacked in speed, though, we made up for in accuracy.

  “Manning turrets,” Walpurgis announced with ice-cold focus, as she rerouted control of the turrets towards the cabin. She fired a stream of laser fire towards the cluster of missiles before their targeting computers had a chance of dispersing them. The lasers cut through them like a knife, taking out six and then eight when one of those exploded and eliminated two more with it. After that, the missiles scattered in every direction, all the while closing distance to the ship.

  “Deploying IFS,” said Rylena as she typed into her own console. IFS was shorthand for Interference Field Systems. She was launching her own attack to the targeting computers of the missiles, trying to cut their connection towards the station. Usually, trying to use IFS against the supercomputers of a space station would be futile. In this case, the station hadn’t been maintained in years. The few computers that still were operational had out-of-date firmware and firewalls.

  Another five missiles malfunctioned when the IFS wave hit them and fried their computers.

  Walpurgis shot down another one as they reached the red-threat zone of space around us. After a missile was close to a spaceship, they were much harder to shake off.

  “Flares, Beard,” I called without moving my sight away from the screen. Flares went out one second after I called for them and they did so just in time, as the missiles were now so close Walpurgis was having a hard time targeting them while the clumsy-moving freighter shook us around as I fought the controls.

  They weren’t actually flares, but little computers —not unlike my real burner Berries— trying their best to disguise themselves as the ship. It was the last line of defense in ship-on-missile combat, a last hail-Mary to save our skins: if the missiles didn’t explode against the flares, they could easily catch up to us.

  I wasn’t using them as a last resort this time, though, but as a distraction. I needed the time to turn the ship around.

  “What are you doing, Cole?!” Beard exclaimed as the cabin’s screens showed us making a u-turn and racing towards the missiles. “You are going to destroy my ship!”

  All but two of the missiles had been fooled by the flares, but not one had exploded. They would get back on track in a second or two and then we would be done with.

  “Walpurgis, get those two!”

  It was an insane order. At this short distance, with the missiles maneuvering for impact, and the ship shaking against the forces of botched acceleration and momentum, to hit both of them with an old laser turret was nearly impossible.

  I had seen Walpurgis on the accuracy ranks Rylena had compiled, though. She didn’t complain or say anything, she simply switched turret-controls from starboard to bow. Two single laser beams shot right in front of us and vaporized the missiles at the last second.

  “Hold on!”

  They still exploded, though, as they were already primed for impact. I was almost torn from the controls as the ship tried to jump in every direction at once. The cabin was filled with almost every alarm complaining at the same time. Shields were gone, bow armor had been vaporized, life-support compromised, and so on.

  The motors were perfectly safe at the end of the ship, away from the explosion. We powered through it and came out an instant later, full speed ahead against the station.

  “They are going to turn us into slag,” warned Walpurgis, “when their batteries realize we are in range.”

  She meant Janus Space Station. I was betting everything on one lucky factor. Here’s to hoping Beard’s skill comes through for us.

  The video-feed of the ship’s back showed how the surviving missiles followed behind us, clearly recovered from the flare’s ruse. They could easily catch us now that we were on a straight fly pattern. And they did. They got so close to the ship I was sure we could smell them.

  Then they drew back and blew themselves up safely in the empty space.

  “Good call, Cole,” Rylena called. She was glued to her console without bothering to look at the screens. She knew we were alive because we hadn’t re-spawned yet. “Missiles won’t follow a direct collision course against their own space station.”

  She was right. It wasn’t a Rune thing, but a trick implemented in most older space flight simulators. Too many players loved to skip entire plotlines by drawing fire on purpose from the Big Baddies they weren’t supposed to fight yet, then kamikaze-ing their own ships against them, which was instantly followed by a hundred or so missiles following suit and turning the ship’s shields to dust. Sometimes it was enough to take them out in one hit.

  Developers got wise to it —and explained it in-game as a natural defensive implementation�
�� and instructed missiles and torpedoes to blow themselves up if their target got too close to their own allies.

  “Great, now the Station’s turrets will blow us up!” exclaimed Beard, tugging his beard like a mother in distress. “My poor ship!”

  “Missile launch is an automatic process,” Rylena told him. “The call is made by a computer as soon as a ship without appropriate credentials jumps into range. But the laser-batteries are manually triggered, by proximity.”

  “We are getting pretty damn close!”

  “Yes. But those are hundred-year-old computers,” Rylena said with a triumphant smile. “And I just shut them down.”

  As to prove her words, the doors of the hangar facing us opened slowly, as if fighting their orders to the last second.

  “We own this station, now.” Rylena boasted.

  “Could’ve told me,” Beard muttered. He crossed his arms. “You almost gave me a heart attack, Cole.”

  “Well, to be fair, I had no idea she was going to do that,” I laughed, “I just hoped she could.”

  “You… That’s a lie, right? Are you making a joke? I don’t always understand the States’ humor, that’s why I don’t find it funny at all…”

  The hangar was as dead as the rest of the station. Rylena told us Janus was barely running on its last dredges of energy, its reactor dried up a long time ago.

  The walls were covered by a combination of rust (could rust even grow in space? I was sure it couldn’t. Yet, here it was) and grime. Life-support had gone out a long time ago, so shields were a no go. Stepping out into the hangar was stepping out into the vacuum of space.

  We sealed our spacesuits, filled our oxygen-cells to capacity, and we jumped out into zero-g, greeting the pitch-black darkness with industrial lanterns.

  The floor was littered with pieces of drones, military androids, and cargo-haul crawlers. Every single one of those was magnetized, so their remains were glued to the metal sheets like a dinosaur frozen in amber. They would probably be there for as long as the station lasted.