by Hugo Huesca
“Is the flare’s signal strong enough to catch the drones’ attention?” I asked.
“No, we are too far down the station. The walls interfere with the signal, it’s already pretty scrambled.”
“So, there’s nothing stopping them from eating us alive?” asked Beard. Then, he added, “screw that. Walpurgis, pass me those grenades.”
Three minutes later a series of explosions rocked the warehouse, shaking it and us like we’d been thrown into a blender. Beard and Walpurgis had followed Rylena’s instructions and chucked a couple of plasma ‘nades under the main life-support pipes of the place and also over the main concentration of drones. A cloud of dust and shards of metal rose instantly all over the warehouse, but we were ready with our heat-visor’s modality. The drones appeared like tiny specks of heat thanks to their batteries. The explosions had melted a good chunk out of them and they were scattered and confused, moving back and forth between the severed pipes and the ship’s corpses, like ants whose anthill has just been crushed.
Then, before the beetle-like things even realized they were under attack, Beard stepped in with his rocket-launcher. After that plasma explosion, there weren’t many beetles around. No any Posse of Iron ships either.
“Now you know how it feels,” Beard told them.
After our brave ambush against the unsuspecting maintenance workers, Walpurgis and Rylena took out the remaining drones with careful laser fire. Around us, the station groaned as if it was a giant warning us not to try something like that again.
“The warehouse has stronger beams than the factory,” Rylena told me, catching my worried glance at the ceiling. “It’s easily able to withstand a couple of explosions.”
“I agree,” said Beard, who was an engineer after all, “but don’t get cocky. Janus seems to love treachery.”
We were in luck, though. The freighter remains, as big as a dilapidated house, had been only partially eaten, leaving the valuable insides.
We found the crates of Z-Alloy on that freighter’s own cargo room. They floated all over the place like treasure chests waiting to be claimed by brave adventurers.
“Excellent,” I proclaimed, “just like we planned.”
“Don’t taunt the game like that, please,” muttered Walpurgis.
“You superstitious, too?”
“Creepypastas are not superstitions, man,” said Beard, absent-mindedly, as he tied a nanite cable to each crate. Rylena helped him while her scout drone flew in circles all over the freighter like a guardian dog, searching for any danger.
“No. I’m just saying, Rune can have a messed up sense of humor. You said it was programmed by Kipp’s parents, right?”
That was a compelling argument. I decided then to refrain from saying this like, “you’ll never stop me now!”
We all helped Beard set up the Z-Alloys. Moving heavy objects in space was a matter of fighting inertia and keeping them moving. We were already prepared for that, thanks to him. Merchants worked with heavy cargo by attaching them tiny rockets, the size of a beer can, in key points. The rockets had a nuclear battery and very low power output. They worked by applying a small force constantly until the cargo had the desired speed and the merchant turned them off until needed again. After that, the only problem left was steering.
You could handle steering with more rockets and turning them off selectively, but Beard didn’t have enough in his pack for all the cargo we intended to transport.
And we all knew we only had one trip left. The one back towards the hangar where we probably would have to fight about every single drone and android in the station.
At least Beard’s bazooka still had some ammo left.
The Z-Alloy crates weighed a couple tons each, according to Rylena’s mechanical eyes. We handled their steering mostly by smashing them against the walls like improvised siege weapons, pushing them with our oxygen jets and max power, in short, controlled bursts, and by praying we didn’t get sandwiched between two of them.
Like herding very dumb, super heavy, really clumsy sheep across the jagged edge of a mountain.
The noise we were making by the time we managed to get the Alloy to the corridors of the station was enough to qualify as a rave party on its own. If the noise of the game could be heard outside in the real world, every single person in my apartment complex would be up by now, banging on my door.
That’s probably why none of us realized 401 had shut down and gone silent until it was too late and we were standing in front of the man who carried the poor spheric drone.
He stared at us in silence from a cracked black visor, cutting off our way forward. Walpurgis, who was in front of us pulling the ropes to her for better steering, was the first one to see him.
“What the—”
She had her rifle instantly trained on him and after hearing her, a second later so did we.
“Who are you?” I asked him. He was a player, I realized instantly, thanks to the same mysterious difference between NPCs and real persons that made it impossible to mistake them. “You with the Posse of Iron?”
He was tall, almost tall enough to reach the ceiling on his own. His spacesuit was old and heavily damaged. You could see the mechanisms beneath the layer of armor, whirring uneasily on his torso. The cracked visor of his helmet was black and it spat vapor from two exhaust fumes by his jaw.
It wasn’t the uniform of a mercenary, but rather the outfit of a person who had been away from any civilized space for a long time.
“Boy, that’s an interesting quest you have there,” he said, finally, nudging his head towards me.
“What are you talking about?” players couldn’t see the quests of one another unless they chose to share them. They were out-of-game information, and as such, couldn’t be hacked like communicators could.
“Shoot him,” Rylena told Walpurgis, suddenly, her voice dripping with cold terror. I turned towards her in surprise and then Walpurgis shot a barrage of laser fire at the man until her rifle overheated.
Every shot hit him square in the chest or the head. After the last, the man and his suit stood unharmed right in the middle of us. I hadn’t seen him move. He had displaced himself several meters without moving his legs. And his shields hadn’t even flared with Walpurgis fire.
“Mind telling me where you found out about the planet Validore?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Shade
The man gave no signs of realizing —or caring— that he had just been shot.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered at Rylena over the privacy of our comms line. She didn’t turn to look at me, she was transfixed on the tall player in front of us. He, in turn, was staring at me with grim intensity.
“Where,” he repeated, “did you find out about planet Validore?”
Beard raised his own blaster and Rylena did the same with her rifle. I made a snap decision and stood in their line of fires, raising a hand to gain their attention.
“Stop! He hasn’t attacked us yet, what are you doing?” I demanded.
“He’s obviously an enemy,” said Beard, “he has out-of-player knowledge, right? He has to be a government agent passing as a player, something like that. You told us someone was watching you, remember? With a drone in the real world?”
Rylena said nothing. The green light of her eyes cast a shadow beneath her visor, making her look like an apparition.
“I have no love for the States’ government,” said the man and I realized he was using our same secure channel. How long had it taken him to hack it? “Your secrets are safe with me.”
“We don’t have any reason to believe that,” said Walpurgis. She calmly changed her rifle’s coolant cartridge.
“Of course you don’t,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter either way. You’re not going to find Validore.”
“That’s very much our business,” I told him, “if that’s all you have to say, please, get out of our way.”
He shook his head. Walpurgis sidestepped me
and shot him again, point blank, jamming her finger in the trigger until the rifle’s muzzle was red-hot and the rifle’s internal system melted.
It was like shooting wet paper balls at a tank.
“What’s wrong with you?” she growled at him. She got a knife out of her combat belt, along with her backup blaster.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said, as calm as if we were taking a stroll through the park. “You come into my home and attack my minions. And when I try to talk to you, you shoot me. Rune’s system has you classified as good guys in the karma system. Well, not you, Walpurgis, you’re as gray as they come. But, as a group, I mean.”
“Man, if you want us to talk to you at least tell us how you’re just standing there after taking enough laser shots to blow a fighter out of orbit,” Beard told him.
“I’m obviously a hacker,” he said, “I’m not playing by Rune’s rules.”
“Hackers can’t pass the security checks,” said Beard. “It’s too advanced.”
“There’s no such a thing as a perfect defense,” said the man, “if you’re good enough. My name is David Terrance. Pleased to meet you.”
“David, I’m Cole and these are my friends, which you already seem to know. What do you want with us?”
He turned to me. Walpurgis took the chance to try and stab him, with as much success as before. “Rune isn’t supposed to be handing Validore quests anymore. Yet you three have it on your quest log.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. Fun fact. If you were to check the System’s databases, you’d see all the Validore tags are a late part of Rune’s main quest.”
“There’s no Rune main quest,” said Beard. Rylena was still as silent as a statue.
“Not anymore. It never went live. Before launch, though, it was very much there. Rune built it. It wanted a main quest. It was to be randomly generated on the go, but with some very important fixed points.”
There was something very wrong with David Terrance, hacker. He wasn’t like Roscoe, even if that wasn’t a great measuring metric. There was a stiffness to his movements, a falsehood implied in the way he stood.
And why was he telling us all this? We had never met the guy. I nervously glanced behind my back to make sure there was no ambush incoming while he distracted us. Then I remembered an invulnerable player didn’t need any ambush.
“So… The Quest Generator System tried to make a main quest. Big deal, that’s why it’s there for,” I said. I was lying through my teeth. I knew perfectly well people had died for this quest.
David Terrance let out a long sigh. Steam came out of his helmet’s exhaust vents like small geysers. “Perhaps I’m trying to warn you. Perhaps I’d like to see myself what’s hidden in planet Validore. Who cares? Planet Validore has been moved.”
“That’s why we’re trying to find it,” said Beard.
“There’s no map to Validore. The game never tried to hide it, the quest tried to get as many players as possible towards the Zodia System. Now, there’s nothing there. It has been artificially moved somewhere else.”
“You mean by the developers,” I said. “Well, you’re not making any sense, then. They could’ve just deleted the planet if what’s inside is so dangerous. It’s their game, after all.”
The black hacker shrugged. “I’ve seen the game files. After the players reached Validore, they found nothing there. The game just ends, I think. If there’s anyone that knows for sure, those must be Rune’s creators.”
Those were Kipp’s parents. Who had been dead for almost two decades.
“The map you carry in your mindjack’s archives is useless,” David said. “It’s the Keygen that’s invaluable. Guard it well. Or give it to me, if you don’t want it.”
“We very much want it, thank you,” said Walpurgis. I nodded. “Are you going to let us go, or are you just going to stand there until the drones return?”
“I can give you safe passage through the drones. They are just NPCs. Believe it or not, I’m on your side.”
“Why? You don’t know us at all,” I said.
“I have searched for something like Validore before,” he said. “My failure cost me something dear. But, you have something I did not. It stands to reason you may have better chances. I just want this whole business laid to rest.”
To my surprise, he stood to one side of the corridor, freeing the way. “I’ve told you all I know. If you want to find the planet, find the people who moved it. And be careful about it, because those people are not afraid to kill. See, they think they’re doing the right thing.”
“We can take care of ourselves,” said Walpurgis. I could hear the anger in her voice.
“I bet. But having a 120 skill level in shooting won’t help you when the real firefight starts.”
“It’s 121.”
David Terrance laughed. It was a coarse, raspy laugh, like a hyena’s. “You have ten minutes to reach your ship. During that time, nothing will attack you. Goodbye, guys. I wish you the best of luck.”
Then he slowly floated down the floor like a hologram. That’s the noclip command Script, I realized, as he went. His visor was the last to disappear under the metallic latches. He never stopped watching us, as if memorizing our faces.
“What a creep,” grunted Walpurgis when there was no trace of David.
“He sounded like he was trying to help,” I said. I agreed with her, though. I didn’t like that black visor at all. Most players activated transparency to talk to other players, so they could see their faces. We hadn’t seen his at all.
“We have to leave. Now.” Rylena suddenly started moving, like the devil himself chased after her. I had never seen her afraid before.
“Hey.” I ran after her, using my magnetized boots to ignore the lack of gravity. “What’s wrong? You’re acting very weird.”
“He paralyzed me,” she said, without turning back. “One second after I shot at him. He paralyzed me and shut down my comms so I wouldn’t tell you guys what I saw.”
“You saw something?” Behind us, Walpurgis and Beard were struggling to get the Z-Alloys moving again. “What are you talking about?”
She finally turned back. Her visor was transparent and I could see she was white as a sheet. “I’m a Battlemind. I can see everyone’s stats and vital signs. Every player, every NPC. I’m seeing yours right now.”
“And?” Her tone of voice made the hair on my arms raise.
“He had none. No stats. No class, no username, no nothing. As far as the game was concerned, nothing was in front of us this whole time. That’s when I started shooting.”
“He’s a hacker, right? He could fool the game,” I said. It was more an attempt at calming her down than at arguing. She was having none of it, though.
“I already looked for David Terrance in my mindjack’s search engine,” she said. Somehow, I knew what she was going to say next and it made me feel a cold terror that chilled me to the bone all the way back in the sofa of my apartment. “David Terrance has been dead for three years. He died in a government raid when the SWAT drones went haywire.”
“Oh…”
“Cole? He was using a mindjack when he died. One of those dangerous older models.”
We stood there like frozen statues. We left Janus station very quickly after that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Shipyard
We decided quickly after that to not talk about Terrance or we would probably end up in an asylum. It was easy to imagine what had really happened. Another famous hacker had found us and for some reason or another had decided to mess up with our heads a little, make the encounter more memorable.
If we were to look inside Terrance’s avatar dark visor, we would see just another normal human face, perhaps mocking us for being so scared of him.
That’s definitely what we would see. Yes. Sure.
At least, Terrance made good on his promise to keep the crazed robots of the Janus Space Station away from us long enough to store the
Alloy inside the merchant freighter. We flew away from the hangar just as they started to come back to their usual murdering senses.
As we flew away I turned a screen to see a wall of androids behind us staring at us with their little red eyes. It was almost like they were sad to see us go and had prepared a little goodbye party. There were no signs of the station only true inhabitant, either. I suspected we’d never see David Terrance again.
I was very wrong, of course… But that’s another story.
“We should turn around and empty our own missiles on the station,” muttered Beard as I piloted his ship deep into space and began the jump preparations.
“I think we should let sleeping dogs lie,” Walpurgis told him. “If my rifle didn’t kill him, I would assume nothing will.”
“Damn trickster kids, trying to mess with our heads like that,” said Beard. I realized he was smiling just a tiny bit over the corner of his lips. The man was probably happy he finally proved to us creepypastas were real.
“The new ship is almost finished,” said Rylena, before Walpurgis and Beard could continue their argument about ghosts. “Only the weapon systems are left. But Terrance is right about something. Kipp’s screenshot isn’t getting us anywhere fast. At this rate, we will have a new ship and nowhere to travel to.”
I set course for the Federation’s Shipyard. We had saved the weapons for last since we intended to pool our remaining databytes into them (and the best insurance money could buy). Perhaps even sell Beard’s freighter for that.
“I have an idea for finding Validore,” I said after we had jumped away from Janus and were in preparations for hyperspace, “but it may be dangerous. Give me a couple of days to sleep on it, then I’ll come back to you.”
“Are you being intentionally vague?” asked Rylena. She smiled for the first time since the station. “Is that just to add mystery? If you call me at 3am telling me you have something important to say, but it’s too dangerous to speak over the phone, I will just assume you are about to be murdered as soon as we hang up. So please, send me your investigation over email before calling.”