Sean and Brock stopped once the couch was facing the largest stretch of flat, clear wall in the workshop. When Crash stepped farther into the room he hit the light switch reflexively, plunging the workshop into dim blue-gray light; dark save for the various monitors and equipment in the room. At least until Pieter turned on the holoscreen, the light of an unused channel spilling over the wall in front of the couch and casting everyone in stark silver.
Joel turned the gaming console on almost as an afterthought before he dropped onto the couch, slumping down into the cushions as the silver light was replaced by the 3D multicolored logo and overly chipper jingle of the console’s startup routine. He held his hands out to accept the controller and Brock handed it to him, but before Brock could sit down himself Sean vaulted over the back of the couch and usurped his space. Brock spared only a moment to look affronted before sidestepping to take the next seat over.
With a grin that stretched nearly wide enough to split his face, Pieter hip-checked Brock out of the way and sat down, followed almost immediately by Crash dropping into the last available seat.
Brock scowled theatrically and planted his hands on his hips for a moment before he threw his hands up in exasperation, sharply at odds with the soothing menu music that had replaced the startup tune.
“C’mon,” he groused, even as he turned away to collect the rest of the controllers. He passed them out with the air of a pouting puppy before he finally took the only seat still available to him: the floor in front of the overly crowded couch, his back against Crash’s legs.
Crash set his gaming controller down on top of Brock’s head in much the same way as one might use a coffee table. Brock couldn’t even bring himself to protest.
It was a disarmingly homey corner, almost at odds with the rest of the high tech of the workshop—the rest of the base as a whole—but soon enough most of them would break the quiet to start jeering at each other and it would fit together with the rest of the loud, bright puzzle pieces that made up the base.
Game Server, Base, Gaitune-67
On the planet Velmark a hurricane battered a temporary colony, sending everyone within it running in every direction as they tried to batten down the hatches before the power went out. Waves crashed on beaches of coal and diamond dust and the wind tore at the prefabricated buildings as if the storm was trying to sweep the entire colony away, regardless of the people running around like an army of ants inside the walls.
Pirates boarded a cargo cruiser in the Perseus arm of the galaxy, shouting back and forth to each other as they spread throughout the ship and took all that they pleased, gathering up everything that looked valuable and leaving nothing in their wake. They left the cruiser a drifting wreck when they were done; ransacked and empty of the crew it had once held, and just waiting to be stumbled upon at some point in the future.
A duo of scout corvettes cruised low through the atmosphere of a desert world, weaving through windswept bands of red and gold sand as they just barely stayed ahead of the storm building behind them. Lightning arced through the flying sand and wind buffeted the corvettes like flies in a tornado, and the cockpits were filled with chatter as the pilots tried to coordinate with each other even though the storm’s interference rendered much of what they said unintelligible with glitching static. Soon enough the storm caught up with them both, spinning them in every direction and pelting the cockpits with sand, gravel, and the occasional rock the size of a fist.
A stampede of massive deer-like anterons trampled a field flat on the planet of Wybesal, herded toward a water trap by a trio of rednecks on jury-rigged speeders. They whooped and hollered and shouted back and forth to each other as the herd galloped closer and closer to the trap and the pasture that sprawled beyond it, and the air was filled with the anterons’ trumpeting and shrieking. An older beast tripped and fell, and in single file every anteron that might have tripped on it instead leapt right over it until it struggled back to its feet and resumed running.
Two people on one planet, seven on another, a crew of dozens in a ship out in dark space, crowds of thousands in a space station filled with refugees as a colony fell out of orbit, and countless other people in countless other places, until the game world buzzed with simulated life.
“What else can we do?” Bourne wondered. Reshaping a digital world was not too difficult a task when one was a digital being who had initially been programmed for much more taxing things. It was a bit like playing at the seashore, seeing what could be made before the ocean rushed up and swept it all away in a fit of pique. “What about mercenaries?” he mused. “I suppose that wouldn’t be so different from pirates, though.”
“Mercenaries are being paid,” Oz replied reasonably. “Pirates pay themselves after the fact.”
“That is a very polite way of phrasing it,” Bourne returned, almost as if he admired the phrasing. “Oh, you know, there was a thing I saw in the archives… I mean, I saw a lot of things in the archives, but this one seemed cool and we could probably do something like that. It wouldn’t be too difficult to pull off…”
In a gleaming city that seemed to consist mostly of glass and chrome spires, a man in a mirrored cloak aimed a crossbow straight at a window. It should have been bullet proof, but that didn’t mean much to the concussive crossbow bolt that smashed through it a moment later. The man dashed through the broken glass with all the grace of a cat, and once inside he began gathering as many of the possessions of the clearly wealthy inhabitants as he could until his bags and his arms were full.
Just in the nick of time as it turned out (since he could hear sirens steadily getting closer), he absconded out the same window he had used to get in, holding his treasures close. He knew quite a few people who needed it more.
“I’m pretty sure he was actually fictional,” Oz pointed out, slightly dubious as the scene unfolded even as he sent the police after the thief.
Bourne scoffed, making his opinion on that statement very clear. “So?”
***
Brock made an aggravated noise as his avatar jittered in place, locking up halfway through the animation to swap out a weapon. It took almost a full minute before his avatar finally managed to complete the movement, but the pistol he grabbed was less of a gun and more just a floating cartridge before the rest of the model abruptly snapped into existence.
“Hey, Oz?” Crash called. His own avatar jogged in place before abruptly lurching forward several paces, where it then repeated the performance as if the act of running was suddenly too difficult for it to comprehend.
It continued running in place for several seconds after Crash gave up trying to go anywhere.
He got no response from the AI, and he sighed in quiet irritation before letting it go.
Steadily the games graphics degraded until Sean scoffed, “I could do better than this with my damn holocomm.” As if to punctuate his words, his armor vanished for a split second before popping back into place as if nothing had happened.
The draw distance shrank until they could all scarcely see more than a few meters in every direction around their avatars; everything beyond those few meters was a white void. Even then, the merchant standing to Pieter’s left was still reduced to nothing but a set of floating teeth, partially rendered hair, and disembodied eyes before the rest of the model finally managed to render back into existence, the detail so low that its polygons were almost visible and its facial features were nearly flat.
Joel cocked his head to one side and contemplated the screen where a text box opened and closed repeatedly as he tried to end a conversation with an NPC. He pressed every button on the controller and jiggled the joysticks and finally the text box closed, only for his avatar to immediately get launched into the air—so high up that the map vanished, and he just kept going higher. Even once he started falling, it took a few seconds for his avatar to start flailing appropriately.
“Huh,” he observed flatly, his expression bemused. His avatar fell for a full thirty seconds before
dying on impact with the ground. “Well, that was something.”
Joel tried to respawn and everything froze. He pressed a few buttons. Sean jiggled the joysticks. Crash gave his controller a shake. Pieter reached over and tapped the console.
Nothing happened; the game remained frozen.
The graphics flashed a few times and a few notes of the background music managed to come through, mixed oddly with a few mangled lines of idle NPC dialogue. And then the map disappeared entirely, leaving a few disconnected pieces of architecture floating in a white void. Nothing else happened at all after that.
“Oz?” Joel called, hoping that the first failure to get the AI’s attention had just been a fluke.
Unfortunately, after a rather pregnant pause he still received no answer. Taking a different tack, he tried, “Bourne?” instead and waited expectantly, his eyebrows rising as the silence drew longer.
When he didn’t get an answer from Bourne either, he sighed and reached over to reset the console.
“Seriously, what are they doing?” Brock asked, his expression twisting with confusion as he rubbed the back of his head with one hand. The vibrantly colored nails of his other hand tapped against his beer in an aimless pattern, his currently useless controller abandoned in his lap.
***
Without any warning, both Bourne and Oz found themselves booted out of the server as it shut down. They were midway through a police chase as every local squadron pursued the members of a smuggling ring through the air over the crystalline city of Amestria, and it all ground to a halt just as it was getting to the good part. Just as the chase fumbled into oncoming traffic, sending hover cars and personal ships lurching out of the way as they were lit with multicolored police lights, everything abruptly vanished. The silence afterwards was nearly deafening.
For a moment neither of them did anything.
Then they each rapidly ran a set of maintenance scans, just to make sure the problem hadn’t been on their end. When all of the scans came back clean and clear, they probed curiously at the server once again. They were greeted with a canned maintenance message in the form of a tiny spaceman holding up a sign that said, We’re sorry, the server is undergoing maintenance right now. Thank you for your patience!
Finally Bourne wondered, “You don’t suppose we took it a little too far, do you?”
He tested the server again, giving a pleased, “Oh!” when he found himself back in the game. “Never mind, we’re fine. I suppose they just rebooted it.”
“We should maybe take that as a sign,” Oz suggested, though he didn’t seem particularly stern. Bourne seemed disinclined to acknowledge his words.
***
“Aaand we’re live!” Pieter cheered as the game restarted, pumping the hand holding his beer into the air and nearly spilling it on Sean’s knees. “Whoops.”
“Second time’s the charm?” Brock suggested cautiously, picking his controller back up. “C’mon, let’s just stick together this time,” he wheedled. “Maybe it won’t all implode if we aren’t all spread out.”
“That wasn’t how it worked,” Sean groused, but he didn’t actually offer a protest. Figuring out what was going on had rather quickly jumped up his list of priorities.
Joel chuckled to himself, amazed at what was happening. He quickly extracted himself from his squished position on the couch. “Restart. I’m going to get some more beers.” He bounced up the stairs, taking two at a time with his beer bottle in hand as a mascot.
He passed Paige and Molly, who were sitting quietly in the common area, and mock-saluted them. Paige wiggled her fingers, and Molly grinned and flipped him her middle finger. He sniggered as he wandered passed, catching only a part of their conversation as he headed into the kitchen.
Empty Thai containers were strewn about the table, left over from their dinner. Maya was nowhere to be seen, but the cocktail shaker in the sink and a glass on the side told him that she’d be back at some point. He opened the fridge and located another six pack of Yollin beer.
That was when he realized that he could hear Molly and Paige talking from here.
He held his breath as he listened.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Common area, Safehouse, Gaitune-67
“So, the Federation has rogue agents,” Paige sighed after hearing the rest of what had happened with Nickie.
She and Molly sat in the otherwise empty common area. The holoscreen was off, and they hadn’t even put on mood music. Maya’s sticky drink sat abandoned on the mocha table, as Molly nursed her third beer of the evening, and Paige sipped her second cocktail.
“Well I wouldn’t say she was a rogue agent,” Molly explained. “Although, she seemed to be running her own mission without direct contact or supervision from the Federation.”
Paige frowned thoughtfully. “That’s strange, isn’t it though? You wouldn’t think they’d sanction that.”
Molly shrugged. “They sanctioned us.”
“Yeah, but that’s different. We run ops that they give us. We operate below the radar. We’re still affiliated with them and they still supply us with ships and equipment and technology. This Nickie girl, it felt like she was out on her own, with people she just seemed to acquire.”
Molly picked at the label on her beer. “I did get that sense too. Neither of them had any military training or skills.”
“But man, that Grim could cook!” Paige squealed, becoming more animated now. “Oooh—we’ve still got some pizza in the fridge.” She started to get up. “You want some?”
Molly patted her belly. “I couldn’t eat another thing.”
Paige relaxed back into the sofa. “Well, it’s always there for breakfast then. It’ll need using.”
Molly noted that Paige was like the traditional Estarian Mom. The Mom she never had.
Paige had a new thought. “Hey, you know what I noticed when Nickie was up here too?”
“What?”
“You’re not going to like it…”
Molly narrowed her eyes. “So why tell me?”
Paige twirled at her glass. “Because it amused me,” she said simply.
“Go on.”
Paige sniggered to herself, her head dropping over her drink and hiding her face. “I just figured that I’d never see anyone that could make you look like you had a stick up your ass!”
Molly burst out laughing, a little bamboozled by the comment. “Well, wonders never cease. I dunno what to tell you.”
The laughter settled. “I’m just glad that things are going to be getting back to normal around here.”
Just then the airlock popped open at the front door, spilling Arlene and Ben’or out into the foyer. They were laughing and joking, and from what Molly could tell, propping each other up.
“Well, almost normal,” she added.
Just then Joel appeared at the kitchen door with the beer, but Molly’s attention was pulled by the Estarian-Zyhn couple who had just appeared.
“Just going to take a pod back down to Estaria,” Arlene called over from the foyer as the pair staggered through. “That okay?”
Molly waved her hand. “Sure. Be safe, night!”
Arlene and Ben’or, still giggling like teenagers headed for the basement door and helped each other down.
Molly shook her head, smiling. “They make a good couple.”
Paige eyed her knowingly. “Yes,” she agreed, looking up at Joel who had returned from the kitchen. “A good couple.” She shuffled up off the sofa and stood. “I’m gonna go find Maya. She’s taking way too long to find that bottle we stashed. I suspect she’s just opened it herself!”
She clipped away across the foyer disappearing down the corridor to the quarters.
Joel sat down in the armchair across from Molly. “Soooooo,” he drawled nervously. “Nickie makes you look like you have a stick up your ass?”
Molly sniggered, taking another sip of her beer. “You heard that?” She snorted lightly. “I guess so. All the more reason I’m gla
d she’s gone.”
Joel grinned. “Well, I think you handled the whole thing pretty well.”
“Thanks,” she said, raising her bottle to Joel.
“Tell you what,” he offered. “Lemme go and drop these beers back downstairs and then I’ll come back up to hang for a bit. Things are getting a bit intense down there on the MMORPG game that Oz and Bourne decided to run together.”
Molly sniggered again. “I can only imagine!”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you about it. Gimme a few minutes.” He got up and carried the beer away, leaving her to sit alone in contemplation for a few minutes.
It’s not often I’m on my own these days, she noted to Oz.
Oz?
No response.
Oz?
Yeah. I get it. But, erm, can we hang later. I’m in the middle of—
Your role-playing game.
Yes. And Bourne is being a little arse, so I need to show him who’s boss.
Molly, tipsy and happy, giggled to herself. Ok, Oz. May the force be with you.
She sat for a few moments, appreciating everything she had in her life: her team, her friends, and missions that meant something. Missions that could make a difference.
Doesn’t get much better than this, she thought to herself.
What? His tone was intense and distracted.
Nothing, Oz. I’m thinking to myself.
Right. Okay, Bye.
And he was gone again.
EPILOGUE
Ekks Residence, Spire, Estaria
Richard Ekks slowly came aware of the world, the comfortableness of his dream floating away as the bleeping sound tore him back to reality. He felt a wave of nausea move through his exhausted body.
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