Frank shivered. “Don’t even joke about crap like that! I don’t want to live out my post-post-glory days in some pastel petting zoo or earsplitting convulsion festival.”
With a smirk, June egged Frank on. “Fine. I’ll admit Pretty Pony Petting Place would be hell for anyone over the age of six.”
“Or equipped with a set of testicles,” Frank added.
“But Rave Dance Mix is one big party,” June said. She cast a stray glance Reggie’s way. “Plus, a guy who can dance is sexy.”
Before he got roped into a make-up date in a virtual warehouse rave filled with phony teenage avatars and a relentless untz-untz-untz beat that hammered clear through his chest, Reggie decided to steer the conversation back to more weighty concerns. “Well, start thinking about our next retirement home.”
Frank grunted. “You mean cemetery. Besides, this place still has some fight left in it.”
Reggie could only hope his friend was right.
Chapter Three
Reggie stood on the top floor of his palace high-rise at the heart of Jenova City on Nibelheim. The view was spectacular as always. Mixed among the 30 or so million non-player characters that called the capital city of Wounded Legion home were 1,100 players. Many of them had secondary homes for little bases of their own scattered throughout the faction, but the majority logged in every night to the heart of Wounded Legion. The city glistened in the sunlight of the pale class-G star that Nibelheim orbited. The glass skyscrapers set as a backdrop against the trails of ion engines from suborbital traffic as the waking city yawned and began its day.
“Everything the light touches is my empire,” Reggie muttered.
All those NPCs out there, going about their days. All that processing power to simulate a living, breathing city on a make-believe world. Though he knew better, Reggie tried to imagine that each of those fictitious creatures out there had a living, breathing human mind inside it. He couldn’t. He knew better. It was hard enough wrapping his head around the idea that his own brain was run on those in computers. He caught himself wondering if some future upgrade of the Valhalla West servers would allow him to contemplate that conundrum.
Reggie shuddered and shook his head.
Clacking footsteps on the hard, glossy floor caught Reggie’s attention and brought it back inside the palace. He tried to guess by the quickness and cadence who it might be that came to visit. June? Of course not. He’d know those footsteps anywhere. Chase would’ve called. Frank never stopped by.
He got his answer when the visitor spoke.
“Doing that whole Batman thing again?” Olaf asked. “Looking out over your city and brooding?”
Reggie grunted. “Batman always did that on rooftops.”
A rustle of fabric told Reggie that Olaf had shrugged off his suggestion. “Brooding is brooding. But hey, never mind that. I got news that will snap you out of that brooding pronto.”
Curiosity got the better of Reggie. He turned and saw his personal secretary—for that’s what Olaf had appointed himself—standing there in a baggy uniform, leaning against the back of Reggie’s couch. It bugged Reggie that the disheveled uniform was an intentional choice. Olaf actually had to go into the editor and update his appearance, selecting the fit of his uniform to deviate from the standard clean-cut, military look the Wounded Legion used as a default.
“We lose another planet?”
Olaf grinned. He shook his head.
Reggie rolled his eyes and guessed again. “June is waiting outside and used you to drag me to our next date?”
That wiped the grin off Olaf’s face. “Whoa, nothing like that, sir! No, there was just a system-wide news broadcast. It’s on every screen in the city.”
“Give me the executive summary.” Reggie didn’t have the patience for this dangle-and-chase game. He wasn’t a cat. Olaf was either going to spit it out or get the hell out of his private quarters.
It appeared that it wasn’t going to come to that, though. Olaf gushed like a schoolgirl with a crush. “Valhalla West is gonna have some kind of tournament. Like… like shut down interstellar combat and get real-world television coverage kind of tournament. Platoon combat. Closed arenas. Live coverage. Commentators, prizes, the whole works.”
The digital blood in Reggie’s veins began to pump in earnest. “Go on…”
Olaf obliged. “They’re calling them Valkyries. Everyone in the winning platoon gets one. Medium-class juggernauts. Sick stats. Won’t be available any other way. You wanna pilot the best? You gotta be the best. I know you always preferred a medium jug. This would be right up your alley. Old tanker like you ought to be right in the mix. Plus, nobody’s got more hours in this game than you.”
“How sick is sick?”
Rather than give a verbal answer, Olaf picked up the remote to Reggie’s television and flipped it on. He navigated through a series of news announcements and brought up the stats on the Valhalla West Tournament Edition Valkyrie Juggernaut.
[Weight: 65 tons]
[Max Speed: 80 kph]
[Head Armor: 4T]
[Torso Armor: 6T]
[Arm Armor: 2T]
[Leg Armor: 2T]
[Heat Sinks: 24 (effective)]
[Targeting Computer: Kvasir-I]
[Engine: Mjolnir-IX 400MW]
[Primary Weapon: Particle Blaster Mk2 (x2)]
[Secondary Weapon: Longsword (x2)]
[Jump Boost]
[Manufacturer: Helheim Forge]
Reggie just stared. It was a medium juggernaut by weight, size, and maneuverability. Hell, it was on the nimble side even for a medium. But the weapons loadout looked like something you would see on a good-sized heavy. Reggie scanned the stats to figure out how they were pulling this off without breaking the game mechanics.
He squinted. “What the… oh, I get it now. They conjured up some new heatsink system.” Reggie gave a chuckle. “Trans-dimensional mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, dump your excess heat directly to Valhalla. Bullshit. A bunch of slimmed-down, overpowered weaponry with 24 tons of heat dissipation packed into a 2-ton magic box.”
Olaf stared right along with him. He grunted. “Yeah, looks like you’re right. But still, who wouldn’t give their left nut for this thing?”
“A woman?” Reggie suggested, thinking immediately of June.
“You know what I mean,” Olaf replied. “You have players dusting off old accounts to come back and play for these. You have every faction sending its top players. This is gonna be a knockdown, drag-out brawl across the entire Valhalla West servers. If I wasn’t in such a hopeless scrub, I’d volunteer for it myself. 200k credits? I can scrape that together. But what’s the point when I’d only get my ass handed to me? You… you can make something out of this. You’ve got a chance—a damn good one.”
Reggie sighed softly. If only that were the whole story.
The Valkyries were kick ass rides. There was no doubt about that. Just a quick scan down a stat sheet was enough to tell even the rawest noob that these are special vehicles. Admittedly, the styling was a little bit on the flamboyant side for Reggie’s tastes, but the next time a player chose style over stats at high-level gameplay would be the first.
The problem was what this meant for Valhalla West and Armored Souls. The Valkyrie was broken. Brokenly powerful. Head-to-head, it was a match for any single juggernaut in the game. It could snipe light juggernauts, slug it out with heavy juggernauts, and dodge circles around the super heavies. Against another medium—supposedly its peers—it would be like turning a rabid wolf loose in a pet store. The mere existence of such a vehicle, and the shabby, hand-waving explanation of the tech responsible for it, undercut the carefully crafted world the Valhalla West created in Armored Souls. Every expansion brought a few improvements in the underlying technology of the Star League. But the Valkyrie was a quantum leap. Each of the five given out to the victors would be a walking zone of unfairness.
Plus, it was a sign that Valhalla West was getting desperate to bolster flagging pl
ayer login rates. Just more fuel on the fire for the rumors that the game had begun its slow spiral into obscurity.
Olaf departed and left Reggie with his thoughts.
Reggie looked at those stats again.
[Weight: 65 tons]
[Max Speed: 80 kph]
[Head Armor: 4T]
[Torso Armor: 6T]
[Arm Armor: 2T]
[Leg Armor: 2T]
[Heat Sinks: 24 (effective)]
[Targeting Computer: Kvasir-I]
[Engine: Mjolnir-IX 400MW]
[Primary Weapon: Particle Blaster Mk2 (x2)]
[Secondary Weapon: Longsword (x2)]
[Jump Boost]
[Manufacturer: Helheim Forge]
The Valkyrie was a cheap trick. It was schmuck bait. If the player base had an ounce of self-respect, they’d protest the introduction of such an imbalanced juggernaut.
Reggie had to have one.
Chapter Four
Despite being a glittering palace of glass and some sci-fi steel substance, Reggie’s home also contained an Irish style pub with dark wood interior, low lighting, and the pervasive smell of beer and fried food. It’d been one of the cheaper upgrades he made to the place, but it had been money well spent. Most of the players of Wounded Legion weren’t allowed inside. Only a few even realized that it existed. It was the place that Reggie disappeared to when he wanted to be alone or only surrounded by a few close friends.
The staff was a bunch of NPCs that Reggie new like old friends. Tommy the bartender. Lisa the cook. Donna the hostess. Vern and Tamara, the waitstaff. They were practically people. The subdued music in the background was mostly classic rock. The patrons were a rotating mix of NPCs from the city, drinking, laughing, and playing darts.
Tonight, Reggie had company.
Chase was back. He spent a good portion of his time in Armored Souls traipsing around Wounded Legion territory, putting out brush fires and lurking in back alleys for intel. Capping out at max level had sapped Chase of most of his incentive to go out on missions. Working on Silent Shuriken had given him a taste for the cloak and dagger world, and Chase had run with it.
“Looks like I’ll be getting a vacation,” Chase said, picking a plate of nachos. “Shutting down inter-faction warfare during the entire tournament makes running counterintelligence sort of pointless. Makes you wonder what everyone’s gonna do. Sit with their thumbs up their asses while the top players compete?”
June set down her pint glass and waved Tamara over for a refill. “Regular missions will still be going. Not everyone gets all caught up in the interstellar politics side of this game.”
“They don’t?” Chase asked with a grin. “How many times can you go on the same kill X juggernauts mission and still keep coming back every night? I mean, that was cool for the first few months, checking out all the procedurally generated variants. But once you peel that back and see how all the pieces come together, eventually you’ll realize that you’ve done every mission in every permutation. Gotta make your own competition in this game. Or at least, you get a June faction who will do it for you. Me? I’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer.”
Reggie raised an eyebrow. “Like paying off some mercs to invade us, just so I’ll have something to do?”
The sheepish grin on Chase’s face was all the answer he needed. “Yeah, Frank’s never been great about keeping his damn mouth shut. It’s not like it’s even the first time I’ve done it. People just don’t attack Wounded Legion like they used to. I mean, you’d think we were the number five faction on the server or something.”
June pulled a tablet computer from her pocket, punched a few commands in, and slid it over to Chase.
Chase stared at it for a moment. “Oh, hell no.”
Reggie took custody of the computer. He scanned down the list of top factions that June had brought up.
[Omnus Domini]
[Hell Furies]
[Adamantine Horde]
[BXV BROS]
[Centurion Core]
[Wounded Legion]
With a grunt, Reggie returned the tablet to June. “So, what? We slipped to sixth. Normal fluctuation. We dropped to seventh a few months back. We recovered.”
“You say that like it wasn’t a thing. This isn’t the stock market. I worked my ass off to get us back to where we were,” Chase said. “We didn’t just magically rebound. I arranged a merger with a noob faction and engineered us conquering two planets.”
“I think I was training some of those noobs yesterday,” Reggie observed dryly. “I’m thinking I might have preferred being seventh.”
“Nah,” Chase said, blowing off the notion. “You get off on being a top dog. ‘Top five’ sounds a hell of a lot more prestigious than ‘top ten.’”
“Can we address the real issue here?” June asked.
“You mean why Frank isn’t here?” Chase replied flippantly. “I called him twenty minutes ago, and he’s just across town at the boxing arena.”
“I think Frank probably didn’t want to get caught in a crossfire over someone’s hobby of cooking up insurgencies for me to stomp out,” Reggie said.
“I mean, this tournament,” June said, steering them back on track. “If we want to be ready to throw down with the top teams, we can’t just show up on game day and see what happens. We need to get some training in.”
“Training…” Chase echoed skeptically. “You mean that stuff Reggie was doing with the Noob Patrol? Pass. We’ve played Armored Souls long enough that we aren’t going to get any better. Welcome to the skill plateau.”
“No, she has a point,” Reggie stated firmly. “This isn’t kicking around some faction a tenth our size, figuring out how many juggernauts they can field and bringing twice as many of our own. We’ll be in a cage fight with another platoon of equal size, and—”
“And we don’t know any of the rules,” Chase cut in. “Valhalla West carefully teased the grand prize without giving a sniff of the ground rules. Platoon-based could mean practically anything. We could be allowed just a standard 5-jug platoon, but they could also be referring to a 15-jug grand platoon, or it could be faction-based combat with multiple platoons deployed across a larger battlefield. They might invent new platoon guidelines like a 3-jug platoon. I’m not going to Noob Camp just to hang out with you guys on a firing range.”
Chase’s argument was the verbal equivalent of a movie chase where the guy running away knocks over every fruit cart and bazaar stall along the way to slow his pursuers. June wasn’t deterred. “Well, they won’t keep everyone in the dark long. They’re really geared up for this one, and they’re going to want the teams at their best. That means we can expect to hear the full rules soon, and when we do, that’ll be the starter’s pistol to get our asses in gear for the brawl of the century.”
“I’ll download the Rocky soundtrack,” Chase said. “Maybe I can get time to pass in a montage.”
Reggie took a long breath. “So, I suppose that any question of whether we’ll be entering has been settled.”
Chase and June both looked at him.
“Have you seen those stats?” Chase asked.
Reggie scanned the stat line again.
[Weight: 65 tons]
[Max Speed: 80 kph]
[Head Armor: 4T]
[Torso Armor: 6T]
[Arm Armor: 2T]
[Leg Armor: 2T]
[Heat Sinks: 24 (effective)]
[Targeting Computer: Kvasir-I]
[Engine: Mjolnir-IX 400MW]
[Primary Weapon: Particle Blaster Mk2 (x2)]
[Secondary Weapon: Longsword (x2)]
[Jump Boost]
[Manufacturer: Helheim Forge]
“Yeah,” he said with a wistful sigh.
“We’re either going to win those or end up facing them in battle,” Chase said. “I for one do not like the idea of going robo-e-robo against one of those things.”
Chapter Five
While the giant machine of Wounded Legion lumbered forwa
rd under its own mass, a collection of five of its top players met on a desolate moon in the Andares Sector. Outside the cockpit of Vortex, a slight breeze of methane gas blew past, so thin that the wisps could be seen. Opening the hatch would have been suicide, but for Reggie and his platoon, this wasn’t a dangerous mission. It was training.
“Hey, everyone,” Reggie called out as they gathered at the entrance to a complex of canyons that would be their practice battlefield. “This is going to be the first of probably a nightly series of practice sessions leading up to the tournament. We need to make this a habit. I want excellent to become—”
“A routine,” Chase finished for him. “Spare us the pep rally. You’re forgetting who you’re talking to. We’re not the new guys. In fact, all of us have actually been playing Armored Souls longer than you have.”
Reggie scanned the platoon view on the display in front of him. Chase was piloting Diablo despite the Jackal class having fallen out of favor among the wider player base. Decked out in orange and gold, Phoenix shone like justice beneath the Andares sun with June at the helm. Frank still had Gremlin, and he’d even managed to learn how to use it without resorting to melee combat every fight. Last but not least was Roger in his Titan-class Yawndark, semi-invisible in its purple paint job against the backdrop of space.
“Fine,” Reggie said at last. “Nobody here’s a noob. But we need to get all the kinks worked out of our teamwork. Kick off the rust. Get used to being ground troops again instead of officers and generals.”
“I log more combat hours a week than the rest of you sorry lot combined,” Frank groused. “Desk jobs are for washed-up old men, and I’m past all that.”
Reggie snickered. Whenever he got down in the dumps about the whole afterlife aspect of Valhalla West’s little ant-farm suite of games, all he had to do was spend an afternoon shooting the breeze with Frank. The old-timer had run a marathon to stay ahead of the grim reaper and finally won. While some hundred-some-odd-year-old body got put in the ground, the Frank Reggie had known lived on. Frank was the guy who’d survived getting old.
Ghost Platoon Page 2