A part of him wanted to ask for more visitors. Reggie wouldn’t have minded seeing his dad. Hell, even talking to Daisy might help keep him grounded in this surreal fishbowl existence. Not being military, they might be at liberty to give him answers. But Dr. Zimmerman’s words seemed crafted just to head off such a request.
Reggie flashed a close-lipped smile at the doctor. “No worries, doc. I’ve got my priorities straight.”
Play their game. Trust Whitten. Play along. Reggie could do that.
“Excellent,” Dr. Zimmerman said with a curt nod. “You don’t need me for the rest of the insertion process. Carry on.”
When the door closed behind the doctor, Reggie and Nurse Mallet were alone.
“You need me to undress or anything?” Reggie asked, idly flicking one of the dangling straps on the tubular frame resting inside the pod. His head tugged slightly this way and that as Nurse Mallet adjusted the brain-scanning rig. “Might make things easier on you.”
She snorted a light, amused chuckle from outside Reggie’s field of vision. “It might surprise you to learn that you’re actually easier to wrangle while unconscious. You planning on this being a short trip, or you going to be staying a while?”
Reggie caught the gist of the question. Was it worth hooking him up to everything, or just enough to keep him comfortable for a couple hours? As much as he hated the idea of all the tubes and wires, he’d rather she not asked and just done it.
“Whole kit and caboodle. I plan to stay as long as your fine folks let me. June—that’s what I heard the doc call you, wasn’t it?”
“First Lieutenant June Mallet,” she replied formally. “That’s me.”
“Well, June, if it weren’t for you being here when I come back, I might not come back much at all,” Reggie said, twisting as much as the rig allowed to smile up at her.
She tapped a finger to his lips. “See? This is what I mean about you getting easier to wrangle while you’re out cold. You don’t make me blush.”
Reggie wriggled himself into as comfortable a position as he could manage, knowing he’d be there a while. “To my thinking, if the sight of a naked man isn’t making you blush, he’s doing something wrong. How about this? While you’ve got me off in dream-land, playing juggernaut pilot, I’m all yours. Fair game. Even sign papers if you need it in writing. That be enough to get you to blush?” He winked even though she probably couldn’t see it.
Her tone held a stern warning that she’d do no such thing. “I think you’d best be on your way. Goodnight, Warrior King.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A tingle ran through Reggie’s whole digitized body. It was like coming up for air after a dive, lungs on the verge of bursting. He felt alive again. The hospital, its close-held secrets, and military need-to-know bullshit faded away as he sat up from his bed aboard the House Virgo command ship.
Part of him had expected to wake up in the infirmary, locked in that weird medical force field while surgical robots loomed nearby, still wet with his blood.
Reggie went to strap on the holster for his coil pistol, but it wasn’t at his bedside.
“Bleep,” Reggie muttered. “I died wearing it.”
There was nothing in his insurance policy that covered personal belongings. He could only hope that everything on Vortex had been taken care of.
His next stop was the hangar, to see for himself.
Reggie marched down the halls with a bluster and speed that averted any conversation before it started. NPC crew ignored him. Reggie failed to return nods and waves of acknowledgment from the players he passed by along the way.
Entering the hangar, Reggie was awash in the industrial grime and echoes from every corner as juggernauts were repaired and refitted. The moving sidewalk didn’t move fast enough, so Reggie jogged atop it. Stationary objects rushed past as road-traffic speeds.
He slowed to a halt on the moving walkway, then steadied himself and hopped off.
There it was, looming above in all its glory. Vortex looked like it had just come back from the carwash. Its metallic enamel surfaces gleamed. Rushing to the nearest kiosk, Reggie brought up the juggernaut status screen and saw that everything was there.
In one corner of the kiosk screen was a clock—almost as an afterthought. It read 18:46:22. The Cold Brotherhood would be logging in soon.
Even in digital form, a cold sweat broke out on Reggie’s skin.
What was wrong? Running missions was the whole reason for being here, wasn’t it?
“King!” Chase’s voice carried over the buzz of angle grinders and the growl of overhead winches. “There you are!”
Chase rode the moving sidewalk over to Vortex and stepped off.
“Hey,” Reggie said, hardly trusting himself to look in Chase’s direction. He’d heard Chase die. The sound echoed in his belly, right alongside the screams of his unit during that ambush.
“We’re gonna be looking for a fifth tonight at the very least,” Chase blabbered on, ignoring Reggie’s discomfort. “Iris posted that she needs a break from Armored Souls. The stress is getting to her. Kim’s confirmed he’s up for whatever. Barclay’s been quiet on the forums. Not sure what’s up with him.”
Reggie’s chest shuddered as he drew in a slow breath. “Everyone’s… all good?”
“Um, they’re all pissed as bleep at Specker,” Chase said. “Remember that whole talk we had about insurance?” He aimed a finger up at Vortex, then down the rows of parked juggernauts to where Diablo stood at the ready. “Well, you and me were the only ones who were covered during that bleep show. Losing a drop ship was way worse than starting the engagement from outside the city.”
“I’d just leveled, too…” Reggie murmured.
Chase clapped him on the shoulder. “Me too, just a mission back. Best time to go in on dangerous bleep like that. Barclay was just 1500 XP from leveling, though, so I wouldn’t mention it around him.”
Reggie stood gazing off into the distance, along the seemingly unending line of juggernauts.
“Hey, if you don’t mind, I’ve even got a mission picked out for us,” Chase said, holding out a tablet until Reggie accepted it from him.
On the screen, the shape of a mission description took form. Reggie had read enough of them to recognize the shape of the formatting. Bulleted mission objectives, tactical overview, maps with various levels of detail depending on available intel, and a snapshot photo that kind of summed up the place.
All Reggie saw was the desert.
“It’s a bleep-tastic little romp. House Risun border space. More of a supply raid than a combat mission,” Chase spouted with hardly time to draw breath. “Figured we could fit some Miniguns into our load outs and do some anti-personnel mop-up. You know, to get back at those bleeps who deleted us at Dagwald.”
Reggie’s chest tightened. All he could see was that nameless desert town where Chaz, Murray, and Davis had died. The ruined buildings looked futuristic, but the shape of the roads and the feel of the place—even from a still photo—was too similar to ignore.
With a trembling hand, Reggie handed back the tablet before it fell from his grasp.
“Anyway,” Chase said cheerily. “I’m heading for the lounge to grab a drink and pore over some load out calcs. See you there.”
Reggie stared after Chase as the moving sidewalk whisked him away.
He couldn’t do this.
The real world wasn’t an option. He couldn’t live a life of support groups and chats with Dr. Zimmerman. But the Cold Brotherhood had become a surrogate for his old crew. That was the one part of reality that he most needed to escape.
Before he had time to think things through, Reggie rushed from the hangar. He ran down the moving sidewalk, hoping that Chase had enough of a headstart that he wouldn’t catch up. Out in the halls of the House Virgo command ship, Reggie dashed past NPC crewmen, bowling them over or shouldering them aside in his haste.
He was breathing hard—the game’s way of telling him to spen
d more points in Toughness. But Reggie had a mental toughness that kept him pressing on despite the burning in his digitized lungs.
At his rented quarters, he slapped a hand on the door release and stumbled through.
Hands on his knees, still struggling for breath, he looked up. His reflection in the mirror looked back:
[PER: 5]
[GUN: 13]
[SHO: 3]
[AGI: 3]
[PIL: 9]
[TGH: 5]
[CMD: 5]
[Command Radius 1]
[Heat Management 1]
In a corner of the mirror, there was his faction designation: the House Virgo crest, a script ‘M’ with what looked like a stylized fish worked into the rightmost line of the letter.
In olden days, when a soldier deserted the battlefield, he’d cut off whatever emblems or patches identified the master he served. To a modern soldier, the idea of going AWOL was deeply disturbing. Actually deserting seemed unthinkable.
But House Virgo wasn’t the US Army. He hadn’t sworn shit to them. This was a game, and Reggie was going to play it his way. He tapped the faction logo on the glass service.
A small menu popped up.
[Faction > Roster > News > Rewards > Info]
Reggie poked around, tapping down through the Info menu before discovering what he was looking for was under Roster instead.
He found his own listing.
[King - Gunner L5 - Vortex - Daisy]
Reggie tapped on his entry.
[Stats > Log > Friends > Leave]
Halfway to the mirror, his finger stopped. Could he go through with it? Reggie wasn’t a quitter. Gritting his teeth, he mashed the button, leaving a smudge on the glass: Leave.
[Are You Sure? (Verbal Confirmation)]
“Yes,” Reggie spoke firmly to the mirror.
Instantly, his House Virgo uniform faded. With a quick intake of breath, Reggie worried that he’d be left naked. But instead he now wore a plain gray outfit of similar cut and style to his House Virgo uniform. There were no patches, ranks, or insignia of any sort. The only exception was his name plate, which had remained unchanged.
“King, Gunner 5.”
Reggie was now a factionless nomad.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Hours later, Reggie was on board a transport ship. It was public transit, not for vacationers or commuters, but for mercenary pilots. If Reggie wanted to conduct missions in Vortex for credits, this was the life he was going to be living.
The ship’s name was the Meritorious. Sounded like a kick in the teeth to a guy who’d just deserted his faction.
It was probably a hang-up of the game developers, but the ship had a bar for pilots to hang out and drink while ferrying from one paid job to the next. He was signed on for a mission working security for The Volta Group. It’d be the better part of a day before they arrived. Most of that wait was various stops to pick up pilots from across half the Star League.
Unlike the lounge on the House Virgo command ship, this place had a little atmosphere. The lights were low, accented with teal and orange to give the black, glossy walls an iridescent look. Funky jazz played just low enough that voices carried across a table without having to shout.
Reggie sat alone at the end of the bar, keeping the NPC bartender company. He’d tried to strike up a conversation, and it had worked for a while. But there were only so many pre-programmed conversations in the guy before Reggie started hearing reruns. Nothing broke the illusion of a real person like hearing the same thing over and over again.
Someone had mentioned in passing that the Toughness stat determined how long it took to get drunk. As Reggie downed his third beer and gestured for a fourth, he almost wished he had dropped fewer points into it. To his way of thinking, the time to get drunk should be the same for everyone. Let the guy with the high Toughness get over his hangover faster.
“Hey there, warrior,” a silky-smooth voice cooed at his ear. It was too familiar and threatened to drag Reggie out of his illusion. “Mind if I join you?”
“Nurse Mallet?” Reggie asked breathlessly. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him. He was worse off than he’d realized. She was back in the hospital, tending to Reggie’s physical body.
But her nose crinkled, and her answer chased away his doubts. “June. I’m just a pilot here in game. Keep the RL stuff in your pants.”
She looked just like her real-life counterpart. June wore a custom mercenary flight suit, the sort of thing he’d seen in shopping screens and swiped past without a second thought. There’s no way they would have looked that good on him though. Over her uniform, she wore a jacket that wouldn’t have zipped closed at the front without the aid of hydraulics. Her hair was shorter here. Gone was the braid she kept in the hospital, replaced with straight, unbound locks that seemed to keep in place by digital magic, just brushing the tops of her shoulders and pushed over her ears.
“I… um. Hi. What are you doing here?” Reggie managed to stammer out. The beer wasn’t getting him drunk fast enough to deal with this right now.
“We get account notifications for you,” June said, keeping an eye on Reggie that seemed almost watchful, rather than interested. “When Dr. Zimmerman saw you’d ditched House Virgo, he wanted me to come see whether you were alright.”
A lump clogged Reggie’s throat. “Oh. That’s why you’re here. You made an account to come check in on me. Well, I’m fine.”
“I didn’t have to make an account,” June insisted. She pulled back the left side of her jacket, exposing her nameplate. It read, “Nightingale, Scout 13.”
Reggie gaped. And for a moment, he was ashamed of himself for gaping at her level and not the rest of her. “Level 13?”
“Everyone working at the Valhalla West partnership medical facilities has to try out the game before we can work with patients who use it,” June explained. “Nothing says we can’t keep playing afterward.”
“And you’re into the whole combat side of things?” Reggie asked skeptically.
June smirked. “I’m an O-2E. Came up through the 82nd doing LRS. Ended up going back to nursing school after my first deployment. Medieval alchemists tried to turn lead into gold, but all it really takes is a nursing degree. I came back out with a gold bar.”
Reggie just shook his head. The white medical getup. The Hollywood smile. The nagging little fantasies any patient’s liable to develop for a nurse with a body like hers. None of it fit with the image of June jumping out of planes over hostile territory.
With a wistful sigh, Reggie threw down half the contents of the next mug of beer in a single gulp. He gasped. “Ah. Give me a real tank any day of the week and twice on Sunday. This place’ll never beat doing real work that matters.”
“I do that all day,” June replied. “Most players use the game as a sleep-replacement. It stimulates the brain with the equivalent of REM sleep, except it doesn’t inhibit memory formation. It’s actually up for 30 percent more restful than natural sleep, so if I wasn’t here, I’d probably be playing Jungle Explorer—of Football Hero on spectator mode. Armored Souls has the sort of exhilaration and camaraderie I miss from my airborne days, but nobody in Armored Souls gets hurt.”
“So… you checked in on me,” Reggie said with a nervous swallow. “What now? You off to a mission or something?”
June laid a hand on Reggie’s knee. “Your offer still stand?”
Suddenly warm under the collar, Reggie cleared his throat. “Offer?”
June leaned closer. Her breath tickled his ear. “The rig doesn’t interfere with memory. You know what you said just before going in. Did. You. Mean. It?”
Reggie licked dry lips, holding perfectly still as June hovered around him. “I’m not even sure I could. Why would—?”
“You can,” June assured him. “Maximum quality of life. Valhalla West provides all extended services. Me? I just upgraded my account before logging in…”
“Why would anyone…” Reggie didn’t know how to f
inish the question. The answer was at once unseemly and glaringly obvious.
“There are other ‘games’ that are little more than brothels,” June whispered into his ear. “You can bleep to your heart’s content. Armored Souls had all that code, too, but it’s not a selling point. Now, last chance. We’re both consenting pilots. You want to bleep or not?”
A chime sounded from Reggie’s pocket. Quickly jerking upright on his barstool, he fished out his brand new mini-tablet.
[Reminder Alarm - Mission Departure in 5:00]
“I… I gotta go,” Reggie stumbled over the words. He slid off the far side of his seat and tugged down the hem of his jacket. “Maybe another time.”
“Blow it off,” June said, swiveling her seat and leaning an elbow on the bar. Reggie’s gaze traced the line of her body from lips to toes as she watched. “There’ll be other missions. It’s merc work.”
Reggie kept his deep breath quiet and slow, taking back control of his faculties. “Can’t afford to. It’s not the credits, it’s the reputation—something you might want to keep in mind on the outside. Don’t want you getting reprimanded on account of me.”
Now that he was without a major faction to feed him missions, Reggie was dependent on the reputation system to qualify for jobs. Being a zero was bad enough. Going negative, he might have to craft missions of his own and take salvage as his only pay.
June sighed and turned toward the barkeeper. “Suit yourself. Can’t promise I’ll be here when you get back.”
“If not, see ya back in the land of flesh and blood.”
With his uniform fitting tighter and retaining more body heat than it had when he’d put it on, Reggie made his way to the hangar of the Meritorious.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The drop ship that touched down on Xebulon was packed with a rogue’s gallery of mismatched juggernauts. They lacked any common cause or ideal beyond one simple trait they all shared.
Dead Mech Walking: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 1) Page 18