Prices, to say the least, got out of hand quick.
There was a Plasma Launcher Mk2. It was in almost all respects identical to the Plasma Launcher, except that it added 100m to the max effective range and it was cooler by 1 unit of heat. It also cost four times as much.
Reggie was about to exit out of the shopping kiosk when the presence of other tabs caught his eye. He’d heard chatter about structural upgrades. There were improved versions of the electroactive polymer fibers that the juggernauts used for muscle inside their exoskeletons. Heat sinks with improved efficiency fell under the Structural category as well. Laser-dispersing paint jobs, higher power reactors, and jump-assist boosters were tempting targets for some window shopping.
Nothing was convincing Reggie he needed to buy it.
41,000Cr sounded like a ton of money when a typical mission was netting anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000, plus the odd bit of salvage. But when it came time to put those credits back into the economy, Reggie felt like a beggar picking over scraps.
The tab labeled Operations kept Reggie from giving up and finding a bunk for the night. He still didn’t care for in-game rest—it couldn’t properly be called sleep. Close your eyes; wake up hours later without a hint of dream or sense of time. He shuddered. Better to shop until he dropped.
The Operations tab was a combination of faction organization, employment advertisements, and real estate listings.
Reggie browsed faction ads looking for pilots.
LFP - L12+ - MUST HAVE L/M/H JUGS AND MISSLE BUILD
LFP - ANYONE WELCOME - SOCIAL FACTION
LFP - LIGHT/SCOUT SPECIALIST ONLY
LFP - IN-GAME WOMEN ONLY - NO MISSIONS
LFP - 5,000 STAR LEAGUE REP MIN - MUST HAVE CLEAN REP OR 0 IN ALL FACTIONS
LFP - FORMER MECHWARRIOR PLAYERS PREF - NO MIN LEVEL
They came with names like Pizza Patrol, Ladies for the Evening, KillaBlastaDudes, Soul Krushaaaaz, and Bears Eating Smaller Bears. It all sounded so… unprofessional.
Reggie gave up. None of them said “off-duty tanker in PTSD hospital purgatory” or anything that could be construed that way. Nobody deserved a ticking time bomb in their faction, liable to freeze up at the oddest triggers.
Plus, some of those ads sounded a lot like they weren’t about combat.
He swiped over to the real estate tab.
28-BAY - CMD BUNK - UPGR REP BAY - MOUNTAIN VIEW - 780,000Cr
10-BAY - FOREST BASE - FULL REC RM - DROP SHIP INCL - 1,250,000Cr
12-BAY - STEALTH 14 - DEF SHIELD - 825,000Cr
20-BAY - FACTION INCL - RETIRING PLAYER - 2,500,000Cr
8-BAY - CMD BUNK - FULL DECO - LOUNGE/BAR - 120,000Cr
Reggie kept scrolling through, envisioning each in his head from the tiny pictures included with the listings. Shopping for on-base housing had been mostly a matter of “can you or can’t you” afford it. There wasn’t a whole lot of selection. But these juggernaut bases being bought and sold were as unique as a used car lot. There was everything from last-year’s fleet lease sedan to old commercial vans with the logo still painted on the side.
But it was all overpriced. 41,000Cr wasn’t going to get him so much as a parking space.
Then he saw it.
Just before giving up and closing the kiosk, Reggie spotted a listing that sounded like it might work.
5-BAY - STARTER - BASIC REP BAY - LANDING PAD - 50,000Cr
It wasn’t 41,000Cr, but it was within reach.
He remembered Kegmeister. Reggie knew the sort of missions he’d get dragged out on working mercenary roundup missions. Cannon fodder didn’t get to be choosy over who led their missions.
Reggie wanted to be choosy.
9,000Cr was a gap he could close. It would actually be pretty simple.
Swiping back to the main menu, Reggie went into his own hangar options. Vortex stood there on screen, looking the same as the looming mechanical monster standing beside him, rotating slowly. Reggie swiped the Wolverine aside.
Daisy spun in slow circles. His first juggernaut. His first wife. Why had he named the damn thing after her?
With an angry stab of his finger, Reggie mashed the Sell button.
[Are You Sure? (Verbal Confirmation)]
“Bleep, yeah!”
He’d been prepared for the game to demand a more courteous “yes.” In fact, he was already drawing breath to calm his pent-up frustration and give a more levelheaded answer when the credits appeared in his account.
56,000Cr
Reggie snorted a little chuckle. If only the divorce had been so quick and painless. He looked up, and there was an empty spot in the hangar where Daisy had been parked. There hadn’t been a clamor of cranes to haul her away. The little Pixie-class light juggernaut simply vanished.
It felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, heavier than the 25 tons of the Pixie he’d named after Daisy King—or Daisy Lewis as she was back to calling herself these days.
Swiping and tapping at the kiosk, Reggie got himself back to the listing.
5-BAY - STARTER - BASIC REP BAY - LANDING PAD - 50,000Cr
The picture was a desolate, rocky hellscape, barren as an open pit mine and just as ugly. The details tab said it had atmosphere, no plant life within 100km, and radiation exposure within safe human limits. It was no looker, but it would be habitable. Reggie was pretty sure he’d lived places that couldn’t say as much.
He hit Buy.
[Are You Sure? (Verbal Confirmation)]
Reggie swallowed. “Yeah. I wanna buy.”
6,000Cr
[Enjoy Your Purchase]
“Thanks. I think I will.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
It had taken time for a transport to pick Reggie up from the Meritorious, but it was still faster than waiting for the ship to dock at a major port. The 1,000Cr were worth the hassle, even if he didn’t have many to spare.
Reggie’s new base was on a massive asteroid just too small for the Star League to consider it a moon of the uninhabited planet it orbited. Neither the asteroid nor the planet had a proper name, just a series of letters and numbers for stellar cartography purposes.
Vortex currently resided in one of the base’s five juggernaut bays. To call them minimalist would be a disservice to the cause of minimalism. The base itself was a small cavern complex combining naturally occurring and machine-excavated chambers. One of the naturally formed stone cathedrals had five hollowed-out areas along one wall. That’s where Vortex stood.
An overhead gantry ran along the cavern ceiling, able to access any of the juggernauts parked in the bays. A surprisingly modern kiosk stood at the end of the row, ready to process player purchases.
The base was eerily quiet. If he stood still, Reggie heard the dripping of water from the stalactites farther into the base.
Reggie clapped his hands together, snapping himself from his contemplation. “No point gawking at the place. Plenty of time for living in it later.”
Heading down a person-sized tunnel lit by jittering fluorescent lights, he found a communal barracks. Five military-style bunks lined one wall, spaced at even intervals, bedsheets neatly tucked.
Reggie sat on one of the bunks. Coil springs creaked beneath his weight; he could feel them through the thin mattress. Flopping down, his head hit the pillow with a dull puff. Bare fluorescent bars lining the ceiling stared back down at him, harsh and bright even through closed eyelids.
“Computer, turn off the lights.”
No luck. Not voice-activated.
Standing with a groan of protesting springs, Reggie found a panel on the wall beside the doorway and shut off the overhead lights.
There was still enough illumination from the hall lights through the doorless opening for Reggie to see his way back to the cot. He collapsed with a grunt that seemed to expel the day’s exertions, leaving him an empty shell of a digital man.
The cot’s rusty springs creaked and grated with his every movement. Reggie lay there fully clothed,
boots on and everything. Eventually, he grew so still that only the steady rise and fall of his chest remained in motion. It was little enough that the cot stayed silent.
All Reggie could hear was the sound of his own breath at first. Eventually, as his ears attuned to the stillness, he picked out the dripping water in the distance. Somewhere belowground, the hum of a generator gave an undertone to the base’s soundtrack.
Sleep shouldn’t have come at all. He was a digitized impression of a man secured inside a pod, back in a hospital somewhere. In the technical sense, he was asleep the entire time he played Armored Souls. Falling asleep within the game seemed redundant.
But as mental fatigue and the emotional trials of abandoning his faction sank in, sleep came. Just as it overtook his consciousness and swept him away, Reggie wondered whether it would awaken him in the pod.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Hours had passed.
There had been no dream, no sensation of the passage of the missing six hours, fifty-three minutes of his life. Reggie rubbed his eyes and sat up to an orchestral performance of the many coils in the cot’s mattress, each wailing off-key.
When Reggie found the wall panel and flicked on the overhead fluorescents, the sudden brightness stung his eyes. Then, as they adjusted, the sight of the shabby barracks stung his pride.
“Can’t believe I paid good credits for this bleep-hole,” Reggie grumbled.
Of course, he’d seen the prices on places that would have been nice the day he moved in. But this was a little different.
There was no dropping by a Home Depot for a couple cans of paint or some flooring tiles and grout. This was a world where upgraded living space was just a few taps of a kiosk away. There wouldn’t be hours spent on hands and knees laying flooring, no weary wash-ups at the sink after a day spent covered in flecks of paint from using a roller.
A nice bed, a relaxing atmosphere, and anything resembling creature comforts were all just credits away. And credits didn’t come twice a month like a paycheck. They were out there on the far side of missions. Missions meant either going out there solo, riding along as someone’s cannon fodder on a big job, or finding himself a platoon.
Reggie had already resolved that he was done taking human players out into the field until he had earned the right to command. That meant getting a handle on his shit. And he wouldn’t know that until Doc Zimmerman cleared him.
Reggie found a computer panel in the hangar. One of these days, he was going to have to dig into all the nooks and crannies to make sure he didn’t miss anything important. Once signed in on his Star League account, Reggie started looking for NPC pilots to hire.
It was arduous work. Eventually, standing there in front of the screen swiping, reading, and swiping some more, his Toughness gave out. To keep going, he dragged one of the cots the length of the hallway and halfway across the hangar, metal feet screeching and echoing the whole way. It was the wrong height for a chair, but reaching up to the panel was better than standing there on sore feet.
Most NPCs demanded signing bonuses which, for the purposes of Reggie’s bank account, ruled them out immediately. Then there were NPCs who would only hire out to pilots of a certain level or reputation. Again, immediate cause for deletion from Reggie’s search.
By the time Reggie had cut the list of candidates from hundreds to a mere dozen, he was looking for commonalities. Running with NPCs was like teaching kindergarten… to a class made up of chimpanzees. The more uniform Reggie could make his platoon, the better. The standard he settled on hardly mattered, so long as he could find four of them running similar models of juggernaut and similar skill builds.
With a sigh, Reggie dropped a fourth name into his prospective roster.
“I hope this isn’t a huge mistake,” Reggie grumbled, looking at the names and portraits.
Sando, Barv, Fraya, and Tenny—that was his new platoon. Each of them piloted a Chipmunk with SRM-2s and Miniguns. They’d be a quick strike team with Reggie as the muscle. Scouting, flanking maneuvers, and hit-and-run tactics would be their bread and butter.
God, they were noobs, though. All of them were just level 2 except for Fraya, who was just level 1. All total they barely outleveled him.
Swallowing down his doubts, Reggie made sure all four were highlighted and no others, then hit Hire.
Over the course of the next half hour, each of the NPC pilots arrived separately by public transport. Reggie stood out in the bleak, windswept rockscape outside his new base of operations, watching from a lookout point with a clear view of the sky and the landing pad.
They were a colorfully non-descript bunch, caricatures more than people. Sando was a cocksure bastard who walked around with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. Barv was a bombastic ginger with a wicked grin and looked to be spoiling for a fight—in a juggernaut or otherwise. Fraya was a busty blonde with dimples who kept the top buttons on her flight suit undone. Tenny was the serious one of the bunch, with a grim scowl that matched the battle-worn armor vest she sported.
Reggie kept conversation to a minimum, knowing that the less he spoke with them, the longer it would be before he got sick to death of their company. Maybe somewhere in this game, there were non-player characters with some depth, but these four were just batteries to plug into juggernauts to make them move.
“C’mon you lot. Let’s get hatches down and find us something to shoot.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Transport to this dustball planet had cost Reggie most of his remaining funds. If they failed the mission, he would be relying on insurance and evac to an in-game hospital just to leave again.
“All right, you dysfunctional bits of code,” Reggie radioed out. “Let’s get this mission in the rearview and collect some credits.” Once he’d learned that his platoon was incapable of taking offense, he quit pulling punches when addressing them.
Reggie and his nameless platoon set out from a farm, where the owner had requested that they deal with “critters” that had been sneaking in and stealing his cattle. Having played a video game or two in his youth, Reggie knew at once that they wouldn’t be dealing with wolves or coyotes.
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 0/100]
Straightforward enough. Reggie didn’t want to tax the intelligence of a crew with less computing power than his phone.
The farmer’s land bordered on a valley of rock pillars, like in the Badlands back on Earth. Reddish-orange stone formations like stacks of mismatched coins formed a forest maze, offering plenty of places for beetles to nest, hide, or set up ambushes.
Insects shouldn’t have had the brains for advanced battle tactics, but that didn’t mean some sadistic game programmer hadn’t made them that way. Reggie wanted to be prepared for anything.
“Weapons hot,” Reggie radioed, even though none of the Chipmunks possessed the sort of high-energy systems that threw heat even in standby. “Fire at will on anything that comes up as a mission objective.”
That ought to cover it. Nothing crazy. The NPCs ought to have been able to process that order.
“Mercy is for the merciful!” Sando declared. Reggie supposed he was trying to exclude himself in that designation.
“Time for a Barv brawl!” Barv boasted.
“Everyone be safe and have fun shooting people!” Fraya shouted cheerily.
“Yes, sir,” Tenny said with a voice like iron. Reggie liked her best already. He didn’t even care that she called a sergeant “sir.” Here, he was her commanding officer.
Minigun fire rang out on all sides. Four juggernauts blasted away into the twisting trails that ran among the rock formations.
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 1/100]
So far, so good. Reggie figured out where their target had been since none of them had shared the data on its location. There, on the gravel-strewn valley floor, was an insect the size of a minivan. It had pincers large enough to decapitate a grown man and a shell thick as plywood.
Luckily, M
inigun rounds tore through the carapace with ease.
Reggie watched the rocks for movement. It was hard to hear anything over the joyous, haphazard fire of his overzealous companions. With Armored Souls keeping track of ammo and heat, it was rare for anyone to just fire blindly into shadows. But the Minigun was one of those rare pieces of equipment where the game broke down a little. The ammo for one was so inconsequential that the game ignored it entirely. It also drew so little heat that a standard load-out could dissipate continuous fire.
So, Reggie had to put up with his genre-savvy platoon taking advantage of some Hollywood physics and firing like drunken mobsters.
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 3/100]
But once in a while, they hit something. Reggie had yet to even spot a live beetle.
That changed in a hurry.
Barv rounded a pillar and screamed incoherently into the radio.
“Barv, report,” Reggie ordered. “What do you see?”
“BUGS!” came the ever-so-helpful reply.
What Barv failed to mention was the number of bugs. Reggie’s first indication of trouble was the platoon status screen, where Barv’s Chipmunk started turning yellow as tiny bits of damage began adding up.
“Tenny, Sando… third one—whoever you are—get over there and help Barv,” Reggie radioed. “Fraya. Sorry. I’ll remember that.”
Reggie swore under his breath, but all he heard was “bleep.” He had to keep their names straight or he’d never be able to assign individual orders.
The three other Chipmunks closed on Barv’s position. Reggie gunned the accelerator on Vortex to catch up.
Miniguns that had gone quiet during the repositioning now opened fire once more.
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 4/100]
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 5/100]
[Primary Objective: Kill Giant Beetle 6/100]
Dead Mech Walking: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 1) Page 20