“Bah!” she yelled, skidding around another corner seconds before a pair of missiles careened past and exploded against the far wall.
The blast wave bumped her forward but didn’t knock her down. She ran only thirty yards to the nearest turn despite the corridor going much farther. Any longer and the boss would have a clear line of sight on her. One hit and she’d be gone.
Shit. The entry hall is really long with no turns. I’m screwed. I―she glanced down at her forearm guard. Evasion had reset. If she timed it just right, she could possibly make it.
Fawkes pushed herself up to a hard sprint, trying to buy an extra few seconds of distance ahead of the plodding Glomulus. “Anyone know if hit resolution is determined before or after the attack animation?”
“Uhh, dude,” said Nighthawk. “This isn’t 2018. There’s no behind the scenes ‘rolling’ anymore in MMOs. Shots go where shots go. If you can avoid the beam, you don’t get hit. Real physics.”
She grinned. “Awesome.”
“You’re getting close to the door,” said Rallek.
Fawkes kept sprinting hard, but risked a quick peek over her shoulder. Glomulus’ purple flesh reflected in blur on the walls, but he hadn’t come around the corner yet. She hauled ass, taking the rapid left then right around the tuning-fork-shaped area and entered the final straightaway, some hundred yards to the exit with nowhere to hide.
Particle beams, unlike lasers, traveled slow enough to perceive, even slower than bullets. An agile, aware player could, in some cases, dodge them. She kept glancing back over her shoulder, waiting for the fat alien boss to show itself. In seconds, she got her wish.
Glomulus’ six eyes seemed to bulge with glee at catching her in a long, confined place where she had no corners to hide behind. He lifted his rifles like a twelve-hundred-pound squid-headed redneck one-handing a pair of shotguns.
Two plasma beams blasted forth.
Fawkes waited the fraction of a second it took them to make it halfway to her and activated Evasion. The instant the cooldown went off, she stopped caring about looking behind her or even if those two beams hit. Only speed mattered.
Energy buzzed past her on either side, scorching the walls and covering her with tiny blue sparks of ionization. Fawkes leaned into her stride, running like the three men who’d abducted her were right behind her for real. She ran like the time she’d first shoplifted a candy bar at nine, and thought she’d go to jail for the rest of her life.
She ran like failure would get all four of her friends killed.
Particle beam after particle beam whizzed by. Missiles detonated on the ceiling inches behind her, others overshot and blew up well in front of her, leaving a haze of smoke she sprinted blindly into. Splash damage from the explosions whittled her health down bit by bit. Thirteen seconds later (with two seconds left of Evasion) the door came into view. Her health had gone down to thirty-one percent from nearby detonations. Nothing had actually hit her dead on yet.
“Shawn! Land now!” she screamed.
The last second of Evasion protected her from another double-blast of particle beam. Fawkes hurled herself at the door, bursting out into the open. She almost tripped over her own feet in an effort to make a sharp left turn and break line-of-sight. Her whole body trembled with adrenaline. Despite all that running, she shivered with excess energy, wired up and jacked to keep going, not even breathing hard.
If nothing else, I can run around this building.
Five seconds later, the Stormbringer shot out from behind a distant outcropping of tech and glided toward her. Both turrets fired so fast at the gnat swarm of fighters that the green pulse laser bolts sprayed like water from hoses.
She started running toward the ship, but stalled when Nighthawk erupted in cackling laughter.
Glomulus, a twelve-foot-tall, nine-foot-wide blob of alien flesh, squeezed itself out through a door the size of a submarine hatch, and snapped free with enough force to wind up falling flat on its front. She gawked, stunned at the cartoonish ridiculousness of the way the game animated that.
“Crap! Too many fighters. Be right back,” yelled Nighthawk.
Kavan emerged from the doorway, firing his rifle into the big alien’s back, not that it noticed.
Fawkes snapped out of her mind fog and ran for cover behind a large component sticking up from the hull. Glomulus rose to his feet and fired, scorching holes in the high-tech forest around her. She leapt over a gap in the armor plating, only a short distance across but easily thirty feet deep. Chased by particle beams, she darted from cover to cover, hiding among the boxy protrusions and towers littering the skin of the Reckoning. Glomulus thundered after her, taking a shot whenever even one pixel of Fawkes’ character came into his view.
“Over here, ya big fat slug,” shouted Kavan, but despite his best efforts, the alien ignored him.
“Coming back around now,” said Nighthawk.
Fawkes made her way in a circle, heading back to the clearing by the doorway. An explosion overhead sent a huge antenna collapsing toward her like a felled tree. She leapt back in time to let it crash to the ground in front of her, but the attack forced her to divert to the left and shimmy through a canyon between two long, boxy structures. She squeezed out the far end not a second after Glomulus lined up a shot down the gap. Fawkes dove to the ground out of the way of the particle beam, which hit an anti-fighter turret as big as her brother’s van, destroying it in a shower of sparks and metal fragments. Two seconds after she stood back up, a burning fighter craft came hurtling straight at her.
Screaming, Fawkes dove into a hole that turned out to be a cylindrical recess with no exits. She curled up in a ball on the bottom, guarding her face with both arms for all the good that would do against an exploding starfighter. Everything shook with the explosion of the ship tumbling over the hull above. Metal bits and smoke poured in on her head.
Whoa. She simultaneously felt awe at the programmers for making such a realistic game, and nearly shit her pants at almost being pasted by a crashing space ship. Numb to it all, she leapt on a small ladder and pulled herself back out of the pit before Glomulus could catch up and trap her in a little hole where she’d have zero chance to survive.
He barely managed to point his rifles at her again before she leapt out of sight behind a huge, boxy component. With the tromp of the alien boss shaking the ground behind her, she ran to another fighter turret, which pivoted to the right in anticipation of something approaching. Glomulus fired a bolt that barely missed her face. With a squeak, she skidded to a stop and darted left, behind the turret.
The Stormbringer slid sideways out from behind a huge superstructure studded with smallish antennas. The turret she hid behind began firing tiny (by comparison) laser blasts into the corvette’s shields, each dissipating in a beautiful ripple effect. Glomulus’ gurgling rambles drifted closer. She started to run for the next place to hide, but four blue laser blasts from the Stormbringer converged on the giant alien. The main guns knocked him flat on his back, charred, with a little more than half health remaining.
“Whoa,” said Nighthawk. “Tubby’s got some hit points.”
Glomulus let out an angry groan and wobbled upright.
Nighthawk fired the ship’s lasers again and launched a torpedo for good measure.
The energy blast left Glomulus with a scrap of health. A conflict in the aggro mechanics must’ve occurred, as the boss couldn’t seem to decide between firing at Fawkes or the Stormbringer. In the two seconds between laser strike and the slower torpedo arriving, he did nothing but shift facing back and forth between them.
With a fleshy splut, the torpedo stuck in Glomulus’ blobby chest, knocking him back one step. All six eyes on little stalks bent down to look at it, but whatever code forced him to attack the character with the quest orb kicked in, and he raised his rifles at Fawkes. Before he could fire, the torpedo detonated, showering the area with purple slime.
“Come on!” shouted Nighthawk.
He
wheeled the Stormbringer around to put its rear end toward them and opened the cargo ramp, which reached full extension the same time the ship touched down on its landing pads. Fawkes ran through a hail of laser bolts coming down from the fighter ships trying to hit the ship. Fortunately, even a player character in a fighter would have a hard time seeing, much less hitting, someone on foot, and NPC pilots had no programming to do such a scummy thing―at least on purpose. She jumped onto the ramp right as the ship started to lift off.
Kavan’s leap fell short; he landed with a grip on the ramp, legs dangling.
“Don’t close it!” yelled Fawkes. “Your dad’s not all the way in.”
“Sorry. Gotta move. Fighters,” yelled Nighthawk.
“I’m slipping,” said Kavan. “Screw it. I’ll meet you after respawn.”
The Stormbringer executed a sudden vertical dip and deceleration. Kavan floated up and shot into the cargo hold like a human missile, crashing into the far wall and losing another twenty-two percent health.
“Oof!” he rolled flat on his back and lay still.
“You okay? That didn’t actually hurt, did it?” asked Fawkes.
The whirr of the cargo ramp closing almost overpowered the endless laser barrage from the turrets.
“It looked like it should’ve hurt, so I said ouch. Psychosomatic.” Kavan grabbed her arm and let her help him up. “We should get to the bridge and strap in. This is going to be rough.”
“Yeah.”
They raced up the stairs and down the main hall to the bridge, leaping into the two seats on either side of Nighthawk. Fawkes squealed at the viewscreen showing a trench in the Reckoning’s hull, narrow to the point the Stormbringer couldn’t fit in it level. Nighthawk had tilted the ship diagonal, leaving mere inches of clearance on either side.
“Why are we playing chicken?” asked Fawkes.
“Uhh, too many fighters,” said Nighthawk. “The encounter’s tuned for forty ships, all constantly killing the fighters. The respawn is timed for that… so since we’re only one ship, we can’t kill them fast enough. There’s over 1,500 of them out there.”
“It’s a goddamned piranha swarm,” said Angel813.
Nighthawk grinned. “We’re flying toward the back end now. I’m gonna do the pop up thing again. The Reckoning will try to shoot us with everything it’s got, and I’m hoping it’ll take out a bunch of fighters in the crossfire.”
Fawkes nodded.
“Ballsy,” said Kavan.
Nighthawk laughed.
Fawkes clung to the armrests of her chair for thirteen seconds, vibrating with unfocused emotion. So many fighters chased them that red lasers fell like a rainstorm on the artificial terrain scrolling by on the viewscreen. Elation and dread merged into a single, irresistible need to scream―a raw outburst to release tension.
Nighthawk jerked back on the stick, and the hull of the Reckoning fell away to reveal the starry expanse of outer space. A soft, roaring explosion rumbled in the distance behind them, probably hundreds of small fighters blowing up as the capital ship’s large laser batteries unleashed their fury.
Angle813 whooped. “We made―”
Fawkes’ vision filled with fire. The burn intensified until the entire world became silent whiteness. Only the sound of her hard breathing existed for a few seconds, echoing over deep silence.
Shit. Did they melt our brains?
The blinding glare faded to black.
“You know, I really should’ve tried doing something reckless, like engaging the warp drive too close to another ship instead of trying to climb out.” Nighthawk’s voice came from everywhere at once.
“What happened?” asked Fawkes.
“Ship blew up,” said Kavan. “We’re dead.”
“What’s with the blackout?” asked Fawkes.
“Never died in a ship before?” Nighthawk chuckled. “The game is trying to figure out where to respawn us. Give it a moment.”
“We died?” asked Rallek.
Fawkes cracked up laughing. “We tried to take on a forty-crew raid boss with one ship. What did you expect would happen?”
Quest Turn-in
36
Fawkes floated for a while in blackness before a sense of gravity returned. Floor manifested under her boots. Background music of the cantina persuasion started, and scenery filled in.
Silver-accented round booths with black cushions lined the walls of a modest-sized bar. Stairs off to the left led up to a second floor with more of the same over-stylized tables. Rallek, Nighthawk, Kavan, and Angel813 had all appeared standing near her under the flickering glow of multicolored light beams that reacted to the music.
The soft ping of an incoming message chimed from everyone at once.
She opened a display window to check. An email with the title ‘Ship Destroyed’ appeared as new.
Your spacecraft was destroyed during a raid event, and is inaccessible until the next reset day. The ship will be available at the starport facility on Malinoa IV, the nearest settled planet.
Considering they’d pulled this on a Sunday, they only had to wait a few days for the reset.
Kavan growled. “Dammit. We’re stuck on this planet.”
“Not necessarily.” Rallek smiled. “We could use a portal.”
“Oh, Mr. Moneybags,” muttered Kavan.
“Says the guy who bought his ship with real cash.” Angel813 grinned and leaned a little closer to him.
Fawkes glanced at Rallek with a ‘you see that?’ expression. Rallek remained oblivious. When Kavan returned her smile and took her hand, Fawkes almost gasped.
The crew migrated to a seat at one of the tables, filing one by one past the narrow gap to the ring-shaped bench.
An NPC woman with hot pink skin and green hair approached. “Hi, can I get you guys anything?”
Nighthawk ordered chicken nuggets and fries.
After he finished laughing, Rallek got the same. Plus a beer.
“You have steak?” asked Fawkes.
“I’m sorry, this is mostly a bar. We have pizza, hot pretzels, wings, nuggets, fries, onion rings, and glorblatt.”
Everyone cringed at the same time.
“Uhh, wings,” said Fawkes. “And a beer.”
Kavan got a basket of onion rings and a beer.
The woman smiled, thanked them, and walked off.
“Woo!” Nighthawk raised his hands, clapped, and pounded a little drumbeat on the table. “That was awesome!”
“You’re not at all upset we got shot down?” asked Kavan, still sounding miffed.
“Nah.” Nighthawk shook his head. “That was super fun.”
“It’s damn amazing we stayed alive that long.” Rallek reached across the table and clapped Nighthawk on the shoulder. “Nice work.”
“Ehh. Thanks. I knew we were gonna die on the way out. As soon as I got under the laser’s arc, I figured it would be impossible for us to escape, but hey, you got the thing right?”
Fawkes nodded. “Yeah.” She sent out party invites to re-establish the group. Once the line of portraits appeared off to her right, she accessed her inventory and pulled out the purple orb. “I have no idea what this thing does.”
“I just got a quest update for The Lost Dreadnought.” Rallek gazed into space as if reading. “Says we’ve discovered the ‘quantum core’ that Dr. Prakash sent us to retrieve. Oops. Did we skip a step?”
Fawkes shrugged, examining the orb in her hands. “It’s usable… I wonder what it does.”
“Where do we turn it in?” asked Nighthawk.
“There’s nothing in the mission log about that.” Kavan glanced over at her.
Kavan scratched his head. “We never actually got a quest from a Dr. Prakash.”
“Maybe we have to use the item for the update?” asked Rallek
“Okay.” Fawkes ‘invoked’ the orb.
The cantina dissolved once more to black nothingness, except this time, all the characters remained visible.
“Wel
l, that’s different.” Kavan gazed around. “I wonder what this is?”
“Holographic communication maybe?” Rallek scratched his head.
Darkness gave way to subtle tones of blue-grey, and a large but austere office appeared around them, the sort of office that belonged more in the real world than a spacefaring video game universe. The characters slid around like chess pieces, going from sitting in a ring to a straight line upon a black sofa, facing a big silicon desk. Three men observed them from behind it.
Only one sat, a middle-aged man of Indian descent in an expensive-looking pale grey suit. Short hair slicked back over his head lent an air of menace to a smile that mixed predatory annoyance with admiration.
To his right stood another middle-aged man resembling an over-the-hill hippie forced into a shiny blue suit and tie. Though his beard had been trimmed neat (his hair less so), he had an air of not belonging in a place like this. He offered the most genuine smile of the three.
The third man, likely Japanese, appeared younger than the others, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties. His immaculate black suit didn’t look as expensive as the others’ outfits, though he clasped his hands in front of himself with an expression of stern propriety.
Behind the men, a window looked out over a modern real-world city. Amazon Secure police helicopters hovering around the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance suggested a view of San Francisco. Of course, that didn’t mean much. Active-display windows could make any office appear to be anywhere. Plus, she felt pretty damn sure they remained in the game, considering everyone still appeared to be their characters.
She pulled a bit of her hair into view to check. Yep. Still pink.
“Welcome,” said the Indian man. “I am Vinod Prakash, CEO of Cognition Systems International. With me are Gerald Barker, my co-founder, and Leonard Nakamura, senior vice president of our legal team.”
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