Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  Good times.

  “Sorry I put you through that,” I finally told Harrison. Somehow, I felt much better. For a little while, the memory of me being a shit-headed thirteen-year-old was closer in time than the image of my hands covered in Foreman’s brain-matter. “I had no right to the patience you had with me, to be honest.”

  “Ah! Don’t be sorry. You had a rough childhood, I know how it goes… Hell, so did I, Cole. Lower Cañitas’ born and raised, myself. I was Grace’s neighbor when we grew up. She ever tell you that?”

  “No,” I said with honesty, not bothering to hide my interest. “Mom never talks much about her childhood.”

  “She was my first crush, but I was invisible to her, back then. We became best friends in middle school, then we lost contact. High school, I went to the same classroom as your dad. Watched him go down the wrong road, even then…” But Harrison tactfully avoided further discussing the topic of my father. “Then I became a police officer, like my dad before me—it was tough at first. Many of my first arrests were friends of mine. You can imagine how that went.”

  “Yeah, I can.” He had a couple old scars across the lines of his forehead; I could fathom a guess how he got them.

  “I got to watch your lot grow up. Darren, Bliss, you… I’m surprised so many of Lower Cañitas’ youth turned out more or less all right in the end, you know? You should see the incarceration rate of other districts.”

  So, what you’re saying is, you’re not a stranger. It was the kind of revelation that wasn’t a revelation at all. It was always there, in the background. Like his relationship with Mom. The only reason I had never figured it out was because I very much didn’t want to. I still remembered the chat Van and I had when Mom told us about the ring, later that day:

  “Seriously, dude? Are you still not going to take the fingers out of your ears? Literally everybody knew.”

  “Kipp didn’t,” I tried to parry with the best thing that had come to mind.

  “Oh, yes he did. And Irene knew the instant she saw them together at the base. As did Walps and Gabrijel.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, my God, you really should tell the Fort’s therapist about this.”

  “Act? Go throat a cactus—that’s Officer Harrison! Marrying Mom!”

  “When Mom goes to tell our brother the news, I hope he’s more tactful than you, knucklehead.”

  “He’s me, Sis, I doubt he’ll react much different.”

  “So you say… Here, I’ll cut you a deal. Stop freaking out for a bit and go hang out with Mom for ten minutes. See how she’s smiling. Ugh… At least the cameras are offline, I’m supposed to be the tough one…Seriously, go with her and then you can freak out if you want to be even more childish.”

  So yeah, long story short, I got out of my “freak out” phase. But the idea of having a new father figure wasn’t as simple to deal with.

  I told Harrison that, with more tact than I’d done before.

  “I don’t have to be one,” he said without missing a beat. It was clear he’d given the matter some thought. “You and I can agree you’re a bit too old for father figures. But hey. I’m here anyway, so…We’ll get to be part of each other’s lives, and it may as well be as friends. Think you can do that?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I can do that.”

  We shook hands on it and Harrison relaxed like the crisis had gone away. I vaguely was aware the chopper was losing altitude and a quick glance out confirmed the helipad of Mercy Central Hospital was getting closer and closer to us. The landing lights blinked faintly as we crossed the dense curtain of smog near San Mabrada. My eyes watered as the acrid smell permeated our clothes and probably reduced our life expectancy several minutes with each breath.

  “You’re wrong about one thing,” I told Harrison.

  “What?”

  “You said this was over for us. I don’t think so.”

  It was something that still nagged at the back of my head. I could point at what it was now that the fog of trauma around my mind had parted a bit. Something Keles had said in the Signal.

  “This wasn’t my idea. I only improved it. Your leaders had this power all along.

  Keles, for what little I knew of him—and that was too much for a lifetime—fancied himself an important player in whatever unfathomable game the chess-masters like Caputi played. He was rambling mad, but this didn’t sound like one of his boasts.

  Harrison frowned in a way that added ten years to his forehead. “It isn’t? Cole, listen, you already talked with the military. Let them handle it.”

  I swatted pearls of dirty pollution-sweat out off my forehead. “If there’s any more danger—if shit hits the fan again—I’m not going to be waiting around for Keles to reach Mom or Van or my friends. I need to know you have their backs…James. Just in case.”

  James winced and then nodded. “Just in case. Of course. But… don’t go running head-first into a firefight again, OK?”

  “If I can help it,” I told him with a smile. “Trust me, it’s not like I’m doing it on purpose.”

  “Yeah. If you did, you’d be a cop!” He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke.

  We arrived at the Mercy soon after that.

  The hospital was packed with the wounded, their families, and civilians like us from the Fort.

  Almost all drones and unmanned electronic equipment had been disconnected under orders from the PDF. Just in case, they said.

  The newscasts were being blasted on every screen and hologram in the room, asking the public to turn off every drone and non-vital appliance in their houses, at least for the time being. The reporters were calm and they joked around without a care in the world, a carefully constructed act to keep people from panicking. They blamed a new virus and insisted the incident wasn’t at all related to Rune Universe and the rumors started there about a mad AI.

  “If there was a mad AI running around, trying to take over the world,” said the blond, middle-aged woman sitting behind the agency’s desk, “I bet we’d know it. It’d be the event of the year. At this point, the poor folks at the UN are going to start thinking it’s some kind of tradition, don’t you think, Kent?”

  Kent, the other lead anchor, laughed in a plastic way and patted his co-star on the shoulder. “Maybe we could get our resident AI and set it against the invading alien army the folks at 6.2chan insists is going to tear Earth apart. Then, instead of a new Event, we’d be dealing with the match of the century!”

  I looked away from the hologram, feeling vaguely murderous. Hospital security and military volunteers guided the fresh batch of refugees (that included us) down several floors and into the lobby. As we walked out of the aisle, several overworked doctors rushed towards the most roughed-up people around and checked the tags the paramedics had put on us before we were pushed out of the Fort.

  When my turn came, the doctor gave my tag a once-over, shone my flashlight over my eyes, and asked me: “Cole Dorsett, right? Are you in shock, Cole?”

  “I mean, would my answer change anything? If I say no, you’ll believe I’m not thinking straight—”

  The doctor tossed my tag back at me. “You seem fine. If you feel dizzy or nauseated, find a nurse and tell ‘em to shoot you up with something strong.” He left without another word towards the patients who were actually bleeding.

  Mom caught up with me not long after. “You’re absolutely not going to tell them to drug you up, young man.”

  I tried to resist the impulse to joke around the best I could, but it was ingrained in my veins:

  “But Mom!” I said with an exaggerated, whiny voice. “It’s free drugs! Those are the best kind!”

  Mom tried to resist her maternal instinct, but it was too strong. She looked scandalized at the gazes of the people around us. “He’s joking!”

  A girl’s voice came from a corner by the receptionist’s desk. “Ah, you should have told me before they opened the morphine buffet. I can
’t remember my last name anymore.”

  Van rushed towards us like a girl-shaped bullet, and before I could react, both Mom and I were trapped in a relieved hug. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Same, Sis,” I told her.

  For a second we all stood there, tired, perhaps a bit scared, but together.

  There was warmth here. It was like all the trouble that we had left behind didn’t exist anymore. That we could just forget about it. We were safe.

  And there’s work to be done, I thought with a sad grin. People were dead. Keles was still out there, planning god-knows-what. If I let him get away, I would never be able to live with myself.

  I would never be able to forget the mangled body beneath that white sheet. Unless I did something about it.

  13 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  FATHER ISSUES

  SHORTLY AFTER JAMES reunited with us, Van and I left him with Mom while we searched for the room where our friends were.

  It took us more time than I’d have liked. The hospital was stacked almost at capacity with the wounded and hurting. The corridors were heavy with the nervous activity of nurses and doctors rushing in every direction. Every one of them had the expression of someone with varying amounts of sleep deprivation.

  The hospital used an old generation of drones, so they must have been safe from Keles’ control, which relied on connection to the Signal and not normal Internet. Still, the bulky medical drones gave me shivers as they wheeled along their doctors, sometimes yelling encouraging things like:

  HANG ON, JESS, YOUR SHIFT WILL END IN JUST ANOTHER EIGHT HOURS!

  And:

  DON’T WORRY, HENRY, I’M SURE THE NEXT PATIENT WON’T DIE IN YOUR HANDS!

  Van and I exchanged nervous glances.

  “I don’t recall there being so many civilians in the PDF,” my sister told me as we dodged one tubular surgery drone that had been labeled obsolete since before we were born.

  “Neither do I,” I said. The drone disappeared as it cut towards a corner, the equipment in the tray it carried bumbling precariously. “In fact, I don’t remember there being so many wounded.”

  “Perhaps they’re housing more soldiers than we thought?”

  I nodded noncommittally, but neither Van nor I bought that. The PDF had its own medical facility. To house this many States’ soldiers in a civilian hospital would be tantamount to admitting we were being invaded.

  Still, we couldn’t ask a doctor or nurse. They had their hands full. In fact, the only looks we got as we delved deeper and deeper into the floors of the hospital wing lasted only half a second—enough to make sure we weren’t bleeding or dying right now. So we were left to our own devices.

  We found Beard’s room near the end of the hospital wing where the civilians were housed, an older part of the building that had suffered the most during the crash of 2037. The lighting was candle-light yellow thanks to ancient lightbulbs, and the smell of disinfectant was strong.

  The room had a 3D printed plaque that announced IVANIC in the middle of the plastic door. Muffled sounds came from the interior.

  “Found it!” I told my sister.

  We opened the door and the sickly light of the corridor was replaced by the clinical white that’s a staple of any self-respecting hospital. The room was barely big enough to fit the bed and a small, plastic couch—probably 3D printed too—that was against the wall opposite the bed-frame.

  Beard was lying there. His expression was distant and his eyes were hazy. He was surrounded by his entire family. His arm was in a cast, but if he had any other injuries I couldn’t see them.

  For a second, my heart stopped. Then I realized no one was crying or gloomy in the way bad news makes people act. Beard’s wife was even rolling her eyes.

  I knew Beard and her loved each other. She’d never do that if he was really hurt…

  Misha was there, unharmed, and when Van and I entered the room, he glanced at us and grinned.

  “What took you so long? We were starting to get worried.”

  Beard turned a weak glance toward us. “Cole? Is that you… my good friend Cole? Come here… come here where I can see you…”

  “Uh…”

  “Come! My time is running short…”

  “Gabrijel!” his wife chastised him. “That really isn’t funny.”

  She told us, “He has been trying to get all your friends to listen to his last wishes every time someone enters the room. But he only broke his arm!”

  “While heroically saving my family,” Beard explained.

  “He fell down some stairs,” a girl’s voice said next to me.

  It was Walpurgis, sitting on the plastic couch next to Irene and Mai.

  “It was a tragic fall,” Beard muttered softly. “I’m not ashamed of it. Not at all.”

  Irene’s eyes shone as they recognized me, in that way of hers that made my knees weak. Although her expression was tired, the smile that across her face wasn’t.

  She hugged me, quickly, almost jumping from the couch. “Cole!”

  I kissed her.

  “Oh, no,” said Walpurgis somewhere far away. “Seriously? There are kids here.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty tasteless to kiss in front of my deathbed,” Beard said.

  We let each other go, but I kept an arm over her shoulders, enjoying the warmth of her body. “Sorry.”

  I looked at everyone here. My friends, to me, were part of my family. And they were alive and well.

  I realized I was smiling like a dork. I looked at Walpurgis. “How the hell did you get here so fast?”

  She snorted and, as an answer, took her smartphone out of her biker jeans and held it in front of me. “This is a phone. It’s a recent device that lets people talk to each other. When combined with a motorcycle, you can arrive at a hospital when you’re told your friends just came back from a small war.”

  Mai laughed nervously. “She’s acting tough, but she went so far over the speed limit when Irene told her about what happened, I was sure she’d fitted a hyperdrive somewhere on the bike.”

  I realized the CIA analyst had her hair badly frizzled. “I thought I wasn’t going to survive it,” she added. Her hands twitched a bit on her lap.

  “Ah, lucky for you, you were going to a hospital anyway,” Beard noted.

  We spent the following hour telling each other our own stories of what had happened during the attack on the base. From Van, I knew how Irene and she had been among the first to reach the hospital, followed by Beard and his family. They avoided the brunt of the fighting.

  He never had time to attack the civilians, I thought. Keles. There was little doubt in my mind the butcher of Ankara had little regard for human life.

  The reason my family had survived without a scratch—discounting a broken arm—was because the PDF had never given him the chance. No other way to think about it.

  Taken by surprise, betrayed by their own weapons and tools, the soldiers had fought with brutal bravery. Their reaction was directly related to our survival.

  Bought with their blood.

  With any luck, I thought, I’ll repay the favor.

  “I wonder why the attack stopped,” Misha asked during a lull in the conversation.

  So I told him some soldiers had realized there was a failsafe installed in the drones. They managed to reach it in time.

  I didn’t tell them about Foreman. I decided I’d tell Irene first, in private. She already looked at my face with worried eyes, like she knew something was going on.

  Of course she does. Never misses a thing.

  I did tell them all I knew about Keles, and how he had been the one behind it.

  “A fucking ghost in the machine,” shuddered Beard while I explained how Keles had jumped me in the middle of the Translation, and how easily he had beaten me. “Just what I feared. A ghost story.”

  “Language, dear.”

  “I still have no idea if the other Cole is okay. Or if Francis is. He was jumped, too, and I lost contact
with him.” I needed to log in as soon as I had the chance.

  “They both are stronger than you realize,” Irene said. I could tell she was worried, though, because of the way she scratched her chin without realizing it while her eyes darted to the floor. “Even then… we should check on them.”

  “Anyone brought their mindjacks?” Walpurgis asked.

  “No,” snorted Beard. “Silly me! Of course I should have thought of bringing my videogame console with me while being evacuated from World War Droid!”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t fit you, Beardie,” Walpurgis said with dignity. “I did think of bringing mine, it’s in my bag. By now you should be aware how many of our adventures end up happening in Rune.”

  “Wait just a second,” I interrupted. “This is not a normal quest, Walps. I don’t know what Keles is, but I remember seeing his body. He’s not human anymore. And he just attacked a military base. We may be in over our heads on this one.”

  She didn’t even miss a beat. “So, you plan on sitting this one out?”

  Point taken, I thought. And said aloud, “No.”

  “That’s settled, then,” she said. “This is my world, too, you don’t get to play hero without us.”

  Mai beamed at her.

  Walpurgis caught a glance of Mai, coughed, and added, “Also, what exactly do you plan on doing? Miss your shots until phantom Keles gives up? Nah, you need someone competent with you, bro.”

  “I take offense to your hurtful implications,” I muttered.

  “Irene and I brought our mindjacks,” Van said. “We were raiding Sleipnir when the sirens started going off, so we already had them with us.”

  “Youth today have very worrying priorities,” Beard whispered to his wife. “It didn’t even occur to me. Am I getting old, Katy?”

  “Yes. But don’t worry. I like my men well-aged,” she whispered back. Misha and his little brother made a chocking face when their backs were turned.

  I had to grin at the scene. “Well, then, that’s settled. How about we steal a bit of Wifi from the hospital and pay a visit to the undead asshole?”