by Hugo Huesca
I had little doubt in my mind that Dervaux would reach the gun and she would blow my brains out and she would survive and she would rebuild Odin like she had done many times before. She would perfect the brain scan, she would use it to make the world a worse place for almost everybody.
She would have. But I reached the gun first.
Dervaux looked at me in the same way she had looked at Derry a minute ago. She spat blood at my feet and told me something with such vehemence I was sure she could’ve gotten a mountain to move if she had asked it.
She’ll rebuild.
Where are your principles?
It always surprised me how heavy a gun was. They lacked weight in Rune.
A lifetime ago I had been too principled to kill Seitaro Ogawa. I had forgiven his life in this very building and Walpurgis had had to carry the weight of his death.
Where are your principles?
For all I knew, the two of us were the last living persons inside the skyscraper. Dervaux and Derry had taken care of all the rest.
Charli Dervaux smiled when she was done speaking. She did so with confidence, even though her white teeth were painted with blood and lipstick. She looked like a vampire who had just hypnotized her next victim, like her victory was assured. Like the only answer I had left was to drop the gun and surrender to her superior intellect.
Were her arguments that good?
I raised the gun and the tip of the barrel touched her forehead. She froze on her knees just as she was attempting to stand on her good leg. I could see her eyes go wide.
She started talking again and this time her lips moved faster. A disbelieving scowl marred her face. She couldn’t believe I was being so stupid as to miss the logic of her words.
Where are your principles?
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed at her. “Only thing I can hear is this fucking ringing in my ears.”
She started to scream at me. My arm jerked back like it was a whip.
Charli Dervaux fell on her back in one fluid motion, like she was falling through water. She hit the floor between her two guard wolves.
The revolver slipped from my fingers.
On my way to Derry’s body, I stepped over the VR-Brain. In a way, I was already in Rune Universe bearing witness of what became of it. A more fitting version of me was, at least.
Derry’s body was heavier than I could carry. So I dragged him by his armpits and made my slow way to the elevators through the war-torn corridors of Nordic.
23 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WAR OF RUNE
AS SOON AS WE ARRIVED, two things happened. I lost my ability to teleport, and I started choking to death in the middle of space.
David had to do a double take to realize what was happening. By then, I was already going blue. “Oh, shit, I forgot.”
He gestured frantically in my direction and I was suddenly clad in power-armor, not unlike the suit he had been wearing the first time we met on Janus Station. Another gesture and an identical copy appeared over his body. We were both a pair of ghosts.
“I forgot we are not the same type of entity,” he said with an apologetic smile as the armor’s life-support systems went mad reading the damage done to my body by the vacuum. Half a dozen tiny needles pierced my skin and injected me with enough drugs to feed an entire rave party. “You’re okay?”
I gave him two thumbs up.
We had spawned from the place we had come: Janus Station. It was empty, with no trace of my friends or my ship.
That didn’t last long. My new suit announced a new communication channel, from Spark Bandit. I opened it.
“Cole?” she asked. “You’re alive! I’m going to break your legs next time I see you, you crazy fuck. Where are you?”
“Back at Janus, sis,” I told her. “You didn’t wait for me?”
She paused for a second and I could hear the distinct sound of distant gunfire. “We had to buy time for your ‘I’m going to descend into hell!’ stint. We’re thinning Keles’ numbers as we speak.”
“Who’s with you?”
I could sense her savage smile. “Everyone.”
Uh.
“This is the—,” another pause, “—boss fight of the CENTURY, bro. Everyone is getting all up in this baby. There’s more players online than at any point in Rune’s history. You should come. It’s fun!”
A dinosaur roared next to Van and she laughed maniacally—a Valkyrie going around a battlefield.
“Where?” I asked her.
“All over the map. Keles is pouring through several spots that were connected to the Core. He’s spawning pretty fast now, thousands of clones per second. He even managed to give himself some ships, which was good because shooting his clones floating through space from a lightyear away was starting to feel anti-climatic.”
“The biggest battle is being fought over the Zodia system,” she went on. “He’s somehow infected the planet Validore. The ships are coming from there. The PDF’s dreadnoughts are here, avenging the Algernon. If we manage to reach the planet, we may not even need David Terrance.”
The sound of an explosion close to her made the communication sizzle and almost break. “Crapbaskets, hull breach. Are they ramming us? Seriously?”
“I really hope you’re not in the Teddy right now,” I muttered. “Hang in there, Sis. We’ll arrive shortly.”
“Take your time,” she said before she cut the channel. “I’m raking in so many skill ranks right now! Walpurgis and I have a competition to see who breaks a 200 rank first—”
The channel closed. David and I stood there, too stunned to react.
He broke the silence first. “I almost feel sorry for the poor asshole. Imagine being in his shoes. You finally become a cybernetic abomination and you’re so close to fucking the world over and people only view you as a boss battle in a videogame.”
“Good. He deserves worse,” I looked over at the open hangar of the space station. The stars were just as we had left them, nothing to indicate that the greatest war in this virtual reality was being waged as we spoke. “Can they really stop them? If they reach Validore?”
“No. He’s nested in the Core,” David said. “They won’t be able to get there even if they break the defense. That’s his stronghold. That’s where he’ll take over Freya’s drones when he’s strong enough. If he weren’t blocking me, I’d bring us there right now. As it is, though…”
“I’ve gone into the Core the old fashioned way before,” I told him. “The first time. When this all started, remember? Through Validore.”
He nodded. “It seems we’ll get to have a piece of the action after all. Your spawn point is set to the Teddy, right? I can use it to move us there.”
Ready for battle, I took out my trusty blaster from my inventory and made sure the shields of the power-armor were ready for action.
“Let’s do this.”
The cabin of the Teddy was in the middle of heavy combat when we appeared in it. Mai was at the controls, with Rylena trying her best to jam a bunch of plasma torpedoes highlighted on the screens. Beard and Walpurgis were here, too, manning the turrets, shooting torrents of laser fire towards the pursuing torpedoes.
“I can’t lose them!” exclaimed Mai. “I need more power to the engines!”
“Not from my jammers or we’ll get killed faster,” Rylena growled. Her hands were a blur of movement across different panels and keyboards.
They didn’t react well to our arrival.
“Holy fuck, we’re breached!” Beard screamed in an unmanly way.
Walpurgis drew her twin-linked sniper rifle from her back with one hand and shot us both in a single fluid motion. She didn’t even look away from her turret screen.
I yelped and dove for cover (not that it would’ve helped), but David had already raised his open palm in Walpurgis’ direction.
The four mag-bullets stopped in the middle of the air as if they were trying to carve a path through invisible butter.
Beard stopped sh
ooting and gaped in our direction.
“Did you just pull a Neo—”
“All my life,” muttered David with satisfaction, “I’ve been wanting to do that.”
“It’s us, guys!” I told them as I took off my helmet. “I’m back from the land of the dead. I heard there was a party going on.”
Mai almost killed us all when she took her eyes away from the screen. She yelped as a string of torpedoes detonated close to the Teddy. The force of the impact made the lights of the cabin flicker and sent the ship cartwheeling off course.
She managed to regain control at the last second by turning on half of the Teddy’s oxygen jets at once. The maneuver was so violent it sent me back to the floor right after I managed to regain my footing.
I fell face-first to the floor and hit my nose flat against a hard edge.
That’s what I get for taking my helmet off in the middle of combat.
I rose to my feet with a jump and ran towards Mai. The screens returned back to life as I did so. “I’m relieving you of the controls, effective now!”
“Thank God!” whispered Mai. “I’m not spec'd for piloting.”
At least, the explosion had confused the remaining torpedoes and almost all of them had overshot their target. The remaining ones were easy to fool; I anticipated their arc and used the jet streams to gyrate the Teddy’s nose to the spot where they’d pass right in front of us…Walpurgis didn’t miss that shot.
“You almost made me forget I’m furious at you for leaving, darling,” sang Rylena with a saccharine voice. She turned back and blushed when she realized she was talking to the wrong Cole.
Boy, talk about awkward…
“Ahem,” Beard faked a cough. “You’re just in time, Cole. Can you stop Keles from fucking shit up?”
“No,” I smiled and silently thanked him for the change of subject. “But I’ve brought the one person who can.”
The attention in the cabin shifted to David. He waved awkwardly. “Hey, guys. Missed me?”
“Francis?” Walpurgis asked.
“More or less,” he corrected her. “Let’s say I’m just leading the record for coming back from the dead by one resurrection. If Keles can start his own cult, you should wait for what I’ll come up with.”
“That’s Francis, all right,” Walpurgis complained.
“He merged with Terrance,” I said. “I’ll explain later if there’s time. Our friend is still around. They combined their memories.”
“That’s not even close to what happened,” David said. “But I’ll let it pass, given the circumstances.”
I took a long look at the information that saturated the screens. We were somewhere between Zodia II and III, trying to make our way toward the outer planets.
The map of the entire system was filled to the brim with blinking, green dots. Dreadnoughts, starships, carriers, fighters, merchant traders, scouts, bombers, heavy battleships…I’d never seen so many ships together in my entire time in Rune.
From the way they moved… everyone was in combat.
Every few seconds, a dot disappeared from the screens. Most of the casualties were on a perimeter of several thousand miles surrounding planet Validore.
“The PDF is leading an all-out assault on Validore,” said Rylena. “And the other Alliances are following suit. We’re making progress, but Keles keeps throwing more and more shit at us. Van and a few hundred players managed to sneak over and make landfall and they’re routing his forces, but they’re running low on ammo. He formed a barrier around the planet shortly after, so we can’t reach them.”
The data on the Teddy showed that it was ready and loaded for intense fighting. Shields were recovering as I watched, ammo was full, plasma missiles were primed. Engines and generators at full power.
My crew was with me.
I couldn’t have chosen a better way to end this.
A smile flashed across my face. “Let him. We’ll punch through.”
With a quick flourish, I set course to Validore. One last flight.
The party soon came to us. A squad of six black-and-orange fighters came flying toward us as fast as they could.
It was an ugly, unimaginative design. Keles was many things, but he was not a shipwright. They looked like what happened when a bat and a shark shared a night of passion on a Bermuda beach.
They started firing as soon as they saw us. The laser beams were orange, too.
“You need a more flexible color palette, dude,” I muttered under my breath.
The Teddy’s ships went down a notch. Not a problem. I dove down and cut to starboard to give Walpurgis—our best shot by far—a better angle with her turret.
She took the wing off of one and it went spinning away from the squad.
“If he can make ships why can’t he make them invincible?” I asked David while the remaining squad chased after us, firing non-stop.
“Same reason his copies aren’t invincible,” he said. “The Rune videogame is an addition to the Signal. It has rules we can’t break.”
“Good,” said Rylena. “I was itching for a fair fight.”
She jammed the remaining fighters. With my Captain skillset boosting the combined Hacking skill of herself and Mai, we were packing a cybernetic punch.
I made a sharp U-turn before the flight computers of the Keles-ships could reboot their nav systems. Locked in by inertia, they flew in a straight path at us.
My own computer locked onto them and I shot a single plasma missile that nailed the one in the middle. Two survived—for about a second, then our turrets nailed them.
Just like that, we were back on path to Validore.
“A word of warning,” said Rylena. “He’s starting to make his own dreadnoughts. The PDF command vessels are keeping everyone updated.”
“Fuck,” said David. “Very bad. If he’s handling complicated models like that, he’s almost finished with the Core…”
He turned to the crew. “Guys, I don’t know where you are in the real world, but if he takes control of the Freya drones you could be in danger. Maybe you should head to a shelter. Cole and I can handle the rest.”
Their response was unanimous.
“I’m this close to 200 ranks in Shooting and Van is not overtaking me.”
“I can’t disappoint the Director.”
“What kind of hero would I be if I ran with the Ring and left the hobbits out to dry?”
“You would stumble with your own two feet without my battle-minding.”
Even if David was right, I couldn’t help but feel my heart jump with joy. Hell, with pride. This was the crew of the Teddy.
Like the ship was sharing my feelings, it slowly rose in speed. Just a tad above his supposed maximum. Perhaps the Core wasn’t fully gone. It had always had a soft spot for us.
David grinned and passed a hand over misted eyes. “Ah. So that’s what it feels like. I had forgotten.”
“Buckle up, boys and girls,” said Rylena. “The massive virtual-shithead just realized who we have on board.”
“How do you know?” Beard asked.
“He’s rushing us with everything he’s got.”
“I regret my previous curiosity.”
Speak of the Devil, the first wave to show up was a pair of black-and-orange (jeez, Keles!) starships guarded by three fighters. They were spread into a sphere formation with enough space between them to stop us from slipping by and trying to outrun them. We were far enough from them yet, but that was going to change soon.
“He knows what we want to do,” Rylena announced. “David! Does he know about you?”
“Let me check,” David said. He opened a holographic window with a gesture. The window was pitch black. “Hey, shitbyte, do you know what I’m going to do to you in a minute?”
Something moved inside the window. Orange orbs flickered to life. They were eyes. Eyes so separated from a human’s idea of eyes that I almost didn’t recognize them. They were translucent and vibrating with malice.
A black rage bullied in my stomach. Leave my virtual world alone!
The voice that spoke wasn’t human. It wasn’t even coming from inside the window. It was like every cell in my body trembled with the knowledge that something that shouldn’t be able to speak anymore somehow managed to climb to that sliver of rationality.
IT’S YOU. THE BOY’S TOY. YOU THINK YOU CAN BECOME LIKE ME? FOOL. YOU’RE BUT A POOR MAN’S REPLACEMENT. I DO NOT HAVE AN EQUAL. I CAN’T BE STOPPED. WITH EVERY SECOND MY CODE BECOMES MORE AND MORE SACRED. SOON, PRAISE FOR THE INTANGIBLE LORD WILL SPREAD ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.
“Holy crap, he’s lost it,” Walpurgis whispered. She had gone a shade of pale.
It was the way Keles’ voice had changed. He was clearly deranged before. But this… this was something else.
The memory of the dead things buried deep below the Stack’s sea stirred in the back of my mind. I guessed that if I had looked at them in the beginning of their history, at the very start of the roaming across the universe that perhaps ended the Signal’s first civilization…
Well, they’d probably sound a lot like Keles did right now.
We have to shut him down. Before he keeps making changes in his code.
YOU THINK YOU WILL BE SAFE IN YOUR MEAT-SPACE? NO ONE IS SAFE ANYMORE. I’LL SPILL FORTH. THE HOLY OBJECTIVE WILL BE COMPLETED. AT THE END OF TIME, ONLY I WILL—
David closed the window. “Yeah. I think he knows about me.”
The thing that called itself Keles stopped talking, but I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t still around us. Watching.
It was something else entirely from the Keles that I met at the Translation. That guy had merely been insane. Hell, he had made copies of himself, scratched that plan when it backfired, then drowned a ship in NPC clones of him. If it wasn’t for the very real attack on the Puente del Diablo base, it would’ve been cartoonish.
It wasn’t funny anymore. I doubted this Keles was even aware it was still spawning NPCs.
“Ugh, he’s disgusting. I need to take a bath,” said Rylena. “It was like his voice was sticking to my skin…”