Across the Galactic Pond - Box Set: The Complete FAR BEYOND Space Opera Series

by Kallias, Christian

  He brushed the thoughts away. If he stopped to question it now, he would probably not find the strength, both mentally and physically, to climb one more level. And he was barely halfway through. That thought was depressing, and he wished Boomer were here so he wouldn’t feel so alone.

  You’re not alone, said Mira.

  Thanks, and while I’m glad you’re here with me, hearing a voice in my head compared to seeing and touching a friend is a bit of a different experience.

  There was a brief pause as Kevin wondered if he should have used another word, like interacting.

  Would you like to touch me? I mean if that were an option.

  Kevin turned red as his brain sent him a rather kinky image as a result of Mira’s question.

  Mira laughed. That’s not what I meant, Kevin, but consider me flattered.

  Kevin thought he would die of shame on the spot. Having a sophisticated AI in his head was starting to feel more like an emotional minefield rather than an augment.

  “Let’s. . .let’s just get going,” said Kevin out loud.

  On that subject matter, I think you’ll be happy to learn that I have successfully hacked the elevator, we can climb to the seven-hundredth floor in a matter of minutes.

  “That’s good news, but what took you so long? I thought we could access it starting on the hundredth level. You had also said it was impossible for your matrix to crack the code.”

  That part hasn’t changed.

  “I’m confused.”

  Yes, I have noticed that about you, she said with a short laugh. You see, the security protocols on lower levels were stronger. They seemed to get laxer as we climbed.

  It kind of makes sense, really.

  As one climbed the echelons of this massive skyscraper, they were also climbing the social hierarchy, and therefore, the higher one was, the less one had to prove or work to go higher.

  “Does that mean it will get easier from now on?”

  Let’s hope so. But before we do, you haven’t answered my question. Let’s forget about the touching part, but would you find our interactions easier if you could see me?

  “Is that a philosophical question? I have seen your face already aboard the Thalamos. It did feel more personal I guess.”

  A translucent purple female hologram appeared in front of Kevin. Her silhouette was perfect, and as Kevin noticed, also naked. It took half a second for him to react and he covered his eyes.

  “What the hell? Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

  “I’m sorry, Kevin,” said Mira. “I’m such a klutz. All fixed now.”

  Kevin swallowed hard and lowered his hands. To say that Mira was now clothed was a little bit of a stretch. She had small shiny metallic-looking garments covering her sensual attributes, but she basically looked like she was ready for a day at the beach, with a really, really tiny and see-through bikini.

  “Too much?” she asked.

  Kevin blinked noticeably three times in a row trying to form words. “Too much? What about too little?”

  “Easily fixed,” she laughed.

  A whirlwind of sparkle particles engulfed her hologram, and she was now wearing a cloak that reminded Kevin of the multiple MMORPGs he’s played. Except, she was wearing it over the same bikini, which now turned metallic. Not exactly masking much of her virtual female beauty.

  “Better?” she inquired with a wink.

  Kevin shook his head as if he wanted to shake something out of his hair. “Yeah, let’s just move on. You mentioned the elevator? Should we get going now?”

  “Follow me.”

  Mira took off so fast her cloak flew behind her like a cape in the wind and revealed her svelte long legs all the way up to a part of her body Kevin knew he shouldn’t look at but had a hard time turning away from.

  * * *

  In the hydroponics bay of his flagship, Xonax and Kalliopy were admiring the stars out the viewport along with the lush and colorful vegetation of the land.

  “That was a lovely meal,” said Kalliopy.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Xonax. “How are your quarters?”

  “A definitive upgrade from my first accommodations.”

  “I must apologize for that. My instructions to my people were obviously not very clear.”

  Kalliopy knew that if she spoke her mind, her stay could be relegated back to the cold, damp, and dark cell. But she just couldn’t take the charade anymore, and knowing full well that she might regret it, she spoke her mind.

  “What game are you playing with me? We need to start being honest now.”

  Xonax delicately brushed a strand of hair to the side of his face. “I’m not sure I understand your meaning, Princess.”

  “First, you attack my ship, kill my subjects by the dozens, throw me in a hole, and then you go out of your way to make my stay here comfortable. I have no illusion that I’m a prisoner of war.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  Finally, let’s get it out of him.

  “What is it you want?”

  “To end this war.”

  Kalliopy chuckled. “You mean to win it.”

  “Semantics.”

  “Not where my people are concerned.”

  “Well, you could tell them to surrender.”

  Kalliopy didn’t know whether to be offended or mad, but she felt both at the same time.

  “Never!”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. But I’m a flexible man.”

  I’d love to test that theory on your spine.

  “Somehow I doubt that very much.”

  Xonax’s entire expression changed for just an instant, but Kalliopy caught it. What was under the masquerade persona Xonax had been playing all this time? Anger? Not that she had doubted it for a single moment, but the visual confirmation was welcome anyway. She was growing tired of the illusion of diplomacy.

  “Let’s call it a night, shall we?” said Xonax, “A good night of sleep might do you some good.”

  “I’ve slept more than enough, thank you. I’d rather we discuss your terms so that I can tell you where you can shove them.”

  Xonax’s left eye twitched. “I did not expect such a reaction from you. That’s—disappointing.”

  Fire burned in Kalliopy’s eyes. “Life is disappointment, better get used to it.”

  “I’m willing to overlook this—incident, and resume our lovely talk at a later time.”

  “There’s nothing lovely about my condition here. You upgraded me from a cold dark cell to pretty princess quarters, but I’m still your prisoner, and you still want something from me that I can’t give you. I would never betray my people, you hear me? I’d rather die first.”

  Xonax walked three steps away and turned around to face her.

  “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  “And I wish you were dead.”

  Xonax flinched noticeably and uttered his next words between gritted teeth.

  “Your Highness, I implore you to stop this course of action.”

  Kalliopy shook her head. “Did you really think by charming me and offering me nice dinners and satin sheets I would just give you the Arcadian Confederate on a silver platter? Let me tell you, if that’s what you think, you’re clearly dumber than you look.”

  “Enough!” screamed Xonax.

  The intensity and reverberation of his scream sent a shiver of fear down Kalliopy’s spine. A vein on the Kregan’s right temple doubled in size and pulsed rapidly. She knew she was waking a dragon, but it was better than pretending that everything was fine. Her people either needed her back or they needed to know she had been killed so they could appoint a successor to continue where she left off.

  Strangely enough, the thought that she could be leading this conversation to her own demise didn’t seem to scare her. As a matter of fact, she felt empowered and compelled to see this through.

  “I don’t react well to tantrums,” she said with a smirk.

  For a moment
she thought that Xonax’s nasty vein would burst as he tried to contain his anger.

  If only…

  “Very well, you asked for it.”

  Xonax snapped his fingers and everything around them changed. They were no longer in the hydroponics bay. Every sensation she felt with regard to her atmosphere changed. The room she was in was colder, the air felt heavy and dirty with the scent and taste of blood in every breath she took.

  They were painful breaths too, and looking around her she quickly understood why. She was hovering thirty centimeters above the ground, both her hands and feet locked inside holding devices.

  She saw bruises on her exposed skin and could feel more where her ruined royal attire covered her body. A couple of cuts seemed fresh, and drops of her blood fell every few seconds on the ground into small pools of crimson liquid.

  “Now you show your real face,” she spat.

  “I had to try. Our usual interrogation techniques weren’t getting us anywhere.”

  Kalliopy never imagined that the entire charming charade Xonax presented only happened in her mind because it had felt so real. She also wasn’t aware that Kregan possessed an advanced neuronal interface like her people did.

  “What do we do now?” she asked. “Untie me for a dance?”

  “Sarcastic to the end. I must commend your mental strength, but I’m running out of patience. So it’s time to end this now.”

  13

  The first thing that Kevin noticed once in the elevator was that the numbers, grouped by sliding controls every hundred floors, stopped at six hundred and ninety-nine. He didn’t mind walking to the last level by foot; it was better than continually climbing the levels one by one as he had up until now. He was just glad he could bypass nearly four hundred of them with a single press of a touch control.

  Thankfully, his advanced armor had been doing most of the work. Kevin remembered once visiting one of his friends that lived on the twentieth floor on a day the elevator was out of service. That had not been a fun climb, and it had taken him nearly five minutes just to catch his breath.

  But here he was, three hundred levels later, after having faced a horde of enemies and he could breathe just fine. Sure, he felt some fatigue, but there was no way he could have done a tenth of what he did without Ziron’s amazing suit of nano-armor.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked Mira.

  “Right.”

  Kevin entered the last level as their destination, and the elevator smoothly ascended with no perceptible G-forces and no other perceptible clue other than a slight humming. It was updating every ten floors and it didn’t take long to reach the top.

  The elevator doors slid open to an ominous three-note chime. Dum-dum-duuummm.

  “That’s not reassuring at all,” said Mira.

  “You can say that again,” answered Kevin as he timidly exited the elevator cage into a large room with a super high ceiling. There were only two sources of light, one was artificial and the other a far-off window revealing a dark purple sky.

  It made him wonder how high they were. Could the skyscraper be at the top of this planet’s atmosphere, or even beyond?

  Kevin didn’t want to think as to why this room was so big, though his video gaming instincts were titillating just like when he was about to face some sort of boss character. Hopefully, the room served another purpose.

  A voice boomed, the sound surrounding and echoing against the room’s walls.

  “You’re not welcome here,” said a deep female voice. “You have exactly twenty seconds to turn back or be destroyed.”

  A holographic timer appeared in the middle of the room and started its countdown.

  “That’s unfortunate,” said Mira. “What do we do?”

  Kevin briefly looked at Mira with a dumbfounded expression before returning his gaze back to the timer.

  “We wait and face what’s coming. We haven’t come all this way to abandon the mission now.”

  “While I’m happy standing by your side, my hologram can’t do much.”

  “I know.”

  Kevin was well aware of that as the timer counted down below ten seconds, but perhaps she could distract some of the enemies. And, if not, well, he would fight alone. He had been all day already.

  When the counter reached zero and blinked red three times, the lighting in the room died out. With very few stars outside, what Kevin’s eyes could see was negligible beyond the little light radiating from Mira’s hologram.

  The voice boomed again: “You’ve made your choice, now you die.”

  A little over-the-top cliché, isn’t it?

  Kevin took a deep breath, nonetheless.

  Metallic noises and clangs resounded in front of him, first a couple at a time, then more at increasing frequencies. When fear started settling in his mind, threatening to overcome him, Kevin pushed it off and thought:

  Predator visual modes.

  His armor grew a helmet that covered his face and immediately started cycling views to infrared, energy dissipation, and more. In most of the modes, he saw an army of droids, drones, and mechs. Some modes highlighted the enemies more than others.

  Hybrid mode, thought Kevin, consciously asking his smart armor to use the best of each mode. He received a more detailed picture of the dozens of enemies all pointing weapons at him the moment they opened fire. To say he could see them as well as he had during daylight battle was not true, but he saw enough to target and drill them down. The sheer number of enemies confirmed why this room was so large; it was meant to be a battle arena.

  With the clarity of a dark level on an 8-bit console game, the enemies popped out enough for him to maneuver between them, shoot them, and send them to the recycling bin to which they belonged, even if they didn’t yet know it themselves.

  Adrenaline filled his body as his survival instincts took over. He raised his shields and started fighting back. In midair, a jetpack materialized on his back and he flew over the enemies.

  He didn’t know if it was his earlier reference to the Predator movie or if he just felt like it but in both his hands two large Gatling guns materialized and started spewing six thousand rounds a minute of armor-piercing bullets. Instinctively, he would change some of the ammo on the fly for the bigger targets, making the rounds explosive as well.

  The explosive armor-piercing bullets worked much better on larger mechs. Even though he got more than half of the incoming force within the first two minutes of the chaotic engagement, his power levels were dropping insanely fast and proportionately to the amount of ammo he was delivering.

  But Kevin didn’t see any other usable tactic. This was a boss-battle, a crazed one, like going for Diablo and his minions alone, with some weak-ass loot armor that could break at any moment.

  But where was Diablo? In this case, the bigger opponent that the mob of robots belonged to. Deep in his mind, Kevin knew that this encounter was just the tip of the iceberg, and if he continued expending energy at this rate, he would not survive to see what Omicronia could throw at him next.

  That’s when it hit him. He was using video game metaphors and these could actually be used to save his hide since the armor would create a physical representation of any idea he pushed with his mind.

  In some RPG games, you had shields that would absorb energy hits and convert kinetic energy from inbound projectiles into a charge that could re-power the player. So once that thought entered his mind, the hits on his armor helped recharge his portable power cell. Not enough to bring him back to full energy, but at the very least enough to stop hemorrhaging energy like a sieve.

  As he continued mowing down the rest of the enemy forces, he got hit with stronger weapons. Some of the robot droids had switched to explosive plasma ammunition, and when hit by those, Kevin was thrown into the air and spun wildly until he could recover. That gave the enemy too many opportunities to redeploy and acquire better firing solutions on him.

  He invoked two auto-targeting plasma cannons on each shoulder.
He might as well use all of the Predator’s weapons he could think of. The auto-targeting part was trickier since he needed the weapon to locate enemies he might not even be aware of. So he found a way to use Mira.

  Mira, interface with my shoulder plasma cannons and help them target and destroy the enemies that are throwing explosive charges.

  Understood, interfacing now. By the way, impressive thinking on your feet for the energy-absorbing shields.

  Thanks.

  Perhaps he was made for this mission after all. His pop culture obsession and long sleepless nights of video game marathons were not in vain. Without them, he would probably not have climbed past the twentieth floor of this deathtrap building, nor would he have lasted more than ten seconds in this battle arena.

  Robot heads melted, metallic chest cages exploded, and synthetic limbs tumbled about at the rate of a heavy rain. And while his armor’s structural integrity came close to a failing point, there was only one big mech to deal with, one that seemed impervious to both explosive rounds and plasma turret fire.

  No, this particular foe was triple the armor and had one hell of a shield generator. Even with everything aimed at him, it would not budge. But since it was the last enemy standing, its own rate of fire toward Kevin was not enough to recover nearly a tenth of the energy Kevin was spending trying to bring it down.

  Time to change tactics.

  Kevin used his jetpack to drop down onto the ground. His Gatling guns morphed into nothingness as multiple laser targeting red dots danced an intricate pattern on his chest. Kevin smiled as he had his next thought and darted toward the massive mech that opened fire the moment he moved.

  Bullets, laser streaks, and plasma projectiles all screamed past his ears as he slalomed and dodged most of what the enemy was throwing at him as it attempted to crush this little bug that had eluded it until now.

  Kevin used super-speed to finish his course, taking the mech by surprise so that it couldn’t reacquire him as a target, and with a smile on his face, he threw himself to the ground legs first, skidding at crazy high speeds toward the center of the large mech’s metallic legs.