Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) (9 page)

On board the Relic. Five hours later

Breaking the fragile ice from its edges, the hatch between decks clanked open.

We were in zero gravity. Stars twinkled through the breach holes. Strange objects floated around. My mind expander enveloped them in an emerald shimmer, highlighting them, while trying in vain to identify them against the Technologist Clan database.

No human had ever set foot here. At least I didn’t think so.

Liori materialized next to the nearest entrance and cast a studying glance around. “Power’s down,” she said. “I can’t locate the interstellar communications module.”

“It’s about a hundred feet further up the corridor,” Jurgen’s voice replied as he controlled our progress online. “Watch out. I’m powering everything up.”

Stars distorted in the haze of the force field blocking the breach holes in the hull. Flailing cables began to spark. Invisible exhausts spewed out little jets of oxygen snow as the automatic life support system attempted to restore atmosphere.

Once again I heard the sound of the ancient machinery start up behind my back. This time it was Arbido. He clambered out onto the service deck and chuckled with satisfaction, noticing the abundance of artifacts. Without hesitation, he began collecting them, simultaneously taking stock of his finds and streaming their data into the group’s local network.

“Zander, everyone, wait for me!” Foggs had fallen behind us all. He'd used this opportunity to deactivate his gravitech and was traveling in zero gravity, practicing this new mode of movement. His floating cargonite-clad figure scrambled out of the hatch.

“You haven’t wasted your time, have you?” he teased Arbido who was busy stuffing his finds into three containers at once. “Why won’t you use the inventory?” miscalculating his movements, Foggs bashed his head against the ceiling and grabbed at a broken piece of pipework in the wall.

“Inventories are for personal possessions only,” Arbido grumbled. “Loot belongs to everyone. Waste not, want not. You’ll all be grateful. Did you see the size of those breach holes? You did. Good. Once Jurgen switches off the shields, half of these goodies will be ejected into open space.”

“Leave him,” I told Foggs. “And please switch your gravitech back on. This isn’t the right time to practice.”

My body tensed like a coiled spring. I couldn’t explain this sudden sense of foreboding. This part of the Relic had never been explored. The Dargians hadn’t attempted to restore it, either. The surrounding rooms had been at the mercy of both vacuum and cosmic cold for thousands of years.

My interface pinged. The tactics subsystem operative window revealed a handful of scarlet markers. A few of them blinked and then expired.

“They’re mobs!” Liori shouted a warning. “They’re not in the database!” her outline disintegrated, returning to me in a swarm of battle-ready nanites.

“Arbido, step back! Foggs, you cover him! Keep behind me, both of you! Charon, where the hell are you?”

“I’ll outflank them,” Charon replied. “There’re some breached bulkheads here.”

Foggs switched on his gravitech, preparing for battle. He pushed Arbido toward the wall, controlling the service hatches above his head, gutted by some ancient blast of decompression. There were plenty of them around and they might prove too inviting for
serves
. These local maintenance robots-turned-mobs were smart enough to use them, especially when attacking in a network-connected pack.

But why? There shouldn’t be any aggressive mobs here. Immediately my imagination offered me the gruesome shape of Avatroid. After everything we’d gone through on Darg, I knew only too well what a hostile AI was capable of.

A segment of the force shield flashed weakly, snapping me out of the haze of my confusion. I stepped forward, covering the others. Luckily, the corridor was quite narrow and the threat was still a long way away.

I read their signatures. Liori had been right. There was nothing like them in our databases. Were they some unknown type of on-board cyborg?

The number of scarlet dots continued to dwindle. There were only five of them left now. For mobs, their behavior was weird. They were supposed to attack us, fiercely and blindly. Instead, they kept retreating. I zoomed in on a scale model of the deck. They were retreating toward some unidentified structure, taking shortcuts through demolished rooms and breach holes.

“No idea where they came from!” Jurgen commented tensely.

“Check the logs. Could the power activation have triggered some of the deck’s machines?”

“I’ve done that! The only things that came on were the emergency shields and the life support!”

“It’s all right. We’ll see in a moment.”

My mind expander kept showing five targets. They’d now clustered about fifty feet away from us, next to a strange-looking disk-shaped structure that differed dramatically from all the others.

Slowly we advanced amid floating debris that consisted increasingly of more and more lumps of molten cargonite. Darkness lurked within the breach holes. Rooms to both sides of the corridor were completely ravaged. There must have been one hell of a battle here at some point in the past.

I should have got used to it, really. Wherever we turned, the echo of mysterious ancient developments followed us everywhere: on board spaceships and stations, in the asteroid belt, on Wearong’s satellites and even on the system’s only habitable planet.

Outlined in yellow, a large object appeared in our way. Unlike all the others, it wasn’t floating but lying on the floor. Its signature was easy to read: this was the typical aura produced by discharged power units.

“Foggs, cover me!”

The leader of the Daugoths clan, Foggs was an experienced player. He realized the ambiguity of our situation perfectly well — and still he wasn’t going to trade his gamer mentality in for questions without answers. Now too he acted without hesitation. In a few well-rehearsed moves, he shone laser beams into the nearest breach holes, pointed Arbido at a small niche formed by two bulges in some deformed bulkheads, then nodded back to me:
Go to it!

* * *

The yellow aura enveloped a creature lying on the floor.

It wasn’t humanoid. It lay sprawled, extending its thick tentacle limbs like a starfish.

What a strange mob. I crouched next to it and ran my right hand over its body.

The Founder’s Glove switched to scanner mode. The creature’s body was covered with a rough hide, crackled and bulging. Within it lay power cells.

A cyborg!

Confirming my initial idea, more technogenic details began forming in my mind’s eye: the creature’s core, the servomotors, the cargonite tubing of its artificial skeleton entwined by dry mummified muscles.

You have studied a cyborg. Origin: unknown.

You’ve received +3 to your Alien Technologies skill.

Your Exobiologist skill isn’t active yet. You cannot level it up.

“Zander? What have you got there?” Foggs asked impatiently.

“It’s a cyborg. Judging by its state, its organic flesh has been dead ever since this deck was decompressed.”

“Has it been lying here for thousands of years?” Arbido asked in disbelief.

“They were in energy saving mode,” Jurgen explained with calm expertise while receiving the data in real time. “These mobs have been lying there until conditions have become favorable for their activation. Now I understand why most of their markers went out. Their internal power supplies are completely depleted. When I activated the deck’s power, they came out of their hibernation hoping to charge up.”

“It doesn’t look as if they succeeded. Their markers first faded, then expired completely. It didn’t even come to a fight.”

“I’ve found an alien ship!” Charon’s voice echoed in the earphones. “It’s small. It’s fused with the hull. I’ve never seen this kinds of creatures before.”

“Novitsky,” I called out. “I want you to sort it out. Get Danezerath and a few men to cover you. Liori will meet you there.”

“Got it!”

We continued on our way. We didn’t stay to investigate. Exploring an alien ship was an important and interesting thing indeed but at the moment, we had totally different objectives.

Charon scrambled out of a breach hole. “All clear,” he reported. “All the mobs have been deactivated, whatever they are.”

The Relic was bursting with mysteries. We were yet to learn the story of her space travels which she guarded so closely. I was pretty sure the Founders hadn’t been her only crew. The frigate must have engaged in battles and performed hyperspace jumps long after her original creators had exited this stage of history.

“Here’s the communications module!” one of the rooms on the deck floor plan began to glow, highlighted. “It doesn’t look as if it has power though.”

“Little wonder,” I walked in and took a look around. “We might have to attach all the cables by hand. This is probably the work of cyborgs. Charon, can you help me?”

I grabbed at a bunch of cables hovering in a fancy loop in mid-air and studied the connectors. They seemed all right. No sign of fire damage.

“Please don’t rush it,” Jurgen told me. “I need to study the diagram, then I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

We paused, waiting. Charon held the cables. Arbido looked around him, taking in the scene. Foggs took up position at the room’s entrance, controlling the corridor just in case.

Liori and I stepped aside.

Her cybermodule was surrounded by a thick cloud of nanites forming her image. She looked me in the eye, anxiety in her stare. “Zander, it’s probably better I come with you.”

This was a hard decision. Still, we had to part ways. Someone had to stay behind in case the ancient device malfunctioned and sent our identities to some God-forsaken part of its network. Or just tore our neurograms apart and scattered their fragments over hundreds of star systems. The device had been out of use for several millennia, after all.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

Charon began connecting the cables. The ancient control panels lit up with a complex pattern of indicator lights.

“All done,” Charon growled.

Liori and I stood there silent, looking into each other’s eyes.

A makeshift adapter fashioned by Jurgen clicked its jury-rigged clamps. The sound fell flat in the stale rarefied atmosphere. Five ports glowed on the adapter’s surface: the number of navigator artifacts about to be connected.

“Excellent,” Jurgen commented. “The communication module works. Now I want each of you to connect your navigator to an available slot.”

Nanites touched my lips. “I’ll be waiting,” Liori whispered.

Click.

My navigator was connected. Charon was the next to use the module, followed by Arbido and Foggs. We’d brought Jurgen’s navigator with us and activated the last slot.

The light flickered and went out. Three intersecting circles of energy lit up at the center of the room.

“Excellent,” Jurgen said. “Everything’s working. I’ll connect myself from here via the onboard network.”

“And what do you want us to do? Should we stand in a circle and hold hands?” Foggs joked clumsily.

“No need for stupid rituals. Either the device accepts your settings and kicks in, or it doesn’t, becau-“

A surge of interference swallowed the rest of his phrase, distorting his voice. A pale glow filled the room.

Reality blurred and flickered, then expired.

An unidentified location in space

W
ater warbled nearby. My visor was broken. The odor of decaying leaves mingled with the aroma of flowering grasses.

My vision came back slowly. At first, reality was akin to a blurred pencil sketch.

Gradually the world began gaining detail, glitching occasionally as it grew in color. I could already see a large mossy boulder half-buried in the ground; a green meadow edged with fluffy seed balls; and further on, the swaying branches of brambles heavy with tiny red fruit.

The icons of my interface were gray: inactive.

A rabbit sneaked past. A large lizard froze in a small rocky crevice.

A breeze ruffled the trees, bringing the faint disturbing odor of decomposition.

A scattering of red indicator lights on the inside of my visor blinked, then went out. I couldn’t move. My armored suit hindered my movements, digging into my body as if deformed.

Communications were down. My mind expander didn’t respond.

Right! No good lying around! I leaned against one arm and tried to heave myself up. My suit’s servodrives screeched.

My heart was pounding. I was short of breath. Where on earth had this fabled Founders’ network sent me?

I struggled to catch my breath, then took a look around. A greenwood forest towered nearby, looking rather worse for wear. Its branches were broken as if ravaged by a tornado. A siege tower lay overturned on the ground at the forest’s edge. Its sharpened pales, dark with time, pointed every which way.

This was the Crystal Sphere!

I could barely recognize my stomping ground. This newb location had suffered some drastic metamorphosis. Once bustling with life, it was now uneasily quiet. The village where a few years ago I’d completed my first quest had been reduced to a few houses, and even those stood roofless.

I could see a range of low hills to my left, their slopes peppered with craters and scorch marks. This looked very much like the aftermath of a mass use of top-level spells which was unacceptable in a newb zone.

There were some marshes not far from here, inhabited by an old friend of mine. I might need to ask him whatever had happened here.

My companions were nowhere to be seen which worried me quite a bit. I wasn’t used to having so little information about my surroundings.

Never mind. The main thing was, we’d made it! Even though this good old fantasy world wasn’t our ultimate port of call, still I found it encouraging. Our identities had just traveled through an ocean of light years and ended up in a predetermined location of Earth’s cyberspace!

As I took my bearings, my armor had completed its transformation. Instead of the cargonite suit I’d been used to, I was now wearing a pair of statless canvas pants and a matching shirt.

So the Crystal Sphere’s engine had apparently accepted me, stripping me of any technological advantage. The only thing still reminding me of Phantom Server was the Founders’ navigator device which had suffered no transformation.

“Zander!” a desperate scream made me swing round. This was Arbido’s voice!

A narrow river flowed behind some shrubs to my right. I could distinctly hear the warbling and splashing of water.

“Help!” the scream was coming from the river bank, accompanied by the clashing of steel.

A wide trail led off in that direction. It was still quite fresh, the leaves on the hacked-off branches of the surrounding bushes still rigid.

“Help, someone! They’re killing me!”

I ran as fast as I could.

The trail ducked into a small ravine, then brought me out to the bank.

Wow! What was that? A battle must have unfolded here, and very recently too!

Decaying bodies in muddy bloodied armor lay everywhere, pillaged by groups of looters.

I saw Arbido. He stood with his back to a blackened piece of driftwood, clumsily brandishing a
naginata
with a broken shaft. Three ragged skinny bandits (definitely NPCs, judging by their vile expressions) stood there in sullen determination, waiting for him to run out of steam. They didn’t want to take any risks but they apparently weren’t going to let him go alive, either.

Their gear was all mismatched, their dented armor bloodied and pierced in places.

I picked up a sword as I ran: its blade jagged, its tip broken off.

I knew the Crystal Sphere like the palm of my hand. I used to play as Paladin, and I still had all my skills at knee-jerk level. No idea how the game engine had gone about adjusting my current levels, but it should at least be good enough to smoke a few robbers!

Arbido noticed me and stopped yelling. He perked up a little. His helmet was gone, his Dargian suit (the only one that could fit his goblin build) still surging with charges of energy. That’s why the NPCs hadn’t dared to attack him yet. They must have thought he was bewitched!

I had about a dozen paces between him and myself left when the looters turned around and took off.

Further upstream the bank was ripped apart, forming wide ravines. One of them parted, revealing Charon, also without a helmet: all covered in mud, angry and disoriented. He held an uprooted young tree in one hand and clenched a rabbit by its ears in the other.

“Phew,” Arbido crouched, gasping. “I nearly had a heart attack. I thought that was the end of me.”

Noticing us, Charon growled a greeting. In a flash, the bank emptied. The looters disappeared very promptly.

“Did you see Jurgen and Foggs?” I asked.

“
Nowr
!” Charon cast a curious look around. “Is this your world?”

“Not quite. This is a made-up reality. Will you let go of the rabbit, please?”

Charon released his fingers. The harmless NPC scampered away.

“What do you mean by a made-up reality?” Charon asked. “I can see no traces of civilized life here! Why are the local technologies so primitive?”

“I’ll explain to you later. Now I’d like you to remove your suit. Arbido, that applies to you too.”

“Why?” the old man wasn’t in a hurry to comply. “What have you done with your own suit?”

“The Crystal Sphere’s engine has utilized it. But before that happened, the wretched suit very nearly broke every bone in my body. So you’d better get out of yours pretty quick. We’ll get some new gear here.”

“What, take it off corpses?” Arbido cringed.

“Just do it!”

While they were busy removing their suits, I tried to explain to Charon the meaning of a “game world”.

“I still don’t get it,” he finally admitted. “Who killed them?” he pointed his improvised club to the river bank strewn with bodies.

“No idea,” I admitted. “The rules forbid any serious fighting here at all.”

The two neat piles of cargonite armor began to quiver, losing shape. Soon both suits had totally dematerialized.

Arbido shivered. All he had left on was a pair of knee-long pants.

Charon’s light onboard suit wasn’t affected.

“Am I supposed to freeze to death?” Arbido began to moan.

“Just wait a little. I’ll get some gear from somewhere. Weren’t you going to contact someone?” I reminded him.

“To do that, I need to get to the nearest tavern! It’s not very far from here, don’t worry. We’ll get there in no time at all.”

“I don’t think so. You can forget your tavern. The village has been reduced to ruins.”

He looked flabbergasted. “What do you mean?”

“Can’t you see what’s going on?” I stared at the dead bodies. The memory of my arrival in Phantom Server sprang to mind. This was exactly what I’d encountered in the alternative start location on Oasis when I’d first arrived there. Some of the avatars there wouldn’t disappear after the character’s virtual death. Which meant that the player had died in both worlds, crumbling under the realism of the experience provided by his or her neuroimplant.

Thousands of players had died here as they tried to hold the river bank. Who could have attacked them? The broken weapons, the pools of blood, pierced armor and shattered shields — all this pointed at a fierce struggle, but at least half of the gruesome picture seemed to be missing. Whoever had created this battle painting was a very, very strange artist.

I could see hoofmarks in the sand. A lost horseshoe. A broken piece of a spear with a very unusual tip. A scaly glove lay by the water edge. I picked it up. It must have been hacked off with the bearer’s hand still in it. Still, it was empty inside.

Did that mean that the attackers, whoever they were, had successfully respawned?

“Zander!” Arbido scurried toward me. “There’s something I need to tell you! I have a cache here somewhere!”

“All right,” I agreed. “Let’s see if we can find it. What have you got in it?”

“Just some gear I stashed away for my mercs. You know very well that these start-up locations are a dream to work in. Newbs can be too impatient, too hungry for adventure. So my guys did their bit by offering them a free ride through the local dungeons. It’s not much in terms of gear, really, because my guys didn’t want to stand out too much in the crowd. Still, it’s better than robbing corpses.”

“I wouldn’t say so. They have all sorts of gear all the way up to level 50. It looks as if the entire area came here in order to deter the invaders or die.”

“Whatever. It’s up to you.”

“It’s okay. We’ll open this stash of yours, that’s for sure. What did those looters want with you? I saw them talking between themselves. They didn’t seem in a hurry to get a taste of your naginata.”

Arbido shrugged. “They were weird. They could kill me in their own sweet time. At first I couldn’t even move. One of them stumbled over me and saw that I was alive. You can’t imagine how pleased he was! That grin of his! He said to the others, “We need to bind this one! We can carry him to the old well and throw him down. Once the Reapers have him, we can count on a reward!”

“What did you say? The Reapers? Never heard about them.”

“Neither had I,” Arbido headed toward a small ravine, then pointed at two flat rocks on the ground. “That’s my stash, down there.”

* * *

Arbido’s stash proved untouched. I moved the rocks aside and scooped the sand out until I discovered three large chests.

Arbido opened them and quickly equipped himself in some leather armor and a short sword. I was more interested in the scrolls he kept in a separate box.

Arbido proved a foresightful type. Actually, why would his business acumen surprise me?

We couldn’t find anything that would fit Charon though. Never mind. We would think of something, that’s for sure.

The scrolls proved extremely handy. They were nothing special, just a bunch of regular spells, but you didn’t have to be a wizard to use a scroll. All you had to do was break the seal. I took all of them. I also found a slotted belt and moved the Wall of Fire and the Hand of Earth to quick access slots.

My interface was still dead, the icons of my mnemonic abilities inactive. But once I’d handled the scrolls’ yellowed parchment, two of the Founders’ icons suddenly appeared in my mental view. Both were related to high-temperature exposure.

“Step aside, guys!” I focused on the bottom of one of the ravines and activated a Wall of Fire.

It worked nicely! The shrubs exploded in flames, the heat searing my face. The local critters scattered in all directions.

“Why did you have to waste it?” Arbido demanded.

“Because we’d better check it now than be stuck with a dead scroll in the heat of battle. You should have stashed away more of them, man. We could use them, that’s for sure.”

“That’s a bit of wishful thinking now, isn’t it?” he grumbled.

While Arbido and I sorted through his stash, Charon waited on the bank, looking pensive. He paid no heed to the stench of the dead bodies; instead, he watched the waves rolling onto the sand shallows and frothing around the rocks.

“A long time ago there were rivers in my world too,” he half-growled with a sad gasp.

“Why, what happened? Why did they disappear?”

“We entered the era of the Black Sun,” the Haash announced sadly.

“Did that have something to do with the Founders?” I suggested.

He nodded gloomily.

“Can you tell us?”

“Not now,” he growled. “It’s a long story. Zander, when are we going to get to your planet?”

“I’m afraid it’s not going to be easy now,” I glanced at Arbido but he preserved a broody silence. “First we need to find Foggs and Jurgen. Then we’ll go for a walk. I have an old friend living nearby. He might be able to tell us more about all this.”

Charon shook his head. “You just said this is a made-up world. Does it really matter what happened here?”

His words made me think. The idea of a game was alien to him. The Haash viewed their lives as the only possible reality.

“Listen, Charon, why didn’t you ask me to send you to your own star system?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go back home and see how things are going there?”