Shepherd's Crook: Omegaverse: Volume 2 (8 page)

Phani Mutha smiled, taking a sip of his beer. He was going to open a pet shop.

Chapter 12

Duncan laughed, reading the email from Phani. He thought that the man had a brilliant idea; just about every player in the game had at least an apartment. Who wouldn’t want a dog or two, or maybe some cats or other pets to liven their place up. Duncan had enjoyed the fish tank, and that was only a display, really; the fish in it were in no way an artificial intelligence.

“What’s funny?” asked Matt.

“Nothing, just a sec,” grinned Duncan, sending off his response to Phani, agreeing to the proposal. The Fauna VI facility was expensive, a couple of million credits - about the profits from a couple of dozen of Eta Bootis runs - but he had no doubt that the pet store would rapidly pay for itself. Besides, he thought, they’d need the facility for colonization eventually anyway.

“Get your head in the game!” shouted Vince, laughing, “We drop in three minutes!”

He was in a shuttle with his four friends, Shannon again the command and control, preparing for combat while an audible countdown sang out; currently sounding off every minute. They’d all received a news flash this afternoon, along with all of the other players based at the Kepler station, that an invasion was occurring on one of the planets in the sector and that a large, joint operation to repulse the attack had been called for that evening.

Mission control was busier than Duncan had ever seen it during his, admittedly short, time in the game. Squads of five jostled to get through airlocks into ships around the entire circumference of the station. Once inside, the countdown building the excitement, everyone read about the upcoming mission’s parameters.

“What’s an ‘orbit drop’” asked Duncan.

“Very cool!” said Vince.

“Yeah,” added Clancey. “Instead of landing and waiting or taking back off, the shuttle will remain in orbit and we’ll jump like paratroops out of the back.”

“It’s only done every now and then,” continued Matt. “It would probably get old if we did it every mission, but this time …”

“With probably hundreds of groups of players,” interjected Vince.

Matt nodded, “ … it should be very, very cool.”

“And I have to sit up here in the shuttle with my thumb up my ass,” grumbled Shannon.

“Lucky thumb,” cracked Vince.

“Stoofoo, jackass!” laughed Shannon.

A message came over the loudspeaker, “Two minutes to drop!”

“Won’t we splat? asked Duncan.

“Nah,” said Matt, “we’ll fall through the atmosphere just fine. Keep your helmet faceplate closed. A parachute will automatically open.”

“Pretty near the ground,” added Clancey, “so don’t panic.”

Duncan went back to his inventory screen, selecting gear, donning armor.

“Shannon,” said Matt, “can you find us some nice safe territory to land on?”

“On it,” she said. “It looks like our little sector of responsibility is just to the west of a small town. I’ll put you down just behind a hill near there. It looks like it’s covering the line of sight to the down, and there’s a copse of trees nearby to the north.”

“Sounds good,” said Matt.

“But I’m going to drop Vince right damn in the middle of the town square.”

“Even better,” laughed Vince.

“One minute to drop!”

Duncan had finished with his armor, and it, as well as his plasma rifle, were connected through to the shuttle’s conduit power feed. He checked that his m1911 .45 was loaded, a round in the chamber. He had plenty of grenades.

“Thirty seconds to drop!”

“Aw, shit!” yelled Duncan. “I know what I need.”

“What,” asked Clancey, concerned.

“10 seconds to drop!”

“A friggin’ Pearlight conduit rail-gun with a Hawkeye scope!”

“5 seconds to drop!”

His friends all started laughing. Then they jumped.

Duncan looked to his left, then to his right, then back to the front. All around him, and he assumed behind him, meteoric streaks of fire were etching through the atmosphere of the planet as hundreds of players dropped from shuttles spread over hundreds of kilometers. He looked down toward the rapidly approaching ground; still probably the better part of a hundred thousand meters below him.

“How do I control this,” he asked.

“Control what?” came Shannon’s voice, calm.

“This drop. My attitude.”

“Are you out of control?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

She laughed softly, “Don’t worry about it, sweetie. Your fall and landing are all automatic. If it gets too much, just close your eyes. You’ll be able to feel the parachute when it opens.”

Duncan gulped. He was, he had to admit, not a fan of heights. Even standing on a ladder could make him woozy. He had recurring nightmares that involved merely standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. Interestingly, though, he wasn’t bothered by heights as long as he was strapped into something. Roller coasters never bothered him; he’d even flown in a small, two seat, aerobatic open cockpit biplane through loops and rolls. He’d enjoyed that.

Falling, however, affected him physiologically, even in games. Even in flat, non-VR games played on computer monitors. He couldn’t even leap off of a cliff or building in a game without feeling a lightness in his gut, an uncomfortable tingling in his scrotum. He looked upward, focusing on the streaks, now disappearing as the players all dropped into the atmosphere and slowed.

“Where’s all this heat bleeding to?” he wondered aloud. “How are we not all burning up?”

“It’s a game,” laughed Matt. “It’s magic masquerading as ‘old one’ technology.”

“Isn’t that kind of lazy?” Duncan asked, “Game design wise?” He was trying to keep his mind occupied; to keep from looking below the clouds that were inching into the lower part of his vision.

“As long as it’s internally consistent,” said Vince, “it doesn’t matter. What was that Asimov quote?”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” answered Clancey, “and it was Clarke, not Asimov.”

“Yeah,” said Vince, “that’s the one. They could probably justify actual magic-looking game aspects by some technological crutch.”

“You could shoot magic-missiles from your fingers or lightning bolts from your eyes,” he continued, “and explain it away by saying it’s nanobots or some Tesla-esque electrical focusing device or some such.”

“So,” responded Duncan, relieved as clouds enveloped his view, “as long as you have some bullshit pseudo-technical explanation you can science-fiction-ize any mystical, metaphysical horse-shit that man has thought up over the last few thousand years.”

“Yup,” said Vince, “even death can be overcome. We resurrect in game. They explain it by saying it’s done with some highly advanced rapid cloning. One of the partial scientific justifications is that it can only bring you back from the last copy; the last time you checked in at a space station. That’s mainly a game design decision too. If you had no penalty for death in the game, it would become meaningless. So adding that you lose all experience points as well as loot acquired since your last backup makes it hurt just enough to matter, but not enough to really screw you over.”

“Like permanent, dead-is-dead, death.”

“Exactly,” said Vince, “if you had to start over from the beginning, how many people would continue to keep playing?”

“I’m glad we can resurrect in the game,” said Duncan, finally looking down. Bile rose in his throat as the ground, a few hundred meters below, rushed toward him, dizzying him. “I get the feeling I’m going to need it very,
very
soon.”

Chapter 13

Eric West looked up from his computer screen as the phone on his desk rang. He pulled on a headset and answered the line.

“Emu Systems customer support,” he said, “my name is Eric. How can I help you?”

“The internet,” said the female voice on the line, “isn’t working.”

He closed his eyes, mentally sighed, and began filling out the contact sheet on his computer. Eric asked the lady, who sounded elderly and as computer literate as a terrier, for her name, contact information - all of the info his manager could use to show what an amazing department they had and how he deserved a large bonus and, maybe, a company leased BMW. Of course, Eric thought,
he
being the manager. Eric would never see any of the perks his efforts provided to the suit wearing, hair slicked, public school boy who ran the department.

After he spent the better part of a half an hour trying to explain that the internet was working correctly, and that the connection to said internet provided by his company was also working, and that the wireless router in her house was apparently the cause of the problem - a router that had nothing to do with his company - he was stymied by the classic customer checkmate. She demanded to speak to his manager.

Eric could hear him, in his beautifully appointed office, apologizing on behalf of Eric; his face reddened. Embarrassed and angry, he closed out the contact form and assigned it to his manager.

He dashed off a quick email to his clanmates, explaining that they’d need to each pitch in to pay for the insurance on the replacement for the HMS Westy; adding that if they’d been available to man their stations, he wouldn’t have lost the ship in the first place. A lie, he knew, but he felt he could use this setback as an opportunity to enforce the need for the group to play as a group.

As he clicked send, he heard movement behind him. He opened a data sheet for a new series of high speed modems being rolled out over the next few months and pretended to be absorbed in it until he heard a cough behind him.

Eric turned in his chair, forced himself to return the crooked half-smile his manager wore. Eric wondered if the guy had picked up that mien learning to seduce first year coeds at Oxford or Cambridge or wherever.

“It’s not what you say, Eric,” the manager began, using his rote speech, “but how you say it.” He smiled fully now, beaming, “I got the old bat happy. Gave her a free month of service and the number of the router support line, but,” the crooked smile returned, “it shouldn’t have come to that, should it?”

“If I had the authority to give her a free month, I would have,” he paused, “sir.”

“Not good enough, Eric,” he said dismissively, “I’ve told you before, you’ve got to be able to deflect these types before it ever gets to that. It should never come to my attention, much less become my problem,” he frowned. “Work on that.”

“Aye aye, sir,” said Eric, turning back to his computer, seething.

Eric left work, a little early, leaving by the side door away from his manager’s office. He walked out into the early September evening, frustrated. He wasn’t concerned with his job; he’d closed off that annoyance as he left his cubicle. He was frustrated by his inability to outfit the HMS Westy as much as he wanted. Needed, he corrected himself.

He boarded the bus home, wondering how he’d raise the funds to buy the cladding that would cloak his ship from pirates. He’d figure that out later, he thought, then began doing the mental calculations for the advantage a cloak would allow him.

If he hunted outside of a gravity well, he only had to get up to the few percent of C required to make a jump. He needed his hunting ground to be far enough away from the likely attack point that the pirate wouldn’t detect his sudden acceleration until it was too late. If he was ten light seconds away, but it took him thirty light seconds to accelerate to jump speed, then his adversary would get twenty seconds notice before the attack.

The Westy had to be, he thought, close enough to be able to “see” the attack quickly, but not so close as to spoil his attack before it began. He’d try one-eighth of an astronomical unit, or AU. That was about a light minute. Sixty seconds.

So sixty seconds after an attack, he’d see it, then go to flank speed. If it took him thirty seconds to get to speed, he’d still be able to jump in on top of the pirate a minute and a half after it had attacked the cargo ship. That was much better than thirteen or so minutes he was used to working with.

In addition to being a larger shock to the pirate, to be hunted so quickly, it would give the Westy a much smaller area of space to sort through; if he was close enough to detect the actual launch of the torpedo, not just the explosion, he’d have a pin-point location to jump to.

Eric smiled into space, confusing the little girl bus passenger who happened to have glanced at him at just that moment. Then Eric stood as he reached his stop and, rejuvenated, dashed off the bus and to his building.

Eric spoke into the phone, this time in his flat.

“Yes, I know I’m a little late on the August payment, but I’ll send it off today.”

He paused, listening.

“No,” he said, “it will just be the minimum amount, I’m afraid. I’ve had a bit of a family crisis, you see,” he smiled, trying to project that friendliness into the phone line and through to the credit card support agent on the other end.

“Thank you, yes, everything will turn out alright for mother, I’m sure,” he continued, “but it would be awfully helpful if I could get a little extension on my credit line. To help her out.”

He listened.

“Really?” he brightened. “Thank you. That will help immensely.”

He closed the line, ending the third such call he’d made to his creditors in the last hour. His lines of credit now extended, he had enough, barely, to add the cladding to the HMS Westy and begin hunting earnestly now. He smiled and, finishing the last of his microwaved dinner, walked into his computer room and sat heavily in his chair.

“Number One,” he said, “bring up the purchase listings for cloaking devices and cladding, if it pleases you.”

Eric looked to his newly updated sensor systems. The cladding he’d just purchased wouldn’t stand up to much of a direct scan; but it would help. He’d need a full cloaking system in order to really be invisible at a distance to an active search, but the cladding would allow him to sit quietly and not have to worry about being detected by a visual scan.