Server Extant

High over the dark side of Epsilon server, Silias, one of Supa’s air wing was busting his motors at the limits of their altitude ceiling. Below him, the crenelated, desert-like terrain of the server rolled around its abbreviated horizon. An R1 planet, like the earth, might have a diameter of twelve thousand kilometers or so, but a Knet server surface was never wider than thirty kilometers, and even that was allot of detail to simulate. The ratio of terrain height to circumference gave them a ‘Little Prince’-like quality, spherical islands in space. Most server surface was low-poly, terrain carved out and detailed by fractal generators at the point of creation, but here were high detail areas too.

Silias was the first to see the link markers. They appeared as thin, blue columns, ascending to infinite distance.

When a link was activated, it sent up a column of light that penetrated everything, and marked its location to anyone within visual range. Silias knew that the entry points that had vomiting Kysairon fighters into the heart of his besieged city were here, that, over the darkling horizon, these delicate beams marked the location of the attacker’s landing ships.

He thumbed his comm to ‘high priority’, to send a message straight to the leadership.

‘Got them!’ he said, ‘links spotted, I got their landers!’ He switched to his squad channel. ‘All air units converge on my marker!’ There was a chatter of enthused agreement. On his tac map he saw the green triangles of his peers alter course and begin to converge on his location. They were widely scattered, however, and time was now of the essence. They had to hit the landers, but if he did it alone he was liable to be blasted out of the air before he could even get a shot off.

‘What do you see?’ came M0nsterbra1ns’ voice from the comm.

‘Closing now,’ replied Silas. ‘Let me get up on them.’

Silas dropped altitude and descended to a dozen meters or so above the rocky surface, heading, at top velocity, for the link lights. When he’d closed to a kilometer, he rose a little and swung right, coming up over the terrain clutter. Immediately visible were three Kysairon landers. They looked like featureless cylinders, standing on triple struts, illuminated, from below, by floodlights. Thirty meters out from the ships, an array of high-cap links were set up in a semi-circle, flashing and flickering as they accommodated a two-way traffic of roaches, hurrying to and from the holds of the landers like a line of hump-backed ants. Those coming from the holds were carrying red ammo boxes on their backs, the ones returning from the links, to the carrier holds, were not.

‘You seeing this?’ asked Silias, knowing the forward base must be fixed on his video feed. ‘Three landers. They’re humping crates into the links.’

‘Yeah,’ came DeLuca’s voice, ‘they’re stacking the junction vault.’

‘Holy fucken shit, really?’ Silias was shocked.

‘Do you think you could hit some of the crates if you did a run on them now?’ asked M0nsterbra1ns.

‘I don’t know. Probably. But they probably have a defense line, they might down me before I can get a shot in. If I wait-’

‘No time,’ said M0nsterbra1ns, ‘take the shot.’

‘Okay,’ said Silas, with the stomach-tightening clutch of excitement that every gamer lived for. There was no point in over-thinking this. Any angle of approach could be the wrong or right one, and he had not time for a circuit that might get him spotted anyway. Just go at ’em.

He wheeled and accelerated directly at the landers, as low over the flashing terrain of gullies and serpentine ridges as he dared. He pulled up and popped over the rise. He saw, in sudden, spectacular array, the three great cylinders of the Kysairon ships, the flood-lit landing zone, the swarming activity. But his raptor’s eye was locked on the only only thing that mattered, the line of red boxes, being transported from the open cargo holds to the links. He fired, and the nose gun sketched out a jittering line of sparks and dust along the ground, as the Kysairons began to scatter. Go into it, you fucks, his brain screamed, trying to get the bullets into crate line, and, an instant later, they did. There was a red blossom, as a crate was hit and a chain reaction flashed, like explosive dominoes, to the hull of the first lander. As Silas shied off his run, the lander went up, in an explosion to warm the heart of the most jaded pyromaniac. Wreckage was flung out by the blast, trailing wreaths of fire, striking the second Kysairon cylinder. The average roach, instincts honed by a thousand pointless fatalities, could teach any rat a thing or two about the art of deserting sinking ships, but most on the flat were immolated before they could scatter. The second lander began to topple.

Silas whirled around in a looping arc, desperately craning his head so as not to miss the spectacle. The second cylinder struck on its side and blew up too. The shock sent his little vehicle reeling across the sky again, like a leaf, as he struggled to bring it back under control.

In the forward base, two large red squares and a whole swarm of littler ones disappeared from the battlemap. The room erupted into cheers.

Silas got his machine upright and saw that the landing site had been consumed by two great columns of ascending dust and smoke, wreathed with lighting. Sailing, turning lazily over and over through the air, to vast heights, was an expanding corona of wreckage, some of it trailing elegant ribbons of fire. It was a truly stupendous, beautiful sight.

But, even as his thoughts turned to the third lander, his luck ran out. Silias didn’t see the Kysairon rankers who emerged from their hiding places in the folds of the earth below, and barely had time to register the violent disintegration of his machine as his K-Bee was struck by heat/energy and kinetic weapons. The sky upending, as he spun into the ground. His visual field went blank.

KILLED BY TAKATYCHO

‘Fuck you, Takatycho!’ said Silas, in the dark.

* * *

In the P-fed depot, two of the high-capacity links went dead. Lopslide looked across to Cubist, who shouted, ‘They just hit our landers. Two down.’

‘Fuck! I knew it! Our charger?’

‘It’s okay, they got the other two.’

‘Thank fuck. Alright, that’s it, we’re out. Carnivous!’

‘Carnivous!’ yelled Cubist, to where the tall, slim figure stood on the pyramid of red crates, ‘They got to our landers. We’re out! We’re leaving, now!’

The figure did not move. Cubist looked across to Lopslide, who shook his head. His mind was vibrating with an intense instinct to flee. The ground was about to drop out from under them. They were standing next to a stack of explosives that probably had enough power to crush the Vault and destroy Epsilon’s junction box and Cubist was intensely aware of the appalling, unnecessary risks they were taking. If it blew, if one of these treacherous little roach bastards decided to pop a bullet into it, just for the fuck-you fun of it, not even his kingpin Id could eat the damage. And now the carriers were going down.

Without another word, he stepped through one of the remaining links and vanished, followed by Lopslide. That was the signal that released the hesitating rankers from their obligation. They bolted for the links.

As his associates fled, Carnivous stood, in silence, staring at the junction box, now half submerged by a geometric stack, like a great, red pyramid of explosive Lego. As the bulk of his raiders fled though the links, Carnivous’ cruel head turned to survey the, now quiet, depot interior. A dozen of his lowest-ranked followers remained, staring up at him in silence.

‘Deactivate all the links but one.’ Carnivous said, in his cold, heavy, pitch-shifted voice, ‘and change its exit code to two, two-five-nine-zero. Place the high-cap on top of the stack. Retreat to ambush points and prepare for attack.’ They hurried to comply.

The kingpin’s gaze returned to the junction box.

* * *

In the forward command, M0nsterbra1ns and the remaining officers stared at the map in consternation.The jubilance over the destruction of the landers had been short-lived. Silias was down and the other K-Bees were too far away to attack in time. Even now, the final lander would be finishing its work.

‘If they’ve stacked the junction,’ said said Marquis, ‘but they haven’t blown it yet.’

‘Probably still getting their people out,’ said DeLuca.

‘Then we’ve still got time!’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ‘We can get in there and kill their trigger men, we can stop them.’

‘That’s suicide,’ said DeLuca. ‘All it takes is a single ricochet into that thing and the whole lot will blow.’

‘We can use military teleporters’ replied M0nsterbra1ns, ‘At close range we can penetrate the Depot. They shut the field down so they could use their links.’

‘Then they’ll see the tele icons before we come though and trigger the stack.’

‘Maybe’ said M0nsterbra1ns, ‘but I’m doing it. Silias bought us time. We can still fix this!’

‘Don’t,’ said DeLuca. ‘It’s over. We lost this one.’

‘I’m not losing an entire server!’ shouted M0nsterbrains. ‘I should have gone down there right from the start. I should have trusted my instincts-’

‘Boss-’ said DeLuca.

‘I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault. But I am not going to sit here, like a hemorrhoid, and wait for them to blow it. Who’s with me?’ He looked around the table.

‘Fuck it’ said Marquis, heavily. ‘I’ll come. If we lose this server, I have no future in P-Fed anyway. None of us do.’

‘We could become rebels’ said DeLuca. ‘Just take off.’

‘You can, if you want’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ‘I wouldn’t blame you. But my name is on this mess. I’m not going to run. It wouldn’t be..’ he hesitated. The word he was looking for was ‘honorable’, but it seemed pretentious. ‘Cool’ he finished.

‘Well, those of us who are going better do it now’ said Marquis. ‘They must be getting ready to trigger.’

‘I’ll come,’ sighed DeLuca.

‘Get the telies’ said M0nsterbra1ns.

* * *

Inside the depot, there was a waiting silence. The great pyramid of red crates brooded on its vast, explosive potential, crowned at the top with a column of light, the one remaining link. Hidden, in ambush positions, about it, were a dozen roaches. Forbidden to use projectile weapons or explosives because of the risk of accidentally triggering the stack, they nervously shifted in place, chain-axes and whipcracks in hand. There was a thrilling sense, in each of them, of being suicide troops, the last defenders. The high-value players had bailed. No one knew what would come next. Carnivous could not be seen.

‘Teleporter!’ hissed a roach and pointed at a little yellow cube, about two centimeters across, that had appeared in the corner of the loading chamber and skittered up against a wall.

‘Here’s another!’ said another roach, further down the length of the depot’s cavern.

‘Split up and find them all!’ said the first roach and they scattered, trying to keep the teleport icons in view as they leapt from surface to surface, mapping out the room. The little yellow boxes found ceilings and tracing around objects. Their operator was mapping out the exit-point by touch, otherwise he or she could transport into some solid object. The Knet did not allow that, so it resolved the conflict by combining both physical masses into inert matter with a combined vert count and all prop values set to zero.

The yellow icons were mapping out their perimeter.

‘Guys!’ whispered a roach, excitedly, ‘get on this, it’s gonna come through!’

Suddenly, DeLuca did. Luckily facing her opponent, she was able to parry his swing by slicing off his arms, and bifurcating him down the middle with her military chainsword. M0nsterbra1ns was less lucky, a Kysairon roach was behind him, and managed to wrap him in a whipcrack’s filament, but he jumped at his attacker, getting the angle to slice downward off his spin and decapitate him. Both roach corpses collapsed, spraying pretty awesome-looking digital blood.

’Get ‘em!’ yelled the surviving roaches, and there was a scuffling, metal-zanging battle that fell swiftly to silence. DeLuca and M0nsterbra1ns stood over the corpses of a dozen, low-ranking Kysairons. They listened. Silence.

DeLuca made the ‘WTF?’ hand-gesture, pointing around, by which she meant, ’where is Marquis?’

The controller shook his head. Marquis had abandoned them. Either he had never intended to activate his teleporter or he had chickened out, at the last instant. They were alone.

’Remember’ M0nsterbra1ns, signed, putting a finger to his head then making a gun finger, ‘No shootie.’

DeLuca misinterpreted that as a suggestion they not commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head, but she hardly needed to be reminded not to fire any projectiles in here. She nodded. ‘Look around’ he motioned, and they split up to search, going clockwise and counter clockwise around the cluttered perimeter of the depot.

The tension was singing in M0nsterbra1ns’ nerves. There was either a trigger man still in here, or some bomb timer. They had minutes, if that, to find it. Thank God none of the enemy suicide troops, left in the vault, had fired at the stack. But.. why didn’t they? All it took was one little bullet. M0nsterbra1ns reflected that there was at least one advantage they had; there would be no rankers in here. No one would risk a more valuable Id in proximity to this massive bomb. No one in their right mind, anyway.

He had finished the half-circuit of the Depot. There was no sign of DeLuca. M0nsterbra1ns moved cautiously around another column and suddenly found her. DeLuca’s digital corpse, split in half, intestines spread out beside the body in loops, a disgusting simulated detail M0nsterbra1ns thought entirely unnecessary, lay, in a splattering of blood. Beyond her was the stack.

M0nsterbra1ns exhaled to see the sight. A great, pyramidal pile of explosive crates covered the vault’s blunt sides, ascending to a peak. From its tip rose a column of pure blue light. Someone had placed a link at its summit. This symbol of escape, survival and salvation, resting at the top of a great, deadly trap, chilled M0nsterbra1n’s gamer-soul.

Carnivous was standing before it.

‘I’ve laid waste to your little kingdom,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t difficult.’

‘What is this, you idiot?’ demanded the Epsilon controller, coming out of the shadows.

‘Don’t you know?’ replied the kingpin, gesturing to great space. ‘An arena. This link is the only way out and the only way to it is through me. One of us will leave.. or neither.’

‘You ridiculous fucking maniac’ gritted M0nsterbra1ns. ‘You trash my server for this?’

‘This isn’t about some server,’ replied Carnivous, ‘It’s about you, M0nsterbra1ns. I’ve come to rescue you. From your crawling progress towards mediocrity and compromise. I’ve come, to raise you, into the upper air. With me.’

M0nsterbra1ns looked around, taking in the territory. Clever. They could not use their embedded weapons here, without triggering the stack. So it would be hand-to-hand. A test of pure reflex, not firepower. A situation Carnivous apparently thought would advantage him.

‘You’ve gone totally sideways, haven’t you?’ said M0nsterbra1ns. ‘You’re betting your kingpin Id on a single chainsword fight?’

‘And yours’ said Carnivous. ’The word.. is deathmatch.’

The P-Fed controller understood what Carnivous meant, and it made him even angrier to think that this nutcase had so adroitly lured him into his personal melodrama. I never should have been controller, came the rueful thought. Too late for that now. But at the same time, he felt the unsettling awakening of something else, an old feeling he’d almost forgotten in the careful toil of climbing P-Fed’s ranks, of ego-debasement, status-accreting and selective risk. It was the thrill, indistinguishable from terror, that the problem-gambler feels as he puts it all on black, the realization that it was all coming down to a single throw. M0nsterbra1ns felt completely present, sharply aware of himself, standing beneath this deadly stack, in presence of an implacable enemy. The noise in his mind died away and all that was left was a simple truth; only one of them would get out of this place alive.

It will be me.

He selected for chainsword and the weapon snapped into his hand.

* * *

In the flying smoke and confusion of the Kysairon landing site, the survivors of the raid were storming out of the scattered links and cramming aboard their remaining lander. Even as Cubist and Lopslide leapt into the cargo bay, the doors were closing and the engines glowing up.

‘Where’s Carnivous?’ yelled Hammerziet. Cubist shook his head. The kingpins strode up the narrow ramp as it lifted and sealed behind them.

The K-Bees of Supa’s surviving air wing, closing on the landing site, were just in time to see the Kysairon lander rise into the sky, on a column of invisible force, sending a great, expanding bow-wave of dust rolling across the land below it.

‘Too late!’ someone yelled on the comm, but, an instant later, another voice burst onto the all-channels.

‘This is picket force, we have arrived over server Epsilon. What is the situation?’

The relief force had arrived.

* * *

Above Epsilon server, six General Purpose Cruisers, or GPCs, the workhorse warship of the P-Fed, had gated in from the server field extends and were splitting into an encircling pattern. There were basically long, armored boxes backed by engines, the internal compartments of which could be fitted with weapons, energy sinks or troop carriers as needed. From the underside of each, four high-powered interceptor/fighters, called Imperialists, fell from their drop bays and accelerated away from the parent ships.

On the control bridge of the lead GPC, the Squadron Commander was trying to raise the city defenses and the server controller, but was receiving no answers. In the abandoned forward command, the battle map crackled with his exasperated inquiries, to an empty room.

‘What the hell?’ said the SC to his subordinate. From his own battle map, one of his imperialist pilots spoke up.

‘I see a lander climbing out of gravity! It’s coming right at the group!’

‘Well, we’ll get this fucker anyway,’ said the SC. ‘Vaporise first and ask questions layer, that’s my motto.’ He pressed the all-comm. ‘All units fire at will. Down that lander.’ To his deck controller he said ‘mag this up, I want to see them blow.’

The bridge screen selected a square of the full field, where a small object could be seen glimmering against the darkened curve of the server planet, and magnified it. A little cylinder was visible, catching a rim of sunlight.

In Knet ‘space’, the empty, gravity-less area that went to full server extents, there was no need for escape velocity to achieve orbital free fall. Knet world mechanics were a sort of convenient short-hand of the R1. Gravity from the surface of the server extended up five hundred meters, then began to fall away inversely, until it was gone at ten kilometers. Only two of the Knet’s nine motors and effectors, #2, the repulsion plate, which pushed against other objects, and the #4 strong force emitter, could lift a mass above the gravity threshold. The imperialists had powerful SFEs, that allowed them flight in and out of Knet ‘space’, but less powerfully-engined masses like the GPCs could easily get dragged into gravity capture and crash if they went too close to server surface.

‘Time to go by-by’ said the SC, in a distinctly dorkish fashion.

The lightly-armored Kysairon lander, basically a storage cylinder with engines on it, was accelerating directly into the combined guns of the picket force. It seemed to be struggling against gravity, which was good, because it meant the thing was packed with high density objects and expensive player Ids. The SC smiled. It wasn’t every day you got to blow up about ten million points worth of prop. This is gonna sting, he thought. Idly, he hoped it wouldn’t just explode but do some form of partial disintegration, as its repulsior plates became unaligned, and fall, burning and spinning, into the darkening surface below. That would look cool.

The guns on the cruiser’s bow mount began to fire. The projectiles from mass/force emitters had to follow the laws of momentum. Arcing your shell onto a moving target in this frictionless environment was an art. However, the SC almost immediately saw sections of the cylinder front rip and peel away, spinning out chunks of wreckage as projectiles struck. He reflected that it was probably easier to hit a target when its approach vector lay right down your own course. He was about to open his mouth to say something to that effect, when he saw the cylinder split apart from within, blown out by the lighting up of several very powerful engines.

‘Charger!’ yelled the SC.

The Kysairon charger, a gleaming wedge of black metal, proceeding from its giant motors to its pointed tip. It was a powered battering ram with a tiny carry load, the rest in mass and engine. No wonder the lander had been struggling, with this monster in its belly. It blew though the wreckage and accelerated right at them.

‘Everybody volley forward, volley forward!’ yelled the SC, ‘Turn aside, engines full, evasive action!’ He realized his comm wasn’t on, activated it, and this time his orders were ’Scatter! Shoot!’ he turned to his sub and shouted, ‘zoom back, extents!’

The big screen jumped back to mag1. The charger, a little black wedge, like an arrow head, outlined by the corona of its engines, was gleaming in the light of the sun. It was growing palpably larger.

* * *

In the cramped steering chamber of the charger, the Kysairon kingpins, backed by a mass of rankers valuable enough to be worth saving, sat behind a single roach pilot. His control panel was simple. There was a joy stick for direction, and the power throttles of seven massive engines. Landing the charger was a real bitch but that was usually more of a problem for whatever it crashed on than the vehicle itself.

The command view had no HUD instrumentation apart from a single, red target, projected onto the screen. The pilot put the target on the lead GPC.

‘Accelerate,’ said Hammerziet, and the pilot put his hands on the master levers and pushed the engines to full. A thrumming vibration in the machine became a dull roar.

‘Do we really want to ram them?’ asked Cubist, uneasily.

‘My turn to be captain!’ said Hammerziet. ‘Everyone else shut up.’

The CGP, was now filling a third of their screen, powering sideways, was flashing from its gun turrets as it sent defensive fire at them. Now they took some hits, swaying left and right as the kinetic objects imparted some of their energy to the larger mass. It gave an impression of the power behind the projectiles.

‘We’re all in here with you’ Cubist pointed out. ‘You’re not alone, in your head, talking to the voices.’

‘Ach, fine,’ said Hammerziet, rolling his eyes, ‘take it off the cruiser then. Just buzz him.’ The pilot made no adjustment.

‘If you want to ram them, ram them!’ said Cubist, ‘I’m not pussying out or nothing.’

‘No, no, no’ replied Hammerziet, ‘we won’t ram him. To save your delicate anus, because I know you homosexuals need to rest it between bouts of that thing you do that is wrong in the Bible.’

‘Ram him then, bitch!’

‘I will, bitch!’ replied Hammerziet. ‘Put the target back on the GPC.’

Again, the pilot made no adjustment. The cross-hairs had never deviated from the now, much larger, enemy ship.

The pilot, a roach-level player called __̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.__ , would later claim his actions as an attempt to assassinate half the clan leadership. However, the truth was that he could not hear Hammerziet, Cubist, or anything other than the classical music (*Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills) he had blasting in his headphones.

‘I’ll tell you what-’ said Cubist.

‘Whoah!’ yelled Hammerziet, realizing they were actually going to hit, and then they did. They were all thrown violently forward and the screen went momentarily dark. Then they were back out, into open space, powering hard for the field extents, as wreckage from the destroyed cruiser whirled about them and fell away, the desperate shots that the other P-Fed ships sent after them widened from their course, diverging left and right, falling impotently behind.

They’d busted off Epsilon server.

* * *

M0nsterbra1ns’ head tumbled, like a surprised football, down the stack of explosive crates and across the floor.

‘Disappointing’ said Carnivous, as his adversary’s body slid after it, a heavy, blood-spouting rag doll.

He stared at the small object below, coming to rest in the gloom, against a pillar. His mask-face was unreadable.

Killed by Carnivous.

He pulled a little roach grenade, a firecracker-powered thing, twisted its timer and tossed it down the descending stack of explosives. He stepped though the link and was gone.

* * *

Streaming over the smoking city in a disciplined V shape, six P-Fed imperialists were rolling around over the highways, choked with corpses, crashed cars and burning high-tops, when they saw the explosion. A bright light illuminated the city from within, and several skyscrapers, their bottom floors sheared away, began to collapse.

‘Holy fuck!’ came the voice on the all-comm, ’we just lost the server!’

On the second ship, the acting SC (the original having been trapped on the engine-less half of his wrecked cruiser, burning up his disconnected comm trying to get someone to save him, as he spun towards gravity capture) was tracking his forces on the battle map. ‘All interceptors back into space!’ He ordered. ‘We just lost junction control. We have to stand by to hold this server. Where is Blut0?’ One of the imperialist was gone from his screen. ‘Did he get downed? What happened?’

‘Dunno,’ replied his XO. ‘Maybe he turned off his tracker.’

‘Someone get on messaging and find out what happened to the garrison. There’s no one on the comm! How the fuck can there be no one on the comm? What happened?’

‘Already on it.’

‘And tell fleet to send everything they have. Once people knows Epsilon’s up for grabs, it’ll be a Roman orgy up here.’

* * *

Carnivous emerged from a link, set up in a small warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Here, its engines glowing dully, was a parked P-Fed imperialist, its cockpit open, it pilot waiting silently in the shadow of the landing gear. The name tag on his uniform read ’Blut0’.

As the kingpin emerged, a flash of light came from the semi-distant city, and there was a rumble. He ignored it.

‘I parked the vehicle as you ordered, O Horned one’, said the pilot, bowing.

Carnivous ascended effortlessly into the cockpit. He ramped the motors. ‘You have done well,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘Remain here and die for the cause.’

‘As you command’ replied the pilot. ‘Wait-!’

The cockpit hatch came down. The imperialist’s engines flashed up, and it blasted itself off the ground. As the dust cleared about him, the P-fed pilot saw the interceptor, standing on its tail, its engine a bright star, as it ascended into the sky.

‘What cause?’ he yelled.