Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) (11 page)

We were within a stone’s throw of the woods. “Foggs,” I looked around until I saw an old pile of broken branches overgrown with moss. “Let’s go fetch him a few bits of wood. It’s not as if it’ll cost us anything.”

“Why do you think we came here? To complete some stupid community-work quests or to rescue our in-modes?”

“One doesn’t affect the other,” I snapped.

* * *

The Chrystal Sphere

The old forest sprite got all emotional. We’d refused to take his neurograms and his rusty sword, so he accompanied us all the way back to the river bank.

“There’re no boats left,” he said ruefully. “Those cack-handed wizards burned everything in sight. You’ll have to swim, I’m afraid. We should have taken a few floaty branches with us,” he said with regret.

“Leave it,” I said. “We’ll manage. You’d better tell us: have they killed all the Neuros? Has no one survived at all?”

“No idea! From what I heard, a few castles are still holding,” his outstretched hand pointed at the wisps of mist floating over the water. “Beware of the gray mist. Our village men said if you die from it, you’ll never respawn again. What do you need in the land of the Reapers?”

“We need to get a few friends out,” I said in all honesty.

“You’d better take this, then,” Forrest offered me a scroll. “Only break the seal when there’s no other way.”

“Thanks.”

While we were talking, Foggs had decided to set an example and had begun swimming across.

“Your turn,” I nudged Arbido to the water edge.

He cast a fearful glance at the rippling waters, took a deep breath and stepped in. Immediately he lost his footing and sank shoulder-deep.

He panicked. “Zander, I can’t swim!”

“We should have found him a horse,” Forrest creaked, “only there’re none left, are there?”

Arbido struggled, splashing about right next to the bank. I was forced to get in the water too. The steep sides of the bank plunged into a clay bottom. “Grab at my belt! Stop freaking out!”

With a splash, Charon jumped in the water. After about half a minute, his head finally resurfaced. He had a very peculiar way of swimming, his arms pressed to his body, his legs kicking. He looked perfectly at home in the water.

By now, Foggs was already halfway to the other bank, struggling with the current.

“Zander, don’t leave me!” Arbido kept flapping his arms around, preventing me from saving him.

“Stop it! No one’s gonna drown!”

“Water is getting inside my armor!”

I kept swimming, trying to pace myself. You had to be really down on your luck to drown in a digital river located in a virtual world. Still, I couldn’t help the realism of the experience. Before those neuroimplants came about, I’d had no problem whatsoever swimming in full knight’s armor.

My Physical Energy indicator began to fade. My vision blurred, my arms refused to move. I was drowning.

Charon hurried to my aid. He supported me with one hand and grabbed Arbido with the other, all the while battling the current. He dragged us out onto the shallow bank and went back to get an equally exhausted Jurgen.

We sat on the bank, gasping. Water poured from under our armor. Wet clothes clung to our shuddering bodies.

It was taking us too long to restore our strength. Which was bad news: apparently, our in-game abilities couldn’t help us much. When I’d picked up the scrolls though, a new tab containing a few simple spells had appeared in my interface. I tried Healing and Vigor but neither worked. Our lives continued to dwindle.

Groaning, Jurgen collapsed onto the wet sand next to me. He lay sprawled there for a while, staring at the sky. Then he propped himself up on an elbow.

“It’s only going to get worse,” he said. “We don’t even know how far we have to walk. What if we have to fight?”

I kept thinking about that too. Whoever it was, they weren’t likely to let us through without a struggle. “Can’t we block the data coming from our in-mods?”

“Too risky, isn’t it? At these authenticity levels... The in-mode feedback prevents us from overexerting ourselves. Feeling sick is basically a fuse. If we switch it off, our bodies might burn out, it’s as simple as that.”

“So you’d rather drown in a virtual river, would you?” Arbido snapped.

Foggs walked over to us. “It’s all frozen over there,” he pointed in the direction where we were about to head.

“Jurgen, I’d like you to disconnect my in-mode’s sensors,” I wrote access codes for him in the sand. “Don’t touch yours for the moment. Three of us is enough.”

Foggs nodded his approval. His Physical Energy levels were fine, and so were Charon’s. We still had to find out why.

“If you wish,” Jurgen grudgingly complied. “Just remember that-“

“It’s my decision. Here, take my navigator.”

* * *

The energy surge was incredible. It felt as if someone had breathed life back into me.

While Jurgen was busy with my hyperspace navigator disabling some of my in-mode functions, Foggs did a quick recon of the area. I couldn’t agree more with Forrest: the defenders’ wizards had done a very sloppy job. Then again, how much could they see in this weird mist? The whole bank was pockmarked with deep craters; it was singed in some places and frozen in others. The wizards must have used blanket attacks wasting inordinate amounts of mana with virtually nothing to show for it.

“Are you two done?” Foggs sat down next to me.

“We are,” I replied. “I feel much better now.”

“Then you’d better come with me. I want to show you something.”

He took me to a very unusual group of statues. Three goblins, a couple of orcs and five armed peasants had been caught in a Frost spell. The mist enveloping the shore had conserved its effect.

“Could these be the Reapers?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Foggs replied. “More like their cannon fodder.”

We walked on. Soon we emerged into a large burned-out glade strewn with the bodies of mobs disfigured by fire.

“Could this mist block their respawning?” Foggs wondered.

“I think so. Forrest told us so, didn’t he?

I noticed a dead ogre. A direct hit from a ballista had pinned him to the log wall of a squat hastily built fortification. A spiked club had fallen from the giant’s stiff fingers. It might actually make a nice weapon for Charon. The magic oak it was made of was as strong as steel.

“Heavy!” Foggs struggled to lift it. “Let’s go give it to Charon to cheer him up a bit.”

Indeed, Charon was sitting all hunched up on the river bank.

“Here, take this. It’s for you. Perfect, don’t you think?”

Charon cast a disinterested glance over the weapon.

“Hey, man, whassup?” Foggs crouched next to him. “You shouldn’t get so worked up. Forrest loves telling stories just to scare people. You believed him, didn’t you?”

My mnemonic chat icon suddenly blinked. Things were definitely different on this bank. My interface seemed to be waking up. It must have had something to do with the proximity of the Corporation’s testing grounds.

Arbido startled and swung round. The door of a fisherman’s hut creaked open, letting out Jurgen. He was holding a harpoon and an expired torch.

“Mnemonic communications are back up,” he squinted at the light. “Who activated them?”

“I did,” Charon said.

“Why, what did you want? Why did you call me?”

“Zander asked me about my world,” Charon gasped hotly. “I couldn’t explain it with words. I want you to see for yourselves! This is what happened a thousand years ago,” he closed his eyes and froze, wheezing.

The mental images he forwarded to us felt like a very old faded memory. They transported me to an alien setting. Glaciers rose all around. I could see craters encircled by ice ridges and an occasional cliff — the lifeless landscape of an ice-bound planet devoid of any atmosphere. I could just make out the dark skyline of a city lying far ahead. Its architecture was dominated by oblong shapes; most buildings looked like the yet unopened buds of some fantastical flowers encrusted with frost, immobilized by an abrupt ice age.

The picture shifted as if Charon had raised his head to look up at the sky.

Deep space gaped overhead, studded with bright clusters of unblinking stars. In one place their pattern seemed to be overlapped by an invisible spherical object. I couldn’t make out any details: I could at best compare it to a blob of darkness against a backdrop of gloom. But as I’ve mentioned already, the Haash are capable of seeing part of the infrared spectrum so the longer he looked, the clearer the various shades of temperature appeared.

There was a source of energy lurking within the mysterious dark celestial body!

“Our star,” Charon wheezed.

Their sun had gone out? Was that how their planet had lost its atmosphere?

No, that couldn’t be right. A dead star looked totally different. Its surface was obliged to emit a weak reddish light. The agony of a star normally lasts billions of years, but Charon had just mentioned a millennium.

The picture blurred, moving, as it returned to the sad panorama of the glaciers as cold and gloomy as the morning twilight.

A narrow staircase cut in ice spiraled down a crater’s side. I could see a few cliff ledges and some kind of buildings below.

The picture blurred, then came back into focus.

I saw a frosted-over airlock gate. It was ajar. Behind it a tunnel descended under the surface, deep into the depths of the planet’s crust where its magma core still preserved a semblance of warmth, allowing the remnants of the Haash civilization to survive.

The descent seemed to be never-ending. The enormous artificial spherical caves were all deserted. I came across occasional structures that looked like underground shipyards. I recognized the familiar outlines of
yrobs
decaying in the grip of their service towers.

The local civilization kept retreating. Step by step, year after year the Haash continued to lose their battle against the cold. Forced to abandon their underground dwellings and workshops, they continued to dig, deeper and deeper, in order to start afresh, losing time, energy and knowledge. One doomed generation after another kept going down in history until one day a discovery was made at an underground building site. A mysterious fragment of an alien spaceship had been found on the shore of a gigantic underground lake whose leaden waters rippled deep below.

Charon opened his eyes. He shrugged as if trying to shake off his frozen stupor. Mental contact didn’t come naturally to him. His concentration disrupted, he was forced to switch to a more familiar communication mode.

“That discovery gave us hope,” he said hoarsely. “The hope to be able to jump to another star system and find a new home there.”

“How did you manage to fly your ship through hyperspace? Tell me!” Jurgen demanded.

“I don’t know. I can only fly
yrobs
. I wasn’t privy to the sacred mystery. Only the chosen ones knew how the jump worked: those who built and controlled our starship.”

“The jump, was it instant?” I asked.

“It was,” Charon lowered his head in sorrow. “We failed to find a new home. We met Dargians instead. They attacked us straight away. No negotiations, nothing. The battle was brief. Only two wings of
yrobs
managed to escape. One retreated toward Argus. Humans killed them all. My wing attempted to take cover on the destroyed station. Rash took us prisoner. The rest you know.”

“And what had happened to your star? Tell us!”

“Alien machines did that. They built,” Charon faltered, searching for the right word, “they built a
shell
.”

“So your sun didn’t go out completely, then?” Arbido sounded surprised.

“
Nowr
. It turned black. There was no warmth coming from it anymore. It happened many generations ago.”

“We call it a Dyson sphere,” Jurgen said. “It’s an artificial structure that captures a star’s entire energy output. The creatures that built it must have been incredibly advanced technologically — and desperate for energy.”

“Not creatures. Machines,” Charon repeated. “Our ancestors tried to rid themselves of them but failed. Now it’s happening to you. I’m very sorry.”

“Oh please!” Foggs exclaimed in indignation. “Who are you listening to? This Forrest will tell you everything you want to hear just to get you to fetch him some old branches!”

I sat next to Charon. “How many of you are left?”

“A few hundred. They’re building another ship. A big one. One that allows them to spend countless years flying to the stars. Not everybody trusts alien technologies.”

“Where do they want to go?”

“Our objective was to find a habitable planet and communicate its system’s coordinates back to the rest of us.”

“So that other ship, is it equipped with the Founders’ communications too?”