Shepherd Moon: Omegaverse: Volume 1 (13 page)

“I feel completely the opposite,” she said, “I need to be around other people, the more the better, to really get my energy up.”

“That makes you an extrovert.”

“So I guess,” she continued, “that’s why I’m always going from person to person. It keeps me going.”

He laughed. “You’re an energy vampire!”

“I vant to suck your chi” she laughed.

“Would a beer suffice?” he asked.

“You bet!”

Duncan entered the key code to let them into his building, then opened the door for Anna.

“Hey,” he said, “how did you get in here this morning?”

She looked at him, her face serious, “I memorized your code the last time we came in.”

“Really?”

“No,” she laughed, “not really. Someone was coming out as I came up. He held the door. He was very polite.”

“I’m so glad our security is so tight.”

“Anyway,” she laughed again as they entered the elevator, “I did memorize it this time, just now.”

“Well,” he said, “go ahead and impress me. What is it?”

“3201,” she giggled as the door closed. She pressed the button for the fourth, top, floor.

“Damn,” he laughed, “I’ll have to see about getting that changed.”

They left the elevator on the fourth floor, walked down the long hallway to his door. He unlocked, opened it, let her through. It closed behind him as he walked toward the kitchen. He pulled a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, opened them, then joined her where she sat, reclined, on his couch. She was fiddling with his remote.

“TV on”, he said.

“Music channel ‘Anna Child’,” she added. His TV began playing her default playlist, scrubbed from his social network connection to her. He didn’t recognize the song. He didn’t doubt that he’d never heard of the band, just as he didn’t doubt that would be the case for her entire playlist. She took the beer he held out, took a sip, then curled back into the couch, looking at him. He sat next to her.

“Won’t you miss your career?” she asked.

“You’re not going to change the topic of conversation, are you?”

She paused, stared at him earnestly.

“I find the topic very interesting. It’s not only like a next step in human evolution, the changes could be huge and instant. It’ll be a quantum leap in our consciousness.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

He took a sip of his beer.

“In any case,” he continued, “to answer your question. No, I definitely would not miss my career.”

“But you do such cool things,” she countered. “You deal with people all over the world, every day.”

“And people all over the world are no different than you or I. All they really want to do is worry about their own concerns. Nothing we do matters,” he said.

He continued, “I’ll sum it up. Before I moved to Charlottesville to manage a little software development startup, I was in charge of development for a Fortune 500 company in Manhattan. In addition to New York, I had teams in London, Paris, Mumbai, San Francisco and Columbus Ohio reporting to me, daily. I was in charge of developing the vision for a seventy million dollar a year arm of the company. We were the second largest arm of the company.”

He took another sip of his beer, “So one day we were going to have a meeting within the company. Every arm was going to be presenting our plans for the next year. I worked my ass off to get ready. I even had to pull an actual all-nighter the night before the meeting to finish. Everyone else left at five.”

She cocked her head, watching him.

“So the next day, at the meeting, we go around the room. Everyone who was supposed to give a presentation instead had some excuse as to why they weren’t ready. Except me. I was the only one who was done. Do you know what our boss said?”

She smiled, shook her head.

“He said ‘Duncan gets a gold star!’ and then everyone laughed. That was it. It didn’t matter that nobody else had finished, and it sure as shit didn’t matter that I did. A couple of months later, layoffs were announced. I volunteered, took the very nice severance package, and moved here.”

She leaned into him, he put his arm around her.

“So, ‘no’’, he concluded, “I will in no way miss my career.”

They sat listening to music for a while, then ordered a pizza for dinner. Once finished, her ephemeral visit ended as it always did; with a kiss, a goodbye and no mention of the future.

* * *

Duncan entered the bar, saw Clancey was already there. He took an empty stool next to him. Shannon was working the bar tonight, she approached them.

“Beer?” she asked

Duncan nodded, ”and a tequila.”

“Rough day?” asked Clancey

“Not really,” answered Duncan. “I just feel like having a little of the Don,” he smiled.

Shannon poured a generous glass of Don Julio, put it in front of Duncan, then turned to attend the tap.

“Anna never asked if I’d miss tequila,” Duncan muttered, taking a sip.

“What?” asked Clancey.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“So,” continued Clancey, “been on any shopping sprees?”

“Yeah. Bought a fully tricked out Clipper class. Mining rig, extra cargo, best shields and cloaking. You name it, I got it.”

“Holy shit,” said Shannon, rejoining with Duncan’s beer.

“Yeah,” said Clancey, “that must have cost the better part of twenty million.”

“About that,” confirmed Duncan, “but it should be able to get me wherever I want to go. The extra fuel means that I’ll be able to jump to some systems that aren’t on the main nav routes.”

“Maybe there’s a reason they’re not on the main routes,” countered Clancey. “Maybe there’s nothing there worth seeing.”

“Maybe,” grinned Duncan, “maybe not.”

“In any case,” added Shannon, “that’s not really very multiplayer, is it? Are you bored with playing with us already?”

“Nope,” countered Duncan, “far from it. But I’ve still got a boatload of money left to equip with some really good gear. And besides,” he shrugged, “the ship does come with a shuttle. There’s nothing a C and C five can do that my shuttle can’t.”

“Except instantaneous travel. We can’t just zip from the space station to the mission objective like we can with the automated shuttles.”

“And there’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything to do if we do go hunting on our own” said Clancey.

“All true,” said Duncan. He drank from his beer, and wondered why he didn’t tell them about the space station. Probably because he’d just found it and didn’t really know anything about it. That was his first thought. He quickly dismissed it. He knew better. It was really because he was a private person. He just didn’t like people to know his business. He didn’t know why. He just knew that all of the hype about the rail gun auction had bothered him. If he hadn’t sold it anonymously, he’d be famous within the game now. The attention of fame, attention of any kind, was anathema to him. His friends wouldn’t understand that, he knew. Nobody ever did. They always took his aloofness as a personal insult, an editorial on his feelings about them.

Duncan licked the beer foam from his top lip.

“All true,” he reiterated, “but you never know. We might find a good little planet we can terraform.”

“That takes the better part of a year,” said Clancey, “even if you’re doing it full time.”

“But it does generate on-planet missions. We can play those missions; they’re no different from the ones you’ll get at a space station. And completing them helps accelerate the terraforming process.”

“How?” asked Shannon.

“Among the rewards for those missions are usually resources needed by some aspect of your terraforming. And even after terraformation has completed, you still need to build camps, villages and begin to colonize. Completing missions helps to attract colonists, trade. All sorts of stuff.”

“You’ve been reading,” grinned Clancey.

“I have,” admitted Duncan. “Terraforming and colony building are like a long term, real time strategy game. Very long term. Going from a terraformed planet to a full, industrial colony can take years. Real years. I like those kinds of games. So does Jamie.” Their friend Jamie was a hard core gamer, but didn’t really like the first person shooter kind of game that they usually played in the Omegaverse. His friends had been trying to get Jamie into the game as long as they had Duncan.

“True,” said Clancey. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’m going to try to find a trade route, or a hard to find trade item, and corner the market,” he said, the plan details coming to him as he spoke. He needed to go somewhere nobody else went. Where nobody else
could
go. He thought he knew of just such a place.

Chapter 15

Duncan entered the bridge of his ship. It had just left the station, the immense hangar doors closing back into the false crater. There was nobody in the star system that he could detect, other than himself. He wasn’t surprised. It was still morning, east coast time, and most of the players would be at work or asleep. Still, he’d had Clive run all of the contacts for the area since he’d logged out the night before. What little traffic there was had seemed transitory. His real concern, the HMS Westy, hadn’t been in system since their last encounter.

He walked to the central chair, sat, and looked around. His crew were hovering over their respective work stations. Clive stood to his right, a little behind. Activity was constant but unobtrusive. Like background music. But it wasn’t real. They were computer animations, contrived solely for his benefit. He didn’t wonder at the confusion Shannon and Mike had shown at his plan; here he was, in a game designed for limitless players, playing by himself.

There were thousands of groups in this game. Many of them had dozens, if not hundreds, of members. There were factions of groups that numbered in the thousands of players. Space battles between hundreds of ships, while not common, weren’t rare. And Duncan had, almost from the start of his game career, come into enough money to purchase his way into a position of power among any of the groups. But he hadn’t. He wanted to play by himself.

It addressed his personality, he thought. Where most other players saw the game space as a stage to make a name for themselves, Duncan saw it as a vast mostly unexplored area. He could go anywhere, with time. He could see things before anyone else. He didn’t necessarily want to do it alone, but the solitude held no dread for him. He wanted to build something, but was just as happy if nobody else ever saw it.

That’s what drove his plan and made his decisions for him.

He brought up the navigation display.

“All ahead full speed,” he said. “Take me to the jump point, Clive.”

A waypoint appeared on the jump point. He selected it and, from there, traced a line to the jump point in system Eta Bootis. He was going to visit the
Canis Arcturus
. At their homeworld.

“Is my insurance all paid up?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” answered Clive.

The starfield resolved itself as Duncan jumped into Eta Bootis. It was a main sequence star, roughly twice the mass and three times the radius of Earth’s sun. The readout indicated that it was evolving into a red giant; a middle aged star that was running out of fuel, it would one day grow large enough to engulf the inner planets, of which the
Canis Arcturus
homeworld was one. But that was far in the future.

“I’m picking up a large number of ships, sir.” said the nav station, “The nearest is approximately ninety light seconds away.”

They had a minute and half until they were detected by the closest ship. It would then, via the faster than light ansible communicator, alert the rest of the fleet.

“Perhaps we should make ourselves known first. Use that time to figure out if we need to run,” Duncan smiled.

“Six minutes until our jump drives are charged, sir” said the helm station.

“We’ll be dead by then if they’re hostile,” said Duncan. “Open a hailing frequency to all ships,” he paused, “No, wait! Shit!”

He opened his inventory page. His head was bare.

“Where the fuck did I leave that cowl?” he said. He began to sweat. If he’d left his
Canis Arcturis
artifact in the station or in his bank vault, he was rapidly going to be out the two million credit insurance on his ship.

He leaped from the chair, remembering, and ran to the door at the back of the bridge. The door to his private quarters. He went through, saw the cowl lying on the floor, breathed a sigh of relief, and grabbed the furry hat. Duncan put it on his head and returned to the bridge.

“Open a hailing frequency,” he repeated, “to all ships.”

The hail was answered, and an imposing werewolf appeared on the screen. He was of a type with the one that Duncan had killed in his second mission. The larger, alpha wolf he’d taken with the sniper shot while it was in the middle of managing the roasting of a colonist.