Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Read online

  [You have killed Captain’s Guard!]

  [You gain 35 XP!]

  Almost at Level 2 already. Kind of a sick way to think of it. I pulled the spear from the Guard’s body and kicked him to convulse and bleed out on the deck. The other guard was a sitting duck for the five of us, alone in a semi-circle of blades. He fell back from us, hands raised. His face was a bloody mask. “Please, I yield! Mercy!”

  “Slaver dog!” Bob snapped back. “Where was your mercy for us?”

  Wikati was breathing hard, but she was staring at the Cossack with hard, predatory eyes. “My thoughts exactly. Who did you plan to sell me to? Some slumlord who’d keep me locked up in his brothel? A lord wanting an exotic fuckdoll? A legion? Hard labor?”

  “I don’t know!” He was looking between us, eyes wide and white, as Rutha and Louis joined us from the shadows of the mast. There was a riot going on down on the rest of the ship. “I am a mercenary, hired on at Taltos! I have a family-”

  “Leave off.” I stepped forward, his friend’s saber loose in my hand. “He’s surrendered.”

  “He’s honorless scum!” Bob snarled at me in Tuun.

  “He’s a mercenary. He doesn’t believe in honor, just coin,” I said. “Different gods for different men. He surrendered. He knows we’re his masters now. There’s no honor in putting him down.”

  I got an auto-prompt. You have learned a new skill: Negotiation.

  Both Wikati and Bob turned on me to argue, but Rutha stepped forward, hand raised. “This is pointless. The man was doing his job and following orders, however loathsome they might be. Slavery is not illegal in Vlachia.”

  I held up a hand, staring down at the shaken guard. “How did we get here?”

  The Captain’s Guard frowned. “You were purchased. My Guildmaster assigns jobs to us. I was rostered for Captain Melint’s ship this cycle. We left Gilheim… we are going to Zaunt.”

  “So you are trading slaves to the Mercurions,” Rutha said. Her voice was like a whip. “North or South?”

  “South.” The big man cringed.

  A collective gasp went around the others.

  “What does that mean?” I said, looking around.

  “South Zaunt is the home of the Phaedran Mercurion clans. Our fate there is even worse than being worked in the mines,” Rutha said. “Zaunt has been embroiled in a civil war of attrition between north and south for nearly five hundred years. The Phaedra fight with machines that extract mana from the bodies of living things. They call them Sanghar’tak.”

  “Cursed things,” Louis said hoarsely. “Machines that shred people on the battlefield and feed on their blood.”

  The Captain’s Guard shook his head. “Please, m’Lady… I was hired on. I don’t get a say in where the Guild sends us.”

  “I am Rutha of Vasteau, Court Sorceress of Ilia.” Rutha drew herself up. “This ship is being taken over in the name of His Lordship Eduard Scandiva, Protector of Ilia and Warden of the Realm. Swear you’ll lay down your sword for the duration of the mutiny, and face the Warden’s justice.”

  The Cossack dropped his blade, glancing down at his dead comrade. “I surrender, lady.”

  “Then it is done. Come with us to confront your Captain.” Even in rags, her skin sluiced with dirt and thin mud, Rutha had the air of a noblewoman: or at least someone who was used to being listened to and obeyed. Wikati looked reproachfully to me, then Bob and Louis.

  “The lady and the mountain man have the right of it,” Louis said.

  Bob made a heavy sound. Reluctant agreement.

  I nodded. [Negotiation success!]

  “Come. Let us finish this,” Rutha said. “The sooner I get access to mana, the sooner we can be off this stinking hulk. You there - unlock this door.”

  “On the honor of my Guild, I cannot assist you,” the guard said, speaking quickly. “They’ll execute me as soon as you all will. Take the key from my neck. I can say I defended myself and did not cooperate with a mutiny in good conscience.”

  “This is not worth another life, indeed.” Rutha turned her face to me. “Hector? Will you do the honor?”

  I shrugged and walked up. The others tensed as I frisked the big guardsman, but he didn’t lash out at me. I pulled a [Bridge Key] off from a necklace he was wearing. It appeared in my Inventory, under Quest Items.

  “Okay, move to the sides of the door in case there’s projectiles.” I slot the key in the lock and turned it, squeezing the handle. “Get ready.”

  The party assembled: whatever ‘Starborn’ meant, apparently it made them inclined to listen to me. I cracked the door open, and yelled in through the gap. “This is a takeover! Surrender and drop your weapons!”

  [You have learned a new Skill: Intimidate. While you may catch more flies with honey, you won’t have any flies to begin with if word gets out you have a bug zapper.]

  [Intimidate failed!]

  “Go dunk your head, you goatfucking savage!” A man’s voice roared back. “This is MY ship. Drop the forward rudders! Hit the rear flaps!”

  “Is he crazy!?” Wikati’s eyes widened, huge in her dark face. I was about to reply when the rudders dropped and the flaps… flapped?… and the ship suddenly pitched forward. It bodyslammed us all into the wall, including the guard, and sent unsecured cargo sliding across the deck to slam and shatter into the masts. And we were at the front of the ship, where the turbulence was least. Screams pealed from the back as rioting slaves and sailors were thrown off their feet into the air.

  “Crazy as a shithouse rat!” I shouted over the din.

  The ship pitched up and down as I kicked in the door, and it nearly slammed back on me as an explosion rang out inside the cabin, the crack of a pistol in a small room. The slug hit the hardwood and bounced, and I burst into the room just to see one of the Navigators take the ricochet right to the throat.

  “Hold it, asshole!” I leveled my spear at the Captain, who was backed up into the other end of the bridge, where the rounded bubble windows converged into a soft point. “Freeze, or I’ll run you through!

  [Intimidate failed!]

  The Captain snarled in frustration, frantically reloading as his Navigator slumped off his chair and fell limply to the ground. I tensed for the charge, only to be thrown off my feet as the ship lurched to one side. The Captain, wedged into the tight corner, was able to stay upright.

  “Hold it right there!” Rutha stalked in past me to the abandoned navigation panel, which flared to life in her presence. “Or I’ll burn you alive in here!”

  At her command, the Captain finally faltered. “Who in the Hell are you people?!”

  “I am the Court Sorceress of the Protectorate of Ilia, and I demand that you put down your weapon. Now.” Rutha held her hand out over the Navigation sphere, causing the blue-white globe to swirl and the ship to shudder.

  “Sir, please! Lucas is dying!” The other Navigator called back, panicked.

  Rutha had told me she couldn’t do anything without her spell gloves. I knew she was bluffing, but the Captain didn’t. He licked his lip, face beaded with sweat, and dropped his pistol.

  “Good man. Now. We’re going to land as soon as we reach a coast,” Rutha said. “How far off are we?”

  “Not far. Abou’ twenty leagues off of South Zaunt,” The Captain growled, looking alongside at his other navigator.

  “Then we’re going to steer our way there, very nicely, and drop anchor,” Rutha said sweetly. “And pray to the gods the Phaedran Mercurions don’t find us before I can summon help, because they’ll be just as happy to grind you through their blood-engine machines.”

  The Captain grunted, looking down along my bloody spear, then at his injured Navigator. “Lucas is out. You’re a witch: can you work a navglobe?”

  “I’m a fast learner,” Rutha replied.

  “Good. Because we’re already off course.” The Captain was tense, with the bated, high-strung air of a vicious dog in a cage. “You there: take my man downstairs and get him healing afo
re he dies.”

  I was in half a mind to argue, given that the fuckwit had shot his own crew member, but if we were going to make land… “Fine. But you better hold your end of the bargain, Captain.”

  I pulled Lucas outside by the armpits, where my team and a few escaped slaves were waiting.

  “What’s happening?” Louis asked.

  “We’re headed for land, and they’re going to anchor and let us go. Wikati, Bob - do you think you can watch over the bridge? Make sure the Captain doesn’t get any funny ideas about Rutha? I have to go take care of our Navigator and get some rest, or I’m going to keel over.”

  Bob grunted, and went inside without another word. Wikati nodded. “Sure.”

  “Alright. Good luck.” And then I continued on my way, taking Lucas the Navigator - semi-conscious and bleeding - down below decks for a brisk drag to the medical bay.

  Chapter 9

  I got Lucas sorted out - they had the right tools in the medical bay that meant this NPC probably wasn’t going to bleed to death - and commandeered an officer’s bunk for myself. Every conscripted soldier dreamed of doing something like this at least once, right?

  Once I bunked down, I tried to sleep - ‘tried’ being the operative word. My first problem was fear. What happened if I went to sleep in a world like this? When I’d played VR games before, you logged out and took the gear off when you got tired. The sensation of being fatigued and hungry inside of a video game was weird, and made more surreal because I was getting prompts warning me about fatigue and hunger penalties to my skill stats every now and then. Besides that, just because we had the Captain hostage and were headed for land didn’t mean there weren’t people on this ship who still wanted to kill me. The encounter with Matir – and my weird status in the game - also loomed large in my memory.

  The nine-pointed star symbol no longer burned. It had faded into a raised scar with thin black lines just under the skin, like a Maori tattoo. While studying it, I discovered a feature of Archemi I hadn’t known about - you could look at items and people and call up information on them, like an ‘info’ command. They ranged from the commonplace (Table: An ordinary table.) to the sarcastic (Chamber Pot: Step 1: Apply butt to seat 2: ??? 3: Nightsoil!) and the cryptic (Vase: can be used as a murder weapon. Please be careful.).

  When I looked at the tattoo, I got a blank translucent window. No text, no title, and no GNOSIS information input. Nothing. For some reason, the empty window made me more nervous than if there’d been no effect at all. The tattoo clearly had some kind of item/inventory number assigned to it, but no reference. Like ‘missingno’, or a glitch.

  Or a virus, a small voice in the back of my mind whispered.

  That thought woke me up enough to make me act. I called up my Message center, and rattled off a quick email to the Mod team with a description of what had happened. The reading and writing process was strange: I could basically compose by thinking of what I wanted to say. IRL, reading had been slow and painful thanks to my old friend dyslexia. Here, the system filled in the blanks and turned letters around the right way, allowing me to ‘read’ as quickly as anyone else might have normally done.

  Once that was finished, the knot of tension between my shoulders finally eased off, and I began to get drowsy as the ship rocked on. I half-dropped off at one point, only to startle up when I realized I was falling asleep. Eventually, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. When sleep came, it was like a door slammed shut. No dreams, no sense of time passing, just what felt like a long moment of darkness, and then the sound of something hard being beaten against wood and my name being called, over and over again.

  “Hector! Hector!?”

  I woke with a snort, confused, and groaned as a sharp, hot sensation lanced through my head. Suddenly, I was surrounded by HUD prompts.

  [Message from Temperance: “Are you alright?”]

  [Sleep restored full HP!]

  [You are hungry! HP will no longer regenerate!]

  “Urgh… wait, I’m coming!” I called to Wikati - it was her panicked voice outside - and then waved the alerts away like flies. “Auto-alerts off, for fuck’s sakes!”

  The little messages all disappeared, except for the message from Temperance. It was an Urgent Admin Message, and throbbed red when I tried to close it.

  “Shit.” Rubbing my eyes, I cued the message to display.

  Hello, Hector - I have been trying to message you for the last five hours or so, so please open this message as soon as it arrives. We cannot find your character ID and believed your transfer had failed, so we were quite shocked to receive a report from you. It’s fantastic that you are safe, but this is a first for us and we need to follow up to make sure you’re alright. If you can get this note, please check in ASAP. You can reply to this message or whisper with username ‘Temperance’.

  Thank you,

  Temperance.

  So Matir hadn’t been bullshitting me after all? I got to the edge of the bed and rubbed my hands over my face, frowning. I was too groggy to trust myself to think correctly, so I spoke aloud. “Menu: Message Temperance.”

  The HUD whirled and opened a rectangular message screen with a blinking cursor.

  “Hector!” Wikati cried outside the door.

  “Hang on!” I called back, and the cursor obediently typed what I’d said. “No, goddammit. Scratch that. ‘Hi Temperance, I’m fine. Things are a little weird, but I think the game sorted itself out. I’ll check in properly soon, but I have to run: there’s an IC emergency over here. Is Steve okay? Thanks, Hector.’ Send.”

  The message window flashed blue and then vanished. I staggered out of the bunk, still mostly undressed, and unlocked the door to reveal Wikati: bloodied, the armor she’d taken from the guards dented and torn.

  “The bridge,” she blurted. “The prisoners stormed the bridge. They dragged the Captain out!”

  “What?!” I left the door open, and lunged back to the chair where I’d left my own clothes and weapons. “What the fuck happened? Where’s Rutha?”

  “She’s trying to calm them down.” Wikati’s voice was high-pitched with stress. “They won’t let the Navigators get to the console… I think they’re trying to turn the ship around to go back to Daun.”

  “But that’s fucking ridiculous. We were almost at the delivery port, weren’t we?”

  “Yes. We sighted land this morning, and when they saw that it wasn’t a green coastline and we were North, and there were icebergs…”

  “Where are they?”

  “Near the bridge. There’s a big crowd. Bobayer and Louis are trying to hold them off while Rutha steers, but-”

  I sighed. “Go back out there, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  The Lysidian woman nodded and broke off down the rocking corridor at a run.

  I equipped my armor and sorted through my scanty pile of loot, but there was nothing any better than what I had. Just as I picked up my spear, something occurred to me. I could probably message Steve the same way I’d messaged Temperance. My spirits lifted a little as I dashed out the door, calling the HUD the same way I had for the gynoid. “Menu: Whisper Steven Park.”

  No such player found, came the reply.

  His old MMO handle was SP_Mikklos, so I tried that.

  [No such player found.]

  My stomach twisted nastily in a way that had nothing to do with food. I tried several different variants of the ‘Mikklos’ name before giving up in a cold sweat. Steve probably had chosen name I didn’t recognize, and that was why I couldn’t tag him. I was about to try something else when the ship jolted, and then dropped what felt like about three feet.

  “Fuck!” My feet left the deck, and I crashed against the wall as it listed hard toward the left, and then shuddered. My ears popped as the timbers around me groaned. I ran as fast as I could, catching myself every time the ship bucked, and burst out into a full-scale riot on the upper deck. Ex-slaves were battling sailors and each other in the early morning light. The nexus of the chaos
was near the bridge.

  “Hey! Move it! What’s going on!?” I shouted over the noise as I got to the edge of the crowd, pulling people away, ducking a fist that swung at my head, and shoving back the man who’d taken a shot at me. I broke through to the front, where Bobayer was arguing down a semi-circle of angry Tuun.

  “What else do we want? What kind of question is that?! Turn it around and kill the devil dog over there! That’s what we want!” One man was leading the shouting, stabbing his finger past Bob toward Louis. Louis was standing in front of the Captain, who was slumped against the wall. The medic who’d cared for Lucas the night before was assisting him. The women were inside the bridge. Rutha was bent over a navglobe, disheveled and pale as milk.

  “He lied to us!” Another older man at the front of the pack snarled, slashing a hand toward the bleeding Captain. “This isn’t Gilheim!”

  “Of course it’s not sodding Gilheim! We don’t have enough food or fuel to turn around!” Bobayer shot back. “We will land, and the Witch can use the engines to call for help from-”

  He was drowned out by the rising rage of the people in front of us, and I was suddenly reminded of my own wisdom. Individuals could be smart, but mobs were always dumb.

  “We ain’t getting no help from the Witch!” Someone else howled from within the crowd.

  “Look!” I waved a hand, resting the butt of my spear on the ground. “We’re all in this together, and-”

  “We’ll be killed!” A Lysidian woman closer to the front cried out, her voice shrill with hysteria. “I don’t want to die here!”

  “Turn it around!”

  “Give us the Captain!”

  “You’re working for them!”

  “Throw them overboard!”

  “Stop this! Stop this!” The old woman who had been chained in the row across from me was trying to calm people down, her voice drowned out by the growing hum of rage. I began to feel it, the air of menace. These people had been only the most tenuous of allies, and they were rapidly turning into their own worst enemies.