The Gaming Outpost

I had been walking for a week northward along the coast, eating lizards, and running cactus through my Pulp-O-Matic threshersquisher which was unfortunately foot-powered as the solar panel to run it had been eaten in the last universe by a tyranosaurus rex attracted to its glitter.  Since using that in a diversion had saved my life for a few years before another rex got me, ate me, and swallowed me, I had to consider it a wise investment.  So I tried not to grump.

After a week of crossing hote stone, and dodging snakes, I came to a roadstart.  A beaten metal sign, painted white, with a black border, all covered in dust welcomed one in Deutsche-Anglais to the ‘Trans-Coastal Highway. Coldpoint 4,027 Modastadia to End of Highway.’

It was one lane, and straighter than a ruler.  No honestly it was not.  I always wanted to say that, though. A ripple under the sand showed where two wheeled cars or trucks might have rode.  I shrugged, prayed for blessing which included thanking Him for what He already gave me, and began to walk north.  If this kept up, they’d (my fellow versers in other worlds and times) would be calling me the Walking Man.

A week later, with two days off to rest up as you simply cannot hike forever without taking time off to hunt, and catch up on sleep, and despite that I had been shorting the effort spent on putting up a perimeter watch of stones and leaves and whatever I could find, and I woke to see a large shape, massive, humanoid near me.

My first thought was troll, and then bandit.  I reached for my sword, and the figure grunted.  And in the moonlight, I saw that it was a large, brown bear.  Trolls eat humans per preference to other foods (except for elves.  A troll will travel for weeks just to get a nice tasty bite of elf.)  Bandits may or may not be sadistic or desperate enough to kill you.  Bears, if this universe was like most, and bears were not malevolent time-travelling gangbanger superintelligences armed with laser cannons (don’t ask, please.  Just don’t.  Its painful to remember.) tended not to want to eat human.

He rolled over toward me, and I froze.  He swatted at me, and it took no effort to roll in a wild, flying tangle ten yards away.  That thing was strong.  It came roaring at me, and I realized that I may have a problem indeed.  Sometimes a bear will attack.  Maybe it had gotten a sniff of my food, and then could not figure a way to break into my backpack, and frustrated bear means angry bear.  Or maybe it had gotten up on the wrong side of the cave this night. Whatever. The important thing was how to keep myself from being bear chew toy.

I roared back, right in his face.  And he lurched back in surprise, and I like to think, a bit of fear.  With that, I scrambled out of my sleeping bag, and threw it in his face as he came back at me.  He swatted it away with several swipes, but by then I had already turned about, and was running.

Down a dry arroyo, and up, and the bear was catching up.  At the rising slope on the far side, I was slipping and sliding, and so I grabbed a smooth chunk of stone, and spun, flinging it like a frisbee.  Klonk!

Right between the bruin’s eyes.  He froze, and then whimpered, and then rose to his hind legs, and roared.  It made my puny roar seem puny.  It also announced his intention if not in words.

“Stupid human die now!” (Translated from bear speak.)

I took that time to get to the top of the arroyo with him down in the base of it, and he came up after me with his four broad paws, and claws providing much better purchase.  And I dove through the branches of the Joshua tree I had been aiming at.  It was a high, rolling dive with his paw swishing past my right shoe, and I came through the snapping, scratching branchlets hoping not to hit anything major, and then came down on the far side arms out, hoping not to split my brains open.

I came out of the dive, and into a roll with a jab in my back like a crochet needle stabbed in my back by a crazed ex-girlfriend (really don’t ask. Just never accept romantic advice from Whisp.)  On the far side of the tree, the bear was snuffling about, rumbling, wondering where I’d gotten too, and so I sat out to beat feet.  It would take him maybe a minute, if less to figure out where I had gone too.  I intended to be long gone by then.

And so I was.  I spent the night cold, tired, and with a t-shirt bandage wrapped around the hole in my right shoulder.  That morning I got back to see my gear smashed, and my sleeping bag shredded, and my backpack in three pieces.  The only thing salvageable was my canteen which was dented but still worked, and a working knife in its sheathe.  This trip had gotten a lot harder.

And as I stared at the broken bits of my beautiful Pulp-O-Matic  I was hard-pressed to restrain the urge to go hunt up a bear, but with just a four inch knife that would be stupid.  I try not to be stupid, but I have to admit it was very hard that morning.  Grrrrrr.

Two hours before Halfnight fell, I rolled off my futon, and began my morning crunches.  The ab burn torched my waking grumpy cloud, and a handful each of grapes and walnuts made me willing to face the night.  A quick shower made possible by the air drops of asteroid ice on this brutally arid Draekl’s World, still only a third of the way through terraforming, and I walked out as First Sun, a brilliant GO blue-white dropped over the horizon, leaving only the far distant red supergiant, the Night Sun, to limn the roads and sparse desserts full of water scavenger genmods, and stonebreaker moss and trees (also genmods).

Taking my bike into town center along the dusty road, I passed Jam who was jogging while pushing a three-wheel baby scooter with Jam ver. 2.3 on board, and looking completely adorable, and more like his wife than him which frankly was a good thing as Jam’s ancestral genmods clashed badly aesthetically with the basic human design given us by the Creator.  On the plus side, he could work like a mule, and had the reflexes of a striking cobra.

Dodging as I crested the hill which showed the rather small town center beyond it, a chipmunk with a stonebreaker nut in its teeth, I skidded to a halt.  It looked at me fearlessly as no one hunted the little beasts, and then scampered off to bury its treasure.  If remembered, it would yield nice food for the winter, but if forgotten as most likely, by the next spring it would turn to an acid which would cut into the bedrock, and provide a place for a stonebreaker tree to sprout.  I sometimes suspect God uses us humans the same way.  We think we’re doing one thing, but actually we’re doing something else.

Of course, I’m a verser, an interdimensional traveller, and so such thoughts are natural to me.

Twenty-three thousand miles above the Whipcord VI-B hovercraft, the Stareye reconnaissance satellite orbitted in a fixed location relative to New Terra, and the Doldrum Sub-continental Swamps which were 32% larger than Australia on Old Earth was, at least as of four hundred years ago when the crew of Far Voyaging left the Sol System.  The Whipcord ran through the swamps and the the knifegrass sticking up out of the waves at the edges of the open water ‘pots’ in between the ‘clots’ of grass and seaweed and handfuls of dirt and thousands of seabirds that could not hold up a man. The whirr from its powerful 1.2 megawatt electric motor gave sign of enough power to hit a hundred knots in clear water, but it was not humming easily at forty knots as the four man crew searched for pirates.

The great mass of living matter made chemsniffers useless, and the clots had enough green matter, and metallics that a pirate sub could hide under one for days with no one the wiser whether they used sea-borne radar like the Spectreslash radar on the Diamond-class anti-pirate cutters, or watched from overhead with the reconnaissance satellites.  But a Whipcord could tow a sensor buoy fifty feet beneath the surface, and it was silent enough to sneak up on a sub.

“We got a tickle, Captain.” Edward Lukas, owner of the right railgun mounted on a robotic pivot on the top edge of the hull, also had the job of watching and more importantly interpreting the datafeed from the mid-range sensors.  You could set the sensors to computer overwatch, but then every school of fish of the inedible metalfin (genetically engineered to clean the seas of toxic metals and then beach themselves so they could be processed by human hands), or even tuna would set it off.

Captain Joseph Montgomery, or “Monty” to his friends, was a verser, a quasi-immortal dimension traveller who shared with certain other versers, like Michael Di Vars, a desire to be on the sharp end, grunted an acknowledgement to Ensign Lukas.

“Morrie, ten degrees port.” The Captain said. “Slow five knots.”

Moriander Ab Nvu was helmsman, and a lieutenant.  He came from the Southerly Isles where the Gra Protectorate had a base on the far side of the world from Gra Home.  But, not desiring a life of fishing and pinjin-fruit-picking, he had joined the Imperial Gra Navy which welcomed him as the Southers seemed to have some genetic predilection for the water and an understanding of its wiles.

“Aye, sir.” Moriander said which came out more like ‘Aiisur.’ due to the heavy accent of the Isles.  He pushed over the wheel a notch, and pulled back the throttle a touch.

“Tickle, tickling, contact, contact at two hundred yards…” Lukas sang out even as the backbeat of Granady, Iomeer Granady from the mountains of Gra Home’s north, his deep bass voice started to say ‘tickle, tickle.’ for the starboard sensor.  The computers on board did a simple bit of geometry called parallax, and spat out the likely location to the Captain who was faced with a hard decision that had to be made in a second.

Press on and firm up the target, or pull back now and send the targetsquirt to the Diamond-class cutter Ara’s Vengeance twenty miles to the east.  Being a Whipcord driver required an aggressive mentality, and the Captain pushed on.

“Sounding. Sounding.” Lukas hollered, only training keeping his voice from rising to a squeak.  The pirate sub had heard something, and was sending out a sonar pulse.

“We’re locked on good, Captain.” Iomeer grated out.  The sub had made a mistake in sending out an active sonar pulse as that made its own location clear.

“Spin…” The Captain began to yell, and then a honking, blaring beeper on his console started proclaiming that a missile had been launched. The Captain realized that he had been unlucky.  The pirates had just started mounting a quick pop-up snapshot missile by the name of the Hummingbird.  It could launch from twenty meters under the water, leap ten yards above the water, and ignite in less than two seconds.  Its range was short, only ten miles, and its warhead was only a quarter pound of semtex, but that was more than enough to do for his Whipcord.  Worse, it was fire-and-forget, targetted on the heat of his engine.

The Captain thought, and saw no place for him to escape if he turned to port or starboard.  He almost gave the order to abandon ship, which considering the giant man-eating eels in these waters was not an order lightly given, when an idea burst into his brain.

“At the sub, full speed.” He snapped. The Whipcord slewed around to port, and then accelerated like a bunny rabbit pursued by a cougar.  They raced through the knifegrass at hull-slicing speeds, and the Captain thought, and then waited and…

“Redline it, Moriander.” And the Whipcord gave its last surge of speed, and lurched forward, now doing a hundred thirty knots with splinters of knifegrass being flung into the air to land a half-mile away.  The Captain looked up, and he saw the driveflame heading toward him still building to what would be near supersonic velocities.

And for a long second, he saw it grow larger.  Its white fins, and black color bars on its pale green fuselage, and for a second as it passed but four feet overhead, he thought he saw the Humningbird insignia, and he prayed that it would not explode from a proximity fuse.  It either did not have one, or there had not been enough time for it to arm.

The missile went past, and then skewed wildly around in the sky, trying mightily to turn and pursue his bright in the IR engine, but then it hit the water, and a boom and splash in the distance behind told of its failure.

The Whipcord raced overhead the sub, and targetsquirted even as it did.  Two missiles launched from the Vengeance.  Both were supersonic, and had a warhead of some other chemicals equivalent in explosive power to a dozen pounds of semtex.  One came close enough that its explosion damaged the pirate sub, rattling it severely, breaking seals, and flooding compartments.  The other hit within ten yards, and water is not readily compressible, and carries a shock wave very nicely.  It crushed the center of the sub, and broke it in half before the Whipcord had gone five more miles away from the scene of the skirmish.

Shotgun out, strap wound about my right forearm, high-stepping over the building edge, ducking under the damoclean daggers of unfallen window shards, the glass under my feet crinkling, smells of old hamburger, and an orange and yellow clown figure sitting at a rusted table stand with the rotted remants of the table stinking about the clown’s plastic feet, moving on, look left, look right, notice the kid’s hamster trail, and look up, look up so quick yanking the shotgun from low ready in fear, nothing waiting on top of the plastic fortress under the broken glass gateway to the open sky, walking onward, slow, making little noise except crackle and splinter of glass against tile, outside, a shape, raise shotgun, oh, a dear, smiling slightly, it had not taken the deer long to invade the cities and they could outrun a zombie in their sleep, with the deer came feral dogs who soon looked less like dogs than some new species, species being a terribly inexact and scientifically useless word, a small wolf with reddish brown tufts of hair over gray undercoats that hunted deer by preference but would settle for zombie as it was carrion, glad were we few human survivors that it was a magical danger peculiar to humans, for otherwise we would have had hellhounds to contend with, and oh, I was so tired, and I leaned against the counter in the front room, swaying a bit, something moved in the kitchen among the rusted metal giants of frying devices and heating tools made by gods of the old ones, and it was a rat, I prayed it was a rat for I had but two shells left, and we were almost ready to take our raft out to the island in the harbor where there were no zombies, if only I could keep our small colony alive for a few more days, but the shape was larger, and not wolflike, and I took my shotgun to my shoulder and prayed, and waited for it to come out from behind the tilted mass of a cooler, breathing in the scents of days happier, hoping that I could keep the human race alive in this universe, but there was just me, and my shotgun, and there were so many…

The shape moved, and I fired.

“What in the name of inhospitable universes have I fallen into this time?” And Dawn in her huge kevlar overcoat stepped around the corner, and levelled her minigun at me.  She stared; I stared.

“Joe?”

I grinned.  We had versed together before, fought aliens and pirates, and explored the deepest cave in the Unknown Province, and even kissed once.

“Joe? Why’d you shoot me? Not that it hurt, not your puny little gun, but…”  And I tried to explain, I did, but every time the words started to come, I found myself crying, until finally Dawn just hugged me, and told me it was okay, and I was not alone, and she’d help me do whatever crazy quest I was doing if only I would stop crying, but I did not even though eventually I got out words about zombies, and being on patrol, and being one of the last humans on Earth, and how I had failed in my prior world, and I was so afraid that I would again, and so she hugged me, and whispered in my ear that Dawn had come.

Smoke scent twitched his nose, and Jon flicked a glance at the driver’s window of the car he was breaking into.  A man shape coming at him, and Jon ducked under his arm pit, spinning sideways, his high arms blocking a sideways slashing karate chop even as the thing in the shape of a man crashed into the door of the car.  A three inch punch to its gut jolted his arm like hitting  a punching bag, and the followup left hook to the thing’s face tore at the smooth, dark face, exposing the crunchy, yellow foam underneath.

It kicked out at Jon with bone-breaking force, and he dove back, tripped, landed on the concrete of the parking garage floor, and knew doom as the rictus that passed for a smile crossed the thing’s face.  Beyond it, there was another thing, and a man in a coat jacket and tie smoking, who nodded to the man on the ground with a mockery of politeness.  The thing, a bipedal killer of some sort,  jumped forward to land with both heels on Jon’s chest.

Jon rolled under the car, and came up on the far side just in time to see the thing dive at him with a stiffness not natural, and enough strength to break bones.  Jon let himself fall, and the thing took him over the three strands of steel wire that kept cars from going over the inner edge of the parking garage.  Spinning in the air, Jon fell from the third floor wire fence to the second floor wire fence which sliced through the thing, and Jon threw himself to the right, and rolled out onto the hood of a large truck, crumpling its hood, and then starring the windshield with his left heel as he tumbled.

It started screaming about ‘thieves’, and Jon rolled off, his chest aching, perhaps a rib broken, and took the time to glance at the dead thing which hung in two parts over the second floor wire railing.  Inside the dark tan exterior was a yellow, crunchy foam, and inside that was the skeleton of something robotic which had been cut in half, and there were sparks.

Above him, he could hear the pounding footsteps of the other thing, egged on by the smoking man.  And so Jon ran, not knowing how or why.  He had versed into this universe, and within two days, things of metal and hard foam, robots pretending to be human, but guided by other humans had begun pursuing him.  So he ran, while searching for an answer.

Kyle waited in the golden wood while the dark bird on his forearm ruffled and smoothed its own feathers.  He waited patiently for justice came at its own pace. And then the black-eyed raven stared at him, fixed him with its eye…

…laughing, arrogance, secret power and delight in the usage of the same, a deliciousness that even now craved more, a blindness that saw not God nor Justice, willful blindness it would be if that was needed, but it was not…

Such a man offended Ravenna, goddess of Death and Justice, servant of the Most High, and so she sent forth her Hunter, the immortal verser, Kyle Whitecliff.  And then the raven fixed him with its other eye, and Kyle flinched.

…desperate, not understanding, my wife she won’t, why?, pushing up from the mucky bottom, trying to breathe, can’t, oh, it hurts, please mama, please God make it stop….And it did. The man did not die yet, but he blacked out, and dropped into vision so his last minutes were a peaceful dream.  Kyle shivered, his eyes wet with unshed tears, tears he forbad himself for until the wicked were punished, he would be hard-eyed, the destroyer.

And then the raven plucked at Kyle’s hand, and drew blood.  Blood for blood, the message was clear, and Kyle nodded, and the raven flopped off flying horizontally until it gained speed, and then it began to rise and grow until it reached the edge of space and went beyond to the Castle to sit with its kind on the roof peaks and to look down into endless space.

Kyle began to walk, and it was easy-going at first.  But the tree-shrouded forest ended, and he walked into a blackberry patch of many acres in extant.  He saw in the distance some folk who stared at him, and Kyle wondered for after all, he was not far from their clothing.  Pushing onward at a slant away from them, and past them, he came to a barbed wire fence which he hopped readily.  In the thick brush on the other side, he scrambled among the green leaves and branches, and leapt across a ten foot deep water drainage ditch.

Up the shoulder, and he came to a concrete road.  Flipping a mental coin, he went right.  About ten minutes later, an electric car whizzed past him, fairly silently.  This bothered him not as he had driven internal combustion automobiles, alcohol fueled dragsters, and even hay-powered horse drawn wagons.  But the driver yanked at their wheel, headed toward one ditch on the left, and then overcorrected back to the right, and came within inches of going into the ditch he had just crossed before fishtailing back onto the concrete road, and zipping away.

Shrugging, Kyle pushed on.  Bad driving was univeral in all the different universes he had been to.  He trekked up the first hill, and down it, and by the time he crested the third hill, he decided that the locals did not believe in cutting through hills, or did not know how.

And down at the bottom of the hill was an intersection blocked off by four police ‘jeeps’ in pink and silver.

“This bears study.” Kyle said, and crouched to his knnes to spy out the situation.

The man rose from his bed in the small, stone bedroom, and padded out to take a shower in the icy chill waters that flowed from, well, better not to ask.  It was that sort of place.  Some corridors were known to go only one way, and were though to end in very strange places.  But Justice is not a simple thing as you dig beneath its surface, and the man occasionally felt the call of those unexplored halls, and the whispered secrets in the dark shadows that would try a man’s soul, and test his nerve and wit.

Showered, he clothed himself, but not in the robe he expected.  Instead, laying out for him was a green camoflage jumpsuit, and a black leather fringed vest of snakeskin, and a pair of beaded moccassins made for him Back in the Worlds, in another world by Chief Talking Owl.  Next to them, on the living room couch, lay his weapons.

No one should be able to get into his bedroom suite, among the fellow hunters, trackers, beasts and seers that occupied the stony castle that hung on adamant will alone.  And then he scented bacon from his kitchenette, and smiled.  No one but one that is.  He dressed quickly.

She came out with a platter of bacon, over easy eggs, ruby grapefruit pre-cut, yoghurt, and the green olives he liked to finish off with.  A cup of coffee was in her right hand, black, no sugar, no cream.

“Goddess.” He protested, even though seeing Her with the food, her long black hair, and dark gown, barefoot feet, and always knowing, frequently chill, but now warm gray eyes pleased him greatly.

“Sit, Kyle.”  He frowned, but only for a second.  It was the Goddess’ will.

He ate, and she just sat there and smiled at him.

“Darling Kyle, although it pleases me to have you about, there is an unpaid murder.”  He sat up, his eyes sharpening, and she nodded.

“My Hunter, you shall go forth.  As a verser you are most useful to me, but I do not know when you shall find a world that allows passage back to the Castle.  Don’t forget me.”

“Never.” He assured her fervently, and then she gave him a keyring that would allow the wearer back into the Castle of the Just, where the Hunters served Ravenna, Goddess of Death and Justice.  She got up, and kissed him, and he fell, fell far away and back into the Material Worlds.

Kyle Woodcliff rolled to his feet, his cerametal framed fletchette pistol snapping into his hand, bird song distant, and towering trees over his head as he looked about.  No immediate threat came to mind, so he retracted the pistol with a quick shove into his arm rig under the sleeve of his jumpsuit.

The woods extended to the edge of his vision in all directions, and no bear, nor megafauna such as a rhinocerors or stegasaurus, came stomping out of the woods.  Nor did he see any moving plants, or feel malignant presences.  It seemed safe.  He blew out a breath, and kneeled with eyes open to give praise to God and his servant the Goddess.

All of his gear was with him in a sling pack, as he made a point only to carry what he really needed from world to world.  Working knife, medcomp, a hundred feet of cord, a dozen time delayable firecrackers, and a few other oddities along with food and water made up his supply.

Testing his powers, he reached out to the mind of the bird tweeting in the branches above him.

…o glorious creator of so splendid a morn1 hear me sing, o ladies, I sing of the goodness of the day, and I too am a very handsome specimen of the creator’s art….

Kyle chuckled at the male bird’s self-assurance, and wished at times human life was as simple and pure as that.  Disconnecting, he spoke a Word, and snapped his fingers, and his fingers snapped, but no spark of lightning jumped into the sky.  It was a world with psionic abilities permitted, but magic was either non-existent or almost so.  His arm rig worked, so technology did.  With a quick bounce in his moccs, he leapt up, and flipped in the air, and came back to his feet.  It seemed this was a world, as most were where the gifts of the body were not limited.  That was good.  Kyle disliked worlds where he had to struggle to remember how to walk.

A great shadow darkened the land, and Kyle looked up to see a bird with wings that would dwarf a 797, but it came down, and by imperceptible adjustments, it was the size of a normal raven when it landed on his right hand.  But its eyes were keen and bright, even more so than a normal bird of that kind.

….