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  You have been hit by (Elite) Virodeshian Pirate Captain’s blaster pistol. Your Medium EVA Suit absorbed 65% of the damage (10 damage) and loses one point of durability. 97/100 total durability remaining.

  You have been hit by (Elite) Virodeshian Pirate Captain’s blaster pistol. Your Medium EVA Suit absorbed 65% of the damage (11 damage) and loses one point of durability. 96/100 total durability remaining.

  You have been hit by Virodeshian Mechanic’s blaster rifle. Your Medium EVA Suit absorbed 65% of the damage (7 damage) and loses eight points of durability. 88/100 total durability remaining. Warning! Your Respirator Compression Module has been critically damaged!

  “Total Damage and durability loss only, nothing else,” I growled, quickly adjusting the settings of my AIVO to better suit this encounter. Some players craved detailed stats and information the second it was available, but it was too much clutter in a situation where life and death were only separated by a fraction of a second. Keeping a clean user interface was the only way I could get the most out of my instincts and intuition.

  With two of my attribute points invested in Mind and one in Tech, I only had 25 health compared to Brandon’s 45. Three hits alone had claimed 14 of my health points as I crawled to relative safety behind the ruined console. Sparks jutted from the fried electronics as the aliens sunk more blaster bolts into its charred frame, trying to punch through and finish me off.

  Thankfully, the console in front of me was blocking enemy fire for the time being, but I wasn’t in a position where I could support Brandon in the fight. If I was in danger of taking more damage before I could heal, I’d have to protect myself with a meager Mana Shield and try to move to better cover. If that happened, Brandon would have to fend for himself.

  I eyed the heavy crystal-like composite material comprising the ship’s front viewport. There were hairline cracks in the scuffed surface originating from a concentrated point of impact where it appeared one of Brandon’s shotgun slugs had smashed into the surface. It wasn’t enough to break it, but viewports like that didn’t have interior shielding, and on a freighter this battered and old, it probably wouldn’t hold up to continued fire if he focused it down.

  Though I didn’t know anything about Virodeshian engineering, most modern starships in real life had a metallic safety shield that would slam shut from the edges of the viewport and form a decent-enough seal to keep as many survivors alive as possible in the event of catastrophic failure. With the position of our enemies, I hoped most of them would be sucked out into the void before that could happen—if it happened at all. None of the aliens were wearing environmental suits, and Virodeshians didn’t have the ability to survive in vacuum for more than several seconds as far as I was aware.

  In all likelihood, Brandon and I would likely be credited for the kills with a hefty load of XP if this went the way I expected in a best-case scenario. I still had one more trick up my sleeve that could buy us more time.

  I activated my Overload ability, compressing five times the normal pack charge into my blaster’s power coil. The barrel glowed orange for a moment, and my blaster hummed, vibrating in my hand before I released the pressure with a burst of violent recoil. The burning projectile rocketed out of my gun with incredible force, hitting the pirate captain with an ear-splitting bang as it popped.

  The bulky alien wasn’t prepared for the hit and wilted as burning plasma splashed over its armor from the point of impact. I watched with immense satisfaction as the pirate captain’s health bar dropped by at least 25%. It staggered back, yelling in pain as it tried to scoop burning sludge from its sundered armor.

  I ejected the ruined red-hot charge pack, throwing it to the side and slamming a new one into my blaster. I pulled back the slide of the weapon to flush the simmering heatsink with cold air as I waited for the cooldown to expire so I could start shooting again. Overload was great at dealing a lot of damage very quickly, but it destroyed charge packs irreversibly and could cause catastrophic damage to my blaster if I didn’t take steps to ensure my weapon had time to cool immediately after the devastating ability.

  The thrill and hope of an easier battle was short lived. The pirate captain tossed a small cylindrical vial into its circular mouth, crunching down hard with sharp, pointed teeth. Its health bar surged to its maximum, and the alien resumed its attack, shouting out commands to its remaining forces. To make it worse, the captain smashed another vial across his chest. Metallic liquid welled from the point of impact, creeping across the ruined armor to reverse all the damage we’d done.

  “Brandon, blow out the viewport, it’s the only way!” I yelled over the cacophony of battle. We weren’t going to win this, and a quick glance back told me the elevator we had come up in was no longer a viable option for escape. Panels hung from the ceiling, and the electronics in the back were shattered, on fire, and coughing out smoke. This was the only way we could win.

  Brandon had taken up a hasty defensive position behind another computer console, but it didn’t give him full cover with his character’s size. He ejected a spent drum magazine to the floor, deftly loading another of the massive ammo containers from the back of his belt into the beefy weapon. He was doing damage to our enemies, but it was clear the elites outleveled us and had powerful armor protecting them that was making this fight close to impossible.

  Brandon scowled as a blaster bolt slammed into his chest, pulling down his health and smoldering on the surface of his armored EVA suit. He returned fire and responded to my plan. “You’ll die! I got the notification that your suit’s RCM is shot to hell. You can’t breathe without it and it will take us at least three minutes to get to Exowurm.”

  “Just do it! We can’t get through the pirate captain’s armor and if it keeps healing up we’re screwed,” I snapped. Brandon had taken a few hits himself, but his much heavier armor offered better protection, and he was only down a fraction of his health.

  He was right about my suit. It would take us at least three minutes to get to our ship, probably even more since we were at the front of the freighter and our ship was orbiting near the midsection of the ship, almost a kilometer away. Our suits had built-in flight systems that used pulse emissions to allow us to maneuver in space, but they weren’t especially easy to control under ideal circumstances.

  These weren’t ideal circumstances.

  I toggled my inventory overlay, quickly filtering it to display my consumables. Thankfully, I was carrying an EVA repair kit, and it would allow me to patch the damage to my suit. The respirator compression module performed two important functions: first, it optimized the airflow from my main and auxiliary air tanks to keep pressure in my suit and allow me to breathe. Second, it pulled CO2 from my helmet and forced it through the suit’s scrubbers to recycle air and keep me from suffocating.

  With the module malfunctioning, I would have to manually pressurize my suit, and wouldn’t be able to effectively scrub the CO2 from my suit. Even with the oxygen flowing, I would kill myself as the toxic CO2 built up.

  Brandon cast one more concerned glance over at me but set his jaw and started firing slugs at the viewport, trying to keep his aim consistent to amplify the effect and speed up the seemingly suicidal process. The first three of Brandon’s shots echoed through the bridge as cracks started splintering across the surface of the viewport. The material was tough, but it didn’t look like it would hold up much longer against Brandon’s cannon of a shotgun.

  I turned my burning focus back to my repair kit, activating the item and pressing it to the RCM module on my suit. The point of impact from the blaster bolt had melted through the small cylindrical tank underneath the punctured armor. It had been a lucky shot for the alien that landed it—and an incredibly unlucky one for me.

  The Virodeshians were yelling and rushing our position in desperation now that they knew what we were trying to do. They were only about five meters away and would quickly close the distance. If they reached us, then this would all be over, and we’d lose our liv
es and Exowurm.

  Realizing the severity of the situation if the bridge didn’t hold, the pirate captain activated its magic again, flinging some of its underlings into the air and suspending them in front of Brandon’s line of sight on the viewport. The effect was instant, revolting, and had a negligible outcome on stopping Brandon’s shotgun slugs as they passed through flesh and armor alike, in exploding rifts of green gore.

  Through heavy breathing and overpowering adrenaline, I watched as the repair kit worked its magic, pixelating and slowly repairing the small sub-durability bar floating in my AIVO above the armor module. It would have to work for me to make it out of this alive—this was the only EVA repair kit we had left.

  Suddenly, the chaotic noise filling the bridge was swallowed and replaced by vivid silence as if someone had flipped an analog breaker switch. I was flying through the void the next moment, sucked out into the majestic blackness of space in a wild, tumbling spiral. My helmet materialized on my head a split second after it detected the sudden change in pressure, but my RCM hadn’t fully regenerated yet and wasn’t functioning.

  I was going to die.

  Nausea flared as my body flailed through space. I suppressed the urge to fill my helmet with vomit with some difficulty. Activating the pulse jets from my wrists and feet, I stabilized myself with a great deal of effort, stopping about 50 meters away from the front of the Virodeshian freighter.

  I was already running out of air in my helmet. The interior surface of my visor was coating with condensation, obscuring the vision of my surroundings. Shit. Come on, regenerate. The regeneration wasn’t on a set timer, it was going to take as long as it was going to take depending on the damage to the module it was working on, which in this case was substantial.

  If my RCM didn’t finish its repair soon and kick into action this would have all been for nothing. No, that wasn’t true. Brandon would get out alive, and as long as one of us didn’t die, we wouldn’t lose Exowurm and everything we’d invested in this game. Only it was so much more than a game to me already. The stakes were much higher.

  Thankfully, my AIVO overlaid itself directly in my vision, so I could still see everything I needed. A quick check of my EVA suit’s modules showed that air was pumping from my main tank, but it wasn’t reaching my helmet. Something vital in the suit wasn’t functioning, and I needed to fix it before it was too late.

  I tried not to panic—tried to remind myself that this was just a game, but it felt all too real in this instant. The claustrophobia of being trapped inside what now felt like a coffin was almost too much. I was suffocating.

  “Activate auxiliary air tank,” I croaked after the mental command failed to register with my AIVO. My voice sounded distant and weak, and the words felt strained and far away. It took all of my energy just to think through the thickening haze. “Brandon—I’m not getting… air to my hel—” I couldn’t finish my sentence; the exertion was too much.

  I tried to form more words to explain my situation, but they failed me, my chest was imploding in on itself as my ribs felt like they were going to suddenly snap.

  Air.

  It was a desperate mental command, but I knew the end was close. Through blurred, fading vision, I could see that my RCM module had fully regenerated and displayed on my AIVO as functioning. In fact, all my modules in my suit were glowing steady green. Everything was A-Okay.

  Blackness swam on the edges of my vision, swirling and dancing toward the center. A pressurized fire burned in my chest as the coldest sensation I’d ever felt started to consume me. Everything inside me screamed for air, for me to do something to live. But there was no effort I could muster against my impending death.

  Just before unconsciousness pulled me under into its sweet, painless embrace, the breath I no longer knew I had exploded from my lungs, as if I was hit by a star cruiser.

  5

  “You’re okay, buddy. Wake up, we’ve got to move,” a familiar voice said through the speakers in my helmet.

  Someone was shaking me in place, but I felt the distracting sensation of weightlessness and unlimited freedom of movement in null G. My eyes were still closed, but cool air was pumping into my helmet, working extra hard to stabilize the environment and clear the excess humidity.

  Oxygen.

  I could breathe again, I was still alive.

  I cracked open my eyes, feeling immense fatigue. Brandon was directly in front of me, checking over my EVA suit and making sure I was all right.

  It took me a second to process what had happened. My suit’s respirator compression module had been shot out in the firefight with the squids. That thought jostled me to full attention, breaking through most of the haze of exhaustion and confusion. The next thought I had was how terrifying and realistic Eternity Online could be even when my real, physical body was 100% safe.

  I flailed in place, trying to manipulate my body in null G without thrust so I could see the aftermath of my stupid plan. It had almost killed us both, but somehow we were alive.

  There were Virodeshian bodies, spent charge cell canisters from blasters, and equipment and debris from the ruined bridge of the freighter suspended in space, twisting and orbiting in small, insignificant cycles of movement. It was abundantly clear we would have a hard time looting the bodies without an extended EVA session and a propulsion-assisted cargo container from Exowurm.

  My AIVO displayed that my health and mana were almost full and that my EVA suit was restored to maximum durability. I had a debuff afflicting me though, and I expanded it with a mostly transparent background.

  Fatigue IV

  You are fatigued from extreme strain as a result of a near-lethal brush with suffocation.

  -25% base movement speed.

  -10% weapon and spell accuracy.

  -10% health and resource regeneration.

  +10% resource cost when using active spells and abilities.

  10% chance for this debuff to transition to Fatigue V when performing physically demanding actions for the duration of this debuff.

  When removed, Fatigue III is applied. Resting can remove all instances of this debuff.

  Duration: 10 minutes.

  Everything in my suit was glowing steady green and actually functioning now. I had just over four hours of oxygen in both tanks remaining. There were also two after-combat notifications for me to read, but I saved them for later, focusing on the present.

  “What happened, and why do I feel like I got hit by a space cruiser?” I groaned, trying to understand why I was still alive. Everything that happened after Brandon blew out the viewport was hazy.

  The timer. We were almost out of time to play before our alarms would go off back on Tiyvan IV, where our real bodies were sleeping. The thought snapped me into action.

  Brandon helped me orient my body so we could maneuver back to Exowurm, which was still orbiting the now-crippled Virodeshian freighter. “Software bug with your suit. I had to manually reboot it for the RCM to kick on and pump air into your helmet. You gave me a scare there. I accelerated as quickly as I could to get to you and hit you a little harder than I expected. Sorry about that.”

  “Ugh. That was awful. Thanks for the save, buddy. I didn't like our odds in that fight. We were fine until that captain showed up.”

  “Our odds weren’t good,” he agreed. “Come on, we need to get out of here. There’s a possibility that pirate captain didn’t die, its body isn’t with the others.”

  I grimaced. It wasn't a good revelation. Bodies didn’t simply go missing in situations like this, even with such destructive forces. Wanting to be sure, I scanned our surroundings, looking for any sign of the high-value corpse without success. If the captain had died, then there was the possibility a new spell encoding would be up for grabs, and I still had three open spell slots in my Strexian implant to accommodate it.

  We activated the pulse thrusters on our suits, moving toward the freighter and my ship. The movement of EVA space travel always felt awkward at first, almo
st as if I was trying to propel myself through a body of water with my chest puffed out and arms held back. After a few seconds, I adjusted the angle of my legs, soaring alongside Brandon and easing off the throttle on the pulse emitters to build some acceleration.

  “How the hell could it survive that?” I asked. As we approached the massive freighter, it was clear there was no emergency paneling where the viewport had been. The entire bridge was exposed to vacuum, and the pirate captain hadn’t been wearing an EVA suit.

  “I don’t know, but the captain wasn’t sucked out into vacuum and isn’t in what’s left of the bridge now. I don’t like leaving, but we only have 15 minutes until we’re pulled out of the game and back to Tiyvan IV. I don’t think this is worth taking a personal day, do you?”

  I sighed, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. “No, it’s not worth a personal day since we can’t get this stuff out of here now anyway. I’m not excited about leaving this haul behind. The pirate captain probably can’t fly this freighter by itself, though, even if it’s still alive. We just have to hope it doesn’t have any more friends.” I was beyond frustrated. The contract we had come here for in the first place probably wasn’t authentic. And there sure as hell wasn’t time to go into the freighter’s engine room, salvage the warpdrive, and get back onto our ship and jump away to safety in 15 minutes’ time.

  The Virodeshian pirate captain would be after us if it was still alive. To leave empty-handed after going through all of this ignited fire in my blood. But Brandon was right. It wasn’t worth the personal day, especially since we would need help scoring the two ships we had flagged as our winnings. It would take time when we weren’t playing to put together a salvage crew for the task.