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B2 - Chapter 4 – Life is a broken highway
🕑 Added 2024-11-08 14:58:55 +0000 UTCJace saw the vehicles coming closer – speeding up far faster than the APC could. He ducked his head inside as he heard the whiz and ping of bullets flying past and into the armored hull, respectively. “Greg? Any ideas?”
Greg nodded and pointed to the roof, “There’s a port I can pop out of.” He picked up the rifle, slammed in a magazine, and racked the slide. “I can handle it.”
“Or,” Priam said, “We can avoid violence. Jace, use your eyes.”
Right. Let’s see if that works. But first – Dark Matter Shield (Rank 3). The purple pulsated around him, and he popped his head back out and stared at the chasing vehicles on their approach. Alright (Terrifying), do your thing. He cracked a smile as he saw three of the five pursuers slam on the brakes, the slight red cones extending out along his line of sight. “That worked for some of them, but they gotta have a few who are equal to Tier 3.”
Ollie floated outside of the car window and nodded, “Yup. Nebula Alliance provided cybernetic augmentations. Your eyes won’t work on them.”
Greg opened the roof panel and his body coated over with thick layered rocks as he activated Planetary Defenses (Rank 3), and his helmet also popped out of his armor to cover his head. He stood up in the back of the APC and his body from the chest-up was plainly visible to those outside. Jace could hear the light ‘crack’ of bullets impacting his buddy, and then heard the barking report of his rifle firing in response.
“Guadalajara Reconquista!” Greg shouted. “They’re not going to stop chasing. We’ll have to disable their cars or kill them!”
Killing these people who were just trying to live their lives did not feel…right, to Jace. They’re not soulless megacorp people, he thought. Just street folk with cars and not in the cities. He pulled out two throwing knives. Dark Energy Mine (Rank 1), he thought as he focused on first one knife, then re-used the skill on the other. A black bead appeared on the tip of each. “Ollie, I’m a pro with these, right?”
“Yup! Swordmage Stance (Rank 3) makes you a master of all bladed weapons.”
Jace leaned out of the window and saw sparks as Greg’s bullets impacted hardened windshields. He heard his friend growl, “Armored windows. Of course.”
Alright. Easy enough. Just pull back and…throw! Jace threw the knives at the same time – one at each vehicle. They both hit the front of the vehicles, and as soon as they touched, he thought one word. Detonate.
Gravity ceased to affect any objects in a five-foot radius around each knife-tip as a pulse of grey-purple energy boomed outward; invisible to all except for him. The shockwave did not encompass the entirety of each vehicle – but it just had to touch something to affect all of it. Both cars bounced off the next bumps in the road, the rubber of the tires causing the now frictionless and gravity-less vehicles to angle upward. Crap! I don’t want them to fall to their deaths! Cancel Skill!
Both vehicles had ascended ten feet before Jace’s cancellation took effect. Both clattered down – and one of them lost control and veered off to the side of the highway over the cracked, broken ground. The other one, though, kept pursuing. Jace saw – almost in slow-motion – a bullet coming right for him. It impacted his Dark Matter Shield, and he jerked back reflexively; but no pain reached him. Just a little bit of tiredness from the defensive barrier’s effect.
Greg let out a laugh, “Nice job! Just one more.”
Priam popped his head out of the window next to Jace, his body covered in the glimmering, golden-honeycomb barrier of his Pulsar Ward. “Oh, it’s metal? Should’ve said that earlier.” He pointed his palm at the pursuer, “Priest’s Smite (Rank 10).” A bolt of crackling, yellow-gold lightning shot down from above the vehicle and slammed into the front of it. Jace couldn’t make out the people inside, but the sudden jerking motions of the car told him enough – they were also jolted.
The same lightning bolt rippled down from above an additional four times and the vehicle began to slow. “Yes!” Greg shouted. “Good job, bunny-boy!”
Priam ducked inside the vehicle and Jace followed. They rolled up the windows and Greg put the roof-slot back into its secure position. Jace looked sideways at Quinn who had a placid expression. “You good?”
“I’m fine,” she said in monotone. “Half-circadian cycling limits my emotional responses. Greg will keep us safe.”
Priam crossed his arms and pouted slightly, “But Jace and I took out the vehicles.”
Greg patted him on the back, “You did good, kiddo.”
That made Priam beam, and Jace chuckled. “Yeah, you did good. Completely disabled the vehicle and probably some of the guys inside with their cybernetics.”
Darrin, Greg’s spider-like Wayfinder, crawled out from inside his armor, “Actually, Nebula Alliance prosthetics are resistant to electricity. However, out here in these wastes? I would wager that their cybernetics are from these megacorporations – their own models based on the ones provided by the faction.”
Priam nodded, “Good thing I also have magnetism as part of my Pulsar Cosmic Power. They’re not resistant to that, right?”
“No, they would not be,” Ollie replied.
Jace leaned back in his seat and shut his eyes, “Wake me up if something happens I need to help deal with.”
>>>---<<<
The rest of the days passed uneventfully. Whenever more of the Guadalajara Reconquista showed up, Jace would first try glaring at them – and most of the time, that worked wonders as their pursuers just veered off the road as terror struck their hearts. When that didn’t work, Priam would just use his Priest’s Smite Skill and short-circuit the vehicles.
Overall, it was quite an uneventful trip once they had come up with this strategy.
They arrived in a region that Greg referred to as ‘The Old Shipping Route’, but Quinn called the Panama Canal. Greg explained that it used to be a shipping lane where a series of pumps would let boats go from one ocean to another without having to go around the most Southern tip of South America. “But,” he said, “Back in the 2140’s, General Logistics completed their trans-Pacific rail line, and then they replicated that from North America to Europe. And it was cheaper to run trains versus ships, so this became a defunct piece of infrastructure.”
“If it’s a giant canal, how do we go over it?” Priam asked.
“They made some bridges. But they are heavily guarded by Pheracorp, since they basically control all of South America at this point. We’ll have to pay a bribe to get across, or give them something valuable.”
Quinn took a deep breath and her hands snapped to either side of the steering wheel versus her single hand on the bottom of the device. “We’re already here?”
“Yup,” Ollie replied as he nestled around Jace’s neck in his silvery-outline form. “We have plenty of creds to use in a bribe.”
If they keep their word, Jace thought. “How trustworthy are these people?”
Greg grinned, “Not very. But we have guns which shows them we mean business. And they’ll see our Cosmic Power symbols; so, if we just say we’re a Streetrunner crew on the way to work for their bosses – they’ll likely let us by.”
Quinn nodded and continued driving. The road changed from cracked asphalt and became more solid in its construction. Jace’s face was glued to the window as he saw the edges of what might have once been verdant jungle but was now just a twisted marshland. He could see the rusting hulks of shipping vessels sitting off of the coast and saw the oil shifting in the water creating a rainbow sparkle on the ocean’s surface. “They just left those here?”
“Yeah,” Quinn replied. “They left them. Not profitable enough to scrap, so they just let them sit.”
“It’s also why you can never get good fish and chips out this way,” Greg said. “There’s no real fish anymore outside of special hatcheries.”
“I’ve never had that,” Jace said. Priam nodded along and echoed the sentiment.
They rolled up to a heavily fortified checkpoint at the start of an enormous bridge. The checkpoint had 3-d printed concrete walls, metal bollards, and security turrets that all trained themselves on the vehicle. Quinn pulled into a spot that was about five-hundred feet away and marked out with a ‘wait here’ decal on the street surface.
A vehicle drove out to meet them. An armored sedan of some type, and the men who were inside piled out with Pheracorp outfits that seemed to be unwashed and in various states of disrepair. They surrounded the APC and raised their weapons – four of them. The driver of the vehicle – a Pheracorp employee wearing the same attire but much cleaner and more well-maintained – walked up with a larger version of a sliverscreen. He tapped on the window, and Quinn rolled it down.
“Good evening,” Quinn said with a grin.
“Evening miss. What’s your business in Pheracorp’s holdings?”
Greg leaned forward from the back of the vehicle, “Streetrunner crew.” He held up his hand with his Cosmic Power symbol. “Aspirants. We want to take on some jobs for your bosses.”
The man nodded, “Let me see if the higher ups will waive the entry fee.” He leaned in, and lowered his voice to a whisper, “I’m new here to help bring these sorry excuses back into line…but they will expect a…tip, if you catch my drift.”
Quinn nodded and looked at Jace, “Would you?”
“Guess I’m the sugar daddy of the group,” Jace muttered as he leaned over to Quinn’s window.
The man in the outfit froze in place. “Y-y-your ey-eyes…” He was trembling in place.
Shit. Right. Turn off that (Terrifying) augmentation, he thought. Thankfully over their travel he learned he could just toggle it on or off and did not have to manually activate them each time. “How much?”
The man’s expression resolved rapidly, but he was still shaken and his voice was more tremulous. “500 creds per guy here; so, 2,000.” He held up the larger sliverscreen, and Jace tapped in the amount and transferred the money. “Pleasure doing business. Please head across the bridge. Stay inside the vehicle.” The Pheracorp employees all put their weapons up and packed into the sedan.
Quinn started the APC forward and they went through the checkpoint before she revved the engine and took off down the well-maintained roads. “Why do they have such good construction out here?” she asked.
“Beats me,” Greg replied. “Probably to get up here quickly and use this as a natural chokepoint for the various gangs and cartels whose territory we passed through.”
Priam was seated in the back and had an upset look on his face. Jace clambered back there and sat next to him, “What’s up?”
“Did you see all that…pollution? The world is poisoned. No wonder your gods stopped being worshipped. There’s nothing in nature to look at with awe and wonder.”
Jace nodded with understanding, “I get it. I’ve grown up in cities all my life. Until the Aspirant Trial, I’d never seen grass – much less the various terrain tiles on Nihil…Nihi-”
“Nihilethelea,” Priam replied.
“That place,” Jace said with a chuckle. “I suck at complicated words.” He patted Priam on the shoulder, “We take down these megacorps, and the Star Council takes over? I’m sure they’ll fix everything.” He looked over at Quinn, “Right?”
She nodded and glanced back for just a moment to make eye contact with Jace before turning her attention back to the front. “My faction just wants to improve people’s lives. The faction leader told me that for a tech world like Earth, that means getting a tech uplift to push us into a Type 1 Kardashev Civilization. That includes fixing the planet to keep it sustainable.”
“Karda-what?” Priam asked.
Greg nodded, “I’m lost with that term as well.”
Quinn sighed, “It just means a civilization that has full mastery over their world and all of its energy. It means that humanity will be advanced enough to colonize other planets in our solar system.”
Jace frowned and looked at Ollie, “Doesn’t that mean that worlds that are connected by The Cosmic Corridor could eventually find each other by flying through space?”
Ollie laughed, his deep voice betrayed by his small, cute, otter body. “No way. Space is huge. It is tough going past the speed of light. Even then, you are aiming a needle into an infinite void. The few civilizations that do meet outside of The Cosmic Corridor? Almost always end up making trade pacts. There have been a few wars between worlds, but those are few and far between.”
Greg chuckled, “Why am I surprised. We have an alien in the car with us!”
Priam huffed, “Excuse you. I’m not an alien. If anything, you three are!”
Jace just smiled in the absurdity of it all. Two months ago, humanity was alone in the cosmos. Now? He’d seen wonders beyond imagining, been on an alien, magitech planet – and lost limbs on that planet. He’d been to a fully magic world and fought literal dragons and giants.
A war between worlds is the least surprising thing in this whole mess. As he was thinking about the idea of Earth going to space and exploring the cosmos with Chroma, a message notification pinged in his vision. From Shhiv.
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[Hey! It’s been a few days and I wanted to check in on you.]
[Missy’s new business is very interesting. She’s an artist, a good one! I get to handle the logistics side of this new deal. Plus, we’re making some decent Stardust!]
[How are you holding up? I can’t believe I have to spend almost a whole month away from you.]
//////////////////////////
Jace cracked a grin. He willed the response box to open, and as he thought, his words became text on the screen. Always good to see a message from my girlfriend. Happy the business is taking off – it was a smart play. Can’t believe no one came up with the idea of cosmopanel covers. I’m holding up fine. I did miss waking up next to you. Been sleeping in a car for a few days here. Not nearly as comfortable. “Send.”
//////////////////////////
[I get that. Nights are a bit lonely here, too. Anyways, I’m sure you’re busy.]
[Just stay safe out there.]
//////////////////////////
Jace grinned and sent back a message. I’m not busy. What do you want to talk about?
The two kept conversing via The Cosmic System as the APC rolled along down the highway.
Comments
Aclys
Highway to the danger zone...
