“The Federation, full name The Federation of Five Planets, is one of four sovereign factions in the known galaxy, and the largest by a generous margin. Second in population is The Toncon Theocracy, then followed by The Starspawn, before finishing with The Collective. The last is a nation of Artificial Intelligence, which these introductory chapters will not go into.
The Federation is not a place of abject evil nor boundless good. Nevertheless, they maintain order, and do so while respecting the rights and privileges of the human race. They cannot claim a technological edge like Toncon and its gravitation wonders, nor are they as adept at living in space as The Starspawn. Yet if one has needs, this author highly doubts that it cannot be met on one of the hundred Federations planets.”
An introduction to the wider galaxy, chapter two.
“So,” Nova began, bobbing up and down. “Humans are bad at math, which means we’ll have to come up with something to display. If you’re against experience and levels, we can do a feat system, or even a milestone one, where I don’t tell you anything until you’ve unlocked something special. We can also go the powers route, where you can choose new, special powers after enough energy has been collected, or a free system, where you manipulate raw energy. Or—”
Mat held up his hand, shaking his head. “Hold up, Jesus. I guess levels is the easiest thing?”
“Excellent!” Nova exclaimed, already rolling out an expansive character sheet over his vision. “Here you can see—”
“No, hell. Get that away from me. Just give a single level counter and how close I am to the next one.”
Nova dimmed, then complied. A small number zero appeared at the top of Mat’s vision, with a bar below it. It was filled about halfway, both the number and bar fading once he stopped paying attention to them.
“The simplified formula, which is not entirely accurate but much easier to comprehend, is as follows.” The AI bobbed up and down, seemingly bouncing back from his disappointment. “Experience is cumulative, and a milestone has to be reached to enter the next level. As the level increases, it becomes harder to fill you with energy, so more is required. The formula is fifty times your level to the power of one point eight.”
Mat shrugged. “Sure.”
“Quite so. Experience is based on the emotional connection between death and the realm we are drawing experience from, meaning roughly that the harder they are to kill, the more experience you will get.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Nova managed to raise his eyebrow at him. “Are you familiar with Aura Arithmetics, Ether Metrics and Second Math?”
“No,” Mat replied, crossing his arms. “And I don’t care to be. It’s far too gamified to be a coincidence.”
The AI tsked. “You have a suspicious mindset, Mat. Did anyone ever tell you that? Nevertheless, your belief is not required. That is how it works. Now, this is an exponential curve, but not a particularly strong one. The death of Felip gave you twenty five experiences, for example, while—”
“Felip?”
“The Starspawn you killed,” Nova clarified. “His name was onboard the ship's AI. He was running an interesting route, actually, and a risky one, but my point—”
“What’s a Starspawn?”
Nova hissed in annoyance. “I realize that you’re new here, but please don’t interrupt me. Starspawn are, loosely speaking, a nomadic and non-centralized people that live between the other political entities in the galaxy. Their official name is the Starspawn of Nikel, but most people just call them Starspawn. Felip here had hollow bones in his legs, and an old injury in the one you broke. Modifications like that are relatively common among the Starspawn.”
“Why would anyone want hollow bones? Is Starspawn a catch-all term for unaffiliated groups? Wait, doesn’t the marrow in bones make blood? Are they bird bones?”
“We can play twenty questions later,” Nova insisted. “But yes, they are their own people, with their own identity, but they don’t live on planets. Can we please move on?”
Mat grunted. “Fine. Continue.”
“Thank you. As I was saying. Felip gave you twenty five experiences, which is halfway to the first level. Had you been level ten, this would be about one twenty-third of what is needed to get to level eleven. Roughly. I’m simplifying a lot of very complex mathematics. Human minds are so simple.”
“You quite literally stole my name because you couldn't think of one,” Mat replied, rolling his eyes. “Right, fine. But you lifted that body even though I’m not level one yet, so more experience does something even if I don’t go up a level.”
Nova tilted to the side. “They are an auxiliary tool at best. Even at level fifty, when there is enough energy to activate them all, you will acquire far better weaponry by using them for their intended function, and not as weapons themselves.”
“Alright. So what’s next, then? Go to wherever this ship is going, then try to sneak away? Pretend we’ve always owned it? Hide in as deep of a hole that we can find?”
“Not sure. Ah, actually, one second.”
Mat shrugged, and a moment later Nova blasted his vision with more gaming screens. Mat waved them away, which accomplished absolutely nothing. “Nova, get that shit out of my face.”
“I’m testing some new functions,” the AI replied. “Would you happen to know the difference between ‘friendly approach’ and ‘we’re boarding you’?”
Turning, Mat shot the orb an alarmed glare. “What?”
“We’re being boarded,” Nova decided. “In about ten minutes, anyway. More Starspawn. I really hope they weren’t friends of the guy you just killed.”
Mat tried to take a calming breath, finding it not very calming at all. “We, Nova. The guy we killed. Can you evade them?”
“No. Their ship is faster.”
“So we’re just fucked, then?”
Nova floated back to hover in front of him. “That’s accurate. I have been able to engage in cybernetic warfare with their systems. There is good news and there is bad news. I can see that you’d like the bad news first. Very well. These Starspawn dabble in slavery. The good news is that they’ll very most likely be taking you alive to play in ‘The Great Game’. This will, most likely, allow us to level a great many times.”
“Any version of this where I don’t end up getting enslaved?” Mat asked, panic creeping into his tone. Nova shrugged, then shook his head. Mat lunged for the gun he’d acquired, though no one was here. Yet. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Alter our course. Strand us.”
“The risk—”
“I don’t care about the risk,” Mat barked. “Strand us.”
Nova’s hovering intensified, as if annoyed. “The risk is not the issue, I was saying. They employed counter cybernetic warfare programs when I interacted with their vessels. I no longer control our ship.”
“You lost the ship?!” Mat half screamed, half demanded. “What kind of AI are you?!”
“The kind made for reality manipulation, not hacking. Their software is working with fifteen times the processing power mine is. My processing power being your brain.”
Mat sighed, anger draining away as quickly as it had come. “You suck at hacking, you mean. Can’t you use the ship's hardware to help you?”
“It is not my speciality,” Nova replied haltingly. “And while I can use regular hardware, I am not, technically speaking, software. My creators dubbed me a ‘ghost’, but I prefer the term memCore.”
“Lovely. Good for you. How do we get out of this?”
Nova shrugged, a gesture that translated despite having no body. “I don’t think we do. That isn’t so bad, actually. More experience means more power, and more power means more choices. The galaxy might not be run by evil incarnate, like some of your memories would suggest, but it isn’t a nice place, either. Use this as an opportunity to, what’s the term? Powerlevel.”
“By killing other people in ‘Great Game’,” Mat replied. “Hard no. What even are they?”
“You would understand them as gladiatorial matches being livestreamed over the dark web. Some are simple, some are grand, but there’s always one going on, and it’s making too much money to ever be fully stamped out.”
“By The Starspawn, you mean.”
“That’s a generalization,” Nova hedged. “But they make up a large percentage of the staff, yes. Either way, I can deal with anything they put in or around your body to control you, and then we start leveling up. I made that sound like there was an alternative. There isn't one. And unless you’ve spontaneously grown able to hide your thoughts from me, you haven’t thought of one either.”
Mat rolled his shoulder, his mind narrowing to only a single choice. “We fight. I have a gun and time to prepare. Barricades. Yeah. Barricades.”
Nova didn’t reply, but Mat didn’t let that stop him. So as his precious minutes drained away, he upended the table, jammed one of the doors with an iron bar poker thing, and made two separate fallback positions.
Probably. He wasn’t actually entirely sure what those looked like. Either way, he ripped free as much futuristic furniture as he could, piled it high, tested their stability, watched it fall over, then redid the whole damn thing.
Then he hunted for cameras, which Nova helped point out. Minute after minute his time drained away, until Nova spoke up again.
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“They’re in visual range,” Nova reported. Mat made to go to where he had discovered the bridge, but a screen appeared in his vision. Handy. “I’m slowly losing control over the ship's internal systems. You’ve gotten all the internal cameras, right?”
Mat nodded, his attention on the fake screen. Three ships there were, and they looked as sci-fi as he could imagine. Sleek lines, dark steel, bristling with guns. All three were shaped in vague v-shape forms, and bright plumes of energy trailed behind them.
And the Tunnel, as Nova had called it, framed it all. “How did they even get in our Tunnel?”
“Skipper and Tracker. In short, they can track and break into another ship's Tunnel. Not cheap. I’m beginning to suspect they’re not here to recruit for their Great Game.”
Mat frowned. “But you said—”
“I embellished,” Nova interrupted, tone strained. “I didn’t get past their system's security, alright? Sixty three percent of ship attacks in this region are perpetrated by Starspawn slavers. I made an educated call.”
“You guessed.”
“That’s another way to put it, yes. But it does seem likely we’ll end up there anyway, so I wasn’t wrong.”
Mat glanced back at the screen, and the ships had closed an alarming amount of distance already. In fact, if he was seeing this right, then—
A great thunk echoed through the space, and the entire ship shuddered. Mat turned to the airlock, crouched behind his barricade. Maybe he could do nothing, maybe he was about to die, but here and now, the thought of quietly surrendering didn’t even occur to him.
The screen in his vision winked out. Nova, now apparently as blind as he was, started circling around the room in near panic, and Mat tightened the grip on his pistol. He didn’t want to kill, but he wasn’t a pacifist, so if these fuckers thought they were going to enslave him, he was going to exercise his god-given right of fighting for his own life.
Then there was a sound behind him, like the shrill scream of a hundred lasers, and Mat turned. There, as the wall melted like wax and a nice, cream colored curtain caught fire, was another hole into the ship. No, not a hole. An entrance.
He jerked his gun around and opened fire, hitting one of the six approaching figures by sheer luck, and the shot washed over their armor without noticeable effect. Mat froze, his mind not quite able to figure out what to do now.
Grey, visored helmets glared at him from across the room, and one of the strangers pointed a weapon at him. A weapon attached to a third, metal arm, which came from their back like a spider’s limb. Mat had exactly half a second to marvel at actual power armor before something hit him in the neck.
Nova shouted something, but Mat lost consciousness before his head hit the floor.
He woke with cold itself worming into his bones, like the deepest of winters had invaded his blood. Despite his biology demanding movement, he couldn't flinch away, or even shiver. His body was locked like it had never been before, and even the straightjacked he’d tried as a dare paled in comparison.
Mat glanced to the right, wishing to and failing to heave in relief. At least he could still see. What he saw, on the other hand, was less than pleasing. Gleaming metal walls rose inches from his body, tall and thin—coffin. He was in a coffin.
He looked at himself to avoid a panic attack, straining to cross his eyes. A tube was stuck down his throat, one he couldn't feel, and cables ran from the ceiling down onto his back, either plugged into him or trailing down to the floor. And he was naked, because why not, at that point.
“Ah, good, you’re awake,” Nova began. Mat tried to speak, then failed. Nova hummed. “It appears we’re in somewhat of a predicament. Also, you’ve been asleep for six months.”
Six months?!
“Closer to seven?” the AI murmured. “My internal clock didn’t work so well while your brain was shut down. I’ll make a note of that. From what I’ve been able to gather, they put you on ice after our capture, which is why you’re feeling like shit right now. The good news is, they bought and or acquired high-level Toncon cryofreezers, which translate to pretty good Federation standard equipment. No permanent brain damage for you.”
Yippie the fucking yay. And the bad news?
“Well, we’re waking up, so that means we’re about to enter into our initiation game. And there’s a bomb in your neck.”
Mat really hated the fact that he couldn't glare, because that would have done wonders to stop the panic climbing up his throat. I thought you said you could ‘deal with’ anything they put in my body.
“They have good nanotech,” Nova grumbled. “Stolen, probably. It has a very sensitive trigger, and honestly, it seems like a waste to use this on people just to cull half of them in the first match. Nanosurgery is harder than the manuals made it seem, alright?”
Fucking fuck fuck fuck.
Raging was nice. It felt good, and Mat needed some endorphins after dealing with… everything. But without being able to move, he ran out of steam quickly, and Nova seemed perfectly willing to wait him out. Finally, after a few minutes, he aimed his thoughts in the AI general direction.
What’s an initiation game?
“Oh, right.” Nova cleared his throat. “So, themes tend to vary, but the basic rule is always the same. You get dropped—literally—into a melee, and if you get one good, clean kill, they pull you out. If you don’t want to kill, or if you hesitate, or fuck up, etcetera, you’ll die to someone who didn’t do any of those things. Welcome to the life of a bladeslave.”
What’s a bladeslave?
“We are.”
Any further questions were interrupted by the fact that the tube in his throat was retracting, pulled out and away from his… his coffin. Mat retched, revulsion crawling over his skin. When the thing was finally gone, the cables on his back detached—of course they had been inside of him. Silly to think any other possibility could be possible—and he felt needles three inches long pull out of his spine.
Pain was not the word to describe the feeling. Agony, perhaps, but it wasn’t bad enough for that. Something between pain and that sick, twisted feeling in your stomach, like eating rotten meat while watching maggots crawl out of the flesh.
Feeling returned to him gradually, and Nova shrugged. “Seems like this is it. I suggest pretending that you aren’t special in any way, shape or form, and then to kill someone as quickly as you can. If they find out I’m here, to the operating table we go, never to wake up again.”
“—ea’,” Mat responded, looking down at the floor. A floor, he could now see, that had a seam in it. “I’m fucked.”
Nova tsked. “We, Mat, but good job not responding verbally to my questions. They might not be able to hear me, but you holding a one-sided conversation would be rather suspicious.”
He didn’t respond. Hell, he almost expected to get dropped right this second, stiff limbs be damned. Instead it took another two minutes, during which he got both the chance for another panic attack, and also had his full functionality restored.
Mat stretched as best he could, desperately wishing for more room. Before that could turn into anger, robotic arms descended from the walls, dressed him in a strange one-piece clothing thing, retracted, and then the floor opened up beneath him.
Gravity did what it ought to do, and Mat dropped down, any semblance of calm and planning wiped from his mind. He’d been expecting an arena. Maybe even a forest, or a field. Stands with bloodthirty fans, or robots the size of buildings.
Instead he fell down at what appeared to be a lifeless, barren planet, rapidly approaching the ground. He barely noticed the cable attached to his new overalls-like suit, or that he could breathe despite the fact that he was in outer space.
And the sun was red.
The sun was red. Every ounce of caveman biology rebelled at the very idea, but then that too was wiped clean by the inexorable, relentless approach of death.
A drone whipped by, avoiding him by mere feet, and a hundred more lit up the gloomy night. Despite that, he could see well enough, and what he saw didn’t fill him with confidence.
Dozens of objects were falling from the sky, coffins all. Dozens of people, he dimly realized, each seemingly trailed by their own set of watchful, nimble drones.
The cable snapped tight, and his stomach ascended up to his throat, a deep certainty forming in his mind. He was going to die. Right here, right now, he was going to hit the floor and detonate like a rotten tomato. Closer and closer it came, until it felt like he had sped up a hundredfold.
His feet hit the ground like he’d been gently placed there by an angel, and the cable detached, leaving him free. Mat blinked, uncomprehending, as he breathed stale air and felt hard stone under his soles. Whatever he was wearing, it let him feel just fine.
It was weird feeling the ground with his feet. Unnatural.
Something hit him in the back, and Mat sprawled forward, scraping his arms along the rock. He twisted more out of panic than strategy, and saw a woman looming over him, face twisted in fear as her hands hefted a stone.
Before she could bring it down, another man closed the distance, wrapping his hands around her neck and twisting. A moment of grim satisfaction came over the stranger’s face, relief and something more. The woman fell, boneless and limp, and the man was yanked upwards by some invisible force.
Mat shook his head, unable to keep up. Old, buried instinct roared to life, the instinct of humanity when it still feared the dark. So he grabbed the rock the woman had dropped, and surged to his feet as quickly as he could, eyes darting around like a startled deer.
No one was there. Oh, there were plenty of people there, but none close enough to hurt him. So Mat twisted, uncertain about what to do. Did he… did he hunt someone? Split their skull open and claim victory, whatever victory meant?
The choice was taken from him, and a woman ran in his direction, a cold anger carved into her face. Mat flinched back from it, from her, and almost dropped the rock. Almost, but not quite.
Before he could process that someone was attacking him, she was there, clawing at his face with bare hands. Mat shoved the smaller woman back, but she fell with it, rolling to her feet like she’d been born to the action. She snarled again, lips curling into a full sneer.
She came again, and this time he lashed out in blind panic, rock impacting flesh. The woman coughed, drooping back and gripping her stomach, half stumbling over yet more rocks. Mat froze, unwilling to believe he’d just done that.
The woman didn’t share his hesitation, picking up a stone while she came again, hefting the weapon high.
Mat scrambled back, and she sped up to catch him, her foot coming down awkwardly on the ground. She fell, but she hit him while she did, and Mat screamed when her full weight rammed the stone against his knee.
Pain seared across his mind while he buckled, bone and flesh contorting as blood splattered against the ground. Mat tried to catch himself and ended up falling over the woman, his weight driving her down.
Agony and adrenaline chased higher reason from his mind, so when his fingers found her neck, he squeezed. He barely felt her hands claw at him, scoring deep lines in his skin, but he tucked his head away, shielding his eyes. Still she struggled, so he slammed her head against the floor, willing her to stop fighting.
Something broke, her body went limp, and a blinking, rapidly vanishing notification congratulated him on;
You have reached level one. Congratulations!
You can now select one (1) perk.
Mat stared at nothing while the notification vanished, looking between the woman he’d just killed and the brief evidence that someone had congratulated him for it. Some dim part of his mind realized Nova had probably interrupted an automated system, because the AI knew how Mat would take this.
The rest of him was throwing up, a storm of emotions boiling over and forcing anything resembling coherent thought out and away.
He was still dry heaving when an invisible force pulled him up, and a cold, automated voice rang out from one of the nearby drones. Drones which had been recording, editing and streaming every second.
“You have killed, and you will thus be rewarded. Rise, bladeslave. Rise from the mud and claim your place among legends.”
A gleaming coffin snapped shut around him, and Mat stared at his blood covered reflection. His own face stared back at him, and Mat found it to be the face of a stranger.
When a needle brought oblivion, he embraced it.
Afterword
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