Secret Project - First Chapter

[So, this being a funny week, I've decided to share something here apropos of nothing to see what you guys think. This is a secret LitRPG project that's been in the works, and is meant to have mainstream post-apoc appeal. I've written the first chapter to get a feel for how the book might play out, and would love to hear your thoughts. Would you read on if you didn't know it was a Phil Tucker book? Do you enjoy the premise? Is there something lacking that you'd look for in a first chapter, or some other problem that leaps out at you? Cheers!]

Chapter 1

I'd almost finished scouting Planet Earth for possible colonization when the damned Star Kings beat me to the punch. 

I’ve no real excuse. The assignment shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of weeks, but there I was three months later at a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona futzing with my report, by bodyguard bored out of her gourd. I’d known shortly after arriving that I was going to recommend total liquidation and strip-mining, but to my burgeoning surprise I’d found myself lingering. 

It was the art. It’s just true, we endotherms tend to create the best stuff. Maybe it’s our knack for allusive thinking, or the fact that we all started off on the evolutionary ladder as nervous prey, but the best interpretations of reality out there are generally by warm-blooded creatures, and boy was humanity creative. While most of the religious stuff left me cold, I was mesmerized by Islamic geometric patterns, some of that cave painting truly felt timeless, and Cubism, I mean, wow. It’s why I was in Barcelona, only a few blocks from the Picasso Museum, when my spacecom let out a warbling beep and alerting me to the fact that the world was about to end.

“What is it?” asked Selene, her voice a low electronic purr, rich with hope that something, anything had happened. 

Irritated, I hurriedly dipped the date I was nibbling into my silica pouch then popped it into my mouth, brushed my fingers off on the djellaba I’d taken to wearing since my visit to Morocco, and tapped on the com.  

Huh.

“Looks like a Star King cornucopia machine just hit a mountain range in Alaska. That… that can’t be right.”

Selene’s whip-like tail of pure gold undulated excitedly as she crowded in close. Even as I queried further data, the Star King artifact began unleashing its self-replicating nanobot swarm.

For a long, surreal moment it was all I could do to just stare at the data. Selene studied me expectantly, her large, funicular ears quirked, her pale ivory eyes nictating once. It took me an embarrassingly amount of time to assimilate just how profoundly everything had instantly changed. I just sat there, blinking like a rookie surveyor.

“And?” she prompted at last. “An error, assuredly?”

I sat back, causing the human-sized chair to groan precariously beneath my bulk. In many ways I was the opposite of Selene, all muscle and sinew compared to her unearthly grace, my skin a dull grayish white where she was ivory-toned plating over exposed golden and dark mechanical understructures. 

Her chair never groaned.

“It means my in depth report? Obsolete.” I glanced about the sidewalk cafe, and gestured at all the other customers who were sublimely unable to pierce her invisibility cloak and my own apparator illusion of a middle-aged human. “All these smiling, happy humans, earnestly discussing their little lives and preoccupations? Doomed.”

“The Varsin gave you no warning?” she asked, and I knew from her sly tone just how provocative and rhetorical she was being.

I mechanically ate another date as I blinked at my starcom. “No. But--how? There are regulations, protocols--this can’t be happening. Earth is a Category 6 neutral planetoid under GCA interdict. You can’t just dump a cornucopia machine on it and say it’s yours. There are protocols.”

“Some one,” purred Selene, “forgot to tell the Star Kings.”

“Hold on.” Abruptly furious, I activated my anonymity bubble and opened a direct link to my employer’s field office in Proxima Centauri. Sure I’d been ducking their requests for direct communication for a month now, and yes, their tone had grown increasingly testy, but nothing in their missives had indicated a real emergency. 

Nothing.

“And… the signal was jammed.”

Selene quirked her head to one side. “Planet dampener?”

I looked up at the cloudless blue sky in pure frustration. “A planet-wide dampener. That’s just shy of being illegal and also completely unnecessary. Who did they think the humans were going to reach out to? The microbes on Europa? Fucking Star Kings.”

“As your loyal bodyguard, I suggest we summon the Starskipper.”

“Hmm.” I tried to get a bead on the cornucopia machine itself, see if I couldn’t patch into a direct channel to speak with its owners, but nothing. It was either deliberately ignoring my queries, or more likely insulated from contact by dint of being behind its own event horizon. 

What a mess. 

A few humans were already talking urgently to each other, phones no doubt reporting the alien phenomenon taking place in the northwestern United States. Soon the whole cafe and the entire city would be upended by panic and chaos. 

“Yeah.” I poured the remaining dates into a side pouch. “Time to go.”

Selene rose, leaned backward to such a degree that she clasped the rear of her chair and somersaulted slowly and with complete control onto her digitigrade feet. Whereas I merely rose ponderously to my feet and dropped the right amount of Euros on the table. Stashed my tablet and starcom in the lovely leather satchel I’d purchased in Ulan Bator, and stared off down the cobbled street in disgust. 

“You think there’s time for us to grab some of paintings from the Picasso Museum?”

Selene had no brows, but her complete lack of response was answer enough.

I sighed. “Fine. Let them be devoured by the Star Kings like everything else.”

“Your anger is curious.” Selene quirked her head to one side. “Given how your employers would have done the same.”

“If I recommended the planet for liquidation.”

“If?”

I decided to ignore her and tapped my wrist band to summon the Starskipper. It was parked some five thousand miles away next to an impossibly blue little lake in the Rocky Mountains, but it should reach me in less than a minute. I’d load my flitter, strap in, and--and instead of the customary little chirp of compliance, I got a dull buzzing sound.

That wasn’t right.

I stared at my band and tapped the summon button again. 

Once more with the negative buzz.

Selene’s tail lashed archly. “Are you doing that correctly?” 

For the first time I felt a little frisson of fear. I dug my starcom back out and opened a direct channel to the Starskipper.

Nothing. 

“They haven’t just cut off all interstellar communication, they’ve shut down all ansible channels on the planet itself. Come on!” I threw my starcom away and Selene was gone in a flash, as I knew she would, slipping down the street to snag it from the air, navigating between the humans with ease.

Jamming all ansible channels?  That stank of deliberate malfeasance. What the hell were the Star Kings up to? Selene handed me the starcom and I checked the on the event horizon. It had already expanded across the Bering Strait into Russia and east into the Yukon.

Well, shit.

My short-range com was still active, so I broke a bunch of protocols of my own and summoned my flitter to land right here the street.

More and more people were stopping to stare at their phones.

The flitter dropped smoothly from the sky, dropping its translucent camouflage to settle on its three stout little legs upon the broad sidewalk, its cockpit popping open as I jogged over heavily.

Several hundred tourists and locals stopped to gape as Selene dropped invisibility for no good reason other than my having already broken protocol, and leaped smoothly to soar a dozen yards and land neatly inside as I clambered in, the pilot’s seat immediately adjusting to my frame. The shouts of alarm and fear where cut off as the cockpit sealed. Ignoring the distressed humans outside, I placed my starcom in the navigation socket and willed it to take me to the Starskipper.

Up we flew into the beautiful Barcelona sky. The city dropped away, then sped out of view as we zipped west. It was only a little over five thousand miles to my ship, but since the flitter could only go about a thousand mph, it meant I’d be cutting it close.

Real close.

I could hear Selene’s metal fingertips tapping on her screen. She was no doubt running calculations of her own. And realized that the situation was serious enough to not warrant raillery.

Anxiety was making my muzzle itch, so I scritched at its underside as lightly as I could manage while I watched the radar, the arid farmland of Spain blurring past below. The event horizon continued to crawl south across Canada into British Colombia. Irritated, I tried again and again to pierce the dampener, cycling between attempts to communicate with my employers, the Starskipper, or the cornucopia artifact itself, more out petulance than any real hope of getting through, and when we sped out over the glimmering Atlantic in all its corrugated blue glory, I set to writing the most caustic and insulting report possible. The moment I broke atmo and the dampening field I was going to file a complaint with the Galactic Central Authority first, and then against my employers, the Varsin, second, for allowing me to fall into this ridiculous situation.

Amateurs. They were all damned amateurs.

There wasn’t much to do as the waves fled past beneath me. Unable to resist, I dialed into some human news outlets.

They had to be going mad with confusion and fear.

“...the Secretary of Defense has issued a statement affirming that the event was not a weapon strike, as The American Meteor Society is said to have received over three thousand reports of the fireball sighting prior to impact. NASA has determined that the object’s trajectory crossed over British Columbia before impacting the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska at--”

I twiddled the dial. 

“...footage shows a rapidly expanding dome of silver light that is moving at what is estimated to be six or seven hundred miles per hour, expanding from the impact site in Alaska in a perfect circle and cutting off connection with everything that falls within its radius. No reports have yet been received of--”

I scowled and shifted to private US military channels, and listened as a couple of fighter jets lost communication the second they flew into the event horizon. Poor bastards. They’d no idea what they were dealing with. I listened to a handful more reports, then cut it off altogether. It was all just too depressing.

“At least they will have a chance,” said Selene, which was a curious statement for her.

“At least?” I asked.

“I was attempting to cheer you up.”

I wanted to twist about in my seat, but that was impossible. I had all the spinal flexibility of an Earthling rhino. “Cheer me up? I’m not sad. I’m furious.”

Again her silence spoke volumes. So I simply sat there, arms crossed, staring at my radar in dull anger as the flitter went as fast as it possibly could and the horizon boundary crept south across the United States. 

“We aren’t going to reach the Starskipper in time,” said Selene at last.

Irrationally, I felt defensive for the flitter. It wasn’t meant for emergencies. The Starskipper could have, should have, reached me in minutes. 

But here we were.

“No, I reckon we won’t.”

“And we can’t reach the Varsin. Nor the Star Kings by means of the cornucopia machine.”

“I know what you’re driving at.” I just didn’t want to say it out loud.

“If we had executed this mission in the allotted time frame--”

“Hey, I wanted to be a hundred percent sure.”

“We have dallied an excess seventy rotations.” Her tone grew hard. “Had the Star Kings not forced our hand, I am loath to imagine how many more we would have wasted.”

“It wasn’t waste. I was…” I searched for the right words. “Making sure,” I said lamely.

This wasn’t my first emergency in the field, not by a long shot, but this had to be the most embarrassing. My anger warred with a reluctant sense of humiliation. Whose great idea had it been to turn this easy gig into a working vacation? Not Selene’s. Have fun with it, I’d thought. Take your time compiling your report, go ahead and write long drunken screeds on the greater value of creativity versus the prospective wealth hidden in the planet’s core. Tirades I’d tiredly delete in the morning, before deciding that perhaps a couple more days were needed to be certain humanity was right for liquidation.

I rubbed at my muzzle in chagrin, and sighed. 

The event horizon stabilized just as we hit the North American continent. It curved from the north western tip of Mexico up and across the United States from Dallas to Knoxville to Montreal. The dome itself covered most of Russia, a chunk of northern China, and the northern bits of Japan and Scandinavia. Just under half a billion humans, gone like that, but my thoughts strayed instead to the little Shinto shrine I’d fallen in love with outside Sapporo, how the rain had misted down as I’d sipped tea with that old blind monk under the moss-covered awning. I hadn’t even bothered with my apparator. Just sat there in all my glory, wondering if I was making a mistake recommending this planet be consumed.

My sense of urgency was gone. The Starskipper had no doubt been atomized, its elemental components re-used to furnish the Proving Grounds. I flew the last stretch in a morose state of mind, not thinking of anything much. Selene had the grace to be silent. Finally I caught sight of the event horizon up ahead, emerging from rugged landscape of eastern Tennessee.

I set the flitter down on a narrow mountain road in Smoky Mountains National Park. The morning mist was lingering over the dense woods on either side, and the air was cool and wet and scented with petrichor as we opened the cockpit and stared at the event horizon itself.

It was beautiful, in its own way. A great opaque silver wall that curved up and away into the sky, forming the giant dome that now covered a third of the planet. Its surface was polished to a perfect sheen, and radiated its own cool light under the heavy cloud cover. A handful of cars had stopped before it, folks on their way to Pigeon Ford, probably, and who’d gotten out of to stare dumbfoundedly at the alien phenomenon.

They were so flummoxed it took them almost a minute to notice the flitter when I dropped the camouflage. At first they shouted in English and pointed and tugged at each other, but when Selene leaped out with feline grace, all shimmering ivory and gold and with her lashing tail, they screamed and yelled and ran off into the woods.

I could have stopped her, but I just wasn’t in the mood. 

I stepped down heavily beside her. “The horizon’s stabilized. I reckon it’s already accepting contestants.”

“How many, do you estimate?

“Ten thousand, maybe? Given Earth’s population, that sounds about right.”

“Which means we must hurry.” She prowled forward, stalking with her precise steps, a marvel of biomechanical engineering and utterly at odds with the dark Tennessee woods on either side. 

She was right. Even worse than getting caught snoozing with my pants down would be getting locked out of the Proving Grounds and being forced to hope that a bunch of barely evolved primates would win the contest.

That wouldn’t be just humiliating. That’d be tantamount to suicide.

Selene was complex enough that the Horizon wouldn’t confiscate her as equipment, but everything else would have to stay in the flitter. With extreme reluctance I tossed my gear into the cockpit, starcom included, and in nothing but my djellaba and slippers I padded after Selene, up the rain-darkened highway, past a white pickup and a family van, past two cars that had experienced a fender-bender as the Horizon had no doubt come rushing up, and approached the horizon’s gleaming curvature.

We got within three yards before Selene tripped the onboarding message:

“Welcome the Proving Grounds! In compliance with Galactic Center Authority protocols, stewardship of your planet has been awarded to that noble and space-faring species known only as… the Star Kings. Revered by all, pre-eminent amongst the other members of the Galactic Confederacy, it is truly an astounding honor to be chosen by the Star Kings for resource extraction, terraforming, and colonization. But in their gentle compassion and sweet sympathy, the Star Kings have chosen to grant you a chance to earn autonomy instead of heroic self-sacrifice.”

“Hello? Security? Operator? Is anyone there?” My voice barely echoed in the foggy damp. “I’m a member of the Galactic Confederacy. There’s been a mistake.” 

“For the Star Kings are a compassionate species, and know that while all other sentient lifeforms are inferior in spirit, mind, and body, some may yet deserve a chance to join them upon the galactic stage. Thus they have initiated a Proving Grounds trial where you must race against two rival species from planets chosen for resource extraction. The first to reach the cornucopia machine and there defeat its Guardian shall secure clemency for their kind, while the remaining two shall be lovingly and respectfully processed.”

“It’s a pre-recorded message,” purred Selene in disgust.

“Hello? Hey! I’m not a human.” I had to try, right? “I work for the Varsin Exploratory Corporation, and am licensed by the Galactic--”

“Thus, take heart and seize the moment! The first ten thousand entrants shall be granted a miraculous System that shall furnish them with powers beyond their imagination, and aid you in achieving your goal. Race across the Proving Grounds with verve and zest, and know that the Star Kings shall be watching you from afar with appropriate expressions of sympathy as they cheer you on. Know also that there is room for wonder and enjoyment as you undergo this competition, for you shall traverse terrain that has been meticulously created from the geographies of all three planets, and encounter fascinating and curious creatures from your collective legends, mythologies, and the Star Kings' own genteel home planet.”

My shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch, which for my shoulders was a lot. “Damn it. We’re going to have to go in.”

“Better yet, you may make friends amongst the other two species, and learn much about the wonders of the galaxy if your mind is open to the novelty and delights of first contact. Now, please proceed through the Horizon, so that you may choose your three Elements and begin walking your path toward enviable success. The illustrious and holy Star Kings salute you!”

Selene was prowling back and forth, clearly agitated. “This means a complete recomposition. I am not pleased. Not pleased in the slightest.”

“We’ll sue the Varsin, we’ll sue somebody for all they’re worth and get everything fixed once we’re out of here,” I said. “Somebody’s going to pay for this fuck-up.”

She glanced back at me, going still in that ominous manner of hers that still caused my heart to beat harder. “Somebody is clearly at fault.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll be fine while we’re inside. And I’ll clear this up with the Arbitrator the moment we’re inside. I’ll explain the mistake. We’ll get the Starskipper back, be released, and out of this Solar System within the hour.”

Selene just stared at me for a moment longer, then darted into the silver wall and disappeared.

She never was one for hesitating.

Me, on the other hand? I took a look all around the beautiful woods, inhaled deeply, then wished the Star Kings would collectively suffer from explosive intestinal failures. But with no means to effect that desire, and with no other choice in the matter, I scowled and stepped into my glimmering reflection.

A message popped up in my vision just as the silver drowned my eyes:

[System Error: Galactic credentials not recognized. Contestant categorized as HUMAN.]