Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

I was not a particularly well-camouflaged cat, but the people from the ship didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the valley after they’d captured the runners. They took their prisoners into their ship, and then emerged to explore the farmhouse. Before I was halfway down the valley they brought an elderly man out of the house and marched him off to the ship, and then there was no more activity until I was close enough to be making serious decisions.

With the ship sitting in the middle of a grain field, I could probably get right up to it without being spotted—so long as there was no proximity detector to beep out a warning. The question was, what was I doing here? I’d been sent on a scouting trip, and potentially to check on a fellow cat, but I’d seen no sign of any cats being taken into the ship, and what did Cat-me care about a bunch of captured humans?

But I was a Player Character. My decisions were not driven by self-preservation, but by story, advancement and reward. And any risk had to be significantly mitigated by the fact that I was safely stowed in the Soup at the Challenge entrance—along with at my parents' house in Drenthe. The most I had to worry about was my player statistics and boasting rights.

Well, and pain. Pain was definitely a factor I’d never before had to deal with in an MMO.

The prospect didn’t deter me, but meant I was not inclined to attempt a run past the mobs to a checkpoint manoeuvre. If this game even had checkpoints. It could be so freeform as to not have an actual objective: a sandbox cat colony, there for me to make what I wanted of it, spaceship included.

In any case, I wanted into the ship, which was not so simple a goal. Spaceship design didn’t lend itself to convenient open windows.

Hoping I wasn’t irradiating Cat-me, I crept up to where the ship had opened. The door had closed, the ramp was gone. I trotted beneath one of the straight sections, nose twitching at a variety of harsh scents. There was definitely an ozone tang, with an acrid undernote, and a weird burned popcorn odour that I realised was coming from the grain immediately flattered by the polyhedrons. Definitely some heat involved in the landing.

As I approached the central circle, I spotted quivering in the grain immediately below it, and was two heartbeats from bolting when a pair of grey ears popped above the green-gold, unripened heads of grain. The farm cat.

I blinked a quick greeting, and then sent an image of the door as I’d seen it when open. Farmhouse Grey’s ears showed dissatisfaction, and then I had an image back of smooth, unbroken metal. No way in.

The question of how two cats could possibly break into a vehicle most definitely not designed to be opened from the outside was thankfully made moot by a clunk and sliding noise above. The door had opened, and the ramp was lowering.

Thank you, plot convenience.

Before the ramp had fully extended, one of the sleds shot off the end of it, sending a ripple of heated air through the grain as it sped away. Two quick leaps took me to a convenient position just behind the ramp, where I could peer after the sled without exposing myself.

The thing was overloaded, bunny-hopping over every hillock and tussock. One of the captured humans was driving it, with the rest piled in the back. No—not all of them. The older man and the young boy with the dog were missing.

I stayed where I was, watching the progress of the sled and waiting for the second, which emerged before the first had made it halfway across the valley floor. Still I waited, in case a third was going to shoot out, but nothing came, and my sensitive hearing picked up no sound of movement immediately above me, so I shifted to a vantage point in the grain that would allow me to look up the ramp into the ship.

There was someone up there, but they were turned away, studying a monitor set by the door.

Farmhouse Grey moved before I could, leaping to the top of the ramp and dashing left. I followed, working to get a better idea of the interior, and to spot a good hiding place, or other people, all in a few glances.

The area just within the hatch was completely clear: a long corridor stretching to my left and right, joining two of the polyhedrons. The opposite wall, however, was a series of doors and hatches, with the nearest two open, revealing empty spaces that must have held the sleds. Almost everything else was closed, and I joined Farmhouse Grey in a determined pelt for a pair of ramps at the very end of the corridor to the left. A door stood open at the top of the up ramp, and we raced to reach it before the person at the hatch turned around—or it shut.

Skidding through the door, I found a room with angled walls that suggested it filled half of the top section of a polyhedron. Two examining tables sat in the centre of the room, while the flat inner wall was taken up by a door and weird glass box shelves whose purpose I only realised when I spotted the boy in one.

That was after I’d dived to the right, trying to put something solid between me and the woman standing at one of the tables. I ended up crouching behind a lump of black and white fur that set my sense of smell into a shocky spiral of Threat: it was the dog, limp but still breathing. I couldn’t see Farmhouse Grey, and concentrated on finding somewhere, anywhere, that I could hide properly.

There were cabinets beneath the examining tables, sealed. A lot of storage built about the walls. And—there! A sliding door, a few centimetres ajar. Not quite wide enough to fit Cat-me, but not too heavy to resist being jiggled a fraction further. More difficult to hook claws on the ridge of the handle indent and shove it back—definitely not a standard cat manoeuvre. It didn’t quite close completely, but that suited me, and I settled down to watch and hope that my heart would stop racing enough for me to think.

Being rather hungry and ragingly thirsty did not help. Gaming with an Actual Body—or virtual facsimile thereof—definitely had some downsides, and I wondered why Ryzonart had bothered to include things like thirst or wet rooms , when they surely could have created a game where food and drink were just perks, not a necessity with consequent revolting expulsions .

Wrestling with distraction, I watched. My view from the cupboard was necessarily narrow, but I could see that the dog was beginning to stir. I could only occasionally see the woman moving around the examining table, seemingly doing vitals tests on the unconscious man, but I had a clear view when she produced a thick metal rod and pressed it to his temple. He jerked in a most unpleasant way, and when she moved the rod away, a silver disk was left behind.

Some sort of…what? Communication device? Symbol of completed processing? The woman wore a disk in the same place, I noted, but from my position I couldn’t see whether the boxed-up boy was similarly decorated.

The door in the central dividing wall opened and a man came in. Another silver disk. He and the woman spoke briefly in a language I didn’t recognise, and then together lifted the older man lying on the examining table. This was my first good look at the captive. All three people were dark-haired, with a skin tone that suggested a Mediterranean region, but while the two invaders were wearing baggy jumpsuits with a scratchy-looking insignia on one shoulder, their captive was dressed in worn but perfectly recognisable jeans and t-shirt. Propped upright, I could just make out the faded image on the front of the shirt: lush lips and tongue. The faint words beneath were in Arabic script.

The two invaders carefully transferred the unconscious man to one of the clear-doored shelves built against the inner wall, and sealed it. Then they stood over the groggily shifting dog, having an incomprehensible debate. The man seemed to prevail, and picked the dog up. Both invaders left through the door to the corridor.