Prologue

Lost Signals

Since its invention, humanity's greatest achievements and most horrifying events had been televised. Landing on the moon, the first mission to Mars, the first colony on mars, and in 2324 the launch of NASA's first interstellar colonial craft, an Armstrong Mark 2 called Far Horizon, modified from the original design that carried 220 colonists to Mars. The massive vessel was the first of its kind, housing just over 11,000 brave pioneers with aims of establishing a colony on Gilese 667Cc almost 24 lightyears from Earth. 17 months into their mission the Far Horizon failed to send its daily report. The fate of the Far Horizon would become the most discussed, debated, and dissected topic of aviation history. Decades, and then centuries passed, and hundreds of colonies were established across the Milky Way. Then, in the year 2584 a research vessel would finally find traces of the vessel, confirming that all 11,253 souls had perished.

In that same year, a fledgling colony on the far side of the galaxy ran into serious trouble. The colony vessel arrived in system to find their star had developed a serious instability. A rescue craft was dispatched immediately, equipped to transport the entire colony's population 800 lightyears to a second site, ripe and ready. Things did not go as planned...

The ghost of the Far Horizon seemed to haunt every channel as Chris surfed up and down the dial looking for something worth watching. The remote wasn't real, and neither was the TV, but they functioned as an echo of something familiar from back home. Somewhere on his own colony vessel, Chris's body slept.

“So of course everyone is comparing this to Far Horizon because its another colony ship that's fallen out of contact,” a man in a suit was saying. The reporter interviewing him nodded along, then gestured to a display showing the colony ship's expected flight plan.

“But it's not the same?” the reporter asked.

“No, not at all. In the case of the Far Horizon all contact was lost with the vessel, but in this situation we are receiving a large number of communications from the vessel's automated systems. What's troubling is that the ship's crew has, for some reason, failed to make their reports for three days now.”

The reporter traced her fingertips beneath the ship's projected path and circled a particular spot. “Is it true that there have been anomalous radio signals detected in the area where the vessel is currently located?”

The man shook his head, bewildered. “Not to my knowledge.”

Later that day the announcement would come out that 25,000 colonists had been taken hostage. Three weeks later the call came out for volunteers, and within a week Chris was well on his way to joining what scholars were already calling the largest, strangest rescue operation ever undertaken by humanity.

Chapter 1

Joining the Cause

Chris looked around his apartment for one last time. It was a virtual environment, one he'd tailored to look much like his first apartment in college, only twice as big and with a lot better internet, and a view of a mountain lake instead of a dry, oil-stained parking lot with water-starved weeds growing up between cracks in the asphalt. So, not all that like his first apartment in college, but that had been how the idea started, anyway.

Only a few minutes left in the queue and Chris's consciousness would be transferred. Waiting was a big part of colony life. In fact his own vessel wasn't due to arrive at the colony site for another 10 years. That was a lot of time to spend in cryo-sleep. That's why his mind was awake in this simulation, receiving training, socializing with friends and family, and generally trying to make the best of what was otherwise a glorified nap. The cryosleep ensured that his body didn't age. Not much, anyway, but it had long ago been found that stimulation of the mind was important.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” Chris mumbled aloud. He checked his watch again. Three more minutes.

This same policy was, of course, how the entire colony aboard the Starhopper had been captured and dragged into a fantasy-themed game called Darendal, from which none of them could leave, nor could the Starhopper's awake crew retrieve them. Medical sensors proved the colonists were still alive, and communications had been received by several governments concerning their fates. These communications had not been released to the general public, but it was publicly understood that whatever terms had been offered had not been accepted.

The only downside to joining the rescue effort was that once Chris went into Darendal he would be trapped there himself, after a fashion. Unlike the Starhoppers, Chris could be roused from the game in real life. This had been tried, his commanding officer assured him.

“Thirty-three thousand souls,” Chris reminded himself. That's why he was about to join these people in their prison, and to fight for their freedom for what could be years. It was a lot of lives. It was time.

The apartment faded to black. In a way it was like slowly waking up except things went out of focus as you became more aware. Things went that way until it had all gone dark and a loading notification hung suspended in the void. Since Chris was pretty sure his brain was the computer that was being loaded, he tried not to think of tubes and a million little nano-tech robots marching into his brain and swarming over it like ants. His head began to itch just thinking about it.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Good to know that still works,” he grumbled to himself. He wondered how much time he had left to report to duty. In response to the thought alone a clock flashed in the sunless sky overhead.

“Twenty minutes! Can't this load faster?” he complained, but no one answered. Thinking back to his earlier musings on the loading message that still pulsed before him, it occurred to him that he might have just called himself stupid. Fortunately no one had been around to see it.

Eventually the loading operation completed and a character creation screen slid up from the ground. Towering statues of knights in armor stood watch on either side, each holding a sword, tip planted in the ground between their boots.

“Welcome to Darendal,” a voice boomed from somewhere far away.

Chris stepped up to the menu and the controls engaged, responding to the movement of his hands. A soldier in simple leather training armor stood in the middle of a platform, rotating slowly as he moved through a prepared sequence of sword strikes and then bowed. He snapped to attention when Chris motioned him closer.

There were a number of sliders for facial structures: eye color, eye size, shape, forehead, hair color, hair patterns, tattoos and piercings. Adjusting one of the eye color sliders made the character open his eyes wide, colors crossing both irises like something out of a strange music video. On the opposite side additional options allowed changing the race, sex, and height of the figure.

Nothing for class? That seemed a little odd, but these newer games had a tendency to be a little more flexible with their class systems. Chris tapped the race button and the fair-skinned soldier was replaced by a tall man with dark brown skin and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore similar armor to the previous character and also carried a sword. Another tap of the race button produced an asian soldier, this one's model also wore basic training armor and carried two smaller swords which he twirled once with a flourish. The next tap of the button brought Chris back to a soldier that looked a bit more like himself, at least until he took control of the facial features.

The image on the platform zoomed in, showing the character from the shoulders up as Chris adjusted the size of the character's nose. It was at this point he noticed the character had a pronounced ridge on the forehead, reminiscent of an old Star Trek character. Something the developer had put in as an homage perhaps? Chris thumbed the race button a few more times, the bust switching through several more variations of the same base model and then back to something that looked a little less exotic.

An alarm chimed, the exact source of the sound hard to pinpoint.

“You are due at the barracks in 10 minutes,” the system alerted him in its electronic yet distinctly feminine voice. A clock appeared on edge of Chris's vision, displaying in sharp focus despite being well off of center field.

“Crap,” Chris muttered and frantically started adjusting the bars, summoning up a mirrored image of his own face to try to match as a model. “Doesn't this thing have a face match feature?”

The recruiters instructions hadn't mentioned one, but they did outline a few guidelines on base character creation and expectations.

Character Creation Guidelines for Recruits

1. Choose Harrington's Way as Starting City

2. No extreme hair styles or facial features

3. Use your given name for system prompts

4. Remember this is your only character and it cannot be changed

“Well? Is there? C'mon I'm trying to make a good impression here!” Chris called, looking around to see if the inquiries had prompted some sort of helpful guide NPC to spawn. Nothing answered, which wasn't surprising. Why spend time on something as important as the character creation engine? It only affected everything for the rest of the game, a game he might be stuck in for quite a while.

After a few more minutes he had the nose about right, and the eye color match was dead on. He wanted to be recognizable as himself, a problem that the dozens of slider bars wasn't making easy.

“Three minutes!” the system warned. Chris cursed, frantically flipping through the facial feature bars and swinging them this way and that. The timer flashed red as it dipped below a minute, pulsing with a menacing crimson and black pattern as the seconds ticked away. The bust looked mostly like him. Quietly he prayed the in-game systems would allow him to make more adjustments later, but he was out of time. He slammed the accept button. Nothing happened. He hit it again. It was not going to ingratiate him to his superiors showing up late to his first day.

“Please select a name.”

“Damnit, I'm Christopher Lenz.”

“Christopher Lenz, Accepted. Welcome, to Harringon's Way.”

The game screen faded away. Chris felt his stomach lurch up toward his throat as vertigo gripped him. At first it felt as though the floor had fallen away, but in reality his entire body had fallen into millions of particles, collapsing in on itself as structures lost all cohesion.

Another loading prompt appeared, this time floating alone in the void. Then, as though he had just woken up, light illuminated a new world with Chris standing at its center. For a few heartbeats everything was still. In front of Chris, soldiers had formed two lines. Each was dressed in the same simple starting armor from the character creation screen, pale leathers with a narrow variation of swords. At the front of the line, older men wearing officers blues sat, interviewing each of the soldiers when their turn came. Light came mostly from torches and open windows. On the table, a few lanterns that seemed to be glowing from some sort of luminous crystal provided ample light to read by and cast long shadows off the hard-edged facial features the officers had designed into their avatars.

Then the heartbeats passed. Someone cursed. The officer in the middle of the table stood up so quickly that his chair tumbled over backward. Right around this time it had registered to Chris how easily he could see over the heads of pretty much everyone in line in front of him.

The officer pointed a bony, accusatory finger toward him. “Is this some kind of joke?” he demanded, his hard tone indicating that if it were, he did not think it was funny.

Chris tapped himself on the chest, faintly mouthing the words and then barely squeaking them out. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you!” the officer demanded, but the words only barely registered to Chris's distracted mind. He'd looked back, hoping to find someone had shown up with a bright green mohawk or lime green skin. Instead he found a horse's tail, coal black and swishing, the position was all wrong, making Chris's mind fuzz with the strange impossibility of where he stood and the horse stood. He scrambled to get out of its way, hooves clattering on the stone floor. Then he tripped and stumbled, forcing a group of recruits to quickly scramble out of the way. He crashed into a wooden table covered in snacks, the planks splintering as the entire weight of his body hit it at once. For a few long moments he lay stunned in the wreckage, spilled tea and wine pooling around him like blood. He willed his eyes to focus again, tracing up an equine leg to the horse's chest and then to the hazy line of thinning fur, where deep brown fur gave way to human skin.

Well, I made an impression alright...