plastic inlay, stamped with a long serial number. On-screen, your HUD morphs to become more complicated and dangerous. You can’t believe they waited this long to give you a gun.
’Tween Decks
A cramped world of palettes stacked with spools of thick metal cable, dormant terraforming machinery, prefabricated huts, farming equipment, fertilizer, seeds, and water purification units. An Emerald Green Key-Card sits at the center of a giant web strung all the way across the entry to a disused dining commons. You do not find the spider.
You don’t know why you left home. You don’t even know why you sat down to play this game instead of going home or getting work done. But definitely life in a mining colony sucked; as a chieftain’s daughter, you knew you’d have to marry whomever your father said to marry, and the day was coming. And you looked at your mother’s face and saw that she wasn’t going to save you. She wasn’t even going to fight for you. You stole a one-person ship, and as you felt the acceleration subside and you drifted in the black nothing, you felt the absence of a pressure you’d been feeling without knowing it for all your fourteen, all your twenty-eight years.
Where would you go? Ganymede? Jovian orbit? What if things are just the same there? You warmed up the engines. You rotated the ship to point in-system, toward forbidden Mars and devastated Earth, Venus, and Mercury, or straight into the sun if that’s what it took to feel anything different. There were stories of long-dormant defense systems from the days of the stellar siege, of rogue mining robots gone sentient, of ancient Martians returned, of old-world technologies long forgotten.
You were asleep when the proximity detector sounded and showed you a ship where no ship should have been, in the darkness between Mars and the outer planets. The largest ship ever built, maybe, straight out of the legends of the Second Terran Empire.
Shopping District
A chalked symbol informing you that the last sailors of the Second Terran Empire Fleet hold the territory beyond, although they’re a little hazy about what they’re doing there. In the end you are permitted to boss-battle the prince’s older brother with stun weapons for the right to live and enter the sacred refrigeration and storage deck and look upon the Sleeping Ones.
The crowd lines an arena that was once the sunken floor of a two-story food court. The prince is watching; you feel his sense of fear, sense of awe. You’re a girl and you’re about to fight the brother he could never match. You face him across multicolored tile.
Normally you hate boss battles, a highly conventionalized way of staging a climactic moment that is purportedly dramatic but that usually devolves into hitting a supertough enemy’s weak points over and over again until he disintegrates or his head flies off and becomes a rocket-powered helicopter with its own special weak point; repeat as necessary.
The brother’s head does not turn into a helicopter. You throw chairs, scale the side of the food court, dodge through the crowd. You reactivate the sunken fountain and roundhouse-kick him into it. Press N to decline his offer of marriage.
Stasis Tanks
The prince’s brother shows you the secret treasure-house of the world. Inches under the glass, you can see a teenage girl who looks maybe a year younger than yourself, but she must have been born well over two thousand years ago. You see Ley-R4, queenly and unmoving; you see Pren-Dahr, her captive, who elected to come with her. She doesn’t even know the empire’s fallen or that her ship got lost. She’ll never even know you or the prince were there. You must save her.
Spinal Tramway
You see now that you originally landed two miles up from the aft engines. If the ship were Manhattan, you’d be walking from Houston Street to the Bronx, block by block. The ship is big enough to have its own seasons, which work their way up and down its length with the stale air and recycled water. It creaks and sighs. It’s getting colder. You have a lot of walking to do.
The tramway flooded when the ballast tank in the middle of the foredeck was breached. As you watch, a monstrous vertical fin taller than a man breaks the surface, followed by a column of gray-green muscle. You’ll have to find another way around.
You don your space suit and traverse a silent, dark, hull-breached section to reach the foredeck. Grisly corpses of men and women