PROPHET Without Honour Anarchy Online Book One Ragnar Tørnquist P W H rophet ithout onour Anarchy Online Book One by Ragnar Tørnquist Prophet Without Honour © FUNCOM 2001 Prophet Without Honour Anarchy Online original storyline created by Gaute Godager, Tommy Strand, and Ragnar Tørnquist Prophet Without Honour: Anarchy Online Book One written by Ragnar Tørnquist www.ragnartornquist.com Play the game www.anarchy-online.com Prophet Without Honour “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” - Genesis 28:12 “All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.” - Edgar Allan Poe Prophet Without Honour Prologue Rubi-Ka, 29475 AD The gleaming towers of Omni-1 reflected the fiery maroon light of twin suns succumbing to distant sandstorms, red dust stirred up by incessant winds along the arched horizon hundreds of miles due north. Large flotillas of ships passed north and west, rising slowly like grey whales drifting to the ocean surface, seeking to avoid the storms by crossing over them. To the east, there was the faint silvery gleam of another flotilla returning from the mines. While the storms were still much too remote to be heard – even with the most sensitive of implants – Philip Ross felt them. Rubi-Ka was, after all, his world. Not a sparrow would fall to the ground without him knowing. Figuratively speaking, of course. There were no sparrows on this planet. Ross focused. The windows darkened, and the panorama before him grew dim, leaving his office in a comfortable gloom. The office was located on the top floor of one of Omni-Tek’s most imposing and heavily fortified towers in the capital city. It encompassed a sprawling circular expanse Ross privately thought of as his private Colosseum, and though it lacked lions and gladiators, it had the desired effect on his subordinates and colleagues. It intimidated them. They were impressed with size. Size meant power. His office made them feel small, smaller than him. And everything about Philip Ross was big. 7 Prophet Without Honour He gazed at his robed reflection in the artificially darkened glass. He was taller than most men; grey, chiselled, trim, he possessed the right combination of charisma, maturity, and virility for a person in his posi- tion. He was not vain, but he knew the power of appearance. Philip Ross was not one to neglect even the smallest of details. He turned away from the window. His enhanced vision adjusted to the deepening gloom as the sun finally yielded to the escalating storms. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture in the office. The one indulgence in an otherwise prudent arrangement was a mahogany desk imported from Earth and built from some of the last remaining trees of the ancient replanted rainforests. There were only three chairs, imitation leather but comfortable. Unlike many of his associates, he had no need for expensive bronto-hide to impress visitors. There was a single console, not the latest model, but a stable and functional one, more than good enough for his purposes. A corporate-sized screen was tuned to the live Omni-Tek news broadcast when not in use, which was most of the time. There was even a potted plant, a genetically uncontaminated cactus, painstakingly transported from the European desert to an alien world where, against all odds, it seemed to thrive. Last, and most certainly least, the security droid standing to rigid mechanical attention near the elevator doors. The Omni-Pol agents who had installed the defence systems in his office had insisted on this final piece of personal protection, though of course he’d objected. Vociferously. The lethal contraption was obscenely brutal looking, kitted out with energy shielding and what appeared to be a portable cannon. It stood unmoving, awaiting the arrival of something, someone, to destroy. To expect violence was to invite violence, Ross knew. And though he’d never shied from violence, he wanted none of it here in his own home. Home. Now there was a foreign word. This wasn’t officially his home. He had one of those, a home, a fully furnished penthouse apartment with personal attendants and room upon useless room, elsewhere in the city. But Ross spent the lion’s share of his life in this Colosseum, like a jaded emperor, making decisions based on the acts of brutality and stupidity he was witness to on the screen. Running Omni-Tek’s operations on Rubi-Ka was not something done between breakfast and supper. His work was the entirety of his existence, 8 Prophet Without Honour the sum of his life. It was a life truly worth living, there was no doubt about that, but even Philip Ross could get tired. And right now he was very tired. He wanted nothing more than to go back to his grand home and fall asleep in a proper bed, soothed by the cool, clean sheets and the scent of the rose gardens below. He was tired and disappointed, and he wished that the day had brought some- thing to ease the pain brought on by the news of that morning. But it hadn’t. The news had only gotten worse. I extend a conciliatory hand, he thought, I get down on my knees and beg them for peace, for understanding, for a chance to negotiate an accord. And all they do is turn on me and stab me in the back. There were reports of new skirmishes outside the immediate juris- diction of the city, between Omni-Tek’s pacifying troops and clan-affiliat- ed rebels. People had died, tensions were strained, and both sides were now tugging at their leashes for a chance to go to war again. And while these unfortunate incidents weren’t entirely unexpected, it still angered and saddened him to think of the wastefulness of it all, for both sides involved. Ross knew that he’d made an error in judgement early on. He’d completely underestimated how the disgruntled few could affect the complex machinery of progress. That lesson had been taught a million times over, most effectively a good seventeen millennia past, when, like a latter-day Moses, David Marlin had risen up and brought his people out of slavery, destroying the Omega in the process. The ensuing era had given birth to Omni-Tek, and Ross guessed he owed the man a silent prayer of thanks. But the example he had set… To have imprinted on humanity the virtue of rising up against authority, against government, against corporate dominion, at any and all costs – and to have brazenly professed this to be a good thing, an hon- ourable thing… No, the man had done more to damage mankind than to heal it. David Marlin ought to have laid down his sword after destroying the last of the Omega. The freed slaves, the Solitus, the inheritors of Earth, should have been allowed to decide their own fate. There was no room for gods in the kingdom of man. Now grand but meaningless words were being flaunted as truth in the face of reason; words like “freedom”, “liberty”, and “justice for all”. Justice for whom exactly? Freedom and liberty from what? 9 Prophet Without Honour Perhaps those words appeared to resonate with truth when chanted by sign-bearing demonstrators – because in principle they were worthy and important words – but when the ideologies behind those words were applied to the real world, at least a world as precariously bal- anced as Rubi-Ka, they spelled only disaster: Disaster for him, disaster for Omni-Tek, and disaster for the millions who depended on the corpora- tion to protect them and to provide for them. The only thing the clans were accomplishing by their misguided resistance was to disrupt that balance and cause untold pain for the very people they sought to liberate. Not that Omni-Tek would immediately crumble if they lost Rubi-Ka and their steady supply of notum. No, the company was too vast for that to happen, too entwined in every imaginable industry and trade. But there were other corporations encroaching on Omni-Tek’s turf, and notum was the only thing that could possibly guarantee Omni-Tek’s supremacy for the foreseeable future. Without notum, Omni-Tek might be nothing more than another hyper-corporation. The thought unsettled Ross, made him fidgety and nervous. He clenched and unclenched his fist and thought about the war he didn’t want, the war that disturbed the balance of his world, and about the spar- rows that fell to the ground on the screen in his Colosseum. Now, with the gloom grown deeper, the suns absent, and his office darkened to a satin black – only the thousands of glittering lights in the city below provided any kind of illumination – Philip Ross suddenly felt desperately and achingly alone. If they would only understand,he thought. If they could see what I see, if they could only know the truth, that there is no future for this world without us, without me, perhaps then we would know true peace and prosperity. He stood gazing out at his city, his world, for a few more minutes in silent contemplation. From this height, life was abstracted into flick- ering lights and bursts of energy from moving vehicles. He couldn’t see the people he knew were there, but they were there, somewhere, living, sleeping, dreaming. Philip Ross turned away and headed for the comfort of a home rarely visited, a bed rarely slept in, and, he prayed, a long night’s sleep without dreams, a dark and restful abyss. 10 Prophet Without Honour Between the stars, 28911 AD The dust-red globe, covered with a patchwork of real-time sensory data in all colours of the rainbow, was slowly beginning to solidi- fy at the heart of the increasingly complex diagram of interstellar bodies that orbited David’s field-of-view, updated continuously by his neural interface link. It wasn’t a particularly big planet, a bit smaller than Earth, but compared with its gas-giant siblings – dim, hulking monstrosities, mottled with fierce storms the size of continents, encircled by glittering belts of ice asteroids – it looked tiny, almost dainty, like a baby planet taking a walk with her older brothers. The system had twin suns: the smaller one red, the larger one yellow. The two suns orbited each other like graceful ballerinas engaged in an epic recital spanning light-years and aeons. Because of this, the trajectories of the system’s planetary bodies were more complex than they would have been in a single-star system. Of course, the mathematics of this astral performance weren’t much of a challenge to the onboard systems, not with lifetimes to spare. Even David, given a few months and some assistance from his interface, ought to have been able to plot the course of the ship towards her desti- nation. David blinked, and plugged out. The experience was akin to watching a bathtub being drained in fast-motion; the water – or in this case visual data containing information about his journey, past and present, and his current position and status in relation to the ever-changing gravitational forces surrounding him – swirling down an invisible hole, pulling him down with it. The effect still made him feel queasy. He tried not to spend too much time linked up. There was something to be said for the quaint pleasures of seeing things with your own eyes, hearing them with your own ears: to read books and watch films, to study prints of art from Earth’s long-lost past, to listen to the musical recordings contained in the ship’s core – Bach, Mozart, Martinez, the Beatles – and to gaze at the stars. The stars were always, always changing as his journey took him farther and farther away from home. Back on Earth, all those long years 11