“In your world, perhaps they are strong. But here in the game they’re just mages with strong and weak sides. I need their names and, if you can, figure out the coordinates of the game hexagons they might be found in. No,” I jumped out ahead of a possible objection, “this will not be espionage on your part. I simply want to have a serious discussion about the future of our family. Don’t you want our children to be safe?”
Such a direct way of posing the question instantly knocked out the support for any potential objections, and the Princess nodded back very quickly.
“Now that’s great! So, let’s get to the ship. The technicians said the repair is finally over. There’s no reason to stick around here anymore, let’s take off as soon as possible!”
Psionic skill increased to level sixty-three!
My mana, by the way, had drooped to practically nil during my talk with my wayedda. I continued smiling tranquilly, kissed Minn-O on the cheek and pointed at the gangway. And only after the princess had left and hidden from view, I wiped the abundant sweat off my temples and forehead. That conversation was unbelievably hard... It was not merely speaking with a pretty girl. It felt like my chest was being crushed by invisible restraints and I had to break taught ropes and disarm a trap. And it looked very much like I had demolished all the blocks and limitations in the Princess’s mind, though. Clearly, her grandpa had put them there to control his beloved granddaughter, hoping to steer Minn-O’s thoughts.
But even these difficulties were not all that had me worried. It was very hard to explain it in words, but every minute I felt more and more urgently that we had to get off this comet right away. I couldn’t find any logical explanation for the strange desire, but it was getting harder and harder to ignore the growing itch. It was probably not just an urge to quickly reenter the vortex of new adventures, but a warning of some still unclear danger. And it threatened not only me but my ship if we went too slow. But my Danger Sense skill was silent, so I was confused and not sure how to reconcile my contradictory feelings.
The last of the Geckho technicians finally left the tin-can frigate, and I got a confirmation from the Starship Pilot that we were ready for takeoff. The Senior Mechanic also confirmed and, a bit later, the Navigator. We were just waiting for Eduard Boyko to come back from the real world, and the last boxes of equipment and spare parts to be loaded on.
I was watching the frigate systems check as the Supercargo and assistants hurriedly threw the last containers into the cargo hold. Then Dmitry Zheltov’s voice rang out in my earphones, sounding upset:
“Captain, there’s a significant desynchronization in the maneuver drives. It isn’t critical, but I’ll have to get used to it and learn to compensate. I suggest after takeoff we go through the tail of the comet so I can practice dodging the ice chunks and set up all the thrusters, shields and lidars.”
“I agree, but let’s not go far,” I immediately warned. “That way, if any problems are more serious, we can come right back to base... Hey Kirsan, where are you going? Get back to the ship right now, we’re taking off!”
The repair bot had left the starship for some reason and was loitering around the still unloaded boxes, either searching for a part or wanting to help load. The metal millipede stopped at my exclamation and, drumming its endless little feet, glided nimbly in my direction. Raising the front half of its body and stopping in front of me like a cobra opening its hood, it clearly wanted something. What though? Maybe it had all the parts together and wanted my Annihilator for repair?
I extended the ancient weapon to the bot, but Kirsan didn’t take it. It stood next to me for another thirty seconds with its body raised, attracting attention and trying desperately to tell me something by gesturing and blinking its mechanical eyes. But then it seemingly lost faith in my imagination and crawled toward the ship.
Naturally, the repair bot’s behavior seemed strange. I even checked the millipede and other bots with my Scanning ability just in case. Was this Fox telling me it had come? But no, my mini-map was showing normal mechanoid repair bots. The other crew members were also just who they appeared to be. Eduard Boyko returned to the game and distracted me, so I threw all this unimportant information out of my head.
I walked into the frigate last of all, stopping on the gangway and casting a long attentive gaze over the repair hangar. I ran a test scan, comparing the number in my crew with my list and gave a heavy sigh. Everyone was there, no extras. Despite all the opportunities I’d given it, the Morphian had decided not to rejoin us...
* * *
WE HAD ALREADY been spinning around for twenty minutes in the cloudy tail of ice and ammonia crystals that extended far beyond the comet’s core, but the Starship Pilot just could not set the thrusters right. In the words of Dmitry Zheltov, two maneuver thrusters were on the fritz, giving an unpredictable delay of between three and twelve seconds. And the main thruster was also giving just seventy-three percent of its predicted power and periodically turned off as well. The pilot was nervous, mad and threatening to rip the hands off the cheap Geckho commissary officers who had stuck us with this poorly refurbished crap.
I sent the repair bots out to fix the problems and help the pilot, but I also needed their help. The gravity locators were going haywire, periodically showing some massive dangerous objects nearby. The radar was also spitting out nonsense, sometimes showing things that weren’t there, and other times showing nothing. The lidars hadn’t detected any danger, and the external cameras weren’t showing anything larger than a fine icy haze. The malfunctioning of the ship locators was a serious reason to return to base, because flying in the endless cosmos with such problems was too great a risk.
I was already morally prepared to give the order to return and fix the malfunction in a calmer setting, when suddenly... the picture on the outside cameras sharply changed. Just two hundred miles from our frigate, hundreds if not thousands of starships appeared! By then, we had managed to get more than five thousand miles away from the comet’s core, so the ships that appeared could not be guarding the Geckho military base. What was more, the tactical map was showing that these were primarily Tolili-Ukh X frigates, big clusters of them. There were also plenty of heavy cruisers, though. With every second, more and more new ship markers appeared and each and every one was of Meleyephatian assembly. I had barely realized that when a siren kicked on, announcing a combat alert. Strange of course, that we hadn’t seen all these ships earlier, but it looked very much like we had come face to face with the Meleyephatian fleet as it prepared to attack!
Danger Sense skill increased to level forty-three!
Eagle Eye skill increased to level sixty-seven!
I felt a shooting pain in my chest. Before the message came in that my Danger Sense had improved, I already knew that we’d landed in VERY deep trouble. The two hundred miles between us and the enemy was nothing at all in space. At this distance, the Meleyephatians would not miss. Actually, it was strange that they hadn’t fired yet...
“Dmitry, fall back!” I shouted, stopping the pilot as he started taking our frigate away from the mass of ships. “No dodging maneuvers. Don’t provoke them! Fly calmly and smoothly. Navigator calculate a jump to the Medu-Ro IV station at once! Tell me when the frigate is ready for a hyperspace jump. And Ayukh, prepare a message for the defenders of the military base. We must warn the Geckho!”
Authority increased to 43!
“Yes sir, captain! But that will be all we have time to do,” the old Ayukh grumbled, nevertheless completing my command. “The transmission will be immediately intercepted and we will be destroyed. It looks like they haven’t made up their minds about us yet. After all, we do have a Meleyephatian ship!”
I was also counting on that when I ordered the pilot not to make any sharp movements in this tense situation, so we wouldn’t be revealed. If I were in command of the Meleyephatian fleet, I would have been in no rush to destroy one of my own ships, which seemingly had emerged from hyperjump a bit away from the rest.
I would first have tried to figure things out. And as for sending a message to the defenders by other means... there was another way!
“Avan Toi, Basha, Vasha! All of you immediately leave to the real world. I don’t know how but I need you to send an urgent message to your race’s military: in the game that bends reality, the Geckho base on the Un-Tesh comet will soon be attacked by a Meleyephatian fleet! The enemy already has around two thousand ships in the tail of the comet! Have that relayed to the comet defenders and Kung Waid Shishish! Tini, you exit and give a similar message to Leng Amiru. The Miyelonians are allied to the Geckho in this war, and they just might make it in time to help!”
Authority increased to 44!
Uline Tar ran onto the bridge in a state of alarm and suited up in her combat armor. There really was no reason for the Trader to be there at such a critical moment, and I was going to send her away but I didn’t have time. The communication screen flickered on and a message came in from one of the cruisers. It was just crackling, squawking, screeching and rustling. I didn’t understand a damn thing, and neither did anyone else. All that was clear was that the Meleyephatians were demanding something. But what was it? I’d like to at least have a vague idea... I turned to the Trader:
“Uline, do you remember when I asked you how Uraz Tukhsh spoke with the Miyelonians on the pirate station Medu-Ro without knowing a word of Miyelonian? You mentioned some kind of device...”
“Yes, Gnat. An automatic translator has long existed for all the main languages of the galaxy.” Uline dug in her sack and took a dark plastic disk the size of a saucer from her inventory. “This is a base model. It’s a useful and necessary item when there’s just no other way. But high-quality translators, as with weapons or other equipment, require high stats to use. Above all they need Intelligence and Perception, but also decent Electronics, Astrolinguistics and a bunch of other stuff. But for such a basic one as this, the quality of the machine translation is dog shit. It only translates individual words, but the emotional and sense weight in Geckho depends on combinations of words, length of pauses, volume and other minor things. So often the machine translation warps the meaning of a phrase so much it means the opposite!”
I stopped Uline from digging further into the explanation. This was not the time. I asked her to prepare the translator, then replayed the message. A mechanical voice in Geckho translated all the creaking and squawking thusly:
Free Captain. Identify. Forbidden. Screen of distortion. Center.
At first glance, it was a totally senseless collection of words. But ordering the rest of the crew members on the bridge to be silent, I tried to decrypt the missive:
“Seemingly, we have been taken for a Meleyephatian Free Captain’s ship. Clearly, they think we’re going to take part in the attack on the Geckho base. Now they’re demanding that we identify ourselves. I didn’t understand after that... some kind of screen of distortion and center... totally unclear.”
“Well Gerd Gnat, they might be talking about the distortion generator,” Ayukh said, marking one of the ships in the enemy armada on the tactical screen. “This ship is creating a distortion screen, which warps the light rays of the visible spectrum and dampens many other kinds of waves. In fact, it has created a screen of invisibility, which is where the Meleyephatian fleet is hiding.”
A distortion screen! And it was clearly of colossal dimension, given that a whole fleet was able to hide behind it! So that is why I couldn’t see all the ships even though my instruments were showing a large number of massive objects nearby and some kind of distorted signals from them! So... it seems I guessed what the remaining words meant:
“Most likely, they were asking us to come closer to the center of the distortion area, so our frigate won’t unmask the remaining fleet! Dmitry start gradually moving the frigate toward that point,” I placed a marker for the Starship Pilot at the end of a direct line through the nucleus of the comet and the distortion generator ship, but thirty miles behind it. “And go calmly, with no sharp bursts. Ideally head toward the Medu-Ro system when you do, so we can jump out right after all the calculations are complete. Ayukh, give the pilot our vector.”
Cartography skill increased to level fifty-five!
Astrolinguistics skill increased to level eighty-three!
You have reached level seventy!
You have received three skill points!
Our frigate took a wide curve and began approaching the enemy. I wondered how the Meleyephatians would react. My heart was pounding in my chest, the last seconds stretched on for a long time. In the strained silence, Dmitry Zheltov’s voice sounded very sharp like a pistol shot:
“Strange that this fleet doesn’t have any landing ships,” said, the Starship Pilot, drawing our attention to that bizarre fact. “How are they going to capture the Geckho base on the comet?”
“Well, they aren’t planning to capture it,” our omniscient and experienced Navigator answered. “It is not in the Meleyephatian tradition, and they have no use for one more base in this sector of the galaxy. They will simply blow up the comet together with the base. See that huge destroyer that just showed up on the screen? Those titans with their massive firepower are used to get through forcefields and destroy space stations, planetoids, comets and other celestial bodies.”
My chest grew cold. The Meleyephatians were going to destroy the Un-Tesh comet together with the military base! But my respawn point was there!!! If our ship was shot down now, and the comet was destroyed, my character would appear in the vacuum of space, hopefully wearing a sealed spacesuit. Although... perhaps that would be worse because then I’d have to die a long and tortured death after four and a half hours suffocating. And every subsequent death would be instantaneous...
Damn... The situation was coming together not only worryingly, but critically dangerously in a way that cannot be overstated. It threatened me and my friends with a final death both in the virtual game and the real world! A player could not survive the irreversible final death of their game avatar, a fact I had heard many times. After a character’s stats all reached zero, which affected the body in the real world, the owner would be as good as dead. Yikes, I really did not want to experience that...
“So Ayukh, what’s there? Are we gonna be ready for a hyperjump soon?” I hurried the old Navigator, who was frantically calculating and very quickly moving the star map around on his screen.
“I’m done drafting the message for our military. It can be sent at any time. But the jump parameters are still being calculated. This computer is too weak. It takes a long time to run a calculation... Uline, give the bot what it wants!”
I then also noticed that Kirsan was acting weird. The metal millipede had its claws latched into the automatic translator disk and was clearly trying to take it from the Trader. Uline was resisting desperately, cursing and even kicking the repair bot, but after Ayukh’s admonishment, she unclenched her fingers. I didn’t hear the millipede say anything, but a message was clearly transmitted somehow, because a metallic voice distinctly said:
“No hyperjump. Bomb on thruster. Three.”
“What?! The ship is rigged to blow? Show me right now!” I leapt out of my seat with all possible agility and dashed after the bot who, as it turned out, could move pretty fast when it wanted to.
Machine Control skill increased to level fifty-one!
Psionic skill increased to level sixty-four!
Only after the fact did I notice that I had given the command without any captain’s tablets or opening the game menu, just with my voice, doubling the message mentally. But the repair bot understood me perfectly! And I also understood what exactly Kirsan wanted to tell me on the station, and why he wanted to attract my attention.
Following the swift-footed millipede, I went down to the lower deck and ran through the mechanical area. Then throwing back a grate, I squeezed into a utility closet that was quite narrow even for a human, which was to say nothing about a Geckho. Apparently, it served to provide
access to the hyperspace drive. But while we were parked on Un-Tesh, the Geckho technicians hadn’t ever made it back here, because the engine was already installed, and the huge furballs were simply too large.
Nevertheless, someone had clearly made it in: all three of the corrugated metal cable sleeves leading from the power unit to the hyperdrive were rigged with identical flat round bombs that looked a lot like hockey pucks. They probably weren’t too powerful, but they only needed to upset the synchronization of our finicky thruster systems, and the starship would be blasted to atoms by a colossal burst of energy.
Magnetic bomb (armed!!!)
Attention! Disarming this bomb requires the skills: Electronics level-55, Explosives level-55, or Break-in level-55. Character class must be either: Sapper, Geologist or Thief.
Statistic requirements: Agility 15, Intelligence 12.
Attention! Your Electronics skill is too low.
Attention! Your character lacks the Break-in and Explosives skills.
I needed just a tiny bit more Electronics, a mere two points. And I could easily have solved that problem by investing what I had. But that wouldn’t help, because Gnat didn’t belong to any of the required classes. A Thief could remove these mines, and my ward’s main Break-in skill was up to 63. I knew he had Electronics somewhere around 55, too. But I sent Tini into the real world and I had no idea when my kitten would be back.
The Navigator’s voice rang out in my headphones.
“Captain, calculation of hyperspace jump parameters complete, the frigate is currently on the correct vector. We can jump at any moment...”
“Stop!!!” I cried in a voice not my own. “Don’t activate the hyperdrive!!! There are three bombs on the power cable. If you activate the hyper, we’ll be blown to smithereens! I’m trying to figure something out.”
Game Changer (Reality Benders Book #3) LitRPG Series Page 20