Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1)

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “It’s clear up there.” My partner said, returning. Then he nodded in the direction of the rubble, “D’you hear? They’re looking for you already.”

  I could hear one of the Qualian commanders issuing orders through the wall: “First team take the rec area. Second team, you’ve got the exam hall. Third team—you take the mess. Fifth team—lecture rooms.”

  “Those boys are not playing around,” Lestran smiled again. “Come on. The general’s office is empty.”

  “Why this is just paradise,” whispered Lestran, as soon as he stepped into the office. “How things have changed in here!”

  My new partner’s astonishment was justified—we really had found a nice place. The ubiquitous gray walls of the Training Sector were covered bookcases. I could already see pacifiers, blasters and energy cells strewn about their shelves. There weren’t any force fields, so Lestran instantly dashed to the weapons rack and grabbed the first blaster he could get his hands on.

  “Now we can play war for real,” he said satisfied. I, however, stopped in my tracks: What if my partner decided to use his weapon against me and then give me up to the locals, claiming that I had taken him hostage?

  “Chill,” Lestran laughed seeing me hesitate. “I don’t betray my friends.”

  A desk covered in papers and a holographic screen occupied the center of the office, so while my partner armed himself, I took a seat in the general’s plush chair, causing it to wince beneath my armor’s enormous weight, and commenced with some industrial espionage. Unable to understand the value of each separate paper, I photographed everything that got underway with my PDA, having first plugged my comm cable into the desk’s data port. The office computer wasn’t password protected, so I simply tasked my PDA with copying whatever it got its little hands on. Thank god I didn’t have to worry about the device’s memory—the player’s PDA had seemingly limitless resources.

  “Check out what I found,” Lestran whispered to me loudly. His voice was so happy that I was forced to give up photographing the papers for a second. “This is an access key to a frigate!”

  “And?”

  “My escape plan had been to hide in the hold of a cargo ship or transport—one of the ones in the hangars below—but now, we can fly out of here on our own! With our own ship!”

  “Do you know how to fly it?”

  “Why sure! I’ve done the Training Sector eight times already, trying to get in with the pirates!”

  “How many crew does a frigate need?” I again restrained myself from asking why Lestran was so eager to join the baddies. As far as I understood it, he had decided for himself that I was motivated by the same purpose and therefore could trust me.

  “That’s the beauty of it! The two of us will be enough!”

  “There’s one problem though—I never took the classes…”

  “You know your colors, don’t you? You can check out how to do it right in real life later. Oh boy!” my partner exclaimed once more upon opening a wardrobe.

  “What now?”

  “Oh—no big deal…Just, here—catch!” A symbolical bag of money came flying in my direction—the developers of Galactogon, it seems, had decided to implement the transfer of money between players in a manner that was universally recognizable. Being utterly symbolic, the bag could contain anywhere from one credit to several billion. The symbol here mattered more than the size.

  Acquired credits: 15,339 GC.

  “That’s exactly half, I swear,” added Lestran. “When you’re done with the data, change your clothes.” My partner indicated another wardrobe: “There are some pretty good class-C clothes in here—with high resistance stats. Plus several medkits, grab them too. I’m gonna check out that safe, for the time being.”

  Acknowledging my partner with a wave of my hand, I turned my attention to my PDA’s display, which had projected a strange notification: “General, you requested information that has been classified as ‘Secret.’ Please enter your access code…”

  It seems that my PDA had already copied everything that there was in the office computer and had begun to send its little tentacles further out, where, of course, it encountered some protection. Knowing that to go on would be probably pointless, I nevertheless ran a search on the data I already had for the string “Code”…Who knows those developers were thinking…

  “Access Code Accepted. You have gained access to the KRIEG Project…”

  The KRIEG Project? The same one that the mysterious stranger had mentioned in solitary? To my immense surprise (and grave failure on the part of the general), the access code was recorded in a plaintext file with the very descriptive name “Access Code.” The file contained only one line, which once entered in the password prompt, allowed me to peek where I shouldn’t have. I say “shouldn’t have” because literally a moment later, the following notification appeared on the screen: “Unauthorized data transfer detected. Download progress: 77%. Access to Project KRIEG has been limited. General, please remain in your seat—you will shortly be contacted for verification…”

  “Lestran, we’ve got a problem!” I instantly apprised my partner. “It looks like we need to get out of here!”

  “General Trank!” A holographic head of some Qualian appeared about three feet above the desk and began yelling with a voice full of authority. “On what grounds…WHO ARE YOU?”

  Counting my blessings for not having removed my armor, which kept my face a mystery to the screaming head, I slammed my fist down on the comm’s holo-crystal, cutting the transmission. I ain’t scared of you, hollerin’ head…

  “You’re right, time to boogie,” Lestran agreed, throwing two blasters over his shoulder. “I’m not getting anywhere with this safe anyway—don’t have the skills for it…Are you going to change or not?”

  “Sure,” I said and, not wishing to make my friend suspicious with my hesitation to grab some more loot, approached the indicated wardrobe and opened its doors. To my further satisfaction with the mechanics in Galactogon, I didn’t have to remove my armor to change the clothes underneath. It’s not that I distrusted Lestran, but…

  “What do you think?” smirked Lestran, once I literally froze in my tracks before the wardrobe. Under the clothes and the medkits (which quickly took up residence in my inventory), the wardrobe also contained one item which, having read its description, caused me to swear in surprise:

  Journeyman’s Satchel with Anti-Grav. Weight: 1. Item class: D-44. Decreases weight of items in satchel by 200.

  “There were only two of them. I took one for myself. Nice little item, eh?”

  The item was more than nice. Considering that things in Galactogon have their own size and weight, having an extra two hundred units of carrying capacity is simply a godsend to a starting player. Along with the money I’d accumulated, I was beginning to loathe the idea of deleting my current character. Pirates, after all, could be a swell crowd to run with. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I would have to read a bit about the game’s shadow guilds.

  “Stan, my man, gather all the information you can find about pirates in Galactogon and copy it to a separate file. I’m interested in both locals as well as human pirates,” I ordered, popping momentarily out of the somatic interface. I was unwilling to leave this question for later. If we ever did manage to get off this planet, I wanted to know everything there was to know about piracy in Galactogon.

  “Alright, let’s scram,” Lestran offered, approaching the door and pushing a bookcase onto it. The door was hung to open inward, so unless our pursuers decided to use their weapons, it would take them a long time to break into their boss’s office.

  “Let’s go,” I agreed, but then, feeling suddenly mischievous, I inquired: “Where’d you say the safe was?”

  For a player dressed in marine armor, breaking a safe out of the wall was a question of several seconds. Several strange cables ran from the safe to the wall. These I cut with my built in knife. If that was the alarm, then it wouldn’t do us much har
m, and if that was a dead switch that destroyed anything inside the safe…Well…we could simply consider ourselves unlucky. Putting the safe in my bag, which could easily accommodate this new weight due to its newly upgraded carrying capacity, I set off after Lestran.

  “Here we are,” my partner whispered, peeking through a slit in the hangar’s door panel. “There’re three engineers in the hangar repairing something. Shall we wait until they leave?”

  “We don’t have time to wait. Pretty soon the general will return to his office and find the door blocked. Even a local can do that math. You took several pacifiers, didn’t you? Those are quite powerful against defenseless creatures. I don’t suggest we use the blasters—might damage the ships.”

  “In that case, you get those two on the right and I’ll take that one on the left. I’m going in!”

  The procedure for restraining the careless technicians was in no way different from the earlier one involving the instructors and the guards—lift them up high and let them down (not lightly). Repeat as necessary. To my immense surprise, there was no one else in the cavernous hanger. Either there was a personnel shortage here, or everyone had taken off to help track down some renegade player—me, that is.

  “Check these beauties out,” Lestran uttered lovingly after he had dealt with his engineer and gotten a chance to look around the hangar. It contained nine ships—two frigates, five interceptors, a harvester and a transport. It became more and more evident to me why gamers loved Galactogon so much—up close, the vessels were quite impressive. Still not knowing which frigate would be ours—the green one or the blue one—I simply marveled at the stately might of each ship. Each line and curve was exactly where it needed to be. Two giant beam cannons in the nose cowling and two more in the fairings of the forward fuselage made the frigate seem like a formidable weapon. Each frigate was about three hundred feet long, much larger than the smallish interceptors and the harvester. Only the pot-bellied transport approached it in its dimensions; however, even for an inveterate landlubber like me, it was evident that you couldn’t get far in a tub like that.

  “The blue one is ours, I’ll tell you what to do!”

  We couldn’t help but grab four repair bots along our way to the ship. Since repair was Lestran’s main occupation, he was fully capable of not only controlling these strange, arachnoid creatures, but could also fix my armor with their help. Over the past hour, I had gotten so used to my suit, that I didn’t even notice it anymore. That which had initially struck me as incredibly inconvenient (for example, the HUD) was gradually beginning to seem ideal to me. Maybe I should become a marine after all?

  The entrance to the ship was right behind the forward bulkhead. With a trembling hand, Lestran put the access key to the door, which instantly opened with a slight hiss of steam.

  “Look at that! Alright, Surgeon—let’s figure out whose ship this is now rather than later. The system is asking me about it—which one of us should I register as its owner?”

  “Me,” I replied without a second thought. “One of us can’t fly it. You said so yourself, so we’ll play together. But if it weren’t for me, you’d still be doing the Training Sector over and over again. That’s number one. Number two is that since we’re heading to meet up with some pirates, the ship owner has to be the one whom they’re interested in. Otherwise they’ll just attack us, take the ship and then tell us to get lost. I already received a notification that Galactogon’s shadow guilds are curious about me. Have you gotten one?” I turned to Lestran, eloquently tipping my head to one side.

  “Well then the robots are mine!” Lestran burbled petulantly. “And we split the loot 50-50!”

  “That works for me.”

  “What a greedy pig you are,” my partner said, still unwilling to calm down. He did something on the panel before him and I received a pretty welcome notification:

  You have earned the “Captain” Achievement. You are now the owner of a spaceship.

  You have acquired a space frigate. Weight: 250,000. Item class: D-77. For a detailed description of the frigate, please consult the ship’s manual.

  You are the first player to own this frigate and have the right to change its name. The current name is Dratistan.

  Uh, excuse me, but no! I have very little desire to go flying around in something called the Dratistan.

  “Couldn’t think of anything more clever?” quipped Lestran, when the ship’s name changed. “Sit here. I’ll explain to you what sequence you need to press the buttons in. I’ll sit beside you and plot our course. Do you even have a slight idea of where we need to go?”

  “I do. First into space and then to some backwater planet without resources. We’ll leave the ship there, then pop out of the game and check out the instructions. I won’t take a single step further until I know how to fly. By the way, how are you on time?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve got a month at least.” Lestran pointed at a dark-red, almost maroon, button and continued, “Check it out, first we need to start the reactor and after that…”

  I listened eagerly to Lestran’s introductory lecture on piloting a space frigate. Of course, I could absorb the entire process this very night by finding some emulators, but at the moment we needed to take off and fly away, having broken through the planetary defense ring—and that, as my partner pointed out, was a problem in and of itself. Especially, he underscored, for a ship with a name like ours.

  Listening attentively and writing down the sequence of commands, I smiled to myself: Today would see the maiden voyage of The Space Cucumber. My Stan would be happy to hear the news…

  Chapter 3

  Flight

  “I’m starting the engines,” Lestran narrated his conjurations over the control panel. In principle, one person was enough to fly a space frigate, but you had to choose either between flying the thing or manning the shields and guns. The control mechanics did not allow for both to be done at the same time.

  “Frigate Dratistan, please explain your engine start,” a voice instantly demanded over the intercom.

  “We are conducting a test fire of the engines and reactor,” Lestran replied, signaling me to stay quiet. “They’ve been acting up lately and we haven’t been able to figure out why. I mean, we already took the hyperdrive apart and changed the power cells—nothing helps.”

  “The facility is currently on high alert. Please cease all testing procedures on the frigate.”

  “Guys, guys, what are you talking about? If I don’t find the problem, General Trank will eat me bones and all! He personally ordered us to get the frigate working like new!”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” the voice replied less confidently. “Shut down your engines immediately!”

  “Understood. As you wish. Please state your name and rank so I can pass it on the general. You know yourself what happens when his orders aren’t followed—so I’d like an official prohibition against further repairs. Please give me your name and I will happily shut off these damn engines!”

  “Alright, alright. I’m sending over a marine squad to protect you while you run your tests.” It seemed that the general had such a reputation on this base that arguing with him was dangerous to one’s wellbeing. “Signing off!”

  “And now our future is in your hands, Surgeon. We’ll need to destroy that marine squad quickly. You’ll only get one shot off—after that it’ll be a melee.”

  “No there won’t.” I jumped up from my seat and ran to the ship’s exit. “Follow me!”

  The bodies of the three engineers we taught to fly had not vanished (according to the forums, if you take a local’s equipment, his body will vanish after a minute, but if you leave the equipment, his body will vanish only after 24 hours—a convenient feature when you’re in the midst of a large battle). Running up to the bodies, I began to strip one of its clothes. After that, I shoved it under the ship and heaped some tools on it—hoping against hope that it would vanish before the marines arrived.

  “If th
ey start shooting, we won’t get off the planet,” I told Lestran when he caught up with me. “You have experience as an engineer, even if remotely. It’s time to use what they taught you. Put this on—you’re going to pretend to be a Qualian worker.”

  “Not a bad idea but where do you want me to get the gray skin and third eye?” sneered my partner, nevertheless stripping the second corpse. Using the pacifier I pulled the third worker closer to us, undressed him and also concealed him under some instruments—if we were going to risk it, I was going all in.

  “Hey—anyone alive in there?” No sooner had I managed to hide the body than the squad leader’s voice echoed in the hangar. Lestran needed only a few moments to put on the engineer’s robe and pull the hood over his head. I, meanwhile, thanked Galactogon’s mechanic of allowing me to change clothes without removing my armor for the nth time.

  “Over here!” I yelled, waving at the three marines that had popped up into the air. These guys were so good at controlling their suits that I even started to feel a little shame about my own clumsiness. I could fly too theoretically speaking, but in actual fact… “Since we’re not allowed to be inside the frigate, we decided to test out this faulty armor. What a heap of junk…How do you boys even move in them?”

  My irritation seemed so natural that, gently landing on the floor, the marines merely smirked.

  “And who asked you to squeeze into it?” asked the squad leader. He was wearing a newer-generation suit, which had some kind of weapon that didn’t look like a blaster mounted on its right shoulder. The other two troopers were wearing the same suit as I was, with the slight difference that theirs were still in one piece.

  “Just my natural propensity to do dumb stuff and wanting to prove to myself that I could. Something’s jammed in it though—it’s not letting me get out. Now I’ll have to ask the senior engineer to help me take it off…Hey, listen, fellas—do you know any special commands for this thing? It just wouldn’t do to make an engineer work in marine armor!”