“How much more do we have to go?”
“About three feet. We should have enough juice, but…Personally, I’m not sure what we’ll do afterwards. My armor has 15% power left and I assume that you guys have not much more than that. We’ll be able to change the ship’s orbit only once—after that, we’re icicles. What do you think, Surgeon? Maybe we should shoot ourselves before it’s too late?”
“And admit that we’ve wasted four hours for nothing?” I smirked. “Sorry, but no way. Let’s get to the outside and then see what our chances are. Maybe we’re only several days’ journey from some star and already falling towards it as it is. We’ll always have the chance to respawn. I don’t feel like losing the ship in such a dumb way.”
“Didn’t Marina promise you a new frigate?” Wally spoke up. But I interrupted him right away.
“What do we need an F-class tub for? What are we going to do with it? With The Space Cucumber, we defeated a cruiser. All we’ll be doing in an F-class frigate is running from Cyanide from one system to the next. If there’s a chance of saving the frigate, we need to take it. If not, we’ll think about something else…”
That morning Marina had called me to ask how things were going and suggested that we abandon The Space Cucumber, taking with us anything of value we could carry. The captain of Alexandria promised to give me and my crew a new frigate. It would have to be F-class, albeit with whatever upgrades she found on hand. I promised to consider her offer as soon as we’d reach a dead end in our attempts to salvage The Space Cucumber. Then, we got to work, toiling to get through the rock and, now, when there were only a few feet left until the end, my crew turned out to be utterly demoralized. We needed a single goal that could unite us, but at the moment I couldn’t see it. Everything was just too bad.
Our emergence into open space wasn’t even greeted as a victory—by that point, Miloš’s blaster had been fully discharged, so we had to use Wally’s, then Lestran’s. We finally broke through with Tristan’s rifle. By the end of it, Haggis and I were the only remaining armed players on The Space Cucumber. At least our weapons had leveled up to class-D…and a full D at that…
The bungled hyperjump had brought us to the center of some uncharted solar system. All my PDA could do was whine pitifully, finding no nav beacons. Scans of the sky map also revealed nothing about what part of Galactogon we were in. I would have to get Stan on this job. If anyone could figure out where we were, he would. The only thing we could say at the moment was that we were lost…like, really lost.
“Flying to that star would take days upon days,” Wally appraised the situation as soon as we had all emerged from the ship. “If we pointher at that star and expend all the fuel our suits have left to accelerate her, then—give me a second—then considering the star’s mass, The Space Cucumber will fall into the sun in seven months. That’s under ideal conditions, mind.”
“Guys,” Lestran suddenly exclaimed from the other side of the frigate, “take a look at this!”
We floated over to the engineer who was pointing at a direction away from the sun and saw a small spot, set apart from the surrounding stars by its blue-green hue.
“Planet with vegetation,” my PDA happily reported. “Belongs to the category of planets which have an indigenous flora and fauna. Probability of finding Raq: 0%. Probability of finding Elo: 74%. Probability of finding…”
The PDA went on reporting a ton of information about the planet, without, however, providing its name or location in the game’s universe. It was a typical planet with vegetation somewhere on the periphery of Galactogon. There were millions of such planets.
“Hmm…” Wally said expressively, evidently calculating something. “Hmm…”
“How informative,” Tristan replied sarcastically. “Well, don’t leave us in the dark—pun intended. What’d you come up with?”
“My preliminary calculations suggest that that planet is moving toward us and will pass literally clicks from us. If we adjust the frigate’s trajectory to intercept its orbit…I have no idea how we’ll land the ship without engines, but heck, this part isn’t rocket science: We should be smashed into a pancake. What do you say?”
“Which way do we adjust?” I instantly made up my mind. If there was a way to save The Space Cucumber, I was all for it.
“We have two hours until contact, so let’s all push from this side.” Wally instantly flew over to the far side of the rock cocoon, pressed up against it and opened his suit’s throttle to maximum. “What’re you all standing around for? We might not get another chance!”
With two percent power remaining, each player began to push The Space Cucumber. And once the power ran out, we headed back into the ship. If the frigate was doomed, it was preferable to be inside of it and respawn all together. Otherwise, we would have to spend a long time looking for our belongings at the “graveyard”—the place where players’ ships respawned.
“Ten minutes until reentry,” said Wally, checking his PDA.
“Listen, how do you know all this stuff anyway?” I asked unable to contain my curiosity any longer. “Whatever crap happens to us, you seem to have either a plan or a tool to deal with it.”
“I want to become a navigator,” Wally smirked mysteriously. Our suits’ power went down to basically zero, so we took off our helmets in case we needed to shoot ourselves in the head with blasters.
“And?” I didn’t understand such a mysterious admission.
“The captain of the ship is the one who makes the decisions about how and where the ship goes,” Lestran explained for Wally. “All ships—with the exception of cruisers—combine the role of captain and navigator into one player. But a navigator on a cruiser is an indispensable position. After all, it’s he who pilots this giant vessel through space. Marina has utterly insane requirements for her navigators. I once read how…”
“I am currently fifth in line for the position,” said Wally proudly, as if admitting that he was some superman. Judging by the reactions from Lestran and the gunners, this wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Let me see!” Tristan exclaimed, as if he had heard some wondrous news.
Wally pressed several buttons on his PDA and a hologram appeared of a fiery number five. The sacred significance of this presentation remained a mystery to me.
“Well then!” Haggis cursed and patted the shieldsman on his shoulder. “You’ll be our protégé in case of anything. Fifth navigator…I can’t believe it. How is it that Marina let you go?”
“Seven minutes till contact,” replied Wally, smirking, and as he did so, The Space Cucumber began to shake from side to side. “We’re entering the atmosphere. I suggest that anyone who doesn’t want to go prematurely buckle up snug…”
Our crash onto the surface was so violent that I was almost ejected out of my captain’s chair. For a second I lost consciousness and naïvely decided that this was it—the respawning sequence in Galactogon. My body felt broken and stars played across my eyes. I planned on appearing on Qirlats and resuming my travels in the frigate, but…The Space Cucumber was not in agreement with this kind of continuation:
Hull Durability is now 1%. The ship requires a complete overhaul to fly again.
All life support systems have shut down.
A hundred feet worth of rock skin had cushioned our entry into the planet’s atmosphere. As we plummeted to the surface, the rock layer took the brunt of the impact, distributing the damage evenly across the ship’s volume. Everything took damage from the fall, even our suits, but the worst news was that The Space Cucumber had remained in one piece—our rock cocoon had saved us from respawning. As soon as my vision cleared, I realized that neither Lestran nor Tristan were with us. It seemed that they had failed to buckle in securely enough and had as a result been smashed and smeared against the transparent cabin windshield. On the floor, I saw several spare parts for armor and an empty engineer’s blaster, suggesting that our two departed friends had been on board until the end.
&
nbsp; “It didn’t work,” Wally sounded disappointed as he stretched his neck. “Now we’ll definitely have to abandon the frigate—I have no idea how to destroy it. Maybe we can chip away at the remaining 1% with a pickax?”
“Yeah of course, but…” I began but cut myself off. I didn’t want to abandon The Space Cucumber. I didn’t want to abandon her very badly! I hadn’t stolen her and improved her to lose her like this over nothing.
“I think my armor’s out of power,” Miloš fretted. “You guys can figure out what our next move will be. I’m going to get some rest. Surgeon, you can still move, can’t you? Send me back to Qirlats. I got nothing else to do here…”
“Me neither,” added the second gunner. “Shall we meet up again tomorrow at nine and decide what to do next?”
I didn’t say anything and simply raised the blaster, pulling the trigger twice. Since the players had already taken off their helmets, it wasn’t too difficult to send them to respawn. Literally ten minutes later—the length of time it takes to respawn in Galactogon—they would appear back on Qirlats.
“Wally?”
“I guess I should get some rest too. How are you holding up?”
“I don’t even know…I just don’t want to lose the ship in such a stupid way. Such a childish mistake…”
Raising my blaster a third time, I left myself alone on The Space Cucumber.
My marine armor beeped mournfully, reminding me that its batteries were almost empty. I had to make a decision. I could either shoot myself with my blaster and go respawn with everyone else, or I could leave the suit in the ship and go look for some way of destroying The Space Cucumber. A countdown timer appeared, showing that I had all of thirty seconds to make up my mind. If I couldn’t come to a decision during this time, the suit would become my little tomb and I wouldn’t get another chance to respawn for about a week—when I would finally starve to death. This particular form of suicide was always an option in Galactogon too…
As a great man once said, “Alea iacta est.” My suit of armor beeped one last time and fell silent. Fresh air drifted in from the hole we had drilled through The Space Cucumber’s hull, so I was alright wearing my regular clothes. It’s funny but players tend to wander around Galactogon without their armor suits, wearing them only when they’re on board their ships—I, however, had grown so comfortable with that hunk of steel that, now, I felt naked. The repair materials that had been left behind by my crew were enough to repair my blaster, ensuring that it wouldn’t randomly explode in my hands when I tried to use it. However, its ammo did not increase as a result. The blaster had about twenty more shots in it before it turned into a shoddy metal club, so I would have to be very careful with when I’d choose to use it.
The only good news was that, according to my PDA, there was a great likelihood of finding Elo deposits on this planet. The distinguishing feature of this resource was that you didn’t have to actually refine it to stuff it into your energy cells: It was enough to simply place your powercells on the Elo and in several minutes, they’d be ready to go. Though, even here the developers had included several limitations. You could only use this method to recharge the powercells of one fully-assembled item. If you simply put an empty powercell against a lode of Elo, the cell would remain empty. Plus, you could only charge items using these Elo lodes—Elo already stored in a powercell, for example, didn’t have such properties. Finally, the most unpleasant limitation for any guild that came across such an invaluable lode was that the lode would deplete, growing smaller in proportion to the energy that had been transferred from it. You couldn’t use one lode of Elo forever—sooner or later it would run dry.
I had no plans for enriching myself, but if I could find an Elo deposit, I could drag my armor over there to recharge it, then us it to cut a hole in The Space Cucumber’s hull and remove the harvester. Then I could use the harvester to activate the Elo lode, charge The Space Cucumber’s powercore and finally activate the self-destruct mechanism. Now I began having regrets that I had so quickly dispatched my crew back to Qirlats. A few extra hands could have really come in, well, handy. Although, again—surviving on an unexplored planet without marine armor…
“Wally, it’s Surgeon. I’m going to tinker with The Space Cucumber for a few days. I’m hoping to find some Elo. If nothing works out, I’ll pop back to Qirlats. Gather the other guys tomorrow morning. I’ll get in touch with Marina and ask her to sponsor us with that frigate she mentioned. We can’t say no to such an offer. Until I show up, I’m making you captain. Good?”
“Good—only don’t disappear for too long. What do you want us to do?”
“Head to Daphark—just not directly—and find Trid. Try to do any assignments he gives you. The only thing I ask is—if he wants you to destroy something, find any excuse you can to avoid doing it. We can’t afford to risk losing another ship.”
“Roger! I’ll get in touch with you again tomorrow at ten so that you can confirm me taking over to the others. Just in case.”
“What do you think—where’s the best place to look for Elo?”
“Can’t help you there. That stuff could be anywhere. There aren’t any restrictions about that. Read the forums. There are probably surface deposits of the stuff which I haven’t heard about. I’m a navigator, after all, not a miner.”
“Alright, call if anything. Over and out.”
With a bitter glance at my petrified marine armor, I retrieved both of my pacifiers from my inventory and crisscrossed them behind my back like a ninja. A blaster is a blast and all, but it was nice to have a tried and true instrument handy. Then, taking the blaster as well, I began to slowly make my way through the rock corridor—despite our fairly soft landing, The Space Cucumber had not deigned to roll onto her side.
You have discovered the planet Karlaton. Please assign this planet a second name.
You have earned the “Discoverer I” Achievement. A share of the resources discovered on this planet belongs to you. Current resource share: 5%.
The notification, appearing as soon as I stepped out onto the ship’s hull, forced me to freeze, dive back into my rock egg and sign out into reality. I wouldn’t take step one on a newly-discovered planet without knowing everything there was to know about this topic. What if, as the discoverer, I get to make any wish I wanted? Like, say, a complete overhaul of my beloved ship. Until I knew otherwise, Karlaton would remain off limits to me.
“Greetings Master,” Stan cranked his music box.
“I need everything there is to know about newly discovered planets. Bonuses, advantages, facts, gossip and just a basic rundown about that game mechanic. You have two hours, so drop everything and get to work. Wait, no—make me dinner first. I’m hungry.”
“As you wish,” Stan instantly replied. “Eunice has responded to your message, do you wish to see her reply?”
“Sure.”
Stan swiveled one of his screens toward me and projected several lines of text onto it:
“Alexis, my regards! Good news! In actual fact, five of the twelve are dead—not two, as you thought. One of us is very deliberately and systematically killing his competitors and I have no reason to think that you aren’t the killer. In two months I will be out of the Training Sector. We can talk then. But only in-game. I’m not about to talk or meet anyone IRL. As soon as I get out of the Sector, I’ll send you my comm’s ID. If you’re innocent, my advice to you is change your place of residence. There are too many people who know Alexis Panzer, Runlustia’s famed Paladin.”
“Stan, where’d the message come from?” I instantly asked.
“The message came through an encrypted channel. I cannot determine its sender’s coordinates. If you wish to initiate an official trace, please provide your approval for the filing of form 582U-EZ. Only upon receiving official permission from the authorities…”
“Cancel that. There’s no point doing that now.” I didn’t feel like getting in touch with the police and explaining myself.
“
In that case, allow me to remind you that in two days you have scheduled a meeting with law enforcement officials, during which you will receive an award.”
“I remember. Whatcha got about the space exploration?”
“Projecting to screen now.” Stan replied. “I will be appending further data as it is compiled and systematized.”
As Eunice’s letter gave way to excerpts from Galactogon’s manual and forum posts on the topic I’d requested, no matter how hard I stared at the words, they refused to arrange themselves into logically coherent sentences—Eunice’s message still rang in my head: “Five of the twelve are dead.” If Lucille—our disagreements be damned—was also part of this thing…
“Stan, bring up the contract for the billion pound check wager. I need the organizer’s contact info. I’d like to talk to them.”
“You have reached Thompson.” The male voice answering my call was saturated with bureaucratic undertones. Though he had only said four words, that had been enough for me to understand much about this person. I’d seen plenty of his kind before during my time in Runlustia.
“Good day, my name is Alexis Panzer. I am one of the participants in the check wager. Your contact information is in the contract, so…”
Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) Page 17