A Check for a Billion

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “Who are we going to call?” asked Eunice. “A player or a local?”

  We didn’t have a choice — we would have to reveal our homeworld’s coordinates to someone. There was no other way to get Brainiac back. The locals were out of the question. I didn’t have any contacts besides the pirates and the Precians and recent events had demonstrated that neither of those could be trusted. In the best case scenario, they’d take over the planet and in the worst case, they’d sell us out to Aalor or Kiddo. That left the players, but there were some pitfalls here too. I hadn’t the time to make any real friends in the game and everyone else was sure to betray us for a chance at unique loot or just GCs. Judging by her actions, Kiddo was really pretty pissed with me.

  But why am I such a ninny anyway? I don’t need to look for new friends, I have old ones! I still remembered the number from my Runlustia days, even if it wasn’t in my current contacts list.

  “Hello, wanderer!” a familiar voice greeted me from my PDA. “Have you already been discharged?”

  “Not quite,” I ducked the question and got down to business. “Alonso, I need help. Are you in Galactogon?”

  The process of recovering the orbship ended up taking quite a while. Alonso’s wife showed up with him. As the head of their guild, Lucille flat out refused to let her husband go alone. It was a good thing that they arrived in a simple scout instead of an entire cruiser. Dismissing me with her customary scornful look, she immediately walked over to Eunice. Alonso and I were in for a long and thorough conversation, the general gist of which was ‘why the hell hadn’t I called earlier?’ He had a point and so I had to make sincere excuses, playing the pity card. After that the girls joined us and we all began talking about Constantine.

  “He forced us to abandon the contest by threatening our children,” Alonso said in a heavy voice, lost in memories. “We submitted an official letter to the corporation stating that we were giving up the search for family reasons. That damn freak! He died the death he deserved. So is this why you’re in the hospital?”

  After that we began to relax a little. Alonso brought with him a traveling cooking set which included some strong drinks and snacks. While our wives flew off to Belket to get Eunice’s fighter, we relived some fond memories of our past over a couple drinks. By the time the girls came back, we were already dozing, drunk to all hell. I think we’d even managed to get into a fight, but I can’t remember about what or how it ended. What I do remember is our promise to see each other in meatspace as soon as I got out of the hospital. It had been a long time since I’d felt this kind of warmth and friendship.

  A light injection into my forearm brought me back to the game. The ‘hangover’ debuff hung in front of my eyes for a few moments, forcing me to hear my heartbeat right in my skull, but then it dissipated. Alonso and Lucille had already gone. While I was asleep, Eunice not only came back with the fighter, but even managed to fly to the ship graveyard and recover the orbship.

  “Get up, you boozehound,” the girl said happily. “I got a call about our home. Can you imagine — the assholes turned themselves in as soon as they heard that there had been casualties. They must’ve realized that their days were numbered. It really did turn out to be Fighting Breed! Or more precisely that part of the guild that did all the real life fighting. We won’t be getting that house back either. They’ve confiscated the entire lot and offered us a replacement cottage in a new location. I have already approved it. Stan’s backup is online so if you want to talk to your smart home, you’ll need to contact your doctors.”

  Ta-da! If only every husband could have a wife like this to help him with his hangover! There’s nothing like good news to raise your morale and instill the desire to forge onward.

  After a few hours of correspondence, and another hefty payment, a message appeared on my PDA: “Master, all systems are nominal. My survey of the new house is 83% complete and I have some suggestions for modernization. What are your instructions?”

  Stan was in his element. If there was anything to be improved he’d be sure to do it. Or else toss it in the trash. There was no other option. Having made sure that everything would be taken care of, I returned to the ship. At long last our troubles had ended. Or that’s what I wanted to believe.

  “Brainiac set course for Shurtan. Recon mode.”

  This time nobody bothered us. The computer switched off all unnecessary equipment and devices and we soon found ourselves in orbit around one of the outlying planets. Three flying fortresses hung in the system, providing full protection for the repair docks. The train of transports went on ferrying marble down to Shurtan. The hardworking Zatrathi hadn’t stopped for a second, following their Queen’s orders.

  “Our camouflage is working quite well. No one can see…Danger, Captain! We’ve been spotted! Shields are up!”

  “Retreat!” I ordered and the orbship rushed away from the system. The Zatrathi had installed some stationary defenses which immediately began to test the strength of our shields. Meanwhile, the entire Shurtan system came alive with hundreds of small points, rapidly approaching us. Fighters!

  “Last time they weren’t so quick on the ball. Have the Zatrathi learned how to detect ships with their reflectors up?” asked Eunice.

  “The Zatrathi have nothing to do with it,” the snake explained. “We remained undetected until that ship there highlighted our location.”

  A video appeared on the screen. A scout with the name Inevitable-S-332 had been lying in wait for us behind one of the planets. They had anticipated our arrival — and moreover at a particular location. The scout painted the orbship with a beam, revealing both itself and us to the Zatrathi. The stationary defenses dealt with him in a few shots, depriving us of even a chance at revenge. Again that damn Aalor! And again he’d foiled our plans! This was really beginning to look more like a vendetta than a simple contract job for Kiddo.

  “Captain, our old friend is here! Warning, external interference detected! Engine power reduced by fifty percent. I am analyzing it now!”

  The battlesphere appeared nearby and fired a violet ray in our direction. Warlock’s speed fell noticeably, allowing the Zatrathi to close in on us. On top of this, the sensors indicated that the Zatrathi had sent one of their flying fortresses after us. This was really bad. Speed was the only way we could avoid that monstrosity. Is that battlesphere really on the side of the enemy?

  “I have identified the malfunction, Cap’n. The acceleration module has been disabled. It will take a minute to repair it.”

  “What was that beam? Can you protect our ship from further disruptions?”

  “I will have to think,” the snake replied after a pause, acknowledging her failure.

  “Brainiac, head back to Blood Island. There is nothing for us to do here.”

  The fighters were almost on top of us. The gunner even got a few with some well placed flams before the starfield before us grew long with lines. We flew half of the way in complete silence. The snake repaired the damaged module and began sullenly thinking how to defend against the new weapon. The marine was snoring and the gunner went back to working on his rudiments.

  “Do you know where Liberium’s base is?” My wife’s question shattered the silence on the bridge.

  Eunice’s eyes flashed with the resolve to fight to the bitter end. Aalor had gotten between us and the check. He needed to be neutralized. Without any further thoughts, I was fully behind my wife’s idea. We needed to strike Liberium so forcefully and openly that anyone who wanted to mess with us again would think three times before doing it. Brainiac knew Aalor’s base coordinates. He had downloaded them when Warlock had been integrated into Aalor’s cruiser. There remained the question of who’d we’d take with us, but I already knew who could help. In the end, I still had some cards to play.

  “Which cruiser did you choose for me, small fry?” said Tryd instead of a greeting.

  “It’ll be Inevitable, of course.”

  “A good choice. I approve. Alexand
ria is off limits. Captain Kiddo can be useful for Wit-Verr. What did you want?”

  “An assault team and a skeleton crew to pilot the stolen cruiser. We won’t manage on our own.”

  “Acknowledged. You will get your team. When do you need it?”

  “Now.”

  “Heh. Reasonable. While they’re chasing you all over Galactogon, thinking that you’re hiding out somewhere, the last thing they’ll expect is an attack. You might just be lieutenant material after all. I will notify Wit-Verr. Where do we meet?”

  “You’re coming with us?”

  “Do you really think that I will let you ruin my ship, small fry? Why you’ll answer to me for every little dent. You are a pirate, not a hero. So act like one. Jump in, steal it, hand it over to me and you can be on your way! No unnecessary property damage! Planet Barganil in confederate space. I’ll be waiting for you there in four hours. I will have my people ready. We’ll need fifteen seats.”

  “It’ll be done. Over and out.”

  Eunice stared at me for a long time before saying with a sigh:

  “I don’t trust him. In general, I get the feeling that he’s being played by a human instead of an AI.”

  “Just a feeling?” I smirked. “I haven’t a doubt. Didn’t you hear that the Galactogon corp is constantly hiring people? And not only programmers, but basically anyone intelligent. It’s just not realistic to come up with scripts for these characters — they need instant reactions, improvisation. The Precian adviser — he’s run by an AI. But Tryd is a human. In fact, I think that the corp dug up a real pirate from somewhere and hired him to play the NPC. No one else could be so true to the real thing. You’d need a genuine pirate!”

  “Cap’n, I’ve figured it out!” The snake’s joyful cry echoed across the entire planet. “The violet ray is pionic radiation which interferes with out marchand singulators. That’s how it disrupts the acceleration module! It’s desynchronization! Elementary!”

  The snake’s excitement was reassuring but I didn’t have much desire to dive into Uldan technical terminology.

  “Can you shield all the modules that use singulators?”

  “All of them?” the engineer asked, surprised. “They’re only in the acceleration module…Although, wait, no there’s another couple in the tracing unit…Don’t worry, Cap’n, I’ll take care of it! Ten minutes! I’ll check everything again and close it. They won’t get us that way again!”

  The snake slithered away to tinker with the ship.

  “We need to figure out why that battlesphere attacked us,” Eunice broached an unpleasant topic. I had put if off to the very end, since the Uldan’s actions suggested to me that they had decided to take my orbship away. And I didn’t like that conclusion one bit and so was looking for another logical explanation of what happened. The battlesphere wanted the flying fortress to catch us. Which meant only one thing — the loss of Warlock.

  “If we eliminate the most likely theory, which, by the way, I do not believe,” Eunice continued her thought, “then they wanted to send us to Mercaloun. I doubt we could have made it through by running for it. Is the snake in some kind of danger?”

  “Impossible!” said the ship computer. “The great lady said that the Zatrathi could not do anything to her! Her word is unquestionable.”

  “Maybe the Zatrathi cannot, but I bet the Queen can. Let’s head back to Shurtan. Brainiac calculate a hyperjump ASAP! If something will happen, it’ll be now. Eunice, I have an assignment for you too. Ask our dear ship computer who Belmarad is. He prohibited Brainiac from telling me, but he didn’t say anything about you. I want to know why he had the right to order my computer to do anything at all.”

  There were no objections to this, and as we flew, Brainiac happily told Eunice the story of the dark Uldan master, who was notable for his cruelty among his race. It got to the point that Belmarad began to conduct his experiments on his own people, for which he was imprisoned. But, since his status meant that he could not be imprisoned in a capsule, the prisoner was sent into a black hole. As for his authority over my ship computer — everything turned out to be so banal that it even hurt. The Uldan had been one of the ship designers and had included his authorization in the computer’s very source code. Brainiac could do nothing about this.

  The Shurtan system was crawling with Zatrathi as before, albeit the composition of their forces had changed. Two more flying fortresses had joined the three that had been there. We got lucky that our exit point from hyperspace was not far from the marble planet, so we didn’t set off any alarms as we passed. The Zatrathi’s capacity for learning from their mistakes was frightening. They had spread out across the system, ensuring the maximum level of protection for their shipyards — although questions arose immediately when it came to these. A visual inspection of the system revealed an odd picture — the enemy operations were clearly winding down. The transports were no longer rushing about with their loads of marble, there were no more damaged cruisers undergoing repairs, and the shipyard itself was beginning to drift away from the system. We had been gone for only one hour, but the Zatrathi were already busy relocating. Why?

  “Captain, we are receiving a message on the closed Uldan channel,” whispered Brainiac in shocked surprise. “I quote: ‘You are too late. She can no longer be saved. Flee, you fool!’ The transmission source is unknown.”

  We did not have time to react to this news. A new character entered the scene.

  “Lex, what is that thing?” Eunice asked with a hushed voice, staring at her screen like a rabbit at a boa constrictor. From the opposite edge of the system, absorbing one planet after another, an abyss was advancing on us. Its size was terrifying — Shurtan’s star, a yellow dwarf, could easily fit inside this colossus and there would probably still be room for one more. The Zatrathi Queen had decided to personally pay her respects to Mercaloun.

  The Queen’s immense gravitational forces destabilized the star system. Shurtan’s sun began to roil and seethe, spewing huge arcs of flame into space. Several of them passed too close to the retreating shipyard, thoroughly melting one of its sides. The rest rushed to the new point of attraction — the Queen — who swallowed them without a trace. The closer the Queen came to the sun, the more erratically the star behaved. From a perfectly round ball, it turned into a burning rugby ball, stretching towards the Zatrathi leader. The consequences for the rest of the star system were catastrophic. Two flying fortresses, the shipyard’s escorts, evaporated along with the shipyard itself. Several arcs passed along Shurtan, turning it into a hunk of boiling marble. The planet beside us wasn’t spared either. Its orbit changed and it rushed straight toward the sun, as if it too wished to fuel the center of its universe.

  “Cap’n, this system has become unstable! We need to leave!”

  Our camouflage disappeared, but the Zatrathi paid no attention to our appearance. They were fleeing the system themselves, trying to put as many AUs between them and their own Queen as they could. The main villain of Galactogon was terrifying indeed. It now became clear that the Queen was not just a huge ship of stellar proportions. She was a living being. Her numerous spires were actually tentacles pulling the ‘tastiest’ parts of planets or ships into her omnivorous maw — a bottomless black abyss, from which even the light did not return. Little eyes were scattered all along the queen’s surface — and these were all currently locked on the only nearby dish — the burning and boiling planet Shurtan. Swiping away the approaching sun with a couple tentacles, thereby both incinerating them and changing the star’s trajectory away from her, the Queen crept up to Mercaloun’s planet. Brainiac was already calculating a jump to Barganil, yet we managed to witness the inglorious end of the great Uldan lady. Shurtan disappeared in the Queen’s maw without a trace — and at that point all her myriad eyes snapped in our direction. The tentacles shot for their target — only to encounter the void. We had jumped into hyperspace.

  “Do you have Ash’s contact? You need to give him the coordinates of the Qu
een.”

  Eunice’s voice was firm, but her pulse reading indicated that she was far from calm. The leader of the Zatrathi had just devoured our best hope of getting the prize check.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The two countdown timers in my HUD had ticked off yet another hour, leaving me but four to think everything over. Frankly, I had already made up my mind, though I wasn’t in any rush to pull the trigger. As bad as I wanted to see Hansa’s fourth tier of upgrades, my path in this game didn’t lie with the Precians. What did they threaten me with? The wrath and enmity of all the game’s empires? Oh please! There are so many independent planets in Galactogon that they will run themselves ragged trying to find me.

  Since I didn’t have Ash’s number, I was forced to dial Vanguard directly. I managed to get through to one of the leader’s deputies, who thanked me laconically for the news about the Queen and hung up. His reaction stunned me actually. It wasn’t like I was telling him about a new sale at the nearby store — this was serious business! I’m starting to get the impression that it’s better to avoid the powerful in this game entirely. The more ordinary the player, the clearer his intentions.