Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (18 page)

Fifth…

“Good morning, Master,” the alarm clock in the person of Stan woke me at eight in the morning. Since I hadn’t finished my fifth point, I decided to consider it moot. “Breakfast is served. You’ve received a notification concerning the criminal complaint you filed. Dan Cormack has been arrested. Aside from the unlawful access of your virtual space, he is also being charged under several statutes that can not be disclosed due to the ongoing-status of the investigation. The authorities thank you for your vigilance and request your credentials in order to furnish you your reward. How do you wish to respond?”

“Send them over,” I replied without a second thought. As a law-abiding citizen it was extremely advantageous for me to receive a reward from the police. Future employers and sponsors would take notice of the authorities’ official recognition of me. If I did manage to find the check (something I couldn’t even let myself believe was possible at the moment), it would be good to cover any financial bases involving the powers that were. Stuffing myself with another sandwich, I cooed: “Stanley, what’d you find out about Smolyanov?”

“Unfortunately there was no mention of this person in any public sources,” Stan reported with notes of sadness in his voice. “My analysis suggests an 80% probability that Mr. Cormack invented this person to earn your trust. Further analysis of the data stolen from your network reveals a focus on uncovering bank account numbers. It seems that…”

Finishing my breakfast, I grinned at my own paranoia. One half-stupid hacker (even if he was a guild leader) had been enough to cause me all kinds of nightmares. I needed to take things easier and relax a little.

“Hello everyone!” I said upon entering
Galactogon
. “What’s new with our dear
Space Cucumber
?”

“I’ve come up with a slight improvement to our defenses,” Wally reported, “but implementing it at the moment is pointless. It’s not like we’re going to take on a Legendary anyway. They’ve done such a number on
The Space Cucumber
that…Heck, they even pinned on a self destruct button.”

“That’s nice and all, but there are a few presents here that aren’t welcome in the least.” Haggis pointed at his screen, bringing everyone back down from cloud nine. “Take a look there, Wally. This is up your alley.”

“Hmm…” puzzled the shieldsman peering at the screen.

“What is it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“A bypass to a device that’s been installed between the fire control system and the shielding generators. They’ve planted a bug on us. If its owner wanted to, they could take over our weapons systems and leave us toothless. And that goes for both the blasters and the torpedoes.”

“First thing I thought to look for,” Haggis explained. “I heard once that Marina managed to capture some enemy ships without firing a single shot. And the ships in question had only recently been upgraded. In fact they were fresh out of the drydocks…I guess Kiddo has people working in the shipyards of other clans. It takes some fancy equipment to install one of these bugs.”

“Alright guys, I’m delaying our departure by another 24 hours,” I instantly made up my mind. “I need a full sweep of the ship for any insects that don’t appear on the ship’s schematics. I’d rather avoid any surprises. One request—we’re only looking for them. We’re not trying to remove them. At the moment, we only need to know how many of them are onboard.”

There were four bugs altogether: one on the fire control system, the second on the nav computer (presumably to track everywhere we went), the third on the self-destruct mechanism, and a fourth which logged everything going on in the ship as it flew. While the ship was landed, the bug turned itself off, so it was very difficult to find it without knowing what to look for. We found it nonetheless.

“We can block them with our shields,” Wally suggested when we started discussing what to do with these Grecian presents. “They’ll go on functioning as normal, but as soon as someone connects to them from outside, the shields will block them.

“Won’t work,” Haggis shook his head. “They could run a check on the bugs by, for instance, sending a test command once a day. The shields will block the incoming connection and whoever put the bugs there will know that they’ve been compromised.”

“I don’t see what all the hoopla is about. Just remove them and that’s all she wrote!” Miloš said, bewildered.

“Marina didn’t put them there for no reason,” I shook my head. “In her view, all of you are future candidates for her crew. She needs to be able to monitor how you act…”

“Then we should place jammers next to them wired to the captain’s controls,” Tristan spoke up. “Let them steer
The Space Cucumber
all they want. As soon as things get dire, we’ll jam them and reclaim control. For both us and Marina, that’ll be a onetime occurrence, so we’ll have to wait for the right moment when everyone will least expect it. And we have to keep in mind that while we’re flying, there can be no talk of the bugs or our knowledge of them. What do you say?”

Everyone agreed with Tristan’s proposal. Wally installed jammers around the bugs and rewired them straight to the powercore, bypassing any communications equipment, after which I requested permission for departure from ATC.

Newly-refitted,
The Space Cucumber
set out on her first official voyage.

Chapter 6

The Trial of
The Space Cucumber

The rest of that day,
as well as the next, turned into one big training exercise. We zoomed from one end of the Qirlats System to the other. For target practice, we obtained permission to destroy a lifeless asteroid and generally spent that day-and-a-half becoming comfortable with operating the various systems aboard
The Space Cucumber
. No one wanted to set out on a maiden voyage into zero security space in a new ship, so we landed a harvester on the asteroid. Miloš began shuttling back and forth between the ship and the asteroid, practicing fire support, resource extraction and harvester disassembly, after which we would extract both the marine and the mining equipment from the asteroid while shooting at a theoretical enemy. We launched torpedoes and caught them again using our flycatcher and, after the asteroid had been destroyed, started maneuvering between its debris, testing my piloting skills and Wally’s shield management. Tristan and Haggis blasted their cannons in different directions, aiming at targets that only they could see, and only Lestran sat quietly at his station, periodically pushing some buttons to send the repair bots to the parts of our hull that had suffered collisions with the asteroid’s heavier fragments.

Marina finally sent over the piracy guide I had requested late that afternoon. It covered everything from important locals and their whereabouts, to safe havens, important players and their guilds. Studying the guide, I kept shaking my head in perplexity. Were those four little sheets from the safe really worth so much information? In her message, the girl had asked me to keep the guide’s contents private because it had been gathered by her people over the course of several years, breaking not a few rules in the process. There were however no other constraints on disseminating the information, say to private parties. I got the impression that Marina trusted me as a potential ally, but I had to instantly reject this idea since I wasn’t in the habit of believing in fairy tales when real money was at stake. It followed that the guide had been composited and edited in a manner that, even falling in the wrong hands, would somehow help the captain of
Alexandria
. However, even this edited information was much more detailed than everything that Stan had been able to come up with. Gamers posting to forums weren’t very fond of discussing their buccaneering exploits in any detail.

There was another question that troubled me during our testing of
The Space Cucumber
. Had we really found all our stowaway insects? There was no way I could be 100% sure that those four bugs were all that had been slipped onto our frigate during her refit. I decided to snag Lestran during the crew’s days off and go with him to some neutral planet where we could have some neutral party sweep the ship. Stan had already identified four such technical bases, which would not instantly attack us due to our pirate affiliation. I decided to deal with this issue as soon as possible. It also made sense to run background checks on the four players flying with me. As one of my closest companions was fond of saying, “Believing people is okay—just make sure you shoot first and ask questions later.” I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Warning: Active hyperspace scan detected,”
The Space Cucumber
’s onboard computer reported in a robotic voice, catching us unawares. We had been in hyperspace for thirty minutes and had traveled halfway to the planet Daphark, where Hilvar had sent me with a message to a local named Trid. No one had expected any surprises. You couldn’t change your course in hyperspace.
Galactogon
offered no way of braking externally and
The Space Cucumber
had no jammers to block hyperspace scanners. All we could do was sit and watch the monitors which instantly reported our imminent capture and extraction from our hyperspace jump.
The Space Cucumber
was yanked into deep space about halfway between Qirlats and Daphark.

Hyperspace scanners and the disruptor beams required to yank a ship out of hyperspace could only be installed on a cruiser. Further, to pull off such a trick, you’d have to position specialized tracking beacons along the trajectory of the hyperjump. If you calculated the velocity of your target, you could capture it and yank it into a point of space of your choosing—for example, right in front of an entire armada. The type of vessel yanked out in this manner didn’t matter one bit. It could be a lowly harvester or a Grand Arbiter—the mechanics governing its ejection from hyperspace worked flawlessly every time. The only limitation was that you could only trap other players’ ships; the locals could travel without any problems, paying no attention to this aspect of the game.

One of the main sources of guild income in
Galactogon
was control over the hyperspace lanes between planets. With two or three cruisers in its fleet, a guild could comfortably announce a toll for the hyperlanes it controlled. It would hardly occur to their victims to try to fight, and the guilds yanked basically every vessel that passed through the lanes under their control. Of course all such tollgates had been identified long ago and the tolls themselves were well known. Players could save time by paying the toll ahead of time at the point of departure and thereby receiving an EZ Pass—a beacon which would send special signals in response to hyperscans. But again, all this was the case for well-known and well-traveled hyperlanes. Every once in a while the guilds would go to war over control of these routes, but such conflicts generally took place in alliance space. I had no idea why someone would erect a hyperspace trap between Qirlats and Daphrak—two Confederate backwaters. As far as I knew, there weren’t so many players who passed this way, so there was no way that maintaining such a trap would even pay for itself.

But the fact remained—
The Space Cucumber
began to decelerate and emerge from hyperspace.

“Shields are up!” said Wally as soon as the hyperdrive disengaged. “Four torpedoes straight ahead. We’re being targeted with EM cannons. They want to knock out our shields!”

“I’ve got a lock on the three closest torpedoes,” Tristan instantly added. “I’m taking them out in five, four, three…”

“Multiple bandits stern-side,” Haggis reported. “Four torpedoes…”

“Two cruisers straight ahead,” Wally managed to add before I could react to the situation. Practice all you want in simulators and training missions, until you’re used to real battles, you’ll find yourself constantly one step behind.

“Arm the flycatcher Tristan. Haggis, you take the rest of the torpedoes. Wally—don’t let them hit us. Here we go!”

“That’s
Dauntless Warrior
!” yelled Lestran, parsing the torrent of data scrolling down his screen. “Seven cruisers, thirty-two frigates and a hundred interceptors! It looks like the entire Cyanide fleet is here!”

I threw
The Space Cucumber
into a sharp ascent, showing
Dauntless Warrior
our bilge. It was the standard maneuver to capture torpedoes, but, no sooner had I reached my desired heading than yet another cruiser materialized in front of us and launched a spread of torpedoes. They really had us by the tail now…

“Tristan, launch torpedoes straight ahead. Take them out!” I ordered, making my decision instantly. Any adjustment to our trajectory would force
The Space Cucumber
to lose inertia, becoming a sitting duck for her enemies. I didn’t know about
Galactogon
, but in
Runlustia
, players who were on giant elephants felt themselves fully secure and tended to lose their vigilance and reflexes—which fact I had exploited more than once. This was no different. Common sense had it that, seeing another cruiser dead ahead of me, I should have banked sharply, avoiding a direct engagement. The cruiser’s flycatcher alone guaranteed her victory. I was sure that they’d want to capture us. There was no way they wouldn’t. Considering that a swarm of frigates and interceptors roiled above and to the sides of the cruiser, there would be no point in trying to break through there—the alluring emptiness under her bilge however…An inexperienced player would definitely try to pass beneath her, falling right for the flycatcher and making my enemy only happier.

“Just not under the bilge!” yelled Lestran, reading my move and deciding that I had gone utterly nuts.

“Three torpedoes down, one got through,” Tristan reported, ignoring everyone around him and focusing on his job. “We don’t have time to shoot it down.”

“Deflecting won’t work either,” Wally added. “Get ready—we’re about to take a hit.”

“Lestran—emergency repairs! Direct hit incoming…”

The Space Cucumber
shuddered, the screens shut off for a moment—but then came back on.

“Hull Durability is down to 20%. Power is 40% below nominal. The hull’s beam absorbers have been wiped out. Our portside has been crumpled…I need ten minutes to repair half of the lost Durability.”

“Gunners, on the count of three launch torpedoes at that cruiser’s bay doors. Get ready! One…two…,” I ordered, ignoring Lestran’s report. We had survived a direct hit from a torpedo and continued on our course. There were no further missiles ahead of us, but I could see perfectly well how the cruiser’s bilge opened, releasing its flycatcher. It began to head toward us. The distance between
The Space Cucumber
and the cruiser grew smaller and smaller. Giving my enemy another second, I yelled, “Three!”

“We’ve been captured!” Wally said almost instantly, while all of the frigate’s instrument panels went dark. Having taken control of our ship, the cruiser’s captain wasted no time and simply cut off all of
The Space Cucumber
’s onboard systems, turning us into a giant hunk of metal.

“Thirty seconds until the torpedoes hit,” added Wally. “Us, that is. The ones that were coming up from behind…”

“Hey! My screen’s come back on,” Lestran said puzzled, as I squeezed whatever juice
The Space Cucumber
’s engines still had in them. The acceleration pressed us into our chairs, but I managed to note my two gunners launch one more torpedo apiece. A pretty little window popped up before me, reminding me that all of this was no more than a game:

“A Pirate I Was Meant To Be” Mission Progress: 1 of 10 cruisers destroyed.

You have earned the “It’s Not How Big It Is—It’s How You Use It” Achievement. You have destroyed a vessel larger than yours. Damage done to all ship types increased by 10%.

You have earned a new title: “Improbable.” Your ship has reached a new class! Current class: B-1. Two additional slots unlocked. Durability and Energy have been restored by 100%.

“Whoa—B-class?!” Miloš whistled from his observer’s seat. As a marine, he couldn’t do anything to help us so his job was simply to enjoy the show.

“Marina’s people leveled us up to C-99, so everything’s as it should be,” I said what everyone already knew and pressed the rejuvenated
Space Cucumber
to its max. The experience we gained for destroying the cruiser was distributed across all our equipment, but the ship itself received the biggest chunk of XP.

“We won’t get very far,” Haggis pointed out about a minute later, turning away from his tail turret. Fully repaired and conjoined with the aft EM cannon, the tail turret presented a compelling argument to the interceptors chasing us from keeping up their efforts. “The cruisers are turning to give chase. We’ve got two good engines of course, but we can’t compete with ten of the same type…As soon as they get some steam, we’ll be done for. They won’t offer us a second opportunity to shoot at their cruisers. They’ll knock us down from behind…”

“It’s too bad they’re all D-class,” muttered Wally. “If they were at least C-class, it wouldn’t feel so bad, but D…”

For a little while we were silent flying away from the armada, and only Haggis giggled spitefully, knocking yet another interceptor down to half its Durability. Without resorting to torpedoes, it was too hard to kill them, but damaging them enough to force them back to their cruiser was a task that my gunner managed perfectly well.

“They’re gaining,” said Wally, pointing at six bleeps on his screen. Even if they were still far away, the steady rate at which they were closing the distance…“ETA seven minutes. They won’t let us bounce to hyper, so…Maybe we should self destruct? We’ll come back as C-class, basically like we started…If they grab us with a flycatcher, the self-destruct will stop working too.”

“Asteroid belt dead ahead,” said Lestran. “We can go through it and gain several minutes. The cruisers won’t go straight through. The rocks are too big. We can slip through though. Even if we die, good luck finding our wreckage.”

All of a sudden a crazy idea entered my mind and began to scream: “Try me!” Giving in to its pernicious influence, I inquired, “Guys, what do we need to go into hyper again? I know it’s a dumb question, but I’d like to know for certain. I’ve got this idea.”

“To jump to hyperspace we need the destination coordinates,” began Wally. I had already noticed that he was very familiar with
Galactogon
’s technical details and was therefore a valuable hire. The main thing I had to keep in mind was that he was ultimately working for Marina. “And it’d be nice if those coordinates weren’t in fact the center of some star. Also, we’d need forty seconds of inaction while the hyperdrive initialized for the jump. Aside from that, the ship can’t be painted by a disrupter beam and…Well, that’s it. Those are the three main requirements; everything else is secondary.”