Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (19 page)

“How many of those can we do at the give moment?”

“Just the coordinates. We have several star systems straight ahead of us. We won’t even have to alter our heading. As for the rest, we don’t have a free second, let alone forty, and they’ll instantly hit us with their disrupter beams as soon as we try to initialize anyway.”

“How long until we reach the asteroid belt?”

“About two minutes,” Wally sounded doubtful. “Are you really considering going through it, Surgeon?”

“No,” I shook my head, causing my shieldsman to lower his shoulders in relief. “We won’t fly through the belt. We’re going to hide ourselves in it…”

“WHAT?!” All four players’ exclamation was so simultaneous that I couldn’t help but crack up. Only Miloš, relaxing in his chair, laughed with me. What else could you expect from a marine?

“We’ll be pulverized instantly!” Wally spoke up, as soon as I had adjusted our bearing. “Our shields aren’t powerful enough to withstand an asteroid impact and our beam cannons won’t destroy them. And using torpedoes will do nothing but clear the way for the guys chasing us. What’s the point of flying through?”

“Lestran, what’s the size of that belt?” I asked my partner, ignoring Wally.

“About one AU wide and one AU deep. I can’t get a length reading, so I’d say at least one hundred AUs in either direction…Listen Surgeon, I have to say I agree with Wally—this is madness.”

“You’re the one who brought up suicide,” I grinned. “It’s too late to take your words back.” I took a look at my crews’ closed helmets and couldn’t help but explain: “Look, I’m not going to try to fly through it! I don’t think I’m an ace or anything to try to pilot the ship by reflex alone. My plan is to fly into the belt and hide among the asteroids. If they can’t see us, they can’t use their disrupter beams on us. We’ll land on an asteroid and kill the engines while we initialize the hyperjump. Maybe we’ll have to take the asteroid with us, but the important thing is to skedaddle. You see what I’m saying?”

“The powercore might not handle it,” Wally replied after some thought, “if we tow the boulder with us. And we can’t kill the thrusters while inside the belt either—we’ll need to be able to dodge the asteroid…Damn! I would turn and take at least one frigate or several interceptors with us, but I have to say that your idea is doable…crazy but doable…I’ll try to get the most out of the shields. That’ll buy us some time.”

“In that case, battlestations! We’re going to pay a visit to the wandering rocks!”

“Hey jerk, where you think you’re going?” the ship’s comm suddenly came to life for the first time since the ambush. Nadeep, the captain of
Dauntless Warrior
, had decided to pay us a personal visit.

“We’re taking a field trip!” I parried, braking the ship. Entering an asteroid belt at full power would have been pure suicide. “Someone told me that they’re giving out donuts straight ahead, so I’ve decided to check it out! I’d love some donuts about now.”

“You think we don’t know how to flush you out of there? I’ll blast that damned belt to pieces!”

“Go ahead and blast it. I don’t have any plans for it anyway. Alright, no offense but I’ve got to go—more pressing matters to attend to.”

“I’ll…” Nadeep managed to begin before I cut the transmission. It would only be a distraction.

Lowering my speed to the minimal setting and thereby allowing six giant cruisers—as well as their attendant swarm of interceptors and frigates—to almost catch up with us, I took a deep breath and plunged
The Space Cucumber
into the asteroid belt. Tristan was blasting salvoes from the tail turret ceaselessly. Wally was deftly hanging and re-hanging the shields that the interceptors kept knocking down and simultaneously deflecting the smaller debris. Haggis was firing torpedo after torpedo at the asteroids we had passed to create a cloud of shrapnel four our enemies. Lestran was darting about like a singed cat, fixing different parts of the hull and complaining that he had already lost three of his repair bots. Miloš was giggling nervously in his seat and I was trying my best to avoid the larger boulders.
The Space Cucumber
was moving slowly but making progress into the asteroid belt all the same, finding her path through the chaos all around.

“Durability’s down to 70%,” moaned Lestran. “I don’t have time to fix everything! Try to be more careful, Surgeon!”

“If we keep going straight,” added Wally, “we won’t find the room to wait while the hyperdrive engages. Cyanide’s calculated our trajectory. They’re blasting their way with torpedoes into the heart of the belt. Those cruisers have plenty of them…We need to adjust our course to fly parallel to the belt.”

“A Pirate I Was Meant To Be” Mission Progress: 11 of 150 interceptors destroyed.

“I have a feeling that they won’t just let us waltz out of here,” smirked Tristan, sending another interceptor to meet its maker. Unlike in open space, it had become hard for the interceptors to get a safe distance away from
The Space Cucumber
and Tristan therefore now had time to finish off the little spacecraft.

“Two beam cannons down. We’re down to one!” Miloš reported happily a minute later. He was the only one who managed to keep track of the readouts on his screen. As soon as I adjusted our heading, everyone had to work harder. Even Haggis, who began to hammer the interceptors from the side cannons and torpedo launchers. I had it worst of all though—I was constantly letting boulders through to us, causing the hull to creak under the strain of the impacts. Lestran was cursing up a storm but repairing my errors all the same. Tristan started singing some kind of pirate ditty, as if he was some buccaneer running from the Royal Navy. Wally was muttering something incomprehensible to himself…The atmosphere in
The Space Cucumber
was a tense one indeed.

“We’ve lost our beam cannons!” Milos said after a minute.

“Torpedoes are done too,” smirked Haggis.

“But we don’t have any pursuers either,” Tristan added sadly. “I have no one to shoot at anymore. I think we lost them, for a bit at least.”

“Hull Durability is down to 15%, our powercore is down to 22%,” Wally reported. “We won’t get much further.”

“Then let’s land,” I decided, choosing the most promising looking boulder, “for example, right there!”

A humongous asteroid was turning lazily not far from
The Space Cucumber
. It was large enough to hide an entire cruiser. Huge craters formed by impacts with other asteroids, fissures, caves—it would have been difficult to find a more ideal place to secrete ourselves.

“Come on then—surprise us,” grinned Miloš when I did a flyby of this tiny planetoid, unwilling to let any pursuers see where we had decided to land.

“Durability down to 5%. Powercore’s in the red at 12%,” Wally reported wearily once we had alighted on the asteroid. I should admit that I had plunked us down pretty hard. The asteroid was spinning ceaselessly, so after deciding on a landing spot in the shadow of an enormous mountain, I had tried my best to match its rotation and lost track of my surroundings—which instantly made themselves known with a powerful asteroid strike to our hull, finishing off what remained of our portside engine. We would need a full-fledged overhaul station to repair our ship now, and we still needed to get there somehow. Slamming down heavily onto the asteroid and stirring up a cloud of dust in the process,
The Space Cucumber
got lucky for the first time during the battle. The scout drone which Wally launched at the last possible moment revealed that we had fallen several dozen yards into a fissure and caused a landslide along the way, which covered us entirely with debris. Basically,
The Space Cucumber
had now dropped off the Cyanide Guild’s radar.

“…hell are you, you dweeb?” While Lestran and Wally busied themselves with emergency repairs (attempting to jump to hyperspace with 5% hull Durability was a very bad idea) I turned on the comm and instantly heard my friend Nadeep. “Anyone see their wreckage?” he asked his subordinates on the open channel.

“The only wreckage is from the ships we lost. Most likely they landed on an asteroid and went dark,” came the reply from one of the players, making me want to give him a pat on the back for his guesswork. “We can destroy every asteroid along their last known trajectory. They couldn’t have gotten far.”

“D’you hear that Surgeon? I know that you can hear me! We’re going to smoke you out, you son of a dweeb! You might as well blow yourself up now.”

As soon as I found a moment, I called Marina. The nice thing about comms in
Galactogon
, compared to the ones IRL, was that even if the person you were calling was in another part of the universe, your conversation still took place in real time with no delays. In that sense, the in-game physics were very different from the real world.

“I’m listening,” Marina answered.

“Hey, this is Surgeon. You got a minute?”

“Not really but what’s up? What’s going on?”

“Well, here’s the situation…” I painted the girl a picture of our battle with the Cyanide Guild after they had ambushed us in hyperspace.

“Okay…what do you want from me? You got yourself into this mess—now dig yourself out. If things come down to it, blow yourself up. We put a button on your ship.”

“Eh, don’t worry. I’ll figure that out myself just fine. I want you to consider something else though: How would Nadeep know that we were going to Daphark? Even assuming that Hilvar sends every player that comes to him to that planet, how would Nadeep even know that we had gone to Qirlats? I definitely didn’t tell anyone about that. And when you were capturing
The Space Cucumber
, you hadn’t yet been ready to ally with me. Do you understand now why I’m calling you? I’m not complaining—I’m trying to warn you.”

“Are you sure that none of your…” Marina began and instantly cut herself off. She had been the one who had supplied me with my crew after all. “Thanks for the heads up, Surgeon…If you’re right, I’ll owe you one. Where are you now?”

“Asteroid belt in the Ramtil system, but we don’t need help. We’ll figure it out ourselves. We’ll just make some repairs and then be on our merry way. Just make sure to take care of your moles.”

I hung up and leaned back in my chair. There was nothing else for me to do. The Cyanide Guild could only have plucked us out of hyperspace if they knew ahead of time that we were jumping between planet A and planet B. There was absolutely no way that Cyanide controlled that hyperlane normally. Consequently, this had to be a deliberately planned revenge for the money they’d lost. Moreover, Nadeep had clearly known that we were flying a wholly retrofitted frigate. Otherwise, he would’ve only brought his own cruiser. I wasn’t even sure what would have happened in that case. A stock D-class cruiser was comparable in strength to an upgraded C-class frigate. But when the cruiser brings an armada as backup…

“They’ve begun to destroy the larger asteroids,” said Miloš, watching the feed from the scouting drone. “I’d guess that they’ll get to the one we’re on in ten minutes.”

“Lestran, what do you have?”

“We can try to get out of here in about two minutes. I can get the hull back up to 12%, but we simply don’t have enough repair materials to fix anything else.”

“Wally?”

“I need a couple minutes as well. I’m diverting power to the remaining engine. I think that’ll let us limp out of here. I’m just not so sure that we’ll be able to tow the asteroid with us. If that was possible, everyone would be doing it already.”

“Who knows what we’ll actually tow with us. Maybe it won’t be the entire asteroid and just some part of it. Or maybe we won’t take any of it at all. Of course, maybe we won’t go anywhere at all either. Until we try it, we won’t know. But I can tell you one thing—I don’t much feel like blowing myself up. A class-B ship is quite a thing.”

“I’m done!” Lestran reported. “Repairs are complete. Durability is at 11%. It’s slowly degrading due to the debris that’s pressing down on us.”

“In that case, let’s get underway,” I said, seeing that Wally was ready as well. “Initializing hyperjump procedure…”

“Alright then. So that’s why no one ever tries to jump right from a planet’s surface,” I muttered as soon as we reentered realspace and saw what had become of us. The jump to Daphark had taken no less than an hour, but there had been no way to tell whether the asteroid had come with us or not.

The good news was that the asteroid, as such, had not in fact come with us. The bad news was that
The Space Cucumber
was now encased in a giant layer of rock about a hundred feet thick, which had effectively turned our ship into an enormous and smooth, boulder. We only managed to establish the thickness of this epic structure after Miloš busted through the external hatch and then used his blaster to drill into the rock.

“We don’t have a hull anymore,” smirked Wally, checking the ship’s status. “Or, more precisely, our hull is now a giant boulder that’s fused with the ship. The engines won’t work, the sensors won’t work and we have no idea where we are now. I propose we exercise the self-destruct option.”

“What’s with you and blowing ourselves up?” I grumbled. “Are we near Daphark or not?”