Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (21 page)

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…”

“Alexis!” the man interrupted me. “It’s very nice to hear from you. If I am not mistaken you are playing under the handle ‘Surgeon’ and you are with the Qualian Empire, no?”

“That’s correct. How shall I refer to you?”

“You may call me Dmitry. How may I be of service?”

“Dmitry, I received news today that five of the twelve gamers brought on to your wager have died. This leads me to fear for my life. I am calling you because I would like to hear your official statement on this issue.”

“True, we are aware of this issue and are currently trying to resolve it by any means necessary,” the supervisor of the project informed me. “We have assigned a bodyguard to each project member. We are keeping a close eye on all the neighborhoods where our members live, so you have nothing to be worried about. We have everything under control.”

“Thank you for that explanation,” I mumbled, utterly unconvinced by Dmitry’s confident and cheerful voice. Any time they tell you everything’s under control—it’s time to panic.

“Alexis, I don’t wish to come across tactless, but how did you learn about the participants’ deaths?”

“From the web and my own inference,” I replied. As silly as it seemed, I wasn’t about to betray Eunice. Aside from making it impossible to figure out what the conversation was about, an encrypted channel also prevented any record of a conversation ever having taken place. “One of the dead was in my trio. I identified him by looking for his physical appearance in public news outlets. The others I got more or less by accident. Until our conversation, I had no assurance that they were also participants. Now I can see that my reasoning did not betray me.”

“Thank you for the explanation. I assure you that we are doing everything in our power to ensure that you face no obstacles in your performance of the duties you have undertaken. May I help you with anything else?”

“No, thank you. You have reassured me,” I told Dmitry and hung up. I would bet the head on my shoulders that now was the time to be really worried.

“Send Eunice the following message:
‘You are right, trust no one. Get out of the Sector, then we’ll talk.’
Next—I need you to find an apartment and devise a plan to move us there secretly. The one condition is that no one can know that I am moving at all. Understood?”

“Understood. Searching for a fitting residence now. Please forgive me, when you said the word ‘us’ were you speaking of yourself in the plural or did you have someone else in mind?”

“Us. I need access to your resources through a secure line. You yourself will stay here and remotely interface with the system in the new house. That’s an important condition.”

“Understood. Master, I have completed processing the data about discovering new planets. Do you wish to see the results now?”

“Sure. Let’s see what you got…”

“A Planet discovered by a player has two official names—one that was assigned to it by the developers and another that the discovering player gets to assign it…A player who discovers a planet receives X% (depending on rank) of all resources extracted from this planet…Additionally, the discovering player receives a +10% bonus to the probability of discovering a unique item…”

This was pretty boilerplate stuff that, aside from suggesting that I could win the lottery, told me nothing of value. The forums too bore no mention of any first wishes. It was as if
Galactogon
players had never even heard of such a thing. In my beloved
Runlustia
, when a player discovered some new land or area, he received several nice rewards, including a wish of his choice…Here, on the other hand…As for the unique item (I just couldn’t pass this detail by without checking it out further), in
Galactogon
this could be anything and everything—from an energy sprite to an entire solar system. The important part was that this item would be singular in the game, having no analogue whatsoever. Considering that, like with all items in
Galactogon
, this item too could be taken at will by anyone who cared enough, its use to me was about zero. I didn’t exactly wish to become a collector of rarities. And yet that +10% was immense, since the base stat to begin with was 0.001%.

Thus, the only boon from my discovery of this planet was the money I could get from selling the naming rights. There were plenty of self-absorbed donkeys and suchlike narcissists in
Galactogon
and they would jump at the chance to name a planet after themselves. And, it should be said, of these, the male contingent far outnumbered the female one. Stan even showed me an official blog dedicated to the purchase and sale of secondary planet names. The prices started at ten thousand dollars for a planet on the periphery of the known galaxy and went all the way up to tens of millions for planets closer to the center. The only requirement was precise coordinates of the unnamed planet’s solar system—that is, a luxury I could not afford at the moment. If I knew those, I could have convinced Marina to send me at least one of her scouts. A pair of torpedoes was all
The Space Cucumber
needed…

Before climbing back into the game capsule, I spent some time staring at the wall in meditation: As fraught as my relations were with Lucille, I had to let her know that five others had already been killed. I realized that Alonso would get it right in the nuts, but better he get it from a wife who’s alive than hold me responsible later for staying silent. I decided to let Lucy know as soon as I finished moving to the new apartment Stan was still looking for. Only after that—better safe than sorry.

Please assign this planet a second name.

The first thing I saw upon resigning into
Galactogon
and stepping out of the ship was a dialog box asking me to enter a new name. Considering my salary, ten thousand dollars wouldn’t mean much, so I selected the input box (you had to enter the name by hand) and christened my planet.

Name accepted! Planet Blood Island welcomes its discoverer!

I didn’t feel like thinking about it and simply named the planet according to the pattern I’d already adopted. If I ever got out of here, the name would remain a fitting memorial to
The Space Cucumber
’s untimely shipwreck. Otherwise…well…any captain would be proud to make even such a minor contribution to the memory of his first ship.

Blood Island turned out to be a very green planet. Huge green ferns rose against a vista of mountains, their thick trunks camouflaged by a chaos of smaller trees, bushes and grasses. My PDA deemed the various avian species darting about as “mostly harmless.” It felt like I had a discovered an evergreen Eden. The only interruption in this flowering spectacle was the enormous crater caused by
The Space Cucumber
’s crash landing: a hundred or so yards of disrupted turf and broken saplings. I was sure that after a few months, the frigate would be entirely buried by Blood Island’s vegetation.

I gathered any food there was to find on board and had to smile to myself—considering that a player in
Galactogon
could go hungry for no more than two days, I would definitely have to depart Blood Island in a week. We had not bought any supplies on our way out of Qirlats, as most players only ate when they were planetside anyway. As a result,
The Space Cucumber
only contained the three daily rations that had been there when Lestran and I first boosted it from the Training Sector. If I skipped a day, I could stretch this food to last a week. After that, I’d either find myself on Qirlats from starvation or…or I’d find myself on Qirlats with my ship. Obviously, I preferred the second option.