“That’s enough,” I said, succumbing to gloomy thoughts. John Levin—a gamer of immense experience and enviable connections with the powerful of this world—had suddenly decided to start Galactogon from scratch. You don’t make a choice like that because you’re in a bad mood or just had some stupid argument with someone. Obviously, John had a reason that he could not say no to…like one billion pounds sterling! That had to be it. John had been one of the twelve sent into Galactogon by the betting Masters. My chances of getting that check had just grown by a twelfth…Damn! What was I thinking about? Someone had killed John! I had flown a Gard flyer enough to know that even if you wanted to ram the thing into a wall, its configuration would stop you. All aspects of the flyer’s safety mechanisms had been considered thoroughly.
So he had been murdered. Now I needed to know the reason—was this really an internal squabble within Zarathustra or a deliberate assassination of one of the gamers in search of the check.
“Stan, search request: I need any information you can find about Galactogon players who have reset their characters in the past month. If all twelve started simultaneously, then their previous characters would’ve been deleted that same day. Any public sources, forums, social media and anything else you come across. I need lists of people.”
“Understood. Will there be any further instructions?”
“Yes. Find me two former Draanmir players, IRL names: Constantine and Eunice. Both started playing Galactogon the same time I did. You can find their pics on my phone. What’s the status of panic mode?”
“Panic mode is still in effect. There have been three attacks over the past 24 hours, two decoy VMs have been breached and ransacked. After gaining access to the system, one of the attackers made some poor choices, seemingly having decided that the system was entirely his; this gave me time to trace the attack vector back to its origin. This yielded a residential address belonging to a Dan Cormack, the guild leader of the Black Lightning, as you are already aware. Will there be any further instructions? I advise you to lodge a formal complaint with law enforcement, while requesting to remain anonymous.”
“Agreed,” I replied after a little thought. If any Qualian scum (even if one born here IRL) had decided to break into my system, he deserved to have his fingers broken. I didn’t like doing that kind of thing myself, but I was acquainted with several wonderful fellas who would jump at the chance to dig around some hacker’s system. Best of luck to you, Dan Cormack.
Stan had finished his biography of Hilvar by this time, so I began to study it.
He was a local of the Pyrrhenian race. The first stop for any player wishing to become a pirate in Galactogon. Even if the player never made it into the Jolly Roger, he’d still have to deal with Hilvar. Planet of residence: Qirlats. Missions types: messenger, ship destroyer and local abduction. Upon reaching a Rapport of 20, Hilvar would send the player to the headquarters of the Jolly Roger where—I didn’t need to know that yet. What else was there about Hilvar? One of the cofounders (along with the Corsican) of the official pirate guild of Galactogon, the Brotherhood of the Jolly Roger. Left his leadership role several years before the game’s beginning to become the first obstacle that players who wish to join the shadow guilds of Galactogon encounter. It fell to Hilvar to determine who would become a pirate and who wouldn’t. The Corsican’s former right-hand man.
Ho-hum…
The bad blood between Hilvar and the Corsican was turning out to be a river. There was no other way to explain his visceral reaction to seeing Marina. Moreover, it was safe to assume that Marina had grasped this perfectly. It would have been dangerous to underestimate the intelligence of Alexandria’s captain. Consequently, the Corsican was well aware of Hilvar’s dislike of him and yet allowed him to maintain his position as first recruiter. Why?
“Stan-my-man, I’ve got another assignment for you.” Realizing that I needed to know more, I turned to my chief researcher. “Dig up anything, even if it’s gossip, about the relationship between Hilvar and the Corsican. And dig around in Galactogon lore. Maybe there’ll be something worthwhile in there.”
“Understood,” reported my smart home. “Your criminal complaint has been submitted to the proper authorities and you have been issued a case number. I have preliminary search results concerning players who began their characters the same day you did. Currently this list includes 382 people from every part of the globe. Shall I filter these results for our country?”
“No, I’ll need all of them,” I replied, understanding perfectly well that the betting Masters could have found players from anywhere. “Could you tell me please about the search algorithm?”
“Forum posts referring to a newly created character, personal websites, public requests to tech support.”
“Am I on the list?”
“No, I have been unable to find any mention of you.”
“Cancel that search then. There’s no sense in looking for competitors that way. Just to make sure—is John Levin on the list?”
“No, this player was not identified during my analysis.”
“Got it…Prioritize collecting information about piracy and finding Eunice and Constantine. Limit that search to our country. They had no accents. Anyway, get to it…Wait!” A thought had suddenly come to me. “Replay my vidcall with Cormack.”
“…I’m guessing you sent your requests not just to us, but to all the other Qualian guilds as well—so you may be sure that Sergei Smolyanov is already well aware of your vidphone number and email. That bit of info is free by the way. If he weren’t such a jerk—and from an enemy empire besides—I would absolutely be on board with his whole secrecy thing. A hundred thousand dollars is a very big sum, after all…”
“Stan, get me a bio of Sergei Smolyanov as soon as you can: who he is, where he’s from, where he’s going and why. That’s highest priority. Everything else is secondary. I need that done by tomorrow morning.”
That night, however, sleep took a long time coming. The panic mode ringing in my head demanded some kind of action, but nothing reasonable would come to mind. I knew too little and couldn’t discount the possibility that I was simply being paranoid. What did we have?
First. Twelve players were hired to find the check. All twelve were distributed throughout the different empires of the game. My first challenge then was to figure out what empire John Levin had been assigned to. If he had been sent to the Qualians as well, then my fears would be baseless.
Second. I had been told that a certain Sergei Smolyanov was prepared to offer $100,000 for information about new players. And so we put our thinking caps on and began to think: About four hundred players started the game the same day I did. So then, what, was I supposed to assume that Sergei was the lunatic son of some billionaire, willing to spend an ungodly amount of money on that harebrained scheme..? Utter baloney. There’s only one possible conclusion—Cormack was my only enemy and no one else. Why tell me all that, after all? To find a way into my network? Possibly…I needed to keep thinking and wait to see what Stan would come up with in the morning.
Third. Let’s assume that my fears were founded and someone was tracking down the contestants. And why would this be only limited to the players? After all, the betting Masters found me easily enough. A billion pounds was a large enough amount of money to have an effect on people, including those who may have been close to the two bettors. It followed that my address, appearance, electronic identity and basically all the information there was about me or the other eleven contestants was in the hands of the betting masters, and one or both of them could easily have passed it on to some ringer that they were paying to eliminate us. Say, half the prize in exchange for the ringer eliminating the contestants of his protégé. But golly! What was I even going on about? If I was correct, then I was a potential corpse standing in the way of someone’s fortune. The only thing that could save me was my premature exit from the Training Sector, which would have given me a head start of, say, two-three weeks. But no mor
e. As soon as the ringer left the Sector—let’s take the worst case scenario in which the player has no money but no limit on playing time either—the elimination process would begin. I needed to move as soon as possible, even if temporarily.
Fourth. We, the players, were not allowed to make alliances in game, but no one said anything about real life. I needed to find Eunice and Constantine, tell them about my suspicions and offer to work together. Correction—let’s assume the worst case, in which one of those two was the traitor. In that case, I could meet with them only after I had moved—and only virtually—and with a scrambler. What a prize this check was turning out to be.
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 Alexand
ria. 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.
Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) Page 14
