“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.
I found a cable in Lestran’s repair bay and used it to shimmy down from the hull. It’s not like the Elo would come to me, so I’d have to take a look around the planet. If I had my marine armor, I would’ve kicked in my thrusters and circumnavigated Blood Island in a few days, but…Well, that was yet another “if” too much.
“What up Surgeon?” Wally called me that evening. “Marina sent us the frigate as promised. Since you’re not around, I took on the role of captain and registered the new ship under my name. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course not. It’s looking like I’ll be here for at least a week,” I mumbled, wearily leaning against the trunk of the nearest tree. “W
hat’s up with you guys otherwise?”
“We made it to Daphark today and found Trid. His missions for us consisted of destroying several F-class orbital stations, delivering a couple messages and ferrying some Qualian. Pretty basic stuff on the whole. It’s more work for the ship than for our crew. According to the forums, Trid’s gonna make us run around for several weeks, so you have plenty of time.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon,” I smiled and joked around with Wally for a few minutes before turning off my comm and looking wearily at the dark jungle around me. I had managed to traverse about twenty clicks in the direction of the mountains on the horizon. The jungle was an impassable mass of latticed trees and branches, vines, grasses, bushes and other large plants. Thick green snakes coiled in the branches of the canopy. I was getting the impression that all this life teeming on this planet had been made for me alone—as nowhere along my way had I encountered so much as a single trail. Even in the best conditions, it would have been impossible to traverse this morass if it weren’t for my two fully-charged pacifiers. I put away my blaster in the first few minutes of my journey, since shooting at the plants would have been pointless. The pacifiers, on the other hand, lived up to their name. Branches, grass, vines, snakes—all of it went flying out of my way. That which refused to fly, crawled. When the first snake, irritated by my rude treatment of its tail, attacked me, I almost met my Planetary Spirit. I managed to react to its lunge in the nick of time, however, stopping its hissing maw several yards from my face. The pacifier did its job well, pacifying the serpent. After the snake’s skull finished its exchange with the nearest tree trunk, I received a notification that my weapon’s experience bar had grown by several points. Searching the dead snake, I found “Venomous Saliva,” which could be used in the forging of armor. What else was there to do but smile contently and open hunting season in earnest? I instituted a mini-genocide of snakes, birds, monkeys and anything else that got underfoot. (At one point it even occurred to me how nice it was that there was no PETA on this planet.) I was pretty sure that Blood Island had never witnessed such an extinction event. The thing that perplexed me the most, though, was that all the animals I encountered seemed to live up in the trees. It was as if this newly discovered world had never gotten around to evolving land-based animals.
Or so I thought…
After my chat with Wally, I was about to pop out to reality when I heard a fierce roar come from the jungle before me. It sounded like a trumpet’s call—as though some unknown creature was calling me to battle. The roar came again just as fiercely and insistently. Although, I thought, maybe I simply hold myself in too high a regard and that call has nothing to do with me at all. Perhaps these were just the mating calls of the local macaques and all that was going on was two males were squaring up to fight over a female…
As I advanced towards the sound, the trees ended abruptly and I found myself in a small clearing, no more than fifty yards across. Looking closer I realized that the clearing was artificial—the bushes and grass had been carefully flattened or uprooted. On the opposite side of the clearing from me stood the source of all this belligerent ruckus—a humongous, nine-foot-tall creature that bore a close resemblance to the common rhinoceros.
“What’s up? Wanna chat?” I said, putting my pacifiers away and retrieving my blaster. My two clubs would be useless against such a monster and there were no boulders I could pick up and throw at it.
“Grrr!” replied the creature and, fixing me with its three eyes (the third being on its forehead), charged in my direction. Judging by the speed it accumulated, the beast was not much disposed to idle chatter. Too bad for him…
“They never want to talk,” I muttered, taking aim and pulling the trigger. Even if my blaster wasn’t as powerful as Miloš’s, it would be more than enough to…
Melt in my hands?
The beast charging in my direction turned out to have the very pleasant name “Cryptosaur” and the very pleasant characteristic called “active resistance,” which instantly incinerated my blaster as if it were some plastic toy. Puzzled, I stared at my hands, then up at the three-eyed cow with a horn on its nose that was still closing in on me. I had the presence of mind to jump back only thanks to the reflexes I had accumulated in Runlustia. Jumping to the sides wouldn’t have helped—the beast would have caught me anyway. In jumping backwards I wanted to mitigate the damage I knew I would take. It seemed to have worked…
The beast struck me with such force that I flew about thirty feet backwards. If I had remained standing in place, then instead of its forehead I would’ve met its horn. After a short flight through the brush, my back encountered a giant tree trunk, which I slid down along, getting tangled in the vines and bushes the length of the way. My breath had been knocked out of me. It was painful to even move, much less attempt to untangle myself and flee from the monster. If it weren’t for the clothes I’d pilfered from the Training Sector, I would’ve been waiting ten minutes to respawn in Qirlats. Without breaking its stride, the cryptosaur busted through the bushes and rushed past me, dodging the collision with the tree at my back. I heard the cracking of branches and the rhino came barreling past me in a different direction, seemingly calculating a path for a final killing blow.
“Kaldaran daragost!” a mighty, somewhat croaking voice drowned out the tramp of the cryptosaur, which was busy turning around for the coup de grace. “Rekvasta narguler!”
Hadn’t I already told myself to learn the in-game languages? This wasn’t Runlustia where you could buy a mission in any store—Galactogon was much closer to reality in that sense. You had to do some studying here if you wanted to understand anyone besides other players—and quite pointless studying by the way, since none of these language existed in real life.
Doing my best to remember the spoken phrase, so I could run it past Stan later that night, I worked on catching my breath and tensely awaited the appearance of this new representative of the local fauna. The hit I had taken from the cryptosaur had been a pretty bad one.
“Surgeon, kardane delrogast?” Even though I expected the newcomer to appear from the direction of the clearing, where I had heard the initial shout, the stranger appeared right above my head. Flabbergasted, I found myself looking at a three-foot-tall butterfly, which the developers had deigned to give four arms, a pretty unremarkable human face, two giant horns where the antennae should have been and, well, sentience. If it weren’t for its bright blue, pupil-less eyes, this creature could easily be taken for a person who could see what my name was like anyone else in the game.
“I don’t understand,” I shook my head, answering Yalrock—a member of the Uldan species. I had always paid close attention to images when studying the various Galactogonian guides, yet I had never seen either any Uldans or butterflies among the game’s species. This just meant that Stan would have more work to do tonight.
“Kardane delrogast?” Yalrock repeated, evidently not understanding me either. The undergrowth behind the giant butterfly crackled as the cryptosaur returned for another visit. Taking a seat on the ground just like a trained dog, it froze, waiting for the Uldan’s next command.
“I don’t understand,” I insisted once more. Assuming that locals in Galactogon behaved as they did in other games, I couldn’t pop out IRL to find out what I was being told. If I did, I’d lose contact with this Uldan and then get smashed to pieces by the unfettered cryptosaur upon my return. “I only speak English. I don’t know any other languages.”
“Dernast shradnalar,” Yalrock shook his head sadly, flicked his wings and swooped up into the air. “Zartas!” he commanded, pointing at me—at which, the cryptosaur charged. The last thing I remembered was the melancholy expression on the face of that giant butterfly.
Dang! I’d lost The Space Cucumber.
“Greetings, Master…”
“Stan, hack the Galactogon servers if you have to, but I need this text translated,” I said, sending Stan a recording of my last ten minutes in Gala
ctogon. After a moment’s thought, I also sent over the star map I had photographed in the vicinity of Blood Island. “After you translate the text, I need to know anything you can find about this mysterious butterfly named Yalrock, the overgrown rhino that killed me and a full analysis of the star map. Download any maps you can find and analyze every possible viewing angle. I have to know where that planet is located.”
In ten minutes, my character would respawn on Qirlats, so I was planning on signing into the game one more time and leaving the respawn area. After death, the player reappeared in the abode of the Planetary Spirit and it was considered bad form to remain there for a long time. There weren’t any fines or anything—it just wasn’t done. A weird custom, of course, but whatever: You don’t get to make up the rules when you’re still a newbie. Tomorrow morning I would call Wally and spend some time simply grinding for positive Rapport with the pirates. Unfortunately, it’d be much harder now to fulfill the mission Hilvar had given me.
“Understood. Processing now. Master, while you were absent, I found several new places of residence matching your search criteria. One of them is located in this city. Two more are in the suburbs and one is in the capital. I would like to point out that most landlords require personal information from their renters, therefore…”
“Let me see the two in the suburbs,” I interrupted Stan’s droning. I really needed to do something about his tone. The more he worked for me, the more he sounded like a nagging wife—“this wasn’t right and that wasn’t right” etc. I’d trained him too well.
“Alonso! What’s going on?” I called my friend as soon as the apartment issue was settled. The place that Stan found turned out to be so fitting that I had literally nothing to object to. The new place featured a direct and encrypted line to my current house, properly installed alarm systems and a location that was quite a distance from the city center yet still on a busy street in a nice neighborhood. Considering that the house it was in also had an underground passage to a neighboring lot, I could safely assume that it had been designed by some paranoiac. Though, to be fair, I learned about the alarm system and the underground passage only after signing a rental agreement and an NDA with the owner, who insisted on seeing his future tenant in person. It seemed that he liked something about my face because he signed the contract almost instantly—having first haggled about the price a bit. In my view, one hundred thousand a month for a house was too much, considering that my salary was five hundred thousand, but all he would give up was a measly ten thousand. The landlord dug his heels in and was about to say no completely, so I had to give in. If it had to be ninety, then let it be ninety. My safety and peace of mind was worth more anyway. After I sent him the master codes, Stan set up a connection to the new house, scanned its systems and disappointed me with the news that my new residence did not come with a game capsule. This begged the question of what to do next—move the capsule I had, or buy a new one. The second option won out, despite the exorbitant price for that hunk of steel—another fifty thousand dollars. If there were specially trained agents monitoring my house, then all my attempts to keep my move secret would come to naught as soon as the movers showed up. I needed to approach this problem creatively.
Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) Page 18
