Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1)

by Vasily Mahanenko

  Carefully touching the projection, I lifted it above the planet and felt myself sink into my chair as the ship began to move. The map’s scale instantly changed to accommodate Yalrock’s current speed and I moved the projection in the direction of The Space Cucumber’s location. The testing phase had begun…

  “Captain, the data transfer has been completed—recoding is underway,” the slizosaur informed me after we stretched a long cable between Yalrock and The Space Cucumber. It seemed that in deciding that energy could only be transferred through a cable, the developers had decided to accommodate reality at least in some way. I’d have had a good long laugh if I had been able to simply transmit the Elo’s energy straight into the frigate through ninety feet of rock. Thankfully, the devs spared me the laughing fit, making the recharge process of The Space Cucumber quite realistic.

  Adapting my seat to the dimensions of my marine armor, I received the snake’s report that all the data had been transferred from The Space Cucumber—with the exception of several spy modules that were sending the ship’s coordinates somewhere into space. I guess we hadn’t found all our stowaway insects after all!

  …Establishing current location…

  …Current location established…

  …Nearest inhabited planet: Zamir, Pyrrhenian Empire (Voldan Alliance).

  …Calculating optimal hyperspace route…

  …Hyperspace route calculated—ETA: 30 minutes.

  One of the screens displayed the known parts of Galactogon along with a distant point which indicated the location of Blood Island. My eyes almost popped out of my head once I realized how far my thoughtless hyperjump had taken us from the known systems. This may as well have been as far as anyone had ever gone from the chief, inhabited systems of Galactogon.

  “Computer?” I said aloud, by habit more than anything else. Long, long ago, Stan had become if not my friend, then an invaluable component of my life, and I had become so used to communicating with him by voice that I automatically tried it here too. As I had already found out, for instance, The Space Cucumber’s computer did not respond to such voice commands.

  “Orders, Captain?” replied the space around me. My jaw dropped: the ship was “alive!”

  “Give me a brief report on the ship’s status,” I decided to try a test phrase to get a sense of how developed the AI was. I had just finished looking over this same data several minutes ago and wanted to see what the ship would tell me about the same information.

  “Taking into account that the information you just reviewed accounts for 90% of the ship’s status report, I will add that the assault droids require Tiron to function at full power. The assault droids suffered cumulative damage of 47% after the last battle. Most units require a complete overhaul. Only four droids of the thirty-two on board are currently battle-ready. It is also preferable to refill the ship’s Elo reserves. Current onboard energy reserves will last about a week under typical operating conditions. One hundred thousand years of standby have an effect even on a Klamir-type ship. All systems are currently nominal. There are no deviations, aside from the crew’s status. Crew readiness is currently at 25%. The crew requires further training. It is not recommended to engage another ship in direct combat until the general level of crew readiness has reached 50% or higher. Planetary scan complete. Elo reserves have been identified. It is recommended to fully mine the identified Elo lode. Do you wish to dispatch the harvester to do so?”

  “We have a harvester too?” I asked, riffling through the ship’s attributes with astonishment. I could swear I had not seen it in the ship’s manifest.

  “The cryptosaur model attached to this ship as a marine and droid commander has the additional capability of mining certain resources. A harvester performs the closest analogue to this function in this galaxy; therefore, I took the liberty of substituting the semantic sense of the word. The cryptosaur can extract the Elo.”

  “I approve the extraction,” I managed, and one of the screens flashed over to show the cryptosaur’s first person view. The hull opened and the animal burst out as fast as it could in some direction known only to him. Although, that’s not true—the onboard computer knew that too, but…Oh! By the way!

  “Computer, what is the proper way to address you? Do you have a name, number, model or personal preference?”

  “Negative,” came the response. “The former captain did not use my voice functionality.”

  “In that case, I will refer to you as Braniac. It’s just not nice to not have a name. What do you mean when you say the captain didn’t use your voice function? Do you have some kind of telepathic link option or something?”

  “No, the former captain used the command key. As a rule, the Uldans did not like to use voice commands.”

  “Got it. Tell me, do you have any information concerning the history of this race? Who are they? Where did they come from? Why did they disappear? What wars did they fight? Maybe you know where their secret bases could still be located?” I asked the last question out of sheer curiosity, knowing very well that—in this ship and crew—the Galactogon devs had already given me an utterly insane present. By the looks of things, nothing short of a cruiser could challenge a klamir (as Braniac referred to this ship type)—everything else would be sheer suicide. Even a flycatcher would do no good against her. I could tear up a frigate’s shields and blast her apart with my beam cannons without having to resort to torpedoes. I couldn’t understand why the designers had decided to introduce such an imba, game-breaking ship, but I was happy to be on my side of this issue. She was mine, after all. I could even risk taking on a cruiser—Yalrock’s class was much higher than I had expected. I thought that B-class ships didn’t just fall from the sky, but the game had proved me dead wrong.

  “I have transferred all information about the Uldan race to your personal PDA,” came Braniac’s reply. “Including a description of their wars, history, origins and eventual demise. As for secret bases, unfortunately…” There followed a short pause, during which I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, thinking if no, then no. “According to my calculations, there is a probability that one of the Uldan bases survived. All the others were based on planets that no longer exist.”

  “One base?” I barely squelched an expletive. “Where are its coordinates?”

  “Considering current imperial territorial and administrative divisions, the base is located on one of the three moons of Zalva, the capital of the Precian Empire. The Uldans built their bases deep underground, so, assuming that the moon is still in one piece, the base should still be there.”

  All my joy at hearing that there was an ancient stash after all evaporated as soon as Braniac told me where this stash was. From what I knew about the game, a solar system containing a capital planet was basically in the center of the empire and was therefore one of the best defended places in that empire as well. Those systems were swarming with Grand Arbiters—against which other ships were nothing but toys. Players could only go to such a system by receiving an invitation and considering my not-so-friendly relations with the Altan Alliance, of which the Precian Empire was a part, obtaining such an invitation was beyond impossible. It was too bad…

  “The cryptosaur has found the Elo lode and has begun mining it,” said Braniac, directing my attention to the appropriate screen which showed a huge clump of a blue mineral, surrounded by scorched earth—Elo irradiated and destroyed anything around it. The rhino didn’t try to reinvent the wheel in extracting the resource and did what his kind normally do—ran at it at full speed. His horn struck the lode, knocking off a piece of the mineral, at which the rhino simply ate this fallen piece. After just ten minutes, the cryptosaur’s capacity bar filled up and he turned to go back to the ship to unload.

  “Ten hours left until the lode has been fully exhausted,” Braniac commented on the mining progress. What a good name I’d given him! “Travel time is ten minutes. I recommend we approach the lode and shorten the harvester’s trip length.”

 
“Agreed,” I nodded my head and gingerly touched the control orb. “Gunner, get ready to destroy the frigate as soon as we are at a sufficient distance from it. Engineer, tell the cryptosaur that we are headed toward him—tell him to wait for us by the lode.”

  “Consider it done, Cap,” the snake instantly responded as I carefully lifted Yalrock from the ground. The time had come to say goodbye to The Space Cucumber.

  Frigate The Space Cucumber has been destroyed. Due to its destruction, all ship attributes have been decreased by one class. Current ship class: B.

  “Lestran?” I called my partner as soon as Yalrock alighted near the Elo lode. The rhino instantly got onboard and threw up everything that he had managed to mine by that point. A robotic arm emerged from the wall and loaded a heap of Elo into a container. Fun little operation this…

  “Hey Surgeon!” the young man answered chipper as ever. He was still in the game.

  “I have an assignment for you tomorrow. I need you to go to Qirlats and retrieve The Space Cucumber from the graveyard. Wally isn’t around, so I’m giving you this assignment. Can you handle it?”

  “No need to ask, sir! Hold on, what about you? You can’t kill yourself?”

  “No, it’s not that. I’ll show up a bit later. Return the frigate she gave us back to Marina and tell her thanks. Then, continue doing Hilvar’s missions. Agreed?”

  “Alright! Everything will be done to a T.”

  After I hung up, I spent a few minutes watching the cryptosaur mine the Elo lode, running to the ship and back, and finally signed out of the game. I had had enough adventures for today. The main testing of Yalrock would come tomorrow. The important thing was for Stan to decipher that command key…

  Chapter 10

  The Patch

  “Good morning, Master!” Stan chirped as soon as I opened my eyes. My night had been a restless one. I kept having a nightmare in which I kept dying in different ways—either I’d get blown up, or crushed, or shot. And every time the murderer was a different person whom I’d never seen before: A man with sideburns, a tight white T-shirt and strange brass knuckles that resembled three long claws. A young girl in black skintight clothes that resembled latex, who moved so fluidly that the murder would begin to resemble a dance. A weird looking guy in green clothes with the emblem of a lantern on it…It was quite a night. The only good thing was that the night had ended and the day during which I was to test out my new ship had finally come. If she was half as a good as her description made it seem, then I’d be sure to donate some money to the game’s admins—presents like that deserved recognition.

  “What’s new?” I asked Stan as I sat down to breakfast. My chief deputy found the wherewithal to provide me with everything I needed, even in this new, strange apartment—as though trying to soften my time in house arrest.

  “Repair work on your old home is underway. All the debris was hauled away overnight. Today the contractor will begin to reframe the walls. You have received a message from the police, notifying you that your reward will be awarded to you upon your release from house arrest. Galactogon’s game servers are offline today due to a major update. I have finished deciphering the text on the command key…”

  “Stop!” I interrupted Stan’s report, despite the fact that the deciphered text was very important and was a priority matter for me. “What update? Why didn’t I hear about this earlier?”

  “Everyone has just found out,” explained my smart home. “A global update has been rumored for a long time—to the point that most players have begun to ignore such rumors. The developers have maintained their silence until today. Basically, no one was ready for a patch of this magnitude. Also, I would like to point out that the information you initially requested about Galactogon asked for important game mechanics, the history of races, ship piloting, game economics and a search for coordinates based on several images. At no point did you ask about the probable future condition of the game or its forthcoming updates. As a result, I decided that this information was not pertinent and omitted it from my reports.”

  “Hmm…” I replied expressively to Stan’s explanation and shoveled the next load of pancakes into my mouth. An unannounced patch is a pretty curious thing. Many companies, even the one that ran Runlustia, used this tactic—after all, most of the testing was done not by the players but by QC programs. And yet, I found it strange that no one had leaked that this was going to happen. It’s basically impossible to keep such information secret until the last moment—unless of course, Galactogon’s IT security was impeccable. “Alright, put together an outline of the changelog and find me an exhaustive description of any changes to piloting mechanics. They have published something like that, haven’t they?”

  “Yes, the new information should be posted on the official site. Displaying it now.” A projected screen popped up in front of me and began to fill with neat lines of text. My eyebrows rose higher and higher as each new sentence entered my gray matter. It was as if the new information was too much for my head and had inflated my brain up against my skull. I could see now why they had shut down Galactogon for an entire day—a typical patch could easily be applied within an hour, without the servers even going offline. But the game designers had cooked up a colossal adjustment to the game’s mechanics, including the additions of entirely new pawns.

  And so!

  Galactogon now had several new types of vessels—among which there was still no mention of my new spherical klamir. Players now had access to the following ships, in ascending order of power: interceptor, scout, shuttle, transport, blocker, monitor, corvette, frigate, albenda and cruiser. The albenda—a monster housing fifty players—was basically no different from an un-upgraded cruiser. But the new updated cruiser…Well, I couldn’t even imagine how anyone could take one on anymore. There was also the harvester, but players couldn’t control it, so that tub was not included in the list.

  Since the basic flight mechanics hadn’t changed, this expansion to the game’s fleet, was just about the only thing of interest to captains—and still it was but a drop in the bucket of what the developers were now introducing to Galactogon. The patch was directed above all at the engineering side of the game. Engineers now became incredibly useful, desirable and, well, basically indispensable to any ship. Thus this patch would be a godsend to any players who’d chosen this career, as they would now be the masters of repair and upgrades. They could tinker with the engines, weapons, armor, fuselage—if you wanted to improve anything, an engineer was what you needed. In addition to all that, they could now create individual robots—including gigantic robo-titans. It seemed like someone on the dev team had gotten tired of the marines lording it over all the planet-bound plebs and decided to buff another class for the sake of variety. All you had to do now was obtain one of these titans and learn how to control it—no amount of marines would be scary after that.

  What I couldn’t help but be happy about was a new macro-mechanic called the cosmic raid—once a week, a humongous asteroid would come flying at a random, Confederate planet. The players would have to all get together and destroy this boulder. On one’s own, even with Alexandria, you couldn’t deal with a monster like that—you wouldn’t have the time and weapons. So uniting with other players was now mandatory. Naturally, this meant new missions and rewards, new opportunities for building Rapport and new factions, new planets, new trade routes, new mechanics, new, new, new…

  Since most of Galactogon’s competitors had shut down, swelling the games userbase, the developers decided they had to make some concessions and simplified the game somewhat: At last, there would be a list of missions. Until now, it was up to the players to decide whether they had received an actual mission or not—and only a rare notification every once in a while would assure us poor bastards that we were indeed on the right path. The patch introduced a journal which would list the mission that a local had given to the player, as well as the current missions’ progress. On one hand, I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t
done that earlier—on the other, it was nice to see that someone was listening and thinking about the game’s future.

  According to the number that Stan displayed in his outline, there was about twenty-two new additions to the game, starting from the new ships and ending with new skins for the ships, so I didn’t delve too closely into the whole list. And yet, all of this was eclipsed by the patch’s main addition—for the first time in the game’s history, a common foe had appeared! An aggressive race from another universe had launched an invasion of Galactogon—threatening all twelve empires at once. In order to provide the players with an incentive to participate in the defense of their galaxy, the invaders had by some miracle managed to kidnap a representative from each empire’s ruling dynasty. Even the Anorxian Empire—an empire of robots ruled by a CPU—had one such weak link in its hierarchy. Twelve princes and princesses had gathered at a symposium for how to defend their universe—and that’s where they were all kidnapped. It was a pretty story, but the point was simple—the designers wanted the players to drop everything and go save those hostages, committing themselves to war with this new enemy…

  “Master, someone has come to see you,” said Stan, tearing me away from my study of the manuals. I glanced at my watch and my eyebrows, already exhausted from all their recent jumping, tried to take off one more time. I had been sitting in front of my screen for six hours. There had been so much new information to read and process and it was so interesting that I hadn’t even noticed the day go by.