Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1)

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “What’s up all,” I said, still considering Eunice’s escape plan. “So what about that info—will you share it? And I mean share it—since I’ll give you the planet’s coordinates either way. I got nothing to hide from my allies.”

  “We’ll consider your offer and get back to you around lunch. You’re going to be in Galactogon all day, right?”

  “Yup. I’m planning on staying late. Listen, Marina, it’s a dumb question but since we’re already talking, have you found out anything about that Rrgord guy? What’s up with that mysterious Precian?”

  “Erm…” a pregnant silence filled the ether. “Did you read the changelog at all or what?”

  “Obvi,” I said surprised. “But what does the new patch have to do with a Precian I was told to find long before the patch? The devs wouldn’t mess with continuity like that.”

  “Right…Tell me, what is the main change in the new patch?”

  “Marina, I am flattered that you want to try your Socrates on me, but let’s do this a little more directly, okay? Just tell me straight out—did you find out who Rrgord is or not? I won’t figure out your hints either way.”

  “He’s the Precian prince who’s been kidnapped by the invading Zatrathi. He is being held captive with the other eleven figureheads of the ruling dynasties. Rrgord, or ‘The Libertine,’ as he is called—he is the only Precian who has an enormous frigate that’s controlled by only one being—is the heir apparent for the Precian throne. According to the lore, Rrgord grew up far away from the game’s main events and was carefully protected. Few knew anything about him—so it’s all the more surprising that you managed to stumble across a local that mentioned him. There are no other Precians named Rrgord.”

  The Libertine…

  I felt an immense sense of relief when Marina told me all this—I had been wrong after all. Yalrock hadn’t been talking about Hilvar—the freedom loving pirate, no! He had meant Rrgord, the heir of the Precian Empire, who’d been kidnapped by the Zatrathi. Thus, the only local who could surely tell me where to look for the prize planet had become the focus of the entire game. Rescuing him on my own was out of the question, and joining with other players to fight the Zatrathi…Well, it wouldn’t be long before they’d requisition my Yalrock for the sake of saving the universe or whatever.

  I sent Marina the coordinates to Blood Island and signed out of the game. I didn’t feel like talking to Wally anymore. I needed to get Eunice to sign out so I could discuss the new developments with her. Did it even make sense to extract her from the Sector, now that it was impossible to free Rrgord?

  “Stan, pull Eunice out of Galactogon, will you?” I said as soon as I’d emerged from my capsule. The house that we’d found ourselves locked in had been designed for only one gaming capsule, so the cables from the new one were now strewn all over the floor. The technicians had tried to bind them together of course and hide them as best they could, but still it wouldn’t be too unlikely of an accident if I snagged one with my foot and yanked it out.

  “That’s unfortunate,” said Eunice when I told her the news. “Although…On the one hand, it sucks, but on the other, we know for sure now who could help us find the prize planet. We just need to figure out how to get past the Zatrathi. Have you tested the ship already?”

  “No. I spoke with Marina. She promised to send me some info about how she managed to land in the Training Sector. After that, I figured I should talk to you first. Did you find out your planet’s coordinates?”

  “Not yet. I got the name, though. I’m on Vozban in a system called Gantanil-3. The planetary defenses seem pretty standard—two Grand Arbiters and six orbital stations. I haven’t gotten around to reading up about the system garrison, but I’d guess that it is quite significant. I can’t even imagine how Marina managed to pull it off.”

  “We’ll know this evening. Sorry that I yanked you out of the game—it was silly of me. I don’t know what came over me, but I really started thinking that it’d be better to hold on to what I already have and put the search on the backburner.”

  “Eh, I feel you. A unique ship with a unique crew is not the kind of thing one commits recklessly,” Eunice offered supportively. “So if you decide to stash your sphere somewhere and go on fighting in your frigate, I’ll understand.”

  “Uh-huh. Considering that Yalrock is better than The Space Cucumber across the board—twice as good in some areas—then…Alright, I’m going to go back and test the sphere out. This evening it should be clearer whether we should still plan to break you out. I recommend you get back to your training. Personal experience suggests that being untrained is not much fun in Galactogon. Stan! Get the capsule ready…”

  “The Planetary Spirit has been activated,” my engineer reported as soon as I returned to the game. All I had left to do was shake my head in astonishment and look at my watch—it hadn’t felt like thirty minutes had already gone by. How time flies! “Blood Island is now the homeworld for Yalrock and its entire crew.”

  “In that case, man your stations! We’re taking off!” I ordered and wriggled into my marine armor. The time had come to see what Yalrock was capable of.

  For the next half hour I dashed back and forth across the solar system, trying to understand the principles behind piloting the klamir. Even with its upgraded engines The Space Cucumber was no match for Yalrock in speed. By my calculations, a class-B klamir could fly one-and-a-half times faster than an A-class frigate. The orangutan was blasting asteroids left and right, showing off his accuracy and reaction time. The engineer/shieldsman put on a master class in shield placement, deflecting the asteroid fragments away from the ship. For my part, I threaded the ship between the scattering rocks and focused on getting a handle on its avionics. Only the marine had it easy, snoring peacefully in his berth in the bilge. What I liked most about the locals was how unfinicky they were—they were told to test the ship and that’s what they did, speaking up only to help me out when I had made some mistake. There was no whining to the effect of “I need to get back IRL” or “Let’s go blast someone already” or “What the hell are we doing anyway? Let’s start some trouble and figure it out later.” More and more I didn’t feel like parting with this new setup.

  “Surgeon, this is Marina,” the captain of Alexandria called me up about an hour later. “Accept the transmission request I just sent you—it’s got a link to a video that shows how we managed to land on that Training Sector. Thanks for the planet. One of my guys checked out what you told us. We’ll be arriving in-system pretty soon. Tell me, that round ship that’s bouncing around the system like a ping-pong ball—is that you?”

  “Yup. I’m trying out my new toy.”

  “Partner…I need to know—what, how and where’d you get her?”

  “She’s a klamir. Got her on Blood Island by an act of god. There’s no other. Marina, I know that this might sound wrong, but this ship is off-limits to you. At least for the next three months. I need her for my own personal business. I’d be happy to show you what she can do as well as how I came by her, but your engineers are not allowed on board. Or any marines, for that matter. Sorry.”

  “You do understand that if you show up in that ball in the populated part of Galactogon, the whole fraternity of antiquarians will come after you in short order?”

  “I understand that very well. But I don’t have much of a choice at the moment. I’ll say it again—I need three months. No one will steal my Yalrock until then. As soon as I’m done with my business, we can have a talk about studying the orb. There are many curious things here.”

  “I hear you. In that case, you owe me a link to a video about how you managed to get your hands on that ship. Best of luck to you, partner. I know as well as anyone what it means to have a personal goal that you have to give your all to achieve. If you need my help, call. I’ll send you Anton’s and Lisp’s numbers as well. Over and out.”

  “What are your orders?” Braniac asked. “Shall we continue testing the ship? Over the last h
our and a half, crew readiness has reached 32%. Our probability of defeating a similarly-equipped opponent currently stands at 20%.”

  “In that case, set course to the Glastir system,” I decided, choosing a Confederate system on the periphery of Galactogon’s populated space. I didn’t want to jump right into the thick of it. First I wanted to see how Yalrock would handle a battle with neutral ships. If I had all day, I had better use it to its utmost.

  “ETA is one hour and ten minutes,” Braniac instantly replied. “Commence hyperjump?”

  “Do it,” I said and the stars around us instantly stretched into thin, white lines. Braniac did not need to enter anything into the system, as he himself was the system. The more time I spent with this ship, the more I liked it. But it was important not to get too used to it—I could easily become over-reliant on it.

  “Braniac, pull up the video from my PDA,” I issued another command, after downloading Marina’s video from the link she’d sent me. It was time to find out how this girl had managed to land in the Training Sector…

  “Ten minutes until we emerge from hyperspace,” Braniac warned me just in case, tearing me away from my contemplation of the video I had watched. Despite the fact that the video itself was only ten minutes long, quite a lot of things had been crammed into it. If I had to summarize Marina’s “masterpiece,” I’d paint the following picture:

  Capture an imperial service vessel. And I mean capture—not destroy—the plan requires a senior imperial official to succeed.

  Hack the onboard computer until the captain engages the self-destruct procedure. Here, Marina managed to keep the ship in one piece by bribing several locals and instructing them in what they needed to do. It was the locals on board the captured ship who prevented the captain from self-destructing and granted Marina access to the ship’s computer.

  In this manner, you obtain landing codes reserved exclusively for the Very Important Local on the captured vessel. It’s worth pointing out that you have to keep this VIL alive, since as soon as he dies, the codes become inactive—a particularity of the game that’s worth keeping in mind.

  Using the codes, you gain access to the Training Sector’s defense system and thereupon transmit an official SOS, announcing that your own ship is about to perform an emergency landing. The strange thing is that the same trick wouldn’t work on trade planets or on any planet where the emperor is present. You can only do this kind of thing on the Training Sector and several other key imperial planets. I was grateful that Marina mentioned this fact, since I was already considering using the same technique to get onto my Precian moon.

  The planetary defense forces then contact your ship and begin asking what’s happened to her and why she doesn’t match the VIL’s customary ship. One of the biggest disadvantages to hacking the VIL’s ship’s computer is that doing so bricks the vessel. Completely. It can’t be transported to a repair-dock, it can’t be destroyed, it can’t be touched whatsoever. But all you have to do is explain that due to a battle with some enemies of the empire, the ship’s parameters have changed and that all that’s keeping her together now is spit and good old imperial knowhow. Marina pulled this trick twice and it worked both times.

  After that, you land in the Training Sector. Here, Marina messed up—she tried to land on the planet in her cruiser, instead of the shuttle she normally used. The cruiser was not designed for this kind of thing and plummeted to the planet like the hunk of metal it was—never reaching the landing spot she had chosen beside the barracks that housed the recruits. The second time, Marina used a frigate and peacefully descended to the Sector, emerging to meet the senior officer in charge of the Sector. She told him that the VIL was on his deathbed and so could not descend to the planet himself. Then she asked for emergency medical assistance. This triggers an assistance request, giving the players five minutes to do whatever it is they came to do, return to the ship and make their run out of the system. This was the point where Marina turned and attacked the Grand Arbiter, realizing perfectly well that she was committing suicide. The girl just couldn’t believe that it was impossible to destroy that ship. She didn’t send me the battle itself—just its last moments showing the Grand Arbiter breaking apart and a notification appearing that her ship had leveled up—right after which, her ship was destroyed too.

  At that point the video ended. And this was precisely what I spent the rest of my hyperjump contemplating. None of this would work for me if I didn’t first find a Pyrrhenian VIL of my own. The captain would destroy the ship long before the rhino would make it to the flight deck. Plus, it’d be necessary to keep the cryptosaur’s dimension in mind—it was unlikely the ship would have the space to allow him to move around freely. That left the assault droids. I had 32 of those bad boys in my hangar, but only three or four were battle-ready. The rest would need to be repaired and I had no time for that.

  So, in the end, I was at a loss about what to do next…

  “Leaving hyperspace in four, three, two, one,” Braniac said, paying no attention to my contemplative state. “We have reached the Glastir System. The nearest planet is…WARNING! THREAT DETECTED! HOSTILES INCOMING!”

  “Shields are up,” the snake instantly responded, pulling me out of my shocked state and forcing me to evaluate the situation. As soon as I did that, I had to curse through my teeth—I had managed to plunk us down square in the midst of the Zatrathi fleet. The entire solar system was swarming with the fragments of some developers’ hallucinations—which by some error had become the Zatrathi ships. There had been no description of these new spacecraft in the changelog and now that I saw them firsthand I began to wonder what drugs the game artists had been on when they cooked up this stuff. Each one resembled a huge formless blob which bristled with dozens of sharp-tipped and crooked appendages—more reminiscent of stalactites or stalagmites than parts of a ship. Everything was jagged, corroded, huge, lacking any symmetry and yet somehow still flying. Even my modest knowledge of physics told me that this kind of design should not have been capable of spaceflight at all. But I guess the designers had been unconcerned by this.

  Yalrock’s main screen was helpfully informing me that the klamir was being locked onto by hundreds of enemy ships. The only good news was that the composition of the invaders’ fleet was pretty ordinary—they had the same old cruisers, scouts, frigates etc…just spiky and scary-looking.

  “Braniac, jump us to any part of Galactogon—just get us away from here,” I ordered, taking over the ship’s controls. I didn’t much want to become a hero who’d smashed himself headfirst against this enormous armada. As a rule, such heroes tend to acquire their status posthumously.

  “I am unable to perform your orders,” Braniac instantly responded. “It is currently impossible to jump to hyperspace from the Glastir system. Judging by the disruption field that’s blocking our egress, the source is the fleet’s flagship—identified as an orbital station. My recommendation…”

  “Seven torpedoes inbound. Contact in twenty seconds,” the snake drowned out Braniac’s voice. “The gunner can destroy five. One will be captured. That leaves one which must be evaded, while he reloads. What are your orders, Captain? Shall we give battle?”

  “Battle stations!” I decided, realizing that it was too late to listen to Braniac’s advice. All that was left was either to die and respawn or to try our best to get out of there in one piece. And if I preferred the latter option, I needed to get on with it.

  “Contact in ten seconds…”

  Carefully, I placed my hand on Yalrock’s projection and moved it. This was instantly followed by the feeling of intense acceleration, which, partially absorbed by my armor, still forced me to struggle from making any sudden movements. We began to travel away from the torpedoes’ trajectories—rendered on my screen as inbound red lines.

  “Fire at will!” I ordered a moment later, realizing that the torpedoes had already adjusted their course but the orangutan hadn’t moved a finger to knock them out. Here then were the fi
rst disadvantages to having a crew of locals—I would have to constantly tell them what needed to be done. Any human player would already be pouring fire in every direction—orders or not.

  “Two cruisers off starboard, three above, 22 interceptors are currently flanking us to cut off a retreat,” Braniac began chirping in my ear, even though my eyes could see all this just as well. To my surprise the angular ships turned out to be extremely fast and agile. Even though Yalrock was flying at full power, the enemy was catching up on either side of us in a pincer maneuver. And not just interceptors or something—the huge cruisers were doing it too! In my view, the developers had gone too far. There was no way any player could run away from a battle with an enemy this fast.

  “Thirty torpedoes inbound from port, thirty from starboard, forty coming from above, fifty from below and twenty-two straight ahead,” the snake cheered me up after twenty seconds of this race between the turtle (me) and the hare (the Zatrathi). “Contact in twenty seconds…No interceptions possible…”

  I looked at the space around us helplessly, completely unable to see a way out that did not involve having to respawn and lose a ship class. The invaders’ fleet was closing around me like a giant set of jaws. Beams flashed against our shields, threatening to blast them apart, and to top it all off, the inbound torpedoes had formed a noose around us that would tighten in the next few seconds and turn Yalrock into space dust and some floating loot. I’d lose a hundred levels and a ton of money on repairs, and my crew would probably lose some experience not even having fired a shot. We’d lose the twenty-two torpedoes we still had over nothing! Damn it all!

  “Shieldsman, do what you have to but we need to survive a direct hit from several torpedoes,” I ordered, changing our course with the control orb. What was the point of running if we’d be destroyed either way? We had to give battle and knock out at least one enemy. Even if it was only an interceptor.