Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (35 page)

“She knows and there’s no need to talk about it!” the fox girl cut off the engineer, obviously hiding something. “What about the mine?”

“Nothing. That is, I can’t do anything about it. It’s connected to the central onboard computer, so you can’t just hack it on the spot. Does anyone have access to the station computer?”

“You know yourself that we don’t, slizo-dude,” I said.

“I’m a dudette, but that’s beside the point. In that case, I won’t be able to take off the mine. Or, to be more precise, I can take off the mine but doing so will decapitate the hostage. Will that work?”

“Zatrathi progress through the barricade has accelerated,” Braniac advised me. “The barricade will be breached in one hour and ten minutes.”

“Back to the ship!” I ordered and then turned to the Delvian: “Sorry, princess. We won’t be able to rescue you this time. I have one more question for Rrgord, before I leave you. Please translate this for me: ‘Where can I find the planet with the check?’”

“With the what?” the Delvian translated the puzzled Precian’s response. “He doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Neither do I, actually.”

“I have reason to believe that Rrgord knows the coordinates of a planet I am looking for. It would be a new, unexplored planet that he maybe came across while traveling around
Galactogon
.”

“Prince Rrgord discovered seven planets and doesn’t know which one you’re interested in. Besides, he doesn’t have all their coordinates memorized. They are in his ship’s computer and his ship is back on his home planet. Ask his father. He will give you access to the ship and you can look up the info yourself. Rrgord will send you the access key now…”

As soon as I saw a notification telling me that I had received an access key to the prince’s ship, I asked the Delvian, “May I do something for you? Maybe you want to pass along a letter, some message, or an item? I’ll be telling all of
Galactogon
about you guys and I’ll be sure to mention that we’ll first have to capture the station and destroy the computer before coming to save you. But all that will take some time. I figured that maybe you…”

“You need to go to my home planet—here’s the system access key—and find Alviaan. Tell him that I…that we…tell him that ‘we made it!’ He’ll understand what I mean.”

Mission Unlocked: “The Stork and the Fox.”

Description: Notify Alviaan, First Councilor of the Delvian Emperor, that the princess and he have “made it.”

The Delvian froze and I could see even through her furry face that she was blushing. I had never seen such a strange mission description and had to read it several times. Was she really pregnant? How fun! I had never encountered pregnant locals in a video game before and didn’t quite know how to react. How could I leave her like this with the Zatrathi? How far along was she? And most importantly—what did I have to do with all this? I had a specific goal that I felt I was more than halfway to. All I had to do was find out the coordinates of the seven planets and carefully explore each one. At that point, my time in
Galactogon
would probably come to an end.

“I’ll let him know,” I replied, still wondering why I was taking on all these additional errands. On the other hand, that prize check was unlikely to go anywhere while I took a little trip to the Delvians. I doubted that any of the remaining contestants had even left their Training Sectors yet…Speaking of which!

“Sorry, I have another question for Rrgord. I need to get a recruit out of a Training Sector before she has officially graduated. May I have an access key to Planet Vozban in the Gantanil-3 system?”

“You want to take a recruit out of the Training Sector before they have completed their training?” the Delvian asked with surprise, making no move to translate my question to the Precian. “That’s impossible! You can’t release unprepared recruits into the larger world! They will fall easy prey to the Zatrathi!”

“Princess, please just relay my question to Rrgord,” I insisted. “It’s very important for me to get this person out of the Training Sector because…Well, she is a woman and she and I ‘made it’ too.”

The Delvian blushed all over again, sucked in a large gulp of air to say something, changed her mind, sighed heavily and passed my question on to Rrgord. The Precian raised his eyebrows in astonishment, stared at me like I was some mythical creature and finally shook his head in the negative. The prince was against the idea. The fox girl tried to explain something to him, but Rrgord was as adamant as a cliff—he refused to grant me access to the Precian Training Sector.

“It won’t work, pirate,” the girl said sadly. “I knew it’d be pointless to ask Rrgord. Recruits are an extremely sensitive topic for any empire. No empire would allow anyone to remove players from its Training Sector. Go now. You can’t stay here any longer…”

I flew the two miles separating me from
Yalrock
in ten minutes, stopping by the warehouse along the way to stuff my inventory full of Raq. Evidently the developers had planned some kind of epic battle to save the hostages and therefore wouldn’t allow me to rescue them prematurely. Otherwise, there’d be no incentive for the players to join the war against the Zatrathi. At least now, the objectives would be clear: Board the station and rescue the VILs without space support. Best of luck with all that! At the moment, I was more concerned with how I was going to escape this place without falling to Zatrathi marines or frying the imperial beau monde.

If I flew out into open space, I’d still be caught in the space disruption field that the station projected. I couldn’t simply fly away from the station either—the enemy ships were simply too fast for
Yalrock
. Breaking through by giving battle wasn’t an option either—outrunning a hundred torpedoes happens once every blue moon. The only remaining option—already tested with
The Space Cucumber
—was to hyperjump from inside the station. I knew that this would result in a 90-foot-thick layer of metal forming around my ship, but couldn’t see another way out. At the very least, I had enough powercells on board to ensure my self-destruct once I had jumped away from this place. The main thing was to get away.

“Braniac, plot a hyperspace jump to Qirlats,” I said, as soon as the door to my ship dissolved behind me.
Yalrock
once again looked like a perfectly smooth metal sphere.

“I must recommend against attempting a hyperjump from inside the station,” the computer instantly struck up his Canary song.

“Braniac, that order stands as issued.” I cut him off before he could get in the swing of it. “Calculate a jump to Qirlats. I know exactly what will happen. That’s a direct order!”

“Understood. Jump will be initialized in one minute and twenty seconds.”

“Since we have some time, why don’t you tell me what you’ve managed to haul away from that warehouse…”

Forty tons of Raq, two tons of Tiron, five of Elo—the droids had done their best and still they hadn’t managed to fill
Yalrock
’s cargo holds even halfway. Considering that the orangutan and marine had regained 100% Functionality, which meant that respawning wouldn’t do anything to them, we had really taken a good bite out of the Zatrathi riches. It was too bad that I hadn’t managed to rescue the aristocracy but the other players could handle that just as well. My reconnaissance operation had turned out well and now I just had to get the information out to the main world. Or rather sell it.

“Ship is ready to jump to hyperspace!” Braniac said unwillingly and couldn’t help adding, “If we jump from inside the orbital station,
Yalrock
will become covered in a 120-foot-thick layer of metal.”

“I thought it’d be close to 90 feet thick?”

“One hundred and twenty feet. In the worst case scenario, 150.”

“Will we be able to break through it?”

Braniac fell silent for about twenty seconds, then reluctantly said, “Using all of the cryptosaur’s Functionality, we will be able to make a tunnel in the shell that would be wide enough for the slizosaur to exit. If we feed her with the Raq that we have, we will be able to remove 80% of the metal layer.”

“Will the remaining 20% be around the ship or just on some side of it?”

“If we aim the slizosaur at the body of the klamir, she will be able to…”

“Braniac, stop dilly-dallying! Will we be able to remove the outer shell without the ship having to self-destruct or not?”

“Self-destruct?” a note of alarm sounded in the computer’s metallic voice. “Why would we self-destruct
Yalrock
?”

“Because you keep dragging your legs instead of giving me an answer! Enough talk! If we can’t free ourselves from the metal shell, we’ll blow ourselves up. Engage jump!”

“Roger,” Braniac said in as crestfallen a voice as I’ve heard a computer use. “For your information, the Zatrathi marines have just broken through the barricaded hallway and will be arriving in twelve seconds…eleven…ten…Hyperdrive engaged. Entering hyperspace now.”

I sighed with relief once our surroundings had turned into shimmering lines—up until the last moment, I was afraid that the station’s space disruptor would block our hyperjump even inside the station itself. The danger passed. It seemed that the Zatrathi had not anticipated that someone would sacrifice their ship to escape. I guess
Runlustia
’s devs had something to teach their
Galactogon
counterparts after all.

“How long will we be in hyperspace?”

“ETA is twenty minutes. Egress coordinates remain undetermined.”

“We’ll figure that out. The important thing is not to collide with anything bigger than us. Give me a rundown of the information you managed to steal about the Zatrathi vessels. Speed, firepower, weak points and strengths—in other words, anything that will help us fight them. We need to study our enemy from every possible angle.”

“Transmitting data to the screen now,” Braniac replied after a short pause. “According to the preliminary analysis, the enemy ships may be divided into several categories…”

The twenty minutes of hyperspace travel passed unnoticed in the study of the stolen data. The best way to characterize my sense of time was with a phrase I heard someone say somewhere once: “One and the same minute passes in different ways for a person on a date with someone they love and a person who’s rushing to get to the bathroom.” Braniac did such a good job of presenting the crucial moments of the battle, the battle characteristics of the Zatrathi ships, their tactics, the speed of their torpedoes and so on that I couldn’t help but rub my hands in anticipation—this kind of data would garner good money from a number of
Galactogon
’s guilds. I just had to make sure to sell it the right way.

“Ten seconds before we emerge into real space,” Braniac jarred me from my reading. “What are your orders?”

“Prepare the crew for breaking through that outer layer.” Unwillingly, I put aside the report about the Zatrathi for a better time. “The main objective is to create an opening in the outer shell. Also, I need the coordinates for our whereabouts. Braniac, what condition does
Yalrock
need to be in to be capable of jumping to hyperspace?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Can the ship jump to hyperspace if it is partially covered in a layer of metal? That is, will you be able to calculate our destination coordinates accurately or will they remain random?”

“Request understood. Processing now…”

“Cappy, this may be a dumb question, but why do you care?” the engineer asked over the comm. “The marine will make a hole, I’ll destroy the outer layer and then we can be on our merry way. All we need is ten hours—and even that gives us room for error.”

“That’s assuming our errors won’t be forced onto us,” I replied. “What if we pop out in the center of another Zatrathi fleet? Or in the middle of an empire? We might not even get thirty minutes.”

“I agree, at least as far as the Zatrathi are concerned, and yet the chance of that happening is so insignificant that it’s not even worth considering. As for imperial space, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. If we tell them that we have information concerning their beloved princes…At the very least they’ll be willing to talk—by the time we arrange that, I’ll be done with that shell.”

“Egress imminent!” Braniac interrupted, as
Yalrock
began to shake. In earthquake terms, the shaking felt like a 7.0 on the Richter scale, no less!
Yalrock
sank into a frightening silence and all the lights dimmed as if someone had cut the power—the intercom was the only thing still telling us that we hadn’t been destroyed. Not entirely, at least. “The primary powercore is out of order, power has switched to reserve powercells. We have approximately twelve minutes of reserve power remaining. The cryptosaur has begun to make a passage through the outer shell. He has been granted access to all onboard Raq. Ship Durability is down to 30%.”

“Engineer, fix that powercore,” I instantly commanded. We simply could not remain without power. “Do what you have to—but I need it back on line.”

“Roger that!” the snake replied and I saw her body slither past the main deck. I guess she could no longer get around along the surface of the ship. She reported back a second later: “I need about ten minutes to make repairs.”