Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (8 page)

I didn’t bother to ask how this player could be so sure of himself. Instead, I pressed myself to the opposite wall, aimed the weapon at the wall and pulled the trigger. Instantly, I hoped that Lestran had managed to dart behind a corner. Fragments of rubble flew everywhere, reducing the Durability of my armor by 1%. This was followed by my temporary ally’s invective:

“You dingbat! You couldn’t wait until I took cover? What are you standing around for? Heal me!”

Before I could administer another dose of the healing injection, I had to remove two large boulders that had pinned Lestran to the floor. The wall’s demolition had turned out very realistic—there was so much dust that I even thought I was back in real life for a second. Typically, most games try to avoid taxing the capsule’s system resources on rendering such insignificant details.

Bit by bit, the outlines of a passage began to flicker through the dust. Opening the instructions I had received from Stan, I entered the command to turn on the floodlights. Two bright beams split the murk and our eyes encountered a steep winding staircase, running both up and down.

“This way!” Lestran ordered joyously and deftly squeezed through the opening in the wall. “We need to go down!”

“One second,” I replied, squeezing through the opening with some difficulty, after which I stuck my arm and blaster back through it and took several shots at the walls and ceiling of the hallway we had come from. In a few minutes, the assault would commence and I didn’t want to leave an obvious trace of where we had gone. Let them suffer a bit removing the boulders, while I got to be Maniac for a bit longer. I needed to find out after all, how Lestran had learned about this secret passage.

“Right on!” the player agreed with me, descending several steps lower. “No one knows that you can bust through there and since it’s all buried now, they’ll think of looking in the hangar last of all.”

“Do you know what’s up there?” I pointed up the staircase.

“Sure. General Trank’s office—he’s in charge of all of Training Sector Alpha-332. I managed to find this stairwell during my last life, but they caught me in the office and sent me to jail—and boy did my imperial Rapport suffer a hit. So I had to start all over…Otherwise, this is a very curious building, which I’ve managed to dig around in quite sufficiently by now…”

“So what’s the deal? Do you think they’ll look for us there?” I asked Lestran, pausing my descent. “Is it very far up?”

“Look for us?” Lestran also halted his descent and even climbed a few steps back toward me. “Doubt it. The office is three floors up and…Wait, don’t tell me you want to go take a look?”

“Well what do you think would be better: If we approach the pirates with data we’ve stolen from the computer of the executive officer of the Training Sector or simply show up willy nilly saying ‘take us as we are—we’re so cute, after all?’” I said, applying pressure to Lestran’s sore point. Why was he so set on getting in with the pirates? And why wouldn’t I use that fact to my advantage? From my time in
Runlustia
, I could safely say that the offices of commanders typically had something worth stealing. At the very least, there would be some nice items up there.

“Let’s go,” Lestran made up his mind, squeezed past me and began to ascend. “Though, on second thought, wait here. If there’s anyone in the office, we won’t go in—we can’t let them know where we are. If there’s no one in there…I gotta say, I’m damn lucky to have met you! What’s your guild anyway?”

“Let’s do that later—the loot’s getting cold!”

Lestran merely smiled and began climb the stairs.

Just then, a menacing and mighty voice shook the entire building: “Surgeon! You refuse to listen to reason and will therefore be placed under arrest until the investigation has been completed! Commence the assault!”

“It’s clear up there.” My partner said, returning. Then he nodded in the direction of the rubble, “D’you hear? They’re looking for you already.”

I could hear one of the Qualian commanders issuing orders through the wall: “First team take the rec area. Second team, you’ve got the exam hall. Third team—you take the mess. Fifth team—lecture rooms.”

“Those boys are not playing around,” Lestran smiled again. “Come on. The general’s office is empty.”

“Why this is just paradise,” whispered Lestran, as soon as he stepped into the office. “How things have changed in here!”

My new partner’s astonishment was justified—we really had found a nice place. The ubiquitous gray walls of the Training Sector were covered bookcases. I could already see pacifiers, blasters and energy cells strewn about their shelves. There weren’t any force fields, so Lestran instantly dashed to the weapons rack and grabbed the first blaster he could get his hands on.

“Now we can play war for real,” he said satisfied. I, however, stopped in my tracks: What if my partner decided to use his weapon against me and then give me up to the locals, claiming that I had taken him hostage?

“Chill,” Lestran laughed seeing me hesitate. “I don’t betray my friends.”

A desk covered in papers and a holographic screen occupied the center of the office, so while my partner armed himself, I took a seat in the general’s plush chair, causing it to wince beneath my armor’s enormous weight, and commenced with some industrial espionage. Unable to understand the value of each separate paper, I photographed everything that got underway with my PDA, having first plugged my comm cable into the desk’s data port. The office computer wasn’t password protected, so I simply tasked my PDA with copying whatever it got its little hands on. Thank god I didn’t have to worry about the device’s memory—the player’s PDA had seemingly limitless resources.

“Check out what I found,” Lestran whispered to me loudly. His voice was so happy that I was forced to give up photographing the papers for a second. “This is an access key to a frigate!”

“And?”

“My escape plan had been to hide in the hold of a cargo ship or transport—one of the ones in the hangars below—but now, we can fly out of here on our own! With our own ship!”

“Do you know how to fly it?”

“Why sure! I’ve done the Training Sector eight times already, trying to get in with the pirates!”

“How many crew does a frigate need?” I again restrained myself from asking why Lestran was so eager to join the baddies. As far as I understood it, he had decided for himself that I was motivated by the same purpose and therefore could trust me.

“That’s the beauty of it! The two of us will be enough!”

“There’s one problem though—I never took the classes…”

“You know your colors, don’t you? You can check out how to do it right in real life later. Oh boy!” my partner exclaimed once more upon opening a wardrobe.

“What now?”

“Oh—no big deal…Just, here—catch!” A symbolical bag of money came flying in my direction—the developers of
Galactogon
, it seems, had decided to implement the transfer of money between players in a manner that was universally recognizable. Being utterly symbolic, the bag could contain anywhere from one credit to several billion. The symbol here mattered more than the size.

Acquired credits: 15,339 GC.

“That’s exactly half, I swear,” added Lestran. “When you’re done with the data, change your clothes.” My partner indicated another wardrobe: “There are some pretty good class-C clothes in here—with high resistance stats. Plus several medkits, grab them too. I’m gonna check out that safe, for the time being.”

Acknowledging my partner with a wave of my hand, I turned my attention to my PDA’s display, which had projected a strange notification:
“General, you requested information that has been classified as ‘Secret.’ Please enter your access code…”

It seems that my PDA had already copied everything that there was in the office computer and had begun to send its little tentacles further out, where, of course, it encountered some protection. Knowing that to go on would be probably pointless, I nevertheless ran a search on the data I already had for the string “Code”…Who knows those developers were thinking…

“Access Code Accepted. You have gained access to the KRIEG Project…”

The KRIEG Project? The same one that the mysterious stranger had mentioned in solitary? To my immense surprise (and grave failure on the part of the general), the access code was recorded in a plaintext file with the very descriptive name “Access Code.” The file contained only one line, which once entered in the password prompt, allowed me to peek where I shouldn’t have. I say “shouldn’t have” because literally a moment later, the following notification appeared on the screen:
“Unauthorized data transfer detected. Download progress: 77%. Access to Project KRIEG has been limited. General, please remain in your seat—you will shortly be contacted for verification…”

“Lestran, we’ve got a problem!” I instantly apprised my partner. “It looks like we need to get out of here!”

“General Trank!” A holographic head of some Qualian appeared about three feet above the desk and began yelling with a voice full of authority. “On what grounds…WHO ARE YOU?”

Counting my blessings for not having removed my armor, which kept my face a mystery to the screaming head, I slammed my fist down on the comm’s holo-crystal, cutting the transmission. I ain’t scared of you, hollerin’ head…

“You’re right, time to boogie,” Lestran agreed, throwing two blasters over his shoulder. “I’m not getting anywhere with this safe anyway—don’t have the skills for it…Are you going to change or not?”

“Sure,” I said and, not wishing to make my friend suspicious with my hesitation to grab some more loot, approached the indicated wardrobe and opened its doors. To my further satisfaction with the mechanics in
Galactogon
, I didn’t have to remove my armor to change the clothes underneath. It’s not that I distrusted Lestran, but…

“What do you think?” smirked Lestran, once I literally froze in my tracks before the wardrobe. Under the clothes and the medkits (which quickly took up residence in my inventory), the wardrobe also contained one item which, having read its description, caused me to swear in surprise:

Journeyman’s Satchel with Anti-Grav. Weight: 1. Item class: D-44. Decreases weight of items in satchel by 200.

“There were only two of them. I took one for myself. Nice little item, eh?”

The item was more than nice. Considering that things in
Galactogon
have their own size and weight, having an extra two hundred units of carrying capacity is simply a godsend to a starting player. Along with the money I’d accumulated, I was beginning to loathe the idea of deleting my current character. Pirates, after all, could be a swell crowd to run with. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I would have to read a bit about the game’s shadow guilds.

“Stan, my man, gather all the information you can find about pirates in
Galactogon
and copy it to a separate file. I’m interested in both locals as well as human pirates,” I ordered, popping momentarily out of the somatic interface. I was unwilling to leave this question for later. If we ever did manage to get off this planet, I wanted to know everything there was to know about piracy in
Galactogon
.

“Alright, let’s scram,” Lestran offered, approaching the door and pushing a bookcase onto it. The door was hung to open inward, so unless our pursuers decided to use their weapons, it would take them a long time to break into their boss’s office.

“Let’s go,” I agreed, but then, feeling suddenly mischievous, I inquired: “Where’d you say the safe was?”

For a player dressed in marine armor, breaking a safe out of the wall was a question of several seconds. Several strange cables ran from the safe to the wall. These I cut with my built in knife. If that was the alarm, then it wouldn’t do us much harm, and if that was a dead switch that destroyed anything inside the safe…Well…we could simply consider ourselves unlucky. Putting the safe in my bag, which could easily accommodate this new weight due to its newly upgraded carrying capacity, I set off after Lestran.

“Here we are,” my partner whispered, peeking through a slit in the hangar’s door panel. “There’re three engineers in the hangar repairing something. Shall we wait until they leave?”

“We don’t have time to wait. Pretty soon the general will return to his office and find the door blocked. Even a local can do that math. You took several pacifiers, didn’t you? Those are quite powerful against defenseless creatures. I don’t suggest we use the blasters—might damage the ships.”

“In that case, you get those two on the right and I’ll take that one on the left. I’m going in!”

The procedure for restraining the careless technicians was in no way different from the earlier one involving the instructors and the guards—lift them up high and let them down (not lightly). Repeat as necessary. To my immense surprise, there was no one else in the cavernous hanger. Either there was a personnel shortage here, or everyone had taken off to help track down some renegade player—me, that is.

“Check these beauties out,” Lestran uttered lovingly after he had dealt with his engineer and gotten a chance to look around the hangar. It contained nine ships—two frigates, five interceptors, a harvester and a transport. It became more and more evident to me why gamers loved
Galactogon
so much—up close, the vessels were quite impressive. Still not knowing which frigate would be ours—the green one or the blue one—I simply marveled at the stately might of each ship. Each line and curve was exactly where it needed to be. Two giant beam cannons in the nose cowling and two more in the fairings of the forward fuselage made the frigate seem like a formidable weapon. Each frigate was about three hundred feet long, much larger than the smallish interceptors and the harvester. Only the pot-bellied transport approached it in its dimensions; however, even for an inveterate landlubber like me, it was evident that you couldn’t get far in a tub like that.