Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (22 page)

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. “What’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
Galactogon
. 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.

“What’s up!” Alonso replied enthusiastically from his end of the line.

“Listen, I have this thing…Lucy, hey, don’t leave!” I managed to call out, seeing Alonso’s wife in the background of the vidphone screen. “I have some business to discuss with you.”

“You want to ask me to keep mum about your little friend?” said this gentle and wonderful specimen of womanhood, making me second-guess what I was about to do. Should I warn this bitch? Nah—she could go to hell.

“So what’d you want, Alexis?” asked Alonso, casting his wife a stern look. It took me another second to come to my senses and understand that he wasn’t guilty of anything at all and if something were to happen to his wife, then we’d both regret it. Together.

“Alright, here’s the situation—just hear me out and don’t interrupt me…”

“…So I’m about to move, even if it’s only for half a year or so. Better safe than sorry…You understand. I called because I wanted to warn you. What you do with this information is up to you guys of course.”

“Thank you!” said Lucy and for the first time in the three years I’d known her, I saw her other side. She was no longer some rambunctious cutie that had come to dislike me for whatever reason (most likely because Alonso constantly blathered on about our adventures together). No, she was now serious and composed—as a guild leader should be. “What Empire are you in?”