Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (25 page)

It seems that the orangutan had been designed alongside the rhino, because the two merged seamlessly. My tank grew in size. Two blasters appeared beside the horn, suggesting that the strabosaur hadn’t vanished but merely become integrated in the machine, after which all three of us dashed off back to the initial clearing.

“The gunner,” Yalrock shook his head respectfully, as if he had doubted my ability to handle his mission. “That leaves the engineer who also performs the shieldsman’s role. You will have to travel beneath the earth, so leave the marine and the gunner here. They won’t help you in the subterranean world.”

“I need to go underground?” I asked surprised, since this dashed my plans for pacifying the engineer-shieldsman.

“That is correct. The engineer is a creature who dislikes sunlight very much and prefers to spend all his time under the soil around here. No one else hangs out in his tunnels, so you won’t confuse him with anyone. The entrance to the engineer’s kingdom is right behind you. Until we meet again!”

“What?” I managed to yell before the earth under my feet dropped down, dragging me with it. Once again I had been thrown into the thick of another mission without a chance to prepare myself. How much more of this could I take? It took one glance around to understand that nothing good would come of this. I was in the middle of a round chiseled tunnel that was about five feet wide. Its rough-hewn walls suggested that this passageway had been created by artificial means, while the dimensions spoke to those of the engineer who had made it. I quickly recognized whom I was up against—I’d often run into giant worms in
Runlustia
, who’d gnaw similar passageways for themselves. If the width of this monster was five feet, then I was scared to even imagine what his length would be—simple math yielded more than 30 feet, at a ratio of 1:10. (I think that’s the minimal ratio of a worm’s width to his length under normal growing conditions, but I could be wrong.) In any case, I wouldn’t be able to lift a creature that large with my pacifiers.

“Yalrock!” I shouted up into the opening overhead, which was so perfectly round it could have been a specially made elevator to shuttle players up and down.

“I’m listening!” The butterfly’s head popped up against the circle of sky.

“Ask the gunner to give me one of his blasters.”

“You won’t need it!” the ancient assured me, after which the opening closed, leaving me alone in the dark.

Realizing that there was no point in just standing there, I spread my arms and, touching the walls for the sake of balance, began to make my way along the passage. To compensate for the sudden loss of sight, I opened all the in-game windows I had available to me—showing me my current status, inventory, buffs and various other statistics. This didn’t make the corridor any lighter, but it became a lot easier to move forward—my brain now understood that rather than going blind, someone had simply turned out the lights.

After five minutes of careful progress along the tunnel, I saw a flickering light far ahead of me, resembling weak candlelight. Instantly closing all the game windows, I hurried onward as quickly as I dared. I didn’t even consider the possibility of the light being some kind of trap—like the kind used by deep sea fish—since I had not encountered a single branching passage during my walk and could only move forward anyway. If, that is, forward was even a concept in that dark place.

The light grew brighter with each step, gradually growing into the white light at the end of the tunnel. Figuring that an ambush could be waiting ahead, I slowed down as I approached the exit, crept up to the end of the passage and peeked beyond it. My eyes had already adjusted to the light, but I still had to doubt their accuracy for the first several seconds, for the passage had led me to an enormous well-lit cavern, in the center of which stood a huge and working factory. Yes, that’s right: a factory! Droids flitted here and there. Sparks flashed as one thing was transported past another. Long smokestacks dumped black smoke, as if the factory was powered not by Elo but by heating oil or even coal. And in the center of this industrial conflagration, lying upon the flat roof of the factory and pulling levers and yelling at the robots, was the slizosaur.

Like the strabosaur, the slizosaur had four arms. Like the cryptosaur, the slizosaur had three eyes. But that was the end of his similarities with the crew of the ship of the ancients. The slizosaur was a giant serpent, and his body was covered in an intricate ornament that constantly mutated in shape and color like a kaleidoscope. The head of this creature was no different than that of any other snake, except for the third eye. Also, the mouth kept opening and closing, as if the snake was saying something instead of hissing as snakes typically do. Only then did I notice that I couldn’t hear a single sound from the bustling factory or the screams of its chief executive. Looking closer, I realized that there was a barely glimmering layer at the exit to the catacombs. It took me a minute to find the source of this force field and check its attributes: “Universal Noise Dampener.” The device managed its job perfectly well, cutting off any sounds from passing beyond the limit of its glimmering field, while simultaneously filling my mind with cognitive dissonance—I had the feeling that I had gone deaf. Devoting another minute to look over the tunnel’s exit for an alarm system and not finding it, I carefully stepped through the portal.

And instantly the noise crashed down on me.

The sound was so intense that I really did lose my hearing for a moment. I kept my eyes on the snake which went on issuing orders (except, now, I really couldn’t hear these). I moved forward, hoping that my hearing would finally adapt to the surroundings and begin to discern the various sounds, instead of the uniform metallic crashing that was coming through at the moment. Passing about sixty feet, I took cover behind a smallish pile of rocks, which were strewn all over the place in the cave, and took a moment to assess the situation. I couldn’t check the snake’s attributes or abilities, so I had absolutely no idea how I could possible defeat it. The ceiling was about 150 feet above me, but even two pacifiers wouldn’t be able to lift that monster and the cave seemed to have no boulders to throw at the engineer…Even the pile of rocks that I had taken cover behind, consisted of pebbles that couldn’t possibly be used to take care of a five-foot-wide snake.

Half an hour of sitting behind the pile didn’t yield anything. It was true that I began to distinguish different sounds in that noisy chaos and even discern the snake’s speech. No one was paying attention to me, but the task at hand of recruiting the engineer had not advanced one iota. The engineer went on sitting on the roof of the factory, engrossed by his levers and ignoring the surrounding world. Sighing bitterly because I understood that I would have to do something I hated—take an unnecessary risk, that is—I crawled out from behind the pile of rocks and strolled over towards the factory.

“Greetings!” I called out, stopping two yards from the snake’s gigantic tail. I had been allowed to calmly approach the factory, walk around it, find the ladder to the roof, clamber up it and walk up to the control station. It was like no one cared a bit what I was up to here. Taking a closer look at the engineer, I barely suppressed a gasp of astonishment—the engineer was about thirty feet long. This begged the following, quite reasonable question: Exactly what kind of vessel was this ship of the ancients that could be crewed by four intelligent beings of absolutely enormous proportions? And how would they all fit on deck?

“I got no time for this!” the snake replied in Qualian and without the hint of a hiss. “Come back in twelve years. I should be done with this project then.”

“I don’t have twelve years!” I shouted back, shocked. “I need your help!”

“Everyone needs my help!” parried the serpent, without even turning to look at me and still manipulating his levers. “Yalrock gave me an assignment—and told me to send everyone his way. As soon as he says the word, I’ll deal with your problem. But for now get out of the way—I’m about to get to the most intricate part of the operation.”

The levers began to shift and click faster. All four hands of the engineer flashed with a great speed—at some point he even brought his tail to bear—and he seemed to completely forget about my being there. I was really beginning to dislike this state of affairs. What was this whole “go do this but we can’t tell you what” thing? A catch-22 mission? Or just a bug in the scripting? The butterfly knew damn well that the engineer wouldn’t cause me any trouble—otherwise he would’ve let me have a blaster. At the same time, this was a computer game—there had to be a way to do the mission. By definition! The snake claims that Yalrock ordered it to listen only to Yalrock’s orders. But the same butterfly sent me here to convince the engineer to join me, knowing very well his previous orders. A contradiction? In general, yes it was—and one that would be impossible to resolve without the ancient captain being there…

“Cease ignoring me this instant!” I ordered, as soon as the chill of realization had run down my spine. “As the ship’s captain, I order you to end your work on this project! From this moment on, you are under my command. I rescind your previous captain’s orders! Are there any questions?”

“No, captain, sir!” retorted the engineer, finally turning to face me and smiling contentedly. “The ship is ready for voyage. The bridge has been modified to fit your dimensions. Shall I deliver us to the surface?”

“Meet the crew” Mission Accomplished.

Despite the fact that there was no overall list of missions in
Galactogon
, the system would dutifully notify you if you completed one. Such was the current notification about the completed mission—I had succeeded in gathering a crew for the ship of the ancients. All I had to figure out was how I could transfer the data from
The Space Cucumber
to the new ship in order to establish my coordinates.

Chapter 9

The Ship of the Ancients

Slizosaur, strabosaur and cryptosaur.
This was no mere crew. This was the dream crew of any gamer—a huge, 30-foot-long snake, a four-armed orangutan and a 9-foot-tall rhinoceros. The really surprising thing was that out of this entire zoo of prehistoric fossils (at least this was what their names suggested), only the snake knew how to speak. The orangutan-gunner and rhinoceros-marine only knew how to perform the orders they were given.

“Hmm…Honestly, I didn’t think that you’d make it,” Yalrock admitted as soon as I appeared from below ground, riding the engineer. The snake hadn’t dallied. As soon as I saw the mission accomplished notification, he bent down, inviting me to hop onto his back. His body transformed before my eyes. A comfortable-looking seat appeared and I realized that the snake, like the rhino, was an artificial creation. It’s dumb of course to distinguish between real or artificial beings when it’s all part of a game anyway, but if we were in reality, the slizosaur would have been a robot. An enormous, autonomous, artificially intelligent robot.

“In that case, before going to my rest, I’ll give you control of the ship,” Yalrock went on and held out an oblong item that looked a bit like a pyramid with a small base. This six-inch-long object was also twisted along its central axis, a bit like a wrung towel, so I had no way of associating it with anything I’d ever seen before. Basically it was a strange twisted pyramid with buttons.

“This is the command key,” Yalrock explained when I looked up at him perplexed. “My fellow Uldans were a bit lazy and didn’t feel like always having to go fetch their ships. So they fabricated a command key that let them control their ship remotely. Considering that all you need to do at the moment is transfer the frigate’s data, take off from the planet and send out an SOS, there’s no reason to explain all the functions of the key to you…”

“I have a different proposal,” I interrupted the butterfly. “Why should I call for help, if I can just fly over to the frigate and blow it up? I wouldn’t even need to copy her database. All you’d need to do is show me how to work the weapons. My
Space Cucumber
will automatically pop up in the graveyard and no one will ever find out about this planet. Why show anyone this troika?” I nodded at the robots. “If someone finds out about them, this planet will become a very popular place for my ilk.”

“There is a seed of reason in your words,” Yalrock said after considering my offer. “I like your idea, but in that case, I need to teach you how to pilot the ship during atmospheric flight. It’s decided then! Look,” the ancient bent down to me and began to show me various button combinations on the command key. “This is how you call the ship…”

The training lasted about ten minutes, during which Yalrock showed me how I could call the ship, open her, initialize the engines, block access for others, unlock the crew stations…As it turned out, the three huge animals didn’t actually enter the ship like the captain, but simply attached themselves to her hull: The marine took up residence in the bilge; the engineer coiled between the pressure hull and the outer hull, connecting to the powercore; and the gunner clambered up to the very top of the ship and merged with a special nacelle from which he could coordinate point defense and the rest of the weapons systems. This left the player, who remained inside the ship along with four free chairs which could be used as passenger seating. At least, this is how Yalrock described the situation to me, without showing me the actual ship. When the time came for that, well…

Basically, my jaw hit the floor when I saw this miracle of ancient engineering.

Every vessel in
Galactogon
had a pretty standard layout consisting of the engines, a powercore section and a front compartment for the crew. In one way or another, this design was replicated for every ship, from the mighty cruiser to the lowly scout. The only difference was the presence or absence of certain external attachments—sensors, weapons and shields. All the ships were basically shaped like flat triangles, so I expected anything but a gigantic, perfectly round sphere with a metallic surface. There was neither a visible entrance, nor openings for weapons, nor portholes, nor sensors—this ancient artifact had nothing but a smooth and metallic outer shell. Having walked around the ship, I couldn’t contain my smile—the sphere didn’t even have engines. I had no idea how this thing was even supposed to fly. And yet I had just seen it come flying in over the mountains, so I just had to assume this capability on faith…It was becoming difficult to believe the game manual’s claim that
Galactogon
employed realistic physics. This was downright impossible, after all!

“My ship,” Yalrock said proudly. “I showed you how to control it, how to enter it and how to fly it. I have nothing else to tell you, so I can calmly go to my eternal rest. Goodbye, Surgeon! I am happy that you allowed me to discharge my ancient duty…”

The butterfly’s body began to melt and literally after a few moments, the ancient who had been standing beside me vanished, having melted into the air around us. The cryptosaur and strabosaur bellowed a mournful dirge, while the slizosaur bitterly remarked, “Goodbye, old captain. You have earned your rest.”

Having paid its respects to Yalrock, my crew froze awaiting my orders. They made no motion to go anywhere and made no move to take up their positions on the ship, so sighing with ease because I had finally found a moment of peace, I opened the main menu and signed out of the game. I had done enough for today and needed some rest. Additionally, I needed to figure out the text inscribed on the command key—I wanted to know what Yalrock hadn’t gotten around to telling me. I was sure that Stan would now be able to figure out this language…

Something told me that I could under no condition abandon this ancient ship!

“Master, we are at defcon 4!” Stan reported as soon as the cocoon’s lid slid aside. This phrase was so unexpected that I even froze for a moment: My smart home typically welcomed me back with an entirely different greeting.

“Report!” I ordered, climbing out of the cocoon out to the floor.

“Two hours ago, a truck flyer lost control and crashed into your former house. Almost half the house has been destroyed. The damage is particularly severe in your bedroom and the room with your gaming capsule. The communications systems and my mainframe have not been affected. First responders discovered the remains of your substitute under a fallen wall and identified him as an unemployed citizen named Alex Lowell. The shipping company which owned the flyer has already contacted me, wishing to settle the incident with you. In any event, they will be held accountable for manslaughter. Law enforcement wants you to contact them as soon as possible. I have prepared a text for your interview with them. You may study it if you like. You were in
Galactogon
during the event, as evidenced by the game’s logs.”

“Why didn’t you let me know as soon as it happened?” I almost yelled in irritation. My home had been destroyed while I was playing with some robot animals?! “Dial the police this instant!”

“There was no immediate threat to your life, so per the protocol, I…”

“I said, call the police!” I barked, interrupting Stan. If I hadn’t moved, then…It was frightening to imagine that I could have been in that cocoon and—and that would have been it! One less gamer looking for the check! Only an idiot could believe that a truck flyer had strayed from its course purely by accident. Those things fly high above the city and are subject to strict oversight. I was shaking with adrenaline. I had never encountered something like this. Nevertheless, my mind went considering this catastrophe. Someone with access to flyers and their configurations first killed a famous gamer and now made his way down the list to me. And the betting masters dared insist that they had everything under control! It was pointless to even call them—they couldn’t tell me anything…

Lucille!

“Stan, put me in touch with Alonso this second!” I yelled, wishing to warn the girl. Even if she was the mastermind of the assassinations (which was impossible to check or prove), I couldn’t not warn her. And yet, when the vidphone connected, I saw a police officer instead of my friend.

“Alexis Panzer?” the cop asked in a low, gruff voice.

“That is correct.”

“This is Captain Simo, municipal police. Thank you for finding the time to contact us. Tell me, please, are you aware of the incident with you residence?”

“Yes, but I would like to know the details.”

“We would too. If it’s not too difficult, could you explain why you contracted the services of the ‘Anon Movers’ company?”

“I thought that this kind of information was confidential…”

“That is correct, but that was the case only until one of their employees died. At the moment, this company is very interested in cooperating with our investigation. Therefore, I will repeat the question, why did you contract the services of Anon Movers? Were you afraid for your life?”

“Captain, I will deal with this question myself.” Suddenly the screen with the police officers split and an aging man appeared in the new half. He was also wearing a uniform, albeit one that seemed to outrank Captain Simo in seniority—as was corroborated by the captain’s instantly deferential look.

“Yes sir,” the captain retorted, confirming my guess and froze in expectation of his orders. I never imagined that the police were so strict in their discipline.

“At ease, captain,” the old man said benignly, as though he’d expected exactly this response to his sudden appearance. “You may go. I am personally taking over this case.”

The second half of the screen with the captain’s visage vanished and for a short while, the old man and I studied each other in silence. I didn’t know about him, but I had absolutely no idea how to conduct myself—judging by the captain’s reaction, I was faced with some kind of top brass, and yet I felt no trepidation before him. In general, I had ceased to process everything that was going on as reality—instead, I felt like I was at an audience with the Emperor in
Runlustia
, waiting for him to address me first.

“So, you believe that someone is hunting the contestants?” the old man broke our silence without looking away, as though he was carefully monitoring my reaction. My heart skipped a beat when I realized how he had articulated his question…He hadn’t said “hunting you” period, or asked “why did they attack you” period—no, he had specifically used the words “contestants”…This could only mean that the old man was in the know.

“According to my sources, five of the twelve are already dead,” I cast my line. If I was wrong, I could still wriggle my way out and if not, then…

“There are six of you remaining,” said the old man, his words hitting me like a ton of bricks. I managed to stay on my feet, but the realization that six of the twelve participants had already been killed turned my legs to rubber. This was not what I had in mind when I agreed to take part in the wager. “We are watching your every move and every breath. We are monitoring your communications in-game, and yet we still cannot figure out which of you six has done all this. The contest organizers are worried. They have engaged the best detectives—but everything has been in vain. We still don’t know which of you has a helper and how his orders are issued to him. Did you think that you could absolve yourself of suspicion by arranging for a flyer to crash into your house?”

“Excuse me?” I asked baffled—and suddenly, it struck me: They were suspecting me too!

“We understood each other,” the old man cut me off tersely. “Until the investigation is complete, I suggest you remain in the house you are in at the moment. You may consider this a house arrest. The court’s decision in the matter will be delivered to you within the next few hours. You may order whatever you require through your smart home. Any contact with the outside world must take place either through me or my subordinate. Our contact information will be included in the court order. Are there any questions?”

“I know another participant—a woman. I have a request: Could you make sure she’s resettled? I really wouldn’t like for another out-of-control flyer to fall onto Lucille.”

“All of the remaining contestants will be resettled today. So your request is too late. Is that all?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I have nothing to hide, so I give you permission to use my private data as you see fit. I understand that you will use it anyway, but for the sake of the record…Tell me, is Eunice, one of the three who were with me, still alive?”

As much as I wished to refrain from broaching this topic, Eunice and I had spent a night together and, as a true gentleman, I was compelled to take an interest in her wellbeing. She wasn’t going to talk to me and she had deleted her vidphone account, so I could only find out through the old man how she was doing. What if she was one of the six victims?

“Please wait for the court order and continue your search for the prize planet. Thank you for giving us permission to use your private data. That makes things a bit easier for us…And, yes, she is still alive.”

The screen blinked and then dissolved, leaving me deep in thought. So that’s how it was!

We really were being targeted and eliminated—and the organizers of this “last man standing” contest had really taken an interest in the massive demise of their contestants. Considering their status, I had to assume that they had checked everyone and everything. And yet, the flyer that had come crashing down onto my house couldn’t care a bit about that—as well as whoever had arranged for that to happen…