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THE OPERATION was entering its eighth hour. I just had to pay for another ummi on the long-distance communication cabin, because our time was almost up. At first I was sitting in the nearest automatic cafe, sating my hunger with Miyelonian treats and watching the local news on a big screen. Then I moved to the captain’s berth in my frigate. The Miyelonian Medic forbid me from being with him in the long-distance communication cabin, saying he had to maintain a sterile environment, so I had no idea how the operation to remove all Valeri’s tracking microcapsules was going.
On the ship though, repair was in full swing. The clanging, the shrieking of metal being cut and smell of slag reached me even in the captain’s berth, which had not been damaged in the Meleyephatian attack. Princess Minn-O couldn’t take all the noise and exited into the real world. The other crew members also tried to request leave to exit the game but I exercised my authority and sent everyone not involved in the repairs to the shooting range. I’d had enough of seeing my crewmembers’ corpses after every firefight! Let them train at the firing range, level their skills, improve their survival chances and learn to work together as a team!
Now I was regretting that I didn’t have Fox with me. She really knew how to make people sweat their guts out! No messing around or goofing off with her. The deadly Morphian was quick to punish for disobedience and had a perfect awareness of all her students’ health and endurance levels. That made it a bad idea to act smart or try and save strength. Fox was the ideal trainer, making people push themselves to the point of exhaustion, and spar to the verge of death. Gerd T’yu-Pan and Svetlana Vereshchagina could conduct classes too, of course, but they were no competition for the ghoulish space fox.
But I stayed put and didn’t go to the shooting range with the others. First of all, I was currently undergoing my required uninterrupted three-days in game before I could change my virt pod location. A chance death in that time would be extremely bad. Second, I figured Gerd Mauu-La the Medic might need me at any moment.
The wall screen was showing a rerun of the local Kasti-Utsh III news. I frowned and turned off the monitor, because I’d already seen the leader of the Pride of the Sweet Voice’s “masterpiece.” What a bitch that Journalist was! To pervert and warp material like that! There wasn’t a single word about me or my crew. And meanwhile, the only reason I brought Gerd Undi Ar Miyeyauu on that flight was to raise the Fame of myself and my crew!
According to the dark-furred Journalist, she was working off a hint sent in by fans who worked for station security. Detecting a sensation with her journalistic sixth sense, the Miyelonian snuck onto the starship where a special operation was being planned to detain a Meleyephatian spy ring. And the video clip I shot showing the First Pride ready to repel the attack was included. Yes, it was powerful footage, but Gerd Undi took credit for the scenes and her journalistic success. The rest of the video was quite erratic – fussing around, guns firing, the camera falling on the floor, a mess of articulated spider legs... Gerd Undi was trying to hide that she had been found and killed by the Meleyephatian spies, which made the report vague and hard to follow. But at the same time, she claimed to be an example of self-sacrifice for the sake of valuable footage! The report contained a few more scenes I shot – the Meleyephatians tied up with satisfied First Pride soldiers standing next to them. There wasn’t a single word about the frigate Tamara the Paladin, or Captain Gnat and his team! She never even showed the attack of the Pride of the Bushy Shadow or Big Abi being captured. And that, after all, was the part I was most hoping would get airtime. I wanted to screw up my implacable enemy’s Authority, but most importantly send a message to the Great One that I fulfilled her condition and defeated the pirate leader.
Clearly sensing my frustration, the Shadow Panther, who was lying at my feet, gave a growl of dismay and lifted her head in worry. Little Sister had refused to eat ever since her master left and was always trailing right behind me, clearly afraid to lose me too. I gave the huge snow-white beast a scratch behind the ear:
“Yes, Little Sister, I am also worried about Valeri. But everything will be fine!”
That calmed the panther down a bit, and she lowered her snout onto her paws again. But I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d already spent my free skill points (five each into Medium Armor, Danger Sense and Eagle Eye). And studied the sprawling Relict-language texts in my Listener Energy Armor because I finally tracked down the guides and “help section” in the operating system. Well, not exactly operating system. That’s too simplified a term, this was... I just didn’t have the words to describe it. Too complex and all-encompassing, a sort of generalized method of creating and systematizing everything – from computer files all the way to planets and galaxies.
For a moment, I even thought I might have touched upon the great mystery of creation if not of the Universe itself, then certainly of the game that bends reality. It was possible that top Relict Hierarchs were in fact behind its creation. Either that or they were first to discover it and adapt it to their needs, changing reality at their discretion. However, I simply lacked the Intelligence, skills, knowledge and even Relict-symbol vocabulary to really make sense of what I was reading. Too complex. Yes, my Astrolinguistics was up to 97, and Electronics 88. However, after the hundredth message saying I’d failed an Intelligence check, or lacked this or that skill, I realized it was time to give up. I’d hit my limit for one day. To make matters worse, I couldn’t focus. I was constantly distracted and I was not working effectively at all.
Still under an impression from what I read, I even tried to study written Meleyephatian from wall panels in the frigate corridors and instrument arrays. But then I got stuck, not understanding how to connect the words I knew with the webs of thin intersecting lines. But nevertheless, I had made up my mind to study the spoken language of the Horde with the help of the Translator Ayni and Eeeezzz 777. After all, they controlled forty percent of all star systems in the known part of our galaxy.
“Captain, can you come over here?” the Medic’s voice rang out in my headphones. I had long been expecting him, but was also afraid when he finally contacted me.
A starship captain looks undignified and silly running down a corridor, but I didn’t give a damn about appearances. Two minutes later, I was standing next to the long-distance communication point. The shaggy orange Medic Gerd Mauu-La Mya-Ssa, leaning against the wall on his back, was standing on shaky legs and fitfully trying to swallow a pill of some kind. Was it really all that bad??? My heart simply stopped in despair. Fortunately, the healer explained that he was merely very tired.
“My Endurance Points are down to zero and barely coming back via the usual methods. No, no. I certainly shouldn’t have any alcohol now!” the Miyelonian refused when I offered him my thermos of restorative cocktail. “I need my paws steady and my mind clear. The hardest part of the operation is still ahead. Leng Gnat, remember when you said you can temporarily knock out the electronic implants? I think it’s time. Otherwise, I’m stalled out. I don’t understand how to disarm all these tricky little devices. Now... another three minutes forty-seven seconds and we’ll go into the operation room.”
Despite the tension of the situation, I was holding back a smile. The Medic had clearly said that time in “loyas,” a unit of time used by his race, but the game algorithms automatically translated them for me into minutes and seconds. Sometimes, the automatic replacement was useful, but right now it felt unnatural and silly. I might even call it a bug in the game that needed fixing. But the Relicts had died out, so nobody had made any updates or patches to the game that bends reality for thousands of years.
“Alright, captain. Ready!” Four minutes later, the Medic found the strength inside himself to continue the several-hour operation.
Leaving Little Sister in the corridor, I followed Gerd Mauu-La into the long-distance communication cabin. Woah! Everything was so different. The walls of the small room were draped in glowing white fabric, apparently so their shifting colors wouldn’t distract the surgeon, and to provide additional lighting. I read the popup message:
UV Panel (medical implement).
Ah, and they’re also bactericidal... Not bad, not bad at all. In the middle of the room hovered the familiar “coffin,” but it was now completely unpacked and there were bundles of wires and all sorts of tubes leading to a number of drips that stretched from it into Valeri’s body, which was lying on a levitating ovular surface. Three round drones the size of an apple were slowly circling over the girl’s body with a slight buzz, scanning and feeding their results to a data panel.
Valeri herself then... I swallowed nervously... had her skull open, her ribcage split, and ribs sticking out in different directions... her right eye was out of its socket and hanging by a thin thread of sclera and blood vessels... there was a large number of surgical cuts all over her body... Jeeze! There was no blood, but still a wave of nausea swept over me. No, I could never be a surgeon. Not for me.
Successful Constitution check!
I looked away and discovered a glass mug on a table next to me with fifteen tiny metal balls inside, each a millimeter or two in diameter – the capsules that had already been extracted.
“Captain, I have already removed the bomb from her atrium. As well as everything else I could figure out. But here,” the Medic pointed at her trepanned skull, then at her left calf, then at somewhere inside her open stomach and finally her popped-out eye, “these six devices are all linked together by a complex system of some kind. As far as I can tell, removing any of them will cause all the others to self-destruct. And they exchange data via nerves and blood vessels using ion conductivity. I might be able to take out this microcapsule in the wall of her bowel, but I am not certain and afraid to risk it.”
I took out my Prospector Scanner and the metal tripod. I looked dubiously at all the complex electronic medical equipment providing Valeri’s life support and shook my head. No, cutting power to everything here with a powerful EMP was not an acceptable way out.
“I am of course no Medic, but do the nerves of a human eye really lead directly to the bowel? Or the blood vessels of the brain directly to the calf? As far as I remember from school, humans have two separate blood circulatory networks, and the brain is supplied separately from, for example, the legs.”
“That is true, captain,” the Miyelonian turned on the tablet and, in the air next to him there appeared a three-dimensional hologram depicting the human circulatory system. Another couple flicks of the tablet and another hologram was placed on top with a diagram of the nervous system. “I have been studying your race’s body structure for the last several days. The signal circuit is intricate, and the linkage between the microcapsules is accomplished by a very unconventional method.” The Medic placed six red points on the hologram. “Some of the remaining implants in the female’s body are in fact not connected between each other.”
Gerd Mauu-La reached for the flying box of tools and took out something that looked like a wiring tester with two contacts on the end of some thin wires.
“Here, look captain!” the Miyelonian touched the slit in her leg with one, then placed another on her bare brain. “There’s a signal! This one goes through the nerves, not the veins. But put them here,” he said, moving an electrode from her head to her open stomach, “and it’s gone! There must be a way to take all these devices out. After all, they must have been installed without killing the body in the first place. But we need to do it in the right order, and figuring out what it might be is a very difficult little brainteaser!”
* * *
“NO, FIRST WE NEED TO pinch this blood vessel so the signal won’t get through!” Gerd Mauu-La was tired but in very high spirits as he placed a pin on the patient’s carotid artery and very skillfully pulled the penultimate capsule out of Valeri’s head with electromagnetic pincers. The tiny metal ball rolled around the glass bowl with a ringing sound, joining the twenty other identical ones.
I erased yet another little circle from the diagram on the electronic board. I was too drained to even feel happy. The medic and I had spent three whole hours solving this puzzle! We composed diagrams, talked through the order, argued, erased everything and started again. That raised my Electronics skill by four points to 92 while my progress bar to level 98 filled up by two thirds. The Miyelonian Medic levelled up a full two times, hitting 106. But I would spit in the face of anyone who said those two levels came easily! Not even close! He was pushing his abilities and skills for all they were worth, working to the point of complete exhaustion.
And now, finally, the last microcapsule was removed and tinkled into the bowl with the others.
“Do you know what you’ve just done?” I asked, turning to the Medic. “You are the first individual in history to remove the Tailaxian leash! I deliberately hid this from you, but it was previously considered impossible.”
“Yeah? It really was difficult,” said Gerd Mauu-La Mya-Ssa, slinking onto the floor, completely drained. “When I get old, I’ll open a clinic providing this unique service to natives of Tailax. But today, I’m getting drunk! As soon as I stitch up the human female’s body. Valeri will have scars, but they won’t be too noticeable and will last only until her first respawn.”
“Think you could do it again in the real world?” I asked, my voice shuddering treacherously, because there was a huge amount riding on my question.
The Miyelonian turned his big-eared head in my direction, looked me right in the eyes and gave a silent affirmative nod.
