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NATURALLY, given that, we could no longer even think of staying at Kasti-Utsh III for long. We’d calculate coordinates for a new hyperspace jump, this time to Earth itself, recharge if necessary then fly off to aid the Human-3 Faction! Otherwise, soon enough, Captain Gnat would be logging out permanently alongside a third of his crew. And there would be issues with piloting the frigate, because none of the remaining crew had piloting skills, and I was controlling many ship systems directly.
None of the crew objected. Perhaps my business partner Uline Tar had a differing opinion, but if she did, she kept it to herself. Minn-O also immediately stated her position that after our marriage and the death of her grandfather, there was no longer anything to connect her with her former faction. What was more, having a mage husband was the princess’s only remaining chance to survive in the hostile magocratic world. With Gnat out of the picture, Minn-O La-Fin would very quickly die “on accident” because she stood in the way of too many ruthless bloodsuckers, who were currently salivating over the riches of the La-Fin family. I could read unhidden panic in my junior wife’s tone, and I assured my wayedda that it was too early to count me out. I would not allow the H3 faction to be destroyed. I was not going to force the Princess to fight against her subjects either though. The mere fact that Minn-O would not be interfering or telling the enemy our plans was enough.
And although we still had a day before things would really heat up, the rest of the party was subdued because no one was in the mood to celebrate anymore. Those who were quickly finished their cocktails and the open boxes of fancy food then left, some to their quarters, some to go on shift. The Miyelonians just went into the real world.
I called the white Kirsan over, who I considered the most senior of the three Mechanics, and finally gave the repair bot my Annihilator. Previously we lacked either the materials or time to modify my weapon and had little reason to increase its firepower. It could already shred through any barrier and chew enemies into hunks of flesh already. But increasing its accurate range seemed important because now I couldn’t hit anything farther than twenty or thirty feet away. And increasing the battery capacity or even adding a special firing mode with more conservative power usage wouldn’t hurt. As it was, a nuclear battery on full charge was good for thirty shots at most and the fact that I had my last one in the gun now didn’t paint a pretty picture. Buying an extra battery was a big challenge. There were very few on the market and batteries for guns and Relict artifacts were not exactly available at every station. And they cost way too much. I was no Croesus nor Count of Monte Cristo to be using weapons that cost two hundred crystals per shot.
“Ideally, change it away from the disposable nuclear batteries to ones that we can recharge from the ship’s power systems,” I kept dreaming and Kirsan looked attentively at me with his faceted eyes. The repair bot was actively moving his many little hands both to say how long it would take and trying to get a thought across: “That might be a tall order, captain, but I’ll see what I can do.”
The huge metal millipede stashed the invaluable weapon in a hole in its chest and crawled nimbly off toward the supply room. Before that, I never suspected that the repair bots’ chest pieces could move aside to reveal a storage compartment. For some reason I instantly realized three electromagnetic bombs could easily fit, and the thin and flexible millipede could get into even the hardest to reach places on the starship including the maintenance area behind the hyperspace drives. The white Kirsan’s chest cavity was empty before he put the Annihilator in there. But I ran a scan, which showed that the other two millipedes had something in theirs. Some pieces or patches of metal. I couldn’t see better, so I would have to check what my Mechanics were hiding in these secret spots when I got the chance.
At the same time, I checked up on the other two repair bots through the security cameras. One of them was lying out pieces of the destroyed relict combat drone on the floor of an empty room, thoughtfully crawling between them and, one after the next, lifting them up and carefully inspecting them with its many mechanical eyes. Apparently, repairing the Small Relict Guard Drone was going to be very difficult, so I didn’t want to distract Kirsan.
The last of the metal millipedes was turning something over very quickly in its jointed hands, spinning and twisting the object every which way as if solving a Rubik’s Cube. With a certain surprise, I realized that it was the Pyramid Signal Booster, although it didn’t look quite as disk shaped as before. In fact, it was now an articulated fractal construction, more reminiscent of a three-dimensional asymmetrical snowflake. Yeah, that was it. I had given the ancient artifact to my Mechanics so they could remove the “only for Relicts” limitation and, the mechanoid repair bost had seemingly discovered it could unfold.
I took over for Dmitry Zheltov on the bridge and sent the Starship Pilot to get some rest. The frigate was on autopilot going through a hyperspace jump, so there was virtually no work to be done on the bridge. If nothing out of the ordinary happened, this would be a long boring shift of around an ummi and a half, after which Ayukh would take over. Still, I wasn’t going to just sit around for eight hours. In fact, I was planning to use that time to maximum effect, levelling Gnat’s skills as much as possible, above all those connected with psionics and controlling machines. After all, when would I get a better chance to practice directly operating the various frigate systems?! With the whole crew resting, they wouldn’t even notice. I could also afford to pull Astrolinguistics up a bit. Sure I was understanding Relict glyphs better all the time, but some of the messages from my Listener Energy Armor were still indecipherable.
So then, how was my little Gnat doing for abilities? What to improve first? I opened my information:
Gerd Gnat. Human. H3 Faction.
Level-74 Listener
Statistics:
Strength 14
Agility 18
Intelligence 23 + +5
Perception 27 + 2
Constitution 16
Luck modifier +3
Parameters:
Hitpoints 1612 of 1612
Endurance points 1008 of 1209
Magic points 759 of 899
Carrying capacity 62 lbs.
Fame 66
Skills:
Electronics 61
Scanning 35
Cartography 57
Astrolinguistics 83
Rifles 51
Mineralogy 50
Medium Armor 54
Eagle Eye 70
Sharpshooter 34
Targeting 23
Danger Sense 48
Psionic 73
Mental Fortitude 54
Mysticism 24
Machine Control 66
My firearm skills were noticeably lagging. To have Rifles at just 51 and Sharpshooter at 34, with my character at seventy-four was not even funny. As far as I’d heard from the First Legion, it was considered standard to have main combat skills one point five times higher than character level. Targeting was even further behind, even though discovering and highlighting targets for others to shoot was Gnat’s only effective method of long-distance combat.
Sure, here I had the excuse that I had changed class, and a Listener was more a mage that knew how to control machines than a classic gunman or scout. But that did nothing about the worrisome fact that Gnat hadn’t been to the firing range in a very long time. As for my psionic abilities, things were looking a bit better, but still not exactly one point five times over character level, so I had plenty of work to do there as well.
Anyhow, I started with Scanning. I gave a mental command, activating the ship scanners and requested a complete picture of everything happening outside my frigate. I had no idea what I could get from scanning in hyperjump, or if the scanners even worked like this, but the mental command worked. The computer froze for a long time, trying to interpret the clearly unusual feedback, then it brought up some long parallel stripes and something strange — a spot of light moving quickly away. A second later, some words came on screen in Geckho:
Gravitational anomaly. Class SA-113/FF.
At the same time, my heart clenched in pain and foreboding. I was at serious risk. I felt a prick as if a needle got stuck all the way into my heart. It felt like I was squeezed in a vice for a few painful seconds, but then the feeling gradually retreated, leaving me sitting in the pilot’s seat and reading a flurry of messages, my eyes open wide in fear. Apparently there had been problems with the ship:
ATTENTION!!! Gravitational scanner has gone out of order!
ATTENTION!!! Short-wave radar has gone out of order!
ATTENTION!!! Neutrino scanner has gone out of order!
In parallel with this, I saw many messages run past about changes to Gnat’s statistics:
Scanning skill increased to level thirty-six!
Scanning skill increased to level thirty-seven!
Electronics skill increased to level sixty-two!
Danger Sense skill increased to level forty-nine!
Machine Control skill increased to level sixty-seven!
You have reached level seventy-five!
You have received three skill points.
If I had been out fishing, the closest analogy would be a bite from an especially feisty lunker knocking me off balance, breaking the line and making off with my tackle. What even was that??? I waited one second, decided not to sound the alarm and just called Ayukh and Dmitry Zheltov. But first to come on the bridge was my Wayedda Minn-O, running in panicked:
“Gnat, what happened? I was sleeping and it felt like someone poured a bucket of cold water on me! My Danger Sense jumped up twice!”
Ayukh the Navigator then pushed her out of the doorway and strode quickly into the control room looking disheveled. He had also been awoken. Behind him was the Starship Pilot and Uline Tar for some reason. I pointed the crew to the system malfunction messages on screen and briefly explained what caused them.
The furry gray Navigator stroked his nose with a clawed paw in thought:
“I don’t understand, Gerd Gnat. Why did you run a scan in a hyperjump? Here in hyper, everything goes by too fast. The scanner pulse travels at light speed, so it will never reach a target and bounce back while we’re travelling faster than light! Even a child knows that!”
It looked like my abilities as a captain had seriously fallen in the Navigator’s eyes. In response I just shrugged my shoulders indefinitely, then made the same motion in Geckho body language, jutting out my lower lip and rolling my eyes. What could I have said in my defense? That I didn’t know it was pointless to scan in hyper? But it worked!
After another half minute of grumbling, the Navigator took a seat and opened the astronomical body classification system. Ayukh, like all the others, was looking for the “Anomalies” section. The object I scanned was eventually found in the category “Rare, unconfirmed:”
“SA-113/FF class anomalies are found moving at faster-than-light speeds in hyperspace. They have very high mass, similar to that of planetary moons class 3B and higher. Much information about this anomaly is conjecture. Only one has ever been clearly detected two hundred eleven tongs ago in the star system 5С-678/PP by a Meleyephatian scout-research ship. They are thought to correspond to ships of Supercarrier or Titan class. However, starships of super-heavy classes have not been built by the great space-faring races for more than three hundred tongs, and the few remaining ones have long been scuttled, so the most probable explanation is that this is the signature of a starship of an unknown race. WARNING! These objects react very poorly to detection, and are known to destroy ships shortly after discovery.”
Woah! How lucky we apparently were that this contact with hot-headed unknown aliens had merely taken a few scanning systems offline. We could easily replace the fried systems. As far as I could tell from my captain’s tablet, all the required parts were already in storage. After some six or seven hours work for the repair bots, all negative consequences of this unpleasant encounter would be done with. But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this was not random, and I would be finding out more about this mysterious object despite its clear danger and unfriendly reputation.
Wow, the last time such a thing had been seen was more than seven hundred years ago. If I could detect what this mysterious ship was and where it was based, just the location of an unknown race could be sold to interested parties for lots of money, immediately solving my financial issues. And if I could be the first to reach their planet and find some unique artifacts... I checked myself for counting my chickens before they’d hatched.
“Ayukh, is there any way to tell where the anomaly came from and where it was going?”
The experienced navigator spent a long time immersed in calculations after which he turned toward me, his furry face impossibly surprised:
“As strange as it may seem, yes captain! We spent enough time at a short distance from one another, insofar as directionality and distance mean anything in the distortion of hyperspace. So we have a few markers from our locators, that we can use to estimate a trajectory. The object was headed for star system B7670/MP, that’s another arm of the galaxy altogether. At our current level of technology, it would take more than a lifetime to reach. But it started from much nearer by, although it would also be quite the long haul: two tongs minimum not counting time to stop and recharge. The Aysar Cluster. Hmm. That system must be noteworthy for some reason, seeing how they gave it a name instead of just a number. “
“The Aysar Cluster? Where even is that?” I asked, and Ayukh obediently zoomed out the star map, pointing at a point far past Meleyephatian territory and outside the bounds of known space.
I had to admit I was baffled. Why was there a name for this place, a star was hundreds of parsecs from explored space? I asked, and the Navigator opened a detailed guide and read aloud:
“The Aysar Cluster. Triple star. 3B orange dwarf, two satellites of type 7D and 11F. Six uninhabited planets. This star system became famous after one of the largest space battles in the history of the Universe took place there 2.3 tongs ago.* Current sovereignty: Swarm.
*Note: all sources are secondary and require confirmation.”
The Swarm? What was this Swarm? And who was battling who in that distant star system? Unfortunately, there was no more detailed information in the database. Old Ayukh, although he had worked as a Navigator his whole life and knew the star maps and space races like the back of his hand, didn’t know either.
In the end, we didn’t find anything of use. Both the start and end point of the mysterious space oddity’s route were so far away from anywhere we could get to that the information had no practical application. Nevertheless, I asked the Navigator and everyone else there to keep it a secret.
But I was not allowed to sit and peruse the scan in calm. Ayukh was sitting at the navigator’s panel, calculating the potential risk and profit from various trade routes. My business partner was still nourishing a hope that we could work our way back up to a decent reputation and be rid of the black spot of piracy. And she had a plan to tell me. Right after the end of the war on earth we were going to take a few jobs transporting goods to distant colonies that weren’t too squeamish about less than savory traders. A few successful voyages and clients would stop being so worried. Then our unsavory reputation would be washed away in short order. I didn’t have much to say and especially didn’t argue. Still, something was telling me that, with my restless character and talent for getting myself into trouble, that black spot wouldn’t wash out quite so easy!
* * *
“LEAVING JUMP IN NINETY seconds!” the Starship Pilot informed me, looking concentrated and impossibly distinguished.
“Sufficient energy for hyperjump to Earth,” came the voice of our Miyelonian Engineer, Orun Va-Mart over the loudspeaker. He was now in the engine room.
“Well then, Dmmmitry, I see no reason to dock. Request an acceleration lane from the dispatchers! Vector 114:37:22, distance 4.3 units, I’ve still got it on my palmtop,” the old Navigator from the crew of the Shiamiru had flown to Earth from Kasti-Utsh III a few times before so he had no reason to run the calculations again.
Good thing we had enough power and could go help the faction right away. As it was, Imran and Eduard were going under the Dome then back into the game regularly and, every time they came back, they had worse news. The Rainforest node had fallen. What was more, the Dark Faction had managed to reinforce there by landing just under one and a half thousand marines in three waves via Sio-Mi-Dori antigrav. And by Geckho ferry, the enemy had brought heavy armor and rocket systems to the Rainforest node as well. So now the Dark Faction had a strike force that threatened our whole territory from the undefended south. It was a critical situation. I had no idea where our directors would find the troops to fight on two fronts at once.
But that wasn’t all the bad news. We had confirmation of the seemingly impossible fact that the German capital node had been lost. And now the enemy had captured the island and was using it as a base to send assault groups down our whole coastline. We lost our southernmost Tropics node without a fight. Our fifty players, all from peaceful professions, had no chance against an enemy with such vast numerical superiority. So on an order from Lozovsky, they retreated through a neutral and severely boggy node to the allied German faction’s land. And now everyone already knew that our three hundred H6 players, even reinforced by Centaurs and our fifty builders, had no chance of withstanding a serious attack. The fate of the H6 faction was basically hanging by a thread.
All our hopes rested on my starship getting there as fast as possible. And from there, we could either do it the nice way, negotiating as General Ui-Taka suggested, or the mean way by ruthless orbital bombardment. Either way I was intending to stop this bloody war. It would take nine hours to fly from Kasti-Utsh III to Earth. My faction could definitely survive that long, even if it came at the cost of a few territories. But I was much less sure that my badly-beaten allies could last for nine hours.
But then, finally, we emerged from hyperspace! The local station was not a colossal spindle with one entrance to dock like Medu-Ro IV, but a basically flat metal plate five miles in diameter. And it had many entrances around the whole perimeter, which was very convenient. There was so much going on! There were thousands and thousands of starships, all of Miyelonian design.
When Ayukh suddenly fell into silent agitation, I didn’t know what was going on at first. In fact, Uline Tar came on the bridge and wasn’t her usual talkative self either. Also Ayni the translator, who we invited in case the station dispatchers used any complicated terms, had crawled down off her seat and was trying to sneak out of the room. Even Dmitry Zheltov went gray in the face and turned unconfidently toward me in hopes of an explanation, or perhaps further instructions. What was wrong? Then it hit me: here among the thousands of ships, not a single one was noncombat! There were only frigates, battleships, carriers and landing ships, all fitted out for war! We had stumbled upon the Miyelonian fleet!
In the midst of the Miyelonian armada, our little Meleyephatian frigate looked like an unfortunate soul that just wandered into the wrong neighborhood. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Our instruments showed that many ships and station systems were scanning us. And why not? I was a free and neutral captain. I hadn’t done anything to the Miyelonians, so I had the complete right to visit the popular trading station. Finally, the monitor lit up, and a young fluffy Miyelonian dispatcher asked:
“Free Captain Gerd Gnat, what is the purpose of your visit to Kasti-Utsh III?”
Purpose of visit? I honestly told the kindly Miyelonian lady that I was not planning to stay here or even dock my ship. Kasti-Utsh III was only a midway point on my route and now I needed a free lane to accelerate for my next hyperjump.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Gerd Gnat,” the cat on the screen bared its teeth predatorily and pushed down its ears, immediately losing its sweet demeanor. “The station and surrounding space are on temporary military lockdown. No starship may use long-distance communication or leave the station for the next five standard days. Such is the order of Commander Leng Keetsie-Myau. So welcome to Kasti-Utsh III, Gerd Gnat!”
