In Search of the Uldans, page 27
part #2 of Galactogon Series
“He offered me half a million real credits for a spot and completely refused any share of the loot,” I improvised. Vargen wanted to impress me with his connections and knowledge of my affairs, but the move didn’t come off so well. I knew his informant—Kiddo. More of a leaky sieve than a partner, that one.
“I cannot grant you such conditions,” Vargen did not hide his displeasure. “Twenty thousand real credits for two spots and a third of the loot. Do not forget that the coordinates were ours. If we agree and the mission is a success, you will get another planet.”
“No, these conditions don’t suit me,” I said without the slightest hint of politeness. Since there are several such planets, it means there is nothing unique about them. “One hundred thousand real credits from each and the opportunity to be the first to participate in the auction. If we find something, Eine will also want it.”
“When can we pick up the ship parts?” Vargen decided that these details were not important. I was completely certain that a task force of 3–4 cruisers would remain on duty in the system with the strange planet to keep me from getting close. Giving me the coordinates was one thing. No one had promised to give me access though.
“Right this instant. Dock ten.”
Vargen departed without bothering to say goodbye. I hadn’t managed to eke out a ‘friendship’ status with his guild and could safely assume that Liberium would continue to treat me like a dangerous freak that was to be eliminated at the first opportunity. The hell with it. The terms of our mutual neutrality were clearly spelled out in the contract. If someone from the guild or in its pay attacked me, the contract would be terminated and I would be free of my nondisclosure obligations. Accordingly, Vargen’s feelings did not bother me. It was much more interesting to decide what to do next. The idea of hanging around Belket and selling access to Hansa upgrades was out of the question—all the guilds who could afford the expensive upgrades had already acquired them long ago. My only clients would be minnows like Gammon or freelancers like Kiddo, but I doubted I’d make much money from them.
I returned to the orbship and ordered Brainiac to set course for Daphark. This was my third attempt to get in touch with Hilvar’s aide and become a pirate. This time nobody bothered me: No disruptor beams, no hostile cruisers, no weird meathead bullies. For the next few days, the player named Surgeon had become extremely uninteresting to everyone. After weighing all the pros and cons, I finally decided to call Wally, who was flying somewhere around Galactogon on my Space Cucumber. The frigate, in which I invested a lot of my own and other people’s money, was the first ship I received in the game, so I was still interested in her fate.
“Wally, hello! This is Surgeon. How are you? How’s it going?”
“Hi,” came the terse reply. “I heard that you were back online. Was wondering when you’d call.”
“Relax. I wasn’t planning on taking my ship back. I’m curious about your progress with Hilvar’s mission. I need help getting in touch with Tryd, his intermediary. Who is he? What can I expect with him and what shouldn’t I do around him?”
“Eighty-seven fighters, forty-two scouts, twelve shuttles,” answered Wally. “Thanks to you running your mouth, we still have a lot of work ahead of us. The Space Cucumber has reached class A. I’ve upgraded her a bit with Kiddo’s help. All in all, we’re keeping our heads down, doing our job. The crew is all the same; there’ve been no changes.”
I estimated that Wally and the crew had completed half the mission requirements over these two weeks. I had no idea why he sounded unhappy—the potential rewards were worth all the grinding.
“As for Tryd, he’s an ordinary local. A Delvian. His missions are classic—deliver a letter, pick up a package, go here, fly there. Nothing complicated. It’s a chain of twenty missions altogether. We completed them in two days. There is one detail. Daphark is a planet of rogues and criminals. Even the locals tried to steal my ship there, several times in fact.”
“Not your ship—my ship,” I corrected Kiddo’s officer.
“Yours. Anarchy reigns on Daphark, the law of the jungle. There’s no security, no police. All power rests with the local warlords and moguls. It’s a true Eden for the riff-raff of Galactogon. Keep your bits about you if you go there.” Wally paused and then changed topics abruptly. “Surgeon, since you called, let’s get down to brass tacks. I want to buy The Space Cucumber from you. You have your own ship now and I don’t want to spend my money investing in someone else’s property. But I need to upgrade the frigate too. The Zatrathi are kicking our ass all over this quadrant. I can hack the mainframe and re-register The Space Cucumber to myself but I want to do this by the book.”
As I expected, Wally did not like to be in a state of uncertainty. Who knows when I would call and demand my frigate back? Kiddo didn’t work with dependent people.
“What do you propose?” Obviously Wally had prepared himself for this conversation in advance.
“You gave me a B-class frigate. Kiddo paid for a ton of upgrades and we grinded her up to class A. I am ready to pay you the market value of a B-class frigate, plus ten percent on top. I was thinking that 110 million GC would be fair.”
“Stan, I need a price check urgently…”
“I confirm Wally’s estimate,” the answer was not long in coming. “The cost of a frigate of this class starts at 80 million.”
“Pay me 150 and you can have her,” I decided. Those who cling to the past have nothing in the present and are terrified of the future. The Space Cucumber is gone. I should recognize this and move on.
We agreed on one hundred and thirty. As soon as the money appeared in my account, I received a notification that the frigate was no longer mine. Wally did not wait for me to send him the access key. He had long since cracked the ship’s security and the only reason The Space Cucumber had remained mine was his principles. Such people are rare. I’ll be sure to invite him on any raids. Having one of my people working for Kiddo will come in handy anyway.
“Warning! We are under attack!” cried Brainiac as soon as we emerged from hyperspace. The orbship appeared in the Daphark system and was instantly locked onto by the orbital station. The locals weren’t sleeping on their watch and rolled out the carpet for us.
“Twenty torpedoes inbound,” the engineer piped up. “We are being tracked by EM cannons. 150 small bogeys incoming. None of them are larger than a frigate.”
“We’re leaving,” I ordered. “Torpedo speed?”
“Sixty percent.”
“Maintain speed at sixty then. We’ll wait for them to run out of steam. Hold your fire. We did not come here to fight.”
The locals swarmed us in their fighters but they did not open fire either. Everyone waited to see how I would react to the torpedoes. I made no aggressive moves and once the torpedoes petered out and stopped trailing us, I contacted the system dispatcher:
“This is Orbship Warlock requesting permission to land.”
“What the hell do you want in these parts?” came the rude response. The station was still locking onto us, but there were no further torpedoes. This in itself was a positive sign.
“I have some business with Tryd.”
“Does he know you?”
“No, Hilvar sent me.”
“So you want to become a pirate?” the dispatcher’s voice suddenly grew a lot warmer. “Why didn’t you say so right away? We are always happy to welcome new brethren! Follow descent corridor 4-7-23. Prepare for inspection. Not just anyone can land on Daphark.”
There were two inspections. Initially, the orbship was scanned for unregistered life forms, or at least that was the official explanation. In fact, the locals were making sure that any arriving ship wasn’t carrying law enforcement agents from some empire. The law with its long arms had no business on one of the few pirate planets. The next inspection took place in person and was more scrupulous. They not only examined my ship for prohibited items, but also called Hilvar to check my story. The Pyrrhenian looked at me from the screen and admitted that he did send me to meet Tryd a couple of weeks ago but added that had no idea where I had been this entire time and why I hadn’t tried to complete his mission earlier. In parting, he strongly recommended running an additional background check on me. I was forced to prove that I had no links to law enforcement agencies and then explain where I had been this entire time. The locals turned out to be meticulous investigators—they got to the bottom of every detail and demanded confirmation of every word. At long last, they accepted my story.
“Tryd is waiting for you. We’ll be watching you. One wrong move and we’ll send you packing from this planet. And you won’t be allowed to come back. Statist spies have no business here!”
Having ordered Brainiac not to let anyone close to the ship, I headed to my meeting. Daphark was a strange planet indeed. Ruin and poverty reigned on the streets, against a backdrop of spaceships and apartment blocks. The locals were all dirty, angry, sullen or completely sick—a state I had never encountered on any other planet. Beggars scurried everywhere, begging for alms in the various languages of the Confederation. Waste was dumped directly into the streets and the sewers were clogged with litter. A stinking slurry flowed along the pavements, turning the road into a slow-flowing river. The locals deftly jumped along makeshift stepping stones, not noticing the stench. The sensory filters in my armor suit were a real life saver here. At times, I encountered the wrecks of machines littering the streets. They had not worked for a long time and had become rusty monuments to a time when life was better on Daphark.
Tryd had an office (if you could call a tiny room with holes where the windows were supposed to be an office) on the upper floor of a high-rise building. The windows and doors throughout the building had been busted a long time ago. The stooped old fox stood by a large window opening and gazed down on the dark gray city. There weren’t any street lights and what illumination there was came from burning rubbish and ships’ spotlights, which only really illuminated small areas around the pirate vessels. There was no electricity. Daphark suffered from serious shortages of elo.
“So you’ve decided to become a pirate?” The Delvian barked, turning in my direction. A terrible scar gashed across the fox’s face, depriving him of his right eye and part of his cheek, which twitched to reveal yellowed fangs. Tryd flaunted his terrible appearance, enjoying his visitors’ reactions. I immediately got the urge to start asking the NPC about his scar. Such features usually indicated that some prying would be rewarded with a mission.
“You are unconcerned by the alien invasion taking place?” continued Tryd. “Instead of fighting the Zatrathi for the sake of all of Galactogon, you want to rob and kill the defenders?”
“Defending Galactogon doesn’t earn me anything but trophies and honors,” I answered the old fox. “I handed the Precians a Zatrathi flying fortress and a scout on a platter, and in return I received a paltry five percent discount with the Hansa Corp. Being a hero is noble and all, but it’s not profitable. I prefer to combine these two concepts.”
“Combine, eh? Here’s a mission then. There is a certain Ruandr who lives on the planet Hillstock in the Rell system. Your job is to find him, give him a letter from me, get an answer and come back. You can combine what’s good for you and pleasant for me. Now scram! You got three hours. Hillstock ain’t far.”
New mission available: Planet Express. Description: …
“Seriously?” I didn’t feel like spending two days running around like a messenger boy. “I’m supposed to become a pirate, the terror of Galactogon by doing stupid delivery missions? You think if I start at the very bottom of the career ladder, I’ll climb my way up rung by rung?”
“Eh? What ladder?” Tryd replied, taken aback. “What are you talking about, small fry? You were ordered to deliver a letter—why are you still here?”
“First of all, you didn’t even give me a letter. Second of all, why can’t you just call the guy? Do you not have his number? Does he not have a phone? Does Ruandr perhaps have some religious objection to answering the phone on…what day is it today anyway?”
“So you don’t like to follow orders, eh?” Tryd came to his own conclusion, and a notification about a penalty to rapport flashed before my eyes.
“When have you seen a pirate running errands?” I stood my ground. “A pirate either thinks for himself or ends up a corpse. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a spy for the statists.”
“Did your homework, I see…” A grin appeared the on fox’s face, turning the already ugly mug into a mask of horror. The good news was that my rapport with Tryd had returned back to neutral. “In that case, here is another assignment for you, worthy of a real pirate. If you want to be one of us, kill ten creatures on this planet. Anyone you want! Because you can. Once you’ve killed them, come on back to see me. I’ll be waiting for you here.”
Tryd returned to his contemplation of the slums before him, as if forgetting about my existence.
New mission available: The Killer. Description: …
“Stan?”
“According to the fora and information received from player Kiddo, one of the missions issued by Tryd involves killing ten random creatures.”
I grinned at the phrase ‘information received from player Kiddo.’ At the very beginning of our relationship, Marina had made the generous gesture of giving me a summary of what it would take to become a space pirate. In fact, it turned out to be a slightly more detailed compilation of official and well-known information. While the official FAQ mentioned that Tryd was a contact of Hilvar’s, Kiddo’s info stated that Tryd was ‘a contact of the Pyrrhenian Hilvar.’ In other words, there was detail, but it was useless. Kiddo had taken care not to provide any extra info.
“What about the creatures? Are there no restrictions at all?”
“Absolutely none. Some of the players even tried to kill Tryd himself, others attacked random bystanders and still others asked the warlords that run Daphark to serve as executioners. There are very many options for completing this mission. You need to choose an acceptable one for yourself. “
“Tryd, I refuse to do your mission,” I said, confident that it would be more interesting this way. “First you want me to be a messenger boy, now you want me to be a sociopath. I want to be a pirate, not a murderer. What the hell is the point of killing those who could be profitable later and who pose no threat now? And ‘because you can’ isn’t a good reason. I can pick my nose too, but doing it won’t make me a pirate.”
“So what do you want from me?” Tryd replied to my objections.
“A mission. A real one. One that is worthy of a pirate.”
“You’re not a pirate!” the fox cut me off, turning his back to me. “And you don’t want to do anything to become one!”
“Sure I do. But not this way! Those who want to be pirates love freedom and stealing stuff. They are not servants, delivering messages for their masters; they are not murderers, spilling blood because they can! A true pirate’s blood boils from adventures!”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say so from the get go? You’re a romantic, eh?”
“There are a few of us,” I admitted. “I spoke to some who have done your tasks. They talked about strange missions: take this thing there, hide that thing there, jump and crawl. Truly great missions for prospective pirates! They teach exactly what pirates shouldn’t have: obedience, humility, and timidity. Thank you, Tryd, but that’s not for me. I will pass your greeting on to Hilvar.”
“You’ll still have plenty of time for that,” smirked the fox. “So you don’t like my assignments? Then here is a worthy task for you—steal the Lara crystal from Derval the Fierce, one of the local warlords. It is the symbol of his power—he values it more than his own eye! If you steal it, I will call you a thief and a brother. If you fail, you may as well get off this planet now! You’ll never be a pirate!”
Tryd left the room, slamming the door, which already hung loosely on one hinge, behind him. The door couldn’t bear such abuse and crashed to the floor, stirring up a cloud of dust. The old fox swore bitterly, spat, kicked the sash, and vanished in the neighboring room.
A couple of minutes later Stan sent me a summary report about Daphark. A huge city covered the entire land mass and was divided into districts each of which had its own overlord and standard of living. The Pyrrhenians ruled all of it—the flying fat men had taken all the power in their little hands, eliminating any competition and stabbing each other in the back without the slightest hesitation. It was utter chaos. Wars over territory could break out at any moment and yesterday’s allies could turn on each other over something as minor as another mansion. When hostilities broke out, the civilians huddled deep in their burrows, waited for things to blow over and then crawled out to rebuild their hovels—though, just the walls, since there was no point in putting glass in the windows. It’d only get broken again soon enough.
Derval the Fierce controlled a sector of the city known as the Red Rose. This contained the city’s central neighborhoods and the main attraction—Daphark’s first ten docks. Nine of these were arranged around the tenth, giving rise to a floral design from above. Although it wasn’t a rose, so much as a daisy. Whether this fact was related to the name or not, no one knew, but Derval maintained tight control on his ‘Rose’ and didn’t hesitate to crack heads to ensure order. Within its confines, the Rose’s districts were fairly tranquil, which allowed its residents to enjoy windows with real glass.
