Chapter 4

There was a sudden, heart-stopping wrenching feeling somewhere deep inside my left ear. One moment I was standing in a bizarre alien prison alongside a kidnapped pop star and my childhood friend, the next moment the three of us were standing in a vast, black chamber. Like the one we had just left it appeared to be fairly limitless, with no real sense of height or width to give a sense of depth. Instead the shadows reached out for infinity, lit by that same eerily sourceless light. The only real difference was the single spotlight highlighting the space in front of us.

Directly underneath that light was a somewhat familiar sight. It was a table some ten feet across, marked off in a series of hexagons forty-eight deep and forty-eight across on the two main axes. From there it devolved into a honeycomb of spaces, some raised, some sunken, all wreathed in a dark grey smoke that seemed to emanate from the table itself. Directly in front of the table were three circular outlines, just wide enough for a single person to stand inside of. It was clearly a gaming table if I’d ever seen one.

On the far side of the table I could make out what I suspected were our opponents. There were three of them to the three of us, with far more appendages than any sane race truly needed. They started out as bipedal, arms, legs, head, just like us. Then it got nuts. What mouths they might have had were hidden under four tentacles, the shortest of which could have been no less than a foot and a half. Two more tentacles hung down from the back of their heads, each reaching to mid-back. As if that weren’t enough, whatever drunken deity was responsible for their creation had seen fit to add another four tentacles, these erupting from their backs and wrapping around their abdomens like a series of belts. All wrapped in skin the color of grape jelly. They couldn’t even properly be called disgusting to look at, as the entire arrangement was too bizarre to properly digest.

“Adam?” Bethany asked nervously. “Where are we?”

“The bigger question is what are we supposed to do?” Eve asked.

I looked back and forth between them and shook my head. The board in front of us looked like something I had seen before and on the plus side it was unlikely that anyone was actually going to be shooting at us during a board game. On the other hand, we didn’t have any rules to read, nor was there a helpful sign giving us any idea what we were supposed to be aiming for.

“Only one way to find out,” I offered as I stepped into the center circle. Eve looked at Bethany, then stepped into the one on my left. Bethany took the only option left and as she did so the board lit up. Six lights appeared above the board, three red and three blue. On the board itself glowed three red orbs, each a few spaces in from the edge of the table. The smoke peeled away from the orbs, revealing empty hexes around them.

A holographic screen popped up in front of each of us, though the ones in front of the girls were too small and at too much of an angle for me to get a proper read on. I soon learned that was deliberate. I started to flip through some of the options on the screen. Not a single one was in English, but there were quite a number of helpful pictures to see what was what. I turned towards Eve and opened my mouth. “Hey, it looks like-”

KerrrrzzzcrZUHBOOM

A literal bolt of lightning stabbed down from the darkness overhead. Not only was it loud enough to drown out whatever it was I might have said, it also hurt like a motherfucker. Getting “shot” by the hologram had been nothing compared to this. I felt the briefest tingle before it connected, then someone reached into my brain and turned all the pain dials up to eleven.

“Adam!” Bethany screamed. She started to try and step forwards, but the ring she was standing in flashed and she bounced backwards, as if she had run into an invisible wall. There was no comical bonging sound, just the flat slap of flesh hitting something hard. She bounced hard enough that she ended up slamming into the other side of the ring.The second collision dropped her to her knees, hands flailing as she tried to find purchase that was never there.

I climbed to my knees and looked over at Bethany. My first instinct was to tell her that I was okay. My second instinct quite appropriately bit my tongue as it kept me from summoning another pain bolt. Above the gaming table a script of alien language began to glow. I had no idea what it said, but the message was properly clear. Communicating between players wasn’t allowed. The only reason I could surmise they hadn’t zapped Beth was because whoever was making us play out the game didn’t recognize the difference between a name and a cry of fear.

I wondered about that, later. Surely whatever entities had abducted us had enough grasp of the English language to communicate with us. So there was nothing to keep them from telling the difference. At least, not unless they were pulling from different sources. The ones who had kidnapped us likely weren’t the ones who had punished me - at least not this time. Which meant that we were playing against someone else’s team. And if that was the case, were the three beings standing on the other side of the table prisoners just like us? Or had they volunteered to be there?

Either way, that dark room wasn’t the best place to be pondering these questions. I held up a hand to both girls, both letting them know I was okay and trying to keep them from saying anything else. As I regained my feet a large orb appeared in the center of the table and began to flash in multiple colors. Red, green, yellow, blue, black, faster and faster until all five were spinning around like the sections of a beach ball. Finally it stopped on a solid red color. We had the opening move.

I went back to the controls and started flipping through the menus. Page after page of space ships unfolded in front of me. X-wings and Battlestars, colony ships and cruisers, all pulled from a variety of different sources. Underneath each one was a series of dots, but no explanation for what they stood for. As I looked up at the table, I realized I could only see one of our three starting planets, the one directly in front of me. The other two had vanished into the smoke, hidden by the same fog of war that covered the rest of the table. Three ships floated around my home planet, two X-wings and a version of the Jupiter 2. I sent the X-wings out first, sending each one to the limit of their range, or about three hexes. That proved to be a smart move, as the second X-wing uncovered another planet at the edge of its range. I sent the Jupiter 2 after it, but the colony ship didn’t have quite the same legs and ended up two spaces short.

Curious, I went back to the menu and started looking through the construction. One ship in particular stood out. Its build time consisted of a single turn, but it had a fair rate of speed, and its weapons ... I grinned as I punched in the order. My planet flashed and the new fighter appeared. It hovered around my planet as the controls locked, clearly ending my turn.

I turned to look at the girls, to see how they were progressing. Eve was still fiddling with her controls, but Bethany had already completed her turn as well. The popstar seemed more confused as she glanced over and shrugged helplessly.

The sphere in the center of the table changed colors as our opponents took their turn. I peered intently at the table, searching for any sign of what they might be doing, but there was nothing discernible through the inky blackness fogging the field. Their tentacles waved back and forth as their hands moved at the controls. At first I thought it was simply random, but the longer I watched, the more obvious it became that there were definite patterns in their movement. My eyes narrowed as I realized what was going on. No thunderbolts were forthcoming on their side of the field, and that could only mean one thing. We weren’t allowed to talk to one another, but there was nothing to prevent them from communicating!

I tried to think of what that might mean as far as a strategy was concerned, but by then it was already our turn again. I looked over helplessly at the girls. Eve was focused on her menus, but Bethany looked at me, pressed a single button, then shrugged as she shook her head. It was clear that she had no idea what she was doing. I bit my tongue and tried not to curse. If Bethany was in over her head, then there were only two effective players on our side. Without a better way to talk to one another, I had no way of helping her.

Instead I had to focus on my own plot of land. I sent my scouts out further, operating a long, thin cone. As the ships moved the spaces they had revealed remained clear, so at least the fog wasn’t a permanent feature. The Jupiter 2 touched down and then vanished off my display entirely; the tiny little colony ship had been expended in claiming a new world. The planet flashed as I claimed it, but showed itself as locked for new orders. I sent the fighter from the previous turn out after X-wings, sitting in a spot where it could cover either of them in the event of trouble. As a second colonizable system appeared, I was forced into a decision. With only one functional planet, I could either continue to explore or create another colony ship. At the same time, the new planet was far enough away from my starting point that it would take another Jupiter class colony ship two turns to reach it, but only one if it was built at the planet I had just claimed.

Expand or prepare for a fight? I frowned as I considered the question. There clearly wasn’t going to be a diplomatic solution to this game, at least not that I could imagine. If anything, that would have been entirely contradictory to whatever desires our hosts may have had for their entertainment. So it was definitely going to come down to a fight. But I didn’t know what the other side had up their sleeve. It was the old Risk debate all over again. Do you hole up in New Zealand and Australia, building a steady but small number of troops while forcing your opponents into battles along a narrow front or do you start gobbling up as much as you can see, hoping to get big quick enough to avoid being eaten alive in one bad turn?

That was when I realized I was thinking about the game all wrong. This wasn’t Risk. This was Dungeons and Dragons. The map wasn’t a series of colorfully decorated territories, but a dungeon to be explored. And when it comes to a situation like that, the answer became clear. He who takes the most actions wins. Dragons aren’t dangerous because they have absurd stats and hit like a freight train; it’s the fact that they have the ability to slap around an entire party all by themselves, dishing out a claw there, a bite here, and then lighting the survivors on fire all before anyone else can get a turn. The more planets captured, the more ships you could control. The more ships, the more actions.

So I built another fighter.

Either way I was going to need another two turns to capture the planet I had just discovered. But this way I could go ahead and keep looking for more planets in the meantime. Colony ships were too slow to do the job themselves, so it was better to keep leapfrogging forward. Or at least, that’s what I thought.

The next few turns passed in rapid succession, each side exploring and gobbling up defenseless territories. I couldn’t see what the other side was doing, but I could see that Bethany wasn’t doing. Every turn she did the same thing. Pressed a button, then stood there. She screamed, she slapped the console, she even started yelling at the ceiling. But while Eve and I were busy managing our nascent empires, Bethany was just losing it.

By the end of the fourteenth turn I had amassed another ten planets. The ones on the edge of the frontier focused on smaller ships, while the ones deeper inside my borders had started focusing on larger, more time consuming projects. I didn’t want to sacrifice too much of my construction capacity, but putting larger defenders in place just seemed wise. I didn’t want to get caught with pants down once the bad guys came knocking, even if I technically wasn’t wearing any pants.

I needn’t have worried too much. I was actually the first one to intrude on their parade.

The first fighter I had built was out along the northern edge of my perimeter, growing closer and closer to where I expected to start running into resistance. I had spotted a nice little world the turn before and so my fighter headed right for it. By then I had crossed what I considered to be the hemisphere of the board, separating our side from theirs. So I wasn’t too surprised by the fact that the world in question as already occupied. Of course, that left my poor little fighter against whatever it happened to encounter. Which, in this case, happened to be five needle-nosed craft of comparable size. The game paused and the field vanished as everything switched over to combat mode.

Picture this, if you can. An orange sun burns at the center of a field of stars, with a green planet and its half dozen moons floating in a nearby orbit. Five craft flash by, each about forty feet long and ten high. They are semi-teardrop shaped, with rounded sterns, noses that end in narrow points, and no discernible canopies. The only features that stand out from their black hulls are the stubby barrels of their guns, each connected to a large round blister. The fighters almost disappear into the star scape behind them, given away only by the blur of starlight across their skins. They are sleek. They are deadly. Everything about them screams that your day is fucked as they fly by in perfect formation.

Bumbling into this scene is their opponent. It looks like the redneck version of an X-wing fucked a TIE fighter and this is the result. The main body is long and boxy, with a pronounced canopy that fairly screams, “Shoot Here!” Attached to this body are bulky wings which are about as aerodynamic as a pair of bricks and only serve to give the craft an even larger profile. Mounted at the point of each wing are wide barreled guns big enough to stick your head into. The entire thing is a bare metal grey with the occasional spot of black, and two mismatched purple and pink blazons on the sides of its wings. It looks like the sort of thing you might pick up in the dollar store emblazoned as the STARFIGHTER SUPREME while joking about taking off for GREAT JUSTICE!!!

The five black craft swing about as they notice the interloper. With practiced precision they split into cross formation, the four wingmen spinning around the axis formed by their leader. Blue lasers stab out at the clumsy grey fighter, which bibs and bobs inq a desperate attempt to avoid getting purged from the sky. A blast clips one of the wings, sending the doomed craft into a frenzied spin which it can’t possibly recover from. The black fighters zoom past, gas ports firing as they flip end over to come back for another pass.

Only ... their opponent is still spinning. Up, down, left, right, almost as if it is completely out of control. But panels are opening up on the wings, revealing even more gun ports. And then it opens fire. Red bolts of energy come stabbing out from every point, forming an almost perfect sphere around the ugly little ship. The five black craft try to evade, but it’s impossible. Their opponent isn’t even firing at them so much as it is firing at everything. Accuracy isn’t a concern when the entire universe can just go and get fucked. Death is flung in every direction, admittedly missing far more than it hits, but where it hits comes destruction. The five black ships are ripped apart as they try to fly through the storm of energy, coming out the other side as little more than flaming wreckage.

Thank you, late night Saturday movies, for introducing me to The Last Starfighter in all its cheesy glory.

The Gunstar finally stops its spin, then advances on the green planet. Another ship is in orbit, a pair of cigar shaped hulls joined in the middle by a common hangar. Red bolts paint a line down the side of the colony ship, leaving explosions in their wake. As they cross over the center the ship shatters, flinging debris into an expanding cloud of flame and boiling gasses that temporarily obscure the racing fighter. Then it comes flying out of the collapsing fires, zooming into an almost perfect profile shot just as the entire clip freeze frames.

One of our opponents let out a wicked screech, mouth tentacles waving wildly. The two tentacles on the right side of its abdomen stabbed out in my direction, pointing with great accusation as the one on the top left of its body jabbed at the ceiling. I didn’t need a translator to know that I was being accused of cheating, though whatever mechanism I might have employed was unavailable for mention.

The answering punishment bolt was as satisfying as it was expected.

The alien collapsed into a puddle of pain and agony, its screechings reaching a tea kettle’s wail of distress. Its fellows immediately wrapped their own tentacles tightly around their bodies, standing tremblingly still as they tried to avoid drawing any sort of wrath upon their own heads. For my part, I turned and smiled at the girls. Eve flashed me a thumbs up, while Bethany blew me an exorbitant kiss. My small victory seemed to have helped get her to calm down, at least a little bit.

Humanity: 1 Other Guys: 0

That fight started a series of escalating conflicts across the board. My direct opposite and I had found each other, so now it was a proper race. Any other planets we discovered in that immediate area were going to be hotly contested for their ability to support one another, even as we started to bring our heavier weapons forward now that they had a place to deploy.

I didn’t seek to colonize the new planet, at least not at first. I suspected that my opponent was going to try to reclaim it, so instead I actually pulled the Gunstar back, leaving it in an empty hex nearby. That was apparently considered to be close enough for reconnaissance purposes, as I was able to watch a small squadron of cruisers pounce on the system the turn after that. Those cruisers in turn found themselves the victims of the White Base and her attached units. All of her attached units.

There wasn’t really a method of studying the units we were ordering, but I’d managed to work a few things out by trial and error. For example, all of the units I could build were all from stories I had read or watched, but only if I had actually seen it for myself. I was aware of more powerful creations - the entire game would have been over much more quickly if I’d had access to something like the Lensman series or any of the technology available to the Culture - but because I hadn’t experienced them for myself they were considered entirely off limits, something I planned to remedy in the future.

The other important factor I discovered was that a carrier unit came equipped with its onboard craft. Order up a Star Destroyer, for example, and it came with a full load out of TIE fighters. It meant a longer build time, but it also gave those units a bit of an edge when it came to dealing with an enemy.

But most importantly of all, a particular ship was always considered to have access to anything it had ever used, whether or not it could have physically held so many weapons or subunits in its own reality. That was an almost overwhelming advantage in and of itself.

It was also the only reason we didn’t get our asses completely handed to us.

Eve found herself in a fight no more than five turns after my own. By then the other side had seen what we were capable of and wasn’t sending out anything less than a cruiser backed by a wing of fighters. They sailed into one of the worlds Eve had claimed, only to encounter half a dozen copies of the Andromeda Ascendant waiting for them. The battle was short and brutal, leaving no survivors on the enemy’s side.

The next few battles were similarly lopsided, but by the time we reached the thirtieth turn the tide began to swing against us. My legs had begun to ache from standing in place for so long, but that was nothing compared to the migraine that was beginning to form right between my eyes. The more planets we conquered the more tasks we had to complete and the wider the front became. Each battle was effectively an unskippable cutscene and the more ships involved the longer each scene became. So on top of the need to strategize and manage an economy of actions, our captors had turned the battle into a match of endurance. I could see the fatigue affecting our opponents as well. Every so often their head tentacles would wipe sweat from their eyes, and the one opposite Bethany had taken to using its four body wraps as a sort of seat.

Worse, Bethany still hadn’t come out of her corner. I had managed to sneak a few fighters over to her and Eve each, letting me keep an eye on their side of the boards. Eve was developing a small, but well concentrated, flank to my left. She hadn’t expanded as fast as I had, but where I had a thick shell and gooey center, Eve had set up multiple defenses in depth. Bethany had managed to get her colony ship to one other world, but that was it. Her two starting fighters remained parked, one for each system.

Our enemies seemed to sense her weakness and they had begun to capitalize on their own strengths. What had initially seemed like a series of random clashes had instead turned out to be a set of probing attacks designed to get a measure of what we were deploying against them. Most of their setbacks had been simply because of the sheer variety of ships we were throwing at them. It was soon clear, however, that Eve didn’t have quite the same pool of knowledge to draw on that I did. She was primarily pulling from three major sources: Andromeda, Star Wars, and Independence Day. There was a lot of power there, but they were keeping her bottled up through a sheer press of numbers, burying Eve under the weight of cheap, quickly built cruisers and destroyers. Her own reinforcements were coming down as a mere trickle by comparison, barely keeping ahead of the flood of destruction being poured in her direction.

Then the blitz came. I had been holding down the front lines, exchanging systems back and forth with my direct opposite. He was good, but predictable ... or at least pretending to be. He’d throw a stock fleet at one of my systems, and I’d throw him a curveball by turning up a new source to let him figure out. He’d storm into a system, only to discover a replica of A Baoa Qu spitting out an endless swarm of mobile suits and mobile armors. Then we’d end up in one of his hexes, as Manticoran and Havenite super dreadnoughts poured waves of missiles into his defenses before hypering out of the way of retaliating forces.

All of that was just a distraction, hiding their real intentions.

I’d been so focused on holding what we had and trying to expand further that I

made the sort of mistake anyone can suck a rookie into - I over extended my lines beyond what I could supply. It wasn’t just a matter of replacing ships, but just getting them from the rear to the front was beginning to take several turns. I had four sizable fleets moving around in response, but six more were still in transit, occupying empty hexes, when the other side launched their attack.

They came in from the right corner, having suckered me out of position the turn before. I knew, then, with absolute certainty that our opponents were somehow able to communicate. While Eve’s opposite kept her locked down, the other two launched a dozen raids on my border, capturing seven of their targets and crippling another three. I stood there and watched for almost a solid hour as they eliminated almost a third of all my holdings. The captured worlds were immediately colonized and reinforced, providing the bulwark for the next round of assaults. With the border cracked, they could gobble down everything in their path until they finally reached my point of origin. By then they’d have so many construction opportunities it wouldn’t matter.

If it had been a video game, I’d have already been reloading from a previous save. Instead I retreated, pulling back towards the nearest points of safety. I abandoned the crippled worlds, sending their defenders into Eve’s hands in order to buy her more time. All but two of my fleets then fell back to my own worlds, which began churning out as much spam as I could muster. The last two had effectively been cut off by the blitz, so I sent them to the only safe space within reach. I grimaced as I watched them enter Bethany’s hexes, offering what little defense they could. Reports started to trickle in on her capabilities, but I ignored them as I raced through my construction queue, desperately seeking an answer.

I watched, dry mouthed as the counter over the table indicated the start of the fifty-first turn. We’d been there for at least six hours or more, long enough that my stomach had given up on hunger and settled on stoic emptiness. Pain echoed in my skull as I punched in my last set of construction orders, then settled back to wait. This time there were no fleet movements. Just a deep breath as I waited for the inevitable. I looked at each of the girls and shook my head. Eve nodded, Bethany frowned.

The attacks came right on schedule and another eight worlds fell. We managed to save five and I was already beginning to plan the next round of my retreat when I realized there was still one more attack pending. Seven of the enemy fleets had followed down the two I had sent to hide in Bethany’s corner. It was overkill in my opinion, but then the enemy hadn’t asked for it in the first place.

I sighed as the video of the battle started up. On the bright side, I was so badly outnumbered that I didn’t expect it to take long. The video started with one of the enemy fleets, nine hundred and sixty of the needle-nosed fighters, four dozen heavy cruisers, and twenty of their battleships. The battleships were monstrous things, triangles a mile long and a quarter that in height. Each side mounted six long rows of rotating turrets, all of which were capable of independent adjustable fire. They zoomed out as the fleet arrowed in on a blue world and its little grey moon.

I frowned as I looked at the moon. None of the other videos had included planetary bodies aside from the single planet representing the hex. Something on the moon twinkled, almost like a star in the distance. The twinkle grew brighter as the enemy fleet approached, the moon growing larger and larger. And as it did, I smiled. The twinkle finally resolved into a coherent image, that of a cloud of TIE fighters.

Thousands of them.

Behind them came sixty more Star Destroyers, with the epically oversized Executor at the center of it all. The defenders closed on the attackers, the TIEs zooming in to deal with their hopelessly outnumbered counterparts while the Star Destroyers focused their attention on the much smaller cruisers. The enemy battleships tried to butt their way into the middle of the brawl, their turrets operating on continuous fire. Purple beams of chaotic energy scythed through friend and foe alike, leaving nothing but flaming vapors in their wake. Shields around the Star Destroyers flickered and died, followed by the ships they were meant to protect only a few moments later. Their casualties mounted past the fifty percent mark, but the Executor and her surviving escorts continued to plunge into the maelstrom, their turbo lasers adding to the destruction as they finished eliminating the cruisers and finally turned to the more dangerous threat.

Then the moon opened fire.

The Star Destroyer fleet had been careful to spend the entire battle “down” from the perspective of the moon. It might have seemed odd, but it was a careful deliberate tactic as a brilliant emerald line temporarily connected the northern hemisphere of the moon to four of the enemy battleships. They seem to hang there for a moment, speared through in a single line, before vanishing in a chain of fireballs.

Ten minutes and six more shots of the Death Star’s main gun later, the battle was over and all attacking fleets were marked as completely eliminated.

Silence fell over the gaming chamber as the video cut out.

Losses on our side had technically been fairly heavy. Most of the Star Destroyers had gone up in flames and trying to calculate the number of destroyed TIE fighters was simply impossible. Then again, that was entirely the point of TIE fighters. Between the complement assigned to the Death Star and those assigned to the Star Destroyers, I hadn’t been sure of how many there had actually been in the first place. The important thing was that there had been enough of them present to keep the other side from taking the hex. More importantly, they hadn’t even been able to touch the Death Star. Between its planetary-class shields, numerous turbolaser platforms, and associated parasites, the battlestation had simply slaughtered everything in front of it.

The silence was broken by a trio of furious steam kettles as our opponents all began protesting at once. Their tentacles waved madly, jabbing at empty air as they all voiced their refusal of what had just happened. I waited and waited and waited for the punishment bolt to silence them but it never came. Instead their protests continued until the game just quietly rolled into our turn. With a new turn came completed work orders ... and a second Death Star, complete with accompanying fleet.