chapter 212

My eyes were glued to the screens in the command centre. No matter what angle I approached this problem from, the end result seemed unsatisfactory. A deep drag on my cigarette seemed to help relax my nerves.

Another alert came through that another section of the shell was ready for installation. Time was ticking down fast. This was beyond annoying.

The factory was finally starting to run out of materials. We had purchased more than we originally planned because, when the quota for the quest was full, there were hundreds waiting to sell the metal they had salvaged. There was almost a riot.

Bob hated that we needed to do so. While the metal alloy we were making was valuable, it would never measure up to the other things we could have used that cargo space for. Perhaps we can sell the excess to make up for some of our losses.

Back to the problem of the campers. It was a nice enough idea to go on the offensive and smash them so badly that they would not poke their heads out while we were flying, but the problem was that it simply wasn’t possible. It wasn’t because the idea wouldn’t work, it would, if we could engage with enough of their ships.

There was always hope that they would be stupid, but no one was ever actually that stupid. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have survived long enough to become the problem that was now in front of us.

For certain, we could destroy a few dozen in the first engagements, as they wouldn’t have expected that, but afterwards they would not engage unless they were damn certain of their success. There was the choice of baiting them out, but that had a whole different set of problems.

There was a good chance that they would underestimate us if we willingly flew into their trap. It would be easy enough to let them set it up. We could simply contact them ourselves and set a drop-off point for the payment for them to leave us alone.

My sixth sense was pretty certain that whoever was in charge of the campers—which really sounded more like an insult than a proper name—would not stick to any agreement if he thought he had a chance to take things by force, which seemed to be the way they operated day to day.

He would probably underestimate Forward Horizon and not bring enough ships, but that ‘probably’ was something I didn’t like. Another problem was me underestimating them. Forward Horizon could take a lot of punishment and dish out even more, but we weren’t invincible.

It was either a slow grind of a war, which we couldn’t afford with our current time limit, or we willingly walked into and triggered a trap where our chances of survival were up in the air.

There was also the option of sneaking out of here, but that would never work. Not only would we need to accelerate for quite a while to reach the speed required to enter FTL, but it would also be easy enough to calculate our trajectory and see which entrance we would be using.

Good enough stealth technology would help with that, but there was no way they didn’t have informants on this station who would alert them immediately if we moved out.

With the shell on, our offensive capabilities were a lot lower. It would even interfere with some of our shields. The shell itself was good armour, but any damage to it lowered our chances of survival in the FTL currents by too much.

I pulled up an image of the sun. It looked so similar to the sun that illuminated Earth. It created the most beautiful sunsets. I wanted to curse this sun in as many languages as I knew. Not only was this the most anomalous star in the Milky Way Galaxy, but it also happened to be going through a more active period of its life cycle.

FH managed to confirm that this more active period was quite well documented and happened surprisingly regularly. It was simply bad timing. She also found out that during those active periods, especially at the peak times, there were no recorded entries of any intact or even half-intact ships. All that was flung into this system was scrap.

All of that meant that we were correct in thinking that we didn’t have much time if we wanted to get out of here while we still had a clear idea of how the FTL currents moved.

In other words, we seemed to be fucked. “FH, any ideas?”

“You have asked me this eight times already today. My answer hasn’t changed.”

“Perhaps we need a different angle from which to approach this?”

“To my knowledge, we have gone through every remotely strategically viable solution. There doesn’t seem to be one that would achieve all our goals without putting us in tremendous danger.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“If it were only tremendous danger, that wouldn’t be too bad. The problem is that it’s unknown danger. We… Wait.” My mind focused on the words strategically viable. “What would be strategically unsound?”

“What?” FH asked, thoroughly confused.

“We have gone through every strategy that anyone would consider, but that isn’t the full breadth of things we could do. What could swing the numbers in our favour that isn’t a conventional solution to the problem we are having?”

“Captain, I’m not entirely sure what you mean…” She seemed to trail off, which usually meant she had thought of something and was now pursuing that idea to test its viability.

The more time she took, the faster my frown disappeared. She spoke again when I finished the last drag of my current cigarette.

“Morale. That’s the thing we overlooked.” I didn’t interrupt her, as she obviously needed to organize her thoughts once more. “Yes, it could work.”

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”

“One of this system’s anomalies makes it so that radio signals travel basically instantly throughout the entire system. That means there is no communication lag even if you are on opposite ends. That means we can communicate with every ship out there, including the campers?”

“Yes, we know this. We were going to use it to let them set up the trap we were going to spring.”

“Exactly that, but instead of actually letting the trap happen, Captain, you can use it to sway the campers to our side.” I had kind of followed her idea up to this point, but she really lost me with that.

“Don’t give me that look. The ones in charge don’t want us to get out of here and notify the Adventurers Guild of this place, so they can continue to play kings. But most would certainly want to leave, especially if you can make the outside world look as good as possible.”

That made sense. She also sent me some data to back up her idea. Most of the people here on the station did seem to want to leave, at least according to what they were talking about on the web. Even among most of the scavengers, no one actually spoke of wanting to stay here, even if they didn’t speak in favour of leaving.

In the end, this system was a hard place to live, as surviving here wasn’t easy. While it was a gamble whether this would work or not, it was the best chance we had. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. It wouldn’t change much.

“FH, broadcast me live.”

“As you wish, Captain.” It took her only moments to set everything up. She counted down from three. “And you’re live.”

“This is Remi Graves, captain of the Forward Horizon. I wish to talk to the leaders of the campers.” Absolutely everyone should be able to hear and see me right now. FH filtered through a lot of join requests until finally another video appeared on the screen beside my own face.

“You sure have some nerve, outsider. What is it that you want?” In the video, this person was surrounded by others in some sort of command room aboard a ship. There were many in the background who seemed to run the day-to-day of the ship, but there were seven others dressed similarly to the one speaking. They all looked quite self-important, so they were probably the upper echelon of the campers.

“I wish to negotiate safe passage to one of the entrances.” All of them started smiling, but not in a nice way.

“We can make that happen, but it’s going to cost you quite a lot. First, you will pay for each of the ships you destroyed coming in. Then there are the people we lost. Each one will cost—”

I interrupted him. “I will not be paying anything, but I will promise to notify the Adventurers Guild of this place so they can come to rescue everyone here.” That seemed quite amusing to them.

“Countless others have made the same claims. No one gets out of here.”

“It is true that we cannot guarantee a 100% chance of getting back to civilization.” Those words seemed to vindicate everything they believed in. Somehow they looked even more smug. “But if we can get to one of the entrances without having to fight, the chance of us safely leaving is about 70 to 80%.” They didn’t look so smug now.

“That percentage falls quite fast the longer we stay in this system, and it falls even faster if we need to fight our way out of here.”

“So, you’re a comedian. You think you can fight your way out of here?”

“I know I can. Doing so would, however, reduce our chances of surviving the FTL currents by too much.” Come on, say it. Please say it. One of you has to be that stupid.

They didn’t like the provocation. Some of them looked quite angry. “You think we would let you try to escape from here? That ship of yours will be ours. You just don’t know it yet,” one of them said, and that was close enough.

“Fine, how much is it going to cost me for you to allow me to try to get out of here and contact the Adventurers’ Guild to help rescue everyone here?”

They seemed to discuss things amongst themselves, but they weren’t even doing a good job of hiding their intentions. “We can come to an arrangement. Let’s switch to a private channel. I am sure you have enough riches on that ship that we can come to an agreement. We even have a good drop-off location already picked out”

Here we go. I stopped pretending to be nice and as unconfrontational as possible. “You’re slimy, worthless pieces of living carbon. You aren’t even trying to hide the fact that you would never honour a deal. You want to keep playing kings in this small sandbox, wearing your paper crowns and thinking you’re something special.

“The galaxy outside this system is filled with portals. Each and every one of you could go through mana rebirth and start ranking up.” I was no longer talking to them, but everyone that was listening in. Not that they noticed.

“You would gain strength and increase your lifespan. Most of you haven’t even eaten solid food in your entire lives, and oh boy, some of the cooks and the types of meals they can make. You would give all that up and more just to play king in this tiny little system?”

“You listen here, you brat. You won’t escape this place. You won’t even leave that station. We’ll hunt you down and everyone else who thinks they can escape from here.” He continued his rant, or perhaps it was a monologue. I didn’t know if they were evil enough for that.

None of them even noticed how the atmosphere in that room had changed. They were surrounded by the crew in charge of running that ship. Regular workers. Most of them seemed to only be trying to survive the harsh reality they were in.

Hopefully that was enough. Now there was a chance that some of the camper captains might not fight us or even help us. FH was already reporting that a lot of the scavengers, and even some of the captains of the station’s military ships, were willing to escort us when we tried to leave the system.

That was more than I had been hoping for. Even the overseer seemed to want to contact me. My attention was suddenly pulled back to the screen and the video of the camper leaders. One of the security guards seemed to have gotten angrier and angrier the longer those leaders monologued. Was he going to snap?

A moment later, we all watched in complete shock as he raised his gun and opened fire. Bullets flew towards the leaders. Everyone was in shock, and while a few of those leaders managed to use some skills to survive the initial wave of bullets, half of them were already dead.

His gun clicked empty just before the other guards filled him with bullets. Two of the leaders had survived untouched, and one seemed to be alive but seriously wounded.

Then another person who had walked over to check on the wounded leader pulled out a handgun, finished the wounded leader off, and tried to kill another before she was also killed.

Another moment passed before someone off-screen fired again. Panic set in as everyone looked at each other, not knowing if the others would turn on them or not. The next moment, the signal was cut off. On my command, FH ended our broadcast as well.

“Well, that was surprising.”

“None of my simulations predicted that,” FH said, her disbelief mirroring mine. This was either very good or very bad. Only time would tell.