StAG: Chapter 6 - Boardgames

 Jun was happily cooking, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat. I remember he was cooking sour chicken with a lot of red sauce and rice. This is a typical meal in spaceships because it sticks to itself and to the plate, which is useful in low gravity environments so your food doesn’t float away. 

Jun came to me and handed me a full plate of rice and chicken.

“Thanks," I said and turned back to go to my room, but Sagira was coming through the elevator just as I was going out.

"Where are you going?,” she asked.

"Come eat with us father,” Jun invited me.

“It’s an order,” Sagira clarified, “and this is my ship, so you have to obey.”

The five of us sat down to eat. Khalfan started the conversation.

"Guys, guess what I found!. Remember that guy whose hands we cut off?, I've still got them!, they were on a jar in the storage room.”

Jun sighed.

"Khalfan, what’s our guest gonna think?.”

"That we cut off hands!,” he laughed.

"He was holding a detonator,” Sagira intervened. “One of those detonators that explode if you let go, so we had to neutralize that threat.”

“Guys!," Jun nearly screamed. “Can we talk about something else?, please?.”

Awkward silence. This was exactly why I didn’t want to mix with people like them in the first place. When I remembered the kind of people they were and the kind of things they did, I could only hope they would repent one day and become better people.

Then I saw Oakley, bruised, chewing slowly because it hurt her jaw, and I thought of the tears that had just dried in my cheeks.

"Do… you guys like board games?,” I ventured.

More silence, but this wasn’t awkward silence, this was terrified silence. Jun was intrigued.

"What kind of board games?.”

"Classics. Uno, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Parchis…"

"Those are all good but, do you know what I really like?.”

Khalfan's smile had vanished.

"Oh no.”

"I like those board games that are complex, with lots of pieces and rules, do you like those?.”

“Catan?."

"More complex than that.”

"Risk?, Hero Quest?”

Jun shook his head, and slowly said:

"Have you ever heard of…”

Khalfan seemed to be in pain.

"Why why why…”

Jun smiled with a mischievous plan.

"War of the Ring?”

Oakley smashed her chopsticks on the table. Sagira sighed an looked at the roof, wishing she was somewhere else. Khalfan pinched the bridge of his nose and growled in frustration. I was utterly lost.

"I know War of the Ring,” I confessed.

Everyone muttered words of complaint.

"We are doomed Oakley,” Sagira said.

"We’ll get through this captain,” she replied in a playful tone.

"…but I’ve never played it,” I added, cautiously.

"How come?,” Jun inquired.

“All catholic priests like Tolkien, I don’t know why.”

“The books, sure, but the board game?.”

"It’s gonna sound super weird but… I like reading rule books for board games, even if I have never played them. Sometimes I enjoy that more than the actual game, I don’t know why. I’m weird… so yeah, I’ve read the rules for War of the Ring.”

"Do you wanna play?.”

“NO!," Khalfan begged me, “do not do it, please!.”

"What’s going on?”

Jun was happy to explain.

"You see, once we start we can’t stop. You can eat or go to the bathroom but you can’t sleep, you can’t do any other task, the game must be finished.”

"Doesn’t it take like four hours?.”

“Exactly."

"I mean… we have like 40 hours until we reach the next station, right?"

"It’s agreed then,” Jun declared, and honestly, when he said that I shivered a little.

“No!," Khalfan clamored. “I’m not doing this again!, I’m not playing in your team Jun!.”

"I’ll do it,” Sagira said with a mix of resignation and excitement.

“WHY!?," Khalfan demanded to know.

"It’s gonna be fun, the kind of fun you are glad you did but you don’t wanna repeat for a while.”

Oakley sighed.

"Well Sagira, I guess… if you wanna play, then I could play too, we could play the four player version.”

"You are all MAD!,” Khalfan accused us. "This job is just beginning and you wanna torture yourselves with an impossible game. You are all bad in the head and I am not that kinda doctor. Screw. all. of. you.”

Somehow, he was laughing again by the end.

We ate and we talked some more. Afterwards Jun went to his room and brought back an old box held together by many layers of tape and opened it to reveal a board and hundreds of pieces perfectly organized. The underside of the board was glued to magnetic plastic, the one used in fridge magnets, and every piece had been carefully fitted with its own little circle of magnetic plastic too. This way if we stopped accelerating the pieces would not float away.

We laid the board on the table, it barely fitted, and then we set everything up. It should have taken us a long time, but Jun had memorized where everything went. Which was crazy because that board has hundreds of sections with very weird names, but he knew exactly where each of them was.

We rolled dice to divide into teams and factions. Oakley and I would play with the Shadow Armies, while Jun and Sagira would play with the Free Peoples' Armies.

This is an asymmetric game, and it is one of the most complex games I’ve ever played, but the basic idea is very simple. The Free Peoples can win if the Ring Bearer makes it to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring without being corrupted. The Shadow Armies can win by taking a certain number of fortresses and cities or by corrupting the Ring Bearer.

The developers probably intended for the Free Peoples' player to move the Fellowship as a whole, so that they can withstand the corruption. Instead Sagira had the idea of splitting them up and making them leaders in many different fortresses. Also, instead of moving the Ring Bearer directly to Mordor, Jun would use him to activate all the nations and have access to their armies.

As a result, after an hour and a half of this Oakley and I realized we were fucked. Our huge armies were sieging like three fortresses at the same time, but we couldn’t take them because the bonuses from the members of the Fellowship were just enough to stop us. And sure, our armies regenerated and theirs didn’t, but they had numeric advantage because all their troops were together while ours were doing the long trip back from Mordor to wherever they were needed.

"We need to change our strategy,” Oakley told me during a snack break.

"Perhaps we should commit all the reinforcements to just one siege?,” I suggested.

"They will see it coming and send even more reinforcements… no, I think we need to forget about the sieges, split our forces, and take as many regions as we can."

"Oh, I see. They will not be able to recruit any more troops…"

"And then we can continue eroding their defences until the fortresses fall.”

"But what if they try to snipe our small detachments while they are taking the regions?.”

"Then we just send the Nazguls to give them combat bonuses. Come on!. We can do this!.”

And we did. We changed our strategy and after another hour and a half Jun and Sagira were on the edge. We had eight victory points. We needed two more to win. We could get them by just taking one more fortress. The problem was that we focused so much on taking regions and eroding defenses in the fortresses that we pretty much ignored the Ring Bearer, and now they were just one step away from Mount Doom… however they were also just one point away from being corrupted by the One Ring.

We attacked a fortress, we were just one good dice roll away from winning, but we lost. The fortress held, and now it was their turn. Again, we were just one dice roll form winning, if we could just corrupt the Ring Bearer, or if they didn’t roll any movement points… But we didn’t corrupt them, and they got the one movement point they needed. The Ring was destroyed.

“YEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!.”

Jun and Sagira were screaming and jumping, while Oakley and me were feeling the frustration. I threw my head back on the chair. Oakley made her hands into fists and shook them intensely, but then she calmed down.

"Well comrade, we did our best,” she said to me.

"And we came very close to victory.”

Jun stopped screaming and jumping with joy.

"You both were truly worthy adversaries.”

Then Sagira jumped on his back.

"And we look forward to beating you bitches AGAIN!.”

Then Jun ran around the room with Sagira on his back.

"Some other time,” Oakley proposed. "I don’t feel like playing this game again for a while.”

"Preach sister!,” I said in agreement.

"I hope…" Jun said, but he was gasping for air. He sat down to rest, but Sagira was still on his back, so she ended up sandwiched between Jun and the chair, much to Jun’s delight. Sagira escaped from this sandwich and sat down on the floor. Finally Jun had the breath to continue speaking. "I hope one day I can invent a game this good.”

"Inventing a whole game?,” I replied. “I can’t imagine how people do that, you have to come up with rules, see if they work, change them if they don't… I prefer to master one set of rules to perfection.”

"I never thought that priests would like to play board games,” Sagira told me, 

"Well, I may have an unusual job, but I’m just a normal person. Plenty of normal people have unusual jobs.”

“Hey," Oakley ventured carefully, "now that Khalfan isn’t here… can I ask how did you become a priest?.”

"I also want to know,” Sagira confessed.

"Me too,” Jun joined in.

“Well… Where should I start?. I grew up in a scientific outpost near Titan, just a few thousand people. We didn’t have many luxuries, resources were always tight, but we never lacked anything. We were happy. 

Then the Silence happened. I was too little to understand what was going on, but I remember my confusion. I woke up one day to hear my parents whispering in the kitchen with some of their friends. They were talking about the supply ships being delayed and not answering any calls. No one had been able to contact Earth for days. Complete radio silence. They talked about a lot of things I didn’t understand and don’t remember very well. They were circling this issue over and over looking for an opening but they never found it.

During the chaos I got separated from my parents and I met some… violent people as Oakley likes to call them. It was horrible. I used to go to sleep fantasizing about my parents suddenly crashing the walls like superheroes coming to save me… but of course that never happened…” I had a knot my throat.

“Do you want some water?,” Jun stood up, filled a glass and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I drank it. It didn’t help, but I had to continue. “I thought that torment would never end, but it did, thank God. After that I ended up in Erathipa, a cargo ship turned refugee camp orbiting Europa Station.

It was amazing… I mean, it wasn’t… It smelled horribly, there was very little food, the water tasted like poorly filtrated urine and blood, it was always crowded everywhere… But when I arrived they took my name and put it in a database. If I died they would know. ‘Here it says a boy named Jacobo should be around here, where is he?, what happened to him?,’ they’d said. They would look for me… They would at least know I had died.

Then I met her, mother Joanna. Who in their right mind would have entered that place voluntarily?. She would, she did. She was a nun, and she came with a host of people ready to help. They gave us food, clean water, medicine, they fixed the air filters which I didn’t even know were failing. All for free, all without asking a single thing from us. We would sneak out and steal the food they brought, because we didn’t understand… but they didn’t mind, they just asked us to share… 'Whomever stole the lentils, please share them!,' they would scream 'there will be more food!, we promise!.’

Mother Joanna, Father Michael, Lucas, Xochitl… All those people were so good and so pure… I wanted to be like them. I went to mother Joanna and I asked her to teach me. Then I started learning, I started reading, not just the Bible, not just about Jesus, but about the Church and its history, the councils, the schisms… There were many dark and shameful times in that history but, in the end… Millions of people searching and serving the ultimate truth for thousands of years… It filled me like nothing else, it inspired me.”

Everyone was in silence, appreciating, thinking.

Jun broke the silence first:

"Why didn’t they rescue the Pope?.”

"Back then Linus the Second transmitted regularly. He was on the move, running away form all the mess, trying to get to a space port. I guess they thought the allies who had helped the Pope up to that point would help him get to safety in Mars, Venus or one of the Langrangian points. In the mean time we needed their help in the refugee camps.”

“Like the refugee camp we just crossed?,” Sagira reminded me.

"You are right,” I admitted. “Millions of people still need our help, and for years we helped them. I followed Mother Joanna to Chichiwal, Kwalko, Eileithyia, Atahensic… We even helped the A.I. Kementari when she asked us for help.”

“She can go fuck herself,” Oakley declared.

"I said the same, but Joanna made us go anyway. Her people are innocent.”

“Debatable.”

“Regardless, during all those trips I realized our help wasn't enough, we were only nine people. We needed leadership, we needed an institution to coordinate the efforts of all christians. The main message of Jesus was to help the poor, the sick, those who suffer injustice, people in need. That's why we need the church.”

“But now it’s every cardinal to himself,” Jun observed.

“Exactly. Just like the United Nations the hierarchy of the Church was destroyed during the Silence. Now the Church has splintered into a million tiny communities who all hate each other because each one thinks the other ones are wrong.”

"When in fact they are all wrong,” Sagira pointed out. “Because no one is helping the poor.”

“Exactly!,” I was so happy they were getting it.

“It seems to me, that even if you find the Pope you won’t restore the church,” Oakley warned me, “not entirely.”

“I have to try.”

Silence again, and again, Jun broke it.

"Well, you are certainly the most altruistic client we’ve ever had… and the best at boardgames too.”

If I had known in that moment just how much Jun knew about altruism, I would have realized he was only being polite.

I woke up the next day when Jun called us for breakfast. Then Khalfan took his turn teaching me. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. He taught me how to apply a tourniquet, what to do if someone falls unconscious, how to treat laser wounds and other first aid topics. Luckily Mother Joanna had taught me the basics already, so I didn’t came at it blank.

Our lesson was interrupted just in time. Khalfan wanted to teach me how to do injections by injecting myself with saline solution, which I’m pretty sure is not how it’s done in medical school. Thankfully Jun screamed calling all of us to the common room, which had been transformed into a small auditorium.

The room was dark. The only light was the screen Jun had set up. We stood in front of it and his presentation began.

“Okay everyone, here’s the current job: to acquire a return pod. This is the only way to land and take off safely from Earth. Here’s where we are gonna get it form,” he went to the next slide and I saw it. I was speechless, it was too much of a coincidence. “Jabru Station.”

“Fuck,” I uttered.

“Yes Jacob?.”

“Nothing Jun, is just… I know the place… Some people there gave me money for this quest.”

“Well, sadly they didn’t give you a return pod, so we are gonna steal it from their army.”

“The army!.”

The others looked at me, tired of my interruptions, but I couldn’t help it. I really was surprised.

“Yes, the army,” Jun assured me, "specifically from their armory. They call it can armory but it's more of a series of hangars where they also keep small ships, mechs and things like that.”

“It must be the best defended place in all of Jabru Station… this is suicide…”

Jun had gone to the next slide showing a few maps of Jabru Station, but he didn’t continue. He put down his control and spoke to me again.

“I know you are new and you are only gonna be with us for a short while, but you are part of our company now. We trust each other completely, utterly.”

“I remember.”

"If I tell you this is the plan it’s because we can do it and get away with it. You have to trust me. Understood?.”

“Yes,” what else could I possibly say?.

Then Jun continued explaining the plan, and I didn’t say anything else.

After the explanation we went to the cabin. I looked up through the glass dome and there it was, tiny in the distance, you could have missed it in the blackness of the sky, but it was easy to find if you followed the long lines of lights stemming from it. These lines were the engines of ships nearing or leaving the station. The ones really close to it formed a swarm and made the station shine.

But that was all the observing I could do, now it came time for the flipping. Up to that point we had been accelerating towards Jabru, that’s why it was directly above us, but now we had to accelerate in the opposite direction and cancel the excess speed. Modern ships are bidirectional and that’s not an issue, but this was an old ship so it had to actually flip to point the thrusters in the opposite direction. This is a cumbersome maneuver and for that reason Sagira had ordered us to be in the cabin strapped to our seats.

We sat and we waited for a while. Sagira was doing something with the dashboard, frantically checking one screen after another over and over. At first none of us said anything, we were letting her do her job, but she was taking too long.

"Everything in order captain?,” Jun asked her.

“I'm trying to get us onto the approachment trajectory,” she explained, “but it’s weird. According to the ISO we should be in route, but the paths of all nearby ships seem erratic, no one is following the ISO except for us. There’s even one ship that’s just stationary.”

“Perhaps they rerouted the ships due to an accident involving that ship,” Oakley suggested.

“Perhaps,” Sagira conceded, “but there’s nothing in the public log, and the are no messages about this in Jabru’s official blockchain.”

“Do we have a visual on the stationary ship?,” Jun inquired.

“That's what I’ve been trying to get. The computer is struggling to get it for some reason, any moment now… there.”

The ship we saw was nearly a hundred meters in diameter, white and shaped like an icosahedron with spikes all around, but those were not spikes, those were mass driver cannons and thrusters. We recognized it as a military ship, a frigate, one of the few who had survived the many past and ongoing civil wars. None of that was surprising, instead what surprised us was the blue letters we could see on its white surface: UNUM.

“What the fuck is that doing here?,” Jun demanded to know.

“Maybe it belongs to Jabru?,“ Oakley suggested.

“But it still says ‘UNUM’," Jun refuted.

"Maybe they captured it recently,” Khalfan thought out loud.

“Shut up, I’m hailing them to know what’s up,” Sagira ordered us.

After a couple of seconds she got a text reply and she read it aloud.

“Apparently that’s the MS Anbay, and get this, temporary seat of government of the United Nations Ultraterran Mandate.”

After we heard that phrase there was a moment of shock, and then we all exploded into laughter. After a while Sagira held back on her laughter to continue reading.

“These guys… listen to this. Warning, you are approaching rebel controlled territory. It’s not safe.”

“They have to know how that sounds, right?,” I wondered.

“You have received the coordinates of a loyal base. Please go there. Failure to comply will result in your vessel being added to the database of rebel controlled ships. Who falls for this shit?.”

“What station they want us to go to?,” Khalfan asked.

“Ummm… apparently it’s called Februus.”

“That explains it. I know the guy. He is a petty warlord who used to be a captain in the UNUM navy. He is desperate to get some trade into his station so apparently he has resorted to scaring poor suckers who were heading to Jabru.”

"He is scaring people alright,” I pointed out, “everyone is avoiding the approachment lines to be away from them.”

“Why weren't we notified?,” Jun asked.

“I don’t know,” Sagira replied, “I tell you, there’s nothing in the official blockchain about this.”

“I mean…” Khlanfan told me, “people are avoiding them, but it’s a formality. Can you imagine if they attacked a ship in Jabru’s space?. Jabru would melt their station tomorrow.”

“Technically, they are fifty meters away from Jabru’s airspace,” Sagira told us.

“Well, I like formalities,” Jun declared, “get us inside Jabru’s airspace now, we can join the approachment lines later.”

"Roger that,” Sagira replied.

“Well, if you are not gonna flip the ship, I guess we can go, right?,” Khalfan asked.

“Yeah,” Sagira confirmed, “you can go to your rooms, I’ll call you in an hour or two.”

We took off our seatbelts and stood up. I called the elevator but then an alarm sounded, just for one second, before Sagira deactivated it.

I felt the tingling sensation of a fear rushing into my blood. I think we all felt it. Khalfan, Oakley, Jun and I turned towards Sagira who was still sitting on her chair. She looked at us with an emotion we still have no words for. It’s a mixture of fear, regret and pity. It’s the emotion you feel when you see someone who is about to die and there’s nothing you can do, but that someone is you.

“Sagira…" Jun begged with a knot in his throat.

“They shot at us,” she confirmed, “it's a mass driver charge.”

I know what you are thinking. The projectile was still thousands of kilometers away form us, couldn’t we just run away?. No, that’s what makes space warfare so horrible. You can be long dead before you actually die.

This is how Douglas explained it to me when I was a child. Imagine you are at the center of a sphere, that sphere contains all the places you could reach in the next ten minutes if you started running right now. Now imagine that sphere is inside a cone, the point of that cone is the mass driver charge. When the charge explodes its debris will continue moving, forming an expanding cone of smaller projectiles. 

When your enemy shot at you they calculated how far you could possibly go to ensure you will be inside the volume of the death cone and the projectiles will tear through you. The simple fact they shot at you means you will be hit.

“ETA ten minutes,” Sagira replied. 

“So this is the day I die,” I said to myself.

She took off her seatbelt and sat in the floor. We followed her example and we sat too. “What do we even do?.”

“I have heard stories of ships trapped in death cones,” Oakley said, “crews of thousands. They spent their lasts minutes sending messages to their loved ones, writing poems, fucking or killing each other.”

There was silence as we thought about that.

“I don’t feel like doing any of those,” Jun announced, and the feeling was mutual.

We sat in silence for a while. No one was saying anything.

“There’s something I’ve never told to anyone,” I announced.

“This is your chance,” Jun said.

“This is the story of the first friend I ever had, Noreen. I met her in the refugee camp. After the things I had done I thought I could never be truly human again, like there was a barrier between me and normal people, but Noreen didn’t know that. She talked to me like she would any other boy, and to my surprise I found I could respond to her normally enough. She saved me blankets and books, I got her oranges and headphones.”

“I’m happy you had a friend,” Jun told me.

“Well, one day she got a message from a stranger telling her that her father had survived, he was in a comma in Mars. I told her to stay, but she had this fantasy that her father would wake up and the first thing he would see was his daughter smiling in front of him.”

“What happened to her?,” Khalfan asked me.

“A few days later I got her message. Her ship was trapped inside a cone by an abandoned defense system. I can’t forget her voice and her tears. She was so afraid to die, so desperate to stay alive. I could never imagine how she felt in that moment, until now.”

“Does that make it better or worse?,” Oakley asked me.

“I don't know,” I replied, a small laugh pushing through my tears. “I just imagine the projectiles piercing through the ship, like rain, mincing every passenger, mincing Noreen. Hopefully her brain was destroyed before she could feel any pain.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Sagira reminded us.

“I'll try to make a note,” I promised her.

“I will never know the suffering of those I love,” Jun said. “In my next life I hope I can be something like a clam, or a coral. Something that lives a long uneventful life, so my soul can rest for a while.”

“I miss my sister,” Oakley said, “I hope I don’t disappoint her by dying so young.”

“I'm happy to die in this ship,” Sagira said, “I’m just disappointed I couldn’t finish it.”

“You always say it’s not finished!,” Oakley replied, laughing.

“It's not!,” Sagira insisted and laughed too.

“What about you Khalfan?,” I asked him.

“I just wish I could have killed a certain someone, but none of you know her.”

We stayed in silence for a couple more minutes but then another alarm sounded. This time Sagira didn’t silence it immediately, so the lights kept flashing and the sound kept wailing. 

“They heard christians resurrect and they want to double kill you,” Khalfan told me and for once I laughed at one of his jokes.

“It is weird they are shooting again…” Sagira stood up to check her screen.

“They are a little early, we only resurrect until the Day of Judgement.”

Then I felt as if a ghost was pulling on my blood. I couldn’t move, suddenly my body was many times heavier than before. We were accelerating as much as possible.

“Sagira!,” Jun managed to scream, “there's no point!.”

“There is!,” she screamed, “Jabru Station shot an interceptor charge!.”