Ghost Ship (2)
The report from the research vessel we had dispatched stated that the ghost ship was believed to be a vessel from the Dark Age.
The Dark Age.
In this game’s lore, it was an era so distant from the player’s timeline that it might as well have been another universe—spanning anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years in the past. It was the age when the ancient civilizations still thrived, young and burning with ambition… a setting that existed purely as backstory.
And as was always the case in games of this sort, the ships and equipment from that era boasted technology so overwhelming that the present day could not even begin to replicate it.
Of course, those who had never tasted Dark Age tech dismissed the whole concept as nonsense, scoffing that such things were impossible. But that was the talk of complete newbies—the kind who had only just clawed their way up to interstellar nationhood and still knew nothing about the wider galaxy.
Spend even a little time wandering the stars, and you learned—whether you wanted to or not—just how magnificent the Dark Age truly had been.
Take Alina, for instance, the saint who reigned over our office slaves. She herself was a hyper-advanced strong AI manufactured in that very era. And if I dug through my needlessly complicated, user-hostile UI, the national rankings would spit out those question-mark nations whose identities we still couldn’t pin down. Those were the living fossils that had preserved Dark Age technology intact—proof that the age had been real.
So when the report claimed this ship belonged to that era, I couldn’t hide my shock.
“A Dark Age vessel? That’s a jackpot if I ever heard one.”
“Right? If we’re lucky, we might even reverse-engineer the tech from back then.”
What I had thought was a free battleship event had turned out to be a ship plastered with ancient technology. And the report contained something even more important.
“…This doesn’t look like a battleship.”
“Why not?”
“They kept their distance in case of an attack and scanned it from afar. Apparently its size completely dwarfs any ordinary battleship.”
The moment I read that aloud to Riel, a new event message bloomed in front of my eyes.
In order to determine what the object truly was, you dispatched a research vessel to investigate. At last, the results have arrived.
Amazingly, aside from a few weld marks near the bow, nearly every part of the vessel is composed of materials found only on Dark Age artifacts.
Even more astonishing is the fact that—contrary to the initial report—the ship’s size vastly exceeds that of any modern battleship.
The problem is that this information has also reached other empires.
Having grasped the strategic and technological value of the vessel, neighboring nations have already begun laying the groundwork to claim ownership.
Option 1: We can’t just sit still either. (Proceed to linked event)
Option 2: All this fuss over a single ship? I don’t get it. (End event)
The exact dimensions still hadn’t been confirmed, but the moment I saw the event I felt a faint flicker of recognition from my previous life—something about a game event I had once watched.
If I remember right… this was the one where you could repair the ship and fold it into the empire’s fleet, wasn’t it?
The details were hazy after so many years, but if we did nothing, some other nation would snatch the prize right out from under us.
(Proceed to linked event)
I immediately summoned the Purge Squad members who had been about to hold a fanatical prayer meeting with their cultists in the basement of the Foreign Executive Ministry.
“You lot. Come do a job with me.”
“UOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!!!!”
“If it’s with the Minister, we’ll follow you to the edge of the galaxyyyyyyy!!!!”
After calming the over-eager maniacs, I sent them straight out to seize that magnificent ancient battleship—no, Super Dreadnought, or maybe even a Titan-class—for the empire.
“With the Purge Squad on the case, we can pretty much call that ship ours already.”
“Riel, never forget that complacency is the enemy.”
“…Is there something else going on?”
I answered while skimming the finer details of the report.
“Looks like the neighboring nations have already launched their own special forces to grab the ghost ship.”
“Still, most of them don’t stand a chance against our Purge Squad kids, right?”
I found myself nodding at her words.
“I honestly can’t imagine our Purge Squad losing.”
“Minister, that’s a death flag.”
“Ah.”
I hastily stuffed the words back into my mouth, watched the Purge Squad’s ships break orbit and head into the void, then turned back to the mountain of work still waiting.
“All right, let’s get back to business.”
“Even if an ancient ghost ship pops up, our workload never changes, does it?”
Just like always, we began grinding through the backlog one task at a time.
Only a few minutes had passed when—
I couldn’t hide my puzzlement at the call coming through my terminal.
“An audience request at this hour? From whom?”
I genuinely had no idea who would want to speak with me right now. Riel, standing beside me, looked just as clueless. Even while the channel stayed open I glanced at her, but she only shook her head.
Then the voice on the other end supplied the answer that only deepened my unease.
Hearing that name, my first reaction wasn’t curiosity—it was a sour mood.
From our perspective, the Prosnark were hardly a trustworthy bunch. They turned other aliens into soap at the drop of a hat. They practiced repeated genocide, and when it suited them they carpet-bombed innocent civilians and infrastructure from orbit without a second thought. And if they decided someone was inconvenient, they assassinated key figures of nations they weren’t even at war with yet.
“Understood. I’ll call back shortly.”
> "Understood, Minister."
I closed the channel and turned to Riel to discuss how we should handle this.
“Riel, what do you make of it?”
“Beats me. Honestly, I can’t even guess why the Prosnark ambassador would reach out to us at a time like this.”
That was the real problem—we had no idea what the Prosnark were thinking.
“Alina, have you picked up anything?”
“I did confirm that the Prosnark ambassador has been exchanging heavily encrypted communications with her homeworld recently, but the encryption is so advanced that decryption failed, small fleshling.”
Even Alina had nothing. I sat there fretting over how to respond.
PAUSED
To stop wasting time I hit pause and kept turning the problem over. The thought eventually crept in that this might be a Prosnark plot to assassinate me.
It’s not pure ego talking. Right now the Holy Sevelian Empire is basically being hard-carried by me. If the Prosnark want a chat, it could easily be a setup to eliminate a key figure. They’ve pulled that exact move before.
PAUSE RELEASED
I unpaused and voiced the suspicion to Riel and Alina.
“Riel… you don’t think the Prosnark are trying to assassinate me, do you?”
Riel’s reaction was immediate.
“Minister, isn’t that a little too full of yourself?”
She hit me with the “you’re being a narcissist” tackle right away.
“Well, you’re not wrong, but…”
“….”
“If the Minister gets assassinated it would be a disaster. What should we do about this?”
She followed the tackle with a two-faced flip so fast I couldn’t keep up. Giving up on her, I turned to Alina for advice.
“Alina, how do you think we should handle the Prosnark ambassador’s request for an audience?”
The high-intelligence AI answered in her usual calm, matter-of-fact tone.
“If you are concerned about terrorism or assassination, why not simply propose meeting at that place?”
“…Ah. There.”
The moment I realized which location she meant, I understood it was the single most effective venue imaginable against the Prosnark. I nodded and reopened the channel.
“It’s me. Arrange the audience with the Prosnark ambassador. Yes… tell them we’ll decide the location on our end.”
I had decided to go ahead and meet those terrifying Prosnark bastards after all.