Chalto thudded down the ramp into the unknown station. He wasn’t stupid; he knew the adjunct was using him for something. Likely something she wanted from this station, but he couldn’t figure out what.
He studied some of the eiraxin history before becoming a representative on their world, and even more after Xing’che had asked him to chaperone her atonement voyage, but he was not an expert by any means. Of course, he knew about their past; the council ensured all inducted species did, but didn’t share most of the council’s views on the matter. He suspected it was a fundamental difference in the way his species viewed violence.
Most people saw the borganians lack of open conflict as a sign of their passive nature and inability to understand tactical situations, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They failed to account for the fact that the lack of open conflict did not mean peaceful. Borganians did not engage in open warfare to the extent that most species did before reaching the stars, but they did have violent disagreements at times. Their conflicts were usually just small-scale or one-on-one affairs.
Chalto scanned the quiet, almost clinically bare hangar. It even smelled sterile, which meant nobody had been in the space for a long time. Chalto had been aboard many stations before landing in his role as representative, and they all shared the same issue. Even the best atmospheric scrubbers couldn’t catch every particle, and those got pumped back in when the atmosphere was refilled.
That gave stations a distinct smell, which his species was quite adept at picking up thanks to their highly developed olfactory senses. They used that sense of smell to find buried tubers, which were their main source of food on their home world. Most of the time, stations smelled of sweat, unwashed bodies, or fur, depending on the majority species aboard that particular station.
The borganians ability also helped them tell when people were lying to them, and had helped tremendously when the Astryx first approached them over a century ago. He glanced at the adjunct as she walked into his field of view. He suspected his nose would be helping him once again.
“Are you certain this is the correct station?” Chalto asked. “It feels abandoned.”
***
Xing’che knew what to expect when she arrived, but seeing the damaged ship sitting in the docking cradle still threw off her expectations. The fact that nobody had intercepted their arrival was also strange. She suspected the station AI couldn’t stop Chalto’s ship from docking because of its diplomatic credentials, but it had still been a gamble. She knew that the Astryx were still using the same diplomatic encryption from the Alliance days. Mostly because that change was baked into the existing Concord stations, which had been repurposed long ago, and nobody wanted to spend the time or energy to change a system that was working.
She shouldn’t complain too much. If it weren’t for legacy systems, her efforts to free her people would have been doomed from the get-go. The real question was, where were the station’s occupants? They must have returned by now, and there was no way they could have missed the representative’s ship docking.
“Are you certain this is the correct station?” Chalto asked. “It feels abandoned.”
She was about to respond when she heard a noise. Her head turned as one of the doors to the hangar slid open, and ten maintenance bots entered the room.
Chalto and Xing’che’s people tensed up as they noticed the bots were equipped with large plates of metal in the front, while others had poles attached to them.
Xing’che did her best to look surprised as well, but inwardly she sighed in relief. It was exactly as Commander Zyn’vak had said. She worried that they might have picked up and left, and while the station would assist in her efforts, the ship was her true goal, and if they had abandoned that as well, it likely meant it was beyond fixing.
The bots stopped about ten meters shy of the group. There weren’t nearly enough to form a solid wall, but everyone had frozen in place. Nobody wanted to risk being stabbed or run over by accident, and none of Chalto’s people were visibly armed.
A suited figure entered the hangar a few moments later and crossed the space in an odd gait.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the suited figure said as it stopped behind the other drones.
Chalto moved a few steps closer and cleared his throat. “My name is Representative Chalto. Who am I addressing?
“You can call me Captain Jacob.”
“Captain?” the man asked in surprise. “I apologize for intruding on your station, Captain Jacob, but I assumed it was operational. Your station AI seemed to think so as well, because it granted us landing privileges. I must confess that it may only be because of our diplomatic status, but it still stands. We only wish to rest for a few days, refuel, and then we will be on our way.”
The figure seemed to consider the answer for a moment before responding. “Fine,” it replied grudgingly. “Just be aware that your people are restricted to certain areas and the station has limited resources. I can provide refueling for a fee, but I will not be sharing the limited foodstuffs with you. If you can accept those conditions, you will be allowed to remain.”
“That is an acceptable offer, Captain Jacob,” Chalto replied with a nod.
***
Jacob had been in contact with the station AI the entire time he made his way to the hangar, trying to find a way to revoke their access, but without them actually breaking the restrictions he set upon them, he could not get the station to send them packing, which was frustrating to no end.
Being the station head really didn’t mean much if he kept coming across rules he couldn’t enforce, and there were more esoteric rules and directives than he could count. He really wished he could just replace the damn AI with something better, but it wasn’t as simple as changing a few lines of code. If it were, he would have done that by now. Maybe mix in some of the remnants left behind by Melody and hope for something a bit smarter, but that was a risk. If he messed up the AI, the automated systems would take over, but if something went wrong with them, he was screwed. There was no way he could operate the massive station by himself, or even with the help of the other humans.
He had confiscated the device that the eiraxin soldiers had used to kill Melody, but it was useless without the code that he had snuffed out to save himself. Rebuilding that code was not something he was even remotely qualified to do. That meant he was stuck working within the restrictions of the current AI. That being said, he was going to have to figure out something eventually.
He was sick of having to work around material and system limitations. A good example of that was the shield generators. If he could have flown deeper into Astryx space and wasn’t limited by the range of the relay satellite, he might have been able to find a station selling a larger shield generator. Ideally, he would buy one specifically designed to enclose an entire station, but he suspected that would be prohibitively expensive, so he made do with what was available.
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Okay, enough self-pity, he had work to get done and guests, and while he had addressed the strange gorilla-like representative, he hadn’t missed the stunning eiraxin woman standing next to him. Her body’s response to seeing him had been entirely too enthusiastic for his taste, and put him instantly on guard.
She could have almost passed for a human in the right light or circumstances. Her skin was slightly more reddish in hue, but not something that would have been out of place in certain regions on Earth or for a beachgoer who spent a bit too much time in the sun. The soldiers who had attacked Melody’s core had a similar complexion, but their skin had been a much more vibrant pink, almost a rose color, which would have made them look out of place on Earth. The similarities to humans made him wonder, but not enough to approach the woman and ask her about it. He suspected that was exactly what the woman wanted.
After laying out the rules, Jacob turned around and left the group to their own devices. He pulled the drones back and positioned them at the entrances to areas he didn’t want them accessing. If the station couldn’t stop them, the drones would. Then he sent in the unmodified drones to ‘refuel’ the ship.
Really, he was sending them in to get as detailed a scan on the vessel as possible. If he couldn’t get rid of them, he might as well get something useful out of the deal, and it would help him keep an eye on them.
After doing as much as Jacob could to keep them from causing trouble, without actually attacking them, his thoughts turned back to the eiraxin woman. She was here for something, and he suspected she wasn’t going to leave without getting it.
As the drone was heading back to its charging cradle, Jacob took a moment to pop back into the apartment to alert his fellow humans of their new guests.
“I wanted to notify you all that we have some diplomatic guests on board. I would recommend avoiding them if possible, but if you can’t, please be civil. The last thing we need is a diplomatic incident.”
Jacob could have kept the information from them, but with them exploring the station in their new bodies, there was the possibility they would come across the aliens at some point, so he figured it was just best to tell them now instead of hiding the fact.
Katherine had been in the middle of eating, and her spoon had frozen halfway to her mouth when Jacob popped in and dumped this information on them. “Aliens?” she asked in concern.
“Yes,” he sighed. “But just think of them as people. You’d be surprised at how normal it is to interact with them.”
Barry looked intrigued by the news, but Franky looked uninterested.
Perhaps that was for the best, he told himself. The three needed to experience aliens eventually, since the station was going to be crawling with more soon, so best to get them acclimated now.
There didn’t appear to be any more questions, so he nodded awkwardly and disappeared from the apartment to continue working on the shield emitters so he could ignore the new problem that had just landed in his lap. Maybe it would resolve itself?
When he popped into the drone stuck to the outside of the station, it felt the weight of responsibility lifted off his shoulders, then again, that might just have been the weak gravity. Either way, he looked around and admired his work. With the dozen new bipedal drones, work was proceeding at twice the speed. His efforts were only hampered by the drone ships, or lack thereof. The station had been able to produce two of the bus-sized drones, and a third was on the way, but they took far more time and materials to produce than the normal maintenance drones, so he couldn’t just build as many as he wanted.
Jacob had been preparing to take another trip to Vorlos station, but with the damage to the transport and his guests, he would have to postpone that for now, which would set his plans back a few days.
As much as he tried to push those thoughts out of his mind as he worked, they kept floating back to the surface of his mind. The eiraxins wanted something from this station and Melody’s hull. Given what type of ship Melody was, he doubted they had anything noble planned. He believed what the commander had told him, but he didn’t believe it was the whole truth. The man was a soldier, but the eiraxin woman was different. You didn’t arrive with an Astryx diplomatic envoy unless you had actual clout to pull strings.
If he left things the way they were, she would have the advantage. He grumbled and hopped to the drone he had left in the control center.
Even though the others had agreed to his proposal to open up the station, Jacob hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. He had been procrastinating because he knew inviting outsiders would change things, and he wanted more time to prepare and protect the station. The station had plenty of defensive weapons, but according to Hallik, they weren’t very effective
Jacob figured there were enough weapons that he could just focus on a single target at a time to let that damage add up. What the station lacked were defensive shields, which is why he had focused on adding those. The eiraxins’ return changed things. He needed to stop whatever they were planning, but he had limited knowledge and tools to do so.
“If you can’t beat your enemy fairly, change the rules,” he said quietly as he activated the comm system and contacted Hallik.
When the amuni man’s face appeared on the massive viewer, he was covered in dirt and what looked like blood.
Hallik squinted at the picture. “Jacob, is that you? Why is your image so tiny?”
Jacob mentally slapped himself and adjusted the zoom so the control room’s camera was centered on him and not the entire floor. “Sorry about that. I haven’t had time to adjust the new comm array since installing it. Is this better?”
Hallik nodded as one of his hands wiped away the viscera from his face. “What’s up? I’m kind of busy at the moment.”
“I can call back if this is an inopportune time,” Jacob said.
“No, just hold on a moment.” The view shifted before Jacob could respond.
Jacob heard Hallik yelling to one of his people, then more shifting, before his face came back into view. “You’re calling about the offer I made, aren’t you?”
Once again, Hallik was perceptive. Keeping him on the line was something a used car salesman might do. Jacob sighed. “Yes. I’ve spoken with my fellow humans—”
“—You saved them?” Hallik asked in shock.
“I did.”
“That’s amazing news. I’ll make sure to celebrate your victory, but let’s get back on track. You want to accept my deal?”
“I want trade,” Jacob corrected.
Hallik didn’t seem offended by that; in fact, the man laughed. “Fair enough. As I said, I know a few merchants that might be interested, but Sha’la might be a better contact for that. What about my other request?”
“If the station is going to open publicly, I don’t see why we can’t host the entity that provides your contracts.”
“Smart,” Hallik said. “That way, bounty hunters don’t have free rein.”
“You don’t seem all that upset about it.”
Hallik shrugged, and something wet and fleshy fell from his shoulder to splat on the camera. The man flicked it away and wiped the screen clear. “Sorry about that. We were busting up an illegal animal fighting ring, and some of the owners turned the animals against us in an effort to escape. It didn’t work, but the bigger critters required explosive ordnance to deal with. As for having restrictions, why would I be? I may be a bounty hunter, but I work within the law.”
“There will be weapon restrictions as well,” Jacob added after hearing the man’s story.
Hallik chuckled. “I wouldn’t expect any less. Now I really do have to get back to work. I’ll reach out to my contacts and let them know you’re looking for trade, but you should speak with Sha’la yourself.”
Jacob thanked the bounty hunter and closed the call. He did take his suggestion and contacted Sha’la, but she wasn’t available, so he left a recorded message.
Once he was done, he returned the display to the security view and watched the new arrivals filter out of the ship to stretch and explore the hangar. None had left it so far, but that would only be a matter of time.
“AI.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Monitor the individuals from that ship. If any of them go near the restricted areas, let me know right away.”
“Would you like me to document that as a preference for all ships going forward?”
Jacob thought about it for a moment. “Can I change that preference later?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Then do it.” It would become annoying as the station got busier, but it was better to be safe than sorry. With the AI watching them, Jacob would know if they were up to anything suspicious. He was mostly concerned about the eiraxins present in the group, but he didn’t know if the other aliens were allied with them or not, so better to keep track of all of them.