Jacob avoided the aliens as much as possible because he didn’t want to get caught up in more of their political bullshit. He was already being pulled in too many directions as it was. Before his abduction, the only things he needed to worry about were a few bills, getting to work on time, and maybe some chores.
New, he was rebuilding a fricking starship to stay alive, saving and helping his fellow humans get on their feet, which wasn’t always a smooth process.
He was also working with Sha’la and Hallik to get the material orders placed for the eventual merchants who would be coming out to the station, which meant also monitoring the production queue of new power cores.
There were station upgrades, so he could actually defend himself instead of just being a target for anyone and everyone. Since the station already had weapons, he was focusing on the shield generators. Representative Chalto’s arrival proved that there were still voids in his understanding, and he needed to spend more time looking into that. Meanwhile, he was trying to convince the AI that the representative’s credentials weren’t legitimate.
He wasn’t ready for this level of responsibility, but there was nobody else who was capable of doing it.
It didn’t help that his efforts were hitting a wall with the AI, and he wasn’t sure how to proceed on that front. It wasn’t like he could reprogram the damn thing, which meant he had to be careful around Chalto. Jacob didn’t know exactly what power the diplomatic credentials gave the man, since the damn AI refused to tell him, but poking around the edges of that control seemed to suggest it was quite extensive. You could say he was being shortsighted by avoiding the problem, but Jacob liked to think of it as out of sight, out of mind.
He didn’t want to give the aliens any more reason to dig into him, his situation, or his ship. It wouldn’t take long to figure out he was in control of such a dangerous vessel.
That being said, if they had stormed aboard the station armed, like the eiraxin soldiers who had boarded not too long ago, he would have handled the issue far differently. So far, they hadn’t done anything to warrant such an approach. There was no point in making enemies if he didn’t need to, and he certainly didn’t want to leave a black mark on the station’s reputation before it opened to outsiders. If they did cause trouble, he was ready to deal with it.
The Frankenstein drone that Jacob had built wasn’t anything special. He realized he needed something a bit more modern than just crude spears and shields if another group of armed idiots boarded the station. He only had one of the modified maintenance/combat drones because the weapons required some of the same components as the power cores to create. He didn’t want to waste too much of his dwindling resources on these new drones, when they would be of better use in producing more cores to buy additional materials. He also doubted the modified drone would hold up to an actual combat drone, but it was better than nothing.
There was another restriction that made only a single drone viable. When he realized he didn’t test that possibility back when he was looking at arming the drones with small arms, he had slapped himself. As it turned out, using the weapons required complete attention from a merged individual, which was not ideal. It meant he needed to come up with a way to control multiple drones simultaneously, without splitting his mind, bypass that restriction entirely, which was in place to prevent an AI from going rogue and using drones to kill people, or giving the others access.
Jacob wasn’t entirely opposed to that last idea, but there was a large gulf of trust the others needed to cross before he would ever give them access to anything other than their low-level roles. And even if or when that happened, that would still only give the station four armed drones.
Unfortunately, the station didn’t have any blueprints for actual combat drones, which would have made things much easier and not consumed even more of Jacob’s limited time. He suspected all of that data had been wiped when the Alliance took control of the station. The only reason the station knew how to fix Melody’s hull and build the small arms was that the blueprints had been stored inside the dead AI’s core. He was thankful the AI thought those plans were important enough to keep, or he would be really screwed.
He was happy that he had options and happy he didn’t have to use them, because the aliens weren’t doing much of anything. And just because Jacob was avoiding the aliens, that didn’t mean he didn’t keep tabs on them through the security feed. He would have watched them constantly, but he was already splitting himself dangerously thin, and their presence had forced him to put the transport repairs on hold.
Jacob fired up the surveillance cameras. He assumed the aliens would be attempting to get past his drones the first chance they got, but they hadn’t gone near those sections. Most were staying within the hangar or working on the ship, while a few were roaming the corridors close to that hangar, being nosey, but just the normal kind of nosiness people have in unfamiliar environments. The station AI was monitoring them as well, and Jacob had given it quite a few trigger conditions so it could alert him even when he was busy elsewhere.
He watched the workers inspecting their ship with amusement. The AI had given their vessel a clean bill of health, but he also understood that looking at something yourself could go a long way to easing any anxiety.
“Trust but verify,” he muttered before continuing.
It felt awkward going through the video feeds outside the virtual apartment, but he didn’t want to come off as overbearing and intrusive while the others were still getting used to their new bodies. The AI was monitoring them as well and would alert him if they got into trouble or needed assistance.
He really needed to figure out how to project a screen into his vision while piloting the drone.
He felt like he was close to figuring that out, and that might just be the key to creating a duplicate avatar to control multiple drones instead of just splitting his mind. He could currently operate eight drones at a time if he split his mind, but it also required the drones’ internal programming to pick up most of the slack, and that programming is what prevented them from firing weapons. He could hop between drones, and he was forced to on occasion to keep track of everything going on, but each connection took valuable time. Doing that with the armed drone would cause the previous drone to stop firing. Not exactly ideal in a combat scenario.
He glanced up, and even though he couldn’t see through the wall, he knew Barry’s drone was still sitting lifeless outside the security office. The man was a bit of an enigma to Jacob. When Jacob first managed to leave the virtual world for a drone body, he barely went back. Sure, it was nice spending time being human, but even with the impressive simulation of life the Concord Imperium had created, the virtual space felt hollow to him.
To each their own.
Jacob shook the thought away as he scrolled to a new feed. The new view showed a group of the same gorilla-like aliens as Chalto. They were tentatively exploring the rooms near their hangar.
After watching them for a few minutes and seeing nothing of interest or concern, Jacob moved on to the next. The eiraxin couple was making out in a side room, and he quickly moved to a different feed.
He didn’t need or want to see where that was going. The next image showed two more eiraxin women. Jacob recognized one of them immediately. It was the same one who had the calculating gleam in her eye when he met with Chalto.
The pair was sitting at a table in one of the large cafeterias, playing a game that looked a bit like Scrabble, but with colored and lettered cubes instead of tiles. The pieces reminded him of the wooden blocks that children might play with, only smaller and more finely decorated.
Jacob was curious about the game, so he zoomed in closer and studied it in more detail. Then he groaned.
It wasn’t a game at all. It was a message to him. A row of blocks was sitting in a line with a very specific sentence spelled out on them in eiraxin.
“Captain, can we talk?”
She knew he was keeping tabs on them. He suspected she would be the one to approach him, and it looks like he was right.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Nope,” he said, flipping away from the feed.
Her unorthodox attempt to contact him proved that she wanted to get him embroiled in whatever nonsense she had cooked up. His first instinct to avoid them at all costs had been the right one, it seemed. He didn’t want to pit himself against the unknown eiraxin woman or make an enemy out of the Astryx, so he would avoid her like the plague until they finally left.
With his daily voyeurism out of the way, he hopped out of the body in the security center and went back to work.
Thankfully, not everything that was going on was an annoyance. Hallik and Sha’la had both gotten back to him, and the news was good. Word of his power core deliveries was getting around, and the demand for the premium cores had actually gone up, driving the price even higher.
Sha’la was ecstatic about that, because she made more money, but also because it had been easy for her to line up trade contracts for the station. Had she not been the only independent source purchasing the cores, he doubted it would have been that easy to convince people. The problem was that the trade contracts she was making were for his station and not the one in Vorlos. It also didn’t help that Jacob’s station was way out in the ass end of nowhere.
Still, ten merchants had picked up material contracts to deliver goods in exchange for power cores. That would alleviate a lot of his bottlenecks. It would have been so much easier if the Concord shipyard were not situated in deep space, far from any system, and with no access to materials outside of the beat-up transport. Jacob would still have a few months before the first shipments arrived, but his current stock of materials would last a few more weeks, and he could make one more run with the transport, once it was fully fixed, so he was fine with that.
Hallik’s news, while not as profitable, was still good. The mercenary had spoken with a few of his colleagues and contacts. Unlike Sha’la, the amuni man wasn’t able to convince any merchants to risk such a trip, even with the promise of Xalos-equivalent power cores. Considering Jacob and his operation were a complete unknown, that was a hard sell, even for the outgoing amuni man, and Hallik didn’t have the same standing as Sha’la did when it came to trading. Hallik was able to convince the Bounty Association and more than one of his colleagues to set up shop on their station, so that was something.
Jacob still didn’t know how he felt about that, so he did a little digging on the Bounty Association. At first, he thought it was just some third-party entity that accepted and distributed bounties for the Astryx Council, but it turned out the Bounty Association was part of the Astryx government, similar to the US Marshals, only with less oversight and vetting, since bounty hunters weren’t government employees but independent contractors.
It didn’t take Jacob long to figure out why the Astryx had set up such a system. Why bear most of the cost of finding and apprehending criminals when you could offload it to private enterprises? A few less-than-savory individuals joining the association was a small price to pay when it meant saving billions every year, probably even trillions, given the size of Astryx-controlled space. Finding out that the Astryx was composed of dozens of different species and covered nearly a twentieth of the galactic arm that Earth was located on was a bit of a surprise.
Jacob couldn’t recall the name of the arm, not because the memory was stolen from him, just because he never paid much attention in science class. The only thing he remembered from those lectures was that it was considered a minor arm of the galaxy. That’s the only reason Jacob even recognized it on a map when he was comparing their borders.
During that search, he also learned more about the dead zone. It was no wonder humanity had never detected alien signals. The area of space that the Concord Imperium had destroyed cut straight across the galactic arm and ran for hundreds of light-years. Earth was not in the center of the dead zone, but it was well within that area of space. Only sheer dumb luck and maybe sabotage aboard Melody had stopped Earth from joining all the other dead worlds.
Some of the worlds must have recovered or were spared as Earth had been, but if they were on the same level as humanity and were using radio to communicate, it would probably be decades before anything popped up on sensors back on Earth. And if they had transitioned past crude radio, like the Astryx members, humanity would never know, because they couldn’t detect faster-than-light communications.
That did leave one burning question unanswered. What was on the opposite side of the dead zone? It was clear that space was chock full of life, so he did not doubt that other species existed past that void in space. Perhaps he would find out after he fixed Melody’s hull.
***
Franky double checked the cameras in the room to make sure Jacob wasn’t watching. There was no conveniently blinking light or anything to indicate they were active, but Franky had discovered a little trick to keep track of the man’s surveillance. He pinged the local power converter, thanks to his technician access, and asked for a power draw report. Only four people had access to station systems, so it was easy to tell when the power draw increased, even minutely.
The report came back, and Franky grunted in annoyance. The man had been watching a few minutes ago, but his daily check was over with, because the power spike had ceased.
While it annoyed Franky to be spied on, he was glad that Jacob was so damn predictable. If they had been opponents in a game, Franky would have destroyed him without even resorting to any underhanded tactics.
He chuckled at that thought as he made his way to the job terminal. One of his favorite methods for defeating his opponents in tournaments was getting them banned. It wasn’t easy, but he had perfected the method over the years. A small USB stick with a restricted program and auto installer was all he needed. He would wait until the person was distracted with something else, usually some hot woman that Franky paid to flirt with them. Then he would reach behind his computer, pretending to check his cables, then slip the device into their computer. Most tournaments had people who would verify any programs that were running on a device after a match; once such a program was discovered, that person got banned, and even if they beat Franky, he still won.
Certain tournament setups made that approach impossible, but he had other methods. A keyjacker was another classic of his. It was a lot like a keylogger, but was specifically designed to kick in only when a certain program was running. It would hijack the keyboard input at random times, and either delay the response or simply omit the key press entirely. He always chuckled when he saw his opponent blame their keyboard or mouse for the intermittent issues, if they ever noticed them at all.
Franky had been forced to stop using the USB method a few years ago after someone got busted for doing something similar in another gaming tournament, but he learned how to get around that issue rather quickly.
Social engineering was much easier to implement and hide his direct involvement. Once he learned how to do that, he never looked back. Sending people random emails never worked; people were wise to that. What did work was getting a hot girl to flirt with his opponent. They would give the guy a fake name and get his target’s email address or even phone number. Then Franky would send them an email or text from that ‘girl’ with a link to some random chick’s racy photos. Once they clicked on that link, he had them.
The best part was that he could do it weeks or months in advance, as long as he knew who was in the tournaments. He always hid an activation date in the programs he built, keeping the program inactive until the day of the tournament. Since the programs were handcrafted and tested by him, they weren’t on any anti-virus registry or publicly available, making it rare that the infected computers ever caught the program in time.
And even if they did detect it when it activated on the tournament day, what were they going to do?
Unfortunately, tournaments were beginning to wise up to all the cheating, so some were starting to ban any outside devices and required all attendees to use tournament-provided resources. Franky avoided those tournaments, or he would have been higher ranked. Part of the reason was that the risk of losing was too high, but also because he had a very specific mouse and keyboard setup that he liked to use, and the tournaments weren’t going to offer the specially modified devices.
He shook away the memories as he reached the terminal. Over the last few days, he had queried the AI relentlessly to learn what he needed to do after the alien chick gave him an idea, although he would never admit that to anyone. As it turned out, it was rather easy to jump ranks, especially when your direct boss was dead, and no other candidates were vying for the position.
Franky checked the terminal and smiled, seeing that his efforts had paid off. He was now a Maintenance Supervisor.
When he checked his new authority, he cursed. “The fuck is this shit?”
He still didn’t have access to the hangar. The AI wouldn’t provide him with information on the security clearance of each level either. He had to hope that the Maintenance Manager role would give him the access he needed, or he was going to have to come up with another plan. He couldn’t go any further than that because the only other role before the Head of Maintenance was the Maintenance Director. Since that role reported directly to Jacob, it meant Jacob would be alerted if Franky suddenly asked to be promoted to that position.
That wouldn’t go over well for Franky.
Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to wait days this time for the role approval. “AI?”
“Yes, Maintenance Supervisor Franky D?”
“There is some emergency maintenance that needs to be completed, but I don’t have access to those areas, and our manager is gone. I would like to request to be the interim manager until the position is filled or my application is accepted for the position.”
“One moment while I verify your request.”
Franky knew this was a gamble, but he was betting that the AI was just as stupid as he thought it was. If it wasn’t and actually checked the station to find where the supposed emergency maintenance was required, he would be shit out of luck.
After a tense wait, the AI finally responded.
“Interim Management role approved. I have forwarded your request to the Maintenance Director for review.”
If Franky’s drone had a mouth, it would have been smiling ear to ear. He checked his new authority and couldn’t help but chuckle. It said he had full access to the hangar, but he wasn’t about to trust a system that Jacob controlled.
He made his way through the maintenance corridors and stopped at the same pressure hatch as before. Without hesitation, he opened the hatch and stepped inside. The AI was silent as he stood there, and the ship that would be his escape was still parked where it had been the last time he visited.
He smiled in triumph. It was time to move forward with his plan.