Jacob spent about an hour fine-tuning his plan to get the framework from either Chalto or his captain. He considered asking Barry, but the man was lost in his own world, not that he would be much help since he eschewed using the drones. That left Katherine, but he quickly dismissed any assistance from her. Her opinion on aliens was far stronger than he had assumed. Unless his intent was to kill the aliens, which it most certainly was not, she would only be a liability.
Getting the framework off the corpses would be simple, but killing a representative of the Astryx sounded like a good way to eliminate any chance of surviving the judicator’s arrival.
After another hour of fruitless plans, he finally figured out a solution to his problem. It was such a simple solution that he should have considered it first, but he had been too focused on stealing the item that contained the framework. He didn’t actually need to steal the item; all he needed was a scan of it, and the AI could do the rest.
That was assuming the device was inert and unpowered, which he was almost certain it was. If he was wrong, well, he could go back to the drawing board, but he decided to move forward with the assumption that he was correct.
Jacob redirected one of the unmodified maintenance drones to where the representative and the rest of the aliens were staying. He would have gone in his bipedal form, as that would be less intimidating, but the sensors on that form were not as robust as the ones on the maintenance drones, and the modified drones were busy guarding key intersections to keep his guests from wandering. The extra armor and impromptu weapons he welded to them made them slow and ponderous, even more so than their unmodified counterparts, so they were useless for almost any other task.
If they could fire weapons by themselves, they might still be useful for something other than a barrier, but he was having little luck changing that code. He hadn’t even located the code in question yet, as there were billions of lines of code to go through, and he hardly understood what any of it did. The station AI could not assist. Heck, it didn’t even respond when he queried it about the code; instead, it immediately reported to headquarters. Thankfully, the comm system was still offline, so all the AI got was an error when trying to send an alert about his unauthorized query.
Once the drone neared the alien holding area, he popped into it and piloted it the rest of the way. It didn’t take long for people to notice him, and those nearest the drone shied back in concern. Even the representative and the crew tensed as the drone slowly approached them. He could have warned them ahead of time, but he was annoyed after spending the last few hours trying to break into their ship.
“Representative Chalto, how are your people doing?” Jacob asked in a pleasant tone.
“Captain Jacob?” the man asked tentatively.
“Yes. I am remotely controlling this unit as I am busy elsewhere, but I wanted to check in with you.”
“We are doing as well as can be expected, Captain, but your station lacks—How do I put this delicately? Any creature comforts. Do you and your people not enjoy such luxuries?”
Jacob could tell the man was fishing for information, but that didn’t bother him. The longer he talked, the more accurate the scan would be. He could have just left the drone there without conversing, but he thought that might look suspicious, and the man was likely to wander away from it if it just sat there.
“We do,” Jacob replied. “But we have only recently recommissioned this station. Creature comforts were low on the agenda of items to produce when we arrived.” Technically true, although he had access to his apartment and all that went along with it, including the simulator his friend had owned, which sat unused and collecting virtual dust. It felt a bit too weird to use a simulator in a simulation, especially when he already had access to something like merging and a much more advanced training simulator.
“I see,” Chalto replied. “Would it be possible to purchase some bedding and other necessities to make our stay a bit more comfortable?”
That was a good question. While Jacob and the others didn’t need such things, the station would soon receive more alien guests, so it would be worth looking into. “I will need to see what the fabricator has material for and get back to you with a list that you can purchase from.”
The station had a banking system, but it was based on the Imperial Mark, which was apparently Concord’s defunct currency. Jacob didn’t want to open that can of worms, so he popped over to his body inside the security office, while keeping a virtual window open to the drone conversing with Chalto. It wasn’t the first time he had split his attention like that, but it was the first time he had done so from within another drone. It felt weird, but it wasn’t causing him any strain, so he left the window open.
“AI, does the station have any allowance for currencies other than the Imperial Mark?”
“Yes, Captain. However, I am not able to access the central exchange to determine exchange rates for low-order species currencies.”
There was that term again. It annoyed him that the AI’s creators had added their own prejudices to the AI.
“What about peer species?” Jacob asked.
“The only peer species I have on record, Captain, are the t’uk, lau, and eiraxin, but their currencies were phased out during the founding of the Concord Imperium, and the Imperial Mark was established as a means to keep all three races equal and to stop the constant conflicts between the three signatory races.”
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Jacob was surprised to hear that the signatory species didn’t get along. He wondered what made them decide to join forces to become something even worse. Then, something else the AI said registered.
“Wait… You were made before the Concord Imperium existed?”
“Yes, Captain. My core was commissioned two hundred and thirty-seven years before the Imperium was established.”
“How long did the Imperium exist before the war broke out?”
“Seven hundred and forty-six years, Captain.”
Jacob did the math and gaped.
“Does that mean this station is almost two thousand years old?” Jacob asked in shock.
“Not quite, Captain. This station was built one hundred years after the Imperium was established. My core was brought here then.”
That was still old as hell. Jacob wanted to query the AI further, but he was on a mission at the moment, and he could tell representative Chalto was getting annoyed by the small talk he was feeding through the drone to keep him occupied.
“AI, did you ever query Vorlos Station? I’m sure they have some sort of exchange.”
“Yes, Captain. The exchange rate is a week old, but that is within Imperium regulation.”
Good, that meant he didn’t need to turn the comm array back on. “Use that and my sales data from the power cores to determine what their currency is worth, but don’t convert it to local currency until a purchase is made.”
“Do you wish to include any conversion fees, Captain?”
“No, let’s not do that for now.” He probably wouldn’t ever do that, but it really depended on how the AI reacted to using the trade standard currency instead of Imperial Marks. He wasn’t even sure if the Astryx currency had a name since it was just digital transfers.
“The currency exchange is in place, Captain. Is there anything else?”
“Yeah, get me a list of items that you can build that are available for the general public.”
The list was massive. Jacob had to remind himself that the station was designed to house an enormous number of people.
“Remove any of the items that would cut into the materials used to build power cores.”
The list shrank, but not as much as he had expected. There were even food items on that list. Jacob removed those for now, since he hadn’t been lying about how limited their food reserves were. He had only purchased a small assortment of proteins and other items, in case they got unwanted guests that needed to be held for a bit.
Now he had those unwanted guests, but they brought their own food, so they could use that up first.
Jacob quickly finished up and popped back into the maintenance drone. “I believe I’ve taken up enough of your time, representative. I’ll make a list available on the cafeteria console shortly. You will need to register as a guest before you can make any purchases.”
“Thank you,” Chalto bowed slightly.
Jacob programmed the drone to head back to its work zone, then he popped back into the apartment and pulled up its scans. He quickly discarded the bio-scans, then sent everything else to the station AI to sift through. “One of the scans should contain the framework needed to decode the program we were discussing earlier. Once you find that, let me know.”
“Command confirmed, Captain.”
Even with the AI working on the issue, it still took seven hours before it located the framework. The item wasn’t in a card like he might have expected, but a plain ring that Chalto’s captain was wearing. Jacob hadn’t even noticed the jewelry, because Chalto’s species liked to walk on all fours. The ring was also colored to match the same dark olive green skin on their hands, which was much darker than the rest of their skin. At least the skin that was visible outside their clothes.
Once Jacob learned about that, he took a look at the other members of Chalto’s crew. The three massive ones had similar rings around their three meaty fingers, but unlike the captains, they were connected together. Jacob knew a weapon when he saw it. On Earth, they would be called brass knuckles, but whatever material they were made of certainly wasn’t brass. It had to be extremely hard to withstand the abuse of being scraped against floors constantly.
As much as Jacob would like to know more, his alert beeped. The ring had been completed by the fabricator and had been delivered to the ship.
Jacob pressed the item to the touchscreen, and it lit up, asking for a code. It took the AI less than three minutes to determine what the code was. It flashed onto the touchscreen, and he felt the ship shake slightly.
When he went around to the hatch, he smiled. It was open. The airlock must have been pressurized, because a cloud of dust was billowing away from the entrance.
The inner entrance to the hatch opened with the same ring and code combination, and Jacob stepped onto the ship. He wanted to jump with joy, but he needed to make sure there weren’t any other hidden surprises aboard.
The first thing he located was the cargo ramp. Jacob couldn’t open it at the moment, as the ship was too precariously balanced, but that would be fixed soon. He already had drones coming with massive hydraulic cylinders to stabilize the vessel.
The cylinders were normally designed to open and close the massive blast doors aboard Melody, but he had modified and repurposed them to act as jacks to lift the ship. He had faith that they would function just fine for supporting the ship and even raising it enough to replace the damaged and fused landing strut. If not, he still had the ramp he constructed from broken junk aboard Melody. That would give the drones more height if they couldn’t quite reach.
The interior of the vessel was impressive in how comfortable it felt. The only thing he had to compare it to was Melody, the station, and the stolen transport, and none of those could be called inviting. Even the VIP suite he took for himself on the station lacked any sort of amenities other than a pile of dust where a bed had once been. It was all cold metal walls, floors, and ceilings.
The representative’s ship was the complete opposite. Outside of the airlock area, the walls were covered in earth-toned panels that both softened the space and absorbed sound. The floor had some sort of rubberized coating that had just a bit of give to it without making walking difficult. It was colored in more muted tans, making it appear like you were walking along a sandstone path instead of a ship’s corridor.
Even the ceiling was colored in a sky blue, the lighting hidden, but seeming to move across the surface, almost like a real sun. It was a rather interesting effect, but Jacob continued down the corridor until he found the bridge.
The bridge was secured with a different code, but it didn’t take the station AI long to crack that one either.
Jacob was glad the copy of the ring had a connection address for the AI to access. If it didn’t have remote access, he would have had to cut each security point out and have the AI scan them manually, the same way he had with the one on the hull.
The hatch slid open silently, and Jacob stepped onto the nerve center of the ship. He took in the workstations, designed for the gorilla-like aliens rather than a standard humanoid, and sighed. He had been hoping for controls similar to the ones on the transport, but everything was different. It was going to take a bit to figure everything out. Without dragging his feet any longer, he moved to the first terminal to inspect it.