Once Jacob was relatively certain that the ship didn’t contain any nasty surprises, he pinged both Barry and Katherine to start moving their storage units aboard.
Neither person responded, which was annoying, but he did see Katherine enter the hangar a few minutes later, pushing a flat four-wheeled cart that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a home improvement store.
She had to maneuver around some of the damage on the floor since she had come through the maintenance tunnel and not the main hangar entrance, but she managed it without too much issue.
Jacob could have been petty and made her wait at the airlock after her little outburst and refusal to communicate, but he was better than that. Okay, maybe he wasn’t above being petty if the situation warranted it, but that wasn’t right now.
The inner airlock opened, and Katherine went to push past him, but he stepped in front of her cart to stop her.
“What?” she asked in annoyance.
“Where’s Barry?”
“How the hell should I know?” she replied. “I’m not his mother. If he wants to dick around, that’s his problem. Now, are you going to move so I can start installing these?”
Jacob shuffled out of the way of the cart. “There’s a storage room toward the rear of the vessel. I’ve already marked the correct terminals for power, but you need to wait until one of the drones brings over a power converter before plugging them in, or you’ll burn out the data cubes.”
“Fine,” she said, pushing past him without another word.
Jacob didn’t know if she was still angry at him for what he said last time or the fact that he had the station AI watching her, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have time to find out what the temperamental woman’s problems were.
He went back to the bridge and began familiarizing himself with the controls.
Much like the transport, the vessel required more than one crew member to fly correctly. Unlike the transport ship, the representative’s vessel wasn’t set up to transfer controls to a single station. There wasn’t any option to merge with the ship’s systems either, which he couldn’t quite understand.
The Concord Imperium had merging technology centuries ago; it should have seen improvements similar to what he saw in ships and weapons, not be completely absent. It made sense that the entry hatches didn’t have it. Nobody wanted people remotely accessing your ship controls. He even understood why the beat-up old shuttle that the eiraxins came in lacked that functionality, but this was a high-end vessel. Jacob hadn’t seen too many alien ships since being abducted, but he had seen enough from his trips to Vorlos Station to recognize that.
Representative Chalto’s ship was not a junker. If it wasn’t clear from the pristine hull, the complete lack of scuff marks on the tough flooring was further evidence that the ship was either brand new or extremely well cared for. A new ship belonging to someone with enough political clout as the representative would certainly have the best systems money could buy. So why didn’t that include mind/machine merging?
Controlling a ship using your mind or even a part of it was a vastly superior option to manual control. Even Jacob could tell as much after experiencing the difference over the last six months. He really needed more time to dig into galactic history and find out just what the hell happened during the Concord War and after because he was obviously missing something. That didn’t mean he was entirely ignorant; he had done some research after learning about his predicament, but that was more focused on the legal ramifications rather than history. He could save himself some time and ask his prisoner, but she could just lie to him, and he wouldn’t know the difference. Besides, she was highly biased.
Jacob pushed those thoughts aside as he continued looking over the ship’s controls. He was going to have to make a copy of them and upload it to his virtual storage for Katherine and Barry to practice with. He would have replaced all the controls with the more familiar ones aboard the transport, but he doubted there would be time to retrofit the vessel properly.
What he did instead was build a slightly modified drone that more closely resembled the representative’s form. It was still bipedal, but with much longer arms and a more hunched stature, making it far more adept at using the ship’s controls properly.
He wasn’t even sure if the original bipedal drone would have the flexibility to operate the controls of this alien vessel.
Once the ship got out of range of the station, Katherine and Barry would have to take turns piloting the craft. They weren’t going to like the experience of jumping into a drone used by someone else, but they were going to have to get over that.
***
Katherine finished installing her storage units and sighed. She really wanted to punch something, but the only thing worth punching was the data cubes she had just installed. That wasn’t an option. She had already punched Barry after he told her that he wasn’t planning on leaving, but the act of punching someone in virtual reality did little to improve her mood, and the man hadn’t even reacted to her assault. She hadn’t planned on punching Barry when he asked to speak with her; it just sort of happened when he told her he planned on staying on the station. And like most stuff she did, she regretted it immediately afterward, but was too stubborn to apologize.
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How could he think that staying was smart?
She knew that leaving was the smart choice, but after Barry had declared his intent to remain, it felt like she was abandoning the only people who understood her situation. She didn’t want the only other person to know what she was going through to be Franky. The thought of having to confide in that man made her sick.
The best-case scenario, Franky got himself killed before reaching Earth, leaving her as the sole survivor of this god-awful nightmare. Being alone with her condition would suck, and probably drive her insane at some point, but it would still be preferable to having to do it alongside Franky. Not that a man like that would allow competition. If she was right about what he was up to, there was no way he would leave her alone.
Katherine chuckled at that thought. Franky was going to be in for a hell of a surprise when she showed up in a much nicer ship that was both armed and shielded, instead of that old junker Jacob had shown them a virtual image of.
The thought of rubbing that in his face almost made abandoning Jacob and Barry worth it. She had been on the fence about Jacob for some time, and she still was, especially when it came to his opinions on aliens. The effort he had put into getting them off the station had changed her mind about him being some sort of controlling psycho, however.
She was still pissed at him, though, and that wasn’t likely to change any time soon. How could he be so goddamn nonchalant about being dead and digitally recreated? Barry was similar, but that was also different. Barry was a full-blown nerd, and the lure of a shiny toy was enough to distract him from the truth of what they had gone through.
Jacob didn’t have that same sort of obsession about him, and by his own admission, he had spent months alone with the AI, Melody. Katherine couldn’t even contemplate how horrific that was. She had only been dealing with their new reality for less than two months, with others who were in the same boat, and she could feel herself fraying at the edges. Barely a night went by without her hyperventilating, crying herself to sleep, or waking up because of a nightmare. Even the knowledge that she didn’t need to breathe or sleep did little to help her calm down.
Only her anger washed away the dread and fear that she felt, but she couldn’t keep going like that forever. She could tell that her attitude was driving a wedge between her and the others. Well, mostly Jacob. Barry didn’t seem to care one way or another.
Katherine took a moment to pop back into Jacob’s apartment and calm herself. She had her own place now, but she didn’t like spending time there. Franky hadn’t been wrong about the room feeling like a prison, even if she had expanded it slightly to have more space.
Once the slight panic attack subsided, she popped back into her drone and decided to go apologize to Jacob. If she was going to leave soon, she didn’t want him to think she hated him.
Apologizing to someone was not something she would have considered back on Earth. If she were back home, she would have just cut the person out of her life instead of facing the issue. She had burned plenty of bridges and former friends that way. Some who deserved it, but many others who she now realized were just looking out for her. At the time, she felt they were holding her back or trying to control her life. By the time she realized they were trying to help her, too much time had passed, and she couldn’t bring herself to say sorry. Coming to terms with her death had led her to examine her past mistakes. There were so many she wished she could change.
To say that she didn’t like what she saw would be an understatement. She needed to learn to be a better person before she ended up like a female version of Franky or worse.
She knew that apologizing to Jacob would be the first small step in a long process, but she needed to start somewhere, so she headed to the bridge. When she stepped inside, she froze and forgot what she had come there to do. There were three of what could only be described as mechanical gorillas standing around the room.
One of them turned toward her, and she had to fight down the urge to flee. “Jacob. What is this?”
“These are drones, shaped to better work with the ship’s systems.”
“I gathered that much,” she replied flatly. “Why do we even need them? Can’t we connect to the ship’s systems as we do with drones?”
“Apparently not,” Jacob replied through the drone’s speaker. “Either the merging process was less widespread than I believed, or the technology was abandoned at some point.” He made an awkward shrugging motion as he said the latter.
Katherine ignored the grinding whine from his drone’s motors. They both knew the drones weren’t designed to handle certain movements, but they were both guilty of forgetting that limitation and doing it anyway.
“Sorry about that,” Jacob apologized. “So, what brings you up here? I would show you how the ship functions, but I’m still working on that with the AI.”
Right. Katherine had come up here for a reason, and now she was hesitating. She wanted to shake her head, but she stopped herself. The limitations of the suited drone both annoyed her and let her focus rather than waffle in indecision.
Why can’t admitting I’m wrong be as easy as shooting aliens?
Jacob waited silently while she worked through her hesitation, which caused her annoyance to spike. Katherine wanted him to ask what was wrong again, so she didn’t have to initiate the conversation, but he had already given her an opening, and she was stalling. She pushed those negative thoughts to the back of her mind and tried to imagine that Jacob was just a boss in a game that she had to defeat.
It was ridiculous that she had to resort to such childish measures to converse with someone properly; she was a grown-ass woman, she should be able to communicate like an adult.
“Um—,” Jacob began to ask as the silence dragged on.
“—I came to apologize,” Katherine blurted out, cutting the man’s question off before she could look any dumber than she already felt. Before he could respond, she quickly continued. “I shouldn’t have been so short-tempered and angry with you lately. Our situations aren’t your fault, and I realize now that you are doing everything in your power to make things better.”
“Um…thanks,” Jacob replied awkwardly. “Does that mean you’ve changed your opinion on the aliens?” he asked hopefully.
How could he be so damn innocent and forgiving after everything he went through?
Jacob reminded Katherine of a puppy. She almost hesitated to shatter his optimism. Almost. “Don’t push your luck,” she replied coldly. “I know it’s not rational, but I still blame them for everything that’s happened to us.”