“Jacob!” Katherine yelled as she stormed into the kitchen.
Jacob froze, the spoonful of cereal paused halfway to his mouth. Maybe if he didn’t move, she would go away? The glare she leveled his way told him otherwise. He sighed and put down his bite of food. “What now?” he asked tiredly.
“Don’t give me that attitude. Why are the alien ships still hanging around? The message you sent us said you convinced them to let you live, but when you finally reactivated my drone—don’t ever take that away from me again—I went to the control center and saw the alien ships were still here.”
“Oh… right. I forgot to mention that.” To be fair, he had a lot going on, and neither Katherine nor Barry was responding to their direct messages. Barry was lost in whatever project he was working on to the exclusion of all else.
Jacob understood the man was singularly focused, but he found the lack of communication to be extremely annoying. Katherine hadn’t responded because she was rightfully mad at him.
“First of all, I warned you that I had to power down all the drones. It wasn’t like I removed your access to any other systems.”
“It’s not the same,” Katherine declared.
She wasn’t wrong about that. It’s why he spent so much time in the drones instead of hanging around the apartment.
“As for your other question, I may have avoided a death sentence, but that doesn’t mean I’m free from suspicion. They are using the inclusion of trade and the Bounty Association as an excuse to keep armed forces here to protect their assets.”
“That has to be illegal!”
Jacob shrugged. “For all I know, it is. I’m not exactly an expert in galactic law. I only studied legal precedents that might help with my unique circumstances.”
“Tell them to get fucked then,” she said angrily.
Jacob rolled his eyes. “How exactly would I do that?” he asked. “Did you suddenly develop a weapon system capable of breaching military-grade shielding?”
Katherine opened and closed her mouth, but didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
“Besides,” Jacob continued, “their presence makes us safer.”
She must have realized he was right because she stormed out of the kitchen.
Jacob shook his head and went to take another bite of his food before a voice from behind him spoke, surprising the shit out of him.
“Jacob, do you have a moment?” Barry asked.
“What the hell, Barry! First, you ignore my messages for days, then you sneak up on me?”
“You should have seen me connect to the apartment log,” Barry replied in confusion.
Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Barry, I’m not watching the logs constantly. Who would even do that?”
“I do that,” Barry replied.
Of course he did.
“What do you want, Barry?”
“I need access to the production line.”
“For what?” Jacob asked suspiciously.
“The project I’m working on,” the man said cryptically.
Jacob shook his head. “If you want access, I’m going to need more than a vague statement.”
Barry thought about it for a bit before he nodded after coming to some internal resolution. “Fine. I’ve been designing new bodies.”
“Why?” Jacob asked.
Barry looked at him like it should be obvious. “Jacob, I’m going to be blunt, your design sucks.”
“Ouch,” Jacob replied. “I know it’s true, but hearing it said out loud still hurts.”
“So can I have access?” Barry asked, skipping over the devastation he had left with his previous comment.
Jacob wasn’t surprised by that. He suspected Barry wasn’t good with people for some time. Nobody who could spend so long meditating while completely ignoring everything going on around them could be considered sociable, but Barry took that to the extreme.
He shook his head in response to the man’s question. “Still not good enough. I need to see this design and the parts list. We don’t have that many resources, and I can’t risk you introducing something dangerous to the station. You can blame Franky for that.”
Barry crossed his arms and glared at Jacob, which came as more of a shock than his surprise appearance in the kitchen. It was the most emotion the man had shown since Jacob had met him.
“The design belongs to me,” Barry replied firmly. “If I show it to you, what’s to stop you from stealing it and building it yourself?”
“What?” Jacob asked in surprise. “Why would I do that? And why does everyone think I’m some scummy jackass? No, I won’t steal your design, but I doubt my words hold much weight. AI?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Can you register individual patents?”
“Not without access to headquarters, Captain.”
That was less than ideal. Then he remembered that the Astryx ran on a form of capitalism. They must have some way to protect intellectual property.
Jacob navigated the Astryx legal system as Barry waited, arms crossed. It didn’t take him long to find a system to register inventions. Jacob opened the window in his apartment and pushed it toward the waiting man.
Barry pored over the legal document with the same thoroughness that he did everything, which meant it was going to take time. Jacob didn’t mind waiting, because he wasn’t actually waiting. He left a virtual avatar in the apartment while he went to check on the final repairs for the ship.
The hangar was still in ruins, but the exterior door had been made functional again. He turned to the ship, which floated inside the space. He realized why Concord didn’t have tools designed to prop a ship up. They didn’t need them when they could simply turn off or control the gravity inside a hangar, suspending a ship easily. All that time he spent creating supports to prop up the vessel for repairs was completely pointless.
It galled Jacob that he hadn’t thought of trying that; it was the same thing with the tethers for keeping tools from floating away while working in space.
He had to remind himself that he wasn’t an astronaut, nor a mechanic. Everything he was doing, he was figuring out for himself, and there were bound to be mistakes along the way. It didn’t help that the Concord Imperium did things vastly differently. They didn’t do spacewalks for one, or if they did, there was no record of such practices. Everything was done through drones, with the proper tools permanently attached to the machines.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Jacob only learned about tethers when he saw an over-the-top Astryx ad about some energy drink. The individual in the ad literally clipped himself to a ship and jumped into space to rescue the drink after it escaped from the pouch on his suit. That was when Jacob noticed all the other tools the suited figure was wearing had handy retractable ropes attached to them to keep them from doing the same thing as the can.
The ad didn’t bother to explain why an astronaut would need a canned beverage in space, or how he was expected to drink it without suffocating, but that wasn’t the point of the ad. Jacob didn’t care about the point of the ad either; what he took away from it was the tethers. It was such a logical solution to a problem that he wondered if the information had been erased from his mind.
That was the worst part of memory loss. He never knew if what he was learning was something that he had already known in the past or something actually new.
Jacob paused and took a moment to calm himself before he got angry at Melody once again. The AI was dead; there was no point wasting time being mad at a computer program that was just following its programming.
Once Jacob was centered again, he checked in on his apartment avatar. Barry was still reading the document, so he had time. The repairs hadn’t taken very long after Jacob had dedicated as many drones to the problem as feasibly possible.
The damaged landing strut had been completely removed, and the new one looked nearly identical. The only difference was the metal’s color. Instead of the standard metallic silver that the other one sported, the new one was the same bronze coloring as the transport had been.
While Jacob had taken the time to get a full scan of the ship and could recreate it from scratch, it would take time to reconfigure the smelters aboard the station to produce many of the materials that the vessel was composed of. The metallurgical testing showed that the removed material was actually weaker than the bronze-colored metal.
Jacob was sure the material had some other quality that made it more ideal for landing struts, but he didn’t think it would make a difference in the short term. He only planned to retrieve that moron Franky from Earth, then the ship would return to the station. He didn’t need it for transporting goods, so it would likely sit for quite some time until he needed it to visit Vorlos. The merchants would be arriving in a few weeks, and once they did, all material transfers would be handled by them, freeing Jacob up to fetch Franky and work on the station and Melody full-time.
Speaking of, the ship bringing the Bounty Association crew had arrived earlier in the day, but they were currently docked with the judicator’s vessel, likely getting briefed on the situation before the majority of the Astryx fleet departed. There was nothing Jacob could do to harm them, so keeping an entire fleet on standby was overkill. He did wonder how many ships they would leave, but even one was more than he could deal with.
Jacob hadn’t forgotten about his prisoner either. His chats with Adjunct Xing’che hadn’t really gone anywhere. She spent most of her time trying to convince him to help her people. To allow them at least a guarantee of safe passage on the station and equal rights.
It seemed like such a simple request without any context, but once you knew the political ramifications of her request, it made things so much more difficult.
He almost wanted to agree with her just to spite the Astryx, but he had to think things through. The station was a monumental opportunity, not just for him, but for Barry, Katherine, and maybe even Franky if the man could be convinced not to be a complete asshole once he was returned to the station. There was also humanity to think about.
If Franky reached Earth, there was no going back from that. Humanity would finally know that there were aliens out there. What they did with that information was up to them, but he would be remiss if he didn’t help humanity navigate the new situation somehow.
Jacob still didn’t know what form that support might take, but he would figure that out after he figured out how much damage Franky’s reckless stunt had caused.
“I can agree to this,” Barry said, pulling Jacob’s attention back to his avatar.
The man quickly provided all the relevant information and registered his patent with the Astryx. Once he was satisfied, a virtual representation of what the man had been working on appeared in the kitchen.
The new form wasn’t as advanced as Jacob had feared. When Barry first told him he was working on a new body, Jacob had been picturing some metallic skeletal monstrosity, like seen in some of the action movies he remembered. Instead, it looked rather harmless.
Its head was a nearly featureless oblong dome that only barely resembled the shape of a human skull. There were slight deformations where the ears and mouth should be, but besides that, there was nothing. The head was attached to an actual spine, not just a rod shoved through the entire frame.
The torso was covered in an off-white, almost dirty cream-colored material that was partially transparent. Jacob could see the vague shapes of devices lying beneath the surface and even the occasional blinking light. The drone wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests, that’s for sure. Even if Barry’s choice of material didn’t make the thing look like a ghoul, the barrel-shaped chest didn’t help matters. Despite that, it was still smaller than the drones Jacob had designed and built.
The legs on the new drone were just bare metal, with exposed pistons and armatures covered by safety shields. It gave the overall impression that the drone had skipped leg day.
When Jacob moved, the head followed him smoothly, and he looked at Barry questioningly.
“I’m controlling it at the moment. The previous automation controls weren’t sufficient, and I haven’t had time to fix them.”
Jacob winced internally at that. He had spent a lot of time working on the current controls. Barry wasn’t wrong; however, the controls were shit, he knew they were, but they worked well enough so he never set aside the time to improve them.
“What’s the torso made of?” Jacob asked as the robot twisted to follow him.
“It’s a flexible polymer I located in the parts catalog. It resists cracking, tearing, deformation, and cold. It’s the same stuff used in the central layer of the space suits.”
“Does that mean these bodies can go into space without the suits?” Jacob asked excitedly. While he was sure the more flexible form would be a huge upgrade in and of itself, not having to wear the bulky spacesuit would make work so much easier.
“No,” Barry admitted. “I would have to cover all of the exposed metal and integrate far more robust thermal management systems into the drone to make that a reality. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find more efficient systems that are small enough to fit into this design.”
“Okay, I get that, but why leave any exposed metal at all?” Jacob asked.
“The exposed spine and legs assist with thermal management. Sort of like a heat sink. Separating the head and torso also reduces signal noise on the sensors.”
“I can’t imagine you stuffed all the same sensors in that space as what’s in the current model, so what sort of sensors did you include inside the head?”
“Video, audio, thermal, chemical, infrared, ultraviolet, lidar, radar, and electromagnetic spectrum scanners.”
“That’s all,” Jacob joked. “Did you leave anything out?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Barry replied, missing the joke entirely. “I removed any sort of life-sign/bio-signature detector. I figure with some clever programming, the other sensors can reproduce those results, if not on the same level. I didn’t add a sonar either, because taking the drone in the water would be ill-advised. While it is water-resistant, it is not waterproof. I didn’t include any sort of neural, energy, targeting, threat analysis, IFF, structural integrity, or external power monitoring sensors either. Those systems were simply too big or too complex to integrate into the space available.”
“I-I didn’t even know we had access to that many types of sensors,” Jacob admitted. He really made a piss poor engineer. “Are the current maintenance drones capable of all of that?” He probably had the information stored somewhere in his mind, but with so much added data from Melody, finding it would take longer than just asking Barry.
“Some of them. The drones don’t have the neural, targeting, threat analysis, or IFF sensors since they are meant for repair work.”
Okay, now Jacob didn’t feel so bad about not knowing about some of those systems. He hadn’t done much research on the combat drones apart from the weapons.
“I’m impressed,” Jacob replied honestly. “We are still low on supplies, so I can’t just give you free rein to make as many as you want, but I will authorize you a limited run of three units. One for each of us.”
“Why would I make more than three?” Barry asked. “Unless you are expecting to retrieve Franky with your upcoming trip.”
Jacob assumed the man wanted to sell them, but he thought about that for a moment and realized that didn’t make a whole lot of sense since there was no real market for humanoid robots that could be controlled through merging. Now he felt stupid. “Forget about that. How do you know about my trip?”
“An educated guess that you just confirmed. I don’t know why you care about Franky. The man will likely never change.”
“I don’t actually care about him,” Jacob admitted. “As for him not changing, you are probably right.”
“Then why waste time on him?”
“I don’t honestly know. A feeling of responsibility, perhaps? I can’t just leave him out there to cause problems, not when it was my fault that he stole the ship.”
“That is true,” Barry admitted. “Well, good luck with that.”
The man and his drone vanished a moment later, and Jacob could only shake his head at the man’s harsh comment and quick disappearing act. Barry got what he came for, and that was all that mattered. He wouldn’t change in a day.
Jacob authorized the materials for three drones. If he got lucky, maybe one of Barry’s new drones would be ready before he departed for Earth.