Despite Jacob’s optimism that his incarceration would be over shortly, it wasn’t. Weeks went by without any change. He could have broken out at any time, thanks to the small void cannons tucked into the drone’s arms, but he didn’t want to resort to violence just yet. The cannons also used a huge amount of energy, and if he used them recklessly, the drone would run out of power and be at the mercy of his captors.
If it came down to that, he would rather detonate the small charge built into the weapons to keep them from falling into human hands. The last thing he wanted to do was kick off an alien arms race on Earth. When he had first looked into the personnel weapons of the Coalition, he hadn’t understood why they would build their weapons to self-destruct. Now it seemed obvious.
Void Cannons had given Concord a massive edge in military might, and keeping that edge kept them in power for hundreds of years before multiple species banded together to overthrow them. From everything that Jacob could find on the subject, it had been a close fight until something shifted the balance on the battlefield. While Jacob didn’t like what the Concord Imperium had done, he could at least respect their effort. That being said, he was in a bit of a pickle.
While the Chinese seemed the most accommodating, that turned out to be a ploy to make him more compliant. The so-called superior never materialized, and all Jacob got were promises that he would appear when he had time. That didn’t stop the interrogator's questions, which slowly went from innocuous stuff like where he was born, or which foods he liked best, to questions about how he had arrived back on Earth or where he had been since his abduction.
He would like to say he was surprised, but he wasn’t. He had been aware of all the sensors and devices aimed at him through the walls of his rather plush cell. The scientists working with those devices seemed rather annoyed that they weren’t getting the readings they expected. Jacob chuckled internally at that. While the suit wasn’t specifically designed to interfere with such scans, the material lining was rather radiation-resistant. Eventually, they would quit bringing in new pieces of equipment and stop playing nice.
Honestly, he was a bit surprised that none of the three nations had demanded that he remove his suit yet. That wasn’t entirely true. The scientists at all three locations had expressed concern about alien contamination or diseases when they thought he couldn’t hear. A few even mentioned being worried about him being able to breathe the local atmosphere.
That alone told him that not everyone in the research institutes was a complete asshole, just most of them.
There were also the issues of his abduction, which all three groups had asked about. Apparently, his disappearance, along with the others, was widely known among the intelligence community, but when Jacob searched the internet for information about it, nothing appeared. He wanted to ask them who he was, but he didn’t want to give away the fact that his memories had been tampered with. That would raise even more red flags aside from those already waving because he was in a robot body.
Honestly, Jacob was in no rush. The leadership of Earth was only inconveniencing themselves, while he was perfectly happy to get some work done back at the station until they made up their minds or he got sick of waiting around.
He left avatars in control of the drones, while he went back to the station several times during the weeks of incarceration and questions, to welcome more merchants, and even the first permanent station resident outside of the people who rotated through for the Bounty Association.
“Sha’la!” Jacob exclaimed when he saw the shorter tiyau port liaison step off the ramp of the latest merchant transport to arrive.
She came to a stop and looked at him in confusion for a moment. Likely because he was piloting a Barry drone and wasn’t wearing the awkward spacesuit. “Jacob?”
He nodded. “Got a much-needed upgrade thanks to one of my fellow humans.”
“Is that how tall you actually are?”
Jacob had to pause and think. His virtual self was a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters, but he had tweaked his proportions to be taller, one of the many benefits of being digital. The drone, on the other hand, was a hundred and seventy-five centimeters, which was probably closer to his original height.
“Close enough,” he admitted.
She grumbled something under her breath about how unfair tall aliens were before sighing.
Jacob decided to change the subject. “So, what brings you here?”
“I’m setting up shop,” she said with a big grin, quickly forgetting her vertical shortcomings.
Jacob tilted his head at her in confusion. “Why? I thought you were happy with your job at Vorlos Station.”
“I was, but then I made so much money, I was able to buy this beauty from a merchant I knew who was retiring soon. I made him an offer for the entire ship, along with his crew, and his company license, and he was more than happy to offload everything and head home to enjoy his twilight years with his family.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“None of his children wanted to take over the family business?” Jacob asked.
“Nope, they all had families of their own and didn’t want to spend the majority of their lives flying from station to station.”
“And you do?” Jacob couldn’t quite picture the diminutive woman captaining a starship.
“Stars no,” she laughed. “But I do like making money, so I hired a new captain to do that for me. I’m just here to establish my company headquarters. I figured that would make our deal much easier.”
“You mean so you could keep an eye on me and protect your investment?” Jacob asked pointedly.
“I can do both,” she said with a smirk.
Jacob shook his head in exasperation and motioned for her to follow him. He reduced his pace so she could keep up. Honestly, he welcomed the grey-skinned alien woman. As far as friends went, she was one of his better ones, which didn’t say a lot about his ability to socialize. Still, after their rocky start, she had kept her word at every turn and actually worried about him. It’s more than he could say for his fellow humans.
“So, how much did you spend on the ship? It doesn’t look very new.”
“Worried I got fleeced?” she asked in amusement. “Don’t be. The guy gave me a fantastic deal on the ship, even if it is outdated and in need of a full overhaul. I don’t suppose your shipyards are operational yet?”
“Technically, they are,” Jacob replied. “But I only have one recent design. The rest are from nearly a thousand years ago.”
“The representative’s ship?” she asked, and he nodded.
“I’m not an engineer myself, so I can’t say for sure if any of those systems would work with mine, but if you have someone who can make that distinction, I wouldn’t say no to some upgrades.”
Jacob had enough engineering knowledge that he could probably make that call, but he hesitated to agree. “I’ll see what I can do, Sha’la. Most of the incoming materials are geared toward producing more power cores, while the rest are earmarked for repairs of my own vessel.”
“I saw that behemoth when we were coming in to dock. That has to be the largest space vessel I have ever seen. You can’t tell me the materials required for my small ship will delay that thing’s schedule by much.”
“Days add up,” Jacob replied. “What if everyone who comes here wants similar upgrades. Ten days turn into twenty, and those turn into forty, the next thing you know, I’m years behind in bringing it to full operational status.”
“True,” she admitted. “Why not reduce the ship’s size then? That would free up both time and materials.”
“I thought about that, but there are two problems with that suggestion,” he said as they walked toward the commercial district. “The first is that the station doesn’t have the requisite blueprints to build a new ship from what remains of the old. And I certainly don’t have the skills to design a ship from scratch, which would mean hiring someone who could. That would take both time and money. I can’t imagine redesigning every single system aboard a vessel is cheap or easy, let alone reconfiguring an existing one of that size. That issue could be overcome, however, but the second issue is a showstopper, and that is the AI core.”
“What’s so odd about that?” Sha’la asked. “All ships have AI cores.”
The port liaison knew about his situation, but she didn’t know the full details because even Jacob wasn’t aware of them when he told her. He only learned about the strangeness of the core shortly before the judicator arrived, and that was only after looking over the full scan of the representative’s vessel, which held its own AI core, one much smaller and more limited than the stations or Melody’s
“The ship’s core runs through most of the substructure of the ship.”
She stopped and turned to him with a look of shock. “What?”
“My thoughts exactly,” he sighed. “It seems there has been a monumental shift in AI design since the Concord days. And before you ask, no, I can’t move my consciousness to another AI core. I already tried with the representative’s vessel after it shifted ownership to me. The Astryx systems simply aren’t compatible. I would need to find another Concord-era AI core before I could try again, and I somehow doubt that will resolve the problem, because the station’s core is similar in that it spreads through most of the station’s central section like a nervous system. I’m not saying it’s impossible to find an alternative, but it’s going to take an unknown amount of time, which means fixing the vessel is still my best option.”
They walked in silence for a bit before Sha’la spoke once again. “You know the Astryx government isn’t going to like you fixing that ship.”
He nodded. “The judicator made that point very clear, but now I also know what systems make it such a concern to the broader galactic community. I can’t leave all of them out, because some are integral to the ship’s operation, such as the oversized phase coils and reactors, but I can turn that additional energy toward something more productive.”
Maybe a shield rather than the radiation panels that were along the entire underside of the ship, essentially making it a floating nuclear disaster capable of projecting deadly radiation that could scour an area thirty kilometers wide with each low-orbit pass.
Jacob had known the ships were used for some dark purposes, but after finding out about those panels, he understood why the Astryx were so determined to rid the universe of them. It was a disgusting use of technology, and all it really did was dump the waste radiation from the reactor into the panels, letting it blast out naturally. He was in the process of eliminating that bypass, but he had a lot of things to test virtually before he would feel safe actually making the changes. Thankfully, that could be done toward the end of the repair process, which had a long way to go.
Sha’la let the topic drop shortly before they arrived in the market area.
She whistled as she looked around. “I’ve never seen a station so empty before. It feels wrong, but at least I get to pick my spot. I assume I get a friend’s discount?”
“Sure,” Jacob replied. “Full price, just for you.”
“What? Why?” she pouted.
“We can’t have people thinking you’re too friendly with a criminal, can we?” he laughed.
Sha’la grumbled that he needed to let that go, but she wasn’t truly upset. She picked the space right across from the Bounty Association and got to work purchasing items on the newly updated interfaces, which weren’t perfect, but were way better than the old ones.
Jacob could spend time improving the interface even further, but he spent most of his time in the virtual doing stuff, so he didn’t see the point, probably why the original system had been so bad in the first place. Everyone aboard the station during its Concord days would have been able to merge properly.
Once Sha’la got settled, she put in a buy order for a single crate of power cores. Jacob asked her why she didn’t buy more, but apparently, she was nearly broke after buying the ship and everything accompanying it.
He laughed at that, but he had to set that drone’s focus to the side as something was finally happening back on Earth.