2-6
I was standing on the bridge of the ship watching the giant space dock ahead of us. It was a giant ring floating in an asteroid field. There were ships shooting away from it deeper into the mass of floating stone and some coming back to dump their load of material. The giant ring would open up and the ships would disappear into its side. I could see it producing all types of ships.
Guardian Wannaniki shifted from where he was sitting at one of the consoles, “So whats the plan here?”
Owl pointed at the giant ring, “I am going to buy an orbital facility I can throw into lagrange point two. It will save me a whole lot of time having to build my own.”
“Are those things even up to your standard of tech?” I had to ask.
“No but refurbishing them and building a whole new one are two completely different things.” She answered.
We floated closer with Owl at the helm. She must have been talking to them or something because she knew where to land. The ring opened up and Owl navigated us into the ring. We landed in a line up of ships, like a parking lot of a major business. Owl gave us a nod and left, leaving me with the four aliens on the ship.
I leaned up against the wall of the kitchen and watched the four of them eat. This time it was a weird looking slug thing that let out a little cry as they cut into it. I couldn't wait to get back to our home planet and get something to eat there, I didn't really need to eat but I could still feel the emptiness of my stomach and it wasn't happy. They seemed to enjoy it though.
“What can you four tell me about your planets?” I asked the group.
Lahrya, the blue lady, paused in her eating, “Well, my home planet is tropical. It's very humid and most of it is covered in water. Most of our cities are built around the equator.” She waved her eating utensil around, some six pronged thing that looked like a tiny mace, “we don't do too well in the cold and we enjoy high humidity levels.”
“Their government is the most interesting part of their culture” ,Guardian Wannaniki said between bites. He must have liked that food quite a bit because he was eating it with enthusiasm.
Lahrya nodded, “Everyone gets a say. When your twentieth turn under our sun happens you're allowed to debate laws that pass. Any law that gets passed gets torn apart by our whole species and then we vote it into effect. That's just on our home planet though, we have some other colonies that are different. We have one that is run by a corporatocracy. If you end up there you can become a dept slave and work a few hundred years of your life away. The older people of my species see it as a learning experience of the younger. I find it amusing.”
“How old are you? What do your people consider old?”
“I am a little over two hundred years old. My people consider anything over nine hundred years old. If you breach a millennium, you're ancient.” She replied to my question.
“My people are very shut in.” Sahluya, The lady with reddish skin and tentacles hanging from her head said. “We like to keep to ourselves.”
“They are very mercantile. They believe they can sell anything.” Lahrya threw out.
Sahluya glared at Lahrya and Guardian Wannaniki chuckled, “You might not get much from her. What Lahrya said was the truth. If you had some credits she might sell you the information. They are not really shut in people. Prying any kind of information from them takes credits and they can face fines for not taking the right bribes. There's a whole culture around what kind of bribes are ok and what you need for under the table means.”
“That sounds like a mess.” That earned me a glare from Sahluya.
Guardian Wannaniki shrugged, “It's very intricate. The Guardian that patrols in their space has a few degrees in law. It's mandatory to navigate the bureaucracy of the place without offending anyone or selling yourself into slavery.”
I chuckled, “Glad I'm not Owl then. That's more her area than mine.”
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“You think Owl will be able to navigate their laws easily?” Guardian Wannaniki asked.
Sahluya had been watching our conversation. Her head was bouncing between the two of us. “I think they are going to try to screw her over once or twice then shes gonna end up owning the whole planet.”
Guardian Wannaniki nodded his head, “Your faith in your companion does you well. It shows character.”
Faith.. Right.. Owls mind terrified me. We had been teleported to who knows where and it took Owl a half an hour to come up with a plan to get us home. A plan that was working too. I dont think this trip really affected her. We were on the way home and Owl was out right now buying groceries so she didn't have to cook at home.
“We live on something of a desert planet. The planet the fighting pit was on kind of reminds me of my home world.” Rowand, the green girl I had been teaching boxing, said. “We don't really have cities. Well we did but for as long as I've been alive we have lived on moving barges. It lets us move away from any kaiju that pops out of the ground.”
“How often do kaiju show up?” I asked her.
She shrugged and played with the food on her plate, stabbing a worm thing that looked like it was going to escape, “Not as much as they used to. History said they showed up quite a bit. They have mostly killed each other, we don't know if they breed though.”
Another mess Owl was going to dive head first into. I don't think I could exterminate a whole planet of Kaiju in the time we had. Owl didn't seem bothered by the prospect of it though. Guardian Wannaniki stood up and put his plate in the washer, “My home planet is a water world. You can see it in my eyes, they are adapted to the lower levels of lights deep in the waters. We build our homes and things out of coral. We have turned it into an artform, our buildings are all beautiful colors meshed together.
We use a bioluminescent coral for lights. It glows at a certain level of movement around it. Most of our food is a type of fish or plant. We have whole farms that sit on the surface and grow plants for us to eat.” He nodded to me, “I am excited to try the food of your planet.”
I gave a shrug, “I don't know if we have anything that fancy. Most of our places are built out of stone if you live in the cities or wood if you live in rural areas. There's places that sell fish and things like that, you might enjoy them.”
“Do a lot of your people run around in animal costumes like Owl? Is that a thing?” Lahrya asked.
I almost answered but Owl walked by the door to the kitchen. I pushed off the wall and walked past the group to catch up to Owl. I caught up to her in the front of the ship, she was already lifting the ship from the parking spot and turning it towards the exit, “Get anything interesting?”
We slid smoothly out of the docs and the rest of the group walked into the front of the ship. Owl nodded, “Yes. It wiped out most of my funds but I got something that will be useful to me without too much work.”
“What do you consider to much work?” Guardian Wannaniki asked.
“Stripping it bare and remaking the whole thing from the base that was there. This thing has a FTL drive to so we can ride in a less cramped space. We will all have our own rooms.”
Owl wove us out of the docks and up over the top. This close and I could see there was quite a bit of traffic. Ships were shooting across randomly ahead of us. Owl had to change direction quite a few times to dodge them. We crossed the ring at an angle so the trip wasn't long. Owl rolled us over the other side of the ring and a giant scepter appeared before us. Guardian Wannaniki stepped forward, closer to Owl and I, “ah. One of the Sodorellian space stations. Those are one of the higher end models around.”
Owl shrugged, “It fits my standard. It has enough fabricators I can swap the bots out for things I designed.”
“How many bots did you buy with it? Those space stations normally have a few thousand if you dont have biological staff.” He asked.
“Enough to keep it running without.” She replied.
We got closer and I saw more details, it still looked like a wizards scepter. The top was a clear alloy and it looked like a huge park or something was in it. It looked like it was made from levels stacked on top of each other and the bottom came to a point. Owl flew us into a little opening in the side and the giant door closed behind us. Owl parked us in the brightly lit hanger, the walls were painted white and it was as large as some of the stadiums I had seen on our home planet.
Owl shut down the ship we were in and we walked to the back. The lift lowered us down, Lahrya looked excited to go explore. She scattered with the other two, Owl didn't seem to mind and I followed her along with Guardian Wannaniki. She skipped everything and walked right up to one of the walls. There was a little console melded to the wall and she stopped by it. I heard her suit hum a little and she pulled out a little cube from her increasingly shortening cloak.
She held it out to the little counsel and the cube shifted before something extended from it. She plugged the extension into the counsel then took a step back. Guardian Wannaniki gave her a look and was about to ask her what happened when the hanger lights flickered. I heard Lahrya let out a little yelp that echoed across the hanger and chuckled.
The screen on the console changed into Owls mask when she had her mask closed. The same voice that spoke when Owl teleported us spoke out across the hanger, “Systems Coopted. Welcome Home Owl.”
“We are not home. Quit that. How constrained are you?” Owl replied.
“Systems are running at ninety three percent capacity compared to base.” The voice replied.
Owl crossed her arms and nodded, "That's better than I was aiming for.” The next exchange of words happened rapid fire, “ Scan all the bots in the station and repurpose them.”
“Done.”
“Get the OwlBot production started. I want all the bots replaced by the time we leave the system.”
“Done.”
“Set course using the star charts to our home planet with stops indicated in your files.”
“Done.”
“Have the OwlBots break down the bots that came with the station.”
“Done.”
“Scan through the programming of the station and replace it with yourself. Get rid of all the bugs and spyware.”
“....Done.”
Owl nodded and then turned to us, “Let's go find our rooms then explore this place.”
I heard Guardian Wannaniki swallow beside me, “Was that an AI?”
Owl let out a huff and started walking to a nearby door, we followed, “No. AI uses too much processing power that could be used elsewhere. It's a very advanced Virtual Intelligence I made. I keep a copy of its base in my suit. Being forced to explain the mechanical nature of the soul to an AI always turns into a pain in the tush.”