Ever since I awoke in this body, I’d known that the galaxy was alive around me once more. There’d been people, the System was no longer dead, and its marketplaces had been teeming with activity.

Now, however, was the first time I truly felt it.

Naturally, whenever we’d approached any of the settlements scattered across the galaxy during our journey, there’d been an increase in space traffic.

Never like this, however. There were ships everywhere.

Although New Hub had only been colonized a mere few centuries ago, its population already numbered in the hundreds of billions, and the armada of ships now hovering in its orbit would’ve left any child’s jaw agape in wonder.

Military fleets, ranging from cruisers to lighter rangers, stood out with their blinking lights of red and blue, directing traffic and keeping everything moving with their heavy armaments; many of the larger mercantile vessels proudly wore the colors of the corporations they served, or sported the flags of whatever Dodgers or mercenary groups that were paid to protect them; and tens-of-thousands of personal ships crisscrossed between them.

Over it all, however, loomed a single mega structure.

Although the warp gate remained powered down, the activity around it was palpable. A literal swarm of ships was illuminated whenever a flare of energy passed through the moon-sized construct, preparing for the moment the wormhole generator would rip a tear through space itself.

The Dyson sphere meant to power it was already in place, constantly siphoning the smaller of the twin-stars that illuminated this system.

“Excited, kid?” Mikayes asked, pulling my eyes from where he restlessly paced back and forth across the room.

In less than 40 hours, the gate would open. We’d arrived just in time, and ships were already crowding the space around it — kept in line by whatever forces the Astral Fleet had managed to spare within this sector.

There was even a Moon-eater present, out-sized only by the gate itself where it hovering around the structure like a hungry shark.

Mikayes seemed nervous.

“Soon, you’ll meet the rest of our crew,” he continued, rabbling out the words as if only to keep himself calm. “I don’t think there was anyone with a taste for human children this time around, but I’m not entirely sure. Guess we’ll soon find out?”

He gave me a half-hearted grin, which soon faded beneath the look Jenna sent him. It wasn’t a long glare but telling enough.

For the past hour, she’d remained busy trying to secure a landing spot for us, and she didn’t want any dumb distractions. For Mikayes sake, lest his pocket get completely emptied getting us down to the surface.

From the sound of it, some ships had been hovering out here for over a week, trying to find an authorized landing spot they could afford. We didn’t have time for that, nor could we risk landing wherever while flying a rental either.

The dilemma seemed to stress Mikayes to no end, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to get back at him a bit.

“Shouldn’t you be worrying about your crew eating through your savings rather than me?” I innocently asked. “It can’t have been cheap keeping them on stand-by all this time. I mean, there has to be a lot of very lucrative, guaranteed deals out here with the gate about to be opened…”

“Don’t remind me,” Mikayes mumbled, having turned a sickly shade of pale.

On each planet, moon, or station we’d briefly stopped by coming here, the man had tried to convince more people to join our motley crew. All of their starting bids had been double mine, yet none had listened for long.

There were still only the three of us, and whoever remained within New Hub by the time we managed to land.

I’d almost pointed it out as a new notification popped up on my glasses. I could’ve opened it with a voice command but chose to instead do so under the pretense of adjusting them upon my nose.

While I didn’t really care if Mikayes heard me, I was kind of curious how long me and Jenna would be able to keep up our quiet conversation. We’d been doing it for an hour now. Merely to test the equipment, of course.

“Be kind.” Her message read. “He’s lost quite the few good people already because of our delays. Only his most ‘loyal’ friends are still down there, waiting for us, and Mikayes doesn’t have a lot of those if you’d believe it…”

“Jenna, give me some good news,” the man complained before I could send my response. “The cheaper the better.”

“I’m working on it,” she huffed out loud. “But all our bookings have been nulled because we showed up late, and we’re not the only ones looking to land down central right now.”

“Can’t you check with the company if we can return this ship directly?” Mikayes pleaded. “For old times’ sake?”

“I’m currently in an open channel with the Vexonian, and it doesn’t seem completely off the table.”

“Really?” Mikayes lit up. “That’s—”

“It will incur us an extra fee atop the late return though,” Jenna continued, not sounding too pleased with whatever conversation she was having with said ‘Vexonian’. “Not to mention we’ll be forced to pay for their in-house cleaning service — and you know how cheap that is — not to mention parking fee for the duration it takes to clear out our things, and—”

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It was an interesting thing to witness, the color of Mikayes’ face change from the pallid shade of a corpse, to a bright tinge of hope, only to now settle in a furious red.

“Those tightwad, money-grubbing, skinflint, ass wipes!” he barked. “Scrooges and pikers, the lot of them! Without me, they would’ve gone out of business years ago. I’ve been their most trusted, loyal, and caring customer ever since I set foot in this sector, and yet…”

He went on for quite some time.

Fortunately, it seemed the channel Jenna kept with them wasn’t one to pick up voices, and she eventually managed to negotiate a landing permit for us. Paid straight from Mikayes’ pockets.

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

Mikayes was still fuming as we left that rusted hangar behind. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the drippingly cheerful manner the Vexonian woman in charge of us had treated us with, or if it was the extra courier charge they’d slapped on top of everything for everything still aboard the ship as we returned it.

An extra courier charge for every. Single. Item.

At least it would be transported to the larger ship meant to bring us through the gate tomorrow.

Not that Mikayes had become any happier because of it, even as Jenna pointed it out. She, too, had seemingly worried that Mikayes would attack the Vexonian woman if he was allowed to remain in her presence for too long.

Now, however, it wasn’t long after we’d stepped out on that dusty street, teeming with life, that a business like smile found its way onto Mikayes’ lips.

Thousands of people — human, alien, or otherwise — were passing us by every second. Some to our sides, others above on layers of winding catwalks, and even more in the tunnels below, visible through grates that lined the street.

A single block of shuffling between potential customers and over stacked carts, and Jenna was forced to grab hold of Mikayes collar a dozen times to keep him from bolting off to peddle his wares.

He’d kept some of them, the more lucrative ones, in a knapsack that was currently slung over his shoulder.

“Crew first, pointless bartering later,” Jenna hissed that last time she was forced to hold him back. “I thought we were pressed for time.”

“Securing funds, Jenna. It’s called securing funds.” Mikayes laughed, his eyes darting a dozen ways at once. Profit was written in his golden irises. “For may the Triumvirate know we need it after that daylight robbery we just went through. Or midnight glow. Or whatever they call it on these static planets.”

The entirety of New Hub didn’t spin like normal planets would. Or rather, it did, but at such a glacial pace that you could live in one without ever seeing direct sunlight for a lifetime.

Before the first settlers claimed this planet, half of it had remained cast in a seemingly eternal, freezing night. Now, over a hundred reflective satellites dotted the sky, serving as miniature stars to bring daylight to this planet-wide city.

Though, looking up, it wasn’t them that caught my eye, it was the massive warp gate that dominated the sky, visible from wherever you stood in the city as long as there was no roof above your head.

“More so,” Mikayes continued, “we were pressed for time, just not so much anymore. No matter what we do, we’ll still be at the back of the queue waiting to pass through the gate. You saw the chaos up there. We might as well commit to taking things slow and steady at this point.”

“What about the others, though?” Jenna called after him as he’d slipped out of her grip. She didn’t bother chasing after him.

“I wasn’t sure how long we’d be struggling to land, so I pushed up our meeting until the evening,” Mikayes called out over his shoulder, already half swallowed by the crowd. “Feel free to look around until then!”

Jenna turned towards me with a heaving sigh.

“Let me guess, you want to take the opportunity to go spend your hard-earned credits as well?” she tiredly asked me, and without waiting for my answer, she continued, “Your UI is working fine, right? Just let me know when you’re ready to meet up again, and I’ll send my coordinates.

“In the meantime, I’ll probably grab something to eat and drink around here while I’m free from that lunatic, and if you take long…” There was a brief pause, and then a nod, “meet us at the Pariah’s Refuge in eight hours. You’ll be meeting your new colleagues there.”

I gave a faint nod.

Truth be told, I’d only been half-listening to whatever they were saying ever since we came out on these streets. Not that it mattered. Her words were saved as a transcript and a video recording on my upgraded interface anyway.

I’d double checked, all the while my eyes were taking in a hundred sensations at once. Perhaps I’d gone a bit too crazy with the features I’d installed into my UI, and it was starting to get overwhelming.

Part of my glasses was busy mapping out my surroundings, scanning everything my eyes saw. A vague skeletal structure was already beginning to form of the tunnels beneath us, the streets we’d walked, as well as the five plus floors of every haphazard building we passed by – walkways passing above our heads included. There was even an indication if they were the rickety bridges of planks and rope, or full steel constructs.

The entirety of New Hub was a hodgepodge of several different cultures and intents stacked on top of one another. There were millions of hidden worlds, shops, bars, cafes, and services hidden away behind signs that ranged from inconspicuous to blinking neon monstrosities.

The impressions were everywhere, filling any airspace not taken up by shoddy repair jobs or hovering drones that constantly called out new products or ‘great’ sales. There were crawling species, rolling aliens, and even winged folk up above, casually shifting between the different walkways with a few beats of their wings.

There were also vehicles, too damned many of them, operating by other means than wheels.

It would’ve been a hectic place even without my glasses, and now, my interface was swarming with notifications. Faces were scanned, unprotected uplinks were accessed through my D-grade (recently upgraded) Skeleton Key, filling my vision with name tags and potential threat levels.

There were heat scans, temperature readings, smell identifiers, long articles about every new species I saw, recommendations for good restaurants, suggested paths where the crowd was less dense, and…

“…careful, OK?” Jenna finished, looking at me with a hint of worry.

I’d completely zoned out, and I was forced to take a quick look at the logs to confirmed what she’d said.

“This place is more chaotic than usual because of the warp gate being opened.” And something about “a lot of fortune seekers and charlatans being around.”

She’d glanced towards Mikayes at that point, barely visible where he stood, halfway up some stairs and shaking hands with a scaly Neptune elder, both of their smiles looking equally genuine.

“I will be careful,” I confirmed with a nod, only for the lie detection of my interface to flare up. At least she couldn’t see it.

But no, the full features of my System were finally available to me. I needed to try them out, and with only eight hours to burn, care wasn’t exactly a priority in my mind.

Not that Jenna needed to know.

She’d go get herself a drink, and I’d be busy with my own things: gathering information, optimizing settings, buying necessities, and trying out my new stats.

I still hadn’t figured them out fully. I knew that my current strength lay somewhere between being beaten black and blue whenever I got Jenna to take our training seriously, and beating the simulated frilled pouncer 10/10 times. Which was a dubious measurement.

Then again, even if I still looked like a scrawny bean sprout, too tall for my weight, I didn’t feel particularly weak anymore.

The Cryak genome was now mostly my own, and it’d changed me in ways you couldn’t see. My muscles were denser, my bones harder, and Strength 27 as well as Fist-Fighting 12 must count for something, right?

As such, even before I’d waved Jenna off, my UI was already busy scanning any hoodlums or petty criminals passing by — anyone that seemed willing to get down and dirty as soon as I stepped into an unattended alley.

In the name of research, of course.