A yellow light flashed on Alexander’s belt and he started wrapping up the work he was doing outside the ship. He knew things were going too well. Three days had gone by without so much as an alert from the other four. At least it wasn’t a red light.
He thought it might have been a fluke, or that his light bar had stopped working for some reason. When he returned to the shuttle on the first day, he found the other four relaxing. Turns out there hadn’t been anything to worry about. The ship’s supply of missiles had been expended during its fight with the Talon and there wasn’t a second nuke aboard, which had lifted quite a bit of stress off of everyone’s heads.
Alexander wondered what could have been important enough to call him in today. His first guess was an issue with the reactor but the light had come from Eva’s radio. As far as he knew, she wasn’t working on the reactor. He bent down and grabbed the lip of the armor surrounding the exposed opening into the hull. Then he pulled himself forward, floating effortlessly through the opening and toward a sealed hatch. He twisted in mid-air and landed feet first, using the extendability of his legs like shock absorbers to arrest his momentum.
Zero-g work was difficult, but it seemed like Alexander’s robot body had been perfectly designed with that sort of environment in mind. It was just another aspect of his body that reinforced his idea that the body he inhabited was made to maintain a ship or something in space. Another was his ability to magnetize himself to surfaces. There would be little point in having a feature like that on a planet.
He opened the hatch and closed it behind him as he waited for the pressure to equalize. The other four had managed to get life support working again but it was running off of battery backup until the reactor was checked out. If the batteries got low, they could run a power cable from the shuttle to an emergency power shunt inside the ship. But it hadn’t come to that yet. Four people didn’t use much oxygen and they were only pumping atmosphere to the areas they were currently in.
When he could start to hear again, Alexander picked up his radio. “Eva, I’m in the airlock, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Acknowledged,” the woman replied, sounding rather perturbed. He wondered what happened.
Once the door showed a green light, he opened the airlock and headed into the ship. Each step clanked against the metal grating as he slowly made his way to the shuttle.
“What’s up?” he asked when he passed through the open airlock.
“It appears my son got into a bit of trouble back on Eden’s End,” she said tersely.
“Trouble?” Markus certainly didn’t seem like the sort to go actively looking for trouble. Yulia on the other hand, that he could see.
“He got into a fight with a boy. I let him know how disappointed I was that he needed to resort to violence without trying to find an alternative solution. But that’s not why I called you.”
“It’s not?”
She shook her head. “I’ve enough experience that I’ll manage just fine with Markus. What I wanted to show you is this way, follow me.”
Alexander followed the woman down the corridor.
“When I was testing for air leaks, I found one in the Captain’s cabin. It took me a bit to figure out where it was coming from.” They arrived outside a door and she pushed it open.
The inside of the room was a disgusting mess and he shuddered to think what had gone on inside the room.
“Now you see why it took time to find the leak.”
“Yeah. Almost makes you wish you could just set everything inside on fire.”
“Don’t even joke about that!” she looked over at him to make sure he understood how serious she was.
He held his hands up in a placating manner. “Sorry.”
She nodded and headed over to a corner where some items had been moved around. Alexander could see spalling on the wall where a small hole had been patched.
“This is where the leak was coming from, but it’s what I saw behind the wall that I called you about.”
“Behind the wall?”
She tapped one of the walls, then the adjacent one. You could tell one was hollow. “I could see the wall of a compartment through the hole, but I couldn’t find any way to open it up. You think you might be able to find something?”
Alexander shrugged. “Maybe. If not, I can always just cut a hole and pull it open.”
“How about we not resort to that just yet? If there is something behind the wall, I don’t want to damage it. Let's spend some time looking before we bust out the plasma torch.”
“Fine with me.” He needed a break from the oppressive silence outside the ship anyway.
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He started moving everything away from that wall, it seemed like the room may not have been as messy as he first figured, a good majority of the items must have been knocked loose when the ship was hit.
Instead of just tossing stuff around the room to become floating hazards, each item needed to be secured in netting. The only issue there was the fact most of the netting in the room was broken or torn. He ended up just using the broken netting to tie up some big items and not worrying too much about the small stuff like clothing.
Once the area was clear, you could see a large metal panel that ran from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like every other panel in the room. The only thing that gave away its purpose was the discoloration along one edge, likely from being opened multiple times.
Alexander could also see a thin slot was also present in the gap between panels.
“Seems like some sort of carded lock,” Alexander stated.
Eva frowned. “Probably a biometric lock with a secondary keycard then. There’s no way we’re getting in without that card. I guess we go with your plan.”
“Hold on,” Alexander held up his hand. “Let me try something first.” Before Eva could reply, the tips of his fingers on his other hand separated into smaller parts. They were still attached to the main fingers by wirelike filaments.
Eva’s eyes bulged but she didn’t say anything. She must not have seen him working on delicate electronics before, he used to do this all the time back on Petrov and had even done it a number of times on Eden’s End when he needed to reach into tight spaces to push a connector in place or work with small delicate items.
The finger attachments weren’t all the same. The top one was much thinner. He snaked that inside the card reader slot and felt around. Technically, he looked around, since he could see through the finger if he focused enough, he just rarely did that because it was weird to see through your own fingers.
Three more of the thin attachments snaked into the slot, attaching themselves to the terminals for the card. As soon as that happened, his internal interface popped up a window displaying actual code.
“Huh, that’s neat!”
“What’s neat? What are you doing?”
“I connected to the card reader and am currently reading the code. It’s a pretty sophisticated security mechanism. The card it’s looking for must not just be a card, but an actual program chip.”
Eva hissed at that. “Are there any countermeasures if it fails to receive the proper response?”
“A few,” Alexander stated. He decided not to tell the woman that this lock was keyed to the entire ship. If someone tried to brute force the door or hack the lock with a dummy card, it was set to trigger a core meltdown.
It couldn’t do that at the moment because the core was offline and cold, so there was no real worry. The program was also too stupid to recognize Alexander’s attempt as a hack. So he spent the next ten minutes examining the code. Once he was done, he chuckled.
“What?” Eva asked impatiently.
He would probably be impatient too if he had been left standing around for ten minutes without a single word.
“I figured out the code. Step back a bit, I’m going to unlock it.”
“You’re sure it’s safe?” she asked while she moved across the room.
“Yup,” the safe door gave a slight click and popped open.
Alexander grabbed the edge of the door and pulled it the rest of the way, exposing a space that was a little over a foot deep, three feet wide, and almost six feet tall.
There were a few shelves inside the space and they were all stuffed full of items.
Eva walked back over and whistled. “There’s gotta be a fortune in gems alone in there.”
That was probably true, but it wasn’t the gems that caught his attention. The items that caught his attention were the stacks of little silver credit chips and the five fusion activation crystals.
It didn’t take long for Eva to notice those as well. “Why would he have activation crystals inside a safe?”
“Backup ships maybe?” Alexander proposed.
“Maybe.” She reached in and pulled out one of the crystals to examine it. “No manufactuer marking on it. Could be in microprint.” She offered it to him.
He zoomed in on the crystal and examined its surface as closely as he possibly could. “I don’t see any marking, micro or otherwise.”
“Could be a homebrew pirate ship then. I heard rumors some pirates had their own hidden fleet yards. Guess this just confirms it.”
“You think five ships are just sitting out there?”
“Don’t get any ideas, Alexander. You have one heavily damaged ship you can’t even crew as it is. What would you do with five more?”
“Bring them back here and find crew for them, obviously,” he stated as he plucked a tablet from below the stack of crystals.
It wasn’t a normal tablet, it was the kind used for storing pictures, and it only had a single one on it. The picture was of some smirking woman standing next to a large window overlooking a field of stars in the background. It was the other item in the background that got his attention. The frame of a ship could be seen being assembled in space. And it looked to be a rather large one. Certainly larger than this frigate.
He took the crystals and the picture and tucked them into his pack.
“You’re not seriously going to go looking for this place are you?” Eva asked.
“I don’t see any harm in trying. Although it probably won’t be anytime soon. Not that waiting is an issue, it’s not like those ships are going anywhere.”
Eva just shook her head. “Suit yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn you though. What do you wanna do with the rest of this?” she gestured to the safe.
“Do you have a credit chip reader?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Didn’t think I would need one. Mingyu might have one though.” Eva radioed him.
“Yeah, I have one with me. Why do you need it?”
She told Na to meet him in the Captain’s quarters. It didn’t take the man long to get there, he was apparently just inside the bridge, cataloging the repairs that would be needed for the consoles.
The Captain of the Destiny quirked an eyebrow when he spotted the open safe. “Guess he didn’t trust his money to be far from him. I assume you want to check the credit chips?”
“If you don’t mind,” Alexander replied.
After going through the stack of chips, Mingyu shook his head and handed the pad to Alexander.
“That can’t be right… Can it?” Alexander asked in surprise.
“Unless my reader is suddenly faulty, you just pocketed yourself over five hundred million credits. Congratulations, Alexander, you’re rich, again.”
Alexander had the sudden urge to run his hand through his hair. It would have looked pretty silly for him to actually do it though.
Mingyu was also wrong, he was already rich thanks to his windfall from the pirate bounties. He hadn’t mentioned those to anyone though. This money felt dirty though. It likely came from all of Arkonis’ previous victims that he and his crews had preyed on over the decades. It didn’t feel right to keep it.
“No, I think I’m going to split this up between the people who lost loved ones in the attack. If they don’t want it or would prefer to trade contributions for it, I’ll keep it and split it between the people who helped defend Eden’s End. I’ll give them the same option.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Mingyu asked. “It’s your money and you can do whatever you want with it, but money has a tendency to change people.”