Molly ignored my reading, for the most part. Occasionally she would interrupt me, if I had been doing it too long and she became bored, but usually she just smiled and kissed me on the forehead.

After a week of living in Los Angeles with Molly, she asked me when my trip to Storage was. I took the hint and got portal morties from Terna.

My hobb partner also included another grocery bundle for Nozzle’s tribe. My fob was delivered by a standard pod in the hotel. Once I had changed clothes and kissed Molly goodbye, there was very little else to do but input the arrival platform I wanted and step through a portal.

After my surroundings changed from a high-end hotel room to a domed jungle, I took to the air and started looking for Nozzle.

The oversized insects were starting to get used to my presence. One of the leaf bugs ignored me completely when I pushed it aside to get into the elevator shaft. A quick survey of the elevator shaft and surrounding tunnels told me that Nozzle wasn’t in the immediate area. I pulled up my fairy fire map in my anti-magic helmet and delved into uncharted territory.

For a few hours I stayed near the top of Storage, flying through tunnel after tunnel looking for a sign of my gobbs, but the trail was cold. I spent the rest of the night searching, and discovered some wondrous and terrifying sections of Storage as I did.

One low tunnel in particular was completely full of blinking fireflies, which camouflaged large, aggressive, bioluminescent slugs that tried to drop on me from above. It was another swamp biome, with a deep lake full of BuyMort bugs and life.

The hobbs and gobbs both had a cultural focus on reshaping Storage, and though my rise had changed the hobbs forever, the gobbs never stopped growing.

They outnumbered the rest of us by a lot, I suspected. During my wanderings that first night, I found evidence of several gobb encampments. None of them had any gobbs, but as I had seen, one tribe could leave dozens of encampments in an area in Storage, due only to their migratory nature. With the influence of the recent slavers in the area, I couldn’t tell how many tribes I was tracking.

My map of Storage expanded dramatically while I searched. The only zones on it that were left unfilled were those populated by the tall-people, as Nozzle had called us. Humans, hobbs, Orkreshi, and Nah’gh were all represented, with the occasional Knowle.

Really though, Storage didn’t discriminate. Each species had individuals that fell prey to BuyMort’s worst instincts and ended up in the super structure once they’d run out of morties for good. It was a snapshot of the BuyMort population numbers. Those of us who were good for manual labor lasted, while the management came and went.

There were no delves in Storage that I could find, and no settlements of record. To my reckoning, that made them one of the least populous members of the BuyMort system. Knowles were running a close second, which made sense considering their last home world had been intentionally destroyed by the Church roughly two centuries prior.

Humans still had two planets. Neolithic Earth had the resources to survive the war, and Axle had made sure Nu-Earth did too. Orkreshi Prime was still in the system, even though its entire solar system had fallen in the resource wars that followed the Church conflict.

Meanwhile, those who had adapted best to Storage learned to live off its ‘land,’ and their numbers rose dramatically. First the hobbs had flourished in the primitive Dyson sphere, and quietly alongside them, the gobbs followed suit.

Since the doors had been opened, that dynamic seemed to have accelerated. Storage had become a true dying ground for the less-hardy species. Those who lived within the BuyMort system had feared Storage before, but now it was a cause for true despair.

The weight of my actions began to rest on my shoulders more and more as I slowly widened my search of Storage, hoping I was going in the right direction. My Cicada wireless was useless, as the gas giant was enjoying one of its large electrical storms in the upper atmosphere, so all coverage was down.

Lights were also primarily off in my portion. It was a protective measure, something Storage did on its own. The few settlements I encountered in my search were all burning torches and bonfires to keep the inky dark at bay.

Only those near the top, in the cold, had any light. And that light by the stars alone, the system's sun was on the far side of Storage for the next thirty hours. While the planet’s rotation was faster, the superstructure in its atmosphere skated along the top, causing somewhat longer day and night cycles.

On the second day of my visit, I decided to run in a straight line directly for the sun, after checking my position on a planetary map. The area I had mapped was infinitesimally small. Fortunately, it was easy to return to my starting point, as I had the arrival platform’s coordinates and could order a free pod anytime I wanted.

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My sun-run had the effect of getting me away from the electrical storms and back into Cicada Wireless coverage, but I still couldn’t reach Nozzle. He was out of range, according to the service, which meant wherever he was, it was likely part of the electrical storm. Needless to say, that storm covered a much larger area than I could successfully map.

But I tried. For three days, I flew through the tunnels of Storage and searched for my friends, for Nozzle’s tribe. As far as my grid went, and as slowly as they had to move, I should have found him. But at the end of my scheduled trip, I had found no gobbs, just abandoned settlements.

At the end of my trip, I landed on the outskirts of a mostly human settlement and summoned Terna’s grocery pallet.

The gate guards, because all settlements in Storage had to be walled now, sounded the alarm when the flash of rainbow light bounced across the dark tunnels and lit up their night. I was gone before they could find me. I flew up the tunnel to the arrival platform and used the funds Terna had provided me for travel to buy a portal.

I arrived back in the hotel room, which Molly had rented out for the month. She wasn’t there, so I quickly showered and got dressed in a clean set of clothing. She’d been shopping for me ever since we first hooked up, so I just picked some of the clothing items she’d found appealing enough to buy for me.

A charcoal suit with a dark gray shirt, and a pair of matching derby shoes. Then I pulled out my phone to contact her and stopped. My thoughts wandered to MortMobile.

I wondered if he could help me find Nozzle, and how much the service would cost. That would be if the entrapped deity within the phone would even remember me. His mind had been stretched to the point of breaking when we first met, and with his occasional help, I had reduced the load on his mind. Mostly by reducing the sheer population using his services, but still.

He owed me.

Once again my attempt to access the service was blocked by insufficient funds. I’d been coasting on reputation, living like a monk when not in the arms of my spend-happy girlfriend, or sleeping on Terna’s various couches. My BuyMort account info was not exactly promising.

At some point I was going to have to find an income source of my own.

But, for the time being, I helped prepare the Pykrete for its expedition. I met up with Molly, and through her connected with Shoshanna. She was working on hiring a crew with the remaining funds, since the shield had been repaired in my absence.

The main difficulty was in the length of the voyage. Most people who hired out as crew for various space-based jobs wanted a solid window for the job’s length, along with location, wages, food, housing, duty lists, etc. But we were only able to provide a wide window for their length of employment.

The way hunting for Cubes worked was simple in theory, but complex and time consuming in practice. Most of the non-profit’s work to that point had been sifting through records, where they were available, and doing trajectory calculations based on the data. They produced these stellar maps that looked like flowers, with a single, central path lifting out of the many curving available path variations.

If the Cube in question had struck the edge of a cargo bay door, for example, or been pushed off-course by the ship’s thrusters once ejected, that changed its possible location hundreds of years later by massive margins. Our journey’s goal was to explore one of those flowers, in an attempt to find a relatively small object floating through primarily empty space.

The central pathway was always illuminated in red, with the surrounding pathways a shade of dark orange, eventually fading out to white as the pathways became increasingly less likely. Each flower map had hundreds, if not thousands of potential pathways to follow.

So when a potential crew member asked us about how long the voyage was expected to run, we had a hard time giving them a straight answer. A week at the shortest, with fourteen months on the outside range.

Many of the potential hires balked at the uncertainty and turned us down flat. The handful that agreed typically had issues. At the end of a two-week hiring process we ended up with a captain that had a clear drinking problem, a pilot with social anxiety, and a pair of mechanics that clearly wanted to use our expedition as their honeymoon.

I was handling security, which had made Molly horny for three solid days. Still, I only hired a couple of men to aid me as security agents. Both hobbs were quiet, with a lengthy history of similar hires on their resume. From the brief conversation I’d had with both of them, they were former military who hired out after a bad discharge.

Perfect for my needs. Also almost certainly plants for Axle, considering the uniform nature of their background checks. It was almost as though they’d been written just for me, to give me my perfect hires. There were others who applied that had a similar profile, if not the same word for word. And none of them showed any hesitation at the uncertain timeline.

I picked my favorites from the list of what I felt certain was Axle’s attempt at a leash and dismissed the rest. Both the hobbs practically reeked of BlueCleave when I did in-person interviews with them, which solidified my choice. I wanted Axle to know everything.

There was nothing in our activities for him to use against me politically, and Terna had already trained me in not talking about the upcoming campaign. For good measure, I kept all my notes and thoughts on the growing campaign in my head, just in case one of Axle’s men got into my devices while on board the Pykrete.

Anything Axle got from his spies would be harmless. It would also have the likely effect of lowering the attention he spent on me. I’m sure one innocent venture over a month or so wouldn’t give me complete freedom from his gaze, but I also doubted the hobbs were on board to sabotage anything. I planned on staying up the first couple nights to ensure they were just watching and listening.

Beyond that bit of espionage, I imagined they would make excellent deck guards. BlueCleave training was still top tier, and for a hobb to get into special forces that sent them undercover usually meant they were pretty good at their job. It was an assumption based on what I’d seen so far, but it was a safe assumption.

The military machine I had built had a great foundation, one that Rayna had set. I doubted the competence of that machine had dulled much after her death, with near-constant war since my own time. If all went to plan, the spies would do a great job and leave without anyone aside from me suspecting them.

I made sure to include an open comms policy in the hiring paperwork, specifically for them. It did, however, function as a very welcome perk that got us a few more hires.