"B6Y," X-Talia said.

"Uh," Sam whined in consternation, "you blew up my destroyer. This is totally not fair."

To be fair, the computer probably had an optimal pattern for searching for targets in the little space battleship game they had going on. Factor in that X-Talia was supposed to be some type of human interaction machine, and she pretty much already figured out where Sam had placed her ships. Poor Sam didn't have a chance.

"Jeez, this isn't going anywhere," I complained, scrapping my current project and refreshing the screen to start over.

"What do you got so far?" Sam asked as she stared at her tablet, trying to figure out where X-Talia's ships might be.

"Bridge, galley, engineering, space for a shield generator, and I want redundant environmental systems in each major compartment," I replied.

"D12X," Sam said to X-Talia. "What about a cargo bay?" she said to me.

"I really don't know. I didn’t have one on the flying brick, but I'm kind of getting used to the extra space," I said.

"Miss," X-Talia said, grinning at Sam.

"Maybe we should focus on the rooms that we have. What exactly do you hate about this one?"

I sat back in my seat and tried to organize how I wanted to respond to this.

"Well, first of all, I hate having berthing so far away from the bridge. It'd be nice to have redundant environmental systems in each of the sections. And I guess I'd like a little more room in the bridge and galley. We don't even use berthing."

X-Talia called out a number, and Sam responded with a miss, much to the splicer's relief.

"So, we wanna expand the galley, maybe put the crew quarters off it. Make the bridge a little roomier too, I think," I suggested.

"Yeah, that seems fine to me, but what about the rest of the ship? Does the lock have to be in front?" Sam asked.

"No," I answered.

Sam called out a number to X-Talia and missed before she returned her attention back to me. "Is this kind of a blue-sky thing? Just say what we want and add it to the list."

I hadn't actually thought of it that way, but I guess I should have asked if Sam wanted anything in particular.

"Um, I guess, for the moment at least.”

“I'd like a full medical lab and maybe a hot tub," Sam said.

"A hot tub?" I repeated.

"Well, I like a pool, but I figured that was a little too much," Sam explained.

I shrugged and added it to my list of things to put into the ship. X-Talia called out a number, and Sam gritted her teeth. "Hit," she said. "Honestly, we don't really use the berthing area, and we could almost cut the size of the captain’s quarters in half," Sam mused. "Maybe four rooms off the galley: three crew quarters. One of them could be a guest quarters or expansion if we ever hire somebody, one can be a medical lab, and of course, we definitely need a head. Hmmm."

“It seems like I want too much. I'm trying to design a ship, and I don't know what I want the ship to do. The flying brick had a small bunk, small galley, small head, and Sany-box, a cockpit instead of a bridge, and another very small… I can't even call it a room, just kind of an alcove in the galley where I could stick my chair. It always seemed like plenty of room, but I've kind of grown to like being able to walk around.”

"We should get, like, an entertainment system, then we can play games and stuff together. Instead of just watching you lie like a vegetable in your chair," Sam said, motioning towards my chair and throwing a number at X-Talia, who grinned and said, "Miss."

I screwed around with the ship design a bunch more, but never really got anywhere. I reverted to flipping through other ship designs. The only thing I was certain of was that I wanted several slots where I could attach freight containers that could be swapped out for shield generators or drone bays or something.

"Random idea," X-Talia said before turning into an egg-shaped thing painted to look like a fat little version of her avatar. The egg thing popped open, and another slightly smaller one popped out of it, which popped open and another even smaller one came out.. "What about more like a nesting doll situation? Have a single main ship, small and compact, maybe just kind of a cockpit-bridge-galley situation that attaches into a larger superstructure?"

I thought about it, but really wasn't sure. "Seems like a lot of redundant systems and mass."

X-Talia shrugged. "Sam slammed her hand against the table. “Long hauler!”

"What?"

"There's a long hauler design where the shipping containers are all attached to a solid spine. The front two containers are living quarters. Everything else is in a container."

I cocked an eyebrow. I don't know if I like the idea of having a ship with a very long spine. Again with the mass and whatnot, but it would be nice to just slot things in and to have a lot of slots. I'm seriously gonna consider that.

We spent the next couple of weeks falling in and out of the Rift and stopping at stations with our drop-off-pickup-and-go tactic. We were flying the ship under the Res-a-tesseract name again and at each station it was Rick James who was getting paid. My personal account was basically empty, so it was pointless to go inside the station since I couldn't actually thumb for anything. It was a considerable annoyance, but after another month of travel, we were damn close to reaching the very edge of nowhere. We drifted through an uninhabited system, only a couple of days' Rift journey to our final destination. It was a place to change course and maybe see if there was anybody out here mining. Looking at the designs for miners, most did not have Rift drives, which meant with the Res-a-tesseract, if we get it outfitted for mining, we could hop into an uninhabited system like this, do some mining, and then hop back. It was one thing that would give us an advantage, but I wasn’t sure that the quality over quantity thing worked unless the system had some type of precious material that wasn't widely available in another. Chances of that were kind of slim, but it cost us nothing to drop off into a system, get an idea of what celestial bodies were around, and then hop out. Our four-hour recharge finished before we received a transmission.

Words came over the speakers in an incoherent babble. I looked up at the screen, wondering if X-Talia was going to translate. She seemed to catch sight of me. Again, it was odd as she wasn't actually seeing me from the screen, she would be watching from the cameras in various locations. She held up a finger. "Hold on." When the message stopped and I thought X-Talia was going to translate, the message started again in what sounded like a different language. X-Talia frowned. "Okay. I think I got it." She popped the words up on a screen, but I didn't need to read it because the next cycle was in my own tongue.

"Unidentified vessel. This is the Zatochi Warship, Sea of Agony and Torment. You have entered Zotochi controlled space. Leave immediately or be obliterated."

I turned to look at Sam, who stared back at me, her expression mildly horrified. "Where is it?" Sam asked, turning her attention back to the screen that had X-Talia's avatar.

"Hold on. These sensors kind of suck. They're quite far out," X-Talia replied.

That gave me a bit of hope. If they were far out, we had plenty of time to ditch. X-Talia brought up an image on a grainy screen. The light from the system's primary was at just the right angle, and the ship was lit up, but it was so far out there that I could barely make out what it looked like. On a second screen, X-Talia put up an extrapolation slowly revealing a large boxy type structure that looked like it had some type of large swiveling weapon on the front and wings made of large metal slabs that made it look like it was holding shields out to its sides. Being so far out, I figured I had plenty of time to interact with them. I waited for the message to finish cycling through the various languages before replying.

"Sorry, we're new to this sector. You wouldn't happen to have a map of other places you control. So we don't go there?" I gave X-Talia a shrug in response to her frown. "How long will that take for them to get the message and be able to send something back?"

"About 47 minutes."

"Okay, let's plot a course and be ready to open up a Rift in say, one hour."

X-Talia gave a nod and plotted some directions for me to follow.

48 minutes later, I got a reply. It wasn't anything other than a star chart with a large swath of stars highlighted in green. We were in one of those green star systems, so I assume that belonged to the Za’ochi or whatever the hell they called themselves. We fell into the Rift and off to our next destination, our final destination.

“So, aliens?"

Sam snorted. X-Talia just gave me a shrug.

"Yeah, probably not," I said, more towards Sam. "You figure if humanity actually met aliens, that news would have gotten out. They also didn't seem that unfriendly considering they sent us a star chart of where to keep out."

"Something to look up when we get to where we're going."

Our final destination was Rixa. Rixa was an orange dwarf star that cast an amber light over the system. It consisted of three rocky inner worlds, an asteroid belt, and an exterior Jovian with truly impressive rings.

The first world was a molten orb that the locals seemed to call The Forge. The second world was one of those pristine candidates for terraforming; gravity was about point seven five standard, and it had a magnetosphere. The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, and people had flocked there and built cities with the expectation that terraforming would happen, but it never did, leaving Rixa-2 or Aurelia, as the locals called it, a barren wasteland full of poor people. Rixa-3 or Nexus seemed to be the trade hub of the system. Odd when you consider that the gravity was point six standard, it had no atmosphere, and nothing else that seemed to be really going for it. Then again, it was a trade hub and had a lot of industry on the surface.

That was another thing about this sector that blew my mind. A lot of these ships were designed to land on the surface of a planet. The Res-a-tesseract was not, even if it was physically possible. It didn't have anything to land on. As far as I knew, landing on a planetary body was illegal unless you had specific non-gravitational thrust abilities, which just seemed like a waste of mass. For those who had business on the surface, but didn't have the ability to land a ship on the planet itself, there were several space elevators. Perhaps that's why the planet has become the economic center of the system. The low gravity and stability of the planet itself made it ideal for space elevators and whatever came with them. It seemed to have a single moon, which was nothing more than an asteroid engineered to be a massive space station. For as backward as these people seemed to supposedly be, they liked to make big structures that didn't look like the standard cookie-cutter orbitals.

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We were not the inner planets though. No, we were out by the Jovian. Azor was a gorgeous light blue with swirls of various other colors and its rings were stunning. It was the primary mining place of the Free Light Mining Consortium. They had several refineries in a large station orbiting the planet. For the moment, that was our home. The consortium didn't particularly care if some people were independent miners. So it wasn't like we had to fight anybody for a claim or that we could actually claim anything. It was really just go in, mine what you could, and sell to the consortium. At least that's what we were told. We hadn't successfully done any of it yet.

The mining laser was the lowest form of mining tool. The safety instructions had specified that the user should be wearing a fully armored hard suit at a bare minimum. I didn't have a fully armored hard suit. I had what the bounty hunter was wearing with a couple of patches where I'd stuck holes. It didn't take long to figure out why the safety documents wanted the user to be fully armored. Apparently, superheating various metals and other mineral deposits caused miniature explosions. I assumed that would be greater or lesser depending on what type of material we were attempting to mine. I don't know what type of material this was. I just knew that the scanner said it was a large deposit of metal, and X-Talia said we could probably sell it.

Three hours spent tethered partially to an asteroid and fully to the Res-a-tesseract, and I was pretty much ready to give up mining. Maybe if we had enough money to buy a drone so that I could just sit in the ship while this was done automatically. Floating uncomfortably in an itchy spacesuit with bits of rock exploding outward and pinging off my helmet was not doing it for me. As if the universe wanted to punish me just a bit more for my attempt at honest work, I got to see the largest explosion yet.

I'm pretty sure I screamed in pain as hot fire slammed into my left leg and sent me spinning. I dropped the mining laser, which was fine. It was tethered to my suit and powered off when the trigger wasn't depressed. I gritted my teeth and stared through teary eyes down at the large hand-sized shard of rock or metal or whatever the fuck sticking out of my leg. I wrapped one hand around it and was about to pull before I realized that would be a terrible fucking idea. I spent the next thirty seconds or so frantically trying to keep the tether from looping around the rock. Once I was untethered from the asteroid, I started pulling myself in towards the ship. A little too fast. I hit the edge of the lock and screamed again as the rock in my leg was jostled once more. I could hear Sam and X-Talia speaking in my suit's comm, but I was a little preoccupied with getting myself into an actual livable atmosphere before the thing impaling me came out, along with all my fluids. After the lock shut, I could see the flashing lights that meant we were trying to repressurize the whole thing, which would take forever because the cargo bay was fucking huge. Some semblance of gravity started to pull me down to the decking. I found myself lying on my back and staring at the ceiling, sound finally starting to hit me as the room filled with enough atmosphere for vibrations.

It took forever, endless waiting, the time made only longer by the fiery, lancing pain shooting through my leg. As soon as the klaxon stopped, I heard Sam rushing down the ladder and saw the familiar red face pop in front of me from the other side of the helmet's faceplate. She grabbed hold of my head and started unlatching things.

"Are you hurt anywhere other than your leg?" Sam asked, her voice quick and professional and honestly lacking a lot of the panic I was expecting.

"No," I gritted out between clenched teeth.

"Good. X-Talia, reduce gravity to 1/6," she commanded.

I felt my weight cease to exist for just a moment, and then Sam shoved her arms underneath me and picked me up. Oh, great, I get to be princess carried. Sam awkwardly climbed the ladder, carried me into the medical closet, and unceremoniously dropped me on the table.

"X-Talia, one standard, please," she said as her fingers worked at my suit. To be perfectly honest, it felt great to get it off of me, hot and sweaty on the inside, but I didn't like the way she swore when she got down to the legs. "I need your ass up," she said, sounding like it was going to be an ordeal.

I attempted to oblige and had more pain shoot through my leg. Apparently, it was going to be an ordeal. With the suit taken away from my back, I could momentarily revel in the cold of the table. I felt the boots come off, and Sam worked my good leg out. That meant she now had to work the bad leg out.

"Hey, Grant."

"Yeah."

"Sorry."

I was gonna ask what she was sorry for when she grabbed hold of the rock and ripped it out. I swear the damn thing hurt worse coming out than it did going in. After a small scream, which did not at all sound very manly, I looked down to see Sam packing some type of foam into the hole before trying to chuck the suit off my leg. I assume the foam was to stop it from bleeding because it wasn't gushing blood, so there was that. She then pressed some device up against the hole, which hurt, and then swore, which made me think things were gonna hurt worse.

“Don't you have any anesthetic?" I said through gritted teeth.

"Not anything good," she replied, searching through a kit and pulling out a few items. I lifted my head back up to look at her just as she shoved a metal tool into my leg. I dropped my head back with another short scream and fought the darkness that encroached in my sight, blocking off my peripheral.

"I got it," Sam said just a moment before I heard a loud ‘tink’ of something hard falling into a dish. More foam and bandages followed.

I lay back, my head on the table, pain radiating out of my leg. "Well, doc, am I gonna live?"

"Yeah. Don't do that again. I told you I'm not a thoracic surgeon or abdominal surgeon or really any kind of surgery other than, like, face and stuff. I can do liposuction," Sam said.

Despite the pain, I had to chuckle. "Well, at least it won’t get any worse for a few moments."

That’s when X-Talia chimed in. "You just had to say that right now, didn't you?"

The annoyance in her voice made me pause. "Why?" I asked.

"Because we've been scanned multiple times by a ship that's not broadcasting a transponder code."

“It’s not that stealth ship is it?” Sam asked. A stupid question considering said ship was missing most of its insides.

"They are slowly drifting in our direction and scanning us. No, it's not the stealth ship," X-Talia responded.

"Can we get more details other than a ship is scanning us?" I asked.

"A shuttle-sized craft with external guns and presenting no transponder codes is scanning us," X-Talia replied, sounding kind of annoyed.

I rolled my eyes and looked at Sam. "Can you help me get to the bridge, please?"

Sam looked down at my leg then back to my face before making an exasperated expression that only a woman could master.

"X-Talia, can I get 0.75 G," Sam said.

I could almost chuckle with the way she flipped from fractions to decimals. Sam helped me off the table, and I leaned against her as I limped my way through the door and across the catwalk. The ship was so terribly designed.

"They've sent us a voice message," X-Talia announced.

"Play it," I said.

"Res-atract, Resr-teser-tact, Resta whatever the fuck your ship's name is, state your business and affiliation," the voice on the other end was male, and I almost laughed as I listened to the guy trip over the ship's unpronounceable name.

"When we get into the galley, turn off the lights in the cargo bay and anything else behind us. Can you respond with something that sounds automated? I don't know. Tell them we're an AI controlled drone ship and we're doing geology or something. I don't know," I instructed.

"Suuurrre," X-Talia said, drawing out the word before playing her response for us. It started with a chime. "Greetings unidentified vessel. This is Syracuse Mining Corporation prospecting droneship four. Current objectives are to gather information on the rings mineral composition," X-Talia spoke once more clearly addressing us. How is that?"

“Great." Sam helped me into the galley, and we shut the hatch behind us. Never did the small galley seem like such a big space when you had to cross it with your leg throbbing in pain with each heartbeat.

"Rest-a-trick. This is Rixa system authority. Cut power and prepare for boarding," came the next message.

Shit. Now what? I looked at Sam, who looked horrified, as if reading my mind, X-Talia said, "Now, what?"

"Give me a second to think," I groaned as I sat down in the pilot's chair and tried to organize my thoughts around the pain. "Is he actually System Authority?" I asked.

"System Authority is handled by the Sentinel Mercenary Company. Chances of this ship being a mercenary company vessel is extraordinarily low. I suspect a pirate," came the response.

We knew there were pirates in the area and that they were a recurring pain in the ass for many miners and transporters. Hadn't expected to actually have to deal with them so soon, as the Sentinel Mercenary Company made frequent patrols of the rings. Huh. He wanted to board us. "Ok. Here's an idea. Can you respond by telling him no, but make it sound like he actually could and that there would be no repercussions if he did?"

"Uh, sure," X-Talia said before the chime came again, "Boarding this vessel is against company policy and unsafe due to a lack of atmosphere in the cargo hold," the message ended with a chime again.

"I feel like I'm walking into a mall," Sam said.

"Reest-a-tect, I insist on boarding for routine check," came the response.

"Tell them you'll comply with all System Authority bullshit."

"This vessel will comply with all System Authority orders. Please proceed with caution as the cargo bay is in vacuum.”

“Sam, can you run and get the hard suit and the guns then close the hatch and we'll actually deal with the cargo hold?"

She gave me a nod before getting up and heading out. I sat back in my chair and winced. I think I might have an idea.

I watched on the tablet as our friendly neighborhood System Authority guy, who was definitely not friendly or a System Authority guy, docked with us. Slowly and cautiously, he boarded the empty ship, drifting weightless throughout the cargo hold while looking around with a flashlight. My heart pounded in my chest, which only caused my leg to throb quicker. This sucked. The guy made his way up the ladder and got himself firmly planted in front of the door to the galley before he tried to throw the lock. Fortunately, it was electronically sealed when there was a difference in pressure between the two rooms.

"Rest-at-rict. In order to do a thorough inspection, I need access to the ship," the guy told the ship, which was forwarded into my helmet.

X-Talia replied, again starting with the chime. "The galley is pressurized, the cargo hold is not. Opening the door now would cause explosive decompression. Would you like me to repressurize the cargo hold?"

The guy groaned over the mic. “Yes, pressurize the damn cargo hold."

"Please stand by as repressurizing the cargo hold will take several minutes."

He groaned over the comms. Didn't say anything, just groaned. I understood his frustration. There was a lot of volume in the cargo hold, and the fact that we could store that much breathable atmosphere in small containers still amazed me.

Cargo bay filled, the electronic lock disengaged, the man threw the lever, opened up the galley hatchway, and walked in. As expected, he focused more on the kitchen area than the alcove to the left. That was his mistake. Three steps in and the lights turned on. I heard him swear through his suit. I, of course, had been ready for this. Sitting back in my gaming chair, armor-piercing rounds in my pilfered lead thrower, and the polarity on my face shield nearly maxed. Over my suit speaker, I said, "Freeze, drop the weapon."

The guy practically jumped out of his skin. I suppose walking into a dark ship that was supposed to be just a drone, only to have the lights come on and somebody yell at you would be pretty terrifying. He did not drop the gun. However, he started swinging it towards me, and I thought I was gonna have to shoot him. He aborted the action when he noticed I was in a hard suit and not holding an Arc pistol like he was, instead throwing both his arms in the air.

"I said drop the weapon," I repeated.

Hesitantly, he actually dropped the damn thing.

"Out of the hard suit. Now," I ordered.

"Well, hold on there, buddy," he said.

"No, not your buddy, not your friend. Get out of the hard suit. This here has armor-piercing rounds. It won't protect you. You can either let me shoot you with this, in which you will die, or you can get rid of the hard suit, and I get to switch over to an Arc pistol, in which case you won't die. Your choice."

"I'm with System Authority," he claimed.

"Yeah? Well I’m with emperor Mung of the Jalapeno Empre. Hard suit off. You got to the count of 10 to comply.” Emperor Mung? Where the hell did I get that from.

The guy started stripping, which was a relief because I didn't actually want to shoot him. This would be a pretty simple open-shut case. Pirate walks into our ship, tries to take it over, we defend the ship, and we drop them off with the Sentinel Mercenary group, preferably a ship instead of a station, so we don't have to spend a lot of time. We go on our merry way. Hell, maybe there's a bounty we can collect. That would be nice, and now that my pirate friend here was complying, we'd be able to tie him up, throw him in a room, and do that. It would take maybe 12, 14 hours, and I'd actually be able to get rid of a guy without killing him. Yeah, this was gonna go okay.