There was a helpful directory for shoppers available on the local version of the internet; both of the various shops and what they were selling as well as of the pirate ships and, essentially, a local version of Craigslist; a variety of offers were appearing and vanishing even as he looked, though, disturbingly, while there were crew applying for jobs, and captain's hiring crew, there was also a slave market; apparently a central hub here on the station offered auction services for captured prisoners, mostly crew of Republic civilian ships and outposts, though, surprisingly, there were a few locals listed as well.
This was attached to a guide to the local sales; each deck had an array of vendors catering to the pirates and militaries of a variety of races, and even the fully legitimate navies apparently did some shopping here; as he looked over the wandering groups of bedraggled, strangely dressed aliens, alongside the more organized, neatly dressed squads with clear rank badges, he wondered how many were pirates, how many privateers, and how many just soldiers.
He was casually walking towards what he'd been told was one of the more advanced corporate sales booths to browse their offerings, when he saw a demonstration that brought him to a stop. A six-limbed alien; one more insect-like, with a dull grey carapace and long spindly limbs, all carved with a variety of symbols; was making gestures; and a series of objects, mostly bullets from the look; were floating in midair in front of it. A handful of aliens and locals were nearby, watching.
He was distracted from the show for a moment by a brief hiss of water vapor as someone's suit-mounted humidifier sprayed the air; before stopping to watch.
The alien, for its part, turned to focus on Eyeball when he arrived. His translator picked up the last few words of what he'd been saying; "And for the right price, you, too, can learn how to..."
Eyeball shook his head and kept walking. He hadn't really thought too much of using magic for such casual, mundane things. If he marked his fingers, or maybe the artificial limb, up the right way, he could use it almost like a telekinetic; though actually needing gestures to do things.
He stopped. That... actually had potential. He looked down at his artificial arm; it had once been a relatively simple, six-fingered limb. At first built to automatically fail at a remote command, with a limited amount of remote control, unlike most artificial limbs, because it was intended for a prisoner.
Now... it was a mass of semi-liquid metal that seethed with murderous intent, made primarily from the molten remains of instruments that had caused the death of millions of terrified sentient beings in assembly-line fashion. He could easily put sub-components of different runes and symbols in there and merge them together to produce larger effects.
He turned back to the insectoid alien and the small crowd of amused pirates and gawkers; and the creature seemed to have been focused on him from the moment it saw him. It rose to its full height, spreading its armored limbs to reveal its softer underbelly; his translator indicated this was a sign of submission, akin to a bow.
He wondered, for a moment, if he should bow, or copy the gesture; would the alien's own translator understand it as an attempt to copy, or.. he decided to just give a short bow. The creature turned to the crowd. "Please depart. I must speak with this one."
A local, one of the humanoid Shoork, started to interject. "But I wanted to.."
"No. Go." A subtle gesture; the young woman was lifted off the floor and deposited a few meters away, out in the open pathway between stalls.
Eyeball glanced at it for a moment... and then stopped before the insectoid. "Hello there. Name's Eyeball. I haven't seen much magic in use in these parts."
The creature returned to the submissive pose. "I am Dancer of Worms and Fire. The Confederacy and Republic are both aware of magic, and have operatives who use it. Though, the Confederacy could best be said to have a thousand different groups, each of differing competence and importance. My own people have dedicated magic-users on every combat vessel, and use it to some effect. Not as great as your own, obviously."
Eyeball chuckled. "I was going to argue, but really, I can't argue too much there. The designer of my people's first starship was close friends with the most wise sorcerer of my world. There were legends he had sacrificed an eye to gain his knowledge, but that's nonsense. And to my knowledge, every ship that left our star-system had at least one on it.""
Dancer gave a long, hissing laugh. It was strange; he was still vaguely insectoid like the Forstagers. But the black and brown of his carapace, and the more fat central body, made him look... hideous... rather than the beautiful, sleek form of what shouldn't be that different; only the thousands of intricate symbols carved into the carapace, limbs, and tiny, numerous digits, made up for it. "How do you have so much power? And your foci? You carry the two most powerful ones I've ever encountered. My people have a focus called the Spire of the Stars which is almost as powerful as the weaker of those two. We use it to launch starships into orbit."
Eyeball glanced down at the handgun, and the false limb. One had been imbued with the terrified deaths of millions, the other with that of a handful of extremely powerful beings; starting with a functionally infinitely powerful Titan. The most powerful Foci he was aware of were Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he wasn't sure just how much stronger they were than Titanslayer, but it was significant. Did these people not understand how to make such a thing, what mattered for it?
"These aren't the most powerful Foci from my world, but they are pretty far up there. I have to ask... do your people know what makes a Focus more powerful?"
Dancer studied Eyeball for a moment. "This is a secret. Each race maintains its own secrets, though there are things I'm allowed to share. It requires intense, focused emotions, and we usually craft them at funerals for important figures, at the heart of great celebrations."
A slow nod. "That's part of it, yes. But if you've never encountered a focus of this strength, and have fought the Republic for any length of time, I suspect you don't know the more unpleasant things behind making a powerful focus. Tell you what. You help me learn your own species magic, and so long as its enough to actually be useful, I'll give you the details for how I made this..." He raised his prosthetic limb. "And also for how an ancient leader from my world forged a pair of them that made this look pathetic. They are... simultaneously very different, and very similar."
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"..Is the process hard to replicate?"
Eyeball grimaced, looking at the floor. "I... could probably go to the Jernal homeworld tomorrow, and if I could clear away the bombarding fleets, craft the most powerful focus I'd ever seen. Something that would make these look pathetic. It would take minutes, hours at the most. According to my research, that wouldn't even be the best place to make one, because that tragedy is mostly over; there are some where it's still a work in progress that could be far more effective."
Dancer looked at the hand, and the gun. "...You can create a focus in less than an hour!? Our processes take... well. More than that."
"The gun took hours; and if I understood how a Focus worked, and had empowered it earlier, it would be a dozen times as powerful. The arm was converted into a focus; and it took minutes."
"...If you will show me that process, I will teach you everything I know about magic."
"Sure. I'll arrange a berth for you on the ship. Mind if I ask about the name? The translation for it sounds... odd."
Dancer gave another chittering laugh. "It's a joke in my language. Comparing the word for cooking a creature without limbs to a ruthless dictator, like the royals here. How much space will I have to work with?"
Eyeball chuckled. "Mute. Ascension, call this gentleman. He's a possible asset on the magical front. Arrange a room for him. Not paying this one, he's in it for a mutual information exchange. Also... do a survey of nearby systems. I want an ongoing mass-death event the Republic is causing. Something we can intervene in, but which has already done a fair amount of damage."
The insectoid suddenly perked up; touching a comms device attached to the side of his face; and Eyeball gave another short bow, before turning away.
***
Sitting at a terminal in the Gaze of Wrath's medical bay with a pair of Ascension drones pressed up against him, dozens of artificial limbs busily working, Doshet stared at his terminal, casually eating some sort of hideous green 'ration bar' that tasted... surprisingly good.
Since his brief meeting with the Duchess; and the load of food that had been brought aboard almost immediately; he'd spent the past few hours here, with the machines slowly removing the implants; he'd chosen to simply be immobilized and locally numbed, rather than sedated. He had much to learn.
He knew that the Jernal, trapped in their own system, had been visited by other races before. Even recognized the sluggish blue creature. But when he replayed the silver-headed one's conversation with her, words stood out. From his past actions, it's likely that, purely to make things difficult for the Republic, that one would have helped the Jernal as much as possible.
Why hadn't this Confederacy? The Republic's ground forces were so slow, so pathetic. Real soldiers like Doshet's mother would have made short work of them. Even just making a deal with a single Jernal nation would have provided them with thousands of soldiers, eager to defend their homeland; or avenge it.
So. He studied the Confederacy. The Duchess. The 'Queendom', as it were, with its queen and three kings, and dozens of princes, princesses, dukes, duchesses.
The first thing that stuck out... the Shoork might not care about how closely related to the Founders you were. But... the squid and humanoid sides each had their own royalty. And if you weren't related to them... you were either a foreigner, part of a merchant family, or property.
They had, in fact, rescued people from the Republic before; only to essentially enslave them, settling them somewhere inside the Queendom, far from the Republic, safe; and useful. He could find entries on a species named the 'Tamrik' whose scattered colonies had been overwhelmed by the republic; and been mostly resettled in Royal territories as colonies of serfs, doing farming work.
The screens were bothersome at times; reading information seemed so slow when it took almost as much time to change to the new screen as it did to swap pages; but within the first few minutes, one of the machines had stopped by; and another screen was placed beside the first, synced up so that one was loading the new page while he read the first.
His insides felt... strange. He tried not to think about the ongoing surgery as he read; the constant work to undo years of torment and implantation. Or the fact that, from what he could tell, these Royals weren't that much better than the Republic; just on the opposite sides. Hopefully they didn't leave the Forstagers here. He'd grown sympathetic to the poor, helpless, shiny creatures.
***
Eyeball had, at first, ignored this vendor. He had a holographic display over his counter, and racks of some sort of side-arm and rifle that looked far too bulky to be worth carrying around; and the display showed a soldier waving the handgun-sized version at a swarm of insects, the creatures falling to the ground en masse; and the trees and plants around them simply wilting away. A 'Death Gun' that could simply eradicate life forms inside its area of effect, stopping all biological processes.
He'd already picked up different versions of shield-generator based weapons he was planning on using for a new shroud grenade design, EMP weapons, a larger, more powerful version of the 'Pulsewave' weapon the 8AD had been equipped with; he'd even grabbed a sort of plasma cutter that looked like a lightsaber, except, of course, without any sort of force field nonsense; but after a few steps, he turned around; and stepped up to the display. The place was empty; Eyeball looked at the display closely, as the salesperson; one of the local blue-skinned Shoork; looked up attentively.
".... A death gun. Point and kill anything. Why exactly is this not more popular here? Don't pirates have quite a bit of use for murdering folks?"
The man sighed. "Well. It's an 'exotic' radiation gun, virtually nonexistant half-life. Absolutely terrible armor penetration beyond point-blank range, limited effective range in atmosphere, but for unarmored victims, if its big enough to survive the initial shot, its still gonna die later from its insides being fried. It's... only really good for clearing out hostile wildlife and killing people in vac-suits; who, around here, they want to capture and sell as slaves."
Eyeball chuckled. "So... basically, it'll leave equipment mostly intact, but the person inside normally sells for more than the equipment would. And the people you -want- to kill with it, it only works... how far off?"
"For the heavier armor suits, you need skin contact; it won't go through that much armor at all. For the lighter ones, within a few meters. Even vac-suits protect you at fifty meters in vacuum, or thirty in most atmospheres... water makes it just a few meters even for a vac-suit. But... if you have a pest problem, whether its a herd of rampaging monsters or a swarm of bugs, or even bacteria, its amazing!"
A slow nod. "I'll take Sixty, and the schematics. Are Bacteria a problem that often around here?"
"Not too often unless they've been engineered as weapons. Most bacteria don't even work on things from offworld unless someone built them to do so; the rare times they do, though, its nasty. One time the Republic invaded a world, some bug in the biosphere killed anything that came into contact within minutes. Nice for them to get a taste of their own medicine for once. So... sixty? You're sure?"
Eyeball reached over and picked up one of the fat, rounded handguns. "I don't sell slaves. I'm much more interested in retrieving intact equipment than living corpses... and I can still make use of one of these Republic nutjobs even if they're dead. Delivery to the Gaze of Wrath."
He checked the price board on the vendor's display; and set a stack of credits out on the counter; which the man gave a quick accounting of before setting them in a lockbox beneath the counter. "Well then. Pleasure doing business with you!"
Eyeball nodded; and checked his HUD. He was supposed to go visit the Duchess in a few hours, before leaving the station for his next stop. All sorts of things to work out; what would happen to the Forstagers, possibly arranging a fleet to try to get that Neutronium... but he had another stop first; see what sort of crew he might find here that he could work with in the event Ascension had problems with EMP somewhere down the line.