"Good Morning," Taylor yawned.
She rolled away from the groggy asari next to her and sat on the edge of the bed. Life aboard the Celebrimbor had quickly settled into a rhythm of the last few days of travel. Mordin had taken over one of the ship's science labs as his own, it was an exploration vessel after all, and occupied his free time analyzing the drone shell Taylor had produced for him with occasional help from Lela.
Niusa and her had also helped Taylor make an inventory of what the admiral had left them with the ship. They had enough fresh provisions to last them a few days and rations for emergencies but there wasn't exactly an abundance of either. Some of their credits would have to go towards that on their next stop.
She had dumped the pile of Cerberus crates in her storage space into one of the ship's cargo bays and they had sorted through their contents. The weapons had gone into the armory, the rations had gone into the pantry to pad out their provisions, and the rest was left there as it wasn't of much interest to them. Hopefully, they could sell the stuff at some point.
Taylor had also built two more flight bracelets for Mordin and Lela. Their reactions had been priceless, Mordin had looked like a kid in a candy shop while Lela had looked at her like she was pulling an elaborate prank. Until she was hovering five feet off the ground and freaking out. They had used the shuttle bay to practice, it was smaller than on the cruiser but still the largest room with little clutter in the entire ship.
Mordin had grasped the basics quickly but his way of flying was strange, in quick bursts like a hummingbird. Lela had required more time, the lack of a strictly define set of controls had confused her. Interestingly, it was Niusa who had managed to explain things the best. Taylor was too used to the fluid mental interfaces that shards provided and Mordin was, well, him.
In between everything, Taylor also took some piloting lessons from Lela for both the ship and shuttles. The latter were familiar; they used the same control scheme as the small freighter she had been practicing on, but the six hundred feet long exploration vessel handled completely differently. For precise maneuvers, it still used the throttle and stick configuration, but most of the manual flying was done with two orbs with which she could control a flight curve of sorts. It was completely alien at first but once it clicked for her, she found it very pleasant. She could simply tell the ship where to go, what to do, and the flight computer would do it for her.
When she had free time, which was a lot of the time, she watched asari holo-vids with Niusa and sometimes Lela. It was a fascinating look into their culture. The shows were heavy on intrigue, often with multiple interleaved plots, and took their time to resolve everything. It was probably the kind of thing Lisa would love-hate. They also watched several movies as a group. Mordin played his favorite salarian flick. Surprisingly, or maybe not, it was about a group of salarian scientists saving their home world from a zombie plague of all things. Lela showed a recent human-quarian movie about a quarian girl on her pilgrimage and her romance with a human ship captain who rescued her from a drell bounty hunter. It was incredibly cheesy.
Niusa had also started to share a bed with Taylor. Her presence soothed the asari with her presence during stretches of relay travel. She had learned that the process was unpleasant for her with her heightened biotic sensitivity. Like the hand of an uncaring god. She thought the metaphor was fitting. The more she learned about the relays, the less she liked them. Taylor also found Niusa's presence comforting. The asari had grown on her quite a bit with her bright and joyous personality.
"Good Morning," Niusa groaned. "We're there?"
"Almost, Mordin is handling the in-system transit from the looks of it."
"Let's get ready then," she cracked her neck.
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The disadvantage of having a quarian ship was the discrimination. Traffic control at the station in orbit of Tuthion put them on hold a grand total of five times and they let nearly a dozen ships dock before us, ships that had been behind them in the queue.
"Celebrimbor, you are cleared for docking at bay sixteen."
"Fucking finally," Niusa cursed. "What took them so long? Did they have to roll out the red carpet?"
"Or getting a security team together," Lela sighed.
"Are they going to try to search the ship?" Taylor asked.
She had lived in Brockton Bay, she was familiar with the kind of bullshit the cops loved to pull. A lot of them had been Empire sympathizers and whether they didn't like the color of someone's skin or thought they looked a little too Jewish, they would find a way to make your day miserable.
"Not usually," Lela shook her head, "but they'll probably put some security around, to 'make sure we aren't stealing from honest folk.'"
"I think it's better if some of us stay on the ship," Taylor said. "In case some moron gets ideas."
"Tay, you go with Mordin," Niusa said, "and Lela can guard the ship with me. Works for you?" She asked the quarian.
"I wanted to buy a few things while on the station …" Lela said, hesitantly.
"We can rotate," Taylor offered. "Once Mordin and I get back with the supplies, you and Niusa can go do some shopping. We aren't in a big hurry." From the nods she received, everyone seemed satisfied with this arrangement.
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Once Mordin and her had cleared the security checkpoint, she let her salarian friend take the lead. His contact was down on the planet so they had to take a shuttle from the station as their ship was too large to land at the planet's small spaceport. Tuthion looked strange from space, it had a single large continent with a roughly pentagonal shape almost entirely covered by a massive mountainous jungle. Most of the cities had established themselves near the coasts where the terrain was less perilous. Their destination was near one of the points, the capital city of Tuthion Prime.
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"Contact resides in industrial district at the edge of city," Mordin informed her. "Will likely need to rent shuttle to get to destination."
"Did you send them a message?" Taylor asked.
"Meos expecting us," Mordin nodded.
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Mordin landed their transport shuttle in front of what looked like the bastard lovechild of a used car lot and salvage operation. The compound was surrounded by a high concrete wall with barbed wire at the top, likely to deter potential thieves.
An alien was waiting for them at the edge of the landing pad. It was her first time seeing a drell. They were a reptile-like species that balanced precariously on the human side of the uncanny valley. It was difficult to describe, the English language felt lacking. The front and top of his head were covered in yellow-green scaled plates with some darker patches while the back and next had reddish folds of skin. His eyes were pitch black and Taylor briefly caught two pairs of eyelids when he blinked.
Unlike the asari with their strangely mesmerizing head crests that reminded her of an octopus, the drell looked more like a species that had evolved on a desert planet. The pattern on his skin was also reminiscent of one of Newter of Faultline's crew. If the extranet was right, their skin was also covered by a slightly hallucinogenic substance which explained the aposematic coloration that screamed 'do not lick, poisonous.'
"Mordin," he greeted the salarian. "It's been a long time. Didn't think I'd ever see you again."
"Apologies, galaxy large and troubles many," Mordin shook his hand. "Allow me to introduce everyone. Seti Meos, old acquaintance, Taylor'Hebert, travel companion, captain of Celebrimbor."
"Pleased to meet you," Taylor shook his hand as well.
"Pleasure's mine," Meos smiled. "From what Mordin sent in his message, you need parts for your ship?"
"Indeed, both spare parts for repairs and materials to perform some upgrades."
"I don't have much in the way of quarian tech," Meos scratched his chin, "it's pretty hard to come by, but I can show you what I have."
"Lead the way," Taylor said.
She followed Meos inside the salvage yard with Mordin. Contrary to expectations, everything was well organized and protected form the elements which made it easier for her. She let her tinker power lead her through the selection process and picked whatever it recommended. Most of the components for the slip and shift drives were fairly mundane, metal and plastics for the frame, cables, connectors, and computation units to control the drive, and only the cores for each needed to be manufactured with powers.
The slip drive needed some crystals capable of folding gravity in a way beyond what element zero could do, not that they could afford the quantity of element zero she would need in the first place. The shift drive required things even harder to obtain, organic crystals very close to shard-flesh in nature that existed on multiple layers of reality at once. Even with her enhanced mind, the seven-dimensional schematics were hard to fully grasp.
In the end, they ended up buying almost two hundred thousand credits worth of stuff. As a bonus, she had found everything she needed to build a proper recycler and fabricator to replace the ones in the ship. With those, she would no longer be limited by what could be built with omni-gel, like parts of the drive cores or even element zero if she wanted to waste energy. The best part would obviously be the ability to bootstrap her tinker cycle without the need to rely on her summoned drones.
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Before returning to the ship, they also made a detour to purchase provisions. They added several crates of cryogenically frozen ingredients and prepared meals to their already full shuttle. Since they had both levo and dextro species on board, it was a bit more costly but she thought it was worth it.
For the return trip, they brought the shuttle directly to the station where they unloaded everything on grav-pallets. She would have loved to drop everything directly into the Celebrimbor's cargo bay but Mordin told her it would likely be a massive hassle with a rented shuttle, especially for a quarian ship.
It already proved to be a hassle to bring their legally acquired merchandise back to their ship. A pair of security agents, a turian man and a human woman, conveniently stationed near their ship had stopped them and asked to see the receipts for everything on the pallets then insisted on making a detailed inventory just to waste their time since neither of the guards could tell what the components were. Mordin hadn't really intervened beyond answering questions the female officer asked him and provided the receipts for the merchandise. She wasn't certain that it would even help, the turian was looking for any excuse at this point.
He even insisted that she open up a capacitor bank to check inside for contraband.
Taylor explained in graphic detail what manner of painful death awaited them if they did.
"Is this a threat?" The turian man asked with a sneer.
"Merely a statement of fact," Taylor said flatly. "Even a residual charge at the amperage this device operates at will turn anyone into charred meat. There is a reason the connectors are covered in bright red plastic."
The turian wanted to say something, probably nasty, but his colleague put a hand on his shoulder. She seemed to be the sane one of the pair.
"There's nothing on the scan," she told him, "let it go. The receipts are legitimate, I contacted the seller. He yelled at me for harassing one of his best customers in months."
"Fine, pick up all that mess before I ticket you for littering," the officer turned around and stormed off.
"Sorry for the inconvenience ma'am," the woman gave her an apologetic look, "there has been a string of thefts on the station and it has everyone on edge."
"I hope you catch whoever is doing this," Taylor said.
"If you find any information, contact security, there's a bounty," the officer said and jogged to catch up with her partner.
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As she unloaded the grav-pallets with the help of some telekinesis, Niusa walked into the cargo hold.
"What did these two officers want?" She asked. "We watched with the ship's cameras, it seemed pretty serious."
"It was probably eighty percent assholery from the turian's part," Taylor shrugged, "but the woman told us there had been a recent series of thefts on the station."
"So we're super unlucky and showed up at the wrong time?"
"Well, there's a bounty on any information about the thief," Taylor leaned against the wall, "maybe we can turn this to our advantage. That little shopping spree made a big dent in our finances."
Niusa gave the stacks of crates twice her height and which filled a good chunk of the cargo hold a sideways glance.
"How much?" She asked hesitantly.
"One hundred and eighty-four thousand for the materials and twelve for the provisions. The latter should last us at least three months so it was an investment."
"By the … that's a lot of tech," she looked around the room, "but I guess you plan to build a completely unknown type of drive so … maybe it's a bargain."
"The hard part for those drives are the cores, I have most of what's needed for the support frameworks but I'll have to create the cores with powers because the materials for them don't exist anywhere in this universe and the tech to build them is equally complex to set up."
"How complex are you talking about? Ezzo drives are already insanely complex."
"For the slip drive, I need exotic crystals that can fold spacetime," Taylor explained, "and for the shift drive I need one that has a seven-dimensional structure."
"What the," Niusa almost choked. "How can something … no never mind, I'll leave it to Mordin to figure out."
"Powers are bullshit," Taylor gave her a smile and a pat on the shoulder.