“...and I'd like to thank you all for listening.” I said into the camera and gave them a beaming smile. “Good day.”
The signal cut off and as Simone gave me a thumbs up gesture, I was met with a round of applause. I chuckled as I put my armored suit coat back on and stored the cloak and blast shield.
“Thank you for letting me in.” I said and walked over to the emergency station worker in charge.
“Are you kidding?” The man asked and shook my hand. “I just met the Hero of Chofaris, who is even more of a hero than I thought he was, and he just let everyone know what was going on.” He said and let my hand go. “We won't even get fired!”
The small crew running things there let out several laughs.
“Hey! We could do our own interviews of each other of this and make a fortune!” One of them suggested and they all laughed.
“If you want to do it, you have my permission to use the footage.” I said.
“HA HA!” The man that made the suggestion laughed the loudest.
“We better go, in case they did find some crazy military unit that would want to confront me.” I said. Simone and I left the small underground facility that was well concealed and I took her normal hand and covered us in Presence, then used Presence Run. We ran through a bunch of underground tunnels to the hidden entrance we had come in through. Once outside, I activated Stealth and we ran across several streets to a local landing pad.
“Okay, Jelly.” I said and closed the shuttle's hatch and dropped the Stealth technique. “Take us to the first stop.”
“I can't believe I'm doing this.” Jelly said with a laugh and flew the shuttle at a much faster speed than normal hover traffic was supposed to allow. She stayed low and avoided detection and we arrived at the main government building and landed in the parking lot. I opened the hatch and hopped out.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I asked Sheph and she shook her head.
“Hurry up and let's go.” Sheph said.
“I just have to grab something first.”
I walked around the shuttle to the government vehicle that was still in the same spot I had parked it after the explosion. I used levitation on it and put it on top of the shuttle, then secured it with several cable tie-downs and then hopped back into the shuttle and shut the hatch.
“Okay, one more.” I said.
Jelly added power to the shuttle and lifted off, then carefully flew through the capital city to the next spot. “You weren't joking!” She said and laughed as she brought the shuttle into a hover over the hidden armored personnel carrier I had stashed.
“Hey, they aren't going to need it anymore.” I said. “Keep the shuttle steady while I attach it.”
“Do you really need an APC?” Sheph asked as the shuttle's hatch opened.
I shrugged as I grabbed more cables and then jumped out of the hatch. I had the APC cabled up and had mag-locks set on both the sides and the bottom of the shuttle, then levitated myself back up to the shuttle's hatch and closed it.
“Really heavy load, so no sudden bursts of speed.” I cautioned Jelly.
“Thanks for telling me! I never would have guessed!” Jelly said loudly and added twice as much power to the engines and eased us up slightly. There was a sound of groaning metal for a moment, then a little jerk, and nothing. “You're paying to fix my shuttle!”
“One of the cables slipped off the main support and crushed a couple of the metal panels, so sure.” I said and covered the shuttle and our load in a Presence Barrier to distort what we looked like. “Now stop complaining and get us out of here.”
Jelly cursed at what was probably going to take a few hours to repair, then we slowly rose up into the air. “All right, we're on our way.” She said and flew us up and around a few of the heavy traffic patterns. Once we were in the clear, she pushed the shuttle to its limits and it started to vibrate.
“You know if we die, we can't repair the shuttle, right?” Simone asked Jelly.
“Wait until we hit the upper air currents with all this extra weight on our ass!” Jelly said and laughed. “I hope you have something for our passenger to catch her lunch.”
It took a couple of minutes for her words to become true. The shuttle started to shake like an unbalanced washing machine in the spin cycle. I quickly grabbed Sheph's shoulder and shared energy with her to stop her from throwing up. A minute later, we hit an air pocket with no wind resistance and the shuttle shot straight up like a rocket.
“Wooohoooo!” Jelly let out at the feeling of weighing three times her own weight, then it eased as the atmosphere outside the shuttle started to fade away.
“This thing is going to need a complete overhaul.” Simone said as she checked the several red blinking lights. “I think the aircar on the roof crushed half of the gravity sensors.”
“I knew I should have made a solid Presence layer on top of the shuttle.” I said with a sigh. “Oh, well. I'll remember to do it next time.”
“Next time?” Sheph looked at me like I was insane.
“I meant when moving something too big to put inside a shuttle.”
“I thought you meant this crazy ride.” Sheph said and relaxed. “Thank you for keeping my lunch down for me.”
“I did that for me.” I said. “Jelly would make me clean it up!”
“Damn right I would!” Jelly said. “Okay, we're coming up on the shuttle bay.”
“Now the tricky part.” I said and waited for the shuttle bay doors to open, then I used Presence to unhook the cables from the APC hanging from the bottom of the shuttle. Once it was free, I eased it into the shuttle bay. The gravity was off, so I floated the vehicle all the way to the back of the bay, turned it on its side, then rested it against the side of the bay where a shuttle used to be.
I hooked the machine into place and nodded to Jelly. She floated the shuttle into the bay and brought us down to land on the floor, then the bay doors closed. I motioned for Sheph to stay strapped in and opened the shuttle's hatch and floated out, unhooked the government hover vehicle from the top of the shuttle and floated it over to the same side with the APC and secured it to the wall.
“Okay, Gleas.” I said into my wrist com and floated back over to the shuttle. Gravity returned to the shuttle bay and I dropped to the floor beside the shuttle's hatch and walked inside. “Welcome to your new temporary home.” I said to Sheph and she unstrapped and stood up.
“That sounds so reassuring.” Sheph said and grabbed a small bag.
“Well, I'm assuming that you don't want to stick around here anymore.” I said and escorted her off the shuttle.
“I don't.” Sheph said. “I've got enough money to...”
“Don't worry about that.” I said and led her across the cargo hold and to the stairs. “The only time you have to spend your own money here is when you buy things for yourself during our shopping trips.”
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“You think he's joking.” Simone said from behind us and then chuckled. “You'll see.”
“We'll have to skip shopping this time, I think.” I said.
“Yes, we need to keep a low profile for a while.” Sheph reminded us. “This is... well, you...”
“It's all right.” I said and led her to an empty room. “Here we are.”
“Oh, my.” Sheph said when she saw the very nice room. “You gave me the VIP suite?”
Jelly and Simone laughed and walked by us.
“What's funny?” Sheph asked.
“All the rooms look like this.” I said and I saw and felt her surprise. “I'll bring up your other things when they get here.”
“Thank you.” Sheph said and looked around. All of the rooms are this opulent? She asked herself.
I chuckled and shut the door and walked back to my own room. I had some personal time with Hailey scheduled and walked over to the bathroom to grab a quick shower, then was met with a solid wall of suds and bubbles.
“HAILEY!” I yelled and she laughed and laughed.
The next few days passed without fuss as Simone, Jelly, and I worked on gathering more salvage. With Simone's extra arms and her constant use of Presence to reinforce those arms, she not only got stronger in her muscles but in her Presence as well. I would conduct lessons for two hours in the evenings and kept teaching both Simone and Hailey what I could to help them progress as much as possible without causing themselves or others harm.
We worked hard while we used the same schedule as the SAR rescue teams, even with my limited pilots. The three of them worked out a new rotating schedule to follow during the week and on our days off, Simone would do a shift and fly us to the planet. We quickly filled the Udelis, both the cargo hold and the collapsible metal racks on the top of the ship, then started working on filling the new ship.
The work progressed over the next few weeks and we stripped wreck after wreck. The things we acquired were worth a lot more because we only had the high priority wrecks left. We found three more shuttles, plus maintenance parts, and I highly debated dropping some essential cargo to take them.
Jelly had another idea instead. “Why don't we hang them from the bottom of the ships like you did with the shuttle and the APC?”
Simone and I exchanged looks.
“Can we do that?” Simone asked. “The deflector screens won't cover much of them under the ship.”
“We have dozens of them, so we can install two more.” Jelly said. “They're deflector screens, not shields.”
I laughed. “All right. We'll try it on the new ship. If we find any more...”
“We'll only have the capacity to take four, total.” Gleas said. “Any more than that we have to either convert and sell locally or destroy them.”
“I'd suggest the convert and sell locally option.” Sheph said. “I've seen the shuttles you use. You can sell them at significantly lower than full price and you'll get rid of them fast, while gaining a huge liquid capital influx for other needs.”
“He wants a space habitat for us all to live in.” Hailey said and Sheph looked at her. “We can't keep living on a ship forever.”
“Then yes, convert and sell them is definitely what you want to do.” Sheph said. “Just proving you can acquire large sums of money at regular intervals will prove you're serious with...”
“I either want to buy it outright or buy the inner structure and build the outside myself.” I said. “I do not want to go into debt and have to work it off for thirty years or something.”
“Hunter, space habitats are expensive.” Sheph said. “The materials alone are...”
“...really cheap back in the Dizahl System.” I finished for her. “I'm going to keep looking for some nice portable reactors or even a good main reactor to use as a starting point.”
“Portable?” Sheph asked.
“One he can move around by himself and attach things to.” Simone explained. “A main reactor would require engineers and workers.”
“Usually the reactors are the first thing ships dump when they are about to be blown out of space, so my hopes are really low.” I said. “I'm going to keep looking, though.”
“I'll hope you do find one and you can get that ridiculous notion out of your head.” Sheph said with a laugh. “You can buy a galactic space station core on the open market.”
“Pre-made?” I asked, curiously. I hadn't heard that you could buy just the main part and I thought it was the whole thing or nothing.
“I'm so glad I decided to come along.” Sheph said.
I laughed. “Being charged with trumped up treason charges had nothing to do with it, huh?”
“I left before that.” Sheph said with a smug smile and everyone laughed.
“All right, then.” I said and tapped the table to make the hologram of the alien wrecks shift to show a huge ship that looked like a carrier. “We strip this huge son of a bitch down to the bulkheads. According to the schematics it has three shuttle bays.”
“THREE?!?” Jelly yelled, and then coughed when we all looked at her. “Ah... carry on.”
I shook my head at her enthusiasm and then continued. “I suspect there's at least ten shuttles in the bays. We can convert them and sell them privately in less than a week.”
“Oh, goddess.” Deborah said in a soft voice. “Even at a reduced price like Sheph suggests...”
“We can all make a ton of credits with almost no effort.” Simone said with a smile.
“Then are we all agreed that we move this wreck up to the top of the priority wrecks?” I asked and everyone nodded. “Gleas, get us close to that side of the debris field.” I said and she left. “Jelly, you're going to have your work cut out for you.”
Jelly nodded. “I'll have a flight plan by the time Gleas gets us over there.” She said and left as well.
“Hailey, you're on monitor duty.” I said.
“I'll keep everyone bright and alert!” Hailey said and took off. After a moment, she was back and wagged her finger at me. I chuckled and bent over so she could kiss me, then she left for real.
“Who wants the co-pilot seat?” I asked and Deborah raised a hand. “Then get your ass to the cockpit.”
Deborah chuckled and left.
“Sheph, since you have a better handle on the locals, start discretely looking for a few buyers.” I said.
“Not a problem.” Sheph said. “I know six families right now that would kill to get a personal shuttle.”
I nodded. “Then we'll hope for at least that many.”
“I'll make some calls.” Sheph said and left.
“That leaves us.” Sandy said and put an arm around Beatrice's shoulders.
“You two have the most important job of them all.” I said and they leaned in close. “Go and relax until your shift starts.”
Sandy snorted a laugh and Beatrice smiled.
“No public naked running.” I reminded them as they walked by.
“Not public. Got it.” Sandy said with a grin and pinched Beatrice's butt. Beatrice let out a yelp and ran as Sandy chased her from the room.
“You have a great group of people there.” Simone said as she stared out the meeting room's door.
“Yes, we do.” I said and she turned to look at me. “You are as much a part of this group as anyone.”
“Hunter, I... you know that I...”
“Hailey and I have been making huge strides with you.” I said and reached a hand out to her.
Simone used a three fingered hand on one of her extra arms to take mine, then gasped.
“We're almost done here.” I said and she saw the things I was going to do when we had the salvage job completed.
“After what you did for me...” Simone said and stepped close. “...I won't ever question your decisions.”
I raised my eyebrows and let her hand go. “What was that you just said?”
“I said that I won't question your decisions.” Simone said and used all four hands to grab onto me. “I didn't say I would always agree with them.” She opened all of her considerable mental barriers and let me in completely. She hadn't done that since we had met that first time. This moment was when we both knew that she was finally ready to be in the relationship we had both intended to have from the beginning.
Simone smiled wickedly as I surrounded her mind in Presence to protect her, then I made a hole in my own mental barriers to only let her in. When our lips touched, so did our Presence. Our minds and our energy swirled together, unbidden. I had to restrain myself and ease what was happening, since Simone had no intention of stopping once it started.
“We need to get to work.” I said when I broke the kiss.
“Of course.” Simone said and her mental barriers popped back into place and my assistance was no longer required to protect her thoughts. “I will not be accused of being unprofessional.”
“I could make a joke about you wearing a flight suit doing just that.” I said with a smile.
“I was thinking the same thing about you.” Simone said with a matching smile.
“I'm changed.” Jelly said as she came into the room. “Let's go.”
“We're on it.” Simone and I said at the same time and followed Jelly to the shuttle bay.
“I'll load the supplies.” I said and grabbed a pile of structural members and sheet metal and stored it, then loaded the bag of holding with the necessary computer components and converters necessary for working on the shuttles.
“I just love this bag.” Simone said and put the tools and things necessary for the work we were about to do into her own bag.
We got everything we needed and climbed into the shuttle. Jelly waited to get the all clear from Gleas before the shuttle bay doors opened, then she took a quick stock of the environment. There were smaller wrecks and pieces of debris floating around, so she took her time to fly us out and around to inspect the wreck.
I used my Detect Presence and told her the best place to stop, which just happened to be in front of one of the shuttle bays. I told Simone to stay in the shuttle and I floated over to the wreck to inspect the very large bay doors. They were nearly identical to the ones on my new ship, which meant there was going to be a surprise inside. I had 'seen' it already, so I made sure to not share that information with either Simone or Hailey until I opened the door.
I used my Light sword and severed the main mechanism on one side of the door, then used Presence to push it open from the inside. The large door swung open to reveal to everyone what I had already seen.
Shuttles. Lots and lots of shuttles.
My estimation of having ten shuttles was pretty accurate... if I was only counting one of the bays. Unlike ours where we mounted the extras on the walls, this shuttle bay had shelves for them. They would lift off, move into the middle of the bay, then launch out the doors.
“By the goddess!” Someone whispered on the open com line.
“Yeah.” I said and then chuckled. “I'm thinking it's going to take more than a week to work on them.”
“Ha ha!” Simone laughed and floated by me and into the bay. “Let's get started!”
I laughed as well and floated in behind her.