Chapter 2
TWO
LYRIEN
A female alien was trying to barter her way onto my ship.
She looked like the Taygetans, but was smaller, with curves that rounded out under the normally shapeless grey smock she was wearing.
Her feet were bare, her light yellow hair pulled back from her face with a piece of fabric that matched a tear at the bottom of her smock.
Her face was shockingly plump in comparison to the Taygetans, with smaller eyes and rounder cheeks.
Given that she was dramatically shorter than her species, it looked as if she were a version of one of them that had been squished down, with all the height going sideways.
Her hair was pulled back behind her head, and it was matted together in uneven chunks with loose strands that frayed out.
Her smock was scuffed, and the opening to the station's ventilation tubing lay torn open on the ground behind her.
She had emerged from it a few moments after my delivery drone had left, accompanied by the Taygetan security team.
The single guard left to make sure I didn't send any more drones into the station was out of sight around the hallway, talking to one of the scientists.
The alien female stood in front of the airlock connection, holding my target in her hand.
"Research data from this station in exchange for safe passage to a location of my choosing," she said. "But you have to let me on right now. They'll spot me on their security cameras soon."
I ran a risk prediction heuristic on the scenario.
I had taken over the courier shipment, hacking into the system that was intended to route it to another vessel, and stole the delivery location.
From the contents of the order, it was clear that the research station had lost enough supplies that this delivery had enough leverage to force a physical connection rather than just send supplies over via shuttle.
I needed the physical airlock connection.
When I made the docking connection and slipped a stealth drone in to clamp onto the walls and set up a fake network, it had taken me moments to get through their security when one of their devices logged onto my fake network instead, providing the credentials to get onto their system and into everything.
But once there, I discovered they had wiped all their research from their system.
They had even gone so far as to throw sheets over everything in the labs so I couldn't get a visual inventory of what was in there.
There was one room without optics, likely their security hub.
It was clear that something was suspicious, but it wasn't an overheated laser cannon.
I had already begun drafting a backup plan to send an additional drone into the station to search, starting with the blacked-out room. I had the device almost fully configured when the alien female wiggled herself out of the ventilation tube and offered me exactly what I'd come to retrieve.
They had a traitor.
A rather disheveled-looking traitor.
The risk prediction heuristic pinged on a small closet that appeared to have been turned into a cell, given its door locked from the outside and a bucket of biological waste in the corner.
There were scratches on the wall indicating the passage of time, and the room contained a blanket draped over a table, concealing the ventilation shaft.
Not a traitor then, prisoner.
The likelihood of this being a Calicium trap dropped.
Calicium didn't keep prisoners for that long.
But I would need to scan her to be certain.
I slid open the door, and I ran a quick scan over her as she stepped into my airlock.
If she were a Calicium infiltrator agent, her implants would flag on my scan, and I could dispose of her in the airlock.
If she were completely biological, it would be simple enough to dart her in the airlock and take the data storage from her before putting her back on the space station.
I had no intention of taking on a passenger, and the Taygetans had laws about how they dealt with aliens.
The scan finished.
Anger spiked in my system as I added its details to my mission log.
She wasn't just carrying evidence in her arms.
I didn't allow advanced intelligent biologicals inside of me, but I had to bend my own rules.
My preference gave way to moral responsibility.
I couldn't leave her here like this, not with that thing around her neck, making it utterly clear that the Taygetans on this station didn't follow their own laws anymore.
I had to get her away from this place, from these criminals who would put something like that on another person.
With that, my decision was made.
I immediately adjusted the internal atmosphere of the entrance to my ship to match the environment on the station, heating up to a comfortable temperature standard for golden zone bipedals.
I normally kept the part of me accessible from the docking connection cold and unbreathable to make it difficult for lifeforms to get onboard unless they were suited up, but this alien female didn't have such protection.
I set my manufacturing bay to work to equip one of the empty rooms to change it into a passenger suite.
I hadn't taken a passenger before, but I understood the principle of it and had architectural plans for it.
There was no way I was going to force her back to the station with that abhorrent thing on her.
The Taygetans were a part of the Alliance, and she was wearing a device around her neck that violated one of their major accords.
Any device that constrained free will was illegal in all Taygetan systems, let alone the Alliance as a whole.
For my people, that particular method of control was deeply offensive, given our more recent history.
But then again, I had been hired to pilfer this research station's data because of a rumor that they had violated that accord.
The proof of that rumor was now standing in my airlock.
"Hold your breath for disinfectant," I said.
She did as instructed, squeezing her eyes shut, and I cycled the airlock with a standard cleanser.
Then I opened the inner door, and as she stepped out into my warmed-up, newly air-conditioned hallway, I rolled one of my drones up to her.
She clutched the data device to her chest, holding it up as if she were afraid I was about to try to wrestle it from her.
"I'm not handing this over until we have a clear written agreement to the trade," she said.
There was a nervous tremor in her voice, but her brown eyes stared at my drone as if she were challenging me.
She had no weapons, no authority, and with that collar around her neck, had clearly been in a position where she was in no control over what was happening to her.
She was inside me, and if she knew what I was, then her bravery was even more astonishing.
But I suspected she didn't know what I was.
After the Caliciums, my species was more careful about interacting with unknown aliens.
"That is acceptable," I said, modulating my vocal tones to be soothing.
I could see her shoulders relax just slightly in response.
"Please allow me to remove the device from your neck.
It is in violation of the Alliance Accord on Sentient Custody, and I would like to take it off of you and store it with the rest of the evidence. "
Her eyes widened. "Yes, please."
I extended the manipulator on the drone and made a connection with the collar. In a few moments, I hacked it and triggered the release safely. I extended the drone's storage compartment and dropped it in, logging it into the report as physical evidence.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"I am ship classification XTRA0354, but you may call me Lyrien," I said. "What is your designation?"
"You can call me Maria," she said.
"That is a remarkably short name," I said. "Do you not have titles or family identifiers? I've never seen one of your species before."
Her eyes widened, and there was a shimmer in them, like liquid gathering in the corners.
"Dr. Maria Pilar Cortes," she said. "My name is Dr. Maria Pilar Cortes. No one on the station cared about that."
"Would you prefer to be called by your full name?" I asked.
"Maria is fine," she said, her voice hushed. "Am I talking to a computer or a crew member?"
"I am the ship," I said. "I currently have no crew members on board. You are the only mobile sentient inside of me."
It limited me to a certain extent from hosting a crew.
There was a great benefit to having mobile crew members that more than made up for the additional resource generation required to care for their needs.
At the same time, it was a huge risk, especially because I was shellbound.
Crew could defend you, but they could also betray you.
It was a massive risk letting her on board, especially when she had Calicium tech around her neck.
I was vulnerable.
But I couldn't leave her behind.
"What did you mean by evidence?" she asked.
I thought about what I should tell her. I didn't know what species she was, or why she was there.
The language she was speaking was loaded into the linguistics database, but it wasn't assigned a planet of origin, just a species name, which was extremely strange. Stranger yet, the language was flagged with a request to report any speakers to the Shek’invitali and was accompanied by biological care and medical data, so her species was known even if its origin was restricted.
After loading her biological data from the file, I took a moment to adjust the air composition in the ship to include more oxygen as was required by her species and increased the temperature a few more notches.