Sullen Stars: Free Merchant

Rachel wasn't sure where to go after leaving the lawyer's office.

She could have returned to the spaceport, but it was impossible that there was anything but bad news there.  Even if there wasn't anything worse wrong with the ship than it first appeared, she knew the damage was beyond her ability to afford.  At this point, she just hoped that she could find a way patch the RCS lines so she had attitude control, get it back into space, and just never try to land again.  It was the best she could do now.  When Tony and Andrea dragged her back to court, she'd have to hope Alex could handle it on his own, whatever the laws were for that, or she stumbled across buried treasure in space and could afford to fix the landing struts.

The spaceport could only have bad news, and she really, really just didn't need any more bad news.

Instead, she took a leisurely stroll back to the Kalamatsi Bridge to give herself a chance to think about what to do next.  She took the lift up to the observatory this time, and while she had no intention of patronizing the restaurant, she found a seat outside of Papa Papadopoulos's Gyros.  Maybe she'd have a few minutes to sit around and contemplate her situation before one of the owners realized she wasn't a paying customer and booted her out.

The spot she chose was in the far corner of the patio surrounding the restaurant, hanging over the edge of one of the bridge's towers and overlooking the river that flowed out into the ocean.  Even now, hours later and under full sunlight, the waterway traffic was almost nonexistent.  A cargo ship floated lazily below on its way to some unknown port upstream, but clearly nobody thought this was a good time of year to go out on recreational boats.  Thirteen or fourteen months from now, that would be a very different story.  During the height of summer, the water below would be choked with ships of all sizes, covered in men and women in bathing suits looking to cool off.  She was thankful that someone else was piloting the yacht the few times she'd been out on the water.

She leaned back in the springy metal mesh chair and propped her hooves up on the railing.  Maybe up here the crosswinds rushing over the patio would dry out her sandals and pant legs.  The whistle of wind between the gaps of the fence surrounding the observatory was all surrounded her now.  As good as it would be for drying her clothes, this time of year, the frigid air also drove away all of the sensible people or kept them indoors, even if it meant being crammed inside the restaurant like bugs.  And to be sure, it was already every bit as busy inside as she remembered it could be.

Despite the risk of the wind snatching it from her hands and scattering it on the literal winds, she pulled the packet of papers from before from her pocket and unfolded it all.  She really should have left it with Alex, but he could get another copy if he wanted it, and reading it gave her something to do.

The invoice and will didn't interest her at this point, and she skipped over to the invoice.  Her invoice, which somehow she'd never seen in fourteen years.

Tsoukalos Personal Companion Virtual Intelligence Synthetic

Generation 7, Revision 93

Sex: Female  Gender: Female

Age: 28 (simulated) Height: 164 cm

Coat: Black  Eyes: Blue  Hair: Black Horns: Gray, 14 cm

Measurements: 93-60-97 cm (see next page for details)

Phenotype Code: 5108-E960-3CEA-93CD-9CE9-E43F-B6D3-69C0-295B-FEA5-269E-BB57

Personality Seed: CD18-6912-B1C4-0CB3-0A6B-4A2C-B1E7-CC4B (factory randomized, unlocked)

Options

Base Model     177,383 cr

-Organic Simulation Phenotype 28,319 cr

-Reproductive Simulation  15,827 cr

-Digestive Simulation   8,010 cr

-Inductive Charge Port  1,492 cr

Battery Uprate, 91 MJ   9,191 cr

Reactive Polymer Musculature 12,635 cr

Fullerene Carbon N. Skeleton 11,121 cr

Olfactory Sensors   7,771 cr

Personal Companion Programming 10,000 cr

Delivery (Rawiyah, Anvari)  5,664 cr

Total      287,413 cr

Somehow, reading an invoice that detailed what she was worth, down to the credit, didn't invoke much emotion.  In a way, she guessed it wasn't so different from an organic person.  She was sure that the law had defined what a person was worth, and certainly insurance companies had.  People just weren't born with a nice, detailed description that said their ability to eat food was worth eight-thousand credits, or that having a vagina was worth another fifteen-thousand.

Andrea's words still resonated in the back of her mind though.  “Read your instruction manual,” because it detailed that she would “perform any domestic duties” as requested.

The wind whipped around and blew her already unkempt hair in her face, but she didn't really notice.  She thought back to the dozens of times she'd sat almost in this spot, across from her father.  He always ordered the basil, tomato and garlic feta gyros, and even after several years she'd never really found a favorite.  To be honest, she didn't care much for the food here.  Maybe Tsoukalos Tech made defective taste buds, but who could say if what she experienced was the same as someone else.  There was certainly food she did enjoy, and she loved the confections that their personal chef, Mrs. Chua, baked.

If she didn't really like the food here, why didn't she say something or suggest going elsewhere?

And the yacht?  Her father didn't have many chances to take the boat out on the ocean, but he always took her with him when he went.  She never really cared for the experience though.  There wasn't much to see out on the water, aside from the hundreds of other boats, and the cool spray from the water didn't do anything to improve her comfort from the heat.  The heat didn't bother her like it did an organic.

If she didn't really like going out on the water, why did she do it?

Was I bound to do whatever he asked?  Did I ever even have a choice?

It certainly felt like she did.  She could have said no, couldn't she?  She was just being nice.  He was always so caring to her, so she was just returning the favor.  He even asked her on occasion if that's what she wanted to do, and even though she never said no, that meant she did have the choice to say no, right?

Somehow, it felt hollow.  There was one way to be sure, and that was to read her user manual as her dear sister suggested.

There was only one problem with that.  As much as she tried scouring the networks for said instruction manual, she came up empty.  She found a few press releases from the company announcing the product line, a few… product reviews… for said line, a sensationalist news article about a Tsoukalos VI that refused to perform some illegal smuggling activity at its owner's behest, somehow leading to both questioning of the dangers of VI synthetics for their ability to “pass for a person” while performing illicit actions and questioning the danger of creating robots that could tell their owners no.  What might happen next?  The robots might start getting uppity and demanding things like humane treatment and dignity or something equally dreadful.

The invoice said my personality was “unlocked.”  Did that mean I had the power to say no, but not all VIs can?

During her scouring of the information replicated from Rawiyah's internet to the caches on Anvari, she was able to find the Tsoukalos Technologies Personal Companion Builder app for her compad.  After a brief consideration if she should waste the time and storage space, she downloaded the app and fired it up.

After navigating through a dozen menus and agreements, including a particularly amusing one that spelled out that it was against Rawiyah planetary law to use this application's AR mode to generate false footage of a politician or celebrity with the intent to defame them, she was presented with a surprisingly extensive list of species to choose from, including anthropomorphized avians, lizards and other kinds of creatures she never expected.  If she were on Rawiyah, she could even download other species packs, of up to thirty thousand species.  Impressive.

Naturally, she started by picking cattle from the bovine submenu and generating a few random women.  The randomizer had restrictions on most of the options, keeping the designs within certain heights and builds, probably for cost reasons.  After unlocking the height and dragging the brown cow woman smiling at her up to 2.2 meters in height, a helpful warning at the bottom of the screen informed her that there would be an additional charge for materials at this size.  She amused herself for a few minutes with seeing just how extreme some of the settings could go, such as breasts so big that the app both warned her that there would be a surcharge and the avatar hunched over and propped them up in her hands, complete with a text box saying, “A little big, don't you think?  Tsoukalos Technologies recommends sticking to more realistic proportions for engineering and personal interoperability reasons.  Click here to reset parameters to recommended limits!”

A little more digging pointed her to a text box where she could enter a phenotype code, and after a minute of fumbling around to enter the obnoxiously long code on her invoice, she was presented with a digital recreation of herself.

“Not creepy at all,” she mumbled as she spun the avatar around to verify that it was her in every way.

Almost all of the parameters were middle of the road.  She was ordinary height, had an ordinary build.  Proportions were all very close to ideal averages.  Her breasts were even a little smaller than ideal.  So much for being a sexbot.

The next step of the design process was the personality.  She skimmed over the options, for which there were hundreds of choices with sliders she didn't recognize the names of, but she opted to skip over it and just entered the personality code she'd been given.

“Hi there,” her digital doppelganger said as she waved to her from the screen.  “How are you?”

“Not so great,” she answered back.

Little Rachel frowned and cocked her head.  “Oh, no, that's not good to hear.  What's wrong?”

Huh, didn't expect it to be so interactive.  She flipped the toggle for Augmented Reality mode, and Little Rachel appeared standing on the railing on the screen.  “It's a really long story, and I don't think you'd understand.”

Little Rachel jumped down from the railing and leaned back on it.  “You're probably right, sorry.  I wish I could help, but my knowledge is pretty limited.”

“Just here to sell robots for Tsoukalos Tech, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so.  It pays the bills, as the saying goes.”  She chuckled.  Rachel imagined the feeling she got was akin to what everyone meant when they said the hair stood up on the back of their neck.  She did talk like that.

“Yeah… yeah, I guess so.  Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Mmhmm.  What's on your mind?”

Rachel turned her pad around to face the camera toward the restaurant.  “What do you think about eating here?”

“I don't know, sorry.  But if you like it, I'm sure I'll like it.”

There was that feeling again.  “Y-yeah, okay.  I'll talk with you later.”  That's enough of this...

“Okay, b-” Little Rachel didn't have a chance to finish her goodbye before the app exited.

“Hey, aren't you cold out here?”

Rachel looked up with a start.  A sandy coated doe wrapped in a thick blue coat and wearing a warm smile was standing at the gate to the patio.  The sack of food dangling from her arm rustled as she drew a hand up to cover her mouth.  “Oh!  Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were someone I knew.”

“It's okay, no problem,” she replied, forcing a little smile in return.  “And it's not too bad.  The sun's up now and it's a little warmer.”

Ms. Deer glanced out over the water toward the sun.  “Yeah, I guess so, but boy, it seems no matter how long I live here I never get used to the weather.  Uh, but anyway, sorry to bother you.  Have a nice day.”

“No problem.  Have a good day.”  Rachel waved the deer off and put her compad away.  She should probably get going anyway.  She had to face the spaceport at some point and have a decidedly not good day.

Maybe she'd give it just a few more minutes first.

[hr]

For once, the news wasn't as bad as she feared.  Or at least, not yet.

The spaceport ground crews had put a brace beneath the ship and brought it back up to level, but there was no sign of anyone attempting to condemn or cordon off access to it like she half expected.  Good, that would give her somewhere to stay for a few days until her money ran out entirely.

What happened then?

She had no idea.

A few ideas crawled their way to the front of her mind during her trek back here on foot.  She could try to just leave, like she considered before.  She didn't really even have to fix the attitude thrusters.  In space, she could manage with one functional thruster on the port side.

If she did try to leave and gave up on getting her inheritance, which sounded increasingly like a smart decision since at this point she was just squandering what was left of her legal account balance, what next?  She wouldn't put it past Tony and Andrea to start undercutting her business just to spite her, even if it meant they lost money.  She was already barely scraping by with this ship.  But then Freeman Express really only operated in the Autolye system.  They ran the rare spike drill to neighboring systems, but if she could get to another system, she wouldn't have to worry about them.  Even if they tried to repossess Theseus, they wouldn't have any authority to do it in a different system.  Oh, sure, her Exchange account's debts would follow her to the end of the galaxy, but nobody would value this ship enough to matter.

I'm worth half as much as the ship was brand new.  I'm surprised they aren't trying to repossess me.  Didn't their lawyer say she'd found some case about...

Terrifying as the thought was, they despised her enough that she couldn't imagine they would “employ” her anywhere, even if it meant she was an unpaid laborer in a warehouse.  They'd rather she was in this shape.  No money, nobody to fall back on, and very soon nowhere to even be.

Theseus had a spike drive.  She'd never used it, she had no idea when it was last used, she sincerely doubted it would function properly at this point, and to top it off, she didn't even know how to perform a spike drill.

She didn't know how, yet, but she could learn.  She had four or five days that she could afford to remain in port.  There had to be a comprehensive set of free video tutorials somewhere she could find that would give her enough information to perform a drill.  You get what you pay for and she was sure that any such tutorial would be almost as dangerous as trying it blind, but if Theseus exploded on the edge of the solar system or disintegrated halfway to wherever she was going, she wouldn't be in much worse shape than she was now.  Not to mention it would deny her “siblings” the pleasure of taking back the hunk of junk they gave her in lieu of the shuttle their father said to leave her in his will.

So where would she go?  Rawiyah sounded like a good choice.

Tsoukalos Technologies was based there, so the planet must have had an amiable political climate to VI synthetics.  Not to mention she needed someone to fix her arm, and she doubted anyone in the Autolye system could.

Yes, Rawiyah sounded like her best bet.  She just had to figure out how to use the spike drive, get the ship back into orbit, refuel and head to the edge of the system.

Sure, she could do that…

[hr]

Almost every part of her little plan had a major hole in it.

First of all, Theseus was probably never returning to orbit.

The reentry and impact damage had done more than just burn through the RCS lines.  The main power was still out on the ship, and the displays on the flight deck informed her that the computers had restarted a few thousand times during her trip into the city.  Just before they crashed and rebooted again.  There was no need to get a repair quote on that.  It was going to be in the five digit range, and that was just too bad.

Second of all, even if she could get the ship back into orbit, all Lockhoof ASLC-100 series ships were equipped with Tripton Dynamics Series 2 Metadimensional Slipstream drives, which were as close to bottom credit as such things got.  So much so that she gathered that some Rawiyah cruisers used them as emergency backups.  In short, the navigation charts she found on the network informed her that the engines just couldn't make the trip to the Diores system where Rawiyah orbited.  Some strange consequence of the way metadimensional space worked.  If she tried it, the drive would be forced back into real space somewhere between systems where there was no stellar gravity well to allow reentry, and she'd be stranded.

Third, even if Theseus was in flying shape and had a functional drive that could take her there, she was kidding herself if she thought she could learn how to do it by watching videos on her compad.  Sure enough, there were dozens of such videos, but every last one of them came with an enforced warning from Anvari that attempting to perform a spike drill without proper training and certification was both a violation of Anvari law and so dangerous she might as well jump out of the air lock first.  And those warnings weren't unfounded.  Based on her very brief research, certification took ninety days under normal conditions and involved prospective pilots learning a lot of theory before even being given a chance to try their hand at it under the supervision of experienced trainer pilots.

Navigating metadimensional space was complicated in ways that an ordinary computer just couldn't do it.  Nobody had managed to build an autopilot capable of doing it yet.  That alone told her a lot about how complex and dangerous the process was.

So, never mind.  Never mind.

It didn't make getting to Rawiyah impossible, but based on her research through a few different travel brokers implied that the very best rate she could possibly expect to get for a cheap ticket to Rawiyah was three-thousand credits, and she could expect the trip to take about two months given stops to refuel and pick up supplies, other passengers and incidental cargo on the way there.

On a whim, she checked her account.  Six-hundred seventeen credits.  More than she thought, but hardly enough.

Sitting in the darkness of the ship's lounge, surrounded by the faint glow of the emergency lights and what little light reflected up the boarding ramp and access corridor, Rachel stared at her compad and the monetary reality of where she was.

From here, the only solution she could see was to sell Theseus.  Nobody would pay what the ship was worth based on its age, which was almost fifty-thousand credits based on her research, but it was worth something for scrap.  Twenty-five hundred credits?  Maybe…

But before she committed to giving up on the ship and checking if a scrap yard would pay her for it instead of charging to have a twenty-thousand ton hunk of steel and composites hauled away from the spaceport, she found a used ship listing online, and with great hesitation, she put the ship up for sale.

Priced to go, make an offer.

Just make it soon.

[hr]

Responses were predictably slow and less than enthusiastic when they saw the state of the ship.

Rachel could only guess how many people walked away the moment they got to the landing pad without even walking up the ramp, but the first two to actually take the leap of faith didn't leave her with much faith.

A rabbit was the first to come inside, but he didn't do much looking around.  He wasn't interested in buying the whole ship no matter how cheap she offered, but he did offer to buy some of the electronics from the engine room if she was interested in parting it out.  A few hundred credits, if she took the offer, so she wrote it down.

The second was a bobcat who was a little more interested in buying the ship outright, but she only offered five thousand for the whole ship, and she couldn't get the credits for it for about three weeks.  That wasn't going to work, but Rachel copied her contact information just in case.

A little surprise came with the third visitor, who introduced herself by calling out, “Knock knock!” as she banged on the access ramp with a hoof.  “Anyone home?”  The voice sounded kind of familiar.

“Come up!” Rachel shouted back while she dragged herself out of the chair in the lounge and prepared for another insulting offer or general disappointment.

To her surprise, a sandy coated doe with a heavy coat speckled with snow appeared in the corridor.  “Oh!  Oh, wow, it's you.  Hi there, isn't this quite a coincidence?”

Rachel shook off the mild shock and brushed the nonexistent snow off of her own shoulders.  “Uh, yeah, wow, it is.  You're here to look at the ship?”

“Mmhmm.  You're Rachel, right?  Rachel Freeman?  I think that's the name that was on the listing.”

“That's right, and you...” she raised a hand for a shake.

“Daphne.  Daphne Buscemi.”  She returned the shake and looked around.  “So, this must be the ship I saw in the news yesterday.  Had a hard landing?”

Rachel chuckled nervously.  That made it on the news?  “You could say that.  Had an access panel come loose during reentry and the damage almost caused me to crash.  The ship's in really bad shape and I don't have the money to fix it.”

Daphne cocked a frown.  “Sorry to hear that.  Just based on what I saw outside plus what you said just now, I doubt we've got the money to fix it either.  To be honest, I was looking for parts more than anything.  This is a Lockhoof ship, right?  ASLC-17...6?”

“Close.  187.  You have one?  What parts were you looking for?”

“Electronics for the most part, but we could also use some hydraulics.  Our boarding ramp gets stuck half of the time and we have to cycle the system to get it to open, or use the mechanical override.  Electronics… oh, let's see… could use another sensor fusion board and another backup main processor.”  She grinned nervously.  “Don't tell anyone, but we flew out of the Antonious system last week without a backup.  Cooling system went out and burned it up.  My brother would kill me if he knew.  That's pretty dangerous.”

Rachel crossed her arms and did her level best not to blow out a sigh.  “Everyone wants electronics.  Guess that must be a common problem with these ships?  The lidar system hasn't worked right for like a year.”

“Oh boy, you got that right.  I really want to trade our ship out for something newer that wasn't made by Lockhoof.  All of these old ships have these ass-around plumbing and wiring layouts that cause so many issues.  I hear the newest ships started fix some of those problems but we sure can't afford anything brand new, and if we could it would probably be an East Star ship of some kind.  Those are so nice.”

“Yeah, so I've heard.”  Rachel activated the lamp on her compad.  “Well, if you want to take a look around, be my guest.  Maintenance told me it was almost impossible to get to half of the crap that needs maintenance on the ship, but if we have to tear something apart to get to it, it doesn't matter anymore.”

The two women worked their way through the center corridors of the ship to the main computer, which was little more than a closet with enough space to admit one of them at a time, with ten different colors of cables running through the ceiling and three walls covered in fuse boards and hot-swappable computer cards.  The emergency lighting was a little better here, probably to allow the crew to see and get at the computer in case it was the source of the major malfunction that killed power.

Daphne squeezed inside, filling most of the available space with her poofy jacket. She traced a hand along a pair of braided metal hoses piped into the floor that reached up to a sequence of cards.  “That's a good sign, looks like the coolant system is still intact.  You haven't had any warnings from the computer about CRC or bus errors, have you?”

Rachel leaned back against the wall in the corridor.  “I've seen enough errors from different sensor systems that I couldn't tell you, but it's only been the sensors as far as I know.  That doesn't sound familiar, anyway.”

The deer pried some heat sinks loose and frowned.  “That should've been harder.  Thermal compound must have cooked.  Uh, well, how about this.  These boards are usually worth about five hundred credits apiece used.  How about I give you five hundred for both of them?  One of them is bound to work, and would give us our backup again.”

Rachel shrugged, pictured Tony doing the same thing and swore not to do it again.  “Deal.  It's a start.  I think that gives me about two-thousand more credits to get from scrap in the ship somewhere.  If you want to start digging in the floor access panels to get to the sensor boards, knock yourself out.”

Daphne pried the cards loose and weighed them in her hands.  That was it.  The ship was definitely never flying again now.  “Two-thousand?  I'll have to talk to my brother about it before I let go of that much money, but if you're parting the ship out then we could probably use that much in parts.  Reentry can be pretty hard on them so stuff wears out.”

A little dry chuckle forced its way past Rachel's lips.  “You got that right.  Do you work for one of those high altitude overnight courier services or something?  I've heard that's really hard on ships like this.”

“No, actually.  My brother and I are the proud operators of Buscemi Passenger Services, registered out of Hypaspa Station in the Rima system.  We ferry passengers around the galaxy, and when we can't get enough people needing to go places we take parcels and other urgent packages sometimes.”  Daphne rolled her eyes.  “You'd think that out of an entire planet you'd have plenty of people wanting to get transport to somewhere, but between having to find routes that everyone wants to take we're usually only carrying four or five at a time.  But anyway, most systems don't have great orbital infrastructure so we usually have to deliver straight to planets.  It feels like every other landing we've got a part burning out or shaking apart.  What about you?  Courier?”

Passenger services?  Rachel cleared her throat unnecessarily.  “Sometimes, but mostly between orbital stations.  This, uh, this is the first time I've landed in a while, and I guess it's the last.”

Daphne blew some dust off of another circuit cluster.  “I can tell the ship's pretty old.  Not that there's ever a good time to get stranded somewhere, it's probably better to get stranded on a planet than out in space.  Although Autolye's got pretty good infrastructure so I'm sure you could get a rescue shuttle out in a day or two.  Though I guess that's plenty of time to freeze or suffocate if life support bites it.”  She squeezed back out of the closet.  “Speaking of which, you must be used to running the ship cold.”

“Huh?”

“I just don't know how you stand it without a jacket on,” Daphne said with a little grin.  “Are you the only one here?  If your engineer is around I can talk to them about getting some more parts pulled out.”

Rachel shrugged again and almost punched herself.  “You're looking at her.”

“Oh!  Oh, sorry, I figured you must have been the pilot or something.”  Daphne scratched an ear nervously.  “Just, um, the outfit is all.”  Whatever that meant exactly.  The deer's shirt was buried under her jacket, but she was wearing dark jeans that looked a little threadbare.  And steel tipped boots, now that she looked.

“Well, I'm kind of both, to be honest.  More of a pilot, but when you're the only one aboard you've kind of got to do everything, right?”  And heeeere we go.  Three, two, one…

Daphne's jaw dropped open.  “You've been running a deep space freighter all by yourself?  Holy cow!  Uh, sorry, I, uh, I mean, how do you manage that?  If this ship wasn't registered out of Anvari I'd be sure you had enough automation, but these ships require bridge watch twenty-four hours a day.  Not that anything usually happens, but wow, that's super dangerous letting the ship run itself while you sleep.”

Not going there right now.  “Yeah, I know, but like I said, didn't have a lot of choices.  Couldn't afford a crew with the way this hunk of junk was breaking down.”  She held her arms open.  “And I'm grounded now, so that's that.”

A heavy silence fell until Daphne broke it by saying, “Could have ended worse I guess.  But, uh, let's go take a look at the lift controls and hydraulics at the access ramp.  Maybe you can give me a story or two while I see how hard it'll be to disassemble everything?”

She didn't really have any good ones, but anything to pass the time would be welcome.

They made their way back around to the boarding ramp, where Daphne spent a while picking over the pipes, hoses, pumps and pistons buried in the walls behind access panels while Rachel regaled her with the most interesting stories she could, which mostly consisted of the one time one of the ship's reaction wheels got stuck running at full RPMs because a relay burned out and shorted closed.  She had to kill it by pulling fuses, all while the ship spun around its center line around five times a second.  Oh, and she definitely couldn't sell that reaction wheel anymore so Daphne shouldn't ask for it.  There was a scent of burnt grease throughout the ship for a week afterward, and she was reasonably sure it wasn't any good anymore.

Daphne stopped fiddling with a nut half the size of her hand and stood upright.  “Yikes, we've never had that happen, but maybe we should get a few spare relays from the fuse boards too.  Anyway, I'm going to have to run get some tools from our ship to get all of this loose.  But I was also thinking that, you know, once I pull this apart you won't be able to close the board ramp again.  So… maybe I should look over the rest of the ship first, right?  But, uh, I also need to talk to my brother about how much we can spare to spend on parts right now.  So, let me run and go do that and grab my tools.”

Rachel stopped her before she made it halfway down the ramp.  Partly because she still had those processor boards in her hands that she hadn't paid for, but also because she had an idea.  “Hey, wait a second.  You said you run a passenger service, right?”

“Uh huh.  Why?”

“Well… if you're short on credits, maybe we can make a deal?”  Rachel kicked a miniature snowdrift sitting in the corridor that Daphne tracked up into the ship on her way in.  “I, uh, I'm not looking to just scrap my ship.  I'm trying to get money to get off of Anvari.  Since that's what you already do, would you maybe be willing to trade for that?”

Daphne's ears perked up.  “Trade spare parts for a ticket?  Huh, yeah, maybe.  You scratch our back, we scratch yours?  Yeah, okay.  I need to talk to Frank about it, but I think we can do that.  Where'd you want to go?”

“Rawiyah.  I think.  I'm, well, I'm still trying to kind of figure that part out, but I just kind of want to leave the system.”  She slapped the wall.  “Think there's enough scrap here to pay for that?”

The doe at the bottom of the ramp tried to whistle, but only blew out a little plume of fog.  “Rawiyah's kind of out of the way and I don't think we've got anyone else looking for passage there, but yeah.  Yeah, I'm sure there's enough parts here we could pay for that.  Lemme run and talk to Frank, and I'll be back.  Okay?”  She tried to wave goodbye and remembered she had the computer cards.  “Err, let me also leave these here.  Back in a minute!”

Rachel took the cards back and watched her trot off through the snow.  Was she making a good deal, or throwing away half of what she could get for the ship?

She plodded back toward the lounge.  While she waited, she might as well compose a message to Alex, telling him that she was probably going to drop the suit and leave.  He'd get paid either way, and it wasn't like he sounded too confident that he could turn the suit around.

For the first time for as long as she could remember, Rachel felt a little flutter of excitement in her stomach.

Which was tempered by the realization of how weird it was that her designers went through the trouble of integrating such an unnecessary parallel to how an organic woman might feel.

But she couldn't deny that she was looking forward to something for the first time in ages.

[hr]

The next three hours of silence were agonizing.  For a while, Rachel worried that Daphne had run into unexpected complications with her little plan to strip everything valuable from Theseus, or that her brother had told her no and they left without informing her.

She was getting ready to go plug the computer boards back in when someone banged on the corridor wall and a woman shouted, “Ding dong!”

It was soon clear that Daphne had been spending time assembling a veritable workshop's worth of tools.  Enough so that she had a companion with her, hauling two duffel bags filled with clanking metal.  The buck was heavyset, with a spotted coat, thin windbreaker that fluttered in said wind and thin framed AR glasses.

He plopped the bags down at the end of the ramp and groaned.  “Well, Ms. Freeman, if you want a trip to Rawiyah, do you mind helping us disassemble your ship?”

Rachel never thought she'd say yes to that, much less with so much enthusiasm.