Sullen Stars: Free Merchant

A few hours in Gerald's Antique Bookstore went by faster than Rachel ever expected, but even a massive orbital station like this one could only house so much of something as niche as a book store, so it didn't take her very long to exhaust the possibilities.

She still hadn't heard anything from Daphne or Frank, so after acquiring a cookbook explicitly tailored to herbivores and two more novels in a series about an AI programmer who had to travel from star system to system hunting down a rogue AI that she'd accidentally released and was trying to take over the Exchange's computer networks, Rachel sent another message to both of them saying that she'd be in the Parmesa Spire Park on deck eight if they needed her.

The park looked like it belonged on a completely different station, although in truth the entire Parmesa Spire looked that way.

Unlike the utilitarian floor plans and uninspired, flat walls and ceilings from the central hub, the habitation spire was built up from circular, concentric tunnels ringing central shops and parks that serviced the living spaces in the outer rings.  Each deck also had six smaller parks constructed on the outermost rings in the forms of observatories filled with vegetation and trees overlooking the docking spires and space beyond.  It was like staring out into the night sky.

The Spire Park was actually three separate sections, filling four decks each and spaced evenly from the top to bottom of the spire.  The bottom decks were covered in natural looking landscapes with little ponds and streams interspersed with small groves of trees, eating areas and playgrounds for children.  The top deck of each was covered with displays that emulated a natural sky.  Judging by the orange overcast, the station's local time must have been sunrise or sunset, but she didn't bother to get out her compad to check.

She found a spot on a hundred meter long faux wood bench on the second deck, overlooking a pond filled with waterfowl of some sort splashing around.  Somehow, she had the entire bench nearly to herself, with only two badger children competing from space.  From what she gathered through overhearing their frustrated chatter, they must have been doing middle school math homework in a rush before their class started.  Must have been early morning then.

There were a few others milling around in the grass below, consisting of a couple of gophers fawning over each other behind a pair of trees, and a rabbit walking a pet of some kind she couldn't quite identify from here, but it was evidently too early for most people to be up and about.

She wished the kids doing their homework well and searched the bench for a charging station of some kind.  Maybe it was just the thought of the people around her being groggy, but the distinct sluggishness in her body and difficulty focusing told her that her batteries were getting weak.  In her state, a weak battery might strand her here.  Having to get Daphne or Frank to carry her to a charging station would be extremely embarrassing, and wasn't an experience she wanted to repeat.

By waving her hand over the bench's front, she finally felt the tingle of an inductive charging pad, which was an annoying place to put it, but it was better than nothing.  She'd have to keep her palm held over the front of the bench the whole time, which was going to make it hard to read any of her books, but she'd manage.

A warm, clarifying sensation rolled through her as the charger engaged.  As drained as her battery must have been, she'd probably have to sit there for almost a full day since the charger was no doubt designed for hand held devices and not full sized robots, but it wasn't like she had anywhere to be at any particular time.  If the Buscemis didn't come looking for her, maybe she could sit here all day.  Even if it meant using up the two books now and thus her main source of interstellar entertainment…

She caught herself with a hand against the bench and blinked away a sudden loss of balance.  Wait, what th-

The warm sensation suffusing her hand evaporated.  A couple of seconds later, it resumed where it left off, and she felt the charger reengage.

A little flutter of worry rose in her throat.  Sofia told her that her battery was past its replacement date.  Was it failing entirely now?  But Borealis's chargers work-

She pulled her hand away from the charging pad and waited an agonizing few seconds for everything to stabilize around her again.  Forget it.  She wasn't recharging here.  The pad must have been malfunctioning.  Maybe…

Maybe she should just head back to the ship after all.  At least if she passed out and collapsed there, she wouldn't make a spectacle of it.

Sluggish as she felt, she forced herself to her hooves and started the marathon back to the ship.  She hoped her battery would last that long.  It should last for at least another full day with the way she felt, but if its zero point was that far debased, who knew how long it would actually last.

[hr]

About the time she reached the central hub, her compad chimed to inform her that she had a message from Daphne.

Hey, Rachel.  Went looking for you in the park but didn't see you.  Did you head back to the ship?  Anyway, I looked over your invoice and you can bill it to us.  You said it would take ten hours?  If so, you might want to get on it.  We've got a big cargo order to handle and we want to leave tomorrow.  Having some help loading it would be great.  Let me know what's up.

Well, that was a timely and welcome response.  She penned a quick response that she was going to go back to Lombardi Robotics right away to get started, and did just that.

A VI synthetic took her payment information and escorted her back to a more brightly lit back room packed with boxes, stacks of tablets and compads and several carts with computer displays and full consoles.  The overhead lights blared intense white light that reminded her of the hangar they arrived in.

Sofia strolled in and flashed her a little grin.  “Welcome back.  Didn't think I'd see you here again so soon, but I'm glad you got your finances sorted out.  Are you ready to get started?”

“Past ready,” Rachel said in a more tired tone than she intended.  Her battery really must have been drained.

“All right then, great.  Just to give you a little idea of how this is going to work, I'll plug in again and start running some diagnostics.  You should go to sleep after a few moments, and when you wake up, it'll all be over.”  She pulled out the fiber cable and held it up.  “Any questions?”

Rachel shook her head and removed her shirt in preparation.  “I don't think so.  The sooner we can get started, the better.”

“Okay then, if you'll have a seat here, I'll get you plugged in.”  Sofia indicated what looked like a second hand dentist's chair from a hundred and fifty years ago.  Very inviting.

“All right.”  She plopped down and raised her arm.  “Let's get to work.”

Sofia plugged the cable in, and almost as soon as she did, Rachel felt her skin go numb.  “Hey, uh… should… I… b...e...”

[hr]

Blaring white line shined from above, washing out Rachel's vision.  Her body felt impossibly heavy and unwilling to respond to her mental command to sit up.  The only thing she could feel was an unending tingling sensation in her legs.  Someone said something, but whatever they said was distant and lost in what sounded like mumbling in Italian.

Something clicked in the center of her skull, whether it was something she simply heard, felt or experienced in ways that defied description she wasn't sure, but everything came into focus at once.

“Oookay, looks like everything is green.  How do you feel?  Can you hear me?”

Rachel curled her fingers and tried to sit up.  A pervasive weakness still fought her as she pushed up from the table she was now on, but she had the strength to do that at least.  “My legs hurt..”

“Hmm.  That might happen,” Sofia said, not sounding entirely sure of herself.  “Until the new sensor webs integrate with your neural net and settle down, you'll probably have some weird feelings like that.  Happens even with the Lombardi synthetics we work on sometimes.”

“How long will it be like that?” she asked as she flexed everything and looked herself over.  Her feet and hooves looked much better now, and the only indication that anything was ever wrong was a subtle shift in the fur grain around her ankles.  But she'd also been stripped down to her underwear, and she really wanted to solve that right away.

Sofia stepped around into her field of view and reached over to unplug the fiber cable.  “An hour or two at most.  Don't worry, it happens.”  She smiled and tilted her head.  “Everything else feel okay?”

She swung around to get on her hooves.  The uneasiness was still there, but she had full feeling in everything now.  She braced against the table behind her and said, “Better.  Much better, I think.  Just as soon as I learn to walk again.  You didn't run into any unexpected problems, did you?”

“No, nothing serious anyway.  You're a slightly newer model so it took a little bit of figuring out how to unthread your femoral nerve fiber bundles, but I managed without any problems.  Just took a little longer than I expected, but don't worry, I didn't charge you for it.”

She tried her weight without leaning against the table.  Everything was much better.  Her arm felt so much better too.  “Thanks, I really appreciate that.  Uh, where are my clothes though?”

“Ah, yeah, sorry.  Right over here.”  She pointed at the end of a row of boxes against the wall, where the last had dark green fabric spilling out of its top.  “I'll let you get dressed.  Whenever you're ready, just meet me out front and I'll get you checked out.”

While Sofia left her to that, Rachel grabbed her compad out of the box and out of instinct unlocked it to check her messages.  Two things immediately jumped out at her.

First, the current date was November 4th, and she'd come in on the 2nd.  When she doubted her memory, she checked the date on the invoice they sent her to confirm it.  She'd been here for close to a day and a half!

Second, which was unsurprising given the first point, she had half a dozen messages from Daphne ranging from “Are you at the robotics facility?” to “Hey, it's been a while.  Everything okay?” to “Please call ASAP.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, which she could tell was going to need some work now too, and groaned, “Oh, shii... oot.”

During the process of trying to snatch her pants up, she messaged Daphne to let her know that she was awake now.  Instead of a message in response, Daphne called her.

“Rachel?  Rachel, are you okay?  Where have you been?”

“Sorry, apparently the repair job took a lot longer than I expected.  Ten hours of labor must not have meant in a row.”  She juggled the compad as she fumbled to get her shirt on.  “Where are you?  You didn't have to leave me behind, did you?”  They had to still be in the system at least...

“No, no, but the sooner you get over here, the better.  We're down at the ship now trying to get the cargo loaded.  We've got like a hundred barrels of biofoam solution we're trying to load to ship out to Hessa and it's taking forever.  Frank says we've got to leave in four hours and we'll never make it at this rate.  He's already in a bad enough mood and I'd rather...  Yes, you are.  No, don't tell me that, I know when you're upset and... Look, forget it, Rachel's coming and she...”

The call cut out, which was probably for the best.  Oh, crap.  She rushed to get her shoes on, ignoring the thrown away and disheveled look she no doubt wore now, and hurried out to sign whatever it was Sofia needed her to.

If Borealis had to leave in four hours, what would they have done if she wasn't finished with her repairs yet?  Maybe it was best not to think about it.

[hr]

To her surprise, it only took about fifteen minutes to trot through the various hallways, crowds and lifts she needed to in order to get back to the hangar, and since it looked like there weren't any shuttles back to the ships nearby, she opted to continue that trot all the way down the rows to the ship.  If there was any upside to the haste, she was at least capable of running now, even if she kept it to a slow jog, and within a few minutes of it the irritating tingling in her legs had ceased.  That was very good, since she clearly didn't have time to go back and complain to the techs at Lombardi Robotics to try again...

Even before she got to the ship, she saw the massive pallet of black barrels sitting next to the ship, and could tell that Frank, indeed, was mad about something.  He shoved a barrel over by himself, despite what she guessed was a not insignificant risk that the top would blow off and spray biofoam everywhere, and put his entire body into shoving and rolling it toward the cargo lift.

When she got a little closer, she could see where precisely that had apparently happened at least once, and Frank hadn't changed his strategy in response...

Daphne came plodding down the ramp and did a double take when she saw her.  She flagged her down and met her at the mass of barrels, trying and not doing an excellent job of not looking anxious herself.  “Hey, you got here just in time.  Lend us a hand, would you?”

The two of them lowered one of the amazingly heavy barrels together, with a bit more care than Frank was taking, and proceeded to roll it to the lift together while Frank stormed by on his way to get another one.  Rachel leaned in a little closer and whispered, “Should I ask what's wrong?”

Daphne grunted and said, “I kind of screwed something up.  Try not to worry about it, it'll be okay, okay?  Just... probably shouldn't bug Frank for a little while, is all.”

Not asking was going to be difficult.  Or, more specifically, not thinking about asking was going to be hard, but she could avoid actually doing it pretty easily.  But, there was one thing she had to ask.  “Okay, but, uh, he's not mad that it took so long for them to fix me, is he?  I really had no idea that was going to happen.”

“No, no.  No, it's just... it's something else.  Don't worry about it.”

That sounded anything but reassuring, but it was also clearly something too private to press her about now, so she just nodded and helped roll the barrel over to the lowered cargo ramp.  There was only space for three at a time when laid over like this, but since Daphne didn't seem to care, she didn't say anything about it.  A quick check back at the pallet confirmed that they had... seventy or so more to load up, so this really was going to take forever, even with her help.

After Daphne triggered the red button to start raising the platform up into Borealis, she plodded around to the access ramp.  Rachel tailed her and tried to change the subject by asking, “So, where were we delivering all of this to exactly?  I think you mentioned it on the call just now.”

“Hessa,” the deer answered.  “Ever heard of it?”

“I don't think so, sorry.”

“It's a small planet in the Damián system.  Just one drill from here.  It's pretty far out in its system but the atmosphere is so thick it's amazingly hot anyway.  Or that's what the information I just read says anyway.  I've never been.”

Rachel followed her back to the cargo compartment and helped her roll the barrels off of the lift to the growing collection, where they had to stand it back up again, lest it fall over during flight and make an unholy mess.  Once the batch was complete, she started lowering the lift again, but at least they could ride it down.

“So who's ordering it?  Doesn't sound like somewhere that should have a lot of people living on it, and this... this is enough biofoam for like an entire city's hospitals.”

Daphne waited for Frank to dump off another barrel and head back for more before she answered.  “It's a low tech planet, so they can't manufacture stuff like it locally.  I'm talking primitive factories, maybe early ground cars.  Anyway, Francis thinks they'll be willing to pay a lot for it.”

“Thinks?”

“Uh huh.”  They passed him on the way back over to the massive stockpile that didn't seem to be getting smaller, and she said, “We've got to find buyers once we get there.  We've never done anything like this before.  It was a gamble and we might have gone into debt to finance it.  I hope we can find enough buyers once we get there, because if we don't this is going to be a problem.”

Rachel felt sympathetic pain somewhere deep down in her Exchange account.  “Dang, I hope it works out then.  Didn't find any passengers needing to go anywhere instead?”

Daphne shrugged and started rocking a barrel over.  “Probably.  I mean, there's a ton of competition here, but look at everyone around, coming and going.  There had to be something, right?  But Francis got this idea, so here we are.”

The other deer in question stomped back over and grasped the brim of a barrel of his own.  “Yeah.  Here we are,” he spat.  With a deep thump, he shoved it over and rolled it away ahead of them.

Well, that actually kind of explained his bad mood.  She could only guess that the two had a falling out just before she talked to Daphne.  That sucked and was going to make the trip pretty awkward, but maybe if they finished in time she could go get the groceries after all.  She had to imagine both would feel better after getting something home cooked to eat.

[hr]

Despite their initial progress, the two deer grew tired of hauling the barrels around and soon left the loading to Rachel alone for a while.  That slowed things down, and despite her hopes and wishes, they burned through almost all of their remaining time loading the cargo.  Afterward, despite having about half an hour left until their departure window, all of that was time spent in the ship and waiting for their turn from STC to depart.

So, no home cooked meal to help paper over the tension.  Great.

Better still, it was Daphne's turn to take off, so that left her and Frank alone together in the lounge.  The wait to depart was filled with a solid half hour of the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the table and staring at their compads without saying anything.

When the shudder of the ship lifting off never materialized, Rachel's patience finally wore so thin it was starting to fray her metaphorical nerves, and she had to find something to say.  Daphne said not to bug him, but what did that mean, anyway?  She didn't have to bring up what just happened.

“So, uh, you know, in the future I could help with some of the piloting.  And, uh, for that matter, if you want I could try to learn something during this spike drill to help out with that in the future.”

Frank raised an eyebrow and lowered his compad.  “Huh?”

“Yeah, didn't Daphne... say...” she trailed off as that last conversation played out in her head again.  Wait.  Wait a second.  Daphne never brought that up again.  Did she even talk to him about it?

“...say what?” he asked.

Shiiiiiii-ooooot.  She cleared her throat and waved her hand.  “Uh, w-wait, sorry, I misspoke.  I meant to say that, uh, since I know how to pilot Lockhoof ships that, uh, you know... while I'm aboard I could help out some if you wanted.”

He set the compad on the table and tilted his head back a bit to literally look down his muzzle at her.  “What was that part about Daphne?”

“N-nothing, I didn't-”

Frank held up a finger.  “Please.  Just say it, okay?  I'm not in the mood for beating around the bush right now, okay?”

She really, really didn't want to now.  It felt like she was putting a knife in Daphne's back...

“If you don't tell me I'm just going to have to go drag it out of her in a minute.  What else did she do?”

Whoa, wait a second there.  What did she do in the first place? Rachel thought while trying to buy time to answer in a way that didn't sound incriminating for anyone involved.  “Sorry.  Uh, back when we were leaving Asa, she told me that she wanted me to be part of your crew.  That she'd have to talk to you about it.  I-I thought she had already.”

Frank dropped the back of his hand on the table with a resounding thunk.  “Unbelievable.  No, she didn't talk to me about it.  What did she tell you?”

“Th-that's pretty much it,” she stammered.  “That she wanted me to join the crew and that I could help with the piloting, and if you took the time to teach me, the spike drills too.  I don't have to sleep, you know?”

“Yeah.  Yeah, I know, but it doesn't matter.  Even if we want to, we just can't afford to hire you.  Not before today and especially not now.  Not after she went and spent almost four-thousand credits without talking to me about it first.”

Whoa, what?  Daphne didn't mention that earlier.  Every argument had two sides to it, right?  “I-I know, I shouldn't have brought it up like this.  But, you don't really have to pay me.  I mean, it's not like I have a job right now, and I don't need food or air, so I don't need much.  Just having somewhere to stay goes a long way...”

He groaned and slouched back into his chair.  “Unless you want to sign off as being our property, it's not that simple.  Hypaspa Station law has minimum wage laws, you know?  So we'd have to make you part owner or something, and ugh, we'd have to get our parents involved.  It would be a major ordeal, not something we can just do on a whim.”

Well, now she felt like complete crap.  “Sorry.  I didn't...”  She trailed off as a realization struck her.  The repair bill was over three-thousand credits, and Daphne said to bill them directly.  “...wait.  Did Daphne offer to pay for my repairs without asking you?”

Now it was his turn to look a little uncomfortable.  Finally, he nodded.  “Yeah.  Yeah, exactly.  She didn't tell me until I was balancing our accounts and had a moment of 'holy shit what happened.'”

She curled her feet up involuntarily.  “...oh.  I-I... I'm sorry.  I had no idea she did it without asking you.  I didn't even plan for that, okay?  I-I just mentioned to her that I had no idea how I'd pay for it, and she-she said that since you got so much value out of scrapping Theseus that she could... could you know...”

He placed his face in his hands.  “Rachel.  Don't get me wrong.  We probably did get more than that much value out of your ship, but we don't have that kind of liquid capital.  That's why I took this gamble on the biofoam instead of just waiting on someone to book tickets somewhere.  It put us even further in the hole, but at least it can get us out of the hole after one more trip now.  The passenger fares from Asa didn't even cover the bills here.”

Taking a gamble when you were in debt sounded like a pretty bad idea, but they'd been doing this longer than she ever had, and it was hardly the time to argue with him.  She just nodded slowly.  “Yeah, I get it.  Sorry, if I had any idea you weren't both okay with it, I wouldn't have done it.  I'd have just waited until I got to Rawiyah and figured something out.”

Frank didn't look back up.  “Not your fault.  Just... I don't want to think about it right now.”

“Yeah.  Okay.”  The ship was still accelerating from its departure so she should have stayed put, but not after that.  “I'll talk with you later then.  To help get the cargo off the ship.”

“Later,” he grumbled, still not looking up.

Well, so much for that.  She halfway wanted to still offer to watch the flight deck for them some, but after that, she had little interest in talking to either of them.  No, she just needed to head back to her bunk and read the books she picked up.

But not the cookbook.  No need for that now.