We had our first market stop about a month and a half into the first leg of our trip to the Frontier. The holds were full and we couldn’t take on any additional cargo, but Elladan would be the last market hub for a while and we needed to take on fresh consumables. Plus, Grace had made good on my offer to pick out cargo bots for the ship and the distributor had some of the ones I liked in stock at their warehouses there.
The crew seemed to have been of two minds about bot labor before I came aboard, but I had ideas about ways to soften them up. I gave my auxiliaries permission to look for opportunities to introduce the crew to the possibilities of not carrying heavy stuff or having to wipe down bulkheads by themselves. My auxiliaries' efforts had paid dividends and Grace was now very interested in also not having to have his crew move things by hand. Apparently, Brando once messed up his back so badly that he’d been forced to work from a hoverchair for eight months and Grace had horrors about the possibility of that ever happening again. It ended up being something Doc could treat aboard, but if Brando had done himself any more damage he might have needed a surgery outside of Doc's capabilities and that could have paused his career as a spacer for years.
Actually, I was a little surprised that I even needed to sell them on my bots.
All the spacers I’d ever worked with were so used to bots that they hardly seemed to see them, except to step around one or pick it up if it had gotten stuck somewhere. Even the assholes aboard Mimir thought of the shipbots as a sort of useful pet and would even pat their shells in passing. I wondered if this was a consequence of my new crew being used to working on smaller vessels, where bots weren't so critical to shipboard life.
I’d never worked on anything smaller than a Cruiser so I wouldn’t know.
The time had passed more quickly than I expected. I spent most of my time in my pod or in the galley. I had put some weight back on, but not so much that I wasn’t still freezing all the time. Doc had given me permission to bunk in my pod with the heaters on until my weight was back up into the green zone. As a result, I still hadn’t really had a chance to interact much with any of the crew aside from Elaine, Brando, and Coro who had ended up as my mess buddies.
I’d encountered Taj, the pilot and Grace's husband, briefly in the corridor and we had a short conversation before a comm burst pulled him away. Amanda, the XO, was on the opposite duty shift from me so we hadn’t had a chance to do more than see each other’s faces and wave from a distance. At least, I think it was her. It was probably her, unless there was someone else on board who went around in an armored EVA suit at all times. There might have been a time in my life when I thought that was weird, but you only had to live through one hull depressurization to stop judging how people coped with life in the Dark and I had more reason than most to keep my assumptions to myself.
“Have you really never been to Elladan?” Elaine asked when we were seated for our last meal before Grace called our leave. We had gotten into the habit of syncing up our mess times. Mostly, Elaine came and got me for meals, but there had been a few times where my auxiliaries prompted me to go get her out from her latest ‘ponics problem for a rest cycle. I hadn’t told them to watch her, but they had a passive surveillance of the ship through the bots. Elaine was the only one they seemed to think needed minding, though.
I didn’t mind. She was very nice to look at, for one, and seeking her out meant that I got to look at her. For another, I genuinely liked her company. She was an intelligent woman and spoke passionately about her interests.
“No, never. The ships I worked on hardly ever went on the common spacelanes,” I explained. “I never had the opportunity.”
You would think that the less populated sectors of space would be more superstitious rather than less, but right now a lot of the Fringe sectors were areas where the Third Expansion had petered out due to the more diffuse concentrations of natural resources as you got closer to the spinward edge of the galaxy. The colonies out there had been repopulated by first-gen core world expats, rather than the original third wave exo-colonists who all abandoned the Fringe for better opportunities during the Fourth Expansion Ring into the Perseus and Sagittarius Arms. Those bare bone space stations and terraformation projects in the Fringes went abandoned for decades until core-world expats needed somewhere to flee unfavorable civic reforms.
Fringers tended to be a bit more tolerant so long as people left them alone. As a result, it ended up being generally safer for me to stay in the Fringe than it was for me to be in the First or Second Expansion Rings.
I wasn’t really sure what it would look like for me in the New Frontier, which was technically the Fourth Expansion Ring. The Fringers out in the Norma-Outer Arm didn't have enough to worry about losing any of it to non-tangible threats, but the New Frontier was doing well and people with a lot to lose and not of a lot of criminal predation were more likely to worry about space bogeymen.
I could just hide aboard Cassandra in the worst case scenario. There were no guild regs saying I had to take my shore leave if there was any chance it would be dangerous for me, just that Grace had to give me the opportunity.
“Oh?” Elaine smiled. “Well, we should take in a holoshow while we’re at port after you’ve had a chance to do your shopping. It’ll be my treat. I know all the best spots for gear on Elladan. My dad was stationed there for a little while when I was a teenager, before I left for Uni, and we go back every year or so.”
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“I’ll be in your care,” I said and closed one eye so I could check my feed. “I’ll take a look at their lineup. We should be within their broadcast envelope now.”
“I already did when we got close last night. Camanira Laser Dance is in their Prime Theater right now,” Elaine said with excitement and forwarded me several video shorts through the feed of a sort of laser carnival performance with crazy costumes and a lady swinging around the theater’s air space in a floating ring, getting close enough to some of the box seats to touch hands with the audience. It looked like the theater served food too. I could see some of the people in the shorts with basically a full meal in front of them. “I want to get a box seat and I always feel weird sitting there alone, so you’d really be doing me a favor if you came.”
Elaine was overestimating how much convincing I’d need to spend a nice night out with a pretty girl and get a fun meal out of it.
“What are you ladies talking about?” Grace interrupted, sliding a meal tray down on the table next to us. He took about one out of every four or five meals in the galley, I’d noticed, and would happily mix with the crew. I supposed that made sense on a ship this size. The Captain didn’t really have the option of being a distant, untouchable authority figure when he was one of the only eight or nine people aboard.
“Sin is coming with me to Camarina tonight,” Elaine said, grinning.
“Oh? I saw a viral short from their show last year,” Grace said with a matching smile. “That’s the one with the sky dancers, right?”
“Sure is,” Elaine tapped her fingertips together and smiled. “She’s never been to Elladan so I get to show her all the good spots.”
Grace had been taking a bite out of his lunch and inhaled wrong when she said that. He didn’t seem like he was choking so I didn’t get up to whack him on the back. He pounded on his chest and found a smile for Elaine. “I’m so happy for you,” he wheezed and cleared his throat before turning to me. "Elladan doesn't have a huge human population and the ones who live here tend to keep to themselves. The locals and transients will probably give you space, so you probably won't need to worry about—ah…"
He trailed off, looking awkward and touched his collar. Oh, he meant the Spot.
"I know, that's why," Elaine sighed. "Elladan is the biggest commercial hub in the region. We're technically in the Mid-Sectors here, even if we're on the outermost edge of the Second Expansion Ring. Things are going to get real utilitarian after this. All that new industry, art, and culture is gonna be concentrated planet-side. The orbitals and stations are still pretty utilitarian, except for Freeport Romulus."
I perked up. "Do you usually stop there?" I asked.
Grace nodded. "Yes, it's the primary hub for space trade out there. Most of the Colonies use the Freetrade Exchange there since the station is centrally located. There's a lot of indie trader traffic to and from Romulus, so there's always someone who can pick up and deliver their consignments—including us. We'll list our cargo, aside from the turkeys, on the Exchange and it'll usually get picked off within a day while we take on new fuel and consumables. Then, we'll pick up a cargo going near to our final destination and use that to cover our fuel. We usually have a stopover there for a few days."
It would be really nice to see Romulus again and see what kind of facility he'd landed in. Lupa made it sound like he'd done well for himself, but he wasn't the type to volunteer details so all I new was that he felt the station was 'acceptable.' He'd hinted a couple of times that I should try to come visit, but I hadn't found an opportunity before now.
That reminded me, I needed to get some letters written to Lupa and Romulus letting them know I'd left Mimir. They'd be relieved to hear it. They'd been on me for years to cut my contract short there, but Captain Kavara was technically a guild-sanctioned captain and I didn't want to risk him blacklisting me. Holliday could do a lot to me, if he ever caught me again, but he couldn't cut me out of legitimate spacer work.
I settled back in my chair and listened to Elaine and Grace dicker a bit about where the good shopping on Elladan was. I directed one of my auxiliaries to take notes and found that it already had been. It had a short list of body shops, too, where it wanted me to go get a diagnostic done on my enhancements.
Mentally, I flagged the node that one was talking from. That one hadn't produced an intelligent synthetic yet, but all my other kids' first signs of sentience had been bitching at me about not looking after my health so it bore watching. I babied it for a little while and promised I'd go for a checkup. It wasn't wrong to be concerned, I hadn't had routine maintenance in a couple of years.
My eager auxiliary presented me with a possible itinerary that I forwarded to Elaine. It made plenty of time for playing around and taking in a show, so I figured I'd let her decide.
Elaine did that sideways glance that some people did when they were trying to read their feed without accidentally staring at someone's face or randomly closing one eye. "I didn't even think about an enhancement checkup," she commented. "I think this makes sense."
"Thanks, one of my auxiliaries is feeling anxious and it's past time."
"Did it add the salon stay too?" she asked as her gaze flicked through the invisible document she was reading. "I didn't think an AI would care about physical appearance."
"They do, actually," I explained. "Especially the ones who grow up symbiotically with a human brain. They understand that how we organic beings feel about our bodies is critical to our physical well being. They know that personal neglect can the first sign of mental or physical malfunction. They may not understand exactly how it all works, but it's still a metric they can track."
"Fascinating," Elaine chuckled. "I'm gonna veto the place it chose, though. My sister says they inflate their ratings on the Feed and butchered someone's hair that she knows. I know somewhere better and they know me well enough to let us walk-in."
I listened to my auxiliary quietly fuss about how unfair it was that there was no publicly available database for word-of-mouth recommendations and realized I should probably start thinking about names.
Grace's band buzzed at him and he smiled. "Looks like we're safely docked," he said and tapped into the feed. "All hands! This is your Captain. We have arrived safely in Elladan station. Pilot reports we are now docked and authorized to access the station. You know what that means. Liberty call, liberty call! Liberty commenced for first duty shift until 0800 tomorrow morning shipboard time. Now liberty!"
Elaine squealed and clapped her hands. "Come on," she said to me. "Let's go!"