Corebound Chapter 3-31 (Patreon)

Bob glided Abyss Pearl to a perfect landing. All the simulator training had really helped; he couldn’t imagine landing without it.

The trip from the station to Earth had been boring. He liked boring. After all the stuff that had happened to him after Jacob’s abduction, boring was good; it was safe.

Bob hadn’t mentioned anything to Jacob the first time they returned to Earth, but he had been terrified back then. He kept dreaming of faceless scientists snatching him out of his bed and strapping him to a table before sawing open his head as they cackled wildly.

Thankfully, it was only a nightmare. Bob couldn’t actually remember any of the horrible shit they had done to him. The treatment Dr. Tanaka had given him had helped him with the whole what is real and isn’t issue he was having, but there was nothing the man could do for the missing memories. Most of what he knew was pieced together by Jacob.

Sometimes he wished his friend hadn’t told him what happened.

Bob flipped on the intercom. “Ship is down, get the cargo freed up, I’ll be down in a few.”

Bob received an affirmative response from his crew chief. Yeah, he had an actual crew now. It was crazy to consider. Less than a year ago, he was just some streamer; now he flew a spaceship with a multispecies crew.

Speaking of crew, Thyr’tek appeared on the bridge.

“Phase coils need an overhaul. Those Concord ones might be faster, but they burn out a hell of a lot quicker. I’m not sure if the tradeoff is worth it.”

“Probably not,” Bob agreed, “but we need speed right now more than longevity. I’ll ask Jacob if he can replace the coils. That should make our departure quicker.”

Bob knew his deliveries weren’t life-critical, but they were important, so the more he brought, the better off humanity would be.

“If you say so,” the eiraxin man shrugged.

“Captain, all ship’s systems have been put in standby,” Julius confirmed.

Julius was one of the bridge crew, and one of the few humans aboard. Originally part of the group rescued from NASA, the man had been in training to become an astronaut.

Bob thanked the man and the other two bridge crew members, both of whom were young eiraxins. Leti and Ghek. They were so young that they didn’t even have an achievement title in their names, which was why they had requested to come.

Bob had been training the inseparable pair for quite some time, so he knew they were competent, and it was rather difficult to find crew. A sizable chunk of the eiraxin population on the station wanted nothing to do with space travel after the ordeal they went through to make it to the station. After hearing the stories, Bob couldn’t blame them.

When he finished filtering out the older eiraxins, who weren’t as capable of learning a new demanding trade, his prospects were few and far between. A single Jacob avatar or merge-capable individual would have made the crew mostly redundant, but Bob didn’t want to hog such a scarce resource for what amounted to delivery missions.

After scouring the station’s inhabitants, he found enough people who were trained and willing to lend a hand. That still left him with a skeleton crew, but he preferred fewer people anyway.

By the time Bob made it to the cargo hold, the crew chief was already shouting orders at the maintenance drones to direct them on how to offload the material. The man was completely neglecting the tablet sitting next to him, which he could have used to give the drones orders without shouting.

That wasn’t the first time Bob had seen the older man shouting at the drones. He was pretty sure the man just liked to shout. As long as it worked, Bob saw no reason to stop the activity.

A few other temporary crew members were on the tarmac, ensuring the parts were laid out for the ground teams to get at easily.

Bob kept to the side of the ramp as he made his way down, easily avoiding the swiftly moving drones. A humanoid drone was waiting near the ramp. Bob was about to wave at it when he noticed the drone was idling.

Idling is when someone isn’t directly merged with them. Bob and many others had picked up on the slight differences during the last few months of interacting with the machines. The differences were subtle, but they were there.

“Jacob?” Bob asked, knowing the drone wouldn’t be there without reason, and just saying his friend’s name was enough to alert him.

Sure enough, the drone shifted and looked at him, the holographic face smiling instead of looking blank.

“Hey, buddy. I got a favor to ask.”

“Last time you asked me for a favor, you got abducted by aliens. What’s up?”

“Hopefully no abductions this time,” Jacob laughed, motioning for Bob to follow him to a nearby building.

Bob wanted to ask if another abduction was actually a possibility, but decided he was better off not knowing.

As soon as the door shut behind him, most of the noise cut out from the noisy delivery area. The Abyss Pearl wasn’t the only ship or work crew out there. Drone ships were coming and going regularly, and a dozen identical ships sat on the far end of the airfield that were clearly attack craft of some sort. Bob was curious about those, but he knew Jacob would tell him about them if he was meant to know.

“I assume you saw the ships parked on the runway?” Jacob asked.

Bob nodded, glad he wouldn’t have to bring up the subject or wait to find out.

“Those are our new fighters.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to fly one for you,” Bob said immediately. He had been one of the best fighter pilots in Omacron Six, but that was just a game. He didn’t think he could do it for real, even if his mind hadn’t been messed with by those scientists.

“No,” Jacob answered, waving his hands. “I was hoping you could train the pilots. I did what I could to get them started, but quickly realized I was out of my depth.”

“You want me to stay on Earth to train them? What about my deliveries?”

“Those are important too, but not nearly as important as this. This hasn’t really been made public, so don’t mention it, but I took severe damage during the last attack. Without other ships to back me up, I don’t think I can hold out against another wave of attackers.”

Bob was taken aback by that news. He had seen Melody at the station; the ship was ginormous. If Jacob thought it had taken damage significant enough to risk losing it during a fight, he believed him. Bob just found it hard to picture just how badly damaged the vessel had to be for that to happen. It hadn’t been nearby when he transitioned in.

“That means I’ll be on Earth for some time. What about my crew? They can’t exactly mix with the locals.”

“I’ll make sure that isn’t a problem,” Jacob said.

Jacob might not have been the most dependable before his abduction, but his friend had changed significantly since then. When he said he would do something now, Bob believed him.

“Alright. When do I start?”

“Just like that?” Jacob asked in surprise.

“Yup,” was all Bob said. Earth was his home; he would do everything in his power to save it.

“Okay. How about now?”

The walls of the building shook slightly, and Bob peered out of the small building’s window to see a cargo drone land right outside. That shouldn’t happen. “Did you tune the gravitics to make them do that?”

Jacob laughed. “I did, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking. People kept complaining that the drones were too damn quiet when they came in to load and unload. People said they never knew when they showed up unless they were keeping watch. Since we don’t yet have global comms and power is still few and far between in most locations, we had to come up with a low-tech solution. I figured a small emitter field imbalance to shake things up as they come in would help alleviate that problem. And it has.”

Bob nodded in approval. One of the things that still weirded him out about the gravity-defying ships was how damn silent they were.

“I assume you also have accommodations for my people?”

Jacob nodded.

“Alright. Let me notify my crew that they are on extended leave. I know some were curious about Earth. It’s too bad they couldn’t see it before the t’uk destroyed most of it.”

“It’ll be better than before in no time,” Jacob said, clapping Bob on the back and leading him back outside. “And your assistance is going to help with that.”

Bob couldn’t help but smile at that thought.

***

Barry studied the information packets his contacts in the Astryx had sold him. Most of the information was useless, but there were nuggets of gold hidden within for those who knew where to look. It took some piecing together, but he realized the council was debating what to do about their missing fleets. Earth’s name and the word humans kept popping up in that conversation, which wasn’t good.

They might have already decided on a course of action if he hadn’t injected some of his own turmoil into their council sessions. Jacob’s veiled warning about the High Chancellor was probably correct, but Barry wasn’t going to let some ancient AI pull the strings without interference.

To throw a wrench in any of the AI’s plans, he leaked reports to a few other species about what the veyrit had done in Sol. No information coming outside of the Astryx or from humanity would be trusted, so he carefully tailored it to look like their own intelligence reports. Those reports were submitted by operatives that he had paid ludicrous amounts of money to in order to ensure it got into the “right” hands.

Paying off so many enemy intelligence assets had nearly emptied the bank account from the power core earnings, but it was well worth it.

At least one of those agents had gotten the data where it needed to go, because the Astryx council was now arguing for a new council head to replace the current veyrit one and demanding a full audit of their military logs. His information contained no specifics as to why they wanted to audit, but Barry knew.

A few of the council species were calling into question the veracity of an unnamed report. The rest didn’t seem to care, but the distraction was enough to tie up the Astryx’s decision for a bit. Hopefully someone would pull Barry’s actual complaint and add fuel to the fire, but it was unlikely.

Barry had to play a delicate game. He wanted to throw a wrench in the Astryx and High Chancellor’s plans, without becoming an obstacle. He didn’t doubt that the ancient Concord AI could and would remove any obstacles to its desired outcome. He was starting to think it already had. A few of the t’uk’s actions, such as the destruction of their Xalos production facility, which would have been a major card to play, had never made sense to him until Jacob revealed the AI’s existence.

The hardest part was that he couldn’t even discuss any of his plans. The AI had to be listening to everything they did. A beep alerted him that he had a meeting with the Primogen. Barry had not been looking forward to that after Katherine told Xing’ket about the AI and Concord Imperium.

He straightened his back and connected to the call. “Primogen, glad you could join me.”

The man’s expression made it clear he wasn’t glad to be having this conversation, but Barry would manage.