Derek froze.

  The voice hadn’t sounded angry … but the declaration was weird.

  He turned around to see a young woman, most likely around his age, with fiery red hair topped with a pair of … were those fox ears? Though the glowing blue eyes spoke to her having a race evolved beyond fox beastkin, or, more likely, something entirely different with some superficial similarities.

  Also, our ship? Was he somehow included in that? Or had it wound up double-booked somehow, because it was supposed be his ship, weird as that was to say?

  But before he could spin out too much, he decided to just ask.

  “What exactly are you talking about?”

  A small part of him bristled at what could be her assertion that it wasn’t “his” ship, plus the “his” part was far too new for him to get overly upset about its being challenged just yet …

  “I mean, it’s our … is it finally getting taken ou- …” she coughed into a clenched fist, then straightened. “Sorry, from the top: my name is Wilhelmina Rosenkreuz, call me anything but Wilhelmina, I was on the team that built that ship, and we’ve all gotten pretty worried it’s going to get gutted for parts instead of being used.”

  That certainly made sense. But also …

  “Why wouldn’t people want this ship?” Derek asked. Had he missed some major flaw that had scared off all other potential claimants?

  “Maintenance requirements,” she said flatly. “I mean, normal spaceships are literal rocket science, and this ship is that and the most complicated field of magic known to man.”

  “Do you know anyone who can do the job … actually, what do you want me to call you? Because I don’t think you want me to literally use ‘anything but Wilhelmina’?”

  “Mimi,” she said. “And anyone on the original team could do it, me included, and I’m just the intern.”

  “Define ‘intern’,” Derek said.

  That term had a lot of meanings in the current day and age, ranging from the old “kid gets work experience and a point on their resume in exchange for scutwork,” to the far more modern concept of “person to low leveled to be useful but had to be hired due to laws that necessitated the creation of advancement opportunities.”

  “Graduated from Akashic academy, don’t have the Levels to do my own thing, so I’m here for now,” Mimi explained. “So, can I come?”

  Derek resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. Had she mentioned she wanted to come before that point?

  Now, he could probably find someone else to be the engineer on his ship. Hell, assuming the documentation on its construction was as complete as he expected from something even indirectly directed by Isaac, he could probably make himself a custom [Skill] purely for performing maintenance on this ship specifically and then level it up to the point where he could do all the engineering himself. But why would he want to?

  Here was someone eager to come along, who didn’t seem to be disagreeable or liable to cause any great interpersonal issues (though he’d have to make sure to have everyone on the crew to meet before they set off, just to make certain of that), and wasn’t at such a high Level as to trivialize what everyone else did.

  So, barring any problems cropping up, there were few points against and a whole lot of points for him having found his engineer. Assuming there were no unforeseen issues, which meant asking a whole lot of questions.

  “You don’t even know where we’re going,” Derek pointed out.

  Mimi shrugged. “You’re going exploring, Dr. Thoma is giving out ships to people who’ll do that, and he’s the one who brought you here. It’s obvious.”

  Put like that, it was.

  “We are, but we’re going to go for the long haul,” Derek agreed. “But we’re going to have to make sure we all get along if we’re going to be on a ship that small together for that long.”

  “Seems doable,” Mimi shrugged. “I’ll mostly be in the engineering section anyway.”

  Now that, Derek called bullshit on. Not the location of her work, mind you, but the fact that that would somehow stop interpersonal conflict if it came about.

  “We’re going to be taking the ship back to Mars for the time being,” he offered. “How about you come along, we’ll see how things go, and if it seems like it won’t work out, I’ll buy you a ticket back here.”

  “Works for me,” she nodded happily, then turned to the wall panel, muttering something about needing to check certain things, but the only reason Derek even caught that much was because it was communicated with simple words; everything else was technobabble in need of clear enunciation, if it was meant to be understood.

  “Oh, and, can I ask what species you are?” Derek finally asked, earlier curiosity returning.

  “Sionnach Sidhe,” Mimi said, turning back towards him.

  “Fox fairy?” Derek guessed. He didn’t speak Gaelic, the language still largely dead outside of a couple of colonies that tried to make it their official language once more, but “Sidhe” quite famously meant “fairy” and as for the fox part … visual clues certainly helped with that part, especially since the Gaellic word for “cat” was one the few others he knew.

  “Yep,” she announced, once again facing the screen, tapping away at it. “Weather manipulation, mostly useless. But I can foresee solar flares, if we’re that close to something that’ll throw them.”

  And that seemed to be the end of the conversation, for good, this time, Derek felt. So he grabbed a chair, a table, and a tablet to start reading up on the ship. Exact metrics of the maneuvering and weapons systems, read up on any particularities the controls may have, make sure to familiarize himself with any deviations from the standard layout he’d learned at the academy …

  Also, a good hour into that, Derek realized he also needed to start registering the vessel, so he switched to doing that.

  Name? That had already been decided a while ago. Dragonfly.

  Type? Armed fast freighter/scout/exploration vessel.

  And so on, and so forth.

  Mostly just data entry that probably should have been automated, at least until he came to the “military auxiliary” portion of things.

  In essence, the UEN offered certain things for captains willing to promise their aid under certain circumstances.

  Ferry supplies in case of natural disaster. Ferry supplies in case of war. Transmit a copy of gathered survey data to the military. Get a free paired FTL transmitter that would route through the military switchboards, because while those things weren’t expensive, they also weren’t cheap either, and the “risk” of being used as a relay was relatively minimal. Well, not risk, but maybe “downside” would be more accurate?

  Either way, the ship already had two installed, one connected to here, the other to Olympus Mons, that last one wasn’t going to be needed. Neither was anything else.

  Even though the military instructors at Seoul Academy had been, obviously, pro-military, they couldn’t let that bleed too heavily into their lessons, due to them having actual oversight from the dean. As such, he’d actually gotten a solid overview of how these things worked, what was and wasn’t worth it.

  For example, sharing survey data was basically free money, unless you were a contracted survey ship with conflicting contracts. And yes, technically, surveying was what hewas supposed to do, but said surveying was of the “make sure there were no threats” type.

  As for everything else … he could always volunteer his services if shit hit the fan, but by not signing up, he’d be able to avoid getting drafted.

  And so on, and so forth, until he went back to going through the manuals.

  ***

  “What’s this I hear about you picking up an engineer?” Isaac asked upon returning to Derek, who currently had the room to himself since Mimi had left a while ago.

  “She was wondering what was going to happen to ‘their’ ship, I asked what that was about, seeing as I thought it was my ship, and things just kinda went from there,” Derek explained.

  Isaac laughed. “Yeah, doesn’t matter if you’re the guy who owns the ship, if you’re the one who paid for it to be built, or even the one who designed it. End of the day, it’s still going to be the chief engineer’s ship, and there ain’t a damn thing you’ll be able to do about it. Good luck with that, Captain.”

  Wait, that was right … he was a captain now, right? Derek grinned.

  “I mean, as long as she’s okay with me being its captain, I don’t have a problem with it being her ship,” he shrugged.

  Isaac nodded. “Good choice. Did you know her starter [Class] is literally [Wunderkind]?”

  “No, we didn’t talk about tha- …” Derek began, until his mind caught up to what he’d just heard. “Really?”

  “Yep,” Isaac said. “I read her transcripts, she doesn’t have the mana or [Skills] to build ships on her own yet, but she’s brilliant. I mean, the [Class] says it all, doesn’t it?”

  “What’s her Level?” Derek wondered.

  “50, peak of the second Evolution, waiting for a better option,” Isaac replied immediately. “Just like your friend.”

  “Oh, God, not you too …” Derek sighed, while Isaac laughed.

  “Last time, I promise.”

  Isaac began to turn around, away from Derek, likely aiming to open a portal to let Ye-in come here more easily, before pausing. “Also, you and whoever you’re going to have as a part of your crew are coming to a party on Olympus Mons in a week, for some hands-on instructions.”

  “At a party.”

  Derek was surprised that dust didn’t billow from his mouth, considering the dryness of his tone.

  “Trust me, it’ll be interesting,” Isaac said as he conjured a portal and stepped through, leaving Derek to wonder.

  Even though they’d barely gotten to know each other, he did trust his older brother … which only left him that much more confused as to what this was going to be about. Yet, at the same time, wasn’t that one of the fundamental parts of trust? Doing something that seemed weird simply because of the person who’d asked you to?

  Either way, he didn’t get the chance to thoroughly think that through, as that was when Ye-in stepped through the portal, only to freeze when she caught sight of the ship in the window behind him.

  “Is that it?” she gasped.

  “Yep,” Derek announced. “That’s the Dragonfly.”

  “What’s it like inside?”

  “Don’t know, I was waiting on you to go in,” Derek told her.

  “Well, let’s go, then!”

  The two of them might be in their thirties, but she looked like she was eighteen while he looked twenty-five, and both of them were acting like five-year-olds on Christmas morning … so it was pretty lucky they were alone in the room as they headed into the boarding tube, ten meters of a clear material that looked like plastic but clearly wasn’t, leading towards a hatch on the outside of the Dragonfly, which opened easily when Derek tapped the corrosponding command on the pannel next to it.

  Of course, there were much more robust, manual controls hidden beneath armored panels that would be accessible come hell or high water.

  The door swung outwards, smoothly revealing the inside, which was …

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Someone really likes blue,” Ye-in commented.

  “It’s a pretty shade,” Derek agreed. “I think I prefer it to the usual white.”

  But other than that, it was mostly built like your typical utilitarian ship, with easy access to things that might need repairing because they ran along the ceiling, though the fact that the walls were painted literally anything other than the bland white of most other ships, especially of the military variety, automatically gave the ship a hell of a lot more character.

  It still seemed like a normal vessel, though … and then they reached the first storage compartment, staring down into a space so large the entire ship could practically fit inside …

  “I think I’m getting vertigo,” Ye-in commented. “This is awesome! Is the entire ship like that?”

  “The reactor is too, same goes for the rest of the storage compartments and the hydroponics are sized to feed a hundred,” Derek said.

  “But do we have a use for all that extra power?” Ye-in asked.

  “Yup,” Derek grinned back at her.

  Though they didn’t wind up going straight for those, instead finding themselves in the bridge instead, which was the size of your average living room, with a massive screen on the bow-facing wall, a central chair clearly meant for the captain resting against the opposite one, two consoles on each side wall, each with their own chair, and in the center sat a large table that, according to the blueprints, could fold into the floor, and pop out a holographic screen if needed.

  There was also a second set of chairs for it, though those were presently in the floor, stored in their own set of spatial pockets.

  “Seems like it was designed to be livable on top of being functional,” Ye-in obvserved.

  “Oh, by the way, one of the engineers who built the Dragonfly would like to come with us,” Derek said. “She’s coming with us on the flight to Mars, to see how quickly we’ll get on each other’s nerves.”

  “And if we do?”

  “Then she doesn’t come,” Derek said. “New crew members should be an ‘all yes, no noes’ kind of deal. Everyone’s got a veto.”

  Of course, that heavily depended on the size of the vessel; everyone getting along in a crew of a thousand simply wasn’t feasible, yet at the same time, any ship requiring that many people would also have the size for those who truly could not stand each other to keep separate.

  But on a ship like this, a vessel that, according to the documentation, required only three crew at the bare minimum, two people getting along like oil and water would have serious repercussions for everyone.

  “Okay, just making sure,” Ye-in said. “Now, where are the guns?”

  ***

  Half an hour later, Derek and Ye-in were back in the boarding tube, waiting for Mimi, who’d come marching up with four storage rings quite obvious on every finger except the thumb of her right hand.

  “Hi, I’m Wilhelmina Rosenkreuz. I go by Mimi, but I don’t care what you call me as long as it’s not ‘Wilhelmina,’ I’m a Sionnach Sidhe, Mom’s Irish, and I’m an [Arcane Spatial Engineer].”

  That was … a lot of unasked-for information, but considering she’d preempted most of the questions that would have eventually come up, there was little need to complain, though a lesser person probably still would have.

  “Nice to meet you,” Ye-in replied, holding out her hand for Mimi to shake. “I’m Ye-in Nan, and an old friend of Derek’s. I’ll be taking the role of XO, or at least as far as that role exists in a crew whose number is in the single digits.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Mimi replied with a happy smile, vigorously shaking the proffered digit.

  Derek gestured towards the inside of the ship, and they headed in together.

  “Why do you want to come with us so badly?” Ye-in asked.

  “I get to explore the galaxy in a ship I helped build. I get to be a ship’s engineer. Why wouldn’t I want to come along?” Mimi replied, a happy little grin on her face as she glanced at various pieces of gear as they passed them.

  “You’ve got us there,” Ye-in chuckled softly, then elbowed Derek in the side. “Sounds better than just running away from expectations, doesn’t it?”

  “It does when you put it like that,” he sighed. “How about ‘heading off to make our mark’?”

  “Uh-hu,” Mimi agreed, only to suddenly freeze, cock her head to the side, and stare at him. “Wait a minute … are you Dr. Thoma’s son?”

  Derek promptly missed a turn and walked into a wall, while Ye-in seemed to be dying of laughter.

  “So, no?” Mimi asked.

  “He’s my older brother,” Derek explained as he rubbed his nose.

  “Oh.”

  Yeah … anyway, moving on …

  They wound up walking through the ship for another half hour or so, with Mimi pointing out interesting nooks and crannies, until they eventually reached and settled into the bridge to set off.

  ***

  “Squidworks control, this is Captain Thoma of the Dragonfly, requesting permission to depart.”

  It was minutia, it was bureaucracy, it was boring and bland procedure he’d doubtlessly get sick of after the first half-dozen repeats.

  But for a reason he couldn’t quite put into words, saying that sentence sent a thrill of pleasure down his spine.

  “Captain Thoma, this is Squidworks control, permission granted, transmitting route … now.”

  The directions popped up on the main viewscreen an instant later, instructing him to use thrusters to ease out of the cradle (once all links had been properly disconnected), then stop and rotate towards the exit before hitting the interior of the station’s outer shell, then once again ease the ship towards the secondary doors, sized for smaller ships like the Dragonfly, rotate once again to aim the ship out said door, and finally use the thrusters to head out said door until they’d reached a safe distance to light off main propulsion.

  VASIMIR thrusters, while simple, rugged, and reliable, were also still, effectively, rockets, ones that burned quite hot; the beam of plasma that came out of the spaceship’s rear end was still, well, a beam of fucking plasma, more than capable of wrecking anything within several kilometers of it. A distance that was nothing in space under almost all circumstances save docking/undocking.

  And getting out until then was mostly just a math problem, of firing what thrusters, and for how long, all without crashing into something … piece of cake, the exact reason he’d made [Stellar Mental Maths].

  He did glance at the calculations the navigation system had done, just to make sure they matched, now that things were for serious, and his fingers danced across the controls, the ship underneath him rumbling to life while his face felt like it would crack in half from smiling so much as the ship drifted forward.

  Now, he could literally walk faster than the ship was moving right now, but it was a starship, damnit! A ship he was piloting! What could be more awesome?!

  Ahead, the outer hull of Squidworks seemed to break open, a large chunk pulling outwards to grant their exit, several more taps of the controls lining his ship up and guiding it out, then a few more commands rotated the vessel one final time, pulling the engines away from the outer hull, waited thirty or so seconds while the Dragonfly drifted fully clear … and then slammed the pedal to the metal, though sadly, said pedal was sadly entirely proverbial. And taking starship engines from zero to full burn in an instant was a bad idea.

  But the ship did begin to both accelerate and increase in acceleration, the plasma cloud behind them growing brighter and brighter, until they were accelerating hell-bent for metal.

  While the distance between their location in the asteroid belt was quite aways from Mars, four light minutes, in fact, hundreds of millions of kilometers, a number high enough to remind him that he really should start thinking in light-units, it wasn’t actually all that far in the stellar sense. Enough to burn at full half the way there, then flip once they hit that point and decelerate back down to a reasonable orbital velocity, which they’d hit right upon reaching Mars, perfect for slotting into the spaceport, where he’d already booked a berth, right when they’d need it.

  Derek wasn’t quite certain how long he’d been sitting there, grinning, by the time Mimi got up from her chair and announced she was going to check on the engines.

  Ye-in waited for another minute after that before spinning her chair around to face him.

  “I like her,” she announced. “I think we got our engineer.”

  ***

  Four hours into their flight, Derek gathered them in the bridge in its “conference room” configuration, with a starmap unrolled across it.

  Of course, there was some fudging with distances going on; the Milky Way was something like a thousand light-years thick, and any proper way of displaying it would have to be three-dimensional, but at the same time, the map on the table was more of a prop than anything else, something to explain his proposed path with.

  And if they needed an actual display, the navigation computer was right there.

  “So, what’s the plan, then?” Ye-in asked as she came in, tried to flounce onto her chair, except the seat in question proceeded to do its damndest to adjust to her pose and instead wound up pitching her to the floor. She did catch herself, a forcefield providing her a place to plant her hand while she pushed herself back into her seat.

  “I think those might need some adjusting,” Mimi commented flatly as she claimed her own chair, though she was rigidly straight as she did so, seemingly expecting it to be on the verge of turning into an ejection seat … which may or may not be a real risk, Derek wasn’t sure. [Starship Maintenance] was about fixing damage, but if it was just badly calibrated but working, that might not set off the [Skill] … shit, he needed to check that.

  “Maybe,” Ye-in agreed once she was done making sure her seat wouldn’t act out again, then looked at Derek. “So, plans?”

  Right …

  “Most people head corewards via Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, or Epsilon Indi, especially after the Dyson sphere was found,” Derek started. “I was thinking it might be a good idea to head to Sigma Draconis instead, use their catapult to get to Freedom, stay there a couple of days to see if we can find something interesting to trade, then take their catapult as close to Neo-Laconia as we can get to sell any trade goods we might have gotten. And buy anything we might have forgotten.”

  The Freedom star system, nicknamed the Mild West, occasionally maligned as “idiot’s paradise,” was a rather unique place.

  As one could easily tell from the name alone, it had been settled and developed by staunch libertarians taking full advantage of the new frontier and the opportunities granted by the System, with the entirety of their laws fitting on a simple pamphlet.

  Most of it was System-enforced promises and contracts, plus general decency.

  For example, rather than set safety standards, an employer would have to, while being scanned by a truth spell, swear that they would be comfortable working in the current conditions, were they on the same level as their workers. And even after that oath was given, if something still happened, there’d be absolute hell to pay.

  And they didn’t have traffic control for their spaceport; it all functioned on the basis of “go where you need to go, make sure other people know where you’re going to avoid collisions, but if you hit someone and it’s your fault, you’re fucked.”

  Supposedly, the same idea traced through the entirety of their culture and legal code, all enforced by [Justiciars] who were literally incapable of being corrupted, due to the limitations imposed by their chosen [Class].

  Of course, all that could have easily made it a haven for criminals. And in many ways, that was how it wound up playing out, with only the more serious crimes getting filtered out.

  At the end of the day, asking “have you ever committed a crime” while under the influence of a truth spell was, well, utterly pointless. There were so many laws, far too many of them incredibly obscure and of minimal impact, that some studies claimed the average person broke dozens of them on the daily.

  A whole lot of people felt that Freedom was the ideal society.

  A whole lot of other people thought that living there was the closest thing to hell on Earth.

  Derek ... Derek would make his own decisions once he’d experienced it for himself.

  However, all the things that many people saw as problematic had also made Freedom an entrepreneurial haven.

  That had resulted in all sorts of cool shit being built, as well as crazy shit, useless shit, or just plain shit shit. The kind you usually couldn’t get anywhere else, or at least not for quite a while later. As such, you could get all sorts of excellent trade goods, assuming you had the capability to find them.

  The sorts of trade goods that, assuming they weren’t completely absurd, Neo-Laconia liked to grab.

  And this was also a star system with a very descriptive name, at least if you knew that “Laconia” was the region that Sparta was in.

  Of course, Sparta had fallen, rather unspectacularly self-destructing over the course of centuries due to being forced to spend the majority of their resources and focus on preventing a revolt by Helots, their slave caste.

  A problem that the people of Neo-Laconia had sidestepped entirely by the simple method of not keeping fucking slaves. In fact, aside from the fact that they loved their martial prowess and liked Spartan symbolism, they actually stood against much of what Sparta had been about. Between them and the inhabitants of Freedom, the UEN hadn’t had a single issue with slavers out that end, because those fuckers were hunted like dogs in that corner of the galaxy.

  Instead, the people of Neo-Laconia were relying on a simple “trick” for all their non-military needs, a single teachable [Skill] that grew exponentially stronger the more people were using it in a given area. And as for what it did? Well, it did … everything, but mostly the upkeep of infrastructure, plus agriculture, construction, and all sorts of other things.

  But that [Skill] was rather famously only good for making generic stuff. Anythin special would have to be bought, and since the Dragonfly’s cargo capacity bordered on the absurd … why not make a little money on the way?

  Those were his thoughts on the matter, though, what did the others think?

  “I think we should go to Chimera, first,” Ye-in said after a long pause, causing Derek to raise an eyebrow. That was in the complete opposite direction …

  “I mean, do you really think going exploring would be a good idea without ever having seen any aliens? Real ones are apparently weird.”

  “All sapient species are weird to the others,” Mimi pointed out. “The Assai are jumpy by anyone’s standards, the Dromon think anyone who believes in the concept of nation states is certifiably insane, and the Koinian idea of ‘hierarchy’ is so complicated that not a single member of a different species has managed to fully understand it in the last two decades.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Derek asked.

  “We had Kiretas the All-knowing at Squidworks last year, some invitation from Professor Shaw, I think,” Mimi explained. “I … I honestly don’t know how to explain it. He’s an alien, and you know that when talking to one, even if you can’t see them. They’re … they’re not humans in a funny suit, or something a computer came up with, they’re different, and you can only ever forget that for a few seconds at a time, before either of you does something that reminds the other that … that you’re literally from different worlds.”

  “And you think it’ll help to have met a different kind of alien,” Ye-in affirmed.

  Mimi nodded. “Also, the aliens at Chimera will know new humans are going to be weird; they’re prepared to let any problems get papered over.”

  Well, that certainly was an excellent point.

  “Also, there’s a chain of catapults that’ll let us get there in a day,” Ye-in added. “We wouldn’t even be losing that much time.”

  And that was an even better one.

  “Alright, let’s do it, once everything is set up,” Derek agreed, leaning forward and steepling his fingers. “Do you have anything you need to do before heading off? It’ll be a while before I can head off because I’m trying to get [Chimera] and hit Level 25.”

  “Good for you,” Ye-in told him. “I think I’ll just train.”

  “Does that mean I’m on the crew?” Mimi asked, making Derek wince internally. He and Ye-in probably should have told her the moment they decided she was … but there was no changing that now.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “In that case, I think I’d like to run some experiments with the Dragonfly, now that she’s out of the dock.”

  “No weapons tests in the solar system,” Derek felt the need to remind her. That would set off all sorts of alerts, and the navy wouldn’t be happy. Also, he felt like keeping the heavy guns on the down low was probably a good idea …”

  “Sure thing,” she beamed at him. “And nothing’s going to happen to the ship, I promise.”

  It seemed Isaac had been right. It was the engineer’s ship, no matter what any paperwork might say.

  And speaking of his older brother …

  “Oh, and Isaac said we have to go to a party,” he said. “Apparently, it’s going to be some kind of practical lesson.”

  “Well, that’s ominous,” Ye-in declared. “I’m in.”

  “Did he mention a dresscode, though?” Mimi asked, causing Derek to shrug.

  “He isn’t the kind of person who’d let us embarrass ourselves and call that the ‘lesson,’ right?”

  Oh, shit … that was an uncomfortable thought, but only for a bare handful of seconds.

  “No,” he said. “But we should probably still make sure to get set up early …”