Jacob really wanted to explore the station and see the other aliens, but he was also in a bit of a hurry. Thankfully, Sha’la had saved him a bunch of time by buying all the power cores he had brought with him while also handling the purchase of his other items. She had been mostly honest as well, which was nice.

  He wouldn’t have even realized she had lied to him a few times if he had not been monitoring her vitals with his sensors from the moment they started interacting. Her heart rate spiked when she first tested the power cores, and again a few times after. So even though he didn’t know anything about alien biology, the change was enough to tell him that what he had was special.

  Jacob wondered what made eight-hundred-year-old technology special, but he chose not to ask about that, so he could continue to hide his ignorance and the fact that he was essentially a fugitive under the Alliance rules. He didn’t know if those rules were still in effect, but it was best to be cautious.

  To be honest, he didn’t really care if the power cores were worth more than she told him. He only needed materials and had come expecting to fill less than a quarter of his cargo space with the cores that he had brought, so filling the entire hold and having extra credits on top of that was beyond what he had hoped. The fact that she agreed to create an account and place the additional funds into it for him was a bonus. The power cores required some unusual materials, but his list included enough to produce another twelve crates of power cores. Now that he knew they were worth so much, any issues financing Melody’s repairs were dealt with.

  He could have brought more power cores, but one in ten was reserved for the station to power more drones. Thankfully, they were a rechargeable resource. If they were single-use, it would have been a nightmare.

  This wouldn’t be the last time he stopped by and traded for parts. The transport was only so big, and Melody was going to require materials from dozens, if not hundreds, of trips back and forth before it was fully repaired.

  So with that in mind, he stood off to the side, watching as pallets and crates of materials were delivered by workers and loaded aboard the transport. Most of the workers were tiyau, aliens like Sha’la, but he spotted a bruth. The three-foot-tall humanoid looked a bit like a koala, only far less cute, with its matted, greasy-looking fur. Going by the wrinkled noses of some of the other workers, it probably didn’t smell all that good either. Chalk that up as a win for being in a robotic body.

  Jacob knew that wasn’t a normal look for their species, because he had seen more than one advertisement with a bruth in them. They were actually quite common in the ads aimed toward younger audiences, probably because they looked so damn adorable when they weren’t looking like a homeless vagrant dumped into a vat of week-old fryer grease.

  Cuteness seemed to transcend species, but the bruth individual loading materials must not have gotten that memo, or just didn’t seem to care.

  The only other species he spotted was one of the six-limbed amuni. It was speaking with Sha’la about the power cores and rubbing its hands in what Jacob took to mean delight.

  “Definitely got fleeced,” he muttered quietly.

  It took hours for the transport to be loaded, and Sha’la had vanished into her office long before it was done. She did tell him he could come get her if there were any issues, but the dock workers were quick and professional.

  One of them walked up to him with a tablet after the last crate was loaded. “I need you to confirm delivery, sir.”

  Jacob assumed he would just need to sign off and be done with it, but he had to individually scan each crate and confirm that the item was what he ordered. The process was time-consuming, but he could see how it was designed to prevent delivery issues and even maybe criminal activities. He just wished he had known ahead of time instead of just standing around gaping like a fool. He could have been scanning them from the moment they were dropped off.

  The last crate beeped, and he handed the completed shipping manifest to the worker. The tiyau man nodded and hurried down the ramp. He wasn’t the only one in a hurry.

  The landing pad had come alive in the last few hours. People and deliveries zipped across the space as ships waited to be loaded or unloaded. It gave Jacob the image of a disturbed ant’s nest, but he knew it was organized chaos.

  With a sigh, Jacob turned away from the scene and headed into his transport. He wished he could stick around and learn more about the different species, but he knew the faster he returned, the faster he could get repairs started. The center aisle in the cargo hold was the only one wide enough to fit down without having to twist sideways, which he was glad for. He had been forced to crab walk through the stacked supplies when he scanned them, which would have been annoying in his old body, but had become a chore in the drone.

  He entered the control room and closed the ramp before checking the phase coils. Once again, he wished he had done that instead of waiting around, but he had been too enraptured by watching the aliens.

  One of the coils had to be replaced, but he had become so proficient at the process that it only took him a few minutes to swap the unit out. Within the hour, he had transmitted his request to leave. His docking fee was waived since it was his first time at the station, but he was glad he now had additional funds to cover that expense the next time around.

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  A voice he didn’t recognize said he was cleared to depart and sent the flight information.

  Jacob thanked them and left the station.

  ***

  Sha’la rubbed at her tired eyes and glanced over at her mattress. She really wanted to sleep, but she had one more task to complete before that could happen. With a sigh, she plopped herself in front of the communicator in her apartment and called up her contact.

  The silver screen pulsed with light for a few moments before her contact picked up. His image replaced the silver.

  “Sha’la! My favorite port liaison, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call? Have you reconsidered my offer, perhaps?”

  “I already told you, Hallik, I don’t date outside my species.”

  “Someone as lovely as you, you do yourself a disservice by not exploring all your options.”

  “Your flattery won’t make me lower my fee, either,” she replied coldly.

  Hallik chuckled. “You can’t blame a man for trying. What do you have for me today, hmm?”

  “I don’t know, could be nothing.”

  “Oh?” Hallik asked as he leaned farther away from the pole he was currently gripping to look closer at the recorder. “You’re usually pretty certain when you send me criminals to track, which is why I like working with you. What’s different about this one?”

  “I’m not sure. It was a new visitor to the station. The man felt off from the beginning, especially since he kept his suit sealed and helmet set to reflective the entire time. Other than him asking me to come aboard his ship, he didn’t really do anything.”

  “Hmm. Those hardly seem like concerns, except maybe the part about asking you to board his ship. I assume you were alone when he did that?”

  Sha’la nodded. “I was, but I may have misinterpreted that situation. I was rather tired when he arrived. That isn’t the only odd thing about him. He’s flying some relic of a transport, but he brought in multiple cases of Xalos power cores. How else could he have gotten his hands on that many without stealing them?”

  Hallik rubbed at his chin with one of his free appendages, while the middle two crossed themselves as he remained attached to the pole with his bottom pair. “I haven’t heard any chatter about an Xalos shipment going missing, but companies can be tight-lipped about stuff like that. Hard for people to trust a company that can’t even protect their shipments. Did you tag the transport with one of the trackers I provided you?”

  “Why do you think I’m calling you?” she asked in exasperation. “Are you going to look into it, or what?”

  “Maybe,” Hallik replied.

  “What?” Sha’la demanded.

  “Calm down. You know you only get a cut if the target has a bounty on them. If not, I’m out a significant amount of money. Who covers those expenses, hmm?”

  Sha’la ground her teeth in annoyance, but she had something that would placate the bounty hunter. She pulled one of the power cores out of her bag and set it in front of the communicator.

  “Is that what I think it is?” the amuni man asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Hallik shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, Sha’la, my dear. I thought you’d be smarter than skimming from your employers.”

  “I didn’t steal this,” she bristled. “I paid for it myself.” She would have purchased more when she was setting up the buy order for Jacob, but her bank account wasn’t that deep. One of the units, even at a considerable discount, had drained most of what she had saved. She had planned on selling the unit on the exchange and tripling her money, but now she was going to have to use it as collateral to ensure Hallik took the job.

  Hallik snorted at that. “And I’m sure you paid the going rate for it as well?”

  She didn’t answer, but her silence was enough for the bounty hunter.

  The amuni man chuckled. “Fine. If you’ll be putting that up as collateral, I’ll look into your mysterious man. It won’t be right away, however.”

  “What? Why not?” She really needed him to arrest Jacob as soon as possible so she could sell the power core and recoup her savings.

  “Because I’m currently tracking a group of eiraxin dissidents.”

  “Oh,” she replied in understanding.

  “Oh, indeed,” he nodded. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be done with this job in a few weeks. Once I wrap things up here, I’ll go track down your paramour.”

  “He’s not my—” she began before stopping herself and glaring at the man’s teasing smirk. “I need to get some sleep. Update me when you can.”

  There was nothing she could do to change his mind, so she simply ended the call.

  ***

  Hallik shook his head after the call ended. Then he stretched along his sleeping pole for a moment before crawling headfirst toward the floor and out the door.

  “Hey, boss,” Joris said as Hallik entered the bridge. “I thought you were getting some sleep?”

  “Got a call from my contact on Vorlos. She has a possible target for us. Can you pull up the trackers?”

  “Sure thing.” The shalis’s exoskeletal hands blurred over the controls as they activated the subspace scanner.

  Hallik found the hands of a shalis more disturbing than their bipedal appearance, segmented bodies, or multifaceted eyes. In his opinion, hands should be soft, yet strong enough to climb a tree, but he kept that thought to himself. The truth was, Joris was one of his best people, despite his inability to grip most weapons properly without the aid of special gloves.

  The screen flashed to life, showing two signals.

  “It looks like the new contact is moving into the dead zone,” Joris confirmed.

  The target could very well be a privateer then. Not many people willingly lived in that area of space for the same reason he was hunting eiraxin dissidents. The Concord Imperium had carried out a genocide so horrific that it had forced the rest of the neighboring species to rally together for the first time since recorded memory to stop them.

  The worst part was that the Concord Imperium had carried out its horrific actions under the guise of improving those worlds, delaying the discovery of what they had been doing by decades.

  Most of the habitable worlds in the dead zone became collateral damage when the Imperium rendered them uninhabitable instead of admitting defeat. That callousness toward other species was why the eiraxins were mostly forbidden from leaving their home world, even after nine centuries, unless they were being monitored.

  “Sir,” Joris said, shaking Hallik from his thoughts. “It looks like the dissident ship has finally stopped.”

  “About time,” Hallik said with a huff. Maybe he would get to Sha’la’s request sooner than expected. “Wake the crew, I’m going to go get suited up.”

  Joris nodded, and soon the overhead light started flashing yellow, followed by an alert message.

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