“There are insufficient materials available to make repairs to your vessel, Captain.”

  Jacob was struck dumb by the AI’s response. “What? Did they remove those materials when they decommissioned this place?”

  “Negative, Captain. The materials were left behind when the workers departed.”

  “Then what happened to them?”

  “Most of the materials were exhausted to upkeep the station.”

  That explained why the station looked to be in such pristine condition despite being over eight hundred years old. Even out in the middle of interstellar space, there should be some rocks and dust floating around, impacting it, and Jacob hadn’t seen any evidence indicating shielding of any kind.

  “Can you provide me with a list of the materials you have on hand and what they are capable of manufacturing?” This was beginning to feel a lot like when he started fixing the ship. He really hoped he was wrong.

  The AI materialized a list. It was a short one, but one item did catch Jacob’s attention.

  “You can manufacture power cores?”

  “Yes, Captain. This facility is fully equipped to manufacture power cores.”

  That was one silver lining.

  Jacob had only recovered nine of the energy storage devices, and none of them lasted very long before having to be recharged. If they had similar runtimes, he would have assumed that was normal, but they varied wildly in how long they maintained a charge.

  Each time they were recharged, that length seemed to grow shorter, which made him believe the power cores were close to failing.

  “Can you provide me with information on the manufacturing process?”

  “Yes, Captain. Would you like this in the same temporary storage?”

  “Actually, hold on a moment.”

  Jacob used the knowledge gained from his new title to assign himself as the Head of Security. He had to invoke emergency powers to give himself a second role on the station, but it wasn’t like anyone was around to call him out on the abuse of power. Then he assigned himself a permanent address on the station.

  Since he was the only one on the large structure, he made sure to pick the nicest room, which was not the one normally assigned to the Head of Station Services. He didn’t know who the room normally belonged to, but he didn’t particularly care, either. The space was massive, like an oligarch’s mansion, over-the-top huge.

  Considering the size of the station, the apartment didn’t take up much room, but it still seemed like a huge waste to Jacob. He wasn’t even going to use the space, other than for the large data storage it provided.

  “I’ve assigned myself a room. Please transfer all my data to that area.”

  The AI complied.

  Jacob perused the new information, but he didn’t understand any of the technical data involved in the process. He sighed, not sure what he expected. He had no background in engineering, and the data Melody had given him was only a surface-level understanding, so he could repair or replace parts, and that was about it. Even the data on the phase coils only covered repairs and operation.

  He closed the file and stopped to think about his next action. The first was to fix the ship, because that’s where his mind resided. He considered transferring the AI core to the station, but that came with a host of problems.

  The main problem was that he would have to trust the station AI and the drones to handle that while he was essentially unconscious. That made that option a non-starter, even before he factored in whether something like that was even possible. Melody’s core was essentially the brain for the entire ship. To say that it was the ship wasn’t hyperbole.

  Moving the core to the station didn’t really solve his problem either. It just moved it to a different housing, one that couldn’t be moved. He didn’t want to be stuck aboard an immobile station for the rest of his life.

  The ship may be in awful shape, but it was still mobile, which is why he hadn’t bothered asking Melody if it was possible to transfer his memories to the station. Assuming Melody even told him the truth, he doubted the AI would agree to help, considering that Jacob was its captain.

  The next task was to figure out how to restock the station, which he had to do in order to complete the first task.

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  “AI, do you have a way to restock the station, like mining drones or something?”

  “This is not a mining station, Captain. All materials were delivered via transport.”

  “I assume you can’t just call up a new delivery, can you?” Jacob jokingly asked.

  The AI didn’t respond.

  Jacob sighed. He forgot that this AI didn’t respond unless you asked it a question in a specific way. “Can you order materials for delivery?”

  “I have sent multiple order requests over the last five hundred years, Captain. None of those requests has been fulfilled.”

  After the AI told him about the lack of response from headquarters, he hadn’t held out much hope, but he had to ask.

  “Can we pick up our own materials?”

  It was another question he didn’t have much hope for, but the AI surprised him.

  “Yes, Captain. There is a transport vessel docked at the station, which can be used to retrieve the materials we need.”

  Jacob perked up at that. “Show me.”

  ***

  Jacob stared at the dusty ship in awe. It wasn’t huge, but it nearly dwarfed anything humanity had ever sent into orbit. He was pretty sure the International Space Station was slightly longer, only because he had seen a picture of it next to an American football field for comparison once.

  “How long is this ship?” Jacob asked the AI. He could have asked Melody, now that he was no longer in the security office, but he still wasn’t in the mood to speak to the ship AI, and Melody hadn’t bothered to reach out either.

  “The transport vessel is ninety-five meters in length and forty meters wide.”

  It certainly was thick. It was also ugly. Well, maybe ugly wasn’t the right word. It looked like whoever had designed it had only been concerned with utility. Not necessarily a bad thing for a cargo vessel, but Jacob would have preferred something a bit more stylish. At least Melody had a few curves. Those curves were hidden under the huge chunks of missing hull and countless impact craters from weapons, but you could sort of see them if you squinted.

  Either way, now he had a ship that could transport parts. He just needed to know where to go to get the parts or materials he needed.

  “Are you able to determine if any of those old Concord facilities are operational?” If they were, maybe he could just browse those locations like a free supermarket.

  “No, Captain. Without a response from their central AI, I cannot determine if those locations are still operational.”

  “What about other types of signals coming from those areas?” Jacob knew he was reaching, but the station had working sensors, so maybe it wasn’t such a stretch.

  “I have been detecting unknown signals for the last two hundred and thirty-two years. They are coming from an area of space where one of the mining facilities is located. Would you like me to try and decipher these signals, Captain?”

  He was sure the station AI was capable of doing that, but he knew Melody was far more capable, even with its diminished capacity. There was being stubborn for the sake of anger, then there was being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn. He wasn’t going to waste time and valuable resources just to prove a point.

  “Can you forward that data to my ship’s AI?”

  “I would need approval—”

  Jacob cut the AI off. “You have my approval.”

  He was not part of the conversation after that. It seemed Melody was smart enough to give him time to himself, so all conversations came through the station AI.

  “Data has been deciphered, Captain. Should I play the result?”

  Jacob nodded the drone’s sensor cluster, but he realized the AI wouldn’t recognize the gesture, so he said yes.

  What came through was a video recording, translated into eiraxin. He could tell it was translated, because the individual’s lips didn’t match the words as it advertised its services.

  It seemed that even in space, you couldn’t get away from ads.

  The individual was not humanoid or eiraxinoid, if he used the old Concord terminology. It had four ‘legs’ or what it used as legs. The appendages were bare and looked more like the feet of an orangutan. The alien had two arms, also with similar opposable thumbs for gripping. Its head looked rather human, aside from the oversized eyes, slits in place of a nose, and lack of any iris that Jacob could see.

  “Um, what is that?” Jacob asked.

  “That is a member of the amuni race. They were a low-order member of the Concord Imperium, mainly used in agricultural zones due to their arboreal nature.”

  “Slaves?” Jacob asked in shock.

  “No, Captain. Slavery would imply they were not paid for their work. The Concord Imperium did not abide slavery.”

  “What does low-order mean then?”

  “Low-order members of Concord were given minimal privileges and restricted mobility. They were bonded to the high-order members who ran the planets they lived on.”

  So not slaves, but some sort of serf. That didn’t make it much better. Then again, the individual in the advertisement seemed to be doing well. Perhaps that system had been abolished after Concord was defeated. For all he knew, that was the whole reason for the war in the first place.

  More advertisements followed, all with their own alien. Jacob was curious to learn about them all, but he decided to wait. For the moment, he told the AI to notify him if one of the advertisements showed a founding member of the Concord Imperium.

  The videos kept playing, but the AI never once interrupted them. That didn’t bode well for the founding members, but Jacob found it hard to care. They seemed like real pricks, and he hadn’t even met them.

  “What about the allied worlds that forced Concord to sign the Sovard Accords?” Jacob asked, almost forgetting about that group.

  “I do not have information on the allied worlds. The majority of the data about the war was wiped from my archives after I was sent the Sovard Accord.”

  Seemed like a weird thing to do unless they were trying to hide information.

  Jacob wasn’t sure how the allies thought their plan would play out if the rogue AIs never visited such stations, but it must have been successful to some extent. There was at least one station flourishing with multiple species and had been for hundreds of years, according to the AI.

  The advertisements, while annoying, were beneficial. They showed all sorts of station resources for sale, and one even showed the station from the outside. The AI was able to confirm that it was indeed a Concord mining station, but it had been modified at some point. Jacob really didn’t care what had changed, so long as it could provide him with what he needed, and it looked like it could.

  Now that Jacob had a destination, he needed to figure out if he could get there.