PrincessColumbia

  Diane’s first steps on her station were met with silence, her footfalls thudding on sound-dampening pads built into the flooring. She could feel more than hear some form of robotic action happening below the deck ptes, probably “retrieving” her “luggage” she would have had in the hold of the shuttle had she not just spawned into the game. As the doors to the airlock hissed closed and the sound of the docking cmps releasing were audible through the wall pting, a holographic woman resolved in the air in front of her. Unlike the ‘holodeck’ she had generated her character in, this hologram was clearly intended to be seen as an artificial being.

  “Greetings, Commander. Welcome aboard Station 42586A. I’m Katrina, your digital assistant. I have instructed the station’s systems to transport your belongings to your quarters.”

  Ah, Diane thought as she took in the hologram’s appearance and behavior, This must be the tutorial program and probably provides the pyer with missions and the like. “Thank you, Katrina. What’s with the station name?”

  “The Terran Colonial Corp’s charter does not specify names for stations until they have been cimed by a commander operating under the Colonial Corp’s aegis. While the updates I have received with your ownership packet have advised that the Colonial Corp no longer exists, the Terran Federation has cimed the mandates to occupy all seed stations within treaty allowed space and dismantle seed stations in foreign territories should they be found there.”

  “I see,” she replied as she started walking past the hologram, “Please guide me to Ops and can you expin what a ‘seed station’ is?”

  “Certainly, please follow the holographic line to the nearest waypoint.” As soon as Katrina said the words, a transparent line of light shimmered into existence in the hallway, hovering like a ghostly handrail. The digital assistant hovered alongside Diane, not moving her legs in a walking motion, just standing in the air. “In the te 21st century, Earth established the Terran Colonial Corporation with the intent of establishing human colonies in as many pces as possible throughout the gaxy. As early FTL drives were notoriously dangerous, probes were manufactured at rge scale. These probes had self-maintaining and repairing computers built in as well as robotic tools. The probes were sent across the gaxy using the early faster than light technology. Upon reaching their target destination, the computers onboard would begin the process of building a space station suitable for human habitation. Per the records received with your ownership packet, approximately 83% of all probes sent out completed the construction of their seed station. About half of those have been cimed by either the Terran Federation or Independents.”

  Diane’s eyebrows rose, absently noting that the hall they were walking down was curving to the left, likely meaning that they were circling the docking bay and would reach the arm that would take them to the station itself after they passed the access passages for two more airlocks. Sure enough, they passed one on their right in short order. “So basically, there’s just a bunch of these stations scattered around the gaxy and Earth gets to pick who owns them?”

  “Correct,” answered Katrina. “However, while command of the station is restricted to the holder of the correct 2048-bit hash key, which for this station would be you, bypassing physical security is possible with the right tools and equipment, which brings us to a…problem.”

  As they passed the second passageway, Diane’s brows pinched as she said, “Oh?”

  “In the three hundred years since the initial wave of seed stations were sent out, a good deal of them, including this one, have been subject to other sentient races attempting to move in and take control of the station. While they are never able to enter Ops with anything short of a Type 4 starship mounted tricobolt ser canon array, they have been able to access the non-staff and crew living spaces.”

  They began to approach what Diane presumed to be the primary access tunnel to the station proper. Presently standing open were two massive sliding doors that appeared to be able to close off the docking bay from the tunnel completely. She looked up and spotted what appeared to be a ‘drop’ door that was about three feet thick. I wonder how the game designers rationalized a ‘seed’ station assembling that on it’s own with no foundry or refinery? she thought as she walked. “So what you’re saying is; we have squatters?”

  “Correct,” replied the hologram, “Please wait here, the car will arrive shortly.”

  As soon as Katrina said, ‘Correct,’ a subtle ‘ba-ding’ sound chimed in Diane’s ear and an indicator light appeared in her vision. What the…? As the light, a gently white throb of a tiny blur, almost like the stories of a willow-the-whisp, pulsed in the corner of her sight, she turned to look, only for the light to remain locked on that spot on her vision. It took her a moment or two, but she realized this must be a notification. I’m too used to notifications on my headset, I guess, she thought, Let’s see if I’ve guessed correctly…

  She gnced around and confirmed that there was nobody else present except for Katrina’s hologram and flicked her wrist, bringing up her HUD. Sure enough, a new notification was waiting for her to view it. She tapped it and a dialog popped up, followed by two more notifications. “New mission: Recim Your Station. Squaters have taken over parts of your station, you need to deal with them to establish full command and control.” Huh, nice and brief…

  She flicked to the next notification, which read, “New Tree Added, Station Research.” She noticed the words “Station Research” were a link, so she tapped that and was unsurprised to see a semi-transparent dispy of a ‘tree’ of nodes, each indicating different research avaible for, she presumed, running and maintaining her station. The entire tree was grayed out. She presumed as she unlocked the nodes it would fill with color and each node would likely provide some sort of boost or buff to her. She tapped on the bottom-most node, uncreatively belled, ‘Station Ownership,’ and there were apparently 20 levels the node could be leveled to. Fortunately, the requirements were listed right on the node. “Complete the mission, ‘Recim Your Station,’” and “Build the Ad Astra.”

  ‘Ad Astra’ was also a link, so she tapped it and was taken to a new part of her in-game HUD, dispying a series of ships that appeared to be different capabilities and power levels. For the space-lover who built models of ships in their spare time, this was like catnip. “Ooooh,” she moaned, “Katrina, how quickly can we get started on ship building?”

  If Diane didn’t know better she’d swear she saw the corner of the hologram’s mouth curl upward just a touch, “While the shipyard will have to be constructed to build a more advanced ship, such as those included with the blueprints provided by Earth in your ownership packet, the station can, with its current capabilities, build four basic ships. While we will need materials for three of them, we have everything on hand now to build the Ad Astra, a basic Explorer-css ship.”

  Diane couldn’t quite keep her giggle contained, “Okay, so when can we get started on that?”

  “Perhaps we should finish the tour first?” suggested the hologram.

  Diane blushed lightly, “…right…”

  Going back to her HUD, she brought up the st notification. “New Tree Added: Ethics.” And that was it. There was no expnation beyond that, just the link through the word, ‘Ethics.’ She tapped it and was greeted with a simir grayed out tree of nodes as the Station Research tree. This had, at it’s base, a node that was named, “WWCFD?”

  She understood the concept, of course. ‘WWJD’ and ‘WWtSD’ were ubiquitous phrases in America. ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ was often used in joking terms, such as having to decide between two dinner options, but it was originally intended to help people make conscientious choices that would lead them back to God, specifically when a more peaceful approach was called for. ‘What Would the Second Do?’ was much newer but often used with far more prevalence. It was invoked if there was a choice between sparing a potential enemy or acting in defense of The Body of God, the intent was you were supposed to make the choice that would guarantee the protection of The Body. If Jesus was the open hand of friendship to those who submitted themselves to God’s will, the battle-ready fist of The Second was the might of God against His foes.

  …so who is ‘CF’?! she mulled with a frown. Tapping the node, she read, “What Would Captain Freeman Do?” her confusion skyrocketed, Captain Freeman?! The Joke of the Rebellion Fleet?!

  Of the many (many) series and movies that had been produced over the years with the title of ‘Star Trek,’ none of them were quite so divisive as the two animated series. Simply because they were animated there was a contingent of the fandom that refused to accept them as canon lore. Of those who did accept them as part of all things Trek, it was an even split on whether Star Trek: Snipe Hunt was good Trek or bad trek. The series wasn’t even about Captain Freeman, it was about her much more competent daughter who’d been busted down from Lieutenant to Ensign and assigned to her mother’s ship. Freeman spent five seasons being the least qualified captain in the fleet and having her skin and reputation repeatedly saved by her daughter and the motley crew of lower decks team, or ‘snipes,’ she’d assembled.

  How in the gaxy she was supposed to figure out something that would unlock this Ethics tree based on Captain Freeman, she had no idea.

  Her musings were interrupted by Katrina, “Ah, there’s the car now.”

  Diane looked up to see a golf cart-style electric vehicle approaching their position with a quiet hum. It stopped in front of her and, with a wave to dismiss her HUD, she climbed into the car. It started up on its own and turned around, heading back down the tunnel. As it was moving, Katrina manifested her hologram inside the car with Diane.

  “As is the standard for Earth seed stations upon completing their primary phase of unmanned construction, your station has a central core that contains a construction deck, above which is the ‘life’ spaces. Beneath the deck is where the station’s support systems are housed, including the primary and tertiary reactors, battery banks, waste materials processing, and other assorted functions that can mostly, if not entirely, be automated by non-sentient A.I., robots, and mechanical systems. Usually these systems require, at most, a sentient to inspect that they’re operating properly once per Earth month.” Diane noticed the light seemed to be getting brighter the further down the tunnel the drove, mostly from the proximity to the entry to the central core. Katrina continued, “Above the deck is where people, and by that I mean sentient beings, do most of their living, thus calling it the ‘life space.’ Presently the only building there is the Operations building which, of course, remains powered down and locked until you enter. The apartments for crew, visitors, staff, and the like are built into the inside of the ‘shell’ that covers the life space portion of the core. This is where the squatters currently reside, so it is unlikely that you will encounter them until you’re ready.”

  “How many squatters are we talking about, here?” asked Diane.

  “At this time, approximately 200 of the apartments are registered as occupied. Due to the difficulty the squatters have had opening new dwellings, they are rather tightly packed in.”

  “When did they get here?”

  “The first squatters arrived approximately 150 Earth years ago. While none of the current batch of squatters…”

  Diane’s face twisted into a grimace, “Can we use a different term for them? We’ve said ‘squatters’ so much it’s starting to sound like a fake word.”

  I swear she’s smiling at that! thought Diane as Katrina continued, “While none of the current batch of tenants are descended from the original ship crew compliment that attempted to take over the station, there have been approximately five generations of unauthorized tenants living on this station since.”

  “So it’s not like they have homes I can just send ‘em back to…”

  “Correct. Further complicating the matter is the missing starships,” Katrina pointed out, “Several years ago a small…shall we say ‘civil war’ broke out among the tenants and a few of them took the st remaining ship and departed for destinations unknown. They have not been heard from since and are presumed lost. That ship was nearly 100 years old by that point and the knowledge of how to properly maintain it had been lost since.”

  Diane frowned, “So we’ve got a pack of, essentially, natives who are likely expecting to be evicted without transport or home.”

  Katrina remained silent at this.

  Fortunately, the lull in conversation was interrupted by the car exiting the tunnel, finally allowing Diane to see the inside of her station. It was massive. She could have made ten copies of her ft’s tower back in Houston and stacked them on top of each other and they still wouldn’t reach the top of the containment dome!

  I’m still in Houston, she thought with a touch of humor, This is VR, no matter how immersive.

  Still, she marveled at the spaciousness of the pce. Having grown up with the few stations the U.N. put in orbit in the aftermath of the war where space was limited, gravity was provided by the entire thing spinning like a wheel, and every single cubic inch had to be optimized, the cavernous life space of the station was downright decadent by any standard of her real life.

  Curious, she held a hand over her eyes to block out the gre as she looked to the ceiling. She spotted the source of the artificial lighting that was bright enough to make the deck look like it was baking under the noonday sun in Texas, but couldn’t make out any details without hurting her retina. She lowered her eyes to the bck tarmac the vehicle was trundling over and asked, “What’s the light source? It’s…intensely bright.”

  “That would be the antimatter reactor.”

  Diane shot Katrina a startled gre, “…are you telling me there’s a continuous antimatter explosion going on over our heads?!”

  Katrina smiled, as though educating a child, “The antimatter is fed from a magnetic bottle into the reactor core one atom at a time. It just so happens that the reaction, which only ‘explodes’ enough to produce enough energy to power the oxygen recmations, has a significant amount of ‘waste’ radiation in the visible light spectrum. The designers of the seed stations realized they could use the ‘waste’ light to simute a day-night cycle on the station.”

  She’s mocking me…but that requires the advanced emotions of a rogue A.I., and she’s not trying to drive me out of VR or kill me and she’s given no indication of trying to phish for my IRL information…she can’t be a rogue, can she? I must be imagining it… She shifted slightly so she could feel the somewhat comforting presence of the pistol on her back. “That’s clever. So, what’s all this intended for? Seems rather…industrial for a living space,” she gestured across the expansive tarmac with clearly delineated zones meant for some form of construction but were currently empty.

  “This section is intended for materials refining, processing, and storage. The synthesizers and 3D printers can only operate to build new ships and construction if there’s enough raw materials to do so. In the basic blueprint loadout for these stations is a mining ship. You’ll need to use your Ad Astra to gather the initial batches of raw materials to build your first mining craft, but after that you should only mine with Surveyor-css ships.”

  The car was now approaching what would, in nature, be a cliff. It stretched from one side of the station to the other and went up a height of about four stories. It was plenty accessible; she could see stairs and lifts built into the structure and the car was turning up a vehicle-ready ramp to take them to the upper level. “What’s with the…cliff?”

  “That is intended to keep the industrial deck separated from the command deck. While emissions in general are managed by scrubbers for both the individual buildings as well as the station, dust and debris that are generated from the refinement and processing of materials can still spread without some sort of barrier. Rather than building a wall, the deck is split so airflow ‘falls’ off the command deck, utilizing air pressure instead of infrastructure to contain airborne particles. It is imperfect, but a perfect system does not exist.”

  She nodded in appreciation, “That’s reassuringly competent de…sign…whoah!” As she had been speaking, the car crested the ramp it had been climbing and she saw the command deck.

  The name did NOT do it justice! Only about 40% of the ‘deck’ was a solid, ft surface. There was a single building slightly off-center, which she presumed to be the Operations building, and there were ptforms simir to the defined spaces on the industrial deck to indicate where future buildings would go, but they were scattered across a ke that spanned almost half the command deck. She couldn’t see details, but there were definitely patches of greenery all over the pce, aesthetically id out so as to be a comforting reminder of life on a pnet.

  “In…incredible! And brilliant! The water…not only does life need water but it can function as a heat sink for reactors…and it can help regute the atmosphere…and the pnts probably provide some of the oxygen production and air scrubbing…” she turned to Katrina, only then realizing she had stood up in the car and was leaning over the front console in excitement. “Is the ke a biome?”

  Katrina gave an indulgent nod, like a teacher giving approval to a student, “It is. The reactors, as you guessed, dump their heat into the water. Some extremophile organisms were harvested from Earth’s oceans and pced in suspension aboard the seed ships. They process a lot of oxygen that leaches through the water and into the atmosphere aboard the station. The most complex organisms in the water are krill. The climate systems monitor the popution of krill and release robots to harvest them for animal protein that is used in the food synthesizers.” She pointed to a particurly rge patch of green just barely visible on the other side of the Ops building, “That’s the rge-scale farming section. Some specialty crops are grown there, such as potatoes to provide starch, which is easier to grow than to synthesize. Most of it is soy. Some of the soy is used for soy products, but most is taken to the food synthesizers for processing into more diverse foods. The rest is dedicated to multicrop farming to produce the nutrients needed for the food that is made by the synthesizers.”

  Wow! That makes a bit more sense than replicators! If only this were real… She sat back with a smile, “Clearly the designers of this station put a lot of thought into it.”

  “Indeed, they did,” said Katrina as the car turned onto a ramp that would take them to the Ops building.

  As Diane approached the Ops building, she realized that she’d have an audience for her official activation of the facility. “Katrina,” she said in a low tone as the car pulled to a stop in a marked space, “Who’s this?”

  Katrina disapperated from inside the car and reappeared on Diane’s side as she stepped out of the vehicle. “Norma Grice, third generation tenant, human. Father was killed by a raiding party when she was a toddler, mother died of illness two years ago. She’s become something of a leader among the tenants. She’s been...annoying.” Diane cast another suspicious gnce at the remarkably human-behaving ‘digital assistant,’ but chalked it up to a programmed humanism. “Before the tenants lost contact with people outside the station, she made efforts to recruit a hacker or two in order to defeat my encryption lockouts.” Now Diane could swear Katrina looked smug, “Naturally, they were unable to get through even the first defensive firewalls.”

  As they walked (well, Diane walked, Katrina merely floated along beside her) up to the main entrance of the Ops building, Diane took in the appearance of the new woman. Probably not a pyer, but can’t be sure...could be a rogue, but if she’s a ‘generational’ NPC most likely not. The woman was short, though not to any sort of extreme. Her dirty blond/light brown hair was probably as well managed as could be given the circumstances of her upbringing. It was cut short, but attempts had been made to manage it into some sort of style with some hinting of spikes and waves throughout, but whatever she had been using as a soap had done a number on her follicles. The hair resembled sun-damaged straw. She was surprisingly plump. “Katrina,” she subvocalized, “She looks very well fed for someone who’s essentially a homeless refuge.”

  “The tenants have access to the emergency systems in the residential apartments. The synthesizers are programmed to provide any food requested by any individual identified by biometric scans up to the system calcuted suggested caloric intake.”

  Diane nodded, stopping a few feet away from Norma, feeling somewhat guilty standing there in brand new, practically designer clothes. What this other woman was wearing was generously called ‘hand me down.’ None of it fit. At all. What wasn’t too tight (the pants) was so baggy as to appear to be mimicking a tent. The shoes appeared to have been soled with deck pting.

  “So,” sneered the self-appointed representative of the ‘tenants,’ “You’re the new ndlord?”

  Well now I just feel dirty, thought Diane. “I’m the new owner of this station. How did you figure that out?”

  Norma gestured with a thumb over her shoulder to the inside wall of the station, “We’re living right on the skin of the station. We saw the shuttle approaching. That’s a big deal, almost no ships bother to dock here anymore.”

  “I see,” Diane rumbled. I...didn’t mean to do that. Her voice had come out in her normal tone, but it was accompanied by a deep base growl. At the unconscious dispy of dominance, Norma’s scowl deepened and she straightened her spine. A small part of Diane almost wanted to purr in anticipation of a good fight. Her megafauna-predator-descendant body seemed to be pleased that this woman was so eager to square up. “I have some business to take care of before we can discuss this further. As soon as I actually find my office and properly activate Operations for the station, we’ll talk.”

  Turning to Katrina and away from Norma in an obvious gesture of dismissal, she said, “So how do we go about doing this? Is there a keycard or retinal scanner or...?”

  They both ignored Norma’s irritated ‘hey!’ as Katrina answered, “Nothing quite so crude. Your complete biometric profile has already been loaded into the computers across the station. The security scanners in the door will open to you right now.”

  In a dispy of sheer vexatious spite, Norma reached for the handle of the entrance door and tugged. The gss-like material flexed slightly, but the door didn’t open.

  Diane closed the distance between them and put one hand on her hip and rested the other on the door handle. This close their height difference was stark, Norma’s eyeline was right about at Diane’s breasts. Rather than looking at said assets, the shorter woman just gred up at the amazon. Diane just stared back, waiting patiently until finally Norma huffed a breath and dropped her hand in a fist at her side.

  Diane pulled the door open, stepped back a little and gestured chivalrously, “After you.”

  Norma blushed and stomped into the building, Diane stifling a chuckle as she followed.