PrincessColumbia

  The activation and cim process turned out to be a touch anticlimactic. Katrina guided her to the top floor of the Ops building to the actual main Operations Hub and gave her a brief tour of the facility. Most of the stations were command consoles for functions and facilities to the station that hadn’t been built yet, so there were only two really useful consoles in the room; the Inventory status console and Station Status console. Both were fully operational and, apparently, had been for the st 200 years or so since the station’s automated building protocols had completed the core.

  The inventory was surprisingly well stocked, but not by much of significant value. The station’s automated bots and systems were programmed to periodically deploy out into the system and retrieve any material the sensors deemed needed for basic construction...but without a refining facility the useable material was extremely low grade. As she learned of this, Diane got a new notification that proved to be about a “Construction” tree and a new task list along side her mission list. It was already poputed with “Build the Ad Astra,” but now also had, “Build Refinery.” Curious, she tapped the ‘Refinery’ link and almost uttered a curse that the still-tagging-along Norma would have found odd, since she couldn’t see Diane’s HUD as an NPC. The link took her to the Construction tree and the node for the Refinery…which had thirteen links to other building nodes on the Construction tree and links to a new tree called “Research.”

  I’ll have to build…gawd, a second dock, a building for…astronautics? Well, I guess that makes sense. Gotta have someone to tell you where to find the stuff you’re refining. …there’s pns for an entire R&D Department?! She skipped past the buildings and checked out the new Research tree. Way down at the bottom was a single node, “Construction Speed.” Between that and the, “Refinery Technologies,” node were ten more research nodes that needed to be unlocked.

  …there’s going to be more desk work for this game than I thought… she pondered as Katrina led her to a pair of sliding gss doors near the back of the Ops room.

  “This,” the tutorial program inadvertently distracted Diane from her study of the game’s trees, “Is your office.”

  Diane chuckled, “...there are many like it, but this one’s mine.”

  The response was a pair of twinned confused looks from both the NPC and the tutorial program.

  “...never mind,” muttered Diane as she rounded the desk and moved the very nice and expensive-looking desk chair back, “So is this as straight-forward as the door or do I need to do something specific to activate Ops?”

  “Simply instruct the computer to activate the building. It is actively scanning your biometrics the entire time you’re on the station to it has already identified you,” expined Katrina, “All that remains is the specific command.”

  Diane shrugged, “Computer, activate the Operations building, please.”

  There was the sudden sensation of an almost imperceptible hum as every light, HVAC system, computer, and electrically powered accessory in the building received power all at once. The lights in the office and main Ops room which had been on standby suddenly bloomed with a cool blue light that was bright enough to drive away most shadow but not so bright as to make it difficult to see. Dark paneling that Diane had assumed was simply an interior design choice flickered to life to reveal that they were huge dispys that wrapped seamlessly around the entire office that wasn’t a door or window. Startup routines could be seen scrolling up all the dispys and, when she looked down, she saw the same was happening on the surface of her desk. Momentarily, a holographic computer interface bloomed to life where she would expect a desktop monitor if she were at an office back ho...er, outside the pod, and a very pleasantly ergonomic keyboard rezzed into pce. Oh, nice! I hate touch interfaces for typing, let’s see if... She reached out and tapped a few keys experimentally and, yes, they had the familiar spring-lock feel she preferred in her keyboards.

  She smiled and looked up at Katrina, “So, Ops is activated, do we need to wait on anything else to get started with building a ship?”

  Katrina raised an eyebrow, almost incredulously, “...no, though I imagine dealing with the squ...” the digital assistant gnced at Norma meaningfully, who for her part just huffed indignantly, “Tenants would take priority.”

  “Is getting the ship started going to require more effort than activating Ops?”

  “...no...”

  Diane smirked, “Computer, begin construction on the Ad Astra based on the avaible blueprints in station memory.”

  One of the wall-dispys that had completed its boot-sequence and was on a pleasant screensaver mode flicked over to a visual of a wireframe of a spaceship. It appeared to be a fairly small craft, though obviously intended for long-haul exploration. Callouts appeared for crew quarters, a mess hall, waste recycling, fuel storage, and everything else one might expect of a small expeditionary vessel. The exterior design seemed based on a modified Straczynski-esque1Just a quick note since this won't likely come up in the story; as Babylon 5's primary message is anti-fascist anti-authoritarianism, even mentioning it is banned in the American Republic. It's influence on the sci-fi/specutive fiction genre would remain in belling a ship like the Starfury fighters as "Straczynski-esque" designs, even if nobody inside the wall can source the naming convention. craft. Instead of a squat pod that held life-support and an ejectable cockpit, the main body of the ship was somewhat shaped like a ground-transport cargo vehicle, as though someone had taken a semi-truck and attached trailer, fused them into a single piece, modified the front so it looked like a fat sports car, spiffed it up to look like it belonged in space, and then made it big enough to house three to five people and everything they needed to live for long periods of time in the void of space. Attached at the corners starting about one-third of the way back from the nose of the ship were squat ‘wings’ that would never keep the ship in the air in atmosphere. They were in a vague ‘X’ configuration, which would allow for creative use of thrust from the nacelles positioned at the ends of the wings to allow for crazy-fast turns. The nacelles looked like they provided all the thrust to the ship, as well as maneuvering. It’s no Conquistador-css, Diane thought with a smile, But it does look like a sleek little ship. The dispy popped up with a status bar that was familiar to anyone who had used a computer in the st century and ticked up to the 1% mark after a moment.

  “Awesome!” remarked Diane, “So, Katrina, any other immediate tasks? Activating anything else necessary right now?”

  “Dealing with the highly annoying tenants?” offered Katrina.

  “Oi! You’re the one who’s been sitting on the ability to build a starship the whole time I’ve been trying to deal with the little housing crisis in the residential habs!” snapped Norma.

  Katrina gred, for all a tutorial program could gre, at the woman, “You are not authorized users of this system. Had your predecessors left this station as they should have then there wouldn’t be a ‘housing crisis’ in the residential habs.”

  “Alright, that’s enough,” said Diane, “Katrina, could you give us the room, please?”

  “What?!” the hologram seemed surprised, then collected herself so quickly Diane wondered if she was seeing things, “But…security protocols…”

  Diane waved a hand dismissively, “‘Security protocols’ I’m not familiar with and, since I’m the fiat commander of this station, don’t apply to me if I say so.”

  “I really should remain present as a precaution in case she…”

  Diane huffed, “She’s, what, four feet tall?”

  “Five-foot-one!” Norma growled.

  “Meanwhile I’m a six-foot-one…”

  “Six feet, nine inches,” interrupted Katrina with a significant gre at Norma.

  “Sure, that; and I’m an apex predator species, I think I’m more than capable of taking her in a fight if it comes down to it. Besides, you’re a hologram, you can monitor the office via the security systems, right?”

  “…yes.”

  “Well then, you can give us the illusion of privacy for this conversation and at least take your physical presence out of the room so you stop antagonizing the person I’m trying to…” she gnced at Norma, who’d set her jaw stubbornly, “…have a conversation with.”

  Whoever on the dev team programmed the personality of the tutorial program did a damn fine job of making them appear to have emotion as Katrina gave every impression of being hesitant to concede the point as she said, “…very well. If she…causes problems, simply eject her from the office and I’ll seal the doors and flood the Ops command level with a neurotoxin.”

  Diane frowned, “A non-lethal neurotoxin, right?”

  Katrina seemed to be refusing to meet Diane’s eyes as she started disapperating from the room, “Sure, sure. Non-lethal.” And with that, she was no longer in the room.

  Diane allowed a small smile to quirk as she started removing her jacket. Part of it was comfort, part of it was a test. She was deliberately exposing the weapon stuck to her back to Norma. If the woman noticed it, she was either a human pyer who, for whatever reason, had chosen to take charge of a band of gactic nomads and homeless people, or was a rogue A.I. who was using the cover of being a refuge on an uncimed station to hide from hunters such as herself. She turned just enough to drape the jacket over the back of her office chair, watching Norma out of the corner of her eye.

  No response…let’s see if she’s just faking… As though reaching back to scratch an itch, she palmed the grip of the weapon while using her thumb to “scratch” the nonexistent itchy spot then casually pushed the weapon against her thigh, making it pinly visible as it adhered to her leg like it had her back.

  Norma gave no response whatsoever, just sitting down in one of the chairs obviously intended for visitors to the office.

  All right, Diane thought as she took her own seat, She’s just an NPC A.I., so no threat here, “So,” she began, “Not to seem like the bad guy, but I this is my station. I get that some of you were born here, but this isn’t 20th century America with a liberal policy that allows illegals to drop a kid and cim backdoor citizenship.”

  “… ‘America’…?” Norma said the name of Diane’s home with stark unfamiliarity.

  Stifling the frustration that the game creators didn’t bother to give America it’s proper pce in history, she simply said, “A country on Earth, predates the period of space exploration and contact with life on other worlds. Point is, I am the w here. It’s my life and safety on the line if I let the lot of you stay and someone turns out to be a bad actor. I’m quite invested in keeping the skin on my back on my back.”

  Norma simply gred back at the newly minted station commander.

  “What I’m saying,” said Diane into the silence, “Is you will need to sell me on letting you all stay here. As you pointed out, I’ve got a starship under construction,” she gnced at the wall dispy, Norma mimicking her, and they saw the build progress was now at 2%. “I won’t even need to space you all. I can build a…let’s see here…” she turned to her holographic dispy and started tapping menues and was pleased to see it was fairly easy to navigate. She found the computer’s storage of ship blueprints and filtered out what the station didn’t have the capability to build yet, then tapped and flicked the pns over to a wall dispy. “I could build one of these,” the dispy lit up with a wireframe of another starship, but this was not something sleek and intended for exploration like the Ad Astra, this was a box with an engine strapped to it. The ‘ship’ part was what looked for all the world like a glorified camper van scaled up to house everything necessary to support a barebones crew, in-system flight, and FTL. Attached to that was a comparative behemoth of a cargo container, obviously intended to be modur and detachable. The name attached to the blueprint read, ‘ECC Goldrush.’

  “Obviously, we’d have to mod the cargo container, those things are designed to haul materials, not people, and it wouldn’t be comfortable. We probably wouldn’t be able to kit it for gravity and atmosphere control would be…problematic. It would take who knows how long to get to a friendly port…” a notification popped up on her holographic dispy, blinking a furious red. Her eyebrows scrunched together, she tapped on the notification and saw a message: Katrina - “8 days to nearest Terran Federation station.”

  “Katrina, at least pretend this is a private meeting, please…” she muttered, then to Norma said, “About eight days, I guess, to the nearest friendly port.”

  The space-born woman frowned at the schematic for the surveyor ship on the wall, her face no longer a mask of anger but now showing muted concern. “I…know some of us would take you up on that. The people who came here on ships that abandoned them, people who had homes and want to go back to them…but,” she turned a pleading look to Diane, “I…I was born here, this is the only home I know!”

  So much for the easy solution, Diane thought. She leaned back in her chair and drummed her fingers on the arm rest, letting the silence linger.

  Norma gnced around the office, clearly trying not to look at Diane directly. “This…doesn’t look like I imagined.” Diane’s eyebrows went up, somewhat befuddled by the seeming non-sequitur. Norma continued, “My parents…well, my mom was born here, too. Living as, basically, refuges is a rough life, but it made us stronger, you know? My dad came in on a ship and stayed when he fell in love with my mom, we’d talk about what we’d do with the station if we could ever just crack the computer…didn’t know it had a freaking A.I. keeping us out, of course. It wasn’t until I brought in hackers that she bothered to show herself.” Memories were pying in the movie theater behind Norma’s eyes, Diane could see that much. A thought drifted up from her unconscious mind reminding her this was a generated character in a game, though she dismissed it. Such thoughts wouldn’t help her solve the problem.

  Norma kept going, “When my folks…died,” she took a breath, letting her eyes rest on the window behind Diane, one that looked out over the nutrient farms filled with soy pnts. “When they died, I was…kind of all that was left for leadership. I guess mom had become something of a…I dunno, unelected governor or something. When she passed people kept coming to our apartment to get their problems solved, and I just couldn’t turn them away, they’re my people.” This st part came out in a firm tone as Norma’s attention and focus returned to Diane with a vengeance, “And I’ll be spaced if some rich upstart from Earth shows up and evicts us all because some centuries old program licks their boots!”

  The part of Diane that had surged with excitement at the spitfire that had confronted her at the Ops main entrance practically purred at the dispy of spine. Wow, she thought, Kinda hot, kinda cute. A bit like a kitten that’s convinced it can take down a full grown human, but wrapped up in a sturdy, no-nonsense package of a woman. She let a small smile turn the corners of her lips up as she leaned forward. “Let’s crify a few things, here.” She cast her mind back to when she was in character creation and reading the history of the gaxy in the game, specifically how The Lost Generation was being managed by the Terran Federation.

  “I’m a war orphan, and further, not human.” She opened her mouth in a reptilian smile and let her extremely long tongue snake out through her fangs. Other than a raised eyebrow, Norma didn’t react to the inhuman features. Diane retracted her tongue, fortunately without any slightly embarrassing sounds. “I’m a Morvuck, and we’re descended from what Earth people call ‘dinosaurs.’ Morvucks have a name for them, yeah, but humans seem to recognize ‘dinosaurs’ even if they don’t know, specifically, what Mortan’s megafauna look like. I didn’t grow up there, sure, but I was given all the knowledge Earth databases had about my people. What I did grow up as was poor, and a refuge. I don’t have bags of money hanging out on a ship somewhere ready to pay off some mercs to come in and sweep the pce clean, I have a ‘get out of the system free’ card that came with being a war orphan. Earth has too many of these stations still floating around uncimed and not enough people to spare and go take them over. They also have a whole flock of kids like me they’re trying to get off government assistance, so they’re giving us these stations and making us Not Their Problem. In other words,” she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk and folding her hands, “This is now my only home, too.”

  Norma sagged back in her chair, the bulky flight suit jacket that Diane now suspected of once belonging to her father almost swallowing the smaller woman’s torso. She gred at Diane without heat, “That…I wanted that chair, you know.”

  Diane smiled softly, “Yeah, well, I want my parents, just like I suspect you do, too.”

  That, at least, wasn’t a lie in the slightest. She wanted her folks in ways that hurt to think about sometimes. She missed her dad, but she’d ‘lost’ him years before he took his own life. After her mom died he rarely showed the kind of life and drive he’d had before the cancer, so for her she’d had a chance to let go of him emotionally even before he actually passed instead of being a walking memorial to his wife.

  Her mom, though…

  “Watch, Dy,” she said, using the shortened name she’d created for him sometime before he could talk, “See how Mariner is practically falling over herself trying to be like Captain Kirk?”

  Young Dyn wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he nodded anyway.

  She was clearly aware he wasn’t quite up to comprehending, being only seven. Some of the other parents at church had been shocked when mom admitted she let her child watch Snipe Hunt, which was filled with some rather filthy nguage and adult humor. “Mariner’s mom understands the trick of this here, she knows that the Rebellion could be vulnerable if she makes a deal with the Breen, nobody’s even seen them without their helmets, after all. How do you trust someone like that? But Captain Freeman knows that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

  They watched as, in as comedic a way possible, Mariner’s attempt to eliminate the Breen ‘threat’ was neatly diffused by Captain Freeman and pyed off as a ‘demonstration’ of how effective the Rebellion could be in simply eradicating the Breen, who were already hard pressed by the Klingon-Cardasian Alliance. The accord between the Rebellion and the Breen wouldn’t result in the allies the Rebellion needed, but it at least kept the Breen from joining the Alliance.

  “I don’t get it,” said Dyn, “Mariner was right, the Rebellion didn’t need the Breen to win, they would have been better off not even trying to make contact. What was the point of the whole thing?”

  Mom had simply smiled down, “Dy, sometimes you do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because you get some benefit out of it.”

  Diane blinked the memory away, Now why did I think of that right now…? Her mind fshed back to that root node of the Ethics tree in her in-game HUD, WWCFD? “What would Captain Freeman do?” Well, something horribly counterintuitive to protecting your back and saving your own ass…

  The silence in the room wasn’t a comfortable one, but it also didn’t want to be broken. As she saw the build progress for the Ad Astra tick up to 3% in the corner of her eye, she pondered the woman in the seat across from her. Her mom was a governor without a town, huh? And the people here trust Norma as though she were the one in charge…well, maybe…

  “Tell you what,” she said abruptly, “No matter what happens, for the near future your people don’t need to be crammed into just a few apartments. This station can house thousands of people, you’ve got, what, four hundred? Five hundred?”

  “Eight-hundred and seventy-two,” replied Norma grimly.

  Diane whistled, “Over eight-hundred people crammed into two-hundred apartments? Let’s see about spreading them out a bit. And I’m hungry, let’s take a look at those food processors and see about some food.”

  Norma was taken aback, “…wait, what?!” She scrambled to her feet as Diane stood.

  Diane shifted the weapon from her thigh to her back in a smooth motion just before grabbing her jacket off the back of the chair. “Your people need a good night’s sleep and some food and some options. I need someone who can handle people while I run the station and, hell, I’ll need a crew. It seems like we’ve got a solution here.”

  “You’re…letting us stay?!” Norma blurted incredulously as Diane started to the double-doors.

  As the doors slid open she said over her shoulder, “Only the ones that want to stay, obviously. Your people have been here a lot longer than I have, I’ve got access to all the systems and we’ll be building things out here for even more capacity. I say we work together.”

  Katrina appeared next to her as she exited the office, “Your solution to the problem with squatters is to invite them to stay?”

  Diane nodded as she walked past Katrina, who floated along beside to keep up, “You said it yourself, you have some systems that need actual people to at least check, and we’ll need people to man all these stations. We have a supply of people already here and ready to go.”

  Norma scrambled to keep up, “…I don’t get it, why aren’t you just throwing us off the station? You could just as easily get a crew that you’ve personally vetted and jumps when you say so.”

  Diane smiled softly as they headed for the lifts that would take them to the first floor of the building. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “…sometimes you do what’s right because it’s the right thing to do.”

  As she stopped in front of the doors to the lift, she noticed a notification for her in-game HUD that she’d completely missed whenever it had popped up. Curious, she subtly flicked her wrist to bring up the HUD, then used the eye tracking to ‘tap’ the notification.

  Ethics Node Unlocked: “WWCFD?” – New Ethics Nodes Avaible.”

  Smiling in private victory, she dismissed the HUD as the doors to the lift opened.

  PrincessColumbia