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  The newly formed team subsequently recovered the artifact known as the Rose of Light, hidden on Earth for the last two decades. That was the easy part. In getting it safely back to its owners they faced unexpected challenges, fighting off the Helgan usurpers being just the first. They also had to deal with running out of fuel before leaving the solar system where there were no fuel depots.

  Upon returning the Rose to its Ackalonian owners, the partnership found itself relatively well off financially for the first time in several years. With money in the bank from the successful completion of that job, Lexi’s first, they now had the leisure to pick and choose among available jobs while making arrangements for a significant remodel of their starship.

  Chapter 3

  Hanging on Cardin’s Paradise

  Lexi was the one who brought it up, although no one argued with her that Urania’s interior space was poorly laid out for the team’s needs. Built almost one and a half centuries ago as a scout in the Vankovian exploratory fleet, she was intended to carry a crew of eight, with the expectation that she would be out of touch with civilization for years at a time. According to Geena, the longest she and Crane had ever been between planets was six months.

  Urania was designed with large sections of storage space for supplies; storage space that greatly exceeded what the three of them could use. Vankovian scouts of that era had eight small personal cabins. Two of which the team now used to house their gym equipment. They really only needed two of those cabins for sleeping. Lexi slept with Ron most nights. They had not entered into a life-partnership agreement yet, but after living in close quarters for nearly three months, while neither was in a rush, both nevertheless already believed it was only a matter of time. Neither could imagine being separated from the other.

  Samue Investigations, the business name the mother and son team operated under owned WA32198389-18-32405, the ship now known as Urania, for over twenty years. At least Geena did. Ron was a little young to own a starship back then. In all of that time, they never bothered to make changes to the interior. They hadn’t even done anything about replacing the worn gray floor, recoloring the ubiquitous pastel blue walls, or changing the cold spectrum lighting. They thought of the ship more as transport than the home that it was.

  Urania was originally built as a military vessel by a non-human race. She still looked the part. Now that Lexi was a member of the crew, she sometimes felt as though she was trapped on a submarine on Earth. She wasn’t sure, but doubted ceilings on submarines were as high as Urania’s. Even Ron had ample head room. He was six-seven and fairly massive carrying two-hundred-seventy pounds of bone and muscle. She also doubted submarines were this ugly. She was pretty sure the navy of the United States thought about things like not contributing to depression among their sailors due to poor paint and lighting choices. Or maybe not.

  Using the ship’s educator to learn Accord technology and with Ron and Geena teaching her about their civilization’s history and culture, Lexi observed that both technical and social growth within the Accord allowed itself to stagnate thousands of years ago. There was really no other word for it. Furthermore, it was her observation that everybody was complacent with the status quo. No one wanted to rock the boat by innovating. She mentally termed it the “Accord Disease.” What they were now planning in terms of remodeling Urania could have been done any time over the last two decades. My friends have the disease too. I’m the cure. She wished there was some way to “cure” the Accord itself.

  In addition to improving their living quarters both esthetically and functionally, Lexi was thinking about other alterations to her immediate environment. She was almost convinced that the accepted fact that artificial gravity and travel through hyperspace had to be mutually exclusive fell into the urban myth category. She acknowledged it was true bringing up the ship-wide gravity field everybody employed in normal space would rip a ship with an active hyper-drive apart. Accepted scientific doctrine was correct as far as that went. Hyperspace resented gravity big time.

  Yet, that wasn’t totally true either. When the hyper-bubble around a ship was activated, the ship was already in hyperspace. It could sit there without any complaint even if artificial gravity was at full strength. Trying to push through the medium with the hyper-drive caused things to go bang.

  Doing the physics in her head and discussing the math with Urania during their morning chats left her with the conviction there should be a threshold point. If that point wasn’t exceeded, artificial gravity and the hyper-drive didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. She believed that smaller grav fields like, say, one the size of the floor in her soon to be redesigned shower were technically feasible. Urania pointed out that she was the only one who thought so.

  There would still be a slight increase in hyper-spatial turbulence. They could live with that. The consequential, very minor, decrease in speed those relatively tiny grav-fields would cause would also be tolerable. She hated having to wear nose plugs to keep the water out of her lungs while showering in zero-gee. All of them would have been happy to give up enjoying wine and their morning coffee out of sippy cups if offered a choice.

  The problem with that idea, at least until she had time to engineer a solution, was no one had ever designed a gravity field small enough and focused enough. The technology didn’t exist, which she pegged as another symptom of the Accord Disease. The general consensus among Accord experts was that it couldn’t be done. Because of that, as far as she knew, no one was even trying to figure out how to make it work. How small and focused can a gravity field be? I imagine the dampeners or possibly the hull itself could be improved to handle the extra turbulence. If the ship didn’t vibrate, it wouldn’t shake apart. So much to do.

  At the end of the prior job, Lexi’s first, the team delivered the Rose to Universal Underwriters, the underwriter of the policy on Ackalon’s Rose of Light. Geena, as promised, acquired a list of open jobs from her contacts. Accord civilization encompassed a vast expanse of space and a large number of worlds. A surprising number of insured valuables went missing. The several insurance conglomerates headquartered on Cardin’s Paradise were always shopping out jobs to independent investigators for recovery. There were a number of other insurance firms headquartered on Cardin to which Geena extended feelers; her small free-lance team had never been exclusive to Universal although that was where they found the bulk of their work.

  Urania would be in dry dock while being serviced and remodeled. The three human crew-members were all looking forward to an enlarged shower so that they could all fit at the same time. Oddly, Urania, who seemed to vicariously enjoy her partners’ various physical escapades, was looking forward to it as well. Odd as it seems, my cybernetic friend really is a bit of a voyeur, Lexi again thought, smiling.

  All four of them realized that by the time Urania was rebuilt, there was a high probability that some of the jobs on the lists they were now reviewing would have been picked up by others. Some were so old the trail was cold, although it was worth remembering that the Rose of Light turned up twenty-four years after it had been lost. Some of the other jobs, such as the one involving an entire ship that went missing transporting a cargo of valuable art work, were just too dangerous. They obviously couldn’t go up against pirates with an unarmed ship.

  Because Urania was weaponless, they would be forced to skip over some of the jobs on the roster from Universal Underwriters. That didn’t sit well with Lexi. She fully intended to arm Urania as soon as she found somewhere that would do it for her, even if that meant Helga. Going the Helga route meant she would have to register the team as Helgan mercenaries. There were several disadvantages with that. Funny, but the pirates didn’t seem to have any issues getting their ships armed despite the laws designed to prevent that very thing.

  The old weapon bays, launch tubes and missile storage rooms were still intact, even though the weapons were removed fifty years ago when the Vankovians decommissioned WA32198389-18-32405. Throughout the Accord, with th
e exception of the Helgan world, weapons were illegal on privately owned vessels. Usually, if ship owners added weapons, their ships wound up being confiscated by port authorities. Lexi personally believed that was a really crappy idea due to the reality of uncontrolled piracy. According to rumors Geena picked up, piracy was becoming more of a problem.

  The intent of those laws, of course, was to prevent pirate wannabes from arming their ships. Weaponizing Urania was not an upgrade they could legally have done on Cardin’s Paradise. But there were other worlds; other ways. It is going to happen. It has to. The Helgan ship they encountered on Earth was armed. If the Helgans hadn’t honored the terms of their Honor Challenge, if they attacked us after I beat their swordsmen, we wouldn’t have had anything to fight back with.

  For now, though, what they really needed to do was to gut the interior and beef up the hull integrity without touching any of the essential components that made command-comp, aka Urania, well, Urania. Computer technology, like practically everything else, had advanced very little in the century and a half since Urania was built. Most computer upgrades were out of the question now that Urania had become sentient. Even Urania agreed that she couldn’t have been sentient during her first century as a Vankovian scout.

  Now having more credit in their account than, according to Geena, they ever had previously, they spent three weeks interviewing contractors and soliciting bids. During that time, Ron and Geena took Lexi sightseeing as soon as Ron belatedly realized Cardin’s Paradise, which he thought of as his home planet, was her first “alien” world. Cardin was where Geena met her life-partner Crane and where their only child, Ron, was born. The team spent evenings hanging out in bars, dancing and enjoying native foods. At the end of the second week, they booked four days at an exclusive beach resort where Ron and Geena taught Lexi how to surf. She loved it.

  Lexi also made them take her shopping, picking up a box of nine communication units. Until she saw them, her plan was to build her own, but what the heck, one less thing to worry about. She recognized the need for the devices while battling the Helgans on Earth. Ron disappeared into the Helgan ship to get Geena out and neither of them knew how the other was doing. Information that would have been useful to know. Lexi was forced to prolong the honor bout long enough to give Ron time to spring Geena.

  As it turned out, she could have easily dispatched both of her opponents. If she had, the Helgan ship would have left, with Geena still a prisoner. Prolonging the bout was in itself a challenge, both tedious and risky. At the same time, Ron had no clue as to whether Lexi was winning or already dead until he came across the Helgans still on the ship watching the match on their viewscreen.

  In the case of the comm-gear she purchased, she doubted she could have come up with anything better. These units were very well thought out. In fact, they were fantastic. The wireless devices, powered by the body’s own electrical field, consisted of two pieces. One fit invisibly into the ear canal, adhering more or less permanently, requiring the use of a special solvent and device to remove.

  The units were advertised to be totally undetectable except by the most advanced medical scanners. The shop owner, Pete Isher, with whom Lexi spent as much time chatting with as she did actually looking around, stated that the promotional material for the devices was accurate. When they later tested that claim in Urania’s medical compartment, she proved unable to find the devices which looked like part of the ear.

  Once he understood what Lexi envisioned her group getting involved in, Pete upsold her to the incredibly expensive, top-of-the-line version that included both GPS tracking ability and monitoring vital signs. That tiny little piece of technology was more than just an earbud. It included a microphone that both picked up external sound as well as speech conducted through the jaw bone. Pete pointed out that if they could teach themselves to subvocalize, the technology would clean up minor garbling and they could have a private conversation when other people were present.

  A separate piece included with each unit was a contact lens. Linked through Urania’s network, they would be able to share what each other was seeing. It was designed so that a supervisory team could follow what mobile assets were looking at either on a screen or as a hologram. With these, not only would the team be able to keep in constant contact, they would be able to track each other’s position. The entire setup operated over an encrypted virtual network which in theory ensured total privacy. Lexi didn’t really believe that. She was convinced anything could be hacked. In this case, she allowed the devices should be secure under most circumstances. The shop owner agreed with her assessment.

  Chapter 4

  Universal Underwriters

  The team interviewed contractors and checked references. A week later, they selected the firm owned by Agm Hans and scheduled the job. They agreed on a start date for thirty-two days from now. The job was projected to take four weeks. Agm, who operated a single crew, was currently working on another, larger job and wouldn’t be available until that wrapped up. Meanwhile, his architect was beginning the first round of floor plans and technical drawings. An order for hull plating was placed. To everyone’s surprise, it was received within the week, nearly five weeks earlier than expected.

  Rather than wait for the remodel to be started, Lexi returned to Pete Isher’s shop and purchased a simulated firing range. It reminded her of a gaming system like she had on Earth growing up. Well, she had one in the house she shared with her roommates, too. The main component was a small computer. The software supported over a hundred different guns. In addition to simulated guns, the device supported up to sixteen users at a time. The holo-visors giving the illusion that the user was in the simulation had to be purchased separately. She bought four of those, four simulated Glocks and one simulated assault rifle. She also picked up six magazines of simulated ammunition for each of the weapons so they could practice using the reloading option.

  She and Ron set it up the device on one of Urania’s subsystems. Lexi also took the opportunity to trade in the team’s antique firearms and replace them with modern handguns. The team would spend their downtime practicing with swords in the empty cargo hold and guns using the ship’s newly installed simulator.

  Thirteen days into the wait, they received a call from Jackson Meeham that changed everything. Having Jackson, president of Universal Underwriters take the time to call personally was not only surprising, it was puzzling. Meeham ran one of the largest corporations on Cardin’s Paradise. He was also a member of the seventeen-person board that governed the planet. Yet, he took the time to reach out to them, inquiring if they could meet with him immediately.

  They previously met him for the first and only time just under four weeks ago. None of them questioned his presence at the meeting where the Rose of Light was turned over to the planetary ruler of Ackalon. That made sense. Calling them now, four weeks later, did not.

  Jackson was at the prior meeting because of the rank and power of his policy holder. Ad Boc Seckan held the title of Plicora of Ackalon. At the time, none of the three were entirely sure why the Aeolus team was invited to a meeting attended by a man who ruled an entire world. Universal was already in possession of the Rose. After the meeting was over Boc Seckan’s daughter, Jis Boc Seckan, mentioned their presence was requested simply because the Ackalonians desired to meet the people who found the missing Rose. Her father wanted to thank them personally.

  Jackson’s request for a personal meeting now could only mean something incredibly valuable had gone missing, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been involved. Even so, unless somehow an entire planet had been misplaced, none of them could understand why meeting with them hadn’t been delegated to a manager several tiers below president. Someone stealing the Rose again was one of the possibilities they tossed around. Apparently, for the moment at least, Aeolus Investigations was held in the highest regard. It was a heady feeling for all of them.

  In a way, that was awkward. They all realized it. While both Ron and Geena were experie
nced and talented investigators, the recovery of the Ackalonian artifact boiled down to pure luck. A professor showed it to his postgraduate student, Lexi Stevens, a month and a half before Ron told her what it was and why he and his mother were looking for it. True, the Samues managed to narrow its location down to a university campus in Washington state, but it was only because Lexi already knew where to put her hands on it that she was able to lead the team right to it.

  Nevertheless, despite not having a clue as to what this meeting was about, the invitation was one they couldn’t turn down. Nor did they want to. Even Lexi agreed that if they had to put off Urania’s remodel another few months for what might turn out to be a high-profile job, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She trusted that her partners where as good as they believed themselves to be. Even if, at this point, she was still useless as an investigator, she wasn’t concerned about the team’s overall ability.

  They arrived a few minutes early, dressed in hurriedly fabricated formal business attire, and were ushered directly to Jackson‘s office. He and another man rose to their feet as Geena, Lexi and Ron entered. Jackson introduced the other man as Prince Jadkim E’Kret of the royal family of Borgol. Jadkim was a Grake, a humanoid, but not truly human, species of mankind. Grake tended to be short by human standards. Jadkim stood just over five feet tall. Like all Grake, he was hairless. He looked as though his slight frame had been chipped out of gray shale. Lexi was fascinated. Everyone else she met on Cardin’s Paradise at least looked human.