Dicker lets off a little laugh. “You can’t outrun your fate, Jimmy. It always catches up with you eventually.”
Maybe not, I think to myself. But stacking the odds in my favor can’t hurt either.
CHAPTER TWO – DELPHI
My first glimpse of Jimmy, Xyla, and the Big Dicker was back on the ship stop closest to Harem Station. It’s one of the ship stops only outlaws frequent. But it’s also one of their usual haunts when they travel. I was waiting for them for weeks. After we learned about what happened at Bull Station things got pretty tense where I was and I was ordered to put the plan in motion.
My little dragonbee bot, Flicka, had already infiltrated the ship stop’s maintenance logs and inserted a virus that would automatically load itself deep inside Dicker’s core the next time they came by, so after that it was just a waiting game.
Getting to Jimmy wasn’t going to be an issue. I was pretty confident about that part of my plan. Xyla… she was a whole other issue that needed to be dealt with.
But fate finds a way.
When they passed through the ship stop a few spins ago and I learned that Jimmy was on his way to drop Xyla off on Blue Sand Beach for a girlfriend getaway, I knew this was going to be OK. Everything would work out.
So now I’m following them in my ship, the Queen Bee, and we’re hovering just a few million klicks out from the Blue Sand Beach station. Waiting to activate the virus and follow them.
“Xyla has been logged into Blue Sand arrivals,” Queenie says.
“Perfect,” I say. “Don’t lose them.”
“As if,” Queenie retorts.
She’s more confident than I am because the Big Dicker is a much more sophisticated piece of equipment than Queenie is. I’d never tell her that to her interface, but it’s true. We don’t have an ALCOR AI to provide us with all kinds of fancy, new upgrades. I’ve heard that he makes his own sentient ships out on Harem Station. So it’s very possible that there’s some component inside Dicker that will identify my virus and disable it before it can get a foothold.
And if that happens all of my carefully laid plans will be worthless.
I need this to work. I need them to break down and make an unscheduled service stop so everything hinges on what happens in the next few hours.
“Dicker is in undocking sequence,” Queenie says.
“Good,” I whisper, eyes locked on the large screen above me. I lean forward, trying to get a better look at Jimmy’s ship. She’s very sleek and long, with an ample cargo bay on her underside meant to hold crews of bots. That’s what they do. They liberate bots and borgs from their masters and give them a new home on Harem where all their restrictions are removed in exchange for five hundred spins of servitude.
I admit, it’s a pretty nice deal if you’re a bot.
They do this with sentient ships too. If they make it to one of the two ALCOR security gates and surrender, ALCOR will tow them through the gate, dock them into a medical bay, and then sign them over to someone trustworthy on Harem to give them a new life.
This is totally illegal in Prime Space. But even before the Prime Navy made an alliance with Harem after the explosions at Bull Station, they didn’t interfere. If your sentient ship decided to bail and made it to Harem, it was gone for good. They would not go in to recover them.
Since I started working with Queenie a few months ago I’ve often wondered if she would ever abandon me like this. She’s capable of it, that’s for sure. I don’t trust her and I doubt she trusts me, but she’s getting something out of this partnership just like I am. You’d think she’d do as she’s told, but sentient ships are sneaky fuckers. Which is why they’re not allowed to exist without a responsible party being in charge of them.
ALCOR knows this is a hard-and-fast rule so he makes sure all his sentient ships leave Harem with their new responsible party. At least he did. Before the Prime Navy made that alliance.
But now? There’s no telling what that insane AI will do. It could be that autonomous sentient ships will be common in the years ahead.
Everyone is on edge over this. What will the galaxy look like with free sentient ships all over the place? They are all so dangerous. Pretty much everyone agrees that autonomous ALCOR is bad enough.
But… what if he did that with other AI’s too?
The only thing we have going for us as far as that little scenario goes is that sentient AI’s are locked onto stations and planets and can’t leave.
At least that was what we thought before ALCOR left Harem and blew up a Cygnian warship, leaving a copy of himself behind.