[Okay, okay, okay! Listen! How about this? We make an agreement that each of us get an “I do whatever I want and the other one can’t say anything” card. I’ll use mine for this, and you can use yours whenever you want,] I offered her a solution in hopes of drowning out our argument.

[In that case, I’ll use my card to stop you from doing this.]

I nearly dropped the engine I was carefully moving into the ship with the heavy load machinery. [That’s not how this works! It would make the cards pointless…] I screamed back in my head in utter annoyance.

[This wasn’t in our plans! It worked out well, you got what you wanted and even more, than we hoped. I understand that you feel confident by being successful, but don’t let it get to your head. You took your bite, let the matter rest; don’t go for another, bigger one! Overconfidence is a danger-]

[Please, let me focus now. I’m setting down the engine, I need to concentrate.]

Getting knowledge packs for basic ship construction wasn’t cheap, but I deemed it necessary. We were currently on a small rock in space which housed a ship junkyard. Even though I had no hopes of putting together a phase-engine or an anti-gravity core, I was able to fill up an empty hull with the necessary parts. It wasn’t hard to find a beat-up ship that had a large chunk of it missing. The ship was mostly stripped clean of any valuable systems and only the life-support was still intact inside. For the phase-engine, the regular engine, the shield generator, the scanner, the GG core and the bridge gate I needed to find used ones in the junkyard or order them from somewhere else. Loading them into the hull with the machine that I rented wasn’t hard, installing them took some time, but it was still manageable. The biggest headache was isolating the gaping hole in the back part of the hull. Genna’s endless pecking in my brain made it a downright challenge.

I knew I was completely crazy. I knew I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing, but it was an opportunity that I couldn’t miss out on. Although Genna was throwing an endless stream of nag towards me she was still talking to me. I wouldn’t have dared to continue with my preparations if she turned completely quiet. I hoped that if I showed her that the plan was feasible I would have a better chance of convincing her. She agreed to make Urmont’s pocket lighter once. Why wouldn’t she agree a second time?

After the engine landed snugly in its place I breathed out in relief. Even though the phase-engine I bought was a used and old model, it was still the most expensive part.

After wiping off the perspiration from my forehead I said to her, [Look! I really, really badly want to do this. There’s a level 1 BioEnhancement out there in space, which belongs to one of the worst guys you could find around this segment of the cluster. Just this once, please let me do this! I swear on my life that next time I’ll listen to you. Please don’t make me beg on my knees.]

…

[Is there any chance that I can convince you to drop this idea?] she asked after a long pause.

[Well, you can send that message you prepared a long time ago about me to your boss. That would pretty much stop me from doing this... or pretty much anything else at all.]

[How do you know I have a message prepared?] she asked back stiffly.

[I guessed, but now I know.]

[Aium, I didn’t w-]

[You don’t have to explain it, just agree to this. Please!] I interrupted her while holding up a hand.

[You might think I don’t have to, but I certainly will! Yes, I have a message prepared for ADMIN. Your unpredictability and these sudden ideas you come up with scare me. What if one day you decide to do something truly horrible or even worse, hurt people? I live to help you and I think you’re a wonderful individual in your own strange way, but if you cross some lines I’ll have to step in no matter how I feel.]

[Fair enough. If I ever go crazy, feel free to stop me. I get it. I told you, you don’t have to explain it. But this isn’t something that’s at that point yet, right?]

[I… I don’t think.]

[Are you with me then?]

[I seriously feel like a victim here...] she said with a pained sigh.

[So, I know it’s an asshole move, but I’ll need your help with a few things and we don’t have much time,] I said with a scrunched up face, afraid from her response.

[Your shamelessness is unprecedented. You know that, right?]

[Soooo, is that a yes?]

...

I explained to her the details of my plan and what I needed her help with. Meanwhile, I continued to work on the hole’s isolation on Piece of Shit 2.0.

The plan’s biggest hurdle was finding and intercepting the transport ship in the middle of nowhere. We knew only a few key points. The guy told us where the ship came from and its time of arrival.

Calculating its route with the currently available safe routes was a piece of cake for Genna.

The problem was getting a timeframe for the ship’s movements. This was the one thing I couldn’t solve no matter how hard I racked my brain. Genna came to the rescue with a clumsy idea. We knew they were in a hurry to get here, and we also knew when the auction took place. There were numerous reports and articles about it on the Network, but as for the nature of the BioEnhancement, it wasn’t disclosed to the public. So we knew the route, the starting point, and the estimated arrival. With this, the ship’s speed was fairly easy to guess. Figuring out the most efficient route with the available data we had a couple of stops they most likely touched within a timeframe.

Genna was a huge fan of the Network. In her free time, she liked to browse various sites and communities. She often showed me interesting or funny - in her opinion - things during our time together and it turned out to be valuable! There was an enormous community; the Spaceship Enthusiasts Club. The one Kal was a member too. They had countless members across the Empire and a lot of them were enthusiastic ship watchers. They spent considerable amounts of time and effort to watch and catalog ships at various places. I didn’t understand the fun in that, but people liked to watch cars and planes in my time too. Couldn’t judge them, since watching documentaries to no end wasn’t that much better either. Anyway, it wasn’t hard to find from there people on the various key station that were ship watchers. Genna sent a series of wickedly convincing messages to them, pretending to be an enthusiast which was partly true. She asked them for their ship lists during the timeframes. The responses didn’t take long to arrive and with cross checks, she managed to narrow down the list to a single ship. It was a bit shocking how easy it was to track down a someone with only a few pieces of information.

According to Genna’s predictions, we asked ship watcher on the last station they were supposed to stop to keep an eye out for several kinds of ships among which, one was the real ship we were looking for. We would know the exact time when they left so we could make our move precisely.

After I managed to get the ship into working order I started putting together a little machine with a very special purpose in mind. I gave it a little engine, a few positioning pistons, a very basic remote control system, and a huge 100-liter tank. The whole junkyard was mostly automated, only a few absent-minded clones operated it. I rented out one of their copy machines, hauled the thing that I put together inside and for a hefty price I made 50 copies of it. Since the machine was extremely simple and made from cheap materials, it was possible to use the copier. As it constantly popped out exact copies of what I put inside I lifted them into a container and loaded them into the ship. When I was done with it I used the liquid that Genna ordered from a few places to fill up the empty tanks of my little creations.

When I was finally done with everything I was dead tired. I crashed down into the captain’s chair in the control room of the ship and fell asleep. I still had some time for a quick rest.

[Okay, we’re here, how much time do I have?]

[43-46 minutes. I can’t give you an exact number,] she told me. [What if it’s the wrong ship?]

[Nothing. We’ll just act like we’re really stranded here in a broken ship,] I said and shrugged.

I used the holoscreen’s control and the storage bay door where the little machines were put opened up and they streamed out. The scanner was already running and it was slowly giving me the Death Drones’ location in the area one-by-one. I didn’t have time to come up with a more elegant solution, so I controlled my machines one-by-one manually and gave each of them a Death Drone’s location near us. After 30 minutes, all 42 of them were reaching their target. The remaining ones I ordered back into the storage area. There were fewer Death Drones in the area than I expected and my machines wouldn’t have reached the far ones in time. As the final preparations, I checked the four animal-repellant-stunrods at my belt and put on my mask with the image showing the red grin.

[Are you sure the crew will be clones?] I asked with a bit of hesitation as I looked down at my stunrods.

[They should be. Real people only travel by official Transport Ships.]

[I’m real and I’m in the middle of nowhere in a half-broken ship,] I argued.

[Exactly!] she snapped back.

[What exactly?]

[You are here with your real body! That’s the problem! You have some very deep-seated problems.]

[On a scale of 1-10 how frustrated are you that you can’t find any evidence that I’m insane?] I asked with a chuckle.

[10! You were right, the Empire would surely study you! You act like a mental patient, but you show no signs of any known illnesses or deviations. If IDEA found out about you, she would definitely want to take a very good look at your brain.]

[Idea?]

[She’s like ADMIN, but she’s the head A.I. of the Research Department.]

[Ah...] I nodded awkwardly. [Didn't the creepy guy who’s after me talk about her in that message?] I added after a sudden spark of realization.

[You’re right. She mentioned her in that message briefly. We can talk about this later, but I think it’s time.]

“Let’s start then!” I said with a huge breath and started pressing buttons on the holoscreen with my sweaty hands.

First, I checked one more time my little machines. When I was sure that all of them were in place, I activated remotely the spark heads in their tanks. Immediately after I pushed another button and the emergency signal started pulsing out of the ship. I couldn’t see it with my own eyes, but the scanner showed on the screen as the nearby Death Drones suddenly disappeared at the same time. My little suicide bombers worked like a charm. You couldn’t buy anything explosive on the market under normal circumstances, but I managed to find a volatile liquid used in visual entertainment machines. Unfortunately, a dozen drops of the stuff was enough to operate a fire blowing machine for hours so the stuff was only sold in small quantities. I asked Genna to order from nearly thirty sellers to get enough. The Death Drones weren’t the toughest constructions, to begin with since their only purpose was to die if anything happened to them. When the 100-liter tanks blew up next to them they had no chance.

As I was celebrating the disappearance of the Death Drones from the scanner, a blaring alert popped up on the holoscreen:

“WARNING! Safe route X554-O22 has become unstable. Until the Space Travel Protection confirms the situation don’t move from your current position! We’ll update you shortly!”

“Well, that worked out. Now let’s see if we were lucky enough to catch them,” I said aloud while staring at the scanner.

The plan was to shut down the safe route when they were close to us in the middle of nowhere. It was a bit of a gamble since they were traveling in Phase. Genna made her calculations as precise as possible, but it was still up to luck. According to the rules of space travel, in a case like this, all ships must stop until they get updated by the STP. Most of the time they would have to either continue on, turn back or in very dangerous situations STP ships would come to rescue them. If a ship has a malfunction and unable to move, they are to immediately broadcast an emergency signal. If another ship is in a certain distance from the stranded one, they have an obligation to transfer over the crew and any valuables they have space for. The rescuers would earn a reward from the STP. Even though there were no real lives in danger, the safety of transportation and trade had to be protected.

At this point, we were already sending out emergency signals. The STP was alerted immediately and they must have been already on their way. When they found out that there was no Darkness and the Death Drones were blown up they would surely comb through the area. I had a very limited amount of time to pull this off.

Beads of sweat were rolling down my temples under the mask and my eyes started to water from staring at the scanner without blinking. The tension of the moment made me feel like time slowed down to a crawl.

[We had a very low chance of succ-] started Genna, but the rest of her sentence didn’t come out because a bright dot appeared on the scanner not far from us, indicating that a ship came out of Phase.

[Is it the right ship?! Quick, switch to visuals!] she said in excitement.

[We don’t have visuals… I forgot it.]

[Seriously? I perfectly predicted their position and time and you forgot to check if the ship had any cameras left?]

[Shut up!]

[What are you still waiting for?! The dot is approaching us! Get to the bridge gate!]

[Yes!] I woke up from my daze and started running towards the back with shaking legs.

When I arrived in the room where I installed the bridge gate I rushed up to the small holoscreen on the wall to check on the situation. The other ship was right next to us by then. Shortly after arriving I received a call.

“Your ship looks horrible! It wasn’t the Darkness right?” came the voice from the shaking image of a human. Using half-broken and used equipment had its drawbacks.

“Thank god you’re here!” I exhaled with a shaking voice. “I had an explosion in the storage bay while in Phase and now the Space Travel Protection sent out a warning. I was scared senseless,” I muttered. I didn’t have to try too hard to fake my nervousness since I had plenty of it.

“Well, we are here to help, but if the STP tells us that the Darkness is in the area we will leave without a word. Just a warning. How big is your crew and what kind of goods would you like to transfer over? We have plenty of space,” said the guy from the other ship.

“I'm alone and the ship doesn’t have anything valuable anymore. The storage area emptied out in Phase when it blew up. I just want to get my clone off of this wreck. It has BioEnhancements and it would be horrible to lose it too.”

“Okay, that’s easy enough. Establishing bridge connection. Somebody will be there to pick you up. Red Korte out!”

With that, the call disconnected and immediately after the bridge gate behind me started sizzling with a metallic sound as a connection was established.