USD: 8 Days after the Arrival to MIL-1A

Location: 92 Pegasi, Ackman Orbit, A3123Y Orbital

Amy hummed to herself lightly as she sipped her morning coffee. The wall display was showing a sunrise scene taken from Ackman’s surface, adding a brisk chill feeling to the room. It wasn’t any cooler than normal, though, as the central air was set at a non-wavering 22c.

If it had varied any, Amy would have been worried about station malfunctions.

Abbey mumbled something intelligible as she ate her breakfast cereal that Amy had prepared for her. Amy glanced over at her, but it wasn’t that odd for Abbey to talk to herself. The young NAI was swinging her legs back and forth while maintaining an inner conversation with her MainComputer.

Amy was still getting used to Abbey’s peculiarities, but the outright fear she had felt when Abbey had… converted Captain Yalof and his crew had slowly disappeared. Mostly. Abbey acted and listened to her about things and rarely made a mistake twice.

At the very least, she had done nothing terrible or harmed anyone by accident again. In Amy’s mind, the event had been the mistake of a young child and since Abbey seemed to accept that it was wrong and promised not to do it again; Amy felt like they could put it behind them. She’d continue to guide and teach Abbey the best she could, anyway.

A beep at her datapad drew Amy’s attention as she scrolled off the daily reports. Logan shot her a message informing her of the frigate crews, and GAI had finished their shakedown movements around the station.

Amy sighed, feeling stressed.

Both Wyles and Whitely had suggested they join the destroyer on its patrol. She had had to find a convincing reason to forestall that idea and had sent the destroyer on its own to prowl around for the Corpo remnants that were still creeping around the edge of the system. They hadn’t liked that idea, saying it invited defeat by spreading their forces and weakening the protection for the vulnerable older station, but Amy couldn’t let the ships join up.

One conversation or look at Captain Yalof’s eyes would be all it took to cause a panic. The Alpha Core wasn’t very talkative anyway, from the few times Amy had tried to converse with him. Coordination was better handled through Abbey instructing A31.

Now that the frigates were prepared, they were planned to rendezvous with Ackman Station and tow the structure to A3123Y for prep work on the new station merger. The new station shell was already progressing rapidly, and by the time the old station reached them, it would be halfway built.

It felt like the hardest part would be herding over the old residents to the new station, but they had already informed everyone of the situation and would hopefully prepare for the move.

Abbey let out a cheer at something, then jumped up out of her chair and took her bowl to the kitchen sink to wash it. Amy smiled and came over to help, rubbing Abbey’s head.

Two big, surprised eyes looked up at her.

“I’ll take care of the dishes. Go get your uniform on. We need to go work with Whitely on the station integration plans today.”

Abbey smiled back at her and raised her hand. “Okay!” Then ran off to the bedroom to change.

USD: 9 Days after the Arrival to MIL-1A

Location: 63 Hydrae, Hydra Prime Geostationary Orbit, MOR-1

Thea sighed as the gangway door took longer than normal to slide open. She was already agitated and unhappy to have been called to visit mother on Hydra’s Main Orbit Relay without an explanation. She only needed a few more days and she would have had made enough funds to pay for her Chi upgrade.

The summons had not even come with a priority clearance, so her light cutter had waited in the traffic queue like everyone else waiting for a mooring. The effort needed to transfer a computronics module to the ship and to prepare her battle station for independent action had been annoying effort as well.

Two Corporate Marines flanked her as she finally stepped onto the MOR. The corridor at least had a moving walkway, and her bodyguards quickly cleared a path for her when needed. The crowd was pretty thick; this was a civilian mooring, and the amount of traffic was heavy since the MOR acted as the primary relay for traffic from the surface to other orbital habitats and outbound/inbound receiving stations.

They reached the tramline quick enough. A mental request cleared the car for her as green lights suddenly turned red with an ‘Official Use Only’ moniker. A micro-charge beeped hatefully at her, but Thea wasn’t in the mood for riding a standing room only tram today.

She opened up a data screen on the window of the car and swapped to a display of the system’s stock and securities exchange. Logging into her account, a massive balance of trillions of credits sat uselessly. Enhanced GAIs, people with certain genome modifications, and especially NAIs, were all prohibited persons for interacting with the exchange for obvious reasons.

Instead, she got an account full of play money. She’d already looted the entire market multiple times on it, siphoning more credits than she’d ever hoped to make in real life. She’d turned the side act into a game, although the real fun came when she bothered looking for bad actors who were cheating the system.

Those came with an actual bounty for identifying. The perpetrators usually ended up working the rest of their lives in a moon-based prison labor camp. The rewards were still enticing enough to tempt criminals, though.

As the tram reached her stop, Thea and her escort exited to the military hub section of the station. It was a small station in itself, and she had to switch to another line to reach the main command center section and the conference room that had been assigned for the meeting.

She’d already suspected something sour by the summons, but the armed marines in power armor at attention outside the meeting room confirmed it. A naval officer stood waiting for her, his cap under arm. As she approached, he stepped forward.

“Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fallon, Ma’am. I’ll be providing your brief.” He extended his hand, and Thea did her best to hide a grimace. She hated spooks. They were always in her business and causing trouble or demanding help or extra resources for surveillance.

“Phi Thea C-BS 3737. I don’t know what this is, but let’s get it over with.” She said, refusing to take the hand and pushing past him into the meeting room. Fallon followed her inside the room while her security escort stayed out.

The meeting room was dimly lit with yellow path lights inlaid on the floor. A massive table dominated the room, a rectangular shape with smooth corners and a dozen chairs. Only one other person was present, already seated at the far end of the space.

Thea recognized the woman immediately. It was one of the female avatar surrogates of her mother, Rea. A sense of creepiness filtered through Thea’s spine, although it was mostly because Thea had been present when Rea had created the latest set of bodies.

Each one was fitted with all the trappings of what an NAI would consider an Avatar… except they allowed Rea to swap between them on the fly as needed as long as they were within her ShipCore range. That was something Thea would never feel comfortable with, but enough NAIs found it useful and had the temperament for it and took advantage of the process. Not Thea, though.

As she continued to approach, Rea opened her eyes suddenly and gestured to a seat halfway down the table. “Thea. I expected you to be more punctual. Sit.”

“Maybe if you had given me a proper Mooring, I would have got here sooner.”

Rea was not satisfied. “You should have expected the delay and scheduled an earlier arrival.”

Thea bit back a retort. There was no point in arguing with her mother. That would only lead into a circular argument that ended in her own detriment, so Thea kept her mouth shut.

Agent Fallon moved to sit on the opposite side of the conference table.

Thea pulled out the chair her mother had indicated and sat down heavily, crossing her arms. “So? What’s going on? Why have you pulled me off customs duty and called me here in person? I’m only days away from my Chi upgrade.”

Thea knew Rea had to have known that, and the timing was incredibly suspicious. There was an unwritten rule that interference in the purchases of an NAI upgrade was prohibited by Moneta, but she knew there were dozens of shady methods or even outright legal warfare that could skew things out of her control without raising eyebrows.

But she had lived under her mother’s shadow for long enough to avoid pissing her off. At least not for the last few years. And it shouldn’t have been much of a bother for Rea to create another sub-core to replace her. It was even the natural progression of things; Thea had replaced an older sister almost a decade ago.

Fallon took his seat and pushed forward an intelligence folio. The holographic computer on the table analyzed it and suddenly shot up an image of a starship. It was vaguely familiar, and Thea felt a growing alarm as she recalled the name of the ship.

“We have evidence that the IND Iron Horse, a ship that went through your customs, was one of the ships that engaged Corporate forces on the western frontier around Nu Crateris. Worse, we believe it was working on conjunction with a rogue NAI that has been affecting operations in the area, and is the main contributor to the failure of Operation Rug Pull.”

He slid another folio, this one marked Top Secret, across the table to her. She opened it. The operational details were written in a brief summary, and she skimmed them.

“What’s this have to do with me?” Thea asked, but she had a sick feeling oozing through her gut. She had a strong idea of what was going to be said next.

Rea waved her hand and the hologram hovering over the table swapped pictures to one that Thea recognized easily. It was a highlighting of the Iron Horse. The picture zoomed in to a single compartment that blinked and highlighted in red. The smuggling compartment.

“Do I need to play back your audio-visual logs, Thea? I know you allowed that NAI through customs in return for a bribe. This NAI is likely the child of the rogue NAI causing problems on the frontier. This is going to reflect poorly on me, as Moneta will examine all the evidence herself to prepare for a pacification strike in the region.”

Thea squeezed her hand into a fist on the table, but did her best to remain calm. “But this happens all the time. You even encouraged me to do it before to increase profits.”

Rea shook her head. “This time it’s a problem.”

Agent Fallon pressed a key, and the holotable flipped to a display of Meltisar. “We will conduct an operation to search for and seize the Rogue NAI’s child. Partly to gather more intel on whatever the rogue is planning, and to prevent Meltisar from gaining further NAI resources.”

Thea’s eyes widened in alarm, her stomach in free fall. “No. You want to send me?”

Rea nodded. “Besides being fined 75% of your total credit balance as punishment, you will surrender your battle station and go with Agent Fallon to Meltisar to carry out this operation. Once you’ve located the rogue NAI, you will either terminate her or subvert her and bring her back to 63 Hydrae.”