Sexy Space Babes: Chapter Forty (Replaced) (Patreon)

“What do you want?”

It was a little strange. Being back in an interrogation room. Doubly so, given that it was his own actions that put him there.

“I don’t ‘want’ anything,” he said, regarding the lowkey scowl of Interior Agent Pernora. “I’m here to give you something.”

The woman scoffed, but there was no missing the hint of interest in her eyes. Which was a given really. If she hadn’t actually been interested in what he had to say, she wouldn’t have agreed to this meeting.

Though, calling it a meeting may not actually be apropos, he thought, glancing around the room he was in. The interrogation room. Which was a far more fitting descriptor for this event. A voluntary interrogation.

Even worse, this time there would be no Tisi rushing in to save him. Because, after buying Scales lunch – ostensibly as an apology for pistol whipping her in the face – he’d managed to convince her to part ways with him.

And he’d like to think that he’d be aware if she’d continued following him in secret after that. For his peace of mind, if nothing else. Because if he couldn’t see Scales, a woman he knew, tailing him, he sincerely doubted he’d have been able to pick up on someone with less salubrious intentions who happened to be on his trail.

Of course, I might have made my attempts to keep myself from harm entirely redundant by coming here, he thought, glancing once more at the Interior agent’s impatient features.

He could only hope that Pernora’s career aspirations trumped her monetary ones. A bet and thought that seemed reasonably solid when it had come to him nearly two hours ago.

Now though? Now he wasn’t quite so sure.

Fuck it, he thought.

“I think the Grinshaw’s Maw may be engaged in less than legal activities,” he said, trying to keep his voice as level as humanly possible, even as Pernora’s eyes widened.

He’d done it now. He was committed.

“That’s a heavy claim,” the woman said, playing it cool. “A dangerous claim too. To make against a line of the Helrune dynasty’s standing.”

“Oh no,” Jason waved his arms in feigned – and real – panic. “I would never dream of accusing one of the Helrune’s of such a thing.”

“Yet, you just claimed that the Maw, her ship, is engaged in illegal activities,” Pernora pointed out.

Jason shrugged. “Mistakes happen. While I’m sure that Lady Hela herself is innocent of all wrongdoing, there’s no denying that the Maw has some… oddities in both its construction and actions. Perhaps it’s nothing. Merely the result of my overactive male mind, yet I could not live with myself if I didn’t bring my suspicions to the proper authorities.”

He was laying it on thick, and the slight sneer the Interior agent was sporting told him that she believed none of it.

Still, that gleam of interest was still in her eyes.

“Well? Do you have any evidence of this supposed wrongdoing?” she asked, looming over him.

“I do,” he said easily, bringing up his data-pad and flicking through it to the correct file. A task made all the easier by the fact that, at least on this occasion, his interrogator had magnanimously chosen not to handcuff him to the table.

Bringing up what he was after, he turned it around triumphantly to show to the Interior Agent, who examined it with clear interest.

Time passed.

The woman’s features twisted into a frown.

More time passed.

Said frown deepened.

“So you wasted my time by bringing me in here just to show me a bunch of cargo manifests?” she asked, visibly unimpressed.

“And a ship schematic,” he pointedly pointed out as he poked the screen pulling up said picture.

Pernora crossed her arms, leaning back. “Of a Heavy Cargo Cruiser, Gragel Class? The same as the Maw.”

The woman’s voice was utterly dismissive, but he had a feeling it was an act. The woman he’d met months ago, who’d brought him in for interrogation based on the most flimsy tangential evidence imaginable wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss something like this.

She’d been hungry. For anything. Anything at all that might put a feather in her cap and get her off a world she saw as a painful punishment.

Which was what he was betting on. That on the off-chance that Hela had already bribed the woman to look the other way in regards to her activities, the revelation as to exactly what those activities were would mean that her desire for glory would outweigh her desire for money.

Was it risky? Yes.

Stupidly so.

He also didn’t really see any other option.

Tisi, for all that he trusted her, was not in any position to stop Hela. If she even believed him and the, admittedly not quite airtight, evidence he had. Over the word of a woman she’d been friends with since they were children.

And even if she did believe him, he also knew that her next move would be send that evidence up the chain of command. Because the woman was a soldier though and through. She believed in the system. In the chain of command.

And he didn’t.

Not one bit, given the Shil’vati’s seeming cultural acceptance of bribery as the cost of doing business. All it would take is one mole in that chain, and he’d be toast. And he sincerely doubted that Hela didn’t have at least one mole in the military around Gurathu.

Hell, his heory about her smuggling people off-world was based on the assumption that she had an arrangement with at least one of the picket ship’s crews. Ships coming to and from Gurathu were supposed to be inspected after all.

Sure, taking his theory to Tisi shifted the onus of responsibility out of his hands, but it also took away his control of it. Which bugged him more than it should. Because if he told Tisi about what was going on and she decided to go the 'official' route despite his misgiving, or worse, confronted her childhood playmate personally, there was literally nothing he could do to stop her. It was her decision then after all.

He didn't like that thought. Not one bit.

Not least of all because he saw the most reliable and realistic method of some would-be assassin silencing Tisi was for the Whisker to suffer an accident. Which he doubted would be too difficult to arrange.

Which would leave him, Tisi and the rest of the crew dead. 

So no, he couldn’t involve Tisi.

The Interior agent across from him might have been a freshly formed turd of a woman, but she was at least one he’d seen and gotten the measure of. One he could at least attempt to predict. Which was better than trusting his fate to a dozen faceless nobodies who sat above Tisi in the chain of command.

…It also helped that the Interior agent was also his only other option.

“Yes, it’s a diagram of the Maw,” he said. “Given that the Maw is a civilian ship, her details are publicly accessible.”

“Alright, what’s the big deal?” the woman asked.

“Cargo capacity,” he stated, tapping the screen to bring up the disparity in weight loads. “The Maw isn’t moving as much cargo as it should theoretically be capable of.”

And hadn’t that been easy to learn. All it had taken him were a few lies and a little… smooth talking at the custom’s office. The warehouse manager there had almost fallen over herself to give himself access to the files.

...Then again, it wasn’t like he could particularly blame her. Private or not, it wasn’t like a cargo-ships manifest was particularly valuable. Not when compared to the opportunity to help out an attractive young man.

And isn’t that arrogant? He thought.

“That’s it?” Pernora deadpanned, taking him from his thoughts. “You want me to investigate a ship of the Helrune dynasty because their shipments are a little on the light side?”

Jason was undeterred, nor was he fooled by her – hopefully – feigned disinterest. “Do you have any idea how expensive shipping stuff all the way out to Gurathu is?”

The woman shrugged.

“Very,” he continued. “Which is why everything’s so goddamn expensive out here.”

To be fair to Pernora, although she was – hopefully – playing hard to get, she wasn’t slow on the uptake. “So you’re saying that it doesn’t make sense for the Maw not to be squeezing every possible bit of profit out of the journey it can?”

He nodded. “Have you ever met, Hela?”

Pernora looked uncomfortable, but nodded slowly. “We’ve met. In passing.”

Jason really hoped that was all it was, or all he was doing right now was digging his own grave. For all he knew, Pernora had been tapping a panic button under the table since the moment he’d started talking and was now waiting patiently for a band of goons in Helrune uniforms to turn up and take him away.

“Does she strike you as the sort of person to miss out on a possible profit due to a lack of attention to detail?” he asked.

The woman grunted, which he took to be an acknowledgment of his point. Which was a little annoying, as he’d thought it was a pretty decent point and went some way toward establishing motive after he’d shown means.

Because while he could say that Hela had a pretty good grip on six of the seven cardinal sins, he could well claim that she’d completely sidestepped sloth. In both personas. Valley girl or ruthless businesswomen.

“No,” Pernora allowed. “No, she does not.”

“So you’ll investigate?” he asked, unable to hide his excitement.

The Interior agent glanced at him, then down at the data-pad on the table. Eventually she seemed to come to a decision.

“Alright,” she sighed. “It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

Jason slumped in his seat, relief washing over him. His conscience was now clean. He’d seen a possible issue. He’d brought it to the correct authorities. His role in this was over, small as it had been to begin with.

Chances were, all of this was just a paranoid conspiracy he’d constructed in his head.

Pernora would go off, do her thing, and then he’d get an angry vid-call from her in a few days, complaining about him wasting her time.

Yeah, that’d be pretty ideal.

-------------------

Still, while Jason was relieved that Pernora was investigating – or at least claiming to – he could easily admit that there was an additional sense of relief in being back in-space.

Which he could also admit was a little odd, given that the Whisker was a warship on patrol. At any moment a horde of ravenous pirates could have jumped into the system and the tiny picket ship would have been Gurathu’s first line of defense against them.

Fortunately for him, unlike his possible imagined abductors, he figured the chances of that happening were so slim as to be non-existent.

Yes, Gurathu had a pirate problem in the past, but that had only been because it had been such easy pickings. The moment the planet had put measures in place that made raiding them even a little inconvenient, the raids had stopped.

Or changed modus operandi, but that had little to do with his relief at being back aboard the Whisker.

Which was the reason why he didn’t entirely jump out of his seat when both Kernathu and Tisi bustled into the engineering bay.

“Jason, you’ve got to see this!” Kernathu cried, excitedly waving her data-pad in his direction.

A little bemused by the show of excitement from the usually gloomy young woman, he glanced at Tisi’s equally gleaming face, before tentatively taking the thin device.

Looking at the screen, he didn’t quite know what he was looking at to begin with. But as his eyes roamed slowly over the runic Shil’vati text, he found his eyebrows climbing up his forehead.

“You patented my mouse design?” he asked.

Kernathu nodded excitedly. “I did.”

He just looked at her, then back down at the device in his hands. “Thank you, but…why?”

Sure, mice were handy little tools, but he hadn’t invented them. He’d just made an adaptation for Shil’vati systems. Which he could readily admit hadn’t been entirely simple, but that had been one he’d been learning to do before he’d been conscripted.

Given that it had only taken him a few days to adapt the code and print off the parts for it, it hardly seemed worth patenting.

Given that, again, he hadn’t been the one who came up with the idea.

He frowned a little. “Actually, can we even do that? Given that I didn’t come up with the idea?”

Tisi placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “We didn’t patent the concept, we patented your specific design. Now it’s up on the data-net for others to download and use, but they pay you a royalty each time.”

That was… cool? He didn’t really see all the excitement to be honest.

Still, I suppose I shouldn’t be knocking a few extra creds in my… Jason’s thoughts trailed off as he looked at his royalties accrued since the mouse had gone live.

“I… ah…. think the program might have a glitch,” he said, wrestling his suddenly uncooperative tongue into submission.

“What? Why?” Kernathu asked, practically snatching the data-pad from him to look it over.

Jason just stood there, finger still numbly outstretched. “Well, the number at the bottom had a few too many zeroes attached.”

Kernathu stopped in her inspection of the device to frown at him, as if he’d just wasted her time.

Fortunately, Tisi stepped in before the smaller woman could say anything. “Yes, Kernathu and I were also a little surprised by how popular it was. We thought it was a decent product, which was why we patented it in the first place, but even so, the response has been surprising. Especially given that we really didn’t do anything to advertise it.”

Jason stared numbly at the numbers again as the device was dumped in his hands.

“Of course,” Tisi continued. “I wouldn’t expect those number to stay that high for long. I imagine people back in the Imperium are already scrambling to make their own equivalents of your ‘mice’.”

Jason didn’t bother to correct her on her incorrect use of the word. Or perhaps it was the correct use? English could be a confusing beast at times, especially when that single word was used in a conversation that had thus far been entirely Shil’vati.

He could well imagine that some egghead in the Imperial palace was already scrambling to come up with a proper Shil word for his mouse. The Shil’vati were pretty particular about things like that. Unlike English, which just stole and adapted things from other languages without a care in the world, the Shil language was a much more carefully crafted and codified beast.

“Thank you,” he said again, but for the first time with genuine emotion beyond amusement behind the sentiment. “Kernathu, Ma’am.”

“You’re welcome,” Kernathu and Tisi both beamed.

Well, it seemed that he was now, if not wealthy, than close to it. Especially given that the note at the bottom of his royalties summary had happily pointed out that his device had yet to be delivered to all domains under the Imperium. Nor had all the details of royalties from worlds it had been delivered been collected yet.

Yes, it seemed he was now just a little on the wealthy side.

-------------

It had been nearly three days since Kernathu and Tisi had unveiled their ‘gift’ to him, and Jason was still feeling the high.

“Could you stop smiling like that? It’s creepy and gross.”

Jason liked Glider. Unlike most of the Shil he’d encountered, the long-eared woman had an almost delightfully acerbic attitude towards him – and everyone else, bar Tisi. Sure, it had taken a few weeks for it to come out in force after she’d grown used to him, but now it was here, it was on full blast.

It was a breath of fresh air to be honest.

Though he imagined it helped that he didn’t actually spend a great deal of time with the woman. He could well imagine that while her personality was fun in small doses, he’d find it… grating after enough time.

Predominantly because he was exactly the same way.

Which was why, as he continued gazing out the Whisker’s forward display monitor into the inky blackness of space, he also continued to smile. Wider.

And hum.

Jauntily.

“Ugh,” the woman groaned as she continued to tap away at the console in front of her. “I could pull rank on you to get you to stop? You know that, right?”

“You could, you very well could,” he allowed.

Given that he was fresh-ish out of basic, without even his tertiary training to his name, just about everyone on the ship outranked him. He was the low head on the totem pole. Technically he should still only be an acting-recruit, given the lack of said training, but whoever had pulled strings to get him shipped out to Gurathu had apparently also been required to get him promoted to a full private for that to happen.

Which was kind of ironic when one thought about.

“You think I won’t?” Glider asked.

“I think it would hurt your pride to be forced to rely on the infinitesimal difference between our ranks to get me to shut up.”

It also helped that the chain of command between the Navy and the Marines was a little fuzzy. Not a lot. Just a little. The end result of which being that while a Navy officer could give a marine of lower rank orders, said orders could be countermanded by any marine that chose to do so, even if they were of a lower rank than the initial naval officer.

It also helped that unlike on Earth, pilots were not all automatically officers. Which was good, because he would well imagine some part of him dying inside if he were ever forced to salute Rocket.

And he had been entirely correct about Glider’s ego, because the woman just scowled, but did not give him an order to stop smiling. Or humming.

Fortunately for her, he wasn’t so much of an asshole that he derived more than a tasteful amount of pleasure from annoying her. Which was why he stopped humming.

He didn’t not stop smiling though.

It wasn’t every day that a man’s net worth multiplied. And he really did need to do something nice for Kernathu and Tisi for being the driving force behind his recent good fortune.

You know, besides the kiss on the cheek he’d given the engineer. He might have done more, but he’d worried for the woman passing out given just how blue she turned just from a light peck on the cheek.

He might have done the same to Tisi were it not for the fact that the woman blushed almost as much from just watching him give Kernathu a kiss. And that she was an officer and the ship’s captain.

Different etiquette between enlisted and officers, even in a military as alien as the Shil’vati.

Though he hadn’t exactly been blind to just how disappointed – even crushed – his captain had looked after he’d given her a solemn handshake in thanks for her efforts.

Also, Yaro was a factor, but after months of being intimate with one woman while technically in a relationship with another – and didn’t that make him feel like a douche for saying aloud? – he’d come to be a bit more… comfortable with the alien notion of polygamy.

Certainly, Yaro hadn’t given him much more than a slightly raised eyebrow when he came back from the Nighkru ambassador’s ship covered in the woman’s… scent.

Idly he found his gaze moving over to the asteroid fueling station that was their very purpose for being in the system. Well, specifically, they were there for the gas giant the station orbited, but in practical terms, the station itself was the lynchpin for any ship planning to refuel on the precious hydrogen required for ships to make an FTL jump.

Sure, the Shil’vati’s anti-grav system allowed large ships to enter the gravity well of worlds they realistically had no business being in, but even an idiot would be able to guess that a ship that refueled from industrial pumps would fill up faster than one using its own air intake filters.

Even as he watched, a small blob detached from the station, drifting down to the gas giant ‘below’.

“Ever wonder why the military doesn’t use automated drones for more than just civilian stuff?” he asked idly.

“We do use drones,” Glider rumbled, not looking up from whatever she was using. “Though if you’re asking why we haven’t replaced you, me and everyone else on this rust bucket with cheaper automotons, I don’t have an answer for you.”

“You don’t?” he asked with genuine surprise.

The woman shrugged. “Apparently there’s a technical bottleneck somewhere according to an article I read. In which case, you’d know more than me.”

This time it was his turn to shrug. He’d have to do some research later, because the only bottleneck he could possibly imagine keeping the Imperium from legions of knock-off terminators was the AI.

Which was a shame, because he wouldn’t mind being made redundant, and thus not sat on his ass with little to do but stare out into the nothingness of space.

Which was why reality chose to spite him by making the section of space he was looking at suddenly less empty…