Chapter 2

While Maxwell snored in his box, the Guardian maintained his eternal watch. He watched the postal workers as they operated the postal facility. There were ten of them. Some directly dealt with customers, others worked in the backrooms, and some drove small trucks and directly delivered packages to mailboxes.

He knew all of this through a combination of advanced scanners and sensors, as well as small camera drones. These drones were miniscule and effectively invisible. They also had cloaking devices, downsized versions of the ones Catalum ships used. They could see on every level of the electromagnetic spectrum and had enough penetration to see on the other side of a solid wall.

Imperial ships wormed their way into every space and system they could find because nothing was going to stand between them and their charges. Physical, digital, or otherwise. He had a wide range of computer viruses at his disposal for digital spaces. The typical imperial ship was able to see everything around their charge.

Combine this with the kilometer-long supercomputer inside their hulls, and even a Catalum Corvette was able to predict ten minutes into the future every action that everyone could make.

Not that his charge was in any danger, of course. This planet was safe by imperial standards. The most powerful organization on the planet, the one whom the person his charge was mailing itself to be a citizen of, was completely unable to challenge the lone corvette on an even battlefield. There were other organizations, including some that were not so secret as they thought, but nothing within a hundred kilometers of this place would even consider his ward something to go after. But even if it came to that, there was always the option of revealing his presence with a bunch of particle lasers and plasma cannons should he be unable to defuse the situation and get his charge to safety.

The Guardian watched the postal facility the rest of the day. He watched them interact with a few dozen customers over the remaining hours that the facility had before closing. His charge was untouched and still sleeping in its box. As the planet’s rotation neared star-set, the activity in the postal facility died down. It eventually closed; all its workers signing out and going home, the little creature none the wiser, still sleeping in its little box.

The Guardian stood watch for the rest of the night.

By the time Maxwell woke from his slumber, his box had already gone through the local post office’s checking and logistics and paperwork. His box, and other boxes and bags destined for the community down by the coast, were being packed into a small truck for local postal operations.

The Guardian watched the planet’s star rise over the horizon and postal workers come in for their shift. The facility woke back up as people clocked in. People opened the building for business as usual and got to work shuffling packages towards their destinations.

As the box was loaded into the small truck, the creature woke up.

“Me wake. Bump. Box bump. What news?”

“Nothing happened while you were asleep. You were safe in the night.”

“Night! Night dark! Dark bad!”

“You can’t see anything in that box. It might as well be pitch-black outside.”

“Oh. Me okay then.”

The Catalum homeworld was in a star system that contained three stars. It was a trinary star system with a larger, heavier star in the center, and its two small fast-moving planets, and then a smaller star that orbited it, with its own planets, and a small third star on the edge of the second star’s gravitational influence, where a gas giant would have been. Between the second and third stars were a trio of planets that were held in place by their gravitational forces.

The center star was a yellow giant. The second star was also yellow. The third star was a red dwarf. The Catalum homeworld was the second of the three planets orbiting the orbiting star. It was a moderately-sized rocky planet with some vulcanism but not quite the same degree as this planet where his charge’s new owner was located.

The set up of the three stars basically meant the Catalum homeworld’s surface was constantly bathed in soft light. The creatures that evolved on the planet would evolve to be surface dwellers, crevice dwellers, or adapted to the inland sea in the southern hemisphere. The creatures that would eventually give rise to the Catalum species were surface dwellers, as they were small and obvious prey for predators that lurked in the crevices. These proto-Catalum would eventually evolve some level of burrowing ability, to provide shelter for younger members of the species as well as to access new food sources.

But they would be very reliant on sight and dislike the dark crevices. It had been one-hundred-and-fifty-million-solar-years, measured using this system’s local measurements, since the Catalum people took to the stars not out of choice. And they were still apprehensive about being in dark places.

The reality was a bit more nuanced than dark places bad. Individual Catalum were okay with being in a dark place so as long as the walls of that place touched their body. In layman’s terms, they were okay with dark tunnels and burrows that they dug, but not a dark open cavern between the planet’s many plateaus and mesas. Maxwell had not noticed the darkness in his little box because the box touched the sides of his body.

“Box moving. Lifted. Carried.”

A postal worker picked up the box that the creature was residing in and carried it to his small truck. He positioned it on the very top of a stack of boxes in the back. Most of the boxes he was carrying on his delivery route were rated as fragile, so he would take care of them.

A few more trips between the small truck and the postal facility and the truck was full. The worker fetched keys for the truck and got it ready to go.

“Vroom. Vroom. Me like sound.”

Maxwell heard the sounds the small truck’s engine made and decided he liked those sounds.

The Guardian didn’t exactly like the design of the small truck. Compared to the box truck, it was slow, underpowered, and easily damaged. It wasn’t that the box truck was much better, though. The box truck was also underpowered. But it was bigger and less easily damaged. The Guardian would look into maybe slipping this postal service the designs to something better.

The driver of this truck drove out of the postal facility’s back lot and got out on the state road. He drove down it for a few kilometers before getting off, the first section of his route. driving down the smaller roads along the north to south state road and dropping those boxes off at various houses along his route.

“Box bump.”

The box in the small truck lurched as the small truck temporarily slipped off the rural road as it made a turn into another rural road. The box bumped into the wall and other boxes.

“Box shift.”

It shifted somewhat. Not enough to be a worry, for all three of them: the ship, the puppy dog, and the truck driver.

The Guardian heard the driver curse under his breath about under-serviced rural roads.

The driver spent the next two hours driving to houses and dropping packages off. His charge’s box was not dropped off at any of these houses.

“Box deliver?”

“No, box not delivered yet.”

“Okay. Tell when deliver, okay?”

“I shall do that, my Little One.”

“Me not so little!”

“Yes, you are. To me at least. That’s why I call you my Little One. I won’t have any more say on this.”

“Oh. Okay. Me wait then.”

Maxwell was a perfectly normal average sized Catalum. That’s why he said he wasn’t so little. He was not little, compared to most Catalum. There were absolutely some Catalum that were a bit smaller, and some that were a bit bigger, but the reality was that the average Catalum size and weight came to about Maxwell’s level.

Maxwell, as all Catalum were, agreeable with basic information, especially if that information came from their ships. Of course, The Guardian was many kilometers long, and that’s why he ended the conversation there. Catalum sometimes forgot how big their guardians were. They were children, even the ones millions of years old. Children sometimes forget.

By the third hour of the driver’s trip, near the end of his first of two drives, the driver finally neared the destination that maxwell was mailing himself to. He was the last package in the truck and was bouncing around in the back. The creature was not in any danger; the bouncing wasn’t that much all things considered. But he vocalized every bump and movement because of course he would.

“Box bump.”

“Uh huh.”

“Box bump. Shift, too.”

“Yep.”

“Slide. Box hit wall.”

“I see.”

“Box shift. Another wall. Bump.”

“Of course.”

And on and on. Maxwell ignored his ship for the time being, more focused on what his box was doing in the back of the small truck.

Eventually, the truck came to a stop. This was the destination of the drive. Maxwell was at his New Home.

He was still in the box, though. There was no way that small creature was getting out of that box on his own.

The driver got out of the truck. He went around back and opened the trunk-side.

“Door loud!”

The door was only moderately loud. But it was the snapping open mechanism that startled the little dog.

“Box grabbed. Box carried.”

The postal worker had grabbed the box and was carrying up the steps towards Maxwell’s new home.

The new owner’s house, as determined by The Guardian, was one of those southern plantation type houses. It was a boxy square two-story house on a slightly raised foundation with a first floor and second-floor wrap-around balcony. Box columns held up the balcony; there were a grand total of twenty columns, four on a given side and one for each corner. There was a set of double doors on each floor and one at the front and back of each floor. A front door, a back door, a public front balcony door, and a private back balcony door. There was a cosmetic observation fixture on the tope center of the roof.

Aesthetically, the house was mostly white. The window shutters and roof were black. The concrete foundation was left unpainted.

Surrounding the house was a modest garden for the size of the house, which the Guardian noted was a tad over thirty-one-thousand square feet. Beyond the garden was a large lawn with southern oak trees. Beyond that on the left, right, and back was a mixture of oak forest and oak woodland. Deep into the forest was a clearing with a lake; a path led from the back lawn through the forest to this lake.

The Guardian quietly investigated the house and property. It was a rebuilding of a much older plantation house that looked very similar to the one built by the new owner’s family over a hundred years ago. The Guardian noted that the house was rebuilt by imperial services. More specifically, a frigate passed through the area, demolished the old house, and built a new one in its place. It went unnoticed because Catalum ships were able to function in their full non-offensive capabilities while cloaked up and halfway across the star system.

Frigates were the Empire’s diplomatic barge ship. They were a perfect cube, one-hundred-kilometers on each dimension. Their job was to facilitate contact and negotiations between the Empire and local civilizations. A typical space-faring civilization, especially those that were in the galactic-scale level, would sometimes have flagships as powerful as corvettes. Frigates were large enough to get the point across that they would not mess around with the Empire, but small enough not to be that intimidating. They were, of course, intimidating, as they were twenty times bigger than the largest flagships. But they weren’t moon or planet sized. The Empire found that people were a lot more apprehensive about planet-sized diplomatic battlecruisers.

The box was placed upside-down upon its destination, the doorstep of the caretaker. The creature did not mind his position. The mail carrier rang the doorbell and left, having more deliveries to make in his second drive before his day was done. Catalum were well adapted to being upside down, though usually they were attached to a ceiling as they slowly walked across it, while being upside down. This was something they evolved to be okay with from their time in the homeworld.

“Box upside down.”

“I see, Little One.”

“Where Owner?”

“It would seem that he is not here.”

“He? Owner is he?”

“It doesn’t matter if he or she, but yes, the new owner is like you. He.”

“Okay.

“When owner come?”

“Unsure. I will investigate it.”

“Okay.”

“In the meanwhile, you may go to sleep. I am unsure how long the owner will take.”

“Okay. Me sleep. You wake Maxwell when owner is here?”

“Yes, I will wake you when he comes.”

“Okay, then. Me sleep.”

The creature started to snore, still upside down in the box.

The Guardian used its sensor and camera drones to scan down the property. He found no trace of the owner at first. He knew what the owner looked like. The new owner was a man in his early thirties with blonde hair and blue eyes, a slender build, and a quiet look in his eyes. There was obviously something off with him that the Guardian could recognize. All he had was the picture and name of the man. The man’s name was Jake, a one Jacob Jones.