Chapter 8

Two days after we arrived at the first of my planets, we docked at Mir-11 and the government types swarmed aboard. The Gorokian weapons had them nearly wetting themselves. I think several did wet themselves when they saw the Gorokian fighter I brought to sell them.

Between the technology items they bought, the ores they wanted, the weapons, the fighter, the android pilot, and the android flight crew and ground crew for the fighter, I think they paid me half of what they had collected to date for exploration and mineral leases they sold in the new territory.

The girls insisted on having dinner at the Spacer’s Grill, the same restaurant chain that we visited on the Tomkit Station the last time we were here. “Were you at the Tomkit Station a few weeks ago?” our waitress asked when the girls ordered a bowl of Perseus paste.

Evidently, the girls were now legendary among the employees of the Spacer’s Grill. Not surprisingly, Tashia didn’t care for the Perseus peppers, although she loved the milk. Nathan and Felicia just laughed as people stopped by to watch the girls eating a bowl of the purplish Perseus paste. While we ate, the androids were busy aboard the Demeter and the Cornucopia arranging the remaining cargo. I had a feeling that the waitress was flirting with us, but I already had my hands full. I did leave her a tip of ₮10,000 that she would never forget.

After dinner, I called my family to warn them that we were inbound, and then transmitted a list of our remaining cargo to the Terra Ceti commodities board, listing our arrival time as 0600 local time. We loaded the two finished smaller freighters aboard the Phaunos so the androids could start adding weapons and AIs. Then, we used the gate to Terra Centauri where I was a little surprised to find three extra ships tethered to a geosync anchor in orbit above my parents’ place.

A quick data dump from the corvette I left there let me know that I was right to leave protection for my family. Three times, someone tried to kidnap a member of my family. Everyone involved was currently a prisoner aboard the corvette. I made Felicia and Nathan promise not to say anything to my family, as they were blissfully unaware of the threat, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Everyone was excited to see us back, especially since it was the first time Felicia and Nathan had gone. Everyone commented on how much younger the two of them looked, and we commented on how much younger the rest of the family looked. I had to laugh at the creativity my brothers showed. They started using the slaves I left to make porn videos and had a rapidly growing presence in the porn industry. They even started a live-feed porn channel.

Nathan and Felicia called it a night at the same time I did. They decided that they liked the quiet of the early mornings, which meant going to sleep earlier. Besides, they had to take the Phaunos to Iota and Planet Alpha tomorrow to load it with timber.

For the time being, I assigned Ramina to go with Nathan and Felicia, and had Simpta fill in for her, although any of the androids could do it since they all shared the same information. In the morning, as soon as we exited the Terra Ceti gate, Simpta let me know mentally that the station had assigned us Berth 1 again, and there were dozens of ships waiting for us.

Several timber buyers were disappointed with the limited amount of timber we brought back but I explained that my brother was bringing in more tomorrow. I had to amend that a few minutes later when Ramina let me know they were inbound with two pirate ships aboard.

That caused quite a stir among the buyers since pirates this close in the system were rare. These two ships had been waiting near where I usually made my jumps. Ramina spotted them using the probes I left in the area. She launched a probe ahead of the ship, making the electronic signature of the probe match that of the ship.

“You should have seen it!” Nathan exclaimed. “As soon as they fired on the probe, we fired the rail guns with your newest ammo. Rather than destroying the ships, the rounds disrupted everything electrical within a hundred feet around where they hit, including the engines and power sources. The pirate ships were dead in the water, on emergency life support, and didn’t have a single breach in the hull,” Nathan bragged.

“The boarding party used stun weapons when they could, and more than half of the pirates survived. They’re shackled and under guard in one of the cargo bays.”

Since I left the two small freighters in orbit above my parent’s home, I had the corvette send a skeleton android crew to the three captured ships and then accompany them here. The two pirate vessels were unloaded and the pirates shackled aboard the Cornucopia. Once that was done, Felicia and Nathan headed out again. My androids were still interrogating the pirates that attacked Nathan, and were getting lots of good information when the corvette and three small ships arrived.

I was only mildly surprised to learn that one of the disgruntled diamond buyers who barely met the opening bid and didn’t get any of the diamonds was behind the pirate attacks. When we interrogated the men sent to kidnap my relatives, the story was the same. The buyer sent people out three separate times to kidnap someone in my family so he could force me to tell him where the diamonds were from. When none of the three attacks succeeded, he decided to hire pirates. How he knew pirates was beyond me, but as shady as he was, I was sure he knew more criminals than just the pirates.

Since the Phaunos hadn’t quite reached a point it could jump, I was able to send Ramina a mental message to bring back all of the diamonds except the blue diamonds. I let her know the rest of my plan so they would be careful returning. I planned to save the blue diamonds for the Emperor or other Gorokians. For whatever reason, they loved blue diamonds. As long as I could get as good a price from them as the Karkallian buyers would offer, I was happy. Because I wasn’t gouging them on the price, they were happy, too.

I filled out and submitted the claim form for all five captured ships, claiming them as captured pirate vessels, and offered the three small ones for sale. They were too small for me to use, but I kept the two cargo ships, sending them to Mir-11 with a skeleton crew of androids to have the ships upgraded. These would work with the ore refinery platform, selecting asteroids and guiding them towards the ship where they would be sliced, diced, and then smelted.

As the day progressed and the cargo disappeared, more and more of my androids worked on the hacker’s two cargo ships. I named them the Coeus and the Crius, after two of the Greek Titans since they would be shuttling stuff back and forth between here and my Greek letter planets. We were installing the rail guns, the sensors, the cloaking, and the merged AIs--all the good stuff I wasn’t ready to fully share with Terrans.

When the last of the cargo was gone, I left a tentative ETA for the arrival of the Phaunos sometime around noon so that interested buyers could be there.

I arrived home just in time for the girls to drag my family and me out to dinner. Once again, they ordered one of every item on the menu, this time to let Tashia try them. We all laughed as Tashia made faces at the foods she didn’t like, and mmmmmed at the foods she found surprisingly good.

As we left the restaurant, I sent a mental command to our shuttle to pick us up. Instead, they cautioned me to stay inside the restaurant. A cloaked shuttle had arrived a few minutes ago and seemed to be hovering just above the exit. I had my cloaked shuttle meet us by the rear exit and ushered my family back inside, explaining that there might be a danger outside of the front door.

Donning our enhanced body armor, I exited the front door with a dozen of my armed and armored Gorokian military androids surrounding me. My corvette was overhead, ready to intervene if necessary.

Six of my androids exited the building ahead of me, ready to trap an attacker between them and me. Seconds after I left the restaurant, all hell broke loose. The six androids in front of me and I were each hit with multiple rounds fired by shooters inside the shuttle. The burst of data that hit me told me the rounds hitting us were meant to stun a person. They didn’t expect me to be wearing body armor or be guarded by androids.

The corvette and my androids returned fire, quickly silencing the guns from the shuttle which took off headed north with the corvette in hot pursuit. “Is everyone okay?” I asked needlessly. I already knew my androids and I were fine but asked for the sake of appearance because of all of the people who quickly showed up to find out what happened.

Even before the shuttle arrived to pick us up, the corvette let me know that they captured the ship. It had headed for space, and the corvette used the new rounds on it that shorted out the engines and power source. The cool thing about doing this is that it was less a matter of permanently frying the circuits than of temporarily disrupting them. The disruption lasted for roughly four hours before the circuits stabilized again.

Boarding teams made quick work of disabling and capturing the survivors. By the time we got the family home, the androids interrogating the survivors got the same response that we’d gotten earlier--the diamond buyer.

Rather than wait for his next attack, we pre-empted him. Eschewing the inter-system gate that would record my arrival back at Terra Ceti, we made the jump to Terra Ceti and showed up where the shuttle was supposed to go if they were successful. The dealer had an impressive array of Terran weaponry installed in the building to protect him, but the weapons had no effect on the battle armor and personal shields my androids wore.

Twenty-three minutes after our arrival at his headquarters, my androids led the dealer, who was now wearing a slave collar, aboard the corvette. It took six more hours and two hundred androids to strip the building to the walls and load everything aboard the Cornucopia. With the slave collar on, I had no trouble getting him to drain all of his accounts into one Mette opened.

To prevent anyone from tracing the transactions, she opened a hundred different accounts in as many different banks, electronically deposited the funds, and then transferred them to another account in milliseconds. Then the accounts were closed, and all reference to them permanently erased from the bank’s computer, which should have been impossible.

He had a surprisingly large inventory of expensive goods squirreled away in his headquarters. Those that we, or he, could identify as stolen, we anonymously dropped off outside the closest police station with his recorded confession about who stole the goods, who they belonged to, and how he had acquired them. The confessions implicated at least fifty other criminals.

Between his confessions and draining his accounts, there would be a lot of pissed off criminals looking for him. Much of the money in the accounts he controlled belonged to other criminals. One of the things he did was launder money for criminals, and more than half of the money in his accounts was money he was laundering.

We made the jump back to Terra Centauri and arrived in time for me to catch one whole hour of sleep. I made sure the androids would wake me so I wouldn’t sleep later than usual. The fewer people who knew about what we did last night, the better.

The nanites allowed me to be surprisingly energetic when I woke up. The girls wanted to know what happened last night, and I told them that I took care of the problem permanently, much the same way we took care of the hacker.

By the time we left for Terra Ceti to meet the Phaunos, my androids had gone through everything we took last night. Most of it we donated anonymously to charitable organizations, but some of it mysteriously appeared in front of the Ceti City central police station to add even more credibility to some of the accusations my prisoner made against other criminals.

The Phaunos arrived shortly after 1100 hours and the timber buyers immediately descended on her like starving termites, eager to get at the timber, especially the tall trees. An android accompanied each buyer to record their bid. That allowed me to try, for a few seconds, to keep up mentally with the furious bidding war. After about ten seconds, I tuned it out, reminded once again about the potential problem of information overload the mental communication could present.

The diamonds I had Nathan bring back were initially intended to lure the man we captured last night so that I could capture him. Instead, I decided to go ahead and sell them, and posted them on the commodities board with bidding starting at 1500 hours local time.

The buyer making the rings and necklaces for the girls arrived early with the finished sets. They were magnificent, and I told him so, and then ordered six more sets. “My fiancée has some strange notion that more wives are better and more prestigious. Who am I to argue? Isn’t the woman always right?” I kidded. He laughed with me as I paid for both the five complete sets and the six additional sets, but I honestly hoped that we didn’t use all of them.

The bidding on the diamonds went quickly. A couple of the buyers commented about the man I captured last night not being there looking for a steal, although they had no idea that he was now missing. The sales of the timber finished at almost the same time. “That was crazy, but nothing like the marketplace on Toolondo,” Felicia laughed as we looked over the empty cargo bay we were standing in.

“Think you can handle a trips every week?” I asked Nathan.

“Hell, yeah,” he replied excitedly, but who will pilot the other ship?” he asked.

“The androids,” I replied.

Tashia almost looked shell-shocked. “There was so much happening at once,” she said, almost reverently. “You said that the marketplace on Toolondo is busier?” she asked Felicia.

“Much busier,” Felicia replied. “You should watch from overhead the first time,” she suggested, and brought up video of our last visit to show her.

We moved to a different berth so someone else could use Berth 1 and finished reloading the ship for the return trip to Toolondo. Nathan warned me that there were four cargo containers of Perseus peppers ready on Planet Alpha. “Already?” I gasped. Growing up on a farm, I knew crops took longer than six weeks to produce ripe fruit.

Mentally, I checked the onboard library and found that Perseus peppers usually took sixty days from planting to first harvest. I also learned that they produced continuously until frost or cold killed the plant. If the plants survived the winter, they would eventually reach six feet tall, producing hundreds of pounds of peppers per plant each year. As long as we shielded the plants during the annual flooding, they would be hugely prolific.

Feed for the cattle and another ten stasis cargo containers filled with bottles of ice-cold milk were loaded and we were ready to leave before noon. Giving Felicia a hug and shaking Nathan’s hand, we climbed aboard and prepared to depart once Ramina was back aboard.

I stopped at each of my other planets on the way to Iota. The Phaunos headed straight for Iota to load the tall trees while the Demeter headed for Planet Alpha to load timber. Both ships dropped off additional androids to help harvest timber, compliments of the rogue diamond buyer. They also left two more cargo shuttles and more sonic cutters. The Phaunos also dropped off six more of the MAREs to help speed up the recovery of alluvial gold.

On Nu, I picked up three cargo containers each of the five different colors of marble, as well as the ingots and diamonds. Despite only having the new mining pods for diamonds for a few days, diamond production was picking up already.

One of the androids showed me something unusual they found. While planting seeds for the tall trees, they found several lumps of fungus growing among the roots of the tall tree they cut down. After analyzing one, they realized that they were like truffles that were found only on Earth. So far, none of the other Terran planets had anything similar to truffles, despite repeated efforts to introduce them on the other Terran planets. Despite efforts to repair the ecological damage to earth, truffle production, and overall agricultural production, has declined continuously for the last thousand years.

Having never tried a truffle, I had no idea if these tasted the same as truffles from earth, but they were good. My quick mental search of the library aboard the Cornucopia told me that these potato-sized truffles were larger than all but a handful of truffles found to date on earth. I told them to go ahead and harvest any they found and to keep them in stasis for Nathan to take back. The androids assured me that they could locate any that were in the top foot of soil. If the truffles were accepted, I’d send more androids to help with the search and harvest. I took four with me to see if the girls liked them enough to take them to Karkalla in the future.

“Tadolas?” Tiyya asked questioningly when she saw them.

“These are a fungus that grows among the roots of the tall trees. They are similar to a fungus on earth that is considered a delicacy. Terrans call them truffles,” I explained.

We had sliced truffle, or tadola, with dinner. The three girls loved it, but it had a decidedly different effect on Tashia. We had just found an aphrodisiac for Gorokian women. The rest of dinner was forgotten as an impromptu orgy ensued in the dining room. I had all nineteen of the truffles brought aboard to take with us and advised them to harvest all they could find. Even if they didn’t go over well on earth, they would be a hit in Karkalla and especially in Goroke.

By late the next morning, the ships were all stuffed and we headed out of the solar system to make our jump. Planet Alpha now had two human helpers, although they had to be fed and accomplished much less each day than an android. One of their tasks would soon be to grow and prepare their own food.

All of the plants were thriving, and I left a message for Nathan to bring more androids, more equipment, and more seeds or seedlings, as well as young orange trees and banana tree pups to plant here. I might as well use the planet to its fullest capacity. I also wanted a few of each plant taken to Iota since the plants there seemed to be growing even faster than the ones here.

It was weird walking around Nu. On other planets, either I needed a spacesuit, or I could just walk around normally. On Nu, I had to wear a mask over my mouth and nose that extracted oxygen from the carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere. The mask gave off methane with each exhale. It stored the excess oxygen it created from the atmosphere and filtered out the excess carbon dioxide so I could breathe.