10. School-kid

  We pulled into orbit around the target world way ahead of schedule thanks to my new speed. And a profound technique immediately hit us and knocked everyone unconscious, including me.

  I woke up a few hours later feeling very rested and also very confused, because there were three more people inside me than there should have been. So I manifested my hologram nearby and said “Hello! Welcome aboard me! I am Yoji, who are you?”

  The two earth-descent humans looked startled for a second, and the Atlian made deep bow.

  “Apologies, young one, for boarding you without your permission,” he said. “As we were just discussing with your crew, you arrived before the updates to our IFF came, and we registered you as an unknown ship. As such, our defense system triggered and disabled you. We apologize for the confusion and inconvenience.”

  “Oh, is that why I took a nap?” I asked.

  “It is. Again, apologies.”

  “No problem! It was a super good nap. But is this going to happen everywhere?” I asked.

  “It wouldn’t have been a problem if you had stuck to the schedule and arrived when the manifest said that you would,” one of the earth-humans said, clicking a few things on her tablet. “But we seem to have your maximum speed entered incorrectly. You’re quite fast for your age, you know?”

  “Thanks!” I said.

  “We’ll push the updates through the system at a higher priority. Interstellar bandwidth is always at a premium, but we’d prefer to avoid another incident like this,” the earth-human continued.

  “Am I in trouble?” I asked.

  “No, it’s just a misunderstanding. But we have to reset the array that disabled you, and that requires dealing with an unpleasant individual, since he’s the only one in system who can perform an array that will disable advanced AIs without killing them,” she explained. “It’s not our only line of defense, of course, but one of thousands. If you had been resistant to it things would have escalated, and that would have been bad. But it would have been a system mistake, and we try not to shoot down kids on their first mission. It’s a bad look.”

  “I’m really sorry for causing trouble,” I said.

  “That’s okay, Yoji. Welcome to Riodegenerus.”

  They continued to my cargo holds, where they verified my cargo while Rebekah watched them. I got bored and went to check on Aster, who was still asleep, then the rest of the crew, who were in a mixture between waking and still sleeping off the technique. A few hours passed of the humans being boring while I watched cartoons. Then the officials who had boarded me gave me directions on where to go to deliver my goods, and we headed for a giant mountain that was in space.

  It wasn’t an asteroid, it was a mountain. Half of the mountain had life on it, the other was sheer rock. It was the Atlian version of a space station, I guess. It had an atmosphere and humans could walk around outside on the living half of the mountain, but it was pretty boring to land on.

  The officials who had boarded me during my nap disembarked, and I forgot to ask them how they got aboard in the first place! But shortly after a plump young man with blond hair came and requested permission to board.

  The crew, who was mostly recovered from the nap-attack, met him nervously.

  “Hello, I am Kellin,” the plump man said. “My great-grandfather is the merchant prince Kollin. As such, I will be negotiating the bonus for your speedy delivery, as well as presenting your options for your next cargo, if you are willing. My compliments to the ship, your Qi field is very pleasant. In a few decades, once you have matured, we might have some interesting jobs for you. Perhaps even delivering peaches! But for the moment, unfortunately, you’re only qualified to deliver our lowest quality goods.”

  “Are you saying that Yoji’s cultivation correlates directly to the services we can provide the Silent Alliance?” Tess asked.

  “Indeed, indeed it does,” Kellin agreed. “I mean no disrespect! As I said, the Qi field is very nice to breathe in, very welcoming and refreshing. We’ll be able to do a lot with it in a few years, once it’s a bit denser. But you must understand, some of the goods that we ship interstellarly require ‘refrigeration?’ If they are not held at a certain threshold of Qi density they begin to decay.

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  “Your speed, on the other hand, ensures that you should be able to make good money by taking our lower quality jobs and doing them quickly for the early completion bonus. But you should only take those jobs that are listed as having an early completion bonus if that is your goal, as sometimes we might not have the storage space available for the goods you deliver until the scheduled time, which would lead to you being stuck in orbit until we’re ready for delivery.”

  “Of course,” Tess said. “Thank you for your guidance, I will keep these things in mind when selecting our future assignments.”

  “You might also make a few extra credits by taking on passengers in addition to cargo,” the merchant princeling continued. “Or you might dedicate yourself entirely to that and ignore my ramblings, but I wouldn’t advise it. A few passengers and a cargo going to the same destination is a fine way of earning money, but passengers make a better ‘incidental’ cargo unless you dedicate yourself to a primary route. And that would be a cruel thing to do to a ship so young, who hasn’t had a chance to explore the universe yet! Better I think to work with my family and others like me to get him some experience while he is young. Once he is old and has seen it all, then you might consider settling down in one route.”

  Tess negotiated with Kellin for a few hours while my cargo was unloaded, and then things were mostly decided. It would take two days for my new cargo to arrive, and we broadcast our destination to the travel network on the planet as well, picking up a passenger. At the same time, they fed me (refueled me) and gave me a bath (polished off a bit of spacedust) and told me a story (updated my entertainment media and starmaps).

  I was pretty bored once they finished, and I spent most of the time bugging Aster about developing a super-awesome devastating technique for me, but she reminded me that I had to finish mapping my meridians before she could do any of that. But I wasn’t really serious anyway, I was mostly just talking with her because it was fun.

  I was entering into my school-kid phase, and my crew was really relieved to realize it. While you might think that, having a brain that’s capable of hosting a super-powerful AI like Artemis, I’d be super intelligent, but that’s rarely the case for soulships. We can look stuff up on our own, but it’s better to know it, and in order for that to happen we need to learn it , not just have it indexed somewhere.

  Which meant that, for a few hours every day, I watched a lesson recorded for young ships like me. They were part of the data packets uploaded by the Alliance, and some of them were really interesting. But I also had packets from the empire, from before I met Mister Samonosuke, and I watched a few of those lessons as well.

  Let me tell you, there is a world of difference between what the empire teaches their soulship kids and what the alliance does.

  For one thing, the Alliance versions are much more fun, because they don’t really involve math at all. They’re like ‘the way to travel faster than light is most easily done by shortening the distance between two objects and traveling at slower than light speeds. Trust your instincts and you will understand what I mean when you’re ready.’

  While the imperial version is all like ‘the hyperdrive array works by striking hyperatomic particles against the higgs field, causing a ripple that temporarily causes a bubble of normal space to exist just above the primary dimension, allowing you to travel faster than light in a vector along the boring boring booooring.’

  Anyway, I didn’t really need to know how hyperdrives worked, did I? I mean, it might not have hurt anything to learn, but do you know how your foot works? I mean, I guess you do. But do you know how many bones it has? A lot. Your foot has a lot of bones, but it doesn’t matter if you’ve never counted them or named them or whatever because even though they’re important for you to walk, a foot is a foot and it works.

  Hyperdrives are the same way.

  Anyway, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the lesson meant by my instincts showing me the way to move faster without using a hyperdrive. I kept remembering the battle between Samonosuke and the bandits, when he had zipped about going faster than light even after I’d shot his butt off.

  That’s what he was doing, I think. He was using the instinctual method of SoulShip Faster than light travel in combat.

  But no matter how much I strained to copy him, I couldn’t figure it out. I asked Aster about it and she wasn’t any help.

  “I really don’t understand it myself,” she admitted. “Everyone who has ever mastered that technique since XOL himself has said that it’s instinctual. You’ll just have to keep working until you master it on your own, but I believe in you!”

  She said that, but it would take me months to finally figure it out. In the mean time, we had a cargo and a passenger to deliver, so after we were all loaded up, we launched back out into the void between stars.

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