Travel and pilots

But they aren't going to be very skilled or loyal in that case and while the latter isn't a necessity it is preferred and the former is a matter of course. Either I'm gonna have to find a diamond in the rough driving a civilian ship but extremely bored or I'm finding a military pilot in a desperate situation that I can do something about.

I don't really want to spend any more money than I have to given what I had to use to entice Marianne but at this point it doesn't really look like I have a choice. Even then I'm not so sure I could even get a pilot. Maybe I shouldn't have excessively focused on combat power and got a cheaper mercenary.

But combat power is essential for this team to get them out of any scrapes or just plow through things where necessary. I mean without Marianne this whole thing falls apart. Not completely but it's like a small shrug could break the fragile glass and the whole team would be wiped out. While I'd accept a loss or two on the team this job I'd really rather not have them all wiped out and even worse captured.

Well I guess I'll just have to make up for my money management error with effort. So I go through individual ship logs and captains. Looking for anyone skilled enough to do what I want them to do while still being mentally stable enough that just putting them in a room with people like Marianne and Delilah wouldn't set them off.

Even with Amelie's support as a commander and Emily on site to give commands from me I'm not so sure there are many people who's personalities would work well with these kinds of people on the team. I'm not even sure Amelie will take up a commander role and Emily might be there for the briefing but there's no way they'd let her get close to the headquarters itself so she can't come along on the mission.

That means the only person there who is definitely taking up a commander role would be me. I'm a robotic voice in people's ears though. Even with the strength I can now simulate through my voice I don't think I could keep all these personalities in check.

Oh and apparently Delilah and Dalia are finally replying to my message. So is Marianne now that I see it. Sounds like Marianne's all for the mission. Well she doesn't seem particularly enthusiastic in her reply but the fact that she answered at all means she's enthusiastic.

As for the partners in crime. Dalia seems a little scared of me which is to be expected. Just as expected is the fact that Delilah seems annoyed or rather downright furious. Yep I can already tell who's going to be more of a handful. She's gonna rebel at every turn isn't she.

It's not like there are many criminals who would work for me willingly for essentially no pay so I didn't really have a choice and loyalty doesn't matter. After the mission they can do whatever they want but if they deliberately mess up the mission it could be a problem. Let's try to split the two up and perhaps do a little meddling to make them feel at home on the team.

Ok so all I need now is a pilot. Luckily while I was dealing with their responses I found something interesting. Not a person yet… Buuuuutt it's close enough. A bunch of people are disappearing in a certain area of the star-system. At first I it was some nonsense like an area filled with radiation or a star that keeps blowing up. I even thought at one point that it was just idiots all going to the area that's clearly dangerous just to test their metal. You'd be surprised how many people do that.

But nope they actually had a reason for it. Apparently the local priest wants a certain girl on the planet. So he sent his armed forces to 'cordially' invite her. It appears however that the girl was having none of that and didn't trust anyone.

So with an apparently improvised spacecraft from the planet's surface she managed to fight off the local priest's troops. Furious the priest tried again and again to capture her with no luck. Now he's just using her to dispose of troops who are too nosy for their own good.

Honestly it'd be kinda sad even if I didn't hear about the girl's story after. I however investigated her background and found she had a pretty hard life. She was a squirrel kin which is pretty common on this planet. They tend to live in the abundant forests there. The issue was that the girl was apparently 'cursed'.

Even in today's society there are some primitive cultures or races that see everything unusual as bad omens. This is one such case. The squirrel-kin are secular and don't interact much with the rest of the galaxy so they don't know but it's actually possible for a lineage that once died out to return through the later bloodlines.

Apparently the girl, her name is Lumi by the way, was one such dead lineage. Not knowing that meant that her extremely pack-like brethren saw her as 'cursed' and not of their bloodline. So they kicked her out as the 'cursed child'.

She ended up heading to the mountains to live on her own and did pretty well for herself judging by the satellite pictures I can get of what's happening now. She's got a whole factory and other stuff for flying equipment. Oh and her lineage was that of a seemingly snow white flying squirrel.

I presume she naturally prefers mountains and other cold areas because of her species and that's why she ended up there. Though it's also entirely possible that she just doesn't like people and ended up that way because of that.

EEEEeeeeither way, she's apparently got enough piloting skill that she can take down a fleet or two all by herself. They weren't very well trained and frankly she had the better tech despite it being improvised but her skill is still impressive.

Question is how do I recruit her? She clearly doesn't trust people and it's not like I'm an exception to that. In fact I'd bet she would ignore me even if I went through the effort to hack her ship's speakers or something.

So question is how can I entice her? What does she want more than anything else in the world? Does she want solitude? Better equipment perhaps? Maybe she just wants her mountain as her own territory?

Well lets try the first two and we'll see if that gets a reaction. I'm sure I could whip up some ships and equipment that fascinates her. Being someone who builds ships herself I imagine she's interested in how her work compares and even if not she'll probably end up wanting them to steal my tech and I wouldn't really mind.

It's not like she can spread it anyway. With that thought I decide to send over some prototype ship parts for the one I'm building for her. Oh yeah, I had the robots on the artificial planet start on that a little while ago.

Let's just send some parts her way and see if she responds. Oh I can also send some information about the situation she's in and what I can do about it. If that doesn't work then I'll just have to look closer into her background or just give up on her entirely.

As much as I need a good pilot I can survive without one. It will just take a tremendously large amount of effort on the rest of the team's part to make up for the absence. It might also happen to mean we lose a few members but in ideal scenarios that doesn't happen so all for the best outcome I guess.

Now that I've done my best to get a pilot I've only got a few more things to do before I work on personal projects. The company and whatnot really. I also want to build a few external bodies. I didn't have the tech or skill to make one when I was human but now I'm so much faster at processing things that I came up with a few designs already and can't wait to test them out.

First though lets find a place for everyone to meet up and escape to. No doubt Flux will be on their tail when they make their escape. Ideally that's not going to happen but realistically I can see it happening and have to at least prepare for the possibility.

So without further ado lets find a warehouse on an abandoned or primitive planet and buy it. Gotta make sure that it's well defended or at least in the public eye too. What that sounds like an oxymoron? Wellll see I need the place to be out of the public eye on the inside so they and I can have secret discussions about very criminal things.

Buuuuuut I also need it to be in the public eye so if Flux comes after us they have to answer to the public. They can't very well say 'Oh someone broke in and stole very important data and technology and we'll leave this planet if they don't return it so get out of our way' because not only would they lose a bunch of shares and trust from their backers but they'd also likely not be given the time of day by the citizenry since everyone knows how corrupt they are.

Soooooo lets start up a temple orphanage. It'll only take a few days to get things up and running with the connections I've got through Emily and that'll be a good way to hide stuff. The orphans wouldn't tell on us even if they could and orphanages are very much in the public eye at the moment especially when it comes to Flux.

Hehe while I was rescuing Emily I decided to anonymously tip a news station of what Flux was doing to the orphanage. I also got a journalist to 'accidentally' leak the fact that they got this tip so they couldn't just ignore it.

Because of that the orphanage has become significantly better managed though it's only until the public outcry calms down. Even better people are keeping an eye on any Flux connections with orphanages because of the news. Meaning they couldn't attack an orphanage if they tried.

So lets start one in an abandoned temple. Lets also have a few news reporters there on the day we break into Flux so they can see Flux's tyranny first hand. Oh I can't wait to see the look on the pursuers facers when they chase these hardened criminals into an orphanage full of reporters.

Anyway one quick purchase and an Email to Emily later and we're done setting up an orphanage. Now lets get to my own projects.

Amelie's perspective:

The message I got from this Mainframe character went something along the lines of 'You want revenge right? Well I want Flux gone too. Perhaps we could help each other. I've gathered a team of specialists to take them down and I want you to be a part of it. Meet me at X location if you agree to take part.'

I've never met nor heard of them before and they still want me to just go along with whatever plan they have going. They either have some nerve or are just that confident that I want revenge. Though being honest they have every right to be. I am after all currently in a space train set for destination who knows where per the request of this mysterious character.

They said they gathered a team but I don't know any of the members. They could just as easily be luring me out to murder me and yet I don't feel that's quite correct. If they wanted that they clearly have both my location and a way to track it. If they had the resources to murder me on some random planet then they likely had the resources to murder me anywhere given their tracking ability.

Maybe that's an excuse considering I do really want to believe they can help me with revenge. I am interested in their offer if it's genuine after all. I need a way to blow off some steam with Flux after all they've done recently and this is the perfect time to do it.

Even if it's not genuine I'm sure I can fight my way out anyway. I comfort myself with that thought as I hear the speakers announce our current location and destination. "This space train is currently in the.." It paused for a second here. Not because of the pause you often get with text to speech that used to happen but more because it was checking it's locator and database for where it actually is and the database is so large that it takes a serious amount of time.

It doesn't take long to deliberate however as it almost immediately continues. "star group: Malarie. Galaxy: Germinine. Solar system: Abby. Current ruling authority of this region: Papysee council of Maledge. Current course set for destination in local solar system. Planet donavore" The destination takes a little while to register for me. I don't think I've ever been there. For that matter I think I only ever even heard of it once or twice.

It's probably an abandoned planet or something. I mean it makes sense. Who would want to reveal to the public that we plan on attacking Flux. Keeping things secretive is a habit of the business. Still I do think it's quite funny we're having a talk like this in solar system Abby.

Abby was declared a saint a little over 30 years after she died. To explain Abby's sainthood you'd have to explain why Germinine became a patron saint. I actually think it's quite interesting the reasoning for the names of galaxies and systems being saints.

You see the papysee council or as everyone just calls it here the church, is actually a fairly old civilisation. They've been around since a few hundred years into the early space age. Their patron deity Malarie was actually the person who got equal rights for races and stuff back when space travel was a new thing.

Anyway since the papysee started themselves based on her teachings they ended up representing equality for all and a few other of her ideals. Because of that and the policy that Malarie designed giving everyone access to their basic human rights: food, shelter, clothing, freedom etc… The church became a sort of dumping ground for all the useless members of the other civilisations within traversable distance.

Except the church turned itself from a dump to a recycling plant thanks to a completely different saint. Anyway they've stayed around so long because everyone wants to send troublesome individuals from their society towards the church and in exchange the church will turn them into civilian personnel such as couriers.

They don't reform everyone and the couriers end up staying in the nation most of the time meaning people just lose good human resources to the church but because the church also made itself a trading hub people can't really complain.

That's why the church has been around so long and why if the church declares their area of influence to be the 'Malarie' star-group then people can't really complain. Though they have strangely little political or military influence because of their recycling program. Since this means they train only civilian jobs rather than military or political ones.

But hey I like that about them. Right I was thinking about the saints originally wasn't I. Well essentially saint Germinine and saint Abby were work colleagues. During the time before FTL travel people realized that eventually the star-groups were going to get so far away that they were going to be incapable of travelling between them.

During that time Germinine was a researcher and she created gear to try and help people communicate with others in different star groups which ended up being the backbone for quantum networking but that's another story. Anyway while she could invent these things she couldn't market them and so Abby came in.

She sold the products and marketed them and Germinine while she was at it. She made Germinine out to be well… A saint. Someone who cared about others families and wanted them to be able to communicate with each other and stay together. So she made back-breaking efforts to portray Germinine as someone who would never let someone suffer the pain of having their family ripped apart and marketed the communication gear under that narrative.

Whether that is true or not is blasphemous to think about apparently but more than likely Germinine was just a mad scientist and Abby was the true brains behind everything. Still it was a nice enough gesture to get them immortalised in the religion of Maladian so that's how they became a saint.

Interesting story right? Well this made Germinine into the patron saint of family, communication and fun. So imagine the scenario, people clearly committing or at least plotting criminal acts on a planet in the solar system of someone who got their sainthood from spreading the word and communicating with your families.

Kinda ironic right? Well I'm sure this planet what was it again? Donavore? I'm sure this planet Donavore probably has a backstory of it's own for it's name. Soph always found this kinda stuff fascinating and I had to listen which is why I can write up everything I just said word for word because it's almost a carbon copy of what Soph told me.

Reminiscing about my dead sister I arrive at my destination over the next few days.