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The drop out of zerospace did not feel that exciting to Apollonia at this point.

But Brooks had made a point of inviting her to the bridge for their arrival, and she did not want to be rude.

Every one of the officers were tense, and though she was distracted thinking on other things, it felt impolite not to be paying attention.

“Surfacing in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!”

She felt the strange pull as they came back into realspace, and then the spherical screen that surrounded the command center came on.

Ahead of them she could see a distant space station.  It was large, apparently – not as big as the Chain, but it was big.  Other dots in the distance, slightly too large and dim to be stars, glittered – other space stations.

She’d heard of Gohhi Station, of course.  Though there had once been a single station here, it long pre-dated humanity even arriving in the system.  And like how her own home system had split and split again, when people in Gohhi got tired of the leadership or felt too crowded, many simply left.  Thus the occupied area of this empty patch of space had grown and grown until it was teeming with stations great and small.

“Gohhi Main,” Ji-min Bin announced.  “We are in the queue for docking, with three ships ahead of us.  Docking wait is approximately four hours.”

“About how long it’ll take us to even get close enough,” Urle noted.

“Well, the Gohhi have to play their games,” Jaya commented.  “If we say anything they can rightly point to our velocity and make us appear unreasonable.”

“Really?” Apollonia said.  She froze, wondering if she should have spoken.

But the officers merely looked to her curiously, waiting to see if she’d elaborate.

“I mean, uh – do they not like you here or something?  Because it sounds like they’re trying to just find a way to be rude without actually causing you an incovenience.  It’s . . . you know.  Rude.”

“That is exactly what they’re doing,” Brooks said.  “Making a point in the most cowardly way possible.”

“And they’re our allies?” Apollonia asked, looking at him.

“I wouldn’t say allies,” Brooks said.  “But they are merchants and we have much to trade.  They are, however, threatened by the fact that our economy is not based on private ownership – and so they attempt to keep us at arms-length.  One way they show that is with these petty games.”

“Why so cowardly, though?”

“Because,” Jaya supplied.  “The Sapient Union represents, by far, the majority of humanity, along with Dessei, Sepht, and . . . well, all Bicet, as far as I know.”

Cutter looked over at her as she spoke, and clicked his mandibles, apparently in agreement.

“No factionalizing,” he said.  “Healthy for species.”

Apollonia was unsure what to say to that, thinking of how little she knew of Beetle-Slugs.  People had always described them as being uniform, lacking individuality and personality.  In a way, a metaphor for how the Sapient Union was viewed.

She could see it wasn’t true of the SU as a whole.  But she still hadn’t known any Beetle-Slugs long enough to know if there was any truth to the claims about them.

Cenz spoke.  “Gohhi has the largest non-solar population in the known galaxy!  And given the mix of species, both from within and without the Sapient Union, it has one of the most varied as well.”

Apollonia squinted at the distant stations, then brought up her tablet to get a zoomed view.  They were big, sure, but not as large or fancy as the Chain or Korolev Station.

“I kind of expected to see more planets,” she admitted.  “Rather than just more space stations.”

“Really?” Cenz asked.  “While most intelligent species do hail from planets, it is true, the majority of advanced beings in the galaxy live in constructed stations.  Typically around a star, but also extra-stellar like this.  They certainly outnumber terrestrial beings by a substantial margin!”

Apollonia could see how it made sense.  A world could only support what, ten or fifteen billion comfortably?  At least if you didn’t want to wreck everything.  But some systems had tens of trillions of beings . . .  Even if you colonized other worlds, the majority would have to be in space . . .

Urle pointed to the screen, and a circle appeared, zooming in.

“Glorian task force,” he noted.  “Appears to be fifteen warships, from battleships to light cruisers.”

“What are they doing here in such force?” Cenz asked.  “Though that is not enough to threaten Gohhi, it is . . .”

“Threatening all the same,” Jaya said.  “Such intimidation tactics were once common in human history, often called ‘showing the flag’.”

Brooks was watching them intently, Apollonia noted, and his face was full of distaste.

She knew about the tensions with the off-shoot of humanity . . . and of course she had heard of the Glorians.  A substantial amount of the entertainment she’d known back on Hellrock had come from their space – always violent, always jingoistic, usually centered around some team of soldiers or investigators who were former soldiers, and usually foiling some kind of alien terrorist plot in the name of defending their civilization.

“They’re nothing to worry about,” Brooks declared.  “If they were to start violence, it won’t be here – they’d get nothing except Gohhi turned against them.”

“All the same,” Urle noted.  “I think we should keep a few sensors trained their way.”

“Absolutely,” Brooks agreed.  “They’ll try to drone-dive us by ‘mistake’ a few times to see what they can learn.  Deploy our own drones in a normal formation, but ready to move into blocking positions.  I’d like to cause them some frustration.”

“Aye, sir.”

Apollonia was looking at their trajectory, noting that they were headed towards the Gohhi main station – even though there was another station not far away that was marked as belonging to the Sapient Union.

“Don’t we need repairs on the ship?” she asked, looking up at the Captain.

“Yes,” Brooks replied.

“Then why are we going to the Gohhi hub, and not an SU repair station?”  She looked out at the glinting hub for Gohhi.  She knew of the place by reputation, and from that she knew it was far more like New Vitriol than the Sapient Union.  The graft and price gouging alone would probably dwarf the cost of actual repairs.

“It’s Gohhian law,” Urle answered.  “There are guilds for things like ship repair, and if we wanted to maintain our own station, we’d have to register as a corporation.  Which, well, technically we do, but that requires very strict information sharing on our services and technicians, which we do not desire to share.  So while we maintain a repair station for certain things, we don’t actually cater to our own ships.  Instead, we cater to independent ships who don’t have a home port, which helps popularize the Union and means we can keep key proprietary technologies to ourselves.”

“So . . . we’re just going to let strangers on the Craton instead?” Apollonia asked, frowning.

“We vet all workers that come through the guilds, but we also don’t let them into sensitive areas.  By hiring a contractor we can stipulate where they can go, what they can do, and what information they can share.”

“It’s hardly ideal,” Brooks added, dryly.  “But that’s the cost of maintaining a presence in Gohhi.  They will try to cheat us, and to a certain extent we will pay higher fees to get our windows replaced, but we’ll also take our own actions to keep the graft down and force them into something roughly analogous to honesty.”

“Windows . . . irony is that everything we buy will probably have been created in an SU system anyway,” Urle grumbled.

“What do we do to make them be honest?” Apollonia asked.

“They rib us, we rib them,” Urle said.

“We push for improved worker’s rights by demanding very strict safety protocols and paying them fair wages – which is far more than they typically make,” Brooks explained.  “This means paying the contractor company more, too, but also wins us friends among the people who matter most.”

“I imagine a lot of them would want to leave with the ship . . .”

“It does happen,” Urle said.  “Which, frankly, is something the Gohhians hate.  But like anyone else, if they want to come to the SU, they have to go through the right channels.  We can’t take on refugees unless they’re being politically persecuted.”

Brooks shifted in his seat.  “Which reminds me – Cutter, would you take the lead on the negotiations over prices?”

The Beetle-Slug engineer turned in his seat to look at Brooks, then nodded sharply.  “With pleasure.”

Brooks smiled, looking to Apollonia now.  “They hate dealing with Cutter.  And he loves it.”

“Captain,” Shomari Eboh said, turning in his seat.  “You are receiving a priority message from Sol.”

Brooks nodded and looked at his HUD.  His face turned more serious, Apollonia thought – contemplative.

He rose.  “I will be in my study.”

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