The hatch under the nose opened with a touch and a wide ramp smoothly lowered. Marty scampered up and into the ship. I knew from experience there wasn't much to see in there—three chairs, some redundant control consoles, and a small cargo area. There wasn't even an engine room. It was more of a space car than a space ship, if you get my drift.
I followed Marty up the ramp. He was sitting in what I thought of as the pilot's chair, the one at the very nose of the ship. As far as I knew it didn't matter what chair you sat in to fly, but still.
"This is amazing. Seriously, Jake, I want to fly this thing. I'll do anything. Want a slave? You've got one. Just let me be the pilot."
"Hold on, man, no slaves needed. Let me think about it. Maybe if you're good enough, you can be the pilot. We can't have you wrapping this thing around a mountain or an asteroid or what have you."
"Whatever I need to do. How do you fly this thing, anyway? There's no joystick, or yoke or whatever."
"The Union isn't real big on physical controls. There's a skill implant to fly her in the outpost library. I'll show you."
It took a minute to show Marty where to go in his Interface, but he picked it up quickly. I looked at the list, noticing some entries that hadn't been in the station database. I resolved to come back to it later. My skill implant queue had been empty for a while.
"I can train all of this? What, I can just learn how to speak Chinese, just like that?"
"Yeah, it's awesome."
"That can wait. Piloting: Redemption comes first. Damn, I don't have any Nanite Clusters. This says it will cost one."
"Brick, can you give Marty access to three hundred Nanite Clusters for whatever upgrades he needs, as well as any materials for those upgrades? Get him a Combat Vision Augment too, or an Engineering one if you prefer that, Marty."
"I'm all about the kicking ass. Combat, please."
I rolled my eyes. "Fine. Remember, though, this first bunch is free. Let's call it a signing bonus. You're going to have to work for your pay after this."
"No doubt! You don't know me that well Jake, but I've got a hell of a work ethic."
The only part of his work ethic that I had seen so far was the part where he ditched his job at the Sheriff's Department to go on the run with me. I hoped it was better than that.
"Three hundred Nanite Clusters and a Combat Vision Augment are on the way, Jake. I will place them in the outpost's storage arrays."
"Great. Remember Marty, if you upgrade your Transcendent Flesh it'll knock you out for a while, so make sure you queue it all up at the same time. Stat upgrades and the Flesh upgrade."
"Got it," he replied, his eyes not leaving the Interface as he rapidly paged through screens.
Marty was completely absorbed and didn't even notice when I left the control center in search of something productive to do.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Found our Lead
NEARLY TEN HOURS LATER I was deeply concentrating on the design I had spread out in front of me when Brick broke hours of silence. Marty was passed out on a cot nearby, his upgrades in progress.
"Excuse me, Jake."
I had been fully in the zone, and I was pretty sure he knew that. I had been working on a knockoff version of my Gazer. We had that limited run blueprint, but it only had one use left. If I busted too many more weapons, we'd be done. Besides, I thought I had some ideas to make it better. The mental thread I was following evaporated as I was knocked out of my flow state.
"Shit. What, Brick?"
"I believe I may have found the materials we need to complete the Redemption."
"Really? Tell me, and patch Metra in for this."
A moment later, Metra spoke up. "What? I was working."
"You're always working. Let Brick tell us what he's found."
"Thank you, Jake."
"As you know, I have been hacking the planet."
"Stop it, Brick."
"I have so far been unable to find anything useful in determining who took the gate materials. I continue to devote a portion of my resources to doing so.
"However, early in the process I discovered some of Mattias's old activity logs. Your grandfather spent a lot of time compromising computer systems on Earth's Internet. Some of that access is still available. The actual data he found is no longer present, but there is some indication that he found evidence of a Union materials cache here on Earth."
"Really? Wow. I never pictured Grandpa as a hacker."
"Mattias was a very resourceful man. Earth's Internet is amazingly insecure. Nearly everything is connected to it, which makes penetrating secure facilities largely a matter of finding where the personnel have gotten lazy."
"When you say secure facilities, what are you talking about?" I asked.
"The target facility is officially unaffiliated with any government that I can find. At least, I have been able to find no record of it in the Pentagon or State Department files I have access to. Since it is in the United States, I have not searched other government databases. It is, however, guarded by military hardware and personnel.
"So a black facility then, nice."
"What does color have to do with anything?" Metra asked.
"I'll tell you later. Go on, Brick. What did you find?"
"I compromised a music streaming service, gaining root access to their servers. Factually speaking, I compromised all of the music streaming services. However, only one has been fruitful so far. I then put an updated version of each of their apps into production. This app was designed to use security flaws in the base hardware or software to gain root access to the hosting device."
Music streaming was how pretty much everyone listened to music. That was millions of devices Brick had compromised. I was impressed.
"With full access
