boy who knew things.
ALCOR had made a deal with them when Tray and his brothers landed. ALCOR wanted access to the galactic web. He wanted to communicate with people again. And even though Tray had no clue why he was there on that station before that moment when ALCOR made his offer, he was one hundred percent sure why he was there after he made that offer.
Answers had come spilling out of his mouth. He had no clue where those answers came from. But the words came out anyway.
This train of thought led him right back to Canis.
“How do you know about these girls?” Tray asked Canis. “How do you know where this place is?”
Canis took his time in answering, like this question was important and he wanted just the right words to explain himself, and then he said, “I don’t know. I have no clue, Tray. All I know is that this is the right answer.”
It was almost the very same scenario playing out, all over again. Like… like… something on a loop.
Was that fate? Luck? Coincidence?
Tray didn’t know. He would probably never know.
“Does that bother you?” Canis asked.
“No,” Tray answered dryly. “Not at all.”
Canis laughed. He was sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge. His feet were swinging because they didn’t reach the floor. “Maybe you should be more suspicious of me?”
“Maybe I should. But I don’t think it would matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because when I showed up on ALCOR Station twenty-one years ago I had a plan too. I had answers too. And I didn’t understand one bit of it. So if I am suspicious of you then I’d have to be suspicious of myself.”
“Maybe that’s a good idea? Maybe we should be suspicious of each other?”
“I think it’s too late for that, don’t you?”
Canis shrugged. “But what if we’re doing the wrong thing?”
“Canis, no matter what happens next, leaving girl minds in this containment facility to be enslaved later will never be the right answer.”
Canis thought about this for a few minutes. Then he nodded his head. “Agreed. OK. I’m not going to second-guess myself anymore. I’m going to tell you the whole plan.”
“You mean there’s more?” Brigit asked.
“Yes, there’s more. We need to get all these minds back to Harem Station.”
It took Tray about half a picosecond to deduce why the girl minds had to be taken back to Harem Station. And then it all started to make sense.
“Because I hear that Harem Station keeps a giant fleet of ships in the docking bay.” Canis looked up at the ceiling. “That’s true, right?”
“It’s true,” Tray admitted. ALCOR was forever building ships. That was one of the first things he’d ever taught Tray and his brothers when they arrived. They all had to build a ship. Even Tray. Though he hadn’t done much shipbuilding after that one initiation project. “There are hundreds of ships on that station at any one time.”
“How many of them have minds?”
If Tray had a body he would have shook his head. “We personally have Lady Luck, Big Dicker, and Booty Hunter. Every once in a while, we get a new sentient ship in and we always have a few dozen who come in with their responsible party. But any ship without a responsible party gets assigned one fairly fast. Harem Station makes money three ways. The Pleasure Prison virtual. That’s our number one source of credits. The Princess Harem, of course. That doesn’t actually bring in a lot of credits. Most people can’t afford them. But the second most lucrative business we run on Harem is the ship-building. ALCOR gets a finder’s fee when the sentient ships come in and he pairs them up with a new responsible party and engineers a new transponder for them. But it’s the regular ships we build on the station that bring in the credits.”
Tray had never thought much about ALCOR’s shipbuilding business, but ALCOR was very particular about the number Harem Station had to have on hand available for sale. Tray had always thought it was because ALCOR liked a stocked showroom. Having hundreds of brand-new ships in the docking bay made this business look legitimate and flashy. The number of ships for sale would never dip below three hundred and sixteen.
He didn’t have any idea why that was the number, it just was. They often had more than that number. But if someone came in looking for a new ship and ALCOR had three hundred and sixteen exactly, and not a single extra, then