Chapter 224: Touring

Glancing at the screen that depicted the landing pad I was descending to, my eyes couldn’t help but wander around the city that was entirely encased by a colossal energy shield. It was like one giant snow globe, but there were real people inside, with numerous vehicles darting around.

After months of patience and hard work, our prototype ship was completed, and I could finally venture out to the various major hubs of humanity in outer space. My first step was naturally one of the most well-known destinations, the moon.

Humanity has romanticized the moon for countless years, and in this world, vacationing on the moon wasn’t something ludicrous. It was one of the most developed settlements away from Earth with practically every single company of note having a branch here.

As I got closer, I noted how pristine the city was. It was a far cry from Aegis that looked like an aging industrial factory with a gloomy atmosphere. The moon screamed class, befitting for the wealthiest people in the entire human race.

Once I was close enough, my ship automatically connected to the city’s traffic control, which gave precise instructions for us to reach the landing pad through the air traffic. Along with it came a robotic voice that blasted from every speaker aboard.

“Welcome to Soluna. Please follow our instructions as closely as possible or you may be fined.”

Unlike the other space stations I’ve been to, Soluna had a fully automated system, making use of rudimentary AI. I heard that many of the shops here were automated as well, but I wasn’t too worried about it.

With the conception of our prototype spaceship, I didn’t forget to include my useful companion, Lanus, in the ship. With human resources set to be our main bottleneck, it would be foolish of me not to explore options that could mitigate the issue. Having a productive AI on board could do just that.

Numerous calculations and adjustments were all left to Lanus, and in this case, communicating with the automated port authority as well.

However, any onlookers examining my ship would only find it to be a makeshift pile of junk. Otherwise, it was just too suspicious of a mercenary suddenly showing up with a brand new ship. It would be practically screaming that I was corporate-sponsored, which was the last thing you wanted to be known as in the mercenary world.

With that in mind, we quickly descended onto the space station and I started exploring the city—or so I wanted.

“Alert. Missing spacecraft licenses in the system registry. Soluna Port authority will be locking down the vessel until the issue is resolved.”

“Yeah, yeah. We knew about this already,” I said. “You’ll go handle it, won’t you, Echo?”

The giant cyborg slowly panned toward me with an unamused look and sighed. It was Thorne.

“Whatever you say, Captain Shake.”

We had known our lack of license would be an issue, but it wasn’t something we wanted to address in Aegis. It would be too obvious. Our cover was to be mercenaries. There was no need to risk hacking into the consortium’s records for just a license. I simply could apply for it officially.

I did wait until we reached Soluna to register because it made it harder to track our origin. We could’ve flown over from Earth or from one of the other stations within the system. It would make it easier to sell our backstory of having hijacked a ship from pirates during our trip.

“Hey, it’s not all that bad. Just some paperwork. I’ll be there for the interview, so that’s all you have to worry about.”

“The paperwork is exactly what I didn’t want to worry about,” Echo replied.

I shrugged as we stepped off the ship.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Tell the bot you’re illiterate or something and do everything verbally. I’ll leave it to you.”

With that, I hopped out of the landing area and into the greater city of Soluna. Numerous people crowded the streets, with all of them seeming to be well-off corpos. I wasted no time in turning on my navigation software, leading me to our local contact.

I was soon brought to a noodle shop where each seat was partitioned. I sat down in one of the chairs and allowed it to take me away, heading down like I was falling. The artificial gravity was set to be the same as Earth, so I felt nothing off as I was swooped away to the back kitchen.

“Sir!” one of the chefs saluted. I recognized him to be one of our earliest agents within the intel department. While they had expanded in recent years, it was still good to see a familiar face.

“How’s the local sentiment about us around here?” I asked.

“Sir, as one would expect of a newcomer like us, our brand isn’t even talked about at all. Most of them aren’t even within your target market either, with the average age of those who are interested being almost double your parameters.”

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“That’s fine. We’re still new. But did you manage to start some rumors about our generous employment conditions? It’s more important to stir up appeal at this stage.”

“Somewhat, sir, but the workers here don’t congregate like they do in Aegis. Most company forces them into their dorms, much like we do.”

“So the complex environment with so many companies present has caused everyone to play it safe, I see. Focus your efforts for the next few days to raise up the anticipation of our hiring.”

“Yes, sir!”

With my orders given, I was swiftly brought back to my little partition within the restaurant. I finished a bowl of ramen like any other guest in the restaurant and went on to my next destination, the equivalent of the Haven bar back in Elevate City. Its name was Tranquillitatis, and I learned about it from Amos.

With my power armor projecting an image of a gruff mercenary with a large frame, I strode into the bar. I scanned the venue and found many people dressed in plain corporate clothing, unlike what I was expecting from a den of mercenaries. But then again, like Aegis, in these highly regulated cities, it was the norm for local mercs to take on another job as a cover.

Blatantly displaying yourself as a mercenary would just draw the wrong kind of attention despite how useful they were to corporations to use against their competitors.

Few professional mercenaries operated outside of Earth. To be one, it required them to own a ship, so they could freely traverse the expanse, where no corporation could easily track them down in retaliation. For this same reason, independent mercenaries were more valued by companies, as that would mean fewer loose ends.

I sat down at an empty table and began calling my contact. No one answered even after calling three times, so I decided to give it a few minutes. I signaled for one of the staff to come take my order, and a young woman quickly approached me with a smile.

She had a ponytail full of plain brown hair, or so I thought. Her hair glowed vibrantly from within as if they were light strips.

“Welcome to the Tranquillitatis, sir. What can I get you?”

“Just a glass off—”

“Oh, wait. Let me guess,” she interrupted, drawing closer to me. “Are you perhaps looking for Mare?”

I blankly stared at her, confused, but in reality, I wore a frown underneath the projections upon hearing her mention the name of my contact.

“Umm, are you perhaps Mare, and that was some pickup line?” I asked.

“What? No. I’m talking about how you’ve been trying to reach Mare, right? You’re from Aegis?”

Seeing how she confirmed her involvement, I no longer played dumb.

“In that case, yes.”

“So, what are you looking for? Work?”

“Exactly. Something easy to get me used to this place.”

“Okay, one Gelatin Cider, coming right up.”

The girl retreated into the back and quickly returned with a drink before walking away without a word. I picked up the cup and casually examined it for a few moments, and learned that I could remotely connect to it.

Once the connection was established, I quickly found a list of tasks with brief descriptions. It listed stuff such as asset retrieval, elimination, and search and rescue. There weren’t a lot of details, but judging from the reward listed, they shouldn’t be too hard.

I selected one and signaled for the same girl when she walked by and she took my drink away. Not long after, I received the bill along with a small data chip. As expected, it had the details I needed to complete the task.

With my errand complete, I went to rendezvous with Thorne.

I found him at the consortium office closest to where our vessel was moored. He was still in line with dozens of others. I walked straight up to him under the watchful gaze of those others in the queue.

“Almost done?” I asked.

“Just the interview left, as you planned. It’s also been boring as hell, just like you suspected. I can’t wait to get this over with.”

“Good, because I just picked where we should go next.”

“Already? Send me the deets.”

I did as he requested, and he soon looked up at me blankly. I soon received a call from him through our company’s internal systems.

“This isn’t like you to pick something so simple. I expected chasing down pirates or something that will get you in the good grace of some potential recruits,” Thorne immediately said. “This is still a search and rescue mission, but what’s the point of earning the gratitude from a bunch of jobless nobodies?”

The mission I selected was something Thorne and I had done many times. It was to rescue a bunch of people who had been taken because they couldn’t pay their debts. The people they owed money always had a way for them to pay them back, and in this instance, it involved human trafficking. There wasn’t much information on what the debt collectors planned to do with their victims, but I doubt it was anything good.

While this gig sounded like doing a great deed, the benefits of it paled in comparison. The family members of the kidnapped had put up the task, and the money they could offer wasn’t enough to cover the potential equipment damage for a gig like this.

On the surface, this task only offered us useless connections.

“Don’t be so quick to judge. We just got here, so we shouldn’t jump straight to anything big. We need to build a reputation first before any QGs would entrust us with any big tasks. Besides, this is just the type of publicity stunt we need.”

“Publicity? I doubt anyone would care about rescuing a few bums.”

“Well, the bums have mouths on them, and if they’re jobless, they must have a lot of time on their hand. Including their family members, it wouldn’t be surprising to expect some old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing to work, right?”

“Whatever. It doesn’t hurt to try, I guess.”

Before we could discuss any further, we were finally called into a separate room where we would be interviewed by a member of the consortium.

A middle-aged man gestured for us to take the seats across from him as he reviewed the contents on his handheld terminal.

“So, Mr. Echo and Mr. Shake, I see. Your little group has applied to register a ship that you flew into the city with. May I ask where you came into possession of this vessel?”

“We found some parts from one of our jobs, and we pieced it together over the years. It survived our test flight here fine, so we’d like to register it.”

“Oh? Salvaged goods. Do you mind if we checked for any old serial numbers?”

Before I could respond, Thorne—or Echo, to be more precise, broke out into a coughing fit.