This flotilla-city was a collection of habitats, shops, ports, warehouses, med labs, and the other common buildings a settlement would need (bars and restaurants aplenty), along with bits of the asteroid itself fastened together with metal pipes and connected by spaceways. It was impressive, but also hard to navigate given the lack of planning. Some of the spaceways gave a nice view of space and the surrounding spaceways, but using that to navigate was unreliable.
In short, from inside the spaceways, it was a maze. Traders believed this was a maze on purpose, to make it easy to hide, escape, and transport anything the Celestial Customs and Commerce Commission (4C) didn't want transported without their official stamp, things like bulbous plumeria plants. Bulbous plumeria plants have many uses, but the most common is medicinal, where they help with acclimation of the human body to a space environment - everything from breathing to digestion.
Dear Itokawa, I thought to myself. I'm sorry about the bulbous plumeria farm, and for destroying your lovely asteroid. To be fair, it was only a loosely connected bit of rocks to begin with. We should have been warned about its structural integrity. But still. I'm sorry. My bad.
That was 197 years ago. I was sure the Itokawans would throw a huge party for the 200th Anniversary of their destruction and resurrection, a party that everyone in the solar system would want to attend but probably couldn't, to celebrate their resiliency. That was a party I wanted to crash. Sneak into the 200th Anniversary of The Fracking on Itokawa, I added to my mission log.
Itokawa was pretty cool if you thought about it. They hated miners, whom they now called "frackers," so if you wanted to start a rebellion or get yourself thrown out into space to die, all you had to do was affiliate yourself with a mining company or say something stupid.
I would never do that.
Itokawa also didn't have potatoes! They had gangs, miscreants, smugglers, gamblers, debtors, unlicensed medics, biotic enhancers, runaway aiways, you name it. It wasn't perfect. But no potatoes! I was sure they had some backroom Hot Potato match somewhere, but I'll be damned if I have to suffer through another meal of potatoes paired with drinks of potatoes. When we got back to the ship from our meeting with @diamonddocker, the first thing I did was grab a nice cold glass of filtered water, before proceeding to an evening on the toilet.
The next order of business before heading to Itokawa was to get a new paint job for The Pharaoh. I couldn't be the fancy merchant for this part of the mission. Yes, I was playing the same character, but on Itokawa, if I showed up in a golden ship in a fancy suit, I would probably not make it down more than a few hallways before being abducted or killed. Fancy people did fancy business in other places, like around Bar None. Here, fitting in meant going unnoticed until you wanted to be noticed.
@horus was just going to have to accept that a paint job wasn't technically a modification. I also justified it by telling myself that he probably didn't know all the details of the mission.
I was going to miss the gold and blue on The Pharaoh. I figured maybe I'd revert to that color scheme when it made sense to do so. But, for now, I needed to blend in.
There were plenty of places in space to get work done on a ship, and I had a decent number of qcoins at my disposal as part of my Vanquisher position. Part of the mission budget would go to repainting, with a shop far enough away from Psyche to discreetly alter the ship.
We stopped at Steve's Ship & Shop, located on "the Pit," a small space station that could barely be called a space station. It was little more than a refueling outpost with ship technicians, a convenience store, a hotel, and a fast food joint called Planet Delicious.
Steve and his team lived up to their glowing reviews. They refabbed The Pharaoh and turned it into a black and red beauty. As much as I missed the gold and blue, when Steve showed me the ship, I over-enthusiastically hugged him repeatedly.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
"Now THIS is a Dominator worthy of a Vanquisher!" I screamed, then realized that Steve probably shouldn't know about all that.
I could have panicked. I did consider shooting him before he could stash his memory of the moment. Instead, I opted for promising him more business on my ships. My Extronet data queries told me this was not unusual, especially at The Pit. I'm sure he knew something was up anyway. People don't just go around mucking with their ships for fun. It's expensive work.
I liked Steve and most of the folks in his shop anyway, and I figured I would need a mechanic, @horus be damned. Steve told me all about his folk rock band, The Heart Wrenchers, his mother's obsession with knitting, and his dog, Puffy, who sported a knitted sweater and loved to sit on people's laps.
While the ship was being prepared, Puffy helped me find a new outfit. I had to ditch my purple and black fancy suit. The suit needed to be incinerated anyway after my issues with the potato beverage, but I was happy to see it go. Not my style. I couldn't find anything on Psyche that didn't have potatoes on it, in it, or around it. @astrowave might like his I'm a Baked Potato shirt, but I was done with potatoes for a while.
I had a few options that I picked out at Steve's Ship & Shop. The selection wasn't fantastic, but I picked up jeans and a gray hoodie. I threw in a black knitted cold-weather hat his mother made for good measure. He wanted to give it to me for free, but I insisted.
My outfit for Itokawa included one more key item. The Alliance Starmada had provided a real leather jacket. It had to be real. In most parts of the system, this would indicate that I was in the leather trade, cattle, goats, etc. But in other parts of the solar system, leather meant human trade. Leather was also part of elite fashion, or "old Earth" fashion, so it wasn't like everyone wearing leather was a trader. The first signal, however, of a tradesperson was that they wore real leather. The second was a simple letter, inked in temporary ink so it could be altered, on the middle of the forearm or on the ankle.
4C would sometimes ask people to show their arms or ankles to check. C for cattle. G for goats. H for humans. Of course, no one put the H there. Instead, all I would need to do is tap the middle of my forearm with two fingers (middle finger and index finger, which is the letter H in old American Sign Language).
I realized, after staring at myself in the holo-projector in my jeans, gray hoodie, and leather jacket, that this is what I would choose to wear if I wasn't in an Alliance Starmada uniform all the time. Maybe not the real leather jacket. I didn't feel super comfortable in it mentally, although it was a very comfortable jacket physically. I felt much more at home dressed down like this, and it started to sync in that as a Vanquisher, I'd be able to do this most of the time. I would only need the uniform for official Alliance Starmada business.
We flew into Itokawa and made for the Port of Alloy, its largest port of entry. Not that it was huge. Itokawa had been regrowing at a high rate ever since I fracked it apart, forcing the population to build the spaceway maze and other new structures. Suddenly, it was more popular. Unsavory, but popular. Yes, I'm trying to find the positives. In some ways, I hoped, by destroying it I had helped it evolve into something better.
But if I'm being fair, crime also skyrocketed. This was the smuggler capital of the solar system. The Celestial Customs and Commerce Commission (4C) had a presence here, but it was understood that some of that was for show. When 4C tried to exert more influence, bad things happened to them. The thing is, 4C is not a Union orAlliance agency. It was one of the dozen or so organizations that supported both and operated at the solar system level, with mixed success in different parts of the system.
Here, in neutral territory, you would think 4C had more influence, but the reality was that Itokawa didn't care at all about the rest of the solar system. No one here really did. They wanted to get away from all of this. These were people who clung to the outskirts, entrepreneurial folks who just wanted to be left alone. And they had guns. And they had gangs.
I pulled The Pharaoh in and landed among the Port of Alloy towers, where they had long-term docking for 40 moderately sized ships. There were similar towers in different regions of Itokawa to accommodate visitors, and rates were expected to continue going up as the area grew. Ships coming and going to drop off and pick up from Itokawa had their separate zones. We would have to shell out a few hundred qcoins for a three-day visit. I took docking space Blue 29, Port of Alloy.
I hated leaving the ship. The Pharaoh was starting to feel more like home in these few early days with the crew. We did puzzles and played games in the common area, spent nights watching movies together, and generally had a peaceful trip. But there's work to do.
Among the crew, I hadn't really gotten to know @foxcutter very much, so I opted to have him join me on Itokawa. Besides, this was a nefarious place by reputation, so having a biodatascientist who could do some extra hacking and sensory extravaganza would be handy.
I forced him to pick from the other clothes the Alliance Starmada thought I might need. They thought I needed the leather jacket, but we didn't know where the path would take us. @foxcutter ended up in gray pants and a light yellow long-sleeved shirt that he cuffed at the wrists.
We set out from the ship to get ourselves in trouble.
Get yourself into as much trouble as you can get out of.
That's one of my mottos in life, and it described this mission pretty well. Itokawa, here we come.
rascal words of wisdom (or just stupidity).