C: Launched

Rafaela leaned back in the pilot's chair that she had flopped down into after she had finished arguing her ship into NOT scanning potentially explosive devices.

She couldn't help rolling her eyes when the ship complained, "A maintenance drone has just actively scanned the object and is now carrying it off!"

"Good," she said firmly.

"But," the system began to protest.

She cut it off with, "If the station accidentally sets something off, it's not our fault, and picking up after things and keeping the docking area clear is the drone's job."

"This station does seem to have an unusual number of drones," her ship commented.

Rafaela sat up straighter and asked, "How many?"

"Over three thousand," the ship reported after a moment.

She blinked and then shrugged as she informed the plump fairy with the worried expression, "That's actually a low number. Some large stations have tens of thousands."

"Brennant's station only had 30," the ship argued.

"His station was tiny compared to a city sized station like this," Rafaela pointed out.

"I've finally received approval to launch," her ship reported.

"What?" Rafaela asked blankly.

"I finally figured out why all of my applications were being automatically refused," the ship announced a bit proudly. "We were misidentified as a cargo pod, since we arrived in the automated cargo system. We'll be towed to the first ring to be launched again within a few minutes, and this way we don't have to use nearly as much of the limited reaction mass we managed to take on."

"Launched toward where?" she asked after a moment.

"Toward the second planet, but we have just enough mass that I can safely change our course toward Brennant's station, so that we can acquire the rest of the old core data," her ship explained. The pudgy avatar on the screen looked oddly hopeful.

The delay in her response was longer this time as she weighed her options and the prince's words. "But he told us to stay close?" Rafaela muttered querulously.

"I judge that being launched by the cargo system is less risky than trying to maintain an undocked position within the automated cargo docking system," her ship argued.

"We could just dock again," she pointed out uneasily. "The drone already carried off the thing that guy shoved through the door."

"You've been attacked here, and so have Eks Corp's Princes. You aren't safe aboard this station," her ship argued.

Rafaela couldn't really argue it's logic, although she hadn't known that Brendan had also been attacked. "The prince was also attacked?" she asked warily.

"Yes, although there is very limited actual data that the station allowed me access to, I could try to bypass its security," her ship offered almost cheerfully.

"Don't!" she objected immediately. She might have credits in her account for now, but she also had a hundred places to use them all, and didn't want to be fined for letting her ship hack into the station's system.

"Then we should allow ourselves to be launched," the ship insisted.

Rafaela frowned. Guilt gnawed at her as she considered the way Doris had been taken away, but after a moment she nodded. "Okay, but first inform Brendan that we're going."

"I've sent a message," her ship replied after a minute, "but he's not responding, or picking up the call."

Rafaela hesitated again. But when she tried to imagine what she could even do, aside from notify Eks Corp Security that their two princes were possibly in danger from an Eks Corp Security team, she came up blank.

"We are being towed into the launching ring," her ship informed her. "You should get into the medical pod again."

She blinked at the now serious face of the little fairy on the screen in front of her. "The medical pod again?"

"The cargo system is set near the limits of unaugmented human acceleration tolerance, since the pods aren't supposed to carry passengers," the ship informed her authoritatively.

Rafaela wasted precious seconds before the screen displayed a new message from Brendan that asked, 'You're still aboard your ship, right?'

The question irritated her for reasons that she couldn't explain. "Reply: Yes," she instructed as she moved from the chair to the medical pod.

Her eyes took in the warning icons on the list of supply levels. Reaction mass wasn't the only thing her ship was short on. Some restocking had already been accomplished since Brendan had left, but not everything.

"Are you sure this is safe?" she asked a bit worriedly. "There are more empties than there were."

"Those are all things that this station doesn't supply. None of the sources I can find in this system supply them. Everything needed to treat basic wounds has been replaced," her ship assured her.

Rafaela frowned as she finished shucking her clothes and triggered the pod to close. From the interior access she pulled up a larger view of the list of supplies. The ship was right, the list of red dots matched the items that she hadn't been able to find for the system either. The change was simply that now all of them were apparently completely empty.

The first ring's boost caught her in the middle of reading her own treatment log, as she tried to find out what the beyonder medical system might have been putting into her, and why. The acceleration was even rougher than the deceleration had been, and a groan escaped her before she blacked out.

Seemingly moments later she roused again to the disorienting floating feel of no acceleration at all, and the voice of her ship announcing calmly, "…reaching the second ring in 30 seconds."

She drew a sharp instinctive breath and half choked on the ventilator in her mouth. Suddenly her surprise at the closeness of the outbound rings changed to worry that she'd been out a lot longer than it had felt like. Before she'd even finished bracing herself for it, the next rush of acceleration shoved her flesh into her bones again, and her consciousness slipped away.

"In a minute," the voice of the ship informed her as she struggled groggily.

"In a minute?" Rafaela asked with confusion.

A very brief pause preceded the reply of, "We are accelerating again in 48 seconds." A moment later the ship added, "45."

"How long are we averaging between accelerations," she asked more clearly, thankful that modern ventilators didn't prevent speech.

"About five minutes," the ship replied almost gently. "Approaching the third ring in thirty seconds."

This time, she was ready, and when she recovered consciousness again the ship's countdown was still above 2 minutes.

"Is the acceleration amount dropping?" she asked with confusion. Usually a body would take damage from each boost, and so people would recover more and more slowly. It was one of the reasons that the cargo ring setups weren't usually used to carry live passengers in this system.

There were systems on record where passenger conveyance ran through ring systems that accelerated or decelerated them much more slowly. But it was a vast investment to create so many more of the expensive ring stations, and for a young system with good ion drives available, the magnetic rings which had to maintain set positions were too limited and too expensive to use for anything beyond the most heavily laden cargo routes.

"Not according to my calculations," the ship replied. "This seems to be a very well built and consistent cargo transportation system."

By the time they passed through the twentieth ring, Rafaela wasn't even completely losing consciousness. She clearly heard the ship announce with satisfaction, "We have reached our transport velocity. I am altering our course toward Brennant's station. We should arrive in around 62 hours."

"Were you just going to keep repeating that until I woke up?" Rafaela asked rather grumpily.

"The medical pod assured me that you were already conscious before I began my announcement," the ship informed her cheerfully.

"But sometimes I've woken up in the middle of a sentence," she objected as the pod began emptying in preparation for her release. She was starving.

"I'm sorry, I think that it has not completely adapted to you yet," the ship apologized.

"Adapted?" she asked. "I couldn't identify every substance that it wants to use, but the hardware seems fairly standard."

"It's estimations were not originally based on your body," the plump fairy said with a helpless wave of her little hands, as the main screen of the ship was revealed by the pod's opening.

"Having it completely scan me was the first thing you did!" Rafaela argued.

"Yes…" the ship answered slowly.