Traveling out to the station Isaac had told him about wound up being unsurprisingly difficult.

  Or rather, it turned out to be exactly as difficult as someone who properly thought it through would have expected. Derek … hadn’t.

  He was used to only needing to actually “travel” during times when he was on Fast Travel cooldown, and even then, that only ever meant a couple of hours on a plane or ship at most, even on the longest of journeys.

  Not only was the station he needed to get to well beyond the reach of the Fast Travel network, but so were all the best places from which he could transit to it. And any place where he could reach those places from …

  In the end, he went to Seoul’s spaceport, bought a ticket to get his ass up into orbit, and then took a passenger liner to the asteroid belt from there.

  The ticket was quite cheap, in fact. Whereas airplanes had hard limits as to how large they could get without prohibitively expensive enchantments, spaceships could balloon to vast sizes relatively easily, especially when you weren’t going for warships, which had a whole other set of concerns in need of addressing.

  As such, you could cram in a whole lot of people in something two kilometers long and seven hundred meters across.

  Oh, Derek was sure the ship was a big and grandiose sight from the outside, but he barely had even a second to view the exterior hull, windows in space stations being a bad idea, and the boarding tube’s clear walls being too short to grant a good opportunity.

  And now it was time for the safety breathing.

  If your Fortitude is below 60, do not hold your breath in the event of loss of atmosphere; the pressure difference will do more damage than the loss of air. If you find yourself hurled out into space and have abilities that can create light, use them …

  The usual nonsense, in other words.

  Of course, it wasn’t actually nonsense; it was of absolutely vital importance … to anyone who had never been on a starship previously. Outside of the location of the escape pods, there was absolutely no difference in safety briefings across starships, so he settled in with an e-reader, though he soon switched to reading over his progress instead.

  Two more [Skills] unlocked, though they were, most likely, the last of the low-hanging fruit. He’d made [Skills] based on the rest of the things he’d practiced that were actually suitable for knowledge-[Skills]. Anything more would doubtlessly require significantly more study, but it wasn’t like “reading” was hard to sneak in between other stuff.

  As for the [Skills] themselves, the first was simply a combination of engineering and electrical [Skills] with a smattering of maths thrown in because calculating stuff was a big part of both the previous things. And [Veteran’s Knowledge] had wound up in the mix as well, simply because being able to fix his own ship on his own would hopefully be a game-changer, and certainly an important place to focus on.

  The second, meanwhile, was only slightly less important, and that was warfare.

  And less important only in that he’d probably use it a lot less, and that, unless he leveled up a whole lot before he ran into his first problem out there, he’d likely be on the wrong end of a truly massive Level difference, which cleverness could only help so much with.

  As for the [Skill] itself, it was basically an acknowledgement of his studies, powerful in the sense that it would actively help him make connections, and once he leveled it past a threshold, he might wind up with a nasty set of abilities.

  Plus, there was the issue that its power most heavily drew from historic battles, and … well, most of those had very few lessons applicable to space combat.

  Though that did leave him with one question: what would happen if he obtained another version of [Veteran’s Knowledge] and threw it into the pot?

  A question for later …

  ***

  Then, after a quick layover in Ceres, the dwarf planet covered in haphazard construction that predated all safety standards beyond “if it can’t hold atmosphere, you’re dead,” he proceeded to a more out-of-the-way station deeper in the belt that mostly served asteroid miners and those who made their living farming space-related monsters, from where yet another spaceship brought him to a backwards-ass, as middle-of-nowhere-as-humanly-possible supply depot, where Isaac finally picked him up.

  “You know, if you’d told me you didn’t know how to get there, I’d have picked you up back on Earth.”

  “I figured you’d be busy,” Derek shrugged.

  “There’s busy, and then there’s busy,” Isaac replied. “Not having even two minutes to spare is a really bad sign.”

  That made sense. But Derek decided he wasn’t going to ask for that kind of help, not when he could get that part done on his own. Unlike …

  “Isaac, could you teach me [Veteran’s Knowledge] again?” Derek asked.

  “Sure … what happened to the first one?” Isaac asked even as he activated the teaching process.

  “Put it into an engineering [Skill], and it ended up epic,” Derek explained, accepting the taught [Skill] and fusing it with [Scholar of War].

  It wound up bumped up to legendary, without any actual changes to the description itself. Which meant that, while it had to have gotten better, the actual improvement would likely reveal itself during use.

  “I think it might upgrade everything by one rarity tier,” he suggested while sharing the [Skill’s] description, and was offered yet another instance, which he gladly accepted, restoring [Veteran’s Knowledge] to his status sheet.

  “Soooo … apparently, that’s the limit,” Isaac said, giving the empty air before him an annoyed look. “Seems like you’ll have to visit me every time you want another instance of the [Skill].”

  Derek shrugged. “One of your [Classes] is about teaching, the only one I have is about learning, I think that combination is overpowered enough already.”

  Though it would have been awesome …

  Isaac nodded, then turned away from Derek to open a portal, one that led to a practically identical space station. The same stainless steel walls, floor, and ceiling, the same bright lights that just barely resembled the sun, and the same kinds of ducting and electrical lines running along the ceiling for easy access.

  The only difference? Their destination was noticeably cleaner, and that was saying something, considering how devoid of dirt and debris most space stations were. A scientific space, Derek supposed … only to be proven wrong less than thirty seconds later, when Isaac led him into a cavernous … thing of gantries and habitat bubbles, the walls so distant that Derek wasn’t even sure that what he was seeing were walls, there was every chance they were simply metal beams so tightly clustered he couldn’t tell them apart.

  Though, admittedly, after looking around a bit, he did figure out that things only really looked messy from where the two of them were standing, in the center of the whole affair, there were easy ways to reach the metal shell enclosing the whole affair from every point in the gantry system. Also, there was a clear glass dome around them; the place wasn’t pressurized as a whole, though that much glass was its own kind of flex, considering the cost of reinforcing it to meet safety standards.

  But the thing that really drew the eye was the ships. So many ships … and most of them were vessels of war.

  Destroyers, cruisers of varying specialties, even what looked like a battlecruiser, going off sheer size alone. Also, it had enough visible guns to

  “How come you have all these?” Derek asked.

  “There are people who will build a ton of crazy shit given half a chance, and enough of that stuff turns out to be useful that I’m giving giving them that chance. These are the ‘good’ products,” Isaac shrugged. “It’s not like I have anything else needing the money.”

  “Sorry, what I meant was: how come you’re allowed to have all these?” Derek corrected his earlier mistake.

  “By having more destructive potential on my person than all these ships put together, so telling me I can’t have them would be pointless, and by consistently being helpful, so no one’s going to forbid me from possessing them out of spite … well, no one with the power to make it stick, anyway.”

  That was logical. And terrifying, if it applied to anyone else, in addition to Isaac.

  Though, at the same time, would someone who was both powerful and unstable even go for this kind of strategy? It wasn’t like there was anyone in a position to take over the world; there’d be far too many there who’d interfere. Some would do so for altruistic purposes, others simply didn’t want someone else to have the kind of power they would never have …

  Ultimately, the Level cap had stopped things from getting too out of hand, according to most people who’d voiced opinions on the matter. Plenty of individuals had had meteoric rises, but there’d only been so many filters that whittled that number down, resulting in a sizable group now considered “S-Rank,” too many to all be coopted or eliminated in any realistic scenario. Without that … if there were only a handful of people at the top, single digits, how easy would it have been for them to carve up the world between them?

  But philosophical and sociological musings would have to take a back seat to him getting his own ship.

  “So, which ones are ...” Derek started, then cut himself off. They were all Isaac’s, obviously, and switching to “which ones can I take?” would hardly have been a good look.

  “I have a list,” Isaac said. “Come on.”

  From what had clearly been a viewing area of some kind, it was only a handful of steps towards a large conference room.

  “So, how does this station work?” Derek wondered. “It looks …”

  “Inefficient?” Isaac asked.

  “… not like a shipyard,” Derek finished lamely.

  “I mean, it isn’t,” Isaac explained. “And it’s never going to be, the shipyard is the next station over.

  “This place is where I pay so that the best, brightest, and most imaginative can do whatever the hell they think is interesting.

  “If that goes well, the results get published, and maybe monetized.

  “If it doesn’t, we’ll still have learned something.

  “And if things go really badly … then we’ll either know not to do that again, or how to do it differently.

  “In the end, it all works out for the best.”

  Huh. Though Derek wondered if that was true in the “profitable” sense, or just that it would hopefully end up helping make sure the Earth remained undestroyed throughout whatever happened in the future.

  “Anyway, like I was saying, there are a lot of unusual ships here, and I can access the files from the shipyard too. We should have something suitable here. Any ship you think will work best …” Isaac offered.

  Part of Derek instantly wanted to grab the battlecruiser, simply because, well, battlecruiser, but that would have been a terrible idea.

  Getting the crew for one would have been hard. Getting supplies out there far harder. Making the over a thousand crewmembers a battlecruiser required at the bare minimum respect him as their captain? Functionally impossible …

  Oh, and [Stellar Mental Maths] capped out at destroyer size, so going out in anything larger would see him outright useless, which cut a surprisingly small portion of the available vessels.

  Derek was vaguely aware of the conference room door opening and Isaac engaging the newcomer in some conversation, but then stopped listening when it became clear that it was just routine stuff.

  As he kept reading, it became rather clear to Derek that Isaac hadn’t quite thought the offer of “pick whatever you want” through. Or he hadn’t known what was currently here. Or maybe there was enough trust there, and his older brother thought him intelligent enough to disregard the “stupid” options.

  Such as this one: an experimental missile cruiser named after the Parthian empire.

  Essentially, missile cruisers were a simple re-skin of the much older concept of the arsenal ship, essentially a vessel that had as many missile tubes crammed into as could possibly fit and nothing else, capable of outputting enough firepower to make even a battleship flinch, despite battleships being, on average, five times their size and holding enough guns to wipe out a cruiser and barely even notice.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The issue was that, even in the best-case scenario, a missile cruiser did not have the defenses to stand off the retaliatory salvo of a battleship’s missile batteries; ergo, their heavy focus on offense over literally everything else would see them doomed.

  Well, actually, that was an issue.

  The other one was the preponderance of vessel-teleportation abilities that fell under the collective nickname of “Warp.” Accelerating the ship down its timeline, placing it where it would have been an hour in the future, assuming neither course nor velocity changed, spatial folding, actual teleportation without caveats …

  Almost all captains had them, as well as navigators, some engineers too, all of which meant that there would be very few points when a battleship couldn’t evade the single salvo a missile cruiser carried, even if said evasion would take it out of the fight for a bit.

  All reasons why he’d been told that missile cruisers were rarely built, and typically captained by someone with a [Skill] or [Skills] that could mitigate those weaknesses.

  Also, there was no real way to reload in the field, which made these vessels doubly bad for exploration.

  However, the people here at Squidworks had taken the concept and built something genuinely diabolical. Specifically, a missile cruiser with an enchantment array in its hull that ensured that any teleportation or teleportation-like action would see both the cruiser and its missiles dragged along, forcing the unfortunate target of its wrath to take whatever it couldn’t fend off on the chin. And that was exactly as devastating as it sounded.

  The ship also had a function that made its missiles phase through both the exterior hull and each other, removing the necessity for actual missile tubes. The actual deployment made the missiles fall through the hull in a single motion that could be done without warning, without complication, and allowed for a mass launch that exceeded anything any other vessel was capable of.

  Though the part that truly surprised Derek was that he could see how it had been done, at least in part.

  In essence, the designers had taken full advantage of the limited number of enchantments on a missile cruiser, which had, in turn, minimized the draw on the ambient mana, thereby allowing them to create arrays far more intricate and power hungry than anything starships normally had.

  Typically, they had enchantments for catapult- and [Alcubierre Bubble]-compatability, a whole host of structural reinforcements, artificial gravity, mass-manipulating enchantments on the drives to increase the mass of ejected propellant while reducing that of the vessel in this specific regard, and the cooling runes on the mirrored armor meant to foil lasers, plus a few specialized enchantments that varied by class … by the time all that was in place, there wasn’t much left to play around with, much less add in something as complex as the anti-escape array.

  Also, this thing was one hell of a prototype, near as he could tell, nowhere close to ready for mass production.

  But there were a whole lot of other ships there.

  Such as a kind of scout ship that was basicaly a living space the size of a normal house sandwhiched between the sensors in the bow and the aft engineering compartment, with a railgun running down its port and massive laser down its starboard side, and enchantments economized to the point where it was actually shielded, which few enough starships were in a position to do, due to the mana constraints.

  It was fast as hell, and while it only had a couple of guns outside of the point-defense array, those guns packed one hell of a whallop, and the shields added a very special kind of reinforcement that didn’t just stand up to a certain degree of damage, but did so with absolutely no damage to the vessel itself.

  Though it was also limited in other ways. It was small, eight meters across and fifty long, its cargo space left much to be desired, especially as it lacked the spatial manipulation many other ships had, due to that mana being needed for the shields.

  Of course, it did have more than enough capacity for the provisions he knew they’d need, but not for the “nice to haves” they’d be sorely missing in many situations.

  All told, a perfect exploration ship, though Derek had the distinct feeling he’d wind up in trouble that required heavier firepower and emergency gear.

  He still marked it down as a “maybe,” though.

  Then, out of curiosity, he did pull up the battlecruiser’s stats.

  A Prometheus-class vessel, designed specifically to function without missiles, as those tended to be rather restricted, and as such, bristled with energy weapons. It lacked anything capable of contributing to a missile duel, but was more than capable of obliterating anything short of a battleship in a beam duel. Especially since it sported a spatial-magic-based targetting array for its spinal gun, meaning the absolutely monstrous particle beam that would have otherwise required turning the ship to aim now actually had a sixty-degree cone of fire, which was the only reason spinal weaponry was even viable on capital ships.

  That little trick had been painfully obvious in hindsight, but humanity had wound up “getting inspired” by the Assai during the battle of serendipity, and now everyone was pretending it had been figured out by humanity because the thought of having missed it was still bugging naval engineers even decades later, according to Captain Amos, at least.

  The Prometheus really was an incredible ship.

  Man …

  Derek sighed. A battlecruiser had never been on the table, but now that it seemed available, it was almost painful to set it to the side.

  Alright, next candidate!

  The following vessel was decidedly interesting, a stealth ship designed to take full advantage of the fact that kinetic projectiles in a vacuum kept going until they hit something, a fact that, when combined with the fact that the ship in question was almost invisible, meant that this vessel could sucker punch just about anything.

  Also, well, stealth ship. The easiest way to survive a space battle was to never be seen by anyone who’d start one; that was just common sense.

  Of course, just because a given vessel was designed for stealth, it wouldn’t automatically be immune to detection; there was a lot that would go into actually pulling off a stealth mission, but it wasn’t like silent running was difficult as a concept, it was mostly a matter of discipline.

  An interesting ship. Especially since anyone who could see through the stealth systems, assuming they were properly employed and the vessel was kept at a distance, would likely be so powerful that no other ship type would have a greater chance anyway.

  Certainly a good option, though he’d need some more training before he felt comfortable using them. Though a refresher course on proper emissions control would be a good idea regardless.

  Hm.

  Solid candidate, earmark to later, read further in.

  Derek looked at and dismissed three more variations on a standard scout vessel before digging deeper into something else.

  A variation on a fast auxiliary/repair ship that was just about the closest thing to a Van Neuman machine on the list, designed to be able to rebuild itself from just about anything, as long as a single one of its engineering bays was still intact, plus it’d let them resupply from just about anywhere, and modify the ship anytime they came up with something appropriate, though that last one would require a massively higher class of engineer than would normally be brought along for something like his expedition.

  Unless he learned enough to do it himself, which would involve a delay that bordered on the ludicrous, even if he studied on the way out.

  But the idea of being able to perfect his ship over time was oh so tempting …

  Certainly an impressive collection of ships.

  “So, see something you like?”

  Derek yelped and shot up out of his chair, spinning in the same motion to come face to face with Isaac.

  “Fuck,” he sighed, one hand clutching his chest, glaring at his older brother. “Did you have to sneak up on me like that?”

  “Sorry,” Isaac said. “I need to actually focus on making noise. I’ll come from the front next time.”

  Then, after a brief moment of silence, he added, “Most people I work with either have sensory [Auras] or are used to it. I’ll work on that.”

  Yeah, that made sense, but it didn’t make it any less startling, though.

  As for the question Isaac had asked, however …

  Derek nodded happily. “I still want to read through everything before I pick something.”

  “Hm,” Isaac said, approvingly, glancing at Derek’s list of candidates. “Stealth, engineering, or what’s basically an oversized, overpowered fighter jet. Solid choices, if you play to their strengths.”

  “Anything can be good if you use it to its greatest effect, anything can be terrible if you use it in a way that’s not compatible,” Derek replied.

  “But just because a use wasn’t originally intended doesn’t automatically mean it won’t be effective,” Isaac pointed out.

  “Oh, I know,” Derek sighed. “I keep getting dinged for ‘creativity’ though.”

  “People never liked the concept of ‘it ain’t stupid if it works’ in a classroom setting, and probably never will,” Isaac agreed. “Lucky for you that you graduated, then. Anyway, I’ll stop distracting you.”

  And with that, he headed back out again, leaving Derek to the files.

  Up next … well, a whole lot more ships that were varying degrees of interesting. Drone carriers, small mobile factories designed to build miniature, single-use catapults to rapidly leap across the universe in fifty-light-year increments, or leave them behind to return to Earth in a matter of minutes across thousands of light-years.

  Though that trick only worked because the ship itself had been magically modified to work together with the catapults it built, allowing said catapults to be a mere fraction of the size and cost of the normal ones.

  Because, for all that the “borrowed” technology was incredibly powerful, it was also expensive enough that even Sol system only had thirteen as a whole.

  The actual “physics” behind it was even more obscure and arcane than quantum mechanics, but according to the simplified explanation he’d gotten during his education, the titanic ring of rune-bearing girders and crystals basically attempted to push the ship into a different dimension, one which was fundamentally incompatible with “normal” matter and would normally obliterate the hapless vessel.

  However, the other part of the technology was the special reinforcement and warding on the ship, which prevented it from being destroyed, instead resulting in it being hurled back into the “normal universe,” except when that happened, the exit could be up to, well, fifty light years from the location of the catapult.

  Yet another, entirely unique vessel was one that had exterior spatial warps, bending space into a pretzel to render it almost impossible to cleanly target by anyone who hadn’t fully mapped the whole affair, granting the ship unparalleled survivability … against any opponent without the firepower to just saturate the area around it, which any heavy cruiser and above could achieve.

  As far as small vessels went, it was functionally invulnerable, but at the same time, the ship was heavily limited in being able to fire back due to the difficulty of aiming its own weapons through the haze of its defenses, furthermore, the fact that these warps were on the outside meant that the ship’s location was blindingly obvious to any vessel that could detect such a thing.

  But what a ship!

  And things continued much the same from there.

  Some ships had, apparently, only been built to see if one specific thing could be done, others were clearly alternate design principles that hadn’t taken off for one reason or other. Clearly, the scientists and engineers here had been having their fun with their vast budget.

  Until, eventually, Derek found a ship that was utter perfection.

  Working name: Escher, as in the artist M.C. Escher, known for the impossible geometry seen in his paintings, and the ship reflects that … sort of.

  It had all the spatial warping of the previous ship, but these were internal; the fact that its cargo storage capacity exceeded even a battleship’s being the least of the benefits.

  For starters, its reactor had been similarly empowered, the enchantments woven together to support each other in a way that massively reduced the cost of each individual one making the whole thing even remotely possible.

  However, it was everything that the reactor could power that made the ship so damn impressive, with twin spinal weapons, one an absolutely monstrous railgun, the other an ultra relativistic electron beam, a weapon whose rather bombastic name was only matched by the sheer havoc it’d wreak on anything it hit.

  The thing about electrons was that, well, they were heavily charged particles, and unlike with regular particle beams that typically used iron ions, that charge couldn’t be neutralized by adding electrons as the beam was leaving the weapon’s barrel, thereby preventing the particles in the beam from pushing each other apart and turning a lethal lance into a scattershot hail of infinitessimal bits of matter that were utterly incapable of doing anything on their own.

  So, electron beams were finicky… unless you could crank the “muzzle velocity” up high enough, to the point where the electrons the weapon launched were within spitting distance of the speed of light, with the relativistic distortion of time that created slowing down the degradation of the beam to the point where its “expansion” was negligible across normal combat distances.

  And when it hit, well, electrons in motion did not like to be stopped, slowed, or even redirected, releasing their energy in the form of Bremsstrahlung, or “breaking radiation” vast blooms of gamma radiation that would errupt inside any ship they struck … because yeah, armor had a seriously hard time keeping out something that small, moving that fast.

  Now, that wasn’t to say that these weapons ignored armor entirely, far from it. Pure probability dictated that much of the beam would be caught on the outside and “merely” fry anything near the site of impact, but that was just the initial strike, and that alone would trash a huge chunk of the target.

  But there was a reason why these guns weren’t found on anything smaller than a capital ship. And that was the same thing that made them so nasty, the Bremstrahlung.

  Normally, particle beams were circular, keeping particles going round and round and round until they were fast enough to do real damage, at which point they were hurled out, like a stone from the slingshots of old.

  Tight, compact, efficient, ‘nuff said.

  Try that with electrons, though, and you’d find the inside of what was still a relatively fragile device in the grand scheme of things utterly hammered with gamma rays.

  No, electrons needed linear, straight, accelerators, and those needed space. Space that could come from either pure size, or by a certain kind of magic bending the rules of physics over its knee and spanking them until they cried uncle. And just what kind of magic was innate to this vessel?

  So yes, this was a destroyer-sized vessel with the same kind of gun as a battleship, though obviously at a much lower power level.

  Now, of course, this was quite the powerful concept, but there was a reason it hadn’t been implemented on a large scale.

  Having one ship that could reliably punch out an equivalent enemy and do so about as safely as was possible in warfare was great … but not when the enemy could build an entire squadron for the same cost.

  Obviously, having that kind of advantage on something like a battleship was a whole other matter, with a whole other set of calculations, as a ship like that would be able to fly around the enemy territory and take down capital ships one by one, but a cruiser, even a heavy one?

  There were far too many of those around, in any even remotely normal navy.

  Being able to reliably take down those one-on-one would still be a powerful ability, but any ship like that would be liable to get confronted by two or more vessels matching its tonnage, boxed in, and blown to bits.

  At that point, you might as well just build an appropriate escort-killer who won that matchup through sheer size and firepower instead, while also having all the extra survivability that heft brought with it.

  And that was the exact kind of thing battlecruisers were great at. After all, “strong enough to wreck anything weaker than it, fast enough to run from anything stronger” quite succinctly summed up one of the primary purposes of that kind of ship.

  It certainly fit the mold of “crazy but impractical shit scientists come up with when the beancounter is away” much better than it did “revolutionary weapon that will change the face of warfare,” simply because of a prohibitive cost that wouldn’t go down for centuries, if ever.

  But it existed.

  And it was only one of the ship’s spinal guns.

  The railgun was, well, a railgun. Two rails that were only connected by the conductive projectile in the middle, then you ran electricity through that assembly, and the Lorentz force would move the projectile forward. Simple.

  Once again, it was the spatial magic that made it devastating. Because the same enchantment that extended the length of the particle beam could be temporarily extended straight ahead, compressing a thin line of space up to a light second in length down to a mere kilometer or so, allowing the projectile to cross the distance in the blink of an eye.

  So far, so nasty.

  Then there was the fact that the only defense against kinetic projectiles was, you know, being somewhere other than the space it moved through, as such, they were perfect for trashing the protections meant to keep away lasers and particle beams.

  And no one was going to dodge a projectile that was, in essence, fired from the point-blankest of ranges.

  Another super expensive addition to the ship, Derek had the distinct feeling most ship designers would prefer to have an additional heavy energy weapon over what was apparently named the “Moebius Gun,” but the ship had already in, so …

  Yeah, it might have not the stealth, or engineering capability of the more specialized vessels, it lacked the bevy of turreted guns of proper naval destroyers, having just six, evenly split between lasers and particle beams, plus the usual point defense suite, and overall, its combat capabilities outside of those two main guns was minimal … but those guns more than made up for everything the ship didn’t have.

  Furthermore, this particular design had more than enough cargo space for him to pretend to be a perfectly ordinary freighter with some extra exterior guns for protection.

  And even if someone did clue in on the fact that his ship had spinally mounted weapons, no one would suspect just what kind of havoc those guns could wreak.

  It was perfect.

  But even so … time to read through the rest.

  ***

  “Would you really have let me take the battlecruiser?” Derek finally asked, after having met his brother in the station’s coffee bar and chosen his ship.

  Isaac shrugged. “I told you you’d get whichever one you picked, and I meant that. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have drawn my conclusions from that.”

  “So it was a test?”

  “Eh …” Isaac made a so-so gesture. “I wouldn’t go that far. It’s more like … well, you judge people based on how they act. If I offer my hand for someone I just met to shake and they do it, I’m going to remember that. If they have a handshake like a dead fish, I’ll also remember that. If they punch me in the face instead, then I’d react appropriately.

  “But even though I’d form opinions based on what happened, that doesn’t mean the handshake was a test. I don’t do those kinds of ‘tests.’ They break trust, and make it way too obvious how big of a paranoid bastard I am.”

  “Right … because it’s not like you’ve mentioned that almost every time we’ve been in the same room together,” Derek commented.

  Isaac shrugged. “But does it sound believable when I say it?”

  Well. Shit. That actually explained a lot … though Derek sincerely doubted he’d have been as willing to make jokes like that, had he been in Isaac’s position.

  “Anyway, would you like to see the ship in person?”

  Derek nodded so quickly it felt like his head might fall off, and after several minutes of maneuvering through a confusing series of corridors and ladders, the two of them reached another large room, adjacent to the ship, with a sizeable window showing the vessel in question.

  A sleek cigar shape, ninety-six meters long, twenty-seven wide, mirrored armor glittering in the light of countless welding torches and spotlights spread throughout the shipyard, its innocent appearance belying the lethality it concealed underneath.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” Isaac announced, already tearing open a portal to somewhere. “I’ll bring your future copilot by in an hour or so.”

  With that, he vanished, indeed leaving Derek alone, where he could only stare at the vessel. Though a few minutes later, he marched over to the nearest wall panel to view the most direct feed from the ship he could possibly get.

  And then a voice called out from behind him.

  “Hey, what’s happening with our ship?”