Page 77 of Veiled Vixen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - TRAY

Right around the same time that Booty Hunter was making plans with Draden to go back to Harem and save everyone, Tray and Brigit were settling in to their new Prison Princess body.

In the week that had passed on Mighty Minions Resort Tray had become a lot more comfortable with who he was. In fact, this transition into Prison Princess had been easy. It felt natural and very much like a foregone conclusion.

And as far as sentient ship bodies go, he could not have asked for a better one than the old Demon Girl. She was a proper warship with SEAR cannons, and whole levels of crew quarters, and huge navigation screens, and he had officers. Ten of them. Ten freaking people to help him keep his body in shape and working properly. That was ten other minds helping him out. And the crew! Mother of suns! He had well over two hundred crew members. More than five hundred hands with fingers to do all sorts of things he now could not.

He was powerful.

They were powerful. Because he and Brigit were now entangled, so he had to share his power with her.

Which he did not mind at all. Tray wasn’t sure he’d have felt so confident if Draden was still tangled up with them too, but that didn’t even matter anymore. Draden was not. He was Draden again. Inorganic now with his new sexbot body, but he was still exactly like the old Draden. And if you didn’t know he was a sexbot, you’d think he was an organic human.

But Tray did have a problem with Mighty Minions Resort. Because now he was a ship and had to have a responsible party. And that sucked. At first he figured ALCOR would just be his responsible party, but it didn’t work that way. All sentient ships must be tied to a human. And an AI, even one like ALCOR, didn’t count.

And the crew, while awesome, were all working for Mighty Boss.

Not only that, he and Brigit had no credits. They had a Mighty Minions transponder to get through gates and they had their own fuel pellet generator on board, so they didn’t have to worry about actual travel, but aside from those two things in their favor, they were kinda broke. So they couldn’t even lure the crew away from Mighty Boss with the promise of a new contract.

This was a problem.

Tray needed a responsible party and he needed a way to get his own crew, which he could not afford. Or lure his current crew into another contract, which he could also not afford.

So it was fortuitous that a little boy called Canis came to his docking bay asking for a chat.

Tray had heard of Canis, of course. Delphi would not shut up about him after everything that happened on Lair Station. She had bonded with the kid during their daring escape and was disappointed that he had to stay back on Mighty Minions because Harem Station was not an appropriate place for a child to grow up. Even an Akeelian child.

And Tray was eager to talk to this child. He had looked up the rules regarding sentient ships and responsible parties and it appeared that while the legal age of responsibility when it came to sentient ships was sixteen, and this kid was ten, there was a clause in the statute regarding Akeelians.

Because Akeelians aged differently than all the other humanoid species, some Akeelian representative had objected to the age of responsibility for Akeelians being sixteen since that was far less mature than most other humanoid species in the galaxy, and had the entire race struck from the previous ruling, and put in a motion to change it to twenty-five.

Someone else then objected, wanting the age to be “after the year of rage,” which would put it around nineteen. Then there were some arguments and ultimately whoever was in charge that year declined to rule on the matter and the motion expired.

However, the clause excluding the Akeelians from the age of responsibility was still there, meaning there was no actual age of responsibility when it came down to whether an Akeelian could be in charge of a sentient ship.

And this was how a ten-year-old Akeelian boy called Canis came to be Tray and Brigit’s responsible party.

Because Canis had a plan.

He too wanted to get the hell off Mighty Minions and get back to the business at hand—which was a very intricate, well-thought-out let’s-kill-Veila plan that included all seventy-three of his little-boy Akeelian friends.

And ta-da!

Tray not only had a responsible party but a crew of little kids who hadn’t even asked to be paid.

He should be called Luck instead of Tray.

Because ‘little kids’ wasn’t actually the most accurate way to describe small Akeelian boys. And even though none of them were trained in how to run a ship, especially a huge warship like Prison, Brigit had found a way around that problem. She took all the training manuals, reorganized them into easy-to-follow flow charts for all the critical systems and components, and then built a database that could be accessed on every screen inside the ship.

By the time this happened Booty Hunter had already taken off with Draden. Everyone was preoccupied with this new development. Especially ALCOR and Asshole. And Prison’s legitimate crew were home now, so none of them were staying on the ship. So no one noticed that Canis was making daily trips to the docking bay to meet privately with Tray and Brigit as they got their own escape plan in order.

By the time everything was in order they had been on Mighty Minions for three weeks and ten representatives from Wayward Station were on their way to the resort to have a chat with Mighty Boss about all the runaway/kidnapped Akeelian boys who were being harbored there.

“We have to leave now,” Canis said one morning as he came through the airlock. “The Wayward Station governor will be here tonight.”

Tray had to admit he was intrigued by this new development. One quick search of the galactic web told him that Crux’s father, Mahtar, was still the Wayward Station governor. And even though Tray’s father was not listed in the search as the Station AI manager, Tray had a feeling that he would also be in that meeting. If he were still alive after his part in the original escape of Tray and his brothers twenty years ago.

And Tray very much wanted to see his father.