Devon had opened the door between her comment and mine, causing him to only hear the threat Instead of the comment that had caused it. This resulted in him frowning at me before commenting.

"That's a violent way to greet someone"

"She started it" I whined a little defensively as I looked Clara over, wondering why she was here. "Why are you down here trying to scare the shite out of me anyway?"

"I'm in charge of the docks, why wouldn't I be down here?"

"Okay, miss smarty-pants, tell me why you are here on dock number 3 then."

"Oh, I have been here all night, ya know once we had that little talk last night, I came down here knowing you would eventually show up." she declared as she grinned at me.

"Riiight. Okay, fair enough I suppose, what can you tell me about this creepy house sitting on the side of a dock then?"

"Hmm?" she said as she turned to look at the house behind her for a few seconds before spinning back around to face me with a huge smile on her face like I was about to love what she had to say. "Oh! This is your house… well, not your house exactly. It is the dock's crew house, it's there to house the crew of the ship while it is in dry dock. It's a small quaint house out here, but it's actually a complex… Uh, I want to say apartment building, but it's more like a town, it runs under the floor we are standing on and can house up to a thousand families."

"That's a lot," I said as I looked over the building.

"Yea, the door there in front, leads to a sort of lobby with a… well, the blueprint called it a disc elevator but it, well it is a buckler shield sized disc you stand on, and it kinda floats down like an escalator."

"Okay, that makes sense, I guess."

"Yea, well next to the lobby on the right, there behind that window, is an office where you, the captain of the frigate, and me, the docks' foreman, get together over a blueprints table, it's kinda like a command table, but instead of displaying everything to do with the dry docks it only displays the ship and what licences and blueprints I have to use on the ship. I think… well, when dad put me in charge of the dry docks, a new app downloaded onto my HUD. It was a control for the dry docks, had bookings and timing, all sorts of stuff like that, and it even had features where I can control everything in the docks, life support being one of the scary options. But I can also control the docking clamps on the ship. But the point is I can control who I assign to a dock, which leads me to believe I can charge more for a more licensed foreman or use a… Well, you get it. The frigate is the first ship to come in that needs me to use this app, as so far we have just been building ships, which I can do from the dry docks command table… Yes, I have one."

"Okay, well that's a lot to unpack," I said as I turned and started walking towards the house, wanting to get a good look at the blueprint table and see what we could do with the frigate.

I glanced over my shoulder before turning to ask Clara another question, but what I saw made me look back again. My car was turned off, no lights anywhere, but what shocked me was it had changed colour, and had a lot more damage than it did a few minutes ago, almost like it had been in fender benders. It had damage to the doors bonnet and a bunch of scratches all over the body, generally looking like an old beat up version of my car.

"What the?" I said as I stopped walking.

"Don't worry about that, it's camouflage. Clara's contribution." Devon said as he stopped next to me.

I nodded my head slowly before turning back towards the house and walking into the door, looking around the room. It was nice, had a nice plush rug and a punch of plants. A few pictures were hanging on the wall. There was even a screen showing the feed from the Orbital Stations cameras.

"This is really impressive," I said to Clara as we stopped to look around.

I noticed a huge drop to the floor below on the opposite side of the room from the front door. I frowned as I couldn't see where the disc elevator was. I moved over to stand by the edge and as I reached it a blue circle appeared around my feet and the bit I was standing on began to descend to the lower floor. Moments later I was standing on the lower floor staring at the wall for a moment before spinning around to look at the hallway into a lobby. I could best describe it as a place that looked a lot like all the places I had seen in shopping centres. There were the dozen or so chairs and huge pots with tall trees and various shrubbery around them. The spots always seemed to have men sitting in them as they played on their phones. My friend's mum once told me it was the husband's parking zone. I glanced up at the floor above as the thought of how I was going to get back up there ran through my mind. The next second, I was suddenly ascending back up on the same disc I had come down on. Once reaching the top, I took a few shaky steps away from the edge before walking over to Clara.

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"That was terrifying and amazing" I said to her as I glanced back at it curiously.

"Yea? It scared the crap out of me when I found it… I even fell off the stupid disc."

I let out a laugh as I moved my hand up to hide it as I quickly turned and walked into the office. I saw her make a face at me as she followed me into the office, and we were soon standing around what looked to me like a pool table, but instead of green felt there was glass. Clara leaned over it and tapped a black dot in the middle that I had failed to notice before looking over at me as the frigate began to materialise in the air. Once it was there it suddenly split apart, showing every piece of it and each compartment, It even had labels. I leant in thinking this was amazing and flicked a hull plating watching it suddenly spin rapidly.

"Incredible" I whispered.

"It is in interactive blueprint designing mode. Very cool right?"

"Yea."

"Alright, shall we get started…" she stared at me waiting to see if I was going to answer the obviously rhetorical question, and when I didn't bite she sighed and continued. "I have got your frigate up on the table here and have disassembled the entire thing, as you can see by all the pieces floating nearby but separate. Normally I would buy the licence and the blueprint for this ship. However, the licence for this frigate is stupid expensive, not as expensive as the carrier that you somehow got for free and is licensed at a value in the billions, but this one is still in the hundreds of millions. Now while I am making a few million on the construction of ships for… well a lot of different people here and off the station. Hundreds of millions is not a price range I can swing around in yet. That means I don't have the licence for this bad boy, and I won't be able to get it any time soon. However, what I do have, is the licences to repair these damaged parts," she pointed at the parts of the ship that were clearly damaged before continuing again. "I couldn't afford to get all of it, like the food processors or the hydroponics stuff, but I can make your ship whole again, with what I got. Basically, I can fix this, but I can't furnish it or build a second ship, because that shit is expensive for this small dock, okay?"

"Clara, you have the blueprint right here, what is stopping you from just building it?"

"Licences… Okay, clearly you don't understand! When you purchase a licence, it goes into a sort of keychain on your HUD. Then when you go to a fabricator to print a part, or the docks command table to start the building of a ship, the fabricator checks your keys for the correct key that unlocks something inside the fabricator. This allows the fabricator to read the blueprint before it can print anything. Without that key, nothing happens, the fabricator literally refuses to print anything. And the worse part is if you try to get insistent, work around it or even tamper with the fabricator, it notifies the company or individual who owns the rights to that licence. They can, depending on the severity, then fine you or even send the law to arrest you. Oh, if you chose to tamper with the fabricator, then there have been instances where they have shot first and collected bodies afterwards… just saying."

"Right… Licences important, don't fuck with the fabricator, got it." I smiled nervously as I took a step away from the table.

"Yea, now, so you are aware and can approve the work order, I can fix all this" she said as she pointed at the damaged hull, engine, then moved on to point at the laser defences and weapons arrays, continuing on to the shield emitters and back down the ship to point at thrusters. "All this, I can fix, I have the licences for it, and they are here in this blueprint. What I can't fix is the luxuries or furnishings inside. There are a lot of them and I just don't have the capital to go after it. I have to think about other ships that I will be working on after this one.

"Right, so you have a budget for this?" I asked before watching her nod her head.

"Yea, and it was tight, i just barely squeezed the laser grid into it after I got all the important stuff."

"Okay, one question, if you need my approval to start all this, then why have you already begun to remove parts from the ship?"

"Hmm? Oh, I needed samples to find out what it was made out of, and the plates were so damaged that the dock literally refused to let me clamp parts of the ship without removing them. I got some warning that this part or that part could or would explode and damage the clamping arms if I tried to. I also have one clamp that is still disengaged because I received an alert that the ship would explode and take the entire dock with it if I tried to clamp it over the dock.… I think it said reactor bay, but it might have said engine room… I wasn't paying attention at that point I was just closing windows as I screamed, okay, okay, I get it!" she let out a soft giggle as she shrugged her shoulders.

I narrowed my eyes feeling like that really wasn't an explanation and i kinda still wanted to rip her head off, but being the better person that I am, I let it go and instead turned my attention to the blueprint in front of me.

"Alright so fix the hull, weapons systems, shields and propulsion, that's not much… I assume you are also fixing the life support, but you mentioned that eco habitat was out, so how would I go about fixing that? And any other bits that you are unable to fix?" I asked as I looked through the blueprint at Clara.

"Uh, well I wanted to add life support, but I was two hundred credits short, and couldn't afford to add it, sorry, the rest can be fixed on the move with your fabricator… oh shoot, I forgot to mention I got the licence to repair that beast! It is truly a beast, chewed up eighty percent of my budget! I am terrified to find out what it would cost me to get the licence to actually build one of those things."

I made a face at her before flicking my wrist towards her as I mentally transferred 200 credits. "Here, fix the damn life support."

I watched her nod her head as her eyes darted back and forth over a screen I couldn't see then moments later I noticed bits inside the ship turned from red to green as she smiled at me.

"Done! Life support can now be replaced." she declared excitedly.

Once I had noticed that I started noticing all the red inside the ship, but there was a lot of green as well, mostly the hull and things on it, but there were also a few things inside. I nearly let out a squeal of delight when I noticed a green label for a coffee maker.

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