[Moose]

  He poked at the tablet a few more times. He would have loved to get it working for himself, but it was clear it really wasn’t meant for him.

  ‘I feel like I’m going to break the thing. It’s basically an oddly shaped smart phone made out of thin plastic.’

  It probably worked great for everyone else. Hell, it might even work ok for him if it wasn’t made out of whatever it was made out of. As it was, it just felt too fragile in his hand.

  ‘I wonder what kind of screen it is. If I can strap a few together and set them on a backing, it would be a pretty good little screen. It would just be a matter of figuring out the programing at that point.’

  It would be nice to have something that could alert him when he wasn’t on the bridge. He might be able to spend a lot more time out and about if he didn’t need to sit there and watch the computer do its thing.

  He sighed.

  “Kitty. We need more of these. We also need information. Books, you know? Otherwise just tell them to get needed supplies.”

  The girl gave him a look as she cocked her head. He really hoped everything was getting conveyed to Pup and her friends. He trusted Kitty to do her best, but he didn’t think she really understood trade and economic systems. It wasn’t really something he could explain, being an abstract concept she really didn’t interact with much.

  When she started chirping at Pup, the poor alien seemed very confused for a bit but eventually nodded and walked away. The male watched from the doorway and followed Pup as she left. He was probably in charge for their ship and wanted to make sure things were working out.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going into the station myself this time. I would just need to have Kitty stay here and not let strangers on.’

  He didn’t think it would happen. They weren’t even docked at the moment and he wasn’t about to let people he didn’t know fly his ship. They must have a shuttle bay or something for the aliens to be going back and forth. He had managed to see the cargo bay on the screen when they docked, but if they had a shuttle bay, he was completely ignorant. It was probably on the internal map, but he hadn’t had a real chance to examine each and every room the map showed. He was taking that slow.

  Not that that was the only hurdle. Even if he trusted someone else to fly and didn’t need Kitty to understand how to guard a ship, he was beginning to suspect he had a problem.

  Well, multiple problems.

  He glanced at the hand that had held the tablet again. It was clear from the tools and other things that the aliens used that he was significantly larger than the norm. There was no way that general tools like that tablet were made to a specific size just for the two races on-board and that lizard race Pup’s ship had on it. That was three examples of a relatively uniform size and the tools reflected that.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Kitty was an outlier of course. He still didn’t know if that was because she was a normal human or if she was some kind of cross breeding experiment, but she clearly bucked the trend he was starting to see. Unfortunately, without a measuring system he objectively understood, he couldn’t get any relative measurements. He knew roughly his own bodily proportions, but if he had grown they weren’t very useful. Rather than assume the rest of the galaxy was filled with races at three foot nothing or ships filled with children sailed the stars, it was far more likely to assume he was bigger.

  He had no idea what the averages were for aliens of course. His best guess for now, purely to make the math easy, was that five foot was about the average across the board, which would make him over nine feet tall and make Kitty somewhere in the seven or eight foot range. Far too large for most common built structures.

  At least by old earth standards.

  That may be different on a planet, but in space he didn’t see spacefaring races building extravagant ceilings and massive open spaces just because. Ironically, space was at a premium in space. He doubted he would fit all that well outside the industrial or manufacturing sections of a space station. His ship was pretty much a perfect example, even if the hallways were slightly larger than he expected the norm to be.

  He had no real desire to walk into an industrial section, look around, then get back on the ship because everything else was too small for him. It was all metal anyways.

  ‘I might think differently if we landed on a planet.’

  It might explain why he felt everything was so light and flimsy. Physics was physics, but if he was expecting something to be a certain thickness compared to his height, he could be wildly misinterpreting those measurements.

  The other problem was what he had been given the tablet for. It seemed mail was a thing, even way out here in space! It was just too bad it was spam mail, but still, a neat discovery. According to Pup, the mail had been addressed to him, though he suspected it was probably addressed to ‘the captain’ rather than him personally. She had wanted his opinion and to find out if he wanted to buy anything. Once he translated it as best he could, the mail itself amounted to little more than ‘stay there and win a prize!’. It was so obviously spam that it was embarrassing. He could appreciate Pup not wanting to make decisions for him, but he would need to teach her to avoid scammers like that.

  ‘I’m not sure if it is comforting or unsettling that spam-mail is still an issue.’

  He brushed that off as the meaningless crap it was. It was the shopping list he had much more trouble with. Figuring out what they needed had been his objective since the last station. The problem was, he hadn’t had enough time to figure it out. He was perfectly fine just getting money, but bulk purchases still had to come at a discount right? If Pup and her friends were going to do a big trade with that cargo, he might as well take advantage.

  If only he knew what was in demand.

  ‘I got plenty of cargo space. It would be brain-dead to leave it empty. It could be making us money.’

  One they got back into the exploring part of his ship’s classification, he might actually need that space for supplies and samples and what not. For now, since he was helping Pup, it was just wasted potential.

  He honestly didn’t really know how his finances were doing. Completely ignoring the compounding interest he might possibly be acquiring back home, the numbers Pup had shown him were pretty big.

  The problem was that this ship was pretty big too.

  He needed to find a mechanic or learn to perform the maintenance himself, and he doubted he could manage that second one before something bad happened. He also needed a quartermaster to help with these problems in the future. That didn’t really impact the shopping list now of course, but it highlighted how little he knew of what was required. Pup and her friends might have their own thing going on and supplies were plentiful for now, but he needed to learn fast.

  He would need to see about hiring that extra help at some point soon as well.

  Something Pup was probably going to have to be a part of, now that he thought of it.

  Kitty didn’t seem that keen on job interviews.