"What do we even know about that planet, anyway?" Lirin asked, already a little tired. "Besides the fact that it's a dwarf planet, nothing, really. We list it as inactive," Berindr stated. Lirin didn't say anything, just rolled her eyes wearily. "Come on... let's jump there quickly," she addressed her two colleagues: "I guess we don't need any extra equipment for this, we'll take a look around, and we're coming back. It'll be nonsense again."

All three then left the room and took one of the four cylindrical glass elevators to the ground floor. As soon as they walked out the door, the tall, dark complex of 3 connected vertical hollow hexagonal hangars appeared before them again.

As they walked back, automated carts carrying weapons and fuel for the ships passed them here and there. Then, from a distance, the intensifying sound of engines could be heard, and another Vega-class ship suddenly descended from the sky to the right hangar, and then disappeared behind its walls.

Upon entering the hangars, an enormous and also beautiful arrival and departure hall appeared before them, which was 3 stories high. There were also plenty of shops all around, which were teeming with all sorts of aliens.

The joke was that PCP did not own the entire hangars, only a few upper floors, and in the others, there was space for civilian transport.

Just before entering this hall, however, all three sharply turned left into a quite insignificant room, where 2 guards in black combat suits, the same as they had worn earlier, were already waiting for them. Behind them stood one wide transparent elevator and next to it a terminal. Although everyone knew each other well, they still had to beep the chip in the sleeve of their uniform at the terminal before they could finally board the elevator.

The elevator then took them up to the 12th floor, where they had previously flown in with the Vega. It was precisely that 12th floor that belonged exclusively to PCP. All around them, only a number of other PCP workers in their, this time, red-and-white uniforms adorned with the occasional triangular pattern were now passing by. Different job positions involved different uniforms.

So they got out of the elevator into the main circular corridor, which was also similarly stylized as the employees' uniforms, i.e., in white-red-black, and continued through it to their ship.

On the left side of this corridor, they were accompanied the whole time by one longitudinal window occasionally interrupted by thin columns. From it, there was a view out into the interior of this hollow hexagon and to the surrounding individual smaller and already horizontally built hangars, in which individual ships were hidden. These small hangars were of various sizes, exactly according to what kind of ship was hidden behind their gates. Most of the hangars were the smallest, whose gates were only 14x10m, and it was in one such hangar that their Vega was waiting for them.

And they were already at it, at their black-black shiny Vega, which looked like its designers had taken all sorts of triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids and decided to build a ship out of them. Now it was also beautifully visible how huge its side engines were and how in their perpendicular position to the ground, they exceeded the top of the ship by a full meter.

A thick cable was currently connected to the lower side of the ship, with which they were recharging the Vega's Rison source, above which a small white inscription Vega was hidden, and below it the version and number of the piece: V14.23/11.

Suddenly, everyone received a warm welcome from the approaching old Actilian engineer Mokir, who was basically a meter-tall, stout shrew walking on two legs and dressed in gray overalls.

And as soon as he greeted, he immediately started talking to Lirin:

"You're really in a hurry today. Unfortunately, the ship is not ready yet, we just started. You arrived just a moment ago."

"We're not flying far, Mokir, we can handle it with the amount of fuel we have," Lirin was convincing. "Well, I don't want to lecture you too much in this regard, but wouldn't it be better even in the case of some unexpected conflict..." Mokir objected.

"Nothing should happen, it's a small planet without life," Lirin said.

"It's FC-506, the closer edge of Karfus," Oril added.

"Hmm. And yet they're sending you. I wouldn't recommend it. Berindr can order, and Ogdirad will sign it, but ship service is my thing. I don't want to sign off on this. At a minimum, it will undergo a short wear inspection and get more juice. No way, I'm not letting you go right now," Mokir remarked.

Lirin smiled warmly at the little man and said:

"If you say so... It probably won't hurt if we slow down a little today. And how long will it take you?"

"2 kertyls, that's my minimum," Mokir said.

"That's not exactly a little in our case, but it can be survived," Lirin reassured herself, but even so, it seemed long to her. A kertyl was a little under 10 minutes in conversion, so 2 kertyls were already equal to an almost twenty-minute delay.

"I'll even write you a service excuse for it. Besides, it won't be a lie. Because, I can't even give you another ship now. They're either already in the field or they're in even worse shape. Now, for example, you might have caught a glimpse of Patrik returning, and he and his buddies drained his Vega perfectly. You just have to have a reserve, I'll arrange it with Berindr. After all, it's not a call for help, but just another energy anomaly, right? Or not this time?" Mokir said.

"It is, it's just another energy anomaly again. The signature again corresponds to Gorinium, and so we just have to fly there," Lirin said.

"Of course," Mokir acknowledged, but immediately added: "but not before I prepare the ship for you, because you don't know if you'll need energy for combat, and you wouldn't have that at the moment."

And he immediately offered kindly:

"Well, but while we have a moment, don't you want to sit down for that wait? Have a drink and maybe go to the toilet. I know there's that option in the Vega too, but under such uncivilized conditions, and you've already been... 11, 12 chaper on the way. Come on."

He waved his paw and was already leading them to a closed lounge on the left side of the hangar, where another technician was sitting behind a table in a small kitchenette. And then he called out over his shoulder: "Even performance must go down without a break. How about hot chocolate, although it's from powder, so it'll be more like cocoa, but whatever. I don't give a damn if you don't manage to finish it, everything counts. It should restart you a little before the journey."

Oril, in response to the offer, shook his head with interest and looked at his colleagues, and they too finally accepted the idea silently. With a certain initial reluctance, but they accepted.

Someone might have thought, what about coffee? Well, coffee was not allowed because caffeine was labeled as a drug. The problem, among other things, was also that every species of alien reacted to it differently, and so, for the sake of everyone's peace of mind, it was simply banned. So only caffeine-free coffee or something like that from the Jaspitusans was an option, and Mokir rather chose hot chocolate, which is also excellent and includes sugar, which would give them energy.

Unfortunately, this little break for hot chocolate could cost them dearly. FC-506 was, as luck would have it, just the home of that problem from which those Gorinium decoys were supposed to distract PCP members.

And just at that very moment, as everyone was entering the kitchenette, entire legions of small and elongated transport ships with a bright lemon-yellow paint job were already taking off from the surface of this darkened, rocky planet. Those ships were called VER-6, and on each of them was painted some kind of black symbol of a crossed-out square, from each side of which one thin tip of a star emerged. The front of the ship then had the shape of a glass hemisphere embedded in a long body with 2 and 2 wings, with one barrel protruding from the edge of each.

Two figures in very dirty white spacesuits, therefore currently gray, were always boarding each of these ships on such a wide iron-concrete landing area.

They carried with them on a levitating cart a package of 3 large cylinders full of yellow glowing material, Gorinium. As soon as a ship was filled, it quickly flew away, and another empty one flew into its place.

The reason for all this commotion was a 2 km distant huge factory the size of a small town, which stood on some kind of rock island and seemed to be relatively damaged by some explosion. It was a rock island because otherwise, all around were already huge chasms from intensive mining. Everything, everything around was hollowed out from mining, only the rock with the factory on top stood where the original height of the terrain was.

Some parts of the mine were already inactive for years, and mining there had completely stopped, but others were, on the contrary, too alive. To the left of the factory was apparently the newest mine, but it didn't look good at all. It was completely and deeply demolished by a strong explosion. So it was no longer actually a mine, but just an ordinary burnt crater, from which smoke was still slightly rising. The crater was so huge that although the epicenter of the explosion must have been a considerable distance from the factory, otherwise there would be no factory standing there anymore, yet at least partially the edge of the crater reached into the rock massif with the factory.

Right at the edge of the crater stood blackened structures of exposed and twisted iron, which used to be buildings for cleaning raw Gorinium. From other damaged buildings, workers were coming out with carts full of salvaged Gorinium to a huge bridge over the mine chasm, at the other end of which a landing platform awaited them. On the bridge, the workers became a crowd, which, however, completely filled the bridge. The crowd slowed down considerably there and carefully proceeded across the bridge to the other side.

"So hurry up, add it up, quickly, quickly. They couldn't have missed this accident. PCP and the Dartatuni will surely be here in a moment. We don't know how much time we still have before they find us. Those fake incidents bought us some time, but I'm not going to tempt fate so much that I waste time here with some slowpokes. Load the cargo, find a free spot in the ship, and disappear. Whoever stays here longer will soon disappear like this planet. The cleanup crew is already working on covering all traces," a certain Vergabein, who was standing in a black spacesuit opposite all the incoming workers and sorting them into ships, was calling out into the transceivers.

Dozens of people quickly disappeared into the VER-6 ships, even with their carts. The full ships continued to fly away quickly, and empty ones immediately flew into their place. It all resembled busy ants saving their loot and carrying it to safety.

In the factory itself, meanwhile, a group of people in bright white-yellow suits were placing boxes of explosives at every major intersection. It was basically just Gorinium enriched with a few components that made it even more destructive.

"Sector 19 is ready," a person who had just gotten up from a prepared charge announced into the ether and waved a red signal light above his head in the distance.

"Sector 20 is also ready," a person in the distance told them over the transceiver and additionally signaled again with a signal light.

"Vergabein, the cleanup crew is done here. I'm starting the countdown. Speed it up there," the person in sector 19 then announced into the transceiver, and that other voice immediately sounded in the transceiver and added: "We're leaving those who will be there when we arrive. Tell them that, and maybe they'll hurry up." "Vergabein hears, understands, and will relay," a third Vergabein voice sounded in the transceiver.

Vergabein then announced opposite all the workers with carts: "The cleanup crew is finished, whoever will be here when they arrive, stays here." The crowd moved noticeably, several people even almost dropped their cargo as they sped up to make it onto the ship.

In contrast, on Jaspitus, they were now having a good time.

The PCP strike unit was whiling away the waiting time by chatting with Mokir in the kitchenette over a drunk cup of hot chocolate, and they were keeping an eye on how the ship was being recharged. Their main area of interest now was their host, about whom they surprisingly knew little.

Although they had been seeing Mokir for some time and knew a little something about him, their mutual communication was always mostly about work matters. And when they occasionally didn't talk about work, Mokir didn't go into depth in the topics. So, as far as his life, hobbies, and opinions were concerned, they basically hadn't learned much about him in that time. And so, since they had to wait anyway, they took the chance to learn something more about their colleague and were asking like crazy.

All three of them were now listening intently to Mokir's answer to a previously asked question: "Lurd has already finished school and is getting ready to join me."

"So that's nice, that it will be like a family profession," Lirin reacted.

"It's still incomprehensible to me that you remember all those 24 grandchildren and keep track of them," Oril joined the conversation, fascinated.

"How did you even manage to support your 8 children back then?" Draine was interested.

Mokir, meanwhile, began to explain: "Well, at the time when I was still stupid and became an 8-time father, I met someone who was good with money and just needed someone reliable to take care of his ships, and that saved me. He paid very well."

"And where did you work before that?" Draine was interested again.

"Well, count it up, from when I've been here, and when you now know how well I was doing, it's not hard to guess. That is, if they taught you at the academy why and how the Community of Planets came into being. But I hope you won't immediately snitch on me to the commander. It actually might not matter to me now if someone found out, I just don't want to trumpet it too much, so I don't, for example, spoil it for Lurd..."

That caught Lirin's attention: "You don't mean to suggest that you worked for the one who..."

"Yeah, and you're still terribly wronging him to this day," he added with old-man determination and elaborated: "I mean, not you, but the Community of Planets and PCP. Yeah, true, he did strange things, that's true, but it always turned out in the end that it was actually good."