Chapter 2

3 weeks later

It had been three glorious weeks in the company of Lexa, my new starship. In that time not overly much has happened really. It was mostly mundane unless you count traveling by starship around the world.

There was a few different groupings of precious metals and other things in multiple places around the world from Lexas scans but the easiest for me to get to was somewhere near England. I thankfully didn't need to do any diving or anything, I mostly just expanded the ships shields to encompass most of the wreck of the ship that contained the precious metals and artifacts. I did wear a wetsuit though to be in the spirit of things and all that, not to mention my personal shielding device of course. Never know what's down here.

Nothing really untold happened or anything crazy. We have scanners for a reason after all. I'm pretty sure the shipwreck we found was the Merchant Royal though as there was a massive amount of gold as well as a few hundred silver bars amongst other trinkets.

Sadly I wanted the treasure legally so I had to go through a circus. Renting a large boat, diving and all that joy. Had to play pretend that I was just diving all over the area. Once I 'found' the treasure I had Lexa go through the proper channels from our English cousins, I would either have to 'salvage' the treasure or simply sell them the coordinates with some picture proof. The pictures shows piles of chests filled with gold as well as silver bars, not to mention all the artifacts located in the hull of the ship.

I may or may not have taken a few of those artifacts, mostly jewelry and a couple large bags of the coins and placed them onboard Lexa. Just maybe.

The appraisal was approximately in the 2 billion range and they were offering me 35% after Lexa negotiated with them on my behalf. I most certainly didn't want to deal with people, other than showing up when and where necessary. We played it off as a lucky find though so nobody was overly suspicious as we spent a week in those waters just diving, including with a 1 man submersible.

I did admittedly take my payment in multiple forms. I gave the option to pay 85% cash and 15% in gold, it didn't need to be from the treasure ship as I didn't care about coins, I accepted gold bars in exchange. Also I didn't have much storage room for such, so I couldn't take too much with me anyways.

I would mostly just be taking things I could barter with onboard to sell or trade in different dimensions if necessary, wine, spirits, even some plant seeds with instructions. Mostly fruits and cocoa, amongst others. Maybe some saplings.

Sadly I could only really spend a little over 15 million dollars before I was prepared to leave due to over stuffed ship with Lexa, there simply wasn't enough room to store anything else on board, that's with filling every nook and cranny with things. I even bought a few portable DVD players with a bunch of tv series and movies along with batteries to run them for a while until I can figure something better out. I could just use the main screen to play videos but only if I was on the ship and only if people knew about the ship.

There were also some old and original books, works like the Wonderful wizard of Oz, Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, some works by Shakespeare, Mark Twain and others in the collection. I bought the oldest versions in the best conditions that I could.

Just for examples, I brought several dozen crates of wine as well as several expensive crates of scotch amongst other random bottles of spirits, different kinds of vodka as well as the fixings for mixed drinks for those who don't like it strait from the bottle

I may have also brought a bunch of different teas/plants along for the ride with instructions on how to make different varieties, simply because who doesn't like tea?

All in all I didn't really spend very much and could store even less on the ship, mostly I just rented a good sized climate controlled storage locker and stored the excess things for another time and payed it in advance for several years. That was really the best I could do at the moment, other than some clothes, my own weapons and ammo that I had already had, not much else would be of use to me that I can think of.

It with that we were ready to make our first jump in to the unknown.