Chapter 11. Extensive Damage.
“A spider tried to talk to you? I have no record of audio readings coming from the spider. Please run a diagnostic on your systems, there might be a fault occurring,” LANI replied with skepticism.
“It didn’t verbalize, it spoke through my systems, here, let me see if I can send you the data,” Watkins said, pushing the transcript of the spider’s conversation to her.
“Odd, try to communicate with the thing,” LANI suggested.
Watkins turned his view inward, trying to find the connection the spider had used to speak to him. He followed a presence throughout the compartment, and after concentrating on the corner of the room that the spider had made its home, he could see it. The spider was linked to his compartment through a thin thread of data. It wasn’t a physical connection through the webs it had spun up there, but something deeper.
“I don’t know if you can hear or understand me, but I don’t wish to be enemies either. As long as you don’t attack my core or my units, I’ll leave you in peace,” Watkins tried to tell the spider.
He wasn’t sure how much of what he said got through to the creature, but he thought it raised and lowered its body, as if trying to nod. It didn’t try to speak further and seemed content to stay in its corner of the room. Until it did something hostile, he’d leave it be.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think it’ll leave us alone as long as we do the same,” Watkins said.
“I have my doubts that the spider is that intelligent. The best-case scenario would be to kill it and reprocess the creature to hopefully obtain a MOBS pattern,” LANI suggested.
“No, it’s a risk we don’t need to take. There’s no way to tell how powerful it is, and I don’t think it harbors any bad intentions toward us. The spider seems content to absorb the energy my core gives off, without attacking my minions or my core,” Watkins said.
“It’s your ship, just note my previous warnings in your logs,” LANI snipped.
While it may be Watkins’ ship, he still had a lot of work to do before it was anything more than a drifting hunk of alloy. His drones had swept up the last of the debris and repaired the compartment by the time Watkins was ready to absorb another section of the ship. Keeping with his earlier plan, he began to move in the other direction, at the wall aft of his core room.
The process went smoothly, and he found that infusing his will through the compartments felt much more natural. He made it about halfway into the compartment when his ability to push his will further along the walls and deck floor were stopped in their tracks.
Annoyed, he tried a different approach, pushing along the top of the compartment. He made even less progress here before he was blocked by something. Despite not having permeated the entire compartment, Watkins felt the familiar click in his mind as he gained access to the limited space that he had been able to control.
“Woah, LANI, you need to check this out,” Watkins said as his view over the compartment activated. The reason he couldn’t permeate the entire compartment was readily apparent. There was no longer a complete compartment here. Something had shorn off half of the engine compartment, and all that was left were the jagged remains of the engine room.
“The damage to our vessel is even more extensive than I’d feared. Maybe the ship was closer to the station than I anticipated when it was struck by the kobold missiles. Either that, or we faced a large collision with some station debris. Either way, you’re going to have a lot of work to do if we want to get our engines operational,” LANI said.
Watkins noted a hint of fear and concern in LANI’s voice. It wasn’t something that he had felt from her before, and that worried him. Taking a simulated, calming breath, Watkins looked more closely at the damage. Whatever main drives the ship has sported were gone, and with them, their ability to maneuver.
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No, that wasn’t quite right, there was something still there, mounted on the hull under the engine room. Watkins pushed his influence into that area and felt relief as his system identified what he had discovered.
Maneuvering thruster, 11%. This maneuver thruster is heavily damaged and currently inoperable. Enough of the original structure remains for it to be repaired.
“LANI, I think we got a bit of a break here,” Watkins said, pushing the data on the thruster over to his adjunct. LANI was quiet, absorbing the data before responding.
“It’s just a maneuver thruster, not a main drive unit, but it’ll give us something to work with. Send a drone to repair it, and we’ll probably get a schematic on the thruster, allowing us to potentially manufacture more of them,” LANI said with confidence and hope returning to her voice.
Watkins did just that, sending a pair of drones to work on the thruster. Another of the hidden compartment doors opened in the core room and as the drones passed through, the compartment was exposed to vacuum. It didn’t harm Watkins, LANI, or the drones, but there was one of his rat MOBS guarding the core and it was sucked through the compartment and out into the void of space.
As it flew out of his influence, Watkins could feel his MOBS dying as the connection to his core faded. Even worse, there was no way to recover the remains for reprocessing. A quick check of his resources showed that Watkins had plenty on hand to construct a new mutant rat MOBS, so he went ahead with the replacement.
Oddly enough, the vacuum itself didn’t kill his minion, as it seemed to survive solely on his core energy. Maybe the extreme cold of the void would eventually harm it, but other than that, his minions needed no air to breathe or food to eat. That would cut down on the need to stock food and water supplies on his ship, as his crew of core-controlled units would be relatively self-sufficient.
His resources had exceeded what his drones could carry in their bodies, and it was nice to see the storage racks in the fabricator room holding something. The blocks of salvage were rectangular and reminded Silas of gold bars he somehow remembered from his human life. Gold had been precious back in his old world, and those ingots of salvage were just as precious to him now.
The biomass was stored on a separate shelf, and it wasn’t nearly as disgusting as he had feared. His reprocessor turned the biomass into solid ingots. It was sort of like huge food bars but speckled with different colored bits. At least it wasn’t some goop which was what Watkins sort of assumed given that most of the biomass he’d obtained came from recently deceased vermin corpses.
There was a total of 33 salvage ingots, and 12 of the biomass ones. Even with half of the storage racks in the compartment reprocessed for salvage, the total amount he had on hand looked rather pitiful. As long as there was enough to repair the maneuver thruster, Watkins would be happy.
The drones tasked with repair were taking their time, carefully examining the thruster before doing any work. In his mind Watkins could see their progress. The mounting support for the thruster was also damaged, and had to be repaired first, or firing up the thruster would cause it to tear loose from the ship. While the pair of repair drones worked, Watkins tasked another drone with gathering salvage on the partially destroyed compartment.
Almost everything that was loose had been sucked out into space, but there were plenty of bent plates and jagged edges that could be shorn off to reprocess. It would benefit him by providing some salvage and allowed his drone to prepare the surfaces for rebuilding at a later date. Work was slow, as Watkins ordered his drones working in vacuum to be especially careful. One misstep would leave his drone helplessly drifting away.
His integration of the partially shorn-off engine compartment was progressing much quicker than the intact compartments had. With the thruster repair taking a while, he was soon ready to integrate another compartment of his ship. He started with the next, and last, large compartment fore of the reprocessor compartment.
It was becoming easier with each integration, and the process flowed smoothly as Watkins began to exert his control over the new compartment. Just like it did with the engine room, his control came to an abrupt halt about halfway through the compartment. Realizing this was likely due to more extensive damage, Watkins continued to integrate everything he could. With just over half the compartment integrated, it snapped into his control.
Once again, the damage was massive. The entire bow of the ship was gone, shorn off just like the engine compartment. Unlike with the engine compartment, Watkins could see something sticking out at the edge of the ship’s hull. He didn’t control the exterior of the ship yet, so he couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
From what he could see, there was a huge piece of wreckage impaling his vessel on the port side, right where the smaller ship compartments were supposed to be. Watkins almost drooled as he looked at the wreckage. It had damaged his ship, but from his point of view, it was a massive piece of salvage waiting to be processed.
With all that salvage, he may finally be able to restore his ship to a functional vessel.