Chapter 14. Void Beast.

Watkins watched carefully as the drones were pulled off salvage duty to help safely transport the research module to the core room. It took his drones a while to dismount it from the research lab floor. After that, they to physically move it through the ship. Hatchways were a bit of a struggle as they weren’t mounted flush to the deck and there was a small, five-inch frame that the drones had to step over.

He almost ordered one of his rats or the beetle to be reprocessed so he could control an extra drone to help, but the crew of six drones that he had on hand seemed to manage things. It wasn’t until the research module was placed on the deck of his core room that Watkins felt some relief. Five of the drones went back to salvaging the station wreckage, while the last drone went to work on repairing the research module.

“LANI, how can my drones repair the research module, when they’re only level zero? I’m not going to complain, but I would have through they would have needed more upgrades to work on something that complex,” Watkins asked.

“For repairs, they can often handle more complex items than their level would suggest. Creating one from scratch isn’t possible at this time, but with most of the device there to examine and compare while they work, they can get it to a functional state. That doesn’t mean the research module will function at full capacity, and the makeshift repairs the drone is working on will surely hamper the module’s effectiveness,” LANI explained.

That was a logical enough explanation, and as much as Watkins wanted to start researching upgrades, he still had the rest of the ship to integrate. His work wasn’t going to stop with the integration, he had the whole bow and aft engine sections of the ship to rebuild. As for the interior of the ship, there was one last compartment to integrate. It was the furthest aft, save for the engine compartment.

As he pushed his will into the compartment, Watkins felt his control rapidly spread over it. This was the fastest he had integrated a compartment so far. When total control snapped into place over the compartment, he realized that while he was getting faster at his efforts, this compartment was the smallest one they’d explored so far.

It was a galley, and it had been spared the worst of the destruction. The compartment had retained its hull integrity, so most of the items inside were still functional. There was a small food and drink fabricator that worked off biomass cubes. The fabricator had suffered minor damage, and his drones could have it fixed up without too much trouble.

For now, they had no living crew, so the galley renovations could wait a bit. There was a nice discovery inside the compartment. It had been fully stocked for the potential first voyage of the ship. Nearly a hundred biomass bricks were stacked in the various storage cabinets, and the food fabricator itself had eight loaded into it that were ready to be used.

Watkins put the galley repairs low on the priority list, but did have recovery of the biomass bricks set a bit higher. He wanted most of them safely stored in the fabrication compartment with the others. He decided to leave in place the biomass bricks that were already loaded in the food fabricator in case his crew were hungry whenever they eventually made it back to the station to revive them.

With the last internal compartment under his control, Watkins examined his status. He could feel the improvement, but it was always nice to see it quantified.

Vessel: Pending.

Vessel Core: Jesse Watkins.

Hull Durability: Unknown.

Core Processing Power: 24%.

Core Durability: 100%.

Systems:

1. Level 0 auxiliary processing server housing the LANI system: 43%

2. Level 0 universal fabricator: 100%.

3. Level 0 reprocessor: 81%.

Crew: none.

Core controlled units:

Command Limit: 12/13.

1. Simple repair drone, Level 0 (6).

2. Mutated bilge rat, Level 0 (5).

3. Yendax Beetle, Level 0 (1).

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1. Salvage: 87.

2. Biomass: 89.

He had bumped his processing power to 24%, still not even close to what he was capable of, but enough to boost his command limit up to 13. With an extra slot open, he ordered a new drone to be produced, giving him a total of seven. The new drone would be ordered to work on the reprocessor before helping with the salvage operations.

The reprocessor was still at 81% and was suffering from internal damage that the beetles feeding off it had caused. With so much salvage being pulled from the wreckage imbedded in his ship, Watkins wanted to make sure he wasn’t wasting any due to inefficiency while reprocessing it into usable material. There was a lot of the ship that he needed to rebuild, and every ingot of salvage that he could eke out of the reprocessor was crucial to his survival.

“LANI, I’m going to start working on integrating the hull. We need to have total control over the ship before I begin major repairs and rebuilding,” Watkins said.

“That is a logical approach, though I will try to get your attention once the research module is functional. Which research options do you wish to pursue first?” LANI asked.

“I’m not sure yet. I think we need to see what we find on the hull. Maybe there is a major component that we’re missing or that needs to be upgraded,” Watkins said. In truth, despite the information in his database, there was much about the ship he didn’t know about or understand. By integrating the entire vessel, he’d have a better feel for it, as the ship was essentially his body. Once fully his, Watkins would know what was missing.

His first efforts at integrating the hull were slow. He started on the hull directly over his core room, using structural braces to reach the exterior. It might have been faster to start where the hull was breached, but for some reason, Watkins felt that having the hull over his core compartment secured would help to protect him. He was also slowed by the rather unique makeup of the hull.

Internally, the ship’s compartments were heavily reinforced and essentially armored boxes inside the ship, but the hull itself was on a whole other level. Only two inches thick, the armored hull possessed far more integrated devices than the walls of the internal compartments had. For a while, Watkins pondered over their use, but eventually, as the integrated sections of his hull integrated with his core, Watkins could tell what he was looking at.

The most complex components turned out to be his ship’s sensors. He’d already integrated with the internal sensor devices that gave him vision over the compartments, but these were much more powerful and numerous on the armored hull. His armor was also oddly complex, and it had several kinds of protection built into it.

When hit by a beam weapon, like a laser, the hull would fragment into tiny particles instead of melting. These particles would remain near the hull for several seconds, dispersing the power of further attacks in the same location. His database flagged it as ablative armor and it would weaken any energy weapons fired at his ship. The alloy of the armor itself was a weave of metals and ceramic, which would both protect from kinetic energy, and shield from any harmful radiation or similar energies they might run into.

All in all, it was advanced protection, and he confirmed with LANI that his armor was another experimental component of his ship, and more advanced than even most warship designs. The only drawback was that his hull could only mount about two to three inches of armor over his ship. It seemed that the processing power of his core would limit his ability to integrate more hull material or expand the vessel’s size.

Additional protection would be offered by a shield generator unit that would block any damage up to its load limitation. Sadly, he couldn’t detect any shield generator units currently functioning on his ship. Watkins would need to integrate further forward on the ship as, according to his schematics, the shield generators were wing-like projections just aft of the torpedo launchers at the bottom of the hull. He’d get there eventually but given that they were projections off the hull, there was a good chance that the debris had destroyed or at least heavily damaged them.

As more of the exterior of the ship came under his control, Watkins could feel himself improve, and his core processing power climbed faster than it had done with the interior compartments. After a bit, he’d take a break to see if there was a corresponding increase in his command limit. More drones working would always be a good thing.

Almost as if he’d jinxed himself, Watkins could feel first one, then a second drone drop from his control. He paused his hull integration, and in the moments that it took him to solidify his hold over what he’d already integrated, another drone was gone. With his attention back on the interior of the ship, he looked for the problem. It was probably part of the debris breaking loose and dragging his drones along for the ride.

While he searched for the issue, he ordered three replacements to be fabricated. It would take some time for them to get built, but his total salvage had gone up considerably since he’d started working on the hull. In addition, he’d oddly gained a few bricks of biomass somewhere along the way.

“Watkins, look, there on the station debris, I see atmosphere venting,” LANI said.

“We lost three drones as well, what’s happening?” Watkins asked. Where his drones had been pulling salvage off the station debris, he could see a dark opening. The drones had breached the exterior of the station debris in that spot, and a few wisps of atmosphere were being pulled from the now-exposed interior of the station debris.

Something else pulled itself from inside the ruined section of the station. It was a living creature, but like nothing Watkins had ever seen. Even looking at it through his sensors, the image seemed to roil and shift. Its body was a greyish-green mass of flesh, and from this ball of flesh an ever-changing assortment of limbs sprouted.

“No, Watkins, this isn’t good. I think we’re in really big trouble here,” LANI said. Watkins could hear the fear in her voice as they watched the creature pull itself from the debris and crawl its way onto his ship.