Chapter 8. Brawl.
Their forces backed off, organizing themselves in a line just past the shelving racks. The rats and beetles were really going at it, but it seemed like the beetles had at least a slight advantage. Their armored carapace took a few seconds of gnawing for the rats to crack through, and those seconds usually resulted in another beetle chomping on the rat with its oversized mandibles.
Minutes ticked by, and the casualties among the combatants began to mount. Three beetles had fallen, but only the large mama rat and two of the smaller younglings remained. A beetle latched onto the large rat, who returned the favor, the chisel-like oversized teeth of the rat cracking completely through its attacker’s shell, killing the creature.
The other beetles took advantage of the opportunity, quicky dispatching the two young rats before turning their mandibles on the sole survivor. A few chomps of their mandibles later, the beetles emerged victorious, though the two surviving bugs sported numerous cracks and gouges in their armored carapace.
“Go get ‘em boys,” Watkins ordered. His mutant rat led the way, followed closely by the four drones with their makeshift weapons. The beetles responded immediately, furious that they were interrupted just as they had started to feast on the fallen.
The regular rats hadn’t done all that great against the beetles, but Watkins’ mutant was a bit tougher and could weather a beetle chomp or two. Sadly, the mutant fell a moment later as the second beetle ganged up on it, but the four drones had arrived quickly behind the mutant and added their weapons to the fight.
Wielding hammers, all the drones went to town on the beetles, cracking through their shells with each blow and in seconds, the last of the vermin in the compartment was dead. It was strangely quiet now, but Watkins didn’t have time to sit around and enjoy it. He had work to do.
Two drones were tasked with gathering up the fallen. It should give him plenty of biomass, not to mention that he still had half the room to scour for debris. Watkins worried each time the drones left the fabrication compartment. Their journey to the reprocessor had been fine so far, but it bothered Watkins that he couldn’t see what his units were doing or if their path was safe.
“With this surfeit of resources, we should max out your units. What kind of mix do you want between drones and MOBS?” LANI asked. According to the system details, Watkins could make a max of ten units. He had five drones, counting the one held in reserve at his core room. To balance things out, Watkins would create five of the mutated rats.
“Let’s go half and half. With five each, we should be able to defend ourselves and keep gathering up salvage and repair our ship. Even better, I think I’ll be able to expand to another compartment soon,” Watkins explained, noting his control over the fabrication compartment had increased to 71%.
“I’m afraid that I won’t be much assistance for the next expansion. The previous one took a lot out of me, and it’ll take me a lot longer to recover,” LANI replied. Watkins could hear it in her voice, a weariness that exuded from her, despite her digital existence.
Before expanding to the next compartment, Watkins made sure he had maxed out his troops. Resources were good as far as biomass, but salvage was running low. Realizing that the storage racks that were taking up a large portion of the compartment were doing him no good at present, since he had nothing to store, Watkins tasked three of the drones with taking apart and recycling half the room’s storage racks while the other two drones repaired the damaged section of the ceiling that the beetles had invaded from.
All he could do now was wait, and Watkins found he was very good at doing so. Something tickled the back of his mind, and he remembered that he wasn’t always this patient when he was still in his human body. He struggled, trying to remember more of who he was and what he’d done, but most of the memories drifted away when he tried to grasp onto them. It was like he was trying to grab water with his hand, an impossible task.
In his creation as the ship’s core, Watkins knew that his memories were still stored away somewhere, but it was supposed to be an offsite storage location. He tried to recollect where it was stored, but the knowledge wasn’t to be found at this time. What he could remember were things mostly pertaining to his military service.
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“LANI, do you know where my memories are stored? When I was created, I was told that many of them were supposed to be downloaded and stored offsite, so I’m assuming they’re not aboard my ship,” Watkins asked.
“Let me check,” LANI said, going quiet for a moment before continuing. “I can see that at the time of your creation, a large data file was sent from your core to the main research station in this system. Once we repair the ship, we should investigate the station. Part of my own functionality was also to be stored there, since not everything could be loaded into the servers they installed in your core room,” LANI said.
“Thank you, we’ll look together to find what we’re missing of ourselves, but first, we need to get my ship in order,” Watkins said, happy to have something to work on which would take his mind away from worry over his lost memories.
“I feel that I need to inform you about something else, Watkins, there may be a problem with the station,” LANI said.
“Problem, what problem?” Watkins asked, his concern growing.
“It was badly damaged in the attack that spurred me to seek you out. The information on your memories would have been downloaded after we knew about the impending attack, so it would stand to reason that it was stored somewhere secure. We’ll need to search the station to be sure, but you should know that there is a chance our data was damaged, especially given how much time has passed,” LANI explained.
Watkins felt anger build. He didn’t ask for this, for his life to be taken from him and his mind to be picked apart for some mysterious system to determine what it wanted to keep and what it wanted to throw away. As his anger built, a sense of calm tried to assert itself. Watkins shook it off, the calm was false, it was something artificially created to suppress his human emotions.
He fought against the calm, trying to keep himself feeling human for as long as he could, even if feeling human meant feeling angry. In time, he felt the pressure on him to remain calm relent. It had backed down, and Watkins let his anger simmer for a bit longer before he chose to let it slowly fade.
His memories might be on that station, and he was going to do everything he could to get them back. The next step was to integrate into a third compartment, but which direction should he go? Toward the bow was where his drones had gone to deliver things to the reprocessor. That should be his next goal, to reach the reprocessor and take it under his protection.
“I’m going to begin integrating the next compartment, please don’t disturb me,” Watkins said coldly to LANI when he noted that the integration of this compartment had reached 100%.
“I’ll try not to interrupt you unless there is an emergency. Captain Watkins, I can sense your anger at me, and I know it is at least partially justified. One thing you should consider in your calculations is the fact that if I hadn’t intervened when I did, you and your entire crew would have perished in the explosion aboard the vessel you were fighting,” LANI offered.
Memory of that last battle on Earth that he had been involved in had been retained. The system had decided it was worthwhile to keep since it was ship and combat related. Looking over it, he could see that LANI was right. Some unknown ordinance had been sloppily stored on the smuggler’s vessel and the gunfire from the fifty caliber had caused the massive explosion.
Still, despite her logic, Watkins couldn’t quite bring himself to completely trust this strange adjunct companion he had been saddled with. He might have died in the explosion, but the only reason she had rescued him was to use him, not to save him out of the goodness of her heart. That brought up another question, one that only LANI could answer for him.
“What about my crew?” Watkins asked.
“Your crew, aboard the ship from Earth? They were rescued as well, placed in stasis on the station. None were viable for a ship’s core, but it was thought that they might be useful in assisting you with your vessel. Just like with your memories, I can’t guarantee what condition we’ll find them in,” LANI explained.
“As long as there’s a chance that they’re still alive, we need to get to them. Now before I get distracted again, I need to integrate the next compartment into our ship,” Watkins said.
Determination burned in him. His crew had been saved and might still be alive. His mind had been downloaded with some knowledge of stasis. The data was enough to know that it should have kept his crew safe, completely pausing the passage of time, but there were no guarantees after such a long time had passed aboard the damaged station.
Pushing his will outward, Watkins began to infuse himself into the wall of the next compartment. As before, he started at the hatch and worked his way outward. He could more easily feel the microscopic conduits, life support controls, and other devices integrated into the alloy of the walls.
His will flowed slowly through the walls as Watkins used the existing devices as a road to follow as he slowly but steadily exerted his control. The process was not an easy one, and LANI wasn’t able to assist him this time. Despite the challenges, he was going to do this. The ship was his, it was part of him, and he would take it back one compartment at a time. And once he had control, he was going to use this ship to rescue his crew and recover his memory.