02 - Back to the Hiveship
“I can’t go back empty handed,” Maya said as she and Tender walked toward the doorway. “I mean, sure I got me some fancy potions from Bell’s matriarch, but I need more.”
“There is still Pegarios,” Tender replied.
“Yeah, we totally gotta get back with him. He’s got about a dozen million of our credits. If we could snatch that up again and then maybe we could buy more potions from Bell’s grandma.”
“I don’t think she’s his grandmother.”
“They’re all descended from her, right? Like twenty five thousand people sprouted from her loins.”
“Descended from her loins…” Tender paused.“Also, you need to stop reading the System reports. They cost credits and you’ve been burning through a lot of them.”
Maya snorted. “You make it sound like I’m addicted. I’m not addicted. I didn’t just Google myself to find out what information there is out there on me,” Maya said. “Okay, maybe a little. I mean I need to know what the word is, y’know.Luckily, it’s just our corporation certification with the System and some information about who the board members are. No levels, no last seen locations, etc.”
“Interesting,” Tender said, obviously not interested at all.
“Why can’t I come?” Roci demanded, speaking up for the first time.
“Already told you, kid. I don’t know what will happen if you cross over.I mean you’re not a biological being, so you can go back and forth, but you’re also not a rogue AI and when the System changed you, your black goo sorta dried up. Hell, I don’t even know what’s powering you because the original mana battery I put in there should have burned out long ago.”
“I’m an abomination?” Roci asked archly.
“Hey, like a hot minute ago I was a teenager too.Don’t try to pull that crap on me, kiddo.Keep an eye on the Cage and when this whole mana purge thing is over and done with, you can come galavanting back in with bells and whistles on.”
“But I want to go back to the RSH!”
“Teach those Astronauts more engineering. We need their brainpower.”
“Ugh, Yuri is an jerk,” Roci said. “Hanna is cool, George is stuck in his old ways of thinking. Izumi wants to be an [Enchanter].”
Maya paused and frowned.“Shit,” she muttered. “I totally should have asked if they got teachers and the like they can send.”
“Who?”
“Bell’s people,” Maya said. “I know the System tossed around a lot of Foundational books when Integration occurred, but there are still plenty of people who probably want to learn some stuff we have no idea about.We need more knowledge cubes too.” She shook her head. “Later. We need to check on the hiveship and Junior.”
“It’s been eleven days, he’ll be dead,” Roci said.
“Who’ll be dead?” Bell demanded, overhearing them.
“Nothing!” Roci turned and raced off.
“It feels odd,” Bell said. “I spent months wanting to leave that place, but now that I cannot go back. I sort of miss it.”
“Fear of missing out, maybe,” Maya said. “I mean, we’re gonna be on so many adventures and you’ll be stuck here, pushing paper and having to deal with whatevera Merchant Liaison does.”
“We ensure that the merchants we deal with have the best interests of House Domakun,” Bell said.
“So, you’re like enforcers or something.If a trader does something you don’t like, kneecaps are broken?”
“In the old days, it was wrists,” Bell grinned.“Four limp wrists is a saying in my world.”
Maya paused and looked at her friend. “How are you?”
“We had this discussion,” Bell said.
“Yeah, but how are you?”
“Fine. I think I’m good. I’ve returned to my family, but after all these months of doing things on my own… I feel, stymied.”
“I understand. It’s hard being on your own and returning to your fam, only to be treated like a child again.”
“It’s not quite that, but I suppose close enough.”
“Well, you did save my life so I’m glad you did it.”
“I do not regret it, I just wish to ‘bitch’ about it.”
“Hey, you’re learning all the wrong English words,” Maya said grinning.
“Make sure Junior is okay, If possible, bring him to the Cage. I think I would like to continue working on shaping his mana trace.”
“Ha, you called him a him and Junior,” Maya grinned as she opened the door. “Looks like little Bellerina misses his algae buddy.”
“Please leave,” Bell said.
***
“That’s a lot of friggin’ ship,” Maya said looking at the mass of the hiveship. They had opened a door outside of the remains of the Bonita’s Revenge, seeking the tesseract packs that had been caught up in the destruction of the ship.
The world wasn’t absolute black anymore, but it wasn’t the rainbow sky hellscape that Maya knew. The sky was a reddish hue, barely emitting enough light to make things visible.It only made the world more hellish looking and Maya disliked it.
“At least it managed to land,” Tender said.
“Yeah, barely,” Maya remarked.
The hiveship had ‘landed’ but it had landed upon a trash pile.In fact, it had completely crushed a trash pile, compressing the massive pile of metals and machinery into a misshapen lump.The hive ship was also listing to its side and she could see the exposed internals that the railgun had punched through. At least the fires were out.
“Think the rogue AIs are still kicking?” Maya asked.
“The mana purge is still in effect,” Tender said. “We locked down the liquid mana reserves that the hiveship obtained, they might have run out of mana by now.”
“Fingers crossed.This whole using twenty times normal mana is kicking our butts.”
They marched to the Bonita’s Revenge, the ship had seen better days.Maya looked at it and realized she felt nothing. It wasn’t their home, it wasn’t a ship she loved.It had always been Shen’s ship and Shen was a monster.It was an ugly ship created by an ugly SIL.
Maya’s sensor box took in the scene, displaying a wireframe view of what remained of the vessel. The hiveship wasn’t stupid, they wanted the Bonita destroyed because they had thought that was where Maya was using her dimensional cage from.Although they had destroyed the ship; they had only destroyed the unnecessary parts.The engines and engineering section were still intact, which meant the original C5 mana core was still intact and the tesseracts that Tender had to leave behind were still intact.
The Bonita’s Revenge was an oddly designed ship. Shen had created it as his mobile base, but the craft itself was simply a bridge, to control the ship, and an engineering section, to power and give it flight.The ‘main’ insides of the ship had been the Habitat, or Hab, that was removable.Maya didn’t know why it was designed in that manner, but now with he ship destroyed, the Hab still remained operational.
Nan had all her medical stuff in the Hab, which lay in the area between the BR and the Hangy.They passed it, looking over it with their scanners.The building had survived, with minor damage from flying debris, but noting that couldn’t be fixed.
They continued onward, the ground becoming covered in debris and trash that had been tossed about by the explosions that had rocked the BR. The ship was a mess up close, energy weapons, explosives, and railguns had torn the hull to shreds.They hadn’t even activated the defenses on the ship before it was destroyed, not that it would have done much.
“A shame,” Maya said. “We could have used this ship to fly around the RSH.”
“You have your doors,” Tender replied, picking his way through the debris.
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“Yeah, but it’s way cooler to play ship captain and pretend I’m Janeway and kick some robotic ass, no offense,” Maya said.
“Who’s Janeway?” Tender asked.
“Just a badass fictional character,” Maya replied.She took out her cutter and began removing plating that blocked her path.
They worked in companionable silence as they cut their way through the debris and into the engineering section.It took nearly an hour, but they managed to enter the room, finding what they were looking for.
“It’s pristine,” Maya said.
“The hiveship wished to secure the resources here,” Tender said. “A C5 core and the engines would have benefitted it greatly.”
“Good for us, I guess. Well, not really seeing as they fucked up our ship.But at least they were greedy enough to not utterly destroy it.”
They found the tesseract packs, still connected to the ship’s power system.The mana core was dead, as there was no ambient mana for it to consume.Maya walked around it and peered at the device, it was a heavily shielded cylinder that stood nearly eight meters tall and three meters at the base.As a Category 5 mana core it produced nearly 350 megagens of power, in normal ambient mana.
The core, along with the original core of the Hanganathorie and a second core that Shen had obtained, were what powered the Cage.They had been only able to get twenty hours of Cage time with the cores, and it had taken them six days to recharge.That felt like a lifetime ago for Maya.
Now they had the tesseracts that acted like a combination mana core and mana battery; additionally the mana stored within it could be used by SIL and machine.That was the real power of the tesseract.Mana storage was easy, but storing mana that could be used by SIL was near impossible.The mana in a mana core was not the same as the ambient mana that SIL absorbed and used when activating Skills or when using their occupational abilities.
Maya looked at the tesseracts before she inventoried them.They had a massive amount of wealth on their hands. They had the ability to make even more tesseracts and in a manner that would have made even Tier 4 craftsSIL jealous.They didn’t need the massive infrastructure or the thousands of highly skilled SIL to create condensed mana and then transform it into a tesseract, all they needed was the improved black goo that Roci had concocted and the liquid mana that existed in this plane.
It was way to easy and Maya realized how careless she had been with the tesseracts.The old adage of valuing something because it took hard work to obtain, seemed true.The tesseracts were easy to make, relatively speaking, and she knew she didn’t fully appreciate the value they presented.
Entire civilizations weren’t able to make the sheer amount of tesseracts she had created in a few short hours.
Tender marked and noted the equipment that could be salvaged as Maya stared at the mana core, lost in thought.Once they were done, they opened a doorway and entered the Cage.
“Are you okay, boss?” Tender asked Maya as they unloaded some of the items they had inventoried.
Maya looked up. “Huh?”
“You seem… down,” he said.
“Nah, just thinking.”
“Always a bad idea,” Tender said.
“A joke?” Maya asked.
“I am working on my humor. Nan said that humor makes one more… approachable.”
Maya looked up at the six eyed rogue AI.He towered over her, wide in the shoulders to accommodate the four arms he had and clad in black carapace armor that he had taken from the original Shen zombies.The liquid mana bath that had increased his levels and reshaped his body, making him leaner in some areas, but the overall effect was that Tender was still a giant walking robot of doom.
“Personal growth is the best growth,” she said. “But don’t change who you are just to make other people happy.”
Tender tilted his head at her and then nodded. “Alright, boss.”
“I’m okay, Tender.Just feeling nostalgic and thinking.Things are changing, for the good, but also changing.Bell’s now stuck in the multiverse, so is Yosi, I’m not sure about Roci.Even with the tesseracts, we’re not going to keep the Cage operating all the time, it’s just drawing too much power.”
“The liquid mana from the hiveship should help.”
“If it’s still viable,” Maya said. “Also, I don’t think we should use it to top off our power.The tesseracts are the most valuable thing in the multiverse, we have the liquid mana and the black goo, so I think we should just use all the liquid mana we have to make more tesseracts, even if we can’t power them.”
“That’ll required an initial investment of mana,” Tender said. “Half a liter of liquid mana, twenty liters of refined black goo. As we’ve wiped out our black goo reserves, we’re going to have to make more, that requires mana stones as the main ingredient.”
“There’s a lake bed of mana stones out there,” Maya said. “We can harvest that. We can make more black goo, if need be, but I think we don’t have to.”
“Why’s that, boss?”
“The hiveship. It’s basically a giant rogue AI body, one that runs off of black goo.”
“Ah,” Tender nodded. “You seek to drain the hiveship?”
“Totally. We found out we can upgrade the black goo that the rogue AIs use into the refined black goo, so this ship’s goo is useable.”
“That’s going to be a lot of work.”
“We make more tesseracts, we make more black goo mana netting, we toss that netting out over Earth, use the high ambient mana there to super charge them, and voila, a constantly renewable energy source to keep the Cage running until the components all wear out.”
“That’s going to be a lot of work,” Tender said again. “There is only about ten of us to do it.Perhaps if I manage to complete Nan’s new body, that will be eleven. I’m not sure about Scotty or Zono. Scotty prefers his non-corporeal form, Zono… Zono has been quiet.”
Maya felt a pang of guilt at the words.Zono, the big boisterous AI mining barge, had been captured by the hiveship.They had torn apart his body and interrogated him on what he knew.Now he wasn’t the big hiveship that was tearing apart trash piles; he was a tiny AI core that hadn’t spoken much since he was rescued. Maya didn’t know how to help him, therefore Nan, Roci, and Veskari were taking care of the core, trying to coax him into communicating.
“All your rats and defense drones died,” Maya said. “But you can still command drones, right?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, we do have several hundred ant heads in our possession.Along with the location of all their bodies, which I don’t believe the hiveship grabbed.We can reattach the head with the bodies and reprogram them to do our nefarious bidding.”
“That would require me to remain in the RSH to control them,” Tender said.“If you wish to also use them in the multiverse at large, then we shall need someone else to control them there.”
“Maybe we can conjure up a controlling AI for them, we just need bodies to do all the heavy lifting that’s ahead of us,” Maya said. “We’re short handed to do anything meaningful and it’s beginning to suck because all the work we manage to do, just gets kicked over by some asshole with bigger levels and a shittier attitude.”
Maya rubbed her stubbled head and sighed. “Alright, I spent three days moping. I think I might have brought it along on this expedition,” she said. She turned to Tender and grinned. “Let’s see if we’re still mana rich.”
***
“Well, shit,” Maya said.
It took some time, but Maya and Tender managed to locate the cargo areas of the ship. The hiveship was two kilometers in diameter and nearly a half a kilometer tall.They still had the scans of the ship, but the layout of the ship was vastly different from what a SIL would have designed. The cargo areas were multiple and small, the hiveship used a variety of dimensional storage containers and various methods to move around parts as needed.
It would make taking the ship’s materials easy, but it also was a confusing mess of small rooms and areas that weren’t well defined on the scans.Through exploration and getting lost in the maze of tight corridors and railings, Maya and Tender finally came across a liquid mana storage container.
“That’s a lot of mana,” Tender remarked.
Chuckles the Dragon had said the hiveship was also stockpiling liquid mana, the same way Maya had been doing.She looked up at the massive containment field and could only stand there with her mouth hanging open.
The hiveship was not messing around when it began loading up on liquid mana.Maya guessed the container held nearly five thousand liters and it wasn’t the only one.She looked down the long slightly curving corridor and spotted several more containers.
Maya brought up the scan of the ship and used it to figure out where they were.She highlighted the components that made up the mana containment tank and searched the rest of the ship scan to find anything identical to it.It only took a moment and the results flashed on the tablet.
“Holy shit,” Maya muttered.
Tender peered at the tablet. “Holy shit,” he stated.
There were fifty identified containers of liquid mana on the hiveship, each comparable in size to the one she stood before. A quick calculation showed the tank held six thousand liters of liquid mana.
“We’re gonna make so many tesseracts,” Maya whispered.
***
“I’ll grab the head, you grab the ass end,” Maya said as she bent down to grab the worker ant’s head in her hands.Tender grabbed the back end of the ant and together they pulled it out of the entangled pile of worker ants that blocked the corridor.
As the ship had ‘died’ and the power shutdown, the ants had all turned dormant to the lack of being continuously fed mana from the hiveship.Hundreds of worker ants were strewn about the ship, making it far easier on Tender and Maya to collect and begin processing them.
Once the ant was set on a clear spot, Maya rolled it over, exposing the undercarriage of the rogue AI.She used a cutter to open a section of its thorax and began pulling out components.
“I’m getting the hang of this,” Maya said as she reslotted in apremade rack of components. There was a slight twitch from the ant, but it remained dormant.The new rack was software to override the controls of the ant, turning it from the hiveship’s drone to a Maya drone.
The rogue AI would still have to powered back on, but that was the least of their worries.It had been nearly five hours as Tender and Maya swapped out components and turned their once enemies into their willing servants.
After they were done, Maya touched the ant and summoned it into her inventory.At Dimensional Inventory IV, she had gotten rid of the fifty kilogram weight limit per stack.Now she could fit anything over fifty kilograms into a stack and the rogue AI drones did stack.
“Alright, I think this’ll do for a test batch,” Maya said standing up and stretching.“We’ll get these bad boys running and see how many you can control at once.”
***
The room was dark and quiet and as Maya shone her light around, she spotted the dormant bodies of more worker drones and various other rogue AIs crumpled onto the floor.They were stacked onto of one another, seemingly all climbing and crawling toward a singular point in the room.
That point was obvious, a massive cylindrical object that sat in the center of the room.It was painted a dull green color and Maya could see some lights still blinking upon its surface, the only lights she had seen in the entire ship besides the mana containment tanks.
The scene they witnessed had been played out in many other rooms on the ship. As the drones began to lose power, they had all rushed to the places where power was stored, the mana core chambers.The hiveship was massive and that required a lot of mana cores to keep it powered, even with the inefficiency of keeping larger mana cores together, the hiveship still had over two dozen C5 or greater mana cores to power the ship.
Then there was the literal heart of the ship, the massive mechanical organ that pumped the black goo in a series of pipes all throughout the vessel.That was the main goal that Tender and Maya had been aiming for, when they stumbled across the mana core chambers.
The cores were dead, just like the cores on the BR and the Hangy’s old core.The mana purge had shut them down and drained all the mana out of them, but the ship had also run off of black goo.The sheer size and amount of black goo running through its veins had allowed it to survive long enough to begin pumping and using liquid mana to offset its energy usage.
“I don’t even know what to do with all these cores,” Maya said.She felt a little overwhelmed about the sheer wealth of parts and materials that the hiveship offered them. Everything from intact drones, entire rooms filled with dimensional storage containers, an ocean of black goo, and now over two dozen mana cores that each could power a starship.
“According to the scan and what we’ve identified as the main black goo arteries, the estimate of black goo is around fifty billion liters,” Tender said looking down at a tablet.
Maya chuckled.She sat down on the deck, then lay down.She continued chuckling.
“Oh, shit,” she laughed.