Dav hated Corvettes.

These vessels which typically ranged from 25 meters at the smallest to 100 meters at the longest were the stuff of his nightmares. A Corvette was, in essence, a gunship; take a large vessel, stick a bunch of armor and shields on it, put turrets absolutely everywhere, stuff it to the gills with anti-air and anti-ground missiles, and you have a corvette.

These vessels were the second-largest vessel in the Imperial Navy that could enter a planet’s atmosphere, and the largest that could do it with any modicum of grace. The larger Frigates could only hover forward in sub-sonic speeds and hardly turn, less their 250 meters of mass crash down and make a massive crater. The smaller fighters could dance circles around them.

But a Corvette didn’t need to dance, because its heart was evil incarnate and its systems were manned by the damned – in Dav’s mind, at the very least.

In reality, due to the smaller size of the typical Corvette, they were often used to move large amounts of equipment that could not be ferried by unarmored transports, or dropped from orbit in a drop pod. They were also used to gain land superiority in atmosphere where orbital vessels didn’t have the required finesse, as well as missile boats for fighters. A fighter would lock a target, and after several seconds, there would be a hypersonic missile trying to make sweet-sweet love to its tail-section.

And Dav hated them.

His fighter, meant for light strike against soft targets like transport trucks and fleshy infantry simply wasn’t armed heavily enough to make a dent in one save for the smallest ones, and the heavy interceptors and allied corvettes would always take their sweet time to descend from orbit.

Dav and his squadron, in the meanwhile, had to play tag with a floating firebase with an attitude problem.

Worse, he had served on one for the duration of his training to acquire his qualification – those were the longest three months of his service. All the armor, weapons, and missiles make for VERY little room for crew, which numbers from eight men to twenty at the most. On the smallest boats, you have two four-stack bunks in a tiny berth, another closet with a bed for the ‘captain’, and the ‘fishbowl’.

The fishbowl, named so for its shape, is a spherical command and control center in the heart of each Imperial Navy vessel. While civilian pleasure yachts can afford to have real windows to space, a real vessel would have its captain popped like a marshmallow by a laser before you could even tell the battle started.

The modern “bridge” of space vessels was more akin to a tomb of armor and shields, seated in the heart of the vessel which was built like an onion than an ocean-fairing ship. A Corvette’s ‘fishbowl’ was a claustrophobic mess, with all the crewmembers shoved in equal spacing all over the inside of the sphere into their respective stations, with gravity disabled and inertia dampeners running on ‘high’, which meant that you were constantly fighting the urge to vomit due to a vibrating stomach, while the aft gunner’s smelly athlete’s foot was fingering your left nostril.

There were no veteran corvette crews – either you survived deployment and were moved to a frigate within a year, or you went back to being a fighter jockey.

Dav had gone the other way – but he did manage to pick up a qualification as a gunnery officer along the way. It was more of a joke and a way for the Navy to justify the expenditure of trying to promote fresh trainees into ships of the line, which always needed more fresh meat, but serving on a corvette qualified one as a commissioned officer.

The qualification didn’t come with a rank, and served to indicate that the individual went through the required training and gained the relevant experience to serve in the role they were serving in aboard their vessel. Any Captain of a ship-of-the-line would laugh in Dav’s face had he sent in a transfer request asking to fill the role of a dedicated gunnery officer, rank and all.

A 25-meter Corvette is not quite like a five kilometer battleship, they would say.

And yet, here he was, sitting in the Bridge of the ‘Resurrection’, with the Custodian floating to his right. To the floating sphere, his qualification gained in a sweaty room with eight other guys was enough to be installed as the ‘weapons’ master’ of a ten-kilometer alien dreadnought that dwarfed any Cephia Leviathan by a significant factor.

Of course, there were no weapons ready, or even able to fire on board the vessel – according to the Custodian the ship took critical damage millions of years ago. This was being remedied – once he’d given his permission for it, several car-sized drones entered the hangar and dismantled his vessel in seconds and absconded with the reactor. A few minutes later, the ship had come to life, lights flickering on in its corridors.

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The Custodian claimed that the damage was fixable, but required help from something that he could not reveal to him just yet, but apparently the energy from the experimental reactor was being used to top off the emergency batteries, start up another auxiliary generator, and fuel the massive nanite vats somewhere in the ships.

He still couldn’t wrap his brain around the concept.

The Empire, and through it, humanity, had experimented with nanotechnology for hundreds of years, but had never managed to achieve sufficient control and miniaturization of mechanical systems to create real nanobots that could do significant work.

Most companies and laboratories besides a few theoretical institutes simply decided to put it aside – in most cases, macro-scale engineering was sufficient, and when it wasn’t you could usually bioengineer some microbe to do it for you, which was how Old Terra’s oceans were cleaned up to begin with.

The few projects that were successful created a “Grey Goo” scenario – and after the loss of a research station that simply went ‘pop’ and turned into a silvery semi-sentient goop blob in orbit, further experimentation was restricted in scale, and was to be carried out remotely and around a convenient sun or other similar natural disposal site. And yet, this mysterious species had vats of the magical machines sitting around, and even put some inside him.

Vat used the mental trigger that he’d set up with Custodian’s help, and brought up his status display.

In a rectangular screen the calming shade of blue, was his entire medical history, injury status, current chemical processes in his body, and even lifestyle suggestions, extrapolated simply by the nanites’ exploration of his body.

The ‘master-slave array’ layout used a central construct with a small quantum computer a few millimeters in size, and controlled the ‘slave’ nanites via differentiated ‘sergeant’ nanites that distributed commands at lightning speed. They used the materials in his body to procreate, and could even temporarily replace damaged cells while encouraging the growth of the new cell rapidly. This reminded Dav that he was no longer fully human.

He still struggled with the Custodian’s words.

The procedure Dav had went through had cured him of all his small aches and pains, and even that niggling dig in the shoulder he had from the time he got catapulted out of a parked fighter by the ejector seat by accident. No human chiropractor could figure out what had happened to that shoulder, but somehow these alien robots did.

And then there was the matter of his ‘improved’ genetics.

According the Custodian, since he accepted the terms of the contract, he was now allowed to know the name of the mysterious race which had created this vessel.

The ‘Seraphim’, as they translated into common-speak, were surprisingly human in shape – two hands and two legs, a torso and a head. This was apparently a universal trend among carbon-based life forms in the Milky Way. While some had more limbs or less, there were very few exceptions to this, like an amoeba-like species that dwelt in ocean worlds and simply flew around space with those very oceans, when they migrated from world to world every several tens of thousands of years.

Apparently they were one of the most advanced races of their time, until some sort of war happened. The details of the conflict were classified according to the Custodian, but most of the major civilizations collapsed, at which point this very vessel was sent out, got caught up in an ambush, and hurtled into unknown space until this very day.

And now Dav had some of their genes inside him – which kind of worried him, since human rights kind of applied only to humans in the legal context. Of course, with the Cephia things had been mixed around quite a bit and there was talk of a sweeping amendment to the basic principles of the Empire, but the gears of bureaucracy turn slowly and eat up no-names like him.

The Custodian explained to him that, according to the treaty, the genetic uplifting of newly discovered races was allowed but restricted to specific conditions – this was done because much of the technology used by the uplifting races was genetically locked, and so it was often necessary to forcefully ‘uplift’ ambassadors from the ranks of the new races.

Asking how this did not contradict the clause about genetic experimentation and mutilation of the treaty made the Custodian chuckle – “Experimentation? The genetic code of the Seraphim that now graces your cells has been fine-tuned for thousands of years by the best minds and verified countless times before being approved for use. The Seraphim do not ‘compromise’, ‘settle’, or choose anything else but the best of the best.”

Asking about the nature of the genes he’d received simply got him a “wait and see” from the chrome beach-ball, which he was used to considering his former military association but never the less unhappy with.

This was also stipulated in the contract between Dav and the Resurrection.

The Custodian had insisted that Dav was contracted to the ship itself, and not to it, saying again and again it was alive. Dav had asked if it was an AI, an artificial intelligence, and received ‘No’ for an answer. Asking for an explanation got him nowhere.

The contract mandated several things:

Dav had sworn to serve and protect the Resurrection, its interest and crew – and in return, would do the same. He was to take up a role as a crew member, his past military knowledge taken into account, and would serve as an ambassador between the Resurrection and any human entity or organization, as well as Cephia. While Dav had explained matters regarding the Gremlin, the Custodian had replied that unless they directly attacked the Resurrection, it could not provoke the first strike against an unknown space-faring species on the words of another.

The Custodian itself was very quiet, replying in short sentences or single words, at times resorting to simple text messages to Dav’s new visual interface, straight through the new Seraphim implants. Its entire being was currently troubleshooting a massive vessel that had been neglected for eons.

After several hours, it had found Dav in the bridge.

“It’s time, Weapon’s Master Dav. We shall commence the awakening the Resurrection. Your assistance is required.”