Raptor One – Chapter 106
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As I finished that one day trek to the avali colony to leave La’mos on their care, I finally reached my ship in orbit, inside the command module, seated on my chair I look forward at the darkness of space and the planet bellow that’s getting smaller by the minute, a sense of accomplishment for helping a soul in need makes me sigh as I watch the girls work on their consoles, the ship, ICW – Tenacity open it’s solar sails while activating it’s Slipstream ring, the kickback of the energy as it rips space time slows the ship to a stop as it fights the kickback.
With the silence of electricity as a trigger we enter the alter dimension, the normal space turning into water like particles and the solar systems becoming shining stars around us as the ship fly around the particles like water closer to the solar systems that are adjacent to Magma Tesla solar system.
“White, I found some clues of what’s inside this system, it’s a no good, a barren world and a too high solar radiation.” Zu say while shaking her head.
I give a nod and wave to Cold as she nods my way, the ship resuming it’s travels around Magma tesla solar system.
Another hour pass by as we travel between the waves of particles before exiting it’s wave tunnel into stale waves close to another solar system, I give Zu a look and she looks back at me.
“Got the basics again, somewhat moderate solar radiation, the planets seem normal, and there’s asteroids field there, but only one and we don’t know It’s composition.” Zu say with a nod.
I wonder how she manages to get all that data from some basic info.
“We are returning to normal space here, let’s see this asteroid belt, Shy, how’s our solar radiation protection?” I say and ask Shy.
She nods before talking “The steel plates are enough to contain this level of solar radiation, Sigma also said that the ship hull protection have electromagnetic deflectors to keep the radiation away but it’s cost us on the energy side depending on how bad the radiation is.” Shy say with a nod. “Weapons ready.” she finish her words while focusing on her console.
“The guns are loaded White, and the ship is in top notch, there was some systems I needed to give some maintenance but we are free to go.” Peppy say with a happy voice.
“Good, let’s go Cold.”
“Understood.”
With her words we feel the ship get thrown back to normal space and the first thing we had to do was deflect two asteroids.
“Initiating evasive maneuvers!” Cold say with full focus as she try to get out of the asteroid vector course.
“The ship is too fast, I’ll lose control if I try anymore!” Cold say in alarm.
I give a calm nod, we just exited the slipstream, the correct action was to reduce speed back to none before looking around and acting but we don’t have this deluxe action right now.
“Shy! Otkrytyy ogon'!” I mistranslated my words due to haste but the content is the same, open fire!
“Un- Understood!” Shy managed to understand my words and fired at the asteroids.
Shy was keeping laser focus on the gun control and as soon as she got the command she used the point defenses to fire, four bullets leaved with pinpoint accuracy and blew the asteroids into pieces, the pings of small piece of asteroids hitting the plates can be heard as Cold slows the ship to a stop.
“Zu, triangulate our location.” I say to Zu with a sigh and chuckle “Nice shot Shy!” I say with a laugh.
“Th- Thanks White.” Shy say with her small voice.
“Da, now that we can see things better now we should look for the asteroid field.” I say with a big smile, my fangs showing as the mask parting to let some of my emotions leak.
“Sure thing, just waiting for Zu to get us a solar map.” Cold say with a nod, a little disgruntled by her failure. “I’ll tame you one day...” She say in a low voice but we all can hear her due to our acute sense of hearing.
I shake my head, I did make Tenacity a wild horse, the skilled can do things others can only dream, but that’s a matter of skill, something Cold don’t have yet, it’s already good she’s not hitting other ships like her first time.
I chuckle at the memory, Cold was still veery green in navigation when we participated on the Erchius outbreak, almost hitting other ships a lot of times, that was true hazard navigation.
“White, I got us a solar map, the asteroid cluster is... here, almost besides us, that also explain the asteroids that came our way.” Zu said with a smile as she returned to manning her station.
“That explain the loose asteroids coming our way, if it was worse we would be dealing with a comet, and those things hit as hard as a spinal railgun on overdrive.” Peppy say with a small laugh.
“Well now, we have a solar map, so let’s start moving... Adjusting solar sails, burning side thrusters, powering main thruster...”
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I watch as Cold give a series of commands to the ship as we depart from our place and head into the asteroid field, the voyage was tranquil and took 30 minutes to get on the outskirts of the asteroid field.
“Sigma, can you deploy the drones and search for the metals I want?” I ask Sigma.
*Understood Captain.*
With her words the drones are soon launched and in no time was scanning the asteroids as we slowly enter the asteroid field.
“Contact... Friendly... Id gives out it’s a mining ship.” Zu alerts us as we slowly move deeper into the asteroid field.
*Captain, this area of the field have partial amounts of ores you need, most are iron, but there are some copper and titanium.*
“Da, mark the more rare titanium and mine it first before mining the iron and copper, and deploy the drop module to speed up the collection.” I say with a nod of my head.
*Understood Captain.*
As we where mining the asteroids and harvesting their ores with the drop module the detected ship was seem in our camera vision.
“That’s a big ugly bastard right there.” I said with a laugh.
“Sure is.” Zu also nodded.
“Wow, I wonder the use of all that antennae.” Shy said with curiosity.
“To think our ship was like that when we where simple asteroid miners...” Peppy said with a sigh.
“Yeah, compared to the old look of Tenacity, our current Tenacity looks more like a high tech warship than a flying derelict like this big guy.” Cold said with a sigh.
“I wonder if I shoot it with some laser blasts from Selket... Will it fall apart like a tin can?” Nail said with a chuckle as she looked at the clunker of a ship.
“Yes, it would, the ship was made with low budget in mind as the scanner shows, it would fall apart if anything hit it strong enough, I wonder why they made a cruiser sized death trap...” Zu replied to Nail while shaking her head.
“Contact, we got a hail.” Zu said to me seconds later.
“Da, accept.” I said with a nod.
The main screen of the ship popped a human face, female, the usual black colored hair, cut short to not get in the way.
“Hello there comrade, here to loot some goodies from these gold nuggets?” She asked me as her ship blows asteroids with magnetic slugs, their own drones collecting the parted rocks back to the ship hold.
“Privet tovarishch, da, I'm here getting some ores for refining, seen any pirates as of late? I cold do with some bounties myself.” I said with a sigh, my mask letting out a hiss from it’s nozzles.
“Well, now, we do have some pirate issues on sector eleven, the pirate ship that got there are getting very daring and the miners have vacated the area due to the high risk of getting blown up, me and some others are exceptions as we need the credits, we got a crew to pay and a ship to fix along with families to sustain, care to help us?” She say with a nod after talking with another female close to her that’s away from the camera.
“Da, that’s good, got a detailed pic from the bugger?” I ask her and she shakes her head.
“No, the ones that did get visual became space debris, most likely it’s a big ship, want the star map from this asteroid? We do have some active satellites monitoring the asteroid movement to lessen the risks and maintenance.” She say with a smile and I nod.
“Great, then I'll be ending our conversation here, good hunting!” She said and waved to us before ending the call, a minute later Zu received coordinates of sector eleven and access to the satellites.
“How’s the map coming along?” I asked Zu.
“It’s getting together great, we got the asteroid composition and size, forwarding information to Cold... Done, now we just need to keep a heads up for damage.” Zu said with a smile before focusing on her work.
“Shy, how distant will the drones work along with the drop module?” I asked Shy.
“As long as we don’t exit the solar system we can have it working, as long as they have energy that is.” Shy said making me nod.
“Good, leave the drones mining here let’s patrol sector eleven for this troublemaker, if the rusted painting did not show wrongly, they are independents from the moon colony of Magma Tesla, that means we can get some extra money for liberating a resource spot from pirates as their economy will increase again as the miners will resume work and lower the prices again.” I said with a chuckle.
“That’s for sure, I know what they are passing as we where miners ourselves, the greater the risk the more we ask for the ores, that’s will get us a bonus from the local government.” Zu said, acknowledging my words.
“Got us a travel route, it will take... one hour of travel, the asteroids here aren’t that packed together but aren’t loose too.” Cold said while looking back at me.
“Sure thing, let’s get some of the ore bounty before going, I’ll do some refining while we get there.” I said while stretching myself, I’m trying to keep the parchedness I'm feeling down, I'm slowly feeling out of breath, dry, my throat gluing into itself as my body feel the low level of blood running on my body.
I give a sigh and get up, walking down the middle ship to the living quarters, one look at the liquid tank gives me... only water, it’ll have to do.
I sigh again and sit on the low table with a cup of water, drinking it don’t do much but at least help me alleviate the feeling of dry throat.
While taking some time off, I also think about how to proceed with my medical duties, all that I have is two under rated welding slash medical gauntlets, it have a grabber to help with welding and medical duties but that’s it, injuries can’t be treated that fast and welding shut a wound won’t help it on the long term, I need scalpel, hemostat and skin peelers to make work a little easier, at least I don’t need suture needles.
While drinking from my cup of water I find out about a group of herbs made from a old world technology, the place it grew came from a zombie quarantine world and it thrives in that area, they are expensive as heck, but worth the time, some looking give me the details.
Herb group: Umbrella Corporation type Herb.
Type of Herbs:
Green Herb->
Blue Herb->
Red Herb->
Data-> The U.C.H(Umbrella Corporation Herbs) series was made to fight the rampaging bio terrorism that was going rampant on planet *!@&*@*, it’s use widespread on all sectors, specially medicine and botanics.
After reading the basics from where it came from I nod my head, so resident evil did happen, but not on Old terra.
With a chuckle I sip my water and click on green herb.
Green Herb-> Bio engineered herb to heal wounds at a great speed but with the side effect of over taxing the body stamina, depending of intake it can cure all kind of wounds with minimal effects but won’t treat wound infection and necrosis.
I nod at the information, it’s a good herb alright, the data show it’s as good as nanite injection which is a damn pricey medicine.
Click on Blue Herb.
Blue Herb-> Bio engineered to treat any kind of poison, it acts as fast as the green herb and can and will count as disinfectant, also relives food poisoning but don’t treat wounds.
With a nod and another sip I understand this herb, the famous all cure, that’s good, I'm getting more interested by the moment.
Click: Red Herb
Red Herb-> Bio engineered to help both strains of herb to increase power of the other herbs while lowering side effects, if used solo will grant higher imunologic protection, but is better used when mixed with Green, Blue or both herbs.
Another nod unconsciously leave me as I finish reading the details, a immuno booster, that’s good, it’s basically all I need right now... Oh? What’s this?
Click: Botanics.
Botanics-> All three strains of herb grow very fast, their growth rate is monstrous compared to normal bio engineered plants, they take 3 days to grow from a seed to full growth and won’t die even if trampled, burned or exposed to radiation, a very resilient plant that can grow on all biomes, unfortunately it’s locked inside a very hostile planet full of mutants with high chances of infection.
I nod at the words and click on medicine.
Medicine-> The three strains of herbs can be grinded easily into fine dust that can be used or mixed together to make a more potent medication, expert use also allow it to be made into tablets for easier oral use or made into a spray with alcohol or methanol that can be used locally to both disinfect and speed wound healing, use of medical care from a expert will double the healing of the wound too.
Finishing my cup of water I place it on top of the low table and start focusing on the technical aspect of the herbs and possible locations where I can adguire the herbs for planting on the ship...
This will be a dangerous ordeal when it comes but will be worth the danger.
I think with a visible grin on my mouth...