The next few weeks were definitely tough going, ripping chunks out of ships designed to survive warfare in a vacuum wasn’t easy (duh). But with the help of three Exo-frames (it would have been four, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to adapt one to Bleyk’s uh........ unique physiological needs), things started to take shape. Sure the shape in question was a rough parody of the sleek lines the ship initially had, but we weren’t exactly in a situation to be picky about cosmetics. Because let’s face it, you do not use body filler on a starship of any type if you want to be able to patch future damage.

We’d set up assorted drones with ship repair and cleaning software, and set them to work. Pretty sure if they weren’t already way past it that what we did would have completely voided the warranty of course, as a few of them insisted on telling us every five minutes as we worked on them, and some of them were salvaged from such interesting places as the pleasure districts, so a rather diverse crowd. But they worked (even if you did occasionally have to point a jury-rigged bunny bot in another direction because they got themselves stuck in a corner, and repeatedly walking into a wall was not a productive use of their run-time), and smart people make do with whatever they can get their hands on. (Even if you took it from an animatronic petting zoo........ OH did you think I meant THAT kind of bunny? Tsk tsk, get your mind out of the gutter.)

Ol’ sawbones now had two assistants, running bootleg nursing software, a lot of people complain about the freeware versions, but as long as you can put up with them occasionally chanting an ad for Jolt at you before they started treatment there was nothing wrong with them, and it beat the alternative. I hear the nagware versions were geared to deliberately wait until mid-treatment before they start running the ads. (Though apparently, that kind was popular in maternity wards, as during labour it’s really handy to have something you can justifiably punch that isn’t the cause of your pregnancy.) Bleyk had also expressed an interest, but we’d tactfully explained that human biology was rather finicky, and we didn’t have, or even know what a Blargot was, and definitely did not need one, no matter what their previous experience of biology may tell them. So after a little observation, we’d realised that they were actually pretty good at cobbling bits and pieces together for the ship, and they’d even managed to figure out a way to use their ship as both their habitat on Relly and a water circulation system for the water supply for the ponics bay. Increasing our available water supply on board while putting Jenel in the best mood I’d seen them in for quite a long time. As far as I was concerned the latter alone was worth the price of admission.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

We’d even managed to haul an old galley setup from some kind of old embassy ship, it did mean the deck being a bit wonky (like a five and a half foot ramp to access it, and a hole cut between decks eight and nine, but hey for the capability to prep food more advanced than dehydrasnax I would take it, even if it did mean rigging up a massive circle of double-layered walling around it.)

That wasn’t to say we’d gotten everything, the little light ships would have to suffer some extensive remodeling to get even close to functional, and we still needed to figure out how the hell they had moved under their own power because for some reason ships moving without a crew’s instructions tended to make folks nervous.

Of course, Bleyk’s pet cleaning drones had been put to work on the ship (we had to tell Nara off after we caught her strapping knives to a couple of the little vacuum drones, what the hell is Roomba jousting anyway? Whatever it was Bleyk very much didn’t appreciate it so we quickly put an end to it. We needed cleaners more than we needed to keep Nara occupied, a little.)

Then finally came the hard bit, we had to bolt in a secondary core while trying not to make it obvious that we had bolted in a second core. (We figured making it obvious would be equivalent to putting up a big flag for our enemies, and a flashing neon sign saying "highly explosive bit, please shoot here".) To prevent that we hollowed a section right into the middle of the aft section, as far away from the primary as physically possible, then placed it there before filling the remaining space as best we could, patching the hole we’d cut, and hiding it behind some facade so it wouldn’t be so obvious. After this I was finally starting to understand why the Melter’s ships came in so many wild and wacky shapes, it’s hard to target the vulnerable bits if nobody has a clue what the hell they are looking at in the first place.

From there we decided to take a little time to explore properly. There’s a limit to how much you can do at once, and we were way, way, way past those limits by now. So we had to take a little time to reflect on what we’d done, explore a little, and of course, see if we could cadge any useful crud from these ships. We’d found a lot of replicators already, but they were mostly the old-school type. (YUCK there’s a limit to recycling, and I draw a line at food and water unless there are no other choices at least.)

I walked past a bank of old terminals, and couldn’t resist a chuckle, they were the dreaded 1000 series. Some genius had thought it was a good idea to save space by placing the capacitor banks inside the terminal, along with the fuses, so working at those things was equivalent to playing with matches in a dynamite cache. Only the melters still used those things, the only use we’d have for those damn things would be to jettison them at people we didn’t like. They would have been pretty useful when we’d needed crud to blow up earlier though, so I guess there’s a time for everything.