Niusa left with Lela a little less than an hour after Taylor had returned with Mordin. She announced they'd be back in a few hours since they had plenty of time. She had already paid the docking fees for the whole day and her expedition planet-side had only a third of that.
With some free time on her hands and plenty of materials, she started work on her first project, upgrading the engineering bay fabricator and recycler. Compared to the small tabletop units she had used back on Omega, the one on the ship was an industrial model the size of a minivan. It had three separate print chambers, one with a liquid bath for electronics or boards, and two others for standard printing with air filters and positive pressure to remove contaminants.
And it would help create the parts for its replacement. The omni-gel tanks were a quarter full, plenty to print the components she needed. She uploaded the schematics to the fabricator and queued the parts.
While everything was printing, she fetched the large pile of reinforced aluminum beams from the storage room to build the frame. Even in the age of the omni-tool, some work required old-fashioned power tools. The admiral had been nice enough to leave them in the ship when his team left and she had bought a few of the more specialized ones from Meos.
The base shape was a prism with a base around six meters on each side and four meters high. The single print area would be smaller than that, however, at around three and a half meter on all sides. Quite a large space was required to fit all the electronic equipment necessary to coordinate everything.
"Purpose of construction?" Mordin asked as he entered the room. "Exotic drive system?"
"No, this one is a fabricator," Taylor answered, "the omni-gel based units are too limited for my needs. This one will be able to print meta-materials with the right quantum-level configurations and removes the impurity problem entirely. It will also be faster."
"Will new unit require base material?" Mordin asked as he peered into the fabricator. "Omni-gel ubiquitous availability an advantage. Assumes recycler unit will be produced in parallel."
He looked fascinated by the phased-array emitters currently being printed. They were one of the hardest parts to build for this line of machines. Thousands of miniature antennas precisely arranged to be able to steer hundreds of printing beams with femtometer precision.
"It can use omni-gel as feedstock," Taylor explained, "but it won't be able to create some exotic materials since the structure isn't right. It can technically act as a recycler as well but the efficiency is only around ninety-six percent compared to a dedicated deconstruction array."
"Some would call ninety-six percent efficiency impressive," Mordin chuffed.
"Those people haven't had a taste of perfect energy-matter conversion. That's where the real money is. Can you pass me the drill with the number six bit?" She held her hand out.
"Ship will require larger reactor and batteries," Mordin flicked the tool from the bench right into her hand. "Energy requirements astronomical, literally."
She placed the last shelf in the service compartment and bolted it in place, they were finally ready to be populated. She needed at least three emitters to start with. After that the machine could finish building itself.
"I'll have to build an AM reactor either way, the two fusion plants on board won't be enough once the drive core has been removed. And I need to find the moron who thought it was a brilliant idea to use the drive core as the primary generator …" She was interrupted from her tirade by her omni-tool.
"On, Niusa is calling me," she frowned.
She picked up the call and found her friend looking distressed.
"What's happening?" She asked. "Is everything alright?"
"Ah, Taylor, it's … that turian officer, he started questioning Lela."
"Again …" She sighed. "Let me talk to him." She put her helmet back on and waited for the holograms to appear. Niusa showed up first, followed by Lela alongside the same pair of officers that had accosted her.
"Officer, I must ask you to refrain from harassing my crew," Taylor asked politely. "We have been docked at this station for less than a day. From the bulletins, thefts have been ongoing for a week now."
"You could be accomplices …" He grumbled.
"If your thief seems to be smarter than average," she remarked. "If they have accomplices, they probably use something exponentially less conspicuous than a quarian vessel."
"Hmmm, this has merit. Fine, you can go, but I'll keep an eye on you."
"Have a good day officer," Taylor hung up. "This man is such a pain …"
"Zealousness often desirable trait for detectives," Mordin said. "Intelligence often preferred as well, however."
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Lela came back with two bags partially filled with various objects. Taylor assumed they were to personalize her cabin since she spotted a box that looked to be a model kit for a ship called the Destiny Ascension in one of them. Niusa had six bags so full they were close to bursting.
"That's a lot of clothes …" She said with a raised eyebrow.
Two thirds of them were filled with clothes, an entirely excessive amount of clothes in her opinion. Then again, she was the type of person to wear the same clothes every day, even after Lisa had filled her closet with a mountain of outfits.
"I left my wardrobe back on Omega," Niusa shrugged. "I was tired of wearing the same armor undersuit all the time."
"It's your money," Taylor shrugged.
"Maybe one day, I'll get out of that suit and into some nice clothes," she grinned.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
"People more persuasive than you have tried and failed," Taylor grinned back.
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Taylor went back to building the fabricator after everyone had settled on board. The last phase-array emitter had finished building and she attached it inside the fabricator's ceiling. She tucked the bundle of cable required to drive it, which was as thick as her arm, in the space between the ceiling of the print area and the top of the fabricator itself then split it above the service compartment. The two power cables went down to the right towards the power distribution unit and the control wires went to the left into one of the cable rails.
Once everything was in place, she brought the pallet of computers she had bought over and started connecting everything together. Each emitter required a dedicated unit to be able to keep up and they were all controlled by a fourth central computer that was in charge of coordinating everything. These optronic processing units had been the priciest among everything she had bought, coming in at twelve thousand credits each, but the increase over conventional silicon-based processors had been worth it.
With the tedious part completed, she installed the power distribution units in and plugged everything into an industrial outlet. None of the components burst into magic smoke. It was a good sign. She uploaded the control software to the computers and plugged a few canisters of omni-gel into the appropriate ports.
In theory, her fabricator was ready to fabricate.
She reviewed everything one last time before she started the first test print. The emitters gave out a low-pitched humming sound and a perfect cube or iron crystal appeared layer by layer on the print bed. After thirty seconds, it was done. Taylor picked up the metal cube and scanned it with her omni-tool. It returned the expected results, a solid block of iron with a regular crystalline structure all throughout. To confirm, she absorbed it into her stomach and analyzed it.
Still perfect.
She queued up a series of prints. More emitters and better computers to start with. Since the print bed was massive, she could arrange them in a grid and have them be built in sequence to remove the need to get the parts out between each cycle.
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Local night arrived half-way through their stay. Niusa tried her hand at preparing a traditional asari dish. Out of solidarity for Lela, and curiosity, Taylor ate the dextro variant as well. It tasted surprisingly good for something completely improvised. She suspected that some of the spices didn't have equivalents between each chirality. She tasted the levo variant as well, for comparison, and found it slightly spicier and more bitter.
"It's still impressive you managed it," Taylor congratulated Niusa.
"There have been some chefs trying to match recipes for centuries. Even with computer assisted models, it's difficult since every race tastes things slightly differently. Humans are much less sensitive to capsaicin than turians but more to bitter flavors for example."
"It tastes a bit strange, very flavorful and sweet, but I like it," Lela said.
"Meat very tender," Mordin commented. "Spice blend accentuates vegetables. Sauce has perfect consistency. Result, success."
After the meal, they all piled into the recreation room to start their customary movie night. It was Taylor's turn this time and she had finally managed to track down a copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies. They were freely available to download from the Library of Congress' extranet site as the copyright had expired almost a century prior.
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During the night, Taylor was woken up by an alarm on her omni-tool. Someone was trying to break into her ship. She untangled herself from Niusa's grasp and opened the holographic interface. The external cameras showed a small team of people in concealing clothes near the rear docking ramp. One of them was crouched near the access panel and typing on their omni-tool.
"You've made a stupid choice today, Mr. Thief," she grumbled.
Nobody stole from her ship.
"What's happening?" Niusa asked.
"Thieves trying to break in," she explained. "You can go back to sleep," she ran her hand along her friend's head crest, "I'll go teach them a lesson."
"Don't go overboard alright?"
"Don't worry, I'll just scare them a bit. The only damage will be to their pants."
She materialized her suit around her and walked towards the bridge. She wondered how the thieves had arrived undetected and why they were trying to break into her ship in particular. From there she looked at the external cameras and finally spotted what she was looking for.
Even during the night, the security checkpoints were manned, so the thieves would have had trouble moving through the station undetected. Similarly, traffic control was present around the clock. One exception she had learned about was intra-station traffic.
The docking bays had space for one or two shuttles to land and unload cargo. It made sense, merchants who needed to move large amounts of cargo would probably find it easier to transfer everything with shuttles directly rather than go through the station every time.
It was strange that station security hadn't caught on to their scheme. She knew there were cameras everywhere and a mysterious shuttle landing near every burgled location was certainly suspicious.
Maybe they did know but couldn't identify the crafts? The shuttle did not show up on her tactical display. Since the Celebrimbor was only using passive instruments while docked, active sensors would turn everyone nearby into popcorn from the emissions, only crafts that had an IFF beacon showed up.
On her omni-tool, she called station security and informed them of the attempted break-in.
Then, she left the bridge and quickly flew through the ship to reach the cargo bay the thieves were trying to break into. She turned on the internal defenses and aimed the turrets towards the door. She took a seat on a crate and opened the cargo bay, her trusty Carnifex in her lap.
"Good job Badger," a gruff voice said. "Alright boys, get ready, my contact told me this ship just loaded nearly two hundred kay of tech. Should be an easy mark but keep your heads about."
"Boss …" Badger started but the door had opened enough for the group to see her.
"It wasn't Badger who opened the door," Taylor said. "Station security is on their way, I suggest you surrender."
None of the thieves raised their weapon. At least they were somewhat professional.
"Damn it!" The leader said. "We're busted, let's scram."
The group of thieves ran off towards the shuttle parked nearby. Taylor walked to the door of the ship and aimed her gun at the shuttle's rear thruster. They were half-way to their destination when she fired one enhanced round into the rear thruster and hit exactly where she meant to, right on the power conduit. The engine sputtered and the shuttle listed slightly to the left. She shot the second thruster and the safety systems kicked in. The other two engines turned off and the shuttle slammed to the ground.
Badger looked at her in disbelief. She twirled the Carnifex around her finger and attached it back to her hip in one fluid movement.
A group of four officers rounded the hallway leading to the security checkpoints. Even if the thieves were more numerous, the officers wore light combat armor and had kinetic barriers while the thieves had neither of those. Since they were smarter than average, the thieves all put their hands in the air and went down to their knees.
After a few minutes, a larger group of officers arrived and started to properly arrest the thieves. Among them were two very familiar figures. The turian detective and his human partner.
"Officer," Taylor announced with a grin. "I found your mysterious thieves."
"It looks like you have," he ground through his teeth.
"Now about that bounty …" She leaned forward.
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It took some time for things to settle down. The thieves were taken away in cuffs but with the way she had disabled the shuttle, station maintenance had to bring in the equivalent of a tow truck to get it out of the way.
She gave her deposition to detective Petagatus with a copy of the security tapes from the ship. While he wasn't overtly friendly by any means, the turian seemed to at least respect Taylor after this incident. Detective Pruden, the woman, spent some time on the phone with her superiors while that happened. She came back with a credit chit filled with the full bounty, a total of sixteen thousand credits, and thanked Taylor for solving the problem with no bloodshed.
"Thank you for your time captain Hebert," the woman shook her hand, "have a pleasant night."