- Chapter 02 -

Well, it’s been three hours. Three long and tedious hours. Three hours filled with me juggling a dozen different things at the same time. Three hours of me being the BOSS, hell yeah.

Okay, so it really isn’t anything so spectacular. In fact it is truly mostly tedium. Thankfully I don’t have the usual living foibles of getting bored or zoning out. A perk of my existence, I guess.

But while the action certainly wasn’t anything to write home about, the work I’m doing is definitely interesting in and of itself. Like, who wouldn’t do a little happy dance while watching two eight-feet tall robots hauling around thousand pound (or half of that in kilograms, roughly) chunks of material before tossing them into a machine that melts it all down into atomic gruel? I have no idea how it works, but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying watching it.

Literally though that’s all I’ve been doing. Playing street sweeper and cleaning up everything I can get my bots to catch. Which is surprisingly a lot, given how tall and generally bulky those ‘labor robots’ are. They come equipped with a whole bunch of tentacle-like limbs just like Pete, but are several times larger and handier. Not to mention all the attachments they possess. Suction cups, clamps, vacuum nozzles. Or the laser torches that can cut through big and bulky pieces in mere seconds.

Yeah, those are only used for the biggest of pieces that float about in zero g. The SAP can take some pretty big pieces, but even then some things are just too big to get through the doors. So they have to be cut down to size first. Which the bots take care of in a very precise and controlled manner. It’s great to watch.

Okay, so I may be exaggerating it a bit. But there isn’t really anything else I can do at the moment. My dearest Pete is stuck, unable to move forward on his way toward the Hessisian’s engineering bays; while also now unable to make his way back either. It was dumb bad luck too.

Pete had run into a literal roadblock in his path, as part of the emergency bulkhead had been closed across the hallway. Not a big problem, as all it’d take is a bit of time to cut a big enough hole for him to get through. Yet while doing so a part of the wall had twisted loose from whatever micro-gravity the ship was under and slammed him flat. Thankfully Pete is a tough little guy, and is just fine. Just stuck.

But that went to show, via a mathematical model I pulled up, that the Hessisian is moving. It’s also spinning around and around in a very weird manner. Totally out of control, is how I would have put it.

But as anyone who’d ever been to an amusement park can contest, when you have something of a certain mass spinning around, it exerts a force all of its own. Even during my time, such centripetal forces were used to simulate artificial gravity in long-range spaceships. Usually those bulk haulers heading toward Mars or the asteroid belt.

In this case however, it’s just plain annoying.

Which is why I have my two newest bots doing cleanup as fast as possible. In fact, they’ve brought in so much scrap and salvage that I’m already in the process of manufacturing another pair of the labor bots to speed up the process. Which left me with a lot of time to sink into my thoughts while keeping an eye on everything.

And Miss High Overseer Yvar Kjeris, of course.

The woman has been reticent since her breakdown earlier. Not that I can blame her. So I cajoled her to return to the SAP and let me work instead. That worked out fine, because the woman in question took a seat in the corner and promptly fell asleep. Ah, the failures of mortal flesh. Not that I’m going to say that out loud, but you get my meaning.

In the meantime I have the SAP’s airlock running full tilt. One of my bots would grab junk, toss it in, and once it’s piled high the outer door will close and the inner one would open. Then the second bot pulling a much bigger anti-gravity cart would fill it up and carry it off to be recycled. And there’s a whole lot of it.

Just in the past two hours there have been metric tonnes of metals and materials collected and processed. Anything and everything that isn’t securely locked in place is fair game, as far as I care. Which includes pieces of walls, armored bulkheads, pipes, data cables, power transmission lines… If you can find it in any sort of infrastructure or electronics, it goes into the recycler.

All of which promptly gets torn apart atom by atom by a neverending swarm of industrial nanites before being separated by atomic mass and then compressed into highly refined liquid gruel. Which is the best way I can explain it without getting into all of the science. It leaves me scratching my head, too, because I have no idea how the technology compresses tons of stuff into a pressurized bottle filled with liquid. Room temperature liquid, at that.

It is not a molten mass, that’s for damned sure. If it had been the SAP would have either been A) out of power already, or B) damned hot in here. Neither of which is a good option, in my opinion.

Also, speaking of power, it seems that whatever was used to attack the Hessisian has left enough radioactive material or residue behind for me to actually start dumping it into the SAP’s power core. Technically a ‘cold fusion reactor’, the thing can accept just about any sort of radioactive material in order to sustain itself. That and ‘energy crystals’, which I have yet to come across. Which really speaks to how behind the times I am, because I kept imagining some big and bulky fuel cells would be required. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

Right at this moment though I have my labour bots working on a little side project. Which isn’t so little, but definitely necessary. Mainly in putting up a makeshift bulkhead across the first set of side passages off of the main hallway. It had only taken me a few minutes to manufacture a set of middling-armored, triangular shaped bulkheads, which the bots are right now zapping into place. Or welding, if you can call a damned laser torch a welder.

Just another one of those future-alien things I’ll have to get used to.

All said, this is a case of keeping more junk from floating into the hallway. The Hessisian is a total wreck, from what I can figure, and is also very slowly spinning around its central axis. It is also spinning end-over-end at an even slower rate too. Which has the effect of slowly shifting every free floating mass around inside of itself.

Which, in turn, makes it a problem and a half when it comes to clean up. Especially the further from the SAP’s airlock I get. Thus is how poor Pete ended up getting trapped. So I’m taking preventive measures, by barricading the hallways in and out along the central corridor. For now at any rate. Eventually I’ll have to open everything back up, but my main priority is still to get access to the engineering bays of the Hessisian itself.

I’d really like to fix whatever needs to be fixed before we all go ‘BOOM!’. Just in case of a reactor breach or the like. I definitely also need to get the power back on, and the main computer system back online as well.

All said, I’m going to be busy for a while. A long, long while.

---

Twelve Hours Later

Hahaha! It’s great to have Pete back on his feet. The little robot isn’t any worse for wear from his long wait, thankfully, but it’s great to have him going about his business again. Which is very similar to acting as my forward scout in this case, but no matter.

Really though, it had taken forever to get this far. I now have a total of twelve labour bots running around, but most of them are on patch-it duty. Only four of them are allocated to collections and recycling now. Mostly because I’ve gotten most of the main corridor cleaned out already, and am now in the process of breaking into all of the rooms along this length of hallway.

Which just means more messes to clean up, and more gaping holes to patch with printed bulkhead pieces. Ugh. Whatever the Clek had used to fire upon the Hessisian with, it literally shredded the interior of the ship like buckshot from a shotgun.

The Clek really seems favors this sort of weaponry. From their handheld splinter guns all the way to their shipboard weaponry systems. An interesting tidbit I finally got from Yvar when she finally woke up from her long nap.

Such weapons fire a solid shell that’s just armor penetrating enough to make it past those parts before fragmenting within the target itself. Yvar’s previous wound is a prime example of how much damage such capabilities can cause. The interior of the Hessisian is just the same, too.

Just like a person wearing body armor, a starship is armored on its exterior but much softer on the inside. The Clek make full use of that design philosophy when it comes to most of their weapons in turn. Which is kind of scary, when I think about it.

So now I’m on fix-it duty in order to clear out the hallway and all of its attached rooms. Even though that means that just about everything those rooms had previously been used for is now junked. I literally cannot find a table that isn’t missing at least one of its legs, for instance.

“Just do what you can, Havok. What those rooms were used for before doesn’t matter now. But we will eventually need the space, hopefully repaired enough to at least hold an atmosphere. The Hessisian did have a crew of over a hundred Hysarians’.”

Those were Yvar’s words on the subject, to which I’m quite in agreement with. There’s no way the SAP could hold so many people, to begin with. And in all honesty I don’t have the know-how to actually fix the Hessisian by myself either.

I’ve been running on pre-installed blueprints and schematics this entire time. Sure, given enough time and resources I could build an Explorator class ship just like the Hessisian from the ground up, but battle repairs isn’t really something noted within my databanks. To put it simply, I’m more of the ‘rip-it-out-and-replace-it’ kind of guy at this point.

Or instructing my army of robots to patch up the holes and check the structural integrity for when we pipe life support back into the areas we’ve gone over. So that’s just what I’ve been doing, with everything torn out or already damaged being tossed into my recycler. Now that Pete is up and going again however, I have something new to turn my attention toward.

Which is oddly anticlimactic, truth be told. When Pete finally breaches the sealed bulkhead into the next hallway segment, he’s promptly greeted with… nothing. As in, very little scrap floating around in zero-g and a corresponding amount of battle damage.

Thus I put out a call for Yvar, who’d been staring into her latest cup of coffee-goop in the small kitchenette within the SAP. Sitting in one of the only two chairs and a fold-out table that could be used within that small space. On the other hand I’ve gotten quite good at using the consoles in every room, so I beam everything that Pete is seeing into that screen so the woman doesn’t have to move or come to me physically.

“What is this area, Yvar? There’s far less damage here than what we’ve come across.” My voice draws the depressed woman’s attention to the screen, and I could all but see her eyes light up at the scene.

“That’s one of the sleeping berths!” Yvar stands up then, something like elation crossing her beautiful face as she almost stumbles in her haste to get to the console along the back wall. “Those four rooms hold four stasis pods apiece. They are also more heavily armored, too.”

“Hm. That explains why there isn’t much damage done in this area then. I’ll have Pete check the individual rooms while the labour bots make their way to the closed bulkhead and work on removing it. Are the stasis pods movable?”

“Ah, yes, they are, Havok. The stasis pods are self-contained when removed from their racks, much in the same way those here in the SAP are. But they only have enough internal power for two hours.” Yvar replies after a moment of thought.

“Good to know. I’ll keep you updated on everything I find, thanks.”

Thus a new page is turned for this whole endeavor. Sadly it isn’t to be a very nice one. Pete is able to get into the first two rooms with little issue, but the first room has two of its four pods damaged and in critical condition, while one of them in the second berth is just the same.

The last two rooms on the other hand have been blasted to hell and back. Only a single intact pod was found in those rooms. And even I had a momentary feeling of nausea at the blood and gore Pete found within them.

Purple-blue blood turns black as it oxidizes, much like red human blood does. But that only counts when it isn’t instantly frozen and scattered into tiny crystals from the lack of gravity and heat. Chunks of frozen flesh doesn’t work much better in the unforgiving void of space either.

Ugh. I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of that memory, damn it.

Yvar’s reaction on the other hand is even worse than my own. For one thing, she knew every member of her crew by name, and had picked most of them herself over the years. So while she’s happy to know that at least some of them survived, the loss of the rest hit her even worse than her own breakdown earlier did.

Even worse is that three of those nine surviving crewmen may not survive being revived from their time in stasis. Those three damaged pods are entirely reliant on the berths’ backup systems to remain operational. I did make the suggestion of replacing a couple of the pods in the SAP, but Yvar vetoed that suggestion without a thought.

Apparently the pods in the crew quarters here in the SAP are of a different design.

“Fine then. I’ll arrange to have all of those stasis pods moved into the SAP all at once. Those three damaged pods will be placed near the medical bay, just in case.” It was the best plan I had, but also the only one to give us the greatest chance of keeping those people alive.

To that end however I put in the order for several more of the anti-grav carts. The ones that the big Labour Bots can haul around are just big enough to carry a stasis pod apiece. Which works out well, given I only have my twelve bots to work with.

Pete on the other hand is left to idle for the moment. I’m not about to continue exploring until this issue is taken care of. Although that doesn’t mean I’m idling either.

Instead, I start a production run of ten space suits for the crew. These are only lightly armored however, and are not powered beyond zero-g assistance needs. But they are wholly self-contained and vacuum rated. If anything more specialized is needed, I can print it out later.

For the other necessities that the crew members might need, those are stored or produced in the other chambers of the SAP. Thus is something I’m generally hands-off with. Like changes of clothing or food production. Not part of my overall responsibilities here.

“Just sit down and finish your drink, Yvar. I want you ready to meet those that wake up instead of worrying about anything else. Those stasis pods will be transported into the SAP in about thirty minutes.” I try to get the woman to relax, a bit fearful of what this rollercoaster was doing to her mental state.

And I thought a living consciousness such as myself had all the emotional problems, jeeze.

Thankfully Yvar gets the hint and sits down again. I’m not sure if it is a nervous tick or something else, but she’s even started to tap her fingers on the table in front of her with one hand. The other is thankfully steady while holding her cup though, so that’s a good sign.

“Just relax. We’ll get through this.” I say then.

The next thirty minutes shows that my time table was spot on, too. Once the sealed bulkhead into the sleeping berth area is cut open and promptly recycled, my labour bots are put to work in hauling their newly constructed anti-grav carts to where they need to go. The three remainder of my bots are put into standby out in the hallway, just in case extra muscle is required.

Nothing goes wrong though, and within a minute of the first pod being disconnected from its rack it is already loaded up and being hauled back to the SAP. Mostly free of debris by this point, the hallway is a straight shot straight to the airlock of the SAP itself. Thus they take only a few minutes to get moved all together.

The damaged pods though report a cascade of failures as soon as they are removed from their racks. I’d had Pete install one of my transceivers into each of the pods before they were removed, thankfully slotted right into some sort of slot ready to take add-ons just like that. It reminds me of the USB slots in old computers, which works just as well for me.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Thus those three pods are the first to be brought into the SAP once the airlock is cycled. Then they are placed gently on the floor outside of the medical bay, just as I had planned. Yvar running right in afterwards though was not.

“Open the pods, Havok!” She yells, nearly hysteric. Her command pressing into my mind really makes me want to grit my teeth however, but I sidestep that by arranging my orders properly.

“Calm down, Yvar. They have to be opened one at a time, because the medical bay can only hold a single person at a time. Saving one while inadvertently killing the other two isn’t the solution to this problem.” I try to keep my voice steady and confident, even while signaling for one of the bots to press the buttons required to cancel the stasis.

Usually these pods take a full hour to revive their occupants, in order to keep anyone from getting ‘stasis sick’. Going from frozen deathliness to being awake in an instant is not pleasant, as I understand it. But emergencies being what they are, there’s no reason to wait for these three in particular.

Thus the stasis pod cycles very quickly, and I keep an eye on the readouts it is producing. There are all sorts of mechanical errors that pop up, along with an absurd consumption of the pods internal energy supply. But it does finish its processing quickly, and the door slides up and open with a hiss and a blast of white, wet air.

The Hysarian, a man, who’d been laying inside of the pod sits up with a jerk and starts gasping for breath, wide-eyed. Before he promptly rolls over and starts vomiting on the floor. Yvar is there within but a moment to hold onto the man’s shoulder and help keep him steady. Like I said, sleep sickness isn’t pleasant.

“It’s okay, Layvor. It’s okay…” I don’t know if Yvar is repeating the same thing over and over again for the man, Layvor, or for herself. But I don’t interrupt. This man seems fine, so I move onto the next damaged pod.

This one turns out to require some mechanical persuasion in order to be opened, but thankfully my labour robots have enough brute strength in order to pull the damaged door off of it. That said, the woman beneath had to be taken into the medical bay promptly, because she hadn’t regained consciousness.

Thankfully it only takes a minute before the medical diagnosis comes out and a single injection is needed. From what I can gather, it’s the Hysarian equivalent to adrenaline, which kicks her out of that comatose state. All good news for me.

The third pod turns out to be a major problem though. Both mechanical damage and damage to the occupant means that this guy ends up in the medical bay at the first possible moment. Which is followed by a lengthy surgery and a cloned replacement organ. Interesting to watch, on my part, but worrying to everyone else who is up and awake.

Other than that bit of excitement however nothing else has gone amiss, and an hour later I now have a whole crew of ten people. Not counting High Overseer Yvar Kjeris herself, the other nine are definitely shaken. Although not nearly as much as the first three, due to their rapid thawing.

Two hours later and everyone is up and about, including the guy who’d just gone through quite a bit of surgery. The numbers are rather skewed, from my point of view however, as there are seven women and only three men in the whole group. And all seven of the women are either in the overseer caste, in the case of Yvar, or are librarians. Of the three guys, two of them are of the worker caste, while the last is of the builder caste.

That really put the whole social dynamic bare right in front of my eyes. Especially because everyone is nearly religiously devoted to Yvar herself. Such near-worship and reverence really seems to perk her up though. Ugh. Yet the builder caste guy and the librarian girls also seem to have a pretty easy relationship.

The odd ones out are the worker caste guys. Standing near the back, their heads are down and don’t look at anyone straight on if they can help it. On the other hand, their hands are all kinds of twitchy.

Thankfully Yvar herself catches on to such a thing quickly, and is able to put my mind at ease fairly quickly.

“Keln, Meir, relax for a minute.” She starts, stepping past the crowd and to those two guys. I’m not sure if learning their names is important for me at the moment though. “The Hessisian has suffered catastrophic damage, so your normal duties are therefore suspended. We are in the SAP, and your group is the first we’ve managed to retrieve and revive.”

Yvar then goes about explaining what is going on. Most of these people had been in stasis for weeks, ready for their duty rotations to come around during their trip. So the attack by the Clek, the Hessisian’s subsequent damage, and everything else is very much new to them.

The two worker caste Hysarians’ are the most distraught however. There’s only ten of them in the whole of the ship, and their duties are mostly of janitorial nature. Or when loading on supplies and the like. Running errands for others, too.

Come to find out, the worker caste of the modern Hysarian Empire tend to be full of the, for lack of a better term, ‘dumb’ ones. Men and women who don’t have the smarts to do well during their schooling cycles. But unlike other species’ who may have just lumped them into society as a whole, every Hysarian is given a guaranteed job and wage. Thus the worker caste in particular tend to be extremely devoted and almost fanatical in their work.

Because while a Hysarian tends to be assigned to a caste and thus stay there for all of their lives, it isn’t as if there isn’t any forward mobility within their castes. Or that if they produce good offspring, that their children cannot be assigned to a different caste all together. So even the worker caste isn’t shrouded in a cloud of economic dread as you’d expect.

The next bit of business however causes quite a row however. That is, of my existence and to what purpose High Overseer Yvar Kjeris had put me too. Not to say that the crew went all in with swinging fists, however. Instead, it’s potentially worse for me.

Because the Librarian girls all started talking to me at once! Scientists, one and all, they started asking questions from the most mundane to the most esoteric. Questions like: ‘How are you feeling since you woke up?’ are easy enough to answer. After all, I’ve been doing fine and find this situation to be rather exciting, if entirely unexpected.

But a question like: ‘Are you recording any of your own emotional patterns? If so, then what is the average disparity between their peak intensity and their lowest? If you aren’t recording such vital data, then what can you claim to be your peak emotional response to this situation?,’ really boggles my mind.

Like whoa, really! I know that living consciousnesses are considered to be emotionally unstable or the like, but I don’t need a scientist trying to delve into my mental state. Not that I say that out loud, of course. I’m not in the occupation of adding more fuel for the fire, thank you very much.

That said, I do try to answer all of their questions as best I can. In fact, separating my attention between all of the librarians is a fairly simple task by this point. Thus I answer the questions one by one. Most of my responses tend to be a let down though, as if they were hoping for some extreme behavior or something.

The woman who’d asked about my emotional states was very much surprised at my answer though. Because most of my emotions are rather muted, and had always been that way. Something that had apparently not carried over in all of the data crystals I’d poured my memories into, all of those years ago before I ‘went to sleep’ on Earth.

“Ooh-hmm. If I may put forward a conjecture, I believe your accidental mind-transference caused your muted emotional responses due to the fact that it was incomplete in some fashion.”

While I’m able to understand what the scientist is saying, it’s way over my pay grade in actually understanding what it means. It isn’t like I can't feel my emotions at all, you know. They are just greatly diminished in comparison to hormonal driven flesh and blood beings. Bow to my brilliance, mortals! Mwahahaha! Okay, maybe not, but you get the idea.

“It was never supposed to happen to begin with, from my point of view. The virtual reality helmets of that time weren’t built to copy or record the brains of humans. Only allow a connection between the brain and a wider computer network. How I ended up trapped, I have no idea.”

And that was the end of the discussion, as far as I was concerned. Yvar herself had to pull that librarian aside in order to get the woman to drop the issue for the moment. We all have more things to worry about.

I specifically was still busy. The stasis pods the crew were brought in were already being recycled, for one. Far more complex than what I’d already recycled until this point, I ended up with a hefty amount of biological material from each one as well as an array of far rarer materials to boot.

At the same time, I’d sent my bots out to continue collecting debris and patching up holes. The inclusion of those anti-gravity carts was a boon to their work as well, which I hadn’t thought about before. Now each bot could carry out far more than before, and also haul in a larger amount of materials for recycling. Yay for efficiency!

It also goes to show that I am not all knowing either. An AI would have been able to pin-point that sort of issue nearly instantly, yet it had taken me far longer to figure it out through trial and error. Ugh.

At this point I can only do what I’ve been doing however. Crying over spilled milk has never been my thing, but I will at least try to find points that I can work on. Being more efficient will save time and effort in the long run, after all.

Thankfully I now have actual helping hands! Yvar, while a knowledgeable companion, has been a decided let down when it actually comes to constructive endeavors involving physical movement. Or labour. But the three men in the group are more than ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Which is just great for me!

In any case, I have all of the space suits brought up for each of them. Their skin tight bodysuits aside, the space suits offer far more protection, even here within the SAP. I don’t want to take any chances, and I tell them so when I ask the crew to wear them.

Afterwards I trade out one of my bots that’s on recycling duty to the two worker caste guys on the lower level of the SAP. They get to work with enthusiasm, although one of them ends up asking me rather politely if I’d manufacture a set of exoskeleton rigs for them. That was something I hadn’t looked into yet, but it turns out to be a fairly common piece of equipment.

The exoskeleton rigs, as it turns out, offer the same benefits of powered armor suits but without all the extra bells and whistles. Including the gloves and boots that fit over their space suits, the entire assembly boosts the strength and movement speed of the worker wearing them. At least the general type does. There are rigs that specialize in construction, or mining, or as a booster in far larger and more powerful mech-like machines.

In this case, the most simple type of rig is all the worker caste guys need or want. In truth it is all they are trained in. So I put them in and within twenty minutes the guys are wearing them, as happy as can be. I also take the time to order up a much more powerful builder rig for the builder caste guy.

Which turns out to be a good thing, because that guy is totally nuts. While not in the nit-picky way of a desolate housewife ready to beat on her wayward husband, he definitely did not appreciate my quick-and-dirty patch job in the hallway outside of the SAP. Not that he could have done much better, but I could feel the sacrilegious outrage even from here.

Apparently the builder caste is very detail oriented and not afraid to show off their expertise in that regard. They also almost worship whatever they are building or work to maintain. To me, that’s just all very weird, but whatever.

“Look, uh… Layvor,” I almost stumble when it comes to the man’s name, and take a moment to search my memory for it. “I’ve been doing the best I can here. I am not a trained engineer or technician, so my personal expertise when it comes to construction is non-existent. But the Hessisian has taken a pounding, and we just may not have the time to ‘grind the welds down’ as you’d just suggested. I’m more worried about getting to the engineering bays and making sure the reactor core doesn’t explode.”

That seemed to quell the man quite a bit, for which I’m thankful. On the other hand, I definitely have to give the guy a job or otherwise he’d go right back to nitpicking everything I’ve been working to accomplish. So to that end I assign him a pair of my labour bots and tell him to lead his team in making sure every compartment we come across is air-tight so they can be pressurized later.

With those problems taken care of I finally turn my attention back to actually getting into the engineering bay. Which isn’t a big problem, because it’s just beyond the sealed bulkhead on the other side of the sleeping berth. Or rather, it wouldn’t be, except this bulkhead is magnetically locked down. Which makes it almost impossible for me to cut into while it still has power.

Getting into where I can override the lockdown means actually digging into the crawlspace under the floor. For which I just send Pete to do the job. Easy enough on that side. On the other hand, actually using the override requires dataline. A whole lot of dataline. Spools of it. Along with adapters, encoders, and a ‘key box’.

Turns out that is where Layvor really shines, and is more than happy to take over for me. Or as he put it: “We don’t need a bloody novice locking out the main computer due to trying to hack the security systems.” But I have no problem letting him take the reins on that issue anyway. Let it be on his head then should something happen, right?

That said, I was definitely responsible for producing everything Layvor needed to get to work. Which was quite a bit, all told. Thankfully most of it was simple things. The datalines, for instance, are a flexible cable with a core of what I’d call a crystal, like fiber optic cabling, tightly bound by a nano-weave of copper and then sheathed in a mix of some sort of amorphous steel and plastic. Don’t ask what or how that is, because I have no idea.

I swear, I spent twenty of my accelerated minutes staring at the blueprint, trying to make sense of it myself.

The adapters and everything else was just as easy, too. The ‘key box’, on the other hand, was a pain and a half. On its own, the damned thing is a handheld micro-computer programmed in a very specific way. Actually being able to print one up required that I go to Yvar for clearance. One of the few Hysarian-only technologies that I as the SAP couldn’t produce on my own. Annoying.

That said, I did kind of trick Yvar into giving me a blanket clearance for anything and everything I may require. Once Yvar had typed in her access codes and went into the medical bay for a verification scan, everything became unlocked for me. And I do mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

Besides the core programming that kept bugging the shit out of me everything Yvar gave me a command, the SAP’s systems unfolded around my consciousness like a damned blooming flower. Where before I had to personally access a specific module of the SAP in order to issue commands, now I was able to just log my commands directly. I could also adjust internal settings and everything. All of which left me relatively elated.

It was also something I did not mention to anyone else. Being seen as a galactic boogeyman is quite bad enough. I don’t need the crew freaking out just because I got a few more bells and whistles installed.

So while I was playing around with all of that, I was also keeping an eye on Layvor. I’m really not sure if it is a Hysarian predilection, but the man was even humming while working. At least he was quite skilled at it, using the tools he’d requested to join cut strips of the dataline to various adapters and splitters before hooking them into encoders and other bits and pieces. The whole thing looked kind of like a damned spider web to me.

Pete on the other hand had been handed over to follow Layvor’s instructions, which were much more precise than my own. Thus he was easily able to clear out what needed to be cleared out in order to gain access to the bypass ports installed around the sealed bulkhead. From there, Pete was set to work on plugging up the completed segments of the dataline.

To me, it all just looked complicated as hell. I would have just plugged into the system directly and brute-forced the damned thing open. But what the hell do I know, right? I’m just a mind trapped in a damned machine. Grumbles~

On the other hand Layvor’s solution was a thing of beauty when he finally got it completed. There are three bypass terminals for the bulkhead, and the three ‘ends’ of the net that Layvor had put together hooked into all three at the same time. From there everything is centrally connected to the Key Box, for which I really need to think of a better name for. But at the same time each of the bypass ports is plugged into each other too.

It’s probably to balance the system or some such, but I have no idea.

Once Layvor stands up and actually starts typing away on the Key Box though, it’s over and done with in a flash. Like literally, the energy field that keeps the bulkhead electromagnetically locked flashes visibly once before disappearing all together. At the same time the bulkhead starts to grind open with a rumbling that shakes the hallway for a moment. Yet of course it gets stuck when it’s only halfway open.

But that leaves more than enough space for a person or one of my labour bots to squeeze through. As always though, Pete is the first to enter the blackness beyond. And I’m kind of glad it was only Pete, because what I saw through his eyes left me wishing I could really retch.

The engineering bay of the Hessisian is the single largest compartment in the entire vessel. It spans five levels in total, separated into open deck spaces surrounding the several key machines that keep the ship ticking along nicely. That includes the power core, main computer system, life support systems, the ship engines, and the slip-drive itself. Such open space would allow for easy access and maintenance to those very important systems.

Yet now the entire back end of the Hessisian is trashed. The ships’ engines, which is a combination of cold plasma thrusters and some sort of gravity drive, are gone completely. Literally ripped from the hull. The same for the slip-drive. Only that one looked like it had exploded instead of just being torn out.

Everything else within the engineering bay is trashed. Just from what I could see through Pete’s eyes and sensors, everything of critical importance has taken at least severe damage. If not is totally inoperable. Which definitely explains why I couldn’t get a connection to the main computer system. There probably isn’t much left of it at all.

In my horror though, I’d forgotten to tell Layvor to stay outside. Thus he’d slipped into the chamber after Pete and was left staring as well. I could even see his trembling even through his space suit.

“Oh, Goddess…” He mutters, and I totally agree with the sentiment.

“We definitely have problems.” I say solemnly, which earns me a nod from the otherwise preoccupied builder. “That said, I’d really really really like it if you’d go check on the power reactor. It seems to be offline, or at least shut down, but I’d like to make doubly sure.”

That gets the man moving, nearly tripping over his own two feet. Which isn’t easy to do with magnetic boots, but what do they always say about haste? Not that I’d blame Layvor for it at the moment.

As for Pete, I send him on his way to where the mainframe for the main computer is. It’s up a couple of decks, but that doesn’t mean much when most of the levels are torn apart. He just ends up climbing a wall or two.

It isn’t as if I enjoy what is found though. The mainframe was built as a spire, thicker at the base before tapering off near the ceiling. Connected by thick cabling to the auxiliary systems positioned nearby, the whole thing had roughly the same amount of processing power my systems in the SAP do. ‘Had’ being the key word there.

Because the top two thirds of the entire spire has been blasted to shattered pieces. Most of which have floated off into the void from the massive holes left where the engines and shit had been. Those that remain float around and bang ineffectively against anything and everything nearby.

On the other hand, the base of the spire is relatively untouched. The ships’ auxiliary systems also seem to be in working order as well. Only they are no longer powered. Which leads me to the next important decision. I’m going to need a whole bunch of power cables and a lot more dataline.

Layvor, on the other hand, has news for me too. Thankfully it is of the wipe-the-sweat-from-my-brow kind. The power reactor is damaged, but went into emergency shut-off mode. It had ejected its previous fuel intake, out into space thankfully, then shut down after locking up. There’s no danger of it exploding unless we turn it back on without repairs. Which isn’t going to happen.

The bad news however is that Layvor cannot be sure how much fuel is left in the ships’ stores. After all, the Hessisian’s reactor core is way bigger than the one within the SAP, and runs solely on liquified power crystals. Which is highly atomically unstable by itself, and basically goes bad very very quickly. No doubt the intake pipes are full of the ruined remnants of the fuel.

“I don’t know about you, Layvor, but I’m really not looking forward to informing the High Overseer of this…” I cannot help but say after going over everything. The man simply nods and keeps his own mouth shut.

“That said, help me run the power cables and datalines to what remains of the main computer. If it is totally scrap, then we’ll need to wire the ships’ systems directly into my own here in the SAP. I need a better picture of what is left of the Hessisian before anything else happens. And I’d really like to know where we are now.

“We may end up having to make planetfall somewhere in order to survive.”