Jacob removed himself from the drone and let it continue its work, raising up the huddled fearful masses from that hellish pit and into his waiting embrace of safe harbor. As he watched the terrified faces of the refugees slowly fill with relief, he couldn’t help but be filled with a poetic sense of righteousness, and without thinking, Jacob couldn't help but perform an old habit from his childhood.
“They and every beast, according to its kind, and all the livestock according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, according to its kind, and every bird, according to its kind, every winged creature. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him.” Jacob said to himself as he watched the new crew enter into his safe and inviting shelter. Jacob had never found solace in quoting scripture like the priests told him he would, but he had learned to recite it all the same. The pitiful state of those he had requisitioned from that hellish existence seemed to have drawn the good book out of him. Priests of his childhood often told stories of devils and demons from the pits of hell, what they wanted from mankind, and the acts of barbarism they would revel in. When Jacob had heard his first tale about them when he was much younger, the tales had given him such vivid nightmares, but they were only just childish fever dreams. At least, they had been. Now that he had seen what the priests had talked about in the flesh, he was very glad that his childhood night terrors had been so tame in comparison.
Once the last member of the refugee party had boarded and removed themselves from that wicked ship, Jacob went about scanning and codifying that part of the ship into his databases for further investigation at a later date, half his mind still split between ship repairs and his current task of piloting and observing the drone. He could have left the drone to do its scanning, but he felt uneasy leaving the little bot alone to do its job, but he couldn’t explain why.
The drone made a final pass, taking in the bottom of the pit and giving the weapons systems a final inspection and gave a satisfied chime with its thoroughly completed task. With the enemy ship scanned and tucked away for later, Jacob decided to check up on how things were going with the repairs and cleanup to his battered form. Even with the limited amount of hands available, clean up was going faster and more smoothly than he anticipated. Almost 80% of the debris had been labeled and attended to, and another 80% of activated safety systems had been deactivated, cleaned up, and refilled. Even the hull breeches were at a 50% sealant rate, and according to Jacob's intergalactic chronometer, a timekeeping system that maintained the average time based on the half-life of some element called Aguulfsic, it had only been 30 cycles since the clean up and repair efforts had begun in earnest. Jacob wasn’t sure if that was fast or slow in comparison to days as he knew them, but judging by the condition of his captain, that was at least a day back home.
The medical bay was flooded with the refugees, their trauma and diseases being treated with the highly developed equipment left behind by very advanced benefactors. Many of the alien crew were having new translators installed, and the ones whose original implant locations were too inflamed from infection were undergoing their first round of antibiotics, their measurements being taken for a later installation date. Jacob was glad his medical supplies were well stocked as a large portion of it was emptied to ensure the reinvigoration of the new workers he had taken in. Once enough of the crew had been treated, each member was given an assigned quarters, a small portion of what went for rations in this space-faring age, and their tasks and sections of the ship they would be assisting in rebuilding. While he did feel for the plight of his new crew, they were still crew, and idle hands were the devil’s playground. Not to mention that while the droids were effective at their tasks, there were just some spots that they just couldn’t reach in a timely fashion, and more independent help was just the thing he needed.
Jacob wanted to be a stern and watchful captain, to be the watchful eye over the shoulder of his crew, but the way they marveled at him and stroked his consoles while muttering praises inflated his ego enough to let them be for now. Still, boosted ego aside, he had no reason not to agree with them. Jacob was a pretty good ship if he did say so himself, even if he didn’t have cannons.
“Oh! I almost completely forgot,” Jacob said, diving into his databases. The images of thousands of starships began to appear, their shapes forming from stardust and points of light that Jacob was becoming accustomed to in the inner reaches of his new mind. Rising into a twisting spire around him, the shapes of impressive alien ships from all over the far reaches of space rose and swirled around him rapidly with a wave of his hand. As Jacob examined the ships, some were given a red hue and blinked out of the torrent of designs, eliminated from the ever-rising spire of ships and returned to their original state of stardust. The list began to dwindle, as the constructs of example ships were eliminated one by one until a final line of ships remained. With another wave of his hand, the bulk of the outer shape of the ships fell away and returned to stardust and points of light, leaving only three distinct forms behind that gave Jacob a malicious grin.
“What good is a ship without cannons? Hello, my pretties!”
Jacob marveled at the sleek and powerful designs that he had singled out and selected as his newest additions. Three different designs were all his databases had to offer in the way of proper cannons as he knew them, but they were marvels in and of themselves. His first selection was nothing more than a simple and affordable energy weapon, a creation of the Renne. This particular weapon didn’t have a name as they were so common, but the design had shown promise as it could be pulsed and modulated an almost infinite amount of times.
Stolen novel; please report.
Second on Jacob’s list was something a bit larger and with a bit more impact. It wasn’t a weapon at all, actually, but was a shuttle launching system developed by an aquatic species called the Yindk, according to the GSFC data. Yindk reminded Jacob of sea cucumbers that seemed to have a love for exotic spectacles, as each photo of their representatives had them wearing more and more lavish pairs. Their shuttlecraft were insignificant compared to other species as the Yindk were a rather diminutive race, but due to this they were able to find a way to forgo installing FTL systems in their shuttles and would simply launch them at FTL speeds from their larger ships.
Lastly, his personal favorite of the bunch was a cannon called a Kimbreian Mass Driver, and she was an actual proper space cannon in Jacob’s opinion. She was a fifteen-foot-long piece of plasma artillery that was noted to have the plasma maintain cohesion longer than the average plasma spitters among the stars. Where the Kimbreian model varied from the norm was in her ammunition as the Mass Driver used a solid fuel as its base for the plasma that had to be changed every one thousand shots or so. What drew Jacob's attention to this design was that it was discarded by the Kimbreian armada for space-faring use as it was, in their definition, severely unfeasible. If the ammunition core overheated, it would completely ignite, causing it to detonate its one thousand round lifespan instantaneously. To the Kimbreians, this was devastatingly and prohibitively expensive, and the cannon never actually made its way from the drawing board to circulation, but to Jacob, there was no finer specimen to help him with his plans for adventure.
Jacob positively beamed at the thought of the adventures his new armaments were going to provide. With a contented sigh, he sent the blueprints and schematics for his new toys to the automated manufacturing systems, and they processed the information with gusto. After a few processing cycles, however, the system produced an error code and gave Jacob more than a few warnings. According to the warnings, cannons fell victim to a host of restrictions and required several licenses that could only be provided through a slew of paperwork from the GSFC, and until the registration key from the completed and accepted paperwork had been submitted, they were not going to be built. Jacob stared at the warnings for a moment and sorted through the requirements, confused as to how these restrictions were able to be enforced all the way out here in the inky blackness of space.
Wondering if there was any way around these roadblocks to his newly discovered treasures, Jacob dove into himself and waded through all the systems and subsystems that comprised the internal networks of the Feather Fall. After a few twists and turns throughout the ship, there it was in all its hideous glory. Tucked away, hidden among the stacks upon stacks of code and commands was an almost malignant clump of restrictions sitting in a node connected to his AI module. Jacob set his jaw, rolled up his metaphorical sleeves, and began determining the way he would be going about erasing it, this connection being one of his last steps to true unabated adventure. He poked and prodded at the malignant pustule for a time, trying to determine what he could with his limited knowledge.
Unfortunately for Jacob, the code providing the restriction was more than just simple code. It was a piece of hardware that, judging by its annoying simplicity, was someone's last-minute attempt at giving the previous AI a leash. Jacob knew he couldn’t remove his own hardware unless it was damaged as the drones would ignore anything that was where it was supposed to be, even when he was piloting them. So that meant he would need outside help. More pokes, prods, and physical scans of his core elicited new information about the chip, as it was called, that stood between Jacob and his prizes.
With a final scan, all of the data points he could decipher fell into place before him at last. With an excited fervor, Jacob began to pour over the knowledge he had gained. As the cycles ticked by, the chip and its purpose went from an annoying roadblock to almost seeming cruel, in the way it was executed.
This restriction had been designed with an AI’s capacity to care for and protect the crew or passengers it carried as its main driving force. Clumsily, but deliberately, the restriction chip was tied to Jacob’s ability to regulate the life support systems, gravity controls, base electrical systems, FTL drive, almost everything that Jacob had the responsibility to control seemed to pass through this cancerous thing first. The more he learned about his restrictor, the less it seemed like a leash or bridle and more of a gun pressed firmly to the temple of his occupants. Were he to try and overwrite the code, the chip would detect this and simply sever the integration with the entirety of the Feather Fall.
Without his connection to those vital systems, Feather Fall would be set adrift into the void of space with a damned crew that would quickly suffocate to death and become a tomb for those species that did not require atmosphere to survive, as they would simply starve to death. All that as a threat just to keep an artificial intelligence, which cared so deeply for their occupants they interrupted a soul on its way to heaven, under thumb and obedient. It was so unnecessarily cruel.
Jacob felt his metaphorical blood boil, evidenced by the drones and robotic crew members being snippy to the organic crew for a few cycles. To threaten the lives of his crew and deny Jacob his love of freedom was not something he would stand or take lightly. Unfortunately, this waiting executioner was not simple code, but something physical that had been installed and would not be easily bypassed from the inside. I’m going to need an unwitting pair of precise hands with delicate tools, Jacob thought as he began to scheme his solution. An impact alarm notification sprung to life in his data stream showing a cargo container had fallen in the living quarters and required attention.
Jacob grinned and thought, I’ll need skilled hands or a rather clumsy set with a wrench and no scruples, which he found quickly as the impact reading indicated that Captain Sean had fallen out of bed.