The Scrapper, Ch. 6
I hoofed it up to cockpit with the catchers in tow. Instead of sitting down and skimming the console I took the opportunity to start propping the panels into the cockpit windows. It wasn’t much but these were literally the only viewports I had access to, they had to work.
Din was replaying the logs and explaining as it went: “Palletbot requests clarification, I explain we desire to install solar catchers to its frame and expect it to maneuver around the outside of the hull trying to find the best angle to receive solar energy.”
I nodded, snaking a cable through some nearby structure to keep it off the main console, “Sounds good so far…”
“Palletbot considers, and then requests assistance. I ask what assistance it requires, it requests assistance again but adds an administrator tag to the ask. I inform it that the administrator is not here and it is just Human: Kal, Vessel Designation: OLGa, and myself.”
“So it wanted help from its higher ups, can’t blame it there… It would be nice if we had some of that right about now.”
“Palletbot continues to request assistance until some internal timeout is reached, then it proceeds to go into hibernation, presumably until it is back within range of BRK-GL1.”
I paused trying to prop up the second catcher, “So… it asked for help until it realized it didn’t have any, and shut itself down once it realized none was coming? That’s kind of depressing.”
“How so?”
“It’s like a child crying for their parent and after so long they just pass out from exhaustion.” I frowned, when said it like that it was DEFINITELY depressing.
“When Palletbot wakes up, I will reassure it that we are here to help!”
In the back of my mind I was considering something much more direct: I could easily get to the control ports on the bot and program it to do what I needed it to do. Alternatively, I could just unplug the battery and use that, though it’s hard to say how much juice that really had to offer. I kept those thoughts to myself, I don’t think Din would appreciate the thought of ‘stealing’ another bots autonomy, or thinking that I would do the same to them if the situation called for it.
Both catchers were in place and their cables were tucked away, their plugs tossed near one of the many outlets within the ship. I plugged them both in and to my surprise something actually started to trickle through. Not MW worth, certainly not enough to power anything immediately, but it was to start gathering at least.
“Kal… I have some unfortunate conclusions to share.”
I winced, “Those are always fun…” I hiked back up to the cockpit and saw a few readouts waiting for me.
One was our current position info. Middle of space, nothing nearby, little to zero actual momentum. At these speeds one could mistake astronomic drift as motion.
The other was our power, the incoming solar was showing up, but we were still net-negative. Life support was engaged to it’s lowest viable level, the rear engines were voids on the display- totally offline. Forward sensors weren’t active, but we were still drawing a significant chunk of power from somewhere.
“Our current energy will deplete in approximately 1 day with the catchers installed. Better positioning might improve that, but we cannot adjust for that.”
“Okay, but what’s using so much energy? OLGa is down to basic life support, I don’t know what else we could shu-” oh. I slow walked into Din’s conclusion.
“Yes, -I- am the primary energy draw right now.”
I swallowed, “So you’re saying… we have to turn you off, or we’ll run out of power.”
“OLGa will run out of power regardless. If I am hibernating, I estimate you can get another 3 days of power, and with some luck, the trickle charge may actually overcome total usage.”
“Luck hasn’t been kind to us so far. Stick a pin in that, the other issue is we aren’t moving. How are we supposed to fix that?”
“I do not have a good answer… We do not have the reserves for me to plot a route or calculate the angle, but I believe you could get some momentum by venting the cabin again. That would also put air reserves close to empty, and the power draw needed to cycle and repressurize would…” Din trailed off, very unlike them, but I understood the implication. Getting momentum like that might get the ship to a port at some point, but I, we, would be dead.
I took a deep breath and my entire body felt heavy. That stupid inhaler didn’t last long. One thing was for sure, I needed rest. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, not many options. “How would I go about pulling you out of hibernation, Din?”
“Simply call for me. The subroutines are always running. Depending on the state of Our Lady’s Gambit though, it may take me some time to wake up.”
I nodded, “Alright. I think rest is the best thing for everyone right now. I’ll let you know if we make some progress, okay? Just… keep an ear out.”
“Understood, Kal! I will hibernate until you wake me up!” I watched the console cycle a few times before returning to it’s default setup, the one I saw when I first stole it. Huh, Din must have simplified that for my benefit. Somehow it knew what was easier for me to comprehend. I’d have to ask how they did that later.
I looked down at the stubborn Palletbot ‘sleeping’ in the delivery port and shook my head. If that one was going to be a glorified piece of scrap I may not have a choice, I’d have to crack it open and make it do what I wanted. I’m sure there would be a lengthy philosophical discussion with Din about why it was necessary in the moment and maybe not ‘okay’ morally speaking. I might also have to explain that robots and AIs were not, strictly speaking, humans and maybe the same ethics that we apply to organic bodies didn’t apply to digital entities.
Not like we treat humans equally across the board… My bald patch ached in response. Yeah, I’d like to avoid that conversation if possible.
Our Lady’s Gambit was awfully quiet when there wasn’t an energetic, freshly iterated AI trying to constantly tell you things. Or when you weren’t actively working on some repair, or trying to handle explosive decompression, or just trying to keep the ship from tearing itself apart. In some ways, it was peaceful, just the gentle hum of life support running to keep the air moving, and an occasional crackle from the oxygen candle actively keeping me alive.
Maybe it was the secondary concussion, or the excess oxygen I was breathing for the first time in so many hours, but my eyelids were heavy. The lack of external stimulus to keep dumping adrenaline into my bloodstream was also driving the oncoming exhaustion. Down on the deck I pulled a lever on the wall which dropped a cot out from the wall, dusty mattress and crusty pillow included. They looked like the softest things the Keeper had ever made, just for me.
I drunkenly fumbled for the medkit, looking for those O2 pills. I pressed one from the blister packet and stared at the off-white oval. Chemistry was never my strong suit, I much preferred mechanical things that I could see and touch and actually maintain, but I’d seen these save lives before. In the back of my head (near the wound, I’d like to think) I worried that this would make me sleep so hard that I would sleep right through the low oxygen alarms, just… wake up dead, as it were. The other side of that card was the same result though: falling asleep and using more oxygen until it was gone. Either way I died in my sleep, might as well hedge my bets.
I cracked open a rep-strip and took a bite, tossing the pill into my mouth and swallowing both. Snatching the Strawvival off the top of the inert Palletbot, I wandered over to the various above-ground lines I had tapped earlier. I nozzled some of the coolant into my canteen, and then stuck the open end of this fancy straw into it and drew on the mouthpiece. At first nothing came through, just air and a strange taste like chlorine. A few pulls later I could hear something getting closer, and eventually a gurgle of fresh water hit my tongue. It was a relief to say the least, both that this thing worked, and to have some fluids in me that weren’t synthahol. I drank everything in the canteen and kept going until the straw was just pulling air again. The water had a mineral taste, but I wasn’t getting any of that sweet chemical flavor that prop-g usually left behind.
NO, I don’t drink engine coolant regularly because I forget to stock water. Shut up. (I do.)
The pill didn’t need much encouragement before I felt my eyelids drooping. I could feel my breathing and heart rate slowing down. My eyes were blurry as I stumbled towards the cot. I made a halfhearted attempt to brush off the thin layer of grime that had accumulated after years of not being used, but all I managed to do was smear the grease from my hands onto the mattress before I gave up and collapsed into it. At first it had no give, it was as hard as the plastic that supported it, but then the fibers relaxed and the entire thing let out a sad fwooooosh as it accepted me. The pillow, conversely, looked nice and firm but was almost entirely air. My head nearly fell through to the mattress, so I wound up squishing it flat and folding it over twice. I may as well have just grabbed a jacket or spare shirt or something to use instead for all the good this thing was.
Having found a soft place for the first time in what felt like an eternity, my body went into full, proper, shutdown. I slept a dreamless sleep in a sky full of stars.
When I woke up I rolled over, a leg dangling off my cot and bouncing off the floor. My eyes didn’t want to open, but I forced them to. Sleep wanted to reclaim me, but I knew I needed to get up and re-enter the crisis that was my life.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes was a process. There was SO MUCH dust and other junk that had accumulated. It seemed darker now somehow, you’d think that after being asleep in the low light your eyes would adjust but it turns out humans weren’t meant to see in near pitch-black. I slowly made my way back up to the cockpit, feeling as I went. My legs felt like molasses that had run a marathon, stiff, painful, sludgy. Only the occasional LED along the way to indicate a system or alert or general status was there to guide me. I couldn’t tell if the pill was lingering inside me or if I just needed to wake up. Probably both.
I pulled myself into the pilot’s chair and looked over the console, “Alright, where are we sittin’ Di-” I stopped short of saying it’s name. Probably shouldn’t wake them until I needed help with something… or until we had more power in reserves so I could chit-chat without risking oblivion.
I peered at the readouts and… the catchers were still doing their job at least, but the ship as a whole was still running negative, with an estimated two days left. Not a whole lot of time to figure this… Wait two days? I thought it was closer to three? I checked the chronos and sure enough, I had been sleeping for close to 18 hours. This surprised me to the point that I shot a glance at where I had placed the oxygen candle to keep it from burning the ship down, only darkness and vague shapes to return my stare. My stomach growled in confirmation of how much time had passed.
I couldn’t help but gulp, nervousness creeping back into my waking mind. Okay, just under two days to figure out what the hell to do about this. No pressure. Say what you will, but panic is better than caffwater for clearing the sleep from your head.
The console wasn’t lying, I discovered, after investigating and doing spot checks on the actual levels throughout OLGa. They all showed the same information relative to the sensors readouts I saw in the cockpit. Breathable air levels were low, reserves were low, I was totally out of fuel and propellant, and battery levels were steadily falling. No matter how many times I went over this, it wasn’t changing, and despite my hopes and dreams, I was the only thing that could save myself.
I could make more oxygen to breathe, so the two issues competing for my attention were the lack of momentum and (arguably more important) the slow power drain that would absolutely kill me. If Palletbot wasn’t going to help then I needed a way to make more power.
I briefly considered the logistics of burning an oxygen candle to generate steam from whatever coolant I had, but abandoned the idea when I realized I’d be consuming my water supply in favor of somehow capturing the steam to spin a turbine I didn’t have, and all of this would need to be in some kind pressurized container… Mentally I crumpled that idea into a ball and threw it away.
I didn’t want to cannibalize Palletbot but it was looking like my best option. If I hadn’t sold my accumulator I could try and repurpose that for some power at least, even without the blackbox you could recycle energy off those and I could use the trickle charge from the catchers to power the laser, then the recyclers would be charging the ship directly… That’s assuming, of course, that there was enough light to actually power an entire accumulator block. If ships could run off solar alone, we wouldn’t still be using liquid ammonia for engine propellant.
After my fourth round of the ship (and second repstrip) to clarify current levels, I spotted the PlasSaw. Thrown from its holster back around the BRK, it had clearly gone through a few impacts and was now a broken chunk of plastic pieces, metal innards, and a circular saw blade. An LED in my head turned on, the miniature accumulator! I scooped up all the bits I could find and floated my way up towards the ceiling, to one of the few overhead lights that was still lit even in the low power.
The electronic components of the device seemed to be intact at least, it was possible this could be made functional again as a saw, but I didn’t have anything to cut through now that I was actually unmoored. Din mentioned the frame was some kind of alloy that included rubidium… The ONLY thing I’ve heard of ships using Rb for was in their blackbox, which was directly tied to interstellar travel, so it would follow that this alloy might be tied to that somehow… right?
I didn’t have much else to go on, my knowledge of the actual mechanics of FTL travel was minimal to say the least. I knew how much a blackbox would get me in credits, not how it worked internally. It’s a blackbox after all, you aren’t supposed to open those and investigate (it tanks their value).
What I did know was that between a blackbox and an accumulator, you could generate enough free electrons that most ships had built in recycler circuits. The laser accumulator took a tremendous amount of power to run so being able to recycle ANYTHING improved efficiency overall. Add in some solar catchers and some conservative power usage, and your only real bottleneck became supplies for the crew. If you had the credits and knew someone that could procure a license, you could even install a replicator to keep a crew fed indefinitely via waste recycling. That might seem gross at first, and you’d be correct, it is. But replicator strips would keep you alive and on long hauls being alive was the only realistic end goal.
The leftovers of the saw came apart easily enough, none of the screws or connecting tabs had survived in any meaningful way. The accumulator itself was a strange mutation of its larger counterparts, almost like a flattened version that still had all the same landmarks as full scale model. Focusing prism at the front, helix shape with Klein-Eulerbach inversion, aka the accumulator portion. Last I knew they stopped making these with glass and had swapped to something more resilient, probably a metal or metalloid… and it would have to be a mirror surface so probably some kind of chemical process to deposit all of that… Nope, getting distracted, stay on track, Kal.
I pushed off from the ceiling and dropped back down near where I’d left my food and the Survistraw. Snatching another bar, I took the straw back to my coolant lines and pulled enough out to fill my canteen, stuffing the straw into the open canteen hole.
Returning to the ceiling I started removing the more delicate components from the outside of the accumulator, mostly the parts that still had a screw attached or were trailing wires back to the control board. I traced out the power wires and the couple of control wires that would send signal into the board itself, the stuff that dictates power, amplitude, that sort of thing. I was developing a working theory regarding Our Lady’s Gambit and it’s mysterious alloy frame:
- The excessively rusted equipment I continue to find in this ship seems to be concentrated around anything modern, e.g. the entire engine bay and it’s seemingly bolted on blackbox housing and accumulator mount
- So it would follow that this alloyed frame had something to do with how this particular shuttle was trying to get around and it had been retrofitted with modern equipment whenever it was acquired by the blastjerk that I stole the keyfob from.
Din had mentioned that maybe this ship was unique, a prototype maybe? If nothing else, I was hoping that this bitty accumulator could be powered by the catchers, and generate enough of a resonance with whatever this alloy was that it could be recycled. With any luck it would be enough to offset my own usage, Keeper maybe it would be enough to turn Din back on and then we could figure out how to actually get out of here.
After an hour or two of testing inputs and outputs, I thought I had enough of an idea to at least make an attempt, so I headed down to good ol’ maintenance panel IJ-22. It seemed like the best place to start, mostly because I was familiar with it and it seemed to have a good view of the frame. I popped the panel open and placed my accumlator-bomination on a coolant pipe that ran adjacent to the frame, nozzle pointed at the strange alloy that looked like every other frame I’d ever come across.
I floated up to the cockpit, I was getting used to being in zero-g inside the ship. It was nice until something you casually left floating was suddenly wrapped around your head and you’ve seen too much slasher-media to think it’s anything besides a Craydorian Octospider trying to latch onto your face and drink your brain through your ear. Look, I know those are old-flicks but they’re classics for a reason, they’re good.
Solar levels were still trickling in according to the console. O2 was starting to drop again, but it still felt like I was breathing fine. I set a reminder alarm to go off in an hour, I’d probably have to spark another candle, not a big deal. I wonder if the light from the candle would actually generate enough photons for the catchers… Something to test in an hour.
In the meantime I dredged out a splitter cable and combined the two catchers down to one input and used the remaining input to extend down to the accumulator. With any luck this would be just enough power to run that AND feed back into the ship’s batteries.
I had to strip the wire and hook it directly to the battery terminals from the PlasSaw’s casing. It looked junky because it was, if I ever made it back to port I’d make it look pretty.
I held my breath and flipped the power switch.
At first, nothing. Not a power LED or any kind of whirring, grinding, hell I’d take a pop and a plume of smoke. I sighed, of course this was too much to ask. Of course the catchers don’t have enough to power this AND charge the ship, of cour-
I froze, staring at the frame where I’d aimed the accumulator. A small red dot had appeared while I was lamenting my fortune. The red dot wavered along the edges, which was to be expected with the inconsistent power it was getting, but what really caught my attention was the shimmer of red-violet that grew outwards from it. I sat and watched for a while, nibbling at a replicator strip (gross, this one was Pinoconut Butter flavored. It’s like they just hit buttons at random when they started a production run. “They’ll eat it,” I could hear the Admins telling the Board members. Yeah, we prefer not starving unfortunately.)
Over the course of the next hour the shimmery coating had spread to most of the frame that I could see. There seemed to be larger deposits within the alloy that shined brighter, and microscopic lines that connected all of the various “nodes” across the metal. I couldn’t tell if that was just oxidation glowing now that it was being exposed to energy or if that was the rubidium itself doing… something. I held my hand near the frame (away from the laser, which had steadily gained a more solid beam as time went on). A beep from the cockpit followed by the alarm I had set caught my attention.
I floated up, staring at the catchers as I went, hoping to see a huge star suddenly off to port or starboard just… blasting the ship with light. Taking my seat the first thing I noticed was our energy levels had stabilized finally. We weren’t gaining yet but… at least we weren’t draining. O2 levels getting a bit low, good guesstimate on my part there, note to self to light another candle off and angle a catcher towards it, see if that does anything for me.
An unfamiliar beep to my right, near all of the old fashioned switches and levers this shuttle seemed to be adorned with. A light with no label was blinking at me, a soft amber, about a 1 second interval. Hm, something to circle back to I guess.
I snagged an oxygen candle from down on deck and floated back up to the cockpit with the small metal crate my singular package of food had come in. I don’t think the candle flame, even burning at 1000c or so, would melt through this. I’ve heard of cargo crates surviving atmospheric entry, and I’ve personally seen a pallet take full thruster from a ship that was too eager to undock. Suffice it to say, I had at least one very sturdy component on this ship.
I panned one of the catchers inwards, setting the crate up on it’s side and putting the candle inside. I wish there were some mirrors or something reflective I could put up behind it, maybe help capture some more photons but.. I resigned to see if this even did anything before I started scouring for improvements. I pulled the igniter and this time it actually worked like it was supposed to. Placing the candle inside the crate I was worried again about the heat but… it would be okay.
The deck still looked like a mess, the open maintenance panel had a soft glow coming from it now. Not necessarily bright, but enough to make out in the reduced light I existed in now. My eyes skimmed over Palletbot and again I thought about just coding something to make it go outside and find more light for us. Then again… power was stabilizing, I had air and some food.
I ran some quick calculations on usage vs. charge rate and found that if things continued as-is, we might overcome use and start charging in the next three days. That’s probably accounting for whatever I’m getting with this candle burning so those numbers aren’t really accurate. Well, it meant that I had some more time on my hands in any case.
I decided on what I’d do with my stowaway. My hands clicked away on the keyboard, writing some blocks of code, looking up a reference I’d thankfully saved on my tablet before I left. The actual API hooks for these bots weren’t hard to figure out but it was definitely not something I was used to poking at. Further, I wouldn’t really know how well this worked until I went down there and actually woke the bot up to test. I had a decent idea how it would go, and initial simulations on the console seemed to work. The best part was it all compiled without too much prodding or debugging. I wish I had Din to help me out with this, I bet they’d already be done and we’d be on our way.
It’s funny how attached you get to something you’ve only known for a few hours. Maybe I just felt more at home around machines, bots, constructs, all of that. The only people I’d ever gotten close to were Tak and Lopi.
Well, and Emdee of course. If she were here? Man, I wouldn’t even be worried. I’d just have to wait for an order, or to be pointed at a thing to fix, she’d spout off some one-liner of wisdom to keep me distracted despite being bathed in oil or grease or narrowly avoiding a plasma jet from a poorly patched thruster… and I’d be fine. I’d be safe.
I wonder what she’s up to now.. She left a few years back, told me and Tak we were as ready as we’d ever be, gave us a pat on the shoulders and then she was just… gone. Walked through the airlock and into our memories. I never took her for the traveling type, honestly I thought she and Lopi were going to bolt themselves together for a while there… Guess something came up.
The code was looking about as complete as it could without actually uploading it, so I transferred it to my tablet (still sitting around 58% without a charge since I hit BRK, gotta love transdermal heat chargers, too bad they only worked for low power devices) and floated down to the cargo port.
I punched the reset on Palletbot and gave it a second, watching on my tablet for it to hit network. Hopefully I could catch it before it started requesting assistance and going into shutdown again.
Its wireless connection pinged and I opened a connection.
———————————————————
>>OLGa.Kal> admin.request transfer
>>OLGa.Palletbot> query
>>OLGa.Kal> transfer = request
>>OLGa.Palletbot> request != admin
>>OLGa.Kal> user.request analyze transfer | accept != required
———————————————————
I heard some grinds and whirs from the square robot next to me. After what felt like an eternity I finally received back:
———————————————————
>>OLGa.Palletbot> ACK
———————————————————
I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d rather have this bot on my side than force them to do anything. I loaded up my recent programming attempt and dropped it into a shared file space on the network.
———————————————————
>>OLGa.FileNet> ForYourConsideration.cbs
>>OLGa.FileNet> Download started. . . .
———————————————————
I sat waiting, skimming my code over again. I was very worried it just wouldn’t work at all, or that the version differences would be too large and this was just going to come across as garbage code to Palletbot.
I stood up and walked over to the open panel where I’d left the accumulator running. The laser itself looked like an actual beam now and the frame…
I crouched down to stare, it looked like a tiny galaxy was forming all over the metal. Stars and lines and galaxies and nebulae arms reaching, stretching down into the bowels of the ship. I could actually see the glow as it worked its way down and down. I shoved my head down and could see it extending in both directions. This was by far and away the most unique thing I’d ever seen a ship frame do, though I still wasn’t sure if this was going to explode or… WHAT it was going to do. Maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t have a full size accumulator to start with.
A crackle on the overheads, then a small click.
“Tsshk: Testing. Testing.”
“Oh! That code did work after all!”
“Code bundle included: Seventy - One syntax errors. Corrected and implemented.”
“Seventy one? Yeesh I didn’t think I was that rusty…”
“Errors were in version and BRK specific API functions. Implementation successful.”
“Well I’m glad to hear that worked. I figured if Din could talk on the overheads maybe you would find it easier than communicating on terminal.”
“Overhead access is - - - Inefficient. But suits user better.”
I nodded to myself. At least I can talk to this one before I decide whether or not to scrap it.
“What are your reserves looking like, uh… should I keep calling you Palletbot?”
“Designation: GIM Pallet Automaton - R48-Q10. Current power levels sitting at 67%, low power mode active for conservation.”
“Hmmm… can I call you Rate? Maybe Q-ten… Oh! I could call you QT!”
“Please make a decision and I will register.”
This one wasn’t as sociable as Din, but maybe that’s just because this wasn’t an actual AI, more of a “this will get us by” chatbot. It also wasn’t designed to hold a conversation via terminal, let alone actually talking to people. I sighed.
“Palletbot it is.”
“ACK”
I gave it a pat on its top loader frame. “Glad to have you aboard and awake again.”
“QUERY: why was I brought out of sleep mode?”
“Well, I was hoping I could talk to you about my idea of having you scour around the outer hull of the ship looking for the best angle to catch solar.”
“ERR: no locomotive capabilities.”
I squinted at the bot, “What are you talking about? You were able to move back and forth between the station and ships, how do you not have any movement capability?”
“ERR: No magrails detected in the vincinity. ERR: BRK-GL1 out of range. ERR: No additional instruction sets.”
So it needed the magrails to move at all, I just got lucky when I broke off and this guy happened to come along for the ride. I bet StationAI was delivering the actual instructions on how to move and where to move to the whole time. These were just little puppet bots riding on their guided tracks. So that whole idea was bust. I sighed.
“ATTENTION: Rb SIGNAL DETECTED.”
“Say what?”
“REPEAT: Rb SIGNAL DETECTED.”
I shook my head, “There can’t be a signal anywhere near us, sensors would’ve picked it up light years away when we were stranded and I haven’t seen anything since I woke up.”
Palletbot simply repeated the message. “I think your sensors are fried, there isn’t even a blackbox on th-” An alert from the cockpit now, that same unfamiliar beep accompanying it.
I floated up and got myself situated in the seat before skimming over the console like I had been. Battery levels are… actually up! Hey that’s something! I guess the candle was actually working!
Glancing to the side I saw the candle had tipped over and snuffed itself on the edge of the crate, when did that happen? But if that wasn’t providing extra for the catchers then how were we suddenly net positive for battery?
I stared at the console, willing the numbers to correct themselves and show me that I was suddenly going to be suffocating in the next 20 seconds, but they remained steady. That beep to my right again, the pulsing amber now a steady glow. A fresh window popped up on the console display, one I hadn’t seen before.
The window itself looked old, like someone had put retro aesthetics on the program just for fun. I couldn’t believe the title on it, it wasn’t possible, it wasn’t something this ship had installed…
————————————
- RbDrive Tuning Menu -
- Please select an option -
- 1. QScanner
- 2. Hotspot Map
- 3. Diagnostics
————————————
I blinked a few times, there’s no way I had a blackbox in here, what was this menu? Why didn’t any of this show up when I was on my salvage run originally? It wasn’t possible to do any kind of tuning without a blackbox! At least… that’s what I’ve always been told. What did Din say? That this might be a prototype? Keeper, how old of a prototype was the question… There had been enough catastrophes in the early days with the Rubidium drives… was this one of those unwieldy, impossible to stop early designs?
Only one way to find out, I guess. I got into the first option, the “QScanner”. I was presented with a localized star map, it didn’t have the BRK on it, so I guess this was an archived chart? Where was all this hidden in OLGa even? I zoomed out until I saw two red pips showing on the map, one was approximately half a light year closer than the other, but on a very different heading.
I knew from before our escape that the two nearest stations were the mining cluster jail, MCJ-IFR, and the freelance station, ISP-FL. I didn’t remember was which was which though. With the ship running in low-power mode I didn’t want to spin the sensor array up to check. If these were the options, the decision was simple.
I selected the closer of the two and watched as an archaic loading bar slowly crept towards the other side of the screen. I shook my head, there’s no way this was going to work. Then again… I looked back to the extinguished O2 candle, if I haven’t been getting extra power from that, then the laser accumulator MUST be doing something.
That familiar unfamiliar beep to my right. I turned to look and it had gone from amber to green, as well a bright glint caught my eye down on the deck. The small accumulator was fully aglow, a bright light emanating from the hole it sat in.
I rushed down as fast as floating would allow, thinking there was a fire, only to discover the light was too bright for my eyes. I quickly snatched my goggles from my tote to investigate. The laser was absolutely generating enough energy to create plasma like it was originally intended to, but the frame itself stood rigid, I couldn’t even feel heat radiating from either device, so effective was the heat sinking. Then again the exterior of the ship was probably frozen by now so maybe floating in around was helping too.
A floating sock passed by my periphery and I turned to notice anything not secured down (read: all of it still) was now moving towards one side of the ship. Intrigued I floated back up to the cockpit and pulled up a coordinate map.
There we were in the center… and after a few seconds, the X coordinate shifted by .1, then Y by .2, then Z by -.1
We were moving! Keeper Eternal we were actually moving!
I snagged the oxygen candle and rushed down to the now blindingly bright plasma being generated. I held the candle low enough and FWOOSH back to life it roared. I did a little dance, I couldn’t help myself. “We’re moving, we’re moving, haha!”
“ACK. Movement confirmed. ETA - - 4.8 days until MCF-IFR contact, 5.1 days before docking range.”
I stopped in my tracks. “What did you say?”
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