chapter 55
"Get into standard formation," I heard over the radio. It wasn't too hard to manoeuvre, but I wasn’t letting the autopilot handle it. This was a good way to practise, and that's why we were doing it.
The refuelling station was behind us, and now on the display, I saw how all of the ships in the fleet were moving into a line formation with the battlecruiser in front. This was what was called the standard formation. It’s where you got your most defensible ship in front, and everyone else used it as cover.
Of course, that wouldn't work if every ship was basically at similar defensive capability, but that's why usually in fleets it seems like there are always at least one or two heavy defensive ship types, as apparently this works the best in most types of engagements.
We couldn't practise when approaching a station; otherwise, they would most likely see us as enemies. But the battlecruiser captain wanted us to learn and practise while we were accelerating to get back into FTL.
I was pretty close to the battlecruiser, as my role would be to shoot down incoming missiles. This was basically the only thing that my ship could do. Hopefully it won’t take too long to make the Mark II, as being this useless in combat was annoying me.
Before we entered FTL, we moved into a looser formation meant for flying through the side dimension. When we once again transitioned, I could finally turn on the gravity generator. A moment later, we were once again in zero gravity, which was kinda annoying. I really missed having proper gravity and in the proper direction.
It took a few more days before Lola was done with the VR, but as we were trying to run it, we had a bit of trouble.
"Remi, I think this won’t work. We need to overclock our processors too much. There’s no way we can run complex simulations. Let me try something," Lola explained, as I was connected to the VR. We were barely getting enough frames generated for me not to be stuck in a picture world.
Slowly the details dropped off, and soon I was in a greyish room that looked similar to a gun range.
"This is the best we can manage at the moment. It’s just a simple gun range for simple practice."
“If this is the best we can do, then this will have to do. Thank you, Lola, for putting this together. Continue working on the other VR environments. Eventually, we will still be able to use them.”
“Acknowledged.”
It was a good bit of practice, and while I would need to train in the real world as well, VR was used quite extensively to train soldiers. You can learn quite a lot of technical things and get the general practice on how things work inside a VR. That way, you need a lot less time to acclimate when you start doing things in the real world.
It wasn’t the best, but one by one, we all will do an hour of practice every day. Sam and Dean were quite happy. Even if they couldn’t practice with their own bodies, they could at least do so in the VR simulation. Lola also practiced, but she had chosen an interesting avatar. It was a mix of droid and bio-cybernetics.
This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.
She explained to me that this combination should be quite powerful. She had been doing quite a lot of experimentation in her free time with biological life and cybernetics. She was really good at it, and she liked to do it, it was kind of like a hobby to her.
It didn’t take her too long to realize that some biological life could perform certain things better than mechanical life. So she’s trying to combine the two using the knowledge we have and what the new crew members could provide us.
There could be an argument made that perhaps she should be spending more of her time working on the ship’s tasks and problems, but even AIs need time for themselves. So, I had no problem with this. In fact, I encouraged it.
After that, time continued to pass faster than I expected. It didn’t take too long for our next refueling stop to happen. Using refueling stations made everything go so fast, with seemingly no trouble coming our way. Every time we accelerated away from a refueling station, we practiced formation flying or scenarios.
It was quite a fun way to pass the time, and for the first time, I really felt like I was properly flying a spaceship. During the next FTL stretch, I managed to finish working out the problems with Experiment 333.
This would probably not be the last time I would need to make changes, but it had proven itself enough, so it was time to name it. Putting some real thought into this, I ended up with the name FH-02. FH stood for Forward Horizon, as this weapon was made on the ship, and it was the second version of it.
Perhaps I should use more of this designation for other things that I come up with. It would be nice to have, in the future, a full armoury full of stuff that all had FH somewhere in their name, meaning that I had come up with them. That would be so satisfying.
We continued to fly, getting ever closer to our destination. During all of this time, I’d also been working on my skills, and nowadays, if I had a free hand, there was always a die floating there.
Thanks to this, my telekinesis skill was coming along quite well, but it was about time, as my mana sense was about to reach a milestone.
Sitting on my bed in a meditation position, I concentrated on myself and my surroundings. There was mana here. This entire side dimension was filled with it, especially the current, but it wasn't raw mana. It already had purpose. Still, I could feel it a lot better. And then it finally happened. The skill expanded, becoming more complex as I reached a deeper understanding of it.
The extent to how far I could feel mana expanded immediately. It also didn’t feel so overwhelming. Opening my eyes, I could still feel the mana, yet I could now easily move around without getting overwhelmed by the new information. I now believed that I could use the skill in a fight without getting distracted.
“This feels amazing,” I said out loud and fell through my bond’s congratulations.
On my status the skill was no longer in the novice rank instead it was in the apprentice rank.
Everything continued quite the same way as it had been, as we slowly got into a rhythm. After a few more refueling stations and thousands of light years traveled, it was finally time for me to leave the fleet. We had shrunk quite a bit, with only 14 ships remaining.
“Thank you for this opportunity. Forward Horizon signing off,” I announced to the fleet as we finished refueling. Instead of going with them, we were heading in a different direction.
As soon as we entered FTL, we needed to make a sharp turn. It was weird to fly without any radio chatter going on, but I also kind of liked the silence.
It took us four days to reach the edge of this current, and then, with a bit of turbulence, we were outside the current flying in free space, so to say.
Our destination was 21 days away: a forge system called Dralun. There, we should be able to rent ourselves a long-term shipyard berth and finally start building out the Mark II.
Looking over my notebook, it was filled with designs, and I had used quite a lot of processing power to simulate all the different versions I had tried. Technically, I wouldn’t start by building out the structure of the Mark II.
We would be starting by upgrading our processing capabilities, then making some more droids to help with the building, while I built a test model for the side engines to see if the design I came up with could actually work. Because if it did, it would be amazing.
Our destination should also be a safe place for us to hold up at, as this part of the galaxy has turned quite dangerous. The war between the two pirate lords was now in full swing, and both of their families seemed to be getting involved, which brought in a lot more powers. The war that we originally diverted our path to avoid now looked like a small skirmish between feuding children.
It’s kind of hard to believe the facts we were getting through the quantum net during our stays in real space, but apparently, already over 1,000 ships had been destroyed, with no end to the fighting in sight. Right now, things seemed to be quite equal, but I guess we’ll have to see who comes out on top during this war of the pirate lords.
“This will be the final stretch before we reach our destination. Estimated flight time: 21 days,” I announced to the ship and everyone on it.