chapter 81
“Do not rush like headless chickens; move with speed and purpose. If any of you load anything out of place even by one millimetre again, then you are going to do drills until your joints smoke.”
“Did you really just try to overlift your capability? Yes, it's only 1.3 kilogrammes over your recommended, but do you not see that this is not just any cargo? It has the capability to shift, which will most definitely overload on the corner, and we will have a mess on our hands.”
“Do not be as stupid as X553, who, for some idiotic reason, thought that a liquid container filled to the brim wouldn't shift its weight under heavy gravity load. Am I working with a group of X553s?”
“No, Quartermaster Bob,” answered the other hauling drones in unison as Bob continued to educate in his own way.
The ship had a little bit more work that needed to be done, but some of the cargo we were bringing along could already be stored alongside the dismantled factory we had built. It was weird to see the place so empty and quiet compared to how it was before.
“FH, move the left side engine to up position.” I listened carefully alongside several other drones working with me to hear if anything was off as the huge engine, with its propellers already attached, moved from its resting position fully vertical.
The mechanism that allowed it to turn like this also needed to fully support the entire ship’s weight, as this massive engine should theoretically be capable of lifting this thing off a planet.
Now I could understand the numbers and the theory of how it worked, but the ship looked so much bigger than I expected, even though it was still in the small B category, just one above the smallest ship category in the universe.
I think I’ve never truly understood how big ships could get. There would be so much space on a ship that was 1.5 kilometres long, and there are battleships that can get to that size easily, not to speak of hauling ships. Those would be 10 times bigger than my ship, but that's only in length; as you add width and height, the inside space gets so much bigger.
The amount of work and resources that would go into making a ship like that is absolutely crazy. While a megastructure would require a lot more resources, a lot of it could just be inert structure. A ship couldn’t afford that, especially if you were a fighting ship, you would need to use absolutely every inch to maximise your chances of survival, and that meant so much work.
While no one has built an absolute beast in this galaxy, from the quantum net there seemed to be confirmed builds of ships exceeding 10 kilometres. Those were always built as a show of power and intimidation, as many of these beasts have been, because ships that are even over 2 kilometres just get too big to be effective.
Those types of ships would need fleets around them to truly shine, but the truly huge beasts, they would need such huge numbers, and even then they’re just too big of a target to keep properly safe.
But that’s for fighting ships. Apparently there’s plenty of hauling ships of that size and even bigger, mostly made to haul stuff from galaxy to galaxy, never dropping out of FTL until they reach their destination. As that’s the best way to keep themselves safe.
Compared to those, my ship is a small one, but it’s certainly plenty big for us. Also, improving a smaller ship with extremely high-end materials is a lot easier and cheaper, and if you pack enough power into a small ship, it's actually even more dangerous than a bigger one.
A few days went by as we finished testing things. When the shield generators all fully powered up, it was amazing to see how they fractured the lights just a bit, causing the ship to look a bit hazy, and only if you had the right angles could you see it clearly.
We had some pre-programmed patterns installed into the shield system to deactivate when we need to use our weapons. They worked well enough for now, so at least we wouldn’t be firing on our own shields, but that’s only in the case when the targets were far away.
Fast fliers that were close by, we just wouldn’t be able to adjust our shields fast enough to keep up with the fast-moving point defence turrets, at least for now.
All of this should be good enough to fool everyone here that we actually finished building the ship. There was still a lot left to be done, but that would all be in the operation part of the ship.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a lot stronger from the G-ranked portals. I just needed tougher opponents, and we should have plenty of those at our destination.
The quiet was deafening, and in my vision the timer that estimated the completion time of the Forward Horizon Mark 2 blinked as every number was 0. We finished three days ahead of schedule, which gave Bob plenty of time to pack everything up as well as we possibly could.
Currently the back ramp was down, but the cargo bay wasn’t as empty as it usually was. We spent basically all our liquid currency, only keeping 50 million, to buy everything that we knew we could sell at a higher price at our destination.
This should net us a tidy profit which will hopefully fuel the next stage, making me and my crew as strong as possible to match our ship’s new capabilities.
There would be no point in having such a capable ship without us being able to match the mission rankings the ship could take. It would just be too dangerous, as a single boarder could probably take us all out. We would need good materials to upgrade my other crew members, and I would need to run many portals to start getting my own ranks up.
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Most of our drones were already in storage. Because most of them could fly, a lot of them were stored on the ceiling of the cargo bay. There were so many different lowered storage compartments, not just for drones but other things as well. These were mainly for our own ship supplies.
Otherwise, a lot of the cargo area was taken up by food. While these were still high-calorie meals, they were the better kind, the stuff that actually had flavour. They would fetch a good price because shipping them has the problem of volume, as they took up quite a lot for their price.
The reason why we have so much of it, over half of the currently used cargo area is because of their price and size. We just simply didn’t have enough credits to fill up the cargo area with more expensive and more space-efficient cargo.
As I was close to the now closed-up lifting platform, which was quite huge as it connected the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor, the white light that illuminated the cargo bay switched from their bright white mode to a more dull yellowish one.
There was no need to keep everything illuminated so brightly, as it was just not good for health or sometimes even for the cargo we would be transporting.
On the side I used the staircase that led upwards and entered at the second floor. The four main engines were quite close, and they were already powered up and ready to go.
Here there was a little bit more free space, as this was where the lift was that could take stuff from the first floor to the second. There were still some things stored up here as well that we were going to be using to turn the third floor into a proper workshop.
The engineering console, as we now officially called it, was still massive and currently operated by five droids. Their bodies were built in a way to make them the best at doing this type of job.
All of them had eight extremely dexterous hands, and while technically they could do other things as well if the need arose, they were mainly designed to work perfectly with the engineering console that is responsible for the power, communication, and any other thing that needed to move from one location to another on this ship.
Despite their frail-looking bodies, they are quite durable, as they are meant to do their jobs under duress, even fix the console if something broke during combat. Right now their AIs were quite simple, but that’s because it takes time to properly develop AI this specialised, and I wanted to do it right.
Right after the engineering console is the power core. It sits in a protected housing and it’s filled with so many nano machines. By volume, they take up about 50% of the housing they are in.
The reason being that this power core is at the very centre of the ship, and this number of nano machines weigh so much, they are also meant to act as ballast to keep the ship’s weight distribution in an optimal configuration.
While proper cargo management is always important, we can never be certain that we can get it completely right every time, and during travel some things might shift, so it's important to have such a way of managing weight distribution. Of course, there are limits, as the power core still needs a proper configuration to keep fusion reactions going and the ship powered.
Walking further towards the front of the ship, the railgun starts. Its shock absorption structure takes up quite a lot of space, making moving on the 2nd floor towards the front a bit more difficult. We have some degrees of adjustment on the railgun, which just means that it takes up even more space.
Before we decided to put this here, the area would have been partly my workshop, but now we were using the area on both sides of the railgun as a place to store more necessary supplies and some drones.
Between the floors, as they were quite thick, were the fuel and other tanks that kept water and gases to keep the ship livable. There were two staircases at either end of the ship, and a centre staircase that was a bit bigger, which could also be used to bring smaller sized cargo up through the entire ship.
As I entered the third floor, I let out a sigh. Everything here was packed up, but in a way that we could easily take apart, as everything here would need to be assembled, turning this floor into a workshop.
There was one annoying thing, and that was that the command bridge as it took up a large portion at the centre of the floor, reducing the area I had to set up, but it also provided a good opportunity, as some of the machinery needed something incredibly sturdy to attach itself to, and that armoured wall would do quite well.
As I used the front staircase to get up, I was also quite close to the hydroponics area. Here there were tanks filled with snails and algae.
While I did have plenty of data saved from Earth that could be used to make seeds for all types of plants, there would just be no point in planting them here, as the first time we needed to accelerate to get to FTL, most of them would be destroyed.
I believe with all this technology and magic there should be a way we can fix that problem, as I really did crave a good crunchy apple and some tomatoes and of course some fried potatoes. Remi, stop that. The foods are good enough, you don’t need stuff like that.
One thing that also has helped quite a lot with my food cravings is chicken. I never was a fan of goat meat, but whatever miracle made it so that on the dwarf home planet there were chickens was just the greatest thing ever.
Lola also confirmed that while there were some differences between the genetic code, it could all be explained by thousands of years of breeding, the way we also bred our domestic animals. So yes, they are still the same animal.
I kind of wanted to keep that to myself but also not. So before we enter FTL, FH will send a message containing all the data we have on this phenomenon to that old scary dwarf and let them handle it with the resources they have at their disposal.
Finally, I climbed to the 4th and final floor. Here at the front there was a smaller version of the hydroponics that were on the 3rd floor. We needed this extra bit to make sure that enough oxygen could be produced so that if something happened and we were stuck in space, we wouldn't have to rely on the supply that we were bringing with us.
While the other floors were quiet, this one wasn’t. There was a large training area here, and I could see Dean and Sam practising with their rifles alongside their squads. As I walked past them, they stopped.
“Is it time?” Dean asked, and I gave him a sharp nod. They started preparing and storing everything they had used, as we wouldn't want them flying around when we started accelerating.
I left them to it and headed further towards the back. The command bridge extended all the way up here, and I needed to move around to the side to get to the back half of the ship. I kind of wanted to check out the spa once again, but it could wait. I did try the swimming pool once, and while it’s not that deep, it was still quite nice.
Lola was towards the back, doing some last checks on some of the stored machinery that also needed to be assembled for her own medical bay/workshop.
“Lola, start finishing up, it’s time.” She looked up and gave me a thumbs up.
I headed inside the command bridge. This place took up a lot of space inside the ship. As I walked in, I was greeted with multiple rows of workstations. All of them had large screens and could be used to control many aspects of the ship’s functions.
Currently all the seats were empty. A small staircase to my left led downwards towards the sleeping quarters and the ships servers under that.
As I walked forward about halfway towards the front, the floor stopped. Now the entire height of the command bridge was on display. Near the bottom were multiple different control stations, all of them suspended and able to rotate 360°.
This was more commonly known as the floating bridge. A bridge like this is perfect for smaller combat ships, especially ones that can enter a gravity well of a planet. As I slid down the ladder and stepped on the floor, the screens and projectors lit up, displaying the 360° field of view the ship had.
Of course the main command station had more screens, as it would be quite awkward to try to look at something that's below the ship by leaning over the chair.
It took a bit to get used to this view, and of course if needed it could be shut off, but as we don't have any way to actually look outside the ship without cameras, I felt that it was a nice way to see what was outside the ship.
As I climbed the command station and sat in the captain's chair, for the first time I felt that the first stage of the ship was done. As the chair read my biological and digital signatures, confirming that it was me, all the screens lit up, welcoming me.
“I’m waiting for your orders, Captain,” FH communicated, and at that moment I felt two of my bonds snapped into one. At this moment FH, the AI that is the ship and Forward Horizon Mark II, became truly one.
“Get us clearance to leave in two hours. Start running last checks and start the warning klaxons so everyone can start preparing for takeoff.”
“As you command, Captain.”