chapter 103
I was thoroughly exhausted. The last three days, I have done nothing else but help build up the factory and help make and design our new droids, designated as Guard Patrol FH 5701.
These are the humanoid droids that will be patrolling and fighting the other gangs in this town. We could have tried to make them look like real people, but it would have taken too many resources and time, so they looked quite robotic.
The most difficult thing about designing them was creating a command structure that would function without me being here, and so that we could insert simple AIs into them that would be commanded by more complex AIs in safer locations, who in turn would be subordinate to Bob.
Basically, what we ended up with were control towers. In the basement, in one of the more secure rooms, was a huge AI core that only looked like an AI core, but inside was completely different.
Instead, it housed multiple regular-sized AIs and a lot of additional hardware to handle more connections to the simpler AIs, and the software to help keep them running with minimal effort from those AIs inside.
All of this meant that now we could build a couple of hundred guard patrol droids that would be as smart as any of the smart AIs because they guided those simple AIs, but also they would be cheap to make and easily replaceable.
The last part was quite important as we were constantly losing some in probing attacks that followed when we quietly shifted to cover the territory owned by the previous gang.
FH and Bob were really efficient at all of that. I really needed to stop being surprised about how efficient those two can be.
The previous gang was running quite a standard protection racket, which was illegal, of course. We didn't want that kind of attention, so we did it somewhat legally, as all the businesses now employed us as their security company.
Our rates were a lot more reasonable than they were before, and while some took convincing, in the end they understood that we could offer them an opportunity to expand their business without having to pay a bigger cut.
It still surprised me how uncaring the police force was in this town. It seemed that their main focus was on the central city, and what happened here near the border meant a lot less to them. Because of this, basically only the centre of this border town was properly protected, with every other area controlled by different gangs.
No idea how things got so bad, but it was to our advantage for now, so I wasn’t complaining. All of this would only need minimal input from me after we got everything rolling.
Now, however, I was completely done. I didn’t even have enough willpower to try to get up and go inside the ship and into my bed. The chair here was good enough. Sleep soon claimed me.
Slowly, I was woken up by a constant beeping. Before my eyes snapped open, my mind was bombarded with a lot of information about what had happened during my brief sleep. Almost four hours. I guess that was good enough, as I felt quite refreshed.
We seemed to have lost another four guard patrols, but during this time we had already produced twenty. It was a good thing that major attacks and damage to the city’s structure would still bring in the proper authorities to handle everything, so we weren’t being attacked heavily, at least not yet.
It would be a mistake on their part, as the longer we had to build things up, the harder it would be to dislodge us.
Finally, I got up to turn off the beeping. The machine that was doing it had finally finished slow-hardening a piece of metal. Picking it up, it was the size of a playing card, with the thickness of it being almost half of a deck of cards.
This represented nearly 8% of the gathered scales from the three portals. This should be stronger than the metal we were currently using to build anything that needed to be durable, starting from drones and ending in the ship’s main structure.
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Most of this metal came in large armour plates meant to armour up ships. The techniques used to make such metal only used tiny amounts of space-monster carapace.
While the portal monsters were nowhere close to the resilience of space monsters, this alloy I was now holding also had a tremendously larger percentage of it composed of monster materials instead of just metal. Because of this technically it should be stronger, but I don’t actually know. So, it was time to start testing this.
I was about halfway done with tests when I was alerted to an attack. Immediately I connected through Bob with the main control matrix, from there to the sub control matrix, and then finally to the guard patrols who were correctly fighting.
They patrolled in pairs. These ones were currently being shredded apart by a couple of machine guns that were being shot out from an armoured vehicle disguised as a small truck.
These two didn’t get the chance to fire before they were too damaged to do anything. This was the reason why we stopped having them in larger groups, as a surprise attack was usually good enough to destroy even a large group in a short instance.
Already other guard patrol pairs that were nearby headed towards this location, with two of them already being close enough to open fire using the FH-02 rifles.
They weren’t strong enough to properly damage armored vehicles, but they were enough to spook them. Instead of immediately driving off our territory they instead accelerated towards the two engaged droids, which was their mistake. As soon as they got close enough, the droids threw shaped charges in front of the vehicle.
Explosives are dangerous to use as they did quite a lot of collateral damage, but these ones were specially made so that they would only exert explosive force in one direction. The vehicle tried to swerve away but it was going too fast, trying to run down these two droids.
The explosives triggered, blowing the whole vehicle upwards about a dozen centimetres. That didn't stop the vehicle from running over and completely destroying the droids.
The vehicle itself continued to roll as it had plenty of speed and hit a lamppost that finally made it stop. It was completely on fire now with nothing inside surviving.
More and more droids arrived, starting to clean up, and some of our repair drones were deployed to fix up any damage that might have occurred.
In the grand scheme, this exchange went really well for us, as that vehicle was easily twenty times as expensive as the four droids. It always upset me how prolonged conflicts always came down to which side won the economics battle. It just didn’t feel right.
Bob and FH were handling all of this, so I focused back on the alloy. It took a few more hours but finally the tests were over. This thing at minimum was 1.5 times better than our current best, but it was almost three times better at handling piercing type of damage.
This was all just the beginning. We were basically at the start here in terms of portal ranking. It was hard to imagine how strong some of the alloys could be in the future as we start delving into stronger portals.
Different types of monster materials probably will give different properties as well. The fact that if I didn’t have this looting ability, it would have taken us hundreds of portals to get as much material as we did meant that a lot of possibilities were open to us.
It was easy to imagine what might be possible in the future, but those were dreams that I shouldn’t focus on at all right now as we needed to survive to reach that point. One step at a time—that was how we needed to do it—but it was good to have a direction which would make every step forward truly meaningful.
Now it was time to continue processing more of what we got and then start upgrading everyone. I also needed to start designing a weapon that could handle underwater portals. That would mean a lot less conflict with other adventuring parties and extra credit in our pockets.
Time continued to pass as I continued to work on what I needed to do, but every so often I directed a few patrols into the local junkyards. It was a new hobby of mine to let them walk through the junkyards looking for interesting things to buy and bring back here.
Already I had quite a collection. Not only were they a good source of upgraded materials, but they also helped me understand the different types of technology out there. Luckily or unluckily, this has given me a lot of ideas on future designs for our equipment and upgrades for the ship.
We will, however, also need to buy fully functioning technology I was not familiar with. For that we would need a bit more stability, but during the past few days multiple gangs have stepped up their attacks.
They were moving fast, but they were still not fast enough. We were building up too fast.
“Captain, I have to interrupt you,” FH said as she contacted me.
It took me a moment to realise where I was, as I had been disassembling a broken-down plasma gun. It was a fascinating piece of technology that was bordering on the edge of being classified as artefact-grade technology.
“What is it? Has anything—” But my own words trailed off as I realised eight days had passed without me even realising it. Okay, I really needed to take more breaks.
“Bob is requesting extra help. One of the gangs has started to use enhanced individuals that are too difficult for our current guard patrols to handle. He wants Sam's and Dean's squads to be ready to be deployed.”
While I might have lost track of time, I wasn’t that far gone that I didn’t keep track of the conflict that was happening outside. We now had enough forces that we could easily suppress any incursion into our territory, so I guess they were now starting to use people that had proper skills for fighting and who weren’t simply G-rank.
“Yes, they can go and fight, but we will need to figure out a way to give Bob a few squads of heavy hitters that he could use while we're not here. Perhaps it's time to start making a few heavy patrol droids.”
“Heavy patrol droids? We don't have any such blueprints.”
“You are correct, FH. That means I need to take a break from disassembling and figuring out new tech. Time to design some proper murder bots, I believe Bob is going to love them.”
“That’s also something I wanted to talk to you about. I think Bob enjoys this conflict too much. I’m worried that he’s focusing too much on fighting and not enough on actually resolving this conflict.”
“I mean, you’re handling the legal side of all of this. Perhaps you can start putting pressure on the gangs in another way so that we could use that as a way to secure our standing. The more leverage we have, the better.”
“I will see what I can do. I will inform Bob of your decision and what we discussed.”
“Yes, thank you.”
So now the question becomes: what should the heavy guard patrol be able to do so it could fight the higher-ranked individuals?
A railgun would cause a bit too much collateral damage, especially if you missed. Lasers would be accurate. Perhaps that and a combination of missiles—yes, that seems dangerous.