chapter 139
The damage report was finally completed, and it was nearly 20 pages long. The crazy thing about this is that 95% was wear and tear. So many things were pushed beyond their limits, and we did find that FH’s innate ability did come with another drawback.
The longer she used it, the more stress it put on the system she was boosting with our affinities. We didn’t know this before, so right now, if we were to push the ship again and needed to fight, a lot of things would break. Things that were needed for this ship to keep functioning.
The worst thing was that we didn’t have the required materials on board to complete such extensive repairs, but we did have enough to get the truly critical systems in good enough condition so we wouldn’t be stranded in space.
“Captain, we have received orders. We have been assigned the trail of the main battle. How much we contribute to the clean-up is up to us.”
That sucked. That meant we couldn’t go and loot the mothership. Approximately 30% of its structure remained, which meant there was a lot of loot to be gained there. But as expected, FH showed that the battle barge and the battleships were heading that way.
“That’s just unfair. You should have a big enough contribution to be able to also loot there,” Sam said, and I could hear the anger in his voice.
Everyone else seemed to agree as well. They were right, we should get quite a big portion of the loot thanks to our lucky shot that took out that main railgun that had been such a hindrance to the entire fleet.
“Well, the official contribution isn’t calculated yet. That’s why they can do that. But there is a benefit to this as well: it means less oversight, as they are going to be quite far away.”
That perked everyone up. FH was already planning an optimal route so we could get as much loot as possible, and of course, we could hopefully assemble one of the fighters fully.
Getting to the loot wouldn’t be that simple, simply because it was all drifting apart with every passing second. There was no convenient loot chest where everything appeared. Fortunately, we had advantages in that department, as we had quite a lot of drones capable of easily going in and out of space and manoeuvring in it.
We hadn’t had a need for vacuum-specific drones for quite a while, so they were of an older generation, but they would be good enough to get the job done. With a few commands, those drone squads were woken up to start their wake-up diagnostics and get ready for their prolonged mission.
Another thing I noticed as we were gathering information about the loot trail was that there were a lot of destroyed frigates as well.
Usually, these are left behind as graves, and we certainly wouldn’t want to break that tradition, but there were plenty of loose chunks of armour and other smaller pieces of ships that I believe are not counted as grave sites.
“FH, remind me, would it go against tradition to pick up some of those armour pieces from the destroyed frigates that are no longer a part of the main structure?”
“It would not go against it. And we have to go close to most of those ships anyway to check for survivors.”
She then displayed plenty of other frigates that were heading over to other destroyed frigates, especially those that were still able to signal that some inside were still alive.
We were not really equipped to handle rescuing living people, but double-checking never hurt anyone, as there were plenty of ships currently focused fully on finding survivors. Most of them not because of altruistic reasons, but because this would get them some more contribution points.
“Captain, I finished asking permission, citing the reason for claiming such salvage as resupply material for ammunition and repairs. I already got an affirmative answer back, although they did stress not to touch more intact ship sections.”
“It just seems a waste to let all of that disappear when the portal closes. Sometimes these biological sentiments don’t make sense to me,” Bob said out loud. A discussion with him and Dean followed on the nature of tradition against survival.
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We finally began to move to our first destination. We were moving quite slowly because our drones needed the time to fly out and collect all the loot in range.
It was so satisfying seeing them flying out, grabbing hold of any piece of loot that could be valuable, and then bringing it back after a short examination and confirmation if we wanted to bring it in or not, judged by FH and Bob.
Bob had gone to the cargo area, as we would most likely fill up our cargo bay, and plenty would be brought inside our deep storage. We had been at it for only half an hour when we had already found two of the most valuable pieces of loot these types of ships could give.
They were a pearl-like crystal that was perfectly round. The ones inside the fighters were small, maybe a bit bigger than a marble. One of these fighters should have at least a couple inside, but they are quite hard to find in the largeness of space, and with how drops work, most probably disappeared.
Inside the fighters, these are used to power their cutting lasers and in their power generation. The mothership would have crystals like this that were bigger than me, and those were incredibly valuable. If one of those remained, anyone who could claim it using their contribution would be truly rich.
FH sent me a report on what she knew about these crystals and what their attributes were. It seemed that these could be used in power generation as extremely stable transformers that can take a lot of power input from different sources and give out an exact structure of power best suited for whatever application you need power for.
That could be really useful, although we wouldn’t need it in our own power generation systems; we already have that level of exactness. As for laser weaponry, I was pretty sure that this could be used in hard light weapons, although they would need to be cut to a different shape. Some experimentation is going to be necessary.
Another well-known usage for crystals like this was to cut them into a specific shape that would be perfect for capital shield generators that were incredibly powerful and made for ships like the battle barge, which had enough power generation to meet the needs of those shield generators.
Our ship probably only produced at a maximum of 2 to 3% of those shield generators’ power requirements. The bigger ships got, the crazier the numbers involved became. To the point that making something like the battle barge most likely costs in the realm of trillions, not billions, of credits.
Of course, most items like that you couldn’t buy on the open market, as they were rare components that basically never appeared. Only in large auctions could you possibly get one, but usually they were used by the factions that found them.
The number of fighters that died still meant there were a lot of these crystals out there. It didn’t take too long for our sensor AIs to get particularly good at finding the signatures of these crystals, so we truly started to pick up a lot of loot. Unfortunately, we couldn’t hide a large portion of it, but for our own needs, we would certainly get enough.
This meant that after cutting and combining these crystals—and of course, if they worked for hard light weapons—we should at least have the capability of changing all of our point defence turrets over to hard light.
Just imagining it gave me chills. It would also mean that our point defence weaponry would be stronger than our mid-sized turrets, which is kind of funny. But the best thing: we would then no longer only have ammunition for short engagements, but instead for prolonged ones.
When we reached some of the floating pieces of the frigates, we discovered a problem. It should have been quite obvious, but the drone ports we had were obviously not large enough to bring some of these pieces in, and some were big enough that even opening ramps wouldn’t work.
This meant we had to slow down and give our drones the chance to cut through some of these pieces so we could bring them on board. Then we needed to cut them up even more so we could get them into deep storage. Fortunately, Bob could handle that easily enough for us; he even transformed a part of the cargo area into a processing factory.
As time went on, a bigger percentage of our drones became involved in the looting process. I was keeping an eye on everything, quickly noting down things that needed to be improved, processes that needed to be optimised, and design ideas for new drones that could accomplish the tasks needed for such jobs.
There would be a lot of modernization that needed to be done, and I really hoped that we could get a clearer understanding of the lasers the fighters used to cut through anything, because fitting those to my drones would be a huge boost.
Like this, hours turned into days. Every so often, we needed to return to the battle barge to offload our loot and get inspected. The inspection was a weird affair but incredibly efficient.
I watched as once again the same person walked through the airlock connected to the rear ramp. He only walked in a couple of steps, and then I could feel some expenditure of mana that sent a wave through the entire ship.
“You are all clear. Happy looting,” he said, so tiredly. The dude was barely standing, as he most likely needed to inspect basically every ship, and each time we came back, he was the only one who showed up to inspect after the cargo was offloaded.
He was quite a short elf and was quite upset when we came here the first time, when I didn’t come down to greet him, but by the second time, he didn’t care any longer. Overworking did that to you.
Our stuff in deep storage wasn’t found, even the forbidden loot. We basically had enough looted pieces of the fighters to make two completed ones, so now we were only focusing on the stuff we could keep, as now a large percentage of it always went into deep storage.
With all this looting, we had even found a few crystals that were big enough that they should work in upgrading some of the medium-sized turrets. We would also have enough of the smaller ones to upgrade all the point-defence turrets a couple of times over, which also meant that we would have enough to outfit quite a large force with these kinds of weapons.
The one thing I wasn’t sure of was whether this technology could be used to make melee weapons. I would need to look into it a bit more, and for now, only my crew members could use these types of weapons.
The leadership called the looting over when almost two weeks had passed. The mothership was basically gone; only the parts that were forbidden were left behind. Every enemy frigate was also looted along with a large portion of the fighters.
The best thing was that we were already incredibly rich while the loot sharing hadn’t even begun yet. We basically had everything we would have wanted and more, but now let’s see what we can claim from that mothership so that hopefully we could convert some of our bigger weapons over to hard light, which would significantly improve our offensive capabilities.
Unfortunately, these types of enemies wouldn’t be any good for upgrading our defensive capabilities. When we were done here—which should be in a day or two—we should really be heading towards someplace where we could start hunting space monsters, so that we could hopefully improve our armour to a stupid degree.
There was also talk of a celebration for the larger contributors on board the battle barge. And honestly, a bit of fun didn’t sound bad.