chapter 162
POV: Baron of Rock, Krundiin
“Baron Krundiin, a space battle is happening in the L57 section. We have visual.” That was close by. I grinded, and they immediately got to work. As I shifted, I heard the cracks. This desk job was too stationary. Small robots were already cleaning the dust that fell off my body, keeping my office clean.
A screen was brought into the room, and soon, tactical information was shown with four ships. One of my subordinates started to talk, but I indicated with my pipe for him not to speak.
The situation was clear enough; it was already displayed on the screen. That pirate lord sure has some rocks between his legs to start trouble here.
My body started to feel uncomfortable, so I pulled on my pipe. With my Ignite skill, the rocks placed inside the pipe lit up like wood. The vaporised rock was pulled into my body, bringing me relief.
My species was never meant to live in places like this. Our home planet was extremely active volcanically, with our species needing a toxic environment to survive. Only a few of us who reach such ranks as mine can survive what others call normal environments.
I was snapped out of my musings when the adventurer ship started to fire bolts of light. Those weren’t laser weapons that were made not to fire continuously. This made me lean in to see the screen even better.
“Do we have a magical scan of that adventurer ship?” I vibrated out. Letting the universal translator do its job.
There was brief panic in my subordinate’s eyes. It was amusing to watch, because whenever they were on the ship, they never once hesitated.
We had been in this place for too long, but titles came with responsibilities and limitations. However, that pirate lord might give us an excuse to take the old beast out.
“We do have on record that the adventurer ship did have a mana signature when it left the station nearly a day ago. We’ll have more information soon.”
Focusing back on the screen, the battle had heated up. That ship Forward Horizon was putting on a great show. Then it started to fire even more light bolts. Curious what the aim was, as those smaller ones didn’t seem to have as much range.
It’s impressive how long their mana reserves were lasting. When the pirate lord's command ship’s frontal shield collapsed, I knew they would lose that fight.
“Baron, we have confirmed that they are not using just regular mana batteries, but a mana battery system.”
Now that’s impressive. More information started to be displayed about the captain of Forward Horizon. His name was Remi Graves, with not many accolades to his name. He did seem to participate in a raid inside a black space portal. Impressive, and that contribution, I wonder what he did to get that.
Overall, not that impressive, but wait, what’s that? Just recently, he seemed to be a gladiator for that Duke who ran that battle moon. But what is he doing here? That person doesn’t let entertaining people go so easily. There’s more to that story.
“Dig deeper about this captain.”
Another ship gone, and soon the battle was over. That was an impressive show, and he must have some background, or he is someone who can accomplish things that should not be possible. Perhaps he could even help me with that annoyance.
“Baron, we can listen in on the communication between Forward Horizon and the Last Hope Station.”
Focusing back on my subordinate only for a moment made him continue speaking.
“It seems that Forward Horizon’s side is not securing the communication line, so everyone can listen in.”
Clever. You might just do. Giving my assent, soon we heard that nasally voice I hate so much. It seems that the procurement office already wanted those wrecks.
“You were not cleared for battle. So no, you do not have permission to salvage those wrecks.”
There was silence for a while, as communications from such distances took some time. Most seemed to dislike that, but I enjoyed the time to think. Then I finally heard the voice. It was not as smooth as I would expect from a species made of flesh. It was not unpleasant.
“So it is illegal to defend yourself in this solar system?”
Oh, that was a good one, especially because everyone was listening in, it wouldn’t have worked otherwise.
“Of course not. You had every right to defend yourself against pirate scum. It’s that a lot of railgun shots were fired, which means a lot of work in trying to track those trajectories so that nothing critical would be hit. That is costly.”
I hate it when that individual makes sense.
“Not to worry. Sending all relevant trajectory data on every projectile fired in this fight. We will now be salvaging these three wrecks. What we leave behind, we’ll sell you for the standard rate. We will notify you when we are done.”
“Excellent, excellent. Get me all the information you can about them as fast as you can. We’ll see if they want to take on that quest.”
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POV: Remi
A click shut off that call. Damn bureaucrats, why did they have to be so annoying? The battle hadn’t been over for a minute before they already tried to contact us to claim our salvage.
“FH sent them the relevant data needed.” It was a good thing that our sensor AIs were so good.
“Acknowledge,” FH responded, getting everything set up.
There were life signs on all three of the ships, although only the second one had more than a dozen. This was going to make things more difficult. I didn’t want to be a monster that just killed everyone.
“Give them a chance to surrender. Allow them to launch lifeboats.” Most ships in this galaxy had some type of lifeboats. They really were just coffins that would allow you to get away from a doomed ship in the hopes you could survive long enough for someone to show you mercy.
“Understood, captain,” Dean answered. He and Sam would be responsible for neutralising any remaining threats.
Bob was already waiting for my command.
“We can’t take much, as we are being observed heavily. What’s your recommendation?” We should only take the truly valuable metals and just sell everything else, even though we would be taking a loss, but I wanted to know what Bob would choose.
“We should start with the engines, rip them apart, only take the truly valuable metals. We continue to do so with the rest of the ship until our cargo hold is about 70% full. At the same time, loot anything highly valuable that isn’t nailed down.” He did not disappoint me.
“What about the time frame?” I asked him, this time not testing, but wanting to understand how long something like this could take.
Bob thought for a while. “Well, we can’t use all our drones, that would be a dead giveaway that we are able to hold more space than should be possible. If we go about this violently, and I truly mean that, it would take three days.”
“Violently, you say. Sure, let’s do it like that. I feel like we should get out of this system for a while and let things calm down.” Bob grinned as he left, like he was planning something evil.
In the following two hours, we managed to contact most of the people left on the three wrecks, telling them to board the lifeboats. Some refused to surrender, and two of them we did not manage to contact, even using drones, as they were in areas that were inaccessible because of ship damage.
We also now understand what Bob meant by violent means of salvage. He was using our ship’s hard-light weapons to simply melt and carve through the structures and armour of the enemy ships to get to the juicy parts, as he called them.
We weren’t actually losing that much value, as most of the stuff we were destroying would have little value to the space station. Still, this must look quite brutal.
Hundreds of drones went about stripping everything valuable from the three ships. Already, a lot of their valuable cargo was starting to be identified and brought back.
We had to depressurize our cargo hold, as we couldn't use the deep storage access as a way to bring stuff on board. There was also the problem of us having a full cargo bay, which everyone would know about.
A few weeks off the grid should fix that problem, as we really didn’t want to sell these materials but keep them for our own use.
A day and a half passed quite quickly. Everything valuable that wasn’t nailed down was already transferred over. Unfortunately, these pirates weren’t that rich, although the captain did have in his safe about 50 million credits in high-value materials.
I do believe that was the bounty he was paid to kill me. It was disappointing that I was worth so little, although that number should have risen quite a lot after this display.
“Captain, someone named Baron of Rock, Krundiin wishes to contact you on a secure video call. They’re hoping that you would swing around and come close enough to the Last Hope station. He wishes to offer us a quest.”
“Any idea what this quest might be?”
“No, captain, but this person seems to be a powerful individual and the captain of a ship that hasn’t left the space station in a long while, but used to be quite feared.”
FH’s ability to gather information and give so much context so quickly was something truly invaluable. As for this quest, it shouldn’t hurt us to hear him out.
“Captain, I apologise, I am going to need fourteen hours more than the three-day deadline I promised,” Bob said to me, looking disappointed in himself.
“It’s not your fault; you couldn’t have predicted how much damage our battle did to the internal structure of these ships. Take your time.”
My words didn’t change Bob’s opinion on his failure. That’s something I needed to help him fix about himself. The question was how to go about it. Perhaps the problem was that we were having too many successes; it often gave a false sense of superiority and expectations.
Yet in space, failure most likely meant your death. This was no place to play around. There must be some way of doing this. VR simulations weren’t real enough for them to count. The truly comprehensive VR simulation we could not run, at least not yet. There was an evil thing I could do with that, but that was for later.
After a meditation session and a proper sleep, we were finally done with the salvage. The list of loot we had was wonderful, including a lot of variations of different handheld weapons that I could take apart and study.
Around us now were a lot of the station’s ships that had rescued the people inside the lifeboats, most of whom were killed as they didn’t choose to serve a working prison sentence. Just another reminder of how cruel this galaxy could be.
“Captain, I managed to sell off the wrecks for 68 million. They bargained quite hard, but it’s not a bad price for us, especially because I managed to get them to pay us out in hard currency. It’s also a good excuse for us to swing back around the station.”
“Excellently done, FH. Let’s collect our pay and see what this Baron wants.”
A small shuttle brought our pay when we got close enough. I let my crew handle that, while I handled the Baron.
A secure line was connected that no one would be able to listen in on. Soon, an image appeared on my screen. It was hard to fight myself not to react.
“Greetings, Captain Remi Graves. Well, fought. I am sure your nickname ‘Pirate Pain’ will stick. You sure seem to find a way to make their lives hell.”
The universal translator did all the work there, as through the video, all I could hear was vibrating and grinding rock. Then a cavernous mouth opened on what looked like a humanoid rock creature. It then pulled on some long pipe, whose end glowed extremely brightly.
“Well met, Baron of Rock, Krundiin.” Well, I now understand why he was called that. “Pirates do seem to be unlucky when I am near. But what is this quest you wish for me to hear out?”
“Excellent, you wish to get straight to the point. There is a system about a week’s travel from here. A part of it used to be my territory. Everyone else who owned territory there has also seen their holdings destroyed and then been driven out.”
“About six years ago, a space portal opened up there that no one managed to clear. It’s not because the space monsters are so dangerous; it’s because these particular space monsters require a lot of effort to get rid of them. They offer nothing for anyone strong enough to be interested in such a low-ranked threat.”
Information was sent over on bus-sized space monsters that seemed quite armoured and kind of looked like cockroaches. They weren’t really that valuable, and they didn’t have the ability to travel between star systems. But inside a star system, they were quite an annoying threat.
It seemed that they were quite well equipped to handle projectile weapons like railguns, thanks to their skills, and their carapace made laser weapons quite ineffective. The material composition was interesting, but without the skills to defend against projectiles, they would be quite easy to shatter.
“I can see you already understand. They could be cleared out using a lot of firepower to overwhelm their skills, but gathering so many ships would be expensive, and there are a lot of them there.” Before he could continue, I cut in.
“But my hard-light turrets counter them perfectly.”
“Exactly. If you are willing to do this job, I am willing to process all the space monster corpses there and pay you everything they would make. But I need it done fast.”
My eyes looked back at the information about these space monsters. It seemed that their biology required organic substances. The information about the system now made me understand why they were a problem. It seemed that this system was used to produce a lot of food substances.
Clearing that system out would most likely take quite a lot of time, but it would bring us a lot of wealth and help us improve our ranks. Yet something felt fishy. This offer felt too reasonable.
FH understood my needs, bringing up more and more data on the solar system. A lot of different powers used to hold territory there. Most of it was being sold dirt cheap, but FH managed to catch that someone had been purchasing, in the last day or two, a lot of that ‘useless’ territory.
“I will take half the value of the space monster corpses, but in exchange, I want to own 25% of that solar system.”
A grinding noise followed, which wasn’t translated, so I was guessing this was just the physical reaction.
“Preposterous! Do you understand how valuable a solar system can be? Those space monster corpses wouldn’t be worth 0.1 percent of the future profits of that solar system!”
“I could be a silent partner. You would have full operational control, and I will lower that to 15%. But I can just walk away. Can you afford that much useless territory?”
“Good, good, but you will take 8%.”
FH started to show me on another screen the future profit predictions.
“It’s a deal. I can sit here for a bit and accept your official quest offer when you have secured the entire territory of that solar system.”
“Then it’s a deal. It will take me a day or two to finish up. After that, I expect you to go and clear that system as fast as you can.”
“Of course I will. Those space monsters are cutting into my profits.”