chapter 172
It was like the entire ship got quieter. The lights dimmed, the power cycling smoothed out and lowered. The communication network that connected all the AIs underneath FH seemed so quiet.
It didn’t mean that the ship wasn’t functioning—it was—but it seemed to be in a standby mode. Threats were still tracked, and I knew that the ship would fire back at anything it deemed a risk, but obviously it wouldn’t do it at full efficiency. It was more going to be like an automated protocol attacking and not an active mind.
That was actually better than I hoped for. Not knowing what else to do, we decided to gather around at the unofficial meeting table in hydroponics. We ate and just talked amongst ourselves as FH was advancing.
“Anyone else notice that we are barely getting any advancement to our rank?” Dean suddenly said when he folded his hand. Guess he didn’t have good cards this time.
“Even more than normal is going to FH. Because of our connection, we will all equalise soon enough. You all would not have noticed it before, but ever since you all got your souls, I have barely seen any advancement, even less so when FH awoke.”
“So what does that mean for us?”
“That’s simple, Lola, we continue to hunt more space monsters.”
“A simple plan. I like it,” Bob said while showing he had pocket aces, which meant that he won.
“You lucky bastard,” Sam blurted out, barely holding back his frustration as it was a bad beat.
Playing came to a stop when I started noticing the changes the ship was going through. The first thing to alert me was the ship’s self-maintenance systems. They are always running some diagnostics, which soon started finding irregularities.
I really should figure out a different error code than red when stuff goes out of expected spec but in a positive direction. The entire structure of the ship was getting stronger. And not in a bad way, like it was getting too hard, as it needed to be a bit flexible. No, it was being itself but better, just like our bodies when we ranked up.
In about ten minutes of me observing, the systems handling the other parts of the ship started reporting the same issues. Communication lines worked faster than they should, the server utilisation dropped as their processing power got better. These weren’t huge changes, at least not individually, but all put together, they would make a huge difference, and this was just the beginning.
It took another two hours before I once again heard her voice. “Captain, I feel strange.”
“That’s to be expected. We’re going to have to run full diagnostics and recalibrate almost everything. You can stretch yourself out.”
The moment I finished saying that, the ship started to move a bit as FH moved about to get used to her new power.
“Feeling better?”
“Yes, Captain. That really helped me feel like myself again.”
“Excellent.”
What followed was a couple of hours of diagnostics. After that, we started to send out drones, which were also improved minutely, to start accelerating the space monster corpses so that they would eventually make it out of the portal.
This burned up a lot of fuel, which made me remember that we really needed to make drones that used materials that could interact with the fabric of space so we wouldn’t be using up so much fuel.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Even after three hours, we were only done with basic diagnostics. We still had a long way to go. Fortunately, there were quite a lot of space monster corpses to handle, which meant that we had plenty of time.
One of the problems Dean pointed out to us was that with our improved capabilities, if someone was keeping track of this ship they would notice the difference, which meant that we needed to dial down our capabilities to our previous level, at least when someone was around to look at us.
My mechanist affinity could be used as an excuse, as people like me can improve ships in ways that aren’t normal. It would, however, be better if we were able to keep it hidden for as long as possible.
Bob was doing an excellent job sending off all the space monster corpses we didn't want to keep and harvesting the ones that we wanted to keep. We had to build a lot more storage drones, using up many of our materials, but we can replenish all of that from the pirate ship wrecks outside.
Like this, eight days passed quite quickly. For the ship, new standards were recorded and updated. Overall, almost every part was improved. The more connected something was, the bigger the improvement. A good example were all the drones. Their upgrade was minute because they were so loosely connected, but they still were upgraded.
The main components of the ship nearly got a 40% improvement in their composition. That didn't mean that now each part worked 40% better. It was difficult to quantify that change.
It's like having two knives with two different steel mixtures. In every measurable way, one of the steel mixtures is 40% better. It's tougher, it holds an edge better, but it still would not be able to cut through metal armor. Bread would not pose a problem to either knife. But one of them would bite into wood a bit better than the other. So yes, it does give improvement, just not as much as you would expect.
All of that meant it was more difficult to figure out where the new limits were for absolutely every part of the ship. This meant a lot of testing, a lot of rewriting of programs, but that was all done for now. The next time this was going to happen, we should be able to do it faster.
It would take about three weeks for the last of the space monster corpses to drift out of the portal, which meant that we still had plenty of time. We updated the fleet outside about the current situation. That should mean that we would be left alone for a while.
Even with how large our ship's deep storage was, it was starting to get pretty full. Those Queen Guard bodies were quite large, giving us a lot of materials to work with. With the extra room my new workshop gave, it was time to build a refinery so we could turn a lot of space monster parts into usable metal.
In three weeks, we were about 70% done building out the refinery. It consisted of multiple different machines that would be able to make us the next tier of materials. We needed to use basically everything we got from all the portals we cleared, but one problem remained, heat.
This inventory skill was amazing, allowing me to have this kind of workshop on a ship. We could now bring power lines here, communication lines, and everything else we needed to connect to the ship, but it was still a separate space. This meant that we also needed to deal with pumping in air and cooling the entire place.
All of these new machines put out a ton of excess heat, even though I tried to make them as efficient as possible. On the top of our to-do list was to find some skill or a magical device that would help deal with heat, and at this moment, I wanted to push those even further up—but they were already at the top, so unfortunately, that wouldn't do anything to help me.
It was amazing how little everyone appreciated the fact that planets were so big, and you could dump so much heat out into the environment without ever having to worry about literally cooking yourself because you decided to run too many machines that put out too much heat.
Even some of the magic-tech solutions FH had found existed were not a complete solution. All of them used a lot of mana, which, fortunately, wasn't a crippling problem for us, but even then, they required other substances as well.
One of the better magic-tech devices that were sold were basically a giant air-conditioning devices. They simply dumped the superheated gas into space. We had similar capabilities currently, but compared to those devices, we were using a bicycle to race a jet engine.
That device would help in battle, but they would only do so in prolonged ones. The biggest problem remained not being able to pull away enough heat from the relevant components in time.
This wouldn’t be a problem with our refinery, as that gave out a lot of heat, but it was steady output, something that could be managed. Unfortunately, that was not possible with our current capabilities.
This meant that we could only run it for about 11 hours in a 24-hour cycle in the current not finished configuration. While this wasn’t exactly good for efficiency, as two of those hours were required to start and stop all the machinery, it was starting to reduce our current volume of stored material.
Just an hour ago, FH reported that the last space monster corpse drifted out of the portal, so it was time to go and kill the queen. We would have some time before the portal collapsed entirely to get out of here, which also meant that we would have time to loot whatever was left.
I held the rod in my hand that was going to try to collect all the information I got from using my looting ability on this space monster. It was a lot larger than the last one, and I was pretty sure I was going to pass out when it was over. It was still going to be worth it, and I knew that my crew would gather everything useful and get us out of this portal before it collapsed.
The asteroid we were approaching was cracked in half. It seemed to have a natural cavity of some sort where the queen obviously hid herself so she could lay her eggs in peace.
How she was able to find something seemingly so perfect, I didn’t know, but obviously, she had been inside that asteroid for way too long. It also looked like the damage to her part was self-inflicted as she tried to make more room for her eggs as she herself grew bigger.
All of this seemed quite tragic. The first few shots we fired missed, as it seemed that she had an even stronger version of the shield these types of space monsters had. That meant that the shots instead hit the remaining eggs, which made her really mad.
We increased our volume of fire, which seemed to visibly strain her. More shots started to hit, although nowhere critical just yet. It took a whole minute before our shots started to land in places other than her carapace. The moment I felt her death followed soon after.
The understanding of who she was came next, and every part of her I knew. Most of her I made disappear into currency, but I left her core and many of the crystals that made up her shielding. As soon as I felt it all finish, my mana was fully drained, with me greeting the blackness that followed.