chapter 173
When I opened my eyes, I was still exhausted, even if plenty of my mana had been replenished.
“Captain, we are out of the portal. Sending you all the recent data.”
My mind was flooded with information as FH transferred everything relevant. We successfully took all the loot, we were out of the portal safely, and had made proper contact with all the Baron’s forces that had made it to the system.
There were now quite a lot of ships here. Besides the fighting force, most of them were already here collecting space monster corpses, while everyone else was busy dealing with repairing some of the more intact stations and manufacturing centres.
“Let’s start harvesting those wrecks.”
“Understood, Captain.”
It was easy enough to get FH to open up one of the deep storage rooms where we kept all our truly valuable items. Before I stepped in I felt the ship start to move, and as soon as I crossed the threshold, it stopped. It was so fascinating that gravity wasn’t affected by acceleration in these rooms created by inventory-type skills.
Bob was already inside, going over all the loot we had gotten.
“Captain, you're awake, good. We have quite a few large space monster cores that would be quite valuable to sell, but not here. We would need to go someplace where adventurers actually trade to get the best prices.”
“Would we have enough if we sell what we won’t be using to finally purchase the majority of the skills for everyone’s builds that they want to make?”
“It all depends on this large stone,” Bob said as he pushed around with his feet a space monster core that obviously had transformed into a skill stone.
It looked impressively large. “So that queen did give us a last prize.” Bob nodded to that, but it was also obvious that none of us could absorb the skill, otherwise we would know how much it would be worth.
“So, the testing equipment didn’t work on this one?”
“No, Captain. It can only work if it has the skill in its database. While that should theoretically allow us to inspect around 90% of the skills that drop, that still leaves about 10% we would only be able to figure out if someone could actually absorb it.”
“Captain, about that…” Our discussion was interrupted as FH spoke to both of us. “While the stone isn't exactly calling to me, I get a sense that I should be able to absorb it if my body had a more compatible part.”
That immediately caught my interest. “Do you mean in a way similar to how Expansive Swarm almost called to me? I would have only needed to change some of my internal parts to have bigger drones housed in them, and then the skill would fully accept me?”
“Yes, Captain. It’s almost like that, but even less so. The calling is so faint it’s hard to be sure it’s there at all, but I am sure it’s real.”
“Bob, as you were. I’m going to go and see what information we have about the queen. Hopefully, I can figure things out from there.”
It took a while to decipher all the information I gathered about the queen. The rod had almost been overwhelmed with all the information it tried to copy from me in that brief instant. This time, I was smarter, focusing on the important things at the start, as that seemed to be the best time to get the most intact data.
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Now I had an even better idea of how their sensory organ worked. It really was a miracle of evolution. And it was evolution—I was certain of that—as not every part was useful anymore, seemingly parts of its former iterations that were no longer needed.
Its main difference from every other sensory organ most biologicals had for sensing their surroundings was that it needed ambient mana to work. It also needed internal mana, otherwise it didn’t have the power to do what it needed to do.
This was most likely what we needed for the skill stone to work. It wouldn’t need to be exactly the same organ, it needed some of its functions to be the same.
“Lola, can you join me in my workshop?” I sent a message to her, getting a response that she would be here in about 10 minutes or so, as she needed to finish something before coming.
Even if we made this device, that didn’t mean that the skill would be useful for FH, but that device and its functions should help us get better information about our surroundings, which I know all the sensory AIs would love. They would go crazy about any device that would give them even more information about what was surrounding us at any given moment.
There was also quite a lot of detailed data about other organs. Most of them would not be useful for us, but one picked my interest. It was the way this space monster made its shields. They used a different base type than the ones that we currently had, and ones that were mostly useless, at least that’s what I thought.
These space monsters definitely made me understand that all three different shield base types would have their uses. While it’s true that the other two ones—one good against physical projectiles that we have and the other that’s good against lasers—were just better at the lower end. But we were no longer at the lower end of the power scale.
This shield base type is described as being good at pulling missiles out of their current trajectory, but even then, most missiles would have self-correcting thrusters, barely making these shields usable. At the power scale these space monsters were at, they could easily bend the trajectories of railguns, and the stronger ones could even bend our hard-light bolts.
Thanks to the Queen I now understood at least biologically how this worked. Well, I actually didn’t understand understand, but I could see the underlying principles that I could start experimenting with so we could build a similar version.
At that moment, Lola finally made it to the workshop.
“It’s so hot in here,” were the first words out of her mouth. That made me look towards the refinery section of the workshop that occupied a large portion of the available space.
“That thing puts out a lot of heat. I’m using my nano machines to the best of their ability to reduce the heat. They take and absorb quite a lot, transforming it into power, but it’s not enough. If this room wasn’t hooked up to the ship’s cooling system, it would eventually melt itself and everything in it.”
“That’s kind of scary. What happens if the connections are damaged? Can they be damaged?” For the last part, she sounded quite confused.
“Those connections can definitely be damaged, but I made them quite robust. They’re actually quite creepy. If you scan them outside, it’s like they’re cut in half, the other part of the connection disappearing into nothingness.”
“Couldn’t we be discovered if someone was scanning us if they look so strange?”
“FH thought of that. We made them seem like they were a part of the cooling system. It required some rerouting of stuff, but we shouldn’t be discovered like that. At least the good thing is that if this room ever truly went out of control, those connections would eventually fail, leaving this room completely cut off from the rest of the ship.”
“So technically, we could use these rooms to test explosives?”
“Technically, but we don’t know the upper limits. We are pretty sure that they would eventually start hurting FH. We just haven’t tested the limits, and frankly, I don’t want to. It seems to be too dangerous.”
“Understandable, but there are safer ways to test. I will look into it.” I think I felt the entire ship shiver after Lola finished saying that. “But what did you want me here for?”
“Come take a look at these two organs.” What followed were multiple hours of us going through all the data as I needed to translate quite a lot for Lola to understand all this technical data.
“There is no way we could make these biological organs. They would require way too much life support, and I wouldn’t even know how we could control them. Now if we try to recreate the effects these organs achieve, it’s a different story. They would need to be bio-cybernetic. I wouldn’t think they would work if they were fully mechanical.”
“There’s probably a way to make them fully mechanical, but they would probably also need to be quite different. FH has information about devices that function similarly, but they are way too expensive. The mana sense device we currently have seems to be an extremely simplified version of this organ.”
“Should we put the seed project on hold to figure this out. The shields seem extremely useful, and so does a better way to sense the surrounding world. But do we need them right now?”
“Actually, yes. Also, FH believes that this sensory organ would allow us to at least figure out the skill stone we got from the queen.”
“What about the wrecks?”
“What about them? Bob will handle most of their harvesting, and it's not like we are going to go 24/7 on this. It's a longer-term project.”
“What about hunting space monsters? I thought we were going to be doing that.”
“Timing is everything, Lola, and right now we have a way to make our ship stronger once again. Even if it takes us a couple of years, we aren’t in a hurry.” She raised one of her eyebrows at that.
“Plus, if we stay here, we can observe how a solar system is rebuilt. The logistics needed, the manpower, and everything else. It would be good information for the future.”
“Sometimes I wonder how far into the future that mind of yours thinks. Even now, it surprises me, as most humans barely think a year or a few into the future.”
“It’s good to once again be able to think so far ahead. When we found out what the universe was actually like, everything felt so claustrophobic, like I could only think about our next action, not knowing if even that was the right way to proceed.”
“Do you now have all the answers?”
“Fuck no, but I’m no longer completely blind.” Both of us smiled at that. For a couple of moments, nothing was said, there was comfortable silence between us before we got back to work.