Ash stepped into the interior of the ship and closed the lock behind him. He noticed he was cut off from his bot's mesh network and their relay to the station datanet, although the ship's private internal datanet was available. Generally, these two nets would be synchronised by the shore power and data connections on the pier.

Ash used his owner's private signing key to cryptographically sign his own ident-packet with Captain level permissions, then logged in to the internal datanet with this authentication token. It would remember him as Captain now for whatever duration he set in the authentication packet — in this case, it was indefinite.

He verified that there were no other listed users with valid credentials — the act of claiming the ship as salvage should have erased the entire user database, but he wanted to be sure.

Ash peered around, "Ship, I need to access what is left of the station's datanet." Which way to go? The ship's datanet offered a fair number of amenities, one of which was a map. So he opened that app and began walking to the command deck.

The ship answered unhelpfully, "Shore data connection is unavailable."

Ash rubbed the back of his neck. This was the main problem with low-level AIs; they did not have great problem-solving skills. Although to be fair, the bots weren't advertising their mesh network as a relay. "I set up a mesh network to provide a wireless relay. I left a bot on the pier that can relay to the station's datanet. Connect to that ad-hoc network."

Ash did not have to talk with this AI verbally, but he realised he sort of missed talking to someone already, and it has been only a few hours, objectively. Although, subjectively to him, it has seemed a lot longer.

There is a big difference between communicating digitally and talking. Talking was an ingrained human social behaviour while communicating digitally mainly was abstracted away from his brain. So although even in real-time, it was closer to sending a letter or text message, it didn't quite satisfy the same social urges.

After a moment, Ash noticed he could reaccess the station datanet, albeit in seemingly low data mode. However, there were bandwidth constraints while accessing the datanet through a relay of devices that were never really designed to perform that function.

Ash checked in the status of his bots, and they had identified 7 demolition charges and mapped somewhat near 65% of the remaining station. He pulled the station's 3D map up and put each position of a bomb as an overlay. Based on the position of the first 7, it was child's play to infer the estimated position of the last 6. They weren't hidden and were placed to maximise the incineration of the station. He marked the approximate place for the undiscovered charges and sent it to the bots.

The ship replied, "Connection with station datanet reestablished in low data mode. Most station services are listed as unavailable." But, of course, that was the downside to talking with your mouth like a peasant — namely, that he was already aware of and already acted on the message the ship tried to convey before the ship even finished speaking it.

Ash couldn't find anything demanding his immediate attention on the datanet, but honestly, he was grossly unqualified to operate a starship. He decided to continue leaning on the ship's AI, "Thank you. Can you give me a status report? There does not appear to be any alerts indicating an emergency, but I have never operated a starship before. Was there any damage after the incident with the station?"

He paused and then thought to clarify, "And by the incident, I mean the event that immediately preceded the loss of power and data connection with the station." The AI was probably smart enough to realise what he had been talking about, but then again, it has been over two years for it. So there might have been any number of things it might consider an incident in the interim period.

The ship reported, "I recorded similar gravitic shearing forces of slightly less intensity than those expected in a second to third layer transition, which is well within the design specifications of the Mistress of Space IV. There was no damage."

And then it continued, "Reporting, due to the loss of power provided by the station I have been using utilising Auxiliary Reactor 3 approximately two hours per week to maintain power cell charge levels and to ensure main reactor 1 and 2's capacitor rings are fully energised. Helium-3 fuel reserves and reactive mass tankerage are still, nominally, full. The past Captain's practice was to purchase fuel and reactive mass at Sol due to the price difference. The most pressing thing that should be brought to the captain's attention is that the stevedore bots from the station are currently over 21,920 hours late in unloading the cargo."

That last bit was another reason Class 2 AIs were sometimes called artificial stupids. Their grasp on cause and effect left something to be desired if it wasn't something they'd encountered before.

The interior of this ship was a lot posher than what Ash was expecting. Although, he is still using his 21st-century brain to judge these things. Ash navigated the ship's corridors and datanet simultaneously. He wasn't even entirely sure why he was going to the bridge as almost the entire function of the ship could be handled through the datanet. No, it was definitely a tradition, at the least. It wasn't like he just wanted to sit in the captain's chair or anything.

Finding the maintenance interface, he activated the entirety of the ship's ready supply of exterior maintenance bots and gave them orders to scan its exterior. This behaviour was one of the hardcoded options and was also optimised to hell, being one way to inspect the ship for damage. He wanted to verify that there wasn't an additional multi-gigaton nuclear demolition charge stuck to the hull, though.

His bots had already found all 13 of the ones aboard the station, which matched the 13 that the engineering officer modified, but Ash always was a belt and suspenders type of person. On the subject of nuclear explosives, it paid to be paranoid.

Ash looked through a recreation common area as he walked through it towards the bridge. Is it then another tradition that a ship's command room should be close to the bow? Did that come all the way from the wet navy days, as it wasn't like there was a single window on this ship, "Ship, once the maintenance bots finish their current assignment, I want to bring reactor 1 and 2 online."

The ship warned him, "Station regulations request that our class of vessel should only bring our main reactors online after leaving their local exclusionary volume of 20 kilometres, if at all possible."

Ash rolled his eyes. He doubted people universally complied with that request even when the station wasn't a pile of wreckage in a different dimension. Maintenance on fusion reactors was tracked both by total hours of operation and by start and shutdown cycles. Start-up and shutdown were always the hardest on this type of equipment.

A quick check of the ship's logs backed up his intuition; in the past, the Mistress of Space IV had only shut down its main reactors when the ship was scheduled for a substantial layover, and even then, only after station power was connected and available.

The exterior bots were already 60% finished with their examination when Ash continued humouring the ship, "Well, let me know if the station authorities call to complain, OK?"

"OK, Mistress." Ash twitched. He was a little more curious about how far on the Matriarchy side of the power dynamic did the Queendom of Meraseta fall? His mental image was wearing leather and wielding a riding crop.

Ash arrived at the bridge and looked around. Inside he was thrilled; it looked exactly like a bridge of a starship should! It even included the giant screen that was probably wholly superfluous. Ash tried and successfully managed to avoid giggling when he sat in the captain's chair but is pretty sure he was grinning like a fool.

The bots were done. It would have taken longer for an honest maintenance inspection where micrometre cracks and damage in the ship's exterior were the subjects of interest, but when they only had to detect unusual objects on the hull, they just floated around the exterior using radar and LIDAR.

He mentally brought up the Main Reactor Start checklist, but there wasn't really anything he needed to do himself. His previous life full of checklists made him want to at least follow along, though, in case something unusual happened. "Ship, reactor 1 to standby, prepare for ignition."

Deep inside the ship, containment fields powered up, and a pre-measured amount of He3 fuel was suspended inside a chamber, "Fast Ignition, now. Spool up to idle, and if there are no problems, prepare reactor 2."

Although modern reactors like the one aboard the Mistress of Space IV used repulsor fields to contain the high-energy plasma of their nuclear reaction, lasers were still the most common method to impart the initial energy to start things going.

In Reactor #1 deep aboard Mistress of Space IV, several lasers bombarded fuel suspended in the middle of the reactor's torus while strong repulsor fields acted in concert, squeezing it from all sides. It wasn't long before the laser's job was complete, and the repulsor fields merely had to keep the self-contained reaction from touching the reactor's walls while adding new fuel as necessary.

Ash repeated the verbal instructions to start reactor 2 to a similarly uneventful startup.

Now that Ash had a working starship, he had the strong desire to leave the space station, never to return. He'd like to acquire resources out of it, though. Especially everything in the station's engineering areas, although he realised it was probably not, ultimately, necessary now that he had this ship.

It was standard practice to have a healthy number of industrial fabricators aboard interstellar ships in order to fabricate replacement parts against any eventuality. The ones aboard Mistress of Space IV were big enough to fab a Toyota Hilux easily, with room to spare.

He liked talking to the ship out loud, he discovered. "Ship, send me a manifest. You said the stevedores were late; what were we offloading, and what else were we carrying?"

The fact that near molecular fabricators were almost universal made Ash wonder what exactly did interstellar ships transport. Raw materials as feedstocks? He received a file transfer, the manifest.

Ash was partly correct. Apparently, the Mistress of Space IV was closer to a wandering salesman or tinker than a container ship. Most of the cargo was feedstocks, but they did not sell those, generally. Instead, they sold proprietary products that were designed by the parent company that owned the ship.

Ash wondered how you would avoid having your physical products pirated in the age of fabricators, and the answer was apparently you did not transmit the designs at all. Instead, you sent a ship like a door to door vacuum salesman, and when customers requested a product, you fabricated itself to whatever specifications they provided and handed it to them.

Modern anti-copying technology was comprehensive and could either thwart scanning technology or self-destruct if that was impossible. While no protection was undefeatable, the resources necessary to do so were immense.

Even for an entity in a second rate state, it was likely cheaper to just buy the product unless they needed more than a billion units than to try to break the protection. For customers in backwaters like the Solar Union, it was an even more ridiculous proposition. In fact, most of this ship's customers were in areas of significantly less technical advancement as their home port.

This meant Ash's options were even better than he thought. He could move on immediately if he wanted to because this ship was almost as much of a factory as it was a freighter. The idea of leaving all the active electronics, fabricators and supplies the station represented pained him, though.

It was like sticking his hand into a giant cookie jar full of treats that he just found out had a dozen armed mouse traps inside as well. The intelligent thing to do would be to carefully pull your hand out of the jar and then find the asshole who offered you cookies and kick him in the balls.

He had three options, really. The safest would be to depart immediately. Although he didn't think he was going to do that, he really wanted the cookies.

The next safest option was to use maintenance bots to cut out the engineering can from the station and just abscond with it. It didn't really matter if it came out in a fully functioning piece, either, so long as the electronics and fabricators inside were salvageable.

Judging from a 3D map of the station, it would be doable; the closest demo-charge to the can could be bypassed, too.

The most dangerous option would be to try to disarm or remove the demo charges. Ash bit his lip and frowned. He could undock and place his ship at a stand-off distance and program the bots with a high-gain directional antenna from there. In the worst case, only the station would be incinerated — nuclear explosions in space aren't REALLY that dangerous, so he wouldn't even have to travel too far away. On a planet that is different, the destructive effects are mainly from the atmospheric pressure wave. No atmosphere, and the danger is mainly only in the incineration zone. And the radiation.

Ash also wanted to abscond away with the two other ships here, especially that little revenue cutter. It had a lot better armament than his freighter, and he might need it. Of course, it's doubtful that either government ship will offer itself up to him like the Mistress of Space IV did, but he could crack each ship in his leisure.

The dispatch boat was also something he was interested in. It could probably get to the fifth or sixth layers of hyperspace, and while he did not know any reason that would immediately help him, who knows what the future would hold.

For the second time in a few minutes, Ash visited the maintenance area of the ship's private datanet. He selected about four hundred bot types that he felt would be useful and commanded them to leave the ship. Next, he started a simple fabrication job and rolled off eight copies in the maintenance quick-fab, tasking one of the last bots to hold off departing in order to take them to the station.

Once a good percentage of the ship's maintenance bots were on the station, he had them join and take over the existing bot-led datanet. Then, pulling up a station map, he indicated 8 different spots close to the station's exterior and issued some orders.

The eight devices he printed off were a very simple high-gain omnidirectional antenna paired with a power-cell powered datanet extender. He would be able to use the Mistress of Space IV's directional antennas to maintain something akin to a datanet connection to the station even at stand-off ranges.

He had been using several hundred of his threads of attention on a crash course of ship handling ever since he realised that the ship was not damaged. Of course, he was nowhere near qualified, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't fuck things up too severely.

Clearly, the station would not let go of this ship, though, without power and functioning electronics on the pier. If there wasn't a nuclear bomb within 10 meters of the airlock, Ash would have used one of the ship's lasers to just cut away the dock. As it was, he had to wait for three of the maintenance bots he sent over to the station to cut the docking grapple free.

Using only manoeuvring thrusters allowed him to back the big ship away from the station. He didn't power the giant fusion torch rockets at all, but he did use other thrusters to turn the ship on its axis, slowly pointing its armoured nose at the station as it backed away. Then, after a small delta-V was established, he cut off the manoeuvring thrusters altogether and just let the ship keep floating away at a small velocity, "Not like I'm going to hit anything, after all."

Ash did set up a trigger to fire the manoeuvring thrusters in a pre-programmed burn to bring the ship at rest in reference to the station when the distance opened up to 50 kilometres. He'd keep the armoured and shielded nose of the ship pointing at the station the entire time — it was designed to keep the ship safe from particle collisions even at fractions of light speed so it wouldn't even notice a nuclear explosion head-on.

He sent a message to the bots on the station to begin and stood up. He didn't have much to do now but wait. He figured he could finally start the process of regrowing his skin. It would take almost a day to do it by himself, but he was sure there was an auto doc around here that was compatible with synth skin. First, though, he had to find a shower — he didn't know for sure, but he thought it was highly likely that all his old skin falling off was going to be gross as hell.