Ash's prediction proved to be an understatement. Did anyone realize how much of their tongue and the interior part of their mouth was considered skin, he wondered?

After he made his way to the medical bay, he did get to experience the luxury of a shower that had nine automatically tracking showerheads and over a hundred different soap options, even if it took him a relatively long time to figure out how to take off a kimono.

He wasn't even sure what these traditional flip-flops were called (zōri, something in his mind called out to him), but he thought it was cheating that they had a battery-powered traction emitter to keep them on his feet. To Ash's way of thinking, that was basically admitting that your shoe was a piece of shit if you need high technology to keep it on your feet.
Well, he likely wouldn't be wearing that again. He was pretty sure it was a lot harder to put on than it was to take off.

He activated the medical suite after a tractor field selectively and carefully pulled all the water off his surface, which sure beat drying with a towel and was quicker too.

A request from the medical bay to connect to any onboard medical diagnostic suites was approved, and Ash watched curiously as some part of his brain ran different software in an emulator. He could see it communicate and see what resources it requested, but it was opaque in its operation. It was a curious feeling.

After a moment of that software and the medical bay talking to each other digitally, his built-in transceivers noticed several radar and LIDAR scans.

The auto doc was a disembodied class 1 AI and, predictably, a genius with its diagnosis, "You are missing your skin, madam! Decompression injury?"

Ash wanted to facepalm. Why did he select the full-service option when he activated the medbay? He should have just got in the auto doc. He sighed. Talking without a whole tongue took some getting used to, "That's right. Are your facilities capable of synthesizing DynaCorp SynthSkin v14.7, or will I need to just wait until this heals the old fashioned way?"

"Absolutely! Please enter the auto doc, madam," said the disembodied voice.

Ash rubbed the back of his head. Of course, anyone who has ever been in the cockpit of an F-5 fighter can't be called claustrophobic, but the auto doc more resembled an Iron Maiden than any kind of medical device.

Thankfully he had a reason to put off getting inside for a couple more minutes, at least, "We need to wait a few minutes for a delivery bot. I am having a micro-fission auxiliary power unit fabricated, and I would like it installed at the same time; no use growing skin back twice."

The auto doc had a ridiculous British accent, "Quite true, madam! If you would please send the specifications of the APU, it would be appreciated."

Ash directed a file transmission to the auto doc with the specs; it was the smallest and highest end APU in his design database that would fit inside his chassis.

It was a plutonium-239 micro-fission nuclear battery with a max continuous output power of over 111,000 kilojoules or approximately 31kW. Clever use of repulsor fields increasing the pressure of the fuel keeps it supercritical during operation despite being relatively small in mass. That also increased its safety, considering a failure in the repulsors stopped the chain reaction. It had a service interval of about ten to twenty years, depending on the use rate.

The datanet said the fab still had fifteen minutes to go — any fabricators that could utilize fissile materials was slightly complicated and operated much slower when using such material. The storage of fissile feedstock was complicated as well — you could just store a massive tank of ten tons of molten silver but do that with PU-239, and there will be a nuclear explosion.

The auto doc actually made a humming noise, "Very good, madam! This should not be a problem."

Ash also decided to top up his power cells while he was waiting. A tiny, thin prong of superconductive material popped out of his pinky, and he plugged it into one of the receptacles in the room; it was a universal android and bot charging port. He noticed his system manager automatically throttling the charge rate to be below 1.2 megawatt, which was significantly lower than his rated charge rate. Ah, apparently, his hair functioned as heat sinks, except it fell out with his scalp.

Ash reviewed the status of the bots working on the station while he waited. The army from the ship was making short work of the station. Then, one of the humanoid bots from the station physically disconnected the jury-rigged fission power system, and afterwards, hundreds of bots began cutting a path for the engineering can to slide out. The biggest bots looked like some kind of spider-mech and cut from the outside in, while smaller varieties cut from the inside out. Logistics bots stood ready to replace power cells or chemical canisters for the plasma cutters in order to keep downtime to a minimum.

Things were on schedule, and the bots were used to working on the serious armour of an interstellar starship, so it wasn't surprising they were making short work of the simple steel of a space station, but it will still take over eight hours for the first phase to complete and to free the can.

If that worked, he would proceed to phase 2, which was an attempt to remove the two derelict ships by cutting them away from the pier and then putting a small ion-thruster on the exterior that would over a few hours impart enough delta-V to push each vessel out of the area of immediate danger.

The last step would be an attempt to remove each of the demolition charges without setting any of them off. Again, 8 of the charges were reasonably close to the station's exterior, so it was relatively simple to cut a hole to space next to them. The others would be slightly more complicated but still feasible.

After thinking about the best way to get rid of the charges, he decided on the very technical solution of having a bot pick them up and toss them out of the hole into space. Very gently.

A toss with an acceleration of a tenth of a G or so would impart enough delta-V to the charges to clear the station's general area after a day or so. Ash figured it would either work or instantly explode. If the worst happened, the only thing he would lose was a bunch of scrap, as valuable as it may be.

Ash's power cells were fully charged about the same time as the micro-fission APU was delivered. He retracted his charging port and stood up. The auto doc called out, "Please place the APU you wish installed in the auto doc's armatures." Thin spindly arms had extended out of the side of the oversized Iron Maiden looking device. Ash glanced at the APU; it was about as big as a hardcover book but a small one, not Harry Potter. He placed it in the "hands" of the machine and took half a step, and climbed inside the auto doc.

The doors closed around him, and a voice all around him called out, "Preparing to begin. The full procedure will take approximately three hours and twenty-five minutes. Please enter stand-by mode to begin."

Ash sighed, set a timer to wake him in three and a half hours as a precaution and powered down all systems. Do androids dream of electric sheep? He supposed he was about to find out.

—-

Androids can dream, of course, but if Ash did, he did not remember it. He had to admit being able to just turn yourself off-beat lying in bed and tossing and turning for an hour before sleep finally claimed you.

A system diagnostic ran automatically on startup. New peripheral. Auxiliary power unit, driver mismatch. His subconscious corrected the software error and brought the hardware up again, this time successfully.
He could feel! How nice! The auto doc opened its clamshell doors, and Ash quickly got out before it decided to close on him, keeping him trapped for all eternity like a horror movie. Finally, the auto doc chimed out, "Finished, madam. Your systems are with nominal deviance. You are cleared for return to service."

Although there were no mirrors in the medical bay, there were a number of cameras. He connected to the surveillance suite from the ship's datanet and took a moment to look at himself, naked. His hair had been fast grown all the way down to his ass. Va-va-voom! Sexy as hell, which was confusing on many levels.

Ash stopped creeping on his own body but not until after giving his chest a test squeeze or three...

Ash sighed again, revelling in using a tongue that could actually feel the inside of his mouth when he moved it around. His voice from before always had something of a lisp, like he had just arrived from the dentist's office or something. Then, finally, he finds his new voice much clearer, "Whatever. This is fine. I'm not getting back into that get-up, though."
He glanced at the discarded kimono and cheat-sandals on the floor before queuing a simple ship suit one-piece to be fabbed at the nearest fabricator to his precise dimensions. It only took a couple of minutes before it was delivered, and Ash wasted no time in putting it on.

A little form-fitting... or maybe A LOT form-fitting, but better than being naked. He also queues up the smallest form factor environmental hazard pressure suit to be produced at one of the industrial fabs. He was not going to go back to the station unless it was rendered safe, and possibly not even then, but he will need a P-suit eventually in any case, no matter what he decides to do.

Ash left the medbay and started to aimlessly roam around the ship, exploring. On the walk, he reviewed his database of human-form android bodies. Unfortunately, none were as advanced as the one he was currently using. He could use a bio fabricator and simply build an organic body, but he has had enough of human frailty for now. The synthetic options were not great, either.

The ones that were as robust and as armoured as his current body looked more like a warbot than a person, and the ones that resembled a person were almost as fragile as organic bodies or were cheap, mass-produced affairs designed to be used in high radiation or similar hazardous environment and replaced regularly.

None have all the features his current body have, especially the ultra-high-speed wireless transceivers. In addition, his current body can sustain over two dozen full speed datanet connections simultaneously, which none of the models in his database even come close to.

He wondered if that woman who reincarnated him intentionally removed any possible quick replacements from his design database for her own amusement. After thinking about it for a while, he decided she had probably not. His android body was the state of the art product of a first-rate state. It was clear that whoever used to own the AI that lived in this body doted on her very much. But, wait, what was that complicated emotion he was feeling? Bitch, you better not still be in here.

Whatever. If Ash was still a human, he knew he would have made transitioning into a male-form body a priority even if it meant more risk and less capability, but the current him had a lot more machina-ego than the male-ego. So he won't transition into a body with worse specs than the one he was now. But wouldn't mind controlling such bodies as puppets.

Ash's plan was to become the spider at the centre of a vast web eventually anyway, so it was not as though he wanted anyone to ever see his actual body in any case. With low enough latency, he could control any number of super masculine bodies on earth from anywhere on the planet — in fact, during the tail-end of the dark ages, it was unlikely anything else would impress anyone, anyway.

Ash hummed the theme to the 1960's Spider-Man cartoon as he continued the exploration of his new ship.