The first phase of the Save The Space Station plan was almost complete. Ash had his swarm of bots fill the empty parts of the engineering can with all the easily movable, valuable and exciting loot from the main station — including the bodies of all the humans and androids. Most of the bots from the Mistress of Space IV that were unnecessary also got on board in case the worst happened.
Ash will examine the human corpses and check the compute modules of the androids to see if any of them are salvageable. He doesn't have a lot of hope for that, though. Now that he was aware of the precise stresses involved based on the ship's recordings, he could calculate that it was unlikely there would be any survivors.
The past few hours that Ash used gaining access to the factory section of the ship's design files turned to be mostly a waste of time. It was full of a couple thousand designs of various devices, both of industrial and consumer-grade, but it turned out that overall, in almost every case, the designs were slightly to largely inferior to what was in his internal database.
Didn't the woman say she gave him an open-source design database? Did that mean a different thing than what he thought it did? He assumed he would have the bottom of the barrel series of designs. The only answer is that it wasn't open to everyone — otherwise, this company could not have made any money selling products that were, in most cases, slightly inferior. The only thing he could think of was his files originated from a colony database from one of the better second-rate or first-rate states.
There were a couple gems, though, including a design of an ultra-large heavy industry fabricator that was designed to be fabricated in pieces and pieced together. There were a couple of similar designs in his database, but this one was optimized to work with the fabricators the freighter had on hand.
The other good find was a stealth satellite system. While his internal database included over ten thousand satellite types, none were really designed for stealth, and while he did have some generic stealth space vehicles in his database and stealth technology classes in his university segment, he didn't really feel like reinventing the wheel.
He eventually planned to go planetside, which made a global, low latency satellite communications system an absolute prerequisite. Ash planned on operating on multiple continents simultaneously through drones and class 2 AI minions. Geosynchronous satellites would be totally unacceptable — at a geosynchronous orbit, the round trip on light-speed communications would be over 550 milliseconds.
However, if he had a constellation of one or two thousand satellites in shallow orbits, such as 100 or 200 kilometres, he could have global communications from opposite sides of the world with less than 30miliseconds lag. That was essentially imperceptible to humans, even augmented humans of the future, so it would be possible to directly control organic drones and interact with humans without them thinking anything was out of the ordinary. He didn't want his drones burned as demons, witches or taken as mentally deficient, after all.
However, so many satellites meant that they would be noticed if he wasn't careful. The 12th century was the last gasp of the Dark Ages and the start of the Renaissance — people would notice a grid of bright stars orbiting the Earth.
The stealth satellite chassis featured an incredibly tiny radar cross-section which isn't that useful, YET, but it also featured a surface that has an albedo so close to zero that it is almost impossible to measure.
Looking at pictures of it in promotional materials made it appear so black that he thought it was CGI at first. It looked awesome. He would have loved to have a car painted with this deep a black in his previous life, although people would probably have crashed into it. The previous owners of this ship marketed these sats to state-level entities, mostly to spy on their own citizens. The Solar Union was one of their better customers!
People wouldn't see them in their primitive telescopes — although it would still be possible to infer something was there when one of the satellites occluded an existing star or planet, but there wasn't anything he could do about that.
Light-bending cloaking devices, ala Star Trek or Ghost in the Shell, might be possible, theoretically, but only from a small angle of observation — look at it at the wrong angle, and it stands out worse than if it wasn't being used.
Ash pulled up a real-time image of the engineering can slowly emerging from a gaping hole in the side of the already wrecked station. He would let it get at least ten or so kilometres away before green lighting the attempt to cut away the two smaller starships.
Ash stood up, verified the production queue was correct and started the factory churning out segments of a recycling facility designed to work in gravity and environments similar to Luna. Since he planned to place it ON Luna, he thought it would work great.
If the space station was incinerated to atoms, he would have a lot less mass to feed into the recycler, but it was still a good investment even then. Next would be a giant rolling vehicle that would need to be built in over a hundred discrete segments. It was a mobile factory that was designed and optimized to fabricate roaming regolith mining bots, and it built these bots out of 94% native material. Material that the robots themselves were mining.
Fuck the G-rides; he wanted the machines that made the machines that made them.
Ash would have to supply some carbon and rare earth metals, but there was plenty of aluminium, titanium, iron and silicon on the Moon. So it wouldn't take long to reach a break-even point, and after that, he would just be raking in these useful elements. Calcium, too, which was abundant on the Moon's surface, was a great electrical conductor so long as you keep it in a vacuum. And the Moon and space have a lot of that!
In the short term, the Moon also gave him a ready supply of Helium-3, to be sifted out of the regolith on the far side due to the solar wind depositing on its surface over the millions of years. So while the Moon did not contain all that much, certainly not enough to support even a pre-FTL civilization's fusion fuel requirements, it was enough for one solitary machine's personal use for decades to come.
He could eventually build a purpose-built drone ship designed to take the atmosphere from one of the Jovians in the long term for fuel in space and use deuterium-tritium reactors on the Earth. There is an abundant source of deuterium in the ocean, after all.
And tritium, well, he could make that himself. A good portion of the feedstocks on Mistress of Space IV were radioisotopes. Although a quarter or more was now useless lead, once polonium, there was still an abundant source of fissile and fertile material. He was neutron-source rich, even!
And when he got planetside, it would be even better! Ash remembered an article in his past life that mentioned the sea contained 3 parts per billion fertile uranium. So considering there was approximately 1.4x10 to the 18th power metric tons of seawater, that was 4.6x10 to the 9th power tons of U-238 waiting to be extracted, which is easily transmuted into plutonium!
Ash frowned and paused as he was walking. Sometimes being a walking calculator was nice, he supposed. Doing math was definitely one of them.
Thinking about unlimited plutonium at his fingertips brought to mind one of the reasons Ash might need it, "Ship, summarize the sensor data recorded about the departure from the station of the last two ships."
The boyish voice of the ship was prompt, "The Armed Merchantman Measure Twice, Cut Once departed the station on an approximate least time course for the planet Jupiter at exactly... "
Ash interrupted, "Disregard objective time reference. Set reference time to be at the time the freighter left and continue."
The ship continued, "Measure Twice, Cut Once was observed at heavy boost for approximately 34 minutes before it made a second layer transition. Seven hours and two minutes later, an electromagnetic spike consistent with a down layer transition was observed in the general vicinity of Jupiter, along with a passive target under heavy deceleration.
This contact's transponder was offline at this time but I, acting in my capacity as CIC, have high confidence that this was the same freighter. Passive sensors could only track the contact at this distance while it was boosting. The contact stayed at rest with the Jovian for approximately 36 more hours.
Speculation, he was refuelling reactive mass and He-3. The freighter continued a heavy acceleration boost out system, roughly in the direction of the galactic core. By the time we lost contact, he had achieved a velocity of approximately 32% c."
The ship paused, and Ash frowned in thought, "Forty hours after our sensors lost contact with the freighter we assume is the Measure Twice, Cut Once the yacht Tachyon Fairy left mooring and departed on a course that used Luna to break line of sight."
So maybe the freighter is doing what they planned. Whether they planned on coming back in a few hundred years to check on things was an open question, though.
Ash said, "Assume the Measure Twice, Cut Once cut boost when we lost contact, plot their presumed ballistic course for me with the assumption that they will resume acceleration after clearing the Oort Cloud." A file was transmitted with the requested information. There were several options as a destination with resources if they just wanted to kill time.
The fact they stayed in the main universe to travel made that more likely. Interstellar space was the emptiest in this universe, so if your goal was just to kill time, relativistically staying here made sense.
He had the strange urge to chase them down, "Where did the Tachyon Fairy go?
The ship was unhelpful, "Unknown. Speculation: They did not want me to know their destination. I have no information on their motives.
Speculation: They travelled past Earth, using the planet to shield them from direct observation and only cut boost when that became impossible. They are now travelling ballistically until they leave the volume of space where an upper transition can be detected electromagnetically. After that, their goal will be a transition to second or beyond layers and travel at their discretion, undetected.
Speculation: They entered into Earth orbit and are using stealth features to remain undetected.
Speculation: They landed on Earth.
Speculation: They landed on Luna, on the Earth-facing side.
Speculation: They crashed in their attempt to land on Earth."
That was pretty much Ash's own opinion as well, except he thought the Earth landing was the most likely and the landing on Luna the least likely. Of course, it could be a coincidence that they immediately used Luna as a shield; after all, Luna is directly in the way for least-distance travel to Earth from L2, but something tricked Ash's paranoia.
Namely, he recognized his own professional caution or at least the spacefaring equivalent of it.
An alert over the network brought him the visuals of one of the bots attempting to cut free the little dispatch ship, something was outside of parameters, and the bot did not know how to proceed.
Well, so much for that ship. The dispatch boat must have been moored right on the edge of the field that caused the universal transition. The first third of the boat was, just, missing.
Well, he would proceed as planned. The aft had the best bits anyway, namely the reactors, engines and hyperspace converter. The hyperspace converter might be a total loss as it is tuned to the total volume and shape of the ship it's installed it, and whatever Frankenstein bow he cludged together definitely wouldn't meet spec.
But maybe he could use it for in-system purposes or just wait until he had the proper infrastructure to build interstellar ships before refurbishing it.
Whatever, Ash was already happy! The revenue cutter was slowly accelerating away from the pier!
Thanks for the chapter.
Hang on. I wonder what's stopping the couple aboard Tachyon Fairy from returning to the station and retrieving the fabrication database? Maybe they already have backup copies of their database? It's not like the engineer can confirm that they will land on Earth anyway.
The fabrication database this chapter talked about was the one aboard the freighter / factory ship Mistress of Space, which wouldn't allow anybody on board.
@SpiraSpira That said, you are correct. They had the run of the station for a month or so at least so I imagine a lot of stuff that wasn't bolted down was absconded with.