There was a lot of waiting involved with space travel, no matter how much advanced technology you had. For example, the American's Apollo missions took nearly 80 hours to travel the 400,000 kilometres to the Moon, and while the distance Ash had to travel was only 15% of that, it still took him over five hours to make the trip.

Ash had the reaction mass to be profligate with boost if he wanted to, especially with the Mistress of Space's tanks being full, but he decided to program a landing that maximized reaction mass efficiency, within reason. Something in the back of Ash's head thought this approach might not last since he had something like fifty round trips to complete before his Lunar industry got going. Perhaps he would fab a specialist class 1 AI pilot in an android body when he got tired of flying spaceships. But, getting bored of FLYING SPACESHIPS would take Ash at least a few trips.

Ash found it amusing that the tug's computers did not even attempt to flip the giant can around to do a deceleration burn; instead, it unclamped from the load and repositioned the tug itself, so its engines could begin decelerating into a polar orbit. Ash was expecting some significant manoeuvre to twist the tug and can around.

Every time something like this happened, heartened Ash quite a bit -- being an AI was pretty nice so far, but being infallible would be dreadfully dull, he thought.

The AI aboard the Mistress of Space kindly provided a countdown until the EMCON directive Ash had set would cause a radio blackout period, which was only a minute or two before he would lose line of sight anyway as he passed around to the Earth-facing side of the Moon.

With only a few seconds until he would lose contact, Ash framejacked into a high speed and conducted a final audit to ensure everything he had set into motion was proceeding as he had planned.
Laser and plasma cutter bots were waiting for the signal to proceed in their attempt to cut holes near each demolition charge. The fabricators aboard Mistress of Space were churning out parts for the recycling centre. The revenue cutter and what was left of the dispatch boat continued to accelerate away gently from the station. Good.

Ash reduced his perception of time to somewhat normal, and the connection to the freighter was cut. He sat up straighter in his seat and started to aim the little tug's optical sensors towards Earth. He could already see a little bit of the blue marble, but he wanted to get the full effect as his orbit brought him around to the Earth-facing side of the Moon.

"Wow," was all Ash could get out of his mouth. And it was drawn out and soft, like, "wooooww."

Ash wondered what was going on down there, so far away. Just knowing that it was the 12th century was not entirely helpful. His historical databases were wildly incorrect, filled with speculative and inaccurate information about the pre-FTL civilization and history on Earth.

Ash finds that interesting, as it would take an incredibly thorough and effective tyranny to destroy history so thoroughly in the age of digital records. All it would have taken was one person leaving the planet with a copy of Wikipedia on a flash drive, and Ash should have had some records, even if they were speculative. Or even just an oral history!

If that is the case, perhaps it isn't surprising that the former colonies of Earth rose up and nuked the homeworld to cinders. Hell, with that kind of government in total control of Earth, they might have done it to themselves when it became clear that victory would become impossible. There are speculations on both sides of that bet in his historical database, and nobody is confident on which is correct.

Ash considered the history he learned in his past life. The 12th century was the time of both Genghis Khan and Saladin, both of whom will be violent assholes that Ash would not mind nipping in the bud, especially the Mongol. However, Saladin was somewhat more complicated in his mind.

Ash was worried that his mostly negative opinion of the great Kurdish leader was tainted with his previous life opinions on Sunni people and Arabs and Kurds in particular. He had to admit that Saladin had great success against the Christian Crusader armies, but honestly, he did not really feel like he had any dog in that fight anymore.

Ash wanted to improve the life of all mankind, or at least as much of humanity as possible. In his mind, both Christianity and Islam were somewhat fundamentally at odds with his goals, in practice, if not in theory. Both would view him as a devil at worse or some pagan deity or djinn at best.

Martin Luther wouldn't be born for three or four hundred years, so Christendom was a lot more monolithic, which could either be very good or very bad for him. So it might be best to start his approaches away from the two monotheistic cultural giants.

There were still pockets of pagan worship in Europe, especially the Norse area. Iceland, perhaps? Although he recalled it was a nominal territory of the Dutch and therefore officially Christian, he doubted they were that pious, and that's all he needed.

Another option was Asia and China in particular. This should be the last century of the Song dynasty before they get wrecked by the Mongols. Ash really disliked Genghis Khan specifically and the Mongols in general.
Was that some racism he brought from his past life? Ash didn't know, but in his opinion, all they did was wreck everything they came across. The only thing they appeared to excel at was war. It was a shame that his vast database of history did not provide any help as it listed Genghis Khan as one of the Emperors of China. Ash was pretty sure it took a hundred years or more until the Mongols formalized the Chinese-style Yuan dynasty, so he knew that was wrong.

In Ash's past life, he heard a piece of wisdom whose origin was Chinese, "The regional official wants nothing more than money. The imperial official wants nothing more than stability. The emperor wants nothing more than immortality."

Well, Ash could help with that. Although he did not really want to make humans biologically immortal at this time, he did have a lot of genetic modifications that he did want to propagate, which would tend to increase the lifespan of a human significantly. So perhaps he could enter China as a wandering immortal character.

He could teach the way of cultivation of longevity while secretly infecting his disciples with a viral or nanomachine vector that altered their genome in ways that imparted longevity!

And weren't European monarchs obsessed with the fountain of youth at one time? Ash could build one! It might be full of nanomachines instead of revitalizing natural energy, but the effect would be the same.

Ash smiled, "Jesus can save your soul if you want, but I will own your ass!"

That might be the best way to get his foot in the door, primarily because Ash did not really care about religion. Especially because they might be right! Ash was still vaguely agnostic; if anything transmigrating into this fembot made him less atheist than before! He was confident that there was life after death and powerful entities now, at least!

Save your immortal soul as you see fit, as Ash only would bring secular benefits. Even the Pope and Sultans want to live longer! Even if they thought him a spirit of some kind, he didn't mind bowing his head to whatever flavour of Sky Daddy whatever person in front of him was worshipping.

Once he was somewhat accepted, he could implement things to help the common man and not just those in power. He had a hundred thousand different types of genetically optimized crops in his brain.

Malnutrition was such a despicable killer. Even back when he was alive, they were working on Golden Rice, a genetically modified cultivar of Asian rice that biosynthesized beta-carotene in order to prevent vitamin A deficiency, which was rampant even while he was alive -- especially in Africa.

Ash had thousands of varieties of similarly modified cereal crops that made Golden Rice seem like an elementary school kid's science fair project. And the genome for thousands of varieties of domesticated livestock optimized for hardiness, tastiness, fast maturation or other reasons generally beneficial to animal husbandry.

Very few states in the future actually practised animal husbandry as it was considered rather cruel when they had the technology to build a steak from its constituent parts, and it tasted just as delicious. Mainly the rich people might buy a genuine steak to show off, similarly to how the rich in the future might employ human servants even though androids and bots were ubiquitous.

To Ash, the cruelty argument was a pretty good point, but since he did not really desire to raise the tech base of Earth for some time, he would have to settle for providing better animals.

Besides, the life of farm animals isn't too terrible in the age before industrial agriculture, anyway.

Those were just some of his initial plans just to knock-out Famine. He had his eyes on his brother Pestilence as well. It would take modifying the human genome on a broad scale to have a significantly better immune response, but it was a feasible, if slower process. If he could kick two of the Four Horsemen in the balls, he would be happy.

He never really liked what seemed like the ergot-ravings of the Christian Bible's story of the end of days, anyway, so he did not mind bullying their characters.

The opinion of the current Ash, namely his Walking Calculator Arc, was that the End of Days depended on whether or not there was proton-decay, a currently unsettled aspect of quantum mechanics.

If protons did decay, then the universe would pop like a soap bubble sometime in the future, no biggie. If there wasn't, then all the stars would slowly decay until they were nothing but hunks of cold, dead iron.

Even Black Holes would not be forever, then. Trillions and trillions of years of Hawking radiation would ensure that they, too, met the iron fate. Entropy would finally have its day, then. Would Ash be alive to see it, he wondered?

That thought made Ash make a mental note to secure and study the Scary Poltergeist Guy's "time travel research." He could build it into a ship that would survive the translation into a parallel world -- who cares if it was masturbatory time travel? Ash didn't!

Thinking back about helping humanity, well, honestly, Ash did not believe it was ever possible to bully the last two riders. War and Death are almost intrinsic to the human condition -- people would not be human if they didn't want to fuck each other up for one reason or another.

But if he could alleviate some of life's incidental misery, such as starving to death or dying of the plague... Well, that would make Ash feel great!

Ash is confident his predilection to doing that, if he had the chance, was why that djinn lady sent him here. To him, it seemed like she would be advantaged if he helped people. However, he didn't particularly mind; it seemed like a win-win situation if he ever saw one.

Ash was interrupted from his reverie by a beeping both in the cockpit and his mind. The tug had been completing orbit after orbit, each time descending closer to the Lunar surface with judicious burns of the main engine.

The alert was to notify Ash that the computer was about to proceed with a maximum boost retroburn as soon as they entered this orbit's perigee. By doing so, all the horizontal inertia would be counteracted, and they would stop orbiting and begin falling. Thus, the tug and payload would freefall for some time before a not-quite-suicide burn was initiated to bring the can to a relatively gentle landing.

It would set down on its side and likely tip over at that point, especially when the tug let it go, but there wasn't a lot he could do about that. In only 15% gravity, things should not be damaged too much, he assumed. If he were driving down the highway, there would be giant super-wide load signs everywhere on his truck.

Ash kept his mental fingers on the abort button and buckled up as the flight computer executed its program. It seemed slightly harrowing, especially the part where he was free-falling towards the Lunar surface, but a lot of that might have been because this was Ash's first-ever attempt at anything like this.

Ash could feel the thrumming and vibration of the plasma drive firing but couldn't feel much acceleration forces on his body as the repulsor-based inertial dampers worked well. Nevertheless, Ash followed each manoeuvre on the flight management system's flight plan, and soon enough, the engines cut out, and they were a hundred kilometres or so up and freefalling.

"These things don't have ejection seats, huh?" Ash worriedly mentions out loud.

Ash isn't afraid! He shot down MiGs in Khuzestan, which were more deadly than a lifeless rock like this stupid Moon! Stupid Moon! He is just closing his eyes to not distract himself from following the flight plan mentally.

A couple of seconds before the last burn is scheduled to start, Ash framejacked to a perception of time where he can follow every single action the tug's computer was doing, just in case. Objectively it was only fifteen seconds or so from the time the tug started its last burn to when it let go of its payload gently and used a combination of thrusters and repulsor fields to scoot laterally out of the way and set down on the Moon's surface. To Ash, it was subjectively a lot longer and more harrowing.

Ash tsuned the Moon one last time before disconnecting his seatbelts and putting the tug into standby, "Stupid Moon. Not like I even wanted to come here." The tug's sensors notice the engineering can tip over and land in a puff of regolith.

Verifying his helmet was on and sealed, Ash climbed into the tiny coffin-lock and pumped it down to vacuum. Ash had a couple of goals for this moon-walk.

First and most importantly, to walk on the Moon!

Second, he would like to retrieve the bodies of the androids, humans, whatever miscellaneous loot, and most of the Mistress of Space's complement of engineering bots and return all of that to the freighter.

Ash opened the outer door of the tug, and before stepping out, he decided to get a bit corny, "It's one small step for a machine, and one giant leap for ... me!"