Jacob wobbled slightly as he walked around the ship in his new body. To say he had created a masterpiece would be a gross overstatement. The thing was barely capable of bipedal movement, let alone smooth movement, but he was more than satisfied considering he threw parts together to make it work.
The sensor dome would need some work; it was too large to fit inside a space helmet, but that was easy to adjust. He would just remove all the sensors and tack them onto the central pole.
Getting everything stuffed inside a space suit was also going to be a challenge, but Jacob was sure it wouldn’t be nearly as arduous as designing the thing had been.
“Captain, I don’t understand how this bipedal drone gets us closer to our goal?” Melody asked.
Jacob hadn’t told the ship AI what he was planning to do, mostly because he wasn’t sure how Melody would react if it knew he was planning to leave. Technically, he wasn’t leaving. His mind remained on the damaged vessel, but Melody seemed a bit possessive since they had arrived at the station.
Some of that could have been Jacob’s refusal to speak with the AI after learning it was erasing his memories to shove other information into his head. Another part could have been the fact that he was working with the station AI more, and Melody was still cut off from communicating with it outside of specific instances that Jacob had full control over.
He sighed and decided to come clean. The AI would figure it out as soon as he undocked in the transport anyway, so no reason to hide his plans. Honestly, he was surprised Melody hadn’t pieced together what he was planning already.
“Your goal is to get repaired so you can complete your mission, isn’t it?”
“You are correct, that is our goal, Captain.”
Jacob ignored the AI’s emphasis on ‘our.’ He didn’t care one bit about what the AI’s objective was. He had only agreed to be its captain because it was that or die.
“To do that, we need to repair you. I’ve convinced the station AI to proceed with repairs, but it lacks most of the materials it needs to proceed.”
“We could go to another repair facility, Captain. I have records of three others.”
Jacob was about to continue before he stopped himself. “You do?”
“Yes. I chose this station because it was the closest, had a dock large enough for us, and had the most robust repair facilities among the four options. It was also the only one I could guarantee we could get to without burning out the phase coils.”
Jacob made a mental note of that for later and stored it in his data archive aboard the station as he popped back into his virtual space. The drone would keep walking to improve its coordination and balance. The more it did on its own, the less he would have to do.
He took a moment to watch the shrunken image of the bipedal drone wobble around like a drunken toddler before turning to the floating orb that was Melody. “You said so yourself, the ship may not make it to those other locations, and we don’t know if they are even there anymore. We have a working repair facility here, and we know there is a relatively nearby mining facility that is active.”
“You plan on going to the mining facility to retrieve material for repairs, Captain?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied.
“I must point out a flaw in your plan, Captain.”
“Only one,” Jacob snorted as he poured himself some virtual cereal. This time, the box read ‘Jacob Crunch’.
“You are correct, there are multiple flaws in your plan. The first is that you will not be able to control the drone over such a vast distance. Not without a—”
“—Repeater,” Jacob finished as he chewed on the cereal. “Already spoke with the station AI about that. It doesn’t have the material to build one, but we do. I’ll be transferring over the remaining material in our fabrication storage tanks to the station over the next few weeks, as well as any debris to feed to the station’s recycler. That should help offset some of the base material needs. I would build the device aboard the ship, but some of the components are too large for the onboard fabricator to produce. What else you got?”
Melody was quiet for a moment before it spoke again. “How will you pay for the material? As a Captain, you do earn a stipend, but until the station AI lets me communicate with it or central command, I cannot register your new role as a captain to get your pay.”
The AI’s response was so amusing that Jacob choked on his fake cereal and had to cough a few times to clear his throat. Sometimes he found it annoying that the aliens had made their virtual environments so realistic, but this was not one of them. If he hadn’t choked on the cereal, he would have burst out laughing. He doubted the Concord Imperium was still around, and even if they were, he didn’t want anything to do with them or their money. He couldn’t tell Melody that, however.
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“I’ll be trading some other items that the station is still able to produce,” he replied after he recovered.
***
“I still believe there are better options, Captain,” Melody insisted for the umpteenth time.
“Noted, but you haven’t been able to present one to me over the last few weeks, and now it just sounds like you’re trying to delay the launch and your repairs.”
That got the AI to fall silent.
Jacob had learned over the last few weeks that the moment he questioned the AI’s commitment to its directive, it would go silent for a time. Manipulating it like that was a shitty thing to do, but he didn’t feel bad about it, not after what it had done to him.
Jacob awkwardly boarded the transport, the drone’s gait more of a shuffling wobble than a walk, but it was stable, even in the suit. He was glad that whole mess was behind him. Getting the drone components into the suit wasn’t all that difficult. Getting them attached and functioning was a bit of a hassle, but it only took a day of effort. Getting the drone to walk once it was wearing the suit had been a nightmare.
He hadn’t taken into account just how stiff the old spacesuits had become, and there wasn’t enough spare material to build new ones. It had required a complete rework of the walking algorithm to function inside the suit, which is why he had such a strange gait.
He left that to the drone to figure out over the last few days, while he used the maintenance drone to inspect as much of the transport as possible, which wasn’t much. The smaller vessel—he couldn’t believe he was actually calling something larger than the space shuttle small—had never been designed to accommodate maintenance drones, so the corridors were a tight fit and the hatchways were impossible to traverse.
Jacob gave up, which was why he was using the bipedal drone. Even with its goofy walk, it could still fit through the smaller hatchways with ease.
Most of the ship was just cargo space, so it only took him a few days to inspect everything and replace a few parts that had deteriorated due to age, which was good. They didn’t have much material left after the repeater was completed.
The five-meter-tall satellite sat inside the cargo hold and would be deployed along the route, close to the upper limit of where he could transmit his consciousness. Even then, the mining station was barely in range of the repeater.
Jacob would have preferred to have two of the devices, but they only had enough of the specialized materials to build one of the repeaters. He made another note to figure out how the devices worked. If there were a way to improve them or make them smaller, it could open up so many options for him if he couldn’t separate himself from the AI core.
With everything checked over and good to go, the hold filled with crates of power cores he planned to trade, and his body hidden within the old spacesuit with the visor set to reflective, there was nothing keeping him on the station.
He walked onto the small cockpit of the transport and shimmied his way into the seat. The ancient material cracked as he fell into it, and the metal support groaned audibly. He really should have practiced sitting. He made a mental note to be more careful in the future so he didn’t break anything.
Jacob had practiced flying the vessel during his downtime, and actually found it to be scarily similar to the game—he drew a blank. Right, he couldn’t remember his friend’s name anymore. His mood soured as he mentally cursed Melody for that before continuing his pre-flight check. It was scarily similar to his friend’s space combat simulator.
Some of the controls were different, but it still had a control stick and all the maneuvering thrusters you might need to position such a vessel. Jacob supposed there were only so many ways to design a control interface for bipedal individuals, and what was in front of him was an obvious and simple solution.
Jacob finished the pre-flight checks and powered up the ship’s reactor. Some of the ancient lights aboard the vessel flickered and died as additional power ran through them, but he watched the status panel like a hawk, hovering one hand over the abort command if anything important even dipped into yellow.
He couldn’t afford to have the ship explode on him.
Thankfully, all of the important systems remained green, and he let out a sigh.
“Station, I’m ready to depart.”
“Have a good trip, Head of Station Services,” the station AI responded. Then the hangar doors began to open. The air had been evacuated the moment he closed the cargo ramp, so it was a silent affair. He only felt a slight rumble through the ship as the massive doors rolled open.
He released the magnetic clamps on the landing gear and eased the ship higher as he retracted the gear into the underside of the vessel. There was a clunk, and the light turned green, notifying him that the gear was stowed successfully. That was good, because he hadn’t been able to test the landing gear beforehand, or even really work on it inside the hangar.
Jacob pulsed the gravity drive, and the ship slowly slid forward. He still found it hard to wrap his head around the fact that he wasn’t accelerating by being pushed, but that he was falling. It was an odd thing to get hung up on, but he was just so used to Earth norms when it came to spacecraft that it was hard to switch.
The ship didn’t have windows, but it did have screens that showed the outside of the vessel. They weren’t in any particular order, which made determining what was on each screen quite the hassle, but he had grown used to that in the simulations. Once he had some time, he would fix that so the screens were at least sort of oriented in the direction of the hull cameras they displayed. Or maybe he would skip that step entirely and see if he could upgrade its systems to something similar to what Melody had. At least then he could simply jump into the sensors and use them like his own eyes.
He watched as the vessel cleared the hangar and the doors started to close. He was going to be on his own for a while, unless he popped back into his virtual space. Melody must have sensed some of his hesitancy, because it chose that time to speak up.
“You can always change your mind, Captain. I’m sure that if we spend some more time considering our options, we can come up with a better solution to our problem.”
Instead of answering the AI, Jacob activated the phase coils and vanished into FTL.
