Phantom Star

Walking up to the airlock of the Octavius I wilted a little under the looks of the two guards standing outside it.

The soldiers were huge and both locked eyes onto me the moment I started approaching.

“Umm. The Baron?” I managed to stutter out before the guards nodded and stepped aside.

“I’ll escort you Captain.” The guard offered surprisingly kindly and I perked up a little. They might be scary as fuck in their uniforms with some minor armor plating, and laser rifles, but they were nice I guess?

I followed along into the well lit clean halls of the Octavius. I once again looked around in slight jealousy at the Phantoms' less than clean interior. I’d get there eventually, but for now it was a mess.

Following after I continued wringing my hands as we traveled deeper into the ship. I didn’t know what the Baron was really after with this, but it made me super uncomfortable. I just wanted to fix the Phantom Star. Not… Carouse with nobility!

It was common sense not to piss off nobles. I had some protection from it being from a middle class background, but even Uncle Kyle would be really wary about pissing off someone of the nobility.

Out here in the Kenish Duchy, on the frontiers of explored space, they were the law, and they had the weapons to back it up.

Another reason to get my ship up and running. Kind of hard to press me into something when I had weapons to argue my point.

Then the soldier stopped and a door opened.

There stood the same woman that had invited me to this dinner. Artemis? Cool name, scary woman.

“Excellent. You’re dismissed. Captain Katherine, please follow me.” She spoke, the guard I had been following saluted and then I was following her inside into a room that was… Swanky?

Large window panes with a view out to space, with lots of gilding and pomp. It was like something out of a period drama, only with a space backdrop.

The large table in the center of the room was just large enough for a group of people to sit around it, without it being so large you couldn’t talk to people.

And around it was a collection of familiar faces.

I continued to wring my hands a bit as I realized that my idea of casual, and their idea of casual might not be the same thing.

Sure I was wearing clean clothes, but my jumpsuit, and work shirt were still rough, and a bit stained. I lowered my hands a bit to try and hide the old grease stain in my shirt just under my chest. Maybe no one would notice?

No. They would notice. I sighed quietly as I was guided forward.

“Captain Katherine Ferrous.” Artemis introduced me, and the Baron rose from his seat.

“Wonderful! The woman of the hour. Please Captain take a seat here, be welcome as an honored guest at my table.” He said, speaking formally… Which, I wasn’t sure if it was just his personality, or some tradition I had no idea about.

Greeeeat.

I walked to the seat at the Barons right hand that was held open for me and I settled in, only once I did, did I notice the rest of the men around the table also taking their seats.

As I had moved, Artemis I noticed had also taken her seat at the same time.

It took just a moment as I sat to notice the height difference of everyone at the table. The chair was just large enough for me, but it still left me head above the Baron on my left. It made it really hard to sink into the chair to hide.

“Thank you for coming, I hope my spread will delight you. I pulled out all the stops in celebration of our victory.” The Baron began and I smiled a bit weakly as I looked at all the food on the table.

I had once lived on earth with its seemingly infinite amount of food from all over the globe, but I couldn’t name a single dish that was heaping on the table in front of me.

I watched with an awkward eye as everyone began. A pointed finger, and the plate would float up from the table and move into reach. Everyone began filling their plate, so I pulled up my bravery and pointed at something that didn’t look like it was going to make me sick.

When it floated over I used the tongs to grab a bunch of what I had thought was noodles.

Nope. Not noodles…

I very carefully grabbed the tiniest amount onto the plate as I didn’t know if putting it back would be a bad idea. And then pointed at something else.

Yep. This wasn’t moving. So I grabbed a bit more of it onto the plate to try and cover up the fucking wiggling wor-Nope.

“Tell me Katherine, how long before your ship is fully repaired? I hope the damage from the battles wasn’t too much?” The Baron started and I nodded actually relieved as it meant I didn’t have to try and eat any of this.

“I don’t know. It could be a while. I have everything I need now to complete the next expansion. So I’ll likely do that first.”

“Expansion?” This voice came from Eugene who looked up from his bowl of squirming worm-Nope. Bowl of Nope.

“Yes?”

“You plan on making her even larger?” Eugene asked, sounding interested.

“Oh yes. The current floorplan had both of the sides cut off due to some… constraints. It’s missing basically all of her crew quarters, and additional weapon sections. Thanks to the Pirate ships, I have everything I need to finish her.”

“Aha! I knew there was something off with the design! It was left unfinished!” Eugene crowed out seemingly quite happily, and I noticed his Babbit peeking over his shoulder, and I gave her a wave.

“Oh? How many more weapon systems will be available? I had considered the ship to be undergunned for its size.” The Baron asked, between a sip of whatever he was drinking.

“Well…” I trailed off because… Did I want to just tell him? I shook it off. He would know no matter what, it wasn’t like I could install the weapons stealthily. It wasn’t impossible to hide weapons when they were installed, but moving equipment into position and installing it would be obvious to the Octavius.

“Yes?”

“Well first I’m going to install some laser batteries. A quad battery along the side, and then a few smaller AA turrets. Missiles aren’t fun to deal with.”

“Indeed. The Octavius will be getting some missile defense retrofits as well after what happened.” The Baron grumbled, and for a moment, he wasn’t the powerful noble, but a man in his twenties pissed that someone had damaged his ship.

I felt a bit of camaraderie with him for a moment, and then he looked back at me, and spoke.

“But is that all?” He asked, almost too casually. His eyes told me he was digging for information, and luckily for him he was going to get it.

“Pop up missile racks. Missiles are expensive, but in emergencies they’re valuable.”

“Indeed they are!” This time the military officer Hamlin spoke up, the man nodded seriously after his declaration. “If you need to source some ordinance, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Finding missiles is not a difficult task, finding missiles that function often is!” He offered and the Baron raised a glass in the air to that earning chuckles around the table.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I agreed with a smile. They were scary but most of the actual officers were pretty nice.

Speaking of drinks. I looked over at the glass of… Whatever that was beside my food, and reached for it so people would stop asking me some questions for a moment.

I took a sip and put it back down smiling fakely as I fought the desire to puke.

It tasted like cough syrup. Flat cough syrup.

The only good thing was that it wasn’t alcoholic at least.

I had a sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to enjoy this meal very much.

Thankfully, conversation was stalled out as Eugene cut in.

“So the SDA for your Phantom. Outside of the calculations which are the most complex parts, you made it out of just a few Warp Arrays?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that.” I offered, which he nodded already understanding. “But mostly true. The Warp Control Arrays already function as an SDA Controller… If you don’t have a working Warp Array, then when you drop into subspace…” I trailed off and Eugene nodded, but he added for those around the table. Not all of which were engineers.

“You drop deeper into subspace constantly without one. Technically you could still escape if you break your ship's rift bubble, but it’s much more dangerous, and it’d be a rocky re-emergence.” He said and earned some nodding heads.

But the obvious question was still there so I spoke it. “So I took multiple Warp Arrays and fixed them up and combined them, so they’d have at least enough processing power to handle the actual calculations from another source. Most of it is done on board the Phantom Stars computer, but that’s not really amazing either. Just some modules I’ve scrapped over the years.” I ended up mumbling a bit towards the end as more and more eyes were locked onto me.

“Do go on Captain. I’m truly fascinated.” Eugene urged me, and I nodded. It was kind of embarrassing to talk about salvaging garbage when I was surrounded by so many really rich people.

“Well my Crabbit, and my ship's computer, and the Warp Controllers, all work together to handle the calculations. Well… The calculations were a bit off. Which is why it nearly shook me apart when I used it… I should be able to fix that, probably.”

“Indeed! I can’t even imagine. The calculations for entering subspace are difficult by themselves. I studied the best courses in the entire Duchy, and I can assure you the math is well beyond me.” He said looking at me with an eye that spoke of how serious he was. And…

Well just like the baron there was greed there. The desire to have what I had.

I nodded and fake sipped at my drink. As we had talked I’d grabbed a few things from the table and finally found something mostly palatable. Some sort of meat dish, that I was pretty sure was actual meat, and not just manipulated protein. I of course had no idea what sort of protein it was.

“I just… Kept working on it, until I figured something out.” I said, which was technically the truth. Mostly I had just listened to the song as it guided me in making a functional SDA controller.

Eugene to my surprise didn’t jump on me, and instead simply nodded, but his eyes spoke of his desire to learn more.

Slowly different subjects were brought up. The repair of the Octavius. System defense plans. Even the transport of some of the new supplies from the pirates out of the system and towards L1T-Z Station.

I nodded along taking in the information idly as I did my best not to become the subject of conversation again.

Thankfully things grew relaxed, and instead of being asked tons of questions, I was enjoying a story from Hamlin about some battles he had been in years ago, and how bad things had gone.

“Of course the damned Idric and their love of ballistic weapons started firing like crazy. You could practically hear the sound of all the rounds crashing into the asteroid. Of course the fools didn’t realize it was pure Iron. We hid out for an hour or so hiding among the craters and just keeping them from trying to push around with our lasers.

Eventually our reinforcements arrived, and they had blown through most of their ammo! Hah! Damned fools! They always run out of ammo, that’s the first thing you need to remember whenever you fight the Dominion.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I offered, as that last bit had been aimed at me, and he nodded pleased at my words.

It was good information to be fair. So the Idric Dominion, the star civilization north of the Kenish Duchy, was focused on using ballistic weapons.

Cannons like that were still useful even in space battles. Whether they were something like flak rounds, or high speed gauss cannons. Throwing a heavy projectile at incredible speeds was still a strong basis for weapon systems.

There was a lot of research and technology already built into a simple cannon. It was a weapon that had existed for literal millenia. Even frontier civilizations like us could pretty easily pull out some crazy things using ballistic weapons because the tech was completely ubiquitous.

The only other tech that was as ubiquitous was missiles.

The Kenish Duchy I lived in tended to specialize in lasers though, which was a bit odd for a frontier civilization, but it was thanks to some asteroid fields with excellent materials for laser emitters that had galvanized the Duchy in the past.

There was a reason the Phantom Star was going to mostly have energy weapons, after all.

Well, I thought they were cool, but besides that, they were easy to get here.

Thankfully the meal started winding down, and soon enough I was finally able to escape, but as I rose to leave the Baron spoke.

“Captain Katherine. I hope you enjoyed dinner?”

“Ah, yes. It was an experience.” I offered back. My plate was still full of some things, but I had found a few things I could enjoy.

“Excellent. Then Captain, I bid you goodnight, and I hope we will work together many more times in the future.”

“Ah… Yeah.” I offered back and then hurried away. Shit. Was that some sort of weird tradition that said I would work for him now?

Stupid social shit. I was an engineer! I built things! I didn’t deal with people!

—--

“How's that coming?” I called out as I hit the bottom of the ladder back in the hangar bay. I stepped out onto the hangar and then walked to the pile of cabling grabbing a bit more and throwing it over my shoulder. I started walking back to the ladder as I waited for the update.

“Little biters are chew-chewing!” Was the response I got which made me stop and shoot a look at the Crabbit that was in charge of keeping the Nanopaste in order.

“Details please.” I demanded flatly.

“Uuuu. Projected timeline is intact?” She offered, sounding sad that she had to actually speak normally.

“Thank you. Make sure the biters are doing well.”

“Yes!” She cheered her little arms waving above her happily. The Crabbit were developing their personalities very well.

I continued on dragging the cabling back up the ladder. For once I was glad that I hadn’t finished the interior paneling. Running more and more cabling from the power systems through the ship so that the future additions would get power was a long task, and it was only made easier since I could just jump into the maintenance tunnels.

Suddenly as I was walking down the hall to the starboard side of the ship, to try and get the power cables ready for the additional crew quarters, and weapons, the lights went out.

The Crabbit on my shoulder reacted pretty quickly, she activated a flashlight from her face screen.

“Thanks. Now what is going on? Can you find out?” I asked and she chirped quietly in response.

My current shoulder Crabbit wasn’t much of a talker. I could see her antenna flicker a bit as she sent requests and then she spoke.

“Uuuu. Accident… Everything will be fixed soon… Don’t come to the engine room… They say.” She said in a slow stutter.

“Don’t come to the engine room huh?” I asked, turning towards the engine room. What were they up to?

Walking down the hall I could hear the sound of Crabbit cries and the sound of struggles.

As I walked into the engine room I dropped the cable on the ground and put my hands on my hips.

“Alright! That’s enough of that!” I called out and all the Crabbit inside stopped. “What happened?” I demanded as I glared at the mess.

One of the Crabbit had obviously gotten trapped in some falling cabling which was pretty rare. They were usually good about this sort of thing.

But then the rest had obviously decided to make it into a game.

“Oh no!”

“Accident! Accident!”

“Save me!”

“Uuuu.”

“Don’t you lie!” I said and that earned a flinch from all of them except the tangled up drone.

“Uuuu.”

“Just a game?” One finally admitted and I nodded. The trapped Crabbit looked like she had been looped up and the others had obviously been messing with her keeping her trapped.

“Help! Save me!”

“Where are we?” I demanded and the Crabbit squirmed a bit. Their grippers touched together awkwardly as they were afraid to answer. “Well?” I demanded not letting it go.

“Engine room.” One said and I nodded glaring.

“That’s right! The engine room! What’s the rule about the engine room?”

“Hmm? No strangers inside?”

“Yeah! That’s the rule!” Another agreed nodding.

I opened my mouth and then realized I never had actually given any rules for the engine room… I was dealing with childlike AI. They might not be just like human children, but I still needed to remember what I was dealing with sometimes.

“Okay, new rule! No playing in the Engine room! This is a Red Zone!” I called out, and I had to fight off the smirk as the Crabbit gasped.

“Red! That’s serious!”

“Yeah! Red!”

“What does Red mean?”

“Duh! It means… Stuff! You should listen more!” They all argued together and I just let them. It was actually more effective sometimes to let the AI work out the meaning of things themselves.

“Alright. I’ll start marking off some of the sections of the ship on the door to mark the seriousness of the insides. But the Engine especially isn’t a game area. All of you get back to work.” I pointed and the Crabbit sensing they were being forgiven zoomed off as fast as they could,

All except one.

“Uuuu. Trapped! Help! Save me!”

“I know, relax Honey. I’m coming.” I said with a laugh as I bent down and started untangling the poor drone.

—--

“Kat!”

“Oh hey Marie.”

“Look at you! I haven’t seen you in forever! Hiding in your ship?”

“I’m not hiding! I’m fixing her.” I denied a bit sullenly. Just because Mom had been super duper angry when she learned I had had dinner on the Barons ship in my normal clothes didn’t mean I fled to the Hangar ship to hide… Still my look had Marie’s teasing turned into a gentle smile.

“How’s your ship? Need any help?”

“A bit beaten up, but I’ve fixed most of the damage from the battle.” I admitted. Most of the damage had just been cables jostled around or a few electronics cracked from the vibrations, which was a good learning experience to harden them a bit more.

The damage from the battle was mostly fixed by now, but the prep work for the upgrade to the full sized ship was a continuous stream of work on top of the repairs.

I had to not just prep for the expansion, but also keep the work on course. Right now the Crabbit weren’t actually adding the large side wings of the ship, instead the large chunks were being formed from nanopaste. After all, there was no difference whether I grew the wings from the ship, or grew them separately and then attached them later.

Not even touching on the additional engine Nacelles that was taking up all of my personal attention when I wasn’t doing anything else.

So I was basically supervising both wing growths, the engines, the prepwork for the attachment, and repairs..

It was a lot. Crabbit might be incredible, but they still needed a lot of supervision.

“Well, that’s good! You had us all worried about that.” Marie said as she came in to nudge my shoulder. “But hey. You’ve been hiding for so long you haven’t heard. The War started in full.” She told me and I flinched a bit.

“Really?”

“Yep! Apparently there was a huge sneak attack against the Dominion. But more importantly. It means the station isn’t on lockdown anymore. We should be getting visitors again soon!”

“Okay… That’s nice?” I asked, because I mean, we always had visitors before and it wasn’t a big deal then.

“Silly! You have a ship now! You should start thinking about your crew!”

“I don’t want-” I cut myself off. That wasn’t entirely true. I did want crew, but I wanted people that I would actually like. “I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m going to be pretty picky about crew.” I said and Marie rolled her eyes before reaching up and poking my cheek.

“Of course you are! You’re the most socially awkward person I know!”

“I’m not socially awkward! I just like doing my own thing!”

“Suuuure.” She teased out and I huffed at Maries laughter as she jerked her head. “C’mon let’s get some food, and I can fill you in on all the gossip you’ve missed.”

“All of it?” I whined, because I never paid any attention to the station gossip.

And there was a lot of it. The fact was almost everyone on the station was family. And family members loved to share gossip.

“That’s right! So I need to work extra hard to keep you filled in!”