Phantom Star

“C’mon you stupid thing!” I growled, loosening connectors that had been flash fried and then left to cool in the vacuum of space for a few decades wasn’t easy. The plug wasn’t moving and I finally gave up. *Crabby, give me a hand?*

*Yes! I’m here to help! Strong Strong Strong!* It repeated as my Crabbit floated over and grabbed the plug and instead of pure strength used that gravity panel inside to just push against it. I moved back and the plug popped, sending Crabbit jolting up but she inverted her Gravity and just spun for a few moments instead of smashing into the ceiling.

*Wheeeee!*

*Okay you goof.* I said laughing as I reached up and grabbed her to stop her spinning. She could have stopped herself, but she was playing. *We’ll play after. But we need to get this console moved.*

*Yes yes!* It cheered and I nodded. I had been working with Aunt Sheila for long enough she no longer hovered as I worked, and let me just explore and scrap whatever I wanted without issue.

The fact was? I loved it. Exploring old Spaceships was the coolest thing in the galaxy!

I giggled as I walked back through the dead ship, my helm light the only thing lighting my way. *Hey you all. Once you are done with that. The console is ready to go too.* I called out, and my little gaggle of Crabbit cheered as they continued to leap frog a large chunk of the engine shielding out through the door.

Thanks to Aunt Sheila looking the other way, I had a dozen Crabbit now, and more in the works constantly. I was at the point where if I supplied the parts, I could basically go to sleep and there would be a new chassis to finish the AI install with in the morning, as they built themselves…

There might be a few laws that I was skirting close to breaking, but my Crabbit were completely safe. I wasn’t worried at all.

*Aunt Sheila. I’m finishing up here.* I called out over the radio as I watched the Crabbit move the large piece of equipment past me.

*Brat. I’m not even halfway through. Double check again to make sure… But if you are done feel free to do what you want.*

*Thanks!* I confirmed having already done a second sweep. The Crabbit were far from infallible after all, their child like mentality sometimes got them distracted. Type 4 Sensors were extremely good, but there were always materials that interfered with sensor readings, so sometimes you just had to take things apart and use the Mk.1 Eyeball.

I floated back to the engine bay and stopped looking over where the Iris Drive used to stand.

It was amazing. Even without the Drive the entire bay was beautiful in a way. Iris Drives were the piece of tech that allowed expansion into the Galaxy without limit.

Infinite power. It only had a certain output, but an Iris Drive as long as it wasn’t damaged could output power for Millennia without a hitch. They were both ubiquitous, and incredibly valuable. They came in all sorts of sizes, most people just called the smallest version of them Tiny Drives, and they were used in everything. Even if the smallest version were the easiest to produce, there was such a constant need from the ever expanding humanity that they were still valuable.

And the larger the drive the more difficult it was to make. The more expensive the shielding and power systems were needed.

I closed my eyes and I could see the engine room I was in at full power. I could see every piece of shielding, the plasma transfer conduits. It was a good engine. A bit old. It used some older parts, but it had been a good engine. Solid. The reason this ship died, hadn’t been because of engine failure.

Crew death.

I shook it off. Opened my eyes and saw the room as it was, scrapped to the copper in the walls if the ship had such a low quality material.

There was a lot of good engineering in this room, but nothing of value. Better tricks of the trade and better results were possible, shown in a dozen other ships nearby.

Slowly, I was putting together in my head all the best tricks I’ve seen. I wasn’t the only techie in the Galaxy. Wasn’t the only weirdo that wanted to live in an engine bay and tinker with the engine until it purred just right.

But I could learn from them. Even if the engine was gone. The parts taken, or the engine destroyed by directed energy projection from a pirate, the ship still sang to me what it had been, every piece of hull remembered what it had been like to fly.

I hummed along with the song of this ship. Smiling at the feeling it brought.

I was getting closer to my goal. I nodded satisfied and turned around. Heading out through a second airlock letting the Crabbit continue to load up the shuttle to head back to the Station. I stepped out into nothing. Spacewalks were surprisingly peaceful when you still had Gravity. I bounced a few times casually drifting towards the binding cable.

It was basically a cable with a built in gravity plate. It would hold whatever it was attached to, securely, keeping it from jostling around. It meant even when the Scrap Field was hit by micro meteors, or whatever, the ships weren't smashing into each other.

They were all connected but not always well. Making the entire field a sort of spider's web of connected ships.

I leapt and my Crabbit assisted me as I landed on the cable I wanted and I let the Gravity shift, letting Crabbit basically ‘drop’ me away from the ship I was just on towards another.

It was exhilarating. Falling forever and ever until I landed softly on the hull of the next ship.

Then I moved on, three more drops and I was there.

It was an old Super Freighter. It had been completely gutted so long ago there wasn’t anything of value inside, and the ship itself was pretty useless to anyone. So I had basically started using it to store all the extra scrap I had found that I was going to keep.

Aunt Sheila had been annoyed, but had agreed that if I was scrapping I should get some rewards as well.

It helped that the Crabbit had sped up her job by an incredible amount, and we were clearing ships just the two of us faster than ever before.

I landed on ‘my’ hull and ran to the airlock practically giggling.

I don’t remember where it was mentioned, but going from the stone age to old modern earth would take more than just the knowledge.

You’d have to make tools. To make tools. To make the tools. Because things had advanced that much even then.

While I wasn’t in the stone age. I had big plans, and I needed big tools. So I found myself with the same problem. Building tools, to make the tools. The Crabbit had taken years of effort to get even one going, but once I had one. Another dozen wasn’t hard.

That was what I was doing now.

I entered the ship and then went in deeper. Inside the massive cargo hangar I had actually got it all set back up for a normal atmosphere. A few Iris Drives had powered everything, and a few old air canisters brought back to the Station for recycling had given me enough air to get it comfortable.

I passed through the airlock inside the hangar and pulled off my helmet as I hurried to the little mad science station I had set up.

It was a Tab, connected to an old ship's computer console, and then hooked up to a dozen odds and ends and a Crabbit stationed here to keep an eye on it all.

“How’s it going?”

“Yes! Within tolerance! Tolerance acceptable!” It chirped back and I grinned as I looked over the little round tub that was at the center of it all.

This kludged together thing was my hardest undertaking yet. I looked at the small glass tube that I was going to have to replace with the contents of my vat once they were complete. On the side in the strictest lettering it said.

Hull Repair Nanopaste. *DANGER*

I mean… It wasn’t not unsafe? They were fine. I had already hacked into their little nano brains with the Crabbit’s help and right now I was making literally a few quintillion Crabbit Nanomachines.

Nanopaste was extremely expensive and extremely rare, especially out here on the frontier. It was technically supposed to be a military only resource as the military gobbled up every scrap of it they could.

Well that and some of the dangers it held.

No one, uh, wanted another Grey Goo scenario…

But we were scrappers, of course we had some hidden stuff stashed away. I had swiped this tube from the station's hidden store room, and I’d replace it with superior Crabbit brand Nanopaste. Once their first cycle was finished.

Once the first cycle was done, I’d have basically an infinite amount of the little goofs.

And they could do more than repair if I gave them direction. They were vital if I was ever going to get my own ship that wasn’t just a rust bucket. They would help me fix up a ship to proper status without me having to actually repair the entire superstructure.

Nodding that they were growing just fine. I shifted to another project.

This was one of my favorite things.

Iris Drives.

They were beautiful. A square of machinery with a crystal glass letting you see if the reaction was active. They came in all sorts of sizes, but for a ship I was going to need something a bit bigger than the small drives that often powered smallish machines.

I mean my Crabbit ran on the Small sized drives, a step up from the smallest, Tiny drives. Yet the amount of power was incredibly limited compared to what I would need for a ship.

Everything ran on Iris Drives. If you needed, say, a communications console that would work even if the ship was broken in half, then it had an Iris Drive installed.

I looked at the Small Drive. Watching the light inside glow a pretty Blue. It was infinite energy.

“In the palm of my hand.” I joked as I lifted it up.

But it wasn’t enough. This Iris Drive would run something up to a car well enough, but a ship? And especially a ship that I planned?

I wasn’t going to drive a winnebago!

So I had listened to the song, the one the Iris Drive sang, of eldritch unknowable things.

The Iris Drive alone sang a song more otherworldy than any other. Punching through to subspace in order to draw power made the entire tech practically eldritch. There was often a joke that anyone that understood how they worked was insane and gibbering in a padded room only released when work on one needed to be done.

But I wasn’t insane! Definitely! Hearing songs of all the tech around me was perfectly sane!

I walked over to my project. Right now I wasn’t actually building. I was in the design phase. The fact was, I would never get access to a Medium sized Iris Drive. Whenever we stripped a drive from a ship if it wasn’t instantly put into use it was sold to the Duchy as part of our obligation. They paid well though. So it all worked out.

Everyone always needed more ships. Everyone always needed more ship sized Iris Drives. Everyone, and always.

But I had none and would never get my hands on one, so I had done what I always did. I asked the song for an alternative.

It sounded insane even to me, but I listened, and so I slowly created a 3d object in my Tab.

I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work. People that messed with Iris Drives tended to very quickly disappear.

Iris Drives were insanely reliable, unless you started messing with them. Thankfully anyone causing the subspace breach in the Iris Drive to destabilize would usually just kill them, and leave a melted room behind as a testament to their foolishness.

Also it ruined the materials that were needed to make the Drive function, so everyone was wary about messing with them.

But… I still worked. It was weird. A series of bypasses, to shunt the energy from an Iris Drive around… I continued programming as I grabbed a small canister I had left here last time and took a swig of water.

This was insane, yet… my hands continued to work. Slowly the shape of it continued to grow. It was… Strange. Shunting the power through different channels, which then forced the power into an array of other Iris Drives, which… Well everything told me at that moment the array should explode in a horrendous annihilation of reality that would happen so fast I wouldn’t even know I was dead before I was incinerated.

But… I continued working on it. It would require one central drive, and then six more. Placed around it shaped like an Octahedron. Once the power shunted to the other Drives they would then shunt to the others…

“Heh… Hehehe! This is insane!” I told myself as I continued the project. This couldn’t work. Wouldn’t! I know this sort of test has happened before! The Iris Drive was old. Thousands of years old, and really the only changes that have happened since then are better power control systems to draw on the energy released. You couldn’t make a zero point warp shunt provide more power! It just didn’t work like that!

And this… This wasn’t trying to mimic a bigger drive using multiple drives to power one thing. As long as you weren’t planning on going to warp, you could stuff a ship with plenty of small drives to power it. Our Shuttles did that. Most had one small drive, and a few tiny ones. You just didn’t need much power for a shuttle that wasn’t going into the atmosphere.

But this?

This was something else.

“Hmmm? Explosion?” I blinked as I looked up at the Crabbit that asked and I shook it off. Of course they would look at what I was doing.

“I don’t think it will.” I said, oddly confident despite how insane this was.

“Explosion.” She confirmed a moment later, and I laughed.

“That’s what’s supposed to happen, but… I’m pretty sure this will work. We’ll do some tests, and I’ll make sure we do this safely okay?”

“Yes yes! Safe testing! Standard Lab procedures!”

“Ah. You got me.” I told her laughing. That’s what I had told Crabbit about any sort of experimental work we did. Gotta be safe about things, at least as much as we could…

When working with an experimental Warp Drive like my Octahedron Drive? Eh. I’ll call it the Diamond Drive. Easier to say.

—--

“Kat!”

“Wha?” I jerked upright standing where I had been sitting, blinking my eyes. Ah shit. Mom was pissed.

“What did I tell you?”

“That if I keep falling asleep during my lesson time. I’d lose my access to the Scrap Field.” I answered back honestly and I winced at the admittance, closing my eyes. If I actually lost access…

This was a terrible time! I was so close!

But then Mom sighed, and reached out and pulled me down into a hug. I was much taller than Mom after all.

“You really need to get this exam done right Kathy. I know Sheila has taken you as a sort of apprentice, but you still need to pass the Scrappers Exam. Right now you are working under Sheila and that won’t last.”

“I know.” I said honestly with a wince. The Exam was something everyone took at sixteen, and I was inching closer.

I was still working with Sheila nearly every day, or at least as often as I could, because I loved going out and tinkering away, but I wasn’t studying as much as everyone wanted me to.

The problem was the Exam wasn’t entirely technical knowledge. There were also rules and guidelines and other stuff that I had to know.

And I was bad at remembering all of it.

Shit.

“Please focus on this Kathy, this is more important than you can know. I’d have killed to have-” And Mom suddenly cut herself off and shook her head. “You’ll do this right. Promise me?”

I grumbled out a promise, and Mom nodded, reaching out and pressing a warm hand against my cheek. “That’s my girl.”

Then she turned and left the living room, and I was left staring at my learning docs on my Tab. I really needed to figure this out, but everything was so close to being done! The Diamond Drive chassis was basically finished.

Because of the extreme tolerances I needed to make it entirely from Nanopaste. It was funny, if anyone ever found out it would end in my immediate banishment at how many cred’s I was technically throwing at it.

Nanopaste was expensive shit after all. Well maybe not considering I was making my own. Most people would be more likely to pay me to keep it away from them, than to buy it.

I ran a calloused hand across my face. I didn’t even want to be a scrapper. I wanted to get on a ship and travel the stars, but I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t have a ship! I needed more time to fix up a ship to working condition before I could think about leaving, and no longer be bound by the Scrapper Exam…

If I failed the Exam, any hope of me being allowed in the Scrap Field would be over. Almost no one failed the damn thing, but those who did? They usually left the station shortly after.

As stupid as it was, it was a rite of passage. Do it, or you would forever be considered too stupid to keep around safely.

I shook it off. I was practically falling asleep already, so there was no point staring at the Tab. I got up. I walked out without saying anything to Mom, gliding across the hall to the elevator and heading up to the Hab.

It was busy as always when I entered. I noticed some new arrivals, sitting around the food court area. Gruff spacers chowing down on actually cooked fresh-ish food for the first time in potentially months depending on how far they went. Although most freighters don’t travel quite that far.

If you had to do a month of travel you’d want an Iris Drive that could push into Warp. I walked past them to the food court and looked plaintively at Uncle Henry.

“Don’t pull that with me. You can’t pull off Nebula Eyes anymore.” He told me gruffly aiming a spatula at me, but then he continued. “Hungry?”

“Yes please.” I said and smiled as he flipped some meat on the grill. It wasn’t actually meat, Manipulated Protein was the official name. It came as a paste, and you could eat it as is, but most people would put it through a reprocessor which would set it to some texture.

In this case, it was sort of like a Hamburger… Sort of. If you closed your eyes.

When it was finished it was served on another textured piece that was trying and failing to mimic bread. It was sort of like a Hamburger taco. But with a bit of salt and a dash of ‘Slogan’ which was actually some sort of condiment that had a real name but no one remembered it and just called it the nickname.

It tasted like Mayo mixed with soy sauce, but it was the best I could get.

I grabbed a seat near the travelers and started eating. A bottle on my hip provided me with water. Drinks were weird in the future and I usually just stuck to water.

I’d kill for a soda.

“What’s got you so down?” A voice said at the same time the seat opposite me was taken.

“Oh hey Marie.”

“Nunununuh. Why the sad face?” She demanded and I couldn’t help but smile at her exuberance.

“Studying.”

“Ew. Glad I don’t have to do that anymore.”

“Yeah.” I grumbled, but then Marie caught on and smiled at me.

“Little Kathy, you're plenty smart. You can do it.”

“I don’t even want to. I want to be a ship captain.” I grumbled, something that I had said before although not usually in such direct terms.

Marie though, instead of telling me to not be silly just shrugged. “The Exam still has a lot of information in it, even if you aren’t going to stick around.”

“I know. I just… I have a lot of projects right now, and I can either finish the important stuff, or study.”

“Stuuudy.” She told me waving her lunch at me as if I could be hypnotized. “You just have to put it in risk and reward. Failing the test would be bad, even if you do want to be a captain. While passing would only be a useful thing. Right?”

“Uuuuu.” I moaned, then bit into my Taco-Burger and chewed so I wouldn’t have to accept what she was saying. I just wanted to make shit!

“Heh. See, even you know I’m right. Besides… Marshall will leave you alone once you complete the Exam.”

I just glared at her over my exaggerated chewing as she laughed. Once I was done I responded. “I don’t care what Marshall thinks. He needs to stop trying to boss everyone around.”

“He does, and I think he’s learning that. Did you hear?”

“That he got the aft dock? Yeah.” I confirmed and Marie leaned in to whisper.

“Oof. Working with old Collin?”

“Don’t call him that where he might hear. You know he has bionic ears.” I whispered back.

“Pfft. He does not.”

“Pretty sure he does.” I grumbled. Uncle Collin was complicated. A man that was extremely good at his job, but he could be a serious asshole when he wanted to, and he woke up and chose violence most days. The sort of guy that the station might have kicked out, if his work wasn’t so good.

He ruled the Aft Dock with an iron hand. Usually that wouldn’t have been allowed, but Collin was notoriously good at whipping troublemakers into shape.

“I hope they don’t send me there.” I whispered an honest fear.

“Nah. Aunt Sheila will claim you. I’m in logistics, you know? Her profits have more than tripled since taking you on, and everyone knows it.”

“It’s not that much.” I denied Maries exaggerated number instantly.

“286%” She said right back, and I rolled my eyes.

“Calculator brain.” I teased her, and she smirked like a shark.

“And don’t you forget it tech humper.”

“Uuuuu.” I whined and she just laughed. I had continued to get a reputation as the kid to go to when you needed something to repair. Marie was entirely responsible for that. But with my own ability, and Crabbit helping, there wasn’t much I couldn’t fix.

“Speaking of which!”

“Ah.” I said, light bulb going off. “You were talking to me, trying to be nice and comforting so you could ask me for help.”

“Bing!” She said giggling. “The Logistics has some wonky stuff up there. Aunt Kelly might not care, but the door jammed on me this morning, and-”

“Alright. I’ll help, that's dangerous.” I said cutting right to the point… “But you need to help me study.”

“Hah! I knew you were going to ask that. Deal.” She said throwing out a hand which I shook.

—--

“And if-”

“Alert console. Register it through the Tab and…” I grunted a bit as I dug through the control panel, my hand deep inside trying to grab the problem. Stupid wire.

“Aaaand?”

“And inform the supervisor.” I added, irritated. It was hard to pay attention to the song when I was trying to answer stupid questions.

“Kathy. I think you need to calm down. Most of the answers follow the same formula. You already know all of this.”

“Uuuu.” I groaned, doing my best to ignore her, and finally I found it. A loose wire. I pressed it back in, and spoke. “Crabby, give me a bit of a push on this one.” I asked and micro gravity shifted pushing the wire deeper into place.

“There. Tell whoever came through for maintenance last time to be gentler. They knocked the wire loose.”

“Sure sure. As long as the door works.”

“It will.” I assured her. The song was glorious and happy… Well mostly. I eyed a few things around the room that I could hear weren’t working properly.

“Nope! I know that look. Go on Little Kathy. You did your job.”

“It’s not my job, I don't get paid!”

“Internship among a Gold Rated Space Station! Excellent work. I'll add it to your file.” She said with exaggerated chipperness.

I just rolled my eyes and gave the Crabbit on my shoulder a look of pain. It tilted its body at me, and that made it all better.

This one actually looked like it should. One of the first fully completed Crabbit.

It had both grabbing arms and four legs. With the Nanopaste I could make things much more accurately even without fabrication machines… Meaning as long as I could teach the Crabbit the correct directions, they could just synthetically configure the nanopaste in the correct shape.

Testing this had been one of the main things I had been doing in my free time. I needed the nanopaste to be perfect in order to make a diamond drive, and so the Crabbits had been the test bed for getting the Crabbit Nanopaste to configure properly.

It had actually been going so well, I was onto playing with other ideas. Originally I had thought to grab some random hull from the scrap field for a ship, but… There was potential here. That wasn’t even the only idea!

I was already playing with an armor recipe while I tried to sleep. There were a few shapes I could configure at an atomic level that would be far superior to normal materials of the same type, and I could even make the material ablative and just have it be repaired afterwards!

I was going to make super armor for my future ship!

Well… Extremely good armor for not being one of the Monolithic State’s. The human states that were so powerful, they were the source of the culture for all the sectors around them.

We were out in the boonies of human territories, and so far our nearest Monolith State meant our tech was backwards comparatively.

I shook off the musing and left the logistics office far behind as Marie didn’t want me hanging around now that the door was fixed.

Heading back through the Operations Floor I stopped and stepped aside as Great Uncle Kyle came walking down the hall in the opposite direction.

I gave him a little bow, and thankfully he didn’t stop.

He wasn’t an unkind man, but this wasn’t the Hab level, or Quarters. If he stopped me here, it was as the absolute authority on the station, and not a distant and rather unfamiliar relative.

I hurried past once he was gone.

While Marie had given me an okay, that didn’t mean she was right. I still needed to study, but… If she thought I was doing well, if I was smart enough to pass the test, then why wait so long?