Vivid Stars Online

I started my investigations with engineering, the only part of the ship we were constantly running. If anything was going to fail, I figured it would be there.

Settling down near the reactor, I reached out with my senses. The surrounding room seemed to light up with meaning as I got feedback from the technology embedded in the walls.

With Mira still locked out of the secure areas, there was no resistance as I began focusing on each system. I didn’t think she would try to stop me, but the presence of an AI seemed to impart a kind of life to the surrounding technology.

It created a resistance that just wasn’t there with normal systems, and it was always easier to interface without one being present.

First, I focused on the reactor sitting at the back of the room. I had expected it to be the most complicated piece of technology I had ever scanned and was instead surprised to find it to be rather simple.

While there were plenty of complicated components, some regular technology and some psionic, the basic operations were simple. Rather than burning the fuel we put in for power, it was more like the fuel evaporated into pure Psi energy.

It then drew the energy into a series of converters before becoming the electrical power that flowed around the ship. It was an intriguing process that had me wondering whether I could do something similar.

Being able to create power on demand would be extremely useful, and I filed the idea away for later. Even if I couldn’t achieve it with just my Technokinesis ability, we could potentially fabricate smaller versions of the converters.

Putting thoughts of the future aside, focused my senses on detecting any issues. Despite not having the blueprint, I could get a general sense of when something was awry. For the most part, it was in good condition, but I still found plenty of areas where parts had degraded from age or use.

Drawing forth my energy, I focused on each in turn, reforming them to the correct shape and condition. It was tiring work, both mentally and energy-wise, and it wasn’t until several hours later that I was done.

There’s no way I’ll have time to do everything now, I thought with a groan as I stood up. But the reactor’s the most important. While the minor imperfections I’d found had little risk of a catastrophic failure, each one I fixed upped the reactor’s efficiency.

And with the limited fuel we had available, we needed all the efficiency we could get. We’d already burnt most of what I had found in the cargo hold and would soon be relying on what we could get from beast corpses.

Better ask the Captain if we can have the patrols bring kills back, I mused as I turned toward the fabricator. Maybe we can get them some form of vehicle to carry them? It would be a lot better than asking them to drag the bodies back.

I took a note on my watch before settling back down and reaching out with my senses again. I had a vague hope that the fabricator would be as easy to understand as the reactor, but it was quickly dashed.

It was packed with incredibly advanced technology that I could barely begin to understand. Even after spending half an hour focusing all my attention on it, I could only get a vague sense that it was mostly functioning as expected.

“Be careful with the fabricator,” I said with a sigh as I turned toward Elana.

“So it’s complicated then?” she asked, looking up from the robot she was examining.

“Beyond complicated,” I responded. “If it breaks I’m not sure I could even fix it. Even if I could, it would take days or even weeks of trying to figure it out first.”

“Right, I’ll be careful with it,” she said, nodding fervently. “It’s a good thing engineering has an extra layer of armor. It’s unlikely to take damage even if the hull’s breached.”

“That’s probably the only reason it’s running so well as it is,” I responded with a nod. “I’m glad those ancient spaceship designers thought ahead.”

The conversation tapered off after and I got directions to the other important locations and moved on. It was almost lunchtime already, and I’d only examined two pieces of technology so far.

Going to need to speed things up, I decided as I munched on a ration bar. I’ll just do a quick check on each of the rest. I can always come back to them later.

Next up was life support, which was further along on the central deck of the ship. This put it on the same level of engineering, and it also had an additional layer of armor. With my senses, I could also detect a direct, armored power cable running between them.

Makes sense. Life support is pretty important when you're in space. How long would it even take before the air ran out on a ship this size? I wondered, before shaking the thought away. Given the tiny size of our crew, it might last days, but we’d still die in the end.

Stepping through the door, I found myself in a tiny compartment surrounded by consoles. Each displayed data on the atmospheric content of the ship, and many showed flashing red errors.

I panicked for a minute, worried that the entire system had failed, before relaxing as I realized what the problem was. The systems here did not like how the hull breaches were letting the external atmosphere in.

While I could understand the reasoning behind that, it thankfully wasn’t a problem with the planet’s atmosphere being breathable. Reaching out with Technokinesis, I began shutting the system down to save power.

There was little reason for it to be running until we had the hull sealed, so I only left it on long enough to get an idea of how it was functioning. Much like the reactor, it wasn’t at full efficiency but was still running at an acceptable level.

I wanted to fix up the issues before we left the atmosphere, but for now, I simply shut it down and moved on toward the shields. I didn't have a layout of the ship, but I felt an odd instinct telling me where everything should be.

The shields were again further down the central floor, and I smiled as I began to understand the design ideology here. It made sense to put your most important systems in the middle of the ship so they were more protected against damage.

The internal structure might be a lot weaker than the hull, but it would still take effort to blow through. With the extra layer of armor at the end, it would take a lot of power to take any critical systems out.

So it came as quite a surprise when I reached the shields, only to find half of them missing. “Bloody hell,” I cursed as I looked at the sheer cut separating the remaining machinery from a long cooled pool of slag.

I didn’t have the experience to know if this was caused by plasma or something else, but I knew it had to be nasty. Looking up, I could see blue sky at the end of a clean-cut hole.

What could even do that in a single shot? Some kind of battleship-mounted weapon, maybe? I theorized with a shake of my head. It was a wonder that the ship had even made it back after that, and I could only put it down to its speed, and potentially its stealth capabilities.

Come to think of it, the gunboat’s shields weren’t working either. Maybe taking them out was a standard tactic for whoever they were fighting. It was certainly a worry to consider a civilization that could give the Arkathians this much trouble.

As far as I knew, we didn’t have any direct evidence of who they could have been, either. Hopefully, that meant that the Arkathians had won and cleaned up any evidence, but I still couldn’t help but worry.

As much as I tried to put the thought away, I couldn’t help but think back to the battle damage at the first facility I’d found. If they’d won, then surely they would have fixed it up, right? Not to mention all the damaged ships they left behind.

My only consolation was the vast time gap between now and when that fight had to have happened. Whoever their enemy was, there had to be little chance of them still being around.

That finally calmed me enough to take stock of the damage. It was as bad as I first thought, with roughly half the total mass of the shields being missing. That was far too much for me to repair with just Technokinesis, not with the cost of creating mass from nothing.

I eventually decided that our best bet was to extract and recycle the remains. A quick message to Elana had me cursing again, as she couldn’t find a copy of the blueprint in our fabricator.

Hopefully, one of the other ships has a working version, I thought with a sigh. We might be able to reverse-engineer the blueprint from that.

With that in mind, I sent a message off the palace to make inquiries. Since the Duchess had distributed the ships, hopefully, she would have the most information on what was working.

Having done all I could here, I moved on to the remaining systems on this level. I was relieved to see that both the artificial gravity and the thrusters were working but despaired again as I found the wreckage of the warp drive.

It had taken even more damage than the shields, the area around looking like some form of localized implosion had taken place. The internal structure had been sheered clean off several dozen feet away, leaving only small pieces of wreckage on the floor.

So they took out the shields, then the warp drive so they couldn’t jump out, I theorized as I kicked a chunk of metal away. It might make sense, but it’s still damn annoying. If anything’s going to need rare materials, it’s going to be a damn warp drive.

Sighing, I put in another call to Elana. “Warp drive’s busted as well, nothing here but a big hole where it should be.”

“Damn,” she responded. “I saw that, but I was hoping it wasn’t anything too important. How can you even tell what should be there?”

“It's hard to explain,” I responded, shrugging despite her not being able to see me. “I can kind of get a sense of how things should be. It’s how I can fix things by returning them to how they should work, and it seems to carry over to figuring out what’s missing.”

“And somehow you just made me even more jealous of that broken ability,” she laughed before continuing. “Well, I can tell you we don’t have a warp drive blueprint either. Most of what we have are things that would be damaged a lot, like the hull, or simple stuff like the wiring and consoles.”

“Maybe it was information security or something? Keeping their more complicated and important blueprints secret. We’ll have to see if we can get one of those from the other frigates as well.”

Saying goodbye, I closed the call and moved on to the other floors. Much of the space above the central floor was comprised of living quarters, while the space below was the cargo hold.

This let me bypass most of it until I was on the top floor of the ship. There wasn’t too much for me to check, but there were a few things, like sensors, that had to be on the outside of the ship.

The most interesting thing I found was the contrast between the many holes in the outer hull and the two deep shafts that had taken out our critical systems.

It looked like the bulk of the damage had been superficial like it had been caused by much lower-power weapons. Even when they’d blow holes in the hull, they hadn’t gone too much further into the ship.

I didn’t know why this was, but I had a few ideas. My first idea was that it was because of regular engagements with smaller ships, followed by a couple of strikes by something much larger.

My second idea was that the lower-power weapons had been used to break the shields before the higher-power weapons had done the actual damage. Even not knowing for sure what the cause was, thinking it through gave me some ideas for when I would actually captain the ship.

Thankfully, I didn’t find any other critical damage by the end of the day, even after covering most of the ship. I reported my findings to Elana for her materials list, before turning in for the night with Linnea.

Tomorrow I would get my new ability.