Vivid Stars Online

Surprisingly, the ship still had power, though at a very low level, and the airlock opened without draining my Psi reserves. Walking inside, I found myself in a chamber before another door.

I had a feeling that something was supposed to happen here, some kind of decontamination perhaps, however, it no longer functioned. Instead, I simply focused on opening the internal door before moving into the ship proper.

Now that I was inside, the strange effect on the hull was no longer inhibiting my senses, allowing me to get a better feeling for the ship. The first thing I noticed was the masses of empty space inside, taking up nearly a third of the entire structure.

At first, this confused me until I felt the attachment points along the edges of it. Some kind of modular design? I mused. Perhaps to have a different load-out depending on the mission.

Whatever the purpose originally was, it was now simply a massive hole in the ship's structure. This was actually pretty interesting for me, as I felt like it would allow me to put in something that matched my needs.

Perhaps even a hanger, I thought as I tried to think about the relative spaces. I thought I could easily fit the four fighters and the gunboat in with plenty of space to spare for a maintenance section.

This would allow me to carry all my ships around with me, while still being able to deploy them in a fight whenever I needed to. There will probably even be space left for a cargo hold or something. I needed to bring back loot somehow, after all.

Now wasn’t the time for that kind of planning, however. I still wasn’t completely sold on the ship and even if I took it, that would be a discussion to have with an actual designer of some kind.

Instead, I turned my attention to the rest of the ship. In particular, I focused on the weapon systems, trying to figure out how the missile and torpedo launch systems worked. One thing I was worried about was resupplying them, or even if there were any present on the ship at all.

What I found was that the tubes ran through the sub-structure of the ship, passing through a lot of the internal walls, to reach a central munitions storage area. This was located close to the center of the ship, something that I guessed was to limit the chance of them being hit.

You wouldn’t want your missile magazine going off, I thought with a wince as an image of plasma fire hitting explosives came to mind. That could be the end of your entire ship.

While I could track all the different tubes to where they entered the storage area, I couldn’t sense anything beyond. It felt like the same stealth effect that was on the hull and it would force me to go down and have a look in person.

I wasn’t sure why this was the case, my only thought was that they designed it as a second layer to ensure that the missiles were never detected. With a shrug, I began walking through the ship toward the center while checking out my surroundings.

Several of the corridors had collapsed due to battle damage, while other sections were exposed to the external atmosphere. It’s definitely going to take a lot of work to get this back into space-worthy shape, I thought as I walked, barely noticing that I had already started thinking of it as mine.

The walk to the center gave me plenty of time to survey the area of the ship that wasn’t just empty space. I found roughly eighty cramped living quarters, a mess hall with food storage, an ancient and withered hydroponics section, and even more rooms filled with technology I couldn’t understand with only a brief exposure.

I also found what felt to be a very complicated cooling and heat storage system laced throughout the ship. This confused me at first until I remembered reading about stealth ships needing to store heat in sci-fi.

It’s so you can’t pick up a hot spot against normal space, right? I thought, trying to rationalize something that was out of my normal experience. Maybe that’s another reason to avoid plasma guns. Less heat buildup?

Whatever the case, the system was there, and the same hull breaches that allowed the atmosphere had damaged much of it. I might have to fix that as well if I wanted the stealth system to be fully functional.

Soon I had reached the middle after having scanned about half the ship with my Psi sense. Putting aside the rest, for now, I focused on opening the door to some kind of engineering section.

Where I had first thought just the munitions storage was shielded, it now seemed like the entire core of the ship was wrapped in that same, odd stealth plating. Despite the limited power that had the rest of the ship lit in low, hazard lights, there was still enough here that I had to work against the ship’s security measures to get the door open.

Has to be important then, I mused as I forced it with a surge of energy. At my will, the door slid open, revealing gleaming consoles and machines spread throughout a massive room.

This area seemed to have been spared the damage the rest of the ship had taken, perhaps because of its location within an additional layer of plating. It also hummed with a low surge of power. While it felt far from its normal capacity, it had a lot more than the trickle flowing to the rest of the ship.

Looking around, I found what I thought was the engineering section of the ship, along with a massive power core. It was the source of the power, though I could feel that it was only running at a fraction of its maximum capacity.

Dozens of consoles were hooked into it, displaying analytics and information on strings of Arkathian runes. On the opposite side of the power core, a large machine was built directly into the wall.

Even a brief brush of my senses showed an incredibly complicated machine, one that was connected to the engineering room on this side and to the missile and torpedo storage on the other.

It took me long minutes of focusing solely on it to determine that it was some kind of fabricator that served the dual purpose of aiding the engineering section and building more munitions for the ship.

Nice! I thought with a grin. Not only did this solve my ammunition problem, as long as I could find the right resources, but it might also even help us fix the ship itself. We would just have to figure out how to get it running, and what to feed it.

That brought another thought as I focused on the power core. Need to figure out what that runs on too, I thought, it might be different from whatever they use for their ships here.

My exploration led to two large fluid tanks, one on either side of the engineering bay. Much like the munitions storage, these were connected back into the fabricator. Huh, I thought, a little surprised at that. So they have to bring something in here, probably large pallets of stuff, and then feed it into the fabricator to make fuel?

I had assumed that they would have some kind of external port to fuel the ship up. However, I eventually realized the likely reason. A lot of things on this ship, like the hydroponics section and the onboard munitions production, felt like they were designed for long-term missions.

The kind of mission where it would have to fend for itself for everything from food to fuel. Though I suppose they could probably just throw barrels of fuel into it if they had them and have the fabricator pump it into the fuel tanks.

The only question was how they got enough stuff up here, whether it was raw materials or barrels of fuel, to fill the massive tanks I could feel behind me. An idea struck me and I swept my perception over the floor, soon finding the section that was designed to lower down as an elevator.

Since it was within the engineering section, it still had power and I could easily move over and trigger it. With a soft hum, a large segment of the floor began lowering me down into the depths of the ship.

Before long, it stopped on what I felt was the bottom floor, in the middle of a large cargo hold. Well, I guess I don’t need to worry about that, I thought with a laugh at my earlier musings. Though it looks like it’s connected to the modular section.

It made sense that a larger hold would be one of the modular options, essentially allowing them to double or even triple the available space if needed.

Currently, the space was nearly empty, with just a single pallet sitting in a corner. Walking over, I found them to be barrels of some kind, each giving off an obvious psionic signal.

Realizing I’d felt something similar to this before, I pulled out one of the Beast cores we’d gathered on the way. It was a similar enough signature to make me wonder if the barrels contained liquefied cores, or at least liquified psionic something.

That must be why these are so valuable, I realized as I looked at the core in my hand. I’d never really questioned why the cores we so in demand, but if they were used in powering old Arkathian technology, then it made sense.

Though I guess that means this is all Psi-Tech, right? I mused, Or at least the power system is if it’s running off some kind of Psi fuel.

It was nice to see that I had at least some fuel on hand, as well as a method of manufacturing more through the fabricator. While I’d have to do more research, it may be as simple as just throwing cores or other Psionically active material into it.

With that, I’d seen the bulk of the ship except for some of the other side and the front, where I assumed the bridge would be. Since I had limited time, I left the opposite side for now and made my way through to the front.

As expected, I found the bridge along with several rooms that were stuffed with all the technology that was required to keep a ship like this running. While some of it was life support, other parts did things I lacked the education to even begin to work out.

Finally, I came to the bridge itself, a massive room with dozens of consoles inside. A large, currently blank view screen dominated the front of it, while on either side were consoles I felt were designed for pilots and navigators.

The size was dazzling, and a bit dismaying as I realized just how many people would be required to fly it. I really don’t want to hire that many, I thought with a frown as I stared around at all the consoles.

Then a thought hit me and I pulled out the AI core and held it contemplatively. The Arkathians had seemed to be quite afraid of AI, using them for menial tasks on ground-based facilities.

I was fairly sure they would have been horrified at the thought of one running a ship, which was exactly what I was now thinking of. It would certainly help cut down on the required crew, I mused as I stared at the surrounding room.

If it can do most of the monitoring and communications that I see here, we could cut it down to myself, a pilot, and a few others. Add in some maintenance robots and you could probably just have a single engineer plus my Technokinesis.

While it was a risk, I knew I could beat the AI in a fight if it came down to that. Besides this, I was banking on it being pretty grateful for being spared and freed from the facility it had been stuck in for ages.

I really hope this isn’t a mistake, I thought as I walked over to the largest console and began focusing my Technokinesis as I pushed the core forward.