Chapter 39 In space with a junkyard ship

Being alone in the elevator gives me the time to put the briefcase down and open it. It seemed to have an internal mechanism that kept it shut, which took a few moments to click open so that I could see inside.

Inside were bars of metal I was not familiar with, written on them were the number 24 and 1 kg. There weren’t too many of the bars, but they did look extremely expensive, so I hoped that I wasn’t getting fooled.

Closing the briefcase back up, I also took out the atomic bullet from my revolver and hid it inside my left arm. Can’t be too careful up there, as I really didn’t want the trouble that came with trying to smuggle atomics into this station.

The elevator seemed to stop earlier than expected if my calculations were correct. When the doors opened, my contact waited for me with a serious face in a hallway that looked like the one I entered before, but wasn’t.

“There are three different groups waiting for you near our establishment. One of them seems especially angry. So follow me, we're letting you use one of our secret entrances that will take you a few blocks away.”

“Thank you,” I said to him as I started to follow. He rapidly led me in the direction of one of the main streets.

It didn't take us long to reach our destination, and as he opened the door to let me out, he said, “Good luck. Next time, let's hope you aren’t in such a hurry.”

I gave him a nod and moved outside.

“Master, can you hear me?” rang out in my head almost immediately.

“Yes I can, and I am safe.”

“Finally! I’ve been so worried.”

“Seems like they can block quite a bit. Has the situation changed at all?”

“This station’s tracking device did arrive. Otherwise, things are going to schedule.”

“Good. Hopefully, I can get to the ship without any problem.”

Walking faster than normal on the main street brought attention to me. It was nerve-wracking to move about with so much wealth, and every time someone looked at me, it felt like they could sense what I was carrying and were only waiting for the right moment to attack.

Nothing happened, not until I made it to the elevator that would take me to the arm my ship was docked in.

There were a few other people on the elevator with me, waiting for it to close and start moving downwards, but from the stairway that led to the public transport, five individuals were rushing down, and I saw recognition in their eyes when they saw me.

They looked determined and started to rush even faster. All of them skidded to a halt a moment later when they noticed that I had my revolver out and pointed straight at them.

We stood like that for an uncomfortably long time, with the people in the elevator hugging the walls, some of them seemingly panicking.

Eventually, the doors closed, and the elevator started to move downwards.

“I apologise for that,” I said to everyone as I holstered my revolver.

Some of them relaxed, but not all of them, and most left the elevator at the first opportunity they got.

Hopefully, the way I handled that wouldn’t be a problem, and if it was, then I was already away from the station when the questions came.

The door closing behind me, sealing the rest of the station from my dock, made me relax just a bit.

“We really have overstayed our welcome. Lola, how much longer?”

“About two hours.”

“I guess that’s going to have to be good enough.”

“Did the deal go alright?” she asked me, her voice quite curious.

“Theoretically, in this briefcase, there should be metal that’s worth 950 million.”

She didn’t respond before I got back to the ship.

“Only a few metals could be worth so much. Could you show me?”

I opened the briefcase on one of my workshop tables and, for the first time, picked up one of the bars. The metal looked like steel but weighed less.

“Oh my, that’s Adiminium and with the purity of 24 percent. This metal, in comparison, makes the armour currently around our ship be comparable to wet clay.”

“Oh, you must be exaggerating.”

“Perhaps a bit, but not by as much as you would think. That here is one of the best metals available in the universe. It’s an iron-based metal that comes from a certain type of monsters whose biology changes the base iron into something truly fantastical. It’s basically the best metal for edge-type weaponry.”

“So is it worth as much as he said it was?”

“It would be around 950 million. Just a moment. The current market price here would be just under 952 million.”

“Damn. Bob, you’re in charge of packing up everything. Everyone else, start going into hibernation. And Lola, did you figure out if we can detach something in FTL and what would happen to it?”

From Bob, I got a positive feeling, and soon after, Lola spoke.

“It would depend on the object, but it would have to be quite sturdy to survive it without any damage. But as it slows down, it would reenter real space.”

“That’s unfortunate. But it should not be a problem.”

Lola wanted to know what the plan was, but once again, I remained silent on that front—at least for a little while longer.

Going through the checklist for departure went faster than I expected, but it would still take time before we could leave, as not everything we had ordered had yet to be delivered.

Bob did not like that fact, as he wanted to be done as fast as he could direct and move cargo, not wait on some deliveries.

At my workshop table, I now had the booby-trapped gravity generator. What I needed to do was add the new quantum tracker to it, which would mean that this one would then have three of them—which was kind of funny.

All this time, the nano machines had also been working on removing a lot of the explosive material. Removing it all was unfortunately not possible, otherwise it would trigger some fail-safes.

Fortunately, we were able to remove enough that, with a little bit of reinforcing using some metal from the outer armor, even if this exploded, it wouldn’t damage the ship or the quantum trackers.

As I started to work on this, I also talked with Lola, as Lola wanted me to explain everything that had happened during the meeting.

“I would be really curious to see what’s on that primer they gave you.”

“Me as well, but we can’t just connect that to our server. We need a truly isolated computer, just in case.”

“Agreed.”

“You know, when I walked in one of the main streets, there was an interesting shop. It was all about printing plants.”

As soon as I mentioned it, it was like Lola came alive. I noticed that everything to do with biology, cybernetics, and of course the combination of the two, really seemed to interest her. She was also weirdly good at it, but I wasn’t complaining, because thanks to her, my body was in such a good condition.

“We should now have enough funds that we could purchase some of those devices when we upgrade the ship.”

“That would be wonderful, but those are still too expensive, I think. Even the lowest models start at well past 100 million.”

“We’ll think of something.”

We continued to talk like that as I worked, making a booby trap out of a booby trap.

It took an hour longer for everything to arrive than expected, but everything was eventually shipped over, and nothing that we didn’t want came aboard. As we scanned and visually checked everything. Then we started to do our last checks.

It had been nice to be on such a large station, but it really was starting to get a bit too dangerous. Lola started to request undocking clearances, and slowly the bureaucracy worked, until the klaxon started to sound outside the ship as the ceiling started to open up to the vacuum of space.

When the doors were completely open, the gravity cut out. On the monitors, everything seemed green, so the RCS thrusters fired, slowly moving us out of the dock and into outer space.

We had requested two hours of stay near the station in one of the testing zones, as we had made quite a lot of changes to the ship that we needed to test out.

The two main engines were now cycling up. The fusion reactions were periodically being triggered, and now they lasted for about 12 minutes each, bringing so much power, but we also now had systems that needed quite a lot.

Now the main engines were a lot more responsive, and as soon as I pushed the accelerator just a bit, they reacted almost instantly, pushing the ship forward. The best thing however was that they didn’t have that annoying sound. They almost sounded pleasant.

“That’s going to be so much better,” I said to myself as I continued to look over all the information we were gathering as the ship went through diagnostics while we continued to test the new systems.

There was another addition to the controllers, and that was to turn on and adjust the strength of the gravity generator. Slowly, I brought the power up on the gravity generator, seeing if any of its readings went to red, but when we were at 1G gravity, everything seemed stable.

Pushing it the other way so that I was starting to be pushed toward the window, only being held in place by my straps, was a weird feeling. But the gravity didn’t feel any different. Was I really, just with my fingertips, controlling gravity itself?

This made me feel strangely powerful.

There was still some testing to do, but an hour later, everything seemed ready. Just one more thing to do before we start to accelerate out of this system.

The call connected quite fast.

“This is Remi Graves. I’m calling in regard to the quantum tracker I was sent.”

There was a moment of pause before I was answered.

“Yes, I remember. I can also see that you are currently already outside the station, and you seemingly have a weapon brandishing investigation. It seems that you have many things to explain?”

“About the weapon thing. I thought it would be better to do that than to have a bloody fight in an elevator.”

Another pause.

“We can let that slide, as you have been quite helpful.”

“And I hope to continue to be helpful. Speaking of that, I’m going to soon leave. The day after I entered FTL. The quantum tracker will once again start sending a signal. I would guess that approximately an hour later, in that location, you can find two fleets. One being the Crivordid Pirates, the other a black fleet. What you do with that information is up to you.”

“Wait, what?! You can’t be serious!”

“Of course, this isn’t guaranteed, but it’s a pretty good chance that it would happen, as I said. That is all that I have to say. Happy hunting.” We sent them our planned path so they could follow us precisely of course if they choose to even come.

And with that, I ended the call and felt judgment coming from Lola.

“Why couldn't you just tell me that? So we are depositing the booby trap and then jumping into FTL. The Terran Cooperative will send a Black Fleet, which is a code name for corporation-backed fleets that do their dirty work and the pirates who will show up in force, only finding the trackers.”

“Mhm,” I answered.

“Then they will most likely start fighting each other. And at that point, a patrol fleet of Haver Prime will show up and attack both of them, hopefully removing one of our problems, the pirates, and seriously hurting the other.”

“That’s exactly it.”

“That isn’t as crazy as I thought it would be.”

“You see? You just didn't have faith.”

We moved toward the 10G acceleration runway. With that acceleration, it will take us about three days to reach FTL speed.

I kinda wanted to use my new gravity generator, but it wasn't strong enough to counteract such strong acceleration, and it was recommended that it not be used to lower acceleration stronger than its maximum, which was 5G acceleration.

It was a good time to start working on my skills, because during FTL I wouldn’t have much mana to work with.