Chapter 30 In space with a junkyard ship

Fortunately, in this hangar there were cranes that suspended from the ceiling. Currently, the entirety of the back of the ship was open as we had to remove basically all of it. It was a bit annoying doing this by myself, but my drones and Bob were a big help.

We still couldn’t lift out the main engine, as it was too securely attached, and the only way to get it out was to cut it out—but it was too tight, as I basically built the ship around it.

Originally, I had dismantled the hull, but right now there was another way. Nano machines were cutting through all the welded connections, and when that was done, we could just slide it out—theoretically.

The new engines and the armour plating had already arrived. It was a heavy expense, leaving us with basically only around 200,000 mana credits. But we still had quite a lot of stuff to sell off, so we should have enough for the other things we need. Hopefully, my deal to sell off some of my collection of entertainment would work out.

The old armour was about 1/3 removed, and it would be a bit awkward to remove the ones on the bottom, but Lola figured out we can simply tilt the ship and gain enough access to do all the work we need to do.

We will not be replacing the broken wheels in the middle from the missile explosion, as even without them, if needed, we could land—but things would need to be quite bad if we would actually need to use them.

It was also time that I slept a bit, but before that, as I was sitting on my bed, I finally took out the skill stone. It wasn’t anything special—just a pretty stone that easily fit in my closed fist. All I would need to do was squeeze a bit harder, and the stone would break, and then I should be able to get the skill that’s inside of it.

When the skill was hidden, I could not feel its call. But as soon as I made contact with it or I could see it, there was a sort of call in the back of my head—wanting me to use it, to absorb it.

Perhaps whoever that was, who I killed, was able to sense the skill without an ability. Maybe he had some sort of cybernetics. But when I thought back to just before the looting skill did its thing, he didn’t seem to have any cybernetics that would enhance vision, and my clothing should also have stopped anyone using such methods.

So it must have been an ability—or perhaps even a skill. But if he already had skills, I do not believe he would have gone after me like he did.

Now it was time to start concentrating. As I was holding this skill in my hand, I tried to filter out the basic affinity. That didn’t work at all, and I spent quite a lot of time on that. Perhaps that was the wrong way to go about it. Let’s try it another way.

With my mind affinity, I tried to sense outward, but the skill still seemed to call to me exactly the same as before. Just in case, I did it with my basic affinity—same result. So perhaps it didn’t work. But when I tried to do it with my mechanist’s affinity, the results were... different.

I could still learn the skill, but it felt like the call wasn’t as strong—like the skill would work, but it wasn’t the best skill for this affinity.

Perhaps this was a bad skill to try this out with, as this was universally recognised as one of the skills that could be used by basically any affinity.

Yeah, that was my mistake. But I think I found a way, I would just need to test this a bit further. So instead of filtering out, I needed to feel with that affinity, to see if a skill resonated with that affinity.

So, nothing else left but to do it.

Crushing the stone was easier than expected—it was like it wanted to be broken. Then I felt something entering me. It was quite disconcerting. Eventually, in about five to ten minutes, it settled down in my core. The whole of my center felt like it was burning, but slowly, it was calming down.

After that, everything felt the same. Then I tried to do the exercise to feel mana. Everything exploded around me in so many different colours. I was seeing new things and smelling new smells. There were other things as well that were harder to understand.

The thing was, I didn’t have to see them with my eyes, but when I opened them for the first time, I could see mana. And it was beautiful.

Doing this was exhausting, so I needed to stop—but the skill worked. Pulling up the status screen, there was a new entry.

Name: Remi Graves

Age: 34

Species: Human variant (bio-cybernetic) Male

Bonds:

AI: Lola, Bob (100+)

Ship: Forward Horizon

Items: None

Enhancements: Bio-cybernetics, Bio-nano machines

Body: rank G

Mind: rank G

Core: rank G

Innate ability: Looting variant

Affinity:

Basic: rank G 1/3

Mind: rank G 1/3

Mechanist: rank G 1/3

Skills:

Novice Mana Sense

So the skill was at novice proficiency. That makes sense, as I basically know nothing about properly sensing mana. Seems like there was going to be grinding in my future to get this skill to a better proficiency level.

Now, however, it was time for some sleep.

Five days later

It was nice to eat some better food, but what was also weird was looking from the hydroponics toward the back of the ship and seeing it still half open.

The removal of the old main engine was easy enough, it actually did just slide out. Also, the installation of the new fusion engine was even simpler, as it was so much smaller. Yet it weighed quite a lot.

That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that there were some hardware locks.

Currently, a lot of my nano machines were making their way inside the fusion engine to dismantle those locks safely and to get a better view of the entire engine so I would know how to fix it, and if needed, make replacement parts.

To get off the ship, I simply walked out of the back hole and jumped down. With the 0.4 gravity, jumping from this height was absolutely no problem—in fact, it was my preferred method to get down.

The underside of the ship was now replaced with the new armor plating. While the old one looked dark grey in colour, this new one looked light grey, which would mean my entire ship’s colour scheme would now be different. There was always an option to paint it, but I had no idea what colour scheme I would want to go with.

Drones were busy working, stitching up the new armour and then heating it afterwards to make a truly solid bond, while others were cutting the rest of the armour pieces into the correct sizes.

A nice discovery was that we could rent some more cutters and even stitchers for quite the cheap price. After modifying some drones a bit, they were now doing the heavy lifting of cutting and stitching everything.

What I focused on was dismantling the old main engine. We also now have a lot more cargo space as we finally sold off quite a lot of our materials, and from the old main engine, about 40% of its magnets—which brought in quite a hefty sum.

Turns out they're quite expensive. They got us a bit above 18,000,000 mana credits, and the rest of the cargo we sold off brought in 15,600,000 mana credits.

We have spent some of it getting the necessary fuel lines for the new engines and a few other things to make them work properly, and we finally have a proper fuel line for the power core. All of that plus some more materials only came to about 600,000, so we still had quite a bit, but there were still a few things we needed to buy.

Most of the things we could just order, and they would be delivered here—but not everything. What I also wanted to do was to be finished with upgrading the ship so I could work on some more offensive things.

We were so outgunned that it was hilarious, so that needed to be fixed before we set off. Fortunately, a lot of it I could do while enroute if we got ourselves a gravity generator.

Another city trip was in order. The last time I went was just two days ago to look over some more shops. I also had another conversation with my contact.

This time he said he was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t been able to see one of his favorite movies without advertisement. Of course, that was a lie—this was a test. But that meant I needed to find a way to somehow pirate the movie, which was going to be hard.

It was annoying that even here there was no way, even if you paid heavily, to watch any entertainment without advertisement that simply ruined the experience.

I was almost finished dismantling that rest of the old main engine, it was soon time to work on the movie problem—then head to one of the shops I heard sold repaired gravity generators and see if we could get ourselves one.

While busy working, all of a sudden I got an alarm.

“Lola, what’s that?”

“Outside. It’s the same people who greeted us the first time we got here. They are requesting permission to enter.”

“Do they have officers with them? Did they finally find out?”

“No, it doesn’t look like it, but they also don’t seem happy.”

“Well, let them in.”

Lola opened the doors, and once again the group of small people walked in exactly the same way as before. Fortunately, I had their species key, so my AR was showing what their body language was saying. They seemed a bit angry, especially when they saw the state of my ship.

“What is the meaning of this? In your request you stated minor repairs—this is not minor repairs.”

I looked at them and then back at my ship. Yeah, I could see why they’d think that.

“Turns out my ship’s armor was more damaged than I thought. The side engines are basically unusable, and the main engine was just not good enough. But not to worry—the work is basically half done already, and I’ll be out of here within the two-week deadline we had.”

That made them stop a bit and look around. Their body language seemed to relax a bit. The main one with its clipboard started to look through it.

“Normally, these kinds of repairs take one to two months. That’s what we expected when we walked in.”

“Look at how many drones there are. He has a large workforce working,” one of the others said to their leader.

“That’s a lot of drones. They aren’t AI by any chance, like the ones we saw before?”

Nice, now I could use my adventurer status. Instead of answering, I sent over a version of my adventurer card that displayed my bonds.

All of them seemed to blink in unison for a moment.

“Now that is impressive, and I must give you my deepest apologies for interrupting you. It seems that our assumptions were off.”

“No need to apologise. I understand—it’s your job. Was there anything else?”

“No, will be leaving now, but make sure all of this is cleaned up before you go.”

“You got it,” I said while getting back to work and, from the corner of my eye, watching as they left.

“That was a bit weird. Lola, what do you think about that?”

“I did some digging while you guys talked. Seems like there's a loophole to extend your stay in the station, and that’s when you haven’t finished your repairs in time. They must have thought that we were trying to use that to extend our stay beyond our current plans, and without having to pay the standard fee, but getting a discount for it.”

“That’s a nice thing to know just in case. But yeah, we wouldn’t want to stay here for too long, as we have already made enemies, and I bet the Earth corporations are not going to be pleased about what I started with that investigation. And who knows what the pirates think?”

It took a bit more to finish dismantling the old main engine, but it was finally done. The hardware locks were still not completely broken on the new engines, so it was time to finally watch that movie.

Lola had already tried, but nothing she did had worked in getting a recording. She couldn't even see the movie—whenever she tried to, all she got was corrupted images and sounds. That was to be expected. It was like that back on Earth as well, although the newer stuff was so bad that it was not worth pirating.

It was going to take a lot of processing power to get a copy of this movie, and it wasn’t going to be perfect, but hopefully it was going to be good enough.

I started to watch it, fortunately my cybernetic eyes were able to watch it, and my ears were able to hear it without any problems. Most likely because I was connected to it with my AR, and it runs probably some sort of recognition software to see if an actual person or not was watching.

Even if I were to send a copy of the movie from the recording of my own eyes to Lola, it would still be corrupted. That was impressive.

After a bit of experimentation, we did have to do this the only way I know how to break basically every copyright protection.

While I was watching the movie, Lola was directly connected to me, but even then she couldn't make a copy. She had to generate every frame and every sound, basically making a brand-new version of the movie to actually get a file without copyright protection and without the stupid advertisements.

She had to utilize basically all the computing power we had to do it properly, but after about 3 hours, we had the movie—that was only one hour and 47 minutes long—in a clean file. There were just so many advertisements, they took so much time, and we couldn’t even fast-forward through them, even while paying quite a lot to see it.

At least it was actually a really good movie, but I think now it’s time for another trip to the city.