Collection 13 (Patreon)

Collection

Chapter 13

-VB-

Danielle

“Somewhere between Amnesty and Bonavista,” Magistracy of Canopus(?)

3002 March

She was the quiet one. The entire crew said so, and she wasn’t going to say contradict something that was so … objective. 

But being quiet did not mean mindless, even if mechanic work can sometimes substitute for meditation.

And all of this was impossible.

She wanted to scream it out loud, but there was only the confined spaces of the two ships. Well, one ship. Humpty Dumpty had more or less become the dependent’s ship while Captain Edward and his Solo Killing became the primary combat ship. 

Oh, sorry. She mislabeled that. 

The sole pocket warship in the entire Inner Sphere and the periphery.

Oh yes, she rode one of, if not the most dangerous, ship in the fucking galaxy! 

Did it scare her?

… No. It made her feel safe. Even though she wasn’t inside of it anymore, the thought that the captain would turn it around to defend her and the rest of the crew of the Humpty Dumpty (horrible name) assured her more than anything else. 

Because she saw what happens to aerospace fighters, battlemechs, and dropships that thought they could take on Solo Killing. All were found wanting. 

Personally, she didn’t care for the Free Worlds League. Miguel might have said a thing or two about how great it would be if the captain worked for the League, but he didn’t make a fuss because he knew - and everyone else knew - that it was half-hearted jest at the worst and his own propaganda-filled brain spewing out stupidity at best. And because no one in this “fleet” cared for the League and definitely cared a lot about their new jobs, nice comfy and safe interior of pocket warships, and the knowledge that any life they might have outside of it was subject to all manners to stupid fuckeries of the Succession Wars, no one was going to be leaking anything without consulting the captain. 

Besides, she got to play with all sorts of new tech and get her hands dirty learning about them. 

Well, there were few things that she couldn’t understand. All of the high tech stuff that let him do the FTL stuff was out of her league, but the Siege Cannon, the drones, and the other mechanical things were right up her alley. Hell, the Siege Cannon wasn’t even complicated. It was just a really big gauss rifle! 

… But saying it like that ignored how gauss rifle production was a lostech, but a lot of things that Edward did was impossible, so one more impossibility was not surprising. It was, however, what really highlighted Edward’s ability to make things that are out of this galaxy. 

Back to the Siege Cannon. It was a very big gauss rifle - or cannon - that didn’t fire a slug but a self-propelled anti-dropship grenade. The rail produced a really powerful electromagnetic field using its own miniature fusion reactor (ripped out from a Warhammer, apparently) that Edward redesigned for maximum output in exchange for diminishing the reactor high consistent output. This would sling the bomb along the rail from zero to a max of five thousand kilometers per second! Edward didn’t use that maximum output ever in atmosphere, though. He said something about either the gun breaking apart or the shockwave breaking the gun in atmosphere. 

But in space, that was no problem. 

This was apparently a very old technology that Earth abandoned in favor of what would become Gauss Rifles of the Star League because each shot ate away at the physical rails. 

Edward got around that by manufacturing the rails within the ship itself and replacing as needed, because the Siege Cannon came with automated rail replacement mechanism.

Yeah, as long as Edward had the scrap metal onboard for his “microfabricators” to make stuff like that, he didn’t need to do maintenance. Hell, he could break down the broken rails to make new rails! 

Danielle stopped, mentally and physically, because she knew that if she continued with this train of thoughts, then all she would do was praised Edward in her head instead of focusing on what she needed to work on: Miguel’s PHX-1XEM and the spare heavily modified Wasp-1L. Hell, calling it a Wasp was actually a misnomer at this point because it was a freakin’ Frankenmech at this point with the weird thruster legs and odd jump jets. 

The Wasp, as the captain explained it, was for “mech space combat.”

She wasn’t sure how that was going to work. Sure, mechs were sometimes put on the surface of a dropship when going got tough (according to the the holonews, school, and holovids), but that was supposed to be once in a decade situation if not never encountered by some people. Yet this one was supposed to fly around like aerospace fighters and LAMs? 

So she learned by getting her hands dirty. 

Because she could understand what she touched. 

-VB-

Edward Arlaoskas

A random red dwarf star 1.1 lightyears rimward and anti-spinward of Amnesty

3002 April

“I name this star … Rest Stop,” I said out loud on the public announcement system linked between my two ships as I logged in the star system’s position into my ship’s star map.

“{That is a terrible name,}” Armas scoffed. 

And my computer spat out an error; Rest Stop existed already, the name of a star system spinward of Outworlds Alliance. 

“... Apparently, it’s already taken.”

“{Eh. Can’t be worse than This is it? over on Lyran’s Enders Cluster.}”

Right. I forgot that that was a thing. 

“Okay, how about Curiosity. After the Mars Rover?”

“{The what?}”

The computer accepted that one. 

“Sweet. This system is now Curiosity System.”

Curiosity System was centered around Curiosity star, which was a M7V red star, or a main sequence red star of low luminosity. It had two asteroid belts, the first between its first planet and the second between its second planet and the third planet. It had five planets orbiting its star; Curiosity I was barren, half-molten, and tidally-locked rocky planets. The second was a semi-habitable rocky world with 1.8 atmospheres pressure at “sea” level. Unfortunately, its sea was a toxic alkaline sea that didn’t have any life in it except maybe some extremophile bacterias. The third was a toxic planet 1.5 times the size of Earth. The fourth planet was a cold, rocky world.

Curiosity III was the one we were currently orbiting after I had gone and surveyed the entire system. 

“{So why are we here instead of some other place with people?}” Armas asked me.

I was about to answer him when Inspired Inventor chimed in and tossed me a point. A bit surprised by the random event, I unintentionally muted myself, but then remembered that Armas was expecting me to answer soon, so I cleared my voice and did just that. 

“Because I want to test a few things out, mostly with the drones, and a system where there are no eyes looking at us at all is the best place for exactly that kind of a test.”

“{Cool. Do I need to do anything?}”

“Nope. I can command the drones from Solo Killing.”

“{Alright. Then I’m gonna go and sleep. Good luck with whatever you’re doing.}”

And then he toggled off the comms on his end. 

I hummed as I did the same.

I crossed my fingers, and a shadow clone popped to life. 

“Sup.”

“You know what to do. Experiment Mining Drones is a go.”

“Aight,” my clone said as it sat down in front of a computer specifically tied to the drones. This computer didn’t work unless I manually overridden Humpty Dumpty’s command over the drones, which I did right now. 

Experiment Mining Drones was a very simple experiment. Currently, Humpty Dumpty had only Wasp drones but it had the necessary blueprint, fabricator chip, and materials already installed and loaded up into its microfabricators. The Beehive-class ship also had a small refinery ready to turn any raw materials the drones would mine into refined materials that the microfabricators could use. 

Oh, and for the new point, I thought about it. I had already invested points into spaceships, their designs, and some of the related fields that gave me. I had a total of twenty-eight points invested into the fields and then some more in related fields like mechanics and material engineerings. I needed to diversify a little. 

… So I put that point into Gundam Engineering. The moment I did that, I realized that Gundam engineering was a lot more complicated than I imagined. I mean it had to be considering how much more advanced it was compared to the regressed technological levels of the Inner Sphere. 

I mean, the Inner Sphere and even the Clans didn’t have laser sabers. 

Well, there was work to be done, tools to be made so that I can make tools to make even better tools, and designing to do.

I got to it.

---

The mining drones, which were shaped more like box with tools haphazardly attached to them, each took an hour to dig up, identify, and bring one ton of useful ores. With the limited space on both the Humpty Dumpty and Solo Killing, this meant that the drones could only work a few hours a day. Which was inefficient. 

So I got to work expanding Humpty Dumpty.

---

Humpty Dumpty’s rear expanded so that it could now hold another two hundred tons of cargo. This necessitated an increase in wing size, more thrusters, and reinforcement of the original hull’s internal structure. However, this also made it longer and even less maneuverable than before. 

Armas and Amy didn’t care, though. The additional material from ice rocks and room could now let them have hot tubs on demand. They and everyone else ignored how I made more graviton plates that made artificial gravity possible. They were just happy they could soak in hot water. 

---

The mining drones’ algorithms got better at detecting what was a good ore. This actually reduced their ore output per hour from one ton to quarter ton. I was fine with that; two-thirds of what they used to bring were junk rocks in the first place, so the drones sifting through them before they brought it onboard meant less work for us. 

---

After a month in space with the occasional trip towards the inner system for a crew-wide sun bathing, I finally finished the experiment and optimized the systems, cargo holds, refinery, and microfab production line for me to make anything I wanted, though anything big will take a long time to make. 

But this also meant that I now had the manpower and the materials to upgrade Solo Killing into something more dangerous and defendable without having to worry about C-Bills! 

And that’s exactly what I did.

Oh, and I also should mine as much raw germanium as possible. It will be the best commodity good to carry and sell as I fly around the Inner Sphere, especially in trade hubs where it will be sought after. It should help me buy any components I want but don’t necessarily want to queue up on my microfab. 

Like armor plates. Those wasted the most amount of material and time.

-VB-

Ellison Terans, Precentor Mu XII

Gatchina

3002 April

She’s been in ComStar for thirty-nine years, and had spent thirty years of it within ROM.

One could say that she was a veteran spy… but that would be a lie. 

She was Mu/Mu, ROM’s information analysis division. She didn’t go out of her way to infiltrate and kill people. No, no, no. Getting her hands dirty would be taking the jobs of Rho agents. 

Besides, she was way too sickly for that. Getting a cold every other month kind of limited any kind of long time missions, yes? 

But sometimes, things required a more hands-on approach, and she would gladly do them for the sake of ComStar and the Inner Sphere. 

It was why she had traveled from Atreus all the way out here to the rimward-antispinward periphery of the Free Worlds League after receiving word of strange phenomenon surrounding a mercenary company whose main war platforms were their dropships.

It wasn’t like there weren’t those before; Mercenary Review Board counted at least a couple dozen mercenary companies that was used more for their dropships than their mechs, though that was a drop in the bucket when there were hundreds of thousands of mercenary companies. 

Hell, most of them didn’t have a battlemech!

But the word of this company and their MRB listing unnerved her. Their speed across the periphery unnerved her. Most of all, the supposed “spinal cannon” of their main dropship really unnerved her. 

It sounded less like a real mercenary company that managed to scrounge up decaying metal and more like a Free Worlds League’s experimental weapons research group operating a front company.

So she was here to personally see to the information while disguised as a mere adept on her pilgrimage across the Free Worlds League.

Of course, once she was inside of an HPG station’s safe space, she’d shed that disguise. 

Like now.

Precentor Gatchina smiled. He was a Free Worlds League local, unlike her Terran-self. And standing next to him was Adept Neumarianburg. 

“So you can confirm that all of these readings are what you saw?” she asked the adept. 

“Yes, precentor,” the adept responded sharply out of nervousness. 

Ellison nodded smoothly. 

She walked into this office smiling.

She wasn’t smiling anymore. 

“Thank you, adept. Not only did you write down a very detailed report, you also measured and saved the … anomalous entry and exit signatures of their ships. Ships that should not be able to jump yet did so anyway.” She closed the window of the report on the computer and turned to the two. “Of course, this will remain only between us three, yes?”

“O-Of course, precentor,” the other precentor replied. Yes, he was very nervous.

It was not often a Precentor of ROM (not Precentor ROM but of ROM) came by. 

“Good. I must go to Terra as soon as possible. Please schedule me for the quickest route there.”

-VB-

Current Inspired Inventory Skill/Knowledge:

Starsector Spaceship Engineering 7

Special Forces 5

Mechanic 7

Material Engineering 6

Battletech Spaceship Piloting 4

Stargate Hyperdrive Fundamentals 4

New Eden Warp Fundamentals 4

Starship Rigging 6

Close Quarter Combat 3

Spaceship Design 3

Chakra 4

Gundam Engineer 2