Matuscarantos

  The past three months had been a mad dash of mechanical engineering hijinks and technomancy insanity overload. We had begun working almost the instant the HG model droids arrived, and I'd only stopped working when X4 forced me to, sometimes literally. I was obsessed with bringing the ship up to full functionality, and I wasn't going to let things like food or sleep slow me down. The burning drive to get out amongst the stars was only growing stronger with each passing day.

  First up was plugging the pointless gaps in the design of the ship. The HG droids, supervised by Red, managed to quickly weld the outer shell into the proper shape. They did it in small segments, which to my mind seemed detrimental, until at the end of the first week of work I couldn't tell where they had been welding.

  We failed the first pressure test, due to some unregistered damage on the central hull. So we went back to welding and hunting down damage on the rest of the ship's outer hull. The following week we had passed the pressurization tests, and the Jade Shrike's chassis was officially ready for space.

  While they had been working on that, I was studying the cruiser parts. Sorting them based on need, level of damage, and amount of effort required to fix.

  Learning that even using Scan, never mind anything else, on the cruiser parts was harsh on energy requirements nearly killed me. My mana was at zero before I'd really begun to process all the information. These days, running out of mana hurt in a way I couldn't fully describe. If you might imagine a strong itching inside your arteries and veins, with the rest your body going ice cold, you'd begin to understand. I worked on getting right to the st point of mana then stopping before the crash.

  The principle of size mattering as much as complexity was reemphasized. Each of the rge scale parts took multiple Scans to understand, and even more Scans to lock down what needed to be repaired. Repair itself was a long slow process requiring many sessions for each part. However, all the grueling cycle of draining my core, paid interesting dividends, Scan Machine evolved into Scan Machine II, then Repair into Repair II.

  My Scan, down to a base cost of 1, could handle rger and more complex machines without as much of an increase on the energy costs. It also, starting listing known improvements and upgrades to any parts with which I had prior knowledge. The ability was a little less instinctual now, offering more detailed technical information.

  All of my other abilities made their own gains as well, and with each improvement I felt more driven to push myself harder, to go further. I'm pretty sure, X4 started slipping various agents into my meals in order to either help me sleep or force me to rex. That they were often less effective than normal was an interesting puzzle to us both.

  At first, this duplicity aggravated me, until I realized that it was just the way he was programmed. He was quietly and subtlety taking care of problems on his own initiative. The caregiver personality baked into his Protocol droids scripting, and the assassin coding were merging into one devious unified whole. I was just gd he was on my side.

  But for all my magical abilities, and X4s task management, the real star of the show was Red. He ruthlessly pushed every micron of efficiency out of his droid crew. Not only was every job completed on time, everything was over engineered to be more durable. For example, the backup power conduits now had their own system of backups. For power to be completely lost to any section of the ship, the power cores themselves would have to both be destroyed.

  Ah, I'd found a busted heavy freighter power core in the Shipyard's scrap recycling center. The best part, I paid only a small fraction of it worth. Even X4 had no compints about the purchase. Running the second core turned out to be easy work, and while our average fuel costs would go up by about 23%, that was while running cruiser level systems.

  Once repaired, the cruiser systems went into the Jade Shrike with only a few minor difficulties, other than taking up twice the room. Yet we found that we barely noticed the difference.

  We had barely managed to fit the giant Navsystem into the Cockpit, and had to sacrifice the extra seating to do it. There was only the pilot's char in there now. The best part is that we found tons of fragmented navigation data from the cruiser still locked in the system's memory banks. Red was confident he could restore most of the data, given time. I looked forward to want he would discover in there, and it was good he had found another hobby instead of bossing around the newbie droids.

  We figured out how to split up the components of the Comms system, while keeping it fully functional. The bigger version that we had would allow us to contact any future allies from much further away. Our sensor ended up being the same. We could scan a whole system at once.

  The gap in the wing was reworked into being the Hydroponics and Environmental control center. X4 found us a agridroid and a starting package of hydroponic growers. Each a fully autonomous biosphere that reguted everything from pnting to recycling should it prove necessary. The rest of the ship would have a few algae carbon scrubbers pods and other non-edible pnts to brighten up the atmosphere. The agridroid would maintain everything, and keep track of the food harvest cycles.

  We won't mention our protein growing operation. Thankfully, I didn't have to look at it. It was functional and efficient, that was all I had to know. Altogether, we should be able to produce enough food for five human sized adults. Combined with a few months of stored food cubes, sustenance should never be a problem.

  Next to the cockpit, were my quarters, I kept them simple for now. Next to my quarters was the combination crew room and lounge. The crew would have built in bunk bed style cubbies. Which they could close off for privacy. I made sure the mattresses were comfortable, and the cubbies had plenty of room for a human. The lounge area, had a ton of gaming options including Sabacc, Dejarik, and Pazaak.

  At the bow's port side we had droid charging stations, and droid storage for when they had nothing to do. I wasn't going to force them to stay there, but it was an option they had.

  Then there was the port side airlock which had two EVA suits and gear for making repairs in the void. At the Stern port, we had an escape pod, and the refresher corewards from there. The sonic shower were nice, they had a ton of special features to massage you while you got clean, very nice.

  At the stern was Engineering, with our css two Hyperdrive, and dual power cores. We ended up having to add extra venting to account for the second core, but it worked out. Corewards from Engineering was the Galley. It was well appointed, because I wanted to try my hand at cooking more. Though X4 mentioned looking for a chef droid.

  At the stern's starboard side was my workshop. With all new autosmelters, sonic forges, particle assemblers, and much more. I had nearly everything I needed to build just about anything.

  We installed two of the cruiser's quad turbo ser cannons on the top and bottom main weapon mounts. I wired them into the targeting system from the cruiser so they should work together well. I really didn't want to have to manually control the weapon as was common in the YT-series from some reason. I also added in eight of the cruiser's point defense rotary ser cannons, four on top of the disk four on bottom. Pal insisted on the setup, he cimed missiles were deadly and we should take no chances. It seemed to be overkill, as two should have been enough to cover most of our needs. Still they could be used in an aggressive fashion if needed, so I was good with it.

  A concussion missile system went in under the cockpit. Being a cruiser model it unched four missile per salvo. Which would get costly, but would also allow us to stand up to much bigger ships. To really hammer the big ships though, we needed a photon torpedo uncher, but we couldn't find one for sale anywhere.

  It had been rough, but we were now ready for the shakedown run.

  Matuscarantos