20 - Stiff Upper Lip

Boom!

The heavy blast door protecting Captain Huvano’s personal suite hit the deck in a loud crash, sending delicate decorative figurines tumbling to the floor. Maya stepped through the billowing smoke and residual heat, covered head to toe in battle armor.

“Just needed a little nudge,” she said, her voice muffled through the helmet.

“I believe five kilos of Helix explosive gel is more than a little nudge,” Tender said as he trailed behind her.

“Three damn hours,” Maya said. “I tried for three damn hours to unlock this damn door, as they say where I come from if brute force doesn’t work, you’re not applying enough brute force.”

“I suppose so,” Tender said.

A sigh emanated from a bag Tender carried. “Those figurines were dilapso crystals, formed in the blood of a brown star dwelling creature called a Sosapass,” Veskari said.

“Are a bunch of crystals shaped into very pornographic positions gonna help Roci?” Maya asked as she bent down to peer at the figurines. Naked demonic Nerigana were definitely not human-like downstairs.

“No.”

“Then who cares,” Maya said. “We’re on a smash and grab mission.”

She stepped forward and an audible click filled the room.

“Oh, shit.”

From the ceiling dropped the barrel of what looked like a minigun. Before she could even move it gave a loud click and then drooped. Dead.

“What the hell?” Maya asked, staring at the hidden weapon in disbelief. “You said there were no traps.”

“Ah, it seems that Huvano did not entirely trust me with his security measures,” Veskari said. “But at least due to the age of the weapon in question, it seems to have barely had enough residual power to only activate, not kill.”

‘That’s not getting you off the hook for saying there were no traps,” Maya said.

“Well, [Adventurers] always expect traps,” Veskari stated.

Maya looked at Tender. “We are not [Adventurers]. I’m a newbro [Merchant] and Tender’s my honeypot wingman.”

“I can barely understand half of what you are saying,” Veskari said.

Maya scoffed and pushed deeper into the suite. She made sure to check the deck for traps; instead of the metallic flooring she’d seen everywhere, the suite was laid with lovely geometric patterned tile. Expensive and unnecessary, but that’s how high leveled rolled.

The room was as gaudy as Maya had imagined. Rich golden and azure gilt lay over everything, there were some mana lights that were still functioning, casting warm ambient lighting over various niches filled with delicate carvings, trophies, and prized enchantments.

“Crap, this place is decadent with a capital D.”

“Huvano was from a wealthy Family,” Veskari said.

“He wasn’t the head of the House?” Maya asked.

“Oh, no. Huvano was still too low leveled to be involved fully in Family business. The Huvano House was ruled by a council of seven Tier 3 SIL and there were over a thousand high leveled Tier 2 SIL that ran the day to day business, Huvano was in the lowest of the rankings.”

“Dang, Pegarios barely has the one old lady that’s dying,” Maya muttered.

“Behind that bookcase, there should be a small keypad, the passcode is 524862,” Veskari said.

Maya paused and looked at the books. They were the first actual paper books she had seen in months. She pulled one off the shelf and flipped through it. The text was Nerigana and it seemed to be akin to fables or fiction.

The keypad was hidden behind a false front and Maya punched in the code. Nothing happened. She sighed and pulled out a power unit from her Inventory and dismantled the keypad. After a few minutes of tinkering, she powered the pad up and then punched in the code.

There was another audible click that put Maya on edge, but instead of a half dead weapon dropping from the ceiling, the bookcase swung open.

Behind it was a large transparent wall that held a naked humanoid figure. There were no features, no identification marks or anything. It was just a ebony fleshed humanoid figure. A blank slate. Of flesh. Well, golem flesh, but it still looked like flesh to Maya.

“This you?” Maya asked.

“Yes,” Veskari breathed. “That is a mid-grade, Tier 2 golem construct.”

“Tier 2? Could we harvest it to add to the Cage?” Maya asked.

Veskari was silent for a while. “Yes,” he said.

Maya grunted. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna steal your body,” she said. “Just wondering. You’re a real asset to the team, Vesky. I’d never do you dirty like that.”

“Thank you, Maya.”

“That’s an odd body, though. It looks like a lump of clay, shouldn’t it be all demonic looking or something?” Maya asked.

“The Tier 2 golem construct body is a malleable form. It can become any physical shape that I wish it to be. It can created clothing and stabbing weapons, if I wish.”

“Can’t turn into a gun and shoot?”

“No, no complicated machines,” Veskari said. “Mid grade, not High grade.”

Maya nodded. “Alright, T-1000. Let’s heft you outta here.”

***

Veskari strutted out of Huvano’s suite like the cock of the walk, taking the shape of the gecko velociraptor that was Yosi, but this time blinged out in lace, frills, and rhinestones.

Although Tier 2 components didn’t have a long use life, when in storage in the right conditions, they could last far longer than Tier 1 components. The same went with the battery, another crafted mana battery that could half power the Cage.

Temptation and greed nearly caused Maya to switch out Veskari’s nearly full battery for one of the barely recharging batteries they had hooked up to the cores. That would shave off a lot of damn time for them, but she had to relent.

Screwing over Veskari to save Roci was not an act she was willing to do. She needed Veskari and she was not an asshole… usually.

“Alright, After we’re done here, I want you to triple check that assault craft. Make sure every inch of it’s in good condition,” Maya said as they walked down the corridor.

“I need to see Yosi first,” Veskari said.

“Bullshit,” Maya stated bluntly. “You can play hide the dino sausage later, check that assault craft out. Work first. Play later. You both have things to do.”

Veskari grumbled something but he didn’t go against what she said. He led them through several corridors and passed several shut blast doors. Maya had dropped those doors as a security precaution and now grumbled as she had to reopen them and then have Tender and Veskari lift the doors to be relocked into place. A Tier 2 golem construct body was far stronger than Tender’s frame.

“Don’t worry about it, pal. Just hang onto that feeling of inadequacy at the sight of Veskari’s bulging biceps and use it as fuel in your workout later tonight.”

“I don’t feel anything,” Tender said.

“That’s the spirit. Stiff upper lip.”

Maya unlocked a few other doors and they arrived to a maintenance room tucked between a bathroom and a water processing station. Maya eyed the water pumps and could almost feel the things she could make out of the machine.

“This it?” Maya asked as they entered a large room.

“Yeah, these are the artificial gravity panels,” Veskari said.

The room was about five meters long and three wide. In the center of the room, free from any clutter or machinery were sheets of what Maya would have suspected as being ply wood. They were nearly two meter by one meter rectangles and about ten centimeters thick.

The Hanganathorie was a space ship, Maya knew it intellectually. It traveled through space. It had space ship shields, space ship defenses, space ship artificial gravity. All the things she would need if she were going to try and get to a space station in orbit.

“All this surviving day to day against wacky shit that pops up is really hampering my exploration and studying of this ship,” Maya said to Tender.

“Agreed, boss. There is a lot of ‘wacky shit’ going on lately.”

“Right!” Maya sighed and popped the faceplate of her armor off. “Okay, we need five of these panels. Then we’re gonna start stripping the remaining thrusters off the starboard side, they still seem intact. In addition, we’re going to need to fix up the oxygen cycler. We only have… thirty hours to do it.”

***

The dimensional cage required a minimum of 16Mg to open the threshold, a number that Maya still hadn’t figured the reason for. The Cage didn’t draw any power when it was activated, only when it was being used. Their new operating procedure was to wait until the cores charged the two main mana batteries which would take nearly eighty hours total.

Maya was pushing them to the extreme limit of what the Cage could run on, 20Mg. If they did it right, they would have ten hours of MVT to find Roci and hopefully save the space station, but that would take forty hours of recharge time for them to achieve. That meant just over three hours and twenty minutes in MVT would have passed.

The space station had been under attack by some kind of slime creature, but in addition to that their orbit was beginning to decay; which would cause them to all die when they hit the atmosphere. That would happen in six MVT hours.

Bell had suggested they just wait and then send in Tender and the assault craft to rescue Roci, but Maya’s mind was already moving a step ahead and thinking of the possibilities.

Worry for Roci and their potential death was plaguing her, but she could do nothing right now for Roci. The drone rocket had already been fired and by now the fight against the slime had been won or loss. Maya felt her stomach churn at every thought of what might have happened to Roci.

It was odd, she found herself thinking. Just a few days prior she hadn’t known what to do with the young AI. System Touched and given her name, seemingly given the abilities granted to actual SIL. It was an odd thing that no one had the time to fully process. Too much was happening constantly for her to sit down and fully think it through. All she knew was that allowing Roci to die or abandoning the young AI was wrong and she was not going to allow it to happen.

Roci was a Sullivan after all. A part of her House, the same as Yosi. If she couldn’t protect those of her House, then what did that mean?

Maya shook her head as she disconnected the gravity panels and loaded them onto Tender’s back. The rogue AI was strong enough to carry these and Veskari had already skittered off, probably to show off his rhinestones to Yosi. She had been working on refurbishing the space suits they had found. They weren’t made from organic material and they were of good quality, so the last twenty thousand standard years hadn’t harmed them. They were also designed for the Nerigana and the Nerigana were short folk, short slave owning folk.

Even as worry consumed Maya, she was already making other plans. Perhaps it was all the new attribute point she had assigned to her mental stats, but she felt wonderful. Extremely tired, but absolutely wonderful. Her mind was clear and her thoughts, although slightly scattered were clear and concise.

The System had told her she needed all her stats above a hundred and to be in Tier 2 levels, which were over one hundred, to begin using essence mana in earnest. Maya glanced at her status page and saw that she was half way there, in levels and in attribute points. With her new Foundation, she would be getting a lot more points per level than usual, almost enough to gain one whole point for each stat.

The assault shuttle was small enough to fit into the dimensional cage, but Maya wasn’t just stopping there. She wasn’t just out to save Roci, she was out to save the space station and hopefully recruit the occupants to her cause. She had a space ship that couldn’t fly, there was a space station that was dying in Earth orbit, there was an apocalypse going on, and if there was one thing she learned from Star Wars it was having the high ground.

The cores were the main concern first of all. She needed them in orbit, after Tender had told her Earth was experiencing an ambient mana saturation of nearly 8000p per meter, Maya was overjoyed at the news, that would mean they would be making the 350Mg per core per standard day she had hoped for.

The new recharge rate of the cores would allow them to almost indefinitely be able to stay connected to Earth, if they didn’t move around too much. But to change out the cores, to replace the batteries, and to spread out the black goo net, they would need people on the ground, or in the space station, to do the work for them. It was either that or have Tender or Nan live out in orbit around Earth, changing batteries.

That was something Maya wasn’t willing to do. She loved the two of them and she wasn’t about to send them off to be a battery changer. If there were people in orbit already…

It was selfish she knew. These people had families back on Earth too, they had to be worried, scared, and completely out of the loop as to what was happening. Integration had scrambled a lot of electronics in the days that followed. They had no idea what was going on, except that they were being attacked by a space monster.

They deposited the panels in the mess hall, where everything was currently being stored. Yosi was at a fabricator they had pulled out of the BR and was using duracloth to adjust the space suits. She wasn’t a skilled tailor or seamstress, but Nan had produced a simple design that was based on Maya’s physical requirements and needs. They were rough measurements for men and women bigger or smaller than she was.

Bell was working at his new alchemy station, making more potions the astronauts might need and also relearning his rusty skills. It had been nearly four months since he had made any kind of potion.

Nan was making everything from food ration bars to medicine and at the same time involved in a small competition with Bell to create items that humans would need to survive in space. Maya didn’t discourage the friendly rivalry, it was producing results.

It was a good thing that rogue AIs hadn’t gotten to the ship thrusters. Maya didn’t know what to do if they had been recycled like much of the higher end materials on the ship. It took her and Tender nearly twelve hours to pull the four thrusters out of the hull, all the while Maya cursed and groaned as her limited [Mechanic], [Technician], and [Engineer] abilities weren’t much use. The removal and installation of thrusters were too high leveled for her to instinctively understand how to do it.

But it wasn’t a total loss. Veskari talked them through it and

in the end she did level enough to understand what to do.

[Mechanic] Level 9

[Technician] Level 6

[Engineer] Level 3

She could almost feel the call of the level 10 occupational bonus. If she leveled mechanic once more she would be able to apply one of the bonuses she had received. The five bonuses she had gotten from leveling to level fifty were still something she hadn’t fully looked into yet. Veskari was a font of knowledge and that knowledge was needed to make sure the assault craft was space flight worthy.

She could wait. Right now getting everything ready for the trip back to Earth space was paramount.

Ultimately the goal was to save Roci, but beyond that they needed that space station. They needed those astronauts and they would do so by giving them everything they would need to survive in space. Maya would build an entire space station from the ground up if she needed to. But for now, she would provide them with power, food, oxygen, water, gravity, and thrusters to keep the station from decaying in orbit. She would give them knowledge cubes, space suits, tools, weapons, and if it were possible she would buy a settlement deed for the station.

She sat down heavily on a thruster, feeling exhaustion clawing at her mind.

“You need to sleep, boss.” Tender said.

Maya looked up at the rogue AI and smiled weakly.

“You know the words.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’

“Damn straight. Now, let’s work on that water recycler.”

***

Day 6

International Space Station

“Was I just hallucinating?” George Hazel asked. He blinked and stared out a porthole in the Copula, looking toward a spot in space where he swore he had seen Morse Code messages.

“I don’t know,” Hanna Rogers remarked. She looked exhausted. “I think I saw the message. I’m not sure.” She breathed weakly in the dim light. They were on chemical lighting now, their electronics finally giving out to some kind of electromagnetic pulse.

They had all seen the strange lights coming out of Earth. What looked like explosions and then the sudden disappearance of all lighting across the globe. That had brought more fear than the possible explosions they had seen. It had lead to some tense moments between the three American astronaut crew and the three Russian Cosmonauts. Only Izumi Kaname was the outlier, the Japanese native being the peace broker between the two groups.

Was it nuclear war? What had happened. The satellites were all down, they couldn’t reach planetside, and they were stuck up here as their equipment slowly began to fail.

It had been nearly a week and they had been able to keep things running for five days, but on the sixth, everything began to fail.

It wasn’t whatever had struck Earth that was causing the station to fail, it was that thing upon the hull of the space station. A slime like creature that had mutated from some of the biological experiments that had been brought on board. No one knew what it was, some kind of ameba perhaps. Even Hanna didn’t know and she had been a biologist as well as an engineer.

It had grown fast and large, one of the cosmonauts, Anton Misurkin, had shoved it into a Soyuz reentry craft, but he had been hit by a piece of the slime. It had eaten through his torso in minutes, killing him before they could even try and help him. The Soyuz capsule had been ejected, but the creature had somehow returned.

Now it was chewing through their hull, trying get at them. If it weren’t for the danger and terror it represented, the scientists and engineers on board would have loved studying it.

“There,” George said. He blinked, the message was coming very fast. “It says… ANY1 HOME.”

Hanna chuckled, without looking up. She was too exhausted.

A strange thing had occurred nearly seven days before, a message had all filled their vision about something called Integration. Many said it reminded them of video games, something about RPGs and the like. George wasn’t one for video games, he was a colonel in the US Army. He was also the station commander for this expedition.

This Integration was the cause of all their misery, it seemed. It had done something to Earth, it had caused wide spread destruction from what they could see. There were whole landmasses that were… missing. More than that, there were land masses that had seemed to appear over night. It was strange and terrible.

Yet all their fear had been reserved for the slime monster trying to chew through their station. They didn’t know what to do now, they had no power and were working off of their reserves. The only hope was that they would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere before the slime killed them all. Decompression or burning up. It was a hell of a choice.

“What did you say back?” Hanna asked. “No solicitors?”

George grunted. “No, just SOS.”

“Shouldn’t it be SOSS?”

“You know SOS isn’t an abbreviation for anything.”

Hanna chuckled weakly.

Another thing that had occurred after Integration was a few of the crew gained some kind of power. Hanna’s was Air Cleanse. Once an hour she could cleanse the air in any one of the modules she was in. With the oxygen scrubbers down now, it was a miracle, but it also meant she had to keep moving. They had rigged up a mechanical air circulator to keep the fresh air moving, but it was a fool’s errand. Eventually they would run out of clean air or the slime would kill them or they would die in reentry.

He sent a last SOS signal with his light and then sat back. He was probably hallucinating. He stared out of the porthole and saw a small bright explosion, blue light flashing and then it was gone.

“What was that?” he wondered out loud.