Deepspace: Zeta-13’s Restoration (Ea)(Com)

A commission for last_of_workers

“A long time ago, Zeta-13 was created as part of a special initiative by the Imperial Core. According to laws, Zeta-14 was classified as a space station under the control of the Imperial Core, meaning no one could mess with it.

However, after messing with a mysterious column, the place was ravaged by anomalies and abandoned, and according to those same laws, it was now considered lost. Having drifted so far from where it was originally located over the past hundred years, the laws meant it was up for grabs.

So by all rights, the eleven captains who claimed it working together had full ownership of it and all its resources, and no one could dispute it since it was perfectly legal. It was a long, hard battle for the captains, but one well worth it.”

After losing their original bodies, their ships and having to fight for their lives, the captains did it; they finally beat the anomalies and claimed Zeta-13. They each teetered on the edge, faced death and came out on top, and now the worst of it all is behind them.

They can now continue forward, but what exactly does that mean for them? They still have no ships, and despite leaving the anomalies behind for good, Zeta-13 and its surface were still covered in crazy robots, horrifying monsters, broken equipment and a list of other problems.

It was a death trap for normal people, so a long discussion took place amongst the captains, where they came up with several ideas on what to do next, and in the end they all came to the same conclusion.

They couldn’t abandon Zeta-13; it’s too valuable, and if they did abandon it, someone else would come around and claim it and plunder it themselves, meaning all the work they did to claim it was for nothing.

So the best option for them was to clear out the remaining baddies and other problems and work on restoring Zeta-13, starting with the most important things and working their way down the list until everything was done.

Their goal was to now turn Zeta-13 into a full-fledged stronghold for deep-space travelers and exploration, and by doing so, change the map of the human empire forever. It was a long, challenging road for them, but after only six months, they were already making great progress.

While the place wasn't entirely safe, it was already the powerful stronghold they hoped it could be. Adventurers just like them now came to Jirlopos-4 in order to have their ships repaired, replenish supplies and even trade with the captains.

They still have a long way to go before Zeta-13 is fully functional; after all, there is only so much they could do in six months, but despite that, they got a lot done. Several rooms were restored for deep-space travelers.

Most of the space docks were restored, meaning they could house ships of any size and in great quantities. They even restored basic processing plants and several food sources. So now they can create all kinds of parts and grow many different foods that are often traded.

Although some of their more popular trade items come from the things the anomalies created, some of which were impossible to recreate and some of which were extremely hard to do so, making them worth a ton, and thanks to how long the anomalies were there, they had an abundance of them.

Normally a space station this massive would have someone in charge, but early on the captains agreed no one person would be in charge and that they’d each take responsibility for a specific area, and they’d work as equals to maintain Zeta-13 together.

Elber, thanks to losing access to her emotions, she was easily the best of the group to make complex decisions based on cold calculations and sound logic, not to mention she’s shown she can do that in the heat of the moment where others might panic and freeze up.

So she was tasked with overseeing the command center. Her main role there is not an active one. Her role there is emergency commander, which only activates if something threatens the station, like, say, a starship starts attacking.

In those moments it's her job to lead the others, decide what can be sacrificed and what needs to be protected and overall put an end to the danger as fast as possible with the minimal amount of damage to the station.

That could in theory be done by an AI, but they didn’t have access to one that powerful out here in deep space, and it would be too expensive to buy one right now, so they made do with Elber at the helm.

When not doing that, Elbar studies Zate-13, looking for the best course of action when it comes to rebuilding. Once she has a solid plan, she gives her input to the others and allows them to vote on it, but more often than not they take her logic to heart and follow it.

Other than that, she sometimes has to play judge amongst the other captains. Since she only thinks with logic, they use her to settle arguments and petty squabbles, and she sometimes takes her new ship out and simply flies around.

Briyelle, thanks to her incredible speed, is in charge of the rescue service department. Whenever there’s an emergency, no matter where it is in the facility, she’s the first one on the scene. Once she arrives, she does whatever she can to put an end to the danger.

Then she sees to any potential victims, taking them back to the rescue center to be treated by the medical bots if needed. So far she has personally saved over a hundred visitors and two of the other captains and has no plans to stop. The first few months of her job were more challenging.

She had to avoid certain extremely damaged routes, which made her response time longer, but more recently they fixed most of the tunnels, which she not only has mapped out in her head perfectly but also made it so she can get anywhere in half the time.

When there’s no emergency. She simply runs around the facility for fun, checking on people. Deron, she was put in charge of the supply department. She’s responsible for not only finding resources, extracting them, delivering them, and processing them, but also storing them for later use.

On top of all that, she’s also in charge of buying resources they can’t find from merchants. It’s a lot of work, which fairly earned her the title “Master of Warehouse.” Luckily, her job is made easier thanks to her nanobots.

Of course, she still can only control so many nanobots at a time, so it still takes her quite a bit, as even though it seems like a ton when you’re standing next to her, the work she gets done at a time is merely a drop in the ocean thanks to the size of Zeta-13.

Luckily her request for a special system that's hooked up to her was finally installed throughout the facility. Thanks to it, she had boxes of nanobots stored around and could connect to the boxes and use them as a transmitter.

That not only allowed her to control more at a time, but it also allowed her to control them more easily even if they were on the other side of the facility. Still, I thought, with all that, she still barely gets half a percent of her job done at a time.

Johnath, thanks to her incredibly special antennas, took over the support center and managed all life support functions. From the mundane things like ventilation and temperature controls to very important things like water filtration, artificial gravity, food production and monitoring radiation levels.

She also works alongside Briyelle by making all the medications someone would need, even going so far as to treat things that the visitors were about to get sick with, as she believed it was easier to prevent things than to treat them later.

Gayge, her role on the station is a bit different and is both simple and extremely complex. She’s a psionicist, which says it all. Her job is to monitor the mental field around the station and detect any negative intentions, as well as monitor people with her psi abilities.

Using her powers, she tracks threats that couldn’t possibly be discovered using normal methods, and should something extremely serious occur, she can use her more powerful abilities to perform a miracle and save someone.

On the outside, just looking at her while she works, she seems to just be meditating, but all her comrades know the truth, and while they don’t really know how her powers work, they know they’re crucial to maintaining the peace and operations at the facility.

Vycter, thanks to her very unique body, was able to take the position of chief mechanic. She now spends most of her time refitting the station and incoming ships that arrive in the hangars, where she spends a good amount of her time.

With her abilities, she can not only perform ultra-precise operations on extremely fragile objects, but she’s also able to lift and move very large and incredibly heavy objects with her bare hands, say the ships she’s working on for instance.

Now, while she is a mechanic, she’s not an engineer. She has no idea how to fix things she’s never seen before, and if something breaks suddenly, she’s at a complete loss. So she often speaks to Zaxary for guidance or help and then follows her instructions to fix problems.

Orin, her role is a bit strange compared to the others. Her main job is to create robot workers for the facility. From simple dust-cleaning robots that zoom across the floor or dust the walls and ceiling to special robots designed to help in rescue and aid as well as anything else that may need a small bot.

She mainly creates robots, as she really doesn’t like creating intelligent living creatures for specific purposes like that. She finds it inhumane. However, some tasks require living creatures in order to be completed, so she sometimes has to do it.

At first she was pretty bad at creating living creatures, but after long hours in the lab, she was able to create an entirely new species that was pretty similar to humans in shape; of course, their size is much different.

She can only create small things, so each one of these creatures only grows to a max height of one meter. In addition to that, their infancy state is quite short. They go from newborns to adults in less than a month.

In terms of intelligence, they often rival humans, sometimes even surpassing them, so while they were small, they weren't inferior in the slightest. Each one is capable of learning things quickly and they usually adapt not only their minds but also their bodies for the jobs they were created for.

As neat as they are, there is one downside. According to her calculations, she believes they only have a lifespan of thirty years, but since that much time has yet to pass, she’s hopeful she’s wrong and they get to live much longer lives by her side.

They are essentially her children; she remembers their names, their faces, the way they act and the things they like, she even knows them purely from their voices, and because they’re like her children, she truly cares for them.

So if one gets upset, hurt or even passes away, it makes her heart ache, and because of her genuine love, each of them is completely devoted to her and willing to protect her and her home even if it may cost them their lives.

Zaxary, thanks to her immense knowledge and ability to understand any mechanism, she was tasked with being the station's chief engineer. She’s the one everyone turns to when things need to be built and repaired, as she always has a plan or, at the very least, an idea of how to do it.

She’s basically Vycter’s supervisor as well, but they don’t work like boss and employee. Instead, they tend to work as teammates, with Zaxary tackling the more complex problems and repairs and Vycter handling the smaller, more delicate, or easy-to-complete ones.

Despite what each of them focuses on, they work closely together on things all the time. Sometimes it’s because the other needed help, or one of them didn’t have much work, or they had so much work it was quicker to be teamed up.

As much as Zaxary loved working on ships in the past, she quite enjoys her new position of working on ships and the station, and she loves having a partner that not only listens to the directions she gives but is always eager to follow them.

Maxtom, she works as a part of the security team, but unlike Nyco, she’s an investigator. She spends her time solving old crimes and potential new ones by collecting evidence, gathering intel and spying on people.

Thanks to her powers, most of that is pretty easy. If she suspects someone is up to something, she simply follows them, and since they have no idea she’s there, they often commit crimes or confess to them right in front of her.

Once she has enough proof, she arrests them and tosses them in jail. Maxtom often goes and chats with Gayge when she’s having trouble finding clues, and thanks to Gayge’s psychic powers, she’s able to tell Maxtom where she needs to be in order to solve a case.

Nyco, she does two different jobs, one that she was assigned and the other she does because it’s just who she is. Her first job's main responsibilities include ensuring the station's military systems all work properly.

That included the weapons the facility uses to defend itself, the shields that protect the place, checking the minefields out on the surface, the combat fleet, and everything that could be included. If any of those things stop working, she either buys new ones or gets Zaxary to fix them.

Luckily they haven’t needed to use anything but the shields, as the only danger seemed to be random asteroids that fly in every once in a while. As for her other job, which she gave herself because her first job was boring and not enough.

She works alongside Maxtom in security. She acts as the head of security, essentially acting as an officer of the laws the captains put in place for Zeta-13. So she spends time patrolling and keeping the area safe and free of bad people.

Sometimes people do start stuff, and she’s had to knock someone out a few times and send them to jail, but for the most part people look at her and know that they should think twice, maybe even three times, before committing a crime around her.

Cayne, still the strong yet loving person she was, took on two different jobs. The first one is as the master chef. She not only cooks every meal for the captains who eat, but she also creates handmade food using products grown on Zeta-13 by Jonath to feed visitors and long-term guests.

She easily creates thousands of meals to prepare for guests each morning. Food that goes into a machine keeping it nice and fresh and allows the guest to pick and choose what they would like to eat.

As for the captains that eat, she manages their meals a bit more intensively. She wants them not only to have proper meals that fill them with energy, but she also wants them to have healthy diets, so she makes each one a specially crafted meal suited for their needs.

Once she’s completed her main cooking duties for the day and cleans up, she begins her second job, which is basically just helping out the others where they may need it. With Briyelle, she helps tend to the sick.

She acts as Elbar's eyes and explores still damaged areas to collect data on if they should be repaired. She’ll help move the heavy crates in the supply center for Deron. Jonathan and she work hard together to tend to the crops and animals that Cayne uses to cook.

There isn't much she can help Gayge with, so Cayne mostly just checks in on her and brings her treats and sometimes tidies up her area. With Zaxary and Vycter, Cayne would often lift really heavy things or move around the parts for the massive starfighters they were working on.

With Maxtom and Nyco, she’d help out where she could, either by helping to investigate or by patrolling the areas just to let crime know they were watching, and lastly, with Orin, Cayne will bring supplies Orin needs in order to create her children, and then Cayne will play with them a bit.

That’s all of them, and that’s what life inside the Zeta-13 is like. It still has a long way to go before it’s fully functional, but it’s a beacon in deep space, and with the captains of it determined to see it restored. What comes after that? Well, the answer is the same as it’s always been: more adventures in deep space.