Chapter 34 In space with a junkyard ship

Two days later

“It’s time to take a break from your mad scientist phase. The gravity generator arrived.”

Lola's voice broke my concentration. Then I processed what she said. So it was time to stop for now, but I still needed to finish this missile, as it was in a crucial stage, and I did not want to leave it unfinished and in a dangerous state.

It took me about four minutes to finish assembling it, after which I added it to the stack that was already done. They were still untested, as there was no way to test them, but the simulations showed that they should function excellently for their purpose.

Stretching myself felt good. Had I really been working on this for so long? My alarms were still set up for me to take breaks, but I guess my mind was so much on my work that I didn’t notice so much time passing by.

Walking onto the ramp, it was easy to see the shipping box in the distance that had the gravity generator in it. Instead of going and opening it up, I lit up a cigarette and continued to watch the box.

The delivery service that brought this box to me didn't allow the transport of explosives. Even for my missiles, I needed to buy base materials to turn into explosives instead of straight explosives. So there shouldn't be anything that goes boom, but there must be ways of getting past those restrictions.

So instead of going there myself, it was time to send in some of the idling drones. The ship was basically done. There was just another coat of stealth paint to be added. Both the engines were tested and seemed to be working, although the real test would need to be conducted outside this hangar.

The armor was also completely done but testing it would be quite stupid and something outside my current capabilities. The radiation shield was fixed. The two side engines, however—one was completely nonfunctional, and the other would become nonfunctional if I tried to use it. Both would stay in that state for now.

There simply wasn't enough time to do anything with them, as my two weeks were soon going to be up.

I still had the side cannons, but knowing now how strong the armour of everything flying is, they are pretty much useless. Currently, we only had one turret. I could’ve fixed the lower turret that got destroyed, but instead, it will now be used to launch missiles.

The ones that I designed were not meant to take out ships, they would be way too expensive and take up way too much space to ever be useful as of right now. So, I would have no capability of taking out any ships. Instead, these smaller missiles are designed to intercept incoming missiles, hopefully eliminating the need for me to ever use my remaining turret.

It was fun to figure out how to make the large open-source missile designs into smaller versions for the purpose I wanted them to complete. Compared to Earth designs even the open-source ones were superior.

What I had to do was also update the ship profile with the Adventurers Association using their quantum computer. Whenever you made significant changes, especially to engine configuration, you needed to update the description of your ship so no one would think that you were trying to impersonate an adventurer spaceship.

My ship was now registered as Forward Horizon Mark 1.1 with the updated description of it. Technically I could even transfer this name and registration to a new ship which will save me some time later on.

The drones had finally gotten the boxes open, revealing the two gravity generators. One of them should only be missing the crystal, and there was an instruction book on top of the gravity generator with another device.

“Bring the instructions back, but otherwise stay away from the gravity generators,” I instructed the drones that had opened the shipping box.

The instructions themselves were fascinating, and I learned quite a lot. The funny thing was that the book was changed—someone had written over it. It was written in common, but the lettering of the writing was so precise it almost looked machine-made.

These updated instructions were for the extra device sent with the delivery that would allow you to more easily change the shape and the intensity of the gravity generated.

From what I understood, usually, you needed to do this by manipulating dials placed inside the device. The instructions also said not to open the device, as it was hardware locked. That was also handwritten.

“Yeah, this is not at all suspicious,” I heard amusement over our connection from Lola, the ship, and basically every other drone.

I’m pretty sure that this calibration device was actually quite expensive.

“Lola, can you find out the price of the calibration device?”

“It's a specifically built tool and quite expensive—around 4 million, it seems like?”

“Looks like our enemies are gracious enough to donate us quite a lot of credits.”

It was time to start breaking those hardware locks very carefully. In fact, breaking them would probably be a bad idea. Bypassing them would be a better way to go, but it would take time.

Most likely, I would need to get the nanomachines in one at a time, and it’d take a while for them to reach the critical mass required for them to start gathering information about what’s inside.

To one of the drones, I attached a box with nano machines to deliver it to the gravity generator and deposited it on it. It needed to stay in proximity because we needed an extremely good connection to the nano machines, and I needed to do quite a lot of hands-on control of them to make sure that nothing went wrong.

It was an intense close to four hours when we finally started to get a clearer picture of what was inside one of the housings. The other housing didn’t have any hardware locks, and inside was an almost complete gravity generator, but it was missing a few coils that I should be able to make, and of course, the crystal.

The information we were getting from the hardware-locked device was crazy. So I was half right. There was a tracking device that seemed to have a simple quantum computer. But there were also explosives. They looked to be shaped charges meant to do damage toward the outside and keep the inside of the device intact—most likely for the tracking device.

All of this was incredibly well structured, and in a way that, if I were to break anything—even the tiniest of the hardware locks—the breaking of those circuits would trigger the explosives. Hopefully, there would be a way to disarm the explosives.

Almost 45 minutes later, and I had a complete overview of the booby-trapped device’s insides. Currently, I was a bit away from the screen, thinking about the implications of what I found.

There wasn't one tracker—there were two. One of them looked to be a more standard design made from the open designs available on the quantum web that even Lola managed to find.

The other one was more refined and had hardware locks of its own. There weren’t any markings on it—I wouldn’t expect there to be—but Lola suspects it’s from a corporate backing.

“So do you concur, Lola, that both our enemies hired that shop owner to plant their trackers and explosive shaped charges, most likely meant to take me out of FTL?”

“That does seem like it. Most likely, they don't know that both of them paid the shop owner—he was just double dipping, getting commissions from both sides.”

“I mean, you gotta admire the hustle of it. Wonder what he thought about being hired to do the same job for two different parties. Anyways, we have a larger problem to think about. That shop owner is good, and I don’t think there’s a way for me to disable any of the hardware locks—they're just way too good.”

“It’s a problem indeed, but I think we could neutralize the explosives. Yet the device would be made unusable afterwards, and the trackers would still be working. At least those trackers would only work after we drop out of FTL.”

That was true. It was actually really hard to track anything in space. From what I understood, the quantum tracker had built-in data collection for acceleration, time, and other things, so it could give the approximate location of where it is through the quantum net after every FTL jump. And of course, when in real space, it could update in real time the current location.

It is not a perfect tracker, but fooling it would not be easy. The problem was I didn’t want to lose the rest of the device, as I really needed a gravity generator.

That way I could keep my workshop operational during FTL travel—which was crucial so that I could build up the necessary resources for my ship upgrade and to make additional money, because everything manufactured would bring in quite a lot of credit.

We pondered on this problem for quite a while.

“What if we build a fake version of the insides of the device while we slowly lower it out from the bottom? There are large enough sections without a hardware lock that we should be able to cut into it and slowly transport the device out piece by piece while building a cheap replica so we wouldn’t trigger the booby trap.” Lola explained.

She then showed me an animated version of what she wanted to do.

“It will take time. We would also lose some nano machines. We would need to leave them behind to mimic some of the properties of the inner workings so we wouldn't trigger anything.”

If we succeeded, we would have all the necessary components to assemble a new gravity generator. Basically, the only thing we needed to build was the housing, and that would be easy enough.

We fortunately had the second device without any hardware locks, so I could get a proper molecular scan of the entire housing, which would only take a bit of time to print out.

With the plan made, it didn't take too long to implement. We gathered the necessary materials and the required number of nano machines. The booby-trapped device was moved to a more distant location, and so the operation began, with me still being quite far away from it—just in case.

Multiple times we were so close to disaster, but after enduring nearly five hours of working on the booby-trap device, we now had all the pieces of the inside of the device that we needed.

Now all that was left to do was assemble the new one, and we should have ourselves a gravity generator. We could also probably buy the necessary crystal and make the missing parts from the second device to have both be functional gravity generators.

That would, however, take a bit too much time, and I was running out of it. But what I could do was just buy the crystal and finish the device while in FTL.

“Lola, add the crystal to our shopping list.”

“Acknowledged.”

Now came the real question—do we turn this into the authorities, or could we use this in a way that would perhaps eliminate one of our enemies and send a message to the other? Yes, I think there is a way to do this that might even help us make some credits.

“I do not like the look on your face. Please tell me you're not thinking of doing something crazy?” Lola said and continued to question me as I didn’t answer.

Oh yes, the more I thought about it, the more I liked this idea.