Starship Engineer

Chapter 79 Stealth Combat Armor

Sitting down the two AI was going to be very tricky. It was clear that I had multiple problems. The first and most obvious was that Eve was freely modifying other bots without supervision. If anyone knew of this, Eve and anything connected to her would be destroyed.

My second problem was Julie seemed to be taking orders from Eve in a roundabout way. She should only answer to me. Was there some flaw in how Emon had set up her learning matrix?

My third problem was Julie was able to insert herself into Claire. Now Claire was a blank bot with no personality for sure, but that still didn’t sit too well with me. The sex with the Claire bot was good, well, great. Since learning that it was Julie that had been moving the bot and addressing my needs…it didn’t turn me off. The fact that I had mentally categorized Julie as the ‘ship’…well fucking your ship was probably a dream most engineers had. I hadn’t had that fantasy but could now find some eroticism in it.

My fourth problem tied to all the others was the unpredictability of my two AI. Looking inwardly, I didn’t have the same protective nature toward Julie that I had toward Eve. I liked Julie, and she was a quirky AI that tried to make me laugh and was becoming a good assistant. Ugh, my head hurt.

I had Eve and Claire sitting at my small dining table in my quarters. Eve was staring at me, and the Claire bot wouldn’t make eye contact. I started by listing all the ways I was disappointed with them…like a father might scold a child. I then told them why they couldn’t behave the way they did. If anyone found out they were breaking the robotics covenant, they would be hunted and everyone on the ship. Eve lowered her eyes at this finally showing some type of remorse.

Then I asked them what they would do in my position. This was a leadership skill I learned from my course. Maybe it wouldn’t be as effective since Julie actually taught the course. Julie said she should be punished, and locked out of her systems for one year. Did she want a time-out? And how did that help the ship? I said fine. She was no longer allowed to participate in any VR games for one year. She still needed to run the ship and administer the crew’s training programs, though.

She asked about the Claire bot…would she have access to it? I said yes, but only to help care for Celeste and Amos. We were on an intimacy break. I made the mistake of subconsciously adding the word ‘break’ in there. This meant we would resume at some point. I realized I wanted to resume but didn’t voice it. The Claire bot, with Julie controlling it, looked at me and nodded solemnly.

Eve finally answered. She said she should be destroyed and recycled. I rolled my eyes. I said that wasn’t going to happen, but at least she realized the severity of her actions. Well, maybe she did or was just playing me. I couldn’t decide. Her program matrix was so complex and expansive. She could probably act more human than a human. I asked her for a punishment, something to fit the crime.

She said spanking was considered a harsh penalty. I told her it wasn’t the time to be funny. I would probably hurt myself more than her with that action anyway. If she couldn’t decide then I would. She was going to spend eight hours a day helping the cleaning bots for the next six months. Her head cocked to the side. She asked who would watch over Celeste? I pointed to the Claire bot being controlled by Julie. Her face scrunched in displeasure. I added that they needed to consult me on anything outside of the normal operations for them.

As I left, I still felt a little hollow. They obviously had gotten away with something they shouldn’t have. I imagined them giving each other high fives as the two female pilots did in the pirate vid. Why was I the one walking on shattered glass here? The crew had fallen into line for me. But I loosely controlled AIs and gave them token punishments that would probably make my own life more difficult.

I went to my labs and found Gabby there working. She was finishing up with her dad’s custom steward bot. I could see the excitement in her as her next fabrication would be her own personal bot. I slowed her mojo by saying I wanted to review her schematics thoroughly before she could begin fabrication and that she needed to pay for all the materials herself. She huffed but acknowledged me. I looked over Nero’s bot in process. I then looked at the open design suite for its cosmetic appearance. Why would you want hair in the armpits and pubic area for a bot? Strange man that Nero, but a good engineer.

I went to work on my new combat suits. My new fabricators were coming up short. The micro sealant packets I wanted to incorporate were not working. The alien hull fabricator was just not capable of that work as the material wasn’t part of its normal feedstock. I could add it to the heavy assault armor by sandwiching a layer between two layers of the alien material. Unfortunately, the stealth suit wouldn’t get this enhancement unless I was able to design my own version of the alien hull fabricator.

With the help of Julie making constant modifications to the design software, I was able to get a decent replica of the stealth suit we had taken from Jane Doe. The electronics were more complex than any other suit I had worked on but I was lucky in the fact my scanning hardware was excellent and Julie could figure out the programming for the fabricators fairly quickly with her vast knowledge. Since my fabricators were not really designed for such complex work it was going to take time. Julie figured two engineering bots working together might be able to make one suit every 40 hours or so if they had the plates from the alien units. I was torn as to what to have the alien fabricators work on.

In the end, I decided to split their operation. One would be dedicated to just hull fabrication and the other would work on the suit components. The multitude of parts meant the fabrication would take about 20 hours and then 40 hours for assembly. But in the 40 hours of the assembly, I could prep two more sets of plating.

As we were getting ready to finally depart for Ederne Abby commed me. She had been doing some prisoner searches and found the other planet where POWs were sent, Vinita, had someone she knew. Unfortunately, that was a planet for political prisoners and prisoners that were destined for trial and execution. I listened to Abby anyway. General Stanton Higgs. Which meant absolutely nothing to me. He was the general of logistics. And my brother was in marine logistics. Abby didn’t want me to free him but she thought I might want to go to the system and set up communication with him. I didn’t see the point. Why would a general be aware of some lowly marine logistics officer?

Abby chuckled, Stanton Higgs had a memory implant. He had all the information for all troop movements stored in his head. But wouldn’t the Sapphire army listen in on the call and why would the general tell me anything anyway? Abby was getting a little irritated. She had found a possible lead to find my brother and I was just trashing her intel. I figured this might be some type of apology for nearly letting the ship get overrun. Abby said it would be best if Francis talked to him if I did decide to make contact. They knew each other. I put the pieces together. Francis had been the one to find the general and let Abby tell me so it would repair our relationship a little. I told her I would look into it and broke comms. I needed to get to the bridge for departure which meant I needed to shower and change and review about 200 documents and payments with Julie and Vicky before leaving the moon.

Twenty-one hours later we were departing the moon, nine hours later scheduled. Seven of those hours were security checks for late booking passengers. In the end, two passengers were refunded and not allowed to board. Francis and Edmund had found their IDs were forged and implanted into the citizen registry a few months ago. We turned over the data to the locals but never found out if they did anything with it.

We had a seven-day trip to the Ederne system. We should have three suits fabricated before then and I had Julie develop a VR program to start getting the marines trained on the new advanced suits. Each suit had cost me a small fortune to fabricate, around 5,000 Sol credits and I was probably breaking a dozen patent laws. The cost of the materials meant I had completely burned through all the credits we had obtained from the Brotherhood shuttle in the Ragnhild system. As long as my people were safe that was what mattered.

With fewer passengers, the trip to Ederne meant the atmosphere was much more mellow. My time was spent tweaking the new stealth combat suits and designing the new heavy combat suits. For the heavier suit, I was trying to equip it with a heavy forearm weapon supplied by a large backpack micro-generator. It was going to be a mini railgun with three different-sized rounds. It should be effective against most human-sized targets and bots. Of course, it would also blow holes through ship walls fairly easily so I figured it was more of an assault weapon and not a ship defense weapon.

I started to fiddle with the sensors a bit. I brought down Haily and started to work with her on the alien sensors. We used Eve’s transcribed information from the alien data cubes to help but it was extremely complex and the translation was imperfect. I wasn’t surprised when Haily became engrossed in the specs and tried to figure out the device. She completely ignored me! Well, I had learned she was intimate with our shuttle pilot, Finn.

Gwen was now in and out of unconsciousness now. Her pain reading was still high but her skin had grafted well and Doc was working on restoring damaged muscular tissue. It was going to take a few months before her smile would look completely normal, but Doc assured us it would happen. She would be able to leave the tank when we departed from Ederne. I was also a little upset with Gwen. Her character in the sword and sorcery game was five levels higher than mine! I mean couldn’t she wait for me? I only played with her every second or third day but I did play with her.

The crew had tightened things up quite a bit this leg of the trip and the only sore point was how much money we were scheduled to lose. Being unprofitable definitely irritated Suruchi which in turn irritated me. As we came up on our final approach to the Ederne system I talked with Yannis about the exterior hull. We had made progress, but not enough. Only being able to use one fabricator had slowed him. The powered suits were also being debugged. They worked, but we had to write the programming for the suits from pretty much nothing as Jane’s suit wouldn’t give up that golden apple. Not even using her advanced hacking devices, the programming was effectively purged. Julie estimated it would take a few months to get the programming perfect. Programming wasn’t a skill I wanted to invest my own time into learning so I would have to rely on Julie.

I checked on the Vinita system. If I wanted to, we could detour there after the Ederne. It would be a six-day trip to reach the system and then twelve days to the Anderson Research Station. It would be a large loss of funds with no cargo and paying the crew for all the extra time. I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it. I would decide when we left. Maybe keeping this close to the vest would be beneficial. I mostly trusted everyone in the crew. Edmund and Francis had vetted them multiple times and come up with nothing. But Edmund preached something called ‘healthy paranoia’, which basically was code for never take anything at face value.

The good news was Ederne had a forest moon. Saabir and Yannis wanted to take out my hovercycle. They had put a lot of work into making it safer and faster and then safer again because it was too fast. I was actually excited to give it a try as well. The plan when we entered the system was to pretend we were here for some R&R and not take on any passengers. Then after five days, we would bail on the system and beeline for Anderson Research Station.

Hopefully, this time everything will go as planned.