Starship Engineer

Chapter 92 Esmeray Station

Seven months…223 days…to me, the time flew by too fast.

The crew called the station Esmeray which meant Dark Moon, an apt name for a hidden base. The hardest part of the seven months we stayed on the station was keeping the passengers happy. I told them that we were docked at a secret pirate base, but we were not pirates. My story was our sublight drives were damaged, and we needed to do a complete rebuild from the parts on the station. I let them wander a bit, but once we actually started building the scaffolding to hide the Void Phoneix’s appearance, I kept them confined to the luxury deck.

Thankfully we didn’t have any competent engineers amongst the passengers. They were fine for the first eight weeks but then got anxious. Every week Suruchi and her staff were bending over backward to keep them happy. Each of the passengers was going to receive 2,600 Sol credits when they disembarked…whenever that was. That amount had started at 1,200 but had been slowly increased through negotiation with Suruchi. I didn’t mind the cost, I just felt like an idiot for taking on eleven passengers in the first place.

The odds had been extremely low that we would find the station. And once we were here, it just made too much sense not to leave. We had also been on high alert for the entire time we were docked at Esmeray, we were ready to get everyone on board in twenty minutes and depart. I didn’t want to get caught with our pants down like when we were plundering the alien planetoid.

In reference to pants down…my new software engineer brought me into Julie’s AI room to get my assistance with model replacements. It hadn’t occurred to me at the moment that it was a job usually a bot would do. Just pull a data module, scan for damage, and replace it. Well, Danielle made a move on me, pinning me to a rack and kissing me hard. I had been eyeing her a lot since she came on board, and she had assumed my coming to help her was a clear invitation, so she jumped me. She had been very aggressive in her pursuit, and as we lay on the floor of the AI processing room, I asked her what made her so bold. She had talked with Gwen. Gwen had told her if she wanted anything to happen, she was going to have to initiate it. So I guess thank you, Gwen!

The relationship between Danielle and myself was just having sex at different secret locations across the ship for the first week. Then the next month was in her quarters. Then she just seemed to have moved into my quarters. Ten weeks after hiring her to my crew, she was living with me. Gwen seemed to think it was completely normal and still came by for dinner every evening and to play with the kids.

Surprisingly Julie and Eve never commented on my new relationship. I knew Eve had a bit of a jealous and protective streak in her. Julie’s program was all about pleasing the ship captain, me. When I asked Danielle to look into the potential issue with Julie, they had a frank conversation about my mental well-being. Julie referred to herself as the concerned ex who would be there to pick up the pieces if Danielle broke my heart. I laughed at the characterization, but when Danielle did not, I grimaced slightly. I doubted my AI problems were completely behind me.

One of our most successful projects was getting the marine drop shuttle fitted with the micro FTL drives from the Brotherhood. The range was slightly diminished from the 25 light-year specs. My shuttle could only make a max trip of 20 light years. We were missing some of the core programming and modules from when I cut through the nose of the shuttle. Still, it was a huge boost from its prior half-light-year skip in subspace. The team had transferred over to trying to upscale the drive to install a similar system on the ultra-fast courier ship, the Caladrius. Since the Caladrius was getting a hull upgrade, adding the subspace emitters wasn’t difficult. The project wasn’t complete before we departed Esmeray station, though.

Our shield technology made some leaps forward. Hans Anders was able to get the smaller alien units functional with a reasonable power adaptation. Upscaling the shields was feasible, but the core problem was the power consumption for the large ship. Hans was mostly working with computer models during our time at Esmeray since the outer hull was seeing so many changes already. He did manage to install some forward alien shields on both of our fighters, drawing directly from the engines, sacrificing maneuvering for shields.

We finished the entire outer hull of the Void Phoenix in just four months, including adding all the defensive upgrades and the two future emplacements for the heavier forward offensive grazers. The ship looked marvelous, and it felt dirty to cover her with four large scaffolds. This would change her from a sleek predator of space to a fat egg. It had to be done. It would also be apropos to her name of Phoenix when we were able to shed the outer skin and fly unmolested again. Each of the four scaffolds had 196 points which it was attached to the phoenix with explosive bolts. To remove our covering the ship would need to be vectoring forward, blow both the two aft sections, flip 180 degrees, and then blow the two fore sections.

Unfortunately, we didn’t put as much engineering thought into our hull addition. The additional subspace emitters, deflector shield emitters, sensor extenders, controls, and dozens of other things we covered with the shell took an extreme amount of engineering hours to troubleshoot issue after issue. Torra had the most difficult job having to recalibrate and reprogram the systems for propulsion due to the altered mass and numerous covered thrusters. That got even more difficult as we started stuffing the voids in the scaffolding cavity with items from Esmeray station to sell. When we were ready to depart, Torra was also close to term. She was going to have identical twin boys.

The good news from this major clusterfuck was we were definitely going to appear as a heavy lumbering freighter with lots of engineering problems at our next port of call. And even though it was going to be difficult to retrieve these hastily secured items from the voids they at least made it appear we were an actual trade ship.

Nero had led the salvage operation with Kara Briggs. They had combed both vessels and took everything of value that was not bolted down. We still left a lot behind as the station’s volume was nearly thirty times that of the Void Phoneix, but they assured me that we had gotten everything of value that they could stuff under our girl’s skirt.

Vicky, the logistics officer, had prepared some nice falsified cargo manifests. When we did sell these items, it was going to look like we had been traveling the cosmos just trying to make a credit here and there like most of the other independent traders out here.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when a fair number of Kara’s crew wanted to sign on to the Void Phoenix. I paid well. I was not the Union. And the crew lived pretty pampered lives with all the tech on board. Will Swain, the doctor was my first signee. He was sweet on my Doc, Andie. He was going to be in charge of caring for our (hopefully) extensive marine compliment. His nickname became ‘Scrubs’ by the marines. He thought it was because medical personnel needed to scrub in before procedures. It was actually because the marines considered him a second-tier doc compared to Andie…calling in the scrub to handle the lower-priority crew.

Elias and Zoe, by far, had the best time during our stay. They got active fighter training blowing up drones. Had plenty of time to move ships and shuttles out in space for testing, and both got sizable pay raises on top. The only problem was tracking their fuel consumption when they went joyriding. Fuel was the one resource we needed to track. The Sapphirean fighters were becoming my go-to offensive tool in the VR emergency sims. They could take a beating with their alien shield and hull and were deceptively fast. I hated the idea of ordering a pilot to hold off a trio of corvettes so we could escape in the sims but damn if Zoe and Elias didn’t get it done 9 out of 10 times. The pair even designed an ad-hoc race track on the station for the completed hoverbikes. After Saabir crashed one of the bikes on the track, I had to end that fun, though.

My two botanists, Miguel Asuni and Abraham Zaire were testing their new fruiting bushes. They were making juices from the yellow fruit and seeing if it was compatible with human physiology with the help of the doctors. About five months into our stay, Miguel got impatient and just drank some…and he didn’t die or turn into a hideous beast. Their early tests had said it was edible, but the Doc always wanted more testing done. It had a weird sugar molecule in it that she was uncertain about. Now Migual wanted to try fermenting the fruit to create a new alcohol.

Our sensor module project was also a notable success. They were fine-tuning the calibration. They worked on showing object masses instantly out to nearly 1,000,000 km. Danielle was still working on translating the data to terminals in the bridge, but if I understood everything, stealthed ships wouldn’t be able to hide from our sensors. The device somehow pulled its data from subspace based on molecular density to form an image…which made no sense. I was curious to know what would happen if we used the sensors within subspace.

Two of Kara’s old crew signed on to my crew as well. Garrison Saku become our sensor engineer. At the same time, Maria Roma became our power systems engineer. Both were just technicians and not even close to being engineers, but I hoped they would grow into the role by completing certifications. It had actually been Gwen who convinced me to let them join the crew. They were extremely positive personalities and great at parties. Julie set benchmark certs the pair needed to reach to keep their crew positions.

I didn’t see much of Gabby in the seven months. She was locked in the robotics lab, working most of every day. Her personal bot, the one that looked like me, was assisting her with refurbishing all the station bots for us to sell. I did get a few notifications from Julie that Gabby was poking through my Venom Bot files, but I never addressed it.

The marines were having a lot of fun, and Luna was practicing her new craft of servicing the combat armor. She was actually getting pretty good at it, and I was getting a little too concerned about how comfortable the girl was around the marines. Abby assured me she was like their younger sister, nothing more. Julie had VR certs for the new suits now, so the marines had worked their way through them and were doing the practical certs. They were itching to bring in more of their friends from the Union into the fun. Well, that was going to be our next stop.

As the final checks were being done, I had a meeting with Kara Briggs. She had given it much thought and requested to join my crew. When I asked what capacity, she stumbled and said whatever was available. Didn’t she want to return to her family? The Union navy was her family. I talked with Suruchi about it, and she said I should make Kara the bridge first officer. Suruchi would gladly relinquish the title as long as I didn’t cut her pay. So that is how I added our first actual naval officer to my bridge.

It felt like we were leaving home as we detached from Esmeray station. We left enough behind that if we ever needed to hide out here again, we could return to a functioning station. Now I needed to go drop off nine of Kara’s crew and eleven passengers who had long overstayed their welcome.