Chapter 72: Absorbing More Materials

"We didn’t break anything, Captain," Elena said, stepping up to station two with her head held high, though a distinct warmth colored her pale cheeks. "On the contrary... We’ve significantly improved this vessel using parts salvaged from the raider."

Jin-Ah tapped the central holo-projector on the command console.

HUMMM!

A crisp rotating wireframe of the Wanderer-7 expanded into the air between them in bright clean cerulean lines.

Elena pointed to the bay right behind the dorsal turret housing.

"First, Harper stripped the raider’s machine shop... We moved their high-precision CNC ballistic lathe and balancing jigs into our armory, so we can now press our own tungsten slugs to a tenth of a micron."

"Next, the hull," she went on, gesturing at the starboard flank of the model, where a row of dense dark plates stood out in sharp relief. "The Shroud Ray fight left our starboard armor belt critically damaged. Chloe and I cut seven slate-composite battleplates off the Black Kite’s hull, carried them across and welded them over our damaged frames... Our starboard kinetic dispersion threshold is up twenty-two percent."

Aoi stepped up beside her and tapped the lower engineering manifests.

"Camila and I took the raider’s medical and fuel stores," she reported smoothly. "We moved over two thousand liters of refined Pyre Eel propellant into our ventral bladders, and we recovered three synthesis cartridges from their medical lockers. They refilled the medbay vats and sped up your recovery..."

Jin-Ah swiped her slate and brought up the astrogation overlay.

"And I broke through their corrupted firewalls and pulled their full regional star charts, with jump corridors mapped across three neighboring systems... The Foundry absorbed every piece of it."

The display shifted and highlighted the vessel’s evolution readout in bright amber.

[WANDERER-7: CURRENT EVOLUTION PROGRESS]

[Vessel Classification: Tier-1 Assault Corvette (Vessel Tier 2)]

[Overall Evolution Bar: 24%]

[Active Hardware Additions: High-Precision CNC Ballistic Lathe, Starboard Slate-Composite Battleplates, Refined Bio-Propellant Reserves, Medical Synthesis Feed, Sector Cartography Ledger]

Leo stopped chewing.

He looked at the glowing twenty-four percent and then at the six women around the dais.

He saw the fresh calluses on Harper’s knuckles, the tiny burn holes in Elena’s sleeves from the plasma torch, the soil still in the seams of Camila’s apron and the quiet pride in Aoi and Jin-Ah’s eyes.

...They had gone through that freezing tube over and over, cut half a raider apart with hand tools and hauled tons of metal across the void with their own arms to make his ship whole again.

A deep quiet warmth settled behind his ribs.

He set his bowl down, wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked at each of them in turn.

"Thank you," he said, low and sincere. "All of you. You did an incredible job... Really."

All six of them exhaled at once, their shoulders dropping as bright relieved smiles spread across their faces.

Harper rubbed the back of her neck, Elena gave a dignified little nod and Camila practically bounced on her heels.

"I carried all seven," Chloe said quietly from the step by his feet.

Leo reached down and ruffled her bangs, and she leaned into his hand with her eyes half closed like a cat in the sun.

"There’s one more thing about the raider, Leo," Aoi said, her tone turning a shade more serious as she crossed her arms. "When Elena opened up their engineering deck, we found their core. It was a seeded crystal drive, just like ours... and it had Ren’s red virus chips jammed into every port around its base."

Jin-Ah reached into her thigh pocket and held up the frozen chip, still faintly frosted after a week.

"The same model as this one."

Leo’s brows drew together. "His own ship?"

"It was never his ship," Elena said bluntly, her icy eyes narrowing. "A seeded ship answers to its Captain and nobody else. If it had been Ren’s, he’d never have needed to chain it... It belonged to someone else from Earth I think, and Ren forced it to obey him with those chips."

Leo blinked and sat with that for two silent seconds.

He looked out through the canopy at the dark slate prow of the ninety-meter raider still clamped to their flank, and then a dry amused smirk spread across his mouth.

"I see..." he murmured, shaking his head with a quiet chuckle. "Is that why he drove so badly?"

Harper let out an explosive snort and threw her head back laughing so hard she nearly choked, while Camila giggled into her hands.

"I’m serious!" Leo said, holding up a potato wedge like an accusing finger. "He kept telling me to take the eel broadside on a three-quarter burn, and then he lectured me that my angle was off by three degrees... It was like getting flying lessons from a guy steering a tractor with a pair of pliers! If the ship wasn’t even his, no wonder he flew like an amateur!"

"He was an atrocious pilot," Elena agreed, a rare wicked little grin curling her lips. "And Dekker was the one flying it half the time anyway."

As the laughter faded, Leo leaned back against the headrest and let his eyes drift upward, reaching inward for the memory of what had happened out in the freezing dark.

...It was frustratingly vague.

He remembered the boot slamming into his ribs, the sickening tumble through the vacuum, the burning in his lungs and the blind desperation of spending the spin he’d saved since the Shroud Ray.

He remembered a hexagonal black vial and drinking fire, and his own heartbeat so loud it had shaken the stars.

After that there was only blinding golden light, the void folding under his feet like crumpled paper... and the terrifying certainty that the universe had no choice but to obey him.

He focused his intent and called up his interface.

SHING!

A translucent blue panel flickered to life beside his shoulder.

[STATUS]

[User: Leo Kaine (Master Captain / Level 5)]

[Skill: Universal Determination]

[Rank: SSS-Rank]

[Description: As long as you have enough determination, the universe will bend to your will to make sure you accomplish your goal.]

[Availability: Locked... Criteria is unfulfilled and Host biological parameters currently insufficient for conscious reactivation.

Leo stared at the greyed-out text, and his jaw tightened.

’What’s the point of an SSS-Rank skill if I can’t use it at will...’ he thought with a flicker of annoyance darting through him.

He remembered the sheer impossible scale of it, the cold of space simply ceasing to matter, the void folding under his will and the raider’s rail-cannons swinging around like toys in slow motion... It had been intoxicating and undeniably magnificent.

’I nearly blew myself apart using it,’ he thought, glancing down at his newly healed chest. ’My body wasn’t ready but I’ll figure out how to open that door again... That power... I want to use it again.’

He dismissed the panel with a flick of thought and looked back out through the canopy at the Black Kite.

The raider hung beside them like a dark hollow carcass.

Its port engine was a mangled ruin, its cannons and missile cells were gone, and its decks had been stripped of everything useful... Ninety meters of dead slate-iron, taking up their docking clearance and sitting in the drift like a giant beacon.

"Alright," he said, setting his empty cup down on the tray. "We’ve got everything we need out of her. Time to clean up our flank."

He laid his right hand flat in the primary crystal cradle.

HUMMMMM!

The familiar warm pulse of the neural link ran up his forearm and locked into his spine with a clean effortless resonance, and the Wanderer-7 shuddered with purring life as every display brightened to full clarity.

"Vela," he said. "Disengage the docking sleeve..."

HISS-CLANK!

Down the starboard corridor the heavy magnetic latches on the accordion tube let go with a sharp report, and the sleeve retracted, pulling away from the Kite’s outer ring as the corvette’s airlock doors sealed with a heavy pressurized thud.

Leo nudged the port attitude thrusters and eased the Wanderer-7 fifty meters off the raider, letting the dead warship drift into his forward firing arc.

He pulled up the weapons panel, and his eyebrows rose.

Beside the familiar turret readout sat two unfamiliar icons on the dorsal shoulders, labeled in fresh green text.

[SECONDARY BATTERY: POINT-DEFENSE LASER x2 / ONLINE]

"...Huh?" Leo said and fired them.

ZAP-BOOM!

ZAP-BOOM!

Two blinding high-density crimson beams lanced out from the Wanderer-7’s dorsal shoulders and struck the Black Kite dead in the midsection!

KRA-CRACK!

They vaporized three meters of slate-composite plating in a fraction of a second and boiled the titanium underneath into a white-hot cloud of plasma that blew the raider’s fuselage in half.

Leo’s hands froze in the cradles.

"Whoa," he breathed, staring at the devastation blooming across the dark. "What was that?! Since when do we have lasers that hit like siege cannons...?!"

Elena stepped up to the rail with a proud and immensely satisfied smirk.

"Since your third day in stasis, Captain," she said, resting one hand gracefully on her hip. "When you tore up the raider, its two point-defense laser batteries survived with barely a scratch on their housings... Harper and I took the cutting rigs out onto their dorsal hull, cut them free and mounted them on our secondary hardpoints, and then we rerouted auxiliary power from the core to double their output."

"We balanced the capacitors with the raider’s heavy bus switches," Harper chimed in, grinning ear to ear. "They drink power a little fast, but they’ll melt an armored shuttle in three pulses."

Leo looked at the two of them and a bright genuine grin split his face.

"You two are geniuses," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "...Remind me never to make you angry."

Harper puffed her chest out with a triumphant laugh, while Elena merely inclined her head as if the praise had been expected.

Camila had both hands over her mouth, and Jin-Ah was already scribbling the battery output into her slate with a look of deep professional offense that nobody had told her the numbers first.

Out through the canopy, the Black Kite was coming apart.

Its spine had snapped in two, and the huge sections of dark slate hull tumbled slowly through a glittering cloud of pulverized titanium and severed conduits.

Leo picked up the last potato wedge with his free hand, popped it in his mouth and tapped the recovery stud on the armrest.

"Foundry Recall," he said casually around his food. "Bring it all home."

THOOM!

A huge radiant cone of sapphire light erupted from the corvette’s ventral prow and caught the tumbling wreckage in a shimmering envelope.

The moment the chunks of slate touched the blue light they dissolved into swirling streams of glowing particles that poured into the Wanderer-7’s intake manifolds like a river of liquid starlight.

GURGLE-CRUNCH!

Deep in the ship’s belly, the Foundry roared to life, grinding the dense alloys down and swallowing every scrap of it.

A brilliant golden panel rolled down the holographic well in long columns.

[MAJOR VESSEL ABSORPTION]

[Target Absorbed: Tier-3 Raider (Black Kite / Seeded Hull)]

[Raw Materials Digested:]

[.High-Density Slate-Composite Alloy: 14,200 kg]

[.Structural Titanium Alloy: 8,900 kg]

[.Refined Superconductive Copper: 1,450 kg]

[.Intact Heavy Conduit Modules: 42 Units Vessel]

[Structural Evolution Progress: 24% ? 31%!]

[Evolutionary Milestones Unlocked: Internal Cargo Capacity Expanded by 30%... Main Hull Tensile Strength Increased by 18%... Magnetic Shield Grid has now been restored]

The Wanderer-7 groaned with raw physical growth.

The runners along the bridge pulsed with blinding intensity, the deck plates under their feet felt thicker and heavier, and a soft blue shimmer rippled once across the outside of the canopy as the shield grid hummed awake for the first time since the tutorial.

"Shields," Jin-Ah breathed. "We have shields again."

Leo let out a low whistle as the faint blue film faded back into the dark.

...Whatever came at them next, they wouldn’t be taking it bare-skinned anymore.

CHIME!

[Foundry intake complete... This unit notes that the Kite was considerably more useful dead.]

Harper burst into another snort, and Camila shook her head with a small amused smile.

Leo chewed the last of his potato and stared at the thirty-one percent marker with his dark eyes narrowed in thought.

’Days of siphoning asteroids for half a percent at a time,’ he thought, his fingers tapping slowly on the armrest. ’And one hostile ship gives us seven percent, a cargo hold and our shields back...’

A slow spark lit in the back of his mind.

’Out here, we might have to start hunting ships down for their raw materials... The gains are way too big to pass up.’

"Alright," he said, turning toward the console. "We’ve got fuel, food, armor, shields, and the ship is growing. What’s our next move?"

The bridge went quiet.

Jin-Ah took two measured steps forward with her slate held firmly in both hands, and her face had gone completely serious.

Her dark eyes locked onto his with an intensity that cut straight through the warm glow of the feast.

"Captain," She said. "There’s something else you need to see... A planet."