Matuscarantos

  There was, of course, a catch, especially for only 500,000 credits.

  This particur YT-2400 known as the Red Moon, was a Spice smuggling vessel. Specifically, a Dark Dust smuggler. When it was finally captured, red handed, the Hutts had the ship stripped bare, hunting for every st spec of the powerful hallucinogen. Probably for their own use.

  The irony here is that the Spice Trade wasn't illegal in Hutt space, you just had to pay for the right permits. They were expensive though, so I completely understood why some beings might resort to smuggling.

  Accord to the ship's records, even the bulkheads had been removed in the extensive search. All that was left were the outer chassis, the power core, and the original hyperdrive engine. And those were probably untouched because the weight a ton.

  While troublesome, I could definitely work with that.

  Where other beings might be reluctant to deal with these issues, I saw it as an excellent opportunity. I could purpose build the floorpn from scratch. Did I really want to haul cargo, or transport passengers? No.

  I had a different vision of my ship's future.

  I wanted to travel as far and as fast as I could away from here. I wanted to be able to live without having to rely on others. I wanted to be able to turn any and every piece of scrap I came across into something amazing. So I needed, a full Workshop, Hydroponics, extra power and fuel capacity. And scary weapons to defend it all.

  A moment of loneliness hit me. I didn't understand it. How could I be lonely? I had my droids, and I'd certainly gather more droids as I could. They were wonderful company, and I would never tire of their antics, or working to make them better. But deep down perhaps, I thought something was missing from my picture of the future. Not that I had any clue what that might be right now.

  Perhaps with time and travel I'd figure it out.

  I bought the Red Moon. And paid the transfer fee to get it towed to my rented Ship lot.

  I'd need materials to build it out and make modifications, and those aforementioned weapons because pirates were certainly a common problem, especially in Hutt space. Because most of them in in one or another Hutt's pocket.

  I dug into the list of vessels again, and struck gold for a second time. A sale of the remaining parts of an old light Cruiser, with massive battle damage, model unknown. There were nav systems, comm systems, targeting systems, environmental and so on, pretty much very major system but the engineering section, no engines, no power core. That meant there was still hundreds of tons of usable Durasteel armor pting. Even some of the weapons remained retively intact.

  Though mounting a quad turbo ser cannon or two might be a bit much. Nah, who am I trying to fool, I was totally going to figure out how to use those.

  I'd likely need to run a second power core for the heavier draw of cruiser sized weapons. Or install heavy capacitors to store enough for a few shots, or both. I wasn't likely to run into anything heavier than a light cruiser anyway. If I did I should be able to out run it.

  1,000,000 credits. And yes not one of those systems was completely undamaged, but that was hardly a concern for me. I might have to pull off a few tricks and a lot of extra mana usage. It might take me a few months to fix up everything and get it adapted and installed on my YT-2400, but I was expecting that level of commitment to begin with.

  I bought the cruiser parts, and paid the towing fee and rented lot 38 next to the one I was already renting to have enough room for all the parts. Bh, this was starting to get a little out of hand.

  Nah. Way too many crazy ideas were dancing in my head. I needed to get my hands on my new baby. We'd better hustle, anyway, because I didn't want those parts unguarded for any longer than necessary. I might have to buy a few more guard bots.

  X4 hailed a couple of taxi speeders, and we were off. I spent most of the ten minute trip looking at the stars through the transparent ceiling. letting my thought wonder in the void.

  There she was, the Red Moon. 28.5 meters port to starboard. 21 meters Stern to Bow. 9 meters at from the top main weapon empcement to the bottom weapon empcement. Most of the ship sat at about 5 meters height creating a sloping effect on the main disk.

  My sense of ascetics was immediately insulted by several issues. Firstly, she was painted completely red, a horrid vibrant red that tore at the eyes. No, just no. That would have to be fixed post haste.

  Secondly, was the incomplete feeling of the shape.

  As almost all YT series ships were, the Red Moon was based on a disk. This particur model had a wing coming off on starboard side of the disk at the end of the wing was a tube with the cockpit at the bow, and an escape pod at the stern. The primary problem being that the disk, and the wing for that matter, wasn't complete.

  A small chunk of the starboard stern of the ship wasn't included in the baseline design. Also the wing was unnecessarily split with a gap in the middle. That was roughly 15 to 20 square meters of space sacrificed for what? Why would anyone think this was a good idea? And then if you made the wing fully symmetrical that might add yet another 5 square meters.

  With the already oversized power core that the base model included, it wasn't like they had needed to cut the weight down. And with what I was pnning to do about the power situation the weight would matter even less.

  While the non central cockpit was already a slight annoyance. That I could live with, but these intentional gaps in the design really pissed me off. It was inefficient. Well, I was going to fix those, right away.

  Feeling the sheer scope of the work I was pnning, settle on my shoulders, I sighed.

  "What's wrong, Master?" X4 had gone instantly into his worried mother mode.

  Red chimed in, Whurrr, Eeeek, Beep. The Astromech droid sound derisive, as he once again demonstrated his command of foul nguage. Were his former owners really that foul mouthed?

  "Yeah, Red hit right on the head, she is a hunk of junk, but she's our hunk of junk. It's going to take a lot of work to get her the way I want her. I'm kind of ticked off, but also kind of excited at the project we have before us." I gestured at the huge pile of cruiser scraps in the next lot. "X4, H-E, and Pal are on guard duty. Keep naughty hands away from our parts. Red, I'm going to need your help with all the welding and cutting we are going to be doing." The Power Hauler was going to be on parts hauling duty. Ha.

  Wait no, we could speed things up dramatically with the right help, and I wasn't hurting for money even after my earlier spending spree.

  Red and I accessed the local terminal to check for some few droids to help us.

  Ah ha! Four brand new HG-87 Engineering Droids. The HG-87 was a retively new model, the design was only a few hundred years old at this point. But they'd proven to be reliable. The were short squat non-humanoid models with six tool den arms and quadrupedal locomotion. Their programming was specialized in ship building and repair. 240,000 credits for the lot. I purchased them on the spot.

  They weren't likely to have developed their own sparks yet, but their interaction protocols should be robust.

  I also saw two IG model guard droids. They were somewhat used, and would need some repair. However, they were exceptional at their function and more than worth the effort. Another 200,000 gone.

  These droids had likely been thoroughly wiped. So I wasn't expecting much personality out of them at first.

  "Master, I would suggest a more tight fisted approach to spending from now on." X4 called out with a chastising tone. I'd forgotten I'd given him access to my finances, in a move to keep from having to deal with people myself. One more area for him to worry about me.

  Okay, while I still had more credits than I'd spent, X4 was right, I needed to calm down on spending for now. I had to make what I had st until we could start bringing in credits from our activities.

  "Alright, I'll slow the spending X4." But I wouldn't promise not to spend anything.

  Leaving X4 and Pal to deal with the new comers when they got here, I took Red into our new home. The cargo ramp was 4 meters wide and extended the full ten meters to the deck of the station.

  I was struck by how much room we had to work with. Sure a lot of that was because there were no interior bulkheads left, but hey, adding in bulkheads was an easy task. The hard part would be when we added to the chassis and making sure it was sealed tight so that we didn't decompress the second we left the Shipyard. I was trusting that my technomancy would be able to help out a bit there.

  We inspected the hyperdrive and power core, Scan revealed they were in surprisingly decent shape, but I could still see a few areas to make small improvements. The venting system was also good to go.

  It was hard to believe this was all mine now. We checked out the empty cockpit, the areas where the escape pods were missing. The sadly vacant weapon mounting points. I was gd that all the docking hatches and the former air lock's out door were still functional.

  I pulled up my datapad and paid a small fee to connect to the local public Holonet. I think my first act as Captain should be to rename the ship. I ran a few different name generators, trying to find something interesting.

  After some internal debate, I decided on a new name. Perhaps more fierce than I'd first intended, but I liked the sound of it. Our ship was now The Jade Shrike.

  Matuscarantos