It was a few days later that the Republic Embassy finally responded to his notification about the bodies; and a courier ship had coasted its way over to the Barricade as the ship was being carefully taken apart in a way that usually wasn’t done for engineering work; the Empire-make plasma beamer that was going to be one of its primary weapons when all of this was done was being dragged along by a series of drones; making careful measurements; firing; and dragging a few centimeters. Then repeating the process.

  Over. And over. And over. Creating a fairly smooth line as it worked its way across the ship.

  Kyle was safely inside, wearing his engineering frame, watching as it worked, when the signal came through; the dock next to his own had been occupied. He had company.

  He nodded to himself… and opened the airlock, continuing to monitor the cutting process on a tablet as he waited… and not for long.

  The local envoy for the republic; one of hundreds of envoys the nation had scattered around in places important enough for them to want a representative; stepped through; clearly an augment, though the exact type was uncertain, the man was short, heavy-set, and had a faint blue tinge to his skin, wearing a perfectly tailored suit; though the two bodyguards behind him were both wearing standard dark green skinsuits with the Republic logo.

  Not that different from the massive pile he had in storage, in fact, though skinsuits were a bit tougher and lighter than they used to be as materials advanced.

  He looked at the man for a moment, and set the tablet in a pouch attached to his frame, before giving a short bow.

  “Hello there, sir. My name is Kyle Huxley, and I have been performing a licensed salvage of an abandoned Republic spacecraft. I need to verify your status as a representative before we go further. May I please see your paperwork?”

  The man blinked… and raised his right hand. The guard on his right stepped forward, and opened a pouch of his own… extending a small slip of paper, with gold-embossed logo and data on it… which Kyle accepted, scanned… and read over the Envoy’s data in his HUD.

  Everything appeared to be valid… he gave a short nod.

  “Thank you, mister Chen.” He glanced at the display on the wall. He could just barely make out the cutting process.

  The envoy looked it over himself, before returning his gaze to Kyle. “The notice indicated there were human remains. How many are we speaking of?”

  Kyle grimaced. “Thirty-two which are almost entirely intact, and quite a few more only partial. I also have two hundred and twelve PB boxes that formerly belonged to the crew, and one item that I’d like to contact the family of the owner if at all possible, as it wouldn’t fit in a PB box and is a bit more delicate.”

  Chen looked a bit angry, his bald form crinkling as he shook his head. “...So many years out in the void. These wrecks haven’t been searched nearly as thoroughly as they should have.”

  “I can agree there, sir. Unfortunately, like many of the wrecks, someone went over this one a long time ago with a specific purpose in mind; in this case, grabbing the computer core; so people who came by later mostly assumed that it had been fully searched and skipped it for more potentially lucrative finds.”

  He nodded. “I suppose I can understand that. Over a million starships were destroyed in that war. I’m not surprised a few slipped through the cracks here and there. What’s the item that won’t fit?”

  Kyle slid the tablet back free… and tapped it a few times. Bringing up the katana, and the scroll attached to the plaque where they were mounted on the wall. “A katana. Oddly enough, I recently salvaged some of those off of an Empire wreck, earlier, but this one is much, much older. Definitely centuries, possibly even as much as a thousand years.”

  Chen stared at the tablet for a moment. “.... That…. Is strange. Its a relic of a truly dark era on old earth. Why would he keep such a thing?”

  “No clue. I found plenty of other small mementos, trinkets, good-luck charms, that sort of thing, and put them in the PB boxes, so they can go to next of kin.”

  The man nodded. “Appreciated. Our people might have been enemies at the time, but the Republic is always grateful for the dead to be treated with the honor and respect they deserve.”

  “Of course.”

  Chen looked at the wall display, then back at Kyle. “So you’re cutting the vessel up for scrap?”

  Kyle followed his gaze… and shook his head. “No. She’s going to be rebuilt. The bones on these old girls are solid, and so much of them can be re-used, re-purposed. Instead of war, whats left of her will get to go out exploring the unknown.”

  “...An interesting endeavor. I will have the captain’s family contact you, regarding the sword. No records of how they died, their mission, or the like?”

  “No. I can tell you the ship went down to two direct strikes.. And someone managed to board her, since there was a little fighting on-board. That’s about it. The recordings from the cameras would have been on the computers that got dragged out.”

  “Well then. I will have my people begin preparing the bodies… and the boxes… for shipment. Good day.”

  Kyle nodded… and turned back to the work. He had an incoming shipment that should show up any day now… and quite a bit of work to do both before and after.

  ***

  Over a month later, the Sapper II was beginning to show some real progress; as the entire future crew was gathered together inside the main engineering bay, putting the finishing touches on the main reactor. It had taken weeks of assembly, buying a few parts, and then swapping out a few of them for new ones, before it was, in theory, ready to go.

  Thor was carefully checking the coolant levels as they all settled around it, the crawling maintenance bots busily laying conduit everywhere… and when he nodded.. Kyle stepped up to the console he’d installed in the chamber.

  “Well, people. If you don’t have faith in my engineering skills, this would be the time to get out. If something were gonna go wrong, this would be the moment.”

  They looked at each other. Barry started whistling to himself as he fake-nonchalantly started walking towards the door… only to stop and turn to watch. “Yeah, we’ve all looked it over. Besides. We’re all implanted. Even if you manage to kill us all we’ll wake up tomorrow.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Kyle slowly shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith.” He slapped the button… and after a few seconds, the slow, steady hum could be felt as she started up… and the lights flickered. “....There we go. We are no longer on station power. Tomorrow I’ll start moving the Sapper’s over here to serve as backup. But…I’m moving in here tonight.”

  He looked around at the exposed open hull where the bots were laying conduit; where plating would be attached only after everything had been tested as working… and grinned. “So. Next up, engines. Then weapons. Then the armor… and weapons again for the external mount stuff.”

  Sherry looked around at the chamber. “...You realize that this kind of stuff isn’t supposed to have such a small crew, right? You want to have someone monitoring this reactor… all the time. Its not like the little ones that usually stay stable for years… the output here is massive, and can fluctuate. Something goes wrong and doesn’t get caught fast enough, it cooks the whole thing.”

  “Automation, Sher. Automation. That console can handle most normal stuff. Only the most egregious, weird, stuff will need us to mess with it… and it can safe it and divert us to the backup, in the unlikely event the bots can’t deal with it.”

  Barry sighed. “Bots are good and all. But the people who live a long time in space don’t rely on them. They check everything. And have good, capable people check it all, too. The only way to get a machine good enough that I’d actually trust a crew of machines is if you had an illegal AI running the place.”

  Kyle chuckled. “Why illegal? How familiar are you with the rules for AI?”

  Barry blinked. “...Pretty damn familiar. Deal with them in-game every day and even help program them. Some of them can be surprisingly convincing.”

  Kyle nodded. “Okay, so. I started off with it in game, too, and programmed my pets in-game with stuff that would be illegal out of it. There’s two core rules that only apply to real-world AI stuff. It can’t seek out targets without human input. And it can’t be able to make more of itself. All the rest is really fuzzy, case by case sort of nonsense that, worst case scenario, the Directorate gets pissy and makes you take it apart.”

  He grinned. “Which means… I can make them capable of handling literally every problem the ship can run into so long as I don’t make them self-replicating death-bots. I’ve actually got all the programming I need, not to make them real AI, but to make real self-replicating death-bots… modified for a game instead of real-world application. I took one of the high-end combat sim games and programmed the maintenance drones, at first, based on what they’d need to do in there, then made adjusted real-world versions.”

  The entire group just stared at him. Thor walked up to him, looked down at him… and took a firm grip on his ear, looking inside as Kyle swatted him away.

  “Just checking to make sure there’s still something in there. That’s a crazy way to do things. And risky.”

  “You say that. But I tested it extensively… in the real world… with the first Sapper. And I’m gonna let them do most of the work for the Sapper II, and check behind them to verify… and before we actually take a trip out there, run them through drills. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Sherry gave a long-suffering sigh, staring at the ceiling of the reactor room. “Just gotta be independent, don’t we. Ugh. Men. Its fine. We’ll be there regardless. Just don’t go out without us.”

  Kyle smiled at her. “Not right now, at least. Besides… we’re hunting dragons. No way I’m leaving you guys out of this.”

  ***

  It would take another month before the ship was ready to move; not to actually leave the system, but actually undock and start making trial runs. All of his friends had come by, picked out their own rooms, and spent at least a week or so on the ship… he hadn’t been alone the whole time.

  The main deck looked terrible, despite being almost completely done. A huge mass of exposed plumbing, conduits, with all the panels that would cover them adhered to the walls, making people walk over them; he’d received dozens of complaints about them, but he didn’t want to attach everything until he’d tested it all out under power; it would be much easier to fix a short or other issue if it happened while everything was clear and visible.

  At the moment, the only one there was Thor; wearing his typical green-black pattern skinsuit, and sitting at what would be the pilot’s chair in the future; glancing back at him. “Looking good, Mastermind.”

  “Seriously, either just Kyle or Captain. Or I’m gonna start rotating through your old names… Athlete.”

  Thor grimaced. The name was a reference to a fungal infection he’d had for months because he refused to wash thoroughly for a while there. “...Got it, Captain. Everything green.”

  “Sapper to dock, I’m leaving the net attached to the airlock and taking a short test flight. Any incoming or outgoing to avoid?”

  ~Relaying to your board. Got a couple of shuttles of recruits incoming from Ash, ETA thirty-seven minutes and forty-five. All clear after that for a few hours.~

  “Confirmed. Detaching now. Will plan to dock back in one hour, and inform if anything changes.”

  The ugly box-like shape of the Sapper; covered with black spray-on thermal insulation, a cheaper version of what was on the Empire ships, with a network of tiny silver posts sticking through in a grid pattern… detached with a shake.

  Within a few seconds, as they started to slowly move away, they could feel the gravity shift… as Thor started the drives.

  “Okay. Lets take her through her paces. A few rotations, accelerations, and a brief hop.”

  Thor nodded. “Got it. I can see the darkspace jump already plugged in. We just testing engines and artificial gravity for this run?”

  “Negative. I’ve got five hundred dummy rounds stuffed in the missile launchers. No engines, no payload, just aluminum tubes we’re gonna run through the auto-loaders, launch… and take out with the point defense turrets.”

  Thor chuckled. “What, not going to test the main guns?”

  “No point… yet. Those are gonna be the last thing I test.”

  He nodded… and they drifted away from the Barricade for a few minutes… before triggering the drive.

  Buried in the heart of the Sapper, electricity flowed into a tiny speck of mass, connected via properties Kyle didn’t understand to a distant black hole… and reality flickered.

  She’d just moved roughly a light-hour.

  Kyle checked over the boards, letting the sensors run until he had good numbers.

  “Alright then… looks like we are… Eight hundred and two kilometers off. That’s… within the usual margin of error. If we can get it tighter, that’d be good. I’d love to be able to pull off some cool tricks like that. You should switch to gunnery mode for this next bit.”

  Thor glanced back at him. “So what will it look like if its all perfect?”

  “There’s forty fifty-millimeter tubes, forty hundreds, ten one-fifties, and five drone launch tubes that could, in theory, launch damn near anything, albeit not that fast. If everything works properly, every single one of them is gonna fire two projectiles at top speed, and we’ll have one hundred and ninety projectiles flying through space.”

  “Alright. Show me what you’ve got!”

  Kyle took a deep breath, slapped the fire control button… and throughout the newly designated ‘Missile Deck’ of the ship, the auto-loaders sounded, the maintenance bots watching as motors whirred and blank aluminum canisters in roughly the same shape as a missile were pushed through; and he could feel it as much as here it.

  A deep, terrible, grinding noise. As lights flickered and the scanners picked up the projectiles flying off into the void, he could immediately tell something was wrong…

  Even before the counter came up. Only 80 projectiles had been launched. Not just some… but most of the launchers had failures in them.

  And from what he could tell, in the worst place; the auto-loaders. Either there was something wrong with the fake ammo he was using, or the loaders themselves had a problem… and there were so many different things that could cause it. “....Fuck.”

  This was gonna take some time.