Two days, nine hours. Seven shifts; and the beginning of the eighth. Before his first official watch, Kyle would have a bit of an issue sleeping… but still, he arrived on-deck, a hot cup of fake coffee in hand, and gave Jenny a nod as he stepped on-deck.

  She studied him for a moment; she’d found the time to change into a dull red skinsuit before her shift, that had a badge he wasn’t familiar with on the shoulder.

  “Dead silent, as usual for an FTL shift. Don’t fall asleep.” She slowly rose to her feet, stretching… and nodded off to the side. Yumi had already shown up, and was at her own console; apparently putting a private message together.

  “Got it.” He glanced around. “No Billy?”

  “The younger mister Rush is still in the shower, I believe. If he doesn’t show up til after the shift actually starts, let his cousin know. He…”

  A mildly damp black-furred figure in a grey utility skinsuit suddenly dropped onto the deck with a loud clank… and just lay on his back for a moment. “Not late! Don’t say I’m late cause I got here early!”

  Jenny stared down at him. “...Two minutes early, but yes.”

  She sighed. “Keep an eye out. This ship feels weird. Always things moving around…”

  Kyle nodded. “There’s a set of twelve maintenance drones that are always monitoring the ship. There’s actually a command you can give them to do a complete sweep of the outer hull, spot pressure checks, the whole nine yards. They’ve been doing internal scans on a pattern since I sealed the last breach, but won’t do the outer hull check without a command.”

  He grinned. “The two forward missile bay doors? Are also where they pop out and back in. The rails that accelerate them just shut off, the drones crawl out… its a fun design.”

  Jenny shook her head. “It’ll never be a replacement for a solid engineering crew, but good work. Might as well get that done on your shift.”

  Yumi glanced over from her own console. “...Should we do that? If we lose a drone in darkspace, we’ll never see it again. Even a momentary loss of magnetic connection and it would be gone.”

  Jenny glanced at her, then at Kyle. “You built em, you paid for em. Its on you, boss-man.” She turned and gripped the ladder, vanishing out of sight to the next deck up, undoubtedly heading off to sleep.

  Kyle sat down in the captain’s chair, even as Billy settled in at his own. “Well, Yumi… there’s some unique stresses that Darkspace puts on a ship, both going in and out. And while I flew her a bit in controlled circumstances to make sure it was all working, I wasn’t allowed to actually leave the salvage yard’s space without a captain on board. So…. I want to make sure nothing’s wrong. Besides… there’s twelve of them. And I’ve got the parts to make more. And they’re spiders, too, so there should always be three magnets on the hull, minimum.”

  She gave a slow nod. “Understood.” She glanced down at her console, and tapped a button, sending whatever private message she’d been working on. “The sensor suite on this vessel is… extensive. I understand the drones have fairly good sensors as well?”

  He tapped a few buttons. He and Billy had been planning on doing sims for the drones, no time like the present. He loaded up the scans of the different options, and passed the files over to Billy’s console on the left.

  “Sure. My primary expertise is robotics; I actually worked through the bachelor’s-level classes with billy here before finishing the master’s course. My sensor drones were my final exam. Here… most of its security locked, but if you’re gonna be on sensors you should see the schematics.”

  He passed the details for the sensor drone over to Yumi, and the woman gave a quick nod before enlarging the design and specs.

  The ball-shaped drone appeared to have…a long mane of hair dangling behind it. She blinked. “...What is the purpose of the… hairs?”

  “Look at the specs. Each of those tendrils is an optic fiber. The wire attached to the fiber will bend in certain ways as the magnet at the end has a current run through it. Its essentially over a hundred tiny cameras pointing in every direction, which can give a fairly good amount of composite detail, and provide a little bit of cushioning to prevent the drone from suffering significant damage from low-speed impacts; though every impact will damage a few of them and degrade sensor quality.”

  He tapped a button. The display showed a brief animation of the hairs moving in a rippling pattern. “They can also let it crawl just by bending them, if the gravity is low enough, though, again, it damages them to do so and makes them less useful as cameras. If its over point six G, all they can do is roll. These are not built for atmosphere.”

  She nodded as she studied the design. “Interesting. Do you mind if I copy the design later?”

  “Only if you pay me royalties on each one you make.” He smirked. “Anyways. Those can also launch through the missile tubes, but if we pop open the blast shields, we can release the whole bundle of a hundred at once.”

  “...One hundred independent sensor arrays that can be sent to coast through a system. We could perform a full system scan in…. Hours. Impressive, for a corvette.”

  He nodded… and after a few seconds, typed in the command to start the hull survey. Just in case. “Its what this girl is built for, surveying star systems, exploring. I plan to spend a few years looking for fun alien life, old abandoned human colonies, that sort of nonsense.”

  Yumi smiled. “So not going to be going back to civilization after?”

  “Aside from dropping you folks off, and getting my license certified, no. Hell, tons of independent worlds out there will issue a license to anyone who pays the credits, so if I somehow get cheated out of the flight hours I need for that last requirement, I might just divert us so I can nab one real quick. We’re passing by dozens of independent systems and even the edges of Empire space on this trip.”

  They could hear the faint mechanical cycling through the ship, as the missile bay doors at the front opened…. And the maintenance drones started crawling out.

  “Anyways. If you look through, you’ll find details of the target system. I doubt it’ll have changed much, but if you want to control the sensor drones, you can plot out the best places to launch and retrieve from, that sort of thing.”

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  He turned away, back to his console, and swapped over to the gatling gun layouts he and Billy had worked on. “We’re actually going to be running sims on some options for the combat drones, if you wanted to join us. Unless the maintenance scan finds something, our ‘maintenance’ for this shift will be actually applying whichever one seems to work best.”

  She looked at the designs for a moment, shaking her head. “Not really interested in combat drones. I’m familiar enough with them as it stands.” She turned back to her own console… and he could see the map of the system pop up. She was likely plotting out how to scan the whole thing for evidence of pirates.

  Kyle studied the different weapon layouts. “Alright, Billy. I figure we run a few tests in the simulator against the baseline ones, and against a few other targets… gunships mostly… and see which one gets the best kills vs. deaths. What do you think?”

  “Fine. Your first thought for type A, mine for type B, then the ones we came up with together as C and D.”

  He brought them up, and put the modified version into the simulator… noting in the differences in heat generation, ammunition loading speed, power consumption… it took a few minutes for the sim to calculate all the details… and they started it running.

  He didn’t even notice when Yumi quietly made a small adjustment to the running maintenance program, diverting the drone that would be scanning the outer hull away from the comms array.

  ***

  A few shifts later, the whole crew was assembled on the bridge; with the exception of Jenny, who was actually waiting in the cockpit of her fighter, which apparently had a callsign of the ‘Poisseux’; a name she would help pronounce but refused to explain.

  Zeke leaned forward in the captain’s chair, looking around at the uniform circle of consoles. “Alright. We’re making entry on the outskirts of the system shortly. Odds are low, but we might be entering a combat situation immediately.”

  He glanced at Billy. “Will. I want you to start launching sensor drones from the forward tube the moment we come out. Follow the plan Yumi laid out.”

  “Aye, Captain Rush.” He grinned. Zeke simply turned away, serious at present. “Mister Smith. You’ve got the helm for right now. Poisseux is ready to take over if need be, don’t hesitate to slap that button if it gets dangerous. She’s flown dozens of combat missions in ships bigger than this one before.”

  “...Yumi. I want you sweeping local space. Keep an eye on anything nearby, and listen for signals. Everyone else…”

  “Tom, Clarice. Me and you two are on guns. Watch the scopes. Each of us has control over one section. If you spot something, say something immediately, but hold fire until I give the order.”

  The bridge had gone steadily more quiet. The cheerful atmosphere was gone. The threat might only be a gunship.. But it was still a fight.

  For the first time in the trip, Kyle was actually glad he was there. That his mother had actually compelled him to hire on a crew. He might not keep this crew… but it had been interesting, going back and forth with Billy, and Zeke seemed to know what the hell he was doing.

  He focused on his own board, the thrust controls, ready just in case they needed some hard manuevering…

  And then… starlight.

  One moment they were in the void of Darkspace, the dull omnipresent core off in the distance. The next…. They were on the outer edge of a star-system too unimportant for a name; just listed as IF-H09 on the charts.

  The ship rocked gently, as sensor drones were being launched… and an image of the system came up on-screen.

  They drifted for the moment. Not firing any thrusters or trying to draw any attention, just…. Looking.

  Yumi spoke up first. “I’ve got active comms traffic from seven ships and five bases. I’ve also got a distress beacon… looks like a termination alert. No vitals.” She tapped a few buttons.

  The system display popped up.

  Sometime, millions of years ago, a planet had been shredded by tidal forces as it was pulled apart by a nearby gas giant and its moons, creating a series of asteroid belts that circled the system.

  None of the worlds were habitable; and only one was close to 1G. So everyone lived in various domed structures on the largest rocks… and a beacon warning that someone’s corpse was present rang out near the outermost ring.

  The captain nodded. “Will, disregard Yumi’s plot for a bit. I want sensor drones in a rough perimeter around that beacon, aim for a good spread that gives us coverage of the nearby rocks from all angles. Once that’s launched…. Yumi, any nearby threats?”

  “Not a single nearby object over ten kilos, sir. I’ve got a chunk of rock a few hundred klicks out that will eventually pass ten kilometers away less than a meter across.”

  “Looks like thats in… Tom’s sector. Tom. Go ahead and shoot it.”

  The furry young man blinked. “Uhh…. sir?”

  “One of the best way to stealth a mine or a missile is to make it look like a rock. Making invisible? Extremely difficult. Making it look harmless? Not so much. Shoot it. We’ll open up and launch the rest of the sensor drones all at once… and let Jenny loose… after.”

  After a few seconds, Tom had the tiny rock brought up on his screen… and fired all five lasers he was controlling at once. There was no visible response… as they missed entirely.

  “....Tom.”

  “Apologies, captain. I didn’t enable… there we go.” A second shot. The rock burst into a cloud of tiny particles.

  “Excellent. Open the hatch and launch however many Yumi’s pattern called for.”

  The display was already being populated with data, as the drones hurled out into the void at a significant fraction of lightspeed; followed by the much slower movement of the ones just released.

  Zeke gave a slow nod as he watched them cycle out. “Alright… we’ve got about eight hours before we get any useful data from the ones flying by the corpse. Just in case someone spots where we came in and tries to gank us, I want a few of your mines deployed here, and we’ll quietly move behind that rock until we’ve got readings. Any recommendations, mister Smith?”

  It took Kyle a moment to respond, forgetting about his offhand last name recommendation. “If we blast another few rocks to add a bit of energy into the area, it’d be harder to tell the regular mines from hot rocks in time to make a difference. If we deploy all eighty of them right here, they could kill a cruiser as it emerged. I’d recommend… six of the laser mines and two spoofers.”

  Zeke blinked. “Spoofers...I didn’t see those. What are they?”

  “They mimic the Sapper’s signals and radiation, and use magnets to make a sort-of cloudy shell of iron powder. They have about six hours of juice, and during that time will make someone think its us… briefly. Then the laser mines will all fire pulses at them til they burn out if they shoot at the spoofed copy.”

  “...Why two?”

  “One turns on for six hours. When it runs out of juice, the next runs for six hours. Before its done, we’ll have the scan results, and will either be moving to some other system, and collecting them… or engaging in a fight.”

  Yumi was listening attentively, nodding along, clearly interested in the design as she typed away at her console.

  “...The level of preparation and inventiveness is impressive, Smith. I’ve heard of such things, but never actually been able to use one. Billy, deploy as he recommended. Alright, people. We’re probably not going to see any action for four hours if someone’s coming to kill us, or eight if we’re going hunting. Jenny, make sure everything’s in order, then re-dock. You can take a nap for three hours. Everybody else, we’re splitting. This isn’t a sprint, its a marathon. We all need to be up and fit to fight in eight hours. Hope you’re used to taking cat-naps, because we’re going to be having alot of that for the next day or two.”