I woke up in a hell of fire of death and quickly leapt to my feet my brain reeling in shock as the sounds of gunfire and explosions rattled the walls just where had i woke this wasn't my bedroom not even my house and who was shooting at who what war had started here. I found a locker with clothes in it which I quickly put on, dark gray pants and shirt with a black leather 'bomber' style jacket and what i would call steel toed jack boots in matching black leather, outfitted with clothes and some shoes i was as ready as I could be barring finding a weapon. I checked the room I woke up in and found several bodies around the room and after checking each i ended up stripping off a pistol and its holster though as i examined the pistol i realized that it was nothing like anything I'd ever heard of for starters the bullets it fired were triangular and small and then i realized it was a flechette pistol which made sense kind of everything else looked like it was pretty dang advanced compared to the technology i was used to. I checked for anything else in the room i recognized and found the supply cabinet which was locked but a couple shots from the flechette pistol opened it and i found some obvious gauze patches and I grabbed a couple of tubes labeled 'quickclot' all of which i pocketed in my jacket for now and then time was up I heard footsteps outside the room closing on my position so I quickly hid myself to observe whoever was approaching. I held my breath when a full squad of armed and armored troops stepped into the room and fanned out then heard the shots as they confirmed the kill on the corpses and began checking the room for anyone else thankfully they would check my spot lsst but I didn't hold out hope of taking these guys down with just the pistol but they didn't have thick neck armor so maybe i had a chance.
I took careful aim and pulled the trigger my target the mans neck where two plates met and with the quiet hiss of the flechette i spun and fired on the next of the marines hitting him in the neck before either fully processed the attack. I ducked down then moved quickly to another piece of cover the first two marines were down but the one might get back up I'd only fired a pair of flechette darts at his neck after all, meanwhile the other two marines opened up on the hospital bed I'd popped up from but they didn't catch where I had crawled to thankfully because whatever they were shooting was going right through the hospital bed and putting holes in the wall obviously armor piercing rounds. I popped up again once they stopped firing and took another down with a trio of neck shots and then had to dive from the cover I'd found to behind another hospital bed and this time the marine kept track of me so I moved again thankfully my roll to my next cover i shot the last Marine in the ankle and distracted him long enough for me to break contact. Once more i was out of sight and then the marine did something i didn't expect he started shooting wildly at every bit of cover around and ill admit he got really close to hitting me one bullet passed right next to my ear and I got a couple slivers of steel to the cheek from the hospital bed but I waited patiently and finally he ran out of bullets in his gun and went to reload so I popped up and started shooting. I didn't hit the target I'd aimed for but dead center in the mans face shield with all four shots and the first couple just cracked it the last two went in and dropped the man thankfully or I'd have been given a few new holes there was no intact cover to hide behind. With the marines down I looted myself one of their rifles and all the ammunition I could grab which amounted to 2 extra mags from all of them except for the last guy so with my new rifle in hand I checked to see if I could actually take their armor off and maybe wear a set. I checked each armor set and figured out how to remove it then painstakingly took off the most intact armor and helmet and outfitted myself and quickly realized that it was still keyed into the tactical network of whoever these marines were so I quickly found out a lot of useful information i was on a space station being the most important thing I learned right up there with what they called themselves 'Reaper Squadron' which did not bode well for peaceful interactions or my longevity.
I made my way through the stations corridors finding plenty of bodies and even more questions just where was i and what universe did I end up in the armors were vaguely familiar but it wasn't ringing any bells for me it just looked like full body armor with honestly over sized face screens it seemed an odd choice for combat armor but what did I know it certainly didn't look like any armor I've seen before though nothing else sparked anything the marines themselves looked normal if with a few oddities like strange lumps on their heads and surgery scars honestly it was definitely not exactly normal by any metric. I had made my way towards what I figured was the outter section of the station assuming that the persistent leftward curve of the passageway i was going through was an indication of where the center was and so I found myself in a bay that was a surprise and it was not a great one honestly there was no ship in the bay but there was a forest of corpses floating around in it mostly because the bay itself didn't have whatever functioned as gravity on the station. I had long ago extracted the slivers of steel from my face and coated my wounds with the quickclot powder which burns like hell by the way and so when I opened the frigid bay it absolutely burned on my pour tortured face since I'd taken to leaving the faceplate open on the helmet.
I closed my helmet and explored the bay and quickly realized that there was a feed hopper for source materials and a giant 3d printer type assembly in the room which I figured could probably 3d print a ship if raw materials and power were given to it and then I realized that whatever mission the Reapers were on was finished because they had just signaled departure in the com. I explored the entire station and honestly there wasn't a single other person in the entire thing and worse than that there wasn't a single ship on the station either so apparently I would need that giant 3d printer after all. I worked on fixing the power to the 3d printer bay which took a while but eventually it was fixed then I started hauling everything i could think of into the hopper assembly to be 'recovered' by the system which took forever but eventually everything that could be brought in or broken down had been and then out of a desire not to have corpses floating around or every where else I fed the bodies into the system as well.
I checked the 3d printers systems and was shocked to find everything that I'd fed into the material hopper now had a blueprint and of the original blueprints in the system there was only a few ship systems but no hull whatsoever which seemed odd why wouldn't they have a hull design in the system. I decided to draft my own hull blueprint how hard could it be right yeah I was utterly wrong on so many levels from materials shortages to missing technology i was boned so hard but then I decided that if i wasn't staying on the station I could salvage everything not critical for it to run so I started a salvaging spree cutting removing and 'recovering' materials until the station was a shell of itself and I had filled the hopper. I had added a few pieces of technology as I'd torn apart the station which actually made my ship idea possible though it still lacked a proper power source I'd only found a few reserve batteries and assorted other ones from the suit it was not enough.
In a desperate gamble I drafted my new ship design it was a wild one in some ways first I built the interior the hull spars bedroom fuel cells and battery banks then I began adding hull which was not very thick honestly only six millimeters of metal between me and space did not feel very comfortable but I did find an interesting entry in the terminal a living armor material that would actually grow in space over time but then I saw what it was made of and nearly vomited. The marvelous 'growing' armor was made up of bioengineered bone it was actually supposed to be used for broken bones but it would absolutely function as armor in space and would actually grow in those conditions though it was no more resilient than actual bone and I'd have to basically cover the entire ship in the remains of the dead but I sighed dammit I'd have to do it if I wanted something more sturdy than an escape pod so I added it to the exterior in the thickest layer I could barring the hatches and windows that were not supposed to be covered.
The final design of the ship was honestly not bad if one didn't think about what the armor was made of and actually the armor produced a small voltage when it was being hit by radiation a system that would alert the person who had it installed in their bones that they were in a radioactive area but i used it to power my ship instead. The ship ended up being 40m long and 12m wide with 4 main engine units on the rear each housing control thrusters and three 'main' thrusters and a 'Drone accelerator unit' basically a little reactionless drive designed for drones and an intake nozzle fitted to the front of each housing to scoop up fuel for the thrusters. I had added full amenities to the design and even gave it a few point defense lasers salvaged from the stations hull and a honestly stupid amount of batteries that actually acted as a tertiary hull on the inside of the ship and I was very careful to make sure that the landing ramp wouldn't grow itself closed nor would any other part that needed to open or move. Once the ship was finished I set the printer to work crafting the monstrosity though I did add a copy of the feeder hopper and 3d printer inside the ship which could be used to replace any damaged part of the ship if needed i made sure it was large enough for that specific purpose.
As the ship printed I explored the station and checked everything one last time and found nothing new just the way I'd left it heck my ship had an actual copy of the stations computer core designed into it and I'd pull copies of all of it's data before I left which was coming soon if the 3d pdinter was telling me the truth on the timeline for the ship being finished. I slept ate some food from the stations dwindling supplies and exercised then repeated until the ship was completed and then i connected the ship to the station and copied everything over then transferred all of the remaining food and supplies to my new ship which I had named the 'Dread Queen' I felt it was fitting and it even had a matching transponder showing it was a 'Ossuary class yhat' I thought it was a fitting class name and due to its size it was classed as a yhat anyway. I checked out my new ship and I'll admit it was actually quite nice and almost perfect except for the lack of proper galley equipment and food but food wasn't totally absent just lacking variety though i had included a feature of the station which h was a fully functional hydroponics bay both algea grow tubes and the other plant growth trays and I had stocked both with as much as they could fit though i had over done it a bit in all honesty.
The ship was complete only lacking the fuel and consumable supplies that i couldn't find for it yet though the fuel situation was easy enough to solve as all I had to do was connect the consumable lines and turn on the pumps which filled the water, fuel, and atmospheric systems rapidly and then I was set to sail in my newly built ship though i made sure to get every ounce of data from the 3d printers systems and copy them to my new ship before I scrubbed them from the printers database and then recycled all remaining memory modules from the station thus permanently erasing my presence. As the Dread Queen pulled out of the bay I made certain to only use the thrusters which is how I learned that what might have been sufficient for a space station was overkill on a yhat as the ship almost collided several times as I just gently attempted to move it from the bay. Learning that the thrusters on my ship were basically the equivalent to main engines was an experience but with some programming i was able to reduce their output sufficiently enough to not absolutely obliterate the ship the next time I tried to dock. As I tested each system I realized that the ship was fully functional even the 'Drone accelerator drives' were working exactly as intended so I let the ship drift awhile and monitored the charge rate and thats when I found a secret feature of the ships hull it acted as a sort of Geiger counter in space each time we hit a pocket of higher radiation the hull would generate more power and i could almost hear it growing it was a strange experience admittedly but it was also peaceful too. Floating around in my new ship was fun until I decided that I'd see how fast it could go and while I'd added an inertia dampener to the ship which because I don't like single points of failure meant I added four and so when I pushed the accelerators to maximum capacity I found out that the inertial dampeners were at the absolute limit of what they could handle and I was slammed back into my seat under 5gs of acceleration with the ship absolutely rocketing forwards which only lasted 15 seconds due to me thankfully preprogramming a timer to cut the engines off if no input was given during that time. The ship had reached a scary 900g's of acceleration in the test which frankly was impressive but also terrifying if one of the inertial dampeners had failed I'd have been paste instantly so obviously I added 6 more of them through the ship which would activate as needed basically as soon as more than 1g was detected in the ship another would turn on instantly it was not exactly ideal but i also made it so that 5 dampeners were always running rather than the 4 I'd originally installed and had running which forced me to convert a storage closet amidships into a dedicated inertial dampener room. My second speed trial proved the idea sound and the ship hit its maximum acceleration on the accelerators alone at 900g's then i hit the aft thrusters as well and it climbed up to 1058g's of acceleration which felt insane for a ship this size and I noticed that my backup inertial dampeners had activated and three of the five were running apparently they did have limits and I was nearing them with the ship going full speed.
I checked power consumption and noticed that the ship had built a bow wave of radiation while I was pushing it to the maximum and as soon as id stopped accelerating the hull began to sing as it rapidly grew thicker which was an unexpected experience to say the least but then it stopped and I checked the hull readings and found out exactly how much that massive burst of radiation had grown the hull and I had to sit down again. I checked physically and through the readings and both confirmed that the hull was now 6mm thicker than it had been on 90% of the ship and 1cm thicker on the bow this growing hull might actually be an issue if it kept growing like this though i could imagine the ship becoming huge if it kept growing that fast.
I decided not to stress myself about the ships hull for the time being and so i decided that I'd head to the nearest outpost which was 4ly away so I pointed the ship and proverbially gunned it and oh boy I set a new speed record on my ship while I traveled the ships acceleration actually increased as I watched and it was slightly terrifying because id hit light speed in a few hours and was now technically FTL which was fascinating to watch one moment the stars seemed to be streaks and then suddenly all but the one dead ahead vanished. I had slowed the ship down before I arrived in system and I checked the ships systems and say the top speed I'd achieved and the acceleration i had reached both were shocking I'd hit 128x light speed and hit 2,000g's of acceleration before I'd slowed the ship and the almost explosion of the radbow wave was shocking as well I had reached 'vaporize the ship on a pebble' speeds and reached my target system in 12 days.
I checked the ships hull and I was shocked yes it had gained several cm of thickness but it had also taken several hits and instead of out it had filled the holes in meaning that the outer layer of the ships armor now was almost 4cm thick most places sure its calcium but 4cm is allot of bone and then I ran a spectrograph on the hull and nearly spit blood it wasn't just calcium it was now a metallic alloy of calcium and while I knew that the bioengineered bone I'd used was different it generated electricity when bombarded with radiation after all but I certainly wasn't expecting it to be transmuted into something else yet here it was so i had to test it. I took a chunk of the hull and tested it with everything I could and compared it to its base starting material and my shock was profound it was actually lighter than the same volume of base material and 170% stronger in every metric which was surprising granted its still based on calcium and thus it still wouldn't compare to steel or other better materials but it was on par with pure unannealed aluminum which while not amazing meant it would actually act as proper if bad armor now i wondered if it would further mutate and change in the future.
The batteries had slowly discharged as I'd traveled but I still had over half charge when I finally slowed the ship and they had quickly recharged once the ship was slowed down and by the time I'd reached the station i was almost back to full charge again so apparently the ships current range was 8ly without stopping with a maximum of 10 before power became an issue. Docking with the outpost station was easy but it was concerning and then I found out why they had been attacked and like my own outpost they had been slaughtered and left to rot and like the outpost id come from they had their own even larger 3d printer and feed hopper for it so i made a choice and fed my ship into it and printed out an even larger version after I'd fed the remains of the crew and everything else i could salvage from the station which also included a proper FTL drive a jump drive. The Dread Queen entered the hopper and I almost cried but once it was fully fed into the system much like the original system i could now reprint it if i wanted to but I chose not to instead I created a warship a proper one and not just a yhat but a true battle cruiser though I had to create my own turret designs because the system didn't have any like i wanted.
I designed a starship like two earth battleship's mated at the keel and rounded with a flat 'deck' with three sets of turrets on each fore and aft and with 3 guns per turret with the largest weapons i could come up with which amounted to high powered rail guns with autoloaders feeding them bullets made of nickel steel which I'd source from the asteroid belt and I'd try to find tungsten if I could for some truly deadly firepower. The ship I'd designed bristled with weapons the 36 heavy rail guns were just the most obvious but i also added 40 twin turrets with heavy dual purpose laser guns mounted in them and 100 twin turreted point defense guns and i didn't skimp on the armor either the inner layer was nothing but batteries designed to be sacrificed before the pressure hull took damage over that lay 6cm of the hardest alloy I could manage and on top of that just 5mm of the new growing bioarmor which I expected to reach much greater thickness before the ship saw battle.
I installed the jump drive into the ship and verified it would be sufficient to jump a ship twice the current designs size which required some modifications but 4 jump drives were installed and the ship was ready in that aspect then i double checked my math and added 20 of the accelerators to the battleship's design as to push something as massive as it currently was would require it it was more than 4 times more massive than my yhat had been but it was close and then i added 60 inertial dampeners to the ship because if it was like my yhat it would move quick and then i made certain to add the thrusters which following the original design i added 80 of. The ship would move like no other and once I finalized the design I realized id missed one thing that this station had available in its printers database a large scale station fusion reactor so I added that to the design and finished it. The 3d printer started printing out the ship and i patiently began feeding scrap and material stock into the hopper and watched as the entire bay filled with gleaming black starship and the print itself took three months to build and id had to disassemble most of the station to feed the beast.
I collected everything I could after basically dismantling 90% of the station and when the new ship was finished I stocked it with everything I could and then named her 'Requiem' and gave it the class 'Ossuary class Dreadnought' a fitting name and class since it was made with the bones of the fallen. The ship was monstrous 2,000m long death machine designed to shrug off damage and keep fighting sadly i was the only crew member aboard her but I would change that as soon as i could but first steps I slaved her systems to the captains chair and took her out gently then turned her towards the next destination and put her into sprint mode I wanted to see how fast she could really go and I was not disappointed in the least. Much like the smaller yhat class ship I'd created the Requiem was just as fast if not faster and while her bow wave formed it was just as terrifying as the yhats only worse because this was so much bigger and faster though I felt none of the acceleration I could watch as the gas climbed and climbed hitting 2,000g's in the first hour then 3,000 before finally hitting 4,000g's and stopping twice as fast as the yhat had been which made me wonder just what was the maximum achievable. I'd stocked up on nickel iron asteroids and had the 3d printers printing out the nickel steel slugs for the railguns as fast as they could and while i had 15 light years to cross i doubted it would be an issue after all I'd just need to slow down to recharge and it would only be 22 days before I arrived which was surprising in and of itself. The ship slowed and the hull began to sing its song and it lasted far longer this time probably because it was a longer distance and faster but regardless the hull grew and when it stopped I checked the readings and found it now had 4cm of the bioarmor instead of the 5mm it had before it was now as thick as the yhats hull had been and checking the composition it had grow about 19% stronger which was fantastic for my part this stuff really was a miracle material.
As the Requiem neared the system station i noticed the wild activity around the station like a hive of bees had been kicked so I broadcast a message enquiring about docking and acquiring supplies and new crew which apparently calmed the frantic activity down significantly though their response was stilted and they had obvious concerns about us not taking over their station or system which caused me to laugh so hard i cried because the us was just me and I had no desire to take over their system it was humorous and I had to rectify their assumptions but I did so in a way that let them make their own assumptions and told them only one person would come aboard the station which was true only i could after all. I docked the warship with the station and made my way to the docking bay and headed aboard the station and to the recruitment office because I'd definitely need reliable crew though I'd only take the best from this station and only after thoroughly cross checking their credentials.