AN: TCTS has passed the threshold of 300,000 words published publicly! I want to thank everyone who has been accompanying me on this journey and thank all those who've shown their support for my work on Patreon! You all are the reason why I keep on writing even through the times I've lost passion for this work, and your comments are what reignite that passion in me.
Chapter 41 marks the nearing of the end of Book 2 and the beginning of the Kingdom-building and Technology-focused Book 3...
Will there be more tragedies to uncover? People to kill? Ships to build? Relationships to mend? Stay tuned for more Dragon Ba- Ahem. My lawyer has advised me not to finish this statement for copyright reasons.
The House of the Reapr welcomes Operative Fawaz Damilare to its ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Stars. As your Fleet Admiral, I, Crimson_Reapr, welcome you, honor your commitment, and thank you for your service. May our power reach beyond the edges of charted space, and may ruin fall upon all who stand against humanity's strength.
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POV: Mark Shephard
The heavy, unyielding silence of the Indifference's medical bay had clung to me like a second skin for the last forty-eight hours. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Kaelen floating in that translucent blue gel, a ruined monument to a war I had come to learn was waged in my name. I needed a distraction. I needed noise. I needed the violent, structured chaos of creation to drown out the ghosts of my past that were currently tormenting me.
Fortunately, the IUC Navy had just delivered two massive, battered distractions right to my doorstep.
I stood on the primary gantry overlooking Docking Bay #2, holding a steaming mug of black coffee. I looked through the glass of the blast door before me as inside, a second set of massive, windowless, heavy blast doors of the drydock were wide open to the void. Two heavy industrial tugs, looking like mechanical scarabs, were slowly guiding the Vengeance and the Swift Justice into their respective cradles.
"Holy mother of fuck," Kenjiro muttered, standing beside me, a datapad clutched in his hands. He startled me for a second, not because he took me by surprise, but because this had been the first time I had ever heard him curse... and it sounded like he just discovered vulgarities last week. He took a sip from his own mug, though filled with that green tea shit he liked so much, his eyes wide behind his glasses. I tried it once, and I'm 98 percent sure that a glass of piss tasted better.
"The files didn't do it justice. That thing is practically scrap." He was looking at the Swift Justice. The Corvette looked like it had been chewed on by a cosmic leviathan and then spat back out. The port side was caved in, entire armor plates sheared off to expose the twisted, sparking guts of the crew decks. Honestly, it was a miracle that 12 out of a crew of 15 had survived and that the reactor explosion wasn't as catastrophic as it should've been.
"Yeah, the Justice is going to be a nightmare," I agreed, my eyes tracking over the jagged edges of torn tungsten-carbide. "We're basically going to have to build a new ship inside the corpse of the old one. But that's a problem for another day. Today, we'll be starting on the Vengeance."
I shifted my gaze to the second Corvette. To the untrained eye, the Vengeance looked surprisingly intact. The sleek, angular lines of the 150-meter warship were mostly unbroken. Her dark gray hull paint was scorched, and she had a few localized craters from kinetic impacts, but she wasn't missing chunks of her anatomy.
But I wasn't an untrained eye. Whatever Anahrin had done to my brain to make sure it had the neuroplasticity of a child, paired with the structural schematics Marcos was currently overlaying onto my pendant, which I was currently using as goggles, told a much more horrifying story.
"The problem with that one is the inertia," I said, pointing to a subtle, almost imperceptible bowing along the ship's central spine. "She took a glancing blow from a railgun slug right on the forward starboard maneuvering thruster. Though it didn't penetrate the citadel, the kinetic transfer was... Jesus. It sent a 150-meter ship traveling at sub-light speeds into an uncontrolled, violent flat-spin."
"The G-forces," Kenjiro winced, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Exactly," I said grimly. "The armor held, but the inside of that ship? The inertial dampeners most likely overloaded and blew out within the first two seconds. Every mounting bracket, every hydraulic line, every structural rib in that ship has been subjected to shear stresses it was never designed to handle. The frame is definitely warped. The reactor housing is probably hanging on by a handful of stripped titanium bolts. And the crew..." I trailed off, taking a slow sip of my coffee. "Well, only the captain survived. The rest of the crew had to be hosed out of the bridge before they towed her here."
Kenjiro visibly paled. "Right. Well. Where do we even start with that? I spent the entire day yesterday digging through standard operating procedures for damaged ships. After all, I may be an engineer, but I barely know anything about ships. I read that the Navy's standard operating procedure for a warped keel is to decommission the hull. Makes sense since you can't just hammer a starship back into alignment."
"Yeah... Well, the longer you stick around, the more miracles you'll see," I smirked, setting my coffee down on the railing. I cracked my knuckles, the sound echoing loudly in the cavernous bay. "Marcos. Time to go to work. Lyra is at the orphanage for the next eight hours. You know what that means."
"Indeed, Bossman," Marcos's crisp, synthesized voice echoed from the bay's massive overhead speakers. "Initiating Protocol: 'Garage Band'. Atmospheric scrubbers are set to maximum to filter plasma fumes. All automated repair drones are off the leash and awaiting orders. And, per your specific instructions..."
A heavy, rhythmic thumping suddenly vibrated through the metal grating beneath my boots. A lone, driving guitar riff began to build, echoing off the walls of the drydock, growing louder and louder until the drums kicked in with a concussive boom.
Black Sabbath's Iron Man blasted at roughly a hundred and ten decibels.
"Hell yes," I grinned, feeling the bass in my chest. I looked at Kenjiro, slapping him hard on the shoulder. "Grab your plasma torch, Kenji. We're stripping her naked."
The next three days were a blur of sparks, sweat, and heavy metal.
I didn't run Shepherd Orbital Works like a corporate shipyard. There were no safety briefings, no bureaucratic requisition forms, no waiting for a union rep to sign off on a structural cut, and no OSHA. That meant that it was just me, Kenjiro, a swarm of fifty automated utility drones, and Marcos managing the logistics from the central mainframe. As long as neither Kenji nor I died, everything was fine.
The first step of curating such a structurally compromised ship was triage. The drones, which had undergone modification at Marcos' behest, were chunkier and resembled floating metallic spiders armed with high-intensity laser cutters and hydraulic claws. Under Marcos' control, they descended on the Corvette's hull like vultures, armed with industrial lasers meant to slice through warped armor plating that was too damaged to salvage.
I stood on a lift platform, a heavy welding mask pulled down over my face, a massive plasma cutter gripped in both hands. Sparks rained down like a golden waterfall as I manually cut through the heavy locking bolts of the damaged port-side thruster housing. The smell of vaporized titanium and burnt synthetic hydraulic fluid was intoxicating. Just like gasoline back on earth.
"Marcos!" I yelled over the blaring music and the screech of tearing metal. "Give me a tensile readout on the primary keel struts near sector four!"
"Scanning, Mark," Marcos replied, his voice cutting through the noise via my earpiece. "Struts four through nine have suffered micro-fractures along the lattice. The rotational torque from the spin compromised the integrity by 42%. If the Navy tried to fire the spinal rail cannon with those struts in place, the ship would literally tear itself in half."
"Alright. Let's Rip 'em out!" I barked. "Kenjiro! Get the heavy lifters in here! We're pulling the entire central housing!"
Kenjiro was on the deck below, operating a massive, bipedal loader mech that had cost me 1.2 million credits. When I found out that mechs were a thing in this universe, I felt my inner kid get giddy with ideas. However, their usage was rather lackluster. There had been a few implementations in military warfare, but they weren't as efficient as the military had desired. So that resulted in the construction of a bulky, industrial piece of hardware, painted caution-yellow and covered in grease. He maneuvered the mech into position beneath the open belly of the Vengeance, raising its heavy hydraulic arms.
"I'm locked on!" Kenjiro's voice crackled over the local comms. "But the starboard coupling is jammed! I think the shear force must have fused the locking pins! It won't budge!"
"Hold your position, I'm coming down!" I tossed the plasma cutter onto the lift and dropped over the side of the platform, falling twenty feet and landing on the grated deck with a heavy thud, my enhanced knees absorbing the impact without a twinge. I jogged under the belly of the ship, looking up at the massive, twisted metal coupling that was holding the damaged structural rib in place.
It was a mess of warped steel and sheared bolts. The force of the spin had literally bent a solid block of military-grade titanium alloy like a piece of cheap plastic.
"Fucking piece of shit," I grunted, grabbing a massive, two-handed Kinetic Wrench from a nearby tool cart. The tool weighed nearly eighty pounds, designed to be used by two men or a light industrial exoskeleton. I hoisted it over my shoulder like a baseball bat, climbed up the maintenance ladder, positioning myself right next to the jammed coupling. I slotted the head of the wrench over the fused locking pin. I braced my boots against the bulkhead, took a deep breath, and pulled.
The muscles in my back and arms corded, the synthetic fibers woven into my biology firing at maximum capacity. The metal of the wrench groaned.
"Mark, careful!" Kenjiro called out from the mech. "If that pin snaps under tension, it's going to act like a piece of shrapnel!"
"It's not going to snap, it's going to turn!" I gritted my teeth, pulling harder. The veins in my neck bulged. "Come on, you son of a bitch, give out."
With a deafening SCREECH, the fused metal gave way. The pin rotated, breaking the seal.
But it gave way too fast.
The sudden loss of resistance sent my momentum flying backward. My right boot slipped on a patch of leaking hydraulic fluid. I lost my balance, the heavy wrench flying out of my hands. I threw my right arm out to catch myself, twisting violently to avoid falling off the ladder, and slamming my fist into the solid, tungsten-carbide reinforced bulkhead of the engine corridor.
*BANG*
Have you ever heard a piece of hollow metal hit another piece of hollow metal? Well, that was the sound it made. The impact sent a shockwave up my arm, a sharp, blinding spike of pain shooting from my knuckles all the way to my shoulder.
"Mhmmmm, Fuck!" I roared, dropping down to the catwalk, clutching my right hand.
The music overhead abruptly muted.
"Hey Mark! You okay?" Kenjiro shouted, popping the canopy of the loader mech and scrambling down the ladder. He rushed over to me, his eyes wide with panic. "Did you break it? Let me see!"
I unclenched my jaw, taking a ragged breath. I hadn't felt pain so intense like that since I woke up on the Perseverance and tried to move my broken arm. I looked down at my hand. The skin across my first three knuckles was split wide open, welling with thick, dark crimson blood. It hurt like an absolute bitch, a deep, throbbing ache that pulsed with my heartbeat. But the bones weren't broken. I could feel the density of what Anahrin had done to me holding the skeletal structure together.
"I'm fine," I hissed, wiping the blood onto the brand-new overalls I had bought just yesterday. "Just slipped. Fucking hell, that stung."
"Stung?" Kenjiro stopped dead in his tracks, staring not at my hand, but past me. He slowly pointed a trembling, grease-stained finger at the bulkhead. "Mark... what the actual fuck."
I turned around.
There, perfectly imprinted in the heavy, armor-grade tungsten-carbide plating of the bulkhead, was a dent. It wasn't a small scratch. It was a localized crater, roughly the size and shape of my fist, driven nearly two inches deep into metal that was designed to shrug off localized explosive shrapnel. The paint around the impact zone had flash-flaked off from the sudden kinetic transfer.
Kenjiro looked from the dent, down to my bleeding knuckles, and then back up to my face. He took a slow step backward.
"Now, punching a hole through a sheet of steel is one thing. But you... you just punched a hole in a warship," Kenjiro whispered, his voice pitching up in disbelief. "A military-grade, kinetic-resistant, deep-space warship. With your bare fucking hand. Mark... what the hell are you?"
I looked at the dent, flexing my bloody fingers. Oops.
"I told you, Kenji," I sighed, grabbing a clean rag from my back pocket and wrapping it tightly around my knuckles. "I'm just built different. Quite literally. Let's just say I had some... experimental augmentations done a few years back. Black market shit. Keeps me durable."
"Durable?" Kenjiro dragged a hand down his face, leaving a streak of motor oil across his cheek. "Mark, if a normal human hit that bulkhead with that much force, their arm would have shattered into powder up to the elbow. You dented the hull. You're a walking weapon!"
"Yeah, yeah. How about we keep this between us?" I said, offering him a tight smile. "We all have our pasts, and if the IUC isn't doing shit, then you have nothing to worry about. Especially since they owe me so much after that courthouse shitshow..... Besides, look on the bright side."
"What bright side?" Kenjiro threw his hands up.
"The locking pin is loose," I pointed at the coupling. "Get back in the mech and pull that rib out. We've got work to do."
Kenjiro stared at me for another three seconds, shook his head in absolute disbelief, and climbed back into the loader mech. "I don't get paid enough for this shit," he muttered over the comms. "I'm a thermal dynamics engineer, not a handler for the supernatural."
"Play the track, Marcos!" I yelled, ignoring the throbbing in my hand.
The heavy guitar of AC/DC instantly roared back to life, filling the drydock. The mech's hydraulic arms locked onto the damaged structural rib, groaning as it pulled the massive, warped piece of titanium free from the belly of the Vengeance.
By the end of Day Three, the Vengeance looked worse than when she arrived. We had stripped away nearly forty percent of her outer hull plating to access the damaged internal superstructure. The massive drydock was littered with neatly organized piles of warped metal, severed hydraulic lines, and shredded kinetic dampeners.
But this was exactly where I wanted her. You can't fix a broken bone without resetting it first.
Day Four was when the real magic started.
"Alright, Marcos," I said, standing in the expanded printer room, wiping the sweat from my forehead with a relatively clean rag. "The old ribs are out. The Navy would usually wait three weeks for an off-world foundry to cast new structural supports, ship them here, and then spend another week welding them in. How about I give myself a challenge and do it in twelve hours?"
The three circular 3x3 meter nanoprinters and the massive 8x8 meter printer were humming softly, their internal blue lights pulsing in standby mode.
"I have the schematics for the Vengeance's primary structural ribs and kinetic dampener housings uploaded," Marcos said. "Queueing the print jobs now. Running the 8x8 at maximum capacity simultaneously with the three smaller units is going to pull a massive amount of juice to modify the atomic structure of the raw titanium and tungsten."
"Good thing we aren't relying on the station's local grid," I said, tapping the central console. "Keep the main power feed tethered directly to the Shepherd's reactor. We have more than enough output to run them all hot. I want the 8x8 printing the massive central keel struts. Have the three 3x3s churning out the new kinetic mounting brackets and hydraulic manifolds. Feed them the raw titanium we got from the GalNet payout."
"Power levels are perfectly stable, and the reactor is singing," Marcos confirmed.
The industrial lights in the drydock didn't even flicker as the nanoprinters whirred to life with a deep, bass-heavy hum.
No matter how many times I saw them going to work, it was always mesmerizing to watch. Unlike standard human 3D printers that simply layered molten metal or sintered powder, the Strathari technology worked on a brutal molecular level. I had tweaked a few things and created an automatic feeding system for the printers after figuring out that they could work indefinitely as long as they had material.
Every once in a while, the drones would pause from their work to move the metal I had purchased into a set of massive automated hoppers that would then feed the materials into the machines. Inside the printing chambers, high-frequency molecular induction fields superheated and broke the metals down, instantly building an atomic lattice structure.
The new structural ribs grew, materializing from the base plate upward, a shimmering, flawless composite of metal that was lighter than standard titanium but possessed a tensile strength that most likely defied what humanity knew as the laws of physics.
I stood there for an hour just watching the 8x8 printer construct a forty-foot-long, gracefully curved structural rib. There were no weld lines or weak points. It was a single, continuous piece of perfect engineering.
"Kenjiro," I called out, walking back out to the drydock where the thick atmosphere scrubbers were working overtime to clear the metallic dust. "The first batch of mounting brackets is done. Marcos will start having the drones move them into position on the port side."
And, for the next two days, you could say we became conductors of a mechanical orchestra. The drones flew back and forth, carrying the newly minted, gleaming alloy parts from the printer room to the exposed skeleton of the Vengeance.
Kenjiro operated the heavy loader, sliding the massive ribs into place with a grinding screech of metal on metal. I was everywhere at once, using my strength to manually align heavy bulkheads while the drones laser-welded them into the frame.
We replaced the shredded kinetic dampeners with newly designed units I had mocked up with Marcos. Instead of using standard hydraulic fluid to absorb the shock of a railgun impact, I utilized a highly dense, magnetized ferro-fluid encased in the new alloy which I was starting to call S-Alloy. If I were to patent it and publicly sell it, then it would be known as Super-Alloy, but I was just thinking of paying homage to the Strathari with the S part of the name. The system should, theoretically, absorb and disperse rotational torque a good twenty percent more efficiently than the Navy's proprietary tech.
We were sweating, cursing, and bleeding. I had refused to use the Shepherd's med bay to heal my wounds because I wanted these so-called "battle scars." But my split knuckles throbbed every time I gripped anything, but I wrapped them in bio-tape and kept moving.
By the afternoon of Day Six, the internal skeleton of the Vengeance had been completely rebuilt. The structural warp in her spine was gone, corrected by the perfect tolerances of the new struts.
I was lying on my back on a mechanic's creeper beneath the primary thruster housing, using a heavy torque wrench to tighten the final physical bolts on a fuel manifold, when the music suddenly cut off.
"Marcos?" I grunted, sliding out from under the ship. "Why'd you kill the track? I was in the zone."
"Protocol 'Garage Band' has been suspended," Marcos replied, his voice shifting from standard volume to a much softer, more pleasant tone. "The VIP has arrived."
The heavy, pressure-sealed personnel door at the far end of the drydock hissed open, and out came Lyra. "Papa!"
I dropped the heavy wrench onto the deck with a loud clang and scrambled to my feet. A massive, involuntary smile broke across my face, instantly erasing the exhaustion of a sixteen-hour shift.
Lyra was running across the grated catwalk, her little boots thudding against the metal. She was wearing her favorite bright yellow dress, though it was currently covered by a child-sized, heavily stained mechanic's apron I had bought for her. On her head sat a slightly crooked paper hat, the word "FOREMAN" written across the front in messy, colorful crayon. She was clutching a plastic clipboard.
Behind her walked Sergeant Miller, holding his pulse rifle at a relaxed low-ready, a bemused smile on his scarred face. He gave me a two-finger salute before taking up a post by the door. Now that I had begun to make deals with the Navy, Admiral Krane had seen that as the perfect excuse to have a 24/7 rotation of Marines protecting this shipyard and Lyra. But I wasn't complaining. It stopped me from having to pay the useless private security agency, as Sergeant Miller had pretty much taken it upon himself to ensure Lyra came and went safely from the orphanage to the shipyard.
"Hey, Bug!" I laughed, dropping to one knee as she barreled into me, throwing her arms around my neck. I hugged her tight, mindful of my greasy hands, making sure not to stain her dress. "How was school?"
"It was so good!" she beamed, stepping back and adopting a very serious, professional expression. She tapped a toy pen against her clipboard. "Sister Elara said my math scores are the highest in the class! And Timmy traded me his dessert for my apple. But I'm here for the inspection now."
"Ah, yes. The inspection," I nodded solemnly, standing up and wiping my hands on a rag. "Of course, Foreman Lyra. We've been waiting for you."
Kenjiro climbed down from the scaffolding, his face breaking into a wide, goofy grin. Whenever Lyra was around, the cynical, stressed-out engineer vanished, replaced by 'Uncle Kenji.'
"Afternoon, Boss," Kenjiro said, offering Lyra a crisp, exaggerated salute. "The men have been working very hard."
Lyra giggled, adjusting her paper hat. She walked over to the edge of the gantry, looking out at the massive, exposed skeleton of the Vengeance. Her eyes widened, reflecting the harsh industrial lights of the bay.
"It's naked," she whispered, her brow furrowing in confusion. "Where is the armor?"
"We had to take the armor off to fix the internal structure, Bug," I explained, stepping up beside her and resting a hand on her shoulder. "This ship got dizzy. It spun around really, really fast, and it hurt its insides. So, Uncle Kenji and I took out the broken bones and put in new ones."
Lyra looked at the massive, gleaming struts. She tapped her pen against her chin, a gesture she had absolutely stolen from me.
"Did you use torque?" she asked, looking up at me with absolute seriousness. "Like Marcos taught me? Force times distance?"
I let out a bark of laughter, glancing at Kenjiro, who was failing to suppress a chuckle. "We used a lot of torque, Lyra. We had to twist the metal really hard to make sure it stays in place when the ship flies."
"Good," Lyra nodded, making a random scribble on her clipboard. "If you don't use torque, the bolts go flying off. Timmy didn't use torque on his block tower, and it fell over. It was a disaster."
"Quite the tragedy," I agreed solemnly. "We'll try not to be like Timmy."
Lyra walked along the railing, inspecting the work with a critical eye. It was a bizarre, beautiful contrast. Here was a machine designed solely for the purpose of violence, a warship meant to hurl depleted uranium through the void and shatter the enemies of the IUC. And inspecting it was a nine-year-old girl in a paper hat, her presence instantly turning the grim reality of a drydock into a playground of imagination.
"What happened to your hand, Papa?" She had stopped, her sharp eyes locking onto the blood-soaked bio-tape wrapped around my knuckles. The professional foreman act dropped instantly, replaced by genuine, wide-eyed concern. She reached out with her small hands, gently holding my massive, grease-stained fingers. She hadn't noticed them before due to the fact that I had been wearing gloves when around her. Gloves I was not currently wearing.
"Ah, that," I said, feeling a sudden flush of embarrassment. I shot a warning glare at Kenjiro, silently daring him to mention the dented bulkhead. "I was just being clumsy. A wrench slipped, and I bumped my hand against the wall. It's just a scratch."
Lyra frowned, inspecting the bandage closely. "You have to be careful, Papa. If you break your hand, you can't build the ships. And if you can't build the ships, the bad guys will win and take your credits."
The words hit me harder than the bulkhead had. She said it with the innocent, matter-of-fact logic of a child, but the weight of it settled heavily in my chest. If you can't build the ships, the bad guys will win and take my credits. I thought of Kaelen in his tank. I thought of the millions of credits riding on these contracts. I thought of the actions SIGS had previously taken.
"You're right, Bug," I said softly, kneeling down again so I was eye-level with her. I gently poked her nose, making her scrunch it up. "I'll be much more careful. I promise. The Foreman's orders are absolute."
"Okay," she smiled, her concern evaporating as quickly as it had arrived. "Can we get pizza now? Uncle Kenji promised we could get pizza if I did a good job on my inspection."
"I did no such thing!" Kenjiro gasped in mock outrage, clutching his chest. "This is slander! Insubordination!"
"He totally did," I stage-whispered to Lyra. "He's paying, too."
"I heard that!" Kenjiro groaned, shaking his head. "Fine. But I'm getting extra pepperoni, and I'm not sharing."
"Deal," I laughed, standing up. "Marcos. Shut down the primary printers and seal the heavy blast doors. Engage the automated security grid. We're clocking out for the day."
"Understood, Mark," Marcos replied. "Have a pleasant evening. Enjoy the pizza, Lyra."
"Bye, Marcos!" Lyra yelled up at the ceiling speakers, waving her clipboard.
I looked back at the Vengeance one last time before we headed for the exit. We were only six days in. The ship was still missing her armor, her sensors, and her weapons. The Navy expected this phase of the repair to take four months.
We had done it in less than a week.
I wasn't just fixing a ship. I was reinventing the way humanity built them. I was turning the Vengeance into something stronger, faster, and infinitely more durable than she had ever been before. When this ship flew again, she wouldn't just be a Corvette. She would be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
"Come on, Papa! Uncle Kenji is going to eat all the pepperoni!" Lyra tugged on my good hand, pulling me toward the thick airlock doors.
"I'm coming," I smiled, letting her drag me away.
The galaxy was a mess, but right here, right now, things were going exactly according to plan.
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