chapter 210

Almost my entire focus remained on calculating the stresses Forward Horizon was going to go through when we left this system and the design of the shell needed to help us do that.

FH was helping me a lot, as she was the one who could do the bigger calculations more easily than I. The biggest danger was us tilting too much. If the FTL current came from anywhere but directly in front of us, things got bad really fast.

We needed to repurpose one of the inventory rooms FH has to run tests. As I stepped out of the portal from the test room, I activated the latest test. FH made the portal disappear, but even then, I hid behind the wall just in case.

There was a dull snap that I heard, and then I felt FH feel pain. It was brief, but it was still there.

“Was it bad?” I asked her, worried that she was pushing herself too much.

“It is fine. This is needed,” she said, but I could feel the pain she was trying to hide.

Walking back inside, I saw that the measurement tools had recorded everything properly, but I could also see the scar on the wall that was slowly healing. We were testing material strengths, and some of these tests had become quite dangerous, as the forces involved in pushing these types of materials to their limits were honestly crazy.

“This material is strong enough and doesn’t require too much material compared to the other alloys. Are you running the tests yourself right now? Is this enough?”

“This material does what we want it to do, but the cost is still high in the sense that we don’t have enough materials. Not even close to what we need, but we can’t make it weaker. Otherwise, we’ll cut it too close.”

She was right. There had to be something we could do. Walking into my workshop, I sat down behind the screens and opened up a view of the space around us. There were many wrecks close by, but these ones had been pretty picked over.

Further out, I was certain there were wrecks that had the required materials, even if they didn’t come in the pure forms we needed. If the concentration were high enough, it would be worth processing them. It was more work, but we would get what we needed.

There should be enough purity in the metals that were out there. “FH, have you inquired if we can connect to the heat-dissipation systems of the station?”

“Yes. Here’s the data on how much heat we can input into the station. The limiting factor seems to be the ports close to us, not the station’s overall heat-dissipation capacity. That itself is pretty impressive.”

Looking over the data, I saw that it was indeed impressive. “They’re probably using some magic tech heat-dissipation systems.”

It seemed every landing pad had a heat-dissipation port that we could connect to. Of course, we didn’t have anything that could transfer heat into that port, but that would be easy enough to make.

We could push our factory quite a lot. In fact, more than one port could handle. Some of the other ones were also close enough that we could use them as well. The design work took about two hours as I finished making the blueprints of the transfer cables that could connect to the ports.

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“Bob!” I yelled through our bond to get his attention. “Come to my workshop.”

He was currently working on storing the things he had been buying for the past couple of days. He had been so fascinated by the niche things he’d been able to get that I’d needed to start yelling to actually get his attention.

“Yes, Captain. Coming.”

It didn’t take him long to reach my workshop, but my thoughts had already drifted to thinking about how to get enough materials without us having to go out and constantly travel back and forth between a wreck and the station.

“Did you find anything new to buy?” Of course he would ask that.

“Bob, time to switch gears. Start ramping up our factory. I sent you the first blueprint of what we need.” He only took a moment to look it over.

“That is doable enough. We have the materials needed. Did you figure out the material composition for the shell?”

“Yes, that’s why we need to ramp up production, but we are missing quite a lot of materials.”

“I thought you worked on fixing that. That’s why you did all those tests?”

“We simply can’t lower the strength of the material any further. Here are the numbers we’re going to need.” Bob was silent for quite a while.

“That’s a lot. I can see why no one else has escaped from here before if this is close to the minimum needed.”

“Well, our ship being in the shape that it is doesn’t help us, but yes, anything lower than this structural integrity will mean death if you try to leave.”

“It would take us months, if not years, to gather enough, depending on how good the salvage is close to the station.”

That word, salvage, triggered something. My head whipped towards the screens, and I quickly pulled up the data on the most powerful groups in this place. One of those was the Salvagers, which was basically a union that every ship captain was a part of and mainly dealt with salvaging.

“FH, is there a quest board on the station?”

“One moment. Yes, there is. It is mostly used for the trade of extremely rare materials or components. But I see where you’re going, and yes, there are some quests issued to gather certain materials or components.”

“Excellent. Make a list of the materials we need and what purity we would accept. Include the quantities needed and update the list constantly. It will be first come, first purchased. That should light a fire under everyone’s ass.”

“And the payment?”

“Make it lucrative.”

“That will fix the time problem,” Bob commented. “I’ll start configuring the factory immediately. We should be done with the heat-transfer cable in a day.”

“Excellent. I will leave it to you.”

I went back to refining the design of the shell. The material we were going to make it out of and its shape were also quite dialled in, but there were still some improvements to be made.

Dean and Sam had also been handling the information gathering. The political situation on the station seemed a lot more complex than we originally thought, with quite a few different factions vying for control, but the Overseer had that title for a reason. It was like he was the king, and the other dukes never messed with him, only with the other dukes.

Sam was not entirely confident that he had found where Melly’s species’ arks were, but he had narrowed it down to three locations. What made his job harder was actually the quest we issued.

Basically, pandemonium followed as the quest went live. We were paying quite well, and although the materials that contained what we needed were common, they weren’t exactly rare either. This meant that everyone with a decent enough scanner could get a pretty big payday.

The Web was basically calling this a gold rush, and already we were getting plenty of materials to get started. It seemed that some were willing to chop up some of their own ships’ armour, or they already had some of the materials we needed in storage.

In the first few days, we basically got three percent of what we needed, and these were only the scraps that people had lying around. We were a long way away from having enough to finish building the shell, but when we did finish, there was another problem.

The entryway we needed to use to escape wasn’t the one controlled by this station. It was one controlled by the campers. That was a problem because most of my ship’s combat capability would be unavailable while the shell was on.

There was a chance that the Overseer would be willing to escort us, but I was also certain that he wouldn’t want to risk a conflict with the campers, as his fleet was definitely weaker than theirs.

This was definitely a problem. We could always try to negotiate, but whenever I thought of that, my sixth sense flared with a warning. Of course, they were the kind of scum who wouldn’t uphold any agreement if breaking it would bring them enough benefit.

Did we need to clean house before we built the shell? It would be dangerous. I was certain that they had strong ships as well, not just the cobbled-together, heavy-alpha-strike-capable ships meant to destroy anything that looked too intact after coming through the entrances into the system.

The Overseer himself wasn’t too happy about the quest we issued. In his words, it was causing too much disruption to the station’s operations. I would let him cool down a bit before starting discussions about what we needed to do to try to escape from this system.

There might also be the problem of some of the people in leadership not wanting us to escape, as it would mean the rest of the galaxy would learn of this place. Power did some crazy things to people, and others coming here would mean that their power would be eroded.

Now, I wasn’t exactly sure what the Adventurers Guild’s response would be to this place, as it was basically a ticking time bomb. My mind really couldn’t come up with any solutions to this problem, but fortunately, it was beyond my need to worry.

My focus was to get out of here and get as far away from this place as possible, which we were already doing by heading to Earth.