Chapter 6: The Little Engine That Could

So. As it turns out, designing a spaceship's interior is somewhat harder than I'd thought it would be. I mean, who knew? I had gone back and forth to the Altered Carbon Universe a number of times, scavenging parts of various machines by dint of hauling scrap from the zombie apocalypse "safe" universe and using my alchemy to make doubles of the various components, though this did have limits as many machines required extremely precise fittings and I was only able to carry so much in any one trip. So. Yeah. But -- machining tools were mine. In all of that work I finally clued in that I could use a sort of CAD schematic from the cyberbrain firmware alongside my alchemy, basically turning myself into a sort of human replicator. I was still hesitant to make an actual replicator that way; the things relied on precise mechanical placement of quarks. I had a bunch of decisions to make in this thing -- decisions like whether to arrange proper decks or not. I eventually decided on using the outer hull as the "floor" decking for the gravity-plating, on the notion that this could double as inertia cancelling by increasing power to the plating as appropriate. This would leave me with seven "decks"; the outer ring of six, and an interior "engineering" compartment. Five meters of clearance and rhomboid sidewalls, with periodic bulkheads every ten meters. Fitting the capsule into that setup was actually easier than I'd thought it would be -- I did have to blister down the core "engineering" section a little for the length of the capsule by a meter -- but that was less of a problem than you'd think since I needed to fit the sockets and nutrient exchange anyhow.

But … ugh. There's a reason why science fiction shows never focus on the design phase of spaceships. Thrusters and guns are nifty when they're someone else's problem to actually implement. And the closest I had to temporal compression was the ability to rely on open-source design AIs from both the Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell Universes for fitting things together. But they kept making … let's call them "interesting" decisions, as they were designed with the assumptions of their native universes and sometimes they conflicted with one another. Honestly. At one point one of the compartments in the design was supposed to be filled with jello. Not even joking. Jello.

I was left scratching my head for a while before figuring out what in the world was up with that. Turns out there was legitimately a good reason to have something like that on a spaceship: emergency acceleration countermeasures. No, seriously; while a human being of moderate health in a prone position relative to the acceleration can sustain upwards of ten gravities for prolonged periods (an hour or so) without developing medical issues, the moment they are upright or trying to move that stops being the case. But if a person is suspended in a fluid? Oh, that changes the game. Arbitrary accelerations of up to thirty gravities can be sustained without the subject experiencing acceleration stresses.

Needless to say, I redesigned my control throne in the capsule to double as a control dive tank after learning about that. Wasn't as pretty to look at, but the idea of the capsule was to improve survivability, not look impressive. The reason for the use of the "space jello" by the way, was because the gelatin was meant to be treated with a compound that would make it exert van der waals forces against itself but nothing else, meaning that it would self-adhere in a vacuum and as such could be held in place with webbing unlike actual water.

Over the weeks I spent banging my head against the designs, even with all of the cheating software and use of time-compressed VR simulations, I learned rather a great deal more than I'd anticipated about how to design even a spaceage spaceship. I was lucking out a lot by not needing to worry about things like movement stresses and center of balance and fuel density considerations. Those five terra-root cold-fusion plants I had? The bio-alchemy I had learned back in the Fullmetal Universe actually didn't object to my force-growing cuttings of the plants. Being able to produce more than twenty gigawatts of power in a space no larger than a grown man? Scary stuff. The fact that I'd need that kind of power to properly operate the thrusters I was embedding into the capsule and corvette? Yeah. I could've gone with the sublight thruster designs of the Conastoga, but those relied on conventional fusion reactions and EPS plasma conduits to directly feed the thruster engines. Ideally I'd use proper antigravity thrusters but the designs I currently had access to didn't really scale up enough to handle the output levels I needed without taking up more space than I was even remotely comfortable with. There were probably universes I could reach that had such tech, but I already felt like I had far too much to digest on my plate as it was.

Especially with that damned shuttle from the Taelons. There was a lot of stuff in the thing that didn't make any sense whatsoever. Even with the more advanced mathematics and models I'd pulled from the Conastoga from the STU and the Altered Carbon Precursor tech I was able to extract from their datanets. There were some small parts that weren't too difficult to work out -- especially with the terra-roots and Skrill as alternative examples of the necessary biology for transferring significant power; I'd worked out biotech ion thrusters that way, which reduced the amount of non-living material I'd need in the ship's structure significantly. But the ID drive? Every time I tried I just wound up going cross-eyed. The virtual glass was … well, I could copy the emitters and slap them down on something, but the field equations to get shaped virtual glass? I'd tried dozens of equations before I largely just gave up and decided to go with flat hexagonal honeycomb panels of emitters and fill in the blank space within. Imperfect solution but hey. The stuff could tank literal anti-tank munitions easily enough.

For a CIWS system -- some of my plans involved navigating asteroid fields and the idea of doing so without countermeasures was just not on my to-do list at all -- I'd decided to go with further dumbed-down Skrills combined with the ion thruster for additional confinement and acceleration. I couldn't use the bio-alchemy for that, but I could follow the original instructions on cloning more of the things I'd stolen from the Final Conflict Universe and just … well, not grow the brain. Required direct stimulus to activate and fire, but that was okay. Better than having lots of sentient organisms in an "and I must scream" scenario. Little dimples in the hexagonal hull gave the sunken turrets the ability to cover a significant arc, and I was hoping that by having enough of the Skrill Cannons tied into the organic hull of the ship I could further reduce the energy drain on the ship when in navigation. The total size of the things worked out to about a full meter, so I only had six total of the things -- one pair on the end-corners of the same two sides of the hexagon. That gave me three cannon with forward and back facing arcs, and four for any side facing arc, with total depression capacity to the very face of the hull. Decent coverage.

The Skrill Cannons themselves … not the greatest range possible. The normal Skrill weapons had a weapon aperture of about two centimeters, and had variable strength outputs for energy and focus. I'd kept those features, especially since they had the ability to produce artillery fire levels of kinetic impact at the upper range, but the problem was the decoherence. After about two hundred meters or so, the energy projectile would have a diameter of twenty meters. Ergo the use of the ion thruster setup in a linear accelerator configuration -- to improve the coherence and raw acceleration of the projectile. The total energy values didn't change, but it went from a range of half a kilometer to a range of five hundred kilometers before diffusion made the weapon meaningless, with a velocity of maybe a thousand kilometers a second. I could probably do more, but the energy costs involved were already in the megawatt rangesI even if most of that was in the thrust acceleration as the Skrill weapon used some sort of matter to energy reaction that didn't draw on the electrical systems, and as I'd said -- I wasn't looking for a capital-ship weapon, or even to be effective in space-combat with these things. They were meant for interception and defense strictly.

Of course, you can't have a decent spaceship without some method of moving it through space. While I could, to an extent, handle that problem myself, single points of failure and spacetravel are the devil's playground. So fie on that. No -- I had spent a significant portion of my time trying to work out exactly how the Taelon shuttle's propulsion systems worked, only to find myself utterly vexed by the interdimensional drive system. It used mathematics that were utterly alien -- pun intended -- to any of the AIs or smart systems I had access to. I could reproduce most of the parts fairly easily enough; the Star Trek universe scanners and my own alchemy-based structural analysis allowed for that much. But the parts all depended on a kind of energy I could neither reproduce nor manipulate in order to function as intended, and the exact mechanics of how they operated were not included in the shuttle's computer systems. I would be stuck observing them in action and testing to exhaustion if I had any hope of ever actually reproducing the system.

That wouldn't stop me from using it, mind, on my corvette -- though the size differentials and staying power involved meant that I'd be best served making relatively short hops. If my guesses were correct, I'd top out at about three times the speed of light. For a system that worked in-atmosphere, though, that wasn't a bad option. The realspace thrusters were more of an issue, however. By comparing the components I could understand from the Taelon shuttle to the ion thrusters of the Altered Carbon Precursors (seriously, the people there used the things for sky-cars.), and cheating a little by using energy emitter cells from a Skrill weapon in the Host bioprinters instead of the usual growing pattern, I was able to create a kind of thruster solution that was able to give appreciable accelerations in real-space to the vessel.

It was a total kludge, but it worked. The standard Taelon thrusters were strong enough to lift a shuttle into orbit; what I built was three times the size and maybe two thirds the total power. But I could build it, and my hexagonal corvette had room for six on each end of the ship. I'd get maybe -- maybe -- twenty gravities of thrust out of the setup, on emergency power. Cruise speeds would be more like five to eight.

Life support… I might have gone a little overboard on, considering I used what I could draw from the Final Conflict universe, the Star Trek Universe, the Altered Carbon Universe, and what I could from stealing the data from the NASA computers of the postapocalyptic zombie universe. I wanted stupid levels of redundancy on this. I had chemical, powered, and biotech solutions each of which could provide breathable air, potable water, and edible foodstuffs. Some of those wouldn't be pleasant, but they'd keep me alive. Each had their own methods of detecting the level to which they should operate that were independent of each other, and each were sufficient to a crew of twenty. I even set up a medbay with four cryopods, a Host medic, and an autosurgeon table from the Altered Carbon universe -- complete with a micro pharmaceutical factory.

The machine shop included a pair of general autofabricators (think 3D printers on steroids) from the Altered Carbon universe, though hybridized where that was easy to do with components from the Conastoga's fabricator specifications, so while it was no replicator system, it came pretty close. I also included a horse-scale Host printer.

For computer systems… well, I didn't quite get what I'd hoped for there, but Host Pearls in VR setups were tied to the thrusters and CIWS systems, all of which had feeds from automail optical sensors based on my own eye as well as the scanner schematics from the Conastoga, which I was unfortunately unable to convert into a biotech analogue. A much larger and heavier-duty version of the scanner equipment was built into the fore and aft of the hexagon, allowing potential binocular refinement. While the scanners were FTL-capable, they were rather limited in range. I'd get centimeter-scale image resolution out to maybe two light-hours; and could detect gigawatt-scale energy concentrations out to maybe a light-day. With dedicated focus on an area, and time spent in scanning, I could probably increase those ranges by a factor of one hundred -- but that would mean sitting relatively still for at least half a day.

I was damned proud of the thing. I was going to call her the "Heartseed". She would change everything for me.

As I slowly slid myself into the control tank, and waited for the automail couplings to connect me to my new creation, I found myself staring at the smiley I had drawn onto the face of the blank-white worker-drone Host that I had taken to have following me around if for nothing else than to have something to talk to. This wasn't much of a surprise considering that even with the occasional trip to a law-drama universe's earth for a nice meal and maybe to catch a movie -- after checking to make sure that zombie-world money spent there as well as its own -- I was rather starved for conversation after the last couple of months of design and construction. I would have felt bad about leaving behind all of the construction equipment and materials I was leaving in safe-bunker I had set up in the zombie apocalypse world, but I figured it would make a decent fallback should all else fail me. I had even left instructions for the systems there to start up the construction of another Seedship, though that one would lack the ID system of the Heartseed. I'd feel bad about the Hosts I was leaving behind excepting that they were very carefully ensured not to be sapient.

I looked my smiley-ed companion in his inky eyes. "You know. I've gone through all this effort and I'm still not sure if the damned thing will actually work. I could be about to kill myself, you know? Oh, everything the Thinktank can work out says the numbers should be in my favor here, but what do they know? Besides being programmed with literally every law of physics and bit of sensor equipment I have scavenged, and observing my transits with the Taelon Shuttle like a bajillion times."

The Host just stood there. Judging me silently.

"Yeah. yeah, okay. What have the Romans done for us lately? I get it. I get it. No need to nag."

Slowly I began powering up the systems of my new vessel. Six and a half years after I first left my original world, four months after I finally pulled the trigger on escaping into the wider multiverse -- that I could reach -- proper, I finally felt like I was at a moment of true beginning. I was truly reaching a point where instead of simply scavenging things, I would be making them. I even knew exactly where to go for my first trip. But first…

A series of bone-deep "thuds" made there way along my back as the automail connectors hooked into place. With a gradual pace I warmed up the terra-root cold-fusion reactors and fed power to the systems of the ship. This would be the first time I'd done so with myself connected. I could feel the skin of the hull like it were my own. The automail optical scanners I'd built into the hull gave me the weirdest sensation -- it was like seeing with one's elbows and finger knuckles. I could hardly make heads or tails of the sensory inputs, relying on my neural implant to override the signals with a "hud" that was intelligible. The various system-monitoring Hosts were each in real-time providing a stream of data that I could "look" at by turning my head one way or another and having the cyberbrain firmware-derived datastream I was viewing focus on that part of the the virtual space. Eventually, I'd be able to operate all of this directly via the automail connectors, but for now the information was simply too overwhelming and unfamiliar. There was also a proper physical control center that the Hosts monitoring the systems could interact with controls directly for -- any one of the three systems would be sufficient for operating the ship, and it could even largely operate without me at all once powered up, though nothing could override the automail connectors.

The smile on my face was completely hidden by the breath mask of my acceleration tank -- again a completely redundant system given the accelerations I could actually achieve; but between it, the gravity plating in the bulkheads and hull, and the inertial dampeners I had in place I had three mutually independent systems to protect me from acceleration-related mishaps, each of which could handle any I could actually generate fully on their own… and plans to obtain a few more on top of that.

The reason that smile was there was because I was seconds away from taking off in my very own spaceship. Built by my own hands, no less.

I maaay have done the "countdown to liftoff" thing. I would of course deny and fangasming involved should I be called out on it. But it would have been worth it. Because not even a minute after that, thanks to an extremely brief jaunt on the ID drive just to prove it was in working order, I was in space.

Anyone who ever tells you that the Overview Effect isn't that big a deal, by the way, is lying their ass off to you. I looked down upon the vasty deep and saw the shining blue jewel of humanity's origin, the cradle and womb of my very species, and I wept at the beauty of it. There were no words. No words at all.