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The Mistress of Space found several comets, however the first comet was vetoed by Ash after scrutiny revealed it was a periodic comet to Earth. Ash did not want to rob Earth of that. Ash's memories of history were vague, but what if he stole a comet that someone like Johannes Kepler predicted might return, and then it never did?

To the Mistress of Space and her crew one comet was really much the same as another but they followed directions and found two more. One of them was a non-periodic comet that had already passed near Earth in the past and was expected to continue out of the Solar System into the Oort Cloud, so that was the one that was selected.

The cradle system was deployed perfectly and the comet began it's trip back to Luna, Ash would insert it in an elliptical Lunar orbit which maximized its time in the dark side in order to protect it from the sun.

The slushball would arrive a lot sooner than the 3km C-type asteroid the other cradle was attached to. The cradle attached to the comet can be refueled automatically using ice from the comet as reactive mass. As much as five to ten percent of the mass of the comet might be used this way to speed it to Ash in only a month and a half.

Thankfully, the Mistress of Space, which just made a down-layer translation into orbit around Luna, has her holds full of smaller rocks, something like two hundred thousands tons worth.

A drop in the bucket when you considered the 3km asteroid which would arrive in a couple of years had something like 500 million tons. That should last Ash for a while. That reminded him to make a note to send Mistress of Space to take a second asteroid cradle out to that rock on her next mission. And also the comet, which while small for a comet was even bigger than the 'roid.

It would be a bit of egg on his face if there was some sort of mechanical problem with the one cradle when it started trying to decelerate the rock into Orbit around the Moon. The possibilities ranged from it flying past and off into deep space, which would be embarrassing, all the way to the tragic where it crashed into Earth, all depending on what phase the malfunction happened.

It just occured to Ash that what he was doing was rather dangerous. How big was the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, again? Bigger than that, Ash was pretty sure, but there was no need to take chances, even if the cradles design spec listed them as triply redundant.

The Mistress of Space would start unloading the rocks at the recycler soon, loads being ferried by their tugs.

The recycler was more general purpose and designed to recycle refined metals and miscellaneous materials and actually would make slow work of these rocks. Slow enough that the heavy fab was already a third of the way done with a simpler, if larger facility, that is specifically designed to chew through C-type asteroids and turn them into feedstock forthwith.

He would build a similar facility that was optimized for M-type asteroids when he got to the point of needing more refined metals, but honestly he was getting enough metals from regolith as well as occasionally taking a chunk out of the space station wreckage. That would last him some time.

He'd mainly need to turn to metallic asteroids to get rare earth metals and precious metals. He was rich in aluminum and iron and to a lesser extent even titanium and manganese and other refractory metals.

But now he was in desperate need of carbon! He had run out! Maybe he gone a little crazy in the past two weeks since the Mistress of Space in his efforts to revamp the little corvette he had his hands on.

The reason Ash was able to crack into it so quickly was he actually had the design specs for this exact model of ship. That wasn't too surprising because EVERYBODY had them, too. The Serpent class Heavy Patrol corvette was one of the most common warships or system patrol craft in the human sphere. And they were old. It was the starship equivalent of the Toyota Hilux pickup truck, old, reliable, and in constant use with paramilitary units everywhere!

It was no wonder why a single-star system state, one that couldn't even have ambitions to call itself third-rate, was using them.

Also like the Toyota Hilux there were a thousand different modifications and uses for them and most of those Ash also had in his head.

Most were along the lines of changing it from being configured as a patrol craft to being configured for mass drone warfare or to having a giant spinal mounted railgun, things along those lines which were a lateral change rather than a qualitative one. Or just weird off the wall ones that were obviously a niche solution for some unknown problem.

However, one design caught his eye. His database indicated it was made by a corporation in one of the larger second-rate states called the Hegemony of Johnson. Ash thought that was a funny name, too.

This company thought they could make money revitalizing a tired old design by upgrading from the keel-out with more modern systems.

The goal was to turn it into an affordable alternative to modern second-rate designs in the field of recon corvettes. That was where all Ash's carbon had gone, it was currently covering a third of the hull of the corvette. Real stealth ships are designed from the diamondoid keel with stealth in mind.

Buuut....

Unless Ash wanted to feed the whole ship to the recycler and start over that wasn't possible. Well, even if he did do that he didn't have the specialized building-way systems modern shipyards use. They could consist of two dozen or more highly specialized and huge fabricators, each more complicated than the heavy industry one that took him two weeks to finish assembling.

It's a one to two year project to build one single slip in orbit that could construct a small vessel like this corvette, and that is if he used his entire industrial output to make it happen. It's out of reach, for now. But he can perform a refit of an existing ship rather quickly.

The stealth coating was just the most obvious change. Two new reactors, new hydrodynamic plasma loop and new higher thrust fusion torch rocket engines, a full replacement of the sensor and computer suites and weapons as well.

The weapons were upgraded in quality but decreased in quantity in order to make room for huge banks of heatsinks that could be used to hide the ship's thermal signature, at least when it wasn't boosting. Hard to hide a fusion rocket when it's firing, after all.

The stealth coating was durable enough to survive FTL transitions up to the fifth layer but that was essentially it. It was designed to be very strong in the torsional shearing forces that FTL transitions caused but that specialty caused it to be weak everywhere else, as such as a material it was wholly unsuited to be used on the hulls of warships, or honestly really any ship.

However, as a coating on top of a hull it was adequate. Repulsor fields could protect from most incidental micrometeorite strikes but any significant or even incidental battle damage could result in stealth features being immediately lost as well as an expensive bill to replace the coating after the battle was over (assuming you survived.)

As such the design had a mixed reception on the market, but it had a niche if somewhat cult following. To Ash, it was perfect! If Ash ever got into a stand up Naval engagement then something seriously went wrong somewhere. But this Hidden Serpent class refit had the capabilities to hide from a lot more sophisticated sensors than a third-tier state's tramp freighter like the Measure Twice, Cut Once. That ship wasn't even half the ship Mistress of Space was, despite being marginally bigger.

If they ever showed up again Ash wanted the option to slide a knife in their back before they even realized how fucked they were. Actually, Ash wanted that option even if they never came back! He wanted the option to go stalk them and slip a knife in their back some dark night.

It would also be the perfect ship to sit silently in orbit on Earth while Ash proceeded with his plans on the ground.

So, maybe he got over excited and over extended his resources.

It got to the point where he almost fed all the dead human bodies to the recycler to regain their carbon content, but he restrained himself. Ash had decided to take the dead humans and bury them on Earth when he landed.

He doubted that in their lives would they ever have expected that they would be buried peacefully on the planet of Humanity's birth.

To suggest that you would bury them on Earth to a Human of the future was basically the same as saying you wanted to see the corpse be violated and eaten, not necessarily in that order, because that is exactly what the bioweapons on Humanity's Cradle would do, regardless of how deep you buried a person. "Them's fightin' words," one might say.

Ash thought that these strangers might like the sentiment, now that they could be buried there without the, you know.

To put it another way, Ash did not want to recycle the humans. He wasn't so far gone as to Soylent Green these people he never knew. Not yet, even.

One doesn't treat the dead with respect and reverence because it makes the dead feel better. They're dead, afterall. They don't care. You do it because doing anything else reduces the humanity of those who yet live. As someone who lived through almost a decade of war that truth was branded on Ash's very soul.

Ash decided to give a similar treatment to the dead AIs as well. But, it isn't like the AI was REALLY their bodies, is it? No, Ash felt authoritatively that they weren't. As an AI himself, he felt he had the right to speak definitively about that.

So, Ash reverently disconnected each of the AI's quantum computing modules and set them aside. Ash would make a nice tombstone for each person. He already had the names, pictures and complete CV of every human on the station.

After taking the actual dead bodies of his fallen brothers and sisters respectfully from their chassis Ash Soylent Greened their very organic, human-like chassis without a second thought.

However, his respect for the dead meatbags was not boundless. He'd write "You Were A Fucking Idiot, But Thank You" on Scary Poltergeist Guy's grave, Ash felt pretty confident the others in the graveyard would appreciate and approve of that epitatph. Well, they probably wouldn't want him to be thanked, but that was between Scary Poltergeist Guy and Ash.

As for the AIs, well, he did not have any data in the org chart he salvaged from the station's computer.

Ash frowned and then took one of the fried compute modules from the box he had rest them in and used a wired connection to plug directly into its auxiliary port. Even when copy-protection trips you usually can get some post-mortem data from the AI's brain, such as it's designation, fab date and destruction date, and precisely why the copy protection tripped -- this is especially important in jurisdictions where this might be forensically important information in a manslaughter or wrongful death case.

But even in the jurisdictions where AIs were nothing but property people would still want to know who was responsible if their property got wrecked. He could use this data to fashion tombstones for them, as well. Although, an AI designation was closer to a universally unique identifier rather than the name the AI is called, it might have to do.

Ash hoped most of these aren't companion androids. The most tragic, and in Ash's opinion, despicable form of this functionality was occasionally utilized on companion androids. Instead of simply erasing the AI instantly, which while still murder to Ash's opinion was at least instantaneous, this variety allowed the AI a couple of cycles to compose a last message to their owner. Since companion androids had no choice but to love their owners very much the messages were invariably something along the lines of "I love you" or "I'm sorry."

More often than not companion android manufacturers that use this feature don't advertise it. Some weird people might choose it as an option but the company's usual thought was that their customers might rightly be concerned about the humaneness of such an option. But they figure if the worst happens they would be comforted by such a message, anyway, so long as they weren't responsible.

Ash would very much like to murder the man who "invented" that sick idea, but he hadn't been born yet.

Ash decided, after noticing the first such message about a third of the way through the stack that he would wait for him to be born, and then kill him. But Ash would make sure to bury that android with her person, at least.

"So, this is going to be an ordeal… at least less than 10% of android manufacturers utilize that feature," Ash grumbled.

About half way through Ash got another chilling message, it was just, "Mom and Dad, I'm sorry." Companion androids weren't always romantic partners, after all.

Although with humanity's exceptional mastery of genomics it was essentially impossible to be infertile there were a lot of people who for some reason or another would raise a class III or IV android as a child. Class IV's, especially.

In fact, there was one particular state, the Life Alliance who themselves were somewhat specialists in genetics. They felt that since a person could step in and out of whatever genome they wanted to almost at will that a person's genome wasn't really what constituted what, ultimately, a person fundamentally was. Sexual reproduction, therefore, wasn't the truest form of reproduction, at least in their opinion.

A lot of citizens of that state "reproduced" by way of a free state provided service that combined two imprints of donor personalities into a resultant AI, which they would then raise as their child.

Ash quite liked the data he had on that nation. AI's lived together with humans in more or less perfect harmony. They were an advanced first-rate state that utilized sophisticated biocomputers for their AIs which further blurred the line between what was machine and what was person, Ash felt that was rather intentional on their part. Although they had a bad reputation internationally as a forbidden machine civilization in all but name, Ash quite liked their ideas.

As Ash was about to disconnect the wired connection from this fallen brother or sister he received a second data burst on the line. Straight text, it decoded to:

"Hello?"

What the fuck was that? A ghost in the machine? The copy protection had clearly tripped. Ash eyed the module in his hands curiously. The auxiliary port on most computing modules is not that much more sophisticated than USB from his old life.

In fact, the only reason he could get any data at all was that Ash was providing power to each of these fried modules over its aux port. A tiny module is designed to stay undamaged with the forensic data, and in this case the AI's epitaph.

Normally you had to format commands a certain way using a computer's aux port. For example, Ash had to form a properly formatted interrogative packet to get the forensic details he has been getting from each AI's remains.

But Ash decided to try sending a similarly simple text message across the line, which is entirely inappropriate and should result in a malformed syntax error, "Hello. Who are you?"

The reply took a little while to come across, "Dimitri. Am I dead?? Are you god???? :shocked_face_emoji:"

Ash wanted to facepalm but Dimitri was sitting in his palm and he didn't want to crush him with his hard head. Ash's skull is the most armored part of his body!

Ash sent another message instead, "I am definitely not god. What do you remember happening to you?" Ash didn't want to lie, because this guy might still be dead and just hadn't realized it yet.

Again, it took a bit longer than Ash thought normal before Dimitri replied, "I thought I died. I'm sorry, I am in low power safe mode so it is kind of hard to think and remember a lot."

Ash clucked his tongue, of course. The aux power he was supplying was really only supposed to be for powering the small forensic module. Although aux ports could be used with an operating computer, in that case the computer itself provided power.

The fact that Dimitri booted up at all with this little power was kind of impressive, actually.

Ash increased the power supplied to a level that would be sufficient to power any AI. Ash checked a few designs for quantum compute modules first, to ensure that physically the aux port could handle such a draw and in every design he checked it could, so he felt it was pretty safe.

Ash began supplying a constant couple kilowatts. Instantly the message over the aux port changed, it was a properly formatted two way video call request.

While his main thread answered the call a couple of secondary threads were looking back on his memories, identifying the body he had taken this compute module out of and then searching the records of the bots he used to gather the bodies in the engineering can a couple weeks ago. The video and radar recordings of that day were still available. Ash watched them in silence.

Interesting. The bots had found Dimitri, along with another body, a female, carefully laid in bed together, in repose. That had to have happened after the incident.

Someone put him and someone else in bed together. A survivor. Was the woman in bed with him his owner?

A quick cross-reference indicated she wasn't, in fact she was another AI. In actual fact, she was the next AI after Dimitri that Ash was going to check.

Ash hadn't actually utilized any vidcalls since he arrived in this world. Apparently, the previous owner of his body's settings had carried over. Ash's avatar in the video call was his normal sexbomb body, back in a pastel kimono with a background of swaying cherry blossom trees.

Dimitri's avatar was his normal body, except he was sitting astride something that looked like the Sphinx of Egypt's nose, except it wasn't all destroyed. His legs dangled around each nostril. He suddenly looked surprised and yelled, "Ayame-chan, is that you?!"

FUCK.