Deepspace: Orin Captain of the Conquistador (Ea)(Com)

A commission for last_of_workers

Orin was inspecting the drones that had just been completed. Though the three AI assistants he had installed onto the ship rarely make a mistake when constructing their designated type of drone, he really doesn’t have much to do while his ship is flying through space.

So each morning when he wakes up, he does a system scan of the Conquistador. Once he gets the report, he looks it over and makes sure that there’s no problem anywhere on the ship. As the Conquistador is huge, it’s quite common to find something broken among it each day.

After inspecting it and repairing as needed, Conquistador doesn't have much to do, at least not until he gets some place to start mining. So he goes and checks the drones on the ship, which is mostly so he can play with them and entertain himself.

The Conquistador is considered a mother ship type, and all that really means is that it's the storage and control center for many smaller ships. All mother ships are huge, as most of the time they store tons of ships and people.

However, Orin is the only one on the Conquistador, and instead of ships, he has the ship control to store and even create three types of drones. The first being scouts, which he sends out first when he arrives at a new planet and or rock.

These drones will scan for signs of life, precious minerals, and many more things like the stability of the planet and oxygen levels. They then send the data they collect back to the ship in real time as they go.

Once the coast is clear and if the scouts find something to extract, Orin will then have the Conquistador send out the second type of drones, that being the mining drones. They go to the locations found by the scouts and using a powerful laser, they start mining.

Once they free the minerals from the surface, their lasers turn off, and they pull out a claw to pick the mineral up and bring it back to the ship. Once everything’s been extracted, the drones all return to the ship, and the Conquistador will go off to somewhere else.

Now there’s still a third type of drone that doesn’t get used all that much but is the most important. Those are the fighters. These drones are deployed anytime the ship or Orin is threatened, whether by other ships, asteroids, or anything else that may come up.

They’re equipped with Hexos-9 cannons, which are capable of shooting small yet powerful blasts that burn hotter than five thousand degrees Celsius, so anything they hit is in grave danger. These drones are also three times faster than the others.

Of course, the downside to them is that they’re much weaker than the others due to being slightly smaller, and hitting something or being shot is usually enough to cause the drone to explode. Luckily, Conquistador can hold a ton of drones, so it has plenty to spare.

As for how the drones are made out here in deep space. Stealing the ideas from another ship he had encountered that created nanobots inside them, Orin set up three production assemblies inside the ship in the areas that had previously been used to house extra passengers.

Each one is dedicated to converting minerals into the materials to make each drone. Each one is also managed by an AI that Orin installed himself in order to make the process fully automated. Mayve manages the creation of scout drones.

Rosha manages the creation of mining drones, and lastly Haylea manages the creation of the fighter drones. All three together help Orin and the Conquistador travel around in deep space without the need for anyone else.

Which is nice, but the biggest downside to this process was that each assembly required certain materials and took about a day's worth of time to create each drone. So if Orin goes through too many drones, he’ll run out of spares and need to wait for more to be created.

Which actually happened to him recently. One of the planets he was working on suddenly had its gravity increased by a hundred, and it pulled all the drones to the surface and crushed them in a moment, leaving Orin without any mining or scout drones.

It wasn’t a big deal, as Orin had plenty of materials on the ship, so he could go months without collecting more, but it does leave him quite bored each day as he waits for the drones to be made. So he plays around with the drones by flying them around the storage bay.

He hoped something interesting would happen to keep him entertained, but as this was deep space, asking for something like that to happen was like asking space itself to invert and turn white. It just wasn’t likely to happen; some things, however, manage to break all odds.

Orin jumped to his feet when the alert for a distress signal went off. Orin ran to the cockpit and checked it out. The signal was coming from Zeta-13, which was in a sector quite close to Conquistador.

Orin thought about not going, but if he did, he’d be able to claim Zeta-13 for himself and perhaps do something interesting with it, and at the very least he’ll be able to get a ton of resources from it. So he convinced himself to go.

He jumped to the next sector and thought he was going to have the advantage because of how close he was, but he arrived to find the space around Zeta-13 was chaotic. Anomalies were occurring everywhere in the space around Zeta-13, making traveling toward it dangerous.

Orin knew he had to be careful, as one wrong move would be his end. So he deployed the fighter drones and started to use them in unison to blast away most of the obstacles in his way, like the asteroids and broken ships.

He also had to dodge random blasts of acid rain that came pouring out of portals that seemed to open and close randomly around him. It was pretty hard with the size of the Conquistador, but he managed to get through everything with minimal damage to core parts.

Orin lands at the space station and takes a breather. He then watches as several other much smaller ships land around him, some of which he knew and considered friends, but he knew right now they were also competition. Everyone chatted in the square before heading to the orbital elevator.

While on the elevator, Orin leaned back and started to daydream, which was unfortunate timing, as he wasn’t paying attention when the space station and elevator vanished. He snapped out of it to find himself plummeting to the ground.

Orin had no idea what to do, but luckily the Conquistador knew he was in danger and sent out a fighter drone to catch him. It then brought him right to the ship. Orin jumped off the drone and landed on the floor in the storage bay and started to catch his breath.

That’s when the next anomaly occurred, and Orin ended up passing out. Orin woke up some time later when she heard some strange noises. She sat up and looked around, and while she could still hear what sounded like something being built, she couldn't see where it was coming from.

Orin stood up and tried to remember what happened, but she had no clue. One moment she was on her ship and the next she was standing in the middle of nowhere, which sounded just like the assembly area of her ship.

Orin put her hands on her ears and yelled about it being too loud. Suddenly Orin could see things displayed in her eyes, almost like a HUD, but it was weird since she didn’t have that sort of thing installed into her eyes.

Orin ignored it for now and watched what it was doing. Orin then saw what looked like a symbol for hearing pop up, then she watched as the number next to it went from one hundred to twenty-five. As it got lower, Orin noticed the noise wasn’t as loud.

Orin was impressed; she had no idea how she got these upgrades but she wasn’t going to complain. Instead, she wanted to know more about what they could do. So she asked it to tell her the source of the loud noise she was hearing.

It was able to do that, but what it brought up was confusing. It claimed the noise was from a drone being created and that it was coming from inside her. Orin laughed; it had to be malfunctioning, right? she couldn’t make anything inside her like that.

Orin looked down at herself and suddenly found herself less sure of her words. She hadn’t realized it until now, but the body she was in wasn’t even her own. It seemed to be now part machine and fully female, which was nothing like the one she was in before.

Orin gulped and then asked her system if there was really a drone being made inside her. Suddenly Haylea spoke, and Orin could hear her as if she was in Orin’s head. Haylea told Orin that it seemed to be true and that she was currently making a drone.

Orin started to panic and told Haylea not to make a drone inside her. That she was only supposed to do that inside the ship. Rosha spoke up and said that something happened and that she was pretty sure Orin was on the ship now.

Orin’s eyes started to twitch and she asked how that was even possible. Mayve seemed to have a partial answer for that. She suspects the anomalies they’d seen up until now likely caused them to fuse together, with Orin being in control.

That made sense to Orin, though she still wasn’t happy with it. Orin then asked more about the drone thing being built inside her. Rosha took over and said that it seemed all three of them were still capable of creating drones; just now they’re smaller and built inside Orin.

Mayve started talking again and told Orin that she actually thought they could do a lot more than make drones now. Orin was curious and asked what she thought they could do now. Mayve then they started to go over the list.

Other than making drones, Orin could have them make almost any item she could imagine, as long as it fits inside her body and she gets the minerals for it. Orin was surprised to hear that, and admitted that sounded quite useful.

Mayve then said that it seemed since Orin was still part human, they were capable of creating biological things as well. Orin tilted her head and asked what that meant. Mayve continued to explain.

If Orin told them to, it seems they could even grow a baby inside her without the need of anyone or anything else. Orin could also fully control the features of the offspring, to the point of making a completely new species or making an exact copy of herself.

She then asked Orin if she wanted to go ahead and have them do that. Orin freaked out and said no. There was no way she wanted them to create anything inside her, never mind a baby. All three of her AIs sounded sad hearing that, but accepted it.

Orin then started pacing back and forth as she processed what had happened to her so far. There was nothing she could do about her body or lack of ship right now. So her best bet was to head to the center of Zeta-13 and hopefully get help from one of the other pilots.

Of course, who knows what she’ll come across as she heads there? It could be dangerous, in which case having a drone to help her would be a good idea. She just wasn’t sure she liked the idea of building them inside her. She also has no idea how the built drone comes out of her, but she’ll surely find out soon.