Jacob held the drone’s hands up in surrender, which required him to balance awkwardly on the drone’s legs. Chalto’s people really weren’t built to stand upright. He could have argued with Katherine, but knew better than to push someone to change their mind on something that they believed so vehemently. The fact that she had apologized to him at all was surprising, but he took it as a good sign that she would come around to his way of thinking eventually, assuming he survived.
After she said her piece, the woman hurried off, leaving Jacob alone on the bridge once more. To Jacob, it almost appeared as if she were running away in embarrassment. He didn’t know why she would feel embarrassed about apologizing, but he couldn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating her strange behavior either. He needed to figure out the ship’s controls and get out of the hangar before the judicator arrived.
He picked up the remote scanner, which was just a drone scanner mounted on a crude cart, along with a drone interface and a power core. Since the largest drones were the only ones with the detailed scanners, and they couldn’t fit past the ship’s hold, this was the next best thing.
The process of scanning the bridge was tediously slow, and he had to start over on a few sections when he failed to move the scanner properly. Normally, the device worked with other drone sensors to capture images and obtain accurate measurements to build a model. It wasn’t much different from how smartphones produced a 3D model. The only difference was that the Concord sensors could scan through material to a certain extent, much like X-ray or ultrasound imaging.
Jacob didn’t have the time or space needed to use a mobile scanning unit with all of the sensors he required, so he had to be more deliberate with how he moved the scanner. He chose to strip the scanner down to just the actual sensor to make building his cart as fast and simple as possible. He was kind of regretting that decision as he slowly moved the sensor over the surface, keeping it at a set distance. Once that was done, he moved over an inch and repeated the process.
Chalto’s people might have been awkward on their legs, but they were quite low to the ground and stable otherwise. Having their thick arms act as additional points of contact on the ground made a huge difference in stability. Jacob probably could have managed with the humanoid drones, but those would have had issues reaching low enough to scan some of the control surfaces of the representative’s ship, since they were on the floor.
Technically, the controls were in slight depressions, situated around what looked to Jacob like a motorcycle seat, specifically the sport bike variety. He wasn’t sure how the seats functioned until he brought in the modified drones. The new drones weren’t anatomically accurate to Chalto’s race by any means, but they were physically close enough that they allowed him to see how the seats were meant to function.
The seats acted more like a couch that you lie belly down on. There were no restraints of any kind, either, which Jacob thought was reckless until he realized the ship had its own gravity. He wasn’t sure he would trust his life to a system that could fail if the power went out, but he hadn’t designed the ship.
Eventually, he finished the monotonous work of scanning the bridge controls and transferring the operating systems behind them to the station.
Once he was satisfied that he had everything he needed, he popped back into the apartment. A new door had appeared on the wall. Well, it would have been new to the others, but it wasn’t new to Jacob. He had used it once before when learning how to control the transport.
He opened the door and walked into the flight simulator. The space was an almost perfect replica of the representative’s ship’s bridge. It was so close that he felt a wave of déjà vu pass through him.
Jacob hadn’t experienced that when he used the transport simulator, but then again, he hadn’t recreated the entire bridge of that vessel. He hadn’t done anything really. The station AI had provided the simulator, and it had only included the controls and seats because it was designed for pilots in training.
Melody had added the simulated sensor and camera readings, adding more realism to the system, but it had never felt real. This room was different. It felt real, and now that Jacob was standing within the same space in both his physical form and his virtual one, it made him feel weird. He quickly shook off the uncomfortable sensation and looked around the room.
“Let’s see what the ship is capable of.”
He moved over to the pilot’s couch and looked at it in consternation. Then he looked at his own body, including his hands, arms, and legs. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to fit, but he gave it a shot anyway.
He tucked his feet into some stirrups at the back of the couch, then tried to bend his legs to place his hips against the raised portion, but he was too tall to make that work. He did eventually manage to wiggle himself down into that portion by sitting bowlegged.
It was immensely uncomfortable, and he was pretty sure he would have dislocated something from his hip if he had tried it in real life. Next, he leaned over the raised section, ignoring the pulling pain in his hips and legs as he reached for the forward controls.
His hands came up a foot short, even if he stretched as far as he could. The only way he could reach was to straighten out his legs, balancing his knees where his hips should have been.
“This isn’t working,” he grumbled and stood up.
Jacob stretched out his sore muscles, then glared at the seat as if it had personally offended him. He knew what he had to do; he just didn’t know if it was possible or wise, considering the disassociation issues faced by those who merged with technology.
Technically, he wasn’t merged with technology; he was the technology, but he didn’t know if that distinction would matter if he changed his virtual form. He had already experienced a few of the other issues associated with merging, so he knew he wasn’t immune, despite his unique circumstances.
He was about to risk shifting his identity to match one of Chalto’s crew when he stopped himself and slapped his forehead. “I can just bring in a virtual drone!”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Three of the modified drones appeared, one for each type of control station. “AI?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Can you control these drones as if they were piloting the ship?”
“I can, Captain, but only because they are virtual simulations.”
Well, that answered Jacob’s other question about whether or not the AI could simply pilot the ship until it lost contact with the vessel. Not having to wait around to learn how to fly the vessel would have saved so much time.
Jacob connected to the drone in the pilot’s couch and started experimenting.
It took him a few minutes to figure out how to even power the vessel. It didn’t help that all the controls were in Chalto’s language instead of Trade Standard. He supposed it made sense, you wouldn’t build a ship to suit some other race if everything else was built to suit you, but the delay still annoyed him.
The simulation ship lifted off the hangar deck, and Jacob eased one of the controls forward, causing the ship to pitch sideways and crash. The simulation reset, and he tried the other control. That sent him crashing in the opposite direction.
Pushing them both forward sent him forward and down, crashing for a third time.
It took Jacob a few hours to tease out the control functions, but he did eventually have the ship rotating inside the simulated hangar. The trick turned out to be using the hands and feet controls at the same time.
Doing four things at once was a bit awkward, and he was still bobbing around like a cork in water, but the ship was moving. He sent his findings to the AI and transferred control of the ship while he moved to another drone.
The other drones had been idle while he played with the controls. Two controlled and monitored ship systems, like sensors and landing gear, while the other was in charge of weapons and defenses. You would think that made the pilot’s station the busiest, but that wasn’t true at all. Once the ship was in open space, the pilot’s only duty was to set a course and activate the phase coils. The sensor station was by far the most involved, since it required constant monitoring.
That need for constant monitoring was probably why there were two sensor stations and only one pilot and weapons station. He could have filled all the stations with drones, but he didn’t see a point in having two drones doing the same task. Jacob also didn’t create a drone for the captain’s command couch because that was set up for monitoring only. Technically, it could act as a backup for the sensor operator’s position, but it couldn’t cover for the others because of how different the controls were at each station.
The sensor station had a series of displays, placed in a shallow arc around the front of the couch, making it easy to view them all without turning your head very far. There were no hand levers or foot controls at the station, only a series of touch panels and physical buttons with security covers.
Jacob figured those were probably manual backup systems.
After perusing the sensors for a bit and finding them mostly identical, if quite a bit better than the transports were, he moved over to the weapons station.
Weapons was by far the most complicated-looking station. There were two thick joystick-style controls, one for each hand, along with some foot controls that looked a lot like the ones from the pilot station.
After pressing each of them and having the ship slide left or right, he realized they were pilot controls, probably designed to shift the ship sideways to avoid an attack. There was a sort of half-globe display in front of the station, along with targeting screens.
Jacob had the AI create a virtual target, then had the AI-controlled pilot rotate the vessel to see how the target appeared on the display.
The result was rather interesting. Even though it was only a half globe, the display was able to mimic a full sphere, showing the target below and behind the ship when it rotated past the horizon of the display.
The targeting display was quite a bit different. It appeared like a cone, starting small and growing outward. It seemed that the ship’s weapons only had a small arc of fire.
Jacob had assumed there were other hidden turrets or something to protect the ship’s blind spots, but if there were, he couldn’t find any controls for them.
He wondered why there were two control sticks if the four visible cannons were the only weapons. He played with the controls for a bit and realized the ship’s four cannons could be independently aimed, doubling the targeting cone’s area.
Jacob certainly wouldn’t have designed a ship to be so limited in its offensive capabilities, but he supposed the representative’s ship wasn’t actually a warship. The pristine condition of the weapon’s controls spoke volumes for how often they got used. All of the other stations showed signs of use, but there wasn’t so much as a nick or scratch on the control sticks on the weapon’s couch. The shield controls were a different matter. It looked like those got used quite frequently, which made sense.
He felt sorry for the person responsible for the weapons because pressing a few buttons occasionally seemed like a rather boring job.
It was too bad he didn’t have the shield’s specifications, so he could compare it to the one he purchased on Vorlos Station. He planned on scanning the entire vessel if time permitted, but he made a mental note to scan the important bits first. Even if his plan failed, he could send the data along with Katherine and Barry. Someone would find that useful back on Earth if he didn’t survive.
That reminded him that he needed to move as much data aboard the representative’s vessel as possible. Jacob would prefer to live, but if the Astryx were dead set on killing him, well, he could uplift humanity. He still thought that humanity should work with aliens, but he wasn’t above being petty to spite them if they took his life.
Jacob spent the next few days getting more familiar with the alien ship’s controls. He even turned off the AI-assistance, just to see how difficult it would be for one person to control each station.
Turned out that it wasn’t much of a hassle at all. He could certainly see how it wouldn’t have been possible for biologicals, but being able to jump from drone to drone ensured there was no real-time lag between leaving one station and moving to the next.
Satisfied that he was at least proficient enough to get the vessel out of the hangar, he packaged everything he had learned into a training program for the others and loaded it aboard the data storage cubes. He had some drones move a few of his personal storage units aboard the vessel while he was training. Now that Jacob had the entirety of Melody’s core to himself, along with the overflow, he didn’t have much need for the extra data storage inside his personal residence—or at least not most of it.
Jacob ran into an issue when he tried transferring the data. The AI refused to allow him to move anything from the station data archives to unauthorized storage. The only things Jacob could include were plans available on Melody’s core, the designs he had come up with himself, or the few items he had scanned since arriving. He could get around that block by manually copying the designs, but that would take an enormous amount of time, which he was in short supply of right now. So, the best he could offer outside of that was pictures of the items in question and their purpose. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
He debated on whether or not to include information on merging, but decided that he might as well. That being said, he made sure to include a warning about all the nasty medical issues involved with such a process right at the forefront of that document. It would be up to someone on Earth to decide if they wanted to pursue such technology.
With that done, he popped back into the maintenance drone inside the hangar to see how the work was going to replace the damaged landing strut. He didn’t even have time to see how the removal was going before the AI interrupted him.
“Captain, ten armed vessels have appeared outside the station.”
“Dammit!” he swore.