After leaving Bob time to ponder everything that had changed, Jacob decided to do much the same.
He headed toward Melody, taking the same path that the Astryx forces had when they came to destroy the ship’s AI. The damage had been repaired during his absence, leaving no trace of the one-sided conflict.
Jacob almost wished some of the signs had remained. He had learned a lot during that brief encounter. Having a physical reminder of that struggle every time he passed by would reinforce the fact that there were much bigger fish in the universe. And they were willing to come out to his distant little corner of space to prove that.
He might have come to a tentative agreement with the Astryx, but they weren’t exactly friends, and they weren’t the only threats he needed to watch out for. If he wanted to survive, he needed to adapt.
He encompassed that in everything he tried to do. He made the new combat drones, pushing through roadblocks, coming up with alternative plans, but he was only one person, despite having access to an entire AI’s worth of processing power. That was one of the reasons he turned over operational control of the station to Barry while he was gone. It wasn’t that he couldn’t operate the station using an avatar; he wanted to see what the man would do. He wasn’t disappointed.
Befriending Xing’che to get her to open up never would have occurred to Jacob, so his efforts were already paying dividends. Having Katherine help the eiraxin refugees had also been a spur-of-the-moment decision that had brought more than one benefit. He supposed he could include recruiting the humans to that list.
Little by little, he was leveling the playing field between the sides. Would it work? Maybe. He wouldn’t know until the next issue cropped up. Hopefully, Barry’s efforts would head that problem off before it arrived, but if it didn’t, well, he was working on an alternative.
Jacob looked up as a maintenance drone zipped toward him. It maneuvered around him like water around a boulder before disappearing into the station for more materials.
He watched it go for a moment, marveling at the improvements. Most of them were Barry’s, but Jacob had more firsthand knowledge of their limitations, so he had weighed in when they were modifying the design.
The drones were now three times faster than the old tracked models. They were also far nimbler and more maneuverable thanks to the six orbs that rolled beneath them. Barry had been the one to suggest using the same technology that made the orbs on the combat drones spin and rotate, but flipping it so they could act as omnidirectional wheels. Jacob’s addition to that idea was to coat the orbs in the same material that was on the tracks, so they would be able to work in zero-G.
The design had to be tweaked quite a bit to get everything to work properly, but they did eventually come up with a design that utilized a slightly tapered ring around the center of the orb, which produced an anti-grav field that held it stable in all directions.
That improvement alone had sped up repairs on the ship and station, but they hadn’t stopped there. Barry had designed larger arm units that were designed off the bipedal drones, giving them more dexterity, allowing them to do some of the tasks that only the bipedal drones had been capable of before.
Specialization was the last thing they had added. The Concord drones were a marvel thanks to their wide set of skills, but they didn’t excel at anything. That worked when you had an actual crew to fill in the gaps where expertise was needed, but Jacob was lacking people to fill that niche, so drones programmed specifically for a task were created. If that task was complete, the drone returned to the cradle, got a new program, and maybe some different appendages to assist, then it was off once more.
In the short term, it was actually slower doing it that way. Jacob had run the numbers before they deployed those new drones, and by now they were already outperforming the upgraded standard maintenance drones in certain areas.
It was weird stepping into the airlock aboard Melody and seeing it open. The ship wasn’t airtight everywhere, but about a third of it had been sectioned off after the station repaired the sub-structure in those areas.
Jacob might grumble about the station AI being a poor conversationalist, but he would never claim it didn’t know what it was doing when it came to fixing a ship. Pressurizing the vessel wasn’t needed to fix it, but not having to open and close the airlock constantly sped the process up considerably.
He wove through the madness as dozens of drones zipped past him, grabbing material that had been stockpiled in the airlock and then zipping back off to deliver it to the other drones making repairs.
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It was amazing to see all the work getting done, but he really wanted a bit of time to himself, so he continued until he found one of the new temporary airlocks that had been placed inside the large corridors of the vessel. The door opened with a quick ping, and he stepped inside.
Once Jacob was through, silence greeted him. He continued until he found one of the large rents in the hull. He climbed the broken material onto the outer hull, where he sat and watched the stars.
He was toward the front of the vessel, giving him an unobstructed view beyond the station and the docking cradle. Without those, it was easy to feel like he was floating in endless nothingness, just bobbing through space with nothing to worry about.
It was what he needed after Earth and the trip back. His social battery had depleted long before the trip ended, and while the thought of being alone for an extended period of time terrified him, he still needed some alone time now and then.
He spent an hour like that before his peace was interrupted by an object approaching. He turned to see what it was and easily located the drone ship as it flew past, carrying what looked like hull plating.
When Jacob actually looked, he saw eight more of the drone ships going back and forth between the ship and the station.
Jacob was confused by that, so he pinged Barry and popped into the apartment, leaving the drone sitting on the hull.
“What’s up?” Barry asked.
“How did you get nine drone ships built so quickly?”
“I didn’t. I purchased all of them from a merchant in Vorlos. Once they arrived, I just removed their computer processors and replaced them with the Concord ones so the station could utilize them.”
“Damn, I wish I had thought of that. So you didn’t create any drone ships?”
“Oh, no, I did. Just not the maintenance variety.” Barry pulled up a ship that Jacob didn’t recognize.
“Is that a combat drone ship?”
“Yup. Based on the design you had, but I added energy cannons, a shield, upgraded gravitics, and upgraded phase coils.”
Jacob whistled at that. “When did you have time to design all that?”
Barry shrugged. “It wasn’t all that hard. Most of the systems were already in place; I just modified them slightly to make them work with the new hardware. The hardest part was getting the shield generator to work. I had to scale the one you were installing on the station back so it used less power and was smaller. It’ll only take a single shot from a ship’s energy cannon, but it’s better than nothing. Now that I have some experience with the generators, I’m almost positive that the ones on the Astryx combat drones would have only held up for a shot or two from a ship cannon. Not because I think they are weak or anything, but they lack a dedicated reactor, and shields are extremely energy-intensive. I would have preferred to use the shield generator design from the Abyss Pearl, as that one is both stronger and more energy efficient, but I barely understood what I was doing when I stripped away parts from the shuttle generator.”
“So no combat drone shields?” Jacob asked.
“Even if I were an expert on the technology, I wouldn’t recommend it. The reduced operational time just doesn’t seem like a good trade-off. Especially when the rest of the combat drone is so quick and easy to produce.”
“So the Astryx versions are like the German Tiger tank from WWII, while our drones are the Sherman tanks?”
“Not exactly an accurate comparison, since both combat drones could have the same weapon loadouts—” Barry paused as he caught Jacob staring at him with a blank face. “—sorry. Yes, you could think of them that way.”
Jacob smiled. Sometimes the man started going off on a tangent when all Jacob wanted was a yes or no.
He didn’t expect the Astryx to attack again, but not having a countermeasure for those drones was unacceptable. They were the last defensive layer missing from the station.
Jacob had already installed the energy cannons, although he would prefer more powerful ones, but he figured volume of fire would help there. Then Barry had installed the station shield. There was also additional shielding around the central core of the station, making attacking the station a much more daunting task. He wasn’t naïve enough to think it was unassailable, but the shields, guns, and combat drone ships would make it much harder. That left internal defenses as the last obstacle to overcome.
Knowing that the Astryx drones were not as all-powerful as he might have believed was a good start, but the drones wouldn’t be enough. The new program Barry had written bypassed the weapon restrictions, but those drones were far less capable than a piloted unit. Maybe with four-to-one odds, they could take out an Astryx combat drone, but they didn’t have the resources to throw into producing thousands of the drones.
“What about defensive turrets at key intersections?” Jacob asked.
Barry shook his head. “I thought about that, but I also watched the combat footage from the Astryx drone. Hidden turrets would be ideal, but I couldn’t come up with a deployment method that was faster than the drone’s ability to target, meaning the turrets would have to be deployed ahead of time. Without a shield, they would just be destroyed before getting more than a single shot off.”
“So shield them,” Jacob said.
Barry stood there. “Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. It would actually solve more than one issue. We could shield all the intersections, locking down the station even without deploying the turrets. I was going to repurpose the shield generators you installed into more combat drone ships, but we lack material for those ships, so instead of letting them sit around until we have more material, I can start installing them in key areas.”
“If you need any help, let me or Katherine know. I’m sure she’d love to play with some new weapons, even if she doesn’t get to fire them. You should also check in with the General. I’m sure he and his people have way more experience dealing with creating chokepoints than either of us.”
Barry nodded. “I’m speaking with him at this very moment.”
Of course he was.