Astra Pt. 09

Jack looked back, "Low power mode now. Do not contact me for 24 hours. Wake every 12 and check if I am back. If not back into sleep mode." She nodded and went out. Jack brought the ship onto the moon near the Drakor ship and landed with the rear toward them. Jack walked out as he lit up his sword. He put it away and walked forward to the 3 Drakor waiting.

One floated his sword over, "A Justice has 2 swords."

Jack thought and showed him that discussion along with helping others construct their swords. He turned it into a ball of Metal, "Fix."

Jack took it and made a globe of Tera with the moon and then took it and restored it to its former glory and activated it. He put it away. He asked, "What do I call you?"

He heard back, "Vengeance."

Jack asked, "Where do we go from here?"

He heard, "We wait for the one you named."

Jack sat down.

He heard, "Not a tactically sound position."

Jack smiled, "Prove it!"

He came in with an overhead shot that bounced off his shield belt. Jack responded, "Try again."

He sent the wall of liquid telekinetic energy as he raised his hands to strike, he pinned them in the wall and Jack had his sword pointed at the Drakor. "The perception of weakness is not weakness."

He put his sword away and released his hands. He looked at Vengeance and Vengeance came around to strike again from the side. Jack went ethereal on him. Vengeance backed off after spinning wildly for a second.

Jack returned. "I let you bounce one off my shield, one to pass through me. I get the impression you want to fight me. Is that what you are trying to ask?"

He heard, "You are an abomination. I will end you."

Jack rolled backward, "This just the two of us, or are your friends involved as well? Is this to first blood or going to the death? I hope you have a telekinetic shield to save yourself."

The Drakor lit up his sword while Jack did the same. He put it to his left side and waited. Holding it like it was sheathed. Vengeance came in with a high shot again with a slightly elongated reach. John stepped forward, blocked, and turned his back toward him. He ran his sword behind him with a two-handed strike straight into the chest of the Drakor at 2x speed. He sent him flying for 30 meters on the moon's low gravity surface. The Drakor got up slowly and looked across at the human who stood before him.

A Drakor Capital ship appeared. While Jack waited, another shuttle launched. He heard, "Dispenser of Justice you are, put your sword away."

Jack put it away and the other came back and stood to the side as the new Drakor entered the area from the second scout. Jack sent him the scene from the bridge where he had issued his warning about the treaty and their approach to adding Hybrids. Then what 'the time monitoring' Drakor told him.

The Drakor looked up, "I do find you an anomaly but in a good way. This explains why we have had such trouble with your species. They were denied the choice to even be given the choice. You overcame it because you felt you had to save humanity. You also did it differently. You focused on the hand to choose the blade that best described you. We might see more justice types if we used that method. Some would not end up mischaracterized or misnamed. Things for us to consider. You graduated here as well.

I now understand why they waited. They wanted to see if you got that treaty signed before you left. You succeeded in that goal. I hope you find your success here as well. I know nothing of this other Drakor, but giving you a chance to get humanity to graduate here seems like a fair approach, to the unfair situation you found yourself in."

Jack bowed to him and returned to his scout. He sealed it up.

Jack returned to being John in his mind. He got the ship powered up and the shields on as he took it up. He pointed the ship for Geos. He got into orbit and located the remains of a single settlement on the planet. No human life. He took them down as Astra came to. He brought it down a few hundred feet from the settlement. He found the journal of the original settlers.

'Crop ships blew from micro-meteors and ore miners destroyed in the asteroid belt. 3 colony ships arrived with no food. Cannibalism kicked in almost immediately as we had a hard time discerning what was and was not edible. The few seeds brought that remain, failed to produce enough to satisfy the population.'

The last survivor took his own life after writing an entry cursing the Federation for forcing them here. Jack looked at Astra, "They did not come here on their own. They were sent here in this timeline. Sent and died. The dead were eaten first."

He held the charter and the name changes for the colony in his hands.

John went to Meos and found nothing. He landed and looked around, "Those plants are edible. We are 2 years away from Tera with 5 years of food. Only one option."

He pulled out the gear and started fabricating up a 4 pylon Wormhole Engine.

Astra looked at him, "You're building a Wormhole Engine?"

John nodded, "Yes, too much crap can go wrong for a ship this small to travel that far alone, and through that deathtrap asteroid field. We know what it can do to our ships. If we had enough firepower, it would be a different matter. We cannot go with more pylons because we need to be able to land this ship.

We will go bigger and add a three-core multiplexer for the Wormhole Engine. That means we need to stretch the length by another 10 meters for both decks and the exterior frame. That means building a land-based drydock to support that effort. We are talking years for just the 2 of us."

---

John drank more than he ate during the first 2 years. Until he ran out of mead 2 years in. He stretched the coffee for 2 years because of his mead consumption. He spent many hours some distance away at a river and drank alone in his depression; especially that first year. Far enough away that Astra could not traverse it alone and the ship had command codes that kept her from mining trips as well as coming after him. John wanted privacy and he warned her about nagging him through the implant or he'd pull it and leave it out.

Astra tried to console him but she felt it as well. She felt John as he pulled away from life in general. She had to kick him in the ass now and then to get him working again. Over the first 4 years, he went without sleep. He refused to talk, using only the telepathic interface to his chip. He told her it was the only method he had to exercise telepathy and he needed it to be as strong as possible for the trip. She felt there was more to it but did not push the issue.

Most of the first year was spent building equipment and modifying the scout to do the mining needed. He had to build an external workshop to set up a work area large enough to create the power cores, the dry-dock, and set up the beam press. Astra could not spend long hours away from the gravity plating that recharged her. Once he got the new cores installed, he used the old ones in the workshop and had gravity plating inside of it so Astra could assist.

John had to build a smelter as the engines had to be the titanium-H alloy as did the framing and plating for the extension. He worked mostly alone on that task initially; when he took the time to work. Astra got used to calling him John during this time. She got fucked by him 14 times a day on average and worked to ensure he ate. Which was an ever-increasing challenge as time passed. He did not drink heavily but he did drink alone and missed meals. He got the mining rig to work first.

They needed titanium and the other elements in addition to more hydrogen for fuel. He had set it up under the shuttle. It took 6 months to build that modification. He took out 6 of the 14 seats from the front center of the design. All to avoid going through the half-deck where all the power cores, shield generators, and computers resided. John recycled those seats into the fabricators.

Astra helped immensely with that project as he was gone half the time drinking near the river during those early days. The process to make metallic hydrogen as a stable component typically required molds to generate each metallic hydrogen brick with the right amount of Vironidite. Sometimes he would do the metallic hydrogen bars while in space and extend the trip a couple of days. If they mined Vironidite and other material first or needed more time to find some of the rare elements for the alloy.

They spent the day fucking non-stop while the mining machines ran. Those were days she could get him to eat more regularly. He bypassed the molds by using high-pressure telekinesis, 2,000 liters at a time. He funneled in the Vironidite until the mix was right and then dropped it out into bars on the ground. Astra picked up and stacked the bars for him.

It would wipe him out to do it that way. While Astra begged him to do smaller batches, he simply refused. 'He had to exercise his talents.' Each tank produced 2,000 bars of stable metallic hydrogen with exactly the right mix that way. Astra generally looked forward to those trips; except when he extended it to make bars because it wiped out a lot of his energy and that took a toll on his depression. John set up a hammock for them, though he refused to sleep, it was for sex.

Sometimes he shut off the gravity plating and turned it into Zero-gravity and fucked Astra while they floated in space. That caused a lot of tears in Astra's skin and bruises on him which healed quickly but gave him an outlet for aggression that she knew he needed. They went out once every 6 months and restocked fuel and Metallic Hydrogen at a minimum. That was a 3-day trip each way that they did together mostly. The smelter that created the metallic hydrogen titanium alloy pieces was the true pain in the ass he had to deal with.

He could not use telekinesis on those pieces. He had to find all the individual elements to make those bricks for the alloy. The wormhole engine and most of the power core components he needed required the alloy. John had to build the Wormhole engine components, new heatsinks, and power relays to go with the 3x 500-terawatt power cores and 2 spares. All of which had alloyed components in them.

That meant going out and finding asteroids to find and mine the other components from the titanium to Vironidite. They got to where they placed tracer tags on good mining sites as they orbited inside the system. Then the components needed to make the onyx cover the new section of the ship. The pieces he had to cure required hours in orbit to cure the framing extensions, plating, and engine components. He had only two fabricators and they could not be used to make the alloyed parts.

They all had to have molds. That made it time-consuming. Occasionally Astra went mining without him while he worked on the engine assembly, power core assembly or the 16-hour stretches at the beam press. Astra had to time it to always be back on time. She failed that only once and the mental argument they had from that left them both feeling worse for wear. John lost a day's worth of work as it left him worried that he was stranded and alone.

Astra promised to come back even if she had not filled up at that point after that exchange. They went from mining to creating those bricks and then curing the manufactured alloy parts in space. John ensured he had everything he needed before he disabled his functional ship. He spent almost 3 years preparing the ship to be dissected. Just to ensure he had everything needed to put it back together again. Jack had made the pylons out of straight stable Metallic Hydrogen.

He also hoped it would increase performance and he had no plans to coat them. That avoided the curing process needed in space for the alloy for those pieces. He could get away with it for that, but not for everything. John had to build the pylons in layers and then merge them once he had them all together and aligned.

It took 100 layers to build one pylon and each layer took 16 hours to create and shape right. It took just under 9 months of dedicated labor out of the 2nd year just to create those pylons alone. He knew Sprits could have gotten it done in half the time by herself. He could meld in the edges of the layers, with that much Metalic Hydrogen he could not manufacture the pylons strictly through telekinesis. Each pylon was nearly 150,000 liters of stable metallic hydrogen. He could simply meld the edged of the layer onto the new whole.

John was not the Structural Engineer she was in working the beam press. He did get better over time. In short, John was not just the manufacturer. They became the miner for every element he needed for the fabricators. The manual and mental labor for every piece of hardware they had to stage for the assembly. At the 3-year mark, he built up 2 more fabricators and recycled the old ones as they neared their end of life. One had already started showing signs of instability.

Once those were operational and he was restocked on all elements, he began the retrofitting of the ship. John had decided against maintenance bots on this ship because of the limited space and construction time and material they would need. He would need them in Tera and ensured they were stocked to build them when the time came. He had fabricated the medical bed and his bed for a new home but did not assemble the parts. Instead, he had built a loft into the roof of King Arthur to hold the pieces until he had a home.

It was there if an emergency came about and Astra needed to assemble it to treat him. Astra had filled the sperm refrigeration unit a long time ago; cycling out the bad and stored fresh samples along the way. Even after creating 2 more units to store them; which was an argument she only had once with John. He let her have the time and went off drinking as this was less than a year in when she asked to make them. It kept her busy. In a way, it made him happy for Astra to have something to do besides be John's taskmaster.

They got the 4 pylons set. The length of the ship stretched out how he wanted it, including rewiring just about everything in the ship to accommodate the extra length. All of the wire in the wiring was stable metallic hydrogen with an insulation layer. Thin enough to be pliable. Then the new wormhole engine was built which had a simple single crystal-to-crystal design as he would be the only one powering it. A risk unto itself that he had not discussed with Astra at all.

She suspected but never questioned John on the matter. He stacked about every free space available on the ship with another 30,000 standard bards of stable Metallic Hydrogen when they were getting close. On the last trip out, they filled 7 tanks with Metallic Hydrogen before packing up and departing; the last tank was hydrogen for fuel. He installed the crystals.

One into the Wormhole Engine. The other he had in a large necklace with the sword and shield crest. He wore it under his shirt every day since he created it on the first day. John went to check on the other colony. Nobody had returned to that rock. He checked the interior of the solar system and found no other ships. He nodded and pushed the power up slowly to maximum on the Wormhole Engine.

He had talked it over with Astra, "Best to return where I left from."

Astra nodded. He had started talking again as he had finished the project and she found she had missed his voice.

---

As they pushed through. They had to take evasive action as a battleship almost ran into them. Two destroyers moved back and aimed at his black ship with the silvery-white pylons.

John sighed, "So much for a low-key return."

John was hailed and he decided to answer it. John looked at the angry man on the screen, "Where in the hell did you come from?"

John smiled, "I spent my formative years in Japan."

The guy looked miffed, "You just appeared in front of us!"

John nodded, "I felt the same way when trying to dodge you!"

The man sighed, "You are running no transponder."

John had shut it off for fear of pirates and had not thought to put it back on. He had wiped out the name and the designation on the shuttle knowing it would cause more trouble than it was worth. John looked at the man. "Last survivor of Tau Ceti. John Travus. They had no Tower Controls or military."

He nodded, "Get that thing properly registered."

John nodded, "Plan to do just that when I get to Tera." He headed toward Tera as the destroyers backed off.

As they neared the planet he heard, "Unidentified craft, you have no transponder signal."

John replied, "Transponders were a luxury in Tau Ceti. The colony was destroyed by starvation and pirates."

He saw the same old antiquated fighters. One of the fighters looked at the ship, "About the size of a scout and a half in length. Maybe larger. Smaller than a destroyer."

John smiled, "Affirmative."

The other fighter asked, "What is with the pylons?"

John replied, "Research equipment."

They saw him slow down. "Everything alright scout?"

John smiled, "Just taking it to port speed."

The Tera pilot responded, "You got another couple of hours yet."

John replied, "That is fine by me. What station would I be coming into?"

He heard, "Tera-7, the newest one."

John asked, "Who is President?"

He heard a laugh, "Trudy Winthrop from England."

John sighed, "Did they ever get Jupiter to work?"

He heard another laugh, "Only in swallowing another rig. The company went bankrupt last month."

John asked, "Nothing left of it huh?"

He laughed, "Only a small space station high up and out of danger. Why? Are you looking to waste some money?"

John asked, "What is the going rate for liquid metallic hydrogen?"

The guy laughed, "I think it is at an all-time high of 10,000TC per ml after the Jupiter failure."

John looked back at the 7 filled containers. Astra smiled, "Like starting over."

John nodded. "Ever since we left." He connected comms with Tera-7, "Can you tell me who holds the paperwork on the failed Jupiter project?"

The lady laughed, "Believe it or not it was a subsidiary of GS systems. Lost them a ton of credits. They returned the lease over to the government mineral department."

John nodded, "Connect me please." He got a pleasant-looking woman who asked, "How can I help you?"

John smiled, "I heard the lease for Jupiter was returned to you?"

She nodded, "The hydrogen is for any use the Liquid-Metallic hydrogen is another matter, 500 million TCs for a 50-year lease."

John asked, "What about Saturn?"

She looked, "Available and the same."

He nodded, "I have some cargo to unload as soon as I get that taken care of, I will be by to see you. Does the Jupiter lease include the space station?"

She looked, "Yes, it is not much, probably a few hundred people at best."

John nodded, "How much for just the station out at Jupiter?"

She looked, "You want to buy a small used space station outside there; If you are wanting a space station around Jupiter it would cost 5 Billion TCs. For a permanent lease. That station cannot be sold separately as it is tied into the lease."

John sighed, "I wanted to move it away from a planetary body. Did they build a station out at Titan? I have been out of the system."

She looked, "Not yet. Are you wanting the right to build there too?"

John smiled, "How much, and is it exclusive?"

She laughed, "Yes, it is exclusive and that is 5 Billion credits. Not as high of a risk as a permanent lease. It does not count building it which will be a few billion more."

John smiled, "About 10 billion."

She shook her head, "You could build a space dock for that."

John smiled, "Two of them, in actuality. What is the going tax rate? I have been out of the system as I stated."