“Power is online. There are two areas where breaches are shown, due to damage, both are under ten centimeters in size and can be blocked with energy barriers. Would you like me to send a repair team from the Battalion to patch the holes in your ship?” Nico asked.
“Do it, they aren’t doing anything important anyhow, and the Dutchman has enough materials on board to make a few small repairs so that we can get atmosphere back on the ship. Is there any in reserve or are we going to have to break down an asteroid to get what we need?” Max asked.
“They evacuated the atmosphere from the ship before they left, to put it into storage mode and reduce corrosion. Once we fix the holes and get everything else working, we can release it again.” Nico informed him.
[General Yaakov, we have the ship’s main engines online. There are a few small holes in the ship, if you could authorize a team to come to repair them, I will send you the data.
The Colony Ship has enough storage space to hold all four vessels in its hangar bays since the Colonists took all their shuttles and most of their materials with them.] Max informed the others over the Command Channel.
[That is excellent news. Take what you need and get the ship patched, then send the Admiral the destination coordinates so he can bring the Dutchman in.
Third, through Fifth Battalions, use your X109 units to maneuver the Pirate vessels into the cargo bays and out of sight. We will inspect them and get at least the two of them back online as we go.] General Yaakov ordered.
Nico unlocked the airlock doors for the First and Second Battalions, along with sending the location of the holes to the teams. The external hull was made of the same materials that the main bulkheads were, so there was a good chance that they could manage a temporary patch using the existing ship as the source of materials, saving the time of creating a compatible alloy with the materials printers and sending it over to them.
They could repair the bulkheads at will, but the external hull repairs couldn’t wait. At least not those two, since there were tens of thousands of other small damages that didn’t compromise the structure littered all over the outside of the ship.
“Hey, Max, do you see what I see in these design specs?” Nico asked, drawing his attention to the screen that she had managed to get translated into Kepler Standard.
“Total Mass, power output, hydroponic bays, crew compliment. It all looks pretty normal to me.”
“No, in the actual specs. This ship is only capable of a Warp Factor of two. It isn’t running from pretty much anything. Plus, it isn’t exactly stealthy. We might have to talk to the General about where exactly we can go that isn’t going to get us attacked by idiots that think they can steal our new houseboat.” Nico told him.
Each numerical increase in speed represented a square of the speed of the previous factor, so going down to a factor of two from the factor of six that the Dutchman could maintain was going to be painful.
“Even after the modifications that we both made?” Max asked.
“That I won’t know until we actually try. It’s probably better than the original, but looking at this, the ship was definitely a generational transport. Getting here could very well have taken them hundreds of years.” Nico answered, unsure of the answer herself.
“Do we know where they came from?” Max asked her.
“Not yet. They deleted all the navigational and personal data from the systems, it was only because I could hack the pods that we even know what they looked like.” Nico sighed.
They could have been from one of the Dwarf Galaxies that were relatively near their own, but Max didn’t have enough information on them to know for sure if they had any advanced civilizations. Many of them were at the end of their probable life-supporting period, with their Stars moving into the Red Giant phase, so if they had civilization, it would have most likely come and gone billions of years before Humanity was born.
That thought was actually a little terrifying to Max. If there was still an intelligent species out there that had been evolving for a billion or more continuous years, what sort of being would they have evolved into? It was better not to think of that, all of the answers seemed terrifying.
The Pirate ships were slowly moving now, being maneuvered by battalions of Fast Attack Mecha, while Admiral Drake led the Dutchman to the large Cargo Bay near the front of the Port side.
The information they had said that it used to hold terraforming devices, so it was exceptionally large and had gantries and overhead cranes to facilitate both movements of materials and repairs.
There was a smaller version that the Pirate Cutters were brought to in order to be repaired, and the technicians were already beginning the system scans to determine if they could be properly brought back online with the materials on hand.
[General Yaakov, If we scavenge the third, mostly destroyed vessel, we can bring the other two back up to peak condition, and even increase their firepower with the Mecha technology that we have on hand.] The technicians determined a few hours later, after exploring the ships.
[Good. Get on it, and give them some defensive firepower worth mentioning. Then use some of the leftover ship to patch the more damaged areas on the hull of the Colony Ship. Make it obvious too. I don’t want people to see a new fleet of colonists, I want them to see a repurposed Colony City, understand?]
[Yes Sir, we will get right at it.]
That had the Technicians busy for the foreseeable future, and now that they were all on board, General Yaakov wanted to get as far from here as he could.
The mission was a failure, and they had to hide somewhere, so he planned to continue on course, but not turn to head into Tapani Territory. Instead, he would head along the border with Kepler toward the Galactic Core, where very few inhabited star systems existed.
From there, they could skirt inhabited space and keep an eye on the Klem Pods. If they weren’t intercepted and made landfall on an inhabited planet, they could offer to step in, and nobody would be any the wiser. They had a Colony ship now, so their technology could be attributed to anywhere in the Galaxy over the last two millennia.
Nobody expected cutting-edge technology aboard such a ship, but a large fleet of ancient and obsolete war machines retired by their home systems? That was how most Mercenary Forces were formed.
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