Spoiled Brat A Mile Long 2

I will have the chapter as links to download at the bottom of the post. As well as a link to the Google Document page.

Halla System.

Thalia.

I had the trio of Javalins let go of the shuttle a few hundred metres from the surface of the planetoid and descend on their jump jets, using up a fair amount of reactive mass but preserving what was in the shuttle. I could refuel my Mechs from one of the Mechbays scattered around my body but refueling my shuttles was going to be far more complicated.

I could probably do it, but I would be doing it using my Stinger who had a body many times too large for the job. Who would have thought that the biggest problem I was facing at the moment was that all of my Mechs were too big for what I needed them for?

Well I suppose the lack of material and crippling system damage was also a big problem. Ah well, one problem at a time. My trio touched down with only a minor amount of staggering to keep their balance as I fought against the interference and turned about to the mining facility as my shuttle touched down rather gracefully for such a big, fridge-coded girl.

Did this make me a pirate?

...nah, no way, me? A pirate?! What a crazy thought.

My Javalins swaggered forwards and began to investigate the outcropping of buildings. There was a big warehouse building next to a relatively flat area of ground so I directed ‘05315’ to go over there and pull open the door that had been left unlocked. It was half empty, or half full depending oh now you looked at it. Half a dozen forklifts were haphazardly parked around a power cell that was dead as a dodo while the warehouse itself featured huge shelving units that criss-crossed the entire warehouse. My Jav stalked inside and pinged the warehouse database only for the building to call me a bad guy and to go away.

Okay, the warehouse computer said I did not have clearance and was in violation of something or other. Who cares? No one had been here in decades at the very least! I ignored the computer and made my own visual inspection of the loo- contents of the warehouse, made rather convenient because all of the coils of wire and crates all had trackers on them identifying their contents.

A few hundred tons of 304 grade stainless steel, a dozen tons of 316... A lot of water, tungsten... woah, almost a thousand tons of metallic calcium. There must be a range of deposits on this planetoid if they are making so many different things here. I guess that explained why there is a mining base here in the first place. It did not explain why it was abandoned, unless the place had run dry and it was simply not economically viable to collect all of this stuff.

Yeah, that must be it, this was pretty much refuse! Waste, whoever owned it clearly did not want it anymore so I was doing the galaxy a favour by reusing and recycling! I used the Jav to begin picking up and carrying coils and crates over to my shuttle... loading her was going to be a pain huh.

I glanced down at the forklifts and cursed the lack of automation on them. How was it cheaper to have a guy driving this stuff around compared to just putting a computer in the forklift to do it for you! No wonder this place went out of business!

I huffed and turned my attention to the remaining two Javalins as one of them went to inspect the refinery. A series of simple and rugged machines designed to have various ores dumped in one end and produce a range of different processed materials at the other end.

As well as a huge slag pile to the north of it with what looked like a monster truck with a big spade on the end to push all the waste product away from the site now and then. A ping and another frustratingly analog vehicle relegated to the list of things to scrap for parts. Finally I sent my Javs to the borehole and the big habitation structure next to it.

It was a big cube with rounded corners and a base that sloped downwards into the planetoid regolith. Two bands of windows circled the square and there were airlocks on the north and south sides with some wheeled transports left next to them likely designed to take people from the hab to the other parts of the facility.

Oh a whim I pinged the transports and almost had a fit.

OF COURSE! Of course the things that were designed to have a human in them could be controlled remotely but a forklift, a vehicle that could just be transporting material needed a person to operate it!

STUPID! DUMB! BAKA! I’M GLAD I BLEW UP YOUR DUMB TURRETS!

Turning my attention away from the most baffling decisions humanity has ever made I looked up on top of the hab at the most beautiful thing humanity has ever made.

It was a sixty metre tall communications array with three long range laser relays, a microwave emitter and receiver combo and a whole host of other dishes up there. It was like I had been walking through a desert for years only to be confronted with an oasis. More water than I could drink in a lifetime, left here just for me.

I suppose I could forgive the stupids this time, for such a wonderful offering, to me! Hehe! 

I just had to get all of that equipment up to me, even with just a Stinger doing the installation. These communications arrays were rugged designs and were just slightly more complicated than a plug and play system if my database was correct. The system itself did not quite match anything in my database but I am sure it was fine. 

I dedicated a Jav to that project, carefully hopping off of the planetoid surface and using the thrusters to bring the Mech onto the roof of the hab to begin dismantling the comm array ready to be carried over to my shuttle as my final Jav made it’s way to the borehole that dominated the facility. 

It had a roughly four hundred metres radius and looked to have been made by some kind of machine that had been dropped onto the planetoid and had started to dig on its own. A quick search of my database produced nothing specific so this was likely some kind of purpose made machine, or it was something relatively new on the market, hardly surprising but potentially very useful if the boring machine could be extracted from the hole at all.

There were two elevators on either side of the borehole, one was just a large bucket, or more accurately a series of large buckets that pulled material out of the hole as it was being bored while the other looked to be a large cage big enough for a light mech to get into with a big yellow sign in English and Portuguese saying that the elevator had a limit of two hundred tons maximum.

Yeah, this thing carried Mechs, it had to. I climbed into the cage and very gingerly pressed my big mech hand against the control lever, throwing an arm out to grab one of the bars running around the cage as it jerked to live and began to lower into the pit with the rhythmic sounds of the steel chains clanking against the metal box propagating though the material and into the sensor systems of the rugged combat rated Myomer that allowed my Javelin to move.

The signal started to get squeezed so I sacrificed some more reactive mass, much less of a sacrifice with the discovery of metallic calcium in the warehouse, and adjusted myself so I was near directly over the borehole itself with my Stinger relaying down to the Javalins. It was a bit awkward to hold this angle but I just needed to do a quick visual check to see if anything useful had been left behind.

Once I got the comm array installed I could faff around down there as much as I liked... as long as I kept close to the borehole itself, signals could only bounce so far after all. While I waited for the elevator to reach the bottom of the borehole I busied myself with loading up the first shuttle and beginning to carry over parts of the comm relay as well as using the Stinger and Javelin sensor arrays to compile a much more detailed scan of the facility.

The refineries themselves were pretty standard and relatively compact. If I could get the machines themselves up to me I could have a vastly more comprehensive material refining capability for almost no investment. I would need to clear out some space somewhere however. Perhaps in one of my cargo holds? I was reasonably sure that things had not been packed totally efficiently.

Besides, I was going to be consuming a lot of the parts in storage for repairs now that I had at least some of the materials required to begin the major repairs. I was still going to be confined to this star system with my Compact KF Drive damaged, at least until I could source some Germanium to repair the drive. 

The chances of me finding enough germanium in this system was quite remote however. With the metallic calcium I could bodge together a torch drive capable of getting me to another star system the long way, but I would need to stock up on a lot of material if I intended to slowboat my way anywhere.

I turned my attention to the Jav descending into the earth as the elevator came to a stop and the grate lifted up onto the back of what must be the boring machine. It was huge and looked like it was designed for people to work on it... well the material was eaten from one end and pumped out here on this platform before it was scooped up by the bucket elevator.

This was the machine's butt, people working here walked around on its butt all day. I suppressed the electrical equivalent of a snicker and set that thought aside.

I stepped out onto the boring machine and looked at a row of six well used rugged sets of powered exoskeletons. Roughly six tons of grabby machines designed for someone in some kind of environmental suit to climb into them and start using the things. A quick ping by my Javelin gave back clear readings. 

They were Myomer based and even had a cheap neurohelm derived control and security mechanism built into them, incredibly basic but just enough to allow full operation of the heavy skellies.

I did a little hop of joy in my Jav as I stalked over to the suits left here for me and got to work.

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It had taken a month to ferry up the comm relay, the exoskeletons, learn how to control the exo’s remotely and begin installing the comm relay itself. As for the boring machine, it was broken and I had no idea why. So I had started to dismantle it and bring the pieces up to the surface, sorting them into useful bits, potentially useful bits and scrap.

It was truly remarkable just how many parts, electronic components and resources I had extracted from the base and after testing out metallic calcium as an alternative base in the manoeuvring thrusters of my shuttles I had decided that the performance was... acceptable. 

Well, terrible actually, the systems were simply not built for it, but it worked good enough to operate in the small amount of gravity caused by the distant gas giant and much closer planetoid. With the good stuff put into storage and my shuttles using up the metallic calcium I could put my full fleet into service and had begun to do so. 

It would still take me a few more months to fully dismantle the base but once that was done I could... Well I could do a lot of minor repairs, there had been a reactor down in the mining base so if I was lucky I could fix one of the broken auxiliary reactors inside of me. The large amount of steel could help patch up the holes and repair parts of my superstructure that had been damaged. 

I had a lot of things to do but I could not help but feel like I was running in place. If I could not find Germanium in this system I was going to have to spend the next decade stocking up on reactive material using far more primitive mining methods than the boring machine. If I managed to stock up on enough reactives I might even make it to the closest system in the next century or so.

I sent a ping to the comm array attached to a freshly patched part of my hull and felt a giddy excitement as a flurry of boot sequences for the different components of the array began in concert. Almost instantly the Mechs I had on the planetoid began to move faster, smoother and what had been fuzzy and lossy imaging became almost crystal clear.

For the first time in a month my Stinger let go of my hull and made its way to one of the many breaches in my body to climb back into me. I would need to check the Stinger over in the mechbay before I put it to work.

On a whim I delved into the range of storage drives on my new comm array. It seemed like the last non-routine message out of this array was in 2866 where this base was given a decommission order and a date established when it would be dismantled...

That was meant to be over a hundred years ago now, man, they dropped the ball on this one. Ah well, I looked though the datafeed for anything interesting but most of it was just routine logs, likely any personal communications were regularly scrubbed from the system to save space on the rather small drives.

Lame.

I then looked over the automated communication traffic logs and found hints that this base had been pinging other bases in this system. I felt my interest spike and dedicated my sensor bandwidth to trying to find hints at where they could be while I continued to look over the data for anything interesting.

Huh, it seemed like five years ago this base sent out an emergency distress signal after a pirate attack? That was strange, I don’t remember anything like that. I dug into the relay data only to find a grainy image of a rather familiar ship in orbit of the mining outpost.

Oh, it was me.

RUDE!

I was NOT a pirate! What a lame thing to say about me!

Ah well, five years was a long time and even after getting narked on no one had come to check this base out. So clearly no one cared, and anyway, if I was the only person in the Halla system I could decide what the rules were and finders keepers sounded pretty good to me right now!

I compressed all of the old logs from the comm array and threw them into long term storage. The chance that I would need that data again was slim but I guess I was a bit of a hoarder, and I had the space so why not?

Honestly, narking on me like that, serves this dumb base right that I was ripping everything up. Five years too, I was pretty sure that nothing was going to come of that at this point.

Probably.

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I have always been interested in the idea of building up from very little, of scavenging and salvaging equipment. I think there is a lot of appeal there.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter! Critical comments are welcome!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/192u4OcfykCYsDCViDeOMXToFHB-6HmP-MzApHMEaN1Y/edit?tab=t.0