Free Wandering Engineer 6: Pirates Bane by Chris Hechtl

lot in power, but it's
making up some in transit time. We really are getting too close to the reserve Admiral.”
    Irons nodded bleakly. There was no helping it. He'd thought they'd
pick up some grav sheer, or some high-density energy packets with the hyper
collectors. They did close to what he had projected in Delta, but still, the
bottom end of that projection. Which was annoying. He shouldn't have counted on
that.
    He had stuffed Phoenix with bladders of fuel before they had left.
It was all gone now; they only had the fuel remaining in the tanks. Even the
bladders had been recycled to make room inside the ship. Not good.
    “So, I'll set up more methods of navigating in VR in rough
patches,” Sprite said, recapping and getting his thought train back onto
positive tracks in the here and now. "That will allow we AIs to focus on
other tasks for brief periods."
    “Agreed. I think finding a way to do the job without sitting on my
butt and staring at the screen helped a little.” Irons smiled slightly. “But
I'm famished now.”
    “Lunch break?” Sprite asked.
    “Yeah, I'm thinking rabbit. Or as close as the food replicator can
get,” the Admiral replied with a wolfish smile. Sprite opened her mouth as if
to object but then closed it with a chuckle and shake of her virtual head.
    <----*----*----*---->
    When he was bored he wrote contingency plans and explored
logistics tables or read manuals. They had a few manuals to hardware that had
come after his long stint in stasis. Not much, some minor changes to reactor
controls, some changes to add more redundant control runs to weapon mounts...
minor improvements in efficiency... not a lot. Of course they had only a few
years after he went dark before the Federation went dark as well.
    He winced and changed to something more productive. He explored
the sector of space with a holo map. The Rho sector capital had at one time
been Pyrax, which had been the oldest inhabited system when it had been formed
into a sector. Eden, its planet, had been one of the first Terran colonies,
terraformed and founded by Lagroose Industries centuries even before the
Federation itself had been founded. The founder of Lagroose industries had
specifically chosen the then very remote system to get away from war torn Sol. The
history books were torn on the subject as to why the founder had chosen a
system nearly fifteen thousand light years from Sol to come home. Some had
thought it was because at the time Eden had been one of the few Terran style
worlds. Others saw it as an escape from war and ever increasingly sophisticated
society. Some had cynically pointed out that the decades long journey had
allowed the founder to use banned medical science to restore his youth in order
to form a monarchy of his own with his own laws.
    War however had eventually followed the colonists anyway. One of
the battles of the First Terran Interstellar War had been fought there, which
was why the Tauren battleship had been left to drift there, and would
eventually be recovered by him and the navy to be rechristened the Bismark.
    Eden had been quite a beautiful world when he had visited it,
almost living up to its name he thought with a pang. Now it was rubble, the
inner Eden belt of the system that had spread out into a ring around the Pyrax
star, denser than the Atens belt had been.  All its industry destroyed by the
Xenos or pulled out by their corporate backers after the Xenos had left. Only
Anvil had been left to rot on the vine, not worthy of recovery for some reason.
    But, back before it's planet's destruction, Pyrax had been the
largest population and industrial system in the sector so it had formed the
center of a sphere of space several thousand light years in diameter. Many of
the systems were dead, only a handful of stars were the right type to not only
have planets, but have a Goldilocks zone and have the right set of variables to
support a life bearing planet. And of course the Xenos had taken a hand