Chapter 46

Battlestate

August 21, 2019

18:52 EDT

The Zeon-class frigates were a step below the Manticore-class frigates that the girls had, being about five meters shorter and having lesser firepower. If they had four Manticore-class frigates, then we probably would’ve turned right around to find something else to do.

Rather than push the throttle forward and fly right towards them, I instead turned the ship ninety degrees starboard and then rolled the ship until our dorsal hull was facing the enemy ships. It gave them a larger profile to shoot at, but it also allowed us to bring all ten of our pulse cannons to bear. Our new Staris-class light cruiser was ovoid shaped with the pulse cannons spread out evenly along the port and starboard hull. Because of the shape of the hull, only six cannons could fire forward or backward at a time which would greatly reduce our firepower.

The second reason that I didn’t charge towards them is that I wanted to be able to fire upon them for the maximum amount of time. If we went at them while they were coming toward us, we would pass each other so quickly that we would only be able to fire for a few seconds before they were out of range. We would then have to flip the ship end over end and slow down, before heading back for another pass.

The weapons on the Manticore-class frigates were all forward-facing, which made much more sense on a smaller, more agile craft. I had each of them spread out, and gave each of them a target to focus on. Mason, Ben and I would deal with the other two.

“Weapons free as soon as they’re in range,” I said, changing the view on the main screen so I could see the incoming ships. It would still be a minute or so until they got into range, but that was the vastness of space.

“It’s too bad we don’t have any gauss cannons or railguns,” Mason said as we waited. “We could’ve been firing this entire time and shredded them by now.”

“Or mass drivers,” I nodded.

That was the biggest pro of kinetic weaponry in space; the ability to fire a weapon and have that projectile travel forever. In theory, at least. They also carried a massive con, and that was simply the fact that battles were often fought over very long distances. It could take a projectile twenty seconds to travel the distance only to fly past its target.

Energy weapons, on the other hand, move much, much faster, but have a more limited range. As they travel through space, they’re constantly dispersing some of that energy into the surrounding space, losing effectiveness. If we fired at the incoming ships before they were in range, we would definitely hit them, but it would be like hitting someone with a wet noodle.

There was another type of weapon that was very effective in any circumstance, and that was the missile. They’re not the type of high-explosive missile that you’re probably thinking of, however. When a high-explosive missile detonates against a shield or against a ship, the vast majority of that explosive energy is dispersed, doing very little, if any damage.

That’s why you need to get creative. In Battlestate, there is a missile that is basically a delivery system for a one-use high-intensity laser. The missile’s job is to get it within range, at which point it would deploy and fire a constant beam of energy until it was either destroyed or ran out of power.

“Twenty seconds until they’re within range,” Ben said.

My heart started beating a bit faster as I looked down at the timer on my screen. This was our first time fighting on our own terms, and though I knew that there was a good chance we would come out on top, it wasn’t a guarantee.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ... wait a minute, I’m picking up a massive power spike.”

Looking back up, I saw that all four incoming ships were rotating until they were facing away from us. Quickly typing on my console, I switched one of the screens so it was showing the two cargo ships. They, too, were facing in the same direction.

“Fire!” I commanded.

“Firing!”

I looked back to the frigates and saw the red pulses of energy fly towards them. The first few pulses hit the two lead ships, but then four hyperspace windows opened and they jumped into them. The cargo ships were gone as well, so it seemed as if the frigates were just buying time until they could jump.

“Well that was anticlimactic,” Tessa sighed as her voice came over the radio.

“You can say that again,” I replied.

“Either they were trying to gather some information or they got here just before we did and were buying time to jump away,” Ben said. “I scanned them when they got in range and it seems like they didn’t have time to upgrade to ion cannons like they had on their old ships. We would’ve mopped the floor with them.”

“Alright, well we’re here to mine so let’s get to it. Tessa, if you wouldn’t mind looking for some high-value asteroids for us.”

“You got it!”

It was going to be very interesting filling all forty-four crates, if we filled them at all. We didn’t have a very big area to work with, so we pushed four of the crates out into open space where my sisters would make sure they didn’t go too far away. One of the upgrades that the Wasp and the Hornet now had was a tractor beam. It was a rather weak one, but it would allow them to capture asteroids or other objects and bring them to the ship.

After helping me set up the six emitters, Mason got in the mining pod and headed over to the first of the asteroids that Tessa had dragged back to the ship. All she needed to do was drag it into place and then match velocity with our light cruiser before letting it go, and it would stay exactly where she placed it.

For this run, we weren’t going after anything that was worth less than two thousand credits per ton. It so happened that the first asteroid was just on the cut off; tantalum. It was a fairly large asteroid, filling two entire crates and still having some left over. There wasn’t enough to fill a third, so rather than break it up and fill one partially, Mason just pushed it back toward the asteroid field. Next up would actually be an asteroid containing plutonium.

“I’ve done some more reading,” Ben said as Mason was bringing it back. “Apparently we want to activate the emitters as soon as you put the lid on one of the crates containing radioactive materials. The suit you’re wearing does possess some minor ability to block radiation, but if we let enough build up, then the radiation will start causing some serious damage to your character’s body. It won’t take much before the damage is irreversible, even with the technology available.”

“Is that the same for me?” Mason asked.

“Nah, you’re protected by the mining pod, but if it makes you feel safer, you can stand in front of one of the emitters when I activate it.”

“It would. Alright, dragging it back.”

The geiger counter attached to my wrist started going off as soon as Mason brought the asteroid, though it wasn’t at a very high level where I was standing. I could see small chunks of rock were sent floating around the cargo bay as he broke it down, but a fair amount also went right back through the cargo bay door.

It didn’t take long to break it up, and there was barely enough to fill the crate. My geiger counter started screaming as I began walking over to close the lid, so I had Mason do it instead. The lid was hinged and had some sort of rubber-like lining to produce an airtight seal, but required pins to secure it. Mason didn’t exactly have the fine motor control while in the mining pod to do that, so I moved over and did it now that the radiation readings had been reduced by a fair amount. The Sterium was definitely doing its job.

As soon as the lid was in place, Ben hit the button to turn on the emitters. There was no indication that anything was happening, but the readings being given to me by my geiger counter were slowly getting weaker and weaker. Within a minute, the readings had reduced by about half, but it would still be a while before the radiation was completely negated.

I was very happy to get the first crate of plutonium out of the way, as the going price was roughly three times that of platinum, at around forty-nine thousand six hundred credits per ton. I wasn’t sure how much the crate of ore weighed, but it was a substantial amount, easily worth at least two hundred thousand credits. Remembering to make sure to track which was which, I used the laser engraving tool to mark that the crate contained plutonium before going over and marking the other two as containing tantalum.

I walked over to the cargo bay door as Mason flew towards the next rock, trusting that my magnetic boots would keep me secured to the deck. What I saw was astonishing, as there was a cluster of twenty or so asteroids that were perfectly stationary floating about a kilometer away. They varied in size and it was hard to tell what they contained from such a long distance, but it was a hell of a lot more efficient doing it this way than the way we had been doing it.

As Mason flew back towards the ship, it was clear that the next crate or two would be filled with platinum. Maybe even the next three. It was a rather large asteroid, one that I estimated to be around twenty feet long and fifteen meters wide at the widest part. Even if it didn’t fill a third crate, we weren’t tossing any platinum. It was too valuable.

“What the hell?!” Mason’s voice came over the radio as he arrived back at the ship.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“A window just popped up in the middle of my vision saying that [Piloting] has reached level one. I don’t know what that means or how to get rid of it.”

I heard Ben laughing. “I was wondering when one of us would learn our first skill. I figured you would have learned [Mining] by now. To dismiss it, just think about it disappearing.”

“That did it, thanks. How do I tell what the [Piloting] skill does?”

“The same thing you just did, but think about your Skills page appearing.”

“Got it. All it’s showing is a two percent increase to reflexes while piloting a ship. That’s it?! Seriously?!”

Ben laughed again. “Skills give you more benefits as they level up, though they can’t increase the capabilities of ships. Apparently there are players that pilot fighters who have very high [Piloting], because reflexes are everything when you’re in such a small craft.”

“You said you’re surprised he didn’t learn [Mining] yet. What’s that do?”

“Makes it easier to find ore and allows for it to be broken down more efficiently, essentially reducing waste. It’s probably a much better skill when mining in an actual mine, but it has its uses in space.”

“I see. Anyways, you wanna begin breaking that down, Mace?”

“Oh, yeah.”

We ended up filling two and a half crates of platinum before he had to go back and get another asteroid containing platinum. The one he selected was a bit smaller than the previous one, but ended up filling a crate and a half, giving us four crates of platinum, total. An hour in, and we had probably already made six hundred thousand credits. The best part is that we still had another thirty-seven crates to fill.

In total, it took around seven hours to fill the rest of the crates with an assortment of ore. I had been keeping track of how many crates we had of each, though it all ended up blurring together at one point. Thankfully I had continued to mark the crates with the laser engraving tool, so it would be easy to tell which was which when it was time to unload.

We had decided we would sell off all our radioactive materials right away, as there was a pretty hefty fee for storing radioactive materials in the warehouse we were renting. That was fine with us as we were the only ones mining the stuff, to our knowledge. We would also be selling off a couple of the crates of platinum, as the price likely wouldn’t lower too much.

As soon as the crates and mining pod were secure, Mason closed the cargo bay door to allow the cargo bay to be repressurized. The radiation readings were nonexistent at this point as well, so we disassembled the six emitters and placed them back inside their protective containers.

My stomach had begun rumbling about an hour before we finished, so after going up to the bridge to transmit the return course to the girls and take us into hyperspace, I beelined to the armory to take off my armor and head to the kitchen. Mason appeared to have the same idea, as he soon joined me there. I cooked us all up some dinner and took mine to the bridge, just in case something happened.

There wasn’t much to do on the way back to the Zecciea space station, though I was able to practice my telekinesis. Even days later I still wasn’t able to move objects around while my eyes were open, though I had gotten even better while my eyes were closed. It was extremely frustrating and I had been tempted to contact the Straesse man who had demonstrated his ability, though held off. I wanted to figure this out for myself.

I didn’t get any better over the next three hours or so, but I did get a lot of enjoyment out of annoying the hell out of Mason. With my eyes closed, I would move one of the metal balls to brush against him, and then hide it under his chair. When he would go to look, nothing would be there. At first he thought that he was just imagining it, but as it occurred more and more he knew that he wasn’t. It wasn’t until over an hour later that he realized that it was me, at which point Ben and I couldn’t contain our laughter anymore, Ben having figured it out pretty quickly.

When we finally arrived at Zecciea, we first headed down to the planet to unload the portion of cargo that we wanted to keep until prices went higher. Thankfully we had a relatively small ship that was able to enter the atmosphere, or we would have had to rent a smaller craft to ferry them down a few at a time.

I was glad that the warehouse we rented had a couple of heavy duty forklifts we could use, otherwise it would have been an absolute pain to unload all the cargo. As it was, we had to unload all of the crates containing radioactive material and put them off to the side, giving us room to maneuver and unload the platinum, gold, rhodium, palladium osmium and tantalum. Everything but the tantalum would fetch us over ten thousand credits a ton right now, though those prices would go a lot higher in the coming weeks and months.

When everything was offloaded, we had ten crates of platinum, two of gold, five of rhodium, three of palladium, two of osmium and two of tantalum in the warehouse. That left three crates of platinum, ten of uranium, and seven of plutonium. After loading them back onto the ship, I made sure to walk around with the geiger counter to make sure that there were no radiation leaks outside of the warehouse. When I didn’t find anything, we drove the forklifts back into the warehouse and locked it, making sure to activate the robust security system.

With that done, we got back into the ship and headed up to the station to unload our cargo. It was extremely easy to get clearance to land into a berth, though that would probably change as more and more people began playing in this area of space. In the meantime, I certainly wasn’t going to complain.

It continued to amaze me that forklifts capable of lifting around one hundred tons were needed to unload a single crate from our ship, but I could move them around with ease in the middle of space. It also amazed me that they weighed that much. A decent percentage of the weight in each crate was the precious metals that we were mining, though the majority consisted of the useless rock that came along with it.

Every time a crate was offloaded, the lid would be taken off and the contents quickly scanned to determine how much of it was valuable metals, and how much was worthless rock. The numbers we got for the platinum were slightly above the usual amount, averaging nine tons of platinum per crate.

The crates containing plutonium and uranium, however, absolutely blew me away. I had estimated that each crate would be worth around two hundred thousand credits on average, but that turned out to be a gross underestimation.

Both plutonium and uranium are both a bit lighter than platinum, but the going price for both was four and four-point-eight times more expensive, respectively. The amount of each of the raw ore varied more crate to crate, but the average was about eight tons of the respective ore per crate. The lowest amount we had received was just under three hundred thousand credits, while the most was a whopping one-point-one million credits.

The girls’ jaws dropped when I showed them how much we got for half of the cargo we brought back, and Mason, Ben and I were very happy to say the least. We had thought that it would take us a few weeks to accrue the funds necessary to purchase a battlecruiser, and it very well could have, if we didn’t go after radioactive materials.

With everything said and done, I deposited ten million four hundred fourteen thousand credits into our bank account, which would have been enough to buy one of the basic battlecruisers and still have a good chunk left over. Or we even could have gone down to the surface and retrieved all the crates we just off-loaded to sell them off too. That would have given us more than enough to get one of the better battlecruisers that came with mass drivers.

After that, the girls joined us when we returned to the light cruiser. I ended up taking them on a tour while Mason and Ben headed up to the bridge to do some research. When I was done, I led them up to the bridge to join the others to discuss what we wanted to do next.

“Alright, so I’ve been doing some searching, trying to figure out how we can maximize the amount of money we make on mining runs. Right now, we’re only utilizing something like sixty to seventy percent of the space inside of the crates, greatly reducing how much we can bring back at a time. I think I’ve found a way to do that, but it’s going to change how we mine going forward,” Ben said before hitting a button causing a hologram to appear.

The hologram was projecting a machine that had a number of conveyor belts and one large cylindrical drum in the middle. On the one end, there was a large opening that had two ridged pieces of metal that formed a ‘V’. At the bottom of the ‘V’, there was a conveyor belt that led up to the cylindrical drum, as well as another conveyor belt at the end of it, which led to nowhere.

“This is the best ore crusher I could find that wouldn’t require much maintenance and would do a good job of crushing ore. If we wanted to go really cheap, then we could just go with the front part of the machine that is called a jaw crusher. One part of the jaw is fixed to the machine, but the other one moves back and forth, generating enough force to crush ore into gravel-sized chunks. From there, the ore could just be dropped into a crate, allowing us to use a lot more of the space inside.”

“Using the whole machine, the jaw crusher will crush ore into gravel-sized chunks and then send it off to the ball mill. Ball mills use centrifugal force and metal balls to grind the chunks down further, until the ore that is discharged is much, much finer. A ball mill also comes with the advantage of being able to choose how fine we want the ore to be ground down by changing the size of the grate at the discharge end. After running through the ball mill, ore would be small enough to fill ninety-nine-point-nine percent of a crate.”

“Now usually there is another machine on the end that would separate the ore from useless rock, but that’s much more complicated and would take up too much space. Using crushers like this should almost double the amount of ore we can bring back, but there is a catch.”

“Gravity,” Tessa said. “You’ve been shutting off the artificial gravity to move things around more easily, but those machines require gravity to function. It also requires a forklift capable of lifting over one hundred tons, as each crate would easily weigh that much, if not more.”

“That’s right,” Ben nodded. “Mason wouldn’t be able to bring the asteroids inside of the cargo bay, so he’d have to break off chunks that would be small enough to fit inside of the jaw crusher. It would increase the amount of time it takes to fill our cargo bay, but it would absolutely be worth it. We probably would’ve made close to twenty million credits today if we had a machine like that.”

“I’m not sure that it’s entirely necessary,” I replied. “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t plan on spending all of my time mining, it’s more of a means to an end right now. Perhaps if we form a clan and it grows then we could have some members who focus on mining, but I’d rather focus more on combat. I’m sure that as this area of space becomes more populated then there will be jobs to hunt down pirates and the like? That’s what I’m interested in.”

“I agree,” Anja said. “We should be spending our time mining until we’re strong enough that we don’t need to anymore. Right now we only have one other competitor, and that is the other group that we’ve seen mining. They’re probably doing the same thing we are, since mining seems to be a really good way of making money early on. If we had started somewhere more populated, then I doubt we’d have made a tenth of what we have so far. Sooner or later, more experienced groups are going to arrive, either from creating new characters here, or making the trip. I think we should be ready when that happens.”

“Okay, then what do we want to do?” Ben asked. “I mean, I don’t think any of us expected to make as much money as we did today. By tomorrow we could double the amount of money we have again and purchase a battlecruiser. We could even upgrade to better frigates at the same time. But what about after that?”

“I don’t think our plan should really change,” Lucille said. “We were planning on spending a few weeks mining anyways, so let’s continue to do that. By the time prices increase, we very well could have enough money to buy a plot of land and build a base if we wanted to.”

“How much does that cost, anyways?” Mason asked.

“It’s not as much as I thought it would be. There are two ways of doing it; the first is one million credits for a single square kilometer. After that it would be up to us to hire a construction company to develop that land. The other way is to pay up to twenty million, to basically look through an actual catalogue and choose what we want built and how everything is laid out. As soon as payment is received, a construction company will immediately start building your base. The caveat is that anything they build must be under nineteen million credits, including the construction company’s fee. Anything beyond that would, again, be up to us.”