Chapter 1

My name is Charles Samuel Knight and I am sixteen. My father started me on the life I have. He was an Archeologist and studied the thousands of derelict spacecraft in Grer system. My mom had been an Archeologist too, but had left us to teach at the college on Miros. There were only two thousand people in Grer, most were old and pretty much did the same thing as dad.

By the time I was ten, I knew everything about engineering from dozens of different dead species. Since the planet was barely habitable everyone lived in biospheres in orbit. I had four girl friends the same age as me and we had made a pack when we were only six or seven. We swore that when we turned fourteen we would marry so that we would never have to part.

Anyway, when we were thirteen; Julie, Teri, Olivia, Jess and I sat down and used a computer to draw up plans for a large self contained biosphere. We had access to all the databases and knew of a thousand year old factory ship from the Silsi Empire. We were all checked and cleared for space work and that was the first place we went.

Using the collective knowledge of a dozen Archeologists we started making some repairs. It took us almost three months to bring it online. After that it was just a matter of bringing material to the ship. It took the factory robots and the production facilities another six months to build the biosphere to our specs in the ship graveyard where we were comfortable.

I guess you could say I was the Jack of all Trades. Jess was our protector, our gunslinger, our weapon specialist. Teri was the real engineer; she knew how everything ran and could fix it or build it in her sleep. Julie was our pilot and navigator, if we went anywhere, she flew or navigated and she could fly anything.

Olivia, well Olivia was the one we all protected. She had always wanted to be a doctor and had studied two dozen races medical practices and equipment. She was also the one that knew everything about hydroponics.

We got starter plants from everyones biospheres and even had several ships leave new plants or seeds. Jess was the youngest and the day she turned fourteen we announced our marriage and moved into the biosphere. Our parents were close by and still helped us a lot. They thought it was just a passing phase we would grow out of.

Almost from that first day we started planning to build a ship. Even though the system was not a registered system of the Empire of Mariss, we were still semi citizens and the Empire had been at war for almost twenty years. We took ideas from several dead races and combined them.

From the three Phase Reactors to the engines from the Avian race Altre. Jess was the one to insist on the weapons and she took a month just to decide on which weapons to use and what we needed for defense. Instead of the human weapons like lasers or missiles, she wanted three systems from three different races.

The other thing was the Alien medical equipment Olivia wanted, equipment any doctor would kill for. But the most important thing was the matter transmission that Teri and I studied and finally cracked. It took us over six months to crack it, and when we did, the limits to what we could do went out the window.

We built a small device and programmed it to take matter from our plants or protein from the protein vats. It would mix or combine them into food. We had to make the dish first and then scan its atomic structure before the synthesizer could reproduce it. Olivia took it over as soon as it proved reliable. Next was a synthesizer for clothing or other inanimate objects. Last was a much larger version that Teri tied into a computer.

We carefully designed our ship from the frame out. It took another year of careful planning and checking before we put the plans into what we called our ship builder. With the use of a nearby hydrogen reactor, the range of the matter transmitter was over a light hour, which reached into a nearby asteroid belt.

We continually monitored its progress but I turned to smaller concerns, like Olivia’s medical equipment and her hydroponics section. Jess got Teri to take time to build another smaller transmitter and quickly drew up plans for an assault shuttle and sets of combat armor. Julie spent her time buried in star charts and ship ID files. It took six months to build the ship.

We called her Night Scream. She was five hundred and twenty meters long, one hundred and fifty wide and one hundred tall. Her hull was over a meter thick, made of a metal alloy so dense it had no comparison in the known galaxy. In addition, it had chameleon like properties that we had further enhanced. We had also incorporated a screen and shield technology that was advanced beyond anything created in the last two thousand years.

The weapons were sixty of what Jess called energy torpedo launchers or torp launchers and they reached out a full light minute at full strength. There were six energy lances that had a range of almost five light minutes. Last was Jess’s main weapon, it was another concept she developed from the matter transmission device and the phase reactor. She called it a phase transmitter. It had a scan range of one light hour but Jess said optimum range was half that.

Olivia had a large sick bay with a dozen stasis tubes and eight regen tanks as well as every piece of technology she needed. She also had a state of the art hydroponics section. Julie had found an old AI on an ancient warship and had insisted we needed it. She had been the one to go through its code line by line to make sure it would be safe.